Personal log: Veronika "Ronnie" Grau, officer commanding USS Falcon NCC-93057
"Permission to come aboard." The big Andorian on the transporter pad salutes smartly. Dunno how they do that without banging their antennae, but hey.
"Permission granted. Welcome aboard, Mr Hihl."
"Thank you, sir." He strides off the pad, and picks up a carryall that looks like it must weigh the same as me. I'd guess it's full of case notes and textbooks and stuff. Lieutenant Commander Sran Hihl seems to be a serious sort of a guy.
"So, where do you want to start?" I ask him. "Meet the senior staff? Check in with the CMO? Go down to deck 12 and sample the rocket fuel they cook up in the chem lab that I'm not supposed to know about? Or just head for your quarters and settle in?"
"Perhaps the CMO would be the best place to start," Hihl says. He's got a rather pleasant baritone voice, easy to listen to. Of course, in his line of work, that's an advantage, I guess.
"Righty ho," I say brightly. "Off to medical, then." I peer around. "Turbolift, turbolift, where did they hide the turbolift?... oh, right, here we are."
"There's no need for you to accompany me, Admiral Grau," Hihl says. "I don't want to take up too much of your time."
"Oh, call me Ronnie, everyone does," I tell him, as I insinuate myself into the turbolift. Truth be told, I don't immediately want him plotting behind my back with my chief medical officer. "Sickbay," I tell the lift capsule. Hihl doesn't say anything. Doesn't really have time, the lifts are fast, and I can talk that way too. "No trouble at all, I suppose I ought to check in on Sickbay myself from time to time, y'know, make sure all the wheels are oiled and the gears are still turning and that -"
"Interesting metaphor, sir." He snuck a word in edgewise while I was pausing for breath, dammit. "Considering your medical history, and especially the Borg assimilation."
"Yeah, well," I say as the lift doors hiss open, "that's sort of behind me now, mostly. God, when I think of what it was like when Two of Twelve was living in my head, I wouldn't even have been able to look at you without her saying */*species 4464*/* at me, here we are, by the way." I stride through the sickbay doors with Hihl following me. At my Hihl, you might say. Ha.
The small, mousy Trill woman at the bio-monitor console looks up as we come in. "What the hell are you doing here?" Zodiri asks. "Don't tell me it's for medical advice, this isn't April the first. And who's this?"
"Chief Medical Officer Zodiri," I announce, waving airily at her. "Zodiri, this is Sran Hihl, he's -"
"It's your damn eye again, isn't it?" Zodiri snaps at me. "Do the bloody exercises and stop bugging me about it. I'd give you eye drops, but you'd only drink them."
"Drink them?" says Hihl bemusedly. His antennae are starting to wilt a little.
"If anyone can get smashed on Retinox-5, it'd be her," says Zodiri. "Who did you say you were, again?"
"I -" Hihl begins.
"This is Lieutenant Commander Sran Hihl," I say loudly, "he's joining us as Ship's Counselor, effective today."
Zodiri stares at me. Her face moves in an odd sort of way, one which takes me a moment or two to recognize. It's not something I often see on Zodiri's face... in fact, it's something I've never seen on Zodiri's face. She is smiling. More than that, she is positively grinning at Hihl, who just stands there looking blank and blue.
"Ship's... Counselor?" she says. She hoots with laughter, and makes waving-off movements with her hands. "Run away!" she shouts, in between chortles. "Run away!"
"You get used to her," I assure the increasingly baffled-looking Andorian. "I have, though I couldn't tell you why. Anyway, once she's got over her fit of the giggles, you can have a nice professional chat about things -"
"It'll have to wait," Zodiri says. She seems to have regained some composure. "I've got stuff on, right now."
"Medical problem?" I ask.
"No, I thought I'd try my hand at knitting, instead. Of course it's medical, you superannuated Borg twit. Ahepkur."
"Again?"
"I must apologize, sir," says a new voice. I turn to my left, quickly. Ada has been standing there, in my blind spot, all this time. I didn't see her, because of the eyepatch, and I didn't hear her, because - being an android - she was standing absolutely still and not even breathing. It's hard to read expressions, because of the metal eyes and the electronic panels... but there is something distinctly sheepish about the way she is looking.
"You girls have got to get your relationship under control," I say.
"I'm sorry, sir," says Ada. "But, well, she does insist on, well, testing my limits."
"Relationship issues?" asks Hihl. Oh, of course, this sort of stuff is meat and drink to him.
"It's more a spelling issue," I say. "Ahepkur is a Klingon, and you know all about Klingon relationships, right? They can't tell the difference between marital arts and martial arts. They get rowdy in the bedroom. Trouble is, when your partner's an android...."
"Currently it looks like eight broken ribs, a dislocated patella, and a contused spleen," says Zodiri. "I mean, bloody hell, why not bring her flowers or something instead?"
"I tried that once, sir," says Ada. "She ate them."
"I didn't know that Starfleet androids were programmed for -" Hihl begins.
"I have a wide range of discretionary functions," says Ada. "And Commander Ahepkur and I... hit it off."
"After kind of a rocky start," I comment, "and maybe a bit too literally, sometimes. Tell you what." I take Hihl by the elbow and draw him towards the door. "Let's leave these guys to it for the moment. Zodiri will get Ahepkur on her feet in time for Ada to put her on her back, and while they're doing that, let's go say hello to the rest of the team, how about that?" He doesn't resist. I have a feeling Ada and Ahepkur aren't in any of his textbooks.
I steer Hihl back into the turbolift. "I should consult with Dr. Zodiri as soon as she's available," he says in rather faint tones.
"Yes, I'll bet. Do you have lots of notes about me? I mean, where are you planning to start? The repeated time-warps? The Borg assimilation? The homicidal fire god who hijacked my brain? It's all grist to the mill, I guess. Bridge," I say to the lift capsule.
"You seem to be... adjusting... to the removal of more of your implants," says Hihl. "I understand that you relied heavily on the mnemonic circuitry for some time, surely the loss of that -"
"Oh, right, yeah. Memory, all alone in the moonlight, I can smile at the old days, I was beautiful then - OK, OK, that last line's going back a fair old way, I admit. Never mind. No, I think what I lost in eidetic memory circuits, I gained in not having a ruddy back seat driver inside my head, commenting at me all the time. Makes it a lot easier to focus, these days. Where are we again? - oh, right, the bridge, yeah."
I traipse out onto the bridge. "Hi there, folks," I call out. "This is Sran Hihl, he's joining us as Ship's Counselor, everyone say hello and welcome, now." I turn to Hihl. "Let's start with the sensible people, shall we? This is my first officer, Commander Tallasa -" I wave my hand at Tallasa, but she is already on her feet. Her expression is stony, her antennae are stiff and twitching slightly. Behind her, at the helm console, her sister Jhemyl stands up too.
"Just Tallasa," Tallasa says, clearly daring Hihl to make something of it.
"And I am Jhemyl," her sister adds. "Just Jhemyl."
My Andorian exec and my indispensable top pilot both lost their family name after their parents comprehensively besmirched it. Clan-honour and clan-disgrace are hot-button topics for Andorians. It took some time, but they finally normalized relations with the last Andorian officer to join the team... actually, I sometimes wonder just how cordial Tallasa is getting with Areb Ysrip, not that I have any way of finding out. I suppose I could just ask Tallasa, if I particularly wanted her to break every bone in my body. Anyway. Right now, the two of them are looking coolly at Hihl, and Hihl is looking blankly back, and the social temperature is plummetting to a level that makes Andoria itself look positively sweltering.
I'm rather suspecting my new counselor spent all his spare time reading up on my records, and didn't worry about the rest of the crew. More fool him.
To try and defuse the situation, I turn to the science console. "And this is Saval, my chief science officer, and - ah."
Saval nods politely: his face, framed by those God-awful mutton-chop whiskers, is composed and neutral as ever. "Welcome aboard, Counselor Hihl," he says. He indicates the Vulcan woman in engineering uniform standing beside him. "My daughter, Lieutenant T'Shomep, is visiting from the USS King Estmere."
Hihl nods politely back, and then does a double-take. "Your... daughter?" he asks.
"Commander Saval was with me on my last trip into the Stygmalian Rift," I explain. "We all got time-warped twenty-four years into the future, that time. It messes things up."
"Adjustments," says T'Shomep, "were needed in our family life."
"Yes," says Hihl, "I... suppose they must have been." I swear I can see him adding things to a to-do list inside his head. His antennae are limp and drooping.
"And over there on comms," I say, "is Leo Madena." Leo looks up with a visible start. "You'll like Leo, I know I do. Leo's a nice lad, makes himself very useful, doesn't have any weird hangups or unusual living situations, frankly I don't know why he puts up with us. Tell you what, Leo, why don't you see Counselor Hihl to his quarters, get him settled in nicely, maybe tell him some more about the Falcon and the team in general? Leo will see you get sorted all right," I tell Hihl. "He's a very reliable person, is Leo."
"Uh, thank you, sir," says Leo.
"Yes," says Hihl, "yes, I see I have... a lot of data to review. Thank you, sir."
"Well," I say, "no great rush. I'll come and have a chat, once you're ready, in office hours, sometime soon. Ish."
Hihl lets Leo usher him into the turbolift. "Oh, just one thing," I call after them. "Leo? Better not tell him about those Ferengi snuff holograms - what was it, Ferengi Execution 104? Save that for some other time." Through the closing doors, I catch a glimpse of Leo's ears turning bright red, and Hihl looking towards him like a man with many questions.
The doors hiss shut. I saunter over to the command chair, sit down, settle myself in.
"Nice man," I say to the world at large. "Highly qualified, too, according to his personnel file. Energetic, able and dedicated, they said."
"Yes, sir," says Tallasa.
I grin at her. "Anyone want to bet he'll last six weeks?"
"No takers, sir," says Tallasa.
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