Chapter Three

U.S.S. TITAN

It had been four years since Lieutenant Melora Pazlar had left her brief assignment aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise-E and until two months ago she hadn’t been back aboard a Federation starship. Her chief reason for staying so long in her native world’s microgravity environment was personal. But now she realized that she’d had another legitimate rationale for having steered clear of Starfleet vessels for so long: physical discomfort. Even in the specially designed uniform she wore, adapting to the “normal” shipboard gravity could be a chore.

The uniform’s exoframe servomotors let out a low, almost inaudible whine as Pazlar’s willowy form progressed down the corridor. She moved forward deliberately, her garlanic wood walking stick assisting the exoframe’s step-by-step redistribution of her weight. She saw a Vulcan and a Bolian approaching her, and politely nodded and smiled to them as they neared. She hoped she was concealing the constant pain and pressure Titan’s “standard” gravity settings caused her.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant Pazlar,” the young Bolian woman said as she came to a stop alongside her Vulcan companion. Her smile displayed a wide mouth full of bright teeth.

“Good afternoon, Ensign Waen,” Pazlar said. Her mind raced, but she couldn’t remember the name of the middle-aged Vulcan male, even though she had met him several days earlier. She noted that he seemed disinterested in her, so intent was he on the padd he carried. “I hope your day is going well,” Pazlar said, at a loss to think of any other chitchat.

“Very well, thanks,” Waen said. “We’re on our way to the arboretum to see how Savalek’s new Kyloorchid is faring.” She gestured toward the Vulcan as she spoke the name, then back down in the direction from which they had just come. “I suppose you’re off to see what they’ve done to your quarters?”

Pazlar nodded. “I have to confess I’m a bit anxious about that.”

Waen leaned in closer, bringing her hand up to her mouth in a conspiratorial gesture. Pazlar doubted that she needed to bother whispering, since Savalek seemed absolutely absorbed by whatever was on his padd. “I heard some fairly loud swearing coming from the open doorway as we passed. I think it was that Ferengi geologist.”

TheFerengi? What is she talking about? Why would—what’s her name, anyway?—why would Bralik be in my quarters?Pazlar shifted her cumbersome weight, wincing slightly as her body settled into a new position. “Well, I’d best get down to see what all the swearing is about.”

“We’ll see you soon,” Waen said, her tone jolly.

“Good grace,” Pazlar said, remembering the Bolian term for a friendly farewell. As she made her way down the corridor, she heard Waen whispering to the Vulcan behind her. She turned her head slightly, and caught Savalek staring back at her with a strange look on his face. The Bolian woman, caught whispering, waved to Pazlar with slender blue fingers.

What were they whispering about? And what was that look in Savalek’s eyes?Melora was used to such whispers; as the first Elaysian to join Starfleet, she had initially been confined to a gravity-negating mobile chair, and had later worn an exoframe even more cumbersome than the current model. Early in her career, she had often felt—fairly or unfairly—as though “high-g species” regarded her as a cripple. Despite the subtly contoured brow ridges that marked her as a member of a nonhuman species, it had always seemed that many of her fellow Starfleet Academy cadets had had a difficult time fathoming the essentially gravity-free environment from which she had come. Granted, the existence of a place such as Gemworld—whose null-gravity humanoid habitat had been maintained since antiquity by automated machinery—seemed at first glance to defy every known law of planetary science. Still, Pazlar was always frustrated when others apparently failed to understand that she was no more out of place in one g than, say, an oxygen-breathing Terran would be in Pacifica’s undersea city of hi’Leyi’a.

Early on during her time among humans, all the whispers and “special” treatment had made her extremely defensive. By the time she had been assigned briefly to head stellar cartography aboard space station Deep Space 9 some nine years ago, she had developed a decidedly antagonistic attitude. The station’s doctor, Julian Bashir, had offered her a neuromuscular adaptation therapy which could have acclimated her motor cortex to standard gravity—permanently. But she had decided against the therapy, having learned by the end of her short stint on DS9 that her attitude, not her physiology, had needed adjustment.

She had spent the next several years honing her skills, acquiring new ones, and then being tested on numerous short-term “specialty” assignments, ranging from stultifyingly mundane mapmaking junkets to some truly harrowing missions in which she had piloted shuttles. During the Dominion War, she had helped save 192 of her shipmates, and had been decorated for valor afterward. Immediately following the war, she had accepted an assignment aboard the Enterpriseto conduct a low-gravity science study on Primus IV.

But fate had made other plans for Pazlar. After she had been contacted by the Lipul, one of her homeworld’s six sentient races, she convinced Captain Jean-Luc Picard to divert the Enterpriseto the artificial planet known as Gemworld. Although Pazlar and the starship’s crew had succeeded in preventing Gemworld’s destruction, she had been forced to take the life of another Elaysian during the mission. In the aftermath, Picard had granted her extended leave from Starfleet to face her homeworld’s Exalted Ones, and to atone for her crime. She had spent a seeming eternity drifting in cloistered meditation, fasting and contemplating her deeds on that mission—actions that weighed heavily upon her even now, and probably always would.

Although even the Exalted Ones had finally declared the death of the renegade engineer Tangre Bertoran justifiable and unavoidable, Pazlar had continued her atonement rituals for many months—intervals known as “shadow marks” among the Elaysians, whose world lacked a natural satellite from which to construct a lunar calendar—before making her decision to reconnect with Starfleet. She had been on assignment with the science vessel Aegripposwhen Captain Riker had invited her to join the crew of Titan.

Pazlar thought her initial meeting with Riker last week had gone quite well. He was fresh from what had apparently been an unusual honeymoon on Pelagia, and had seemed eager to accede to Pazlar’s requests.

“If I take this job, the stellar cartography lab isgoing to be micro-g most of the time,” she had said firmly. “Not to put too fine a point on it, sir, but I’ve adapted to everyone else’s need for gravity for a long time now. I think it’s time that my colleagues began to adapt to some of my more…free-floating needs.”

“Agreed,” Riker had said, smiling. “There’s something else, Lieutenant.”

“Sir?”

“We’ve got a pretty radical structural idea for your quarters,” he had said with another disarming grin. “I’ve had the engineering teams working on cabin retrofits for several members of the crew who have special environmental requirements. I think you’ll like what they’ve come up with for you.”

Now, a week later, Pazlar neared the alcove that led to the door to her quarters. Or, more specifically, one of the doors. As the Bolian had said— why am I so bad with names?—the entryway stood open, and several blue-banded engineering hover platforms were visible just inside the alcove.