It was not an unusual experience for an explorer, of course, and it was a welcome one; yet it naturally brought trepidation too, as any new undertaking did. Perhaps that was all there was behind her sense of alien-yet-familiar dread. Maybe it was heightened because from here on, they were completely on their own—no real-time contact with Starfleet Command, no starbases to offer rest and replenishment, no other starships able to reach them in a hurry. She had gotten a taste of that during their recent sojourn in the galaxy next door. But in an odd way there was something even more daunting about doing it on purpose.

She felt Will’s gentle skepticism, reminding her that she sometimes overanalyzed, an occupational hazard. “Probably,” he said aloud. “But keep a mental eye out, just in case.”

Now she did turn to him. “Aye, aye, Captain,” she said with an insouciant salute.

He looked her over, reminding her that she was thoroughly out of uniform. “Must be cold over by the windows. Wanna come back to bed?”

“No, thanks,” she replied after a moment. Somehow she didn’t feel chilled anymore; it must have been a relic of the dream. “I don’t think I could get back to sleep right away. Maybe I’ll go for a walk to clear my head.”

“All right, then.” She sensed the disappointment that he quickly reined in. She knew he regretted that he couldn’t always be the one to make her feel better, to take care of her. But she also knew he understood how it was for her. Not long before her ordeal with Shinzon, Will had suffered his own ordeal, held hostage and tortured by the dictator Kinchawn of Tezwa. He still had his own occasional nightmares, and though he’d cherished her comfort and support, still there were times that he needed to deal with them on his own. After all, in the wake of being victimized, degraded and depersonalized, it was healthy to reassert one’s independence, to find one’s own inner strength.

Deanna went to the closet, slipped on a light blue wrap and a pair of sandals, and headed out the door. She sent a light mental caress Will’s way, only to find that he’d already drifted off again. Still, his serenity in slumber was a pleasant sendoff.

Strolling the corridors of Titanfelt somewhat like an exploration in itself. It was still a fairly new environment to her—a new class of ship, a new set of crewmates. More importantly, that crew was the most diverse one in Starfleet’s history, including many species Deanna had never personally met before. The Federation had always striven for diversity in principle, but in practice had tended toward fairly segregated crews. It wasn’t a formal policy; people generally just preferred to work among those with similar customs, outlooks, and environmental needs. Even in the absence of outright prejudice, segregation tended to result from simple complacency, the unresisted impulse to seek the familiar. So maintaining true equality took conscious effort, and sometimes the effort fell prey to other priorities, or to simple neglect. There had been occasional attempts to challenge that status quo, most notably Willard Decker’s Enterpriseexperiment of a century before. But reconciling the needs and attitudes of radically different species posed many challenges, and with the loss of Decker on his crew’s maiden voyage, some of the impetus for greater diversity had been lost. The technology for balancing so many species’ environmental and medical needs had been less advanced then as well. So over the ensuing years, things had settled back into a less challenging status quo. Certainly some progress had been made; during Deanna’s tenure on the Enterprise-D and -E, over a dozen species had been represented among the crew. However, it was still fairly unusual for humanoids and nonhumanoids to crew together routinely.

The minds behind Titan’s mission had wanted to change that. This new generation of Luna-class explorer ships—a prototype design mothballed when the Dominion War had forced a shift toward more combat-oriented starships—had been revived after war’s end, promoted as a reassertion of Starfleet’s core ideals of peaceful exploration and diplomacy. For years, Starfleet had been forced to focus on mere survival, and many of its ideals had needed to be compromised in pursuit of that goal. Some had been compromised without so great a need—as Deanna and Will knew better than most, after their experiences on the Ba’ku planet and Tezwa. Many in Starfleet felt it was essential to reaffirm a higher set of values than survival alone, to remind the peoples of the Federation that it was more important to live forsomething than simply to stay alive. Hence the ambitious new mission of Titanand its eleven sister ships—emissaries to the unknown, questing out in all directions, hands extended to friends not yet met.

But if these ships were to represent the Federation, it was resolved, then they must represent it in all its diversity. If they stood for peaceful coexistence with future neighbors, then they must stand for peaceful, eager coexistence among the Federation’s members. Hence the Great Experiment was spawned, reviving Willard Decker’s dream and going it one better—or twelve better.

Will Riker had been a natural choice to carry forward that dream—even aside from the striking similarity of their names and aspects of their life histories. For as long as Deanna had known him, William Thomas Riker had been a passionate xenophile, not merely tolerant of others’ differences, but positively delighted by them. He took an unabashed, childlike glee in learning about other cultures, sampling their cuisine, their customs, their music, their art—and in his bachelor days, their sexual customs as well. (Which didn’t trouble Deanna in the least; on the contrary, his range of experience in that regard had benefitted her greatly. Though she couldn’t always say the same about his experiments with alien music or cuisine.) The chance to captain a crew with so many different species on board, many of which he’d never worked alongside before, had been a dream come true for him.

Will had been a gregarious first officer on the Enterprise,popular with his crewmates, organizing poker games, dinner parties, and other crew activities. So far, after a hesitant start and a little prompting from Deanna, he had proven a gregarious captain as well, as fascinated by his crew as by the unknowns that lay outside. It made for high morale among the crew, and Deanna was gratified by that.

However, it also gave her a lot of work. Eager to learn about his crewmates’ diversity, and to prove it was an asset to a starship crew, Will had encouraged the expression of cultural idiosyncrasies that a more conservative captain might have discouraged in the name of discipline. To be sure, Titan’s personnel were all professionals, all perfectly capable of self-discipline, and did not use that liberty as an excuse for irresponsible or outrageous behavior. Still, with so many different value systems interacting, some friction was bound to arise.

Deanna’s wanderings brought her to a case in point: the mess hall. Glancing inside through the windows inset in the doors, she resisted an urge to recoil at the sight within: the predators were feeding. It was hard enough for the members of a single species to agree on what constituted appealing cuisine and acceptable table manners, let alone the members of multiple species. But this was particularly so when several of those species were obligate carnivores.

In the first weeks of Titan’s mission, Dr. Ree, the ship’s dinosaurlike Pahkwa-thanh chief medical officer, had asserted his predatory identity by putting on flamboyant public displays of his rather savage approach to ingesting large, bloody chunks of raw replicated meat (and sometimes real raw meat, courtesy of the Klingons whose vessels had accompanied Titanon the Romulan mission). It was a bold gesture of the kind Deanna would expect from a predator, a forthright assertion: This is what I am, and if you wish to accept me you must adapt to it.It was also typical of the doctor’s cutting sense of humor, the kind of wit that pulled no punches and shocked people for their own edification. And at first it had just been accepted as one person’s eccentricity—although Deanna had noticed that many in the crew took careful note of Ree’s routine and sought to schedule their dining at different times.