Ah, I'm so happy to have had my first reviews on this story :) Thank you very much for your attention. This present chapter is just a short in-between; I just recently added it, as I felt the dialog-filled other chapters lacked space for depth of character, and something deserved to be said of how Merrrshika adapted to her change of life…
Chapter III. Settling in…
The first day of Merrrshika on board Voyager was a busy one. She first was given a tour of the most important areas of the ship by the captain herself, was introduced to most of the crew, was more thoroughly acquainted with the bridge officers, was scanned over by the doctor who checked her for potentially problematic commensal bacteria, environmental and food compatibility, was debriefed by Tuvok about the main directives and procedures and given a ton of PADDs to study over about protocols and such. She was assigned quarters – those recently given up by B'Elanna as she moved in with Tom.
It was not until fourteen hours after coming on board that she was left alone for a moment. The humans and even the Vulcan had had trouble believing they could keep her working for so long, even if she told them that a day for her was forty-three Starfleet hours, and that a normal shift for her was precisely fourteen hours. Of course, she omitted that she had been up for almost four days straight, never getting more than two hours of sleep straight before another of her hacks just blew off and she had to repair it lest she found herself assimilated by a waking drone. But it was her first day on board, and she was not about to complain that she was tired. Tomorrow, maybe, she would ask a little moment off, so she could rest, adjust to the change, and study more PADDs. Surely this would be alright.
She sat on the bed of her new quarters when the door closed on Tuvok who had walked her to her door. He had explained to her that security codes would be delivered for her personal use of replicator rations and computer access, and that she would soon be enlisted in the personnel roaster, so the computer would respond to requests for directions from her.
She looked around in the minimal light, the pupil of her feline eyes dilating by an order of magnitude in the dark – there was something blinding to her in the light of Voyager. The quarters were passably aseptic and impersonal, being recently vacated, but the captain had assured her she could do the arrangement of her living quarters as she pleased. Still, there was the smell of a female occupant lingering; Merrrshika strained her sense of smell, and determined the occupant was not human – she was used by now to the smell of the main species on board – but could not clearly place who. She shrugged; it did not really matter.
She looked down at the bag besides her on the bed; her only belongings. She had three sets of clothes counting the one she had on; her very precious organic-inorganic interface; a recipient for water that would be useless on a ship equipped with replicators – what amazing technology, that one –; a bunch of hairpins; the Mirrresh equivalent of a toothbrush; a dog-eared, small black book where she had compiled most used commands in well over a hundred foreign programming languages of nearly as many species; a beautifully sea-carved stone from the summer house of her mother; and a piece of plating from her shuttle.
She sniffed, then started to outright cry as she took out the small piece of chitin-like material out of her pack. Her shuttle had been a good vessel; she had been courageous and generous. Not the kind to jump happily into a fray, but determined to do so if she sensed that it was the only way her pilot saw through. She had been capable of auto-piloting without much sleep for weeks on end while moving through worp as Merrrshika fled her home world in search of a way to escape what she had brought down upon herself.
How she was supposed to keep off it because she was supposed to suspect that she could find information on biological weapons in this database, she could not fathom – it was not like Merrrish was known to delve on those things, and more than one government had been overthrown for only daring to mention the possibility of research on that field. To know that very precise, down to the most minute details, plans of such weapons were stored into a database in the head of the military security of their beloved government would be enough to put the whole planet through quite a chaos. Merrrshika was not a politician; she was not a military; she was not a spy looking for intelligence; she was just a hacker with a dumb sense for foolish challenges. She had been trying to go through the thirteen levels of locks on remote access combining voice-print, password, terminal authentication and so on for years, and had spent most of the last months concentrating her efforts on that. The new back-up subroutine manually-activated in case of software breakdown she had designed for voice-print recognition had paid well, enough so that she could just be lazy, and try her ultimate challenge for a few months.
She was not unhappy to have achieved that, she was honest enough to admit it to herself; she was very proud of it, in fact, and she had learned quite a few very, very useful tricks in doing so – otherwise she would never have been able to crash the hive of mind of the borg sphere before her shuttle finally gave up and died. She did not regret too much going away from her home world forever, as she was in space for adventure, as much as she was in hacking for challenge and adventure, but as she sat listening to the hum of mechanical devices carrying through the clock-work of the Voyager, looking around at the aseptic quarters she was in, and laid a hand on the metal-cold small table by the bed, she realized she would deeply miss being onboard an organic vessel. And she would never be again.
And yet, mere days ago, she had watched the alarms of her shuttle flickering as she was giving away the last of her plasma and strength to get her within beaming range of the borg ship thinking she would never want to pilot an organic vessel again, because not a single shuttle could reach the ankle of the current one. Yet it had not occurred to her at the moment that something less would still be better off than nothing – it was probably better that way, it would have been a very unkind thought to the dying shuttle. Better she died with pride to be the only one worthy in her pilot's eyes.
Said pilot was now crying her last tears over her loss, painful tears for giving away this world forever, and letting out the tension of the weeks of fleeing and hiding and hacking here and there, trying to find a solution while eluding Sherrrim's very competent hackers and tactical officers. In the end, she just fell asleep like that, exhausted, in her clothes, on top of the covers of her bed, her hand still clutching the smooth piece of plating that had crowned the pilot's helmet.