Work Text:
“Have you checked the secondary power regulator?”
“Yes, I have,” Michael grumbled between clenched teeth. “It’s reading a steady 4.53, just as expected.”
“And the intake valve,” Saru went on as if she hadn’t even spoken. “The manual recommends testing it with a dye solution before use.”
“It’s sealed, Saru.”
Her tone clearly didn’t sit well with her fellow officer.
“Safety precautions are important, Lieutenant Burnham,” Saru lectured, reminding her of the worst of her instructors at the Academy. “Why, if you miss one step, it could cause a chain reaction and destabilize the machine, leading to damage to the samples or even injury to yourself.”
He hadn’t let up in this line of questioning once since she’d started the assignment. Challenging her every action as if she hadn’t had the basics of research and lab equipment drilled into her long ago as a child on Vulcan. Younger than he’d been when he’d first touched advanced scanners and scopes. If he wanted to be helpful, he should do it himself. Not pester her with paranoid checking and double-checking. This was probably why he hadn’t been promoted yet, despite his greater experience and longer service.
Why the Captain had decided they needed to work on this together, she didn’t know. It seemed completely illogical. It would be far more efficient to assign them to completely separate tasks. Saru’s caution was only going to slow her down, and if he kept interfering with her work, he was never going to get any of his own done.
If only she could prove to Georgiou that she was capable of working alone. Then perhaps she could impress her Captain with projects that weren’t slowed by anyone’s interference. If only he would shut up and let her work instead of doubting her every move.
She turned around, stared at Saru, and slowly smiled. “You know, I think you’re right. This equipment is very dangerous. We should be taking all necessary precautions.”
“I am- glad to hear you agree,” he said, uncertainty making the words sharper than usual. “Now if you’ll consider the manual...”
“You should pay attention to your own assignment.” She pointed to the equipment on his table. “That’s a multi-spectrum reconstructive scanner. If its emitters aren’t aligned properly, it might leak radiation that could cause health problems or introduce faults into ship’s systems.” Which was incredibly unlikely, and they both knew it, but she needed to make her point.
“I have adhered to regulations in my work, yes,” Saru insisted, even more uncertainly now.
“I read a report of a case last month where a similar device suffered a fault in its beam focusing processes. The emitter exploded and the force drove a piece of shrapnel into a lab assistant’s heart.” She felt a small thrill of triumph at the unease that passed over Saru’s face. “Maybe if you stop distracting me from my work, you can attend to your own and ensure the beam regulator stays within safe parameters.”
“Well, I-” He lifted a hand, put it down again, and turned back to his own work.
Finally, quiet. Michael activated the scope. It hummed to life. Data flowed onto the screen. And despite Saru’s fussing, nothing else happened. Michael rolled her eyes and got to work.
Michael worked through processing two of the samples, finding nothing notable. She had fifty-four of these to process and she was determined to finish it before the end of the shift. If Saru wanted to waste the whole shift with checks, he could, but he wasn’t going to get in the way of her productivity. Or her positive work reviews.
But it was unnerving for him to be so absolutely silent. She told herself it was illogical to be distracted by a lack of distractions.
She risked a glance at Saru. He was still at his console, scanning through the readings, but one hand was rubbing anxiously at his neck.
She refused to feel bad about it. Or tried to. Something itched at her every time she looked at him. Illogical. Unnecessary. She’d done what was best for them both.
At least he was quiet now. Which meant that soon enough they’d be done with this assignment, and she could report the results to the Captain, and not have to think about it anymore.
Space travel was dangerous. Saru knew that, had accepted that long ago. He was not willing to abandon this life in exchange for any amount of safety.
He knew Burnham had most likely invented the lurid story she had told him. She wanted to unsettle him. Enjoyed it, even. He couldn’t imagine how.
But that didn’t make the gruesome outcomes she’d described any less vivid in his mind. And it didn’t make him any less focused on looking out for danger, listening for the first spark of trouble.
But it was enough to unleash a flood of thoughts he’d been holding back all day. How the coolant lines in the bulkheads could rupture, condemning anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity to painful injury if not worse. Or how the experimental biofilters on the transporter might fail to recognize pathogens contained within a sample, and they’d spread to infect the entire ship. Or… but it was no use.
He had work to complete. He wouldn’t let doubt get in the way of that.
Michael fed another sample into the machine. It chirped unhappily at her and refused to give a result. She frowned and ran a simple diagnostic, which reported that the resonance medium had fallen below usable temperatures again. She tapped the controls to heat it up again, hoping none of the other readings had been compromised.
She barely had a chance to cry out in indignation when Saru grabbed her arm and dragged her to the floor. Half a moment later, the machine sparked, and then the specimen chamber burst apart in a ferocious electrical crackling and a spray of superheated fluid.
Smoke rose up, and a terrible acrid smell that burned her nose and made her cough.
“Computer, cut power to Science Lab C-3, table 2,” Michael ordered, voice grating in her throat.
The machine powered down with a painfully sharp whine, leaving no sound but her own breath. Saru rose and offered her a hand. Against her better judgment, she took it. She expected him to say something stern, but he didn’t, only, “Are you hurt?”
She wasn’t. Because of him. Michael shook her head. “How did you-”
“The sound changed as it overloaded. I doubt a human could have heard the difference.”
She wondered how many of a starship’s machines made sounds he could hear but most species couldn’t. But she knew better than to ask now.
She studied the wreck left behind on the counter. If she’d still been standing in front of it when it malfunctioned, it wouldn’t have killed her, but she didn’t want to think about the burns that it would have left on her face and hands.
Michael risked a glance at Saru, and then looked away again. “Thank you.”
He studied her, and she itched guiltily under his eyes in a way she hadn’t in a long time.
“I am well aware that I am considered to be difficult to work with,” he said after a moment. Michael considered that the same could be said of herself. “But the safety of my fellow officers is not something I am willing to compromise on. Especially in a situation like this one, where a little caution poses no risk to an active mission.”
She straightened and set her shoulders, and clasped her hands behind her back. “I must apologize,” she said, calling on all her Vulcan training. “I have not treated you with the respect befitting a fellow officer.”
It wouldn't be enough, but it was the only thing she knew how to offer.
He sighed. “I do not mind a little… heated debate at times. But I require a certain degree of understanding. I don’t enjoy speaking of what sets me apart from most others.”
And what had once made him part of others, one of many, on his faraway homeworld. Michael had no right to challenge that, not when she too had once been an alien on an unfamiliar planet.
When she still felt that way sometimes.
“Let’s clean this up,” she said, because it meant she didn’t have to keep looking at him, and because it was probably the only useful thing she could do now.
By the time they’d scrubbed up the last of the residue and gotten all the fragments into the recycler, their shift was over, and a group of ensigns was waiting to use the lab. Saru warned them off - after one unexpected issue, the rest of the equipment couldn’t be trusted until they figured out the cause. Michael considered the logic of offering to assist, but then a new assignment came in on her padd, and Saru shooed her off to take care of it, and that was the last she saw of him that day.
She’d thought it was done with, that the lingering itch in her mind was her own to deal with, when Saru approached her the next day.
“The issue with your molecular resonance filter,” he said, holding out a padd. “It seems that the material of the chamber itself had weakened while the seals remained intact. It would not have shown up on a standard diagnostic and none of the existing safety precautions would have prevented it. I will be conducting tests on the rest of our equipment to ensure the same flaw isn’t present in any other places.”
Michael nodded. “I can assist you.” She didn’t need to check the data to trust that he was correct.
“That will not be necessary.”
“The Captain assigned us both to complete this project. That includes any unforeseen work that arises as a result of it.”
He sighed. “I will be in Science Lab 3,” he said, and walked away, arms swaying behind him.
Michael stared after him, trying to decipher his words. Was that an invitation, or was that simply him giving in to her insistence when he’d prefer to be left alone? She couldn’t tell. And after the other day, she couldn’t ask.
But she could put her skills to use. And it was better to make a decision and follow it through than to wait around half-heartedly, accomplishing nothing.
She arrived at Science Lab 3 two minutes later, prepared to do any work she needed to. Saru didn’t say anything, but he transferred the relevant settings to her tricorder, along with the file he was using to track the results.
She got to work without a word. She was going to prove to him that she knew how to do this just as well as he did. After a few scans, she at least had to admit that his caution hadn’t been entirely misplaced.
“I am reading microfractures in the secondary chamber of instrument 85-B,” Michael reported. “The rest of the structure is sound. I will replicate a replacement chamber and install it.”
“Replicate two of them, please,” Saru requested. “Instrument 74-B has suffered the same fate.”
“Understood.” At this rate, they’d probably have to check the other labs too, just to be safe. But that would take hours or days, and mean a huge backlog of assignments.
“There is an easier way to do this,” Michael said, and before Saru could interject his doubts, she added, “with no loss of accuracy.” He nodded at her to continue. “If we filled the scope chambers with a diffusion of triphosphate-4 and exposed them to an alternating beta wave, it should illuminate any microfractures or irregularities without the need for individual scans. It would speed up our work by 82%.”
Saru considered the idea. “I agree. A very useful suggestion. How did you come about it?”
She braced herself against the memories. “At the Vulcan Learning Center, we were expected to maintain our own equipment. Any missed flaws were severely punished.” And her work was held to Vulcan standards, with no concession made for her human inadequacies.
“A fair system,” Saru said. “It’s good to learn the hows and whys of the tools one uses.”
That wasn’t why she had learned it. “Sometimes the other students would… introduce faults to test my abilities.”
“Your classmates would sabotage your equipment?” Saru sounded horrified. The one time she’d counted on his subtlety, he had to cut right through to the truth. She shouldn’t have said anything. She didn’t need pity.
Michael shrugged. “They wouldn’t describe it like that, and my teachers never would either. They made sure I could never prove it.”
“Even so, it was wrong,” Saru insisted. “You could have been badly hurt. Deeply illogical, I would say.”
The school administrators hadn’t seen it that way. The only illogical one, according to them, had been her, for protesting imagined injustices instead of simply doing her work. “Yeah. But it taught me a lot.”
She looked away from his intense gaze and busied herself with programming the emitters to produce the correct wave.
Saru made a clicking sound, but didn’t say anything more.
Three hours later, they had finished the scans, revealing twelve damaged devices out of the two hundred aboard. Most had been in proximity to Michael’s and might have been destabilized by the same thing, but the rest had been in other parts of the ship.
“Which indicates this is a larger problem than we thought,” Saru said.
Michael nodded. “I’ll talk to the lab teams, see if they’ve changed any of their processes recently.”
“I will file a report with Starfleet warning them of the issue. If this is a problem with the construction of the scopes themselves, other ships need to be aware. And I will include your method for testing for invisible damage.”
“Good.” She sent him the last of her files, and headed to her next assignment.
Usually it wasn’t difficult to leave one task behind and move onto the next. But even after they’d made peace, their interaction still lingered in her thoughts. Was this the first time they’d completed a project together without making it into some sort of subtle competition? It was a strange feeling. But in a way it was a relief. Not needing to be on guard for his next double-edged comment, not racing to claim the next praise-worthy discovery. Yes, she enjoyed the competition. But sometimes it made the work so much more tiring than it needed to be.
If they could keep working like this… But it didn’t really matter, Michael reminded herself. She had her goals, and she still wasn’t going to let him get in the way. And she knew he wasn’t going to stop criticizing her and doubting her in pursuit of his own success.
Though, she had to admit that he hadn’t today. Maybe it would be worth taking his concerns a little more seriously, however illogical most of them seemed to be. His senses had served them well yesterday.
They knew each other’s weaknesses far too deeply. But if they could find a way to continue to work together without getting in each other’s way, it could serve both their goals. And if anything could impress the Captain, that certainly would.