Survival Tactics

Old Scars

When they finished their dinners, there was little left to do in the small shelter. They took turns trying to raise the Discovery, but had no more luck than when they'd first tried. Burnham used the topographical data from her tricorder to sketch a crude map on the back of a ration wrapper.

"This is us," she told Detmer and pointed to a drawing of a bubble. "If I'm reading the data right, the river stretches this way—west then south, so that puts us on this edge. Now the camp is over here..."

"What is this?" Detmer asked, pointing to a label on the map.

Burnham looked confusedly to where she was pointing. "What?"

"This...this here," Detmer's finger slid beneath the letters.

"That says 'river.'"

"Oh," Detmer blushed lightly and looked down self-consciously. She didn't have a face that could hide anything, Burnham thought.

"It's a label."

"Right, I get it. It's just...I can't really read handwriting anymore," she said it almost as a question. "The interface," she tapped the plastisteel affixed to her skull, "it can't decipher it."

"Oh," Burnham said softly.

"It can recognize printed symbols twenty times faster than the human brain, but dot an i with a smiley face and it's stumped." She gave a wan smile.

"Corbin—the tech at Starfleet Medical who monitors my progress—he's been working on an upgrade for that, but apparently it's pretty tough. Computers can be stubbornly dumb about some things."

"Yeah," Burnham said, rattled. "Well...here's the mining camp. If we just keep heading east we'll hit some portion of it."

"And then what?"

"We figure that out when we get there."

"You'll understand if I'm terribly optimistic about our chances."

"I understand," Burnham said, hearing her voice slip into her First Officer cadence despite herself. "But the first rule of survival is to keep a positive mental attitude."

Detmer stared at her. "I haven't had a positive mental attitude in a long time."