Angels Unaware
By Laura Schiller
Based on Star Trek: Discovery
Copyright: CBS
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"Michael, thank God you're back. Tell me I'm not crazy!" exclaimed Ensign Tilly as soon as her roommate came through the door of their quarters.
Michael was inclined to reserve judgment. She had expected to find her friend happy and proud after having saved a planet from nuclear winter, but instead, Tilly was white in the face and her curly red hair stood up in every direction. Her eyes were red too, which meant she had either been crying, drinking one of her quadruple espressos, or both.
"What's going on?" asked Michael.
"A dead girl talked to me."
"What?"
"I know how it sounds, but please listen!" Tilly caught hold of her forearms and squeezed, not just for emphasis, but to keep from swaying on her feet. "She was kind of strange, the way she talked was a bit stilted, but – I mean, people think I'm strange, so I try not to judge, you know? I thought she was just new on board and trying to sound professional … but then she called me Stilly and - "
"Ensign!" Michael deliberately raised her voice to the level of an Academy drill sergeant. "Take a deep breath and start from the beginning."
She deposited Tilly on her hypoallergenic bed, pulled over one of the wheeled desk chairs for herself, and prepared to listen.
"Right. Okay. From the beginning. Let's see … "
Tilly took several deep breaths, pushed back her curls, and began nervously braiding and unbraiding them as she told the whole story, clearly making every effort to sound professional. From what Michael could understand, Tilly had met a young ensign who appeared to be a former high school classmate, Mae Ahern, who had encouraged her and helped her brainstorm ideas for saving Terralysium. Except that later, when looking up her name in the database, Tilly had learned that Mae Ahern had died in the Klingon War.
When Michael heard that, it took all her Vulcan training not to shiver. She knew all too well how it felt to meet a ghost from your past.
"I lost touch with her," said Tilly, pulling on her curls in a way that must have been painful. "How could I let that happen? She was my friend. I got so caught up in Starfleet that I forgot all about her … and the Klingons bombed her colony to pieces while I was off looking at mushrooms and being Captain Killy … "
"Hey. Stop that." Michael scooted her chair closer so that she could catch Tilly's wrists and stop them from pulling her hair out. "You have nothing to feel guilty about, do you understand me? If she was your friend, she'd be proud of the work you did, both during the war and today. You saved lives, Tilly, remember?"
She squeezed Tilly's hands and let go. Tilly nodded tentatively, her brown eyes bright with tears.
"And whatever entity you spoke to, we're going to find out who and what it was. I promise you're not going insane, or at least no more than I am. I've been seeing angels."
That, more than anything, helped to shock Tilly out of her self-reproach. Her eyes widened. Her jaw dropped.
"You – wait – did you say – what?"
"I saw a humanoid shape with a red-gold aura and wings just before Captain Pike rescued me on the asteroid. I saw it again on Terralysium when the Captain got shot. The locals believe it's an angel who rescued them from Earth during World War Three. The Captain believes the phenomenon is connected to the red energy bursts Starfleet wants us to investigate."
Michael nearly added the fact that Spock had been seeing visions of the same red bursts, but stopped herself. Her brother was the most intensely private person she had ever known, even by Vulcan standards. It was bad enough that she had hacked his personal log and shown it to Pike – intergalactic emergency notwithstanding - but she couldn't bring herself to betray his confidence again.
"So you see," she concluded, "There hasto be a rational explanation."
"Okay, whoa, whoa. Back up." Tilly waved her hands wildly. "First of all – did you say the Captain got shot? What the hell happened down there?"
"One of the locals didn't believe our cover story and guessed at the truth. He shot the Captain to provoke us into showing our technology. Lieutenant Owosekun and I dragged the Captain into the church to pretend to pray for his life, so we could beam him out behind closed doors."
Tilly gasped. "Is he okay? Are you okay?"
The full answer to that was complicated. Michael had seen enough violence during the war to last more than a lifetime, and to some degree she had become used to it. Also, she hardly knew Pike. Still, the possibility of a third captain dying on her watch had shaken her, reminding her horribly of Georgiou's and Lorca's deaths.
The short answer, she decided, was safest. "Would Dr. Pollard have let us out of Sickbay if we weren't?"
"Fair enough." Tilly scrunched up her face, having evidently had her own encounter with the formidable CMO. "Second of all … first ghosts, now angels? I know you were raised by Vulcans, but how are you not freaking out?"
The Michael who lived on Vulcan would have quoted something wise about self-control. The one freshly released from prison would have ignored the question altogether. The current Michael shrugged and gave her friend a wry half-smile. "If you knew what's been going on in my head for the past months, you wouldn't say that. I prefer to freak out on the inside."
Tilly sighed and flopped over onto her back, staring at the ceiling. "God, I wish I could do that."
Michael, for her part, often wished that she could wear her heart on her sleeve the way her roommate did. The level of trust and courage that took was something she hadn't known since childhood.
Searching for a safer topic of conversation to calm them both down, Michael settled on one of the pleasanter parts of her mission to Terralysium.
"I think Captain Pike is proving himself a competent leader," she said. "He's certainly different from Lorca."
"Wow." Tilly propped herself up on one elbow so she could give Michael a smirk. "Coming from you, that's like a ringing endorsement. Why do you think so? I'm guessing it's not his beautiful nail beds."
Michael chuckled. "No … but the mood on the bridge is different, did you notice? Everyone's more confident, more outspoken. Lorca always used to send the same people on away missions – myself and Lieutenant Tyler." She managed to say Ash's name in an almost normal tone of voice. It was nobody's business, not even Tilly's, how appallingly tangled her feelings for him still were. "I was just grateful to be out of prison and have useful work to do, so I didn't question it, but I should have. Pike didn't do that today. He did what a real captain ought to do and asked who was the most qualified. Owosekun was really useful down there. She helped me save his life."
"Yeah, she's solid. You can count on her." Tilly smiled. "Lieutenant Detmer, too. I knew she was a good pilot, obviously, but I had no idea she was a genius. She did a donut maneuver. In space! You should've seen it! And she was smiling. I didn't know she could smile. I mean, of course she can, but … you know what I mean."
Michael did know. Keyla Detmer had smiled quite often on the Shenzhou, quietly amused by Michael's arguments with Saru, but the Battle of the Binaries seemed to have cost the pilot more than her left eye. It was one of many things Michael still felt guilty about. If Pike's leadership was helping Detmer come out of her shell again, even a little, he had Michael's gratitude.
"I think the difference is that Pike sees us as individuals, not just soldiers," she mused out loud. "He doesn't only tell us what to do. He asks us what we're capable of doing. He reminds me," and for the life of her, this time she couldn't stop her voice from trembling, "Of Captain Georgiou in that respect. I wouldn't mind if he stuck around."
She did not believe in angels. She knew there had to be another explanation for those winged creatures and the entity that resembled Tilly's friend. But if she did believe, she would have prayed to them with all her heart that Captain Pike would survive that phaser burn across his chest. Georgiou had been killed in a frontal attack too. It was Lorca who'd been stabbed in the back.
She closed her eyes, saw the throne room of the Defiant blurring into the Klingon Ship of the Dead, forced them open again and stared at the plain white ceiling. But the echoes of the sound a sword made when sliding into human flesh were harder to block out.
She had never actually seen her parents being killed. Only heard them, from her hiding place in the closet. And seen their blood across the kitchen floor after the Klingons had dragged their bodies away.
She could not lose another captain.
She couldn't.
Not again.
"Michael? … You look light years away. Are you freaking out on the inside?"
Michael jumped. She'd forgotten where she was and to whom she was speaking. Ashamed of herself, she focused on her friend, who was sitting with her arms wrapped around a pillow and watching her with wide eyes.
For such a socially awkward woman, Tilly had a gift for reading people. She would make an excellent commander one day. If she survived that long.
"I think I was," she confessed.
Her inner Vulcan pointed out how illogical she was being. There was no use dwelling on her past, which she could not change, or worrying about a future event that might never happen. If she wanted to protect her colleagues, she should do it by being alert and capable, not by spiraling into panic.
But none of these thoughts, however logical, were anywhere near as helpful as her roommate's kind little voice.
"Can I do anything?" asked Tilly. "Please tell me something I can do. Make it up on the spot if you have to."
Michael didn't need to make it up. She rolled her chair over to her nightstand, picked up her antique paper copy of Alice in Wonderland and silently held it out.
"One classic bedtime story coming right up. Stop me if I read too fast, okay?"
Tilly took the book with both hands and a solemn nod as if it were a sacred text. She patted the space on the bed next to her, inviting Michael to sit, and made a fussy little production of sliding the pillow behind her older friend's back. She cleared her throat and rustled the pages for quite a while until she found the right one. Any other time, Michael might have been annoyed by all these gestures, but today they comforted her. It was all so typically Tilly.
Sarek would have said that the best way to free yourself from apprehensions about the past and future was to focus on the present.
Amanda would have said that not all angels had wings.
They both had a point. Michael settled back against the pillow, closed her eyes and listened to Tilly read.