Arlys massaged her forehead. Her expression was one of deep pain. “Tim, how did you find that amazing evidence of yours?”

He recoiled from the question. “It…” Suddenly, he felt very foolish explaining it. “It was an anonymous tip.”

“An anonymous tip,” she parroted. She threw a murderous glare at him from across the light-years. “Wonderful.”

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to his next question, but he had to ask anyway. “What was wrong with it?”

“Everything, for God’s sake!” She flipped through the stack of papers on her desk, crumpling them and flinging them away as she ranted. “Chronological inconsistencies in the sensor logs, fake security codes—Dammit, Tim, the logs from the Enterprise were signed by an officer who wasn’t even alive when those reports were filed! You’ve got comm-traffic recordings on channels our own signals team confirms were clear. This isn’t evidence—it’s fiction!”

Shock was setting in. “But I got it confirmed….”

“According to Starfleet, you got snookered. And according to me, you just got fired.”

It took a few seconds for those last few words to become real for Pennington. “No, Arlys, please, you can’t…you—”

“Your unpaid expenses are being sent back to you, we’re not covering them,” she said. “You can still submit stories as a stringer if you want, but I’d stick to canned releases for a while if I were you.”

“Arlys, wait, we can—”

“You’re fired.” She switched off the channel without even adding Good luck or Take care. The FNS icon flashed briefly on the screen, which then went dark. Pennington slumped forward and let his head thump against the offline monitor.

This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.

It wasn’t long before he was hyperventilating. He stretched the collar of his shirt away from his chest and pulled it up over his nose. Taking long, deep breaths and exhaling heavily, he calmed himself by degrees. Bile crept up his esophagus. His stomach heaved. So this is what total failure feels like.

Reason reasserted itself momentarily. He powered up the monitor in front of him and patched in to Vanguard’s internal directory. Selecting “M,” he scrolled quickly down to Israel Medina’s name in the crew roster.

It wasn’t there. There was no entry between “Medeira, Specialist Roderigo,” and “Meeker, Ensign Rory.”

Oh, bloody hell, no.

The entire distance between the communications office and salvage bay four blurred past the sprinting reporter.

He bounded into the salvage bay, which was busy with second-shift activity. An antigrav load lifter nearly clipped him at the knees until a sharp-eyed crewman whistled shrilly behind Pennington’s ear and waved him out of the way. The first person whom Pennington was able to flag down and corner long enough to swap two words was a frazzled-looking young woman who had “MALIK, K.” stenciled on the front of her coveralls.

“Crewman Malik, can you help me please?”

She looked at him with the pity one would expect for a lost child. He hadn’t realized how desperate he sounded. “What’s wrong, sir?”

“I’m trying to find Chief Medina,” he said.

She shook her head and leaned closer, as if she had mis-heard him the first time. “Who?”

“Chief Israel Medina, the gamma-shift cargo supervisor.”

Malik shrugged. “Never heard of him, sir. Our gamma-shift supervisor’s Master Chief Shalas.” She pointed down the long aisle of shipping containers at an Andorian woman in a red Starfleet uniform shirt. “That’s her down there. She’s covering beta shift today.”

Pennington backed away slowly toward the exit, no longer caring whether he blundered into the path of some large, dangerous machine. It hardly mattered anymore, one way or another. A quick death might be preferable, he decided.

As meaningless as such concepts as “day” and “night” were in deep space, as far as local time aboard Vanguard was concerned it was the middle of the night. Naturally, it was now, during the sleep cycles of the majority of the Diplomatic Corps staff, that Tholian Ambassador Sesrene had elected to call a meeting with Envoy Sovik, who, in turn, had woken Ambassador Jetanien, who then roused Anna Sandesjo and brought her down here for no good reason except perhaps to fetch the Chelon a bowl of his offensive-smelling broth.

Sesrene, true to character, treaded the fine line that separated curt from rude. “Your government has recanted its call for war.” He spoke through the room’s universal translator. The metallic screech of his true voice was muffled but still audible from inside his envirosuit. “We have no further business.”

Sandesjo remained a short distance behind Jetanien and Sovik, who stood at the meeting room table across from the Tholian delegation, which was composed of Sesrene and his attachés, Pozrene and Tashrene. Lifting a hand to stifle whatever reply Sovik had been formulating, Jetanien said to Sesrene, “Quite the contrary. We remain concerned about your health. This is the first we’ve seen of your delegation since your…episode a few weeks ago. Are you well? Do you require any medical assistance? Or adjustments to your living quarters?”

Sesrene reached out and initiated a touch-telepathy link with his attachés, a practice that Sandesjo had found odd until she realized that it was not all that different from humanoids conferring in whispers. Until their conference was concluded, there would be nothing to do but wait in patient silence.

The three Tholians were all bundled in their golden-hued envirosuits, about which Jetanien had prattled on during the long walk from his office. Composed of Tholian silk, the envirosuits were surprisingly lightweight and flexible around the Tholians’ crystalline, arthropod bodies. No warmer than room temperature on their exterior, their interiors sustained a combination of intense heat and crushingly dense corrosive gas—a Class-N environment that was duplicated in their quarantined residential suites. What little of their heads was visible through their translucent face-plates suggested that their species exhibited a wide variety of colorations. With their multilimbed physiques, Tholians reminded Sandesjo of the venomous ghewpu’tIn that populated some of the darker, untamed forests on Qo’noS. Being in the same room with them made her deeply curious as to how one of these exotic-looking novpu would fare in single combat against a Klingon warrior.

Finally, the touch-telepathy link was broken, and Sesrene’s eyespots brightened slightly as he said, “A temporary affliction. It is of no further concern.”

“We are greatly relieved to hear that, Your Excellency,” Sovik said with a small nod.

“We have no more business with you at this time,” Sesrene said. He turned away from the table, and his attachés moved in synch with him.

“Ambassador,” Jetanien said, his voice suddenly large enough to fill the room with its deep, booming resonance. Sesrene paused then turned very slowly back toward Jetanien, who continued, “Though our council has chosen the path of peace, do not be misled into thinking that we are fools. We know full well that your forces attacked and destroyed our vessel at Ravanar. Starfleet will watch your borders far more closely from now on…. We won’t betaken by surprise again.”

The implied threat seemed to hold Sesrene and Jetanien in place, like the opposing poles of a magnet, filling the room with an undercurrent of violent reprisal.

Then Sesrene ended the discussion.

“Neither will we.”

In unison, the Tholian delegation left the room, moving with almost mechanical precision. Once they were gone, Jetanien turned away and exited through a different door, saying nothing but clearly expecting Sovik and Sandesjo to follow him.

The Chelon didn’t speak until the three of them were in a turbolift on their way back upstairs. “That was not good,” he said. Then, to Sandesjo’s amazement, he said nothing more. Even after they returned to the deserted Federation Embassy office, he had nothing to add to his statement in the turbolift.