Chapter 21

Andrew Picard found nothing comforting in firelight. The flames reaching towards the darkening sky stood out starkly, brightly lit fingers that plucked and took whatever they wished. Marie lay near him on the grass, her breathing shallow and labored, having only worsened since she'd lost consciousness. Winter's cold snapped through the wind that fed the flames, flames that brought no warmth in them. He knew he should get up, flex his fingers as the cold nipped away at the feeling in them, get blankets for Marie, summon help, just get up and do something.

But he didn't. He didn't want to get up and acknowledge that he was alive, because he didn't think he should be. He thought he should be in that barn with his twin, as dead she she must be. Footsteps, one from a running human, followed by several more, sounded close by. And then Andrew noticed the reflections of emergency lights flashing from firefighting vehicles and crews and knew that somehow, help had already arrived. Someone knelt down next to him. "Is there anyone in that building?"

Andrew blinked, focusing on the events around him and escaping from his inward retreat into his thoughts. Medics were already surrounding Marie, administering oxygen, getting her on a stretcher to transport to the medical facility. Only then did he see the burns that covered parts of her body and he wondered if she would become another life taken by the fire. A hand dropped onto his shoulder to get his attention again. "Yes," he said, the acrid smoke causing his eyes to tear up as the wind drove into his face.

"How many?"

"Three." He could do this if he could stay clinically detached. He'd seen his mother do it enough times when she had to function as a doctor and not as a human being who was deeply affected by emotions. "My uncle, my cousin, my..." he couldn't say it. Casting his eyes in the direction of the winery, he saw that he wouldn't have to, firefighters were already rushing inside.

Another medic had knelt next to him, a medical tricorder out and scanning. "You've got some damage to your lungs and throat from smoke inhalation," the medic said. "Were you in that building?"

"I ran in," Andrew said, not looking at the medic. Instead, he was watching the main doors of the winery, hoping to see firefighters run back out carrying his sister, a sister who would still be alive. "When we got here..." If they hadn't run inside, if they had stayed out here, she would be alive.

"Can you tell me your name?" Now the medic was shining a light in each of his eyes.

He squinted. "Andrew."

The other medic looked up from the padd he where he was entering data. "I need your first and last name."

"Andrew Picard." The firefighters still hadn't come out. The others had brought around two of the ground trucks, dousing the flames with one of their many chemicals. "My sister was—" then he was struck by a paroxysm of coughs, his mouth tasting like soot. Once he managed to stifle the coughing, he was barely able to breathe, his throat constricting and his lungs burning.

Almost immediately other medics appeared bearing oxygen and helped him up onto a stretcher. They stopped asking questions aside from whether he could breathe or not. He was still watching the entrance to the winery when the doors shut on the transport and drove towards the medical facility. He saw no signs of where they had taken his aunt when they rolled the anti-grav stretcher into the emergency part of the medical facility. He'd sat up, trying to see and find her, but the doctors and nurses pushed him back down, told him he needed to lie down, he had to save his energy, he was very sick. "I'm fine," he said, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask they kept over his mouth.

The doctors ignored him. "We're going to need to repair the damage to your lungs," one explained. "We'll have to put you under for that."

"No!" He bolted upright and fought against the nurses and techs who tried to get him to relax.

"I'm sorry, but we have to," the doctor said.

Andrew felt the cold metal of the hypo, the hiss of its contents being injected, and then he felt nothing.

2361

Both of them delayed going to bed for as long as possible, repeatedly asking for drinks of water, then trips to the bathroom, then a story, until Felisa finally put her foot down and said there would be no more requests unless one of them was terribly ill. She'd had a feeling they would have trouble sleeping, as tonight would be their first night sleeping in different rooms.

They settled down after her last scolding and she made herself comfortable in her kitchen, sorting through her most recent correspondence with her granddaughter. She wanted to give Beverly more impetus to just tell that man about the twins and how she felt about him. At times, Felisa wanted to contact Jean-Luc Picard herself, just to set things straight between all of them. But she knew it had to be done between the two of them and she had to stay out of it. However, she had no qualms about continuing to hint at every available opportunity.

Little footsteps shuffled behind her. Felisa didn't bother to look up. "You'd better be sick something awful for you to be out of your bed," she said, jotting another note with her stylus.

"Nana," Allie said, fear touching her voice.

Felisa immediately turned around—Allie was never afraid of anything. "What is it?"

Allie's blue eyes were wide, and in them, fright had definitely taken up residence. "I'm missing my Andrew."

"What?"

"I'm missing him. I went..." she trailed off, realizing that what she was going to say might get her into trouble.

Felisa recognized the source of the hesitancy. "You won't get in trouble. Just tell me what's happened."

Allie fidgeted with her fingers. "I fell asleep, but I woke up again and felt lost, so I went to sleep in Andrew's bed and when I went in the room, he wasn't there."

The older woman frowned, as either twin was generally aware of where the other one was, even if they weren't within earshot or within sight, they could point out where to find the other. It was one of their more uncanny traits, even more disconcerting than when they would finish each other's sentences. "Why don't we look for him," she said.

"Please." Allie took her hand and they first went to his room to verify that he truly wasn't there, which he wasn't. They searched the closet, then went from room to room in the house, the guest room, each bathroom, Felisa's room. They went downstairs and searched the living room, library, office, and came up with nothing. The fear that had struck Allie had started creeping up within Felisa's mind, that somehow she'd lost him. Allie's fear she felt even more strongly through the iron grip the little girl kept on her hand, that the idea of losing her twin brother left her absolutely petrified.

As they went back upstairs to begin the search anew, Allie's grip on her great-grandmother's hand suddenly loosened and the girl bolted into her bedroom. "I found him!" she shouted.

Felisa quickly followed and saw where Allie's had found her twin. The boy had somehow taken the quilt from his own bed, along with his pillow, setup underneath his sister's bed, and had promptly fallen sound asleep.

Allie's shout had woken him up and he blinked a few times, obviously surprised to come face to face with his great-grandmother and sister peering at him. "I couldn't sleep," he said. "I kept waking up over and over and every time I woke up, I felt lost. So I came in here."

Felisa realized that where Andrew had set up his little camp was as close to his sister as he could get without alerting his great-grandmother. With both of them saying how lost they felt and seeing how badly each of them slept, she realized that they weren't ready to have separate bedrooms. "How about you both sleep with me tonight," she said. "And tomorrow, we'll move you back in together. But someday, you will have to have separate bedrooms."

"Yes," they said together, the fear and confusion fleeing their eyes completely, replaced by identical grins.

2371

It was dark all around him, he couldn't see, he kept his hands out in front of him, braced and trying to feel for something, anything. He couldn't find her and he was panicking now, the panic taking over as he was engulfed with the feeling of being absolutely lost. His lungs had started to burn and his throat constricted and he couldn't breathe. He had to find her. Had to—

Andrew woke up gasping and sought to bring his breathing under control. It was hard because he didn't feel calm at all. Instead, that incredibly lost feeling saturated everything. He tried thinking about the memory where the dream had come from, when Nana had made her first attempt at separating them and instead of cooperating, they'd both ended up waking up and gone looking for the other. He remembered how that lost feeling had completely disappeared once he was close to his twin, and he'd felt so safe that the concept of having trouble sleeping melted away and he'd fallen asleep easily.

The memory only served to make him feel more lost than before, more than when he'd been that six-year-old boy looking for his twin sister in the middle of the night. Beside him, one of the monitors beeped an alarm about his respiration rate and it brought one of the nurses into the room to check on him. "You're awake," she said.

"Yeah," he replied, his voice sounding less scratchy than he thought it would have, considering how it sounded before being treated. "It's still night." The darkness behind the curtains of the window next to his hospital bed told him. "What day is it?"

"You weren't out for that terribly long," the nurse said, making notations onto her padd from the monitor's readouts. "A few hours, so it's the same day it was before you went under." She frowned at the monitor. "What just happened to you?"

He shrugged. "Bad dream, I guess." Of course, there was no guessing. It had been exactly that, but he wasn't about to tell some stranger how he felt. They wouldn't understand anyway, none of them were a twin.

"Uh-huh," the nurse said, in a way that told him that she didn't believe him in the least about the guessing.

He decided to change the subject. "How's Marie?"

The nurse stopped writing down her notes. "Your aunt is going to be okay, but she'll be here awhile. We've got her in a regen chamber right now to treat her burns and heal and create her new skin. She won't be awake for at least another week, so we've contacted her sister Cécile. She's here already, in the burn treatment room with Marie. She said she wanted to see you when you woke up."

"I've never even met her." He didn't feel up to meeting new people. He just wanted to lay there and wish they hadn't run into the winery.

The nurse fixed a good glare on him. "Young man, she hasn't met you either, but nevertheless, she's fairly concerned about you. You are, after all, her sister's nephew. I'll tell her you're awake." She left without letting him object.

He stared after her, shocked that she would do such a thing and indignant that he couldn't even object. She'd cut him off before he'd even started. As he looked at the empty doorway, another woman walked through it, about the same height as his aunt, same hair, same eyes...he blinked. "I didn't know Marie had a twin."

Cécile smiled. "You'd be surprised at the things one person doesn't know about another, including a person they think they know very well. So I take it neither she nor Robert told you?"

"Obviously not," he said, suddenly irrationally angry at Marie, that she should have her twin be alive and here he'd lost his.

She sat down in the chair next to his bed. "You're angry," she said, crossing her arms.

He frowned at her. "And you're blunt."

"And you," she said, leaning back and reading the monitor, "are most certainly a Picard."

When he saw that she was not only reading the monitor, but understanding and interpreting the results on the screen, he realized there was even more to the woman than he'd first thought. "You're a doctor," he said, much more accusatorial than he'd intended, but he didn't try to explain his original intent.

She nodded. "And a twin, like you."

"Not like me," he said, before he realized he'd said it. It wasn't something he was ready to talk about, and certainly not to this woman he'd just met. "I mean," he said, attempting to backtrack now, "that you're obviously an identical twin, not a fraternal."

"Twins are twins," she replied, looking away from the readouts and back at him. "And even though your sister died in that fire, you're still a twin."

He didn't want to get into the discussion, not then, and not ever if he could avoid it. So he studied the intricate weaving of the hospital blanket that was draped over him. It was only intricate because it didn't involve his making eye contact with Cécile. In any other instance, the blanket would be the most simple and boring one he'd ever seen.

She continued, ignoring his reticence. "And you're quite pissed off, even if you haven't realize exactly how pissed off you really are, at my sister and probably me to an extent. I mean, not only is her twin alive and yours isn't, but it's her fault that you're alive and your sister isn't."

"I'm not—" then he stopped. He'd opened his mouth with the intention of saying that he wasn't angry with Marie, but found that he couldn't say it, because he was mad at her, incredibly mad that she had stopped him. He could have gotten her if he'd gone back inside, he could've gotten all of them. Whoever he reached first he could've dragged out, like with Marie, then gone in again and again until all of them were out of the burning winery, all of them safe and alive. Instead, she'd held onto his ankle, kept him outside while his sister fell silent and died inside.

"Exactly," said Cécile. "I figure, instead of letting you stew over this for months and months and repressing anger at everyone including yourself, that I'd let you know exactly how hard it must have been for my own sister to keep you from going back in."

He finally looked over at Cécile and allowed the anger to show in his eyes. "Her twin wasn't in there," he said.

"No, but her husband, son, and niece were. She'd already faced the reality of the fire and had to choose between the slim, desperate chance that her husband, son, and niece could be saved, that her nephew would absolutely stay alive. Because she knew with almost perfect certainty that if you had gone back into that building, you would not have come back out, and she would've lost all four of you instead of three. So don't think it was an easy decision for her or that she's not going to relive that moment of her life over and over again for years yet. Tell me honestly, if you had gone back in there, and found one of them and figured out that it was your uncle or your cousin, would you have brought them out right then or tried to find your sister first?"

"I would have..." and he knew it would've been a hard choice, because Allie was his twin, his sister, he was supposed to save her. But he couldn't have lived with himself if he'd left his uncle or cousin there to die, and Allie would've never forgiven him if he chose her over someone else that he'd come across before her. "I would have brought whoever I found first outside."

"Do you see that's the kind of decision she had to make when she held you back? And she knew the added layers of what it was doing to you, of what it would do to you, because she's a twin herself. It's up to you. You can say pissed at her if you want, but you're going to have enough to deal with emotionally that you can decide to stop being angry with her and then you'll have one less layer to fight through in the coming weeks."

She was right and he knew it. He wondered how long it would've taken Counselor Troi to get him to recognize what Cécile had gotten him to understand in less than ten minutes. Then again, maybe that's why the nurse forced him to talk to his aunt's sister, because she'd known Marie was a twin, and that Cécile would be able to reach him on a different level of understanding than any typical counselor. Yet he didn't want to talk about it anymore, not that he had in the first place. He just wanted to think about something else, then his mind struck on the other companion of his life. "Have you been to the house yet?" he asked her.

If she was surprised by his abrupt subject change, she didn't show it. "Not yet. I was planning on going once I knew you'd woken up and had spoken with you. Why?"

"My dog is there, in the house. I'm sure he needs to go outside and hasn't been fed yet, he must be starving." He strained again to see the monitor, but it said nothing of when they were going to discharge him. "When are they letting me out of here?"

"Maybe tomorrow morning as long as you stay stable, which means no more gasping for air when you're dreaming."

"So not tonight?"

"Absolutely not." Cécile stood up. "Tell you what. If you'll let the nurse give you a sedative so you can get some sleep—which I know you need—then I will go and look after your dog. Okay?"

He knew that she would have looked after Conal regardless of what he agreed to, but he recognized her insight into how he wouldn't be sleeping at all without a sedative, not right then. And he desperately wanted to be asleep. "Deal," he said. "His name's Conal. He's, um, quite a large dog. An Irish Wolfhound. His name's Conal."

Cécile smiled at him again. "I'm familiar with the breed. I have two myself. You have a good sleep and I'll be here first thing when they discharge you."

He frowned at her second comment, filing away the content of the first. "You won't be sitting with Marie?"

"She'll be unconscious, so she'll be fine while I help her nephew get things sorted out."

Andrew nodded and the woman headed for the door. "Hey," he said, calling after her. "What should I call you?"

"You're my sister's nephew, so I guess that makes you a nephew to me in some way. Feel free to call me Aunt Cécile, as long as there's no expletives between Aunt and Cécile." Then she was out the door, leaving him with a slight hint of a smile.

A nurse appeared to take her place and gave him a sedative-loaded hypo, sending him back into a numbing sleep.

2358

Felisa Howard ran after her great-grandson, determined to catch the three-year-old terror. This time, he'd entertained himself by sliding along the old, slick wooden floorboards of the barn, only to come to a halt when he got splinters in his left foot from one not-quite-timeworn-enough plank. She'd heard him yelp from her spot pouring oats into feedbags and turned quickly enough to witness him hopping around on his right foot, trying to see the bottom of his left, not knowing his Nana was right there and could see him. When he stopped hopping and looked up to see her there, he immediately went into acting as if nothing was wrong at all. He even walked on his left foot, as if to prove to her that he was perfectly fine.

He kept up the act until he realized Felisa wasn't buying it, and then he took off in a run towards the safety of the house while she gave chase. She managed to catch up to him in the hallway, just as she'd snatched up one of her small medical kits. Andrew started howling as soon as she'd pinned him down and she'd yet to even get ahold of his foot, much less touch it. His crying began in earnest when she got to his foot and saw how deep the splinters were and how the skin around them was already red and inflamed. Each time her finger touched the bottom of his foot to check a splinter's depth, he let out another anguished cry, as if she were trying to kill him.

As Felisa picked out one of her tools that worked best for removing splinters with the least amount of pain, Allie came running around the corner, crying herself, and dove over her brother's body. The little girl had ignored first his running from their great-grandmother, because it was a situation encountered often, and then his howling, another situation encountered whenever he knew he was getting any sort of medical attention. She'd even gone off to another room without a second thought as the chase went on around her. But once her twin had let loose with a serious cry of pain, she'd come to his rescue from whatever she'd been doing in the living room.

"Stop hurting him!" she shouted, placing herself between Felisa and Andrew.

"I'm not hurting him, love," Felisa said. "He's got a couple splinters in his foot and I'm trying to take them out. I know his foot hurts from the splinters and hurts whenever I press on it, but I'm not trying to hurt him. I'm trying to heal him."

The little girl looked dubious about Felisa's motives and didn't move.

The older woman sighed. "Here. Watch me as I take them out."

Andrew continued to cry, while Allie, also still crying, attentively watched Felisa work. When Felisa held out the splinters, now free of Andrew's foot, she presented them to the little girl. "See? Now I'll just heal up the inflammation and he'll be good as new."

"Oh," said Allie, lifting her small body off her brother's now that his safety was assured.

"There, finished." She let go of Andrew and he sat up, his crying already abated and left to hiccups and sniffles.

Allie's crying had ceased as well and she smiled at her brother and at Felisa. "Thank you," she said, then nudged her brother.

"Thank you," he said, wiping at his eyes. Then Allie was helping him up off the floor and the two of then ran off into the living room, laughing and smiling, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

Felisa was left, looking after them as the dashed away, taken aback once again at the intangibles that bonded the two of them together. How Allie, even at three years old, had known the subtle difference between Andrew's cries and had only come running once the tone in them had changed from typical Andrew protesting over medical treatment to true fear and pain. And it wasn't often that a sibling would come running like that to protect another, even if they were close in age. Shaking her head, she walked after them, intent on keeping them out of trouble for the rest of the day.

2371

There had been a sharp pain in his foot, hot and piercing. Then he remembered running, being brought to the ground, someone holding him down and trying to look at his hurt foot. He cried and his sister came running and then he knew he'd be safe. He'd do the same for her. It was the way it worked between them, backing each other up, sticking up for one another, always there to keep the other safe. There had been talking he barely heard as he cried, then the pain had gone away from his foot and he came face to face with his tormentor only to realize it was Nana and she'd only been trying to get the splinters out of his foot. And then everything was okay.

Andrew opened his eyes, another memory had settled into his mind as he'd slept, this one of a story he didn't remember many details of, but one he knew all the details of because Nana had delighted in telling the story to anyone who'd listen. He did recall the repeated embarrassment at how easily he'd start crying whenever she'd tried to give him medical attention. But Nana had brushed it off, saying that it was perfectly acceptable behavior for a child and that he'd stopped doing it now. At least the crying bit, because he still tried to escape from his great-grandmother whenever he got hurt and knew she would be coming to heal him.

The nurse appeared within moments of him waking up, followed by a doctor who explained he should take it easy the next few days, no strenuous exercise that could tax the newly healed tissues in his respiratory system. He was also given a pack of hypos he was supposed to administer to himself daily for the next week to keep the stress off his lungs so they wouldn't be re-injured from coughing or anything else. True to her word, Cécile appeared as soon as the nurses notified her. "You ready?" she asked.

He frowned. While he wanted out of the medical facility, he didn't really want to go back and live in that house. "For what?"

"I'm bringing you back to the house so you can pack up your stuff. A shuttle has already been arranged to bring you to a Starfleet transport ship that's due to head to the Amargosa Observatory."

"You're packing me up and shipping me off? Shouldn't I stay here and help?"

"You know as well as I do that you won't be able to stay on the vineyard right now. You're going to have enough difficulty being there long enough to get your things. Right now, you need to be with your parents, not with an aunt by marriage once removed. You need to see your younger sister and brother. What you don't need is to stay here and wait while Marie stays in the induced coma while she heals and I take care of paperwork and all of us wait for the fire investigation team to figure out what caused the fire."

"It wasn't just one of the fermenting machines or anything sparking and setting something aflame?"

Cécile shook her head. "No. They're saying it looks like arson and now they're trying to figure out how it was set."

"Arson." It wasn't a question, nor was it really a statement, just repeated aloud to himself what he'd just heard from Cécile. "Why would anyone want to do that?"

"I don't know. No one does, so that's a huge issue in the entire investigation." She handed him a clean change of clothes.

He shifted and took the proffered clothing. "Why the Amargosa Observatory?"

"It's where the Enterprise has been assigned to go next, it will arrive only a few hours after your transport does. The ship that's taking you there is bringing a new crew to rotate for a tour at the observatory, relieving the current one."

"Oh." She left the room and he quickly changed. The short ride to the vineyard was quiet. When they stepped out of the shuttle, he could immediately smell the smoke that tinged the air. He grimaced.

"I know," she said. "Let's get this over with quickly."

He couldn't agree with her more, grateful that she understood. Conal came bounding up to him when they walked inside the house and Andrew felt slightly less lost. The dog stayed by his side as they continued their walk up the stairs, passing the stack someone had made of his and Allie's fencing bags in the living area. Someone had shut the door to Allie's bedroom and he made short working of packing in his own, already desperate to be out of that house. He went back downstairs with his packed belongings, looking stolidly the other way when he passed the door to Allie's bedroom.

"You packed faster than I thought you would," Cécile said.

"Practice," he replied. Then he noticed that other people were in the house and he identified them as officials from the fire department. "Hello," he said to the man who hadn't gone off around the house looking into things.

"Hello," said the man. "My name is Grégory Gallas, I'm an officer with the European Fire Investigation. I've been assigned to your case."

Andrew frowned. "My case."

Gallas shifted uncomfortably. "As a liaison officer to the family as the investigation goes forward. I'm also assigned to notify next of kin."

"Right," Andrew said, not offering anything else to the investigator. He'd already grown disinterested in what the man had to say, he could call up the report on his own, and he certainly didn't want to listen to any sympathetic platitudes they taught men like Gallas in bereavement school or however they taught liaison officers to by sympathetic.

"I thought I'd allow you to send your own message to your parents before I send the official next of kin notification messages."

"I'm touched," he replied, starting in the direction of the office.

The obvious sarcasm of his reply earned him a sharp look from Cécile.

He raised his eyebrows in a slight apology and went into the office and away from that damn liaison officer. For the next half hour, he sat at the desk, staring at the terminal, not knowing what he should say. He knew that nothing could really dispel the blow the news would render. Then he realized he knew what he should say, but that he couldn't bring himself to say it, much less write it down in any form. Finally, he gave up and keyed in a short message relaying only pertinent information on his whereabouts and relative health. For the rest, he would attach the official report. And it was hard enough to link that part onto the message, because he knew what it contained. He addressed the message only to his father, because he couldn't bring himself at all to send it to his mother. And he knew that his father could soften the blow, maybe a little, when he told his mother. Once he hit 'transmit,' he practically ran out of the room.

"Your transport's here," Cécile said when he entered the living room.

"That was fast," he said, going to his stack of baggage.

"You took a little while," she said. She handed him a padd. "Here's your itinerary. Once the shuttle gets you to Paris transporter station, you'll be beamed straight to the transport ship and I think it's due to get underway straight away."

"Not much time to breathe in all that, much less think," he said.

"I know." She didn't have to say that she'd done it on purpose. He knew she had. They bid good-bye and she promised to keep him notified of Marie's condition, as well as any news she heard that wouldn't be included on the official reports. He surprised himself by giving her a hug before he boarded the shuttle.

The days on the transport passed slowly, filled with meaningless conversations with the crew, requests for stories about the Enterprise and his father, and his continued attempts to rebuff those requests. On the second day, he finally checked his messages and received word that he'd passed the Academy exam and was consequently being offered a place in the class that would be matriculating next fall. If only it had been three days ago, he would've been elated. Instead, he merely checked off the message as read, and tried to forget about it, because it made him remember those last hours with his sister. It just didn't mean much anymore.

He found himself sitting on the floor of his tiny, cramped cabin, leaning against his bunk, and biting his bottom lip so hard that it was nearly drawing blood. Ever since the fire had broken the connection between himself and his sister, he'd felt only half alive. They had entered the world together and he'd always thought they would leave together, that they should have left together. He fiercely studied the wall across from him, ignoring the specter of being alone that wrapped him in vacuous arms, until the thought struck him fully and he suddenly knew what being alone really meant. With that realization pulling a dark hood over his thoughts, plunging him into a dark room, losing himself, he lost the battle with the tears and let them fall.

Near him, Conal got up from where he'd curled up in a corner and sat next to Andrew. First he tried licking away the tears with Andrew pushing him away and the tears not giving any signs of drying up soon. So the wolfhound settled for resting his head on his human's shoulder while Andrew scratched behind his hears, trying to clear the feeling of being lost from his mind.

The feeling of being lost refused to go away. It clung to him through the rest of the journey, stuck to him even as they offloaded onto the observatory. The crew that had been on the station were happy to board the transport ship and head off to new postings, while the new crew were happy at the chance to participate in the upcoming survey mission. After all, as one ensign had said, it was being supported by the Enterprise.

Andrew dumped his baggage in one of the storage areas and went back out to the control center of the observatory, wanting to get immersed in something that could take all his attention and make him forget that he was only half-alive. Once in the control center, he saw a white-haired humanoid looking man complaining rather loudly to the lieutenant commander who had just been assigned to the observatory.

"I'm at a critical phase in my experiment with the Amargosa star," he said. "I don't understand why Starfleet thought it would be a good idea to conduct a crew rotation right now."

"I'm sorry, Doctor, but it was scheduled for this time. You have known about the rotation for quite awhile now."

"Well, I'm sorry that I couldn't make the star conform to Starfleet's arbitrary schedule. I hope you realize that if this experiment is not completed within fifteen hours, years of research will be lost."

"Yes, I do realize that. It's why we trained and oriented the new crew while on the transport."

"Always good to make use of what time you have, isn't it, Commander?" the doctor said, then he looked straight at Andrew. "What do you say, Mr. Picard?"

Andrew did his best not flinch at this scientist already knowing his name. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."

The man walked over, his stride controlled and purposeful. He offered his hand once he was within reach. "Doctor Tolian Soran. I'm the one who is supposed to be in charge of this observatory, but sometimes, I think they only pay me lip service to that fact."

Giving the man a slight, uncomfortable smile, Andrew shook the hand offered him. "Andrew," he said. "Though, it seems you already knew who I was." The fact bothered him and he couldn't exactly name why.

"It pays to know who will be arriving on your station," Soran said. "It ends up saving you a lot of time, as introductions tend to move a lot faster. Time is a very important thing, young man. We're only meant to be around for so long. And as they say, time is the fire in which we burn."

Andrew's hand went cold and he quickly withdrew it from Soran. He couldn't know, there was no possible way news could have traveled this far this quickly about what had happened on Earth. What the man said had to be a coincidence for it to impact him so deeply. Then again, it seemed like Soran calculated every single thing he said or did. He went to reply but his words were drowned out by the sound of the observatory's structure being hit by what sounded like weapons fire from a starship. Like a clap of thunder following a lightning strike, the observatory lurched sideways and tossed most of the crew to the deck.

Soran quickly got to his feet and bolted to the other side of the observatory, intent on saving his experiment's readouts. Andrew didn't bother to get up, he found that he really didn't care if he lived or died. The shots continued to pound the observatory and shook the station again and again. The power flickered and went out, emergency life support generators thrummed into action, casting the control center in an eerie green glow. Andrew decided he should make sure Conal was safe and struggled to his feet, only to be knocked down by a falling bulkhead, while a smaller support truss hit him in the temple. As he lay there on the deck, he heard the sounds of a transporter, then several transports, footsteps, phaser fire. Right as his eyes shut for the last time as he lapsed into darkness, his brain registered the type of weapons fire he was hearing. Type III disruptor fire. That means it's either Romulans, the Breen, or Klingons. But by the time one of the attackers got to his body and nudged it with a booted foot to see if he was alive or dead, Andrew was already unconscious, and wouldn't be able to confirm his theory about who was doing the attacking.