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An amber light began flashing on her console at that moment, prompting her to tap the adjacent incoming message button, followed by the standard acknowledgment signal control. Then she turned toward the bridge’s center, where Commander T’Pol was seated in the captain’s chair staring over Ensign Travis Mayweather’s shoulders at the starscape displayed on the forward viewer.

“The Andorian transport vessel Gankerev has just hailed us,” Sato said. “They anticipate docking with us within the hour, and I have acknowledged.”

“Thank you, Ensign,” the Vulcan said. “Ensign Mayweather.”

Travis turned his chair away from the starscape until he faced both T’Pol and Sato, his face as expressionless as the Vulcan’s. “Commander?”

“I understand that the purpose of our rendezvous with the Gankerev is not merely to bring us additional supplies,” T’Pol said.

“That’s right, Commander,” the pilot said with a tense but otherwise affect-free nod. “I’ll be going aboard her before she leaves. The captain of the Gankerev has agreed to ferry me to my next assignment, so I should be aboard Discovery in time to help with her launch from the San Francisco yards three weeks from now.”

Thanks to all the quiet and not-so-quiet private conversations she’d had with Travis since the Kobayashi Maru incident about his future career plans, Sato was intimately familiar with Discovery, the still-under-construction fourth starship in Starfleet’s warp-five-capable NX-class. The recent escalations in Earth’s defense posture resulting from Vulcan’s decision to play “hands off” regarding the Romulans had forced Starfleet to pull out all the stops in hastening Discovery’s readiness for space.

T’Pol nodded to Mayweather in emotionless acknowledgment. “If you wish to leave the bridge now to make your final departure preparations, I will call Crewman Beaton to take your post for the remainder of your shift.”

“That won’t be necessary, Commander,” Travis said with a shake of his head. “I’m off duty in forty-five minutes anyway, and I’m already packed and ready to go.”

Despite Travis’s repeatedly stated determination to leave the service of a captain he’d claimed no longer to believe in, Sato realized that even now she held out the irrational hope of bringing about a lastminute change of heart regarding his decision to leave. Not even the awkward silences at the party that she, Malcolm, and Doctor Phlox had thrown in his honor yesterday afternoon—a somber crew-mess gathering from which the captain had been excluded at Mayweather’s specific request—had convinced her that keeping Travis aboard Enterprise wasn’t really the lost cause it might appear to be. Hoshi had simply chalked Travis’s emotional distance up to the boomer habit of avoiding overly emotional farewells, a fact of life to anyone born in space and reared in the itinerant, socially isolating business of interstellar cargo.

She took heart, at least, in the fact that Captain Archer hadn’t been on the bridge at this moment to hear his outgoing helmsman speak so casually of leaving Enterprise behind forever.

Three-quarters of an hour later, as she watched him leave the bridge with scarcely a word, Hoshi wondered if Travis could have kept such a tight lid on his emotions had Archer walked in.

TWENTY

Thursday, September 11, 2155

New Byzantium, Alpha Centauri III

DESPITE THE PRESENCE of a teeming crowd hundreds deep, the first thing that Gannet Brooks noticed as she entered the spaceport lounge was the peculiar pattern of shadows that the destination display screen cast across the highly polished tile floor. Courtesy of the Alpha Centauri system’s bright but setting yellow “A” star—whose horizon-distended light painted the scene beyond the polarized tarmac observation windows, beneath both the dimmer “B” star and the red dwarf Proxima’s comparatively dim stellar pinpoint—those shadows fell simultaneously in multiple directions under an unwinking electronic display that read DESTINATION: EARTH.

The next thing that seized Brook’s attention was the