“Not just a sneak-and-peek, then,” Nassir said.

Shaking his head, Reyes replied, “Not this time. We want a full survey. But after Erilon, we’re taking precautions.”

Nassir nodded once. “Understandable,” he said. “Terrible, what happened to Zhao. He was a great officer.” With an almost paternal concern, he asked, “How’s Khatami handling command?”

“Like she was born to it,” Reyes said. “It’s not the way anyone likes to get promoted, but she’s making it work.”

“Good,” Nassir said. “I’m glad.” He sighed, then changed topics. “When’s our mission briefing?”

“Tomorrow at 0900,” Reyes said. “I’ll have Xiong meet with your people on the Sagittarius.” Eyeing Nassir for his reaction, he added, “Incidentally, Xiong’ll be going with you.”

To Reyes’s surprise, the news seemed to please the captain. “Excellent,” Nassir said. “I rather enjoyed his last visit.”

Amazing, Reyes mused. An authority figure Xiong hasn’t pissed off yet. Maybe there’s hope for that kid, after all. “Glad to hear it,” Reyes said, as they started sidestepping through wave after wave of civilians, colonists from the Terra Courser who were pouring onto the docking bay thoroughfare. Eager to escape the press of bodies, Reyes said, “I’ve kept you from breakfast long enough, Captain. Ready to head up to Manón’s?”

“Absolutely,” Nassir said.

They cut left toward a nearby turbolift and were almost free of the crowd when a woman’s voice called out sharply from several meters away. “Diego!”

Jeanne. Dread, like a sudden splash of cold water in his face, shocked Reyes to a halt. He tried not to clench his jaw but failed. Nassir, standing at his side, turned and looked behind them. Reyes asked, “She’s coming this way, isn’t she?”

“With a vengeance,” Nassir said.

Reyes closed his eyes. He took a deep breath that did absolutely nothing to enhance his calm. Opening his eyes to confront the inevitable, he said to Nassir, “Go on ahead, Captain.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nassir, who advanced quickly toward the turbolift. The Deltan captain had always demonstrated a keen sense of when to make an exit—an option that Reyes was, at that moment, dismayed to find himself without. As Nassir entered the turbolift, Reyes turned and faced his ex-wife.

Like many natives of Luna, including Reyes himself, Jeanne Vinueza was tall and long-limbed—the result of spending part of her formative years in a low-gravity environment. Her chestnut hair was curly and spilled over her shoulders and upper back, longer than it had been when he’d last seen her more than six years earlier. As always, she was stylishly dressed and carried a metallic briefcase. She fixed him with her brown-eyed stare as she strode toward him. Other civilians scrambled to make a path for her, some stumbling almost comically out of her way.

Expecting a verbal onslaught, Reyes lowered his chin and chose to lean into the harangue. She stopped in front of him, eyes blazing, and planted her free hand on her hip. She remained as youthful-looking as ever; if Reyes hadn’t known that she was nearly forty-five years old, he might have guessed her age to be thirty-five instead.

Neither of them said a word for several seconds. Then the gleam in her eyes changed from furious to mischievous, and her lips trembled before opening into a lopsided smile. “Hola, Diego,” she said.

He was both relieved and annoyed. “Hi, Jeanne.”

An awkward moment lingered as they wondered how to greet each other. Several clumsy attempts at a platonic embrace and kisses on both cheeks left Reyes feeling self-conscious. He pulled back from Jeanne and looked around to see if any members of Vanguard’s crew were observing this embarrassing reunion. Hundreds of hastily averted glances made him conclude that everyone on the station was probably watching them.

“So,” she began, clearly searching for words. “You’re a commodore now. Impressive.”

Holding up his wrist, he said, “Don’t let a little extra braid fool you. I’m still a jerk.”

“Sí,” she replied, “but an impressive jerk.”

He marshaled a pained grin. “Please tell me you didn’t spend eight weeks on a transport just to come out here and flatter me.”

Turning businesslike, she said, “I’m just passing through, on my way out to Gamma Tauri IV.”

That didn’t sound right to Reyes. “Now, that’s a surprise,” he said. “Thought you always said you wouldn’t be caught dead on a colony planet.”

“True,” she admitted. “I used to say that. But that was before I was offered the chance to be the leader of one.”

“You’re the president of the New Boulder colony?”

“Don’t make it sound so glamorous,” she said. “It’s an appointed position with a contract, like a company executive. And my first item of business is a meeting with Ambassador Jetanien, Captain Desai, and your colonial administrator, Aole Miller.” She looked over his shoulder at a chronometer on the wall. “Speaking of which, I’m running late.” For a moment, she seemed on the verge of saying something else but then thought better of it. “Maybe I’ll see you before I ship out,” she said, inching away toward the turbolift.

“Maybe,” he said. “You know where to find me.”

A turbolift car arrived. Jeanne stepped in and squeezed into place among the other passengers. The doors closed, and Reyes was left brooding in the middle of the passageway.

Serves you right for not reading the damn colony briefings, Reyes berated himself. The Lovell and its team from the Corps of Engineers were currently deployed to Gamma Tauri IV—principally for colonial support but also to find another alien artifact like the ones that had been found on Ravanar and Erilon. If another such artifact was on the planet, as Xiong’s research suggested, and it proved to be as much trouble as those previous discoveries, then everyone on Gamma Tauri IV was in danger.

Reyes had never been comfortable with Starfleet Command’s decision to let civilian colonization efforts provide unwitting cover for its search for new samples of the Taurus meta-genome—an exceptionally complex string of alien DNA, whose discovery a few years earlier had sparked Starfleet’s mad rush into this remote sector of local space, including the construction of Starbase 47 itself. The presence of a legitimate colony, however, was the best camouflage his people could ask for; it gave them countless valid reasons for being on Gamma Tauri IV. Defense, construction, various surveys, mapping, irrigation efforts, sewage treatment—any number of civil-engineering efforts would conceal the Lovell team’s hunt for the meta-genome and another artifact. The risk, of course, was that one wrong move could put the entire colony in peril.

And now Jeanne would be in the middle of it.

He remained bitter toward her for the way she had ended their marriage seven years earlier; she had terminated it like a canceled contract, as if it had been nothing more than a simple partnership that had outlived its usefulness. Despite that, part of him still harbored affection for her. Even as he had cursed her name during the divorce, deep fires had smoldered in his heart for her, and he had tried more than once to fan them back to life; but where he had seen the possibility of rekindling their romance, Jeanne had seen only ashes.

I should tell her not to go, he insisted to himself. Then duty reminded him, You can’t tell her why. And unless she knows why, she won’t listen to you. Maybe not even then.

It had been a serious breach of orders for him to bring his two closest friends—Dr. Ezekiel Fisher and Captain Rana Desai, the station’s presiding Judge Advocate General Corps officer—into the loop several weeks ago, but at least they were Starfleet officers, and he could make a case to Starfleet Command that they needed to know the truth in order to perform their duties.

Telling a civilian would be another matter. Revealing the truth about Operation Vanguard and its current mission on Gamma Tauri IV to Jeanne, no matter how noble his motives for doing so might be, would mean the end of his career once word got out. About that, he had no illusions. If he warned her, the truth eventually would come out, and when it did, he would spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement on the coldest landmass on the remotest planet within reach of the Federation.