Chapter Text
Even Vulcans have sleepless nights. That’s what I told my second in command, Danise Simonson. Perhaps it’s not technically true. There are tricks I learned as a Vulcan child to instantly put myself to sleep—mind tricks. For instance, you imagine yourself to be an empty container. Just a bottle, with nothing inside. But there are also times when one must process one’s thoughts and reactions, dealing with all the many intertwined strands of memory, logic, and impulse that make us sentient. Sometimes, pushing one’s problems aside is simply not helpful.
But perhaps that’s my Romulan side talking. One of my failings…is to blame my failings on my Romulan side.
“Why are you,” I asked Simonson, “here in the ship’s lounge at one o’clock in the morning?”
“I wanted a glass of genmai-cha,” she said.
“Is that an Earth tea?” I guessed.
She nodded, adding, “The replicator in my quarters is busted.”
“I’ll have Martinez take a look at it,” I suggested.
She made the request of the computer, and a mug of steaming tea appeared in the replicator, which she retrieved.
“Don’t bother about the replicator,” she demurred. “Gives me an excuse to get out and mingle.”
Evidently my body language betrayed my internal thoughts. Simonson glanced around the darkened, empty lounge and then sat opposite me in her night clothes and robe.
“Sovak…?” she prompted.
“Commander?” I replied.
“We’re off duty,” she said. “Call me Danise. I mean, I was almost married to your fiancé. And you were almost adopted by my racist mother.”
[See “Starship Churchill: Wishes” — Ed.]
I groaned in revulsion. “Must we speak of that sordid episode?”
She frowned and grabbed my hand.
“You’re troubled,” she said. “I can tell.”
I sighed involuntarily and pulled my hand away from her. I then stood, approached the port-side windows and stared at the distant stars.
“I’ve been reassigned,” I admitted. “I’ll be leaving the U.S.S. Churchill when we dock at Starbase 514. I’m being…transferred laterally…to a desk job.”
Simonson appeared outraged.
“When did this happen?”
“I learned today. That private communiqué from Captain Takala? He let me know.”
“But why?”
I laughed bitterly. “Oh, come on. I was severely written up after our encounter with the Excalbians. And Starfleet was unhappy with how long it took me to figure out the situation with the Endridi colony ship.”
[See “Starship Churchill: Echoes” and the novella Glitterball — Ed.]
“But that wasn’t your fault,” she said.
She stared at her tea mug on the table top for a long while.
“I don’t know what to say, except that it’s not fair,” she added. “When are you going to tell the crew?”
“At Starbase 514. Do me a favor, and keep it quiet.”
She nodded.
I added, “Commander…my position is open. As far as I am aware, no one yet has been posted to the captaincy as my replacement. Do you want me to put in a word for you?”
Her brow furrowed, but almost immediately she shook her head.
“I think,” she replied, “for now, I’m content to not have to deal directly with the higher ups.”
I understood her objection very well.
“Goodnight, Danise,” I whispered.
She departed, leaving her tea on the table.
——————
The Churchill was due to have its network of EPS regulators replaced, a maintenance procedure you don’t postpone unless you have to. That meant at least a week, maybe two, docked in a maintenance bay at Starbase 514.
I gathered the crew in the lounge and said my goodbyes, and expressed how much their hard work and diligence had meant to me. Many cried. A distasteful affair for a Vulcan, but necessary.
Lieutenant C’Mal presented me with an intricate necklace she had designed to represent the concept of Infinite Diversity. Her large feline eyes turned glassy when I told her I would wear it proudly.
Commander Simonson gave me a bright orange data rod (“to match your hair,” she said). It contained a copy of her entire collection of Soul music. She said she didn’t expect me to listen to the entire catalog. Rather it was more something to remember her by.
I gathered my few belongings and moved off-ship to the apartment that Starfleet had provided for me. Starbase 514 is not even near a sun, so I discovered that my two small rooms could be quite dreary and dark. I altered the built-in sun panels to the frequency of Vulcan’s star, but I’m not sure I felt any benefit.
Although I retained the rank of Captain, there was no doubt I had been demoted. My entire staff of five (not including me) were officially termed a technical maintenance unit, and were non-officers. My posting did not even make sense, as my Academy degree was in social science, despite a few programming certifications I had earned on my own. I resolved to learn about subspace network routers on the job.
The most senior member of the staff was a strangely bitter and inflexible human woman named Madge Tilden. Any suggestion I made to improve the efficiency of the operation was met with, “It’s never been done that way. There is no point starting now.” Soon I stopped suggesting and started doing. Her response became: “You don’t think it’s going to stay that way? How long do you think that will last?” I then began issuing orders in writing and requiring mandatory progress reports.
Four days into the job, I called Tilden into my office and demanded to know the reason for her resistance. She informed me that it was because I did not belong there. I was not interested in what she meant; I had heard enough. I reassigned her to the most introductory job in the unit, and told her to sort, test, and catalog every repair part we possessed.
The actual subspace relay, a large, unmanned structure, was several light-minutes away. Physical repairs were accomplished by sending the staff technicians on a shuttle to the relay, something that occurred my first week on the job, when a block of cache memory became unreliable.
Sitting at my panel in my office, I entered the commands and passcodes that shut down the fifth quadrant of the relay. (Me: Why do we not call then sextants instead of quadrants, since there are six of them in a subspace relay? Tindal: ???) The running processes slowly wound down, and once the capacitive energy was drained, the technicians replaced the physical block of memory. Older repair logs listed much shorter times for the processes to wind down, and I decided to check for inefficiencies.