The apartment still smelled faintly of packing crates, even three weeks after the last of them had been unpacked. Karyn had said, more than once, that it would settle in time, that a place only started smelling like itself once enough ordinary days had happened inside it, and James was inclined to believe her. They had moved fast, faster than either of them had really planned to, but there was something about deciding to build a life with someone in the middle of everything else that made all the smaller decisions feel easier by comparison. If he could decide that, he could decide to put the sofa under the window instead of against the wall.
He was still deciding, in fact, exactly where the sofa ought to go, when Karyn came through from the kitchen with a tray of glasses and told him, not for the first time, that it looked fine exactly where it already was.
“It’s crooked.”
“It’s a sofa, James. Sofas don’t have a correct angle.”
“This one apparently does.” He straightened it another half-centimetre anyway, purely on principle, and looked up in time to catch her smiling at him in the particular way that made him forget entirely what he’d been doing with the sofa in the first place.
The chime went off before either of them could do anything about that smile, which was probably for the best given how many people were about to be standing in their living room.
Bexa arrived first, with her loving husband Naprem a half-step behind her, carrying a bottle of something pure, pale blue that he presented to Karyn with the flourish of a man who took a certain pride in his contributions to other people’s gatherings.
“Bajoran Spring Wine,” he said. “Apparently it comes directly from the Emissary’s own vineyard in Kendra Province. Well, that’s what the lovely old lady says from the wine shop I got it from”
“I told you not to always believe her,” Bexa said, already heading for the kitchen the way she always did in anyone’s home. “So, where’s the food, Karyn?”
Before Karyn could respond, the door chime went again. She opened it to find Katherine Mercer and Alexandra Keating arriving.
“Happy First Contact Day!” Alexandra said as she placed a welcoming, friendly kiss on Karyn’s cheek before a quick hug.
Mercer followed suit, and the two women walked in, saying hello to their colleagues and friends.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” Katherine commented as she looked around the large apartment’s living room that connected to the kitchen and a dining room area. All of it was lit by natural light streaming through the wide bay windows overlooking the impressive city of San Francisco. “I am loving the view.” She added as she peered out the windows, and then she blinked several times. “You have a balcony! I am loving the balcony!”
The door chime went off again, and Rio came in, unhurried as ever, and settled into the armchair by the window with the particular ease of someone who had long ago stopped needing an invitation to make himself comfortable in any of James’s spaces.
It was, James thought, looking round at all of them scattered through his and Karyn’s first apartment together, a fairly unlikely collection of people to have ended up so thoroughly tangled in each other’s lives. A captain who’d spent most of his career in operations before command found him, a frontier research science officer turned lecturer, two cadet unit instructors teaching entirely different specialties, a forensic psychologist who taught cadets how to read a scene and a person with equal rigour, an archaeologist who’d somehow ended up a career Starfleet officer and now taught the subject she loved to anyone who’d sit still long enough to listen, and one civilian schoolteacher who had married into all of it without ever putting on a uniform himself. None of them had planned this. It had simply happened, the way these things did, one posting and one dinner and one favour at a time, until one day you looked round a room and realised these were the people you’d built a life alongside.
“So.” Keating settled onto the arm of the sofa James had only just finished adjusting, a glass already in hand. “Delta Squad ran the Kobayashi Maru simulation again this week.”
Bexa, from the kitchen counter, did not even look up from whatever she was doing to the cheese board. “And?”
“And my cadets solved it in a way the simulation wasn’t expecting. Twice.” Keating’s smile was entirely too pleased with itself. “I understand Foxtrot Squad is still working through the standard approaches.”
“Foxtrot Squad,” Bexa said, arriving with the cheese board and setting it down with rather more force than the cheese board strictly required, “produced three away-team leads and a bridge officer candidate this term. What did Delta Squad produce, besides a very creative way of losing a starship slightly less quickly than everyone else?”
“They didn’t lose the starship at all, actually.”
“Nobody’s cadets beat the Kobayashi Maru, Alexandra.”
“Mine came closer than yours ever have.”
Naprem groaned, loudly and without any real hope of being heard, and reached for the wine bottle he’d brought. “I would like it noted, for the record, that I hear some version of this argument nearly every night before bed, and I would like it to stop happening in my own home as well as everyone else’s.”
“Amen to that, brother.” Katherine leaned over and clinked her glass against his with real feeling, the pale blue of the Bajoran Spring Wine catching the light between them. Neither Karyn nor Rio so much as glanced up from their own conversation, long practised in staying out of it entirely, and James had learned years ago that the safest place to stand during a Bexa-Keating exchange was anywhere else in the room.
It was Katherine, once the argument had run its natural course and dissolved back into general conversation, who turned the subject towards him instead.
“Any word yet on a new posting, James?”
“Not yet.” He said it lightly enough, though there was something underneath it that he suspected everyone in the room could hear regardless. “Command says they’re still working through options. I’ve put in for anything with a bridge attached to it.”
“You could simply enjoy the lecturing a while longer,” Rio said, from the armchair, not quite looking at him.
“You’re good at it. The cadets like you. There are considerably worse ways to spend a year.”
“I know. I do enjoy it.” And he meant that, mostly. There was something satisfying about watching a cadet finally understand a concept that had been sitting just out of their reach for weeks, about being the person who got to hand someone the last piece of something they’d been building on their own. “I’d still rather be out there than in a lecture hall. I prefer the faster pace in the field.”
“Mm.” Rio took a slow sip of her own drink before she said anything further, the particular pause of a woman who had been choosing her moments with him for longer than either of them cared to count. “Sometimes settling down isn’t slowing down, James.”
He caught the weight in that immediately, the double edge of it, and did not need to look at Karyn to know she’d caught it too. He considered arguing with her out of reflex, the way he generally did, and instead found that he simply agreed with her.
“You’re not wrong.”
“I usually am not,” Rio said, entirely without malice, and there was real affection under it that softened whatever sting the words might otherwise have carried.
Karyn set her own glass down with the particular deliberateness of someone who had been waiting for precisely this opening. “For what it’s worth, Rio, we’ve talked about it. James and I. If he’s given a ship again, I’m going with him. That’s not up for debate between us, whatever anyone else might be quietly wondering.”
“Nobody was wondering anything,” Rio said, entirely unconvincingly, and there was laughter around the room at that, James’s own included.
“Perhaps Bexa and I ought to come too,” Naprem said, mostly into his wine glass. “Wherever you end up. Anywhere at all, frankly, so long as it’s somewhere I don’t have to listen to this woman relitigate a training simulation every evening.”
“That,” Keating said, entirely too delighted with the idea, “sounds like an excellent way for Delta Squad to finally win by default.”
The laughter that followed was loud enough that it took James a moment to register the sound underneath it, the low, insistent chime of a comm alert, not from one device but from several at once, scattered across the room in jacket pockets and on side tables. Bexa’s first, then Keating’s, then Rio’s, then his own, then Karyn’s a half-second behind it, five separate priority alerts arriving in the same handful of seconds.
Naprem looked between all of them, his own hands conspicuously empty. “What’s going on?”
It was Bexa who answered, already moving towards the wall display, her voice gone flat and careful in a way James had heard from her only a handful of times before. “Put the news on. FNN. Now.”
The screen came alive mid-broadcast, an anchor’s voice arriving before the picture had properly resolved, and then the image itself: Mars, or what had been Mars’s orbital shipyards a matter of hours ago, fire and wreckage where there should have been the clean lines of Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards. Below on Mars, fires raged across the red planet.
Nobody in the room said anything at all for a long moment. James stood there with his own comm alert still glowing, unread, in his hand, and felt the whole shape of the day, the sofa, the wine, the easy argument about cadet squads, fall away into something that suddenly felt very small indeed.
Mars was attacked. Everything was about to change.
Tarsas III, Tarsas system
Stardate: 80675 – Present Day
“James.”
Karyn’s voice pulled him back, warm and present against the quiet hum of the shuttle’s systems powering down around them. “We’ve landed.”
He blinked, and the cockpit’s viewport resolved properly in front of him, green fields rolling away from a low stone ranch house under a wide, pale sky.
“Let’s go recruit my next lot of staff,” he said after a stretch.
