Uhura put a calming hand on his arm. “You know it was beyond his control, Scotty. And Thomas knew he’d be in good hands with Doctor Varian.”

“Well, anyway, it sounds like a fantastic journey,” Blake put in, trying to ease the tension. “But then, your tales about your family are always colorful. I sometimes wonder if you’re embellishing a little, but I enjoy them too much to care.”

Scott crinkled his eyes to emphasize the gleam in them. “Aye, well, that’s the storyteller’s prerogative, Captain.”

Blake turned to Uhura. “You never seem to talk about your family, Nyota. In fact, we’ve been serving together more than six months and I hardly know anything about your past—aside from your time on the Enterprise, of course.”

Uhura hesitated. “Well… there isn’t much to tell. I’m from Nairobi, in the U.S. of Africa.”

Blake’s brows drew together. “Doesn’t your file say Kitui?”

“Oh, yes. I was born in Kitui, because my mother, M’Umbha, was working in the area at the time. Her work with elephants entails a lot of travel.”

“She’s a biologist?”

“A lawyer, actually. She’s a judicial liaison for Africa’s elephant communities. They’re intelligent, of course, but not civilized. They saw what human civilization did to their ancestors, and they have long memories.”

An embarrassed silence fell. Humans rarely liked to be reminded of how brutally they had treated their fellow sapient species on their own planet, such as elephants, great apes, and whales, before they ever encountered an alien intelligence.

“Still,” Uhura went on, “they need someone who can speak for them in the halls of power—make sure their interests are represented.” After the arguably misnamed First Contact, once Vulcan telepaths had confirmed what most human scientists had already come around to accepting even before the Third World War, humanity had striven to achieve communication and peace with the surviving wild intelligences of Earth.

“Like a Council advocate for a Federation protectorate.”

“Exactly.” After a thoughtful pause, Uhura went on. “It seems my mother’s work with the elephants was what inspired my own interest in language and communication, my own interest in contacting new life-forms.”

“ ‘It seems’? ” Blake chuckled. “You sound like it happened to someone else.”

Uhura fidgeted. “Well… it was a long time ago. In many ways, none of us are who we were as children. And my family moved around so much—sometimes in Nairobi and central Africa for my mother’s work, sometimes in Mombasa for my father’s.”

Blake opened her mouth and paused. “I was going to guess he did something space-related, but my last guess fizzled.”

“No, this time it’s the obvious. My father, Alhamisi, was a star pilot. He worked for a couple of Mombasa’s major interstellar shipping and transport firms before going freelance with my uncle Raheem.”