String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [86]
“You first,” B’Elanna said.
Kaytok nodded. “That was quite a fight you and Seven of Nine had back there before you left. She really didn’t want you to leave for the shuttle so soon. Why? It strikes me that right now every minute counts.”
B’Elanna chuckled. Without knowing it, Kaytok had cut precisely to the core of the problems she and Seven had been having over the past year. “Seven has a very precise mind,” B’Elanna said. “She doesn’t like haste and has a very low opinion of what human beings can accomplish.”
“If she thinks you can’t make this trip, then why didn’t she do it?”
“Because she knows she can’t do it. Seven is very aware of everything that happens in her body. There’s a little meter somewhere in her that says, ‘Here’s how much energy you have. Don’t go beyond this line.’ ”
“But not you?”
B’Elanna smiled. “I have one. I just ignore it.”
“How do two people with such different personalities get sent out together?” Kaytok asked.
Chuckling, B’Elanna replied, “I wonder about that myself. Sometimes, I think my captain is blind to the problems some people have getting along. Other times, I just think she has a strange sense of humor.” She smiled to herself, surprised that she was saying such things to a relative stranger. “And then there are the other times where I think the captain is trying to make sure we all learn to get along because we might be together for a very, very long time.”
“I don’t understand.”
B’Elanna sighed. “It’s difficult to explain,” she said. “My ship, Voyager, we’re not out here just for exploration or for, I don’t know, for fun. We’re trying to get home, but home is a very long way off, even moving at multiples of the speed of light. We’ve had a couple lucky breaks, made some jumps, but at the current rate of speed, we’re still many, many years from the edge of an area we call the Alpha Quadrant.”
“Home,” Kaytok said.
“Right. And the way things have been going, we might not ever make it. Or maybe our kids will if we’re allowed to have kids. It’s one of those things we don’t talk about very often because the captain…she doesn’t like to admit it might take that long.”
“And yet she stops to see how she can help a group of aliens living on a planet that she’s never seen before.”
“There’s something to that,” B’Elanna said. “I know there are some in my crew who feel that way, but not everyone. My concern is more that she sometimes doesn’t seem to think about how her decisions might affect our home, our way of life.”
“And you’ve never told her how you feel about this?”
“Not precisely. It’s not easy to talk to her about this kind of thing. She’s my captain. She outranks me.”
“It sounds to me like she’s your hara-tan, but not a very sensitive one if she does not hear your thoughts.”
“A rih-hara-tan can read minds?”
“Not precisely,” Kaytok said. “But a hara can sense the well-being of his haran through their bond, or so I am told.”
“You’ve never had a hara?”
Kaytok shook his head. “I have never been able to form the bond.”
“Oh,” B’Elanna said, uncertain what was appropriate to say next. She considered saying, “I’m sorry,” but instead settled on, “Is that unusual?”
“Fairly,” Kaytok said, and his wistful tone told B’Elanna what she needed to know: Here was another outsider. “But not unknown. Once, a child who could not form the link would have been allowed to die. Today it is treated as a sad thing, but not an evil. Certain avenues are closed to one, certain opportunities. Many of my colleagues are like me, as you may have noticed.”
“I did,” B’Elanna said. “I didn’t spend much time around the Monorhans on my ship before we came here, but I saw that they tended to stay close to each other and speak in the whistles and clicks…What do you call that?”
“Second tongue.”
“Right. You and your group don’t so much.”
“There are some hara among us, but the groups are small,” Kaytok explained. “And they try to be discreet. Those like me, the na-hara,