Captain Elbon Jakkelb watched his first officer, Calumn, hunch over the conference table and shovel oskoid fronds into his mouth by the handful.  Tense away missions always made him ravenous too.  He had ordered a buffet to the observation lounge, hot and waiting for his senior staff’s return.

“We were never in any real danger,” Calumn said, licking sap from his fingertips before resuming note-taking on his PADD. The contradiction between Calumn’s words and body language wasn’t lost on Elbon. Subtly, Elbon nudged a napkin in Calumn’s direction, but he didn’t take any notice.

Yuulik’s eye-roll was pure theatre. It took so long, she had to blink her bulbous eyes halfway through. Between the strain of the eye-roll and the weight of her twin dark-hair fins, her head lolled to one side. After a deep breath, she spooned up another bite of Ktarian eggs, but they were such a soft scramble, she left a splatter of runny drops on the tabletop.

“Like you weren’t in any danger that time the Kazon shot you?” Yuulik challenged Calumn, sitting across from him.  She slurped the eggs from her spoon.  The wet noise gave Elbon a shiver across his shoulders. It required great effort not to cringe.

“I wasn’t,” Calum said. He popped another oskoid in his mouth. “I trust in Doctor Nelli. Don’t you?”

“You’re senseless, commander,” Yuulik said around a mouthful of eggs.

Seated at the head of the curved table, Elbon tried to infer the context clues in Yuulik’s snide remarks, but his attention snagged on the wet fingerprints Calumn was leaving on his PADD and the eggy specks on the glassy tabletop. The glow of starlight coming in through the angled viewports made the wet fingerprints glisten.

Elbon preferred to keep a ship tidy as a temple.

He forced himself to look away, studying the brassy models of every Starfleet starship that had borne the name Constellation. Although the metallic corridors of this ship were new to him, Elbon had served as first officer to half this crew aboard the USS Sarek. He wanted, coming back to them, to feel like his own personal peldor festival.

The reality hadn’t filled him with much gratitude yet.

This was still Taes’s crew. She preferred informality in senior staff briefings, keeping the focus on a family meal rather than statistics and reports. Elbon wasn’t about to disrespect her memory by breaking those traditions. Even if they were unpalatable.

Pivoting the topic of discussion, Nune spoke up. “One of their engineers accused us of fulfilling a prophecy. She compared us to predatory starbeasts.” He spoke expressively with an authority that came from accepting every inch of fear that showed in his dark eyes.

When he spoke, Nune draped a hand over Yuulik’s forearm. Yuulik stopped grinding her teeth, and her shoulders dropped a couple of centimetres. That was new. Elbon wondered how else Nune’s calming presence could serve the crew.

Affecting her professorly timbre, Yuulik said, “It’s clear the Dabari have believed the previous warp-two limit in the Shackleton Expanse has been a law of physics. Absolute.” –She stirred up her eggs some more– “They’ve only spoken with other worlds over subspace comms. Their sensors were too damaged to detect our drop out of high-warp, but our very appearance from beyond their long-range communication makes us sus–”

The chronometer ticked over to another minute mark. Having already understood Yuulik’s conclusion seventeen words earlier, Elbon interrupted, “Then how did you escape?”

“The elder pilot restrained the young bloom,” Nelli answered attentively. Although Nelli rarely ate in public, their maroon chair was already smeared with soil residue.

Huffing since Elbon interrupted her, Yuulik picked up with, “Rythra was fanatical. The others were cautious but less fearful of us.”

Nune’s eyebrows raised, and he said, “Threatening to abandon them on emergency battery power certainly changed our… value.” Although he didn’t put anything more into words, there was a mischievous glint to his eyes. Nune was going through a blond phase. In his last one, he spent his evenings flirting with Elbon’s then-husband. In this one, he found new ways to undermine Elbon.

“He’s right, captain,” Calumn chimed in. “I question the ethics of first contact negotiations with the safeties off. Captain Taes would have–”

At the first hint of that comparison, Elbon felt his very pagh straining to live up to the shadow of Fleet Captain Taes.  Without that pagh alignment, the strength sapped from his very bones.  His patience vanished with it too.  Elbon envied the sheer loyalty Taes engendered, and then he quickly hated himself for the envy too.

“We’ve made them comfortable, I assume?” Elbon asked before either thought could be finished.

Calumn nodded, unbothered. No tension in his posture or around his eyes. He appeared unoffended by the interruption. Yuulik, on the other hand, scoffed loudly.

“With USS Almagest holding position at Framheim Station,” Calumn replied, “we’ve moved the Dabari crew to our finest diplomatic suite aboard USS Armstrong.”

Elbon kept the meeting moving briskly. The sooner they returned to their stations, the sooner the DOTs could sterilise every surface in the lounge.

“And we have the coordinates for the Dabari home world?”

Yuulik, she grimaced, and Elbon couldn’t imagine why until she gave an answer other than a brilliant yes.

“Nearly,” Yuulik replied, the word croaking in her throat. “Astrometrics is working on translating them now from their prototype ship. As we approach the system, we should reduce our own speed to warp two. Only once my team is given full access to the Dabari can we determine the extent of their subspace telescopes.”

Elbon verbalised an brusque, “mmm,” and then he said, “I’ll take that under consideration.”

He made quick eye contact with each of them, and then he said, “Dismissed.”

The senior staff were quick to their feet and even quicker out the door. Only Yuulik dawdled at the table, slowly finishing her eggs, as if dismissal didn’t apply to her. Taes had warned him: Yuulik expected private audiences with the captain.  She considered them her due. If she wouldn’t leave first, Elbon pushed his chair back from the table.

“You think you know everything, don’t you, captain?” she asked, as if it were some secret shame she could hold over him.

Elbon breathed in through his nose. His back was sore from sitting too long, and he didn’t know where he would find the energy to manage one of Yuulik’s tantrums.

Rising from his chair, he asked, “Excuse me, commander?”

While chewing her scrambled eggs, she said, “You believe in your Prophets living outside of space and time. Before you were a counselor, you devoted your life to those Prophet’s teachings, and you shared them, didn’t you?”

And now Elbon felt locked in her targeting scanners. The thesis of her argument was still cloaked, but that didn’t make her any less dangerous.

“Am I missing something?”

“Curiosity,” Yuulik stated. Looking up from her plate, she looked right at him. “I expected more curiosity about the Dabari’s prophecies from you. I expected your own fanatical insights could be instrumental to understanding why the Dabari have mapped their prophecies onto us.”

Elbon could have said all of those same things to himself, and it would have sounded like the voice of reason. His every inadequacy was piled up between them, reminding him of the mistake Starfleet Command had made in expecting him to lead through Taes’s shadow. Somewhere down deep, he felt exposed and afraid, but he pushed it back down. Because it was Yuulik ranting at him, it was much easier to assume she being selfish and wrong-headed.

He braced his palms on the table and leaned in, letting his voice drop low. “Don’t pretend you know what’s happening behind my eyes. You’re a serviceable science officer, but a terrible counselor.”

“You don’t inspire me the way Taes could,” was her condemnation. “You’re going to need to find me a new mentor because this isn’t working.”