String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [7]
“You may tell Mr. Neelix that I am very pleased with his work,” Janeway said, as Naomi’s smile grew bright enough to light the entire room. “And thank you for delivering this to me.”
“Will there be anything else, ma’am?” Naomi asked, apparently oblivious of Janeway’s unwritten rule that she be addressed as “ma’am” only in a crunch.
“May I see your drawing?” Janeway asked.
“Sure! I mean, yes, ma’am,” Naomi answered, pleased.
Examining the broad strokes of deep purple and blue that filled the page, Janeway was impressed to see that Naomi had actually created a very fair approximation of the stars of the Monorhan system.
“What do you think, Chakotay?” Janeway turned to the commander.
“I think Seven of Nine might want to add this to our astrometric database,” Chakotay replied.
“High praise, indeed,” Janeway acknowledged, “although, I wonder…” she mused, taking the drawing and placing it on the wall next to the door in a position where she could have an unobstructed view of it from her desk.
“What do you think?” she asked Naomi. “Would you mind very much if I were to hang this here, for the time being?”
The child’s sweet, prideful smile was all the gratitude Janeway needed.
“I wouldn’t mind at all, ma’am.”
“Thank you for this lovely addition to my ready room, Naomi.”
“You’re welcome, Captain,” Naomi grinned.
“You are dismissed, Miss Wildman.”
With a curt nod, and a bounce in her step, Naomi took three long strides toward the exit before breaking into a full skip as the door opened to the corridor that would lead her back to Neelix and her day of study and play.
As Chakotay watched Naomi’s braid dance in rhythm behind her, Janeway noted the deep lines of worry etched in his tattooed brow. He was still smiling faintly, but the smile no longer touched his eyes.
Nothing about humans irked Seven of Nine quite as intensely as their frequent inability to retain even the simplest series of instructions and perform them to her specifications without demanding infinitely more in the way of explanation and justification than she was ever of a mind to give. In a colleague who had earned her respect, B’Elanna Torres, for example, she had learned to restrain her irritation because she finally understood, largely owing to their recent away mission on Monorha, where they had been forced to function in a “mini-collective” state, that B’Elanna’s questions were not meant to irritate, or to imply any ignorance on Seven’s part, but instead were part of a process of intelligent debate that often resulted in a better solution than Seven might have arrived at on her own. Naturally, she was confident that she would have eventually seen the same issues B’Elanna would raise, but that was because B’Elanna had a natural gift for thinking ten or eleven steps ahead of any problem. This had earned her the right, in Seven’s opinion, to interrupt her course of action, and consider at least a few other possibilities before fully committing herself.
The same could not be said for Ensign Brooks. He was one of a team of engineers who had been assigned to assist her in evaluating the viability of adding quantum slipstream technology to Voyager’s arsenal of not-quite-by-the-book modifications. Though to Seven’s mind, there were infinitely more pressing matters before Voyager’s crew at the moment, Commander Chakotay had insisted that all senior staff were to provide him with regularly scheduled updates of all current projects now that things had returned to something vaguely resembling “normal.” She had every intention of obeying Chakotay’s request, despite the unpleasant fact that it would throw her into Brooks’s path first thing after completing her regeneration cycle.
Brooks was obviously highly regarded by Commander Chakotay. Seven was certain, however, that should he everbe asked to engage in activities that went beyond the theoretical and more toward the practical applications, he would have made Harry Kim’s frequent tendency to come within an inch of his life look like textbook procedure