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By Root 682 0

right now-like she was the child and he was the teacher. There was nothing in her face, in her eyes, to remind him of her upbringing on a pathetic excuse for a colony, yet he thought of it. A colony that had actually seceded from the Federation. Its economy crashed within three decades of that secession. That distant colony where gangs became the ruling bodies, a place that resembled nothing and nowhere as much as it resembled the aftermath of the French Revolution, a place where a bad system was torn down in the name of the people and replaced by something entirely worse. A place whose day-to-day life made the Reign of Terror look organized. Mobs, gangs, indulgence of some, starvation of others, parents teaching their children to be alone because self-sufficiency meant survival. Children functioning like rats in the rubbish. And among them, Tasha. Surviving. Running. Fighting when she had to, eating when she could. Developing the single-mindedness that would allow her to move in record time to chief of security on a mainline starship. Didn’t happen every day.

A wicked way to grow up. Too quick, too hard, and too unforgiving. She’d missed all those girl things, all the giggling and the ducking behind each other and the moon-eyed crushes and the wondrous ignorance that lets a girl believe what she sees on first glance. For Tasha there had been no mirrors or fussing, and if there had been mirrors, wouldn’t she have shrunk away from the gaunt teenager whose hair was cropped to make her look like a boy-less likely to attract the attention of those who took their low-class habits out in casual rape? From the day her mother first took out a knife and sawed off her four-year-old daughter’s knee-length braid, Tasha had learned to deal.

Yet she could still look at him now with this absolute cleanness, this complete faith in him and in everything she saw when she looked at a senior officer, everything Starfleet meant for someone who had grown up under mob rule. As he looked at her now, a half ton of responsibility fell on him. What could he say to her that wouldn’t wrinkle that antiseptic faith? She was stronger with it than without it, a better officer in her purity than the woman she might have become if she gave in to the callousness to which she had every right.

Reaching over the stirring form of Troi, Riker cupped Tasha’s elbow. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t apologize.”

Chapter Eight

BEHIND THEM, ANTIMATTER explosions were still lighting up the solar system in all directions. Amazing that so little antimatter connecting with so little matter could result in such conflagration.

Getting away from the immediate vicinity was easy enough-the creature wasn’t watching for the moment, busy devouring the pure energy of matter/antimatter reactions among the asteroids, and therefore stardrive had a few extra seconds to ride the detonation shock waves and get back toward the saucer section. Easy, considering what had gone on so far today.

Reuniting the ships was something else.

Riker stood beside the science station where Deanna Troi was now sitting. She appeared disturbed, fatigued, aching, somber, like someone who had just heard bad news, but she seemed aware of the circumstances, perhaps too acutely aware.

Watching the disconnected saucer section loom toward them in the viewscreen, Riker felt a shiver of anticipation. This was the tricky part, the difference between pulling an ocean liner out of a dock and pulling back into one. Or maybe like docking one of those aircraft carriers the screen had shown them. Angle had to be right. Every linkage, hasp, and junctor had to line up exactly to its sleeve. Luckily Enterprise had computers made to do that. There was really no such thing as doing it manually, although that was the term they used for less-than-fully automated hookup. Really doing it manually would take all day and half the night. But for the moment Riker was glad Picard watched so carefully as the big ships approached each other, saucer at full stop, stardrive moving forward on inertia so as not to attract