‘So that’s another vote for the Solathian Race Grounds.’ Lindgren swiped her finger across the holographic display dominating the Safe House lounge to tally up her count. ‘Looking pretty decisive, then!’ She turned to the small assemblage of young, twenty-something officers and NCOs with a hint of triumph.

‘Damn it,’ swore Lieutenant Forrester at roughly the same time Chief Bekk gave a hiss of delight, his sharp Ferengi fangs bared.

‘What’re you complaining about?’ The floppy golden hair of Lieutenant Tyderian, Endeavour’s fighter squadron leader, swung as he turned to beam at Forrester. For her part, the grim-faced engineer seemed unmoved by his simple charm. ‘You’d love the Race Grounds.’

‘That’s the problem,’ drawled Zherul, the Orion paramedic.

‘There’s no way Thawn lets me take more than twelve hours off,’ Forrester confirmed.

Lindgren had thinned her lips, obviously not about to voice or join criticism of a fellow member of the senior staff to the junior officers present, but the response was a general grumble of outrage.

‘Surely not,’ blustered Tyderian, blue eyes bright with disbelief. It was a little like watching a puppy be told Christmas had been cancelled. ‘Counsellor Dhanesh says we should all see the sights, and Commander Airex wants us filling in reports.’

‘Yeah,’ said Zherul, smirking. ‘It’s our job to party. In the name of exploration, you understand.’

Forrester shrugged. ‘Not while the ship needs repairing.’

‘But if that happens,’ said Chief Bekk, his eyes narrowing, ‘then all our department heads will follow suit, right?’

‘You’re fine,’ Forrester told the quartermaster with an eyeroll. ‘No way Caede listens to Thawn.’

‘No, but Athaka will! Then other shift leaders might stop and think…’

‘Take it up with Thawn,’ said Forrester. ‘No way I get to feel dirt under my boots this week.’

All eyes turned, at last, to the inevitable. Nate Beckett, perched on the Safe House’s bar with a bottle of beer in hand, sighed. He took a moment for a long gulp of his drink, tasting the flavours, the fizz, then sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘And so you turn to me in your hour of need.’ He jumped off the counter with what he thought a swaggering air, though that was a hard thing to do. ‘To slay the dragon. The harpy.’

‘Your girlfriend,’ Lindgren pointed out in a moment of unhelpful feminine solidarity.

‘But yes,’ said Forrester, ‘please give her a good seeing-to, so she lets us take time off.’

‘Have no fear.’ Beckett set his hands on his hips in a heroic pose. ‘She’s never been able to resist my charm.’

‘That’s… outrageously untrue,’ said Bekk. ‘She used to throw you out of her office in Ops all the time –’

‘You just figure out who else you’re bringing on this racing escapade,’ said Beckett, waving his finger at them all. ‘Who’ll make it cool. And I’ll make sure everyone can go.’

They’d been a persistent band over the years, this collective of young lieutenants and NCOs. They were the sort of officers for whom Endeavour had usually been their second assignment, somewhere they’d been sent once they’d cut their teeth and were now due a little responsibility. Some faces had come and gone over the years – Harkon now on Sirius, Tyderian now here running the Black Knights – but the core had remained, largely built around whoever Elsa Lindgren liked, or at least didn’t want to put up with the hassle of rejecting.

It had not escaped Beckett that they weren’t ensigns any more, the lower deckers at the whims of the truly powerful. Some of them were senior staff – and not second-string like Lindgren had been at Comms. Most of them were the very shift leaders and managers whose wrath they feared. Theoretically, they had the power to deny the iron rule of Rosara Thawn.

But she wasn’t really one of them anymore. Not Commander Thawn, who brunched with Airex and worked out once a week with Kharth. If they’d grown, she’d grown. Nobody had wanted to invoke her wrath when she was a fussy martinet, but now she was the ship’s master, much higher in the chain of command, much more respected. Her wrath wasn’t just annoying now. It was powerful.

‘Fine, whatever,’ said Rosara Thawn when he found her. Or rather, when he found her feet sticking out from under a console in main engineering, and had put the question of Forrester’s shore leave to her.

‘What?’ Beckett stared. He was going to be a hero, and he’d done nothing.

‘Counsellor Dhanesh’s memo said everyone should get a 24-hour shift off. So long as all my shift leaders don’t take their day off at the same time, it’s fine.’ Thawn wheeled out from under the console, her hair a red mane of wildness, face smudged with soot. ‘If Forrester’s sensible, I don’t see why she can’t go on the trip.’

‘Oh. Awesome!’

‘Of course,’ Thawn continued, leaning over to her toolkit, ‘I’ll have to cover her shift.’

There it is. ‘What?’

‘And I wasn’t going to have time for a full twenty-four hours off anyway.’ She looked up at him, gaze guarded. ‘You wanted to go to this race course?’

‘Well… yes. But you mean you’re not taking any time off?’

‘The ship is damaged, deep in the sector. We’re at the mercy of some Romulans we just met, and there’s a Klingon warship sharing our orbit. Why should the chief engineer take a break?’

‘Counsellor Dhanesh -’

‘I won’t work dangerous hours; I will follow all safety protocols perfectly appropriately. And when this is over, I can take a week off and spend it in a bath in the holodeck. Go, Nate. Have fun.’

His shoulders slumped. ‘No. I’ll save the day off until next week. Maybe then you’ll see a way out of this mess.’

She made a face. ‘Is this ship really going to fall apart if you take two days off?’

Beckett had to fight to swallow the indignation, though knew it was pointless. He could sense the immediate regret coming off her in waves, just as she had to sense that she’d insulted him. It was unclear which came first. ‘No, the Chief Intelligence Officer has nothing to do in a star system where Starfleet has never spent more than a few hours, at the edge of known space, in a volatile region, where we have Klingons doing God-knows-what -’

‘I’m sorry.’ Her regret sounded sincere, but so did her annoyance at him milking it. ‘I don’t think you’re slacking. And I’m sorry again, Nate, but I just don’t have time to get into it right now.’

He’d been very supportive of Thawn’s move to engineering, mostly because he wanted whatever made her happy. Had he known it would turn her into an even worse workaholic, he might have thought twice. He let the apologies wash over them both and left, sending a quick word up to the expedition team that they could holiday in peace. Almost at once, the reply on his PADD came from Lindgren, a simple question.

So no Rosara then. You still in?

Beckett was stood before the turbolift, staring at the query, when the doors slid open to show Doctor Starik in remarkably casual civilian garb: a very plain tunic with a thick, leather, belted robe thrown over it, lacking any of the adornments or simple embroidery he might normally wear.

‘You going somewhere fancy?’ said Beckett wryly, stepping in to join him.

‘On the contrary,’ said Starik, apparently missing the irony. ‘The capital city appears to be a diverse place where many people from different socio-economic backgrounds live in proximity -’

‘The clothes, Doc. You don’t normally dress like this.’

‘No. The city may be diverse. It would not be judicious, however, for my heritage to be immediately recognised. It is only sensible for me to pass for a local without further investigation.’

‘That makes sense,’ Beckett allowed as the turbolift began to whisk them away. ‘Going anywhere fun?’

‘I anticipate you would not deem the Rencaris Institute of History and Culture to meet that criteria, but it is the largest museum in the system with extensive exhibits on the colony…’

‘Are you kidding?’ Beckett rounded on him. ‘You know I was an A&A officer before I was in Intel?’

Starik tilted his head. ‘I did not. You are welcome to accompany me. I was going to ask Lieutenant Turak, as we should not travel alone…’

‘We can have Turak, Turak’s fine -’

‘Your company will suffice,’ said Starik, a little more quickly.

Beckett narrowed his eyes. ‘Do you not like Turak? You’re always spending time together.’

Starik paused. ‘Lieutenant Turak has not been receptive to my subtle indications that there might be more to conversation than his studies. Variety in companionship would be… welcome.’

‘Oh, you sassy boy, Starik. I knew you had a judgemental streak in you.’ Beckett clapped his hands together, thinking. He couldn’t take his day off if he wanted to wait for Rosara, but this trip could easily be logged as work hours, and would only take an afternoon. Perusing a museum was the perfect mixture of business and pleasure. ‘Let’s do it. Give me a minute to get changed, and I’ll be your chaperone. Don’t want you getting hate-crimed in the street, after all.’

‘Indeed,’ said Starik mildly.