Chapter 18: Questions
[USS Enterprise-D — Security Office, Deck 8 — 2364, Day 61]
The message arrived at 1830: Lieutenant Coleman. My office. 1900. Off duty. Private. — Yar
Cole read it three times. The words were professional. The subtext was not.
He showered. Changed into a clean uniform. Ate a light meal—the metabolism's demands were quieter on rest days, but nerves killed his appetite. The replicated soup sat in his stomach like a stone.
At 1855 he stood outside Security. The same door he'd entered ten weeks ago for the polywater incident report—that first meeting, Tasha behind her desk with her zero-tolerance expression and her questions about his anomalous blood chemistry. The same spartan office. The same woman who'd survived Turkana IV and turned discipline into armor.
Cole pressed the door chime.
"Enter."
The office was empty except for Tasha. No security staff. No recording indicators visible. The door sealed behind him with a click that sounded very final.
Tasha stood behind her desk. She'd changed out of uniform into off-duty clothes—simple, functional, the kind of things a person wore when they wanted to be comfortable rather than commanding. Her phaser was absent from her hip. In its place, on the desk, sat a bottle of Saurian brandy and two glasses.
The juxtaposition—interrogation room setup with social lubricant—told Cole everything he needed to know about the conversation they were about to have.
"Sit," she said.
He sat. Same uncomfortable chair. Same desk between them. Different stakes.
Tasha poured two glasses. Slid one across to Cole. Took a drink from her own before speaking.
"Q's playground. Three days ago." No preamble. No softening. Tasha Yar communicated the way she fought—direct, efficient, committed. "You moved faster than humanly possible. I've trained with the best hand-to-hand fighters Starfleet has produced. I've fought augmented soldiers on Turkana IV. I know what baseline human reflexes look like, and I know what enhanced reflexes look like. Yours aren't baseline."
Cole picked up his glass. The brandy was amber, sharp-smelling, clearly the real thing—not replicated. Someone had been saving this bottle.
"I've also reviewed your performance logs." Tasha pulled up a PADD—she'd come prepared. "The polywater resistance. Medical flagged your blood chemistry as anomalous. The junction saves in Engineering—reaction times that Argyle has noted as 'unusual' in three separate crew evaluations. The Ligon II transporter room, where you drew your phaser faster than two trained security officers."
Cole drank. The brandy burned going down—a clean, astringent heat that settled his nerves more through ritual than chemistry.
"And then there's Q," Tasha continued. "He spoke to you directly. Called you an anomaly. In my experience, when an omnipotent being singles out a junior lieutenant, there's a reason."
"Q singles out people for entertainment. He called the entire human race primitive."
"He called you something different. And you talked back to him." A beat. "Nobody talks back to Q. Picard does. You did. That's a short list."
The office was quiet. The ship's ambient hum filled the spaces between words—the constant, living pulse of the Enterprise that Cole had grown to love the way a sailor loved the sound of the sea.
"What are you, Coleman?"
The question hung between them. Not hostile—not yet. But relentless. The question of a Security Chief who'd identified a potential threat and needed to assess it before deciding how to respond.
Cole set his glass on the desk. Met her eyes. Blue, sharp, carrying the weight of a childhood spent learning that the only person you could trust was yourself—and the courage of someone who'd chosen to trust anyway, despite everything.
"I don't fully understand it myself." The words came out quieter than he'd intended. Honest in a way that surprised him. "It started after I woke up one day... different. My senses sharpened. My reflexes changed. My body runs hotter, faster, stronger than it should. I can perceive things—energy fields, system states, things that don't have names yet—through touch, through proximity."
Tasha listened. Her expression didn't change—locked in that professional neutrality she wore like a shield. But her fingers, wrapped around her glass, had stopped moving.
"I don't know why it happened. I don't know what caused it. I'm trying to understand it through training and research, but I'm—" He paused. Chose the next word carefully. "—learning as I go."
"Who else knows?"
"One person aboard. Data. He's helping me study the phenomenon."
"Data." She processed this. "You trust an android with information you won't share with your commanding officer."
"Data can't lie. He can't be compromised by external influence. And he understands what it's like to be something nobody has a category for."
The logic landed. Tasha's jaw tightened—not with anger, but with the effort of reconciling her professional obligation with something less definable. She drank from her glass. Refilled it.
"On Turkana IV," she said, and the words cost her something—Cole could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way her gaze dropped to the bottle before rising again, "there were gangs that used enhanced soldiers. Genetic modifications. Chemical augmentation. Neural implants. I've seen what enhanced humans look like when they don't have discipline."
"That's not what this is."
"I know." The admission came faster than either of them expected. "I've watched you. Since the polywater incident—maybe before. You don't use whatever you have for personal advantage. You don't show off. You hide it, which tells me you understand how dangerous it could be if the wrong people found out." She paused. "Augment laws exist for a reason."
"I'm aware." Cole's voice was flat. The augment laws—the Federation's blanket prohibition on genetic enhancement, born from the Eugenics Wars, codified after Khan—hung over his head like a blade. If Starfleet Command learned the truth about his enhanced physiology, the kindest outcome would be discharge. The worst would be Section 31's laboratories.
"Are you dangerous?" Tasha asked. Direct. Clean. The essential question.
Cole leaned forward. His elbows on his knees. His eyes on hers, close enough now to see the fine scar that ran along her jawline—a souvenir from Turkana IV that the dermal regenerator hadn't quite erased.
"Not to this crew. Not to this ship. Not to anyone aboard the Enterprise." A breath. "Never to you."
Tasha held his gaze. Five seconds. Ten. The ship hummed around them. The brandy sat between them, a bridge between the professional and the personal that neither had intended to build.
"Okay." She poured a third glass. This time when she slid it across, her fingers brushed his—brief, accidental, except that nothing Tasha Yar did was accidental. "If you're going to be weird, at least be honest about it."
"That's what Data said. More or less."
"Data's smart."
They drank. The conversation shifted—slowly, carefully, the way two guarded people lowered their walls brick by brick. Not about powers or abilities or secrets. About homes. About loss. About the gap between where you started and where you ended up.
Tasha talked about Turkana IV. Not the way she'd describe it in an official report—sanitized, clinical, safely past. This was different. The way the colony smelled before the infrastructure collapsed. The taste of ration packets that expired before she was born. The sound of phaser fire echoing through abandoned corridors at three in the morning, and the particular silence that followed when it stopped.
Cole listened. He didn't offer platitudes. Didn't compare experiences. Just absorbed her words the way he absorbed energy—carefully, completely, with the understanding that what she was giving him was more valuable than any power he could develop.
When she finished, the bottle was half empty and the silence was the comfortable kind—the silence of two people who'd said enough to know they could say more, when the time was right.
"I should go," Cole said. Not because he wanted to. Because pushing would break whatever this was.
Tasha stood. Walked him to the door. In the threshold, she stopped—close, closer than professional distance, closer than she'd stood to anyone aboard this ship since Cole had arrived.
"Don't make me regret this, Coleman."
"I won't."
She held his eyes for a beat that lasted exactly long enough to mean something. Then the door closed, and Cole was in the corridor, and the Enterprise hummed around him in its midnight register.
His hands were warm. Not from the brandy. From something else—the particular heat generated by trust offered and trust received, the first real connection that wasn't built on crisis or convenience or mutual intellectual curiosity, but on two people deciding that the risk of honesty was worth the reward.
He walked back to his quarters. The corridor was quiet. A passing ensign nodded; Cole nodded back. Normal. Routine. A junior lieutenant returning from a social call, nothing to see.
Inside his quarters, Cole sat at the desk. The Ferengi whip in its lockbox. Data's research papers. The encrypted notes, growing thicker by the week. And now, added to the inventory, something that couldn't be encrypted or locked or hidden: Tasha Yar's trust, extended cautiously, conditional on continued honesty.
He opened his PADD and began composing a message to Data: Re: our research project. I've expanded the circle by one. Security clearance. She'll have questions you may be able to answer better than I can. Coffee tomorrow?
Data's reply came in twelve seconds: Acknowledged. I will prepare a summary of our findings suitable for a non-technical audience. I look forward to the discussion. I will bring prune juice.
Cole almost laughed. Almost. Instead, he saved the message, set the alarm, and reached for the Traveler's teaching exercises. The thought-energy work was waiting. The powers were growing. And the circle of people who knew—who really knew—had just grown from one to two.
Two allies. In a universe of threats, it was a start.
Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more .
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1