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The nightclub assaults Liam Shaw's senses from a half-block away. He feels the place before he sees it. A low, thumping bass reverberates through the pavement, occasionally punctuated by brief bursts of trebel from a Rigelian club mix. Strobing lights flash in the darkness when the doorway hisses open and closed to admit new guests.
"I don't know about this, guys." Liam’s footsteps falter a few steps from the queue where a bouncer is scanning IDs. "This isn't really my scene. I think I'll swing by Chicago and grab a cold one. Maybe I'll head back to the ship early."
"Don't be a wet blanket, Shaw!" One of his companions gives his shoulder a playful but pointed shove. "Nguyen's girl said she was bringing her friends."
"Either way, this place is crawling with cadets." Nyguen confirms this statement, then tips his head and winks at their shiny leiutenant pips. "You remember this place from when we were at the Academy. It's what they call a 'target rich environment."
Liam presses his lips together in silence and follows his fellow engineers inside, wishing that he had never agreed to come along. Stepping into the nightclub is a second blow to his nerves. The roar of the music is almost matched by the buzz of voices. Heat from dozens of bodies makes the room feel stale and close, a sensation emphasized by the sickly sweet deodorizer that the club uses to neutralize the smell of so many aliens mingling in one space.
Liam's eyes flicker toward the exit again. He doesn't like noise, and he doesn't like crowded places. Two beers, he bargains with himself. Two beers and he's heading back to the ship.
"Duy!" The men all turn at the sound of a woman's voice rising over the din. An Alajian cadet emerges from the sea of academy uniforms and launches herself into Lt. Nguyen's arms. "You came!" she squeals, making an embarassing display of kissing him before leading the group to a booth that she's holding in the back corner.
"Friends" turns out to mean a pair of Grazerites fondling each other's horns and a pretty but pissed-off brunette Academy student staring down at a PADD.
"Lieutenant Zain Torber, USS Bellerophon" Shaw's shipmate squeezes forward to stake his claim on the human girl. “Buy you a drink?"
"I have a boyfriend," the girl responds without looking up or offering her name.
”Suit yourself." Torber answers with an shrug and heads for the bar.
Liam flags down a server for a beer, then sighs and slides into the booth across from the cadet.
"You look like you want to be here as much as I want to." He doesnt really feel like talking, but he promised himself that he would sit here for exactly one hour and he'll be damned if he is going to do it in total silence, watching Nguyen and the Alajian see who can get their tongue further down the other's throat.
The brunette lowers her PADD. "We shouldn't be here. We have exams next week."
Shaw laughs. "You still give a shit about that?"
The brunette arches a well-groomed brow, piqued by the question.
Shaw can't resist the urge to poke the bear.
"Don't you graduate next month? I figured you had your ship assignment already."
"I do. The Destiny. We're going to join the seventh fleet." The girl continues to stare at him, the dark expression in her moss green eyes practically daring him to explain his bemused smirk.
"Veteran secret," Shaw says, leaning over to whisper in her ear, "As long as you can hold a phaser rifle or plot torpedo coordinates, no one is going to pull your transcript once you get to your new post."
"That's not true," the girl retorts, recoiling as though she's been slapped. Her cheeks are flushed and her lips are scowling, but there's a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes.
Shaw takes a swig of his beer.
"It didn't used to be true," he presses his lips together in a grim line, studying the woman. She can't be more than eight years his junior, but he feels decades older. "What'd you sign on to study?"
"Comparative Astrobotany," she replies automatically, her features brightening for the first time all night.
Shaw ignores her lovely smile.
"What's your duty station on the Destiny?"
The light is snuffed like a candle.
"Tactical Ops." She bites her lower lip and looks down at the table. "It's only temporary," she murmurs after a while. "There aren't many slots open outside of the Soverign class ships and they haven't been fielding as many of those since...since..."
Since everything went to hell, Shaw thinks, but lets the girl connect the dots for herself. He would almost feel sorry for her- if he allowed himself to feel things any more. She has the look of a Starfleet brat. He can imagine her as a kid, zooming around space in a galaxy class starship in the good old days, field tripping on one untouched paradise after the other while her parents do science all day, safe behind a Neutral Zone that the Federation thought would protect it forever. It was probably easy for a slick-talking recruiter to con her into thinking Starfleet would let her swan around the galaxy picking alien flowers while the Alpha Quadrant was falling apart.
One of the view-screens over the bar is showing a fight. Liam lets the brunette return to her PADD and feigns interest in the matchup while he nurses his drink. He steals an occasional glance at his chronometer, counting down the minutes until he can leave.
Suddenly the bar falls silent.
"Turn it up!" a stranger's voice calls out.
The image of the fight is gone, replaced with the logo of the Federation News Network.
One by one, all of the screens are being replaced by slight variations of the same image: Klingon and Romulan warships along with a smaller number of Federation vessels massed beside an alien-configured space station.
"...reporting two more listening stations in the gamma quadrant have fallen silent, leading some commenters to speculate that a Dominion offensive is imminent."
So it is finally happening. If Liam Shaw feels anything as he absorbs the news of the coming conflict, it is a sense of relief. War with the Domionion alliance has been hovering on the horizon for years like a slow-moving summer storm.
The monitors eventually switch back to other scenes. There are mostly talking heads: gray-bearded admirals in old-style fleet uniforms discussing the Federation's military readiness, a reporter in Paris, waiting for the President to deliver remarks, a few broadcasts from Vulcan and other worlds to offer reaction.
The murmur of voices returns, far more muted than before, punctuated by the occasional beeps and buzzing of communicators as the news slowly trickles through the San Francisco night.
Duy and the Alajian are no longer making out. They are clutching each other tightly, speaking in urgent whispers. The Grazerites slip away into the darkness. The brunette stares across the table at Shaw, her comely features marred with anxiety. He smirks at her and and tosses back another gulp of beer.
"Silver lining," Shaw says, flashing a grin. "Looks like you aren't going to have to worry about those exams after all.” She doesn't react, and so he continues, nodding toward the doorway where some of the older patrons are still somberly filtering out. "Scurrying off to meetings they should have held six months ago. They'll waste about thirty minutes crucifying some poor bastard in the admiralty for the fact that half the fleet is six days away from the wormhole and then they'll move on to their mobilization plan. I give it to 0800 tomorrow morning before they start pushing orders to ship out."
His own communicator is silent, but he knows it is only a matter of time. The Bellerophon is already scheduled to leave spacedock the following day.
The brunette glances anxiously at her PADD and back to his face.
"You think they would call us up early? Before we're ready?"
Shaw makes an incredulous sound.
"What was it- two years ago they had you cadets walking the streets of San Francisco blood testing strangers to check for Changelings?"
The brunette shifts uncomfortably, but doesn't reply.
Liam gulps down his last swallow of beer, slams the bottle down on the table and steals a final look at the time before deciding to break his promise to hold out for an hour. One beer is all he can handle tonight.
"Good luck, kid," he says and heads for the door.
"Wait!"
Liam is half a block away before he hears the voice and realizes that the brunette has followed him.
He tilts his head, waiting for her to speak.
"What you said...you..." she blushes and looks at her feet.
"Do you really think there's going to be a war?"
He snorts.
"There's been a war for months. It's just that no one is calling it that."
The street outside is brighter than the bar. The glow of neon signs illuminates the girl's face, so that Shaw can see the glimmer of moisture at the rim of her eyes.
She's terrified.
Liam tries not to think about how that makes him feel. He sighs and looks away.
"You must think I'm ridiculous,” she sniffs.
"No."
He doesn't. Really. She's frightened because she doesn't know what to expect, and a part of him would give anything to regain that innocence.
"You'll be allright," Shaw says in his most reassuring tone. It’s true in a way, no matter what happens. Either she’ll survive, which is what she thinks she wants, or she'll die, which Liam thinks might be better.
"You've been in a battle before.”
It's a statement, not a question.
Liam's nod is almost imperceptible. He doesn't want to have this conversation, not here, not now, but he answers anyway.
"A long time ago. Before I went to the Academy."
"Wolf 359," she blurts. "Duy told Sarja."
He inclines his chin again, jaw clenched.
"What was it like?"
Liam shrugs.
"I don't really remember the battle. I was in main engineering. We were just running back and forth, trying to keep systems online."
He squeezes his eyes shut when he thinks back to the chaos.
The ship was ravenous for power with defenses and weapons both at maximum and an ever-growing need for force-shields to temporarily patch breaches in the hull. Every time a Borg weapon hit its mark, the power grid flickered as the circuits struggled to adapt.
Its the aftermath he remembers best. A sound that he can't quiet put into words, almost like the ship itself was moaning in pain rent the air as the main engineering bulkhead finally gave way, and then there was green plasma fire for as far as he could see. The synthskin that medics treated him with after his rescue had long since melded to his own body and his physical scars were imperceptible to human eyes, but sometimes when he awoke at night, he could still feel himself burning and smell melted hair and flesh.
Liam remembered clambering over the limp, lifeless bodies of his friends, squeezing through a smoke-choked Jefferies tube and finally emerging on the lifedeck with the other survivors to find that only one of the lifepods had survived the assault.
"It happens really fast," he says quietly. "Just do what your captain says. The senior officers will care of you."
Liam's mind is in the past again. He remembers the young lieutenant who made it down to the lifedeck. She must not have been any older than he is now. She was probably hoping for someone on the senior staff among the survivors, but there was no one- just her own personal Kobiyashi Maru.
He will never forget the look on her face as she counted the hands, and tallied them against the seats on the lifeboats.
Ten seats.
Fifty souls.
The lieutenant closed her eyes, and then opened them again, as if she was hoping to see something else, but the scene was unchanged. She took a breath, then she stiffened her spine, and the look on her face...after all these years, Liam still couldn't quite describe with words the mixture of pride, resolve, resignation and pure pissed-off rage that played across her features, but if someone asked him to define what Starfleet officers ought to be, that look, that moment is what he would think of first .
"You!" she gestured to one of the crew and directed her toward the lifeboat before scanning the room and seizing on another. "And you!"
How did she choose? Was there a reason? Was it random? Was she counting off under her breath? Liam knew the question would haunt him for the rest of his life, especially when she counted down to the final seat and he realized she was pointing at him.
"I hid in a closet."
Shaw's attention is dragged back to the present by the cadet's voice.
"What?"
"I was here on Earth...on Stardate 44002.3."
Liam stares at her. He knows, rationally, that he wasn't the only life touched by the events that day, but he seldom stops to think about the galaxy beyond the red dwarf star where his life pod bobbed among debris.
"They sent us home from school." The girl's voice is softer now and he has to lean close to hear her. "My parents were both at work. They said that the Borg were headed here. I didn't know what to do and so I just...I hid in a closet."
She meets his gaze. The look in her eyes is apologetic and embarrassed and hungry for connection in a way that Liam understands.
He follows her back to her dorm. Maybe she was lying about the boyfriend and maybe she wasn't, but she doesn't mention him again. Liam follows her into her bedroom, peels off her clothes and gives her the only comfort he has to offer.
He wakes up just before dawn. Pale gray light filters through the windows, giving everything a dreamy cast.
In slumber, the girl looks younger than she did the night before. It is easy to imagine her as a frightened child, hiding in her closet, waiting for monsters that never came.
Liam thinks about her, here on Earth, while he was drifting through space millions of miles away. Suddenly, everything feels connected. There's a stirring of something in the place where his heart used to be.
A split second later it's gone.
The monsters will find her.
Soon.
Shaw puts on his uniform and leaves.
THE END