You’ve got to tell him.

Sonya had been saying this to herself for days, ever since she and Kieran both got their formal promotions to full-grade lieutenant at the beginning of the Mudor V mission. They were now holding station for a few days, and Geordi had given both his new full lieutenants “a few days off before I drop your new duties on you.” At present they were in civilian clothes, headed for the arboretum. Keiko was nine months pregnant with her and Chief O’Brien’s child, and several officers had volunteered to do some occasional gardening duty to take a load off the botanist.

The vagueness of Geordi’s phrasing regarding new duties had been at Sonya’s request. She wanted to be the one to break the news to Kieran that she was transferring to the Oberth.

“So I’m assuming we’re gonna have to weed the famtils again,” Kieran said cheerfully.

“Probably,” Sonya muttered.

“Sonnie, is something wrong?”

“Hm? Oh, nothing.”

Kieran stood up straight and said in stentorian tones, “The sound you have just heard is a lie.” Back to his normal voice: “C’mon, what’s bothering you?”

Before Sonya could even come up with an evasive answer—all the while admonishing herself for not giving him the straight answer he deserved—the ship started shaking. Lights flickered on and off, and the ship continued to buck and weave. “What the hell—?” Kieran said before he was knocked to the floor. Sonya was gripping the door frame of one of the labs they were passing en route to the arboretum.

Finally, the shaking stopped, though the red alert siren was still blaring, and emergency lights were all that illuminated the corridor.

Kieran looked up at Sonya from his prone position on the deck. “I ask again, what the hell?”

“Dunno,” Sonya said. “We must have hit something very hard.” She tapped her combadge. It was the start of beta shift, and Geordi had left a skeleton crew in engineering, with Lieutenant Aleakala in charge of the five people on shift. “Gomez to engineering. Chao-Anh, what’s—”

“I can’t talk, Sonya. Come on, everyone, get out now!” Behind Chao-Anh, Sonya could hear the four-note chime that meant a bulkhead was dropping. There must have been a core breach or a hull breach.

“All decks, brace for impact!” That was Lieutenant Monroe, who was in charge of the bridge during this light shift.

Kieran had gotten to his feet. “What, another one?”

The words had barely escaped his mouth when the ship rocked again, sending them both to the deck. Sonya’s ears were then assaulted by an explosion, as the door to one of the labs down the hall exploded. She recalled that Lieutenant T’Proll was supervising an experiment with quaratum. Several containers of the stuff were in the cargo bay right now, more than they needed for their current allotment of thrusters, for T’Proll’s project.

Sonya had a bad feeling that it was the quaratum that exploded, and the only way for that to happen was if there were lethal radiation levels in the lab, which, thanks to the blown door, would be in the corridor in a minute.

As one, Sonya and Kieran moved to drop the emergency bulkhead. Kieran got there a moment sooner, and gave her a goofy grin as he pulled the lever that lowered the duranium door from the ceiling.

While Kieran did that, Sonya tapped her combadge again. “Gomez to engineering.” Her combadge gave a low trill indicating that it wasn’t functioning. Walking over to the bulkhead, she touched the computer screen, but it didn’t respond. “Great, comm’s down, and power’s down.” She looked at Kieran. “I don’t suppose you’re hiding a tricorder in your pants?”

“If I said I was just glad to see you, would you hit me?”

“I’d certainly consider it.”

“Then I’ll just say, no, I don’t.”

Sonya glanced down the corridor away from the emergency bulkhead they’d just dropped. “Come on, we need to get to engineering, see if Chao-Anh needs help.”

Kieran nodded and followed her, only to find that another emergency bulkhead had been dropped. Looking up and down the bulkhead, as if it would provide answers, Kieran finally said, “You know, I don’t think I want to know why that thing was dropped. I just hope it wasn’t because of something on this side of it.”

“Yeah.” Sonya looked up. “Maybe we can use the crawlways.”

“For what, exactly?”

“To get to engineering.”

“Sonnie, we don’t know how bad the radiation is up there. And we don’t know—”

“We don’t know anything,” Sonya snapped. The she sighed. “Sorry, but we can’t just stand here and hope somebody rescues us. The ship is obviously in big trouble, and we have to help. We’re closer to engineering than the bridge anyhow, so let’s get down there and see if there’s anything we can do.”

After considering the point, Kieran nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I just hate crawling around in there, y’know?”

Sonya couldn’t help but smile. “Mr. Gravity Boots can’t handle confinement?”

“I’m a creature of the air. That’s why I like to stay in the nice, big, spacious engine room.”

Sonya and Kieran crawled for the better part of an hour, and only made about ten meters’ worth of real progress. They were constantly doubling back, going around, and avoiding various obstacles in their path, most of which were due to yet another catastrophic malfunction. While it was possible for a ship like the Enterprise to have one or two malfunctions like this, it was almost impossible for so many systems to completely fall apart at once.

“We must have hit a quantum filament,” Sonya said when they took a brief rest at one junction, sitting across from each other in what passed for a wide space in the crawlways.

“That’s crazy. The bridge would’ve seen it coming.”

“Only if they were looking for it, and why would they be? You know how wide those things aren’t,” she said with a grin.

“Nah, I’m thinking Romulan attack. Or maybe a new Borg weapon.”

Sonya shook her head. “The damage was too catastrophic, too across-the-board. Weapons fire wouldn’t do that—or if it did, it’d be enough to crack the ship in half, and we’d have felt it if that happened.”

“I don’t know, Sonnie—”

“Kieran, remember when we first met?”

Cutting himself off, Kieran blinked. “Yeah, but I don’t see—”

“You told me that it was a design flaw, I said it was a tribblecom. Who was right?”

“Oh, that first meeting.”

It was Sonya’s turn to blink. “What other first meeting was there?”

“Okay, I was thinking of the day you came on board and I passed you and Denny in the corridor on the way to a staff meeting.”

“We didn’t really meet, though,” Sonya said with a smile.

“We exchanged words. I said I was running late for a staff meeting.”

Sonya honestly didn’t remember the conversation that clearly—that day was a haze of nervousness and anticipation and her inability to give The Speech to Geordi—but decided not to let him know that.

He’s going to be disappointed enough when I tell him what I have to tell him.

Slapping his knees, Kieran made as if to rise. “Shall we boogie?”

“Kieran, I’m leaving the Enterprise.”

“What?”

“I’m leaving the Enterprise. There’s a position on the Oberth open—a one-year mission dealing with new ways to harness antimatter, under Captain Schönhertz. I’m taking it.”

Sitting all the way back down, Kieran said, “Oh.”

“I’m sorry, I wanted to tell you sooner, but I didn’t know how.”

“Did okay just then,” he muttered.

“It’s a great opportunity, and—”

“Yeah, it is, and you’d be stupid not to take it.”

Her mouth hanging open for a moment, Sonya finally said, “Really?”

“Of course. Geez, Sonnie, I don’t expect you to be a slug like me for the rest of your career. I mean, yeah, you’re on the Enterprise now, but you’re one of dozens. That’s fine if you’re me and don’t want to stand out in a crowd, but on the Oberth? You’ll be sitting pretty. I bet you’ll be running the place inside a year.”

She smiled, relieved more than she could adequately express that Kieran understood. “I hope so, since it’s only a one-year project.”

Kieran laughed. Sonya had never been so glad to hear that wonderful sound as she was now.

“Come on,” he said, getting up for real this time. “We’ve got work to do.”

They arrived at a crawlway just above engineering on deck thirty-two, after three hours of crawling around, a journey that should have only taken one hour at the most. Yes, the Enterprise was large, but they had started out fairly deep in the saucer section. Unfortunately, the damage from what Sonya was morally certain was a quantum filament had been extensive. Many of the crawlways were cut off for one reason or another.

“Genry, we’ve crossed the ice!” Kieran said when they arrived over the corridor outside engineering.

Sonya looked at him with confusion.

“Sorry,” he said, “old book I read when I was a kid. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. There’s this long journey, and at the end—”

Before Kieran could finish, he was interrupted by a tapping on the floor beneath them.

Kieran and Sonya exchanged glances, then shifted so they weren’t kneeling on the hatch. Sonya tried to open it, and saw that it was jammed. “Somebody must be stuck down there.”

“And me without my P-38—it’s in the same pants as my tricorder.”

Figuring she had nothing to lose, Sonya yelled. “Is somebody down there?”

A muffled voice said something, but she couldn’t make it out.

“Lousy duranium—too soundproof,” Kieran muttered.

Sonya started looking around the crawlway. “There’s got to be some way to open the hatch.”

Kieran reached into his pocket. “All I’ve got is this weed-whacker.”

Looking at the long, cylindrical item that was used to remove weeds at the root without overly disturbing the ground, Sonya started turning over possibilities in her mind. “What we need is a sonic enhancer.”

Frowning, Kieran said, “How would that—” Then he brightened. “Oh, right! Perfect! Except we don’t have a sonic enhancer.” Then he grinned. “But we do have the Elllix bafflers. They’re running along the ceiling there.”

Glancing up, Sonya grinned. Reaching up, she pried a panel loose, then looked at the components running through the wall. “Now that’s ironic.”

“What is?”

She grinned and looked at Kieran. “We need the weed-whacker to pry the baffler out before we can modify it so that it will turn the whacker into a P-38.”

“Life’s full of little ironies,” Kieran said as he handed over the weed-whacker. “We make a good team.”

Sonya found she had nothing to say to that.

Within two minutes, Sonya had gotten one of the bafflers out. Four minutes after that, they finished the modifications to the weed-whacker. Ten seconds after that, the hatch was open.

Six engineers stared up at Sonya and Kieran: Chao-Anh Aleakala, Robin Lefler, Martin Kopf, and the other three who were on duty with them, whose names Sonya was embarrassed to realize she didn’t know.

It doesn’t matter, she thought sadly. I’m leaving.

“I am so glad to see you two,” Chao-Anh said. “We’re running out of air down here, and I don’t know what’s happening in engineering. We heard someone raise the blast door, but we can’t get in there, and we couldn’t get the damn hatch open.”

Kieran grinned. “Let’s see what we can find out up here. Care to join us in Leg Cramp Central?”

A few hours later, it was over. Riker and Data—or, rather, Data’s head, since his body had been electrocuted—got to engineering, and raised the blast door. The bridge had dumped power to a monitor down there so they could restore the antimatter containment field. Sonya had been rather nonplussed to see how close they had all come to blowing up, especially since—had Riker and Data not arrived when they did—the field would have collapsed when she and Kieran were still crawling around in the drive section. Everybody had a story to tell of what they were doing when the filament hit, from Troi taking command of the bridge after Monroe’s death, to the captain being stuck in a turbolift with three children, to Lieutenant Mahowiack riding herd on a group of teenagers who were suddenly trapped in a lightless, sealed-off holodeck. But the story on everyone’s lips was the fact that Keiko gave birth to a baby girl—and Worf, of all people, was the midwife.

Soon enough, they were en route to Starbase 67. Geordi threw a partry in Sonya’s honor, at which the only drink available was hot chocolate. Sonya groaned, and so did everyone else when Captain Picard showed up to wish her well. He even gamely took a sip of hot chocolate, and left without a drop on his uniform, to Sonya’s relief and everyone else’s disappointment.

Upon arrival at the starbase, Sonya and Kieran said their good-byes in his cabin. Kieran had been very supportive—until today. His usual flippancy was muted; he kept putting off letting her leave until she had to force herself to return to her quarters so she could clear them out. When she went to the airlock to disembark, her hastily packed duffel bag over her shoulder, he was waiting for her.

“This is it, then?” he said. It was the same thing he’d said six times in his quarters.

“Kieran, please, I need to go. The Oberth is waiting for me.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to hold you up, I just wanted to say good-bye.”

Sonya was going to say that they’d done that, but one look at his face made her realize how cruel that was. Kieran wasn’t very good at saying good-bye. She thought it was in part due to his father dying while he was away at the Academy, though she figured that might have just been her own amateur diagnosis. Either way, she couldn’t begrudge him getting one last farewell.

And she was going to miss him.

Kissing him gently on the cheek, she said in a quiet voice, “Take care of yourself, Kieran.”

With that, she walked past him, and went down the gangway, refusing to let herself turn around one last time. If she did, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to resist his wide, pleading brown eyes.