Uhura

"Dear God, Piri V…" she laughed and shook her head, and let herself relax in the armchair. "What a mess it was - and I mean the planet, the mission, and me! Tell me, did you follow that old historical holo adventure series, The Rise and Fall?"

Chekov and Sulu nodded, but the older men looked blank, except McCoy who frowned. "Was there a swarm of teenagers who always seemed to have far too few clothes between them? With sling-shots and spears? In a post-apocalyptic city, with… lots of rival gangs?" Uhura nodded, and the doctor grinned. "I once stood in line for two hours on Starbase 7 to get some sort of special edition to send Joanna for her birthday. She was addicted to it when she was little…"

"That's the one, Len. Epic teenage love and betrayal among the ruins of post-Eugenics-War New York. And I swear, the moment we made planetfall on Piri V, I knew that the producers of that holo had to have illegal observers hiding out there, because it felt as if we had just stepped onto the set!"

Her voice took on a more somber tone. "I don't know how much you know about Piri. They had been maybe a decade or two from achieving warp tech when the whole planet was devastated by nuclear and biological war. Automated retaliation strikes, atmosphere wreckers, gene-modded plagues - as bad as it ever gets. The Andorians had been responsible for first-contact preparations, and they had had everything planned down to the decorations of the treaty signing hall, when things very quickly and very fatally went to hell. They were angry enough to chew nails. I don't want to be uncharitable, but I think it had at least as much to do with losing access to the Piri dilithium mines, as it did with the loss of life…"

Kirk nodded. In his opinion, Uhura was being far too gentle in her description of the Andorian commission's attitude.

"Ever since then, they've been petitioning the Federation to re-evaluate the planet's recovery. So Starfleet does, every fifteen years or so."

"When we got there, it was sixty years after the war, which meant that the second generation had grown up and taken over - a generation that had never known anything but ruins. More than four out of every five people had died, most in the illnesses and starvation that followed once the bombing finally stopped. It meant that the new post-apocalyptic culture was still very fragile and changing - and very young. Most leaders were in their early 30's.

That still gave them a few years on me and most of the people in my landing party detail - a lot of us were in our early 20's. I was 21. We'd been on a training cruise on the Payne-Gaposchkin for four months, and this - to be part of a real, honest-to-God undercover mission! - was our reward. We cadets were incredibly excited - it was time for some galaxy-saving heroics! No matter that our heroic part specifically consisted of staying very still in the background while the first officer and the communications officer did some fact checking, and then, at the appropriate time, put in a power pack and press a button, once. A single big green button..."

She cleared her throat, leaned forward and said in a mock serious voice, "Now… Mr. Spock, are you familiar with the idiomatic construction 'you had one job…!'?" she started, putting an exaggerated emphasis on 'one'. The others laughed, seeing where her story was leading, while Spock raised one eyebrow as he dutifully searched his memory. Uhura had long ago figured out that his seeming difficulty with human idioms was mostly feigned, and varied according to his present tolerance for human peculiarities. But sometimes, especially if prosody was at work to indicate sarcasm or irony, it could become something of a challenge for the Vulcan.

"The construction has an ellided relative phrase, 'you had a single job, which you failed to do'."

"Indeed." She grinned at him and winked at the others. "Well, I don't think I've ever prepared so much for a mission. I must have re-read the briefing pack a hundred times. I memorized what little we had on the pre-war languages of the region. At that time, the people at our contact site spoke a fast-evolving creole with a single lexical superstrate but with what was probably no less than three grammatical substrates."

Uhura ignored the confused expression on Scotty's face, considering it fair payback for his recent and lengthy rant on the inner electro-harmonics of the warp transistor, and ploughed on.

"I went through the manual for my universal translator signal booster with a fine-toothed comb. I practiced for hours in the gym, learning to use the discrete exoskeleton that they had grafted onto our lower legs and arms to help us move naturally in the higher gravity. My native costume was freshly fabricated: patchwork-repaired flowing pants in dark colors, a very tight grey plastic top and a sort of full-body, green, sheer veil that the locals thought might help with radiation. My hair was impeccably messy, my nails manicured to uneven, stubby perfection, and I had spent the small hours of the morning in the anthro lab, carefully adding another layer of grime and patina on my leather boots…"

"In short, I felt like the queen of cadet adventurers, fully deserving of the praise and the several commendations that I had gotten during that training cruise. My roommate said that I was all smug superiority, hidden under a thin veneer of demure humility." She waved away the polite protests of the others, "oh no, she was right. I was really good - and I knew it, and that made it hard to admit when I screwed up…"

"That single green button was on the UT signal booster I carried. The planet-wide war had wreaked havoc with the technology level - some continents had regressed all the way back to hunter-gatherers . The ruined cities where we were headed had widely varying tech levels - they didn't have the know-how to get the fusion power plants up and running, but they did have portable sun-powered generators that could give them electricity in a local area. Their synthesizer network was down, and their medical science was almost eradicated, but somehow they'd made weapons a priority…"

she exchanged a wry glance with the doctor, who muttered a few choice curses, before she continued:

"They had a few blasters, but with no way of repairing their power packs, these were mostly for display. They had some ballistic guns, but ammunition was a problem - so the general preference was for arrows, sling-shots and spears."

"And, most frustrating for us, they did retain quite sophisticated scanners to monitor different kinds of radiation and signals, and big ugly EMP boxes that they would regularly use to flood their perimeter… This made several things rather tricky, including transporters, coms and the universal translator. Lieutenant Iverson had had us working on the problems for weeks, and we finally came up with a solution to make sure they couldn't detect the UT network or the orbital link."

"Basically, we needed to create a hidden local UT network, distributed so that each unit picked up new examples of the language, and transmitted its findings to the others in short, very discrete bursts. It'd mean a lot of power use, but we couldn't use regular field power packs, because there was just the chance that they'd be detected - so our plan was to use replaceable old BB-batteries. We also needed to keep the signal boosters close to the landing party, so their subdermal translators wouldn't suddenly shut down, and they'd end up speaking alien and expose themselves. This all means that we couldn't just beam the signal boosters down on their own. We needed boots on the ground ready to remove them if we'd miscalculated. And the brass figured that if there was one thing that cadets could actually be trusted to supply on a real mission, it was boots."

"So there we were, in our green shimmering veils, with carefully disguised boosters and power packs in our backpacks. They beamed us down in teams of four to the outskirts of the city, and then we separated and made our way one by one to our assigned coordinates. We knew approximately where the real landing party was going to be - there was a wedding celebration in progress. Two of the mightiest warring clans of the ruined city were going to sanctify their alliance with an arranged marriage - the younger brother of one of the leaders was going to marry the other leader."

"The wedding party was going to make their way through the city, stopping every block or so for entertainment and speeches, until they finally came to the young man's apartment. Our superior officers were going to pose as foreign guests, and gambled on bringing enough gifts to be included in the heart of the parade. They wanted to observe it, and the leaders, close by, to see if this was the alliance that could maybe herald the start of an era of stability and peace…"

"I was stationed right outside the young man's apartment…"

"The young prince!" said Sulu, grinning.

"The young post-apocalyptic prince, all alone in a post-apocalyptic wasteland!" supplied Chekov in an overly dramatic voice.

"Probably pining," said Sulu, nodding sagely.

"Oh shut up, " Uhura said with a smile. "You can embellish the tale all you want afterwards, but right now it's mine to tell."

"Many of the big skyscrapers had fallen down in engineered earthquakes and tsunamis, but there were still several eight-to-ten story buildings standing. Nature had begun reclaiming the glass and concrete, and the early summer meant that facades and sidewalks were peppered with verdant moss and little purple and yellow flowers."

"The parade wasn't expected for a few hours yet, but people were setting up a picnic of a sort in what once must have been a municipal garden about a block away. The mood was festive, and some sort of impromptu cooking competition had begun between members of the different gangs - their language was rather aggressive, but by local standards it was probably as peaceful as it ever got. I didn't know exactly what kind of small animals it was that they were roasting on their spits, and I was careful not to find out…"

"The entrance to the bridegroom's building - a big, almost intact tower - was being decorated with braids and garlands made of plastic string, and everyone was helping. I was crouching down out of the way, shredding old plastic bags into wide plastic yarn, going over everything in my head once again."

"Veil, check."

"Properly grimy boots, check."

"Powered exo-skeleton, check."

"Not attracting any attention, check."

"UT signal booster, check."

"UT booster power packs…" She trailed off, and Sulu beside her groaned in sympathy. "No check." Even after all these years, the memory of the panic that she'd felt gave her an icy feeling in her stomach.

"I'd forgotten the packs. They were still on the bunk in my quarters. All that preparation, all those briefings, all the careful studying that would enable me to stand on the street and push the button when the landing party was coming in with the other guests… and I'd forgotten the one thing that really, really mattered!"

"Oh, I could have killed myself! Or maybe just vanished into Pirean society, never to have to face anyone from the ship again. I wish I could say I had an excuse - that I was distracted by someone else, that I had to rush off to do something vital. But no - I'd been high on adrenaline and anticipation, and it was just one of those stupid mistakes."

"Well, we all know what we'd want our cadets to do at this point, right? Well, I didn't, of course. I really, really should have swallowed my pride and run out of the city as fast as I could until it was safe to use the com, and then asked for an extraction or for someone else to beam down outside the EMP zone and jog in with the damn battery packs… But this was my first mission on my own. I couldn't screw up like that, not when Iverson had done nothing but heap praise on me for the last month. I had the know-how, I knew that given the right materials I should be able to jury-rig a solution in the field." She rolled her eyes and caught Scotty's amused head shake. They'd had a situation like this just the other day - sometimes the cadets with the most potential made the worst mistakes. "If you wondered why I intervened between you and cadet T'Nara last week, Scotty, well this is it. I think that brilliant, infuriating young woman was given to us for my sins…"

"Of course, this was when the little battery indicator started blinking discreetly. I knew I'd be literally speechless in a minute - I needed to get out of there before someone tried to communicate with me and it became abundantly clear that I neither understood them nor could answer! So I thought… well, what were all those Academy classes in electro-mechanics for, if not for this! I mean - how hard can it be to improvise a Bayden-band-compatible battery pack in a post-apocalyptic society? The answer to that turned out to be… interesting." She paused to let her audience laugh. Scotty got a far-away look in his eyes as he contemplated the problem.

"Well, I needed wiring, and a power source. The only building around that I knew had power was the tower that we were currently decking with garlands. So I snuck around to the back, tripled checked that no one was anywhere near, broke the safety valve on the exo-skeleton with one of those 'don't ever tell anyone that I taught you this' tricks that we definitely don't show last-year cadets, and made a twenty-meter jump straight up to a fourth-story balcony."

Kirk gave an appreciative nod, but McCoy shook his head. "Lord Almighty, I hate those exo-things. They make people think they're gods, and that they can go grand-standing and jumping over buildings without tearing out their tendons and crushing bones." He gave Kirk and Spock a meaningful glare. The Vulcan just looked straight ahead. Kirk tried protesting, "But there were all these Klingons, Bones…", but it sounded rather weak, and the doctor just snorted. Uhura saved them from a (by now well-known) lecture by smoothly picking up the story again.

"Well, I landed on the balcony - I won't say I was cat-like, but I was pretty proud of myself. That feeling of satisfaction quickly evaporated when I looked up and saw a young male Pirean standing in front of me, behind what turned out to be, close up, a pretty transparent curtain. He had a certain deer-in-the-headlights kind of look - not that surprising really, when a stranger does a superhero jump and lands on your balcony. I remember thinking 'Don't scream, don't scream, don't scream!' and raising my hands in what I hoped was a peaceful manner. But instead he dropped the glass he'd been holding with a crash, dropped to his knees, lowered his eyes and started speaking in awed tones."

"I had no idea what he was saying or what he was doing."

"We didn't have much data on this phase of the creole - I'd made sure I had a basic understanding of some of the pre-war major languages, but this was a creole, a mixed language, just being born and formed. It was beautifully complex: the lexifier language was from a southern language family, and high on the fusion-synthesis axis, the major substrate of a northern family and heavily asynthetic - the lexicon was underspecified to the extreme…" She sighed, "Oh, I won't bore you with the delicious details. You're all brutes when it comes to linguistics anyway - turn on the UT, and the machine solves all your problems." The humans smiled at her a little sheepishly - they appreciated the work that went into the translator, but it was something that was generally taken for granted, like artificial gravity. Only Spock raised an eyebrow in protest, but Uhura just wagged a finger at him.

"Oh no, you may have an exception once you agree that actual comparative linguistics should be on the cadets' training course curriculum, not just algorithm optimization - it's a talk-the-talk, walk-the-walk kind of deal, Mr. Spock."

The Vulcan did not, of course, sigh, but gave her a long-suffering look that she was entirely unmoved by. There was a constant battle between various disciplines for what should be included in the curriculum: if Scotty got to decide, the cadets would do nothing but applied physics and warp mechanics, and Sulu thought that everyone should really be able to do warp speed battle maneuvers, just in case. It was similar to the way that the different departments' requests for additional personnel and computer allocations had always clashed back on the Enterprise. Then, as now, Spock would eventually work out a compromise, but Uhura had long ago learnt that it didn't pay to back down from her own demands until that point. She gave the besieged Vulcan a smile, and went on with her story.

"I stepped past the curtain separating the balcony from the apartment, and he scrambled backwards, still talking. The room was luxurious - pillows and salvaged tapestries everywhere, a table set for two and a large bed. Along the wall was a defunct pre-apocalyptic synthesizer that really caught my interest - it had been converted to a niche for some potted plants, but there was nothing to indicate that the machinery wasn't still in there…"

"My mind was working overtime - I knew some words from the lexifier language, and I had some theories about sound changes, so I could just about start picking out the copula and some verbs from his speech. And then I figured out a single noun, spoken with awe: zarija."

"And all of a sudden, I had the beginnings of a plan. It was crazy - but at least it was a plan."

"One of the stronger language change patterns I'd detected was a general softening of initial plosives and the elision of word-final consonants – the word had to have been darijan in the pre-war lexifier language. And a darijan, I knew, was a kind of spirit, a magical trickster being that could bless or curse ordinary folk. Quick as the wind, strong as the ocean. Or strong as her exo-skeleton, in my case. Well, as long as he thought I was a local spirit, that would take care of the prime-directive breach – it wasn't a good save, but it was within acceptable limits."

"Someone knocked on the door - the crash when the man dropped his glass had been rather loud. The person on the other side on the door seemed to ask if everything was alright, and called the man in front of me heren... well, let's say it meant 'prince' to make the story more epic, Sulu, but really, a better translation would have been 'boss.' I realized then that this young man at my feet was no other than the prospective bridegroom himself! And even as I cursed myself, I brought my hand up to cover my mouth, in what I'd learned was the local 'be quiet' gesture. He looked dazed, but then blinked several times in assent, and shouted something towards the door. We were left alone."

"A very strong fruity alcoholic flavor was spreading through the room: the prince was a bit intoxicated. Nerves, I imagine - he was maybe two hours away from an arranged marriage, and I don't think he'd met his bride-to-be before. The Pireans had very few restrictions on sexual interactions, so it wasn't that: polyamory and casual sex seemed to be the norm all around, with the only restrictions being, fortunately, consent and adulthood. Marriage thus had little to do with sex or procreation, but everything about leaving your clan for another: blood oaths, promises of eternal loyalty – life-changing, heady stuff. And on top of that, he had just seen what he, quite logically, had deduced was a fairy-tale monster walk through his balcony door."

"He continued talking, and I walked around him, letting my fingers trail over his shoulders while I puzzled together a very minimalistic sentence. Izi lan hami - tell me about yourself. Actually, I think came out more like 'Say me yourself', but it seemed to work fine. He kept talking, his eyes still resting anywhere but directly at me, and I suddenly remembered that folklore said that zarija could steal people's souls if you looked them in the eyes..."

"Well, that was perfect. I put my hand over his eyes, took off the large thin veil with the others and tied it around him as a blindfold. I pulled him up, put him in the chair and said hami, hami – 'speak, speak!' - and he continued talking. And then I slumped down, very un-magic-spirit-like, in the other chair and took several quiet, deep breaths."

"I had a little less than two hours before that door would open, and the bride would arrive. Somewhere in her train would be my superior officers, and right now there was no translator service active in a radius of maybe five hundred meters around me. I had to get the booster powered up, somehow!"

"There were solar panels along the window - but I needed a way to get that weak current into my power pack. I went to the synthesizer and removed the front panel. Someone had torn out some metal in there, but most of the circuitry was fine, but dusty. It took me awhile to figure out what I was looking at - but as we always tell cadets, once a culture has figured out the isotropic matrix, there are only so many ways you can put stuff together. I decided that the easiest way to recharge the thing was to immerse it in a electronegative solution, so I needed an acidic, low-ph bath. Luckily, we know where to find acid in a typical synthesizer construction, right Scotty?"

"Ach, yes..." Scotty nodded thoughtfully. "Clever. But that would ruin the power packs after the first charge. It's a bit, well, it's a bit inelegant."

"We can't all have your genius, dear," said Uhura and smiled at him. "I was quite pleased with my inelegant solution."

"Well, I'm thoroughly impressed. You thought of everything!" said Sulu, and the others nodded their agreement. Uhura gave them a wry look.

"Oh, don't say that just yet... I'd just dumped my power packs in a hastily evacuated flower vase to recharge and inserted the lines from a few solar panels in the solution, when I heard a shocked gasp behind me."

"I'd gotten so caught up in my tinkering that I hadn't heard the prince's tale fall silent. Maybe the taboo against looking at a zarija wasn't all that strong anymore, or maybe he'd started to doubt me because of all the weird sounds I was making, because he'd peeked out from his blindfold and was now staring at me quite intently. I looked more or less like a Pirean, but I was doing some decidedly non-fairytale things. I couldn't have that. So, before he could start to question me, or even worse, call for someone, I simply went up and gave him a long, hard kiss."

She blinked innocently at the admiral. "I mean, what else could I do?"

He nodded seriously, "Quite. I mean, what's the alternative, really?"

"Right! And he turned out to be a very enthusiastic, if a little inexperienced, kisser, and seemed to have forgotten all about the fear of soul stealing! About an hour later…"

"Nyota!" Protested Sulu.

"Oh no, a lady doesn't kiss and tell. I leave the rest to your imagination - but I'll tell you this much: I had no problem asserting that he showed enthusiastic consent in my report, at least," she said with a laugh.

"And meanwhile, my power packs recharged nicely. I picked them up, put one into the booster, blew the prince a kiss from the balcony, and disappeared over the ledge in a single heroic jump into the bushes below. And if that jump ended in an undignified sprawl because I hadn't quite gotten used to my super strength and the dampeners, well, at least the prince didn't see."

"I was back on the street, in my veil, well before the wedding party and my superior officers made it to the tower, quite ready to press the green button. I was nervous as hell, though, not knowing exactly what the fallout would be from my little run-in with the prince - but any tales told of zarija didn't seem to cause any upset, because the celebrations seemed to go off without a hitch. Since I was the last cadet on the route, Lieutenant Iverson and Commander Paul gathered me up, and we walked (I limped) out of the city together. They remained quite pleased with the whole mission, talking about how the translator solution had worked great, and there seemed to be a real possibility of a more stable state formation…. Well, they were pleased right up until they asked me for my report…" She trailed off, happy that as awkward and embarrassing that particular conversation had been, she could look back at it with a smile now.

"Lieutenant Iverson gave me a long stern talking-to about irresponsibility and exactly how disappointed he was in me. It was absolutely devastating, and only slightly undercut by Commander Paul trying her best not to laugh in the background. I knew I had earned a reprimand, but not quite, shall we say, the extent of it or how it would be phrased. The next several days I was pulling extra night shifts, quite happy to be deep into the hottest computer core if it meant I didn't have to face the lieutenant. I swore I'd never forget my equipment again, and forced myself to make some soul-searching personal log entries about pride. I can't tell you how happy I was that when the full mission reports were finished, the only thing that was entered was a demerit for me, with the blessedly vague phrasing 'for carelessness with equipment and interspecies relations.' A few years later, Iverson and I met on more equal terms, and he admitted that he had been quite impressed with my quick thinking, but I don't think he'll ever stop needling me about my alien prince in the tower. And, I suspect, neither with you," she finished with a sigh, half amused and half exasperated, seeing the other humans' grins.

"I see no need for any such reminders," assured Spock.

"Why thank you, Mr. Spock, you're quite the gentleman." She sighed. "Unfortunately still a brute when it comes to linguistics, but a gentleman."

"As much as I appreciate your expertise, I cannot make curriculum changes based on an anecdote," Spock argued. "At the very least I would need a position paper."

"Oh but of course, Sir, that seems reasonable," said Uhura, sweet innocence on her face. She picked up a nearby pad, made three clicks on it. "It just so happens that I have one at hand. There's a thirty-page request waiting for you in your inbox, at your convenience.

He gave her a look, but rather quickly admitted to himself that he was outmaneuvered, as the others started to laugh around him.

"You might as well give in gracefully, Spock," said Kirk. "I think Nyota has shown us all the importance of linguistics in the handling of interspecies relations." Jim's eyes had teared up from laughter, and Spock reflected that it had been too long since he'd last seen him so free from the crushing weight of the admiralty.

"Indeed. It seems that I shall have to reevaluate my position on the matter."

"Uhura, your story-telling is so good, it even corrupts Vulcans!" said Sulu, letting the smiles and whiskey make him daring enough to tease Mr. Spock. Kirk laughed again, and Spock gave the younger man a tolerant, even slightly amused, glance.

"I shall reevaluate my position, based on the commander's logically stated and, I am sure, carefully researched arguments. Should changes be made, and greater weight be put on linguistics and communications, cuts shall of course have to be to other sections of the curriculum. Since the additional navigational modules you yourself have argued for were the latest, and therefore least integrated, parts of the training simulations, you might consider submitting a counter-proposal yourself."

Sulu groaned and sank deeper into the sofa, and Scotty patted his shoulder and said cheerily, "chin up, lad. We're only trying to get you up to speed for the workload you'll have once they finally give you the Exelsior. Think of it as... friendly challenges."

Sulu gave him a dirty look, "I think I'm just going to shut up, drink my drink and listen to Pavel's story."

"Oh no, this isn't fair," protested Chekov, arms crossed in defiance. "Enterprise was my first posting - you already know far too too many stories of stupid things I did back then! I don't think I want to give you more ammunition."

"Oh, not that many stories, Pavel," said Bones. "There was a reason you ended up on bridge Alpha shift first thing - and unlike Scotty, the rest of us thinks that bridge duty is an actual honor." Scotty started to protest, (I was just talking about engineers!), but McCoy waved him to silence. "But sure, if you don't want to tell a story yourself... Hey, I remember you refusing to admit that you had Timorian flu, even when your voice sounded like you'd been inhaling helium… I could tell that story."

Chekov shook his head vigorously and opened his mouth, but was interrupted by Uhura, who threatened, smiling: "Or I could tell one about when you and Riley tried to reprogram the olfactory interface for the universal translator…"

Chekov gave her a scandalized look. "You can't! You promised…"

"I remember when you reinstalled the navigational computer of the Galileo with the wrong Z-axis" mused Sulu with a wicked gleam in his eyes, "all measurements were upside down. Jones ended up bouncing off the wall of the cargo bay…"

Chekov groaned. "Alright, alright - enough! You all be quiet, and I will tell you a story. Blackmail, is what this is! But I'm going to need something stronger than this," he waved at the whiskey. "I think this is a story that can't be told without proper vodka."

Author's note: I wanted Uhura to get to do a Kirkian solution to a problem! What did you think?

Thanks to my beta readers DelJewell and WeirdLittleStories for their patience with my English. My native tongue is Swedish, and I'm slowly learning about capitalization and those weird hyphens that should apparently go everywhere... :- ) In Swedish, Uhura would be a kadettäventyrardrottning 'cadet+adventurer+queen' – compounding galore!

Next up is Chekov, and a story about him and Irina Galiulina (from The Way to Eden) at the Academy...