Star Trek: Foothold - To Relieve Paine

Unsubtle Gravity

Gravity was one of the most unsubtle subtle forces of the universe, and it hadn't been Humanity that had conquered its pull. By the time Earth's apes escaped its pull, uncounted civilizations had lived, flared, and died since the fundamental discovery of anti-gravity maths. Any star ship capable of traversing the vast reaches of the galaxy was an amalgam of such maths, and many others, interplaying in a symphony of mystery and magic, as even most of its beneficiaries were fundamentally incapable of understanding all of the ways it could be made to dance. Someone without an understanding of how the universe worked might think the simplest way to produce anti-gravity effects was to remove the force from the equation: to subtract the effect of gravity from an object, and suddenly it would not be affected by it. The reality was that this concept was about as practical as proposing to extract the wet from water so that one might swim without becoming damp, as the forces of nature and reality weren't simply something that could be turned on or off, extracting fundamental properties from the fabric that defined them.

Buban Roda did not understand gravity, or actually any of the fundamental forces of the universe, really. She understood math well enough, but not in the abstract mystery the universe presented in the form of the reality that gave rise to her being: she knew about money, and greed, and supply and demand. She was one of the many Tellarites who didn't mesh as well with the fundamentals of the Federation core, and found herself out adventuring on the fringes of the frontier. She had been trained in commerce and economics on the homeworld, in one of the many prestigious institutions whose pedigree had not lapsed simply because the Vulcans and Humans impressed on them the notion that money no longer held the same value. She'd always found that to be the narrative of those who didn't appreciate, or simply didn't have, the power it afforded.

Buban also did not understand how that helped her now, as she stood on the observation deck which Doctor Barr had arranged to have set up for guests to visit those who were still in intensive care after the events of the past few weeks. The bay doors were real, and retracted: there were often occasions when there was cause to move heavy equipment into the holocomb chamber, after all. The glass, the console, the barrier which kept observers away from the suspended figures of the patients: those were all fictions, holographic representations within the 'comb itself to give viewers reference and context to the scene in front of them. The patients in the ward fit into two categories: those who were sedated enough not to be struggling against their confinement, and those whose agitation, or pain, or torment saw them struggling helplessly against the gentle caress of nothingness as the anti-gravity cells kept them suspended off the floor, away from the touch of reality and any other force of nature which might complicate their pain. For as simple as it was to levitate the dozen crew too injured to be given cots in the cargo bays, all the money in the world wouldn't help her ease their suffering.

Closing her eyes, feeling the weight of her exhaustion, her guilt, and the fear inherent to the past few weeks, she leaned her head against the holographic glass and let herself drift into the memory of what it had been like when their ship had broken one of the fundamental laws of reality, and suffered for their hubris.

She had been stationed in what remained of the menagerie with a number of the other crew whose professions didn't align with the highly scientific processes going on around them. The Vellouwyn were a crew of specialists, each hand picked for by her Captain with a purpose in mind, but that purpose wasn't always suited to every situation. The siege of the past few weeks had little need for Buban Roda's bartering capacities, or her ability to move information through systems in transactions and exchanges that saw numbers climb in ways inexplicable to those who didn't understand her art. She had felt like a work boot in a fancy house since they'd come under attack, cumbersome and out of place regardless of how useful she'd be elsewhere.