"What about that one?"
"Too short."
"Hmm... That one?"
"Too tall."
"Humm... Oo! That one!"
"Oh God no!"
"What's wrong with that one?"
"Too everything!"
"Jeez you're picky, Alex!" cried Lieutenant Josephine Schmidt.
Ensign Alexandra Dalton sighed moodily. "Somewhere in the universe there's the perfect man for me, Jo," she said, heaving another emotional sigh, "but he's not on this planet."
"What about Dexter?" asked Jo mischievously.
"Dex? Well, I suppose he's kinda cute and all. Why? What do you know?"
"Come on!" exclaimed Jo. "I see how you two look sideways at each other when you think the other one isn't looking."
"Do not!" cried Alex, laughing.
The two women had spent the morning window shopping in Serenity City's enormous enclosed shopping area, the Galleria, as the several bags of shoes and other miscellaneous clothing accessories attested, and after that had parked themselves on a bench along a major thoroughfare to people-watch. Or 'man-watch', to be more precise.
"It sure is nice to have the day off for a change," commented Alex idly after a time.
"It's just until the crews get all our stuff transferred off the starbase and into our new digs here in the city," replied Jo, shrugging the matter off as unimportant. She was just glad to have the day off and didn't want to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. "Besides, all we had scheduled was a standard patrol of the system, and Max said she wanted to do it alone. So Commander Carter let her and cut the rest of us free."
Alex shuddered imperceptibly at the mention of Max's name. "What do you suppose Max does out there all alone?"
Alex shrugged again, but a look of concern crossed her face this time. "She's been spending a lot of time alone since Jazz died," she replied.
Among the primeval ice crystals of Serenity's Oort Cloud, in the cold a full lightyear out from the system's primary, a winged interloper built of metals and programmable alloys followed a hyperbolic course across the plane of the ecliptic. A single human occupied the pilot seat of the sleek, winged craft, physically present in the here-and-now, but mentally, completely lost in the past.
Max relived the events of twelve years ago, at the height of the Dominion War, in the Cardassian Badlands. Banshee Squad had been ambushed by a dozen Jem'Hadar battlebugs. Their Wing Commander, Jazz Phoenix, was cut off from the rest of her team, surrounded by circling battlebugs. Max could hear Jazz on her commlink, urgently calling her name to help her, but there were too many enemy ships in the intervening space. One moment, Jazz's Banshee was on her scope, and the next it was replaced by a brilliant flash and an expanding cloud of plasma and debris. Max had let her friend die.
Then the landscape changed. Max now found herself on Rostella 4, deep inside the dilithium mines there and surrounded by the army of darkness -- animated corpses of soldiers killed during the Second Mulluran War and now under the domination of a Jelly Brain. Far from the light of day, the Banshees found themselves on one side of a bottomless chasm while the army of darkness was on the other, and the only thing that stood in the way of their crossing over was Jazz Phoenix, single-handedly holding the bridge. The undead horrors attacked, Jazz went down, and Max could still see the look on Jazz's face as she pressed the stud on the detonator she held in her hand. The planted explosives went off, the cavern collapsed, and Jazz, along with the army of darkness, was buried under a billion tons of solid rock, while Max and the others made their cowardly escape to the surface. Max had let her friend die again.
Why do I deserve to live?
A rare large cometary core loomed directly ahead of Max's plane, but Max's hand remained steady on the flight stick while her unblinking eyes stared straight ahead out the cockpit canopy. Why wasn't I killed along with Jazz? Twice she died so the rest of us would live! Justice demands payment! The mountain of ice grew ever larger as the tiny fighter shot in an unwavering line towards it. Jazz stared at it as if mesmerized, unflinching, determined to play this cosmic game of chicken to then end knowing full well the inevitable outcome.
At the last split-second however, Max yanked the flight stick over, sending the plane careening aside and clear of danger; the nascent comet continued past, unheeding of the human drama unfolding about it.
"Dammit!" spat Max furiously. She pounded her clenched fists on the cockpit's control panel in a fit of rage. "You're such a coward!" she cried in self-torment. Her blows to the control panel became weaker, and finally she sank back in her seat, dropping her arms to her sides, her rage spent and giving way to self-pity and loathing.
With no one at the helm, Max's Scorpion continued its tumbling trajectory unguided, drifting further out into the cold space between the stars.
"Hey, good lookin'. What's a place like this doing around a nice girl like you?"
"Beat it, loser."
The self-styled Don Juan sputtered momentarily, then collected his dented dignity and slithered off back into the passing crowd from whence he came, leaving the two young women alone again. Evening was drawing close, and the sky was fading quickly through its repertoire of sunset reds and oranges to the starry black of night.
Jo stretched expansively and began collecting her shopping bags in preparation for the long trek back to her apartment. "Well, that was fun," she told Alex. "It's been a long time since I've had a whole day to blow on shoe shopping and guy-ogling. Even if all I'm going home with is shoes!"
"Yeah," replied Alex absentmindedly, her thoughts a million miles away. "We'll have to do it again sometime."
Jo could tell her heart wasn't in it anymore. "Don't worry, Alex," she said consolingly. "One of these days soon you'll find that dream guy of yours. Even so, I'm sure we had more fun than Max did today," she concluded confidently.
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