"Contemplations"
(previous was our new XO's "Executive Concerns"
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Stardate: 60323.1235
Setting: USS ANUBIS, Counselor's office
If anything would test her skills as a counselor, Susan thought as she looked at her computer screen, this would be it.
On the screen in front of her was the crew manifest of the MERCURY. The first - and only - noticeable thing about the list as far as Susan was concerned, was that it was long. And that made her *very* concerned. After all, the longer the list of people involved in something like this, the bigger the chances that someone was hurt.
**Someone other than David's brother that is...**
It gave Susan shivers down her spine to think that she had sat at the same table as the people who attacked this ship. She had talked to them. She had even... She turned away from the screen and tried to focus her mind on something else. Anything else. At least for the time being... But the thoughts persisted. She found herself hoping that Matt hadn't been involved in the destruction of the MERCURY. But she knew that he probably had. And Sol probably had too. Nevertheless... he'd seemed so... human.
It was impossible for Susan to imagine how any person could turn so utterly and completely on his own race. Matt had been - still was as far as she knew because she hadn't seen him being dragged away by TANGIERS ORBITAL security - busy engineering the end of the Federation - which meant the end of Starfleet - which would be a serious detriment to the human race no matter how you looked at it.
Susan frowned and rested her chin on her hands, staring back at the computer screen even though her mind was light-years away. She hated unsolved mysteries. Maybe that was why she was naturally so curious. And maybe that was why she was still thinking about the dark stranger called Matt who seemed to hate Starfleet with every bone in his body. And maybe that was why she still couldn't put Koneki's 'slip-up' out of her mind...
A slip up. She had convinced herself that that was all it had been. It was easy, wasn't it? There was a good chance that her biography would have had the names of her parents below her's. It would have been easy for him to have looked down at the wrong name...
If he'd had her biography in front of him and didn't know the name of those who worked on his highly secretive Scarab-class ships.
Which were both very unlikely.
So what were the other scenarios? That he'd known her mother? Susan remembered a friend of her father's who had always called her Sarah because he had a niece Susan's age with that name. Anna was a common name. Koneki could have been confusing Susan with anyone...
Except...
Except that he'd called her 'Ensign Mei' several times.
So... maybe he had known her mother.
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Setting: 12 years earlier, Dreamscape
The door creaked open and the whole room smelt of dust. Susan giggled softly to herself in excitement. She'd never been in this room before. The floor was covered in thick layers of dust - ten years worth of dust. Maybe more.
Susan imagined herself in an ancient room that she had discovered on a deserted planet. She was an archeologist and in here were the remnants of an ancient culture. She had to be careful and be very quiet in her exploring or else the wicked captain of her ship would swoop in and steal all the artifacts to sell on the black market and no one would ever know anything about the ancient civilization she was uncovering. The story was not entirely fictional. The 'wicked captain' was currently sitting downstairs - right under her feet - busy with his work.
He had grounded her for climbing the tree in the garden after he had told her not to. Bored, she had crept along the corridor out of her bedroom looking for adventure. She had paused just behind the creaky part of the landing. Their house had old wooden floors and some places made a terrible noise when you stood on them. Biting her bottom lip, Susan had contemplated the wide piece of squeaky floor she would have to cross. There was, of course, no particular reason she had to cross it - but it gave her something to do, and the idea was exciting. Remembering the last holonovel she had read about how a bunch of Starfleet captives had escaped a slave camp by climbing through the air-ducts, Susan's eyes moved upward. Of course, she knew there weren't airducts in their huge, rambling, wooden, house but the ceiling held an interesting solution to her problem.
That was when she saw it.
An old fashioned trap-door. It had always been there, of course, but Susan had never paid it much attention. Until now.
With a wicked grin, she had tiptoed to her room where her desk chair had presented an excellent step-ladder. She had carried it silently to the place where the squeakyfloor started and put it down beneath the door.
Now she was here. In this dusty room. And she could never remember discovering something so exciting. She had knelt down in the dust and began sifting through the 'artifacts' - old computer components, picture frames, heirlooms. They all added great dimension to her imaginings. There were even a few Ktarian Crystals scattered in a dusty corner which made the idea of a treasure hunt seem much more vivid. Never, though, had she imagined stumbling on a treasure as great as the one she found in a box of old photo albums.
This was a very strange discovery for a young girl growing up in a time when the only photo-archives were holographic or on computers. Her ever-present curiosity prompted her to leaf through the dusty pages... where she found pictures of her mother. Her mother and a man that must have been her father (though his hair was brown and not gray and his face was clean-shaven whereas the father she knew had a mustache). They looked incredibly happy. She saw pictures of their wedding, pictures of their holiday to Mars, pictures of... her mother in a Starfleet uniform.
To Susan, her mother had been a holoprogram designer. Her father had told her that. But the pictures continued. Many of them of both her parents in uniform. Swallowing hard, Susan had continued until a baby appeared in the pictures. She smiled as she paged through the unfamiliar scenes... until the baby grew past five. The last picture featuring the child was of a nine-year old little boy with blonde hair and excited green eyes, smiling brightly. It was then that Susan, looking at the picture with her blue eyes and stroking her light brown hair subconsciously, realized that she had had a sibling... a brother...
Her father's voice calling her from downstairs brought her back to action. She stuffed the albums back in the box - but she removed the picture of her mother in the Starfleet uniform and placed it securely in her pocket before hurrying back down to the confines of her cell on the wicked captain's ship.
When her father came upstairs to find her, he found her sitting on her bed and reading a PADD. What he didn't see was the piece of paper that she held over the screen of the PADD. The piece of paper with her mother's face on...
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Stardate: 60323.1240
Setting: USS ANUBIS, Counselor's office
Susan started when her door chimed.
"Who is it?!" She asked a little too hastily
There was a pause. Then "It's Ensign Doratheva. Is everything alright?"
Susan took a deep breath, "Of course." She called, "Come in." Obediently the door slid aside and Susan stood up and moved around her desk to greet the ensign. "Why shouldn't everything be alright?" she said with a smile.
--------------- 2005 post #261
Tallulah Habib {thabib@eject.co.za}
Ensign Susan Mei
Head Counselor
USS ANUBIS
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"Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own." - Adam Lindsay Gordon
