Riding alone in a turbolift to the cargo levels, he shed his “lurking” disguise, revealing his regular clothes. He tucked the easily compressible alien fabric into his empty satchel and combed his hair briskly with his fingers, shaking out the dry-powder darkening agent he had treated it with. It was a quick change he had practiced for some time, and he now was quite adept at it. Stepping off the turbolift, he orientated himself quickly and walked toward Vanguard’s main cargo facility.

Several hatch locks shy of reaching it, he stopped at the security checkpoint. Three red-shirted Starfleet security guards manned this entrance to the cargo warehouse. Each barrel-chested man wore a pistol phaser on his belt. Two stood guard in the corridor, in front of the sealed hatch. The third, ostensibly the one in charge, was inside a phaser-proof booth, monitoring security-camera signals, communications from the station’s operations center, and other vital data. All three of them stiffened to alert postures at Pennington’s approach.

The guard with the dark crewcut reached for his phaser. “Halt. Identify yourself.” His partner, a bald, dark-skinned man, rested his hand on his own weapon.

“Tim Pennington, here to see Chief Langlois.”

The one in the booth spoke through an intercom. “What’s your business?”

“Personal visit,” Pennington said. Declaring his profession as a journalist was a surefire way to get himself sent back upstairs in a hurry, and it was for the best if scuttle-butt around the station didn’t mention who had received visits from a reporter. He currently enjoyed tremendous freedom of movement around the station, and he didn’t want to give Commodore Reyes any reason to revoke that privilege.

“You’ll have to wait while we clear that,” the booth officer said. Over the open channel, Pennington heard the man hailing Chief Langlois down in the bowels of the cargo facility.

Despite the fact he was hearing it secondhand over the intercom, Langlois’s response came through loud and clear: “Send him down, Wallingford.”

Glowering at Pennington, the security officer in the booth keyed the control and opened the hatch.

Stepping through, Pennington gave the man a jaunty three-finger salute and said, “Thanks, mate.”

The corridor on the other side of the hatch was shaped like a long, hexagonal tube. Its far end opened onto a broad walkway, which encircled the top level of the service side of Starbase 47’s enormous cargo and maintenance complex. The hum of activity echoed deeply in the yawning, torus-shaped space, which surrounded the energy-and resource-transfer lower section of the station’s core. Narrow shafts of bright blue light demarcated zero-g areas, which were designed for quickly shifting certain types of cargo from level to level, but in fact were most often used by the crew for quickly moving themselves between levels.

The cargo warehouse was abuzz with several dozen personnel and multiple cargo-loading vehicles, all of them moving in carefully choreographed patterns, clearing one bay and loading another, checking in one load of supplies while tagging up another to ship out. Supervisors, recognizable by their mustard-colored coverall jumpsuits, tracked each action on small handheld devices and coordinated with the operations center via radio headsets. Small-arms and ordnance handlers wore burgundy jumpsuits, commercial-cargo movers wore olive drab, and the rest of the Starfleet cargo teams wore dark blue.

Pennington rode an empty, open-sided cargo platform down to the bottom level, where he found Chief Petty Officer Elizabeth Langlois snapping out orders quickly, averting logjams and shipping errors. “Blue three-fifteen,” she said into her headset mic, “move those prefabs to pallet twenty-two-echo and clear the bay-two platform for red nine-five.” She noticed Pennington stepping off the elevator. “Yellow one-baker, this is yellow one-alpha, handing off, confirm.” A moment later, apparently having heard the reply she expected over her headset, she lifted the mic away from her face and nodded toward Pennington. “Tim,” she said, shaking his hand. “What brings you down to the belly?”

“Checking in,” he said with a broad grin. “Everything stacking up okay down here?”

“Can’t complain,” she said, leading him out of the way of a fast-moving cargo loader. “Trying to load up the Meriden for another colony run tomorrow.” They stepped inside her cramped but immaculate office, which sat in a nook of the central core. She flumped into her swiveling, rolling chair. “Someone on gamma shift lost a power generator marked for the Trinay III outpost, and we get to pick up the pieces.”

Pennington leaned sideways in the open doorway. “Another fun-filled day of opportunity and adventure, right?”

“Something like that,” she said. A series of orange lights started to blink on the situation monitor above her desk. She sighed and got back up. “Look, thanks for the drop-in, but we’re busting down here today, and I really need to get back to it.”

“Right, sure,” Pennington said as he followed her back out into the frantic rush of activity on the main floor. “Before I go, can you maybe fill in the blanks for me on a thing or two? Off the record, of course.”

“Depends,” Langlois said. “What’s on your mind?”

“C-1 cargo,” he said. “Do you move a lot of it here?”

“Hang on,” she said. Flipping her headset mic back down to her face, she keyed the transmitter on her belt. “Yellow one-alpha, checking in. Fred, what the hell are you doing up there?…Well, you’ve got a red-green overlap on platform four. Fix it.” Covering the mic with her hand, she looked back at Pennington. “I can’t talk about C-1s, Tim, you know that.”

“Come on, Elizabeth, I’m not looking for details. No names, no dates. Just general, deep background, right?”

“Just a sec.” Down came the headset again. “Fred, I swear to God, if you don’t make red nine-five secure that pallet, you’ll be on solid-waste detail for the rest of your hitch, capisce?” She looked back at Tim. “What kind of background?”

“A general comparison,” he said. “Do you see more C-1s here than you did on your last posting? Does Vanguard move more C-1 cargo than other starbases?”

“We move a lot,” she said. “But that’s all I can tell you.”

“Isn’t that odd, for a colony-support mission profile?”

“Step left,” she said, and he did as he was told. A large pallet loaded with photon torpedoes floated past, driven by a silent antigrav skiff. “We’re multimission-capable, just like every starbase. Colonization, exploration, combat-operations support…. Goes with the territory.”

“Right,” Pennington said. “Thanks for your time, I’ll clear out and let you work.” He dodged under a crane-lifted shipping container and bounded back onto the elevator platform.

As he keyed in the command for the top level, Langlois called out, “Just so you know…yes, it’s odd.”

It began to rise, lifting him away from her. He shouted back down, “But what does it mean?” She shrugged her shoulders.

Ascending out of the “belly” of the station, Pennington was no closer to the truth than he had been before his visit. He had confirmed only that Starfleet was keeping some details about its mission a secret; such a weak lead wasn’t even worth a cup of coffee, never mind a feature headline on FNS.

Patience, he admonished himself. Someone on this station knows about the sensor screen and wants to talk. I will find that person. He knew it might take days, weeks, or a hell of a lot longer than that. Keeping promises had not been his strong suit of late. He resolved that this one would be different. I’ll find the truth, Oriana, he vowed. For you.

Reyes waited patiently after pressing the door signal for the second time in a minute. He felt exposed and transparent standing in the corridor, even though no one had passed by him while he had been waiting. The potential for embarrassment was more than sufficient to leave his face flushed with warmth.