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Tevik knelt beside Trip and began cold-bloodedly rifling through the soldiers’ scorched and bloodied uniform tunics, until he located a small data chip.

“Identification,” he said, holding up the chip momentarily before rising and tucking it into his pocket. “This could prove invaluable.”

Ych’a glanced at her wrist chronometer, looking as close to nervous as Vulcans ever did. “Mister Sodok, I must point out that we do not have sufficient time to conduct a murder investigation.”

“Good point,” he said as he got to his feet. He then fell into step behind Ych’a and Tevik as they moved at a quick, crouching trot through the long, low-ceilinged run of umbilical scaffolding that ended at the outer hull of the Sh’Raan-class Vulcan ship.

Constrained by time, the three had agreed very quickly that the Vulcan vessel represented their best hope of getting out of here alive. Since Ych’a was most familiar with its systems, she would have a better chance of getting the ship clear of the hangar before the reactor blew. Using the Sh’Raan for their escape would also remove a valuable piece of captured Vulcan technology from Romulan hands, and the detonation of the Aeihk’aeleir Shipyard’s reactor core would take out the prototype, thus satisfying their mission objective.

Trip had lost track of precisely how much time remained before the thermal charges they’d planted in the reactor room went boom and sent this place to its reward. But as they reached the Sh’Raan ship’s outer hatch, he could feel in his bones that there couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes left, tops.

“If I understand this facility’s work schedule, the ship should be empty except for a few technicians,” Tevik said as he used the slain Romulan soldier’s ID chip to open the nearest access hatch that led into the Vulcan starship’s interior.

Moments later, Trip and Tevik were following Ych’a down the curving length of an empty, dimly illuminated corridor. “The nearest turboshaft with direct bridge access is this way,” she said.

In short order, the trio entered a turbolift car whose doors obediently enclosed them. Trip felt the slight heaviness in his boots that signaled the lift’s upward surge in response to Ych’a’s terse voice command.

Then the lift came to an abrupt, lurching stop. Ych’a and Tevik traded significant glances that made them both appear very nearly alarmed.

“Nuts,” Trip said.

At least when the big boom comes, he thought, I’ll be able to get away with acting a little bit surprised.

FIFTY-NINE

San Francisco, Earth

ALONE IN HIS OFFICE, long after everyone else had gone home for the evening, Nash McEvoy sat and watched the one Newstime feed he knew had come directly from the front lines of his organization’s reporting.

It was the only story that genuinely worried him, as much for its content as its possible consequences, which could be quite dire for Newstime. Unlike Keisha Naquase’s semipoetical—some would say naïve—elegies to peace, Gannet Brooks’s ever more frequent fire-and-brimstone entreaties to humanity’s basic survival instincts were garnering serious attention across at least a half-dozen sectors of known space.

With Starfleet Command’s attention being the most serious of all.

“This is Gannet Brooks,” said the intense young woman, “with all the news that’s under the sun and beyond, reporting from somewhere outside the Draken system.

Now would come the test. Now he would see if Gannet had taken to heart his request, sent earlier today via subspace radio to her aboard the Tellarite freighter that currently carried her on her travels. McEvoy had asked that she go just a little bit easier on those luckless souls whom fate, UESPA, and the United Earth government had lumbered with the awful charge of conducting the war.

She had not been enthusiastic about his request.

McEvoy held his breath, contemplating the hollow look in Brooks’s eyes as he waited for her to speak. Waited to see if Starfleet had misjudged her.

If he had misjudged her.

“Where