Chapter Text
All of my friends greeted the new investigations into Starfleet with excitement. The very reason many had joined was to try and fix the corrupt system from within, and now their work was being done for them. The lift on the synthetic ban was met with “ah, finally!” and all my peers who had grown up on tales of Captain Jean-Luc Picard were elated to see that their hero was not a madman, but was right all along (as many of them had maintained despite the media’s claims otherwise).
I knew I could never be one of them, because all these new developments filled me with unspeakable fear.
I knew I would never be normal, as my parents had already called me multiple times that day to tell me to start packing my things and come home, to insist that we needed to band together and preserve our “society”, then calling again and again to make sure that I was definitely coming home that day and to inform me of the private shuttle they sent my way.
I knew I was one of the bad ones, because at 13:35 I went directly to my dorm, instead of the café to meet with my friends who were all that I aspired to be. But no, that afternoon I was grabbing my bag and slipping back into the jumpsuit my parents insisted I bring “just in case”, and sneaking to the most far-removed, least-staffed hangar on campus to steal a ship that I had barely any idea how to fly and jamming my fist into the warp button as soon as I cleared the atmosphere, more ships on my tail and multiple voices shouting over my stolen ship’s comms.
I would not be returning to my parents’ home or Starfleet Academy anytime soon.
***
I’d already double- and triple – checked all my devices to make sure that any tracking systems were either thoroughly removed or, if they were unable to be secured, destroyed or deactivated the entire device. I’d read through pages of the ship’s digital manual to figure out how to deactivate any tracking on my ship, before changing direction a few times and then finally dropping out of warp for good. I scanned the surrounding area the best I could tell how to using my limited knowledge, and found myself to be alone. I relaxed and sat down in the lone captain’s chair on the cramped bridge of whatever this ship was supposed to be and let out a sigh. Maybe this would work out after all.
I should’ve known better than to get my hopes up so soon, as not a minute after I sat down the private comm my parents had given me started beeping. I answered instantly, reflexively, a nervous ache already growing in my stomach.
“Veronika, what do you think you’re doing?” My parents’ faces popped up in a hologram projected towards the glass of the bridge window, and they were dressed in formal attire and also on a starship from what I could see of their background. My stomach twisted further in on itself.
“I know you’re scared, but this is madness. You’ll be perfectly safe with us. The Society will protect itself. Come aboard peacefully, and we can forget that all of this ever happened.” I stared at them, and they stared at me, the unspoken threat hanging in the space between us. A much larger, much more expensive starship shimmered to life in front of mine, uncloaking itself, and I realized there was way less space between us than I’d anticipated.
I hesitated for a moment. This entire reaction, this entire plan I’d kept in case of emergency for the past two years, had felt like jumping off a bridge. Of course they’d find me, and they’d punish me somehow, and they’d win. It always ended that way. That was the only way it could end. But, I was tired of it, and if jumping off a bridge was my only option I was ready to try and survive that long enough to make it work.
Thinking back to the VR ship racing games that were never my favorite but that I'd gotten dragged into by engineering friends, I slowly moved my hands forward, keeping them out of my parents’ line of sight. In an instant, I slipped one hand up to switch my comm off and the other further forward to pump against the controls, driving my ship downwards into a nose – dive underneath theirs and up again behind them. As I straightened the ship out with my right hand (albeit quite sloppily, with lots of wobbling back-and-forth), I reached over quickly with my left hand to send the ship into warp again.
I also vaguely remembered from either my friends’ engineering chatter or the ship’s manuals, or maybe both, that ships this small weren’t built for lots of jumps. After a while, they’d overheat, and either automatically prevent further warping or just melt or explode. I really hoped this one was the former.
Now, it was time to figure out how my parents had still been tracking me after even Starfleet lost my trail. I had two theories, and once again, I really hoped it was the first one. The second one would suck more for me, but I’d figure it out nonetheless.
I grabbed the comm from my parents, which I’d thought I’d shut down but apparently not, and spoke to the ship for the first time since I’d asked for its manuals.
“Computer, where is the incinerator?”
A small bin popped out from the wall, and I spared the comm that I’d had since middle school one last glance of both nostalgia and betrayal before chucking it in the bin. The incinerator slid back into place, then whirred and crackled a bit, confirming the deed was done.
I pulled up the scanners again, watching my parents’ ship behind me as I plugged in new destination coordinates. My ship gradually veered to the left, and to my dismay, so did my parents’.
A yellow light popped up under the symbol for the warp core now, and I stared at it incredulously before spinning around to rifle through all the ship’s compartments frantically, leaving them all in much worse shape than I’d found them. Finally, I’d located the two items I needed: A portable, ‘updated’ medical tricorder, and a laser-knife.
I held the tricorder away from my body and pointed it at myself, awkwardly moving it over my head and left arm and body and legs and finding nothing. I switched to hold it in my left hand and move the tricorder over my right. It beeped right above my wrist on the inside of right arm. I looked at the screen, and sure enough, there it was.
A little metal chip, embedded deeply in my arm, just between the innermost nerves and muscles and the bone. I shivered a little, as I remembered my grade school lessons. I should be thankful, honestly, that they trained me for a situation like this, and now I could use that very training to escape their clutches.
Honestly, it would almost feel routine by now, if not for the precision with which I had to act. It had never been about precision before, because in my case, precision didn’t matter.
So, for the sake of precision, I drew a circle around the spot in my arm where I’d need to make the incision. I grabbed the bottle of painkillers that I’d learned to carry everywhere since the time I was thirteen and swallowed just one. Perhaps I’d need to start thinking about rationing them now that I was on my own. Or maybe, some post outside the reach of Starfleet would have something stronger. But I didn’t have time to think about that, or wait for the painkiller to fully set in. I stuck in my mouthguard, grabbed the laser-knife, and jabbed it into my arm.
I let out a grunt, but the first part was always the worst. Well, except for the nerves. I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details, but suffice to say that ten minutes later I finally had the metal sphere in my left hand, a hole about a centimeter in diameter in my right arm, and no feeling or movement in my right hand. The sphere immediately went in the incinerator, and I hastily wrapped a bandage tightly around my right arm before wiping off the excess blood on my left and changing the coordinates once again.
I leaned into my seat as the ship veered right, and I watched the scanner closely. The blinking light that was my parents’ ship sped forward, forward, and straight on past the turn I made. I blinked, checked the scanner again to make sure it was true, and then propped my left elbow up on the dash, letting my jaw rest in my one functional hand. What to do now?
After sitting and thinking on that for a solid fifteen minutes, I remembered that I still didn’t want to be anywhere that anyone upstanding would find me, and while I wasn’t a pro at piloting ships I was pretty decent with cartography. I pulled up a hologram of the known galaxy as I decided which less-traversed corner I wanted to head for, and then once I’d picked a location, plugged in the coordinates and leaned on my hand again.
This time, I sat like that for maybe thirty minutes, maybe an hour before my lethargic brain realized that I was too lethargic to do anything else. I checked my arm, making sure it wasn’t from blood loss, but the tight bandage seemed to be working fine. I should rifle around some more through the ship’s storage for a dermal regenerator, or at least disinfect my wound thoroughly and re-bandage it, but the aftermath of the painkillers and the exhaustion from the day’s stress made standing up seem impossible.
So, I didn’t. I let myself slide out of my chair, onto the floor, and prop my back against the wall. I struggled to pull a blanket out of my bag, and gave up halfway, settling for resting my head on the bag and wrapping what I’d gotten of the blanket around my upper body. I adjusted so my right arm wasn’t at a weird angle, and blinked at it slowly one last time, hoping my body would do what it was made to and not bleed out in my sleep.