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  And all because of her mother, whose smile mirrored Stevens’s.

  Oh yes, this is just going to be one hell of a week.

  Chapter

  2

  “Mom! What are you doing?”

  Ulrika Corsi turned with a start from an open dresser drawer, clutching a drab-colored sweater knit from Yridian yak wool. “Just helping you get settled. You can’t live out of a duffel bag for a week, after all.”

  “I’ve only been here for an hour, Mom,” Corsi said. “You don’t need to cater to me like this.” Stepping farther into the room, she studied the arrangement of furniture and knickknacks that was all too familiar. On the uppermost shelf of a painted wooden bookcase rested the same trio of swim-meet trophies that her mother surely had been dusting for more than a decade. She glanced along a wall to find the same framed family portrait, a sepia-toned photograph of herself on Galor IV with her brother and parents, that had hung in similar proximity to the bookcase in probably half a dozen houses on half a dozen planets since it was taken. On the dresser near her mother, a large candle burned, wafting the scent of pine needles into the air.

  Although Corsi had never set foot in this room, there was no mistaking this place as her room.

  “I just want you to feel at home, Dommie,” Ulrika said as she folded the sweater in her hands. “Allow a mother that simple pleasure at least.”

  “But some of those things are, well, mine.”

  Ulrika laughed. “I assumed that all of these things were yours or else you wouldn’t be carrying them.”

  Corsi huffed as she moved toward her duffel bag, which sat on the floor next to the bed. “You know what I meant. There are some things in there that I’d like to put away myself.”

  “You mean like that?” Ulrika nodded to the edge of the dresser and Corsi followed the gesture with her gaze to see her phaser resting next to a satin-covered jewelry box.

  “Yes, like that.” With a speed that even Corsi did not anticipate, her hand darted to the dresser and snatched up her sidearm. She slipped the phaser into the pocket of her slacks, where it bulged noticeably. “I’m sorry about bringing it into the house. I know the township rules about weapons, but I just don’t feel comfortable without it anymore.”

  The elder woman said nothing in response as she shook out the sweater in her hands, refolding the garment into a more compact bundle. Corsi saw her mother force a smile, a sure signal that a change in topic was coming. “I’m surprised to see this old thing in your bag. Didn’t Roberto give you this for your birthday one year?”

  Corsi found it was her turn to smile. “Yeah, he did. And I told him that it looked like the yak had thrown up on it.”

  Ulrika laughed softly as she placed the sweater in an open drawer. “You always have such a lovely way with words for your brother. That’s your father talking in you, you know.”

  I know.

  Corsi silently watched her mother reach into the open duffel bag and pull out a few more pieces of clothing, putting each in a drawer. Then she saw the elder woman pause as she drew out a Starfleet uniform tunic. “Mom? Maybe that ought to stay in the bag.”

  Ulrika looked up and met her daughter’s eyes in the mirror above the dresser. As she studied the reflection of her mother’s face, Corsi enjoyed the reminder that the woman before her seemed scarcely to have aged in comparison to the mental images she had carried during her years away from home. It was somehow comforting to believe that her mother seemed as unaffected by time as the objects within the room.

  “You probably won’t need it anyway,” Ulrika said as she turned, grabbing the duffel bag from the dresser’s varnished top and passing it to Corsi. “You’re on leave for a while yet, right?”

  “A few weeks,” Corsi said. “But some of that will be travel time back to the da Vinci. It’s not as if Starfleet runs a shuttle service to come pick us up.”

  “Stay as long as you like, Dommie,” Ulrika said as she stepped around her daughter and moved to the bed. She smoothed out a spot on the bedspread and sat down, her light frame not making much of an impression on the mattress. “I left the other thing inside the bag. It looked like a picture frame?”

  Corsi felt her throat tighten a bit at that as she nodded in reply.

  “I didn’t look at it.”

  “You never were one to drop a subtle hint, were you, Mom?” She saw Ulrika smile, and then Corsi knew that she had been roped into a show-and-tell session with the same signature deftness that her mother wielded with each member of the family. The Corsis as a rule never were ones to open up with conversation around the family dinner table, so typically it fell to Ulrika to pepper their talk with loaded questions or open-ended statements that no one dared avoid.

  Mom could teach the Cardassians a thing or two about interrogation techniques, Corsi thought as she fished in her bag and brought out a flat black-framed photograph about twice the size of a data padd. “This is for Fabian. He doesn’t know I have it.”

  She passed the photograph to Ulrika and smiled a bit as she saw her mother analyze it with her trademark scrutiny. “That’s your Fabian on the right, isn’t it?”

  “He’s not my Fabian, Mother. He’s not my anything.”

  Ulrika looked up with a smirk as Corsi sat down on the bed beside her. Indicating the picture with the fingers of her right hand, she said, “That’s the bridge of the Defiant, an old Starfleet ship we rescued…well, it seems like ages ago, now. Captain Gold is sitting in the command chair, there, and…” Her hand froze as it moved from the image of her captain to the next figure in the photograph. “And that’s Commander Duffy on the left.”

  Ulrika’s smile dimmed. “That’s your friend who died, isn’t it? He’s the one who meant so much to Fabian.”

  “Yeah, Mom.” Corsi could not help staring at Kieran Duffy’s broad smile, captured in midsentence as Captain Gold and Fabian looked to be laughing along with whatever story he must have been unreeling at the time. It illustrated best what she knew she would miss most about Duffy: his love for telling a story, particularly an embarrassing one, to whoever would lend an ear.

  The photograph’s mere existence startled Corsi when she first saw it in the hands of Bart Faulwell, who had plucked the image from optical data scans made to record the Defiant’ s condition on its journey back from Tholian space. He slipped the framed shot into her hands moments before she was scheduled to leave the da Vinci with Stevens. When he did so, she noticed several additional frames under his arm; memorial gifts headed to other members of the crew, no doubt.

  “I’m waiting for the right time to give it to him, I guess,” Corsi said to break their silence. “We don’t have much time on duty to take pictures, you know. He’ll be pretty surprised.”

  “Well, this is sure to mean a lot to him, Dommie,” Ulrika said. “You mean a lot to him, too, you know. He went on and on to me while you were in showering. He said…”

  “Mom, I don’t want to hear it.” Corsi’s desire for her mother to get past the notion that Stevens and she were some sort of romantic item brought an edge of frustration to her voice. “I did not bring him here to ‘meet the parents,’ okay? Fabian is a shipmate. No, I mean…well, okay…he’s a friend, but it stops there. So, let’s drop this talk, please, especially before he overhears it.”

  “Then you’d better tell him soon because he’s certainly sweet on you. I think he was just as worried about your getting hurt as we were.”

  Great. This is what I get for trying to help the guy.

  “Mom, he’s clinging to me because I owed him a favor,” Corsi said, swinging her body away from her mother. “He’s got plenty of other friends on board. I’m not really sure why he’s here.”

  Reaching over, Ulrika placed a hand on Corsi’s shoulder. “He could have reached out to anyone, but he chose you. It sounds like he needs you.”

  Plenty of other people needed me, too. And what good was I?

  Ulrika continued, enough pressure in her touch that Corsi turned b
ack to face her despite the burning desire for this line of discussion to cease. “You have the words he needs to hear, even if you don’t yet realize it. You’ll find them, probably when you least expect it. And he may have a few words for you, too, Dommie. Open yourself to listening.” She paused, then added with a smile, “I know that’s not the Corsi way, but still…”

  Motion at the doorway prompted the women to look up with a start and see Stevens’s head and shoulders peering from around the door frame. “Hey, am I interrupting?”

  Corsi’s shouted “Yes!” mixed in the air with her mother’s spoken “No,” bringing a laugh from Stevens. She fumbled a bit to speak to her shipmate before her mother could open her mouth again. “I guess not, then. We were just talking, Fab…”

  The photograph! He’ll see it!

  Corsi snatched the frame from her mother’s grasp and flipped it facedown onto her duffel bag that still sat on the floor between their feet.

  Stevens stepped into the room, his eyebrows furrowing mischievously. “Baby pictures, Dommie?”

  “Not your business, Fabian,” Corsi said with her best security-officer tone. “Just move along.”

  “Well, I guess I can wander back to the kitchen and wait for your father, then. He just pulled up. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  Corsi felt her stomach flutter as the news sunk in.

  I guess it was too much to hope for his running into an ion storm or something.

  Standing, she brushed some of the ripples from her blouse, and with them, she hoped, some of the emotional trappings she had allowed to latch onto her the longer she sat in this facsimile of her childhood bedroom. Though she was not bracing for some sort of showdown with her father on his arrival, Corsi knew that just seeing him for the first time in years would surely fuel her internal fires if she let it. Sighing in resignation, she walked past Stevens and turned toward the kitchen, knowing that her father would come in through the back door and head straight for the food cooler.

  Some things never change.

  Walking just behind her, Stevens said, “You really haven’t seen him since you finished at the Academy?”

  She swallowed hard. “A few times, but it wasn’t for long. He made it pretty clear at graduation that Starfleet officers weren’t welcome in his home.”

  “Well, good thing I’m a noncom, then,” Stevens said with a sly grin. “Want me to run interference? Maybe he’ll forget you’re here.”

  “What I would like you to do is stop talking about me to my mother.” The curtness of her response was a surprise even to her. “And I definitely don’t want you to start sidling up to my father the way you have with her. I don’t need that kind of pressure.”

  “Or maybe that kind of competition?”

  Corsi felt heat rise in her neck as she glared back at Stevens, and turned to respond accordingly when the sound of the front door opening interrupted them.

  Aldo Corsi stood in the doorway, his eyes widening a bit on Corsi while the doorknob rested in his meaty hand. He drew a breath, making his barrel chest puff out even farther, and narrowed his eyes again as he stepped forward and pushed the door shut behind him.

  “You’re home.”

  “Hi, Dad.” Corsi could not help judging her father’s appearance against her memories, just as she had minutes earlier with her mother. He had not fared as well against the passage of time. She let her eyes dwell on his salt-and-pepper hair, the frown lines that creased his face, the slight stoop in his posture. The hint of immortality loaned to Corsi by her mother was stripped away when her father’s eyes met hers.

  The imposing man nodded quietly, then turned his attention to Stevens and offered his hand. “Aldo Corsi.”

  Stevens returned the handshake as Corsi noted his hand being almost swallowed up by her father’s grip. “Fabian Stevens, sir. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “I heard you were coming,” Aldo said. Corsi knew that was about as committal as her father would get at showing any return interest in their arrival on Fahleena III, at least until he wound down a bit from his latest cargo run.

  Stevens must not have picked up on that signal, however, as he kept talking even after Aldo had turned from the pair and moved to open a brushed metal door set into a kitchen wall. “Domenica has told me some about your transport service. I’d like hearing about it and maybe seeing a few of your freighters. My parents run shuttles in the Rigel Colonies. Ever make it out that way?”

  Aldo reached into the cooler and took out a bottled beverage, most likely some blend of fruit juice, Corsi thought, and screwed off the top while the cooler door slowly swung shut. Before taking a swig, Aldo leveled a questioning glare at his daughter. “Rough ride you took. I suppose you lost the ax.”

  Well, that certainly didn’t take long.

  Corsi knew that talk of her family’s most prized heirloom would surface sometime during her visit, though she had not imagined it as the opening volley upon seeing her father. Still, she figured that he would at least ask about its condition, or even ask for its return to a safer haven than a starship. She would not dare tell him that the centuries-old Corsi ax might have been reduced to a mere memory had it not been for the kind actions of Carol Abramowitz, who scooped it up during a hasty raid of the da Vinci for medical supplies on Galvan VI. Not long after its retrieval, her ship’s quarters would be flooded and its contents eradicated by a rush of liquid-metal hydrogen vomited forth from the gas planet.

  “It’s fine,” Corsi said, gritting her teeth. “I brought it home, for good this time.”

  The man drew another deep breath, then looked past Corsi to Ulrika, who had stepped into the kitchen behind them all. To her he said, “The Thelkan traders are arriving a week early. I’ll be leaving in an hour for the rendezvous.”

  Corsi turned to look at her mother as she tried to keep a pained expression out of her father’s view. The fallen features on her mother’s face, Corsi imagined, rivaled her own. “Aldo, that’s a four-day round trip.”

  He tipped the beverage bottle to his lips and swallowed a long draw. “I can’t be late. Not with this shipment.” Aldo stepped past Corsi without so much as a glance and walked into the living room and down a connecting hall.

  “Pretty convenient,” Corsi said. “I guess that’s one way to avoid an argument.”

  Stevens frowned. “He didn’t seem antagonistic, Dom. Just tired. Give him a few…”

  “Not antagonistic? What did you make of the ax remark? Maybe he’s wanting it reappraised?”

  Stevens did not waver despite Corsi’s small hope that he might step back from her. “All right, I don’t know what to make of it. Actually, you never told me the whole story about the ax and the family connection. I just know it’s important.”

  Spite tinged Corsi’s humorless laugh. “Important enough that he made sure it was unharmed before he asked about me.”

  As if deciding that a recess was in order, Stevens nodded quietly before turning to follow Aldo. Corsi shook her head as she watched him leave the room.

  I really don’t need this.

  “You’re not being fair, Domenica,” Ulrika said, her tone the one Corsi knew her mother reserved for making a point above the din of heated talk amongst the family. “Don’t underestimate your father and his love for you. You are not here to see him sit in your bedroom, sometimes for hours. Your communications don’t come as often as ours go out. If you’d like to raise a point about shows of concern, you ought to choose your words with care.”

  Corsi started to reply, but stopped as her mother stepped closer. Ulrika leaned in and kissed her daughter on the cheek. “Take a tip from the Thelkans, Dommie. Meet your father halfway.”

  Then Ulrika left the kitchen, leaving Corsi alone and feeling as though she were frozen in place. She hovered on an edge of emotion that she might have cultivated were she in uniform and on shift as a Starfleet security officer. A good helping of anger would have been welcome, or perhaps a tinge of embarrassment o
r even an undercurrent of ache for a connection to her father. None of those, she realized, were realistic goals for this trip, if ever. Instead, she felt herself giving in to fatigue and resignation.

  Pulling out one of the wooden chairs situated around the kitchen table, Corsi sat down. She propped two elbows on the table and cradled her chin in her hands. Closing her eyes, she began to enjoy the silence, thinking that a few days of rest without the tension of interacting with her father might be just what the doctor ordered.

  No sooner had she started to relax, however, than Corsi heard footsteps approaching the kitchen. She opened her eyes to see Stevens wearing a knowing grin on his face. “So, did your mom put away your entire duffel?”

  Corsi shook her head a bit to focus. “Yeah. Yeah, she did.”

  “Better repack on the double,” he said, the grin giving way to a full smile. “I made us some new plans. We’re shipping out with your dad.”

  Chapter

  3

  What I wouldn’t give for a Starfleet-issue inertial damper right about now.

  After just a few hours at warp four aboard her father’s freighter, Domenica Corsi got a big reminder that her space legs just were not what they used to be. The steady humming of the Pharaon’s deck plates, a vibrating sensation that seasoned space travelers equated with being cradled in their mothers’ arms, was exaggerated on this older craft and consequently wreaking havoc on her equilibrium and her nerves. Even more so than during her travels since leaving the da Vinci less than a week ago, the usually stalwart security chief found herself once again walking wobbly and feeling queasy as the ship sped toward its meeting with Thelkan traders.

  “Oh, Miss Dee, you’re still lookin’ pretty green around your gills, there. Lemme take one more crack at fine-tuning the fields for ya.”

  Corsi smiled toward the voice despite her urge to curl up in a ball on the deck. “Please don’t bother with that again, Mr. Wilson,” she said to the white-haired man standing near the mess hall table where she sat alone in the dim lighting. “It’s not the ship. It’s me. I’m not myself these days.”