Asset maintains perfect recall in high stress training situations
Sometimes rigging up secure lines to the outside was impossible, which meant Seska had to venture off the Val Jean on some backwater colony to find her contact, usually Holtat (who also wore the face of a Bajoran), to pass along information.
Because he was a paranoid fish, he forbade her from bringing anything that could be reprogrammed to listen in. Which meant they had to do this the old fashioned way. Fine. She'd trained for this and ranked in the top percentile.
"Coordinates," she said quickly, smiling the way flirtatious women at bars were expected to. No one in this miserable hole was looking her way, but that didn't mean they weren't watching.
Holtat was an idiot, a nepotism agent tied to a high ranking committee leader somewhere. Probably a liability of a son, one whose father hoped he died in the line of duty instead of warping himself into a sun — at least there was value in the first. Seska had never looked into it (had never been ordered to look into it); she just fed him information about Chakotay's infuriating band of malcontents and hoped he lived long enough to relay it to his contact.
He smiled back, looking like a man incapable of landing a woman at a bar more reputable than this, "Ready."
As she carefully recalled the exact coordinates within Sector 04-70, or the Badlands according to a people who couldn't help naming everything after something else, Seska hoped this pissant had the ability to remember more than seven digits at a time. If she was going to die in that spacial hellscape, she wanted to go out knowing the Empire would find whatever particles remained of her corpse.
Year Of Hell, Day 47
Harry's puzzles were little more than memory recall exercises, packaged in the language of a young man who had never really considered the benefits of clever word play. Yet, it was a serviceable pass at keeping Torres' mind off her injuries as well as her not inconsiderable wrath off of Seska.
Six hours was a long time to spend in a stalled turbolift with a woman who could barely tolerate her on a good day. Especially when today was not a good day.
They hadn't had one of those in over a month.
"He's talking about the Phoenix," she muttered idly, eyes on the doors' seal (again), "the fuselage Zefram Cochrane strapped a warp core to and called a space ship. How that maniac survived the flight is a mystery to me."
Torres huffed — annoyed laughter, the only kind of laughter she ever managed— "They teach you that at espionage boot camp, instead of how not to get caught?"
It wasn't a very good joke, but Seska rewarded the effort with a wry chuckle.
She'd long given up trying to match the half-Klingon's anger, now that nothing would ever convince the engineer they were kindred spirits. Not since the delicate ridges on Seska's nose had given way to the prominent forehead arch and brow crests.
"They not teach you about Terran history at the academy?" Seska shot back, no real bite to it, although she'd never really lose her edge entirely. Before, before, she might have ended the sentence with a snide little, 'or was it on the syllabus only after you dropped out', but Seska was little more than a dropout herself these days.
The spite had left her too, ten thousand light years ago, replaced with the uncomfortable but keen wish to stop fighting.
"Want to give it a try?" Harry asked.
The ensign liked her nearly as little as all the rest, but he worshiped at the heel of his captain, and his captain always took the diplomatic approach with their Cardassian interloper.
"I want," she grunted, trying for the dozenth time to pry open the doors and failing, "to get out of this tomb before the air scrubbers fail and we asphyxiate."
With the right leverage she could pry open the doors, but the leverage wasn't right.
Seska slipped —heat and sweat making her hands slick — and sank to the floor in frustration. She could force them to listen to her recite pi to the thousandth digit, but then she'd have to recite pi to the thousandth digit.
"Fine. It's a probe, Terran, twentieth-century—"
Of course — because of course she did— Seven of Nine chose that moment to pry open the doors.
"Voyager," the imperious blonde said.
…
Every part of her ached from the violent turbolift stall —nose, fingertips, toes, diaphragm, neck. It made her uneven on her feet as Seska walked toward the jefferies tube on deck eleven, her bruised everything ignored for the sake of the task at hand.
Her body might be weak, but her mind was as sharp as ever.
"I am capable of repairing the EPS relay on my own," Seven stated.
"You've said so twice already."
Seska grit her teeth and grunted as she pushed debris out of their way. She could let the other woman go first, use her considerably enhanced strength to free up the path, and really? Why wasn't she? Pride was a distant memory. Pre-Krenim, pre-this morning.
"You are slowing me down."
"Then move ahead of me and carry your own weight. I'm not taking lead for my own satisfaction."
She didn't dislike the ex-Borg, at least, not nearly as much as Torres did. The Starfleet members of this crew hated the Borg more than they hated Cardassians, which meant Seska's social standing had risen precipitously since the other woman's arrival. This alone made her happy the captain had dragged the drone kicking and screaming back to individuality.
Seven gave her the best approximation of Commander Tuvok's raised brow but did what she was told. That extra cyborg strength got them to the jefferies tube hatch in no time.
It's what they saw on the other side of it that gave Seska pause.
"Seven, wait."
The impossible woman was already climbing in to look at the live munition embedded in the bulkhead. Seska felt herself tap her combadge — at that moment, her brain felt like it was separate from her body. In training she'd been informed that this was a survival mechanism — and report their findings to the bridge. All the while, her eyes were trained on the strange, orange glowing pulsations as she followed Seven in.
"Tuvok is on his way," Seska said, when what she really meant is that they should put as many interior hulls between them and the torpedo as they could. Especially after what happened to deck five.
She wanted to beam it into space. She wanted to…
Seska tilted her head, and the gentle hum from the monstrous thing that played with time just so it could kill more efficiently tickled something half-buried under years of useless memories. An image, a voice, an instruction surfaced — a recollection so out of place that she wasn't sure it was real.
Yet, it was attached to a familiar kind face, one of the only that smiled at her on this damned ship no matter how cruel she was in return. An unsure fondness came to her and then left her feeling cold again.
"We're leaving!"
Seska began pushing at a reluctant Seven. The ex-drone was as relenting as the turbolift doors had been.
"I can scan the torpedo to determine the temporal variance-"
Too many people had let Seven get away with her reckless endangerment of herself and others. Seska didn't have time for it. She grabbed her tricorder, calibrated it to the frequency she'd long ago determined would cause the drone an almighty headache, and slammed it against Seven's ocular implant.
Seven's howl of pain was ignored as Seska leveraged herself in the small space to employ several brutal but efficient kicks to the other woman's side. It forced Seven to clutch her head with one hand and crawl for the hatch.
Seska would demand forgiveness later; the captain would never let it go if she let her pet drone blow herself up.
Besides, the frequency was 1.47 microseconds. Hadn't Kes told them this months ago, weeks before she'd left? Hadn't she warned them about the Krenim?
Why had they all forgotten?
Author's note: Voyager Week is here (over on Tumblr), and I've decided to write up a brief treatment of a what if starring Seska using the prompts. Essentially, what if she told Janeway who she really was? This chapter's prompt: Favorite Episode. Year of Hell, I choose you. Posting an hour early because I have a very busy day the 10th.
Fun fact, it's canon that Cardassian children are trained young to have eidetic memories.