As she came to, her ears rang, and her head throbbed. What the hell had just happened? Her memory began to come back to her. It was Captain Feng. When she’d revealed herself, the captain had opened fire. No warning, no nothing. And then that grenade. That grenade had gone off.

“Morrey to Diligent. Requesting immediate assistance at the reactor,” came the frantic voice of Chief Petty Officer Geoff Morrey. “Security and medical. Now. You might want to alert the admiral too.” He knew how she was.

Lying prone on the floor, covered in dust and debris, Ensign Alessa Elara struggled to open her eyes. Everything was blurry, but she could make out the Chief Security Officer of the USS Diligent standing over her.

“You got damn lucky,” Lieutenant Commander Koh smiled. Only the duranium plating on the cargo crate had saved her from having her guts sprayed across the room. “What happened?” The last they’d seen of her, she was rushing off after Captain Feng, muttering about something she’d felt. And then they got the call from her over, a frantic call for help, but they arrived too late, just in time to find the control center in shambles and the young woman lying unconscious on the floor.

Before Ensign Elara could muster the strength for a response though, the beam-ins began.

First came six security officers, their rifles at the ready. They were Lieutenant Commander Koh’s quick reaction force, and they didn’t so much as glance at the ensign or the two standing over her. That wasn’t their job. Their job was to secure the scene, and they did it with military-like precision, taking up position around the room and the adjoining areas, their eyes never so much as drifting from the places from where a new threat might come.

Next came Commander Carolina Lacroix, the Chief Medical Officer of the USS Diligent. She too moved with precision, but as opposed to the security team, her duty was to the injured young woman lying on the ground. She quickly assessed the situation. The wreck of equipment and the scarring on the walls implied a kinetic explosion, and that in turn suggested what she might be dealing with when it came to Ensign Elara.

Finally came the command staff, Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes materializing in the center of the room, flanked on either side by Commodore Amit Agarwal and Captain Kiara Feng.

From her prone position, Ensign Elara’s face suddenly went ghost white. “You!” she said as she pointed at the captain. “It was you. You shot me. You threw the…” But then, as suddenly as she began, she stopped. Something was different now.

“Excuse me?” asked Commodore Agarwal, surprised by the outburst. “Captain Feng most certainly didn’t shoot you.” That was impossible, he knew. The captain had been with him in the admiral’s office as they went over progress repairing the fusion reactor after the other night’s near-cataclysm.

But Ensign Elara just kept staring. It was her. But it wasn’t. “I… umm… you… you feel normal now, ma’am. Not like earlier, when you felt different, like nothing and no one, like I dunno…” Her words were a jumble, partly because of the pain, and partly because she really didn’t have the right words to describe what she’d felt earlier when the captain passed them at the gates.

Commodore Agarwal and Captain Feng just stared at her cluelessly. What was the ensign going on about? She wasn’t making any sense.

But to Admiral Reyes, it suddenly all made sense. The missing shooter. The intelligence report. And now this. A dark shadow washed across her face. The struggle young Ensign Elara was having was familiar to her. “Like a null space, a void that swallows your telepathy whole?”

A look of shock came across the ensign’s face. “Yeah… yeah, exactly that.” That was pretty much the perfect description. “How’d you know, ma’am?”

The admiral didn’t explain. Not immediately, at least. Instead, she turned towards her security chief. “Lieutenant Commander Koh, you never did identify the shooter from the other night, did you?”

“No ma’am, we did not,” Lieutenant Commander Koh frowned. “The surveillance video did not match anyone from the Palisades or the Diligent, nor from any of the local databases.” They still had no idea who had stood there, dressed in a Starfleet uniform, and gunned down three protestors. She didn’t see how it connected though. “How come?”

“I’m going out on a limb here,” Admiral Reyes supposed. “But it’s possible that the shooter the other night, and the ensign’s attacker tonight, they were the same person, one from neither our crews, nor from Duraxis itself.”

Around the room, everyone looked confused. What was she talking about?

“Our unsub is a changeling,” Admiral Reyes declared flatly.

Now, confusion became skepticism. How had she made that leap?

“A changeling can replicate physical characteristics easily, but it’s far harder to match neural pathways. It takes careful study of a subject to do that. When they do a quick and dirty, like what our unsub did here, it’s more like what the ensign experienced,” Admiral Reyes shared as her eyes fell upon the ensign. “You, my dear, were what it didn’t count on, what it didn’t know to fear.”

“How come I’ve never heard of this?” Lieutenant Commander Koh asked. She might not have lived through the War like the admiral had, but she was a student of conflict. She studied everything she could about her enemy, less it ever return, yet she’d never come across so much as a mention to such a fact.

“Once the changelings learned to fool our blood tests, it was all we had to unearth them,” Admiral Reyes said darkly, thinking back to those terrifying days as fear spread through the fleet, the recognition that anyone or anything could be the enemy in disguise. “We kept it very quiet, lest they catch on, but we used Betazoid volunteers as bloodhounds, quietly outing changeling infiltrators in the highest echelons of command.”

“I thought we were done with them after Frontier Day,” Commodore Agarwal sighed.

“We all hoped as much, but just a few hours ago, Captain Vox and I just received an intel report from Fourth Fleet Command,” Admiral Reyes shared. “It cautioned there was a possibility rogue changelings might still be operating within the Federation, and that they might be involved in the latest surge in crime spreading throughout the quadrant.”

No one looked happy with that idea.

“Now, as for how to catch a changeling…” Admiral Reyes mused. Maybe they could use Ensign Elara like a bloodhound? She couldn’t be everywhere though, and those monsters were slippery as hell.

“It might be easier than you think,” Ensign Elara offered lightly.

Everyone turned towards her.

“Voral,” Ensign Elara revealed. “You see, I didn’t know at the time, but I felt exactly the same thing when I reached out to touch his mind.”

Now that was curious.

“It fits too,” Chief Morrey added. “I mean, think about it. Everyone had a lot to say about Voral’s activities now, but no one seems to know where he came from.”

“How convenient,” smiled Admiral Reyes.

Commander Drake was going to get his pound of flesh – or goo – after all.