“Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.”
-Democritus

The lighting in this room was too clean.  Like the inside of a psychiatric facility where nothing seemed real, and nobody blinked unless the orderlies allowed them to.  Captain Michael Dart sat with his elbows on his knees, his spine curved like a bowstring, staring at some screen on the wall across from him that listed the statistics of this Vaadwaur invasion.  His reflection in the panel hardly blinked back at him.  Sunken eyes, half a shave.  The look of a man who’d seen what lies behind the the curtain and couldn’t exactly wipe the smear off his damn soul.

He glanced down at the clock displayed on the PADD in his hand that would soon be handed off with his after-action report.  Time had no business here.  It slithered.  He tried to recall what he’d even said to his crew after they’d limped back to dock at Starbase 72.  Some bullshit about holding on, sticking together, surviving.  Polished up and approved for officer-to-crew broadcast.  But once he was admitted beyond the doors just ahead, the real words would come.  Words with weight.  Words with consequence.  Someone behind that door was waiting to measure just how deep his sins ran.

He’d left her down there.  Left her.  Not just his XO.  But Dren Lor, Revek, and the security officers.  Any surviving colonists.  Fine people, competent as hell.  Probably wide-eyed and dust covered, staring at the sky for ship that might not ever come back.  The order had come through his own clenched jaw.  Teeth grinding like a warp manifold at critical stress.  Run.  Flee.  Evade before all of those Vaadwaur contacts shredded the ship and left their orbit smeared with debris.

Entering Cardassian space hadn’t been marked on their planned vector, but it ended up being the only route left behind the curtain that had fallen around the system.  The Vaadwaur followed, of course – relentless bastards.  But warp space was fractured.  The field kept collapsing, like trying to surf on boiling oil.  The Fresno had skidded into a small stretch of Cardassian territory completely by accident within their confined little bubble, praying their nav systems weren’t hallucinating from all the spatial distortion.

That was when the Galor-class vessel showed up.  The Glintaka vaporized the Vaadwaur pursuers with elegant, brutal efficiency.  Then it turned those beautiful teeth on the Fresno.  That was how Gul Nalmen had found them, hailing the Fresno with that deadpan sneer of his, as though they’d inconvenienced him by merely surviving.

Turned out they both needed one another.  His ship was cut off from Central Command, or any of their worlds really, caught in the same murky spatial prison as the Fresno.  The Glintaka had discovered there was a station – buried within the folds of the Underspace like a malignant tumor – and Gul Nalmen had been trying to crack its purpose while the Fresno had been pulled into this mess.  The Glintaka traded its scans, the Fresno traded its engineering muscle.  And together, they turned their exile into a last-ditch mission.  Not as allies, not as enemies.  Just two battered prey forming an armistice written in dread and desperation.

After a lengthy stretch of analysis, the plan became simple, at least in concept.  Destroy or disrupt the station, lift the blackout.  The execution?  Absolute fucking madness.  Force their way back into the Underspace.  The Glintaka brought the firepower.  The Fresno brought the technical know-how.

The Galor-class vessel tore into the Vaadwaur lines beneath the Underspace with a kind of grim poetry, while the Fresno slid beneath the noise and Michael inserted his team directly into the heart of the station.  They were hardly the heroes.  But Lieutenant Commander Kiran Nivar and his team of engineers had been the scalpel while Gul Nalmen and the Glintaka played the hammer.  In the end, Kiran’s team had cracked the station’s blackout effect like a rotten tooth, and the veil that had kept the Pieris system blind had finally lifted.

Thalissa hadn’t waited for orders.  Hell, she hadn’t waited for him.  By the time the Fresno had circled back around to Pieris IV like a guilty drunk attempting an apology, his XO had already staged a full-blown insurgency.  Montana Colburn, the colony’s chief engineer and not so low-key madman, had been in the middle of a job repairing some ground sensors when the Vaadwaur had come.

He and his engineers didn’t panic.  They tore ass across the rocks and valleys, and vanished into the only sanctuary available – that rancid old smuggler’s den the Fresno had flushed out on their last swing-through.  By the time Thalissa and her team had met up with the Pieris IV’s chief engineer and had been led to the site, they’d cleaned it out.  They’d dragged out all of the corpses, sterilized the viscera with field-grade disinfectant, and stripped the place of any weapon that looked like it could so much as kill a lizard in the dark.

Together, they returned to the colony and retook it in 36 hours of relentless carnage.  The Fresno and the Glintaka didn’t return to liberate them.  They just flew in to find the flags already changed and his XO standing over the ashes.  She’d explained how the Vaadwaur initially came merely for conquest and execution.  But they had stayed for the worm goo – the microbial miracle sauce that turned patches of the Pieris IV soil more fertile than Eden.  They’d been cracking the colonists’ skulls for its secrets.  Every time the scientists stonewalled, a group of colonists had been lined up like used cargo pallets and executed with industrial precision to be dumped in the ditches just outside.

It was all done now – through either cunning, dumb luck, or some foul twist of fate.  It had cost them.  In blood, sanity, whatever scraps of morale they’d had left.  But they made it.  The colony survivors liberated.  The Underspace station gone.  The system open.  The dead accounted for.  And for the first time in weeks, he could hear himself think without the shriek of chaos breathing down his neck.  Maybe there’s no glory in survival.  But it sure as shit beat the alternative.

The doors ahead suddenly whispered apart like the lungs of a dying creature, revealing the cold fury of Zarroc Thakrass on the other side.  The Andorian Deputy Commander of Starbase 72 narrowed his eyes as though he were scanning Michael for structural flaws.  He inclined his white-maned head in a nod, bearded chin lifting slightly.  That was all it took.  It wasn’t invitation, it was gravity that pulled the captain of the Fresno forward like a condemned man offered the illusion of a choice.  Would this debrief end in exoneration, or would it be the last leg of his fall?  Hell if he knew.  But sure as anything, he would soon find out.