Sevek looked up from his monitor to see John McMary, lead scientist for the M-Class planetary development project, leaning over his desk. "What do you require?" he asked.
"Have you finished setting up the secure connection to your house on Vulcan?" John asked.
"No. I will not be able to establish the connection until my home terminal is assembled," Sevek replied.
"What's the hold up?" John asked.
"As I am unable to return to Vulcan to assist with the moving process, the responsibility has fallen to my mate. I will contact her to inquire about the cause of the delay," Sevek replied evenly.
"Just make sure to allow at least five days for testing and troubleshooting. These terminals were retrofitted to send and receive secure subspace signals, but some of them have never been tested. I don't think anyone's tried to use them for anything farther than Titan colony. They should work, but it might take some jiggering."
After two years on Earth, Sevek was still regularly confounded by Standard slang. "Jiggering?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Finagling, rigging, wangling," John replied, as if this were clarification. "We might have some kinks to work out," he said finally.
Surmising that the equipment might need to be adjusted before performing optimally, Sevek decided against requesting the definition for 'kink'.
"When does your transport leave again?" asked John, leaning against the desk.
Sevek refrained from reminding John that his plans could easily be accessed from their group calendar, having surmised that John's purpose for asking was to begin the human practice of 'small talk'. "I depart at 0900, star date…"
"What day of the week, Sevek?" John interrupted, laughing. "I won't remember the star date long enough to go to my desk to punch in the conversion."
"Next Thursday," Sevek replied.
"Do you have any plans after work tomorrow night?" asked John.
"I do not," Sevek answered, getting the feeling that that was about to change.
"Great. Let's get together at The Barley at 1730. I'll send out an email," John declared.
While imbibing ethanol and exchanging irrelevant personal information with his co-workers was not Sevek's preferred way to spend an evening, he understood that John's neglecting to ask if he would be willing to come indicated that this was another of those obligatory human social functions his boss was so fond of.
"What is the purpose of this occasion?" Sevek inquired.
"To send you off of course!" John replied as if this should be obvious.
Sevek raised an eyebrow in curiosity.
"To give everybody a chance to say 'goodbye'. A lot of the staff come and go on interplanetary assignments. They don't know when or if they'll see you again," John explained patiently.
Rather than comment on their ability to say "goodbye" in the office during work hours, Sevek replied, "very well. I will be there."
"Good. Well, I'll let you send that message. Say 'hi' to your fiancé for me," said John, clapping him on the shoulder as he straightened to leave.
"I will send her your regards," Sevek replied, having long since given up trying to understand why humans wished to convey greetings to people they had never met.
Returning to his console, Sevek typed a quick message to T'Ryla, asking that she prioritize the installation of his subspace-capable work console, due to anticipated difficulty in establishing a secure connection.
Hitting 'send', Sevek was about to return to his previous task of aligning soil and rock composition data taken from Yellowstone National Park earlier that week to the radiological timeline his team was constructing, when he received an office-wide message. It read:
Subject: Sevek's Going Away Party
Where: The Hops and Barley
When: Friday, February 12th, 1730
There will be cake.
—
"Olivia, I was wrong!" Eric shouted through the doorway.
"He doesn't believe that," Rolinda, Olivia's Betazoid roommate, helpfully supplied as Olivia lobbed a pair of Eric's uniform pants out into the hallway.
"I'm sorry," he continued as she scored a direct hit to his face with the jacket he had loaned her the previous week.
"No, he's not," Rolinda interpreted, swiping to the next page of her Intro to Command notes.
"It'll never happen again," he implored as the picture cube he had given her the previous Valentine's day shattered against the wall behind him.
"He's meeting Sharana for breakfast in twenty minutes," Rolinda sighed, setting down her PADD and getting up to referee if necessary.
Olivia let out a frustrated growl as she shoved a box of the rest of Eric's belongings out the door.
Eric didn't know when to quit. "She doesn't mean anything," he continued, digging the hole deeper.
"Well, now we're one for four in the truth department," Rolinda replied cheerfully.
Too angry to care who heard her outburst, Olivia advanced to the doorway, wishing their dorm had old-fashioned swinging doors she could slam for emphasis. "Go away!" she shouted, hitting the close and lock button on the door panel.
She waited until she was sure the sound of the cleaning robot sweeping up glass would drown her out before she leaned back against the door, slid down it, and broke down sobbing.
Rolinda came over and sat beside her on the floor. "Really, you're better off without him," she said putting an arm around Olivia. They sat that way for a few minutes, until Olivia pulled herself together.
"We should go get lunch before the disciplinary hearing," Olivia finally said, wiping her eyes and getting up to head toward the cafeteria.
Olivia sat down with several of her fellow first-year cadets, who had their heads together whispering. "Who are we talking about?" she asked with as much cheer as she could muster. She realized, belatedly, that it was entirely possible that her outburst in the dormitory was the topic of discussion.
Much to Olivia's relief, El-Aria replied, "the hearing later today. 'All cadets report to Auditorium J at 13:00' isn't exactly a lot to go on. I wonder who it is, and what they did."
"Fifteen credits says it's fraternization with an instructor," added Yaryx, his eyes flicking briefly across the mess hall to a dark human female upperclassman whose name Olivia did not know.
"Nah, too exciting for this place. Probably academic dishonesty," speculated Joshua.
T'Meera, Olivia's lab partner for XenoBio I, sat down then, interjecting, "It is illogical to speculate with so little information. We will know both the name of the accused, and the charges, in twenty-seven minutes."
The cadets continued to debate the likely topic of the hearing as they finished their food. The first years filed into the auditorium tightly packed together, as if staying together would protect them against being singled out for the unknown Code of Conduct violation.
Olivia and several other cadets surrounding her let out a silent sigh of relief as Admiral Barnett called James T. Kirk, the infamous third-year who had supposedly beaten the Kobayashi Maru, to come forward. Apparently the rumors were true. He had beaten the test, by cheating. Olivia was then not at all surprised when Spock, her half-Vulcan first cousin, came down to confront Kirk with the charges. "Get him Spock," she silently rooted, glad someone finally had cause to put the cocky cadet in his place.
Olivia felt as if she was watching a tennis match. As Spock laid out the charges in his precise monotone, Kirk admitted to them nonchalantly before attacking the test itself. To everyone else in the room, Spock's reply sounded like nothing more than detached Vulcan logic. Olivia knew better. After 19 years of spending holidays with Spock, Aunt Amanda, and Uncle Sarek, she knew Vulcan sass when she heard it.
A cadet approached the committee then, speaking quietly to the admirals.
"We've just received a distress call from Vulcan," Admiral Barnett announced. All cadets report to Hangar 1"
—
The message from Sevek was brief.
"Please prioritize the installation of the subspace terminal in my office. My superior anticipates setup of the secure network will take five days to complete. It will be agreeable to see you."
T'Ryla reflected that after only four visits in two years, it would be very agreeable to spend an uninterrupted year with her mate. She did not respond immediately. It would be logical to begin the installation first, and gratifying to send her reply from the functioning terminal.
Sitting down to the terminal, she spent the better part of three hours installing the appropriate encryption protocols. She was interrupted four times by small tremors, which was only slightly out of the ordinary for the region.
She attempted to send a test signal, but could not establish a connection. After her attempts to send non-encrypted messages from the terminal, and then from every device in the house failed, she concluded that the issue was not with the terminal. She tried to ping her local subspace relay tower, and got no response. Odd. She opened her PADD and navigated to her local news site. Scrolling text at the bottom of the screen declared that subspace communications were down all over the planet. The woman on screen announced that a planet-wide distress signal had been sent out to all Federation member planets, and that citizens were advised to shelter in place and watch the news for further instruction.
Worry was illogical. She would do as advised and continue her preparations, although the terminal would have to wait until communications were re-established. Entering the bedroom, she resumed unpacking the boxes Sevek's mother had sent over earlier that day.
Four hours and seventeen increasingly rough earthquakes later, T'Ryla was interrupted by a blaring alarm on her PADD. The High Council was issuing a planet-wide evacuation order. Wasting no time, she ran outside to the hover car. As she pulled out of the driveway, she could see a crack climbing up the exterior wall of the house. It expanded as another earthquake shook the ground. T'Ryla pulled out of the garage and drove twice the legal limit toward the nearest shuttlecraft station.
Dust clouds obscured her vision as T'Ryla made her way through the city. Buildings that had stood since the time of Surak were collapsing all around her, spewing rubble as they fell. She was forced to ground the vehicle when she could no longer see past the front of the craft. Her way blocked, she abandoned the car and took off at a run toward the shuttle station in central Shi'Kahr. Hundreds of people were running for the station, dragging children and carrying screaming infants.
As she ran, she felt herself getting heavier, as if the planet's gravity was increasing by the second. Above her, she saw shuttle crafts firing their thrusters at full blast in attempt to escape the planet's atmosphere. A few managed to get far enough out to engage their impulse engines and escape the enormous gravity that was pulling more of them than not back toward the surface. She collapsed, unable to stand against the tremendous force. The ground beneath her gave way, pulling her down with it.
Seventeen light years away, tears streamed down the cheeks of the stunned Vulcan geologist. For the first time in twenty-two years, Sevek was completely alone.
—
Olivia was going to pace a hole in the floor. After rushing to the shuttlecraft hangar as instructed, the first and second year cadets had been told that they would not be boarding starships. She and her roommate were now stewing in their room, where they had been ordered to return to await further instruction. The newscasters had said nothing helpful in hours. Shortly after the distress call, all subspace communications with Vulcan cut off. The fleet deployed to respond to the unknown disaster was traveling at maximum warp.
At an uptick in the reporter's tone, Rolinda turned up the volume.
"Starfleet Headquarters reports that they have lost all contact with the fleet deployed to Vulcan," the reporter declared. "All attempts to communicate with Vulcan, as well as with Delta Vega station, have been unsuccessful." The reporter continued on, but it became clear after a few minutes that she had nothing new to add.
Now Olivia was truly worried. Her aunt and uncle were on Vulcan, and her cousin and half of her friends and instructors were on those starships that had gone silent. She thought then that if he were here, Spock would remind her that worry is illogical. She sat on her bed and attempted to control her breathing.
Once she was satisfied that there was no more new information, Rolinda turned the volume back down. Presumably sensing the tone of Olivia's thoughts, she said, "I wonder if Starfleet knows more that they're telling the reporters. I bet if I just snuck over to headquarters, I could take a peek at what they know."
"Rolinda!" Olivia exclaimed more loudly than she intended, "How many times have you told me how unethical it is to read people's thoughts without their permission?"
"So are you gonna help me or what?" Rolinda challenged.
Olivia did not answer, opting instead to put her shoes on and lead the way out the door.
They didn't encounter any instructors as they crossed campus and exited the main gates. This was weird in itself, even with half the staff seventeen light-years away. They quickly jogged across the green that separated the Academy from Starfleet Headquarters.
When they entered the building, no receptionist greeted them in the lobby. They slowly tiptoed down the main hall toward the subspace monitoring department, figuring they would be the first to know of any new developments.
Just before they reached the end of the corridor, Rolinda threw her arm out across Olivia's chest, bringing her other hand up to cover her mouth.
"It's gone," escaped her lips, barely a whisper.
"What's gone?" Olivia asked as the blood drained from her face.
"Vulcan," Rolinda replied, meeting Olivia's eyes.
After a few moments of shock, Rolinda recovered somewhat. "We have to get out of here," she insisted, dragging her stunned roommate as she started back down the corridor. They ran back to campus, slipping back into the dorms. They entered their room silently, knowing that the other cadets would get the news soon enough.
Olivia sat down on her bed in shock. An entire Federation planet was simply gone. Three members of her family and many of her friends, not to mention the over six-billion residents of Vulcan, were likely dead. An announcement came through the emergency system, but Olivia couldn't hear it over the blood pounding in her ears. She stared at the news without really seeing it. Her mind instead supplied the faces of everyone she had lost. Aunt Amanda and Uncle Sarek. Spock and Chekov. The rest of the upperclassmen. Half the instructors. It didn't feel real.
She tried to sleep that night, hoping to wake up from this nightmare; however, it would be several days before sleep came to her.
—
John looked up as one of his archeologists poked her head in the office door. "Check the news," she said before resuming her walk toward the parking garage.
Opening the United Earth News Network page, John couldn't believe what he was seeing. He quickly switched to the Federation News Service.
After replaying the broadcast three times, John still couldn't believe it. Vulcan was gone. Six billion people had just been annihilated.
Sevek. He didn't know if the younger man had seen the news yet. Damn it, the poor kid was supposed to be getting married in two weeks. John stood from his desk and made his way to Sevek's glorified cubicle of an office, figuring even a Vulcan wouldn't want to be alone at a time like this.
He found the young Vulcan sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen, face blank but for the tears streaming down his cheeks. Circling the desk to stand behind Sevek, he rested a hand on his shoulder as he saw the same newscast he had left running in his own office.
The report was bleak. It appeared that most of the fleet sent to aid Vulcan had been wiped out, although two starship-sized warp signatures had been detected by an Andorian array shortly after the planet's collapse. The Andorians were sending two ships to find and pick up any escape pods that might hold survivors, but the size of the crafts indicated that they didn't expect to find many.
Most of the staff were leaving for the day. He didn't want Sevek to have to endure the pitying looks he knew he would receive from their well-meaning co-workers, so he waited until the last footsteps faded out down the hallway to address the younger man.
"Come on son," he said, stepping back to allow Sevek to pass. "Let's get you out of here." He complied silently, not seeming totally aware of his surroundings. John grabbed Sevek's personal PADD as the younger man started robotically out the door.
Sevek allowed himself to be guided to John's vehicle, where he seemed to realize where he was. "Where are we going?" he asked in a gravely whisper.
"Well, you've got no business driving right now, and I figure you shouldn't be alone. So you're gonna come stay with me for a bit," John replied, pulling out of the garage and onto the highway.
He expected Sevek to argue, to say that it was unnecessary, that he was in control of his emotions and perfectly capable of driving himself home to sit in his empty apartment alone. So when, much to John's surprise, Sevek responded with a quiet "Thank you," John's heart broke a little bit more for the young man who had just lost everything.
They rode the rest of the way to John's house in silence. John engaged the autopilot to send a message to his wife Josie, letting her know that Sevek would be staying with them for the evening, and urging her to check the news.
When they arrived, John parked the car in the garage, getting out and waiting to see that Sevek was following before turning to head inside. He heard Josie turn off the news as he opened the door. He led Sevek into the living room and sat him on the couch, intercepting Sam, his excessively friendly Labrador, and ordering the dog to lie on his bed and stay there.
Handing Sevek a cup of tea, Josie said, "I'm so sorry." Rather than the typical Vulcan response of "your apology is illogical," Sevek simply nodded, and a heavy silence fell over the room as John sat down beside the younger man.
"Perhaps we should turn on the news," Sevek stated after several minutes.
John wasn't sure this was a good idea, but if Sevek was determined to hear the gory details of the destruction of his home planet, John could damn well sit here with him while he did it. He grabbed the remote and turned on the projector.
The news wasn't much better. Only several hundred vessels had escaped what appeared to be a black hole in Vulcan's previous location. It was estimated that around thirteen thousand people had gotten clear of the planet. Many of those were being treated for crushing injuries and were not expected to survive. When it was all said and done, it looked like only around ten thousand of the planet's six billion inhabitants would live to see next week. T'Lar, the Vulcan representative for the Federation Council, released a statement that all Vulcan citizens residing off-world should remain where they were until the enemy responsible for the destruction of their home-world was found and neutralized.
Eventually the news began to repeat itself. Josie tried to get Sevek to eat something, to no avail. None of them were really hungry at the moment. She eventually showed the young Vulcan to their guest room.
"The poor thing. He won't eat. He won't try to sleep. He's just sitting on the floor with his eyes closed," Josie said as she returned to her husband downstairs.
"He's meditating. It's what they do. I don't think they sleep much," John explained tiredly. "Let's get to bed. I have a feeling the news is gonna keep getting worse before it gets any better. Might as well get some sleep."