“Cold beer is bottled God.”

Dylan Thomas (1958)

Kirok Skyrunner walked over to the cliff edge after the group had breakfast, gazing out at the breathtaking view of the wooded mountainside. Kirok Skyrunner, a rugged outdoorsman with a warm smile, called his beautiful wife Sophia over. She walked over, finishing her cup of what was supposed to be coffee.

“What is it babe,” Sophia asked, stepping to her husband’s side.

Kirok pointed out the view.

“Look at that view, sweetheart,” Kirok gave her a small kiss on her head.

Sophia looked at the breathtaking view. She whistled as she took the view in.

“That is awesome. So beautiful. I never saw anything like this before.”

Kirok pulled out his tricorder and scanned the lake below.

“That lake is a fresh water one with many fish in it. I think we could spend the day fishing,” Kirok suggested to Sophia.

Sophia looked at Kirok, then gestured at Mike Dart, Thalissa Zheen, and Ramón Gutierrez.

“What about them,” Sophia asked Kirok.

Kirok smiled at his wife, replying, “I’ll ask them.”

Meanwhile, the morning had hit Michael like a sock full of latinum slips – blunt, uninvited, and too bloody bright.  Thalissa handed him a ration bar and he grunted in thanks.  Words were too expensive this early.  He gnawed on the brick of protein, still enveloped halfway into the fugue state of sleep.

All the while, Ramón knelt at a smoldering fire pit like some shaman lost in time, cheerfully coaxing flame from the smoke with the blackened tip of a stick he’d pilfered from nearby.  He hummed something low in Spanish.  Perhaps a hymn.  Perhaps a murder ballad, for all Michael knew.  But the bastard was chipper.  

Chipper, at dawn!  

He’d been awake before all the others, and was responsible for the pot of coffee brewing over the open flame that smelled so strong, Michael mused it might very well double as a compound to strip the paint right off of the Fresno’s hull.

Kirok walked over to where Mike, Thalissa, and Ramón were sitting together, finishing their breakfast.

“Good morning Mike, Thalissa, and Ramón. Hope you slept well. I have a suggestion we can do for the day,” Kirok suggested. “I was wondering if you three would like to hike down to the lake below and fish and hang out together. Maybe we can chat with each other and share war stories on how we handled the Vaadwaur invasion?”

At Kirok’s invitation, Ramón grinned like a fox who just found a henhouse without a fence.  “Fishing?  Orale, cabron!  I can take what we catch and we’ll have fish tacos, just like my abuela makes!”  

He lurched to his feet, abandoning his post at the campfire to stomp towards his gear at the foot of his bedroll.  He reached into the shadows of his pack and like a magician yanking a rabbit straight out of hell, he came up with a steel grey stasis cooler crusted in frost.  “I may have had a little heads up that they were dumping us down here, so I came prepared.”  He popped the lid to reveal a few rows of glass bottles filled with amber.  “Ice cold cervezas!”

Thalissa gave a curious, sidelong glance at Michael.  “What are ‘cervezas’?”

The sight of those sweating bottles brought Michael out of his bleary state.  Beer,” he clarified.  “God help me,” he said to his XO under his breath.  “I think I might like this lunatic after all.”

Kirok saw how excited Ramón was about fishing and laughed. Sophia walked up behind Kirok, hearing him laugh.

“What’s going on babe,” Sophia asked Kirok.

“Ramón…he was prepared for this exercise and pulled out a bunch of beers…ice cold ones.”

Sophia giggled and stepped over to the still half asleep Mike and she nodded to Thalissa.

“Morning. Looks like you two slept well,” Sophia said to Mike and Thalissa.

Kirok walked over to the storage crate that was left at the beacon site, opened it up and grabbed enough fishing line for five poles and grabbed five fishing hooks. Then he walked back to his sleeping back and broke off five nice sized tree branches and tied the fishing line to each one and put a hook on each. Sophia watched him do this and giggled.

“My own very MacGyver, one reason why I married him,” Sophia said to Mike and Ramón.

Kirok saw his wife smiling at him, he grinned like a school boy and brought the makeshift fishing poles over for everyone’s inspiration.

“I didn’t see any fishing poles, so I had to improvise. What does everyone think,” Kirok asked everyone. “I think the others already left camp and headed to the lake. I saw them on the far side.”

Michael was swallowing down a gulp of Ramón’s paint stripper masquerading as coffee while Kirok proffered his makeshift rods.  There was a sort of warped poetry in their construction – sticks twisted just right, line looped with a crazed manner of confidence. 

“Primitive ingenuity,” he muttered as he gave an approving nod.  “Hell, I’ve served aboard ships held together with less.”  In particular, he considered the Resilience, that old Freedom-class he’d served aboard for his cadet cruise.  The Resilience didn’t fly.  She groaned through space, propelled not so much by warp engines as she did through sheer determination and grit.  With a hull that creaked like an arthritic whore in a thunderstorm, she was always just one averted crisis away from a complete breakdown.  

The perfect crucible for engineering cadets to break themselves upon. 

It didn’t take them long to hike down to the waters below their site.  The lake looked like a postcard somebody hallucinated during a wet dream – serene, glassy, unoppressive.  It looked like Jimmy and Mike Ayres were set up across the water.  

Ramón was humming to himself like some half-baked mariachi devil as he tossed his line to the water, but Michael noted the way the counselor observed them all with a critical eye.  Shore leave his ass, there was no way he wasn’t put here to assess his and Thalissa’s mental state after the Fresno’s entanglement with the Vaadwaur.

Michael hung back from the others.  He’d tried to get into fishing once – back on Earth in the Sierras.  The hook caught his thumb.  The fish escaped, and he swore vengeance on the whole concept.  Since then, fishing had become more of a spectator sport for him – one best observed as he leaned against a sunbaked rock, one of Ramón’s cold cervezas perspiring in his grip.  He watched Thalissa cast her line like a goddamn Norse war deity as he sipped away.

Speaking of the Vaadwaur, hadn’t Kirok said something about that earlier?  They’d certainly put the Fresno through the wringer.  Michael took a longer drag from the bottle, swallowing down both the suds and the emotions that came from that whole ordeal.  

He nodded to the other Captain, cutting through this postcard illusion with his single, sober question.  “Hey,  the Carlsbad?  How’d she come through that whole goddamn mess?”  He didn’t need to elaborate on just what mess he was referring to.  They had all gone through it.  It was why they were here.  

They all knew.

It didn’t escape him that the second the words had escaped his mouth, he felt it.  That awful, crawling burn of being watched.  Ramón’s eyes seemed to narrow into tactical sensors.  Keen, calculating.  There was interest in how this conversation would develop.  It confirmed his suspicions of the counselor’s purpose here.

Kirok heard Mike ask about the USS Carlsbad and he walked over and sat next to Mike, nursing his cold drink.

“You asked about the USS Carlsbad and how we dealt with the cowards? We barely managed to get out of that buzzsaw. My wife lost her ship and almost her whole crew to them. I almost lost her. Thank the gods I found her alive. We found a whole colony of former Borg drones that agreed to help us, since they were attacked by the Vaadwaur as well. That whole thing was worse than the Kobayashi Maru.”

Kirok guzzled his whole beer down to drown the feelings of what he went through during the Vaadwaur invasion. Sophia noticed Kirok downing his whole beer and walked over to check on her husband.

“Babe, you ok,” Sophia asked Kirok.

Kirok burped after he finished his beer. He looked up at her.

“I’m ok babygirl. Mike just asked me how we dealt with the Vaadwaur,” Kirok replied to her.

Kirok was looking at his beautiful wife and when he mentioned Vaadwaur, he saw her demeanor change. Her eyes looked like phasers ready to fire. Her facial expression was so dark, it could chill the Borg Collective.

“Oh sh**,” Kirok said. “Red Alert.”

When Sophia spoke, it was like photon torpedoes being launched. Kirok stood up and walked to his wife

“Those spineless bastards…,” Sophia spat to no one specifically.

Kirok wrapped his arms around her, not as a lover’s embrace, but to contain her anger. Kirok softly said in her ear.

“Easy baby. Calm down.”

The commotion caught the attention of the others. Kirok was soothing Sophia, calming her down. He felt her calming down. Then Sophia collapsed onto the ground and started crying.

Michael cringed and took another swig of the suds.  Jesus… his words were barely even cold yet as he watched Sophia’s face crack like glass under pressure.  He knew the question would be a loaded one for all of them, but he hadn’t intended to go so heavy pouring the deuterium into an open wound. 

“Yeah…” he muttered into the bottle.  “Didn’t have it so easy on the Fresno, ourselves.”

Every time he closed his eyes, he still saw them – drifting like glassy-eyed marionettes with severed strings.  Cold, blue.  Spinning in the dark.  The corpses of hull-blown crew still adrift somewhere in Pieris space.

Thalissa stayed silent.  Just flicked her wrist and sent her line sailing again.  But those glacial eyes remained fixed on her Captain, quietly assessing.  Visibly unsettled.  Perhaps even affection tangled up in all that wreckage, almost certainly.  But not a single word crossed pursed lips – just antennae twitching like nervous signal flags.

Ramón stared on, like a predator of pain trained to sniff it out in the wild.  And what he was seeing was a powder keg of guilt and grief.  The sudden shift from his usually hard tone somehow still managed to hit like a fist in the gut.  “Starbase 72 got lucky.  Vaadwaur never came.  But back when I was just a recluta flaco y estupido – a skinny fuckin’ recruit, the Dominion sure came.  I know a thing or two about the shit warfare brings.”

The counselor drained the last of his own brew like it was a penance, then flung the bottle into the rocks a short distance away.  The sound it made wasn’t so much a shatter as it was an exorcism of the memories.

“We’re supposed to be explorers, not soldiers.  Survivor’s guilt is a bitch, hermano.  Left Starfleet for a while after that.  Couldn’t do it anymore.”  Ramón looked out at the lake, his tone softening.  “But talking… helps.  More’n I wanted to admit.  So that’s why I came back.  Different uniform.  Different job.  People need to talk about the crap or else it burns them alive.  That’s why I’m here.  That’s why you’re here.  This ain’t just a camping trip.  This is triage for your soul, cabrones.”

Kirok Skyrunner was on his knees next to his sobbing wife. Kirok looked at Ramon, taking in what he said about the Dominion War.

“Ramon, I know about the pain from the Dominion War. My parents were in Starfleet HQ when the Breen hit Earth. War sucks. I’m glad that we are here,” Kirok said to Ramon.

Sophia regained her emotional control and looked at Ramon, nodding.

“Mike, I’m sorry that you guys had it hard too,” Sophia said to Mike.