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The Moon of J’Gal didn’t get many visitors, save for platoons getting ready to muster out and the dregs of platoons beaming in for treatment. That was one way wars in space were like naval battles back in the old days, Christine thought. You had to be pretty lucky to get treatment at all. If your boat sank, you drowned, and they were still working with cork life jackets. Sure, they’d keep you afloat, but they wouldn’t stop you from freezing to death.
The best thing about a space war was how few of the dead they had to see. If you didn’t have a pulse, the transporter wouldn’t grab you. It made you feel successful. So many saved! Then the numbers came back. So many lost .
It would have been a lot worse without M’Benga, a lot more wondering what the hell are you doing here Christine? Or self-berating: wow, good job with the fucking up in grad school to end up moving from metaphorical hell to literal hell. But Joseph somehow managed to be interested in everything in a way that reminded Christine of why she’d been in school to begin with. You didn’t have to be in school to learn, and there was still so much to learn, about shrapnel wounds, and space-sickness, and new possible treatments using weird alien slime. There were bad days, but there were good days too. There were great days, and you learned to hold on to every minute.
Anyways, they didn’t really get visitors, so the arrival of a diplomatic shuttle with a crew of Vulcans on it was pretty exciting for its rarity. They were mostly there to meet with Trask, get the lay of the land, and then attempt to negotiate for PoWs or something (good luck, said M’Benga with a grunt, but though it was sarcastic, Christine could hear the undertone that he meant it), and the most contact she would have with them was during a brief tour of the medical facilities.
They came in, all robes and frowns and Christine tried not to roll her eyes. She didn’t mind Vulcans. They were fine when they loosened up a little, but every single one of them seemed to have severe social anxiety. Being friendly to strangers wasn’t drilled into them as kids like it had been to her. She didn’t pay much attention to their group, until, when they were leaving, one of the little ones tripped on a bit of broken flooring (Martinez had promised to get it fixed but the organ equipment was a little more high priority), and clipped the wall, and then grabbed her knee and tried to stagger away, but a well of some serious dark green blood had started staining her robes under her clasping hand.
“Get that treated,” said one of the other Vulcans, and Christine could see the little one’s shoulders draw just a little tighter as if the words were heard as a rebuke.
“Hey,” she said, stepping in. “Come over here. We’ll have it fixed in two ticks.”
The Vulcans departed, M’Benga had other shit to do, so Christine hoisted the girl onto a biobed and asked her to pull up her robes so Christine could take a look.
“I apologize for my clumsiness,” the girl said, wincing down at the ragged cut on her shin. She was pretty, with big eyes and high cheekbones and glowy brown skin that would have made Christine trip over her own feet in bisexual panic if she hadn’t been On the Job. Her hair was a little longer than the classic Vulcan cut, shoulder length, tied back behind her head, and though her tone was flatly Vulcan the wry (slightly bitter) self-deprecation in the words made Christine like her, without any real reason for it.
“No trouble. Honestly, a little dermal regen is a pleasure around here. I don’t even have to check your vitals. Unless you just decide to give up breathing on me.” Christine flashed her her best smile. (Lost on Vulcans, of course.) “Please don’t.”
“I have no intention of it,” the girl said, and though it could have just been a flat, wtf, you weirdass human , she flashed the tiniest flex of the corners of her lips, and Christine put a little score in her box. Chip-in-b irdie . (M’Benga had introduced her to an ancient console game about golf. They played every night. It got quite competitive.)
Christine eyed the wound. Fuck, they did need to fix that flooring. That was nasty. She cleaned it up, saw a pained flex of the delicate foot, and started to talk again to distract her, though she knew this wasn’t her skill area. Most of her patients these days were unconscious. It made up for never having figured out the whole ‘bedside manner’ thing.
“So what are you doing on this fun jaunt into a warzone?” she asked. “You some genius adjudicator, a brilliant negotiating lead?”
The girl huffed a small breath out of her nose. “Nothing so official. I’m a trainee theraputics counselor. My career is in treating v’tosh ka'tur for injuries of logic, and it is well known that war creates the most v’tosh ka'tur. So I am seeing it for myself, to gain perspective and understanding.”
Christine’s hand froze as she reached for a charged dermal regen. “You-- you’re a student ?”
“Well, technically I am here as an administrative assistant, but I applied for the post to advance my studies.”
Christine found no words to respond to that. What kind of person would come here to ‘advance their studies’? It felt like some weird Vulcan shit, like war tourism, like--
“What about you? What brings you to this broken, assaulted moon?” The girl paused, frowned slightly, and then offered an entirely unexpected phrase. “What’s a ‘pretty girl like you’ doing in a ‘place like this’?”
Entirely blindsided by the pick-up line, Christine gaped at the Vulcan girl for possibly a whole minute and then realized that the wound had begun to bleed again and tamped it hard with gauze.
The girl looked deeply awkward. “Is that incorrect? I have been reading a lot of Earth sources on PTSD and moral injuries, and also . . . fiction, and I wanted to practice colloquial phrasing.”
Christine’s laughter bubbled out of her choked throat. “It was perfect,” she said, juicing the dermal regen and starting to carefully knit the skin back together. “If you were some sleazy guy trying to pick me up in a bar. I mean, to be fair, if you tried to pick me up in a bar, I’d say yes. But I’m not sure that’s what you were going for.”
The girl looked flustered and embarrassed, and opened her mouth to try to clarify—which would mean she’d say she would never try to pick Christine up in a bar, so better cut her off.
“Anyways, I managed to flunk out of grad school for my MDPhD and ran away to the front. That classic tale.”
“You … failed?” the girl said, her tone slightly cautious, which made sense for someone who was being treated by a medical professional who just admitted they hadn’t passed their training.
“It wasn’t the work. I did fine on the work. It was … people stuff,” Christine said, not making eye contact. “I’m not so great at people stuff. And stress.”
She could see the relaxation of the girl’s body. “There is indeed a lot of stress. One would think that war would bring more, and yet--”
Christine could hear the understanding in the half-finished phrase and glanced up to try to read her face. Did she get it ? Was she also running away from grad school? “You want to be great, you know,” she said, the words tumbling out, unprompted and unplanned. “You want to do this thing because you love it, and then you’re around all these other people who love it even more, who are cleverer, and faster and more charming, and you feel like a fraud, like a poser, and you want it, you want to drink from that cup, but it’s poisoned with jealousy and self-pity, and--”
“And so you choose a concrete moral good, aiding the dying, defending peace, to replace the tangled feelings of not good enough .”
Christine stared at her. “Something like that.”
The girl nodded. “Is it all you hoped?”
Thinking of J’Gal like that, as a place to hold herself firm in the maelstrom, to know that she could never do enough , but what little she could do was infinitely valuable, it was … fine. It had soothed her. But it wouldn’t have been enough without Joseph, without new ideas, something to think about, all of which ended up being a reminder of why she’d gone to grad school in the first place. And maybe, maybe after it was over, she’d go back.
“Both more and less,” Christine said.
The girl glanced down at her leg, now only bruised, and Christine started clearing that away too—not protocol, but this girl was too pretty to be left with bumps and bruises. The girl stayed her hand. “Don’t waste that on me,” she said. “Honestly, you could have used a sticking plaster.”
“Hey,” Christine said. “I could not. That door-edge is vicious. It was at least four mils deep. You needed regen.”
The girl sighed. “My first warwound, in a battle with a doorway.”
The irony was so bright that Christine couldn’t help laughing at her. She glanced up, eyes bright, sharp, a little sarcastic.
“May I speak more with you later?” the girl asked. “I would like to know more about your experiences here.”
“Sure,” Christine said. “Any time. Love to help a girl with her research.”
There was a slight pause. “Yes,” she said. “Research.”
The pause made Christine’s heart clench. Not research? Just … hanging out? Gosh , she was pretty, and what did she look like under those robes? She’d gotten a glimpse at exactly one brown, shapely leg. Christine was not usually an ankle girl, but for Vulcans, yeah, she had sexy ankles.
There was one thing about life under fire. It was a now or never sort of place. “I’m going to want to try to kiss you then,” she said. “Are you all right with that?”
The girl’s head tipped up, her eyemask flexing in a way that said, what? Then that said no , then that said— what is wrong with this human?
Then an odd, curious look passed across her face. “I … don’t know,” she said.
“Okay,” Christine said. “Sorry. I won’t--”
But the girl was holding out her fingers, in a purposeful, serious gesture, and Christine stared. Was this the-- oh.
She cautiously held out her own fingers, and gently the girl pressed their hands together. There was a warmth at the touch, not just in her fingers (always cold), but in her mind also. A spiky, ungainly curiosity, a clumsy, hopeful intuition. And something raw opened up in Christine—it was how much she didn’t want to just kiss this girl in her tent and get naked with her on the bedroll. How she wanted to go on bookstore dates, and sit on a park bench and talk about home and why it wasn’t enough, how she wanted to hear every single thought this girl had had while risking her life just so she could understand her future patients a bit better. How she wanted to tell her how her life fell apart in grad school, about the crying jags and the suicidal ideation and the relentless paralyzing fear, and how stupid it was that here it was better. Here she knew where to put her fear. Here she never had to seek death because it was always around the corner. Here she could golf instead of cry, because everyone wanted to cry, and she needed to stay hydrated.
Then there was a shudder, a flash, and a sensation of staring out a space station window, looking up at the sparks of interstellar battles and feeling a flood of confusion and rage and need. Why was this happening? It was so absurd, so irrational, and she was here, in a classroom, hearing another dull lecture about the application of the Essays on Discipline to therapeutic purposes, when how could there be any help in simple self control when you were exposed to the true illogic of a universe at war?
The diplomatic corps had been an act of desperation. But it had offered so much. Christine could feel the weight of it, so similar to her own, the brutal, horror-filled PoW camps that they had visited, the breath-stealing rattle of the ship as it was glanced by enemy fire, the negotiation gone terribly wrong, and her own supervisor knifed by a Klingon in front of her. Of course , the realization said, of course I would lose my faith in logic if this was the world I knew.
Christine's own pain rose to meet it, that technological optimism she’d been raised with, the idea that if they had Federation technology no one had to die of anything but old age suddenly meeting the reality of supply chains and graft and the fact that people were simply gears in the war machine. Of course it crunched them up, and her job was to patch their bleeding wounds and send them back out there to be crunched again.
Today is not a good day to die. But it’s no worse than tomorrow really. Today is a good day to kiss a pretty girl, and imagine a world where war can’t happen, where things go right and you are okay, and there are still a thousand possible futures that don’t involve blighted colonies and dead kids and greedy old men glorying for war, because of pride and power and disrespect . And instead there's a cool breeze, fresh air, a hand in yours as you walk along the waterside, and the knowledge that you can handle anything, because anything is small, and you are not alone.
“T’Pring!”
The voice cut through the kiss, a Vulcan summons, and Christine shook herself, eyes refocusing to realize that their fingers had wrapped around each others, crooked and clinging, like they did not want to let go. The girl’s head was up, glancing toward the door, and then glancing back, a frustrated expression on her face. She tightened her fingers in a brief, warm clench and then released them.
“I am required,” she said. “Later?”
Christine nodded vaguely, still overwhelmed at the kiss that had been like an explosion in her head, and briefly grasped the girl’s sleeve. The girl felt the restraint, and looked back up, aching and warm, her eyes startlingly voluble with emotion. “Later,” Christine managed.
The girl smiled, the flex of possible dimples just barely creasing her cheeks, and then she slid off the biobed and pushed up on her toes (she was at least four inches shorter than Christine) and pressed a brief kiss to her cheek. Then she left, moving smoothly—and slightly cautiously—out the treacherous door. She was limping, and Christine cursed herself for not pushing to take out the bruising. She shouldn’t be hurting. She shouldn’t be hurting after Christine had taken care of her. It wasn’t fair.
Later though. She’d check on her later.
#
There wasn’t a later. There was an alarm, and injured soldiers pouring in, and the diplomatic shuttle left hurriedly on a new mission. Later Christine heard that there had been a battle, and the shuttle had been hit. If there had been any survivors, they’d been transported to a different med facility, and nothing more was heard of them.
After the news came in, Christine sat in Joseph’s tent beside him, golfing their way around Cheekybeak Peaks. His body was warm against hers. After the girl had left the medcenter, he’d given her the eyebrow—making it clear he’d been watching the whole thing—and said, “Vulcans, eh?” And Christine had laughed, because why not, because she’d kissed a pretty girl, and thought about a future that wasn’t this. “They’re cute,” she said.
Now, feeling him beside her, she could hear the echoes of those words, of the way he’d smiled at her like he hoped she’d be happy, and when her ball went over the edge of a peak and dropped out of sight ( triple bogie) she’d lowered the controller and started to cry.
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