The USS Spector was quiet.

Not the dead quiet of the border. Not the watchful silence that came before a fight. This was a tired quiet. A ship and crew breathing through repairs, damage control teams and becoming whole again.

Deep Space 11 and 17 had dispatched support vessels led by the steamrunner class USS Givens in support. Starfleet command had acknowledged receipt of recovered data. Intelligence had classified the hostile force as a rogue Kzinti element using stolen Starfleet tactical coordination technology.

The Kzinti Patriarchy denied everything.

Of course they did.

The denied sanction. They denied knowledge. They denied that Huntmaster Kharzh of the Broken Fang held any recognised rank, command or authority within Kzinti space. They denied responsibility for the stolen technology, the raider, the attacks and the dead.

The evidence was enough to change Starfleet’s posture along the border.

It was not enough to make politics clean but nothing out on the frontier every was.

—–

Calder found his Valkyrie, Revenant-Six, in the launch bay.

The fighter sat in its cradle beneath the repair lights, panels removed, power systems exposed and hull plating stripped back around the worst of the damage. It looked smaller without the hull plating, more fragile.

It no longer looked new.

Scorch marks ran along the port side where his shields collapsed. One Wing root had been reinforced with a fresh support brace. The nose bore a long black scar. Someone had replaced the damaged panel beneath the cockpit, but he could still see the burn line.

Chief Voss stood on a maintenance platform beside the fighter, arms folded and eyes narrowed at the open engine housing.

Calder stopped at the bottom of the ladder. “Chief?”

Voss did not look down. “You here to apologise to my fighter?”

“I thought about it,” he replied.

“Good, it deserves better.”

Calder looked at Revenant-Six. “How bad?”

Voss dighed, the way only a deck chief could. “Bad enough that I’ve been awake for nearly thirty hours. Not bad enough that I can’t fix it.”

“That’s something,” Calder replied with a smile.

“That, is everything.”

Calder climbed halfway up the platform and ran one hand lightly along the edge of the new panel. His glove came away clean.

Voss watched him for a moment. “I left the scar.”

Calder looked at him. “Why?”

“Because it looked to clean before.”

There was no softness in the way he answered. It made it mean more.

Calder nodded, “Thank you.”

Voss snorted. “Don’t get sentimental. It’s still mostly held together with tape and miracles.”

A small smile went across Calder’s face.

Voss stepped down from the platform and handed him a small metal strip. At first Calder thought it was scrap. Then he saw the lettering burned into it.

REVENANT-SIX

It was from the old damaged panel.

“Figured you might want it,” Voss said.

Calder stared at it for a second too long, when he looked up Voss was already walking away.

“And Calder,” he called back.

“Yes, Chief?”

“Next time, scratch it less.”

—–

The ready room smelt of burned coffee and was full of pilots pretending they were not exhausted.

Calder pushed just inside the doorway.

Then stopped.

His name was on the board. Not written in temporary marker. Not squeezed at the bottom. Not tagged as a replacement, new arrival or a provisional assignment.

REVENANT SIX – ENS. SAM CALDER

The letters sat among the others as if they’d always been there.

Zoral sat at the central table with one arm in a sling and a mug in front of him. Tal was stretched across two chairs with a medical patch across her cheekbone still. Vale sat beside her with a PADD in hand, one eye slightly bruised and still reading.

Tal glanced up. “You planning to stand there all day again?”

Calder remembered the first time she had said something along those lines. How badly he had not wanted to look new.

This time he walked in and sat down.

“No” he said. “Chair looked lonely.”

Zoral raised his mug. “That was almost banter. Dangerous development.”

Tal smirked. “Don’t encourage him.”

Zoral pushed a second mug across the table toward Calder. “Coffee?”

Calder eyed it, “is it safe?”

“No” Zoral replied.

He took it anyway.

Vale didn’t look up from her PADD. “Your final attack manoeuvre remained one of the least advisable ones I have ever seen performed outside of a training failure.”

Calder lifted the mug. “Thank you?”

Vale looked up. “It was also effective.”

Tal leaned toward him. “That’s her way of saying well done.”

“I understood,” Calder said.

“No you didn’t,” Zoral replied. “No one understands Vale. We just nod at what we think are the right moments.”

Vale smiled.

Zoral took a careful drink of coffee and looked away.

The doors opened and Lt Cdr. Rourke entered.

The room changed, not too sharply. No one jumped to attention, not here, not today.

Rourke carried a PADD but she did not look at it immediately. Her eyes moved across the room and looked at each of them one by one. At the pilots assembled, at least the ones who had returned.

Then, briefly, the empty spaces.

Revenant-One.

Revanant-Two.

No fighters in their cradles. No voices on the comm. No boots in the ready room. But not gone either. Not really.

Calder looked at the words above the lockers.

WE COME BACK.

He had thought, once, that it was a promise.

Now he understood it was heavier than that.

It was not a claim that everyone survived. Space did not allow promises like that. Combat certainly did not. It was a duty. Those who came back carried the ones who could not. They brought their names home. Their warnings. Their courage. Their last seconds.

Vrox had come back in the data.

Kade had come back in the way they flew for each other.

Rourke saw him looking. For a moment the room remain still and quiet.

The she turned to the board and tapped her PADD. “Updated rotation. Zoral, you are grounded till the CMO, clears that arm.

Zoral opened his mouth.

“No,” Rourke said.

He closed it,

“Tal, limited flight status pending an engineering review of your fighter and medical review of your judgement.

“My judgement is fine,”

“No,” everyone said at once.

Tal glared. Calder smiled into his coffee.

“Vale, tactical analysis with T’Lenar in two hours,” Rourke continued. “Calder, you are on second alert rotation.”

Calder looked up.

Second alert rotation was not ceremonial. It was not provisional. It was not where they put someone they were still deciding about.

It was work.

Real work.

He nodded, “Aye Commander.”

Rourke held his gaze for a moment. “Do not make me regret it.”

The words should have sounded like a warning, they did not.

—–

Later on the bridge Captain Holt stood beside Rourke and Lt Cdr Paldor, they watched the repair lights move across the Spector’s hull on multiple external displays.

“Command had confirmed the classification,” he said.

“Rogue combat network?” Paldor asked.

“Yes, stolen Starfleet technology, Kzinti-deniable.” he said.

Rourke folded her arms, “That sounds like command.”

“They also want full interviews with every pilot who engaged the system.”

“Of course they do,” Rourke replied shaking her head.

Holt’s expression was grim. “There was an encrypted burst of data, just before the node died.”

“To where?” Paldor asked.

“Unknown,” he replied. “T’Lenar is working with the science team but the directional trace places it deep inside Kzinti space.”

Rourke looked back at the viewscreen.

“Huntmaster Kharzh?” she asked.

“Possibly dead. Possibly escaped. Possibly someone else was listening.” Paldor replied.

Rourke scoffed, “that narrows it down,”

For a while the three stood quietly.

Then Holt looked at Rourke, “Your pilots did well.”

Rourke looked toward the doors at the rear of the bridge. As if she could see through them and down to the ready room below.

“They came back,” she said.

Holt nodded.

“That they did.”

—–

In the ready room, Tal and Zoral had begun arguing about whether deliberately flying through a collapsing relay screen counted as tactical brilliance or self-destructive theatre.

T’Lenar was pretending not to listen whole very obviously recording points for later correction.

Calder sat with them now, next to Vale. Not near the door. Not half in and half out the room.

With them.

Below, in the launch bay, Voss and his crews worked beneath repair lights, bringing scarred fighters back from the edge, one panel, conduit and shield emitter at a time.

On the bridge, Rourke watched the stars.

For one small moment, the Spector breathed.

Then the lights dropped.

Red washed over the ready room, the red alert sounded.

“All Revenants,” Rourke’s voice came over the comm, sharp and steady. “Report to launch stations.”

No one asked why.

Chairs scraped back. Coffee was abandoned. Tal was on her feet first. Zoral swore softly and reached for his flight jacked with his one good arm. Vale grabbed her PADD without looking and it and scooted around T’Lenar as she rose to her feet. Calder was already moving.

The corridors flashed red around them.

Revenant-Six waited in its cradle, scarred but repaired. It was no longer clean, no longer new.

Calder climbed.

Seat. Harness. Helmet. Seal.

His hands found the controls.

They did not shake.

The canopy lowered.

The launch bays lights stretched out in from of him.