Slow Way Home
Chapter 19
[Day 27 of 45]
Montgomery Scott was working in the Engine Room, trying to keep their girl moving and working so a lot of people could get home when the Acting Captain entered. She would have just gotten off Alpha shift and rather than heading to her quarters he saw her walk in.
People stopped respectfully and she nodded, then glanced around, saw something that needed working on, and went to it.
She was good, that lass. She was smart and knew an engine well. In fact, it surprised him that she was on the tactical path at the Academy rather than Engineering.
He saw somebody struggling under the weight of a beam they needed to move so he instantly moved over to help them as did one of the Vulcans. They'd been flocking since the Captain gave the okay. Some were in medical, some in Engineering. Lady Amanda had been helping people figure out jobs that needed to be done.
When he first predicted forty-five days he'd been hesitant, not believing it could be done but not wanting to hurt people's already fragile morale by saying after Christmas if not at all. Now he thought they might make it in forty-days with the progress.
Between the Captain's near daily presence, the Vulcans, people switching off power leaks or fixing them in the open ports it wasn't inconceivable now that they would make it early.
Nodding at the Vulcan who helped lower the device they had it under control he turned back to his work.
~Slow Way Home~
As the screen went black T'Pau wished for a moment she was human. Then she'd have been able to tell the men from the consulate what she thought. But she had to control her emotions, repress the urge to call them sniveling cowards.
"I'm pretty sure if you were human you would be flipping off the view screen," her daughter-in-law told her and T'Pau turned to view Lady Amanda Grayson.
"That would not get the work done any faster," T'Pau told her.
"But it would feel good," Amanda said and T'Pau had to resist the urge to smile. She knew the other heads of the Council never approved of how 'emotional' she had always permitted herself to be. She had refused to strip herself of emotion, allowed herself to give into emotion while amongst family.
"More than likely," T'Pau admitted. She'd always been a rebel. She believed in logic and control, but there was also a place and time for emotion. That logic was not meant to be amongst family.
Though her early years she'd helped bring back the true teaching of Surak – her ancestor – she had never truly fully accepted that Logic was meant to be everywhere though she knew future generations would see her that way. She would either be some crazy Vulcan with Wild Ideas or an all logical woman who used it for everything.
"Your son is being an ass," Amanda said.
"I do not see how my son could be…" T'Pau began, mind not following for a moment.
"I mean he's being rude, and unbending in his thoughts and emotions towards Jim. I mean, you'd think with you as a mother, me as a wife, he could accept Tibby but nooo. He has to go and be unnecessarily rude to her," Amanda rambled.
"He takes after Skon," T'Pau stated. Theirs had not been a love match but an arranged marriage she had not rejected for she had no other prospects at the time and saw him as suitable. She had been pleased when her son made a love match – though she'd had to get over her mistrust of humans to accept Amanda. "Meaning his mind will not be easily swayed."
"So, what do we do," Amanda asked.
T'Pau didn't know but they would figure it out.