Chapter Text
“Fresh start, take two.” Maren spoke out loud to her reflection in the mirror as she zipped up the second uniform jumpsuit of her first day at Starfleet Academy. The girl staring back at her was the same one she’d seen every day for eighteen-and-a-half years – thin and wiry, pale skin, a smattering of freckles across her nose, and eyes the same color as the lichen that grew on the trees near her family home. But the uniform, dark gray with red shoulders designating her desire for command, somehow transformed her.
Taking a deep breath, she combed out her long, fine blonde hair with her fingers, twisted it back into a neat bun and pinned it into place. She appraised her reflection one more time and stood up a little straighter.
If nothing else, at least she looked the part.
It had been a rough morning, she thought, as she shoved her first, soup-stained uniform into the sonic laundry unit. Nothing was going as she had planned. Instead of impressing her classmates and instructors with her intelligence and physical skill, she had spent the better part of the day struggling to recover from foolish mistakes. She felt strangely out of her element so far. She hoped it was just that the incident in PT with the Vulcan girl had started her off on the wrong foot.
Making a new friend had soothed her a little, despite the embarrassing incident that had started it all. She barely knew John Quigley, but she already liked him. He seemed friendly, warm, encouraging, and competitive without being nasty or underhanded about it … unlike certain Vulcans, she thought, twisting her mouth into a pout. She had to admit that he was really attractive, too – tall and athletic, with a tousled mop of sandy blond hair, chiseled features, and piercing blue eyes.
Not that she expected a romance to blossom. They were, at their core, competitors, and besides, her dating experience was limited to one awkward prom night and a fumbling walk to second base. Honestly, between her studies and her extracurricular pursuits, she’d never really had much time for boys.
Her next class was Introduction to Flight Control. Earlier that morning, she had barely been able to contain her excitement at the thought, but now, there was a disturbing apprehension mixed in with her anticipation. What if I screw this up, too?
She had dreamed of piloting a starship her entire life. The goal had carried her through 13 years of straight As in classes far above her grade level and numerous activities designed to make her application to Starfleet Academy shine. But the only practical experience she had with flying was operating the family skimmer and a handful of anti-grav farm vehicles. Without family connections to Starfleet or the space travel industry, there simply hadn’t been much opportunity for her to try her hand at real piloting. She was pretty decent in a simulator, but a part of her knew – and dreaded the fact – that the real thing wouldn’t be the same at all.
She checked the chronometer on her desktop LCARS unit. 12:47. Thirteen minutes until she faced her lifelong dream for the first time. After everything she’d done to get here, she hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be a nightmare.
*****
Icheb had not expected the Academy to be easy. And yet … it was. His first day of on-campus training had been far less rigorous than any instruction he had ever taken from Seven, Tuvok or Captain – now Admiral – Janeway.
So far, he had outperformed all of his peers in every class he’d attended. In PT, he was the fastest. In Comparative Xenobiology, he’d already known most of the answers, and a quick scan of the text revealed there wasn’t much the class could teach him that the Borg hadn’t already uploaded to his cortical array. His experience in Astrophysics II was similar. It appeared the crew of Voyager had compensated for his enhanced intelligence by making his coursework much harder than it needed to be to earn a commission. He was grateful for it, but his current classes were less stimulating in comparison.
In a sense, though, he realized he wasn’t really at the Academy to learn astrophysics or genetics, even though those were the specialties he had chosen. He already knew more than most Starfleet officers about both fields, along with many others. The real reason he was here was to learn about Starfleet. Learn more about humanity. Make the Federation his home.
As he headed into his Advanced Engineering Survey class, he was disappointed to see Eric Atherton there already, sitting in a gallery seat near the door. The admiral’s son looked up from the PADD he had been reading as Icheb walked in, and the expression of disgust on his face was obvious, even to Icheb, who often had trouble reading human emotions.
“Great, here comes the drone,” he muttered. It wasn’t meant for anyone else; he had said it under his breath, but with his enhancements, it was easy for Icheb to hear.
He purposely chose a seat far away from Eric, toward the far side of the room, where anyone who looked at him would see the right side of his face and not the left side with its ocular implant. He looked around the lecture hall as he waited for class to begin. He counted 95 chairs in the gallery area – a small class, by Academy standards. Down on the floor in front, there were twenty lab tables arranged lengthwise in two long rows of ten. Behind them was the instructor’s desk, and behind that, a large holographic screen. The instructor had yet to arrive.
The other students filed in and took their seats. To Icheb’s relief, no one seemed to notice him. He sat scrolling through his PADD, pretending to review the class material and trying to blend in as much as possible.
Sometimes he wondered if he would have been better off on Wysanti with Mezoti and the twins, Rebi and Azan. He missed them. They had been like siblings to him, and he had fit in with them. Even so, he suspected he would have been unhappy on their world. There was nothing like the Federation there … no organization devoted to peacefully exploring the stars, no sleek starships destined for uncharted worlds, and no promise of a truly clean start – away from his parents, away from Brunali, away from the Borg.
But the clean start he was hoping for was only a childish fantasy. If the last five months of interrogation and isolation hadn’t proven that, the past two days of first contact with his fellow classmates certainly had. Some gave him curious stares. Some avoided him. But many were openly hostile, and they seemed to have intimidated even the curious ones into treating Icheb like he didn’t belong.
Outside the Academy perimeter was even worse. There were protesters outside today; he had seen the news coverage on a viewscreen in the replimat during lunch. Many of them had lost family members or loved ones to the Borg, and they carried signs and voice amplifiers, shouting angrily about betrayal and risk and Trojan Horses – a concept Icheb was familiar with from his previous studies of ancient Earth literature. It was obvious they considered him a “Trojan Horse” for the present day – no doubt sent by the Borg to destroy the Federation from within. After a stunned moment watching them, he had hastily replicated a nutritional supplement and retreated to his room, deciding isolation was preferable to the suspicious glares of his fellow cadets.
Now, the instructor for his engineering class finally arrived, and everyone stood at attention to salute him. Commander Ih’irin was a middle-aged Andorian, tall and lanky, with prominent antennae and close-cropped hair that was so bright white it seemed to take on a violet cast next to his blue skin. His uniform tunic was not the gold of the operations division, but the teal that represented the sciences. A theorist, Icheb speculated. He was encouraged by that. Having had extensive previous experience with applied engineering, he would prefer to study pure theory in this class. He found it much more interesting.
“At ease, cadets,” Ih’irin told them, after returning the salute. “Please, sit down.” The 71 students Icheb had counted, including himself, obediently complied.
“Welcome to Advanced Engineering Survey,” Ih’irin told them. His voice was forthright and confident, and loud enough that Icheb thought it would have reached the very back of the room even without the assistance of the microphone embedded in his desk. “You are here because the faculty has deemed you the most promising third-class cadets in the area of engineering. I expect excellence from all of you,” he said matter-of-factly. “Those who fall behind will be moved to the Intermediate section. My office hours are Thursdays from 1100 to noon. Please make use of them if needed. Now, activate your PADDs and bring up the start page for today’s lecture.”
Icheb appreciated the how the commander avoided discussing irrelevant subjects. His instructor in Comparative Xenobiology, a Betazoid doctor, had spent twelve minutes and thirty-one seconds at the start of class telling them about her personal life. She was married to another Academy instructor, also a Betazoid, who taught military history. They had three children aged 14, 12 and 9. They enjoyed Earth but missed their home and visited whenever they could. She was an avid diver and had written 13 separate textbooks on aquatic biology, each covering a different planet.
It wasn’t that Icheb had found her words uninteresting. It was just that he kept waiting for her to draw a direct connection to the topic they were supposed to be studying, Comparative Xenobiology, and she never did. When she was finished talking about her personal life, she simply stopped. Only then had she directed their attention to the class text.
At least she hadn’t asked everyone to introduce themselves like the Astrophysics instructor had.
As Icheb brought up the class lecture supplement on his PADD, the lights dimmed in the lecture hall and the holographic screen activated behind Commander Ih’irin. Icheb could see that at least twenty-three of the other students had activated subtitles in their native languages on their devices. The main viewscreen displayed four Starfleet vessels of progressively advanced propulsion, their engineering sections highlighted and magnified.
“Today we will review the evolution of interstellar propulsion in Starfleet, beginning with the Warp 5 project, then moving through subsequent generations of warp drive and on to more recent, exotic modes of transport. We’ll also touch on speculation about technology still in development, including quantum slipstream drive and transwarp corridors … ”
Icheb found himself listening to the lecture and storing it in his cortical array, but struggling to stay engaged. He had already memorized most of this information, thanks to the Collective, and what they hadn’t uploaded to his memory, he had learned simply by living and working on Voyager.
As he sat there, bored by the lecture’s content and fighting his growing preoccupation with the protests going on outside the Academy’s perimeter, he wondered, not for the first time, if joining Starfleet would prove to be a mistake. He looked around at the other students, some of whom looked equally bored, and some of whom were looking at Commander Ih’irin with rapt fascination and dutifully tapping out notes on their PADDs.
He wondered if there was any chance he would ever be able to call them friends.
*****
“Welcome to Beginning Flight Control. I’m Lieutenant Commander Silai Jiri.” The dark-haired instructor’s long ponytail bounced behind her as she glanced around the crowd. The petite pilot was standing on a small platform in the middle of the simulation hangar in front of a group of forty or so first-class cadets, and she was still shorter than a few of them – including John, who guessed he was easily thirty centimeters taller than she was.
She was hot, he decided. Definitely no more than thirty, with a fit body, nicely sized breasts and a pert ass. The form-fitting flight suit she was wearing left little to the imagination, and he had to fight to keep a tiny smirk of satisfaction off his face. Not only was he going to learn to fly, he would be taking his orders from by far the most attractive teacher he’d yet met.
Suddenly, she looked right at him. “You,” she said, pointing at him. “What’s your name?” The expression on her face was pleasant enough, but her voice could only be described as “commanding.” Her no-nonsense tone stopped him in his tracks, and he bit back the flirtatious smile that he had instinctively been about to give her. Clearly, this was not a teacher who would be taking any shit.
Wiping the smirk off his face, he forced a more neutral expression, then stood up a little straighter and cleared his throat. “John Quigley, sir,” he answered.
The commander gave him a smile that could only be described as malevolent. “Great. Cadet Quigley. Glad to have you here,” she said. Condescension dripped from every syllable. “Now stop ogling my tits and ass and pay attention,” she ordered.
Heat rushed into John’s face, and he gave the instructor a quick, stunned nod. A number of cadets snickered, but a sharp look from Commander Jiri shut them up. A few rows ahead of him, a blond head turned around. It was Maren O’Connor, the girl from lunch. She was looking at him, wide eyed, with an expression that was equal parts amusement and empathetic horror. He didn’t know whether to be pleased to see her again, or humiliated that she was witnessing this.
Beside him, a Deltan boy nudged his arm. “She’s Betazoid,” he murmured under his breath. “Watch where your mind goes.” John glanced over at the boy, still blushing. His classmate offered up a sympathetic shrug.
Shit, John thought. Mind readers. Instantly, he realized Jiri had probably heard that, too. Sure enough, she glanced his way; then tossed him another evil smile. Bitch, he almost thought, but he somehow managed to stop the word from fully forming in his head. Instead, he looked for Maren’s blond head in the crowd to give his senses something to do.
Meanwhile, Jiri explained that their first day would be a sink-or-swim – “Well, fly-or-crash,” she quipped – shot at the flight simulators to assess their skill. “Those of you who display proficiency above this course level may be given the opportunity to test out,” she told them. “The simulators will automatically adapt to your skill level, so don’t bother lying to the setup screen to make it easier on yourself. If you’ve got experience, enter that in. If you’re a novice, that’s fine. It will start off with the basics and gradually increase the challenge as the system assesses your natural skill. If you tell it you’re a beginner and it senses you’re not, I’ll know about it, and dock you points for being both lazy and dishonest.”
Up in front, Maren’s hand went up. Commander Jiri glanced over at her. “You. What’s your name?”
“Maren O’Connor, sir.” She sounded nervous, her voice both faster and higher-pitched than it had been at lunch, but her words were crisp and clear. “Are mechanical malfunctions and troubleshooting are part of the simulation, or is it more like an obstacle course to test our piloting skill?” she asked.
“That will depend entirely on what the system thinks you’re capable of handling,” Jiri answered. “For most of you, no, it will not throw engineering dilemmas at you. If it does, you probably belong in a more advanced class.” She nodded approvingly at Maren. “That was a good question. Anyone else?” She looked expectantly at the class.
While a few other students asked questions about the assessment process, John willed his mind blank. He dared not look at Commander Jiri. He didn’t know why it had never occurred to him that going to a school full of telepaths might be more than a little awkward, or that one of his commanding officers might be a smoking hot mind reader with a mean streak. (Although that, he decided, was just fucking unfair.) He couldn’t wait to get in the simulator, where his mind would be occupied by trajectories, speed and contacts – physical stuff, stuff he could control, avoid, or demolish.
Sure enough, his discomfort evaporated the moment he sat down behind the controls. He hadn’t flown so much as a skimmer in his life, but one of his favorite places to escape to when he had the credits was the massive holoarcade at the old West Edmonton Mall. Flight simulators ranked up there with fighting sims as the best way to kill a few hours when it was just too cold even for ice hockey. He and his friends liked to have dogfights, which he had usually dominated with a combination of excellent fine motor control, quick reflexes, a good mind for tactics, and a fearlessness that bordered on the asinine. He knew his biological father had been – and probably still was – a shipping pilot. If he hadn’t made it into the Academy, he might have done the same thing.
He answered the short questionnaire on the setup screen truthfully (novice pilot, casual sim experience) and fired up the sim. As the control panel configured itself, he found himself at the helm of a type 2 shuttle. Warp capable. He smirked at that. But he could see on the viewscreen that he was sitting on a landing pad in the middle of an impressively built-up alien city, surrounded by giant arcologies and plenty of air traffic. Sensors indicated the city was on the third of five planets in a densely populated binary star system. For this simulation, it was pretty clear he’d be using thrusters and impulse only.
His assignment was to navigate to a space station orbiting the fifth planet and rendezvous with a starship docked there. As he entered the launch sequence, an artificially pissy voice warned him that he hadn’t been cleared for takeoff. Shit. Sheepishly, he apologized and asked for clearance. When it was granted, he took off, and smoothly maneuvered the shuttle through the heavy air traffic until he was clear of the city’s airspace.
He made it to the station with minimal issues. His weakness was obviously that he didn’t know the ‘rules’ of real space flight. The system zeroed in on this, and threw a lot of technicalities at him – right-of-way issues, approach protocols, even a space lane closure due to a search and seizure operation – and docked him a few points here and there for what mostly amounted to minor traffic violations. Then again, he recalled hearing that such violations carried a penalty of death in some cultures, so maybe it was kind of a big deal. For the most part, though, he deftly completed the simulation and felt quite pleased with himself when the screen displayed “Simulation Complete. Assessment Level: 3.5. Score: 8.4/10.
When he exited the simulator, his good mood came to a quick end. Not everyone looked as happy as he felt. Two simulators over, Maren O’Connor was desperately begging Commander Jiri for another chance in the simulator. Her voice trembled, and she was fighting back actual tears.
“Look, I think I messed up on setup,” she was saying. “I thought I put in ‘novice,’ but I must have hit something else by mistake. Please let me try again, Commander. I can do this; I know it.”
“O’Connor, there’s no mistake,” Jiri retorted, looking down at a PADD. “The system was set to level 0.0 and you still managed to crash within three minutes. Six times. That’s impressive – maybe even record breaking. But you don’t get to try again. You’re a novice; there’s no shame in that. That’s why you’re in this class.” She turned to walk away.
Maren wasn’t having it. “Wait, Commander, please,” she cried out. “Please,” she repeated, more quietly, this time. “I think I know what I did wrong. Please just give me one more shot.” John winced at how desperate she sounded. He knew she’d had a bad day, and that this was probably just the last straw for her. He hoped for Maren’s sake that Jiri’s mind-reading powers let her realize that, too.
Jiri stopped short and slowly turned to face Maren. “Attention, Cadet,” she ordered, low and controlled.
Maren instantly complied, sniffing back tears, drawing herself up to her full height and staring straight ahead at the shorter woman.
“I tried saying it the nice way, now I’m going to say it the Starfleet way,” Jiri told her. “This assessment is complete. Your placement in this class is confirmed. Your objection has been noted, and my decision will not change. One more word out of you, and I will recommend your reassignment to a track that better suits your skill set.”
Maren swallowed back tears and nodded. “Yes, sir,” she whispered.
“What was that?” Jiri asked sharply, holding one hand to her ear. “I couldn’t hear you.”
Maren gulped again. “I said, yes, sir,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Good,” Jiri said, locking eyes with her and nodding. Then she gestured toward the perimeter of the hangar. “Twenty laps,” she said. “Go.”
****
After class, John waited for Maren just outside the door to the simulation hangar. She walked out with her head down, nose in a PADD, her face puffy and eyes rimmed pink from crying. She didn’t notice him, or pretended not to, so he caught her by the arm. “Hey.”
She tensed up at his touch, but stopped walking and looked up. She relaxed a little when she saw his face. Her mouth opened as if she wanted to say something, but then she seemed unable to find the words. She looked as if she might cry again at any second, so John rushed to fill the silence. “Jiri’s kind of a bitch, eh?”
Maren exhaled sharply, a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a bitter laugh. “I made a fool of myself in there,” she said, closing her eyes. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking you have to be the best,” John replied. “But you can’t be. Not here. This place is insane.” Off in the distance, behind an old iron perimeter fence, he could see a crowd of people with colorful signs, protesting the Borg kid they’d let into the Academy. Case in point, he thought to himself. No mere human could ever hope to outperform a Borg drone, either academically or physically. Or a Vulcan, for that matter. Or an Andorian. The list went on. He and Maren might have been star performers in their little Earth hometowns, but here, they would be lucky not to wash out. Hell, he hadn’t even made it in the first time he had applied, meaning he was probably a year older than Maren.
She opened her eyes and gave him a baleful look. “I don’t need to be the best,” she said. “But I’ve never failed like that at anything in my life. It just … oh, I don’t know,” she sighed. “On top of everything else that happened today, I guess it was just too much. I snapped.”
“That’s what they want,” John said, taking her by the arm and escorting her in the general direction of Carmichael Hall. “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”
Maren sighed and leaned into him a little, letting him guide her toward the dorms. “How did you do?” she asked, looking up at him curiously.
“On the assessment?” he asked. Maren nodded.
John shrugged lightly. “I did okay. I didn’t test out, but I came pretty damn close. I figure if nothing else, maybe that means an easy A.” He immediately felt bad for saying it to her, given how bad she felt about how poorly she’d done, but to her credit, she didn’t seem hurt by it. “Maybe I can help you,” he offered. “If we can get some holosuite time, I can show you some of the sims I learned on. Maybe it would help.”
Maren offered him a weak smile. “Maybe,” she said, with a half-hearted shrug.
“Okay, wait, stop,” he said, coming to a sudden halt. “What is this ‘maybe’ crap? You’re never going to make it with that attitude. No way are you going to let them defeat you on the first day. You’re the girl who let me sit with her at lunch after I knocked you flat on your ass in front of everyone. No way are you giving up that easily.”
“I’m not giving up,” she protested, starting to walk toward the dorms again. “I’m just … tired, I guess. It’s been a long day.”
John jogged a few steps to pass her, and stood in front of her to cut her off. She stopped and looked up at him with an expression that was somehow questioning, impatient and amused, all at the same time. She had a really expressive face, and for the second time that day, he imagined kissing her lips, which were currently screwed up into an impatient pout. He blushed, grateful this girl didn’t have the same mind-reading skills as the bitchy flight control professor.
“Okay, look,” he said. “Come out with me tonight. Forget this day ever happened. My roommate and I are going to check out a club nearby. It’s supposedly the best one within stumbling distance, if you know what I mean.” Maren smiled at that. “Come on. I promise it will be fun. You’ll forget how bad today was, and tomorrow can be a brand new start.”
She looked up at him, equal parts hope and skepticism. “I have homework,” she pointed out, “and so do you.”
“So? We’ll do it now,” he replied confidently. “We’ll go back to the dorm, get our shit done, and have something to look forward to when it’s all over.” He smiled at her, this time effortlessly managing the devastatingly effective grin he’d used on the girls back in high school. “So?” he asked. “Are you in or out?”
She gave him a long, conflicted look, and for a minute, he was sure she was going to say no. But then her mouth quirked into a little half-smile. “All right, I’m in,” she said. “But first, you’re helping me with my flight control assignment.”
