Seated at the main console on Pytheas, Captain Hikaru Sulu checked the proximity alert, as well as the sensors that, in the right circumstances, should trigger that alert. He also ran his own scans. He’d done all of that periodically since he’d landed the shuttlecraft. Such examinations had become a habit over the years, though up until the last four days, he’d had to utilize a tricorder to check for indications of the arachnoids. As he knew too well, deposits of various elements all around the planet often masked the subterranean bio-signs—and sometimes even the movements—of the deadly creatures. He defended against that by frequently verifying the integrity of the ground in the immediate area.
For eleven years, the arachnoids, as Excelsior’s crew had come to call them, had been a bane. The ship’s complement had numbered seven hundred thirty-two. As best they could tell, twelve died in the collision with the portal, and another eight perished when their escape pod failed during its descent and crashed. That meant that seven hundred twelve of Sulu’s crew made it safely to the surface of the unknown planet. Since then, one hundred forty-seven had succumbed to various maladies and dangers—the majority of them killed by the arachnoids, either as the direct result of injuries suffered in an attack, or from venom injected into their bodies. Most of those casualties had occurred early on during their time on the planet, but Janet Whistler, one of the crew’s medical technicians, had died just eight months prior, when she’d gotten too close to what she’d thought had been a freshly killed creature. Ironically, she’d been attacked by the nearly dead arachnoid while attempting to harvest its venom for use in producing antivenin, a necessity since their remaining stock would soon lose stability and potency.
Satisfied with the state of terrain around and below the shuttlecraft, Sulu turned in his chair so that he could see his daughter—even though seeing her in her present condition broke his heart. In her crew’s battle aboard Amundsen with four of the grotesque arachnoids, one of the creatures had driven its envenomed front appendage into her abdomen. Christine Chapel, Excelsior’s chief medical officer, had been able to remove the section of the barbed limb from Demora’s body and treat her wounds, thanks in part to medical equipment—and antivenin—that the Enterprise crew had sent through the portal, but the doctor could only do so much. Demora’s condition had stabilized for the time being, but she required surgery and support that would be better, safer, and more effectively carried out in a Starfleet sickbay.
Sulu regarded the unconscious form of his daughter, laid out on an antigrav stretcher in an aft corner of the shuttlecraft. Chapel and one of her nurses, Vigo Eklund, tended to her. On a chair behind them, on the other side of the cabin, Demora’s torn and bloodied uniform tunic lay in a bunch. He noted the captain’s insignia, and despite his concerns for his daughter’s health, he took great satisfaction in her rank. With everything else that had taken place over the previous four days, he hadn’t had much of a chance to think about her promotion. The last time he’d spoken with Demora before his disappearance, she’d been serving aboard Enterprise as Captain Harriman’s executive officer. It didn’t surprise him at all that, in the time since, she’d made captain and taken over command of the ship. He felt abundantly proud, which just made the situation all the more difficult.
Sulu almost couldn’t bear what had happened to his daughter, not when they had, against all odds, ended up in the same place years after he had forsaken any chance of ever seeing her again. After Excelsior had collided with the portal and passed through it, he had been the last member of the crew to leave the dying vessel. Blasting away from the mortally wounded ship by firing the explosive bolts on his escape pod, he successfully fled Excelsior, but discovered on his trip down to the planet that his emergency vehicle had been badly damaged. As the pod plummeted wildly through the atmosphere, Sulu worked feverishly to gain flight control. He managed to do so only at the last possible moment, leveling off just above a forest. His pod plowed through trees that slowed it enough to avert his death. When it finally struck the ground, it dug out a long trench, leaving him buried in the escape vehicle eight meters beneath the forest floor, battered and unconscious. Since he came down nearly a thousand kilometers from the rest of his crew, it took them days to find him.
After Excelsior had been destroyed, Sulu had championed all attempts to escape the planet and return home, although he privately concluded that they had involuntarily traveled to another universe. The patterns of stars in the night sky told the crew that they’d ended up incalculably far from the Federation. It had taken months, and in some cases years, but they had all ultimately accepted their aggregate fate to one degree or another. They still took what few actions they could to foment their rescue, although, as time wore on, their expectations diminished to almost nothing.
When Sulu had come to realize that he might never again see his daughter, it had for a time beaten him down. He missed her terribly, but worse than that, he understood that his disappearance—and the eventual presumption of his death—would cause her great pain. He hated to think of Demora mourning him, of her hurting and sad, with the endless ache of uncertainty preventing her from ever achieving closure.
And then when I heard her voice . . .
Sulu still had difficulty believing that he wasn’t experiencing some sort of hallucination or dream—or nightmare, considering Demora’s condition. Four days prior, Ryan Leslie had visited the last of their escape pods still under power. Excelsior’s emergency craft had been designed to keep a full load of passengers alive while adrift in space, or, if necessary and possible, to safely land them on a nearby world. Each pod carried a month of provisions, along with enough supplies and battery power to maintain life support, communications, and rudimentary helm control for the same amount of time.
Once the Excelsior crew had landed on the planet, they’d rationed everything they had. After eleven years, only a single escape pod retained a functioning battery. Where they had initially transmitted distress calls on a daily basis, they had, over time and in the interest of conserving power, reduced that to once a week, and finally to once a month.
Sulu had promoted Leslie to first officer just after the destruction of Excelsior, when Beskle Crajjik’s escape pod had failed during its descent, crashing and killing all eight crew members aboard. Still the security chief, Leslie took on the task of regularly sending out a distress call. He had just finished doing so when he unexpectedly received a message—one delivered in Federation Standard. He listened as a woman issued a call to any Excelsior survivors. Leslie replied at once, but he received no response. The message, clearly on a loop, then repeated, and the speaker identified herself as Captain Demora Sulu of U.S.S. Enterprise. According to Leslie, he had almost knocked himself cold bolting from the escape pod to find Hikaru.
When Sulu had returned to the pod with his first officer, the two men had listened to the message together. The captain recognized his daughter’s voice immediately, and it filled him with an odd mixture of potent elation and a peculiar sense of dislocation. He then realized that Demora’s presence on the planet could mean that she had traveled through the portal and become stranded as well—a disheartening thought he hoped would turn out not to be the case.
Sulu had repeatedly tried to contact his daughter, unsuccessfully. He didn’t know if environmental or meteorological conditions caused the problem, or if the transmitter in the escape pod had failed, or even if Demora might have equipment issues of her own. Since the pod could still fly, though, Sulu formed a team—essentially a planetary version of a landing party—and set out to locate her.
At dawn the next day, they’d found Amundsen. But as Sulu and his team flew toward the shuttlecraft, the ground swallowed it whole—an occurrence that, through the years, had stolen a number of the Excelsior crew’s escape pods. The arachnoids would sometimes carve out large cavities in the earth, essentially creating sinkholes that would trap their prey and allow them to attack.
Sulu had set down the escape pod a safe distance from the opening in the ground. Armed with phasers set to kill, he led his team to the edge of the hole—and then down into it. By the time they had scaled the earthen walls, Amundsen’s hull had been wrecked, its bow staved in, its roof perforated and mangled. One arachnoid had been crushed dead in front of the shuttlecraft, and the legs of a second hung motionless where it had been trapped between the stern and a rock wall. Inside the cabin, two more of the creatures lay lifeless, as did a young female ensign. Another ensign, a young man, had been badly injured, but still breathed. Demora had collapsed to the deck, a disembodied alien limb protruding from her abdomen, her respiration shallow, her color ashen.
Removing the injured personnel from beneath the ground had not been easy. While Doctor Chapel treated Demora and the ensign at the scene, Sulu and the rest of his team excavated parts of the hole, blasting boulders into dust with their phasers and ensuring a clear path for their escape pod. They then flew down into the hole, where they used antigrav stretchers to carry out Demora and the ensign through the compromised roof of the shuttlecraft. They also retrieved the body of the female ensign.
Sulu had then returned to the camp that the Excelsior survivors called home, a collection of dwellings constructed primarily of native materials. They kept the powerless escape pods in various nearby locations, mostly for use as emergency shelters in the case of extreme weather or an attack by the arachnoids. Limited by their lack of medical facilities and supplies, Chapel and her medical staff did what they could for Demora and the ensign.
Later that day, the surviving ensign—Hawkins Young—had regained consciousness. He explained what had happened—to him, to Demora and Ensign Kostas aboard Amundsen, and to the portal, which the Enterprise crew had found not in space, but on the surface of Rejarris II. Sulu wondered if Excelsior’s collision with the alien device had activated some sort of retrieval protocol that had brought it back to the planet for repairs. Young also revealed the plan of the Enterprise crew to restore power to the portal by hauling it back into orbit.
In anticipation of that taking place, Sulu had ordered Leslie to monitor for messages. The next day, he intercepted one sent to Demora by Commander Xintal Linojj, one of the names that Sulu’s daughter had uttered before losing consciousness, and whom Ensign Young identified as Enterprise’s first officer. Transmitted by a probe that had been directed through the reenergized portal and down to the planet, the message provided instructions on how to respond: by recording a reply onto a scrolling padd and then taking it into orbit, to a specific set of coordinates, and holding it up against the forward viewport.
Sulu and several of his crew had flown their escape pod to the second Enterprise shuttlecraft on the planet, where they’d found the scene Young had described to them: Pytheas, surrounded by a probe, two log buoys, and the decaying body of an arachnoid. Sulu found the scrolling-enabled padds aboard the shuttlecraft, and he recorded his own message onto one of them. He identified himself and told an abbreviated account of the events that had resulted in him and his crew being stranded.
Sulu had then taken Pytheas into orbit, to the coordinates specified by Linojj. He and his team saw nothing there, but they held the padd up to the viewport, as instructed. They allowed it to play through once, and then a second time.
Just after they’d begun a third playback, a probe had appeared before them, as though it had just emerged from behind some hidden fold in space. It sent a transmission to the shuttlecraft, and specifically to Captain Hikaru Sulu, informing him that Linojj had read his message. In her response, she expressed surprise and satisfaction at the news of his crew’s survival, as well as concern for Enterprise’s own missing officers. She also asked what she could send through the portal to the Excelsior crew, most especially to aid in the medical care of her captain.
From there, Sulu had begun a dialogue with Linojj, starting with all of Chapel’s requests for medical equipment and supplies. He then told the Enterprise first officer about his daughter’s final words to him. He suspected that Demora’s reference to “Ad Ja Harr’man” had been to her former captain, John Harriman. Linojj agreed, and said that she would pass along the message to him, despite its inscrutable—and possibly nonsensical—content.
That had taken place three days earlier. Within twelve hours of informing the Enterprise first officer of Demora’s message, Linojj had received a response from Admiral Harriman’s posting, Helaspont Station. His reply was brief: “Maintain position and initiate subspace radio silence. Continue to support all Starfleet personnel lost on the other side of the portal. Help is on the way.”
As Sulu regarded the unconscious and badly wounded form of Demora from across the shuttlecraft cabin, he could only hope that the help Harriman spoke of would arrive in time to save his daughter.
♦ ♦ ♦
Acting Captain Xintal Linojj had wanted the ship’s entire senior staff—other than Commander Buonarroti, who remained otherwise occupied—to attend the meeting, but she sat at the conference table in Enterprise’s observation lounge with just one other person: Admiral John Harriman. She hadn’t seen her former commanding officer in several years. He looked well: both his lean body and long face had filled out some, replacing the boyish quality he’d previously retained with a more mature appearance. His brown hair had gone gray, and though it had receded a bit, she thought that, together with his blue-gray eyes, it gave him a flinty countenance.
“Your chief engineer reports that preparations are nearly complete,” Harriman said. He had arrived at Rejarris II ten hours before, aboard U.S.S. Cassiopeia. Rather than its regular complement of five hundred thirty-five, it carried a skeleton crew of twenty-three, including the admiral as its commanding officer—a fact Linojj almost found suspicious, since she knew the Constellation-class vessel’s current captain, Gabe Márquez. The commander had known John Harriman a long time, though, and she trusted him. More than that, he had responded to the message she’d sent to him with greater haste than she’d expected, and she knew that he’d come to rescue Demora Sulu and Hawkins Young and the surviving crew of Excelsior.
At least, she thought she knew that. Captain Demora Sulu’s cryptic message to the admiral—that she had confirmed an “Odyssey solution”—sounded positive to her, if also slightly mysterious. And Linojj certainly couldn’t argue that those words hadn’t brought Harriman racing to Rejarris II. When she had spoken to the admiral after he’d first arrived, she’d asked about the phrase. He deftly moved the conversation in another direction without actually answering her question, and, coupled with her inability to find any Starfleet references to Odyssey in the library-computer, she concluded that the term actually carried significant—although perhaps classified—meaning.
“Once my engineers and computer technicians have transported back to the ship,” Linojj asked, “what are your orders, sir?” Upon Cassiopeia’s arrival, Harriman had enlisted a team of Enterprise personnel to assist him aboard his vessel. He had initially declined to discuss his intentions, causing Linojj to harbor paranoid delusions about Starfleet Intelligence sending him on a covert mission to destroy the portal, consequently stranding Captain Sulu, her father, and all the others on the other side permanently. Harriman’s occasional participation in SI operations had long been rumored. The admiral must have perceived her concerns, though, because he’d then volunteered that he aimed to do everything he possibly could to bring all the marooned Starfleet personnel home.
“When Commander Buonarroti and his teams return to the Enterprise,” Harriman said, “the twenty-two crew members I brought with me will transport over with them.”
Linojj felt her eyes involuntarily narrow. It sounded as though the admiral would leave Cassiopeia empty of any personnel, but a starship could not safely pilot itself, at least not for long. Even if Harriman planned to send the vessel uncrewed through the portal, and even if he had devised a ready method for Hikaru Sulu to get aboard, Linojj didn’t understand how that would allow the starship to bring its passengers home. She feared that the admiral’s “solution” to the plight of Demora Sulu, Ensign Young, and the Excelsior crew would be to provide them a vessel on which to travel, leaving them on their own to find their way home—or simply to find a comfortable place to make a new home.
Odyssey, Linojj thought. She had believed the lone reference to the word that she could find irrelevant to the current situation, but she’d read that the ancient human literary work told the story of an epic journey. Could that be what Captain Sulu intended? Linojj asked herself. Did she discover where the portal had sent her and conclude that a long starship journey could eventually get her back to the Federation?
“Once your crew and the Cassiopeia crew are aboard the Enterprise,” Harriman continued, “you are to maintain subspace silence and travel to Helaspont Station. Once you’ve offloaded the Cassiopeia crew, I want you to contact Starfleet Command and provide them with a detailed account of everything that’s happened at Rejarris Two.”
“Sir?” Linojj said. “You haven’t informed Starfleet Command already?”
“Further,” Harriman said, completely ignoring the question, “you are to deliver to Command my recommendation that the Rejarris star system should be designated a hazard to navigation and rendered off-limits to Federation traffic.”
“Yes, sir,” Linojj said, “but . . . you’re not coming with us?”
In response, Harriman looked away and shook his head, then took a deep breath. His reaction seemed completely divorced from what Linojj had just asked him. When finally he gazed back at her, he said, “Commander, I will not be returning to Helaspont Station aboard the Enterprise. I am taking the Cassiopeia through the portal in order to recover Captain Sulu—both Captains Sulu—Ensign Young, and the remaining crew of the Excelsior.”
“By yourself, Admiral?” Linojj asked, incredulous. It pleased her that Harriman obviously must have the means of reversing the direction of the portal, but the notion of one man piloting a Constellation-class starship sounded like madness. “I know it will only be a short journey through the portal, but there’s no guarantee of the conditions on the other side, or how long it will take to get the Excelsior crew aboard—or if one person can even do all of that.”
“That’s the effort that Commander Buonarroti has been leading,” Harriman said. “Once complete, I will be able to control helm, navigation, the impulse engines, and the transporter from a single station.”
“Even if you centralize control,” Linojj argued, “that’s a lot for one person to take on.”
“As you mentioned, it will only be a short journey through the portal,” Harriman said. “After I’m through and established in orbit, I will begin beaming people up to the ship, specifically bringing aboard crew who can take over all those functions from me.”
“Begging the admiral’s pardon, but it’s been more than a decade since the Excelsior crew have operated a starship.”
Harriman actually smiled, although Linojj didn’t know what she’d said that could have been considered even remotely amusing. “Xintal,” he said, “I’m not sure how long it’s been since I’ve sat at the helm of a starship, but I’m confident that my training, abilities, and experience haven’t deserted me.”
“But you brought a minimal crew with you on the Cassiopeia,” Linojj noted. “Why can’t you bring them with you, simply in the interests of prudence? Or even some additional Enterprise personnel, just to ensure you don’t encounter any problems that you can’t overcome?”
Harriman did not answer immediately, and he appeared to consider what he would tell her. “Because,” he finally said, “the portal operates only in one direction.”
“Admiral, I assumed that if you chose to travel through the portal, you had a means of returning through it,” Linojj said. She glanced through the ports in the outer wall of the observation lounge, where Cassiopeia kept station nearby. At the aft end of its thick saucer section, two pair of warp nacelles connected to it, one above and one below. “Otherwise, why would you do this?”
“Because there may be another way to bring everybody home.”
Linojj thought about that. “The ‘Odyssey solution’ Captain Sulu spoke of.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Harriman said. “Please consider Sulu’s position in Starfleet and her security clearance. There is classified information that she is in possession of, that I am in possession of, that you are not, and I’m afraid it has to stay that way.”
Linojj thought about that, but one detail of the admiral’s unspecified plan troubled her more than any other. “Sir, you’ve implied that you won’t take anybody else with you aboard the Cassiopeia because there’s only a possibility that you can return. Aren’t you risking the sacrifice of your life? Your career? Your colleagues? Your friends?” She deliberately did not mention family, as she knew that he had no living blood relations; his parents had both died, all four of his grandparents, and even his lone sibling, his older sister, Lynn. “And what about Amina?”
The last question seemed to strike a nerve. “The discussion is closed,” the admiral said. He pushed back from the conference table and stood up. “Everything I’ve told you is classified.”
“You haven’t told me anything,” Linojj pointed out, frustrated. She desperately wanted to recover Demora Sulu and Hawkins Young and the Excelsior crew, but not at the risk of permanently stranding even one more person. She stood up and faced the admiral, deciding to take a chance at being charged with insubordination, relying on their personal relationship to convince him of her good intentions. She reached out to him across the corner of the conference table and placed her hand on his shoulder. “John,” she said, “please reconsider your—”
The up-and-down notes of the boatswain’s whistle interrupted her. “Bridge to Commander Linojj,” said Kanchumurthi.
She took her hand from the admiral’s shoulder and activated the intercom set into the table. “This is Linojj,” she said. “What is it, Commander?”
“Sir, there’s a Starfleet warp shuttle approaching at high speed,” Kanchumurthi said. “It’s just relayed a priority-one message from Starfleet Command.”
“Transfer it here,” Linojj said.
“There are no audio or visual components to the message,” Kanchumurthi said. “It’s text only.”
Linojj eyed Harriman, but the admiral appeared as uncomfortable with the situation as she felt. “Read it to me, then,” she said.
“ ‘Enterprise and Cassiopeia are ordered to maintain their positions until a courier arrives aboard Antilochus with new orders,’ ” Kanchumurthi read. “ ‘Signed, Admiral Los Tirasol Mentir, Chief of Starfleet Operations.’ I have verified the authenticity of the message.”
Harriman placed both hands on the table and leaned heavily on them. He looked frustrated, perhaps even angry. “Commander Kanchumurthi,” he said, “what’s the registry of the shuttle?”
After a beat, the communications officer said, “NCC-Twenty-Two-Twenty-Three, assigned to Helaspont Station.”
“One of the new shuttles,” Harriman said, more to himself than to Linojj. Then, to Tenger, “How long before it arrives?”
“At its current speed, fifty-three minutes.”
Harriman nodded. “Before the Cassiopeia will be ready to go,” he said. Again, he did not seem to be speaking to anybody but himself. “Commander Kanchumurthi, I want to be informed as soon as the shuttle is on its final approach to the Enterprise.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“Keep me informed as well, Commander. Linojj out.” She deactivated the intercom, then looked to Harriman. “Do you know what that’s about, Admiral?”
“Maybe,” he said reluctantly, then amended his response: “I think I do.”
After everything that Harriman had told her—and all of the things he had not—the arrival of orders from Starfleet Operations carried by a courier raised her suspicions even higher. “Admiral,” she said, “are you conducting this mission without proper authority from Starfleet Command?” Linojj had no desire to arrest Harriman and place him in the brig, but she also could not allow a rogue operation by a lone admiral—even one she considered a friend.
“I am a part of Starfleet Command,” he said.
Stretching the purview of your admiral-at-large position just a bit, Linojj thought.
“I am acting on recognized and defensible authority.”
“Then why is a warp shuttle heading this way with new orders?” Linojj demanded, challenging him.
Harriman seemed to deflate. “I have an idea why,” he said, “but it’s not what you think it is.”
“Do you intend to follow the orders we’ve just been given, to maintain our positions?” Linojj asked. “Do you intend to follow the new orders when they arrive?”
“I’ll keep the Cassiopeia here and wait for the orders,” Harriman said. “I don’t want to hang any of this on you, Xintal.”
“That’s not what this is about,” Linojj snapped back, her voice rising. She took a moment to calm herself. “I’m sorry, Admiral, but this isn’t about me. It’s about you running a rogue mission and putting lives in danger.”
“One life,” Harriman admitted. “My life.”
“It doesn’t matter that it’s your life,” Linojj contended. “You are a Starfleet asset. We need you.”
“Right now, Demora needs me,” Harriman said quietly. “And Hikaru.”
“John, don’t you think I want to bring them back, too?” Linojj asked him.
“Of course you do,” he said. “Listen, right now, my orders to you still stand. We’ll also obey Admiral Mentir and wait for our new orders. Then we’ll go from there.”
“I don’t need to lock you up in the brig, do I, Admiral?” Linojj asked him.
“Not yet,” Harriman said, and the quick smile he offered returned a boyishness to his face. “But I’ll let you know when you do.”
Linojj left the admiral in the observation lounge so that he could contact the crews aboard Cassiopeia. The Enterprise’s first officer headed for the bridge. Despite Harriman’s assurances, she realized that she could not possibly predict what actions he would take in the next couple of hours.
♦ ♦ ♦
Harriman waited outside the airlock door, tapping one hand anxiously against the side of his leg. He had trouble sorting out all of the emotions he felt: disappointment, anger, frustration . . . and, of course, love. He knew that when Antilochus’s hatch opened in Enterprise’s hangar deck, a Starfleet officer would disembark carrying orders from the chief of Starfleet Operations—orders that Amina had made happen, and that would unquestionably seek to prevent him from attempting to recover Demora Sulu and the other Starfleet personnel trapped on the other side of the portal. He understood why Amina needed to stop him—she loved him and he loved her, and they had built a strong, happy life together—but he couldn’t believe that she had acted on that need.
Beside the airlock door, an indicator light switched from red to green, signifying that he could safely enter the hangar bay. He tapped a control, and the door opened before him. He stepped past it and waited for it to close. Through the rounded, rectangular port in the second door, he saw the warp shuttle sitting in the middle of the landing deck, its hatch folding down to form an access ramp. He worked a control and the airlock door glided open with a mechanical thunk.
Harriman strode quickly along the marked gangway that led to the shuttle. He had made it halfway to Antilochus when the officer conveying new orders to him from Admiral Mentir appeared at the top of the access ramp. It was Amina.
“John,” she said when she saw him, her eyebrows lifting in obvious surprise.
Harriman marched the rest of the way to the shuttle as Amina descended the ramp. They met just as she stepped onto the deck. She held a padd in one hand. “What have you done?” he demanded, taken aback by the ire he heard in his own voice. He also identified something else that he felt: betrayed.
Amina regarded him coolly. She stood just a couple of centimeters taller than he, and she stared levelly at him, her dark eyes deep and alive, but also wary. “Permission to come aboard, Admiral,” she finally said, her tone flat despite the archness of her words.
“There’s nothing funny about this,” Harriman told her.
“No, John, there isn’t,” Amina said. “These are our lives. This is our life together.”
“And so you went to Mentir to stop me?” he said. “How could you?” He turned and walked several steps away, his frustrations mounting. He spun back around to face her, raising his arms beseechingly. “You know that I have no choice but to do what I’m doing.”
“We always have choices, John,” Amina said. “And no, I don’t completely know what it is that you’re doing because you can’t or won’t tell me. But if I’m supposed to know that you have to do this, then how can you accuse me of trying to thwart you? You’ve known me for as long as I’ve known you—almost twenty years now. If I’m supposed to know you, then shouldn’t you know me, too?”
Harriman took a couple of steps toward her. “What does that mean?” he asked. “That if I feel justified in doing what I have to do, then you should feel justified in what you have to do—namely, stop me?”
“John,” Amina said, shaking her head. “John, how have I stopped you?”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he asked. “You convinced Admiral Mentir to keep the Cassiopeia and the Enterprise in place long enough for you to bring me new orders.”
“Because I knew that, in this particular rare case, you wouldn’t listen to me,” Amina said. “I don’t mean that you wouldn’t do as I suggested; I mean that you wouldn’t even listen to what I had to say.” She strode forward, her movements strong and supple, her carriage an exercise in grace. When she reached him, Amina tucked her padd beneath her arm, then took one of his hands in both of hers. “I knew you wouldn’t listen to me because, even if I don’t know the exact nature of the mission you’re going on, I know the reason you’re going. I understand the importance of the bonds you share with certain people.” She shrugged, and the corner of her mouth lifted, causing a dimple to form in her cheek. “They say you can’t pick your family, John, but in the entire time I’ve known you, that’s precisely what you’ve done. Everybody in your life who you were related to by blood is gone—and frankly, some of them weren’t worth having in your life anyway. But you’ve chosen your own family. I know because I’m in it. So is Demora. She’s the sister you never really got to have.”
The reference to Lynn squeezed Harriman’s heart, as it almost always did. He’d loved his sister, older than he by two years. At the age of eighteen, during a break from university, she’d tagged along with friends on a trip to a border outpost. There, local law enforcement believed, she’d unintentionally witnessed a crime, a chance occurrence that had resulted in her murder.
“My sister,” Harriman said, and he thought about how Demora really had fulfilled that role in his adult life. “My friend. She’s in trouble, Amina, and I’m the only one who can possibly save her—her, and more than five hundred other Starfleet personnel.”
“I don’t quite understand how it is that only you can save Demora, because you won’t tell me,” Amina said, though with no hint of reproof. “But I believe you. I believe you because I love you, and because I do know who you are. You would tell me if you could.”
“I really would.” He considered telling her at that moment, regulations and security clearances be damned. But the classified nature of the information wasn’t the only reason he hadn’t told Amina. He also feared that, if she knew what he intended to do, she would never be able to let him go.
Amina patted his hand. “As a Starfleet officer, I appreciate your dedication to duty,” she said. “As your wife, not so much. But you are who you are, John, and I happen to love that man.”
“You don’t know how much that means to me,” Harriman told her. “Especially now.”
“I love you,” she said. “For now and ever.” They had used the phrase with each other almost since the very beginning of their relationship. It had been the title of a sonnet that Harriman had written for her.
“I love you, for now and ever.” He moved forward and kissed her, his hand coming up to cradle her head. Staff in the shuttlebay control room could see them if they looked, as well as anybody who happened to be in either of the observation galleries, but he didn’t care.
When they ended the kiss—warm and gentle and soft, filled with all they felt for each other—Harriman asked the question to which he had to have an answer. “If you’re not here to stop me, then what are Admiral Mentir’s new orders?”
“You’re not taking the Cassiopeia on its mission by yourself,” she said.
“What—?” he began, but he really didn’t know what to ask.
“The chief of Starfleet Operations has temporarily reassigned me to the Cassiopeia,” Amina said. She handed him the padd. “Length of tour to be determined.”
Harriman took the padd and reviewed the order. His mouth fell open. He didn’t know how to react. He felt elated and terrified at the same time—elated that he would not have to leave Amina, and terrified what it would mean for her life. “But . . . the station . . .”
“I’ve left my exec in command,” Amina said. “I think Farish has been waiting for an opportunity like this for a long time. When I informed him, he practically ushered me to the warp shuttle.”
Harriman chuckled, and the lightness of the moment felt good. “You may never get your command back.”
“No, I guess I might not.” The simple statement contained several levels of meaning, the most serious of which Harriman felt he needed to address.
“Amina, this mission—”
“I don’t want to hear anything about the dangers involved,” she said. “I’m a Starfleet officer . . . a captain, not some deskbound admiral. I’ve served on starships, and I’ve spent more time on the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone than almost anybody in Starfleet, including you. And I also don’t want to hear about us maybe never being able to come home. That’s the whole point. This—” She tapped a finger to where her heart beat beneath her chest. “—is my home . . . and this.” She touched the left side of his chest.
“I love you,” Harriman said, and he wrapped his arms around his wife.
“Let this be a lesson to you, John Jason Harriman the Second,” she whispered into his ear. “If you ever leave me, I’m going with you.”