Fur, Rank, and Starlight
A Star Trek: Kelvin Timeline Story
Stardate 2280.341 — Starbase 24, Sector 004

---

The observation lounge on Deck Eleven of Starbase 24 was not, strictly speaking, a place of particular beauty. Its viewport was narrower than the ones Meng Oren preferred aboard the Kitty Hawk, the sort of long, horizontal slot that framed the stars like a painting rather than the broad sweep of open space she had grown accustomed to on her own bridge. The furniture was standard-issue Starfleet beige, the carpet a shade of blue that someone in Starfleet Facilities Command had once deemed "calming" and that Meng had always privately considered the precise color of institutional indifference. The replicators along the far wall hummed at a frequency she could feel in her back molars if she stood close enough.

Still, it was quiet. It was private. And the stars, even framed in that narrow slot, were still stars.

Meng Oren had arrived early.

She stood at the viewport with a cup of Caitian tea, a blend of dried saltmoss and something the Kitty Hawk's replicators approximated as sh'reva root, close enough to the real thing to be comforting. The USS Kitty Hawk was berthed at Docking Pylon Seven, visible from this angle as a dark shape against the stars, her four nacelles dormant and her running lights pulsing slow and steady. Even at rest, the ship looked purposeful, that characteristic silhouette of twin secondary hulls and the reinforced connecting spine that housed her dual warp cores. Meng's ship. Her responsibility. Her home.

She was fond of these quiet moments before meetings, before the weight of rank reasserted itself and she was once again the commanding officer of an experimental heavy cruiser, the first female Caitian captain in Starfleet history, a designation that people seemed determined to remind her of on a regular basis whether she wished it or not. For a few minutes, she was simply a Caitian standing at a viewport with a cup of tea, watching her ship breathe.

Her tail curled at her side, unhurried. Her ears, which had been rotating toward the door at regular intervals in unconscious surveillance, settled forward in an attitude of calm attention.

She heard the footsteps before the door opened.

Two sets of them, which meant they had found each other in the corridor and walked the last stretch together. One set was confident, measured, with the slight heel-strike of someone who had been on starships long enough that the subtle variation in deck plating between a vessel and a station still registered as a novelty. The other was quicker, lighter, with an energy to it that communicated something between purpose and impatience. Meng found herself charting both gaits in the analytical part of her mind even before the door slid open.

Commander Shiboline M'Ress entered first.

She was striking, as Caitians tended to be to non-Caitian eyes, but what struck Meng first was simply that she was tall. The better part of a head taller than Meng, with the long-limbed proportions of a Caitian from the warmer continental regions of the planet, her fur a warm cream and gold that caught the starbase lighting pleasingly. She wore the red skant of a communications division officer, two solid gold stripes gleaming at her sleeves, freshly added if the slight unfamiliarity with which she carried them was any indication. Her eyes were large and amber, and they lit when they found Meng, followed immediately by a straightening of her posture that was impossible to miss.

Behind her came Commander T'Ana, who needed no reminder to straighten her posture because her posture communicated a barely contained irritation with the universe at all times. She was darker-furred, a deep orange-amber tabby with a blunter face and eyes that had the particular yellow-gold quality of someone who had spent decades regarding the symptoms of various ailments with professional suspicion. Also taller than Meng, though T'Ana wore it differently, less elegantly, as though her height were simply another feature of her that the galaxy would have to accommodate. The blue of medical division sat naturally on her, worn and slightly rumpled in the way that suggested she'd come directly from her ship's sickbay and changed in transit.

Both of them came to something approximating attention.

"Captain Oren," M'Ress said, and there was genuine warmth in it, woven through the formality the way emotion sometimes showed through a well-controlled Vulcan face. "It's an honor. Truly."

T'Ana's version was somewhat more gruff but no less sincere. "Captain. Commander T'Ana, CMO of the USS Wainwright."

Meng allowed herself a small breath of amusement through her nose and set her tea down on the nearest table. "At ease," she said, and when neither of them quite managed it she added, a little more gently, "I mean that in the least formal sense possible. We are three Caitians on a starbase with nowhere to be for the next several hours. I'm going to ask you both to call me Meng."

M'Ress blinked. "Captain—"

"Meng."

M'Ress glanced at T'Ana, who appeared to have approximately zero difficulty with the request and was already moving toward the replicator with the decisive energy of someone who had earned her irreverence through long service.

"Meng," M'Ress said carefully, testing the word. Her accent shaped it slightly differently than Meng's own, a trace of regional Caitian vowel shift that placed her from the southern continent.

"Better." Meng gestured toward the cluster of chairs near the viewport. "Sit down, both of you. Get something from the replicator. You've both had long transits, I'd imagine."

"Four days at high warp," M'Ress confirmed, settling into one of the chairs with a grace that came naturally to the long-limbed. "The Yamaguchi doesn't resupply here normally, but Command routed us through because of the crew rotation."

"The Yamaguchi," Meng repeated, settling into the chair across from her. "Constitution II-class."

"Yes." Something shifted behind M'Ress's eyes, a complicated combination of pride and continued disbelief. "Constitution II-class NCC-2034. She's on her third year of a five-year deep-range exploration mission."

T'Ana returned from the replicator with something that steamed aggressively. "And I'm currently aboard the USS Wainwright," she said, dropping into the third chair with a lack of ceremony that was itself a kind of ceremony. "Oberth-class science vessel. Before either of you say anything nice about it, don't."

"How long have you been on the Wainwright?" Meng asked.

"Too long." T'Ana took a long pull from her cup, made a face that was not about the drink. "Fourteen months. I've been petitioning for a reassignment since month three."

"What's wrong with the Wainwright?"

"What's wrong with the Wainwright." T'Ana repeated the question as though deciding which part of a very long answer to begin with. "The Wainwright has a crew of seventy-three. The sickbay has three biobeds and a replicator that produces bandages with an 18% variance in tensile strength, which I've reported eleven times and been told is 'within acceptable parameters.' The vessel's maximum sustainable warp is six-point-four, which means that on the one occasion this year when we actually had a genuine emergency, we spent nine hours getting somewhere that any remotely adequate ship could have reached in two. The science labs are excellent, I'll grant them that, but I'm a doctor, not a geologist."

Meng listened with the attentiveness she gave to engineering casualty reports, precise and unhurried. M'Ress, beside her, was nodding with the particular sympathy of someone who had served on vessels that were not quite adequate before arriving at vessels that were.

"The science facilities are genuinely impressive on that class," M'Ress offered, perhaps reaching for something positive.

"They are," T'Ana agreed. "Tremendous consolation when you're trying to run a trauma protocol in a sickbay the size of a turbolift."

Meng turned her cup between her palms. "When is your current rotation up?"

"Officially, two years from now." T'Ana's ears went back briefly, then returned to their default position of mild aggression. "I've submitted three separate requests for early reassignment. Two have gone unanswered. One came back with a note that my 'exceptional medical expertise' made me 'particularly valuable for long-range science mission support,' which is the bureaucratic way of saying they filed my request in the wrong direction."

Meng was quiet for a moment. Her tail made a slow, considered movement. "I have a meeting with Admiral Brandt's office on Thursday. I can raise your situation informally and see what the disposition is."

T'Ana went still in the way that some people go still when they have not expected kindness from a direction they hadn't anticipated. "You don't have to do that."

"I know." Meng looked at her steadily. "I'll do it anyway. No promises, T'Ana—Starfleet assignments are their own kind of gravitational anomaly—but I can at least ensure that the right people are aware the current situation isn't working."

T'Ana's jaw worked for a moment. Then she said, with a gruffness that was doing significant work to conceal something warmer, "I appreciate that. Genuinely."

M'Ress, watching this exchange, looked between them with an expression of quiet admiration that she made no particular effort to disguise.

"Can I ask," she said, when the moment had settled, "what the Kitty Hawk is in for? I saw her at the pylon when we came in. She's remarkable. I've only seen the class in technical specifications."

Meng allowed herself a small pulse of pride that she was well practiced at keeping measured. "Standard resupply and crew rotation. We've been out for six months, and several of the crew have family situations that wanted addressing. We also have some modifications to the secondary manifold systems that Tommy Scott—my chief engineer—wants to run through the drydock facilities here." A pause. "He's been asking for three months. I finally agreed."

"You trust his judgment on the technical side?" M'Ress asked.

"Absolutely. I simply don't agree with his instinct that every problem requires immediate and comprehensive restructuring." A glimmer of something dry and warm crossed Meng's face. "His cousin is the same way."

"Montgomery Scott," T'Ana said.

"They have the same habit of describing modifications as 'quick.' Nothing Tommy Scott calls quick has ever taken less than two days."

M'Ress laughed, and it was a pleasant sound, less contained than her speaking voice. "My chief engineer on the Yamaguchi is Andorian. He has the opposite problem. Everything he touches takes exactly as long as he estimates, which would be wonderful if he weren't catastrophically pessimistic about timelines."

"How long have you been on the Yamaguchi?" Meng asked.

"Eight months now." M'Ress settled slightly differently in her chair, the change so subtle it was primarily readable in her ears, which shifted from their forward-curious position to something a degree more inward. "I transferred from the Agamemnon after the promotion."

"Before we go any further," Meng said, "we should mark that properly. Congratulations, M'Ress. Commander. It's well deserved."

"From what I've heard," T'Ana added, and she meant it even through her characteristic economy of sentiment. "Constitution II-class Chief Communications Officer, first posting at that rank—that's not a courtesy assignment. They don't put newly promoted commanders into those slots unless the record is exceptional."

M'Ress's ears went forward, which on a Caitian was the unguarded response to something deeply pleasant. "Thank you. Both of you." She was quiet a moment. "It still feels slightly unreal. I spent six years on the Agamemnon and I thought—well. I thought I might be there another three, at least. The timing surprised me."

"Promotions usually do," Meng said. "The ones that matter, anyway."

They settled into the particular ease of officers who have cleared the initial formalities and found each other tolerable. The observation lounge remained quiet around them. Through the viewport, a small personnel shuttle moved between pylons in a slow arc, its running lights tracing a brief parabola against the dark.

T'Ana refilled her cup and returned to her chair with the efficiency of someone who had learned to move quickly in confined medical spaces. "Can I ask something that might be rude?"

Meng considered this. "Probably."

"How did you end up at the helm?" T'Ana looked at her directly, with the frank assessment of a doctor who had no patience for the social lubricant of indirection. "I mean that specifically. You graduated as a helm officer. Served your whole career in that track. Every Caitian I've known who came up through the Academy got channeled into communications, science, or medical." A beat. "Like both of us."

"It wasn't subtle," M'Ress agreed. "I was told at orientation that my 'communication aptitude profile' made me 'ideally suited' for linguistic and signals work. I wasn't told I had a choice."

"You had a choice," Meng said.

"In theory."

"In practice," T'Ana said, "the advisors don't exactly encourage you to think broadly. I wanted to do emergency medicine. I was told that xenobiology was a 'natural fit' for a Caitian applicant. I had to argue for three semesters to get my track adjusted." She paused. "I won. But I shouldn't have had to fight for it."

Meng nodded, slowly. The tea had cooled and she set it aside. "My situation was different, I think. My father was a civilian pilot. My family has been navigating for generations. When I arrived at the Academy, I had a reasonably clear sense of what I wanted, and I was stubborn enough to hold to it." Her tail made a short, decisive movement. "There was an advisor in my first year who suggested I might find communications 'less isolating' as a department. He meant it kindly, I believe. I told him I was applying for advanced helm simulation and thanked him for his time."

M'Ress smiled. "Was he upset?"

"He seemed more confused than upset. I don't think he encountered much resistance on the point." Meng looked at her cup. "I don't think it occurred to him that I was resisting anything. He thought he was being helpful."

"That's the worst kind," T'Ana said. "The ones who think they're helping."

"Yes." Meng paused for a moment in which the three of them seemed to inhabit a shared understanding without requiring it to be articulated further. "But we're here. That counts for something."

"You're here," M'Ress said, with a different weight than she'd used before. "Commanding a Proxima-class. That's—" She stopped, apparently deciding that anything she said would be inadequate, and chose instead to let the silence carry it.

"It's extraordinary," T'Ana said bluntly. "You know that, right? I don't say that to be complimentary, I say it because it's accurate and I suspect you're surrounded by enough people being complimentary that you've started filtering it. First female Caitian commanding officer in Starfleet. Full stop. That's not a small thing."

"I know it's not a small thing," Meng said. Her voice remained level. "I feel the weight of it regularly."

Something in her tone made both of them listen differently.

"What does that mean, practically?" M'Ress asked, and there was a genuine quality to the question, the kind that comes from someone who is calculating forward toward their own future.

Meng was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that was not reluctance but consideration. "It means that I am aware, at most hours, that I am being observed. Not maliciously, or not always maliciously. But when the Kitty Hawk engages with a diplomatic situation and I make a decision, the decision is analyzed in a context that wouldn't apply to a human captain of similar experience. When I succeed, I 'represent Caitian potential.' When I make an error—" a pause, a slight compression around the eyes that was not quite humor— "I 'raise questions.' My first chief petty officer once overheard someone in a starbase lounge say that my appointment was 'an interesting experiment.' He reported it because he thought I should know. I thanked him and wished I hadn't been told." She picked up her cup again, found it empty, and set it back down. "I believe in the mission. I believe in the crew. I believe in what this ship represents. I simply find it tiring to simultaneously be a captain and a symbol."

M'Ress said, quietly, "I imagine you don't have much choice about the second part."

"None whatsoever." A beat of dry acknowledgment. "Which is why I've learned to carry it carefully rather than put it down."

T'Ana was watching her with an expression that had traveled considerably from its starting position of blunt practicality. "For what it's worth," she said, "the fact that you've held the rank and the posting for the time you have does more for Caitians in the fleet than any formal policy. I've had three Caitian applicants this year mention you when they were explaining why they wanted to serve in Starfleet. Three that I know of."

Meng absorbed this. Her tail made a small movement, the kind she was generally able to control in public, a brief curling that communicated something between gratitude and the particular vulnerability of being genuinely moved by something. "I'm glad," she said. "Even when the visibility is uncomfortable, I'm glad."

They sat with that for a moment.

---

The resupply of the Kitty Hawk was generating a modest traffic of small craft between the ship and the station, and the three of them watched it in a comfortable silence for a minute or two before T'Ana broke it with characteristic directness.

"How is it that three Caitians in Starfleet have time to be here at the same time?"

"Coincidence of routing and resupply cycles," M'Ress said. "Though I confess I requested the schedule adjustment when I saw that the Kitty Hawk was berthed here. I wanted to—" she paused, choosing words with the care of someone who works in communications and knows precisely what certain phrases carry— "I wanted to meet you properly. Not at a formal function. Not with rank as the entire architecture of the conversation."

"You've done well," Meng said, with a warmth that was neither condescending nor performed.

M'Ress relaxed further, a degree of tension going out of her shoulders that she perhaps hadn't been entirely aware she was holding. "The Yamaguchi has a good crew. I've been fortunate. But it's—adjustment is the right word, I think. A new ship, a new captain, new command dynamics. I find myself running protocols in my head that apply to the Agamemnon and having to consciously update them. And the Yamaguchi's communication systems are significantly more complex than anything I've worked with before."

"More complexity isn't always better," T'Ana observed.

"In this case it is, actually. But it requires a different kind of attention. More anticipatory work. I'm scanning ahead of conversations that haven't happened yet rather than managing the ones in progress." She considered this. "It's like learning to navigate a river by understanding the watershed rather than the current."

Meng looked at her with genuine interest. "That's an apt description."

"I've been thinking about it for eight months," M'Ress said, and there was something self-deprecating and fond in her voice.

"How's the captain?" T'Ana asked. "The Yamaguchi's."

"Captain Khoroushi. She's—" M'Ress seemed to measure words carefully— "exacting. Very human-centric in her command instincts, but I don't think deliberately so. She grew up in a system where that was the water and she swam in it. She's been adjusting. We both have."

"Does she listen?" Meng asked.

"When I give her reason to." M'Ress's expression was thoughtful. "That's enough. I don't need her to already understand my perspective. I need her to be capable of updating when presented with evidence. She is."

"Then you're ahead of a lot of situations," Meng said.

T'Ana made a sound of agreement that suggested she had experience with the alternative. "My first posting, my commanding officer was a man who had served thirty years in Starfleet and was profoundly convinced that his instincts were correct about everything, including fields he had no training in. I spent eight months on that ship." A pause. "Fourteen casualties that I will always believe were preventable. Not through incompetence. Through certainty."

The observation lounge was quiet. The shuttle had completed its arc between the pylons.

"What made you stay in Starfleet after that?" M'Ress asked.

T'Ana looked at her cup. "The patients. Obviously." The gruffness in her voice was doing the same thing it had been doing earlier, covering something more serious. "The work doesn't change because the environment is difficult. People need help. I'm capable of helping them. The logic of that held."

"It did," Meng agreed. "Even when the rest of the system was aggravating."

"The rest of the system is always aggravating," T'Ana said. "That's constant. You learn to route around it like a damaged conduit."

M'Ress laughed again, more openly this time. They had traveled somewhere past formality and arrived at a kind of candor that was its own form of trust.

"Can I ask," M'Ress said, with a small, slightly cautious shift in her posture, "about relationships? Personal ones? I'm curious how both of you have managed it. Career and—everything else."

Meng and T'Ana looked at each other briefly, a glance that communicated the specific acknowledgment that this was territory they had both navigated very differently.

"I'll go first since I'm apparently incapable of keeping things to myself," T'Ana said. "I'm seeing someone. Bajoran security chief aboard the Wainwright. He's the only genuinely good thing about that assignment, and before you say anything, yes, I know how that sounds."

"How does that work?" M'Ress asked, openly curious. "Professionally?"

"Carefully. We're professional during duty hours, which I maintain through an act of continuous discipline. Off duty we're—less professional." T'Ana's expression acquired an edge that might have been read as embarrassment on someone without her particular brand of frontal presentation, but was clearly serving as a placeholder for genuine affection. "He's patient with me, which requires a specific kind of resilience that I've come to appreciate deeply. He argues back when he thinks I'm wrong and doesn't capitulate when I'm being difficult."

"Important quality," Meng said.

"Essential. Anyone who doesn't push back is useless to me. I need someone willing to tell me I'm wrong when I'm wrong." T'Ana paused. "He does it with alarming frequency, which means either he's very perceptive or I'm wrong more often than I like to think. Possibly both."

M'Ress smiled. "It sounds like it works."

"It works well enough that I would miss him significantly if I transferred," T'Ana said, with the tone of someone making a confession they find mildly irritating. "Which complicates my ongoing campaign to get off that ship."

"I appreciate you telling me that," Meng said. "It's useful context for the conversation I'll have on Thursday."

T'Ana looked at her. "You're thinking about whether a transfer would actually be what I want."

"I'm thinking about whether there's a configuration that gets you a better assignment and doesn't require you to leave behind the thing that makes the current one tolerable."

The silence that followed this had a quality of genuine consideration.

"I hadn't thought about it that way," T'Ana said finally. She sounded slightly surprised. "Hm."

M'Ress looked between them with an expression of someone witnessing a small and quiet thing that she would remember. Then she returned to the original question. "As for me—I'm not seeing anyone currently. The Agamemnon posting was—there was someone. A human engineer, very kind. But the career paths diverged and neither of us wanted to compromise the other's trajectory." A pause. "The Yamaguchi's posting is new enough that I haven't found my footing socially yet. I'm still in the phase of learning who people are when they're not performing their duties."

"That takes longer on exploration vessels," Meng said. "The first mission away from home space is the true introduction."

"Have you been seeing anyone?" M'Ress asked her. "If I'm not being intrusive."

"You're not." Meng's expression was settled and considered. "No. I haven't had a serious relationship since—" she seemed to make a decision about how much ground to give— "since well before the Kitty Hawk. There was a period on my previous posting where I thought there might be something with the captain, but it would have been complicated and I chose not to pursue it." She looked at the viewport. "My relationship with the work has always been the most consistent one. I find that this bothers me less than I thought it would when I was younger."

"You don't miss it?" T'Ana asked. Not unkindly.

"Sometimes." Meng's answer was precise and unsentimentally honest, which was its own kind of intimacy. "Less often than you might expect. I'm surrounded by people I care about. The crew is—" a pause— "it's its own form of bond. It doesn't replace everything. But it isn't nothing."

M'Ress looked at her with the transparent quality of someone still young enough in her career to be working out whether this is what she wanted her life to look like in twenty years, and reserving judgment.

---

The afternoon light through the starbase viewport shifted as the station's rotation brought a different quadrant of space into view. Somewhere along the way, without anyone formally deciding it, they had ordered food from the replicator, the default currency of long conversations, and the table between them now held the comfortable archaeology of a meal in progress.

T'Ana, who ate with the focused efficiency of someone who had trained herself to consume calories quickly during medical emergencies and never entirely unlearned the habit, looked up from her tray. "Can I ask something else that might be rude?"

"You've asked that twice now," M'Ress observed.

"Both times it was an accurate precaution."

Meng made a gesture that was permission.

"The entertainment problem," T'Ana said.

M'Ress's ears moved. Not uncomfortably, Meng noted. More with an attentiveness that was calibrated.

"Elaborate," Meng said, though she suspected she knew precisely where this was going, and felt the familiar tightening just below her sternum that the subject always produced.

"Caitian representation in Federation adult entertainment has gone up something like three hundred percent in the last decade," T'Ana said, with the clinical directness of someone presenting mortality statistics. "I know because I've had to have conversations with junior crew members about it on multiple occasions, which is a part of my job that wasn't in the position description." She picked up her fork. "It's not violent. It's not illegal. But it creates—an atmosphere. A context. There are crew members on the Wainwright, mostly young, mostly human, who have an idea of what a Caitian woman is before they've actually met one. And that idea is—"

"Shaped by material that was designed to be flattering to a particular set of desires," M'Ress completed, precisely.

"Yes."

Meng was quiet. She was aware of her own posture, which had changed in some small way that M'Ress was almost certainly reading.

"What do you think about it?" T'Ana asked M'Ress.

M'Ress considered. "Honestly? Caitians are depicted as—" she seemed to find this mildly amusing rather than distressing— "free, confident, expressive. Which is not inaccurate, in general. The way it's rendered is obviously serving a specific function and making certain emphases that are less about us than about the audience's preferences. But I've seen enough of it to have a sense of the range, and some of it is not objectionable exactly. It's just—selective."

"You're not bothered?" T'Ana said.

"I didn't say that. I said I find it—" M'Ress paused, choosing carefully— "manageable. It's a representation of something vaguely adjacent to what I am, filtered through what someone else finds desirable about it. That's a different thing from a slur or a denigration. It's more like a—" she thought— "a caricature that happens to be flattering in certain directions while being entirely uninformed in others."

T'Ana gave a short, real laugh. "That's a more generous reading than I have."

"You're a doctor. You're trained to see pathology."

"True." T'Ana looked at Meng. "What about you?"

Meng set down her cup with a deliberateness that was not aggressive but was precise. She was quiet for a moment that neither of the others filled.

"I find it significantly more difficult than either of you," she said.

Neither of them expressed surprise. M'Ress's ears had shifted to a kind of attentive stillness.

"When I became the first female Caitian to command a starship," Meng said, "I understood that this meant I would be a public figure in a way that my colleagues were not. I accepted that. I've done interviews for Federation News Service. I've attended functions on Cait specifically to speak to young Caitians who are considering Starfleet. I have appeared in official Starfleet recruitment materials, which I also accepted as part of the role." She looked at the table. "What I did not anticipate was the way the two things would interact. There is—" she paused, finding the right construction— "a market, let's say, for representations of Caitian officers specifically. Caitian female officers. And because I am the most visible one, my name appears in contexts that I find—" another pause— "dissonant."

"Specifically?" T'Ana asked, and she had gone to the careful professional voice that meant she was taking this seriously.

"Specifically, there are publications, visual materials, commercial products on the civilian market that invoke my name or image, sometimes with legal exactness and sometimes without, in ways that are associated with that particular industry." Meng kept her voice level through an act that was practiced. "I have contacted Starfleet's legal division. I have been informed that much of it falls within permissible zones. The use of the title, the rank, the ship's name—these acquire a kind of cultural currency that is difficult to regulate once it circulates."

M'Ress's expression had become something careful. "Does it affect the way the crew relates to you?"

"I hope not. I have no way of knowing, which is—" Meng stopped. Started again. "There are moments when I am on the bridge, issuing an order, and I am suddenly aware that I cannot know with certainty what the person receiving that order is thinking about. That is probably true of all commanding officers to some degree. But for me, it has a specific character." She looked up at both of them. "I am aware that I am Caitian, and female, and short, and those three things exist in a specific cultural landscape that I did not build and cannot dismantle. I manage it. But I do not find it easy, and I find it—somewhat wearing—that I cannot simply be a captain without the additional valences."

The observation lounge was quiet. Outside, the stars were where they had always been.

T'Ana said, after a moment, "That's unjust."

"Yes," Meng agreed. Simply.

"I don't have a satisfying response to that," T'Ana said. "I'd like to offer one. I don't have one."

"I'm not looking for one." Meng's voice was not harsh. It was simply clear, the particular clarity of someone who has thought about something exhaustively and arrived at the shape of it. "I've had the response I can give myself, which is this: I can conduct myself in a manner that makes the association between my name and my record sufficiently strong that anyone who looks finds the record first. I cannot control what else is out there. I can control what I do. So I do that, and I let the rest be what it is."

M'Ress was watching her with an expression that had traveled considerable distance from the slightly formal admiration she'd arrived with.

"Can I say something that might sound—" M'Ress started.

"You don't need to ask," Meng said.

"I think you handle it better than most people would," M'Ress said. "Not because you've made peace with it, or accepted it, but because you've found the part of it you can act on and you act on that. That's—that's a form of discipline that I hope I'd have in your position. I'm not certain I would."

Meng looked at her. "You would," she said. "You've already demonstrated it in other contexts. The situation with the advisor. The six years on the Agamemnon. The move to a more complex posting." She paused. "You've been doing the work for a while. You just haven't named it as such."

M'Ress was silent for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, her expression softened past the point of professional composure into something younger and more open. "I would like to maintain contact," she said. "After this. Not only in the formal sense. I mean—I would like to be able to send you a message when something is difficult and have it go to someone who has been through a version of it."

Meng felt something shift. The kind of shift that doesn't register as large in the moment but that you recognize afterward as meaningful. "Yes," she said. "I'd like that too."

T'Ana, who had been watching this with an expression that she'd assembled from the pieces of something she generally did not allow to be visible, said, "I'm going to be mature about this and also ask to be included."

Meng looked at her. "Obviously."

T'Ana made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one, and went back to her food.

---

The afternoon extended, as good conversations do, past the point where anyone had intended it to go. Someone had ordered dessert at some point, a Caitian grain pastry that the starbase replicators produced with approximately seventy percent accuracy, close enough to be evocative without being quite right. They discussed the politics of Starfleet Command, the variable quality of starbase coffee, the particular challenge of maintaining fitness routines across different ship gravity configurations. M'Ress described the Yamaguchi's first contact protocols in enough detail to be genuinely interesting. T'Ana offered an unprompted opinion on the Federation Medical Review Board's latest personnel guidance that was bracingly negative and probably accurate.

Meng talked about the race against the Excelsior.

"You actually raced her?" T'Ana said.

"Starfleet called it a 'performance evaluation.' The crews called it a race." A pause, the ghost of a smile. "She won. Handily, in the end."

"Captain Sulu," M'Ress said. "He's well regarded."

"Deservedly. He's a good officer and a fair competitor." Meng's voice carried real respect. "The Excelsior is genuinely extraordinary at sustained high-warp operations. The Kitty Hawk has advantages in acceleration and maneuverability that the comparison validated. But at cruise efficiency over long distance—" she shook her head. "We can't compete. She's built for exactly that."

"How did you feel, losing?"

Meng considered. "Appropriately. We were outmatched in the specific dimension being tested. That's information. I'd rather have accurate information than a flattering result." A beat. "My crew was somewhat more upset about it than I was. Tommy Scott spent three days running analyses to determine if there was an engineering solution to the velocity deficit. There isn't. He submitted a report about it anyway, out of professional principle."

"That sounds exactly like an engineer," T'Ana said.

"It was very Scott."

The conversation drifted, and in drifting found new territory. They talked about what it meant to be Caitian in Starfleet in a way that was different from the larger question of the afternoon, smaller and more personal, the texture of daily experience rather than the structural problem. The particular interaction of enhanced senses with shipboard environments. The social navigation of eating habits at communal mess halls, where Caitian dietary preferences sometimes intersected awkwardly with the sensibilities of crewmates. The way that emotional displays, which were natural and legible within Caitian social grammar, were frequently misread by non-Caitian crew as either extreme distress or extreme hostility when they were neither.

"I have a very Vulcan XO," Meng said. "He has become, over time, quite fluent in reading my nonverbal communication. He can tell the difference between an irritated tail-flick and a concerned one. It took approximately eight months."

"Eight months is fast," M'Ress said.

"He's a fast study." A warmth in Meng's voice that was clearly genuine. "T'Vrak is—he's an exceptional officer and a person I trust without reservation. That kind of relationship takes time to build and I'm aware of how fortunate I am to have it."

"Is he difficult?" T'Ana asked. "Vulcans can be difficult."

"He is precise, which occasionally reads as difficulty, and he does not waste words, which in a crisis is an enormous virtue and in a slow afternoon can feel slightly taxing." A measured pause. "He lost most of his family and his homeworld when he was young. That shapes everything about him in ways that I—" she stopped— "that I do my best to understand and make room for. He is also one of the finest people I have served with. The two things coexist."

The station's lighting had shifted toward the cooler spectrum that indicated late afternoon by the clock, though the stars beyond the viewport were indifferent to the station's circadian schedules. The shuttle traffic had slowed. Somewhere deeper in the starbase, a resupply operation was concluding; the Kitty Hawk's running lights pulsed at their steady interval.

M'Ress looked at the ship through the viewport. "She really is beautiful," she said.

Meng followed her gaze. "Yes," she said. "She is."

"Do you ever worry about her? When you're not aboard?"

The question was quiet and specific, the kind that comes from someone who has recently acquired something they are beginning to feel responsible for and is looking for confirmation of how that is supposed to feel.

"Always," Meng said. "But the worry has a particular quality. It's the worry of something that belongs to you in the way important things belong to you—not as a possession, but as a relationship. You worry because you care, and the caring is right, and therefore the worry is simply evidence of that." She looked at the ship a moment longer. "I walked the decks last night at 0200, which I do when we're in port and I can't sleep. The corridors were quieter than at warp, fewer people, most of the crew on shore leave. The ship felt—" she searched for it— "anticipatory. Ready to go somewhere. It's a feeling I've tried to explain to people who haven't commanded a vessel and found it generally doesn't translate."

"I think I understand," M'Ress said. "Or I understand the beginning of it."

"You'll understand it better in two years. And differently in five."

T'Ana, who had finished her food and was sitting with the particular stillness of someone who is content but won't say so directly, said, "I'm going to make a professional observation."

"Go ahead," Meng said.

"You should rest more." She said it with the bluntness of a medical officer and the specificity of someone who had spent several hours watching a subject carefully. "Not tonight necessarily. In general. You hold a significant amount. You carry it well, but it leaves marks."

Meng received this without defensiveness. "I know."

"I'm not moralizing. I'm noting a data point."

"Noted."

T'Ana looked at her a moment longer. "Good."

---

They parted an hour later, in the corridor outside the observation lounge. The meeting had begun as formal as a tribunal and ended as the kind of afternoon that generates its own gravity in memory, the kind you return to without entirely meaning to.

M'Ress extended her hand in the human fashion, then seemed to reconsider, and then—and this was the part that Meng noted carefully—offered the small head-dip that was the appropriate Caitian gesture between officers of different seniority when formality was not required. Meng returned it.

"Safe transit," Meng said.

"And to you." M'Ress's amber eyes were warm. "I'll send a message when we're underway. If that's all right."

"Please do."

T'Ana, behind her, made the face of someone who was not particularly comfortable with ceremonial farewells and was managing it through momentum. "I'm going back to my ship, because my Bajoran is cooking dinner and it takes him a long time and if I'm late the timing is ruined. He takes it personally." A pause. "Thank you for the conversation. And the—" she made a gesture with one hand that indicated the Thursday meeting she could not quite bring herself to reference directly— "the other thing."

"Thursday," Meng confirmed.

"Right." T'Ana looked at her for a moment, direct and unguarded in a way she didn't often allow herself. "You're—" she started, and then seemed to decide the thing she was going to say was excessive, and substituted— "see you around."

"See you around," Meng said.

She watched them go, M'Ress's long stride and T'Ana's purposeful one, two Caitian officers moving down a Starfleet corridor toward their own ships, their own crews, their own particular relationships with the work they had all chosen. They turned the corner and were gone.

Meng stood in the corridor for a moment. Her tail was curled in the way it went when she was relaxed and not monitoring herself. Her ears were forward.

Then she turned back toward the docking pylon, toward the Kitty Hawk and Tommy Scott's manifold modifications and T'Vrak's reports and all the particular obligations of command, walking at an easy pace through the quiet of a station at the end of an afternoon.

The stars, beyond the station's hull, were where they always were. Patient, indifferent, vast, and full of possibilities she hadn't yet imagined.

She was looking forward to them.

---

End

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Stardate 2280.341. USS Kitty Hawk (NCC-1669), Proxima-class Experimental Heavy Cruiser, remained berthed at Starbase 24 for a further six days before departing for the Cygnus region on continued exploration assignment. Captain Meng Oren's meeting with Admiral Brandt's office on Stardate 2280.344 resulted in a formal review of Commander T'Ana's posting. A transfer to the USS Victor Glover, a newly-commissioned Avenger-class heavy frigate, was approved four months later; the Bajoran security chief also transferred to the Victor Glover. Commander Shiboline M'Ress continued her posting aboard the USS Yamaguchi throughout the vessel's five-year mission.

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This is an original work of fan fiction set in the Kelvin Timeline. Captain Meng Oren, the USS Kitty Hawk, and associated characters are original creations. Commander Shiboline M'Ress and Commander T'Ana are inspired by characters appearing in Star Trek: The Animated Series and Star Trek: Lower Decks respectively, adapted for use in the Kelvin Timeline continuity. Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry, is the property of Paramount Global.

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Story and character: Meng Oren by  A dhole and a Caitian

Art by:  tony07734123