Kate Pulaski had brought a unique combination of medical and psychological insights to his case, leavened with good humor and a powerful dose of humiliation. “You can do better than that!” he remembered her barking one day during physical therapy, when he’d wanted to give up after a dozen achingly slow laps around his room.

“I can’t take another step,” he had protested meekly.

“My niece can walk faster than that, and she’s not even a year old yet,” Kate countered tartly. “And she does it without complaining, which is something you might think about.”

Kyle remembered smiling at her, although that meant lifting his head, which was also painful. “You’re the devil,” he had insisted. “And ...” he searched his mind for an adequate insult, but couldn’t come up with anything he hadn’t already used during that session. “And you’re named after a fire-fighting tool.”

“It’s named after me,” she shot back. “Well, an ancestor, on my father’s side. He’s been dead for hundreds of years and I’m sure he can walk faster than you, too. Now get at least another lap done before you break down and cry like a baby.”

He had complained, but he had done the lap. And the next one, and the one after that. Kate had a way to keep spurring him on to new achievements, and the persistence to not let him quit until he really couldn’t go on. She had brought him back from the edge of the grave, there was no doubt of that.

Now, thinking about Kate, about Simon and Commander Bisbee and Lieutenant Michaud and Li Tang and the rest of the brave souls who had died on Starbase 311, Kyle felt his eyes threaten to fill with unexpected tears. He blinked them back, glad there was no one here to see this. It was undignified, a man crying for the dead and the lost, all these years later. An observer might see him and assume he was crying because of his memories of himself, wounded and broken, so weak that his doctor, whom he came to love, had to help him take baby steps, had to support his weight and guide him to a window so that he could see that he really had come home. Or that observer might think he was crying for that doctor, whose love he won and as quickly threw away. Their love had flamed hot for a year, a little more, but then, once he had the strength to function without her, he had somehow come to believe that she was holding him back. He wanted a career again, he wanted to matter to Starfleet, he wanted to apply the hard lessons he had learned on Starbase 311 to his craft. Being with Katherine Pulaski could only get in the way of that, tie him down, and so he had driven her away.

He dabbed at his eyes, smiling wryly at his own foolishness, and picked up the padd again. Something he had seen, scouring the records before he had distracted himself with his own memories ...

He found it. Most of the logs of Starbase 311 had been destroyed in the Tholian attack, but portions had survived, and there was one he had never paid attention to before. A shuttle hangar log showed that in the moments before the red alert, someone had tried to launch one of the shuttles. A mechanical failure had kept it grounded, and then once the attack came, all docking bays and hangars were closed to prevent enemy incursion. There was no record as to who had tried to flee the station moments before the Tholians came, or why. But it was curious, just the same. Did someone know the attack was imminent? Who might have known that, and who would have had good reason to run?

When an idea occurred to Kyle, he tried cross-referencing with the bits of remaining logs he could access. He had also downloaded the inspection reports of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers team that went to the ruins of 311 and decommissioned her, and he checked and cross-checked those as well.

What he discovered surprised him. Heidl, Roone, and Bistwinela had not been near their lab when the attack came. Heidl’s body had been found near the shuttle hangar, Roone and Bistwinela outside the transporter room. More strangely still, when the S.C.E. team had made it into what was left of their lab, it had been dismantled. The Tholians had damaged it, as they had the rest of the station, but none of the apparatus or data that had presumably been in there before the attack was there after. The data, in fact, was never found.

Kyle felt a chill run up the back of his neck. Those three hadbeen up to something, he thought. Something bad—something dangerous. Had they conspired with the Tholians, or was the timing of the attack coincidental? They were all dead; at this point, he would never know. But it caused him to wonder how much else he didn’t know about Starbase 311, and the rest of the Federation as well.

He set the padd aside and stared toward a rusty patch on the wall opposite his bunk, eyes unseeing. No matter what he learned, or figured out, now, it would be a while before he could investigate further or bring it to anyone’s attention.

A long while indeed.

He had just fallen asleep—sleep being one of the few ways of passing the time available to him on the Morning Star,in addition to talking now and then with John Abbott, exercising in his room, and his twice-daily runs up and down the long halls, with some ladder climbing thrown in for good measure—when he heard his voice being called. He hadn’t even realized that his quarters had a comm system, although it only made sense.

“Mr. Barrow,”he heard again. The creaking voice could only belong to a Kreel’n.

“Yes, what is it?” Kyle answered, assuming that whoever it was could hear him.

“This is Captain S’K’lee,”the captain’s voice said. “I thought perhaps you’d like to visit the bridge?”

Kyle didn’t think twice. He could sleep anytime. Anyway, day and night meant nothing on board the ship. In his quarters he could turn the lights up or down at will, and the rest of the vessel was uniformly dark. And he didn’t know anyone except Abbott, barely could tell one Kreel’n from the next, so similar did they look to his untrained eye, so he couldn’t measure time of day by crew members’ shifts. As the weeks had passed, trying to keep track of time had seemed less and less important. He slept when he was tired, he ate when he was hungry, and the rest of the time he tried to keep occupied, mentally, physically, or both. “I would be most interested,” he replied, grateful for the diversion.

“Come up, then,”S’K’lee told him. “I will expect you shortly.”There was a barely audible click as she broke the connection. Like most of the other systems on this ship, communications seemed to be operated with fairly ancient technology. Kyle wouldn’t have been too surprised to look underneath the Morning Starand see a couple of sets of wheels there for landings.

But the door opened when he worked the complicated opening mechanism, so he stepped into the dim, utilitarian corridor and tried to remember where the bridge was. He had only a vague mental image of the ship’s layout, even after all his days on board. The ship didn’t seem to have anywhere near the clean lines of the Starfleet vessels he was used to, but instead it was bulky, almost boxy, with a massive, squared-off bow, tapering slightly toward the stern. He’d been told that she could move fast when she needed to but he had a hard time believing it.

The bridge, he knew, was in a separate dome section that jutted out from the top, not far back from the bow, breaking the line of the ship like an afterthought. Which meant that Kyle had to work his way in that direction. Assuming the artificial gravity was standard, the ladders would take him up. If, however, that assumption was wrong, he might be going in entirely the wrong direction.

But he was in luck. The ship’s gravity was indeed Earth-like, and what felt like up to him was indeed up. After several minutes of searching he found what must have been the topmost deck, and then he ran across one of the more humanoid crew members in the corridor, a female with sleek fur like a panther’s, black spots underneath. “I’m looking for the bridge,” he said. “Captain S’K’lee invited me up.”