“Not at all,” Quinn said, slapping the dust from his trousers as he walked toward the entrance to the docking bay. “Tomorrow’s another day, I reckon. We’ll get some shuteye, start fresh first thing in the—” He checked his chrono and finished his sentence. “—afternoon. Brunch and Bloody Marys on me.”

Despite himself, Pennington smiled. “You’re all right, mate,” he said. “For a pain in the ass.”

“I’m a work in progress,” Quinn said, unlocking the docking bay door. He let Pennington step past him, down the passage to the ship, and locked the portal behind them.

The mottled gray bulk of the tramp freighter Rocinante sat dark and quiet in the middle of an open-air landing pad. Beyond the vessel’s large warp nacelles, its wingtips stood upright in their landing configuration; its narrow wedge-shaped fuselage was connected to the spaceport by a web of umbilical lines providing power, local communications, water supply, waste removal, and fuel.

After several weeks of hopping from one system to another with Quinn, Pennington had in the past week been entrusted with the ship’s security codes. He could now lock and unlock the rear hatch, enabling him to come and go as he pleased while Quinn busied himself with the business of booking freight or passengers for each leg of their journey. With the slow precision of someone who had just mastered a code sequence—or someone who was just drunk enough to have trouble remembering it—he opened the ship’s aft hatch. It lowered with a sickly whine of poorly maintained hydraulics and thick downward plumes of ghostly white vapor.

Pennington plodded with leaden steps up the ramp and lurched like dead weight into his hammock. Several seconds later Quinn clomped up the metal ramp into the main compartment and sealed the aft hatch behind them. Several recent brushes with unsavory types had left Quinn on the defensive. Where he had once taken security for granted, he now considered it to be chief among his concerns.

Quinn sat on his hammock and pulled off his boots. The stench of his sweaty socks had made Pennington gag during their first shared journey. After nearly two months in the man’s company, Pennington still found the smell horrid, but he had developed enough resistance to it that his reaction was limited to wrinkling his nose and rolling over to face the bulkhead.

Just as he was prepared to be serenaded by the buzzsaw of Quinn’s postbinge snoring, the pilot muttered a low string of curses and plodded off to the cockpit.

Twisting back around, Pennington called out, “What is it?”

“Message light’s on,” Quinn said. “Might be a job.” Pennington listened to the sound of Quinn tapping buttons for a few seconds, then the grizzled pilot sighed. “Aw, crap.”

Pennington rolled out of his hammock and stumbled into the cockpit with Quinn. “What’s going on?”

“It’s from T’Prynn,” he said. “There’s a Starfleet ship down on Jinoteur IV, needs a new fuel pod before the Klingons get there—and she wants us to bring it to ’em.”

“Jinoteur?” The word jogged Pennington’s memory. “That’s where we jacked that Klingon probe for her, remember?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said. “I remember. I bet it ain’t a coincidence, either.” He punched up a second screen of data. “She already bought the fuel pod from a vendor here on Nejev. Wants us to pick it up and hightail it to the Sagittarius.” He stabbed at a control with his index finger and shut off the comm screen. “So much for making a profit on this run. Do me a favor, will ya? Go below and make as much room in the hold as you can. I’ll call the vendor and tell them we’re on our way.”

“Sure, mate, you got it,” Pennington said. He left the bridge in a hurry and made his way down to the hold, grinning the entire time. He wasn’t the least bit happy that a Starfleet ship was in trouble, but he was ecstatic that he would be the first and only reporter there to cover it.

It had been a few months since T’Prynn had duped him into filing a story about the destruction of the U.S.S. Bombay, one that had borne all the earmarks of truth but had turned out to be a complete fabrication. He still had not fully deduced her motives for embarrassing the Federation News Service and himself with that intricate charade, nor had he forgiven her. Having been disgraced in the eyes of his peers, Pennington had spent the months since then filing anonymous filler for various news services. Making matters worse, by filing many of his stories from Vanguard, he had unwittingly condemned them to the limbo of the Starfleet censor’s office.

Now he had exclusive access to what promised to be a truly compelling and eminently newsworthy event involving another Starfleet ship—and this time his reporting would be firsthand, as an eyewitness and participant. The sweetest detail of all, however, was that he had T’Prynn to thank for it.

Who says irony is dead? he mused as he set himself to work making room in the Rocinante’s hold—and daydreaming about the story that was about to resurrect his career.

16

“For that reason,” Captain Okagawa said via the secure channel, “we think the Klingons are preparing to eliminate the civilian colony on Gamma Tauri IV, as a precursor to assuming control over the entire planet. We’ve started evacuating our own people, but the colonists are another matter. My first concern was that we wouldn’t have enough room for all of them. Now it seems the bigger problem is persuading them to leave at all.”

Dr. Fisher stood flanked by Ambassador Jetanien and Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn in front of Commodore Reyes’s desk, listening to Okagawa’s report. Having only recently been brought into the loop regarding Operation Vanguard, Fisher chose to stay quiet for the time being. He turned a red data card over and over in his hand while the meeting continued.

Jetanien asked Okagawa, “Have the Klingons made any overt threat against your ship or your people on the planet?”

“No, Your Excellency,” Okagawa said. “But I’ve put my ship on yellow alert anyway. ‘Turn the other cheek’ doesn’t mean stand there and wait to get hit.”

Reyes nodded. “My sentiments exactly.”

“Captain,” T’Prynn said, “when did you detect the spike in energy readings on Gamma Tauri IV?”

“About three and a half hours ago.”

T’Prynn looked at Jetanien and then Reyes as she said, “The signals group down in the Vault detected unusually intense activity on the Shedai carrier-wave frequency around that time. They claim the signal originated in the Jinoteur system.”

“Then it would appear that the link between those two systems is more than merely circumstantial,” Jetanien said as he began pacing slowly in the middle of the office. Looking at Captain Okagawa on the monitor, he continued, “Do you have an estimate on when Klingon reinforcements will arrive?”

Okagawa shook his head. “Nothing definite. But considering how fast their colony ship moved in, I suspect their military can’t be far behind.”

“Getting back to the situation on the planet,” Reyes said, “how many civilians were killed at that aquifer dig?”

In the time it took Okagawa to look at his data slate for the answer, T’Prynn said, “Thirty-nine: nine engineers, twenty-eight workers, and two peace officers.”

A few short clicks prefaced Jetanien’s query. “Are we certain beyond a reasonable doubt that the Klingons aren’t responsible for the attack on the colonists?”

“That’s for Dr. Fisher to say,” Okagawa said. “We’ve sent all the forensic data we collected at the scene. As far as deciding what it all means—“

Reyes cut in, “Point taken, Captain.” Looking at Fisher, Reyes said, “We need your report on the double, Zeke, so consider it a rush job.”

Fisher quipped with a weary smirk, “Aren’t they all?”

“Captain,” Reyes said, “continue evacuating our people. I’ll have the Endeavour pick up the pace; they should be with you in less than twenty-one hours. That should be enough to make the Klingons think twice before taking a shot at you.”