The first shot of phaser fire came two hours later, and Barbara, manning Tactical with Shannon Reed assisting her, let fly with the Nebula-class's full complement of phasers and photon torpedoes, a battery of offensive armament heavier even than that of the proud Galaxy-class starships. Phasers raked Providence's stardrive, but her shields held – for the moment, at least. Her position toward the rear of the fleet, by virtue of her size and armament, preserved them from the worst of the initial battery, but the reprieve could not last. In the spare few minutes they had between the first attack run and the second, they found the time for one last, quiet affirmation as Lynley twisted in his chair to catch Barbara's eyes over the Tactical console behind him and reached out to tangle her fingers with his.

"Live for me?" His voice was almost inaudible.

She smiled and squeezed his fingers tight. "Always. And you?"

He returned the pressure, taking comfort in the simple gesture that had come to mean so much to them both in the middle of a war where time for them as lovers was scant, and the need for that time all the more imperative. "Always."

It would have to be enough, and thank God, for them, it was; if this was a suicide run, they could both go out knowing nothing had been left unsaid. I love you went unspoken; it didn't need to be. The touch of their hands said it all.

Woodrow at the conn blurted, "Photon torpedoes mark 43 starboard, incoming!" and then there was no time for anything else.

"Shields!" cried Barbara, and there was a flare of sapphire off the starboard bow as Shannon threw all the power she could to the site of impact. "Eighty percent power! We're going to take the brunt of it now, sir! Charging phasers!" And once again Providence let fly; a Cardassian cruiser went up in a bloom of antimatter fire, and Barbara crowed her triumph as yet another torpedo found its target.

On either side of them were arrayed Starfleet's ships-of-the-line: the space around the stately Galaxy- and Sovereign-class cruisers lit up like a starfield as their forward shields took the Cardassians' fire straight on. In between them, with the solid, reliable weaponry that had served Starfleet for nearly a century, were the older ships, the Excelsior- and Ambassador-classes that had served so long and so well, and could still hold their own. And of course two dozen at least of Providence's sister ships, the Nebula-class vessels so deceptively small for their weaponry and strength. If she had had the time, Barbara would have felt the awe due such an impressive array; now, however, her fight was the console in front of her and the Cardassian cruisers in the distance, and the skill that had made her one of the Federation's most formidable tactical officers came again to the fore as she fired shot after shot from every phaser strip and torpedo launcher at her command. Next to her Shannon Reed concentrated on maintaining the shields, and though their strength was failing, whatever miracle Carly Doherty was working in Engineering somehow kept them above critical through hit after hit. And in the captain's chair Lynley was bellowing orders to T'Maya and Woodrow at Ops and Conn, rotating the ship just enough to avoid having fire concentrated on one spot long enough to break the shields completely.

But it couldn't last. "Shields failing!" cried a desperate Barbara, hauling herself up from yet another ship-rocking hit, and as she cried out twin phaser beams tore through the primary hull. Through the comm system she could hear reports streaming, reports of casualties and death. Communication with Command and other ships had long since been lost; all they could do was keep fighting and try to survive.

At that moment Thomas Lynley made a last, desperate decision.

The Providence fell back behind two Galaxy-class starships, and the brief reprieve was just enough.

"Battle bridge."

Barbara didn't question; she just went, piling into the turbolift that would take them to the dark, cramped command centre in the ship's stardrive. The Captain, she knew, would have told Medical to relocate to the auxiliary sickbay near Engineering, and Barbara could only spare a moment to thank God that she had sent Shadow to Starbase 1 and Alynna Nechayev at the start of the war; the cat was one less weight on her already breaking heart as phaser fire tore through the starship's saucer section.

She had barely made it to the tactical console when the ship was rocked with yet another blast, and she went sprawling; Lynley, who had entered right behind her, landed half on top of her. Dimly she felt some part of her ankle crack, and then there was a dull flare of pain she didn't have time to acknowledge. Lynley hauled her to her feet, and, ignoring the ache in her undoubtedly sprained ankle, she hobbled over to the stool behind Tactical. (Someday, she swore, she was having one of those put on the primary bridge. With seatbelts.) Shannon joined her moments later; ignoring the viewscreen that showed the wreckage of dozens of Starfleet ships around them, refusing to acknowledge the possibility that the same fate might befall them, she bent back to work. Providence and her crew would survive this, or her name wasn't Barbara Havers.

They did, but only just. When the battle was over, bits of the primary hull were floating around them like so much giant snow. While most of it was intact, it was also covered with scorch marks; the main bridge had survived, as had most of the crew quarters, but two of the holodecks and The Mezzanine were gone. The starboard warp nacelle had been sheared clean away, and over two hundred crew were dead and another hundred at least seriously wounded. Barbara herself downed copious amounts of tea for the badly needed caffeine boost; when that stopped working, as it was bound to, she went to Lafferty and glared him into giving her a pocketful of stimulant hypos to apply as needed. With so many to take care of, he, Jackie, Kimura, and their nursing staff were overworked as it was; he didn't have the time or the energy to deal with his stubborn exec. The stims did help, insofar as they kept her going, but there wasn't yet a chemical substitute for sleep; she holed up at her console in her quarters and did her work from there to avoid inflicting her steadily worsening temper on anyone else.

They limped at half impulse to Deep Space Nine and Miles O'Brien, who made tutting noises and ordered them off the ship and to the infirmary. Doctor Bashir was no less vehement; his excellent staff of nurses and doctors was kept busy with dermal regenerators as they fixed the surviving injured crew.

Even Doctor Julian Bashir, however, couldn't keep Barbara Havers in sickbay when she didn't want to be, not with another hundred of Providence' s crew still to treat. So Barbara made her escape. And that escape, naturally, took her to Quark's. (And, it must be admitted, some desperately needed alcohol.)

"Stardrifter. Make it a double." Wearily, she sank onto a stool, trying to find the energy to order food. She hadn't eaten since long before the first shots were fired, and her stomach was rumbling in protest, but nothing sounded good, not with the aftermath of the battle finally starting to set in. With so much destruction she'd seen neither hide nor hair of Captain Lynley since the battle, either; they'd conferred briefly about what needed to be done, brushed hands in silent affirmation, and been about their business. They were too busy and time was too scarce to do anything else, even with the nearly thirty-six hours it had taken them to make it to the station. Barbara had catnapped for a scarce handful of hours off and on, but even stims could only take her so far, and she knew with a distant kind of certainty that she had an hour at most before she collapsed where she stood.

"You look worse than I feel," remarked a familiar voice behind her, and Barbara whirled on her stool to see a very welcome pair of brown eyes twinkling at her from underneath a mop of hair as red as ever.

"Nerys!" she cried, and squeezed her friend's arm briefly. "It's good to see you."

"And you," replied Kira, tired but smiling. "You got through the battle all right?"

"Two hundred crew dead," Barbara said sombrely, "and another hundred in sickbay right now. Pretty much everyone's got some sort of injury – I had a sprained ankle before your Dr Bashir got to me – but most of us are relatively unscathed, thank God."

"Yes, I was very glad to hear Providence survived the carnage – although I didn't know it until Chief O'Brien stormed into Ops asking for a spare warp nacelle because 'some bloody fool captain got theirs sheared off without blowing up his ship, the idiot'. I told him he'd have to wait till the Inaeiu got here, just like the rest of us."

"But wait, weren't you getting reports of the battle?"

"After Odo and I sabotaged the comm system when the Dominion took the station? Don't be ridiculous. No one's going to be using that thing for at least a week. We did a very good job."

"You... sabotaged DS9's comm system?"

"You bet we did." And Kira's tone was so undeniably smug she had to smile.

"Oh, Nerys." Helplessly, she began to laugh.

She was still laughing hysterically five minutes later when Captain Lynley strode up.

"Oh, *hic* Captain! Did you hear about – "

Lynley blinked and stared at his flushed, giggling exec, who promptly fell off her stool in a heap and didn't get up. It would have caused quite a scene, except this was Quark's, and therefore absolutely no one else noticed.

"Looks like her last stim hypo wore off, Captain," remarked Kira with an absolutely straight face. "You might want to get her to bed."

"Yes," replied Lynley tensely, realising for the first time just how hard she had been pushing herself, "I think I will at that." And he scooped his exec – now sound asleep – into his arms and headed for guest quarters.


"Ow. Turn the sunlight off. What day is it?"

"Wednesday."

"What?" She sat bolt upright, then immediately grabbed her forehead. "Ow. Would you care to tell me why you let me sleep for two damn days?"

"I don't know, Barbara," he replied blandly. "Would you care to tell me how I somehow wound up getting eight solid hours of sleep on our trip here while you got three, and subsequently used so many stimulants your body simply couldn't continue to function?"

"Um."

"I thought as much."

"Sorry?"

"Sorry?" he erupted, giving in, at last, to hours of stress and worry. "Barbara, you spent forty-eight hours running a ship and fighting a battle on three hours of sleep! You used so many stims your body couldn't process them any more! From what Dr Bashir tells me, you're lucky you didn't completely destroy your liver and your kidneys! And all you can say is 'sorry'?"

"I really am." Nervously, she twisted the blankets in her hands. "You looked so – so desperately exhausted. My part was over, except for logistics. And we needed our commanding officer. The crew trusts me, but I'm not you. A starship runs on caffeine and loyalty – loyalty to her captain. And that's as it should be. That's what unites us. And the crew needed her captain well and whole, or they'd have lost themselves in fear. So I locked the turbolift and screened all your comms – if anything had come through from Command I would have woken you , immediately, but it didn't. I'm expendable – "

"Barbara Lynne Havers, shut up." Her mouth closed with a snap. "So help me God, if I hear you refer to yourself as 'expendable' again, I cannot put words to what I will do. You are anything but expendable. Do you think I'd be half the captain I am without you? Do you think Providence would have survived without you? You are not, you never have been, and you never shall be expendable. Yes, there was a complete briefing on my terminal when I woke up – and I sincerely thank you for that, by the way – but I expected that it had been done by an Ops officer who had taken over for you while you slept. I know there were at least three who had a full six hours before I closed my eyes and would have been more than capable of taking over. If I hadn't known my crew was stable and everything was in hand, I never would have slept at all. I expected you to have similar sensibilities. But no. It takes you collapsing at my feet before I learn that you've been running on stimulants for two and a half days! I could strangle you for this!"

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I just – I couldn't leave them. You understand? I couldn't leave them. Not again."

"Not a... oh, Barbara." And he was on the bed beside her, holding her wonderfully tight. "Kerensa. It's not the same. You know it's not the same."

"It feels the same." Her voice was broken, haunted, and he pulled her closer.

"I'm still cross with you," whispered a soft voice in her hair.

"I know."

"I love you. So much."

At last, a smile. "I know that, too." She let her fingers card through his hair, letting him anchor her. "How's our girl?"

"Chief O'Brien is a genius. He found us a spare nacelle and enough starship titanium to patch her up long enough to warp back to Earth. She will need more extensive repairs there, and we will be out of the fighting for several months, but Providence will keep flying. Command is rotating out most of Home Fleet – the least-damaged starships that survived this battle will warp back for their repairs and serve as a guard at the same time, and we get fresh crews out here. We have another three or four days here on the station, though, so if you want to go back to bed –"

"God help me, I do," she groaned, and sank back into fluffy pillows. Sleepy, she smiled up at him. "Care to join me?"

"You know I would." Carefully he settled himself next to her, easing himself under the blankets. Though she normally curled into him, sleeping with her head on his shoulder, this time she turned into the wall, tucking her back against his chest. He looped his arm around her waist almost at once, and sighed in contentment as his hand splayed over the soft swell of her abdomen and she sleepily covered it with hers. His other hand settled on her shoulder, and hers came up to cover his there, too, and the feel of this – feeling as though he could shield her from anything and everything – was almost unbelievable.

If he could have stood between her and the end of the galaxy, he would have.

The sheer intimacy of his hand under her shirt, against her bare stomach, was enough to blow his mind, and if he weren't so thrice-damned tired, he'd want... he'd want... God, he'd just want, want more of her bare skin against his, more of her moving under him like she couldn't get enough, and he shouldn't still want her this badly; it's been over a year, now, and he should have got used to this, got used to her, but every time, God, every bloody time he touches her it's enough to take his breath away.

But he was exhausted, bone-deep tired, and he knew she was worse, and that, he thought, that's the comfort of it, because he still wants her just as badly, but he could bank it, now, because they've got time, all the time in the world, they've done this before and they'll do it again, and so if right now isn't the time, it's okay. She'll be there in the morning. They're in the middle of a war and every battle might be their last, and he'll have to face that fear again and again, and so will she, but tomorrow – tomorrow, she'll be there.

She's already half asleep, and he could feel the exhaustion starting to take him, too – it was so good, now, to hold her like this, and absolute peace settled over him as his body let go of days of tension and fear. He felt her breathing even out into the steady rhythm of natural sleep, and the comfort it brought him was immeasurable. With her, it was all right to rest and close his eyes – and so he did.

Five minutes later, they were both out completely.