‘There’s no way. No way he can make it.’

‘You need a little faith, Lieutenant. He’ll do it.’

‘You’re so completely screwed.’

‘Come on, come on, come on -’

But the clock in the corner of the screen was moving too fast, time slipping through Cortez’s fingers like the proverbial sand, and even as she sat there, fists almost crammed into her mouth to stop herself from making so much of a squeak of anticipation, the clock hit zero.

‘And it’s over! Rigel Rangers have routed the Alpha Centurions!’ boomed the commentator’s voice across the Safe House. The lounge normally enjoyed a languid air of sophistication, but today was crammed full of officers glued to the enormous screen to watch the cup final. As the chime went, the room erupted into a series of conflicting cheers and groans.

‘Told you,’ said Nate Beckett in a sing-song voice. ‘You can brush close to greatness, Commander, but you’ll never have it in your grasp.’

Cortez gave him a beady, baleful look as she reached for her drink. ‘Pick your trash-talk carefully, kid.’

Beside her, Lieutenant Rhade was clapping a disappointed Lieutenant Arys on the shoulder. ‘It was well-fought. A match to be proud of.’

‘Pride doesn’t win,’ came the unexpectedly savage riposte of Counsellor Carraway, who had lost all kindly decorum at several points of the Parrises Squares match.

‘And it doesn’t,’ added a smug Beckett, ‘do you any favours in the fantasy league either.’

Arys groaned, head flopping onto the table. ‘Torlan made so many concessions. Yeark didn’t score.’

‘You’re double-screwed,’ Beckett agreed, pulling out his PADD with a flourish. ‘I bet the calculations will be up in a second, but I think that brings the counsellor to the lead, with his flawless eye for quality.’

‘It’s not just the numbers,’ Carraway said earnestly. ‘You have to accept you’re going to take a hit on something. Rather than try to plug every hole and watch all of them leak a little, you have to look at your team and figure out what you’ll sacrifice. You have to be ready to lose something, even when you win.’

‘Alright, Counsellor Sun Tzu, no need to rub it in,’ Cortez grumbled. ‘Nate, any news updates?’

‘What? Oh.’ Beckett made a face, and tapped on the PADD. ‘Nothing major. No word from Coronal, but even if we had heard something, would FNN know?’

‘They found out in the first instance,’ said Arys. ‘What a failure of information security.’

‘People have a right to know,’ Rhade prompted gently. ‘This Century Storm concerns the whole quadrant.’

‘First major evacuation task group has headed into the nebula,’ Beckett summarised from the PADD. ‘What a bloody mess; how are we supposed to save someone in there when we won’t be able to see more than a kilometre in front of us, let alone call for more help?’

‘Let alone,’ Arys grumbled, ‘maintain a warp field.’

‘It’s like none of you trust me to do my job.’ Cortez drained her drink. ‘Modifications are underway, and will be done by the time we get to Bravo. Visibility in the nebula is going to suck, communications are going to suck, but we’re not going to fly in there and immediately need saving.’ She got to her feet. ‘So to stop you fellas from crying yourselves to sleep with fear, I’m gonna get an early night and start recalibrating the short-range sensors first thing in the morning.’

Beckett smirked. ‘You mean you’re going to go cuddle Commander Valance.’

‘Settle down, Ensign,’ chided Rhade. ‘Best to not pass comment on a senior officer’s personal life.’

‘That’s very responsible of you, Adamant,’ said Cortez, ‘but he is kinda right. Have a good one, folks.’

The aftermath of the match would keep the lounge busy for hours, she expected. Only days ago had Endeavour received word of the Century Storm ravaging the Paulson Nebula, and been ordered to depart the former Romulan Neutral Zone to join the aid effort. The situation had erupted suddenly and was developing fast, and with no specific orders yet, no idea of what they were heading towards, and new preparatory protocols coming in all the time, everyone had been on edge. The hardest part of a crisis, Cortez knew, was waiting.

It was less bad for her and her engineers. They were the ones who got to do the preparations, crawl over the ship’s systems and make sure Endeavour wouldn’t be dead in the water or blinded the moment they entered the nebula or storm. But it meant that Cortez had traded helplessness for exhaustion, and while she hadn’t resisted going to the lounge when Carraway organised the viewing party for the match, she now wanted nothing more than to see her girlfriend, crawl into bed, and sleep.

Valance had given her the keycode to her quarters soon after they’d boarded, so Cortez tried to be light-footed as she slid into the XO’s rooms at such a late hour. But she should have known better; she should not have been surprised to find the lighting dim, not out, and to find Valance sat slumped at her desk.

‘Oh, come on, cariño,’ Cortez sighed. ‘What are you doing?’

Valance jerked up, gaze immediately guilty. ‘I was…’ She hesitated, then switched the screen off and stood up. ‘Finishing work. How was the game?’

Cortez advanced with a grumble. ‘Stupid. Parisses Squares is a stupid game.’

She had hoped for a warm welcome, but Valance bristled at her words. ‘It’s a magnificent game of teamwork, strategy, and skill -’

‘Okay, okay, Commander “Led the Academy Team to Two Cup Victories,” it’s a stupid game when my team loses, and anyway, if you care so much why didn’t you join us?’

‘I don’t like watching it with people. Everyone who’s never played a game in their life suddenly becomes an armchair expert.’

Cortez placed a hand on her chest at the hint of accusation. ‘I would never,’ she said with mock indignation. ‘I’m a mild-mannered and humble person, aware of her own limits and boundless genius and charisma -’

It was a transparent tactic, and it always worked: puff up like a peacock, get kissed by Valance to make her shut up, and tonight was no different. They were both of them weary, worn by the uncertainty ahead as much as the day’s work, but for just a moment Cortez could wrap her hands in Valance’s uniform jacket, pull herself close and let the rest of the galaxy fade away.

‘You better have stopped thinking about work,’ Cortez mumbled at last, eyelids drooped, sleepy and satisfied.

‘I thought I’d get some paperwork done before you got here, but I ended up staring at the same reports,’ Valance admitted, arms sliding around her waist.

‘I didn’t know you were waiting for me.’ Cortez gave an impish smirk. ‘I better make your patience pay off.’

It was thus inevitable that the door-chime sounded four minutes later.

‘Ignore it,’ came Cortez’s desperate mumble from their entanglement of limbs on the sofa. She kissed Valance again, but less than thirty seconds later came the chime once more.

Valance’s head lifted with suspicion, despite Cortez’s low noise of indignant protest. ‘Computer, who’s at the door?’

‘Captain Rourke.’

‘Blast,’ hissed Valance, hopping to her feet and fastening her uniform back on.

‘Someone better be dead,’ spat Cortez. ‘Dying isn’t good enough, unless you, specifically, are the only person who can glare them back to health or something. Or I’m gonna kill him.’

‘He wouldn’t come down at this time if it weren’t urgent.’

‘I don’t know, you two are all buddy-buddy now, you go for drinks together and respect each other as people -’ But Valance was heading for the door, so Cortez shut up and finished fastening her uniform to achieve at least decency. She didn’t much care if she gave the captain the impression he was intruding.

But his expression was stony when the doors opened, and Rourke stepped inside at Valance’s welcome with nothing more than an acknowledging glance in Cortez’s direction that was still enough to send ice down her spine. He knew he was interrupting, and didn’t care.

‘Commanders.’ There was the briefest moment where Rourke glanced between them, likely wondering if he should speak in front of Cortez, before he turned to Valance like he was facing an oncoming wave set to crash against him. ‘We’ve just received word from Fourth Fleet Command; we won’t be rendezvousing at Starbase Bravo, but proceeding direct to the spinward side of the Paulson Nebula.’

The sword of Damocles of his news hung overhead, unknown and unspoken, but still Valance remained all cool business. ‘What are our orders?’

‘We’re headed for the colony Whixby, a Betazoid off-shoot from Mellstoxx. Lieutenant Dathan is preparing information for a briefing tomorrow morning. But we have a secondary objective. We’re not the first ship sent to Whixby; the USS Odysseus was dispatched. They were supposed to send word to Starbase Bravo eight hours ago, and missed the deadline.’

The ice down Cortez’s spine slithered to her heart. The Odysseus had helped Endeavour in their campaign against the Wild Hunt; the two crews had worked together and done so well. But more importantly, the Odysseus was commanded by Cassia Aquila, a long-time friend, rival, and former Academy classmate of Valance’s.

A former lot of things.

Valance’s expression shifted only one iota, with only the mildest twitch at the brow. The average observer would not have spotted a crack in the mask, nor thought much of it, but that was how Cortez knew how utterly devastating this news could be.

Cortez bounced up. ‘There are so many reasons we might not have heard from a ship in the nebula -’

‘There are,’ Rourke agreed. ‘And you can hope for the best, Commander, but we will prepare for the worst – to complete the Odysseus’s mission at Whixby, and find the ship.’ He hadn’t reacted to Valance’s lack of reaction, but now he shifted, self-conscious, guilty. ‘There’s more. Admiral Beckett thought the mission necessitated a representative from his office. Davir Airex is aboard the Odysseus.’

Valance turned away at that, stalking to the window. Stars streamed past as Endeavour catapulted herself through the great void at impossible speeds, but Cortez thought they could not possibly be swift enough at that moment. When Valance spoke, her voice was low, coiled tight. ‘Is there anything else I need to know?’

‘Communication with Whixby has been lost, so we don’t know if the Odysseus made it there. Anything else we’ll learn along the way, or is to do with our duties at Whixby itself. That can wait until the morning briefing,’ said Rourke, a hint of concern at last dropping into his voice. ‘I’m telling you this now, Valance, so you’re not ambushed by it in front of the senior staff, but I’m sorry to say we don’t know much, might know nothing until we get there, and there’s little to do for a while.’

‘Of course.’ Valance didn’t move, her back to them both. ‘Thank you, Captain.’

They both heard the dismissal, but despite the calamity, Cortez moved to Rourke’s side as he headed for the door. ‘Hate to throw more on your plate, Boss, but have you warned Saeihr?’

Rourke flinched. ‘I don’t think she’d appreciated being personally singled out about this.’

Cortez hesitated, then her gaze flickered to Valance, and she made her choice. ‘On your head be it.’

Rourke left, and in the silence Cortez turned, twisting her fingers together as she looked at Valance’s back. ‘What do you need from me?’

There was a pause, and Valance lifted a hand to scrub her face. ‘I won’t sleep,’ she admitted. ‘You should.’

‘Karana -’

‘Endeavour still needs modifications to prepare for the Paulson Nebula and the Century Storm.’

‘But you -’

‘Isa.’ Valance turned, and Cortez didn’t know if she should feel horrified or victorious that, now it was just the two of them, the mask was falling for a sunken expression of pure loss. ‘There’s nothing I can do until we learn more. You can get us ready to act, ready to help, ready to… to make a difference. That’s what I need from you.’

Cortez gave a begrudging nod, and padded across the room to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘You want me back at my quarters?’

Valance shook her head. ‘No. No, I… I suppose having you nearby helps, too.’

‘Then you’re saying all I have to do to make a difference is go to sleep for the next seven hours?’ The joke and smile were gentle. ‘Wake me if you need me. Even if you want to sit in silence with someone there.’

‘I will,’ said Valance, and while Cortez didn’t think that was a lie, exactly, she knew it wouldn’t happen. Because Karana Valance was a deeply pragmatic woman, and in that moment could only care about what might make a difference.

With the storm ahead, that was likely very little.

‘This next part may be difficult to hear.’ Rourke’s gaze swept up and down the senior staff seated in Endeavour’s main conference room. ‘But Commander Airex was also aboard the Odysseus, representing the office of Admiral Beckett.’

Kharth frowned, not at the news, but the complete lack of reaction from Valance, seated to Rourke’s right. You knew, she thought. You were warned. Then she felt the eyes on her, and bitterness at the wave of sympathy she absolutely did not want helped keep her expression level. So as the hush fell over Davir Airex’s former crewmates, she leaned forward and said, eyebrows raising, ‘The mission to Whixby must have been important, then?’

Rourke looked relieved that she pushed on, and thumbed his PADD to change the wall display for the database file on the colony world of Whixby. ‘It is. Whixby isn’t too deep into the Paulson Nebula, but it’s on the spinward side; not too many Federation resources available between here and the border. Normally, the world would be contactable from the outside, but the Century Storm has made that impossible. However, Whixby has been identified as a strong contender as a temporary refugee hub.’

Dathan leaned forward. ‘Whixby is a, ah, resort world, established by an off-shoot of the Mellstoxx III community. Most of the several hundred thousand inhabitants are settled on a chain of islands near the equator, though the population can triple during event season, and it’s already early event season. This means two things: Whixby has the space and infrastructure to take on more people, and already has a weather control matrix installed to control the climate around the archipelago. The Odysseus was sent to arrange that.’

Carraway made a face. ‘Can we guarantee the safety of any world in the nebula? If we’ve lost contact with Whixby, that suggests the Century Storm is close. What if we relocate refugees to a planet whose atmosphere immediately turns toxic?’

Graelin piped up at that. ‘We’re constantly learning more about how these ion storms affect planetary conditions and atmospheres. We know worlds with weather control matrices are more likely to be safe. I’ll be observing further reports throughout the journey and conduct an assessment of Whixby when we know the situation there.’

‘If Whixby is a safe harbour,’ said Rourke with a nod, ‘we boost comms to the region, send word, and prepare the colony to receive an influx of refugees from neighbouring worlds.’

‘If they agree.’ Thawn had been thundering at her PADD the moment the briefing had started, and all eyes fell on her now. ‘Captain, is First Secretary Hale staying aboard for this mission?’ Rourke nodded, and her lips thinned. ‘Good. You’ll need her.’

‘What do you know, Lieutenant?’

Thawn sighed. ‘I know the administrators of Whixby. I’m related to the administrators of Whixby. The Nyder family are part of Betazoid’s Twelfth House. Administrator Falyn Nyder is my cousin… several times removed. More importantly, they were some of the most vociferous campaigners against Federation involvement with the Romulan evacuation.’

Lindgren frowned. ‘Why?’

‘To avoid being burdened by refugees, considering their proximity to the border,’ Graelin drawled. ‘I presume.’

‘Surely they wouldn’t refuse to take in Federation citizens?’ said Arys.

Despite herself, Kharth laughed. That brought eyes snapping back to her, and she gave a bitter twist of a grin. ‘You think they’ll trust Starfleet if we say the relocation of their neighbours is only temporary? What if those worlds are completely devastated? Is the Federation going to help them find new homes, or is the Federation going to say, “Whixby is nice, they’re fine there.”’

Arys shifted his weight. ‘The Federation won’t abandon its own.’

‘It’s hardly abandonment to leave people on a resort world,’ Kharth sneered. ‘Besides, it doesn’t have to be true. Administrator Nyder just needs to fear it enough to refuse to help.’

Thawn gave a hapless shrug. ‘I don’t actually know Falyn very well. But Whixby is run as a resort world; that’s where they get their prestige. Betazoid noble houses holiday there. I think in a few weeks they’re hosting some sort of arts and culture festival; those things have guest lists you’d need to murder someone to get into.’

Sadek gave a gentle hum. ‘Sounds like my kind of place.’

‘I think,’ Valance said very dryly, ‘they can forgo one year of a festival during an unprecedented disaster.’

‘Will they risk forgoing next year’s because their world’s got too many uninvited guests on it?’ Kharth retorted.

Rourke had been rubbing his brow as he listened, and at last he sighed. ‘I will speak with Ms Hale,’ he said at last. ‘Make sure we’ve got the big guns ready for the Nyders. Work with her as your priority, Thawn.’

Thawn’s eyes widened. ‘What? If we’re supposed to look for the Odysseus and probably look at upgrading Whixby’s weather control matrix…’

‘We have a lot of eyes on the Odysseus. Unless Whixby needs saving, there’s no work to do there if we can’t convince them. I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but your family ties are too valuable here.’

Thawn looked like she’d swallowed a lemon, so Kharth looked at Rourke. ‘And if Whixby’s been totally screwed by the Century Storm?’

‘We help them,’ Rourke said. ‘And if necessary, send a request for an evacuation fleet big enough for the populace. I know we’re flying blind for a lot of this, which means you’ll be preparing multiple scenarios. Doctor Sadek will run point on preparing a disaster relief operation for Whixby itself; Commander Valance will make plans for readying Whixby to receive refugees.’

Valance didn’t look happy at that, and Kharth suppressed another bitter smile. She did not revel in Valance’s doubtless distress, but the irony of a sudden, silent solidarity between the two of them was not lost on her. ‘Captain,’ Valance pushed, ‘what if we reach Whixby and there’s no sign of the Odysseus? Especially if the planet needs our help.’

‘We’re not the only ship keeping an eye out for her,’ Rourke pressed. ‘We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it, but I am prepared to engage separated flight mode, leave the saucer section at Whixby, and direct the stardrive section in pursuit of the Odysseus.’

Kharth watched the two exchange looks, and did not envy Rourke in that moment. Valance was too personally compromised, surely, to lead a mission seeking the Odysseus, and yet Kharth could not imagine she would accept being left behind at Whixby. ‘They might be fine,’ she pointed out. ‘They could be sat in orbit at Whixby having hell with their comms.’

‘They might,’ agreed Rourke. ‘To make sure nothing like that happens to us, Commander Cortez will of course continue to make modifications to our systems so we can contact the wider sector and not need saving ourselves. Keeping Endeavour operational is our highest priority; we’re no good to anyone otherwise.’

‘As always,’ Cortez sighed with a sardonic air, ‘no pressure on the miracle worker.’

‘I know there are a lot of variables here,’ Rourke pressed on. ‘We might get to Whixby, find they’re safe and sound and happy to help. We might be heading for disaster. The situation is changing all the time. We’ll spend the time we have making ready for as many scenarios as we can anticipate. There’s a lot of work to be done.’ He nodded curtly. ‘Dismissed. Lieutenant Kharth, hang on a minute.’

There it is. Kharth still stood as the others did, lingering but making it very clear she did not want to settle down for a conversation. ‘Sir?’ She turned to Rourke the moment the doors slid shut behind the last staff member.

He had that guarded look in his eyes again. ‘Are you alright?’ She didn’t answer, cocking her head. If he was going to pry, she wasn’t going to make it easy, and he sighed. ‘Going after the Odysseus. Going after Airex.’

‘I’m not dancing for joy,’ she allowed.

He nodded. ‘That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. We’re rendezvousing at the end of the day with the Salachan; they’re taking some of Ms Hale’s staff and most of our civilians to Starbase Bravo. Doctor T’Sann is going with them. He’s hardly needed in a humanitarian disaster.’

Now she met his gaze, tense. ‘Is this just an excuse to get him away from the Koderex archives?’

‘It’s protocol under these -’

‘It can be both things, sir.’ She felt more taut about T’Sann being put off the ship, she realised, than Airex being missing. But she could do something about one of those here and now. ‘I want your word that we will bring him back aboard the moment this is done.’

The corners of his eyes creased, and she suspected she’d offended him with the challenge. She didn’t care. ‘We’ll head for Bravo once this is over, and pick him up there.’ There was a beat. ‘You have my word. If that’s worth anything.’

‘It’s all I can get,’ said Kharth. ‘Was that all, sir?’ He nodded, and she stormed off. There were conversations she wanted to have, conversations she didn’t, but her PADD was already filling up with preparations for the mission ahead, so they would all have to wait.

It made for a wonderful excuse when Rhade dropped by her office an hour later, just as the rumour mill had made sure everyone knew what was going on.

‘I don’t need checking up on,’ Kharth growled the moment he was through the door.

‘You do,’ Rhade said calmly. ‘And I know that without being a telepath. Commander Airex -’

‘Airex and I broke up almost four years ago,’ Kharth pointed out. ‘Go fuss at the people who served with him since then.’

‘I’m sensing,’ Rhade said dryly, ‘that you’re very angry, upset, and hurt, and don’t know how to deal with it.’

She glared. ‘I’m dealing with it by working and throwing you out.’

‘Then I’ll change topics: how’s the captain?’

She wasn’t sure what he meant, then she caught his pointed look. ‘Also fussing. If you’re asking if I trust him any more, I don’t. If you’re asking if he trusts me any more, he doesn’t. There’s nothing more to say.’ She pointed at the door. ‘Out.’

That worked, but she hadn’t been lying. Focusing on the job made it a lot easier to not focus on anything else. Kharth had become a professional at not thinking about Davir for several years, and still it took all of her measures, distraction, and discipline to keep that up.

There were training scenarios to prepare, security protocols to brush up on and adapt. SAR on a devastated world was different to guarding a refugee hub was different to whatever other nightmare might wait for them on Whixby. So it was not until evening before she could leave the security offices and get to the guest quarters of Karl T’Sann, only to find him packing.

Not just an overnight bag. Everything.

Kharth set her hands on her hips as she surveyed the stripped room. ‘You’re coming back,’ she said bluntly.

‘I would like to,’ he said as he rolled up some socks. ‘Captain Rourke likely thinks differently.’

‘Captain Rourke has promised this is temporary.’ Only then did she realise how childish that sounded. Only then did she realise she’d believed him anyway.

T’Sann gave her a sad, almost pitying smile. ‘I have no intention of this being the end of my access to the Koderex, Saeihr. But I anticipate that will happen, at best, from a distance. I’m probably to be locked in a small room at the Daystrom Institute with a copy and my outside data access highly supervised.’

‘This is stupid,’ she blurted. ‘Starfleet says they want to help the Romulan people, but this…’

‘Is a distraction from what they think is more practical. I know.’ He tossed the socks in a bag and moved to take her hands. ‘I’m sorry to go. I’m sorry to go now, when you have this situation.’

If she didn’t want to talk about Airex with Rourke or Rhade, she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about him with the man she was now sleeping with. ‘I’ll be fine, Karlan.’

He lifted a hand to brush her cheek, gaze still apologetic. ‘Comm me when you can.’

He did not think this was a temporary separation, she realised. Kharth wasn’t sure if it meant something that she was more indignant at the idea he’d be kept from the Koderex than he’d be kept from her, or if she was too busy clamping down on all personal feelings for anything she felt for T’Sann to slip through.

But then, she’d done a good line in keeping all of her romantic entanglements for the last four years as superficial as possible.

So instead of telling him she’d reach out, she said, ‘I’ll be alright,’ and let him kiss her because it was easier than finding either words or the feelings to drive them.

Endeavour docked with the Salachan two hours later. Kharth watched the small ship go to warp through one of the observation decks, taking T’Sann far, far away, and only then did she realise she felt nothing but relief. Not for T’Sann himself being gone, but that his absence meant that she could turn the key on these last feelings, these last vulnerabilities, and lock her heart up tight.

It was the rational thing to do on a mission like this.

Sickbay was a swirling hive of activity. Perhaps storms were supposed to have calms before them and nobody had told Endeavour’s medical staff; perhaps because the storm was already raging, it only seemed fair to gather on the horizon in turn.

Doctor Elvad stepped out from beside a biobed as Rourke entered, gaze level. ‘Captain, is this matter urgent? We’re very busy here.’

Rourke tried to not glare. It’s my ship, you bloody… Cardassian. But that was not a sentiment befitting a Starfleet officer, and he tried to shove it to one side, tried to tell himself he was indignant because a junior medical officer was trying to tell him what to do on his own ship. Not because a Cardassian was. ‘None of your concern, Lieutenant. I’m seeing Doctor Sadek,’ he said, and didn’t break stride as he made for the CMO’s office.

Sadek stood before her desk, a holographic projection above it blazing with a map of the network of settled islands of Whixby. She glanced over her shoulder as he came in, eyebrow raised. ‘Checking up on me?’

‘You’ve got a rough job,’ he said, looking at the display. Along the side he could see tags for multiple projects. ‘You have to prepare for pretty much every eventuality, from everything being fine to the whole planet immediately requiring an emergency response.’

‘I do. It’s just as well I’m a rock star at my job, huh?’ Sadek shrugged.

‘You are.’ He hesitated. This was not going to be easy. ‘We need to talk who’ll be running point on Whixby.’

She cocked her head. ‘I assume, you know. Me.’

‘Running the medical response, for sure. Whether that’s emergency aid or preparing for incoming refugees. But we’re prepping SAR and infrastructure repairs if Whixby’s been badly hit, and shelter construction for them or any incoming refugees, not to mention modifications to the weather control matrix.’

Sadek gave a slow blink. ‘You don’t want to pull Valance off the Odysseus mission. But you don’t want to let her run it, either.’ She sounded like she was working this one through, and her lips pursed. ‘If something’s happened to the Odysseus, especially if it’s some of the Weird Shit from the Century Storm or nebula, you want Cortez to hand. Probably to handle Valance, too. And probably to handle Kharth, too. And if Weird Shit is going on, you want Graelin on the bridge, and you’re sending Thawn to do diplomacy -’

‘In short, my life would be a hell of a lot easier if you actually took the bridge officer’s exam and let your career move beyond Sickbay,’ Rourke said tersely.

She stiffened. ‘My career did move beyond Sickbay. Into medical research. Which I left, along with my family, to come and make your lifeeasier here. Did I not jump through enough hoops for you, Matt?’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ he sighed. ‘I want to give you operational command of the Whixby situation. Everything outside the diplomacy and government liaising.’

‘So you opened by telling me I’ve shoved myself in a small box and that’s a problem for you, personally?’ Sadek drawled.

‘You’re the most experienced officer I have, Aisha.’ He squinted at her. ‘I notice you’ve not said no. You’ve just got at me for how I’m saying it.’

‘I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that,’ she admitted. ‘It helped me buy time to consider. This is a state of emergency, so you can do all sorts of unorthodox things.’

‘I have Athaka ready to supervise logistics and shelter construction, Forrester to supervise the weather control, Lann to supervise infrastructure repairs, Adupon to run point on all those operational matters as your second -’

‘Then make Lieutenant Adupon run it, Cortez trusts him.’

‘He’s not ready to make the hard choices and you know it. But these hard choices are in your wheelhouse. I’ll give you Rhade as a staff officer to help assist and liaise with locals.’

‘Let Rhade run it! You give him the bridge, why is this different.’

Rourke put his hands on his hips. ‘I’m convinced this is the best way forward for the people of Whixby. Even if I didn’t have staff I’m sidelining for the Odysseus situation, if you’d taken that bridge officer’s exam I’d put this whole planet in your care and not think twice about it.’

Sadek made a face. ‘If this goes really well and you try to twist my arm into taking that exam when this is over, I’m letting Elvad take over all your medical care.’

If it goes really well, you might realise how damn good at it you are. But he lifted his hands. ‘This is a once-in-a-century solution, for a once-in-a-century storm.’

‘You’re a lousy liar, Matt.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘There’s going to be a quid pro quo once this is over.’

‘We can discuss that once we’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives,’ Rourke said with a falsely sweet smile, and left.

While he’d technically gotten what he wanted, his heart still hummed in his chest as he reached the turbolift, and on an impulse he shifted his destination from his original heading of his ready room.

The diminutive shape of Cyrod Brigan looked even smaller in the bullpen of the diplomatic offices on Endeavour, alone now the rest of the staff had departed with the Salachan. The man who normally played both watchdog and threshold guardian, straight-laced and disciplined and running a tight ship on these offices, was sat back in his chair with his boots up, holographic displays hovering above him, and he did not look guilty to be interrupted by the captain.

Rourke frowned at him. ‘You didn’t disembark, Cy?’

‘If I leave, who’ll tell you to not bother Ms Hale when she’s busy?’ Brigan mused, sweeping a couple of displays to the side to look up.

Rourke paused, gaze flickering over the maelstrom of news and data about the Paulson Nebula Brigan was trying to consume in seconds. ‘If you need to, tell Lieutenant Dathan you have my permission to join her in the CIC. We’re in this together, even more so this time than usual.’

Their relationship wasn’t tense, but Brigan had made it crystal clear who’s side he was on, and that it wasn’t Rourke. Now he gave a brusque nod. ‘She’s not busy right now. At least, not too busy for you.’

‘Thanks, Cy.’

Rourke did not just step into Hale’s office, but into a tree. A holographic projection filled the room, light blue limbs and boughs shining not just over him, but through him. Faces peeked out, and he turned around, lost the moment he’d arrived. ‘Sophia?’

‘Oh.’ A surprised voice sounded out, and the projection faded to show Sophia Hale at her desk at the heart of the tree. ‘Betazoid families are… complex.’

He stepped forward, eyebrows raised. ‘The Twelfth House?’

‘And its many junior branches, of which the Nyders are one.’ She sighed. ‘I have a meeting with Lieutenant Thawn soon, and had hoped to be more informed. Instead, all I know is that I know nothing.’

‘Some call that wisdom.’

‘I call it maddening.’ But she stood with a tired smile. ‘What can I do for you, Matthew?’

‘I was…’ Hiding? ‘If you’re busy, this isn’t very official.’

‘Please. I could use the break.’ She gestured to the comfortable seating by the window, away from her desk, and switched off the tree.

With a sigh he slumped onto a sofa, and took the coffee she brought over with a grateful groan. ‘I have a missing ship whose crew I like and owe, and a missing former senior staffer I respect. The missing ship is making my XO go nuts. The missing staffer is making my XO and my Chief of Security go nuts. My chain of command includes the only person I can really count on to keep them in check who is still personally compromised, and a man I don’t particularly trust to be given a long leash. And I just had to strong-arm Aisha into taking on more responsibility beyond her role as Chief Medical Officer, and the fact I succeeded is how you know this is really bad.’

Hale tilted her head. ‘Are you worried about the Odysseus, or Whixby? When it comes to your staff?’

‘What happens at Whixby could determine the fate of thousands. But I have to keep a tight leash on my staff with the Odysseus situation. It’s simply not fair for me to expect Valance to walk away from saving Aquila and Airex, nor for me to expect her to do it with a perfectly cool and level head.’ He sighed. ‘I wish like hell they’d sent another ship.’

‘You don’t trust Aisha?’

‘I do. But I’m also formally taking a bit of a gamble. It’s hard to forget that. She’s not a line officer.’ He scrubbed his face with his hands. ‘Both situations are technically under control. I just… there’s not a lot of give. No contingencies or backstops if something or someone falls through.’

Hale nodded. ‘My priority will be getting Falyn Nyder to accept refugees from other worlds, if Whixby is in a fit state. But I have help there – Cy, Lieutenant Thawn.’ She leaned forward, catching his gaze as he dragged his hands down. ‘Keep your eye on the Odysseus. Your crew need you taking care of them, so they can all find that ship. Let me be your contingency on Whixby.’

He’d come because they were friends, because Sophia Hale was the only person aboard he was allowed to voice these fears to without risking undermining his authority. He’d hoped that speaking his mind would release the tension within him, and it did, at least a little. But that was nothing compared to the relief flooding through him at the reminder he couldn’t just talk to her. He could rely on her.

‘Thank you,’ Rourke sighed. ‘I feel like I’m flying blind here.’

‘That’s what storms do,’ Hale said softly. ‘But a little tap and a little help, and our compasses still point north. That’s enough.’

‘Yeah.’ He took a deep, strengthening breath, and straightened. ‘North. That’s enough.’

The Paulson Nebula was beautiful. Thawn supposed it had to be, for such a dangerous phenomenon to draw so many people into its swirling clouds that could wrap them tight and choke them off from outside contact, interstellar travel, air to breathe. While most of the settlements were in the less-dense regions of the nebula, where comms and travel were easier if not guaranteed, she knew there were swathes of clouds that could hide any ship, block any signal.

Now it was like the nebula itself was wracked with nightmares, the ion storms its twitches and shudders of fear. There was no certainty of a gentle caress of a buffet of energy, a swirl of gases. There were only the storms.

Endeavour’s journey through the spinward regions had been smooth so far, but when Lindgren slid into the booth across from Thawn, fresh to the Safe House after a long bridge shift, she already looked exhausted. ‘It’s a martini sort of evening.’

‘It’s a synthehol martini sort of evening,’ Thawn admonished, then looked bashful. ‘Sorry. You don’t need me to tell you that. How hard has it been?’

‘The worst.’ Lindgren took the time to order before she sagged back on the bench and loosened her collar. ‘Remember the trip to Ephrath? Like that, but on steroids. And this time I have to check everything that might be a degraded comms signal to see if someone’s out there.’

Thawn gritted her teeth. ‘I wish I could be up there.’

‘Athaka’s fine. He’s no you, but you prepared him well enough. Are you okay?’

‘All I’ve been doing is reviewing files and records with First Secretary Hale…’

‘It’s your family out there. Everyone’s minds are on the Odysseus. But your cousins are in the path of the storm and we’re already acting like they’ll be an inconvenience, not people we’re here to help.’ Lindgren leaned forward with a soft smile. ‘That’s pretty rough.’

‘I don’t know Falyn. Not really,’ Thawn said hotly. ‘And it’s ridiculous that Betazoid politics are pulling me off bridge duty because Falyn’s a narrow-minded little bureaucrat who might not want to help people if it ruins her tidy life. I’m going to prepare Hale all I can, and then I’m getting back to the bridge and she can bring Whixby around.’

‘Whixby could be in trouble,’ Lindgren pointed out. ‘And if it is, Endeavour’s emergency capacity is only a few thousand, not even a fraction of the possible -’

‘For how little we understand of this storm, Whixby could have popped through a subspace rift and emerged safe and sound on the other side of the galaxy with nobody the wiser.’ Thawn’s voice only got more taut. ‘I am going to focus on what I know and what I can rationally extrapolate.’

It was the end of several shifts, so they were lucky for the twin martinis to reach their table before the evening rush. Stuck in her bad mood and already feeling a little guilty for lashing out, Thawn hadn’t paid enough attention to the doors, and thus looked up with a scowl as Arys and Beckett approached. ‘What?’

Arys looked stricken, but Beckett rolled his eyes. ‘Happy days to you, too. Unless this is a classified chat, shift over, we all need a drink and seating’s going fast.’ Despite his blunt tones, he didn’t move at once, giving them the chance to block him.

Lindgren gave Thawn a gently pointed look, and the two slid down the booth to let the men join them. ‘How was sensor recalibration, Nate?’

‘Oh, your man’s a real slave-driver,’ Beckett groaned. ‘We’re adjusting sensor settings based off every record we have so far – from us and any other ship – on nebula density and storm intensity.’

Thawn arched an eyebrow at him. ‘You’re doing this work?’

He made a face. ‘Remind me who was Science Chief when we went through the Velorum Nebula?’

‘We had a lack of options.’

Their eyes met, and he didn’t break the look as he reached out to help himself to a swig of her martini. ‘Hey, that’s pretty good; I think that’s mine now -’

‘What are you -’

‘You’re just in a bad mood because you’ve been bumped off bridge duty for diplomacy, and you’re taking it out on me. I figure if I’m going to be your chew-toy, I might as well get the fun of acting out.’

There was a low groan from across the table. ‘Could you two cut it out for five seconds?’ Arys’s head was in his hands. ‘We’re all having a rough time.’

Lindgren put a hand on his arm, and looked across the table at them. ‘Navigation has been a particular kind of hell.’

Thawn shifted guiltily. ‘Is it that much worse than the Velorum?’

‘It would be easier if you were there,’ Arys admitted. ‘Athaka’s good, but he doesn’t have your knack for adjusting power allocation. Which has been inconvenient, to say the least, navigating a nebula.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Any of my old programmes from Velorum are for the Manticore. But if you tell him to check them, he should be able to adapt for the new ship and the Paulson; they’re in the department files.’

Arys nodded, brightening. ‘I’ll tell him.’

‘See?’ Beckett elbowed him cheerfully. ‘I knew you’d be happy once you got to come down here and talk nerd.’

‘I want to do my job well, Beckett,’ said Arys haughtily. ‘The lives of a lot of people depend on us.’

Thawn winced. ‘Has there been any news of the Odysseus?’

‘Some. We keep picking up traces of what might be their warp trail, but if it is them, it’s just leading to Whixby.’

‘That’s not bad news,’ Beckett pointed out. ‘Maybe they got to Whixby, everything’s fine, but the storm’s cutting off comms so they’re having a beach party?’

‘New plan,’ said Lindgren with a wry smile. ‘If that’s the case, we join the beach party.’

‘I’ll bring my ukelele.’

Thawn rolled her eyes. ‘Of course you play the ukelele.’

‘I’m a man of many talents, most of them annoying.’

She drew back her martini. ‘You can order your own drink, you know.’

‘I’ll take that as, “I’m delighted by your presence, Nate, please stay for a round,”’ he said with a smirk, tapping an order onto the display before swinging the holo-interface around for Arys. Then he sobered, looking at her. ‘T’Sann is gone.’

‘We have bigger problems,’ she pointed out.

‘Do you think,’ Beckett mused, ‘if we find Commander Airex, we could ask for his opinion?’

Thawn gave a slow blink. ‘Involve Commander Airex in the situation with Doctor T’Sann? Lieutenant Kharth would love that.’

‘Oh no,’ Beckett groaned in mock-despair. ‘An upset Kharth. However will we live.’

‘It’s not a good survival strategy,’ Lindgren muttered into her drink.

Beckett shot her a look. ‘Don’t tell your boyfriend.’

She flushed. ‘He’s not my boyfriend –’

‘Because that would make it commitment, not just fooling around?’ he said with a smirk. ‘He’s in his office, by the way. Working late. Just in case you wanted to stop by.’

Lindgren’s nose tilted up. ‘He can call me if he wants company.’

But while they all stuck out another round of drinks as the next order came in, while they let Arys talk through the challenges ahead in bridge duties and let Beckett talk nonsense to cheer them up, while Thawn found herself unwinding despite her best efforts, Lindgren did slip off after only another martini.

Beckett watched her go. ‘She is playing with fire.’

Thawn opened her mouth to agree, but decided she didn’t want to get into this with the hang-dog expression on Arys’s face. It was one thing to disapprove of her friend’s choices. It was another to accidentally embolden the man who had been pining after her, puppy-like, with no action for a while now.

‘Well,’ she said instead, ‘I’m not sticking around if she’s gone.’ The plan had been to meet Lindgren for drinks, after all. She should, she thought, be more annoyed at being ditched so soon, but there were far too many stresses for something that petty to make it through her shield of anxiety.

‘Then thanks for getting us the booth,’ was all Beckett said smugly as she left.

It sounded like her evening had become a hot date with her latest mystery novel. Normally Thawn would have jumped at that, but spending the trip isolated from the rest of the crew, with a duty that tore her from the beating heart of the ship and all of its tensions, had made her eager to catch up with Lindgren.

Perhaps she was a little annoyed at being ditched.

Worse, she didn’t get much further than settling on her sofa with the book and a fresh glass of wine before the door-chime sounded. It was with a weary air that she answered, but she stiffened at the sight of Lieutenant Rhade. ‘Adamant.’

‘I’m not intruding, am I?’ The corners of his eyes creased with concern. ‘Planning ops with Doctor Sadek ran late.’

For a flicker of a heartbeat she considered lying, then stepped back to let him in. ‘What’s going on?’

He raised his eyebrows as the doors slid shut behind him. ‘I came to ask that of you.’ His frown deepened at her bemused gaze. ‘Your family is involved in this disaster now. Most likely in some danger.’

‘Oh.’ Thawn wrinkled her nose. She did not make any move to usher him to the seating, to offer him any of her wine. ‘I had this conversation with Elsa. I don’t really know the Nyder branch. That’s not unusual. Honestly, I’m more worried about members of my family being an embarrassment or an outright impediment if they oppose refugee resettlement on Whixby.’

‘And you know that is no reflection on you,’ Rhade said gently.

Unlike Lindgren, he had cut to the heart of it despite her best effort at raising shields. She gave a hollow laugh. ‘Of course it is. Don’t be naive, Adamant. I expect very much that I am about to embarrass myself in the eyes of my family or Starfleet or both. There’ll be guilt by association before this is over, and my best hope is to be the treacherous cousin who ruined paradise.’

Rhade sighed and rubbed his temples. ‘I have no understanding of how people can put their own pleasure first like this.’

‘Either it’s much easier than trying to comprehend the vast suffering of the galaxy, or they’re just as dutiful as you, Adamant. But their duty is to family, and their family is committed to the holding of Whixby, this crown jewel in their influence and standing.’

‘That’s not the same. My duty -’

‘Did you come to empathise or to lecture?’

He winced. ‘That was not my intention. I’m struggling to wrap my head around their reticence. That’s all.’

‘I suppose that’s why I’m on diplomatic duty and you’re on relief work.’

‘We are genetically bonded. That leaves me not bereft of influence in the Twelfth House, surely?’

Thawn hesitated. The arrangement between their families was not a secret. Her cousins would likely know, or could find out if they cared to look. She could think of a dozen reasons off the top of her head why Adamant Rhade, a respected Betazoid officer who could appeal to his countrymen’s sense of duty, might be of use in this endeavour.

But to have its fullest effect, they would have to more publicly acknowledge their commitment than they ever had before.

Yellow alert was not supposed to be welcome. Nor was the deck rumbling underfoot, especially in the middle of a once-in-a-century calamity. But both came, and relief flooded through Thawn when, a heartbeat later, the comms crackled with Commander Valance’s voice.

‘Yellow alert. We’ve picked up the Odysseus’s trail, and there’s a storm in the way.’ 

‘What do we have?’

Valance rose from the central chair as Rourke stormed into the bridge, the deck steady by now with the adjustments after the initial pocket of turbulence. ‘We picked up the warp signature of the USS Odysseus fifteen minutes ago. It’s along our present heading, direct to Whixby. But that course is taking us into one of the ion storms.’

As other senior staff arrived, Rourke sank into the command chair. ‘Can we fly through this one?’

It was Graelin who answered; he’d arrived with Lindgren and Valance was trying to not side-eye them both. ‘I would never recommend it. Even if we succeed, our systems modifications are delicate; any damage and we have to repair, which would delay our arrival at Whixby.’

Valance watched Rourke’s brow furrow, but then the turbolift doors slid open for a frantic Thawn to arrive and take her station. ‘I’m here; I don’t care if I’m supposed to be doing diplomacy -’

‘Very good, Lieutenant,’ said Valance with a hint of relief. Thawn would be essential in marshalling the ship’s resources to get them into the storm – and in opposing Graelin.

Kharth seemed to have realised the same, leaning forward at Tactical. ‘How do we get through the oncoming storm, Thawn?’

‘Get me options,’ Rourke agreed, ‘but Mr Arys, I want you plotting us an alternate route to Whixby.

‘It’s worth pointing out,’ said Lindgren as people worked, ‘that I’m picking up comm signals through this next stretch. If the Odysseus was lost around here, it’s not going to be because the storm or nebula blocked their communications.’

‘This was their direct path to Whixby,’ Graelin pointed out. ‘They might have come through perfectly fine and run into trouble later.’

Kharth bristled. ‘This is our first evidence of how deep they got into the nebula, how close they got to Whixby. We should be following this route directly. It leads to where we’re going; I don’t know why this isn’t deeply convenient for us.’

‘Because we can’t fly this ship apart to follow them,’ Rourke said gently.

‘Okay!’ Thawn’s voice was a pitch higher. ‘Based on our scans of of the ion storm, we should be able to modulate our shields to repel the charged particles.’

‘Send me the data,’ Kharth said at once.

Graelin made a low noise. ‘That’s based on our scans solely of the periphery of this storm front, Lieutenant,’ he said sternly to Thawn. ‘This storm may escalate and the warp signature is only leading us deeper.’

‘Then Thawn will keep scanning and I’ll keep modulating,’ Kharth retorted.

Rourke drew a deep breath, and Valance saw him use the apprehension to puff himself up as if it was strength, not fear. ‘Thawn, Kharth – do it. Arys, take us in.’ Valance leaned to her console to send a quick notification across the ship of potential turbulence, to send a quick notification to Engineering of their intentions, and braced.

This was their first time taking Endeavour into danger, real danger. The first time she’d felt the deck hum underfoot for anything other than powering up, the first time her eyes flickered to her display to check their power levels, their shield strength. Had the circumstances been any less dire, she would have feared more for the ship, for her colleagues, for the stress they faced. Today, she feared only failure.

‘Shields are holding,’ Kharth reported as they rattled onward, undoubtedly smug.

‘Captain.’ Arys sounded tense. ‘The warp signature is leading us right into the heart of this storm.’

Graelin leaned across Science. ‘This ion storm is escalating quickly, Captain. It’s already a level 8 -’

‘Endeavour can tackle a level 8,’ Valance said sharply.

‘And if it gets worse when we’re in the middle of it? These aren’t normal storms.’

Then the deck surged underfoot, and Kharth gave a low, Romulan oath. ‘Shields are at eighty percent. I’m re-modulating – Graelin, get me those scans of the upcoming ionic pockets.’ Even as she said this, the ship rumbled again. On the far side of the bridge, an alert klaxon sounded.

‘Engineering to bridge,’ came Cortez’s tense voice. ‘We having a party up there?’

‘We’ve got the trail of the Odysseus, Commander,’ said Valance before Rourke could answer, and he gave her a taut, worried look. The stakes shouldn’t have mattered to their Chief Engineer, only the ship.

Rourke cleared his throat. ‘We’re trying to weather a storm front. It’s only going to get worse from here. How are our power levels?’

‘Pumping everything to shields? We can do it, but I don’t know for how long.’

‘Sir.’ Graelin’s gaze was stony. ‘Sensors aren’t telling me how far this storm stretches. Lieutenant Arys, how much extra time to Whixby would your alternate route take?’

Arys glanced over his shoulder, eyes guilty. ‘Six hours.’

Graelin looked at Rourke, indignant and triumphant. ‘We’re going to rip the ship apart for the sake of six hours?’

‘It’s not about getting to Whixby,’ Kharth snapped. ‘If we take the other route and the Odysseus isn’t there, this ion storm will wipe this trail and we have nothing.’ She looked to Rourke. ‘Captain, if Engineering gives me the juice and we keep a close eye on the storm ahead, I can compensate for this.’

Rourke’s jaw was tight, and Valance watched as he didn’t look at Kharth or Graelin, but to his own display. In the end, his voice came out like it had been dragged through gravel. ‘Bring us about, Mr Arys.’

Kharth stiffened. ‘Captain, I can do this.’

‘You have your orders, Lieutenant!’

For a split second, it was like they weren’t stood before an ion storm arguing whether to brave it. They were back at Teros, stood before a defenceless Romulan ship arguing whether to destroy it. Valance’s heart had been thudding in her chest, but now it rose to her throat and turned to stone like it would choke her.

Don’t make me enforce this order. Not thisone.

Rourke had twisted in his chair to stare Kharth down, and still the Romulan stood firm at Tactical. The fraction of a second they regarded each other stretched out, and out, and out. But before Rourke could push or Kharth could break, Thawn piped up, apprehensive voice loud in the silence, and the shadows of Teros fell away to return them to the depths of the Paulson Nebula.

‘Looking at the ionisation of the particles of this storm, and the age of the warp signature… this area was clear when the Odysseus came through. The storm only manifested later. They probably got through this area fine.’

The only shift in the face-off between Rourke and Kharth was the Romulan dropping her gaze. But it was enough.

Arys’s voice was wracked with the relief everyone else shared. ‘Bringing us about to the new course. ETA at Whixby: fourteen hundred hours tomorrow approximately.’

Rourke cleared his throat, and the tension eased further as the hull stopped shuddering about them, Endeavour pulling back from the ravages of the storm. ‘Stand down Yellow Alert,’ he said at last.

Valance could have reassumed command as they stood down and officers filtered out, but her head was spinning, and with reluctance she directed Graelin to take the bridge. If they were playing this route safe, focusing on Whixby over the Odysseus, he was the better officer to watch the horizon and keep them out of trouble. She, herself, was spoiling for some.

It also meant that, as the senior officers left the bridge in dribs and drabs, she boarded a turbolift with only Kharth. She could have avoided it, could have lingered a heartbeat longer, but the humming in her veins kept her feet moving.

Kharth visibly tensed as the doors slid shut. ‘Deck Three.’ She did not pull her gaze from the control panel.

Valance drew a deep breath. ‘This was a setback. If Thawn’s right and they were clear of the area before the storm -’

‘I don’t need a pep talk,’ Kharth said flatly. ‘I don’t need you to come here and be the captain’s enforcer. Or the one to handle me.’

‘I want to find the Odysseus as much as you do.’ Frustration bubbled in Valance’s chest. ‘No – I want to find the Odysseus more than you do. Forget just Dav, Commander Aquila -’

‘Old friend, sure, whatever.’ Kharth rounded on her. ‘We’ve all got our motivations. One of us is actually pushing to find them.’

‘The captain wants to find them. Fighting him -’

‘The captain has to answer to higher-ups who care more about Whixby than a hundred officers. You can’t have it both ways, Valance; you can’t be Rourke’s good right hand and an advocate for the Odysseus.’

‘I don’t see anyone giving up the chase. We’ll move around the storm, and we’ll pick it back up. And we’ll find them.’

Kharth gave her a look that became increasingly pitying. ‘There you are. Someone else pouring far more attention and affection into Airex than he’ll ever reciprocate. He left us, you know.’

Valance’s back tensed. ‘I don’t really know or care about your messed-up relationship. But I’ve known Davir Airex for three years -’

‘Dav might have been your friend. The one with the sense of humour, the one who cared about people and things? The one who shines through sometimes? But he’s not the one in the driving seat.’ Kharth shook her head. ‘That parasite doesn’t give a damn about you or anyone.’

Valance clicked her tongue. ‘You’re pathetic, Kharth, you know that?’

‘I’m –’

‘I’m here for Cassia, someone I’ve known for twenty years. And I’m here for Davir Airex, who was always my friend. And I’m maintaining control. You? You’re hanging on by a thread for someone who left you years ago, and either you don’t believe what you’re saying but you’re incapable of admitting you still care for him, or, worse, you do believe he’s gone forever and you’re trying to save him anyway.’

The turbolift slid to a halt and the doors opened, the only shift in their surroundings as the two women stared each other down. Valance had height and build on Kharth, but she could feel the anger roiling off the younger woman, and the part of her still spoiling for a fight coiled with delighted anticipation.

Do it. Try something. Give me the excuse.

It was that thought, bitter and furious, that jerked Valance from the moment. Kharth stayed rooted to the deck, but Valance just gave a disgusted shake of the head and stalked into the corridor.

Her quarters were bigger aboard the new Endeavour; a separate bedroom, a bigger bathroom. It was in there she ended up, lights dimmed, sizzling anger soothed a micron by the cool tiles. Valance braced against the sink, ran some cold water, splashed it on her face, and regarded her murky reflection.

‘Damn it,’ she muttered.

She had the key codes to get into Cortez’s quarters, but fading anger warped to fizzing apprehension, so she hit the door-chime instead and was greeted by her very confused partner.

‘What happened up there?’ said Cortez, hand on her back the moment she’d ushered her in.

‘We had to turn back from the storm. Kharth didn’t like it. I didn’t like it.’

‘We’re going to find them -’

‘Please don’t say that,’ Valance sighed, weary rather than angry. ‘We have no way of knowing how this will end.’

Cortez hesitated. ‘Okay. Then if you can’t rely on hope, rely on trust. We have a great crew, we’ve been through a lot, we’ve overcome a lot.’ She moved to grab her hands, gaze intent. ‘Trust the captain to make the right decisions, trust our bridge crew to pick up the leads and follow them. Trust me to keep this ship going as far as we need.’

‘What if it’s not about us? They could be dead already.’ But Valance sagged, resting her forehead against hers. ‘I just tore a strip of Kharth for acting out over someone she’d deny giving a damn about. But Airex didn’t exactly treat me with respect when he left. All those years of friendship, and he walked out like it was nothing.’

‘Relationships are about more than when we’re at our worst,’ Cortez said gently. Then she hesitated. ‘And this isn’t just about Airex.’

Valance opened her eyes at that. ‘Cassia and I… we’ve not been a couple or anything like that for a long time.’

Cortez made a face. ‘Oh, hell no, I’m not stirring this pot by getting jealous like we’re second-year cadets.’ But she softened. ‘I know you’re old friends. I don’t know much more than that.’

Valance sighed. ‘We were roommates, we were friends, we were rivals. I grew up on a world where I was the only half-Klingon, always having to keep my temper or my strength in check, and worse, I was a foot smarter than the kids in my class.’ She spoke without arrogance; that was what it took to make it to Starfleet Academy. ‘Or I was on Qo’noS, and I didn’t belong there, either. It’s not just that the Academy was the first place I felt I could belong, that all these… disparate parts of me could make something whole. Cassia was my first equal, the first person who could challenge me – beat me – without making it a challenge to my existence, my right to belong.’ The corner of her lip curled sadly. ‘We’ve got a bet, did you know? First one to make captain.’

‘What do you win?’

‘Bragging rights for all eternity. Then we’ll come up with another contest.’ Valance shook her head. ‘We’ve not lived together for years. We’ve sometimes gone years without seeing each other. I’ve barely spoken to her since the Azure Nebula. But she’s…’ She drew a shuddering breath. ‘I’m not sure how to get by if I don’t know she’s out there. I can’t explain it, it’s like her existence keeps me balanced, keeps me driven. This other half of me. She was the most important person in my life for a long time, and that’s… a lot.’

‘It is.’ Cortez lifted her hands to kiss her knuckles gently. ‘Thanks for talking to me about it. I know you prefer to not.’

Valance shifted her weight. ‘I don’t prefer to not. I’m not good at it, and it doesn’t occur to me. Greg reminds me sometimes that it takes practice to put feelings into words. That it’s a skill to develop the vocabulary.’

‘I suppose all those sessions are showing their worth.’

Valance made a face. ‘That and I just tore strips off Kharth for kidding herself about her feelings. And I hate it when Kharth makes me a hypocrite.’

‘Being more emotionally accessible than Saeihr is a low bar,’ Cortez drawled. ‘But I, for one, am thrilled that you’ve not tripped over it. It’s a near thing sometimes.’

Rourke stood as Hale arrived on the bridge, extending a hand to the seat to his left. ‘First Secretary, thank you for joining us. Thought you should have a front row seat when we arrive.’

She gave a polite nod as she sat. ‘Best if I jump in only if needed. Perhaps the Nyders will take my presence as a sign of their importance and be flattered. But they might think my being here is the Federation trying to strong-arm them.’

‘We’ll play it by ear,’ he agreed, and took the command chair just as Arys called out their impending arrival at the system. Formally it still had a numbered designation, with only the fourth planet called Whixby, but the star had long colloquially shared the name.

‘Sensors aren’t giving me the clearest picture, but initial scans suggest the area’s clear of ion storms or sign of subspace rifts,’ Graelin confirmed.

‘Comms in the immediate area should be clear,’ said Lindgren, ‘but with the nearby storms and the interference from the nebula, if anyone sent a distress call I doubt it will have gone far.’

‘Dropping us out of warp,’ said Arys.

Rourke tried to not look at Valance and gripped his armrests tight as Endeavour lurched under him. Her flight was normally smooth as silk, the big explorer fast and sleek, but even her inertial dampers were not enough to stop the rumble through her belly as they slid back to impulse in a nebula, close to the planet Whixby.

It raced up to fill the viewscreen, one of the many shining marbles of the Paulson Nebula sent scattering in the Century Storm’s callous game. Gleaming blues of the oceans and whites of the clouds mastered the atmosphere, with only the hint of greens and browns of surface islands brushing the surface like frosting. From this distance, it looked peaceful, safe.

Rourke stood and drew a deep breath. ‘Lieutenant Kharth, report.’ They had to take this one step at a time.

Kharth’s voice came out flat. ‘Civilian vessels, mostly transport vessels and pleasure yachts, in orbit of Whixby. I’m not picking up any other ship in the system, which I should, even through this interference.’

‘Okay,’ said Rourke in a low voice. ‘Keep up your scans, Lieutenant. Commander Graelin, confirm again no more signs of nearby phenomena?’

‘Confirmed clear,’ said Graelin, a little imperious at repeating himself. ‘But there are traces of ionised particles; a storm has been here, perhaps four days ago.’ Before Rourke could ask more, he’d pressed on, dictating the topic. ‘It definitely hit Whixby. I’m detecting surface storms still dissipating with high levels of ionisation. It looks like some of the inhabited islands were in its path.’

Thawn glanced over her shoulder, and Rourke saw on her console she’d been double-checking Graelin’s work. ‘Sanditor is the capital island; it looks clear. Impact will have been on some of the smaller resort islands which… well, fewer people, fewer defences.’

Rourke nodded and looked at Lindgren. ‘Do they have comms?’

‘They do, and they’re very keen to talk,’ said Lindgren in that light voice he knew so well. She knew him, knew he’d want information first, and knew how to politely keep people waiting. ‘I have Administrator Nyder on the line.’

‘On screen.’

He hadn’t been sure what to expect of the possibly combative administrator of a resort world that was the crown jewel in the social currency of a Betazoid noble house. Perhaps more old-fashioned dignity. But the view switched from the peaceful blues of Whixby to a scene of stark white opulence. The angle on the office wasn’t only primed to show the sweeping lines of a marble-white building in the most ostentatious recreation of traditional Betazoid architecture Rourke had ever seen off-world, but the staggering view through open windows, white curtains drifting gently in the breeze. Beyond lay an island paradise, more white buildings tumbling down a gentle slope to where peerless blue skies met rippling blue seas.

Administrator Nyder herself lounged not at a desk, but on a white Chesterfield sofa, wrapped in a robe that was dignified but still suggested she’d come straight from the sun-soaked idyll behind her. With dark hair stacked high and loose locks trailing down to frame pleasant, rounded features, he didn’t think she was much, if any, older than him. ‘The USS Endeavour; what an unexpected delight. My name is Falyn Nyder. I assume you’re here to fret about current affairs, rather than sweet-talk me into some shore leave?’

Rourke couldn’t help but cast a glance at Thawn, whose expression remained for once inscrutable. ‘Administrator Nyder, I’m Captain Rourke. As you can imagine, we’re here in response to the situation with the Century Storm. We’ve detected some of your settlements have been impacted?’

Falyn Nyder gave a sigh, but he was relieved to see the sincerity in her frown. ‘We were lucky; the hurricane’s intensity didn’t last and it only struck three of the peripheral islands of our resort. It could have been much worse.’

‘Casualties? Damage?’ Rourke asked, her casual opulence pushing him to sound rougher out of his perverse habit.

‘Approximately fifty thousand people live and work on those islands. We’re still ascertaining losses, but maybe two hundred. Of course, homes have been damaged, power lines cut… we’re doing what we can. Is this the part Starfleet offers its bold help?’ Her eyebrows raised.

Rourke cast a glance at Hale. She sounds guarded. But the diplomat also kept her gaze inscrutable, and Rourke returned his attention to the viewscreen. ‘Administrator -’

‘Oh, please, Captain. Falyn is fine.’

He took a slow breath. ‘Falyn. Endeavour would indeed like to offer assistance. If you transmit what information you have to us, we can have a relief team heading to those islands within the hour to provide medical and rebuilding support. We’d also like to offer you help modifying and improving your weather control matrix, to protect against future -’

‘That’s all very kind, Captain,’ said Falyn, sobering. ‘And you’ve been very good to ask about us first. But before we dive into details, I must be the bearer of bad news.’

Rourke’s heart pinched. ‘We’re looking for the USS Odysseus. Have you seen her?’

Falyn’s expression fell. ‘The Odysseus arrived five days ago. They conducted scans and their Commanders Aquila and Airex wanted to talk with us about Whixby perhaps offering sanctuary to the displaced of other worlds, which is of course out of the question now considering our own plight. But then one of those… rifts… opened, or at least became detectable, in the system. An ion storm manifested almost at once, and within the hour the hurricane on the surface of the planet had formed.’ She bit her lip. ‘If I’m honest, we don’t really know what happened. The Odysseus headed for the rift, Commander Aquila said they would try to seal it with the expectation it would stop the storm. We lost contact with them, but all we can tell from our scans is… Captain, it looks like the Odysseus flew into the rift to close it.’

Rourke drew a deep breath. ‘Into?’ That absolutely was not anywhere in any of the measures recommended by Starfleet R&D.

Falyn gave a hapless shrug. ‘By our scans, their signal overlapped directly with the rift. Then the rift closed, the storms dissipated in the system and stopped getting worse on the surface – the hurricane was in sore danger of expanding and consuming all of our islands – and then the Odysseus was gone. I’m so terribly sorry.’

Rourke looked down a moment, and did not dare glance to his right at Valance or over his shoulder at Kharth. Emotion warred with reason, both feeding him contradictions; was it hope or logic that told him the Odysseus was only gone once he saw for himself? Was it fear or rationality that pointed out this was perhaps all they’d ever learn, and the ship was truly lost?

Now it was Hale who stood. She barely brushed her arm against his as she stepped before the viewscreen. It was a faint, subtle touch, but still it brought him reeling back into the present, anchored him to the now. ‘Thank you for telling us,’ she said softly. ‘We’d appreciate all information and sensor records you have. And we’ll of course still have those relief teams on the surface as soon as possible.’

But Falyn’s eyes had grown apprehensive at the sight of an unknown civilian entering the conversation. ‘Thank you, Ms…?’

‘First Secretary Sophia Hale of the Diplomatic Service. I’m pleased to see that through the Odysseus’s brave efforts, the hurricane only struck, as you say, the periphery of your settled islands. That’s almost three hundred kilometres away from Sanditor itself. With the rest of your resort intact, and with Endeavour’s help for those of Whixby in need, I was hoping to discuss with you the possibility of extending Whixby’s safety to others in peril in the Paulson Nebula.’

Now Falyn frowned. ‘We have enough trouble here, Ms Hale.’

‘Trouble that Endeavour is more than equipped to correct. Just as Endeavour is equipped to prepare and expand your shelters and supplies for any refugees coming in, and enhance your shielding and protection so Whixby can be not only the pleasure haven, but the safe haven for your neighbours.’

‘So here we are,’ said Falyn in a light voice. ‘The quid pro quo.’

It was Thawn who stood at this, though Rourke realised she’d given Hale an apprehensive look first. ‘Coz, please be reasonable. We’re Starfleet, of course we’ll help no matter what.’

Falyn tilted her head. ‘Rosara, is that you? Oh, you sneaky man, Captain, bringing my cousin along for this little gambit.’

Being winked at coquettishly five seconds after learning of the likely death of a hundred good officers did not improve Rourke’s mood. ‘Lieutenant Thawn is my Chief of Operations and a valued officer. We’re not here because you’re related.’

‘It’s not a quid pro quo,’ Thawn insisted to Falyn. ‘But if we’re going to help you anyway, if we’ll send people down to those islands that have been hit, can you at least hear us out?’

Falyn looked to one side, impatient. Then she sighed. ‘You can visit. It’d be lovely to see you, Rosara, of course, and I suppose Ms Hale is welcome to come sing songs of Federation assistance. But I don’t want more than you two and some plus ones, and you can enjoy Sanditor, because everyone should enjoy Sanditor. But I’m terribly busy; we still have so many people here eager for the festival. I can’t promise you my time.’

Rourke made a face. ‘You’re still doing the bloody fest-’

‘Thank you, Administrator,’ said Hale in a rush. ‘Your offer of hospitality is most appreciated. I’m sure we can come to an understanding of what’s best for Whixby. We’ll dispatch those aid teams soon enough.’

‘You’ll need shuttles,’ Falyn sighed. ‘Transporters are bad enough in the nebula anyway even without the storm. I’ll forward you all the details, Endeavour. Whixby out.’

The squeak of the viewscreen going dead echoed into the bridge’s ensuing silence. Rourke stared at the carpet for a moment, before drawing a deep, rejuvenating breath. This situation needed managing. Most of all, this situation needed pressing forward.

Then Kharth leaned over the tactical arch to glower at Hale. ‘The crew of the Odysseus are barely cold in space and you’re using their sacrifice for politics?’

Hale straightened, frowning. ‘Lieutenant, I’m terribly sorry -’

‘You’re not; we don’t even know what happened to them and they’ve become a coin to -’

Rourke hadn’t cut in right away because the first feeling bursting in his chest had been anger. But anger wouldn’t help, and when he interrupted Kharth his voice was low, soft. ‘Saeihr. That’s enough.’

For a moment he thought she might fight him – then she sagged, the wind dragged from her sails when she met softness and not something else to push against, and her head merely dropped to her station.

He swallowed and looked at Valance. She stood stock-still, staring at the viewscreen, and for the moment he left her there and tapped his combadge. ‘Bridge to Doctor Sadek. We should be getting information imminently about three islands, combined population approximately fifty thousand, hit by a hurricane. Prep whatever relief operations you need.’

‘Understood. We can handle that,’ came Sadek’s calm voice.

Now he looked at Valance. ‘Commander, direct Cortez and Adupon to begin assessment of modifications and improvements to Whixby’s weather control matrix and other atmospheric defences.’ It was minor work, but it would give her something to do in the coming minutes. When she nodded and turned away, he looked to Hale and Thawn. ‘Alright. Bringing Nyder on-side. What do you need?’

The two women exchanged looks, and Hale shrugged. ‘We have a foot in the door. I’ll definitely need Lieutenant Thawn; Nyder’s obviously more receptive to family and wary of me. I think this is going to be negotiation through a lot of back channels rather than sitting her down at a table where she can fight me.’

‘I sense she isn’t using the hurricane as an excuse,’ Thawn said quietly. ‘She’s legitimately worried about her world being able to take on more burdens. Maybe it’ll get better once we relieve some of the pressure and show we really are here to do good?’

‘Maybe,’ Rourke rumbled, pessimistic. ‘If she’s going to play threshold guardian of who comes down to Sanditor, and we’re on shuttles instead of transporters, we’re going to have to pick your support carefully. She said plus ones; who’s your fourth after Cy?’ Brigan was, he assumed, the natural aide to Hale.

Thawn bit her lip. ‘I know you wanted Lieutenant Rhade to assist Doctor Sadek, but I think I could use him down there. He’s betrothed to a member of the Twelfth House, that makes him close to family. I think he can talk to people, or be with me, without it feeling like I’m a Federation meddler.’

Hale nodded. ‘I would concur.’

Then Graelin walked around from behind the science station and said, with a rather puffed up air, ‘May I propose an alternative to Mr Brigan? I’m not sure what support he offers you down there that he can’t give from up here, if we expect Nyder to be unreceptive to formal diplomatic approaches.’

If you suggest Elsa, thought Rourke bitterly, trying to get your girlfriend choice assignments, I swear. ‘Go on,’ he rumbled, trying to not glare.

Instead Graelin gave a smile that wouldn’t melt butter and said, ‘Ensign Beckett.’ At their blank looks he just looked more smug. ‘He’s the son of an admiral, the son of one of the admirals coordinating this entire campaign. If you won’t make progress with formal power, then why not send someone all of the influential people of Whixby would be delighted to cosy up to?’

Thawn’s lip curled. ‘He’s an archaeologist.’

‘He’s also an anthropologist, a science officer, a qualified bridge officer, and a graduate of Starfleet Academy,’ said Graelin in an airy, superior voice. ‘Do you really think having an admiral’s son with you won’t open doors, or at least stop them from slamming shut?’

Thawn hesitated, with even Hale reserving comment before the person closest to this situation gave her opinion. Then she sighed and looked at Hale, lips thin. ‘Yes. Fine. I think Falyn would love to dote on an admiral’s son. She’s probably also juggling a dozen puffed-up Betazoid aristocrats who’d love to do the same.’ She swallowed, anxious. ‘For the record, I hate that we’re thinking like this under the current situation.’

Offering Nate as red meat to a bunch of spoilt aristos while the crew of the Odysseus are, like Kharth said, barely cold. Rourke gave her a nod. ‘We’ll do what it takes to get Whixby on-side. If you’re to look important here, take the captain’s yacht. I’ll tell Sadek I’m pulling Rhade from the relief team.’ That was a blow; Rhade would have done an excellent job liaising with locals and shoring up the organisation of the operation. He was just going to have to find such people elsewhere.

‘Very good,’ said a smug Graelin. I’ll prepare -’

‘You’ll start running scans,’ Rourke said bluntly. ‘And comparing them to whatever data we get from Whixby about the storm and the rift. We start with looking for debris.’ He returned to the command chair, back straight. ‘Lieutenant Lindgren, contact captains of those civilian ships in orbit. Get their sensor logs, too. While everyone on the surface is worrying about Whixby and refugees, we’re going to get to the bottom of what happened to the Odysseus. At the very least, their loved ones are going to get a complete story.’

He hesitated, aware of the eyes on him, the tension rippling through the bridge with those whom people were decidedly not looking at. ‘This might be difficult. This might be grim. But we’re not idle here. We don’t have the complete picture, and we can’t make any sense of this until we have it.’ At last he looked at Valance, stock-still again after dispatching engineering teams, her gaze stony; at Kharth, her face sunken, retreating into herself before his very eyes. He considered dismissing them, but knew all they’d do was go somewhere to watch the data as it scrolled in. At least here he could keep an eye on them.

Rourke drew a deep breath, and hoped he wasn’t simply ordering an autopsy report. ‘Let’s get to work.’

As Chief Koya’s deck gang swarmed over the captain’s yacht Prydwen, Thawn set down her bag and lifted her PADD. Lieutenant Athaka’s face hovered above it, visibly anxious through the comms.

‘No,’ Thawn said flatly. ‘You can’t go down as well. The engineers can handle the field work. Adupon’s going with the relief team, and he’s got Chief Lann and the others.’

‘Lieutenant Adupon’s helping with the damage to the Azure Chain, and that’s Chief Lann’s area, too,’ came Athaka’s fretful response. ‘Someone has to take point with the weather control matrix.’

‘Forrester can do it. Doctor Sadek’s team will have Chief Bekk to help them with logistics. Your place is on the ship.’ If she couldn’t be on the bridge, if she had to be torn away for politics and diplomacy, she would not stand to have a third-string operations officer taking care of Endeavour.

Athaka winced. ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

‘I’ll be a comm call away if you need anything -’

‘So I guess,’ interrupted Beckett’s drawl as he passed her and hoisted up her bag without breaking stride, ‘I’ll get your luggage aboard?’

She hesitated, nose wrinkling, until Rhade appeared at the Prydwen’s open hatch and extended a hand towards Beckett. ‘I’ve got it, Ensign. No trouble.’

Thawn watched as Beckett deflated from the chivalrous pinprick against his jibe, and with a grimace she returned her gaze to Athaka. ‘I’d best go. Again. Comm me if you need something.’

‘You’ll do great down there,’ Athaka said earnestly. ‘Good luck, Lieutenant.’

When his face disappeared, she could see Beckett’s disapproving expression. ‘He doesn’t deal well with separation anxiety, huh?’

She had to smother any amusement at that. Athaka’s painful eagerness to please was sometimes a bit much. ‘He’s just being fastidious about his work, which he does well,’ she said, advancing haughtily on the Prydwen. ‘Whereas you get to tag along as our mascot just for being an admiral’s son.’

Again he deflated, but now she was before the ship’s hatch, looking up at Rhade. ‘Are we ready to get underway?’

‘Soon.’ Now his hand was extended to help her up, and she hesitated before accepting. She didn’t need the assistance, but it would have felt pointed to refuse. ‘Once Ms Hale is here and Chief Koya’s done, I’ll begin pre-flight.’

‘Pilot, bodyguard, scion of a noble bloodline, all-round Starfleet hero,’ Beckett mused airily as he ascended the ramp after them. ‘Is there anything you don’t do, Lieutenant?’

Rhade gave him an uncomfortable look. After a beat, he said, ‘I wouldn’t presume to compete with the likes of Lieutenant Arys, Ensign Harkon, or Commander Valance. But I can take the Prydwen to the surface safely.’

‘I’ll hold you to that,’ said Beckett, tossing his own luggage in the back and sauntering onward to doubtless claim a good seat in the cockpit.

Rhade shifted his weight as Beckett passed, leaving them alone for a moment. ‘Thank you,’ he said to Thawn.

She made a face. ‘If you dragged me away from proper work that can help people and into petty family politics, I wouldn’t thank you.’

‘I’m sure Doctor Sadek doesn’t need my help, and this is important. But that’s not what I meant.’ The corners of his eyes creased. ‘Thank you for involving me in family politics. It’s important. And it’s important for us to be able to rely on each other in situations like this.’

While fate had played Thawn some cruel hands, it continued to tease her along with specks of luck here and there, as that was the moment Sophia Hale ascended the ramp and provided a perfect interruption. ‘Lieutenants. Are we fit to depart?’

‘Ma’am.’ Rhade inclined his head, snapping back to officiousness. ‘I’ll perform pre-flight checks and get us underway.’ He glanced to Thawn. ‘Beckett can co-pilot.’

‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Thawn sighed, and turned to Hale as he left and the hatch shut behind her. ‘Ma’am, I’m not sure why you gave in to Commander Graelin’s blatant machinations.’

Hale quirked an eyebrow one iota. ‘You might have to be more specific.’

‘Ensign Beckett – why are we bringing him? Do we think everyone’s going to be impressed enough with an admiral’s son?’

‘I think that if the leaders of Whixby don’t want to receive me formally, I will use any and every weapon at my disposal with soft power. If even one dignitary or leader wants to speak to Nathaniel Beckett because he is the son of Alexander Beckett, that is an opportunity. Besides.’ Hale tilted her head. ‘I thought he played an essential role in placating the Portal on Ephrath?’

‘I – he played a role – but Commander Cortez -’

The moment Thawn started to sputter, Hale lost interest, giving her a gentle pat on the shoulder as she passed.

The Prydwen was underway soon after, the four seated in the cockpit and able to watch through the canopy as the shining jewel of Whixby grew larger. The captain’s yacht rumbled as they entered the atmosphere, more than it should have, but Beckett tapped the controls and compensated before Thawn could tell him to from her rear seat.

‘I hope everyone packed their bathing suits,’ the ensign pressed on in a low voice, like he was the co-pilot of a tourist transport about to set down. ‘Because it is a glorious twenty-nine degrees in the Sanditor resort, with low levels of humidity and a reportedly gentle breeze about the main docks.’ The deck rumbled as they pushed deeper into the atmosphere, nothing but peerless blue beneath, hardly a cloud in sight.

‘Oh good,’ Thawn muttered. ‘I was thinking of picking up some rays.’

‘Mr Beckett has a point,’ said Hale. ‘We may have to share some of the locals’ leisure activities if we want to spend time with them. If they won’t join me in a conference room, I’ll have to join them on a tennis court.’

‘The hardship!’ Beckett mock-lamented from up front.

Thawn’s jaw tightened. ‘Hundreds of people are dead along the Azure Chain. Thousands more are still in need of shelter, power, food. The whole world needs Endeavour to modify the weather control matrix in case another storm arrives. We can’t play tennis.’

‘Then if you don’t have tennis on Betazed, I’ll adapt,’ Hale said breezily.

‘Ma’am -’

‘Two hundred and fourteen people are dead along the Azure Chain.’ Hale did not miss a beat. ‘Eighty-seven from Rexx, seventy-four from Torstoff, and fifty-three from Aijenos. Most of the people who live there are permanent residents, the staff for the resorts and their families. Many houses have been destroyed, those families left without shelter or anywhere else to go. I am not ignorant of the magnitude of this horror.’ She looked to the front. ‘Lieutenant Rhade, could you route us over the Azure Chain at a height we’ll see something – at your discretion, of course.’

‘Ma’am.’ There was the faintest swerve of the Prydwen as he complied.

Thawn felt heat rise to her cheeks. ‘I’m not suggesting you didn’t know that.’

‘We’re going to talk to people who don’t want to listen, while your colleagues do the work on the Azure Chain,’ Hale said patiently. ‘That’s difficult. But what’s important is that we make things better for the people of the Paulson Nebula, and that means, when it comes to the leaders of Whixby, we play to win. If I have to negotiate with them over a night of karaoke, so long as they give us a refugee shelter at the end of it, I won’t feel guilty.’

‘You shouldn’t,’ Beckett chirped. ‘You should feel guilty for the karaoke.’

‘I’m an excellent singer,’ Hale retorted amiably.

Rhade straightened at the pilot’s seat. ‘Here we are.’

Even from this altitude, when Rhade tilted the Prydwen to adjust the angle of the cockpit canopy, they could see the Azure Chain below. A stretch of small islands sweeping west, on the ones further away Thawn could see the dots of white and metal that were the resort settlements. But the three clumped furthest east, some way from the next closest isle, were in visible distress even from up here.

Craft hovered in the air above them, but to Thawn’s trained eye there were not enough, and they were not large enough, to provide the necessary support. Not with the obvious flooding, the visible damage to the buildings, and the size of the tarpaulin interim relief shelters across the three islands.

They weren’t in sight for long, with nothing more than a snapshot before Rhade straightened the Prydwen. ‘We’ll be at Sanditor in approximately fifteen minutes,’ he said, voice low.

In the silence that followed, eventually Beckett said, ‘Perhaps I’d feel a little guilty about the karaoke.’

‘Guilt doesn’t help us,’ said Hale. ‘Whatever you’re feeling, use it to fuel you. Use it to win.’

As a perfectionist, Thawn was perfectly accustomed to using guilt to motivate herself, but it didn’t feel like the time to point that out.

Sanditor loomed in the distance bigger than any islands of the Azure Chain, just shy of three hundred kilometres away. They couldn’t see the stricken isles from here, and most pleasure yachts wouldn’t match the Prydwen for speed, wouldn’t be used to hop along the chain on whatever activities the resorts of Whixby offered. While they had travelled from disaster to paradise in less than the time it might take to enjoy a cup of coffee, Thawn looked at Sanditor and knew the plight of others lay far, far from here.

There were plenty of distractions. Even the seas looked more dazzlingly blue around Sanditor, lapping at golden sands. Some of the structures along the Azure Chain had looked a little rough or a little stark and modern, but on Sanditor all she could see as the Prydwen slowed and descended were the sweeping lines, tall columns, and shining white of marble buildings. For all of Whixby’s youth and sun and distance from the homeworld, it had been built as a monument to the most aristocratic opulence of Betazed. Thawn hadn’t realised how much that would sicken her until it she was before it.

Rhade set the Prydwen down on a landing pad near one of the largest manorial buildings, which Beckett cheerfully identified for them as the Seashine, the most opulent hotel of Whixby and to where Falyn Nyder had directed them. Beckett was first on his feet as they landed, Rhade running through the post-flight checks, and he patted his uniform jacket. ‘Hope everyone remembered their sunglasses. And that I can get out of these layers soon.’

‘We’re doing decorum first, Beckett. Maybe you can behave yourself for five minutes,’ Thawn chided, but she waited to follow Hale out of the yacht and down the descending ramp into the blinding sunshine of Whixby. Beckett had been right, she would never admit. She did need sunglasses.

Falyn Nyder stood with an aide to receive them on the wide open landing pad, all of the Seashine’s opulence and Sanditor’s beauty cascading behind her. The remaining waft of the down-powering engines set her robe flapping, but even that made her only look more elegant. Even though Hale was leading, it was straight to Thawn she walked, grasping her hands and kissing her on the cheek. ‘Rosara.’

They had not met in some ten years, and Thawn didn’t remember the occasion particularly well, but she let the greeting wash over her. ‘Falyn. Thank you for receiving us.’ Only gently, cautiously, did she extend her thoughts to Falyn’s mind. First Secretary Hale has seniority here.

Falyn Nyder’s smile could not have been more false as she turned. ‘Ms Hale, of course you are welcome. I hope you enjoy your time on Whixby. The least we can offer one of your standing is the hospitality of the Seashine, with Starfleet and the Federation giving such aid to those in need on the Azure Chain. My Director of Operations will be delighted by the help.’

And in Thawn’s mind, Falyn sent the much colder words, If she thinks she can ask more of us, she’s come here for nothing.

Frustration coiled in Thawn’s gut. ‘I would hope everyone’s delighted by the help,’ she said before she could stop herself.

Whether Hale could detect the insincerity or was simply aware of the tension between the Betazoid women, she gave her own, much more convincing smile. ‘Thank you, Administrator Nyder. I’m very grateful for your offer, and I look forward to seeing even more of the beauties of Whixby.’ She gestured to one side. ‘May I introduce Ensign Nathaniel Beckett?’

Falyn’s eyes landed on Beckett, who gave a more casual wave. ‘Neat place,’ he said, and as her brow creased with the hint of uncertainty, of suspicion of who he was, he pressed on with a thoroughly transparent, ‘Dad’s always saying it’s a crown jewel of the Mellstoxx Sector whenever we talk shop. Have you met my father, the Director of Fourth Fleet Intelligence?’

Even though she was dealing with a fellow telepath who would likely pick up on her surface emotions, Thawn rolled her eyes as Falyn swept in to give Beckett a delighted greeting not much less enthusiastic than the one she herself had received.

Then the silhouette of the last of their party appeared at the top of the ramp, and frustration faded for apprehension. ‘And this,’ said Thawn after swallowing, ‘is Lieutenant Adamant Rhade. Of the Seventh House. My betrothed.’

Rhade descended and swept to a bow before Falyn that took her hand. He did not kiss her knuckles, merely paused with his lips an inch above, before he let her go and straightened, blond hair shining bright in the glorious Whixby sun. ‘Madame Falyn. It is an honour to meet such an esteemed member of the Twelfth House.’

Falyn’s eyebrows reached her hairline. ‘My. Isn’t Auntie smart, Rosara?’ Then she turned on her heel, gesturing airily for them to follow, her aide in step. ‘Rooms have been arranged for you all, of course. I’m sorry that I have a board meeting this afternoon, so I can’t show you around, but you are guests of the Whixby Board of Tourism, so you’re welcome to enjoy the pleasures of Sanditor. Leisure vessels to the Azure Chain have been suspended until the crisis there is resolved, but please, do not let the trouble of three hundred kilometres away trouble you. Sanditor and its surroundings remain a paradise for your pleasure.’

Despite herself, Thawn caught Beckett’s eye as they followed, and she didn’t need to be a telepath to read his expression. Are you kidding me?

It was Rhade who spoke up, squinting at the sights before them. ‘People on the Azure Chain need power and shelter, and you’ve still got spare luxury hotel rooms?’

Falyn laughed, but Thawn thought she heard the strain. ‘I don’t own the Seashine, dear Adamant. The proprietors are board members and they were happy to host a delegation from the Endeavour as guests. But I can hardly force them, at the start of festival season, to turn everything upside-down, can I? Nobody on the Azure Chain is starving.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Rhade calmly, ‘that starvation was the only benchmark of suffering.’

‘If you can convince the Lillarties to extend their hospitality to the residents of the Azure Chain, then they can be all our guests,’ Falyn said with a dose more tension. ‘I have directed what resources the Board of Tourism possesses to their assistance. With Endeavour’s help, Sanditor’s rooms will hardly be needed, anyway.’

Beckett slid in beside Thawn as they entered the Seashine through expansive double doors into a cool lobby. At this quiet time of the afternoon, their footsteps echoed against the patterned tiles in bright, welcoming colours. ‘I get it,’ he mumbled. ‘She’s the administrator, she only has so much power, and nobody here wants to give up their slice of paradise.’

Thawn suspected he’d hit the nail on the head, but then Falyn turned to them triumphantly as her aide collected three keycards from the front desk. ‘Nothing but the best for our Starfleet saviours,’ she cooed. ‘Comfortable rooms for Ms Hale and Ensign Beckett, and one of Seashine’s finest suites for Rosara and Adamant, compliments of Madam Lillarties, ever generous friends of the Twelfth House.’

The politics of Whixby fled Thawn’s mind just as the heat rose to her cheeks, and she tried to ignore Beckett’s impish smile of delight. Thankfully, Hale and Rhade were all gratitude and manners, unwittingly shielding her embarrassment and surprise.

Of course, she thought, and tried to not look at the smirking Beckett. I should have seen that coming.

Lieutenant Arys turned from the helm controls. ‘The last shuttle of the Relief Op is underway, sir.’

‘I’ve dropped a comms buoy into orbit, the most powerful we have,’ Lindgren added. ‘If we start roaming the system, Whixby should be able to relay a signal through it and still contact us.’

Rourke nodded. ‘Good thinking, Lieutenant. Patch me through to the Merlin.’ The viewscreen shifted to show the runabout’s cockpit, Sadek buckled in next to Ensign Harkon and Lieutenant Adupon. ‘If you forgot to pack anything, Aisha, now’s the time for me to toss it out an airlock at you.’

‘Please.’ Sadek rolled her eyes. ‘You’re the forgetful one. I still remember shore leave to Brendtan Thakos –’

‘Okay,’ Rourke said hurriedly. ‘You know the drill planetside. Make sure both the relief teams and the weather control teams keep liaising with First Secretary Hale; if the leaders of Whixby are aware of the good we’re doing, it might make the diplomatic team’s job easier.’

‘Or I could show up to a fancy party straight from a fourteen-hour shift in a trauma centre and see how they like it,’ Sadek drawled.

‘And this is why you’re not on the diplomatic team.’

‘Sure. But you’re still teaching me how to suck eggs, Matt.’

Rourke sighed, back loosening at Sadek’s casual confidence. He knew she could do this, could run operations like this in her sleep, would probably be able to pull out of her sleeve a whole additional rescue mission if another island tried to sink under the sea. But the magnitude of Whixby left this situation unorthodox. ‘We’re beginning the hunt for the Odysseus and that’ll likely take us out of orbit, sensor reach being limited as it is. You should be able to comm us, but we might be slow to respond or get here if you need us.’

‘You can cut the umbilical cord. It’s day one and I have everything I need.’ But Sadek’s gaze grew more serious. ‘Go find our people.’

‘I will, Merlin. Endeavour out.’ Rourke sighed as the viewscreen shifted to show Whixby’s orbit, the small fleet of auxiliary craft of Sadek’s team descending like gnats towards the blue seas. Transporters were unreliable in the Paulson Nebula at the best of times, and for the first time he felt the breathing space of his new ship’s considerably more extensive selection of shuttles and runabouts to dispatch people and material.

Then he turned to Graelin, and considered the second challenge before him. ‘How are our scans coming along?’

Graelin arched an eyebrow, not looking up from Science. ‘I have the Black Knights sweeping the periphery of the system and any blind spots our sensors are having trouble penetrating, which means our map is a little cobbled-together. But Lieutenant Lindgren has done an excellent job acquiring the sensor records from the shuttles that were here when the Odysseus went missing. Even if they’re not very precise during a phenomenon noted for blinding us.’ Now he raised his gaze. ‘But yes, I’ve narrowed down the region where the rift will have appeared.’

Rourke nodded. ‘Then let’s take a look. Plot a course, Mr Arys, and take us closer. Slowly. I want us checking every damn inch if we’re half-blind.’

‘I would think,’ Graelin said delicately, ‘that if the Odysseus were drifting out there, I would have detected it.’

‘One step at a time, Commander,’ came Valance’s colder reply.

On the one hand, Rourke liked that someone else was curt to Graelin so he didn’t have to be. But the tension rippling off both Valance and Kharth was not setting him at any ease. As Endeavour pulled out of orbit and headed as Graelin had directed, somewhere in the vicinity of the sixth planet, he turned back to Science. ‘What do we know of what happened, so far?’

‘The story’s a little unclear, even with everyone’s sensor feeds,’ Graelin admitted. ‘But the Odysseus hadn’t been in the system for more than a few hours before the rift manifested. We have the comms exchange between Commander Aquila and Administrator Falyn as well as the sensor feeds picking up the tachyon radiation to confirm this. The storm, too, but the storm manifested very quickly and made these sensor feeds… unreliable.’

Still he pressed on, reaching to swap the display on the viewscreen for a time-lapse map of the system showing Whixby, the Odysseus, and the presumed region of the rift. ‘The Odysseus proceeded to the proximity of the rift, and that’s where communication was lost; they went straight into the storm. It looks as if they attempted to use their navigational deflector to project a dekyon pulse – R&D’s recommended means of manipulating a rift. I believe that failed. It’s a little difficult to tell what happened next. But a cross-reference of every single sensor feed suggests the same thing: the Odysseus flew into the rift.’

Valance straightened. ‘Into?’

‘I’m confused as well. I don’t know what they thought they would achieve. Perhaps the sensors are wrong; we’re talking civilian systems trying to pierce the Paulson Nebula’s usual interference amidst a high-level ion storm around a subspace rift positively seeping with tachyons.’ Graelin shrugged. ‘But whatever happened, it looks like it worked. The Odysseus drops off sensors, and soon after the tachyon radiation stops. Of course, it took a while before it dissipated enough to stop the storm, and the damage was done to the Azure Chain, but even another five minutes could have triggered atmospheric storms on Whixby that might have consumed the whole resort.’

Arys tilted his head. ‘Did they perhaps try to manipulate their warp field from close proximity to the rift and… something happened?’

‘If anyone,’ said Kharth, voice a low rumble, ‘was going to come up with some desperate, untested means of stopping a subspace rift from leaking chaos all over a colony with hundreds of thousands of lives at stake…’

‘It’s Davir Airex,’ Valance finished in agreement.

‘Something certainly happened,’ Graelin said a little pompously. ‘As nobody’s seen or heard from the Odysseus since.’

Rourke put his hands in his pockets and turned to the front. ‘Lieutenant Arys, have the Black Knights fall into escort pattern with us, extended formation and keeping away from our prow. I want them as extra eyes in case of trouble, but make sure they don’t go first.’

Kharth shifted at Tactical. ‘My turn to be the non-scientist. If the rift’s been closed, how are we going to know where it was?’

‘Subspace rifts don’t just vanish with absolutely no damage to the area around them,’ Graelin said. ‘But if it has been fully sealed, with no more tachyon radiation leaking, that may be a subtle matter of detecting variances in subspace, and is absolutely not what I want to do in the middle of the Paulson Nebula.’

Before long they were at the designated region, and Rourke could see their sensor range tighten under the influences of the nebula and any lingering ionisation from the storm. The Black Knights gave Endeavour a little better peripheral vision, but it was still like staggering in the dark.

At length, there was a chirrup from Graelin’s console. ‘I have it,’ he said. ‘Minor fluctuations in subspace filaments suggesting some loosening in the barrier to normal space. Based off scans, I’d say this is it.’ He looked up, and shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

‘But is there any sign of the Odysseus?’ Valance said.

‘Not yet. Amplifying power to the forward short-range sensors.’

Rourke turned to the map on the viewscreen as if that would help. ‘Is there any danger in getting closer?’

‘I’m seeing no other disruptions, no further tachyon emissions,’ reassured Graelin, and Endeavour slid through the blackness of space micron by micron. Then there was another chirrup, and he straightened like he’d been struck. ‘Slow us down! I have something.’

Kharth tensed. ‘Something –’

‘I’m picking up heavy traces of tritanium and dispersed traces of warp plasma,’ Graelin pressed on in a taut voice. ‘Not enough to be the Odysseus…’

‘A shuttle?’ Valance rounded on Rourke. ‘If there was an evacuation -’

‘Commander Graelin.’ Rourke kept his voice level. ‘Do we go on, or do I send in Lieutenant Whitaker’s pilots?’

He clicked his tongue. ‘Send the Black Knights.’

Rourke nodded to Arys, who gave the direction, and turned to Lindgren. ‘Get me Lieutenant Whitaker and his sensor feed on the line.’

‘I’m starting to see,’ said Graelin as Lindgren got to work, ‘what might have happened here. I think that the dekyon burst didn’t work, that the rift grew too big, too quickly. I think the Odysseus approached the rift and attempted to form a warp field that would make contact with the rift itself, with the intention of using that to manipulate it…’

‘That sounds very dangerous,’ said Valance.

‘For it to work, it would require the most precise calculations to modulate the warp field in-line with the rift’s own subspace oscillations,’ Graelin mused, brow furrowing. ‘It would be incredibly complex.’

Rourke caught Valance and Kharth exchanging a look. Boundless faith in the intellect of Davir Airex was not, right then, reassuring. He turned to the viewscreen and raised his voice to be picked up by comms. ‘Lieutenant Whitaker, where are we?’

Whitaker’s voice came back tinny from the cockpit of his fighter. ‘Approaching the object now. It’s definitely not a shuttle; I’m not picking up any signs of flight systems. My sensors here aren’t great, but -’ Then he stopped, and Rourke heard his voice catch. ‘Oh, no. Endeavour, are you seeing this?’

Rourke frowned at the fuzzy image on the viewscreen, and gave Lindgren a curt look. Her hands danced over the controls to improve the feed, and the object became more crisp. It was Arys who made the first low sound of protest, measured and polite even in a time like this, and a heartbeat later Rourke found his own voice to say, less politely, ‘Shit.’

‘Of course,’ said Graelin in a taut tone, ‘while precise calculations may have allowed the Odysseus to successfully manipulate the rift, if they were too close, its closure might have… ripped the ship in half.’

Rourke tore his gaze at last from the drifting wreck of a torn nacelle that had once belonged to a Diligent-class starship, and cleared his throat. ‘Black Knights, is there any other debris?’

‘How quickly?’ Valance watched Graelin, a quaver in her voice. ‘How quickly would the ship be destroyed?’

‘If you’re asking if anyone would have time to get to an escape pod and be clear of any backlash…’ Graelin ground his teeth together, clearly hating this uncertainty, ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t be optimistic.’

Kharth leaned across Tactical. ‘We have to sweep this area for remains, for any escape pods, any shuttles -’

But before Rourke could reassure her, tell her they would do just that, Whitaker’s voice came crackling back. ‘I’m not picking up signs of anything else out here. Not even further debris of the nacelle. It’s like they’re just… gone.’

Silence rang out across the bridge, broken only eventually by Graelin. ‘And, of course,’ he pressed on sombrely, ‘if they were in the mouth of the rift itself when they closed it… it could very well have consumed the whole ship.’ His eyes flickered to the image of the nacelle upon which by now the stencilled name USS ODYSSEUS and her registry were plain to see. ‘Almost.’

Thump. Thump.

Sometimes, Kharth meditated. It was difficult at the best of times, drawing on half-remembered rituals from her childhood, on whatever exercises in mental discipline her father had tried to maintain on the refugee world of Teros. But when her heart was thudding in her chest like it was trying to crack open her ribcage, when her blood was howling in her ears like it would deafen the whole world, that wasn’t a time for peace and focus. It was a time to burn.

The gym spaces on Endeavour were larger than her predecessor’s, which normally meant more of a crowd than she liked when working out. But tonight it was just her and the punching bag. Perhaps too many crew were on Whixby. Perhaps they knew better than to be near her in this mood. She didn’t care.

A solid hook, a series of quick jabs, a swing to the left as if she needed to be light on her feet against this hanging opponent, but it wasn’t enough, didn’t drive out the fire, and with a sound of frustration she slammed a clumsy, furious punch into the bag that sent a judder of impact up her arm.

Then she swore, because all she’d achieved was an ache in her wrist. Kharth stepped back, wiping sweat from her brow, and only then did she realise she wasn’t alone. ‘Isa?’

Cortez was leaning against the wall to one side, holding a steaming mug. ‘Don’t mind me.’

‘Unless you decided to relax by listening to the soothing sounds of me kicking the shit out of something, I will mind you.’ But her friend’s presence wasn’t the intrusion she might have assumed, and Kharth gestured beside her. ‘Water.’

Cortez tossed the water bottle over. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Shit,’ Kharth said simply, having a swig. ‘It’s not very complicated.’

‘I’m sorry. I know you kept Dav at arm’s length -’

‘Wasn’t really that way around.’

‘And now it’s like you’ve lost him a second time.’ Cortez tilted her head. ‘Which probably is very complicated.’

Kharth frowned at her water bottle. ‘Damn thing is, Isa… I think I was ready for this. I don’t know if I’ve been ready for this since he got Joined, or since he left Endeavour, or simply since this mission. But I’ve…’ Now guilt rose in her, subtle rather than choking. ‘This is going to sound awful.’

‘There’s no judgement on feelings. Sorry, with Greg on the surface, I have to go all fortune cookie therapy on you.’

Kharth gave a wry, pained chuckle, then shook her head and sobered. ‘Obviously I hate this. Obviously I was ready to fight tooth and nail to find him. But now we know he’s gone, I… a part of what I feel is relief.’ Cortez stayed silent, watching, and Kharth sighed. ‘Now I can finally mourn him.’

‘You mean Davir Hargan.’

She nodded awkwardly. ‘To me, Dav died when he was Joined. The man I knew was subsumed into this new being thanks to Airex, and became someone I didn’t know, didn’t recognise. But I couldn’t… he was still alive, and so many people talk of building new, changing relationships with friends and lovers who became Joined, like the problem was me, but…’ She took a swig of water like it might drown the new wave of rising pain. ‘Now he’s dead. Unequivocally, Dav Hargan, who I loved, is dead. So, you see, it’s not complicated at all.’

‘Sure. This makes things certain, which is a relief. I’m not judging you, Saeihr, but that’s definitely not simple.’

Kharth hadn’t lied, but she knew she hadn’t told the whole truth. She hadn’t just attempted to meditate. She’d lit a large candle in her room and considered conducting the Fae’legare as she had for her father, writing down every secret she’d never told Dav and then burning them all; all save one, whatever secret she couldn’t imagine telling him even in death. But that traditionally took a witness, and she hadn’t got very far writing anything down anyway.

‘Why are you here?’ Kharth said at last.

Cortez frowned. ‘Checking up on my friend?’

‘What about Valance? She’s lost – I don’t know. More.’

‘I didn’t come here to talk about Karana,’ said Cortez after a beat of hesitation. ‘I came to see you.’

‘As you can see, I’m working out my frustrations with a healthy outlet.’ Kharth pointed at the battered punching bag. ‘But no disrespect, Isa – you wouldn’t ditch Valance for me at a time like this.’

‘She has other people to talk to, like the captain. I don’t know who you’d talk to, with Rhade off-ship…’

‘I could have a completely inaccessible conversation with Dathan talking entirely around my problems and making sardonic commentary instead of any sincere acknowledgement of my pain, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Cortez looked down at her steaming mug. Kharth saw it was the replicator pattern she’d introduced her to, the Romulan blue tea, and felt a twinge, like a muscle ached at the thought of connections she’d built with people. ‘So Karana’s sealed herself in her quarters, my codes don’t work, and she’s not answering.’

‘That’s not good.’

‘No, but it’s not like she’s failed to show up for work, so she can take whatever time and space she wants…’

‘And Greg’s off the ship.’

‘I thought about talking to his deputy…’

‘Wait, Greg has a deputy? We have two counsellors?’

‘We have a whole team now, but the deputy is…’ Cortez hesitated. ‘She’s very nice.’

‘Oh,’ said Kharth. ‘Oh, that won’t help Valance at all.’ She sighed. ‘Alright. I’ll go talk to her.’

‘Uh, no offence, Saeihr, but you’re the last person she’ll want to see.’

‘I’m the only person who shares a shred of her pain, and she hates my guts. I don’t think Valance will resist the urge to yell at me about how little I understand, because she’ll hate that I do. What’s the worst that could happen?’

‘She could stab you?’

‘I think her trying would be very therapeutic for us both,’ said Kharth, and headed for the gym doors.

‘This is why we have a whole team of counsellors now!’ Cortez called after her. But she did not, Kharth noted as she left, stop her.

She went straight to the XO’s quarters, because Kharth suspected if she stopped to so much as think about this plan, she’d realise it was a bad idea. He first tap on the door-chime went ignored, as did the second, so next she thudded on the metal door. ‘Valance! It’s Kharth, I know you’re in there.’ Sound did not travel especially well through these doors. But the ship was quiet, and the crew were expecting her to be crazed with grief anyway. She might as well use it.

Again, no answer. ‘Isa’s worried about you! Someone out here might realise you have half a heart or something if you keep this up!’

That didn’t seem to work. Kharth braced against the door-frame and sighed. ‘I don’t know why you’re getting all wound up about that stone-cold parasite who never gave a damn about either of us anyway -’

It was a low and petty blow and it shouldn’t have worked. Perhaps it didn’t get under Valance’s skin, but someone stood outside her door and yelling did, because at last the doors slid open to show the rumpled shape of the XO. ‘Kharth. Go away.’

But it was past her that Kharth looked, into the debris of the wrecked quarters. ‘Hell’s teeth, Valance.’ She ducked under Valance’s arm before she could be stopped, into the shattered gloom of all her belongings. PADDs had been scattered, some screens broken. The coffee table tipped over. Remains of a plant pot lay strewn in a corner. ‘Did this help?’

Whatever rage had consumed Valance was now at least muzzled, the XO folding her arms across her chest and glowering as Kharth bull-rushed into her sanctum. ‘I don’t want to talk about this with you.’

‘Yes, this is much healthier.’ Kharth frowned at the debris. ‘You know we have holodeck programmes and punching bags? Some metaphorical, some literal?’

‘Kharth –’

‘I’m not here for you. I’m here for Isa, who’s worried about you.’ She hesitated. ‘I guess I’m here for Dav, too. I’d be kidding myself if I pretended it was so simple as Airex stripping him of all emotion. Wouldn’t that be easier for me? But he was your friend.’

Valance’s gaze dropped. ‘Some friend. He left with hardly a word.’

‘He does that. Did that.’ Kharth’s expression creased. ‘But he’s not all you lost.’

‘What in the universe, Kharth, makes you think I want to talk about this with you?’

‘Normally? Nothing. But you don’t want to talk about it with Isa. You don’t want to talk about it with yourself, or you wouldn’t have unleashed every feeling you refuse to process on all of your belongings.’ Kharth waved a hand around the wrecked room. ‘So there’s a very good reason you should talk about this with me: unlike every other option, you don’t give a damn about what I think of you.’

Their eyes met only cautiously. ‘Cassia Aquila was my partner. I don’t expect you to understand that.’

‘Cassia Aquila was a respected starship captain with a glowing career and a shining future. Don’t beat about the bush, Valance. Aquila wasn’t supposed to die first.’

That made Valance take a step back, dropping her gaze. Despite the pain, Kharth saw her hand curl into a fist, and knew the anger wasn’t for her. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I can see that from your incredibly defensive reaction.’ But Kharth shook her head and turned to the room, to the mess. A small part of her, a tiny echo of past supremacist pride, disparagingly thought, Klingons. But she didn’t trust in her mastery of her own anger enough to mean it. ‘I don’t know if you think you’re less without them. I know I said you don’t and shouldn’t care about my opinion, but nothing I ever respected about you ever had anything to do with anyone else.’

After a long silence, she heard Valance swallow. ‘Perhaps this is that bad,’ she said in a low voice. ‘If you’re admitting you respect me.’

‘If I didn’t respect you,’ said Kharth, still walking the room, ‘you and I would have had this out a long time ago.’ She shoved her hands in her pockets. ‘You should talk to Isa, you know. She puts up with a lot of our shit.’

‘I don’t know what to say to her.’

‘She’s also good at doing the talking if you don’t want to talk. Let her in, and I’ll go. How’s that deal?’

The XO looked around the room. ‘She should not know I trashed this.’

‘I think she’ll notice you killed the plant.’ But with a sigh, Kharth leaned down to grab a stack of scattered PADDs. ‘Okay, I’ll help you tidy and you can pretend you trashed less than you did. Then you let her in. Then you and I can get back to having nothing in common.’ But her eye caught the contents of the topmost PADD, and she frowned. ‘Don’t tell me you’re tormenting yourself with the sensor feed.’

Valance advanced to snatch the PADD off her. ‘It’s the data Lindgren got off the ship captains,’ she said defensively. ‘I want to know what happened.’

‘I think you know what happened. Dav came up with something staggeringly ingenious that let Commander Aquila play the big damn hero to save all of Whixby. We might never get a blow-by-blow account. We’re going to have to accept that.’

But Valance was staring at the topmost PADD, frozen in place, and Kharth wondered how far into this work she’d got before trashing everything. Now she looked up as if Kharth hadn’t been speaking. ‘Computer, show me the data file we received from the SS Armitor, main display.’ On the big panel on the wall, a copy of a sensor feed from one of the civilian ships in orbit popped up, jagged lines everywhere with the data from the storm, the Odysseus, its disappearance.

Kharth sighed. ‘Valance -’

‘Shut up.’ Valance advanced on the display, hand reached out – and swept past the data of four days ago, into the feed since. Kharth frowned as she watched the focus swap from ionic interference to subspace eddies to, finally, tachyon radiation levels.

‘The rift closing stopped the radiation emissions. Anything out there’s days old and dissipating.’

Then Valance’s finger landed on a minuscule spike in tachyon radiation. ‘What’s this, then?’

Kharth blinked. ‘I don’t know, crappy civilian sensor systems? That’s from three days ago, the dust had already settled…’ But Valance expanded the view of the timeline, and Kharth squinted as she finally saw it, tachyon radiations spiking and falling, spiking and falling. ‘Why is it fluctuating like that?’

‘Computer, cross-reference our records on tachyon radiation in this time-stamp with our data packets from other ships,’ said Valance, voice that particular kind of tense that Kharth knew meant she was on a knife-edge.

‘Valance, if this is something, Graelin’s been going over all of these, and just because he’s an ass doesn’t mean he’s incompetent.’

‘I would bet good replicator credits he’s not been looking at the feeds over a day after the event.’

‘Okay, so they do spike, but it’s some sort of anomaly…’

‘It’s not,’ said Valance once more data came in. She had to bring the scans to the highest level of detail, catch the fluctuations down to the second as they spiked, then ebbed, then spiked for longer, then ebbed again, and so forth. ‘It’s a pattern. It’s deliberate. And it’s coming from where the rift was.’

Kharth’s heart had burned in her since she’d seen the nacelle of the Odysseus on the viewscreen, but slowly started to run out of fuel, flames sputtering with exhaustion and grief. Now embers stirred as if someone had ever-so-gently blown on them. ‘It’s a signal code?’

‘It’s Morse code.’ Valance swallowed hard, almost frozen by the implications of her own theory. ‘Cassia and I used it for discreet signalling during Academy flight training exercises if we wanted to do something… frankly, dumb.’ She stared at the display. ‘I think she’s alive. And I think she’s done something very, very dumb.’

Golden sunlight seared through the Seashine’s best rooms, as if the island idyll beyond could not contain all this brightness. Thawn looked from the breathtaking view of Sanditor’s sweeping resort buildings, the gently buzzing crowds of genteel tourism, and the sparkling ocean, to turn to the bedroom door.

Rhade stood there, apprehensive. He’d changed out of uniform only grudgingly, choosing a light linen suit that kept his appearance respectable, professional. ‘Are you settled?’

She looked at her bag, sat at the foot of the king-sized bed, cracked open only for her to pull out her PADDs. She had not yet changed. ‘I’m not sure what that looks like.’

‘I see that now. I, ah. We should talk.’

Because what this catastrophe of the century needs, Thawn thought, mindful of guarding her thoughts on a planet of Betazoids, is another boundary for you and me to awkwardly navigate. ‘I – yes. I don’t -’

‘We have more than one room,’ said Rhade, gesturing to the rest of the suite behind him.

‘We have a lounge, a bedroom, and a bathroom. That’s not exactly a spare room.’

‘I can ask for a futon to be brought up, surely. Or bring something from the Prydwen.’

‘You’re here so we can present a united front, and so it’s not just me who has a foot in the door with the Twelfth House. If people know I’ve got you sleeping on the couch, that makes us look like liars,’ said Thawn, and winced when she realised that was exactly what they were right now.

‘You want us to share a bed?’

It was her turn to pause. ‘The sofa looks comfortable,’ she said at last. She had dragged them into a trap, she realised; either their arrangement was purely formal, something for the distant future, in which case Rhade had no influence with the Nyders anyone would particularly care about. Or they were sincerely committed to the match, in which case they had to act like it.

‘That’s perfectly fine, Rosara.’ Even on a Betazoid world, they kept their communication verbal. It was not that Betazoids eschewed speech, but intimates could communicate much more quickly and subtly telepathically, unafraid of what implications or feelings might shine through the process, baring themselves to one another. This was not yet how Rosara Thawn and Admant Rhade worked, however.

She drew a deep breath. ‘Have we heard from Hale?’

‘She’s said she’s walking the resort, likely to scope out the influentials. I’d say we should do the same, but it occurs that you and I are something of a novelty at a time when the people of Sanditor are desperate to pretend a calamity is not a mere three hundred kilometres away.’

‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ Thawn mused, then she stiffened. ‘You’re saying we should look like the latest noble couple to grace Sanditor with our presence, so anyone who wants anything out of the Nyders – or just to brush up against us – comes to us?’

‘Quite. I thought afternoon drinks in the hotel bar. It’s one of the higher-profile establishments of the island, I think. I’m sure we’ll be spotted.’

She turned away, shaking her head with irritation rather than rejection. ‘This is stupid.’ At his surprised look, she sighed. ‘I mean – you’re right. This is stupid that Falyn won’t even talk to us about opening a refugee shelter, so right now the best way to help the Paulson Nebula is to have a delightful cocktail on an island paradise.’

‘I did not want to speak out of turn in front of Ms Hale; the task ahead of her is significant,’ he said gently, ‘but I agree. I think this is preposterous. Falyn is acting like a disgrace.’

It was one thing for her to think that, Thawn pondered, and another thing entirely for someone else to say it. Then her PADD chimed, another saviour in the long line of convenient interruptions, but her relief did not last long when she grabbed it.

‘That idiot,’ she snarled.

Rhade advanced, cautious and confused. ‘Who?’

‘Beckett!’ She turned the PADD around. The alert had been him connecting her to whatever social feed he’d found around Sanditor. Already he’d flooded it with status updates making it perfectly clear the son of Vice Admiral Beckett was on Sanditor and ready to party.

Rhade peered at the photograph Nate Beckett had taken of himself in front of the view from his hotel window, already changed out of uniform. ‘“Sun’s out, guns out”?’ he read dubiously.

‘This isn’t a holiday –’

‘It looks like he’s already getting responses. He’ll network with people we might not reach?’ Rhade ventured.

She stared at him, then tossed the PADD on the bed. ‘Head down to the bar. I’ll get changed and meet you there.’

But she stared at the PADD even when he’d gone. A part of her considered sending a message to Lindgren, up in orbit, but she knew Endeavour had too much on its plate for her to distract the communications officer with her personal life and her ongoing vendetta against Nate Beckett’s face.

Lips thin, she connected the PADD to Sanditor’s networks and straightened. ‘Patch me through to Falyn Nyder’s office.’ Falyn had insisted she was busy, but that had been in front of Hale, and indeed, the line went through after only a few seconds’ waiting, her cousin’s face hovering through the holographic display above the PADD.

‘Rosara, I hope everything’s alright, the room’s fine and all that? It’s been so splendid for you to make time to visit…’

‘Falyn, let’s not beat about the bush,’ Thawn said, because diplomacy had never been her strong point. ‘You know why I’m here.’

Hesitation flashed across the projection of Falyn’s face. ‘You’re a member of the Twelfth House and my guest. But the Thawns don’t have the right to dictate the Nyder’s business and cultural activities.’

For a heartbeat, Thawn thought about getting Aunt Anatras involved, and then remembered communication systems would make that impossible. That was possibly for the best; involving Aunt Anatras would certainly have a cost. ‘I don’t want to dictate anything. But I’d like to think I could make the situation clearer for you. Obviously I have the family’s best interests at heart, I’m not here to hurt your situation here on Sanditor.’

‘I don’t know if you understand my situation on Sanditor.’ Falyn looked away. ‘I wasn’t lying earlier. I have a lot of meetings this afternoon, especially if we’re to coordinate relief efforts with your lovely team. The situation on this world is… complicated.’

‘Then explain it to me.’

‘I can’t right now.’ Then she brightened. ‘I know! You should take the day to see Sanditor, meet some of the people, I’m sure everyone’s keen to know you. And then we’ll do breakfast tomorrow morning?’

Tomorrow morning. A whole evening of nothing but indulgent socialising and leisure while families across the Paulson Nebula lost their homes and had nowhere to go. But Thawn could not think of a counter to Falyn’s reasoning, and could hardly force her. She nodded. ‘Alright. Breakfast.’

‘Splendid, darling. Bring that Adamant with you; isn’t he so handsome and polite?’

Thawn fought a grimace. ‘I will. Goodbye, Falyn.’

It took her a while to make it down to the hotel bar. She had not packed perhaps as she should, had not prepared for the apparent life of leisure Sanditor demanded. So it took a little digging and a little fighting with the hotel replicator before she could find a sun dress that was lower cut than she was happy with but followed the latest fashions, and join Rhade.

The hotel bar had a low hum of activity, the Seashine’s guests returning after a day of the diversion and leisure of the island. She recognised some faces from her research en route to Whixby, scouring the networks for any hint of which influential figures might have arrived before the Century Storm. Rhade had taken a table on the terrace, like most of the guests, and sat with an undeniable air of tension despite the relaxed atmosphere, the drink in front of him.

‘You look lovely,’ he said as she arrived, and Thawn had to fight the impression that while he was sincere in his courtesies, they were still obligatory. Before she’d barely sat, he was continuing. ‘I’ve been recognised by two guests already saying how grateful they are that Endeavour is helping the Azure Chain.’

‘That’s not a good thing?’ she said, feeling a little underwhelmed by his reaction considering how much time she’d spent fighting with the concept of a sun dress, and then guilty because people were dying everywhere.

‘It’s the tone,’ said Rhade stiffly. ‘Like it’s happening a million light-years away, and that now Endeavour’s here, they don’t have to worry about it.’ He sipped his drink, and she recognised it as a light, non-alcoholic cordial.

‘We’re having breakfast with Falyn tomorrow. That might be a chance to get the lay of the land. But we have to deal with these people, the guests, the board members. Falyn can’t unilaterally tell them to do anything.’

‘She’s their leader. She should lead by example,’ he said simply.

Before she could counter that, there was a cry of delight from the open doorways to the bar, and a middle-aged Betazoid couple in summer finery swept out towards them, accompanied by a straight-backed waiter rolling a bottle in an ice bucket.

‘Mistress Thawn! Mister Rhade!’ The woman had, if possible, hair even taller than Falyn’s and a more matriarchal air, and Thawn recognised the couple at once from her research as Cosbar and Evertine Lillarties, owners of the Seashine and members of the Board of Tourism. ‘We’re so delighted to have representatives of the Houses here with us.’

The ice-cold bottle was placed beside the table, flutes appearing as if from nowhere, and with an imperious wave of Madam Lillarties’s hand, the waiter had poured sparkling emerald for them both.

Rhade stood at once, all fine-drilled courtesies. ‘We are grateful for your hospitality, Madam.’

‘It’s our pleasure,’ she said with an imperious tilt of the chin. ‘I’m afraid Cosbar and I cannot join you for a drink as we’d like – we must attend the Board of Tourism – but I wanted to make personally certain that you have everything you need.’

‘And make sure,’ chortled Cosbar, ‘you’ve tasted some of the best fare of Whixby. We won’t skimp on your comfort here.’

Thawn saw the pained look enter Rhade’s eyes, and forced a smile she didn’t know she had in her. ‘You’re very generous.’

But still Rhade pressed on. ‘We don’t need all of this,’ he said, blunter than she’d like. ‘All we’d ask of you is to take to the Board of Tourism the requests of First Secretary Hale. I’m sure you’ll be discussing the Federation’s need for Whixby to be made the shelter for the whole region.’

The Lillarties exchanged looks as Thawn tried to not bore holes in him with a glare, until Evertine Lillarties gave a faint click of the tongue and a sad shake of the head. ‘It’s dreadful, all that’s happening in the nebula. But we have our own problems along the Azure Chain. Those people live and work here on Whixby; we must look to our own first.’

‘I’m sure you -’

‘Must be going,’ Thawn interrupted. ‘With such busy work as speaking to the Board. Thank you for the welcome.’ She waited until the Lillarties had stopped fussing and left before she turned back to Rhade, jaw tight. ‘Do you think shaming them will help?’

He frowned. ‘I’m not shaming them. We need them to understand how much more they can do.’

‘Is that what you think the problem is? That the people of Sanditor legitimately do not understand?’

‘I would rather assume them ignorant than callous.’

Thawn had never thought of herself as a diplomat. But she was starting to suspect that her pragmatism was making her a much more useful asset to this mission than Adamant Rhade and his blazing idealism. Normally she would be frustrated by people ignoring facts she understood implicitly, but normally she was arguing quantifiable matters of science and technology about which she was almost always correct. She did not deal with problems about people, not if she could help it. They tended to dig their heels in rather than admit they were wrong. But this was different. This was family. And Rosara Thawn had long ago accepted that reason and logic would never win over the intricacies of family.

The problem was, she wasn’t particularly sure what did work.

She took one of the sparkling glasses of emerald wine, and noticed Rhade give it an apprehensive look, as if the whole operation might fall apart if he sipped alcohol under circumstances he clearly considered to be on-duty. ‘Perhaps,’ she said at last, ‘we can at least find out more about the Lillarties, and the other members of the board, and report this information to Hale.’

Rhade paused at that, and gave a slow nod. ‘I’m sure she’ll know what to do with the knowledge.’

I’m not, Thawn thought as she drank. But she didn’t have a better plan.

‘It’s natural to see patterns where none exist.’ Graelin wasn’t working very hard to keep a sneer from his face as he gestured to the data feed projecting above his bridge station. ‘We have to follow evidence in science, not hopes.’

Before Valance could dig deep and find a measured response, Kharth snapped, ‘Okay, Commander, then explain the science of a non-existent subspace rift continuing to let out bursts of tachyon radiation?’

The thread of disrespect made Graelin stiffen. ‘It’s a supposition that the radiation came from the rift.’

‘Then where did it come from? A day after the rift was shut?’

‘This is based off the highly-imprecise civilian-grade sensor technology, already at a disadvantage in the Paulson Nebula’s usual interference and the disruption of the Century Storm…’

‘And none of that refutes a damn thing!’

For once, Valance found Kharth’s presence soothing; the Romulan’s anger gave voice to what she didn’t dare unleash. Kharth could be frustrated and agitated and reel it back in when necessary, while the shattered debris of Valance’s quarters told a different story. If she lost her temper, it would be gone for good.

But it also meant she could be good cop to Kharth’s bad cop. ‘What we’re asking for, Commander,’ Valance said coolly, ‘is an explanation for a sudden burst of tetryon radiation a full day after absolutely nothing.’

As Graelin hesitated, Lindgren spoke up. She’d been near the back of the gathering of senior officers grouped around the Science console under Rourke’s silent, watchful eye, and did not sound pleased to wade in. ‘While I see your point about the pattern, Commander Valance, and I agree I could interpret the ebbs and flows as a Morse code signal, there’s something very odd about it.’

‘More than one thing,’ Graelin murmured, but Rourke now turned to her, arms folded across his chest.

‘Go on, Elsa.’

Lindgren slipped past them to bring up the sensor feed of the radiation bursts. ‘The time index. The modulations happen over, frankly, milliseconds. I agree that it looks deliberately rhythmic and matches an SOS. But it happened in such a quick burst that it took you, Commander, poring over the same record for frankly hours before you noticed it. If the Odysseus is somehow out there and made that signal, why like that?’

‘And all of this,’ said Graelin brusquely, ‘presupposes the Odysseus has been somehow capable of manipulating the rift days after it disappeared.’

Rourke at last lifted a hand. ‘Let’s work this through. Tetryon radiation stopped seeping from the rift when the rift was closed. Then there was this burst a day later. Do we know the origin?’

‘We don’t,’ said Graelin.

‘Do you want to do your job and look into where it is from?’ Kharth snapped.

He rounded on her, back straight. ‘You of all people, Lieutenant, are in no position to question my professionalism -’

‘Then what about my position?’ Valance said, voice coming out like a growl. That was enough to drop everyone into silence, because if one thing was more incredible than a destroyed ship sending out signals, it was her backing up Kharth.

Graelin glanced at Rourke, then with a sigh turned back to his console’s display. ‘It does seem likely the tetryon radiation emanated from approximately the same region as the rift once was.’

‘Alright,’ said Rourke, clearly trying to forestall further fighting. ‘What might have caused that?’

Graelin sighed. ‘The most obvious possibility is that the rift was not fully closed. But I’m not sure why it would take another day for that radiation, or why it would then stop. Which suggests it must have come from somewhere else.’

‘Or,’ said Valance, ‘the rift briefly reopened.’

Lindgren hesitated. ‘What might do that?’

Rourke turned to Graelin. ‘Come on, Petrias. Follow this to the end as a puzzle, for once in your damned life. There are no wrong answers here.’

Graelin rolled his eyes. ‘Of course there are wrong answers, Captain. There are answers which waste time, resources, and distract us from where we can be most useful.’

Kharth coiled tighter. ‘This is ridiculous -’

‘Black Knight Flight to Endeavour; we’ve got the latest sensor scans of the Scar. Patching them through to you.’

All eyes turned first to Lindgren, who rushed back to her console with a slightly flustered air, then to Graelin. Rourke spoke first. ‘I didn’t know Whitaker was doing more scans.’

Graelin shrugged as the data packet came through, the projected display above his console growing flush with new information. ‘I told him to, because even if I think you’re jumping wildly to conclusions, I’m doingmy job.’

Valance and Kharth exchanged glances in one of the only moments of solidarity of their lives. Kharth openly rolled her eyes, but Valance’s faint nod conveyed much the same.

‘We also have more data from other ships’ encounters with the rifts,’ Graelin carried on. ‘Which means I have a point of comparison, which means it is exceptionally odd that I can now detect subspace oscillations even four days after a rift has been closed.’ He tilted his head. ‘The rift is shut. But not fully. It’s the difference between a wound healing, and one which still has stitches in. Which is unusual.’

‘Why?’ said Rourke.

Graelin ignored him, reaching up to manipulate the view of the incoming data, bringing some displays larger and tossing others to one side. ‘We’re still not sure how the Odysseus closed the rift. But I’ve been working on my theory these past eight hours, and I’ve been studying database records of the Odysseus’s systems.’ He looked at a line of data, then turned back to them. ‘These subspace oscillations we can detect around the Scar – as Lieutenant Whitaker has so evocatively named the site of the rift – are consistent with the subspace oscillations emitted by a Diligent-class starship’s warp field.’

Valance frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

Graelin gestured to Lindgren. ‘Lieutenant, transmit a subspace communication ping in the direction of the Scar and in accordance with the subspace frequencies I’ve just sent you.’

Lindgren looked uncertain, but did as bidden. One second passed, another, a third –

Her breath caught. ‘There’s something out there.’

Rourke moved back down to the centre of the bridge, shoulders squared. ‘Arys, bring Endeavour in closer to the Scar. I’m not having us half-blind by sitting back and playing it safe if the Odysseus is out there – in there -’

‘We don’t know what it yet means, Captain,’ Graelin warned.

‘Then let’s find out with the most sophisticated sensor array in two light-years, and not a goddamn Valkyrie’s scanners,’ Rourke rumbled. ‘What do you think the Odysseus did, Commander?’

‘Like I said, I think they came close enough to the rift to manipulate it not with a dekyon pulse, but with their own warp field. I’d presumed they successfully closed it, but the process destroyed them.’ Graelin hesitated. ‘It’s possible they closed it around themselves. Which would mean that the Odysseus herself – or her warp systems – have become the stitches.’

‘They’re stuck in subspace?’ said Kharth, making a face. ‘That’s why we can’t see them?’

‘In a manner of speaking. If so, they only have one nacelle, which doesn’t negate their capacity to maintain a warp field, but I can’t imagine this situation is sustainable. So if I’m right, then the Odysseus’s systems will eventually fail… and the rift reopens.’

Valance’s jaw was tight as she moved to Rourke’s side. ‘Is this survivable?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Graelin. ‘But it lends credence to your theory about the tetryon radiation burst being a communication. They might have manipulated their warp field to loosen its grip on the rift an iota, the only way they could signal anything that might be detected.’

‘That doesn’t explain the weirdness of it,’ Lindgren warned.

Arys glanced over his shoulder. ‘We’re within even our limited sensor range of the Scar.’

‘Bring us to a relative halt, Mr Arys,’ said Rourke. ‘Graelin, what’s out there?’

‘Still nothing in normal space by our sensors,’ he confirmed. ‘Conducting subspace scans across these specific harmonics.’

‘I’ve been trying to get more than a ping back,’ said Lindgren. ‘The response matches Starfleet communication systems, but on very low power, emergency only. Nobody’s picking up.’

‘Skies above,’ murmured Graelin in shock, then looked up and his smug veneer re-established itself. ‘I was right. The Odysseus is out there, trapped in a subspace layer at the mouth of the rift. I said it was like it stitched the rift shut, but I think it’d be more appropriate to say it’s a… a stopper.’

‘Life-signs?’ said Valance urgently.

‘I truly cannot tell. We’re operating multiple degrees away from standard sensor calibrations and capabilities,’ Graelin admitted. ‘I can detect the ship’s profile; a Diligent-class with only one nacelle, maintaining a static warp field. And before you ask: no, I have no idea how sustainable this is, either.’

‘What happens if the warp field collapses?’ said Rourke.

‘The rift would reopen; I’d have to run more scans to ascertain if that would be any worse than it opening in the first place. I cannot imagine that the rift could reopen without tearing the ship apart entirely.’

Rourke folded his arms across his chest. ‘We can’t hail them. We can’t scan them. Even if we had a fix on anyone aboard, this would be delicate work for transporter systems regardless of the Paulson Nebula’s interference and any lingering effects of the Scar.’

Valance looked to Graelin. ‘Could a shuttle utilise its own warp field to match their subspace harmonics and dock?’

Graelin made a face. ‘Maybe.’

She rounded on Rourke. ‘Give me the King Arthur, sir; I can board the Odysseus, assess the situation, and if necessary evacuate the whole crew.’ It would be a tight fit on a New Atlantic-class runabout, but hardly beyond a short-term trip.

‘Or,’ said Graelin, ‘you become as trapped as them. Assuming anyone is alive. And all that happens is we’ve sent someone else into a situation from which they need rescuing.’

‘That’s a standard concern with rescue missions,’ said Kharth, moving to the side of the tactical arch to stand nearer Valance. ‘But a starship’s down and we don’t have any better ideas.’

‘That’s no reason to rush,’ Rourke chided gently, but he scratched his beard and looked at Graelin’s sensor feed. ‘One way or another we need to stabilise the situation in the Scar.’ Valance watched his eyes sweep across the bridge, doubtless conducting calculations of personnel. There was no way he would be happy sending her in command of this mission, but she knew he couldn’t spare Graelin from the bridge, and he was no better off sending Kharth.

At length, he drew a deep breath. ‘Commander Valance, take the King Arthur out and attempt to dock with the USS Odysseus. Find out what happened, fix this disaster with the rift, rescue the ship or the crew. Take Commander Cortez and Lieutenant Arys.’ She nodded; both would be instrumental in both the docking process and in whatever needed doing to the Odysseus herself.

‘I’m going too,’ said Kharth bluntly. At Rourke’s look she did flinch. ‘Please, sir.’

As he hesitated, Valance straightened. ‘I want Kharth with me.’ She wasn’t entirely sure why, didn’t know if this was pity or solidarity or professionalism, but the words came before she could stop them.

‘The XO’s leading an away mission without a security detail otherwise,’ Kharth said, rallying, even though there were many possible alternative security officers.

Rourke sighed and rubbed his temple. Then, at last, he said, ‘Don’t make me regret this.’

‘We’ve stripped out every unnecessary pod,’ Chief Koya said as she fell in-step beside Cortez, the two women crossing the shuttlebay to approach the buzzing swarm of engineers around the runabout King Arthur. ‘If it’s not part of phasing through subspace or cramming crewmembers aboard, it’s gone.’

‘Good,’ said Cortez, then hesitated. ‘You left us with a bathroom, right?’

‘Well, you got one.’

‘Then we better not load everyone aboard and get stuck. Or this mission jumping through space-time to find a lost ship in the middle of a subspace aperture could get real nasty.’ It wasn’t that Isa Cortez didn’t care about things. But there was no problem she’d ever faced she didn’t feel was improved by being glib.

‘Better you than me, Commander.’

The shuttlebay looked empty, with most of Endeavour’s ships dispatched on the various tasks before them. Even the Black Knights were still out near the Scar, even the captain’s yacht was gone – possibly for the first time ever – leaving the solitary shuttle Lancelot as an emergency craft once the away team took the last runabout. ‘This is weird,’ Cortez muttered, getting a grumbling agreement from Koya, before she proceeded to the King Arthur.

She found Arys already in the cockpit, running pre-flight checks. He was always rather intense, so if the stakes weren’t so unseemly high she might not have noticed anything was wrong. She put a hand on the back of his chair and leaned in. ‘You know I’m here, right, Lieutenant?’

He turned to her, big eyes guileless even as he said, ‘What do you mean, ma’am?’

‘I mean you’re not expected to put the brakes on Commander Valance and Lieutenant Kharth. I am. That does mean you might have to nod vigorously in support sometimes.’ Rourke hadn’t said anything of the sort to her. All she was formally there for was her professional expertise. But she supposed he didn’t have to warn her that her girlfriend and closest friend were in danger of driving off a cliff. Cortez still preferred this to dealing with the fallout of Graelin being sent instead.

But then Kharth and Valance themselves thudded aboard, and Arys turned back to his controls with another flurry of tension. ‘All systems optimal, Commander. We’re ready to get underway.’

‘Does anyone,’ grumbled Kharth as she buckled herself in at Tactical, ‘want to explain the science of this ridiculousness to me?’

‘Oh, it’s simple, really,’ said Cortez in an airy voice as she pulled up her chair at systems control. ‘We’re going to duplicate what the Odysseus did to get trapped in a rift in space-time and through sheer genius not get stuck there.’

‘Reassuring.’

‘Just watch your displays,’ said Valance tersely from the co-pilot’s chair, ‘and trust Commander Cortez and Lieutenant Arys to do their jobs, Kharth.’

Kharth gave the back of Valance’s head an unimpressed look, then clicked her tongue in a manner Cortez thought sounded rather like a sardonic Airex and did indeed focus on her displays.

Launch wasn’t as smooth as it might have been, the area around the Scar still heavily ionised and agitating the dispersed nebula particles. It wasn’t anything Arys couldn’t compensate for, and soon the King Arthur was sliding away from Endeavour, away from the fighters providing extra eyes and ears around her in this blanket they’d dived into.

‘It’s nice,’ mused Cortez, looking at Black Knight flight through the canopy, ‘that Whitaker gets to pretend he’s useful sometimes.’

‘Fighters are useful,’ muttered Kharth. ‘We’ve spent half the resources we would on shuttles to get four times the coverage just today.’

‘With worse sensors,’ said Cortez. ‘Let’s face it, they’re mostly here because we can’t use them on the relief mission, and once in a while they’ll make Hale look more impressive flying escort formation.’

‘Commander.’ Valance’s voice was clipped in a tone she never normally turned on Cortez. ‘We’re approaching the rift. Focus up.’

This was not the time to bring in her personal feelings. ‘Aye, Commander,’ Cortez said in a bright, professional tone, and turned to her controls. ‘Arys, I’m gonna bring the warp engines online at the lowest power; the nav computer will yell at you. Ignore it and hold position. It’ll take me a hot minute to modify the warp field.’ Theoretically they were travelling at warp to a spot mere metres away, because their interest was not in crossing a vast distance but slipping through the cracks in space-time.

‘Ready,’ Arys confirmed.

‘Keeping active sensor scans up for the Odysseus,’ Kharth said.

‘Good,’ said Cortez. ‘We’ll have to slink right up to them to connect our warp fields once we’ve modulated it right and you find them.’ The ship began to hum around them, and indeed, Arys’s nav computer blatted out an indignant warning until he switched it off.

Valance gripped her armrests as the King Arthur shuddered. ‘Commander.’

‘Modulating our warp field. Anything yet, Saeihr?’

‘Not yet.’

The alarm came back on, or perhaps a different one, and Arys knocked that off, too. ‘Warp field coils are under significant strain, Commander!’

‘Everyone just breathe,’ Cortez said rather tartly. ‘This is child’s play.’ Another alarm went off, and she winced. ‘Saeihr?’

‘Nothing – wait -’

Then a fresh ping appeared on their sensors as everything else faded away. It was a small dot, in itself nothing significant, but of the exact right location and dimensions to be the USS Odysseus. Most of her.

‘Oh, hell,’ Valance breathed, and Cortez’s chest tightened as she realised this was the only real confirmation she’d had that they weren’t wrong, this wasn’t a wild goose-chase, and the Odysseus was still out there after all.

‘Their warp field is still active. Adjusting our warp field’s harmonics to match, then we’ll connect to the same subspace bubble,’ Cortez called. ‘Once that’s happened, bring us in to dock, Arys.’

A moment later, Arys’s controls pinged for the first time in a positive. ‘Bringing us in.’

‘There’s an emergency access hatch along the bridge,’ said Valance. ‘Start there.’

Space beyond the canopy looked normal. Stars still shone, they weren’t facing Endeavour or the sixth planet anyway, and it could have all been the same. Except as the King Arthur drifted in, they could now see the missing ship that had been hidden from view minutes before.

‘This is very odd,’ Kharth breathed, glaring at her controls. ‘She’s still got power, but the levels are fluctuating wildly across different sections. I can’t pick up life-signs, but I don’t – my sensor readings aren’t great,’ she added, making it plain an absence of sensor readings didn’t mean an absence of life.

‘I can detect the rift,’ Cortez said. ‘It’s exerting different levels of pressure across not just the ship, but the warp field.’

‘Meaning?’ said Valance tersely.

‘I’m not sure,’ she admitted. ‘But I don’t think the ship exists entirely in the same point in space-time.’

‘Meaning?’ repeated Kharth.

‘Damned if I know.’

Arys brought the King Arthur closer, and now they could see the score-marks across the hull, the lack of lights at windows. The aft was a mess, one nacelle blaring bright, the most active part of the whole ship, while nothing but rent metal existed where its partner should have been. Then they came closer, and Cortez felt the soft thump of landing, of a docking seal, of a connection.

‘At least their systems are picking up and we don’t have to rip through the hull,’ she pointed out.

‘Seal is good,’ Arys confirmed. ‘Life support active on the other side. We should be good to board.’

Kharth was first on her feet, first heading to the hatch, hand on the phaser nestled in its holster. Valance gave her a look as they all followed. ‘Planning on shooting people to rescue them, Lieutenant?’

‘Following standard protocol, Commander.’ Kharth glared.

Cortez cast an anxious glance at Arys, who looked even less happy, and she drew a deep breath. ‘How about we take it carefully and move along?’ On the one hand, she couldn’t imagine what possible physical threat might be waiting for them. On the other, she’d never conceived of this situation, either.

The hatch hissed, slid open, and then there was the lurching shift in gravity as their ladder extended down from the dorsal hull of the Odysseus and into her bridge from above. Kharth swept the phaser about a dimmed chamber below before sliding down, and Valance was there a heartbeat later. When the immediate response wasn’t violence, Cortez and Arys joined them.

To find themselves at the business end of a pair of phaser rifles.

‘Karana?’

‘Cassia?’

Phasers all-round were lowered, and Cortez breathed a slow sigh of relief. Commander Cassia Aquila and her Chief of Security, Lieutenant Tegan, had taken position behind a set of dim consoles, weapons ready, but at the sight of familiar Starfleet officers they emerged. ‘Took you long enough!’ said Aquila in that light tone Cortez knew was reserved for absolute emergencies.

But she looked a complete state, her uniform worn and battered, her cheeks and eyes sunken, and Tegan was in no better condition. The bridge looked like it had been cannibalised, consoles ripped open, parts hanging out and rearranged, the beating heart of the Odysseus turned into some sort of Frankenstein’s monster.

Valance was straightening, and Cortez could see her shields coming back up. It wasn’t in apprehension of what might be wrong, but the knowledge that one vulnerability was safe meant her guard was settling into place once more. Control was now easier to reassert, and so reassert it she did instead of express anything in front of four fellow officers to a woman she’d built her life around.

‘We got to Whixby, heard what had happened, and all we detected was your nacelle,’ Valance explained. ‘It took a little to go through sensor records and pick up your message – you did leave a message?’ As they talked, Cortez slid to the side, towards one of the few bridge consoles that still had light and power.

Cassia Aquila gave a tight but thoroughly pleased smile. ‘Yes, Karana. I left a message. We modulated the warp field just enough to leak tachyon radiation in what we hoped would be a detectable pattern.’ But she shook her head, delight shifting for business. ‘How’s Whixby?’

‘They took a light beating but they’re alright. We’ve sent a relief team down to the afflicted regions and a diplomatic team to try to get Administrator Nyder to accept the refugee shelter.’

‘They’re still holding out?’ Aquila frowned. ‘The storm’s not stopped yet? How long have you been there?’

‘Less than a day -’

‘Oh shit,’ breathed Cortez as she read the display, then looked up as everyone stared at her. Her throat tightened. ‘I… don’t know how to say this.’

‘Say what?’ said Valance and Aquila at the same time in the exact same Completely Done tone.

So that’s where that came from. Cortez swallowed. ‘Commander Aquila, Whixby was hit by the storm less than five days ago, and Endeavour has only been here for about a day. Commander Valance…’ She had to straighten and force herself to meet Valance’s cool gaze, hesitating even though she knew she was right. ‘Time hasn’t passed at the same rate in the rift. The Odysseus? Has been stranded for approximately three months.’

‘The family’s been here for fifty years,’ said Falyn, stirring sugar into her Jestral tea, the gentle breeze off the coast bringing only strands of warmth to tease at hair as they sat on her apartment balcony. ‘That brings with it a certain amount of prestige, but you know how things are.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rhade before Thawn could project kicking him into his head, ‘but I don’t.’

Auntie picked him for his looks, I take it? Falyn hummed gently into Thawn’s mind, before smiling and sipping her tea. ‘Because Whixby is a resort settlement, it is owned and led by the Whixby Tourism Office, meaning the Board of Tourism acts as the governing body. The Nyders – the Twelfth House – are the primary shareholders in the Tourism Office, but that hardly means our rule is absolute.’

‘The permanent population of Whixby is quite low,’ Thawn explained to Rhade as he shifted his weight. ‘Below the threshold of necessitating a civic government by Federation law. It’s the same principle as if Whixby were, say, a space station.’

‘Of course we have local councils for each island and they have a voice on the board,’ said Falyn rather defensively. ‘Which only adds to the pressures to which I must listen, you understand.’

‘You’re saying,’ rumbled Rhade, ‘that you would love to open up Whixby’s doors to refugees, but the board won’t let you?’

She sighed. ‘I thought we were going to have breakfast, my dear?’

‘We are,’ said Rhade levelly. ‘And Whixby is an important asset of the Twelfth House. One I’m seeking to understand.’

Falyn gave him an unimpressed look, which she then turned on Thawn. ‘There are many families of influence on Whixby. Three of our islands have been hit by a hurricane of unprecedented force. I know you will remind me immediately of the work your ship is doing to help, but it is, regardless, keeping a significant proportion of our service staff away from their jobs. I don’t begrudge them that, but it means matters here on Sanditor and other resort islands are considerably more difficult. With the festival due to start in a mere fortnight, after all.’

‘We don’t -’

But Falyn pressed on as Rhade tried to speak. ‘I am more than sympathetic to the situation, Adamant. But everyone is already scrambling on the Board. If I put to them a suggestion we take on more, I would get nowhere.’

‘We -’

‘Adamant.’ Thawn gave him an airy smile she didn’t feel, which would have made him suspicious if he’d known her better, she thought. Somehow, being around her family made it easier to put on the airs and graces she normally didn’t have time for, didn’t see the point of; it was like ancient programming kicking in to take over. ‘I want to catch up and gossip with Falyn; how about you take a walk down to the water front?’

Rhade narrowed his eyes, looking like he had no idea what possible benefit that could be, before standing at Falyn’s encouraging nod. ‘It would be a delight to see more of Sanditor,’ he said at last. ‘Good morning, ladies.’

Falyn watched him go, then exaggeratedly fanned herself with her hand once the door shut. ‘Honestly, Rosara. The arms on that man.’

‘I know,’ lied Thawn. ‘I’m sorry about him, he’s a little… stiff.’

‘I should hope so.’

‘I mean,’ Thawn pressed on, going bright red, ‘he’s very dutiful and focused on his work, and I don’t think he has as many family obligations to understand the difficult position you’re in.’

‘Rosara.’ Falyn sobered. ‘You’re not in front of your diplomat or your betrothed. You don’t have to pretend you agree with or like anything I’m saying or doing.’

Thawn hesitated. ‘The difference is that I don’t think it matters if I agree with or like it. My opinion doesn’t change your mind.’

That elicited a faint, perhaps even sincere smile from Falyn. ‘That is how family works, no?’ She sighed. ‘I am not in a position to be crass to Starfleet or the Federation. But does anyone honestly trust either of you if you say refugee relocation is temporary? We bring in our neighbours, whose planet is wrecked beyond repair, and in a year’s time they’re still here, with no indication anyone’s going to come back and give them a new home.’

‘I understand that,’ said Thawn, ‘I do.’

‘And I’m not trying to be petty and selfish by saying that the resort matters more than their lives, but – people don’t understand how important Whixby is.’ Falyn lifted a hand and gestured across the peerless view of Sanditor’s shoreline. ‘It’s not just a place important people fritter away a few weeks a year.’

‘I know. We have here now, not Betazed. The Tanhaxan Shores are a graveyard now. The Fordavian Isles a monument.’ Thawn did not remember such golden lands of her homeworld from before the war; she had been too young to know them untouched by the Dominion invasion.

‘You can’t go there without spending half your time reflecting on the mass murder of our people,’ said Falyn, pouring more tea. ‘Whixby is an escape, a haven, a place we can heal and grow instead of resting atop our scars. I will not see it ruined.’

‘I understand,’ Thawn sighed. ‘I don’t know how to explain to you that you can trust First Secretary Hale.’

‘I trust you. But I know you are quite young and quite junior. I’m sure Hale herself would promise you that refugees won’t be on our islands for long -’

‘Islands,’ Thawn muttered, then straightened. ‘Have we been going about this all wrong? We looked to Whixby because we knew you had the infrastructure to take on thousands more people, because we’re not in season yet, not every room’s been filled. But you’re also close to other worlds and you have space.’ At Falyn’s bemused look, she whipped out a PADD and dragged up a projection of a planetary map. ‘But there are other islands. Unsettled islands, hundreds, thousands of kilometres away.’

Falyn tilted her head. ‘You’re speaking of building a refugee shelter on, say, the Spirelight Isles?’

‘They’re a thousand kilometres to the north, their climate was deemed too cool for the resort’s purpose, they’re a little rugged. It’s not ideal, but that makes it even more certain that any shelter would be temporary. Instead of moving refugees into your island paradise nobody would be in a rush to leave.’

Falyn bit her lip. ‘If your First Secretary Hale puts together a proposal on this, a detailed proposal, and if you put your name to it as a daughter of the Twelfth House, I will give Hale an opportunity to make her pitch to the Board of Tourism.’

‘With your backing?’

She gave a light, tinkling laugh. ‘Promise me the votes of other key board members, and sure.’

Thawn abandoned breakfast not long after, proceeding at pace from Falyn’s apartment back to the Seashine Hotel. She had expected Sanditor’s resplendent opulence to feel like a thin veneer, a sheen of luxury stretched over tension and fear. But to walk through the sun-baked streets and shaded alleyways, past the coloured window shutters and vibrant market stalls promising to only swell in size and number as tourism season marched on was to feel nothing but sincerity and joy. Terrors of the Paulson Nebula were light-years away, suffering of the storm was hundreds of kilometres away, and Falyn and her fellows on the Board had done a fine job of making sure Sanditor did not feel the slightest pinch of disaster.

Hale took a little hunting down, Thawn eventually tracking her to a café near the water-front. She had changed out of her business wear, looking for all the world like a tourist sat at a small round outdoor table in a big hat with a tiny cup of coffee. Thawn did not wait before sliding into the seat across from her. ‘Ma’am, I’ve had an idea.’

Hale looked not at all vexed by the interruption, and her expression only brightened as Thawn explained. ‘Compromise. Now you’re thinking like a diplomat, Lieutenant. It’s perfect, it’ll leave absolutely nobody completely happy.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Can you liaise with Endeavour and the relief team to get better data on these Spirelight Isles and whip together a logistical proposal for a shelter there?’

‘Of course, ma’am.’ The prospect of work, real work, swelled in her. ‘Have you been making any progress yourself?’

‘Meeting people,’ Hale said, setting her coffee down. ‘It’s awfully unsubtle work to identify every major business-owner or community leader and go introduce myself, but they all know why I’m here, I can’t pretend to be innocent. But I can put faces to names and disabuse them of any assumptions they’ve made about me. People are considerably more inclined to give you and your words the time of day if you’re sympathetic to their plight. How can we ask them to care about us, if we don’t take time to care about them?’

Easily, Thawn thought, because for me this is about family, and family doesn’t need to be reciprocal. ‘That’ll be essential if we’re to get the board on-side with this proposal.’

‘Of course. If we let this go to a vote without having a damned good idea of the outcome, then we’ve not done our due diligence. I’ll start putting the idea in people’s heads.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘How’s Lieutenant Rhade?’

‘I… he…’ Thawn hesitated. This was a professional question, but she couldn’t ignore the look in Hale’s eye. ‘I’m not sure he was much use with Falyn. Adamant comes from a very different tradition of our people.’

‘Let him be the iron fist if he must be,’ Hale said gently. ‘So long as you’re the velvet glove. Everyone here knows the Federation could potentially do all sorts of things under emergency powers. If Lieutenant Rhade won’t be soft, then use the ways in which he is stern.’ She paused. ‘I appreciate your involving him.’

‘This is about family. He is to be family,’ Thawn said in a stilted voice. ‘It’s only sensible.’

‘Then I appreciate you using your knowledge of family to achieve our goals.’ Hale drained her coffee. ‘We should get to work.’

Thawn left with relief, heading quickly back to the Seashine. Her suite was not a sanctum, not with the rather haphazard arrangement of Rhade sleeping on the sofa only to tidy up all signs of such in the morning, and her mussing both sides of the bed, lest a gossipy housekeeper let on the truth of what was quickly becoming a not-very-worthwhile charade. But she could drag her PADDs out of her bedroom and take them to the seat on the balcony, trying to ignore the distraction of the heart-stopping view.

Patching a call up to Endeavour took longer than she wanted, though, and the tightening in her chest did not ease when she was connected only on audio. ‘Sorry for the disruption, Lieutenant,’ came Elsa Lindgren’s voice, officious and formal. ‘We’re still not in orbit so we’re piping this through a buoy.’

Thawn wrinkled her nose. ‘What are you doing up there?’

‘Rescue mission of the Odysseus.’ Briskly, Lindgren filled her in. ‘It’s been eight hours now and still no word, so things are getting… tense up here.’

‘Great,’ Thawn muttered. ‘I’d hoped you could run some scans for me.’ It was her turn to elaborate. ‘The Spirelight Isles might make a good site for a refugee shelter, but we’ve not done an assessment.’

‘I’ll let the captain know. Try Doctor Sadek in the meantime. She has to have a shuttle team spare.’

Her jaw tightened. ‘I know this isn’t your call, Elsa, but we do remember that the refugee shelter is our primary mission?’

‘You’re right,’ came Lindgren’s neutral voice. ‘It’s not my call.’ Then she brightened a hint. ‘How is it down there?’

‘Delightful,’ Thawn drawled. ‘I’ll fill you in later, though.’ The PADD screen went black as she cancelled the connection, and she sorely considered ordering room service before pressing on. But that felt like too much of an indulgence, too much of Sanditor’s seductive luxury while people were dying.

Instead, she just patched a call through to the disaster shelter three hundred kilometres away while sat on a sun-soaked balcony overlooking an island paradise. The display patched through to show the recognisable interior of one of the pop-up shelters Starfleet deployed for situations like this, the command hubs that could be dropped in almost any terrain. To her surprise, the faces on the other side, looking like they were mid-meeting, were Lieutenant Adupon and Doctor Sadek.

‘I… sorry to interrupt, Doctor,’ Thawn said with hesitation. ‘I just spoke to Endeavour -’

‘Fat lot of good they are right now,’ drawled Sadek. ‘At least to us.’

She winced. ‘How’s progress?’

‘We’ve got this in hand. It’s not my first disaster rodeo. Set up a whole response protocol only via shuttle and with a time delay on anything from the mothership? I was doing this when you were still in elementary school, Lieutenant,’ Sadek said nonchalantly.

‘Weather control systems upgrades are going well, too,’ said Adupon, and it was with a light dose of shock that Thawn realised they were reporting in, thought she was demanding an update. By the chain of command, she was the ranking senior staffer on the planet, even if that situation was more tenuous with Sadek’s current circumstances. ‘We’re increasing the capabilities of the current setup, and erecting more pylons for redundancy and coverage; that way if weather phenomena start up, we can diffuse them sooner. Lieutenant Forrester’s taking a shuttle team to a few of the smaller islands on the periphery of the resort to set that up.’

‘Good,’ said Thawn. ‘Speaking of shuttle teams, if you can spare anyone, I have a survey job I need doing.’ She outlined the situation with the Spirelight yet again, and saw Sadek and Adupon exchange looks.

‘I’ll send Harkon out for a jaunt,’ Sadek said like losing one of her best pilots was no big deal.

‘You don’t need her for a supply run?’

‘I do. She doesn’t need sleep. This is important.’

Thawn exhaled with relief. ‘You’re a life-saver, Doctor.’

‘That was a tautology, Lieutenant.’ But Sadek gave a gentle smirk. ‘Make sure you have a fruity cocktail on me while you rub shoulders with the great and the good.’

‘I – this is a diplomatic -’

‘Nobody who’s ever met you, Thawn, would think you’re sunning yourself while we all work hard. Pull this off, and you get a shelter on Whixby. That cuts down on travel time for evacuation ships, which means they can head back into the nebula for more people, which means more lives saved. Who cares how it happens?’ Sadek spoke in a quick, matter-of-fact manner. ‘So have a goddamn cocktail.’

‘It’s ten in the morning here.’

‘So?’

Thawn suppressed a snicker. ‘Thank you, Doctor. Have Harkon patch her findings through. And, Lieutenant? Tell me if you need anything for the weather control team.’

The conversation did, at least, assuage one iota of her guilt: she’d feared taking Rhade from Sadek’s team would undermine them, but she was realising she should give the doctor’s decades of experience a little more credit.

So she did order room service, a fresh bout of hot drinks brought up to the balcony while she thudded at her PADD to begin a planning proposal for a shelter on the Spirelight Isles. At last she had something she could do, something she was good at, instead of feeling like she was trapped in her family’s complexities where the primary goal wasn’t getting anything done, but making sure nobody was upset.

It took her a while before she thought she should probably tell Rhade. He would likely have some ideas, was a good planner, and could help, even if the idea of having to explain her thought process to him sounded tiresome instead of enthusing. But when she brought up her her local comms system, the PADD yet again spat out an update from whatever feed Beckett was using to stay in touch with locals.

It was yet more pictures, these ones stretching late into the previous night, and almost all of them showing Nate Beckett the worse for wear at increasingly exotic scenes with a series of locals whose faces she only dimly recognised from her research. They were, she thought, exclusively the prettiest people of Sanditor, or at least in the pictures where he had anyone on his arm. There was no sign he had made it back to life that morning.

Then room service knocked on the door to interrupt her ire, and Thawn tossed the PADD on the table with a sigh of irritation. ‘What an idiot.’

Lieutenant Tegan blew their ragged fringe out of their eyes. ‘Space-time hot mess. Huh. We wondered why no rescue party was showing up.’

Aquila sagged, leaning against a console. ‘I’m not entirely surprised. The situation aboard has been… odd.’

Valance’s jaw was tight. ‘Start from the top. What happened?’

‘The rift opened on top of us, the ion storm manifested, Whixby started to get hit, we tried to use a dekyon pulse and it didn’t work…’ Aquila grimaced. ‘Then Commander Airex suggested we use our warp field to plug it as a temporary measure. It was a hugely dangerous task, so I relocated non-essential personnel to the mess hall as an emergency shelter – safer than launching escape pods in the vicinity of a subspace phenomenon, and time was of the essence. It seems the attempt worked, but we lost a warp nacelle first. Then we lost internal comms, and our systems began to fluctuate wildly. We’ve had to reallocate as many resources as possible first to maintaining the warp field, then to keeping life support and emergency replicator energy to key locations. Then we waited. We’ve been in no position to try anything bold without risking the warp field collapsing and the rift destroying the ship before laying waste to Whixby.’

Arys looked around the bridge. ‘Then how come it’s just the two of you here, Ma’am?’

‘And where,’ said Kharth, voice a low rumble, ‘is Commander Airex?’

‘We lost contact with Engineering at once. He left not long after with Commander Templeton to get down there, re-establish contact, make sure our systems were working.’ Aquila winced. ‘I’ve heard absolutely nothing from them since. I sent my Chief Science Officer to the Mess Hall to ascertain the status of my crew there. I’ve heard nothing from them since.’

‘At that point,’ said Tegan rather laconically, ‘we stopped sending people off the bridge. Partly because we’re running out of people.’

‘I suppose this whole space-time mess is why nobody picked up on the signal,’ Aquila mused.

‘It went overlooked,’ said Kharth, ‘because from our end it only went out a day after you went missing, and the only people around to pick it up were civilians. That, and the time dilation meant it was a nearly imperceptible blip.’ She jerked a thumb at Valance. ‘Then the commander found it.’

The corners of Aquila’s eyes creased as she looked at Valance. ‘Of course you did,’ she said softly, then cleared her throat and resumed a businesslike air. ‘We can’t bring the ship up to full power, so all we’ve been able to do is hunker down and wait. I assume you have a plan.’

‘I have a runabout,’ Valance admitted. ‘A New Atlantic has an emergency capacity enough to evacuate your entire crew if needed. But we need to figure out how to close this rift without killing everyone.’

‘I assume,’ said Aquila, turning to Cortez, ‘this is where the Best Chief Engineer You’ve Ever Known comes in?’

It was an odd cocktail of embarrassment, pride, and gut-wrenching terror that twisted in Cortez. She gave an apprehensive chuckle. ‘It’s cute when – nope. Not going there.’ She looked back down at the console, trying to bring up a better systems read. ‘We could detect from the exterior that the rift is placing a strain on the warp field. If the bridge is experiencing time passing at a different rate to normal space, it wouldn’t surprise me if the effect is worse in other parts of the ship. The overall integrity of the warp field would keep the ship intact – or, at least, if the warp field weren’t holding, the ship wouldn’t be here any more. So you still have basic power, individual sections have individual systems that don’t require immediate or complex responses from the central computer – life support, local replicator activity, that kind of thing.’

‘You think,’ said Kharth, ‘that might be why people haven’t come back? Time’s faster or slower for them?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Okay,’ said Aquila. ‘How do we fix this so I can find my people?’

Cortez rubbed the back of her neck, mind racing. ‘We have a very good idea of the subspace harmonics of the rift and the modulations in the Odysseus’s warp field. It’s possible that from here I could make some adjustments to it, basically… reinforce it at certain points. That might bring the ship back into realignment, which might restore ship’s systems and thus contact to other sections.’

‘Or at the least,’ grunted Tegan, ‘it puts us in a position to send a search party without condemning them to experiencing only three seconds or three thousand years in the last three months.’ They shrugged as eyes fell on them. ‘What? It’s what we’re all thinking.’

‘If Commander Airex headed for Main Engineering,’ said Cortez, ‘I’d want to talk to him before we do anything more drastic. Or your Lieutenant Kimathi; he spoke really highly of her, so I expect she’s really good.’

‘She is,’ said Aquila without smugness.

Kharth narrowed her eyes at Cortez. ‘When did Airex speak highly of Kimathi?’

Cortez froze, feeling Valance’s gaze on her as well. ‘When I spoke to him,’ she said in a slightly high-pitched voice. ‘After he worked with Kimathi. After the Tkon debacle. On Starbase Bravo.’

Valance’s expression didn’t move. ‘I didn’t know you met him.’

‘Yeah, well, we almost got blown up together at Teros,’ Cortez said in a babble that increased in speed. ‘It was a bonding experience – except that it wasn’t, he was a total ass who didn’t want to talk to me, or talk about you, either of you, I mean –

‘This is irrelevant,’ Valance said at last, voice clipped in a way which dragged not only Cortez’s eye, but Aquila’s. ‘We’re here to rescue the whole ship.’

Cortez ground her teeth together. ‘Then let me do my job,’ she said as politely as she could, ‘without everyone staring at me. Perhaps, Commander, you and Lieutenant Arys could hop back to the King Arthur and get me a copy of our sensor records of the warp field harmonics.’ That was not a two-person job, but sending Valance alone would have been too pointed.

This didn’t get rid of anyone else, but Kharth looked like she’d got the picture and went to join Tegan for a security assessment, and that left Cortez bending over the engineering console with only Commander Aquila to approach. She, at least, was the person most likely to help.

Instead, Aquila said in a low voice, ‘Let me get this straight: we’ve been missing only five days?’

‘Command lost contact with you and Whixby and sent us to find you and finish the job,’ said Cortez, not looking up. ‘So if you were starting to think you’d been abandoned, you weren’t. The moment you so much as blipped on a rendezvous, a whole damn explorer was sent after you.’

‘I’m not too proud to admit the thought occurred,’ Aquila mused, and looked down at the console. ‘This is my ship, and while I’m not an engineer, I was a pilot. I get warp field theory. I understand that after five seconds’ work you probably understand the situation better than I do, but can I help?’

‘Probably,’ said Cortez airily. ‘You can at least explain context if I run into a snag. Which is definitely why you’re here, one hundred percent for professional reasons, and not even a dose so you can pretend to not ask me how Karana’s doing.’ She didn’t look up from the display, and drew a slow breath. ‘The answer being, she thought for about a day that you were dead and I’m pretty sure she broke every personal belonging in her quarters.’

She felt Aquila stiffen, and the Odysseus’s commander gave a slow sigh. ‘I’m sorry, this must seem very unprofessional of me.’

‘If I’d been cut off from the outside world for three months, the wellbeing of the people I care about would be a pretty high priority for me.’

‘Yes. And she – she wouldn’t tell me. Even once this was over. Not these days.’

Cortez’s gaze flickered up at that. She hadn’t known the old Valance, the bright, upcoming officer who’d harnessed her passions and her fire and driven herself to excel. The one Cassia Aquila had been at the Academy with, known for years. The Valance she knew was coiled and measured and muzzled herself, and while that was hard enough, she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have once known someone so different. ‘For what it’s worth, the moment she thought you might be alive, she was ready to move heaven and earth.’

There was a low thump from the hatch before Aquila could answer, somewhat to Cortez’s relief, and Lieutenant Arys returned brandishing a PADD. ‘Commander Valance is running some fresh scans,’ he said a little sheepishly. ‘But here’s the sensor telemetry and our warp field calibrations from our approach.’

‘Thanks, Tar’lek.’ Cortez nodded to herself as she looked between the rather limited systems controls she’d managed to scrounge access to and the data. ‘Good news and bad news.’

‘Start with the bad,’ said Aquila.

‘I can’t bring the whole ship back into realignment from here. But I should be able to reinforce the warp field in enough places to clear a path to Main Engineering without us being trapped for a thousand years or half a millisecond or whatever’s going on.’

Kharth looked up from the rather limited tactical display she’d been examining with Tegan. ‘So we can raise them?’

‘If anyone’s there,’ said Cortez, glancing briefly to the ladder as Valance returned. ‘Or we go down there ourselves. From there I can do my real magic.’

‘You were right, Karana,’ said Aquila, glancing to her old friend with an easy smile. ‘She really is a miracle worker.’

Valance folded her arms across her chest with a slightly awkward air. ‘She is.’

Rather than reflect on her girlfriend’s ex gushing about her to said girlfriend, Cortez decided to focus on bringing vast swathes of a starship back into temporal alignment in the middle of a subspace phenomenon. ‘This is going to bring things into relative alignment,’ she warned, hands dancing over the controls. ‘I think it might shift our alignment again with normal time, but there’s no telling whether it’ll level out to the same, or get faster our end, or slower, or what. So that means we might be in a real mess if we need any help from Endeavour, seeing as so far an hour on their end has been maybe a day here? I haven’t done the maths.’

‘Yes, you have,’ said Kharth dryly. ‘You just don’t want to upset us.’

‘Okay, yes, we’re presently experiencing approximately eighteen hours for every one they experience,’ Cortez admitted. ‘But nobody likes it when I remind you that I’m rocking smart as well as very cute.’

‘I’ll take very smart,’ said Kharth, possibly to save Cortez from babbling more in her little mental trap between Valance and Aquila.

‘Good. Because I’m done.’ It took the tap of a button to finalise the systems adjustments, and absolutely nothing perceptible happened. No rumble of the deck, no particular energy flare, and yet Cortez was as sure as she could be that she’d succeeded.

Aquila drew a slow breath and tapped her combadge. ‘Bridge to Templeton.’ There was the chirrup of the systems, but nothing more. She grimaced, and tried again. ‘Bridge to Kimathi. Bridge to Airex.’

Cortez shrugged. ‘There are countless reasons our comms might not be reaching them.’

Kharth pushed away from Tactical with a nod. ‘Which means you and I are heading down there, I guess?’

Valance straightened with a frown. ‘Just the two of you?’

‘Yes,’ said Kharth plainly. ‘The engineer who can fix the ship, and me as escort. Is there any reason to send more of us?’ She jerked her head at Tegan. ‘No offence, Lieutenant, but you’ve plain as day been on emergency rations for about a month and aren’t fighting fit if you run into trouble.’

Tegan winced but didn’t argue. ‘You’re expecting trouble?’

‘I have no idea, but we might have to run away from something.’

Cortez winced as she looked between Valance and Kharth. ‘You should hold down the fort here, Commander. If nothing else, it might become prudent to bring the King Arthur around to the mess hall at some point to evacuate the crew there. That’ll take a realignment process which you and Arys are more than capable of doing yourselves, but – that’s still a two-person job.’

Commander Aquila drew a slow breath. ‘Obviously I hate this. That’s my Chief Engineer and XO who are missing.’

‘Last time we met, Commander, you loaned me Rob Templeton on one of our missions,’ said Kharth in a level, even reassuring voice. ‘This time, let me loan you us. And I like Templeton. I owe Templeton. We’ll find your people.’

And Dav Airex, Cortez thought but absolutely was not about to say. ‘Also, there’s an outside chance I’m wrong and we’re about to get ourselves trapped in a subspace pocket where we experience ten thousand years every millisecond,’ she said with forced levity. ‘So if you completely lose contact with us, you should absolutely evacuate the rest of the Odysseus’s crew and… I don’t know, if I have to be stuck with Saeihr for all eternity, Plan B is someone else’s problem.’

Valance set her hands on her hips. ‘It’s not escaped my notice you’ve been talking as if this is decided.’

Cortez winced. ‘I don’t know if I should be charmingly confident or bow to your seniority.’

‘Karana.’ Aquila looked over, gaze exhausted. ‘Let them go. And wish her luck, for Sol’s sake; nobody will explode.’

For a heartbeat, Valance looked like she might argue. Then she gave a begrudging nod and, despite Aquila’s words, turned to both of them. ‘Good luck.’

Cortez ignored Aquila rolling her eyes, and gave the four to stay behind a chirpy grin. ‘We got this. Come on, Saeihr, let’s go on an adventure through time and space.’

‘I would rather,’ said Kharth, falling into step with her as they headed for the Jefferies Tube hatch, ‘just climb down to Main Engineering, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘Guess we’ll find out which. Won’t that be a lovely surprise?’ Cortez made sure to keep the levity in her voice as they left. And she absolutely did not look back, because she wasn’t sure what would be worse: Valance seeing her off with this mask of perfect professionalism, or watching the mask crack.

The Odysseus was not very large, only eight decks in height, but that was still a considerable hike via Jefferies tubes and turbolift shafts in dim lighting. Either between the ship’s power grid being stretched across timelines, or the damage the ship had taken from plugging the Scar in the first place, most systems were out or on the lowest power. Corridors were cast into jagged shadows of erratic emergency lighting or the shuddering illumination of a malfunctioning display panel, doors needed cranking open, and Kharth knew they were lucky to have life support.

She slipped out of the next hatch first, phaser in-hand, sweeping the corridor for possible threat even though they had yet to encounter anything. ‘Clear,’ she said after a heartbeat.

Cortez slid from the Jefferies tube like a professional swimmer emerging from water, and Kharth reasoned the Chief Engineer spent half her life in these things. ‘What did you expect?’

‘I don’t know. Call me paranoid as we move through shadowy corridors with no sign of life.’

‘You’re paranoid.’ Cortez straightened. ‘Or optimistic? Don’t think these are problems so simple we can shoot ‘em.’

Kharth still advanced like she was sweeping hostile territory. ‘Something’s happened to the rest of the crew. You think it’s so simple that everyone else has just been trapped in their own time bubble?’

‘That’s not simple. Maybe only ten seconds have passed down here, so they didn’t get around to achieving anything. Or temporal displacement meant the ship’s systems acted oddly; I’m not even sure how the ship’s still functioning with that going on. Or -’

‘Or?’

Cortez winced. ‘It’s hypothetical. But I guess they could have been stuck down here for, like, a hundred years and died.’

Kharth’s lips thinned. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the cheerful one, Isa.’

‘I’m sorry! I’m just remembering the last time we were in a situation like this, except it was alternate realities instead of time, but still, we were on a ship stuck in an anomaly. Or, on two different ships stuck in an anomaly.’

‘And I was stuck with Thawn, who’s sounding like a positively shiny alternative to your doom-mongering.’

‘Hey, don’t go too far.’ Cortez sighed. ‘Sorry. I’m a bit on edge myself. I know you’ve got more reason to be -’

‘I’m fine,’ said Kharth, and used the turn of a junction, checking all corners were clear, as an excuse to pretend she wasn’t hesitating. ‘We’re doing something. That’s all I need. What the hell are you stressed about?’

‘It’s very silly.’ There was a beat of silence. ‘Commander Aquila is very tall, don’t you think?’

Kharth took a moment to glare at a bulkhead, even if part of her much preferred to deal with this than the crisis ahead. ‘Tall. Blonde. Pretty. Smart. Yeah, she’s the whole package; Valance should sweep her off her feet and forget about you the moment we’re done -’

‘I said it was silly!’

‘That doesn’t give you a pass to be a complete idiot, Isa.’ Kharth gave a low groan. She was the last person to talk about this. ‘You can’t compete with history. Don’t try. Make your own. Valance is not-so-secretly very proud of and impressed by how you’ve come aboard this ship and in four seconds figured out things Aquila and Tegan didn’t sort in four months.’

‘You’re right,’ said Cortez. ‘This isn’t the time for this.’ But there was a moment’s silence as they tromped on down the dim corridor, until she said, ‘Where the hell did you come up with that “compete with history” wisdom?’

‘Romulans are a very spiritual people,’ Kharth prevaricated. When Dav had left to be Joined, she’d spent a long time reading. She had not been the first person to see a relationship transformed by it, by someone they cared about suddenly embracing centuries and lifetimes of experiences, memories. But all those lessons had turned out to be for nothing.

‘You read it on a fortune cookie, didn’t you,’ Cortez grumbled.

‘I don’t -’

Then there was a thump from around the next corner, the sound of thudding footsteps going the opposite direction, and the unmistakable sound of a door’s manual crank. In a heartbeat, Kharth had gone flush against the bulkhead, back to the turn, phaser raised.

Cortez, still in the middle of the corridor, watched with an unimpressed gaze. ‘That’s someone running away, Saeihr. Brandishing a phaser won’t help.’ She wandered past the security chief, sticking her head around the corner. ‘Hullo! We’re the rescue party, it’s okay!’

Seething, Kharth followed her into the now-empty corridor. ‘Oh no, she got shot, how terrible…’

‘Let’s check the doors, come on.’

While there were a series of office doors lining the corridor, only several could have been used, the hatches beside them exposing the hand-cranks. Kharth went to one, Cortez another, and Kharth looked at her with an arch expression. ‘Keep your phaser ready; we have no idea what we’re dealing with.’

‘Sure, sure, I’ll shoot people I’m here to rescue, check your own damn door.’

It didn’t take much for them to crank their respective doors open, but Kharth waited a beat until Cortez stuck her head inside hers, calling out to identify herself, before she examined her own room. The office was completely dark until the dim thread of light spilled from the gloomy corridor, and she did not call out. Instead, the flick of a thumb brought on the light on her phaser and, safe in the cover of the doorway, she swept it through the room.

Dimmed replicator, dead display, chair, desk, silhouette, plant-

‘Hell’s teeth,’ Kharth swore as the light landed on the figure flush against the wall. ‘What’re you – Dav?’

His hands had been lifted against the light, but that wasn’t the only reason she’d struggled to recognise him. His uniform was torn and worn, but most striking of all was the long hair and shaggy beard framing sunken features. He lowered his hands as she did her torch, and she could see those intense eyes locking onto her.

But Davir Airex did not look surprised, and said, ‘Oh, you’re back,’ in a rasping voice.

Kharth did not loosen her grip on her phaser. ‘Isa,’ she called urgently, before returning her gaze to Airex. ‘Dav, what the hell is going on?’

Airex gave a low, detached chuckle, and she realised that much as he was looking at her, he was also looking through her. ‘That’s not going to work.’ He nodded down at the phaser. ‘Are you going to use that this time?’

Cortez appeared at Kharth’s shoulder, and Kharth heard her muttered oath. ‘Well, that ain’t good. Airex, how long have you been here?’

‘I think we’ve got a while longer to go,’ said Airex, but his voice remained light, as if he was talking to himself more than them.

‘And why might I shoot you?’ asked Kharth, lowering her phaser even more.

His expression sank. ‘Because it is my fault. I don’t have any excuses. I deserve it all.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Cortez, ‘that the Odysseus got stuck like this. I mean, you’ve saved a lot of lives down on Whixby -’

‘That’s not what he’s talking about,’ said Kharth in a quiet voice, and holstered her phaser. ‘Dav. You know we’re real, right?’

‘Oh, shit,’ Cortez swore under her breath again. ‘He’s really been here a while, huh.’

‘You said I’m here again,’ Kharth said to Airex softly, and took a slow step forward. ‘What happened last time, Dav? What normally happens?’

He tensed as she approached but didn’t bolt, taut like a horse that might flee if she made just the wrong move. His brow furrowed. ‘I know I became the monster. I became a monster to you.’ He stepped back, hands coming up to his temples, spurred to agitation. ‘That’s why I left, Cara Sai, that’s why I had to go, you were too close on Teros, and I couldn’t – I don’t want you to look at me like that again…’

For a split second, Kharth considered teasing this out, following his train of thought. Davir Hargan had promised he’d come back to her, only to emerge a different man and leave without so much as an explanation. But if Davir Airex had been stuck alone in the dark for who knew how long, there was no telling what demons had begun to pray on his mind. She knew the long-term effects of isolation, the hallucinations brought on by a lack of stimulation, a lack of any outside contact.

‘Yes,’ she said at last, slinking closer. ‘I’m mad at you because you turned into an asshole and left me. But Cortez and I are here from Endeavour, and we’ve come to rescue you. Dav -’ She stopped just within arm’s reach and hesitated, looking into his wide, bewildered eyes. She needed to reach him, but more importantly, she needed to bring him back. ‘Commander Airex, report.’ She reached out to put a firm hand to his elbow, felt him coil like a spring for a heartbeat – and then his vision cleared, his eyes locking on her.

Davir Airex drew a sharp breath. ‘Lieutenant Kharth. You’re -’

‘Real.’

Cortez cleared her throat. ‘Yeah, maybe I should have jumped in sooner – why would you hallucinate me?’

Airex blinked, hard, focus returning to his vision at last. ‘What’s going on?’

‘The ship’s been temporally displaced, Commander,’ said Cortez. ‘That’s why we look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and you, I guess, have been wandering the corridors for… do I want to guess how long?’

‘I… theorised something like that.’ He rubbed his temples, moving now to rest against the desk. He was like a puppet whose strings had been cut as reality flooded back before him, seemingly weak all of a sudden. ‘We were heading for Main Engineering, but everything was… was it just our perception of time, first?’ Again his voice went detached, but Kharth knew this tone; he was thinking out loud rather than going away inside. ‘We got separated; corridors were turning in on themselves, looping, we couldn’t get anywhere, we couldn’t find each other…’

Kharth looked at Cortez, who winced. ‘Bending of space as much as time?’ the engineer hazarded. ‘I don’t have the data and we’re really moving out of my field.’

‘We were on our way to Main Engineering and looking for you,’ Kharth said to Airex. ‘Isa thinks she can free the Odysseus and close the rift.’ That was a generous interpretation, but he didn’t look like he needed new complexities.

‘How long?’ Airex said, lifting his head. ‘How long has the ship been missing?’

She winced. ‘Less than a week.’ She watched his expression creak, and again brought a hand to his elbow. ‘We should get you out of here, back to the bridge. Aquila’s there, Valance is there…’

‘Karana.’ He closed his eyes, screwing them tight. ‘Gods, I thought I’d give anything to get out, but everything I was running away from is still waiting for me, isn’t it?’

Even now, furious at him and broken by him and bewildered by him, her heart pinched at the wave of anguish on his face. Her hand moved to his upper arm, touch gentler. ‘Dav, we are going to get you off this ship, rescue this crew, and anything else, anything else, comes later. Okay?’

His eyes snapped open to lock on her, and he spoke with a rising panic. ‘I told myself I’d apologise and explain. That if I ever got out of here, I’d make it right. But I can’t, Sae -’

‘Later.’ She forced strength into her voice. If she’d been alone in the dark for countless aeons with nothing but her guilt for company, the light at the end of the tunnel might feel like an oncoming train for her, too. ‘We’ll escort you back.’

‘No,’ he said at last, but sounded stronger now. ‘I know the way, you have a mission.’

‘The way is clear, now,’ Cortez said gently. ‘Hatch 3-B can take a direct route to the bridge. No more temporal disconnect.’

He followed as she led him to the doorway, pliant now, exhausted. They’d moved to corridors as much as possible to make their progress quick, but now Cortez led them to the nearest Jefferies tube for a slower, but less-complicated route back. Kharth waited until they were back in the corridor before she asked her next question, wanting him moving, returning to normalcy before she pushed his mind back.

‘Where’s Templeton?’

Airex’s expression darkened, like a memory coming plunging from far back. ‘We got turned around and separated,’ he said slowly, staring for a heartbeat at nothing, and he paused with a hand atop the tube access. ‘I saw him years – some time later. He didn’t have – doesn’t have – I’ve centuries of memories to keep focus, to not lose myself, but he didn’t… was that him?’

Kharth exchanged a cautious glance with Cortez, who’d cracked the Jefferies tube open for him, then tilted her head at the confused jumble of words. ‘Keep it simple, Dav. What happened?’

‘That was real. Wasn’t it,’ Airex mumbled to himself, before his eyes snapped up to meet hers, widening. ‘He killed Lieutenant Kimathi.’

Then a phaser blast from the darkness took Cortez in the gut.

She dropped like a stone and Kharth turned, poised on the balls of her feet. A shadow loomed down the corridor, already opening fire again, and she barely had time to put a shoulder to Airex and half-shove him down into the Jefferies tube. ‘Go.’

Blocking and pushing slowed her down, and the second phaser shot glanced off her hip. It was set to stun, at least, but even a grazing shot was enough to knock her from her feet. Kharth tried to catch herself as she fell, thudding to the deck, and she heard thumping footsteps approaching. So she did the only thing she could do: reached out, and slammed the Jefferies tube hatch shut on Airex, sealing him inside.

A strong hand grabbed her by the shoulder and dragged her upright to come face-to-face with the weary, bearded, bedraggled features of Lieutenant Commander Robert Templeton, XO of the USS Odysseus, and a man she’d once called a friend. His eyes were wilder, less-focused than even Airex’s had been, and it was like he was barely seeing her.

But the phaser pistol rammed into her gut was real enough. ‘Time to end this,’ Templeton growled.

Then darkness.

‘Endeavour alone should thus be able to prepare the Spirelight Isles to receive approximately fifty thousand refugees within the expected time-frame.’ Thawn tapped the holo-projection of the timeline emanating from the wall’s display, sweeping it further along. ‘Secondary support operations will be able to quadruple that in the first week. Initial assessments suggest a maximum capacity of half a million refugees on the Spirelight Isles alone.’

Then she hesitated, looking across the room. ‘That’s wrong, isn’t it?’

Hale was the only other person in the suite, sipping coffee on the comfortable couch she probably didn’t know doubled as Rhade’s bed. ‘It’s not wrong,’ she said gently. ‘But we should probably not imply the expansion of refugee shelters beyond the Spirelight Isles at this juncture.’

‘But you want that?’

‘I want to save as many lives as possible.’

Thawn pursed her lips. ‘Ma’am, that’s a diplomat’s answer and we’re on the same team.’

‘I don’t want to put you in a difficult position with your family, Lieutenant.’

‘Lying to me puts me in a difficult position with you and with Starfleet, though.’

‘Fair enough.’ Hale sighed. ‘It’s my job to not just understand where the other side is coming from, but respect it – otherwise, how can I possibly convince them to reach a compromise? A shelter on Spirelight is a good idea, but I’d expect the Board to be anxious this is a back-door effort to achieve what they’re already afraid of: destroying the resorts in favour of refugees.’

‘Then be clear what you need from me,’ said Thawn quietly, ‘and be clear that I’m a Starfleet officer with insights into Whixby, not a member of the Twelfth House on your team.’

Hale stood up and straightened her blouse. ‘You’re both, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t ask you to pretend otherwise, even to yourself.’

‘My loyalty isn’t -’

‘Being questioned. But I recognise you’re walking a tightrope. So I will ask you to present the plain facts of the proposal, and I will advocate for it. Let your support, as a member of the Twelfth House, be implicit.’

Thawn gave a slow nod. ‘Do you need anything from Lieutenant Rhade?’

‘I’d expect, in doing the rounds, he’s made his position perfectly clear,’ came Hale’s diplomatic response. ‘Let’s keep him as the voice of Starfleet on the streets that people have to contend with in their day-to-day, instead of only encountering our perspective in boardrooms.’

‘Is that helpful?’

‘Perhaps. It certainly makes you look moderate in comparison, which I will take.’ Hale paused, rubbing her temples. ‘When can we speak to the Board?’

‘Tomorrow, perhaps. Slower than I would like. But forgive me, First Secretary – you look tired.’

‘I have been trying to help Doctor Sadek liaise with the local authorities and Whixby’s Director of Operations in the efforts on the Azure Chain,’ Hale admitted. ‘It’s possible I’ve been burning the candle at both ends, but Captain Rourke asked me to help the relief team.’

‘If I may, that’s a lot for him to put on you.’

Hale hesitated. ‘I misspoke. I offered to help the relief team. This mission has everyone stretched rather thin.’

And here I am, thought Thawn guiltily, taking a late night stroll down the market plaza yesterday. She had been clearing her head from her number crunching, taken PADDs to a dock and sat with the stars shining above and the seas lapping at the pier and had been altogether more productive after crawling for too long in her own head in her own hotel room. It still felt like an indulgence. ‘I’ll speak with Lieutenant Adupon, see if -’

‘No,’ Hale said firmly. ‘Finish the Spirelight proposal. Our facts need to be iron-tight and I want your focus here.’ But she took a step forward and squeezed Thawn’s arm. ‘I really do appreciate and value your efforts, Lieutenant.’

It was a little sad, Thawn knew, how much this validation cheered her up. Hale wasn’t in her chain of command, but she was important, respected, and had the ear of the captain. She was spared having to give this a relaxed response with the chirruping of her PADD, and she looked down at the new message with a frown.

‘Oh,’ said Thawn emptily. ‘Adamant and I have been invited to lunch with the Lillarties.’

Hale looked optimistic, but not without caution. ‘That’s a very good sign. You should be as pleasant and supportive of them as possible.’

Those aren’t really words anyone’s ever associated with me.

Cosbar and Evertine Lillarties chose a bistro near the waterfront, the four of them seated outside with a fine view of the sailboats coming in for tourists’ lunches. Exhausted by her work and concerns, Thawn joined them only to let Rhade harness most of the conversation; for all his stern sense of duty, his manners were impeccable. That left him perfectly situated to tease conversation out of Evertine, who was more than happy to do the lion’s share of talking about Whixby, Sanditor, and the festival she still plainly expected to go ahead.

‘…of course, we’re going to have to rearrange some of the programme,’ Cosbar interjected into her enthusiasm with a sigh. ‘We’ll hardly get all the artists we were promised.’

Rhade cleared his throat. ‘No doubt many of the figures who’ve already arrived are exciting? Especially under such exceptional circumstances. Following through on the festival at all is an… achievement.’ Thawn, pouring herself more water, tried to not glare at his hesitant choice of words.

Evertine Lillarties looked suspicious, but Cosbar bustled straight through. ‘Of course,’ he blustered again, ‘but the truly headline events were too busy to arrive so early in advance! This blasted storm.’ He took a large bite of sandwich and pressed on rather hurriedly. ‘Obviously this is an insignificant problem compared to some.’

‘But we can only deal with the situation in front of us,’ Evertine said in a genteel, more diplomatic tone. ‘There’s no gain in borrowing trouble.’

‘Sharing trouble,’ rumbled Rhade, ‘can ease burdens.’

Thawn leaned forward and looked a little desperately at Evertine. ‘Madam Lillarties,’ she said, trying to not flap. ‘I hear the Seashine puts on the ball of the season?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Evertine, picking up the thread of diversion. ‘If you’re still here in a week, you’d be most welcome.’

But Cosbar was regarding Rhade with a slightly frost air. ‘Sharing trouble’s all very well and good,’ he said, putting his glass down. ‘That’s different to dumping it on people. We have to look to our own problems first.’

Rhade tilted his chin up. ‘You have a paradise here on Sanditor. A privilege like that comes with obligations, surely?’

‘To protect it.’ Cosbar shook his head. ‘I have nothing against the people of the Paulson Nebula, nothing at all. But why should we bear the brunt of the cost of the storm, especially when it’s already taken so much from us? The Federation made the same arguments fifteen years ago, when no price was too high for the Romulan evacuation but Colonial Affairs couldn’t even give the likes of us the time of day…’

The moment he mentioned the Romulan evacuation, Thawn closed her eyes. It was as if she were directly in the path of a shuttle crash and could do nothing but accept what came next.

Indeed, Rhade leaned forward. ‘Whixby was still a thriving community fifteen years ago; the needs of the Romulan people were greater.’

Don’t rise to it, Thawn blazed into his mind, but she caught nothing more than a flicker of his gaze before it locked back on Cosbar.

‘And how did they repay us?’ Cosbar countered. ‘They attacked us! I don’t see how the revelations of Mars mean anything but that they remain a bunch of deceitful rats trying to take what was ours and slither behind our borders -’

Rhade’s chair rattled on the sun-baked paving slabs as he shot to his feet. ‘Sir, I do not mean to be ungrateful for the hospitality you’ve shown Lieutenant Thawn and I, but I cannot sit and listen to such words.’

Evertine froze as Thawn did, but Cosbar leaned back on his chair, gazing up at the broad-shouldered officer. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We have offered you hospitality. You weren’t invited here to lecture us.’

‘Then I take it I was invited so you could have a veneer of respectability, to appear as if Starfleet endorses your position,’ said Rhade briskly. ‘Allow me to disabuse you, or anyone, of that notion. Lieutenant Thawn and I can depart at -’

‘Let’s not be hasty!’ said Evertine Lillarties in a high-pitched voice, just as Thawn looked up and hissed, ‘Adamant!’

Silence fell on the table, and while Thawn could not pick up the particulars, she felt the wave of urgent communication from Evertine to Cosbar that had him, at least, falling silent. Rhade remained stock-still, and after a heartbeat, Evertine drew a slow breath.

‘Nobody,’ she said at last, ‘needs to go anywhere. You are guests, and that hospitality does not come with any price.’ An urgent look was flung at Cosbar at that; his moustache bristled, but he stayed silent. ‘I think that the rather dire straits of the region has got everyone on edge.’

‘I think so, too,’ said Thawn, anxiously jumping for the lifeline as Rhade managed to keep his mouth shut for an extra few moments. ‘The sun is, uh, very hot today, as well -’

‘Quite,’ said Rhade in a low, clipped voice, but she could feel the suggestion of betrayal emanating from him at her mollification. He had, she realised, expected him to side with her. ‘I think it would be best if I returned to my duties.’

Cosbar gave a low grunt. ‘Quite.’

Thawn bit her lip as Rhade stormed off. This was only a temporary reprieve, but she had no idea what would come of their next conversation. Then Evertine cleared her throat in a genteel manner, and said, ‘Are you familiar with the works of Torkaxalan, Mistress Thawn?’

They had definitely already talked about the biggest name in contemporary Betazoid art, but Thawn knew a pivot when she saw it. Cosbar settled into the sulk of a man whose preeminence had been dismissed by both challengers and his own wife, and so she was able to see out the rest of the lunch talking about absolutely nothing with a rather strained Evertine Lillarties.

At the least, it averted complete disaster.

Life was ebbing from the bars and eateries of Sanditor by the time she was finished, tourists heading for the afternoon’s activities, and so Thawn let herself be tugged by the crowds once she’d given the Lillarties her polite farewells. They had eaten in the shade while the sun was at its zenith, the warmth slightly less stifling now, and still she found the faint breeze coming in off the docks refreshing, rejuvenating.

She was, she suspected, going to need it. With a sigh, Thawn sank onto a bench near one of the long piers, small pleasure yachts moored along it, and pressed her hands to her forehead. She’d brought Rhade along with the hope he could present Starfleet’s views in a manner palatable to Betazoids, but there was a rift in culture between him and the people of Whixby she hadn’t anticipated. Or perhaps the rift applied to her, too, but she had to manage her family, deal with the political fallout, smooth the feathers he could ruffle and walk away from.

Laughter broke her brooding solitude; laughter she recognised. With a suspicious air, Thawn dragged down her hands to spot a smattering of figures heading down the dock. Young, bright-eyed, energetic, she recognised a few of them as part of the noble families visiting Whixby or represented on its board, but they were not what had drawn her attention. Because at the head of them, regaling the group with some tale that had them in raucous amusement as he led them to one of the boats, was Nate Beckett.

‘Are you kidding me?’ Thawn muttered, getting to her feet. The sound of her heels on the pier rang out like gunshots as she stalked towards them, the half-dozen getting the boat ready to be underway, but she kept her eyes on her target before she drew close and raised her voice. ‘Beckett!’

He was halfway through doing something with a rope on the sailing boat, but shot upright at her voice before she saw him paste on a smile. ‘Mistress Thawn.’ He bounced from the deck to the pier, taking in both her and his companions with a sweep of the hand. ‘Should I begin introductions? My friends, this is Lieutenant Rosara Thawn of the Twelfth House, but don’t be deceived; she’s not just got the ear of the Nyders, she’s also a professional rock star – ow –’

Stalking forward, she’d grabbed him by the elbow to drag him back up the pier. Even though she was in heels and a sundress that didn’t leave her particularly mobile and he was in casual khaki shorts and boat shoes, he still stumbled at the speed and intensity of her extraction. ‘What are you doing?’ he hissed.

‘Me? What are you doing?’ Out of earshot, she rounded on him, eyes blazing.

Beckett blinked. ‘Getting on a boat. You see, they’re these grand inventions that float on -’

‘Beckett!’

‘Snapping my name doesn’t make you suddenly make more sense! What does it look like I’m doing, I’m mingling!’

‘It looks like we’ve come here to try to build a damned refugee shelter and instead you’ve been partying and cavorting with the locals! We didn’t bring you here for a bloody holiday!’

He grimaced, tugging on his rumpled blue polo shirt to straighten it. ‘Let’s be real, you didn’t bring me here at all.’

‘No! Because I wouldn’t have invited you on an important mission for the same reason you get any job: being an admiral’s son!’

There had been a lightness to his indignation so far, treating her anger as a wave to ride. But now Beckett’s expression slammed shut, and she didn’t need to be a telepath to feel the combination of fury and control wash over him. ‘Okay, what curled up in your arse and died, Thawn?’

‘I am trying to get this job done -’

‘No, you’re pissed off about something and, as per usual, taking it out on me. I don’t know when it became open season on Nate Beckett, but I’m not here for you to lash out at because you don’t dare lash out at, I don’t know, Hale, or Rhade, or your own family.’ He folded his arms across his chest, back straightening.

Her lip curled. ‘Alright, then, explain to me the benefit of going sailing for an afternoon?’

‘Here’s a novel concept: I don’t answer to you,’ he spat. ‘Hale’s running this mission. You’re nothing but her link to the Nyders. I don’t have to justify a damn thing.’

‘Ensign –’

‘Oh, no, you don’t come and chew me out just because you’re in a mood and then act like this is a professional situation.’ Now his expression shifted from indignation for a flash of hurt. ‘I thought I’d earned just a little of the benefit of the doubt from you. After Ephrath, after the Koderex –’

‘This has nothing to do with either of those.’

‘You’re right. On those we were working together. But I don’t see any damn reason for us to exchange notes here. After all.’ He tilted his chin up. ‘I’m just swanning around, having a grand old partying time while people die. Isn’t that the case? Doesn’t that make checking up on me a complete waste of your day?’

She was silent, her frustration and anger with Rhade still fizzing through her veins, the nagging sense of guilt tugging at her that maybe, just maybe, he had a point about her taking this out on him.

He smirked without humour at her response. ‘Yeah. So maybe you go back to work, or you go deal with whatever it is you’re mad at Rhade for – it is him, right, either he’s done something and you expressing yourself would require you to acknowledge one single feeling about him, or you’re just freezing up at having to play happy couple for the crowd?’ Beckett shrugged at her hesitation. ‘Thought so. I’ve got a boat to catch. Lieutenant.’

If she’d had a leg to stand on, she could have written him up for his tone of voice, for the disrespect in the jaunty salute he slung her as he stepped back. Then the anger slid off him – or, her senses raged, deeper into him – and he turned like he didn’t have a care in the world, sauntering back towards the boat he’d left behind.

‘Hey, guys, did anyone pack the drinks…’

Turning away from him took a wrenching effort, like she was ripping through her own anger, guilt, and frustration. But she couldn’t stay there, glaring at his back or brooding on her own bad choices, or on the conversations she’d determinedly avoided having in lieu of this fight. The sun was still high in the sky, the day had many hours of it left yet, and she still had a plethora of preparations to make if her compromise with Hale was going to work.

Now was not the time to think about feelings. Not about the Lillarties. Not about Adamant Rhade.

And not about Nate Beckett.

‘There’s an emergency hatch on this section,’ Lieutenant Arys explained to Valance, pointing at the flickering deck plan of the USS Odysseus. ‘We could dock the King Arthur there and easily link up to the Mess Hall.’

‘It’s part of its design as a disaster relief shelter,’ Commander Aquila agreed. ‘Closest to enough escape pods for everyone, too.’

Tegan scratched their chin. ‘What happens if – assuming we can get in touch with the crew down there – they launch the pods?’

Arys bit his lip as he thought. ‘I’m not sure. But any of the most likely outcomes don’t include them naturally returning to normal space.’

‘We have options,’ Valance said a little brusquely as Tegan opened their mouth to theorise again. ‘If we can’t bring the whole ship back into normal space without destabilising the rift, we can bring everyone aboard the King Arthur. We’ll know more once Commander Cortez has her hands on the warp field controls in Main Engineering.’

Arys winced like it was his fault he wasn’t a world-class mind in warp field harmonics and quantum physics. ‘Sorry, ma’am. I’ll keep at this.’

Valance considered apologising, or at least letting him off the hook, but the alternative was to tell him to do nothing while they waited and watched. She gave him a stern nod and moved to the display of the Odysseus’s internals that still wasn’t giving lifesign readings.

Aquila slid to the other side of the console a moment later, voice dropping. ‘Let them work. It makes them feel useful.’

‘I know how to command my team, Cassia.’

Aquila raised an eyebrow a micron. ‘Commander Cortez knows what she’s doing. We’ll hear from her soon enough.’

‘Didn’t Airex and Templeton know what they were doing when you sent them below?’

She stiffened. ‘You agreed to this plan too, Kar. If you know what you’re doing, then you don’t need me to lecture you about when it’s time to sit back and trust your people.’ Then Aquila hesitated. ‘Why am I doing this? Let’s cut to the chase: it’s okay for you to be worried about her.’

Valance met her gaze as firmly as she could manage. ‘When I took this mission, I assured Captain Rourke that I would be a professional about this, rescuing the ship. Rescuing you.’

‘When did you decide being professional meant pretending you don’t have feelings? Once upon a time you’d have set the world on fire to board this ship and still pulled off a daring rescue.’

No, that’s you, Valance thought for a heartbeat, until memories stirred in her of the officer she’d been ten years ago. Lieutenant Valance probably would have done it. Ninety percent of the time, she’d have pulled it off. The other ten percent would have gotten people killed.

‘I’m trusting Commander Cortez,’ she said at length. ‘That’s why I sent her, that’s why I sent Kharth. It doesn’t mean I like it.’

Aquila nodded, not necessarily believing her but backing off. Then she gave a lopsided smile. ‘I like her. Cortez, I mean. You always seemed so heavy the last few years when we talked. She makes you a bit brighter.’ The smile turned to a smirk. ‘I guess sticking around on Endeavour for her was worth it.’

‘I didn’t stay for her,’ Valance said, a little hotly and almost entirely correct, then paused. ‘You’re right, I suppose. I’ve changed a lot. Endeavour – the people on Endeavour, being the XO instead of having the distance of being the captain, it all helps me… be better.’

‘Keeps me ahead on our bet at least.’ The corners of Aquila’s eyes creased. ‘We should have called each other more.’

‘Yes,’ said Valance, and swallowed. ‘But I came when I was needed. And maybe I would have set things on fire if Rourke had tried to stop me coming after you.’

The smirk returned. ‘I’ve missed you, too.’

Before Valance might be forced to do more, such as express emotions in a balanced manner, there was a thump from the Jefferies Tube hatch. They all whirled as it swung open, Valance’s heart in her throat – why would they come back? Why would they retreat?

Then the bedraggled and bearded figure of Davir Airex staggered into the bridge’s dim lighting.

‘Dav?’ she hurried over as he, chest heaving, braced himself against the nearest dimmed console. ‘What happened?’

He lifted a hand, face screwing up in concentration. ‘Give – apologies. Please give me a moment.’

Aquila slunk to Valance’s side, and she saw her gaze flicker to the phaser rifles by the bulkhead. ‘Time dilation, you say.’

Airex was muttering under his breath, and Valance still risked taking an extra step forward. She caught snippets that sounded like nonsense to her, until she recognised one, and realised it was a Trill name; remembered it was the name of one of his past host’s children. He was reciting family members.

Her voice dropped. ‘Davir Airex. You’re Davir Airex, on the bridge of the USS Odysseus.’

His eyes snapped up, and now there was clarity in them. ‘I don’t know how long I was alone,’ he admitted, apprehensive. ‘There were ways I could anchor myself, on my own in the dark. Ways I could focus my mind, with lifetimes of recollections. Ways of not losing myself.’ Now he straightened, anxiety re-entering his gaze. ‘Robert Templeton didn’t have that. He’s completely snapped. And he’s just attacked Cortez and – and Kharth. She pushed me into the hatch, covered my escape, but I don’t…’ He drew a shuddering breath. ‘He’s killed Kimathi.’

Aquila was crossing the distance like a whip-crack, any softness fading. ‘Explain yourself, Commander.’

‘Cassia -’

‘No.’ Airex lifted a hand to Valance again. ‘Commander Aquila is right, but we don’t have a lot of time. May I work and talk?’ He nodded past them to the engineering panel at which Cortez had been working, the brightest and best-functioning of their displays.

Aquila’s jaw was tight. ‘Go on.’

Confidence was re-entering his movements as he went to the display and began tapping at controls. ‘Commander Templeton and I ended up in what I presume now was a subspace bubble where space and time were warping. Not only did we experience… I’m not sure how long. Years, perhaps. But leaving became impossible; corridors curved in on themselves. We became separated at some point. For a time, I was trapped somewhere in total darkness.

‘I know I started to hallucinate,’ he pressed on, not looking up. ‘I can only imagine what happened to Templeton. When I encountered him again, he’d lost his grasp of what was real and what was in his head. I tried to reach out to him and he became violent; I had to flee.’ Airex swallowed hard. ‘Some time later, I found the body of Lieutenant Kimathi. I don’t know if she’d always been in that section with us or somehow got out of Main Engineering. He’d killed her.’

Aquila planted her hands on the console across from him. ‘Are you sure, Commander? I understand isolation has an impact on the psyche, but…’

‘Commander Templeton,’ said Airex, his voice growing in confidence as he read and as he worked, ‘has lost all sense of who he is. All he knows is a world where he cannot tell falsehood from reality, and all he wants is for this to end.’ He paused a beat, reading something on the display, then his eyes snapped up to Aquila’s. ‘He wants to destroy the ship.’

Tegan swore at that. ‘And Cortez has just opened up a clear path between him and Main Engineering without any more time-space shit.’

Aquila stalked over to where she’d put down the phaser rifle and hefted it. ‘Then I guess we’re going after him.’

But Valance watched Airex, watched him work. ‘Cortez and Kharth.’ She swallowed. ‘Did he kill them?’

‘The phaser blasts were Stuns,’ Airex said after a moment’s thought. ‘But I’m trying to recalibrate internal sensors so we can pick up life-signs.’

Lieutenant Arys glanced between them. ‘No disrespect meant, Commander, but if you’ve been… through this… should you be trying to modify the ship’s systems?’

‘Lieutenant, I have spent an interminable length of time needing to keep my mind focused. It has given me a tremendous chance to consider the situation in which the Odysseus finds itself. And I see Commander Cortez’s excellent intellect has provided us with even more data about the condition of the ship and its warp field.’ He was sounding, Valance thought, a lot more like himself, albeit when he was hyper-focusing on a problem.

‘If you can restore internal sensors and comms,’ said Commander Aquila, shouldering her rifle, Tegan moving to join her, ‘then you can find them and send us in the right direction.’

‘If I can locate them, that shouldn’t be necessary.’ There was a ping from Airex’s console, and he gave a thin smile. ‘There. Three life-signs. Templeton’s heading towards Main Engineering, for certain, but he’s bringing them with him.’

‘Why?’ said Arys.

‘That’s not our most important issue,’ said Valance. ‘Stopping him is.’

Airex drew a slow breath. ‘I know how to free the ship,’ he said at last, ‘but it can’t happen quickly.’ With a tap on the console, he brought up a fresh projection showing the Odysseus, its warp field a bubble around it, different sections lit in varying hues of reds and greens. ‘With the calibration data from Commander Cortez’s scans, I can begin a process of incrementally bringing the ship back into temporal alignment. Once that is done, it should be possible to further modify the warp field, returning us to normal space.’

‘What about the rift?’ said Lieutenant Arys.

‘There’s something I should have done when we first used the Odysseus as a stopper. I only thought of it eight months ago,’ Airex said casually. ‘Once the whole ship is in the same temporal alignment, I think I can use the resulting increase in power to flood our warp field with dekyons.’

Commander Aquila moved to join him, reading his work with an intense expression. ‘So as we slip out of the Rift, we seal it fully behind us.’

‘Precisely, Commander.’ He winced. ‘But this process would, from our perspective, take a little time. Which does not deal with Templeton.’

Aquila watched the display, frowning. ‘We don’t need the whole ship in alignment. Just the essential systems, the bridge, the mess hall. We shunted where you and Templeton were back into alignment – can you shunt him out again?’

There was a pause from him. ‘That’s an interesting idea, Commander,’ he said at length.

‘I’m not an engineer,’ said Cassia Aquila without pride. ‘But I’m a pilot, I know warp field harmonics, and I know my ship.’

He still hesitated. ‘It would essentially create a new subspace bubble, restoring the time-dilating effects of that region of the ship.’

‘And if you did it now,’ she said, ‘he’s nowhere important.’

Valance took a step forward. ‘He’s with Cortez and Kharth. What happens to them in that subspace bubble?’

Airex’s gaze dropped. ‘If we don’t bring them back before we return to normal space, they’d be lost.’

Tegan drew a sharp breath. ‘Yeah, but if you drop the bubble before we return to normal space, Templeton could screw us all.’

‘And it’s not an instantaneous process,’ said Airex. ‘Nor is it one where stopping and starting is, frankly, safe. We must remember the Rift, its pressures upon our warp field, and the risk of tearing it back open. If we put them in this, this bubble, we trap them for good.’

Commander Aquila shook her head. ‘This saves the ship.’

Valance’s head snapped over to her. ‘At the cost of three lives. Including your XO.’

‘Robert’s a good man,’ said Aquila. ‘If he’s trying to destroy us, he’s already lost.’

‘Cortez and Kharth aren’t.’ Valance straightened. ‘Minutes ago, you were happy to grab a phaser rifle and go down there to hunt him. Let’s do that while Commander Airex supervises the process from here.’

‘It’s not a process which needs much supervision,’ Airex admitted. ‘The entire point is to do this by tiny increments.’

‘Tiny increments means not very quickly,’ Commander Aquila said flatly to Valance. ‘I’m not risking my entire ship for three people. Whoever they are.’

‘You’re condemning them to death?’ Valance countered. ‘Without even trying?’

‘I know I told you to not ignore your feelings in being professional, Karana. But that doesn’t mean be a slave to them. I have to balance those three against the lives of one hundred people.’

‘This is what it comes down to? The numbers game?’

‘What it comes down to, Commander Valance, is that this isn’t your ship, this isn’t your crew, and you don’t get to lecture me about what risks I will or will not take for them,’ thundered Aquila, standing strong against her. ‘You’re not a captain, you don’t understand.’

They had fought before. Ever since the Academy, they’d found all manner of points of policy, ethics, science to crawl over and bicker about, testing themselves against each other, growing and thriving by being the best challenge they knew. Part of Valance’s blood sung with that same satisfaction of a good fight now, a good contest against the woman she always wanted to be a part of and yet always beat.

But this wasn’t a game, it wasn’t an intellectual exercise, and being right against Cassia Aquila was not more important than saving Isa Cortez.

Valance ground her teeth. Then her gaze snapped to the display. ‘Dav, as you bring the ship back into alignment, can you start with the mess hall?’

‘That should be straightforward,’ he said cautiously.

She turned on Arys. ‘Lieutenant, do you feel confident repeating the process of aligning the King Arthur to a different set of warp field harmonics?’

He straightened, eyes serious. ‘If you’re asking if I can bring the King Arthur around to the Mess Hall like we talked about, on my own? Yes, ma’am. I can do it.’

Valance looked at Aquila. ‘Let Arys rescue your crew and get them the hell out of here. Let Airex bring the Odysseus back into alignment and out of the Rift. Meanwhile, you and I go down and save our people and your ship.’

Silence hummed in the air, even Airex stopping his work to stare at the proceedings. Then Aquila looked at Tegan. ‘Lieutenant,’ she said slowly. ‘Go with Mr Arys.’ Her eyes snapped back to Valance after a heartbeat. ‘I’m sure your pilot is very good, but that’s a two-man job, and saving the crew is the mission objective we don’t have any backup for.’ If they failed to close the rift, Endeavour was out there somewhere. If they didn’t save the crew, they were dead.

Airex cleared his throat very slightly. ‘Actually,’ he said at length, ‘Commander Aquila should remain here. She’s qualified to oversee the process with the data we have. And her command codes should be able to at least slow down Templeton if he gets to Engineering and tries to access delicate systems.’ His eyes snapped onto Valance, and his gaze and expression were the clearest they’d been since he’d staggered onto the bridge; perhaps forever. ‘I should go with you.’

‘Dav, you’re not at your best -’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But I can’t slow Templeton down from here, and if he does do any damage in Engineering before we stop him, I’m more use than Commander Aquila in fixing it.’ Valance knew he wasn’t finishing that train of thought: Cortez could do it, but Cortez might be out of action or even dead. And then he said, ‘Karana. He’s got Saeihr, too.’

Valance looked away, throat tight, and swore in her head in several languages. She drew a sharp breath and looked to Aquila. ‘Cassia?’

Cassia Aquila sighed. ‘The commander’s logic is sound. I’m the captain. My place is on the bridge.’ She turned to Lieutenants Tegan and Arys. ‘Your orders are to get the crew out of here and not look back. Do you understand?’ They both nodded, and she looked at Airex. ‘You better set this program in motion and let me ride it out, Commander.’

He inclined his head respectfully. ‘Ma’am.’

As Airex returned to the engineering console, Aquila padded over to Valance, gaze guarded, voice dropping. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘I don’t get to lecture you on not going hell-bent-for-leather enough, then complain when you do it at me.’

Valance winced. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re not. Don’t be.’ Aquila looked almost disgusted. ‘Stop this apologising for who you are; you never used to do that. You’ve just followed your heart, stood your ground on it, and figured out a way through. That’s the Karana I remember. Just do me one favour.’

‘Anything.’

Aquila squeezed her arm. ‘Fight for Rob like you fight for them, okay? He needs help.’

‘I will. I’ll bring them all back.’

There was a bleep from Airex’s console. ‘It’s started,’ he said, and gestured to the display as the colours of the warp field began to gently fluctuate. ‘We should all prepare for the possibility that things will get weirder before they get easier. But the more this progresses, we should see systems restoring as the computer can communicate more effectively with itself, as power flow evens out. Sensors and internal comms should start to come back.’

Aquila nodded, joining him at the console. ‘I can take it from here. Everyone should get going.’

Tegan and Arys headed off, Tegan looking particularly unhappy about this, and Airex moved to retrieve the phaser rifle that Aquila had put down. His eyes moved to Valance. ‘Ready?’

And for all she’d been racing across light-years, across time and space, on this myriad of rescue missions of him, of Cassia, and now Cortez and even of Kharth; for all there were a hundred lives on the line on the Odysseus, and countless if the rift was left to unleash hell on the Whixby system, Karana Valance couldn’t help but feel her heart lighten. Because whatever hell she was about to dive into, she was doing it with one of the most stalwart friends she’d ever had.

‘As I feel the captain would say,’ she said, chin tilting up. ‘Let’s save the day.’

The pulsing of the emergency lights came in thumping synchronicity to the thudding in Kharth’s skull as she came to. Her gut ached worst of all, the pain spreading across her abdomen and around to her back, and she had to roll, not rise, to take in her surroundings.

Main Engineering on the USS Odysseus. Spotty and intermittent signs of systems functioning. The crumpled shape of Cortez a few feet away.

‘Isa?’ she groaned, but Cortez did not move, and with a wince, Kharth raised her head to see the silhouetted figure before the shimmering warp core. ‘Templeton?’

Robert Templeton looked like he’d not only been left in the wilderness for several years, but dragged backwards through every bush on it. He was leaning heavily against the main warp core control panel, muttering to himself as buttons flashed red and warning alerts blatted, clearly thwarting whatever he was attempting. At her voice, he turned, and his expression folded.

‘You’re still moving,’ Templeton rasped, voice rather detached. ‘I guess I didn’t kill you.’

She sat up slowly, and while he watched her, he didn’t move. His phaser was holstered at his hip, but she couldn’t see hers. ‘Your weapon was set to Stun. Was it not meant to be?’

‘I didn’t…’ His gaze dropped, focusing on something else for a moment. Then he shook his head and muttered again. ‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t matter.’

Kharth did not risk moving further, even as he turned away. She kept her voice as soft as possible to still be heard. ‘Can I check on Commander Cortez?’

‘I…’

‘Robert. Can I check on my friend?’

Templeton gave a sharp shake of the head, then waved a hand at the crumpled Cortez. ‘Go. But don’t – don’t distract me.’

Kharth crawled across the deck rather than rose, and reached for Cortez’s pulse. Steady enough. She dropped her voice more. ‘Isa? Come on…’

A low groan, then Cortez’s eyes flickered open. ‘Tell me we’re back in Kansas, Toto.’

‘I have no idea what you’re on about.’

‘…yup. This is real.’ With assistance, Cortez sat up and slumped against the panel, taking in the situation as focus returned to her eyes. ‘I forgot how much it sucks to get shot.’

‘I try to not be on the receiving end, no.’

Her eyes fell on Templeton, narrowing as she squinted to see the display. ‘Hey, if you keep trying to cut the injector feed, that’s going to collapse the whole warp field!’

Templeton froze, looking back at them. Whatever he had been trying to access from Main Engineering, it looked like the computer wasn’t letting him get very far. ‘I know,’ he rasped. ‘Why do you care?’

‘Uh, because then the ship gets ripped apart in subspace?’

‘Exactly.’ His eyes flashed like this was a useful insight, like this was an exchange of scientific ideas. ‘And why do you care about that?’

‘Uh… because then we’d die? And generally that’s considered a bad thing.’

‘Commander Templeton.’ Kharth tried a similar firm tone that had done something to impact Airex’s reverie. ‘I know you’ve been alone for a long time, separated from Commander Airex. I can’t imagine what it’s been like. But we’re very much real, we’re not a figment of your imagination. We’re a rescue mission, we’re here to rescue you.’

‘Oh,’ said Cortez with more dawning realisation. ‘I gotta keep putting this one out there, yeah: okay, so you and Saeihr here were pen-pals for a bit, but seriously, why would anyone on this ship hallucinate me? We’ve barely met.’

Templeton’s expression flickered. ‘You are new,’ he mumbled. ‘But then again, the corridors stopped turning on themselves. I managed to get down here. That’s all new…’

‘It’s new because we arrived, and we’re changing things,’ said Kharth. ‘We’ve mitigated some of the phenomenon’s effect on the ship, and if you let Cortez take a look at the warp core -’

She’d half-risen, only slowly, but it was ample time for Templeton to snatch his phaser out and level it at her. ‘No!’

Her hands came up as she sank back down. ‘Okay. Okay.’

‘I know how this goes,’ said Templeton, voice now approaching a whimper. ‘Every time I come close to getting out, one of you comes, something comes, and tries to convince me to let things stay the same, let me stay in the dark, and you always say it’s about survival but it’s about just – it all going on forever, isn’t it?’

Cortez glanced at the panel he was at. ‘Why are you trying to blow up the ship?’

‘Over and over, round and round in the dark, and it doesn’t end, and there’s nothing real, and there’s only one way to stop that, isn’t there?’ said Templeton in a tumbling mess, as if he didn’t need to complete thoughts, as if he expected them to know the unspoken in his sentences.

Kharth’s breath caught. ‘I get it,’ she said anxiously. ‘Or, I think I get it. You got stuck on your own for impossibly long, and every time you thought you had a way out… something showed up to stop you.’ You spent forever alone in the dark, and so your mind started spitting hallucinations at you until you don’t know what’s real and what’s in your head. And every time you came close to killing yourself, your subconscious spat out another hallucination to try to talk you down from the ledge.

But Cortez stiffened. ‘Oh my God. Was Airex right, then? You killed Kimathi?’

Kharth could have smacked her, but Templeton flew across the space to ram the phaser into Cortez’s cheek, faster than she’d have expected for a man in his state. For a heartbeat she considered making her move, but her body was still sluggish from the Stun, and she knew she’d only make it worse.

‘You know how many times I shot Kimathi?’ Templeton snarled. ‘You know how many times I shot Airex and shot the captain and shot Tegan? Which one? Which one do you mean?’ Cortez froze, and after thudding heartbeats, he shoved her away and turned back to the controls. ‘Unless you can help me with these systems, shut up.’

Both of them sank to the deck as Templeton stalked back to the controls, and Kharth stayed put several moments to make sure his attention had drifted before she slid up beside Cortez. The engineer’s chest was heaving, her voice almost too low to be heard as she breathed, ‘That phaser’s not set to Stun any more.’

‘Then let’s not piss him off,’ Kharth murmured. ‘What do you think he’s doing?’

‘If he wants to blow up the ship, there are countless ways he can do it from here. The only thing on our side is if the main computer core isn’t in temporal alignment; if requests time out or it can’t run a check fast enough, a lot of the more sophisticated systems just won’t happen,’ came Cortez’s eventual low reply. ‘I could probably do a work-around, but he’s – what’s his training?’

‘Ops,’ said Kharth with a sigh. ‘But he came up as a quartermaster and personnel officer, took it as the command track.’

‘Oh, good. The Jock Ops, not the Nerd Ops. We’d be dead if Thawn snapped and tried to kill us all.’

‘Don’t put yourself down. You’d kill us all way quicker than Thawn.’

‘That’s true,’ said Cortez, her breathing slower as jokes calmed her. ‘I’ve got that instinct of going for the throat. She’d want to give us a villainous monologue first.’ She lifted her eyes to sweep around the gloom of Main Engineering, and though Kharth hoped she was coming up with some genius scheme to use the Odysseus’s systems in their favour, she instead said, ‘So how do we get out of this?’

‘I was hoping you had a plan,’ Kharth muttered. ‘Airex will get to the bridge. Tell the others what happened.’

‘You mean the Dav Airex who was almost as cracked as Templeton?’

‘Airex came to his senses and had a conversation with us. Templeton shot us and still thinks we’re figments of his imagination trying to stop him from killing himself. He’ll pull through for us.’

‘Great. Just great.’ Cortez rolled her eyes as Kharth looked over. ‘We’re in a situation this bad, and all you’ve got is “I’ve suddenly rediscovered faith in the ex who gave me massive trust issues?”’

Kharth winced. ‘Let’s be fair. I had trust issues before Dav. But it doesn’t sound great when you put it like that, no.’

‘Let’s call that Plan… Q.’

‘What’s A through P?’

Cortez let out a slow breath, eyes still dragging around Main Engineering in a desperate hunt for anything that might give them an advantage. ‘Still working on that.’

Thawn had taken her work back to the hotel suite, but Rhade did not return for many hours. She had expected him to take some time to work off his frustration. She did not expect him to glare at her upon his arrival, expression folding into one of disapproval and betrayal, and say, ‘That can’t happen again.’

After days of being on her best behaviour – except possibly for Beckett – something stirred in her. She sat up. ‘I agree.’

‘That scene with the Lillarties was completely unacceptable -’

‘I agree.’ Now she stood. ‘Are you about to say that I’m in the wrong because I didn’t back you when you bit Cosbar Lillarties’ head off?’

He scowled. ‘Cosbar isn’t some soft-hearted socialite who doesn’t understand the galaxy; he’s a man of influence and wealth who’s chosen to use his power to protect himself at the expense of others.’

‘I don’t care. Or at least, I don’t care if I should judge him, because judging him gets us absolutely nowhere!’ Her voice rose in volume and, somewhat to her frustration, pitch. ‘What did you think was going to happen? He’d say, “Oh, sorry old chap, now you point it out, Romulans are people.”’

‘I thought he might think twice before spouting such rubbish and assuming everyone around him agrees.’

‘And will that change how he votes? How he influences others to vote? Or will that make him dig in his heels and refuse to trust Starfleet so much he rejects our proposal for the Spirelight shelter?’ She took a sharp step forward, jabbing a finger at him. ‘Will that achieve one single thing except for making you feel better?’ Her anger at Beckett had felt like a snarl inside her, twisted around and shooting off in an unexpected direction. This fury was different; righteous, correct, a sword to cut through the Gordian Knot of her feelings.

But Adamant Rhade did not move. ‘We cannot achieve anything by treating people like this as if we agree with them. That only emboldens them.’

‘It was lunch, Adamant. All you had to do was change the bloody subject!’

‘He thinks we’re like him! Or he did!’ Rhade tossed his hands in the air. ‘He thinks we’re just as closed-minded, that being from a noble house of Betazed makes us never think of anyone before ourselves. Attitudes like his – no, people, including Cosbar Lillarties himself – pushed our homeworld to lobby the Federation to abandon the Romulan people -’

‘Why are you lecturing me about this? I know! I don’t like it! But that was fifteen years ago and we have to save the people of the Paulson Nebula, and that includes getting the Lillarties on-side!’

‘It doesn’t have to. The Fourth Fleet has declared a state of emergency in the region, and First Secretary Hale is a ranking member of the Diplomatic Corps; between her and Captain Rourke they have more than enough authority to overrule the Board of Tourism.’

Thawn stared at him. ‘You mean seize the assets of Whixby and force the inhabitants to take in refugees. Deploy Security if necessary. Ignore the wishes of the lawful government of this planet. That’s your opinion, the opinion of a man who once preferred to throw his career away on a matter of principle he wouldn’t win -’

‘This isn’t the same as blowing up a defenceless ship.’ He took a sharp step forward. ‘This is about standing up for what’s right, and not allowing bigotry to grow in dark but influential corners. I dare say you’d agree with me if this weren’t so close to your family.’

‘Family,’ she echoed, something humming through and emptying a part of her. ‘You’re right, this is about family. The Lillarties are influential and affect the wellbeing of the Nyders. Which affects the wellbeing of the Twelfth House.’

‘Which is not more important than -’

‘Than you keeping your mouth shut over lunch?’ She’d been frantic in her anger before. Now it had turned cold. ‘We have to do everything to keep our families happy, obey their decisions about our lives without question – so long as it doesn’t offend your sense of honour. Not mine, mind. I have to be dutiful, I have to try to walk the line between the Federation, the lives at stake, my family, because if every step of mine isn’t perfect, I burn a bridge with someone or everyone!’

He hesitated at that, at the shift in her. ‘Both of our opinions are important, Rosara.’

‘So long as I agree with you? Because if this goes badly, nobody in Starfleet will blame you, because it’s not your family. Or your family won’t deem you a traitor for coring out the heart of one of their crown jewels. It’s very easy for you to act like principle is the only thing at stake, because for you, nothing else is at stake.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Not even me, apparently.’

‘That’s hardly fair.’

‘This is the only thing I’ve ever needed from you, Adamant.’ Her throat tightened, and she had to push forward, because she was damned if she was going to let her tears hijack this conversation. ‘You are the only person who was supposed to be on my side, the only person who was supposed to look beyond the cold-blooded pragmatism and politics. But I’ve had more support from Hale, more support from – in his stupid way – bloody Nate bloody Beckett!’ It was an awkward kind of support. But Beckett had at least taken two seconds to consider her feelings and perspective, even if he’d kicked her for them. Rhade was blundering on like he expected her to blindly agree. ‘I expect the Lillarties to be opponents, I expect Falyn to need careful managing. I didn’t expect you to be the biggest obstacle to threading this fucking needle!’

She’d gone back to shouting, and his expression had shut down as she did, folding back into control. She could sense the awkward guilt about him, the apprehension and uncertainty, but he was expert, at least, at not letting it show.

He swallowed. ‘Perhaps I can apologise to Cosbar -’

‘No, you can’t. You’ll choke on it, and it won’t help anyway.’ She turned away, running a hand over her rumpled hair to smooth it. ‘The damage is done; you’ve been the iron fist hammering them with Starfleet’s judgement, and we can work with that. So it’s time for the velvet glove, which means it’s time for you to go. Let your shadow loom from a distance, or you’ll look toothless while we try to smooth this over.’ Hale’s words and lessons rang deep, but even though she was not a diplomat, enough of Thawn’s instincts were still running her decisions – because this was still, at the end of the day, family. She knew in her bones how to keep family happy, at whatever cost. ‘Go to the Spirelight Isles,’ she said at last. ‘Join the relief team, grab one of their shuttles, and start doing some damned surveys and planning prep out there.’

Rhade hesitated. ‘If you want me to go.’

‘You need to be not here if we’re to use your offence of Cosbar to our advantage.’ Her jaw tightened. ‘And yes. I want you to go. There’s no benefit in us pretending that there is anything between you and me. Not right now.’ She looked about the suite to where his bag sat in the open door to the bedroom they didn’t share, and the room suddenly felt too small. ‘I’ll let you pack. Go as soon as you have a ride.’

‘Rosara.’ His voice caught as she turned. ‘We have to talk about this later. Now isn’t the time -’

She swallowed hard, knowing he was trying to be diplomatic, hearing the tone suggesting he thought she was being unreasonable and was too sensible to fight this right now. ‘You’re right,’ she said as she stalked to the door. ‘Now isn’t the time.’

But having stormed off, she had to decide where to go. She didn’t want to be anywhere Rhade would see her once he’d packed and left, which might not be for a number of hours yet. Going for a walk risked taking her near the docks once Beckett returned, and she didn’t fancy whatever would come when they next met. Hale would ask questions she didn’t want to answer.

She hid on the Prydwen for a while. It was soothing to be surrounded by the bulkheads of Starfleet construction and read and lose herself in her PADDs and reports. But it could not last, and so some hours later she wandered into Falyn Nyder’s office with an airiness she didn’t feel. ‘Hullo, Coz.’

Falyn rose from her desk, warned of her coming by staff, apprehensive anyway. ‘Rosara, darling. What excellent timing; I was going to have a break.’ She ushered them towards the office balcony, all the better to make this not a formal meeting, all the better to make this a conversation just between family.

For once, that suited Thawn, and she didn’t stop Falyn from fussing to get them settled, bringing them drinks. She sat on the balcony, watching the beauty of Sanditor spill below: the buzz of activity in the streets, the sea painted with flashes of white sails, the sky painted with flashes of steel. Perhaps Rhade was aboard one of the shuttles leaving, perhaps he’d already left. The sun was turning to gold in the sky, fat and heavy and slouching towards the distant horizon.

‘I heard,’ Falyn said delicately, easing into the seat across from her, ‘that lunch with the Lillarties was a little fraught.’

‘Adamant has very particular ideas of how to do things,’ said Thawn without missing a beat, watching the horizon. ‘I decided it would be best he were put to work elsewhere, if only for a time. He has been restless here.’

‘He seems like a man of action. I’m sure it’s difficult for him at a time like this.’ Falyn hesitated. ‘Cosbar is quite upset.’

Thawn only had to inch out her senses to pick up Falyn’s flicker of amusement. ‘Cosbar seems upset at anything that stops him listening to the sound of his own voice.’

Falyn smirked, but only for a moment. ‘Where the Lillarties go, a sizeable minority of the Board follows. If they decide to set against you, it doesn’t matter what anyone else says or does, you won’t get the Spirelight project or anything else.’

‘Evertine seemed to want peace?’

‘Evertine will smile and charm you,’ sighed Falyn, ‘and then slip a knife between your ribs. You can’t trust her, Rosara.’

Thawn hesitated. ‘Like I can trust you?’

‘I haven’t lied to you -’

‘No,’ Thawn said as delicately as she could. ‘You’ve just not lifted a finger to help me, while I’ve been bending over backwards to respect you and the interests of the family. I have to compromise, but you won’t support this compromise to the Board unless we can deliver a majority?’

Falyn was silent for a few moments, gaze flickering to the view. She sipped her glass of sparkling emerald and sighed. ‘We came terribly close to losing Whixby in ‘85, you know.’

‘Whixby was in no real danger of being overrun by Romulan refugees -’

‘I mean the family came close to losing Whixby.’ A thread of steel wound into Falyn’s voice. ‘Mother first tried to compromise and cooperate with Colonial Affairs. The Board came terribly close to removing her, and it would have been Evertine Lillarties who took her place. Do you know who stopped it? Auntie.’

Thawn frowned. ‘What did Anatras do?’

‘Spoke to Evertine. And told Mother to step down and hand everything over to me.’ Another genteel sip. ‘Mother is back on Betazed now. So I have to keep Whixby not only thriving, but thriving for our family. Evertine knows that she could have toppled us, seized control. That would have taken considerable expense on her part, but Auntie made sure that wouldn’t be necessary. So I have to make sure it’s not necessary.’

‘This isn’t managing everything. This is being Evertine Lillarties’s creature, without her having to lift a finger.’

Falyn sipped her drink again. ‘Do you think Auntie cares, so long as everyone back on Betazed thinks of Whixby as the paradise offered to all by our House?’

‘If it’s making you miserable -’

Falyn almost spat out her next sip, her tinkling laugh holding an edge of hysteria. ‘When did you last speak with Auntie, Rosara?’

Thawn frowned indignantly. ‘About six months ago; we talked about my arrangement to marry Adamant. She was very supportive.’

‘Ah, yes, Adamant, the man about whom your feelings could be described as tepid at-best.’ Falyn arched an eyebrow as she topped up her glass from the jug on the table. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Coz, you’re not especially good at shielding yourself from family. Did she say you could throw the arrangement away?’

‘She said… she said that she’d consider it, but first I had to give it a try. That it was premature to back out.’

‘And once you’ve given it a try, if you still want out, there’ll just be something else, you know. That too much time has passed, that it would be an unnecessary scandal or insult to the Seventh House. That so many of the family’s aspirations are tied up in this connection. That it would undo so much for so many people, and you don’t have to be in love with him, but isn’t he so handsome and nice, couldn’t you just live with him?’

In the long silence that followed, Thawn refilled her own glass. ‘We’re not talking about me.’

‘No, we’re talking about family. And everyone in the family must play their part, my dear. My part is to keep Whixby in our hands, no matter the cost.’ Falyn cast her a sidelong look. ‘Your part is to marry Adamant Rhade, and if you think the feelings of either of us matter in this, you’re a fucking idiot.’

Thawn drew a long and shuddering breath. ‘The difference is that my arrangement to marry Adamant doesn’t affect the lives and well-being of thousands of people,’ she said at length. ‘Anatras is a hundred light-years away. She can’t do anything until it’s over. Evertine can’t call on outside help.’

‘All that does is leave us in the dark.’

‘There’s something my old captain used to say.’ Thawn bit her lip. ‘Character is what you are in the dark.’

Falyn was silent for a little, fidgeting with her glass. ‘I don’t -’

But there was a chirrup from inside her office, a different tone to what Thawn had normally heard from her computers, and Falyn was on her feet in an instant with a frown, heading inside. She reached her desk and brought up a message that flashed red but Thawn, getting to her feet, couldn’t read from the balcony door.

‘What is it?’

‘Great Fire,’ breathed Falyn, grabbing her PADD and moving to the balcony, the message hovering before her. At speed, Thawn could only make out one flashing segment of the words.

ION STORM.

But that would happen in space, they would have warning from Endeavour, they should never have been ambushed by something in orbit –

Falyn manipulated the PADD to expand the holo-projection to fill a square foot of the view from the balcony, then swept the flashing alert to one side. ‘Show me,’ she commanded the interface, and the display magnified the dusk-stained horizon.

Where in the distance, trapped between sea and sky, gathered clouds of black and lightning.

They had made it through to the same deck as Main Engineering, the long corridor ahead leading to the double doors of their destination, before Valance grabbed Airex’s elbow. ‘Before we go in there, I need to know I can count on you.’

He frowned. ‘I wouldn’t volunteer if you couldn’t.’

‘Dav, how long were you down here? On your own?’

He looked away for a moment and drew a deep breath. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘At one point it must have been my perception of time that was warped; I’d been separated from Templeton after… a month? Scrounging rations from an emergency pack in one of the offices. Power went from the room, it was completely black, and when it returned the display said only an hour had passed.’ His gaze went distant for a heartbeat, before he shook his head. ‘It was longer. I expect the same happened to Templeton.’

‘I understand that.’ Valance swallowed. ‘If he snapped…’

‘People don’t just snap and lash out indiscriminately. He has lost all trust that his surroundings adhere to any rules of reality he’s lived his life by. Time and space have no meaning, and he’s so prone to hallucinations he can’t trust his own senses. His conclusion that he should destroy the Odysseus to end this torment – maybe for more than himself, maybe for all of us – is a warped reasoning, but it is a reasoning.’ Airex met her gaze. ‘I’m not going to suddenly decide he’s right, or turn on you, or break under pressure. My reasoning is that our mission is to save our people.’

She dragged her eyes across his face, his features craggier, hair longer and even greyer than she remembered. ‘Don’t come with me because you feel you should. I have no time for you trying to prove yourself if I can’t rely on you.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You and I are due a conversation when all of this is over,’ said Davir Airex in a soft voice. ‘But trust that everything I have done has been to keep people safe.’

That took a leap of faith Valance wasn’t sure she had in her. But she could, at the least, use an extra gunman in the situation ahead, and she turned back to the main doors. ‘We have numbers, but we can’t assume we have the element of surprise. There’s no telling how successful Cassia has been in cutting Templeton off from ship systems down there; he might have access to internal sensors and know we’re coming.’

‘We don’t have time to do anything clever,’ said Airex. ‘So sometimes the best answer is overwhelming force.’ He unslung his phaser rifle, shifting it in his grip with a smoothness she hadn’t seen from him before.

‘We storm in there and he tries to use someone as a hostage -’

‘Then I will shoot him.’

She had never heard Airex speak so casually or confidently about violence either, particularly not his own use of force. But Valance knew she didn’t have a better idea, even as doubt wormed through her gut and up her spine at the changes in her friend.

She turned to the double doors. ‘Swift and sure it is.’

* *

Cortez slid across the alcove in Main Engineering where Templeton had put them, positioned now so he could keep them in his line of sight as he worked at the main warp core console. ‘I think,’ she hissed to Kharth, ‘he’s getting through some of the encryption.’

Kharth scowled. ‘What do you think has been keeping him out?’

‘I don’t know, but the problem is that whatever security program or person’s trying to lock out his access codes, they need to do it to everything. There are about a million ways he could kill us all right now, considering how delicate our predicament is.’

‘Okay.’ Kharth glanced up and around the chamber for the umpteenth time. It did not give her answers. ‘I’m going to need you to distract him.’

Cortez winced. ‘Are you actually thinking of rushing him? We have no idea why he’s kept us alive. That might change real fast.’

‘Preserving my neck for so long he manages to kill us all is not a great survival strategy. I don’t know, try to be helpful, talk to him. I’m feeling better after that Stun.’

‘For the record, I hate this.’

‘You’ll hate dying more.’

‘Only because I won’t be able to say “I told you so.” Just imagine that as the noise the phaser makes when he shoots you.’ But still Cortez lifted her hands enough to not make a sudden movement for Templeton, and began to rise. ‘Hey, Rob – if you’re having trouble with the systems access -’

Even at that gentle shift, he’d stopped his work to bring his phaser to bear on her. ‘Shut up. I don’t want to hear it.’ Kharth could see Cortez swallow but not back down, and she slid away, trying to look like she didn’t want to be in the path of Templeton’s response.

‘Look, I’m not the Chief Engineer here, but I am a Chief Engineer -’

‘You’re just trying to distract me,’ Templeton snapped.

‘Maybe if I’m not real,’ Cortez tried, ‘then I’m here to help. Like a manifestation of your subconscious mind that’s very good at tech.’

It didn’t need to work as a line of argument, Kharth reasoned, as she began to slip around the curve of the alcove, further from Templeton’s direct line of sight. If she could make it a few more metres before he clocked her, then she could push off from the bulkhead, and even if he rounded on her, Cortez was on her feet, one of them could –

Then the doors to Main Engineering slid open, and in burst Valance and Airex, rifles raised. Kharth’s heart lunged into her throat with a combination of shock and relief, and even as Templeton rounded on the interruption, his phaser didn’t come up before they could open fire, before phaser blasts lanced across the distance –

– and slowed. And as Valance and Airex surged forward they, too, slowed.

‘I hate space-time things,’ Cortez had time to whimper before she dove to the deck.

It was child’s play for Templeton to step to one side, out of the path of the blasts – which after a matter of metres, cannoned towards the space he’d been at top speed. From the look on his face, he was as surprised as any at the local temporal dilation effect, but with Valance and Airex moving slower, he had the time to reach for a new panel.

Kharth took a step forward, but his phaser snapped towards her. ‘Please don’t make me kill you, Saeihr,’ he entreated, before hitting a button.

The forcefield sprung up to divide Main Engineering in two before Valance and Airex could burst out the other side of the pocket of time dilation. Valance had shot again, her phaser blast impacting harmlessly off the invisible barrier, then they both skidded to a halt, aghast.

‘Rob!’ called Airex, voice sharper than she’d ever heard it. ‘Everything’s different now, you have to see this!’

Robert Templeton still had his phaser levelled on Kharth, but his expression screwed up. ‘You left me again, Dav. You said you wouldn’t, and you -’

‘You were shooting at us. Yes, I ran away.’

‘Stop talking,’ snapped Templeton. ‘All of you stop talking.’ He stalked back to the main console at the warp core, voice dropping to a mutter only Kharth was close enough to hear. ‘So many fucking voices, how am I supposed to get anything done…?’

Her breath caught. ‘Rob. I’m real, this is all real, which means the ship’s not a prison any more, which means you can -’

But he hadn’t stopped working as she talked, hands moving back across the console, and Cortez rose with a fresh alarm to exclaim, ‘Oh no, don’t do that -’

Then the deck rumbled underneath.

Valance was scanning the area just as Kharth had before, and didn’t seem to be finding anything new. ‘What did he do?’

‘Slowed the antimatter injection rate, because he can still do that within safety parameters, but that’s going to make our power level fluctuate,’ Cortez said in a panicked ramble. ‘Which is real bad news for the stability of our warp field, thus the ship, the Rift… everything.’

Valance looked sharply to one side. ‘Dav, get this damn forcefield down.’

Kharth went to lunge again, but Templeton had clearly identified her as his biggest threat, phaser snapping back up to lock on her.

‘Move again,’ he said in a low, hoarse voice, ‘and I will kill you.’

‘Even if I don’t move, you’ll kill me,’ she replied in a similar tone, hands raised calmingly. ‘But it’s easier to push a button and we all blow up, than watch yourself turn me to dust.’ Her gaze flickered to Cortez. ‘Isa, how long do we have?’

‘Power fluctuations should kick in within two minutes. After that? No idea.’

The deck rumbled again, and Kharth inhaled sharply through her nose. ‘Two minutes, minimum. Then you get what you want, Rob.’ She looked from the barrel of his phaser, up to his eyes, and forced herself to not look away. ‘So what’s the harm in using this time to talk?’

* *

‘Captain?’

Endeavour had sat at the mouth of the rift for days now. Only by their most careful of scans were they sure the Odysseus was still there, and only by the occasional, very faint shift in tetryon emissions were they sure anything was happening over there.

They had sat on the bridge in silence for most of this shift, so after all this time, the uncertain tone in Graelin’s voice was a whole paradigm shift. Rourke looked over at his science officer, only to see his expression shift from curiosity to horror in a heartbeat. ‘Commander?’

‘How is this happening so fast -’ Graelin stopped his own mutter, head snapping up to Rourke. ‘Massive tetryon emissions from the rift, sir; it looks like it’s reopening in front of us.’

‘The Odysseus?’

‘Still there – clearer on our sensors, but their warp field is unstable, they’re no longer securing the rift, and -’ Graelin’s hands flew across his controls as tectonic shifts in circumstances occurred in moments. ‘That energy’s going to rip them apart.’

Rourke shot to his feet. ‘Red alert. Modifications were finished to emit a dekyon pulse? Activate it now.’

‘Aye, Captain.’ Graelin sucked on his teeth, and there was a hum through the deck as Endeavour’s power grid and deflector systems took a sharp swerve in their purpose. ‘Dekyon pulse is stopping the rift from expanding, Captain. If I increase the intensity, I can contract it.’

‘What happens to the Odysseus?’

‘I don’t think they’ll survive.’ With the initial shock over, Graelin’s voice was returning to his confident drawl. ‘But already I’m picking up a massive ionic front forming between us and Whixby; the nebula particles were still agitated from the tetryons, it’s not taking much for the storm to reform.’

Rourke clenched his jaw. ‘Can you raise the Odysseus, Elsa?’

‘Still no response, sir.’

‘We have time,’ he said firmly, seeing the look in Graelin’s eye. ‘Whixby has its new weather control system, so the ion storm has to be significant to disrupt the atmosphere; it might be forming fast, but not that fast.’

‘No,’ said Graelin begrudgingly. ‘But we don’t have forever, Captain. I can close the rift from here.’

‘We’re not at that point yet, and you’re still not sure why a dekyon pulse from outside didn’t work when the Odysseus tried it.’

‘Our ship is considerably more powerful.’

‘That’s a guess,’ Rourke pointed out. ‘And while we still have time, I am not condemning everyone on that ship to death.’

Graelin straightened with a scowl. ‘Then what’s the plan, sir? Wait and see if the Odysseus does something, after days of nothing?’

‘If the rift has reopened, then something’s changed,’ Rourke retorted. ‘If they’re trying something, then they can fix this.’

‘Or the ship’s systems have degraded too badly to maintain the stoppering effect. We can’t assume we can count on them.’

‘Then find me a different way,’ Rourke barked, ‘or find me a new Science Officer.’

Graelin stood ramrod straight, expression twisting in indignation. Then he bowed his head. ‘Yes. Captain.’

Lindgren cleared her throat a moment later. ‘Captain. I’m receiving a distress call from the relief team. Lieutenant Adupon is reporting… a failure somewhere in the weather control grid? Storms are already forming on the surface of Whixby.’

Of bloody course. Rourke bit his lip enough to almost draw blood. ‘Tell them we’re in no position to move, and direct them to fix the damn weather control grid.’ He drew a sharp breath and looked at his bridge team – aside from Lindgren, he had the senior staffer he trusted least and a group of relief officers. ‘This is bad,’ he accepted. ‘But we have time before we’re looking at a fully-formed ionic front, or hurricanes tearing across inhabited Whixby. Our job is to stop this from getting worse, and if we have to, we will close that rift to save this ship and all the people on that colony. In the meantime: buckle up, people.’ He resumed his seat and gripped his armrest time. ‘We’re in for stormy weather.’

‘How did this happen so quickly?’

Falyn Nyder’s office was the administrative hub of all of Whixby, full now with Thawn, several leading figures of the administration, and Falyn herself. But all Sophia Hale needed to do was take two steps inside and ask a polite but firm question, and there was no doubt who was in charge.

‘I’m not a meteorologist,’ Thawn admitted, tearing her eyes away from the display over Falyn’s desk. From here they had access to the planetary conditions system, or at least anything the Board of Tourism had set up over the years. It was not the most robust setup, designed to do nothing but give weather warnings for a sedate island paradise, but she’d seen clearer horizons.

That went for the literal horizon, the skies now turned to grey and shadow, the distant seas to agitation and froth. For the moment there was no more than the shuddering of windows as high winds pelted Sanditor, but it would not stop there.

Hale looked from the window to Falyn. ‘Is this how it started before? With the rift?’

‘I…’ Falyn worked her jaw wordlessly. ‘I don’t know. The cyclone didn’t hit here. We’ve never had any weather this bad hitting Sanditor.’

Hale regarded her for a heartbeat more, her eyes then dragging across Falyn’s bewildered staff, before landing on Thawn. ‘What does Endeavour report? Doctor Sadek’s team?’

‘I – I can’t raise them on comms,’ Thawn admitted. ‘But the communication system here isn’t the most sophisticated, so I’m having a little trouble identifying why, so I don’t really know what to do about it.’

‘Alright,’ said Hale, and drew a deep breath. ‘Keep trying. We need to know the situation as a whole. Meanwhile, what are we looking at here, Ms Nyder?’ Her voice was gentle yet firm, like hands wrapping around Falyn to trap but not hurt her, force her to confront the situation.

Falyn still flapped her hands. ‘This is already a Category 3 cyclone and it looks like it’s on a path to escalate to a Category 5 soon. That’s wind speeds of two hundred kilometres an hour or more, with a very high chance of spawning tornadoes as well as…’

‘In which case, you need to see to the protection of the islands, Ms Nyder,’ said Hale calmly. ‘Everywhere you can contact. Make sure there are designated shelters and ensure local leaders are getting people to those shelters.’

‘We don’t…’

‘Buildings as far in-land as possible that are least likely to collapse, or have other buildings collapse on them; anywhere with sturdy underground construction.’ Hale hesitated, looking like she didn’t want to offend, then said, bluntly, ‘Wine cellars.’

Falyn swept into a huddle with her staff, and Thawn had to think hard to block out the worry and considerations swarming off them while she focused on the display of Sanditor’s systems. ‘I’ve got it,’ Thawn said at last. ‘The Tekiros, one of the transport ships still in orbit, has a fairly modern sensor and comm system. I’ve managed to connect to their sensor feed, and I’m going to try to bounce a comm signal off them and to the buoy Endeavour left in orbit. That should raise us the ship and the Azure Chain.’

‘Show me the sensors, then,’ said Hale, ‘and get us a line to the outside world.’

Thawn grimaced. ‘You’re not a meteorologist either, ma’am.’

‘No, but I’m definitely not a comms systems specialist, so let’s focus on getting one job done, shall we?’ Then the door behind them was thrown open anew.

‘Okay, it is getting seriously dodgy out there!’ Nate Beckett looked like a drowned rat in a loud shirt as he squelched into Nyder’s office.

‘Where have you been?’ Thawn demanded, not tearing her eyes from the comm systems. ‘I called for -’

‘We were guiding in pleasure yachts from the bay, because they’re crewed by tourists who have no idea how to not die in high winds!’ he retorted. ‘When I got your message I was almost a kilometre off the coast, so excuse me.’

‘Ensign, it’s good to see you,’ Hale slipped in without missing a beat. ‘Help me make sense of these sensor readings.’

Grumbling, Beckett made his soggy way across the office to Hale’s display, only to immediately say, ‘Well, that’s not good.’

‘However you explain it, please set your universal translator to “diplomat.”’

‘This shouldn’t have happened so fast,’ he said, but before Thawn could point out they already knew that, he was gesturing across the sensor feed and carrying on. ‘But from the Tekiros it looks like there’s a new surge of tachyons close to the planet. Those are what agitate the nebula particles and ionise them, and they were already pretty agitated from a few days ago. So the ionic front is forming faster than it normally would. We’ve got a level 1 ion storm above Whixby already.’

‘That’s why we’ve got a cyclone whipping up right away here,’ said Hale with dawning realisation.

‘Yeah, but…’ Beckett leaned back to look at Thawn, making a face. ‘Our new weather control system should be eating the effects of a level 1, right?’

‘It should,’ she said without looking back, then made a noise of frustration. ‘I can’t raise Endeavour; with the ion storm between us and them, even using the buoy in orbit, the signal can’t get through.’

‘Try the Azure Chain,’ said Hale gently.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ There was a moment as the display shifted to connect, and for a heartbeat Thawn thought she had visual – before that collapsed, and all that came through was a reedy audio.

‘Sanditor? Is that you?’ Sadek’s voice was crackly, but understandable.

Thawn swallowed. ‘It’s Thawn, Doctor. What’s your status?’

‘Terrible. High winds, cyclone bearing down on us. Have you heard from Forrester and Harkon?’

They exchanged confused glances. ‘No,’ said Thawn. ‘Should we?’

‘This blasted storm. There was a malfunction in the weather control matrix, the pylon on Starglimmer Isle was out of alignment. They were heading there with the Bedivere to repair when this all started.’

Beckett snapped his fingers. ‘That’s why we’ve got a cyclone kicking off at the slightest provocation.’

‘Except we got a distress call from them just as this all started, and from the control system here, the pylon’s not been touched.’

Hale raised her voice, and Thawn thought it was a lot more comforting for her and Sadek to speak, both of them relaxed even in a crisis. ‘Can you dispatch another repair team?’

‘Flight conditions here are so bad that if anyone else sets off, they’re going to need their own rescue party in about five seconds.’

Thawn looked at Hale. ‘Starglimmer’s closer to Sanditor than the Azure Chain.’ Then her throat tightened, and her gaze snapped back to the display not even showing Sadek. ‘Did Lieutenant Rhade reach you?’

‘Don’t worry, Lieutenant, he’s out there personally saving babies from high winds with his shirt off, or something,’ Sadek drawled. ‘But unless you can raise Endeavour, fix the weather matrix, or magic me a bunch of bunkers, I’m going to have to get back out there.’

‘Stay safe, Azure Chain,’ said Hale, and the comm-line went dead. She drew a deep breath and looked between the two officers. ‘Is there anything we can do to raise Endeavour?’

Thawn shook her head, biting her lip. ‘I assume that something’s happened with the rift, and they’re there. Until the ion storm abates or they get closer, we don’t have the power to contact them.’

‘Then let’s assume that Endeavour will make sure the ion storm isn’t about to rip the entire planet apart,’ said Hale.

‘Because we can’t do anything about that anyway?’ Beckett winced.

‘Precisely. Which leaves us with the weather control matrix. Where is Starglimmer compared to us?’

Thawn dragged up the display giving them the latest from the ships in orbit and their own planetary monitoring systems. ‘The cyclone is more or less between us and the Azure Chain, but they’re deeper into it. On the one hand, it’s heading west, towards us. On the other hand, it’s also growing.’

‘That’s the worst luck,’ Beckett grumbled. ‘But there’s Starglimmer to the north. A little further in.’

‘I can take the Prydwen,’ said Thawn after a moment’s thinking. ‘Skirt the cyclone as best I can, set down at the pylon, realign it and restore the weather control matrix. That should dissipate the cyclone, and keep conditions on Whixby relatively stable.’

‘So long as the ion storm up there doesn’t escalate beyond, say, Level 3,’ mused Beckett. ‘Also we’re going to have to fly pretty deep into the cyclone if we want to get there before this gets much worse.’

Thawn’s head snapped around to him. ‘We?’

He made a face. ‘This isn’t a solo mission, and also, I’m a better pilot than you?’

Hale lifted her hands. ‘All we can do here is batten down the hatches, so to speak. Beckett is right.’

‘Not to mention,’ he added, ‘Harkon and Forrester are somewhere out there on the Bedivere.’

‘You understand,’ said Hale, voice taut, ‘that the weather control matrix must be the priority?’

‘I get it,’ said Beckett. ‘We’ll have an easier time rescuing them not in a storm that could drown all of these islands.’

Thawn sighed. ‘Alright. We’ve got gear and clothes on the Prydwen,’ she said, looking between her dress and Beckett’s sandals. ‘Just fly the ship and watch my back.’

‘Hey,’ said Beckett, opening his hands as they stepped away from the desk. ‘I’m happy to hold your coat and wait in the shuttle while you fix things.’

Falyn detached from the throng of officials, wringing her hands together. ‘You’re going out there?’ she said, casting an eye on the stormy horizon beyond her office windows.

‘To stop this entire island from drowning, hopefully, yes,’ said Thawn, out of sympathy or diplomacy. ‘Do me one favour, Falyn, and listen to Ms Hale.’

‘And remember,’ chirped Beckett at her shoulder. ‘Starfleet’s here to save the day. Uh, again.’ They left, hurrying through the corridors of Falyn’s offices as best they could in highly unsuitable footwear, and he waited until they were in the wide lobby before he spoke again. ‘Does Hale actually know how to run a disaster like this?’

‘I have no idea,’ Thawn admitted, looking through the open doors where the wind howled and raged, and threatened to very soon be more than just a danger to patio furniture. If the cyclone bore down on Sanditor, it could level the settlement even before it drowned it. ‘But I think she has more common sense than everyone else on this wretched island put together. Someone has to get everyone to shelter in case we fail.’

For a heartbeat, she felt the worry come off him like a wave, then as she watched he smothered it with an iron grip inside of shunting emotions to one side and a toothy grin on his face. ‘Come off it, Thawn. Dream team like us? We’ll be sipping mai tais on a dock before you know it.’

The Odysseus had been split through time, her crew experiencing days in mere heartbeats, aeons in hours. Kharth had seen the effect of it, the turmoil of Davir Airex, the collapse of Robert Templeton; had seen it in action to thwart the attempted rescue mission of Valance and Airex. But she knew it took no subspace rift, no surge of tachyon radiation, to make the seconds she stared into Templeton’s eyes feel like they lasted til the heat death of the universe.

She could almost feel Cortez behind her, soaking in from display panels every inch of what was happening to the ship. She could hear the others on the far side of the forcefield, Valance’s phaser rifle trained on Templeton as Airex frantically tried to access the systems in Engineering enough to get them access.

But none of that could matter. Even time would be a distraction. So she pushed away their efforts, the roaring tension as the deck hummed under them and the warp core beside her began to churn from its imbalance, the thudding of her heartbeat, and focused on Robert Templeton.

‘I’m not trying to stop you. I’m not going to fight you, Rob. So you’ve nothing to lose by listening.’

He did not lower his phaser, his jaw tight, eyes bright behind the messy beard grown from fathomless isolation. ‘I’m not stopping this. I’ve been through this too many times before; you can’t convince me to give up…’

‘I don’t want you to give up.’ Kharth swallowed. ‘I want the same thing you do, Rob. I want you to rest.’ She forced herself to not look at the phaser as she took the smallest step forward. ‘You’ve been fighting to survive, you’ve been fighting to keep your mind, and now you’re fighting to bring everything to an end. I’m here to tell you it’s even simpler than that. To get out, all you have to do… is stop. Not stop the imbalance in the warp core, not do a damn thing. Just… stop.’

His phaser twitched, and her heart tried to choke her with surging panic. ‘I can’t. I can’t just lie down…’

‘Why not?’ She kept her voice soft. ‘If you’re right, and we’re all nothing, if we’re just a trick… what harm can we do? I’m not asking you to fix the warp core. I’m asking you to do… absolutely nothing.’

‘I don’t…’

‘I know that’s the second hardest thing in the universe when everything’s gone wrong. To lay down your burdens. To accept that you can’t make things right, and just… exist. To accept your helplessness.’ Another slight step forward. ‘It takes trust.’

His lip curled. ‘I can’t trust you -’

‘Maybe not. But I trust you.’ She swallowed. ‘So many of us trust you. Aquila trusted you when she sent you to join our mission against Halvard. I trusted you when we split the team, I trusted you with my captain – that’s my job, my life, I trusted you with that. You proved me right. You were everything I needed you to be then, and I know you’re everything I need you to be now.’

Templeton wavered, but then Cortez, behind her, piped up. ‘I don’t want to worry you, Sae, but we have about a minute before the point of no return -’

‘Shut up, Isa,’ Kharth snapped with more venom she’d ever turned on her friend, Templeton wincing at Cortez’s interruption, his white-knuckle grip on the phaser not wavering. She could hear the distant voices of Airex and Valance, see Templeton begin to look in their direction, and had to take another step just to get his attention. ‘You don’t have to trust me, Rob. I trust you. You should trust you, the man you know you are.’

He took a step back, which she hadn’t expected, and it didn’t feel like a tactical move to get out of her reach but an emotional withdrawal. ‘If I just wait and keep you here,’ he said in a hurry, his voice going detached again like he was speaking more to himself, ‘I get the same thing, and then it’s over…’

This tactic wasn’t working. But he was at least listening, countering her reasoning, and Kharth drew another breath. ‘You know what’s the hardest thing to do in the universe when everything’s gone wrong?’ He cocked his head, listening, engaging, and she swallowed. ‘Carrying on.’

He flinched. ‘I’ve done enough of that; you’ve no idea...’

There was no time. So she took the plunge, straightened, and snapped, ‘My world was destroyed, Rob. Billions of people, my culture, my whole life. And I carried on.’ He stared at that, and didn’t shoot her, which was all she could ask for at this point. ‘I was dumped on a craphole refugee shelter abandoned by the Federation after five minutes, and I carried on. I left my father to be murdered there, and I carried on. I’m not going to tell you it’s worse than what you’ve been through. But don’t tell me I have no idea.’

He was hesitating, and she took another step, a bigger step. ‘So maybe you’re done carrying on. But I’m not. Which means that if you want to stop me, you’re going to have to shoot me.’

His grip on the phaser shifted. ‘I’ll do it -’

‘Like you did a hundred times before, you said, like you shot Aquila and Airex and Kimathi a hundred times, except one of those times, you really did kill Kimathi, Rob.’ She only had one more card to play, and if that didn’t work, she was going to have to rush him. Let him shoot her, and pray, pray that Cortez could do something with the distraction.

She wouldn’t be around to see it.

‘But you don’t want to do that now. That’s why you dragged us down here with you. That’s why you Stunned us. Because you know you really killed Kimathi, and you’re not sure, you’re not absolutely sure that I’m not real.’ He was frozen in place, and with her next step, she slowly lifted her hand to put it atop his phaser. ‘You killed Kimathi,’ she repeated, because that made his gaze waver. ‘And if you don’t give me this gun, you’re going to have to kill me, too. So you better be sure, Rob Templeton.’

His voice came out strained, warped. ‘I… I don’t know…’

‘I do. I know you’re not that man. I know who you are.’ She wrapped her fingers around the phaser, and when she gave the gentlest tug, he didn’t stop her from taking it. ‘I know I can trust you.’

The moment the phaser was out of his hands, he collapsed onto her, sobbing.

‘Oh, God, oh God – Kima…’

She managed to toss the phaser to one side and wrap her arms around him. The most ridiculous thing in the world was to feel a little awkward at this outburst, but she held him, let him sob, and turned her head desperately to the side. ‘Isa, get the forcefield -’

‘On it -’ Cortez raced to the forcefield controls, dropping the barrier to let Valance and Airex in, then she was rounding on the main warp core console, hands already dancing across the commands – only to get another blat of access denied. ‘Oh, now is not the time!’

Kharth could guide Templeton to one of the alcoves, set him down into a collapsed mess she could worry about later. Behind her, Valance was turning away, tapping her combadge.

‘Valance to bridge – we’ve secured Engineering, give us systems access!’

‘I refuse,’ said Cortez, still hammering controls, ‘to be blown up because your ex isn’t a fast enough systems admin.’

Airex had rushed to her side, watching readouts, eyes wide. ‘If you can restore warp field integrity in the next fifteen seconds, we have a chance of riding this out -’

‘I know, I know!’

Valance rounded back on them. ‘You should have access now.’

Kharth stormed over, grabbing the railing around the warp core, and tried to not even look at Airex as she turned to Cortez. ‘Isa, can you do this?’

The console flashed green before her, and Cortez lifted her hands sharply to everyone around her. ‘I can do this if everyone except for maybe Airex shuts the hell up.’ Her eyes landed on the controls, and Kharth watched her draw a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Sure. Stabilise a warp field to stop a subspace rift ripping us apart or unleashing hell on a whole planet and starship.

‘Piece of cake.’

The Prydwen shuddered almost the moment they took off, and Thawn kept her grip on the co-pilot’s controls tight even as she read the display. Somehow, watching a storm front looming on sensors was less stressful than looking through the canopy, where the seas churned and the skies roiled.

‘I really need you,’ she said in a tight, slightly high-pitched voice, ‘to be absolutely sincere in how well you can fly. So I can map you the best route through this storm.’

Beckett didn’t look up from the pilot’s controls, but he did make a face. ‘How am I supposed to quantify that?’ he said, and the Prydwen lurched as a thick gust of wind took them. His hands scrabbled to compensate, and though they accelerated, it was not what Thawn would call smooth.

‘You said you were a better pilot than me! So I assume you have a level of piloting qualification…’

‘If I said I did,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘would that tell you just how deep into the storm you can take us?’ She’d set what she’d thought was a generous course the moment they’d started to power up, but already the storm was intensifying; whatever was going on in orbit was not messing around. ‘Just give me the heading. I know we’re not flying right through the eye of the bloody thing, but don’t handle me with kid gloves.’

‘I notice,’ she said a little frantically, though she still adjusted the course heading as they swept on a north-eastern route, ‘you haven’t really answered the question.’

There was a beat. ‘I was in a flight team at the Academy.’

Tension gripping her throat, Thawn’s gaze came up. Out of the canopy she could see the winds raking across Sanditor below, buildings buffeted, trees bent at a bough-breaking angle. High seas already tore across the docks, and she could see boats ripped away, piers battered and broken. None of this island paradise had been built for a cyclone. ‘How good a flight team?’

‘Okay, so I was the bottom-rated pilot of the bottom-rated flight team -’

‘Beckett –’

‘Someone has to be!’ he pointed out. ‘The team needed a spot filling, I still qualified, and I was against a bunch of people who’re in red shirts now! I don’t fly professionally, I fly for fun!’

‘This isn’t fun!’

‘You’re right! You’re here!’

Her lips thinned, and she reached for the nav controls again. ‘I’m giving us a wider berth of the cyclone -’

‘Look out there, Thawn. Do you think Sanditor has even the extra minutes that’ll take? Stay the course, I can handle it.’ And before she could adjust or counter, he’d hit the impulse thrusters for massive acceleration, the Prydwen shooting away from the island and towards the storm-boiled seas. ‘Keep an eye out on sensors for the Bedivere.’

‘I know,’ she hissed. ‘But you know, there are worse places to be in a storm than a shuttle. It might not be pleasant, but even if it’s seabound they should be able to weather it.’

‘That really depends on what made Harkon crash, doesn’t it.’

Thawn made a face. ‘…I’m flying into a storm that bested Harkon’s skills,’ she realised aloud, ‘with you.’

‘Sorry I’m not Rhade,’ he snarled. ‘He could have flown you into danger if you hadn’t banished him for being an enormous bore.’

‘That’s not-’ Of all the things she didn’t want to talk about with Beckett in the middle of a lethal storm, her relationship with Rhade was close to the top of the list. ‘If you hadn’t wormed your way into this mission for a holiday, I might have someone more useful with me! But no, Daddy had to hand-wrap his darling son a choice assignment!’

Lightning flashed across the Prydwen’s bow, a distance away but enough to have Beckett veer the yacht to port to avoid this oncoming knot of storm, and they both had to hang on tight. She didn’t need to be a telepath to feel the wave of horror off him, though, even if his look her way had only lasted a split second, and she knew his feelings weren’t for the weather.

‘You think I used my father to wriggle into this team?’ Beckett thundered. ‘Fuck my father.’ Now she could feel it, the resentment and bitterness roiling off him, pouring out of a strongbox that perhaps she’d unlocked, but wasn’t at her. ‘If I did things for my father, I wouldn’t be an archaeologist and I wouldn’t have gone behind Graelin’s back with you, and I wouldn’t even be on Endeavour!’ But it wasn’t his words which struck home. There were a dozen retorts she could give, including challenging what he was doing on this mission if she was so wrong. The depth of his outrage wasn’t what stopped her short, but its nature.

Because however differently they showed it, Thawn knew his resentment towards his family and its demands well. It was the same resentment that howled inside her in the black of night, the same bitter sense of entrapment every time she squirmed against restraints that had seen her muzzled on Sanditor – and betrothed to Adamant Rhade.

She met his gaze for only half a heartbeat, and something in her eyes must have stopped him short, too. Then there was an alert from her console, and she rounded back on the sensors.

‘We’ve got a pocket of high pressure ahead; if we go around the outskirts that’s an extra six minutes on our ETA.’ Thawn bit her lip. ‘I can plot us a course through the rain bands closer to the eye. But you’re going to have to react fast to my updates, and there is no room for error.’

There was a split second he struggled to deal with the change in her tone. Then Nate Beckett gave a broad, toothy grin. ‘Piece of cake for the worst pilot in the class of ‘98.’

‘Great Fire,’ Thawn groaned. ‘Do not let me die here with you.’

He was right: he was not a great pilot. But he was better than her, more instinctive. She struggled because she didn’t want to think quickly, she wanted to consult her instruments at every step, but he was better at taking in only what he needed, and adjusting accordingly. She excelled because here she could think six steps ahead, assess the storm as it changed and intensified, and update the flight plan to match.

It was still a bumpy ride as the Prydwen swung to starboard, and she tried to keep track of every surging gust of wind that might knock them disastrously off-course. Sanditor had been left far behind, and she could barely see anything through the canopy but churning clouds and lashing rain; could hear the wind howling across the hull.

Getting out the other side of this pocket of difficulty didn’t feel much better, because the storm was only intensifying, but it did clear up her sensors an iota, her readings otherwise haywire with the level of ionisation in the atmosphere and storm. Thawn drew a shuddering breath. ‘There it is, there’s Starglimmer.’ Nothing was visible through the canopy yet, but Beckett began to guide the Prydwen back lower. ‘We have about twenty minutes before the deeper rain bands hit Sanditor. Wind speeds that high will get people killed.’

‘How quickly can the weather control matrix dissipate it once it’s back online?’

‘I… ten minutes?’

‘So that’s ten minutes to get there and fix this.’ Beckett blew out his cheeks as the view through the canopy began to clear to show the roiling seas and the dark dot of their island destination. ‘Plenty of time.’

There wasn’t much to Starglimmer Isle, and there was even less in the middle of a cyclone. As a volcanic island, it was more of a spit of land and rock striking high into the sky, which was why it had been chosen as a part of the pylon network for the weather control matrix, but as they descended, Thawn could see the lower reaches, the beaches and natural harbours, were all but gone in the sea’s determined campaign to seize the land. The pylon itself struck out some twenty metres above the highest point of the isle, a sturdy and reinforced structure built around one of the rocky outcroppings for stability and shelter.

‘There’s a control hub built onto a gantry at the base of the pylon, around that jagged south-eastern edge of the peak,’ Thawn directed. ‘Get me there and I can do this.’

Beckett’s eyes widened as he examined his display and the canopy. ‘I can set the Prydwen to come alongside the gantry, but there’s no way disembarking isn’t gonna suck.’

Coming alongside the gantry turned out to, indeed, suck. Thawn tightened the already-suffocating seat restraints, Beckett swore the whole way, and when the Prydwen came to a relative stop, hovering in mid-air near the gantry, the cliff-face was mere metres away. It would be so easy for them to be dashed against it with the wrong gust of wind, the wrong move of the thrusters.

But just as Thawn rose from her seat, a new alert flashed on her console, and she hesitated. ‘The Bedivere’s here.’

Beckett shot upright. ‘What?’

‘It looks like they crashed, they’re about a hundred metres below us, near the – the rising sea level.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I’m getting the automated distress signal from the shuttle, but there’s nothing on comms.’

His expression slumped, jaw working for a moment. ‘Life signs?’

‘There’s – there’s so much ionisation in this atmosphere, Beckett.’ She stood up, and grabbed his shoulder. ‘We have to stop this storm. Then we can get them.’

He blinked hard, then shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Right. Safety gear.’

The wind howled with a fresh fury when they popped the hatch, rain at once lashing in. The Prydwen could automatically hold steady only if conditions didn’t massively worsen, only if the computer could continue to compensate, and still there was a longer distance than Thawn really liked between the deck of the yacht and the rain-slicked gantry. It ran around the periphery of the cliff-face, the control panel in the middle set into the pylon that rose along with, and then beyond, the rocks above.

Beckett shrugged into a harness and clipped the safety lock onto a railing above the hatch. He tossed another harness to her. ‘You got this?’

She pulled it on. ‘You don’t need to come with me!’ Already she had to raise her voice to be heard above the howling wind. ‘You can keep the yacht steady!’

‘Oh, hell no. If we pull this off, we don’t need the damn yacht. If you get blown away or something, the yacht’s not gonna save us.’

He was probably right; the longer they were here, the less likely it was they were flying out of this storm until it passed, one way or another. And if there were any parts of this pylon that needed manual repairs, an extra pair of hands might come in handy.

She clipped the toolbox to her webbing, then looked at the gap. ‘Then here goes nothing.’

It was not a difficult jump; not for two trained officers with safety harnesses, even in high winds. But with the plunging depths below, with the slick and juddering landing on a rattling gantry, it was still a heart-stopping lunge, and Thawn staggered to grab the railing. They dragged themselves, foot by excruciating foot, along the wind-and-rain-lashed gantry, and it was safer to look at the pylon ahead, at the cliff beside them. Better than looking to the roiling storm to the right, the depths of this cyclone threatening to consume everything, or the churning reaches below.

An error message gleamed on the main display when they got to the control panel, and Thawn grabbed the edges hard as she set to work. ‘It looks like there’s a glitch in one of the isolinear chips; this pylon never properly connected when the system powered up.’

Beckett was leaning over the railing, peering at the rest of the isle below. ‘Can you fix it?’

‘I’ll have to program a chip to replace it.’ This wasn’t, strictly speaking, complicated work. The storm just had other ideas, and Thawn knelt down as she snapped her toolkit open and fiddled with increasingly numb fingers with the equipment inside. ‘Can you see them?’

‘I think I can see the Bedivere. It might be a rock; visibility’s rubbish.’

‘Hold this for me.’ An extra pair of hands wasn’t essential, but it was useful, and she knew it made him feel useful to crouch before her, hang onto the chip so she had more freedom to connect it through her tricorder and set it up for only the most basic of network functions.

She’d just finished when something else tugged at her attention, a thought that for a moment she parsed as a passing distraction, of her mind trying to go elsewhere to block out the intensifying wind, the chill of already being soaked to the bone. Then she blinked and looked sharply down. ‘I can hear Harkon.’

Beckett stiffened. ‘Hear?’

‘Her mind, she’s down there.’ Thawn shoved the chip and tricorder into his hands, then slid on her front towards the edge of the railing, as if looking down would help. The drop was gut-wrenching, but when she narrowed her eyes and focused, she could feel that familiar shape of thought. And the utter terror it was attached to. ‘She’s alive. I can’t sense Forrester. I don’t know Forrester.’

She slid back to join him, and he wordlessly handed her the tricorder, gaze guarded, as they returned to work. What they were doing was technically simple, but this was as far from a workshop as she’d ever tried to do her job.

‘Got it,’ she said after a couple more minutes, and tucked the tricorder away to pull out a fresh tool, crank open the hatch below the control panel. The isolinear chips gleamed at her, and she ran her finger across the row to locate the one which needed replacing. Despite the circumstances, she tucked it into her away jacket, just in case. ‘Give me the chip.’

He did, then returned to the gantry railing. For the moment her attention was on slotting the chip in place, sealing the hatch, rising to study the display, and she grimaced as she realised it would still need properly calibrating.

Then, from behind her, Beckett said, ‘I’m going down there.’

Thawn turned on the spot, eyes wide. ‘You’re what?’

‘The seas are getting rougher and higher; Forrester and Harkon won’t have much time.’

‘What’re you going to do, sling them both over your shoulder and climb back up with them?’

She could see the fear in his eyes, the uncertainty, but he jerked a thumb at the safety line. ‘I can jury-rig something down there. Get the Prydwen to haul us back up.’ He shook his head, and pointed at the panel. ‘You need to work on this.’

She scowled, knowing he was right on that last count at least, and turned back to crack on with the calibrations. The sky churned overhead, lightning flashed at a distance, and soon, too soon after, came the roll of thunder. She was drenched to the bone, her fingers nearly frozen solid, and the rain on the display didn’t make it easy to read.

So when Beckett landed back on the gantry with a clatter, she hadn’t realised he’d even returned to the Prydwen. But when he straightened he was strapping a medkit to his harness, and she still glared at him even as she worked. ‘This is crazy, Beckett; you’re going to need saving yourself if you go down there.’

‘You don’t need me, you got this.’

‘Maybe, but – you’re the guy who froze up on Jhorkesh, and now you want to go play hero down there?’ For once, she didn’t sound condemning. She’d had her own battle with fear in the face of violence, and now that fear bound them, rather than divided them.

He hesitated, and she looked up to meet his gaze as he said, simply, ‘Yeah, but this is different. That was about taking lives. Now I’ve got to save them.’

‘Beckett!’

He took a step back, to the edge of the space between the gantry and the Prydwen. ‘Hey, fix this soon enough and you can come pick me up down there.’

‘Wait!’ She hurried over and grabbed his tricorder from his belt. A few quick commands was all it took before she popped it back. ‘I’ve synchronised it with mine. It should provide a boost to comms.’

Beckett gave a crooked smile. ‘See? I said you were a rock star at your job. Now finish saving this damned planet.’ Then he swung off the gantry, using the safety line hanging from the hatch of the Prydwen to rappel down, down towards the lower reaches of the isle, and within seconds he disappeared into the roiling mass of sea and rain and wind.

Thawn was swearing all the time as she staggered back to the panel. Recalibration was almost complete, and from there she could re-activate the whole network – but then she’d have to confirm alignment of each pylon in a final stage before the weather control matrix could start to do its job and shield Whixby from the storm. Underfoot, the gantry rattled at the latest gust of wind.

The calibration bleeped completion a second before there was a chirrup of her comms, Beckett’s voice coming through fractured and distorted. ‘Thawn? I’m almost at the shuttle, I’m on solid rock, but I’m out of line.’

It took her a moment to realise what he was talking about, then she looked back to the Prydwen, saw his safety line taut, then twitch as he tugged it. She staggered over, gripping the railing tight as the wind tried to blow her away, and swung back onto the yacht’s deck. It did not take her long to crack open the locker of safety gear, and her heart lunged into her throat.

‘There’s no more. We didn’t pack this thing for mountain-climbing.’

A beat. Then, ‘Okay. I’m going to detach and scramble –’

‘Do not do that,’ Thawn spat, hurrying back to the open hatch. ‘That’s stupid as all hell.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘Hang on.’ She stared at his taut line. Then looked down at her own, loose and with hardly any in-use. Ten seconds later she was back on the comms. ‘You’re good. Go on.’

‘Thawn – what did you do -’

‘Go save them.’

‘Did you give me your damn line?’

There was nothing really more dangerous about this leap, again, from the Prydwen onto the rain-slicked gantry a hundred metres up in the air. But doing it without a safety line made it feel worse, and the wind was stronger, and Thawn let herself stagger straight into the railing and grabbed it with an iron grip as she landed. Her vision swam in front of her for a heartbeat, a vertigo she’d never felt rushing to the forefront before she swallowed it back.

Only then did she answer. ‘Yes. I’m almost done here. Go get them. Thawn out.’

She dragged herself by the railing, foot by foot, to return to the control panel. The display shimmered under the lashing rain, and she had to keep an iron grip on the panel itself as she rebooted the network, and the weather control programme kicked into action, beginning its assessment.

Seconds dragged out, a minute, and a buffet of wind rocked her on her feet as the systems took longer, far longer than she would have liked, to assess what she knew: the storm was bad.

‘…Thawn!’

Over the wind and rain, she could barely hear even across the short distance from the hovering Prydwen. Now her head snapped around to see two figures rising from the mist, strapped to the dangling line, and her heart lunged into her throat as she saw them: the prone shape of Forrester, hanging from the harness, with a conscious Harkon tied to her in a jury-rigged setup.

The wind almost stole Thawn’s voice. ‘Where’s Beckett?’ she had to holler over the howling.

Dried blood ran down the side of Harkon’s face, and the pilot looked unsteady as the line retracted to bring them to the open hatch. Harkon dragged them both onto the deck, fumbling to set Forrester down and then almost collapsing against a bulkhead herself.

‘Still down there!’ she called, and clumsily she detached the safety line. ‘We couldn’t figure a way to get us all up!’

‘Send the damn line back down -’

‘I’m doing it…’

Harkon had clearly needed medical aid just to get on her feet, and for a moment Thawn thought she might totter out of the hatch. But with a hammer on the line’s control, she sent it whirring back down below, tossed and spinning in the wind.

How, Thawn thought for a heartbeat, is he supposed to catch that in these winds?

But the next gust of wind made the gantry not merely shudder – but groan, and with a shriek of metal, the walkway sagged. She grabbed the edge of the panel in an iron grip and stared at it, willing it to finish readying so she could make it begin.

‘Thawn!’ Harkon’s voice sounded distant, muffled. ‘The damn thing’s coming down!’

On the display, the map of Whixby sprawled out before her, each pylon turning green in turn as the network confirmed a connection. One, two, three –

– another groan of metal, and the gantry twisted ten degrees. Thawn’s grip on the panel slipped, and she slid down, scrambling, failing to get a grasp on anything, and hit the railing that was the only thing between her and a long drop. Harkon was yelling, fear stealing Thawn’s hearing as much as the storm, but for the moment all she did was stay there, clinging to the railing for dear life, staring desperately up at the display.

Which at last turned fully green. The network was ready.

It was not with one last, heroic surge of strength that Thawn lunged to hit the activation button. It was a scrambling sort of pounce, her feet skidding on the gantry as she pulled herself up, and then the pylon before her, stabbing up so high into this storm-boiled sky she could not see the top, began to whir.

As she rounded on the Prydwen, the metal gantry groaned underfoot again, and she knew she had no time to take it carefully. If she slipped even a little, she wasn’t going to make it back on the shuttle before the whole walkway collapsed.

Never in her life had Thawn been so deft of foot as she ran, skidding and scrambling to try to hit top speed on this slanted, rain-slicked gantry that teetered and groaned and threatened at any second to send her tumbling to oblivion. She barely got a good push-off as she leapt across the distance, launched herself into the wind with less velocity than she liked, needed –

And caught the edge of the hatch, her midriff hitting the hull. For a heart-stopping moment, her feet kicked at nothing, and she heard the shriek of metal behind her as the gantry finally came sheer of its moorings to the cliff and fell. Then the wavering grip of Harkon on her forearm helped her scramble up the rest of the way.

Thawn rolled face-first onto the deck once she was up, heart thundering in her ears. Beside her, Harkon had all but collapsed in turn next to the unmoving Forrester, only barely conscious. For what felt like an eternity, the three women lay there, Thawn gasping for breath, as the storm raged beyond the hull and the Prydwen hummed at the effort of its battle with the storm.

Then she remembered. Beckett.

Thawn lurched upright just as there was a shadow in the hatchway, and up came Nate Beckett, wild-haired and wild-eyed and pale as a ghost as he hung from the retracted line. He swung back aboard the Prydwen and immediately smacked the button to close the hatch behind him, but she was barely on her feet when he rounded on her.

‘Are you mental?’ he yelped. ‘What were you doing, giving me your damn line! You had to fix the bloody pylon, the damn gantry came down almost on top of me, what if you’d been on it!’

In her relief and exhaustion, it was easier to match his indignation. ‘Me? What if it had hit you, dangling from the shuttle like a bloody fool! You couldn’t wait ten minutes before rushing off to play hero?!’ But he was laughing now, and she couldn’t help but match that, too, relief and hysteria tumbling together. They were both soaked through, both chilled to the bone, and when he pulled her into an embrace of sheer euphoria at their shared survival, shared victory, she had to return it.

‘Told you,’ Beckett croaked in her ear, and now she could hear – feel, radiating off him – the exhaustion and terror of their ordeal. ‘Told you you’re a rock star.’

‘I’m not,’ she wheezed. ‘Because I was stupid enough to not want you here with me. And to let you go down there.’

He laughed again as he pulled back, and this was one of his sillier laughs, with one of his sillier, self-assured artifices of a grin. ‘Don’t worry, Thawn. I’ll come back every time.’ They broke free, and turned to the two rescued officers, both of them a state on the deck. ‘We better get them patched up; I had to revive Har at the scene so she could haul Forrester up with her.’

‘Yeah,’ groaned Harkon from the deck, still propped up against the bulkhead. ‘Didn’t love that. Did love Nate’s timing; looked like the sea was about to take the whole shuttle.’ She looked up, gaze unfocused, and Thawn moved about the room to crack open another cabinet of emergency supplies, dig out a fresh medkit. ‘Is that it? Storm’s going to die down?’

‘It will,’ said Thawn, before casting a cautious look at Beckett. ‘Assuming whatever’s going on with the rift doesn’t get worse.’

Relief dripped from Lieutenant Athaka’s voice as he said, ‘The weather control matrix on Whixby is activating, sir. It’s beginning to dissipate the cyclone threatening the inhabited areas.’

That’s one less calamity to worry about. Rourke still glanced at the display on his armrest, at the ion storm roiling in the heart of the system, at the subspace rift still oozing tetryon radiation to agitate the nebula particles. ‘Any idea how much damage?’

‘My scans aren’t that precise right now,’ Athaka admitted. ‘But I estimate only mild.’

Mild might still mean dozens dead, and they weren’t out of the woods yet. Graelin put a voice to that fear of Rourke’s as he said tensely, ‘If we don’t close the rift soon, that ion storm will intensify and there’ll be nothing the weather control system can do against those sorts of atmospheric conditions.’

Rourke stood, hands on his hips, glowering at the viewscreen showing the drifting hulk of the Odysseus at the mouth of a now-visible tear in subspace. It was like if someone had taken a bloodied knife and slid it through the space between the stars, and now it oozed a purple pus that rapidly dissipated. ‘What’s our status there, Commander?’

‘The same as it ever was.’ Graelin managed to not growl this. ‘The rift is open. Our dekyon pulse has stopped it from growing, but the tetryon emissions are continuing. We’re not capping the situation, sir, we’re only making it become a disaster slower.’

Rourke grimaced, and looked to Lindgren. ‘Any response from the Odysseus?’

‘No, sir. But my readings have begun to clear up and I’ve just managed to pick up the King Arthur; it looks like it’s docked at an emergency airlock.’

‘Athaka, boost power to comms; Graelin, help Elsa work through the interference. If nobody’s answering on the ship, someone has to answer on the runabout.’

‘And if they don’t?’ said Graelin archly.

‘One step at a time.’ I’m not promising to kill them all just because nobody picks up a ringing comm.

Athaka was no Thawn; Rourke saw the inelegance in his work as the power allocation across the ship fluctuated. The dekyon pulse diminished for just a heartbeat before full power returned, but then the systems levelled out, and there was a victorious chirrup from Lindgren’s console.

‘Connected, sir. Putting you through now.’

‘King Arthur, this is Endeavour,’ Rourke called, heart in his throat. ‘Report.’

There was silence, then Graelin sucked on his teeth. ‘They’re out of temporal alignment with us; Lieutenant, I’m sending you an equation to modulate your signal so they can pick it up.’

‘Are we going to have to wait ten minutes for each response?’ said Rourke.

Graelin shook his head. ‘The delay’s on their side. They’re experiencing time much faster. We just need to be comprehensible if they haven’t figured it out.’

‘Implementing the calibrations and repeating your message, sir,’ called Lindgren.

Quickly, almost too quickly, came the fraught voice of Lieutenant Arys. ‘Arys here, sir. We’re evacuating most of the crew from a disaster shelter in the mess hall. What’s going on?’

‘The rift’s trying to crack open and rip you apart; we’re stopping it from doing that, but every second it’s open is a second the ion storm forming in the system gets worse,’ Rourke warned. ‘Where’s Commander Valance?’

‘Valance, Cortez, and Kharth are – it’s a long story, sir, they’re trying to retake Main Engineering. They’re with Commander Airex. Commander Aquila’s still on the bridge.’

‘Are there any other crewmembers unaccounted for?’

A hesitation. ‘A handful. But we have most of the crew on the King Arthur, Captain; I was waiting on the others.’

Graelin leaned forwards. ‘If most of the crew are on the King Arthur, they should get out of there,’ he urged, voice low.

‘And leave the others behind?’ Rourke snapped.

‘We might have to close this rift with very little warning. There are shuttles on the Odysseus; they have other getaway routes.’

Rourke scowled and turned back to the viewscreen. ‘Can you contact the others, Arys?’

‘Negative, sir. Do we wait for them?’

Five lives. Five lives at the least, three of them – four of them – his own. Against the hundred souls on the King Arthur, the hundreds of thousands of souls on Whixby. Rourke glared at the deck, before he rumbled, ‘Get the King Arthur out of there.’

Because Tar’lek Arys was a dutiful young officer, he barely hesitated when he said, ‘Yes, sir.’ But there was a hesitation.

‘They have Cortez,’ Lindgren said softly as the line went dead. ‘And Commander Airex. If anyone’s going to get them out of a tough spot…’

‘I know,’ Rourke said quickly. ‘We have to trust them. Tell me when the King Arthur is clear of the rift.’

Graelin nodded. ‘We should consider intensifying our dekyon pulse once the runabout is clear.’

Rourke turned to him, chin up. ‘That will bring the rift shut on the Odysseus. That’ll kill everyone aboard.’

‘And save everyone in the system.’ As if fate agreed with him, there was a fresh rumble through the hull of Endeavour, the distant and nascent ion storm’s effects making themselves felt.

‘It’s not time yet.’

‘Sir! This isn’t like turning a tap on and off; even if we shut the rift now, the tetryon radiation already in the system is going to agitate and ionise the nebula particles, and the storm will keep forming for possibly as long as another hour before it disperses.’

‘The weather control systems on Whixby are designed to see the planet through mild storms.’

‘And every minute we delay, the more intense the storm will become and the longer it will take for it to disperse before -’

Rourke rounded on him. ‘I don’t need you to explain the science to me, Commander. I do not misunderstand you; I disagree with you.’ Graelin looked struck, and out of the corner of his eye, Rourke could see a guarded expression fall across Lindgren’s face. He swept his eyes around the bridge, at Juarez at Tactical, at what were largely relief officers manning their posts, and drew a sharp breath. ‘A year ago, Commander Valance risked this ship to save my life at the Azure Nebula, even against my orders. Six months ago, Commander Cortez locked herself behind blast doors to protect the ship while she repaired an EPS conduit, and if she hadn’t succeeded, she’d have been killed. Lieutenant Kharth has protected all of you over and over again, against the Wild Hunt, against the D’Ghor, against the Star Empire. We will show them the same courage, loyalty, and trust they have shown us.’

And Dav Airex saved us all – saved Teros – from Omega. But none of you can ever know what he came so close to dying for.

Expressions were set in conviction across the bridge; all but the gaze of Graelin, glaring and stewing. Rourke knew what he was thinking; that this had been an appeal to emotion over reason, that willing the day to be saved was not the same as saving it. The most damning thing was that he knew he was right.

Rourke sat back in his command chair, gripping the armrests tight. ‘Maintain the dekyon pulse, Athaka,’ he called clearly. ‘Bring the King Arthur aboard as soon as possible. For now, we hold this line.’

Cortez knew she was the only engineer in the room by the way everyone else struggled to keep their feet as the deck of the Odysseus lurched. From somewhere in the distance, a warning klaxon sounded; heads snapped around, but she ignored it.

‘That’s just a pressure drop in this compartment,’ she said, grabbing the main control panel for the warp core tight. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ Normally it was a lot to worry about. But they had to survive a while longer before that could kill them.

Airex had grabbed one of the nearest terminals, and she could see the internal systems display he’d called up. ‘The King Arthur has detached from its docking point at the mess hall.’

Valance drew a sharp breath. ‘If they’ve evacuated the rest of the crew, that’s for the best.’

‘That’s also,’ Kharth said, ‘our ride.’

‘We’re on our ride,’ said Cortez with a confidence she didn’t feel. Her hands raced over the control panel, trying to level out the power systems of the Odysseus without any sudden surges as she eased the antimatter injection rates back into alignment. ‘We’ll just fly this girl out of here.’

Next to her, Valance had whipped out her tricorder and used its screen to project a direct communications link to the bridge. After a second, a small, slightly fuzzy image of Commander Aquila at the operations console flickered into view.

‘I’m restoring all your access down there, Cortez,’ the Odysseus’s master said without missing a beat. ‘What’s the situation?’

‘The rift started to tear open as our warp field became unstable,’ Cortez said, not looking at her. ‘I need to not only restore the warp field, but I think expand it to again connect with the torn subspace filaments at the edge of the rift. That will restabilise everything and we can plan from there.’

‘Is it safe,’ said Valance, ‘for the King Arthur to have left?’

‘If Lieutenant Arys could reach the mess hall,’ said Airex, ‘he and Tegan presumably know what they’re doing in manipulating the runabout’s warp field harmonics. They should be able to leave as easily as you got here.’

‘So it’s just us we need to worry about. And, you know, the subspace rift causing all of this,’ mused Cortez. As she continued working, the humming in the deck slowed. ‘I’ve levelled out the warp field. That’s not about to kill us all.’ She glanced up. ‘Uh, Sae; could you possibly go deal with that pressure loss?’

‘Oh, now it’s a problem,’ Kharth groaned, but she obligingly headed to one of the engineering control panels.

‘Do we have a way out of this?’ said Valance.

‘We can figure that out once the rift is under control. Which it will be in about ten seconds; I’m expanding the warp field.’ Slowly, Cortez adjusted a slider on the panel.

Airex straightened up three seconds later. ‘Wait -’

But too late. This time, Cortez was thrown from her feet at the juddering impact. More alert klaxons went off, all of them serious, and though she was the first to rise again, it was to see three panels overload, hear the hissing from above she knew was a coolant leak. Dragging herself back to the console showed the warp field collapsing, and her chest tightened. ‘What the hell…’

‘Endeavour is out there,’ groaned Airex, also pulling himself to his console. ‘They’re putting out a dekyon pulse; when our warp field came into contact with it, because of our calibrations along the same subspace harmonics as the rift, it’s…’

‘Collapsing the warp field. Oh.’ Cortez’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, no. We’ve got to get out of here.’

Airex shook his head. ‘If this ship explodes here and now, the warp core overloading will rip the rift wide open.’ He hesitated, and Cortez could see him running calculations in his head. ‘I don’t think Endeavour’s going to survive it.’

‘Okay,’ she said, like this pause would give her an idea. It did not. ‘Okay,’ she said again.

‘So even if we evacuate right now,’ said Kharth, who’d been checking on Templeton, ‘we’re still not getting out of the blast radius in time.’

Valance had had to pick up the tricorder again, the display showing Aquila’s face shimmering still. ‘Which means we have to close this rift, no matter what.’

Valance nodded. ‘Dav, Isa – ideas?’

The two experts locked eyes, and Airex worked his jaw. ‘If we can match the dekyon pulse harmonics from Endeavour, we might be able to… stabilise our own warp field?’

‘It won’t stabilise it.’ Cortez’s stomach lurched, and she straightened. ‘I know what I have to do.’

Valance rounded on her, eyes flashing. She couldn’t possibly know what Cortez had in mind, but she’d read her tone. ‘What do you mean, “I”?’

Cortez cast a quick, urgent look at Airex and Kharth, and the Romulan security officer, at least, tensed as if she knew something was expected of her. ‘Airex is half-right. What we need to do is flood our own warp field with dekyons. When that comes into contact with the subspace filaments of the rift, that, along with what Endeavour’s doing, should… close the rift.’

Airex clicked his tongue. ‘That’s going to require absolutely fine-tuned calibrations to maintain a warp field in alignment with the edges of the rift…’

‘So you have about two minutes to get to a shuttle or escape pod and get the hell out of here,’ said Cortez, ‘while I get my calibrations ready, and then close the rift on top of the Odysseus.’

‘No way,’ snapped Valance at once. ‘There’s no way we’re leaving you behind.’ She turned to Airex. ‘Dav, we need another plan.’

He looked stricken, and moved to Cortez’s side by the panel. ‘I don’t…’

‘Commander.’ Cortez squared her shoulders and looked Valance in the eye. ‘This is how almost everyone gets off this ship, this is how Endeavour is saved, this is how the rift is shut. Unless Commander Airex pulls a rabbit out of his hat in two seconds, we don’t have any other option.’ Her heart was thundering in her chest, but that was more about facing Valance down than it was about the fear of her impending death. Engineers were always half in love with the idea of dying with the ship. The only regret was that this wasn’t her ship.

Kharth slid to Valance’s side. ‘Commander Cortez’s plan -’

She’d sounded like she was trying to be brisk and professional in her support, but Valance turned on her like she was ready to unleash all of her fury. ‘Stand the hell down, Kharth; you’re not an engineer.’

‘Kar.’ Abandoning professionalism, Cortez flew to Valance’s side, grabbing her arm. ‘I can do this. We don’t have much time. This is my job.’ Valance’s expression was crumbling as she looked at her, and words rose in Cortez’s chest – everything and nothing, none of them encapsulating so much as a particle of what she felt and thought.

So she could have sworn with frustration as Aquila’s voice came through the tricorder sat on the warp core console, an interruption just as she was trying to reduce her heart into pithy words. ‘Commander; I’ve crunched some quick numbers. Does this look like what you need?’

I didn’t need your help, Cortez thought with almost a petty resentment. But she turned away from Valance, because there was indeed not enough time, to look at the file scrolling over her console’s display. Her eyes raced across the algorithm. ‘That looks right, Commander. I’ll adjust the strength and distribution of the dekyons as the rift contracts and ride it through to the end; ideally Endeavour should realise when it’s too late, or you contact them, and they finish the job once the rift’s microscopic.’

‘Good,’ said Aquila. ‘It’s a tremendous idea, Cortez. The sort of thing medals are made of.’ Then every console in Main Engineering flashed red, the words ACCESS DENIED blaring in front of Cortez’s eyes, and the image of Aquila straightened. ‘I’ll take it from here.’

‘Oh,’ said Kharth in the silence that followed. ‘Well played, Commander.’

Cortez’s jaw dropped. ‘Commander, this has to be absolutely fine-tuned -’

‘I understand. This is my ship, I know her systems better than any of you. Now kindly get your asses to a shuttle; the bay is two sections over and the Eurylochus is still in there.’

‘Cassia.’ Valance’s voice was flat. ‘We don’t need to leave anyone behind.’

‘Yes, we do. I’m sure if there was another way, your pack of geniuses would have come up with it by now. And if anyone’s going to stay behind, it’s me. Captain’s prerogative to go down with her ship.’

It was Kharth who moved again in the silence, shaking Cortez gently by the shoulder. ‘Isa, Dav, drag the commander out of here if you’ve got to; I think she might stab me if I try. I’ve got Templeton. Let’s hustle, people.’

Cortez blinked, knowing that Kharth was right, slightly heartened by how she’d rallied as quickly to leave Aquila behind as she’d rallied to leave her behind. She advanced, slipping her arm around Valance’s in a way which would have been sweet had it not also been designed to get an iron grip. ‘Kar. We don’t have a choice; she’s locked us out of all systems down here.’

Valance wrenched herself free, and for a moment Cortez looked around to see if she could spot Templeton’s phaser, wondered if they’d have to shoot her – then Valance grabbed the tricorder with its comms display, and fell into step with them as they stormed towards the doors of Main Engineering. ‘I thought you hated the Kobayashi Maru, Cassia.’

‘I do,’ said Aquila, not looking at the screen, obviously occupied by the complicated work of bringing a rift down on top of herself and her ship. The deck rumbled again, but there was a stability to the hum, and Cortez guessed that was the dekyons beginning to flood their warp field and start building the connections to manipulate the rift. ‘Getting my crew all out of here, getting you out of here, carissima, doesn’t look like a no-win to me.’

Valance only stared as they hurried, and Cortez felt her tense beside her, felt the feelings that choked and smothered any possible response. The main doors to engineering slid shut behind them, and they were running down the corridor now, Airex in the lead as the person who best-knew the layout of the Odysseus, Kharth taking up the rear to help a completely disassociated Templeton.

At Valance’s stunned silence, Cassia Aquila laughed. ‘Remember what I told you. Set the world on fire a little, sometimes. After all – no way you can’t win that bet now.’ And the connection went dead, the captain of the Odysseus’s face winking out of view; out of, for them, existence.

Valance stared at the space where she’d been for a heartbeat, then holstered the tricorder and fell back to Kharth’s side. ‘Let me help,’ she said roughly, and with her strength to half-carry Templeton, it was much easier for them to sprint down the next two sections, come skidding into the shuttlebay.

The view beyond was of that roiling mess of a rift that Cortez had only seen through the sensors before, the wound in space of purples and reds, the edges sparking at the dekyons flooding through to tighten and manipulate the subspace filaments. ‘If this shuttle doesn’t take off right away…’

‘I’ve got this,’ Valance cut off her warning. The ramp from the Eurylochus was already descending, a final gift from Aquila, and Cortez fell into the back with Templeton and Kharth as Airex and Valance slid into the co-pilot and pilot’s chairs respectively.

‘Returning to normal space is going to require,’ started Airex tensely, ‘very precise calculations and calibrations of our warp field. Your timing is going to have to be perfect, Karana, to get us through the right route at the right time.’ His fingers ran over controls, the shuttle powering up.

‘I know,’ Valance said simply, not waiting for anyone to settle before the shuttle ascended and tore away from the Odysseus. ‘Give me a flight plan.’

Cortez had almost gone for the co-pilot’s seat herself, but Airex had got there first. She was, on some level, relieved. This was not her element; she belonged in the belly of the beast, next to the thumping heart of a ship, where she could send her commands out to every limb, every artery. Watching Airex and Valance working together was something else, the Trill acting on more than a knowledge of his vessel and how to harness it, but seeing sensor readings and data possibly nobody had ever seen before and extrapolating a response in mere seconds. Beside him, Valance’s console chirped and complained at every minor adjustment Airex made, every alteration to their course, but she responded like a river merely following its route to the sea.

‘Okay,’ Cortez breathed in the back, slumped to the deck beside Kharth and across from a crumpled Templeton. ‘Maybe trusting your ex isn’t a terrible plan.’

‘Hang on!’ came Valance’s call before Kharth could summon a doubtless-sardonic retort. ‘We’re breaching the rift into normal space in five…’

‘Why couldn’t we get a shuttle with more seats,’ complained Kharth, and they braced.

‘You need to slow down,’ came Airex’s voice. ‘I need another second for the calibrations -’

Then they hit the edge of the rift, the Eurylochus lurched, and everything went black for the second time that day as Cortez was slammed into the bulkhead.

‘The rift is contracting.’ Graelin’s voice was taut, clipped. ‘We need to narrow our dekyon pulse, or we’re in danger of keeping it open.’

Rourke looked over sharply. ‘Won’t that close it faster?’

‘That is the idea, sir.’

Ever restless in a situation like this, Rourke rose from the command chair and glared at the viewscreen. ‘Elsa, tell me you’ve made contact.’ At her hapless look, he rounded on Juarez. ‘Escape pods, anything?’

Juarez, less accustomed to the captain’s truculence in situations like this, winced. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Captain.’ Graelin’s jaw was iron tight. ‘If we don’t act now, we’re going to make this worse, cause further damage to the subspace filaments at the edge of the rift -’

‘Do it,’ Rourke said gracelessly.

He watched as the energy beam from Endeavour licked at the edges of the rift, watched as the tear in space began to swirl and narrow, closing in on the drifting black silhouette of the Odysseus. In the long, thudding seconds that followed, even as he could see the changes, there was no sign of any escape.

One chirrup among many from Graelin’s console did not stand out, and it took several seconds before his science officer spoke up, only hesitated. ‘There’s a shuttle out there.’

Rourke rounded on him, blood pounding. You thought about it, he realised with sickening horror. You thought about not telling me. ‘From the Odysseus?’

Graelin nodded, face folded into a scowl as his hands danced over the console. ‘At the rift’s rate of contraction, they…’ He didn’t finish, then shook his head with obvious anger. ‘Skies above. It’s the Odysseus that’s closing the rift – maybe if I alter our beam to a series of staggered pulses, I can buy them time without screwing this up.’

He didn’t sound happy about the many gaps in the maybe, and Rourke drew a deep breath. ‘What do you need, Petrias?’

‘I need you to shut up, Captain, and for everyone on this bridge to do what I say.’

Rourke felt the eyes of the bridge crew on him, and after a moment’s hesitation, he gave a stern nod. ‘Commander Graelin has the ball.’ He met the other man’s gaze. ‘Use it.’

His science officer swept into action like a tsunami. ‘Athaka, I need you to follow these power allocation protocols precisely. Juarez, adjust the deflector output accordingly; we’ll need incrementally higher intensity with each pulse.’

The bridge swung into motion, the multiple limbs of the great mechanisms at Endeavour’s disposal moving together to perform intensely delicate operations manipulating space and time itself. But Rourke found his feet moving him to one of the mission control consoles, and he swept away the sensor feed to bring up a new interface.

Lindgren had slid up beside him, voice dropping. ‘Sir?’

‘Don’t mind me, Lieutenant,’ he hummed, feeling his heart loosen a little as he worked. ‘Commander Graelin can save this bit of the day. I’m just stealing a little power for our tractor beam.’ He’d done this a hundred times as a tactical officer, but Juarez needed to finish the job to save the system from the ravages of this phenomenon. He could have directed a relief officer to the job, but this – this – was one thing he could do: reach out and grab his people.

The Eurylochus was drifting by the time it was clear on his sensors, but he pushed that from his mind. As he watched, the narrowing of the rift slowed under Graelin’s efforts, the shuttle moving clear under its own momentum, leaving the way for Endeavour to finish the job. It took a simple command to settle a tractor beam around the craft, and only then did his breathing come easier.

‘Rift is closing, sir,’ called Graelin. ‘But the Odysseus will go with it. I can’t tell if there are any life-signs aboard. Five are on the shuttle.’

That didn’t mean much. Rourke looked up to the viewscreen to see the hues of the rift wrap around the silhouette of the Odysseus, contract, warp –

– then it was all gone, and nothing but the blackness of space and the faint swirl of the Paulson Nebula remained.

Rourke swallowed. ‘Any word from the Eurylochus, Elsa?’

‘No response, sir.’

He stepped away from the console to return to the centre chair. ‘Juarez, guide them to our bay. Elsa, direct Doctor Elvad to meet them with a medical team.’ They had already taken aboard the King Arthur, set up an emergency shelter for the hundred crewmembers from the Odysseus in the cargo bay, but he had yet to receive more of an update from Arys as the young helmsman oversaw the process. All he knew for sure was that the rest of his away team was unaccounted for. ‘What’s the situation on Whixby?’

‘The weather control system held, sir. Once it was activated, the cyclone dissipated and I’d estimate minimal damage,’ said Graelin. ‘The additional tachyon radiation shouldn’t be enough for this ion storm to grow beyond a grade 2. I’d expect it to disperse in a matter of hours.’

‘We can weather that,’ Rourke mused. ‘Is the rift gone?’

‘So far as I can tell. It matches the reports from other sealed rifts.’

Rourke met his eye, and gave a sharp nod. ‘Good work, Commander.’

Graelin shifted his weight. ‘Thank you.’

‘Monitor the rift, the storm, and Whixby. We’ll return to orbit once the storm passes or if there’s a fresh emergency. You have the bridge.’

‘Sir?’ Graelin frowned as Rourke headed for a turbolift.

He glanced over his shoulder with a grimace of a smile. ‘I’m going to see my people.’

* *

Crossing the event horizon of the rift had been more of a kick than Valance expected. One moment the shuttle was moving at top speed away from the Odysseus, Airex guiding her on the best route to not fall foul of any of the subspace filaments and their manipulations on space-time. But returning to normal space had brought them through a thread of ionic energy that had overloaded their impulse engines, and the last thing Valance remembered before being smacked head-first into her own controls was the realisation it would completely knock out their system.

The next thing she knew, however, were the bright lights of Endeavour’s sickbay. That was enough to have her sitting bolt upright on her biobed, and at once the firm hands of Doctor Elvad were on her shoulders.

‘Commander, you need to -’

‘Where’s the team, where’s Isa –’ She’d watched Cassia Aquila say goodbye and condemn herself to death; decorum was long gone.

‘They’re all in this sickbay, they’re all alive, and you have three broken ribs so sit down.’ Elvad was half-wrestling her already, but at his words she relented. The fading adrenaline brought a wave of exhaustion in its wake, and she slumped back.

‘You need to get someone from Carraway’s staff to receive Commander Templeton -’

‘Commander, kindly shut up and let me do my job,’ Elvad snapped. ‘Templeton is sedated and Lieutenant Kharth has given a quick account.’

‘Airex – he’s been through a lot -’

‘Which I dare say I already understand better than you, having scanned him myself -’

‘Isa -’

‘Commander Cortez split her skull, yes, but don’t be so bloody dramatic, she’s right here in Sickbay and is fine. Do you think I saw to you myself, with mere broken ribs, without making sure everyone in a far more excitingly worse condition was tended to?’

Now she met the cool eyes of the Cardassian doctor. He hadn’t been aboard for very long, but it seemed he had, if possible, a worse bedside manner than Sadek. She, at least, used her sardonic manner to disarm. Not that Valance particularly wanted to be coddled. ‘Can I see her?’

‘You cannot, you can lie there and let me patch you up and then you can let her rest. Now stop moving, or I’ll sedate you.’

She cooperated long enough to let Elvad work, even when she saw the shadow of the captain appear behind him. It was unclear how long he’d been there, arms folded across his chest, but he didn’t step up until Elvad was finished, leaving her with a wry acknowledgement she’d probably ignore his instructions to not move anyway.

She did indeed ignore them, sitting up with a wince. ‘Sir, the Odysseus – Commander Aquila -’

She’d known the answer even before the look in his eyes, even before the shake of his head. ‘The rift is shut, Valance. The Odysseus is gone.’ Rourke glanced over his shoulder to the rest of Sickbay, where she saw Kharth sat up on a biobed talking to a nurse, and the unconscious forms of Airex, Templeton, and Cortez on other beds. ‘Kharth told me what happened. I’m sorry.’

Perhaps she’d spent too long feeling sick to have any other feelings left. Valance braced her weight on her knees. ‘The crew? Arys?’

‘In Cargo Bay 2 – we’ve converted it to a shelter for them. Whixby’s okay, the storm’s dissipating, everything’s been taken care of.’ He stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Elvad says Cortez will be okay. She’s got a thick skull, you know that.’

A small part of her wanted to collapse at the touch of his hand. Had they not been in the middle of Sickbay, she might. Had she been more sure she could piece herself back together after, she might. Instead, she drew a slow breath. ‘What’s next?’

‘Finish helping Whixby recover. Try to twist their arms to take in more refugees. Make contact with Command and maybe see if we can get the Odysseus crew shipped out of here. In short…’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Nothing you need to worry about.’

Valance swallowed hard. ‘Kharth did well,’ she said in a low voice. ‘When Templeton was going to destroy the ship, she… she talked him down. She stayed calm, she got through to him. She showed good judgement.’

Rourke’s lips twisted. ‘You sure you didn’t take a blow to the head?’

Despite herself, she gave a gentle snort that made her healing ribs ache a little. ‘Arys had more responsibility put on than I would have chosen, and he performed admirably. And Cortez, she… Kharth will back me up if you think I’m biased, but she figured out a complete mess of a situation and kept throwing out solutions. She figured out how to close the rift while buying our team enough time to escape, and if Cassia hadn’t taken over, she’d have…’ The ache moved from her ribs to her chest.

‘There’ll be time for reports and debriefs later,’ Rourke said softly. ‘I’m just relieved you’re all back. I don’t need heroes, I need my crew, but I’m damned proud I’ve got both.’

Valance worked her jaw. ‘Commander Aquila was the real hero. She gave her life to save us and the system.’ She hesitated. ‘I know, I know. A thousand meetings with Carraway after this.’

‘You took the words right out of my mouth. And in the meantime, Valance – you’re off-duty. Rest.’

He left, and she did, at least for a time. But within half an hour, Elvad had confirmed she could leave so long as she kept her activities light, and that Cortez would be kept under for an extra couple of hours while the osteogenic stimulators did their work on her skull.

So she slouched across Sickbay towards one of the other biobeds, and stopped next to Kharth at the foot of where Davir Airex rested, unmoving. ‘What did Elvad say?’ she asked, voice low.

Kharth had barely looked away from Airex, acknowledged her arrival with only a tilt of the head. ‘By comparing his physiological readings to the last ones on file, Elvad thinks he’s aged about a year. So that’s about a year on his own on the Odysseus.’

Valance winced. ‘He said there’d been a period he thought his perception of time alone was altered. So it may have felt like more.’

‘Hells,’ Kharth hissed through gritted teeth. ‘That explains Templeton, too.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m sorry about Aquila.’

Valance merely nodded, not wanting to discuss this with many people, and Kharth was not on this list. She was saved from comment by Airex stirring, and she took a step forward. ‘Dav?’

Kharth slunk back. ‘I’ll let you talk.’ She had waited there since she could stand, waited at the foot of his bed and spoken to Elvad and watched and listened. Now he was awakening, now they might talk, she left.

Valance watched her go, but couldn’t find it in herself to blame her, let alone stop her. She turned back to Airex and moved to the side of the biobed, looking down at him. ‘Are you back with us?’

Blue eyes flickered open, then widened as he took in his surroundings. After a heartbeat, Airex drew a deep breath and said, ‘I will need a shave and a haircut.’

‘At the least,’ Valance drawled, strength coming back to her now she could prop walls back up with their interchange. ‘You look awful.’

‘Facilities on the Odysseus were regrettably lacking.’ Slowly, Airex propped himself up on the biobed. He met her gaze with a guilty air at the mention of the Odysseus, but said no more, and she was again relieved; she did not have the patience to receive a flurry of regrets and commiserations. ‘We’re out?’

‘We’re out. How do you feel?’

‘Like the good doctor I don’t recognise has pumped me full of drugs. I can rather recommend them.’ He looked her in the eye, and the corners of his eyes creased. ‘Thank you for coming for me.’

‘It wasn’t just you.’ She hesitated. ‘You can walk out on me. But I still have your back.’

A muscle flickered at the corner of his jaw. ‘I said when this is over, we should talk.’

‘You need time to recover -’

‘As soon as possible, I must report in at Starbase Bravo. There’ll be no time.’ He straightened, and it was like his face turned to stone as he regarded her. ‘I owe you the truth. I’ve given you too little of that.’

Valance hesitated. Then said, ‘I’d agree with that.’

‘The truth is,’ said Davir Airex in a slow, cold voice, ‘that we’re done, and I don’t need you any more.’ As she stared, he spoke on, tones clipped. ‘I won’t deny I was disorientated on the Odysseus, but I also needed the mission completed.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You went out of your way to displace Cassia from the bridge so you could join me on the mission to Engineering -’

‘It was the best place to be to complete the mission, especially if something happened to Cortez. It wasn’t the time to divert you with facts I… have hoped you might be spared.’ His jaw set. ‘Perhaps you and I were friends for a time, Valance. When you were the colleague aboard who kept your head and didn’t get distracted by petty personal matters. Who wouldn’t divert me from my work or bring a lack of professionalism to the table. But frankly, since you met Cortez… you’ve gone soft.’

It was a curious thing, Valance thought, to be told things she didn’t think the speaker believed and for them to stab deep nevertheless. She swallowed hard. ‘I know what you’re doing. You can’t drive me off by -’

‘You were a reliable ally when you kept your head and, frankly, didn’t have the emotional imagination to pry. But over the last year you’ve become unreliable. Volatile.’

Only the best of friends knew exactly where to slip the knife. ‘Whatever you’re running from, Dav, it’s not going to vanish just because you rush off to Bravo -’

‘We worked together for a while. That’s all. I think there’s little which binds us now.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe if you’d held the course. And your temper. I think your loss of control on the Odysseus when Commander Aquila proposed she sacrifice herself and you did nothing useful to stop her speaks to that.’

Then it didn’t matter if he meant it or was just trying to hurt her, because that was the moment the loss of Cassia Aquila exploded in Valance’s chest like a wave that could drown. She raised a hand, an accusing finger jabbing at him – and then no words came; nothing that wouldn’t have her running to the place of cold detachment that felt too close to him, or fiery, grief-fuelled anger that would prove him right.

So she said nothing, her hand dropping, and turned on her heel to stalk out the door. And as she left, she wondered if she would look back on today as a day she had lost two of the most important people in her life.

The main ballroom of the Seashine Hotel had little to recommend it compared to the grand halls of Betazed, but Thawn had to admit it was impressive for a distant land of leisure such as Whixby. More impressive, perhaps, was the diligence the Lillarties had applied to making it fit for a party – or even throwing a party at all, a mere forty-eight hours after the greatest storm Sanditor had ever known.

Then again, the storm had been stopped.

‘It might be awkward,’ Hale said as they walked through the doors into the thronging masses of the great and the good of Whixby, ‘but it would be judicious to speak proudly of what happened on Starglimmer.’

‘I know,’ Thawn sighed. ‘We need all of the goodwill we can get. And apparently very little of the outside world can burst the bubble of Sanditor.’ Her eyes swept over the fine dresses, the fine suits, already spinning in the music piping from a band elevated at the far end of the hall she knew weren’t holograms.

‘The Lillarties always intended on this ball, and considering how little damage the island took, it’s not outrageous,’ Hale said judiciously. ‘But yes, if we’re not careful, everyone will shove their heads in the sand.’

‘I don’t -’

‘Six.’ Whatever Thawn was going to say was lost as Nate Beckett appeared as if from nowhere out of the crowd, sweeping straight past Hale and hissing the number at her like it was an urgent and indiscreet code.

Thawn watched him disappear into a fresh knot of young Betazoids, and within a heartbeat she could tell he was regaling them with the story of saving the island. That, at least, did suit his skills. Still her lips thinned. ‘What in the Great Fire…?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Hale with a calm wave of the hand. ‘Is Lieutenant Rhade coming?’

‘No.’ Thawn winced at how quickly she’d said this. ‘He’s much happier helping on the Azure Chain.’

‘I wonder if we could have used him,’ Hale hummed, either not picking up on Thawn’s discomfort or politely pretending she hadn’t. ‘But that’s possibly for the best. I have something a little more deliberate in mind. How is the crew of the Odysseus?’

It had been some relief to stop off back aboard Endeavour once the dust settled. Harkon and Forrester had needed flying up so Sickbay could receive them, and the Prydwen benefited from Chief Koya’s tender care. But their mission on Sanditor was not over, so the return to normalcy was short-lived. Now she was back here.

Thawn sighed. ‘The Colne is inbound to bring them to Bravo for care and debriefing. Most of them are in good condition; it seems like those in the mess hall didn’t experience very much time passing at all. It could have been a lot worse.’ She knew it was a little callous, but the numbers spoke for themselves: two losses, and one officer in whatever condition Templeton was in, was better than one might have hoped. Even if a loss had been the Odysseus’s captain.

‘Seven,’ hissed Beckett, sweeping by again like he was on a wire dragging him from one side of the chamber to the other, and was at once gone again.

Hale raised her eyebrows at that. ‘I say. You should think of dancing with someone, Lieutenant. Mingle.’

Thawn hesitated. They were among Betazoids, which nominally made this easier; this was the sort of socialising in which she had been raised, where feelings were open, felt, shared. But after almost ten years among non-telepaths, it did not feel so simple to open back up. Privacy was a habit she had begun to cherish.

But she didn’t have a good argument and so, like she was pulling back on a pair of shoes she hadn’t worn in a long time, she dipped a toe into the fuss and bother of the Lillarties’s ball. Of course, as one of the officers who’d saved Sanditor, it was not hard to draw attention and company, and she had to remind herself to not explain too much of the technical process of what she’d done to fix the weather control system, and to smile, and to laugh.

Halfway through listening to an earnest local express how impressed he was by her feat, she spotted Beckett nearby, regaling a pretty young man with a much more dramatic retelling of the events. Once, that would have twisted in her gut with irritation – at his apparent peacocking at their work, at how easily he navigated something she stumbled and stuttered through – but she found herself suppressing a smirk. Mid-sentence, he caught her eye, winked, and swung into the next leg of the story.

She did roll her eyes, before returning polite attention to the man who wanted to pretend he understood how recalibrating the weather control system worked. Then there was a thudding at the doors as they were not pushed open, but thrown, and the crowds by the entrance fell into a hush as all eyes landed on the new arrival.

Oh, thought Thawn, heart sinking. Oh, no.

Captain Rourke looked a state. He was in uniform, but she knew he had been down at the shelter on the Azure Chain, and it showed. He was rumpled and dirty, his hair rather wild, but his eyes were clear and his gait firm.

‘Evening!’ Rourke called cheerfully, making a bee-line for one of the waiters with a tray of flutes of sparkling wine. He grabbed one, necking it at once, then waved a dismissive hand at the crowd. ‘Don’t mind me, fresh off the shuttle from Azure. Good shindig, crack on.’

Thawn flew to Beckett’s side, grabbing his sleeve. ‘What in the stars is going on with him?’ she hissed as Rourke wandered through the crowd.

Beckett clicked his tongue. ‘Reckon he needs canapes. Come on.’ They slid into the crowd, Beckett grabbing a plate off another waiter, and found Rourke just as he reached Hale. Eyes were on them, nobody else intervening, but everyone clearly hung on the captain’s words.

‘…so the secondary shelter’s back up, but the storm absolutely bodied it,’ Rourke was saying to Hale, a little too loudly, and gestured closer Beckett – or his canapes – when he saw him. ‘Which has set things back a bit. Endeavour’s sent down some more generators, but we reckon a good hundred houses will be without power tonight. If we can’t – cheers, Nate – if we can’t get them back online tomorrow, it’s going to be hell.’ He shovelled a tiny pastry in his mouth, then turned to the watching eyes with a guileless air. Rourke swallowed and brushed pastry off his jacket. ‘Sorry, folks. Don’t mean to dampen the party.’

Hale gave a sunny smile that managed to offer the crowd reassurance without in any way disavowing Rourke, and she put a hand on his arm. ‘Captain, might I offer you my rooms to get cleaned up and changed? Then I’m sure we’d love to hear how things are progressing on the Chain.’

‘Oh. Yeah. Get me some more of them snacks, Nate.’ Rourke snapped his fingers at Beckett, who vanished yet again, then started towards the doors. He did not, Thawn noticed, move very fast – or avoid stopping to talk to various crowds and people, shaking hands roughly, obviously explaining how bad things were on the Chain, as he went.

Thawn slid up beside Hale. ‘Please tell me that was intentional.’

‘As I said, I had something more deliberate in mind,’ Hale said, her smile turning to one the Mona Lisa would have been proud of. ‘The captain rather delights in playing down his manners, and the Lillarties invited him; I thought he might be able to provide a reminder to all and sundry that problems are still near home.’

Beckett reappeared between them, eyes bright. ‘That’s nine, First Secretary.’

‘Nine? Well done, Ensign. Shall we speak with your cousin, Lieutenant?’

‘I… guess?’ said Thawn, bewildered as she followed, Beckett tagging along behind with a light step.

Falyn had been moving from group to group, but clearly hung back at Rourke’s arrival. On Hale’s approach, she pivoted like she hadn’t been trying to avoid them, approaching with an airy smile she probably thought would convince a non-telepath like Hale, but Thawn rather suspected wasn’t doing the trick. ‘Ms Hale! I hope you are enjoying this wonderful party?’

‘It’s delightful; such a relief after the last few days.’ But Hale’s gaze sharpened the moment niceties were out of the way, and she stepped closer to drop her voice. ‘The Board meets tomorrow to discuss the Spirelight arrangements still, yes?’

‘Yes, yes, of course; we’ll have to see what they -’

‘I’m pleased to say, Administrator Nyder, that nine of the members have expressed their support to me,’ said Hale, not breaking her gaze, and Thawn’s chest tightened. That wasn’t a majority, that wouldn’t swing the decision – unless Falyn threw her own weight behind it.

Falyn’s eyes widened, and Thawn could feel the apprehension coming off her in waves, the uncertainty – and the absolute fear. ‘Nine, you say?’ Her voice went a little higher pitched. ‘Well, that’s…’

‘And so I would hope very much,’ said Hale, tightening the noose, ‘that we can count on the Nyder family and the Twelfth House to support such an essential program to house refugees in desperate need.’

Falyn swallowed, gaze flickering to Thawn for a heartbeat. ‘I would have to consider that. It would be…’

‘Quite something.’ Thawn’s voice dropped as her stomach did, and disgust rose in its place. ‘Quite something if you were the deciding vote. Quite something if you had to have an opinion, Falyn?’

She stiffened. ‘Rosara, this is a complicated -’

Thawn turned on her heel, scanning the crowd – and there, not very far away, were the Lillarties. She lifted a hand to usher them over, trying to project a sunny cheer she did not feel. ‘Evertine, Cosbar!’

The two came through, curiosity oozing from them, especially as they saw Falyn’s rather fixed smile. But Evertine kept all of them before her, too canny to ignore any piece on the table, even as she gave a broad smile like they were, indeed, just at a party. ‘My dear, it’s so lovely to see you – you absolutely must enjoy the night, after all your hard work.’

‘I will,’ Thawn lied, ‘but I fear I must talk work just a moment longer, so we don’t have to worry about it all night.’ At her curious look, she straightened. ‘The meeting tomorrow. Half of the board will support establishing the refugee shelter on Spirelight.’

Dealings with other telepaths like this took delicacy and it took discipline. It took taking thoughts and feelings and packing them away; not shoving them into dark corners, but handling them with diligence and care so she could shield herself, project only exactly what she wanted to project. By now, managing her emotions so she didn’t have to feel them came as second nature to Rosara Thawn.

Evertine Lillarties looked and felt like she shared that discipline, emotions nor expression giving much away as she smiled politely. ‘Half? That is interesting. But it -’

‘Half,’ said Thawn, ‘and it will receive the full support of the Twelfth House.’ While Falyn didn’t move a muscle, it was like she’d done the telepathic equivalent of throwing up.

But Evertine ignored her, eyes locked on Thawn’s. ‘That is a most generous act from your House.’

‘We step up when people are in need. It’s the right thing to do.’

A beat passed. Then Evertine Lillarties smiled. ‘And who are we to disagree? I look forward to establishing at tomorrow’s meeting everything we can do for the refugees who’ll settle on Spirelight.’ She laid a hand on Thawn’s arm, laughing lightly, then leaned in, and Thawn felt the press of her thoughts against her mind.

This will have a price.

Then the Lillarties were gone, and Falyn watched their backs for a solid ten seconds before she rounded on her. ‘Rosara, what are you – did you contact Auntie, did -’

‘I did what you should have done,’ Thawn hissed. ‘I took some responsibility and determined that the fate of thousands is more important than whether or not our family keeps it hands on a bloody holiday resort!’

‘You know it’s more than -’

‘I will make sure,’ said Hale gently, ‘that refugee settlements are only temporary. This is not the Romulan evacuation, these people all have worlds to return to, and the disruption will be minimal.’

‘Except some of these worlds are being ruined by the Century Storm,’ Falyn hissed. ‘Coronal! Is anyone ever going back there?’ She looked away, jaw tight, then locked a baleful eye on Thawn. ‘Something will come of this,’ she warned. ‘I hope like hell it lands on you and not me.’

Then she was gone, disappearing into the crowd in a cloud of the clicking noise of her heels and the flashing colours of her dress, and Thawn turned back to press her hands against her temples. ‘I may live to regret that.’

Hale shook her head. ‘Your instincts and priorities are correct, Lieutenant. Well done. And thank you.’

‘I didn’t – I only did what Falyn should have, and if she hadn’t dithered it wouldn’t have taken this long to get support…’ Thawn dragged her hands down her face, then looked suspiciously at Beckett. ‘Numbers. Is that what you were doing all night? Securing the votes?’

‘Please.’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘I’ve been doing that all week.’

Suddenly she felt very stupid. ‘You’ve not been partying. You’ve been lobbying.’

‘Let’s be real, I’ve also been partying.’

Hale smiled gently. ‘I know how to deal with the public faces. But there are back-alleys to a world like Whixby I can’t easily connect with. If Ensign Beckett wasn’t securing arrangements over shots at two in the morning, he was giving me all the gossip I needed to strong-arm people in meetings.’

‘What can I say?’ Beckett shrugged. ‘I’m a charmer. I charm people. But hey, I didn’t deliver a slam dunk like yours, publicly forcing Falyn’s hand.’

‘The only thing worse than me going over her head,’ mused Thawn, ‘would have been for her to go against me in front of the Lillarties and show we were divided.’

‘It was well handled,’ said Hale. ‘Now you should try to enjoy the rest of the party. Or escape, I don’t think it makes much difference. I’ll hold down the fort, and the captain can help once he’s scrubbed up and stopped enjoying being a nuisance.’

Beckett gave Thawn a look. ‘We’ll get out of here.’

‘We will?’

‘Yeah, come on – I got a plan.’

They slid from the crowd, though not without interruptions. At least three well-wishers descended to gush and demand yet another dramatic retelling of the adventures on Starglimmer, which Beckett indulged twice before finally fobbing people off, and they managed to slip from the ballroom. To her surprise, he only took them to a lift.

She slumped against the wall as the doors shut and the lift began to hum upward, her head in her hands. ‘My aunt is going to kill me.’

‘Yeah, but refugees don’t die.’

‘What was I thinking?’

‘Saving lives? All that good heroic stuff? It’s more than anyone else.’ The lift doors slid open, and she realised he’d sent them not to their rooms, but to the roof. ‘Come on.’

‘What…’ She followed, tottering out on heels to the wide, flat roof of the Seashine Hotel, one of the biggest and highest buildings on the island. It was early evening, the sun nearly slid from sight but casting everything it could reach in gold as its parting gift for the day nearly done. Across the town she could see the hum of activity, the lights in windows and shop fronts flickering on, colour and buzz and life spilling out and promising to hum deep into the night. And there, near the edge of the roof, sat a bag of golf clubs next to a setup with a teeing area and some golf balls.

Thawn stared. ‘…I’ve no more to that sentence. Just, what?’

‘I was up here with Baxxress and the others the day before the storm,’ Beckett said cheerfully, and gestured to the golf balls. ‘Don’t worry, they’re holographic; you hit them and there’s a – it’s a projection overlaying the view, you’re not actually going to hit someone with a golf ball.’

‘But why.’

‘Because it’s fun? Don’t you tease, Thawn, you can be fun. I know if you dig deep down…’ He sauntered to the golf clubs and pulled out a driver, turning back to her with a toothy grin. ‘Come on. You want to go back down to the party and listen to a thousand earnest young men feel emasculated as they don’t even understand how you saved this planet? Go down to the docks, and get accosted just the same? Sure, we could get back to Endeavour, but we’re on a resort world. Might as well enjoy it.’

‘By hitting golf balls at Sanditor.’

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t think about smashing this bloody place over the last week.’ He spun the driver in his hand, extending it towards her. ‘Forget the Lillarties, forget Falyn, forget Rhade, forget your aunt, and hit something.’

She laughed in disbelief as she advanced. ‘You are ridiculous.’

‘I am.’

‘And I owe you an apology.’ Thawn bit her lip as she took the club. The warm air off the docks was sweeping in now, lifting the still heat of the day and bringing with it the salty scent of the sea to swirl around them. ‘I’ve underestimated you, even when I knew better.’

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I make a habit of being underestimated. I shouldn’t be pissy when it works.’

‘Yes, but after Ephrath, after looking into T’Sann… I’ll talk to Airex about that before he leaves, by the way.’

‘Sure, you know him better than me.’ But he was looking expectantly at her.

‘What?’

‘You said you owed me an apology, and then…’

‘I -’ She blinked. ‘What, you want the words?’

‘That’s traditionally how apologies work. “I’m sorry for doubting your brilliance and bravery, Nate…”’

She smacked him lightly on the arm with the handle of the golf club. ‘Ridiculous,’ she said again, rolling her eyes. Then she gave a sheepish smile. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Apology accepted. And I’m sorry for being an arse on the docks. This mission was rough for you and I didn’t cut you any slack.’ He shifted his weight. ‘How is Rhade?’

‘I haven’t spoken to him,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not really sure what I’m going to say.’ She teed up a golf ball and stood before it, grasping the driver ponderously.

‘Is that – I don’t know much about Betazoid custom. Your parents decide you two will shack up and then, bang, no choice?’

‘They want what’s best for us,’ Thawn said distantly. She’d said it so many times the words felt rather hollow. ‘I think you know how difficult families are.’

‘Yeah, but my dad just wants to control my every step in my career and turn me into a mini-him. He has yet to try to build me a family.’ Beckett scratched his chin. ‘Probably because he’s really bad at that and doesn’t know how.’

‘It’s about having a companion,’ said Thawn, levelling the driver with the ball and not looking at him. ‘It’s not about having children or being in love, it’s about picking for me a partner who’s going to help me build a life that’s good for me and the house.’ Then she hit the ball.

A long pause followed. ‘Wow,’ said Beckett eventually.

Thawn sighed. ‘No, I don’t really believe it either.’

‘No, I mean – you really don’t know how to play golf.’

This time, the laugh loosened something in her, and she stepped back. ‘Okay, brilliant and brave Beckett, you show me how it’s done…’

‘I will!’ He grabbed a club and sauntered over, twirling it. ‘Just pay attention, and then I’ll show you how to do it – because honestly, can I trust you with anything on your own…?’

She rolled her eyes once more, but couldn’t stop herself from grinning. ‘No,’ laughed Thawn. ‘Apparently not.’

Kharth tried to not look like she’d been waiting outside of Sickbay when she ambushed Carraway on his way out. ‘I know you can’t tell me anything sensitive,’ was what passed for a greeting, ‘but is Templeton alright?’

Slightly startled, it took a moment before Carraway summoned his usual kindly smile. ‘I think you know the question’s more complicated than that. But he’ll be boarding the Colne as soon as Doctor Elvad’s discharged him in just a few minutes. You could… talk to him?’

‘I’m not being evasive,’ Kharth lied. ‘I don’t want to distress him.’

He regarded her a moment, then reached out to clasp her arm. Were he a less reassuring man, she wouldn’t let him get away with that. ‘Saeihr. You reached out to him when he was at his lowest, you saved a lot of lives, and you saved him. You don’t need to feel guilty about that.’ He paused, eyes narrowing a little. ‘Or about what happened to Commander Aquila.’

‘She made her own choices, and I respect those. Save that talk for Valance. What’s going to happen to Rob?’

‘I’ve recommended him for full psychiatric care at Goodrich; I worked there before I came to Endeavour. They’ll help him. But it’ll take time; he underwent a massive trauma and it’s been compounded by what he did after.’ He sighed. ‘If you’re asking about his career, I expect it’s over. For his own good, not as a punishment. Or it’ll at least be years before he puts on a uniform again, and probably nowhere near starship command.’

‘Still trying to not pry, but… Airex didn’t snap like that.’

‘Minds are subtle and different. The mind of a joined Trill is even more different.’ Carraway grimaced. ‘The passage of time alone is a different experience for someone as old as Airex. He’s also had to filter and comprehend the memories of four previous lifetimes. Simply put, his sense of self is more… sophisticated than Templeton’s.’ He tilted his head. ‘I expect you won’t talk to him, either.’

Before she had to answer that, the doors slid open for Templeton and one of Elvad’s assistants to emerge, and Kharth realised she was very glad this meeting was happening in Carraway’s company by the look on Templeton’s face.

He froze at once. ‘Lieutenant.’

For once, she had to soften. ‘Rob. Do I ask how you’re doing, or…?’

‘I’ll stick with “terrible,” if that’s not too vague.’ But he managed a wan smile. ‘Didn’t think I’d see you here.’

‘I see a job through.’ She shifted her weight. ‘I wanted to say goodbye. Or walk with you down to the airlock?’

He gave an awkward nod. ‘Thank you.’

There was not much to the walk, both in duration of ambling to a turbolift and then down a few decks, or in conversation, but she felt the silence was companionable and he seemed to be eased by it, too; likely soothed by the prospect of being near someone without having to explain or justify himself.

They were later to the airlock to board the Colne than most of the crew, Templeton likely beyond facing his former colleagues of the USS Odysseus. Carraway left them there, and she hesitated as she turned to Templeton, trying to ignore the lingering assistant who would help him settle when as he boarded.

‘Can I still write to you?’ she asked awkwardly.

Now his eyes brightened. ‘If you want. I might have only boring things to talk about for a while.’

‘I don’t mind a little boring.’ She hesitated, then stepped forward and pulled him into a hug. ‘Take care of yourself.’

He squeezed tight for just a moment – then let go. ‘You too.’

It was easier, Kharth reflected as she watched him leave, to reach out like this under these circumstances. The stakes were low when all she had to do was be nice to a man soon in hospice care. But the world did seem a little darker with the sparkling wit of Robert Templeton dulled by the ravages of the universe.

When she turned, Davir Airex was paused at the end of the corridor, a bag over his shoulder, frozen halfway through a conversation with a rather stressed-looking Thawn. Even by Thawn’s usual standards. Kharth hesitated as she saw Airex exchange some final, urgent words with the Betazoid, who then did an unusually guilty act of vanishing, before Airex padded down the corridor towards her.

‘Lieutenant.’

‘Commander.’ This had not been unanticipated. She shifted her feet. ‘Back to Bravo ASAP, I see.’

‘I have to…’ He paused, working his jaw – then  his expression set, and he straightened. ‘It’s my job. I appreciate your assistance this mission -’

‘You mean saving your ass several times,’ she said, but much dryer and less angry than might have been expected. ‘I understand how this goes. You look more like yourself – like how I remember you – under stress, but when the crisis has passed, Airex takes over and you’re a million light-years away. I get it.’

‘There’s no such thing as Airex taking over. I am Airex.’

‘Not all the time.’ Her jaw tightened, then she sighed. ‘I’m not here to fight you. I’m not here for you at all – I came to see Templeton. If you have any power in your new, lofty position, find your damned heart and try to take care of him, will you?’

‘He deserves care and compassion, not judgement.’

‘I don’t think people deserve anything; we just get what we get, and you can influence that.’ 

A slow nod. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

She watched his face, watched his mask stay intact this time, though it hadn’t merely days ago aboard the Odysseus. ‘I wish I believed you, that it was only ever Airex making the decisions. It would be so much easier to hate you.’

His frown deepened, and he went to pass her. ‘I need to board -’

‘Say goodbye to me.’ The words slid from her like blood oozing from a wound she’d thought was stitched shut, and he froze beside her, halfway to the airlock. She turned, eyes rising to his, chest tightening. ‘You never did it before. When you left Endeavour, I was in the brig. When you left the Cavalier, you told me you loved me and you’d see me soon.’

Now he flinched, and that was definitely worse than finding him nothing but ice. He turned slowly, and she felt his eyes rake over her, saw the quaver in the mask, heard the roughness in his voice as it dropped. ‘Goodbye, Saeihr.’

She had to swallow. ‘You were right. You should be a million light-years away. It really is for the best.’ It didn’t come out as angry as she’d wanted, and she met his eyes for the last time, that pale blue that had once been piercing and now was cold. ‘Goodbye, Dav.’

To watch him go was to feel a piece of her heart tidy itself up before locking away in another dark and distant corner of herself; conclusive and solid, but still like something had been ripped apart inside to get there. She did not let her eyes fall from him until the airlock door slid shut again, and then he was gone. Again, and for the last time.

It was time, unequivocally, to find Rhade and a punching bag. And then to go back to work.

Endeavour’s business over Whixby was set to last a while as they helped establish the new refugee shelter. Soon enough, more ships would arrive from Bravo, glut with equipment and facilities and staff to provide these temporary homes, and soon after that would arrive the evacuees from the worlds that could not be sheltered from the Century Storm. It meant that Kharth had several days of getting her hands dirty, making sure the shelters were staffed and ready, because the last thing refugees needed was their neighbours making trouble.

So it took the better part of another week before she took time to have a drink alone at the Round Table, which was where Cortez found her after a shift.

The engineer slid onto the next bar stool, the quiet comfort of the exclusive lounge giving an intimacy that was all but impossible in the busy Safe House. ‘Think it’s time we drank and didn’t talk about what happened?’

‘That’s fine by me,’ said Kharth, watching as Cortez signalled the holographic bartender to bring out one of her good bottles of tequila. ‘But you’re the talky one and you’ve not been through nothing yourself.’

‘Karana gets time,’ Cortez sighed. ‘Love of her life blows herself up to save the ship, save us – maybe save me? She gets time. And Greg.’

‘The thing about emotional recluses,’ said Kharth slowly, ‘is that we shouldn’t be left alone in the dark as much as we pretend.’

‘I know. And I’ll be there when she needs me. Which isn’t the same as when she asks. Truth be told, we’ve both been run ragged with the new projects, and I think that’s for the best. I don’t know if you’re like Karana in this way, but she sometimes needs time just to figure out what she’s feeling and how to express it, so rushing doesn’t do good. Being busy lets her brain do some background processing.’

‘That’s not like me,’ said Kharth as glasses were poured. ‘I never get to the “express it,” part.’

‘Be kind to yourself. You express your feelings by lashing out plenty.’

They laughed, a low, exhausted laugh, and drank. Cortez always took tequila smoother than her, so Kharth was coughing when the engineer said, ‘How’re you really doing?’

‘Out of practice,’ Kharth sputtered, then sighed. ‘Weirdly? I’m okay. Rob’s going to be alright, most of the Odysseus are alright…’

‘Airex is alright…’

She fidgeted with the glass. ‘He’s gone. Gone for good, and that’s… I think that’s good. I’m never going to get what I wanted out of him, even an explanation, so the next-best thing is for him to be far away so I can just… move on.’

Cortez grimaced. ‘That sounds awful, but if he’s not going to pony up the goods…’

‘Yeah. I think I accepted on Teros, the way he acted to manipulate me, that he was really gone, but… a lot happened down there.’

‘At the risk of poking old wounds, what did happen? Not Airex, there was – stuff? You went home after so long – well, not home, but…’

‘If it’s not home, I don’t know where is,’ Kharth sighed. ‘And it’s not home. But I saw people I hadn’t seen in years, I remembered how lucky I was to have gotten out in the first place when so many didn’t.’ She hunched over her drink. ‘I hadn’t been there since I was eighteen. My father died there, and I didn’t come back. And I finally thought I was getting answers about how and why my father was killed, but I’ve not had a chance to think about that, not had a chance to dig deeper into this Myriad guy…’

‘Wait.’ Cortez put has glass down. ‘What guy?’

‘The Myriad – some crime boss who wanted information out of my father, and sent goons to get it. He refused, and was killed. But the Myriad faded off years ago, so I’ve not seen any new leads… what?’

Cortez was frowning with an expression of confused horror. ‘That name came up at T’lhab Station last year. That independent Klingon base we went to looking for the Wild Hunt.’

Kharth sat up. ‘The Brethren used it? Or the Orions, or the Mo’Kai…’

‘No, Sae – shut up a second.’ Cortez turned to face her, expression still folded into a frown. ‘We needed the Orions to help us when the Mo’Kai were trying to blow up Thawn and Drake. They didn’t want to, and then Karana dropped this name, made it sound like a code. She asked them to help on behalf of the Myriad. And they jumped right to it like the bogeyman had told them to act.’

Kharth stared at her. ‘Valance did that.’

‘It gets worse.’ Cortez winced. ‘I asked her about it once. A while ago. She was really evasive, but I don’t think she knew what Myriad was, I think she was just repeating something someone gave her.’

‘I swear, Isa, if you make this twenty questions -’

‘Airex. Airex told her to name-drop the Myriad if she needed to, and told her how to name-drop the Myriad.’

For a moment, it was like Kharth couldn’t breathe. Then acting became easier than reacting, and she turned back to the bar as she pulled out her PADD, dragged up a file to project in front of both of them.

Beside her, Cortez’s jaw dropped. ‘Whatever this is, it does not look healthy.’

‘Do you think,’ Kharth growled, ‘that after Dav got Joined and became a completely different person, I didn’t spend months obsessing about who the hell this “Airex” is, was, everything?’ She was scrolling through collections, past the political records of Obrent Airex, past the Starfleet record of Tabain Airex, past the scientific research of Isady Airex, and there it was, the life history of Lerin Airex, who’d died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2396 at the age of fifty-seven.

Cortez looked like she didn’t want to understand, rather than that she’d failed to put two and two together. ‘You think that a previous host had something to do with the Myriad?’

‘It couldn’t have been Dav; he only got Joined in 2396. Around the same damn time the Myriad stopped operating after a career spanning some fifteen to twenty years.’

‘What was Airex’s last host doing then?’

‘Lerin was a biochemist,’ said Kharth, almost not trusting her own words in case they’d catapult her down a drastic path. ‘But he was a recluse, apparently; he supposedly did a lot of his research in isolation, and out here in the Beta Quadrant. He was brilliant, he won awards, but he didn’t have much of a life beyond his work and…’ She worked her jaw and turned to Cortez. ‘Do you think he worked for the Myriad?’

‘I don’t…’

‘Dav lost his mind over my wanting to know what happened to my father.’ Her voice went detached, horrified as she remembered. ‘He said it was professionalism, I thought it was just… just to hurt me, but that doesn’t make any sense, does it, for him to have done as much as he did to stop me on Teros, to manipulate me as much as he did… he knew.’ Dawning realisation came with a crashing wave of nausea, and she had to grip the edge of the bar, nearly doubling-over. ‘Gods, he knew…’

Cortez’s hand was on her back a moment later, voice low and urgent. ‘None of this proves anything. Don’t let your mind run away with the worst case scenario. There could be a dozen explanations, all of them amplified by Davir Airex simply having no idea what to do with his feelings for you since he got Joined.’ She drew a slow, awkward breath. ‘Only one thing is certain.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kharth, voice thick as she buried her face in her hands. ‘So much for goodbyes. Because I need to talk to him the moment we’re back on Bravo.’

At last, the stars streamed past the windows of Round Table as Endeavour moved gently at warp through the depths of the Paulson Nebula towards Starbase Bravo. Weeks of starships braving the dangers of the rifts to close them made the region more placid now, their warp field stable and their sensors and communications clearer. As such, three days out from Whixby, Rourke had finally stopped having breakfast on the go in his ready room.

‘I still feel like an intruder,’ Hale said with a wry smile as the holographic staff topped up their mugs of coffee and cleared their finished plates. ‘This is your staff’s sanctum.’

‘It’s the sanctum of anyone I choose,’ Rourke pointed out. ‘And I reckon you need the getaway as much as any lieutenant.’ Breakfast had been a more indulgent affair than he’d allowed these past weeks, poached eggs and mushrooms on sourdough with the good coffee, the fresh coffee. Mealtimes were more than a chance to take stock or refuel; they made, in his experience, an excellent way to come together and draw a line under an experience.

‘Sanditor wasn’t that bad,’ she said, smirk intact. ‘And the last weeks have been better with the shelter to work on.’

Progress had come quickly after the Board of Tourism had been brought onside, and at last he’d felt like he wasn’t a babysitter in orbit of a crisis he couldn’t weigh into, but the overseer of an endeavour to make people’s lives better. ‘But before then. You still convinced the Nyders.’

‘I’d say Lieutenant Thawn and Ensign Beckett deserve more credit.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘Because you never managed them or wielded their skills. Don’t be bashful.’

‘I thought I was being diplomatic.’

‘And I know better now than to bull-rush through that, but not if you’re playing yourself down.’ He leaned forward. ‘Because you also kept your thumb on the pulse of things along the Azure Chain for me.’

‘Doctor Sadek didn’t need my supervision.’

‘But she benefited from your help.’ He fidgeted with his spoon. ‘I didn’t start this to big you up. I meant to just say thank you. You had your eye on things I couldn’t when I needed to be in twelve places at once.’

Hale’s smile softened, less wry and more sincere. ‘Like I’ve always said: I’m here to make your job easier, not harder.’

He met her gaze. ‘You do.’

Her eyes dropped after a beat. ‘Perhaps not for long. Work in the Neutral Zone will be set back by the Century Storm; relief resources will be sent to the Paulson Nebula, not beyond our borders, and we may have to make friends with more promises and hard work than help.’ Speaking a little faster, she drained her coffee. ‘Which means I should get on the comm to Bravo.’

‘The buoy network keeps the signal clear,’ said Rourke, sitting back with a faint frown as she finished. ‘Thank you for breakfast, First Secretary.’

‘And thank you, Captain.’

Titles were back, it seemed. Rourke wrapped his hands around his coffee cup as he watched her leave, and sighed. The holographic waiter appeared to offer a refill, but he rebuffed it, finishing his drink and leaving as soon after as would be politic. The last thing he needed was to polish off a coffee while the likes of Adupon and Juarez pretended they weren’t staring at him and speculating.

His shoulders were heavier than they should have been with a mission concluded and a hearty breakfast in him, but that wasn’t what ruined his mood when he made it eventually to the bridge. What ruined his mood was Graelin detaching from his post to approach and say, ‘Captain, can I have a word?’

Rourke ushered him wordlessly into the ready room, and decided that while he didn’t need more coffee, he was absolutely going to need a cup of tea to get through this. ‘What’s up, Petey?’

He felt, rather than saw, Graelin flinch. ‘I thought we should speak about the mission.’ Rourke sank behind his desk, and didn’t offer Graelin a chair. The Ardanan took it anyway, shoulders stiff. 

‘All went moderately well, I thought,’ Rourke rumbled. ‘Commander Aquila’s a horrid loss.’

‘Yes,’ said Graelin distantly. This was clearly not what was on his mind, and after less than a heartbeat he said, bluntly, ‘Captain, I didn’t come on this ship to be ignored.’

I didn’t ask you to come on this ship at all. Rourke sipped his tea. ‘Did I ignore you?’

‘You ignored a lot of people for, frankly, a confounding set of priorities. For most of this mission, rather than use Endeavour as the great weapon it is, you sat back and did very little.’

He should have known that captaining an explorer, rather than an escort, would not stop people describing his ship as a weapon. Rourke wondered if it was about him as the commander, or the perspectives of the speakers. ‘You can start speaking freely any time you like, Commander,’ he said wryly.

Graelin tilted his head with a sardonic, frustrated air. ‘I’m your second officer and I was the one on the bridge with you. And it’s my assessment, sir, that throughout the crisis of the Odysseus, of the rift, when you could have solved everything, you did… nothing.’

‘We rescued almost all of the crew of the Odysseus, the away team came back in one piece, and Whixby was cleared of danger.’

‘By the efforts of your away teams –’

‘You think that me trusting my crew,’ said Rourke levelly, ‘to do their jobs when they are the ones facing danger and challenges, when they are the ones who have to rise to the occasion – do you think supporting and trusting them instead of riding roughshod over anything they’re trying to do is the same as doing nothing?’ Graelin was silent for a moment, and Rourke clicked his tongue. ‘Being Beckett’s pet doesn’t give you freedom to backchat, Petey.’

‘Does being the CO give you freedom to disrespect and ignore me, sir?’

‘Don’t be dramatic. I disagreed with you.’

‘You say you trust the rest of the crew – Thawn and Sadek on the surface, Valance on the Odysseus – but you didn’t trust me.’

‘You wanted me to snap the rift shut around the Odysseus and condemn a hundred people to death without trying anything. You want to talk about not trusting – you didn’t trust that maybe I have an idea what I’m doing, that maybe my team had an idea what they’re doing.’ Rourke jabbed an irritable finger across the desk.

‘I needed you to understand what it would take if it became necessary to do the hard thing -’

‘Don’t lecture me about the hard thing, Commander. Not after Teros. Not after the Erem.’

Graelin watched him a moment. ‘It’s because of that. Doing the hard thing once made you gun-shy. I know you wish for the galaxy to be lighter and easier, because that was how it was when you grew up, when you came up in the service -’

‘I came up in the Dominion bloody War -’

‘And then in the golden aftermath before Romulus. You know as well as I do that the universe does not spare us the hard choices simply because we will things to be better, but that is how you have wanted to command since the Tkon crisis. That is how First Secretary Hale encourages you to think, that is always how Commander Valance has been noted as thinking in her records, and who the hell else, Captain, will remind you that it takes more than trust and will to win the day?’

Rourke was silent for a moment, chewing on his words, because he and Graelin were no longer senior staff nipping at Alexander Beckett’s heels for attention. He was the captain now, and this could not be resolved as it might have been a decade earlier. At length he said, ‘I trusted you at the end, didn’t I?’

Graelin hesitated. ‘At the end…’

‘Because I didn’t act at once, because I trusted everyone else to pull themselves out of the fire, and pushed you to think a little harder, look for just another way. And you did that. You got the shuttle clear before you closed the rift around the Odysseus.’ Rourke straightened. ‘Would that have happened if I’d just listened to you in the first place?’

‘Everything working out,’ Graelin said at last, ‘doesn’t justify -’

‘You seem under the impression this mission was a screw-up, Commander, and not a definitive success. Saving most of the Odysseus’s crew is a victory. Securing a compromise shelter on Whixby is a victory. Offering help on the colony and protecting it from storms is a victory.’ Rourke met his gaze coldly. ‘You trying to spin this as anything else won’t work.’

Graelin straightened at that, frowning. ‘I’m not trying to spin things. I’m not about to report to Admiral Beckett that you nearly screwed this up, Captain, that’s not why I’m here.’

Rourke narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you actually just pissed I don’t lean on you like I do Valance, or Cortez, or Aisha?’ As Graelin hesitated, Rourke had to smother a laugh. ‘Act like we’re on the same page once in a blue moon, Petey, and you’ll get that trust.’

Graelin swallowed. ‘Offer it without fighting me for a hundred years or sounding like you’re choking, and I might believe you.’

‘I guess,’ rumbled Rourke, ‘that we’ll see. Reckon that’s all for today, though, Commander.’

‘I don’t -’

‘Dismissed.’

It was not the resolution he had hoped for, but also not the resolution he had expected at Graelin’s opening salvo. His science officer left the ready room, with Rourke able to do nothing for a while but put his head in his hands and sigh.

The Paulson Nebula had been fraught with danger, but it had also been a cocoon, wrapping itself around Endeavour and shielding her from anything beyond. Now they were emerging, the rest of the galaxy was eager again to come forth with a thousand competing concerns; the politics of his superiors, the dynamics of his continuing mission.

So when there was another chime at the door and his gruff answer summoned Doctor Sadek, he sagged with relief. ‘Oh, thank God, Aisha, I thought you were someone else come to give me hell.’

His friend raised a languid eyebrow as she pulled up the chair. ‘Graelin? He had a face like a slapped arse when I passed him.’

‘I think the fool wants to actually belong on board, or at least his ego can’t stand him being the outsider,’ Rourke grumbled. ‘He’s angry I didn’t listen to him and kill everyone, but I did listen to you, and Thawn, and Valance, so on.’

‘Maybe he can’t be superior enough when the staff have closed ranks around your way of doing things,’ Sadek mused. ‘Or maybe he’s about to discover the true meaning of Christmas.’

‘Not holding my breath there.’ Rourke tapped his stylus on his desk. ‘Though it’s sometimes good to have someone around who does actively disagree with you, challenge you. Not that I miss Valance doing that, but…’

‘Matt.’ She tilted her head. ‘Did you think I was magically summoned by your woes so you could off-load on me?’

‘Oh. Sorry. You have actual business?’

‘Don’t look shocked. I do my job sometimes.’ She fished about in her jacket for a PADD.

‘I know – you did it really well on Whixby. I knew I could count on you.’

‘You say that now…’ She set the PADD on his desk and with a quick tap, started to bring up a series of files in a projection above it. ‘And I know what comes after that.’

‘You do?’

‘You want me to take the bridge officer’s exam. Make full commander. Be able to actually help you out when your staff are losing their minds yet again,’ said Sadek in a light, airy voice.

He sighed. ‘I didn’t mean to get at you the other week. I know and I appreciate that you’ve stuck around here for my sake instead of going back to Yasmin and the kids.’

‘Not only,’ Sadek admitted. ‘Life’s a lot more interesting on Endeavour. But you’re right; I’ve left my family behind, and they have always been why I kept my focus on my medical career rather than trying to become some ridiculously well-rounded officer.’

‘I’m not suggesting you should sacrifice them,’ Rourke said with a wince. ‘Simply that if you’re out here, you’re good at what you do, and it’s a damn shame to not be able to use you at your best.’

‘Which is why I have two forms for you to put your scribble on; I’ve done all the rest of the bureaucracy. The first is, indeed, submitting me to take the bridge officer’s examination.’

Rourke hesitated. For as long as he’d known Aisha Sadek, she had been dead-set in her commitment to serving as a doctor, rather than an officer. This had only become more intense since she’d met her wife and had children, her spin on starship service ending on the Achilles with him and Graelin under Captain Beckett, sticking to station life before he’d pulled her back out here.

‘There’s a catch,’ he said at last.

‘That’s the second file. You’re not going to like it.’ She flicked that file up next to the first form. ‘The Obena is a big ship. A lot of resources. Well-defended. Primarily operating in or near Federation space. Often with high levels of warning before we go into danger.’ Sadek met his eyes. ‘I want you to put in the paperwork to bring families aboard.’

Rourke sank back with realisation. ‘You’ll qualify as a bridge officer if you can have Yasmin and the kids with you.’

‘Only fair, isn’t it? The examination would be a huge commitment. Why should I do it if I’m only here for another few months, a year, before I go right back to my family? But you sign this… and it means I can have a future here, on starship assignments like this.’ Sadek gave a guilty shrug. ‘Sue me, I do have a fondness for a spot of adventure.’

‘I remember you were bored witless before I dragged you out of Facility Muldoon,’ Rourke drawled. Then he frowned. ‘Why won’t I like this?’

‘I thought you might fret about safety and everything.’

‘We can easily disembark families ahead of going into dangerous situations, we have separated flight mode, we have a lot of possible evacuation ships, nowhere’s safe in the galaxy…’

‘…and I thought you might fret because now you have no excuse for Ellie to not live with you.’

Rourke froze under Sadek’s suddenly withering gaze and cold words. His throat tightened. ‘That sounds like the sort of thing Ellie and her mother would decide.’

‘Come off it, Matt. You’ve always used the nature of your assignments as an excuse; you served on a bunch of escorts for years until now. On Earth, you could easily visit, be around more. And you liked it. Now? No excuses.’ Sadek stood up and tapped the PADD. ‘So I suppose I’m doing this for your good as much as mine. We’ve patched our lives into states where we’re no longer burning inside. What about living a little? What about actually being a father for once?’

He’d have shouted at anyone else for that, let the rage fuelled by self-loathing and guilt come thundering out. But this was Aisha Sadek, who had warned him off marrying Tess in the first place only to support him anyway, the only person who had been with him every step of his debacle of a family life for over twenty years. He swallowed hard, and could not find words.

Sadek smiled guiltily. ‘Food for thought, Matt. But that’s my condition. Families aboard, and I’ll take the exam. Keep this as a place of business and war, and… honestly, in a few months, it’ll probably be time for me to go home. Help me make this home. I’ll let you think about it.’

She left, the PADD still sitting on his desk, the twin forms shining above it from the projector. And all Rourke could do, holding his mug of tea, thoroughly cold by now, was stare at it and try to summon a single solid thought about the path she had laid out before him.

The message shone at her like it had for the past two hours. But no amount of staring in the dark in her office could change it. Still, that was where Valance found herself when she realised that, over the course of the long evening, the low hum in the deck that had become an accepted background sound over the last weeks had faded.

They were finally out of the Paulson Nebula. The worst was over, at least of their navigational woes. But that also meant Valance was out of excuses.

Ten minutes later, Cortez opened the door to her quarters with a rather apprehensive look. She was still in uniform, the jacket flap hanging open, fresh off her shift as Valance had expected. ‘Hey.’

Valance walked in and tried to not slouch. ‘How’s work?’

‘I’ll be scrubbing out the Bussard collectors for a week. Or, really, engineers who annoy me will. But we’re standing down now – forget the ship. You okay?’ Cortez watched as Valance advanced into the quarters, despite herself heading for a window to frown at the stars streaming past Endeavour.

‘A notification’s gone out,’ Valance said, voice more bland than she wanted, and for the moment she couldn’t look at Cortez. Coming here had taken wrenching something frozen deep inside her, and jagged shards of ice still cut as they were fractured. ‘Cassia’s being posthumously promoted to captain.’

There was a silence as she stared at the stars, and only after a few heartbeats did she feel Cortez slip up beside her, slide a hand across her back. ‘How do you feel about that?’

‘I was thinking. For hours. And I… don’t know.’ Valance sighed. ‘A part of me knows she’d be delighted to go down heroically with the ship and then – and then – win the damn bet.’

‘That doesn’t mean you can’t grieve.’

‘I epxected I wouldn’t know how to go on if she wasn’t out there. Which is stupid, now I think about it,’ Valance mused. ‘We weren’t together in any sense for years. I’ve been going on without her for over a decade. Or…’ She grimaced. ‘Or something else schmaltzy Greg might say, like her not needing to be here to be with me.’

‘That does sound like Greg wisdom. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. Have you talked to him?’

Valance shook her head. ‘He’s been up to his eyeballs with refugees. He made me promise I’d talk if I need to.’ She sighed, and looked down at Cortez. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘Being – being away. Being nowhere. I know I’m not easy to help…’

Cortez’s hand slid down to take hers, and she met her gaze with a solemn frown. ‘You do whatever you need to work through this. I don’t like you locking yourself away for a while, but I think I get it.’

Valance looked down, watched as Cortez’s thumb traced gently across her knuckles. ‘Yes. You do by now, don’t you.’

‘It’s going to be weird, grieving someone who’ll leave a hole in your life but you weren’t around much any more. It’s a different kind of space she’s left behind. I guess it’s going to hit you at different times, and that’s okay if it suddenly smacks you out of nowhere, and…’ Cortez’s voice trailed off as Valance’s eyes raked across her, watching her but not fully listening, and the frown deepened. ‘What?’

‘This isn’t about comparison,’ Valance said carefully. ‘Losing Cassia is – it’s like the unfathomable has happened, but I’m still here, and that’s something I have to learn to live with.  But you…’

‘What about me?’

Valance stepped closer, bowing her head to rest her forehead against Cortez’s. ‘You, trying to sacrifice yourself. You, almost dying over there. That’s the thought that keeps me up, wakes me up; that’s the nightmare I keep having. Losing you, too.’

Cortez softened against her, hands running up to cup her cheeks. ‘I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘You tried to, and you might, and I don’t need coddling, I need…’ Valance hesitated, because yet again words felt too clumsy to encapsulate her evasive feelings, like using oven mitts to grasp smoke. ‘You. I need you, for as long as I’ve got you. You keep me… lighter.’ Airex’s words came humming back, with all their accusations of weakness, and she shoved those away somewhere darker and tighter. ‘I cut off a lot of myself a long time ago, and the old me is gone. You don’t bring that back. But you bring me to… I don’t know. Balance.’

Cortez gave a slightly stupid, crooked smile. ‘I didn’t set out – I don’t want to – change you. You’re brave, and smart, and driven, and like a goddamn tornado I want to be swept up in. But I’m pretty okay with making you happier.’

‘I don’t…’ Valance hesitated, then Cassia’s voice raged in her memories. Set the world on fire a little, sometimes. ‘If you want me to shut up about this until we’ve got more distance from the mission, if you’re worried I’m just overwhelmed and reacting badly, then… that’s fine, but…’

‘I’m not going to assume you’re in distress just because you showed one feeling, cariño,’ Cortez said with gentle wryness.

‘Because we talked about this a bit ago. And then we wanted to think about it, and then we lost the ship, and then you were all… I mean, it’s fine, but…’ Valance grimaced at Cortez’s amused and bemused gaze. ‘You shouldn’t live here.’

Cortez’s eyes lit up, amusement intensifying as she realised what was going on. ‘Ah, we’ve hit the “get the hell off my ship,” stage of the relationship.’

‘That’s not -’ Valance bit her lip with faint indignation at both the stumbling and the teasing. ‘Move in with me.’

‘With you?’ Still with that jocular air, Cortez raised an eyebrow as if this were an outrageous prospect. ‘All my stuff’s here, and – actually, that’s a great idea, it’d give me more room to leave things lying around. Spare PADDs, dirty mugs, laundry…’

Valance slid her arms around her waist, grip tight. ‘Move in with me,’ she said, her own tone lighter now, ‘so I can figure out where’s best to dump your body.’

Cortez laughed, then leaned up for a kiss that was more delight than intense passion, and still made Valance’s heart and chest hum with the joy of it, a joy that nestled right alongside the ground-shattering pain that had rumbled within her since leaving the Odysseus. Neither overwhelmed or negated the other, the two somehow intertwining for something exquisite that shone bright. Life and death. Ends and beginnings.

‘You know I love you, right?’ Cortez murmured against her lips.

Despite herself – despite all that had happened, the years of self-doubt, a crusade to take everything bright and passionate and freeze it in the deepest depths of ice – Valance gave a slow, broad smile. ‘I love you too,’ she breathed, and kissed her again, and wondered if it was possible to feel complete even with a gaping hole inside one’s self.

* *

‘Doctor?’

Airex’s footsteps were light as he padded into the anthropology lab on Starbase Bravo. It was part of the compromise over the Koderex archives that Karl T’Sann had the exclusive use of one of the smaller facilities, with all of his database work accessible by select Starfleet officers. With Airex, Graelin, and others absent in the Paulson Nebula, oversight had been limited during the Century Storm.

Now Airex was back, it was time for changes. And an enlightening conversation with Lieutenant Thawn was precipitating quite a change.

In the small room there was nowhere to hide, despite the gloomy lighting. T’Sann popped up from behind a holographic display, a little wild-haired and wild-eyed, but nothing was unusual for a man deep in his life’s work. ‘Commander! I heard you were back. It’s a pleasure to see you again.’

‘Likewise.’ Airex’s voice was low, guarded, barely courteous. ‘I see you’ve made considerable progress in my absence.’

‘Fewer distractions,’ T’Sann said airily. ‘I hope you’re well, I hope Endeavour is well…’

‘Endeavour is about a week behind me, but they’ll be back. I returned with the crew of the Odysseus.’ Airex’s eyes dragged over him, taking in his dishevelled appearance, his compact, wiry frame of a distracted academic, and the tension in his shoulders eased a little. This could be little more than a conversation, for now. ‘I caught up on some of what you were looking at.’

T’Sann raised his pointed eyebrows guilelessly. ‘You sound like something in particular caught your eye.’

‘It did. After reviewing the whole body of data.’ Airex advanced, a hand trailing along the edge of a console as he joined T’Sann at his work station. ‘I’m curious, Doctor, about one thing in particular: your interest in the Arretans.’

The way T’Sann’s expression didn’t change was, in itself, telling. ‘“Interest” is a strong word,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve found information about them in the Koderex archives. But it’s only notable because these are unique records, ones which seem to have been destroyed on Vulcan. Obviously the focus of the Koderex is Romulan history, but artifacts like this are essential in establishing -’

Airex’s hand moved out to tap the console in front T’Sann, and he killed the display. ‘Then why hide it?’ His gaze was cold, now, stony. ‘Why look into these records in secret?’

T’Sann hesitated. ‘Starfleet would love to take away my work. I’m sorry for slightly shifting outside the boundaries of the agreement, but you understand I have to be careful to not lose everything to the likes of Petrias Graelin. You’re a scientist, Commander Airex, you understand.’

‘I do.’ Airex’s jaw was tight. ‘And you were placed under these restrictions for a reason. I’m sorry, Doctor, but I’m going to have to suspend your access to the Koderex until we can look -’

‘No.’ The anger that flowed from T’Sann was sudden, intense, but low and cold. ‘That is unacceptable.’

‘Out of respect for you and your work,’ Airex pressed on, louder, ‘this does not have to be a formal withdrawal of your access, this does not have to be a suspension of our agreement with the Daystrom Institute. I’m going to lock you out and, as a gesture of good faith, you and I can resolve this between us.’

Something shifted in T’Sann’s expression, and the hairs on the back of Airex’s neck went up. ‘You’re right,’ he said, voice like iron wrapped in velvet. ‘We can resolve this between us.’

Airex had seen his share of combat, violence, and brutality. He still did not have time to react as T’Sann grabbed him by the shoulder and slammed him face first into the console, stronger and faster than expected even for a half-Vulcan. Airex’s head hit the display, and he felt glass crack as his vision exploded at the impact.

But before he could do more than scrabble and reel, T’Sann leaned down. He still had his hands on him, the Trill pinned against the display. ‘This,’ T’Sann hissed, ‘can be a gentlemen’s agreement.’

The last thing Airex knew before he blacked out was fingers pressed against the side of his head, and the clear, piercing sense of some external presence tearing into mind, thought, and memory to rip, wound, and obliterate.