Kharth had cancelled the all staff morning briefings as soon as she felt she could get away with it. Nobody needed to waste their time that badly. They all knew the situation, and Doc Winters’ circumstances weren’t changed by the tiniest update on Thawn’s progress.

There was progress, at least, Thawn explained that morning to her, Caede, and Airex in the conference room.

‘Our power systems are back up to eighty per cent efficiency,’ she read from her PADD, tired as ever. ‘And we’ve identified all the damaged SIF emitters. That’s our next priority.’

‘Good,’ said Kharth, sat with her back to the resplendent view of the stellar phenomenon that was hiding them but might kill them at any moment. Then she realised she should probably say something else. ‘That’s good work. Do you have an ETA on the SIF systems?’

‘Obviously it’ll get better by degrees,’ said Thawn, a little more snippily than Kharth liked. ‘It could be days before we’re back to full field integrity.’

‘Let me know when we’re at seventy per cent.’ That was a margin of error Kharth could live with. She looked at Airex. ‘Time to start planning our return trip.’

Airex was more relaxed. ‘I have research programmes in place for once we can move. And I’ve had Turak working on the data we accumulated on our trip here.’

‘Good,’ Kharth said again. ‘You should get to it. But. Good work.’ Thawn didn’t look convinced, Airex didn’t look like he needed convincing, and she gave Caede a quick nod. ‘Stick around a minute, Centurion?’

The Romulan watched the other two leave, and barely waited for the doors to slide shut behind them before he turned back to Kharth. ‘You don’t need people to like you, you know.’

Her jaw tightened, trying to clamp down on the flush of embarrassment at her personnel management skills. ‘I’m not trying to make them like me. I’ve served with them both for years. This isn’t personal.’

‘It looks personal.’

She scowled. ‘Doc Winters says Lieutenant Athaka needed to go back into surgery because of an internal bleed. Another setback for his recovery.’

‘So you need me running Ops a little longer.’ Caede’s arms were folded across his chest, making his shrug even more curt. ‘I’ll do what’s useful. Just don’t ask me to make friends.’

‘I never asked that,’ Kharth snapped. ‘I don’t care, so long as you do your job.’

‘You do care, because you think getting on is an important part of doing the job. It’s not. So long as everyone pulls together for the same cause, the job gets done. We can’t be distracted by stupid personal things.’

She drummed her fingers on the table. ‘Do you want to help get us home? Or do you want to sit on the sidelines and judge?’

‘I want to understand why you’re twisting yourself in knots, as if you need their approval. You’re the captain. They don’t have a choice.’

‘I thought the Republic wasn’t the authoritarian crap-shoot of the Empire? I thought you had the joy of shared ideals and all that?’ she snapped before she could stop herself. ‘I thought you were there because you wanted to be there?’

‘I’m not there right now,’ Caede pointed out. ‘And I don’t know where a pampered evacuee sitting pretty in Starfleet gets to lecture me about the Republic, how it works, or how I should feel about it.’

‘Pampered?’ Her eyebrows hit her hairline. ‘I was dumped by the Empire and Starfleet on a refugee world and got out by luck; there’s nothing pampered -’

‘And before that?’ Caede leaned forward, lip curling. ‘You did get evacuated. So you were on the homeworld, and important enough to get a proper evacuation to an actual relocation hub. Maybe you weren’t top of the pecking order on Romulus, but that’s not the life path of the really desperate.’

Kharth had to take a beat and swallow the instinct to fight. The smart response wasn’t to keep parrying his blows; it was to look for an opportunity to counter-strike. Her eyes raked over him, over his intense gaze. ‘Right. You were a poor borderlands kid who can suddenly make good in the Republic.’

‘I worked my way up -’

‘I didn’t ask. I don’t care. Why the hell do you care about me?’

‘Because I get them.’ Caede jabbed a finger at the door to the bridge. ‘Starfleet, through and through. Slack-jawed wonder at a pile of space dust, adopt the trans-galactic roadkill off our starboard bow. You? You walk like a soldier, talk like a soldier, then crunch time comes, and Starfleet’s got you twisting in the wind. I don’t care about your feelings, Kharth; I care because you’re in charge and I don’t get you.’

I could talk and walk like a soldier because that was what I brought to the table when Rourke or Valance or anyone else could say ‘let’s find another way.’ But now it’s my table, and I have to push for the Other Way.

And I don’t know what that looks like.

‘You don’t need to get me,’ said Kharth, even as she wondered if the others could sense what Caede did; if that was why Thawn saddled up to fight her every time and Lindgren acted like she was a bomb that might go off. The way Airex and Logan were managing her hadn’t escaped her notice, either. ‘You need to follow my orders. And right now, that’s for you to keep helping.’

And maybe be a voice at the table I need to hear.

She was saved from whatever Caede’s response might have been by a chirrup of the comm systems.

‘Bridge to Commander Kharth – we need you here,’ came Logan’s crisp, urgent summons.

They were bursting through the doors to the bridge seconds later. ‘What do we have?’ Kharth called, moving to stand before the central seat. She’d had long enough to think about it to not want to sit this time.

‘It’s Skippy,’ said Airex, frowning as he read off his readings. ‘He’s just peeled away from our starboard bow and is heading off.’

‘What I’m interpreting from his emissions suggests a lot of distress,’ added Kally, visibly upset.

‘Are you -’ Kharth shut her mouth. You called me because the cosmozoan’s decided to have the zoomies? She worked her jaw before summoning a more constructive response. ‘Do we have any idea what’s upset Skippy?’

‘No,’ Airex allowed, ‘but we’re talking about a life-form that lives here. If anything is going to have a more sophisticated understanding of changes in its environments than our under-powered sensors that still can’t quite pierce the nursery’s interference, it’s a native.’

‘Yeah, but it’s still just a cosmozoan,’ said Caede, to a hint of Kharth’s cynical relief. ‘It might have freaked out at the wrong kind of space dust. Animals aren’t that smart.’

‘I’m not taking us to red alert, no,’ Airex said levelly.

Logan called out next. ‘Commander, I’m picking up the Merlin on a return course. They ain’t due back from their patrol for another twenty minutes.’

‘Maybe they were spooked by Skippy running off,’ Caede drawled.

Kharth ignored him. ‘Hail them when they’re in range.’

‘They’ve already opened a channel,’ said Kally with a hint of impressed surprise. With Lindgren at the helm of the runabout, the odds of the away team breaking through interference to open communications had clearly improved. ‘Patching through.’

The link was not perfect, however, static buzzing about Lindgren’s words. ‘Merlin to Endeavour, do you… ead?’

‘Reading you, Merlin, but you’re patchy,’ said Kharth. ‘What’s the news?’

‘Picked up… ment out… sery.’

Kharth glanced at Kally. ‘Can you improve that?’

‘Not as much as giving them a minute will,’ the ensign admitted.

There was a burst of static. Then Lindgren’s voice came again. ‘Any better, Endeavour?’

‘Better.’

‘Good. Because we picked up movement outside the stellar nursery, toward the aperture.’ Lindgren paused for a beat, perhaps making sure she’d been heard clearly, before dropping the words Kharth didn’t want to hear. ‘It’s the Hirogen.’

Kharth’s throat tightened. ‘Did they detect you?’

‘Negative, Endeavour. Or, no indication they did. Our systems and sensors should be much more sophisticated than theirs. We came about as soon as we could, but…’ Another hesitation. ‘They’re heading into the nursery. Sweeping movement. Like they’re looking for something.’

Kharth looked down at the PADD Thawn had left from the briefing, the update on Endeavour’s repairs that had sounded so promising when they were hidden in the stellar nursery with days to repair, and now looked like an update on a gushing chest wound at the prospect of another confrontation with the Hirogen.

‘Of course they are,’ she said, unable to keep bitterness from her voice. ‘Why would they give up? They’re hunters.’