Chapter II The Assignment
Spock
Tomorrow would be the last day of the term. Then the cadets would be released for a 4 week holiday. Most cadets would return to their hometowns, but some would stay at the Academy. Spock usually stayed at the Academy, working on his own many projects. The Academy staff encouraged him doing that, as the products of his projects were always valuable. The current Kobayashi Maru simulation programme, for example, was conceived during such break. It had proven to be a valuable test for the cadets, especially those in command track, training to face the unthinkable and be good captains of the Starfleet starships.
Spock was working in his small office, listing possible projects to fill his break when the comm buzzed.
"Commander Spock, this is Admiral Marcus. Could you please come to my office at once."
"Aye, Admiral. On my way." Spock responded. It's not very often that the head of Starfleet would call a lowly Starfleet Academy instructor directly, but Spock did not speculate why. He donned his dress uniform hat and went out to one of the transport tram connecting the Academy with the Starfleet headquarter. Once at the headquarter he reported to the guard at the lobby and was brought to Admiral Marcus' office.
"Sir," He said and stood to attention in front of the Admiral.
"At ease Commander Spock. And do sit down. I'll be as brief as possible. As you know, Commander, we are not officially at war with Klingons. Yet. But the wind of war is coming. We would prefer it not to happen and we are doing all we can to avoid it. One of the things we have done is to strengthen our intelligence services. Yes, we spy on them and on others. And we need your expertise."
Spock offered no response, but continued attentively watching the Admiral, who carried on his monologue, "We have a special unit, Commander, called Section 31, which is actually our intelligence branch. Don't worry, we are not doing anything unethical. I know you teach interspecies ethic and that you rather like following all rules and regulations. Nothing I'm going to ask you is unethical. Section 31 needs support because they do not have enough people to intercept, decrypt and translate messages. Something you can't trust a universal translator on. I know you are an exceptionally good computer programmer. I have also heard that you have a special group of students who are bright xenolinguists. We need you to work out a programme to systematically sweep an area and intercept and filter messages relevant to our intelligence, in all and any language we know. The project is called Project Rossetta and will start immediately. I have informed the Academy Director and obtain a release for you and one or two of your students to work for me. You choose which students to work with you. Please report for duty at Section 31 tomorrow morning. Needless to say, this is confidential."
"Very well, Sir. Thank you."
Spock thought about the project with interests. This will be a challenging one, developing a programme clever enough to filter relevant messages, encrypted and in many languages. Yes, he's definitely interested. He then thought about which student to choose to help him. Immediately Uhura's face appear in his mind. It's only logical to think of her, he mused, as she is by far the best xenolinguist currently the Academy had.
After the class that afternoon Spock asked Uhura to stay back and asked, "Cadet Uhura, do you have any special holiday plan? Are you going home to your family?"
Uhura, still flustered from being so near Spock without anyone else around, answered quickly, "Not really, Sir. I do not plan to go anywhere. My plan is to stay in the Academy." Inwardly, she made a mental note to find excuses to cancel the trip with Gaila and Zeta to a beach resort she had previously agreed to. She'd do anything to help Spock. Hopefully it would involve working in close proximity to him.
Spock answered, "Very well. I have a project I think you can help me with." Then he explained what Admiral Marcus had said this morning.
Uhura
Getting out of the classroom, Uhura found it really hard to contain herself – she wanted to run to the nearest hill and shouted hurray from the top. She felt like jumping up and down. It was a dream came true. She'd been invited, picked, chosen, to work on a highly secret section of Starfleet! She was noticed! And she would be given a chance to use her skills in practice, in an official assignment!
On top of that, on top of that, she would be working with the hero she'd been worshipping all this time. Commander Spock, with his cool brainy persona, the subject of her dreams, would actually be working alongside her. She just couldn't find any word to describe this happiness. She's simply in heaven.
So occupied was she with all the happy thoughts that she forgot to invent excuses to Gaila and Zeta. She only remembered it when she bumped into them at the corridor just outside their room, and Gaila chirped cheerfully, "Uhura! You look so happy, thinking about our upcoming trip? You bet it's going to be fun. Mexico is so full of gorgeous males!"
Called abruptly down to earth, Uhura responded, "Gaila, Zeta, I am so sorry I won't be able to go with you." Mind whirling trying to invent some plausible excuses, she walked inside.
Gaila's face fell as she followed her in. "Oh no Uhura. Come on! You've said you'll come. Come on, it will be fun. We always have fun holidaying together. We can always move to a quieter place if you don't like the noisy hotel at the beach."
"Look Gaila, I'm really sorry, I was looking forward to it as well, but something important came up this morning. It's family matter. I have to go and meet my uncle," Uhura said.
"You've never mentioned any uncle, Uhura, nor any relatives at all for that matter," Gaila said.
Uhura felt a bit hurt. Most human cadets would go home on term breaks and spend a few weeks with family and friends. In her two years with the Academy she had never been home at all. She walked into the Academy compound when she enlisted, and she never looked back. The Academy was home. Because she had nowhere else to call home. That place she left, where she came from, did it even qualify as a home? No. It was a place of messy, sad, hurtful childhood that she would never even want to visit or think of again, ever. So all this time, she had been one of only a handful of human students staying in the Academy over term breaks. Of course, there were always some extra-terrestrial students staying in campus during holiday time – they don't get to go home as often as the human students. So she'd go with the likes of Gaila and Zeta, holidaying somewhere as a group rather than staying on campus. But lately she preferred to spend her term breaks roaming the libraries and sensor labs, honing her skills. Because she's aiming for something. Something to prove herself, to show those people back where she came from, that she could soar higher than them.
"Oh Uhura, I'm sorry," Gaila said hurriedly when she saw the hurt look in Uhura's face. "I didn't mean to pry into your personal life. If you can't go then so be it. I hope next time we can go together again. You've been too serious lately, girl! Where's this happy girl I knew before? Don't work too hard. You're already top of the class anyway. You'll get any assignment you want. So relax a bit. Oh allright, I tell you what, if your business finishes early, call us and come to us, ok?"
Uhura smiled and said, "Thanks Gaila. I will."
Gaila and Zeta walked out. After checking briefly that the door had been closed and Uhura out of hearing Zeta whispered, "You know, honestly I am glad she won't be coming with us this time. She'd be a party pooper, Gaila. I really don't understand why you're so faithful to her. She's too prudish, no fun at all."
"Hush!" Gaila responded mildly, "Uhura's alright. She didn't use to be this serious. Lately she's been too bookish and a bit of a loner for her good. But not all the time. She doesn't like boys the way we do but she's alright, actually. I like her."
The next morning Uhura found Spock standing still, hands clasped at the back, at the platform of the transport station, waiting for her and the tram to get to Starfleet HQ across the channel.
"Good morning, Commander," she said.
"Good morning, Cadet Uhura."
They stood side by side but did not speak again until they arrived at the Starfleet HQ, where they reported to the guard, got security checked, and were brought down deep underground in a lift. At B5 level they were taken out and led through a row of offices full of computers that buzzed with noises and blinking lights, to a small room at the end. Inside, an officer sat on a desk in front of his computer.
"Commander Spock, Cadet Uhura, I am Commander Ross, head of the Alien Communication Interception desk at Section 31. Throughout Project Rosetta, you will report to me. Admiral Marcus has given you the background?"
"Affirmative, Sir." Spock responded.
"Then please start right away. You will have the project parameters and all the detailed information needed in the set of computers we leave in the next room. I want you to study it carefully and come back to me with a plan by tomorrow."
They were left in their work room, where Spock silently sat in front of a computer. Uhura did the same and started to delve into the many documents there. The information was hard to digest and she had to concentrate hard. At first her mind kept wandering off. Was this what she had dreamt her exciting assignment with Spock going to be? Definitely not. But how stupid of her to think that being with Spock would be very exciting. She had heard of him by reputation and had sat in his classes. In flesh he certainly wasn't the hero she worshipped in her dreams. Trying hard to wipe the thoughts out of her mind, she concentrated on the documents and finally, after getting to the main part, past the project definitions, started to find it interesting.
"Do you have a plan already, Cadet Uhura?" Spock's voice suddenly filled the silent room, making Uhura jumped.
"It appears I have startled you. My apology." He said.
"It's ok, Commander. I was just so deep into the documents, I forgot where we are." She responded, annoyed at herself for being so embarrassing. She added hurriedly, "I think I can give you some definitions and parameters, Sir, based on the messages I have encountered and intercepted during the sessions in the long sensor labs."
"Indeed, I have heard that you actually spend many nights in the lab, on top of the standard time required by the Academy. If I may ask, why?"
"It is no different from the projects you work on, on your own initiatives, during your term breaks, Sir. Something useful to do, something you're interested in. In my case it is also to hone my skills at the languages. I would like to be able to qualify to join the USS Enterprise crew after graduating."
"Fascinating." Spock said while watching her intently.
Uhura's heart quickened and she blushed. She tried to hide it by busying herself to search for her own documented intercepted messages. "Here, Sir, are my documented find. There is also a whole archive full of other such documents. I can go through them and find useful identifiers and key words, Sir, which will help you with the algorithms."
"Please proceed, Cadet." Spock said.
That day and the next few days moved in a blur for Uhura. The project was challenging, she had to trawl through copious amount of data and find patterns. Which is difficult considering the wildly diverse grammar and syntaxes in the languages they have to deal with. She fed whatever she found to Spock, who worked on it and came back to her with revised algorithms, which she needed to run through her database again.
They worked well together. They would come at the same time in the morning, made a beeline to the room and worked and worked. Then at lunch break they would go together to the canteen, sat face to face in a table and ate quickly without exchanging many words, then walked back to the room to work again. Occasionally she would make a cup of tea to refresh herself, but Spock didn't seem to need any. They worked late. At the end of the day Uhura would be exhausted, but Spock didn't seem to be tired at all. When she observed this he simply answered that Vulcans did not need as much sleep as humans. But he duly stopped working at 8pm and they would walked together to their assigned lodgings.
Even though they did not speak much to each other, other than when they brainstormed or went through the programme together, it was an enjoyable time for her. She began to understand Spock more. She enjoyed their intellectual exchange and even the companionable silence they have during lunch time or the journey to and from work. The silence didn't seem to be awkward at all, it felt natural. They understood each other.
At the end of two weeks their programme had been assembled and was ready to be tested on the real thing. They were brought to one of the sensor labs at the Starfleet HQ, which are bigger and more sophisticated than what they had at the Academy, and were given access to install the programme. Then they sat down side by side on a desk, earpieces on, to start observing and overseeing the machine intercepting and interpreting messages, automating the tasks that used to have to be done by a horde of people like Uhura and her xenolinguist classmates.
They had to go back down to the work room at the basement to revise and refine the programme, then tested it again, refined it and tested it again, until they were happy with it. But in the end the project finished ahead of schedule. The programme was installed and functioning properly in all sensor labs in both the Starfleet HQ and the Academy. Both Commander Ross and Admiral Marcus were happy. Uhura was ecstatic. Her name on a useful programme, the achievement recorded in her Starfleet dossier. Spock? Impassive as usual, this wasn't his only achievement, nor was it the best. But Uhura did detect a hint of satisfaction, and occasionally a glint of pride in his eyes.