The fair-haired, Scotland-born writer looked annoyingly fit, in a yogurt-and-yoga kind of way. His smile felt condescending. “Quinn. I see you found the fast track back to the gutter.”

“Yeah, but I’m looking up at the stars.”

Pennington looked up. “Those are holograms.” Back down at Quinn. “Can you even see them through those whiskey goggles you call eyes?”

“No, but I know they’re there. And they’re lookin’ back at me.” And laughing.

The younger man kneeled and tried to snake his hands under Quinn’s armpits, but the grizzled old pilot and soldier of fortune shook him off with a violent spasm of twists and jerks.

“Let me help you up,” Pennington said. “We need to get you home.” He reached out again, and this time Quinn was too tired to struggle, so he let his body go limp and transform into dead weight in Pennington’s hands. “Come on, you stupid tosser, get up.”

Drool spilled from the corner of Quinn’s mouth and ran down his shirt as he mumbled in a pathetic monotone, “Leave me here.”

Pennington’s voice cracked from exertion. “Not a chance.”

Exhibiting a degree of stubbornness Quinn hadn’t known the man had, Pennington snuck under Quinn’s arm and draped it across his shoulders, then forced him to his feet. Despite thinking he would passively resist, Quinn found his feet keeping step with Tim’s as the writer lurched forward and led Quinn down a street of blurry lights and murky shadows. “You’re doing great, mate,” he said. “Just a bit farther.”

They might have been lumbering along for seconds or minutes—Quinn couldn’t really tell—but he lost hold of his anger and sank into maudlin gratitude. “Thanks.”

Pennington’s voice was taut from the strain of carrying Quinn. “You’re welcome.”

Not certain he’d made his point, Quinn added, following a wet and odiferous belch, “No, really, I mean it, thanks. I’m glad you found me instead of . . . instead of those security goons.”

Pennington guided Quinn around a corner. “They aren’t looking for you.”

“The hell they ain’t. Busted up some shit real good down at Shannon’s.”

“I squared that, mate. Paid for what you broke. Got the charges dropped.” As they started up some stairs, Quinn’s head dipped forward, and he found himself hypnotized by the off-sync spectacle of their moving shoes. Pennington’s feet stepped straight and sure, Quinn’s splayed in a pigeon-toed pantomime of alcoholic ineptitude.

Weaving and staggering down an open-air promenade, Quinn began to recognize familiar details of the residential building in which he lived. Even in his deeply sotted state, he knew that without Pennington’s guidance, he would never have been able to tell one of the station’s prefabricated living modules from any other, much less have found his own door in this rat’s maze from hell. Then he caught up with the conversation of a minute earlier. Newsboy’s probably the only reason I ain’t in the brig right now. “How ’bout my other bar tabs?”

“Settled,” Pennington said.

They stopped in front of a door that Quinn assumed must be his own. With effort, he swiveled his head toward Pennington, only to find the man’s face too close for him to focus on. “So, does that mean I can go back to Tom Walker’s place?”

“No. It just means he won’t press charges.” The door opened, and Pennington dragged Quinn inside. He led him to a sofa whose upholstery had already suffered a terrifying number of indignities caused by Quinn’s headlong plunge off the wagon of sobriety, and then he slipped out from under Quinn’s arm and let him collapse onto the sofa.

“Home sweet home,” Quinn mumbled into the cushion.

Pennington took a moment to prop Quinn on his side, using pillows to prevent him from rolling onto his back. Then he fetched a small trash can from the kitchenette and placed it next to the sofa. He ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. “Need anything else?”

Quinn thought he should find some way to thank Pennington, some way to reward him for playing the part of his guardian angel despite all the stupid crap Quinn had said to him, for being such a good friend to him despite all the misery Quinn had brought into his life, most of it unintentional but a catastrophe nonetheless. Of all the people he had ever known, Pennington was one of the few he still knew who hadn’t written him off as a lost cause. That deserved some kind of recognition. At the very least, it merited a sincere word of thanks. Something.

“Tim . . . ,” he began.

His stomach twisted in a knot, his chest heaved, and he puked a gutful of half-digested food and bile that reeked of sour mash, all over Pennington’s feet.

He was almost grateful to lose consciousness before having to say he was sorry.

Doctor Carol Marcus was on the move and in no mood to stop for anyone or anything. She passed one of her colleagues after another as she circled the main isolation chamber located in the center of the Vault. The recently rebuilt, state-of-the-art top-secret research facility lay deep inside the core of Starbase 47, and it was the most heavily shielded and redundantly equipped section of the entire Watchtower-class space station.

“Watch those power levels,” she said to Doctor Hofstadter as she passed his console. “We can’t afford a spike.” The dark-haired, bespectacled researcher nodded once in confirmation of Marcus’s instruction, then he resumed his work. Striding past another station, Marcus paused long enough to lean past Doctor Tarcoh, a spindly, soft-spoken Deltan man of middle years. She activated a function on his panel. “Remember to keep the sensors in passive mode. I don’t want to feed this thing any signals it can use. You saw what happened last time.” Tarcoh continued his work, duly chastised for his error.

The “last time” Marcus had spoken of, and which every scientist on her team recalled all too vividly, was a disastrous attempt to make contact with a Shedai trapped inside a Mirdonyae Artifact identical to the one still housed inside the Vault’s main isolation chamber. The steps that had been necessary to transmit a signal through the artifact’s baffling subatomic lattices had also enabled the creature snared inside it to replenish its power and exploit damage the Federation researchers had unwittingly wrought in the artifact. That error had led to an explosive episode of escape and the violent destruction of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers vessel U.S.S. Lovell.

As she moved around the laboratory, checking status gauges and second-guessing all her colleagues’ work, her Starfleet counterpart, Lieutenant Ming Xiong, fell into step beside her. “He’s still waiting for you in your office,” Xiong said.

The reminder turned her mood into thin ice—cold and brittle. “Let him wait.”

Marcus kept moving, and Xiong followed her. “He’s showing you a courtesy by coming down here. He could’ve had you hauled up to his office.”

She ignored Xiong’s warning and took a moment to sidle up to Doctor Koothrappali. “Keep an eye on the plasma capacitors. If they redline, dump the charge through the station’s main deflector dish. Don’t ask for permission, don’t wait to be told. Just do it.”

The longer Marcus pretended nothing was wrong, the more apparent Xiong’s anxiety became. “This isn’t a joke, Doctor. And it’s not some mere formality.”

“When did you become such a stickler for rules and regulations?” As soon as she’d said it, she felt a pang of regret, because Xiong’s reflexive wince told her she’d struck a nerve. The young lieutenant had once enjoyed a reputation on Vanguard as a maverick and iconoclast. The last few years, however, had broken his spirit by slow degrees; the final straw had been the recent demise of his friend Lieutenant Commander Bridget McLellan, known to her friends as Bridy Mac. The former second officer of the Sagittarius, McLellan had been reassigned to Starfleet Intelligence as a covert operative attached to Operation Vanguard. Xiong had often spoken of her as his “big sister.” Her death in the line of duty, while on a mission to which he had assigned her, had left him emotionally devastated for weeks.