Captain’s Log, Stardate 79278.8,

We’ve spent the better part of a week chasing ion trails, but I’m still no closer to locating my missing crew members. Soon after the Kazon-Relora carriers overpowered Constellation, their entire fleet scattered in different directions; each trail and trajectory led us to nowhere. We’ve learned too late that this final warp trail we’re following wasn’t even among the originals. Based on the distress call we’ve received, it’s not even a Kazon carrier we’re following; it’s a Trabe carrier leading a refugee flotilla.

Reclined into the magenta velvet of her over-stuffed sofa, Taes shifted her weight onto her left hip. She grimaced, unable to ease into any degree of comfort in the relaxed posture.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t find Nune,” she said, her voice rasped with the overwhelming emotion. Losing crew members to death was gutting, but losing crew members to a fate unknown was worse, maddening. She looked down at her knees rather than face his judgement.

The holo-communicator form of Commander Kellin Rayco prompted, “And Yuulik.” Taes could hear a gentle chiding in his tone even without looking at him. As if he was disappointed in Taes for forgetting about Yuulik but not so disappointed because he knew the truth. Even though they communicated over long-range subspace, Taes appreciated that he could see right through her.

“Especially Yuulik,” Taes admitted. She brushed a piece of fluff from the thighs of her uniform trousers.

Getting out from under Taes’s wing had clearly allowed Kellin to relate to her as something other than a matronly mentor — maybe a friend, maybe a sister.

Taes shifted her weight onto her lower back, and it still didn’t help. Her ready room offered no resemblance to the sterile geometry of the Constellation. Like her previous ready rooms, her private retreat was meant to feel like a pocket dimension, far away from the bridge. Every wall was swallowed by fabric, be it woven tapestries, silks that caught the starlight, and gossamer organza. Even the ceiling seemed to sag with draped cloth as if the room was mid-exhale. The mismatched colours and textures elicited polite queries from her senior staff, but Taes kept discovering new patterns in the chaos.

She looked for the pattern that would tell her what to try next.

“When you lost me to the Dominion,” Kellin said, through some mechanical distortion due to the great distance, “Nelli said you stopped. You came undone. She couldn’t inspire you to do much other than sleep.”

“After Frontier Day, I almost resigned my commission,” Taes said. She looked up to meet his grey-blue eyes. “I didn’t see any light in our work without you.”

Kellin’s hologram stood in the middle of the small compartment, clasping his hands behind his back and tilting his head to the left.

“That can’t happen, captain,” he said, steel wrapped in cashmere. “Your crew still needs you. We’re months away from the Barzan wormhole. Given the dwindling state of Almagest’s stores, Elbon understood we should have turned back to the alpha quadrant already.”

“If there still is an alpha quadrant,” Taes said. And she knew it was dramatic, but that didn’t make it less true. Her home colony on Nivoch was long abandoned, but Kellin’s family, his parents and sisters, were still back there.

He stood taller. “All the more reason you should grieve now. Feel what you need to feel as if Nune and Yuulik were already gone. Feel it until you cry and throw up. You can’t come undone again. Too many depend upon you, captain.”

Taes flung her arms out, and they fell limply to the sofa cushion.

“Is that fair?” Taes asked, through an anguished sigh. “Why do I only get to be a person in the dark corners, behind the veils?”

Kellin’s expression softened, but his eyes didn’t.

“It was your choice,” he said.

Her chest tight, Taes sucked in a long quavering breath, breathing through that choice, and the hundreds of other small choices that put her in command of Constellation Squadron. Inelegantly, she bumbled her way off the over-stuffed, over-sized sofa.

“I don’t think I’ll come undone this time, but I’ve said that before,” Taes reflected. “I’ve been leaning into embodiment. I’ve fought so hard to be anything but numb. That means not being afraid of my distortions. That has… brought me closer to the girl lost in the woods. I don’t think she wants to be found anymore.

“If Yuulik remains in the clutches of the Kazon, I might burn down the Nacene Reach to find her.”

As Constellation dropped out of warp, Captain Taes eyed the chronometer among the status indicators running across the lower frame of the viewscreen. Agreeing to respond to the Trabe distress call was a gamble.  A strategy. The Trabe may prove all the more amenable to a temporary alliance to defend against the Vaadwaur in a rattled and fragile state.

Even so, every minute this rescue required gave the Kazons another minute to travel further away with her missing crew members. It weighed on Taes like a stone in her stomach. Taes needed an additional exchange from this encounter: all of the Trabe’s intel about the ever-changing borders of Kazon-Relora space. A set of guardrails would go a long way towards simplifying Taes’s search.

USS Meridian dropped out of warp a heartbeat later. While Constellation held her position, the Defiant-class starship swerved to wedge itself between the Trabe carrier and the fortress-like battleship on the attack. The asymmetrical-armed hull was plated with dark, striated alloys, and a citadel superstructure topped its mass.

Meridian’s shield bubble flared as it took the energy blasts intended for the Trabe carrier. Coming to the aid of the Trabe caused a sensory disorientation for Taes because the Kazon had taken all of their ships from the Trabe when they overthrew their oppressors; the starships all looked identical from a distance. With the arrival of the Starfleet pair, the smaller vessels among the Trabe’s flotilla retreated from the conflict at full impulse.

“Hail the attacker,” Taes ordered.

A breath later, Nova replied, “There’s no response to our hail.” Her voice was clipped, lacking her usual sardonic humour. She had been a shadow of herself ever since Yuulik hadn’t come back from the away mission.

From the science alcove, Flavia interjected, “The computers recognise the battleship from the D-E-I databases. This class of vessel is commanded by an android race known as Pralor-type Automated Personnel Units. A-P-Us.”

“I recall the name from my briefings but little else,” Taes remarked. Willing herself to evoke a significant factoid from memory, she squinted at the viewscreen, watching the APU battleship launch another lance of disruptor energy at Meridian. She shook her bald head and then gripped the armrest of her centre seat.

“It hardly matters if they won’t speak with us,” Taes decided. She looked to Ache and ordered, “Hold them in a tractor beam.”

The APU battleship seemed to grow all the more massive on the screen as Constellation approached and then snared it in the coruscating blue glow of its tractor beam.

“Open a hailing frequency with the Trabe carrier,” Taes asked as she rose to her full height. This was the part of the duty that came naturally. She created space for others and made them feel safe. This was what she had been doing since arriving in the Nacene Reach. This time would have to be a contest with herself: what was the fastest she could reach a trade agreement? Then, she could get back to finding Yuulik.

“I’m Captain Taes of the Federation starship Constellation,” she rattled off. “We have received your distress call and subdued your attacker. How may we resolve your dispute?”

Transmitted on the viewscreen, a harried woman with slicked-back grey hair narrowed her eyes at Taes. Judging by the architecture, she appeared to be in the command centre of the Trabe carrier. It looked far more well-maintained than the counterparts Taes had glimpsed in the Kazon fleets.

“You’re Starfleet, yeah?” the woman asked. “I’m told Starfleet has always dealt fairly with the Trabe in the past.”

Taes consciously affected a neutral expression. The Delta Exploration Initiative’s security advisories about interactions with the Trabe came to mind, but to Taes’s knowledge, outright hostilities had always been minimal.

“You could say that,” Taes said, leaving unsaid how fairly or not the Trabe had dealt with Starfleet in the past. “That’s certainly our intention on this day, right?”

Nodding vigorously, she replied, “Yes. Yes, of course. I’m Governor Solrem Vesht. We’ve suffered casualties, and my ship’s warp drive is offline. Any assistance you can provide that will allow us to leave this place in one piece would be graciously welcomed.”

“Your warp drive, you say?” Flavia piped in. Glancing over at Taes, Flavia raised an arched eyebrow, and Taes could assume Flavia was concerned about the report of warp blackouts in the other quadrants. “Have you encountered any subspace anomalies?”

Vesht frowned at that question. The deep lines of her face told the story of how frequently she made that expression. Behind her hazel eyes was a wild, hunted look, but when she shook her head at Flavia’s question, the movement betrayed fragility.

“Mmmmm,” Vesht said, “I understand you’re explorers, but now’s not the time. Those creatures are pirates. They mean to steal from us. We managed to fend off their boarding shuttle, but their battleship disabled our warp engines.”

Vesht’s frown turned into a contemptuous sneer. “Violence is all they understand, Captain Taes of the Federation starship Constellation. Destroy them before they destroy us all!”