Dearest Thriss, Anichent, Dizhei—I love and miss you all, but this mission must come before my return to Andor for the shelthreth. I hope that someday you understand my choices and forgive me. While it might seem I’m being selfish, I’m doing this for you, for all of our people. Our people’s present course merely postpones the inevitable—we must explore new possibilities if we are to defy our fate. And if a few aren’t willing to make sacrifices for the many…Unfortunately, because you are matched to me, you are among the few. You didn’t choose this for yourselves and for that, I’m sorry.
In the early weeks of the mission, Shar had watched Vaughn and his daughter, Ensign Tenmei, tentatively feel their way back to reconciliation after years of estrangement due to her belief that Vaughn had put his duty to Starfleet before his love of her mother. Shar wondered if someday he would have to make a similar reconciliation with his bondmates.
Early this morning, he had come up empty as he fumbled for the right words to express his thoughts to those closest to his heart. Never mind that he had years of practice recording such messages, having spent so much time away from them, communicating solely through subspace letters. No matter where his Starfleet assignments had taken him in the past, maintaining his ties to his bondmates had been a priority. Infrequent were the times when, as a group or individually, they could take leave from schooling or work.
While Dizhei’s teaching responsibilities tethered her to Andor, both Anichent and Thriss left home for personal and professional reasons. Anichent’s research and conferences had provided him with opportunities to visit Shar at the Academy. Thriss regularly went from Andor to Betazed with her own zhavey, a visiting professor from the Andorian Art Academy to Betazed University. During the war, Thriss had managed to meet Shar for weekend leave on three occasions. In the war’s darkest hours, each of her visits had buoyed him up and renewed his resolve to press forward in the face of reports enumerating Starfleet losses. Her dreams of a post-war future underscored his determination to make the most of every duty shift, helped him avoid discouragement when the casualty reports listed the names of friends and officers he had served with.
Damn it, Zhavey!I had reconciled myself to not seeing them before I came home from the Gamma Quadrant. I had prepared myself and knew I could make it for another few months and then return home for the shelthreth. But you couldn’t trust me enough to accept my choice without questioning.
Of all of them, he thought Thriss would have most appreciated this voyage. She never shied away from new experiences, always living close to the edge, plunging into the unknown when the rest of them cowered beneath their covers. Since they were children, she had always been the first to take a dare. More than once, her risks had landed her in the infirmary or before a disciplinary council, but her passion never dimmed. She never ceased to surprise him.
He still remembered the look on his bondmates faces as they stood by while Charivretha demanded he return with them to Andor.
Ever the optimist, Dizhei had tried to look cheerful, but her cloudy eyes and too bright smile betrayed her true feelings. Anichent’s silence during the argument had disappointed Shar. After so many years of closeness, Shar assumed that he, even more than Thriss, would know why Shar needed to join this mission. Anichent had been Shar’s first love, the one who, early on, had encouraged his academic pursuits, fed his ambitions to attend the Academy. Hadn’t it been Anichent who, in his pragmatic, methodical way, outlined the sacrifices Shar would have to make in following the life path he had elected to take? But in their last encounter, he’d barely said a word.
And Thriss…
How many sleepless nights had they spent lying on their backs, mapping the constellations in Andor’s heavens, interspersing their stargazing with talk about their goals and dreams? His absurd aspirations didn’t sound quite so absurd when she brushed her lips against his ear, whispering words of encouragement. She, more the others, had always defended his choices, even when those choices were made at her expense. After everything they’d been through together, after he’d opened himself to her incandescent spirit and saw his own yearning for a better future reflected back at him…How was it that she, of all people, could come to him making that final desperate appeal as he was about to board Defiant? Oh, Thriss…
The shuddering transport groaned to a halt. Shar sprang through the barriers and ran up the steps to where the Avaril’ s crew prepped for launch, Defiant once again nestled inside its cavernous bay. Hoards of Yrythny shuttled storage lockers of supplies into exterior hatches; officers with electronic tablets ran through pre-launch checklists. Shar surveyed the crowded platform until he found his own crew. Dr. Bashir was giving last-minute instructions to Ensign Juarez, who would stay behind as medic for Lieutenant Dax’s team. Spotting his commanding officers engrossed in conversation, Shar worked his way over to them. He assumed a position at Vaughn’s elbow, waiting for his turn.
“Transmit on subspace channel delta—” Vaughn was saying. Ezri’s brow furrowed. “Delta? That requires security encryption.”
“Right. I want our communications kept private, just to be on the safe side.”
“All right,” Dax said, and then smiled. “Any last words of encouragement?”
“Yes. Try not to start a war this time.”
“Very funny. I’m not Curzon, you know.”
“Try to remember that and I’m sure you’ll do fine.” Vaughn surveyed the dwindling activity in the launch bay and said, “I expect we’ll be departing shortly. Has your team finished offloading your supplies?”
Lieutenant Dax threaded her hands behind her back and stood up a little straighter before turning to Shar. “Ensign?” she said in her firmest command tone.
“Yes, sir. An hour ago.”
“Excellent work, Ensign,” Vaughn smiled, placing a hand on Shar’s shoulder. “Since I won’t be here to consult with Lieutenant Dax, feel free to offer any insights you might have gleaned from having a professional politician for a mother.”
Never mind that I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid being overtly associated with Zhavey …“Yes, sir.” Shar took a deep breath. “Sir, if you don’t mind—”
“Yes, Ensign?”
Shar fingered the isolinear chip in his hand. “Commander, I realize this is unorthodox, but I have a personal request to make…” His antennae tightened and twitched.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Dax interrupted, “I need to say good-bye to Julian.”
Respectfully, Vaughn waited until Dax was out of earshot to speak. “You were saying, Ensign.”
“When you transmit your weekly report to Colonel Kira, would it be possible to attach a personal letter to my bondmates?”
Vaughn smiled. “Of course, Shar,” he said gently. holding out his hand to accept Shar’s chip. “Though I can’t guarantee that the report will go out on schedule, I’ll make a point of adding your message to the data stream. Rest easy, Ensign.”
“Thank you, sir,” Shar said, flushed with gratitude. “And good luck.”
As he walked away to look for Nog, Shar spotted exhausted Ensigns Senkowski and Permenter and knew his friend would be close at hand. Neither officer had been far from the Defiant since the Avaril docked. Earlier this morning, Shar had observed Permenter curled up on a storage locker, snoring. He turned a corner around stacked cargo canisters and as he suspected, found the chief engineer speaking animatedly. Enthused about the task at hand, Nog didn’t notice that both ensigns stared at the padds they held, their bloodshot eyes looking like they were propped open with toothpicks.
“—and make sure that the cables we’re running down the new EPS conduits are free of irregularities. The shield augmentation might destabilize if—Shar!” Nog exclaimed. “Want to hitchhike to the Consortium with my engineering crew? Lieutenant Dax won’t care.”
“You know how clumsy I am with a hyperspanner. I’d probably couple a flat ring to a trisk wire.” Shar recalled more than a few near-misses during the Core repair
s back at DS9.
“Hey! That was almost a joke. Not quite ready for stand-up at Vic’s, but you’re coming along nicely.”
“Stand-up?”
“Never mind.”
Shar had been gradually assimilating his shipmates’ sense of humor on this trip. They tended to sprinkle humor into almost every conversation. He supposed that with practice, it would eventually come naturally to him.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Nog said. “Hey, Tlaral! Come over here.” He waved her in their direction.
A Yrythny was bent over a communications unit, using a microlaser to fuse the last array component in place. She lifted her eye shield. “I’m busy!” Tlaral shouted.
“I want you to meet my friend and shipmate, Ensign ch’Thane,” Nog shouted.
Tlaral nodded politely, dropped the eye-shield and resumed her work.
Nog whispered, “She was one of the ones who beamed aboard to help us after we tripped the web weapon. If I could find a way to get Commander Vaughn to let me invite her to stay with the Defiant permanently, I would. She’s a whiz with the cano pliers—and I’ve never seen an engineer who could diagnose a circuit board faster. Except maybe my father.”
“Is she going with you?” Shar asked, wondering if the glow in Nog’s face indicated that he might find true love, or at least serious infatuation, on this journey.
“Her husband—they call them consorts here—is a bigwig in the government. He’s going to be on board, too. He’s like the science minister or something? Mutters a lot.”
“M’Yeoh. Yes, I’ve met him. Why is he going with you?”
“We need a senior government official in order to be able to trade at the Consortium. He was the only one who didn’t need to be here for Ezri’s gig.”
Shar knit his brow quizzically. “Gig?”
“We need to go to Vic’s more when we get back, Shar. You’ll pick up the lingo in no time. You need to get into the groove.”
Shar felt confident he could live a fulfilling life without knowing what a “groove” was, let alone getting into one.
The Avaril had been gone from Luthia for less than a day when the Yrythny General Assembly summoned Ezri to appear before them. She shouldn’t have been surprised—they’d been anxious from the beginning.
Vaughn had only just launched when a messenger appeared with her nonnegotiable schedule, loaded with committee meetings from breakfast to bedtime. Having only a cursory knowledge of the Yrythny, she hardly had enough information yet to make any substantive pronouncements as to the merits of each case. She had wasted no time in assigning the entire away team to research while she’d locked herself into the makeshift office space provided her by the government. After a few minutes standing on her head (which seemed to settle her nerves) she had begun mapping out strategy, searching Curzon’s memories for any relevant experiences he might have had. What she concluded was that whenever circumstances hurtled Curzon into the unknown, he was phenomenally gifted at faking it. Some help you are, Old Man.
So she had treated her meetings as she would a surprise exam or a red alert. Focus. Breathe. Study the situation. Act, not react. And try not to panic. It worked for the most part. A thirty-two hour diet of position papers had filled her head with facts. Whether she could put them together in a useful fashion was another issue altogether.
She was about to find out.
Nothing like having some prep time, Ezri thought, shuffling through the padds loaded with Yrythny history, law, customs and geography brought to her by Candlewood and Shar. She read as quickly as she could, catching the main points and leaving the fine print for later; hopefully, no one would be quizzing her. She’d just finished perusing a treatise on Wanderer rights when Shar appeared in her doorway.
“The escort’s here, sir,” Shar announced.
“Already? They’re early!” Ezri moaned. “Help me gather all this up. And find me something I can carry it in. I don’t know when I’ll be coming back here today.”
Shar quickly procured a shoulder bag and loaded it up with any and all items Ezri might need. “Coral Sea Wars, then Black Archipelago Conflict,” she pronounced finally. “First Proclamation on Rights came with the Peace Talks.”
“I think Black Archipelago comes before the Coral Sea Wars,” Shar commented, then added “sir.”
“After! Let’s go!” She marched out of the office and into the exterior corridor, where the escort to the Assembly Hall awaited her.
* * *
Since he’d first set eyes on it, Vaughn knew that the Avaril rivaled even a Romulan warbird in size. After living aboard her for only a day, he decided that she conformed less to his notions of a starship than she did to a warp capable space station. Finding his way around identical spiraling corridors and dozens of transport car tracks proved challenging. If their wide-eyed expressions of confusion were any indication, his crew felt similarly.
Because Defiant was still, to all intents and purposes, uninhabitable until repairs were completed, the crew had been provided accomodations aboard Avaril. Bowers, who had been supervising the removal of personal crew gear from Defiant, had mistakenly guided a group, arms laden with duffel bags, to the Avaril’ s engine room. Wisely, Chieftain J’Maah had designated several large empty rooms close by Defiant’ s bay to serve as living space, minimizing the square meters in which the Starfleet crew could get lost. To facilitate intercultural understanding, Chieftain J’Maah had provided them access codes to the unrestricted portions of the ship’s database. The voyage to the Consortium was expected to take four days in each direction, so Vaughn had issued a standing order that all Defiant personnel were to spend at least two hours daily exploring the political and social contexts of the sectors they were traveling through. In addition, attendance at scheduled inter-crew mixers was mandatory (the exception being Nog and his engineers: repairing the Defiant took precedence over all activities for the duration of the journey). For himself, he was determined to memorize the layout of the Avaril; he hated getting lost.
But there were practical concerns that required adaptation, such as the sleeping accommodations. Because the rooms given over to the Defiant crew weren’t actually designed to be quarters, nothing remotely resembling a bed was available. Bashir and Prynn had been assigned to collect sleeping bags, blankets and pillows from Defiant. After the first night sleeping on the Avaril’ s decks, Vaughn expected the crew’s tolerance for noise, snoring and quirky bedtime routines to increase markedly.
With Bowers, Bashir, and Prynn still fine-tuning housekeeping and his briefings with Chieftain J’Maah completed, Vaughn was left with a block of time before he was scheduled to join the Avaril’ s senior staff, including Science Minister M’Yeoh, for dinner and a discussion of what to expect at the Consortium.
From what Vaughn had gathered so far, M’Yeoh, in his ministerial position, would secure credentials for Vaughn to conduct trades under the Yrythny’s sponsorship. Vaughn’s impression of the science minister since their first encounter was of a sniveling career politician. Descending from one of the oldest and most prestigious Houses on Vanìmel had been enough to secure M’Yeoh a high government position. Developing a constructive working relationship with him over the next few days might prove challenging. Vaughn had never had much use for inheritors of power; they were too often more trouble than not in his experience.
Checking the time, Vaughn noted that he had about half an hour before he was to present himself in J’Maah’s quarters. Having heard that the crew had organized a poker game for later in the evening, Vaughn decided to go on a personal errand now, before the meeting with J’Maah, freeing him up to play a few hands after dinner.
Though he knew unscheduled hours might be infrequent in coming days, he decided to forgo practicality and download the next volume of The History of Terran Civilization from the Defiant’ s library into a padd for recreational reading. He’d finished the volume on Alexander the Great the day before they’d encountered the Cheka weapon;
he was eager to revisit the rise of the Roman Empire.
With most of the crew settling into their new living spaces, Vaughn wasn’t surprised to find the corridors outside Defiant’ s bay empty. He entered his personal access code into the doorpad and strode across the bay, the hollow clap of his shoes against the deck plates echoing through the chamber. Like a recovering patient, Defiant rested on her seldom-used landing legs. Supplementary power modules attached to external access ports and long, snakelike umbilicals trickled energy into the ailing vessel’s environmental systems. Vaughn patted her hull affectionately, hoping for her quick recovery. He ordered the hatch to open and he climbed aboard. Given the chance, Julian would lecture him about unnecessary radiation exposure, but the hyronalyn would cover him for more than the fifteen minutes the task required. Besides, decontamination was progressing at a good clip, and Vaughn wanted to sit in the captain’s chair, feel the armrests beneath his hands, take in the view from the center of the bridge. He might not be Defiant’ s first love, but he felt their courtship was going well and he missed being in her company.
He hadn’t taken ten steps down the corridor beyond the airlock when he swore he heard the sound of a door closing. Tensing, he kept still and waited for any further sounds, but heard nothing. He didn’t dare ask the computer for information. At the closest functional companel, he initiated internal and external sensor sweeps; both yielded nothing. As far as the computer was concerned, Vaughn was the only organic being in the repair bay. Still, he couldn’t shake the sense that someone or something had been here—if not when he arrived, then certainly just before.
The Defiant had been boarded illicitly—he was sure of it. He wished the violation were unexpected, but the only unexpected part was how soon into their journey it had happened. Though his hosts had been gracious since achieving an “understanding,” Vaughn knew intuitively that he needed to be wary.
Thus far, all his interactions with the Yrythny, save the manipulative tête-à-tête with the Assembly Chief, had been nonconfrontational and cordial. Vaughn had collided with enough admirals and politicians in his day to recognize that getting a job done sometimes required playing hardball. Since the unpleasantness back in Luthia, the Yrythny had facilitated his every request and resolved every concern he raised. That alone troubled him. Though it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the Yrythny’s unhesitating cooperation had been bought with Vaughn’s concession to allow Ezri to mediate, Vaughn had become too old and suspicious to take anything for granted. He found himself wondering what the next round of demands would be. If any more unauthorized visitors come aboard, I need to know how, and why, and who’s being so bold—without needlessly worrying the crew. I will not be surprised again.
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