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“I had a hunch. We may be in the middle of nowhere, sir, but news still makes it here.” She propped herself up by her elbows on the beach chair. “I heard the basics of what happened with the Romulans, and I heard who died—including Data.”

Riker rolled up the pants of his uniform and then walked over to where Vale’s beach chair sat. “Not exactly the milk run to Betazed we were expecting.”

“What’s the whole story? I heard the reports, but that’s not really the same thing.”

Taking a seat on the end of Vale’s beach chair, Riker did as she asked. He spoke of positronic emissions detected on a planet near the Romulan border, and the subsequent discovery on that planet of a prototype android that, like Data, was designed by Noonien Soong and that the eccentric old roboticist had named B-4. Immediately afterward came the part Vale knew from the Federation News Service: there was a coup d’état on Romulus, with a Reman named Shinzon now ruling the Romulan Star Empire. This was major news, given that the Remans had, up until now, been a slave race within the empire.

What the FNS didn’t mention was that the Reman wasn’t really a Reman—he was a human clone of Jean-Luc Picard. Part of a since-abandoned plot by the Tal Shiar, the Romulans’ secret police, to replace high-ranking Starfleet officers with their own agents, Shinzon was raised in the Reman mines, eventually rising to prominence as a centurion during the Dominion War.

To make matters worse, Shinzon needed Picard—something in the captain’s blood would save the clone from an early grave—and he used whatever means he could to get it. In the end, the Enterprise crew triumphed, but not before suffering heavy losses in battle to Shinzon’s powerful ship, the Scimitar.

Among those losses: Lieutenant Commander Data, who sacrificed his life to stop Shinzon once and for all.

“It should’ve been me.”

Riker shot Vale a look. “What was that, Commander?”

“I said it should’ve been me. I’m chief of security, it’s my job to do what Data did.”

“Nobody could’ve done what Data did. And if you were on board, you’d have been doing what Worf was doing in your place: repelling the Reman boarders.”

Vale didn’t accept that. Her job was to keep the rest of the ship safe—that’s what security did. That’s what Domenica Corsi did for her when she shot Dar back on Izar, and that’s what Vale swore to do every day of her life since then. That’s what she’d been doing for four years on the Enterprise.

She sat up all the way, as regulation as she could be while sitting in a beach chair and wearing only a bathing suit. “I’m sorry I let you down, sir.”

Riker looked at her as if she’d grown a second head. “You didn’t let anybody down, Commander. You took a vacation—”

“When I should’ve been doing my job. I took advantage of your offer, and—”

“Did what every officer’s entitled to. I checked, by the way—you didn’t just have ‘a little bit’ of leave time coming, you had as much as possible without getting a formal reprimand on your record. Commander, you are entitled to the occasional break. We all are. And I think, particularly after what you’ve done for the past year, you earned the right to some time for yourself.” He leaned forward. “Duty doesn’t mean you’re on every hour of every day, Christine.”

“If you say so, sir.” Intellectually, she knew the captain was right. But thinking about the fact that Data, who was functionally immortal, was dead, it still didn’t feel right in her gut.

It should’ve been me.

She got up from the beach chair. The sunbaked sand flowed around and between her toes, sending a warm feeling through her feet.

Dammit, maybe Genestra was right about the guilt.

Then she realized just what she was thinking. Am I going to believe the smug manipulative bastard who was sent to the ship to give us a hard time by an admiral with an agenda? Or am I going to believe William Riker?

It wasn’t even a contest.

“You’re probably right, sir,” she finally said, favoring Riker with a small smile.

“I’m the captain now, Commander Vale—I’m always right.”

Running a hand through her auburn