Enemy Memories

Posted on Fri Sep 13th, 2019 @ 9:23am by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox

Mission: Family Detention
Location: The Forager and the People's Will
Timeline: 2396

The smuggling ship known as the Forager orbited the only world forbidden to one of its two residents. The well cloaked mid-sized freighter hovered thousands of kilometers about the glistening turquoise seas and lavender and green spotted lands of ch’Rihan. The planet known to the rest of the galaxy by the bastardized name of ‘Romulus’

Watching through the small porthole window of the cargo hold, 10 year old ‘Melanie’ Dox watched the world that she had always been taught was her home slowly spin below her. And it was as close as she had ever been to it.

Orbit.

It would be twenty-one years before she would learn her true name of Mnhei’sahe, hidden from her. Twenty-one years before she learned that the human, Declan Dox was never her father. Twenty-one years before she would have the pointed Rihannsu ears that had been surgically removed when she was four restored. Twenty-one years before her DNA would be repaired to make her damaged blood flow green again. But for now, little Melanie Dox looked longingly out the window and dreamed.

All of her life, her Mother had denied her any knowledge but the most perfunctory regarding the world of her people. But her's wasn't the only voice that the young Dox was exposed to. Her cousin Lhi t'Aan spoke often of ch'Rihan. Of the Hartlhei caves that she played in as a girl. Of the Korthre cliffs on the edge of the Mhiessan Provence. Of the flowering plains of Aihai with its lavender grass spreading out for what seemed like forever. Lhi would Melanie all about their homeworld for hours on end, long into the night when she had visited, years earlier.

And the refugees they took on, feeling not the world itself but it's increasingly repressive government, would often speak of its beauty and its virtues when Dox would sneak into the hold to listen. And thinking of all that, Dox wanted to leap out the window and run through them all.

But she was forever denied. Ch’Rihan, mother said, was too dangerous. She told her that she would never be welcome there. That the mixed human heritage she didn’t yet know was a lie was a crime on her home. She told her all about the dreaded Tal’Shiar. The Rihannsu secret police that would take her away forever if they even knew she existed. Her mother would never go into great details on her own past, but she told Dox enough for the young and impressionable Rihanna girl to know that the Tal’Shiar was the reason that they hid. And that if they were ever found that it would be over. She told her enough horror stories about the oppressive government of her home to give her nightmares.

But others had told her enough visions of perfect beauty to fuel all the dreams of home a little girl could ever need.

Sighing, Dox flumped back, away from the beautiful view. Her mother was down there right now. She had beamed down leaving the young girl alone with the ship on automatic pilot to pick up supplies for their next smuggling run through the neutral zone. It was a hard and lonely life, but it was all Dox had ever known. And she hated it.

And, of course, Mother had left her with work to do. Lessons to study. Skills to practice. She was still nursing thick, brownish-purple bruises up half of her left side from her regular Llaekh-ae'rl lessons of the day before. The violent and brutal martial art her mother had begun teaching her when she was six always left a sore mark. Sometimes bruises. Sometimes cuts that became scars. Sometimes broken bones. But Mother was insistent. Dox needed to master these skills if she was to survive in a universe that despised her people. To survive if the Tal’Shiar ever came for her. And smuggling ships rarely had dermal regenerators on hand just for bruises. That power expenditure was a luxury reserved for real injuries, mother said. So she scowled and bore it, as usual, learning to ignore things like everyday aches and pains. She was trained to. Trained to fight through pain. It was simply a part of life for the all-too young Rihanna girl.

“The Tal’Shiar won’t care that you hurt. They will relish in the pain of your broken bones. But if you can strike them through that pain, then you become more dangerous than those that would take you away.” Mother would say, forcing her to learn to use her own pain as a weapon.

Walking back to the center of the room, Dox was to practice her strikes and positioning, but she couldn’t concentrate. That window kept calling her. She was supposed to practice and memorize the characters of the Vulcan language and write a report on their similarities and differences to the Rihan alphabet. She had to read ten passages from the poetry of S’Task, one of the founders of ch’Rihan, and tell her what they meant. And mother wanted her to read three chapters of some stupid human book called ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ that didn’t make sense to her.

Mother wanted her well versed in the cultures she would have to learn to interact with, often more than her own, but Dox couldn’t make herself care. Human culture was stupid. The only thing she liked of it was the music files that Declan Dox had left in the ship’s library when he abandoned them years ago. Loud, angry music that helped her deal with her emotions and how they always tried to punch their way out of her. She liked that one thing from Earth, but that was about it. Earth wasn’t home. Ch’Rihan was home. Earth was just the place that made leaving the sector illegal. Earth was the place that the man she still believed was her father ran to when he left them.

Looking back towards the window as she shuffled in place, picking up and then putting back down the PaDD’s left for her to study as she nervously ran a finger over her ear. Why was she looking at stupid lessons, she thought? Mother was GONE and there was a world below her. HER world. The home she was taught to fear and love in equal measure, and she eyed the cargo transporter and thought. Would it be truly so bad to simply scan for a place with nobody around and simply beam down and breathe the air. Touch the soil. Feel the warmth of Eisn on her face through the teal twinged sky at last?

Thinking about it, she sighed. She knew how to work the console. She knew how to do it and erase the records. Hell, she knew how to fly the ship herself by now. She could break orbit, warp away and leave her mother behind and be free. But she also knew she wouldn’t do any of those things. She was trapped and she knew it.

On the forager, that ship that was her home for all of her life, she was little more than a prisoner. Kicking over a spanner left on the deck, she cursed out loud in her native tongue. "Imirrhlhhse!”

Then her cheeks blushed a deep brown, the color of her genetically damaged blood, as she imagined what her mother would do if she heard her talk like that. It almost sent a wave of panic through her as she shuddered. Heavier lessons for sure. More intense drills. More time nursing bruises and broken bones. But mother was gone and the ship, at least for the moment, was her’s.

The security cameras had been programmed to replay a very dull loop of her lessons from the last time mother left the ship and she was as free to do whatever she wanted for the next hour as her heart demanded. So she closed her eyes and left the ship that way. In her mind, it was easy to run in the fields and play in the caves. In her mind, she wasn’t alone. In her mind, there were always other Rihannsu children to play with who accepted her because in her mind, she looked normal. Her ears were pointed and she didn’t look half-anything. In her mind, she was just the normal little Rihanna girl she wanted to be. She belonged.

So she ran. She ran until she imagined her lungs burning cold with each rough breath, laughing maniacally as she did. And she felt the damp grass between the toes of her bare feet as the clouds swirled overhead. Flumping back carelessly, she rolled in the grass and giggled as she looked up at the clouds. One looked like a beautiful bird, the other like a child. No, three children. Then the last... looked like a ship.

The claxon of the red alert went off, snapping Dox out of her momentary daydream. Hopping back to her feet, she scrambled from the cargo hold, up the ladder to the spinal corridor and onto the bridge. She knew the sound well, it was the Forager’s proximity alarm.

Sliding into the helm seat that was two sizes too big for her still, Dox leaned up and looked out the transparent plastisteel front window as the light of Eisn was blocked out by something amazing. A D’deridex class warbird was entering the system and making orbit just above and ahead of her. At barely 2,000 kilometers away it might just have been the most beautiful thing the very young pilot had ever seen.

The rays of ch’Rihan’s sun cut through the elegant, sweeping curves and shimmered off of the deep green hull. The reflected light cast a brilliant emerald glow into the window of her little cloaked ship as her eyes went wide with wonder. She had only ever seen one from half a system away on the ships monitor’s, but she was in love. On the underside of the hull was the raised lines decorating her with the spread wings of great Al’thindor. The glow of the nacelles fired her imagination as she imagined standing in her engine room before the artificial singularity that powered the magnificence of the ship.

When she was younger, her cousin Lhi gave her a gift. A small model of a D’deridex that Dox had then assembled painstakingly. Hand painting her hull and each of her windows, she spent 9 days building the model. It was her most prized possession and there was the real thing, seemingly so close she could reach out and touch it. A few months after getting the model, she had downloaded the ship’s official specs and began studying them intensely, hiding both from her Mother. She became obsessed, memorizing every deck and room and learning everything she could. And it wasn’t hard to close her eyes again and imagine herself at the helm of that magnificent ship. But she didn’t want to close her eyes again. Not then. She wanted to be there as much as the shimmering jewel below her. She imagined herself a grown woman in a charcoal gray uniform sitting at that helm, piloting that bird into the vastness of the cosmos. Suddenly, it was all she could imagine.

But that Warbird wasn’t imaginary, it was there and the proximity alarm was still chiming off.

A quick glance of the sensors showed that they didn’t see her and their orbit being so close was just a coincidence. Deftly, the all-too young girl dropped the ship’s velocity and adjusted the Forager’s orbit using maneuvering thrusters so as to avoid sensor detection. Slowly, the Forager let the mammoth Warbird float gently ahead as she slid the small freighter into a safer orbit, out of range of their own proximity sensors just in case the cloak failed.

It was further away after a few minutes, fading into a green blob on the horizon as she sighed wistfully, closing her eyes again. She had never seen anything like it and dreamed that one day, she would be on one of those jewels in space.

---------------

Then her eyes slowly opened for real. A knock in the hum of the engine roused the young Starfleet Lieutenant, Mnhei’sahe Dox, from her shallow, fitful sleep. Rolling over… she was still there.

Another night in the modest quarters of the D’deridex-class Warbird called ‘The People’s Will.” Her Grandmother’s senatorial flagship... and her prison.

What she had dreamed of as a girl had become a prison and a promise all at once. She was being taken to ch’Rihan, possibly never to leave again. A prisoner of the Imperium unless she fully embraced the offers of her Grandmother and took her place in the empire as its ‘loyal daughter’. An act that would only require abandoning her wife and unborn children, her family on the Hera, and every oath she ever swore. And she cursed herself for silently wanting it on some deep, painful, weak level. For wanting to give up and finally go to the home that was denied her all of her life. For wanting the family that her mother had denied her. And her shame hung heavy on her heart as she found her resolve and strength buckling under her Grandmother’s aegis.

But beyond the bonds of family her Grandmother was trying to restore, were the machinations of Riov Rendal and the Tal’Shiar. Machinations Dox was under no illusions that her Grandmother was innocent of involvement in. Dox knew that she and her captive mother were also bait for a trap. A way to lure the Hera to ch’Rihan in a rescue attempt. A way to give the secrets of the gods to the Tal’Shiar. And Dox had to stop that from happening at all costs.

And in her heart, she still had Mona. Mona’s swirling energies fused with her own. That brilliant purple glow that reminded her who she was and what she had. Mona was there. Mona’s presence in her heart would remind her of who she was. She was not Mnhei’sahe t’Rul. She was Mnhei’sahe Dox. Through that bond, she reminded herself of all of that. That was who she was and that was who she would be until the day she died. And Mona would always be there inside her until that day, even if that day was tomorrow.

Closing her eyes again, she found herself trapped like she was on the Forager... as she began to silently weep herself back to sleep as her half-asleep mind fought against itself. ‘Mona... It’s a trap. They’ll kill you all if you come. They’re waiting for you to come.’ She thought to herself, reaching out to that lavender energy she could see so clearly in her mind as she faded back to a fitful sleep, praying she could be heard.