Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?

Actually, you can stop the signal, turns out. At least, if you're a lowly tracker pilot in the war against the Borg, and you get marooned, after a battle, in a technically neutral space quadrant. Just Laurie's luck to get beached on the only known planet – since he's never even heard of it happening before – with something in the water – well, the ale, perhaps – that messes with the lifetime chronometer of his personal tracking chip. It's knocked it right down to zero.

Just as if he were dead.

If he'd noticed while he was still on the – extremely friendly and helpful – planet of Winter, then it wouldn't have mattered so much. They're neutral in the war, not technologically useful enough to be of interest to the Borg, and not on any major trade routes. And the paperwork on their admission into the Hainish alliance, which would commit them, isn't quite done yet. But his ansibular comms are active, and after one night of recovery and winding down after the skirmish, Laurie thinks, he'll get back in his craft, report to his Starfleet mothership for duty, no harm done...

Then his engine dries up over one of the planet's moons, he crashes and his comms go blank. Also his leg is injured, and he's losing blood, with insufficient nano-meds on board.

That's when he notices that he's officially, electronically dead. To be fair, that was a hell of a hangover.

And it still beats assimilation.

In the atmospheric insta-bubble from his emergency survival pack, he hunkers down and waits out his luck, to see if it'll turn. Or if he'll be the lone target of the Furies and the fates, same as always. Hugh always did say he'd provoke the wrong commanding officer one day, with batted lids and blatant, innocent come-ons: although it was understandable, since back in those dear dead dim days at the training academy, that was just after he'd tried flirting with the drill sergeant/cultural exchange tutor, Mr Spock, to see if he could get a rise out of the emotionless old droid. In the dimness of the plasta-flex of the bubble, as his rations run down, Laurie sees the blips and flares and tracking lights in the dark skies. They're his fellow survivors, being picked up and taken home by rescue pods. Unless they're getting picked off, harvested and assimilated by the Borg, of course.

And behind the Borg, it's rumoured, the Shing, once again. But it's better not to think about that.

But then, the pilots being picked up weren't damn fools enough to linger with the locals on Winter a few hours, and get their trackers disabled, so bully for them. Laurie is chewing at a fairly disgusting dehydrated rations bar, and brooding about how much water he's got left. And how much it matters that your life-tracker's on the blink, when you might not have enough life left for it to really matter at all... So that he maybe misses the shake and grinding clip of another pod-vessel, locking on to the mating connector of his bubble. It's followed by the rather timid buzz of a request for admission, on the internal cubicle-door to the air-lock.

Saved! He's saved! Or doomed, of course. But as he squints at the vis-screen, taking a ganders at his new guest, Laurie feels pretty sure that this isn't a Borg-faced masked marauder set upon blasting him into oblivion or hauling him off to be broken down for scrap, and co-opted for the greater good of the hive. For one thing, he can see the chap, and those wide, ingenuous blue eyes are honest and fairly intelligent, and more than a bit apologetic. And for another, he's wearing the slightly nerdy scrub-suit of the Starfleet medical star-corp.

Anyway. Death by using the last of his dried-out nutri-bars and recycled-water, or by being too trusting of a mined-out ex-human posing as a Starfleet medic? Laurie shrugs, and beeps open the air-lock.

And the beaming face revealed, as his guest pulls off his helmet and takes a free unfettered breath of the recycled warm stale air of the capsule, reassures him considerably. That isn't the face of any Borg or co-traveller. It isn't the face of anyone with the wit and low cunning to be a deceptive double-agent, for a start. And he doesn't think a Borg drone, even a cunningly disguised one, would have quite such a shy and uncertain smile. "Hello there! I say. Nice place you've got here," the fellow offers, clunkily earnest enough that Laurie isn't certain it's a joke. "But I expect you're quite keen to get out and get back to your unit, am I right? I take it from your uniform," and here his eyes skim over Laurie's ripped and torn Star fleet junior combat pilot jumpsuit, his battered leg that the kit-meds are only doing so much to ameliorate – and over his thighs and arse, for that matter, sly and then suddenly innocent – "that you're attached to the Starfleet astro-service? How about I get to work on the injuries you've sustained?" The informality's restful, if unorthodox. He probably doesn't find that injured pilots care that much about name, rank and serial number, no doubt. And he wiggles aloft his medi-kit, packed with nanites and morphia. It's a promise of proper pain relief, and an instant healing of the trauma to muscle and bone that will leave Laurie lame if not for Starfleet medical tech. And it makes something locked tight like a vice in Laurie's chest, unspool. He feels as if he might actually cry. He's had a really poor-quality couple of days, lost in a space war.