Chapter III: Reunited

Alex narrows her eyes at Moira. "The Commander, you mean?" she asks. "She’s... about to talk to the captain of the USS Dove, the new Spacefleet ship joining us."

Alex turns in her seat to face the engineer. "Are you all right? You look like someone dragged you here from your quarters by your feet."

Moira takes stock of the room and quickly shakes her head, then shifts out of frame of the video.

I ah......have ah method 'a discernment, that ah tapped inta regardin' meetin' tha slugs. It does not bode well.....Ah'd like ta share mah insights.......

Cass looks over her shoulder and thinks, Oh, boy - Moira sure picked a bad time to go on a bender.

"Um, Moira? Do we need to, um... talk in the ready room?"

Believe it er not, Commander, that may be a good idea. Just tell tha comm that yeh had a sudden insight from engineering. Cuz yeh're about ta.

"Well, as it turns out, we're waiting for them to arrive, so let's have a private chat. Alex, care to join us?"

Moira steps into the ready room and grips the back of a chair. She's exhausted. Her arm hurts. Her head hurts.

And she didn't even have the benefit of getting schnockered.

She stares at the two for an awkwardly long time. Just as Cassano's mouth twitches to tell her to get on with it, Moira speaks.

First off, ah'm not drunk.

She straightens herself up as well as she can.

'Bout fifteen years ago, in tha Auber System, ah had some shore leave. Went ta go get cleansed by tha locals. An' hooooooowee it was one'a tha strangest things ah've ever done. Visions an' weird sounds an' such. But they let me keep a bottle a' their......potion.

She chooses the word carefully to promote the "not drunk" sentiment.

Ah still turn ta it on occassion when ah'm stuck. An' ah've been stuck on this exchange.

Her eyes get wide and she stares at them like a mad woman.

We were all stuck in concrete. Tha slugs - well, green things at least - had legs. Arms. Bodies. But they still looked like slugs. An' everywhere they went, in this field a' hundreds a' trapped people, they kept attackin' an' eatin'. One of 'em was huge. An' every time it ate someone, it got bigger, an' bigger, an' bigger.........

She pauses and looks at Cass for a long time, clearly trying to decide if she should continue. She takes a deep breath.

An' ah saw you, Cass. With a tiger man. When tha two of yeh stepped in tha way, tha green things stopped. Except tha big one. It kept eatin' an' attackin' an' gettin' more an' more dangerous. Ah think.....

Screw it. She had jumped the shark this much....

Ah think it ate me, too.

She stands and stares at the two of them, feeling out the room before she provides her interpretation. Though she does shrug slightly.

Fer tha record, this is their religion. This potion. Ah'm not drunk.

Alex comes along, having mentioned that she wouldn’t miss it for the world. After Moira finishes, Alex points out with a dry chuckle,"It being their religion and you being drunk on the potion are not mutually exclusive. But I’ve seen Auber mystics before. It’s not completely crazy to think we can gain valuable insights here."

Cass listens to Moira's account of her - well, her vision, Cass guesses is the term - quietly, and with a growing sense of detachment. Or maybe alienation - she's really not sure. When the engineer finishes, clearly looking for a reaction, Cass is at a loss. She's grateful that Alex has something to say, because she herself is drawing a blank.

But Alex isn't offering an interpretation yet, either, also looking first for a reaction from Cass. Well, maybe she should just go with her gut. That usually serves her well. She opens her mouth. "You know, I was really a great pilot. And I really enjoyed being one. I loved flying."

Okay, that really wasn't as germane a contribution as she'd hoped. Or maybe it was.

She puts her hands out, palms up, in a WTF gesture. "I have dealt with a coma-stricken commanding officer, a captured away team, and a body-stealing slug race. I've had my face half burnt off, nearly lost our top doctor, killed a bunch of slugs by accident and two in cold blood, and then got delusions of grandeur about brokering peace with them. I've felt reasonably certain about how to do this job up till now, despite how insane it's gotten, but this? I don't know what the fuck to do with this.

"When did being a commanding officer start requiring dream interpretation skills? How do I even begin trying to unpack that kind of gobbledygook? And what the hell is a tiger man? What am I supposed to do now, Moira? Order 'tea, Earl Grey, hot' from the replicator so I can try to read the leaves?"

She suddenly realizes that she's standing, waving her arms around animatedly. Not very captain-y, that. She sighs heavily and forces herself to sit back down.

Moira wants to offer her some purple drink, but she suspects that's a bad idea.

Ah'm sorry, ah just....

She sits, too.

Listen. Ah think it's a sign that we might be able ta convince tha people, but not tha queen. An'.... mah drunken - AH VISIONARY - state seems ta think yer doin' a great job. So....even if this is just a revelation of mah own deep fears, at least ah can say with total confidence that ah trust yeh, Cass.

She does a double take.

An' he was a tiger man. Humanoid, with a tiger face. Maybe he's on tha crew of tha Dove.

She waggles her eyebrows.

Or maybe he's your tiger.

Okay, that's just unfair, Cass thinks, blushing as Moira returns a profound compliment to Cass' biting sarcasm.
Cass rolls her eyes at the last bit. "Okay, assuming he exists, how do we figure out who the tiger man represents? I mean, could he be the captain of the Four? It kind of seems like it must be one of the slugs, doesn't it? But if so, why is he a humanoid tiger in your vision, while I'm just regular me?"

We live in space! Are there any races that are literally tigers?

Cass opens her mouth, but there's nothing lurking ready to come out. She looks at Alex, who probably knows whether there's a race of tiger humanoids in the galaxy.

"It's not so much dream interpretation, Commander," says Alex, standing up and walking around behind Moira, studying her like one might take in a piece of sculpture at a museum. "More that the Auber method opens up connections to the subconscious and allows for connections to be made between bits and pieces of information a person didn't even know they had, much less that they were related. Unfortunately, the output from that process is often equally as cryptic as the original data. There's a fine art to interpreting it that the Auberine spend a lifetime studying."

She puts a comforting hand on Moira's shoulder. "I have spent exactly one week, three days and... oh, sixteen hours or so studying it, but I might be the best we've got right now, so... I think Moira's interpretation is sound. One thing I would add that might give some insight into the 'tiger man'. There's an old Earth saying that a tiger can't change its stripes. Meaning that whoever this person is might be someone that either you think has changed but actually hasn't, or that will never change regardless of what's happened."

"I would venture a guess either way that it refers to Lt. Commander Borealis."

Cass stares at a spot near the ceiling for a while before asking, "Is your guess that Zephyr is the tiger man based only on the fact that he's been a slug host and come through it safely, or is there more to your reasoning?" While there's a certain poetry to the theory, Cass isn't ready to just accept it without more to go on.

"As I said, Commander, it's a guess. It seems to fit with observations I've made, and it's the best I can come up with on the fly," says Alex. "Moira's vision suggests that whoever this person is, they have some ability to counteract the advance of the... slugs, as we've taken to calling them. It could also be the captain of the Four, though why that manifests as a tiger, I can't say."

She shrugs. "It could really be anyone. I would say it could be me, but I lost my last bits of dark hair years ago. I have no stripes any more. In any case, I think we should keep in mind that while it might be the most abstract and curious part of the vision, it pales in comparison to the image of the slugs devouring everything in sight." She looks at Moira, squeezes her shoulder briefly, and says, "Including you."

Moira appreciates the gesture but tries not to show too much concern past what she's already shared.

Either way, Commander. LC Lloyd. Ah cannae promote dockin' with these things anymore. Visions aside, there are too many risks ta either vesses.

Cass deliberately puts her emotional response to the imagery aside. She can't get bogged down in that right now. "Okay, if we accept this vision as valid input, then our actual true adversary is the slug queen. Despite the obvious unsustainability of the slugs' approach to taking hosts, she keeps pushing it. It must profit her in some way that we're not able to see. The rank-and-file slugs seem individually persuadable - like the captain of the Four - but as long as the queen is committed to staying the course. That interpretation of the vision tracks perfectly with the events we've actually observed.

"So I think we should keep the fact of this vision between the three of us, but use what it confirms to formulate recommendations on how to proceed from here. Any objections to that? Any additional suggestions?"

"Seems appropriate for now," Alex replies. "But I would point out that we've had no direct communication with the Queen. I hesitate to ascribe any motives to her until we do. For all we know at this point, the captain is manipulating access to information to give us the impression of her that he wants. It's what I'd do."

She pauses. "If I had an agenda of my own." She smiles then. If it's meant to be reassuring, it doesn't quite get there.

Moira raises an eyebrow.

Well, yeh haven't finalized our swap plans, right? Why don't we meet in open space, outside tha home but not inside, and send two shuttles back an' forth? Then yeh can ask ta comm tha queen first, but we can warp out if we hafta.

"Wait - what? Hang on." Cass turns to Alex. "To be clear, I'm not ascribing motives to the queen, I'm extrapolating from the available evidence. Humanoids outnumber the slugs pretty convincingly, if the numbers we've been given are real. That no doubt accounts for their extreme aggression, but it also means that they don't have a prayer of conquering humanoids if we mount a serious defense. So that means that there's something going on that we don't yet see. That matches the part of the vision where the queen keeps eating and gaining power even when we stop the other slugs.

"And the captain of the Four has never given me any impression about the queen, other than that he serves her. But some of his in-the-moment reactions have suggested that he's genuinely listening to my arguments at times. That's where I'm drawing the conclusion that individual slugs might be persuadable."

Turning back to Moira, "Now, what do you mean, meet in open space, outside the home?"