Star Trek: The Next Generation™: The Insolence of Office

by William Leisner

  Deanna felt the beginnings of doubt starting to seep into the Tavnian’s mind. “Why wouldn’t he have let me know about this?”

  “Well, if you had let a woman like me slip through your fingers, you’d hardly be eager to publicize it either, would you?” Lwaxana gestured with her arms to accentuate just how absolutely fabulous she truly was. “But I can see you still don’t quite believe me. Go, call Jeyal. Go on, you can be assured I will still be right here whenever you want to come back and apologize for mistrusting me.”

  Deycen clearly didn’t know what to believe now—as a product of Tavnian upbringing, he wasn’t used to interacting with a strong and confident woman. But, even though his misgivings were plain to both Betazoids, he refused to betray them outwardly as he told Lwaxana, “You left your husband, who proclaimed his love for you, took you into his house, gave you a son. You dishonored him, and you dishonored all Tavny with your disrespect. I trust nothing you say. I will contact Jeyal, but until he tells me differently, you are still his wife, that is still his son, and you are still coming with me.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Lwaxana said, dropping her charming smile and glowering at the Tavnian in a way that said she wasn’t about to beg him for anything. “You are speaking to a daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed. Now, you will leave this house, and you will do so without me. And if you make me repeat myself, you’ll be leaving without some other things you arrived with.”

  Just then, there was a thump and a clatter, causing Deycen to spin and look around behind him. There he saw Mr. Homn, just inside the front door, a half-dozen cloth mesh bags overstuffed with groceries dropped at his sides. Deycen, like most Tavnian males, was relatively tall—close to one hundred and ninety centimeters, by Deanna’s visual estimate. As such, he was clearly unused to being towered over, as Mr. Homn was doing at that moment.

  Deycen looked from Homn back to Lwaxana. “If I discover that you are misleading me, woman, you will regret it.” This threat lost much of its impact as he turned back toward the door and actually cowered as he rushed past Homn, nearly tripping over a loaf of kaseton bread in his haste to leave.

  “Well,” Lwaxana said as Homn closed the front door behind the departed ambassador, “now perhaps we can have a proper breakfast, hm? Come, Mr. Homn.”

  Lwaxana turned and headed back toward the dining room, leaving Homn to gather up his bags, and leaving Deanna struck dumb by the conversation she’d just witnessed. After a moment’s hesitation, she started after Lwaxana, quickly falling even and matching her slow, weighted gait. “Mother…”

  “Yes, Little One?”

  Deanna shook her head in exasperation. “I’ve been trying since I got here to get you to open up and talk to me about Jeyal and Odo.”

  “Yes, I know,” Lwaxana sighed. “It was so wearisome, dear.”

  “Mother!” Outrage and relief warred in Deanna’s mind. “I thought…I was worried that you…”

  “That I was repressing unpleasant memories again,” Lwaxana said, giving her a small, sad smile. “No, dear, I’m afraid the entire last year is crystal clear in my mind.” They reached the dining room, and Lwaxana sighed as she lowered her pregnant body back into her chair. “I’m sorry, dear, I just…I’m finally home, in my own house again, here with my wonderful, loving daughter, and…I just wanted to cherish the moment, and not think about what’s past. You can understand that, can’t you, dear?”

  Deanna felt a mild sense of déjà vu. “Yes, I understand,” she said, as she lowered herself into her own chair. “But…what about the future?”

  “Well, that’s a lot harder to avoid thinking about,” Lwaxana admitted, as her hands went to her belly. She seemed lost in thought as she slowly caressed her bulging midsection. “Your father had wanted us to have another child,” she finally said.

  Deanna felt a jolt of surprise at that unexpected revelation. “You mean, after Kestra died?”

  Lwaxana flinched at the mention of her first daughter, then nodded. “He thought it would help things if we…Well, I don’t know for certain just what he thought; I would tune him out immediately any time he broached the topic. Poor man—what he must have gone through, dealing with my denial on top of everything else.” Lwaxana paused, lifting the napkin from her lap to daub at the corners of her eyes. “But, I couldn’t even bear to think about it. I was so worried about you, protecting you. Even with all those memories locked away like they were, I knew that protecting two children at once wasn’t something I was capable of.”

  “It’s hard to believe you ever questioned your capabilities,” Deanna told her.

  “I do project a very convincing air of confidence, don’t I?” Lwaxana managed a tiny smile, then she sighed and dropped her head again. “Part of me wonders if I shouldn’t have stayed with Jeyal.”

  Deanna was taken aback by that admission. “Why would you say that?”

  Lwaxana took a deep breath, and then explained, “On Tavny, the male children are taken away from their mothers and raised exclusively by other men. When I realized I was pregnant, and Jeyal told me about that custom…I have to admit, Deanna, my first reaction was relief. I wouldn’t have to be responsible for raising another child at my age. I wouldn’t have to worry, if my attention wandered for half a second, that something terrible would happen.

  “But then I thought about Kestra, and about the other children Ian and I never had and never would,…and I realized that this—” She lightly patted her stomach. “—was a gift. I had to get my son away from Jeyal.” The strength and determination now crept back into her voice. “I couldn’t let this last chance just slip away from me.”

  The room fell silent then. Mr. Homn entered, carrying several more bowls and plates piled with market-fresh food. He and Lwaxana exchanged silent nods as he gathered up the over-ripened hilreps and headed back into the kitchen.

  Once they were alone again, Deanna reached over the table and took her mother’s hand. “Mother…why did you never say anything? All your letters, they all painted rosy pictures of your new life on Tavny. If you were so unhappy, if you wanted to get away from Jeyal, why didn’t you turn to me for help?”

  Lwaxana gave her an indulgent smile. “What could you have done, dear? Come riding to Tavny with phasers blazing, like one of your Eastern heroes?”

  “Western,” Deanna corrected automatically. “And no, but…you should have at least come to me on the Enterprise once you did leave.”

  “That would have been the second place, after here, Jeyal would have thought to come looking for me,” Lwaxana said. “Besides, could you imagine Jean-Luc’s reaction if he were to see me in this state? Oh, the rage of jealousy he would fly into!”

  “Mother…”

  Lwaxana raised a questioning eyebrow, as if challenging Deanna to deny Picard’s deep-seated and long-suppressed desire for her. Then she shrugged and said, “I went to Deep Space 9 because I know Odo has his own sense of justice. He believes it’s a universal constant, regardless of who makes the law or who has the power to enforce it. He understood Tavnian law was unjust, and he did all he could to ensure the wrongs done to me were set right. Jean-Luc, on the other hand, is a Starfleet officer.”

  Deanna’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean?”

  Lwaxana tilted her head and looked at her daughter askance. “Little One, remember, I left the Federation. Just like those Marquee people on the Cardassian border.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Deanna said, shaking her head and not bothering to correct her mispronunciation of Maquis, “that is a different situation altogether.”

  “Is it? I submitted myself to Tavnian custom and Tavnian rule. Leaving Jeyal was a violation of Tavnian marriage law. And Jean-Luc, bless his heart, would have felt an obligation to follow that Primary Direction of yours, and to give in to Tavnian authority.”

  Deanna was about to deny that there was any possibility of such a scenario playing out that way. But the words died in
her mouth as she realized her mother’s concerns were not entirely unfounded: in matters of marriage, Federation law did, in fact, always defer to local planetary law. Given that the United Federation of Planets included cultures and species that wedded in pairs, trios, and quartets of mixed genders, same genders, varying genders, and no genders, it would have been impossible to do otherwise.

  But still…“You’re not giving Captain Picard enough credit. If you needed his help, he would have found a way to help you. We would have found a way.”

  Lwaxana shrugged. “Perhaps,” she said, lowering her eyes and picking at the cavat muffin sitting on her plate.

  Deanna just stared at her and said nothing, letting that one word hang in the air between them—along with its implied follow-up, perhaps not.

  Lwaxana lifted her eyes to meet her daughter’s glare. “Deanna, please. I chose to turn to Odo for help. And Odo helped me. Try to be happy for that.”

  “I am,” Deanna said. Though happy was about the last word she would have applied to her emotional state at that moment.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The first emotion Data ever experienced was anger.

  His brother Lore had used the emotion chip that he had stolen years earlier to broadcast anger and other negative emotions into Data’s positronic brain, and then played upon that murderous rage to turn him against his friends, forcing him to violate his most basic, hardcoded sense of right and wrong. The incident had been so disturbing to him that, once he overcame Lore’s influence and reclaimed the emotion chip, Data had intended to vaporize the final gift his father ever gave him. He had been willing to forgo ever feeling any emotion ever again, in order to avoid re-experiencing that kind of dark anger ever again.

  And even after a year of experiencing, developing, and refining the new emotional aspect of his being, anger still disturbed Data on a very deep level—not only in himself, but in others as well. Which created a deep conflict within him when he entered main engineering and witnessed the scene being created by his friend, Geordi La Forge.

  “I am still the chief engineer here, aren’t I?” Geordi bellowed at his staff. The ship’s matter/antimatter reactor had fallen silent, and his uncharacteristically angry voice filled the ship’s cavernous, multileveled engineering section. Data counted eleven others present, all standing stock-still and mute, like a herd of grazing animals hoping to avoid drawing the attention of the predator who had suddenly appeared in their midst.

  When Geordi didn’t get an answer to his seemingly rhetorical question, he fixed his gaze on the engineer standing closest to him—a young, red-haired human woman Data recognized as Ensign Inge Eiger—and stepped directly in front of her, pushing his face within centimeters of hers. “Aren’t I?” he repeated.

  “Yes, of course, Commander,” Eiger answered, staring back at him in wide-eyed bewilderment. She, like all but one of the gathered engineers, had served under La Forge for only a few months, and clearly had no idea the normally genial chief engineer was capable of such wrath. For that matter, neither did Lieutenant Barclay, the one holdover from the Enterprise-D currently present. He had recognized La Forge’s behavior as being so atypical, he had felt it incumbent to alert the bridge. Barclay shot a sideways glance at Data from the far end of engineering, expecting him to step in and defuse the situation.

  But Data found himself as frozen as the others, as La Forge continued to rage. “Then explain to me why the warp core was taken offline when I never signed off on doing so!” he demanded of the young officer. Eiger’s mouth opened, but no words came out of it.

  “But you did, sir,” another voice answered. La Forge spun away from Eiger and toward Lieutenant Paul Porter. The deputy chief engineer pulled himself up to his full height and continued, “During the Algenib II mission. You said, the next time we were at a starbase, we should do a full physical inspection of the plasma inject—”

  “An off-the-cuff comment I made a month ago is not authorization!” La Forge snapped.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Porter said, controlling a slight wavering in his voice. “I was just trying to show some initiative, sir.”

  “There’s a difference between initiative and insubordination, Mister! Do you want to run this engine room, Porter?”

  Before Porter had to answer, Data managed to screw up his courage and step forward from his spot by the corridor doors. “Excuse me, Geordi. Could I speak with you privately for a moment?”

  La Forge spun and glowered at him. “Kinda in the middle of something here, Data,” he said, practically snarling.

  Data nearly let himself be cowed, but held steady. “What I need to talk with you about does take precedence.”

  For a moment, La Forge fumed silently. Then he turned back to Porter. “We are at a security summit. The last thing we need is for some flag officer to come aboard and find this ship is not at one hundred percent readiness.” He turned to address the entire section. “Get the core back online,” he barked, before turning and leading Data into the small enclosed alcove set aside as his office. Once the doors slid closed behind them, Geordi turned and said, “I wish you wouldn’t undermine my authority in front of my people like that, Data.”

  Data noted his emotion chip generating a feeling of indignation in response to that. “Geordi, I am your friend, but I am also second officer of this ship. Your behavior just now was completely unprofessional and unacceptable. Had I not extricated you from that unnecessarily confrontational situation, you would have been the one to undermine your own standing with your staff.”

  La Forge gaped at Data as if physically struck. Then, he dropped into one of the chairs in front of his desk, and put his head in his hands. “You’re right,” he muttered. “Dammit. I can’t believe I’m letting him get under my skin like this.”

  “You are referring to Admiral Hayes?” Data inquired, his own emotionalism ebbing along with La Forge’s.

  “Yeah, I’m talking about Hayes. Look at this.” La Forge reached over to turn his desktop computer monitor around and tabbed a sequence of keys on its base. Data read what appeared to be a random list of Starfleet facilities off the screen: Deep Space 2, Starbase 86, Efros Station, Starfleet Engineering Academy–Triex Annex, and several others. “What is the significance of this list?” Data asked.

  “Hayes sent it to me,” La Forge said. “These are my possible new postings if I refuse to cave in to him.”

  Data considered that with a degree of incredulity. He looked at the list again. “These positions do not seem to be suitable to an officer of your experience and ability.”

  “No kidding they don’t,” La Forge said, letting the anger return to his voice. “Every one of those positions was last held by someone with at least five fewer years of service than me. And all but one of those officers is leaving for better positions.”

  “And the one exception?” Data asked.

  “Died. Probably of boredom; nothing has happened at Efros since Ra-ghoratreii’s funeral. You’ll also notice there are no ships on that list,” La Forge continued, growing more and more animated. “Hayes wants to make sure he keeps me nice and secure in one spot. He might as well ‘assign’ me to Jaros II if he wants to punish me for defying him.”

  “I do not believe it reasonable to ascribe personal motivations to Admiral Hayes’s actions,” Data said, in what he calculated would be a soothing tone.

  “It’s personal to me, Data!” La Forge shouted, loud enough to make Data flinch. “I’ve been in Starfleet for fifteen years, and Hayes is using two incidents to make his case. How many times in those same fifteen years has my VISOR been used to save the ship or pull off a mission?”

  Data attempted to determine an accurate quantification, though he quickly realized that every contribution La Forge had ever made to any mission could be construed in such a way, since the VISOR was integral to his performance of his duties. He then thought to include these instances in his calculations, with the caveat that such contributions would not hav
e been significantly impacted if Geordi had ocular implants, as Hayes wished, rather than a VISOR. He dismissed that idea, understanding that answering the question in such a way would be counterproductive to his friend’s mood. After a humanly imperceptible pause, he said simply, “A number significantly greater than two.”

  “Damned right! Hayes has no right to treat me like this. No right.”

  Data hesitated before pointing out, “He is a superior officer…”

  “I don’t care if he’s commander-in-chief! It’s wrong, Data. Don’t you see? It’s wrong!”

  But Data did not see. He believed La Forge was now calling into question either Hayes’s morality or ethics in pressuring him to replace his VISOR with ocular implants. Data wanted to find merit in that argument, as it would provide his friend legitimate grounds to protest the admiral’s orders. But he could not. La Forge’s opposition to Hayes’s orders was not based on morality or legality, but on…

  On emotion.

  Data realized he could not fully understand Geordi’s emotions because he was not experiencing them himself. At the moment, he was primarily feeling sadness at the thought of his closest and most valued friend leaving the ship. He also felt sympathy for him in his unhappiness. But he didn’t share La Forge’s anger over his perceived victimization.

  And so, recalling Troi’s advice, Data began to search his own memories for analogous situations. He felt fresh, uncomfortable emotions swelling within him as he recalled first being activated aboard the U.S.S. Tripoli, and the way the chief engineer laughed as he switched the newly discovered android off and on like a child’s toy.

  …and his time in command of the Sutherland, dealing with the arrogant, distrustful, and insubordinate Lieutenant Commander Hobson as his executive officer…

  …his first meeting with Will Riker, who’d automatically assumed a “machine” could not have legitimately earned a Starfleet commission…

  …Admiral Haftel denying him his status as a parent and ordering him to relinquish custody of Lal…