RECAP of chapter 9:

In light of her promotion, Ferasini breaks up with Lorca.

Lorca finally makes a speech, evoking everybody's team spirit and telling people to complain directly to him if they got some bone to pick. One Lieutenant Rubau takes him up on it and shows up to tell him off. Lorca is suspiciously convincing as he creeps on her, but he only wants to show her her own hypocrisy. He sends her to her room. No personal agoniser, though.

Leighton cracks a bit under various stresses and takes it out on Kodos.

Lorca sits Leigthon down for a heart-to-heart about Tarsus.

Chapter 10: Shadowboxing

It hadn't taken the agoniser long to dissolve the fabric of the trousers and settle snuggle against the skin of his leg. Normally, agonisers wouldn't be noticeable, laying dormant until they were woken up, but due to the awkward placement, Tyler was regularly reminded of its presence. As if he needed it.

The silence in his quarters had been deafening, filling his head with a cacophony of thoughts and not making much sense. No doubt, Lorca had wanted him to sit down and think things through, but the clarity of mind seemed to elude him thoroughly.

Tyler spent the time shadowboxing. He had been cut off from all entertainment the computer would otherwise have been able to offer, so there wasn't much else to do to try and quiet his mind. He went for hours until he let himself drop on his bed and sleep, only to wake up, take a shower, eat a little, then go again. Days fused into each other.

Today was no different. He tossed himself onto his couch by the window and watched the starlight as it rushed by. He couldn't even guess where they were going, but the way they dropped in and out of warp at irregular intervals, switched off the cloak and then jumped back to warp indicated they were traversing a fairly densely populated area of the Terran Empire and needed to keep bloodhounds off their tracks. There had not been any incidents, as far he could tell, at least none which had required any kind of ship-wide alert to be issued.

The comm hissed archaically as it was suddenly switched on, far from the normal sound it would make to establish a connection. Tyler only turned his head to the desk as the computer screen flickered up, then closed down again.

Eventually, the distortion cleared, "Commander Tyler, this is Kriger, can you hear me at all?"

Tyler considered staying silent for no other reason than sheer apathy. Instead, he said, "Yeah, I hear you."

His voice sounded rough in his ears. He should maybe have talked to his mirror a bit more in the past few days to keep in practice.

"This took way longer than I wanted. The captain's little robot has some nifty programmes injected into our computer system. But it should be safe now."

"So, you want a chat?" Tyler asked. "I'm not in the mood."

Kriger chuckled. "I could reverse the blocks placed on your computer access. Reestablish your command privileges. Open the door."

Tyler considered it. "That'd probably be treason."

"Yeah, but what's the worst that could happen? More house-arrest? Come on, that's a joke of a punishment."

"Can you get rid of the agoniser?"

"Unfortunately, no. I can circumvent a lot, but that trick Lorca pulled with the ship back when he took it, it's still in effect. Some stuff I can't get to without dismantling the whole shebang. Can't hide that very well."

"So, I walk out and I'll get exactly as far as the captain lets me. What's there to win? I'm beginning to think you're setting me up for something, Kriger."

Another snorting laugh, but then he grew serious. "I get why you'd think that, but as long as he doesn't know he can't do anything. You just have to be careful and… finish him."

Tyler took a deep breath, to gain some space. His body had felt heavy and liquid as he'd laid down, but now he found he was tensing up to spring long before he'd made any conscious decision about it. He sat up.

"And there's just the two of us?" Tyler asked. He had weapons in his quarters. He wouldn't dare try a phaser, these were tracked by the computer and even with whatever Kriger had done, it might be risky to take one. A dagger would do just fine.

He went to the cabinet where he kept it and picked up a long, slim blade. Easy to conceal in his sleeve, long enough to puncture the heart, sharp enough to slice a throat to the spine.

But Lorca? Was this really meant for Lorca?

"Well, he's not made only friends on the ship," Kriger said. "He's gone a bit erratic recently and madman need to be put down, everyone knows that."

"That's not a very specific answer," Tyler said. He slid the blade into his sleeve and it settled against the fabric, secure but ready for him when he needed it.

"He'll get us all killed if he's not stopped, that's pretty obvious. I can't give you a number, or a lot of names, but that's just because people keep their mouth shut about these things. But there's quite a few people who were pretty vocal in their support of him and many of them… well, I haven't heard them say anything anymore for a while."

"Not very specific," Tyler said again, more to himself this time. He walked to the door anyway. "Open up."

Kriger could be heard chuckling again. Despite his confidence, it took almost a full minute until the door lock could be heard to disengage and the door finally opened to an empty, dimly lit corridor.

"Here goes nothing," Tyler said and walked out.

Almost immediately after he crossed the threshold, the agoniser pulsed to life. Its odd placement meant the pain wasn't everywhere at once, but climbed up the back of his leg like a sea-monster's snare until it reached the nerve endings in his spine and from there wrapped around his chest. He managed one more step forward. Stupid. Should've been one back into his room and out of the haze of agony.

Instead, his leg buckled and took him down with it, heaving at the pain as it held him down, voice creaking in an effort to keep the scream down. Distantly, he heard Kriger cursing through the comm channel.

A transporter beam flared up ahead of him and the pain faded, leaving an insistent throbbing behind that discouraged any attempt to get up.

Lorca stood in the corridor, Irsa pinned behind his shoulder, and looked down at Tyler with a slow contemplative look, the kind a child gave an insect before they began ripping off wings.

"I'd offer you my hand," Lorca said. "But I don't want to lose it."

When Tyler only responded with a groan irritation flared across Lorca's face and he snapped, "On your feet, soldier!" Adding, "Talking down to you is too easy already."

Tyler struggled himself upright. The pain was fading rapidly, the wonders of agoniser technology. Punishment rendered, you were expected to get back to duty immediately, otherwise, the function of the entire ship could be in jeopardy. He stood facing Lorca, waiting. There really wasn't anything to say that wouldn't make his position worse. The dagger in his sleeve itched with its presence.

Lorca gestured at Tyler's open door and when Tyler didn't react, Lorca arched a condescendingly questioning eyebrow. Tyler stepped back and inside his prison, kept going so Lorca — with Irsa in tow — could follow him inside.

"Sit," Lorca said and Tyler sat on the couch he had left mere minutes before, his head no clearer than it had been, but his muscles more exhausted than the workout had been able to render them.

Lorca decided to sit on the desk, giving him a nice vantage point — so much for not talking down to anyone — and a casually unconcerned appearance. Irsa put herself neatly out of the way but positioned to easily interfere with any attack Tyler might attempt.

"Tyler," Lorca began, shook his head and sighed. "Ash. I don't get it. What's the point? Where are you going with this?"

The admission of I don't know burned on Tyler's tongue, but he held it in.

"Alright," Lorca said. "Let's see how it plays out, shall we? You've killed me. Cut my throat, choked me, bashed my head in on the toilet bowl. Whatever. Doesn't matter. I'm dead. Probably shit myself, because death's like that. The cleaning bots will handle it. They'd probably struggle with a whole body, but who cares? What's next? You walk out, go to the bridge. What's your first order, Captain Tyler?"

Neither of them thought of the line of questioning Lorca had started as anything but a snare. It was in Lorca's faint smirk and arched eyebrows and quiet voice and the long lines of his body as he perched over the room.

Tyler took refuge in routine. "Status report."

"All systems nominal, sir."

Not going to get much mileage out of that tactic, apparently.

"What's our current course and objective?"

"We are on course to Arc, ETA in thirty-four hours. We are on a randomised pattern warp jumping to avoid tracking and detection. No sign of pursuit. As part of the deal we made on Yemuro we are to drop off Zralisss on Arc. Do you wish to renege on the deal, sir?"

This part of the setup was too transparent to even consider.

"Of course not."

Lorca made a sound, a short, aborted chuckle which did nothing for the mood.

"Congratulations, you've bought yourself a handful of days. You've dropped off Zralisss, what do you do now, captain?"

Tyler suspected the combination of perfectly honest honorific mixed with just a faint trace of insubordination was something Lorca would have done towards people who outranked and irked him. Something many cadets learned early.

"I should probably let the vulcan off on Arc, too," Tyler said. "Without you, there's no reason for developing a spore drive."

"Isn't there?" Lorca raised his brows a fraction higher. "The spores powered the Charon, powered the ISS Buran. They had it weaponised, you know. Displace an enemy into another universe for a fraction of a second, it overloads the computers with contradictory sensor readings and renders them helpless for long enough to beam a boarding party over. That's what happened to me. It's also the ultimate cloaking device, think about it. I'm afraid you've already missed the bigger picture. And sooner or later, your crew will want to hear a direction from you, captain."

Unwilling to admit defeat, Tyler braced himself and said, "Survival is going to do it. We are already pirates. There's a lot we can do. Make our lives good. Better than chasing gossip across the galaxy, anyway."

Lorca shook his head, disappointed. "You didn't get what I just said about the spore drive, did you?"

"You don't want it as a weapon to help us. You want it to get away from here."

Lorca snorted laughter, "And who wouldn't? Still, it's an opportunity you failed to recognise. An angle you didn't see and couldn't play. I'm beginning to see why you were in command of an insignificant force on an insignificant planet."

"Took you long enough to figure that out," Tyler said. "Who's missing the bigger picture now?"

Lorca tilted his head and smiled faintly, "I thought of you as a friend, this didn't need to happen. You are demoted to crewman…"

"Why not go all the way to full civilian?" Tyler sneered.

Lorca's humour dissipated at the interruption. "… and you're assigned to Putaway. I'm sure Dr Sennai needs someone for grunt work. Don't disappoint her."

Another scornful comment burned on Tyler's tongue, but he held it in this time, Lorca was clearly not done with him yet.

"You are banned from carrying a phaser, but you can keep your knife…" he glanced at Irsa and she shook into motion, startling Tyler just a little. He had forgotten she was there.

Her voice was thin when she said, "Right sleeve, sir."

"Very good," Lorca nodded towards Irsa, then looked back at Tyler. "Make sure you don't use it."

He stood up, leaving whatever else might need to be said hanging in the air between them. "Your privileges have been set according to your rank. Your duty starts now. Dr Sennai is in the lab, go see her."

Tyler let him get halfway to the door before he said, "What about the agoniser?"

"Check by sickbay."

"You could remove it right now."

Lorca glanced over his shoulder, "Keep your pants on in front of your commanding officer. I know you people have problems with that, but do your best."

"You told me the agoniser was a sign of weakness. Are you afraid of me? Sir?"

That got Lorca to turn back around fully and regard Tyler with a long look.

"Maybe," he said as if the admission was nothing. "Maybe the fact that someone I thought of as a friend tried to murder me has unsettled me. No shame in that."

Lorca waited, challenging, giving Tyler all the chance in the world to keep arguing, but Tyler found he'd lost the taste for it. At the back of his mind, he kept waiting for Lorca to ask about his accomplices. For a moment, Lorca looked like he might go on, find the open wound to pick at, but he finally let go. Tyler hoped his general discomfort made it hard to spot his agitation about the particular.

Lorca left the room without another word, or a gesture, barely even a look. Irsa trailed behind him, the fixture of his alien shadow.

A lifetime ago, Tyler had harboured all sorts of suspicions about Culber. His illicit drug dealing had meant he had connections to many places and many people, most of it hidden from observation and control. That Culber had been revealed to be an agent of Gabriel Lorca had come barely as a surprise. Much less of one, anyway, than to find himself throwing in his lot with Lorca, though in the privacy of his mind, Tyler insisted that it wasn't quite the same thing. To him, his betrayal was far smaller than Culber's, because this Lorca could not be a traitor to an emperor he had never sworn to serve.

Tyler had made his way to sickbay, grateful that he met no one on the way there and for Culber to keep the acerbic jokes to a minimum as he removed the agoniser and dropped it, small and vicious, on the table next to the bed.

"How about a little something, eh?" Culber had asked with a grin and Tyler, much to his surprise, had found himself saying yes.

"Do you think he's behaving erratically?" Tyler asked a little later. He was leaning back in his chair opposite Culber's desk, feet resting up on it next to the screen. The thin, metallic tube of a cigarette in his hand emitted curls of light purple smoke. He hadn't asked what exactly Culber had loaded into the device, but found he liked the taste — acrid and bittersweet, uncompromising and not meant to please — it was an odd edge there, keeping him sharp while his mind relaxed.

Culber chuckled and took a drag off his own cigarette. "Captain Lorca?" he asked.

"Who the fuck else," Tyler growled.

Culber laughed again and then grunted in thought. "I think we're seeing him trying to adapt."

"What? It's been months!"

"I did a bit of digging in the computer's archives. There's not a lot on his universe, most of the data is either deleted or corrupted. But it still makes a picture." He paused, took a drag. "Or just get him talking about it, easy as fuck, actually."

Tyler contemplated the very concept of a whole different universe. Sometimes, it was easy to forget to believe in that part of the story. It was just too strange to fit into the grind of everyday thinking. Another universe, similar, but different. Something like the first colonists on distant worlds, so far away from where they were born, the imagination just failed and settled instead into a vague, ever-present ache somewhere deep in the chest.

"I've never thought about that," Tyler confessed with a twinge of guilt like maybe he should have considered what that might do to a person. "What's it like? His universe, I mean?"

Culber snorted. "Less… everything."

It made Tyler chuckle. "Wow, thanks for the enlightenment, doc."

Culber waved him off. "It's a far more repressive place, apparently. They have this, uh, federation of aliens, all thrown together as… equals, I guess. Think of what that'd mean, though. You can't have all these weird cultures and societies on eye-level without friction. So how do you deal with that? You dial back on personal freedom for everyone. They don't approve of personal ambition. Everything they do, it has to serve the community, not themselves. I mean, can you imagine having to please the vulcans and the andorians at the same time?"

Tyler chuckled. Even under terran rule, the two species couldn't stop themselves from needling each other constantly.

"Sweet mercy," Tyler muttered.

"It gets better," Culber grinned. "Tellarites are one of the founding members of their federation."

Tyler burst out laughing at the very concept. It was entirely ridiculous, and yet, here they were, looking at it as if it was an actual possibility.

When the laughter dissipated with the purple smoke, Tyler said. "Yeah, but how's that explain his behaviour?"

"He's got a lifetime of that other universe to wade through. His entire life, he was used to repressing his emotions like some kind of wannabe vulcan, because there's just a very narrow range of feelings that are okay to express. His people have enslaved themselves. He's not used to being free. That's bound to cause some whiplash."

Tyler thought about it. "He was different on Tarsus."

"He had focus on Tarsus, decisions are a lot easier when death's staring you in the face."

"I thought… " Tyler groaned at the admission crawling to the forefront of his mind and dropped his head back in an entirely irrational attempt to keep everything down. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and let his arms drop by his side. "He was one to follow," he mumbled, teeth grating on the tube in his mouth, smoke wafting around his face.

"Yeah, that's the type," Culber agreed.

"You too?"

Culber shook his head. "Another man," he said. "Same promises. But let's not forget how we got here. This guy, from under this massively restrictive regime, he managed to beat us at our own game. All of fucking Tarsus, Landry, Captain Maddox. He took them all down, just like that. That's not someone who can't do it. That's someone who's never realised who he could be if he only let himself. He doesn't want to be such a person, because his society has told him his entire life how that's bad. I don't think he has disappointed us yet. His biggest crime is drinking replicated coffee. And the rest? Mishaps… well, happen. But in the grand scheme of things, if I had to pick between Lorca and any fucking other commander in the Empire, I'd go with Lorca, because he's the one coming out on top."

"Same promises, eh?"

"Yeah, like I've said."

Culber's intensity cut through the smoke briefly, before he settled himself back down and took another drag and exhaled, to fill the rift he'd torn. "Anyway," he muttered to help the effect along.

Tyler realised he might not be talking to a sympathetic ear about his concerns and briefly wondered if he'd already said too much. The smoke made it hard to remember, besides, he probably couldn't fall further in Lorca's regard, so it didn't really matter. Might as well push on.

"Madmen need to be put down," Tyler fixed on Culber. "I'm not sure any more he's not one."

"Fuck off with that nonsense."

Tyler sighed and said nothing for a while, watched the smoke waft towards the ceiling and be sucked away by the air filtration system.

"What are we even doing? He's making us mirror his crazy federation. Aliens, no-fighting rules, robots, magic mushrooms, more aliens. We are just here so he can jerk off to how he's sticking it to the 'terrans'."

Culber was silent, eventually, quietly, he said, "Would you go with him? Into that universe?"

Tyler looked at Culber. "Let me guess, you would, right?"

Culber shrugged. "If I'm invited, why not?"

"They despise us," Tyler said. "He does. He makes that pretty clear."

"And you need to be what? Loved?" Culber said with a sneer. "Don't be a crybaby about it."

Culber stubbed out his cigarette. "You gotta figure out where you stand and what you want. That's not his problem, it's yours."

"Fuck you."

"I'm free tonight if you are," Culber offered through a toothy grin.

With a snarl, Tyler tossed the cigarette on the desk between them. It bounced off to the side without making Culber flinch. The doctor continued to grin and leaned back in his chair. "Tomorrow then?" he asked.

"Dream on," Tyler sneered and got to his feet, just lingering because he didn't want to look like he was fleeing the situation.

"Look," Culber said with a sigh. "I meant that. Figure it out. If you need some chemical help with it, you know where to find me."

Tyler huffed, fixed on Culber and shook his head, a little sadly at the sudden stark reality of where they all found themselves at. He left Culber there and went to find the damn vulcan, so he could embarrass himself further.

The brutalist concrete angles of the conquest area fortress were almost as alien to Zralisss as they would be to Lorca. She had never seen the architecture of the gorn while they were still in charge of their colonies. She had been born and raised in an imperial hatchery, where they bred and trained gorn as slave-masters, pit-fighters and shock troops. Her cultural heritage was nothing but a few academic papers, heavily coloured by the opinions of the imperial experts who wrote them. She knew very little of what had taken place when the Terran Empire took down the gorn, so the scenario buried in the combat simulation computer database was as good as any.

The simulation room was flooded with two centimetres of real water, adding realism to the limitations of what was mostly just projection which faltered when touched. Though, some of the pillars and walls were solid enough to make a stalking predator forget she was just playing pretend.

Lorca had picked the scenario, whether merely pandering to what he perceived to be her interest or for some other reason, she couldn't tell. The far more interesting aspect was why he had taken time out of his day to invite her into a combat simulation in the first place. It was obvious to even the most casual observer that things on his ship weren't going smoothly and him checking out for several hours was a risk. He wouldn't be taking it if he hadn't any ulterior motive. And Zralisss found it fairly curious that she seemed to be that motive.

On the other hand, he did seem to enjoy the sense of inferiority the simulation would be giving him, a sense of going against the odds. The first terrans who set foot on gorn colonies had been eaten alive, quite literally. Then superior in numbers, with comparable weaponry but far greater physical power, the terrans had stood no chance at the beginning. Only sheer numbers, and the complete disregard for their survival, had lead to triumph for the Empire.

This, however, looked more like the early days. A few vanguard troops, carefully edging their way through architecture that dwarfed them, equally terrified by the unknown and the known fates of those before them.

Her side still ached as she made her way forward, careful not to disturb the water too much and give her location away. The simulated weapons delivered pain in a similar fashion to personal agonisers, making it linger to imitate an injury, even a debilitating one, without doing any physical damage. All in the mind, but impossible to move past either way.

Irritatingly, she had lost Lorca in the maze of interconnected rooms and hallways with their unsettlingly stark cuts between light and dark. If it was meant to play to her strength — gorn architecture, after all — it didn't do it very well. The whispering of the water confused her hearing and the many twists and turns meant she couldn't follow her sense of smell either.

Short corridors with many turns had depleted her limited phaser charges and she was fairly sure Lorca wasn't doing any better.

Something splashed to her right, past a doorway and into black shadow. Too loud to be anything but an intentional distraction, but by then, she had already turned her head and it was enough. Lorca collided with her back like a wall had dropped on her. The butt of his carbine hammered into her neck and a hard kick at the base of her tail propelled her into a wall — a solid one as if he had known. By the time she responded, he had already pressed the muzzle of a phaser to her knee and fired, the intense pain making her buckle and lean even heavier into the wall.

A real fight would be over by then. He had all the options to finish her off and move on. A blast like that wouldn't just hurt, it would have cut deep into her leg, crippling her to the point where she could not simply crouch down on all fours, lever one leg against the wall and launch herself at him.

He stopped her advance — badly — by jamming the carbine towards her armpit, but the blast it released went past her, barely leaving the sensation of a scratch. She clamped her arm down on it, reached past and punched his shoulder, short jabs in rapid succession until his grip on the gun released and fell into the water. Lorca brought up his other hand, the phaser, against her neck, but she knocked it away and stepped in close. Like this, she felt a surge of excitement, something primal she hadn't seen coming, at just how much smaller terrans actually were, weaker in every way, easy to bully into submission. Lorca hadn't chosen hand-to-hand combat because he wanted to, but because the setting hadn't given him much choice, just like those terrans before him. He was scrambling backwards now, trying to gain some space, get the phaser back up to aim at anything other than the wall behind her. She gripped the side of his head, almost get her fingers in the right place to throw him. Lorca snarled and strained and resisted.

Lorca let go of the phaser in his hand, dropped and caught it with the other and blindly, managed to get a shot in towards her groin. It hurt like a bitch, but not as badly as it could have, her skin plating extended much further back, the sensitive area was at the base of the tail, not between her legs. Still, it was enough for him to wind out of her grip. She would have repaid him in kind, but the scrawny bastard didn't give her an opening. But he was still too close, his carbine lost somewhere in the darkness and the water, his phaser wrapped in his hand like knuckles. No charges, then, Zralisss thought as he drove his fist into the side of her snout and jarring her teeth. She hissed at the pain but didn't let him get away from her again. She blocked the blow, got a grip on his other arm and knocked his feet away from under him with her tail again. He stepped at her leg, as he hung in her grip, then snapped his head against her snout, clearly having figured out this was a sensitive spot. Though, only because she wasn't allowed to bite. He yanked himself free from her grip, but instead of pushing on, he slipped backwards in the water, then struggled to his feet a safe distance away.

Water sluiced off the hydrophobic coating on his armour but clung to his hair and face as he watched her warily, adjusting the grip on the phaser in his fist.

Zralisss let him go as far as he liked, standing up straight and swiping her tail over the surface of the water, only half-heartedly looking for his carbine. She didn't need it, but it would be good to know it hadn't landed anywhere he could get to it in time.

Behind him, the corridor stretched on for a few meters before it turned into the murky darkness. If he made a ran for it, he might make it, set up another ambush and try to turn the tide back in his favour. He seemed to be weighing his options, breathing hard as he was.

At the back of her head, a smug little remark itched with the need to be spoken, but he wasn't the kind of opponent who should be given a warning. She could gloat when he was finished.

Unlike him, she still had a few charges left, after all. She took a step toward him, just to spook him momentarily, making him twitch as a minute distraction. She drew her phaser from its holster at the small of her back and fired at his legs. He shouted and buckled, and she didn't let him get any further, fired again, aiming at his shoulder but getting his chest because he was still falling. He slipped away from her until his back hit the wall. He blinked a few times, slowly, struggling with the pain before he focussed on her. If looks could kill, she was fairly sure she would have burst where she stood. It made her keep her phaser up when somehow, some primal animal instinct warned her of an enemy who should already be dead.

Lorca held the moment, intentional or not, but then dropped his head back against the wall and laughed a rasping, breathless sound.

"That's a good one," he coughed, still chuckling.

"I have a few more if you want," she offered, though deciding they were probably done and relaxing her stance.

"Maybe some other time," he said. "Computer end simulation."

The lights brightened and most of the structure surrounding them faded, leaving only a few solid pillars like the Lorca was leaning against. The water drained away rapidly.

With the simulation ended, the suits stopped delivering the pain of inflicted injuries and Lorca got back to his feet with little apart trouble. He squared his shoulders and flexed his arm, shook out his leg.

"I have a question for you," he said, picked up the carbine on his way to the control console next to the door.

"We didn't do this for fun, did we?" Zralisss said.

He gave her a quick grin over his shoulder. "Don't tell me you didn't enjoy yourself," he said, glanced at the console. "You've killed me seven times and crippled me… oh, thirteen times? Fuck, there's no kill like overkill, huh?"

She stepped to his side. "I'm dead five times and crippled three."

"You won, anyway." He didn't seem angry at the result, more amused, maybe even vindicated in some way.

She shook her, "Once would be enough, you got there first."

He turned to her, still smiling, but getting serious. "My question is this: would you join my crew?"

She said, "No."

"And you didn't even think about it," he shook his head and shrugged as he turned away. He shook back into motion and walked through the door, leaving her to trail behind, still wrapping her mind around his question.

"You didn't give me any time to think," she pointed out.

"I didn't give you any time to lie."

Lorca stored his weapons in the locker, turned back to her as he undid the clasps of his armour.

"Why would I lie?" she asked. "I owe you nothing. Why ask me?"

"I need a Chief of Security who can beat me in a fight."

Startled, she repeated, "Chief of Security?"

"The position is vacant and there's no good candidate on board. You're the obvious choice," he turned to look her over pointedly.

"I don't like you," she said.

He chuckled and shrugged the armoured coat from his shoulders, discarding it on a bench. "You don't, do you?" he asked back but didn't give her a chance to reiterate her point. "The offer stands, think it through. We're about thirty hours out from Arc, take the time."

He paused a moment, smiled again. "Regardless, thanks for joining me. It was fun, wasn't it?"

"Yeah," she conceded.

"Just focus on how much more fun we could have," he said and winked.

#

The Defiant continued on her course, elegantly dodging imperial spy satellites, patrols and warships lying in wait.

Tyler silently and grudgingly took orders from Sennai. The lab took on shape around them smoothly and the vulcan's calm seemed less judgmental with every hour that passed. Ferasini spent her time between Sennai's lab and the bridge, never showing any insecurity over her newly found position and her glaring lack of experience.

During nightshift in Engineering, Chief Bell stepped next to Kriger's workstation and put down a bottle of beer next to him. It was labelled with hovering lightprint, marking it was a genuine product of Pacifica. One of only a few crates they had stolen from a luxury cruise liner a few months earlier. Lorca had it locked down tightly, to dispense on special occasions.

"I stole it," she said and smiled. "Peace?"

Kriger looked from the bottle back at her, letting her hang there.

"Good enough," he said and took the beer.

At the end of his night shift, Romeo Zhang leaned his shoulder into the wall next to Alibali's door and waited, carefully sculpting his facial expression before she opened. Her face lit up and he wondered if she realised just how obvious her every emotion was.

"Hey," he said softly. "I know this is a bad time, but… you didn't get into trouble, did you?"

She pulled a face but shook her head. "Not really. Just a talking to."

"Guess the captain knows what you're worth."

She smiled, a little flustered at the compliment, and said, "Want to join me for breakfast?"

Zhang returned her smile brightly, "Absolutely."

End of Chapter 10

Author's Note: So, apparently Elon Musk wants to have a city on Mars by 2050. I'm pretty confident I can finish the fic by then. (I'm sorry.)