From: "Nora Rivkis" 
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 07:42:19 -0400
Subject: USS CHESAPEAKE: Holodeck -- Post Mortem

SD 90411.1155
MD: (I don't know, but this is about six hours *before*
        the Counselor's visit to Marine deck. Someone
        backdate it for me, please?)
HOLODECK SUITE 2: setting: a planet with forested
   mountains apparently recently hit by a gruesome
   earthquake and consequent chaos.
David had to keep one eye on each platoon, it seemed.
Constantly. And he didn't have that many eyes.
Second, for instance, had escaped him entirely. It was 
not shooting. It was not taking evasive action. "Second
platoon, green light on enemy sector four. GREEN LIGHT!"
he snapped; and they moved in professionally, but still
too damned tentative. No initiative -- and what was First
doing? By private com: "Etienne!! Where are you taking 
them?"
"Somebody trapped under here, sir!" the young lieutenant
called out, and David swore, and cut off the program on the
spot.
Slowly, the units reassembled. T'sharet was looking anxious
and a touch defiant even through her composed Vulcan mask.
Etienne Krauss was hurt and bewildered, and Galia was just
close to tears.
"At ease," David said quietly, nodding to the platoons them-
selves. They did not relax till their own commanders turned
and confirmed the order. David sat down on the floor of the
bare holosuite. Slowly, one by one, so did the rest.
"Lt. T'sharet," David said, very gently. "Tell me what you did
wrong."
The Vulcan had her answer ready, and though the only sign
was a faint acrid tone behind the words, David could tell she
was disgusted with herself for it. "I was too conservative, sir.
I commanded 'by the book' in a non-textbook situation. I missed
opportunities I could have taken, especially to help my teammates."
She held her head rigid by the end, unable to look at her fellow
commanders, for shame.
David lifted a hand quickly. "Not as bad as you're making it,
Lieutenant," he pointed out quietly. "You weren't asked for
help; you ran your sections of the grid acceptably and kept
them under control; you were just a little... inflexible, that's
all. You're right; you went a little too much by the book, but
if you're scared and uncertain and your troops" (David was
careful not to say 'men' this time; T'sharet's platoon was the
one made up almost entirely of women) "are going in jumpy,
that's sometimes what you have to do. Just learn when to
use it, and try to ease up with it after you get through the
first few minutes. It *should* be a tool to carry you into
battle-mindset, and then your instincts should take it from
there." He was talking about instincts to a Vulcan, he realized,
but T'sharet was a soldier, not an ordinary Vulcan by any means.
She nodded understanding, then turned to her own platoon
and murmured, "I apologize for my failure to lead you properly."
There was such a hasty wave of assurances and spontaneous
affection that David had to cut it off after a minute by raising
his hand for silence. But he let T'sharet have those few minutes.
She needed the approval.
He turned to Galia. "Second Platoon. Lieutenant, what did *you*
do wrong?" In his mind he thought of her as Galia; the familiar
name from a familiar land; he'd known maybe fifteen others at
home. To her face, he used her rank. Strictly. After what she had
been through under Lt. Andersen he could not risk *any* familiarity
that might be taken wrong.
She shook her head in despair. Her hands were very white, and
her fingers twisted together around a strand of hair that had come
out of its tight braid in combat. "Everything," she mumbled. "We
didn't move, we didn't fight, we stood around looking like a bunch 
of fools until you had to tell us three different times where to go 
and what to shoot. No damn initiative, no aggressiveness at all;
couldn't even keep our attention on the job enough to tell where
someone was coming up from behind a rock or something. We
just screwed the whole thing up and it's my fault; I didn't lead 
them." Once again, David was struck by how desperately these
soldiers were driven to take responsibility for each other. It re-
minded him of what he'd heard of the best from his own people's
Shoah: the little helps that the helpless can give each other which
sometimes make the difference between a few surviving and nobody
surviving.
"No initiative," David had to agree, as gently as he could. "No
aggressiveness. I can't be the one to tell you to shoot every time.
You need to trust your own judgement more. I'm going to start
running drills up here just for Second Platoon -- for G-d's sake,
you need a name, all of you need names, this is ridiculous; I 
can't keep calling you numbers," he interrupted himself. "Get
together and find something you can be proud of calling your-
selves. Anyway. I'll set the scenario, and I'll watch the tape of
it afterwards, but I won't be there. So you'll neither have anyone
to count on except yourselves... nor the boss watching over your
shoulder while you work." He smiled a little. Galia, to his surprise,
smiled back, though her eyes were glistening damply.
With that, David moved on quickly to let her recover her poise
unnoticed. "Krauss. What did you do wrong." And this time, he
was not trying to sound gentle at all.
Etienne Krauss looked blankly back at his commander for three
bewildered and horrified seconds, then threw his hands straight
up in the air. "I don't *know*!!!"
"You don't know?" Quieter now, not as sharp, but it was David's
dangerous voice. The company had not had much occasion to
learn it; they were learning it now.
Hotly, fair face reddened a bit with embarrassment and anger:
"No, I don't! We fought all right -- a little clumsy, maybe, but
we've been off for five months and still getting our reflexes back
-- we handled our section just like you said T'sharet did, and
we did it by our own sense instead of the textbook. When two
of Galia's men had disappeared and we thought they were trapped,
we went after them. What *did* we do wrong? You tell me!"
"Control yourself, Lieutenant," David replied, calmly, even bored.
"Yes, you did a fine job for most of the exercise, considering how
long it's been since you've fought, let alone on rough terrain. Why
did you go after the men from Second?"
Caught off guard, the young Swiss spluttered and turned even
redder. "We couldn't just *leave* them there!"
David shifted suddenly from his crosslegged seat on the floor
into his more usual crouch, leaned toward the platoon leader
for emphasis. "You could have done exactly that. And, until
your own section is fully secured, you *must* do that. Second
had its own responsibility for rescuing its men; you had an
assigned objective. Till that objective is met, you *may* *not*
go chasing a different objective, humanitarian or otherwise."
"But... but... Second wasn't *doing* anything about it! Second
wasn't doing anything at all, you just said so!" This time Galia's
head whipped around like a striking snake to glare at Krauss,
and there was more fire in her eyes than water.
"Are you saying I wouldn't have protected my own men?" she
snapped at him, in little more than a whisper, but one hissed
through her teeth. David intervened quickly. 
"Silence! Galia, shut up; I'm handling him." She did shut up,
and the use of her first name, accidental in David's preoccu-
pation, went unnoticed. "Etienne: if you think another comman-
der may not have noticed something important to their platoon,
you can tell her heads up to it by com. You can't divert your
entire platoon to go take care of it for her. That speaks badly
of your views of her capability, undermines morale, breaks 
down the chain of command, stretches your own resources
far too thin, AND GIVES ME NO F***ING IDEA WHERE 
YOU'RE GOING TO BE. Do you understand this?"
Krauss stared at the floor. "Yes sir."
"Dismissed. Krauss, T'sharet, Galia, don't bother your
troops; they've earned the rest of the morning off." David
had begun the drill at an irregular hour; he wanted them
used to it again. The Marines began to move off. So did
two of the three platoon commanders.
David waited till they were cleared out. "What is it,
Halivni?" he asked carefully, then, cursing inside at
the distance he had to keep. It was harder with her
than with any of the others -- because she was from
home, because there was no such thing as formality
between ranks in the army that had raised them both;
because he missed so *much* having an Israeli around
to talk to. Just to talk to. He could never mistake his
desire for the old cameraderie of the IDF for romantic
interest; that had been buried in him with Yael and
he very much doubted it would ever be reborn. But
she could mistake it. After what Lt. Andersen had forced 
on her? She could. Easily.
David kept his distance.
Galia's shoulders crumpled as soon as they were alone,
and the tears she would not shed in front of her platoon
came spilling over. A sign that she was beginning to trust
him? Or just that he didn't matter enough to her to keep
her pride around him?
She mumbled something into her chin. He had to ask
her to repeat it. She lifted her head, ignoring the tears
that streaked her face. "We'll never make a platoon, sir.
Better send us back. We'll take that discharge now; I'll
see to it the men don't complain."
David frowned. "Don't you think that's a little strong for one
bad drill? You were as rusty as the others."
Her fist slammed against the wall hard enough that he
would have to send her to get Medical to look at it. Small
fractures could explode in combat situations. That took
up one small corner of his mind while the rest was listen-
ing, frozen, to her words: "We're *helpless*, David!! We are
so f---ing helpless we can't even engage an advancing enemy
without waiting for your orders. We've been turned into a
bunch of goddamned machines and we'll never get out of
it, never..." The tears began again and this time it was her
head she started to beat against the wall, but, familiarity or
no, he took four swift steps forward and stopped her, strong
hands pulling her away from it, by the shoulders -- impersonally.
"Hey, hey!! That's no way to talk! If you're going to say 'never'
then maybe you should take that discharge after all, but not
the rest of them. Go home," he suggested, trying to keep his
own voice from cracking; it did anyway, a little. He hoped she
didn't notice. He was still holding her shoulders in his hands,
and turned her around to face him before looking deliberately 
into her eyes, releasing her, and stepping carefully back.
"I can't leave them..." she was already muttering. "But I can't
lead them back to being a workable unit either. I'm not workable.
None of us are."
"They're the bravest unit I've ever had the honor to meet," David
answered, with simple, quiet sincerity. 
She looked up, surprised. In the moment's silence he remem-
bered suddenly that she'd called him David; reverting, as he'd
been trying not to, to old habits. At home, first names were
standard for everyone up to and including the Chief of Staff --
if you didn't use his nickname instead, which was silly and
mildly obscene.
He smiled at her. And she crumpled under kindness, the 
tension draining out of her all at once but replaced by nothing,
so she sank to the floor and stretched out on it, face pillowed
on one arm, breathing in ragged, not-quite-sobs.
Mechanical instinct, his first training sergeant had called it.
What your mind and body do with a situation when you are
too fatigued or shocked or confused to know what to do; often,
quite complex, and ideally, trained to be the right move. How
to remain a competent soldier while your brain was numb from
pain or grief or confusion; David had used it a lot in the mad 
days in Lebanon after Yael's death. Now, his feet were carrying
him over to the programming station for the holosuite; his mind
on automatic -- guitar? No, piano, it would keep him in a set 
place away from her, she could not think it might be anything
irregular. He found a program in the listings which involved a
concert piano chamber; stripped it with quiet orders till only
the piano and bench, plus a row of chairs right where Galia
was lying, remained. It would give her something soft to be on,
at least. Could he really do this?
It had been Yael's song. He knew it before her -- all Israelis
knew it, though it had been written by an only dubiously Zionist
American Jew a few centuries ago -- but he had played it for
her once when they were no more than friends, when he had
longed for her as only an awed and tormented teenager could,
and had had the sense to realize that as her friend he held a
place in her life that none of her passing lovers could hold. She
had cried at the song, and hugged him; the feel of her arms
had stayed with him for days. Long after, she married him for
the sake of that same friendship, sick of the men who fawned
over her. He remained, as her husband, the easy and comfort-
able friend of her childhood, and never told her of the rest. But
he'd played this for her when her cynicism threatened to stop
being a radical conceit and make her genuinely unhappy, and
it always worked.
Now Yael was dead and he wanted the song to stop tears, not
start them. Yael didn't need it anymore, but Galia might. His
throat was not quite tight enough to hurt his voice, not after the
introductory piano chord loosened the pain in his chest, anyway.
	Laugh at all my dreams, my dearest; laugh and I repeat anew
	That I still believe in Man -- as I still believe in you.
	By the passion of your spirit 
	Shall the ancient bonds be shed,
	Let the soul be given freedom. 
	Let the body have its bread.
	For my soul is not yet sold to the golden cap of scorn
	And I still believe in Man and the courage in him born:
	Life and love and strength and action
	In our hearts and blood shall beat,
	And our hope will be both Heaven
	And the earth beneath our feet.
	Laugh at all my dreams, my dearest;
	Laugh and I repeat anew
	That I still believe in Man...
	As I still believe in you...
	And I still believe in you.

Galia was looking up by the end, lying still on her stomach on
the row of chairs, propped on her elbows to watch him at the
keyboard. "I didn't know you played."
"Yeah, just a little." She swung her legs over the edge, listening
closely as he tried to pass it off. "You know Eilat, three drinks 
and every lonely adolescent thinks he's a bard."
"I know... G-d, Eilat... it all seems so impossibly unreal from
here." She'd walked over cautiously and was standing by the
piano. 
David dropped his head and shadow covered his face. Galia
thought it looked like a dark angel regretting the fall into Hell
after there was nothing that could be done about it. "Unreal...
yes..." he murmured faintly. And his shoulders fell and he
hunched over the keyboard as though it were all he had left
to guard, and she sat beside him, and trauma or not, over-
familiarity or not, the two exiles held each other in their lone-
liness and for a while neither one was afraid.
Respectfully submitted,
Naomi Rivkis
1LT David Shachor
MCO, USS Chesapeake 
	
 
 

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