Anonymous eyewitness statements corroborated one another’s accounts of the bizarre powers Mitchell had displayed during the ship’s transit to Delta Vega. The unattributed statements of these alleged witnesses also had exposed several small but inexplicable discrepancies between Kirk’s own official logs, the death certificate filed by Dr. Piper in the Vanguard operations center, and the account of helm officer Lee Kelso’s death on Delta Vega.

Smack-dab in the middle was Kirk’s glib verbal evasion: “My answer is in my report.” Opposite the rest of Pennington’s story, those six words looked more damning than Kirk could ever have suspected when he’d said them.

The bottom-line conclusion of Pennington’s story was simple and to the point: The inconsistencies all pointed to a cover-up. Specifically, Pennington had made a very convincing argument that Kirk had, in fact, personally killed Gary Mitchell and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner. The question that Pennington had left unanswered was whether Kirk’s action was justified.

I suppose I should be grateful he cast himself only as my judge and not as my jury and executioner to boot, Kirk brooded. He clicked off the monitor screen, rose from his desk, and collapsed onto his bed. It irked him that members of his crew had spoken without permission to Pennington. Torn between his respect for the freedom of the press and the desire to maintain discipline aboard his ship, he reminded himself that freedoms such as this were what the Federation stood for. He remembered one of the teachings of Captain Friedl Segfrunsdóttir, a professor of Federation Law at the Academy: It’s not enough to stand up for rights and freedoms only when they’re convenient. To defend them in principle, defend them in practice, always.

Kirk had considered those good words to live by then, and he still did now. He resolved not to issue any prohibitions to his crew regarding Pennington, or any other reporter. The story might yet blow over, or it might mushroom into a court-martial. Damn the consequences, he decided. I know what I did, and why I did it. And if I have to answer for that…so be it.

He was about to lower the lights and settle in for a much-needed night of rest when his door signal buzzed. “Come.”

The door swished open. Scotty barreled in, a portable data display clutched in his hand. The look on his face was a mix of horror and righteous rage, and his anger thickened his brogue. “Captain!” He waved the data device at Kirk. “Have ye read this? That daft bugger Pennington’s slandered us! Slandered you!”

“Scotty, calm down. It’s—”

“—a travesty! That’s what it is! I swear to ye, Captain, if I find him, he’s goin’ head-first into an impulse vent!”

“Mr. Scott, that’s not—”

“Of all the bloody nerve! Who does he think he is? And who the bloody hell was he talkin’ to? Not my people, I’ll tell you that fer nothin’…”

As Scotty’s tirade continued, Kirk settled into a chair and waited for the chief engineer to pause for breath. Suspecting it might take a while, he made himself comfortable.

9

“Helm, move us into a standard orbit,” Captain Gannon said. “Lieutenant Nave, hail the outpost.”

Gannon watched the planet’s curving line of night slip off of the main viewer as the Bombay circuited the upper hemisphere of Ravanar IV. They had made good time, reaching the outpost in less than seventy-eight hours.

Her alpha-shift team was on the bridge. Milonakis drifted from station to station, ever vigilant for potential problems and eager to keep everyone in synch. Lieutenant Oriana D’Amato was at the helm; beside her, navigator Ensign Berry was already hard at work plotting the ship’s fastest route to its next urgent task. Lieutenant ch’Shonnas quietly monitored his science display, the cerulean glow from under the sensor hood barely noticeable on his blue Andorian skin.

Lieutenant Susan Nave pivoted away from her communications console. “Captain, we have audio contact with the outpost.”

“Patch it through.” Gannon turned her eyes upward to help herself focus on the message, tuning out the gentle bleeps and whistles of the bridge’s computers at work.

The teasing voice of Commander Dean Singer came through loud and clear. “Well, well, if it isn’t the hardest-working ship in Starfleet.” She could hear his teammates in the background, laughing and making other sounds of relieved jubilation. “You have our new coffee machine, yes?”

Coffee machine? Gannon grinned. His code phrases aren’t subtle, but at least they make me laugh. “Yeah, Dean, we’ve got your new coffeemaker. You fellas must be pretty surly after a week without your daily java.”

“You can say that again.”

“It comes with a free pound of whole beans. Do you want the Colombian, the Denevan Mountain Roast, or the—”

“Captain,” ch’Shonnas interrupted. “Picking up six signals closing fast.” Milonakis dashed toward an auxiliary sensor station. The androgynously beautiful Andorian officer continued, “Traveling in pairs, and converging on our coordinates at high impulse.”

“Confirmed,” Milonakis said from the opposite side of the bridge. “Boosting power to the sensors.”

“Batten down the hatches, Dean,” Gannon said. “We’ve got company. Bombay out.” With a slashing motion, she signaled Nave to close the channel. “Milonakis, can we identify those ships?”

“Heavy trace elements in their impulse exhaust…” He and ch’Shonnas volleyed reports past Gannon, like verbal badminton.

“Local subspace dimpling indicates rapid deceleration from relativistic velocity,” ch’Shonnas said.

“Reading unusual energy surges on all six ships…”

“Comparing against the databank…”

Milonakis looked up, alarmed. “They’re Tholian.”

Lifting his eyes from his sensors, ch’Shonnas turned toward Gannon. “Confirmed, Captain. Six vessels, Tholian design, on intercept trajectories, and charging weapons.”

“Yellow alert, raise shields.” She swiveled toward Nave as the warning lights on the walls began to flash. “Hail them.” Gannon pondered why a Tholian patrol would be this far from home and why it would act so aggressively. This wasn’t Tholian space, and they had never before gone out of their way to pick a fight.

Nave entered the commands and nodded back to Gannon. “Hailing frequencies open.”

“Attention, unidentified Tholian vessels. This is Captain Hallie Gannon of the Federation starship Bombay. We are here on a peaceful mission of exploration. Please respond.”

Anxiety leached the moisture from Gannon’s mouth as several seconds dragged on without reply from the Tholians. Once again hunched over his sensor display, ch’Shonnas said, “Captain, the Tholian vessels are slowing to half-impulse, raising shields, and deploying into an attack formation.”

“Helm, break orbit, start evasive maneuvers. Get us out of here.” The Tholian cruisers took shape on the main viewer. Gannon thumbed the intercom switch on the arm of her chair. “All hands, this is the captain. Red alert! Battle stations!”

My God, Kevin Judge thought. Has she gone mad?

Main engineering on the Bombay was a madhouse on the best of days. Now the red-alert klaxon was wailing, crimson lights were flashing from every corner and flat surface, and his engineers were scurrying every which way in a frantic race to escape the cold hard fact that they were in the part of the ship that any smart foe would target first and hit the hardest.

He waved down the attention of a team of engineers as they jogged past, each clutching a breathing mask in one hand and a toolkit in the other. “Dump anything noncritical,” Judge told them over the din. “Power down secondary systems, route everything to shields, sensors, and tactical!” Working at his master console, he pieced together new circuit paths, desperate to distribute the stress loads that combat-power demands would place on the already sorely overtaxed starship. He felt the impulse engines rumble overhead as the ship broke orbit and accelerated into battle.