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“Captain,” Saru says, standing at Georgiou’s desk and hoping he’s making the right choice. “I believe I will be able to tolerate the conditions around the crashed ship.”
Captain Georgiou raises an eyebrow and looks at him over a padd. “Volunteering, Mr. Saru? This is a most unusual occurrence. I might start to wonder if you’ve been replaced by an imposter.”
He adjusts his uniform. “I assure you I have not, Captain. And it would be a poor imposter who acted unlike I do.”
Georgiou sets her padd on the desk and sits up to study him with her full attention. It is a sensation he’s never quite gotten used to.
“Then explain this to me,” she orders. “There is a device in the wreckage that creates fear. You, my friend, are particularly sensitive to that state of being. Why, then, would you offer to subject yourself to it?”
Saru clicks uncertainly, measuring his words. “That analysis is not precisely correct, Captain. According to my scans, the field generated by the device triggers an intense stress response in living beings. But as it poses no physical threat to wellbeing, I believe I will be able to withstand it.” Or so he hopes. “Kelpiens are better equipped to handle stress than many other species. You must agree that this would be preferable to subjecting any of the human crewmembers to the same.”
Georgiou considers, her dark eyes watching him, studying him, judging him. “And you are certain of this? The device will not pose a problem?”
He spreads his hands. “I am certain. It is, I believe you would say, ‘all bark and no bite.’”
Georgiou laughs. “Ha! Very well. You have yourself a mission, Lieutenant. Perform it well.”
Saru has only a moment to savor the pride of having pleased her, and then her next words bring that crashing down.
“I will be sending Commander Burnham to join you.”
Saru clicks in dismay. “Captain, I would not recommend that.”
Burnham is… difficult, to say the least. The two of them have formed a grudging tolerance over the years, but it is not quite a friendship. He does not relish the idea of working alongside her under the additional pressure the device will no doubt place on them.
Georgiou is firm. “That is my decision, Mr. Saru, and it will stand. Perhaps the experience will serve to provide Michael with some... perspective.”
He has no choice but to accept.
They beam down to a dusty clearing some ways away from the target. It’s the closest they can manage with the interference the wreckage is kicking off. The entire area is littered with ruins, low rings of tan stone marked here and there by pillars, some toppled and some still standing, the tallest of which stretch almost four meters high.
Saru wonders if the crashed ship was conducting a survey mission when it went down. Sadly, there were no life signs when the Shenzhou arrived. Perhaps the wreckage will hold some clues. The ship isn’t from the Federation or any known planet, and according to their scans the wreckage is at least a few weeks old. If any of the tech is still intact, Shenzhou’s engineering and science teams might be able to extract useful data from it. This may well lead them into a First Contact situation if they can trace the craft’s origins.
Saru has prepared himself for many possibilities.
Beside him, Burnham’s expression is tight and unreadable. The field is working its effect on her, but she is resisting it admirably.
“Shall we proceed?” Saru asks, with an elegant shrug.
“If you think you’re ready for it,” she says, and strides off towards the ship.
Saru follows cautiously. He reviews their surroundings, tricorder beeping. He’s already programmed it to track the strength of the field without throwing unnecessary alerts. So far, it’s within tolerable levels. To his tremendous relief, his predictions were correct. The device’s effect on Kelpien physiology is, paradoxically, much less pronounced than its effect on others.
Which doesn’t mean it’s comfortable, not at all. Unease prickles at his neck and along his spine, his muscles tense, ready to run. But it’s nothing he’s not familiar with, nothing he doesn’t feel on a daily basis. His ganglia itch terribly, but it’s a purely physical thing, like the infection he once had as a child. He does not sense ill intent, and he does not sense approaching death. Only waves of tension radiating out from the crashed ship.
The two of them pick their way through the ruins. With every step, the tension grows, but Saru’s hypothesis holds. Even so, he will be greatly relieved when they can disable the field.
The ruins are fascinating. He nudges at a piece of cracked stone with a hoof.
A few centuries ago, before an asteroid impact wiped out all higher life, there was a documented pre-warp civilization on the planet. But they were clustered in the forests and plains of the eastern hemisphere, not the deserts. Someone else lived here once, the forest-dwellers’ millennia-ago ancestors or cousins, a civilization that lived and died and left little behind but these stones, now worn to nearly nothing by the wind and the sand.
Burnham, the xenoanthropologist, would know far better than he what these ruins might have been when they stood tall and alive.
He turns to ask for her theories, only to find that Burnham has fallen behind. She’s a few steps away, leaning heavily against a fractured pillar and struggling for breath.
All thoughts of ancient people fall away as he goes to her side.
“Commander-“
“Shut up,” she growls, eyes screwed shut.
She’s shivering, sweat drying cold on her smooth skin.
Saru’s vision encompasses a wider spectrum than most Federation species; it has never been strange to him to see heat as an aspect of light. He knows some people might find it invasive that he can read the changes in temperature great emotion brings as easily as they might read a smile or a scowl on their flexible faces, but he cannot help it.
He sees her temperature fluctuate just before she falls.
Michael crumples to the dust of the unnamed planet, her back pressed against a fragment of ancient stone wall.
The crushing feeling in her chest makes her feel like she’s back in that tiny closet again, listening to the Klingons roar and laugh over the bodies of her parents. She needs to run, but she can’t move, can barely think.
Everything is wrong, everything is falling apart, and it’s going to tear her into pieces and she’s helpless to stop it.
A hand on her shoulder brings her back to the world for a brief moment, enough for her to open her eyes.
Saru crouches beside her, face infuriatingly gentle.
“Breathe,” he says, as if it’s that easy. “We are safe. Nothing has changed.” He holds out the tricorder with its little green indicator lights blinking an all-clear, but she hardly cares.
“Why aren’t you affected?” she snaps at him as much as her knotted throat will allow. This isn’t fair. He’s the one who’s afraid of everything. She’s faced down so many dangers, received awards for courage, and now she’s rendered a trembling mess by an inanimate object? While he just sits there and watches her with all that concern in his eyes?
“I am affected,” he admits, and she knows he’s telling the truth, damn him. “It is difficult to bear. But there is no true threat. You must believe that.”
Fear without a threat is something he bears every day. But Michael can’t tolerate an enemy she cannot see, cannot fight.
“We must disable the device,” Saru says, stating the obvious. “I could go ahead-“
“No.” She drags herself to her feet. Saru helps her up, because of course he does, and she can’t bring herself to shove him away.
Her skull feels ready to burst with the strain and her heart will not calm no matter what meditative proverbs she recites in her head. Sarek would be deeply disappointed. But now she has a target, and that is enough to let her move.
A few steps later, a few steps that feel like forever, and they’re close enough to see the shape of the wreckage through the dust.
“There.” Saru points towards a silvery shape near what must have been the ship’s tail. “I believe that is the-“
Michael aims her phaser and fires, ignoring Saru’s flinch at the sudden motion. The device goes up in a shower of sparks, and finally, finally, the terror eases.
Scientifically, she knows one moment is no longer or shorter than any other, but the six and and a half seconds she wastes catching her breath and waiting for her pounding heart to slow feel very long indeed. She doesn’t look at Saru.
She pulls out her communicator.
“Commander Burnham to Shenzhou, we have disabled the device.”
Ensign Connor’s voice crackles over the communicator. “Acknowledged. Do you require transport?”
“Not yet. We are going to finish our investigation first.”
“Understood. Shenzhou out.”
Michael snaps the communicator closed and glares at Saru, who does not deserve it.
With the device destroyed, Saru’s fear-instinct retreats to the back of his mind, not quite dormant, but not nearly as overwhelming as before. His worry, however, remains.
He looks to Burnham.
His first instinct is to stay close in case she falls again, but he knows she would resent that. So he remains three respectful steps away, waiting for her orders.
“Well?” she demands. “Let’s get a better look at this thing.”
He nods and follows.
Fear is not a cause for shame, he wants to say, as his sister always said to him. Had the device been designed differently, I would have been useless to you, he could say.
He opens his mouth. “Are you all right, Commander?” he asks instead of either of those things.
“I’m fine,” she says, curtly. “Follow me, Lieutenant. We have work to do.”
She marches up to the wreckage and starts scanning it.
When he joins her, she tenses, and without looking at him, says, “I’m sure you’ll delight in putting this in your log.” The words are sharp, cutting. “You’ve been waiting for it, haven’t you, Saru? Seeing the tables turned?”
A confused click escapes his throat, and he nearly misses a step. Yes, it’s true that they rarely agree on anything and he often finds her manner abrasive and aggressive, but does she truly believe he enjoyed witnessing her distress? Even the memory of her fear makes his heart ache.
They are not quite friends, but over the years he has come to trust that they cared for each other. What has he done to make her think he would regard her pain with anything other than concern?
“No,” he says, to all her assumptions, spoken and not. “I… believe we can omit that detail without compromising the report.”
She makes a strange, surprised noise, as if she’s trying and failing to laugh. “Bending the rules, Saru? Has this device affected you in ways I have not noticed?”
There’s her formal Vulcan dignity again, the mask back in place. And that makes her the second person to tell him he’s behaving strangely today. Is it truly so odd of him to want to assist his crewmates? He will have to think on that.
But at least the opening lets them slip back into a familiar pattern.
“Perhaps it has only affected your limited human perceptions,” he says, drawing a comfortable distance between them. “I have always kept my reports relevant.” These little barbs mark out a well-trodden path that they can walk without encroaching on more personal ground.
“Oh, so I’m limited now?” Michael returns, a smile pulling at her lips. “Might I remind you I have at least 300 hours more away mission experience than you do?”
“And most of that spent standing around at diplomatic occasions enjoying the refreshments, I’m sure,” Saru says mildly.
Michael raises an eyebrow. “The First Contact specialist, dismissing the importance of diplomatic pleasantries? You surprise me, Saru.”
He replies with something else bland and needling, and just like that, things are almost normal between them. Doubts still linger in Saru’s mind, but he knows this banter well enough for it to be almost comfortable.
The rest of the mission is uneventful. Most of the ship’s databases are corrupted beyond use, and the little they can get gives them no clues as to the ship’s origin or intent. They scan the body of the deceased captain, revealing little, and decide not to remove it from its resting place.
“I believe the device was not meant as a deterrent or a weapon, but as a distress beacon,” Saru theorizes. He gestures towards a set of dusty controls. “These transponders are set to similar frequencies. The device likely activated upon impact.”
Michael nods. “But there was nobody near enough to respond to it, so it simply continued transmitting.”
Saru looks to the horizon, feeling a stab of grief for this alien explorer who died alone and unseen.
“A succinct analysis,” is all he says.
“Captain,” Michael says, once all the reports have been filed and the Shenzhou is on the way to her next assignment. “I wish to ask you to explain your logic in assigning us to this mission.”
Georgiou shakes her head. “Do I really have to spell it out for you, Number One?”
Michael holds back a sigh. “Philippa. Please.”
The look she receives in reply tells her she’s failed some unspoken test. “You and Saru have a lot of potential together,” Georgiou explains. “Someday, you may be a great command team. But you waste your energy bickering like children. You do not appreciate each other's skills, or the places in which you might bolster each other's weaknesses.”
A pause, just long enough to make Michael uncomfortable.
Georgiou continues. “I thought it might be useful to you to experience a taste of what our Saru feels on a daily basis.”
Michael nods. She wonders if she’ll be as quick to tease him, now.
“And you wanted Saru to experience being the one on sturdier emotional footing,” she finishes.
“Oh, now, is that what happened?” Philippa asks, with a glance towards the laconic and impartial reports on her desk. Her tone says she already knows. How has she guessed? Saru would not have told, not after he promised her privacy. She trusts him enough for that.
She wonders if he knows.
She wants to blame the device, the alien-inflicted stress, for how she treated him today, but she knows that’s not true.
“I understand,” she says, and takes her leave. “Thank you, Captain.”
Philippa’s eyes follow her from the room.
On the Bridge, she sees Saru at his station, reviewing scans of the system where they found the signal. She’s not sorry to leave it behind, and she doubts he is either.
“Lieutenant Saru.”
He turns. “Commander?”
She stands stiffly before him, drawing on all her Vulcan training. “I wanted to thank you for your assistance on the mission today. Due to your contributions, we completed it efficiently and safely.”
“I am pleased to have been of use,” he says, something wry in the words. “Your performance, as always, was unimpeachable.”
“It was a valuable experience,” she agrees, willing him to understand.
Something in his eyes says he does.