Written for: DesertVixen in Star Trek Holiday Exchange 2024

They didn't get many new prisoners, so each one was big news.

Laren heard there was a shuttle scheduled while she was in the gardens. It was her turn to turn the compost pile.

"Olwen said it was an admiral, someone really high up," Sime said. Sime was an engineer who'd somehow managed to hide a gambling addiction until he'd gotten in hock to the Orion Syndicate—and then, instead of coming clean to his superiors and asking for help, tried to clear his debts by selling information that had led to the deaths of half-a-dozen Starfleet officers, and the enslavement of four civilians. Laren despised him, but then, she didn't like many people.

"It's probably just a lieutenant commander who got caught selling Starfleet equipment to Ferengi," Laren said dismissively.

"No, really, it's someone big!" Sime said.

Laren ignored him, finished up her work, and went inside. The rec room was crowded enough that she wouldn't be left alone—they were encouraged to be friendly, to build social bonds, as part of their rehabilitation.

Laren wasn't particularly interested in forming social bonds with anyone here. Laren wasn't interested in forming social bonds, period.

(Her therapist said it was a trauma response from growing up in the instability of the camps. Probably true, not that it mattered. And it also ignored the effects of years of hostility from her so-called siblings-in-uniform.)

Laren went to the kitchenette and grabbed the pitcher of apple juice out of the cooler. It was pretty good; they grew the apples themselves, and made it into juice. (While the guards watched carefully to make sure none of it was left to ferment into alcohol.)

"Hey, Ro, did you hear? There's a commodore on this week's shuttle!"

"I heard it was an admiral," Laren said without turning around. She poured herself a glass, put the pitcher back, and went into her room to read. There were two options: she could read on a PADD (which could be accessed by the staff) or replicate a paper book (replicator choices could also be accessed by the staff). After a short internal debate between something her therapist would approve of, something to spite her therapist, and something random her therapist probably wouldn't care about, she went with the third option. She didn't feel like having a debate about her reading choices this week.

The shuttle with the commodore-or-admiral-or-whoever showed up while Laren was spending a couple of days in the hospital. It was a chronic problem, left over from malnutrition and toxic exposure in the camps as a child, and she'd been receiving treatment for it since joining Starfleet. Although it was beyond the prison infirmary's capacity, they usually brought the doctor to the prison rather than sending Laren to the doctor. It wasn't the first time they'd done it this way, though, if the doctor had a schedule conflict. Laren wasn't a violent offender, and she wasn't a flight risk.

At least, not a serious one. Earth's population was too homogenously Human for her to get away and blend in long enough to leave the system.

It meant she missed the welcome dinner and the first few days of the new prisoner's presence, not that Laren minded, and the new one was assigned to a different cell block, so it took her a few days to learn his name.

"Wait, Maxwell?" They were hanging out in the rec room after group therapy. The staff liked it if you were social. And they always knew. No guards or therapists or social workers were in the room, to give the illusion of freedom, but there were cameras covering every centimeter. "Like, Captain Ben Maxwell? The hero of Vilorix III?"

Odovacar nodded with a smirk. He was an inveterate gossip and deeply annoying about it.

"A captain and a war hero did something that got him sent to prison," Laren clarified. "Not dishonorably discharged, not a slap on the wrist and administrative consequences. Prison." Starfleet was fairly good about weeding out the bad apples before they got to command rank. People judged unstable or dangerous were shunted into jobs that limited what damage they could do, and given therapy to help them get back on track, or just drummed out of the service altogether. Small crimes were given restorative sentences, making you fix or undo whatever it was you'd done.

To make it to one of the few Starfleet prisons, you had to have done something really bad. Killed someone, maybe. Or, as in Laren's case, done something that resulted in death, while being unrepentant about your actions and considered "difficult" by your superiors.

Odovacar nodded again. "He tried to start a war with the Cardassians, invaded their space and destroyed a whole bunch of bases and civilian transport vessels."

"To the extent that any Cardassian transport is civilian," Laren said dryly. Very little about the Cardassian Union was truly civilian in the way the Federation understood the term.

Odovacar went on, elaborating all the things Maxwell was supposed to have done, some of which might even have been true, all of which were definitely exaggerated. Then he started on all the things Maxwell and his family had suffered at the hands of the Cardassians, none of which would have been bad enough to rate a mention in the camp Laren had grown up in. She listened with half an ear.

No wonder Maxwell got sent to prison. Half of Starfleet might think he was a hero for what he'd done, or at least reasonable. But the Cardassians would be furious, and need to be placated somehow, if they didn't want to start the next inevitable war right now. No doubt the Cardassians were insisting that a Federation prison, notoriously soft as they were, wasn't an appropriate punishment.

It also explained why they'd arranged for her to be gone when Maxwell arrived—they were probably worried that as a Bajoran, she'd approve too strongly of what he'd done.

Laren considered seeking Maxwell out just for spite and contrariness, but only idly, to pass the time. Everyone had more than enough time here. The chances of them having anything in common were pretty small, and she had a pretty good idea what a decorated captain would think of a cashiered ensign.

So she did her required hours of therapy, and her shifts in the kitchen or on whatever group project people had started up, and her gardening, and hung out in the common areas just enough to keep her therapist from starting on about how important friendships and social bonds were, and did her best to bide her time.

She had another seven years here, after all. Two for every person she got killed.

She wondered how many Maxwell had gotten, for attacking Cardassian ships.

"Can I ask what kind of berries those are?"

"Datyoberries," Laren said, without looking up from where she was weeding. "From Bajor."

"Are they a favorite of yours?"

Laren looked up. It was a Human, male, probably a couple of decades older than her. "Never tried them. Never even heard of them before I came here. But my therapists think they'll help me 'reconnect with my Bajoran roots.'"

"Is it working?"

"Not really." Laren shrugged. "But there's worse ways to spend time than out in the garden."

"You're not wrong about that," the man said. "I'm Ben Maxwell." He held out a hand to shake, in the traditional Terran greeting.

Laren stripped off her gloves and shook hands with him. "Ro Laren." She considered pointing out that Laren was her personal name and Ro was her family name, but decided not to. Lots of humans took that as permission to use her personal name, when it wasn't. Better to wait until he'd picked whether he wanted to call her by her personal name or her family name, and then correct him about which was which.

The next obvious question was 'what did you do to get sent here,' but Maxwell earned a few points by choosing another line of conversation. "Do you like gardening?"

Laren shrugged. "It's not bad. If you get your own patch and grow different stuff than the plots near you, you can usually time things for when nobody else is around." She put the gloves back on and went back to weeding.

"Is that something I'll need to take into consideration?"

Laren laughed mirthlessly. He hadn't been here for very long. "Nobody is here because they're just such a great person with a winning personality," she said. "But if you spend too much time on your own—or avoid people too obviously—they label you antisocial. Well," she eyed him, "maybe not you. At least at first. Your reputation will help you there. Me, they were looking for that from the start. You don't want to be labelled antisocial."

"I'll take your word for it," Maxwell said, a bit taken aback. "Any other advice?"

"We're not in the same block, so I don't know who to warn you about."

"Warn me about?"

"Snitches," Laren said. "Some people think they can get better treatment by reporting on their fellow prisoners, or making them look bad. I've never seen it work out for any of them—the guards don't want to incentivize false reports—but that doesn't stop them from trying." She took in the expression on his face, and smirked. "Most people are not here because of their deeply principled stands, captain." She was here partly because of a principled stand, only nobody believed her when she said it.

"I suppose not," he said.

They chatted for a bit about what kinds of things people grew in their garden plots—the Datyoberries were the only Bajoran plants Ro had, the rest were Earth plants like tomatoes and strawberries that she'd gotten used to in Starfleet.

Maxwell broke off mid-sentence, staring at something behind her. "I thought the guards didn't mix much with prisoners," he said.

Laren followed his gaze, and sure enough, there was a guard in a Starfleet uniform standing at the west entrance to the garden. "It's because you're blocking the camera's view," she said.

"What?"

"There's only one camera covering this garden," Laren said. "Unlike places where they expect lots of people to hang out together." She pointed to it, and Maxwell turned, frowning, to find it. "You're standing directly between me and it, and you have been for the last several minutes. They want to make sure you're not covering for me on purpose."

Maxwell's lips pinched. He took an exaggerated step to the side, so the camera could see both of them clearly, and watched as the guard wandered off. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"I wanted to see how long it would take them to respond."

"And?"

Laren tilted her head. "He came out a bit quicker than they usually do. After all, there are a lot of innocent reasons for blocking a camera's view. Maybe he was bored … or maybe they don't want you talking to a Bajoran."

"Why, because they think the two of us will start a riot, escape past the sensor net, get offworld, steal a ship, and start attacking Cardassians?" Maxwell snorted. "If I was going to do that, I would never have surrendered my ship to begin with."

"More likely, they just don't want us commiserating on how awful the Cardassians are and how much they deserved whatever you did to them," Laren said. "They want to reform us. Make us 'better.' Which means we have to accept that what we did was wrong."

Maxwell was quiet for a bit. "Parts of it were wrong," he said. "But the goal? No. If I could have convinced the Federation that the Cardassians were rebuilding, and that a short, decisive war now would prevent future suffering—"

Laren snorted.

"What?" Maxwell said.

"You think nobody's ever tried to tell the Federation that?" she said. "You know how many Bajorans there are in Starfleet? How many refugees from other planets the Cardassians have conquered? We know the Cardassians are a threat, and the Federation is the only power in the galaxy that might stop them. There are quite a few Bajorans in Starfleet Intelligence—both undercover in Cardassian space and doing analysis at Headquarters. For that matter, how many Federation worlds along the Cardassian border have been screaming all along that leaving the Cardassians to re-arm was a mistake?" She shook her head. "And you thought, what, that just because you're a decorated officer—and a Human—and a war hero, they'll listen to you?"

"They might have, if—"

"You can't make the Federation see or hear anything it doesn't want to," Laren said. "No matter who you are. No matter how good your intentions."

"So what about you, Ro Laren?" he asked. "Did you have good intentions?"

"Sure, for all the good it did me," she said. "I made a bad call, people died, and I already had a reputation as a troublemaker."

"A single bad call would not get you here," Maxwell protested. "Not even if people died."

"Sure it would," Laren said. "If it was disobeying an order." She concentrated on ripping out weeds. She didn't need to look up to predict his expression. "The ship's second officer, Lieutenant Gregg, was a petty, incompetent, jerk, with a talent for pushing blame for his mistakes off on other people. He was leading an away team, a medium-sized survey on a world that also had a Latovra scout group—they hadn't formally claimed the planet yet, but it was a first-class scout team, they told us that when they beamed over to our location to confront us."

"Why didn't you leave immediately?" Maxwell asked. "Given how territorial the Latovra are."

"I did mention that Gregg was incompetent?" Laren said. "He wanted to stay and finish up. Didn't even inform the ship the Latovrans were there—which, if he had, then nobody would have died."

"If he had, and your captain was even half-way competent, he would have ordered you back to the ship then and there," Maxwell said.

Laren shrugged. "In hindsight, the thing to do would have been to call the ship myself," she said. "But I hadn't thought he was that stupid." She explained the whole chain of incompetence and bad luck that had led to the last, catastrophically stupid order that would have gotten them all killed, and what she'd done instead. "It would have been fine if the ship was in orbit where I assumed it was. Well, not fine, but nobody would have died. Instead, they were off surveying the outer planets in the system, and it took them fifteen minutes to reach us. And people died."

"You'd all have died if Gregg had his way," Maxwell said. "Given his incompetence, I'm surprised the court-martial convicted you. Or didn't just let you off with a discharge."

"I could have gotten a discharge," Laren said. "If I'd been willing to take all the blame for the incident. Throw myself on the court's mercy, and agree that all good little ensigns should always follow orders. Let Gregg use me as a scapegoat. He may not have been court-martialed, but at least I got them to look into his actions—the board of inquiry demoted him for cause, and he got transferred to a dead-end position on DS6."

"And you're here."

"And I'm here." She finished loading the weeds into the bucket and stood up. "I'm sorry I got them killed. There are several things I could have done better, along the way, that would have gotten us out of there without anyone dying." More than one officer had pointed them out to her, along the way. "But I'm not sorry I disobeyed that order. Which makes it very unlikely I will be paroled." She stripped off her gloves. "No doubt we'll see each other around, Captain."

"I'm not a Captain any longer," Maxwell said bitterly.

She didn't see Maxwell often; they lived in different buildings, his garden plot was close to his bresidence, in an area she had little reason to go. She liked him better than she liked most of their fellow-prisoners, but not enough to tick off the staff by going to see someone they were trying to keep separate from her.

But the prison wasn't that big, and there were regular social events. Music concerts, classes on a wide variety of subjects, dances, game nights. Poker games were rare, because of the number of people who suffered from gambling addictions of one kind or another. Laren thought that was stupid, because while friendly poker games were common in Starfleet nobody bet anything of value on them. It was other games, played in bars and casinos while on shore leave, that got people into trouble. And a gambler could bet on anything, whether or not the game was designed for it.

She didn't mind learning to play bridge and scasa and trebon instead, though, and card tournaments weren't a bad way of passing time. Maxwell loved cards, particularly scasa, and since that tended to be less popular, Laren often ended up playing at his table.

"What about you, Ro?" Grant asked. 'What do you plan to do once you're out' was a perennial topic of conversation.

"I don't know." Laren studied the cards in her hand; scasa was a Bolian game, and she wasn't as familiar with their numbers as she was with Standard numbers, so it took a little more mental effort to play than it otherwise would. (Which was part of why she liked it.) "Probably get a job on a freighter or station somewhere." It was a fairly standard goal; Starfleet's training standards were high enough that even cashiered officers were in high demand for certain jobs.

"Boooring," Grant said. "Going back and forth on the same route forever? With the same systems breaking down all the time?"

Laren shrugged. He wasn't wrong. "It'll do for a while, at least."

"I'd have thought you'd go home to Bajor," Maxwell said. He tossed a card into the center of the table.

Laren winced. It was the twelve of shovels, and that set the suit for the next round, and she knew her team was short on shovels. Everybody played their next card, and the game paused while points and demerits were tallied up. Maxwell's team had pulled ahead by a substantial margin … but there was still hope for Laren's team.

"Aren't you interested in going back to Bajor now that the Cardassians are gone?" Maxwell asked. "What's it like?"

"I don't know, I've never been there," Laren said. "I mean, I was born there, but we were moved to a labor camp offworld before I was old enough to remember anything."

"I'm sorry," Maxwell said, and from around the table came a murmur of the kind of useless sympathy Federation types were so prone to.

"Not anyone's fault but the Cardassians." Laren's voice was short. "What about you, Maxwell, what are you going to do when you get out of here?"

"No idea," Maxwell bit out. His fingers tightened on his cards.

Mercedes was the leader for that round; she played a four of scythes. "Aw, come on, you must have something you want to do."

Laren kept her face impassive, but her team was strong in that suit; they should make up some ground.

"Well, I always figured I'd retire to Setlik III with my family, but I guess that's not happening, now is it?"

Several people tensed at the savagery in his voice, but others shared a chorus of the same sort of pointless remarks they'd given Laren just a few minutes ago.

"You know," Laren said as the last few people played their cards for the round, "sad as it is to have your family murdered by Cardassians, life does go on."

"Are you going to tell me that my wife and kids wouldn't want me to dwell on their senseless murders?" Maxwell asked.

"How the hell should I know?" Laren asked. "I never met them. But they're dead. You're not. You can't change that, so either learn to live with it or don't, but don't pretend like your life is a grand tragedy that nobody else can ever understand. Or do you want to hear my tragic history?"

"That won't be necessary, Laren." He lowered his eyes back to his cards.

"Bajorans put our family names first, personal names second," Laren said. Now of all times she wasn't in the mood for anyone's over-familiarity.

"Sorry. Ro."

Laren nodded, and the game went on.

A few days later there was a chime at her door. "Who is it?"

"It's Ben Maxwell."

She set aside the puzzle she was working on. "Enter."

He came into the tiny room and stood hesitantly just inside the door. Prisoners got a bunk, a sink, a dresser, and a small table which could stand by itself or be swung over the bed to use as a desk. Laren was sitting at the head of the bed, back to the wall, and was using the table as a desk. She gestured at the foot of the bed. "Have a seat."

He perched on the bed. "I wanted to apologize, for the other day."

"What for?" Laren asked.

"I didn't mean to downplay or demean the way you Bajorans have suffered at the hands of the Cardassians—"

Laren rolled her eyes. "You didn't. If anyone here understands what it's like to have the Cardassians destroy the people you love, it's me. I have no intention of having a pity party or a contest for who suffered the most. It happened. It's over. Now we pick up the pieces. I just didn't want to hear your pity party. You stopped when I asked. We're fine."

He looked vaguely bewildered, like nobody had ever talked about his trauma in such a matter-of-fact way. Which was probably true, Laren realized. He'd been a decorated captain; his own crew probably tip-toed around his grief, and as for his friends, well, the Federation wasn't used to tragedy. Starfleet officers risked their lives every day, but their families didn't. He would have been buried in well-wishes by people who couldn't understand what it was like, and didn't want to, and saw his suffering as some sort of unique horror.

"All right," he said, slowly. "Telling me not to call you Laren felt like it was a bit more than that."

"Some days the Federation's human chauvinism bothers me more than others," Laren said.

"I understand."

"No you don't," Laren said. "You've lived most of your life in a world designed for people like you. Even this prison is designed mostly for Humans. But as long as you listen when I tell you something, that's all I need."

He nodded. "That, I can do." It made him infinitely better than 90% of the Humans she'd served with.

She expected him to get up and leave, but he didn't. "So, have any new thoughts on what you want to do when your time is up?"

"No." Maxwell snorted. "Maybe I'll follow you out and we'll join the Federation merchant fleet together."

"You didn't kill anyone the Federation cares about, and you have a lot of people who like and respect you," Ro said. "You'll be out of here before I will."

"Maybe." He didn't sound hopeful. "How do you deal with it? I can't stand this place."

"Unlike the camps I grew up in, there is abundant good food, good medical care, climate control, and I don't have to worry about anyone getting tortured to death. If I'd seen this place as a kid, I'd have thought it was paradise. But say what you will about Cardassians, they didn't have cameras everywhere." There weren't cameras everywhere; the bathrooms and bedrooms were unmonitored. It was still a lot. Laren hated the feeling of being watched.

"Really? I'd have thought that, given the Obsidian Order, the Cardassians would have surveillance everywhere."

"Everywhere they cared about, sure," Laren said. "They didn't care about the parts of the camps where we lived. Not unless someone made trouble, and then they'd either round up a whole group and shoot them in retaliation, or pick up a few people and torture them for information, depending on who was in charge. Don't get me wrong, I'll take constant surveillance over a chance of torture and death any day. That doesn't mean I like the cameras."

"I know what you mean," Maxwell said. "And the boredom is driving me crazy."

"There are so many things you can do, and none of them matters at all," Laren said.

"Yeah," Maxwell said. "It's certainly nothing like Starfleet."

"I don't know," Laren said. "Doing lots of pointless things to please authorities who have already decided I'm a problem is very reminiscent of Starfleet, to me. But I guess that's the difference between being an ensign with a long disciplinary file, and being a decorated captain."

He grunted, and didn't try to tell her that she was wrong about her own experiences, or assure her that Starfleet wasn't normally like that, it was just her. She appreciated it.

He got up. "I should let you get back to your puzzles," he said.

"Stop by any time," Laren said.

He nodded, and left.

They talked more, after that; she didn't know if she'd call him a friend, but they got along well enough. He was less annoying than a lot of their fellow prisoners.

When Admiral Kennelly dismissed her, the guards escorted Laren back to the prisoner area. She went to her room and sat on the bed for a while, arms wrapped around her legs, thinking very hard.

Then she got up and walked over to the building Maxwell lived in.

He wasn't in his room, he wasn't in the common area; she eventually found him in the art room working on a clay sculpture.

"Got a minute?" she asked.

"Sure, Ro," he said, gesturing her to have a seat at the table.

She didn't take it.

Maxwell looked up at her, and then past her to the security cameras in the corners of the room. "Give me a minute." He finished what he was doing and put his half-done sculpture in the cupboard. He stripped off his apron and washed up, and then led her back to his room.

"So. What can I do for you?" he asked once they were both seated on his bed.

"Admiral Kennelly," Laren said. "Do you know him? How trustworthy is he?"

Maxwell frowned at her. "Why do you want to know?"

"He has a job for me that would get me out of this place," she said.

"What kind of job?"

"You don't want to know," she said, "and it's classified, anyways."

"Ah," he said. He probably thought it was some sort of intelligence mission—a Bajoran convict would be a very believable person to be making trouble in Cardassian space, one whom the Federation could so easily disavow.

Laren would have been happy to do that. What Kennelly had actually offered … it seemed too good to be true, and was setting off all kinds of alarm bells.

"I don't know him," Maxwell said. "Not really, at any rate. A few things at parties, here and there. My—my former second in command was his aide for a bit, only had good things to say about him. That's all I know."

Laren nodded. Nothing helpful, in other words. "And Captain Jean-Luc Picard?"

Maxwell blew out a breath. "A good officer," he said bitterly. "The one they sent to bring me in. Smart, honorable, dedicated to peace and justice … the best Starfleet has to offer."

So, not the kind to approve of the sort of mission Kennelly was sending her on. Not the sort to approve of her. But the sort of officer she'd wanted to be, once upon a time, when she was a lot younger and more naïve. Well, she wouldn't be serving under him for very long, so what did it matter?

There was nothing else she could ask him, she realized, nothing else she could say. "Thanks," she said, getting up from the bed.

"Any time," Maxwell said. "And good luck."

Laren nodded. "To you as well. Hope you get out of here soon."

"Write, if you can," Maxwell said. "So I know how it goes."

Laren nodded again. "I'll try and send a note."

She went back across the prison to her own building and her own room. She changed into the uniform lying on her bed, packed the few mementos she had that she actually wanted to keep, and then went to the comm terminal at the front door and signaled the office. "Tell Admiral Kennelly I'm ready," she said.

They beamed her up directly into the fast passenger liner that would take her on the first leg of her journey out to Enterprise and the rest of her life.