“That’s unclear at the moment,” Reyes said. Pennington waited for him to elaborate, but the man had said his piece.

“But you have a hypothesis as to what happened?”

“I have orders to investigate.”

“Where was she lost?”

“That’s classified.”

Pennington saw where this was going. “Her assignment?”

“Classified,” Reyes said, his tone regretful.

“Can you at least get me a crew roster?”

Reyes shook his head. “Not until the families are notified, you know that.”

“Some scoop,” Pennington said, with more bitterness than he had intended. “One of our ships is missing, and so are the details.” He pushed his chair back, stood, and switched off the recorder in his hand.

“This was a courtesy, Mr. Pennington,” Reyes said. “In an hour I’ll be making a general announcement. When I do, you can bet every comm line off this station will be jammed with traffic for the next day. If you want to file this story while it’s still yours, I suggest you get a move on.”

“Thanks.” Pennington walked out and made it most of the way through ops before his false angry glare faltered, threatening to reveal the tears that were welling in his eyes.

He was deeply thankful to reach the turbolift alone. As soon as it had dropped below the upper decks into the sparsely occupied and heavily insulated core section, he halted its descent and let himself sink down to the floor as his sorrow poured out of him. Heaving sobs clogged his sinuses, forcing him to gasp raggedly for air. Tormented wails erupted from deep within him, one after another, for minutes that felt endless.

When, at last, he had exhausted his body’s reservoir of tears and rage, he remained seated on the floor of the turbolift, his head atop his knees, his grief-reddened eyes hidden behind his hands. Memories of Oriana’s hair, her laugh, her accent…they called out to him from the cenotaph of his memories, reminding him that every passing day for the rest of his life would carry him farther from her touch.

A voice from the intercom intruded on his grief.

“Turbolift three-fifteen-alpha passenger, this is the ops center. Are you all right?”

Pennington was glad the person on the other end could only hear him. “Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“You’ve been stopped for nine minutes. Are you lost?”

“No.” He pulled himself back to his feet and gripped the turbolift throttle. “I’m fine, thank you.” Twisting the throttle, he resumed his descent.

“Because if you need directions—”

“Bugger off,” Pennington said, ending the conversation.

Thirty seconds later he exited the turbolift and plodded across the empty nighttime park toward his residence tower in Stars Landing. He felt unbearably heavy, too weighty to move, too slow and freighted with despair to continue taking step after step. But he also felt insubstantial, an echo of his former self, a half-faded copy of the man he’d been only minutes earlier, reduced to a lonely pantomime of the life he’d taken for granted.

Time passed in chunks, pieces of it eluding his memory.

He drifted into his apartment, which looked like the heartless gray confines of a prison cell.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he wondered how he’d got there from the door without walking the space between.

Standing in the lukewarm spray of the shower, he recalled the bed but not his rising; remembered the gaunt stare of his own visage in the bathroom mirror but not turning on the water.

Reading the words he’d just sent to his editor, he couldn’t recollect having written them. But there they were:

On stardate 1321.6, the Federation starship Bombay was reported lost with all hands while on a classified mission in the Taurus Reach. The Bombay, under the command of Captain Hallie Gannon, had been assigned to permanent duty at Starbase 47, under the oversight of Commodore Diego Reyes.

A complete roster of the Bombay’s crew is being withheld pending Starfleet’s official notification of their families. The crew of the Bombay, a Miranda-class starship, is estimated to have numbered roughly 220 personnel.

As of this writing, the specific cause of the Bombay’s destruction has not been made public.

Pennington grew angrier each time he read it. Oriana’s gone and no one will say how, or where, or who, or why. What the hell is Starfleet hiding? In Pennington’s opinion, the only thing that Starfleet guarded more jealously than its secrets was its pride. Could it have been crew error? Or did Reyes send them on a suicide mission without telling them?

The speculation was enough to make him insane with rage. Someone knows, he told himself. Somebody is going to talk, sooner or later. And when they do, I’m going to make certain the truth gets out…. I owe her that much.

Looking around his apartment, he found it difficult to believe that only a few days ago she had been here, or that those few passionate hours had slipped by in such a blur. Then he noticed her small overnight bag still resting on the chair beside his dresser. In the frenzy of activity that had followed the revocation of the Bombay crew’s shore leave, her friend had never come by to pick it up. His eyes scanned the room, noticing tiny traces of Oriana’s past presence everywhere he looked. A decorative hairpin on his nightstand. Bottles of her exotic shampoo and conditioner on his bathroom vanity. One of her earrings on his dresser—which itself had at least one drawer full of her civilian clothes. Strands of her hair in the bedsheets, in the shower stall, on the carpet, on his shirt.

Oh, dear God—if Lora sees this….

Pennington raced to his closet and threw things aside until he found his old duffel bag. He went one square meter at a time, policing up every tiny item that could be linked to Oriana. It all went into the duffel bag, hurled unceremoniously into canvas oblivion. Using the handheld vacuum, he collected up almost all the hair, but he stopped when he got to the bedsheets. Removing the hair would be one thing; washing out the other evidence was a dicier proposition. Better to dispose of them, he decided, and stuffed the whole lot, pillowcases and all, into the duffel.

When he was done, he resisted his bitter pangs of guilt.

Rank sentimentalism, he chastised himself. That’s all it is. It’s just a bag of junk. It’s not her.

Logic was no match for his mourning heart, still grappling with the utter finality of Oriana’s death. His rational mind knew the collection of clothes and toiletries and knickknacks was nothing more than a discreet conglomeration of random items. He knew they had no intrinsic meaning. Peering down into the bag, however, he felt like he was clinging to his last shards of her, the scattered fragments of remembrance. I know I have to throw it away. But how can I? Would she have done that to me?

He wondered what trinkets and baubles and mementos Oriana had kept of him. Luckily for her, all those miscellaneous bits of incrimination had been lost along with the Bombay—

Oh, bloody hell. He winced as he remembered what she had said to him about her overnight bag, before she left his arms for the last time: “My friend Katrina will come by later and take it down to my storage locker.”

The storage locker! She could have anything in there! His mind pinwheeled through worst-case scenarios, all of which had one fact in common: As soon as Oriana’s death became official, every last item in her storage locker would be released…

…to her husband.

Pennington cinched shut the duffel full of Oriana’s effects and left his apartment, running to the quartermaster’s office.

Kirk rehearsed all the different things he might say, weighed the merits of all the potential opening conversational gambits he might employ. None of them felt right. There’s just no good way to say something like this, he lamented.