Personal Diary — Meng Oren
USS Kitty Hawk, NCC-1669
Stardate 2280.198 — Late Night, Personal Quarters

---

The Kitty Hawk is purring.

I notice it more at this hour than any other, when the gamma shift has settled into its quiet rhythms and the corridors outside my door carry only the soft footsteps of officers who prefer the dark. Two warp cores running in synchrony produce a frequency you cannot hear so much as feel — a low, steady vibration that travels up through the deck plating and into the soles of your feet and, if you are standing barefoot as I am right now, makes the pads of your toes hum very faintly. I have said this to Tommy Scott on at least three separate occasions and he keeps trying to calculate what frequency it would be. He never quite manages it, because he is listening for it instead of feeling it. Some things cannot be measured, Tommy. Some things you simply know.

I am standing at the viewport in my quarters, looking at nothing. Stars. The usual stars. One of them is probably a sun and probably has planets and probably, on one of those planets, there is some being staring up at its sky right now thinking thoughts that no one else in the universe has ever thought before. I usually find that comforting. Tonight I find it only vaguely interesting.

Tonight I am thinking about the word cute.

---

I should document this properly for myself so that in thirty years, when I have presumably achieved a level of emotional equilibrium that currently escapes me, I can read this back and either laugh or conclude I was entirely right to be this annoyed.

His name was Commander Carver Reynolds. Starbase 214. We were docked for six hours, resupply and crew rotation, the kind of stop that barely registers in a ship's log. He met us at the docking port. Big man with weird beard. Tall, which I acknowledge is not a relevant detail except that it clearly was relevant to him, because he looked down at me the way they all eventually do — not with malice, not even with condescension exactly, just with that particular recalibration I have come to recognise as the moment someone who expected a starship captain discovers instead what I apparently look like.

He shook my hand. He said, and I am quoting this precisely because I ran it back in my head approximately forty-seven times during the resupply:

"Captain Oren. I've heard a lot about you. I have to say — you're even cuter in person."

And I smiled.

I said, "Thank you, Commander," and I moved the conversation forward to the supply manifest, which is the correct and professional thing to do, and I was very pleasant throughout the entire meeting and I showed no indication whatsoever of the thing that was happening inside my chest, which was approximately equivalent to a containment field losing integrity around a matter/antimatter reaction.

[bleep]!

[bleep] Carver!

[bleep] Carver Reynolds!

I want to say that and mean it entirely, so I'll say it again: [bleep]! [bleep] Commander Reynolds and his [bleep] compliment and his [bleep] recalibration and his certainty that what he [bleep] said was something I would want to [bleep] hear!

[bleep] his stupid beard as well!

There. I feel marginally better. I [bleep] know the Kitty Hawk will censor all of that if this file is ever accessed, which it won't be, because this is a private personal diary that I keep encrypted under a Caitian cipher that would take Starfleet Intelligence six months to crack. But I feel better knowing I [bleep] said it.

[bleep] Reynolds.

JR MacReady would have kicked his [bleep] butt. Yeah. Or at least reminded him like he did to those womanizing, objectifying lieutenants from the John F. Kennedy — that I am a capable Starfleet captain who happens to be a Caitian, not a Caitian who holds rank — that I am worthy of respect. I love you, I [bleep] miss you, JR. Accepting command of the Kitty Hawk is the hardest [bleep] decision I have made.

---

Let me go back. I need to go back, because this is not just about Commander Reynolds.

I am Polar Caitian. Polar Caitians — and I have explained this to more Academy instructors and shipmates and Starfleet medical officers than I can count — evolved in different conditions than the Desert Caitians or the Forest Caitians that most non-Caitians picture when they picture us. We are smaller. Denser. Lighter-furred, with the cream-coloured undercoat that is characteristic of our subspecies. The average adult female Polar Caitian stands approximately one hundred and seventy centimetres. The Desert and Forest lines average closer to one hundred and eighty. People sometimes confuse this with the species average, but there is no single Caitian average, not really. We are not a monolith any more than humans are.

I stand [bleep] one hundred and fifty-three centimetres.

My mother is one hundred and sixty-nine. My father is one hundred and seventy-four. My brothers are taller than both of them. My sister has exactly our mother's build. And then there is me. One hundred and fifty-three centimetres, which places me, depending on how you measure these things, somewhere between "short even for a Polar Caitian" and "that is simply a very small person."

I was aware of this from early childhood. Children are perceptive in the way that blunt instruments are precise — they notice the thing most directly and say it without the social lubrication that adults apply. I was called small by other kittens before I understood that it was meant as an insult. I was called runty by a neighbour's son when I was six, and by an off-world tourist — a human, I think, or possibly a Bolian, the memory is imprecise — who saw me at the spaceport with my father and said something to the effect of look at the tiny one in a tone that was apparently meant to be charming.

My father held my hand and kept walking. He did not say anything. He was a pilot, accustomed to long silences. I have thought about that moment many times over the years and I have decided that his non-response was the right one, though at the time I wanted him to say something that would make the tourist understand they had said something wrong. But the tourist had not thought they said something wrong. That is the thing. They never do.

I grew up believing — because my parents believed it and my grandmother believed it before them — that size does not determine what you are capable of. My grandmother navigated by starlight from a hunting sled in the dark season when the polar sky is so clear you can see the curvature of the galaxy. She was one hundred and sixty-one centimetres, which made her short by our family's standards. She used to say: the current does not care how tall you are. Only whether you can read it.

I have carried that with me across thirty years of Starfleet service. I have carried it through the Academy and through the Reinard and through the Carpenter and onto this bridge. It has kept me company during every moment when some part of me wanted to stop and say to whatever room I was standing in: I am here. I am capable. Look at what I have done, not at what I [bleep] look like doing it.

---

My first week at Starfleet Academy.

Seven [bleep] days. That is how long it took.

A cadet from — I forget where. Betazoid, I think, which is funny in retrospect given my complicated relationship with that species, but irrelevant to the current story. He was tall in the way that young human males are often tall, all limbs and confidence, and he [bleep] looked at me across the mess hall on day six and [bleep] said, very cheerfully, "Hey — Mini Meng!"

The table [bleep] laughed. Not cruelly — not like the children on Cait who sometimes meant to wound. Just casually, reflexively, in the way that humans laugh when something is framed as a joke and they have not yet decided whether to examine the joke or simply respond to its framing. I smiled. I do not remember if I said anything. I remember putting my tray down and eating my food and completing my meal and going back to my quarters and sitting on the edge of my bunk for a considerable amount of time, listening to the sounds of San Francisco below the Academy windows.

Mini Meng.

I have been called a great many things in my career. I have been called exceptional. I have been called infuriating. I have been called a fine officer and a formidable tactical mind and, on one occasion by the most exasperating captain I ever served under, too clever for my own good, which I consider a compliment. I have been called the ship's whiskers by an engineering crew that meant it with genuine warmth. I have been called Commander and Lieutenant and Captain.

I have also been called animal, four times, by officers who varied in their degree of knowing that it was wrong. I have been called vermin once, by a drunk in a bar during shore leave who was subsequently shown the error of his approach in a way that did not require Starfleet to file any documentation, because nothing was technically damaged.

And I have been called cute. More times than I can count. More times than I have bothered counting. By diplomats and traders and Starbase personnel and visiting officers and civilians at functions and a human admiral at a diplomatic reception on Earth who I will absolutely not think about right now because that evening already lives in sufficient infamy in my personal memory without requiring fresh airtime.

What they all have in common — all of those people, every instance — is that they meant it as a [bleep] compliment.

That is the part that is hardest to explain to people who have not experienced it. It is not that they are trying to diminish me. It is that they do not notice they are doing it. The word cute does not trigger any alarm in their minds because in their minds, it is simply a pleasant observation about a pleasant thing they are looking at. It does not occur to them that what they are looking at is a [bleep] Starfleet captain. It does not occur to them that cute belongs to a category of words that are applied to small animals and children and things that are appealing precisely because they are non-threatening. It does not occur to them that the moment they say that word to me, they have — without any hostile intention, without any awareness — placed me in that [bleep] category.

Non-threatening. Decorative. Manageable.

I am the [bleep] commanding officer of one of the most advanced experimental vessels in the Starfleet inventory. I command a crew of eight hundred and fifty personnel representing over forty species. I have defended Federation colonies, executed first contacts, pulled ships out of astrophysical disasters, and outmanoeuvred Gorn commanders in the Cestus system with a hit-and-run tactical series that I will put against anyone's tactical record in this or any quadrant. I have done all of that at one hundred and fifty-three centimetres, which I note every time I feel the need to remind myself that size is not the point, and the point is capability, and I have proven my capability so thoroughly and so repeatedly that the proof could fill its own database entry.

And someone always, eventually, looks at me and says cute.

[bleep].

---

There is another layer to this that I am not always willing to discuss. I am going to discuss it tonight because it is two in the [bleep] morning and I am in my own quarters and the stars are doing nothing particularly interesting outside my window and I might as well be honest with myself about the full scope of what I am feeling.

When I enrolled at the Academy — this was 2255, and I was one of three Caitians in my class, which felt like both a distinction and an isolation — Caitian culture was already beginning to circulate in Federation media in ways that I found increasingly uncomfortable. I was aware of it before I left Cait. The shift happened gradually, then all at once, the way these things do. Holographic entertainment, distribution networks, the general acceleration of cross-cultural exchange that comes with a Federation expanding at the rate ours was expanding then. Caitians became visible in a way we had not previously been visible. And with that visibility came a particular kind of attention that I had not anticipated and that I have spent the better part of my career navigating.

I will not be more [bleep] explicit than this, because this is my diary and I prefer not to dwell on the specifics. But what I will say is that the word cute, when applied to a Caitian Starfleet officer, does not exist in a cultural vacuum. It arrives pre-loaded with associations I did not consent to and do not represent. Every time someone says it, they are — knowingly or not — reaching for a version of me that belongs to a genre I refuse to inhabit. A version that exists for someone else's comfort and entertainment. A version that does not command starships or write tactical papers or navigate through phenomena that have killed other ships. A version that is just an object of desire. A version that is simply an image. A pleasant, non-threatening, manageable image.

[bleep] that image. It has nothing to do with me.

---

There are male Caitians who considered me unattractive because of my height. I am going to say that plainly, because it is a plain fact. Among Polar Caitians, the pairing preferences include considerations of genetic compatibility, and my size — significantly below the subspecies average, well below the full species range — raised questions, in some quarters, about inheritance. Would a kitten share my stature? Was my height an anomaly or a pattern? No one was cruel about it, mostly. It was simply a calculation that happened, that I was sometimes made aware of, and that contributed to a pattern of romantic relationships that were fewer and shorter than I might otherwise have wished.

I chose early on not to have children. I will not pretend that the calculation above had nothing to do with it, though it was not the only factor and in some ways not the primary one. A life in deep space does not lend itself to the kind of continuity that children require. My career required sacrifices, and I made them clearly and without regret, and I have filled my life with other forms of connection and meaning. I do not feel the absence as a wound. I feel it sometimes as a question — one of those questions that does not require an answer so much as it requires acknowledgement that it existed.

What I feel more acutely is this: I was found [bleep] unattractive because of my size by some of my own people. And found unbearably cute because of my size by people outside my people. Two different audiences, two different assessments, both predicated on the same physical dimension of me, neither of them particularly interested in anything that dimension failed to contain.

It is an interesting kind of erasure, being simultaneously too small and too decorative. Invisible to the people who wanted something larger. Visible to the people who wanted something ornamental. Neither group, generally speaking, having any particular interest in the part of me that actually commands a [bleep] starship.

---

Eleven Caitian captains currently serve in Starfleet. I know all of their names. I have met most of them. They are extraordinary officers and I am proud to be counted among them.

Among them, my ship is the largest, fastest, and most advanced.

Among them, I am the only female.

I think about that sometimes — not with self-congratulation, which would be both premature and exhausting, but with a kind of clear-eyed awareness. The first. The only. There will be others; there are young Caitian women at the Academy right now who I have spoken with, who I have tried to offer something that resembles the mentorship I would have wanted at their stage, and some of them are going to be excellent officers and some of them will command ships and I will feel something I cannot quite describe when that happens. Something between pride and relief.

But right now, in the current moment, in the current quadrant — it is just me.

The first and only female Caitian starship captain in Starfleet.

And this afternoon a Starbase commander told me I was [bleep] cute.

I want that on the record. Not a Starfleet record. My record, the private one, the one that lives in this diary and in my own memory and in the specific feeling I carry when I walk off a ship at a starbase and someone recalibrates. I want it documented that I have achieved something that no one before me has achieved, and that people still look at me and reach first for a word they would apply to a small animal.

---

I keep coming back to Commander Carver [bleep] Reynolds in my mind. Not because he is exceptional — he is [bleep] not; he is entirely representative of a thing I have encountered dozens of times, and his particular version of it was not even among the more egregious examples. What I keep coming back to is the [bleep] smile I gave to [bleep] Reynolds.

Automatic. Reflexive. Already in place before the word fully registered.

I have been performing that smile for years. It is a very specific smile — warm, appreciative, slightly amused, designed to communicate I received your observation and I am not troubled by it and we can now move to the next topic. I learned it at the Academy, refined it aboard the Reinard, deployed it so consistently by my time on the Carpenter that I could produce it without engaging any part of my brain above the automatic. It is a professional tool and it is effective and I am not proud of it, but I am also not ashamed of it, because the alternative — responding honestly — has costs that I have calculated carefully over many years and generally concluded are not worth paying in the specific context.

What I really want to do, when someone says it, is something far less diplomatic. I want to set my ears flat and bring every centimetre of my one hundred and fifty-three centimetres to bear on the full weight of twenty-one years of Starfleet service and say, quietly and without raising my voice, that this is a [bleep] Starfleet uniform and this is my vessel and you are speaking to a [bleep] captain, and I would [bleep] appreciate it if you would recalibrate accordingly.

I have never said it. Not in those words.

I have said it in other ways. Indirectly, through the simple fact of my conduct and my record. Through the way I hold a bridge. Through the way my crew moves when I walk into a room, not from fear but from the particular kind of focus that forms around someone they trust. Through twenty-one years of proving, over and over, in the most literal possible terms, that I am exactly what my rank insignia says I am.

That is a slower argument. It requires patience and consistency and the willingness to make the same proof repeatedly across the full span of a career. It is not as immediately satisfying as the alternative. But it is more durable.

My grandmother navigated by starlight. She had to prove herself every night, to the dark and the cold and the ice that did not care what she was called. She proved it by reading the currents correctly, every time, until her accuracy became the thing people spoke about and not her height.

I think about her more than I probably ought to, for an officer of my rank. But I think she would have understood this diary entry. She would have understood the smile and the thing behind the smile and the two hours of standing at a viewport at two in the morning working through it in her head.

She used to say the ice does not call you cute.

She meant it as a compliment about the ice. I have always taken it as a compliment about myself.

---

The ship is still purring. I can feel it in my feet and in my spine and in the very slight vibration of the viewport glass under my fingertips where I have been resting my hand without noticing.

Tomorrow I will review the survey data from the Cygnus sector and have a technical briefing with Tommy and a session with T'Vrak on the quantum resonance anomaly he has been tracking, and at some point I will eat something and probably walk the lower decks at night the way I always do when I need to feel the ship under my feet in the literal sense. I will be Captain Oren from the moment I step out of this door, which is how it should be and how I want it to be.

Tonight, here, I am just Meng. I am one hundred and fifty-three centimetres and I am tired in a very specific way that has nothing to do with the length of today and everything to do with the accumulated weight of a very specific four-letter word. I am the daughter of two Polar Caitian pilots and the granddaughter of a navigator who used silk and starlight. I am the only female Caitian captain in Starfleet.

I am not cute.

I am not an object of desire.

I am exactly what I set out to be.

I am going to bed.

— M.O.

---
End of Entry — Personal cipher lock applied

—

Story and characters: Meng Oren ©  An Orange Space Cat

Art by:  tony07734123/KangWolf

Caitian species and related lore © Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry and owned by Paramount Global.