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What if I had to order him to go to his death?

That’s why I just can’t give him an answer yet.

We’ll be at Starbase 96 tomorrow, so at least I can get away from him—and he’ll be in charge of the S.C.E. team while I’m gone, so he can put that newfound confidence to good use.

Sooner or later, though, I’m going to have to deal with this.

Later. Definitely later.

Personal log, Commander Sonya Gomez, S.S. Culloden, Stardate 53273.9

This may be the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.

We’re just starting to descend into Sarindar’s atmosphere on the Culloden. The ship is owned by Zilder, a Bolian who was hired by the Nalori to ferry people to and from the surface and perform various other technical and administrative tasks for the project. When I asked him how a Bolian contrived to get a ship named after a place on Earth, he just smiled and said, “Ho’nig will provide.”

That’s the really odd thing about Zilder. Ho’nig is the collective god of the Damiani, a humanoid three-gendered Federation species. I didn’t think that anyone off of Damiano worshipped their god. It wouldn’t bother me, except Zilder spent the first day of our trip trying to convert me. After over twenty hours of his missionary zeal, I’d convinced him that my religion was none of his business, and he let up. If he hadn’t, he’d be easy enough to avoid: the Culloden is built to transport up to three hundred people, so with just the two of us, it’s pretty roomy.

But I was talking about Sarindar.

From space, the planet looks mostly white, almost like it’s a big snowball flying through the night. As you get into orbit, it starts to look more like a jewel—at the right time of day, from the right orbit, you can see glints and reflections. According to what I’ve read, the plant and animal life is all silicon-based, and the vast majority of it is crystalline.

We’re descending now, and it’s even more amazing than I could’ve believed. When you come out of the reddish-purple layer of clouds, you look up and see an orange sky. As expected, the delicate flora is photosynthetic living crystal. What I didn’t realize is that the ground is also made up of similar substances: jagged plains of diamond spikes, quartzand-topaz mountains, and forests of amethyst. The water of the streams and rivers that I can see from the Culloden’s viewport are sparkling and crystal-clear—literally!

Now we’re flying in closer, and I can see some animals that I recognize from the file—a shii drinking from a stream; a meir gliding through the air; a pack of kliyor running into the forest.

The suns are starting to set, so the shadows and the reflections are especially spectacular, with colors bursting from all the crystalline flora.

Intellectually, I expected this to be a lovely planet, but I had no idea it was going to be this beautiful.

Ah, now we’re seeing something less beautiful: the work site for the SA. The prominent feature of the site is the perfectly circular, two-hundred-meter-diameter concave dish. In the center is an opening roughly four meters wide. The surface of the dish is incomplete, just an empty skeletal framework. Turning it into a full dish is part of what I need to accomplish here. The site’s also dotted in many places by slender metallic towers that hold sensor palettes. The long shadows cast by the suns setting make it look very eerie.

We’re about to land. I think I’m looking forward to this.

Supplemental, planet Sarindar

I’m now settled in my tent. That’s right, tent. I’m in a canvas tent. Not even a proper Starfleet shelter, but a tent.

I don’t even know where to start. The equipment that I’ve seen is old and horribly maintained. Old I can live with—since joining the S.C.E., I’ve dealt with everything ranging from three-thousand-year-old computers to hundred-year-old starships to state-of-the-art Androssi security devices—it’s the badly maintained part that’s going to cause headaches. The only weapons on the planet are sonic pistols and rifles that look like they’re about a thousand years