Christmas Present

Major Indigo strode onto the bridge of the S.S. Endeavour precisely on time, at 07:45, Greenwich Mean Time, having stowed her holdall in her assigned quarters. As expected, General Claret and Colonel Vermilion were waiting for her.

"Are you ready?" Vermilion asked her, concern evident in his voice. He alone knew that she had been to the old church and spoken to the priest there, and he knew how much it would have hurt her to discuss the subject he knew must have come up. It still hurt him to think of what had happened, what had driven the man he considered as close as family to take his own life, but Vermilion masked his own pain in deference to her.

"Absolutely," she replied, taking in her old friend's face. "You know, I'm actually excited."

Claret shook her head at the look of childish glee on Indigo's face. She had never worked out why it was that, in the most serious of circumstances, when she should be concentrating the hardest, Indigo seemed to release her inner child. Still, Indigo was the only person who could pull this off, and she was the best field agent Spectrum had.

"Is your ship ready, Colonel?" Claret said aloud, addressing Vermilion.

"Aye, ma'am, Spectrum is Green," he replied formally. "The Endeavour is fully supplied and overhauled, our crew is assembled and at their posts. We're just waiting for the word, ma'am."

Claret reached out to shake Vermilion's hand – a human gesture that she was still getting used to after forty years in command of Spectrum.

"The word is given, Colonel," she told him. "You are cleared to leave orbit at your leisure; once I have left the ship, of course. Your mission briefing is as before." She gave a wry smile. "Please don't make me regret giving you a ship to run around the galaxy in, Vermilion, after all the trouble you used to cause on Earth," she added with a wicked glint in her purple eyes. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"Wouldn't dream of it, ma'am," Vermilion chuckled. "Major Indigo will surely keep me in check."

"That's what I was afraid of," Claret muttered.

Indigo laughed along with the senior officers. "We'll behave ourselves, General," she promised.

"You had better," Claret responded, pointing her webbed fingers warningly at the pair. "If I hear you two have been up to your old antics again, you'll be back here so fast your feet won't touch the deck. Now, be on your way, Endeavour, and may Fortune cast her light upon you."

As soon as Claret had left the bridge, Vermilion settled himself into his chair in the middle of the command centre. "Major Indigo, please take your station and prepare to leave orbit."

"SIG, Colonel," Indigo acknowledged the order faultlessly and moved to take her seat at the helm.

"Captain Cerulean," Vermilion continued, "are the calculations complete?"

"Yes, sir," the scientist replied from Vermilion's left. "The temporal coordinates are locked."

Vermilion inclined his head towards the large African man in thanks before moving on to his next target. "Captain Wheat, has the structural integrity been upgraded according to the specifications for the temporal jump?"

"Aye, sir," Wheat, the chief engineer confirmed. "The whole ship has been reconfigured for this mission."

"Excellent," Vermilion said. "The last thing we need would be for the ship to fall apart around us. Lieutenant Opal," he continued, addressing the shimmering, but otherwise empty space beside Indigo. "Is our course plotted?"

"Aye, sir," replied an eager voice through the radio receiver installed in the navigation console. "Our course to the singularity has been entered, avoiding the major shipping lanes and patrol routes."

"Very well," Vermilion concluded. "Major Indigo, take us out of orbit at one quarter light speed and continue on Opal's course."

"SIG, sir, one quarter light speed," Indigo confirmed, her fingers dancing elegantly over the controls at her fingertips.

Secluded in his quarters several hours later, Vermilion studied the crew roster for the Endeavour. His assignment as its commanding officer was temporary, but he felt it prudent to at least make an effort to get to know the people that would be making this monumental journey with him. The number of staff was minimal – just enough to cover each of the three shifts. There was no excess, up to and including the fact that his First Officer was doubling up as the Alpha Shift helmsman.

The crew was mainly human, as was usual with Spectrum, with a few aliens thrown in for good measure. Two of the three scientists on board were Centauran, the exception being the section leader, Captain Cerulean; the Chief Engineer, Captain Wheat was Khameri, and the Beta Shift helmsman and navigator, Fuchsia and Cerise respectively, were a Geminian partnership. In fact, the only helmsman or navigator who was in any way Terran was Indigo, who partnered Lieutenant Opal on the Alpha Shift.

Vermilion had never served with Geminians before, although he knew that they were extremely efficient. The trouble was that they were so in tune with each other that they sometimes forgot about the people around them. They rarely left their homeworld, or, at least, they tended to travel on Geminian vessels. The ones that did leave the bosom of their race were often doctor/nurse pairs looking to expand their horizons by studying interspecies medicine. This pair were indeed a rarity, and Vermilion was looking forward to seeing them in action. Geminians were telepathic, but only with their partner, with whom they were bonded at birth in a male-female paring. They lived together from the moment the youngest was born, grew up learning the same things and always went into the same career, working next to each other. When maturity came, the partnership became mates; when death came, they died together, neither able to survive without the mental presence of the other.

Khamerus Prime was populated by two different humanoid species, both of which were known as 'Khameri'. The two races lived side by side in harmony. Unusually, both species were indigenous to Khamerus, and so shared some similar characteristics, although there were distinct differences. One of the races had evolved in the desert areas of the planet, and tended to be tall and willowy, averaging about seven feet tall, and were bald with dark red skin and five fingers and a thumb on each of their hands; the others hailed from the more temperate regions, and were shorter in stature, averaging around five-and-a-half feet, with paler, pink skin, generally black hair and possessed a fully prehensile tail around the same length as their body. These days, there tended to be people of both species living in each environment, and intermingling was possible, although not common. Wheat was one of the rare crosses, possessing both the dark skin and extra finger of his mother's desert tribe and the hair and tail of his father's people.

The Centaurans were a familiar race to Vermilion, having served on Starbase under General Claret for so long. There were a great many of them in Spectrum these days, although their numbers still lagged far behind the human members, and they were an amazing species as far as Vermilion was concerned. Their diminutive stature and slender limbs meant that they did not make very good foot soldiers, but their incredible adaptability and inquisitive minds made them ideal Spectrum agents. They were an amphibious species, possessing both lungs and gills, although the former did not develop properly until the onset of adolescence. As such, all of the dwellings on their oceanic homeworld were underwater – and what magnificent cities they were. Vermilion had been lucky enough, as a young man, to go down to their capital, and he had been astounded by the almost ethereal beauty of the place. Even the Earth Embassy, which had been built specially for the air-breathing Humans, was created in keeping with the rest of the architecture – constructed of white stone, with a high roof and plenty of arches. The whole city looked as if it had been lifted out of a fairytale. He often wondered why the Centaurans left their beautiful home to join Spectrum.

The Centaurans appeared as ethereal as their cities, with skin tones of varying shades of pale purple, shifting from lilac to pale violet, and slender, petite frames with delicate facial features framed by wispy, light hair that grew darker with age. They were also telepaths, although their abilities were not restricted to one individual, but their whole race. Their brainwaves were sufficiently different from most other species that they were not able to 'read' them, a fact for which Vermilion had been extremely grateful for when he encountered a whole host of extremely beautiful women on their homeworld, and had entertained some despicable thoughts about several of them. The exception to this was, for some bizarre reason, Mysteron constructs, and by extension, Major Indigo. She'd joked once that it was just as well that she was perfectly capable of keeping up with a Centauran telepathic conversation, because she sure as hell struggled with their spoken language, due to some of the syllables commonly used being extremely difficult for Humans to imitate. An added bonus of this happenstance, for Spectrum, was that the Centaurans were capable of detecting Mysteron agents.

After going over the crew roster twice, Vermilion decided to seek out his First Officer and challenge her to a chess rematch. He still owed her at least three meals, but he was feeling lucky tonight.

Indigo grinned as Vermilion ran his hand absently through his hair, recognising the familiar gesture at once. She had seen him do it a thousand times, just as an old friend used to do.

"What?" he demanded indignantly, scrutinising the chess board carefully.

"Just thinking about the mission; a Svenson and a Metcalfe, fighting side by side, against the odds, to save the world. Just as it should be."

"I don't get you," Vermilion said, perplexed. He committed himself to a move, and immediately regretted it when Indigo took the knight he had just uncovered.

"Oh, c'mon, Jack," Indigo said in exasperation, toying with the piece she had just removed from the board. "You know your dad wasn't the first Svenson to join Spectrum."

"Yeah? What of it?" Vermilion challenged.

"You never looked him up, did you?" she realised. "I thought you would have done by now. All right then, I'll give you this one gratis, but next time you do your own research. Right at the beginning of Spectrum, just when the first War of Nerves started, my father's field partner was Captain Blue. They were a great team, if somewhat troublesome, by all accounts. They didn't always play by the rules." Indigo grinned. "Remind you of anyone you know?"

"Us, not playing by the rules?" Vermilion said innocently, moving his bishop into a vaguely threatening position. "When have we ever done anything that might be considered as outside the rules, or contravened orders, or broken every single regulation in the manual?"

"Quite," Indigo agreed, laying on the sarcasm with a trowel. "What you evidently have been too lazy to discover is that Captain Blue is your great, great, great, great, great, great-grandfather, Adam Svenson." She counted the 'great's on her fingers. "And my Godfather," she added for good measure. She fished around in her bag and pulled out an old book. She flicked through the pages – paper pages! – until she found what it was she was looking for. She handed the book to him and tapped one of the pictures with her fingernail very gently.

"Don't touch the photos, whatever you do," she warned him dramatically. "You'll get fingerprints on them if you do and damage the photo-paper."

"Real photos? On paper?" Vermilion was incredulous. "I didn't think these existed outside of museums!" He touched the very tip of one finger to the paper page of the book.

"Yes, well, be careful," she reiterated. "That is me, Mom, Dad and your- God, I hate the word 'ancestors'. Makes me feel old."

"Rose, you are old," Vermilion pointed out. "Is that kid you? You haven't changed much. But…" He lifted the photo album up, tilted it back and forth as if trying to make the image perform some kind of metamorphosis, then set it back onto his lap.

"Now do you see why I remembered your face from the Europa? I couldn't believe how much you look like Adam, eight generations later. I tell you, you could pass for him, if we ever needed to travel to the twenty-eighties."

"And his wife looks like my Aunt Carole!" Vermilion exclaimed.

"Carole? No way! Adam's wife was called Karen, or Symphony if she was on duty. She was an Angel."

Vermilion frowned. "But the Angels all have names of precious stones."

"Not back then, they didn't," Indigo said, her face more animated than it had been for a long time. "That only came in 2080, after my mother died and they decided that they needed a way of systematically naming the Angels. The first six were Destiny, Rhapsody, Symphony, Harmony, Melody and Prophecy. Rhapsody was my mother. Originally there were five Angels, before I was born. Prophecy was brought in as a replacement whilst my Mom was on maternity leave, but they decided that the team worked so well with six pilots that she stayed on."

She sat beside him and turned the pages of the album back until she reached a picture of six women, wearing what were recognisably Angel uniforms, even now, three centuries later. "I knew I had one of them," Indigo said triumphantly. "Destiny is the blonde on the left, that's Melody beside her, then Harmony, the next ones you know, then Prophecy on the end. The photo below is the captains at the time; Magenta, Ochre, Blue, Scarlet, Green and Grey."

She stretched across him to move her second queen onto his back row. "Checkmate," she said smugly.

Vermilion checked the board in dismay. His king, immediately threatened by the queen, was pinned in by the other queen and a bishop. The knight that Indigo had taken in the previous move had been the only thing that would have been able to intercept the queen.

At that moment, the klaxon signalling the shift-change sounded.

"Have we really been that long?" he asked, checking his watch, then looking at the state of the table beside the chessboard. Several mugs cluttered the area, along with the vestiges of their meal, which had been a stir-fry with several kinds of Centauran vegetables.

"Go on, I'll tidy this lot up," Indigo said affectionately, gesturing to the pile of crockery.

"I can't let you do that," he argued half-heartedly. "You need to get some sleep too, before tomorrow."

"Only a couple of hours," Indigo reminded him, returning the chess pieces to their container. "Now go."

Vermilion stifled a yawn. "All right," he conceded. "Goodnight, Rose."

"Night, Jack," she replied.

Indigo waited until Vermilion had left before acknowledging Opal's presence. She had seen the Mysteron enter just before he left; to her, the being appeared as a brilliant green glow, the same colour as she saw in the aura of replicants, but to human eyes, the being was invisible unless it wished to be seen.

'How much do you remember from the beginning?' she asked it as she piled the plates and cups onto a tray.

'Not much,' Opal confessed. 'I was very young then; I'm not much older than you, Rose. One of my first true memories of the War is my mother's death.'

Indigo, still hazy on the Mysterons' method of reproduction, knew that her mind was translating the term 'mother' from something she didn't really understand. The remark spiked her curiosity, though.

'What happened to it?' she asked.

'It was killed by our own kind,' Opal told her sadly, but with a hint of pride in the thought. 'It helped Captain Black fight against their control, and protected him from the Group whilst he carried out his own intentions when he was directed to kidnap you when you were seven. Its protection allowed Captain Black take control of his body and to hand you over to Spectrum, instead of taking you for the Mysterons. Without its assistance, Black may not have managed to resist the Group for as long as he did.'

'Your mother was killed for protecting me?' Indigo asked incredulously. 'My God, I never thought about anything like that. It never occurred to me before.'

'The Group was very angry,' Opal recalled. 'Black was punished and my mother suffered torture for many days before it was executed; but its resolution to do what was right, even though it knew what the outcome would be was what convinced me that the war was truly unjust, and that I could not stand by and watch the others annihilate your mother's species.'

'I probably owe my life to your mother,' Indigo thought. 'I wish I could thank her.'

'You already have,' Opal responded, overlooking, as it always did, Indigo's confused pronoun. 'By surviving to bring the war to an end and allowing peace to come to our people, its sacrifice was not in vain. That would have been thanks enough for my mother. Please do not be discomforted by this knowledge. My mother was a martyr to the cause of peace. A great many of our people were swayed by her actions. Perhaps not initially, but the seed of doubt was planted.'

Indigo nodded thoughtfully, her eyes falling back to the photo album, still open on the table. The people in those pictures were all now long dead, and some had died at the hands of the Mysterons, but how many more people might have died if not for Opal's 'mother'? Would there even be an Earth left for them to save now? It certainly wouldn't be Indigo saving it, at any rate. She remembered the incident Opal had referred to; knew that Captain Black's mission had been to take her and transfer his own powers to her. She would have been the Mysterons' primary agent on Earth, under their control and doing their bidding; and with the power she wielded, Indigo knew that the Mysterons could have made good on their threat to exterminate the human race.

'I am proud of my mother for its actions, Major,' Opal insisted. 'Please, I did not mean to distress you with this.'

'You haven't,' Indigo reassured it; 'thank you for telling me. Shall we continue?'

There was a slight shimmer in Opal's amorphous form that Indigo knew from long association with other Mysterons to be their way of expressing nerves. However, Opal only delayed briefly before replying. 'Yes, of course,' it said. 'Have you told Colonel Vermilion yet?'

Indigo scowled. 'Sort of,' she said. 'He'd only object if he knew the full details and make a fuss. It's better off this way.'

'If you say so, Major,' Opal acquiesced. 'You know Humans better than I do.'

Indigo ceased her tidying, and Opal moved forward. Its brilliant green glow surrounded her, and she closed her eyes and opened her mind to let it in.

'Breathe,' Opal chided her, with a hint of amusement in the thought.

Indigo hadn't even realised that she was holding her breath, to avoid inhaling the Mysteron. Experimentally, she drew a breath; everything felt normal, and Opal did not appear to be in any distress. Then, without warning, the Mysteron joined with her, overwhelming her momentarily with senses far in excess of her own. Information flooded into her mind faster than she could cope with the influx, and it took all her strength not to pass out. Slowly, drawing on her many years of self-taught discipline coupled with some Centauran practices that Claret had taught her, she blocked out the unfamiliar sensations. Almost immediately, she felt Opal's regret and anguish, as keenly as if it were her own. There was no longer any need for communication between them – they were as close to one and the same individual as they were ever going to get; gradually, Opal introduced its own senses into Indigo's mind, allowing it time to become accustomed to the additional input. Suddenly, they understood the potential the Mysterons had seen in her all those years ago, the being she could have become if not for Opal's mother and Captain Black.

Their eyes flew open, burning their characteristic luminescent green, but with an intensity she had never managed alone. The power of the Mysteron coursed through her veins, exponentially enhancing the abilities she already possessed.

Vermilion let out a deep sigh as he lowered the lights in his quarters and prepared for bed. He didn't know why he still tortured himself by staying so close to Indigo, trying to persuade himself that the platonic friendship they had was what he wanted, that he didn't feel for her what he once had. The time that he could have pursued anything more was gone, the physical age difference too large. At fifty-nine, he was too old to pursue a woman who was physically speaking around thirty years his junior, someone who would be forced to suffer when he succumbed to the inevitability of death. If she even felt the same way.

Enough was enough. After the mission was over, and Scarlet was alive again, he would leave quietly and stop torturing himself.

Vermilion frowned as he entered the bridge at the start of Alpha Shift. Both Indigo and Cerulean were at their stations, along with Lieutenant Bisque from Engineering and, he noted with interest, Doctor Chartreuse was also there, seated calmly one of the spare seats alongside his own. Opal, however, appeared to be missing. Of course, the lieutenant could be there, but normally it had the decency to distort the air around it to appear visible to the humanoid crew of the Endeavour. Damn the Mysteron, if it had vanished!

He looked up at the black hole on the main viewer as he made his way to his seat. They had arrived, and it was now or never.

"Is everything ready for the jump?" he asked the crew. There was a chorus of assent from the officers.

"Major, are you prepared?"

Indigo turned briefly, allowing him to glimpse her glowing eyes. "Aye, sir," she replied, sounding oddly distorted. It took Vermilion a moment to realise that three voices had spoken in unison: one from Indigo herself and both Indigo's and Opal's from Opal's speaker. "We are ready."

We. Vermilion should have realised exactly where Opal was. The ability to make the ship time-travel to an exact destination largely relied on the Mysterons' ability to see in four dimensions. It was an ability that Indigo shared to some degree, but not well enough for their mission to succeed, not enough to sense the distortions of the black hole that would send them back through the years. It had been her idea to enlist Opal's help. It was one of the Mysterons who did not support the war, and was willing to cooperate and serve with Spectrum in order to put an end to it. She had never mentioned anything like this in her explanation of coordinating the manoeuvre, however. He would have forbidden it absolutely, which was why she had probably not mentioned it to him. Damn her!

"Execute slingshot manoeuvre, Major," Vermilion responded smoothly, not letting his discomfort show.

"SIG," Indigo/Opal replied.

Indigo drew a deep breath and closed their eyes, reaching out and feeling the gravity well of the singularity, probing the distortion in time and space that it caused. The helm responded to their thoughts, and the starship accelerated, heading ever nearer to the event horizon. One wrong move now and they were history, along with the rest of the crew.

Although they had made a show of carefully calculating forces and planning flight paths, Indigo and Opal had never intended to use them and they threw the Endeavour into the slingshot using pure instinct. They heard the bridge explode into a cacophony of shouts as they deviated from the plan, although it was probably by no more than a few feet, or a slight difference in speed; all their concentration was on getting the Endeavour through this intact and in the right time, and they stood a much better chance of doing that using the superior Mysteron fourth-dimension sense than computers and mathematical models.

"Colonel!" Cerulean shouted as the ship entered into a low and rapid orbit around the black hole. "They have entered the slingshot closer to the event horizon than calculated."

"Damn them!" Vermilion cursed vehemently, pounding his fist on the arm of his chair. Why hadn't he seen this coming? Why hadn't he learned that Indigo would never change, and would always continue to do things her own way? What use was it in his outranking her if she didn't listen to him once in a while? They had been friends for so long that he often forgot that she was different to the rest of the human race, overlooked the fact that she had luminous green eyes, telepathy, telekinesis and other words starting in 'tele-'. The bright green rings sweeping the helm controls, however, reminded him sharply that she was not entirely human. Two rings he could have just about coped with, their presence generally being the sign that Opal was performing some task, but four interlocked rings was a little too unnerving for him, especially considering that Indigo's eyes were shut and head leant back against the headrest, as if she were resting.

He was about to voice a question to Cerulean, but suddenly, the universe seemed to change. Cerulean seemed to be moving in freeze-frame, as did Bisque. Only the combined Mysteron being posing as his friend and first officer seemed unaffected physically by the phenomenon, the interlocking rings continuing to sweep the helm console unhampered by the time distortion for what seemed like several minutes, but could easily have been seconds, until the bridge seemed to return to normal and a sickening jolt in his stomach told Vermilion that the ship had decelerated, ever so slightly out of synch with the inertial dampeners.

"Has it worked?" Vermilion asked his officers.

"Certainly," Indigo/Opal responded instantly. "We have arrived on schedule."

"Confirmed," Cerulean agreed in a shaky voice. "Scans of the neighbouring systems show planetary position consistent with December 2336. The computer will need a moment to extrapolate the exact date."

"December sixteenth," Indigo interjected. "Twelve hundred thirty hours, Earth GMT."

"Cerulean?"

"Exactly right, sir," the scientists confirmed in surprise. "To the minute, according to the computer."

"Set a course back to Earth, then," Vermilion ordered. "Standard cruising speed."

"SIG," Indigo/Opal responded. "Executing now."

"And then I want to see you… two… in my office," he added. "Immediately. Cerulean, you have the bridge."

"Of course," 'they' replied, setting the automatic pilot and following Vermilion to a door at the back of the bridge, leading to the Colonel's private office.

Vermilion didn't say another word until the door was safely shut and Indigo was sat on the chair before his desk. He decided not to take his own seat, but paced the small room behind his first officer until she turned. Her face was serene, eyes glowing gently.

He wheeled on her with hard eyes. "Why didn't you tell me what the pair of you were planning? You can't just undermine my authority by making a decision that could have put the whole crew in jeopardy. The chain of command is there for a reason – I am responsible for this crew and this ship, not to mention this mission."

"You wouldn't have agreed," Indigo said, her voice taking on an ethereal quality. "This was the only way that the journey would be successful was if we combined our abilities. The computer couldn't compensate for the natural fluctuations in the gravity well – we could and did."

"You're damn right I wouldn't have agreed," Vermilion raged. "I would have thought that sheer common sense would have prevented you from doing something so stupid! Christ, Rose, you spend your entire life avoiding exactly what you've just done. Did you ever think that this could be just the chance the Mysterons were looking for to take you once and for all? What if something else sneaked into your head along with Opal?"

"There was no danger," the being responded in the same even tone. "We both took every caution to ensure that no additional minds merged with our own."

Vermilion looked deeply sceptical as he tried and failed to read his friend's face. Even her eyes were different now, although he would never be able to explain the change.

"Are you even still in there, Rose?" he asked desperately, his spleen vented for the most part, and concern for his friend taking over.

"I am still Rose," she replied. "Just as I am still Opal. I know that you do not understand fully what we have become, more than our separate components. Our awareness of the universe has never been surpassed by the Group. You are correct, Colonel: this is what the Group desired, many years ago, and with good reason. However, I do feel that it is time for us to divide ourselves, for the time being."

With that, she fell silent and her head drooped forwards as if she was asleep. Vermilion watched, unable to look away, as the air around Indigo shimmered with Opal's characteristic disturbance. As the distortion grew away from the tiny body and coalesced into a vague sphere, Indigo slumped in her seat. Alarmed, Vermilion leaped the few feet that separated them and checked for a pulse and breathing. Both were present, if a little ragged, and even as he checked her over, she regained consciousness. Vermilion felt his heart skip a beat as she met his eyes, dazed but back to normal. It was definitely her behind those bright green eyes now, not whatever she and Opal had become together.

"Please don't blame Opal," she begged him in a whisper. "I pulled rank."

"Oh, now see, that I can believe," he responded with a sigh of relief, pulling her closer to him, as if embracing her would make it more real for him. He only held her for a few seconds before turning towards the non-corporeal member of his crew.

"You're dismissed, Lieutenant," he said, not unkindly. "Please return to navigation."

"SIG," Opal replied through the radio receiver on Vermilion's desk. Promptly, the Mysteron vanished through the door leading back to the bridge.

"What am I going to do with you?" Vermilion groaned. Finally allowing himself to sit, he walked wearily around his desk and lowered himself into his chair with a thump. He ran a hand through his still-blond hair as he contemplated Indigo and wondered, not for the first time, why two such opposites as himself and Indigo had remained such close friends after all this time. People had often commented on what a striking team they made when they were field partners; the tall, blond, tanned man and the tiny, raven-haired, pale woman always raised eyebrows. Only after people got to know them did they realise that their equally opposing personalities complemented each other. Whilst he looked like the last of the Vikings, Vermilion was gentle and patient, whereas Indigo, underneath decades of self-control, was every commanding officer's worst nightmare; impetuous and unafraid of disobeying orders when she felt she was right, coupled with a quick temper that matched her late father's in its ferocity. It was exactly those exasperating qualities that would make her an excellent colonel one day, when she allowed herself to be promoted, but Vermilion understood her reasons for refusing any further promotions, ones that would take her away from the field whilst she was still more than capable of serving.

"Put me up in front of a firing squad?" she responded, recalling something she had been told as a teenager. That incident had been before the discovery of the electron rifle, of course.

"Don't even joke about that," Vermilion said, scandalised. "Besides, we don't do that these days."

"I know."

"Forgive me for asking, Indie, but there's something else about your plan that bothers me," Vermilion said, narrowing his eyes at his First Officer. "Something else that you've left hazy."

"Oh, what's that?" Indigo asked innocently, knowing full well what he was about to say. She knew exactly which part of the plan of action was still unclear.

"How do you plan on getting onto Starbase, exactly?" Vermilion inquired. "It's not as if we're going to be able to glide up to an airlock and walk on. You and I, at least, are already there. Granted, I've changed since then, they might not recognise me straight away, but you haven't."

"You've not changed that much," she replied, her tone gentle, but not as if she was trying to flatter him or butter him up, preparing him for something she knew he wouldn't like.

He fixed her with a hard stare, until she relented.

"Opal's going to help me," she told him. "It can teleport me from the ship to Starbase if we come to a stop just outside their sensor range. We're lucky in a way; next year, the sensors will be upgraded, and we wouldn't be able to pull this off. Once I'm on board, and they know where I'm from, you shouldn't have a problem with coming on board yourself, if necessary. I don't recommend that we do too much mingling with the crew of Starbase in this time, even though by this time tomorrow, hopefully, our knowledge of the future won't be worth a dime."

"Amen to that. Doesn't mean I like your plan," he added, "but at least you have thought it through."

It took them another ship's day to make the return trip, having to make similar detours as during the trip out to the black hole. They couldn't risk coming across any of Spectrum's ships of this era before arrival at Starbase. There would be too many awkward questions. Chief Engineer Wheat fretted over fluctuations in structural integrity caused by a malfunctioning power conduit in the field emitters. Although the fault wasn't causing them any problems at the time, without repairs they wouldn't survive the return journey. There was no hiding anything now, no possibility that Indigo could just go in and back out again unnoticed – they had to dock and make repairs at Starbase.

Captain Cerulean compiled a sensor report for the journey, noting particularly that the gravity field of the black hole had fluctuated during the slingshot orbit. Calculations indicated that had Indigo and Opal used the original flight path, the Endeavour would have emerged from the ether approximately a hundred years earlier than planned – if it survived at all. It didn't stop Vermilion smarting over them having left him out of the loop, but it slightly diminished his desire to court-marshal Indigo when they got back to their own time.

A ship's day after leaving the vicinity of the singularity, Indigo brought the ship to a stop, just beyond the horizon of Starbase's sensors.