A/N: Thanks again for reading! And thanks for all the reviews - I really, really appreciate them! Finally, because I don't say it often enough, a big shout out to my beta, penguin_attie, who does the most incredible job. Thanks!

Chapter 24

Kirk knows before the door has closed behind him that he's not going home. The idea is so absurd it almost chokes a bitter laugh out of his tight, painful throat: what, should he go back to an empty apartment and stare out the window at the distant stars and pretend that it's not a mockery of the evening he's just trampled all over? Go to bed and not replay the past five minutes in an endless loop behind his eyelids as he tries not to wonder what this means? Comm Bones for a commiserative drinking session in the hope that the first goddamn question he asks won't revolve around the circumstances that led to the invitation? Stare at a wall? Pace the floors? Swing blindly at inanimate objects until something breaks?

It's barely 2200 hours. He's worked later than this. He comms an aircar - privilege of rank - and directs it to Horseshoe Bay.

Xeno doesn't sleep, not really, but it's a skeleton staff after core hours: one CO and three Yeomen, in possession of a strict set of protocols for who gets woken up and under what circumstances. Kirk's name is somewhere close to the top of the list, but it's a moot point, since, more often than not, he's here anyway. Commander Terek has pulled overnight duty, which is just exactly what Kirk needs to see right now - a Vulcan with one single, twisted braid on his sleeve - and he rises in that familiar, sinuous way as Kirk enters the room. His face betrays no surprise, which it wouldn't, but Kirk's appearance is hardly extraordinary in any case.

He says, "Good evening, Commodore Kirk."

"Commander," answers Kirk more tersely than he means to, but it's been a long day. "Have the Photeus reports arrived yet?"

"Not yet, sir," says Terek. "Commander Willard…"

"Yes, please comm Commander Willard and ask her to follow up with the Antigone ASAP," says Kirk. "The delay is becoming unacceptable. I'll be at my desk; I don't want to be disturbed."

"Yes, sir," says Terek, but Kirk is already moving past him, through the still, dark cavern of the central lobby, towards the sanctuary of his office. There's a light shining from below Ciana's door, but he files the information away under inconsequential and lets himself inside.

Sanders has been tidying again. Irritation prickles Kirk's skin as he barks a command to the computer, dialing down the overhead lights as far as they will go, and finally just switching them off altogether. The pale glow of the terminal screen is sufficient; it's more in keeping with his current mood, in any case. The windows are darkened, though they weren't when he left the room in the late afternoon, but he supposes he's grateful for that. His mug has been washed and set neatly on a coaster beside the terminal screen and his tapes have been filed away in alphabetical order by due date. She's even smoothed out the bumps in the seat of the chair, which has a habit of moulding itself to the contours of Kirk's body when he sits in it too long. Everything is quiet order - methodical and systematized, clean and comfortable - and there's absolutely no reason for the resentment that wells in his tightening chest as he fights the urge to sweep the flat of one hand against a geometrically-stacked sheaf of files on the edge of his desk. It's only that everything's so damn logical, everywhere he looks, and can't a man just mire himself in chaos every once in a while?

Goddamn it.

Goddamn it.

A protest from his knuckles and he glances down, distractedly, to find that he's gripping the edge of his desk with enough force to drain the blood from his fingers. They creak their disapproval as he releases his hold, flexing them stiffly as he crosses absently to the window, where the faintest glimmer of starlight mocks him from behind the curtain of smoked glass. He leans forward until his forehead is pressed against the pane, sharply cold in the tepid air of the office, and sucks in a deep breath. Another. And then a third, as though the air in his lungs has some kind of restorative properties suitable for dampening down the fires of agitation in his belly.

It's not entirely a surprise to hear the gentle hiss of his office door sliding open on the resonant hush outside, although she usually knocks first. He straightens his spine and turns on his heel as Ciana greets him with a conspiratorial twitch of her eyebrows and steps inside, leaning back against the door as it closes softly behind her. Her face is soft with fatigue and stray wisps of hair have escaped from the clasp at the back of her head, but otherwise she's exactly as he left her a couple of hours ago. It feels like longer.

"I thought you went home," she says.

He probably ought to dial the lights back up, but he'd really rather she didn't decide to stay, and that might imply some form of invitation. So instead he steps smartly away from the window, crosses the short space to his desk, slides into his chair without meeting her eyes.

"Not exactly," he says. He attempts a smile, but he can tell by the way his cheeks ache that it's fallen somewhat flat. "I had a prior engagement." A beat. "It… didn't last as long as I expected."

"So you came back here?"

"There are some reports I need to action."

"And they can't wait until tomorrow?" He can feel her gaze on him as he makes a show of reorienting the terminal so that it lines up with the angle of his shoulders. "Seriously, Kirk: go home. That was some quantity of bullshit you had to deal with tonight; you don't need to be here."

A humorless laugh wells up in his throat, and he smothers it with difficulty. "I prefer to finish this tonight," he says, and turns his eyes towards the screen in the hope that she'll give up and go away.

She doesn't, of course. You'd think he'd have learned by now, especially after all those years of dealing with Bones. Instead of taking his manifest equivocation as her cue to leave, she unfolds her arms, pushes herself up off the door, and crosses the room to perch on the edge of his desk. And then she waits.

Kirk gives in; he's learned something at least. He looks up from the screen, meets her eyes, considers raising an eyebrow in challenge, and then decides against it. She's still his CO.

"You're tired," she says. "This isn't healthy, Kirk. You need to sleep as well."

Kirk purses his lips. "Ma'am," he says, as evenly as he can, "I hesitate to point this out, but… you're here too."

She laughs softly, edging back onto his desk in a manner that makes it clear she's getting settled in for the long haul. "Yeah, I pull the occasional all-nighter," she says. "I outrank you, though, Mister. Vice Admiral's prerogative. And, you know… it's not every night. For me."

He leans back in his chair. "I prefer to be here," he says.

"And I prefer to have a deputy who's had more than fifteen hours' sleep in the past four days. Don't even," she says, holding up a hand as he begins to protest. "I don't need the exact figure; I know I'm in the ballpark. You don't 'prefer to be here'; you just don't want to be anywhere else. What is is, Kirk? Did something happen?"

He can feel his eyes darken. "We were at the same meeting, Ma'am."

"Yeah, and I swear I thought you were going to quit right there and then," she says quietly. "But here you are. So that's not it." She raises her eyes to his in relentless appraisal. He takes an impatient breath, but he holds her stare. "After the meeting?"

Despite himself, an eyebrow arches. "I believe I'm entitled to a private life," he says.

She shrugs, but doesn't drop his gaze. "Sure you are," she says. "It's not my place to ask."

Ah. It's a variation on the standard I don't want to pry, one of the most disingenuous statements in the English language. And it's largely unassailable, because it's been mitigated up front. It's not her place to ask, but she's asking anyway. And, therefore, absolved from castigation, she expects an answer.

"Nothing happened," he says shortly. "I was…" - and the pause is more revealing than he would like, but he genuinely can't work out how to phrase it - "…in consultation with Commander Spock."

"Commander Spock, huh?" she says. A beat. "So - who insulted whose mom?"

Laughter sputters out of him, unexpected and irresistible, and something eases, as though it's lanced poison from a hidden wound. She joins him, chuckling softly and folding her arms comfortably across her chest. In another woman, it might look defensive, but her body is soft, relaxed.

"The Zeta Calliope report and the 5 Philippus Alpha report and then you're out of here, okay?" she says. "I mean it. The only thing this department has going on this week is 43 Ilion Gamma, and we're on top of that right now. Don't burn out - I need you in fighting form on Callisto next week."

He smiles. "Yes, Ma'am," he says.

She releases her arms and slides off the table in one lithe, smooth movement. "And then take some leave or something," she says as she stands, straightening, brushing down her uniform where it has ridden up against her skin. "You look like hell, Kirk."

He wonders what will happen if she meets Bones at the ceremony; if they'll annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter in a conversion chamber, or if they'll fall into mutual orbit as two halves of one whole.

"Thank you, Ma'am," he says.

She grins. "I'll see you in the morning, okay?"

And then she's gone.

~-o-o-o-~

Things generally look better in the cold light of day. But the cold light of day creeps under the drapes before Kirk has managed to settle his unquiet mind to more than sixty minutes' sleep at a time, and its remedial effect is somewhat dulled by the thick blanket of exhaustion fogging the inside of his skull. A quick glance at the chronometer tells him that it's another three quarters of an hour until his alarm is due to go off, but he can tell by the sudden spike of adrenalin in his gut that there's no point in even closing his eyes again. This is it. The day has begun, and there's not much he can do about it. He might as well get up.

The sun is barely over the horizon. Kirk shuffles aimlessly, absently, around his living quarters, scratching at his bare chest and scrubbing a hand over his face. He considers slaking some of this restless energy on an early morning run, the way he used to do as a cadet when sleeplessness haunted him, but years on a starship have broken him of the habit, and running in place in a gravity-controlled gym is not the same. The few times he's let his crowded thoughts push him out the door and onto the tree-lined paths of the Presidio, he's stumbled back through his apartment door an hour later, breath laboring an acid-trail of raw heat along his trachea, sweat pooling in the hollow at the base of his spine, calf-muscles pulled tight as a bowstring, and his mind racing in time with his frantic pulse. There are times when he just needs to not be on his own, and it doesn't get more solitary than a 5am jog.

So, instead, he makes himself walk decisively to the shower, as though it's a positive decision and not the default option of a man who's run out of ideas, dials the temperature just shy of scalding, and lets a tattoo of searing water purge the doubt and self-reproach in a current of steam. He stands beneath the excoriating stream for as long as his protesting flesh and skittering, superheated heart rate will allow him, and, when he's done, he steps out of the cubicle in a billow of heat and mist, wraps a towel perfunctorily around his waist, and pads wet footprints across his apartment to his terminal screen.

There's no message from Spock. He didn't really expect that there would be. Still, frustration tightens Kirk's chest and he straightens, turns away, paces to the window. He knows last night was a mistake; it's really not as though he doesn't know. He can feel it in every innervated nerve ending in his body; it's like a cloud of static, hovering around his head and discharging irregular bursts of electricity inside the part of his brain devoted to shame. But the thing is, he's sick of this. He's sick of the tentative equilibrium, of the sense that everything's just a misplaced glance or a brush of the hand away from collapsing in on itself like the heart of an unstable star. He's sick of walking on eggshells and wanting - but never too much, and always at the very back of his conscious thoughts, in case it creeps, unbidden, into the curve of his smile or the tilt of his shoulder. He's sick of being constantly on his guard against stray desire, of scanning the horizon for impending catastrophe, of feeling as though he's some kind of predator on a tight leash, something to be regarded with caution and to keep at a distance. And most of all, he's sick of the constant undercurrent of despair that colors his every word and action with the knowledge that, somewhere along the line, he's bound to screw this up. That living without Spock is like scrambling in the darkness; it's like trying to get by with half of himself torn away, and, somehow or other, just wanting him close by is going to be enough to push him away.

So he purses his lips, steels himself, turns back to the terminal and makes himself write, I guess last night got derailed. Let me make it up to you with lunch. JTK. His hand hovers over the erase key - ninety seconds, one hundred, one hundred and ten; so long that muscle fatigue kicks up a fine tremor in the bones of his fingers - and he stares at the screen until the lines of text blur into each other and two sentences of reluctant contrition congeal into a globular stain of black on white. Bones would call him a stubborn son-of-a-bitch with an over-developed martyr complex, and maybe that's partially true, but it's not just that. It's more that there's an air of desperation to apologizing for something just because he's afraid that he's been down this road before. And he wonders if that bleeds through those fifteen short words; if Spock will read them and hear the echo-voice behind them that whispers, I know I messed up. Please don't leave.

The chirp of his communicator cuts abruptly through his reverie, and Kirk's hovering hand strikes the table with an audible thump. Adrenalin spears his belly and he almost knocks over his chair in his unsteady haste to snatch the device from the kitchen counter where he's stowed it until such times as he might be wearing actual clothes with a pocket or a belt on which to clip it. He knows it's not likely to be Spock, not really - there was a time when a communicator call at 0510 was unlikely to be from anyone else, but those days are gone - but the Human brain is designed to make connections out of coincidence and hope, and for a second, an ill-considered moment, he genuinely believes that the universe works in such a way as to cause his friend to call just as Kirk prevaricates over how to make things right again.

So when he snaps, "Kirk here," there's a catch to his voice; a thready, breathy edge that's all expectation and anxiety.

"Kirk, it's Ciana," says her disembodied voice, brisk and efficient and entirely too free of the fug of sleep to have been to bed yet. He will not acknowledge the jagged shard of disappointment that sinks out of sight in some disregarded corner of his thoughts. "Did I wake you?"

He clears his throat. "No, Ma'am," he says.

A breath of laughter, but businesslike. "I had a feeling. Can you come in? I just this minute got some news across my desk and I need you here."

"News?"

"Yeah." A pause, and he can imagine the furrow of her brow while she debates how much to tell him over an unsecured line. "Not good," she says.

Kirk glances towards his terminal, milk-white glow fading into gray as daylight chases the shadows from the air. "I'm on my way," he says. "Kirk out."

The communicator shuts with a snap. "Computer, send message," says Kirk, and turns for the bedroom.

~-o-o-o-~

It's a strange feeling, reading about a crisis in the hours after it has passed. Commander Jeaunais' report is brief, perfunctory - much like the reports Kirk might once have sent himself, in fact, and maybe it's the fact that he understands this imperative very well that makes it so easy to slip between the lines and read into the stark, emotionless prose the sense of adrenalin massing, of desperate focus, of uncertainty, and, yes, fear. The Hibernia has seen her share of action since she left Spacedock, and Kirk knows both her Captain and First Officer by reputation. They are a solid team, with more than twenty years' command experience between them, and they don't scare easily. Captain Corrigan is a man with a flair for diplomacy: calm, respectful and fair; Jeaunais is level-headed, intuituve and resourceful. They were a good choice for the Draconis mission, no matter what anyone decides to say now. There are plenty of worse ways this could have gone.

It's late morning, and Ciana has gone home to snatch a few hours' sleep and a change of clothes before the inevitable rounds of hand-wringing and recriminations begin, and she's left Kirk to piece together an analysis of the situation from the Captain and First Officer's logs, transmission records, and Xeno's research dossier on the Draconis system. It's not exactly difficult to see what went wrong; it's more that it's going to be tricky to word it in such a way as to avoid sounding as though they're trying to abdicate responsibility for something that is, actually, genuinely not Xeno's fault. Nor is it Corrigan's fault, and it's certainly not the fault of his First Officer, who, without question, saved her captain's life. Draconis II is, by definition, located in a system outside of Federal influence; observation is utilitarian and driven by operational need. They don't have a probe pointed at every planet on which they hope to exercise a charm offensive, and they certainly don't have someone watching every sweep and revolution of its orbital path.

There was no way anyone could have known about the attack.

Details are a little sketchy in places, the way they usually are when an incident is less than half a day old, and the captain, who is the only person who was actually planetside for the whole debacle, is still lying unconscious on a sickbay biobed, but Jeaunais' report outlines the facts as she understands them. They achieved orbit some eighteen hours ahead of schedule, and Corrigan took the decision to allow his Head of Sciences to conduct some additional close-range planetary scans while they awaited final authorization from HQ to make their approach to the designated authorities. It's standard procedure; Draconis II has been warp capable for only a decade or so, as far as anyone can tell, and they haven't developed any kind of centralized protocol for managing extra-planetary traffic. Best guess is that they haven't actually made it past the boundary of their own solar system yet, so it's entirely possible that the Hibernia is their first official visitor - with "official" being the operative word here. It would certainly explain the itchy trigger finger.

The ship has taken severe damage to the starboard nacelle, from a surprise barrage of cannon fire that erupted without warning from a city on the largest archipelago. The loss of coolant through the blast hole triggered a cascading warp malfunction in the central coil, rendering all engine systems temporarily inoperable while persons unknown on Draconis emptied their arsenal into orbit with alarming accuracy and Captain Corrigan was obliged to make a split-second decision about whether or not to launch photon torpedoes and start a war before they'd even exchanged so much as a reluctant handshake. Kirk will be the first to admit that he doesn't know what he would have done in Corrigan's position: it's easy to look back on it now, with the benefit of hindsight, and congratulate or castigate, but in the heat of the moment, with his ship hanging like dead weight in the center of a firestorm and the lives of his crew in the balance, who's to say that he might not have chosen to send a warning shot screaming over the low-lying, water-bound streets; to sacrifice a few hundred people he'll never meet over men and women he's sworn to protect?

Corrigan didn't. As far as Kirk's concerned, he earned his pay for the week right there, because that takes some kind of nerve: to stand in the center of a bridge under fire and repeatedly demand of empty static that it open up a line of communication with you right now, as though it's outside the boundaries of conceivable thought anyone might continue to ignore that level of mulish obstinacy. Kirk takes a moment to wonder, uncomfortably, if it always looked so reckless when he tried that sort of thing.

Captain Corrigan used all available frequencies to repeatedly restate our non-hostile intent, writes Jeaunais with the diplomacy of a woman who's been in similar situations before. It was my stated opinion that we were either misunderstood or unheard, as the attack was unrelenting, but after approximately seven minutes of sustained fire, Lieutenant Cordiner reported activity on Hailing Frequency 3L. This was our first communication with the population of Draconis II. Given our substantial disadvantage, the Captain deemed it prudent to accede to their demands that he beam down to the capitol to open up negotiations. The away party was comprised of Captain Corrigan, Lieutenant Commander Yu (Chief of Security), Ensign Bell (Sec.), Ensign Hashimoto (Sec.), Doctor Vazh (2nd Medic), and Lieutenant Cordiner (Chief of Communications). The team was planetside for no more than three minutes before I received word from Draconis II that the captain had been taken hostage.

Kirk has spoken to her over subspace on and off throughout the morning. She's a tall, angular woman in her late forties, with a handsome face and a stare that you wouldn't want to cross. She's tired and shaken, and a fading blossom of purplish-gray across her right eye and up into her hairline speaks of an appointment with the dermal regenerator in the recent past, but she has the imperturbable constitution of a spacefarer of several decades' experience; he would not object to her presence at his flank in a firefight. Kirk's reasonably certain that her Captain's going to recommend her for a commendation when he comes to, but if he doesn't, Kirk will.

She's not sure what she can add to her report, she says, but Kirk wants her impressions, and that's not something that Starfleet tends to commit to record. It prompts a solitary eyebrow raise that's painfully familiar, and he finds himself wondering, savagely, if this is something they've started teaching at basic First Officer training.

"My impression is that these people have been seriously frightened," she says. "That became obvious very quickly."

You see, that's not in the report; the report talks in brittle, dry inflections about someone called the Ssar Fithosh, whose rank doesn't translate well into Standard, but who seems to have general responsibility for civic security - possibly for the entire archipelago, possibly for the city alone, and possibly - though she doesn't believe this is likely - for Draconis II as a whole. He - she thinks it's a he, though she's prepared to accept the possibility that Human gender conventions are laughably inadequate in this instance - demanded their immediate departure from Draconian space, with the Captain held as surety against the likelihood of another attack, and it took her several minutes of fraught discussion to establish that the hypothetical attack in question was expected to come from the Hibernia, not from the Draconian batteries.

I vehemently stated our position, says her report, that there was no question of the Hibernia's departure without the Captain's presence on board. I was certain, at this juncture, that their intention towards Captain Corrigan was hostile.

Kirk wants to know why, and at first she insists that she can't quantify an instinct. But he presses her, and, after a moment's reflection, she remembers the anger in the Ssar's words; the frills on his neck would quiver and rise, like hackles, when he spoke. It was not interaction, it was overreaction, predicated on his absolute certainty that the Hibernia's intent was to do them harm, and evidenced by no action on the part of Corrigan or his crew. This is when she began to suspect that what they were dealing with was not terror of the unknown, but, rather, terror of the known - that, somewhere in the recent past, Draconis II had learned that they had every reason to fear outworlders.

It was a secondary observation; useful only inasmuch as it provided a frame of reference from which to proceed. The Hibernia was still dead in the air above a demonstrably hostile planet, and the Captain was still in captivity and likely to die if he couldn't be retrieved. But it gave her a blueprint, a way in.

As negotiations continued, she writes, it became clear that it was imperative that we convince the Draconian authorities that we had no knowledge of this earlier contact. I requested details and, at first, the Ssar Fithosh was unwilling to elucidate but, as I recognized that, in all likelihood, this earlier extra-planetary contact was of non-Federal origin, it seemed prudent to invite him to scan our ship for evidence that it matched their earlier visitors'. While I acknowledge the substantial risk involved in such a strategy, I was confident that it represented our best chance for success. It was at this point that they conceded their lack of direct information concerning the specifics of the earlier contact, which took the form of an unprovoked attack on an isolated mining settlement in the north of the archipelago.

Hathsh Sassafith is a village of approximately seven hundred people, on an outlying arm of the island chain. It's nestled along the shores of a deep lagoon blown from the cone of a long-extinct volcano, where the flow of the ocean has created a natural well of semiheavy water that provides the local community with a constant source of gainful employment and income. The attack came by night, when the majority of the populace had retreated underwater, and the first instinct of the elders that remained on the surface - the alpha caste, whose function is primarily custodial - was to dive down to the sleep chambers to protect the young. The Alpha Prime was surfaceside longest, and the report that he presented to the Grand Chamber was unequivocal: three ships appeared out of nowhere in the clear sky above the village; one fired a shot directly at the town hall, where the lights were still burning from the alphas' evening meal, and then all three swooped down on the distillery. This is all he saw before he retreated underside, but, when dawn trickled watery sunlight through the fathoms and he led a tentative expedition to the surface, he found the area around the processing plant in ruins and the distillation vats drained dry of nearly 5,000 gallons of deuterium-rich water destined for the capital.

"No one saw the attackers?" says Kirk.

"No," says Jeaunais. "But they're adamant that the ships were not Draconian."

Kirk is inclined to agree. Draconian spacefaring vessels are bulky and cumbersome, weighted on either side by vast submersion tanks full of Draconian seawater. They're constructed in orbit around the planet and never cross the mesosphere; seven million tons of water is the opposite of aerodynamic, and they would fall out of the sky like massive metal spaceships full of liquid. If three starships descended out of a clear sky and landed on Hathsh Sassafith, they didn't come from Draconis.

I continued to engage the Draconian authorities in negotiations for as long as was practicable, says the report. Commander Yu and the remainder of the away party had been returned to the ship shortly after the Captain was taken hostage, and I informed him, on his arrival on the bridge, that we were at alert level Sigma Rho. As per Starfleet regulations, he understood this to mean that a covert Search and Rescue operation was to be put into effect at the earliest opportunity and removed himself to Security to plan his strategy. At 1112 hours, ship's time, Ensign Bell indicated that Commander Yu's task force was in position. It is my belief that diplomatic engagement may ultimately have proven successful in resolving the incident, and progress was being made; however, I judged the situation to be time-sensitive as I could not verify the current state of the Captain's health. Given that Commander Holtz had earlier reported that warp functions were back online, albeit at a much reduced capacity, I gave the order to proceed.

The words are delivered with such dispassionate authority that it's almost easy to forget that she's talking about a life or death decision, one that was stacked fairly heavily in favor of failure either way: an impossible choice. But, faced with action or inaction, where all else is equal, it's Human instinct to go for the former. Jeaunais is a woman of instinct, and it steered her right this time. Captain Corrigan is suffering the effects of oxygen deprivation and hypothermia, and took phaser fire to the chest and leg during the retrieval, but he's alive. A couple of Draconian military police are not, and now it's up to Kirk to determine if there's any possibility of salvaging their nascent relationship with an antsy populace that have just lost two citizens to Federal firepower. He suspects that there is not.

"For what it's worth, Commander," he says, as he's preparing to conclude the interview, "I believe you made the right call. That will be reflected in myreport."

"Thank you, sir," she says. "I hope Captain Corrigan agrees with you. He… feels strongly about our responsibility to emerging warp-capable cultures."

So does Kirk, though he leaves it unspoken and signs off. The medical report indicates that Corrigan is likely to be fit to give a verbal statement by tomorrow morning, ship's time, which is around 0100 PST; too late to have any bearing on their meetings this afternoon, but maybe soon enough to turn around the Starfleet policy machine if it needs to be turned. Kirk is not likely to take any heat for this, given that it was his predecessor's recommendation and he was only following up on ground work long since set in concrete, but Ciana might and, besides, that's not really the point. The point is that Draconis was a safe bet and a good target for first contact; there's no reason it ought to have gone bad, and what they should be focusing on - but won't - is the question of why. It's going to get buried under operational and trade concerns; can they afford to make an enemy in this sector, what are the fiscal implications if Draconis goes hostile, who will ally themselves with whom. A thousand ripples, but it's the epicenter that interests Kirk. An isolated planet with no near neighbors and nothing particularly to recommend it beyond its potential as the site of a future Starbase; it's neither mineral-rich nor technologically advanced, and if it was in the pirate lanes it would have been raided long before now and the Ssar Fithosh wouldn't be as jittery as a man who's just seen everything he thought he knew about the universe turned inside out. The point is: the timing stinks.

He turns to the comms recording: incoming only, and punctuated with lengthy pauses while the bridge crew, presumably, react to the man on the screen. The Ssar Fithosh is tall, sylphlike, with opaque skin through which it's possible to see the rapid flow of ochre blood in narrow veins just below the surface. Standing to attention, he keeps his limbs folded close to his torso in clean, fluid lines, so that he seems to be carved from yellow obsidian: one smooth, sinuous shape, bent at the neck and narrowing into a serpentine head with double-lidded, suspicious eyes. He barely opens his mouth to speak, and the universal translator stutters here and there over the soft-voiced, palatal sibilants. Cordiner has flagged the most pertinent sections, though he hasn't cross-referenced it with the corresponding footage from the bridge just yet, and Kirk skips ahead to the portion marked Attack on Hathsh Sassafith. The Ssar's neck frills are fully extended, his eyes narrowed almost to slits, and Kirk thinks that Ciana really ought to watch this; there are probably a half-dozen non-verbals that she could identify or make sense of here that have absolutely nothing to do with Human body language cues, quite apart from the qualities that scream person under severe duress. Kirk scrolls through at 2.5 speed, translator squeaking a commentary while the spokesperson for Draconis II describes the scent that hung in the air above the village for many days, which the forensic team from the capitol could not identify, and the unusual signal picked up on long range scanners the night of the attack: three vessels shaped vaguely like sthusa shells, apparently in a geosynchronous orbit above the north of the archipelago, blinking suddenly into existence and disappearing just as rapidly, only to reappear again as blips on a radar screen two minutes later.

The translator has no synonym for sthusa, so Kirk runs it through the cortex and, a moment later, an image blinks to life on his screen, overlaying the righteous indignation of the Ssar Fithosh with a pencil-sketched diagram from God knows where, describing a crab-like creature housed in a kind of upside-down heart-shaped shell, rounded point facing upwards. The picture rotates through 360 degrees, exploring the soft underbelly with its alarming profusion of legs, the thin spine that crowns the apex, the jutting head… and Kirk freezes it on a frontal view, leaning in towards the screen as though proximity might suddenly make the pieces slide into shape.

That looks kind of like… Doesn't it? Or is he simply seeing what he wants to see? It seems a little convenient that this sudden revelation correlates so neatly with a long-discarded idea that he filed away for lack of evidence; it reeks of confirmation bias, but… really? He needs another opinion, but his second choice is currently sleeping off an all-night teleconferencing session, and his first choice…

His first choice has just messaged him, actually.

That's unexpected.

Kirk closes the image with an absent, barked command, and stares at the alert on his screen, rather unfortunately superimposed over the Ssar's open mouth, like a speech bubble on the galaxy's most surreal comic strip. Display message? asks the reluctant emissary from Draconis II, and there's really only one answer to that: if he doesn't read it now, he's only going to wonder what it says until he gives in, ten minutes or an hour from now, and calls it up anyway, and that's not exactly maximizing his efficiency in the interim. So he purses his lips and responds in the affirmative, and the screen switches to his inbox, where, with infuriating Vulcan economy, his friend has written two short, perfunctory, and irrefutably inauspicious sentences:

Lunch today will be impossible. My apologies, CDR Spock.

Kirk blinks, tightens his jaw. He wasn't expecting assent, but this feels like the verbal equivalent of a lightning blow to the gut. This sounds like the opening lines of a man about to take his leave of their friendship. Anger rises with alarming speed: the kind of cold, focused fury that makes him say things he later has to take back, and he grips the edge of the desk to keep his hands from rising to the keyboard where they will certainly punch out a reply that's designed to bruise.

Better to close the message, safely out of sight. It doesn't need to be addressed right this second; he can leave it for an hour, two hours, until this evening if he needs to, until he can work out how to call his friend out on his default overreaction without making it sound defensive and pissy. But he's reaching for the manual command, hand poised over the keystroke that will send the nine-word missive into temporary oblivion, when the screen flashes again, appending two further sentences to the bottom of the screen.

However, there is no need to "make it up" to me. The fault was mine.

Kirk's hand hovers. Fingers flex. It hovers another moment, then drifts deliberately downwards to rest against the desk.

This feels uncomfortably familiar.

He stands up abruptly, chair scraping across the carpet tile with a noise that sounds like something being softly strangled. It's a reflex action, and one which leaves him with very little in terms of options once his somatic nervous system has regained control of his motor functions, so, to cover it, he paces to the center of the room, turns on his heel, and stares out over the bay with unseeing eyes.

It's not as though anything happened. There was a moment, sure, but that's all it was: a fleeting, transitory rupture in this cover they've labored so hard to create. It went nowhere, and that's what matters. It's not as though… goddamn it.

He crosses the room in three rapid strides, ignores the computer's polite inquiry, and taps out a response.

Can we talk about this at least?

Kirk's hand hovers for half a second, no more. Send. It's done.

But there's no reply. He's not really expecting one - not really - though he watches the screen like a dying man in a desert might scan the sands for water. A minute ticks by. Two. Three, and he has work to do; he flicks back to the Ssar Fithosh and allows the frill-necked indignance to wash over him for a moment. But there's an absence humming at the back of his head: an empty space that's full of too much nothing to be comfortable.

Goddamn it.

This has happened before.

~-o-o-o-~

It's not until Bones comms him from an old 'Fleet haunt in Fisherman's Wharf that they used to talk about fondly over late-night brandies in sickbay that Kirk realizes how late it's gotten. A swift glance at the chronometer while he prevaricates over an offer of beer pitchers and big-screen Federation ice hockey playoffs tells him that it's past 2330 hours; the day has disappeared and he has no idea where it's gone. Ciana vanished into the upper echelons immediately after the review meeting, and commed a couple of hours later to say that Kirk's recommendation has been accepted and they would discuss it in the morning; she's been summoned to the Centroplex to conference call with the Minister for Federal Expansion, who's currently in Vulcana Regar and apparently not a happy woman. No-one's happy, least of all Kirk, but there's not a whole lot anyone can do about the way things are.

It's been nearly twelve hours since he sent his message, and Spock has yet to reply.

"That's a hell of a lot of silence I hear in the background," says McCoy, barely audible over the opposite of silence behind him. "If I was a gamblin' man, I'd bet you were still workin', Jim."

Kirk considers lying, but he's too tired. "It's been a long day, Bones," he says. He tries to remember the last time he ate, and comes up blank. "I'll pass tonight."

An explosion of joyful whooping in the background presumably signals a Terran goal. "Your loss, Jim," says the Doctor. Maybe he can hear the lassitude in Kirk's voice - though it doesn't seem likely, given what it's competing against - and maybe he's just distracted by the game, but he doesn't press the issue. "We still on for Sunday night?"

"What's Sunday night?"

With one voice, the bar erupts in a sound of visceral pain. "Damn, that was close," says Bones. Then, "Sunday. Your place. Ganymede's finest ruba grass whisky, courtesy of your friendly country doctor."

Sunday, of course. He'd forgotten. "Sure," says Kirk, and suspects Bones knows very well he's equivocating. Spock will be halfway through his evening meditations now; there's no chance of a reply tonight. A vicious, uncensored part of Kirk hopes the trance is fighting him every step of the way; why should he be the only one to sacrifice peace of mind? "I have work to do. I'll comm you tomorrow."

It's true: he does, but his recalcitrant brain, having worked out that it's supposed to be tired now, has succumbed to a tidal wash of fatigue that softens the edges of his thoughts. He leans back in his chair, scrubbing his hands over his eyes, and stares at his terminal screen as the blurred images gradually refocus, sharpening themselves into the familiar contours of the sthusa shell that he's been staring at, on and off, for the better part of the day. Circumstances have conspired against the procurement of a second opinion, but he's peered at it and cross-referenced and finally superimposed the two images over each other, and he's certain now, or as certain as he can be. The similarities are too pronounced to dismiss as coincidence. The ships that attacked Hathsh Sassafith, the ones that resemble an unassuming freshwater crustacean native to the temperate shores of the Fathassathis river… they look a hell of a lot like Klingon Birds-of-Prey.

But why? This is where the theory falls apart. Draconis II is a long way from the Neutral Zone and, all right, that's not exactly prima facie evidence against, but it's a long long way from anywhere they've been sighted in the past. It's not on any of their trade routes, it's not on the way to or from any of their colonies, and it doesn't have anything worth stealing, bar a few thousand gallons of deuterium-rich water that they can get on countless other worlds much closer to home. Starfleet wants it for a base of operations in an otherwise uninhabited sector of the galaxy; a defensible site to use as a jumping-off point for further exploration, but that's not precisely consonant with Klingon galactic aspirations and it's not likely to capture hearts and minds on Q'onoS as a rationale for paying a visit, Klingon-style.

It doesn't make any sense. Draconis shouldn't even be on their radar, let alone inspire a galactic odyssey across several thousand parsecs of blank space. Why attack a small, isolated settlement on the only inhabited planet in an unexceptional system, light years from anywhere interesting? Kirk rolls his head backwards on his shoulders until it's hanging over the lip of his chair, and presses the balls of his fists into his eyes, feeling little tendrils of sleep tug at the fuzzy edges of his brain. He needs Spock for this. He just thinks better when Spock's with him, and when he's not… it's as though a bulb has blown in a cavernous room; he can see enough to find his way, but it's not quite as clear. Would the world fall apart if he commed him? But he remembers the flash of something in his friend's eyes - knowledge, maybe, or resignation. He knew what was coming; he could see it in Kirk's face. It's not as though it wasn't obvious; anyone could see where Kirk wanted it to lead, and that single word - that plaintive, proscriptive Jim - was almost worse than a litany of reproach. It's not enough to definitively belie the mirrored desire that Kirk thought he saw, that he felt in the hesitant touch of his hand, but it effectively shuts down any possibility of pretending that something else was going on.

So, no, maybe the world wouldn't fall apart if he commed his friend again now, but… some other things might.

He stands up, quickly and impatiently, and crosses to the darkened window. The glass is half-clouded, in deference to an effulgent early-April sunset that bounced golden glare off the bay water at an angle that was exactly consistent with Kirk's eyeline, but the night sky is clear and he can see pinpoint stars peering through the smokey panes. He really, really ought to go home, try and grab a few hours' sleep after the messy night he passed last night; tomorrow's going to be more of the same as today, only possibly with more shouting, and it might be a good idea to have a rested brain that's able to cope with the madness. But the act of getting there is more than he can contemplate just now, and so he stands by the cool glass and watches the criss-cross lines of light scouring the heavens, bursts of heat resistance as offworld traffic penetrates the thermosphere: homespun shooting stars, brighter than the distant suns that scatter the black. Somewhere out there, someone's looking back at them: a far-off blue planet surrounding an unexceptional star, a lonely world in an otherwise lifeless system, hungry for connection. What if, when Humanity began to reach out into the void, the first faces they saw were hostile? Would they have kept on reaching? Will Draconis, now that they've had that sense of wonder snatched away from them, turn inwards again and close off the skies? Detached, isolated, there's no real reason for them to keep trying to bridge the gulf that separates them from the galaxy's abundance; the will was there, once, but what happens now?

Detached, says his brain, and a prickle of something insistent needles at the back of his consciousness. Isolated.

Kirk's eyes widen. Attacks.

Attacks.

He crosses the room in three rapid strides, grabbing and spinning his terminal screen to face him before he's sat down; speaking before it has fully turned.

"Computer," he snaps, and it flashes to life, "Call up all files on the attacks on Ajillon Prime and Archanis IV. All right," he adds, holding up a hand as though it might be in any way effective in stalling the tinny, mechanical protest that these aren't exactly specific instructions. "Archanis - limit to files for January of this year. Ajillon - November, December last year, January this year."

"Working," says the computer

Isolated settlements. Mining communities. He's seen this before. Goddamn it, it's like a blueprint, a facsimile; it's like a mirror held up to the recent past. How has he not recognized the pattern? How has he missed this?

Sweep in and sweep out; food, equipment, supplies all taken. They're not Federal planets; they're not even Federal protectorates, so there's no question of any breach of the treaty… He lowers himself into his chair as the computer rattles out two small, image-heavy files: nothing to go on, nothing to investigate. Second-hand information that suggests discrete raiding parties on a longer foray, but run them together, and… Deuterium. Livestock. Fresh water. Rations. Weapons. Separate them and you have a whole lot of nothing extraordinary.

Run them together, and you could - you could - have an armada in advance.

"Computer," says Kirk, and he can feel the adrenalin rising in his chest, rolling back the clouds of fatigue, blood singing in his ears, "Plot a route from Q'onoS to Ajillon Prime, through to Archanis IV."

"Q'onoS to Ajillon Prime, through to Archanis IV," says the computer, and the screen flashes to black, frosted with flecks of starlight and bisected by a heavy red line that runs from left to right through three yellow dots. It's almost perfectly straight.

Kirk releases a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. His head is swimming. He says, "Pull back, plot onwards to Draconis II."

"Plotting onwards to Draconis II." The image recedes, reference points shrinking as more of the quadrant pours onto the screen. As Kirk watches, the red line turns at a 2D angle of maybe thirty degrees and the viewpoint swivels to show that it's moved in a third dimension also, but not by much. Not enough to blow the theory apart.

But it's a long way from Archanis to Draconis. If there's a pattern… Kirk says, "Check for files on attacks along this section of the route."

"Working," says the computer. Then, "No attacks on file. Widen search parameters?"

Well. It was a long shot. "Widen to include systems within a radius of five light years along the route," he says.

"Working." A beat. "Files report no attacks on any systems within a radius of five light years along the route. Widen search parameters to include attacks on extra-planetary colonies?"

Kirk feels his eyebrows slowly reaching for his hairline. "Are there extra-planetary attacks reported within the area covered by the current search parameters?"

"One attack reported," says the computer. "Stardate 6422.8. Federation Starbase, designation 19."