Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Pilot was not a person.

This was a truism included in what it meant to be a Gorn. The Hive was a person. The Pilot was a cell. She was not the part that made the decisions, or the part that passed on genetic material, or the part whose life had individual value.

She repeated this to herself sometimes, as she sat with her leg throbbing with pain, growing increasingly infected, lest she fall prey to hope. She had known from the beginning that her life was hers only so long as she could preserve it, and if it became a liability to the Hive, it would be severed.

Just as she might soon need to sever her infected leg. It would be foolish to weep for it. It was not a person. It only had value so long as it had a use. It served the whole.

She knew this, and yet she had not yet had the strength to sever it. Because it still had value to her. And because she still had hope, though she knew she shouldn't.

Was there, perhaps, some member of the Hive who thought the individual cell that was the Pilot could be useful again? Was worth salvaging? Would the Queen regret the severing of Pilot 9764 so much that she would risk additional cells on avoiding such a fate?

Surely not.

The human was an unexpected complication. It was beyond forbidden to speak to it, to help it. But the Pilot was a cell severed from the body. She was effectively dead already. So it did not matter.

The human must be no more than a cell as well, a worker, or it would never have been abandoned here alone. It would have been very simple to allow it to die. No action would be required. But, surprising herself, the Pilot found herself moving to protect the human cell.

And why not? No one was coming for either of them. But it was not the Gorn way to be alone, even for a moment. There was always the Hive. They were two severed cells now; the greatest comfort would be huddling together to at least die with company.

The human was absurdly hopeful. Convinced that her hive was coming for her. The Pilot had no way of knowing if this was based on any rational expectation, or was merely a coping mechanism.

They both were the same sex, female, and the same function, Pilot. The human seemed to think it was possible to be a Pilot and not female, which was confusing. Perhaps the Hive had never fully understood the meanings of the two human sexes. Even their governing function, Captain, could be either male or female, yet they had never observed any of the humans reproducing. Perhaps the real leaders and reproducers were another sex, back on the homeworld.

The human asked questions, odd questions, stupid questions, nothing like what a Gorn would ask. She did not ask about battle plans or technology level or systems of government. She asked useless personal questions.

Human: What's your name?

Pilot: I do not have a name.

Translator: DISAGREE.

Human: Do you have any siblings?

Pilot: I had at one time 97,456 of them.

Translator: AGREE.

Human: Do you like any music?

Pilot: What is music?

Translator: [silence]

And when questions had led nowhere, she volunteered information. She demonstrated this strange thing, Music, in her gurgling human voice, and it was oddly pleasant though the Pilot could not discern the purpose.

They played games. The human game was linear, simplistic, but demonstrated humans must have at least six castes or sexes of which the Gorn were unaware.

"Which of these is yours?" asked the Pilot, and the translator said nothing. She picked up a pawn in her claws, tapped it against her chest.

The human made her amusement-sound and mimicked the gesture, also with a pawn, which was clearly a worker sex. "I guess I'm a pawn too, if you put it that way," she said, with a wry twist of her mouth.

"But you think they will come for you," said the Pilot. The translator said nothing.

After several games of human chess and Gorn strategy-training-34, the human lay on her back, giving up questions for a while and only talking.

She had one clutchmate, who was male, but they had been raised together. They had two parents, though from everything the human said about these parents, the Pilot was certain she had misunderstood. This was not the behavior of a breeding pair. They were workers instead, caregivers.

In which case the Pilot had been confused from the beginning, and the human pilot was something very different from a Gorn worker. A Gorn worker would not have had caregivers. Perhaps she was a Queen, probably a juvenile by her size, and that was why she believed she would be saved. But if she was of such value, why would her people have let her come here alone?

The human's soft, clawless hands were gentle on her injured leg. No Gorn had ever touched the Pilot with such tenderness, not even when she was in training and sought pleasure with others in her cohort, rubbing together the vestigial genitals on their abdomens. That was affection, of a kind, but it had been rough, desperate, a way of coping with the harsh training and the loneliness of being separated from their clutch.

And every nameless other with whom the Pilot had done this was now dead, culled for being other than the best of the best. There was no point in wasting food on a cell that did not serve the Hive. Evolution must be practiced even here, in the training swarm. Survival of the fittest.

No one had cared for her when she was injured, because any minor injury was concealed and every major injury was culled. She had learned to hide the burns and abrasions that she sometimes acquired in the training, to treat them with salvaged minerals. She had not learned to extend an injured limb into another's reach and let soft fingers apply a treatment.

She trembled as the human's fingers touched her. A Gorn did not weep, not an adult Gorn who had survived the cullings, certainly not a trained Pilot. But her claws clenched, and her valve-fold loosened and became damp, her tiny stunted ovipositor hardening within.

"Shhh," said the human, a meaningless sound but meant for comfort. "I'm almost done. Just another second."

"Don't stop," said the Pilot. DISAGREE, said the translator. The human made her amusement sound, and in only another moment, as promised, she withdrew her soft fingers.

"I do not mind if I die," said the Pilot. "Not if you touched me that way toward the end. Not if I were not alone."

The translator said nothing.

The Pilot found herself absorbed in the human's fantasy. Perhaps the human was correct and someone was coming for her. And if so, it seemed reasonable to facilitate it. Even when the human seemed mad, heedlessly playing with fire, careless of her own safety even while she believed she had value. It made no sense at all.

Maybe it was all a foolish fantasy, crafted to make their slow death less frightening. Perhaps they would die as the Pilot hoped, together, with the human's soft hands on her, her low voice making her meaningless shushing sound. It would not be so terrible.

But perhaps she was a juvenile Queen. And if so, her people would come for her. They would kill the Pilot immediately, of course, as an enemy, and take their valuable hatchling away with them.

This possibility was not as appealing as the one where they died together. But that was a selfish thought. The human, whatever she was, had value. She was not a cell, no matter whether her people thought of her as one or not. Her continuing to remain alive was important.

The Pilot tried to explain to the human that the converse was not true. That for the Pilot to remain alive was not important. That she was a cell. That whoever found them, Gorn or human, would kill the Pilot immediately. She was of no use. She would be culled. If it was the Gorn that came, the human called Ortegas would be used for food, or as an incubator for eggs. That was how the Queens did things.

In humans, the Pilot thought, it must be different. If this human, with her soft gentle hands, her insistence on saving the Pilot, her belief in her value, was a Queen…she was a Queen better than any the Pilot had ever known.

It was the humans who came for them, in the end. A relief. It meant one of them would live. It meant the human was a Queen, one with value. And that meant the last days of the Pilot's life had value, as she had assisted the human.

And yet not a relief, because what if the humans should leave without killing her? What if she had to die alone?

She came forward, presenting herself for culling. She had had several unexpected days, full of unexpected joys. She was ready.

The phaser burn was hot in her side. Unexpectedly the human screamed, a sound unlike any she had made before. Full of rage, raw, aggrieved. "How could you, she was my [untranslatable], she saved me! Get the [untranslatable]. [Untranslatable] you, get it now!"

The human's soft hands were on her now, her head dragged into that warm lap. "You're going to make it," she whispered. "You're going to live."

"You do not need to lie to me," said the Pilot. "I do not mind."

DISAGREE, said the translator.

Chapter Text

The Pilot awoke slowly, as she had never done in her life. A Gorn awoke quickly, ready for action, or she was culled. A Gorn was not weakened by injury.

The phaser burn was only a dull throb now. Her leg was entirely free of pain. The room was white. Something beeped.

She turned her head. A forcefield shimmer was around the room. So she had been captured, then. She would be studied. They had been warned of this. She should have ended her life before it had come to this moment. She had been trained to do so. After all, had she not known that she was only a cell, that no one was coming for her? She had failed to prioritize the Hive.

"Hey," said a familiar voice.

The Pilot turned her head. It was the human, the juvenile queen.

"Sorry about my [untranslatable]," the human said. "She didn't realize. She's, um…she's been through some things."

"I am aware that I am your enemy," said the Pilot. "I expected no different."

This time, it seemed, the human was in possession of a proper translator, because she snorted. "Normally, humans aren't the shoot-first, ask-questions-later kind," she said, a note of disapproval in her voice. "Fortunately, it missed anything important. It was…a bit hard to convince anybody to fix you up. My [untranslatable] Spock convinced them. He's a Vulcan, they have a moral code about that kind of thing."

"I do not understand that word."

"Vulcan?"

She tried and failed to say it, but it seemed the human understood.

"Friend?"

"Agree."

The human showed her teeth, an expression the Pilot had learned was positive, and yet there was a sadness in her eyes. "It's…it's what you and I are."

"Pilots?"

"No. Our relationship." She waved a hand between them. "How I helped you. How you helped me."

"That is not something Gorn do."

A pause. "I got that impression, yeah." The human paced a little, pausing near the energy barrier, staring downward. "We're in a difficult situation here. I have to somehow prove to the Captain that you're a friend. That you're safe to be around. That you won't lay eggs in anybody."

"I do not lay eggs," said the Pilot. "I am not the sex that lays eggs."

"I thought you said you were female."

The Pilot moved her head from side to side in some confusion. "Not…that kind of female," she tried, and this seemed to be acceptable.

"The real question is, can we trust you? Are you going to hurt anyone? Steal this ship for the Hegemony?"

"The Hive has surely declared me dead," said the Pilot. How to make it clear, the fact that she had no value to the Hive, and yet value to her human friend? "You have declared me alive," she ventured. "If this cell is cut off from the Hive, and grafted onto your brood, then this cell's loyalty is to you."

"Us, the Federation?" asked the human, looking doubtful.

"You, Orrrt'g's," she pronounced, with difficulty. "You are a person here. You have value. I wish to join your brood."

The human's face did a number of things the Pilot could not understand. Finally she said, "I'm realizing that we haven't been understanding each other nearly as well as I thought. There's clearly so much I don't know about your people. But I think that will be enough to satisfy the Captain."

The Pilot was allowed to join Ortegas in her usual living-space, under a number of conditions. The male called Captain clearly did not trust her, but at the same time said that her "intelligence would surely be useful."

"I'm not interrogating her, Captain," Ortegas protested, and the Pilot watched to see if this rebellion would be punished.

Instead the Captain's voice gentled. "Of course not, Erica. I'm just saying. We've never had one peaceful conversation with a Gorn before. If we can figure out what they want, what motivates them, it could change everything. It could be possible to somehow make some kind of a deal with them."

"I'm not sure," said Ortegas. "I think she's different from the others, for some reason."

"One of the good ones?" The Captain made a snorting sound through his nose. "Doesn't matter. This is the first we've known it's even possible for there to be good ones. If we made peace with one, it could happen with more of them."

"Maybe," said Ortegas. She was looking down at her hands, rubbing one of them with the other. "I'll do what I can."

Then the captain departed, and the Pilot was led down an entirely empty series of corridors and to a room Ortegas declared was "hers."

"Is there no one else on the ship?" asked the Pilot.

"No, uh…we cleared the corridor for this. Didn't want there to be any more…incidents."

"You mean me being shot with a phaser again, as your broodmate did."

Ortegas made her amused sound. "Yeah, that, among other things. Didn't want any running and screaming either. Humans are very afraid of Gorn, generally."

"You should be," said the Pilot. "Gorn will eat you and lay eggs in you."

Ortegas clearly did not like this line of discussion. Her eyes went wide and her head jerked up. "You promised you wouldn't!"

"I am not Gorn anymore," said the Pilot. "I am dead to them. I am alive to you. But I do not expect other humans to know that."

It was clear Ortegas did not know what to make of this, so the Pilot explored the room, examining the many items lying out, including tools and machines. She could not tell if this was a sleeping chamber or a workshop. Likely both. Humans must not make a distinction. "How many humans are usually here?"

"Nobody, this room is just mine."

The Pilot blinked. "You sleep alone?"

Ortegas shook her head. "Rub it in, why don't you?"

"I cannot parse this utterance."

"Never mind."

Eventually the Pilot came across a set for the human game chess, which she set up in the way she remembered. The human's shoulders lowered, the tension leaving her body. "Good idea, that'll be a lot less awkward."

They played two games, and then fell into a discussion of reproductive strategies.

"I have not been able to discern whether you are Queen or worker," said the Pilot.

Ortegas shook her head. "The translator isn't getting those words."

The Pilot took the queen piece from the chess set. "Queen," she said, setting it in front. "Drones." These were the two bishops. She demonstrated mating by having each bump in turn against the queen and then fall over. Then she lined up the pawns. "Workers," she said, and touched her chest.

The lines of hair above Ortegas's eyes scrunched in confusion. "You did that before," she said. "I said I was a pawn. Though really, maybe more like a knight? I think a pilot is like a knight. We move fast. But you can't be talking about that."

"You are not a worker," said the Pilot, holding the pawn in demonstration, as she could not pronounce the human word. "If you were a worker, they would have left you to die."

Ortegas looked up with her dark eyes wide. "We don't leave anyone to die."

"You lay eggs?"

The human shook her head. "Humans don't."

"New humans must come from somewhere."

Now Ortegas threw back her head and made her barking laugh-sound. "Oh my god. Um. I can show you some diagrams later. But if your question is, am I the kind of human that can have babies, the answer is yes."

The Pilot lowered her head in understanding. She tapped the queen. "Then this is you. Do you have workers?" She tapped the row of pawns.

"No, no babies yet," Ortegas said, shaking her head. "Not sure I want them."

The Pilot cocked her head. "But you come from a clutch of only two, you said. How does the species survive if the clutches are small and the Queens do not always want to reproduce?"

Ortegas rubbed her face with her hands. "I wish Spock were here. He'd make some sense of this. What you're saying is, Gorn have different types? Some reproduce, some can't and never will?"

"Agree."

"And you're the kind that doesn't."

"Agree."

"Humans can all reproduce," said Ortegas. She took the queen piece and the king piece. "Mother, father, and together they have the babies." She took just two pawns and put them with the king and queen.

The Pilot considered this. "Then how do you decide who has value?"

"All humans have value."

The Pilot did not know what to make of this. It was confusing. No: it was wrong. It could not be true. It was a fantasy, a dream. She had seen the proof of it, and still. Still, it could not be true, because if it were possible for it to be true, then none of what she had experienced had to happen. There was a whole large universe in which people lived differently.

With one claw, she swept the board and all the pieces to the floor, making Ortegas jump. Then she moved to the corner, turned her back on the room, and crouched down. Surely even humans could understand that gesture.

A few hours later, Ortegas approached the corner where the Pilot was huddling. Her steps were slow and cautious. "Um. Friend? Pilot? I have food for you."

The time spent in torpor and thought had not helped. The Pilot straightened, her injured leg and side both giving small twinges of pain, as they had become stiff. She ignored it.

"I didn't know what you actually liked to eat, so I got a little of everything." Ortegas set down the tray on a small table nearby. There were both plants and meat, some of which were burned, as the human liked to eat them.

The Pilot selected the raw meat and tried a little. "Much better than the creatures on the moon," she said.

"Anything would be," said Ortegas with a laugh. She took some of the burned vegetables and ate them. "I'm sorry I upset you earlier," she said in a more quiet voice. "Is it…so bad, to you? To think everyone has value? After all you know you have value."

"Disagree."

Ortegas looked shocked at that. "You don't think you have value either?"

"I am a cell of the body," said the Pilot. "I am only one part of the Hive. Only the Queen matters. If I die, she can make many more like me."

"There's no one exactly like you," said Ortegas earnestly. "There isn't another you, who is my friend, who saved me down on the moon. That matters."

"Your people consider me to have value, because I saved their juvenile queen," said the Pilot stubbornly. She liked this explanation better.

"My friends are all going to have to learn to like you, since you saved me," said Ortegas. "But that's not what I meant."

"I know. I do not wish to talk about what you meant." The Pilot finished eating and rose from her crouch, rubbing her leg with the side of her claw as it twinged again.

Ortegas jumped up. "Still hurts?" Her hand reached half out, hesitating.

It was weakness. At home, it would get her culled. Here, however, it seemed they did not do that. Ortegas did not find it strange to help an injured friend. So the Pilot sat down on the soft bedding in the middle of the room and extended her leg.

Ortegas knelt, her soft hand tracing the scar where the muscle had been injured. "How did this happen, anyway?"

"In the crash. It was trapped. I should have surrendered to the inevitable and ended my life at that moment." Boldly she added, "I did not want to."

"I'm glad you didn't," said Ortegas. Her palm lay flat and still against the scar. "Should I bring you back to sickbay to have them try to fix it more?"

"No. It will finish healing on its own. I have always healed on my own before."

Ortegas's shortest finger rubbed absently back and forth against the scar. "You don't have to now."

It was too much. The Pilot jerked her leg away. "If I had returned to the Hive, maimed as I was, I would have been good for nothing but laying eggs in," she snapped. "Your attitude is nonsensical."

It was getting late, and Erica was beginning to wish she'd come up with a different solution for where to put the Gorn besides her room.

Down on the moon, they had slept within reach of each other, or at least Erica had slept. But it felt different to be here in her room with the Gorn crouched in the corner, staring at her with its lamplike eyes.

"Do you, uh…sleep?" she asked.

"I am awake," said the Pilot.

Erica snorted. "I mean, usually. Is sleeping a thing you do?"

"Yes."

She rooted around in her cupboards for a spare pillow and blanket and made a spot for the Gorn to sleep on the far side of the room. The Pilot only looked at her.

"You can sleep there," she said.

"Disagree," said the Pilot.

"Why not?"

"Because you are not sleeping."

Erica gave a gusty sigh. It didn't often come up, just what crap universal translators were when they only had some vocabulary and not truckloads of social context. Normally, when dealing with any alien, you were dealing with a humanoid who knew what humans were like, and you knew what they were like, and you both knew what the main pitfalls in your relationship were going to be.

This was not that. The Pilot knew some Standard, the machine was starting to figure out some Gorn, and that was about it.

Erica ducked into the bathroom, changed into a tank top and pajama pants, and climbed under her covers. "See?" she called. "I'm going to sleep now. So can you sleep too?"

"Disagree," said the Pilot.

Erica let loose a sound of frustration. "Aren't you tired yet?"

"Agree."

"But you won't sleep."

"I will go into torpor instead," said the Pilot, crouching on top of the blanket. "That is better than nothing."

"What would it take for you to sleep?"

The Gorn looked at her. Away. Back again. Blinked. "I do not sleep alone."

"Pilot, I'm right here."

The Gorn moved one step closer, then hesitated. "Are you giving me permission to join you?"

Erica opened her mouth. She absolutely hadn't been. She didn't want a cold scaly Gorn in her bed. There was saving each other's lives and reluctantly discovering friendship on a cold moon, and then there was cuddling up with a creature that put humans in pods of slime and dissolved them from the outside in.

But sentient beings generally needed sleep to live, and apparently Gorn couldn't sleep alone, so what else was there to do?

She probably just saved my life so she could have a pet to sleep with, she thought resentfully. But then she thought of how, as of this morning, she'd been crying and begging M'Benga to save the Pilot, terrified her friend wouldn't make it, after all they'd been through together. How much she had come to care in such a short time. And now it was too much to ask to share half of her bed?

Sighing, she moved over, so she was almost hanging off the side of the bed, and patted the empty space. "You can sleep on your side," she said. "That can be a compromise between the human way and the Gorn way of sleeping."

Slowly the Gorn approached, climbing onto the bed, making the mattress dip under her weight. She curled into a tight ball, arms wrapped around her knees.

She looked, frankly, pathetic.

Erica sighed again and raised the comforter. "Cold?"

"Agree," said the Pilot timidly.

She draped the comforter over the Gorn. "There," she said. "Better?"

"It is no worse than on the moon," said the Pilot.

"Well, thank god for that," said Erica, turned on her side, and tried to sleep.

Chapter Text

The Pilot had not slept so well since the crash of her ship and the corresponding death of her copilot. She was warm all over.

She had not meant to push so hard to get the human to sleep with her. But even the Monitors never punished anyone so severely as to make them sleep alone. Cull them, yes, but not isolate them. It would have been safer to sleep alone, as a juvenile on the breeding world, than to risk waking with someone's teeth already buried in your limbs. And yet she had not. It was a Gorn instinct to sleep in the largest possible pile, conserving heat.

The human twitched beneath her, then immediately her breath came quickly, tension shooting into her body. The Pilot scrambled away, all the way into the corner. She had done wrong. She had been told to sleep on the other side of the bed. In her sleep she had instinctively transgressed. She already had no function here. Surely it would not take a very large transgression to be culled.

The one called Ortegas lay panting for a moment, dark eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. After a minute she said breathlessly, "You're a blanket hog."

"I do not understand."

"Never mind."

"I have transgressed. I will accept punishment."

Ortegas sat up, her crest of fur mussed and her eyes bleary. "Punishment? You're fine, Pilot, it's okay. Some people are sleep cuddlers, they can't help it."

The Pilot tilted her head to the side. "Next sleep I will stay in the corner and go into torpor instead."

"No, don't worry about it," said Ortegas. "Seriously. It's fine."

The Pilot thought about this, as Ortegas disappeared into the cleansing room and made sloshing noises in the sink. She had implied the human way was to sleep alone. But she also implied some people did not. Had the Pilot, perhaps, taught Ortegas a new and better way of sleeping? She surely could not be comfortable sleeping alone like that. And if that were so, then perhaps this could be one function the Pilot could have, to continue to be useful in this new place.

Sometimes, when Erica's blankets wrapped too tightly around her at night, or she got too sweaty, she dreamed of the Gorn ship. Closed in a fleshy pod, half suffocated, slowly being digested.

That wasn't how she'd woken up this morning. She'd been freezing, not hot, and the Gorn had been half on top of her, like a hot water bottle gone lukewarm. Still terrifying, but not in the same way.

It happened the next morning, and the next. By the third day, the Gorn wasn't like an eldritch horror anymore. More and more, she was like an annoying roommate. On top of hogging the blankets, she took bites out of the soap, she left the sink taps on, and her language sounded like a cross between a hissing cat and a rattlesnake. She wanted to be helpful, and wasn't, and was only with difficulty diverted into watching her way through the computer bank's visual encyclopedia.

It was hard not to feel—well—tolerantly fond of her, anyway. Like her abuela's mean cat that you couldn't pet, who peed on the rug, but he was a fine old man in his own way and part of the family.

It wasn't really curing Erica of her xenophobia, though. Everything the Pilot said about her life back home made Erica hate the Gorn more than before. The fact that they had not valued her friend just meant they were even worse than Erica had thought they were.

But she took a deep breath and tried to be reasonable. She knew it was more complicated than that. And it was time for her briefing with the senior staff, explaining what she'd learned so far.

"The Gorn are a hive species," she said, to the table at large. "My friend is what we'd call a worker, meaning she can't lay eggs and isn't a decisionmaker back home. She never particularly wanted to go to war with us, but it never seems to have occurred to her that was a decision she was supposed to have an opinion about."

"Sapient eusocial species are rare," said Spock. "But they are common among arthropods, such as the Earth termite or bee. In many cases they act like a single organism."

"I don't think that's true of the Gorn," said Erica. "At least—they think of themselves as one organism, sort of, but they're not. The Pilot has a will of her own, she wants to live even though her hive doesn't value her."

"Does she have a name?" asked Uhura.

Erica shook her head. "She has a job and a number."

Uhura's lips pressed together sadly. Bless her, her mentor had been killed by the Gorn and yet her first instinct was still empathy.

"In other words, getting to know her isn't going to do us much good," said La'an. "If it's the queen that controls everything, then it doesn't matter what your friend thinks."

"She can at least tell us how the queens work," objected Una. "Is there just one queen for the whole Hegemony?"

"There are a lot of them," said Ortegas thoughtfully, "but there's one big one that's the boss of all of them. As I understand it, there was one who was really aggressive, but she was killed when we did that trick with the stars."

Uhura looked a little upset. "So we weren't modulating their behavior. We killed someone."

"We assassinated someone who was bad news," said Erica. "So in terms of ending a war with a minimum of casualties on both sides, I think we did the best thing we possibly could have."

"So is that all we have to worry about?" asked Pike. "They won't bother us anymore because the evil queen is dead?"

Erica hesitated. "In… a way. That is, it was only that queen who wanted to use humans for breeding and take over our planets. But the others… Well, let's put it this way. If we were looking at a humanoid species, it would be one where ninety-nine percent of people have zero rights. If they don't excel, they get culled, and I think eaten. And even if they do, they eventually get used to lay eggs in. Apparently, with the old queen dead, the new queen is going to be doing that a lot now. Laying eggs in her predecessors' workers, so she can replace them with her own."

There were grimaces around the table. "That's awful," said Uhura.

"Better them than us," said La'an.

"La'an!" Chapel objected. "They're still sentient beings."

"If that's the way they reproduce, then what's anybody supposed to do about it?" La'an asked. "If we can be left out of their…process…then that's the best we could have asked for."

"Starfleet isn't in the business of regime change," said Pike gently. "We can't barge in and make them stop, not when we couldn't even defend ourselves against them."

"I know," said Erica. She'd known that coming in, but she'd still had to say something. "Can the Pilot at least have asylum permanently?"

"Is her hive going to come after her?" asked La'an sharply.

"No. She's quite sure of that. Once she was out of touch for a few days, they would have given up on her. They don't expend resources trying to find individuals."

"Federation law is that we have to grant it, if they're in real danger and we can shelter them without risk to ourselves," said Una.

Pike nodded. "Then that's what we'll do. Una, get the paperwork started. And uh, Erica? See if you can get your friend to pick a name to put on it."

"You've really got to choose a name," said Erica, as she sat at her desk filling out the asylum paperwork.

"Why?" asked the Pilot.

Because I feel like a dick just calling you "Pilot," she thought, but didn't say. "So we can keep track of you. And put it on your paperwork."

"Put 'Gorn Pilot,'" said the Pilot. "There can be no possible confusion. No other Gorn Pilot has requested asylum."

Erica sighed. Was it culturally insensitive to be hung up on this point? It just felt important to her, like if the Pilot had a name, she wouldn't think of herself as just a cell of a hive. "I just think everybody should have their own name," she said at last.

"Your language already has thousands of words. You truly need to add thousands more for all the possible individuals there can be?"

Erica smirked. "Believe me, it would get confusing without it. How would the Captain call me if I didn't have a name? 'Pilot, to the bridge,' and then he might get any pilot."

"If he needs someone to fly the ship, clearly any pilot would be sufficient," said the Pilot. "Why should he prefer one pilot over another?"

Erica smirked. "Because I'm the best!"

"Then he should call you Best Pilot, and everyone else just Pilot."

"But we're all different. We have different feelings, and people have different feelings about us. If you brought in another Gorn pilot right now, I wouldn't feel about them the way I feel about you. We wouldn't have the same history."

The Pilot considered that, making her quiet rattling hiss. After a moment she said, "This is true. Another Pilot might eat you. Or bring you back to be digested."

Erica rubbed her hand, where her fingers had been regenerated. She hadn't told the Pilot about that, and she didn't want to.

"But situations like that don't come up often," the Pilot added. "And it is more important for all the pilots to know that they are interchangeable. That they do not matter individually, only insofar as their function serves the Hive."

There it was. Her gut had been right. Not giving names did have significance, and it was significance that was bad. Cult-hive stuff. "So this is something you were specifically taught," she said flatly. "They do it that way on purpose."

The Pilot tilted her head in confusion. "Agree."

"The Queens, do they have names?"

"Of course," said the Pilot. "They matter."

"They don't matter to me," said Ortegas. "Not the way you do."

"Mattering is not subjective," said the Pilot. "One matters or one does not."

"And you've decided you don't?"

"I don't," said the Pilot. "That is fact."

Erica bent her head back to the paperwork, though she was mostly thinking and not writing. To what degree was it right to try to save an alien from their own culture? Did it matter if the culture was toxic as hell? Erica hated Vulcan culture, but she knew perfectly well Spock didn't want to be saved from it. But this was different. This was ethics. So she brought in the big guns. "I thought you said you weren't Gorn anymore. That you wanted to be part of my brood instead."

"That was when I thought you were a juvenile Queen," said the Pilot. "But if it will make you happy, you may put down 'Pilot belonging to Orrrt'g's.'"

"That would not make me happy," said Erica. "You're not my property."

"You could select a name for me," said the Pilot.

"Would you like that better?"

"No," said the Pilot. "My name is Pilot. I was very proud the day I earned that name. Before that I was Trainee, and before that I had no name at all. To be Pilot means to have a function. If you took my name and gave me one that meant no function, I would not like that at all."

"Function is mattering?" asked Erica.

"It is the next best thing," said the Pilot.

Erica sighed and wrote in the blank, Gorn Pilot.

Chapter Text

The Pilot was given permission to move around the ship, though she did not attempt it without Ortegas. Even together, they received many frightened stares, humans backing away or glaring angrily. This despite the Pilot having replaced her tattered flight suit with a more cheerful garment, patterned fabric like Gorn wore on their ships on less-work days. She still towered over the humans; even the tallest only came to her shoulders. And she still was unlike them in every conceivable way.

She crouched beside a table in the room that was for eating. This, it seemed, humans did do communally. Ortegas's friends sat around the table eating and talking and pretending very hard that they were not disconcerted by the presence of a Gorn among them. One friend was absent, which was another thing everyone was avoiding discussing.

The non-human among them, the Vulcan friend named Spock, was the only one who did not seem to be alarmed. He asked many probing questions and allowed himself to be questioned as well. It seemed his species and humans were very much alike, that in fact most of the species they had encountered were humanoid and not hive species at all. The Pilot wondered if the Queens were aware of this. Surely they must be, but they had been careful never to include this in the instruction on humans the workers had been allowed to access.

The Pilot wondered what other knowledge had been deliberately kept from her.

"Males live after mating, yes?" asked the Pilot. "Have you mated?"

For the first time, Spock seemed uncomfortable and did not answer. The one called Chapel said, "None of us have children, if that's what you're asking. But some of us have mates that we have committed to. I do."

"For what purpose, if not for children?"

"For fun," said Ortegas. "Like a friend, but…more."

"What makes it 'more'?"

Uhura, who it seemed was the expert on communicating with other species, explained, "Humans often mate…recreationally. The actions of mating, without actually making offspring. It's socially important to us, and we enjoy it."

The Pilot moved her head up and down to signal understanding in the human way. "Workers rub genitals together," she said. "It is not mating. We are not Queens. It is neither useful nor forbidden. It is…" She thought of the rush of pleasure that happened, what purpose it could possibly serve, and yet everyone did it when they could. A vestigial instinct, she assumed, like her vestigial ovipositor, or the nipples on a human male. "For pleasure," she said, because recreationally was not a word the Gorn language possessed.

"And do you do it with everybody, or just some other people?" asked Uhura. "For us, it makes an important relationship with another person, usually just one another person."

There were many in her cohort with whom she would have liked such a pairbond. Those she had desired so deeply to touch. Those she would have called friend, if their language had had such a word.

All of them by now were dead.

She remembered the first Pilot with whom she had flown a tandem mission. It had been intoxicating, wonderful, and after they landed the two of them had touched each other frantically, hungrily, not stopping until they were completely exhausted.

She was from another brood, and her queen had died, and that queen's successor had used that Pilot for eggs. They had burst out of her quite messily in full view of everyone.

She no longer wished to talk about this. She rose upright again. "There is no point in making a pair with anyone." Her nictating membranes flicked quickly across her eyes. "All are family within the Hive. And none of us are worth anything individually. It would be irrational to stake any of one's interest on a single cell that could be culled at any time."

She stalked away, hearing the scrape of Ortegas's chair as her friend hurried after her.

The Pilot spent several hours in torpor, pretending not to be aware of Ortegas moving around the room. Then Ortegas went to her duties elsewhere on the ship, and the Pilot went through more educational material on the computer. She watched a video about bees, which were not, after all, very much like Gorn. Ants perhaps were more similar. If an ant was painted with the right scent, she would leave the nest and lie on the pile of dead. That was more like what a Gorn would do. A proper Gorn, who had not been selfish and indulged in irrational hope as she had.

Then she watched videos of human mating. It was not at all like a Queen's mating, and no one died, although they made sounds as if they might. It was more like two workers taking pleasure together, purely for the enjoyment of it, when no Monitor was watching.

When Ortegas returned, the Pilot demanded, "Is the one called Sss-ah-kkk your mating pair?"

Ortegas laughed. "Ew, no, why would you think that?"

"He is your only associate who is male."

"We don't only mate, male with female," said Ortegas. "In fact, between you and me, I like females best."

"Which female do you mate with?"

"None of them. I don't have anybody right now."

"You are alone," said the Pilot pityingly.

"You really hate the idea of being alone, don't you?"

"One is never alone," said the Pilot. "One should be part of a clutch, a brood, and a hive."

"I have all my friends," said Ortegas. "Including you. So I'm not lonely, don't worry about it."

The Pilot thought it was perhaps not the same. Someone should be touching genitals with Ortegas, making her make those loud and apparently-happy sounds. It was so different here among humans, so free in many ways, and yet Gorn would not have forced Ortegas to sleep alone and forego pleasure-seeking. She was too alone, and that felt wrong.

Sam, of course, demanded his turn with the Pilot. Though after a three-hour interview, he looked a little dazed.

"I'm not sure xeno-anthropology is even the word," he told Erica, when the Pilot had stalked off to their quarters alone. "I generally study humanoid cultures. This is… It's incomprehensible, by any standard, and she's not exactly being forthcoming either. I might as well try to interview an anthill."

Erica frowned. "She usually makes sense when I talk to her."

Sam consulted his padd. "Question: what do you do with your dead? Answer: There are never any dead left over. Left over from what?"

"After they eat them," said Erica. "You really didn't pick up on that?"

He looked sheepish. "I was kind of hoping I was misunderstanding."

"Afraid not. They reproduce in really large quantities, and then cull the numbers down at every stage of development, keeping only the strongest. The Pilot says that it's no different than when the body burns fat cells when it needs energy. You don't mourn the fat cell. You eat it."

Sam hugged the padd to his chest. "I can't publish any of this. We've finally managed to end the Gorn war. Let this information out and people will demand we get back in there."

Erica raised an eyebrow. "Like, 'Oh no, the Gorn are killing each other, let's kill them first'?"

"I never said people made sense. In fact, most of anthropology is exploring all the ways they don't make sense. I'm just saying, I got into this hoping we could find a way to humanize the Gorn—I mean—you know what I mean, right?"

"Yeah," said Erica. "You wanted to show that they're people, not monsters. The way we see Pilot."

Sam looked a little skeptical. "Well…the way you do, anyway. I'm working on it. But what she told me… These aren't just cultural differences, Erica! It's a matter of right and wrong. I've been trained not to judge other cultures, there are some things other species do that seem nuts to us but make sense to them. The important thing is how their cultures serve the benefit of the people in them. But this doesn't. It's—I'm not supposed to ever say this, but it's sick. It's evil."

Erica chewed on her bottom lip. "I can't disagree with you. But like… there's a difference between someone's culture, like Orions being slutty—"

"Sexually open," Sam corrected.

"And the part of the culture where they do piracy and the slave trade, right? There's your real culture, and then there's the bad and oppressive stuff."

Sam grimaced. "Now that would make the field a lot simpler, wouldn't it? Good culture and bad culture and if something is bad culture, it's okay to condemn it. But people are attached to all of their culture, it's not like they make a distinction. And if you condemn the culture you always wind up condemning the people, because what's wrong with them that they came up with a culture like that?"

Erica thought about the Orions, the long and complicated history that had led them to the state they were in. They had once been a civilized and equitable empire, allegedly, but they sure weren't now. "The difference I guess is that you can ask anti-trafficking Orions how to engage with their culture without excusing slavery," she said. "Whereas we still haven't found an anti-eating-your-siblings Gorn."

"You've got to consider the possibility that it's a biological imperative," said Sam. "That they evolved this way, so their instinct is always going to be to eat the weakest ones. Maybe they just don't experience love or compassion at all."

"A genuinely evil species," said Erica quietly. "A species that's an exception to everything we've always been taught, that every sapient species is capable of cooperation and ethics."

"There's a very good reason we're taught that," said Sam. "Any species that makes it to space has to already know how to cooperate. But that doesn't account for hive beings. They don't cooperate, they're controlled as a unit. An alternative to love and compassion that's enough to get them out here, but not enough to make it possible to cooperate with them."

His conclusions seemed unavoidable, and for a moment Erica couldn't see a way out.

But then she thought of the Pilot throwing her a lump of meat. Her big sad eyes at the thought of sleeping alone. "I just don't think we're seeing everything," she said at last. "What you have on paper, the things that she's said, make it sound like you're right. But she is capable of compassion, she showed it to me. And they're communal creatures. Did she tell you she can't sleep alone? Literally, she will not enter a sleep state at all unless she's touching someone."

Sam recoiled and quickly tried to hide his disgust. "She sleeps with you?"

"Don't spread it around," said Erica. "People already think I'm insane."

He gulped. "You're a braver person than I am. After what we went through, too."

"I guess I don't think of her as one of the people that did it," she said. "I think of her as someone else who made it out of the hive. I remember flying us out of there, half dead and bleeding on the console, and now I think, that's the same console she flew. We're not that different."

Sam sighed. "I hope you're right. Because this—" He held up his padd, giving it a little shake. "This is a nightmare. Pike's going to expect a report at some point. But you've got to try to get me something else to put in it besides what she told me."

"I'll do my best," said Erica.

Chapter Text

Erica saw nothing of La'an for two weeks. She was on administrative leave, apparently, because that was the polite way to record "trigger-happy, but given her trauma, we get it."

During her leave, La'an wasn't confined to quarters, but she was still nowhere to be seen. Erica wondered if she was keeping tabs on the Pilot—and by extension, Erica—in order to always make sure she was somewhere else. Erica didn't blame her. From time to time, as she and the Pilot moved around the ship, she caught a reflection of the two of them walking together. One compact human, towered over by a huge scaled creature with an arrow-shaped head full of teeth. The Pilot walked with a raptor's stance, balanced lightly on her toes, head thrust forward as if looking for something to bite.

Only Erica could see the way the Pilot's knees were a little bent, trying to tuck herself smaller so she didn't loom quite so much. The way she shied at sudden movements from humans, ducking her head away and then a second later pretending she hadn't. The signs of her careful restraint weren't obvious, whereas her giant teeth and claws were a bit hard to ignore.

No, it really was no surprise La'an was steering clear.

But when La'an finally returned to bridge duty—minus her sidearm, as she would have to recertify in phasers entirely after her slipup—she still wouldn't look at Erica. Everyone on the bridge was welcoming her, and she gave each a nod and a tight smile. But when Erica said, "Glad to have you back," La'an turned abruptly, ponytail swinging behind her, and didn't answer.

Erica's gut twisted and she stared forward at her console. Was this because she'd cursed La'an out for shooting the Pilot? Or because she'd chosen to save the Pilot at all?

At the end of the shift she darted forward to make it into the same lift as La'an. La'an grasped the handle and stared straight forward as if the lift doors had personally insulted her grandmother. Nervously Erica ventured, "I know you were only trying to protect me."

La'an's posture tightened even further, her chin tipping downward. "I wasn't."

"Come again?"

Finally La'an looked at her. "I wasn't trying to protect you. I fired because I saw a Gorn. That's all. I didn't have orders for it, and I should've followed orders, but I still don't think I was wrong on principle. There are some things you shoot on sight, and that thing is one of them."

Erica halted the lift. "Do you agree she's a sapient being, or not?"

La'an's lips pursed. "If Gorn weren't sapient they'd give us all a hell of a lot less trouble. But they're evil. You think because you spent one day on a Gorn ship, you understand, but you don't."

"I know I don't," said Erica. "I know it's not the same."

"To me you're like those people who go to the zoo and start mooning over the tiger cage and the slime devil habitat. Convinced that they could be the one special person who could pet it and not get their face mauled off." With a sharp twist of the handle, La'an restarted the lift.

Erica's temper flared. "Between the moment you met her and now, only one of you has done any mauling," she bit out. "She hasn't—"

La'an slapped the door release and leapt out on the next floor before the lift had even stopped, not looking back.

Erica's head thumped back against the bulkhead. She hadn't handled that well, but she wasn't sure what way anybody could handle it. Emily Post didn't have a section on how to make peace between your friend who used to eat people, and your friend who shot her on sight with a phaser because her whole family got eaten.

Starfleet was full of tricky situations, and they all had training in how to look past the obvious to find unconventional solutions toward peace. But it was still made of human beings, and Erica herself hadn't been able to make it through dinner with a Klingon. So how could she blame La'an for being prickly? She was avoiding the Pilot, after all, not harassing her.

But still. It wasn't a great situation to have on a ship this size. They could hardly avoid each other indefinitely.

The Pilot finally had an official meeting with the ruler of the ship, along with Ortegas.

She thought she might understand this individual, this Captain, called by his function more often than not, like a Gorn. She had learned his crest of white fur was a sign of age. Not many on the ship had it. It must be how advancement took place. Not like among queens, with the younger supplanting and devouring the older, but how it took place among Pilots: the ones who survived the most culls eventually became senior, became the first on the list to be called for a mission. She herself was quite senior, being thirty brood-cycles old. Old for a Pilot, at least. Few went so long without making at least one mistake.

The Captain had his own room, bigger than Ortegas's, but there was the smell of another there, a female. So he did have a mate, though she was not currently present. Perhaps one earned a mate through seniority. It was the other white-haired human, Chapel, who had also said that she had one.

Would Ortegas live long enough to obtain a mate and a position of authority? Or had she already risen as high as pilots could? She said she was the best.

Ortegas took the chair across from the Captain, and the Pilot crouched beside her. The Captain looked at Ortegas, glanced at the Pilot, looked uncomfortable, and finally seemed to steel himself. "Thanks for meeting with me, Pilot."

She blinked her nictating membranes and did not say anything, because the statement was without purpose.

The Captain cleared his throat. "I have a few different things I wanted to talk to you about. I've had some reports about you from Ortegas, but I'd like to hear a little about your people in your own words. Do you think there's any hope for an actual peace treaty with your people?"

"No," said the Pilot.

The Captain blinked several times. "Could you…elaborate on that?"

"The Gorn do not make peace treaties with anyone," said the Pilot. "It is the Queens who decide, and the Queens respect only those they are made to respect." She paused, trying to work out how to explain Queens and how they thought. The Pilot didn't even know how they thought. She had been in the presence of a Queen a few times in her life, each of which had been an occasion fraught with terror and awe. The smell of a Queen made her want to lie prostrate on the ground. They were not individuals whom one could speculate about.

But when she thought of a Queen beside the humans, all she could think was that the humans could only ever be seen as workers to a Queen, even though they all reproduced. They were small and soft and had functions and mated for pleasure. They were not ruthless like a Queen. They thought the Pilot had value. By definition, that must mean their own value was not much higher than that of a Pilot—a very low value, by a Queen's standards.

"You must hope an aggressive Queen does not come to power again," she concluded.

"What if the people staged a revolt? Made the queen act differently?"

She stared at him blankly. Understanding humans was impossible. For them to understand her, it seemed, was more so. "That does not happen."

"Why not?"

"There are functions whose duty is to make sure it does not," the Pilot said slowly. The Trainers who taught them obedience, the Monitors who observed them after their assignment of function, the Arrangers who assigned tasks, all made it so that even where the Queen was not present, her will still permeated everything.

"What if those people resisted the queen too?"

The Pilot tilted her head in puzzlement. "Why should they?" Surely the higher up the hierarchy, the more a worker would have contact with the Queen, and therefore the more affected by her pheromones she must be.

The Captain gave a helpless shrug. "Well, if you think it's impossible."

That seemed to be the end of that topic, so the Pilot brought up her own concern. "What is to be my function here?"

The Captain's lips pursed. "You, uh… you're basically a passenger."

"That is not a function," said the Pilot. "I require a function."

The Captain exchanged a glance with Ortegas and rubbed his mouth in thought. "I suppose she could do a lot to help train the security team in hand-to-hand," he suggested.

Ortegas shook her head rapidly. "I really don't think so. On the human side, emotions would run too high, and on her side—well, can you imagine the trouble even a tiny mistake would cause? Especially since the head of security…."

"Right," said the Captain.

The Pilot looked from one of them to the other. It was natural that in cross-species communication, much would be lost. Her mastery of Standard was only moderate. Here, they had not spoken at all, yet communication had still passed between them. Telepathy? Pheromones? Or only shared context?

"We need to consider," said the Captain, "what you might do when you leave the Enterprise. Where you might go next."

"Why should I leave your ship?" asked the Pilot, alarmed.

"Well, like you said, you don't have a job here. And we're not really meant for passengers. I know there are lots of good Federation planets with refugee transitional services—"

The Pilot was on her feet. "Without Orrrt'g's?!" she demanded.

The Captain quailed a little, but forced himself to sit up straight again. "Ortegas has a job to do here," he said. "It would be good if you made some new friends somewhere else."

The Pilot hissed, moving slightly behind Ortegas. "She is mine, my brood, my hive," she declared. "You shall not separate us. No one could be so cruel."

Ortegas turned in her seat and laid a hand on the Pilot's forelimb. "It was just an idea," she said soothingly. "We'll talk about it more another time."

"Your leader does not want me," she hissed, desolate. "I have no function. Why does he not cull me instead of this cruelty?"

Ortegas and the Captain looked at each other, faces moving subtly, having a whole conversation with their facial muscles, it seemed. Finally the Captain said, "I didn't know you felt that way about it. Let's put that idea aside for now, and talk about what function you could have here for the time being."

The Pilot did not like this talk of for now or for the time being. She wanted a promise that no one would separate her from Ortegas. But she let herself sink back into a crouch. "My function is Pilot," she said. "That is the only thing I know how to do."

"Do you know how your ships work? Could you give us information about their capacity, about the energy systems they use?"

"I am not an Engineer," said the Pilot. "I can tell you how to fly our ships. That is all."

The Captain rubbed his face. "Want to take her out flying, Erica?" he asked. "May as well see what she can do out there."

The Pilot shivered slightly with delight the whole way down to the place where the shuttles were. When she had been a Trainee and cycled through the different functions to test her aptitude, it was the flight simulator that had delighted her most. She had been terrified that she would not be chosen for it, but it seemed that her delight in the task went together with aptitude for it. Always ships had responded eagerly to her command.

Ortegas was showing her teeth the whole time they boarded and prepared the shuttle. "Pilots are all the same, aren't we?" she said, her eyes narrowing happily. "It's a special kind of person that likes to be out there, among the stars, at the controls."

"You too were chosen for this because of your aptitude?"

"I chose it myself," said Ortegas. "I wanted to be a pilot since I was a kid."

The Pilot blinked her nictating membranes. "Humans simply choose? How then can the number of functions match perfectly with the number of people who want each function?" Perhaps she had caught them out at last. They would cull those who wanted to be Pilots and were not the best.

"Ah, well, if I'd failed flight school I suppose I would've had to be something else," said Ortegas. She finished the preflight checks and showed the Pilot where to sit and how to strap in.

"What if you were good for nothing?" asked the Pilot.

"Everybody's good at something," said Ortegas, chuckling. "Even my no-good brother. But if somebody can't get a job, it's really fine. We take care of everybody. Not everyone has jobs. Some people just have fun, visit with friends, volunteer, write subspace serials for an audience of five people."

"I could not live with no function," said the Pilot.

"Me neither," said Ortegas. "I'm the kind of person who wants to be doing things, making a difference. But still, it can't be my whole life. I fly the ship, it's what I do, but I'm not just that. I have friends, hobbies—things I do just for fun. After all, life is more than what we contribute. We don't live to work, we work to live."

Ortegas activated the engines and piloted deftly out of the hangar. The Pilot was distracted, dwelling on what Ortegas said. It was nonsensical. What was life other than what one contributed? "Fun"? What as the function of "fun"?

She shook her head and focused on the human's instruction. The shuttle was nothing like a Gorn shuttle, but it seemed Ortegas knew how a Gorn shuttle was flown and was able to explain the differences.

Soon the Pilot's claws were gliding easily over the panel and the shuttle was surging, spinning, diving. The ship was not as maneuverable as a Gorn ship, but it could handle the first nine Basic Maneuvers and five of the Advanced Maneuvers that the Pilot knew. The stars wheeled through the viewscreen, tantalizingly close.

Ortegas shut off the intertial damper, threw her hands in the air, and whooped. Yet another alarming noise, but a quick sidelong glance showed she was also smiling.

The Pilot wished to speak, wished to say something that would crystalize this moment, but the moment itself transcended words. They were flying, like a pair of wild birds on the planet where she had hatched, when she was nothing but an unmolted being made of claws and hunger. Before she had learned that she was only a cell and without value. Before her clutchmates had, one by one, been eaten from the inside.

Slowly she reduced the velocity on the shuttle, brought it back toward the big odd-shaped human ship.

"That was wonderful," said Ortegas breathlessly.

"It was useless," said the Pilot. "Done only for pleasure."

"All the best things are," said Ortegas with a grin.

The Pilot's hearts throbbed rapidly. She wished to seize Ortegas in her claws, throw her down on the deck, and rub against her until they both found pleasure after pleasure. Another useless thought. The Monitors only allowed things like that so that they would be mentally healthy enough to perform their functions. But Ortegas thought it was the other way around. That one performed the function in order to support the other parts of life. Pleasure-seeking and sleeping with broodmates and eating food and spending time with friends.

She could not be correct.

The shuttle touched lightly down in the shuttle bay, and the Pilot turned to Ortegas. "You rarely touch me anymore," she said abruptly, because she did not know what else to say.

"You aren't injured anymore," said Ortegas.

"Do only injured people deserve it?"

In response Ortegas reached over, glided her soft fingertips against the scales of the Pilot's forelimb. "The only question was whether you wanted it."

"I want it," said the Pilot quickly. "I want—" She stopped herself.

Ortegas trailed her hand down over the Pilot's claws. "Tell me what you want."

The Pilot thought of herself again as that hungry infant, mindless and hungry and moving at lightning speed from meal to living meal. She had watched videos of humans with their infants, coddling and feeding and carrying from place to place. She would never have received that in any case; she had never been that delicate. But perhaps she deserved more than to be left alone on a planet to hatch from a corpse. Perhaps she would not have been so hungry.

She felt hungry now, hungry not for warm meat but for something she had never known and always wanted. And she feared her hunger terribly. She had devoured her way through living beings, some humanoid, some her clutchmates. She had been too hungry to consider another way. Now she knew there was another way, one in which every hatchling had value, not only those strong enough to survive the breeding world and the culls. She was beginning to believe Ortegas had spoken truly on that point, no matter how implausible it was.

But that did not change what she was, her strength and her hunger. She would hurt Ortegas, if she let herself give in to her hunger, even a little bit. If humans were as hungry as Gorn, they would never say so blithely that it was the pleasures of life that mattered. They would have all devoured one another alive. Hunger like a Gorn's necessitated strict control in the Gorn way.

She jerked her hand away. "It does not matter what I want," she snapped. "I am not like you."

Ortegas gestured to the flight console, the viewscreen. "After all of that flying, you don't think we're alike? It felt like we were just the same, out there. Couple of thrill seekers, out in the stars."

The Pilot faltered, feeling her resolve weaken. It was true. They were alike in that way.

"But you think you are more than that function," she hissed at last, and stalked out of the shuttle.

Chapter Text

"I don't know what I'm doing," said Erica to Nyota and Christine, one evening in Nyota's quarters. "Am I trying to heal a traumatized person? Or am I trying to change her? Like making a cat a vegetarian—going against her nature because what she is makes me uncomfortable."

Nyota looked thoughtful. "It's a high-stakes question," she said. "On an individual level, it's wrong to try to change somebody into something they're not. But on a species level, if the Gorn can't be changed…" She trailed off. "Well, it's something we need to know."

"I spent way too much time trying to change Spock," said Christine, swirling the ice around in her cocktail glass. "A Vulcan is a Vulcan. You can get him to try to get in touch with his feelings, but he'll still be a Vulcan. He was trying to channel his human side to be with me, but it didn't work. A species isn't just a culture, after all. It's a whole different set of instincts inside a person, that they built their specific culture to contain."

"But I don't know what is inside her," said Erica. "What's a culture like that trying to contain?"

Nyota shook her head regretfully. "I wish I knew. Is this from the bottom up, or the top down?"

"At least some of it is from the top down," said Erica. "Like, she did understand the concept of names. She just said that they don't use them because it's important for workers to remember they're interchangeable."

"So it could be that the queens are forcing this culture on the workers to get compliance," said Nyota.

"Maybe," said Christine doubtfully. "But they're hatched out like that, you know. We've all seen it."

Erica thought of the ravenous, skittering, chittering monsters they'd first encountered. Gorn children. Humans liked to imagine returning to the innocence of childhood, unrepressed and pure, a time when they'd been a little bit closer to goodness. Gorn childhood was worse than adulthood. Maybe all that strict control from the top was intended to reign in their even greater natural brutality.

"It can't hurt to try," said Nyota. "If you tried to teach her about the things that we value—love and compassion and the rest—the worst that can happen is, it doesn't work. You can't very well brainwash her into ethics if she doesn't understand what that is. I think it's a lesson that can only work if she has the capacity for it to begin with."

"I'm hardly the person to try to explain ethical philosophy to her," said Erica. "Maybe Spock could."

"Don't try to give her a philosophy lesson," said Christine. "Just—I don't know—show her."

Erica thought about the past few weeks. Waking up with something cold and scaly spooned around her, pretending she didn't mind until she honestly didn't. Getting to know all the faces the Pilot could make with her big eyes and dozens of needlesharp teeth. Whooping as the shuttle swooped and dived under the Pilot's capable control. Maybe she already had been showing her, all this time.

She felt a fond smile spread over her face, tried to stifle it, and ducked her head.

Christine's eyes widened. "Erica. I didn't mean—"

"You have something to tell us?" teased Nyota.

"Don't," she begged, feeling her face heat. "It's not like that, it's not weird."

"I didn't say it was," said Nyota gently. "She's a person, you know we'd never judge you for having feelings for any person."

"She ate her siblings," said Erica. "I'm pretty sure you can judge me for having a crush on a cannibal."

"I mean, we wouldn't recommend you date her," said Christine. She exchanged a look with Nyota and amended, "I wouldn't. But having feelings is normal. You're human, our attraction is….disturbingly broad, by most species' standards."

"I'm not going to try to date her, don't worry," said Erica. "She was pretty firm they don't believe in pairing off. And I know she won't be here long in any event. When the Enterprise next docks somewhere, Pike is in a hurry to find another place for her to be."

Pike, of course, had good reasons. First of all, it was a Starfleet vessel, not a refugee ship, there wasn't much for her to do there. And second, the situation of having the Pilot and La'an on the same ship was taking some juggling. It wasn't a tenable situation long-term, and yet Pike didn't want to suggest La'an transfer when her trauma was completely legitimate.

But the way the Pilot had reacted at the idea had been alarming. She was a hive creature, and she'd designated Erica as her hive. Wasn't that what she'd said at the very beginning? I am dead to the Gorn. I am alive to you. Loneliness was far more terrifying to her than death.

Maybe Erica could take some leave to spend some time with her somewhere else, trying to build up a hive-substitute for her, other people who could look after her. But where in the universe would that even be? There wasn't a Federation world that didn't fear Gorn. Saurians, maybe? They were reptiles too. But even they would have heard of what the Gorn did across the sector. They'd be terrified of her.

Nyota squeezed Erica's shoulder. "I'm sorry. That's gotta be difficult."

She shook her head quickly, trying to look like it wasn't the big deal it felt like. "We've got some time. We'll figure something out. I just…can't get too attached, it wouldn't be good." And she wouldn't understand it. She'd be the first to break my heart, before the distance even did.

Ortegas introduced the Pilot to the concept of fiction. It was an interesting idea. One told lies, with the understanding that everyone knew they were lies, purely for creativity. Like music, noise made only to be pleasurable for hearing.

They sat close together on Ortegas's bed and watched the lie-videos every night. Some were realistic, things humans might do, even if they had not done them in that specific way in real life. Others were fully imaginary, whole worlds and situations that had never existed. Their ability to make up scenarios seemed to be infinite.

"What is the function of lie videos?" she asked Ortegas, as they watched one about a fish and a human child. "Is this like mating for pleasure, useless but you think it is more important?"

"Partly," said Ortegas, her eyes fixed on the screen. "And partly—well, in reality the possibilities are infinite. We have to imagine all of them, so we can decide which ones we want to make real."

"You wish to make real the scenario where water floods your planet and the land is drowned?"

Ortegas shook her head, laughing a little. "It's more abstract than that. It's about…love, mostly."

"What is that?"

The question seemed to frustrate Ortegas. Another word that was so difficult to define. "Like friendship, but…more, I suppose."

"Like mating pairs."

"Sometimes. But not only. They're only children here, they don't mate, it's not about that. But that he accepts her just as she is. That he wants her to be happy."

"The adult female has that with the juveniles too?"

"Yes, she's the boy's mother. You know our families are much closer, we all love each other in our families." Ortegas finally turned her eyes from the screen, watching the Pilot's face. "You've never felt that for anyone? No one's ever shown it to you?"

The Pilot did not want to talk about her own experience right now. She had indeed felt like this many times, but it had been useless, and it had only ever brought her pain. That had been the lesson taught by the Trainers and the Monitors. That one's love should be for the Hive only, that it did not matter which specific cells one nested with, all was Hive. That it was unreasonable to prefer one cell over others. So long as one was not alone, it did not matter.

The Pilot thought it did matter. And yet the way it had mattered to her had not been enough to save anyone. In the end it was better to cuddle down into a warm nest with just anyone, to try as much as possible not to think of this Pilot or that Pilot, but to see all other Pilots as the same. Because there might not always be this Pilot, but there would always be Pilots.

"This is why they came for you," the Pilot said instead. "Because they felt the kinship-feeling for you."

"Yes."

"And everyone receives it? Every human? That is why you all think you have value?"

Ortegas considered that. "I think it's the other way around. Everyone has value, so we try to show love to each other. Because, after all, everyone wants it. I feel like everyone who's capable of wanting love, deserves to receive it."

"That is like saying everyone deserves food, just because they are hungry," said the Pilot dismissively.

"They do," insisted Ortegas. "That right is enshrined in the Federation Constitution."

It was impossible to get past the human's relentless stubbornness. She simply would not understand what she did not wish to.

"You gave me food," Ortegas added. "You didn't think I deserved it?"

"I did not wish to die alone," said the Pilot. And then, the words feeling dragged out of her, "And…you looked hungry."

They stopped talking. The lie-video went on, the human child swearing love, the waters receding through some causality the Pilot could not understand. Ortegas rested her soft hand on the Pilot's thigh, and neither of them said anything about it.

Chapter Text

The human crew had a great fondness for games.

There were a few games permissible for Pilots, particularly training games, and games they had made up themselves for less-work days. But the humans seemed to have hundreds. They played them most evenings in a special room that was purely for "fun." The Pilot couldn't see, at first, why Ortegas insisted on playing them here instead of in their room.

But as more and more humans gathered to watch on each night that went by, she thought perhaps Ortegas was being strategic with this decision. The humans stopped keeping their distance so much, as if additional exposure had taken away their fear. Sometimes they even leaned over the board and gave Ortegas advice about how to beat her. When this happened, the Pilot almost wished she could make them afraid of her again.

The game called darts was easy. The humans threw their arms in the air and made hooting noises every time the Pilot landed another dart in the exact center of the circle. However the game called monopoly was entirely incomprehensible. It was based on an economic system humans didn’t even practice anymore. When she ate Ortegas’s metal piece, the racing vehicle, the game was abandoned.

“Is that how you beat me at chess?” Ortegas demanded, laughing. “I was sitting here trying to work out angles of attack, and you were eating my pieces?”

“In Gorn games, it is appropriate to eat the pieces,” said the Pilot. “How was I to know yours were different?”

The humans all laughed, a sound she had begun to find pleasant. It was a warm sound, a fond sound, a sound that felt like the press of Gorn bodies in a nest. A sound that meant one was accepted as Hive.

The humans did not have a Hive. They did not know what it meant to be One. They thought it was reasonable for a person to be close and then go another place and cease to be close. They thought the Pilot would eventually leave.

And yet the feeling of oneness was not entirely a lie either. They meant it, though what they meant by it was different.

She felt the unfillable hunger stirring in her again. She wanted to eat everyone in this room. Eat them and keep them in her belly forever and make them hers.

She did not do that. She ate six backgammon pieces, which was a joke the humans had not yet tired of. They laughed and laughed and replicated more.

There was always more. The humans did not seem to know what scarcity was. They had never been hungry in their lives.

Erica gave up on the idea of distance, of boundaries. She was going to get hurt, probably, but this was one of those times when she was just going to have to risk it.

The Pilot was a mystery in so many ways. Dispassionately describing horrors, then lapsing into silence while her creepy third eyelid flicked over her eyes. Considering how much better it was there than here? Or realizing the first time how messed up it all was by comparison?

But her affection seemed real. She was desperate to be touched, though she never reached out and asked for it. But every time Erica put a hand on her scales, she stilled, eyes half closing.

Every evening, before bed, Erica had established Cuddle Time. If this terrifying reptile needed snuggles, by golly she was going to get as much as she wanted. After their evening movie, sometimes the Pilot shifted down in bed, laying her head across Erica's lap, and Erica gently stroked the top of her scaly head and down her neck.

"What was the happiest moment of your life?" she asked, partly to make conversation, and partly in the hopes of finally breaking through and finding the Gorns' secret kind side.

"The day I was taken from the breeding planet," the Pilot said promptly. "There were not many of us that survived, out of the number we began with. Perhaps two hundred, out of thousands that were seeded there. But the rest came with us, of course."

"Came with you?" asked Erica, confused.

"In our bellies," she clarified. "No one is left behind. No one fails to return to the Whole. Each cell that is culled is reabsorbed into the body."

"So if you'd died alone on that moon—"

"Worse than culling," said the Pilot. "Eaten by worms instead of by my sisters as I ought to have been."

"So it's not sad for you," said Erica. "When somebody dies?"

That was enough to make the Pilot jerk upright, out of Erica's lap. "What do you think, Orrrt'g's? Do you think it is pleasant to watch a body one has slept beside night after night, burst with hungry hatchlings? Do you think it is pleasant to remember the crunch of my clutchmates' bones in my teeth?"

Erica let out a shaky breath. The Pilot had never hurt her, and yet it never stopped being a little bit terrifying when she got upset. "No, of course not. It wouldn't be for me. But you always seem…fine with how things are in the Hive."

Mollified, the Pilot draped herself back across Erica's lap. "One must be fine with it," she said. "That is how life is. It will not change." She reached up, taking Erica's wrist in her claws and bringing it back toward her head.

Obediently Erica resumed stroking her. Godzilla demands pets, she thought, and tried not to burst into inappropriate, hysterical laughter.

"Tell me why it was so great to be taken from the breeding planet," she said instead.

"They fed us," said the Pilot. "It was the first time in my life anything was ever given to me. We ate as much as we could hold. And at night we slept with full bellies. When we awakened, we were the same number we had been when we went to sleep."

"You were safe," said Erica softly, rubbing the little soft patch of scales behind the hole of the Pilot's ear. "You'd never been safe before."

"Yes. At least until the first trial. After every trial, or as part of the trial, there was culling. But then at least one knew when it would happen. One did not blame oneself."

This revealed a lot of things that hadn't been clear before. The Pilot was capable of sorrow, of missing the lost, even when she ate them. Perhaps she ate them because she missed them, in part. To keep them with her. And she was capable of guilt. Blaming herself for having eaten her clutchmates, even though there had been nothing else to eat, and the hatchlings presumably out of their minds from hunger.

Would that be enough for Sam's report, to help clear up the question of whether Gorn were even theoretically redeemable? It almost felt like a violation, something too private to put in the report, even though the Pilot had willingly revealed all the awful stuff early on. Weakness was the one thing she had held back until now, flopped over Erica's lap in the closest thing she could achieve to a Gorn nest.

"Has it always been that way?" Erica asked. "The breeding planets, and the training and culling, and all that?"

The Pilot's eyes opened again and she shifted uncomfortably. "I do not know. The training materials say yes. However much was missing from the training materials. There is only so much that a Pilot needs to know."

"Who would know?" asked Erica. "Are there Gorn historians?"

"There were at one time," said the Pilot. "I believe the last Great Queen, the one I told you of, ate all the historians and did not designate any more for that function."

"It's not uncommon for a bad government to cover up history that makes them look bad," said Erica.

"It also happens that people tell lies about what they would like to believe," said the Pilot. "Like your videos."

Erica paused in her petting for a moment, surprised. That sounded almost like a confession of something. "I'd like to hear those stories, even if they are lies," said Erica.

"There are no such stories," said the Pilot. "And there is too much talking in this nest when it is time for sleeping." She sat up off Erica's lap and flopped down on the bed with her eyes shut.

It wasn't Erica's usual bedtime for fifteen minutes yet, but she knew a signal to back off when she saw one. She shut off the light.

Chapter Text

The Pilot walked the corridors alone whenever she wished now. No one bothered her, and some, who had witnessed her playing games, offered wary smiles.

She was currently looking for Ortegas, who usually returned to their room by this hour, but had not come back. The Pilot thought she might have stopped by the exercise room.

The doors of the room opened silently at her approach, and she was about to step inside, hearing Ortegas's familiar voice.

But then she heard a different voice, a sharp one, and paused. This was the one who had shot her. The one no one wanted to mention, who had carefully avoided the Pilot since she had come aboard.

"She isn't integrating the way you thought she would," the Other was saying. "I hear she won't pick a name, she doesn't believe in friendship, she thinks the concept of individual rights is ridiculous."

"She's horrifically traumatized," Ortegas objected. "Were you any better, when they picked you up off the breeding planet?"

"I was a victim," the Other hissed. "She was an aggressor. For all I know she was one of the ones down there."

"If so, she was a baby," said Ortegas. "A baby left starved and uncared for. Can't there be more than one kind of victim in that scenario?"

"I'm just saying, a baby raised in those circumstances isn't going to grow up normal and safe," said the Other. "Trauma is real, but it does mess people up. It makes them dangerous."

"Coming from you?"

"I know better than anybody," said the Other, a hard note in her voice. "I shot her, didn't I? I got suspended for it. Because no matter how reasonable it felt to me, there were rules and I broke them. I broke them because my trauma made me violent. Hers made her violent too. I don't trust her for the exact same reason I don't trust myself."

"It's possible for somebody to be a little broken, a little dangerous, and still my friend," said Ortegas.

"It's more than a little," said the Other. "A Gorn baby is a monster from the moment it hatches. Hunger on legs. Even before a single thing happens to it, every instinct is telling it to destroy. She's not going to suddenly get human kindness, it's not in her at all."

"I'm telling you that it is," said Ortegas. "Before I'd even told her a thing about humans and what we're like, she protected me. Fed me. That has to count for something."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this from you," said the Other. "You're the one who couldn't handle Dak'Rah for the length of one dinner, and now you're in love with a Gorn."

Ortegas was silent. But the Other seemed to read some communication in that silence, because she said, "Oh my god. You are."

"I do love her," said Ortegas quietly. "In love—I don't know. I care about her. She needs someone so desperately. Can't you understand that? You've been welcomed and accepted by so many people, Una and Spock and all of us, and it was enough to change things for the better. She just has me."

“Gorn don’t understand love,” said the Other. “Or friendship. She’s not your friend.”

The Pilot had heard enough. She withdrew, as quietly as she had come.

The Pilot paced their quarters, back and forth and back and forth. She nervously ate four chess pieces and a stylus, waiting for Ortegas.

The humans she had met so far had been kind. The Other was not. But the Other was giving words to things the Pilot had been thinking all this time. Perhaps her perspective was the more valuable one.

The Other agreed with the Pilot: it was not possible for Gorn to live as humans did, because they were not evolved to do so, because their way of living was too different, and they did not have the same instincts. A Gorn was hunger on legs from the moment it was hatched. That meant it was not learned, but unchangeable.

Ortegas thought the counterevidence was simple: the Pilot participated in friendship, therefore she had the capacity to be like humans in this way. It was very slight evidence.

But Ortegas did not know all. She did not know how the Pilot felt, because the Pilot had not told her.

The door slid open, and Ortegas entered with her teeth cheerfully bared. "Hi, Pilot, how—"

"Who is the one you spoke to in the exercise room earlier?" demanded the Pilot.

Tension took over the human's body, fear in the way her eyes flicked upward. "You heard that?"

"I was looking for you."

Ortegas worried her lip between her blunt, harmless teeth. "That's La'an. She—"

"She is the one who shot me with a phaser," said the Pilot. "She did it because she had survived a Gorn breeding planet. I may have eaten one of her kin."

"Please don't…do anything to her."

"There is no reason," said the Pilot. "She behaved rationally. At one time she was victim and I was aggressor, and at another time I was victim and she was aggressor. That is only fair."

Ortegas leaned against the wall, relaxing again. "I'm glad you're not mad."

"She is more like me than you are," said the Pilot. "She and I both came from the same place. That is what she said. We came out of it violent."

"I don't think you're violent," said Ortegas.

"I am," said the Pilot. "I have been. I survived that world, which I could not have done if I had not been."

Ortegas clearly did not like this conclusion, but she didn't argue this time.

"She thinks we are different. That because she was born weak and crying, and I was born hungry and with teeth, violence is my nature, but in her it is only an accident of where she grew up. And she is not wrong. There is no before. There is no time when I was not like this. If there is no time when I was not like this, then it is my nature."

"Pilot—"

"But Gorn, all Gorn, were not always like this," said the Pilot urgently. This was the important part, the part that might make all the difference, even if the evidence was slight. "I lied before. There is a story. A…rumor, that once we were different. That Gorn kept livestock for breeding and did not cull anyone. That Queens were soft toward their offspring. That instead of Monitors and Trainers there were functions for giving care. I heard it, and then I was told it was not true, that our history had always been the way it is now. But I think perhaps… I think maybe the Gorn way is not our nature. Perhaps even if the story was a lie, the fact that we tell it means there are other possibilities.”

This seemed to make a difference to Ortegas. Her eyes widened and she nodded seriously. "Do you think many others would prefer a different way?"

The Pilot thought of her clutchmates and broodmates, her Pilot cohort. "The workers would, yes. It is not pleasant to be a cell. It would be better to be a person with value. But of course it will not happen, because the Queens like things the way that they are."

"You'd be surprised," said Ortegas thoughtfully. "Most human cultures had long time periods where a few people were in charge and everyone else had a hard life. Eventually things changed. People won't put up with it forever."

"We will put up with it forever," said the Pilot. "We are born to serve. Your associate is wrong, our instinct is not only to eat and destroy. But she is right that our instinct is not like yours." She was explaining this very badly. It was hard to tell a person who easily talked back to her Captain what it was to be in the presence of a Queen, to smell her smell. What it was to be one of many in a nest, and feel wholeness only when the many were also present. How easy it was to be a nonperson, how difficult it was to be anything else. Humans did not feel these things. They were too thoroughly individuals. "I only wanted you to know that it is not the nature of Gorn. It is my nature. It is the nature of every Gorn now living. But it is not part of what it means to be Gorn."

"I don't think it's your nature," argued Ortegas.

"Your associate is correct. I have experienced things that have made me violent. I am like her. I am not like you."

Ortegas looked at her hands, folding them up and stretching them out again. She rubbed the smaller fingers of one hand. "I never wanted to tell you this," she said softly. "But I was captured by the Gorn too. Just for a little while. I was in a pod, being digested. I lost these fingers." She held them in her other hand.

The Pilot stepped closer to look. She reached out with her claws, hesitating just short of Ortegas's hands. "Humans can regenerate fingers?"

"The sickbay can. My point is—I wasn't changed, not for good. I was angry. I was terrified of you. But that doesn't mean it's my nature. I got over it. And you can't pretend to me you haven't. You saved me on that moon, you sleep half on top of me every night and you don't hurt me."

"I don't hurt you because I don't matter, and you do," said the Pilot.

"People change," said Ortegas, pushing away from the wall. "We're sapient beings. We can choose what to be. That's the whole point of it. As societies, as individuals, either way. You, the individual, Pilot, can do anything you want."

"I have never wanted," said the Pilot, head drawing back defensively. And then, because the lie was too blatant, "I have never been permitted to want."

"If you were permitted to want," said Ortegas, a strange softness in her voice, "what would you want?" They were standing so close now that Ortegas had to crane her neck up to look the Pilot in the eye.

"My wanting would be enough to devour the world," said the Pilot. Exactly as the Other had said. She was too hungry. She was not safe to be near Ortegas.

Soft hands pressed against the Pilot's chest, through her clothes. Brown eyes looked up from under their arcs of fur. "You don't know that," said Ortegas. "It might be different, if you ever had what you wanted. Maybe there's such a thing as enough, and you've just never had it."

"I will never know," said the Pilot. Her hearts were racing. She wanted to touch Ortegas in return, and she did not know where or how.

"Let's find out," said Ortegas, her voice dropping down to a whisper. One hand slid upward, touching the Pilot's neck. The other cupped the side of her head. Humans had no end of ways to touch, transgressive, overpowering ways. This one was like in the videos, before they did the thing called kiss. But the Pilot was not capable of kissing. She had only teeth. All she could do was bite. So she was still.

"You like to be touched," said Ortegas. "Since you said that, I've touched you a lot, and I've never found your limits."

"There are none," said the Pilot.

Ortegas showed her teeth. An expression that should be fierce, but which instead inspired an unbearable tenderness. A feeling a Gorn should not feel. "I take that as a challenge," she said. Her hands guided the Pilot to the bed, pushed her to sit down. "Tell me when it's too much."

"It will not be," said the Pilot. And then Ortegas's hands began to move, and she could not say anything at all.

She realized at once that all the touches before had been something different. Something friendly. This was the thing Ortegas called "more." Those soft human hands brushed over her scales with the lightness of an insect's wing, teasing, making her lean into the touch as they roamed over the ridge above her eye, along her shoulder. They unwrapped the patterned garment she was wearing, reached inside, hot against the cool of her torso. Heat, like a huddle of nesting Gorn, like safety and health, soaked into her skin.

Her breath rattled and rasped, making the sound that usually terrified humans, but Ortegas was not frightened. She knelt at the Pilot's feet, leaned forward, and then her mouth was against the Pilot's neck. Nuzzling and lipping at her, tickling her with little huffs of breath. The Pilot began to tremble, like a chilled infant left out of the nest, but she was not chilled at all, nor lonely.

Her genitals were engorged, yet she did not know if this was pleasure-seeking, if this was the humans' false-mating. Perhaps it was only that she had never been touched this directly at all, except for that reason. She did not want to spoil the moment by trying to press them against Ortegas, so she did not. This was better, a thousand times better, even if Ortegas never touched her there. This felt like the first time she had slept in the nest with her surviving clutchmates, all of them having been finally been fed, knowing that none of them would awake and eat the others, because all of them had full bellies. Safe and warm and comfortable.

Ortegas removed more of the Pilot's clothing, hands stroking low along her belly. And now it did feel like pleasure-seeking, but still her need was not desperate. She was hungry, yes, hungry for touch, but not starving, because she knew she would be fed. Because Ortegas had said she would not stop.

The exploring fingers brushed over the entrance of the Pilot's genitals, and she hissed loudly.

"Too much?" murmured Ortegas.

She carefully took hold of Ortegas's hand by the wrist and moved it back. Ortegas grinned. "Not enough?"

"Agree," whispered the Pilot.

The human's deft warm fingers explored everywhere they could. It was nothing like the rough hurried rubbing she had experienced before. Ortegas wanted to discover everything that was there. Her thumb found the Pilot's vestigial ovipositor and brushed against it, back and forth, back and forth, with a patience that seemed unbelievable.

The Pilot was weak and trembling, too much to hold herself up, and she let herself fall backward onto the bed. Ortegas followed her down, hand still in place, thumb rubbing over and over and over against the same spot. The Pilot thrashed her head from side to side, bucked her hips, as pleasure poured outward from the press of Ortegas's thumb, wave after wave.

Time stuttered and stopped and rushed forward. Every time she opened her eyes, there was Ortegas still leaning over her, still intent, watching her reaction.

This had been so much, too much to expect, and the Pilot pulled herself together, forced herself to stop bucking against Ortegas's hand. She had been greedy and selfish.

"Too much yet?" asked Ortegas. There was a teasing twist in her mouth, a twinkle in her eye, and the Pilot abruptly knew she did not have to hold back like this. That Ortegas wanted to give more.

"Disagree," she said.

"Not enough?"

"Agree."

She had thought Ortegas would resume what she was doing before, but she did not. Instead her fingers explored further. One fingertip slid inside her—inside the space that was useless, that wasn't even for anything, as she was a worker, and yet Ortegas thought it was the useless things that were the most important.

The human's fingers measured the distance from the entrance to the valve-fold—one knuckle—then pushed gently past the fold, reaching the truncated end of the passage. That was all there was there, nothing of note, no eggs and no sperm. But this did not seem to matter. The finger moved, caressing the muscles within, the muscles that had no purpose and yet by some developmental coincidence were full of nerves, because they sent fire through her body, left her shaking and thrashing and hissing. She was not even doing anything. She had not had to earn it by offering the same. Ortegas would simply give and give and give, because that was a human's way, and because this human was special.

And because, perhaps, this human loved her. The Other had said a Gorn could not understand. But this Gorn did.

At last she stopped shaking, drained in a way pleasure-seeking had never drained her before, because it had never before gone on so long. "Enough," she gasped, and it was a word she had not thought she would ever say, about anything.

Ortegas withdrew her fingers, grinning with self-satisfaction. She had enjoyed that. Enjoyed giving to a person who was infinitely hungry.

The Pilot thought she would enjoy it too. That perhaps she could understand now what it was to give and give. "Take off your clothes," she demanded. "I wish also to make you say 'enough.'"

Ortegas seemed to find that amusing, because she laughed as she stripped off her sleeveless shirt and black pants. The Pilot observed her with interest. She had never seen her friend's whole body before. It was soft and scaleless, quite unlike a Gorn's, but not unappealing—perhaps because it belonged to her friend, whom she had come to feel so many things about, things that the Gorn language did not have words for.

Her fingers were too rough and clawed to attempt anything like what Ortegas had done to her. But she let her long, narrow tongue slide out of her mouth, and Ortegas raised one black eyebrow with interest. She lounged back on the bed, letting her legs fall open. "Go ahead and try it. I'll tell you if I need you to stop."

Her human skin was salty, hot, good on the tongue. Her mammalian breasts were sensitive, it seemed, and peaked when the Pilot's tongue moved over them. She had no ovipositor, only a little raised bud, but she liked to have it licked. She liked also when the Pilot's tongue moved inside her, pushed in deep, flicked in and out of her.

Ortegas spread her lovely soft hands on the Pilot's head and cried out, again and again, when the Pilot found a way of rippling her tongue inside that gave her particular pleasure. She screamed untranslatable words, interspersed with more comprehensible things like yes and please and more—yeah—right there.

This was not how Gorn sought pleasure. There was never the time for it, or the privacy to make noise and not be overheard. But they could have, if everything had been different, if the Hive had been like the Hives in the legend. And here a human and a Gorn could seek pleasure exactly like this, in this place which against all odds had been safe for both of them.

Ortegas's soft thighs closed around her head, trembling, and the Pilot pushed her tongue in and out, in and out, until finally Ortegas released her head and gasped, "Okay, okay. Enough."

They lay there naked for some time. There was nowhere they had to report next. No Monitor to demand efficiency in the use of their time.

"That is the fake-mating that humans do, when they are a pair," said the Pilot, after a while. "They think it is important. They think it makes the relationship different."

"Only if you want it to," said Ortegas. "This was just something I wanted to give you. I thought you seemed to need it."

"I did," said the Pilot. "I have been far from the nest for a very long time. There is not enough touching. And Gorn do not touch like you do."

"I thought you said they did have sex," said Ortegas.

"They do. But not like this. Not…" The Pilot waved one clawed hand. It was difficult not to be able to form the sounds of the human language; it had so many words the Gorn language did not. "Our hands are not as soft as yours," she said in the end, which was not even close to what she had wanted to say.

Ortegas rolled on her side, so that her breasts and her knees touched the Pilot's side, and rested her hand on the Pilot's torso, gently stroking. The Pilot exhaled slowly. This touch was as wonderful as ever, if no longer arousing. She had had enough.

"I wanted you to know how I felt. The trouble with love, the thing that maybe La'an didn't get when she said you didn't understand it, is that it's hard to pull out of nowhere. Easier when you've been given it first. When you're not hungry."

And that, perhaps, was the heart of the whole question. It was not that Gorn could not love. It was that love had been lost, somewhere along the way, and there was no one to start it going again. They had rampaged through the universe hungry and terrifying, and it was impossible to love something like that. It had taken a very special circumstance to make it possible between Ortegas and the Pilot.

Chapter Text

“Um. Can I talk to you alone?”

Dr. M’Benga looked up at Erica from his seat at the lab bench and rose to his feet. “Of course.”

In the private consulting room, Erica blurted out, “Gorn saliva. Is it…toxic, or anything? Is it the stuff that digests you in the pods?”

The doctor smiled wryly. “I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to ask. Doesn’t she drool on her pillow or anything? It hasn’t been eating holes in the pillowcase.”

“But if it got on me,” she asked, blushing furiously. “Maybe a lot of it.”

“Again, you should’ve asked before exposing yourself to it, I think.” M’Benga’s eyes were twinkling. “I certainly would have told you beforehand if it was. Anybody could see it was something that might happen.”

Erica covered her face, embarrassed. “I know, I know. First intimate contact. There’s a form. I should’ve gotten us both checked out, it’s just I didn’t exactly plan on—”

“It’s fine,” said M’Benga. “The substance in the pods is bioengineered. It doesn’t come from the Gorn at all. Their saliva is just saliva. You’re not allergic to her either. I checked all her samples against yours two weeks ago.”

“Phew,” said Erica, biting her lip. “Thanks. I didn’t know I was that obvious.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being open about your feelings,” said M’Benga. “Want to hear what else I’ve been learning about Gorn biology from her scans?”

That conversation was more comfortable. They sat down together in front of M’Benga’s console to look at the data. “The real question, the question the Captain had—what’s going to have to go in Lieutenant Kirk’s final report—is whether the Gorn were evolved to live in the particular way they do. Whether it’s changeable.”

“We think it is,” said Erica firmly. “The Pilot and I both agree on that now.”

“I think I can confirm that,” said M’Benga. “Look at her eyes.”

He pointed to the screen, and Erica tried to look at them like a scientist and not think about how they’d looked last night, nictating membranes fluttering, dilated to deep black within. “Uh…?”

“They’re on the sides of her head,” he said. “To look out for predators.”

Erica nodded, trying to think back to Academy xenobiology. “But her teeth are definitely predator teeth.”

“Yes. A predator, but not an apex predator. They seem to have coevolved with a larger creature. This is just a theory, but I think the parasitic egg-laying came from that. It was their way to handle their own predators. I would assume they eventually wiped those predators out and went looking for more. Parasitizing their own kind is more of a cultural dysfunction than an evolved behavior, like cannibalism in humans.”

“The Pilot is just convinced they’ll never change, regardless. That their society is stuck that way.”

M’Benga lifted one shoulder uncertainly. “I can’t promise they will. Their current strategy is working for them well enough, at least in terms of survival if not happiness. But they certainly could. Their eggs, from everything we’ve learned about them, will grow in almost anything. In their territory alone there must be hundreds of animals that would qualify, or they could make an artificial incubator. Given how they engineered those digestion pods, it’s within their ability. They would just have to want to.”

“But they can’t resist the queen’s pheromones, apparently.”

“They could kill her and make a new queen, if they wanted,” said M’Benga. “Like with bees, it’s not genetic. You just have to give a hatchling the right kind of care.” He closed the file on his screen. “Not that I’m suggesting assassination as the solution to all their problems. But knowing Pilot, that’s where her mind is going to go, I think.”

“That doesn’t bother you? La’an says she’s too violent. Unredeemable.”

“The potential for violence is in everybody,” said M’Benga placidly. “As it should be, because once in a while we need it. The challenge for civilized beings is not taking it out any more often than we have to.”

Erica nodded. “Yeah. That’s a thing Beto couldn’t get his head around. That we have phasers and photon torpedoes and yet most of what we do has nothing to do with that. Could say the same about the Pilot’s teeth and claws.”

“Exactly. And as for La’an…I think your conversation with her yesterday made an impact.”

“You know about that?”

“She was here this morning asking about our therapy modules. Her decision, of course, and her business what she chooses, but I think perhaps the Pilot’s presence has been healing for her. Forcing her to face something she would have been happy avoiding forever. As long as she could use violence to keep her fear at bay, she didn’t have to feel it.” He looked grimly thoughtful. “Or perhaps I am only projecting what I would feel in her shoes.”

Erica studied him. The two of them shared some trauma about Klingons, and it was true, it had been easier to handle that in wartime when you could deal with it by shooting at them. Peace had been hard to adjust to. Still was, sometimes.

“Thanks,” she said quietly, at the same time wanting to let him know she followed what he was talking about, and not at all wanting to disrespect him by bringing it up. “I’ll just—maybe I’ll talk to her about it sometime.”

“Do that,” said M’Benga. “I think it would be good for both of you.”

The Pilot was going to meet with the one called La’an.

It was the human with a number rather than a name who had proposed it. Though she was not One as her number implied; surely she was Two, because the Captain was first on the ship. She had said that La’an wished to talk to her, that she was free to refuse, and that it would be quite safe because she and Ortegas would both be there.

The Pilot did not think that was necessary. She was not afraid of the small human who had shot her. Without her energy weapon, she was weak and delicate. The Pilot could have eaten her in very few bites. Not that she intended to do so. She was not hungry.

There was a table between herself and the small human, while Ortegas and the human called One sat off to the side, looking nervous. Ortegas, it seemed, out of protectiveness toward the Pilot. One’s eyes were only on La’an. She must feel the kinship-emotion for that human. Extending value toward that human, in the boundless way humans did. They were all safe there, because everyone present had had value extended toward them, and that value was a reason not to kill.

“I would like to…apologize, for shooting you,” said La’an formally. “I should not have done that. I was…afraid. I have learned that there is no reason to fear you, since your intentions are good.”

“You are still afraid,” the Pilot pointed out. She reeked of it.

La’an’s shoulders drew more tightly back. “I am.”

“That is reasonable,” said the Pilot. “You have been to a place of great horror. I have been there. I saw. I know why you are afraid.”

“Una believed—I believe—that meeting with you like this will help me not to be afraid. That facing my fear and realizing you won’t hurt me will help me move past it.”

“It seems unlikely,” said the Pilot. “I have been among Gorn all my life and I am also afraid of the breeding worlds. I am afraid whenever I think about it.”

“But we are not there,” said La’an. “We are both safe here.”

“And you have your teeth and claws,” said the Pilot. “You have your anger. That is good.”

La’an blinked painted eyelids. “Good?”

“The enemy is not the Gorn,” she clarified. “The enemy is the hunger of the Gorn. We shall be angry about it together.”

Peace, it seemed, had been made between the Pilot and La’an. They spent hours off alone together, doubtless commiserating about how awful the breeding planets had been. Erica tried not to be jealous.

Anyway the Pilot still always came home at night, for cuddles and sex and more cuddles. Erica had thought that having sex would be a change in their relationship, that they were together in a new way, but it didn’t seem like they were. To the Pilot, sex was something that happened between nestmates, and it was good, but not relationship-defining.

After all the Pilot’s neediness about cuddling, Erica had expected her to be selfish in bed, but she wasn’t at all. She was tireless in her exploration of Erica’s body, running her incredibly long, deft tongue everywhere, seeking out sensitive places. Or she would rut urgently against her, seeming to reach an orgasm that came in waves for several minutes.

“That is how the workers seek pleasure,” she said, as they panted together after. “Fast. Before anyone could accuse us of wasting time that is for working. But it is still better with you.”

“Why?” Erica propped herself on one elbow. “You’ve got a thing for humans?”

“No. It is better with you because you have a name. Because I seek pleasure not with a pilot, but with this pilot, you, Orrrt’g’s.”

"Is that what love is?"

The Pilot tilted her head. "I am not the expert in the kinship-emotion, Best Pilot. I am your trainee. You tell me."

Erica lay down, pillowing her head on a cool, scaly shoulder. "Yeah. Yeah, I think that's what it is."

Chapter Text

After several days of strategy and consideration, the Pilot made her decision. It was, in the end, quite easy. Everything together seemed to point the same direction: the words of the human called Captain, the lack of function for her here, the way that more and more she saw her broodmates’ individual faces when she closed her eyes.

They had no names, and yet each was in fact different, unmistakable. And what she had felt for each had been unique. No matter how much she told herself she was only seeking pleasure with a pilot, it was still this one or that one, it always had been.

There were individual faces she remembered, Pilots that had been culled, clutchmates she had eaten. She remembered them all, in their specificity, and no amount of the Trainers’ lessons about Oneness could change that. It did not remove the pain. It made it possible to ignore the pain, but La’an had told her that pain ignored only festered, and it seemed she was right.

They were back there, the survivors of her brood, her Pilot cohort. Eyes that had looked on the Pilot with nervousness or envy, knowing how senior a Pilot she was, and how intolerant of deviation from the instructions of the Monitors. They had never known that she kept them at a distance to protect them from pain. They would not understand until they had felt it themselves. She had always thought that when she too was devoured from within before their eyes, they would understand. And now she thought, perhaps she could prevent that day from coming. Perhaps that was a lesson she could keep them from ever learning.

She felt love for them, all of them, as she felt it for Ortegas. Ortegas had shown her what it was, but she had not taught her to do it. She had always done it. It had just never had a name before.

It would be easy to stay here with Ortegas, to let the human give and give, as was her nature. But with the angry bite of her own hunger within her soothed, she felt now the urgent need to give and give also.

It was time to tell Ortegas the truth.

“I am leaving,” she announced, without prologue, when she next entered the room.

Ortegas jerked her head up. “What do you mean, leaving? You just got back.”

“I am leaving the human ship,” she said. “It was always expected.”

Large brown eyes scanned her face. “I thought you didn’t want to. I thought you said you were mine.”

Pain. Unexpected. Foolish not to expect it. “I am,” she said. “I am your brood. I said that I was dead to the Gorn, and I meant to be. But they are not dead to me. They refuse to stay dead. I… I think of them.”

The human’s soft hands gripped her arms. “I couldn’t replace a whole Hive for you, could I?” she said, a low and meaning note in her voice, one the Pilot could not quite read. “I always wondered if I’d be enough.”

The Pilot swiveled her head from side to side, the human gesture of denial. “If they were dead in truth, you would be enough. But they are there. They are in that terrible place.”

“You said they would kill you.”

“If I do not succeed, they will,” she said. “But I need to try. It must be possible. You explained it. You cannot do that important human emotion when you are always hungry. You have filled my belly. Only when the belly is full can you lie down with your clutchmates without eating them. That is when it is safe.”

Ortegas gave a slow sigh. "You want to go back," she ventured, "because they've never been loved, and you're ready to show them?"

The Pilot bobbed her head in assent. "The Gorn were not evolved to be the way they are. If they were, I would have been happy in the Hive. I would not hunger for the things you give me. And that means they do not have to be this way. We can make lies in our minds, and that lets us understand all the things that are possible."

"You can imagine a better way," interpreted Ortegas.

"It is foolish and may fail," said the Pilot. "But I do not fit here. I yearn for a Hive. I yearn to save my broodmates. The Other and I have been discussing strategy. I told her what the human doctor told you. She thinks it can be done.”

Ortegas’s mouth fell open a little. “I should have known. You haven’t been just hanging out. You’ve been plotting!”

“Yes,” said the Pilot, “you should have. You know both of us.”

“You want to overthrow the system?”

“The many are stronger than the Queens. We can force the issue if we choose."

"If you're not just cells that don't matter," said Ortegas, hands stroking from the Pilot's elbows to her shoulders and back.

The Pilot nodded. "We are not. That was a lie. We are One, but…not in that way. Not in the way where the many have no value."

"You have value," said Ortegas, meeting her eyes in challenge.

The Pilot's eyes shifted away. That was one lesson the Trainers had pressed the most firmly, the one it was the most difficult to unlearn. And yet value had been extended to her. She knew that. "I will accept that you say so."

"You need to convince your broodmates of the same thing," said Ortegas. "That each of them has value."

"I know they do," said the Pilot. "I feel the kinship-emotion for them. The kinship-emotion extends value."

"If this is going to work, you're going to need to come up with a Gorn word for 'love.'"

The Pilot made a new sound, a hiss that could be either noun or verb. "Enter it into the translator," she said. "I will teach it to everyone when I return to the Hive."

Erica made arrangements with Pike for the Pilot's departure. They purchased a small civilian vessel at the nearest starbase, packing it with everything the Pilot thought she would need. She had a plan and a course, which she had worked out with La’an. She seemed confident that she at least stood a chance, that was the important thing.

They made love one last time, Erica riding the Pilot, taking the stubby ovipositor inside her. The Pilot clung to her thighs, careful not to dig her claws in, desperate in a way she hadn't been the first time. Thrusting up into Erica, as if she would climb inside, as if she wanted to stay forever.

Erica ran her hands along the smooth scales of the Pilot's neck and chest. It made no sense, any of it. Why she should love this Gorn so damn much, how she could feel so close to her when so little of what they said to each other was really understood. Something about a piece of nasty raw meat, and a chess game, and the way they'd both looked up at the stars with the same look in their eyes. Something about the way the Pilot hadn't thought she mattered, when in fact she mattered so damn much.

They'd had such a short time, so little time to try to learn everything about each other. Their worlds were so far apart, so different, that they never really could have understood it all no matter how long they tried. And yet they had touched for a brief moment, and both come away changed. That mattered too.

"Mi amiga," Ortegas whispered in her native language. "Cara mía, amada mía. I love you."

She came with a gasp and kept going, wringing pleasure out of her friend, until the Pilot held her still and said, "Enough."

Erica lay down beside her, and they held each other quietly for a while. Eventually the Pilot said, "There is fluid leaking from your eyes."

"I know."

"Is it a problem?"

"Just means I'm sad. I'm going to miss you."

"I am here, thinking of my brood. And when I am there, with my brood, I will be thinking of you."

Erica sniffed. "Yeah. That's how it goes, when you love people."

"I am not forsaking your brood for theirs. My brood is only larger now. I do not want you to misunderstand."

She let out a shaky breath and nodded. "I know." She had wondered, briefly, if the Pilot would give up her plan if she begged her to. But she refused to try. How could anyone look at a Gorn who finally understood love, and say, love less?

"I would like to invite you to visit, but I do not think it would be wise."

"No, probably not." Erica gave a teary chuckle. "When it’s safe enough for me to visit, send me a message."

"That is good motivation for success."

Ortegas was leaking water from the eyes again when the Pilot boarded her shuttle. "We have no words for leaving in our language," the Pilot said. "When someone leaves, it does not matter whether they come back."

"You'll have to make that up too, I guess." Ortegas swiped at the water with her sleeve. "So many words. Or maybe you'll just have to find them. Things there used to be, that the Monitors wouldn't let you say."

"Very likely," said the Pilot.

"We say goodbye," said Ortegas. "Or sometimes, see you later."

"I do not know if I will see you later," said the Pilot. They both stood in awkward silence. Drawing out the moment so that they did not have to part yet. It was useless, and yet sometimes it was the useless things that had the most value.

Ortegas took the Pilot's hand and pressed her lips to the back of it. She had devised a solution to the problem of the Pilot's many teeth. "I love you."

"I have invented another word," said the Pilot abruptly. "Related to love. It is this." She spoke it, a word that had never been spoken before, a word that had never had reason to be spoken before.

"What does that one mean?"

"It is my name," said the Pilot. "I have chosen it. It means…one who receives that emotion, and is worthy of it."

She turned and boarded the shuttle without looking back. If she achieved all her hopes, they would meet again. And if she did not, she would still have been changed, enough to make her life have new value. She would still be Beloved/Worthy of Love. She would still have, once in her life, had enough.