Resistance - J.M. Dillard [44]
“You are working off a supposition that has no basis in fact,” she reminded him.
“As is my prerogative as captain,” he countered.
“Intuition.” T’Lana almost whispered the word.
Picard wanted to see her relenting as a breakthrough, but he feared that this would merely be the first of many conversations where they butted heads. “Counselor…we obviously have read each other’s files. You requested assignment to the Enterprise; you wanted to come here. May I ask why?”
Something subtle flickered in her dark eyes, not outright emotion but perchance an uncomfortable memory. At last she answered, “I deemed it logical to go where I was needed most.”
“I see.” Coming from anyone other than a Vulcan, the remark would be the most pointed of insults; Picard struggled not to take it as such. “Dismissed.”
He turned his back to her and once again faced the window. Against the backdrop of space and stars, he saw her faint reflection before the doors closed behind her.
Sara Nave could not eat. She could not think. She could not even consider performing her regular duties. If Lio had simply been killed like the others, it would almost have been better. But knowing he was out there, knowing what he was going through at that very moment—it was all too much for her.
She stood at the entrance to Lio’s quarters, unwilling to enter. Stepping over the threshold seemed to be an admission of the finality of Lio’s loss. And she was not willing to let him go so easily. He was still on the Borg vessel, most likely still one of them. And if he was alive—in any fashion—there was still hope. Stubbornly, she had refused to cry. She would not allow herself to grieve. Not yet.
She had lost her parents cleanly; she’d been far removed from them, from the final explosions, the death cries, the torn, bleeding bodies. One moment they were alive in her consciousness; the next, irrevocably gone. She’d spent her life avoiding attachments, afraid of another moment this terrible.
But she had made an exception for Lio, had let herself care…She had done so for two reasons. One, she had yielded to hope; she had found someone worthy who had broken her resistance, who had made her love him. She’d known that together, they would have been good. Two, she had been afraid, afraid that if she did not take advantage of her opportunity to be with Lio that very moment, another chance would never come.
Nave shuddered, grasped her elbows tightly. She’d heard Amrita’s garbled keening, the soft, subtle sound of human flesh being ripped asunder…then Lio’s panicked report.
And his scream—quickly extinguished by the whip of metal through air.
She squeezed her eyes shut and heard her own exasperated retort. There won’t be any “just in case.”
But here it was.
Nave drew a breath and stepped inside. The doors slid shut behind her.
She opened her eyes. What had once been standard-issue quarters was now a pure reflection of Lio. The simple, streamlined cot was covered in linens in a variety of earth tones. The walls had been draped with faux leather covering, evoking the feel of a Tuscan villa. One wall had been turned into a larger-than-life-sized holographic picture window that looked out on an ancient village that Lio had told her still stood near the place he had been born. On a nearby wire rack sat a dozen bottles of real Italian wine, not synthehol. Lio had once threatened to share one of those bottles of real alcohol with her. She’d politely declined, stating that the cocktails he ordered up in the club were challenging enough.
The desk, she remembered; he had mentioned leaving something for her on the desk.
He had added a hutch with shelves to the desk; they were lined with a dozen or so real paper books—ancient, leather-bound, with Latin and Italian writing on the spines. Awed, Nave reached out and put a hand on one. Lio had spoken of collecting nineteenth-century Italian literature, but she had never imagined that he actually owned such priceless volumes. She leaned forward to draw in their