It took time to map the contours of an exotic stellar phenomenon or open diplomatic relations with a species that had no understanding of the concept of “I.” It took time and concentration and coordinated effort. Coordination takes unity, and unity takes-well, until this duty she thought she knew what unity meant. Life on Titanhad blown all her notions on that score out the airlock. Lately, when Titanwas performing its function, she found herself experiencing an increasing sense of dread as she anticipated the next catastrophic problem coming from within rather than without. There were simply too many variables, too many potential trouble spots for her to come up with contingencies for everything. The longer Titanwent in the quiet, the more anxious she became.

  Her nerves had, once again, taken their toll on her hair. When she was too long in stir, she dyed. When she was too long waiting for the second shoe to drop, she cut. Now she was both, so…

   It’s too red, she thought, catching her reflection in the polished surface of the room divider. It looks like Risan shimmer ink.

  The length was okay. She always enjoyed a severe cut, but, paired with the red in her uniform, well, too muchwas the simplest way to put it. As soon as she had an hour free, she’d go back to some version of blond.

  Vale had deliberately avoided visiting the counselors’ suites since beginning duty on Titan. Not only did she not enjoy people poking around in her psyche, telepathically or otherwise, she simply preferred Deanna Troi in her capacity as the ship’s diplomatic officer. There was a clear delineation between their duties then, less potential for boundary crossing.

  The command structure was in place for a reason, and those wrinkles that muddied it, say a senior officer being married to the captain, as was the case with Troi and Captain Riker-well, muddywas definitely the word for it.

  Vale’s duties as XO and Troi’s in her other capacity as senior counselor created an automatic-and not always comfortable-overlap. Overlap meant confusion. Confusion meant a drop in efficiency, something a ship with a crew as diverse as Titan’s could ill afford.

  Lives depended, quite literally, on both interspecies and interdepartmental harmony. It was another reason the Sudden Alien Attack scenario was increasingly attractive. Something like that cleared the normal frictions away in favor of duty. Without that Other to offer a binding physical threat? Well.

  If nothing else, the friction proved to her what she had long suspected: no matter the planet of origin, people were essentially the same. Too bad it wasn’t a guarantee of peaceful coexistence.

  A certain amount of chronic discord was inevitable on long-term space explorations, even among members of the same species. You just couldn’t coop up that many people that long in what was essentially a giant metal can and not get some temper spikes. Generally, this sort of thing was self-regulating, only occasionally requiring intercession by counselors-and, once in a while, security.

  The carnivores and the herbivores, for example, had managed to ease into something like a polite truce, the former keeping the blood spray at mealtimes to a minimum and the latter respecting the effort enough not to raise a fuss over the occasional stray droplet. Progress.

  Some of the other frictions, however, still required a degree of management.

   No, you can’t remove this bulkhead, Chaka. I’m sorry the accommodations are so cramped. We’ll work something out for you.

   Yes, Lieutenant Keyexisi, I know Ensign Lavena’s quarters are still bleeding heat from yours, but we’re only talking about a few decimals of a degree. You can’t possibly feel the diff-

   He has apologized, Ensign Mecatus. Put him down. You are not entitled to a quart of his lifeblood.

  It was like being pecked to death by ducks (another of Mother Vale’s maxims). And most irritating of all, perhaps, were the troubles caused by Titan’s chief engineer: the mounting tension between him and the ship’s senior science officer, the difficulties the engineer’s…natural hedonism was causing among not a few of the crew’s female complement, and, of course, the fact that his air of complete indifference to all of it made Vale’s own pressure spike. Routinely pissing off your shipmates might make for a bumpy tour of duty. Adding stress to your XO’s day? That could get ugly.

  Dr. Xin Ra-Havreii was a genius, yes, but that didn’t count for much in stopping someone from punching him in the face. Vale had seen plenty of smart guys pounded senseless by lesser intellects who happened to be in possession of a pool cue. Jaza wasn’t quite there yet, but if Ra-Havreii kept pushing him…

  And so, here she was, waiting to meet with Counselor Troi so they could work out a tandem approach to obviating some of the more persistent issues that had sprung up among the crew.

  Only Troi had been off her game too, hadn’t she? She and, by extension, her staff were evidently leaving enough cracks in Titan’s social cement that crewmen were actually accosting Vale in the corridors to vent their grievances. Being turned into the ship’s walking complaint department had definitely breached the perimeter of her personal neutral zone.

  What the hell was Troi doing back there? She had to know Vale’s to-do list had stretched to the point where it could choke a pig. Troi’s own had to be competitively long. They’d agreed to get this out of the way, first thing, so as not to clutter up the day with missing each other and having to waste time-time in which the frictions would only grow-with serial rescheduling.

  “First will be best,” Troi had said, and Vale had agreed. It was something her mother had instilled in her along with the other little buds of wisdom.

   Clear the scrap away early, so it’s easier to see what’s in front of you.

  At this rate, First was in danger of shoving Second to Third and Third to Sixty-Seventh, and that couldn’t happen if Vale hoped to remain sane. Of course, another ten minutes cooling her heels in this damnable vestibule might push her over the brink before Troi got the chance.

  She’d never enjoyed waiting. Even when she was an officer in the planet Izar’s security force the worst part of the job had always been the stakeouts-sitting meters away from some criminal’s den on the off chance that they might come or go during the hours you were watching. You watched the clock during those times. You waited, expectant, for something previously unconsidered to occur that would shatter your whole program.

  Sometimes it came and you were sort of relieved to have been right-something bad was about to happen. Sometimes it didn’t and you were thrilled to be wrong and for things to run as they should. In either case it was the waiting that killed. In joining Starfleet she’d hoped to put that particular torment behind her.

   But, here I am again, she thought, taking in the room for the seventy-fifth time. If there’s a hell, you can bet it’s a place like this.

  The vestibule was a lot like Troi herself-understated, well put together, professional in appearance but with occasional flourishes. In addition to the walls’ muted colors, pale greens and yellows mostly, she’d hung small tapestries from various worlds. A few leafy micro vines were potted here and about, their branches extending across the ceiling in places and subtly undercutting the sense of being indoors. There was a hint of some fragrance in the air as well-traces of some exotic spice? Maybe cherasroot.

  In any case the whole place was obviously set up to put occupants at their ease, which, of course, made Vale edgy. She was just about to loudly remind Troi of their scheduled meeting when the door to the counselor’s office sighed open and a large scaly figure emerged.