“You cannot survive solely on nutritional supplements,” Seven told Icheb severely, as she watched him once again sucking lunch through a straw in the solitude of his own dorm room.  His desktop LCARS display showed her pretty face was twisted into a disapproving frown.  “Come to dinner tonight.  I haven’t seen you since you began attending classes.”

“I’ve been busy studying,” Icheb said, but it was a lie.  His coursework was so easy that he had been spending most of his time doing his own research and assisting B’Elanna remotely as she worked on developing some of the technologies Voyager had encountered in the Delta Quadrant in anticipation of a possible return mission.

“I understand,” said Seven, “but nevertheless, you require more varied nourishment, as well as social interaction.  I’ll invite The Doctor to join us.”

“Holograms don’t require nourishment,” Icheb pointed out.

“No, but The Doctor has expressed concern about your well-being.  Perhaps an evening spent with you will reassure him.”

Icheb couldn’t help but smile at that.  “In other words, you both miss me,” he said with a small smirk.

The barest hint of a smile appeared on Seven’s face, but it was contained entirely within her eyes.  Her mouth stayed stubbornly fixed in position – a disapproving frown.  “Our feelings are irrelevant,” she said, in a voice so haughty Icheb knew she had to be teasing him.

Despite himself, he grinned, shaking his head.  “Fine, I’ll come,” he assented.  The last of the protesters had finally departed the front gates of the Academy a few days earlier, leaving him feeling slightly less confined.  It seemed possible that he could make it all the way to Seven’s apartment on foot without attracting notice – an opportunity he relished.  He hadn’t had much chance to explore the city outside the boundaries of the Academy.  Both the architecture and the history intrigued him.

On screen, Seven looked pleased.  “Very well,” she said.  “I’ll notify The Doctor.  Plan to arrive by nineteen hundred hours.”

“Understood,” he replied. 

After a final farewell nod from Seven, the transmission cut off and the screen went blank, leaving Icheb once again alone with his thoughts.  Despite his affection for Seven and The Doctor and his happy anticipation at spending an evening in their presence, he suddenly felt anxious.  He knew they were worried about his transition to life at the Academy, and after nearly three weeks, he had nothing positive to report beyond his flawless grade point average and his top ranking in the class of 2381. 

It was 18 days into the semester, and he had yet to make a single friend.  Aside from Eric Atherton, who hated him, and the TAs and student instructors whose duties required them to speak to him, he had conversed with exactly six other students so far.  All of the conversations had been awkward.  All had been in class settings where the instructor required them to pair off or work in groups on an assignment.  One-on-one, students seemed afraid of him.  In the group setting, his classmates had tried to pretend they didn’t hear him speak. He had noted, however, that they were quick to write down the solutions he offered for various questions and problems.

At this point, only his love of the stars and innate stubbornness were keeping him from seriously considering another career path.  Seven had taken a series of exams and been granted a full doctorate.  She would be working as a civilian scientist, albeit contracted to Starfleet for her expertise in Borg technology.  Perhaps he could be of similar use. 

But the stars tugged fiercely at his heart.  He knew it was irrational – in his travels with the Collective and on Voyager, he had amassed a great number of perfect memories of stars, along with many other fascinating and beautiful phenomena, which he could recall at will and view in exquisite detail.  He could access even more by visiting the observatory, or any stellar cartography classroom on campus.  And if he really wanted to see them up close with his own eyes, it wasn’t impossible to be assigned to a scientific vessel as a civilian (although given his reception at Starfleet Academy so far, he couldn’t imagine a crew that would take him without being ordered to do so).

Still, his work with B’Elanna felt important.  If he wanted to travel the galaxy in its entirety – and he did, there was no doubt about that – he would need much better technology than anyone in the Alpha Quadrant had access to in order to make it happen.  Sticking with Starfleet was his best chance at making sure that technology would be there when he was ready.  Besides, aside from Seven, everyone he admired, both past and present, was a Starfleet officer.  He couldn’t deny he wanted to wear the uniform, too.

With a small sigh, he pushed his chair back from the desk and stood up, tossing his empty glass and straw into the recycler and grabbing his Academy-issued PADD.  His next class was in thirteen minutes and he wanted to get there early to take a seat before anyone else did.  He checked his hair in the mirror above his dresser to ensure all the strands were in place.  Satisfied with their perfection, he swallowed the feeling of dread at the thought of spending the next two hours with his classmates and headed out the door.

****

For the second time in a week, Maren was in space.  Not even the fact that she hadn’t yet been cleared for flight – not even supervised flight, to her embarrassment – could spoil the view from up here, as John Quigley expertly eased their training shuttle into standard orbit above the moon.  Below them, the glittering lights of Tycho City and its suburbs spread out in an intricate pattern of hubs and spokes, looking not unlike the spiderwebs that glistened in the early morning dew on the backyard lawn at home.  Enchanted, Maren gazed down through the viewport, forgetting for the moment that she was supposed to be watching John demonstrate how piloting was done.

Frankly, she was tired of watching him succeed where she kept failing, tired of listening to Jiri’s lectures, and tired of the Martian boy in the seat across from hers who kept pointing out how lame the Lunar colonies were compared to the much newer, larger ones on Mars.  So she zoned out, tracing patterns in the lights with her eyes and wondering if there was any chance it would be her turn to fly during this semester – or this lifetime.

J.Q. – that’s what she’d taken to calling him lately, since he was one of seventeen Johns in the freshman class – seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself as he did the required lap around Luna before requesting clearance to land.  This was the second training course – take off from the Academy spaceport, navigate to Luna, achieve standard orbit, do a lap, and land.  Winston, the Martian kid, had already done it, and now it was John’s turn.  Having yet to complete the first course, Maren was just along for the ride.

“O’Connor, pay attention,” Jiri snapped from the co-pilot’s seat.  Maren glanced over and saw the Betazoid had turned around in her chair to glare at her. 

By now, she was too used to Jiri’s chastisement to be flustered by it.  “Sorry, sir,” she said, quickly returning her attention to John’s hands at the shuttle controls.  She watched enviously as his long fingers deftly manipulated the interface.  It was as if he had been born for this.

When they were cleared for landing, John brought the shuttle down so smoothly that Maren barely felt it when they touched the tarmac.  This earned him a rare appreciative grin from Jiri.  “Very nicely done,” she said.  Maren could see John’s ears turn red as he blushed at the commander’s praise.  She struggled to tamp down her envy and be happy for her friend.

As soon as John had secured the shuttle, he turned around and beamed at Maren.  “Not bad, eh?” he asked, clearly proud of himself.

Maren forced herself to smile back at him.  “You were great,” she said sincerely.  It was true – he was a natural at this.  She just wished she was, too.

“All right, plebes, that’s it,” Jiri said, taking John’s place at the controls.  “Time to head home.”  She would be flying them back, as an Earth landing was much more difficult to navigate than takeoff.  Maren checked the chronometer on her PADD.  14:37.  Just 23 minutes until the end of class, and a weekend off from Jiri’s evil glare.

“O’Connor.  Get up here.”  The instructor’s voice broke into her thoughts, and she looked up in surprise.  “Yes, you.  That’s your name, right? Deities know I’ve yelled it enough the last three weeks.  Get your scrawny Terran ass up here and into the chair,” she said, motioning toward the co-pilot’s seat.

Maren was too stunned to reply, but quickly complied, lest she open herself up to more abuse from the bitchy Betazoid.  As she brushed past John on her way to the front of the cramped cockpit, she caught him staring at her with those big blue eyes of his, looking somewhere between sympathetic and concerned.  Embarrassed, she averted her gaze, and took a seat beside Commander Jiri.

“All right, O’Connor.  I want you to tell me what to do.  Don’t touch the controls.  Just talk me through it.  I don’t trust you not to crash this thing, but I need to know you’re keeping up with the class reading.”

Maren bit back a sigh and did as Jiri said.  It wasn’t fair.  She knew the procedures as well as anyone.  So why couldn’t she execute them?  Dispassionately, she walked Jiri through the pre-flight check and departure procedures, making no mistakes.  Within minutes, they were once again high above Tycho City.

The trip back to Earth was a quick one.  Behind her, Maren half-listened to John and Winston talking about their plans for the weekend.  John was going to a concert in Seattle with his roommate.  He had asked her to come along, but Rachel had already invited her to a party.  She was pretty sure she wasn’t going to go, but it had made a convenient excuse to turn John down.  Until she figured out what the hell she was going to do about this class, she had no business skimming off to Seattle to see some band she’d never even heard of – to say nothing of the mental energy she would have to expend navigating her confusing feelings for John.

She still wasn’t completely sure whether he was interested in her, or just felt sorry for her.  He was a consummate flirt – she had personally watched him chat up dozens of girls, all with that same infuriating grin she found herself so thrown by whenever he used it on her.  They had a pretty solid friendship for only having known each other a few weeks, but judging from the cliques she saw forming all around her, that was par for the course at the Academy.  In a place like this, you needed allies fast.

On the viewscreen, she watched as the planet of her birth grew larger and larger ahead of them.  She could almost make out South America through the swirling cloud cover.   She was about to turn to tell John to look up front when she heard Jiri curse under her breath in Betazoid as the console suddenly started beeping.  She looked over at the instructor in alarm.  “What is it?”

Jiri was frantically tapping at the controls, but they seemed not to be responding to her touch.  “I don’t know,” the pilot said.  “I tried to reduce our speed and the controls froze up.”  She kept tapping intently at the interface, but nothing was happening.  Maren couldn’t tell from the Betazoid’s expression whether she was more shaken up or pissed off.

“What does that mean?” Winston asked from the back of the cockpit.  His voice was suddenly an octave higher, and Maren realized he was scared.

“This console is a new design,” Jiri explained.  “They’re still working out the kinks. I tried to reserve an older trainer but this was all they had available.”

Maren cast her a sidelong glance.  “You can fix it, right?” she asked, eyeing the controls herself.  She’d had to troubleshoot glitchy equipment hundreds of times back on the farm.  When it came to making broken systems work, she was a natural.  Never had she thought it would come in handy in space, but a shuttle couldn’t be that much different than any other machine, could it?

Jiri glanced over at her.  “Maybe,” she said noncommittally, pressing her lips together in a thin line.  She looked up at the viewscreen, where Earth was looming uncomfortably large.  “But probably not before we hit atmo.”  She shook her head and returned her attention to the controls, looking frustrated.  “I’m a pilot, not an engineer,” she muttered under her breath.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” J.Q. swore quietly.  Maren shot him a look.  His face was drawn and his knuckles were pale as he gripped the armrests of his chair.  He was scared, too, she realized.  Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to her to be frightened yet.  She was more concerned about figuring out what was wrong and how they were going to fix it. 

Beside her, Jiri tapped her combadge.  “Commander Jiri to Earth Spacedock, do you read?”  Maren craned her neck to peer out of the side viewports, hoping to catch a glimpse of the station, but all she saw was black space, and on the viewscreen, Earth, growing closer by the second.

“Commander Silai Jiri to Earth Spacedock,” Jiri tried again.  “Do you read?”

“This is Earth Spacedock,” came the reply over Jiri’s comm.  “How can we assist you?”

“I’m on a training shuttle with three cadets, headed for San Francisco.  My control panel froze up and we’re coming in hot.  There’s no time for a full system reboot, we’ll burn up on re-entry before that happens.  Requesting immediate emergency assistance.”  Jiri didn’t wait for a reply from Spacedock before standing up and turning to face the others.  “All three of you, get EV suits on, now.  If they can’t get to us – ”

Winston and J.Q. wasted no time.  In an instant, they were out of their seats, prying off the cushions to access the emergency EV suits stored underneath.  Maren, however, kept staring at the controls, analyzing the system layout and looking for a possible solution.  Just as Jiri’s combadge crackled to life again, she reached out with both hands, wedged her slim fingers into the crack where the access panel covered the EPS conduits and wiring for the controls, braced herself with her feet, and yanked on the panel as hard as she could.  The housing came free and clattered to the deck.

“Spacedock to Jiri.  We’re tracking your location.  You’re too far away for our tractor beams,” the voice on Jiri’s comm said.  “We’re trying to get a transporter lock on you and your cadets.  We’ll send the Tigris after the shuttle.”

Jiri was staring at Maren in obvious surprise and no small amount of anger, but kept her focus on the matter at hand.  She slapped her combadge.  “Understood, Spacedock.  Keep us advised.”  As soon as she was finished acknowledging the transmission, she shouted at Maren, “O’Connor! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Maren was already on her knees underneath the console, peering up at the relays.  She immediately saw the problem – a section of the user interface hardware had overheated and failed, taking the main input converter with it.   She frantically traced the tubes and wires surrounding the partially melted mess of plastic and alloy with her eyes, looking for a way to reconnect the impulse engines to the user controls without accidentally disconnecting something worse, like life support. 

Suddenly, she was grateful for her struggles in this class so far – she had spent so much time studying control layouts that she had the locations of every system burned into her memory.  It took her only seconds to plot out an alternate path between the interface and the impulse engines.

“I think I can fix it,” she said, yanking her head out from beneath the console and looking up at Jiri.  “There’s a burned-out relay in the primary interface grid.  I just need to route power around it.  We’ll lose telemetry, thrusters, and weapons, but I can give you enough control of the impulse engines to keep us from hitting atmo.”

“Get your EV suit on, cadet,” Jiri ordered.  “You’re not an engineer, and we don’t have time for this.”  

“Please, sir,” Maren begged.  “I swear I can do this.  It will only take a few seconds.  Just grab me a toolkit.  Please.”

“Maren!  What are you doing?” John cut in, his voice urgent.  “Get your EV suit on.”  He eyed the viewscreen nervously, two-thirds of which was now filled with Earth.

Maren ignored him and looked up at Jiri.  “Commander,” she pleaded. 

Jiri gave Maren a long, hard look, then spun on her heel and lunged for a storage compartment embedded in the starboard bulkhead.  She grabbed a small toolkit out of the compartment and tossed it to Maren, who easily caught it, with a grateful look.

“Spacedock to Jiri, we’ve got magnetic interference near your location.” The voice on the comm crackled with static.  “Be advised, we’re having trouble getting a solid transporter lock.  The Tigris has been dispatched.”

Jiri slapped her badge.  “Keep working on it,” she snapped, then looked down at Maren.  “Now or never,” she said, with an ominous edge to her voice.  She turned to the boys.  “Go stand next to the hatch,” she told them, grabbing her own EV suit out of a nearby compartment and beginning to pull it on.  “Prepare for emergency evac.  O’Connor, you’ve got thirty – ”

“Done,” Maren cut her off, with a breathless edge to her voice, as she hastily fused the relay she’d cannibalized from the secondary grid into place.  The job had been quick and dirty, but it had worked – there was now a clear path of lit circuitry from the control panel to the impulse drive.  She scrambled out from under the console and threw herself into the co-pilot’s seat.  “If you want to stop this thing, now would be a good time.”  She glanced up at the viewscreen, where the Northern Lights now filled the screen. 

Jiri stared at her for a fraction of a second, stunned; then in a flash, she was back in the pilot’s seat, manipulating the interface at breakneck speed.  Slowly, the surface of the Earth stopped rushing toward them, briefly froze in place, then started to recede as Jiri threw the shuttle into reverse.  Behind her, Maren heard one of the boys let out a long, trembling sigh of relief through the speaker on his EV suit. 

Whoever it was, she couldn’t blame him.  Her own heart was suddenly pounding in her chest and her hands had stared to shake as the adrenaline rush caught up with her.  I can’t believe I just pulled that off.  In the moment, she had been so sure of herself, so confident in her abilities.  Now that they were safe, the fear she should have felt all along was setting in.  What if I’d killed us, instead?

She didn’t have time to think about it.  Suddenly, EV-suit-clad arms wrapped around her from behind the co-pilot’s chair and someone kissed her on the cheek, hard.  “Way to go, Maren!” J.Q. exclaimed, squeezing her so tight it hurt, not even bothering to hide the relief and enthusiasm in his voice.  “Where did you learn to do that?”

Maren blushed deeply at the praise – and the kiss – but tried to keep her composure.  This was the first moment of actual competency she’d shown since setting foot in Jiri’s class on the first day of school.  She wasn’t about to screw it up by acting unprofessional. 

“I used to fix stuff all the time back on our farm,” she explained, trying to smooth out the shakiness in her voice.  “Heavy machinery, antigrav lifts, power tools, skimmers.  This isn’t that different.  More sophisticated, but a machine is a machine and a system is a system.  They make sense to me, I guess.”

“Well, you saved our asses,” J.Q. replied with a grin, tousling her hair with a thickly gloved hand and pressing another quick kiss to her temple.

Jiri brought a swift end to the party.  “You also disobeyed a direct order,” she interjected, fixing Maren with a critical look.  “You’re very lucky that worked, or I’d have your ass on report.”

“Yes, sir,” Maren replied, sounding appropriately contrite.  She chose not to point out that if it hadn’t worked, she’d probably be too dead for Jiri to report her.  After all, she noted as she looked around at the others, she was the only one not wearing an EV suit.

“We’ll talk when we return to San Francisco,” Jiri said coolly.  “For now, take a seat.  It looks like you’ll be getting another trip to Spacedock.”

****

After the Tigris had tractored them to Spacedock and they had beamed back down to the Academy, Jiri took Maren aside.  “Cadet O’Connor, a word with you?” 

Maren exchanged a glance with John and nodded, giving him silent permission to go on ahead to the dorms without her.  His blue eyes flicked cautiously over to Jiri and back, and he gave Maren a grim but encouraging smile before heading out of the transporter room.

“Yes, sir?” Maren asked cautiously, when he and Winston had both gone. 

Jiri glanced at the transporter tech.  “Not here,” she said.  “Come with me.”

Reluctantly, Maren followed Jiri out of the transporter room, which was just off the front lobby of the Commandant’s building.  The commander led her down a short hallway to an empty conference room and used her ID to unlock the door.  As it slid open, she motioned Maren in, then followed behind her into the smallish chamber. 

Maren tried not to flinch as the door slid shut behind them.  Alone in a room with Silai Jiri was not a place she wanted to be.  She turned to face the flight instructor, standing at parade rest.  Jiri looked at her appraisingly. 

“That was nice work up there, cadet,” she said.  “You may have disobeyed orders, but you saved Starfleet the cost of a new shuttle, and spared me an awful lot of paperwork.  So we’ll keep your insubordination between us for now.”

“Thank you, sir,” Maren said.

“You’re welcome.  But that’s not what I brought you here to talk about.”

“Sir?” Maren gave Jiri a questioning look.

“I think you’ve made a mistake, O’Connor, and I want to offer you a deal,” Jiri said.

Maren couldn’t hide her look of surprise. “I don’t understand.”  What kind of deal?

“I had a look at your entrance exams before class today,” said Jiri. “They show an incredibly strong aptitude for engineering, and your little stunt up there this afternoon would seem to back that up.  And yet here you stand, beating your head against a tritanium bulkhead, striving to become a pilot, a career path for which you have the least aptitude of any student I’ve ever had the displeasure of failing.”

“Sir, it’s only the third week,” Maren protested. “I’ll catch on, I know I will.”

“O’Connor, I’ve seen your other grades.  You’re a very smart girl with stellar marks in every class but this one.  I know you’ve done the math.  You’re failing this class so hard you’d have to pull a miracle out of your ass overnight and give a flawless performance on every test, every simulation from here on out just to have a chance at moving on.  That’s not a good way to start a career in flight control.”

Maren’s shoulders drooped slightly.  She had, in fact, done the math, over and over again.  Late at night when she couldn’t sleep, she did the math, and worried herself sick about how to tell her parents she was failing at the very thing she’d spent her life working so hard to achieve. 

“Look, O’Connor, here’s the deal,” Jiri said.  “It’s too late for you to drop this class without penalty, but I want you to do it anyway.  If you do, I’ll give you a C instead of the F you’re well on your way to earning and recommend you for the advanced engineering track.  It’s a big honor.  Fewer than ten plebes have ever made it in.  All you need is to get your current engineering professor to sign off, and you’re good to go.  If you hate it, you can always come back and try flight control again later, maybe after you’ve had some private lessons or something.  But if you don’t want a big scarlet F on your transcript marring that pretty, pretty GPA of yours, I highly suggest you take my offer.” 

“And if I don’t?” Maren asked, her voice quiet.

“I think you are far too smart for that.”

For a long moment, Maren stayed silent, weighing her options.  “When do I have to decide?” she finally asked.

“I’ll give you the weekend to think it over,” Jiri replied.  “You have until 09:00 Monday morning.”