Carol Marcus breathed out as the door of her cabin slid shut behind her.
She hadn't been aboard the Enterprise for long enough to make the room feel personal, but at least it was private, and comfortable - and it had escaped any real damage in the battle against the Vengeance.
Before she could decide whether to flop onto her bunk or drop into the armchair, she heard the chirrup of her communicator.
By the time she'd flipped open the device, she'd already worked out who was calling her.
"Yes?" she answered, irritably.
"Karol?" The Anglish was fluent, but the underlying accent was still unmistakably alien. It was a voice that nothing to do with the brightly lit white space in which she stood. "Are you alone?"
"Of course I am," she answered, frowning as the silent motes of a Klingon beam-out swirled around her. As she reappeared on a darkened transporter pad, she snapped off her communicator, clenching it like a weapon in her lowered fist, and glared angrily at Khage. "You damn well knew that already."
"Kai the human," the Klingon laughed, rapping his fist on his chest in ironic salute.
She scowled at him some more, and stalked off the raised platform of the pad, conscious as usual of the cramped proportions of the attack cruiser's transporter room - two individual positions, barely enough headroom for a modestly-sized human, and a step-down area that doubled as an access space for the deflector system behind the bulkhead.
She understood the logic behind the compact design. Minimizing space and structure improved the power-to-mass ratio of ships built purely for combat. In the Klingon fleet, larger beam-outs were generally restricted to Marines, and they used the cargo transporter in the secondary hull.
For a moment, she stood face-to-face with her handler, a blonde Starfleet officer in a skimpy blue deck dress and coordinated nail polish, staring up defiantly at a cheerfully ugly brute of a Klingon squadron leader, too broad-bodied and bulky to pass for human.
She was annoyed that she hadn't been wearing something more practical. Still, at least she was wearing sensible, flat-soled boots.
"I assume you've already figured out the details," she said quickly, preempting Khage before he could turn and stride out of the transporter room. That would have forced her to hurry after him, like a pet at its owner's heels. "Though I'm pretty sure you didn't beam me over here just to say thank you."
Once you chose to betray your people to the Klingons, you quickly learned a whole new set of interpersonal skills. She'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be human.
"You did well," Khage remarked, with a cheerfully ugly smile.
"Thanks," she answered. She supposed it was a complement. She supposed it was true.
The Vengeance was a wreck, Khan was back in his cryo-tube, and Jupiter Station was under the control of the civilian police. All the Genesis torpedoes had been destroyed, and the entire Section 31 program had been discredited.
This was more-or-less what she'd signed up for in the first place.