Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [59]
Of course he still believed, at least intellectually, that he was the right person for this dual job. Though he had served in the far less action-intensive role of stellar cartographer during his first tour of duty aboard the Enterprise, he had also been trained in multiple techniques of unarmed defense, had achieved some of the highest marksmanship scores of his Academy class, and had already proven himself during real-world tactical crises on Trill, Tezwa, and Pelagia.
When he had returned to the Enterprise two years ago following an extended personal leave on Trill, he had transferred to security, joining the department that was then headed by Christine Vale. Had Lieutenant Commander Worf still been in charge of ship’s security then, Keru knew he couldn’t have worked under him; the Klingon officer was the one who had, albeit out of necessity, shot Keru’s lifemate, Lieutenant Sean Hawk, and then let his corpse drift off into trackless space.
No, it was the Borg who killed him, he repeated to himself for perhaps the billionth time. Worf was only doing his job, protecting the ship. Sean was infected with nanoprobes, and would have used them to assimilate the rest of us.
And yet, every time he made that argument to himself, he saw the face of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who had also once been assimilated by the Borg, only to be rescued later and cured of his nanoprobe infection. More recently, the long-lost U.S.S. Voyager had returned to Earth, bringing along a human woman who had also been successfully deassimilated from the Borg collective. Both Picard and the woman Voyager’s crew had repatriated had been nanoprobe-infected for far longer than Sean had been.
He could have been saved, too. Worf was too quick to sacrifice a fellow crew member, battle conditions or not.
It was an ugly doubt to be carrying around, but he had been unable to put it to rest for more than half a decade now. There had to have been another way. Sean Hawk would still be alive today if Worf had simply put forth a better effort to find it.
He knew that this nagging bitterness, this shard of blame that remained lodged in his soul like old shrapnel, was one of the underlying reasons that Keru had accepted the role of security chief aboard Titan when Captain Riker had extended the invitation. He had not said it aloud, but inside, he’d fairly screamed it: I won’t sacrifice anyone on my team. No one is expendable.
During the past few weeks, he had worked his security crew hard, probably harder than they’d ever been worked at the Academy. On the physical side, he had them running simulations in the holodeck, training in multiple exotic forms of hand-to-hand combat, including Vulcan V’Shan, Terran Tai Chi, and Klingon Mok’bara, while practicing with a medley of weapons that ranged from standard phasers to Klingon bat’leth s to Capellan kligat s to Ferengi energy whips. On the academic front, he had them immersed in language studies to free them from total dependency on the universal translator, and introduced meditation techniques from several different cultures in order to bring their minds and bodies into closer alignment.
He knew that some of them resented the extensive training, no doubt feeling they had already “made their bones” serving in their previous postings. He had even heard a few whispered comments about his own previous “cushy” job as a stellar cartographer. So he worked himself hard, right alongside his crew, doing everything they did, as long as his other duties didn’t call him away. Lately, even with the Romulan talks looming, he hadn’t had a lot to do other than continue drilling.
Now, even though he was off duty, he had decided to wear his uniform into the mess hall. Relaxed dress code or no, he felt he ought to at least set an example. Besides, he hadn’t really wanted to take the time to change clothes after the beta shift crew had