San Francisco, at about the same time...
The door chime at Nyota Uhura's dorm room sounded, and the cadet shouted across the suite so that she could be heard by her expected company.
"It's unlocked, Thai!"
The Caitian tapped the button to open the sliding door, fidgeting to keep an ungainly stack of PADDs from spilling out of her arms. When the door parted, she caught a whiff of something pleasant on the air.
"You got takeout?"
Uhura was already laying out a few plates at the coffee table that separated two chairs from the main sofa. Her own set of PADDs were arrayed to one side.
"No, actually I cooked this time. Doro Wat."
The Caitian hadn't the slightest idea what Doro Wat was, but Uhura had a knack for being accommodating to her vegetarian friend's picky tastes, so there was no need to keep her guard up.
Anyone else would just assume things from her feline features, and there would probably be a plate full of seafood murder on it put in front of her, and she'd have to politely lie that she'd 'already eaten', then eat tofu crumbles under the cover of midnight out of her refrigerator like some asylum escapee.
"Great, I'm starving!"
Thaitla unceremoniously dumped her stack of PADDs onto the couch, opting to sit on the floor across from her friend. While they did have studying to do, they both knew there was a lot more to this night than that. The two women looked at each other with barely-caged giddy smiles. Thaitla couldn't stomach waiting to ask.
"So...? What did they say?"
"They didn't really say anything. I mean, you could tell it was a big deal."
"Forty seven warbirds? You think?!"
Uhura began serving, ladling out the spicy Ethiopian chicpea melange onto large injera flatbreads.
"Well, if you didn't help isolate that Klingonese dialect, we'd probably have filed that into the junk stack. What kind of language could confuse 'under attack' with 'having a party' anyway?"
The Caitian laughed, helping herself to the bottle of wine Uhura had placed on the table, filling both their glasses.
"Uhura, I'm pretty sure being involved in an attack is pretty close to being at a Klingon party. At any rate, your name probably hit the short list of every Admiral's comm feed today with that one."
The human took her glass of wine, clinking it with Thaitla's own.
"Well I'm just glad I could pick your half-Klingon brain on that one. I swear we can learn Romulan backwards and forwards, sixteen Deltan subjunctives, vocular binary, and sixty four declensions of Xindi and our Klingon teachers will still be somewhere in the 22nd century. If you pass finals with top marks, I bet you could pick any ship in the fleet."
Thaitla tended to her plate, forking up some chicpeas as a furtive smile crossed her features. Uhura picked up on it.
"Ah ha, so you have thought about it!"
The Caitian's tail tuft poofed as it slapped against the floor and her furtive smile grew into an all-out event.
"Well...haven't you!?! I mean, we're probably at the top of the litter for xeno ling. Who else are they gonna look to first? Tuvel? Hannity? Heidelberg? Please. They're book talkers. Hawkins is pretty good, but your Romulan is just so much better."
Thaitla took a bite of her Ethiopian food, pausing momentarily to bask in a meal that wasn't greasy Indian takeout from Mission Hill. Her eyes opened, and she leaned forward with a conspiratorial expression.
"I want Enterprise."
Uhura's expression changed slightly. Still smiling, there was something else a little more far off. It wasn't avarice, but it was somewhere close.
"Me too, Thai. Me too."
The two cadets met eyes and for a second it was almost serious, until they burst into giddy laughter. Fever dreams and ambition for both of them. They were gunning for the same seat.
Bookmarks