Posted by Lieutenant Commander Dev Siobhan (Chief Science Officer) in Meeting Her Junior Officers - Deck 8 - Science Labs and CSO’s Office

Posted by Lieutenant Corinne Dalton (Scientist) in Meeting Her Junior Officers - Deck 8 - Science Labs and CSO’s Office

(snip)

Dalton sucked in a breath and sank slightly into her seat, a rare moment of slumping. “Friends are definitely in shorter supply, but then again they always were.”

She tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair. “Knowledge can be dangerous. You have two options. One, I can tell you the version of events that will be shared with whomever comes asking, or, if I can trust you and you are willing to keep secrets in the name of protecting me and those that have helped me, I can tell you the whole thing.” Cori shrugged. “Plausible deniability is a nice thing to have sometimes.” She wasn’t willing to drag everyone into her mess, because as wonderful as this new life was, it came with conditions, dangers.

~Corinne Dalton

Dev leaned back slightly in her chair, her gaze drifting—not away from Cori, but inward, somewhere deeper.

There had been a time—years—when that choice would’ve been easy.

Need-to-know only.
No deviations.
No attachments.
No danger of getting pulled under again.

She’d called it efficiency. Others called it cold.
Either way, it kept her intact.

But that Dev—the one who kept her humanity in a sealed container—had cracked open long before she ever set foot on the Ogawa. And for all her effort to keep that grief buried, something quieter had been rising in its place. Something hungry.

Not for answers.
For people.

She looked back at Cori, studying her—not as a mystery, not as a curiosity, but as someone she had failed to see clearly once before. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

“I used to value plausible deniability above all else,” she said. “Safer that way. Cleaner. If you don’t know the truth, no one can force it out of you. No one can use it against you.”

Her voice remained soft, but the weight behind it was unmistakable.

“But I’ve had enough of safe. And clean hasn’t served me in a very long time.”

A pause. Then: a decision.

“I want the truth. Whatever parts of it you’re willing to give. And I won’t share it—not with the XO, not with the Captain, not with anyone—unless you ask me to. You have my word.”

Trust was a tricky concept. It was easy to break and harder to give. Cori had had her trust broken by different people over the years in many different ways. That was then. Now, thing were different. She had a freedom of choice she hadn’t had to have. She could choose to trust people and it was an equal arrangement. In this moment she believed Dev, in her sincerity. That was enough.

She allowed a breath to pass between them—steady, grounding.

“I didn’t protect you before. I won’t make that mistake again.”

And this time, when she offered a small smile, it wasn’t a flicker.

It held.

Lt. Commander Dev ○●●
Chief Science Officer
U.S.S. Ogawa

Holding the Bajoran’s gaze, Cori smiled back, the corners of her eyes crinkling slightly in a way they couldn’t have before because she had never appeared old enough to have slight laugh lines. At forty years old (though she still didn’t know exactly when her birthday was), she appeared actually as her age rather than the twenty-five year old she had been when her original body ceased to exist.

A breath, a decision. She nodded. “There is a lot that happened on the ship after you left that isn’t really relevant to this part of my story. It’s something for later, perhaps.” A breath- such a beautiful thing she hoped to never again take for granted. “But the CO and XO are in on the secret, as you will understand soon.”

“About three years after I lost my body, the ship was attacked by a Douwd. No one knew what was going on, except for myself and our Napean counsellor. He attacked her mind and left her in a coma and before I could warn anyone, he…” She paused, repressing the shudder that even now reverberated through her very being. Her fear of small, dark places. Of being trapped. Alone. “He… somehow corralled me, all of me into a teeny, tiny corner of the Saracen’s computer. We don’t know how- it shouldn’t have been possible. But he did, and there, alone, I existed without sensation or knowledge of the passage of time. Except that it wasn’t a perfect prison. Threads of me could find tiny gaps but they weren’t very big. So I worked hard to free myself. By the time I did and was out of there and into the system properly again, four years had passed.”

Even now it was hard to explain the mental distortion of time having passed so dramatically on you. And for Cori it had happened twice. “Four years was a long time. People declared me missing in action. Jarred, who I had been in a relationship with, was overjoyed. But it didn’t last long. We had both… changed. Loving each other wasn’t enough. So despite trying to be together again, we ended it.

“I was working through everything with our new counsellor. He did a secret eval and declared me formally, Sentient. Myself. Corinne Dalton. Yes, by this point I had been promoted twice, but I was still , at best, just this awkward nuisance to the rotation of command staff. At worst, a liability, a danger.” Cori shook her head. “I was so tired of having to prove myself to every person I met, to prove I was a person. The counsellor became a friend, someone I could trust. He was the first person I told about everything that went down with Lily and Levi, about why I was in a position to be shot on that holodeck.” Cori leaned forward. “To be able to share my story and actually have someone listen and accept my pain as real? There is no beautiful thing than that. Other than love, of course. Do you remember what I told you all on the holodeck after the accident? All I wanted was to not be forgotten. I had to fight every damn day to make sure that didn’t happen.”

She looked down, gathering herself for this next bit. “One day, in my new quarters the counsellor insisted I have, we were unpacking my crates of belongings. All these years had passed and they just sat in storage. We were sharing a meal, well, he ate, I talked, and then… the next thing I know, I am feeling the most extraordinary pain I have ever felt in my life. And keep in mind that as connected to the ship as I had been, when it was damaged, I felt pain.

“I found myself appearing in a lab, and very long story short, a man had been sent a highly sophisticated cube that contained… me. It had been two years, but I wasn’t aware of the passage of time. Again. We don’t know how I was pulled from the Saracen’s computer, or why, or who did so, but I was sent to someone on this ship who deals with classified matters.” She jabbed the point of her index finger into the desk. “I told you and everyone else that ever suggested trying to transfer me that I wasn’t willing to take that risk. It was akin to lobotomizing yourself and we had no way to know which parts of me would survive a transfer. It was a suicide mission, which most people still never understood because they only saw the solution to their problem.

“After convincing the man who activated me that I was Corinne Dalton, essentially, he rallied the troops as it were and through a long story I don’t feel comfortable sharing, they got me this”-Cori gestured to herself”- body. It’s a biological body that has been altered using my DNA and my last transporter records to match me. Every dance injury, every scar. And I am the age I am supposed to be and will die a biological death at the time when I would have naturally.’ She tapped her head. “The only thing that isn’t bio is my brain. It’s positronic. Because you can’t transfer the amount of data that was me at the point I was sent here into a biological brain. Keep in mind Siobhan that at that point I had had instant access to the Federation database for years. I absorbed a lot of information and good parts of it are still rolling around in my head.”

Cori rested a hand on her chest, focusing on breathing in and out. “I can breathe, bleed, break, die.” Her entire face lit up. “It’s extraordinary.” The light softened. “And difficult. I’ve been through a lot of trauma and it’s taking time to process, which I’m working on with the COP. Currently, she, the captain, XO, the two Drs Kane and Dr. Walker are the only ones that know my true state. And now you. If I’m injured, I need an engineer on top of a doctor, Dr. Alexis Kane and Dr. Solomon Kane are my care providers for that reason.” Corin leaned in, a beatific smile taking over her very being. “Best part? That counsellor on the Saracen that became my friend, that I trusted so deeply? He’s our XO here on the Ogawa.” She laughed. “We’re… together now.”

~Corinne Dalton