After the fireworks display of personalities clashing on the bridge, Counselor Turro had expected better from Captain Taes. When a first officer became involved in such matters, it was the captain’s responsibility to show concern for the crew member most affected by the conflict. However, when Taes disappointed him yet again, Turro took it upon himself to act as Taes’s conscience.

The computer directed him to the ship’s arboretum. The small patch of parkland, contained within four walls, looked about as stricken as he felt after the outbursts on the bridge. There were patches of grass and other plants that were still scorched and scarred from their battle above the Vaadwaur homeworld.

The condition in which he found Nova was all the more surprising.

“I didn’t expect to see you shoveling manure, Nova,” Turro said, sharing his thoughts aloud.

“The soil in this trough is contaminated with polyduranide shards,” Nova replied through gritted teeth. She grunted from the effort of hefting another shovel-full of soil into an open orange drum.

“Useless,” she clarified.

Tilting his head and raising his eyebrows, Turro verbally prodded, “Your duties don’t extend to the arboretum most days.”

Nova thrust the blade of her shovel into the soil bed again. “Commander Calumn excused me from the bridge.

“When my boss gives me the afternoon off,” Turro said, easing himself onto the nearest bench, “I hit the holodeck. Or my quarters.”

Snapping her head in Turro’s direction, Nova affirmed, “I haven’t given up. I was non-corporeal for one hundred and forty years; I’m not going to stare at a wall for even an hour.” She shimmied a shoulder to draw his attention to the PADDs littered in the grass and then the Feinberg receiver in her ear.

“The arboretum fuels my creative flow better than my quarters,” Nova said, lifting her shovel to the barrel. “But Ketris said if I kept inflicting my ‘alien jazz music’ on her, I should make myself useful.”

Some distance away, Ketris looked up from the flowers she was pruning. Her wide-brimmed sun hat flapped from the movement. Turro would have expected the elderly Romulan to be out of earshot, but her hearing remained keen.

“The same goes for you, little boy,” Ketris said, before immediately returning her gaze to her flowers.

Nova squinted at Turro. She set her shovel down and balled her fists against her hips. She looked at him, right at him.

“Would you give up?” Nova asked, practically accusingly. “Could you?”

Turro pressed his tongue behind his front teeth. He frowned at her. He didn’t have an answer for her. So he grabbed another shovel and joined her in transporting the soiled soil into the refuse barrel.

Nova didn’t let it drop.

“She was condescending as hell, but Yuulik defended my right to scientific curiosity,” Nova said, and then she rolled her eyes. “As if that’s all there is. But even that was posturing. In the turbolift, Yuulik admitted that she, too, thought I was wasting my time if the translator still couldn’t decipher a word of the alien transmission.

“I’m no linguist,” Nova admitted, “but I can parse out the nonlinear structure of the message. Nested loops. Even without knowing the words, I can suss out the paralinguistics of tone, pitch, and idiomatic rhythms. But I don’t know the words.

“…Am I wasting my time?”

Shaking his head, Turro said, “I can’t answer that for you.”

“You’re right. You can’t,” Nova said, grinning in perverse amusement at his uncertainty. Then she insisted, “Whomever transmitted that message, whenever they sent it, they said what they said for a reason. I owe it to them to listen deeply.”

Turro stabbed the shovel into the dirt again, and he rested his chin on the handle. “What do you owe them exactly?”

Nova snapped, “Don’t twist my words. They’re deserving of consideration. They’re–”

“Take a breath, my darling,” Ketris interjected without pausing her pruning. “You’re aggravating the arugula. The galaxy keeps offering you cues to slow down, and it’s time to listen. You always miss things when you forget to breathe.”

Nova inhaled sharply.

She plucked one of the PADDs from out of the grass and pecked at its interface display.

“Breath pattern,” she gasped.