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Because his hands were now freed by Elena’s sudden departure from his shoulders, Nelson Kemper shoved them both into the pockets of his khaki trousers, as was his wont when he was waxing thoughtful.

“Now we just have to find a fair way to decide which one of us stays home, and which one of us rides out to slay the dragon,” Selma said. Elena threw her arms around her mother’s neck, almost as though she understood the uncertainty that lay ahead.

Kemper absently rubbed his thumb over the slightly serrated edge of the silver disk he kept in the depths of his left pocket. He had begun carrying the ancient dollar coin as a sort of good luck talisman on the day Elena was born.

“Call heads or tails,” he said as he took out the coin.

Then he sent it spinning into the air with a practiced flick of his thumb.

TWENTY-FOUR

Thursday, November 6, 2155

Enterprise, near the Kappa Fornacis system

DESPERATE FOR SOME SURCEASE from the turmoil in her belly, Ensign Elrene Leydon sat in the crew mess, her eyes glued to the wide observation windows. Beyond the layers of transparent aluminum the stars had taken on a bluish tinge, the ship’s relentless superluminal motion stretching them into elongated strands of sapphire brilliance.

“Try not to let the motion sickness get to you,” said the starship’s chief communications officer. “I felt the same way right before my first bridge shift started.”

Leydon tried to contain her surprise, but failed utterly. “How could you tell I was feeling motion sickness?”

Ensign Hoshi Sato flashed a grin that contained no trace of mockery. “For one thing, you’re the greenest-looking non-Vulcan I’ve ever seen. Second, you just came aboard with the new crew rotation we took on during the Archon rendezvous, and I know that the Academy’s high warp simulations don’t really do justice to warp-five flight. And lastly, you’re squeezing that coffee cup hard enough to turn a carbon composite into diamond.”

Suddenly hyperconscious of her fidgeting hands, Leydon set the cup down on the table between them. Folding her hands in her lap, she decided to devote her concentration to satisfying the curiosity Sato had piqued.

“Are you telling me that you felt like you were about to puke a few minutes before you did your first bridge duty?”

Sato nodded as she pushed her now-empty breakfast plate to one side. “Uh-huh. Incidentally, I discovered back then that staring out the windows while the ship is at warp only makes it worse.”

Leydon thought that sounded counterintuitive, raised as she’d been on tales of the ancient ocean fleets of the United States at the height of its global power and prestige. In those days, green sailors could anchor both their sea legs and bellies by staring out at the vast blue horizon—at least according to the lore handed down from her greatgrandfather, who had served aboard CVN-65, the U.S. Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, better known as the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Leydon turned her chair slightly, hoping to prevent the stars from continuing to draw her attention. Leaning conspiratorially toward Sato, she lowered her voice and said, “But why should you have ever gotten that nervous? I mean, you were handpicked by Captain Archer himself.”

Despite some the mean-spirited Kobayashi Maru scuttlebutt concerning Archer that she had heard among some of her recently graduated Starfleet Academy peers—and, astonishingly, even among some veteran members of Enterprise’s crew—Leydon’s image of the captain remained untarnished. Whatever hard decision circumstance might have forced on him out at Gamma Hydra, Jonathan Beckett Archer remained a hero in her eyes. Without Archer, the Xindi sneak attack that had killed her mother would have been followed by carnage on a scale that the captain’s craven detractors probably couldn’t even imagine.

“You’re right,” Sato said. “Captain Archer did handpick me to be a part of his senior officer corps, right before Enterprise left spacedock for that first voyage to Qo’noS. But being handpicked isn’t all that