“Well, those are all the questions I have for you,” said Anand. “Bohkat, what about you?”

The beads in his hair rattled as Bohkat shook his head, and some reflected the bright overhead lighting in their corner of the otherwise dimly lit crew lounge.

Anand nodded in acknowledgement and settled back into his overstuffed chair to face Zamora, who was squatting on a low drink table despite the presence of a similarly plush chair just behind her.

“Do you have any questions for us?” asked Anand.

“I do,” said Zamora, crossing her arms.  “What do the two of you remember about the Dominion War?”

The low chatter and the tinny big band music coming from the other side of the lounge made the question seem out-of-place, like a line from a period film rather than a perfectly relevant inquiry.

Anand glanced at Bohkat, who seemed to be waiting for him to answer first, then leaned forward so that he wouldn’t have to speak too loudly.

“Well, I was only 14 when it started, living on Earth at the time, so not much. My sister was at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco when the Breen attacked, but she made it through uninjured.”

After a long pause, Bohkat spoke up as well.

“I was 14 also, and I was relatively fortunate. My homeworld remained safe throughout the course of the war. I lost some cousins when their freighter was destroyed near Bajor, but… we were not close.”

Zamora nodded slowly as if absorbing their statements. “I’m glad you didn’t experience worse, especially at that age, but a part of me does wish that at least one of you had some instinctive idea of what this fleet is up against. Sometimes fear can be a good thing.”

She punctuated her statement by pushing herself off her seat with a grunt and turning her back on Anand and Bohkat, plodding over to the group on the other side of the lounge.

Zamora nodded at Qsshrr as they crossed paths halfway across the lounge, Qsshrr skittering past her for the next Q&A.

“So what about you, Odalys?” Ixabi asked as Zamora reached their low table and plopped down into the next chair over.

“What about me?”

“What do you remember about the Dominion War?”

“Mmm, I’m getting all talked out. My throat’s too dry.”

“Maybe this Cuba libre will help?” asked Szarka, offering a tumbler glass to Zamora as she sat down next to her.

“Aah, good woman,” sighed Zamora, accepting the drink with one hand and patting Szarka’s arm with the other.

Ang leaned in towards Zamora. “Lieutenant, aren’t you on call right now?”

“That’s why I told the replicator to make it with synthehol,” said Szarka, pointing a finger gun at him with a wink.

“Ugh. I’ll need a few moments to pretend I can feel the effects then,” said Zamora, taking a long sip of her drink before continuing.

“You kids go first, tit for tat.”

Szarka rolled her eyes and collapsed back into her seat.

“Pff, nothing to tell. My colony wouldn’t have known there was a war going on if the Dominion had lobbed antimatter warheads into our town square.”

“These beads?”

Bohkat grasped one of the long beaded braids framing his face and held it up.

“The material varies,” he said. “Some are wood, several are glass. This one is a–”

He paused and smiled.

“It is a silicate mineral native to Rigel V.”

Slowly and delicately, he pulled the last bead off the end of the braid and offered it to Qsshrr.

“Oh!” Qsshrr twitched in surprise. “I did not mean to imply–”

“I have dozens of these,” said Bohkat, still offering the bead. “I’d take it as a great compliment if you’d accept at least one.”

Qsshrr extended one of her cilia, thin enough to thread through the center of the bead, and curled it back in towards her body.

“Thank you,” she said. “I look forward to analyzing its molecular structure.”

“What about you, Doc?” asked Szarka as she lifted her head from where it had been lolling along the back of her seat to look at Ang.

Ang flinched, then reached forward to pull his cup of tea off the table and cradle it in his hands.

“Well,” he said,  “I’ve treated dozens of patients with PTSD from their service in the Dominion War. It was a big focus from day one at Starfleet Medical, especially during the psychiatry rotation.”

Zamora scoffed. “I don’t want to know what your interviewees remember, I want to know what you remember.”

“Oh.”

Ang took a long pull from his tea and stared into his cup, but the group remained quiet and attentive.

“Well, I was living on Starbase 11 with my family during the war, when– uh.”

There was a low scraping sound as Qsshrr crept back to her place in front of the table. The second she finished settling into place, Ang shot out of his seat.

“You know,” he said, “I think I’m gonna go get this interview over with right now. I’ll be back.”

The group watched him depart and sat in silence for another moment.

“They do say,” drawled Szarka, “That people become shrinks so they can diagnose themselves.”

“Yeah, you mentioned it just briefly on the shuttle,” said Anand, “And I was curious.”

“I started practicing guitar a few months ago,” said Ang. “The same time my partner Rurj’ started learning to play the leshpal, which is a Klingon instrument almost exactly like a guitar. He’s very proud of the fact that Klingons ritually destroy their guitars at the end of any really intense performance, and I don’t know how to break it to him that humans have been doing the same thing for centuries.”

“I don’t remember the war at all,” said Ixabi, absently clinking the ice cubes around in her glass. She was staring out the window where the stars went streaking past them.

“I was just a toddler at the time. I learned never, ever to bring it up around the adults because they’d get such intense, frightening flashes of memory before immediately shutting it down, and then I’d either be shooed away or even reprimanded for mentioning it. They taught us about it in school, of course, but they couldn’t convey how awful it must have been the way those memories did.”

Ang returned and slipped quietly back into his seat. Szarka stood up and caught Ixabi’s eyes, offering her a soft smile before making her way across the lounge.

“So that’s what speed dating is,” said Anand, as Szarka listened, bent forward with her chin in her hand.

“It certainly works for some people,” he continued. “That’s actually how I met my ex-wife, so I’m not really sure whether or not that’s a point in its favor.”

“I encountered the Borg once, traveling on a small ship with other Horta.”

Qsshrr shuddered, and even Zamora leaned in closer to hear her story.

“The ship was old and obsolete, and when they found they could not assimilate our species they simply left us, ship and all. But the Dominion… The Dominion attacked one of my people’s mining colonies during the war. It was not enough for them to destroy our processing machinery and facilities. When they saw that the miners had survived the bombardment, they turned all their strength and firepower on each individual Horta. Then, when they saw how well the Horta defended themselves, how quickly they could burn even a Jem’Hadar soldier to carbon, the Dominion soldiers became even more enthusiastic in their massacre. They had far greater numbers than the Horta, and they were unrelenting.”

Qsshrr paused long enough to pull a large ice cube from a glass on the table and pull it back into her mass of cilia with a crunching sound.

“Just three of my people survived in the end, only because it is not an easy thing for humanoids to tell when a Horta still has life in it.”

Ixabi was silent as she stood up and left the group, and when Szarka returned she took a long glance around the table before settling in without bothering to make a quip or comment.

“The moment I met Zamora I knew I wanted to be her friend.”

Ixabi emphasized every other word with a wave of her hands. Her wide smile was reflected on Anand’s and even Bohkat’s faces.

“An older woman who’s seen half the galaxy, a human born and raised on Tellar Prime: how fascinating is that!? Sure, she puts up a prickly, grouchy front, but–”

She paused and tapped at her temple.

“I can sense all the good stuff bubbling up underneath.”

Zamora set her empty glass on the table with a loud clink and leaned forward, waiting until she had all eyes on her to begin.

“During the war, I was one of a team of engineers sent to analyze and dismantle a Dominion subspace communication array, which was of course located on some barren speck of dirt in the middle of nowhere. When we first set down on the planetoid, we were naive enough to think that maybe its location would be the worst deterrent we’d encounter.

“I wasn’t the first, second, or even the third to enter the facility, so I avoided the electrified grids that burnt Smith’s arms up to the elbows, and the cloaked explosives that left almost nothing of Wang or Devi to send back to their families. I actually made it to the central core in one piece. We couldn’t download the data on-site – there was far too much of it – so we had to take the core apart and retrieve as many isolinear rods as we could.

“As we were working, we could hear the phaser fire outside, little by little growing closer but not letting up. It never let up. The Jem’Hadar, for all they looked it, weren’t dumb brutes. They could be cunning and clever at times, but when they had the advantage in numbers they didn’t need to be. They could just keep coming, wave after wave, hour after hour.”

“So what are your thoughts?” Anand whispered once Ixabi was out of earshot.

Bohkat’s nostrils flared as he took a deep breath and considered his words.

“After these interviews and a brief review of personnel files, I believe this crew is more than adequately staffed to keep this ship functioning under normal mission parameters.”

Anand waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t he prodded with, “And?”

“And I am the only one on board with extensive tactical knowledge or training. Two other officers in engineering display superior knowledge of intra-ship shielding function and utilization. None have more than average familiarity with ship or hand-held weaponry.”

“Right.” Anand nodded. “Concerning, but not surprising.”

“Indeed,” said Bohkat. “My other concern is–”

“Eventually our tactical crew must have lost too many to keep holding off the Jem’Hadar, because the explosion in the hallway was set off by one of our own. I’m sure of it,” said Zamora.

“It took out half the structure, collapsed the walls and roof back the way we came. The only way in was cut off, and we were trapped, but it gave us the time we needed to finish the job. And we damn well finished it. All that was left was to wait for rescue.

“In the hours after, we started to hear cracking noises, like rock hitting rock over and over again. Instead of simply waiting for one of their own ships to arrive and teleport them in or teleport us out, the Jem’Hadar were digging out the mountain of rubble piece by piece. Poor Wang had the only tricorder capable of reading the depth of the rubble, so we had no idea how long it might take them to get through, but it went on for days. All we could do was sit and listen to them tear at the wreckage bit by bit.

“I think we’d been in there three days when suddenly the cracking and the voices began to sound much louder and clearer. We began looking for the hundredth time for some place, any place, to hide, until we felt our skin begin to flicker and we were teleported away. I would have welcomed even a Breen ship at that point, but when I realized it was a Starfleet transporter pad under my feet I collapsed, and I… I don’t remember much for a while after that.”

“Zamora,” whispered Anand, and Bohkat nodded. “She’s nominally our chief engineer, but she’s also our most experienced pilot by a long shot.”

“The ship does spend an excessive amount of time on autopilot,” said Bohkat.

“I guess we’ll have to wait until we get our next orders to decide where to put her, but–” Anand sighed and rubbed at his forehead with both hands. “I don’t want to stretch her too thin. No matter where we station her, it feels like we’re putting all our eggs in one basket.”

“Alright,” said Zamora, loudly enough to be heard across the lounge. She stood up and straightened her uniform.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my on-call shift in my quarters.”

She made her way to the exit and looked pointedly at Anand and Bohkat as she passed. “I need to make sure I contact my loved ones tonight.”