Track One: “Hopelessly Devoted To You”

“Commodore James Preston Harvey McCallister, in recognition of your remarkable leadership and meritorious conduct in advancing Starfleet’s primary mission of exploration in the farthest reaches of this galaxy, and in promoting the Federation’s peaceful ideals, Starfleet Command is proud to promote you to the rank of Rear Admiral, with all the privileges and responsibilities therein.”

Admiral Katelyn Jenson pinned the new bars to McCallister’s collar, stepped back to admire her work, and began to applaud. “Congratulations, Admiral McCallister!” She leaned on his new rank with an unmistakable smirk.

Alfie had never seen Admiral Jenson in person before today, only in the histories: the first captain of the USS Ithaca (his mother’s former ship and first command), the woman who had taken the USS Prometheus through the worst of the Dominion War. She was taller than he had expected, silver threading through the auburn of her neatly styled bob, and she wore her dress uniform with the ease of something grown rather than issued. But it was her eyes that held him, sharp and pale, somewhere between steel grey and blue, depending on how the light caught them, and they moved across the room as though everything in it were being quietly evaluated and most of it was passing.

“Thank you, ma’am,” McCallister replied with an appreciative smile as the entire room erupted into cheers and applause around them.

From where Alfie stood, the conference room looked fit to burst. It was one of the largest Brahms Station possessed, a long, high-ceilinged space on the upper ring where the station’s designers had clearly anticipated occasions exactly like this one, and even so, almost every senior officer and department head from across the Odyssey Flotilla had crowded into it, along with as many junior officers as had managed to squeeze in behind them, all in dress uniform, all cheering for his father. Two of the walls were given over entirely to viewports, and beyond them the traffic of a fleet at rest drifted against the dark: workbees threading between moorings, the running lights of ten weary starships catching the station’s floodlamps. Someone, and Alfie suspected his mother, had arranged for the crests of the entire flotilla to be mounted along the inner wall, ten emblems in polished duranium, from the Odyssey’s proud laurels to the Astra’s stylised emblem. Long tables of food and drink ran beneath them, and a low stage at the far end waited for the music to begin.

His mother reached his father first. Captain Karyn Reyas stepped forward, wrapped her husband in a hug and pressed a soft kiss to his cheek, murmuring her congratulations. When she released him, Alfie let go of his fiancé’s hand and crossed the floor to take her place, pulling his father into a tight embrace.

“Well done, Dad,” he whispered into his father’s shoulder.

“Thanks, Alf,” McCallister said, giving him one last squeeze before letting go and turning to address the crowd.

Alfie stepped back, found Jordan’s hand again, and watched his father with enormous pride.

“You good, babe?” Jordan whispered, slipping his arms around Alfie’s waist and drawing him back against his chest.

Alfie glanced around the room and nodded. “I’m super proud of him,” he admitted, tilting his head back to steal a light peck on Jordan’s lips before returning his focus to his father.

The only shadow on it, and Alfie kept it to himself, was the two gaps beside him where his brothers should have been. Theo had sent a message that morning, apologetic and rushed, something about rehearsals he couldn’t move; Henri’s had come the night before, warmer and longer, with a promise that they would all be together on soon. Dad had waved both apologies away with perfect good humour. Alfie had watched him read them twice.

“I just want to thank you all for being here today to celebrate this with me,” McCallister told the room. “I couldn’t have got this far without every one of you. It has been an incredible journey, and while the yards get our new flotilla back up and running, I intend for all of us to actually rest for once. Please, enjoy yourselves!” He gestured towards the food and drink laid out along one side of the room, and on cue, the music began.

Alfie turned in Jordan’s arms. “Listen, if you want to spend time with your dads before we leave for Colludia, I totally understand. Especially as my folks will be joining us there later on to see Theo’s gig.”

Jordan smiled at him before glancing over at his two fathers, who were now congratulating the newly minted rear admiral. “I will, especially as I hear they’re finally taking that proper honeymoon they never had. Almost a month on Risa seems excessive to me, but if that’s what they want, I can’t blame them.” He pulled a face. “Just wish they’d take Will with them.”

Alfie punched him playfully in the arm. “Don’t be mean about your brother. He’s one of us, and all of us cadets said we’d go to Colludia to celebrate the end of the academic year.”

Jordan rubbed the spot with exaggerated hurt. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” He glanced back towards his fathers. “Let me go and chat with them.”

“I want to catch up with my mom anyway. See you in a bit,” Alfie replied, kissing Jordan’s cheek one more time before weaving through the crowd to find her.

As he wove through the thinning crowd, Alfie passed a pair of junior officers from the Triton deep in urgent negotiation about whether anyone knew anyone who could still get tickets to something on Colludia II, and one of them said a name he half-heard and entirely ignored. Whatever it was, it sounded like a shuttle registry.

The applause took a long time to die, and McCallister spent all of it feeling the unfamiliar weight at his collar. He had been told, years ago and by more than one admiral, that the bars changed nothing except the paperwork. He had suspected then that this was a lie told out of kindness, and now, standing in the middle of a crowded conference room on Brahms Station with the applause washing over him, he knew it for certain. The rank did not change the work. It changed the distance. From today, every order he gave would travel further before it touched a deck plate, and he was not yet sure how he felt about that.

What he did know was that he could not have stood here without the people in this room, and so he went to them. He moved through the crowd slowly, letting it carry him rather than steering. Banfield and Jen, once his science officer and his operations officer, respectively, and now the command team of the Triton, raised their glasses to him from beside the buffet. Mo’Lee-Krabreii offered her congratulations with Efrosian formality while Saval, at her shoulder, inclined his head by a precise degree. Patterson wrapped his hand in both of hers and told him the Destiny would be ready whenever the yards released her, and he believed it, because Patterson had never once told him a thing that was not true. Tomaz and T’Rani, scattered now across two ships that had once been one bridge, found him in turn, and each handshake landed like a chapter of his own service history closing gently behind him.
His brother did not bother with a handshake at all. Horatio McCallister came through the crowd with his arms already open and pulled James into a hug that lifted him half off his heels, entirely unbothered by the dignity of the room or the rank of the man he was crushing.

“JP,” he managed, somewhere near James’s ear, and there was a roughness in his voice that he did not attempt to hide. “Look at you. Would you just look at you.”

“You’re creasing the uniform, H,” James pointed out, though his arms tightened rather than loosened.

“The uniform will recover.” Horatio finally released him, holding him at arm’s length to study the new bars at his collar, and his grin turned wicked. “Rear Admiral McCallister. Well, at least Starfleet finally recognises what Karyn’s been saying for years. Best rear in the fleet.”

“There are junior officers in this room, H.”

“And every one of them deserves the truth. Ask your wife, she’ll back me up. She has excellent taste and no shame, which is why we get on.” Horatio’s grin held, but something steadier settled in behind it, and he gripped James’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you, JP. Genuinely. Nobody in this fleet has earned it more.”

Canção reached him next, and she did embrace him, because El-Aurians had never once cared for the dignity of a room. “Rear Admiral,” she murmured, drawing back to look at him with eyes that had watched more than one century of officers rise and fall. “I remember when you couldn’t work up the courage to ask a certain science officer to dinner.”

“You gave me no choice in the matter, as I recall.”

“I gave you a nudge. The universe did the rest.” She glanced across the room to where Karyn stood, laughing with Jirani, and her expression carried the particular satisfaction of one admiring her finest work. “Enjoy the moment!”

McCallister noticed, as he made his rounds, that he was not the only one working the crowd. Admiral Jenson moved through the gathering with the ease of a woman who had spent decades in rooms exactly like this one and had long ago stopped finding them tiring. She lingered with Banfield over something that required a PADD to be produced and argued about, science officers being science officers regardless of the pips they went on to wear. She said something to T’Rani that earned the raised eyebrow that passed for delight among Vulcans. And when she reached Max and Tobias, the formality fell away from her entirely; she took Max by both shoulders and studied him with open affection, and James caught fragments across the noise of the room, his father’s name, the old Odyssey, a laugh from Tobias that turned heads three conversations away. Whatever stories she was telling, they predated all of them, and Max wore the expression of a man hearing his father described by someone who had known him before the legend set in.

She caught McCallister watching and raised her glass a fraction, unhurried, as if to say she would get to him in due course. It was, he reflected, his own party, and somehow she had made the room hers within the hour. He suspected this was simply what happened wherever Katelyn Jenson chose to stand.

He found Zobrella near the edge of the crowd, a glass of something untouched in her hand, watching the room the way she watched everything, as though it were a record to be read. The sight of her still produced a small, involuntary tightening somewhere behind his ribs, which he suspected it always would.

“Captain,” he greeted her.

“Admiral.” The Torothan let the word sit a moment. “I find the conclusion of my report was sound.”

“High praise.”

“It was an accurate one,” she answered, and that, from Zobrella, was as close to warmth as protocol allowed, though something at the corner of her mouth suggested the warmth was real. He had spent weeks under this woman’s scrutiny without knowing what it was for. He found, to his own surprise, that he had come out the other side grateful for it.

Niro rescued him from having to find a reply, and for a few minutes the two of them were simply old shipmates, trading stories of the Audacious.

He was still smiling at one of Niro’s more slanderous recollections when the crowd parted, in the way crowds do for certain people, and Admiral Jenson came through it with Bexa at her side.

“Walk with me, Admiral,” Jenson invited, and it was not quite an order, but it had clearly been raised by orders.
They found a quieter stretch of the room, near the long viewports where Brahms Station’s traffic drifted past against the dark. Beyond the reinforced transparency, he could just make out the Odyssey at her mooring, and even at this distance, even in the forgiving station light, he could see how tired she looked.

Jenson followed his gaze. “I’ve read every engineering survey twice,” she began, and the wry ceremonial humour was gone from her voice, replaced by something more clinical and, beneath it, unmistakably respectful. “Tetryon saturation in the bio-neural systems across every ship in your flotilla. Cumulative shear fatigue through the spaceframes. Warp coils running at forty-eight per cent efficiency on your best hull and considerably worse on your worst. Admiral, I have seen fleets come out of wars in better condition.”

“We didn’t fight a war,” McCallister responded quietly.

“No. You spent the better part of three months holding a containment line around an environmental catastrophe that a sub-sect of the Kazon-Nistrim caused in an afternoon and never once looked back at.” Jenson shook her head slowly. “I am still in shock at what they achieved. Our teams are still trying to understand how they cracked open a dormant Underspace aperture with tools they barely understood, and the collapse bled tetryon plumes across half the Tenarus Cluster. Whole worlds breathed poisoned skies. And your ships flew into shear zones every hazard protocol in the fleet says to avoid, day after day, for nearly three months, because that is where the people were.” She turned from the viewport to look at him directly. “Starfleet Command is calling it exemplary. As Director of Fourth Fleet Science, I am calling it what it is. Your flotilla is exhausted, Admiral. Down to its bones.”

“How long?” Cambil asked. It was the question McCallister had been carrying all evening, and he was grateful, not for the first time in twenty years, that she was the one who asked the things he was still weighing how to ask.

“The yards at Avalon are estimating several months of work, and I would encourage you both not to press them on how many. Re-coring warp assemblies and replacing bio-neural infrastructure across ten starships is not work that hurries.” Jenson paused, and something in her manner shifted: the scientist stepped back, and the woman who had once served as Luke Duncan’s executive officer stepped forward. “I recommend you let it not hurry. Your people have earned rest measured in something longer than a duty rotation. So have you, though I’m told admirals are constitutionally incapable of accepting that, and having been one for some years, I can confirm the research.”

“And when the yards are finished with us?” McCallister asked.

“Then the Barzan Wormhole will still be there, and so will the Tenarus Cluster, and so, I suspect, will the Kazon-Nistrim-Nor.” Her gaze held his, steel-grey in the station light. “Use the time, Admiral. Rest first. Then reorganise and prepare your flotilla. The Delta Quadrant has not finished with you, and I intend for you to go back to it with a flotilla that is more than the sum of its repairs.”

She left them with that, moving back into the crowd, and James watched her fold seamlessly into a conversation with Niro as though she had been part of it from the start.

Across the room, McCallister spotted Alfie and Jordan weaving through the crowd towards them, and the sight of them, hands loosely linked, dress uniforms already slightly rumpled with celebration, loosened something in his chest that months of yard estimates could not touch.

“We’re heading out, Dad,” Alfie announced as they arrived, and Karyn appeared at James’s side as if summoned by the words, slipping her arm through her husband’s. “Transport window’s in an hour, and if we miss it, Athena has promised consequences.”

“She has a list,” Jordan confirmed gravely. “There are subsections.”

McCallister glanced past them towards the doors, where the evidence supported the threat: a knot of cadets had gathered at the edge of the room, and Cadet Athena Banfield-Westerham was at the centre of them all, holding a PADD like a weapon of war. She looked intimidating, like her mother.

“Then we won’t keep you from it,” Reyas said, laughing, though she pulled Alfie into a hug that suggested she absolutely would, for a moment or two, at least. “Give your brothers our love. Both of them. And tell Theo we expect a good seat at this gig of his.”

“We’ll be there the day before the gig,” McCallister added, resting a hand on his son’s shoulder as the hug broke. He looked at the pair of them, his boy and the young man who was going to marry him, and let himself feel the whole of it: the promotion, the flotilla, the months of rest stretching ahead, all of it suddenly ballast against this one simple sight. “Look after each other down there. That’s an admiral’s order now, apparently.”

“It carries further,” Alfie replied solemnly. “We were briefed.”

Jordan shook James’s hand, kissed Karyn’s cheek, and then the two of them were gone into the crowd, gathering cadets in their wake like a tide going out, and McCallister watched the doors close behind the sound of their laughter.

Cambil remained at his other side, following his gaze. “Months,” she repeated.

“Months,” he echoed, with his wife on one arm and his oldest friend at his shoulder, and found the word did not frighten him at all.

It was Reyas who found the young officer first, her gaze drifting across the thinning crowd until it settled near the far wall, where Ensign Scott Florrick stood with a knot of junior officers from the Orion, a glass in his hand that he seemed to be holding rather than drinking, laughing a half-second behind the others in the way of a young man who was present at a party without entirely being part of it.

“You’ve been watching him on and off all evening,” Reyas observed quietly.

“Have I?”
“Mm. The same way you used to watch Tobias, about twenty-five years ago.” She let that settle, then squeezed his arm gently. “Admiral Jenson told you to use the time, James. The flotilla will spend months in pieces. You could spend them building something instead.”

He looked down at her. “You think it should be him.”

“I think you’ve already decided it should be him,” she replied, with the small, knowing smile of a woman who had watched him make up his mind slowly about things for the better part of three decades. “Go on. Ask the lad.”

“Listen to her, boss,” Cambil encouraged from the other side.

McCallister sighed, finished his flute of champagne in one gulp, and handed the empty glass to his wife before crossing the room unhurriedly. He saw the exact moment Florrick noticed him coming: the young man straightened as though a current had passed through the deck plating, and the junior officers around him melted away, their finely tuned survival instincts matching those of ensigns everywhere.

“Ad-Admiral,” Florrick managed, and then visibly heard himself and tried again. “Sir. Congratulations, sir. On the…the promotion. Sir.”

“That’s three sirs in one breath, Ensign,” McCallister remarked mildly. “We’ll work on that.”

“Yes, sir.” Florrick closed his eyes briefly. “Four.”

Something in McCallister warmed towards the young man entirely against his will, which, he reflected, had rather been the pattern where Florrick was concerned. He nodded towards the quiet end of the room.

“Walk with me a moment, Mister Florrick. I have a question to ask you.”

Florrick set his untouched glass down on the nearest table with the care of a man handling live ordnance and fell into step beside McCallister. They walked the length of the viewports in silence, past the moored ships and the drifting workbees, and McCallister let the quiet do its work. He had learned that from watching admirals all his career: the ones worth serving never rushed the important questions. Behind them, the party carried on, the music rose, and somewhere across the room his wife and his oldest friend were almost certainly watching and pretending not to.