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  Wilson returned her smile as he stepped into a pool of brighter illumination. The man looked to be nearing a hundred years of age, Corsi thought, and had looked that way since joining her father’s business when she was a child. The unusual dialect he employed when speaking was one of the things she liked most about him. It was a product of his having been born and raised in the New Paris colonies, one of the first human settlements established in the early twenty-second century.

  His wiry frame showed muscle tone he had acquired over years of loading and unloading freight, running from place to place aboard her father’s various ships, and fixing problems and breakdowns on the spur of the moment. It occurred to her that, in a way, Wilson was her father’s personal one-person S.C.E. troubleshooter. She had long admired the man’s technical skills, which he managed to put to use without the litany of indecipherable mumbo-jumbo that most Starfleet engineers employed. That, along with the man’s genuine warmth and ever-pleasant personality, might very well have had something to do with her own ability to appreciate engineers while at the same time understanding little about whatever it was that they did.

  “Never a bother, Miss Dee,” said Wilson, using the name he had given Corsi from their first meeting when she was but ten years of age. “I’m headed back that way to give that cranky intermix chamber a kick in the antimatter pods.” He started to head for the door but instead turned back to her. “Hey, ya need something cold to drink? Maybe some Q’babi juice? You know, your daddy still stocks bottles of the stuff for when we’re on long hauls. I remember ya used to drink us dry back in the day.”

  They shared a laugh at the joint memory. “Thanks, but I’ll pass, Mr. Wilson. I probably haven’t had Q’babi juice in ages, and I don’t think it would set well with my stomach just now.”

  “Bah!” the elder man replied. “That stuff is perfect for settling a queasy gut. Tell ya what. I’ll go check on the intermixer and I’ll bring ya some juice when I come forward. Why don’t ya go look in on your daddy and that Mr. Stevens ya brung. They’re in the cockpit.”

  Corsi groaned at what such a meeting might bring. “I knew Stevens would jump on a chance to prod Dad with all sorts of questions,” she said as she rose from her seat. “He’s probably ready for a break.”

  “He seems to be kinda enjoying it,” Wilson said. “After all these years, he and I are about talked out. It’s a change for us, having warm bodies aboard, that’s a fact.”

  As Wilson headed toward the freighter’s engine room, Corsi silently agreed that it must have been a change for the pair to bring someone on board the decades-old ship, which her father had named the Pharaon after a ship featured in a centuries-old novel he had loved since childhood. The ship’s two guest cabins had not been tended in what looked like years, states of condition she and Stevens noted as soon as they laid eyes on where they would be bunking for the next few days.

  Freighters had come and gone from her father’s ownership, but Aldo had held on to this particular vessel, the first that his father had entrusted to him when he had come of age and earned the position of shipmaster in the family business, well beyond its prime operational life. Rarely assigning it to his hired pilots, he ran the ship with only Wilson, knowing full well that its size and operational requirements meant enough routine work to keep six people busy. Her father’s theory, however, was that ship work was the best thing to occupy the hands and energize the mind when in space on long hauls.

  As she made her way forward, Corsi heard Stevens’s voice filtering back to her above the hums and beeps of the ship’s various systems.

  “…and so while she’s away from the table, Duffy tells the waiter to add some Jimbalian fire fruit to Domenica’s dessert bowl. I couldn’t believe it, but that’s just what happened. The stuff looked like it belonged there.” Stevens obviously was enjoying this tale at her expense. “So we all dig in, and I don’t know what happened next because I was too afraid to look, frankly, but Dom leaps up and just spits the fire fruit out all over Duffy!”

  “She never was one for spicy foods, Mr. Stevens,” said Aldo with a hint of good humor in his voice.

  “I’m surprised she didn’t force the stuff down his throat,” Stevens said, chuckling. “But we all were laughing and I think she knew it was in fun. She has a bit of a temper, you know.”

  Is that…Is Dad laughing?

  “Oh, I know,” Aldo replied. “Allow a father to admit that she comes by it honestly.”

  As the two men continued to talk, Corsi shook her head in amazement. It had been a long time since she had heard her father laugh, about anything, and it was a welcome sound. The same with Stevens, whom she had not heard expressing that level of joviality in…well, in far too long. It did not even bother her that she was serving as the source of their amusement.

  “She’d probably phaser me if she knew I told you this,” Stevens said, catching her attention once again, “but some of the crew call her ‘Core-Breach’ Corsi.”

  “Not to her face, I’d bet.”

  Stevens laughed again. “Not after the time Duffy rerigged a security alert klaxon to shout out…”

  Okay, that’s enough sharing, Corsi decided as her eyes widened in recognition of the tale Stevens was about to recount. Stepping around the corner and into the cockpit, she announced, “Hello, gentlemen. Having a good time, are we?”

  The two snapped around in their respective seats at the Pharaon’s controls. “Hi, Dom,” Stevens said. “I was dusting off some stories for your dad.”

  “Nice,” she said, adding some chill to her voice, “but something tells me you’re probably not in a rush to tell him the one about you and the Tellarites on Syrinx III?”

  Stevens’s smile dimmed. “That one’s not so funny.”

  Though he still maintained his good humor, Corsi noticed that Aldo had returned to the distant, professional demeanor that he normally adopted when interacting with his shipping clients.

  And her.

  His features once again schooled in the manner she knew all too well, her father said, “It sounds as though you have had many adventures since you joined Starfleet, Domenica.”

  “You could look at it that way, I suppose,” she replied. “Fabian has quite a gift for making things sound more interesting or exciting than they were at the time.”

  Stevens said, “But I never embellish. I only add perspective.”

  “So you say,” Corsi replied. “I don’t want to interrupt. Maybe I ought to hit my bunk for a while.”

  “There are four seats, Dom.” Stevens indicated one of the cockpit’s empty chairs. “Why don’t you sit? I won’t even interrupt you if you want to set the record straight on anything I say.” He paused as they made eye contact, and Corsi wondered whether he could read her face and sense what she really wanted. “Or maybe I could go back and get us all something to eat?” he added a moment later.

  “No,” she said, almost too quickly. “The last thing I need is…”

  The ship lurched a bit and slowed dramatically, noises from its systems whining down and fading away. A red light began flashing on the console before Aldo as the view on the forward screen shifted from a pattern of diverging streaks to still points of light.

  “We’ve dropped out of warp,” Stevens said. “What happened?”

  Aldo grumbled and pulled himself from his seat. “Damn. I thought he took care of this.” He pushed past Corsi and stormed toward the engine room as she and Stevens followed closely behind him.

  The threesome entered the Pharaon’s sizeable but cramped engine room and Corsi saw Wilson, the bottom half of him, at least, protruding from an access hatch in the room’s far wall.

  “I know, I said it was fixed,” he shouted, his voice echoing from inside the access. “I see the problem, at least.”

  “Is it the antimatter injector again?” Aldo asked, his hands on his hips. “You did warn me against getting the refurbished one.”

  Wilson wriggled his lean body back out of the access
hatch and stood up, wiping his sweaty brow with a sleeve. “Nope, but the articulation frame for the dilithium crystals is shot.” He held up a metalalloy piece of the ship’s warp drive for them to see. “I should have known to check it when I made the other repairs.”

  Corsi was puzzled. “Just because I fly around with a bunch of engineers doesn’t make me one of them. What’s the problem?”

  Stevens spoke up. “This is no big deal. The articulation frame holds the crystals firm in the matter and antimatter streams. I can rig up a…”

  “If it’s all the same, Mr. Stevens,” Aldo said, cutting him off, “I’d rather you let Wilson handle it. He’s been keeping this ship at warp since before you even looked at a warp core.”

  “I’d bet that’s not true, Captain,” Stevens countered. “When I was young, my parents let me crawl all over their transports back on Rigel. I was passing tools and playing assistant to our engineers from the get-go.”

  Corsi spoke up. “And he’s been trained by Starfleet, Dad.”

  “Exactly,” Aldo said. A pause hung in the air before he spoke again. “Just keep your hands to yourself, son. If Wilson needs help, he’ll ask for it, I’m sure. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to alert the Thelkans that we’ll be delayed.”

  Corsi’s gaze followed her father’s path back to the cockpit, then she turned to Stevens. “Did you really help your parents with warp engines, Fabian?”

  “No way,” he said, smiling. “I’m a tactical guy, not an engine guy. But hey, the S.C.E.’s reputation with your father is on the line here. This looks like a minor deal.”

  Scowling, Corsi replied, “Yeah, and I know how ‘minor deals’ go back on the da Vinci. Straight into the waste extraction center.”

  “Just think of all that time I spent watching Duff crack these engine problems,” Stevens said. “Some of it had to have rubbed off, right? Just keep your dad out of our way back here.”

  Corsi looked to Wilson, who was watching their exchange. The elder engineer smiled approvingly. “I’ll put your young man to work, Miss Dee. We’ll get this old girl up and running again in nothing flat. Go tend to your daddy. Take him a Q’babi juice.”

  “You guys have Q’babi juice?” Stevens asked, his eyebrows climbing for his hairline. “I love that stuff.”

  Corsi rolled her eyes as she spun on a heel and headed to the cockpit. “Just don’t drink it all, Fabian,” she called back. “Dad hates it when someone drinks it all.”

  She stopped at a wall cooler in the freighter’s mess area and grabbed a bottle of fruit juice for her father, paused, and then grabbed one for herself. As she stepped into the ship’s cockpit, her father was concluding his subspace radio transmission to the Thelkan traders.

  “This is an unexpected delay, Sebarb, but I assure you that our repairs will not take long. Please know that we have your full shipment and will be back at warp as soon as possible.”

  The cockpit’s speakers crackled a bit with the Thelkan’s response. “We have patience, Mr. Corsi, but we have deadlines as well. This might make a difference on our entering into future contracts with your firm should your delay prevent us keeping up our end of other bargains.”

  Aldo hung his head a bit. “Understood.” He toggled a switch on the console to terminate the transmission before turning to face Corsi, who offered him one of the juice bottles. He grunted in thanks and took the bottle, twisting off its cap in one of his large hands. “I can’t be late with this shipment. Of course, they seem to have forgotten that it was their idea to move the ship date up an entire week.”

  She watched him drink from the bottle as she sat down and twisted the cap from her own beverage. “Fabian said it’s a quick fix, Dad. Things should be fine.”

  Aldo scoffed at the assessment. “Sure, it’s no problem at all. We have a Starfleet officer on board to make all our troubles go away.”

  Corsi felt the sting of his words, but resisted the cue to take up the same old argument that had ebbed and flowed between them for years. “Yes, we do, Dad, but it’s not Fabian. He’s a technical advisor. I’m the officer.”

  Her father leveled a withering gaze at her and she met it, their eyes locking with neither father nor daughter refusing to look away. She searched his face for anything that might reveal the feelings he was harboring, but his weathered features revealed nothing, at least at first. Then, for the first time in her life, she saw him wince before breaking the contact. He opened his mouth as if to say something but almost as quickly clamped his jaw tight again. It was as if he was struggling to find the right words.

  I don’t think he wants a fight any more than I do.

  “Dad, you took a dig at Fabian just because he’s in Starfleet, and I’ll bet he’s as capable a technician as anyone who works for you,” she said. “Well, except Mr. Wilson. So why not give him some room to help?”

  “I don’t need Starfleet’s help,” he said. “Once is enough for me.”

  Once?

  “What, did you get a tow or something from a Starfleet vessel? I’ve never heard anything about this.”

  Aldo’s voice lowered. “Let’s just drop it.”

  Corsi stood her ground, hoping that she might get some insight to her father that she had sought for years. “Let’s not. I’ve never heard you talk about working with Starfleet before. I can’t imagine your wanting anything to do with Starfleet.”

  “I didn’t!” His outburst made Corsi recoil, sinking deeper into her chair. “And I wouldn’t have…but your Uncle Gi, well, his vision was different from mine.”

  Uncle Gi? We haven’t talked about him in so long. She held vague memories of Giancarlo Corsi, Aldo’s younger brother, who at one time had also contributed to the family business when the family was living on Madellin Prime. He had died when she was young, and when the subject had come up in subsequent years, much against her father’s wishes, Aldo’s sullen and cryptic response was that his brother had died in an accident during a freight run. Corsi’s occasional efforts to inquire further had always met with resistance, and out of respect for her father, she had restrained from pursuing the matter.

  Was she hearing him right, however? Had Starfleet somehow been involved in her uncle’s death? What hasn’t he told me?

  Remembering her mother’s advice, Corsi decided that now was a time to meet halfway. She sat up a bit straighter in her chair and looked at her father, who had turned away from her to stare through the cockpit viewport.

  “Dad, tell me,” she said. “Tell me about Uncle Gi and Starfleet.”

  Drawing a breath as if in resignation, Aldo nodded.

  “It was supposed to be just a simple cargo run….”

  Chapter

  4

  Stardate 32318.5, Earth Year 2355

  Aldo Corsi had never harbored much use for uniforms. To him they implied a willful adherence to rules and regulations and subordination to a larger entity that the individual had no part in creating or controlling, regardless of whether those directives were ethical, legal, or even sane. He viewed them as the embodiment of a sense of order and rigid discipline that, while admittedly necessary to a degree in his own line of work, was at odds more often than not with the lifestyle he had chosen to pursue.

  Therefore, as he sat behind his cluttered desk amidst the disaster area that was the kindest way to describe his office, Aldo Corsi regarded the man who now stood before him wearing a Starfleet uniform with an expression of unmitigated contempt.

  The man looked as though he could have stepped straight out of a recruiting advertisement. His dark hair was short-cropped, and the black-and-gold uniform, which Aldo thought was unforgivably form fitting, hugged his broad chest and wide shoulders. Three pips along the right side of the neckline, two gold and one black, and a Starfleet symbol on the man’s left breast, which Aldo knew also doubled for a communicator device, were all that adorned the uniform. The boots he wore reflected the office lighting better than the dirty mirror hanging next to the door.

  Wh
ere his uniform personified the cold, rigid world of which Aldo wanted no part, the man’s cobalt blue eyes and seemingly genuine yet still reserved smile appeared to offer warmth and friendship, even as Aldo snorted in derision and offered two simple words.

  “Absolutely not.”

  As Aldo expected, though, Lieutenant Commander William Ross did not waver one iota from the composed, relaxed persona he had presented since entering the office. Instead, the man nodded slowly once, twice, and finally a third time before responding.

  “I understand your reluctance, Mr. Corsi, and believe me when I tell you that Starfleet would not be making this request if there was another way that offered the same or greater chance of success.”

  Rolling his eyes, Aldo turned and cast an irritated look in his brother’s direction. Giancarlo Corsi sat behind a desk that complemented his own right down to a matching clutter of padds and other such detritus as was wont to accumulate in the manager’s office of a busy interstellar freight transport service. Like him, Giancarlo was a man of imposing size and physique, with muscled arms and a barrel chest. The thick mop of unruly black hair and the square jaw were near mirrors of Aldo’s own, and more than one person had made the mistaken conclusion that the brothers must be twins.

  “What?” Aldo asked, noticing his brother’s look of disapproval.

  Giancarlo leaned forward in his chair, the springs of which squeaked in protest beneath his muscular frame. “Try to be reasonable, Aldo. The man’s come a long way to ask our help. Shouldn’t we at least hear him out?”

  As always, Aldo realized, his younger brother was trying to be the voice of reason, acting as a counterbalance to his own tendency to react first and consider the consequences of his actions later. It was one of only a few ways in which their personalities differed. Both men, just two years apart in age, had been inseparable in their youth and had carried their relationship into adulthood, and though Aldo was unlikely to admit as much in public, Giancarlo’s cooler head was one of the qualities he valued most about his brother.