If one could strike gold on a mission of stellar surveys, studying the Mesea Storm was more like striking copper. Such were the metallic hues the swirling plasma storm cast through the windows of the Round Table, Endeavour’s officers’ lounge given a cheap gilding at this late hour.

Kharth’s hand hovered over a piece on the board. ‘Oh,’ she grunted. ‘That’s a silver piece.’ She reached for another. Hesitated. Made the move.

Caede didn’t pause before he moved his piece in response, pinning her back even more. ‘The lighting doesn’t cover the colours any more than it’ll spare your blushes.’

‘I’m not making excuses.’

‘You did last time. Poor refugee kid, hasn’t played a proper game of latrunculo since leaving Romulus. Like you couldn’t replicate a board for sixteen years.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ Kharth sneered. ‘We didn’t have a board at the refugee camp. And who was I going to play against in Starfleet?’

‘Don’t tell me officers wouldn’t fall over themselves to experience a taste of Romulan culture. Just to show off how open their horizons are.’ Caede’s flinty eyes flickered up from the board, waiting for her to make her next move. ‘Or did you want to avoid getting your ass kicked by some human from New York?’

‘No. If that happened I’d sell them the refugee sob story so they’d feel guilty.’ Caede laughed, and she moved, hoping he’d be distracted. But his response came immediately, pinning one of her pieces and forcing her to take it off the board. She made an annoyed sound. ‘I just suck at latrunculo.’

‘Then why are you playing?’

‘You suggested it! Both times! Thought I’d be sociable. I don’t care if you’re playing mind-games, wanting to judge if I’m Romulan enough, seeing how I cope in the face of adversity or whatever…’

‘Nah.’ Caede sipped his white-leaf tea. ‘I like winning, that’s all. Not as if there’s much else to keep either of us busy right now.’ His eyes fell on the windows, at the swirling maelstrom of the plasma storm that had been Endeavour’s home and all-consuming focus for days.

The Mesea Storm lay at the furthest reaches of the Midgard Sector, deep in unclaimed and uncharted space that had once been the borderlands of the Romulan Star Empire, and Starfleet had barely scratched the surface of its secrets. If the Star Empire ever knew them, the records were lost or never to be shared.

‘From a proper first contact to stellar surveying,’ Kharth grumbled, not looking at the window. She was sick of the view by now. ‘Starfleet life is never done.’

‘Beats endless patrols.’

‘We get those, too.’

‘Not on a ship like this.’

‘Yes, yes,’ spat Kharth. ‘I should be grateful, I’ve got so much, oh, but I’m not a proper Romulan because I suck at latrunculo and haven’t read Averin -’

‘I haven’t read Averin,’ Caede grunted. ‘And I’ve met lots of people who are bad at latrunculo. These are your issues, Kharth, not mine.’

Perhaps their exchange officer wasn’t trying to get under her skin, put her in a position to expose her insecurities. But he was managing it anyway. Wondering why she’d agreed to the game this late at night, and hoping for it to come to an end as quickly as possible, Kharth moved a piece, which he immediately took.

The universe was particularly unkind, because the interruption didn’t arrive until after he’d won the match. There was little warning – merely an intensifying of the rumbling of the deck, the creaking of the hull, and then a thudding impact. A lay-person might have mistaken it for weapons fire, the strike of an energy blast, but neither Kharth nor Caede were lay-people.

Besides, with Endeavour travelling with navigational deflectors on, charged and calibrated to weather the plasma storm, there was no phaser or disruptor strike that could immediately rock the ship.

Had they been on their feet, they might have been knocked over. As it was, their drinks went flying, along with the wretched latrunculo board and all of its pieces, and Kharth gripped the armrests tight, jaw clenched, as the ship shuddered and shook around them before the lights died.

There was only a beat as it subsided before emergency lights gleamed to life. They braced and stared at each other, wondering if it was over. Then the red alert klaxon went off.

Kharth smashed her combadge. ‘Kharth to bridge! Report!’

It was Lieutenant Lindgren who answered, the flight control officer running the graveyard command shift, her bid to clock more time in the big chair going more dramatically than she probably expected. Cool and collected, her poise belied the situation Kharth suspected they were in.

‘Sudden plasma discharge from the storm, Commander, bigger than any we’ve had so far. We took it on our shields but looks like it’s overloaded the main deflector dish and short-circuited a bunch of systems in the EPS relays.’

Caede was already at the wall panel, hammering commands to get a damage report. His head snapped over to Kharth, eyes narrowing. ‘Hull breaches in main engineering. Emergency forcefields are kicking in.’

All over the ship, automated systems would be activating, directing people to where they needed to go. Captain Valance would be racing to the bridge. Commander Thawn to engineering. Kharth, meanwhile, knew she should be wherever she was needed most. And she was closer to engineering, not just than to the bridge, but than Thawn.

She shot to her feet. ‘Hold down the fort until the captain gets there, Lieutenant. We’re going to help Forrester in engineering.’

At this distance, they had no choice but to rush to the turbolifts and pray emergency power levels kept them functioning. Everyone else aboard was either already at their post, or hadn’t been awake and alert when the disaster struck. Heads were sticking out of doors as the two senior officers ran through the corridors, but they were the first to a lift.

They were also the first reinforcements in main engineering, bursting through the heavy doors to find it in a state of controlled chaos. At this time of night, young Lieutenant Forrester ran the engine room – though, Kharth thought wryly, Forrester was a veteran of Archanis and Deneb by now, her age less important than her experience of a dozen crises and battles.

Main engineering was a mess of emergency lights and klaxons, smoke billowing from the upper chambers where EPS conduits had overloaded, alerts flashing on a dozen screens. Forrester stood in the middle, commanding things like a very brusque conductor. Her eyes lit up when the doors opened, but her disappointment that they were not Chief Engineer Thawn was nearly palpable.

‘We’re what you get, Lieutenant. Put us to work,’ Kharth said, not wasting time asking for a report.

Forrester’s expression settled. ‘We’ve got hull breaches in this section and elsewhere on the ship. Emergency forcefields are holding, but I don’t want to rely on them. Commander – controls are over there for emergency bulkheads. Make sure nobody’s about to be trapped and seal up where you can to spare us power.’ She rounded on Caede, the more technically minded of the pair of Romulans. ‘Centurion, if you’d help with rerouting power from unstable conduits, me and my team can focus on making sure the containment on the warp core stays stable.’ She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the pulsing, furious heart of the ship.

It was rare Kharth was given simple orders and simple tasks these days. Even in a crisis, there was something soothing about it. On the bridge, she’d have to balance a dozen duties, keep an eye on a whole situation. Here, she could walk three metres and have everything laid out before her. In the background, the shouts of Forrester and her team faded to a distant, irrelevant hum.

Forcefields sealed off hull breaches themselves, while emergency bulkheads sealed off whole sections, sacrificing everything – everyone – ahead of that point. They’d only come down automatically if power systems were desperately failing, if it was that or lose the ship, but otherwise no computer could determine how much of a section, material, lives could be sacrificed to salvage power. Kharth’s chest eased as she saw life-signs clear the endangered sections; Endeavour’s emergency systems had kicked in fast enough that they’d lost nobody, and would lose nobody, to the breaches. Deck by deck, her eyes ran across the breaches, bringing down emergency bulkheads where she could, as with each passing moment, Caede stabilised power flow to bypass damaged conduits.

When they’d arrived, a collapse in the power systems could have brought down the wrong emergency forcefields and decompressed a whole section. By the time the doors slid open to admit the frantic figure of Commander Thawn, they’d backed the ship away from the edge of the cliff she’d been teetering on.

To Kharth, the warp core had looked only subtly different. Upon arrival, Thawn took three steps into the heart of main engineering, looked at the pulsing of the warp core plasma, and swore in her native tongue.

‘Forrester! What do we have?’ she demanded, striding over to her young assistant.

‘The storm’s discharge has overloaded EPS conduits, and there’s been surges in plasma flow putting strain on the warp field coils,’ Forrester began to explain. ‘I’ve been stabilising containment -’

‘Throttle back the injection rate,’ Thawn cut her off. ‘Sixty percent. Cut it right down. We’ll have to reconfigure the entire conduit system.’

Kharth turned at this, aghast. ‘Sixty percent? That’s barely enough to crawl out of here – isn’t that a bit premature a damage assessment?’

‘Didn’t know you were an engineer, Commander,’ Thawn replied smoothly. ‘Thank you for your assistance. But I’ll take it from here.’ Without another look, she advanced past the XO, joining her engineers clustered around the warp core, and began her work as a surgeon trying to coax the ship’s very heart back to life.

Caede and Kharth stepped to the door, a little cowed at their dismissal despite themselves. Caede wore a deep frown. ‘You’re not an engineer,’ he conceded, ‘but you know this ship better than me. How bad’s that power cut?’

‘Depends,’ grumbled Kharth.

‘On?’

‘On if we want to move faster than warp five any time soon.’