The Wallaces have survived a decade on an inhospitable world, and having been recovered along with two surviving children of their lost shipmates, they want to do everything they can to keep their unorthodox and improbable little family unit together; although not bound by blood, they are held by a deep love and need for one other. But now that they have returned to civilization in the Federation, the extended families of one of the children file for custody of the little boy, Ikemba. Wallace’s new family may have defeated the odds and escaped a distant alien shore… but can the family survive the fight ahead?

This is a post that explores the complex emotional and legal challenges, tension and uncertainty faced by Ibis and her family. The dialogue is spot on, with the added humour and irony provided by their lawyer.

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Posted on 09 Sep 2024 @ 10:09pm by Chief Petty Officer Ibis Xeri & Major Porter Wallace & Staff Warrant Officer Chadrin L’Orss

Mission: M4 – Falling Out
Location: Wallace Family Quarters
3434 words – 6.9 OF Standard Post Measure

The first thing Rit noticed upon putting on his new uniform was the single black pip on his collar being joined by a gold one. The second thing he noticed was that the fuchsia of his collar clashed with the green-tone of his skin. Good gods, the purple made his head look like a pea balanced on top of a neck! How was anyone going to take him seriously?

He’d always taken his fashion seriously, because most people expected Orions to dress in leather, and they never disappointed. Leather arm bands. Leather shirts. Leather pants. Leather underwear. Rit had always hated leather (especially the underwear, which chafed something awful). He’d long preferred top-end suits, the more expensive, the better. No one expected an Orion in a Savile Row suit. Juries tended to look at him more favorably; judges barked at him less. Creamy tones seemed best to compliment his skin shade, but he’d gone for the occasional dark suit, particularly when his clients were accused of some particularly horrible crime.

Wait, would he have to go to court in this uniform? What a horrible thought.

Chadrin L’Orss stood waiting for him outside of the Wallace’s quarters. At one moment, her face, posture – everything – morphed from placid to self-conscious as she began tugging at the neck of her uniform and smoothing her hair. “Do I look alright?” she asked breathlessly.

Her uniform looked great on her. Everything – even the blue of her hair and skin stripes – seemed to go with the ugly shade of purple collar. “Yes,” Rit irritably replied. He posted himself in front of the door and started to reach out to the doorbell and froze. “Are you going to be doing that this whole meeting?”

“Doing what?”

“Mirroring me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chadrin snapped back.

“Oh, for the love of the gods…”

It took only a few beats for the door to be opened. At first, Rit thought he was looking at empty air, but his eyes fell toward the floor. The child stared up at the hulking Orion who stood over two meters taller than the tiny Human. The child’s eyes became as big as saucers and his little mouth formed a perfect ‘o.’
Rit glanced at Chadrin, expecting her to engage with the kid, but she was standing as silent as he. Not only that, she’d somehow puffed herself up so that she seemed to be standing taller and more formidable than someone of her stature could possibly be. She also looked like she was about to gobble up the Human with one bite…

Ah. He supposed he needed to do something about that. He kneeled and smiled.

“Hello, miniature Human child. I am Ens…er…Lieutenant Rit Sarteniac…er…call me ‘Rit.’ Are your parents at home?”

The dark curly haired kid made a face up at him with teeth bared awkwardly. It was as if he was forming the face for the ‘R’ sound, but it just rolled into a growl.

Was this little human child growling at him? Did he think he was a Klingon? “Er. Or you can call me…whatever. Are your parents home?”

The boy made a hissing sound. Then, forming a pointing finger, motioned up at him. “‘Neen.”

“Neen? No. I’m Rit. Do you have any…” Rit started to ask Chadrin, but noticed that she was looking at him a mixture of fear and anger. He sighed and rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. She was going to take some getting used to. A lot of getting used to.

“Are – your – parents – home? Ibis Xeri. Porter Wallace? Yes?” He dramatically nodded his head. “Or no?” He shook his head.
The boy pointed– behind them.

When both of their heads swiveled, they observed Ibis’ small figure coming around the bend in the corridor. Walking, at first, but then noticing them at her door, she began a quicker pace to meet the solicitors. She was wearing slacks and a blouse, one of the shirts her mother thought looked very plain, although it was a colorful print by anyone else’s standards. When she came up to them she recognized the one, Chadrin, the Diplomatic officer tasked to helping them with Ikemba’s situation, but turned dark betazoid eyes up cautiously at the big Orion in uniform. She noticed him shift his own sleeve cuff, as if the uniform made him self conscious.

When she spoke, she spoke quietly. “Sorry, I had to take Olivia.” Ibis motioned back over her shoulder before thinking that the direction wasn’t going to clarify much. “To take her to school.” It seemed odd in her head why someone would need to walk a teen to school on a starbase, so she amended further. “Second day.”

Chadrin nodded hurriedly and a little breathlessly, “Of course. Right. I found you a lawyer.” She pointed at Rit and shrugged.

Rit stood up straight and bowed slightly. “Lieutenant Rit Sarteniac. I’m, apparently, your lawyer for your family…stuff.”

Ibis looked between Chadrin and the Orion, gauging the one against the other, trying to determine if they were serious. He didn’t sound, let alone look, like any lawyer she’d ever met.

“He’s good,” Chadrin piped up, feeding off of Ibis’s new energy, “Murderers and thieves and the like, but he’s good.”

At the stereotypical Orion jab, Ibis smirked and very quietly kidded in kind with Chadrin. “I guess their kind have a reputation for that. Sorry… Lawyer joke. Um.” She shifted, pushing her hair back and motioning ahead of them at her own door. “Please. Chandrin, Lieutenant Sarteniac. Why don’t you come in?”

Rit followed Ibis into the quarters, noting that toys and clothes were strewn about the place like a tornado had ripped through only minutes before. As Ibis showed them into the living room, a man – Rit assumed Major Wallace – came through an adjourning doorway. He wasn’t in a uniform, just neat, simple clothes.

“You’re the lawyer? Porter Wallace,” he said holding out his hand to the Orion, who dutifully shook it. If he seemed surprised by his lawyers’ species, he didn’t show it.

Rit introduced himself and hoped it would be for the last time. “We’re early. I’m sorry that you didn’t have time to pick up.”
Wallace glanced around and shrugged, “This is about as clean as it’s going to get.”

“Ah,” Rit intoned.

Taking a seat, Ibis brushed crumbs and a napkin into a bowl still half filled with now cold breakfast oats. It was all she could get into Olivia before they had to leave in time for class, and Olivia had left it on the coffee table. The small action was symbolic in the face of the rest of the cluttered chaos in the room. They’d never actually owned this much to clean up after. Ikemba treated everything just as he had in the wild… roughly and in a broadly scattered manner, just as he was currently doing, cracking crayons and pastels into smaller and smaller pieces and grinding the chalk and the wax into the walls with the same interest he always had grinding chalk or ash into rocks on the shore. She felt somehow guilty for the time she was spending in the science lab, leaving so much of the day with the kids to Wallace. She folded her hands together in her lap to prevent herself jumping up and attempting a panic cleaning during the meeting.

“Of course.” Rit found the closest clean cushion and carefully eased himself onto the couch. Chadrin did the same. “It is my understanding that you want to keep the child?”

“That’s right,” Wallace said, settling next to Ibis on the couch.

The Orion looked around the quarters and thought if it were him, he couldn’t offload the kid soon enough. “Very well. Why?”
Ibis looked stunned at the very question. “Because,” her voice cracked, a flood of reasons rising up from her gut and her heart and getting caught in her throat. “Because.”

Rit looked at Wallace to add more. “Jimoh entrusted him to us. My sergeant. Our…friend. He said we should take care of him.”

“Mm-hmm. Right. Okay. We’ll come back to that. How do you want to handle this?”

“Handle what?” Wallace grunted. “We want to have Ikemba stay with us.”

Ibis nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. With us.”

“I kinda figured. I’m talking about how you want to handle the other two families. The whoevers and whats-their-faces. Do you want the kid to have anything to do with them after all this is over or can I go after them, find the dirt they don’t want anyone to know and air it publicly. And I can exploit every loophole I can find to slow this down until the kid graduates high school. Or college. Or retires, for that matter. We can drag this out until every person in those families is deceased.”

Ibis’ eyes went wide. What was he? A hitman-turned-lawyer? “No, no no, nothing like– He’ll want to know all of his aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. Why would…. anyone…”

Rit shrugged. Why did she find that question bizarre? Some people couldn’t wait to screw over the people trying to screw them. “The other way is easier. You’re sure you actually want this kid?”

“Yes!” Already, Ibis was trying to control herself from shaking, grasping herself by either elbow. “Just not… like that!”

“Lieutenant,” Wallace growled, “I don’t know who you think you are – ”

“I’m just a lawyer,” Rit cut in. He started to rise, “Don’t like my style? I will gladly go and you can – oof!” Chadrin kicked him and pulled him back down onto the couch.

“You’ll have to excuse him,” the R’ongovian said icily. “He used to work for an Orion clan cleaning up their messes so he’s a little rough around the edges. I’m positive, however, that he can play nice. Right?”

Rit shrugged. “I don’t know. The last client I had blew up a cargo ship. Allegedly. She allegedly blew up a cargo ship with a torpedo allegedly stolen from a Starfleet supply depot. Then she allegedly held the crew for ransom, during which she was forced to defend herself from an overly aggressive Starfleet captain who attacked her with little provocation.”

“And he got her off,” Chadrin added.

“Nope. She’s doing a ten-year stretch for destruction of property and fifteen counts of kidnapping. I did get the prosecution to drop the two-hundred-forty-seven charges of attempted murder. I mean, give me a break, right? Her ship had no chance of destroying that Starfleet cruiser and killing the crew. I also got her off the piracy charge. She’d been raised to believe she already owned the cargo on that ship. The jury understood that she was just a victim of an outdated Orion culture that’s been unable to adjust to the modern era.”

“See? The best.”

Wallace blinked, a dumbfounded expression painting his face. This didn’t feel right. It didn’t necessarily feel bad either. Maybe this was like war: sometimes you wanted the person willing to do anything to achieve the objective. Not often, but sometimes. Maybe this was one of those times?

“How are you even….” Ibis paused to rephrase, squinting dubiously, “What is it that you do in Starfleet?”

“I became a biologist. I was studying worms until this morning.”

“Oh.” Ibis’ hackles dropped slightly. In some other set of circumstances, they might have been assigned together, working out microbiome profiles. “I’m.. Life Sciences, too. Botany.”

Rit nodded and tried to seem interested in that tidbit of information. “Wow. We could get together sometime and compare…notes.”

Ibis squinted at him, uncertain if she was being mocked, and once again missing her telepathic insight.

“Well, I can’t be at all what you were thinking. This is too important for me to be your lawyer. I haven’t even practiced in five years. I’m sure you’ll find someone – ”

“Tell them what you’d do. I know you’ve been thinking about it,” Chadrin cut in.

Rit sighed, “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea.”

Ibis’ eyes rested on Ikemba where he had turned a dining room chair over to create a hurdle to clamber over. What if all of her chairs stayed on all of their feet? What if there was no one interested in using them for an obstacle course? She turned back to look at Rit.

“Lieutenant, almost all ideas are stupid.” Ibis said softly, echoing one of her old mentors. Of course, they actually became legitimately bad ideas when you acted on the wrong ones. But until then, they were just ideas. Ideas that hopefully would lead to better ones. “If Chadrin thinks they’re worth hearing, then… hit us.”

“I did some preliminary work while I was enjoying a pie,” Rit begrudgingly admitted, “and there’s a law and, even better, some precedent. The Starfleet Family Act is the law that codifies the rights and responsibilities of family members of Fleet personnel. In amongst that is that it gives Starfleet wide latitude to decide family disputes.”

“So, you think the judge will decide to let Ikemba stay with us? Just like that?” Wallace asked, trying to understand.

“Judge? No. Good gods no. Federation law clearly prefers that orphaned children be reunited family, close-genetic preferred before adopted. If the case stays in Federation courts, then the real question will be if Ikemba goes with the mom’s or the dad’s family. The first petition is to change the venue. Because Ikemba is the child of two members of Starfleet, born on an away mission, and now in the custody of the commanding officer of said away mission, it clearly falls under the Starfleet Family Act. We change the venue”

“It wasn’t an away mission,” Wallace grumbled.

Rit waved away the comment like an irksome fly. “It doesn’t matter. Judge will have to change the venue. It’s the law.”

Ibis had never thought so much about it before, but it all made a lot of sense. Often on long missions in deep space, ships had to settle issues for themselves. But the Sunrise was long since lost, their captain too. Wallace was the senior most remaining officer, of the two of them. “Where… what venue?”

“Here. Whats-their-name – the captain of Obsidian Command – is going to have to figure this all out.”

“DeHavilland…” She had been very kind to Ibis on the Pathfinder. Ibis doubted there would be much hesitation to help them. Her tight shoulders started to fall and she sighed in stages.

“The Starfleet Family Act doesn’t specifically address what happens to orphans whose parents are both killed. Because, that never happens. Stupid,” Rit shook his head, then shrugged, “Luckily, that means the commanding officer of a ship or whatever is given wide latitude to decide. That’s where precedent comes. In 2367 a Starfleet captain returned a human boy who’d been adopted by a Talarian warrior to the Talarian, as opposed to his biological grandmother. The Talarian was even the one who killed the kid’s parents! Okay, so there’s a bunch of huggy, emotional squishy stuff in there, but it boils down to when a Starfleet captain decides what is in the best interests of a child on their ship, the law sides with the captain.”

Turning her face upwards, Ibis searched Porter’s expression. She was hesitant to hope it would be so simple and needed to know what he was thinking. His face seemed stoic and she couldn’t guess. “Would… would we have to be crew? Of the station? For the issue to fall to DeHavilland? I’m on a project, but it’s just a provisional role right now.”

“I don’t know,” Rit responded, his mind whirling. A whole buffet of options of slowing this thing to a crawl. He could argue that the case move to DeHavilland. If that didn’t work, then to the admiral on this station. If that didn’t work, he could make a motion to be left with 9th Fleet command and if that didn’t work…Oh, yes, he could make this last for years…

Then he remembered his clients specifically told him not to do that. Gods this was going to be awful, like fighting with two arms tied behind his back. He’d been taught to do that, but it wasn’t very pleasant. “It should be simple to find out.”

Wallace cleared his throat. “Is there another way to do this without all the judges and legal wrangling? Something that can be done quickly so that Ikemba isn’t kept in limbo? He doesn’t deserve that.”

Rit stared at Wallace as if he’d gone crazy. He couldn’t really be thinking… “Arbitration.”

“How would that work?”

The Orion quickly explained that a panel of three arbiters would be selected, the facts of the case presented to them, and then they would decide what to do. Everything was legally binding and over in a matter of a couple of months. “But I would suggest the Starfleet route. It’s your best bet.”

“I don’t want our ‘best bet.’ I want what’s best for Ikemba,” Wallace replied.

Ibis kept crushing her hands together, uncertain she agreed with Porter. She wanted Ikemba. What was best for Ikemba was the same thing, wasn’t it?

“But how would the panel be chosen?” Ibis didn’t like this option, she didn’t feel they would understand. She wasn’t sure they wouldn’t do what seemed obvious on paper, the way things seemed to always be done. She felt herself waffling between the options. So what if it was all legal nonsense forever. Could she learn to live with this kind of stress? To keep it under wraps and just let Ikemba play and grow and become a man and never be touched by it? Who could decide against her? Her claim was better than blood, she was sure.

Wasn’t it? She searched everyone’s faces again. “I’ll join the Science staff on the station, so there isn’t a question.” She whispered insistently. “I’ll go back to work. I know Captain DeHavilland would push through my request to fully re-enlistment. That will work, right?”

Wallace’s jaw clinched for a moment, but relaxed as he threw an arm over Ibis’s shoulders and squeezed. They’d been lockstep in their decision making on Korix, but there’d been few real options to mull over while stranded on that ocean world. Here, back in civilization, there were so many. “What if you looked in to both and came back to us?” Wallace asked Rit.

“Right. I can do that, but we don’t have a lot of time to make a decision,” Rit stood up, happy this encounter was over. Chadrin followed a moment later. “You’ll have to let that other lawyer sit down with the kid – uh! ” Chadrin had elbowed him in the hip. “Err…With Ikemba soon. We can request a Starfleet counselor be on hand for the meeting.”

“We’ve been working with Agaia Adima,” Wallace told him.

“Okay. I’ll get work on getting it scheduled then. If there’s nothing else, I’ll be going.”

Ibis shook her head, no, there was nothing. The Orion solicitor didn’t seem to want to be there and she didn’t want to keep him. She was left not knowing what to think. There were options to look into but none of those left her feeling very confident about the future. Only the weight of Porter’s arm around her felt grounding.

Ibis sighed, a heavy reflex.

Rit plastered on a bright smile and waved awkwardly, before retreating toward the door. Once he emerged into the hallway with Chadrin, he heaved his own sigh adding an eye roll. “Seriously?”

Chadrin stiffened, snapping back, “Seriously.”

“I guess I need to do some research,” Rit called as he turned on his heel and marched down the hall. “Family law sucks!”
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