Stardate 2257.170
Vulcan Ship Nor Kala'th

"Because our love fits like a glove and I just can't get enough of it," Velek mumbled, tapping his fingers on the desk in time to the beat of the music and accentuating the last words.

He knew them all by heart. Jolly Ship Jive was one of his favorite musicals, and that was really saying something because Velek adored musicals. Whether it was a consequence of having absent parents and a human nanny who loved to sing or whether he would have discovered his passion for musicals on his own, he really couldn't say.

Marco Damien's climactic solo was coming next and he restrained himself from belting it out in his rich tenor voice. The walls of this vessel were thin enough that he could often hear his supervisor, Tavek, moving around next door. With that thought in mind, he turned the volume down several decibels and returned to reading his personnel correspondence, still humming along to the music.

So many notices and advisories and reminders, many of which had come in during the past hour. He waved his hand over the screen to read the next, then realizing many were related to a single subject, adjusted his screen to read them in chronological order rather than most recent first.

2202.71 hours
Intra-ship communication
From Tavek, Senior Aide to Ambassador Sarek — Lodgings for Babel Conference
Research lodgings for Babel conference next month and forward dossier on ten different locations to me.

Rather than launch into an investigation of rental dwellings on Babel, he decided to finish reading his messages. It was only logical, given Tavek's propensity to micromanage.

2202.74 hours
Intra-ship communication
From Tavek, Senior Aide to Ambassador Sarek — Re: Lodgings for Babel Conference
It is essential these selections are within ten kilometers of the capital building.

2202.79 hours
Intra-ship communication
From Tavek, Senior Aide to Ambassador Sarek — Re: Lodgings for Babel Conference
The Ambassador's security detail also requires rooms with at least two points of entry and the ambassador prefers them near the ground level, if possible.

2202.90 hours
Intra-ship communication
From Tavek, Senior Aide to Ambassador Sarek — Re: Lodgings for Babel Conference
It is unknown if the ambassador's mate will accompany him, but the Lady Amanda prefers a room with a single large bed and windows with visually compelling vistas. It would be logical to preemptively identify quarters that have such amenities.

They went on like that. Fleeting thoughts and randomly remembered details streaming through his inbox, taunting him to forget just one of them.

When his father had secured him this posting last year, Velek never supposed it would be so time-consuming and demanding. Were it not for his father's risky politicking to get him this position, Velek would never have accepted it. Being the only child of parents who aspired to positions in life far elevated from the circumstances of their births was an incredible burden.

Officially he was the Personal Assistant to the Senior Aide of Sarek, Vulcan Federation Ambassador-at-Large; unofficially he had a title with a lot of words to describe carrying bags and fetching tea and finding hotel rooms the ambassador's wife would like. It was drudgery being the aide of an aide, but he was twenty-four and had recently graduated in the middle of his class with a degree in xenoanthropology from a mediocre regional university in Sokol. This job was the best he could hope for. In fact, it was a great honor to work for such an important man as Ambassador Sarek, even if only indirectly. His family reminded him of this often.

So did Tavek, his supervisor. Velek often thought his superior was the sort of man his parents would have preferred to have for a son. Like Velek, he didn't come from a particularly prominent family but had gained a position on Ambassador Sarek's staff and was keen to make a name for himself. Unlike Velek, he was tall, muscular, possessed attractive, masculine features and the most logical of dispositions. Velek had been his subordinate for fourteen months and also learned Tavek had graduated near the top of his class from the Vulcan Science Academy, was skilled in several forms of Vulcan martial arts, enjoyed sculpting, and was a Class III kal-toh master.

Tavek was a Vulcan's Vulcan, if ever there were one. Velek doubted whether Tavek had ever even had an illogical thought. He wouldn't be surprised if Tavek were to enter his quarters and inform him he'd just completed the kolinahr with almost no preparation and was about to publish a paper unifying all of physics, which he wrote in between teaching himself Ancient Golic Vulcan and composing a symphony for the Shi'Kahr Orchestra.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Jealousy was completely irrational. He was his own person with his own path to follow. It was illogical to wish he possessed any of Tavek's attributes.

He resumed perusing his messages, reading over details of the ambassador's negotiations with the Illiari to establish a new Vulcan colony on an outlying planet in the Yakaran system. The Yakaran system had seven planets with nineteen major moons. Four of those moons were suitable for supporting oxygen-dependent life and two of them already had established colonies. He didn't know this because he had any real interest in geography—he'd spent most of his first month on the job compiling that report of survey, a report which he doubted anyone really read it in all that much detail.

Regardless of whether anyone appreciated Velek's research efforts, the ambassador had been successful in exchanging twelve metric tons of dilithium for a continent on a remote moon and within the next three years, the first Vulcans would be calling Yakara VIII their home.

The mission was a success, though he wouldn't have cared much either way. Velek wished he were more invested in the work he did. Pride was illogical, but having some sense of achievement certainly wasn't.

He scanned another twelve messages from Tavek containing no new information of any value and just as he began to close his computer station and prepare for a very necessary rest period, another message arrived in his inbox. The title was stunning, the body of the message even more so.

2319.14 hours
Inter-relay communication
Location of Origin: Earth, North American Continent, California, Los Angeles
Sender: Barth, Jason
Subject: Audition for Vulcan male
I got your name from Keith Harriman. I do casting for Federation Troopers. Don't know if you watch it on Vulcan, but it's a serial police drama popular on Earth and a lot of outlying colonies. I got a five-episode part for a Vulcan medical examiner and would be willing to audition you next month. Let me know. Jason.

Velek read the message twice, intrigued that he would be contacted by a casting director he'd never met more than two years after he'd expressed interest in hiring Mr. Keith Harriman as an agent. That was back during a time when Velek had seriously considered becoming an actor, shortly after graduating from university and shortly before accepting his current position.

He had never told his parents about his acting aspirations—they would never approve. Most people did not approve, as he had discovered. Earth seemed to be the primary hub for actors of all species, so he'd contacted nine different agents seeking representation. Five never replied, two asked if he was joking, one responded with a string of profanity, and the last one, Keith Harriman, wrote back to ask if he had any acting experience or head shots and upon learning he did not, promptly told him to come back when he had some acting experience and head shots.

It was a paradox. To become an actor, he needed an agent to represent him, but to get an agent to represent him, he first needed to be an actor. Acting didn't seem that difficult and he had an excellent memory for retaining lines from a script and songs.

It seemed so strange to him that Vulcan had many excellent schools and institutions for the arts, but very little in the way of performance art beyond instrumental music. Surak himself never explicitly condemned dance or theater, yet his people had spent more than a millennium utterly rejecting those art forms. To Velek, that was illogical.

It bothered him more that all the Vulcans he saw in alien holofilms or holoprograms—whenever he could manage to stream them on Vulcan—were not Vulcans at all. They were humans with shaved eyebrows and prosthetics on their ears. The end result was always a grotesque caricature of a Vulcan, a laughable approximation who seemed to think Vulcan facial muscles lacked the ability to move and their vocal cords were incapable of making sounds of differing tones. Was that really how the rest of the Federation perceived Vulcans, as unanimated, interchangeable, monotone individuals without personalities?

He read Mr. Barth's message again and swallowed hard. It was painful to be presented with a sudden opportunity he could never seize. His hand hovered over the screen and the words, "Computer, delete message" formed on his tongue, but in the end, he sighed and closed his computer. He needed to meditate.

"Computer, dim lights to fifteen percent," he murmured. He removed his outer robe and neatly folded it on the bed, then turned to face the wall and knelt.

A deep breath in, a deep breath out, then bedlam. The floor bucked hard beneath his knees, pitching him forward onto his hands and straining the bones and tendons in his wrist to a near catastrophic degree. The walls shook and the lights popped and fizzled into oblivion. The ship's inertial dampeners began to fail and he felt the room spinning faster and faster until a bright flash through the portal heralded the death of the warp engine.

Velek blinked and continued to breathe slowly, pondering how death would arrive. Would the antimatter containment field collapse and deliver an instantaneous end? Would a hull fracture depressurize the ship and result in a relatively quick but not altogether painless death? Or would the emergency force fields engage, leaving him to drift aimlessly in space and slowly starve?

"Velek!" shouted a man's voice.

He sat up and tried to adjust his eyes to the dimly lit room, which was illuminated only by strips of emergency lights on the floor and ceiling. Toran, the ship's navigator, was standing in his doorway. The man's eyes swooped across the image of Velek on the floor and he was ashamed to discover he was shaking.

"What has happened?" Velek asked.

There was no answer; Toran was already gone. Velek scrambled to his feet and staggered down the hallway on quaking legs, desperate to outwardly appear logical even if inwardly he was still reeling. He made it to the bridge to discover everyone else on board was already present. Toran was reviewing something on the central monitor while Sarek and Sovok, the ambassador's public relations liaison, was speaking to the pilot, a man with whom Velek was not acquainted.

Everything was the picture of calm, except for Tavek, who was pacing in tight circles in the cramped space. He seemed agitated, Velek thought. How very un-Vulcan of him.

Ambassador Sarek asked a question Velek could not quite make out, prompting Toran to respond, "We hit the subspace anomaly directly, ambassador. Ejecting the warp core before losing antimatter containment was the only logical option."

He trained his ears to the conversation and heard the ambassador reply, "Can we retrieve the warp core?"

"It sustained considerable and perhaps irreversible damage in the impact that is almost certainly beyond my skillset to repair."

"What does that mean for us?" Tavek barked.

Everyone on the small bridge turned to observe him. His cheeks and the tips of his ears were tinged green. How curious. The pilot spoke. "It means we are without the ability to travel at warp speed. Additionally, we are without the ability to travel at impulse for very long. The hull ruptured near the starboard deuterium cell and we have lost considerable power."

Tavek seemed to sense the others watching him closely and he stood a little straighter, clearly doing his best to project stoic decorum. "Can you restore it?"

"No," the pilot answered. "Though Toran and myself have moderate engineering experience, we lack the necessary tools. The damage to the hull is so significant it will have to be landed and repaired from the exterior of the ship."

Velek was so fascinated by watching his superior's discomfort that he failed to immediately recognize the dire situation they were all in. They were stranded in the middle of a very remote part of space.

"What is the nearest inhabited system?" Ambassador Sarek asked.

"The Yakaran system," Toran replied. "It is 3.72 lightyears from here."

"A distance that would take 249,469,386 years to traverse at full impulse," the pilot added.

A muscle in Tavek's forehead twitched, compelling Velek to look away. It was unpleasant, watching him become so emotional.

"Our situation is not quite as dire as it seems," Toran announced, taking a seat and affixing an earpiece. "We are receiving a response to our distress call from an Ithenite freighter."

The tightening in Velek's chest relaxed, which surprised him because he hadn't been aware it was there until it began to disappear. Ithen was a Federation member and an Ithenite ship would almost certainly come to the aid of a stranded Vulcan diplomatic vessel. This random incident with a subspace anomaly would be an inconvenience, not a death sentence.

When he looked at Tavek again, he noticed his supervisors' hands were shaking.

Stardate 2257.174
Nebor's End, Yakara II

The sounds of a hoverbike tottering up the derelict lane to her property made Mavis uneasy. What fresh annoyance would it bring, if any? She glanced at her assembly of junkyard statues and not for the first time she wished they could magically come to life and chase away whatever hassle was about to land on her doorstep.

She dropped the trowel and flexed her fingers, hoping to get proper blood flow back into her lower digits. The ground wasn't frozen yet but there were traces of morning frost still clinging to the muddy grass. It seemed winter would come early this year and if she didn't dig up the potatoes and turnips now, there might not be much to eat by next spring.

Not that being hungry would be anything new. Mild famines were semi-routine in Nebor's End, the product of unpredictable weather patterns and a populace that after three generations had decided it preferred alcohol therapy to subsistence farming. If Mavis had to guess, half the damn potatoes grown in this swampy hell went into distillers to churn out vodka rather than stew pots to stave off hunger.

No one had ever actually starved to death though, at least as far as Mavis knew. When things got really bad, like they did six years ago, the Federation would swoop in at the last minute with support and supplies, dropping off tons of genetically modified rice and peanuts and temporary compassion.

She felt bad but sometimes she wished another catastrophic disaster would happen just so the Federation would return and offer her some hope of escape. A ship hadn't even entered orbit of Nebor's End in more than five years. It was understandable—who in their right mind would want to come to this piss pot in the middle of nowhere?

When the first V'tosh ka'tur settlers had founded Nebor's End on an outlying moon in the Yakaran system ninety years ago, they had intended it to be a utopia for those fleeing persecution. V'tosh ka'tur literally meant Vulcans without logic, and the ones who settled Nebor's End were especially keen to ditch Surak and his logical teachings. Other misfits from other worlds eventually trickled in and now there were dozens of species living in Nebor's End, spread out over four main districts covering about a hundred kilometers. Nowadays it was only a utopia for people who loved poverty and long winters and depression.

"Hello there, Mavis!"

She gnashed her teeth so hard at the sudden interruption she worried they might break but she didn't turn around. She didn't need to: she knew exactly who it was. She would ask him what he was doing here in language heavily peppered with profanity, but he was a Tellarite and would probably like it so instead she sat up, dropped the spade into the dirt, and asked, "What do you want, Val?"

"I got a job for you."

A job, that was laughable, Mavis thought. When she'd started apprenticing under T'Rika at the salvage yard thirteen years ago, she'd been a scrawny eleven-year-old who'd just dropped out of school and Val had been the mechanic. Then T'Rika died five years ago and must have been in a real drunken stupor when she wrote her will because she'd left the shop to Val.

"You've got a job?" Mavis tutted. "That's nice."

"I need you in the shop."

"You've got jokes," she scoffed.

"Ship landed about an hour ago. It hit subspace turbulence out in the Borderlands and was towed into orbit by Ithenite traders. Hull needs to be patched up and some of the interior needs repair too."

A ship? A ship was here, in Nebor's End? Rather than let her deadbeat former employer know how excited she was, she shrugged and said, "Sounds like you have your work cut out for you."

"It's a big job and they're willing to pay well."

"Good, then maybe you can pay me what you already owe me."

"What I owe you?" he sputtered.

"Yeah, for fixing Dee Henderson's refrigeration unit last week."

He chortled. "Is that why you haven't been coming to work?"

"Something like that."

"What about what you owe me for teaching you how to turn a pneumatic wrench or weld this junk in your backyard?" He waved his hands around at Mavis' collection of scrap statues.

"I taught myself almost everything I know."

He scoffed but before he could contrive some weak rebuttal, she added, "And half the junk in this yard is stuff I took in trade instead of payment because you couldn't afford to pay me. No pay, no work. It's easy as that, Val."

He started to turn and walk back to his hoverbike and for a brief instant, Mavis feared Val had called her bluff. Of course she wanted to work on this ship, not out of the need for cash but out of the hope that she could talk its owners into taking her with them. She didn't even care who they were; she'd hop in the cargo hold of a Klingon warbird if it meant a future outside of Nebor's End.

"Gah," he raged, turning around. "You can have twenty percent."

"Thirty."

"Thirty? Robbery, that's what thirty percent would be."

"Thirty percent."

"Twenty-five."

"Twenty-five and I get the engine out of that old hovercar in the back of your shop."

His face turned sour but he gave a small nod. "Need a ride?"

She looked at his puffy belly and the tiny rear seat of the hoverbike and replied, "I'll walk."

She closed up the shack at the back of the property and nearly let herself out the side gate, but then decided to head toward the main house to check on her father first. With any luck, it might be the last time she ever saw him. She strode up the lopsided, rotting deck, skipping the broken middle step, and entered through the back to find her father sleeping on the couch. Empty cups with dried solkath residue littered the floor and a pungent urine smell drifted through the air.

Were cats nesting in the house again or had her father been so drunk that he actually pissed himself again? She didn't really care: she hadn't lived in the main house since she'd built the shed out back two years ago.

"I'm going out," she called, tiptoeing over rubbish on her way to the front door.

Her father grunted. At least he was alive.

She turned left off the property and headed North, passing Lahress and S'remel, her Caitian and Andorian teenage neighbors, on her way out of the lot. They were smoking some kind of foul-smelling substance and looked rather lethargic and confused but they waved to her as she passed. It took nearly twenty minutes to make it to the salvage yard, but the sleek, elegant ship was visible from the moment she turned out of the lane. It was large and silver and seemed to be attracting a lot of attention from the local residents, which made Mavis nervous. This was hopefully her ride out of here but knowing her neighbors like she did, it seemed entirely possible they could have this vessel stripped to the bolts in a matter of days.

When she reached the entrance to the yard, she found Val standing at the gate with his arms crossed. "You finally made it."

"Yeah. So whose ship is this anyway?"

"Some Vulcan hotshot. I mean the regular kind with the stiff haircut and the hand thing," he explained, forming his hands into a V-shape and waving them around. "Not like you Vosh Cater types."

"V'tosh ka'tur," she corrected.

She didn't actually speak much Vuhlkansu but that wasn't so strange. More than half the population of Nebor's End was Vulcan or of Vulcan descent but few people spoke their complex native tongue anymore, preferring instead the easier and more universal Federation Standard language.

"And where are these Vulcans?"

"Staying at T'Lia's place in town."

Mavis grinned. T'Lia's boarding house was a central hub in the district for prostitution and narcotics trading. "I'm sure they'll be quite popular there."

"I wouldn't expect to see them much."

Her heart sank. "Why not?"

"They're eager to get out of Nebor's End and plan to hole up at T'Lia's until we come tell them it's done."

"Well, can't blame them for wanting out," Mavis muttered, kicking the mud off her worn boots as she entered the yard.

He walked her around to the starboard side of the ship to show her a deep gash along the hull, then gave her a tour of the interior to show her where he thought they would need to stabilize the frame. Aside from the damage, everything was so smooth and shiny and neat. It was new. Nothing on Nebor's End had been new for years.

"What about the warp drive?" she asked.

"I guess they were able to salvage it," Val said, glancing toward the rear of the vessel. "The Ithenite crew helped them drop it in and it seems to work."

"And the impulse engines?"

"Hey, we're not being paid to make mechanical repairs, only structural ones. I don't care if this thing ever flies again as long as they pay me."

She rolled her eyes. "That's the spirit, Val. Prime customer service."

He wandered into a forward cabin and she placed her hand on the corridor wall and glanced in one of the rooms. It appeared to be sleeping quarters, as did the room next to it. She rapped a knuckle on the steel surface, delighted to discover the wall didn't appear to be solid. She could always measure later, but a quick guess suggested there might be as much as a fifty-centimeter gap between the walls. A plan began to form.

"I figure we could have it done in a few days," Val shouted from the other room.

Mavis frowned. "Nah, I think it'll take at least a week."

"A week? They're willing to pay more for faster service."

Mavis didn't care about the extra money. Yes, she would need a week for what she wanted to do, anyway. She was getting out of here one way or another.