• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “Retreat?”

All right, Nash, she thought. You asked for it.

Aloud, she said. “Yes, retreat. Naquase has never been the same since the Xindi attack, and I think you’ve let it affect you a hell of a lot more than you’re willing to admit.”

He glanced down at his wrist chronometer. “Don’t you have a jump-pod to catch?”

“Don’t try to distract me. Naquase’s pieces always say in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways that humanity had better keep its collective head down in order to avoid bringing still more wrath down from the heavens. Now, I’m not going to try to convince anybody that the Vulcans have covered themselves in glory so far during this Romulan crisis, because they haven’t. But I’ve spent enough time reporting from the final frontier to know that trying to run away from what’s out there is no solution.”

“Even when what’s out there absolutely scares the crap out of you?” McEvoy said. “Even when the big brother you thought had your back ditches you when the school bully comes looking for a fight?”

She grinned again, but this time it felt a little more genuine. “Especially then.”

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then straightened in his chair. But instead of going from there straight into a defensive rant, he surprised her.

“You’re right,” he said quietly, looking down at the padd on his desk. “I am scared. Damned scared. Maybe more scared than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I probably felt that way even before the Xindi attack, which might be why I never left Earth, even for a vacation trip.”

Brooks nodded. She strongly suspected that Naquase, who had never ventured any farther from Earth than Lake Armstrong on Luna, felt precisely the same way, even if she would never admit it to a rival reporter.

“But I also recognize that not everybody feels the same way I do,” McEvoy said, still staring broodingly at the padd. “And I’m grateful that at least some people are willing to go out and meet whatever scariness is out there head-on.” He looked up at her then, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose so that his gray eyes looked almost cartoonishly large. “People like that guy you told me you got involved with for a while on Draylax. The one who later got a piloting job on Enterprise under Archer.”

“Travis Mayweather,” she murmured.

She conjured a fond memory of the easy smile of her old flame, with whom she had renewed her acquaintance just six months ago, though with bittersweet if unsurprisingly impermanent results. Brooks had first met Travis around a decade before that, during one of the E.C.S. Horizon’s many brief stopovers on one of the frontier planets she had been writing about at the time. She had noticed right away that they both possessed a kindred wanderlust, though that very trait they held in common could only pull them in different directions, literally putting a light-years-deep gulf between them. And Shakespeare thought he knew all about star-crossed lovers.

Awareness suddenly returned to Brooks that Nash McEvoy was still talking. “But mostly,” he was saying, “I’m glad that people like you aren’t afraid of what’s out there, in the Deep Dark Big Bad. Because that’s why I chose you. But if anything happens to you because I sent you out there...”

As he choked audibly and trailed off, Brooks nodded, his unexpectedly sincere and sober tone taking her by surprise. While she had always acknowledged the mortal danger that might await her during her imminent outbound tour of humanity’s interstellar frontier zones—some of which had already become hot spots in Earth’s rapidly escalating conflict with the so-called Romulan Star Empire—she had been looking forward to her departure with far more anticipation than fear. It had simply never occurred to her that her editor might feel only fear on her behalf.

McEvoy’s voice returned, gathering just enough strength to let him say, “Maybe you’ll come to your senses and come back here where it’s safe during your first layover at Bradbury Spaceport.” His eyes