Chapter 17
Chapter 16
Stardate 57232
Kitty paced back and forth in the brig like an angry cat.
It had been three hours since Kitty had ended up in the brig, and the wait was driving her crazy. Ensign Wolcott sat at her position at the auxiliary tactical station. She was running a diagnostic of some sort and trying very hard to ignore the superior officer locked in the brig across from her --- and not succeeding very well.
It was clear to Kitty that Wolcott was unable to understand how a command-level officer could do what Kitty had done. Wolcott was a new enough officer to still be enchanted by the esprit de corps that all Starfleet Academy graduates have. Most officers, over time, managed to gain a dose of reality to go along with that “team spirit”, but also managed not to lose that spirit. Still, an experienced officer knew that there were times that the rulebook had to be thrown out, that regulations didn’t cover every situation. Carolyn Wolcott was still too young to have gained that much experience. To her, the idea of throwing out the rulebook smacked of treason, a treason that she was obviously taking personally.
Wolcott studiously ignored Kitty as she worked at her station, looking up only occasionally to see that the brig was still secure. She was working hard on some sort of problem, and she seemed to be having difficulty getting on top of it.
Kitty stopped pacing and watched as Wolcott struggled with her problem.
“Need a hand?” Kitty offered.
“No thank you, ma’am,” Wolcott responded coldly. “I’ll handle it myself.”
“You sure? I know those systems like the back of my hand.”
“I’m sure you do, ma’am. But I can do it myself.”
“Suit yourself,” Kitty replied. She sat on the floor in lotus and closed her eyes. She was too wired. She needed to calm down. Being wired like this wouldn’t help matters. She needed to get control and calm down. She began to meditate.
She was fully aware of what was going on around her, despite having her eyes closed. She began a box-breathing meditative exercise. She breathed slowly... in through the nose... hold for a moment... exhale through the mouth… hold again. She set up a rhythm and fell quickly into the meditative state from long practice. She felt the energy pooled just below her navel, the dan tien, where the majority of her chi energy rested. She felt the energy stir and began to let it flow through her. She let the warmth and light of the energy wash away her stress and her nerves. She used the energy to cleanse her mind, body, and spirit.
She felt Wolcott’s eyes on her, felt the young woman watching her with grudging interest.
“What’s on your mind, Carolyn?” she asked without opening her eyes or changing her breathing pattern.
The younger woman jumped at the unexpected question.
“Nothing,” she replied.
“C’mon girl, out with it. Something’s on your mind.”
Wolcott seemed to wage a war within herself. Then with an air of decision she turned to Kitty and said, “I just don’t understand how you could do it.”
“Oh, it’s easy once you get into the habit,” Kitty replied, deliberately misunderstanding the question. “The trick is in the breathing. Once you set up a pattern, your body just falls into the rhythm naturally, like when you tap your toe unconsciously while listening to music. Once you are at that point, falling into the meditative state is almost like falling off a log.”
“No, not that,” corrected Carolyn, “what you did before. Betraying the crew and... and all that other stuff. Attacking crewmembers. Disobeying orders. Attempting to leave the ship without authorization. All of that.”
“Oh. That.” Kitty opened her eyes and looked at Carolyn. “You will find, Ensign, that not everything is covered by regulations, and not every order from a superior officer is right. Sometimes there are good reasons to break the rules.”
Wolcott looked at her as if she had sprouted wings and a tail.
Kitty sighed. “Alright. Here’s a hypothetical situation. You are alone on a mission. You have been ordered not to make contact with anyone while on your mission. There are people all around you, but you are required not to make contact with them. Suddenly a Jem Ha'Dar warship shows up out of nowhere. Jem Ha’Dar warriors start showing up like flies. They begin to attack the people around you. You can fight them off, but only if you organize the people around you to fight as a group. If you don’t the people all around you will die, and most likely you will die too, leaving your mission incomplete, I might add, along with the rest of your life. What do you do?”
“I would help the people organize to defend themselves,” she responded after a moment.
“Even though it broke the rules, even though it would be in direct violation of a direct order?” Kitty asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because my orders clearly never envisioned the situation you describe. The person who gave me those orders had no idea that this situation would arise, and consequently his orders don’t cover the situation described. We studied this in ethics class at the academy.”
“So, there are times that it is appropriate to disobey orders,” Kitty offered.
“Maybe,” Wolcott conceded. “But what you did isn’t the same thing. Commander Riker wasn’t absent. He wasn’t away from the situation. You just disagreed with his orders and decided to act on your own. That’s not the same situation at all.”
“I have information that Commander Riker doesn’t,” Kitty responded.
“Then why didn’t you tell him?” Wolcott asked.
“I tried. He wouldn’t listen.”
“Then you should have let it go. You should have followed orders,” Wolcott said.
“And let my people die?” Kitty asked. “Sorry, can’t do that. And you wouldn’t have either. If you knew --- not ‘thought’ but knew for a certainty --- that someone else’s orders were going to kill someone and that there was another option for avoiding it, you would do everything in your power to protect that person. Even if it meant breaking the rules. That’s what good people do, Carolyn. They worry about each other more than they worry about the rules.”
“But you don’t know that the security team will get killed,” said Carolyn.
“Yes, Carolyn. I do,” she answered quietly. “They are going to die, because they don’t understand what they are fighting.”
Carolyn looked at her. “And you think you could do better?”
“Yes.”
Wolcott looked at Kitty in askance. “So, you don’t think you were wrong in anything you did?”
Kitty considered for a moment. “Actually, I do think I made one mistake. I burned my bridges. I can never be trusted again. Trust is a very important thing for any Starfleet officer to have... we depend on each other for everything, and we need to trust each other to stay alive. I broke that trust, and I can never be trusted again. That means that my Starfleet career is essentially over. But I can live with that, because I did it for all the right reasons: to save the lives of the very people who will no longer trust me.” She chuckled softly. “Seems like I’ve been doing that since I was thirteen, trying to help people who don’t trust me. It’s the story of my life.”
Carolyn looked at her for a few moments. It was clear that she didn’t agree completely with Kitty. But she at least understood now how this could all have come to pass, and that seemed to give her a sense of comfort. Then she turned back to her control board. “I have to finish this diagnostic. There’s an intermittent glitch somewhere in the power leads to the internal sensors on deck twelve, and I can’t seem to pin it down.”
“Have you tried running a test surge through the system to see where it cuts off?” Kitty asked.
“I tried that, but the system says that there is no cutoff,” Wolcott replied.
Kitty thought for a moment. “The relay runs through junction box seventeen, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Bring up the operating software for junction seventeen.”
“I have it,” Wolcott said.
“What version of the software is running?” Kitty asked.
“Version five-point-four,” Wolcott responded.
Kitty smiled triumphantly. “That’s the problem. You’re running an old version of the software. That version was written for the Galaxy Class starships. The sensor hardware was upgraded for the Sovereigns, and new software upgrades were written, but not all the junction boxes were upgraded with the new software. We were in the middle of a war with the Jem Ha’Dar, you know, and getting the Sovereigns out of drydock and into service was pretty important. So little things like this were missed for some of the earlier units like Enterprise. The builders figured we would catch most of the major problems during shakedown and buildup to deployment, and for the most part they did. But every once in a while, they catch something new.”
“How did you know that would be the problem?” Wolcott asked.
“I read about something similar on the USS Intrepid not long after she deployed last year,” Kitty responded. “I like to keep up with the literature.”
Wolcott nodded. “So how do we fix it?”
“Check the operating software for junction sixteen.”
“That one is running version six-point-oh,” Carolyn said after a moment.
Kitty nodded. “I figured as much. Reroute the sensor systems on deck twelve to junction box sixteen. Then run your diagnostic.”
She did. “I’m getting a green light now,” she said.
“Good. Flag junction box seventeen to Engineering for repair and add an addendum as to what’s wrong. They’ll update the software and route the sensors back to the correct junction box when they’re done.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Wolcott responded.
The door to the security section whooshed open, and a white-faced Riker stepped through.
Kitty stood up and approached the force field. “How bad,” she asked.
Riker looked positively haunted. “Seven dead, twelve injured. Four seriously.” He looked at Kitty. “They never had a chance. Johnson said that they were overwhelmed within seconds.” He stopped and studied Kitty. “You knew. You tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen.”
Kitty closed her eyes to gain control of her anger. “Yes. I did.”
“I should have listened.”
Kitty phased through the force field as if it weren’t there. “What about the Captain and the Majestrix?”
He stared at Kitty. “You could have gotten out at any time?”
“Yep.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“To what end, Will?” she asked. “I can think of three or four ways that I could have gotten off the ship and down to the surface, but all of them involve hurting or killing members of this crew, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. Escaping again would have served no useful purpose. What about the Captain and Lilandra?” she asked again.
“Johnson says that they got a good sighting of them, and they looked fine as of when they beamed back out. As to whether they still are --- your guess is as good as mine,” he admitted.
“Well, if they’re not, there’s nothing we can do about it now. We’ll assume that they are still alive and that my goal is their rescue,” she said.
Riker looked at Kitty. “Kitty, I’m not sending you down there alone.”
Kitty stopped in her tracks. “Will, haven’t we been through this enough? I’m going, and I’m going alone.”
“What can you possibly do alone that you couldn’t do better with a backup team?” he asked.
“Fight,” she answered. “Fight this kind of fight. Other people would slow me down. I need to do this alone.”
“There has to be some way we can help,” insisted Riker.
Kitty stopped in her tracks again as a light bulb went off in her brain. She began thinking madly. A full two minutes passed as Riker watched her think, afraid to disturb the obvious epiphany Kitty was experiencing.
“Yes... there is...” she said after a time with a sly smile. “I have an idea. I’m going to need a bigger gun... and some strong backs...”