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Caleb didn’t make it halfway through the summer.
Before he would have considered the lack of Federation security a weakness, but now he knew it as a choice. If someone was desperate enough to hijack a replicator, or a transporter beam, or fudge the codes to secure a few nights lodging or a ship berth… maybe it was best to let them, to allow the down and out that small agency in their own lives.
Once again, the Federation had the resources and the ability to build the panopticon but it chose otherwise.
Which was lucky for Caleb. He couldn’t say which one of his mom’s comments was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but there was a point where his back was well and firmly broken. It was easy enough to tell her he was heading out to pick up dinner from one of the many vendors that ringed the Utopia Planitia shipyards and then just … not … come back.
Replicated mechanics overalls became a forged work order on a medical freighter headed for Tycho City. Tycho City to Tyco Base, the thrice-hourly shuttle down to Earth, and then his wings were all he needed to transport back to the Academy.
The Athena was stiller than it had been during the All-Worlds break when he appeared in the Sato Atrium.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Commander Reno,” Caleb replied, standing at attention.
“Don’t Commander Reno me, you’re supposed to be off on some interstellar tour with your mother.”
“About that—“
“The only thing I need to know is who to notify that you’re here.”
He felt his face falling. Why couldn’t he have a week with no-one bothering him to sort this out?
“Cadet. Who am I calling?” Commander Reno demanded.
“The Chancellor.”
It was hard to believe that Nahla wasn’t in the office by the way her holo was tearing into Mir. Under other circumstances she’d have brought the popcorn, but today Jett felt sorry for the kid.
“Your mother has been on me for the last four days, Caleb! Days! We put out a missing person alert for you.”
“I just couldn’t stay.”
“Why?”
Jett watched Caleb stiffen at the question.
“Why, cadet,”Nahla demanded.
“We went to Bajor. Arts and culture and all of that. Saw a concert in Tozhat at the public gardens and there was a class of kids from Little Blooms in the audience with us. They were as small as I would have been. Every one of them had simple clothes, but clothes that fit. They had socks and boots without patches, neatly trimmed hair—“
Mir looked like he was about to shake apart. Jett didn’t see what was so important about a class of kids, but it was clear Nahla did.
“At ease, Caleb,” Nahla soothed him.
Mir shifted a bit, and then went to sit on the green tiled benches and stare into the Chancellor's dark fireplace before he spoke again.
“Mom didn’t even see them,” his voice was duller now, the anger that had burned hot and bright now banked, “but I couldn’t see anything else. There was one teacher who carried out the little girl that started crying at the drums, other teachers pretended to sneak the kids candies as a reward for lining up, and these two brothers that kept making faces at each other instead of listening. The only thing that happened to them was they got their hair ruffled.”
“You saw them, and knew that could have been you,” Nahla said with a terrible certainty.
“It could have been me,” Mir said, voice catching, “it could have been me if I’d just trusted you.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“But she could have! You know what she told me; you know what I did! And it was all so pointless. Mom’s spent the last sixteen years blaming you for keeping us apart, when it was her all along.”
“I cancel the alert and let her know you’re safe, but you’re going to need to send her a message. Reno, find the kid a place to stay.”
“Will-do chancellor.”
“Caleb, I’m glad that when you ran, you ran back to Starfleet," Nahla said before her holo vanished.
It had been a long day and Jett didn’t have a brain cell to spare, so she decided to put the kid up with them. She sent a message to Lura to replicate a third plate of dinner and beamed them home.
“I am changing. You are recording a message to your mother and then we are eating.”
“Don’t I get to change?”
“Utopia Planitia mechanic’s overalls go with everything.” Thank the heavens her mouth was there with the quip even with her brain firmly offline.
In their bedroom Jett hung up her bright yellow jacket and pulled off her boots. She didn’t see anything that needed cleaning or repair. (After the Hiawatha went down, Jett had gotten into the habit of checking her gear every time she took it off. As traumatic responses went, Jett could live with it.) She put on a clean t-shirt, one that really set off her arms, and a pair of baggy cargo pants that had at least three times as much fabric as the uniform trousers they replaced.
Jett returned to find that things had not gone well in her absence.
Mir was standing, not quite at attention, with the posture of a man who thought he was going to be murdered by a Klingon. Lura was glaring at him from their small table where three meals were waiting.
“What happened?”
“No message, no food.”
Jett had heard that Mir failed to contact his girlfriend for months, admittedly while she was in a coma, so it wasn’t surprising that the kid refused to call his mom. (Mir was great when action was called for, but communication? Not so much.)
“All you have to do is let her know you’re alive and safe. Where you are is a nice addition.”
“I don’t need to explain why?”
“I think you’re at 30% of why. Might be best to wait on that. Comm is about two meters to your left.”
Mir walked over to the screen while Jett sat down next to Lura and reached out to squeeze her hand. She leaned in and whispered, “Sorry kitten, the Chancellor told me to find him a place to stay and my mind short circuited. We can work it out in the morning.”
“Eight hundred hours, no later,” Lura hissed back. What a softie.
It sounded like the kid was trying to type out a message—
“Your mom is going to want proof of life, Mir. So turn on the visual and send her one.”
Dinner was Boudin noir, sautéed apples, and two green salads for the humans, which was a positively tame choice of food at chez Thok. The replicator recipe had a near perfect fried crust on the sausage and a velvety-smooth interior that screamed ‘luxury’ rather than ‘too lazy to program texture into this meal.’ Jett chewed quietly and eavesdropped shamelessly.
“Mom. I’m fine. I went back to Starfleet… I know you weren’t expecting me to leave, but I couldn’t stay. It’s just, well, I don’t know if when you told me not to trust them you meant for me to run, but I was listening to you when I did. And it’s not a good place out there for a kid. It’s not a good place out there for you, and you’re an adult. And you can blame Starfleet and the Chancellor all you want, I did for a long time, but the reason we didn’t see each other until Ukeck was because I ran. Because I listened to you and I ran. I love you mom, but the Federation didn’t make me a stowaway at six. I did.”
There was the chime of a message sending, and then Mir all but collapsed into his seat and began picking at his meal.
“Computer, mute all incoming communications until eight-hundred hours,” Lura commanded.
“Communications muted.”
Caleb ate his way through the fried patties. From the heavy iron tang he guessed they were something Klingon, but Commander Reno was eating them so they were probably safe for humans. They were pretty good with the sweet wedges that he supposed were apples (they were missing both the sour and the crunch of a fresh apple and the standard replicated ‘apple’ flavor but it was the closest taste he knew.)
Neither of them expected him to talk, which was a relief, and when his plate was clear Commander Reno declared it was time for bed.
She replicated him pajamas and sent him off to change and get ready. His bed turned out to be the sofa in their living area, covered in a white sheet and a blanket he knew as “replicator pattern one.” Caleb stood awkwardly in the doorframe as she added a pillow.
“Don’t just loom there, come on in. Lura will be up at five for her morning run, but I’m more of a seven-thirty-only-if-there’s-coffee kinda person. She’s kicking you out at eight, which I guess means we’re headed back to campus together. You okay with the sofa?”
“Yeah, I’ve slept on worse.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to be okay with it.”
Fair. But he was okay with it. The commander didn’t have to make space for him in her quarters, and he appreciated it.
“I am,” Caleb said, not all that confidently, and then blurted out, “it’s kind of you to put me up. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Like I said, Lura gets up at five and we’ve got to be gone by eight. See you in the morning.”
The Commander wasn’t kidding about ‘seven-thirty only if there’s coffee.’ If it hadn’t been for the site-to-site transport Caleb didn’t think she’d have made it to the Athena.
“We should go to the Turner Wing,” he suggested.
“Why?” Reno asked, “There’s nothing there.”
“Nothing but the replicafé. I did a stint as a barista on Kevari. Once we get it powered up I can make you a genuine raktajino.”
“I stand corrected. Lead on, cadet.”
It was easier than expected to get the replicafé working. The Commander’s authorization certainly sped things along, and he had a mug in her hands before she could fall asleep in the seating area. Reno drank it down in large gulps while he pulled a second one for her and replicated himself two egg sandwiches.
She drank the second cup at normal human speed while he ate.
“Well cadet, what are we going to do with you?”
“Ocam mentioned that mom and I should visit Betazed, but she was a little too freaked out about the whole telepathy thing to take us there.”
“Judgy mind-readers,” Reno agreed.
“I’m actually kinda okay with that.”
“Really?”
“Really, Commander,” he said, “I roomed with Ocam all year and I’m dating Tarima. I’m pretty OK with having a Sadal inside my head.”
“Even the President? He was harsh.”
“He was a lot chiller than the last dad that caught me in the middle of the night with his daughter.”
The Commander laughed, “can’t say I’ve ever had a dad pleased to catch me with their daughter. So do you want to get in touch with the Sadal’s, or should we make this an official ask?”
“Official..?” Caleb stammered. It would be nice to be sure he wasn’t going to get kicked out the moment he arrived.
Time change was terrible as always, but Caleb arrived at the grounds of the First House of Betazed well before dinner. Dinner featured several dozen adults, six courses, and an intermittent gong but everyone there was scrupulous about speaking aloud to him.
At sometime during their century behind the wall, the Betazoid version of Standard had drifted. Which was surprising; Tarima and Ocam had no accent. Caleb had to focus to understand them. He kinda liked it; listening that hard kept him in the moment.
What was less surprising but still took some getting used to was the feeling of everyone he met rifling through his head. Maybe not rifling per se, but every thought he put into words felt like it had an echo. From the moment Ocam had started rooming with Caleb and Darem, he’d had an Ocam-flavored echo in his head as he fell asleep each night. Here and now the echo was symphonic, with two exceptions.
Well, two exceptions that he knew of.
Caleb had never felt Tarima, and that hadn’t bothered him. It made sense, Tarima was powerful; an outlier among her own people. And either President Emerin Sadal was phenomenally good at staying out of his head or that man was just as silent telepathically as he was in person. It was kinda creepy, but Caleb could deal with it. It helped that Emirin Sadal’s face spoke volumes. He clearly didn’t approve of Caleb. Which was chill, two-thirds of his instructors, most of the War College, and probably his own mother didn’t approve of Caleb. Caleb could live with that.
“You’re rooming with me,” was the first thing Ocam had said to Caleb when he got off the shuttle.
“You’ve got like a thousand rooms here.”
“Trust me, you do not want to be staying in a wing with Auntie.”
“I dunno, I could use the space—“
“Shut up,” Ocam interrupted, “Auntie is no joke.”
Rooming Caleb with Ocam was clearly not how guests were accommodated at the First House of Betazed: Caleb’s delicate woven wicker headboard and side-table didn’t match the room at all. Knowing that Ocam wanted Caleb there enough to risk breakable furniture was exactly the reassurance Caleb needed.
Living in the First House was more formal than Caleb expected. Like, they provided his clothes formal. Tarima and Ocam dressed to match their father, and Caleb dressed to match them. And just when Caleb thought he’d understood how the First House worked, with the dinners and forks and walks on the grounds, a mature woman wearing a catsuit that could have been sprayed on and a fascinator with a feather tall enough to hit doorframes cornered him while he was on a snack run.
“Why aren’t you seeing to your imzadi’s sexual fulfillment?”
“I’m sorry, do I know you?”
“I am—“
“Auntie!” yelled Ocam as he ran full tilt around the corner and barreled into the woman in a giant hug. “You’re back!”
Tarima, also running and a little out of breath was right behind her brother.
“She didn’t say anything inappropriate, did she?” she asked Caleb, clasping his hands too tightly.
“Not yet?” he answered, “I think? I’m assuming when she was talking about ‘my imzadi’ she meant you, but why would it would be any of her business?”
“It’s not!” Ocam yelled from where he was leading Auntie down the hall. “I’m taking Auntie into Rixx to visit the steam spas, you and your imzadi have three hours to sort it out!”
“He’s not my imzadi!” Tarima yelled back at Ocam’s retreating figure.
“So this imzadi thing, it’s mutual?” Caleb asked, with his best ‘I’m down for anything’ smile.
(He never got an answer to that. Still, she took him to the really fancy tent crossed with a giant wicker mushroom by the bend in the river and explained that it was a ‘silence pavilion’ for when you didn’t want to share your thoughts. Or you wanted to hookup without having both President Emerin Sadal and Auntie listen in.)
Caleb had never had a vacation or spent a summer with friends. It was weird not to have class, or menial labor, or just the daily scramble for food. He felt the Betazoids recoil when he thought about it, their thought-echoes turning sour in his head. Auntie and the flock of similarly aged women that followed her around spreading chaos like parrots crashing a picnic were the most openly distressed.
But in a place where no one kept secrets and no one lied (what would be the point?) whichever Betazoid he’d shocked wouldn’t ask him more about it. There were never questions about his mother or his childhood, just offers of uttaberry jam print cookies or invitations to concerts to “get his mind off of it.”
It was a shallow care, but it felt nice to have any care without the level of manipulation that accompanied both the Chancellor and his mother’s love.
Caleb supposed that this was what childhood should have been like. What he might have experienced if he hadn’t gone out that window on Pikaru. (If he hadn’t gone out the window, would he have still found his way to Starfleet? Or with every visitation, would his mother’s resentment of the Federation found a new grip in his heart?)
Betazed was a place where Ocam could break irreplaceable things. It was a place where Auntie didn’t have to reign herself in. (Although, when he’d mentioned that to Ocam, Ocam had nearly laughed himself sick and declared that Betazoid women of a certain age, “never reigned themselves in. Seriously. Didn’t our history class cover President Lwaxana Troi?”)
But the Betazed of art and leisure was only possible because of the previous century’s psionic wall and now the Federation. Most people never left the planet they were born on, never thought about with the threats or the connections among the stars.
When the youth delegation declared that they didn’t want to live behind the wall anymore they were opening their eyes to those stars, to the Federation, and to Starfleet. For those looking to the stars, Starfleet was there. It was there for diplomats and protectors, for mad engineers and those with a plain and simple wanderlust. Caleb couldn’t imagine living in one place anymore, but he could imagine living in Starfleet.
He may have imagined it a little too loudly.
At the end of the summer Caleb, Ocam, and Tarima shared a shuttle bound specifically for San Francisco with more than a dozen other Betazoids enrolling as first-year cadets.
He knew it was going to be a good year.