“Vedi, è tranquilla,” the poet insisted, but his friends looked down, resigned and grief-stricken. “Che vuol dire? Quell’andare e venire… Quel guardarmi cosi?” But their eyes bore a harsh truth. She was dead. He knew it, deep down. He just didn’t want to believe it. He collapsed by the bedside and began to cry.

“Coraggio,” his friend begged, but courage could not carry him through the anguish of reality. 

“Mimì! Mimì! Mimì!” he wailed, and his sobs echoed through the chamber as the curtain fell. In the darkness afterwards, there was only silence, the audience lost in the deep emotions of the Bohemian tragedy. But then the lights came up. The audience rose to their feet. Cheers and loud applause came from the stalls, the boxes and the gallery. What a show! The troupe came out and took a bow, and then everyone began to filter for the exits.

A young couple merrily made their way past marble pillars and down grand staircases. On a romantic soirée far from the sterile corridors of San Francisco, they’d abandoned their duty uniforms in favor of something more appropriate for the grandeur of the opera. He wore a jacquard navy suit with black lapels, and she’d chosen a flowly phthalo gray evening gown.

“That was brilliant, wasn’t it?”

“Absolutely breathtaking!”

“La Bohème is such a classi…”

But then they heard it, and their eyes met.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked incredulously. To a security officer such as Lieutenant Lionel West, the sound was unmistakable, even though it was completely out of place here.

They paused and listened carefully. And then they heard it again.

“Oh my god… that sounds like phaser fire!” she agreed as shock washed across her face. As a medical officer, Lieutenant Melia Kahale knew exactly what sounds meant. Casualties. “We’re in the frickin middle of Milan… what’s going on?”

“I don’t know, but let’s check it out,” he replied as he drew his phaser from his jacket.

They’d come to Teatro alla Scala to enjoy the graceful composition of Puccini and the emotional libretto of Illica and Giacosa, but their first duty was to the people. They weren’t sure what exactly was going on, but he knew they needed to respond. Without hesitation, they rushed toward the sound of phaser fire.

“Lieutenant West to Starfleet Security. Come in please.”

Nothing.

“Starfleet Security?”

No response.

“Starfleet Operations? … Starfleet Command? … Starfleet Intelligence? … Starfleet officers of any kind?”

Still no response.

“Fuck, I dunno… Milan Metro Police? Earth Civil Defense? Anyone?” 

But still no response.

He had no way of knowing that the assailants had deployed a sophisticated jammer rendering comms and transporters useless across the old city center. He wouldn’t get a response so long as the jammer was active, and it would significantly delay any police or Starfleet response. 

They were undeterred though. The pair emerged through the triple arches of La Scala’s grand atrium, ready to confront whatever lay ahead. And directly across the Piazza della Scala, they saw four individuals dressed in maintenance coveralls exchanging fire with a half dozen men in dark combat fatigues. It looked like they’d all come from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and the gunfight was progressing quickly into the plaza. The problem was dozens of theatergoers stood there in the plaza, mixing and mingling after the performance. Nothing good would come of this.

“Watch out!” Lieutenant Kahale screamed at the innocent bystanders as a phaser blast hit a tree branch and wood went flying. People began screaming loudly and fleeing in every direction.

The chaos was exactly what Commander Lewis and his team needed. Clad in their coveralls, fleeing from the FNN broadcast center, the four operators ran straight into the crowd, using the mass of bodies for cover.

At the risk of harming too many civilians, their pursuers stopped shooting. They cared not for a few casualties, but this snatch and grab was supposed to be discreet. Littering the street with bodies would make things too messy. They shouldered their rifles and hustled after their prey. The two squads dodged and weaved through the crowd, Lewis and his team attempting to create space while their pursuers tried to close the gap.

This was going to be hard to explain to Admiral Reyes, Commander Lewis thought to himself as he sidestepped an elderly couple. He hadn’t exactly told her he was going to break into a civilian news agency, but he’d figured a casual little B&E didn’t really hurt unless you got caught. The problem here was that it had now turned into a full on brawl directly in front of Milan’s premier opera house. There was an ass chewing in his future for sure, if they could find a way out of here first. He still didn’t exactly understand how their break-in had been discovered, nor who their pursuers were – except he was pretty sure they weren’t the FNN’s corporate security.

Right as Commander Lewis and his team crossed the old streetcar tracks adjacent the opera house, a shot rang out in the night. Commander Lewis dove behind a colonnade as the shot hit Chief Petty Officer Shafir in the chest. Her body went limp, and she crumpled onto the cobblestones.

“Fuck!” Lewis screamed. Where the hell had that shot come from? Not behind them. The angle was wrong. It was almost as if it had been taken from overhead… “Sniper!” Lewis warned but too late. Two more shots rang out from high above. One hit Lieutenant Morgan in the shoulder, and the other hit a civilian right in front of Ensign Rel. Both collapsed to the ground.

“Are they?” Ensign Rel asked in a terrified voice as she ducked behind a pillar next to the Lewis. The rifle they’d taken from one of their attackers earlier on had been set to kill.

“No,” Commander Lewis shook his head. From his position, he could see Ayala Shafir’s ribcage still rising and falling in a slow, tempered rhythm. “Just stunned.” Although he wasn’t quite sure why, somewhere between the Federation News Network’s broadcast center and the Teatro alla Scala, the rules of engagement had changed. And thank god for that. Right after all they’d gone through on Nasera, the idea of losing Ayala Shafir or Jace Morgan was not something Jake Lewis or Elyssia Rel were ready to stomach.

Overhead, they heard the whoosh of shuttle engines. They now knew where the shots had come from. Beams of light cut through the fog, and two unmarked shuttles came into view, descending rapidly towards the center of plaza with rifle-toting operators hanging out the rear cargo door. Commander Lewis and Ensign Rel placed careful shots into the square to hold their pursuers across the street, but the numbers were getting worse and worse, and the civilians were making it very hard to exchange fire safely.

“We’ve got to move!” Lewis insisted.

“What about Ayala and Jace?” Rel asked.

“Too much heat, and too many civvies.” Commander Lewis liked a good shootout as much as anyone, but this little op had turned into a shitshow, and there were far too many civilians present. A stray shot was all but guaranteed to kill an innocent bystander if they kept at the gunfight. “We don’t have a choice. Come on!”

As Commander Lewis and Ensign Rel fled into the opera house, Lieutenants West and Kahale approached the pair of shuttles that had just landed in the square. They held their combadges over their heads to identify themselves as Starfleet officers, and West had his phaser drawn. No one moved around Earth airspace without clearance from Sol Station, so they assumed the new arrivals would heed their authority, and they could contain the situation before it got any worse.

But they were wrong.

“Starfleet Security!” shouted Lieutenant West as he aimed his phaser at the men exiting the shuttle. “Stop right where you are! Identify yourselves!”

But the tactical team just poured out of the shuttle, undeterred by the man in a three piece suit holding a phaser. They just trotted past him as if he and his phaser didn’t exist at all.

“I said stop! That’s an order!”

The tactical team didn’t care. No one so much as made eye contact with him or his date as they fanned out to secure the square.

The last person off the shuttle was an immense seven foot tall beast of a man with biceps the size of Lieutenant West’s head. As opposed to the others, he walked straight towards Lieutenant West. His rifle was trained on the Starfleet officer, and his eyes narrowed on him.

“Explain yourself!” Lieutenant West demanded. “Or I will shoot!”

“That’s cute,” the hulk of a man chuckled as he stared at the pitiful creature and its puny sidearm. He thought it was funny how Starfleet officers always stated their intentions first. It made them predictable and slow to the draw. Without warning, he simply squeezed the trigger.

Lieutenant West crumpled to the ground, dead.

The shooter turned his barrel upon the woman in the evening gown. She stood there, mouth agape, stunned at what she’d just seen. The shooter didn’t wait for whatever pathetic words the young woman might eventually muster. Instead, he just squeezed the trigger again.

Lieutenant Kahale joined her partner in the afterlife.

“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” another man said as he drew up next to the shooter. “We were supposed to be discreet. The rules of engagement were Reyes’ people only. It’s going to be a lot harder to explain this.” Shrapnel, burn scars, dead officers, an unconscious civilian, and dozens of witnesses. It was anything but discreet.

“Eh, you worry too much. It’ll all be over in a few days anyways.”

“Grab the fleeters,” the second man ordered of his men. “And let’s get moving on the double!” It would be best if they were long gone by the time the authorities arrived.

With military precision, the tactical team lifted the unconscious bodies of Chief Shafir and Lieutenant Morgan onto the shuttle, along with the lifeless corpses of Lieutenants West and Kahale. The rear doors weren’t even shut before the shuttles began to lift away.

As the pair of unmarked shuttles raced north towards the Lepontine Alps, they picked up four police interceptors and a runabout on approach. “We got company,” reported the pilot in one of the shuttles. “Local law enforcement. They’re hailing.”

“Unknown shuttles bearing three three zero mark three four zero,” came the voice of a surly, no-nonsense metropolitan police officer. “You are ordered to change heading at once for zero four zero and proceed directly to the Milan municipal spaceport!”

“What seems to be the issue?” the pilot asked coyly. He did not alter course.

“Your point of origin is an active crime scene,” explained the officer. “You are wanted by the Milan metro police force for questioning. Adjust heading immediately or we will be forced to engage you.” Sensors indicated the interceptors were weapons hot, and the police officer calling the shots from the runabout was prepared to give the order. He had no idea who these people were, but he knew what had just happened in the city center, and he intended to bring them in.

“That will not be necessary,” the pilot replied calmly. “Transmitting credentials now. Once you validate, you will let us continue on our way under Code of Federation Regulations 11 Section 214.”

The police officer ran the credentials. They came back clean. He revalidated them. They came back clean again. Then he checked the transponder ident. Clean as well. And as much as he didn’t want to believe it, it all checked out, and he knew the regs. “Confirmed, Starfleet Intelligence. You’re all clear. Free to proceed.”

And so off the pair of unmarked shuttles went, disappearing into the shadows of the high alpine peaks.