Star Trek: Picard: Firewall

Book : Star Trek: Picard

by David Mack

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

A thrilling prequel adventure based on the acclaimed TV series Star Trek: Picard!

Two years after the USS Voyager’s return from the Delta Quadrant, Seven of Nine finds herself rejected for a position in Starfleet…and instead finds a new home with the interstellar rogue law enforcement corps known as the Fenris Rangers. The Rangers seem like an ideal fit for Seven—but to embrace this new destiny, she must leave behind all she’s ever known, and risk losing the most important thing in her life: her friendship with Admiral Kathryn Janeway.

Release date: February 27, 2024

Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek

Print pages: 320

Sample

12386

Fenris

The Romulan sun was dying, and what a billion souls called tragedy, a legion of parasites called opportunity.

Epic disasters tended to spawn their own unique ecosystems, complete with figurative watering holes where predators and prey mingled freely, their struggles and pursuits paused in the name of thirst. The Kettle was just such a watering hole, and one of the busiest in Fenris’s capital city. It was full of dark corners and deep, shadowy booths with high-backed wraparound banquettes, its transactions and interactions all veiled by a persistent smoky haze. Furtive whispers hid beneath synthetic music like strangers hiding behind aliases. Its owners claimed the establishment served food, but no one could remember the last time they saw anyone eat within its walls. The Kettle wasn’t known for its bill of fare. Its overstocked bar, however, verged on legendary.

It was there, surrounded by disaster capitalists and sudden pilgrims, that Seven sat alone, craving the fleeting peace from haunting memories that could be achieved only through a sufficiency of booze. She had long since grown tired of the company of others, the pointless effort of small talk, and the ceaseless tedium of sussing out which smiles were lies.

Once, The Kettle had been a quiet place to unwind after a long patrol—until, less than a year earlier, the Federation’s fragile house of cards had come tumbling down. First had been the synth attack on the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards on Mars, in the Sol system. Thousands of lives lost. Countless ships earmarked for the Romulan evacuation destroyed. Soon afterward, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard’s great mercy mission became the next casualty of the Federation’s growing isolationism, canceled in a flash of fear and suspicion. That morally questionable choice had left hundreds of millions of souls stranded on Romulus or in one of its nearby systems, all of which would soon be annihilated by the imminent supernova of Romulus’s star.

Within days of Starfleet and the Federation beginning the withdrawal of their fleet and its convoys of material aid, the first wave of Good Samaritans had landed on Fenris. Since then, they had just kept on coming, more than Seven could count. A handful in each wave came looking to join the infamous Fenris Rangers. Most of the others came looking for ways to help, but there were always a few driven into the Qiris sector by a need to escape their checkered pasts. Those always seemed to be the ones who found Seven here at the bar.

Seven avoided eye contact with the other patrons, and most of the time her focus on her beverage was enough to ward off those who hoped to engage her in conversation. Nonetheless, she remained aware of everyone around her. Every lowlife pickpocket working the crowd at the end of the bar, every lush flirting for a free round in exchange for a favor they’d never deliver, every piece of hired muscle trying to pretend they weren’t hiding at least four weapons on their person. Gait, stance, posture—everything about a person’s carriage was a tell, if only one knew what to look for, and Seven had spent five long years learning how to read the clues that were right in front of her.

Which made the enigma who sat beside her doubly intriguing.

A dark-haired woman, slender as a reed and just as willowy, settled onto the barstool to Seven’s left. She had large, dark, expressive eyes accentuated by intricate patterns and layers of makeup. Her complexion was as pale as it was perfect, and when she caught Seven’s eye she momentarily flashed a smile of impossibly white teeth. Her clothes were clean but not in a prissy way; her boots had seen some wear and tear. She was neat without being fussy.

The woman was unreadable. A cipher.

She gestured

at Seven’s empty glass. “Can I get you another?”

“No.” Seven pretended to ignore the newcomer while studying the woman’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar’s shelves of liquor. “I buy my own drinks.”

“Please?” Like a magician revealing a palmed card, the woman set a credit chip on the counter. “You are the Fenris Ranger known as Seven, aren’t you?”

Hearing her own name gave Seven pause. She realized the woman had picked up her tactic of watching her reflection and now was looking back at her via the mirrors. “I am.” She shifted her right hand toward the phaser pistol holstered on her thigh, her movements glacially slow. “How do you know my name?”

Her question made the other woman laugh nervously. “Are you serious? Who doesn’t know about Ranger Seven? I’ve heard Tellarite merchant marines spin stories about you in bars from Pollux to Qo’noS. I knew that if even a tenth of them were half-true, I had to meet you.”

The stranger’s enthusiasm was flattering, but Seven was in no mood for it. “I’m not giving autographs.”

“I’m not asking for one.”

There was something sly and mysterious about the woman’s confidence, tempered by a quality of awestruck admiration. It was enough to make Seven curious about her ulterior motive. Regardless, she feigned nonchalance. “So what do you want?”

“To talk.”

“About what?”

“How to become a Fenris Ranger.”

Seven stifled a cynical laugh. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Because I want to help. Every night I see vids on the news: People suffering. People with no homes. No food. No water, no medicine. Decent folks left in the lurch when the Federation lost its nerve. Law-abiding colonists left to the mercy of a growing caste of warlords. And if I’m to be perfectly honest with you… it makes me sick. Sick with rage. I told myself there wasn’t anything a single person like me could do about it. But then, it all just got to be too much. The news, night after night—I couldn’t take it anymore. I know I can’t save the galaxy. But maybe, as a Fenris Ranger, I could save a few souls that otherwise might not make it.”

It all had come pouring out of the woman, a confession like a river in flood, and it overwhelmed Seven. She remembered once hearing herself say something markedly similar years earlier, and now, being on the other side of that declaration, she was amazed at how persuasive such passion and naïveté could be when delivered in concert.

Even so… she couldn't

let someone leap blindly into such a precarious life. She looked the other woman in the eye. “I get where you’re coming from. Really, I do. But being a Fenris Ranger isn’t a game. It can be dangerous, but it can also be boring. We protect good people when we can, but sometimes we need to make deals with the devil just to keep the peace. To paraphrase a good Ranger I once knew, it’s not just an adventure—it’s a job.”

Not a word of what she said seemed to dim the other woman’s fervor.

“I’m ready for it. Hard choices, bad food, the long silences of deep-space patrols, all of it. Somewhere out there is a person who needs a Ranger to stand up for them. I want to be that Ranger. Can you help me?”

Seven shook her head. “I don’t know. You seem sincere. But part of me is afraid you don’t know what you’re getting into. Or that you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.”

“What were your reasons for joining the Rangers?”

“Long story.”

“S’okay. I’ve got all night.” The dark-haired woman waved over the Tiburonian bartender and motioned toward Seven’s empty glass. “Another for the Ranger, and a Belgarian Sunset for me.” She nudged her credit chip across the bar top. “And open a tab, please.”

The large-eared barkeep scooped up the credit chip, nodded at the stranger, and then set to work preparing her and Seven’s new drinks.

Unable to suppress a grudging amusement at the woman’s tenacity, Seven gave her a sardonic side-eye. “You don’t like taking ‘no’ for an answer, do you?”

A coy glance full of mischief. “No, I don’t.”

Seven chuckled softly. “That makes two of us.” She paused as the barman delivered the stranger’s multihued Belgarian Sunset cocktail, alongside Seven’s neat measure of bourbon. The fruity effervescence of the former seemed out of place beside the smoky vanilla notes of the latter. Seven cracked a half smile and pretended not to notice. “Fine. As long as you’re buying, I guess there’s no harm in telling you how I got here.”

The other woman leaned closer, her eyes wide and her smile wider. “I’m all ears.”

22380

Earth – Cape Town, South Africa

Seven packed the last of her clothes into a synthetic-fiber duffel and set it on a chair. Cool morning air tainted with the sulfuric odor of rotting seaweed gusted through her bedroom’s open window. From outside the beach house, she heard waves shredding themselves across the rocky sprawl of Macassar Beach, followed by long, ominous rumbles of thunder, low and distant, somewhere out beyond the waters of False Bay, where a leaden sky dotted with black-bellied clouds threatened rain. If her luck held, she’d be gone before it arrived.

She was about to begin gathering her effects from the living room when she heard the semimusical wash of a transporter beam outside, on her front porch. Moments later came the knocks on her front door that she had been dreading now for weeks, but from which there had never really been any serious prospect of escape. She faced the door. “It’s open.”

Kathryn Janeway, now attired in the uniform of a Starfleet vice admiral, opened the front door and took two steps inside the house. “Seven? Is this a bad time?”

Seven tried to sound untroubled. “Not at all, Admiral.” With a gesture she directed Janeway toward the futon sofa. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Janeway eyed the minimalist piece of furniture with suspicion. “I think I’ll stand, if that’s all right.”

“As you wish.”

Self-consciousness overwhelmed Seven with doubts and criticisms. She is appalled by the condition of my home. By its lack of comforts. By my failure to live like other humans.

Desperate not to betray her anxiety to the admiral, Seven masked her dismay with a practiced facsimile of a smile. “Would you like a coffee? Or a raktajino?”

Janeway declined with a small wave of one hand. “Maybe later.”

Pivoting slowly, Janeway surveyed the living room. She nodded approvingly at the various holoframes, which displayed candid images of their former shipmates from Voyager. In one, Tom Paris was laughing while B’Elanna Torres scowled at him. Another had captured Commander Chakotay from a discreet distance, at a moment when he was deep in thought. One frame cycled through images of Harry Kim posing in front of a waterfall during an away mission, the Doctor applying a spritz of liquid-skin bandage to a scrape on the knee of young Naomi Wildman, and Neelix cooking in his kitchen. The last of Seven’s holoframes was devoted to a single image: a portrait of Janeway.

The admiral looked back at Seven with a playful gleam in her eye. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

“Sarcasm, I presume?”

“Actually, no. I’m serious. Your home reflects who you are—or at least, the way that you see yourself. I look around and see efficiency, a cleanliness born of discipline—and perhaps just the smallest trace of sentimentality when it comes to absent friends.” After a pause she asked, “Speaking of which, have you and Chakotay stayed in touch?”

“Not since he left for his new command.”

“Why not?”

It was an upsetting subject for Seven. “We grew apart. What else is there to say?”

“I suspect that’s not the whole truth.”

Struck by nostalgia, Seven picked up Chakotay’s holoframe. She was still processing her guilt about the end of her relationship with Voyager’s former first officer. Her attraction to him had been genuine, and she had never doubted the

sincerity of his feelings for her, but events in recent years had left Seven harboring an anger and envy so toxic that it had driven him away. She suspected those same events had brought Janeway to her home again this morning.

She set the holoframe down. “I presume you didn’t come to South Africa to critique my love life.”

Janeway kept her smile in place, but it was becoming forced. “You’ve grown your hair out. It looks good.”

Reflexively, Seven touched her golden hair, which now brushed the tops of her shoulders. “Kind of you to say.”

“And you’ve certainly been keeping fit.”

“It helps to have a private beach for jogging and swimming. But we both know you’re stalling, Admiral. Why are you really here?”

Janeway grudgingly abandoned her façade of cheer. “I wish I could say I’d come with good news.”

Seven nodded in understanding. This was a continuation of a series of disappointing conversations in which the two of them had been engaged for several months. “Our appeal to the Federation Council for my citizenship…?”

“Rejected. Again. And I’m sorry to say, Starfleet refuses to reconsider its denial of your application to Starfleet Academy.”

“As we expected.”

“As you expected. I thought the C-in-C would see reason when I said I’d resign unless they found you a place in the next class. Turns out… I was wrong.”

Seven moved around the room and slowly gathered up the holoframes. “Did they say why they rejected my application?”

“They tried very hard not to say it, but, in the end, your fear proved to be correct.”

“Because I’m still part Borg.”

Janeway heaved a sigh of frustration. “It’s just so damned shortsighted! I tried to tell them you’re free of the Collective, that you deserve to be treated like any other person, but they see your implants and your nanoprobes, and they convince themselves you’re an infiltrator bent on assimilating Starfleet from within.”

For her friend’s sake, Seven maintained her stoic front despite the tempest of shame and rage that roiled inside her. “Their decision is disappointing, but not surprising.”

“Let’s call it what it is, Seven: a racist, reactionary decision born of fear.” Janeway shook her head and frowned. “I can’t let this stand. I’ll take it to the courts if I have to, but—”

“Please, don’t. Not for me.”

Seven’s plea left Janeway

looking perplexed. “Why not?”

“You have done all you can, more than I could ever have asked or expected. But this isn’t a fight we can win. The longer you tilt at this, the more enemies you will make, in the government as well as in Starfleet.”

“So what?”

“You’re an admiral now. Which means you have more to lose. Please don’t risk your career fighting a lost battle for me.”

“Seven, you know me well enough to know I don’t care about rank, or power. I care about my family, my friends, my crew—and about standing up for what’s right. I can’t just watch Starfleet and the Federation deny you a fair chance at fulfilling your potential because they’ve given in to fear and prejudice. I know they’re better than this—and I mean to remind them of it.”

“Are they better than this? Are you quite certain?”

Janeway’s mien turned wary. “Why would you ask that?”

Seven tucked the deactivated holoframes inside a second travel bag and then beckoned Janeway to follow her. “Let me show you something.”

She led the admiral through the kitchen and then out the back door. The two women plodded through soft, shifting sand dotted with patches of dune grass until they reached the side of Seven’s beach house—which someone had defaced with crudely painted graffiti that read DIE, BORG BITCH. Janeway immediately recoiled from it in horror and disgust. “Who did this?”

Seven shrugged. “The local police tell me it was probably teenagers, but so far they haven’t seemed especially motivated to find the culprits.”

Janeway crossed her arms as if to defend herself from the evil sentiment on the wall. “What do you intend to do about it?”

“Nothing.” Seven headed for the house’s back door.

Janeway’s anger boiled over as she followed Seven back inside. “What do you mean ‘nothing’? Someone has to answer for this.”

“It no longer matters, because I’m leaving.”

“Town?”

“Earth.”

Her declaration left Janeway looking stunned. Seven retrieved her duffel from the bedroom and returned to find Janeway pacing in the living room. The admiral apparently had recovered her wits and her voice. “Leaving Earth? Don’t you think that’s an overreaction?”

Seven set her bags by the front door. “No.” She paused, unsure how much she ought to share about her recent misgivings, but then she decided Janeway deserved to know the truth—not just some of it, but all of it. “To be honest, I’ve felt out of place on Earth since the day we arrived. Everywhere I go, people see my implants and assume the worst. They think I can’t hear their whispers or see how they look at me, but I do.”

Janeway struck an apologetic tone. “It can’t be that bad, can it? Certainly not everyone treats

you that way?”

“You remember my Aunt Irene?”

“Of course.”

“Even after a dozen visits, she still flinches when she hugs me, and she refuses to address me as ‘Seven.’ She insists on calling me ‘Annika’ no matter how many times I tell her that name no longer has any meaning for me. When I protest, she points out that’s the name the Federation put on my identification documents. My real name frightens these people—even my own kin.”

“And you think leaving Earth will change that?”

“Perhaps, if I go far enough.”

“And what do you think you’ll find out there, Seven?”

“I don’t know. A fresh start, maybe.” Her enhanced auditory nerve detected the thrumming of an approaching civilian transport shuttle’s engines. “I just need some time, some space. Some room to breathe while I make sense of all these feelings that have been welling up inside me ever since I came to Earth. Every day my own thoughts get more confusing, and all I want is a chance to be on my own. A chance to figure out who I am. Who I’m meant to be.”

Janeway looked up, evidently having heard the shuttle’s engines as it passed over the house to land on the beach. “I can understand wanting some time alone. We all feel like that sometimes. But you don’t need to leave Earth to find solitude. There are places in Mongolia, or upper Norway, or—”

“My shuttle is here.”

Desperation crept into Janeway’s voice. “Please, Seven, just give me a little more time to sort this out. I can work new angles, leverage other friendships, call in other favors—”

“I’ve made up my mind, Admiral. Thank you for all that you’ve done, but please let this go. Don’t become a pariah for me. As Tuvok always liked to tell me, the needs of the many—”

“Outweigh the needs of the few,” Janeway interjected.

“Or the one.” Seven clasped Janeway’s hands. “Time for me to go.”

Tears shimmered in Janeway’s eyes as she hugged Seven. “Be careful out there.”

“I will.”

They let go of each other. Seven opened the front door to reveal the idling shuttle parked on the dusty ground outside, and then she picked up her bags to leave.

Janeway looked out at the sleek vessel. “Where are you going?”

Seven paused in the open doorway and gave Janeway a sly smile.

“I’ll know when I get there."

32381

Skånevik Prime

The white noise of a steady tropical downpour muffled the Fenris Rangers’ splashing footsteps. Walking point, Keon Harper silently cursed his luck. He and his deputy trainee, Leniker Zehga, were surrounded by a vast jungle that had vanished into absolute darkness when night fell. If not for the ultraviolet-amplifying filters on the two Rangers’ holographic starshades, they both would have been as good as blind.

It didn’t help that the smugglers’ camp they sought was pitch-dark. Harper had expected to catch a break by now. He hated looking stupid in front of a rookie, even one as restrained and respectful as Zehga. The young Zakdorn man remained a few paces behind Harper, who raised his hand and closed it into a fist, signaling Zehga to halt. With a downward gesture, Harper directed his deputy to kneel as he did likewise.

Harper surveyed the jungle ahead of them as Zehga whispered with evident disgust, “Dozens of planets in the Qiris sector, and we get the one made of mud.”

“Could’ve been worse, kid. At least we didn’t wind up on TaQ’hor.”

“What makes there worse than here?”

“TaQ’hor is where the Klingons train targs to hunt.”

“You always take me to the nicest places, Harper.”

“It’s nothing personal, Len. We go where the bad guys are.”

“Why don’t the bad guys ever go to Risa?”

“They do, just not for business. Mooks dig jamaharon as much as the next guy.” Harper looked over his shoulder at Zehga and pointed toward their right flank. “Tell me if you see anything over there.”

Zehga frowned. “Shadows and more shadows.”

Harper had no reason to think that a Zakdorn’s eyesight or hearing were innately superior to those of humans, but he had hoped the deputy would have better luck seeing through the dark. “These Nausicaans are pissing me off, Len. Where’d they learn such good light discipline?”

“Such good what?”

“Light discipline.” It took a second for Harper to realize Zehga had never heard the term before. “Hiding any light used after dark so as not to betray one’s location. On ancient Earth, it was used to avoid being targeted by bombers or snipers.”

In a tone of voice that sounded perplexed, but which Harper had learned to recognize as mocking and sarcastic, Zehga asked, “So, on Earth, learning to sit quietly in the dark is considered an advanced tactical skill?”

“Don’t make me slap those ridges off your face.”

Zehga suppressed a small chuckle, but then his mirth vanished, replaced by a singular intensity of focus. “Contact, bearing two seven point five. Range, fifty-nine point two meters. Steady artificial light.”

Both Rangers squatted lower. Harper tweaked the settings on his holoframe spectacles and squinted as he looked where Zehga pointed. “I see it. Could be a status light on a power pack.”

“So much for ‘light discipline.’ ”

“Maybe not. It might’ve been covered ’til a breeze blew something loose.” Harper undid the clasp that secured his pulse phaser inside its thigh holster. “Let’s get a closer look.”

Slow, careful steps. Harper and Zehga skulked through the jungle floor’s dense growth of leafy plants, whose upper fronds entwined with the ends of vines dangling from the canopy dozens of meters overhead.

As they approached the smugglers’ camp, Harper discerned long drapes of camouflage netting stretched like giant cobwebs between native flora. Beyond the

mesh curtain lay a camp of ramshackle buildings, dilapidated huts, and poorly maintained surface vehicles. There were no signs of guards or patrols. He figured they could thank the rain for that.

Harper signaled Zehga to stop when they were twenty meters from the camp. “I’ll bet one of these big perimeter buildings is their depot for that cache of small arms they bought from the Klingons, and another is where they likely store any heavy ordnance they’re trying to move.”

The Zakdorn’s mental gears were clearly turning. “If you’re right, we could take out their whole camp by arming a grenade with a delayed timer inside their ordnance shed.”

Harper wondered if his trainee had heard a word he’d said during their mission briefing. “Kid, we’re cops, not commandos. Stop thinking like a soldier and start thinking like an investigator. Remember what I told you: quick and quiet. Get in, document the presence of contraband as evidence—and then what?”

Zehga simmered, clearly resenting Harper’s criticism. “Then we fall back and summon a corsair. When reinforcements arrive, we surround the camp.”

“And…?”

“We arrest the smugglers and take them back to Fenris for booking and trial.”

“Correct. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Blowing them up would be faster.”

“It would also be murder, and then I’d have to arrest you.” Harper drew his pulse phaser from its holster. Zehga, in turn, unholstered his stun pistol—the only weapon deputy Rangers were allowed to carry during their probationary training periods. Harper pointed to either side of the encampment. “I’ll head left. You go right. Cut through the netting, and once you’re inside, get eyes on something we can use to get a warrant.” The rookie nodded and turned to start his infiltration but paused as Harper said, “And, kid? Watch your step, yeah?”

“Copy that, boss.”

“I’m not your boss, I’m your partner.”

“Copy that, partner.”

“Now you’re messin’ with me. Get movin’. See you inside.”

They split up, each of them keeping to a low crouch as they circled the camp’s gauzy screen of disguise, in search of concealed points at which to cut through.

Less than a minute later, Harper was at the netting, knife in hand, ready to slice and dice.

Then came a blinding flash of white-orange light and a concussive boom whose shock wave knocked him on his ass. Stunned and disoriented, Harper fought to get his bearings—and then he saw a rising plume of fire and smoke from the other side of the camp, and he knew the op had turned to shit.

Harsh white lights snapped on throughout the camp, and an alarm siren wailed from loudspeakers mounted atop tall wooden posts. The camp resounded with the clatter and clamor of Nausicaan mercenaries scrambling to respond to the emergency.

Harper struggled to get up. His head was spinning, and a swarm of electric-purple spots clouded his vision. As he forced himself into motion, he stumbled and caromed off one tree and then another. He heard angry shouts from inside the camp, voices growing louder because they were heading in his direction. Weaving and staggering like a drunkard after a bender, he lurched through the tangled undergrowth, hurling himself in clumsy strides toward the fire and smoke, until he found Zehga.

The young Zakdorn had been savaged by the blast. His hairless face had been scorched black on one side, and his thin crown of slicked-back dark hair had been burned off. His field fatigues smoldered, adding a chemical stink to the charnel odor of his burnt flesh. The blast had torn open his torso to reveal several of his internal organs, many of which were half-cooked. His entire body trembled as Harper took his hand.

“Good God, kid—what happened?”

Zehga forced out a reply through a mouthful of bloody sputum. “Trip… wire.”

Panic and rage and grief collided in Harper’s head, paralyzing him with indecision. He kneeled beside Zehga with tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Len, this is my fault. We should’ve stayed together. I should’ve—”

“Not… your fault.”

A disruptor pulse screamed past Harper, just behind his head. Instinct took over—he pivoted and fired a shot that landed a phaser pulse dead-center in a Nausicaan’s face. The ugly bastard fell and hit the ground like a sack of stem bolts.

He holstered his weapon and tried to lift Zehga’s mangled, bloody body from the mud. “Hang on, kid, it’s just a couple klicks to the prowler, we—”

“Go.”

“We don’t leave Rangers behind.”

“You… won’t make it… with me. Go.”

Harper was ready to argue, but there was no more time. A dozen Nausicaans rounded a building’s corner and saw him next to Zehga. Disruptor pulses filled the air with searing light and a high-pitched cacophony as Zehga let go of his last breath and went limp.

Harper returned fire as he retreated alone into the jungle. If he had been thirty years younger, he might have tried to carry Zehga’s body, just to deny the Nausicaans the perverse pleasure of desecrating it. But those days were behind him now.

Harper was in his midsixties, but even more damning than his age was the wear and tear he had inflicted upon himself over the years—a state of degradation that once had been referred to colloquially as “mileage.” He couldn’t have hauled Zehga’s deadweight back to the prowler and still been able to outrun the squad of angry Nausicaans who chased him all the way there.

The Nausicaans’ disruptor pulses ricocheted off the hull of his Starfire 500 prowler—a fast, maneuverable, two-seat patrol ship with formidable weaponry—as he pushed it into a nearly vertical run to orbit, a ballistic climb so fierce that even with inertial dampers he still felt fifteen g’s of acceleration slam his back against his seat, crushing the air from his chest and forcing his blood into his already throbbing skull.

He didn’t ease off the thrusters until he saw the haze of atmosphere melt away to reveal the star-flecked sprawl of the cosmos.

Cruising away from Skånevik Prime, Harper switched off his comms so no one else would hear him shout, swear, and howl out his grief for a good, brave young soul who had become a Fenris Ranger simply because he had wanted to help people—and who had died because Harper had pushed him too far, too fast, and had left him alone too soon.

Never again, Harper vowed, staring with rage and sorrow at his reflection in the prowler’s canopy. Never again.

Starheim, Utsira III

The factory was a cathedral of automation. A vast sprawl of titanic machines and endlessly recursive conveyer belts, it hummed with purpose and pulsed with heat. Its fabricators ran around the clock, every day, as millions of parts moved in constant harmony, a tireless dance of creation. Working alone inside this symphony of the synthetic, Seven felt safely anonymous.

She was aware of the irony of her circumstances. Of all the worlds she could have fled to within Federation space, of all the jobs she might have taken to make her feel as if she were actually a contributing member of society, she had found a menial-labor role in an industrial setting that bore a chilling resemblance to the inside of a Borg cube, only not as humid.

Her occupation consisted of waiting at the end of an assembly line’s conveyer belt until something arrived, and then she crated whatever gadgets or gizmos the factory had churned out. When the crates were full, she used an antigrav lifter to stack them on shipping pallets. When the pallets were sufficiently full, she marked them ready for departure and watched them dematerialize.

Seven had no idea where the pallets of goods went. No clue who had bought them or what anyone had paid for them. And she had learned the hard way on two worlds

before this one not to ask questions of people who were willing to pay for labor with anonymized credit chips.

Her work was tedious. It required no judgment or creativity. It was a job the factory manager had said would be “a waste of a synth,” and when he hired Seven to do it, he seemed almost apologetic, as if he had condemned her to some infernal punishment detail. She kept to herself the truth that she found being surrounded by machinery oddly comforting.

A long, low-frequency buzzer sent a shiver through the entire factory.

It was the signal for morning break, when the factory’s handful of organic workers converged on the east-side auxiliary landing pad. That was where Maxx, a portly Bolian food vendor, landed his “chow scow,” a short-range, suborbital shuttle he had converted into a mobile restaurant. Once Maxx had secured his craft on the landing pad, he would open panels on the starboard and aft bulkheads to reveal an array of hot sandwiches, sweet or savory snacks, smokable and chewable stimulants, and an assortment of hot and cold beverages.

The other workers used the morning break to socialize, stuff their faces with greasy handheld food, and smoke during the brief outdoor recess. Seven’s routine consisted of a double-strong raktajino, ...