Following from Knots to Untangle.

***

“Uh, sir?”

“Yes, ensign?”

“Are there supposed to be life-forms in the hold?”

Allan Alia-Ledgard grinned out from the comfortable clasp of the captain’s chair, taking his pilot by surprise. “Ah! Good. Our friends have arrived. Tell Maria to meet me in the cargo bay, and lay us in a course for the Oumoren system.” The captain of the USS Mogrus stood, straightened his jacket, and headed for the turbolift doors.

As the turbolift hummed, bringing him down a level to the main cargo deck of the small Raven-class starship, he studied his appearance in the mirrored surface of the door panel. Graying hair, a full (yet neat) salt and pepper beard, and a thin face that complemented his lithe, wiry frame. Even after three years in the hot-seat, it still seemed odd to look at himself and see the uniform and pips of command, a role he never would have seen himself, the perennial Enlisted Man, inhabiting. But that one-time future was now changed and his trajectory saw a future in the center chair. How quickly life can change. 

The door opened a moment later, and a short woman, with shoulder-length wavy dark hair that touched the gold shoulders of her uniform, greeted him with a smile.

“You should have said something to poor Shavar, he nearly had a heart-attack when he saw the life-signs.” Her voice was robust but sweet, with just a slight hint of her native Japan. “Thought he’d accidentally sucked up the docking crew.”

“And when you have your own command, Maria, you can treat your new ensign however you want.”

“You were testing him?”

Allan grinned and led the way down the corridor away from the turbolift. “No hails from the station?” he said.

“No. No sign that they’re missing two of their crewmembers at any rate. Are you sure about all this? It’s not terribly regulation, sir, is it?”

“Not terribly,” Allan agreed. “But, for all its standardization, Starfleet resists, maybe even precludes, complete adherence to regulation. If we just followed all orders regardless of our own thoughts and opinions, we’d be just another blasted 21st century military filled with patriotic numskulls who think they’re doing Gods’ work or somesuch.”

In another’s voice, this passionate little tirade might have been alarming, but Allan spoke it so matter-of-factly, and with such good humor, that it hardly sounded more fiery than a pronouncement about the type of fish to be served at dinner. If the devoutly Shinto Maria were bothered in any way, she showed no sign of it outwardly. But Allan knew her well enough to have a feeling for what he could and could not say without causing her upset, and within those boundaries their relationship operated extremely well.

“Plenty of patriotic numskulls in Starfleet, sir,” she said dryly. “A few religious types, too.”

Allan snorted. Religion and spirituality were strange bedfellows alongside the predominantly atheist and agnostic human population of the Federation, but little strands of the Old World religions and philosophies lived on nevertheless. Some were the work of dynastic survival—direct from those who had lived through the Third World War. Others were recreations, neo-devotees whose belief was founded through rediscovered scripture. A few were pastiche-creations drawn from the belief’s of other worlds.

But Allan didn’t mind religion, not really, even if he didn’t much see the point. What he did mind was mindless obedience. It seemed to him a far greater difficulty to stamp out ‘yes-men’ and idiot-patriotism than it was to stamp out belief in the supernatural. Both were endemic to sentient life everywhere, but the former thrived even in places where the latter did not.

They reached the cargo bay and Maria keyed the entry code in the control panel. The door clicked as magnets cycled and then slowly slid open.

“Allan, my dear old friend!” The heavyset blue man who exited the cargo bay greeted them with a grin and hugged Allan so tightly that the captain wondered if his ribs would hold.

“Lish!” Allan clasped his friend back, laughing. He managed to extricate himself enough to wave a hand toward Maria. “Lish Dinalin, Ensign Maria Matsumoto, my engineering officer.”

“My pleasure,” Maria said, nodding.

A second figure emerged from the hold, a tight bun of bright red hair crowning a young, handsomely feminine face. She wore the teal jacket of medical and the sciences, and her clear blue eyes were as light as a summer sky.

“This is Lieutenant JG Muninn Musgrave,” Lish said as he beckoned her forward. “The whole reason for this little excursion of ours. Muninn, meet my old friend, Lieutenant-Commander Allan Alia-Ledgard.”

Proper introductions were made all around, and Allan immediately understood why Lish had so taken a liking to the young counselor. She held herself with an easy and companionable charisma that seemed neither affected nor even self-aware, almost animal in its visceral quality. She smiled frequently, and seemed perfectly willing to listen to Lish’s near-constant chatter without even a flicker of complaint. Anyone who could do that, Allan reasoned, deserved considerable respect.

He led them up a deck to the ship’s comfortable recreation facilities, and gave them a brief tour along the way. 

“Living quarters for ten regular crew, double-bunked in these five rooms. But there’s no order to take on a full compliment, and I’ve found that it serves better to keep a smallish crew aboard. You’ve served on a couple of ships, Lish says?”

Muninn nodded and, for just a moment, seemed vaguely self-conscious. “Yeah, the USS Leakey and the USS Hastings. Only a year on each, though.”

“Well, I don’t know their crew, but I’m sure that you did them proud. Bravo’s lucky to have some fresh talent that’s actually seen any proper tours.”

“The good captain thinks that officer training doesn’t provide enough hands-on experience,” Lish said with a twinkle Allan was familiar with.

“It’s only that, these days, it seems like the Fleet’s desperate for warm bodies as much as raw talent. Did you know, they dropped half the advanced course requirements for Enlisted training two years ago? It’s basically just boot-camp with on-the-job training now. Which works out fine if you’ve got really good people doing the training, and don’t have anything too nasty trying to poke holes in you. But it all goes down the drain when you start getting people who aren’t that good at their job training greenhorns who, themselves, aren’t that good at their jobs. Damn dirty cycle.”

Lish nodded, evidently appreciating the rehash of this old conversational territory. “That’s the same thing I was just telling Lieutenant Musgrave about the situation on the station. We have an entire medical training facility down on the colony, a huge campus, and a population composed largely of Betazoids! One would think that it would be possible to have some of them come up and receive a really proper bit of experience, while also doing some good for all the poor refugees coming through. But Starfleet hasn’t authorized the full assembly of a station-side cadet corps, at least, not for counseling. Engineering and security, oh yes, but not for us! It’s all well and good to keep the tricorders running and make sure all those scary restricted areas are well guarded, but depths-forbid that we have good mental health!”

This conversation took them all the way through the rest of the brief tour, with Allan taking asides to point out various areas of interest to his guests. Muninn, he noticed, seemed quite taken with the little ship. When they finally sat down in the little crew lounge, he made a point of bringing the topic around to her experience aboard the station after two years of small-ship life.

“Well…” she hesitated, glanced almost imperceptibly at Lish, and then back at Allan. “SBB is a good place, I can see that. I could see making it a home, if you were to stay awhile. But it’s funny, I think of cities being like San-Fran, you know? All wild old buildings and parks. Bravo feels like a city, sure enough, but more like Mexico City, or Tokyo, if those were turned on their heads and slipped inside an egg. I don’t mind all the space for my apartment, though, that’s true enough. I could host entire parties there.”

Allan nodded. “San Francisco’s a historic city, though. What survived the War got preserved, and everything new has that strict aesthetics code. I love it, it’s pastoral as hell, but it’s about as far from a modern megacity as you can get. So, I see what you mean. For me, Bravo’s a nice place to visit, but sitting inside it starts to give me claustrophobia after a while.”

Muninn made a small noise of agreement, then gave a little smile and shrug. “Who knows, though? I bet I’ll feel settled in after a while.” She leaned back into the soft multicolored fabric of her chair. “So… you’ve spent time in California?”

“That’s where I met Maria,” Allan said, nodding to the engineer.

“I have family there,” Maria said. “And the best engineering courses still happen on Earth. I wanted to fill out my Academy time with the tops.”

“Ahh,” Allan raised a finger and circled it in the air, as if taking in the lounge. “That’s not quite right. The best courses in any subject happen right here, out in the thick of things.”

“I thought you were against simply throwing people into service?” Maria said, smirking.

Allan shot her a faux-dirty look. “I’m against kids being sent here without a proper grounding in the basics, yes. But I’m also against officers who get all their training behind a desk, or, preserve us, from a computer!” Allan gave a little exaggerated shudder. “Did you know that there are training simulations that take cadets halfway through their Academy experience?”

“Only for the most remote installations,” Lish said.

“Oh sure, they say that now, but what happens the next time they decide to expand the Fleet? I tell you, we’re going to have entire crews being sent out who don’t know how to do anything but what they’re told.”

“Well, regardless,” Maria interjected in that tone of voice Allan had come to recognize as a deliberate alteration of the conversation’s course, “San Francisco remains a delightful campus, and I’ve fond memories of the city. That little eatery in the old Tenderloin, what was it called… they did Cantonese food?”

Allan saw the light of recognition spark in Muninn’s blue eyes. “Tom Kung, right?”

“That’s it!”

“I love that place.” The counselor and Maria set forth, after that, down reminiscence lane, figuring out all the various places where they shared memories. 

Allan leaned toward Lish, whose seat was close to his. “Alright, old buddy, think you can clue me in to the fine details now?” Over the holo-call, Lish had painted some broad strokes, but mainly left the details to the imagination. Now he nodded, and his eyes flicked to Muninn for just a moment.

“Come on, show me what you’ve got programmed,” Lish said and nodded toward the replicator which occupied a little alcove on the other side of the comfortably-appointed room. “You ladies want anything?”

A moment later, armed with the order for a herbal tea for Maria and a lemonade for Muninn, Lish joined Allan at the replicator. Allan programmed in his own favorite drink, a taro-root boba tea with just a light sweetness and a hint of vanilla. Lish took a sip through the large straw and made a delighted noise.

“Just like jellies back home! You can suck them right out of the water at high tide.”

Putting that mental image aside, Allan programmed another and handed it over. “Well, what about it? You told me that there’s a starfleet officer out there?”

“Mmmhhmm,” Lish said around a mouthful of boba. “A patient showed up at Muninn’s door, little hybrid Romulan thing… said her mother was Starfleet. Took some tracking down, but we found her. Helen Anderson, assigned on an undercover mission for Intel and then scrubbed out as MIA. Only, that’s all hot air.

Someone added MIA after the fact, sealing up a real AWOL investigation. And, that’s not the strangest part.”

Allan raised an eyebrow when Lish told him the rest.

“Seriously? She tried to get in contact with the Fleet JAG after all this and was blocked out?”

“Firewall algorithm,” Lish said, nodding seriously. “Someone programmed it to keep all Helen Anderson’s communications dark, then let it run loose. Poor thing must have thought that she got scrubbed out completely.”

Allan digested this as he programmed in the drinks for the two women. He’d been around the Fleet long enough to know that not everything functioned ‘as it should’. There were dark egotistical undercurrents aplenty at work in the Fleet, just as anywhere else. Mostly, there were a lot of people all trying to do the right thing — as they saw it — and fouling it up when they got too personally entangled to see the big picture. 

But this didn’t sound like that. 

Allan felt a disquiet grow as he considered the pieces of this puzzle and found something sinister about the pattern that they formed.

“I see why you wanted to take a look,” he said after a moment. He watched the tea, then the lemonade, materialize in the replicator alcove. “But are we sure this shouldn’t have been handed over to JAG directly?”

“I put a delayed file in,” Lish said. But it won’t go until after we’re due back.” He gave a self-conscious laugh. “I know myself well enough to see when I might be jumping the gun. We should have some proof before we go further with anything. But, more than that… if we handed this off, there’s no telling how long it would take an official investigation to get on top of things.” He picked up Muninn’s lemonade and looked toward the redheaded officer. “That patient of hers, that Romulan girl, deserves a chance to see her mom again. If we can give it to her.”

“Do you honestly think the girl’s family is still alive?” Allan asked, feeling a bit horrible for saying it out loud.

Lish just sighed and raised his shoulders. “Who can say? But it’s worth our time to find out for sure. And I think it’s good for Muninn anyway.” Then he leaned in, close, and whispered so that there could be no chance of being overheard. “She’s a unique officer, that one. Exactly the sort of person you asked me to keep a lookout for.” 

There were always the Jefferies Tubes. 

One thing standard about any starship was the need for near-constant maintenance and, despite the proliferation of various automated repair systems employed on Federation vessels over the years, nothing saved you from sometimes having to go directly to the source of a problem with your own two human (or Vulcan, or Bolian, or what-have-you) hands. And so, there was a network of spiderwebbed tubes between the inner and outer bulkhead, as well as between the levels of the various decks, intersecting at major junctions of importance and then branching off again like plant scilia through a starship’s superstructure.

And there were other uses for these little-frequented maintenance areas as well. Uses that Helen Anderson had explained to her daughter many times. While other children came home from school and played or finished homework, Arrhae i-Srathem e’Anderson t’Asenth received private tutelage in everything from Starship design to hand-to-hand combat.

Arrhae to her intimate family, Asenth to the outside world, and e’Anderson only to an elect few who knew her mother’s true heritage, hers was not an ordinary experience of childhood. Helen’s idea of parenting seemed to grow stricter the older her daughter got, as if some shard of glass had worked its way into her heart and built a slow callous around what should have been a center of love and care. 

But, for all that she had felt angry and defiant during her mother’s perpetual grooming, Asenth now found the skills as invaluable as learning to swim on a planet covered in water.

She waited in the cargo container until she felt the distant thrum of the warp engines kick in through the inertial dampening field. The inside of the container’s lid, held open just a notch by the slim blade of her knife, let in both air and light. She squirmed into a better position between the replicator gel packs and placed the soles of her boots against the inside of the lid, then, with a great heave, shoved the metal lid up and away. Her breath caught in her throat as she listened for any interested parties coming to explore the sound of clattering metal, but it seemed that luck was on her side.

She scrambled out of the container, hesitated, then, picked up the lid and replaced it. She might need to use that trick again later.

The Raven-class starship’s cargo bay was impressively large for the size of the craft, and Asenth had never spent time aboard a Starfleet ship before. But she did remember the standardized outlines that her mother had made her learn, as well as the holo-maps of common deck layouts. The cargo bay lighting, off-blue when she had first blinked up at it, now slid slowly into a whiter, hotter range, more fit to see by. If she stayed there for too long, someone would inevitably check to see why the lights were on. As it was, she felt certain there would be other ways for them to figure out that someone came aboard in the cargo. The trick was to be well away before they made that discovery.

She slipped her knife back into the sheath in her boot, and headed for the cargo bay’s far wall, where the hatch for the Jefferies tube stood invitingly. She tapped the control panel, half expecting there to be some sort of lock in place, but the hatch slid open with a whoosh, exposing her to the somewhat cooler metallic air of the tube. Then, she crawled inside.

***

Three days passed, during which Asenth nursed growing regrets for her hastily-made decision to sneak aboard the USS Mogrus. She found it possible to navigate easily enough via the tubes, but always with a sense of anxiety that reminded her too keenly of another time, in the not-too-distant past, when she had been forced to hide from probing eyes. 

She stole a blanket, twice crept into an unused crew-quarters to use the little personal replicator to make herself food and drink, but her sleep came in fitful and disturbed gasps on the hard tube floor. Twice, she barely avoided being seen by a member of the small crew, and she felt certain that her luck would soon run out. Surely, there must be internal sensors that looked for just such a thing as an unwanted intruder. Try as she might, any lessons from her mother on that subject were closed to her tired brain.

But then, somewhere toward the middle of the third day, her restless routine exploded in sound and action.

“Yellow Alert, Yellow Alert. All hands to stations.” The Starfleet computer’s disembodied voice echoed through the Jefferies tubes, tinny and distorted. Asenth sat bolt upright, her blanket falling from her shoulders. Startled, she accidentally scattered the bowl of pretzel bites she had been eating, sending them spinning off in all directions across the tube’s smooth floor.

She was just scurrying over, trying to recapture the wayward snacks, when a deep shudder vibrated up through the metal floor into the flesh of her hands. She closed her eyes and felt it again, stronger this time. This was followed by a faint tug behind her navel, a slight alarm from her inner ear, the faintest moment of free-fall as one might have within a dream. 

The lighting strips, which had gone yellow a moment before, now blinked over to a bright blood-red. A distant alarm blared momentarily, then went still.

Combat. She had never been in a space battle before, but she could guess and decipher the clues. Red Alert she knew, and that meant trouble. The shuddering in the deck plating was what happened with something impacted a starship’s shields, causing a kinetic feedback through the emitter array.

Images flashed through her mind. Remans, monstrous and howling, charging through the streets of her quiet mining town home. People screaming. Bursts of green lightning leaping from rooftops as Legionaries opened fire on the crowds. She found it hard to breathe, to think, and for several long moments could only concentrate on gasping for breath.

Another shudder, much sharper this time, brought her mind back to itself. Again, her inner ear sent off a panicked alarm as the feeling of suddenly falling off a cliff intensified, then vanished, leaving Asenth feeling sick enough to vomit. Not bothering to pull her blanket and foodstuff along with her, she began crawling with all possible haste toward a junction where she knew a LCARS interface could be accessed.

She fairly fell through the hatch into the junction, slammed her palm into the computer panel to bring the screen to life. A large RED ALERT icon appeared in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, then various data displays for the important relays, conduits, and panels that passed through this particular part of the ship. Asenth ignored them all, instead bringing up a readout of the total ship’s status. 

Everything came through in a stream of numbers and letters, part military acronym, part code, part English. She peered through it, struggling to make sense of the flow. Shields were low… that was the indicator for the phaser bank recharging… that was an intruder alert.…

Her breath caught. Intruder alert. She tapped that section of the screen and brought the alert into focus. Two different points on a schematic of the ship appeared. 

One on the bridge… and the other right where she was, deep in the bowls of the Jefferies tubes.

***

Two Reman soldiers lay dead on the floor of the Bridge alongside Maria, who bore a nasty red gash along one side of her face. Red emergency lighting pulsed as Shavar deftly piloted them in a complex series of maneuvers designed to shake off target lock. In the captain’s chair, hair looking more wild and white than ever, Allan gripped the arm-rests and roared, “Countermeasures!” as two more torpedo signatures lit up the tactical map displayed on the viewscreen.

Muninn slipped the phaser back into her holster and ran for the tactical console, drawing on somewhat faint memories of combat simulation classes at the Academy. The USS Hastings had encountered trouble a fair few times, but during those, she had been safely in sickbay, dealing with the repercussions. And she had never imagined something like this. The little Mogrus was dwarfed on the tactical console screen by the sheer mass of the attacking ship, which the computer could only identify as one possible configuration. A D’deridex-class warbird, the largest and most deadly warship ever conceived of by the Romulan Star Empire.

“Uh… countermeasure systems are firing. Shields can’t take much more of a beating!”

“Just try to keep them shifting, we don’t want more of them beaming aboard.”

Muninn keyed in the intruder alert screen and pulled up the internal system map of the Mogrus. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the information there. Two alerts registered, one some seven minutes earlier on the bridge, and another… well, that’s odd. She dug deeper into the data, tension growing. One Romulan life-sign, female, authorized boarding three days ago.

Three days ago marked their departure from Starbase Bravo. One Romulan female life-sign? She pulled up a security feed from the cargo bay, ran it back to their arrival. Watched as a young woman slipped from the interior of one of the supply crates they had been standing with when they were beamed aboard. Muninn closed her eyes and pressed her fist into the chrome edge of the control panel. Asenth. Somehow, the clever Romulan girl had learned where they were going and had found her way aboard.

“BRACE FOR IMPACT!” 

Shavar’s shout gave Muninn barely enough time to grab hold of the console and keep herself from being flung to the floor by a wild fluctuation in the inertial dampening field. The whole ship shuddered like a rock slammed by a hammer. For a microsecond, she felt the horrible tug of their ship’s intensely shifting velocity in the very core of her bones. She pulled up the tactical readout again.

“Shields failing!”

There would be moments only before more Reman warriors beamed aboard, and there would be far too many to fight. Their only hope would be surrender, clearly. As Starfleet officers, they, at least, had some chance.  But Asenth? A Romulan teenager might be lucky for a swift execution. 

“Computer, remove all prior boarding records and delete using total write-over method. Then clear the current Romulan passenger for unrestricted ship access and remove all internal alerts for her life signs.”

***

Asenth felt the shields buckle under the strain of a new wave of disruptor fire. She closed her eyes and held on tight to the walls as the ship rocked violently, shuddering beneath the sudden impact. But then, it ended. Instead of a wall of flame leaping out from all sides, she felt only the quiet calm of the ship at rest, followed by a distant descending hum as of some great electronic machine slowly dying.

Then the emergency lighting kicked on as the ship’s main power died. Asenth let out a little squeak, involuntarily, and then blinked as the junction’s LCARS screen flashed a sharp white. A moment later, a video message flickered to life.

Muninn. The counselor looked frightened. Her hair pulled free of its normal bun, like ragged red threads about her head. She leaned in close to the screen and whispered, her words hurried and frantic.

“Listen, Asenth, I know you’re going to be frightened, but I have a job for you. I don’t know how you got aboard, but you’re the best hope now. I’ve made the computer list you for full access, but everything else will be shut down to secure the computer core once we’re boarded. You need to get to main engineering and find the emergency distress beacons. Their loading system is located there, and you’ll be able to fire it. But you have to wait. Wait until you’re sure the ship is safe. Until you’re sure”—the line went staticky, the video sputtered, froze, and died.

Asenth huddled up to it in the gloom, and hugged herself, imagining horrible faces coming for her from out of the dark.  

Left, left, right. Fifty paces. Left. Turbolift for three junctions. Muninn, blindfolded, followed the prompting of her captors’ rough shoves. She knew that Lish, at least, still lived because she could hear him whimper somewhere nearby every now and then, in clear distress.

After a brief fight, they had been subdued and beamed off the Mogrus and onto another ship, presumably the Romulan warbird that had been attacking them.

After decloaking almost on top of them, the battle had only lasted as long as it did because they clearly wanted the Starfleet vessel intact. Muninn hoped desperately that they did not change their minds and decide to scrap the ship, with poor frightened Asenth hidden away in its guts, all alone.

The turbolift came to a halt and there was the swish of automatic doors, followed by a guttural snarl from somewhere in front of her.

“Take that off her. And that one, he’s useless, bring him to the medical facilities. Go, now!” The voice rasped and rolled, managing to be at once papery and wet.

A moment later, Muninn’s blindfold was pulled back, her eyes adjusting almost instantly to the relatively dark lighting on the Romulan bridge.

A Reman stood before her in full battle regalia, the sort worn by their people during times of crisis, when the Romulans used their kind as shock troops on the front lines. The slick black uniform highlighted the height and sinewy strength natural to his species, and the high collar accentuated the batlike features of his face. He smiled, the expression somehow unnatural on his toothy and twisted features.

“Starfleet,” he said, “we’ve been expecting you. Surprised not to find your Klingon friends waiting for you?”

Muninn glanced to either side. Lish was being ferried back into the lift on a stretcher. She caught a small moan from him as the doors closed. Of the rest of the Mogrus’ crew, no sign. What are you supposed to do when you’re captured? Dim memories from the basic training classes at the Academy filled her mind.

“We are a Starfleet ship on a routine resupply mission, operating under the explicit authority of Resak and the Independent Velorum Government.”

The Reman scowled. “My name is Hartresk, and I do not recognize Resak’s right to command all Remans to appease yet another colonial power.” He leaned closer, his breath strangely sweet, like fermenting peaches. “We expected you, as I said. But we did not expect… you.” He straightened, opened his arms as if to take in the whole of the warbird’s bridge. His clawed fingers stretched, menacing. “I remember humans from the war. Your kind were crushed by the Jem’Hadar at every possible turn. What my soldiers say you did makes you interesting.” 

“Starfleet officers are prepared to defend themselves,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as possible.

He grinned, pointed teeth protruding past his thin lips. “And the best defense is an offensive sally, is it not? Does Starfleet truly think that its subterfuge will go unnoticed? That we have not noticed the proliferation of your Klingon allies within our space, looting and murdering?”

Muninn raised an eyebrow. “I’m not a political officer, Hartresk. I don’t know anyting about Klingons.” That, at least, she could say with absolute certainty.

“No? Well, I know that they are charging in with their empire’s name on their lips… but conveniently enough, they have met with fierce resistance from Starfleet. Our great savior. I wonder how gullible your people think we are, to send such obvious proxies to our shores.” Hartresk leaned closer, reached out, and pinched the teal fabric of her uniform. “And what about this? When Starfleet dresses up its Intelligence Agents in the clothing of doctors?”

“Intelligence Agent?” Muninn opened, then shut her mouth. In the Reman’s eyes, a glint of something furious showed itself for just a moment. A lifetime of pain and rage the likes of which she could not fathom, and suddenly, she felt a twinge of fear deep in her belly. 

“And not the first,” Hartresk said, the words soft and sibilant as a snake’s hiss. 

Her mouth suddenly dry, Muninn tried to rally. “I am not with Intelligence. My name is Muninn Musgrave, I am a counselor with Starfleet Medical.”

“I’m sure that if we look into your alias, we’ll find that you’re everything you say you are. Your people do a very good job infiltrating the worlds you seek to one day absorb. Or did you think I didn’t know about the hologrammed camps your Federation erects on worlds across the quadrant? Even your own people have revolted against you, ashamed of your collusion with fascist powers… or did The Dominion’s destruction of the Maquis make it easy to forget a troublesome thorn in the Federation’s side?” He stepped back from her, his smile gone, his eyes deadly and dark. “We will not be the next absorbed region, Starfleet. We will not trade one obvious Imperial master for another in kinder cloth.”

***

Nothing more came from their conversation, and Hartresk soon bade his soldiers remove Muninn from the warship’s bridge. She felt vaguely woozy after the conversation, now aware of just how much of a dangerous position they had found themselves mired in. Hartresk clearly believed that she was some sort of Agent Provocateur, sent to undermine the Velorum sector’s revolution. And he’s taken my killing of his boarding party soldiers as proof. A moment of nausea passed over her as she remembered the burned-flesh smell in the air after her phaser fire. The two dead Reman soldiers on the deck of the bridge. 

One of the paramount things that they taught all Starfleet officers during the Academy combat classes was that hostile action should always be met with the bare minimum of return force. Was it something else, then? Something inside of me that overran my training? She had never been in real combat before. What if some part of her augmented being liked having the opportunity to kill?

The lift stopped after five junctions, and she felt one of the Reman soldiers behind her shove their weapon butt into her back. She stumbled, fell against another Reman in front of her, brushing her face against their uniform as she did so. Light flowed around the edge of the fabric of her blindfold.

While the soldiers shoved her on, she blinked carefully out from the little gap she had made, taking stock of her surroundings. The air held the damp, stuffy odor of too many bodies crammed into a tight space, too much for the atmosphere system to cycle properly. The lighting, dim as everywhere else on the ship to accommodate for the Reman’s weak vision, filled the corridors with shadows. 

No, not just shadows.

Remans were everywhere, sitting against bulkheads, affecting repairs to power junctions, talking in little huddles. Surely, some of them were hardly more than children. And almost all wore ragged clothing, some even in the threadbare orange of convicts. Very few wore the shiny black carapaces of the Reman warrior elite. 

Another series of turns down corridors, another door, and then Muninn found herself roughly tossed into a forcefielded cell in the ship’s brig, one of three others currently occupied.

“Lieutenant!” Allan Alia-Ledgard stood with a small wince from the bare floor of his cell as Muninn’s guards left the room. He looked weary, but alert, his face seeming older and more lined in the dim lighting. “What happened? Where did they take you?”

She recounted everything quickly, while Allan, Maria, and Shavar listened. Allan sighed when he heard of Lish’s condition. 

“Poor Lish. Better news than I expected, though, to have him taken to their medical bay.”

Maria winced and touched her forehead, where dried blood covered her skin. “Wish they’d extended that all around.”

“Muninn moved closer to the edge of the forcefield and peered at the engineer’s wound. “It looks like mostly a laceration, but you were unconscious, so you probably have a concussion as well. Do you feel sleepy, weak knees, nauseous?”

“A little,” Maria admitted. Didn’t think much of it.”

“You’ll be fine, just don’t nod off.”

Shavar glanced toward the closed door. “Bit nuts that they think you’re a spy,” he muttered. “Think they’ve got eyes on us in here?”

“Privacy’s a Federation policy, Ensign,” Allan said with a small smile, “not a Romulan or Reman one. And not for prisoners, in any case.” He glanced at Muninn.

“Anything else you can remember, Lieutenant?”

“Only that… well, I don’t think we’re dealing with an all-military group here. The ones on the bridge were soldiers, sure enough, but the rest of them? They’ve got civilians filling the corridors, and not just those doing repair work, either.”

“Likely from the local moons and asteroids that were being mined,” Allan said. “I think we’ve stumbled upon a revolutionary relief mission.”

“It’s not a new ship, either,” Maria said. They looked at her, and she shrugged. “Well, it’s not. See that panel on the wall over there?” She nodded toward the brig’s far side, where an exposed maintenance panel’s circuitry glowed. “That’s original multitronic circuitry. I mean, Romulan computer systems are kept simple even in the most modern designs, but I’d stake my pips on this being a first-run warbird, probably circa sixty-one or sixty-two. I mean, this might even be one of the original eight B-Type warbirds produced! That would explain why they didn’t overwhelm us… the earliest model only had a single torpedo tube and ten disruptor emitters…” she trailed off at the looks on their faces. “What? I’m an engineer and I like history, is that so crazy?”

“Not at all, my dear,” said Allan, a genuine smile lighting up his face. “It just means that you’ve once again proved that I’m the luckiest CO in the fleet.”

“Well, there’s something else too,” Maria said. “Does anyone notice how musty it smells?”

Muninn nodded. “I did. There are a lot of people jammed in here.”

But Maria shook her head. “No… it’s not that. A ship like this? Normal crew compliment of fifteen-hundred, sure. But its systems can accommodate up to fifteen-thousand in an emergency. Sure, for extremely limited periods of time, but still.”

“Wait on, hold it,” Shavar cocked an eyebrow disbelievingly. “You’re telling us they’ve got fifteen-thousand Reman refugees here?”

“I’d doubt that,” Allan said, a faraway look in his eyes. “I think Maria’s point is that this warship is held together with spit and tape. It’s not meant to be out here, doing this sort of run, let alone getting into tangles with Starfleet. It’s the projection of strength, the idea of a D’deridex battlecruiser, nothing more.” He looked over at Muninn. “You said that this Hartresk thought you were an Intelligence Agent?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Muninn hesitated only a fraction before replying. “I don’t know. But he seemed to think that there had been others. Which I think might refer to Helen Anderson, the woman we came here to find.”

“Hmm…” Allan stroked his beard, other hand on his hips. “Well, that says something right there. We’re not dealing with experienced politicians. Starfleet Intelligence is more likely to be running an undercover operation to smash a pirate syndicate than they are to be embedding officers in a Reman revolution.”

“Hartresk struck me as a mainstay soldier, Sir,” Muninn said. “He mentioned seeing Starfleet officers engaged in combat during the Dominion War, which means he was front-lines. A shock trooper for the Romulan Star Empire.”

Shavar whistled. “My cousin, Kamal, served the Fleet during the war. He was just nineteen then, but he’s told us stories of relief missions to front-line colony worlds. Can’t even get my head around how that’d have looked if you were really on the ground.”

“No,” Allan said, “none of us can. The attrition rate for the Reman soldiers was exceptionally high against the Jem’Hadar, largely because they were used as an expendable shield for the Romulan Legionaries. Someone like Hartresk might see Starfleet through that lens. Allies with his hated Romulan masters, profiting off of victories bought with the blood of his kin.”

They were all silent for a moment after that, considering. Muninn’s mind again swam with the image of the dead Reman soldiers, the phaser that did the deed warm in her hand. “I should have been more careful. I should have stunned them,” she said, suddenly.

But Allan met her gaze instantly, his expression hard as diamonds. “Stuff that back down, Lieutenant. Second-guessing yourself after the fact is perfectly normal, but you did the right thing. Usually, officers new to the field freeze instead of fire, and I’ve seen the consequences of that course too many times. We’re empathic creatures, at our cores, so it makes sense to care when you kill. But those were trained soldiers, and Romulan disruptors don’t have a stun setting.”

Muninn nodded, though the tight knot in her belly remained.

“So,” Shavar said after a moment, “what do we do now?”

“Now?” Allan settled himself cross-legged on the floor of his confinement space, facing the door. “We get some rest and see what happens next.” 

Nightmares stalked the corridors.

After Muninn’s message, Asenth stayed in the Jefferies tube junction for a long time, huddled up, frozen in a clammy terror. The look on the counselor’s face reminded her too well of the one embossed upon her mother’s when the Reman soldiers came. 

Hide, hide daughter, and don’t make a sound. 

The attic of their home on Oumoren V was not a proper part of the house, not something included on the blueprints of the original prefab. But the building’s original design had called for a modular nature, capable of being replicated at-need for any environment. On dusty, hot, Oumoren V, the shelter had been fabricated and then dropped in as part of the town without any further fuss. But there were still parts of the building intended for connection to other modules, and one such forgotten area formed what her mother affectionately referred to as ‘the attic.’ It was where they kept boxes of holiday supplies, old data slates of her father’s, and other random tidbits acquired through the normal span of a full life. It was also hot, dusty, and filled with the trailing old webs of the planet’s native desert spider.

When her mother pulled the hatch open and lifted Asenth through, she had been almost too surprised and horrified to protest, uttering only a muffled squeak. And then, as she looked down through the hatch into her mother’s wide, terrified eyes, all other protests died on her tongue.

“Stay there,” her mother said. “Hide! Hide, daughter, and don’t make a sound.” Then, no more words, just the hatch being shoved up and into place, and the near-darkness of the tight space.

But Asenth had crawled on her belly to the one source of light, a little ornamental window set into the wall, overlooking the front of their home. The door to the back yard opened onto a series of little sheds for her father’s hydroponic garden, and the old playset from when she was a kid, the one her little brother still used. The front door opened onto one of the town’s main residential streets. The middle, a paved footpath, was bordered on either side by smaller paved lanes meant for self-propelled cycles. Emergency vehicles could easily descend into the wide area of the road wherever was needed. Today, it seemed like they were needed everywhere. Even as she watched, one touched down just outside their house, dust from its repulsors kicking up like an angry brown insect swarm.

Farther in the distance, through the grubby pane of glass, the flower of an explosion bloomed over the town. Legionaries, a dozen or more, disgorged from the emergency shuttle, spilling out in all directions. 

Then, from a house across the street, a dark figure she had not seen before suddenly moved. A Reman ran out into the middle of the open, a large weapon raised in his clawed hands.

There was a flash of green light, then another. A scream of pain, cut short, strangled in the air. 

The Reman’s shots had clipped one of the Romulan soldiers and caught another dead-on with a burst of viridian energy. Both Legionaries fell. Then the Reman vanished, turned to dust by returning disruptor fire. He did not scream as he died. 

The soldiers spread out through the street, exchanging fire with more lanky figures who rushed in, it seemed, from all sides. Asenth watched, wide-eyed. There were so many of them!

A crash from downstairs and a loud scream startled her away from the window. Brother? The scream had sounded bery much like his voice. But her little brother should still be in school… at this time of day, her father would have still been on the way to pick him up. Tightness rose in her throat.

She scurried back around and moved until positioned just above the closed hatch. She heard a voice that sounded like her father’s, yelling something, but he must have been in the kitchen near the back door because he was too far away to make out the words. Asenth’s fingers gripped the edge of the hatch. She couldn’t stay there. Fear clung to her, but it also drove her. If her parents were down there, she needed to be with them, to get to them. She pulled, and the hatch came up an inch. Just below her was her mother, backing away. Backing away. Asenth froze.

She had seen Remans up close before, what child on a mining colony hadn’t? But never that close-up, never right in front of her. The one below, advancing on her mother, spoke of every horror she had ever known in childhood nightmares. The long, unnatural limbs. The gray, dead-looking skin, struck through with a cobweb of black veins. The breathing, guttural and wet: predator’s breath.

“No!” her mother shouted, her voice pitched high. “You’ve got to leave. Leave! Leave us!” She waved at the Reman, as if she could ward off its approach through sheer force of will. “Please!”

But the advancing figure spoke, then, the harsh syllables of its voice like metal on meat. “…No.” When it moved, it seemed to Asenth that it fairly blurred. Every muscle in her body felt as tight as frozen rubber, she could not move, could only watch, while her eyes swam with horrified tears.

The Reman grabbed her mother and threw her over his shoulder, carrying her out of sight as quickly and easily as if she were a doll. And then her mother’s screams of, “No! No, wait!” faded as a sudden explosion rocked the front of their home.

Whatever the blast had been, it sent a concussive wave through the entire structure of the building, shattering glass and bursting through Asenth’s ear. She dropped the hatch with a scream of pain as she fell to the side, clenching the sides of her aching head. Again encased in the attic’s grubby darkness, she was dimly aware of the sound of distant, high-pitched screams.

The pain eventually receded and the spinning stopped, but her hearing remained dull, with a wet feeling deep down inside her ear canals. But even after she could move again, she did not do so right away. The time that it took her to finally work up the courage to crawl to the hatch again would forever haunt her. An eternal ‘what-if’ crawling like maggots in her mind. When she did finally drop down into the debris of her home, hearing muffled, dried blood down the left side of her face from the ear closest to the explosion, she felt so dizzy and sick that she could barely stand.When she found their bodies, she vomited profusely on the kitchen floor.

Her mother’s body lay near the ruined kitchen wall, twisted in a heap of plaster and plastic spars, her neck at a horrible angle. Her father, nearby, seemed to have been struck a glancing blow by a disruptor. His glassy eyes still stared up at the ceiling, open and filmed over in death, one of his legs completely vaporized. Next to him, the much smaller body of her brother, hair matted with blood. And there was a Reman as well, dead on the floor near them, a disruptor held in its monstrous fingers. 

Everything after that lived as a blur in her memories. 

She had stumbled through streets filled with destruction, flames, and bodies. Legionaries and Remans were everywhere, some still fighting, and she avoided them as if she were a ghost in someone else’s dream. She wandered until she came to a makeshift landing field in what had once been the town’s largest park, where two refugee shuttles were being primed to take off. A woman saw her, grabbed her, traded her own place for Asenth’s, and the last thing that Asenth saw through the shuttle window was the blackened and tear-stained face of her nameless rescuer as she gazed upward at an escape she would likely never see.

All of this washed over Asenth as she huddled in the Jefferies tube intersection, the USS Mogrus’ emergency lighting giving the metal world around her a hellish sheen. She felt impossibly cold and damp. Her clothing, already rank from days of hiding out, now stank of sweat and fear and—she felt her shame increase—faintly of urine. 

But it was, oddly enough, that wave of shame that fueled what came next. A sudden and explosive burst of rage. 

For weeks, she had been living with the torture of the ‘what-if’ in her brain. What if she had refused to hide in the first place? What if she had leaped down and attacked the Reman carrying her mother, or ran to the Legionaries (only an unforgivably short distance away), or had done something, anything, but freeze with terror? And now, here it was all over again. A situation where someone needed her. And she was freezing. Peeing herself like a little girl with a bad dream. 

She liked Muninn. The counselor looked at her as if she mattered, in a way that nobody since her evacuation from Oumoren had. And she was kind. And now, she was relying on Asenth for help. But Asenth was letting her down, just like she’d let down her parents and brother. 

With a guttural vocalization of her pain and anger, wordless and animal, Asenth rolled over, uncoiled, and stood as high as the little chamber would allow. A fiery map of the ship seemed to blaze inside her mind. Engineering. That was where she needed to be.

***

In her time exploring the Jefferies tubes of the small starship, Asenth had come to know the layout well, and even begin to form an understanding of why some junctions were laid out the way they were—closer to vital systems like the nacelle controls, or the warp core. Main engineering ran like a post through the ship’s four main decks, connecting everything together. In the middle, the warp core shone like a glimmering spire, thrummed with unimaginable energy. Energy enough to bend space around the ship, to catapult them light years forward at a time.

As she made her way through one of the crawlways that would drop her onto the second deck, directly next to one of the engineering work consoles, she occupied her mind with vague ideas of what it must be like to go on adventures like this crew did. 

She remembered her mother’s stories of Starfleet, but they were never like this. Muninn and the crew of the Mogrus were out here in space, doing real exploration, undertaking incredible missions. She imagined herself doing the same, and felt herself relax into the imagined reality, as she had once when playing games as a child. Now, she found that she could wrap that same belief, that same play, around herself, and use it to lock away the other thoughts that circled, like carrion feeders, in the background of her mind. 

She could be here herself, one day. She could be a Starfleet officer like her mother, like Muninn… she could explore the galaxy, go on adventures… stop bad things from happening.

The tube she was in ended in a hatch, and she pressed the control, causing it to open out into the wide open shaft of engineering. Carefully, she moved forward and looked out. The lights were on, here, but all was quiet. No sounds of movement from above or below.

Slowly, she eased her way out of the shaft and hurried to the console, tapping it with nervous fingers. Her heart leaped as the screen lit up. Muninn really had given her control over the ship’s computer. It took her much longer than she would have liked to puzzle out how just to bring up a schematic of the engineering systems, and most of these she barely understood in the most cursory way. Then an idea struck her. If she had official access…

“Computer?” she said softly.

“Awaiting command,” came the disembodied woman’s voice.

Asenth grinned. “Launch distress beacon!”

“Automated systems have been disconnected due to anti-boarding procedures,” the computer said. “Manual ejection of distress beacon required.”

“How do I do that?”

The screen glowed and a more simplified map of engineering appeared. Then, as if reading her mind, the lighting strips along the walls glowed faintly green, a series of colored dots leading her along the grated deck plating toward a triangular ladder meant to allow multiple crew to climb up or down at the same time.

The lighting strips seemed to lead down a level. Ecstatic at her cleverness, Asenth hurried on.

The lights led her down onto the final deck, and then toward a control panel on one of the walls. The screen glowed to life as she approached. 

“Initiate command when ready,” the computer said.

Asenth only remembered Muninn’s warning a moment after her finger touched the “fire distress beacon” button the computer had helpfully highlighted for her. 

It was a shout from somewhere high above, a cry of annoyance and rage, that brought the warning back to her mind. Someone was up there after all, and they had not missed the beacon as it was manually ejected from the ship.

Only then did Asenth realize, looking around in panic for someplace to hide, that there wasn’t a Jefferies tube hatch anywhere nearby.

They were taken away, one by one, for more formal interrogation. As-yet, the Remans seemed unwilling to use the harshest methods of coercion on their prisoners, preferring for a cross-questioning technique that almost seemed straight from a law-enforcement playbook. They were clearly trying to catch the crew in some sort of a lie, force them to give up more about their supposed mission. This would have been easy enough, if the crew had been merely going about their originally-intended task of resupplying the observation post, but their detour to Oumoren V dramatically complicated matters. All the more so for Muninn, who had two reasons for sidling around the truth: one a secret almost as old as her, and the other (hopefully, she thought) undiscovered in the belly of the Mogrus.

When it came Muninn’s turn to make a second appearance in the grimly-lit circular room that the Remans were using as an interrogation chamber, she felt apprehension in beaded perspiration across her body. As of yet, however, no implements of torture, machines designed to induce drug-fueled confessions, or any of the other dark instruments she might have expected, made an appearance. Either these Remans were, for lack of a better term, more humanitarian than the Romulans they had supplanted, or else they were waiting for some other reason before trotting out the big guns. 

She sat in the middle of a cone of light barely brighter than the ambient gloom preferred by the subterranean race, the two plain metal chairs and table (all bolted to the floor) were her only company. She breathed slowly, methodically, eyes on the shadowy outline of the door. She became so intent in her waiting that, when the door did finally open, she gave a little start.

The Reman who entered gave her a funny look, and his vaguely batlike face broke into what she was coming to recognize as a smile. “There is no need to worry. I treat my prisoners well.”

She recognized him from her first appearance in this room some hours earlier. His questions then, brief, to the point, and calmly spoken, had quite belied his rather intimidating appearance.

“I’ve not had cause to doubt it,” she said with diplomatic calm. “But, I have to ask… For how much longer will we be continuing these sessions?”

“Until you reveal the nature of your mission in our system,” the Reman said, still smiling. “The same as before.” He moved into the cone of light, then, and seated himself in the opposite chair. His long fingers were folded in his lap, and he sat back, the picture of complete ease.

“I told you, we’re not on any secret mission. We came because of a record I came across regarding a Starfleet officer living on Oumoren V.”

“There are no Starfleet officers on Stalx,” the Reman said, using the local’s name for the colony.

But Muninn remained stubborn. “My sources are clear. There is a human on Oumoren V, a retired member of Starfleet, to be precise.”

The Reman gazed at her across the table as if coming to some deep decision. “Very well,” he said, “let us play along for a moment. Assume that there is a human living on Stalx. And a Starfleet officer, at that. Why would they be there?”

“I’d hoped to ask them.”

“It wouldn’t have anything to do with a Starfleet Intelligence operation dedicated to undermining any Reman leadership not vetted by the Federation?”

“No!”

He chuckled. “Ah. Well. Would you be interested in explaining, then, why this sudden interest emerged? Or why this mission was not officially cleared by your chain of command?”

That brought Muninn up short. She hesitated, wondering exactly how much he could possibly know. So far, the line of questioning was much the same as the first time, but something in her interrogator’s eyes made her wonder if there was some change behind the scenes. He knows something, or thinks he knows something.

The Reman, still smiling, pressed on into Muninn’s silence. “We know that your ship changed its flight plan at the last moment, that it had never been scheduled to enter this system. We know that you and the Bolian are not proper members of the ship’s compliment, but rather last-minute passengers brought aboard from Starbase Bravo…”

They’ve cracked the computer, she thought with a silent groan. Even if they had only broken into the recent data storage, that might be enough to lead them to Asenth. Assuming the girl didn’t give herself away in some other manner. Like trying to launch a distress beacon. Muninn tried not to let her panic show. Had she doomed the Romulan girl by giving her those instructions? It was at times like this that Muninn most fervently wished she believed in some manner of god.

“Let’s try this another way,” the Reman said. “I am willing to hear your explanation, your full explanation, for being in our system. I guarantee you fair consideration. But, without that, I am left with my best supposition. And that is that you are agents of Starfleet Intelligence, that your organization is worried about a militant and uncontrollable Reman leader, and that you are under orders to sabotage the revolution. If this is what I return to Hartresk with, I can assure you that he will take it upon himself to execute you all as enemies of the Reman people.”

He did not say this with any rancor, or bravado, or even a hint of threat. Instead, he spoke as matter-of-factly as one might when discussing the complications of patient scheduling. Somehow, that made it seem all the more chilling. Muninn did not doubt for a moment that he would make good on his word, or that death was a very possible outcome of their situation.

She leaned forward, placing her palms on the table. The cold metal reassured her, grounded her to that moment in time. She needed to tell him everything this time, or as close to everything as she could get without betraying Asenth’s presence to people who clearly hated her kind with a passion.

“A young girl came to my practice last week and asked for my help. She was a refugee from Oumoren V, a half-Romulan, with a human mother. When I looked into her mother’s file, I learned that she had been a Starfleet officer, that she had been listed as missing in action over a decade ago. Then my superior, Lish, the Bolian you have in custody, he discovered that there were reports of a human captured by Reman revolutionaries on the same planet. We came for her, because we couldn’t leave a Starfleet officer out here once we’d found her, and because her daughter deserves the chance to see her mother alive again.”

The truth sounded thin in the oppressive room, like a bad cover story. Exactly the sort of thing that an Intelligence agent might spin to keep their secrets under wraps. The thinness of it was part of the reason why she’d tried to dance around it before. The Reman stared at her in silence for what seemed like an eternity, his expression alien and unreadable. Then he barked something, a short retort of sound that made Muninn flinch before she recognized it for what it was: laughter. He was laughing.

“That has an interesting ring to it,” he said. “Though not one Hartresk will be likely to accept.”

“What’s your name?” Muninn asked, suddenly, leaping on a spring of intuition.

Again, that long stare before he spoke. “Janas. My name is Janas.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Janas,” she said, holding his gaze with her own.

“Strangely, I believe you,” he said.

“You do?” Muninn could not have kept the surprise from her voice, even if she had wanted to.

“I do. It fits with what Lish Dinalin said, and with what little we have been able to glean from your ship’s computer.” He gave a rattling sigh. “But a convincing tale is not proof.” He cocked his head to one side. “Do you have proof?”

Muninn licked her lips. “We could… find the woman. The one we’re out here looking for. Her name is Helen Anderson. She can’t be that difficult to locate.”

Janas shook his head. “You truly have no idea what has happened in our system, do you? The struggle between the Governor’s Legionaries and my people resulted in massive destruction across Stalx’s surface. Mines destroyed with the workers still inside, towns bombed, and the streets of the port city of Kalvanthes filled with the dead. Finding your Helen Anderson would be a monumental task.”

Muninn leaned back in her chair, her hope fading. “I had no idea it was that bad there.”

“The Governor treated my kind worse than most,” Janas said, “and many of his own kind not much better. There have been atrocities committed by both sides.”

Alien as he was, a note familiar to Muninn’s ear lived in Janas’ voice. A note of shame. She considered the Reman, tall, powerful, clearly intelligent. What was he doing working for a violent psychotic like Hartresk? Or was the commander of the ship more complex than he at first appeared? There were unknowns here, too many of them. She felt as if any incautious move would see her stepping on a landmine. What questions would break through, would offer some enlightenment that she could use?

“You said the Governor treated other Romulans poorly as well? Were there Romulan sympathizers among your revolution?”

He looked at her, a sudden sharpness in his eyes. “Yes. A good many.”

“Where are they now?” She felt the ice creaking beneath her, prayed it would not break.

“Many are dead,” Janas said. He shifted in his seat, his lanky frame a knot of muscle under tension.

“Did Hartresk have them killed because they were Romulan?” Instantly, Muninn knew that she had picked the wrong choice.

Janas stood with a snarl and he glared down at her from his impressive height. Muninn tensed, but the Reman merely stood there, clawed fists clenching and unclenching. “We fight for our freedom!” he hissed at her. “We are not barbarians, to kill women and children at will.”

Women and children. Muninn closed her eyes as she placed a horrible piece of the puzzle into alignment. “The girl… the one I told you about? She said that Reman soldiers killed her parents.”

Still glowering, Janas shook his head. “As I said, there were atrocities on both sides. But, unless her parents were supporters of the Governor…?”

“They were not.”

They looked at each other, human to Reman, in silence. His face, caught half in and half out of the cone of light, held a complex mix of emotions that she could still not decipher. But, clearly, there were depths under consideration there.

“Come with me,” Janas said, waving her toward him.

He led her to the door, which opened with a hiss at his approach, and then beyond it into a darkened corridor. The same stale smell pervaded here, but there were fewer Remans than before. Janas led her on at a steady pace, his long stride matched by her own. As they walked, he said, “The governor assumed that the Romulan dissidents were the true threat, and killed many of their leaders in the initial hours of the battle. He was, of course, ultimately mistaken in his assessment.”

Muninn took this information in with a small nod. Then jerked her head toward a huddle of Reman civilians in one of the side corridors. “Are these refugees from the mining bases?”

“Correct,” Janas replied. “They were dying out there. No supplies, cut off completely. And this is not all. Some outposts were massacred by their Romulan guards, who then fled on whatever ships were available to them.”

Silent for the remainder of their walk, Muninn tried, and failed, to imagine the terror these people had been living under. And just as bad for those on the surface. An entire star system full of victims. The immensity of it shocked her, appalled her senses. How could something like this be allowed to happen?

Janas led them through another door and into a room filled with glowing panels, holographic screens, and two Remans in long civilian tunics who seemed to be collating data from the various displays. Janas waved them out and led Muninn to one of the consoles.

“This girl’s name, do you know it?”

She nodded, hope blossoming despite her pessamism and fear.

“Her full Romulan name?”

“Yes.”

“Enter it here,” he said, and tapped the console screen. An input pad appeared and Muninn, taking Janas’ place at the console, quickly typed in Asenth’s full name. The computer’s screen showed a circulating icon as it began to work.

“Their names are complex things, tied to family, location of birth, and more. If her family was known to the Governor, then his computers would have their name on file.”

Muninn looked over at him, surprised. “This was the Governor’s ship?”

“Indeed. It was his gift, from the old Romulan government, and the method by which he enacted total control over this system. It was by his torpedoes and disruptors that much of the damage to the towns and cities was done.”

“He turned them on the planet?” Muninn gaped, openly horrified. At his expression however, she flushed, feeling more the fool than she had in years. Yes, of course the Governor had turned his ship’s weapons on the planet. There was no shortage of men like that in history, people who would do anything to hang onto their dominance of others, with no blood price too high for their victory.

“How… how did you take it?”

Janas offered her one of his strange, toothy smiles. “How is it that your Federation saying goes? ‘You cannot Go alone, for a thousand fibers connect you with your fellow-men?’ Nothing good is ever gained in solitude. I served as head of the Reman servants in the Governor’s household. When the leaders of the Revolution needed someone on the inside, they came to me, and it was through me that they gained access to the many Romulan sympathizers in the lower classes of the household. I facilitated the exchange of information that made our dream of rebellion more than a passing fancy. If we had attempted it alone, without the aid of our Romulan brothers, we would have been annihilated. That support included the shield codes for this ship.”

“Then why aren’t you sitting in the command chair?” Muninn asked.

“Because I am not a military mind,” Janas said, “despite that I wear this armor. I am, I think you might say, a politician. There is a time for both in this revolution, and mine is soon to arrive.” He spoke with confidence, but Muninn felt certain that she heard some deeper dissonance within his tone. Worry. He must wonder if the military side will be willing to step back and relinquish its power when the time comes. And why would Hartresk ever choose to do that, now that he’s set himself up at the peak of this new hierarchy?

Muninn felt a tiredness creeping in at the thought of more violence that would inevitably come. All revolutions inevitably ended in a repetition of the same conditions that preceded them. Violence begat violence, no matter how pure the intentions for it were. Here, it seemed, as with everyone else in any history Muninn was aware of, the old pattern remained the same.

She saw Janas looking at her, but was spared having to reveal her thoughts by a beep from the computer. They peered at the console screen together. She struggled to read the Romulan characters, mouthing them out as she went, and Janas got to the point ahead of her.

“Your patient’s parents were marked for termination by the Governor’s guards,” he said. “They were subversives, working to help my people in their district, as well as others who wanted to overthrow the Governor’s control.” He glanced at her. “It says here that they were, indeed, killed during the opening hours of the battle. That would have been when this ship was still under the Governor’s control in orbit.”

Muninn stepped back a pace and nodded at the screen. “Would this count as proof for Hartresk?”

“That you are telling the truth about your mission here?”

She nodded.

“No.” He still looked at her in that vaguely uncomfortable way, his grayish features rendered shadowy in the dim light. “But proof would not convince Hartresk, regardless. He would not see Starfleet here, nor any other outside force. His goal is to keep Oumoren for Remans, and Remans alone, regardless of what the rest of Velorum decides.”

“And is that what you want? You said you worked alongside Romulans to secure this victory. Does Hartresk see any future for them in this brave new world he envisions for Remans, and Remans alone?”

Again, that barking laugh, that toothy grin. “Clever, Starfleet. You’re correct in your thinking. Which is to say: Hartresk is not the one you must convince. His lieutenants are. I would need to bring them irrefutable proof, something of a guarantee. And this would need to be the beginning of something larger, a downpayment, if you will, on certain promises from your Starfleet regarding acknowledgment of our right to self-rule.”

“I’m not a political officer,” Muninn said, “I told you before. I don’t have the sort of connections to make that possible.”

“But you and your crew would be able to bear witness. And your commanding officer, under these circumstances his word would carry with it the weight of at least a basic rule of law.”

“I suppose it would. Starfleet doesn’t make a point of interference, though. Regardless of what Hartresk thinks. We might recognize you, but what about the rest of the Velorum sector? I can’t make promises for any of them.”

“I would not ask them of you,” Janas said. “Merely your public word, while wearing that uniform. That, and the information you’ve given me, might be enough to change matters in my favor aboard this ship.”

And so it begins. The Revolution spins on. And who will win this time? The dream of peace, or the power of rage and war? Muninn looked Janas firmly in the eye, then extended her hand. “You have my word,” she said. 

“This way,” Janas said and motioned Muninn through the open door. She looked around. The room, gloomy and bare save for a chair-surrounded oval table emblazoned with the Romulan flag, must have once served as an officer’s briefing room. Likely one of many such rooms on the massive multipurpose warship.Around the table, seven lanky Remans watched her, their skin pale in the half-light, their dark eyes glittering. One of them, his face narrower than Janas’, with broader lips and low hung brow, stared at her before transferring an angry gaze to Janas.

“This is what you bring us? She’s a junior lieutenant! A medical doctor by her uniform. That’s not what we agreed upon.”

Janas motioned to an open seat, which Muninn took, silent. He then positioned himself at the nearest narrow end of the oval table, and leaned upon it, staring at his fellows. His gaze lingered especially long on the one who had spoken.

“You all know what is at stake. We agreed to meet for this very purpose, and because we have no other choice. There will be no better time for this than now, aboard this ship, while Hartresk is still far from his supporters on Stalx. If we return, we face another bloody war. More people dead. And if we act now, we might be able to save even Hartresk from himself. Is that not worth a little risk?”

“No, Kavouth is right,” said a slender Reman sitting across from Muninn. Given the softer features, the slight curving of torso and face, Muninn decided to classify her as a ‘she’. “We must be cautious first and brave second. It would be better to wait years than to act rashly, unless we are certain of our facts.” Her eyes flickered to Muninn for just a moment. “What of Hartresk’s claim that this one is an Intelligence officer for the Starfleet?”

Janas quickly shook his head. “I understand, Revasin, that this seems a risk. But, I am convinced Muninn Musgrave is not a spy.” He worked, then, through the proof he had gathered, and Muninn looked covertly around the assembled Remans as he spoke. She saw not one glimmer of trust in their faces, not a flicker of relaxation. 

They’re not buying it. Whatever coup they all agreed needed to take place to dethrone Hartresk, clearly nothing made them more afraid than the thought of once more being under the thumb of a foreign power. How could the Federation be so deeply misunderstood? It occurred to Muninn that, for all she had seen of the galaxy, for all that she had tried to better broaden her understanding of the incredibly diverse peoples in the universe, she still carried preconceptions with her that were as deeply ingrained as the autonomic function of breath itself. She brought herself back to the present moment as the Reman named Kavouth again chimed in.

“That her story is self-consistent does not equal proof!” said another Reman, seated nearby. “You know how these people operate, Janas. We’ve dealt with the likes of the Tal’Shiar too long to be taken in by clever stories and computer fictions.”

“Starfleet is not the same as the Tal’Shiar,” Janas said, the slimmest hint of frustration working its way into his voice.

“I think,” Kavouth continued, speaking over him, “that you are so desperate to supplant Hartresk you would be willing to risk nearly anything. I think this is pride at work, not the good of the revolution at all.”

“Pride!?” Janas slammed his fist onto the table, his face contorted with sudden rage. “Is it pride that you feel, Kavouth, seeing our people turn upon one another for scraps? Is it with pride that you observe Hartresk drag us down this path of never-ending violence?”

“Violence is necessary,” said another Reman seated next to Revasin. “Violence is how we arrived here,” he gestured at the walls of the room. “In command of a Warbird. Free from the shackles of the Governor and his Empire.”

But, next to him, Revasin looked suddenly troubled. “We did not accomplish this through violence alone. Nor, even, simply as a Reman revolution.”Her words were quiet, contemplative, and they drew all eyes toward her better than a shout would have done. She stared at the tabletop, her clawed fingers intertwining in her lap, betraying the inner motion of her mind. Janas nodded slowly, his face lightening, but the Reman next to her raised a curious brow.

“What do you mean?”

“Think!” she said, more hotly. “Ghathan, your parents would have been killed last year if not for whom?” The one named Ghathan stiffened, made a little noise of discomfort. And Revasin offered him a sour smile, which she then turned on the others. “Who among us could have done this without the aid of our Romulan brothers and sisters, those who, like us, were exploited by the Governor?”

“Exactly!” Janas said, interjecting before anyone else could speak. “The Tal’Shiar could only survive within the fog of fear they created. The Empire thrived on the destruction of class identity. Romulan again Romulan, and Romulan against Reman. We proved that it could be changed, overcome. We proved that the Governor’s control, and that of his agents, was not infallible. And we did it alongside people that Hartresk would happily see starved and murdered simply for the shape of their features and the color of their skin.”

“Now, see here…” Kavouth started, but Janas stopped him with a raised hand.

“I am not saying that Hartresk is at all times wrong. Without his expertise on the field, we would have surely failed in all our goals. But this is more than vengeance, more than open war. We are trying to build a new government to replace the old. We are trying to create an Oumoren that operates by a code of ethical law. A law that we choose.”

A moment of silence followed this, with all present clearly considering his and Revasin’s words. But it was Revasin herself who broke it, a moment later.

“We still need proof,” she said, her eyes on Janas. “There are too many, here on this ship, who follow Hartresk. The Federation may or may not have the same goals that Hartresk believes it does, but until we have proof that their plans for us are not those of yet another colonial force, can we truly expect any to trust them?”

“We also need the Federation’s acknowledgment,” Janas shot back. “Without it, we cannot make ourselves a legitimate entity in this region. We need… allies. Something Hartresk does not understand!”

But Revasin merely shrugged with her hands. Her dark gaze shifted to Muninn. “Starfleet, what proof would you offer our people? Knowing what you know, having heard what you have heard, how would you convince us of your word? Of your government’s intent?”

Muninn breathed in, then out, deliberately pacing herself. On instinct, she stood, hands behind back at parade rest, hoping that she looked more calm and earnest than she felt. The atmosphere in the room flowed with a palpable tension. Fear, anger… so much rode on what she said next, and how she said it as well.“I understand that you mistrust the Federation,” she began slowly, “and from what I know of your situation, were I in your place, I would mistrust us as well. I would mistrust any outsider that came with an open hand because I’d be used to the other hand holding a knife. I’ve explained to Janas that I am not a political officer… I can’t speak for the Federation when it comes to diplomatic policy. But I am a Starfleet officer, and that means I am bound by certain oaths. Of those, one of the most important is the oath of non-interference. Hartresk believes that I am some sort of agent for Starfleet Intelligence, and maybe some of you do as well. But even if I were, it would be against every principle of the Federation to act against your people in any way, unless you were considering acts of violence against the Federation itself. Our respect for other cultures is paramount, and our desire to help regions stabilize themselves, through their own self-governance, is likewise fundamental to everything we believe. If you bring Commander Allan in, he’ll tell you the same thing. And he has the rank and privilege to deal with you as an official member of Starfleet. To give you at least some of the assurances you seek.”

She opened and closed her sweaty palms at her sides, as if to massage the tension out of the air. Around the table, half-a-dozen pairs of Reman eyes glittered.Then, Janas spoke. “Proof. There is a type of proof that would be undeniable.” When he said this, he looked directly at Revasin. Her eyes widened in apparent understanding.

Muninn looked back and forth between them. “What is it? What can I do?”

Revasin sighed, then slowly stood. The Reman woman was just as tall as her male counterparts, with the same powerful, lanky build. She stalked around the table, coming to stand next to Muninn.

“There are some within my people who retain the Vulcan genes required for telepathic communication,” she said, her voice low. “I am… one such individual. What Janas speaks of is a bonding, a link between myself and you, in which I would conjure your memories and live them alongside you. I would be able to walk with you and seek the subterfuge my comrades,” she shot a glance at Kavouth, “still so greatly fear.”

“Why didn’t you do this when you first took us?”

“Because such a link is extremely dangerous, especially for you. And because to walk in another’s memories without agreement is both extremely difficult and… profane. It requires your acceptance. I would need to be allowed in to the most private and intimate corners of your mind.”

As Revasin spoke, Muninn’s breath quickened as she took in the meaning of the words. Her mind flashed to a dozen petty secrets, personal matters, private yearnings, that she would rather keep secret. And then to the bigger ones, the truth of who she was, a truth that could see her life in Starfleet ruined—and the lives of her parents as well. The secret of a Romulan teenager, hiding in the Mogrus with orders foolishly given to try and signal for aid.

The decision ahead of her so completely overwhelmed her that, for a long moment, Muninn could do absolutely nothing but sit and look up into Revasin’s hard, if not unsympathetic eyes. Muninn’s own gaze swelled with tears, driven up from some deep place, a primordial fear, perhaps, of having her myriad darknesses and failures publicly exposed.

But, for all that, what choice was there? None, she answered herself. No choice at all. And so, she nodded, blinked back the water in her eyes, and swallowed the lump that formed in her throat. “Okay.”

“You accept this?” Revasin said, and something of a surprised tone entered her voice.

Muninn gazed up at her and nodded again, more certainly this time. “I do. If this is the proof you need, this is the proof I’ll give. All I ask is that you look deeply, and see everything as I have seen it.”

Revasin gave a little nod of acknowledgment, then looked at her fellows around the table. “Is this acceptable?”

Not all of them looked completely swayed, and Kavouth’s mouth was a hard line beneath stormy eyes, but no objections were sounded. Janas, though, did not look relieved. He stared across the table at Muninn, clearly troubled, and she found herself wondering what, exactly, it was that she had signed herself up for.

“What do I need to do?” she asked, looking up at Revasin.

“Open your mind to me. Hold nothing back. And remember to breathe.” Without further preamble, Revasin reached out and gripped the sides of Muninn’s head in her long fingers. Her skin was warm, belying the clammy look of her off-white skin, but her long nails pricked Muninn’s skin like razors where they touched.

For a long moment, nothing happened, and Muninn merely looked up into the Reman woman’s impassive face, waiting. The first sign that something was happening came as a background sensation, like an ant walking across the bare skin of her shoulder blades. The vague sense that something was wrong.

In the part of Muninn’s mind that held her medical training, the facts of the experience played out like a textbook’s passage on telepathy. She knew that the electrical signals of her brain were being both received and communicated through an incredibly complex set of electrical nerve points throughout the Reman’s skin. Within Revasin’s brain, the specially-adapted sensory organ responsible for controlling the bridged patterns of their two independent brains was swelling with blood and chemicals as it flared to life, acting almost as the bridge between a human brain’s two hemispheres.

She knew all of this, and knew that she knew it. But, surrounding that textbook knowledge, undermining it, was an overwhelming sense of the alien. It was as if she were standing, naked and alone, in a vast dark cave, and something in the blackness was moving closer to her frozen form, closer and closer, pressing itself against her and invading through her very pores.

“Breathe,” Revasin commanded.

Muninn took a breath. The room disappeared.

***

Muninn stood next to a hospital bed that she recognized, dimly. A sense of disassociation flowed through her, of déjà vu, but somehow keener. She should be in the bed, that much she knew. But someone already lay there, sleeping. A young girl with bright red hair.

“This was your third year of life?”

Muninn started. Revasin stood beside her, calm, looking down at the girl in the bed. She looked up into the Reman’s eyes and nodded. “Yes. An Illyrian colony outside Federation control.”

“Illyrians practice genetic augmentation, do they not?”

Muninn felt her stomach twist. It was as if she were falling, only her feet were planted on the ground. Revasin reached out and touched her arm, and the connection seemed to restore her sense of balance.

“Your mind is rejecting the connection.”

“I’m not trying to.”

“You’ve been hiding this for a long time,” Revasin said, her voice calm. “It is reflexive for you that this should be a secret. You have become used to living with a lie.”

Muninn stared at the girl in the bed. Me. She remembered the horrible pain that cut like heated knives through the fibers of her nerves. An arthritic ache beneath that searing fire. The knowledge that, even with the best treatments available, her limbs would slowly twist and deform as her body contorted in upon itself, her immune system destroying its own body in a violent attempt to survive.

Then, suddenly, the room dissolved as if made of smoke, then flickered back again in a series of images like a manic holodeck program flicked off and on around them. Only Revasin’s hand on her arm remained true and solid as the world changed.

The young girl, screaming for her mother.

Body encased in restraints, needles plunging deep into every vein. The horrible, impossible pain.

The tank that she had floated in. She saw it from the outside now. A chrome coffin filled with liquid, the little red-haired girl inside floating as beams of radiation were fired into her skin and bones. 

Injections, treatments, hyposprays: row after row of faceless doctors visiting, nurses speaking sentences that were merely disorganized strings of sound.And then the images stopped, and they were standing somewhere else. Not the bright, sterile landscape of the hospital at all, but someplace altogether different. Not yet familiar, but surrounded by the touches of her own hands.

Revasin and Muninn looked across to the middle of the room, to the teenage girl perched on the chair, and the red-headed woman sitting on the couch across from her. My office, Muninn realized, looking around at her new professional space on Starbase Bravo, so different from the small offices she’d inhabited on her previous posting.

“They died,” the Asenth said. “The Remans killed them all.”

At this, Revasin’s grip did tighten, and Muninn felt dizzy once again, unmoored.

“What is this?” asked the Reman telepath, glaring at Muninn with lidded eyes.

“The case that brought me here. Her name is…”

“Asenth,” Revasin said, eyes widening.

Before them, the scene seemed to skip forward in time, but Muninn’s mind made sense of it: she knew the conversation, remembered her words of consolation even as she remembered her own sudden fire to do something, anything, to help Asenth survive.

And then Revasin was pulling her around, face-to-face, her eyes grave. “She’s on your ship!”

“She would have been killed.”

The Reman stared at her in horror as everything Muninn remembered from the battle crossed the link between them, becoming shared memories for both.

“You asked a child to do that?”

“I thought there wasn’t any other choice.”

“You thought that we were monsters.”

“I didn’t know.”

Through their connection, Muninn felt a sudden backwash of emotion, a great tide of misery that the Reman could not contain. Hatred, yes. But also pity, and grief, and love, and joy. Here was a sentient being like any other, possessed of feelings, needs, hopes, and cares. For just a moment, Muninn saw Revasin as she saw herself: an isolated, lonely figure, taunted and brutalized by everyone around her. Not just Romulans, but her own kind as well.

Then the connection stabilized as Revasin gasped and forced the flood of memories closed.

“Why?” Muninn asked, as the landscape around them once more floated into a hazy, white fog.

“Because those in pain will always seek to turn that pain around, to cause others the pain and shame that they themselves have been subjected to.” The Reman’s words were strange, halting, ephemeral. For a moment, Muninn was uncertain if she were looking at Revasin’s face or Adeyemi’s. She could so easily picture the dark crow’s feet at the edges of her mentor’s eyes, the sad smile.

Then, all at once, Revasin’s voice seemed to flutter all around her like a million butterfly wings, a soft thunder that shook the air. “Something is wrong!” 

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. 

The word echoed like the strike of some colossal gong.

And Muninn cried out as the connection between the broke. 

A pain, just behind her eyes, momentarily blinded her, and a horrible sense of isolation flowed into her, as air fills a sudden vacuum, rushing in. She doubled over, her nose bleeding, her heart wrenched with a loneliness she could not describe.

The sound of an alarm screeched through the air, shattering the calm of the room. The Remans were all on their feet, and Janas was at the open door, speaking with another Reman in the hallway beyond.

Revasin still held Muninn’s arm. However, though her grip was firm, it was not harsh.

“What… what’s happened?” Munin managed to ask.

It was Janas who answered, rounding on her. “Your ship,” he said with a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Your ship appears to have launched a distress beacon, despite there being not a single member of your crew left on board.” 

“What… what’s happened?” Munin managed to ask.It was Janas who answered, rounding on her. “Your ship,” he said with a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Your ship appears to have launched a distress beacon, despite there being not a single member of your crew left on board.”

“Would you like to explain, or should I?” Revasin said, with a hard glance at Muninn.

Muninn, staunching her bloody nose on her uniform sleeve, waved at the Reman telepath. Better to have it all come from her mouth anyway, that had been the whole point of letting her mind by pried open like a can of fish.

Revasin made remarkably quick work of everything she had gleaned, including Asenth’s presence on the Mogrus. Unexpectedly, the Remans seemed to take universal umbrage with her decision to involve a child in a dangerous situation. This did nothing to quiet her own guilt at having involved Asenth.

“We take care of the young quite seriously,” was all Janas said when he saw the  expression on Muninn’s face. Her scientist’s mind gave Muninn a background flurry of suppositions as to why this would be the case: dangerous living conditions, socialized group dynamics, some other and unseen force between the oft-telepathic species?

“And they haven’t found her yet?”

“No,” Janas said. “She’s eluded the boarding party and stirred up quite the hive. Hartresk is furious. That beacon took off at warp and started broadcasting a wideband signal to half the sector.”

Muninn nodded. Once piece of good news. She still felt queasy from both the mind probe and her sudden shock of fear over Asenth, but at least no longer felt like she might vomit.

And, regardless, Revasin’s testimony had otherwise done the trick. She had found no trace of Hartresk’s feared conspiracy in Muninn’s mind, which seemed to cement the notion that Hartresk’s wild paranoia was likely to do the revolution more harm than good. Through the splitting headache she had acquired, Muninn gathered that the rest of the Reman lieutenants were all swayed against him at last. They are all so afraid. She could feel it more strongly, now that she had come to spend time with them. Even after such little time as this, they were growing clearer to her: their mannerisms and expressions still seen as through a fog, yet visible now as more than alien shapes detached from all reality. For all that they were a hard species, with a visage to haunt the dreams of children, they were no less emotional beings than any Vulcan, human, or… Romulan. Muninn saw, then, how the rough tales she had heard, of Remans as an offshoot of the early Vulcan colonizers, might have some shred of truth. Three apparently distinct species, grown so different, yet not as disparate as appearances made seem.

And isn’t that just the way it’s always been? Different cultures, different colors of skin, and beneath it all: the similarities that should bind us, overlooked?

The rest of the Mogrus crew was reunited in the conference room with Muninn shortly thereafter, while the Reman conspirators dispersed to begin their coup. Allan, when he learned the details of the events that had transpired, looked grave, and sat at the conference table for a long time.

“This is an internal affair,” he finally said, his steely gaze piercing Muninn like an arrow. Maria and Shavar were conspicuously silent at the other end of the table.

Muninn felt a sudden wish that Lish could be there, though Janas had said that the Bolian was still in the ship’s infirmary, being treated by a trusted medic for his wounds. Beneath Allan’s bright gaze, Muninn felt very much alone.

“I know it’s not policy…” she began.

“No,” he cut her off, “it’s very far from policy.” He leaned forward on the table, placing his weight on his elbows, and continued to stare at her across steepled fingers. “There is much that you learn, when you are preparing to take on the role of a commanding officer. The duties responsible in the position mean that you are the person responsible for making these sorts of decisions in the field. It requires… it requires a philological mind, a mind capable of both logical and almost theological thought.” He sighed. “Which is, perhaps, one reason I have never sought command as actively as some of my peers. I can see the requirements, I know what they are, and that is a weight that I have been reluctant to accept on my own.”

“I wouldn’t, I mean…” Muninn started, then cut off her explanation. It felt sour on her suddenly dry tongue. “I understand that this will need to be marked in my permanent record, Sir. But I do believe that I handed the situation as well as I could, under the circumstances. Their worries hinged on me, on Hartresk’s belief that I was the agent of yet another foreign power, come to force their course of action. I tried to get them to speak with you instead.”

He nodded, slowly, still watching her coolly. “A belief that I still don’t fully comprehend.”

She stood on fragile ground, she knew it, and hesitated fractionally to gather her words. So much could be undone in so little a span of time. Not just my career, but my parents’ as well. The thought utterly chilled her. “When I killed those two Reman soldiers, the ones who boarded us… wehn I did that, I think I became more important in Hartresk’s eyes. These people have codes of conduct that I’m not certain of, beliefs about violence that respect strength and confrontation.

And, I think that Hartresk is unstable. His fears are grounded in reality, but the rest of him isn’t. It’s part of the reason his lieutenants are all turning against him now. They were just waiting for some chance, some excuse. Janas, certainly, recognizes the need to at least have the Federation’s recognition, even if they want to remain otherwise independent. Hartresk just sees more enemies.”Allan made a small noise of agreement, then looked at his two officers. “Ward, Maria? We won’t be alone for much longer to deliberate. I need some thoughts on this.”

Shavar looked at Maria, clearly unwilling to add his own voice to the discussion. But Maria Matsumoto took the question in stride, expression neutral yet firm.

“There was not a better way for these things to unfold, and now that they have unfolded in such a way, it seems clear that we must follow the flow.” She nodded at the closed door. “Remans have no reason to trust Starfleet or the Federation, let alone the other Romulan-centered factions that have been arising throughout Velorum. It is poor luck, pure and simple, that saw us land in this position. We must make the best choices available to us from this point on.”

Muninn felt a wave of gratitude toward the engineer, though she had no doubt that Maria’s words were the woman’s earnest appraisal of the situation. Allan seemed to think so, too, however, for he made a little noise of agreement and some of the tension in his shoulders relaxed as he leaned back in his chair. 

“What about this Romulan girl,” he said after a moment. “You noticed her life signs during the battle, but didn’t say anything?”

“I wasn’t sure what would happen to her if they found her,” Muninn said truthfully. “We were being listened to, at the least. I think I can trust Janas and these others not to hurt her, but Hartresk?”

“I suppose,” Allan said after a moment said, “this could also be considered good cause to explore our own security procedures aboard the Mogrus. How in the hells did your patient make it aboard my ship?” He said this without rancor, purely bemused.

“I suppose,” he said, “this could also be considered good cause to explore our own security procedures aboard the Mogrus. How in the hells did your patient make it aboard my ship?” He said this without rancor, purely bemused.

“Think I got an answer there,” Shavar said. He sat a little straighter under their combined gaze. “We beamed the whole cargo allotment up, right? All in one go to avoid triggering any second glances from the automated system or Bravo security when we grabbed the lieutenants.”

A spark of understanding flashed on Allan’s face. “Bloody hell, of course…”

“Right,” Shavar said. “She hid away in a container marked as biological material, and we’d already gathered two unexpected lifeforms. The system alerted us to that, but nothing else would have looked especially out of the ordinary. End of the week, I would have caught it when I went over the logs for my report, but until then…”

“She was free and clear to roam the access ducts,” Allan said. Muninn felt certain that she heard a note of appreciation in his voice. “Well, good. One less mystery. But we’re going to need to act quickly when we’re back on board. I don’t trust coups, they usually go wrong, and we’ve got a civilian to think about now as well.”

“Janas went to secure us passage,” Muninn reminded him. “Once we’re safely back on the Mogrus, we’ll be able to warp out while they make their move against Hartresk’s loyalists.”

At that moment, the door swished open, and the three humans turned to see Janas himself standing in the doorway. He beckoned to them. “Come, we’ve made the necessary preparations. Hartresk left the bridge for some reason, there’s no better time than right now to get you back to your ship without him being able to act.” 

Muninn walked alongside the rest of the Mogrus’ crew at a fast clip, flanked by Janas and three Remans loyal to the coup. The path to the nearest transporter room was a winding one that took them through some of the more populated corridors, and curious gazes twinkled out at the trio of humans as they passed. They were so poor in spirit, so worn through, that Muninn wondered how any of them could sit so quietly. They were refugees, slaves barely free from their chains, and yet these Remans bore a dignity, even in the midst of all their suffering, that one could simply feel.

She thought back to her history lessons: there were times in her own people’s history that saw the same sort of darkness, the same sort of terror. The slow grind into World War Three — a war that, even before the nukes started falling, took the lives of hundreds of thousands and saw millions displaced from their homes.

And before that, the earlier troubles of the 21st-century, the rampant runaway capitalism that created so much horror… and sowed the seeds for the philosophies that would one day underpin the Federation itself: socialism, mutual-aid, destruction of class as a determiner of success and wellbeing. It struck Muninn that these Remans reminded her a little of the people she’d seen in old films about the Bell Riots back on Earth. A people trod upon, weary, used to pain as a matter of course, but still strong. No, it’s more than that. The thought came as she saw a Reman child peering out from around its parent. They’re not just strong, they’re unbroken. As a people, they’ve somehow maintained a sense of self, against all odds.

“Here,” Janas said, breaking into Muninn’s ponderings. They had arrived at the transporter room.

Their guards ushered them inside, and two waited outside the door to fend off any approach. Muninn was pleased to see Lish, still unconscious and strapped into a floating medical pallet, already positioned nearby. Janas went immediately to the console that stood facing the raised circular transporter platform and began programming in their return to the Mogrus.

“How long before you begin?” Muninn asked.

“It’s already started,” Janas replied without looking up. “The duty shift is about to change, and our people have all been assigned to key positions. We’ll take engineering, then the bridge. Hartresk’s friends are devout, but few.”

A faint hint of sadness in Janas’ voice did not go unnoticed, and Muninn suddenly wondered how many of Hartresk’s friends were likewise dear to Janas. In a society as close-knit as this, could any Reman raise a weapon upon another without threatening a friend, or at least someone known? No faceless coup, this. She thought. Perhaps that would make some difference in the end.

The others moved Lish’s prone form up onto the transporter and lowered it to the ground before switching off the medical pallet’s repulsors, which couldn’t be allowed to interfere with the function of the transporter. Then they positioned themselves on the remaining circular transporter pads. Muninn joined them, and found Janas’ looking up at them. No, not at them, she realized. At her. She found herself in sudden awe of the trust he was placing in her, for all Revasin’s exploration of her mind.

“When you arrive on your ship, you must leave immediately,” Janas said. “We will not have control of the bridge, and that means they will still have full weapons and flight control. Disabling those from engineering will take time, and the bridge of a Warbird is designed to be difficult to take by force.”

Allan gave the Reman a small, informal salute. “Hat’s off to you.”

Janas cocked his head to one side.

“Old human saying,” Allan said with a small smile. “I can’t promise to know what Starfleet will decide to do, but know that you’ve got my full support when I speak to command.”

“That’s all I can ask,” Janas said. He pressed the control.

A vague fuzziness overtook Muninn as the system activated, storing her pattern of atoms and electrons in perfect frozen harmony, then reconstituting them through subspace and toward their destination. She was strangely aware of the process as it began and ended. Aware enough to realize, microseconds before full re-materializing on the Mogrus, that something was very wrong.

Fully materialized in the Mogrus’ transporter room, they were not alone.

“Well,” said Hartresk with a cold grin, like the eternal smile of a shark, “it seems that the rumors about betrayal were right after all. Who was it? Revasin? Kanast? Never mind, we’ll find them soon enough.”

He stood, pointing a disruptor at them with one hand, flanked by two large Remans similarly armed. And, next to Hartresk: Asenth. Hartresk’s other hand was clasped around the back of her neck, his long talon-like nails tensed at the smooth and vulnerable flesh of her throat. The teen stared at Muninn with wide, utterly terrified eyes.

Allan was the first to speak. “I assume you are Hartresk?” 

It amazed Muninn that the commander’s voice could remain so steady, beneath such a sudden threat as this. She remembered his speech about command and thought she now understood what he had meant. A captain needed to be more than ordinary. Needed to see the world in a different sort of light, and not even — but especially — when faced with the threat of death.

“Starfleet,” Hartresk said. The sneer on his face showed his pointed teeth. “Surprised to see your Romulan saboteur caught so easily?” He gave Asenth a little shake, actually lifting the teen off the ground so that she dangled and flopped like a fish. She gasped, clutched at his hand, but the Reman’s strength far outmatched her.

“That’s not a saboteur,” Allan said. He stepped off the transporter pad and, guided by some subtle instinct, Muninn did the same. The weapons pointed at them jerked up, aggression taut behind the movement.

“Stop!” yelled one of the two Reman guards.

But Muninn understood why Allan had taken the risk. No easy way to beam them back now. They were all in the room together. Tension flooded the air like gas, a miasma through which all sound and light seemed subtly affected, as if slowed.

“Captain,” Muninn said, gripped by the tension, and an overwhelming realization that Hartresk would undoubtedly kill all of them right then and there if given any choice. “It’s over. We should give it all up.”

She saw Shavar and Maria glance her way, and Allan shot her one swift, probing look. But he must have understood because he gave a little nod, then sighed.

“Right,” he turned back to Hartresk. “You wanted proof that Starfleet Intelligence has been working to undermine you? Well, we’re it.”

Hartresk’s eyes widened. The triumph there was palpable. “You admit this freely?”

“It’s Starfleet policy to never let our own wellbeing stand in the way of protecting civilian life.” Allan nodded meaningfully toward Asenth as he said this.Hartresk glanced at the girl, and for one horrible moment Muninn saw his long fingers clench tighter. The teen gasped, choking for air, her face growing darker as she struggled in his grip. But then the fingers unclenched, and he let her go, shoving her into the grip of one of the guards.

“A civilian? I think you need to stop lying, captain. You’re not good at it. You wouldn’t risk your lives for one Romulan girl. Who is she, then? Some Agent of the Tal’Shiar? Is that what this is? A combined mission by the Romulans and Starfleet Intelligence?” His words had a probing, alert quality, but one riddled with an almost ecstatic security. He knew he was right, and everything they said and did only confirmed it. “Get back on the transporter pad, Starfleet,” he said with a waggle of his disruptor. “We’ll speak at length when we’re back on board. And this time, I’ll have Janas use the toys the Romulans left behind. We’ll get to the core of things then, most certainly.”

Which was the point when Lish’s medical pallet rose suddenly six feet into the air.

Unknown to the others, transport had woken the Bolian from sleep. He’d lain there, as still as he could, barely breathing, while the Reman warlord gloated before them. Only one part of him moved—his fingers—as he slowly inched his hand toward the pallet’s repulsor controls. 

The Reman guard not holding Asenth swore as the pallet hummed up over their heads and fired a wild shot that went wide, smacking into the far wall of the transporter alcove and burning a four-centimeter hole in the alloy. Shavar and Maria dived for cover, narrowly missing being hit by a second blast from the same guard—more green jets leaving blackened marks across the room. The second guard had started to raise his weapon to cover the others but, with a shriek of alarm, found Asenth’s teeth buried down to the bone in his hand. He clubbed her over the head, sending the girl to her knees, but at almost the same moment Allan had flung himself bodily across the room. The Lieutenant-Commander crashed into the guard and sent them both sprawling on the ground.

It would have all come to nothing if Hartresk made not made one mistake. 

The Reman warrior had held off firing at the pallet, but had still pulled his weapon towards it as it moved. Then, when Allan dived across the room, Hartresk had been startled enough to take his eye off Muninn. Just that: a single moment of distraction, nothing more.

It was all she needed. Muninn grabbed his hand, the one holding the disruptor, and squeezed with every bit of power her augmented muscles could muster.

She was rewarded by a high-pitched and plaintive wail from the Remann as bones snapped beneath the pressure of her grip. And she went on squeezing, hard as she could, fueled by adrenaline and rage and fear, and Hartresk’s fingers turned to jelly as she ground them into the unyielding chassis of the weapon that he held.

He swung with his other hand, clawing at her face. A white-hot pain tore through her whole head as he landed his blow. But as she fell back, Hartresk also dropped the disruptor from his ruined hand, eyes wide with sudden fear. Around him, things were going poorly.

Shavar had retrieved a phaser from the locker beneath the transporter console. A beam of brilliant orange, plasma and electricity hissing as it cooked the air, smacked into the still-standing Reman guard. Meanwhile, Allan and Maria were grappling the second, barely managing, together, to keep the lanky warrior down.

Muninn reeled away from the blow she’d been struck, coming up just in time to see Hartresk take two steps forward onto the transporter panel. With his still-good hand, he pulled a device from a clip on his belt and pressed a button there. His eyes blazed with hatred as he began to dematerialize. That gaze met Muninn’s, and held it until he was completely gone, and Muninn knew that if he could bring death to them, and to everything they held dear, he would do so happily and call it justice in the end.

The fight ended quickly after that. Shavar stunned the second Reman, and Lish, who had dived for cover as the pallet rose into the air, volunteered to take Asenth to the medical bay. The teen was bleeding from a nasty contusion on her head, tears spilling from her eyes.

“No, I’ll take her, you’ve got more bridge experience than I do,” Muninn said. “They’ll need you up there.”

And so, while the others ran off toward the lift and the bridge, Muninn lifted Asenth and carried her to the medical bay on her own, ignoring the blood that trickled down the side of her face from her own wounds.

Blearily, the young Romulan looked up at her, eyes hazy. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was weak, distant. “I tried to do what you told me.”

No other words could have wounded Muninn so deeply. The pain she felt, hearing them, struck her more deeply than any blow Hartresk could have ever achieved. Looking down at her charge through a sudden sheen of her own tears, Muninn could only shake her head. “No… hush… you were incredible. You did just fine.”

This seemed to be what Asenth needed to hear because she shuddered and closed her eyes, pulling in close to Muninn’s body. The girl felt suddenly heavier in Munnin’s arms as all the tension flowed from her, leaving her limp. Still breathing, but flown from consciousness for at least a time. And Muninn, alone in consciousness save for her own pain and shame, carried the teen into the medical room and placed her on the biobed. And, while she worked the medical controls, the blissful automation of her training ruled, and allowed her conscious mind slunk into the background to lick its sour wounds.

The lights in the medical bay flickered just as Muninn finished running the dermal regenerator over Asenth’s wound.

A nasty blow, but ultimately superficial. Asenth blinked up from where she sat on the edge of the biobed at the momentary darkness and gripped Muninn’s arm. Muninn held the girl close and listened. There: the telltale shudder in the deck plating. Kinetic vibrations as the ship’s hull responded to the energetic stresses of the shield, the emitters taxed to bursting by some distant onslaught.

“Are they attacking?” Asenth asked. She did not sound afraid, for all that her eyes were wide as shadowed moons. But it was this itself, the sheer neutrality of her tone, that let Muninn know just how far the girl was into a state of panicked shock. To have gone through everything she did back on Oumoren, only to have it repeated with such intimacy here… it made Muninn’s heartache to think of it. 

“Yes,” Muninn said. She wanted to be cautious, to say as little as possible: to lie, even. But she did not because she owed Asenth at least her own full measure of reality, as an anchor to stem the tide she could see lapping at the girl’s mental walls. Truth and trust. Sometimes, in life, you were left with little else.

“Will they get us?”

“Shavar is an incredible pilot, Allan is smart, and this is a hard ship to hit. Combat in space is either about staying close enough to hit the broadside of the metaphorical barn, or else stay back and let sensors do all the target locking.” She was rambling, her evasion obvious. But Asenth just nodded. And then, slowly, the teen leaned forward on the biobed and rested her head on Muninn’s chest. And Muninn, as tenderly as she could manage, medical instrument still clutched in one hand, wrapped her arms around the girl and rocked her silently as the deck shivered from yet another strained impact.

***

“Evase pattern Delta-Sigma-Seven! Cut all power from phaser emitters and open the torpedo bay!” Allan’s commands were clear bells in the singed Bridge air.

“Sir!” Shavar acknowledged, while his fingers danced across the controls.

“Two more misses,” Lish called out from the tactical display. The Bolian had recovered enough, clearly, to handle his duties under the circumstances, but very nearly wished he were still in medically-induced coma and thus blissfully unaware of the trial for their lives presently underway. “Countermeasures are working, for now.”

Maria had returned to the engineering section, and was no-doubt furiously working to keep their little ship together for as long as she could. 

“Are we going to fire on them, Sir?” Shavar asked, with a glance back at his captain.

Allan, who grasped the arms of his command chair with white knuckles, frowned. This was the sort of moment that changed lives. Ripples from what he did here could spread throughout the sector, even the galaxy. In his mind, he saw the Remans filling the warbird’s corridors. How many? Hundreds? Thousands? And against all that life, the crew beneath his charge, facing down a madman bent upon revenge. Allan held no illusion that Hartresk shared similar deliberations. To the Reman revolutionary, Starfleet was just another enemy to be destroyed. A continuation of the same Imperial violence that he had struggled beneath his entire life. And, in the mind of someone like that, any risk—any sacrifice—could easily be approved. The grim accounting of the righteous and the holy: all lives in service to the ideal, to the dream.

“No,” Allan said. “But we might not need to.” The right arm of the command chair bore a holographic touch panel, which he now flipped open. Various small screens flowed up in a blue haze, offering him a full picture of the ship’s status. He pressed his finger into the area and watched as a new line of information emerged.

“Torpedo bay is open,” Lish called out, “but we’d have to place them all in a very small section of their shields to break through, I don’t know if the computer can handle that at more than fifty or sixty kilometers, and even then, they might have countermeasures…”

“Ready five torpedoes and program in a yield of one-hundred percent, with a proximity fuse of seven meters from shield detection,” Allan said.

Lish looked around, gaping. “You want me to blow them up before they hit?”

“Just do it, man!” Allan yelled, losing some of his cool. Their own shields were falling dangerously low, despite the added energy flow from the now-offline phaser banks. “I’m not going to try to destroy a ship full of kids, dammit. We’ve got to be clever. Shavar, as soon as those torpedoes blow, I want you to give us a one-point-one second burst of warp. Course, nine-seven-seven, mark seventeen.”

“That would put us right next to them!” Shavar, though his tone betrayed no small amount of anxiety at this prospect, was already setting the command. Good man, Allan thought. The pilot really was as good as Allan had hoped he would be.

“Right behind them, actually,” Allan said. “Once they veer to avoid the continuing volley, and keep their shields intact. Lish, how’s it looking?”

“Ready!” cried the Bolian.

“Fire!”

On the viewscreen, half a dozen bright red globes burst from their position and arced toward the Warbird. Then, brilliant flashes as the first exploded. Their camera angle veered along with the Mogrus, as the little ship angled toward its new trajectory. Then the stars and the warship both seemed to stretch momentarily as the photons were bent around the little ship’s suddenly stabilized warp field. Then, like a rubber band snapping back into place, everything settled; the stars were once more distant pinpricks, and their view of the warship now saw them looking back at the rear of its warp nacelles.

Green light lanced out at them from a disruptor point along the warbird’s sleek spine, but they easily evaded the beam. The much larger ship, with its incredible mass putting it at a disadvantage against the nimble Mogrus, could not bring its forward weapons to bear now.

“Can’t… keep this up… forever,” Shavar said. His voice sounded strained as he manually adjusted the evasive pattern based on the slow movements of their adversary.

“We don’t have to,” Allan said. He hoped fervently that he was right. “Just long enough for the conspirators to sort themselves…”

“Sir!” Lish’s panicked shout brought Allan around. “There’s another ship coming in. They’re a friendly!”

Allan looked back to the viewscreen, which now focused in on a Starfleet light cruiser emerging from a blur of high warp several-thousand kilos out from the action, just within the limit of their firing range. Twin beams of brilliant umber shone in the blackness as the cruiser opened fire on the Romulan ship, the phaser energy pouring across the Warbird’s shields in a great crackling storm.

Allan felt his heart sink at the sight. He snapped his fingers at Lish. “Get me a line to that ship!”

“Can’t,” Lish called back, “the Romulans are filling the subspace bands with interference.”

“Then get me a damn radio signal!” Allan shouted. “I don’t care!”

The Wardbird lumbered slowly toward its new antagonist, disruptors firing staccato bursts of viridian. A newer model D’deridex would have been more than a match for the smaller Federation vessel, but the Reman’s captured warship had not been refitted in decades—if ever. Allan watched, horrified, as a quantum torpedo left the Starfleet vessel and slammed into the D’deridex’s shield’s causing them to flicker dangerously.

“Salvation, your time is shit,” he muttered to the bridge. 

***

Hartresk growled at the Reman tactical officer, Ekteth. The warbird’s bridge smelled of smoke from a burning power relay that the suppression system struggled to quell.

“We can’t repel firepower of that magnitude!” the officer repeated, pointing at the data on his tactical screen.

“We’re not ready for full combat, sir, we’re just not!”

“We’re not going to let them just destroy us!” Hartresk yelled back. He knew that his control of the situation was slipping from his grasp. Where was Janus? He needed to know what the status was of their fighters. A D’deridex carried dozens of the small Romulan attack ships, designed to provide a cloud of cover in just such a situation as this, to keep a field of defensive fire between the big ship and more nimble attackers.

“Rotate the shield array,” he yelled, “keep them from overloading the emitters, and reroute all power from the engines.”

“Sir?” cried Ekteth in alarm.

“We can’t outmaneuver them! We must out-gun them.”

The officer nodded and opened a communication channel to the engineering deck, while Hartresk looked back at the viewscreen in time to see several of their disruptor pulses make contact with the attacking Starfleet ship. They were taunting him! One torpedo out of the dozens they surely possessed. And their calls to stand down, to surrender… he snarled at the thought. Federation law would never take him away in chains. He would see death’s eyes first, rather than let himself become yet another casualty to Federation brainwashing.

“Sir, I can’t raise engineering.”

“What?” Hartresk rounded on the tactical officer again. Anger flooded him, mixing with a fresh burst of fear. “Out of the way!” he grabbed Ekteth and pulled him from the chair. But his own attempts to bring the channel to life failed.

No, not a failure. The line was open, they should have been receiving him.

The doors of the lift onto the bridge opened and Hartresk glanced over. There stood Janas and several other officers, finally. “Janas!” Hartresk called out, “get down to engineering. Something’s wrong down there, they’re not answering…” he broke off when he noticed the disruptor in his old friend’s hand.

One of the other officers realized what was happening at the same time as Hartresk and reacted even faster. The officer pulled his weapon free and got off a wild shot before he was vaporized. His scream echoed even after his body had been reduced to so much dust in a flare of green light.

Hartresk was already leaping for cover by the time Janas and the others left the lift and spread out, taking out two more of the bridge crew who were brave enough to go for their weapons. Hartresk crouched behind a console, his own weapon in his hand, his mind working furiously. But, even as he looked for an advantage, he felt a black pit of sorrow and rage clenching in his belly. Not Janas. Not Him. Of all the people aboard, of all his old friends from whom he might have expected some traitorous move, never once had his fears fell upon Janas.

“What are you doing?” he yelled, half stalling for time, half struggling with disbelief.

“I’m so sorry,” came Janas’ voice from the other side of the room. “I tried to explain things to you, old friend.”

“What things?” Hartresk could hear the traitors moving, spreading out. They would surround him, take him in a moment’s time. He looked furiously around for some advantage. Met the terrified eyes of Ekteth, standing with raised hands just a few meters away.

“We can’t keep killing everyone who gets in our way,” Janas said. “We can’t just bloody our way through to victory. Not this time.”

“You believe in the revolution!”

“I do. But I believe that your way will see the end of it. I tried to get you to see that. I did.”

“No… no! Traitor!”

Hartresk kicked Ekteth in the leg. The tactical officer screamed and doubled over, then exploded into dust as three panicked disruptor blasts struck him at the same time. In the split second that followed, Hartresk rolled out from his hiding place, his weapon raised, and he took aim, and he fired.

***

The big D’deridex fired a spread of torpedoes, several of which struck blue clouds of energetic particles as they impacted the Starfleet cruiser’s shields. Allan watched from the bridge, knowing that, soon, the captain of that ship would have to authorize a full-scale attack. The cruiser would aim for nonessential systems, of course… but with the shape that the Romulan ship was in, cascading failures would spread like fire. Fire in a pressurized can.

“Ensign, come around to four-eight-one mark fifteen, maximum impulse.”

Shavar had already initiated the command before he took full stock of what it meant. “But sir, that’ll put us between them.”

“I know,” Allan said. “Until we can break through that communication’s block, we have to do something. That old ship can’t take structural damage. They’re held together by integrity fields, and you know the sort of stresses at the core of a D’deridex as well as I do, Ensign.”

They were already speeding in close, barely a hundred kilometers out from the Warbird’s shield limit. In the viewscreen, Allan saw the Starfleet cruiser’s phaser array abruptly hold fire as the smaller Raven-class dipped into their firing zone.

The relief he felt surprised him, considering that his career had probably just vanished as surely as the cruiser’s targeting lock.

“Power surge coming from the Warbird,” Lish called out.

Allan winced, bracing himself for a nearly point-blank impact. At that range, the Warbird’s disruptors might be able to overwhelm their shields completely, depending on how many of their weapon arrays were pointed in the right direction. But then Lish spoke again, confusion and relief evident in his expressive tone.

“…Wait, they’re powering down! Communications are coming back online as well.”

The viewscreen flickered and the fairly-purple face of a man in Starfleet uniform, four gold pips on his collar, appeared there amid a haze of static. “…the hell are you playing at, Mogrus?”

***

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go

.– From In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

The coup succeeded, in the end. Muninn mused on the ultimate victory of Janas’ morality over Hartresk’s while she and Asenth took the USS Plaget’s shuttle down to the surface of Oumoren V, otherwise known by its locals as Stalx. Janas himself had survived his final encounter with his one-time friend, only to be killed by one of Hartresk’s vengeful loyalists later that same day. She had never gotten another chance to talk to the measured Reman, and now, never would. Others, like Revasin, now carried the torch. More bold and violent in their approach, perhaps, but committed to similar goals as Janas, all the same.

Her thoughts turned to Hartresk. His followers were few in number, if dedicated to their erstwhile leader’s cause.

When Janas had killed Hartresk on the D’deridex’s bridge, he had merely cut off the head of a movement that Muninn felt certain would continue to fester underground. Revasin had filled her in on some of the finer details, when they were arranging this visit to Oumoren, and Muninn wondered at the stoicism Janas had possessed in those final moments. To kill his oldest friend in pursuit of the dream of peace… And she had never known, would never have guessed, the relationships at work behind the scenes. Which is the problem with being an outsider to conflict, she decided, You might find yourself involved, but you’ll never have a full picture of what’s going on. It occurred to her that within this realization lay the ultimate case for the Federation’s oft-scrutinized stance on non-interference. When one became involved, one could not do so innocently. The best of intentions would inevitably sour, no matter how worthwhile they were when you began. And then you risked becoming exactly what Hartresk feared: a colonial force, imposing your own ideologies at the point of a gun.

She sat across from Asenth in the back of the small shuttle, while the pilot lowered them through the atmosphere and bore on toward the still-smoking city. The Romulan girl had been exceptionally quiet ever since they received permission from the Provisional Revolutionary Government to land. Muninn, not for the first time, questioned her motivations in bringing the girl home. Was she doing this to sate her own curiosity in some perverse way? Would the conclusion to this adventure offer Asenth anything but more pain?

The shuttle came down at a makeshift landing area about half a kilometer from where Asenth’s home had been.

Exiting the climate-controlled cabin, they were buffeted by a stiff dry breeze, the mark of a world poorly suited to the necessities of life. A habitable world, perhaps, but not one which inspired joy. And yet so many had died for it, for the dream of what it might become.

They set off together, Muninn’s heart heavy as they walked the nearly deserted streets. Two Reman guards accompanied them on their way. Refugees would soon be returning to homes, or the ruins of such, to reclaim their lives. Both Reman and Romulan, it seemed, though the animosity and class divisions between them were still ripe for all the worst that intelligent life could breed.

The buildings were mostly intact in this part of the city. Many were two-story homes, made from a reddish clay or plaster, eerie in their silence. Their flat, overhanging roofs seemed to loom across the street, making Muninn claustrophobic. Asenth kept looking at the Remans walking with them, but the complex expression on her face gave Muninn no real clue of understanding. The girl’s silence seemed only to grow as they came closer to their goal, an absence of sound, like a scream in the vacuum, that nevertheless held an intensity greater than any mighty river’s roar. 

Muninn, for all her training, did not know what to do. So, she did all she could: she held the silence. A silence that lived for several minutes more, until broken by Asenth herself, in the smallest way. A gasp. A lone exhalation from the girl’s lips that nevertheless carried with it a whole world of emotion.

“This is it?” Muninn inquired of one of their Reman guides. The bat-faced male nodded. “It is. The records were clear.”

This neighborhood had seen fighting, and a heavy amount by the look of it. The burned-out carcass of a light shuttle or personnel carrier lay some way down the street. Many of the buildings bore signs of disruptor fire in great charred pockmarks across their ocher clay faces. There were no bodies, anymore, but blood, dried into the street’s dust, could be found without trying, here and there. Stains to remind passerby of the cost of revolution.

Muninn looked at Asenth, whose eyes were fixed on a building straight ahead. Some great blast, perhaps from when the ruined shuttle had exploded, had ripped through the front corner of the building. It bore the mark of other work as well: the scars of disruptor fire, the sign of forced entry in the form of a blasted plastic front door.

Asenth began walking toward it and Muninn followed a pace behind. She had some reservations about going inside, uncertain if the structure remained safe. But there could be no deterring Asenth now. To pull her back would be to break the girl, to shatter the strange stoicism that had settled over her and unleash the ruins of the child within. At least, Muninn thought, the worst had already been made known.

Asenth’s parents, and her little brother, had indeed been killed. As a favor to Muninn, for the part she played in securing the coup against Hartresk, Revasin had made it a priority of the Provisional Government to dig out the bodies and verify them. Their identities were all confirmed by DNA scan. Part of the house had caught fire, presumably after Asenth had run away, and the flames had charred the flesh from the bones of her family. Nothing to see there. Muninn would not let her look at those ruined things, and her concession in place of that nightmare had been to allow Asenth to return home, one last time.

They went in through the front doorway, stepping on the pieces of the door itself, which had been blasted off its hinges by small arms fire. The hallway through the core of the building was dark but intact, blackened by soot in places, but otherwise untouched. At its end, however, lay the kitchen. Its roof had caved in, part of the back wall completely reduced to rubble. The wind, which seemed to blow ceaselessly across the face of the arid world, howled through gaps in the building’s structure, reminding Muninn of coyotes she had once heard in a preserve.

Asenth stopped and looked down. A dried brown stain haunted a spot on the floor. Once, it had been white tile. Now, thick with debris dust and dried blood, it seemed a mockery of civilization.

“Mother,” Muninn said after a moment. Then her gaze traveled to another stain, some little ways away. “Father.”

Finally, toward the fallen beam of the kitchen roof. And though she said nothing this time, Muninn knew that must have been where her little brother’s body had lain. How many other families were sundered like this? How many times would this process be repeated in the coming days?

Asenth’s gaze traveled back to Muninn, and in her eyes was a hollow void that clutched at Muninn’s heart. “What happens now?”

Muninn swallowed. The girl’s tone bore nothing, not even hopelessness. Pure flat acceptance of the worst that life could bring.

“What would you like to happen?” Muninn asked.

A shrug.

“You can stay here. The new government will find you someone to stay with. Maybe a relative? Friends of your parents?”

Another shrug.

Then Muninn grasped at an outlying possibility. Something that her training told her she should not offer because doing so broke down a barrier that it was her sworn duty to never cross. 

“Or you could come back with me. Starfleet would help settle you, get a trauma counselor to support you…”This time, no shrug, just a look. But in that look, a yearning mixed with hesitation. “With you?” Asenth said, after a long moment.

“I couldn’t be your counselor anymore,” Muninn said. “I don’t even know what’s going to happen after all this. There could be an inquest.” She shook this unpleasant thought away. “But… you could stay with me. If that’s what you want. We could also talk to Starfleet about finding you a foster family, someone nice and stable who could make sure you get to live somewhere safe.”

Asenth shook her head, her eyes suddenly wide. “No. With you.” Her voice was plaintive. With some great apparent effort, she managed to speak again, and some greater feeling seemed to now inhabit her words. “I’d like to come back if I can live with you.”

***

Lish clearly thought that Muninn had crossed a line, and yet the Bolian said nothing openly about it. When Muninn explained to him that she intended to bring Asenth back with her, Lish merely pursed his lips and nodded, and through his silence on the matter the wealth of his reservation could be heard. Never before had Muninn known the Bolian to be as reserved.

But that reservation did not extend to Asenth, toward whom Lish directed all manner of jokes and random stories, not with any obvious desire to have the girl respond, but with the simple patter of one who wishes to afford some measure of freedom to another from the need to speak at all.

The Mogrus limped along toward Starbase Bravo on its own, while she, Asenth, and Lish went ahead on the Plaget. 

There would soon be representatives from the Federation, Resak’s broader revolutionary coalition, and even the new Romulan Republic all converging on Oumoren in the next few days. Muninn was glad to be well out of it before they all arrived. She wondered how long the people of Oumoren would maintain their hard-fought selfhood. They deserved self-governance at least, after all they had been through. She had heard from Revasin, some short time before they parted ways the final time, that the D’deridex class Warbird was undergoing extensive repairs and would soon be serviceable again. A functional warship of that caliber might add some weight to Oumoren’s independence claim.

As for Asenth, the girl talked little, but some of the heaviness seemed to lift from her once they were aboard the Plaget and headed away from Oumoren for good. Muninn quietly began drawing up a letter to send to Starfleet Medical, detailing the girl’s history and her likely needs. And she drafted another letter, one infinitely harder to compose, that would see Asenth placed under her care. She would not know, for some weeks yet, just what sort of response Starfleet would have waiting for someone who had so clearly flouted such a ream of protocol in such a short span of time. The inquest that she feared might still come. And, if it did, she would need to leave Starfleet before they dug too deeply into her life’s history. She would rather give up one dream than see her parents’ lives diminished by the scandal that would come if their augmented child were to be made known. 

But that was a problem for another day.