Fleet Captain Taes couldn’t be Nova’s priority. Not now. Not here. Not this. There was a loop in her mind screaming that Taes’s safety should be her priority. Some part of her Starfleet training from a hundred and fifty years ago squeezed at her heart like a ghostly fist. But it wasn’t practical and simply couldn’t be her first priority.

Nova trusted there were security officers for that.

She had two other priorities by her side.

Nova ducked behind the balustrade as soon as she saw the Pralor Automated Personnel Units shoot their first energy blasts. From her location on the second level of the atrium, Taes was on the other end of the atrium. She had been shot down at the peak of the grand ramp that curled up from the concourse. Nova used her first seconds to scan her level for the reflective gleam of Automated Personnel Units. She couldn’t see any at first glance; she recalled them all being gathered in the concourse.

As she pulled her phaser from its holster, it hadn’t occurred to Nova that she would be the only one of her friends with any sense of self-preservation. Still palming her phaser pistol, Nune grasped at the lower hems of Yuulik’s and Nune’s uniform tunics and tugged at them.

“Get down!” Nova hissed.

Nune reacted like a good Starfleet officer — accustomed to taking orders. He hunched down by Nova’s side. Yuulik only turned in Nova’s direction, her eye bulging with confusion. Yuulik was less practised at taking orders. The rapid blinking and glassy sheen to her eyes suggested she hadn’t yet hardened her heart to ignoring Taes being shot by the Pralor APU. Yuulik had never known war. Even during the recent Dominion incursion, Constellation had been sent far beyond occupied territory to locate the origin of the Jem’Hadar lost fleet.

“Commander, I need you,” Nova insisted. This time, Yuulik knelt beside her. Nova forced herself to block out the sound of screams echoing from the concourse, especially the ones that stopped suddenly. The distinctive whine of Starfleet phaser fire helped to screw up her courage.  Security officers were taking care of it.  Security officers would protect the delegates from the APUs.

Spotting the nearest open airlock, Nova pointed it out to her crewmembers. When Yuulik and Nune nodded at her, Nova led them across the docking bay at a crouched stride. Even without any APUs around them, energy blasts were lancing past them wildly — sloppy aim. Nova saw a Trabe woman take an energy bolt in the shoulder, and it dropped her. Nova had been trained for this. When the temporal inversion fold had taken her out of time, the Klingon War had been in full swing.

Halfway to the docking port, Nova spotted Counselor Turro, pushing his way out of a group of Trabe running away from the commotion. She caught his eye and silently conscripted him to join her confused band of stray cats. As soon as she got them into the airlock, protected on three sides, Nova spared the time to assess them.

“Where are your sidearms?” Nova asked, incredulous. “Not even one of you?”

“Where’s your head?” Yuulik riposted. “I actually passed all of my academy exams. That means I don’t have to carry a phaser.”

Out of breath from the sprint to join them, Turro gasped and said, “We came here for the sake of negotiation. That never works at phaser point.”

“Fine,” Nova said shortly. She shook her head in frustration and turned to study the unfamiliar text on the control panel. “I’m gonna seal you all in here. Constellation will evacuate you eventually.”

Yuulik grasped Nova by the shoulder and shook her. She wasn’t shellshocked anymore. Yuulik demonstrated the kind of passion Nova had always prayed to see from her, but which had previously been reserved for test tubes and old bones.

“Are you a maniac?” Yuulik accused. “You can’t take on the Pralor alone.”

“I won’t be,” Nova said, and it was maybe a lie, perhaps a promise. Tilting her chin to Turro, Nova said, “Negotiations don’t work in a morgue either.”

Nune interjected, “Yuulik’s right. There’s no sense taking up arms against the Pralor. They’re literally only programmed to fight an eternal war with the Cravic. They can’t care about anything else.”

A buzzing sound, like an Augment mosquito, assaulted Nova’s ears. Growing louder the closer it got, Nova pivoted on her heel and raised her phaser at the source of the noise. Luckily, she recognised the exocomp form of Lieutenant Cellar Door before she plucked at the trigger. His anti-grav boots zipped him into the airlock where his colleagues had gathered.

She started to say, “Sorry–” but he was already on a tirade. Nova turned her back on them to scan her surroundings. She thought she saw a reflection of silver moving up the ramp to their floor.

“Counselor!” Cellar Door announced, “What a relief it is to find you! It’s my greatest hour of need, I’m afraid.”

Turro folded his hands over his chest. “I can’t take office hours just now, Cellar. Not during a firefight.”

“But I’m having intrusive thoughts!” Cellar Door blared, his speakers amplifying his voice. At his usual volume, he explained, “It’s my voice. In my mind. I can hear myself telling me to kill you. To kill all Starfleet. No, not just Starfleet. All biological life.”

Yuulik’s voice went cold, analytical. “Isn’t that how it started for my junior science officers last year? When their brains were attuned to Borg neural interlink frequencies? Intrusive thoughts telling them: We are the Borg? Starfleet is the Borg?”

“No, Prophets, No,” Turro sighed, sinking to the floor. “The Borg can’t be after us again.”

Condescendingly, Yuulik said, “Killing all biological life has never been the Borg’s quest.” –She clicked her tongue– “Rarely been.”

“Even the Vaadwaur want domination,” Nune said. “There’s no one to oppress if we’re all dead.”

A mystery. Why did Cellar Door have to present her with a mystery? And a mysterious transmission inside his thought processors at that! Nova supposed she could convince herself to trust a little longer that someone else would care for Taes. She tapped in the command on the control pad and slapped the final activator. The airlock door sealed behind her, locking the five officers in a box. Sometimes, it was best to keep the non-combatants out of a fight. Worst case, they still had the advantage of transporters over the Pralor.

“But at this moment, the Pralor wants us all dead,” Nova pointed out. “If the intrusive thought is like a neural interlink, whatever carrier wave is transmitting it to Cellar could be transmitting it to the Pralor too. If anything, the Pralor are the targets, because they haven’t been able to resist the interlink. Cellar’s a bystander.”

Cellar Door vocalised an angry blurb of an error noise. “I’ve never detected Borg interlink frequencies before.”

“It’s not the Borg,” Nune surmised, shaking his head. “It could be the Cravic APUs, provoking us to wipe out the Pralor for them?”

“Or the Vaadwaur,” Yuulik said excitedly. “Manipulating the Pralor again to distract us from the trail to their asteroid field. We never discovered how they manipulated those Pralor spies into sending a false report to their commander.”

Nova unlatched the holster on Yuulik’s hip and took her tricorder for herself. Flipping it open to reveal the whole interface, Nova activated every broadband sensor and waved the tricorder in Cellar’s direction. The comforting warble of the tricorder sounded like Nova’s favourite song in this moment of uncertainty and fretting. But the noise it made was the only useful thing about it.

“We don’t know what we’re talking about,” Nova spat out, annoyed. “I’m detecting no subspace transmissions or carrier waves being received by Cellar Door.”

“My automated diagnostics confirm the same,” Cellar Door offered, hovering closer to Nova. “No signals were detected, but I hear the voice. I promise I do.”

“You have to believe in yourselves,” Yuulik ordered. Despite using the plural, she only had eyes for Nova. “If we acknowledge the assumption that there is a carrier wave, why might it be invisible to our scanners?”

“The voice of the Prophets,” Turro said. Yuulik sneered at that.

“Blood dilithium,” Nune said quietly of the haunted dilithium that threw their lives into disarray. Yuulik’s sneer deepened to a grimace.

“Some transmissions are so alien,” Cellar Door said, “that their entire pattern signal is unknown to our databases.”

Nova pondered, “If the carrier wave were on an ultra-low frequency, below even the lowest subspace bands we’ve charted, it wouldn’t even travel through subspace as we know–”

A loud thunk beside Nova made her jump. The pressure door’s transparent panel was still rattling when she whirled on it and aimed her phaser at the Pralor APU standing on the other side. Evidently, the Pralor couldn’t bypass Nova’s locking code, so it slammed two fists into the pressure door again.

A combadge chirped after Yuulik slapped her chest. “Yuulik to Constellation, five for emergency beam up.”

Over the combadge, a harried voice only said, “Please stand by.” Nova could imagine how many emergency calls were being made to Constellation, when its crew were scattered across the atrium, unprepared for an attack. Let alone the attention that would be paid to the captain’s injury.

“Stand by?” Yuulik indignantly asked. “Do you know who I am?”

Keeping her phaser trained on the APU, Nova shouted over her shoulder, “Open the second airlock. We’ll jump from the landing pad if we have to.”

Nune moved to the control pad. As he worked on it, he said, “If the carrier wave is another form of Vaadwaur manipulation, they would be transmitting it through Underspace.”

The APU banged on the door twice more. It brought to mind a recurring nightmare of Klingons invading the USS Brancus, her sleeping mind imagining them breaking through the door to her quarters. Rattled, Nova took two steps back, hovering her finger over her phaser’s trigger. She steadied her grip on the phaser, which was getting slick from her sweat.

“Didn’t Almagest spend weeks studying Underspace last year?” Nova asked.

Tapping his combadge, Nune said, “Nune to Almagest science department. We need to test a wild theory that a carrier wave from Underspace is controlling the Pralor.”

“Lieutenant Dolan receiving,” came the voice from Nune’s combadge. “Promise me it’s your idea and not Yuulik’s.”

“I promise,” Nune said. “Could you spin up a counter-signal that would interfere with Underspace’s ultra-low frequencies and aim it at Rakosa Five?”

“I can ask,” Dolan replied.

Nune hit the activator on the control panel, and the exterior pressure door began to slide open. Even from the first crack in the pressure, icy wind whipped up in the airlock. Sunlight spilled in, revealing the sprawling city beyond the dockspire tower. Nova stopped herself from counting the number of windows she could see with lights on out there: how many Rakosans would the Pralor come for if their control signal wasn’t stopped?

“Ask for forgiveness, Dolan,” Nune said, the epitome of charm. “Not permission.”

The APU’s pounding on the pressure door sounded different. With each strike of its fists, it wasn’t just a thunk. Nova was starting to hear a crack.

“Out on the landing pad, now!” Nova insisted.

Turro skittered out first with Cellar Door hovering after him. Nune followed them. Yuulik kept close to Nova, only taking one step ahead of her. Each step was like moving through water, buffeted by the high winds in the cramped space of the airlock.

“We’re projecting a counter-signal from the deflector for the first batch of frequencies,” Dolan remotely reported.

The pounding continued. As loud as the APU’s fists were when they crashed into the pressure door, Nova thought her heart was pounding louder.

“God, Yuulik, we might never have another chance,” Nova said. Involuntarily, she laughed at its absurdity. Upon re-incorporating in 2401, every part of Nova’s Starfleet re-training had insisted she had stepped into an enlightened age of peace. How quickly she had adjusted to that peace. The panic tightening her chest was unfamiliar to her now; she thought she had grown beyond it.

“I should tell you–” Nova said, but she screamed when the APU smashed its fists right through the pressure door. Nova squeezed the trigger, striking the APU in its centre mass.  There was no effect she could see. The APU made no sound.  Itt kept tearing an opening through the door. The stun setting was insufficient.

“We’re projecting the next batch of frequencies,” Dolan reported.

The APU stepped through the shattered doorway. Torn metal caught on its bodysuit, tearing through the covering on its left side. Regardless, the emotionless mask of the APU didn’t shift; it didn’t hesitate. It raised a hand to Nova.

Yuulik shoved Nova to the landing pad, using her body as a shield between the APU and Nova.

“Yuulik, no,” Nova hissed, as she struggled to raise her phaser, thumbing the setting bar.

The APU didn’t take another step. It jittered, and it left its hand outstretched.

“May I– may– may I,” the APU said like the skipping of a corrupted audio file.

“May I assist you?” the APU asked.