Captain’s log, stardate 2401.6. While Commander Kharth’s team proceeded to the Synnef Nebula, Endeavour has picked up another Borg homing beacon activating in our vicinity. What we found on arrival, however, was the debris of what appears to be a destroyed freighter. Commander Shepherd has led a team with Commander Cortez to investigate.

The captain’s chair felt not like a seat of power but a vice, pinning her in place and keeping her from where she wanted to be. As XO, she’d have been at the heart of the action, taking matters into her own hands. Now, she had to sit back and listen as the away team’s voices drifted over the bridge.

‘…reaching the signal now,’ came Shepherd’s voice. ‘It looks like a section of the cargo hold retained containment.’

‘Yeah.’ Cortez sounded thoughtful. ‘This damage distribution, the debris drift… their warp core detonated.’

Valance’s jaw tightened and she glanced at Airex, addressing the team but bringing him into the conversation as she asked, ‘Is there any indication why?’

‘Still no signs of weapons fire or damage,’ the Trill reported in a low voice. ‘There’s no indication of external damage at all.’

‘If we suit up and crack open this cargo hold,’ said Shepherd, ‘we can take a closer look.’

‘Negative,’ said Valance quickly. ‘We’re taking this carefully. Access the hold with a DOT. Any Borg technology is to be decoupled remotely.’ With the resources of the King Arthur, Cortez’s SCE team could perform a myriad of miracles without ever stepping foot on a deck.

‘This isn’t a Borg ship, Cap,’ Shepherd reminded her. ‘We don’t need that protocol.’

‘Until or unless we know why this freighter blew up, we’re sticking to it,’ Valance said tersely. Again she glanced to Airex. ‘Any more on the records?’

‘It looks like this was the freighter Arinox, registered as an independent ship at Freecloud. A crew of six. Records are about a year old.’ He shook his head. ‘And no life signs.’

‘From the nature of this damage,’ Cortez butted in, ‘I think the warp core overload was the only incident.’

‘A technical fault?’ said Valance.

‘Too soon to say,’ said Cortez, but she sounded tense. ‘We’re dispatching a DOT to access the cargo hold now.’ They waited. Valance resisted the urge to drum her fingers. Minutes later, Cortez’s voice came back. ‘Patching you into the DOT’s visual feed. We’re approaching the hatch.’

‘On screen,’ Valance commanded.

It looked like the DOT was doing nothing more than crawling over a metal room, floating in space, its internal bulkhead reinforcements and distance from the warp core seeming to have let it endure against the explosion.

‘We can carve through the hatch,’ Shepherd said. ‘But it’s quicker if we let the DOT connect to the door controls and use its own power source to open them up.’

Valance frowned. ‘Does that expose us to risk if a technical fault destroyed the freighter?’

‘It’s possible,’ Cortez started, but Shepherd pushed over her.

‘With Starfleet-issue defences? It’s no sweat, Cap. Accessing the controls now.’

On the screen, they watched an arm extend from the DOT to plug into the floating cargo bay’s hatch controls. At once, the screen beside the controls flared to light, and a data feed immediately began scrolling across it at break-neck speed.

‘Okay,’ came Shepherd’s voice. ‘Accessing -’

‘Isa, disconnect from the DOT now!’ Airex’s voice came like a whip-crack as his head snapped up from his controls.

‘What -’

But any protest from Shepherd was lost as the feed from the DOT went dead. For a moment, everyone paused. Then Cortez said, ‘You want to explain, Dav?’

‘Captain, pull the team out,’ Airex continued. ‘Get the King Arthur away from there.’

‘What’s going on? We can do this,’ protested Shepherd.

Valance shook her head. ‘You heard the man. Withdraw the runabout.’ On their display, the small dot of the King Arthur began to pull away from the debris field, and now she looked back at Airex. ‘Explain?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But there was something in the start-up protocol the DOT activated that stood out. A line of code. Borg code.’

‘How did that get into the cargo bay’s mechanisms?’ Shepherd asked.

Cortez swore in Spanish. ‘Whatever’s inside that cargo bay’s got active nanites. It connected to the ship. Started to assimilate it.’

Airex nodded. ‘Captain, I think it wasn’t a technical fault that made this warp core overload. I think the crew did it.’

Valance turned, jaw dropping, to the viewscreen. ‘They brought debris aboard, and then it tried to assimilate them,’ she said, voice empty. ‘So they blew themselves up.’

‘An’ now,’ added Cortez, ‘it’s got a DOT.’

Valance shot to her feet. ‘Mister Qadir, lock onto the DOT. Once the King Arthur is a safe distance, open fire.’

Qadir, at Tactical, nodded, but said, ‘Captain, I can’t guarantee we won’t compromise or take out the cargo bay.’

‘That’s a price we may have to take. Fire when ready.’

In the end, there was nothing left of the DOT, the cargo hold, or whatever it had held that had unleashed such horrors onto the freighter Arinox. Despite their mission to recover Borg technology, Valance couldn’t feel too sorry about a technical failure that didn’t carry a body count, under the circumstances.

‘Captain.’ Airex looked up moments after confirming the toll. ‘The Excalibur has shown up on long-range sensors, heading for us.’

Valance nodded, relief easing her chest. ‘Maybe they have something to show for it. Back to the barn, everyone. Let’s take stock.’

It took a little time for Cortez and her team to examine the node brought back by Kharth’s team. But merely hours later, the senior staff sat in the conference room listening to the SCE leader.

‘…good news and bad news,’ Cortez said. Behind her, on the display, a vast array of notes and images of the devices and data accumulated by Endeavour’s team shone bright. ‘Good news is that we recovered a decent amount from the node Saeihr’s team brought back.’

Kharth rolled her eyes. ‘Bad news?’

‘You could enjoy the success for, like, five seconds,’ Cortez chided. ‘But, right. There’s a little more good news first – we think we’ve got a data string for the transwarp conduit’s expected exit vector.’

‘You think?’ checked Valance.

‘We do,’ Cortez amended. ‘The problem is that to figure out what it means, I need to compare it to Borg star charts. Because it means absolutely nothing to ours.’

‘So you mean we did all this,’ said Kharth, ‘only to pick up a bunch of numbers which don’t mean anything because we don’t have the right map for its coordinates?’

‘But wait!’ Cortez waggled a finger. ‘There’s more good news! Because I’m giving us the good news, bad news sandwich.’

Valance wondered if she could yell at her to skip to the end while still sounding professional. Once, she might have found this endearing on some level. Now it was professionally frustrating and only reminded her what she missed of Isa Cortez’s sense of humour. ‘Please enlighten us, Commander.’

‘Please,’ pressed Kharth, ‘speed this up, Isa.’

‘Sure.’ Cortez shrugged. ‘Redemption has found a docked probe in the Alpha Wreck. Its systems are de-powered. It has no Borg drones aboard. But its navigational computer appears functional. All we’ve got to do is hop aboard, punch in our data, and see where it points us.’

‘Can we send it to them?’ said Kharth.

‘We could,’ said Cortez. ‘But their CEO Commander Ó Taidhg is currently dealing with disconnecting a whole section of the wreck from power. We can be there in a few hours. And if something goes squirrelly, well, I know more than him.’

‘We should still,’ said Logan, ‘restrict personnel on this mission. Minimise danger.’

‘I’d like you there this time,’ said Cortez. ‘But this probe is sitting pretty right in front of the Redemption and soon us. It can’t come alive and kill us. But sure – me, Logan, and I’d like Thawn’s help.’

Valance nodded. ‘It’s your investigation.’ She turned towards Endeavour’s pilot. ‘Lieutenant Lindgren, set us a course for Lockney, high speed. Dismissed, everyone. Let’s see what’s at the end of this scavenger hunt.’

‘Hey.’ Beckett looked sheepish as he stepped into Thawn’s quarters. ‘I don’t want to delay you, I just wanted to catch you before you head out.’

She was still pulling on her away team jacket. Out the window, the vast stretch of the Alpha Wreck debris field hung, the distant bulk of the USS Redemption before it. They had raced at breakneck speed back to Lockney, and she’d spent most of this time continuing to help Cortez with their analysis.

‘We’ll have to catch up on your mission once I’m back,’ she said apologetically.

He shrugged. ‘You’ve seen the report. That’s most of what there is to know. Nothing ground-shaking. I just… wanted to see you first.’

It was irrational that she did anything other than hug him and say goodbye before heading down to the shuttlebay to join Cortez and Logan at the King Arthur. Instead, Thawn reached for a PADD on the table, and said, ‘There was something I wanted to ask you about. Do you know why Endeavour transmitted a major data package to the Ihhliae when we were damaged by the ion storm and they contacted us?’

He froze, and she knew. ‘That’s weird,’ said Beckett after a beat.

She kept looking at him. ‘It is,’ she said when he remained silent. ‘It is, in fact, a major security issue.’

‘Who’ve you told?’

‘I checked with Kally about comms records. There were none. I checked with Elsa on if I was reading our data processing right. She thinks I was.’ Thawn kept watching him. ‘That’s it.’

Beckett was silent another moment. Then he swallowed and stepped forward. ‘I’ll take that.’

Her grip on the PADD tightened. ‘Was it you?’

He stopped, pausing before he said, ‘I can’t answer that.’

‘It was,’ she said, her stomach dropping. ‘There are only two people aboard who could send a secure file transmission like that without it popping up on Kally’s records, and the other person’s the captain.’

‘I can’t,’ said Beckett, jaw tightening, ‘answer that, Lieutenant.’

His hand was still outstretched. She did not move. First, she had to ask, weakly, ‘Is that why the Ihhliae was disabled by a computer systems shutdown?’ Again he went tense. ‘Did you send a virus aboard to sabotage them?’

‘We can’t have this conversation. And you can’t read my feelings, my mind -’

‘You do get that I spent a year being so pissed off by you that I can actually read your body language the non-telepathic way, right, Nate?’ she snapped at last. ‘And are you crazy? You sabotaged a ship in contact with Borg technology? You could have killed them all!’

He scowled, fist clenching with frustration. ‘It was meant to activate before they got to the wreck!’

‘In the middle of the Mesea Storm? Where an ion wave would rip them apart if they were helpless?’

‘It also wasn’t meant to be that… successful. Anyway, I can’t talk about this!’

‘Can’t, or won’t?’

‘Both!’ But his chest was heaving, more emotion roiling in him than she’d expected. ‘But you don’t get to judge me! Because you don’t know the things I know. You know what I found, back in that lab?’ He pointed an accusing finger towards the door, as if that slaughterhouse lay in the corridor beyond. ‘Plenty of evidence to prove right Starfleet Intelligence’s suspicions that the Romulan Republic’s borders are made of paper when it comes to hanging onto dangerous tech. That wreck Valance let them have? It’ll be in the Orion Syndicate’s hands by the end of the week!’

Her throat tightened. ‘That still doesn’t give you the right to endanger a whole crew of people. What the hell, Nate? This isn’t like you.’

‘I had orders.’

She flinched as a horrid thought occurred. ‘From your father?’

‘No!’ But she was clearly close to home, and he looked away with, at last, a flash of guilt. ‘We have to contain threats like the Borg. And if Captain Valance won’t, then Starfleet Intelligence will. I don’t like what I did; of course I don’t. But it’s better for one ship to be destroyed than Borg technology to fall into the wrong hands or, worse, for somewhere major to suffer the same fate as those poor bastards on their freighter – only to not blow themselves up in time, and then we have a Borg ship somewhere really dangerous.’

She worked her jaw in silence. ‘I’m not pretending I know the right thing to do with any of that. I really don’t. But I think you underestimate how close you just came to murdering a whole ship of people, Nate.’

‘I think you underestimate how close we come, so many days, to crises like Frontier Day repeating themselves.’

She wanted to reach out. Reach out with her senses, find the contours of his thoughts and feelings. Not to intrude, but because she knew it was more complicated than his words and his body language made out. More complicated than he probably knew. Instead, all she had was his blunt defensiveness and his hurt, and the frustration of her own blindness mingled with the indignation at his attacks.

So instead of taking a moment to connect with him, mentally or with words, instead, she snapped, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing things your father would want you to do, even when you know better, and even when it would get people killed. And I can’t believe you’re defending yourself.’

‘I told you,’ he said stubbornly. ‘There are things I can’t talk about.’

‘Right.’ She zipped up her jacket. ‘Then this conversation is over, isn’t it? I’ve got to get to the Lancelot.’

She saw him hesitate. They’d been apart for days, both of them up to their necks in high-stress scenarios, and her about to head off for another one. He’d not come here to fight, but to reach out to her. For a split second, she thought he was going to shove the argument aside and do just that.

But he didn’t. He nodded. And she left. And did her utmost to put the argument out of her mind – put the fact he’d proven right her worst suspicions out of her mind – because, once again, she had to venture into the jaws of danger, and do her job.

Feelings could come later.