The first thing Ox noticed about Starbase 11 was that somebody had planted flowers beside the transporter annex.
Real ones.
Not much of a flower bed. Three narrow rows of blue things with thick leaves, boxed in by white stone and an automatic irrigation line that clicked every few minutes.
Ox stood beside Kane while a pair of technicians argued over a diagnostic cart and watched water bead on the leaves.
“Wasteful,” he said.
Kane looked at the flowers.
“Pretty, though.”
Ox considered that.
“Yep.”
Enterprise hung somewhere above them with half her guts opened to Starbase repair crews. The ion storm had left enough work that nobody expected to leave soon. Rumors moved through the base faster than repair teams did. Something about the captain. Something about a dead officer. Something about records that did not agree.
None of it had anything to do with Ox.
Kane stopped walking.
A man in Academy red stood twenty meters ahead with six cadets gathered around him. He was broad through the shoulders, gray at the temples, and had the expression of a man who had spent years watching young people make preventable mistakes.
He saw Kane.
His face changed.
“Well, I'll be damned.”
Kane said, “Probably.”
The man laughed and came over.
“Jonathan Kane.”
“Elias Venn.”
They shook hands.
Venn looked at Ox.
“And this?”
“Ox.”
Venn waited.
Ox smiled.
“Just Ox's fine.”
One of the cadets snorted.
Venn glanced back and the sound died.
He explained the exercise while they walked. A survey planet less than an hour away by shuttle. Temperate highlands. No permanent settlement. Academy used one valley for field work because it offered woods, broken terrain, water, caves and enough unpleasant weather to teach cadets that maps did not keep boots dry.
The exercise was simple: locate a simulated hostile observation post, approach without detection, recover a coded data module and extract.
Venn would evaluate. Kane would make it harder.
Kane looked at the cadets.
“You want me to make it harder?”
“I want them to meet reality before reality meets them.”
Kane looked back at him.
“Reality shoots.”
“They know that.”
“No. They know the sentence.”
Venn smiled without humor.
“That is why I asked.”
Kane needed another experienced security man. Hale was assisting Engineering security. Rainer had drawn temporary Starbase duty. Mercer was attached to a repair access detail.
Ox was standing there.
Kane said, “You're coming.”
Ox looked at the flowers one last time.
“Yep.”
* * *
The cadets assembled in the shuttle bay forty minutes later.
Ox was checking the emergency lockers when somebody hit him from behind.
His hand caught the locker edge. His other hand went halfway toward his phaser before he recognized the arms around his chest.
“Ox!”
He turned.
For a second he simply stared.
“Lena?”
Lena Ward stepped back, grinning at him in an Academy field uniform.
She had cut her hair shorter. That was the first thing he noticed. The second was that she still smiled with one side of her mouth first.
“You got big.”
Ox looked down at himself.
“Been eatin'.”
She laughed and hugged him again.
The other cadets watched.
Ox hugged her back.
“You're Starfleet.”
“Almost.”
“Well, hell.”
“You didn't know?”
“Nope.”
“I sent your mother a letter.”
“That explains it.”
“What?”
“Ma writes like she's being charged by the word.”
Lena laughed again.
Kane watched from beside the shuttle hatch.
He said nothing.
* * *
They found two minutes alone beside the equipment rack.
Lena had stopped smiling.
Ox was tightening a strap on his pack.
“I never meant to hurt you.”
His hands paused.
Only for a moment.
Then he pulled the strap tight.
“Water under the bridge.”
“Ox—”
He looked at her.
She knew that face. Or thought she did. Years ago he would have smiled too quickly and made some joke because her feeling bad had always bothered him more than his own hurt.
He wasn't doing that now.
He just looked at her.
“Really,” he said. “Water under the bridge.”
Venn called the cadets aboard.
Ox shouldered his pack.
“Come on. Instructor's gonna leave us, and then we'll have to walk.”
She watched him go.
* * *
The planet smelled wet.
Rain had passed recently, leaving the dark trunks shining and the ground soft beneath their boots. The shuttle sat in a clearing between tall silver-barked trees. Beyond it, hills folded into one another under low gray cloud.
Venn divided the cadets into pairs.
Lena went with Cadet Sato. Cadets Bell and Duran took the western route. Kessler and Mbeki would move center.
Kane walked with nobody.
Ox noticed that.
Kane noticed Ox noticing.
Neither mentioned it.
For the first hour, it was training.
The cadets moved well. Not perfectly, but well. They checked angles. Used cover. Communicated quietly. Sato found the first sensor marker before Kane could point it out. Mbeki caught a false trail Venn had planted.
Ox mostly carried his pack and watched the ground.
At a stream crossing, Bell stepped toward a flat stone.
Ox said, “Wouldn't.”
Bell stopped.
“What?”
Ox pointed.
The stone had a thin skin of green growth on it.
Bell chose another.
“Thanks.”
“Yep.”
They kept moving.
The explosion came at 1427.
Ox knew the time later because Lena's chronometer survived.
At the moment, there was only light.
White through the trees.
Then a sound so hard it seemed to strike his chest before his ears understood it.
The ground came up.
Ox hit mud shoulder-first.
Something passed through the branches overhead with a scream of metal.
The shuttle.
Or part of it.
A second impact rolled through the valley.
Birdlike things burst from the canopy.
Someone was yelling.
Ox pushed himself up.
His left ear gave him nothing but a high thin whine.
“Everybody down!” Kane shouted.
Then another flash cut across the trees.
Not from the shuttle.
Kane moved.
The ground beside him erupted.
He disappeared behind a fallen trunk.
Venn ran toward him.
A second burst caught the instructor high in the chest.
Venn fell without putting out his hands.
Training ended.
Ox was moving before he thought about it.
He reached Kane first.
Blood darkened Kane's uniform from hip to ribs. A piece of blackened metal had gone through his side.
Kane's eyes were open.
“Venn?”
Ox looked once.
“No.”
Kane closed his eyes for half a second.
Ox turned.
“Lena. Medical kit. Sato, get everybody behind that ridge. Bell, count heads. Don't bunch up.”
Nobody moved.
Ox pointed.
“Go.”
They went.
Lena dropped beside him with the kit.
The medical scanner flickered, displayed nonsense, and died.
Ox set it aside.
He cut Kane's uniform open.
“That's not sterile,” Lena said.
“Neither's he.”
He packed the wound with the cleanest field dressing they had and leaned his weight into it.
Kane's hand caught his wrist.
“Shuttle?”
“Burning.”
“Communicator?”
Ox opened his.
Static.
He tried again.
Nothing.
Bell returned.
“Seven alive including us. Venn's dead. Kessler's arm is broken. Duran has burns. I don't know what hit us.”
Ox looked through the trees.
The smoke from the shuttle was already spreading beneath the cloud cover.
A black shape moved between two distant trunks.
Then vanished.
“Don't matter yet,” Ox said.
Bell stared at him.
“What do we do?”
The cadet looked past Ox toward Kane.
So did the others.
Kane saw it.
His face had gone gray.
“If you want to live through this,” he said, each word separated by breath, “you'd better listen to the man that's in charge.”
Bell looked at Kane.
Then at Ox.
Ox had already turned away.
He picked up the dead medical scanner and opened the back panel.
“Anybody got a working tricorder?”
Sato raised one.
“One.”
“Then turn it off.”
Sato blinked.
“What?”
“Turn it off. We don't need it yet.”
He pulled the scanner's power cell free and put it in his pocket.
“Lena, stay with Kane. Bell, you and Mbeki get Venn's pack and every piece of equipment you can carry from the shuttle without getting near the fire. Sato, find us somewhere we can't be seen from up high. Kessler, sit down before you fall down.”
Kessler sat.
Ox looked toward the trees where the shape had disappeared.
Then at the smoke.
Then at the sky.
“Move.”