As Airex stepped away from the team, Kharth grabbed him by the arm. Her grip was firm, but as they paused, a few steps away from everyone else, she didn’t quite look at him.

‘I’ll have weapons trained on anyone who sticks their head out from cover,’ she said, voice low, taut. ‘If they look like they’re so much as thinking of opening fire, I’m taking them out.’

He watched her for a beat, how her brow furrowed as she glowered across the yard, how her grip on his sleeve didn’t loosen. ‘I’d say that would complicate the hostage rescue,’ Airex said softly. ‘But at that point, that’s not my problem anymore.’

The light humour made her lips twist, and her eyes fell on him at last. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

‘You already gave me permission,’ he said, and stepped away.

The yard before the storage hall stretched out, broad and barren, and echoing with a silence that did not belong. This should have been a place of work; of agricultural labour, no less, of the harnessing of life to bring more life. But the building’s walls were dull in the afternoon light, the jagged ovals clustered around the sealed doors shining bright against the metal, giving them a freshness. A slickness.

Airex stepped out alone, boots crunching over scattered grain. He took one step – two – four – and was out in the open, and nobody opened fire. By the time he felt in range to call out, he stood amid a sea of stillness and silence, hands hanging empty by his side.

‘My name is Davir Airex of the Federation starship Endeavour,’ he called at last, eschewing rank so they did not confuse him for military. ‘We’ve been asked to help by the Protectorate. But I’m here to talk to you.’

A whisper of wind tugged at the hanging banners, and they fluttered against metal with a hiss of dragging fabric. For a long moment, nothing happened. Nothing moved.

He pressed on. ‘We don’t want bloodshed. We don’t want harm to come to the people inside. Nor to you. I’m speaking because I believe all of this…’ He gestured to the painted sigils, the empty district behind him, ‘…was to say something. So I want to listen.’

Silence again, and Airex realised he’d considered being answered, and he’d considered being shot, but he hadn’t considered being ignored. He was just weighing up his options when a groan of metal filled the air.

Slowly, reluctantly, the sealed cargo door shuddered, and then one slid aside by no more than a foot. For a moment, he had a glimpse of the inside, of cool, dust-tinged darkness, and shifting shapes. Then someone stepped out.

He was an Orvas man in his thirties, maybe; long-limbed, wearing civilian work-clothes layered under a thick jacket. A strip of white cloth was tied around his brow, stark above suspicious but tired eyes. At his side he held a rifle in a loose grip. Across his cheeks were dark smears Airex thought might be ash.

‘You should not be here,’ the Orvas man said, voice rough. ‘This is not your world, your place. Your struggle.’

Airex inclined his head a fraction, making sure to keep his body language acknowledgement, not submission. ‘No. But there are people inside in danger. So we came.’

The man’s gaze narrowed in calculation. ‘The Protectorate sends off-worlders to speak for them. Their weakness knows no bounds.’

‘I’m not speaking for them. Or doing their bidding. I want something from them, and I want nobody to be hurt. And I think the best way forward is as simple as something that’s not been tried yet, by all accounts: conversation.’

A murmur drifted from the doorway, and the Orvas glanced behind him. But after a beat, he raised a hand, cutting short whoever seemed to be protesting from the darkness, and looked back at Airex.

‘Then speak, outsider. Speak, and we will answer.’

Airex took a slow breath, letting the silence stretch only long enough to let the other man’s expectation build. ‘You don’t know me,’ he began mildly, ‘and I don’t presume to know the weight of your conviction or your grievances. But I understand this: nobody takes a risk like this unless they believe every other path has been closed to them.’

The man’s expression didn’t change. ‘We do what we do to demonstrate our strength – and the weakness of the Protectorate. That they have extended themselves beyond our home, and left our people exposed to threat and corruption. That even here, in this colony that was to be a haven, they cannot protect our people. They need you to help.’

‘The galaxy is a vast place, with vast unknowns and dangers,’ Airex agreed carefully. ‘But there is one problem with your message: the government is not listening. They’re suppressing your words, your concerns. And even if you kill everyone here – yourselves, the hostages, us, every Orvas soldier on the planet – you know the Protectorate won’t bow to you. They’ll only harden their resolve.’

‘You doubt ours?’

‘I think violence like yours is wielded by those who think they have no other options to bring people to the table.’ Airex opened his hands. ‘I’m offering you a table.’

A scoff. ‘Your Federation now dictates terms on behalf of the Protectorate -’

‘Not terms. I don’t promise change to Protectorate policy. I don’t even promise you legal immunity. I’m offering you arbitration. For Starfleet to meet with both sides, and make sure there is dialogue. Make sure your concerns are heard by a government whose only response to you is violence and silence.’

It was Airex’s turn to be met by silence, and he took this as an opportunity to wait a beat, then twist the knife. ‘I know you’re prepared to die. Prepared to face all manner of legal consequences. Prepared, even, to be ignored, with the hope that your sacrifice will send ripples.’ He straightened. ‘Are you prepared to be listened to? Give voice to your demands? Speak, instead of simply bleed?’

The Orvas worked his jaw. ‘Why should anything change?’

‘Because the Protectorate seeks to position itself as caretakers of a wider Expanse,’ Airex said more softly. ‘How can they claim such a role if the wider Expanse knows they are helpless in the face of dissent at home?’ Another pause, and he took a careful step forward. ‘Release the hostages. Surrender. And we will mediate your grievances.’

The man stared him down. Then turned. Re-entered the storage hall. And the sound of the metal cargo door sliding shut echoed across the yard into looming silence.

Airex bit his lip and glared up at the sky. He turned back to the road, where the away team clustered near the corners of the low buildings, and his shoulders sagged as he tapped his combadge. ‘Unsuccessful.’

‘Nobody died, Commander – we think,’ came Walker’s voice before Kharth, sounding, Airex thought, a little self-satisfied at the predicted failure. ‘You can hold your head high. We’ll figure out our next move.’

‘Get the hell back over here,’ was all Kharth snapped, and his lips twisted at the corners before he nodded and took a step.

Then the cargo doors slid wide open, and he whirled around to see figures stumbling out. Orvas, civilians, without a headband or weapon in sight. Desperate, blinking against the afternoon sun, they staggered into the open, and Airex rushed forward.

‘This way,’ he urged, ushering them back, counting heads. Four, eight, twelve – fifteen. Fifteen civilians, none the worse for wear.

‘They just let us go,’ one mumbled. ‘After all that…’

‘You’re safe now,’ Airex insisted. ‘Go, back towards the town square – my people will meet you…’

He looked the way he’d gestured, towards the away team and Treviorn, only for a figure to catch his eye. Not from the storage hall, but stood on another road leading away from the yard, a narrower passageway heading north. Stock still, tall and broad, the gleam of a gold Starfleet uniform at his shoulders and the glint of metal around his left eye.

It was unmistakably Jack Logan.

Then footsteps sounded from the storage hall doorway, and Airex spun to see the Orvas extremist he’d spoken to step back out. This time he carried something other than a rifle: the ivory shape of a horned skull, like the one topping the effigy near the mouth of the district.

Airex watched him step into the open yard and lift the skull to place it atop his head like a terrible mask, its white ivory dripping with streaks of red blood.

‘The soil remembers the strong,’ he intoned, voice booming across the yard. ‘The fallen awaken it. Let this be the seed that breaks the rot.’

As Airex lunged forward, his limbs heavy as if bound by chains, the Orvas raised his other hand and thumbed the detonator clutched in his grasp.

And everything went white.