Resistance - J.M. Dillard [53]
T’Lana had just boarded the lift that would take her up to the bridge when she spotted Commander Worf in the corridor. He caught her eye and lifted a finger, a signal, she decided, for her to wait for him.
Out of courtesy, she did so, though she did not relish the opportunity to be alone in his presence.
He entered the lift and gave her a nod in thanks as the doors closed behind him.
“Bridge.” For a few seconds, they rode in silence. And then Commander Worf said, “That was most gracious, Counselor. What you said to Captain Picard.”
The remark caught her off guard, but she realized that the Klingon was attempting to be professional, courteous. To his credit, he was trying to establish a good working relationship. He had made the comment because he was loyal to Captain Picard, and he wished to show his support of T’Lana’s sentiment.
Even flawed instruments, she told herself, could sometimes give correct readings.
She knew that she ought to respond positively; it was paramount, at such a critical time, that the crew function together effectively. But something in his demeanor made her hesitate to reply. He broke off eye contact a bit too quickly, and his tone bore a hint of shyness; he even took a step back, failing to maintain the normal physical distance between colleagues.
He was behaving so, T’Lana realized, because as a male he had noticed that she was a female. He was attracted to her and attempting to suppress it.
This alone would have been enough to unsettle her. But there was further reason: she had noted the powerfulness of his build and the fact that his fierce profile could, even by Vulcan terms, be considered handsome.
She did not approve of her own reaction. She lifted her chin, realizing that the gesture might be read as defiant but unable to prevent it in time. “I did what I deemed logical.” She kept her tone cool.
“I saw no logic in it,” Worf countered. “I saw loyalty and kindness.”
T’Lana did not answer because she knew of nothing appropriate to say. She stared steadily at the seam in the lift doors and told herself that she felt no emotion: no longing and no outrage.
They rode in silence to the bridge.
In sickbay, Beverly Crusher glanced up from her work at the glowing legends on an overhead console. One steadily moving line in a graph, accompanied by numerical data below, represented Jean-Luc’s brain activity; a green blip nearby indicated that the neutralizer chip was working properly. The blip was accompanied by a softly pulsing chirp, so that she need not monitor it visually, but she found it increasingly difficult to tear her gaze away.
She knew it should take the captain less than an hour to accomplish what he needed to do; ideally, it should take him a matter of minutes. Even so, she did not care to spend a single moment waiting anxiously, which she would certainly do if she did not find a way to occupy herself. It was hard enough just to blot out the image of Jean-Luc as Locutus, to intentionally disremember the nightmare of the first moment she had stood on the Enterprise bridge and seen Locutus on the viewscreen—of the first moment she had looked into Locutus’s eyes and seen that Jean-Luc wasn’t there anymore.
It had been hard enough to walk beside him to the transporter room in his guise as Borg; she had kept reassuring herself by looking into his eyes and verifying that the man she knew and loved was still there. But he had moved with a stiff, inhumanly mechanical gait, and each time he had spoken, the sound chilled her: the inflection belonged to Locutus, not the captain.
It was difficult to remember, too, the rage that had consumed him when the Borg had invaded the Enterprise-E. When he had first confessed that he heard the voice of the Collective, she had wondered whether that rage—so mindless, so fierce that he had been willing to sacrifice everything, including his crew, his sanity—had been rekindled. But to her relief, he had remained relentlessly rational. He could not bear the loss of even four officers, and when he asked