The Point is Probably Moot

Chapter 1 - An Escape

Jessie is a friend

Yeah I know he's been a good friend of mine

But lately something's changed, that ain't hard to define

Jessie's got himself a girl, and I wanna make her mine

-- Rick Springfield (Jessie's Girl)

=/\=

The Empress Hoshi Sato stood up and stretched. The Defiant was still a kickin' ship, and she was still the most desirable woman in the Empire – hell, the galaxy! Perhaps even the universe. She smiled to herself. She and the Defiant had been through a number of campaigns together, over the course of three and a half decades. A little paint – in her case, makeup – and no one would see the seams, the threadbare bits, and the sagging parts.

"Andrew!" she called from inside the little bathroom in her quarters. "Let's take a shower together."

There was no answer. "Andrew! Andrew!" She walked into the bedroom. "Sheesh, Andrew, ya lazy bum! Get up!"

He was just lying there in the bed. She shoved him, and his body flopped over to the side. He was dead, a capsule stuck between his teeth. There was a PADD in his hands. There was an open message on it. It simply said, "MM, I'll be with you soon, my love."

"MM?" she asked no one. She performed a quick search for all female Defiant personnel for the past thirty-seven years, ever since she had seized that ship, on January fifteenth of 2155, and then narrowed the search down to only include crew members with the initials MM.

There was one name: Melissa Madden, dead on September twelfth of 2166, a victim of a shuttle crash on Vulcan. The autopsy report had said she was pregnant. Hoshi had figured the girl had been pregnant by someone like Chief Engineer Frank Ramirez. But no – it was now obvious – the father had been Hoshi's lover, the corpse that lay in front of her – Andrew Miller.

She shrugged. She typed a few lines to change Andrew's suicide note.

And now it read: I love you, Hoshi.

Satisfied with the revision, she clicked open her personal Communicator. "Ramirez, Miller is dead. You're now the First Officer."

"Yes, Empress."

"You also get bed privileges."

"Yes, Empress."

"But I'll be looking for another. I've never much cared for your performance. I keep you around because you're a decent engineer. Do you understand?"

"Yes, of course." There was no disappointment in his voice. He had served her long enough to know that the engineering job was a far better one – with a considerably more stable future – than the job of being the Empress's primary bedmate. He'd been clever over the years. Any time she'd tapped him for bedroom services, he had made sure to perform poorly. After a while, she had essentially given up on him. His promotion to First Officer - unlike the one that Andrew had gotten, or Travis Mayweather before him – was due to his performance with his clothes on.

=/\=

In 3110, on August eighth, nearly nine hundred and twenty years later, a Temporal Agent sat at his desk. He tapped his left ear, two times, to engage a tiny Communicator that was permanently implanted behind his left ear. "I'd like to speak with Tina April, on Triton."