STTNG - 01 - Ghost Ship by Diane Carey

Author:Diane Carey
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

“How is she, Mr. Riker?” Tasha Yar kept her voice low. Afraid to attract attention to herself, possibly because she had stepped away from her post at this critical, touchy moment, she knelt beside Troi and leaned over her, nearly whispering.

“I’m no doctor,” Riker said simply, venting his frustration. If he had time to step away from his own post, Troi would be on the way to auxiliary sickbay, but there simply weren’t those extra seconds to spare. So she would remain here, beneath his hands, within his sight, under what little care he could offer.

“Sir, are we going to reconnect with the saucer section?” Yar asked. She looked at him with eyes that wanted everything to be all right, and she seemed as innocent and hopeful as a Disney drawing.

“I don’t think we have much choice,” he told her. “It just didn’t work. We get used to situations that work out, and it’s hard to get hit with one that doesn’t. Fortunes of risk, that’s all, Lieutenant.” He gave her a dismissing toss of his head, silently ordering her back to tactical, but she didn’t go.

“Mr. Riker?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Sir . . . it was my idea to separate the sections.” Tasha paused, waiting to catch his attention again. When she did, she tightened her thin narrow lips and asked, “Should I apologize to the captain?”

Riker dropped himself into the wishing well of those eyes, just for a moment. Her eyes were enhanced with a simple stroke of eyeliner and a touch of mascara; not very much, as though she were unsure and self-conscious about her femininity. Riker found himself fascinated by those thin brown lines, now slightly smudged and a tad uneven. Tasha Yar was all good intentions in one package. Had Riker not reviewed the personnel files of the bridge officers when he got this assignment, he’d have taken one look into those eyes and at the supple, slim body under them and reassigned her to teaching kindergarten to all the children on Enterprise who would brighten to see her face each day.

He felt that way right now—like she was the child and he was the teacher. There was nothing in her face, in her eyes, to remind him of her upbringing on a pathetic excuse for a colony, yet he thought of it. A colony that had actually seceded from the Federation. Its economy crashed within three decades of that secession. That distant colony where gangs became the ruling bodies, a place that resembled nothing and nowhere as much as it resembled the aftermath of the French Revolution, a place where a bad system was torn down in the name of the people and replaced by something entirely worse. A place whose day-to-day life made the Reign of Terror look organized. Mobs, gangs, indulgence of some, starvation of others, parents teaching their children to be alone because self-sufficiency meant survival. Children functioning like rats in the rubbish. And among them, Tasha. Surviving. Running. Fighting when she had to, eating when she could.

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