When Lt. Commander Ibanez returned to the bridge, the USS Calistoga was already approaching Mireya VII. Live and in person on the viewscreen, the hodgepodge station looked even more untidy and disjointed, and yet it came together in an oddly organic structure that melded at least seven different types of architecture into one oddly compelling whole.

Commander Dal was stoic in the center seat, and for a moment Ibanez missed the cheerful greeting that Captain Jemison always offered. Then again this wasn’t an especially cheerful moment, with the looming Vaadwaur threat and the depressing thought that Starfleet needed so much help that they were getting pirates to join their cause.

If Dal was bothered by this, he didn’t show it. It was that same, aggravatingly calm, stoic game face.

“You found two spatial disturbances?” Commander Dal queried.

Ibanez nodded. “Yes, I’m pulling up the specific data stellar cartography has sent over.  I’ll get a report done shortly.”

There was time. The Calistoga entered a synchronous position with Mireya VII and confirmed the away team’s beam in location. Commander Roix signaled her readiness and Commander Dal wished her well.

Why did he feel like he was leaving a team go into the lion’s den?

This all felt familiar in a very unpleasant way. His first mission as a commanding officer was almost his last. He was commanding the USS Trellis, a Cheyenne Class cruiser. It was supposed to be a simple mission – investigate a suspicious communications blackout from Paradiso, a colony on the outskirts of Federation space, one that had a well-used mercantile spaceport for ferrying needed resources from the Federation to the outer colonies and vice versa. He had sent an away team, just like this, and maintained position, just like this.

And what they uncovered was a radical political movement had taken over the Spaceport and was enacting tyrannical control over Paradiso colony – supported by a crew of fanatics armed with a Klingon B’rel class cruiser, a stolen cloaking device and an experimental weapon.

He had spent three quarters of the mission making safe, intelligent decisions that protected his crew and his away team.  He had taken the enemy vessel, the SS Libertine, down to its knees by taxing and targeting its engines.  They should have been able to slip away, giving the Libertine the choice to follow and initiate a warp core breach or to not follow, survive, and let the Trellis go pick up the away team and escape.  Of course, the Libertine chose to follow.  And as planned the engines went on overload.  It should have worked.

And then the enemy pulled out an experimental weapon that knocked the Trellis to a standstill and took their shields offline.

Ishreth had the choice of diverting power to shields to prevent the boarding or diverting power to engines to get out of the range of the Libertine’s explosion.

He chose engines.  The boarding was a horrible fight, but getting cause in the epicenter of another ship’s warp core breach was a surefire death sentence.  The fanatics probably counting on that.

And they made Ishreth pay for his decision by wiping the walls of the Trellis with the blood of his crew.

He could still smell it. Iron and copper and cobalt, mingling together with char and bile.

Limping to the spaceport to rescue an away team that barely made it out alive.

Hazy memories of getting toward back to a Starbase while the oxygen wore thin. While his own injuries made it hard to stay awake.

In the end they suppressed the boarding, recovered the away team and ended up with 37 casualties on a crew of 120 and 18 fatalities. He thought he should never be in command after that. But the facts were clear – he had made good decisions the entire way. They still paid an unimaginable price.

He could still smell it. The wavering burnt hint of fire in the ventilation, the bite of oxidation following weapons fire.

“Commander?”

He snapped his antennae towards Ibanez, wondering how long he had been in his reverie. Focusing on the Science Officer’s features, he could take from context clues that the answer was not long, but Ishreth admonished himself for his lack of focus, nonetheless. “Yes, Commander Ibanez?”

Ibanez took in a long slow breath, watching, wondering if he saw a crack in that calm façade. Maybe he imagined it. “There is no indication whatsoever that the large asteroid was destroyed. There’s no debris field, no indication of destruction, it’s just gone.”

Ishreth let his antennae drop slowly into a pose of deep thought. “Would it be large enough to affect the rest of the field?”

“Yes, absolutely.” Ibanez nodded. “Large enough to be a planetoid. And no, the field isn’t drastically changed.”

“What could cause that?” Commander Dal felt like he was tempting fate merely by asking that.

“Cloaking device. But how would you power it? Subspace anomaly – but we’re not getting anomalous readings. Radiation, possibly. Or maybe it’s been moved to these underspace tunnels.” That last one was pure conjecture on the Science Officer’s part, but he was fixated on anything and everything the Vaadwaur might do to screw them over and figured that he should mention it just in case.

“I don’t like any of those options.” Dal murmured.

“I don’t like ‘em either.”

And for a moment the two men paused, glancing at one another as if they were in a verbal boxing ring, each one wondering ‘was that a joke?’

The moment passed and no one laughed.

“How would it affect the away team if we move position to the other side of Mireya VII, closer to the asteroid field?” Dal pressed, looking for a tactical advantage in the current vicinity.

“Which is also closer to the blackout area…” Ibanez didn’t love the idea.

Ishreth eyed him evenly as if challenging his fortitude. “And a better position to scan for whatever could be the root cause of your missing planetoid.”

Touché.

Ibanez chewed the inside of his lower lip and took a moment to stare at his readings before answering. “We could still maintain a transporter lock.”

With a simple nod Ishreth looked towards the front of the bridge. “Helm, move us to 347 mark 13, safest position near the asteroid field.”

The Calistoga shifted position gracefully, slowly. Nothing that would upset Mireya VII, just a slow orbital path that parked them on the other side. And for a while, nothing happened. Ibanez refined his scans and debated sending out a probe while the bridge maintained a focus on the tasks at hand and Ishreth was left with his thoughts.

The worst part about the fight with the fanatics from the Libertine was the suicide bombers. Ishreth had never even contemplated that in this day and age there would be people so entrenched in an insane cause that they would be willing to swallow explosives and detonate themselves in order to take out Starfleet officers.

But they had, and they did.

He blinked and for a moment he saw the bridge of the Trellis, the scorched and gore spattered bridge; a victim of living incendiary bombs. With the villainous commander of the Libertine, dead at the top of the bridge and wounded carefully placed around was a tableau of palpable pain.

He blinked again and the bright, sterile, perfectly intact bridge of the Calistoga and shuddered.

He had been through the Starfleet mandated counseling. He didn’t think this would return. But here it was, echoes of the past.

“There is a power surge in the asteroid field.” Ibanez’s voice broke him from his thoughts and he turned, thoughtfully towards the science officer. “Faint, but clear – I think the pirates may have built or set … something… in the field.”

He looked to the data steaming in, which was a lot of data, and yet it remained desperately vague. “Can we determine what?”

“I’m reading a mine field, for sure – so don’t go in there.  Or do go in there but be extremely careful. But beyond that there’s evidence of some sort of construction, but not any construction that I can see.”

Ishreth frowned, staring at his second officer, trying to parse out what that could mean. “Perhaps they built something and moved it?”

“Maybe.” Ibanez frowned once again, his features looking tired and drawn in the blue light of his readout screen. “Or they’re hiding something.”

“How long would you need to get clear readings?” Ishreth queried, antennae curling downwards in thought.

Ibanez considered. “If I can launch a probe I can get better readings in ten minutes. But I suppose we need to be real careful with probes as to not piss off our maybe-pirate-allies. So… thirty minutes?”

The last thing they needed was a diplomatic incident hampering Commander Roix.

“Thirty minutes it is. We haven’t gotten a call from Commander Roix, and we don’t have any reason to rush.” Permission given; Ibanez nodded slowly and got to work. Meanwhile Ishreth rose. “I’ll be in my ready room, call me if you find anything.”

He had the benefit of being new, and not a single soul on the bridge knew that this was unusual for him. Ishreth hated being alone in a ready room and preferred to stay connected to the bridge crew as much as possible. But if the former commanding officer had made use of it (and gauging by their reactions she had) then he could slip off and spend some time working through the haunting memories of the past… and screwing his head on straight.

~*~

Fourteen minutes.

It had taken a total of fourteen minutes between when Commander Vagress Losten first demanded the USS Trellis surrender to the point where Vagress Losten was dead.

Fourteen minutes full of cruelty, pain, blood, hurt and violence.  Almost all of that perpetrated by Vagress Losten.  When threatened the Starfleet crew fought back, and the fight was not good.  Ishreth Dal would never say it was good.

There were seventeen dead, four critically wounded and twenty other injuries ranging from mild to moderate.  He had been one of the twenty, and still on the bridge, bound and determined to not see any more blood that day.

None of that counted Vagress Losten’s people.  Not a single one surrendered.  The ones who were not killed in the combat committed suicide in creative ways rather than be taken prisoner.  It was an utterly appalling loss of life.

What Ishreth didn’t know, but had eventually guessed was that Losten had cherry picked the most mentally deranged, committed, warped minds to his crusade to steal the Trellis.  Anyone who might not be utterly loyal and unquestioningly ready to die was left on the Libertine to perish as it’s engines imploded.

The bridge of the Trellis was painted in the blood of the people Losten sacrificed to make his last stand.  It reeked with the most hideous odor.

Somehow it was fitting for a thing that Ishreth would never call a victory.  It was a horrible bloody mess and the only thing he could say was that most of the crew survived.

He was not happy, he was not proud and he was not pleased.

To this day it was seared into his memory. The scent of the incendiary bombs with their sharp metallic char and the viscous organic material they had sprayed as they exploded still filled his nostrils. He had tamped it down so that it was hidden away, out of mental sight and conscious thought. And in the subconscious is festered, growing darker and gaining sharper and longer fangs with each passing month.

And despite none of it being his fault he wondered as he stood in command of the Calistoga, would it be the same this time or would it be different? The Vaadwaur were conquering tyrants with no consideration of life. What if they boarded the Calistoga?

How many would die? How much blood would bathe the halls?

How many death notifications would he have to send to grieving families? What appalling, senseless tragedies might come from the encroaching threat of the Vaadwaur invasion.

No, not threat. Reality.

Maybe the question really was – how did he deal with it? How did he move forward? The Calistoga was filled with good people, and he was committed to seeing not only the success of the mission but the safety of the crew.

But how do you handle the chaos of things you couldn’t possibly prepare for?

His commbadge shrilled.

“Commander we need you on the bridge!  Energy surge from the blackout zone!” Commander Ibanez sounded tense and worried.

Ishreth didn’t answer, he simply rose and moved towards the door.

How did he handle the chaos?  He still didn’t know. But he was about to find out.

The Vaadwaur were coming.