EP 10 "RESIGNATIONS" - TEASER
MEDICAL BAY, COMMAND YACHT
“You’re very lucky, Lieutenant, it looks like you’re going to be fine,” Christian said. “In fact Wheezy says you can return to duty whenever you’re ready, but…ah… take as much time as you need. The rest of your team can handle the medical screenings for now.”
“Thank you Captain, but I’ll be fine,” O’Hara tried to sit up and felt a head rush. “Oooh,” she relaxed back, realizing she was still a tad woozy from the treatment following her blow to the head. In her unconscious state her small team of medics had done their work on her with ease, leaving her to sleep it off. The residual feelings would pass in a matter of an hour or so.
“Please, Captain, would you leave us alone.”
O’Hara looked in the direction of the other voice – crackling with emotion and rasping from hours of internal turmoil, it sounded. There was no mistaking the vague silhouette of the figure who spoke from the half shadowy corner of the tiny medical bay. Jackson stepped forward into a pool of cruel white light shining down from above, her eyes near invisible in the shadowed sockets, her strong jaw clenched tight, full lips a pouting straight line.
“Of course,” Captain Christian said, a little too eagerly, “I’ll be with Mister Lirik.” He nodded and walked out at a pace, managing the briefest of supportive glances toward the treatment bed. There, supine and sporting a pained expression from what was about to come, Lieutenant O’Hara swallowed hard as she watched him go. She turned fearfully to the African American woman who was her superior, and now a whole lot more besides. The Commodore was stony still, the outline of her face fixed, though the occasional quiver of her facial muscles belied any attempt at total composure.
“Help me sit up, would you?” the Lieutenant asked Jackson, a forced request with no hint of warmth, and hopefully unexpected, but ultimately testing the metal of the Commodore’s compassion. O’Hara flicked her unkempt fiery red hair back across her shoulders – it was a far cry from her standard assortment of severe styles usually pulled tightly back from her face and contained within a tight bun secured on top or behind her skull. Catching sight of her muted reflection in the surrounding smoke glass walls the medic worried it gave her an instant look of brooding maternity.
The bespectacled portly veteran unflinchingly stepped up to the bed and provided support to the Nurse’s torso as she eased herself to a sitting position. It wasn’t required – O’Hara felt she had her normal strength, but she wanted physical proximity in an effort to temper whatever emotional outburst Jackson had been preparing.
Jackson remained by the bedside, looking intently into O’Hara’s face as she rested back into the pillow – perhaps there was no such outburst to follow, the Lieutenant wondered.
“You have a loyal assistant in the Jetraleker,” Jackson said, as tonally neutral as possible. “She told us you were pregnant, but would not tell us by how long, or any other information about the foetus. Though judging by your physique and the marked change in your demeanour recently, I would assume this didn’t happen that long ago?”
O’Hara swallowed. ‘Had the Commodore not put two and two together?’ she wondered. Or was she merely goading her, leading her to an eventual crescendo of painful angry accusation.
“I… I assumed you’d worked out who the father was?” O’Hara asked hollowly – she wouldn’t be put through any hoops, no matter how upset Jackson might be, and then realized she’d used the past tense about her son.
The Commodore shrugged and bit her bottom lip briefly, a tear suddenly rolling down her nose, but there was no cry. “I thought there might be every chance it was someone else,” Jackson said honestly, then realized how that might sound. “No offence.” O’Hara merely hung her head. “I just didn’t think it would be possible, though. I mean, I know my son very well, and I know he isn’t stupid when it comes to casual relations. And frankly, Lieutenant, I thought every Starfleet female was bright enough to remember to take every precaution necessary, especially someone in the medical-“
“It wasn’t intentional,” O’Hara interrupted, feeling angry at being judged by the Commodore. “It just… happened.”
“How can you say that?!” Jackson responded quickly, outraged, her face contorting with the strength of her words.
The Nurse felt a little embarrassment, but looking into the Commodore’s eyes, she saw something she’d not expected there – beside the hostility, grief and the jealous foreboding of a mother speaking up for her offspring, there was also something else, perhaps an understanding of the Lieutenant’s predicament.
“We were together the night before the invasion,” O’Hara spoke softly, trying to be kindly to the grandmother of her unborn child. “In his… in your quarters.”
“No,” Jackson rebuffed and thought back to that night before the K’Tani invasion. Her son had come home, he’d tucked into a meal, they’d chatted, and then she’d gone to bed – the last time she’d seen him …alive. The thought just popped into her head and she swallowed hard. ‘No, he might be alive still, please God’, she thought quickly. She studied O’Hara again and thought back to that evening.
“He was alone,” Jackson stated. Shortly after she’d got into bed she had been hailed by Inaami. The Commodore thought mournfully of her old friend and colleague, but she forced herself to work this memory out concerning her son and this…woman. The call had brought her from her bedroom into the main living area – and she remembered her son hadn’t been there, assuming he’d gone to bed. Then, some hours later, she’d left early to go to work and noticed his bedroom door had been locked from the inside – though it wasn’t unusual for her grown up sons to want privacy from motherly bedroom incursions.
“I snuck in,” Lieutenant O’Hara admitted. “Just after you’d gone to bed.”
“Not possible,” Jackson said, recalling their protocol regarding the travel car systems on Helub which could possibly bring anyone right to their living room, “the turbolift car was on night-mode when I left, so it had automatically locked down on our level once we were both inside.”
“I was waiting on top of the turbolift car,” O’Hara half smiled.
Jackson raised her eyebrow, though behind her surprised expression she knew the woman was speaking truthfully.
“The next morning,” O’Hara continued, “he was called to his shift early, before you’d even gone yourself. He said I should sleep in, enjoy the rest while I could. I locked the door and, well, we thought you’d be none the wiser.”
“That’s not like him,” Jackson argued without thinking. “You must have some good powers of persuasion,” she jibed. A memory suddenly returned as she remembered how she thought she’d seen her son among the crowds of security staff at Starfleet HQ when under the impression he was still in his bed.
“We discussed it together,” O’Hara corrected. “He’d said that you weren’t too keen on him seeing me, and as I’d been billeted shared quarters with five other women and we’d both have had to obtain our superiors’ permission to sleep over in a hotel together, which could have brought the matter to your attention, we agreed his place would be preferable.”
The medic thought back to that morning. As she’d lain in bed, she’d watched through the overhead skylights as the ion storm raged across the system, noticing how hundreds of spaceships attempting to flee from the planet and its moon were hampered by flailing tendrils of energy.
“After he’d gone,” O’Hara said, “I fell back to sleep, and then woke nearly too late to get to my own shift. I was assigned to the lower levels of the Command Centre to vaccinate the Federation children against the outbreak of Vekarian flu when the attack came.” Jackson noticed a veil of shock and seriousness fall over the medic’s face.
“The thing is, Commodore,” O’Hara continued, “I’d contracted Mulesan’s Disease several weeks before I came to the Outer Zone. It meant I had to take a strong course of medicine. That medicine forced me to stop taking contraceptazine for the next several weeks and instead revert to a morning after serum should I wish to… well…you know. But with the attack and everything the next morning, and in the rush to get away – and all those people, dying and in pain…I was so frantic I didn’t give it a second thought until I got seriously sick a few days ago,” O’Hara was shocked to find herself welling up. “I… I thought it was just a repercussion from our encounter with the Ere.” She shook her bowed head, unable to say any more for fear of crying in front of the grandmother of her unborn embryo.
Their discussion was closed for now. She felt Jackson’s hand squeezing her own reassuringly and looked tearfully into the older woman’s eyes. “It’s okay,” she said softly to the younger woman. “It’s okay.”
* * *
OBSERVATION LOUNGE, COMMAND YACHT
Reb sat alone on a plain sand coloured couch in the cavernous Observation Lounge, bathed in bright light reflected off the silvery white interior of Bel’s dry dock. It was almost blinding, yet not a bit cold, such were the fully functional environmental settings. He watched as her men flitted this way and that, effortlessly lifting hefty machinery around the Fantasy in the zero g. Yet for all the activity outside, his eyes were unseeing, his mind churning over a personal dilemma, thoughts turned inward toward his pitiful past and his present hopeless situation. His lot was more than just pathetic, he told himself, it was truly sad.
If he weren’t the hardened solitary person he’d somehow become since boyhood, he would have cried from despair, but years of disappointment and short-lived happiness had snuffed out his ability to display such emotions. All he felt was a sense of depressing irony. He had become accustomed to things not turning out the way he hoped, freely admitting that it was mostly due to his own shortcomings. He couldn’t seem to help himself, frequently finding himself up to his neck in it from his own stupidity, and yet he never learned from his mistakes.
As he saw it, meeting Captain Christian and coming to the Outer Zone was bad karma. Had he not broken Federation law he wouldn’t have found himself charged to ferry Christian through the wormhole. Although the K’Tani invasion wasn’t due to his own actions, the result was very much salt in the wound – it felt as if whatever he did in life was doomed. As usual, he had dealt with the situation in his own way, griped and joked through the flight from Qovakia, but he still felt apart from the others, despite the shared experience. While the horror of the attack to everyone else on board was the most terrifying event of their lives, to Reb, it was just another predictable mess in a long history of bad luck.
Only now there was a difference. People were relying on him to do his bit, expecting him to unquestioningly follow orders and be a part of this ridiculous crew on the run from a mortal enemy. He felt trapped, unable to get away from a grim situation as he had every time in the past. He hated the position he was in.
Part of him wanted to grasp onto the opportunity here. Something inside him wanted to join in, hopefully become accepted by the others – especially Christian. He thought that somehow his rejection from Starfleet and subsequent but unrelated disownment by his family – even his own mother – could somehow be resolved by finding a place among Christian’s new crew.
But while it was true that during the time he’d been in Qovakia he had lost his ship and all of his possessions, (and he had been nearly killed more than a few times), most of his attempts at befriending the other crew had failed miserably. Even now, things seemed to be screwing up for him.
It was true that both Christian and Lirik had tried to include him, but that could be explained by their eternal devotion to Starfleet duty and protocol. And it didn’t seem to stop them from correcting him or criticising his choices or opinions at every opportunity. Reb wondered what might happen to him if he stayed. Their future seemed obviously bleak. No doubt they would all be captured. Perhaps he would be killed – the K’Tani might kill them all – in an attack. The odds certainly weren’t in their favour.
More likely, he thought, he would get something wrong, or even be the cause of some terrible denouement. Starfleet had rejected him once, so how could he possible foresee fitting into Christian’s team of Starfleet officers now? He, mister get-up-late and do-what-he-liked serving as a responsible shift-worker in a demanding bridge role where he had to follow orders? He knew he had it in him to do it, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to. Moreover, the thought of achieving something, getting so far only to let down people who might come to trust, even like and respect him, was too much to bear. He’d lost so much already.
Reb finally made up his mind never to let that happen again.
* * *
ACT 1