"Had a good breakfast, Jim?"

The fuming captain sent one of his make-a-klingon-wet-his-pants glares at the CMO, who only smiled smugly back.

"Bones, go pester Spock, will you?"

"Daddy's busy, go bother mommy" Sulu whispered, and Chekov almost didn't manage to muffle a giggle.

It was the fifth day of the diet, and the Captain's grumpiness was reaching Red Alert levels. Really, it wasn't as if Kirk was overweight or anything (well, maybe a pound or two).

The guy was a physical fitness fanatic, you just had to watch him practice in the gym to know that (Anyone who could train by sparring with a Vulcan every other day had to be at stellar fitness levels – even if the Vulcan in question was always pulling his punches). And what with all the planned and unplanned (mostly unplanned) exercise provided by Landing Party situations, he was sure to burn off those extra pounds pretty soon…

Sulu would have been more inclined to believe the doctor's claims of professional objectivity if these diets didn't tend to coincide with the implementation of one of the more-than-normally-crazy Kirkian plans. Basically, 'You scare me half out of my wits, I'm gonna stick you on rabbit food for a month'.

"That's your third cup of coffee this shift, Jim."

The captain looked like he was going through a mental litany of 'I'm-a-starship-captain-I-shouldn't-try-to-murder-sadistic-CMOs'.

"Coffee isn't fattening, Bones!"

"All that caffeine can't be good for you, you know."

"Bones. One more word, one single word, related to diet, and I'm going to put you through the airlock before you can say calories."

The doctor opened his mouth to respond (and probably test the threat), but fortunately, Uhura interrupted with a "Direct call incoming, Captain. From Starfleet."

Kirk was all business at once.

"On screen, lieutenant."

The screen rippled for a moment, then resolved into the image of Admiral Nadya Khan.

"Kirk. Glad to see you."

"The pleasure's mine, Admiral."

Nadya Khan was one of the very few admirals who had the approval of the Brass and the Captains alike.

"Unfortunately, you aren't likely to feel that way once you hear me out. Shore leave is postponed."

Damn, not again! How long was it since they stopped over somewhere decent?

"Admiral-"

"I know, but this is urgent business, Kirk. A Mayday call."

Oh. That trumped every other argument.

"Where?"

Hopefully, it would be something that could be settled quickly – a stranded vessel, maybe, or pirates, something they could deal with in a day or two.

"I'm sending the co-ordinates through. Got them, Commander?"

"Affirmative." Spock looked up from his console. "The call originated from Quadrant 349/23/XZ6."

He frowned slightly.

"One of the Star Desert regions between the Spiral arms of the galaxy."

"Yeah. That is the less troubling part of this mission, I'm afraid. The vessel in question is USS Wanderer."

Everyone on the bridge, except McCoy, reacted.

Chekov actually yelped "Wanderer?" forgetting protocol. His superiors were too taken aback themselves to reprimand the ensign. All resentments of having the shore leave cut out had vanished at the word. The doctor looked baffled.

"Automated call? Or.."

"Automated. It does not, of course, preclude survival, so this is categorized as a rescue mission for the time being. You are ordered to proceed directly to the co-ordinates, after picking up one civilian observer from Starbase 15."

"Civilian observer?"

"Complicated circumstances, Kirk." She paused. "The rest of it is classified. Pipe this call down to your cabin or somewhere private. Captain and First Officer only."

"In a moment, Admiral. Lieutenant…"

"Patching it through, sir."

Kirk and Spock left the Bridge, with a hurried "Sulu, you have the conn." McCoy turned to the rest of the bridge crew.

"Um, am I the only one who don't know what this Wanderer is?"

Chekov and Sulu stared at him, as if he had just asked what a nebula is.

"You really don't know?"

"Doc, the Wanderer is space legend!"

"There're films made about it! You know, that one with Andrian V'Hress, 'Into Darkness'.."

"That one sucks. They got everything about Fleet procedure wrong"

"Never mind the procedure, they got Captain Neill all wrong, played him as twenty years old or something, some dimwit gung-ho brat. They got sued, I think."

McCoy rolled his eyes at the film enthusiasts, not having the least clue who the hell Captain Neill was. Uhura took pity on him.

"The USS Wanderer disappeared about a decade ago, doctor."

"In the star desert?"

"No, as far as I know, it was light years away, practically on the other side of the galaxy. Leaving orbit from Athendal VI."

McCoy frowned. His memory for the intricacies of space geography was limited, but they had been at the Athendal system last month.

"Hang on, doesn't Athendal have only five planets?"

"Yeah, now only five."

"Klingons" Chekov said, as if that explained everything. (Well, to be fair, it sort of did.)

"Klingons?"

"Athendal VI had a seriously high level culture, and all the technology you'd associate with it. A Klingon ship landed before Federation teams could secure the planet, they messed around with some seriously high powered tech. no clue what really happened, but they must have triggered something , maybe got a bit too eager to test a new weapon and forgot to check the warning labels, whatever. End result, Kaboom! No more sixth planet."

"Ow. And the Wanderer?"

"Well, the Wanderer's disappearance is probably connected to the native tech. They tried to merge a far superior warp drive device found planetside with their warp engines."

McCoy stared. Even Jim wouldn't think up that crazy an idea! Uhura went on.

"They didn't have much of a choice. They are the reason we have the Clarkton Biohazard protocol for primary surveys. Some sort of mutated microbe from the planet tagged along, and before the old containment protocols could kick in, half the crew was dying. They needed some sort of rare natural chemical to synthesize the cure-"

"Xianthraicin" Chekov, who had seen the holo-vid film half a dozen times, supplied.

"Yeah, that one. anyway, nearest place where they could get hold of it was a month away at top warp, and the infected had about a week and a half to live. The science officer or the chief engineer suggested they could use this hyperwarp device if they rigged it just right. It could get them to the supply post and back in four days' time."

"The thing sucked energy like crazy, though" Sulu interjected "By the time they'd got it going, there wasn't enough energy left for life support shipwide. They had to launch with a skeleton crew – seventy or eighty, the rest remaining in a temporary camp planetside. The ship was supposed to pick up the meds and return at top speed, supposed to be back in a matter of days, utmost a week."

"Only, it never turned up again. The survivors on the planet kept broadcasting signals for rescue and finally a Federation ship got to them – two months after the Wanderer vanished."

"The patients…"

"All dead. Their CMO had managed to figure out a vaccine that'd keep anyone from newly getting infected, but for those already down, there was no chance. Not without the meds the ship had gone to bring."

The doctor grimaced, sympathizing with the unknown medical staff. He could hardly imagine what it must have been like for them, knowing what exactly must be done to save their people, and being unable to do it just because they didn't have the supplies. That was the sort of issue you'd expect some civilization at class two levels to have, not the staff of an ultra-modern starship.

"Everyone supposed the ship had just, you know, blown up or something. The native technology was studied as closely as possible under the circumstances, but ,I'd guess that wasn't all that closely given what the circumstances were."

They were desperate, they tried a gamble. Just as the Enterprise had tried several times. Their gamble didn't pay off.

"But now they've turned up again…"

"Or rather, the ship has. No way of knowing if any of the crew made it, not till we get there."

"It's been a decade. I wouldn't be too hopeful…"

"We've seen weirder things."

…..

Meanwhile, in his quarters, Kirk was trying to talk his way out of the civilian observer issue.

"Admiral, you know the effect a stellar desert has, and that's on a seasoned crew. A civilian with no experience-"

"Sorry, James Kirk, that argument won't hold. As you would have known if you had let me finish, the guy is a civilian now, but he has more space-time under his belt than you do. Doctor, formerly Commander, Quinlan."

Kirk's eyes widened. He knew that name.

"The Wanderer's Chief Science Officer."

"Yeah. He was among those who stayed back on the planet. With the First Officer down, he was the best one Captain Neill had to leave in command down there. He did a great job, anyhow, with the survivors there. Blamed himself, though, for whatever happened to the ship. Accepted full responsibility for the disaster, claimed it had been his fault for not testing all scenarios adequately."

"He was exonerated by the court martial, if I remember correctly."

"Aye. He just did his job. Gave his captain the best info he had, and going by the logs, he laid out the risks, the pros and cons, perfectly. Captain Neill knew what he was getting into when he made the call. But Quinlan couldn't exonerate himself to himself, I guess. It had been his idea to use the native tech, though of course the final decision, and thus the responsibility, had been the captain's. Survivor's guilt. He resigned from Fleet the day the court martial verdict was given. Cut off all ties to the outside world, went into exile. A self imposed one, of course, with us keeping discrete tabs on him. From what we know, he has been spending the past decade trying to reverse engineer the hyperwarp that doomed his ship. He apparently needed to figure out what went wrong, what actually happened. And whether it was possible to bring them back."

"And now that they seem to have finally come back…"

Nadya Khan nodded.

" We contacted Quinlan once the vessel was positively identified as the Wanderer. The idea was to have him as a planetside consultant here at the base, but he demurred. You can't really blame him for wanting to find out, himself."

"He's going to be emotionally compromised, to say the least."

"He's only along as civilian observer. Whether he's compromised or not won't make much difference."

"It would make him-"

"I know it isn't the best idea, but the fact remains that Dr Quinlan knows more about the hyperwarp drive than anyone we have. Whatever happened to the Wanderer is almost certainly related to the merged technology. Besides," she admitted somewhat grudgingly, "Quinlan has plenty of connections among the Fleet echelons even after a decade long exile. He called in all the favors he was owed, and that amounted to a lot."

The way she said it gave Kirk the idea that Quinlan had pulled a few skeletons out of carefully guarded closets as well.

"Have one of the psychiatrists aboard keep an eye on him. The last I saw of him, he wasn't exactly the cracking type, but a decade of obsession can change anyone, and not for the better."

" Quinlan understands the odds are high against any of the Wanderer crew being found alive, doesn't he?"

Nadya sighed.

"Intellectually, he does, and he claims to be capable of facing the situation, if it should turn out so. But I would keep a close eye on him, should you find this has become a salvage instead of a rescue mission. You know how connections run between deep space crews. "

They certainly did. Quinlan was setting himself up for a very nasty fall, in Kirk's opinion. He should stay back at the base, if he had any sense. Knowing that his people were dead would be bad enough, but seeing it first hand, the way he was planning to?

And if the Wanderer crew, or some of them, were found alive, what shape would they be in? Kirk could completely sympathize with Quinlan's motives, but the former science officer was going to be an added complication to an already convoluted mission. No help for it, anyhow.

Ah, no one ever said this job was easy.

….

"- and so you and Noel will be keeping an eye on Quinlan. Have him take a psych scan when he comes aboard."

"He's a civilian, Jim. I won't be able to order him to take it."

"Just suggest it. He was in the Fleet, he'll understand."

Around them, the sickbay was gearing up for a potential influx of patients. Odds were against finding survivors after this long, but Starship crews made a career out of bucking the odds.

"Uhura and Chekov already gave me a crash course on the Wanderer disaster, but is there anything more than the, you know, public version?"

"Not really. It was big news back then. I missed most of the first flareup, I was assigned on Neural, but around the time Klingons blew up the planet I was back in space. But for all the investigation, no one could figure out what really happened. Maybe if Federation scientists got to examine the rest of the native tech, they could have formed a hypothesis at least, but the Klingon idiots put paid to that."

"A near-inestimable loss," Spock commented " if Dr Quinlan's and Chief Engineer Norcross' reports are accurate. And we have no reason to believe they are not. Considering the Wanderer has been missing for ten years-"

"Ten years? Not ten point four seven six eight something? Why, Spock, you're slipping!"

"On the contrary, doctor, it is exactly ten years. Lieutenant Dehra, Assistant communications officer of USS Wanderer, was in contact with the ship at the moment of its disappearance. She reports having been cut off abruptly, with a high volume squeal of static that resulted in damage to her cochlear membrane and temporary deafness. That is surmised to be the exact moment of disappearance. Since then, every attempt to contact the Wanderer have been fruitless. Till the ship began broadcasting a mayday signal exactly ten years to the minute of it's actual disappearance."

"That rules out natural causes."

Nature is never that neat about tying up loose ends.