The shuttle came in through the aft bay doors on thrusters alone, which told McCallister a lot before anyone said a word.

“They’ve still got the main tractor array down,” Reyas said from the pilot’s seat, not quite to him. “That’s four days past the estimate.”

“It might be five.”

“It is five. I counted.” She set the Kefalonia down on her skids with the particular delicacy of a woman who had flown this bay a thousand times and intended to keep her record intact, and killed the engines. “I am going to be extremely reasonable about this for approximately ninety seconds.”

“And then?”

“And then I’m going to go and find my chief engineer.”

The bay was busier than it should have been. Half the deck was covered in crated components that had clearly sat long enough to develop their own informal filing system, and someone had chalked a running tally on the side of the nearest crate, which McCallister chose not to examine too closely.

Two figures were waiting at the foot of the ramp.

Ensign Florrick held a PADD in each hand and looked like a man who had been holding a position for some minutes and intended to keep holding it. Beside him, half a pace back and entirely at ease, stood Chief Petty Officer Corin, who had been aboard four days and already carried the bearing of someone who had been aboard eleven years.

“Admiral. Captain.” Florrick came to attention. “Welcome back, sir, ma’am.”

“Mister Florrick.” McCallister came down the ramp. “Chief.”

“Admiral.” Corin looked past him at the shuttle. “You came in via shuttle.”

“We did.”

“That’s eleven minutes you didn’t need to spend.” She said it as a simple matter of record.

“The transporters are offline. Primary, secondary and the cargo units. They have been offline since Tuesday, and the yard’s estimate for their return has now been revised twice, on both occasions upwards.” McCallister grumbled.

Reyas, coming down the ramp behind him, stopped walking. “Twice.”
“Twice, Captain. The second revision arrived at eleven hundred this morning, and I have not yet been able to establish who authorised it.” Corin’s expression did not change at all. “I have asked three people. Each of them told me it was somebody else, and the third one told me it was the first one, which I thought showed a certain economy.”

Reyas just rolled her eyes. “What else is down?”

“Environmental Controls on decks nineteen through twenty-two, which is scheduled and expected. Long-range sensors, which is scheduled and has overrun. The holodecks, which nobody has given me a reason for.” Corin paused. “And the replicators in the Auditorium produce tea at approximately the temperature of a pleasant afternoon, which is not a systems fault but has been raised with me four times in two days, and I mention it because at this point I consider it a morale matter.”

“Who raised it four times?” McCallister asked.

“I’d rather not say, sir.”

“Was it Commander Tomaz?”

“It was not Commander Tomaz.”

“Was it Commander Flemen?”

“I would rather not say, sir,” Corin repeated, with precisely the same inflexion, and Florrick’s mouth did something that he suppressed with considerable skill.

Reyas had already turned toward the bay doors, and her shoulders had a particular set that McCallister had learned to recognise around their third year of marriage.

“Ninety seconds is up,” she said. “Mister Florrick, where is Commander Tierra?”

“Main engineering, ma’am. She has been there since oh-five-hundred, and I understand she has not been persuaded to leave it.”

“Good. She can explain the tractor array to me in person.” She paused long enough to put a hand briefly on McCallister’s arm. “I’ll see you tonight. Good luck in assembling your new troops!”

“Thanks!”

She left at a pace that suggested the ninety seconds of reasonableness had expired somewhat early, and McCallister watched her go with the quiet satisfaction of a man extremely glad not to be the chief engineer.

“Right.” He turned back. “Where is everybody?”

“Waiting for you in your office, sir,” said Corin.

“All of them?”

“All of them. They have been there twenty minutes, which is twelve minutes longer than I anticipated, because Fleet Captain Cambil arrived early and then Commander Rosle arrived earlier. It has become rather sociable in there. I wouldn’t let that fool you.”

The office had been the one thing McCallister had argued for.

Starfleet had given him a flotilla, a staff, and fourteen ships, and had initially proposed a converted conference suite with a view of a bulkhead. Keating had read the proposal on her second day, said four words about it that McCallister had not repeated to anybody, and the matter had been resolved inside a week.

Instead, he had a long, broad room high on the Odyssey’s dorsal section, its outboard end swept into a wide curve that followed the hull line, with a dark composite floor that caught the light and gave the whole space a kind of depth. The far wall was glass: a great sweep of bay windows curving behind the desk, so that whoever sat there did so against the view, and at this particular moment the view was the whole working sprawl of Avalon Fleet Yards, gantries and dock frames stretching away in every direction, strung with work lights and alive with the slow crawl of tenders against the dark.

His desk sat beneath them; it was deliberately not large. In front of it, arranged in a loose horseshoe across a deep midnight-blue carpet, sat two long couches facing one another and a scattering of armchairs, with a low glass table between them. Recessed lighting ran in a continuous seam where the bulkheads met the ceiling, and the LCARS panels set into the side walls were deliberately dimmed to a low amber so they wouldn’t compete with the windows.

Four doors lined the room’s edge. The main one, behind him, opened onto the outer office where Corin and Florrick worked; it was the only route from the rest of the ship for anyone without an appointment, a fact Corin had established on day one and already enforced twice, as she’d shared, when they entered. A second door, on the left, led to his private head. A third, on the right, opened directly into Keating’s office and, at her request, had been fitted with an override that worked in one direction only. And a fourth, set into the long inboard wall, gave onto the corridor that ran the length of the deck and served the staff offices, the records suite and the large conference room at the far end, where tomorrow he would sit fourteen captains and their first officers around one table for the first time.

Right now the room contained nine people and a considerable amount of noise.

It stopped the instant the doors opened.

Cambil stood by the windows with a cup of something in her hand and turned first. Keating was mid-sentence, leaning against the arm of the nearby couch with her arms folded, and she didn’t finish. Mercer, seated, looked up with the mild, entirely unbothered expression of a woman who had seen many people stop talking when a door opened. Flemen straightened up off the back of the other couch. Grant switched off the PADD she had been showing to Wrenth. Rosle, who had been laughing at something, stopped laughing. Gray, standing slightly apart near the inboard wall, inclined his head. Corbin, in the far armchair, simply raised his glass of water a fraction.

“Oh, don’t do that,” McCallister said. “Sit down, all of you. Whoever hasn’t got a seat, find a wall and lean on it; I’m not standing on ceremony in my own office.”

They sat. Gray and Wrenth took the wall.

McCallister did not go to the desk. Instead, he took the open armchair at the head of the horseshoe, putting him level with the rest of them, and Keating noticed.

“Right,” he said. “First of all. Welcome. Most of you I know, one or two of you I’ve only just met, and three of you I had to go a considerable distance to collect.” He let that land. “This is the first time this staff has been in the same room. It won’t be the last, and I’d rather we got the awkward part over with now, because tomorrow it gets significantly busier.”

“Tomorrow, sir?” said Flemen.

“Tomorrow at ten hundred, the conference room at the end of this corridor. Every captain in this flotilla and every first officer, with the whole of this staff sitting in. We begin planning our preparations for departure.” He looked round them. “Which means that between now and then, I want each of you thinking about what you need from the people in that room and what they are going to need from you, because I’d rather not spend the morning watching fourteen commanding officers discover each other’s existence in real time.”

“Will Starfleet Command have issued orders by then, sir?” Flemen asked. “Only it would help us all considerably to know whether we’re preparing for a survey posture or something else.”

“No.”

Flemen waited, and when nothing further arrived, nodded slowly. “No, sir.”

“No orders. Nothing beyond what we’re expecting with the standing assignment to the Delta Quadrant, and I have asked twice.” McCallister set his hands on the chair’s arms. “Which is, as it happens, an opportunity, and I’d like us to use it. When those orders come, they will come with a date attached, and from that point on everything we do will serve a schedule somebody else set. We have an unknown number of weeks before that happens. I’d like to spend them on the thing that is hardest to build and easiest to neglect, which is whether this flotilla can actually operate as one.”

“Unit cohesion,” said Cambil.

“Unit cohesion. Fourteen hulls, six of which have never served together in any configuration, and a command staff that until four days ago did not exist.” He opened a hand to the room. “So. Ideas. Anybody.”

There was the usual two seconds of nobody wanting to go first.

Then Rosle said, “Joint flight operations. Not exercises. Actual operations, in-system, with mixed flights.” She had a low voice and used very little of it. “I can put a starfighter wing up from the Odyssey and run approach and recovery cycles against the Leto and the Themis. If their flight control teams have never recovered somebody else’s fighters, I would strongly prefer they discover the problems here, where the worst outcome is an embarrassed lieutenant, rather than in the Delta Quadrant, where it isn’t.”

“Good. Draft it.”

“Already drafted, sir. I’d want four days.”

“You’ll have them.”

Grant leaned forward. “I’d add something to that. Not flight ops, staff work.” She held a PADD but wasn’t looking at it. “Every one of those fourteen ships has its own reporting culture. The Themis files strategic summaries one way because Fleet Captain Cambil taught them to, the Atlas files them another way, and I will bet anybody in this room that the Hypatia has a third system that is more rigorous than either and comprehensible to about nine people.” She gave a faint smile. “If we go out there with fourteen different formats, the first time something actually matters we will lose two hours to translation. I’d like to run a combined staff exercise. No ships, no flying. Just a scenario, and all fourteen operations teams working it at once, and me watching where the information gets stuck.”

“That sounds immensely tedious,” said Flemen.

“It will be immensely tedious, Craigen. That’s why it has to happen now and not later.”

“I’m not objecting. I’m appalled, and I entirely support it.”

Wrenth spoke from the wall, without moving off it. “The scenario should be a Delta Quadrant scenario.”

Grant turned. “Agreed.”

“A specific one.” Wrenth’s delivery was flat and unhurried, and he didn’t seem to notice the room turning toward him. “Not a generic exercise. I would recommend running it against the Kazon sect structure as it stood at our last contact, because it is the hardest of the known actors to report cleanly. The sects fragment, reform and claim each other’s designations, and any strategic picture assembled from fourteen separate sources will contradict itself within an hour. If the staff can survive that, they can survive most things.”

“That’s a very good suggestion,” said Grant.

“Yes,” said Wrenth.

Corbin, from the far armchair, said mildly, “Would somebody mind telling me what a Kazon sect structure looks like?”

The room’s temperature changed by perhaps half a degree.

“You’ve not encountered them, sir?” Rosle questioned. Her tone was not unkind. It was not entirely kind either.

“No. Though I’d be careful with that assumption as a general rule, Commander, because it isn’t quite true of me and it won’t be true of everybody out there.” Corbin’s tone stayed perfectly even. “I commanded the Shackleton in the Gradin Belt for almost a year. So I have been in that quadrant, and what I took away from it was chiefly an appreciation of how little eleven months buys you.”

Rosle inclined her head slightly, which, for her, was a considerable concession.

“The Gradin Belt isn’t the Nacene Reach,” said Cambil.

“It is not, and the Kazon were never my problem. That’s precisely why I’m asking.” Corbin spread his hands. “I’ve read every report the Fourth Fleet has published on the Nacene Reach. I’ve read them twice. And I could not tell you how the Kazon actually behave when they turn up, because reports describe outcomes and they don’t describe the four seconds before somebody decides what to do.”

“They turn up in strength, and they posture,” said Cambil. “They’re testing whether you’re worth the cost. If you look expensive, they leave.”

“And if you look expensive and they don’t leave?”

“Then somebody has misread it, and that happens.” Cambil’s voice was level. “It happened to us.”

“Which report is that in?”

A pause hit the room.

“It isn’t,” said Cambil.

“No,” said Corbin. “That’s what I’m asking for.”

McCallister let the silence hold for a moment before he spoke. “Go on, Romen. What are you thinking?”

“I’d like the veterans to teach.” Corbin set his glass down on the low table. “Not brief. Teach. Seven people in this room have operated in the Reach, and many more are spread across those fourteen crews, and every one of them carries knowledge that never made it into a document because the documents weren’t designed to hold it. And in about six weeks the rest of us are going to be making decisions in a place where the nearest help is seventy thousand light years away.” He shrugged slightly. “I had eleven months out there, and it was enough to teach me that I’d rather be taught badly now than well in hindsight.”

“That’s not a small undertaking,” said Flemen.

“No. It’s six weeks of somebody’s evenings.” Corbin looked round. “I’m volunteering mine.”

Rosle said, after a moment, “I’d teach that.”

“So would I,” said Grant.

Gray spoke for the first time, quietly enough that the room had to attend to hear him. “There is a difficulty with it.”

Everybody looked at him. The Borg implant above his left eye caught the amber light from the wall panels.

“Veterans are not neutral instructors,” Gray said. “We teach what happened to us. I have been out there, and what I carry from it is not a complete picture; it is my picture, and it is weighted towards the parts that frightened me.” He paused briefly to collect his thoughts before continuing. “If seven of us each teach our own version, Fleet Captain Corbin will end up with seven confident accounts that do not agree, and he will have no means of telling which is representative and which is simply the loudest.”

“That,” said Mercer, “is the most useful thing anybody has said in this room.”

It was the first time she had spoken. Every head turned towards her.

“Forgive me, I’ve been listening.” Mercer was sitting with her hands folded, entirely relaxed.
“It’s rather what I’m for. May I?”

“Please,” said McCallister.

“There are two groups in this room, and everybody knows it, and the polite thing would be to pretend otherwise for another fortnight until it causes a problem.” She looked round the horseshoe without hurry. “Seven of you have operated in the Nacene Reach. The rest of us haven’t, and some of us haven’t worn a uniform in eleven years, so I’m rather at the bottom of that particular table. And what I’ve just watched is Fleet Captain Corbin ask a perfectly reasonable question and three people answer him in a way that very slightly suggested he ought to have known.”

Rosle said, “That wasn’t my intention.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t. It very rarely is.” Mercer’s tone did not sharpen at all. “But it will be the texture of this staff for the next six months if nobody names it, and it is considerably easier to name it now, in a room with nine people in it, than in four months with a Kazon fleet on the sensors and somebody hesitating to ask a question because they’re frightened of looking new.”

Cambil said, slowly, “You’re not wrong.”

“No. And Commander Gray isn’t either, which is the part I’d actually build on.” Mercer turned slightly towards him. “If you teach singly, you’ll teach your own fear. If you teach in pairs, with somebody who was there and remembers it differently, the disagreement becomes the lesson. That’s considerably more useful than a consensus account, because out there they will not be dealing with a consensus. They’ll be dealing with whatever’s in front of them.”

There was a longish silence.

“Pair them,” said Keating.

It was the first thing she had said since McCallister came in, and the room’s attention shifted to her in a way that told him a great deal about how the last four days had gone.

“Commander Rosle with Fleet Captain Cambil, since they’ll contradict each other on tactics and both be right. Commander Gray with Commander Grant. Commander Wrenth with Commander Flemen. In fact, any of the captains and commanders in the flotilla who have served in the Nacene Reach.”

“Ensign Florrick can sit in on every session and keep the record, because he’s the only person in this building who was out there as a cadet and as an ensign and will notice the things the senior officers have stopped seeing.” Keating unfolded her arms. “Chief Corin builds the schedule around the yard’s work, and not the other way round, because the yard will take every hour we give it. And it runs in the large conference room, three to four evenings a week, open to every officer in the flotilla above lieutenant, with transcripts circulated to everyone below.” She looked at McCallister. “That’s my recommendation, sir. I’d want your sign-off on the transcripts; some of what gets said in those rooms shouldn’t be written down.”

McCallister looked at her after getting a nod of approval from Cambil nearby. “Agreed, with the transcripts reviewed before circulation, and that’s Katherine’s call, not mine.” He looked round the horseshoe. “Commander Rosle, four days for your flight cycles. Commander Grant, build the staff exercise, and take Commander Wrenth’s Kazon scenario. Fleet Captain Keating has the teaching programme. Commander Flemen, I want a legal and diplomatic annex to all of it, because at some point in five years somebody out there is going to make a claim on us and I’d like our people to have heard your voice before they hear it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Fleet Captain Corbin.” McCallister allowed himself the smallest smile. “You asked the question that made this meeting useful, so you can sit through every session of the thing you’ve started.”

“That’s remarkably unfair, Admiral.”

“It is.”

“I’ll be there,” said Corbin.

McCallister stood, and the room came up with him. He did not stay in the horseshoe; he moved past the end of the near couch, around behind the desk, and the windows and the whole working length of the yards came up at his back as he went.

“Ten hundred tomorrow, the conference room. Fourteen captains, fourteen first officers, and all of you.” He rested one hand on the back of his chair and looked round them one more time: the ones who had been out there, the ones who hadn’t, and a Trill at the door with a PADD and an expression of complete neutrality. “Thank you. That was a better first hour than I’d any right to expect.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sir.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

It came from all around the horseshoe, overlapping and unhurried, the way it does in a room where nobody has to be told to do it. Cambil was already turning for the corridor door. Grant had her PADD open again before she was fully upright. Rosle said hers quietly and meant it. Gray’s was little more than a nod and the word itself. Wrenth said, “Thank you, Admiral,” with the exact intonation of a man filing something away, and Flemen said, “Thank you, sir,” then, under his breath to Grant, something about tedium that made her laugh as she passed.

They filed past Corin, who stepped aside for each of them in turn and said nothing until the last one had gone.

Then she said, “Sir.”

“Chief.”

“It was Commander Flemen. About the tea.”

“I knew it was Craigen.”

“Yes, sir,” said Corin. “I thought you probably did.”

“What’s next then?” McCallister asked, sitting down behind his new desk.