Admiral Kathryn Janeway was a complicated woman. Farkas had nursed deep reservations when she learned that Janeway had been given command of the fleet only a short time after having been resurrected from the dead by a member of the Q Continuum. Over time, watching Janeway in action, Farkas had come to respect both her abilities and her humanity. She was a born leader who did nothing by half measures and was as devoted to the service as anyone Farkas had ever known. Farkas had been particularly impressed with Janeway’s leadership during the fleet’s mission to establish relations with one of the Delta Quadrant’s only civilizations that rivaled the Federation in size and technology, the Confederacy of the Worlds of the First Quadrant.
But none of that changed the fact that this fleet, much like the first ship Janeway had led through the Delta Quadrant, had been forced to absorb trials and losses that should have sent most of them to an early retirement. And she had treated their discovery of DK-1116 like a holiday, even over Farkas’s protestations.
Janeway’s initial response was measured. “I’m not sure what your take on the sensor logs might be, but my analysis is that it is currently too soon to determine exactly what happened to the Galen. Multiple departments are reviewing the logs and I’m still waiting on their final reports Difficult though it might be, I would reserve judgment and resist the urge to despair until we have more information at our disposal.”
“Well, my crew is already wondering where we’re planning to hold our next memorial service.”
“Captain…”
“No, Admiral. We may not have known what we were dealing with when we entered this system, but well before the planet revealed its true nature and pushed a star out of orbit, you had a crew member seriously injured by an alien substance that then proceeded to eat a shuttle before our eyes. I appreciated the fact that you ordered Vesta, Demeter, and Galen out of harm’s way before the planet was scheduled to explode and you remained behind to rescue the last of our stranded crew members, but that run through the asteroid belt was a nail-biter and odds were less than even that any of us were going to survive.
“I hate to say it, but I now find myself wondering whether or not your ability to effectively gauge the risks associated with our directives is properly calibrated.”
Janeway’s jaw clenched before she responded. “As this fleet’s commanding officer, I accept full responsibility for my orders and their consequences.”
“As well you should. My only question is: Has this experience taught you anything?”
“Captain, I don’t have a problem with those I command freely expressing their concerns. I welcome it. But there is a line and you are very close to crossing it.”
“Were our positions reversed, Admiral, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell me exactly where I could put my concerns,” Farkas replied. “You are my commanding officer. I am duty bound by the oath I swore when I accepted my commission to follow you wherever you choose to lead me and to serve you and my crew to the very best of my abilities. But I wish to make myself perfectly clear. Death in the line of duty is a tragedy we all find ways to reconcile. Carelessness is a character flaw and one with which I have never had much patience.”
“Thank you for your candor, Captain,” Janeway replied. “Consider your concerns duly noted and stand by to receive further orders. Janeway out.”
Farkas wasn’t sure what she had expected from the admiral. Janeway’s rank meant that she was never required to justify herself or her choices to those beneath her in the chain of command. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea, both in terms of morale and, more important, in earning the devotion that brought every crew member’s best to the surface when it was most needed.
She had said her piece. And now, she felt worse than before she and the admiral had spoken.
“God damn it,” she said aloud to her empty ready room.
She was seriously considering hitting her rack for a few hours when her operations officer alerted her to a new incoming transmission. She half hoped it was the admiral reaching out again.
It wasn’t.
Instead, Farkas found herself staring into the face of a man who identified himself as an agent of the Department of Temporal Investigations named Marion Dulmur.
3
GALEN
“How are we doing, Chief?”
Not that long ago, maybe a week and a half prior, Lieutenant Nancy Conlon would have given anything to hear these words; for the sum total of her existence to be reduced to an engineering issue. In this one aspect of her life, she had achieved a level of mastery. When faced with even the most challenging problem with a warp drive, power regulation, computer processing, and the complex relationships between the systems necessary to keep a starship operational, she was distilled to the essence of her best possible self.
Far too many personal issues had come between her and this better version of herself in the last few months. She had processed the traumas, accepted that her medical issues were likely terminal, and made peace with the choices surrounding her unexpected pregnancy. She had worked diligently to remove every obstacle standing between her and resuming her duties as Voyager’s chief engineer. Before an artery in her brain had ruptured, requiring major surgery, the induction of a coma to allow for her brain to heal, and the emergency transport of her child into a gestational incubator, she had decided that the rest of her life, however long or short, would be devoted to one thing only: solving the most mundane or complex engineering challenges her job could throw at her.
Had she known then what she knew now, she might have reconsidered her wish list.
Staring at her handiwork of the last thirty hours, she
