*   *   *

“Penny for your thoughts, Commander?” Most of the others had filed out, but Sonya looked up to discover Fabian, Pattie, and Soloman standing before her.

“Sorry, Fabe, just lost in thought.” She smiled a little. “I was just thinking about—well, about how funny life is.”

“You don’t seem to be laughing.” Pattie’s observation did make Sonya laugh, at least a little.

“No, not funny that way. More funny-odd. I mean, here is this ship, this amazing ship, and what do we do with it? We send it into a sun where no one can touch it.” She sighed. “Plus it’s a ship we’ve already seen once before, and now we’re dealing with it again.”

Fabian and Pattie exchanged glances. “Actually, Commander, we were thinking about that too, Pattie and I.” Fabian sat down next to her. “The three of us”—he included Pattie and Soloman with a wave of his hand”—were on the original team. We thought we’d figured this ship out and shut it down, and now here it comes all over again. We couldn’t help feeling like it was a ghost from our past.”

“An old mistake, come back to haunt us,” Pattie said. “And we wondered if, since we got it wrong the first time, we had any hope of figuring it out the second time.”

“Especially since…we aren’t who we were then.” Soloman looked sad, and Sonya knew that this mission had hurt him at least as much as it had her. She’d been reminded of Kieran, but he had been reminded of 111, and they had actually been on this mission together, whereas she had not even been part of the team yet.

“But we couldn’t have fixed this one without any of you.” She looked at each of them in turn. “All of you contributed to this, and came up with things Tev and I didn’t. We needed the fresh perspective, yes, but we also needed your ability to look back at it and see it again with more experienced eyes.”

“I…was embarrassed,” Soloman admitted quietly. “Embarrassed that 111 and I had missed that emergency protocol before. And I felt that I was tainting her memory by revealing that she and I had made a mistake.” He lifted his head and met her gaze, and Sonya saw a strength there that she’d seen slowly growing since Venus. “But her memory is still there. We made a mistake, but now we’ve corrected it. And I don’t think we, she and I together, would have caught the mistake this time, either. I think I caught it because I am no longer 110. I am Soloman. I have changed—grown—and that’s made a difference.”

“Pattie and I may not have changed so profoundly,” Fabian said with a smile, “but we feel the same way. We were less experienced, less crafty. It’s not that we were fools, just that we may not have had the tools we needed back then. Now we do. We’re all better than we were before.”

“And part of that,” Pattie added, antennae waving gently, “is because we’re part of this team. The old group was strong, but this one—this one is stronger.”

“I know,” Sonya said softly. “And it bothers me a little. As much as I hate to admit it, Kieran couldn’t have done the things Tev did. Not that Kieran wasn’t wonderful, and a great engineer, but his mind worked differently. We needed Tev for this.”

“And we needed you,” Pattie said. “You looked at the problem from a different perspective than Salek did, and saw what he missed.”

Sonya stood, and Fabian did as well, the four of them clustering together. Like a group—like a family. “I think,” she said slowly, discovering it as she spoke, “that I could see it because Salek had laid the groundwork for me. Because all of you had. He set things up, and that let me come in now and figure it out from there.”

Fabian laughed, “You know, hindsight usually only works if it’s your own.”

Sonya met his laugh with one of her own. “Well, maybe, but on this team we share so much anyway, what’s one more thing?” Then she shook her head and smiled. “I do feel good about it, though. I feel like this was a chapter in this crew’s history, and we helped close it properly. And maybe now Salek”—she felt her eyes tearing up slightly, and this time chose not to fight it—“and Kieran and 111 and McAllan and Feliciano and Drew and Barnak and all the others who have gone before can finally rest properly, knowing that we’ve put it all to rights.”

“Well,” Pattie replied with a tinkle, “I don’t know about all of it. What have we left to work on, then?”

“Not to worry, Pattie,” Fabian told her as the four of them headed toward engineering. “I’m sure we’ll find something.”

END