Ensign Maya Ortega sat by the window, staring at the Vaadwaur warships all around. At first, she’d wondered why they’d come for the Archanis Station after all these weeks, but as ships began to pour in, she understood. They were using it as a base for refit and repair, leveraging the Corps of Engineers’ equipment and supplies, once meant to revitalize the infrastructure of the sector, now to capture and raze it.

Within hours of taking Archanis Station, the Vaadwaur had reached out their hand across the Meronia Cluster, striking world after world that had, for the first few weeks, been left entirely alone. But no more. Now, those worlds fell one by one, and sitting here in Archanis Station’s diplomatic offices, her job, as assigned to her by their new masters, was to catalogue those conquests. As each new report of some colony fallen arrived on her desk, it cut deep, like a piece of her soul being removed.

It was sick and twisted how the Vaadwaur had put them to work. The diplomatic staff had been ordered to write propaganda pieces that the Vaadwaur would broadcast across the sector to remind all of their supremacy, while belowdeck, engineering staff had been made to repair the very weapons and starships used to lay siege to the sector, and medical staff were put to work caring for the very soldiers that had killed their colleagues and friends. Everyone else, all were tasked with whatever the Vaadwaur wanted for their war effort. Except the command staff and station security. No one had seen any of them since the night the station fell.

When the occupation first began, brave officers had resisted the Vaadwaur’s instructions, but soon, they learned their lesson. Any act of resistance was met with death. But not their own. That would be too easy. Many could summon the courage to stand tall when it was their life on the line, but a mother or a child randomly plucked from their quarters? If you resisted their instructions, the Vaadwaur would march a civilian out in front of you, put a disruptor to their head, and pull the trigger. Nothing you did at that point would help either. You couldn’t plead or beg for mercy or offer to comply. There was only one way to protect the people they were sworn to protect: to serve, and to do it without resistance. What could one do against that?

The sound of metal on porcelain drew her from her thoughts.

Ensign Ortega looked across the office at her officemate, Lieutenant Camille Anderson. The young diplomatic affairs attache sat there casually cutting into a New York strip plated atop chinoiserie-patterned china, an alabaster serviette even neatly folded across her lap. What the fuck? “Camille, how can you eat at a time like this?”

“How can you not eat at a time like this?” Lieutenant Anderson smiled unassumingly as she looked up, waving her fork in Ortega’s direction with a slice of marbled beef on it. “Would you like a bite?”

“Umm, no!” Ensign Ortega scoffed. And not just because she was a vegan. “The Vaadwaur are out terrorizing our colleagues – killing them even – and you’re sitting in here eating a steak off the sort of plateware my grandma serves Christmas dinner on! How?!”

Lieutenant Anderson frowned, setting her fork down and locking eyes with the young ensign, hoping to help her understand. “Look, it’s shitty out there. Real shitty. I get that. But when it’s real shitty, why not take moments to enjoy what little things you can?”

Such a strange way to look at it, Ensign Ortega thought to herself. “Honestly, I haven’t eaten a damn thing in two days. Not since seeing the bodies.” So many bodies. She’d never even seen one dead body before this. Not up close and personal, at least. Now they were everywhere.

“Everyone’s gotta eat,” Lieutenant Anderson pointed out as she picked her fork back up and plopped the slice of steak into her mouth. As she savored the taste, her PADD chimed. She looked over at it momentarily. “Hmmm.”

“What?” asked Ensign Ortega.

“Oh nothing,” Lieutenant Anderson replied nonchalantly as she worked on cutting another slice of the New York strip. “Do let me know if you change your mind though? My eyes might have been bigger than my stomach when I ordered this. May not be able to finish it all myself.”

“I’m a vegan,” Ensign Ortega answered with a bit of disgust. And not really because of her diet. It just seemed so disrespectful to be eating like this when others were dying out there beyond their walls. “But thank you.”

Lieutenant Anderson shrugged. Whatever. It was her loss. And so she went back to her steak, and in the end, she did end up polishing off the entire plate. Every last bite. Might as well, she told herself. It might be a while, she now knew, before she had an opportunity to enjoy again.

Ensign Ortega, for her part, returned to her miserable work, a piece she’d been ordered to draft for their Vaadwaur masters that announced the conquest of three more worlds in the Meronia Cluster, breadbasket colonies that would provide food for the Vaadwaur and their subjects. It was absolutely depressing the way the Vaadwaur were digging in and making the place their own. They were everywhere now. How would they ever get out of this?

Just as Lieutenant Anderson finished off her steak, and Ensign Ortega finished her article, the lieutenant spoke again. “Hey, I got an idea,” she offered as she set her serviette atop the now-empty plate and rose from her chair. “What do you say that we take a walk?”

“Huh?” Ensign Ortega asked warily, caught off guard by the question. What an absolutely bad idea. “Go… out there?” What the hell would they see out there besides more bodies?

“After I eat, I like to stretch my legs,” Lieutenant Anderson volunteered, a tinge of playfulness and mischievousness in her voice that seemed quite out of place given the depressing situation all around them. “Plus, I dunno, maybe we can try a little diplomacy out there?”

“I dunno…” Ensign Ortega replied skeptically. What diplomacy could they accomplish with these monsters? And going out there, any time you were in sight of the Vaadwaur, there was a chance you might provoke them, and if they got mad, someone would end up dead. “Shouldn’t we just keep a low profile?”

But Lieutenant Anderson didn’t look like she’d take no for an answer. Instead, she stepped towards the door, gesturing for the ensign to follow.

“Fine,” Ensign Ortega relented, rising from her chair, praying she wouldn’t regret it.

And then, together, they walked through the upper levels of the station, surveying the scene. They passed groups of civilians cowering and groups of officers working, and at every junction, Vaadwaur soldiers stood watch, their big rifles crosschest, their heads on a swivel, sentries looking for even the slightest misstep. The Vaadwaur’s heavy presence left no doubt who was in charge, but the two unassuming diplomats raised no red flags, and the soldiers allowed them to move about freely. At least as freely as one could be under their watchful eyes.

“Is it just me, or have we not seen a single one of Eriksson’s guys?” Ensign Ortega whispered quietly as they crossed the promenade. Their security chief had a type. Buff, bearded, and weathered, seasoned much like himself. But none of the officers in yellow that they’d passed fit the bill. It was like their security department had just been vanished.

“What use do our new masters have with them?” Lieutenant Anderson asked rhetorically. They had put everyone else to work, but in what way would Eriksson’s guys be helpful to the Vaadwaur war machine? Plus, they weren’t the type to just roll over and submit. “The only question is whether they’re locked up somewhere or the Vaadwaur decided it was more efficient to just kill them off.”

That thought made Ensign Ortega shiver. But even weirder was how her colleague was taking it all. They were just a pair of aspiring young diplomats. They didn’t do things like this. But Camille Anderson seemed completely unphased. And that was weird.

As the pair kept walking, they descended lower and lower into the bowels of the station. 

To an outside observer, their route appeared random and without purpose, pausing here and there, just sort of meandering about, but at every turn, it seemed to Ensign Ortega that the lieutenant was guiding, that there was some intentionality to wherever they were going.

Eventually, they came to a non-descript corridor that looked like so many others, a Vaadwaur soldier standing watch at a door in the middle of it. 

Ensign Ortega walked straight on by, keeping her eyes at the floor, avoiding eye contact or anything else that might provoke the guard.

But Lieutenant Anderson had other plans. 

As she passed the guard, her shoulders hunched, Lieutenant Anderson’s hand suddenly came out of her pocket, and in it now, was the steak knife from lunch. Before anyone could blink, the Vaadwaur soldier included, she dove the blade straight into his supraclavicular fossa, the fleshy and exposed skin right above his breastplate at the base of his neck.

The Vaadwaur’s eyes grew wide as the blade met bone.

He tried to react, but she pushed him up against the door aggressively, plunging the blade deeper and deeper. He gasped for air, but none came as she severed his trachea. Lieutenant Anderson’s eyes stayed locked on him as the light went out of his.

“What the…” Ensign Ortega said as she turned back at the commotion.

The Vaadwaur soldier slumped to the deck. Dead.

And standing over him, the quiet attache that Maya Ortega knew from the office was gone. Now, as Camille Anderson shoved the creature to the side and went for his weapons, there was fire in her eyes. Ensign Ortega just stood there stunned.

“Here, take this,” Lieutenant Anderson said as she lifted the soldier’s rifle from his corpse as if this was all normal. As if she hadn’t just killed a man.

Ensign Ortega didn’t know what to do but accept the rifle. “I… uh…” As she held the weapon, it was heavy, but not as heavy as the realization of what had just happened. They had just killed a Vaadwaur. Oh. My. God. She’d never killed anyone before – or even been party to such a killing before – and the Vaadwaur… what would they do in response? She shivered at the thought.

Lieutenant Anderson, on the other hand, just went about doing her thing, all business now, taking the sidearm on the guard’s waist and pocketing it, and then going for the door, keying something into the access panel by its side.

The door slid open.

“Inside,” Lieutenant Anderson gestured as she stepped through.

Ensign Ortega just stood there dumbfounded, the rifle awkwardly in her hands.

“Get inside, now,” Lieutenant Anderson ordered as she bent down and grabbed the armored shoulder plates of the man she’d just killed. “And help me with this guy.” With a bit of effort, she began to drag his body out of the hallway and into the room they’d just opened.

All Ensign Ortega could do was follow. What other option did she have? Once inside, she realized they were within some sort of a secondary computer core facility.

Swiftly, Lieutenant Anderson went to the main console, her fingers flying across the keys. 

That’s when it became clear to Ensign Ortega that the lieutenant had not gone mad. There was some purpose to all of this. Just not one she understood. “What are you doing?”

“I’m rejiggering the personnel database,” Lieutenant Anderson replied as she connected her tricorder to an access port and triggered a program on it.

“Why?” Ensign Ortega asked, not following at all.

“The Vaadwaur have been using it to determine who might cause them future problems,” Lieutenant Anderson explained as her program started to make changes. “They sequestered Eriksson’s men, but all the others, the heroes among us who might be inclined to rise up, before the Vaadwaur have time to profile everyone, we’re gonna make everyone’s just a bunch of fairies that huff rainbows in a field of daisies.”

“What… how… how do you know all of this?” Ensign Ortega fumbled with her words. None of this made any sense. She and Camille Anderson were just a couple of lower deckers that authored diplomatic papers for Ambassador Michael Drake. Since when did they kill enemy soldiers and alter personnel files?

“Not now, Maya,” Lieutenant Anderson replied as she kept working. In addition to the personnel database, she also made tiny modifications to a small handful of insignificant nodes in the internal sensor network. Nothing interesting. Nothing that would be noticed. But enough, just in case.