Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [164]
“Why is that?”
“Because rebreathers are a pain and compressed air’s still best. At least, it works for me. Compressed air weighs more than regular air. So as you use up your tank, you get more buoyant. Air in your lungs makes you lighter, too, like a balloon. But blow out and you can get pretty neutral, just hover.” She smiled at a sudden memory. “I remember a place called Cod Hole. Big potato cod,” she demonstrated with her hands, “about two meters. I must’ve stayed down an hour, almost two, skimming over coral, like flying. But once my tank was near gone, I got pretty light and bobbed up for the surface, couldn’t control my depth no matter how hard I blew out. Karl, my brother, reached up, pulled me back down before I slipped away.” She finished, lamely, “Anyway, it was… nice.”
“He’s your only family, right?” At the look on her face, Chakotay added, “Not prying. It’s in your personnel files. They say your parents died a while back. Some sort of boating accident.”
“Yeah. My mom’s side came from old Texas. You’d think she wouldn’t take to water. Except she did and then she and my dad got that boat and came out where Karl and I were working and then…”
And then I just couldn’t stand the water anymore, not when the sea had taken both my parents.
“And then I opted for space instead.” She paused, collected her wits, forged on. “Anyway, Karl’s my only living relative besides Aidan… his son. Karl’s wife left them when Aidan was about two, I think. He ought to be nine, ten by now. I’ve lost track.”
“You miss them.”
“Sure. I miss them. I miss Earth. I mean, doesn’t everyone?”
“What about the Equinox?”
A finger of dread touched her chest. Please, don’t do this… just when everything was going so well. “What about it?”
“Do you miss it?”
“Miss the Equinox? Are you kidding? Miss that?” she asked, her voice rising until she became aware that the background hum of voices had ceased. Marla shot a quick glance, saw curious eyes and lowered her voice. “No. I miss home. Not just Earth but the way being on Earth feels. Stand on a mountaintop that’s a thousand kilometers from nowhere, and the feeling’s… huge. Like you’re opening up to infinite possibilities just by watching a hawk catch an updraft. And I miss…” She trailed off, took a sip of coffee. Shrugged.
Chakotay waited a beat. “Belonging?”
“Yeah.” Marla flashed a quick, too-bright smile because her eyes burned, and she knew she’d probably cry again when she was alone. Stop this. You’re not a little baby. Sudden shame burned her cheeks.
Chakotay was talking. “You could decide to belong here.”
“Belong? Here? Is that your point?” She bit off the last word. Off probation, my ass. Chakotay was the XO, just doing his job. That’s what she was: another tick off the old to-do list. All that Starfleet malarkey, all that we’re all brothers under the skin stuff was crap. “I’ll never belong here because none of you will let us forget. On Equinox, we were part of a team.”
“Voyager’s not so different.”
She almost laughed in his face. “The hell it is. You know, if I was going to get religion, I’d have gotten it on Equinox. I didn’t, and you know why? Because everything’s random. You can pray until you’re blue as a Bolian, but at the end of the day? There’s nothing except the one person you’ve got to believe in-and that’s your captain. I believed in Rudy Ransom. He gave us dignity. Even after I started having…” Her throat tightened, but she fought her way past the constriction. “Even when I couldn’t crawl into a damn Jefferies tube, I was still valuable. I belonged.”
“And you don’t think you can belong here. You don’t think you’ll be valued. Marla, you’ve got to believe in yourself before you can let yourself believe in someone else.”
The way Chakotay said it-so calm, so understanding, like a therapist counseling poor, wounded little Marla, spooked by her own shadow. It made her want to throw a chair.
“Value,” she said, as if the