The quiet sliding of the briefing room doors left David alone with his thoughts in the conference room. His gaze lost through the wide windows that looked out aft of the ships oval primary hull, through the void in the catamaran and into the trailing wake of the ship. David had always preferred it at the head of the ship looking out, as it had been aboard Daedalus, he always thought it had a sense of moving foward, but today as his empty eyes gazed out on the specks of light filling the space he found himself looking back both literally and figuratively. 

“Are they worth a penny, Lieutenant?” A warm voice reached across the room and gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze.

Shaken from what he had believed to be his lonely musings he turned slightly to see the face of Ashra, still fitted with her perpetually maternal smile. “I’m sorry?”

“The thoughts, isn’t that what the saying is?” the older woman furrowed her brow, accentuating the creases that had formed over the years. 

“Sort of.” David mumbled politely, the two of them had a passing acquaintance as many did on a ship, a natural result of her being the Chief Medical Officer, he knew she was a veteran, and a re-enlister after Frontier Day. “Can I help you ma’am?” He paused, suddenly wondering if he should stand to the superior officer. 

“Oh don’t be silly.” she motioned to a seat at the long arcing wooden table. David nodded, unsure why she asked his permission. “You can’t go through 3 decades worth of Starfleet without picking up a few extra buttons.” She smiled, it was warm, comforting. “So… should I go rooting through my purse?”

“For what ma’am?”

“A penny?” she said, reaching up to adjust the silken scarf that was wrapped round her head. Golden yellow threads wove through the pink fabric, forming the outlines of delicate petals, abstractly coalescing into blossoming flowers on a golden bough. “I might have to owe you. It’s been a while since they were common thing.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve heard the expression.” David returned his gaze to the windows, the pinpoints of light now streaking away as the vessel slipped into warp speed, the long nacelles just out of sight propelling them to a superluminal velocities without the slightest shake. “I thought you’d be in sickbay ma’am?”

“Oh Ensign Talika is perfectly capable of prepping the team’s supplies. Her bed side manner however…” Ashra tilted her head as he shoulders shrugged, “It’s a work in progress.” she twirled the end of the headscarf in between her fingers. “Besides, I thought you might want to talk.”

“About?” David’s attention was fixed on the starts that peeled away into the distance. He knew of course what she wanted to discuss, Bib had attempted to address the young man’s grief when he had approached the XO with his mother’s message which contained the data from his uncle. Despite the older man’s best efforts, the Commander was not a councillor and had been able to offer little more than a supportive hand on his shoulder. 

“This mission involves your family.”

“Distant.” David added quickly, whilst the contents of his mother’s message remained private it was unavoidable to tell the senior staff at least about the familial source of the data.

“A family separated by lightyears is still family.”

“I suppose.” 

“And a family member that delivered data about the New Maqui’s activities. That’s something you might want to talk about.” 

David hadn’t been able to watch the message again when it had been played to the senior staff, instead focusing on tracking the grain of the dark oak that formed the room’s table. His eyes had followed the twists and turns as he heard his uncle’s panicked voice, unable to block out the familiar Scottish brogue that signalled a relationship to his recently deceased father. A chill had run down David’s spine as, in breathless and frightened whispers the man had relayed what little information he had known about a possible New Maqui attack.

‘Cyodan.’ ‘Freighter’. ‘Bomb.’

Then a flurry of scared shouts and the message had ended, leaving only a frozen image of uncle Saul’s face, thin and fraught in the dim light of a back alley. 

A silence hovered over the room as the two of them looked out the aft windows, the stars silently peeling away from the ship as it carried them toward what might be another loss in the Mitchell family. 

“I’ve always wondered what it must’ve been like aboard those old sailing ships.” Ashra mused. “Watching the waves and wake, leaving the horizon behind.”

The silence continued, David wasn’t feeling particularly talkative, not that he believed he had the words to express his thoughts even if the mood did take him. 

“Most of them leaving a whole world behind. Not unlike the early space farers.” Ashra probed again. The silence remained stoic across the table. “People don’t always appreciate in this age of subspace communication and faster than light travel that every journey still takes you away from somewhere.” She threw another lure across the wooden pond. 

“But you can always go back.” Finally, a bite.

“Sometimes I suppose. But the universe doesn’t stand still, the memory we have is always in the rearview.”

“Did you expect Starfleet to have changed when you came back?” David’s voice was pale from across the slowly defrosting table. 

“I suppose I did. Though if I’m being honest, I wasn’t prepared for quite how changed it would be.” The older woman lent back into her chair as she offered up her own unspoken struggles to the young man, a thought for a thought was a fair exchange. “Theres a trust to be rebuilt in Starfleet, both inside and out.”

David span his chair towards her, his attention drawn from the stellar horizon. Ashra was struck by his dark eyes, signs of the vulnerable man’s lack of sleep. “I don’t understand.”

“People wearing the faces of our friends chased us through the hallways.” 

“They were our friends.” David had been relatively safe from the Jupiter signal along with the rest of the Daedalus’ crew at the far reaches of Federation space. But he had seen the footage; friends and colleagues striking down people who had been mentors, friends and loved ones only moments prior. “The Borg took them. Like they take everything.” David choked back his anger, a lava flow of bile beginning to boil in his stomach. His mind filling with an imagined vision of his father’s face, moments before the explosion of Probert Station engulphed him. The fearful face of his uncle frozen in the message had become the a surrogate visage of his father. In the shadows behind, he could see the faces of his friends aboard the Exodus sphere, fighting for their lives moments before it too exploded at high warp. All of them taken from him. 

“It’s not just the Borg though.” Ashra mused, her eye trained on David’s freshly tense jaw. “The Dominion War, Utopia Planitia, The Lost Fleet, Frontier Day, the Fourth Fleet Directive. Now a New Maquis and a less than friendly Klingon Chancellor.” She smiled wearily. “We’ve been given a lot of reasons not to trust. Perhaps the New Maqui are a symptom of that broken trust.” 

“I’m not sure how my feelings are relevant.” David was desperate for the conversation to be over, to fall back into his empty meditation. Ashra might have kind intentions but talking wasn’t helping, he felt nothing was helping. He longed to run back into the past, to catch the lingering smell of Zaya’s perfume once again, to overhear Hermira’s wicked laugh as she won another round of Kadis-Kot, to catch Maine smiling when he thought no one was looking. To sit at his father’s knee one last time, watching him lick his fingers and turn the page of their nightly story.

“I don’t think I want to discuss this anymore. I appreciate the kind thought but I don’t think you really understand.” David whispered, his wounded heart creeping into his voice as a childish tone. “I’d like to be alone.”

Ashra stood from the table, she had pushed far enough, healing came in stages. She pulled the scarf from her head and held it in her hands, revealing several scars that ran across her hairless head, deep gouges and broken skin that raked across her olive skin creating cruel valleys and trenches; her own marks of battle. “I’m just saying David. Our memories are behind us on the horizon, they’re lovely to look at but they’re out of reach now. We have to remember there’s an exciting new horizon ahead of us. It’s easy for people to get fixated on the past, trust is much clearer in hindsight.” 

The quiet sliding of the briefing room doors left David alone with his thoughts and an extra penny.