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yes same pic as last week..it was my inspiration 😛 😉 feel free to use your own.
Carol was changing out of the medical gown, while Renhol surveyed the readings on the screen attached to the biobed. “You are recovering quite nicely, but I would like to keep you on calcium hypos for your bones for a few more weeks… if you would keep your appointments from now on.”
“I will,” Carol rasped. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to leave my quarters.”
“If the augments want a room on this ship to be off limits to you, it’d be locked by a code you don’t have and protected by a DNA scan you cannot hope to match.”
“Why did you help the augments find a way to remove the slavers’ serial number?”
“Because I wanted mine off.”
Carol jumped off the bed and stared her at her. “You are a slave?”
“Was a slave,” the Trill corrected sharply.
“I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that I’ve never heard of a slave trained to be a doctor. Medical studies are too expensive for that.”
Renhold’s face took on a far-way look. “I wasn’t always a slave, but I had the wrong ideas about the practice of medicine. I thought doctors should be healers, not torturers and executioners. It was just a matter of time, until I treated the wrong person the wrong way and I was caught. Khan bought me because he needed someone knowledgeable of 23rd century health care. All I am on this ship is a medic, not a slave, not a whore and not a Trill without a symbiont. I have free reign of my infirmary, free access to its replicator and nobody abused me, since I set foot on the Vengeance. Did you know that its agony booth is disabled?”
Carol frowned. “You admire them?” she blurted out incredulously.
The Trill shrugged, as she picked at a hypo from a nearby tray. “I’ve heard they were condemned as criminals in Earth’s past. I don’t care. In the present, they’ve treated me fairly. All they’ve asked in return is my loyalty. A reasonable price in my book.” She brandished her dispenser. Carol inclined her head to let her inject it in her neck. The hypo pinched its way in.
“Wherever the augments are going can’t be worse than where we’ve been, can we?” the doctor asked thickly, as she put away the device.
# # #
The Vengeance had been patrolling the Klingon frontier for three times as long a regular Starfleet ship would. The tension of being only a flimsy strip of space away from a well-armed and hostile alien empire and the exhaustion of the long shifts got even to the augments. Nerves were frayed and should they confronted by a host of birds-of-prey, Pike’s cowardly plan might just come to fruition and the problem they posed to the humans would come to an end. Even if they were to be called back across the border, Khan knew they would be walking into a trap and Starfleet would blow them to smithereens. No, there was no going back now. It was time for that, for which he had been preparing for a while by acquiring supplies and people with valuable expertise.
In Starfleet loyalty came at a price and the Terran Empire recklessly squandered riches someone like him with his ear to the ground got to pick up. So he had bought himself various pieces of information that might come in handy. This way he had heard of a technologically backwards humanoid culture that had stumbled across a natural wormhole. It was unstable and offered no safe passage for any ship that might venture through it, but it did open to random points in the Gamma and the Delta Quadrants, decades away from the Sol system. No one knew what was out there in those two quadrants, but Khan knew what was not: the Terran Empire. Other than that, all he wanted was a planet with a breathable atmosphere for himself and his family, a place they could make into a home of their own.
The journey to the wormhole would not be easy, as they had no way of avoiding imperial territory and the Vengeance was not the kind of a ship to avoid detection. But he saw no other way. The Terran Empire and his family could never co-exist.
# # #
Carol nodded on her neighbor’s door with a hesitant hand. The augment woman opened almost instantly and looked at her with curious eyes. She was dressed as the rest of her people were, which was a lot by 23rd century standards: a long-sleeved tunic buttoned all the way to the neck and pants that reached to her ankles.
“Hello,” Carol began uncertainly. “We started off on the wrong foot.”
“We didn’t start off on any foot. You’ve barely spoken two words to me.”
“I was afraid of what you’d do to me.” Carol extended her arm to her. “My name is Carol Marcus.”
The augment grinned and grasped her fingers, squeezing them firmly. “Kati. Come in. We can share a cup of that awful concoction the replicator mistakes for tea.”
# # #
“Permission to come on the bridge,” Carol requested from the threshold.
The augments manning the consoles did not react. Khan was seating in the captain’s seat, his hands spread on the armrests, his posture positively regal, dominating the bridge effortlessly. He turned his head towards her, but his body remained ramrod straight. “Granted,” he said in a calm, neutral tone. He gestured one-handedly that she approached.
She stepped towards him, acutely feeling as though she were walking towards the throne of a king. “What do you need me to do?” she asked once she was right in front of him.
# # #
Carol wanted to believe it was all real: Renhol’s words, Khan’s assurances, the access to food and medical care and the promise of freedom far, far away from the Empire’s tyrannical clutches. But hope was a rare commodity in her world, an illusion that could easily get one killed. Still she was tempted, eased into it by the disappearance of the serial number branding her a slave and the absence of pain from her body. Her skin was milky white again, devoid of bruises and scratches, and the left side of her chest no longer ached from prologued sessions with the agonizer or from being locked in the agony booth. She slept on a real bed and if her nightmares didn’t let her rest, she could always ask and be given a sedative. She was beginning to build muscle mass again and had free access to the ship’s gym.
In some odd ways, she felt safer on the Vengeance than she had ever had anywhere else before. Despite her father’s position, she had never been completely spared unwanted advances, impertinent looks and the occasional invasive touch. But the augments kept their distance. Nobody stared at her body but looked her in the eye and nobody, not even Khan, even got close enough to lay an outward finger on her. It was surreal and it made her very much aware of how much worse it could have been and what she had escaped. But at night, the dreams returned, leaving her shaky and uncertain in the morning, and reminding her how easy it could all go away. Her world survived on terror. Even Khan had acknowledged that much. And terror was the very reason she had been born.
Her mother had been an artist, whose paintings had been deemed unpatriotic. Her father had offered to make the charges go away, if she slept with him. She had refused or so the rumor had it. Carol didn’t doubt that it was true. It was what she would have done in her place and cliché or not, blood was thicker than water. Her mother had been executed, before Carol had turned one. Her father thought she didn’t know any of this, just like he thought she didn’t know that the rebellion had not been completely crushed, when Hoshi Sato proclaimed herself empress a century earlier. But he had loved her in his own way. She had been the only being in the entire universe her Dad had ever loved. And though at times she had hated him, she had also loved him. He had been her only family, the only person she could truly trust. That was why she had never run away, despite her secret sympathies for the rebellion. In the end, it had been her downfall. Members of the resistance were executed on sight so that news of it could not spread; daughters of disgraced admirals were sold into slavery. It was no questions of which she would have preferred.
It was also beyond the shadow of a doubt what she had to do to ensure her place on the Vengeance. For now Khan needed her, but what was to become of her, once she had outlived her usefulness? Still it was hard. Just the thought of a man on top of her, after what the Orions and Decker and his senior officers had done to her, turned her stomach. She wondered if it had been easier, if Khan had given her an opening. But he had not. At first, she had suspected he had lover or a wife among those of his kind and was loyal to her out of some outdated 20th century social convention, but she had not noticed him afford any special favor to any of the augments, though he was on friendly terms with all of them. Then she had thought the way she dressed and carried herself was unappealing to him and replicated herself clothes like those of those of the augment women: plain, lacking in embroidery and golden finishes, beige, white or dark in color, and covering her from neck to ankles. She knotted her long hair in twists on top of her head or wore it in a simple pony-tale.
The Trill doctor and her augment neighbor complimented her on the changes, but Khan could no care less. It would seem she would have to take initiative all by herself. So one evening by ship’s time, she put on a long, wrap dress, like she had seen the augment women wear while they were off-duty, strapped her hair in a loop on her nape, and went to knock on Khan’s door. He opened it with a frown marring his face, several creases denting the upper part of his nose. His eyes were dark. They traveled over her from head to toe in a clinical manner, no heat permeating his gaze. He stepped aside without a word, letting her in. The door sealed itself shut behind her.
Carol spared his quarters a single, furtive glance. They were startlingly similar to those of the rest, simple, furnished with the bare minimum. The only notable distinction was the stack of antiquated, paper book piled on his desk. She turned to him and stretched her arms to wrap them around his neck. He moved before she could see him, fast as a cobra, and grasped her wrists, blocking her advance.
“Have dinner with me,” he said coolly, the scowl smoothening itself off his face.
She blinked. “What?”
“Dinner,” he repeated, releasing her. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
Carol nodded, recalling the Decker had liked to eat first, too. Dinner was a relatively modest affair: a chicken dish and dessert, but he had actual sapphire wine, which was more than welcome given that her replicator didn’t produce anything stronger than coffee. Maybe a little alcohol would help things go a bit easier. A little more alcohol would help things a lot so she drank heavily, especially since he was more interested in nursing his glass throughout their entire meal. He did most of the talking, too, about weapons, tactics and plans to get to a wormhole nearby the Barzan homeworld in order to flee to another quadrant. It was a good move and she found herself not the first time admiring his obvious brilliance and his talent for strategic calculations. She peered at him as discreetly as she could manage with the wine clouding her head and noted just how handsome he was, too. And he had lovely hands, with elongated, perfectly-drawn fingers. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to feel them all over her body. But at the same time, she knew that those beautiful hands could be deadly, possessing a strength that Decker or any Orion could never have, and inflict untold damage upon her.
Her heart sped in fear and she drank even more to quell it, welcoming the rapidly progressing dullness of her senses, until she could feel and remember nothing anymore.
