The Continuing Missions I: The Mission Continues

All Star Trek references, except where I have created them from whole cloth, are the property of Paramount/Viacom. All rights are reserved to them. However, this particular story is (c)2005 by Josh Cohen, and may not be reprinted except for personal use.

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Part Three

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“Computer,” Melimora called out, angling her head toward the microphone pickups in the ceiling, “privacy lock on this room, authorization Melimora-7135-Thorn.”

“Lieutenant, what are you doing?” W’Hoof had taken up a position behind the seat to the left of the captain’s conference lounge chair, the seat where he, as the first officer, always sat. Melimora didn’t respond to him; she just paced back and forth on the other side of the table, her reflection in the clearsteel retaining wall in front of the displays of other ships named Katana just as stormy and dramatic as she herself was. “What is wrong?”

“God damn it, sir!” This shocked W’Hoof, considering Melimora’s Pentekostan upbringing. “How can you just… accept him?” She turned and the bright red of her eyes tore into him. “He replaced our captain. Our captain!” A tear broke from one eye and coursed down her cheek. “The real captain’s gone forever, and I don’t give a damn how much Starfleet thinks of this one, but Frost is not my captain. He never will be.”

W’Hoof folded his hands on the headrest of the chair, looking as reasonable as a Kanid can look – usually they look either amused, thoughtful, or downright vicious, as Melimora knew. “Look, Meli” – her nickname – “I’m not thrilled about any of this. I mean, I miss the captain too. And Brandon, and Halliwell, and Counselor Dave, and everyone else who’s gone. But there isn’t anything we can do about it. We’re Starfleet. We must go on.”

“Go on?” Melimora’s voice broke and she yanked out a chair, falling into it, her face in her hands. “How the hell do you expect me to go on like this?”

This was alien territory to W’Hoof, in more ways than one. Kanids howled to release their frustrations and their sadness, and that was the end of it. None of this human… crying, that was the word. But he tried his best, anyway, circling around the table to take a chair next to Melimora and place his paw on her back, between her shoulders. She turned her head, looking at him through a curtain of tears. “Sir?”

W’Hoof tried a smile. It was not hard, not considering his breed, to approximate one, but a Kanid smile included pheromones no human could detect. Still, he was willing to help out his crewmate – once upon a time, he was just the chief of security, before being thrown headfirst into the first officer’s position, and he knew something about dealing with the crew’s personal issues. “Meli, if you’re this broken up about it, why do you keep wearing the uniform?”

Her voice was soft and husky with emotion. “What?”

“You heard me, Meli. If the captain’s death hit you so hard, why do you keep wearing the uniform?”

“I…” But she couldn’t come up with anything good, so she fell back on the old standby. “I… I guess because it’s what my family and my people wanted for me. I can’t disappoint them.”

“That’s hrwahrf-grarf, and you know it.” Melimora didn’t speak Kanid, but she picked up the meaning behind the words. “Tell me the truth.”

“Is that an order?”

He sighed. “No, Meli. I’m trying to be your friend here, not your superior. Tell me why you keep wearing the uniform.”

She slipped out from under his paw, which fell to the armrest of her chair, but then it wasn’t her chair anymore – she’d gotten up and made her way shakily over to the replicator, ordering up a box of tissues and a glass of water, which she gulped greedily before turning to W’Hoof, a white square pressed underneath her nose.

Their eyes met, bright red to warm brown, and her hand moved away from her face.

“I wouldn’t want to disappoint the captain.”

W’Hoof smiled. “Then don’t. And don’t disappoint this new one either. I don’t think Captain Zohar, wherever she is now, would approve of these outbursts.”

Melimora blew her nose, then put the tissues – used and unused – into the replicator and pressed the “recycle” button.

“I suppose you’re right. She wouldn’t.”

W’Hoof stood. “So don’t.”

A sigh. “Yes, sir.”

“Meli,” the first officer said, relieved that he’d defused his very first potential personnel explosion, “have you tried howling?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s something we do,” W’Hoof explained. “It helps us get past… things like this.”

She grinned. “I’ll give it a shot.”

“No time like the present.”



Ensign Bohannon, coming up to the bridge – it was his turn on the rota – to take over for Commander Briarcliff at the tactical station, heard something very strange from behind the conference lounge doors. He stopped, pressing his ear to the door.

Howling.

But the sound stopped, abruptly, and he shook his head, continuing down the hallway toward the bridge.

Everything seemed normal when the captain returned to the bridge. He had inclined his head in Lessener’s direction – her station was on the opposite side of the alcove leading to his ready room, but she could see him over Ensign Korvn, the monstrous-looking but bookish Accardan absorbed in the library computer station just across from hers – but she seemed placid. Frost cast a meaningful look toward the command area, but she just smiled, almost imperceptibly.

Good.

Frost had had some trepidation in keeping W’Hoof on as his first officer in the beginning – while a good officer, he had virtually no training at the job, despite his time in officer training and in drawing together the old crew as the ship was refit and redesigned – but it looked like the Kanid would work out. At least, for now.

At 1815, the gym was much more crowded than it had been yesterday. In fact, the captain found himself having to dodge other runners on the track as he warmed up. Twice a week – on the Palo-Alto, anyway, and he had no intention of changing his routine on his new ship – he would just jog a couple of kilometers to get his blood moving, and then he would move to – ah, yes, there it was: a kickboxing area. Not kickboxing in the traditional sense, but a place where there were several bags, both heavy and speed, and the one he could never remember the name of, but looked like a basketball attached to the floor and the ceiling by tensile cords. It was here he would work out his frustrations, fighting himself, as it were.

And it was here that the ubiquitous Lieutenant Tennet found him.

“Good evening, captain.”

“Oh…” He paused from a particular vicious flurry of kicks that, had the heavy bag been a living being, would have severely inconvenienced it. “Hello, Lieutenant. Fancy… fancy meeting you here.”

“Not really, sir.” She pulled on a pair of workout gloves – the old-style kind, the kind Frost wore, just leather mittens with a heavy metal bar inside the fist – and began circling the bag next to the captain’s. “I actually do this pretty often. I’m the boxing enthusiast on the ship.”

As he idly continued punching his own heavy bag, he watched with half an eye the lithe, swift technician as she flitted around hers, landing sharp, harsh thuds nearly quicker than he could see her fists move. She paused for a moment, her feet shuffling in place, watching as Frost launched a sharp, quick left hand of his own, knocking the bag so hard that the arc of its swing would have taken him out, had he not been ready to catch it.

“Not bad, Lieutenant.” The bag stabilized, he pulled off his gloves – about half an hour of this was all he could take at any rate, and he was almost there. “I can see why you like it. You look pretty good.”

She raised an eyebrow, deliberately misinterpreting what he was saying – she knew she was attractive, and she knew the captain had seen her in the altogether, as well as in the short-shorts and tank top she was wearing for her workout. Then her face went serious. “Would you like to spar, captain?”

“Excuse me?”

Tennet pointed a glove over to the workout ring that a couple of maintenance ensigns – Frost didn’t know their names – had just finished using to practice what he believed to be Galeo-whatever-it-was wrestling. He had tried it in the academy, but never gotten into it. “The ring is available, captain.”

Frost shook his head. “It’s a nice offer, Lieutenant, but I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, I am your captain. I wouldn’t want you to hold back on account of my rank. Secondly, I’m much stronger than you are – no offense, but unless you’ve got some sort of cybernetic implants” – she shook her head, amused – “I doubt you could take too many hits from me – not that I could keep up with your speed. And third, I seem to remember a certain former Captain of the Enterprise…”

“Kirk?” Tennet sounded amused.

“No. Everyone says that. It was Pike. As I recall, he got into a boxing match with his navigator, who proceeded to lay him out. I don’t feel like getting nailed.”

“If you’re sure, sir,” she said, walking toward the ring anyway. “But I promise to be gentle, should you ever reconsider.”

The captain turned to drop his gloves in a cubbyhole on the wall, planning to head over to the racing pool across the gym, but he stopped when he saw several officers giving him silent, stoic looks.

It only took a moment to convince him. He sighed, heading over to the ring.

One of the security ensigns who’d also been using the boxing equipment – practicing traditional kickboxing, for the record – helped strap the captain and Tennet into protective headgear and regular-style gloves. Then she slipped out of the ring and pressed a button on one of the ring’s posts. There was the simulated peal of a bell, and a small clock at the top of the post began running down from three minutes.

Frost and Tennet met in the center of the ring and touched gloves, and then the technician twisted, shuffling her feet most efficiently, getting into a position where she could launch a quick flurry of left and right jabs at the captain’s side, most of which he managed to take on his arms. She didn’t hit very hard, he mused, but even a mosquito’s bites can kill.

It continued that way for about a minute, Tennet spinning and dodging around the captain, her head bobbing and weaving, landing quick punches that usually landed on Frost’s arms, even though she did get in a couple of decent shots to the body.

And still the captain hadn’t even tried to hit her.

The rest of the crew in the gym had ceased trying to remain uninterested, and were now a respectable distance away from the ring, watching their new captain duke it out with a computer tech. In the glimpses he got of their faces as he stood his ground in the center of the ring, turning with Tennet, taking some hits and blocking most of them, it seemed almost as if they wanted him to lay her out.

The first three minutes, the first round, passed, and he hadn’t even bothered to try. The bell sounded, and they separated, moving to opposite corners. The security ensign and one of the other crewmembers in the gym jumped into the ring, spraying water into the combatants’ mouths. They also surreptitiously checked to make sure neither of them were seriously hurt.

The minute break ended, and the bell rang again.

This time, the captain came out swinging, and Tennet spent all her time ducking and weaving – it didn’t look to her like Frost was pulling those shots, and she didn’t want to take too many of them if she could avoid it.

After a minute and a half of this, he finally connected, that same sharp left that had sent the bag arcing hard enough to take a full-sized human off his or her feet thudding into the forehead of Tennet’s protective gear, flinging her back against the ropes. The basic laws of physics took over and on her way back, Frost rolled with her movement and drove a fierce right hook into her side.

She fell, grabbing her side, and the security ensign practically dove into the ring as the captain slipped back into a corner. Tennet rolled onto her side, waving the ensign off as she began the customary ten-count, watching carefully to make sure the tech was still aware of what was happening. At about eight, though, Tennet managed to pull herself to her feet. She started walking unsteadily toward the captain, gloves down, and his eyes widened in concern.

That was when the punch came that he didn’t expect. It came from about a meter away, Tennet stepping forward and launching all her weight behind her right fist into a strike in the unprotected area around the captain’s mouth.

He was so shocked that he forgot to fall down. He just stood there, barely able to keep his guard up as she began peppering him again, her feet still a little unsteady, her legs a little wobbly, but her fists still quick and stinging, shocked.

By the time the bell rang again, she had landed several shots on him, but it was the one unexpected one that had shocked him so.

When the ensign came to his corner this time, her eyes reflected shock at the sight of her new captain, who she hadn’t even seen in the flesh until today, bleeding from a cut lip. “Sir,” she whispered, “are you sure you want to continue?”

He spat into a small tray she held out for him. “I’m fine,” he said, his voice a little thick. “Just a little surprised.”

The ensign moved her finger around to the four points of an invisible floating square, making sure his eyes tracked, then shrugged. “Take her out, captain.”

“’scuse me?”

“She’s too arrogant. She’s not even protecting herself. Take her out.”

“Is there something I’m missing, ensign?”

But the ensign couldn’t respond – the warning buzzer sounded, and she had to give him a last shot of water before ducking out of the ring. Then there was the bell – the final round, as no match on a starship is allowed to continue past three without supervision from medical; too much could go wrong if the fight went on too long – and they came back out to the center of the ring, touching gloves again. There was a gleam in Tennet’s eye, one that hadn’t been there since she’d challenged him.

“Ready, sir?”

“Ready.” Then he twisted, bringing his left hand upward, aiming for the spot just below her breasts. She turned with him, sliding around the right side of his body and putting the whole of her strength into two hard hooks into his stomach.

He grunted. Just grunted, as he turned to her, his fists cocked, but not blocking her.

Had Tennet had an inner monologue, it might have warned her she was in trouble. But she took his lack of self-protection as another shock, just as she’d shocked him when she’d landed that one big hit in the second round. So she kept landing those small punches, flitting around.

That was when the captain realized the key. She only had enough strength for one good hit every now and then, and she gambled on a perceived weakness or overconfidence to land it.

So he constructed a web against her, bringing up his guard and taking her hits on his arms, speeding up just a bit – not really speed, though, just economy of motion. Tennet didn’t even notice it. When she saw Frost’s right hand drop, she zeroed in on the right side of his head, curling around, feet shuffling, extending her left fist into a blast that she had hoped would knock him flat.

He ducked under it, and the next thing the technician knew, she was on her back, gasping for air.

She barely even heard the security ensign counting her out.

Some of the other crewmembers had helped her out of the ring and onto a bench where she leaned back as her “manager,” the geosciences specialist who’d stood in her corner during the match, helped pull the headgear from her head and the gloves off her hands. A medtech who happened to have been making use of the parallel bars had lifted her shirt up a bit and was running her hands over the red mark below Tennet’s right breast, where the captain had hit her. “You’ll be all right,” she said, her voice gentle. “Just a shock, that’s all. If you want to come by sickbay later, one of the docs can take a look at it, but you should be all right.”

“That’s…” Tennet still couldn’t quite catch her breath. “That’s great. Thanks.”

Frost, his gear also removed, came to sit next to her. “You okay?”

“Ev… evidently.”

“You should be careful not to telegraph yourself,” he said, leaning back against the side of the ring. “It was obvious what you were doing.”

“Was it?” She tried to take a deeper breath, but couldn’t quite catch it, jerking forward and clutching her left arm to her side. “Did you have to hit me that hard?”

The captain tried to smile, but his lip wouldn’t let him. “You hit me first,” he said, pointing to his lip. “Good fight, though.”

“Yeah. Just let’s not do it again.”

“I did tell you why we shouldn’t.”

Tennet stood up, wincing. “Yeah, but I’m not much good at taking advice.”

Frost got up and pulled his towel off the edge of the ring. “I don’t much feel like another couple kilometers.” He reached up to touch his lip. “I’m gonna have to do something about this.”

“Yeah.” Tennet held out her left hand. “Good fight, captain.” They shook hands, and then Tennet headed over to the lockerroom door. As it slid shut, the crewmembers who’d been watching the fight crowded around Frost.

“That was great, sir,” said his ensign – her name was Kay Palmer, and she was average all around: average build, average-brown hair and average-brown eyes. Her name, though, was familiar to the captain’s – she was a member of Commander Briarcliff’s elite security task force, a concept developed by Captain Kathryn Janeway and her chief of security at the time, the somewhat-famous, at least in security circles, Commander Tuvok.

“How so?”

“That woman…” She paused, acutely aware of the fact that while she spoke for most of the crew in the room, Tennet was technically her superior, at least in matters of rank, and she had to tread carefully. “Sir, Lieutenant Tennet, ever since she got here, has been arrogant and spiteful in all her boxing matches. Ever since she beat Ensign Bohannon as the ship’s boxing champion, she’s been so stuck-up about it that none of us fight her anymore. I think we’re glad to see her taken down a peg.”

Frost shook his head. “I wasn’t in it to vindicate anyone.”

“Then why, captain?”

When he thought about it, he didn’t know, and said so. “It just seemed like the thing to do at the time. Sometimes, ensign, you don’t think about what you do, and it gets you into trouble.”

“Trouble?”

He slid through the crowd, which opened a path for him as he headed to the lockerroom. “Well, I did just knock out a valuable member of my crew,” he said over his shoulder, “and now I’m afraid I’m going to end up doing it more often.”

“Don’t worry, captain,” Palmer called after him. “After that, I don’t think any of us would want to take you on.”

The doors to the lockerroom slid open and Frost turned to face her. “Exactly.”

In the lockerroom, the captain pulled off his workout clothes and slid them, along with his used towel, into the recycler and padded into the ablution nook, taking a fresh towel from the stack by the entryway – evidently, more people on this ship preferred water showers to sonic ones, and the quartermaster, his old friend Gus, had picked up on that and stocked accordingly. Hanging the towel on the door to one of the shower cubicles, he stepped inside and palmed it on, turning up the heat – something he could never do when sharing a shower with his lover (a phrase that in and of itself he disliked, but that was what she was; not a fiancé, nor a wife, nor a spouse, so what did that leave?) – and standing underneath it, his head falling forward as the water ran around his cheeks and over his lips. He hissed as it hit the tender spot where his lip had been cut, spitting out the blood that still oozed from it. After a couple of minutes, Frost palmed off the water and activated the sonics, using them to vibrate the dirt and sweat off his body, leaving him slightly damp. Then he pulled the towel down off the door of the cubicle, wrapping it around his waist – the prudishness of most humans and many other humanoid races combined with the crew’s [[antonym of need/desire]] to see their captain naked was what he ascribed that to – and leaving the ablution nook.

He sat down with yet another towel, drying his hair in front of his locker, when he saw Tennet step out of the nook and carefully make her way across the lockerroom to take a seat a meter or so to his left. Unlike the captain, she hadn’t bothered with a towel, and he was struck by how well-put-together she was, even despite her arching forward to keep pressure off her ribs.

“No hard feelings, lieutenant?” he said as he stood up to retrieve his clothes.

She smiled at him, watching as he laid the towel on the bench and pulled on his shorts and uniform trousers. Then she shook her head gently, as if trying to clear cobwebs. “No, captain. No hard feelings.”

The technician sat there watching the captain finish dressing, and then watching him as he left, before turning back to her own locker and pulling out her uniform – she was on at 2000, after all.

“Finally found someone who can take you, huh?” Palmer called from behind her – she’d just come into the lockerroom, still sweaty, plunking down on the bench next to her and pulling off her workout shoes.

“You still can’t, Palmer.”

The security ensign’s face colored and she favored Tennet with a glare hard enough to melt duranium. “Maybe now you’ll be a little less arrogant.”

Tennet just smiled. “Not as long as I can still take you, Palmer.”

Palmer growled a little, under her breath, and stalked off to the showers.

If Palmer knew what Tennet was really thinking about the outcome of the match, and what she’d learned from Frost in the process, she might not have just walked away.

Which was just what Tennet had intended.

After another thirty-second wait for a turbolift – during which the captain idly wondered how difficult it would be to replace one or two of the main turbolift shafts with stairwells – and the short trip from the gym on Deck Nine to sickbay on Deck Eight, the Frost found himself perched on the foot of one of the biobeds, the nurse on duty examining his lip.

“How did you say this happened, captain?” he asked – the nurse was a Bajoran enlisted man named Del Valle.

“I didn’t.” He smiled, as much as was able, while Del went over to the cabinet built into the duty station for a dermal regenerator. “But I was exercising.”

“Exercising?”

“Strenuously.” Then he opened his mouth again for Del to turn his lip downward a bit and run the bright purple beam of the regenerator over the cut, knitting the layers of tissue together with an expert touch. It only took about a minute, all told, which ratcheted up Frost’s opinion of Michelle Tennet – most people didn’t have the guts to hit their captain that hard in a sparring match.

The buzzing of the regenerator stopped abruptly and Del let go of the captain’s lip. “Should be all right now, sir. Just take it easy, and don’t eat anything too hot – it’ll be sore until tomorrow morning or so.”

“Thanks, Del.” The Bajoran nodded and went back to his station, depositing the regenerator in its cabinet. The captain slid off the end of the bed, looking past the duty station and into the clearsteel window of the CMO’s office. Dr. Atridena was there, her face dark, arms folded as she met his gaze for a moment before turning around and slipping out the back door of the room.

Frost left sickbay shaking his head.

“You’re late,” called a voice from past the open doorway of the captain’s bedroom as he came into his quarters, idly pressing the privacy lock button on the doorframe. “I expected you back about twenty minutes ago.”

“Sorry,” he said, moving through the room toward the bedroom, intent on changing into something more comfortable than his uniform. However, once inside the bedroom, he paused.

He had known Commander Lessener would be there. He hadn’t expected to see her wearing one of his off-duty shirts, the collar large enough that her left shoulder was easily visible, the bottom hem barely brushing the tops of her thighs. It suddenly became acutely, sharply obvious to him that, with the rush of evacuating Norpin V, their move to the Katana, and getting acquainted with the crew, it had been more than two weeks since they’d been more than just casually intimate with each other.

It was never supposed to happen that way, the captain’s rational mind protested as he quickly crossed the room and pulled her into his arms, their lips meeting in an explosion of relief and excitement. Frost was supposed to leave the Palo-Alto two weeks before the Katana shipped out, getting together with Admiral Sharp to receive his new orders and meet the crew. Instead, he and Lessener were stranded on the Palo-Alto for another week and a half, assisting in a planetary evacuation effort at the Norpin V Retirement Colony.

And by then, his brain said as he lifted Lessener and carried her to their bed, laughing as she rolled on top of him, the shirt hiking up around her thighs as she leaned forward, running her hands up his chest as she kissed him, a messy, passionate entangling of lips and teeth and tongues, Lessener had taken temporary command of one of the evac ships, getting to the Katana a day before the captain, running the transporters for returning crewmembers and introducing herself around to her staff – mostly the medical, science, and personnel department crew.

Then her mouth started working its way down his neck and over his chest – evidently she’d pushed his shirt off at some point, although he couldn’t remember it – and all rational thought ceased.

The computer chimed 2100, and Frost looked down at Lessener, her chin resting on his chest, her eyes a becalmed blue and still more than slightly unfocused. “Don’t you have a staff meeting?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.” Her voice was soft, almost a mumble, her head turning so her cheek and ear fell against the captain’s chest. He reached up with his left hand and ruffled the back of her hair. “Tomorrow at 0900. Changed it this week.”

“Why?” His other hand idly crept across her shoulders, fingertips drawing what she thought were random patterns but were actually, totally unconsciously on the captain’s part, characters in the Kanid language.

Her mouth opened in a yawn that ended with her tongue stuck out at him, teasingly. “Just felt like it. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” By now his hand had wandered across her back, curving around her side, and she squeaked as he tugged, pulling her up higher on his body so he could reach her mouth, and he did so, kissing her quickly. “Just wanted to make sure. Wouldn’t want your people to think you made a habit of being late.”

“Well, no,” she said, sliding across his body again, the smooth, satiny warmth of her thighs pressing against his stomach, “but if I was late, would this be such a poor excuse?”

Frost opened his mouth to say no, not at all, but by then she’d shifted her hips downward to a much more intimate posture – so to speak – and his mouth closed silently as she sat up, grinning, and then leaned back, arching her spine until she could place her hands palm-down on the sheet – the bedspread was a casualty, flung across the room long ago. Then, in a motion, he still couldn’t believe she was capable of, despite the three years they’d been intimate, her hips lifted a few centimeters, then dropped.

And she did it again.

And again.

And soon enough, both of them were incapable of anything but the most base of physical responses.

Doctor Atridena stood outside the captain’s quarters, arms once again folded, trying to decide if it was worth it to ring the chime anyway, despite the glowing red light that indicated a privacy lock had been enabled. She didn’t know much about this new captain, despite treating him once during her residency on Deep Space Nine – he’d been in a fight that the security officers determined he didn’t start, even though he finished it utterly completely, much to Quark’s chagrin – but she knew that, when these were Captain Zohar’s quarters, the privacy light didn’t apply to her. This, of course, might have had something to do with her status as the captain’s lover, but that was neither here nor there.

Still, she felt a little bit out of sorts, upset with herself over her conduct the previous night at the crew mixer, and wanted to apologize and explain herself. Of course, Frost would never replace Captain Zohar, and she planned to make it that fact absolutely clear to him, but she was willing to give him a chance.

She pressed the page button below the privacy light and waited.

No response.

She hit it again. Still nothing.

Then she pressed her combadge. “Computer, locate Captain Kyle Frost.”

“Captain Kyle Frost is in his quarters, Deck Four, cabin 101.”

“Is he alone?”

“Negative. Lieutenant Commander Jennifer Lessener is also present.”

She knew Lessener and Frost were in a relationship – she checked the chronometer on the ceiling display: 2140 – maybe they’d already gone to bed. Atridena sighed and turned to leave when her perceptive ears – Centaurans, owing to the slightly thinner atmosphere of Centauri B II, her home planet, had better hearing than most Earth humans – picked up a high-pitched shriek followed by a shout that sounded torn out of an unwilling body, and she pressed the override button, calling out, “Medical Override, Atridena-786-Theta-Deuteron! Atridena to security, report to the captain’s quarters!” Lieutenant Farr should be on call, she thought in an instant, and Farr knew enough about the doctor’s personality to know that tone of voice brooked no argument.

Then the door slid open.

Silence.

Just what sounded like panicked breathing from the open door of the bedroom. She jogged across the living room area and turned the corner, looking through the open doorway.

There was the chirp of a combadge. “Security,” the doctor said quietly, “this is Doctor Atridena. Cancel summons to the captain’s quarters. Sorry to bother you.”

A male voice came over the channel – the doctor guessed that Farr had chosen to lead the team.

Then she closed the channel, carefully keeping her eyes downcast. “I’m sorry, captain. I just heard…”

Frost easily slid Lessener – her body slick with sweat, making it even easier – who was in no condition to move, behind him, onto the left side of the bed, and calmly picked up what looked to the doctor like a pair of uniform trousers off the floor, slipping into them and quietly ushering Atridena out of the bedroom. He palmed the door shut and gestured with a hand to the chairs in the corner. “Get you anything?”

She wasn’t expecting this. “No. No, sir. Captain, I should go.”

“Sit, doctor.”

The doctor was too shellshocked by what she’d seen to do more than follow the implied order, listening as Frost retrieved a glass of water from the replicator and carried it back to the conversation area, sitting on the couch and putting his bare feet up. “So. Tell me about it.”

A fine flush filled the doctor’s cheeks, turning them from eggshell-white to a sharp pink. “I… I heard both of you shouting, and it didn’t sound like… well, it didn’t sound like what it obviously was.”

“Obviously.”

“I came by to talk to you,” she said quietly, still having difficulty meeting his eyes but feeling his sharp blue gaze against her forehead. “To… to apologize, and to clear the air a little.”

“It could have waited. I told everyone at the meeting yesterday that whenever I’m on the bridge, I’m always willing to entertain the concerns of anyone in my senior staff. I would have been glad to talk to you tomorrow.”

“I know.” Frost watched the doctor’s hands knit, her knuckles white with tension. “But I had enough trouble sleeping last night after my… after my outburst. And then today, I wanted to talk to you when you were with Valle” – the captain belatedly realized she was talking about Del; he always had had trouble keeping track of the way Bajoran names were utilized, despite being called “Furostu Kylu” by the people of his hometown – “but I couldn’t bring myself to do it in public. I have an image to maintain.”

“The ice queen?”

“Excuse me?” Her chin finally came up, and he was able to catch her eyes with his.

“Finally. You looked at me. I won’t hurt you, you know,” he said idly, sipping his water. He certainly looked like a threat, she mused, several centimeters taller and quite obviously stronger – in fact, he was even more imposing than her ex-husband, who had been a champion bodybuilder in the Academy, although not in the same way; where he had been obviously muscular, Frost’s body language contained more intent than anything else.

“It’s not that, captain. I just… I wanted to apologize for what I said at the mixer. It was wrong of me to speak to you that way, and unfair to compare you to Irit in that fashion. And it was unfair to her, too.” She didn’t avert her eyes, even though what she was saying obviously was difficult. “I’m sorry.”

“Doctor, I understand how you feel.”

A flare of the angry Atridena showed through as she grumbled, “doubt it.”

“Excuse me?”

And then she was contrite again. “It’s… it’s nothing, captain. I… She… Irit Zohar and I were lovers for about a year, before she… before she died.”

“I see.” He truly did, too. He knew that Commander Thenow had lost one of his mates, one Lieutenant Sanali vh’Hablicheq, the chief maintenance engineer, in the attack, and he could see his loss still fresh in his body language, even though he’d only met with the Andorian a couple of times since coming on board. “A lot of good people were lost in that attack. I talked to W’Hoof about this” – the doctor’s eyebrows raised at the quality of the captain’s Kanid accent – “and he said he’d try to mediate between the old crew and the new crew.

“It comes down to this, doctor. W’Hoof is the… I guess we could call him the ‘spiritual leader’ of the old crew. They go to him when something goes wrong. And the new crew goes to either Satan or Jennifer – Commander Lessener – with their issues. But we can’t go on like this for too long. We are one crew, doctor, and while our mission isn’t exactly the same, we’re still part of Starfleet.” He gestured vaguely at Atridena, and she realized he was gesturing at her uniform and the Starfleet emblem attached to it. “Doctor Atridena, you are undoubtedly one of the top doctors in Starfleet. I would hate to think, on a mission maybe five or ten months from now, that I lost a member of my crew because I didn’t have Allia Atridena in charge of my sickbay.”

Her face broke into a smile that, clearly, she was expecting even less than Frost was. But the captain smiled back.

“Thank you, captain,” she said softly.

“Thank you for your concern.” The bedroom door slid open and Commander Lessener stepped out, wrapped in a robe so large on her that it had to be Frost’s. “As you can see, doctor, we’re quite all right. Just a little tired.”

The flush came back to Atridena’s face with a vengeance, and she stood up. “I… I…”

“You can go, doctor,” Frost said, his eyes twinkling with a hint of amusement – a prudish doctor; who’d have thought?

She made good on her escape. “Computer,” the captain said, “reengage privacy lock.” There was a beep acknowledging his order, and he motioned to Lessener to join him on the couch. She took the water glass from his hands and emptied it before setting it on the table, and then slid onto his lap. He let his arms slide around her, pulling her warm, still-trembling body to his, her arms going around his neck as her lips pressed against the hollow of his throat, a warm reminder of their earlier activities.

“Sorry about that,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to be quite so loud.”

He shook his head. “It’s all right, Jen. I’m actually quite gratified.”

“How so?”

“Beyond the obvious?” She nodded. “Not only did I get to clear the air with the good doctor, but I also managed to make you scream. How often does that happen?”

She chuckled, her breath hot against his bare chest. “I’m still recovering from that one.”

The captain’s hand slid up her leg, passing over the softness of her thigh to the warmth above it. “I can tell.” He did something with his fingers that made Lessener stiffen and gasp, her nails digging into the back of his neck.

“Again?” she breathed, incredulous. He just nodded and did it again, eliciting a low, purring moan from deep in her throat.

At least when she screamed this time, he joked later, no one came barging in.

***

End of Part Three