"The Inner Side"

[Guest TParek]

T'Parek sat, her back stiff as a ramrod, her body feeding off of the dry desert heat as she meditated amongst the tan-orange sand and scrubby, arid-thriving plants that surrounded her. She'd brought a candle, which flickered now in the light breeze rolling across the dunes and hills, catching the flame lightly now and then.

 

The Vulcan was solidly avoiding San Francisco, avoiding Vulcans, avoiding Starfleet for a time. She needed to clear her mind, to breathe without having someone watch over her shoulder. Ironic, considering that was usually what she considered to be her primary duty aboard Challenger -- playing the onlooker who stuck her nose where it didn't belong and made sure everything ran smoothly. Smoothly, of course, as only Vulcan management could provide for.

 

Burying bootless toes deeper into the sand, she looked around the Arizona landscape. A casual observer might have confused it for Vulcan; T'Parek could never make that mistake. The sky -- perhaps it needed a storm or atmospheric disturbance to turn it otherwise, then it would be more fitting -- was a deep, searing blue, reaching from horizon to horizon without blemish. Nothing artificial or man-made in sight, which was why she'd taken a good day and a half (and a heavy load of canteened water) to make the trek to the isolated corner of the wasteland.

 

She hugged her knees to her chest, half-mindedly thumbing the still shortly-bobbed honey blonde hair. Thankfully, the abrupt change in hair color turned out to be the more lasting of her scars from the incident. It was a true shame that their now-former commanding officer had been incapacitated, but there was nothing that could be done. In retrospect, perhaps, but they lacked the luxury of putting 'retrospect' into practice with a time-altering device.

 

Something crawled across her reposed arm. Four legs and a smooth, scaled tail brushed across the skin before peering up at the intruder into his-her territory with a frightened little look. It almost made even the Vulcan smile, and she lifted the creature to inspect it. A small lizard, nothing particularly remarkable when one had gone up against Gorn in her day, but still vaguely amusing on some base, emotional level. She released it, letting it scurry back across the rocks where it made its home.

 

Change was brewing on the Challenger -- no, not just on one ship, but throughout the Fleet; throughout the Coalition. The Romulan threat was not subsiding, and it was starting to burn into her as another report here; a theory there came into the public eye. Something was up there -- something large and frightening and intimidating, and T'Parek wasn't sure she wanted to be around when the full brunt of what was to come hammered down on the fledgling organization of planets.

 

Another emotion struck her, one that made her more wary than the brief touch of pity for the reptile: fear. Fear for their work, fear for her life, and a darker, hidden fear that even she didn't completely admit to on a conscious level, something that she knew many of her kind to be facing in their dealings with the Coalition's interest in the Romulans.

 

The fear of discovery.