The room was dark besides the luminance of Nasera’s K-Type dwarf star bleeding through the window over her headboard. The deep orange-red hue it cast across the bedroom reminded Allison Reyes of the blood spilled the night before. By last count, 889 souls lost across the squadron, and more still lay in a state of medical limbo. As for the ship, the Polaris was weeks away from taking to the stars again, but at least it was in one piece. The Norway class vessel from Task Group 514, on the other hand, had been committed to the deep, all hands lost, 190 souls gone in a single instant.

Allison Reyes lay in her bed, exhausted but restless. After the battle, there had been so much to coordinate. There were casualties to manage, a medical field unit to stand up, engineering efforts to start the rebuild, counseling and cultural affairs efforts to care for officers and colonists, and so much more. She hadn’t even spoken with Commander Lewis or his covert operators yet, the people without whom victory would never have been possible. 

By the time she’d returned to the ship at 0240, nine hours after the battle and eighteen since she’d last slept, she had nothing left. After speaking briefly with Captain Devreux, she’d collapsed in her bed still in her battle fatigues, still with dirt on her face and blood on her hands. She slept horribly, her mind a maelstrom of emotions, adrenaline and grief colliding in an aggressive symphony. Regardless of the lack of rest she’d found, it was now time to get up. War waited for no one, and, while they had retaken Nasera, this war was far from over.

Reyes made her way to the shower, disrobing as she went. As the dust-caked clothes fell to the floor, it was like a warrior shirking her armor. She felt vulnerable as she stood there naked, the cold water washing away the dust, the dirt, and the blood. But no amount of soap and water would wash away what had happened.

As she dried off with a towel and put on a fresh new uniform, she thought about what lay ahead. Battle was hard, but the after was even worse. Based on Doctor Henderson’s latest update, there were 301 calls to be made to the families of her crew, notifying them that their loved one would not be coming home. And that number would still grow as more succumbed to their injuries. The Admiral dreaded those calls, but she would make as many as she could herself. These men and women had given their lives for noble purpose, and their parents and spouses deserved to hear it from her. But those calls would wait for a quieter moment, once they had some modicum of control over the situation. There was one call that could not wait though.

Last night, she had composed the briefest of updates to Fourth Fleet Command: “Mission accomplished. Nasera in Federation hands. More to follow.” It was hardly an update, but she could muster no more at the end of the long night. Now though, it was time to get them on the horn.

“Computer, get me Commodore Imya Jori, USS Verity.” Fleet Admiral Reyes took a seat at her desk as she waited for the connection to be established. “Oh, and lights, fifty percent,” she added, realizing she was still sitting in a dark room. The lighting rose, her eyes struggling to adjust, as she straightened her collar. Might as well look at least somewhat put together, especially given what she was about to lobby the Task Force Commanding Officer to give her.

Commodore Jori was sitting in her office aboard the USS Verity, which was stationed at Farpoint Station where she monitored the situation across the Deneb Sector. Jori was just taking a sip of her morning coffee when the computer beeped. The Commodore accepted the call to be greeted by the face of Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes.

Even if the Admiral was trying her best to hide it, Jori could not help but note that Reyes looked exhausted like she’d just been through hell. “I saw that you’ve successfully retaken Nasera,” she said in reference to a brief update from the Polaris late in the night, short and to the point but lacking any real substance.

“The scourge has been eradicated from Nasera,” Admiral Reyes replied, her choice of words very much alluding to her present state of mind. “The Dominion fleet has been defeated, the orbital platform has been destroyed, the planetary defense system is back under our control, and, as of 1910 hours last night, the streets of Nasera City were free of Jem’Hadar.” For the first time in over a month, the people of Nasera II had gone to bed as free citizens of the Federation, and Admiral Reyes was mighty proud of that fact.

While good news, it wasn’t much to go on for the head of Task Force 93. It was just a basic sitrep, the sort of thing that could have been deduced from her brief note in the middle of the night. Commodore Jori knew there had to be more to the story than that. “What is the status of the ships and Nasera itself? And how many did we lose?” she asked as she shifted in her seat, sensing what might come next.

“Victory did not come without cost,” Admiral Reyes cautioned before giving her colleague the readout. “We lost one ship, the Norway from Task Group 514, and the rest of our ships are pretty trashed. It will be weeks before the Polaris or the Diligent will be spaceworthy again, and I’m pretty sure the Steamrunner is going to end up in mothballs once we can get it moving.” Before the conflict began, Reyes had a tense exchange with Jori about what was coming. Now, the Commodore would have to face that reality. “We lost 889 souls across the squadron last night, and there are another hundred or so in critical condition that could go either way.” The numbers were staggering. She’d lost more than a sixth of the Polaris’ crew, and more than a fifth of the squadron’s entire  complement had perished. She paused to let the Commodore process.

Jori closed her eyes for a brief moment to process what she was just told. She said a silent prayer for those that lost their lives to save millions more.

“If it is any consolation Commodore,” Admiral Reyes offered, pain evident in her voice. “They rose to their duty, and they did what had to be done. Each and every one of them.” She thought back to Crewman Nam Jae-Sun’s final words before he and Ryssehl sacrificed themselves aboard the orbital station. ‘Tell my parents I love them, and that I did my duty,’ was what he asked. Crewman Nam wasn’t a day past thirty, and he’d given his life so his colleagues might live and so Nasera might be free. The same was true for every other officer and crewman that had breathed their last breath in the last twenty four hours. They died for greater purpose, for each other and for the citizens of Nasera.

The Admiral’s words lingered on the air, an uncomfortable silence settling over the link as the two worked through their thoughts. It was the hardest of responsibilities a flag officer faced, sending sailors to die. And on this blood red morning, they had to confront that at startling scale.

“Our fight does not end here though Commodore,” Admiral Reyes insisted, piercing the veil of their inner monologues. Her words were strong and biting. “The Dominion still runs rampant across the Deneb. There are dozens of worlds just like Nasera where our colonists still suffer. The relief efforts here are underway. The Polaris, the Ingenuity and the Diligent are in orbit here, and Captain Devreux, Captain Vox and Commander Lee are more than capable of overseeing it. So get me a new ship, and give me a new target.” She was not done with the Dominion. Not yet. Not until the only Jem’Hadar that still existed were in the Gamma Quadrant.

Snapping out of her thoughts, she looked at Reyes, trying to process what her counterpart had just said. “You’ve got to be joking right now,” Jori replied as she leaned in further. “There are other ships in the Fourth Fleet that are responding to other areas.” Reyes’ demeanor was clear. This was not a joke. All Jori could figure was that Allison Reyes had lost her mind. “No, absolutely not. You are to limp back to Farpoint Station for debriefing,” Jori ordered, looking at Reyes with a serious expression.

“I’m too old for this coddling Commodore,” Admiral Reyes countered, using her junior flag rank to remind the Commodore of her veteran status. Reyes was a woman who’d cut her teeth three decades prior during the Dominion War, and who had worked almost every major combat operation since then. “I do not need a debriefing, and Captain Devreux can provide you with whatever details you need. What I need is a ship and a target.”

Admiral Reyes pulled out a PADD and began scanning the Fourth Fleet’s manifest. She quickly found what she was looking for.

“I see here that you’ve got a Duderstadt class light cruiser, the USS Serenity, just fixed up at Farpoint Station after a run in with the Jem’Hadar. She’s down a captain, and I happen to still know how to be one,” Reyes pressed. She put aside the fact that she knew Serenity’s former CO, Captain Mark Gilliam, and that it was regrettable for the Fleet to have lost him. This was war, and that is how it went. “I know we have more targets than we have ships, so it’s a waste to have her sitting there. Give me the Serenity and whatever crew she’s got that are ready to get back in it, and get me back out there. I’ll pull a few of my officers, the ones that shoot rather than the ones that build, to fill any gaps.” The Admiral’s eyes narrowed on her colleague. She would not be taking no for an answer.

Commodore Jori looked at her with a shocked look on her face, although she should have expected it coming from a stubborn woman like Allison Reyes. “Just so you can damage another ship?” she spat back. “I think this has gotten more personal than it should be Allison! You are looking for vengeance,” Jori said with a concerned tone in her voice for her well being. “This time it might be you that doesn’t return.” Jori let out a heavy sigh.

“Each of us needs something to fight for,” Admiral Reyes replied firmly. “I know exactly what I’m fighting for. Do you?” Reyes looked out her window at the star that hung in the distance. “Our people, our way of life, our freedom, they hang in the balance so long as the Dominion remains in our space.” Drawing her focus back to the Commodore on the screen, she then drove the point home: “And so I answer the call, and I will keep answering that call, until that menace is no more.” Or until she was no more, Reyes thought to herself, but she didn’t say it aloud. She fully understood both outcomes were a very realistic possibility. “I just need a ship.”

Closing her eyes for a brief moment, Commodore Jori knew it was pointless in arguing further with someone who was clearly not going to take no for an answer. Admiral Reyes just sat there, staring at her with an ice cold expression. She was not going to back down.

Jori let out a deep breath and worked her jaw a bit. “Fine,” the Commodore conceded at last. “I will be dispatching the Serenity under your care, but I will be coming with the Verity as well. With the Polaris in the state that she’s in, she is in no shape to lead the humanitarian mission. My ship is designed for it. We will depart within the hour.”

Jori looked at Reyes with a clenched jaw for the second time in as many weeks.

“Thank you Commodore,” Admiral Reyes replied, and then she abruptly hung up the link before anything further could be said. The Commodore had relented. She would get her ship. Reyes picked the PADD back up and began skimming the latest intelligence reports. It was time to pick a target.

A brisk morning breeze blew through the grounds of the governor’s mansion, the former throne of Dominion oppression on Nasera. The bodies still lay where they had fallen the night before, colonists and Jem’Hadar alike who met their end in the duel for the soul of the city. Commander Robert Drake, Chief JAG Officer aboard the USS Polaris, walked the scene with two of his investigators. They had no emotional reaction to the carnage, but they were fully invested in understanding what had happened.

“If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” chuckled Chief Petty Officer Geoff Morrey, a seasoned Crime Scene Investigator with over twenty years of experience at Starfleet Security, as he looked at the bodies of Federation citizens splayed across the stone driveway.

“Then it’s probably a crime scene,” Commander Drake filled in. “Don’t you find it odd how the colonists just happened to choose this evening, of all evenings, to storm the governor’s mansion, and that they did it from the west when our people were coming out of the east?”

“The odds are approximately one in nine hundred,” replied Lieutenant Commander Terok, their medical examiner. In reaching those odds, he had considered the probabilities of direction and time and adjusted with a scaling coefficient for mounting sentiments of resistance to be expected from an average occupied population over the course of a month-long occupation.

“Yes, it is almost inconceivable that this was a coincident rebellion,” nodded Drake. “It will be very telling how the team’s debriefings paint the participation of these civilians in their operation.” It was not ipso facto a violation of Federation law to enlist the assistance of civilians on the battlefield, but the appropriate manner and means in which they were used was absolutely defined by Starfleet regulations. “Do we know if there were any survivors?”

“It is our preliminary understanding that at least a dozen colonists survived,” answered Morrey. “I’ve got two of our specialists working on tracking them down now for interviews.”

Terok pointed at the burn pattern on the side of one of the Jem’Hadar splayed across the stone. “The position of this soldier and the location of the phaser burn, the killshot didn’t originate within this courtyard. The angle is wrong.” He looked out past the walls of the estate, across a great field that ran for hundreds of meters before rising into a set of sloping hills in the distance. “It came from those hills over there.”

“Is that a shot you could make Chief?” asked Drake, eying what looked to be about 700 to 800 meters of distance separating them from the shooter’s location.

Morrey laughed. “Not on my best day in my wildest dream.”

“This shot came from one of Commander Lewis’ people,” concluded Drake. There was no way an untrained civilian could hit this shot if a senior security specialist could not. It pretty much confirmed what he already suspected. This rebellion was part of Commander Lewis’ plan. “We definitely need to see the Commander’s after action report.”

Drake looked at the bodies of the colonists again. Lewis had some explaining to do. No rational officer would have considered the equipment these colonists wielded, mostly heavy industrial tools and a few hunting rifles, and come to the conclusion they were sending these colonists to anything but their deaths. And that was almost certainly a crime.

The three investigators stepped through the atrium and began exploring the halls, rooms and courtyards of the large mansion. Now, there were no more colonists, only Jem’Hadar. This had been the domain of Commander Lewis and his team.

“Those guys were ruthless,” chuckled Morrey. “You sure we want to get on their bad side Robert?” While a Crime Scene Investigator, he still had all the training one received at the Security Services School of the Starfleet Enlisted Training Command. But this was something totally different. Somehow, Lewis’ small team had cleared dozens of Jem’Hadar soldiers and, based on the facts at this point, they had only lost one team member of the team doing so.

“I’ve faced far more intimidating of men than Jacob D. Lewis,” Commander Drake scoffed as they stepped into a courtyard in the middle of the mansion. 

There were two medical technicians already in the large outdoor space, standing over the corpse of a deceased Starfleet officer in tactical gear. “This must be the casualty they reported during the operation,” Lieutenant Commander Terok said in a matter-of-fact tone as he approached the corpse. He casually pulled out his tricorder and began scanning. “Cause of death, irradiation of core cardiac and pulmonary organs with high intensity polarons.”

“Caused by a single shot to the rear of the thoracic cage,” remarked Chief Morrey as he came alongside his colleague. “At fifteen degrees off angle.” He looked in the direction where the shot would have originated. There, behind a pillar, lay the body of a Jem’Hadar soldier. Morrey made his way over to the deceased assailant.

The two medical technicians looked measurably discomforted by the nonchalant way these new arrivals addressed the deeply saddening sight before them. They knew this woman. They had worked with her in the Polaris’ Medical Department when she wasn’t training with the Hazard Team. “This is Lieutenant Kora Tal,” one of them explained, trying to humanize the situation. “She was a healer, a teacher and a thinker, a dedicated officer with a husband and two kids back on Bajor. She fought for her freedom on Bajor, and then she joined Starfleet to…”

“To not end up dead,” Commander Drake stated flatly, interrupting the melancholy speech. He didn’t need the sob story. “Your job is to preserve life, and ours is to ensure that proper care was taken to preserve it.” The medical staff should think of themselves as on the same team as him, he figured. If there had been any malfeasance that contributed to the Bajoran medic’s death, he would find it. As opposed to him and his investigators, there was nothing these two medics could do for Lieutenant Kora except throw her corpse in the morgue.

“Hey guys, come look at this,” Chief Morrey said as he knelt at the side of the deceased Jem’Hadar. Drake and Terok approached, and instantly they noticed the same anomaly. 

“Cause of death, cerebral inperfusion due to penetrating neck trauma,” Terok observed. “Curious that, engaged in a gunfight, he would die from a frontal knife assault.”

Chief Morrey pulled his tricorder out and started scanning. “There’s photoreceptive scarring on the walls here,” he explained. “A flashbang.”

Commander Drake stared at the Jem’Hadar. “They bang him so they can stab him and watch him die,” he mused. “This was personal.” And where things were personal, they quickly became inappropriate. “Let’s keep looking. I suspect this is not the last oddity we will find.”

They left the courtyard without another word to the medical technicians. They cared not what was done to the body of Lieutenant Kora. That death appeared clean enough, a discharge of a polaron rifle from the position of a deceased Jem’Hadar.

After another twenty minutes of wandering the expansive estate, they stepped into a large room where something had certainly gone wrong.

“It does not appear you need me to provide you with a cause of death here,” Terok stated.

“No, I most certainly do not,” Drake replied, his mouth agape as he approached a lone chair that sat in the center of the room. Shackled to that chair by his hands and feet was a Vorta, slumped over dead with a single focused phaser burn straight in the center of his forehead. 

In a combat engagement, deaths were expected. Commander Drake didn’t have a problem with the Jem’Hadar casualties that littered across the mansion. They were enemy combatants that were almost certainly engaged in combat against Starfleet officers. Even the stabbing was okay, except in what it indicated about the mental state of the officers. This, on the other hand, was a wholly different matter. This was a restrained prisoner by every definition of the word.

“The abrasion rim indicates a discharge distance of no greater than six inches,” explained Chief Morrey as he leaned over the Vorta. Whoever had taken this shot had literally put the barrel of their phaser right in the Vorta’s face before pulling the trigger.

Drake looked at his colleagues. “This is a war crime.”

“He’s going to deny doing it,” Chief Morrey cautioned. “They’re all going to deny it.”

“Can we sequester their weapons to test signatures?” asked Terok.

Drake tapped his combadge. “Drake to Quartermaster, USS Polaris.”

They waited a good thirty seconds. “Ensign Mills here,” an exhausted voice finally replied, sounding distracted as if in the midst of a dozen other things. “Sorry for the delay. We’re a bit overwhelmed right now with everything that’s happened. How can I help you?”

“Ensign Mills, this is Commander Robert Drake. On the authority of the Office of the Judge-Advocate General, I am placing a litigation preservation hold on all weapons and ordnance returned into your possession over the last twenty four hours by Commander Jake Lewis, Lieutenant Lisa Hall, Lieutenant J.G. Jace Morgan, Ensign Elyssia Rel and Chief Petty Officer Ayala Shafir,” he ordered. “This hold is confidential in nature and shall not be disclosed to any of the named parties.”

“Ummm…” the quartermaster stumbled with his words. It had been an awfully long morning, after a crazy night, and the firmness of that order caught him off guard. “Umm, yeah, sure. But Commander,” he cautioned. “They haven’t returned any weapons.”

“Did you release any weapons or ordinance into their care before the mission?”

“According to our records, negative,” replied the quartermaster. “Just civilian clothing, civilian baggage, tactical vests, and some electronics like PADDs and tricorders. As far as I can tell, they did not submit a requisition for any weapons or ordnance.”

Commander Drake kinked an eyebrow. That was a strange piece of information.

“Alright Ensign,” Drake replied frustratedly. “This hold shall remain in force for any weapons or ordnance returned at a later date into your possession by the five named individuals, until such time as notified otherwise personally by me.”

“Understood. Anything else I can do for you?”

“No, that will be all,” replied Drake before cutting the link. He looked at his colleagues. “That is certainly curious, isn’t it? The Hazard Team heads off on a covert op, and they take no weapons with them.”

“Curious indeed,” replied the Vulcan. “And evidence would certainly suggest they were armed last night.”

“Do we arrange for a warrant to search their quarters?” asked the Chief.

“No,” Commander Drake replied. “The moment a security team shows up at their quarters for a search, they will know something is up. And besides, I don’t think we’re going to find anything. They didn’t leave the ship with weapons, so why would they return with them? This is all mighty strange. We’re going to have to dig a bit deeper first.”

Commander Drake looked back down at the Vorta. What the hell had happened here? He had asked himself that question ever since he heard the Jem’Hadar just suddenly gave up the fight, and now that they were on scene, the anomalies just kept mounting. Dead colonists, a Jem’Hadar stabbed in a gunfight, and now a Vorta that appeared to have been murdered.

“Let’s run a full panel on this creature,” Commander Drake ordered. “And for now, we keep this investigation confidential, even from the Admiral. There’s just too much amok.” Commander Drake knew how Fleet Admiral Reyes regarded Commander Lewis and his band of goons. He would not allow her to obstruct his investigation. And he still had his own concerns with her command decisions during the battle.

The first day was chaos. The second day was better. Slowly, the recovery effort was beginning to take shape. Commander Cora Lee stood in the middle of the government plaza at the heart of Nasera City, surrounded by two dozen officers in yellow, red, and teal. She couldn’t be picky. They had too few people between the losses suffered and the ongoing repair work, so her leadership team for the planetary reconstruction effort was sourced from every department of every vessel in the squadron. Some were traditional engineering and operations professionals, but others were astrophysicists, stellar cartographers, brig officers, and flight controllers. The thing that mattered most, the common thread among all assembled, was their dedication to help the war torn planet heal.

“Where do we stand on getting the power plant operational again?”

“We’ve repaired most of the reactor assembly at this point,” explained a theoretical physicist from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity on the USS Polaris. While he typically spent his days at the whiteboard, he had taken on his new applied sciences role as head of reactor engineering with vigor. “The major problem we have is fuel. The Dominion gutted its reserves. Even with the modifications we made, we’re not even going to make 20% output.” That was hardly enough to sustain the residential units, let alone get the industrial machine rolling again.

“Supply chain management,” Lee instructed, turning to an operations officer from her ship, the USS Ingenuity. “Call Captain Vox and see what reserves he can scrounge from our ships.” Dorian Vox, the CO of the USS Diligent, was coordinating aerial support logistics, for both ship repairs and the supplies they needed on the ground.

“Understood,” nodded the operations officer. “No ship will singlehandedly have the excess reserves of deuterium and tritium necessary, but there may be enough to make 40% if we skim from all of them.” While starship warp cores supported the high energy needs of starships, they paled in comparison to the scale of the planetary reactor for a city of eight million. A further complicating factor was that none of the ships in the squadron were provisioned as deep space explorers on multi-year missions so none had large reserves. Most of what they carried was active within the matter/antimatter assembly.

“You know Commander,” interjected Commander Gelar, the captain of the Steamrunner from Task Group 514 who was doubling as head of residential redevelopment. “My ship is so badly damaged that, if we can just relocate the crew to the other ships, we could probably extract all of her active fuel as well.”

“That would add at least another 20% output, but it would leave your ship dead in the water.”

“Let’s be real. My ship is going to be dead in the water for a long time. These people need it right now,” Commander Gelar replied, looking out at combat-scarred buildings ringing the plaza. These people had been through so much, and he felt guilty he had ever questioned this mission. “My ship’s capacity can go in full towards factories, replication capabilities, hospitals, whatever else they need. I’ll coordinate with the teams to make it so.” He paused for a moment to think, and then he added, “And if we’re relocating my crew, we can also strip the ship of other critical components, equipment, and food stocks. I’ll review the options with supply chain management to get the right items to the right places.”

“That is mighty generous of you,” Commander Lee acknowledged. Although technically a Commanding Officer simply received a ship as an assignment, the reality is that you built an emotional attachment to it over time. Commander Gelar had come a long way from that overtly hostile first meeting with Admiral Reyes to the point he was now offering to strip his ship for the good of the mission. The experiences of war truly had the power to change perspectives.

“Since I’d like to get right to work on that, let me give a brief update on residential redevelopment before I go,” Gelar continued. “The tent cities are up, and the groundwater wells are drilled.” The Jem’Hadar had taken a scorched earth approach to the city once they had realized the battle for Nasera was lost, and beyond the damage they did to the factories, they also destroyed nearly 8% of Nasera’s entire residential capacity. That meant over 600,000 displaced residents. “Unfortunately, our ships did not come stocked for a humanitarian mission of this scale, and with energy limitations with all the damage our squadron sustained, we can’t just replicate more. We’re still short 240,000 beds.”

Commander Lee took that number in. It was shocking, although not surprising, how hard things became when modern marvels like replicators were no longer freely available to make whatever you needed. The ships of the squadron were having to be very diligent about how exactly they delegated emergency power levels, between keeping the ships inhabitable, fixing critical damage, and maintaining tactical readiness until the Dominion staged a counterattack. But nearly a quarter a million people without a roof over their head for the third night in a row was not an acceptable outcome.

“What about couch surfing?” asked Lieutenant Emilia Balan, the diplomatic attaché and cultural affairs specialist from the USS Polaris who was leading morale and civilian government liaison work. “A half million people don’t have homes, but seven and a half million do. What about if we set up a system for people to make available spare rooms, beds and couches in their homes?”

“Would people really do that?” the Commander Gelar asked quizzically. To invite a stranger into your home was not an insignificant ask.

“Times of need can inspire acts of generosity,” Balan replied with an optimistic smile. “These people have been through so much. If just four or five percent of residents take us up on this, everyone gets a roof over their head.”

“I love the idea,” smiled Commander Lee brightly. The initiative, collaboration and unconventional thinking was inspiring. “Lieutenant, please coordinate with the digital systems team to get something stood up, and work with municipal officials to get the word out.” She turned back to Commander Gelar. “Anything else on the residential front?”

“Unfortunately not.” Commander Gelar regretted how slow it was going. “Until we can direct industrial replicators at the task or get the textile factories down here operational again, we cannot truly begin the process of rebuilding what the Jem’Hadar destroyed.” It would still be days before either of those things were a reality.

Commander Gelar took his leave to start the process of strip mining his ship for fuel and needed parts, while Commander Lee turned to the others to continue the discussion. The readouts from the other team leads were much of the same. They were making progress on items like industrial capacity and medical field operations, but the going was slow because their ships, which would typically produce what they needed, were still in such disarray. At least the USS Verity, a fully intact Odyssey class vessel outfitted for humanitarian operations, would be arriving in a few days to help.

The lights flickered as the regional power grid failed. With sunlight pouring through the westerly windows, it didn’t matter for illumination, but it absolutely mattered for the eighty five souls on life support in the ward. Dr. James Henderson breathed a sigh of relief as he heard the whir of turbines as they kicked in. That backup generator would keep his patients from passing beyond the veil.

“Thank god they got that operational yesterday,” he said under his breath as he checked to make sure the power flicker hadn’t disrupted any of the life-sustaining equipment of his patients.

Even though hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and the mills and factories were mostly silent, Commander Cora Lee had prioritized the hospitals first. It had been a tall order to get them operational as the Jem’Hadar had stripped them of everything that had a modicum of combat applicability. The Dominion had no respect for the sanctity of life. Thankfully, Commander Lee was an engineering wizard. By the time the sun rose after the battle, several facilities were already online to take on critical patients, and more had come online since then. There were so many victims of the brutal occupation and the deadly fight for the soul of the city, and they still did not have new enough capacity for everyone, but it was a start.

As Dr. Henderson walked the beds, he noted a control unit for a ventricular assistive device had become desynced. While he worked to reset it, he addressed the patient it was attached to. “How are you feeling this afternoon, Mr. Gilroy?” he asked the middle aged man with hypokinesis in his left ventricle from a debris strike. The doctor’s demeanor gave no hint to the fact the man had almost died as a result of that power failure. Panic helped no one, and especially not someone on cardiac life support.

“Still a bit lightheaded,” Mr. Gilroy replied with labored words as he struggled to sit up. “But alive, and given the circumstances, that’s plenty to be thankful for.” He placed his hand on the bandages above his chest, flashing back to that moment when the grenade went off, the concrete wall shattering, a piece of the wall striking him in the midsection. He would have been dead if not for Dr. Henderson, Commander Lee, and so many other dedicated officers.

Once Dr. Henderson had the control unit reset, he moved on to continue his rounds. Elsewhere among the beds, four other doctors and nurses were doing the same. They did their best to tend to everyone, but five staff for eighty five patients was not an ideal ratio. Regulation dictated the ration should not exceed one per six in an emergency department setting. This trauma ward was absolutely an emergency department setting but its ratio was one per seventeen.

When Dr. Henderson finished his rounds, he shrunk away to a quiet corner of the ward behind a privacy curtain. There, hidden from his patients and staff, he could drop his guard. He keeled over, hands on his knees, as he shut his eyes and exhaled deeply. 

Dr. Henderson was beyond exhausted. He’d slept two hours in the last twenty four, and five in the last forty eight. But he had to keep going. These patients, and so many more like them, they needed him. He pulled a hypospray out of his bag and pressed it against his skin. The hiss brought him the relief he needed. He straightened up. It was time to get back to work.

“You okay doctor?” asked a gentle voice as Dr. Henderson reemerged from behind the privacy curtain. It was Lieutenant Emilia Balan, the cultural affairs advisor from the USS Polaris who was doing double duty conducting psychological wellness checks for the ward’s patients.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Dr. Henderson assured her as he passed her.

Lieutenant Balan didn’t think anything of it. Whether due to her respect for the seasoned doctor or just due to her inexperience with stressful settings, she didn’t recognize the signs. She just turned back to her patient, a young woman in a wheelchair, missing both legs, with blotchy skin from advanced stage sepsis. “I’m sorry about that,” Lieutenant Balan apologized lightly. “You were saying?”

“It was all just so hard,” the woman said, picking up where she’d left off before the interruption. “First they came for my brothers, a teacher and a painter. They said their careers were unproductive, and they sent them to the metalworking plants. Then they came for my father, a retiree, and they sent him to the mines.” Her face grew sad as she struggled with the words. “They said… they said that if they didn’t do as they were told, then they would come…” She stopped for a moment. It was so hard to say. “Then they would come for me.”

Lieutenant Balan placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Please, we can stop if it’s too much.” She felt for this woman, someone so young who had suffered so much. This was why the Polaris and her sister ships had put it all on the line. In another time and another place, this woman could have been her. They were about the same age.

The woman started crying. “No! I want to tell you,” she pleaded with teary eyes. “My brothers, my father, they were good people. They tried. They tried so hard. Every day, they’d rise before the sun, and every night, they wouldn’t get home until after dark.” She paused for a moment, again working up the strength to continue the story. “And then, one day, my father didn’t come home. Those monsters showed up with my brothers. They… they told us that my father was dead because my brothers weren’t working hard enough.” 

The woman’s crying turned to unconsolable weeping. Her agony echoed through the otherwise quiet ward, overwhelming the low din of the backup generator, ventilators, and cardiopulmonary bypass machines that were busy keeping these patients alive.

Dr. Henderson came up behind Balan. “Lieutenant, I’m sorry, but we need to cut this short. Ms. Amol needs to rest.” His patient’s blood pressure was spiking, and if mean arterial pressure climbed too much, the vasopressors in her system would become problematic.

“No!” the woman pleaded. “Let me finish! Please!” She looked up at them with grief stricken eyes, tears running down her cheeks. She wanted so badly to tell someone her story. “My brothers, they went back to work the next day. But that night, the Jem’Hadar showed up again. And that’s when… when they did this to me…” She gestured to where her legs had once been. “To… to inspire them to work harder.” She spat those words out as overwhelming despair overtook her. “I… I’m sorry, I can’t…” She couldn’t finish the story, the part where she would have told the Lieutenant how, on the night before the Polaris arrived overhead, as she lay there struggling with the early stages of sepsis, only one of her brothers came home.

Alarm bells began going off on the vital monitors as the woman started shaking. Two medical techs came rushing over with equipment, and Balan stepped out of the way so they could work. The Lieutenant opened her mouth to say something, but the woman she’d started spasming and went unconscious before she could find the words.

“Lieutenant, that’s it for today.” Dr. Henderson’s words were firm. This was not the time.

Lieutenant Balan was stricken with guilt. What had she done? Had she inadvertently triggered an acute stress response? Had she just made the woman’s situation worse? That woman had already endured so much. The medical techs were shouting readings and Dr. Henderson was issuing instructions, but she couldn’t hear any of it as she fled from the ward into the sterile hallways of the hospital. She was lightheaded, her stomach twisting, her mind racing. She felt like she was going to pass out. She leaned up against the wall, taking deep breaths, trying to calm down.

“Lieutenant, you okay?”

Balan looked around. At eye level, she saw no one, but then she noticed a Chief Petty Officer lying there on the ground working with some wires and a circuit board.

“No, no, I’m not.” Lieutenant Balan broke into uncontrollable tears.

Chief Ayala Shafir lifted herself off the floor. Her work could wait. She only knew Lieutenant Balan in passing, but Ayala Shafir knew those tears well. They were the tears of someone in great pain, and she knew such pain well. She extended her arms in a hug and pulled Lieutenant Balan close as she cried, and cried, and cried.

“These people, they’ve gone through so much,” Balan managed to say between bouts of tears. “And I just made it worse. Me and my stupid question. I just wanted to hear her story, to be a person for her to talk to, and now she’s in shock, convulsing, vitals spiking, having an acute stress response… because of me.”

“Lieutenant, I’m pretty sure you’re having an acute stress response yourself right now,” Chief Shafir replied as she looked the Lieutenant in the eyes. “But if she was telling you her story, it’s because she wanted to tell you.” The Lieutenant looked at her confused. “It’s a form of therapy to help your mind process events it struggles to understand.”

“No, no, I get that,” nodded the Lieutenant, coming back to her senses a bit. “But Chief, since when does a digital systems specialist know about this stuff?” Lieutenant Balan didn’t know much about Ayala Shafir other than that she was a specialist with the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, and that she’d been part of the covert team that had gone to Nasera ahead of the Polaris.

“Since that hacker chick has accumulated a bit of trauma herself over the years,” Chief Shafir chuckled. She didn’t offer her story though. That was hardly what this woman, on the verge of a breakdown, needed to hear. Not unless she wanted Balan to absolutely crumble.

“But, I caused her to…” Balan began to say.

“No ifs, ands, or buts, Lieutenant,” Chief Shafir interrupted. “Doc Henderson will have her good as new in no time, but she’ll still remember your compassion and that you were there to hear her story.”

Lieutenant Balan nodded. Maybe the Chief was right. “There are so many stories like this. Hundreds… thousands… millions. Eight million people Chief,” Balan said regretfully. “That’s how many people went through this hell.” It was unfathomable what they had endured, the forced labor camps, the gross psychological warfare, the physical torture, the executions. Emilia Balan spent her life seeking out the beauty in every place, but she could find no beauty here. It was just unadulterated pain and suffering.

“And every day, you are here helping them little by little,” Chief Shafir countered. “Listening, talking, sharing, helping them heal.” Shafir knew that pain would never disappear, but over time, they, just like her, would learn to walk again. “It is a beautiful thing you do for them Lieutenant.”

“I guess,” Balan conceded. “But the more I hear their stories, the more I don’t get it.” Her tone became angry as she thought about it all. “How does all this happen while the Federation does nothing? ‘We the lifeforms of the United Federation of Planets determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, and to reaffirm faith in the fundamental rights of sentient beings, in the dignity and worth of all lifeforms’ is how our Charter begins. To save succeeding generations from war. The dignity and worth of all lifeforms. How the fuck do we stand idle as this happens?” Lieutenant Balan did not swear, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. It was just too much. She was furious about it.

“We did not stand idle,” Chief Shafir reminded her, thinking back to the ordeal they had been through, the lives they had lost. “We answered the call to protect the dignity and worth of all those here who suffered at the hands of the Dominion.” And that made it worth it.

“But the rest of the Federation, Chief. Where are they? Why do they not answer?”

“I would say it’s human nature to shrink away when the danger is too great,” Chief Shafir replied. She didn’t have faith in humankind. She’d seen too much to believe in them.

“Forgive me Chief, but I just can’t believe that. The human heart cares for its neighbors and gives of itself to shelter them. Look at the 1,600 souls on the Polaris. We gave so much to free those people. I have to believe we are not unique,” insisted Lieutenant Balan.

“Then they simply do not know,” replied Chief Shafir flatly.

“Come again?”

“If you’re right, and humanity would rise to fight this scourge if they knew of it, then the only logical explanation is that they do not know.”

“How is that possible?”

“Are we anything but slaves to those that provide us information?” asked the Chief. Ayala Shafir had spent more than enough time compromising digital systems to know the power of information. “Our world is shaped by the message we get from our media, our governments, and our superiors.”

Lieutenant Balan nodded.

“I mean think of our own mission Lieutenant,” Chief Shafir continued. “Did you know the plight of Nasera before Admiral Reyes gave us our orders?”

“No.

“And where did she get those orders from?”

“Fourth Fleet Command.”

“And where did they get them from?”

“Starfleet Command?”

“Cute idea, but no,” Chief Shafir disclosed. She knew the truth from Commander Lewis, who had been there with Allison Reyes. “Fourth Fleet Command acted unilaterally based on its own intelligence data and the authority it has from its galaxy-wide mandate.”

Lieutenant Balan quirked her head. “Wait, so what are you saying about Starfleet Command?” It sounded crazy what the Chief was implying.

“I’m saying nothing about Starfleet Command specifically,” replied Chief Shafir. “But up there somewhere, whether in our leadership or in the civilian government and the media, the flow of information has been cut off.” That was quite an accusation, but it was the only logical conclusion if Lieutenant Balan was right about the nature of humankind. “It’s either that or you accept my pessimistic view on humanity.”

It was at that moment that Lieutenant Balan realized what they needed to do.

Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes rose early as was her custom. Usually, the day would start with a jog to get the blood flowing, but only three days since the Battle of Nasera, she didn’t have the time for her usual routine. She went straight to her Ready Room to review the latest updates, as she wanted to be down on Nasera by 0800 to check up on the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Admiral Reyes started with casualty reports, as she did every morning. Dozens of officers remained in critical condition, and each day, there would be a mix of good and bad news. Some would pull through. Others would tragically succumb to their injuries. Last night was no different. Five out of critical, the miracles of modern medicine at work, but there were also two who passed away. 

922 was now the number. 922 officers who had given their lives for the freedom of Nasera. The number hurt, but she had moved past the shock. Now it was just reality and, while it hurt to admit, it was only the tip of the iceberg. The longer this conflict continued, the worse it would get, and when Commodore Jori arrived with the Verity and the Serenity in two days time, Reyes knew she’d be heading straight back into the fray. And she would continue to add to that number.

Admiral Reyes’ mind drifted to her fellow commanding officers. How were they faring? She pulled up the latest reports from the Fourth Fleet. Endeavour Squadron was engaged in a pitched battle for Izar, Saratoga Squadron was moving against the Dominion fleet yards near Ciatar Nebula, and the Pioneer was nearing Saxue. Meanwhile, Mackenzie Squadron was over Janoor III and the Resolute was on the ground on Arriana Prime. For those captains, and so many more who had answered the call, they were now face-to-face with the enemy. They would have to make hard choices, and, at the end of the day, there would be more casualties. So many casualties. It was the reality of war.

In reports from the Hathaway, the Mackenzie, and the Andromeda, she saw something else that worried her: Changelings. Admiral Reyes hated Changelings. They turned officer against officer and neighbor against neighbor, seeding fear and distrust in the very people on whom you relied. She remembered the draconian measures Starfleet Security put in place during the last war. If these reports were right, they were probably needed again now. Why hadn’t they just let the morphogenic virus run its course? Sure, lawyers and historians would have called it genocide, but Admiral Reyes had no sympathy for the Dominion’s masters. The Founders had chosen this path.

Another concerning development came from Odyssey Squadron. When they arrived in the Divinium system, they found the colony gone. Not destroyed by an orbital bombardment, nor occupied like Nasera had been. Just gone. And the reason was terrifying. The latest report suggested it was the result of a metagenic weapon. If metagenics were at play, the plight of Nasera would pale in comparison to what was to come. And it made her genocidal thought about the morphogenic virus seem even more justified.

A chime at the door pulled her from her thoughts.

“Enter.”

“I’ve got it!” Lieutenant Emilia Balan declared as she entered the room. “I know what we need to do!” The eyes of the Polaris’ cultural affairs specialist were lit up, enthusiasm exuding from her entire being. “We’re going to give a voice to the voiceless!”

Looking up from her PADD, Admiral Reyes recognized the look at once. It was that of someone that just had a breakthrough. “Come again?”

“You know how everyone is doing their best to bury their heads in the sand and pretend this isn’t happening?” Lieutenant Balan asked, referencing the Federation’s indifferent obliviousness to the events transpiring in the Deneb Sector. “It’s not that they don’t care. Innate, it is human spirit to care. The problem is that they don’t really know. We can fix that. We can inspire the Federation to rise against this… this brutality.”

Admiral Reyes set down her PADD and looked at the excited young woman. She had a sense where this was going.

“Over the last two days, I have walked among these people. I have listened to absolutely heartbreaking accounts of what they went through at the hands of the Jem’Hadar,” Lieutenant Balan explained. “Starfleet Command cannot turn a blind eye to firsthand accounts! The pain, the horror, the grief in their eyes, their faces, their voices, when you hear it, you cannot do anything but want to help. They can’t go on saying it’s a Breen border conflict when the stories of these people are in their faces. We just need to get them out!” Her passion was palpable.

“Did you ever consider for a moment that Starfleet Command already has firsthand accounts?” asked Admiral Reyes. “That there’s some other angle here, some reason they’re not acting.” She had no doubt Starfleet Intelligence and Starfleet Command had the same reports she did. They were just choosing not to do anything with them.

“Maybe they don’t know how bad it is,” replied Balan, still optimistic.

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” Reyes cautioned. Not only had she filed her report with Jori and the Fourth Fleet leadership, but she’d also sent a briefing to Starfleet Command, one that contained irrefutable details, at the attestation of a Fleet Admiral, to the presence of Jem’Hadar. Yet, as recent as this morning, the Starfleet-wide sitrep from Starfleet Command mentioned nothing about the Dominion presence in the Deneb Sector. “They know. They’re just not doing anything about it.”

“Then let’s take it to someone who can force them to act,” Balan insisted firmly. “The people. Take the voices of Nasera, and hoist them onto the galactic stage. We go straight to the press.”

“You know what you are suggesting is a complete violation of Starfleet protocol?” Admiral Reyes cautioned. The Lieutenant had just proposed disclosing sensitive military intelligence to the public without following the chain of command. 

Lieutenant Balan’s face fell, disappointed.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it isn’t an absolutely lovely idea.” Admiral Reyes knew Commander Drake would try to skin them for it. Leaking sensitive information was punishable by dishonorable discharge and prison time if it occurred in an active warzone. The catch here though was that Starfleet Command had not classified the Deneb Sector as an active warzone. That meant the most the JAG would levy would be an administrative punishment. Allison Reyes was a Fleet Admiral. What did she care about a disciplinary finding on her service record? It would be a badge of honor if the action led to public outcry that forced Starfleet Command to act. “I say we do it.”

Lieutenant Balan was confused. She had never broken the law, at least not intentionally. “Are you suggesting we knowingly violate Starfleet protocol?”

“When you listen to the people of Nasera, when you hear their stories, what does your heart tell you?” Admiral Reyes asked. “To stand quiet and follow orders, or to do what is right for them? Countless officers across history have faced this question. I would prefer to be remembered as Gallery or von Choltitz rather than Hagenbach or Keitel.”

Lieutenant Balan was not a study of military history, so those names meant nothing to her; however, she understood the sentiment. After spending two days walking among the suffering, listening to their heartbreaking stories, she knew what was right. “I understand.”

“But it would be best if you keep this between the two of us for now,” the Admiral added. “Collect what you can, get it to me, and I will handle the rest.” For now, she didn’t even intend on telling Fourth Fleet Command. She’d work through other channels. She had no intention of getting gagged before they could give voice to the voiceless.

Dr. Lisa Hall sat in her office quietly reading a paper on the effects of neurological stimuli on Vorta brain chemistry. After her enhanced interrogation of the Vorta commander down on Nasera, she felt she had some updates to submit to the authors.

A chime at the door announced the arrival of Commander Robert Drake, the Polaris’ JAG officer. He strode into the room with proud purpose, his freshly polished boots echoing across the hard floor. Dr. Hall didn’t even look up. He wasn’t here for a counseling session, and she didn’t have any interest in entertaining the shark.

“Ahem,” Commander Drake said as he came to a stop directly in front of the psychologist. Still, Dr. Hall didn’t look up. “Dr. Hall, we need to talk.”

Dr. Hall set down the PADD and looked at him unimpressed. She suspected she knew why he was here, but she had no interest in entertaining the pompous, holier-than-thou defender of Federation ideals. She folded her hands in her lap with a flat expression on her face and waited for him to continue.

“What happened on Nasera?”

“Well, this morning, the sun rose over Nasera City at approximately 0730. I would figure that sometime before that, or after that, most of the population had breakfast. As for what they’re doing now…”

“Quit it Dr. Hall,” Commander Drake interrupted. “You know exactly what I meant with my question.” The JAG’s eyes narrowed on her, but Lisa Hall was completely unphased. She knew men like this. They talked all tough, but if she so much as stood up and slapped him across the face, he’d shrink away and cower like a petrified child. “What happened during the Battle of Nasera?”

“Oh, you would like a history lesson on what happened three nights ago?”

Commander Drake nodded.

“Well, at approximately 1755 hours, a Starfleet Hazard Team dispatched under the orders of Fleet Admiral Reyes executed a series of covert operations to sabotage Dominion-controlled infrastructure, and then, at 1800 hours, a squadron of six ships, led by the USS Polaris, began an assault to retake Nasera from the Dominion.”

“I am well aware of the sequence of events,” the JAG officer interrupted again. This was not what he meant by a history lesson.  “What I want to know is what you and your team did there.”

“The details of that would be in Commander Lewis’ classified after-action report.”

“Well, I’m not reading Commander Lewis’ report right now, am I?” countered Commander Drake. What the counselor didn’t know was that the JAG had already pulled that innocuous and vague report. “I’m here, asking you.”

“And what I’m telling you is that, as far as I am aware, you are not cleared for that information as it was a covert operation,” Dr. Hall replied, her tone shifting from one of petty mockery to one of firm insistence. “If you are interested in the details, you will need to submit a document access request through appropriate channels. And I am not an appropriate channel.”

“That’s bullshit, Lieutenant!” Commander Drake shouted, using her rank to remind her that, while she called herself a doctor, at the end of the day, she was a Starfleet officer first and foremost.

“Commander Drake, I do not appreciate your use of language unbecoming of a Starfleet officer,” she replied with a smile.

“You know I have the clearance to have this conversation.”

“Commander, while I believe I may have an understanding of your clearance level, that is not how the regulations are written.” She was correct in that. The regulations did not defer the interpretation of clearance to each and every individual officer in possession of classified material. “You will need to speak with Commander Lewis if you are interested in understanding the chain of events that occurred on Nasera II.”

Commander Drake absolutely planned to have a conversation – and probably many at that – with dear old Commander Lewis, but not yet. He was hoping to gather some details from the other team members first.  “Let’s try this a different way,” Drake pressed. “We have the body of the Vorta. We ran a full panel on him. Anticholinergics, receptor agonists, amphetamines, angiotensin inhibitors, beta blockers… need I go on?”

“Sounds like our Vorta friend was struggling with quite a set of mental health challenges,” Dr. Hall replied nonchalantly. She spent her life learning to interrogate people. The Commander’s pathetic attempts at interrogating her would get nowhere. “I hope he’s seeing someone for that, and that the medications are helping him.”

“He’s dead Lieutenant!” Commander Drake snapped. “Do you know anything about that?”

“Oh, what a shame. Maybe we should ask that Admiral if she’ll hold a funeral.”

“He was in your custody Lieutenant! This was your doing!”

“You seem stressed Robert,” Dr. Hall replied coyly, using his first name to demean him for the two were most certainly not on a first name basis. “Maybe you should see someone about it. While pharmaceutical drugs are outside my scope of practice as the ship’s counselor, might I suggest you go see Dr. Henderson about something for that?”

“Listen here Lieutenant. Before I’m done with you guys, you and the rest of Commander Lewis’ goons will answer for what you’ve done!” Commander Drake scowled angrily. “This won’t be the last conversation we have on this!” He spun on his heels and departed brisky. He hated spooks. 

Once he was gone, Dr. Hall tapped her combadge: “Hall to Lewis.”

“Lewis here, go ahead.”

“The shark is snooping around.”

“Drake?”

“Yep.”

“Alright, I’ll deal with it. Thanks for the heads up.”

The link hung up, and Dr. Hall went back to her journal article without another thought.

“Computer, locate Commander Drake.” Dr. Hall had just alerted Commander Lewis that the overzealous JAG was digging, and he was having none of it. On principle, Commander Lewis disliked all JAG officers, but in practice, he particularly despised Commander Drake. They had a history. He knew why Admiral Reyes kept him around, but it didn’t mean he didn’t want to space the prick.

“Commander Robert Drake is on Deck 31, starboard stardrive computer core.” 

That was not a place one would expect to find a JAG officer, unless he was busy hunting for something. “Is he with anyone?”

“Affirmative. Chief Petty Officer Ayala Shafir.”

“Motherfucker!” 

Commander Lewis broke out into a run towards the turbolift. He wasn’t worried about what Ayala would say, but he was worried the aggressive JAG would get in her head. Commander Drake was ruthless. The JAG would rub salt in any wound, and Ayala Shafir certainly had wounds from what had happened on Nasera II.

While Commander Lewis rushed towards Deck 31, Commander Drake was already hard at work grilling Chief Shafir. After leaving Dr. Hall’s office with nothing, he’d gone hunting for any other member of that covert operations team that he might be able to elicit more from. He found the Digital Systems Specialist working on a control unit for the starboard stardrive.

Commander Drake had started by pressing her on what had transpired at the governor’s mansion. The murder of that Vorta, and the toxins in his bloodstream, were Drake’s primary objective to explain, because he was damn certain that was a war crime. That line of questioning got him nowhere though with the Chief, as she insisted she was down in the tunnels beneath Nasera City with limited communications.

“You say you know nothing about what Commander Lewis and Lieutenants Hall, Kora, and Morgan were up to,” Drake relented frustratedly as several officers looked on at the heated exchange between the pair. “So let’s talk about something you do know.” While Commander Lewis’ report was devoid of anything Commander Drake could use in a court martial against Lewis and his team, it did give enough details about the events to let him know where to prod. “Lieutenant Commander Jordan.”

Chief Shafir looked down as the memories came flooding back. Pressing that detonator had been one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. Brock Jordan was like an older brother to her, the guy that was always there, pushing them along and picking them up when they fell. “What about him?” Chief Shafir asked lightly, really not wanting to have this conversation.

“His body was located in the rubble of the planetary defense system’s control center,” Commander Drake asserted aggressively. “You and Ensign Rel were with him, but you two are still here, and he is not.” His eyes narrowed on her.

“I am acutely aware of that,” Shafir replied sadly.

“So what happened?” Commander Drake wasn’t going to stop his line of questioning because a petite Chief looked upset. In fact, her demeanor just encouraged his attack.

“As we retreated from the control center, the Jem’Hadar captured him.”

“And you didn’t go back for him?”

“Against a full company of Jem’Hadar? No, that would have been suicide,” Chief Shafir explained as she looked at the soft hands, perfect skin, and unwrinkled uniform of Commander Drake. This was not a man who had ever been in the shit, or anywhere near it. He’d probably never even had to hold a phaser outside of the required Academy courses.

“So you blew up the control center with him still in it? Knowing full well you were going to kill him?”

“Yes.” Her single word answer came out flat, but inside, her affirmation cut deep into her heart. Every night when she closed her eyes, she saw that detonator in her hands again and relived that moment when she pressed the button that killed Brock Jordan. “It was the only option,” she added softly.

Commander Drake was shocked how easy the admission had come. Until now, he did not know who had pressed the trigger. Commander Lewis had omitted who from the report. But now he knew. “That will be for a court martial tribunal to determine.”

Chief Shafir looked at him with disgust. That was what this was all about? A stupid judicial process? There were things that mattered so much more than that. “You think for a minute I would have done it if there was any other way Commander?” A tear ran down her cheek. “Brock was our leader, our friend. But we had to. There was no choice. Otherwise, they would have regained control of that planetary defense system, and this whole mission would have failed,” she insisted, struggling to hold it together.

“It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the law says based on…”

Commander Drake was interrupted mid-sentence as a burly hand grabbed his forearm from behind. The grip was firm and aggressive, spinning him around with a degree of strength far overwhelming any resistance he could put up. 

“Who the fuck do you think you are,” Commander Jake Lewis opened angrily as he thrust Commander Drake up against a bulkhead with both hands. “To come down here and harass my team like this?” He was not going to put up with that, not after everything they had sacrificed.

A crowd of engineering officers working in the stardrive computer core looked over and began to gather around the spectacle. This was not a sight you often saw on Deck 31, or anywhere for that matter, a lanky JAG officer pinned helpless against a bulkhead by an angry old spook. That they were both senior officers on the Polaris made it all the more out of the ordinary.

Commander Drake looked like a floppy mannequin in the grasp of a raging killer, but still he had a smile on his face. “I am simply speaking to a Starfleet officer about her conduct during an away mission, as is my job.” Commander Lewis’ outbreak was just making his job that much easier.

Commander Lewis brought his face right up to Commander Drake’s, so close their noses almost touched. Lewis’ expression looked like he was ready to kill the man. “You sit up here in your plush quarters, intellectually jerking off while we do the hard work that must be done, and then you swoop in like a vulture to second guess every decision we had to make.”

Commander Drake just stuck his chin up proudly.

“You have never put your life on the line for shit Drake,” Commander Lewis pressed, as he held the JAG up against the wall. “You have never stared down a dozen Jem’Hadar warships as you sneak onto an occupied world. Ayala has. You have never snuck around a city filled with trained killers hunting you. Ayala has. You have never gone into a building swarming with Jem’Hadar to carry out a mission where, if you fail, everyone you serve with will die. Ayala has.” Commander Lewis lifted the JAG officer off the ground by the slack in his uniform. “You’re only fucking alive because of what she did!”

The hiss of a door signaled the arrival of a pair of security officers. They rushed straight towards the entangled pair. Commander Lewis saw them coming, but before they could reach him, he chucked Commander Drake onto the cold floor of the computer core. The JAG landed on the deck, looking up at his colleague, shocked by the audacity. This was assault of an officer, plain and simple.

“So stay the fuck away from my people!” Commander Lewis spat at the pathetic JAG as the security officers grabbed him by both arms. The Chief Intelligence Officer didn’t resist. He knew the way to the brig.

Commander Lewis sat calmly in the brig. Imprisonment was not an unfamiliar experience for him, although the accommodations were far nicer aboard the USS Polaris than the dozen or so prisons he’d found himself in over the years. Starfleet was a bit too kind to its prisoners, he thought to himself. But that was coming from the guy who had just presided over the torture of a Vorta commander on Nasera II, and then who’d executed the creature in cold retribution afterwards.

His actions on Nasera II were not the reason why Commander Lewis had found himself in the brig though. The reason for his imprisonment today was far simpler. He’d given Commander Drake a piece of his mind for the way he was harassing his team. His covert operators sacrificed so much on Nasera II, and he could not stand idle as that idealistic scumbag made their pain worse. In hindsight though, Commander Lewis had to acknowledge that it probably wasn’t the best idea to physically assault the JAG officer that was investigating them, but it had felt good to lay his hands on that pompous prick.

The hiss of the door announced a new arrival. The way the brig officer snapped to attention, Commander Lewis had an idea who it was before he could see her.

“Allison, I was wondering how long it would take before you’d come down here,” he said as Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes came into view in front of his cell.

“It would have been sooner,” Admiral Reyes explained as she disabled the forcefield and stepped into the cell with a disapproving look. “But I had a few more pressing problems to worry about than a Chief Intelligence Officer that cannot keep his hands to himself.” Why couldn’t Commander Lewis have just kept his cool? She had a squadron to fix, a planet to rebuild, and a mission to get on with. This was an annoying distraction.

“What’s he got me in here for?” Commander Lewis asked with an amused look on his face. He had no concerns for the charges Drake would level. Worst case scenario, he’d lose his pips and go back to doing what he did before he reupped with the Polaris.

“He doesn’t have you in here for anything right now. You put yourself in here with that dumb little stunt of yours,” Admiral Reyes clarified with a disapproving stare. “An engineering officer called security out of fear for what you were going to do to Commander Drake. It’s not often they see a department head lifting the Staff Judge Advocate up against a bulkhead.”

“That piece of shit deserved it.”

“I don’t disagree,” Reyes laughed. “But there are other ways to deal with these things, like you could have…”

“Spare me,” Commander Lewis interrupted with a look of frustration. “He was harassing Ayala for a decision that she will live with for the rest of her life. A correct decision.”

“You and I both know how difficult the decisions we make in those moments can be, and I don’t doubt you all made the right ones the other day,” Admiral Reyes affirmed with a deep sense of understanding. Decades ago during the war, she’d thrown in with the dirtiest of the dirty, a kill squad operating behind Dominion lines. She was not one to question whether the ends justified the means when it came to the Dominion. Any means were justified against the Dominion. “But there are other ways to deal with the likes of Commander Drake. Ways that don’t give him more ammunition to press charges.”

“He’s going to press charges for this?”

Admiral Reyes laughed out loud. “No, when I went to visit him in sickbay, he said he doesn’t care about what you just did. He called it a petty small crime not even worth his time. He doesn’t care about a disciplinary mark on your messy and heavily redacted service record. He wants your pips stripped and your ass behind bars.”

“Oh please!” Now it was Commander Lewis’ turn to laugh. “Even if he does manage to stick something to me, you know I’ll be released within a week.” As despicable as men like Commander Lewis were to the Federation at large, they were highly valued by those who understood that sometimes you had to compromise ideals in order to protect them. Starfleet Intelligence had no qualms using people of his disposition to do their dirty work, and Starfleet Intelligence had been one of the largest customers of his private outfit after he’d been shelved the previous time for allegedly killing a Romulan Senator. This was child’s play in comparison. “And I’ll just go back to doing what I was doing before.”

“I’d rather that not happen Jake,” Admiral Reyes confided. “I sought you out two years ago for a reason, and I sense I may need you more than ever in the days ahead. I cannot help but think there are strange forces at play right now. Ramar, Dahlgren and Beckett, I trust them, but Starfleet Command, and the Federation government more broadly, they’re not making much sense these days. How can they sit idle with everything that is happening out here in Deneb?” This question had been irking her ever since the Lost Fleet had reappeared.

“Because they’re a bunch of lazy, terrified, appeasing, isolationist blowhards?” To Commander Lewis, the admirals within Starfleet Command were basically just proving what he already knew about them. He’d never had much respect for the bureaucrats that called the shots. If Allison Reyes hadn’t asked him personally to renew his commission, there was no chance in hell he’d be wearing pips today. “Oh, and they’re pussies. They’ll bury their heads in the sand until the Dominion piledrives them.”

Reyes laughed hard at that one. He might be right, but she wasn’t so certain. The depths to which information had been suppressed made her think it might be something more, but it could also just be her past experiences tainting her perspective on the present.

“So you planning on springing me from this joint?” Commander Lewis teased. “Or are you just going to leave me caged up here for a while?”

“There’s a part of me that says leaving you here will keep you out of trouble,” Admiral Reyes replied. “But I’m going to let you out on your own recognizance with one very specific order: you are not to interact with Commander Drake in any way for the next twenty four hours, and I have given him the exact same instructions about you and your team.”

Commander Lewis folded his arms and gave the Admiral a look of supreme displeasure.

“Neither of you is happy about my ceasefire, but this is how it’s going to be,” Admiral Reyes insisted. “I want your word Jake.” She looked right at him and didn’t blink. She was dead serious.

“Fine, you have my word,” Commander Lewis relented, to which Admiral Reyes relaxed. She knew he would not break his word to her. “But you know I’m not going to be any nicer tomorrow than I am today, right?”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that,” Reyes replied. “But in twenty four hours, neither you, nor me, nor any of your team are still going to be onboard the USS Polaris.”

Commander Lewis quirked his eyebrow with curiosity.

“Commodore Jori is arriving with the USS Verity to take over humanitarian operations on Nasera II, and she’s bringing us a new ship so we can get back in the fight.”

A smile flashed across Commander Lewis’ face at that. This was the Allison Reyes he knew, the woman he had agreed to reup with. She was a warrior at her core, and she would not rest until the scourge of the Dominion was eradicated. “Please tell me she’s bringing us something a little leaner and meaner than this whale of a heavy explorer?” Lewis asked hopefully. The Polaris was an impressive vessel, but she was no warship.

“Leaner, yes, but meaner, no,” warned the admiral to a disappointed look from Lewis. “There weren’t a lot of captainless Fourth Fleet ships just chilling idle at Farpoint. We’re going to be taking command of the USS Serenity, a Duderstadt class vessel just out of repairs following a tough run-in with the Jem’Hadar.”

“What the hell are we going to do with a Duderstadt?” asked Commander Lewis. In times of peace, it would be a perfectly innocuous ship to sneak around with, exactly the sort of thing he’d want, but this was an active war. “We just gonna buzz around like a gnat waiting to get swatted out of the sky?”

“That’s pretty much the idea,” Admiral Reyes laughed. She’d given some thought to what they were going to do over the last few days. “Supply lines, communications relays, ship movements, we’re going to stalk the sector, collecting surveillance and striking at points of weakness. Anything we can do to weaken their war machine.”

And so, trusting his word for she knew he would be good to it, Admiral Reyes set Commander Lewis loose on his own recognizance. They had more important things to worry about than some silly JAG prosecution. The Lost Fleet still ran rampant across the Deneb Sector, and it was well past time they got back in the fight.

“Captain, I’ve got two Federation ships incoming. Transponders identify as USS Verity and USS Serenity.”

“Wonderful. We’ve been expecting them,” replied Captain Devreux with a smile. For the last five days, the battered squadron, scarred by the trials of a pitched battle, had done what they could to heal the broken planet beneath them. However, on account of the immense damage the squadron had taken, progress had been agonizingly slow, but finally they were now getting some reinforcements. The USS Verity was an Odyssey class variant outfitted specifically for humanitarian missions, and she would be a welcome relief. He wasn’t exactly sure what the purpose of the Duderstadt class USS Serenity was, but any additional hands would help. 

Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes emerged from the turbolift almost on queue. She’d been troubleshooting a couple fixes to the reactor assembly with the engineers, but as soon as the computer notified her of the incoming ships, she took her leave and headed for the bridge. She was restless to get back out there. “I hear Commodore Jori is on final approach?”

“Affirmative.”

“Alright, call Vox, Lee, Henderson and Balan. Have them meet us in the briefing room. I’ll take the Commodore in my Ready Room first, and then we’ll be right over.”

As Captain Devreux stepped away to place the calls, Admiral Reyes approached the main viewer to watch as the new arrivals emerged from warp. She breathed a sigh of relief as she took in the majestic sight of the Polaris’ sister ship, the USS Verity, and the sleek curves of her new boat, the USS Serenity. The USS Verity would be a massive step up for the rebuilding efforts on Nasera, and the USS Serenity would get her back in the fight.

“Commodore Jori says she’s on her way over,” Devreux offered after a moment.

Admiral Reyes nodded and made her way to the Ready Room. Once inside, she beelined for  the replicator, excitedly placing an order: “Two coffees, one black, one with light cream and sugar.” For the first time in five days, a pair of coffees actually materialized. They had just gotten enough power pumping again to reenable non-nutritional meal replication.

Admiral Reyes carried the two coffees over to the sitting area and set them down on the coffee table. After her prior exchanges with the head of Task Force 93, everything about this setting was intentional. They’d sit at the couches for a more casual atmosphere than across a desk, and she’d even gone out of her way to pull the Commodore’s coffee preference to make Jori feel more at home. A couple minutes passed, and then a chime at the door alerted the Admiral to Jori’s arrival. She rose to greet her guest.

The walk from the transporter room to the bridge had given Commodore Jori an opportunity to take in the damage the Polaris sustained. Hearing about the losses, and now seeing the situation for herself firsthand, she was glad she had arrived to assist. Her heart ached in times like these. You could put on a strong face, but deep down it hurt.

Upon arriving at her destination, the tall slender Trill entered the Ready Room of Admiral Reyes. With a small smile she greeted the older woman. “A pleasure to finally be able to meet in person,” she said as she looked around the room and noticed two cups of coffee sitting on the coffee table near the couch.

“And you as well,” Reyes smiled back, gesturing towards the couch. “Please, have a seat. I trust the trip was rather uneventful?”

“You could say that,” Jori said with a chuckle. It mostly had been, except for that awkward conversation with the acting commanding officer of the Serenity about where they were headed. He was a young officer who had just gotten his promotion to first officer right before they had lost their captain. She tried to explain to him the plan, but with Reyes as cryptic as she had been about her intentions, Jori had probably left him more confused than not. Walking over to the couch, Jori took a seat, crossing her leg over the other before picking up one of the mugs. She smiled before taking a sip. Not only was it a cup of coffee, but it was just the way she liked it.

“What is the report of the current situation here?” Commodore Jori inquired as she brought the cup down to her lap.

“Well, on the plus side, we have food-grade replicators available again,” Admiral Reyes laughed as she raised a toast with her mug. It was funny how the little things in life could go so far. “But besides being able to make a cup of coffee once again, the squadron is still weeks away from being spaceworthy. And that’s far better than the planet. The Jem’Hadar did a number to it. If we hadn’t stopped them when we did…” Admiral Reyes shook her head just envisioning what would have happened if Commander Lewis hadn’t pulled off whatever it was he did with the Vorta.

“As it stands, there are half a million displaced residents living in a mix of tents and couch surfing arrangements,” Admiral Reyes continued as she handed Commodore Jori a PADD.  “Rolling black outs, limited fuel, and most of the factories are still silent. Commander Cora Lee from the Ingenuity has been running the planetary rebuild, Captain Devreux has been coordinating shipside repairs, Captain Vox has been managing airspace logistics, Commander Henderson has been leading medical efforts, and Lieutenant Balan has been liaising with what’s left of the civilian government. I’ve convened a briefing for us all so you can hear the details directly from them. They’ll be remaining here with you while I take the Serenity on ahead.”

Jori nodded. Although she still didn’t agree with the Admirals decision to go off again, she wasn’t going to argue the point anymore. “So tell me Allison, what are your plans upon leaving with the Serenity?” she asked, looking at her with concern. She cared about those who served under her command, and although Reyes was as stubborn as anyone, she was still part of Jori’s task force, and that meant she cared about her.

“The Duderstadt class is fast and nimble, and the Serenity is fitted with its recon configuration,” Admiral Reyes explained. “Have you ever heard of the Scythians, Commodore?”

The Trill Commodore shook her head. She had not.

“The Scythians were nomadic equestrians of a great steppe on ancient Earth. Three millennia ago, their lands were challenged by the massive armies of the Achaemenid Empire. In any head-to-head battle, the Achaemenids would have swept the floor with them, and both sides knew it, so the Achaemenid leader sent a letter to the Scythian general Idanthyrsus insisting that either he meet him on the battlefield or he surrender. Idanthyrsus did neither. Instead, he peppered the Achaemenids with hit-and-run attacks, crippling their capabilities and breaking their will,” Admiral Reyes explained. “We’re going to be like Idanthyrsus’ horsemen.”

Commodore Jori looked at the admiral with a blank stare, thinking she was utterly mad. She puffed out her cheeks only to let the air out slowly. “You just better come back alive and in one piece…” she said as she stared at the coffee cup in her hand for a long moment.

An awkward silence settled over the room.

“Well let’s not keep the others waiting too long,” Jori finally said, interrupting that quiet moment, before taking another sip from that cup she had been just staring at.

“Alright, let’s get to it,” Admiral Reyes replied, happy to see they weren’t going to relitigate her decision. 

Admiral Reyes rose from her position on the couch and led Commodore Jori from the Ready Room across the Bridge into the Main Conference Room. When they arrived, the team was already assembled, sitting at the table beneath the sweeping windows that gave them a wall-to-wall view of Nasera II. Present were Captain Gèrard Devreux, Captain Dorian Vox, Commander Cora Lee, Commander James Henderson, and Lieutenant Emilia Balan, each of whom played a key role in the rebuild and recovery efforts of the squadron and the planet below.

“Thank you for joining us this morning folks,” Admiral Reyes offered. “As you’re all aware, Commodore Imya Jori, Task Force 93 Commanding Officer, arrived a few minutes ago with the USS Verity and USS Serenity. She is here to assist with our relief efforts.” The Admiral smiled as she yielded the floor to the Commodore. This was now Jori’s show to run.

Commodore Jori took a moment to study everyone in the room. “I know the last few weeks, and the last few days especially, have been tough on all of you,” Jori began as she took a seat near the head of the table with all eyes on her. “You have all fought for these people, and they are now free because of you.”

Around the room, there was a mix of pride and fatigue.

“I am here to help ease the load that has been placed on all of you,” Jori explained while adjusting in the chair. “The Verity is an Odyssey class ship specifically designed to handle humanitarian missions such as this.” 

“That assistance will be greatly appreciated, Commodore,” offered Commander Lee, getting straight to business. “Industrial replicators, fuel reserves and provisions for the displaced colonists are our most pressing needs.”

“And medical staff down on the surface,” added Commander Henderson, piling on with his own challenges. “The medical staff have been working double, and sometimes triple, shifts to try and meet the need, but we’ve got thousands of colonists who sustained severe or critical injuries down there. We have neither the staff nor the equipment to tend to them all.” There was disappointment in his eyes at that admission, along with a profound exhaustion from the weight on his shoulders and the long shifts he himself had been running. “And that’s not even to speak for the wounded we still have up here.”

“We’ve been triaging logistics to the best of our abilities, but our ships did not come equipped for the sort of crisis we now face down on the planet,” Captain Devreux added, bringing his own challenges to the fore as well. “Especially with the level of damage we sustained during the battle.” That battle still haunted him, how close they’d come to losing it all, and how many they had lost along the way.

Commodore Jori took in the updates, nodding along as the overworked senior officers gave their brief summaries of their most dire issues. “Commander Lee, you will remain in charge of repairing the damages down on the planet,” she instructed after the barrage of updates subsided. Commander Lee’s engineering prowess and the fact the Ingenuity had sustained the most limited damage of the whole squadron made this make sense. “My engineering team and industrial replicators are at your disposal.”

“I very much appreciate that, Commodore,” the young Commander replied with relief washing across her face. She’d been trying to work miracles with what little they had, but the Verity would change the game for them. “It would also help if you’ve got officers that could coordinate ongoing support for the displaced persons.” Those half million residents who had lost their homes during the occupation had been a serious pull on her attention, and the humanitarian aspects of this operation were not the engineer’s core strength.

“We have supplies and extra fuel for those on the planet,” Jori offered with a soft smile in hopes she could make things easier for Lee. “And my team can manage efforts around the displaced persons.”

“Thank you Commodore.” It was a breath of fresh air for the young Commander who’d felt like she was six feet underwater for the last five days. Reyes had been helpful to keep them pushing ahead, but the Admiral never seemed to fatigue or recognize how they were fatiguing, and she couldn’t invent replicator capacity out of thin air.

Looking at the doctor next, Commodore Jori could see the exhaustion in his eyes. It made her concerned. “I will be taking a good majority of the injured off of the Polaris,” Jori began as apprehension overtook Dr. Henderson’s face. “The Verity was designed with extensive medical facilities including two infirmaries, three surgical suites and three recovery units. I will also be sending over some extra staff to help you and your team with those who remain.”

“Respectfully Commodore, the Polaris is this crew’s home, and I am their doctor,” Doctor Henderson replied. “I would prefer to keep as many of them here as possible.” It wasn’t a logical request, but it’s where his tired and stim-riddled mind went. “What would be most helpful is if your medical teams could bolster the Starfleet and civilian doctors down on the planet’s surface.”

She looked at Dr. Henderson, studying him for a moment, before responding. His request seemed illogical given the current state of things aboard the Polaris. “I understand that Commander, but remember your ship is damaged and one of your infirmaries is still inoperable. You are overflowing with injured crew, far more than you and your medical staff can care for,” Jori insisted as she looked at him. “Let the Verity take some of them off of your shoulders, especially the more critical patients.” Dr. Henderson did not look convinced. “Don’t worry. We will be sending our remaining staff down to the planet as well. We have more medical staff on hand than most other ships in the fleet due to our designation as a humanitarian ship.”

The doctor looked split between relief at her assistance planetside and frustration at her instructions pertaining to the Polaris.

“And doctor, I am relieving you of duty for the next twenty four hours to get some sleep. I don’t want you to become a patient next,” Commodore Jori then ordered.

Dr. Henderson opened his mouth as if to protest. He could do this. He knew he could, just as he’d been doing the past five days. He didn’t need the sleep. He needed to get back to work. There were so many to save, and he had the stims to keep him going. 

Admiral Reyes shot Dr. Henderson a look, speaking for the first time since Jori had taken center stage. “Doctor, I would not argue with the Commodore on this one,” Reyes cautioned sternly. “Commodore Jori is dead right. Don’t make me pull the entry logs for your quarters to see how many hours you’ve actually been sleeping.” So focused on the mission, it was the first time Reyes had truly noticed how bad Dr. Henderson looked, and while she was the first to push her people to their limits when it was necessary, it simply wasn’t necessary with all the new support they’d just gotten with Jori’s arrival.

The Commodore could see the hesitation in the Doctor’s eyes, but she chose a more sensitive tact than the Admiral. She got up from her chair and walked over to him. With a soft caring smile, she placed a hand on his shoulder. “We are in this together. My Chief Medical Officer will take over for the next twenty four hours. I trust her with my life. She will take care of your patients. You need rest.” Jori tried to give him that reassurance that everything will be alright, even if it didn’t feel like it at the moment. 

Dr. Henderson looked conflicted, but he knew he wasn’t going to win the battle against two flag officers so he relented. Commodore Jori then turned to address Captain Devreux. “Captain, you are to focus on getting the ships of the squadron in a position where they can limp back to a starbase,” she said as she walked back to her seat at the table. “Our industrial replicators are at your disposal as well.”

“Yes ma’am,” Devreux replied energetically. With the help of the Verity, and no longer having to ration every last joule of power for their most essential needs, things would get much easier. “Recommend Captain Vox also continues as our de facto airspace controller too,” he said, looking over at the CO of the Diligent who had been exceptional at making sure everything ended up where it was supposed to go. With the Verity now in orbit, that airspace would just get more complex.

Jori smiled as she looked at the Captain. “Of course.”

“It would be my honor,” replied Captain Vox simply. For as much credit as Captain Devreux had given him, this was easy work. Still, it was necessary, and with his ship far from being ready to get back into the fight, it was the best he could offer.

Commodore Jori looked over at Admiral Reyes for a brief moment, and the Admiral jumped straight in. “I recommend that Lieutenant Balan, the Polaris’ diplomatic attaché and cultural affairs specialist, also continues her current responsibilities liaising with the civilian authorities,” the admiral said as she gestured at the young Lieutenant who had sat quiet during the exchange of the more senior officers. This was not the sort of meeting she was accustomed to being a part of, but she had an important role to play. “She has built strong bonds with the civilian authorities and the people of the city.” There was also another angle the Admiral had for Balan, their secret little mission, but she was not going to allude to that here with the Commodore. She was keeping that quiet from everyone.

Commodore Jori smiled at the young Lieutenant who seemed out of her element at this briefing. Jori had been in her shoes more times then she could count over the years as she’d risen through the ranks. “I think that is a perfect idea,” she replied. With all that the people of Nasera had been through, having someone they could turn to was wonderful. “If you need anything please don’t hesitate to ask,” Jori added with another smile. Though times like these were really not smiling matters, Jori tried to keep positivity going externally even if she was feeling the total opposite inside.

Admiral Reyes was pleased to see Commodore Jori in her element. They had clashed a bit in their prior exchanges, but war could do that to you. In a situation like this, Jori seemed perfectly at home. “If it is not clear by now,” Admiral Reyes then said, addressing the elephant in the room. “Commodore Jori is relieving me as head of the Nasera recovery operation, effective immediately.”

There was a stunned silence around the table. No one doubted the Commodore’s competence, but they felt a certain attachment to the woman who had led them into battle five nights prior.

“Where are you going?” asked Captain Devreux. He knew her better than the others, and he was worried about what her answer would be. Something had changed in her since the Lost Fleet had returned, and never in the past seven years had she seemed so distant from him.

Admiral Reyes looked out the wide sweeping windows at the stars beyond. They looked so peaceful hanging there in the vastness of space. “The Dominion threat still lurks out there,” Reyes answered. “Commodore Jori has graciously ceded the Serenity to me, and I’ll be departing on it within the hour to get back in the fight.” There was a dark and menacing look in her eye, that same spirit that a quarter century ago had led her to sign up with a black ops kill squad during the Dominion War. She would not rest until the only Jem’Hadar that remained in the galaxy were those in the Gamma Quadrant. “Commander Lewis and I are going hunting.”

“Allison…” Devreux began to say. He didn’t want his partner to go. This was crazy. They’d just barely survived the Battle of Nasera, and now Reyes was going to get right back at it? You could only get lucky so many times.

“Gèrard, don’t,” Reyes said, putting up her hand to stop him. “There are eight million people here on Nasera that depend on what we are doing, but I’m redundant. You all, and Commodore Jori, can do for them what needs to be done. Where this washed up veteran can make a difference is out there, sticking it to the monsters that did this to these people, and who continue to inflict pain on our people all across the sector.”

“Good on you, Admiral,” Captain Vox said from his quiet corner of the briefing room. He respected her for the way she continued to answer the call, day after day. If the Diligent had been in fighting shape, he would have asked to go with her, but as things stood, that just wasn’t possible.

As for the rest of her team, they looked unsettled with a mixture of disappointment and concerns. Still, they said nothing more as it was clear the decision was not up for debate.

Commodore Jori still had her feelings about Admiral Reyes’ decision, but that argument had already been had, and she wouldn’t press it any further. “I wish you the best Admiral,” she said, looking at her with concern for a moment before she turned back to the rest. “I am excited to work with all of you over the next few days and weeks. To continue to rebuild and help these people,” Jori said with a genuine smile. “Oh one more thing, you may call me Imya or Jori you don’t have to use my rank. I might be a flag officer, I am no different than any of you.” She would rather them call her by her name than her rank, and it humanized her as a member of the team.

Never had the contrast in leadership styles been more clear. Since the Lost Fleet had arrived in their space, Admiral Reyes had pushed her team to their limits, risking it all and paying a steep price for victory, but now, with Commodore Jori taking the reins, the team finally felt supported. Admiral Reyes, for her sake, departed promptly. War waited for no one, and she was ready to get back at it.

Admiral Reyes, Commander Lewis and a small team from the Polaris blazed onto the bridge of the Serenity with fire in their eyes and determination in their step. The rest of the Polaris’ crew still toiled on their ship and the planet below, but whether it was to avenge the tragedy of Nasera or the scars of a war long past, these zealots were restless and ready to strike back once more. They were hand-picked by Reyes and Lewis, battle-tested and non-relevant to the humanitarian mission the rest of the squadron was involved with.

Before anyone could announce her arrival, Admiral Reyes had already swiftly cleared the distance from the turbolift to the command island. “Lieutenant Commander Eidran,” she said briskly as she extended her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Before the acting CO could even respond or shake her hand, the admiral cut right to the chase. “Let’s get this ship ready to depart. It’s time to get on with it.”

Lieutenant Commander Ekkomas Eidran’s was mouth agape, speechless at the whirlwind that had just blown onto the quiet bridge. All around him, the officers that Admiral Reyes had brought with her were making themselves right at home, introducing themselves to his bridge officers and settling in at empty stations to get up to speed.

“You okay there Mister Eidran?” asked Commander Lewis from behind the Master Systems Display as he quickly assessed the combat readiness of the ship. “Admiral said let’s get this bird ready to fly.”

“Oh yes, yes, I’m sorry,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran replied as he tried to get his wits about him. “I… I just didn’t know we were departing so soon. Or at all honestly.” Commodore Jori had been vague about what the Serenity would be doing in the Nasera System.

“War doesn’t wait for anyone kid,” said Commander Lewis gruffly as he sized up the young officer. According to his dossier, Ekkomas Eidran was a cracked Tactical Officer who had just been promoted to Executive Officer, and then tragedy struck, thrusting him into the Captain’s Chair after their Commanding Officer was killed. Lewis was not impressed by how slow Eidran seemed on the trigger thus far. “Let’s chop chop,” Lewis insisted, looking around the bridge and clapping his hands as if to encourage the crew to get their hustle on. “You heard the Admiral.”

Admiral Reyes took in the bridge and its officers. The bridge’s downtempo demeanor stood in sharp contrast to her energized team, and its officers looked melancholy, shocked and subdued. This was going to be a problem. “Commanders,” she instructed, pointing at Commander Lewis and Lieutenant Commander Eidran. “Ready Room, now.” 

Reyes headed for the Ready Room, followed by Lewis and Eidran, while the rest of their people got comfortable with the Serenity’s systems.

Once the door shut behind them, Admiral Reyes looked straight at Lieutenant Commander Eidran. “Ok Commander, give it to me straight,” she demanded. “What the hell is going on here?”

“I’m sorry ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran apologized with an embarrassed expression. “No one gave us any details about the mission. Since the Serenity is not a warship, we all sort of figured we’d be helping with Nasera. I heard from Commodore Jori that the planet is in pretty bad shape?”

“Yes, that is an accurate description,” Reyes nodded regretfully. “And we are going to strike back at the enemy to make sure they can’t keep doing this.” She paused for a moment to study the young man. He had stellar reviews from all his past Commanding Officers, including the recently deceased Captain Mark Gilliam. She had respected Mark. He ran a tight ship, and if he had good things to say about this young man, she wanted to give him a chance. “Frankly though, what I’m worried about right now is why the bridge looks like someone’s throwing a wake?”

“Admiral, it’s just that the crew has been through a lot,” Eidran explained. “We got rammed by a Jem’Hadar fighter while coming to the aid of the USS Kison. Captain Gilliam, and thirty of our friends and colleagues, perished in that moment. We limped back to Farpoint for repairs, but it’s all been pretty hard. Mark was like a dad to us all.” There was a deep sadness in his eyes. “I guess none of us really gave any thought to the fact we’d be going back up against them so soon. I’m not sure we’re ready.”

Commander Lewis looked like he was about ready to rip the Betazoid’s head off for such a pitiful statement, and the Betazoid could sense Lewis’ unrestrained emotions, adding to his discomfort. 

Admiral Reyes took a more graceful tact. “War is a terrible thing,” she offered gently. “Never is the will of an officer more tested than when the battle goes south. We can either shrivel up and succumb to our pain, or we can use it to strengthen our resolve, to avenge the fallen, and to ensure that no more have to suffer the same fate.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran looked torn as he debated those words. They made sense at a literal level, but he was having a hard time accepting them at a practical one.

“Nine hundred and twenty eight officers gave their lives here,” Admiral Reyes continued as she looked out the window at Nasera II beneath them. “But they did it so millions would be free once more. And they did it for each other. A young Petty Officer gave his life rather than turn his team over to the Jem’Hadar. A Lieutenant Commander gave his life to ensure the planetary defense system would not fall back into Dominion hands and be used to destroy our squadron. Two brave men gave their lives to ensure we didn’t have to ram the Polaris into an orbital station. And I could go on and on. Your story is not all that different. The Serenity came to the aid of her fellow officers. Mark knew the risks, yet still he answered the call. Do we not owe it to Mark, to your fallen friends, and to all those who gave their lives here in the Nasera System, and all across the sector for that matter, to finish what they started and to answer the call once more?”

It was a lot to take in. Ekkomas Eidran had not thought of it that way up until this point. He was still in that stage of grief where the world was just a blur.

“Or, if you want to think about it another way,” offered Commander Lewis. “Let’s go get even with those assholes. Revenge is sweet.” The aged spook with weathered skin smirked.

Lieutenant Commander Eidran was shocked by the candor. It was not what he expected from a fellow officer, but it was refreshing. Yes, he thought to himself, he was a fighter. It’s why he’d gone tactical track in the first place. “I guess I can get with that,” he said, his posture straightening. “For Mark, and for the others.”

That was as good as they were going to get from the young man at that moment, so Admiral Reyes turned her attention towards the rest of the crew. “How have you addressed this with the rest of the crew?” she asked. “Morale and all of that.” If the acting Commanding Officer was in this state, it did not bode well for those who served under him.

“Honestly, we haven’t really,” Eidran admitted. He was only weeks out of the Command Academy, and although he knew morale was paramount to a successful command, the courses hadn’t prepared him for this situation, one where they’d lost the ship’s Commanding Officer and a tenth of their colleagues. “And our Chief Counselor was among those we lost too.”

“Well, lucky for you, we brought someone along to help,” Reyes smiled. “Commander Lewis, please see to it that Dr. Hall puts together a game plan to get this crew ready to fight.” 

Commander Lewis nodded. Dr. Hall was absolutely going to adore this assignment, he thought to himself sarcastically. There was nothing the twisted psychologist hated more than being a shoulder for kids to cry on.

“And Commander Eidran, once we’re underway, please arrange a banquet in the officers’ mess, a meet-and-greet, if you will, and a rallying call for what lies ahead,” Reyes instructed. The request might have seemed odd to Lieutenant Commander Eidran, given that they were about to go to war, but Admiral Reyes knew they’d only succeed if they changed the hearts and minds of these officers. She’d have Commander Lewis seed his operators throughout the mess hall to prompt conversations with the staff where they could push their message, and she’d come up with a little speech to get everyone in the game for the fight ahead.

“None of us wanted this, but here we are,” Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes said to the crowd assembled in the mess hall. “Our old enemy continues their rampage across the sector. We have seen the face of their evil, and yet now we are called to face them once more.”

Behind her, the stars streaked by as they headed for the war torn regions of the Deneb Sector still held by the Dominion. In front of her, the officers of the USS Serenity, plus her own small team from the USS Polaris, sat at tables arranged banquet style for this gathering. They’d filled their plates with food, but before anyone began to eat, Admiral Reyes had risen to address the officers who’d soon be marching into battle with her. The room was silent as everyone listened intently.

“We have suffered painful losses and said far too many goodbyes these past few weeks, but we must answer the call,” Admiral Reyes continued in an impassioned tone, each word bathed in conviction. “We answer the call to avenge our fallen. We answer the call to protect those who serve alongside us. We answer the call for those who go to sleep tonight under the yoke of the Dominion. And we answer the call for those all across the quadrant who rely on us to stop this menace. The survival of our great Federation depends on what we do, here and now, today and in the days that follow, until our enemy is no more.”

Just a few weeks ago, the crew of the USS Serenity had lost their captain and thirty of their friends and colleagues to the Jem’Hadar, and just days ago, the crew of the USS Polaris had gone through hell on Nasera. But her words rang true, and the officers nodded along.

“We answer at our own peril, but still we must answer. Peace and freedom, our colleagues and those colonies that depend on us, these are things worth fighting for,” Admiral Reyes concluded. “Tonight we feast, and tomorrow we press on!”

The admiral raised her glass in a toast, and all around her, the officers responded in kind, raising their own glasses high in the air. “Here here!” came their response, in unison with energy.

And then they ate and drank and chatted among themselves, sharing stories of the past and talking about what lay ahead. The message had landed. Admiral Reyes didn’t know whether it was to avenge their fallen, or to defend those still in the line of fire, or to protect the ideals of the Federation at large, but whatever their reason, she could tell she’d done what she needed to do. These officers would rally and rise to the call of their duty.

When at last the plates were cleared and everyone began to retire from the gathering, Commander Jake Lewis, Chief Petty Officer Ayala Shafir and Ensign Elyssia Rel made their way down to Deck 7 where they had each been given temporary accommodations.

The three operators, who had been through so much, walked together. They discussed what had happened, and what they’d soon be doing, and then the conversation drifted towards Commander Drake and his investigation of their actions on Nasera.

“Elyssia, you should have seen him,” Chief Shafir remarked to her Trill counterpart as she recounted what had happened in the starboard stardrive computer core. “Jake lifted that pompous piece of shit right off his feet and pinned him up against the bulkhead. If security hadn’t shown up when they did…” She started to laugh at the thought of what the Commander might have done next, but then, as she thought back to that moment and the JAG’s unrelenting attacks, she got all serious and looked over at him. “But really boss, thank you for having my back,” she offered sincerely.

“It was no biggie,” Lewis shrugged. He didn’t need credit for that. “Any of you would have done the same for me.”

“Yeah, but still, you got thrown in the brig for me.”

“In a cell with greater comforts than the sleeping arrangements we had aboard the Lucre,” Lewis laughed, referencing the Ferengi trawler they had used to slip past the Jem’Hadar two weeks earlier. “I’d hardly call a few hours hanging out in those plush accommodations any sort of real punishment.”

“What did the Admiral say when she came to let you out?” Ensign Rel inquired with curiosity. Outside of large gatherings, the young flight controller did not have much experience with the admiral. “Like how much of an ass chewing was it?” Admiral Reyes seemed like the sort of woman that could take a real chunk out of you.

“Eh, Allison gets it,” Lewis replied nonchalantly. “And besides, she needs me. She needs us. Don’t worry about Commander Drake. He’s just an impotent idealogue sitting in his ivory tower pontificating on topics he does not understand. None of his bullshit will stick.”

“Not that I’m complaining, but if not for his investigation, why’d you attack him?” Shafir asked as the trio came to a stop in front of the Chief’s quarters.

“Because he made you cry,” Lewis answered genuinely as the door to her quarters opened. “It’s the last thing any of you needed to deal with after all we went through down there.” His team was the closest thing he’d ever had to a family, and that was what family did for each other.

“Well, thank you.” Shafir gave him a warm hug before retreating into her quarters. 

Commander Lewis stood there looking dumbfounded as the door shut. He could blend into any environment, break into any place, and kill any target, but a simple act of affectionate gratitude was completely foreign to him.

“How is that what causes you to freeze?” Ensign Rel asked with a laugh. “Good thing the Jem’Hadar don’t know that all they’ve got to do is give you a hug.”

Commander Lewis shot her a look, and the pair started to walk again.

“You really don’t think this Drake thing will stick?” Ensign Rel asked. She believed they had made the right decisions, but she wasn’t as confident as the Commander that they wouldn’t suffer consequences for what they did. The allegations the JAG was leveling were not insignificant, nor completely inaccurate. In fact, that seasoned investigator seemed to have developed a surprisingly comprehensive picture of what had happened on the planet.

“Not one bit,” Commander Lewis answered, his mind drifting to the impossible choice that Elyssia and Ayala had made to blow up the command center while Lieutenant Commander Jordan was still inside. Brock Jordan was one of his closest friends, and a mentor to both Elyssia and Ayala, but if they hadn’t done what they did, thousands, including most of their shipmates, would have died. “You guys made the right call down there.”

“What about what you did? You worried about him sticking that on you?”

“Nope, that won’t stick either.”

“Jake, he’s calling it a war crime,” Ensign Rel cautioned. That was a pretty hefty accusation. Not in her short life, nor in all the past lives her symbiont had lived, had she or anyone she’d ever known faced such an accusation.

“And what would you call it, Elyssia?”

“I would call it necessary to save the lives of hundreds of our officers locked in a bloody battle with the Jem’Hadar,” she answered confidently. She did not for one second question what Commander Lewis, Dr. Hall and Lieutenant Morgan had done. She believed to her core that it was right. “But Drake is going to throw the book at you that says the Vorta was a prisoner of war and should have been afforded certain rights.”

“We act like the law matters, and most of the time it does, but there comes a time when laws must be compromised in order to protect them,” Commander Lewis said as he shook his head. “And this was one of those times.” 

The ensign still looked nervous. “I agree, but I worry a tribunal won’t.”

“You may or may not know, but back in the eighties, I allegedly killed a Romulan senator,” Commander Lewis shared. “Yet here I am with a red collar and three pips. Do you know why? Because those in power know that, if the ends matter enough, any means are justified.”

The bit about the Romulan senator caught Rel by surprise. He’d never talked about it before, and she’d been far too young to have heard about Algorab during its brief moment in the spotlight before the newscycle moved on. Out of pure curiosity, she wondered if Lewis had really done it but, even if he had, she was sure he’d done it for the right reason. She had seen his soul in the rubble of Nasera.

“You should know that Lieutenant Morgan is nervous,” Ensign Rel warned. “He was talking to me and Ayala about it earlier while you and Hall were with Reyes.”

“Did Drake speak to him too?”

Ensign Rel nodded.

“Did Morgan say anything?”

“No, he kept to the script,” Ensign Rel assured him. “Morgan told Drake that if he had any questions about our mission, he needed to speak with you. Drake unloaded on him with accusations though.” Lewis quirked an eyebrow. “He said he ran a full panel on the Vorta and found torture drugs in his system. He also said he knew we executed the Vorta.”

“Cute theories,” chuckled Commander Lewis with a coy smile. “But they’re all just theories. It’s just as likely that the Vorta was seeing someone for his mental health issues, and who’s to say one of the colonists didn’t kill the Vorta after we left?” If the JAG had Commander Lewis’ phaser, he could probably have matched the resonance frequency, but their weapons had arrived with the Lucre, and departed with it as well. There was nothing to tie them to that act of retribution.

“I just hope you’re right,” Ensign Rel said as they came to a stop in front of her quarters. “This team, we need you.” He was the glue that held them together. He never cracked and he never wavered in his commitment and his dedication to them and to the mission. Ensign Rel felt safe with him.

“Look Elyssia, I’ve been at this a long time,” he assured her. “The call was right, and at the end of the day, as reprehensible as I am, I am also necessary.”

“You are not reprehensible to me,” Elyssia Rel offered gently as she looked at him with her bright blue eyes. His weathered skin and deep scars were evidence of just how much he’d given for others. “And I wish you’d stop saying things like that.” This was a man that would go to any ends for his team, his shipmates and really the entire Federation.

Elyssia stepped through the threshold of her quarters, but then she paused. She looked back at the Commander as he began to walk away. She saw a man who gave so much, who cared so much, and yet was so very alone, not just in that corridor, but in life itself. She just wished he could find some peace.

“Hey Commander,” she said. He stopped and looked back. “Before you go, how about a nightcap?” She gave a warm smile and gestured for him to join her in her quarters.

The chirp of a combadge snapped him from his slumber. He felt an unfamiliar feeling, a warm body against his. He opened his eyes and saw her brunette hair, her slender frame, her Trill spots and delicate skin. She looked up, greeting him with bright blue eyes and a warm smile. “Good morning,” she said, the serenity of her presence deeply contrasting with the unfettered shock in his.

What had he done? His stomach dropped. “Did we?” he blurted out. His usual calm and collected demeanor was gone, just like his uniform, and hers.

“Mhmmm,” she replied whimsically.

His mind raced. She was a member of his team. There were rules against this sort of stuff. He rarely cared about rules. He hadn’t cared about torturing their Vorta prisoner, nor about executing their captive in cold retribution. But this? This was too much.

“Relax Jake. I wanted to,” Elyssia assured him sweetly as she reached up and touched his face. Her hands were soft against his weathered skin. “It was wonderful.” When sparks flew between them, it had been clear to her their intimacy was foreign to him, but in those moments, his walls came down, and it just made her appreciate him that much more.

The combadge chirped again.

Duty was calling. He looked around frantically for it. Where were his clothes? How much did he drink last night? The memories came flooding back. He realized it wasn’t the alcohol. So what was it then? A desire for companionship? No, that couldn’t be it. He wasn’t like that. For the aged spook, encounters like this usually came only as part of maintaining his cover and accomplishing the mission, but there was no cover to maintain and no mission to accomplish. Maybe this was something he actually wanted? That thought confused him.

The Commander sat up, trying to keep the sheets over his waist as he searched for his combadge. Elyssia just lay there, watching him, amused at his attempted modesty. It seemed so silly given last night. As he leaned over to rummage through his clothes on the floor, she admired his back, the firm musculature and the scars, wounds long healed from lashings and blades and disruptors. So many scars, each telling a part of his complex story. They added to his character, a character that had drawn her to him.

The combadge chirped a third time. 

He finally found it.

“Lewis. Go.”

“Commander, sorry to rouse you at this early hour,” came the voice of Fleet Admiral Reyes, punctual and put together, a sharp contrast to his own disheveled disorientation. “We’ve got something on long range sensors. Need you on the bridge.”

“Understood.”

Commander Lewis closed the link and turned back to Ensign Rel. She was just sitting there in the bed, making no attempts to cover herself. She was comfortable in her skin, and that just made him more uncomfortable. But he had to admit she was gorgeous too with an enigmatic sort of beauty. No, he reminded himself, she was an officer on his team. And beyond that, it wasn’t fair to her. Anyone who grew close to him was bound to be disappointed when he didn’t make it home. In his line of work, he had no doubt that day would someday come.

“I’m sorry Elyssia,” he apologized. “I want to talk about this, I really do, but the Admiral… I… I’ve got to go.” He scrambled out of bed and hastily put his uniform back on.

“Relax Jake, you don’t have to apologize,” she replied understandingly. “I knew who you were when I invited you in last night, and I like you just the way you are. Duty, honor, loyalty…”

But she was cut off. Now it was her combadge that chirped. She reached over to her nightstand and tapped it to answer the call.

“Ensign Rel, please report to the bridge,” came the voice of Lieutenant Commander Eidran. “It’s time to show us what you can do at the helm.” Reyes had called Lewis, and Eidran had called Rel. They knew what that meant. It was game time. 

“I’ll be right up,” she replied and closed the link.

Elyssia slid out of the bed, graceful as a willow in the early morning breeze. As if trying to respect her privacy, Commander Lewis looked away at the sight of her lithe, naked body. 

“Now you’re going to get all modest on me?” she chuckled.

“I’m sorry. It’s just going to take some getting used to,” he replied, still looking away.

But then he felt her fingers as she came up behind him. “You’ll get used to it eventually,” she whispered in his ear. “Now get going.” She gave him a playful pat a little too low on the back for his comfort. “I’ll be a few minutes behind you so no one gets any ideas.”

Commander Lewis straightened his posture, adjusted his collar and stepped out into the corridor. The hallway was empty, but even if it hadn’t been, he was starting to regain his face. Inwardly, his mind was still chaotic, but outwardly, he appeared the paramount professional. Any passerby would have assumed he was just doing some early morning work with a teammate.

Watching him leave, Elyssia Rel felt the flutter of butterflies. What a nice night it had been. What if this was the start of something special? But then she set those thoughts to the side as she looked over at her uniform. It was time to get to work.

A couple minutes later, Commander Lewis stepped onto the bridge. His earlier fluster was gone. Now his eyes were full of focus, his stride was swift, and his demeanor was determined. “OOD, report. What’ve we got?” he asked briskly as he approached the center island.

“Four Jem’Hadar battlecruisers, bearing zero four five at 1.2 light years, heading two four zero at warp 9.6,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran reported, handing his counterpart a PADD with the readings. “Time to intercept, two hours forty minutes.”

“Have they seen us?”

“Negative. We are running dark, passive only, and no active hits from them.”

To the Jem’Hadar ships, a ship running dark would appear black against the backdrop of space unless they lit up their active scanners, and since the Jem’Hadar would make the same assumption about themselves, they wouldn’t go active as long as they wanted to remain hidden. It was a conundrum naval officers had grappled with since the days of the high seas as enemy ships passed in the night. What surprised Commander Lewis was that the Serenity’s scanners had still somehow picked the enemy out of the darkness. 

“Over a light year at passive, and we’ve got this degree of resolution?” Lewis asked, impressed with the level of detail on the PADD. The passive suite aboard the Polaris might have registered a faint echo of something, but nothing close to the degree of what he saw on the PADD. They had exact vessel configurations, bearings and speeds.

“Didn’t you read the spec sheet Commander?” asked Admiral Reyes as she stepped out of the ready room onto the bridge. “The Serenity may not have the cannons of an Alita, but she’s got the best sensor tech in the fleet, and a team of pros that knows how to use it.” The officer at the operations console beamed at such an acknowledgement from an admiral.

“Do we know their destination?”

“Negative,” Eidran replied. “There are no inhabited systems on their current heading for forty light years.”

“At that speed, they’re in a rush to get somewhere,” Lewis mused. Could they be trying to avoid Starfleet sensors? Possible, but unlikely. They’d already knocked out the Federation sensor networks in this region of space, and so deep into territory they controlled, they would not anticipate running into Starfleet vessels. That meant they should have felt comfortable with a direct course. That meant their destination was the middle of nowhere. A rendezvous with other ships? Or a visit to a stationary asset unknown to Starfleet? Either answer was interesting.

The turbolift slid open, and Ensign Rel stepped onto the bridge.

“Ensign, Jem’Hadar battle group incoming, two hours forty out,” Commander Lewis reported, giving no indication of their earlier soiree. The master of disguise appeared all business now. “We need a place to hide.”

Ensign Rel made her way to the conn and relieved the officer who’d been working the night shift. Her eyes darted across the starcharts, looking for a suitable location.

“What’re you thinking?” Eidran asked Lewis while Rel worked. “We could just turn and burn. We are faster than they are.” Indeed, the Duderstadt class could do more than double the superluminal velocity of the seventies era Dominion battlecruisers.

“We’re not looking to avoid them,” Lewis clarified.

“Come again?” Eidran clarified. This was not a warship. Four Type-XIV phaser arrays and six torpedo launchers would do nothing against four battlecruisers. No amount of speed and agility could score them the win.

Admiral Reyes knew exactly what Lewis was thinking. “We’re going to let them pass, and then we’re going to follow them,” she explained. “Stalk them and figure out what they’re up to.” 

“I’ve got it,” Ensign Rel interrupted from the conn. “Large asteroid field, bearing three four zero, one hour thirty at present speed.”

Commander Lewis came alongside the conn to review, lightly brushing against her shoulder as he leaned in. For just a moment, Ensign Rel flashed back to their night together. 

“That’ll do just fine,” Commander Lewis agreed. “Helm, adjust heading, three four zero, increase to warp 9.99.” It was time to see how fast this little ship could fly. The sooner they got themselves situated, the less likely it was that the Jem’Hadar would light them up. 

“Three four zero, nine point nine nine, aye,” Ensign Rel replied, pulling herself back into the moment. She was really going to need to get a handle on herself. 

The Serenity banked to the left and accelerated to nearly eight thousand times the speed of light. Twenty seven tense minutes later, they emerged from warp. Ensign Rel weaved the nimble ship through the dense asteroid field, searching for a good candidate. After a few minutes, she slotted them behind a craterous asteroid nearly four hundred kilometers in diameter. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Even if the Jem’Hadar lit them up now, they’d see nothing more than a giant space rock.

Now all they had to do was wait for them to pass, and then quietly they would follow.

They stalked through the night, trailing the Dominion battle group as it rushed towards… nowhere? Their heading had no apparent destination, but the Jem’Hadar never did anything without purpose, so the Serenity followed, masking its warp signature through complex subspace field mechanics and keeping emissions otherwise at minimum.

Commander Lewis stood on the quiet bridge. It was just him, Lieutenant J.G. Jace Morgan at ops, a petty officer at the conn, and an ensign at tactical. While stalking a Jem’Hadar battle group was nerve racking in concept, in reality, this was a fairly chill affair.

“Status report?”

“Same as last,” Lieutenant Morgan replied disinterestedly. “Battle group bearing zero zero zero, warp nine point six at one point two.” 

At that distance, the Jem’Hadar battlecruisers were faint flickers on their passive sensors, and the Serenity was just background noise to them. This equilibrium would hold until either party engaged active high resolution scanners, and even if that happened, the Serenity could just turn and burn as they could make double the superluminal velocity of their seventies era prey. The Commander would have prefered not to turn and burn though, as they did want to find out what the battle group was up to.

Commander Lewis came up next to the Ops station. “And what about the status of my shooter?” he asked quietly, recalling what Elyssia had told him about Morgan’s conversation with Drake. With nothing better to do, he figured he might as well do a little wellness check.

“Just bored with nothing to shoot,” replied Morgan nonchalantly.

“That’s not what I meant,” Lewis clarified. “How are you holding up with everything that happened on Nasera? I know the operating parameters were… less than ideal.”

The question caught Lieutenant J.G. Morgan off guard. He expected brutal drills and intense missions from Lewis, but not such human questions. “Honestly, I’m just trying to box it all up,” answered Morgan. “I figure it’s easier that way. That’s sort of what you do, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” admitted Commander Lewis. First you rationalized your choices, and then you compartmentalized them. A quarter century of doing that had made his mind just a pile of little boxes. Morgan was a skilled young operator, and if he saw it this way as well, Commander Lewis figured he’d go far in their line of work. Maybe Elyssia’s concerns were unfounded.

The Lieutenant was about to say more, to admit that his attempts to box it up weren’t working, that he wasn’t sleeping, that he was struggling to eat, that Drake had gotten under his skin. But the sound of an alarm at his console cut him off before he could say any of that.

“Oh shit!” Morgan shouted as his hands flew across his console. “They’re going active…”

Commander Lewis didn’t even wait for him to finish that sentence. “Conn, all stop!” he shouted at full volume, shocking the flight controller out of a relaxed daydream. Their stealth techniques at warp worked against passive sensors but not active scanners. “Ops, full black!”

The flight controller collapsed their warp field, decelerating the Serenity from two thousand times the speed of light to a near stop in seconds. No amount of inertial dampening could keep up with the immense g-forces of that momentum shift. 

The three officers at their consoles managed to stay situated, but Commander Lewis, standing by the Ops console, flew clean and clear over the command island, slamming into a support beam near the conn. As he tried to stand back up, he felt a surge of pain in his left leg, and his left arm was completely limp.

The lights went dim. The consoles went dark. The din of the environmental systems dulled. All across the ship, everything that wasn’t necessary to life support and essential logistics powered down.

Where they’d emerged out of subspace, the Serenity rolled stern over bow, propelled by nothing but the momentum carried from the rapid deceleration. In this empty region of space, there was nothing to collide with so the flight controller didn’t even risk using the impulse thrusters to stabilize them. Even that slight increase in energy could increase the likelihood of the active, high-resolution scanners picking them up.

“Did they light us up?” Commander Lewis steadied himself against the railing.

“Not before we powered everything down.”

Commander Lewis’ combadge chirped.

“Let me guess,” came the voice of Admiral Reyes. “They tried to paint us.”

“How ever did you figure that?”

“Because I’m pinned underneath a dresser that decided me and my bed were an optimal resting place,” Admiral Reyes answered. “And no power now except emergency lighting.”

“We’ll send someone down to help you do some rearranging,” Commander Lewis kidded. The officers on the bridge looked horrified. They’d totally just injured an admiral. “And once you dust yourself off, you’re probably going to want to get up here. I suspect things are about to get interesting.” For fourteen hours, the Jem’Hadar had maintained a consistent operating rhythm, but suddenly  that pattern had changed.

“I’ll be up shortly,” Reyes replied with labored breath as, four decks down, she fought to lift the dresser that was now on top of her. “Do a ship wide check and make sure no one was seriously wounded by that little stunt. There are bound to be some scrapes and bruises.”

“Understood.”

By the time Admiral Reyes arrived on the bridge ten minutes later, a medical technician was tending to Commander Lewis. He had dislocated his shoulder and fractured his tibia. 

“Sir, we should really get you to sickbay,” the tech was saying. “I can’t fix your leg here.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lewis insisted. He’d suffered far worse without the amenities of a starship, and he wasn’t going to chill in sickbay just as things were getting interesting. He popped his shoulder back into place, and then limped over to the admiral, using a railing to keep the weight off his leg.

“What happened?” Reyes asked.

“Battlecruisers went active with scanners,” he reported, ignoring the pain. “We responded with all stop, full blackout. We have no indication they saw us before we turned into a five hundred meter long piece of high velocity space debris.”

“And the crew?”

“Well, they’re all awake now,” Lewis laughed insensitively. Reyes shot him a glare. “About sixty injured, mostly minor scrapes. Five in sickbay being checked for more significant injuries.” Since it was the night shift, most people had been in the quarters, minimizing impact.

“Our friends,” Admiral Reyes then said, looking out into the blackness of the empty space where they now freely floated. “Are they still at active?”

“Negative. They stopped active broad spectrum scans about two minutes ago.”

“Alright,” she said, turning towards the Ops station. “Lieutenant Morgan, bring passive sensors back online and let’s see what’s changed.”

“Coming online now… Oh, that is interesting,” Morgan mused, trying to understand what he was seeing. “Jem’Hadar battle group is no longer at warp, just sitting in the middle of nowhere, and I’ve got new inbound pings converging on them from the edge of our range.”

“What sort of inbound?”

“Can’t be positive at this distance, but they look like Breen heavy supply ships. Six of them.”

Admiral Reyes wanted to get closer. They needed to get closer to get a higher resolution picture of what they were seeing. They’d need clear evidence to keep her out of the line of fire of Commander Drake, the Polaris’ auspicious JAG who had already shown he was not above going after them for doing what needed to be done if they didn’t cross their t’s and dot their i’s.

“Bring propulsion back online,” Admiral Reyes instructed. “Prepare to return us to warp.” Although the Jem’Hadar were clearly trying to avoid being seen, running their sensors in passive except for that one brief moment, there was always a chance they’d get lit up again. “Tell the crew to buckle up. If they light us up again, we’re sending everyone for another ride.” Then she looked over at Lewis.  “And Commander, get that leg fixed up in sickbay while we’re en route. Don’t need you walking around like a gimp when the fun begins.” She was about to take the gloves off them, and she knew her favorite shooter wouldn’t want to miss that.

Nine hundred AU from the rendezvous point lay a white dwarf and a companion red giant. One would not typically park a Duderstadt in the accretion disk of a symbiotic binary star, but the electromagnetic radiation of the Roche lobe overflow perfectly concealed the Serenity’s clandestine purpose. The emissions of her active scanners would be impossible to discern against the frenetic radiation of naturally-occuring positron annihilations and the highly variable interference of the cataclysmic variable system.

“Jem’Hadar battlecruisers are powering up,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran reported. “Looks like the Breen have finished offloading their cargo.” 

A few moments later, the four Dominion battlecruisers peeled away and jumped to warp, leaving the six Breen ships sitting there alone. The unarmed freighters made juicy targets for a crew hungry to strike at the infrastructure of the Lost Fleet’s war machine.

“Did we get what we needed?” asked Admiral Reyes. They’d been fighting the stellar winds and gravimetric shear of the accretion disk for the last four hours, watching and waiting as shuttles moved between the Jem’Hadar warships and the Breen supply ships. She was ready to get on with it, but there were some technicalities to deal with.

“Adjusting for background radiation and expected emissions, it does appear their cargo included high energy polaron sources,” Commander Lewis admitted. “But that doesn’t confirm they delivered weapons of war. Not conclusive enough for a non-neutrality designation.”

“I guess we could always call the Breen and ask?” joked Reyes. “Or maybe we get lucky, and they start shooting at us when we roll up?”

“Yeah right,” Lewis frowned. “The Breen know how cucked we are by our regulations. They’ll just punch it in six different directions. If they do that, we’ll take out one or two at best.”

“Forgive me,” apologized Lieutenant Commander Eidran, at a loss for what Reyes and Lewis were talking about. “What are you two talking about?”

“I want to kill those ships,” Admiral Reyes explained. “But as much as all of us would agree that the arms dealer is just as culpable as the shooter, regulations do not allow us to arbitrarily blow up unarmed merchant ships, even when they’re flying under a belligerent flag.” These troublesome cruiser rules had stymied naval captains for hundreds of years, and the most frustrating aspect about them was that the enemy never seemed to even abide by them. The Breen and the Lost Fleet had trashed dozens of Federation supply convoys.

“Well, we could still do it,” Lewis countered. “Who’s going to give a shit? Freighter crews like these delivered the supplies used to kill our people over Nasera.” He looked over at the young executive officer who’d lost his captain to the Jem’Hadar. “And the material to kill your captain. I say we take the gloves off Commander Eidran. Let him torpedo them in juicy retribution.” 

Eidran wasn’t sure how he felt about violating regulations so cavalierly, and Reyes shook her head. If this were the Dominion War, and she was with her old covert kill squad on a small interdictor, she wouldn’t have hesitated to just blow the unarmed ships out of the sky. However, with three hundred officers aboard the Serenity, someone would spill the beans to Commander Drake, and then the idealistic JAG would haul them all before a tribunal for torching what he would describe as innocent vessels of commerce. Sometimes the law was very inconvenient.

“So what’s the plan then?” Lewis knew Reyes well enough to know they weren’t just going to let those Breen ships go free to keep supplying the Lost Fleet.

“We’re going to demonstrate they are not neutral,” Reyes replied. “And then we kill them.”

“How are we going to do that?” Eidran asked.

“Commander Lewis is going to take a little field trip. The standard is simple. If we find concrete evidence that these ships are participating in trade that contributes to the warfare resources of a belligerent, then they lose non-combatant status,” Reyes explained. “Or if they shoot Commander Lewis, then they’re obviously combatants.” The admiral looked over at Commander Lewis, who appeared unperturbed being used as bait. “Tell your teams to saddle up. We go in five.” That would give some time for the Jem’Hadar battlecruisers to distance themselves, but not long enough for the supply ships to get away.

As the minutes ticked down, Commander Lewis’ team converged on the transporter room. The five man unit was a well oiled machine, trained in the trials of the frontier and forged in the fires of Nasera. For them, this would be just another day in the office. As opposed to creeping around a planet full of Jem’Hadar, this would be more like a simple contraband interdiction. All they had to do was beam aboard a freighter, uncover malfeasance they knew existed, and then the actions they planned to take would be justified.

“Light and fast is the name of the game,” Commander Lewis said to his team members.

Around him, Lieutenant Lisa Hall, Lieutenant J.G. Jace Morgan, Ensign Elyssia Rel, and Chief Petty Officer Ayala Shafir checked the seals on their environmental suits and the calibration on their Type-III phaser rifles. They were ready.

In the two other transporter rooms on the ship, the Serenity’s two hazard teams were gearing up as well. The plan was to board three of the freighters simultaneously, splitting up to collect evidence of what the Breen had delivered to their Lost Fleet counterparts.

Up on the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Eidran ran his officers through final systems checks. The deflector shields were at 70% due to wear and tear from the high heat and particulate accreting from the red giant, but the shields didn’t really matter. Scans indicated the Breen ships were unarmed. All other systems were fully operational.

Admiral Reyes could feel the nerves of the bridge crew. This would be the first time they’d faced the enemy since the fatal encounter that killed Captain Gilliam and thirty of their colleagues. They were visibly on edge, even if this mission was pretty much as low risk as you could get.

“Helm, bring us about, bearing two zero two,” ordered the Admiral. “Warp 9.99, short burst, drop us right on top of them.”

“Two zero two, warp nine point nine nine, aye.”

“Engage!”

The Serenity lept forth from her hiding places, screaming out of the accretion disk at full impulse before jumping straight to maximum warp. It would take the Serenity less than a minute to close the gap, leaving the supply ships almost no time to respond.

“Detecting subspace comms chatter,” reported Lieutenant Commander Eidran as they barreled towards the convoy. Their ship was no longer concealed by the binary star, and the freighter captains could now see them coming. “They’re requesting Jem’Hadar assistance.” 

That meant the Serenity had five minutes, max, before the battlecruisers would descend upon them. One more time, Reyes thought to herself how easy it would be if they just torpedoed them right away. Looking at it another way though, this did offer an opportunity to collect intelligence, so this more strategic approach wasn’t a total waste.

Reyes tapped her combadge: “Lewis, you’re going to have less than five minutes.”

“Understood.”

“Operations, open a channel to the Breen convoy.”

The ensign at Operations nodded once the channel was open.

“This is the Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes of the Federation starship Serenity to unidentified convoy,” Admiral Reyes began. “Stand down and prepare to be boarded for inspection.”

The Serenity emerged from warp, and they could see Breen freighters dead ahead.

“Ma’am, they’re powering engines.”

“Target shields and propulsion,” Reyes ordered. “Disable, but do not destroy.” While she couldn’t arbitrarily destroy merchant vessels, anti-contraband regulations did allow her to disable them in order to conduct an inspection. “All phasers, fire!”

The Serenity’s four phaser arrays came to life, hitting warp assemblies, impulse drives, and shield emitters as the cruiser cut straight through the center of the convoy.

“Status?”

“Four of the ships have been disabled. Two sustained only minor damage and got to warp before we could disable.” Unfortunate, thought Admiral Reyes to herself. If stupid regulations hadn’t gotten in the way, all six would be scrap metal. Still, four would be better than none.

Admiral Reyes tapped her combadge: “Execute!”

The five members of Commander Lewis’ hazard team were already standing on the transporter pad waiting for the call. “Coordinates locked in,” reported the transporter chief.

Commander Lewis gave the order: “Energize!”

The bright and clean aesthetic of the transporter room vanished, replaced by the cold interior and utilitarian walls of the Breen freighter’s cargo hold. Rifles at the ready, protected by the frigid cold by their environmental suits, the five operators swept their muzzles around as they searched for threats. The room was empty though, much as expected.

“Hall, Rel, secure the hold.”

Lieutenant Hall and Ensign Rel moved towards the main entryway of the cargobay. They switched their rifles to a low energy setting and began sealing the double doors shut by melting the duranium with a continuous nadion beam.

“Shafir, time to get cracking.” 

Chief Shafir threw her rifle over her shoulder and pulled out a tricorder. She scanned the room, zeroing in on what she needed. She approached a panel on the wall and ripped it off, exposing internal digital circuitry. Quickly, she got to work.

“Morgan, with me.” 

Commander Lewis and Lieutenant J.G. Morgan approached one of the large industrial crates sitting in the middle of the room. Together, they wrestled it open.

Back on the Serenity, the bridge officers monitored the progress of their teams. All three had beamed successfully into the cargo holds of different freighters.

“All teams report secure. No immediate resistance encountered.”

Freighters were not heavily crewed, and it would take the Breen time to get a team down there to fend off the Starfleet intruders.

“Ma’am, we have the captain of one of the ships demanding to speak with you.”

“On screen.”

The Breen captain wasted no time as the link connected. “You have no jurisdiction here,” he insisted. “Withdraw.” Although his face was concealed by his refrigeration suit and his tone was masked by the tenor of his alien voice, his posture suggested he was not a happy man.

“I beg to differ,” Admiral Reyes snapped back firmly. “The Deneb Sector is the sovereign territory of the United Federation of Planets. Under treaties of interstellar commerce and passage, we have the authority to ensure that…”

“We do not observe your claims to this space, nor your authority to intercept our ships,” the Breen captain interupted. “Your teams have illegally trespassed on our vessels. Withdraw them at once, or we will remove them by force.”

“I would advise against that,” warned Admiral Reyes. “Any effort to interfere with our lawful investigations will be met with lethal force.” She hoped he would call her bluff though. If the shooting started, they were no longer non-combatants.

The Breen captain cut the link without another word.

Admiral Reyes had expected as much. She tapped her combadge. “Transporter chiefs, be ready to bring our people back.” She then tapped it again. “Hazard teams, be alert. You got incoming.”

In the hold of the Breen freighter, Commander Lewis scanned the empty crate he and Morgan had just gotten open when the call came in. “Shafir, you got anything?” Lewis asked as he reshouldered his rifle and stepped away from the crate.

“Almost Jake,” she replied, her fingers flying across a PADD as she worked to crack through the Breen encryption protocols. “Need another minute or so.”

The sound of energy lances from the other side of the double door pierced the conversation. “They’re trying to burn through,” Ensign Rel reported. “We’re going to have company!”

“Defensive positions!”

The operators, save for Chief Shafir, swiftly took up positions to cover the door, their rifles ready to receive the Breen. Over their comms, they could hear the callouts from the other teams as the Breen descended on them.

“Serenity, come in. Team 2 taking fire!”

“Team 3 under fire too!”

The chaotic sounds of disruptor fire could be heard in the background.

“Oh shit! Lieutenant Mattheson just got hit.”

“Return fire! Return fire!”

“There’s too many. Get us out of here!”

“Serenity, now!”

Commander Lewis tuned it all out. Whatever the fate of those other two teams, he could not worry about them right now. All that mattered was his team and the Breen on the other side of the duranium double doors.

“Team 1, you ready to be pulled back?”

“Negative. We have not taken fire yet,” replied Commander Lewis.

“The others have, and we’ve pulled them out. We’ve got enough to pull you back.”

“Negative Serenity,” Commander Lewis replied firmly. He looked over at Chief Shafir. She just needed a few more seconds to finish. “Not yet! I’ll tell you when!” If the other teams had come under fire, the Serenity now had justification to go lethal, but Commander Lewis wanted whatever data Shafir might be able to pull from the ship.

A moment later, the double doors of the cargobay blew open, unleashing dust and debris across the carbobay. A hail of disruptor fire followed. Lewis and his operators responded in kind, their rifles spitting burst after burst of high energy fire to hold the Breen at bay.

“Shafir, how much longer?” Lewis shouted as he ducked behind a crate, a disruptor blast whizzing by just inches from his head.

“Fifteen seconds!” The hacker had broken through the Breen cybersecurity protocols, and she was now in the process of downloading the ship’s cargo manifest and transit history.

Commander Lewis peaked out from behind the crate and fired another volley. This was a good old fashion standoff, the Breen using the cover of the doorway, and his operators using the cover of the crates and pillars in the cargobay. If this continued, fifteen seconds would be easy. 

The Breen had other ideas though. Lewis heard the clink of a metal against the cold floor.

“Grenade!”

Commander Lewis ducked behind a crate and covered his head as the grenade went off. The explosion blew the crate to bits, and it launched the Commander across the deck. His rifle came free of his grip, landing a few meters away, and the mask of his environmental suit cracked. His ears rang. His body hurt. He could feel the crushing cold of the Breen interior leaking through his mask. But none of it mattered. He needed to get his gun and get to cover or he would be a dead man. 

Commander Lewis started to crawl on his stomach towards his rifle, but his injuries and the leaking mask slowed him down. He glanced over his shoulder. Through the cracks in his mask, he could see the Breen now advancing through the doorway. There wouldn’t be time to get his rifle and get back to cover. He looked over at Shafir.

“I’m good!” she shouted.

A Breen soldier neared, leveling his rifle at Commander Lewis.

“Now Serenity!”

And just before the Breen soldier fired, the transporter chief pulled them back.

Lying there on the floor of the transporter room, Commander Lewis breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone was still alive. That one was closer than it should have been. His ears still rang and he struggled to reorient himself, but he could hear Chief Shafir making the call.

“Shafir to Bridge,” she said excitedly. “If you didn’t have enough justification already, what I found justifies it many times over! Blow these fuckers to kingdom come!”

Up on the bridge, Admiral Reyes smiled. That was all she needed to hear. “Helm, bring us about, attack pattern delta four,” she ordered. “TAO, weapons hot. Fire at will.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran didn’t need to be told twice. The flight controller at the helm banked the ship around for a pass at the disabled freighters, and Eidran unleashed a full volley of phasers and torpedoes. One down. Two down. Three down. And four down. Eidran didn’t care that they were unarmed supply ships. They were part of the apparatus that brought so much suffering to those he cared about, and each explosion made him feel a bit better.

When the attack run was complete, all that was left was debris where moments earlier there’d been four Breen freighters.

“Report?”

“All ships destroyed.”

Admiral Reyes nodded contentedly. A good outcome. Those ships would no longer fuel the Lost Fleet’s war machine. She wished she could have just killed all six straight out of the gate, and that she not had to put her officers at risk or lose two of the freighters to warp, but they’d done it clean and by the book. Even Commander Drake would have found their actions acceptable.

“Admiral, we’ve got a new problem,” Eidran reported, his voice growing panicked. “The four Jem’Hadar battlecruisers are one minute out, bearing one five four.”

“Time to exit stage left,” laughed Reyes. “Helm, adjust to heading three three four and get us out of here. Warp 9.99.” The admiral was not concerned in the slightest. In concept, it was scary to be sitting in a Duderstadt class light cruiser with four Jem’Hadar battlecruisers bearing down on you, but in reality, the Serenity could make double the superluminal velocity of the seventies era battlecruisers.

“Three three four, nine point nine nine, aye.”

“Engage!”

“Those monsters, they came to my house. They insisted I help convert a pharmaceuticals plant into… into… a biological weapons facility. I told them no. I took an oath. They went into the bedroom. They dragged my wife out. They put a disruptor to her head, but still I said no. They…”

The grief in the doctor’s eyes was overwhelming. The oath he took as a physician versus the vow he swore to his wife. An inconceivable choice. It must have taken an unimaginable degree of conviction to give up the love of your life to save the lives of others.

“They shot her. They murdered her. Still I refused. But when they dragged my daughter out of her crib, my sweet six month old baby girl, and they aimed a disruptor at her, I… I… I just couldn’t let them kill my beautiful little angel.”

The doctor keeled over, burying his face in his hands, his whole body sagging over as he wept. For ten seconds, for twenty, for thirty, he couldn’t bring himself to say a thing. The grief, the shame, it was just too much. But finally he spit it out, absolute anguish in every word.

“I helped them. I fucking helped them to save her. It is my greatest shame. My girl is still alive, but how many little boys and girls did I kill through my cowardice? I just… I don’t fucking know.”

The recording cut out, and Admiral Reyes set the PADD down. She took a deep breath, trying to center herself as she looked at the pile of PADDs on her desk, each of which told a story just as tragic, just as depressing, just as heartbreaking. These were the stories of poor innocent colonists who had been abandoned by the Federation to suffer excruciating, unimaginable trauma at the hands of the Dominion. The Jem’Hadar and their Vorta overseers, they were animals, plain and simple.

Admiral Reyes forced herself to pick up another PADD. It was hard to watch these stories, but she only had to watch them. These people, they had lived them.

“When the Jem’Hadar came, they shuttered the schools, boarded up the gyms, and closed the parks. They cared for nothing except their great war with the Federation, a Federation I know little about, a Federation that did nothing for me and my son.”

As opposed to the doctor, this mother was angry. Angry at the Dominion, and angry at the Federation. She had every right to be, thought Reyes. The Dominion had taken her home, and the Federation had abandoned her to her fate.

“My son Marvolo, he is… or was… only nine. What was he supposed to do? No schools, no gyms, no parks. While I was forced to make body armor for the Jem’Hadar at the textile plant, he was supposed to sit at home and do nothing. But he was nine years old, a boy of boundless energy who just wanted to go outside and play with his friends.”

The mother was shaking as she recounted her horror.

“One day, while I was at the factory, little Marvolo went out to play. I don’t even know what he and the neighbor kids were doing, but Gloria came to get me. She said the Jem’Hadar had taken him and the other kids. They were going to execute them at sundown as disruptive belligerents. I couldn’t work, my hands were shaking so bad. The guards came over and demanded I get back to work, but I couldn’t. I mean, how could you? So they did this to me.”

The woman lifted her arm to show a cauterized stub where once a hand had been.

“And that night, they dragged me to the town square, and I had to watch as…”

She could not finish her story. She broke down in tears, sobbing and sobbing. Mercifully, the recording ended. Let her grieve in peace. She’d already been through so much.

Admiral Reyes set the PADD down on top of the others. She looked at the stack. These stories needed to be heard. She couldn’t watch any more tonight though. It was just too painful, even for an aged admiral who had experienced the horrors of the Dominion War, the tragedies of the late eighties, and many messy conflicts in the borderlands.

As Reyes looked out at the stars whizzing by at high warp, her thoughts drifted to Lieutenant Balan, the cultural affairs specialist she’d tasked with collecting these stories. She wondered how the ever positive, always optimistic young officer was holding up.

Across the vastness of space, Emilia Balan sat staring at those same stars. Her quarters were dark besides for a single candle she had lit in memory of the fallen who’d passed beyond the veil. She was on a ship with over a thousand crew, yet never had she felt more alone.

How could the universe be so cold?

These people had endured so much. Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, the deepest bonds of love, all shattered by these monsters.

Emilia thought back to a young girl in the hospital a few days ago. She’d lost her father, her brother, and her legs. She was left for dead. All because of some sick manipulation of their evil captors. That girl could have been her. They were the same age. Why did that girl have to endure so much while she sat comfy on the Polaris? The universe was not fair. It was not right.

Then there were the children. The stories of their parents chilled her to her core. So many beautiful flowers crushed before they could bloom, all part of the Dominion’s sick game. How could any society have such disrespect for the young, for the innocent, for life itself?

Emilia crumbled onto the floor.

She curled in a ball.

She cried.

And she just kept on crying.

Emilia Balan could find the beauty in any moment, but tonight, lying there on the cold floor of the Polaris, there was none. No beauty at all. Only suffering. Who the hell were these monsters? And what the hell was this war?

Aboard the Serenity, Admiral Reyes decided she’d had enough. It was time to place the call. Would she face consequences for it? Very likely. But it was time to surface these stories, the stories of subjugation, the voices of Deneb. Starfleet Command had tried to bury its head in the sand, but if the people heard these stories, they would force Starfleet to act. It was probably a violation of a half dozen regulations to go to the press, but she didn’t care. She knew it was the right thing to do.

“Computer, open a channel to Aria Edir in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, Earth.”

Rear Admiral Aria Edir had fought on the front lines of the Dominion War, and Admiral Reyes had gotten to know her well during their time together in the Fourth Fleet. What distinguished Edir from the others though was that Edir was no longer part of Starfleet. She’d retired a decade ago but, unable to fully embrace the peaceful life of the French countryside, she was a regular staple on the Federation News Network as an expert on Starfleet military operations.

The seal of the United Federation of Planets vanished, replaced by an aged Trill woman sitting in her nightgown under a night light that just barely illuminated her face.

“Allison, I must say, this is a surprise.”

“Aria, I’m so sorry to call you at this late hour,” Admiral Reyes apologized, before realizing that in France, it was 4 AM. “Or… early hour, I guess?”

“Early, late, in the vastness of space does it really matter?” Aria Edir had spent over three decades among the stars, and she knew how it went. Time became meaningless when you became untethered from planetary motion. “I’m going to hazard a guess that this isn’t just a middle of the night house call to check on an old friend?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“So tell me, are the rumors I’m hearing true?” Aria asked. “Not the bit about Ramar and Beckett losing their marbles, but the bit about the Deneb Sector and the Dominion?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. How much have you heard?”

“Officially, nothing,” Aria replied, her expression grave. “Starfleet Command is silent, and FNN hasn’t even called me since those rumors started floating around. You’d really think they would too because they always invite me onto their morning shows whenever there’s anything newsworthy out that way.” She’d spent most of her three decades in Starfleet along the borders of the Cardassians and the Breen, and she was a Commanding Officer during the Dominion War.

“So how do you know?”

“Because I’m not a fool Allison. When I visit Paris or San Francisco, I hear whispers in the hallways,” Aria explained. “It’s strange though. It’s like people are afraid to say something, almost like it’s a banned topic.”

Admiral Reyes nodded. It fit with the characterizations she’d heard from the officers of Task Group 514. It was almost like everyone was living by the adage that, if you didn’t say the Dominion’s name, then they weren’t real. Too bad that wasn’t how it worked in the real world.

“Aria, let me give it to you straight,” Reyes said, her voice growing serious. “Around a month ago, hundreds of Dominion ships, if not thousands, appeared across the Deneb Sector. But these are not today’s Dominion. Quantum dating places them squarely from the seventies.”

“The Lost Fleet?” Aria asked, a shocked expression on her face. It had always been one of the great miracles of the war that those reinforcements had never reached the Alpha Quadrant during the war.

“That is our assumption,” Reyes replied. “And they’re back with a vengeance. They’ve struck everywhere from Izar to Nasera to Janoor, and Divinium basically doesn’t exist anymore.”

Aria Edir’s eyes widened. Those were not small worlds. The idea that none of this had featured whatsoever in the press was baffling. Something of this scale didn’t get missed by omission. It only got lost by active suppression. But why?

“We just finished liberating Nasera from their clutches,” Reyes continued. “We’ve got dozens of operations ongoing across the sector to defend what we still control and free those we’ve lost. It’s not going well though. The Fourth Fleet is doing this alone, and we’re spread thin. We need the full might of Starfleet here in the Deneb Sector.”

“You know those five pippers don’t listen to me anymore, present company excluded,” Aria laughed. “Not since I went on FNN in ’93 and ripped them a new one for their bungling of the Romulan refugee zone.”

“Aria, I’m not asking for your help with Starfleet.”

Aria Edir quirked her eye curiously.

“We have collected stories of subjugation from the trials endured on Nasera,” Admiral Reyes explained. “If Starfleet Command won’t act, then we need to reach people who can make them. It’s a lot to ask, I know, but I need your help. You have connections with FNN and others. I need you to help me get the voices of Deneb to the people of the Federation.”

“You understand what you’re doing right?” The retired Rear Admiral knew the regs as well as anyone. As a civilian now, she’d face little blowback and certainly nothing she couldn’t manage, but Allison Reyes was still an active duty Fleet Admiral.

“Leaking intelligence from an active warzone? Yes, I do,” replied Reyes solemnly. “Although, to be fair, Starfleet Command does not consider this a warzone.”

“Is there any sensitive material in what you’ve collected?” Aria Edir still felt an obligation to the men and women who served in Starfleet, and she would not compromise them. She’d expect Reyes to have taken this into account, but she just wanted to make sure.

“Aria, you know me. I’m not going to compromise our officers or our operations. These are just the stories of regular people, simple colonists who placed their faith in the Federation, and who got hung out to dry by them,” Reyes explained. The Trill retiree nodded satisfied. “And Aria, these stories are heavy. After you hear them, you won’t sleep well again. They make the atrocities of the Dominion War look like childs’ play.”

Aria sat there, debating her response. She understood what Allison Reyes was trying to do, and she empathized with her, but this was going against the oath they swore to uphold the laws of the Federation. Still, if it was as bad as Allison said, it sounded like the Federation of today was failing to uphold its obligations.

“Alright Allison, send it over. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you Aria.”

It was necessary. They did what needed to be done. They accomplished the mission. They saved countless lives. But what had they become in order to achieve victory? With the lines they crossed, were they really any different from their enemy at the end of it all?

Lying there in his bed, Jace Morgan saw the Vorta commander. He tied the Vorta down while Dr. Hall shoved a needle in its arm and pumped it full of psychoactives. She had melted that creature’s mind, compelling it to give the order that led thousands of Jem’Hadar to lay down their lives. Wasn’t that how it would have turned out eventually anyway, a bunch of dead Jem’Hadar? Starfleet would have eventually cleared the streets, but it would have come at a higher price. Dr. Hall’s illegal psyop had saved hundreds, if not thousands, of Starfleet officers and Nasera residents from a prolonged ground battle. Did that make it ok?

Lieutenant J.G. Jace Morgan knew he wasn’t going to sleep with such thoughts bouncing around in his head. He climbed out of bed and started pacing around the room.

His mind drifted to what came after the battle was over. He had just stood there as Commander Lewis raised his sidearm to the Vorta’s head and pulled the trigger. He didn’t object as his boss murdered their prisoner. Did the Vorta deserve to die for its sins? Probably. But was it right for them to be judge and executioner? Not according to the law. They criticized the Dominion for their blatant disregard for life, but at that moment, did they have any more regard for the sanctity of life than their enemy?

As Morgan looked out at the stars, his thoughts turned to those lost in the battle for Nasera. Over nine hundred souls given to the deep. He couldn’t even wrap his head around that number, but within that number, there were four that were deeply personal and all too real for him, his teammates who gave their lives on Nasera.

Why was he still here when Nam Jae-Sun, Brock Jordan, Kora Tal, and Jason Atwood were not? Nam had a soul of pure goodness. Jordan was the best mentor he’d ever had. Kora survived the trials of Bajor and never lost her heart. And Atwood had the convictions of a man that would never break. Each of them had given their lives for the mission, for their fellow officers, for the freedom of Nasera. Meanwhile, what had he done? Violate the very ideals they had died to protect?

No, he told himself. This was not a healthy line of thought. Lock it up. Box it away. Move on. That’s what Commander Lewis did. Lots of little boxes. He needed to be more like Commander Lewis. During the day, it wasn’t that hard. He could keep himself busy. But at night, when he shut his eyes, it all came flooding back in the stillness of the night.

Maybe all he needed to do was make himself busy again? 

Lieutenant J.G. Jace Morgan sat down at his desk. He picked up a PADD and pulled open the latest sensor readings they’d collected as they stalked behind enemy lines deep in the Deneb Sector. The USS Serenity was no warship. Sure, they’d been able to take out a supply convoy to weaken the enemy’s engine of war, but what could a lone Duderstadt light cruiser really do to truly cripple the Lost Fleet’s capabilities? As he stared and stared, suddenly it dawned on him.

He tapped his combadge: “Morgan to Shafir.”

For a few moments, there was no response. 

“Shafir here,” a groggy voice finally replied. “Jace, do you know what time it is?”

“Oh crap! I totally didn’t realize how late it was,” Morgan apologized. Disoriented by his thoughts and excited by his epiphany, he’d totally forgotten it was the dead middle of the night. “I’m really sorry Ayala. We can totally do this in the morning.” But deep down, he hoped they could do it now. He didn’t want to lie back down alone with his thoughts.

Ayala Shafir wanted to just chuck the combadge against the wall and pass back out. It had been a long day, in amongst weeks of long days, and she hadn’t been sleeping well. Still, she was worried about Jace. While Nasera had been hard on all of them, Jace had been particularly out of sorts ever since. “No, no, Jace, it’s totally alright. I’m not exactly ready to be a Starfleet officer at the moment, but if you want to come over to my quarters, we can chat.”

“I’ll be right over.”

Morgan closed the link and made his way to Chief Petty Officer Shafir’s quarters. In the silence of the empty corridors, he started thinking again. Thinking wasn’t good. By the time he arrived at Shafir’s quarters, he’d forgotten why he had even come.

“You look like shit Jace,” Ayala Shafir said as she welcomed him in. The lithe woman, dressed in nothing more than a black bedtime slip, had a chamomile tea in her hand and a concerned expression on her face.

“I… ummm…” Morgan said, fumbling with his words as he walked in and collapsed on the sofa.

As she slid down next to him, she could see his hands were shaking. He looked like a shadow of his former self. Ayala Shafir knew that look well. She’d been there before. And she’d almost lost herself. “What’s on your mind buddy?” she asked gently, looking deep into his eyes.

“I don’t know Ayala. I really don’t know,” he replied. “Like why do we do it? Is it really worth it? Should we just give up?” His tone was desperate and broken.

“What brought this on?”

“I was just thinking about everything that happened on Nasera…”

“Well, you see, that’s your problem,” Chief Shafir interrupted. He looked at her confused. “You’re thinking. That never gets you anywhere good. Just accept that it is what it is. We did what needed to be done.”

“Ayala, you weren’t there,” Morgan insisted. It wasn’t so simple. “We tortured that Vorta.”

“So that our people would live to fight another day. Our people,” Shafir reminded him. “You didn’t see what Elyssia and I saw when we came out of the tunnels. These kids, a sea of yellow, teal and red, they weren’t ready for the horrors that awaited them on the streets of Nasera. They were dying by the dozens as they tried desperately to clear out the Jem’Hadar block by block.”

“And then I stood there as Lewis executed him.” That didn’t have to happen, Morgan knew. The battle had already been won by then.

“The Vorta? Yeah, serves that sadistic piece of shit right,” Shafir countered, a deep hatred in her voice. She had no sympathy for that evil creature after all it had done. “Instead of thinking about what Commander Drake said to you, all that crap about it being a war crime or whatever, just remember how you felt when that monster murdered Jason.” She flashed back to that moment in the town square when the Vorta killed Petty Officer Jason Atwood and six innocent colonists for no reason other than to send a message. Jason had died because of the Vorta’s cruel game, a twisted psyop to force the population to do its bidding.

“I guess…” Morgan still didn’t look at peace.

“Look, at least you got to send an evil creature back to the gates of hell where it belonged,” Shafir continued. “I had to blow up Brock, to send our friend beyond the veil, because the only other option was to let the Jem’Hadar recapture the planetary defense system.” She shivered as she remembered that moment in the tunnels beneath Nasera City. If she hadn’t done it, everyone on the Polaris would have died, the mission would have failed, and the eight million on Nasera would still be under the yoke of the Dominion. “Every night, when I close my eyes, I see that detonator in my hands. But you know what I remind myself? It had to be done. Just like what you guys did.”

Morgan nodded. That was what he needed to keep telling himself. It had to be done. What he and Commander Lewis and Dr. Hall had done, it had been the only way to guarantee the freedom of Nasera and save the lives of their fellow officers. He needed to box up his emotions and move on. Just like Ayala Shafir. Just like Dr. Hall. Just like Commander Lewis. It was easier said than done, but he’d keep on trying, day after day, what other choice did he have?

Pulling himself from his rut, Lieutenant Morgan looked down at the PADD in his hands. He hadn’t come just to weep at the feet of a fellow shadow. “Take a look at this.” He passed the PADD to Chief Shafir. “The nodes I’ve highlighted are subspace communications relays we’ve detected in the last few days. Do you see the pattern?”

In her exhausted, half asleep state, Ayala didn’t see it.

“It’s a hub-and-spoke network with supernodes connected to form a multi-star mesh,” he explained. “My guess is that, in their haste, the Lost Fleet didn’t have the time or materials to create a fully connected mesh. Instead, they set up a few high energy hubs, and then the majority of the relays could be cheaper, easier to deploy nodes that only had to reach those supernodes. Knock out the hubs, and the whole thing collapses.”

“Or hack them,” interjected the Chief, suddenly getting very interested. “And we have eyes over the whole thing.” That’s the real reason the Lieutenant had woken her in the middle of the night, because if anyone could find a way to hack the Jem’Hadar, it was Ayala Shafir. “How much ELINT did we capture?”

“Payloads, ciphers, switching protocols,” Lieutenant Morgan replied. “More than enough.”

“Interesting,” Chief Shafir mused as she skimmed the traffic logs. “You might be onto something here Jace. I’m going to need more than a chamomile for this though.” She stood up and walked over to the replicator. “Quad soy misto.” 

Once she had the coffee in her hands, she sat back down on the couch and got to work. The need for sleep had been overcome by caffeine and excitement, and the emotional baggage had been forgotten in lieu of the highly technical work before them. Two hours later, they had all the major details ironed out.

“I think it’s time we call the Commander,” Shafir said as she reviewed their work.

“And interrupt his beauty sleep?”

“Have you seen that dude? There’s no amount of sleep that will make him beautiful,” Shafir laughed. “And besides, he lives for the mission. He’d be more mad at us if we wasted a couple hours of time waiting for him to get up.” She tapped her combadge. “Shafir to Lewis.”

“Lewis, go.” His response was almost instant, and his tone was far too alert for 0400 hours.

“Commander, I think we’ve got something. Jace and I are over in my quarters.”

“I’ll be right there. Lewis out.”

Shafir looked over at Morgan. “See? I told you,” she said with a smile.

Not even three minutes later, Commander Lewis was at the door of Ayala Shafir’s quarters. Freshly out of bed, he was still in baggy sweatpants and a tank top, but he had his game face on. “What’ve we got?” he asked, all business, as he gave the pair a once over. While they too were dressed for bed, they looked like they’d been hard at work for a while now.

“We have found a way to compromise the Lost Fleet’s means of communication,” Shafir explained, handing the PADD over to the Chief Intelligence Officer. “Think Enigma-scale potential impact.” From her childhood hacking days to her days as a digital systems specialist in Starfleet, Ayala Shafir had always dreamed of such an opportunity.

Commander Lewis quickly reviewed the plan. It made sense, and it was something they could accomplish even on the lightly armed Serenity. If they could crack a handful of the supernodes, they could exfil a tremendous amount of the Lost Fleet’s military communications, including ship dispositions, battle plans and logistical chatter. It would be a gold mine for the Fourth Fleet’s efforts to retake the sector.

“And you think you’ve got what you need to actually pull this off?”

“Get me aboard one of those nodes and absolutely,” Shafir assured him. “I may have been playing with sandcastles when you all faced them the last time, but seventies era Dominion systems are pretty archaic by our standards. This’ll be far easier than when I hacked Stardust City’s main computer core.” Shafir smiled at that thought. It had been one hell of a mission she and Lewis had gone on a few years back while in private enterprise.

“Alright,” Lewis declared as he spun on his heels and headed for the bridge. “There’s no time to waste.”

“Jake, would you mind if I changed first?” asked Shafir. The lacy trim of her skimpy black bedtime slip was hardly a work-appropriate uniform, and suddenly she felt self conscious.

“Really?! That’s what you’re worried about Ayala? We got a Lost Fleet to compromise,” he laughed. “You may give Ekkomas a bit of a shock, but I’m sure he’ll live. Come on.” He gestured for the two operators to follow, and so they did.

Up on the bridge, the night shift was quiet and uneventful. Lieutenant Commander Ekkomas Eidran reclined lazily in the captain’s chair, reading the latest articles from the FNN, while the rest of the officers, flight controller included, looked half asleep. 

Eidran heard the sound of the turbolift open and turned to see the three pajama-laiden operators rushing forward. “Ummm, folks, I hate to point out the obvious, but your crew quarters are down on deck seven,” he noted as he tried to process the strange scene. What were they doing up here at this hour, and where were their uniforms?

“We have a new mission,” Commander Lewis said in a business-like tone as he handed his PADD to Lieutenant Commander Eidran. Without giving Eidran time to read any of the material Chief Shafir and Lieutenant Morgan had prepared, Lewis stepped onto the command island. “Helm, prepare to adjust heading for coordinates two six two point four three by three nine five point seven four.”

The tired flight controller looked up, caught in the midst of a daydream. This was highly unusual. The Ensign looked over at Lieutenant Commander Eidran for guidance, but the Officer of the Watch just shrugged. He, like the young Ensign at the conn, had no idea what was going on.

“Ensign, Commander, do you two really want to just keep racing across empty space twiddling your thumbs, or shall we cut the Lost Fleet off at the knees?” Lewis asked aggressively.

A change of plans at 0400 without a briefing or anything seemed a bit strange to him, but that prospect did sound attractive. Lieutenant Commander Eidran wasn’t going to argue with Reyes’ right hand man. He relented with a nod, and the flight controller began calculating a new course. “Bearing zero four two mark five to coordinates two six two point four three by three nine five point seven four,” he reported shortly thereafter. “On your order.”

“Warp 9.9, engage!”

The dark thoughts Lieutenant Morgan and Chief Shafir had been wrestling with earlier, they’d been all but forgotten, boxed up and put on the shelf. They had a mission. It was time to give the Fourth Fleet an edge, one far more impactful than just fragging a supply convoy or passing along some sensor readings as they’d been doing since leaving Nasera.

The USS Serenity raced past the Arcania Cluster and Leonis, cutting deep into the heart of the Lost Fleet’s territory. As they passed Arriana, they heard comms chatter from the USS Resolute. Admiral Reyes almost wanted to stop, to support Commander Mason in his pitched battle to defend the capital of Arianna Prime as it came under siege by the Jem’Hadar, but what could this little ship really add? Not much. This crew was green to combat, and the ship had not even a half dozen phaser arrays bow to stern.

They had to press on. Chief Petty Officer Shafir, Lieutenant Morgan and Commander Lewis had identified an opportunity to deal a critical blow to the Lost Fleet’s war effort. If they could compromise those communication arrays, the Fourth Fleet would have access to a trove of information about everything the Lost Fleet planned to do.

“Admiral, I’m detecting the quantum signature of the supernode on long range sensors,” reported Lieutenant Morgan from the Operations console.

“Any enemy ships within range?”

“Not as far as I can tell,” replied Lieutenant Commander Eidran from the Tactical station. “I can only figure they assume they think we would never risk penetrating this deep into their territory.” Indeed, east of Leonis and north of Izar was so deep in Dominion-controlled territory that there probably wasn’t another Starfleet vessel for a dozen light years in any direction. The Lost Fleet, while substantive, still had limited resources, and they’d tasked those to secure vital worlds, not patrol the barren space between the Ciatar Nebula and Saxue.

“Alright, well let’s still play it safe as we approach,” Admiral Reyes warned. “Conn, lower speed to Warp 6.5 and remodulate the injectors for quiet mode.” The slower speed would allow them to mask their warp trail and hide their emissions. “OOD, prepare to make dark.”

“All hands, prepare to make dark,” Commander Lewis relayed over shipwide comms. Across the ship, officers conducting non-essential tasks saved their work, shuttered their stations, shelved their equipment and prepared for the ship to cut all power and emissions not specifically related to the current espionage activities. Lewis looked over at Lieutenant Morgan at Ops. “Kill it.”

The room darkened and consoles not directly involved with running the ship went off.

“Let’s go,” Commander Lewis said as he motioned for Lieutenant Morgan to follow. Someone else would take over for him at Ops. The two operators headed for the shuttlebay, where Ensign Rel and Chief Shafir waited for them. 

Twenty minutes later, the Serenity slid out of warp, and the shuttle peeled away. Ensign Rel was at the conn, while Lewis, Shafir and Morgan had donned environmental hazard suits for the second time in twice as many days. Today’s affair would be simpler though, just a casual out and back with a spacewalk on a Dominion relay station.

Ensign Rel brought the shuttle alongside the long cylindrical communications array and out the back they went. Commander Lewis went first with a simple push, colliding against the duranium hull of the array and then rotating to get the magboots attached to the superstructure. Shafir was a bit more graceful, lightly driving across the narrow gap and gliding to a stop. Morgan, last to cross the gap, added a little pizzazz, doing a double flip out of the back, the angle perfect for a feet first landing against the structure, the magboots attaching instantly.

“Really Jace?” asked Shafir with an amused expression.

“I don’t get to enjoy zero-g much anymore,” Morgan laughed.

“Come on you two,” Commander Lewis urged. “Let’s get this over with.” He had no issue with zero-g, but he was all mission, all the time. The other two followed as they worked their way up the superstructure. Although they believed they were alone out here, Ensign Rel hovered nearby, making sure if they needed to retreat to it, they could do it as quickly as possible.

After a couple minutes, the three operators came upon an exterior access panel.

“Here we go,” Shafir said as she and Lieutenant Morgan peeled back the access panel and began pulling out their equipment. Typically, weightless work in spacesuits slowed you down, but these two were no novices. Morgan had done time on damage recovery teams, and Shafir did a number of break-and-enters against orbital and deep space facilities. Their experience showed, even in the little things like how they would just set their equipment dangling in the vacuum until they needed it.

Commander Lewis stood there, a sentry scanning the vastness of space for threats. Of course, it was completely illogical. The powerful sensors of the Serenity would see threats a light year before he did, but that didn’t stop him from looking. That’s just how he was.

“How’re we looking?” asked Lewis.

“Recursive deep learning side channel attack got me straight through their archaic encryption,” Shafir replied. “Training the LSTM now so we can speak their protocols natively.”

“And Lieutenant?”

“Working on tweaking the piggyback signal protocol to match the frequency coming off the relay,” Morgan replied. “This way, our backdoor will appear as a natural part of their carrier wave.”

“How long do you think?”

“Take a chill pill Jake,” replied Shafir. “These models are awesome, but they take a while to train. At least two hours to train and do the rest of what we’ve got to do before we wrap.”

Commander Lewis nodded, not because he understood any of what they said, since he didn’t, but he knew what two hours meant. It meant an awful long time sitting here waiting for a Jem’Hadar patrol to happen upon them. He went back to staring numbly into the vacuum.

Back on the Serenity, Fleet Admiral Reyes monitored their progress over the shoulder of a science officer who was validating the work as they went. Lieutenant Commander Eidran’s voice pulled her from her thoughts. 

“We’ve got incoming,” Eidran reported from tactical. “Jem’Hadar battlecruiser, bearing 314 on a heading of 010 at warp 9.6, distance 0.7 light years.”

“Gator, how close does that get them to us?”

“0.32 light years at the nearest point of their current heading.”

“TAO, is that close enough for them to see us while dark?”

“Unknown,” replied Lieutenant Commander Eidran. “But highly likely if they go active at that range. Based on intelligence from the Dominion War, I would assume anything closer than 0.5 light years is too close.”

The Admiral debated her options. She didn’t want to risk the Jem’Hadar discovering what they were doing. If they detected the Serenity sitting here, they’d investigate, likely discover the hack, and then this entire mission would be blown.

“Reyes to Lewis,” she said as she tapped her combadge. “We got a battlecruiser incoming.”

“How long until they see us?”

“Less than two hours before they pass within range to light us up.”

“Well that is certainly unfortunate,” the Commander replied flatly. “We’re at least two hours from being done here.” There was nothing he could do to urge it to go faster either. It had nothing to do with his operators. It was wholly and completely a limitation of compute time.

Reyes was silent on the other side of the line as she debated her options. They could abort, but then they’d just have to come back and attempt again later. That meant losing valuable time. There was another option though. “I assume you’re good if we bail on you for a while?” she asked Commander Lewis.

“Of course.” The shuttle was loaded with provisions. He never left the ship on an away mission assuming it would still be there when he got back. “Are you thinking of a little goose chase?”

“Exactly,” Reyes confirmed. “We’re going to bail this joint, drag them around the sector a bit, and then loop back to pick you up once we lose them.”

“Sounds good. We’ll just chill on the shuttle. She’s way too small to pick up when she’s dark.” Indeed, running with just minimal emissions, the Type 11 would look like nothing more than a small piece of space trash. “Just try not to have too much fun without us. Lewis out.”

Reyes closed the link, thankful for Lewis and his team. Normal officers might have been nervous at the prospect of being left behind enemy lines with nothing more than a shuttle, but Lewis’ operators never faltered or waivered.

“Helm, bring us about, bearing 180 at warp 6.5,” ordered Reyes. The first order of business was to get the Serenity far enough away from the array that the Jem’Hadar had no reason to suspect they were messing with it.  “We will hold this line for 30 minutes, staying dark, and then we turn for 270, increase to warp 9.4, and go full emissions. Light up the sky for them to see us.” At that point, the Serenity would cut straight across the battlecruiser’s course, and it would almost certainly give chase.

“180 at warp 6.5 aye.”

From the superstructure of the communications array, Lewis, Shafir and Morgan watched as the Serenity flipped around. If all went well, she’d pull the battlecruiser’s attention far from them, but it would put her straight in the line of fire. The Duderstadt class was faster than any Jem’Hadar or Breen ship, but if the Lost Fleet pulled more resources to give chase, it would be possible for them to catch her in a dragnet.

“Godspeed,” Lewis said under his breath to no one in particular.

A couple seconds later, the Serenity was gone.

“Alright, let’s give it a shot, shall we?”

Commander Lewis, Lieutenant J.G Morgan, and Chief Petty Officer Shafir crowded around a console in the rear hold of the shuttle. Shafir fiddled with receiver harmonics while the other two watched with bated breath. An encoded and unintelligible byte stream began to flow across it.

“Too much interference is bleeding through from the main channel,” Shafir observed. “It is completely garbling the side channel.” This was by design. It made their hack all but undetectable. The problem was that it also made the side channel unintelligible. “Jace, can you try to clean up this signal?”

“Yeah, give me a moment,” Morgan replied as he rushed over to a second console. “Stream it over to me. Let me try cleaning it up with an IIR band-pass filter.”

A few moments later, the digital signal on Shafir’s display started to resolve itself, becoming a single clean and clear channel. It was still unintelligible, but now for a different reason. “Ok Jace, now bus it through our universal translator.”

“Done.”

Both the screen and the dialogue were complete gibberish to Commander Lewis. He knew how to sneak and how to shoot, but his competence with digital systems ended with the codecs in his tricorder. With the filter and translator applied though, he could now see it clear as day, a direct feed of the Lost Fleet’s comms chatter flowing across the display, every message that hopped across this supernode in the multi-star network topology they’d established to cover the Deneb Sector.

“Good shit you two!” Lewis exclaimed. As Morgan walked back over, Lewis threw one arm over his shoulder, the other around Shafir, and pulled them close, the three of them staring at the juicy intelligence now flying across the screen. “You guys did it. You guys cracked the code. Their traffic is now ours.” He had the look of a proud father on his face.

“Thanks boss!” Shafir beamed.

“I can’t believe that worked…” mused Morgan.

“It was all your idea buddy,” Shafir smiled at him. “You and your nutty 0200 phone call. I’m damn glad now I didn’t just throw my combadge at the wall and go back to sleep when you called.”

“Me too. Me too.”

For all the happiness they were feeling in this moment, it was only the first step. “Now we just have to do this, oh, I don’t know, a half dozen or so more times across the rest of the sector,” Shafir laughed. “And then all their traffic shall be ours.” Still a long way to go.

“Yeah, well once Reyes comes back to get us,” Commander Lewis pointed out as he looked towards the cockpit. “In the meantime, why don’t you two get some rest?” Admiral Reyes and the USS Serenity had left them behind almost seven hours ago, warping away to distract a Jem’Hadar battlecruiser and make sure it didn’t come upon them.

As Shafir and Morgan settled in to get some rest in the rear hold, Commander Lewis made his way to the cockpit where Ensign Elyssia Rel sat at the controls.

“Did they get it?” she asked eagerly as she heard him approach.

“They did indeed!”

Ensign Rel jumped out of her chair and gave him a hug. “Thank you for always believing in us,” she said elatedly. Although she was just the pilot on this sortie, a far cry from Shafir and Morgan when it came to digital systems, she still understood the magnitude of what they had just accomplished. It had the potential to change the face of the war.

“Eh, all I did was tell Eidran we were changing course.”

“Oh, come on Jake. The technobabble that comes out of their mouths is as foreign to you as it is to me, but when they said they could do it, you trusted them,” Rel pointed out. “Just like you trusted us on Nasera.” Commander Lewis was their rock, and as she stared at him with a sense of deep appreciation, she just wanted to be his. These feelings had come on swiftly after the events on Nasera, but intense crises had a way of accelerating such feelings.

Commander Lewis could see the emotion in her eyes, and it brought strange emotions into his own mind. They were uncomfortable. He wasn’t that sort of a person. “Alright, well it’s going to be who knows how long until the Serenity returns,” he said, changing the subject. “Why don’t you go in the back and get some sleep? I’ll take a shift up here.”

“What about if I stay up here with you?” Rel asked with a twinkle in her eye.

It was appealing. It really was. He wanted to take her up on that offer. They still hadn’t talked about what had happened in her quarters the other night. “We still have to do this six more times,” he insisted, pushing these strange feelings from his mind. “Go get some sleep while you can.” She gave him a look of resistance. “Seriously, go get some sleep.”

Elyssia sighed. Maybe someday they’d get a chance to talk about what happened, and maybe someday she’d break through that thick armor of his, but ut for now, she could sense he wasn’t ready. With a discrete brush of her hand across his shoulder, Elyssia relented and retreated from the cockpit.

As Commander Lewis sat there alone looking out at the stars beyond, he wondered how things were going for Allison Reyes and the Serenity. The Duderstadt class light cruiser was fast and sneaky, but Reyes had lit the Serenity up on the sensors of every Dominion ship within a half dozen light years in order to buy them a distraction. That was a lot of heat she’d chosen to bring upon herself.

Several light years away, cross chatter on the bridge of the Serenity was overwhelming. Tactical officers were tacking more than two dozen Jem’Hadar fighters and cruisers converging on their location, coordinating with flight control and navigations as they attempted to chart a course to avoid them all.

“Cruiser bravo is on a direct heading to cut us off.”

“If we adjust to heading three three four, we’ll skirt it by half a light year.”

“Yeah, but fighters whisky and golf will be on top of us then.”

“What about flipping straight around to one eight five?”

“No, sierra has us cut off there.”

Their little stunt had bought Commander Lewis’ team the distraction they needed to finish their work, but in doing so, the Serenity had awoken the hornet’s nest. The Jem’Hadar were dropping a dragnet over them, cutting off every angle of retreat.

“What about if we hide instead of run?” Admiral Reyes cut in.

“How do you figure?” asked Lieutenant Commander Eidran.

“Well, we were invisible before. We just need to get invisible again.”

“Yeah, but now that they’re tracking us actively, we’re not just going to be able to darken the ship and disappear again,” Eidran warned. In amongst asteroids, debris and other objects that littered the stellar landscape, a sensor operator typically couldn’t discern the blip of a darkened ship from the blips of irrelevant objects. However, in this case, they already knew the position of the USS Serenity. Even if she reduced her signature, they’d still know which feint blip to track.

“What do you want to do Commander?” Admiral Reyes shook her head. That was not a productive answer. “Just keep on running as more and more give chase? Find us a solution.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran stared and stared at the charts, trying to discern how they’d get out of this mess. Then it dawned on him. “What about the Minara Nebula?”

“What about it?”

“It is nearly six light years across, and its anomalies completely befuddle sensors,” Eidran explained. “If we can get inside, they will lose track of us. We can then pop out somewhere else, just another anomalous blip on their sensors.”

“If we don’t blow ourselves up,” cautioned Lieutenant Selik from the conn. The Vulcan was an excellent pilot, but he recognized the challenge the plan would present. “The Minara Nebula is rich with spacetime anomalies, ion storms, and thick particulates that make navigating it safely very difficult.”

Reyes came up alongside him and set her hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “Well then mister Selik, you’ll just have to be extra careful.” she insisted. “Set a course. Maximum warp.” There weren’t really any other options.

The Serenity bobbed and weaved through the Minara Nebula, nimbly sidestepping ion strikes and subspace fissures that threatened to tear it apart. As dangerous as it was, the turbulence of this nebula was preferable to the dragnet of Jem’Hadar fighters and cruisers that hunted for them outside of it.

“Registering another surge, port side, danger close.”

Lieutenant Selik banked the ship hard to starboard.

“Adjust pitch thirty degrees. Now!”

The flight controller reacted fast, pulling the ship upward, narrowly missing a gravitational eddy that would have flipped them stern over bow and dragged them down into a subspace fissure below their keel.

The entire bridge crew was exhausted and on edge. Lieutenant Selik had been at this intricate dance for the last ten hours, ever since the Serenity had fled into the nebula. In ideal times, he would have handed the controls off hours ago, but his spatial acuity was unmatched among the Serenity’s small Flight Control department, and he knew that the probability of success reduced dramatically in the event that anyone else took the helm.

Admiral Reyes, for her part, remained on the bridge as well. There wasn’t much she could do to help, as she wasn’t a pilot, a navigator, or a tactical officer, but she knew her presence was vital from a morale perspective. “TAO, status report on our friends outside?”

“Still lingering on the periphery. They’re not stupid enough to follow us in,” the Ensign at tactical reported bluntly. He didn’t mean for it to come across so negatively, but this was insane. “Heaviest disposition near our entry point, but a couple assets have ringed the circumference of the nebula.”

“Gator, can you find us an exit point appropriately distanced from any Jem’Hadar asset?”

“Stand by,” replied the Petty Officer at the navigation console as he ran some calculations, taking into account the larger storms and anomalies that lay ahead of them. “Yes, I think I’ve got one.”

“Route it to conn.”

Lieutenant Selik multi-tasked abrupt adjustments to pitch, yaw and roll to avoid incoming hazards as he reviewed the zigzag pattern that the navigator had developed to dodge the worst of the turbulence. He took a deep breath. This was going to be a long day. “I can make this work,” Selik reported back to the Admiral.

“ETA?”

“Four hours. Assuming the Jem’Hadar do not fundamentally alter the disposition of their forces between now and then.”

“Do you need a break?” Admiral Reyes asked. Although Selik’s stoic Vulcan composure didn’t show it, she could tell how exhausted he was. She debated having him relieved, but there was a delicate balance between pushing her best pilot to his limits and pushing him beyond them.

“Not necessary or advisable.” He could power through. Logic dictated that he, in a tired state, would be better than a more novice pilot in a fully awake state. With Ensign Rel on gone as part of Lewis’ away team, there was no one that came close to what he could do. “Adjusting heading to match new track.”

In sharp contrast to the chaos of the Serenity’s bridge, morning aboard the Type 11 shuttle was a lazy, relaxed affair as they dangled quietly next to the Dominion communications array. Elyssia Rel, Ayala Shafir and Jace Morgan had all caught some shuteye while Commander Lewis kept watch through the night, and they’d just swapped him out so he could get some rest.

Ensign Rel sat at the conn watching the sensors, while Chief Petty Officer Shafir and Lieutenant J.G. Morgan dissected the data stream coming off the now-compromised array.

“This is absolutely incredible,” Morgan remarked. “I’m getting live status reports from a Breen Plesh Tral in hot pursuit of a Phoenix class ship.” He thought about the crew of that small corvette. How the hell would they deal with a Breen heavy raider? “At least there’s no return receipt that any other Dominion or Breen vessels are responding to support.” That meant maybe, just maybe, they might escape. Otherwise though, their names would be added to the ever growing casualty list of brave officers who had lost their lives in this bloody conflict.

“Check this out,” Shafir interjected, not even processing what Morgan was saying given what she had just stumbled across. “Live updates from a Jem’Hadar battleship engaged in a battle with our ships over Izar.”

“How’s it looking?” asked Morgan, pulling himself away from the Phoenix’s plight, hoping the Chief would have better news to share. Izar was a centerpiece of the Deneb Sector, and just like the Polaris had been dispatched to Nasera with a small squadron, a squadron of Fourth Fleet vessels had been deployed for the assault on Izar.

“Well, it was going badly for us for a while. The casualty report isn’t going to be pretty,” Shafir sighed as she thought back to their own battle. Nine hundred and thirty five was the latest count from Nasera, one sixth of the USS Polaris’s crew including three of her ASTRA labmates and four of her Hazard Team teammates. The report from Endeavour Squadron would probably be no better.

“For a while, you said?” Morgan asked hopefully.

“Yeah,” explained Shafir. “Latest blast from the Jem’Hadar battleship was an all-sector request for assistance as it looks like some Starfleet and Cardassian reinforcements arrived to turn the course of the battle.”

“Are any Dominion or Breen assets responding?”

“Not that I see so far,” Shafir said thankfully. “But it’s also possible that a task order didn’t go across this relay. We only have one supernode under our control. We need the Serenity to get back soon so we can commandeer a few more.” That was what would truly change the face of the battle, if only the Serenity could survive the pickle it had put itself in.

She reached out and touched his face, gently tracing his sharp jawbone up to his ear. She let her hand linger there as she gazed at him in his peaceful dream state. It made her happy. Everyone needed a moment of peace, even Jake Lewis.

Elyssia Rel lowered herself alongside him and rested her head on his chest. She could hear his heart beating in a slow, deliberate rhythm. That heart gave so much for them, for everyone really. He poured his soul into his calling, a calling of greater purpose. He’d give anything, his life even, to protect those who didn’t understand what he did. She just wanted to give a little bit back.

Commander Lewis felt the light pressure on his chest. It was a strange sensation as he lay there on the cot in the utilitarian rear hold of their Type 11 shuttle deep in Dominion occupied territory. But it was nice too. He kept his eyes shut and savored it for just a moment. Wait, they weren’t alone, were they?

He sat up abruptly, looking around nervously. “What about the others?” he whispered as he made eye contact with the beautiful young woman who, for reasons he did not understand, seemed to be interested in him. “We can’t do this here.” He wasn’t sure if they should even do it at all.

“Relax Jake,” she offered lightly, her hand lingering on his face as her piercing blue eyes looked straight through him. “Jace is at the conn, and Ayala is buried in intelligence reports. We’re all alone here.” It didn’t seem to bother her one bit that they were separated from Lieutenant Morgan and Chief Petty Officer Shafir by little more than a thin duranium door.

“Still, what if they decide to come back here?” He was embarrassed. This was not appropriate. What would his team think if they saw it? He was their leader. “I can’t be seen cuddling with a team member.” Even if it did feel strangely soothing.

“Why? Because then they’d want a piece of this?” she teased as she grabbed his bicep playfully. “I couldn’t blame them if they did. It’d all just be one big snuggle then. Ayala’s a pretty girl, and I’m sure Jace could use some cuddles too.”

Commander Lewis shot her a glare. Elyssia was totally going to get him in trouble. He didn’t care about the regs, but he did worry that, if he let this go on, it might bias a command decision someday. If Nasera had shown anything, it was that a leader needed to be willing to sacrifice any member of their team for the mission. Could he do that with Elyssia, or with himself, if this went anywhere? He wasn’t sure, and that wasn’t fair to them, or to the Federation.

“Okay, I’ll make you a deal,” Elyssia offered deviously. “I’ll leave you alone to the pleasures of this cold cargo hold if you join me for dinner when this is all over?”

That didn’t address the root of his concern, but then again, when did concerns ever stop him? Life was full of concerns. “Alright, deal,” Lewis relented, giving in to a desire for human closeness that he didn’t know he had before that night with Elyssia on the Serenity.

The Commander stood up and walked over to the replicator while Elyssia just sat there staring at him. “Coffee, black,” he ordered. While he waited for it to replicate, he turned back to her, trying to keep things all business. “Any update from Serenity?”

“Nope, not so far. I really hope they’re ok.”

“Oh trust me, it’s going to take far more than a few cruisers for them to stop Allison,” Lewis laughed. “That woman has been through hell and back twenty times over with these bastards. Do you know her history with the Dominion?”

Elyssia shooker her head. She knew very little about Allison Reyes. She was but a junior flight controller just a few years out of the academy, while Reyes was a Fleet Admiral commanding a sixteen hundred person heavy explorer and managing the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity. They simply didn’t have a lot of interactions, besides the occasional speech or overlapping time on the bridge.

“Back before the Dominion War really even started heating up, Reyes was on patrol when her ship got ambushed by two Jem’Hadar ships,” Lewis explained as the coffee finished replicating. “The CO got killed, as did a third of the crew, but that madwoman led the Jem’Hadar on a wild goose chase through the Badlands. Obviously, she managed to pull it off and escape.” He took a seat next to Elyssia. “And she’ll lose them again and come back for us,” he promised. He had not a doubt in the world of that.

“From the way she talks, there seems to be more than just that though,” Elyssia observed. “Like she hates them. I’ve never seen such fire in an admiral’s eyes as when she talks about the Dominion.”

“Oh yes, there’s a lot more. After that run in, Allison went hunting for a way to get in on the fight. Eventually, she linked up with a team from Starfleet Intelligence Special Operations that one could only describe as a kill squad. Let’s just say what we did on Nasera was clean in comparison to what they did.”

“I’ll be honest, that surprises me,” Elyssia admitted. “She seems so normal and put together.” While Admiral Reyes had quite a fire in the way she talked about the Dominion, Ensign Rel had always seen Admiral Reyes as the pinnacle of a Starfleet officer, the sort of person that young officers aspired to be. She didn’t seem the sort of person who’d throw in with what was described as a kill squad. That seemed more the territory of Commander Lewis and Dr. Hall.

“Starfleet during the Dominion War was nothing like the Starfleet you’ve grown up with. We were in our darkest hour back then,” Lewis continued, forgetting that Elyssia Rel was not as unaware of the war as her twenty five years of age suggested. “And Reyes was in the darkest part of it. You’ll never hear her talk about it, but she spent most of the war behind enemy lines, doing what needed to be done. I know some of the people that worked with her during that period. They were stone cold shooters, infiltrators and interrogators, hardened by the treachery of the enemy. They’d cross any line to ensure the Federation survived.”

Elyssia Rel had her own memories of the Dominion War, courtesy of Jaxon Rel, a prior host who had died in the Second Battle of Chin’toka. Those memories were chaotic and gruesome. They were what drove her to sign up for Lewis’ covert mission onto the streets of Nasera. Still, what Commander Lewis was describing sounded like something else altogether.

“In many ways, people like Reyes and that team she worked with, they are my inspiration,” Lewis admitted. “I was just a goodie two shoes strategic operations officer during the war. I had no idea what they did behind the shroud, but knowing what I know now, if they hadn’t done what they did, we might not have won the war. And that’s why I never hesitate to do what needs to be done.”

She looked at him with a stunned expression, trying to process it all. “Thank you,” she said with the utmost sincerity, touched by how open Lewis was being. He was usually so closed and guarded, and she felt honored to be let in.

“For what?”

“For sharing. You really look up to her don’t you? That’s why you came back to Starfleet huh?”

Commander Lewis nodded silently. There was no other reason he’d put the pips back on except that she had asked him to. It would have been so much easier to make a difference just staying on the outside unencumbered by Starfleet regulations and protocols.

“I had no idea, but it’s really incredible really,” Elyssia remarked. “It’s why she gave us free reign down on Nasera to do what needed to be done, isn’t it? And why she hasn’t jumped down our throats even with all the allegations that Commander Drake is leveling at us?”

“Exactly,” Lewis confirmed. “She knows time was of the essence. Our people were dying minute by minute, and if we’d done things by the book, many more would have died. She can put two and two together. I mean, she totally knows Dr. Hall’s specialization. But she’s not going to ask explicitly what we did because she knows I won’t tell her. Plausible deniability and all tha…”

Commander Lewis was cut off by the sound of the door opening. Chief Shafir stepped through, excitement across her face. “Serenity is back!” Lewis and Rel followed Shafir back into the cockpit, where Lieutenant Morgan was tracking their approach.

“I didn’t see them until they were almost upon us,” Morgan admitted from the conn. “Couldn’t detect the warp signature, no obvious emissions, they really are darker than dark. Pretty impressive, I must say. The Polaris could never sneak around like this, that’s for sure.”

“I wonder if we get to keep her,” laughed Commander Lewis. “Can we hail them yet?”

“Yep, let me get them on the line.”

“Lewis to Serenity, do you read?”

“Loud and clear Commander,” came the response from Admiral Reyes. “How’d it go?”

“No thanks to my inability to even spell LSTM or all those other acronyms Chief Shafir and Lieutenant Morgan were bouncing around, they pulled it off,” Lewis reported. “We have a clean and clear side channel piggybacked on the Dominion carrier wave that we can exfil their comms chatter across. How’d everything go on your end?”

“Well, we took the Jem’Hadar for a bit of a goose chase through the ion storms and spacetime fissures of the Minara Nebula,” explained Reyes. “Took some real sharp flying from Lieutenant Selik, but now here we are.”

“Reliving your glory days huh Allison?”

“Pretty much,” Reyes laughed. “Surprised you remember that Badlands story.”

Lieutenant Morgan relinquished the conn to Ensign Rel, and she began to warm the systems back up to take them out. 

“Well, clear us a spot in the docking bay, because we’re on our way back Serenity,” Lewis said as Ensign Rel pulled the shuttle away from the communications array. “And brew us a fresh pot of coffee because we’ve still got a half dozen more of these relays to hack.”

The light of Nasera’s K-Type dwarf star beamed through the wide sweeping windows of the Polaris’ private dining room. The table was set for four, the place settings immaculate, hors d’oeuvres and pitchers of fresh juice set on a side table. It seemed odd given the chaos beyond these walls, the horrors suffered and the damage sustained, but Chef Zirr Varas took pride in creating a tranquil moment for those who carried them through these impossible times.

Captain Gérard Devreux arrived first. The Polaris was his ship, and he was their host. The last week had been a frantic jumble, just trying to establish a foundation for the city to breathe. Things had finally begun to improve though with the arrival of the Verity, her equipment, and her crew. The opportunity had finally come to gather without being all consumed by logistical topics like industrial replicator capacity and provisions distribution.

“Zirr, this all looks incredible,” Devreux said with an astonished expression. He’d forgotten what an elegant meal looked like after the crucible they’d been through.

“It’s my pleasure Gérard,” the Bolian chef replied with a bow. “After playing quartermaster’s mate for the last twelve days, it’s been a delight to be back in my kitchen.” Everyone, the chef included, had battlestation assignments during critical operations, but this morning, the convening of the recovery effort’s senior staff had given him the excuse to return to his place of happiness.

Captain Dorian Vox and Commander Cora Lee arrived together. The sight of a finely set table with scrupulous small bites, fresh fruits, and pulp-rich juices snapped them from their conversation about ore refineries.

“Woah, Captain! You shouldn’t have,” offered Commander Lee. “This is far too much!” If she’d known they were going to be eating like this, she would have at least stopped by the USS Ingenuity to pick up a fresh uniform rather than one covered in soot from a long night on Nasera.

“Is this why it’s taking so long for you to repair the Polaris?” Captain Vox teased as he approached the hors d’oeuvres table and popped a Bularian canapé into his mouth. “Because y’all are too busy nomming canapés and squeezing lida fruits?” He wasn’t going to object though. After eating mostly MREs to preserve energy capacity for the industrial replicators, the captain of the USS Diligent was elated to enjoy a glass of fresh squeezed lida juice. He loved the bold flavors of the Trill fruit, although it was even better when fermented into lidashk.

Just as the three officers settled into their seats, the door hissed open once more. They rose in unison to greet Commodore Jori as she stepped through the threshold. “Good morning Commodore,” Captain Devreux offered.

Jori looked at him with a smile. She felt like correcting him, but didn’t. She had too much on her mind. “Looks great,” she replied before taking a seat next to Commander Lee. With how busy they all had been, she barely had time to fit in a good meal so this was a treat.

“How’s everything going down on the planet?” Captain Devreux asked as everyone began to eat. Since they’d subdivided his work, his focus was completely on the starship repair efforts, and he knew very little about the struggles of the world beneath them.

“We’re making progress,” Jori said, looking at them. “We haven’t been able to solve all of their housing issues, but most colonists have somewhere to live, even if it’s only temporary until their homes are rebuilt. It will be a long process.” Jori paused for a moment, and then added and she looked around the room, “As for the colonists, the wounded are all being treated and the hospitals are not overflowing like they were when we arrived.” 

“I hope that helps Doctor Henderson breathe easier,” Captain Devreux offered. He had been worried about their Chief Medical Officer ever since the happy-go-lucky exobiologist was converted into a battlefield medic. Henderson had been different, not himself. “Any feedback from your staff about him?”

“My staff are a bit concerned,” Jori began as she recalled a conversation with her Chief Medical Officer. “He seems to be having strange mood swings. One moment, he’s alright, and then the next, he’s jumping down someone’s throat for no reason. She also noticed that he seems a bit paranoid, always looking over his shoulder wondering if something or someone is going to jump out of the bushes, so to speak.”

“Don’t we all feel a little like that?” Commander Lee asked. She knew she did. She’d never been in a warzone before the battle of Nasera, and it had shaken her to her core. “As I walk around down there, sometimes it still feels like a Jem’Hadar soldier is about to unshroud and strike.”

“Meh, I dunno. The Jem’Hadar all did a pretty good job killing themselves off,” Captain Vox laughed. “And not a moment too soon.” He’d been coordinating aerial support during the battle. He’d heard the desperate calls come in as Starfleet officers begged for a lifeline. He still didn’t understand why everything changed on a dime, why suddenly the Jem’Hadar just gave themselves up, but he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the eye.

“Logically, we all get that,” Commander Lee agreed. “But trauma isn’t logical. It’s going to take a while to learn how to live with what happened down there.” She looked over at Devreux and Jori, who both had decades more experience than her. “How have you two learned to manage it all over the years?”

“I don’t,” admitted Captain Devreux. “I took a medical assistant job on an Oberth class surveyor to stay out of the Dominion War, and I’ve been lucky for most of my career that I just never seem to be where bad things happen.” Until now. Now all of that had changed. He looked over at Jori. “What about you Commodore? Any tips for us combat newbies?”

“I was still in the Academy during the Dominion War,” Jori admitted as she looked at them. She knew others who had fought during that time though, and she could only imagine what they had gone through, only to be here now, fighting them again. Allison Reyes was one of those people, and maybe that was why she behaved the way she did.

Those answers had given no real guidance to the young Commander. If anything, they only confused her more. These captains and commodores just looked so much more composed than she felt, but they seemed to have no good answers about how or why. Maybe they were just better at concealing it?

Captain Vox, sensing the awkwardness of the moment, redirected the conversation somewhere more comfortable for his young colleague: “And Commander, how goes your work down on the surface?” He knew this was where Cora Lee shined. She might not have been a fighter, but she loved to build things.

“Similar to what the Commodore was saying,” Lee replied. “Thanks to the added support from the Verity, we’ve restarted operations at some of the critical refineries and processing planets, prioritizing capabilities that will either support our rebuild or support our continued war effort.” The sheer damage the Jem’Hadar had inflicted on the planet made it a complicated exercise in triage, but once they got down to it, she was in her element rigging creative solutions to complex problems. “I’m hoping that with another week or two, we can move from facilities that build weapons to things like schools and parks. I can’t imagine being a kid down there right now.”

“We have set up a temporary school to help them at least get back to some kind of normalcy,” Jori added. She had spent some time on this particular problem, getting kids back in their classrooms. “But they are pretty shaken up from what they went through and witnessed. Some of them lost one or even both parents, now living with other relatives, or as orphans altogether.” Her heart ached for them.

“Lieutenant Balan shared with me some of what she’s heard down there,” Devreux shook his head. “Absolutely tragic. Children without parents, and in some cases, parents without children. The Jem’Hadar were using loved ones as leverage to force the colonists to do their bidding.”

“What kind of sick monsters do that shit?” Lee asked. She’d heard things from the locals while coordinating the rebuild that absolutely shook her.

“The type that deserve to be put down,” Vox replied flatly. He looked out at the stars. “I wonder how the Fleet Admiral is doing out there.”

No one had heard from Allison Reyes in days. Her last communique had just said she was taking the USS Serenity beyond Leonis, deep in Dominion occupied territory, to work an op she thought might end the war. She hadn’t elaborated further. That was the problem with former spooks. They always spoke a bit too cryptically.

“How about the others?” Vox continued, looking over at Jori. “Any word on how the Fourth Fleet is faring across the sector?” They had only won the Battle of Nasera thanks to heroics and a bit of luck, and he wondered whether or not the others had found similar success.

“From what I know right now, Saratoga Squadron is currently hitting the Breen Fleet Yards to take them out of commission,” Jori explained. “And Endeavour Squadron is currently fighting to take back Izar.”

And from there, the four senior officers continued to talk through a variety of other topics, the conversation eventually turning less business and more personal. 

As the plates were emptied, and the conversation wound down, a feeling of restlessness began to settle over them. They’d all been so focused on the rebuild that the reprieve, while nice, was also starting to weigh on them. It really was time to get back at it. Before anyone rose to depart though, a crewman stepped through the door. 

The crewman looked around, embarrassed to be interrupting a flag officer’s meal with the squadron senior staff, but he had an urgent message: “Commodore, I’m sorry to interrupt, but you have a priority one message coming in from Fleet Captain Azras Dex.”

“Thank you,” Jori replied before looking at the others. “Sorry but I have to take this.”

“No worries,” Captain Vox offered as he set his fork down and rose from his chair. “I’ve got to get back to my ship. So many things to do.”

“And I have a duranium mill to get restored this morning,” Commander Lee added, also rising and making for the door.

“Feel free to take the call here Commodore,” Captain Devreux offered, gesturing to the display against the wall in the dining room. “I’ll be up in the Ready Room if you could stop by after. Just want to chat through a few logistical items when you’re done with your call.”

With that, the three officers were gone, leaving Jori alone to take the call. Jori tapped the console to see the face of Fleet Captain Azras Dex of the USS Saratoga on the other side.

“Is everything alright?” Jori asked. She knew the Saratoga and her squadron had been at Lungurn Fleet Yards, and she could tell something was bothering the captain just by looking at Azras.

Making these calls never got easier, thought Azras to herself. A lump formed in her throat, and she swallowed it down, trying to keep her voice from cracking as she spoke. “There has been an accident, sir,” Azras said.

Now it was Jori’s turn to grow concerned. “What kind of accident?”

Azras swallowed hard again and worked her jaw as she tried to find the words which usually came easy to her. Now she was finding it difficult. “I am sorry sir, but Captain Derohl was killed in action,” Azras explained as her voice cracked.

The look in Jori’s eyes said it all. “W-what?” she asked. “How?” Jori wanted to know what had happened.

“He ordered the Gagarin into oncoming fire from a Jem’Hadar ship as the hazard team was returning from their mission. A console exploded, killing him almost instantly,” Azras responded. “The doctor was able to save the Derohl symbiont, which was transferred to Lieutenant Junior Grade Nilah Virahl.” Azras paused and then added: “I am so sorry Imya. I really am. He was a good person and a fine officer who ultimately gave his life to protect others.” Azras’ eyes swelled up with tears.

Jori took it all in as tears began to fall down her cheek. She closed her eyes for a moment. Opening them back up again, she looked at Azras. 

“Thank you for letting me know,” Jori said. She really didn’t know what else she could say. She knew the risks when she sent them on their mission, knowing anyone could die at any time, even her own brother. The communication ended a short time later, and she sat there with her hands over her face trying to collect herself before she headed to the Ready Room.

Captain Devreux could tell something was wrong from the moment Commodore Jori stepped through the door. As much as Commodore Jori was trying to play the role expected of her, there was a deep shadow over her face. He knew it well. He’d seen it all over the ship. It was the shadow of debilitating grief, the pain of loss of someone so close to you. “What’s wrong Commodore?” he asked gently, forgetting whatever it was that he’d meant to speak to her about. Clearly, there was something more important to discuss. “What happened?”

She looked at him for a moment, trying to hold back the tears that were swelling in her eyes. She sat down at one of the chairs in front of the desk. Silence had filled the room as she tried to collect herself. “Just got off the phone with Fleet Captain Azras Dex, who just informed me that…” Jori began before pausing to close her eyes as tears streamed down her face. “Captain Tajir Derohl of the Gagarin was killed protecting the returning hazard team from a Jem’Hadar ship that turned their attention to it.” She paused for a moment. “He was my younger brother,” she explained as she opened her eyes.

“Oh my… oh my god, I am… I am so sorry,” Captain Devreux stuttered to say. This war was so wretched, so heartless. Everywhere he looked, there was just more death. “I wish there were words, Imya, I really do. But there aren’t. I… is there anything I can do?” He extended his arms to offer a hug, the only thing he knew to do.

She embraced him, holding it for a bit before letting go. “Thank you,” she said. There really were no words. She knew the risks when she sent them on their mission. She knew there was always that chance. But she just never really believed it would happen to her brother. No one ever thinks that. “No, not right now,” Jori replied with a soft smile. “At least I know they were able to save his symbiont, that Derohl lives on in another Trill that was onboard the Gagarin.” Even though she lost her brother, knowing that his memories would live on brought her a little comfort.

The Trill experience was an interesting one. It had always fascinated Captain Devreux, the idea that a person’s consciousness actually lived beyond them. He wondered what it would be like when Jori once more met Derohl, but it was no longer Tajir. “I’d asked you up here to talk logistics… but they can wait,” Devreux offered compassionately. “You have more important things to worry about. Take whatever time you need, and please let me know if there’s anything I can cover for you on the Verity or down below. I’m here for you.”

“I appreciate it, but I’d like to keep going,” she said as she looked at him. “I need to keep helping these people. It’s what I have done my whole life even as an engineer. So what logistical things did you want to cover?” Jori mustered a smile, appreciative of his thoughtfulness and caring nature.

“Commodore, please, they’re really not that important,” Devreux replied, raising his hand in a stopping motion. He knew it wasn’t healthy to just keep going. He saw it constantly with Allison Reyes, and just as he would sometimes draw Reyes to a stop, so too would he draw a stop here with Jori. “I’m sure I can sort them. Please, take the time you need, or stay busy if you must, but just know I’m here if you need it.”

Looking at him for a moment and taking a deep breath, Jori could see it in Devreux’s eyes that he truly cared and probably wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Alright you win,” she responded. “I’ll take the remainder of the day off, though I do request that if anything major happens, please notify me.”

“Understood,” he nodded as he watched her turn to leave. Captain Devreux would rather not have won. He’d rather that they could have just sat here and talked about the logistics of the squadron, that an impossible tragedy had not just befallen the Commodore, but alas it had. This war was personal, and the scars it left would live with them forever.

Following The Highway to Hell Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3…

It looked like suicide as the USS Mariner charged straight at a Jem’Hadar battle group. It stood no chance, but still it charged. Admiral Reyes didn’t know what Captain Kobahl was thinking, but she couldn’t just leave the Mariner to its fate. She turned the USS Serenity toward the Ciatar Nebula and engaged the enemy, but against a Jem’Hadar battleship, multiple battlecruisers and a wing of fighters, they had little hope of success.

Volley after volley, hit after hit, it should have been their end, but some miracle, they had prevailed. It had not come without a price though.

“Well, that was certainly interesting,” Commander Lewis remarked as he followed Admiral Reyes into her Ready Room once things had calmed down. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid it spells the end for our mission.” Dozens of ship systems were damaged or offline, including weapons and shields, and they’d lost twenty five sailors in the brawl. They were in no shape to continue their mission behind enemy lines compromising the Lost’s Fleets communications infrastructure.

“I know,” Admiral Reyes sighed. “But we couldn’t just let the Mariner burn. And who knows, we might have just helped end this whole situation.”

From the outside, the scene unfolding in the Ciatar Nebula looked insane, and if she’d trusted the reports from Opaka Outpost and Deep Space 9, she would have written Captain Kobahl off as a dead woman. But she couldn’t do that. There were over a hundred and twenty souls on that ship, and she had to have faith in her fellow captain. In the end, her faith was validated. As the Serenity, Valhalla and Andromeda came to her aid, the Mariner had delivered a message to the Lost Fleet that might have just ended the war.

“What do you think? Will Kobahl’s gambit pay off?”

“I am not sure,” Admiral Reyes conceded. “Bringing the Vorta back from the Gamma Quadrant was a brilliant move. The Jem’Hadar will have a hard time refusing the messenger of their gods. It very well could end it if our generation’s Dominion was true to their word. But that’s a big if. The Founders always play the long game. I worry there’s more than meets the eye.”

“I don’t disagree. We cannot assume it’s over, but what are we going to do about the remaining relays?” asked Commander Lewis. They had only hacked two out of the half dozen relays needed to fully subvert the Lost Fleet’s communications. “As much as I want to say we just get back at it, shields are down, weapons are down, and we can’t even make warp nine.” If they were once again spotted, they would no longer be able to run or to fight.

“I’m going to call Beckett. It’s his problem now.”

Lewis nodded. The Director of Intelligence for the Fourth Fleet would have to decide what to do next. The Serenity’s journey was over, for now at least. 

“We’ll head back to Nasera to assist with the ongoing humanitarian work. We can at least be helpful there,” Reyes continued. “Commodore Jori isn’t going to be happy with me though.”

“Why do you say that?” Lewis asked. This mission had been at Reyes’ own discretion. The Task Force CO hadn’t really been consulted since she didn’t want her to tell them no.

“Because I broke another ship,” Reyes chuckled, for humor was all she had left in moments like this. She had marooned the Polaris over Nasera, and now she was bringing the Serenity back in shambles. “Every time they give us a ship, we turn it into a dumpster fire and fill it with body bags.” The last bit of her statement stung. There had been so much loss of life. Sadly, their story was not unique. Based on recent reports, it was the same all across the Deneb Sector as the Fourth Fleet engaged the Dominion from Izar to Divinium to Arriana.

“How are you handling it all Allison?” Lewis asked compassionately. Admiral Reyes always acted the paramount professional, but he knew the toll it was taking on her personally.

“It really is like the Dominion War all over again.” They had so much blood on their hands. For Lewis, it was mostly the blood of the enemy, but for Reyes, she’d lost nearly a thousand officers on her watch. It was the burden of command, making choices that meant sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers would never come home to their loved ones. “All I can say is that we did what we did for righteous cause. Doesn’t make it any easier though, all the souls we committed to the deep.”

“Have you gotten updated numbers from Nasera?”

“Nine hundred and thirty five,” Reyes reported grimly, a deep pain in her eyes. “Dr. Henderson thinks that’s the final tally, that everyone else will pull through.”

“How many of those were from the Polaris?”

“Three hundred and eight.” Half had died during the battle in the sky, and the rest on the surface as they cleared Nasera City block by block. As bad as those numbers were, it would have been so much worse if not for the selfless sacrifices of a few brave men and women.

“That’s a sixth of our crew Allison.”

“I’m acutely aware,” Reyes acknowledged. “Everyone on the ship is going to have lost a close friend or colleague. It’s probably a good thing our ships aren’t in fighting condition because there’s no way the crew is. For many, this will be the first time they’ve experienced this sort of tragedy.” Their crew had mostly come of age during the relative peace of the nineties.

“What about you?”

“Jake, you know me,” she assured him. This was not her first rodeo. She knew what battle versus the Dominion looked like. “If they give me another ship, I’ll be right back out there. It is my duty.”

“As will I.”

The pair stood there for a while, lost in their thoughts as they stared at the stars beyond. Allison Reyes and Jake Lewis had been through so much together, but this month had been hell. She was glad to have him by her side and, as much as he didn’t often consider it, so too was he to have her by his.

“I’m not sure I ever said it Commander, but thank you for what you did on Nasera,” Reyes offered after a moment. “Your team came through when we needed them most. If it wasn’t for Shafir and Rel, we would have been fried by the planetary defense system. If it wasn’t for you and Dr. Hall, the ground battle would have been far worse. And if Ryssehl and Nam hadn’t laid down their lives, I was seconds away from ramming the Polaris into that weapons platform before it laid waste to Nasera City.” All weapons offline, the only weapon she’d had at her disposal was the massive spaceframe of the Polaris. She’d given the order. Sacrifice a ship, save a city.

“Ryssehl knew the risks when he signed up with us, Allison,” Lewis reminded her. “And logically, they knew they were dead either way.” Just like Reyes, Ryssehl and Nam had done the math. They blew up the platform while still onboard in order to save the Polaris. Sacrifice two, save sixteen hundred.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it? Ryssehl gave his life to save those who turned their back on him so many years ago,” Reyes observed regretfully. “Court martialed in 2367 for what the JAG described as repeated instances of dangerous behavior unbecoming of an officer, but in that moment, he was more an officer than most.” She thought of all those in San Francisco who sat comfy in their chairs ignoring the scourge that ran rampant across the Deneb Sector.

“It’s a shame that Starfleet doesn’t recognize that sometimes we need people like that,” Lewis replied. He knew he was in that same category. Starfleet didn’t want people like him and Ryssehl, but Nasera was proof they needed them.

“I will be recommending Ryssehl for posthumous acquittal and restoration of rank,” Reyes shared. “As well as nominating him, Nam Jae-sun, Kora Tal and Brock Jordan for the Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry.” Nam and Ryssehl had died on the orbital platform, while Jordan had given his life to prevent the planetary defense system from falling back under Dominion control, and Kora had lost hers assaulting the governor’s mansion where the Vorta commander had taken residence. Such citations were a small consolation, but small consolations were all one could find in times like these.

“I suspect Commander Drake will try to take them away as fast as you can give them out,” Lewis warned. The Polaris’ JAG officer was all over them, and he’d have no issue going after the honors of the dead. “And you know he’s coming for those of us that made it off of Nasera.”

“Will he find anything Jake?”

“Shafir and Rel are clean. Killing a fellow officer is never ideal, but they made the correct decision,” Lewis affirmed. “The only other option was the destruction of the entire squadron. A tribunal will find the same, but it would be best for everyone’s emotional state if he didn’t put them through that.” Ayala Shafir would forever have to carry the guilt of pressing that detonator and killing Lieutenant Commander Jordan. She didn’t need to be forced to relive it over and over in a courtroom. “But their actions aren’t really the ones you’re asking about, are they?”

“No. I’m asking about what you did.”

“Time was of the essence. You know what the situation was. You were down there.”

“Yes, I was,” Reyes nodded solemnly. She had experienced the gruesome ground war firsthand as they flushed the Jem’Hadar from Nasera City. Every minute, good officers were dying. They were sailors, not soldiers, and they were unprepared for the ruthlessly effective and brutal tactics of the Jem’Hadar.

“The idealists in Starfleet’s ivory tower do not look kindly upon enhanced interrogation,” Lewis lamented. “But if we had not compelled the Vorta to give that order when we did – and believe me, he wouldn’t have done it so quickly otherwise – you’d be looking at two to three times the death toll. Thousands, rather than a thousand.” And that was even if they’d managed to win at all, Lewis thought to himself. It was entirely possible that without the Vorta’s order, the Jem’Hadar might have prevailed against Starfleet in the battle.

“I do not disagree,” Admiral Reyes nodded. “But I’m not asking you what you did or why you did it.” She had no doubt that Commander Lewis had done what needed to be done, and she had no sympathy for the Vorta. She knew it was a monster, and it deserved whatever it had suffered. “What I am asking is whether he will find anything?”

“Not that will stick,” Lewis replied. “Unless someone talks, and I don’t see Dr. Hall or Lieutenant Morgan doing that.” They were his team. They knew what needed to be done. Without their testimony, the JAG officer could show toxicology panels and phaser burns all day, but he had no way to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was them. The colonists could have just as easily drugged and executed the Vorta after the Starfleet team left the scene. “It would be easier for everyone if you’d just order him to cease his investigation though.”

“You know the process does not afford me such discretion,” Reyes reminded him. “And he would not take kindly to me meddling.” Commander Drake was not one to back down. “The best I can do is make him move expeditiously because that is within my purview as it relates to good order and discipline of my command. Just do me a favor and don’t assault him again.” Poking the bear was never a good idea.

Commander Lewis nodded and then took his leave from the Ready Room. It was time to sort out the mess that was damage control.

Alone in her Ready Room, Admiral Reyes sat down at her desk and took a deep breath. And another. And another. What a fucking day. What a fucking month. How the hell had their mortal enemy returned? And why the fuck was Starfleet Command still sitting idle? They needed more than just the Fourth Fleet to prevail against the enemy. It was time to check in on her other operation, the PR stunt that she was cooking to drum up support at home.

“Computer, get me Aria Edir in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, Earth.”

A few moments later, the United Federation of Planets logo vanished. However, the person on the other end was not retired Rear Admiral Aria Edir. Instead, it was an elderly gentleman that Allison Reyes knew to be her husband Mark. He looked shaken and stricken with grief.

“Mark? Where’s Aria?”

“She’s gone,” he replied grimly. Reyes knew at once that he didn’t mean gone as in gone to the store or the lake. By gone, he meant actually gone.

“Wait… what? When?”

“Four days ago. She went to Milan to meet with a news director at the Federation News Network,” Mark explained. “Something about what’s going on in the Deneb Sector. But she never came home.”

“Did you call the authorities?”

“I’ve called everyone I could think of – the authorities, all our old contacts, anyone that might have an idea – but nothing. Not a thing. This is not like her. Something happened, and I really don’t get it. We live a simple, peaceful life out here, hiking the Verdon Gorge and cruising Lake Sainte-Croix.”

Reyes sat there stunned, just staring at the screen, saying nothing. She was almost certain it had something to do with what she’d asked her old friend to do. She should have been more careful. The way Starfleet Command was so aggressively ignoring Deneb, it was more than ignorance or passivity. It was intentional suppression. In her blind rush for results, she had put Aria Edir in undue risk. This was on her.

“Allison, do you know anything about this?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You’ll what?” Mark was confused. While the Admiral hadn’t answered his question directly, her response still answered his question. What was his wife up to with her old colleague?

“Not over the link Mark. I will explain when I arrive.”

Admiral Reyes cut the link before anything further could be said. If her suspicions were correct, she would not risk it over a Starfleet frequency. They had a new mission, but first, there was one more message to send.

“Computer, begin recording.”

The computer beeped to acknowledge.

“Admiral Beckett, there has been a new development since my last update,” Admiral Reyes began dictating. “I am attaching an after-action report from a combat engagement where the Serenity redirected from our mission to support the Mariner. Unbeknownst to us, although I would presume at your orders, the Mariner was carrying Vorta representatives from the present day Dominion. I am pleased to report that the Vorta representatives were successfully delivered, although at this time, we do not know the impact it had on the Lost Fleet or its operations.”

Reyes paused for a moment to draw focus to the brave officers that had fought alongside her in the Ciatar Nebula. “Captain Sazra Kobahl performed admirably, as did two other captains who responded to the situation, Captain McKenzie of the USS Valhalla and Captain Murphy of the USS Andromeda.”

“Unfortunately, the battle in the Ciatar Nebula did not come without cost. All ships sustained heavy damage and loss of life, but they were within acceptable limits due to the nature of the mission.” It sucked to quantify losses like that, but it was the reality considering the criticality of the mission and the substantial force differential. “Before we moved to assist the Mariner, we were pursuing an opportunity to hack the Lost Fleet’s subspace communications network. The Serenity is no longer in fighting shape to continue this pursuit. I am attaching details of what remains in hopes that you can redirect another vessel to finish the work.”

“Additionally, I am attaching a series of video testimonials we have collected from the survivors of Nasera. They are heavy, irrefutable stories about suffering, the horrors our people suffered under the yoke of the Jem’Hadar. Starfleet Command may sit idle, but the people, our citizenry, they will not sit idle if they hear the voices of Deneb for themselves. You say ‘Trust only the Fourth Fleet’, but I still believe in our people. If they see the truth for themselves, they will do the right thing and compel the Federation to act. I leave these recordings in your hands to decide how to proceed.”

“Computer, end recording, attach records, and send to Admiral Beckett, Director of Fourth Fleet Intelligence.” 

Admiral Reyes rose from her desk and crossed to the bridge. The ship might not have any fight left in it, but Admiral Reyes certainly did. Maybe Beckett would come through, but maybe he wouldn’t, so it was time to address this issue head on. And to find her old friend.

“Helm, can we make warp?”

“Yes ma’am. Up to warp 8.”

“Admiral, may I remind you that we are in no shape to fight?” Lieutenant Commander Eidran reminded her. He could see it in her eyes. She wasn’t here to order them back to Nasera for repairs. This was something else.

“Where we are going, we won’t need torpedoes or shields,” Reyes countered. “And we can conduct repairs en route. Conn, bring us about and prepare to go to warp.”

“Bring us about for where?”

“Earth.”