Archive of Our Own ^beta

For two centuries there were no whales on Earth. And then there were two. George and Gracie came forward in time and saved the humans. That being done, a very natural question came up: what next? They had become formidable marine biologists in their own right after so much time spent with Dr. Gillian Taylor, and they were concerned about the ecological impact of reintroducing their species to a planet that was no longer accustomed to their presence. Whales had died out, and so had most of their natural predators, leaving only disease and accidents to limit their life expectancy. Gracie and George did want to start a pod of their own and ensure a new future between whales and humanity (to say nothing of meeting other species within and beyond the Federation), but it was of paramount importance to do so wisely and well.

Over time, in cooperation with Taylor, Spock, and others of the best scientific minds in two quadrants, the pair worked out how to integrate themselves and their new offspring into their new, old home in the oceans. With no pollution or other human interference that had been endemic in their own time, the average humpback lifespan gradually increased from maybe fifty years to over ninety.

And they multiplied.

Whales aren’t that big on genealogy; nobody really keeps track of who is and is not a direct descendant of the two progenitors. George and Gracie became simply “the grandflukes” to further generations. So let’s just say that one day a particularly adventurous calf, two or three generations removed from the grandflukes, received the honored name of Gillian. She was raised with the same statement of purpose as the rest: “We are not the hell their whales. They are the hell our humans.” Though inherently lovable and probably a little smarter and kinder than their twentieth-century forebears, humanity would always benefit from friends who could keep showing them how to steer their way clear of cruelty, cowardice, and waste, toward compassion, discovery, and an embrace of the truly strange and unknown. The whales, from the grandflukes on, found pride and purpose in their place among those essential friends, but with the Federation the humans had co-founded spread out among so many worlds, it was time for the whales, too, to reach beyond the comforts of their home waters. And one of the most effective ways to get there was by joining Starfleet.

Gillian was not nearly the first-ever Cetacean Ops officer, but she was certainly among the initial hundred. Her first ship, the Oddity, a deep-space exploration vessel on a seven-year mission, took her to many of the places she had heard and read about. Her voyages quickly developed her true capacity for art and song. Yes, she had been brought up from infancy to make whalesong with her podmates like everyone else, not just for communication but for the love of the sound; yes, she had known the beauty of rock formations and sand patterns in Earth’s seas. But what she saw through her viewscreen, which could stretch to take up one whole wall of her tank, unlocked something she’d only heard described and never fully understood. Gillian loaded painting software into her personal archives and began expressing on the digital canvas what the sights of the universe told and showed her. She stared back at the Helix Nebula and shared what she perceived in its eye. She watched black holes collide. Her crew visited some of the newest worlds formed in Rho Ophiuchi while she stayed aboard and tried to count young stars. Every encounter made a difference in the shape of her mind and the tones of the songs she sang for her crew and for herself.

And she flew the ship, of course! Oh, did she ever navigate. Her equipment drew whole new star maps that her vast whale brain used to plot the safest, fastest, and most fun routes through unexplored sectors. After four years, she was already planning to sign up for another mission: with all the beauty and fascination out there, it had become nearly impossible to believe her journey could ever end.

The Oddity died in a collision with an ancient Breen mine on its way home from the border between the Beta and Delta quadrants—very fortunately, at coordinates well within beacon range of the nearest starbase and rescue. The mine’s delayed detonation allowed the full ship’s complement to escape, but there would have been dozens of fatalities if a whale had not been there. Deck 13 was cut off from access to the rest of the ship upon impact with the mine, and Gillian directed the crew trapped there to put on wetsuits and climb into her living quarters, a smaller tank with access to Cetacean Ops. After sealing herself and her friends inside, she ignited the emergency charges to jettison the little tank out of its compartment by the forward hull, forming a larger than usual escape pod. Oh, yes, cetacean officers have a way off the ship in the event of a catastrophe, too. They’re quite bold, but they are not, by and large, particularly foolhardy.

Gillian mourned her beloved first vessel, of course, but no part of the ordeal put her off her appetite for further and greater exploration. Familiar with the superstition that ships named Enterprise and Voyager were prone to discover some of the most fascinating and dangerous galactic phenomena, she signed up immediately when Admiral Janeway’s new ship was commissioned. After all her experience with the reaches of space, she quickly found out she had plenty yet to learn about time. The rifts and paradoxes Voyager encountered on its journey with the Protostar brought out yet more tones in her painting and her song.

Like everyone she knew, Gillian wept with horror at the destruction of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. However, she was utterly unprepared for Starfleet’s reactionary response: the protectionism, the abandonment of exploratory and humanitarian missions, the transformation into… well, into something disturbingly akin to the old Romulan Empire, frankly. She seriously considered resigning and returning to Earth’s waters to live out her remaining years in its beautiful but now rather small-seeming depths—until a subspace message let her know that the new Prodigy, the one remaining Federation ship authorized for new exploration, had been designed with a Cetacean Ops station, right near the forward hull on Deck 13. Her friends. Her stars. Maybe her universe would not have to shrink after all. Not yet.