From behind Sonya at the main console, Ensign Koji Oliver said, “Turbolifts are down, security fields going up on the lower decks.” Then he frowned. “Turbolifts are back up.”

  “Who ordered that?” Sonya asked.

  “The bridge.” Gar sounded as confused as Sonya.

  Geordi went over to the main console next to Koji. “Probably a trick—everyone on the ship knows the turbolifts should be down, but Danar may not. If he sees the lifts are working, he might take one and then we’d get him.”

  “Sir,” Kieran said, “I’m not tracking Danar at all. Are we sure he’s loose?”

  “He’s invisible to sensor scans,” Geordi said.

  “Oh. Sorry, sir.”

  Sonya sighed. Kieran should have known that.

  “Phaser on overload! Seal this deck!” That was Worf’s voice on the speaker. Before Sonya could even register the words, Geordi had pounced on the console and sealed off section twelve of deck thirty-six.

  Sonya held her breath as the seconds ticked by.

  Then: “Captain, the overload has been averted.”

  Everyone in engineering exhaled. Geordi lowered the force fields in that section, but kept the security fields up. Sonya went back to the warp core to see that her diagnostic was done, and the warp core was functioning normally.

  “It’ll be okay,” Kieran said. “I’m sure Worf’ll take care of the guy.”

  “Hang on, something’s wrong,” Koji said. “One of the force fields on this deck just went down. The bridge didn’t—”

  Koji’s words were cut off, and Sonya heard something fall. She whirled around to see Koji being flipped over someone’s back and onto the console by a fast-moving figure who backhanded Geordi hard enough to knock his VISOR off. Both Kieran and Cliff moved to stop him, but they were taken down, too.

  Sonya was about to cry out Kieran’s name as he crumpled, broken, to the deck, but before she could, she felt a blow to the side of her head, and the universe went dark.

  The next thing Sonya knew, she was lying on a biobed in sickbay, a throbbing, nauseating pain in her head, and Nurse Temple standing over her. “Wha—what happen’?”

  “You’re fine, Ensign, just a bump on the head. You’ll be okay in a little while.”

  “Kieran…Geordi…engineer—” She tried to sit up. This proved a rather big mistake, as the room started jumping around, bouncing back and forth, and generally behaving in a very silly manner.

  She quickly lay back down.

  The nurse smiled and said, “Notice I didn’t say you’d be okay now. Rest, all right? The doctor will be by to see you in a second.”

  Temple walked off. Sonya looked around, saw Cliff and Gar, as well as Dershowitz from security on three other biobeds, and Koji sitting in the central biobed, holding his right arm gingerly while Dr. Crusher applied a bone-knitter to it.

  What happened to Kieran?

  Sonya realized that that was the foremost thing on her mind. The last thing she saw before being rendered insensate was Kieran falling to the floor. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and the fact that he might be dead scared her, even more than the notion that Geordi or anyone else might be.

  She figured that everything was fine—that Worf caught Danar or, at the very least, that Danar was no longer a threat, since everyone in sickbay seemed fairly calm.

  But that left her with her own thoughts, which were primarily of Kieran. I’ve been an idiot, she realized. Not that this was a huge revelation—she’d been an idiot in some manner or other for most of the last year—but that didn’t make it any less so. She’d been making excuses for not pursuing a relationship with Kieran, all of which sounded very reasonable when she’d spelled them out at the corner office, and which sounded completely ridiculous in light of what just happened. What if the Borg come to the Alpha Quadrant? What if the next time we’re in the Romulan Neutral Zone, the captain doesn’t have two Klingon ships up his sleeve? What if one of those weird anomalies we come across blows us to bits? What if the next computer virus sends us the way of the Yamato?

  Dr. Crusher finished with Koji and walked over to check on Sonya. A smile on her pretty pale face, she went over Sonya with her scanner. “You’re looking more awake, Ensign. How do you feel?”

  “Nauseous, and my head hurts.”

  “Perfectly normal.” She pulled a hypo out of her blue lab coat pocket and applied it to Sonya’s neck. Almost immediately, her head cleared and her stomach felt like a stomach again instead of a whirligig. “That’ll mask the symptoms until the concussion subsides. I wouldn’t recommend returning to duty until your next shift starts—which, according to the duty roster, isn’t for another twenty hours.”

  Sonya blinked in surprise. It had only been four hours since she’d gone on duty and GQ was sounded. “Thank you, Doctor. Uh, Doctor?”

  “Yes?”

  “What happened?”

  Crusher chuckled. “Sorry, I guess you couldn’t have known. Danar managed to escape. Nobody was killed, thankfully. Worf got a few bruises, Lieutenants Meyers and Costa also got concussions, Ensign Oliver broke his arm, and Lieutenant Duffy cracked a rib. Everyone else was just stunned a bit.”

  Sonya felt a profound sense of relief at the fact that Kieran was okay.

  “Now get some rest—doctor’s orders.”

  Smiling, Sonya lazily raised her right arm in salute. “Yes, sir.”

  She let herself drift off to sleep thinking that she needed to talk to Keiko Ishikawa.

  The pleasant scent of wild roses from Earth, toyar from Betazed, and fire flowers from Berengaria wafted in the carefully circulated air of the Enterprise’s arboretum on deck seventeen. Sonya stood in the middle of the tree nursery—the flowers in question were in the main part of the arboretum—knowing that what she was doing was crazy.

  She had talked with Keiko, who had assured her that she would keep the tree nursery clear from 1900 onward. Keiko had a twinkle in her eye, adding, “It’s about time you two got your act together.” But then, Keiko had recently started seeing Chief O’Brien, so she had such things on her mind anyhow. In fact, Keiko’s recent romantic bent had been one of the deciding factors in her choosing the arboretum as the site for her and Kieran’s rendezvous.

  “Rendezvous,” listen to me. Bad enough I lied to Kieran to get him here, telling him there was a symposium. I guess I just wanted to hedge in case he said no, or wasn’t interested. Sonya hadn’t been on a date since she was a young teenager; she’d been too busy pushing herself to the next level, whether it was school, the Academy, or the Enterprise. By deceiving Kieran, it gave him an easy out, in case she’d totally made a targ’s ear out of the whole thing.

  She was dressed in civilian clothes—a loose brown blouse and equally loose pants of the same color over black boots. It was, as far as she could remember, the first time she’d worn anything other than her uniform when not in her cabin. Lian had joked that she needn’t have bothered packing clothes when she’d come on board. But it wasn’t right to show up for a date in uniform.

  At a little after 1900—being on time had never been Kieran’s strong suit—she went out to stand near the aft door. A few minutes later, Kieran walked up to her. He was wearing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt with a yellow jacket over it, his pants the same color as the jacket. At first she winced, until she realized that the color perfectly matched the toyar, which were in full bloom, and which Keiko had made the centerpiece of the arboretum. That didn’t make the outfit any more palatable, but Sonya resolved to live with it for as long as the clothes remained on.

  She found herself hoping that wouldn’t be too terribly long.

  He offered her his arm, which she took with a smile, and they both entered the aft door.

  “I guess we’re the first ones here,” he said as the door closed behind them with a soft swish.

  The smile growing, Sonya reached up and gently turned and lowered Kieran’s chin toward her. His brown eyes were filled with surprise, anticipation, and confusion, all at the same time. She whispered, “Kieran, there’s no symposium.”

  Her hand moved up to his cheek and she craned her neck to kiss him full on the lips. To her great relief, he returned the kiss, though it took him until after she’d grabbed the back of his head to pull him closer that he thought to put his arms around her.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Captain’s log, stardate 43992.6. Admiral Hanson and Lieutenant Commander Shelby of Starfleet Tactical have arrived to review the disappearance of the New Providence colony. No sign remains of the nine hundred inhabitants.

  They were the best months of Sonya’s life.

  Geordi wasted very little time in putting them on separate shifts. He had no problem with fraternization in theory, but he also wanted his people focused on their work, not on each other. So Sonya was put in charge of gamma shift, which was a promotion of sorts, since she was responsible for the entire engineering section during the “night” hours. Kieran, meanwhile, worked alpha with Geordi.

  The relationship seemed to do them both good. Kieran received more commendations, and he said he was taking the initiative more. As for Sonya, gamma shift seemed to respond well to her leadership skills, which amazed her, as she hadn’t been aware she had any leadership skills. In fact, Commander Kurn, of all people—a Klingon who’d temporarily taken over as first officer as part of an exchange program—had given her a satisfactory rating for her work on gamma shift, notable for it being the only satisfactory rating he gave to anyone.

  Working on alpha, Kieran tended to have the best stories, from him and Chief O’Brien unwittingly contaminating the ship with invidium—which led to Kieran being teased almost as much as Sonya had been after the hot-chocolate incident—to preparing a meeting room for the Legaran negotiation.

  Not that it was all fun. Bernie Kornblum had been killed, shot by an Ansata terrorist who was attempting to blow up the ship, and everyone had believed Data to be dead as well, though that turned out to be a ruse. Several people had also been injured in an attack by a Romulan vessel during the encounter with “Tin Man.”

  Still, things were going very well. The Enterprise did a lengthy survey of the Zeta Gellis Cluster, which included a rather bizarre first contact. Geordi started dating Christy Henshaw, which benefited the entire engineering staff, as it meant their boss was in a perpetual good mood. Kieran had joined the corner office, replacing Lian, who’d been transferred to the Hood, where she’d be the beta-shift ops officer under Riker’s former CO, Captain DeSoto. Wes had been given a commission to ensign, complete with red uniform and pip, an action that pleased everyone except Tess Allenby.

  All was well on the Starship Enterprise.

  And then the Borg returned.

  It started with the New Providence colony on Juret IV, which had been destroyed in a manner similar to that of the planets the Enterprise scanned in system J25 in the Delta Quadrant. A Borg expert named Elizabeth Shelby had been detached to the Enterprise to verify the likelihood that the Borg were responsible, which she did in short order.

  Sonya hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. Kieran, of course, slept like a rock. He’d been on board when they’d last encountered the Borg, but for him, it was just one more mission.

  For Sonya, it had been a lot more.

  When she came on for gamma shift, Geordi, Wes, Data, Marguerite Sherman, and Bigay Ampalayon were all standing around the main console, along with a blonde wearing a red lieutenant commander’s uniform. Sonya assumed this to be the infamous Shelby.

  “Look at Commander Borg go,” Helga Van Mayter muttered when Sonya walked past her.

  “Commander Borg?” Sonya said with a smile.

  “Well, she’s supposed to be the expert. Never mind that we’re the only ones who actually saw the damn things, but hey, she’s the expert. You know, she beamed down early with Data? I heard Riker chewed her aft shields after that one—especially after she cleaned him out in poker.”

  “She cleaned out Riker?”

  Helga nodded.

  Several hours into gamma, Riker came by asking for a report. “Everybody’s up late tonight,” Helga muttered.

  “Can you blame them?” Sonya asked.

  “Not really. God, I hope they’re wrong.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Commander, I think we should call it a night.” Riker’s voice carried across engineering. Sonya looked over to see that Riker, who had been sitting on the console’s edge in front of Bigay and Marguerite, was now standing. “That’s an order. We’ll reconvene at 0500.”

  Four whole hours of sleep, Sonya thought, then realized she was being unfair. Besides, Geordi and Wes were the types to keep gnawing at a problem until they’d completely chewed it, and Data never slept anyhow.

  Shelby then said, “Sir, if I may be allowed to continue with Mr. Data, who does not require rest—”

  “You need rest, Commander,” Riker said.

  For anybody else that would’ve been it. In fact, if Shelby had really gotten the reaming Helga had described, she shouldn’t have even gone that far.

  Instead, she went further: “If we have a confrontation with the Borg without improving our defense systems—”

  “If we have a confrontation,” Riker said firmly, “I don’t want a crew fighting the Borg at the same time they’re fighting their own fatigue. Dismissed.”

  With that, Shelby left, quickly followed by the others. Geordi gave Sonya a nod, which she returned.

  Hours later, at 0415, Geordi came running into engineering. His uniform was rumpled, as if he’d slept in it, and hadn’t bothered to change into a new one. All things considered, Sonya figured that to be precisely the case.

  “Geordi?” Sonya said quizzically.

  “I got an idea while I was sleeping. Something I read about shield nutation modification.”

  Sonya frowned. “You mean the talk T’Dar gave at the FES?”

  Snapping his fingers, Geordi said, “Yes! That’s the one. If we modify the shield nutation, we might be able to hold off the Borg attack.”

  Sonya thought over what the Vulcan scientist said at the Federation Engineering Symposium. “T’Dar’s hypothesis was that the emitters would have to be realigned.” She shook her head. “Geordi, that’d take days.”

  “We probably don’t have days.” Geordi let out a long breath. “Okay, start on it, at least. At this point, every little bit’ll hel—”

  Suddenly, without being entirely sure why, Sonya said, “The Klingons!”

  Geordi gave her what might have been a penetrating gaze if his eyes were actually visible. “I’m sorry?”

  Then it all came back to her, leaping forward from her subconscious, which had made her utter the phrase in the first place. “I just read a monograph last week by a Klingon engineer named Kurak—something about altering shield configuration. JAWM translated it and ran it. Computer, call up monograph from the most recent Journal of Applied Warp Mechanics by Kurak, daughter of Haleka.”

  The screen in front of Sonya and Geordi lit up with the text from the journal. She started scanning it. “There we go.” She highlighted a paragraph and enlarged it.

  Geordi read it over, seeing that it was a program for remodulating shields that would not require realigning the emitters. The intent was to be able to modify shields in battle. “This’ll work—we’re not reconfiguring, we’re remodulating, but the theory should still apply.” Grinning, Geordi gave Sonya a pat on the arm. “Nice work, Sonya.”

  Beaming, Sonya said, “Thank you, sir.”

  “You and Van Mayter get on this right away. And then, when gamma’s over, you all go to bed.”

  Sonya hesitated. “But if we’re not finished—”

  “Give it to Duffy and Barclay. What Commander Riker said to Shelby applies to you, too.” Sonya was about to object, pointing out that she hadn’t been able to sleep in any case, when Geordi said, “Trust me, we’ll come across the Borg soon enough, and when we do, I’m gonna be asking two hundred percent from everyone. Until then, though, I want you all rested. That’s an order, Lieutenant.”

  Those last four words were said in as formal a tone as Geordi La Forge ever used. Straightening, Sonya said, “Yes, sir, Commander.”

  Geordi relaxed again. “All right. I’m gonna see what we can do about phasers. Higher EM frequencies might mess up their subspace fie—”

  “Commander La Forge, report to observation lounge.” That was Riker.

  Tapping his combadge, Geordi said, “On my way, Commander.” He looked at Sonya. “Get to work, then get some sleep.”

  Sonya nodded.

  “Sealing doors to core chamber. Warning: inner hull failure. Decompression danger, deck thirty-six, section four. Sealing main engineering.”

  The computer’s announcement sent Sonya rocketing awake from a fitful sleep.

  Kieran!

  She leapt out of bed, still in full uniform, having feared that this very thing might happen while she slept, and not wanting to waste any time getting on duty where she was needed.

  As she entered the turbolift, her combadge chirped. “La Forge to all off-shift engineering personnel, report to Lieutenant Duffy on deck thirty-six. I’ll be on the bridge.”

  Relief washed over Sonya at the news that Kieran was okay. Maybe they were lucky and they were able to evacuate before engineering was sealed off.

  Kieran was waiting when she arrived at the main engineering console. The core chamber was behind a blast door. Also present were about a dozen engineers, plus some people from security. Sonya tried not to think about who she didn’t see: Alfredo Della Guardia, Denny Russell, Bigay Ampalayon, Beth Bracken, Cliff Meyers…

  When everyone arrived, Kieran—sounding more grave than Sonya’d ever heard him speak—said, “The Borg cut into the deck, causing a hull breach. Nineteen people were unable to get out of the area, of which we’ve scanned eleven outside the hull.”

  “Lieu—lieutenant?” That was Reg Barclay, who was standing over the navigation display. “We’re—we’re moving. According to—to this readout, we’re headed for the Paulsen Nebula.”