“Perhaps I’m only trying to distract myself. Even without serious intent, flirtation with a lovely, intelligent lady is a worthy entertainment in its own right.”

“If you say so,” she told him. “But taken to excess, or where it’s unwelcome, it can be disruptive. Lately your flirtations have been growing more frequent, and there have been one or two complaints. From Ensign Panyarachun, for example. She has to work with you every day, and she’s told you more than once that she finds your attentions distracting.”

“Ahh, but would she be so distracted by them if she weren’t intrigued? I’ve made it clear there’s no pressure on her to respond. I’m simply…expressing my admiration.”

“But she’d like to be admired for more than just her looks.”

“And she is! I find her skills to be exemplary. I wouldn’t be so intrigued with her otherwise. If I only wanted a beautiful face and body, the holodeck is at my disposal.”

“Then if you respect her mind, Doctor, you should respect her wishes as well, and keep your relationship strictly professional.”

“As you do with the captain?” At her glare, he said, “I meant no disrespect, dear Counselor—I simply have trouble determining where you think the line should be drawn. It’s a strange way of thinking to me. Where I come from, it’s considered somewhat rude notto flirt with someone of your preferred sex. And the concept of a professional relationship being asexual by definition…well, back home we feel very differently. Sex among colleagues is encouraged; it’s an excellent way to learn to respect each other’s needs and work together for mutual gain.”

“It’s different for humans like Tasanee Panyarachun. Surely you’ve been in Starfleet long enough to know that.”

“Long enough to find that the lines are more ambiguous than is generally claimed. Besides, isn’t this ship all about encouraging cultural exchange, getting past the dominance of human ways of doing things? Who’s to say my way isn’t worth trying, hmm?” he asked with an impish leer. “It seems to work well enough on the command level.”

“Maybe your way would be worth trying, ifeveryone agreed to it. But for now, just leave the ensign alone.”

“All right,” he agreed grudgingly, “but I guarantee you she’ll regret it.” He furrowed his snowy brows. “On the other hand, maybe there’s something to be said for playing hard to get. It might get her to chase me. And nobody could object to that, could they?”

He stopped at a doorway, which slid open on his approach. “Well. Here we are at my quarters. So either we can end this fascinating discussion on coworker sexual relations, or you can come in so we can explore the issue in greater depth.”

“In that case, Doctor, I’ll leave you alone with your thoughts.”

He clasped her hand in a gentlemanly manner. “Rest assured, my dear, they will be mainly of you.”

She smirked. “So long as they’re about what I said, not what I’m wearing.”

“I daresay clothing will not enter into them at all.”

Glaring at him, she extracted her hand from his. “Good night,Doctor,” she said, and strode away. Once she heard the door slide closed behind her, she dropped the stern act and let out a chuckle. She’d actually found his flirtations rather amusing—purely as entertainment for their own sake, as he’d said—but she hadn’t wished to encourage him.

The chuckle turned into a long, massive yawn, and Deanna decided it was time to get back to bed with Will. I think I’ll file this conversation under doctor-patient confidentiality,she said to herself. Will might be very tolerant of cultural differences, but there were limits.

And this was supposed to be a quiet, late-night stroll,she thought. Serving on this ship is going to be quite an adventure.

Chapter Two

STARDATE 57146.4

Melora Pazlar had decided that the stellar cartography lab was her favorite part of the ship. There was no other place on Titanwhere she could feel so free. True, in the privacy of her quarters the Elaysian lieutenant could escape the ship’s oppressive gravity, shed her motor-assist armature and cane, and drift in the cozy few centigees of her homeworld. But that was a small, enclosed space, comfortably vertical but without the airy openness of home. She’d decorated it with crystal sculptures evoking Gemworld’s lapidary spires, but that didn’t diminish her awareness of the walls, or of the crushing weight beyond them.

In stellar cartography, though, she routinely left the gravity off completely, the better to soar among the simulated stars. In this holographic realm, the walls and the ship could be completely forgotten, and Melora could drift unencumbered through the heavens, dancing gavottes with planets, bathing in nebular mist, cradling newborn T Tauri stars in her hands, communing with the eloquent silence of space.

Except at times like now. “ ‘Gum,’ ” said Kenneth Norellis, breaking her train of thought. “What kind of name for a nebula is ‘Gum’?”

Melora sighed and threw a look at the boyish astrobiologist, who stood on the control platform with the Irriol cadet Orilly Malar, both held there by a gravity field about twenty percent of standard. At first, the whole holotank had been routinely kept in freefall for Melora’s benefit—except for that two-week stretch when Admiral Akaar had taken it over as a command post prior to the Romulan negotiations—but some crew members had found it difficult to adjust to the free-fall environment, so this refinement had been added. It took advantage of the fact that Starfleet gravity stators emitted virtual gravitons which could be calibrated to decay at short distances, so that starships’ internal gravity fields would not disrupt their warp-field geometry. That principle had already enabled her to soar free here or in her quarters unaffected by the gravity from the decks below; it had been simply enough to tweak it so she could do so unaffected by the balcony’s local field. “It’s named after the human who discovered it. It’s just a name, like any other.”

“Yeah, but…‘Gum.’ It’s kind of an unimpressive name for something so, so huge.”

Melora figured she could see his point. The Gum Nebula was one of the largest astronomical landmarks in the Orion Arm. It was a gigantic supernova remnant, a shock front from the death of a star over a million years in the past. It was now over a thousand light-years across and expanding, highly attenuated but still impressive in scale. The volume inside it was large enough to hold the entire Federation and its neighbors with room to spare—and almost all of it was terra incognita. Its nearer reaches had been ventured into by the Catullans and the Klingons, and impinged on by earlier Starfleet vessels on Beta Quadrant surveys, such as Excelsiorand Olympia.But the majority of this vast bubble of space (she’d heard some crew members joking that it should be the “Bubblegum Nebula,” though she’d needed the reference explained) had never been systematically explored—until now. Titan’s mission was an open-ended survey of the region within the Gum Nebula—or rather, the coreward half, with her sister ship Ganymedetaking the rimward half. The ship was now several dozen parsecs past its edge, and the holotank displayed the surrounding space from that vantage point, so that the faint wisps of the Gum Nebula, enhanced for the display, surrounded them in all directions.

Melora had trouble seeing why this region was still uncharted (at close range, that is, rather than telescopically), since it was an astrophysicist’s dream. A lively, turbulent region of active star formation, it encompassed numerous lesser supernova remnants, stellar nurseries, HII regions, OB-star associations, cometary globules, the whole celestial bestiary. At its heart was the Vela OB2 Association, one of the biggest, liveliest star-formation zones in the Orion Arm, and the source of the energy which excited the Gum Nebula’s hydrogen into luminescence, like the candle inside a Japanese paper lantern. Though she supposed that might make it a bit less of a priority for Starfleet, which was generally more interested in seeking out new life and new civilizations. Star-formation zones were extremely turbulent; the birth processes of stars—and the death throes of the short-lived, supermassive stars that died before they could travel very far from their birthplaces—gave off intense radiation, interstellar-medium shock waves, and subspace disruptions, all of which could prevent habitable planets from forming in the first place or wipe out those nearby biospheres that did happen to form.