A/N: I'm sorry it's taken me so long to post this chapter. I was in a pretty bad car accident at the end of my most recent business trip and I had to take some time to recover. I have been writing a fluffy Mandalorian fic and I was able to get a couple of chapters written for that during my downtime but I'm at a different point in this story and didn't have the concentration necessary to work on it. Anyway, I'm doing well now and back to working on this story. Enjoy!

As much as Jim would've liked to have told Scotty about the plan to catch Shakeba's tormentors, if only to allow her to do more in engineering, he abstained. The more people who knew the plan, the more likely it was that her assailants would find out and then they'd never catch them. So Shakeba continued to do menial tasks well below her capabilities, finally insisting that Scotty stop apologizing every time her gave her a new task. It was clear the chief engineer was embarrassed to ask her to check routine wiring when there was so much she could be doing. But even before Jim had clued her into the reason for her prolonged surveillance, Shakeba had taken no offense to Scotty's requests. She'd rather be doing mundane chores than sitting in her quarters, doing nothing.

It was a particularly busy day in engineering – everything that could go wrong, was, all at the same time.

"Lass," Scotty called out to Shakeba, while simultaneously trying to stop a cooling tank leak and explain to an ensign how to reset the reactor, "Can you take a look at the Jeffries tubes in the left quadrant? There's some sort of malfunction."

"Sure," she called out, grabbing a scanner and some tools to take with her.

The left quadrant of engineering was deserted. Everyone was putting out fires (some literal, others figurative) elsewhere. Shakeba scanned the area to ascertain which Jeffries tube was causing trouble. Once she'd found it, she removed the panel nearest her to enter the tubes, swinging the strap of the tool bag she'd brought across her body. Shakeba entered the tube and climbed the built-in ladder inside to reach the junction which would lead her to the area that seemed to be causing the problem. Once she reached the junction, she had to lie flat against the bottom of the tube and shimmy her shoulders and hips to move forward; it was one of the more narrow ones but it would open up into a wider space soon and hopefully, she'd remedy whatever the blockage was quickly and get back to assisting with all the other chaos currently happening. It was strange; engineering was always a bustling place and accidents happened more frequently there than other parts of the ship, in part due to the constant hustling. But today had been especially bad. Shakeba hadn't had a moment to really talk with Scotty but her inspection of the leak in the cooling tank made her think it had been a puncture of one of the funnels. She didn't want to jump to conclusions, but the hole seemed…well…intentional. And that was odd. No one in engineering would be foolish enough to deliberately poke a hole in the equipment. Accidents happened but today had felt a little more like sabotage. She shook her head. Just because she was accustomed to thinking the worst of those around her, and just because she was especially sensitive right now to the fact that someone was after her didn't mean engineering was being incapacitated.

The tube widened and opened into an area where she could stand up. She grabbed a lightstik from her tool bag and shined it down the other Jeffries tubes that opened into this space. Down one of them, she could see some sort of obstruction.

"Gotcha," she muttered, hoisting herself up and into the blocked tube. She crawled on her hands and knees till she reached the occlusion.

"That's strange," she murmured. There was debris filling the tube, which was odd in and of itself. These particular tubes didn't get a lot of traffic. But the items themselves were what really puzzled her – wires, electrodes, adhesive, and containers of saltpeter and what she strongly suspected was aluminum powder….as a child on Boreth, she had played with these very ingredients time and again, constructing weapons to use against her siblings on their weekend retreats because that was a totally normal thing for a Klingon child to do – build explosives to use on friends and family. But she knew this wasn't acceptable under Federation standards and finding a cache of bomb components in the bowels of a starship was not the most comfortable discovery. Scotty was going to lose his shit, she just knew it. 'Where did it come from?' she wondered as she collected the items. None of them were particularly dusty which meant they hadn't been there very long. Come to think of it, the tubes weren't very dusty either.

Shakeba ran the scanner and realized there was another obstruction ahead, in the next juncture between tubes. She scooted her way to the intersection and gingerly dropped out of the tube into the open area.

Though her eyes had adjusted to the darkness within the tubes, Shakeba didn't see the other person in the juncture – she heard him.

"Who's there?"

The response was silence…followed by a blow to the back of her head that knocked Shakeba out cold.

When she came to, Shakeba was lying on the ground of the juncture. Her head was throbbing and she cursed herself for not bringing some sort of weapon with her. But who expected to get knocked out in the Jeffries tubes? As she struggled to sit up, she realized it was brighter than when she'd entered. Her lightstik was on, illuminating the tiny room and a man she assumed to be her assailant as he tinkered with something on the wall. She looked more closely.

"What are you doing?" she asked the man.

"You don't know? I thought you were an engineer. I suppose Klingon engineer training is a little third-rate though, huh?" he replied, his tone malicious.

"I know what you're doing," Shakeba responded, aggravated. "Why? Why are you making a bomb?"

"Oh, it's not my bomb," he answered jovially and for a second, Shakeba could see him fitting right in with Klingons. "Your prints are the ones all over it." He raised his hands so she could see they were gloved. She took a moment to comprehend what he was saying – her head hurt and it was dark and this was not the turn she'd expected her day to take. As discreetly as she could, she pressed her left wrist to her thigh, hoping she would trigger the beacon inside her tracking bracelet.

"I don't even know you," she finally murmured. "Why are you doing this?"

"I guess we all look the same to you, huh?"

He moved closer, knelt down beside her and stared at her.

"You don't recognize me?" he asked her and she stared at the bland face in front of her. It wasn't that humans all looked the same. It was just that the person in front of her was completely unremarkable in every way.

"I think you've mistaken me for someone else…" Shakeba ventured, wishing it could be that simple. This had to be the person who had harassed her since she came on the Enterprise. But why? How did he know about her Klingon background and why did he want to frame her for the bomb? She felt a rush of panic as she looked over at the device. She couldn't see a timer and she wondered what, exactly, would trigger it.

"Perhaps this will help you remember me?" he asked as he stood before her and pulled his phaser out, training it on her.

Shakeba wasn't going to start advocating for the use of phasers as memory enhancers but as she stared past the barrel of his weapon and looked at the man's face, it came back to her in a flash. Celos-D42…Hus…shot in the back by a Starfleet redshirt…and the redshirt was standing in front of her.

"You!" she cried as she pushed herself up off the ground, using the wall to help. He'd really clocked her – she was pretty sure she had a concussion, if the nausea she felt upon standing were to be believed. But she'd been concussed before. The more alarming concern was the phaser she was staring at.

"Now you remember."

"You killed my father!"

"He was a Klingon. I knew you were a traitor but I had no idea you looked at them like family." The disgust in his voice infuriated her but he continued as if her face hadn't twisted with rage. "You're a human," Ensign Wilson sneered. "Start acting like it. That Klingon was no father to you."

"You don't know anything about me," she snarled.

"I know enough to know that you shouldn't be on this ship."

"That's not your decision to make."

"Is that what you think?" He smiled. "What's Captain Kirk going to do when I tell him I found you here, building this bomb? It's a shame I had to kill you in the struggle, but at least the ship will be safe. I'll be a hero!"

Shakeba was pretty sure the man had issues beyond his extreme dislike of Klingons but none of it mattered if she didn't live to tell. She lunged at him, hoping to catch him off-guard with the sudden movement. And it worked, minus the part where she was dizzy and unable to strike him in as coordinated a manner as she would have liked. They wrestled on the ground and Shakeba managed to knock the phaser from Ensign Wilson's hand. The weapon flew across the juncture of the tubes, landing in a dark corner. Before she could retrieve it, Ensign Wilson grabbed Shakeba's hair and pulled her back to him, punching her in the gut. She responded by slugging him in the left eye and they pulled apart, facing one another as each caught their breath.

Fighting in real life never worked the way it was portrayed in holomovies. At least not for humans. Sure, Klingons could punch one another over and over and walk away with, perhaps, a light sweat. But Shakeba had learned the hard way that humans didn't have that kind of resilience or stamina. Fighting took a lot out of a person. And now that Ensign Wilson was unarmed, Shakeba was left with no option but to fight him until she could grab his phaser or help arrived. And she couldn't wait around to be saved, not this deep in the ship. The blow to the head he'd given her had dulled Shakeba's ability to react and she knew it. This was a terrible time to be fighting for her life but it wasn't like she had much of a choice.

"You're the one who spray-painted my door," she gasped as they sized one another up, pacing in a circle, their arms up in defensive stances. "You attacked me the other day, during the alarm."

"Maybe you're not as stupid as I thought," Wilson replied, lunging at her.

They wrestled one another, Shakeba doing her best to keep his hands away from her throat. He wasn't fighting to stall for time – he wanted to kill her. The awareness of this sent a burst of energy through Shakeba and she pushed him off of her, landing another punch to his throat instead. He fell onto his back, coughing from her punch.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked him, not caring that he couldn't answer her. "I've done nothing to you – wouldn't have even known you were on this ship if you hadn't come after me."

"Lies," he choked out, standing once more. "I saw how you looked that day – how you came for me. You'd murder any one of us in our sleep if you thought you could get away with it."

He lunged at her again and she sidestepped him, never forgetting to keep herself between him and his phaser.

"Why would I want to kill any of you?"

"You aligned yourself with Klingons," Wilson snarled. "You can never be trusted."

Ensign Wilson rushed towards her. He knew she would try to dodge him and he was ready for it, turning at the last moment so that he ran into her as she tried to swerve away from him. He tackled her to the ground and Shakeba realized she might not make it out from under him this time.

Pinned underneath Ensign Wilson, Shakeba continued to punch him with her free hand, scratch at him, whatever she needed to do to get him off of her. And, for a moment, she thought she might have broken free. His weight on her shifted and he stopped hitting her. But when she looked up at him, she understood that he had his phaser within his line of sight and she pulled her arm out from under herself, pushing him with everything she had and crawling to the phaser herself. But he wasn't as winded or disoriented as she was. He pulled her back and pinned her back under his knee, slamming her head into the floor with one hand while he grabbed his phaser with the other. Feeling herself once again facedown under a man, Shakeba froze. It was too much like Ovic – she could feel the hate radiating out of Ensign Wilson and it paralysed her just when she most needed to move, to attack. Fear rendered her immobile and just as she waited to feel the heat of the phaser dissolve her into oblivion, something else altogether happened. Suddenly, both Shakeba and Ensign Wilson heard and saw the lights of the transporter all around them and then, they were surrounded by redshirts and Captain Kirk.

"Let her go," Jim ordered Ensign Wilson, his phaser, along with the phasers of everyone else in the tiny space now set on Ensign Wilson. The man jumped up, off of Shakeba's back, his phaser pointed at the ceiling.

"I caught her in here," he explained. "She was setting up a bomb."

Shakeba groaned, unable to get up. "No," she gasped.

Kirk looked at two of the guards with him. "Disarm it."

Shakeba was fading in and out of consciousness. "I didn't make it…"

"Shhh," Jim cautioned her. "Scotty, beam us to med bay."

The next thing she knew, she felt the beams, heard the transporter around her and then everything was so bright and there were so many noises.

"Get her on a biobed now," someone ordered.

"She needs 15 kilos of tramadol, stat."

So many voices, so much movement. Out of the eye that wasn't swollen shut, Shakeba could see the bustle of activity around her. Jim was reassuring her everything would be okay, two nurses were giving her hyposprays simultaneously and behind all of that, she saw Doctor McCoy. He was there, no more than a few meters away, watching. Their eyes locked on one another.

"Leonard," she tried to call out but her voice wouldn't cooperate and she felt herself slipping into the black. The last thing she saw before unconsciousness swallowed her up was McCoy turning his back on her and walking away. She tried to cry out for him, to apologize for everything she'd done that had led to him turning his back on her when all she wanted was to feel his hand in hers.

Med bay didn't function on the same schedule as the rest of the Enterprise. Unlike the other parts of the ship, med bay didn't have night-lighting. It was perpetual daytime in there and Shakeba had no idea how long she's been out before she came to with a shudder.

"Easy there," a familiar voice called out.

"Captain?" she asked faintly.

"Yep. I'm right here. You're okay, alright?" Jim said it like a statement, as though if by telling her she was fine, he had willed it into being.

"That man…"

"Don't worry about Ensign Wilson," Jim rushed to assure her. "He's in the brig. We're taking him to Starbase 6, where he'll be court martialed."

"He killed Hus," she replied, needing to hear the words, needing confirmation that what had happened in those tubes was real.

"I know," Jim answered. "I know he killed the Klingon leader."

Shakeba frowned. Hus was more than the leader of the raiding party. He was more than Head of House Morc. He had been her father. Why was that so hard for people on this ship to acknowledge?

Seeing her unhappy expression, Jim rushed to reassure her.

"He won't be able to hurt anyone else. I promise."

Shakeba attempted a small grin to placate him.

"Thank you."

Satisfied that her memories weren't wrong, Shakeba fell back into a deep sleep. Meanwhile, Jim continued to watch over her as she slept. The grin hadn't fooled him. His hesitance to label Hus as her father had bothered her and as hard as he was working to put aside his unease regarding her upbringing, Jim wasn't ready to completely turn his back on her and trust that Shakeba would assimilate into Starfleet without issue. It was clear she grieved the loss of her adoptive father. How much did she mourn from her former life? How happy would she be in this new world?

Every time she awoke, there was another friendly face by her bedside – Nyota and Carol, Scotty or Gaila or Janice more than once, and Christine was a constant presence as she recovered. Each time, Shakeba felt stronger, learned more about what had happened.

"Yer beacon helped us find yeh," Scotty told her, patting her hand affectionately during one visit.

"But how did everyone beam into the junction?" she asked. Beaming from place to place within a starship wasn't unheard of, but it was dangerous to beam into small spaces like the one she and Ensign Wilson had been found in.

"Turns out, Wilson had a portable transwarp beaming device," Scotty explained. "That's how he was able to get at you that day in the mess hall, even though we had bio signatures for him from across the ship."

"But that doesn't explain…"

"Once you activated your beacon, Commander Hendorff went to find Wilson. When he wasn't in his designated spot, they opened his quarters and found the device. It's easier to use than the transporter room – more able to navigate the narrow passages in engineering. So we locked onto your signal and sent the captain and security to you."

Shakeba smiled in appreciation of the clever solution.

During another visit, Nyota assured her Ensign Wilson had acted alone.

"No one else would ever go after someone like that," she declared.

Shakeba wasn't so sure but she wanted to believe Nyota was right. There might be people on the ship who didn't trust her, given her background, but they were unlikely to attack her. Shakeba supposed that was really all she could ask for until she'd been around long enough to prove to everyone that she was worthy of their loyalty.

On another visit, Carol told her more about the aftermath of the confrontation.

"I should have turned around and gone back to Scotty once I realized what I'd found in that tube," Shakeba sighed as the other woman handed her a glass of electrolyte drink.

"I probably would have done the same thing you did," Carol replied. "How were you to know he was waiting for you?"

"Should have scanned for life signs," Shakeba answered, unwilling to let herself off the hook just yet.

"Maybe. But who would have expected an ambush like that?"

"Someone raised by people who would do that exact kind of thing?"

Carol smiled. "Stop beating yourself up."

"I can't believe I fell for it."

"I can't believe you fought him off alone long enough for help to find you. Looks like being raised by Klingons can come in quite handy!" Carol gave her an admiring look.

Shakeba shrugged. It hadn't been so bad, even if her time in med bay afterwards indicated otherwise.

"He would have destroyed half the ship," Shakeba murmured, still not over how much damage someone had been willing to do just to ensure her own death.

"I assume he intended to take you out," Carol replied. "I don't think he ever had any real intentions to set off the bomb. And even if he did, it was wired incorrectly."

"Klingons wouldn't make that mistake," Shakeba noted with a wry grin.

"Mmm-hmm. They didn't become one of the Federation's biggest enemies because of sloppy attention to weaponry."

It tickled Shakeba in some perverse way to hear Carol speak so admiringly about Klingon weapon expertise. It felt good to be open with her friends about her background even as she worried over whether another Ensign Wilson might pop up in the picture at any time.

Through all the visits, one person remained unseen. Despite the fact that she was in the very place he worked day in and day out, Shakeba never once saw Doctor McCoy. And every time she thought about how he had turned away just before she passed out, her heart sank a little more.