Chapter Two · The Threnody

USS Enterprise-D — Present Day

The message arrived in the second hour of a survey Picard had, until that moment, been finding almost restful.

It was a gravimetric mapping pass through the Keldan Reach, a stretch of unclaimed space nobody had charted properly in a century, the kind of assignment Starfleet gave a flagship when nothing more pressing needed one. He had spent the morning in the observation lounge with a padd of spectral data and a cup of tea, doing something useful with no urgency attached to it. The last several years had not offered him that often enough.

The signal came through on a personal channel, not the ship's, routed straight to his ready room terminal. He recognized the encryption before he finished reading the sender's name. It was a cipher Vash had built for him once, as a joke, out of an old Terran children's rhyme. He had never retired it. He had never told her he hadn't.

Vash.

It had been two years since he'd heard from her. That wasn't unusual. Their correspondence had never kept a schedule. But two years was long enough that he had mostly stopped expecting it.

The message was shorter than anything she had ever sent him. No greeting. No account of where she'd been, what she'd found, or which authority she was currently avoiding, all of which would have been in character. A set of coordinates, a catalogue designation he didn't immediately recognize, and five words beneath them.

Need you. Don't ask why.

Picard read it twice, then a third time, less because the content had changed than because he was searching it for a tone that wasn't there. Vash did not send five-word messages. Vash sent messages that ran three screens and contained at least one line built to provoke him. The brevity frightened him more than anything she could have written.

Riker's voice came over the comm. "Captain, priority call from Starfleet Command. Admiral Sorokin."

"On my way, Number One."

He closed the message. He did not delete it.

Admiral Yevgena Sorokin resolved on the ready room screen with the clarity Starfleet reserved for calls it considered worth the bandwidth. She was a compact woman in her fifties, silver hair cropped close, with the expression of someone who had spent the morning being briefed on a problem she found irritating and hadn't yet decided how irritated to appear. A younger officer stood at her shoulder, a lieutenant commander with a padd and a stylus, and he nodded to Picard without speaking.

"Captain. I'll be brief. I've four more calls after this one." She did not wait for his acknowledgment. "Three hours ago, the long-range array at Outpost Fourteen picked up a gravimetric signature in an exhausted extraction system called Doria Minor. Point-source. Smaller than a shuttlecraft. Reading as if it had the mass of a small moon."

Picard's hand stopped halfway to his cup. "Doria Minor."

"Catalogue designation otherwise unremarkable. It sits eleven light-years from the Romulan Neutral Zone. My science division's models say a signature like that's not supposed to exist. One analyst suggested instrument fault. By noon a different analyst suggested something harder to explain, and more people in that room looked uncomfortable saying it." She said it flatly, the way she said everything. "I'd like a report before I've to choose which briefing to believe."

"And you'd like the Enterprise to provide it."

"You're the nearest capable vessel. I'm aware that sending a flagship near contested space on the strength of one sensor reading is the kind of decision that looks worse in a hearing than in a briefing." Her eyes did not leave the screen. "So I'm asking you to be deliberate. Approach quietly. Keep the Federation flag off every feed in the sector. There's salvage interest in that region. Nothing confirmed. Enough chatter that I don't want us looking like the opening move in a resource grab."

"What kind of salvage interest?"

The lieutenant commander leaned in, speaking for the first time. "Several Vantir Trade Consortium brokerages have filed speculative salvage claims across the Keldan sector in the past six months, sir. Broad, cheap, scattered. Nothing names Doria Minor specifically."

"Nothing yet," Sorokin said. "Lieutenant Commander Voss tracks the Consortium for me. Voss, you may step out."

Voss nodded, tucked the padd under his arm, and left the frame.

"Five people know the Enterprise is going to that system, Captain," Sorokin said. "You, me, Voss, your first officer, and the director of Starfleet Science. I want it to stay five."

"I'll keep it that way." Picard hesitated. He had been deciding for the past thirty seconds how much of the truth to offer. The answer, he concluded, was that he owed her what he owed any superior, and that the sensible course was to give it to her before she found it herself. "Admiral, I received a personal message minutes before your call. From a civilian. She is, at this moment, at the same coordinates."

Sorokin's expression changed. It was not dramatic. A small tightening around the eyes, as of a woman adding a number she didn't like to a column she already disliked.

"The archaeologist."

"You're aware of her."

"She filed the survey permit for Doria Minor under the Cartwright Foundation's name. I read the permit this morning. I read her file afterward." A pause. "It's a thick file, Captain. I'd assumed you knew she was there."

"I did not."

"Then I'll tell you what I'd tell anyone in your position. Whatever she has found, she won't keep it quiet. She has never kept anything quiet in her life. You will bring her under Starfleet protection the moment you arrive. Formally, with a witness. It's better for her, and far better for me, than an archaeologist standing alone in the middle of a strategic incident."

"Understood."

"I hope so." Sorokin's voice did not soften, but it lost some of its edge. "I have a great deal of respect for your judgment, Captain. I'd like to keep having it. Sorokin out."

The channel closed. Picard sat with his hand flat on the desk, and did the arithmetic he had half completed before she finished speaking. Same system. Same designation. Whatever Starfleet's arrays had picked up three hours ago from an empty corner of space, Vash was standing in the middle of it, and had been long enough to decide that five words on a channel only he would recognize were worth the risk.

He did not believe in coincidence as a general operating principle. He believed in it even less when Vash was involved.

Riker was waiting at the command chair when Picard came onto the bridge, and he had the good sense not to ask the question his face was asking.

"Course, Captain?"

"Doria Minor, Number One. Maximum sustainable warp." Picard crossed to the tactical rail and stood beside Data's station. "Mister Data. I'd like everything Starfleet has on the system's history."

"Aye, sir." Data's fingers moved on the console. "Doria Minor was surveyed by Federation contractors eighty-one years ago and rejected as commercially unviable. Tarn-Orlov Mining purchased the extraction rights sixty-three years ago and operated until its dissolution thirty-eight years later. The company's final charts are the most recent available." He paused, his head tilting in the small way that meant he had found something he did not like. "I note a discrepancy."

"Go on."

"The extraction charts for Shaft Nine have been amended fourteen times. All fourteen amendments were filed after Tarn-Orlov's dissolution, under an account registered to the company. The account ceased to exist with the company." Data looked up. "Someone with a valid but dead credential went through those charts, Captain, and changed them."

"Changed them how?"

"I cannot yet say. I can say that in every case the revision removes information. A region of rock that Tarn-Orlov's own engineers flagged, in the original survey, has been smoothed to bedrock."

Riker turned in the command chair. "Somebody tidied up."

"Somebody erased it," Picard said, more quietly. A dead company's dead credential, used to hide a patch of rock. It was not the work of a tidy mind. It was the work of a frightened one. He found he was already thinking of what Vash would say to that, and in what tone, and stopped.

"The signature's also grown," Data added. "By three-tenths of one percent since Admiral Sorokin's call. The rate is not linear, Captain. It is, however, consistently positive."

"Consistently positive," Riker repeated. "That's the most alarming sentence you've said this year."

"I was not attempting to be alarming, Commander."

"I know. That's what makes it work."

Picard resisted the impulse to smile. "Mister La Forge."

The comm chimed. "Engineering. Go ahead, Captain."

"Geordi, how quickly can you get us to Doria Minor?"

"Normal safe transit puts us there in about eight hours." A pause. "If you want it faster I can push the nacelles. Five hours, maybe a little under, but I'd rather not make a habit of it."

"Five."

"Five it is. I'll ask the engines nicely."

"Do more than ask."

"Aye, sir. They'll be unhappy."

Picard turned back to the viewscreen. Doria Minor appeared as a pale marker at the edge of the chart, a point in an unremarkable system that gave nothing away. He could see the catalogue number, the dead company's name, the moon and the second moon and a belt of ice beyond them. It showed nothing of Vash, nothing of whatever she had found, nothing of the thing that could make her stop talking.

"Number One. Admiral Sorokin wants the approach quiet. Take the ship in at a low profile. Shields down until we're in orbit, weapons cold. We do not announce ourselves."

"Low profile," Riker said. His mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "I'll tell the crew to try not to look like a flagship."

"See that you do."

He stepped into the turbolift, and once the doors closed, let himself stand in the silence for three seconds, and then keyed a message at the wall panel and sent it.

Underway. Five hours. Do nothing I'd have to explain to an admiral.

He thought about deleting the last sentence. He thought about how she would read it. She would know he had written it smiling.

He left it as it was.

Five hours later, in the forward observation lounge, with the stars stretched into long pale threads and most of the ship's night watch still at their stations, Data stood at the window and Picard came to stand beside him.

"Captain. You asked to be informed if the signature changed character."

"And has it?"

"It has." Data's voice was level, but he was holding a padd as if he did not trust it. "The growth is continuing. More significantly, the signature has developed a harmonic component. It is faint, periodic, and cannot be explained by the source's known mass or motion. It repeats at a frequency very close to the low range of human hearing." He paused. "I can only describe it as a tone."

"A tone."

"Yes, sir. Sustained, rising slightly, then falling. I do not know what is producing it. I have not been able to rule out that it is producing itself."

The ship dropped out of warp, and the threads of starlight snapped back into points. Ahead of them a small dim sun hung at the center of a system that had, until that morning, belonged to nobody.

Somewhere below it, on a dead world with a stripped crust and a silence you could feel, a woman who had told him not to ask was waiting to tell him why.