Grinning, he asked, “Is that my counselor talking, or my wife?”

Deanna shrugged. “Does it matter? It’s good advice either way.”

His brow furrowed; he could read her emotions as clearly as she could anyone else’s. “Is something wrong?”

She hesitated, then said, “I know what this assignment means to you, what you think it represents. I know you take it very seriously—”

“Well, shouldn’t I take it seriously?” he asked, interrupting her, his words coming out more sharply than he had intended.

Deanna let it pass. “It shouldn’t be a burden, Will. That’s all I meant.”

Riker sighed, leaning forward on the railing and looking down into the void, watching the stars as they continued to stream by below him. “I know. It’s just hard not to think that there’s a lot at stake. I look back on the last decade and I wonder how so much could have happened, how so much could have changed. Sometimes I felt like we were speeding through a dark tunnel, with no way to turn, and no idea what we’d hit next. The Borg, the Klingons, the Dominion…We spent most of those years preparing for the next fight, the next war.” He didn’t bother to mention this last difficult year aboard the Enterprise;he didn’t need to. She knew as well as he what they had endured.

He turned to her again, saw that she was now watching him carefully. “Now we’ve come out the other side, and for the first time in nearly a decade, it feels like we have a chance to get back some of what we lost during those years. We can do the things we set out to do when we joined Starfleet in the first place—the things I grew up believing Starfleet was primarily about. The Federation’s finally at the point of putting ten years of near-constant strife behind it. This mission, this ship, is my chance— ourchance—to help. That burden is real, Imzadi.I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Deanna smiled gently at him, then reached up to touch the side of his face. “You shouldn’t. But you can share it. That’s why you have a wife, and a crew. So you don’t have to shoulder it alone.”

He took her hand, kissed the palm of it, and nodded. “You’re right. And I won’t. I promise.”

“Bridge to Captain Riker.”

Still holding his wife’s hand, Riker tapped his combadge. “Go ahead, Mr. Jaza.”

“Sir, theU.S.S. Seyetik has docked at Utopia Station One. They report that Dr. Ree is preparing to beam over. We have transporter room four standing by.”

A small, puzzling smile tugged at the corner of Deanna’s mouth. “Acknowledged,” Riker said. “Tell the transporter room that Commander Troi and I are on our way. Riker out.” Turning away from the railing, Riker reached out to the platform’s interface console and deactivated the Orion Arm simulation.

He turned back toward her. “What’s that smile for?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Deanna said, brushing the question aside.

Riker’s eyes narrowed with good-natured suspicion, but he decided to let the matter drop. As the captain and counselor walked together toward the exit, the walls of the lab shifted, returning to their usual standby display of the visible universe surrounding Titan.Beyond the gridwork of the ship’s drydock, the orange sunlit face of Mars dominated the space to starboard, the flat, smooth lowlands that were home to Utopia Planitia’s ground installations obliquely visible to the extreme north; at Titan’s port side, the stations and maintenance scaffolds of Utopia’s orbital complex stood out starkly against the yellow-white brilliance of Sol.

“Has the rest of the senior staff come aboard?” Riker asked Deanna as they exited the lab and strode into the corridor. He nodded at two of the ship’s biologists as they passed, an Arkenite whose name he couldn’t recall at the moment, followed by a lumbering Chelon of the palest green Riker had ever seen on a member of that species. The scientists nodded back.

“Almost,” Deanna answered. “Dr. Ree is the last. Well, except for the first officer, of course. But assuming nothing goes wrong there, you’ll be able to hold your staff meeting on schedule, and with everybody present.”

Riker tried to keep his expression steady as they passed an exposed length of the corridor wall, where several techs from the Corps of Engineers were still working at replacing a faulty ODN relay in a replicator network that crossed half the corridor. The work looked considerably more complicated than it had half an hour ago, the last time Riker passed through this section.

“I’m less worried about having a quorum at the staff meeting than I am about launching on schedule.”

“Don’t be such a worrier, Will,” Deanna said. “A few bumps along the way are natural. We still have two weeks. She’ll be ready.”

“Any new bumps I should know about?”

“Not really. Just the challenges you’d expect from trying to accommodate a crew this biologically diverse aboard a single starship. I was on deck seven while the construction team was putting the final section of Ensign Lavena’s quarters into place. I must say it’s a little unnerving to see a wall of Pacifican ocean water that extends from floor to ceiling. If we ever have a forcefield problem, her quarters will have to stay sealed, otherwise the rest of that deck will have a huge flood on its hands.”

Riker smiled. Titan’s distinction as having the most varied multispecies crew in Starfleet history was one in which he took great pride. He was convinced it set the right tone, for the right mission, at just the right time in the Federation’s history. Small wonder, then, that it was also an engineering and environmental nightmare. At least, until all the kinks were finally worked out.

“You’re right,” Riker said. “I’m not going to worry about it. Besides, it wasn’t all that long ago when we had to deal with ships that could have taken on a lot more water than that.” Our honeymoon on the Opal Sea,he thought. Quite an adventurethat was.

They reached a turbolift and stepped inside. “Transporter room four,” Riker instructed it. The doors closed, and the lift started to move.

“There’s something I do need to bring up,” Deanna said. “It’s Dr. Ra-Havreii.”

“What about him?”

“He’s asked to remain aboard Titanduring its shakedown.”

Riker frowned. “Did he say why?”

Deanna shook her head. “He wasn’t specific, but I could tell he was troubled about something.”

“A problem with the ship?”

“No, I asked him that immediately. He said he has no concerns about how Titanwill perform, and his emotions bear that out. This is a personal request.”

Riker nodded, considering the matter for a moment. “All right. Let him know he’s welcome to remain aboard during the shakedown. No, wait, belay that. I’lltell him. A personal invitation from the captain is the least of the courtesies I can extend to Titan’s designer. And while he’s with us, see if you can probe a bit deeper about his reasons for staying aboard—without offending him, of course. Maybe after Dr. Ree is settled.”

“Understood,” Deanna said, and there it was again—that small, restrained smile, the same one she had nearly released when Jaza had informed him of Ree’s imminent arrival.

The lift halted, depositing them outside the transporter room. Riker stopped. “All right, Deanna, what is it?”

Her smile finally broke loose entirely, spreading across her face until it became a grin. It was almost as though she was trying to keep herself from laughing. Not a good sign.

“You never read that file I left you on the Pahkwa-thanh, did you?” she said.

The Pahkwa-thanh,Riker thought. Dr. Ree’s species.“I didn’t see the hurry,” he said aloud. “What’s important to me about Dr. Ree are his talents and his record as a Starfleet physician, not where he comes from. I care about whohe is, not whathe is.”