Declassified

The new hunk of wreckage tumbled silently through space until a work bee moved in to capture the bent and blackened metal plate. Once secured in the tiny craft’s manipulators, the huge fragment was guided safely downstation to a designated cargo bay where debris from the attack was being gathered for analysis.

None of it registered. Desai’s gaze fell instead on the bloated vessel moored to one of the primary spokes of the station’s external docking wheel. The Orion merchantman Omari-Ekon,den of iniquity and illicit trade, and inviolable domain of the crimelord Ganz, had recently returned from months of exile, now sanctuary to the most unlikely refugee imaginable: Desai’s former lover, Diego Reyes.

He’s alive.

Desai tried to wrap her mind around the thought, to come to grips with how so much had changed. Two years ago, Diego had been a decorated Starfleet flag officer—a commodore and the commander of Starbase 47, overseeing a massive colonization effort that had been initiated in order to mask the real reason for the Federation’s rapid expansion into the Taurus Reach. But the cost of maintaining the secrecy of that mission, both in rising casualties and ever-escalating tensions with the Tholians and the Klingons—to say nothing of the lethal power Starfleet had inadvertently awakened in this region of space—had eroded Diego’s certainty about the Federation’s imperative to decode the transformative potential of the Taurus Meta-Genome.

Shadows moved at the edge of her awareness. Outside, shuttlecraft-sized utility ships shifted position, redirecting high-intensity spotlights toward another compromised section of the bay doors.

Having come to believe he’d been following unjust orders, Diego enabled the public disclosure of classified information related to Vanguard’s mission, an act that brought down the full wrath of Starfleet Command, against which Desai, as his defense counsel, had been unable to protect him. Relieved of his command, court-martialed, and convicted, Diego’s disgrace had been the end of his career, as well as the end of their relationship.

And still there was worse to come. The ship transporting Reyes to his imprisonment on Earth was destroyed en route, and for months Diego was believed to be dead.

How can he be alive?

She was dimly aware of distant thunder shaking the deck, passing through the soles of her boots as the engineers cut away another section of Vanguard’s armor, this one even bigger than the last.

After she was nearly consumed by her grief, Desai somehow found the will to move on with her life. For a time she’d even taken a new lover; nothing serious, at least for her—an unsought dalliance to fill the void of physical intimacy, companionship she’d permitted herself to dull the ache of Diego’s absence. After all . . . he was dead.

And then he turned up alive. What am I supposed to do with that?

And how did it change anything, really? Diego remained a convicted criminal and a fugitive from Starfleet justice—and for all she knew, he was complicit in recent acts of theft and sabotage aboard Vanguard. There was nowhere in the Federation he could set foot without being placed under arrest. Desai could see no way to alter any of that, or envision a future that allowed them to be together.

More hull metal sailed past. The breach in the station grew wider, exposing the deeper wounds that had been inflicted upon its core.

What the hell am I doing here?

The bosun’s whistle of the station’s comm system cut through her contemplations. “Ops to Captain Desai.”

She sighed, as much in relief as in a

“Rana, it’s Cooper,”answered Vanguard’s first officer. “The admiral wants to see you in his office immediately.”

Of course he does.Diego’s replacement as base commander had been none too happy about being maneuvered into allowing Ganz back inside Vanguard’s protective shadow, but the Shedai artifact the merchant prince had offered in exchange for safe harbor had made it impossible for the admiral to refuse. The fact that Diego had done the actual maneuvering only made it worse, especially since he was shielded from extradition by the Orions’ thorny relationship with the Federation. Desai’s romance with Reyes was no secret, and she knew it was only a matter of time before Heihachiro Nogura would demand to have words with her. The wonder is that it took him this long to get around to it.

“On my way,” Desai said, and signed off. She thumbed the cha

He’s over there somewhere,she imagined, searching the lighted dots along the ship’s upper half. Maybe he’s even looking up at the station for some sign of me.She considered the distance between her and Diego. It wasn’t far. It felt like light-years.

•    •    •

“Sorry I haven’t been around,” said Ezekiel Fisher. “I’ve been meaning to visit more often, but it hasn’t been an easy time around here. Seems like this place is always attracting the wrong sort of attention. Tholians one day, Klingons the next, and now the Shedai have ripped into us like—” Fisher stopped, raising his hand. “I didn’t come here to make excuses. I don’t visit enough, that’s the bottom line. I’m going to work on that. But I’m here now, because something’s happened that I knew you’d want to hear about. Our old friend has beaten the odds again, Hallie. Diego’s alive.”

The flowering dogwood made no reply, but not once in the past two years of ever-less-frequent visits to Fontana Meadow had Fisher expected one. His one-sided conversations with Hallie Ga

Fisher took a moment to appreciate the breeze that wafted across the meadow. The convincing illusion of an open blue sky and sunlight was no small miracle, of course, nor the expansive plain of genuine green grass or the groves of trees that disguised the false horizon. Vanguard’s groundskeepers did a masterful job tending the station’s terrestrial enclosure, but as far as Fisher was concerned, the real magic of this place was the breeze— randomized gusts of cool wind that caught you by surprise and made the place seem real in a way that nothing else did.

Fisher smiled. “Had a hunch you’d like hearing that,” he told the breeze. “It’s not exactly the sort of news most people around here are celebrating, but I’ll take it. I’m a little worried about Rana. Ever since Diego resurfaced, she’s been finding excuses to avoid me. I know better than to take it personally, but still . . .”

Fisher’s gaze shifted to the brushed metal plaque set into a rough slab of stone beside the tree. The polished silver inscription stood out against textured gray:

IN PROUD MEMORY

U.S.S. BOMBAY, NCC-1926

“OUR DEATHS ARE NOT OURS; THEY ARE YOURS;

THEY WILL MEAN WHAT YOU MAKE THEM.”

Many of the two hundred twenty-four names listed below had been little more than strangers to Fisher. Some he’d met in the normal routine of his duties as Starbase 47’s chief medical officer, but the Bombay’s infrequent and always-too-brief returns to base had made it difficult to know most of them socially, and that failure weighed upon Fisher now, deepening the hole in his chest.