The Best And The Brightest Part 21

"What's gotten into you lately, Starsa? You never used to be this reckless-"

Starsa flipped her board over and jumped on, banking it in the air. "Everyone should learn to relax a little, Nev. That includes you."

Without a farewell, she swerved and skimmed off, over the tops of some Triskel bushes imported from Ventax II. She knew Reoh was just concerned about her. He had spent hours accompanying her through the medical regeneration, and she had been grateful for the company.

But to Starsa, it felt like she was back in her first year in the Academy instead of finishing her last. Back then, everyone was acting all repressed and gloomy over the flying accident in the Saturn fields that had killed Joshua Albert. Now, the year she would graduate, aside from the grief over t.i.tus's death and the disappearance of the crew on Voyager, there were the growing fears about the rise of the Dominion. It was like a shadow cast over Starfleet itself, making everyone frightened.

Starsa banked and returned to the small square she had just sailed through. The signal for a general announcement was on the air. She jumped off and ran a few steps, next to the cadets gathered in front of the screen. Usually Admiral Brand or one of the Academy officials appeared, but this time Admiral Leyton was in the midst of announcing: "... a joint strike force, consisting of the Romulan Tal Shiar and the Carda.s.sian Obsidian Order, was ambushed near the Founders' homeworld in the Omarion Nebula." Leyton took a deep breath, the lines in his forehead deepening. "The Federation did not partic.i.p.ate in this secret strike force against the Dominion, and Starfleet sent no ships until the Defiant was called to the Gamma Quadrant to rescue the two sole survivors. The destruction of both the Carda.s.sian and Romulan elite forces will surely be a factor in galactic politics in the coming months."

Admiral Leyton's blue eyes stared out of the screen as if he wanted to say more, but he simply shifted and the screen returned to the blue Starfleet symbol.

"Well, there goes all the fun," Starsa blurted out.

"Be quiet, Starsa!" one of the other cadets ordered. "This is serious."

A few of the younger cadets were looking at her, so she shrugged and gave them a wry smile. They didn't smile back, obviously too intimidated by the hushed voices of the other senior cadets.

"Lighten up," Starsa muttered, jumping back on her grav board, feeling unusually irritated with the world.

Jayme returned from a relaxing vacation with Moll during the midwinter break to find several communiques from Nev Reoh, asking her to contact him. She went straight to his office in the geophysics building.

"Hey," she said, first thing, "you should get hold of Enor if you want to send anything back to your family on Bajor. She's going to replace an a.s.sistant on the Federation science team at DS9 for a few weeks, monitoring the wormhole."

Reoh shook his head. "I don't have any family on Bajor."

"I didn't know that," Jayme said. "You went back for six months that one time, didn't you?"

"It's required. Part of being Bajoran means you have to see the holy sites." He shrugged. "It also made it real to me, to know for certain that we had gotten our world back."

Jayme remembered how happy he had been last semester when the Bajorans signed a peace treaty with the Carda.s.sians. "Now they've got the Jem 'Hadar breathing down their necks, not to mention all those Klingon birds-of-prey flying through their system. I guess that's what Admiral Leyton meant when he said the failed strike force would change galactic politics."

Nev Reoh nodded, looking down at his hands.

"So what did you want?" Jayme asked.

"Nothing so important," Reoh told her, downplaying everything, as usual.

"I have to study, Reoh. What is it?"

"You know that virus that sometimes switches a paragraph from your old personal logs with someone else's?"

"Yeah, that's happened since my first year, every few months or so. More often lately. Some glitch, they say, in the Academy computer system."

"I think I found out what it really is," he told her.

"Oh? Then maybe you should tell programming-"

"It's Starsa."

Jayme's mouth twisted. "No ..."

"Yes. I didn't think about it until this odd sentence appeared in one of my old logs. Then I realized that my logs didn't start skipping until my third year. The same year I was in the same quad as Starsa."

"That's not enough reason to blame her! I know she's a lunatic sometimes, but that would take ..."

"A lot of effort, to have kept it up for almost four years." Reoh called up the skipped paragraph he had found. "Read this."

Jayme bent closer and read: "I can't believe n.o.body's figured it out yet. I always have to ask people if their logs have skipped before they start to talk about it."

She straightened up, furrowing her brow. It's true, n.o.body looked much in their old logs, even the most recent ones. And Jayme always seemed to hear about it from Starsa first.

"She wouldn't dare!" Jayme breathed in disbelief.

"I checked," Reoh agreed, "and of the three-hundred-and-forty-seven cadets who have reported this skip virus, all of them were either in one of Starsa's cla.s.ses or on a project she worked on."

"She's been gathering people for years!" Jayme exclaimed. "That little slime devil!"

Reoh was shaking his head. "I don't understand why she would expose her own personal logs to the virus."

Jayme was reading the sentence again, laughing at how much it sounded like Starsa. "The risk of being caught is part of the fun. Besides, she wants to read someone else's paragraph as much as we all do. Don't you run to your logs to check when you hear it's happened?"

"She has to stop," Reoh said, ignoring the question.

"Fine, you talk to her."

"Starsa doesn't listen to me. She wouldn't even stop when I told her not to ride her grav board with her cast on."

"Everyone tried to tell her that," Jayme reminded him. "She never listens."

"I'll have to inform Admiral Brand," he said slowly. "It wouldn't be good for Starsa to get away with something like this. Do you think she needs counseling?"

"Hey, we all need counseling for one thing or another."

"I'm worried about her," he insisted.

Jayme tried not to laugh. "Then talk to her. Do what you have to do. But if it happens again, I'll tell everyone it was Starsa who did it."

Reoh walked her to the door. "I'll take care of it."

"Ohh ... you sounded very professorial there." Reoh blushed, but it reminded Jayme of something else. "I almost forgot, have you heard anything about this Red Squad?"

"I heard when Johnny Madden made the Squad," he admitted. "I checked, but it's not an official Academy designation."

"Maybe not, but they're sent on special trips and field training as a group. You have to be recommended by a high-ranking officer in Starfleet, so it might be something new they formed for us cadets."

"Have you been asked?"

"No!" Jayme shrugged, figuring she should ask some of her relatives. "I think it's elitist."

"I'll see if I can find out more," Nev Reoh promised.

Jayme had to smile. "Thanks. With you on the job, I feel I have nothing to fear."

Reoh tried to talk to Starsa on the grand square, but she only wanted to know how he had discovered the log skips were caused by her. She also wanted to know what Jayme had said, and she kept laughing.

Reoh became impatient, and finally he snapped at her, "Do you want to die, like t.i.tus?"

Starsa blinked at him, then her eyes filled with tears. She sat down on the bench, her head in her hands.

"I'm sorry, Starsa," Reoh told her helplessly.

"He's dead!" she said, looking up with a tear-stained face. "It's worse now, you know? At first it seemed like I'd see him any day. He'd appear behind me and pull my ponytail or call me a pest. But now I know he's never coming back."

Reoh sat down next to her. "Is t.i.tus the first person you've ever known who died?"

Starsa nodded, wiping her eyes.

"It's not something you ever get used to," he told her. "That's why I worry about you so much. You do these dangerous things for no reason. It could have been your head you broke instead of your leg when you fell off your grav board. And you could get into real trouble if you keep doing things like sending a virus through the computer system."

Starsa didn't look up, her brow furrowed. "It's just a joke."

"I don't understand you, Starsa. You've never let your pursuit of fun override your good sense. How many times in the past few months have you made the logs skip? Three times? It's like you wanted to get caught."

Starsa stood up with a huge sigh. "If you're just going to counsel me, I might as well go confess to Admiral Brand and get my official counseling over with."

Reoh tried to stop her. "Don't go, Starsa. Talk to me about this-"

"Gotta run." She grinned, that old sly look in her eyes. "You never know what trouble I could find between here and Brand's office."

He couldn't keep her from jumping on her grav board and taking off. She skimmed around two cadets, then did a somersault over the fountain, making his heart leap into his throat. Then, with a wave, she was gone.

He sat back down, his heart pounding. Starsa had never been cruel before. Thoughtless, yes, but no one could ever call her unkind.

"That girl has a problem," someone said from behind the bench.

Reoh turned to see Boothby, the oldest gardener at the Academy. "Hi, Boothby. Haven't seen you lately."

"Been tending a hillside of blueberries behind the recycling center," he said, very satisfied with himself. "I see you're taking up cadet counseling on the side."

Reoh shifted, remembering how he used to come to Boothby when he needed advice. "It's part of my job. Do you want to know something? I've been chosen to be the cadet advisor for an incoming student-a Ferengi. He's the first Ferengi to apply to Starfleet, but he used to live on DS9, so they thought a Bajoran would be a familiar face for him."

"What is this place coming to?" Boothby said in mock-wonder. "But I know nothing will top our first Klingon cadet."

"What about a Borg cadet?" Reoh offered. "Or a shape-shifter?"

"We can only hope it comes to that," Boothby agreed seriously. He cleared his throat. "About that girl; she's in big trouble."

"Oh, Brand will give her a reprimand and some community service. I'm afraid she'll enjoy the attention more than anything."

Boothby shook his head. "No, she's in trouble. She needs help."

"Help? What kind of help?"

"Medical help, if you ask me," Boothby said.

"You think she's sick?" Reoh knew better than to question Boothby. "I thought she'd been acting oddly, but n.o.body would believe me."

Boothby shouldered his spade. "See what you can do about getting her to a doctor."

"Of course!" He started toward the medical building. "I'll tell them to call her in right now!"

Starsa didn't like doctors. She had never been sick in her life until she left her homeworld and went to the Academy. Then it had taken nine long months for her to acclimate, and she had hardly been able to run up a flight of stairs without killing herself. She hated her medical monitor so much that, when they told her she no longer needed it, instead of turning the device back in she had thrown it off the top of Quad Tower Two.

So, at first, she resisted being called in by the doctors to be prodded and a.n.a.lyzed again. But when they started giving her hormone and biocellular treatments, she began to realize how ill she really was.

"Hi," Reoh said, edging his wrinkled nose past the door. "Can I come in?"

"I was wondering when you'd visit," Starsa told him. "I have to thank you for getting me into medical."

Reoh grinned shyly. She was struck by how it lit up his face. "You were pretty angry at first."

"I didn't realize how bad I was. I was wound so tight I was hardly sleeping. These hormones," she said, shaking her head. "You had to go through this when you were twelve years old? That's so young."

Reoh swallowed as if she had asked an awkward question, but she was used to that. "Bajoran p.u.b.erty lasts several years and isn't as ... dramatic as yours."

"I'll be glad to get it over with." She looked down at her chest. "I'm developing, aren't I?"

Reoh turned beet-red. "Uh, I think I've got to go."

Starsa laughed as he ran out of the room, but later she felt awful for making him uncomfortable. She started to cry about it and couldn't stop. Eventually a nurse noticed and gave her another hormone shot. Starsa fell asleep feeling lost and alone.

"Our doctors believe Starsa should be returned to her homeworld for treatment," Admiral Brand explained to Nev Reoh. "Her body is reacting abnormally for her species, and they believe it is due to the environment."

"It will take several weeks for her to get home," Reoh said, already thinking about how to accomplish whatever was necessary as fast as possible. "Will she be all right until then?"

"With treatments and environmental adjustments to her quarters, Starsa should arrive fine. But the doctors say it will be emotionally as well as physically difficult for her. They recommend that someone accompany her." Admiral Brand smiled slightly. "Starsa asked if you could go with her."

"Me?" Reoh asked, feeling very much the odd choice.

"She says you are one of her first friends here on Earth. You are also the one who alerted us to her problem. We could arrange to have your cla.s.ses taken by the other professors, if you would agree to go." Brand spread her hands on her desk. "It would take you at least six weeks, maybe longer."

Reoh already knew it would take longer, because he would have to stay to make sure Starsa was recovering. "I'll do it. When do we leave?"

Red alert klaxons sounded for the third time since they had neared Klingon territory and the supply lines pa.s.sing through numerous inhabited sectors, including Bajor. Clearly, Klingon fingers were stretched toward Carda.s.sia since the recent invasion.

As Reoh ran to Starsa's rooms, he wondered what the alert was about this time. Last time it had been two jumpy Carda.s.sian escort ships and an arms freighter pa.s.sing through to refortify one of the border planets. The time before that, it had been a pleasure yacht that the Maquis had outfitted with a fairly hefty phaser capacity.

The U.S.S. Cochrane was only an Oberth-cla.s.s starship, one of the smallest Starfleet science vessels, but she had ably defended herself and given chase to the yacht. Yet other duties called, and their captain had been forced to transmit the Maquis ship's last coordinates to Starfleet Headquarters.