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Rihannsu starships ran colder than their Klingon or Federation counterparts.
Starfleet vessels aimed, in all things, for a kind of pleasant neutrality. Their climate controls were mild; not too cool for their short sleeves and light fabric, not too warm for long pants and multi-layered uniforms. KDF ships historically placed far more engineering emphasis on weapons than anything else; their environmental systems were perpetually fighting a doomed but honorable battle against tight quarters, naturally high Klingon body temperatures, and thick leather armor.
No such issue on the Ecurai . The warbirds of the Republic were kept cool—not cold, but not quite warm. You wouldn’t get a chill in shirtsleeves, but you’d certainly be more comfortable if you put on a light coat.
Which meant that Satra Valel registered the absence of a warm body in her bunk almost before she was fully awake.
That was, in itself, not unusual. Ael was the commanding officer; a thousand things might call her from her bed at any moment. Satra herself had vanished in the middle of the night plenty of times, in response to an emergency in Sickbay. They did their best not to wake one another.
But here, tonight? Having seen the things they had? 0400 hours, in geosynchronous orbit over Earth for the first time since the Undine…
She counted backward from one hundred and twenty. The cold sheets said that this was more than just a late-night trip to the restroom, but there was nothing to be gained by acting like a fussy mother hlai.
“Computer.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, reaching out to activate her PADD. “Locate Commander t'Dosai.”
There was no mild computerized voice to respond to the request; a wryly self-aware Rihannsu tendency toward subtlety had melded well with the coarse Iuruth sensibilities of the ship’s commander. Wasting air, Ael called it—there was no greater insult, in the dockside slums that had raised her. Taking the time and energy to make someone sit through hearing you out when you could have simply said what needed saying and let them move on with their lives. Putting on airs.
The ship’s computer sent a politely silent ping to Satra’s PADD, and left her in peace.
Starboard observation deck. It could be worse.
Deactivating the PADD, Satra sat up properly and pressed the heels of her palms firmly against her eyes. Finally, shaking herself, she picked up a second unit. The subspace comm frequency she was looking for was already near the top; there was a pause of less than two minutes before it was answered.
“Doctor Valel! It’s been far too long, my friend! Business or pleasure?”
Despite her concern, Satra smiled. “It’s good to see you, Kuumaarke. Do you happen to have my wife on the other line?”
Kuumaarke blinked mildly. “I’m afraid not, Doctor. Is she having difficulty connecting? I haven’t heard anything about communications issues in the Sol system…” A soft gasp. “But then, I wouldn’t have, would I! If the Ecurai isn’t able to broadcast—”
Sensing a solid five and a half minutes of concerned technobabble and possibly an Alliance-wide red alert in the making, Satra held up a hand to forestall any panic. “Kiuu mnekha. There’s nothing wrong, liorae’lagga. I just didn’t want to interrupt a private conversation.”
It drew out a bright, warm smile—the unforced sincerity that had earned her that pet name. “Well, you may now feel free to interrupt away!” She settled back, curled informally in her chair with a cup of what looked like some kind of tea. “And in future I do hope you feel free to insert yourself into any private conversation you wish, Doctor. I’m never too busy for such dear friends—though I might insist you let me finish my breakfast next time.”
After a moment, however, the humor dancing in her eyes faded. She glanced over her shoulder, then tapped something outside of camera range. When she leaned in again, lowering her voice, she had obviously changed the call audio to a private earpiece.
“Doctor,” she said. “How is the commander? Truly. I don’t wish to cross a boundary—I’ve seen some reports, I know some little of what she…what you all saw. But I haven’t…well, I suppose I felt I might not be the appropriate person to reach out to her. Given…”
She trailed off, looking ashamed.
Given how recently we were all fighting for our lives to get in a killing blow against a woman who looked exactly like you, Satra agreed silently.
Or, perhaps more pointedly: Given how openly your evil doppelganger was fantasizing about the sexual tortures she could dream up for us. Given how openly she warmed the bed of a woman who is terrifyingly, heartbreakingly identical to my wife.
Given how openly you’re half in love with the real one.
Something of that last thought must have shown on her face. Kuumarke didn’t quite flinch; but she shrank back into herself.
“Doctor,” she said, too quickly. Then, taking a sharp breath: “I hope—I realize, of course, that this goes without saying. You hardly need reassurance from me that—but, given the circumstances, I only—I hope you know that—I have nothing but respect and deep affection for both of you. All of you! Satra, I assure you, I would never—”
“Kuumaarke,” Satra said quietly. “I trust my wife.”
Lilac skin colored faintly at the censure; Satra acknowledged it with a mildly raised eyebrow, then had the good manners to move on.
“I trust you as well,” she said. “And not just because if I mistrusted you it would mean I mistrusted Ael; and if I mistrusted Ael, I am a citizen of the Klingon Empire. I would have done something about it by now.” That at least got a small, embarrassed laugh. With Kuumaarke finally willing to make eye contact again, Satra said softly, “None of our human allies are responsible for the actions of the Terran Empire. You have done nothing wrong. Neither has she. I wish she would call you in the middle of the night. It would do you both a great deal of good.”
Kuumaarke looked up with a watery smile and a painfully earnest love in her eyes. “Thank you. Well. Jolan tru, Doctor. Best wishes go with you.”
Satra inclined her head with a smile, and cut the subspace link. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stood.
Starboard observation deck.
It could be worse.
“Come to bed.”
Ael didn’t jump. Satra wasn’t surprised; it took effort to sneak up on Ael t'Dosai. But she didn’t respond, either. Not beyond the faintest twitch in Satra’s direction, just enough to show that she wasn’t being ignored.
She was, otherwise, ignored.
Satra Valel had enough pride that she had once called her rescue by the fledgling Rebellion a conscription under duress for the sole reason that it had inconvenienced her—and enough spite that she had dropped the House prefix from the ancient family name t’Valel for the sole reason that the shattered remnants of noble Houses had formed the backbone of Sela’s Empire, and she had wanted nothing to do with it.
She did not generally respond well to being ignored.
She sighed. There was no heat in her voice when she spoke again.
“Come to bed, e’lev. I’ll make it an order if I have to.”
That, finally, got the ghost of a smile.
“This isn’t Starfleet." Ael's voice was rough from lack of use.
Satra raised a warning eyebrow and retorted, “I never said I’d be speaking as your chief medical officer.”
Another long, slow pause. Another faint twitch, another half-ghost of a smile.
“You win,” said Ael softly. She didn’t move to stand.
Satra, who had only very rarely seen her this bad, moved to sit by her instead.
The observation area was actually a small, out-of-the way room near the belly of the Ecurai . It had the novelty of a partially-clearsteel floor, and a gorgeous view of the contrails thrown by the starboard nacelle in a nebula, but was otherwise an unimpressive room—the real observation deck was the mess hall.
But what this unpopular retreat offered instead was privacy. Intended mostly to provide the lower-decks crew with a quiet place to read or finish their reports that was more comfortable than their barracks, it was rarely host to more than one or two people at a time. In the middle of delta shift, it was rarely host to anyone at all. And no one on this ship would intrude on their commander.
Well. Almost no one.
Warbirds were kept dim as they were kept cool; neither Starfleet neutral-white, nor the minimal nightvision guide strips of a Klingon battleship. Warm, gold-and-emerald recessed lighting provided just enough light to be comfortable—just enough light that the shadows cast across Ael’s scarred, exhausted face would never be quite deep enough to hide in.
Satra settled into the padded nook across from her wife, gazed out at the stars with her, and waited.
Three full minutes later, Ael said, “I’m glad she has a voicebox.” Another long silence. “She can never…pretend.”
She tried and failed to keep her heart from cracking in her chest. “Is that what you’ve been dreaming? Ael—” Then, “Look at me.”
Hazel eyes flickered, flinched, and failed to hold contact. As gently as she could manage Satra reached out, placed the tips of two fingers under her wife’s chin, and turned her gaze back.
When Satra had first laid eyes on the woman, Ael had been a ragged, underfed scrap of a thing, half-feral, still bleeding where shrapnel had torn open half her face. She’d stumbled into Satra’s station with nothing but gall and what she’d been wearing when the Tal Shiar attacked: The torn and smoke-stained rags that had once been a security uniform for a colony that had barely hired her before it burned, a shitty plasma pistol at her hip—and a knife’s-edge, fight-or-flight expression.
She’d steadied, over time. With Klingon and Starfleet support, that quivering desperation had faded. Enough food, more sleep, a change of clothes, and she’d started to look less like a half-drowned kitten.
Ael t’Dosai was…Satra was not fool enough to dismiss the old ways, the Element-worship, as an imperial relic. She could recognize the Elements when they conspired to offer her a gift.
Ael was the place where Earth met the Ocean—the great sea stacks, a pillar of stone, immovable, unflinching, enduring any punishment, haven in the storm for any who could reach her. And the crash of the waves as well. Wrath that built slow but ran deep, cold and inexorable and devastating in its power. The determined humility of water, that would dash itself against the rocks a thousand thousand times until one day, both slow and sudden, her enemy collapsed under the weight of its own pride.
A worthy commander. A worthy mate, though they were both slow to see it.
And when she was offered the helm of a modern warbird and made a choice—a real choice, one she could have walked away from alive? That was the moment Satra had seen the starfire in her veins for the first time.
“Ael ir’Iuruth t'Dosai,” she said softly. “Look at me. Look at me, dhael’stelam. What do you see?”
She’d steadied over time, yes. But the hunted look in those beautiful eyes had never left her. It never would entirely.
It was a privilege like none in the galaxy, to watch Ael slowly fold that fear away. The tension lines around her eyes softened, and life gradually began to return to her face as she smiled. A true smile, this time. Her eyes searched Satra’s.
“…Fire on the sea,” she murmured.
“Your wife,” Satra told her. “I hope.”
An old conversation. Fire and Water, she’d said, fingers tracing lightly over the back of Satra’s hand. Brushing calloused fingertips against her skin, raising pleasant goosebumps on the back of her neck. A creature of contradictions. A warrior and a healer, loyalty and defiance, life and destruction. The most compassionate woman I’ve ever met, who threw a rock at my head because I was injured in the field, which is a contradiction if I’ve ever heard one—
Stop wasting air, she’d retorted, and Ael had mimed a shot to the heart as Satra cut into her steak with businesslike precision. And don’t speak poetry if you’re not going to bed me, Commander. It’s bad manners.
“Ael.” She let some steel—only a very little, but enough—into her voice. “My love. Do you think so little of me?”
Ael, gentle but firm, pulled her hand away. “She has the scar. She could have had my voice. She’s an assassin, i’Vorta. She wouldn’t have to fool anyone for long.”
“You’ve never seen your own face.” Satra released her wife’s chin without protest. “Of course you haven’t. You couldn’t know the difference. E’lev, you couldn’t mimic her if you tried. Your facial expressions are an active threat to Alliance operational security. To this day I have no idea how you managed to survive the Tal Shiar. There’s no need for Vulcan mind techniques with you in a room, you could have filibustered the Tricameron without saying a word.”
“Satra—”
“Ael. I know your name as well.”
A very, very weak roll of the eyes. Finally, voice cracking: “I’m just…glad she can’t use my voice.”
It was a solid, reliable distinction. A comfort, with the Inquisitor still at large somewhere. Something to cling to. To erase the vicious, hissing taunt that Ael still believed Satra hadn’t been able to hear—pinned beneath her own doppelganger, knives to each other’s throats, straining, losing.
Trying to protect the pretty doctor, are we? Good. Tell me, has your woman ever tasted an agonizer?
Except that their world had better reconstructive medicine than the Terrans’ shattered universe. Except, of course, that Ael could easily receive the same injury as her counterpart. Be fitted with the same voicebox, and lose that easy identifier. Except that it would make no difference.
With deliberate care, Satra took her wife’s face between her hands.
“Do you think for a moment,” she whispered, “that I wouldn’t know you blindfolded?”
Whatever Ael saw in her face, the next argument died before she could voice it.
Satra pressed on. “It does not matter if she has your voice or you have hers. She has your face already and looks nothing like you, Ael. Don’t speak. You cannot order me to lie to you.” Two fingers pressed gently, so gently, over Ael’s lips. “You have never once looked yourself in the eye. I have watched your face for ten years, my starbird. I have fallen asleep to your voice for a decade. I know how you speak to me. I would hear your voice as clearly through a Terran voicebox as I hear it now.”
“Satra…”
“Don’t speak.” It came out like a prayer. “I know what a thousand forms of love look like in your eyes. I know how love sounds on your tongue whatever tech it might pass through on its way. And the moment any Terran inquisitor tried to use the name of my wife to hurt the family she has built, and thought a convenient scar or intact vocal cords would be enough for me to let her, I would gut her alive and send her screaming to the blackest fires of Gre’thor.”
For a long time they sat that way, foreheads pressed together, uneven breathing too loud in the empty room.
“You spend too much time around injured Klingons,” murmured Ael without opening her eyes.
“taHqeq,” Satra whispered. She brought their lips together. “Don’t speak.”