Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [12]
Early on during her time among humans, all the whispers and “special” treatment had made her extremely defensive. By the time she had been assigned briefly to head stellar cartography aboard space station Deep Space 9 some nine years ago, she had developed a decidedly antagonistic attitude. The station’s doctor, Julian Bashir, had offered her a neuromuscular adaptation therapy which could have acclimated her motor cortex to standard gravity—permanently. But she had decided against the therapy, having learned by the end of her short stint on DS9 that her attitude, not her physiology, had needed adjustment.
She had spent the next several years honing her skills, acquiring new ones, and then being tested on numerous short-term “specialty” assignments, ranging from stultifyingly mundane mapmaking junkets to some truly harrowing missions in which she had piloted shuttles. During the Dominion War, she had helped save 192 of her shipmates, and had been decorated for valor afterward. Immediately following the war, she had accepted an assignment aboard the Enterprise to conduct a low-gravity science study on Primus IV.
But fate had made other plans for Pazlar. After she had been contacted by the Lipul, one of her homeworld’s six sentient races, she convinced Captain Jean-Luc Picard to divert the Enterprise to the artificial planet known as Gemworld. Although Pazlar and the starship’s crew had succeeded in preventing Gemworld’s destruction, she had been forced to take the life of another Elaysian during the mission. In the aftermath, Picard had granted her extended leave from Starfleet to face her homeworld’s Exalted Ones, and to atone for her crime. She had spent a seeming eternity drifting in cloistered meditation, fasting and contemplating her deeds on that mission—actions that weighed heavily upon her even now, and probably always would.
Although even the Exalted Ones had finally declared the death of the renegade engineer Tangre Bertoran justifiable and unavoidable, Pazlar had continued her atonement rituals for many months—intervals known as “shadow marks” among the Elaysians, whose world lacked a natural satellite from which to construct a lunar calendar—before making her decision to reconnect with Starfleet. She had been on assignment with the science vessel Aegrippos when Captain Riker had invited her to join the crew of Titan.
Pazlar thought her initial meeting with Riker last week had gone quite well. He was fresh from what had apparently been an unusual honeymoon on Pelagia, and had seemed eager to accede to Pazlar’s requests.
“If I take this job, the stellar cartography lab is going to be micro-g most of the time,” she had said firmly. “Not to put too fine a point on it, sir, but I’ve adapted to everyone else’s need for gravity for a long time now. I think it’s time that my colleagues began to adapt to some of my more…free-floating needs.”
“Agreed,” Riker had said, smiling. “There’s something else, Lieutenant.”
“Sir?”
“We’ve got a pretty radical structural idea for your quarters,” he had said with another disarming grin. “I’ve had the engineering teams working on cabin retrofits for several members of the crew who have special environmental requirements. I think you’ll like what they’ve come up with for you.”
Now, a week later, Pazlar neared the alcove that led to the door to her quarters. Or, more specifically, one of the doors. As the Bolian had said—why am I so bad with names?—the