Chapter 7: Vulnerable
[USS Enterprise-D — Security Office, Deck 8 — 2364, Day 5, 0900 Hours]
Tasha Yar's office was smaller than Cole expected.
No personal items on the desk. No photographs, no souvenirs, no decorative objects. Just a terminal, a stack of PADDs, and a phaser maintenance kit arranged with the geometric precision of someone who'd learned that disorder could get you killed. The walls were standard Enterprise grey. The lighting was regulation bright.
The woman behind the desk matched the room. Blond hair cropped close, jaw set at an angle that dared the world to try something. Blue eyes that assessed him in the time it took to blink—height, weight, threat level, probable combat effectiveness—and filed the results somewhere behind an expression of absolute professional neutrality.
"Lieutenant Coleman. Sit."
Cole sat. The chair was uncomfortable. Deliberately, he suspected.
"I'm compiling the incident report for the polywater event." Tasha pulled up a PADD without looking at it. "You were the last functional officer in Main Engineering during the outbreak. I need your account—timeline, actions taken, personnel status."
"How far back do you want me to start?"
"From initial exposure."
Cole walked her through it. La Forge's arrival in Engineering, the contact point, the progression of symptoms through the crew. He kept it clinical—times, locations, system statuses. Engineering language. The kind of report that could survive a board of inquiry without a single word out of place.
Tasha typed as he spoke. Fast, efficient, her fingers striking the PADD's surface with a controlled force that turned data entry into something martial.
"You said you maintained partial function throughout," she said without looking up. "Medical's report flags that as anomalous. The compound's mechanism of action doesn't allow for partial resistance in baseline humanoids."
The question sat between them. Cole's throat tightened.
"I've always had a high tolerance." The lie came out smooth. Practiced. "Alcohol, medication, anesthetic—takes more to affect me. Academy Medical noted it."
"Academy Medical's records for Lieutenant Coleman show no such notation."
Cold dropped through Cole's chest. She'd checked. Of course she'd checked—she was the Chief of Security, and an anomalous resistance to a biological agent fell directly under her jurisdiction.
"It was informal." He held her gaze. Didn't blink. Slowed his speech the way liars did when they were too careful, then corrected and spoke normally. "The examining doctor mentioned it during my entrance physical. Must not have made it into the official file."
Tasha's eyes narrowed a fraction. She set the PADD down.
"I'll note it as a discrepancy for Medical to follow up on." Her voice was level. "Continue. What happened after you assumed sole control of Engineering?"
He told her about Wesley's containment modifications. The manual override. The thermal instability analysis. She typed it all, and when he finished, she saved the file and folded her hands on the desk.
Silence.
"Is there anything else for the report?" Cole asked.
"No." She paused. "Off the record."
Those three words changed the room's temperature.
"I was affected too," Tasha said. Her jaw worked once, twice, as if the admission cost her something physical. "I maintained function longer than most, but I was... compromised. I said things. Did things. I want you to know that if we crossed paths during the event, anything that occurred should be attributed to the compound and not—"
"We didn't."
She stopped. Looked at him.
"Cross paths," Cole clarified. "During the event. I was in Engineering the entire time. You were—where were you posted?"
"Deck seven. Security detail, trying to contain—" She stopped again. Something shifted behind her expression—not relief exactly, but a loosening of tension she hadn't realized she was holding. "You were in Engineering. The whole time."
"The whole time. If anyone tells you differently, they were too intoxicated to know what they were saying."
The lie was a gift. He was rewriting the timeline of what had happened between them—or rather, what hadn't happened, because in this version of events, Cole had stayed at his station and Tasha had stayed on deck seven and whatever conversations might have occurred existed only in the unreliable memories of compromised officers.
Except nothing had happened. Not in the way the outline suggested. The cure had arrived before Cole left Engineering. He and Tasha had never met in a corridor, never sat in an observation lounge, never almost kissed while their filters dissolved.
But something had happened. The comm call. Her voice in his ear, professional and clipped, asking for a statement. And now this—sitting across from each other in her spartan office, talking around the edges of vulnerability while neither of them acknowledged what the compound had stripped bare.
Tasha's compound-loosened honesty might have been cured, but the awareness remained. She'd been compromised. She'd lost control. For someone who'd survived Turkana IV by never letting her guard down, that wasn't embarrassment—it was existential threat.
"The incident report will note your actions as exemplary," Tasha said, pulling the professional mask back into place. "Engineering would have been in significantly worse condition without your intervention."
"Thank you, Lieutenant."
"Don't thank me. You did the work."
She stood. He stood. The interview was over.
At the door, Cole paused. What he wanted to say pressed against his teeth—I know about Turkana IV, I know what control means to you, I know this wasn't just embarrassing it was terrifying—but those were words that belonged to a man with future knowledge, not a colleague she'd met through a comm channel.
"For what it's worth," he said instead, "I've seen how this crew operates under pressure. You trained them well. The fact that Security maintained any containment at all during a ship-wide intoxication event is a testament to your department."
Something flickered across Tasha's face. Not gratitude—she was too guarded for that. Recognition, maybe. The acknowledgment of competence from someone who understood what competence cost.
"Dismissed, Lieutenant."
Cole left. The corridor outside Security was quiet—gamma shift traffic, a few ensigns hurrying between stations. He walked toward the turbolift with measured steps, hands clasped behind his back in the posture Coleman's body adopted unconsciously.
His chest ached. Not from injury or exertion, but from the particular strain of sitting two meters from someone you knew everything about and pretending you were strangers.
She'll come around. Or she won't. Either way, you don't push.
The turbolift carried him to deck thirty-six. Engineering's familiar hum welcomed him back—the warp core's rhythm, the ambient murmur of status displays, the faint ozone tang that he'd come to associate with the feeling of being exactly where he belonged.
Argyle wasn't on shift. The duty engineer was a Vulcan woman named T'Pral who acknowledged Cole's arrival with a nod and returned to her console. Perfect. No suspicious eyes, no probing questions, no "lucky timing" commentary.
Cole settled at station four. The same station where he'd first touched a console and had his brain rewritten by Technology Assimilation—five days ago, though it carried the weight of months. He ran his standard diagnostics. Checked the EPS grid. Noted that junction 7-alpha's repair had finally been completed during gamma shift, the micro-fracture sealed and the lining replaced.
Good. One less loose thread.
His PADD buzzed with the shift schedule for the coming week. Standard rotations. No away missions assigned. No special projects.
Routine. Blessed, beautiful routine.
Cole opened a blank file on his personal PADD and began making notes. Encrypted, buried three layers deep in a directory labeled "PERSONAL RECIPE COLLECTION." If anyone cracked the encryption—unlikely, but not impossible on a ship with Data aboard—they'd find what appeared to be a collection of elaborate cooking instructions written in a personal shorthand.
The recipes were power observations.
"Grandmother's pot roast: pre-heat to 350, contact surface for 4-6 seconds produces full flavor profile. Longer contact increases richness but causes migraines. Recommend limiting sessions to 3 attempts per day."
Technology Assimilation, translated into culinary metaphors. It wasn't elegant encryption, but it didn't need to be—it just needed to survive casual inspection.
He started a new recipe for the energy perception: "Seafood chowder: base flavor detectable at 5-meter radius without contact. Stronger ingredients (very fresh fish) produce overwhelming taste. Farpoint clam chowder nearly inedible. Allow cooling time between tastings."
Cole typed for twenty minutes, documenting everything he'd experienced since waking in Coleman's body. The turbolift sensation on his first day—the way his enhanced body had registered the gravity shift before his old instincts understood it. The junction reads. Q's mental touch. The Farpoint creature. The polywater resistance.
Patterns emerged. The Technology Assimilation activated through physical contact and delivered uncontrolled floods of information. The Energy Perception operated passively at short range but could be amplified through console interfaces. The Enhanced Physicality was always on—reflexes, endurance, senses, the metabolic furnace that burned through six thousand calories daily.
Three separate systems. Three separate costs. And somewhere underneath them all, a connection he couldn't quite see—the thread linking a dead engineer from the 21st century to a body that could commune with machines and perceive the fundamental energy of the universe.
The Traveler will know, he thought. When the Traveler comes aboard—and he will, weeks from now, with Kosinski and his fake equations—he'll look at me the way Q did. But the Traveler won't be hostile. He'll be curious. He might even help.
Until then, Cole trained alone. In his quarters, with the lights low, hands pressed against surfaces that taught him their secrets one migraine at a time.
The warp core hummed. The shift passed. Cole worked his station and wrote his recipes and waited for the next crisis, which he already knew was coming.
They always were.
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