FROM: Orion's Plunderer
TO: All ships.

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Transmission picked up by Starfleet sensor buoy, Alpha
Sector parasec 32, Stardate 1618.2

Larssen shifted the gravitronic driver to her left hand to
ease the cramp in her right, shuffled forward as best she
could in her awkward position, and looked intently at the
next relay board.

"I've got two circuits sprung out by impact on this one,"
she said into her comm, "and it looks like the bottom
three connections are warped out of true. I think we
need to replace the whole board."

"Take it out and we'll send one up to you." came the
response from Petty Officer Mentsumo.

Larssen repressed a sigh that would have been clearly
audible to every-one else on that channel. "Very good."
she said, because she couldn't respond 'Yes'm' to
someone several grades below her in rank, and because
she'd be a fool to argue with someone many years above
her in experience. It hadn't been the answer she wanted,
though. She had wanted to hear Mentsumo say
something like, 'Well done, Lieutenant, why don't you
come down here and have a cup of coffee while we get
somebody to do just that.'

She stretched her fingers one last time, wiped sweat out
of her eyes, and set to work unseating the housing. At
least up here, bent over like a pretzel in the part of the
module most damaged by the accident, Commodore
Whittaker wasn't likely to come across her.

Borrowing trouble, the ward-mistress would have called
it, thinking about Whittaker when he wasn't even there.
Larssen couldn't work out which was worse: being in the
room with him and waiting in dread for what he was about
to say next, or wondering what he might be saying, and
to whom, out of her earshot.

The worst of it was, she couldn't be sure what the worst
of it *was*. Much of her junior year, most of the nights
of it, were too blurry to be sure of, and she had spent all
the days and nights since letting go of them, letting them
slip away from her mind until she could think 'The
Academy' and not feel a thump of dread in her chest. A
different Cory, that had been. That had been Cory the
zirdar girl from Initar, and the night Fat Harry Pateman
had dragged her by the ear out of the Pink Elephant,
buttoned her shirt with impersonal hands and then hit her
so hard her feet left the ground, that night zirdar Cory
had died forever. When Fat Harry had hauled her to the
nearest fountain and dumped her in, the girl he had
dragged out again was as new born and cleansed of sin as
the baptised were supposed to be: Cory the Officer,
Cory of the Coveralls, Cory the Celibate.

Or so she had thought. And it had seemed to be working.
When the captain had pinned that medal to her shirt -
mostly she had wanted to run away and hide, before
anyone looked at her too long or too hard, but at the
same time there had been a strange pain in her chest ,
that came back every time she took the medal out of her
drawer to look at it. It took her a while to realise what it
was, that feeling that made her throat ache at the same
time as she wanted to laugh aloud.

It was pride.

She hadn't known there was a feeling in the universe like
that. Now she knew, she'd have to go back and re-read
all the books that hadn't made sense the first time
around. She knew all about being scared of people's
*dis*approval. She'd learnt that early, in the zirdar
house. She'd learnt what you could do about it there as
well. At the Academy, when the other freshers laughed
behind their hands at the gaps in her education and her
deliberate way of speaking, she'd known how to make
them stop. It hadn't been a decision - or she couldn't
remember it being. It had just been what she *did* when
that panic started - and it was a hell of a lot easier, she'd
learned, after a drink or three. But the opposite to the
misery she had felt when they laughed had not been this
soaring, terrifying emotion that the medal gave her. It
had been merely relief.

And it had left her very puzzled, in senior class, when
they had to read all sorts of weird old books from Terra
and Andoria and even some smuggled out of Romulus:
why would anyone risk their life over other people's
approval? People liked you if you let them use you: if
you didn't, the best you could aim for was to be ignored,
forgotten. Larssen had gotten very good at being
forgotten. Practical clothes, functional hair style, and
above all don't bring yourself to their attention, and you
could be reasonably sure of being left alone to get on
with your job in peace. And that had been the sum total
of her ambitions for the rest of her life. Nobody, please
god, would hurt her; nobody would use her; nobody
would look at her as anything other than one more
Starfleet officer doing a satisfactory job.

And then she had turned from receiving Kirk's salute and
seen Brand up the back of the recreation deck, jumping
up and down and beaming with delight; had had her hand
shaken by Lieutenant Commander *Sulu* as she tried to
escape through the crowd, and him with almost as many
decorations as the captain or Commander Spock; had
gotten a resounding kiss on the cheek from Ingrit
Tomlinson, whose cool professional demeanour was
something Larssen would very much like to be able to
copy; and a strangling embrace from Shimona, who was
widely agreed by all to be 'going places, but fast.'

Her head had been spinning by the time she made it
safely back to Bai'tin and Regna and the other staff
from Lab Nine. Her head had been spinning, her eyes
burning, and her heart aching.

The last part of the housing came free, recalling Larssen
to the present. She began to back out of the crawlspace,
dragging the panel with her. An awkward bit of
manoeuvring at the entrance, and she had exchanged the
broken board for a new one. Crawling back in, Larssen
tried to work out what she should do about Whittaker.
When he had called her in to his office all those years ago
and told her he needed 'persuasion' not to put her on
report, she had known what he meant. He had not, on the
whole, been any worse than some of the men at the
zirdar house, and she had endured them without alcohol.
For a moment Larssen considered offering to reprise
their old agreement: he to shut his mouth, her to open
hers. Bracing the relay board into position and beginning
to set the connections, she dismissed that idea. It would
be easier than any other option, true, but she was
Larssen of the Enterprise, now, and the Cory who had
accepted that deal belonged to the past.

Whittaker might already have told the captain. 'Look out
for her,' he would have said, 'she's unreliable. Drinks
too much. Can't be trusted.' Or he might tell Kirk in
the near future. Should she wait until Kirk asked her
about it? That wasn't a good option, either. It would be
humiliating to inform the captain that the officer he had
just decorated for valour had been the Starfleet
Academy joyride, but if she told him first she could
emphasise how much she'd changed. How much she'd
learned.

~About things like pride.~

And even if Whittaker *did* tell him, Kirk might never
give her a chance to explain. Larssen thought that was
probably highly likely: not that the captain would
condemn her unheard, but that he'd consider it improper
to take Whittaker's rancorous gossip seriously enough to
make any enquires into its truth. That could be worse
for her than if he took it seriously. Even Kirk might well
be influenced by a few malicious words, at some level so
deep he'd never know to question his decisions. No,
Larssen knew she couldn't take that chance either.

Perhaps she could ask Fat Harry Pateman to speak for
her. Somehow, even as he'd hauled her dripping and
occasionally retching back to her dorm that long ago
night, she'd known he understood there was more to her
than a nymphomaniac good-time girl. When she'd
reported to his office the next morning with a hangover
that nearly crippled her and the black eye he'd caused,
he'd looked at her out of those little piggy eyes and for a
second she'd thought he understood her better than she
understood herself - and had even had the crazy thought
that if she asked him he'd be able to explain what was
wrong with her, be able to tell her what to do to make
herself normal.

Pateman, however, was well known for believing people
should fight their own battles. She hadn't asked him for
anything then (except for the wastepaper bin when her
hang-over got the better of her at one point during that
three hour interview) and she wouldn't ask him now.
She'd have to speak to the captain herself.

A fastening slipped from her grip at the thought, and
Larssen said 'Garbage' in Romulan and began to hunt for
it. The hunt successfully distracted her from the other
stomach turning thought that had been waiting for a
chance at her attention.

Five months ago, on the winter world of Ser Etta Six,
Commander Spock had laid his hand on her face and
entered her mind. He'd taken possession of her thoughts,
her ideas, her memories. She would have to make some
kind of explanation to Captain Kirk, but even that was
less excruciating than the knowledge she'd been avoiding
for the past five months.

Commander Spock already knew.

From the inside.