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  “What makes you think—”

  “Now, you know that wide-eyed innocent act doesn’t work on me, Jim. You wouldn’t have gone to this trouble if you didn’t have something important to talk about.” He furrowed his brow at his old friend. “But not something official where you can just haul me in and issue an order. You want my help with something else—or you want to talk me into something.”

  Kirk nodded. “There is a matter where I might be able to use your… intercession. Or rather, introduction.” The admiral picked up a data slate that had been resting next to the cole slaw, displaying a paused vid file. “This is from a protest rally that was held near the Academy a couple of days ago.”

  The file showed a slight, black-haired woman addressing a multispecies group of civilians in a public square, though the angle didn’t give McCoy a clear look at her face. He tapped the screen to resume the video and hear what she had to say.

  “Over the past several years, we’ve expressed our concerns about the increasing militarization of Starfleet. As tensions with the Klingons and Romulans have worsened, Starfleet has adopted measures that seem to be anticipating war rather than de-escalating. Shipbuilding has increased. New designs and refits are more heavily, more visibly armed, as if intended to intimidate or provoke. New combat simulations have been added to Academy training. Even the uniforms have become more martial.

  “But the admission of the Arcturian Warborn to Starfleet Academy sends a particularly troubling message. Ever since first contact, the Federation has denounced the archaic Arcturian practice of breeding a race to serve as cannon fodder. Arcturus IV was required to abandon the practice in order to join, and aside from a single lapse during the First Klingon War, they have abided by that commitment to peace and sentient rights. Yet now, the admission of these Warborn students, with more to follow if the program succeeds, appears to be a Federation endorsement of this immoral practice.

  “They say the Warborn will be taught like any other cadets, but isn’t that the problem? What does it say about Starfleet’s intentions for our human youth, our Vulcan and Andorian youth, our Tellarite and Rigelian and Caitian youth, if the Academy’s teachings are now seen as compatible with the practice of breeding a servile race to die in battle?”

  As the speaker paced the stage to take in the whole crowd, McCoy got a better look at her face—an oval face in its mid-forties, with a strikingly beautiful blend of Chinese and European features. It only took him moments to realize why her voice sounded so familiar. Once he’d heard enough (and finished half his sandwich), he paused the playback. “That’s Doctor Ashley Janith-Lau. We worked together on a research project seven or eight years back.” It had been during his all-too-brief return to civilian life, between resigning from Starfleet after his first five-year stint on the Enterprise and being drafted back in by Kirk and Admiral Nogura for the V’Ger crisis. Janith-Lau, a pediatrician, had sought his help in developing a treatment for a congenital developmental disorder causing cognitive defects in children on Terra Nova.

  “I know,” Kirk said. “I was hoping you could arrange an introduction.”

  McCoy stared at him, grinning. “I thought you didn’t want my services as a matchmaker anymore.”

  The admiral glowered. “I never wanted them in the first place. And my interest is professional. What she’s saying about the Warborn could stir up trouble.”

  That was a sobering choice of words. “She has a right to protest.”

  “Of course she does. But with every right comes a responsibility. In this case, a responsibility to get her facts straight about her subject. Her misrepresentation of Starfleet’s intentions toward the Warborn could undermine the program before it has a fair chance to succeed.”

  The doctor narrowed his eyes. “And that’s your only intention? Just to share your side of the story with her?”

  “Naturally.” Kirk glanced down at the image on the slate. “I admire her passion for her cause. It’s obvious that she believes strongly in peace. Naively, perhaps, but I can’t fault her principles. I just want a chance to show her we’re on the same side. This is about remaking the Warborn in Starfleet’s image, not the reverse.”

  McCoy thought it over. “All right. I’ll contact her and see what I can do about arranging an introduction. But there’s a catch.”

  Kirk looked at him warily. “There usually is. What did you have in mind?”

  “Make sure the listening goes both ways. Don’t close your mind to the possibility that she could have a point.” He glanced down at Kirk’s heavy maroon jacket. “She’s certainly onto something about the uniforms. They make me feel like I’m dressing up for a reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar.”

  Ignoring the crack, Kirk studied him. “Do you think she has a point?”

  “Let’s just say I can sympathize with her opinion about the military side of Starfleet. But it’s not my reaction that matters here. Just go in with an open mind.”

  Kirk tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Only fair, since that’s all I want from her.”

  “Is it?” He gestured at the still image of Janith-Lau’s lovely, passionate face. “You’re slipping.”

  “Are you going to finish eating?” Kirk asked, annoyed.

  “Okay, okay.”

  As the doctor resumed his lunch, he mulled over the possibility. Ashley was smart, beautiful, close to Kirk’s age, and a firebrand activist with a deep commitment to peace and compassion, not unlike Kirk’s lost love Edith Keeler. McCoy might have made a play for her himself eight years ago, but she had been too driven by her work to have room for romance, and he’d been looking for something more relaxed and low-stress at that point in his life. But a woman like her could be the perfect match for Kirk after all.

  U.S.S. Asimov

  Uhura was running an analysis of vacuum flare sensor readings at the Asimov’s science station when Lieutenant Tarha addressed Captain Blake. “Captain, a new advisory from Starfleet. Latest vacuum flare outburst: the Vega system.”

  Erin Blake’s face showed concern as she turned toward the communications officer, whose long, straight blond hair was tied back in a severe ponytail. “That’s a busy system. Any damage?”

  Tarha’s voice was heavy. “Two ships sustained damage, ma’am. A civilian freighter out of Rigel, the Norman Mallory, and a Starfleet scout, U.S.S. Xuanzang. Multiple injuries on both. Three fatalities on the Xuanzang.”

  Blake gritted her teeth, fist striking the arm of her command chair. “Damn it! The first fatalities. And we still have no idea why.”

  She rose from her chair and stepped up to the railing by Uhura’s station. “Commander, was Vega on the list of candidate worlds visited by the Enterprise?”

  Uhura had already called up the records on an auxiliary screen, which she consulted now. “Yes, Captain. We had a brief layover at the Vega Colony on stardate 1502, before commencing a star-mapping tour.”

  “Aye, I remember,” Montgomery Scott said from the engineering station. “Not long before we had that run-in with Balok and that oversized Christmas-tree ornament he called a ship.” Uhura gave him a slight nod, acknowledging the reminder.

  “Which would seem to support Reliant’s theory,” Blake said.

  “So far,” Uhura cautioned. “One confirmed prediction isn’t enough to be sure.”

  Blake stroked her chin. “But what is it about the Enterprise that could be connected to this phenomenon?”

  “I’ve been investigating that,” Uhura said, gesturing to the analysis running on her screens. “I’ve compiled all the sensor readings taken from the first five incidents, scanning for any pattern matches to the Enterprise’s engine signature, its shields, phasers, anything.”

  Scott moved over to stand by her station. “We didn’t use ship’s phasers in any of those systems, though. They’re friendly ports.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to rule anything out.”

  “Aye.”

  Blake turned to Tarha. “Lieutenant, relay th
e readings from Vega to the science station, please.”

  “Aye, Captain.” She worked the transfer controls on her station.

  Moments later, the data downloaded onto Uhura’s board, and she set to work integrating it with the previous data sets. After letting the analysis run for a few moments, the commander shook her head. “Still no evident pattern matches.”

  “So what did the Enterprise do at those ports that it didn’t do elsewhere?” Blake wondered. Her eyes locked on Uhura’s. “Can you remember anything that stands out about those particular visits?”

  Uhura hesitated, unsure how to answer. Scott moved forward, almost shielding her, and fielded the question. “Argelius will always stand out for me, thanks to that demon Redjac and those poor women it tried to frame me for killing. And Deneva was a terrible time, what with the captain—Admiral Kirk losing his brother and sister-in-law to the damned parasites. Compared to those, though, the others were pretty routine. Aside from the hash those Cygneti pranksters made of our computer, thinking it needed ‘more personality.’ Took us two weeks to overhaul the system after that.” He chuckled. “Although the inauguration parties on Altair weren’t what I’d call routine. I wouldn’t expect anyone to remember much of what they did on that visit.”

  “Scotty’s right, Captain,” Uhura said. “There’s nothing obvious setting those six visits apart. The systems’ stars are of different spectral types, different ages. Four of them have humanoid natives, but the other two are Earth colonies.”

  “Any commonality in the planets’ magnetic fields?” Blake shrugged. “Maybe they had some weird resonance with the Enterprise’s warp reactor, or something like that.”

  Uhura called up the data on the console. “Different field intensities, different inclinations and declinations, different activity levels during our visits.”

  Blake chewed on her lip. “Well, this is getting us nowhere, and we’re near end of shift. I recommend you sleep on it, Nyota.”

  Uhura smiled. “That sounds like a good idea, Captain.”

  Nonetheless, Uhura had difficulty taking her mind off the analysis. Something about it stuck in her mind, as if there were some pattern in the vacuum flares just hovering on the edge of her awareness. Something about their radiometric and gravimetric oscillations felt almost familiar to her in some way.

  Just before turning in, as she sang to herself in the sonic shower, she was struck by a new idea, a way to analyze the spectrum and structure of the flare oscillations in a manner akin to the analysis of musical patterns. She had already tried a basic Fourier analysis, but what if she tried organizing the data in terms of dynamics, texture, and articulation?

  Setting sleep aside, Uhura threw on a kaftan and sat at the computer station in her quarters, setting up the new parameters for the flare analysis. Before long, she felt she was starting to tease out a recurring pattern hidden in the noise. Her hands moved on the controls, guided by some intuition she couldn’t articulate, and the pattern began to emerge. She began a computer search for similar patterns in the Starfleet database. On a strange impulse, she tied in her personal database as well.

  When the result came up, Uhura stared in disbelief for a long time.

  It was impossible, surely. She had done the analysis wrong, her assumptions leading her down a blind alley.

  She rechecked her methodology, reran the analysis. The same conclusion emerged.

  “I must be too sleepy to think straight,” she murmured. “I’ll look again in the morning.”

  She lay awake the whole night, afraid she was going mad.

  Chapter Five

  Starfleet Academy

  “I’m not here to give you the answers.”

  Portia observed Commander Anjani Desai as the human woman paced slowly before her students, taking care to make eye contact with every member of this study group. The Starfleet Academy ethics professor was a physically unimposing figure, her frame modest in height and displaying soft, pronounced curves rather than firm muscle, her black hair impractically long and carefully styled. Her bronze skin was as unnervingly smooth and taut as an infant’s, a characteristic shared by most non-Arcturian humanoids until they reached advanced age. Still, beneath Desai’s soft-spoken manner, Portia sensed a strong, commanding will that easily held the attention of the students present.

  “Starfleet officers encounter many situations that have no precedent in our experience,” Desai continued. “Defining ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in those situations is something you’ll have to decide for yourselves when you face them. Or at least something your commanding officers will have to decide, with your input as advisors. So what I’ll try to teach you in this course is how to ask the right questions—how to learn the habits of ethical judgment that will guide you in shaping those decisions, or making them for yourselves.”

  Like Bertram, Portia would have been more comfortable sticking with the subjects she knew she could do well, like unarmed combat, survival training, or piloting. Yet she had succumbed to Horatio’s insistence that all twelve Warborn should take Ethics 101 at the earliest opportunity. She did not share his eagerness to become tame and docile; like it or not, she had been bred to fight, and she accepted that as her nature. Yet the boyish Benedick’s eagerness to learn new things had helped her realize that a warrior should welcome being challenged. Thus, she had accepted Horatio’s challenge to enroll in Ethics and prove she could master the subject as well as he, if not better.

  Due to the nature of the subject, the class as a whole had been broken up into these smaller study groups that would meet once a week to discuss ethical questions in depth, led by the professor’s teaching assistants or by Desai, schedule permitting. This group had fourteen students; aside from Portia, Horatio, and Benedick, there were five humans, two Vulcans, an Andorian, a Tiburonian, a Caitian, and an Escherite, a large arthropod whose long, multilegged silver body sat curled up on the floor alongside the others’ seats.

  As Desai encouraged the group to put forth hypothetical scenarios posing ethical conundrums that Starfleet officers might face, it was not long before the male Vulcan, a young, lean one named Vekal, peered intensely at the three Warborn and asked, “Can it be considered ethical to create an entire race of people purely to fight and die in wars?”

  Horatio faced the pointed-eared youth with an even, calm gaze. “I would ask the opposite: Is it ethical to force ordinary people to sacrifice their homes, their families, their careers, and even their very lives in order to transform them into warriors? If wars must be fought, should they not be about protecting the lives and freedoms of ordinary people, rather than taking them away?”

  Next to Vekal, his Tiburonian friend Zirani Kayros tilted her head quizzically. Kayros looked slightly more like an Arcturian than any of the others here, for her scalp was bare and she had large, scalloped outer ears bearing a faint aesthetic resemblance to an Arcturian’s skin folds. “I thought the whole reason you were here was to learn to live like ordinary people,” Kayros said to Horatio. “You don’t think you have a right to that?”

  Horatio smiled at her. “I believe my purpose is to serve others. To protect my homeworld and its people’s well-being. That is the sacred calling I was created to serve.”

  Vekal lowered his upswept eyebrows mistrustfully, taking in all three Warborn with his gaze. “You were created to fight and kill. Do you believe that’s your calling now? Are you here to fight?”

  Portia locked eyes with him and smiled. “Are you offering?”

  Horatio touched her arm to still her. “What matters is the end, not the means. Our ancestors kept the people of Arcturus safe and free to live their lives by defending them against invaders. We do the same by removing ourselves from Arcturus and learning to follow a new path.” He shook his head. “And no, that path cannot include combat. Not unless the motherworld herself is threatened.”

  “So, what if you’re on a ship that’s attacked?” Kayros asked. “If you’re part of the crew and your captain orders you
to fight? Will you disobey?”

  Horatio looked uneasy. “Not all posts in Starfleet are combat-oriented, or even starship-based. There are ground postings. Administrative tasks. Communication and clerical work. Research asteroids.”

  Benedick grinned. “I would like to serve on one of those. Imagine—a whole asteroid, and all they do is research!”

  “Even those can come under attack,” Kayros countered. “A crew needs to depend on all its members to work together to defend it.”

  “Our faith does not allow it,” Horatio insisted. “Starfleet would not force anyone within it to violate their beliefs.”

  “Then how do you expect to make this work, if you don’t think you can fulfill your duties to Starfleet?”

  “She has a point.” Portia was surprised to hear herself speak up, preempting Horatio’s reply. “Our calling is to protect our world, our people. If we become part of a Starfleet crew, don’t they become our people? Don’t we have a responsibility to fight for their safety?”

  “Ohh.” Benedick blinked at her, his mouth open and rounded. “That is a good point.”

  Horatio remained adamant, shaking his head. “That’s not what doctrine says.”

  “The doctrine wasn’t written to cope with this situation,” Portia countered. She gestured toward Desai, who was listening silently but with intense interest. “It’s like the professor said—we’ll face situations without precedent. We’ll have to decide what’s right as we face them.” Portia looked around at the group. “And what feels right to me is fighting to protect my people. Whoever my people are.”

  * * *

  After the study group let out, Horatio pulled Portia aside. “What you said in there was unwise.”

  She pulled her arm away. “That’s not for you to say. And the professor said we were free to voice our thoughts.”

  “Others have that freedom, yes. We have to be more careful.” He looked around at the other students filing out, including Vekal, who still peered at them warily as if expecting them to go berserk at any moment. “We are feared for what we represent. We must prove to them that we are not a threat. That we are not here to be warriors.”