‘I know this is going to sound hard to believe, but we got lucky.’ Airex drummed his fingers on the PADD as he sat in his chair in the captain’s ready room and paused because he knew there’d be protest.

Kharth obliged, sitting forward with a scowl. ‘We’re not even sure of our casualty numbers. This was worse than Izar. Lucky?’

‘Because of the party.’ He shrugged. ‘A large proportion of the crew were somewhere without weapons. That’s why I survived, why the captain survived; Lindgren, Winters, others.’

‘T’Kalla didn’t.’ Kharth’s jaw tightened. ‘Sheer numbers were enough.’

‘It also meant,’ Airex pressed on coolly, ‘Borg numbers in other key locations aboard were much lower. Like Engineering. Which is why Commander T’Varel was able to seal herself in her office.’

‘Adupon’s dead,’ snapped Kharth. ‘If we hadn’t had the party, most people on the bridge would have been unaffected, and we could have contained things from up here.’ But she paused and glanced across the desk. ‘Not saying you were wrong to have the party, Valance. Nobody saw this coming.’

‘I know.’ Valance looked subdued, thoughtful. Airex knew she was on no small quantity of painkillers and that Doctor Winters had protested her going back on duty. But Endeavour’s chain of command was shaky at best, and the ship needed a firm hand. ‘But Commander Airex is correct. We were lucky. I’m lucky to be alive. So’s Thawn. Which is nothing to do with the distribution of the crew and all to do with… luck.’

‘Other ships,’ Airex said quietly, ‘have reported much heavier losses. The death toll in Sol is, frankly, staggering. This has been…’ His breath caught. ‘This has been catastrophic for a generation of command and flag-level staff. It will take Starfleet decades to recover from this loss of seasoned officers. We should expect to see younger and younger officers in more senior billeting for a while.’

‘The Jupiter signal didn’t hit everywhere,’ Kharth said brusquely. ‘Gateway looks like it was shielded by the Synnef Nebula, for instance. Likewise, Bravo and Paulson.’

But Valance sat in silence for a moment until she said, with a heavy sigh, ‘I’m glad to hear that. Gateway can provide the crew with more support when we get there. In the meantime, we have to continue helping our people as best we can. We hold off on funeral services until we get to Gateway; I don’t want people who feel they’re complicit also feeling like they have to attend.’

Kharth worked her jaw. ‘We’re sure this isn’t going to happen again?’

Airex said, ‘Reports from Sol give a complete picture of how and why this happened. Changeling infiltrators compromised our transporter systems to alter us on a genetic level so bio-nanites would be activated upon the transmission of a Borg signal. The signal has been stopped. The Borg ship hidden in Jupiter has been destroyed. Starfleet Medical is working on a way to reverse the alterations.’

‘Which means,’ said Kharth in a clipped voice, ‘we have a Changeling infiltrator aboard.’

‘Maybe,’ said Airex. ‘They may have moved on.’

‘That part does explain some things,’ Valance sighed. ‘Like Ramius Vornar. He could have been replaced for months. Kharth, I want you to keep a tighter handle on the comings and goings of any crewmembers, including once they disembark on Gateway once we’re back. If anyone suddenly goes missing…’

‘It might be a Changeling going to ground.’ Kharth didn’t look happy, but she nodded. Then she said, ‘You should rest.’

‘I’m not -’

‘The Borg almost caved your skull in and blew your arm off. Rhade has the conn. Airex and I are alright enough. I’m surprised Winters let you out.’

‘Doctor Winters is too green to know how to stand his ground against her yet,’ Airex drawled. He’d been there when Valance had left Sickbay. The exhausted young doctor had held firm in the medical aftermath, but denying his captain was a little beyond him. ‘You shouldn’t be on active duty yet, though.’

Valance’s gaze flickered between them. ‘I dislike the two of you teaming up.’

‘Don’t get used to it.’ Kharth stood with a pointed expression. Hands raised in surrender, the captain groaned to her feet and headed for the secondary ready room door leading to the corridor and turbolift, bypassing the bridge.

Once she was gone, Airex turned to Kharth. His chest felt a little lighter despite what had happened; there had been a promise to the air in the discussion, a sense of how the three of them would fit together in the coming months, perhaps years. He gave Kharth a tight smile. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that you did excellent work in a crisis…’

‘Tell that to Ensign Yates,’ came Kharth’s quick, clipped response. Her expression had folded into a more guarded gaze the moment Valance had left. ‘And don’t – don’t act like we’re friendly colleagues, Dav.’

He hesitated. ‘I thought we had been friendly colleagues these past few months.’ She’d come to him to politically manoeuvre against Jericho, had inducted him into Rourke’s resistance. But the unspoken howled between them, and he sighed. ‘I haven’t been avoiding talking. I’ve wanted to leave things on your terms. Not push.

‘I’m not saying you’ve behaved badly.’ She set her hands on her hips and stared at the deck for a moment. ‘I’m saying that you’ve not pushed, and now it’s time for me to set my terms.’

The dread that had churned in him ever since he’d woken up as Davir Airex all those years ago rose anew. ‘Alright.’ It felt like a dumb, simple word, but he had to show he was here. Part of this.

The clumsiness of it was not missed on her as she gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Stupid, isn’t it? You’ve been here for months, and then it took this past week for me to figure out where my head’s at.’

‘It’s not unusual for near-death incidents to crystallise -’

‘I mean Teros.’ Now their eyes met, and the churning intensified in him. ‘Not because of my father, Dav. Because of last time we were here.’

‘I…’ The instinct to explain, excuse, lie had been in him so long he had to work hard to swallow it. ‘Go on.’

But even in his calmness, her eyes flashed. ‘I don’t – it says something that I still want to beat your ass over it. You lied to me, you manipulated me, you used the fate of the people of Teros as a bargaining chip to try to hide your secrets.’

‘You -’ Frustration surged in him, but he bit it back, swallowed. ‘I did.’

Her head tilted. ‘Go on. You were going to say something. Go on.’

Airex grimaced. ‘You tried to abandon the people of Teros to Vortiss in exchange for information about your father’s murder. I know I tried to cover it up, but…’

‘I didn’t expect…’ Rather than anger her, that took the wind out of Kharth’s sails. She looked away, expression suddenly very, very tired. ‘I never expected Starfleet to try to help Teros anyway,’ she admitted after a long pause. ‘I didn’t think I was giving anything away. And then you made it happen.’

‘I made it happen,’ he confirmed. ‘So I could keep lying to you.’

‘I’m not going to pretend we didn’t both mess things up. This isn’t about blame – we’ve been over that.’ When she looked back at him, the anger and resentment in her eyes had all faded for something altogether more scary. Exhaustion. ‘For the last few months we’ve been… things have been almost normal. We’ve talked. Spent time together. It’s been nice, even. I liked it. But being back threw some things into focus. Things I… hadn’t been able to wrap my head around.’

His own frustration had turned to frozen apprehension. ‘Like?’

The corners of Kharth’s eyes creased. ‘I can’t trust you any more. You just – you hurt me too badly, Dav. Over and over and over. We can be colleagues – I can trust you as an officer on this ship, I can trust you to do your job. But I can’t trust you with me. And there’s nothing to be done, no big deed to fix it.’

‘That’s not how trust works,’ Airex agreed, the ashes in his mouth dampening his voice.

‘I don’t know if it’ll ever get better. But I think I have to… assume that it won’t. Instead of going mad, waiting to get past all the hurt you did me. You, Dav, not Lerin.’

It changed nothing. They had been nothing. But it was the difference between a string on the guitar that had been there for years, untouched and probably in desperate need of tuning, and breaking that string. Airex swallowed and for the first time in a long time, felt how he had for the years he’d lived under the shadow of Lerin’s secrets. Trapped, denied his true self.

But it was his own fault.

‘What do you need of me?’ was all he said, voice as bland as he could make it.

Kharth drew a wavering breath. ‘We’re trusted colleagues, Commander. And nothing more.’

‘Understood.’ He glanced at the door to the bridge. ‘Let me take the bridge for the next shift. I know you need to continue the staff check-in.’ In several places, they did not have staff members, injured or too traumatised, and their systems had taken such a battering that finding who was doing which job was not as simple as a computer check-in. ‘I’ll see us into Gateway.’

She hesitated, then nodded. ‘Alright. Commander. You have the conn.’

‘I have the conn.’

She left by the same door as Valance, which was a gift. Now he could stand in this room, close his eyes, and try to will back the surging guilt. Normally he was good at this; had done so for years. But for years, he’d pushed back guilt for deeds committed by a different man.

Now it was his own misdeeds that tore at him, and pushing through anyway would take an extra moment.

They would be back at Gateway in some thirteen hours, and she didn’t know how long it had been since she’d slept. But Kharth could stick herself in her security office, pore over records, and in here, she didn’t have to think.

Too many dead. Some of them her own. More of them had done the killing; Security was the department with the highest proportion of young officers, which meant those who were supposed to protect the ship had inflicted the most harm. With Song and Kowalski gone to Gateway, she had no deputy, no veteran beside her to shoulder all of this.

And more pressingly, she’d pushed Airex away. That was the truth of it, the real reason she was feeling untethered, alone. Everything was changing, and anything that had ever anchored her was gone. Nevertheless, her back stiffened when the door slid open, and Jack Logan entered the quiet office. ‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ she said.

He looked taken aback. ‘I was checking up on you.’

‘This is the security office -’

‘And that ain’t a restricted location at my grade.’ But he lifted his hands. ‘Sorry. Figured you were working to hold pretty much everything together. Wanted to see if I could help.’

He turned, and she closed her eyes. ‘Wait. I’m sorry.’

When Logan looked back, his smile was small but sincere. ‘I don’t reckon anyone needs to say those words right now. Things happened to us. We didn’t do them.’

‘Tell that to half the crew,’ she sighed.

‘I’m trying.’ He had been. She’d seen him in Sickbay, in the shelter in the cargo bay, walking the halls, and stopping with any young officer who didn’t shy away from his visible implant. I’ve been where you are, and I’m still standing, he said, with words and his mere existence.

Kharth sank against the desk she’d been pacing next to. ‘Thank you. For everything, Logan. This would have gone a lot worse if you hadn’t been there.’

He rolled a shoulder as he padded in. ‘Not sure I did anything anyone else wouldn’t have. We checked sensors, we fought back.’

‘I don’t know the first thing about fighting Borg.’

‘You did pretty well, in that case.’

‘It’s my ship. I have to.’ She put the PADD down and watched him. ‘Do they always make you feel like this?’

Logan grimaced. ‘Violated? Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty much what they do.’

She wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold. ‘They came into our home, and they turned our own against us. We didn’t even see them. They just… flicked a switch and did this to us…’

‘But we’re still here.’ He took a sharp step over, then stopped, like he’d had an idea and swallowed it. ‘Living like us, that’s what defies them. Living as individuals with our own hopes and dreams, with our own feelings and desires. That’s what the Borg would take from us. Don’t let them.’

She had to tilt her chin up to look at him. ‘Where do you go, Logan? Once we dock?’

He gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘I reckon I’ll be recalled. Intel won’t want an xB running loose after all this. It’s gonna suck for a few years, likely – more suspicion, more doubt.’

‘That sounds hard.’ It could not be the same as being a Romulan in Starfleet. But it was not wholly different.

‘It’s me. It’s my life now. It’s the scar the Borg left on me, so…’ Logan shook his head. ‘I just try to not be a big-ass hypocrite.’

‘You mean, let them tear you down so much you don’t live with, what did you say?’ She dropped her voice, meeting his gaze.

His frown was faint, but he did not step back. ‘Hopes and dreams. Yeah.’

‘And more.’ They’d untethered her. Not just the Borg, but the Changelings, the Lost Fleet. Command itself. Dav. Now even a dangling string felt like it could be the chain of an anchor; now, even the most fleeting connection felt like a lifeline. She stepped closer. ‘There was something else.’

She saw his eyes rake over her, saw him swallow, and again, he did not step back. ‘Feelings,’ Logan mumbled. ‘And desires.’

‘That was it,’ whispered Kharth, and kissed him. Feelings and desires were, after all, much easier to chase with a man who’d be gone in a day.