Thawn’s eyebrows quirked as Lindgren slid into the seat opposite her in their booth in the Safe House. ‘What are you wearing?’

‘Hey, it might only be a simulator, but I should still practice in the flight suit,’ Lindgren said defensively, unzipping the garment down to her breastbone. Only the white lettering of ‘NDE’ was visible on the navy t-shirt below. ‘I’ve got to get my hours up.’

‘In a fighter?’

She tilted her nose up. ‘In whatever Valance needs me to fly.’

‘Wow.’ Thawn blinked. ‘I thought you took this position to get more away missions. And even that seemed misguided; now you want to double down on being our bus driver?’

There was the faintest furrow in Lindgren’s brow. ‘I see time away didn’t make you more diplomatic.’

Thawn’s breath caught. ‘I’m sorry. That wasn’t meant to be demeaning.’

‘What was it meant to be, Rosara?’ But Lindgren’s gaze turned more piercing, considerate than Thawn thought she perhaps deserved. ‘I expect it’s a lot, being back.’

‘We were talking about your career shift.’

‘Because you wanted to hear about it, or because you didn’t want to talk about your stuff?’

Thawn planted her hands on the table and looked to the bar. ‘We’re going to need drinks, aren’t we.’

Five minutes later, Lindgren looked less tight with a fruity cocktail in her hand. ‘If you think I’m the bus driver now, you can imagine how tired I was of answering the comms all the time. I was like the ship’s receptionist. Pilots make the jump to command all the time. Comms officers? Not so much.’

‘I get it,’ Thawn allowed. ‘And Kally’s really good, even if she’s… annoyingly perky. I didn’t see it coming. That’s all.’ She paused and looked at her friend. ‘I should have. I know you feel like you’ve been shoved in a box for a while, and you want a change. It shouldn’t be surprising you did it.’

‘No. But I’m glad you see, even if it’s with hindsight.’ Lingren took a long slurp of the drink. ‘So, do we talk about you now?’

Thawn made a face. ‘Definitely not. Tell me about what I missed.’

Lindgren looked like she might fight it a moment. But there was far too much gossip to skip on. Thawn’s issues weren’t going anywhere.

It gave Thawn what she wanted, though; a long evening in the lounge so it was late when she made it back to her quarters. Upon returning to Endeavour, there had been no excuses to not share quarters with her husband. So she’d worked longer hours than even usual, and in the past week or so, it had been very easy for them to simply be ships passing in the night. They would talk back at Gateway, she’d insisted.

And he hadn’t argued. That should have worried her, Thawn knew; the Adamant Rhade she’d come to know the past two years had been bold and forthright, courteous but clear. But then he’d taken body blow after body blow: Dathan’s betrayal, the things he’d done under blood dilithium’s influence and, only weeks ago now at Izar, the death of his brother on the Nighthawk. Now she crawled into bed beside him and knew he was only pretending to sleep. She let him.

It was not uncommon for him to be gone by the time she woke up. But when his movement about the bedroom roused her, she raised her head to see it was a good hour before her alarm.

‘It’s alright,’ came Rhade’s low voice. He stood before the chest of drawers pulling on exercise gear. He would hit the gym, bring his uniform down with him, then shower and change and go directly on his shift without coming back. ‘It’s early. Go back to sleep.’

‘Oh,’ said Thawn as her sluggish awareness caught up, and she realised what had disturbed her. ‘We’ve stopped. We reached Teros?’

‘T’Varel must have shaved an hour off our ETA,’ said Rhade, sounding a little more natural now he realised he wasn’t disturbing her. ‘That’s nice. It’ll give us more time.’

‘For Kharth’s scans?’

He pulled his t-shirt over his head, and she felt a pang of guilt that she’d let her eyes linger on him as he’d done so. She could lounge in his bed and objectify him, but a conversation about their present and future was too much. If he noticed or sensed it, he didn’t show it as he gave a quiet smile. ‘For the celebrations. Happy Frontier Day.’

Then he left with no discussion about whether they might spend any of the festivities together. Thawn knew that Valance was having the ceremony at Earth piped to the whole ship, but particularly hosting celebrations in the Safe House. It must have been a curious shift, she thought when she rose once she knew Rhade was gone. Valance had always been the stand-offish one, the one to let Rourke do the social planning and morale management of the crew. Pathfinder had been different with its smaller, collegial atmosphere, and besides, Dashell had been there. Now Valance had no XO, and the austere, stoic officer was expected to keep people happy as well as functional.

But Thawn preferred functional. She could make it to the ceremony in the evening, but if Kharth was running scans of the Teros system as they lingered just at its outskirts, she could help that process go smoother. Besides, if she talked to Lindgren much more, she would get interrogated. So she headed to the bridge.

Kharth had the command seat, with the junior officers who’d drawn the short straws at the other stations. By her side, in the tertiary chair, sat the ex-Borg Logan. ‘I didn’t expect you up here, Lieutenant,’ said Kharth at her arrival.

‘You know how to do a strategic sweep, Commander,’ Thawn said coolly, relieving Athaka from his post. ‘But if we want to dig a little deeper around Teros, I thought you might benefit from my assistance.’

They did. Even just for power allocation management, the whole process promised to go a lot smoother with Thawn at Ops. She’d had to reprogram her controls to be just the way she liked it when she’d come back aboard. Commander Far had arranged commands for what she must have felt kept the key and common inputs all within easy reach of one hand, which Thawn felt grossly inefficient and made it more cumbersome to dive into more complex systems she needed to access. But now it was how she liked it. Comfortable. Familiar.

Teros spilt out before her as they ran their scans, though every impact of people on the system and its worlds read more like a scar than a shining light of life or progress. The sanctuary district had only grown over the years as the first generation had families and other refugees fled from the many upheavals in Romulan space. The fall of the Star Empire a year ago had only brought more. But infrastructure had not kept up with the populace, even though she could see the unmistakable signs of development that their aborted humanitarian effort had wrought. But the industrial replicator had been turned not to housing and support facilities, but to defence.

‘Look at the way the streets have changed,’ Kharth pointed out at one optical scan showing the network of roads and buildings through Sanctuary District A. ‘The Rebirth used their military skills to clamp down on opposition. This is urban redevelopment by way of theories of urban warfare. Vortiss was just a crime boss when we were last here.’

Logan sucked his teeth. ‘Sorry to say that since then, he’s become a kingpin. With a political ideology behind him.’

‘Which we helped happen,’ Kharth grumbled.

Thawn did not share their complaints. Truth be told, she was finding the process too satisfying to reflect too deeply on the implications. That would come later. She’d thought she’d been happy moving on to Pathfinder. But being on Endeavour’s bridge was like pulling on a comfortable pair of shoes. Until she felt a stone in them when their scans got around to checking warp signature trails.

‘This is a mess,’ Thawn eventually sighed. ‘Different warp engines leave signatures which degrade at different rates.’

Kharth leaned forward. ‘Isn’t that a problem for analysis?’

‘Not if we want to make judicious decisions on where to prioritise our scans. Or we’ll be here, scouring each square million kilometres, for days.’ Thawn stood. ‘Permission to take this to the SOC for more fine-tuning as we go?’

Kharth waved her on, and Athaka took her post as she left. With her mind sufficiently full of the technical challenge ahead of them, she didn’t think through the implications of this next step until she finished the short journey from bridge to the SOC, and walked in to find Nate Beckett.

He looked like he’d been already checking their findings as they came in, stood at the main holo-display, but his face fell at her arrival. ‘Aren’t you running the scans?’

Thawn paused. Then drew a deep breath and advanced. ‘I am. Why are you analysing now? Isn’t the party going on in the lounge?’

‘I thought I’d make myself useful instead,’ he grumbled, not surrendering the console. ‘I’ll be there later.’

‘Go be there now. I have work here to do.’

He did step back, gaze sullen. But he didn’t leave, and though she had her back to him as she advanced on the controls, she could feel his glowering presence even without extending her consciousness towards his. Which she did not, under absolutely any circumstances, want to do.

It took a minute before it became too much, and she set her hands on the controls, glaring through the holographic projection as she snapped, ‘Can I help you, Beckett?’

There was a pause. Then he said, slowly but resentfully, ‘You know, what you’ve asked of me isn’t fair.’

She turned. ‘What?’

He looked angry but thoughtful, like he’d been chewing on something and the flavour had only grown more bitter over time. ‘Demanding what I want. Everyone keeps asking that, but you keep asking it like this is a one-way street.’

‘Are we – now? Are we doing this now?’

‘I guess so.’ Beckett gave a surly shrug. ‘Because I keep being asked what I want, and then people tell me I shouldn’t care about what’s possible, I should figure it out and then worry about how to get it. But it’s one thing to do that with my career path or whatever. It’s not fair for you to ask that of me about us.’

Thawn’s breath caught. ‘There’s an us?’

Now anger flashed, and he took a sharp step forward. ‘What do you want me to do? Ask you to defy your family, leave Rhade; put myself out there and let you decide?’

‘But you’re expecting me to volunteer to abandon my entire life for some dumb flirtation?’

‘I didn’t say it was a dumb flirtation.’

‘You didn’t say what it is!’ That was the question. ‘In a different life, sure. We’d go and – I don’t know what people do, get coffee or something, date and find out if there’s anything actually here, but I can’t do that! So I’m trying to carry on, move on, and you need to either stop moping around and making me feel guilty for that, or you need to tell me what you want.’ She had to stop herself from reaching for him – not in comfort, but if she grabbed him she’d shake him.

Tell me why I should walk away from Adamant. Tell me why I should turn my back on my family. Tell me something.

But he met her eyes, and all he said, simply, was, ‘Why don’t you have to be the one to say what you want?’

Any answer choked in her throat. Then she shook her head and turned away. ‘Now isn’t the time for this,’ she reiterated. ‘So let me work, Beckett, and -’

The screeching hiss over the comms system cut off any bitter final words. Thawn reeled, clutching the side of her head at the piercing noise, but it took her a staggering heartbeat to realise it wasn’t just the sound that had hit her like a body blow.

‘What in the Great Fire…’ The dread churning in her gut was almost overwhelming. It was like a whirlpool, not threatening to take her over but to hollow her out and leave nothing but the raw terror she could feel suddenly swelling across the ship. Terror, and something else. Something she had no capacity to comprehend, let alone words to grasp it. Something that warned her to spin back around to face Beckett.

She hadn’t heard him move in any of the commotion, but she’d sensed him change. She just couldn’t have possibly anticipated the nature of that change.

Inky black eyes stared at her as Nate Beckett took one step forward. Dark veins spread across his face like a spider web, stark against the grey hue of his skin. Though she had never seen the like before herself, she’d seen pictures, recordings. Could feel it, or rather, feel the absence of anything that resembled the shapes and form of him in her mind.

‘We are the Borg.’ Even his voice came layered over with others in a soulless symphony. ‘Eliminate the unassimilated.’

And before she could leap away or even scream, he grabbed her by the throat and slammed her down on the SOC’s control panel. And soon, all she knew was darkness.