“Garfield Costa, step forward.”

Next to Sonya, Gar took a single step forward. They were in formation in engineering, along with Ensigns Kornblum, Russell, Sherman, and Van Mayter, facing Geordi La Forge and Data. Behind the chief engineer and the second officer were the rest of the engineering staff, most with big smiles on their faces. Several of them had already been promoted as well; Geordi had gone in reverse order of rank, ending with the ensigns who were making j.g.

Data handed Geordi a box, which he opened to reveal a hollow pip. He stepped forward and affixed it to Gar’s collar. “I hereby promote you to the rank of junior-grade lieutenant, with all the duties and privileges that entails.”

Gar nodded, beaming. “Thank you, sir.”

He stepped back, and Geordi said, “Sonya Gomez, step forward.”

Until he said those words, Sonya hadn’t been able to bring herself to believe that she was really being promoted. Indeed, ever since the infamous hot-chocolate incident, she’d been convinced that her collar would go without any more pips until she finally took the hint and resigned her commission and went into a line of work where she could do less damage.

But after the Enterprise’s mission to the Romulan Neutral Zone ended, the promotion list came out, and Sonya was thrilled to see her name on it. Among other things, it meant she got a cabin to herself. Not that she had anything against Lian, but she hadn’t had a room to herself since she was seventeen.

Besides, Lian’s name had also been on the promotion list, so she was getting a cabin of her own, too, where she said she intended to celebrate along with another new promotion, Lieutenant Tanaka, one of the medical technicians, whom she’d been seeing for a few weeks now.

Ella Clancy had also been promoted; sadly, Tess Allenby wasn’t, which Sonya feared would simply make her friend even more bitter toward Wes. In fact, Tess was the only member of the corner office who remained an ensign.

Kieran hadn’t been on the list, either, which meant that he and Sonya were now of the same rank. Sonya wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

Sonya stood proudly as Geordi affixed the hollow pip to her collar. I can’t believe this is happening.

“I hereby promote you to the rank of junior-grade lieutenant, with all the duties and privileges—”

Feeling like she was going to explode, Sonya said, “Thank you, sir.” Then she realized what she’d done.

Geordi, however, just shook his head and chuckled. “—that entails,” he finished. Everyone else laughed as well.

To her amazement, Sonya didn’t feel embarrassed. She was too happy.

Data and Geordi went down the line to the other engineering ensigns in alphabetical order, ending with Helga.

Afterward, everyone in engineering cheered. Even Data, after a fashion.

Turning to Lieutenant Della Guardia, Geordi said, “We’ve got to get to the bridge—you’re in charge, Alfredo.”

“Yes, sir,” the newly promoted full lieutenant said.

Data and Geordi departed. Sonya knew that Picard and Riker were going to be given a tour of the Angosian capital, so Data was in command of the ship, and Geordi liked to put in time on the bridge, she knew. She suspected that was a holdover from his time as the alpha-shift conn officer before he was given the chief job. If there was one thing she’d learned about Geordi in a year on the Enterprise, it was that he liked to be in the thick of things.

Kieran walked up to her. “Congrats, Sonya. See, I told you. Watch it, inside a few years, you’ll be running this place, while I’ll just be an ordinary j.g.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” Alfredo Della Guardia said. “You got yourself a mighty fine performance review, there, Duff.”

“I did?” Kieran sounded surprised.

“He did?” Sonya sounded the same.

“Hey!” Now Kieran was mock-outraged.

Alfredo shrugged. “His work’s picked up. Maybe you’re a good influence on him.”

With that, Alfredo walked away.

Sonya wasn’t sure what to make of that.

The festivities concluded, it was time to go back to work. With the promotion, Gomez was put in charge of the warp core, which had been Della Guardia’s responsibility. La Forge generally preferred to rotate folks, so they were experienced in all aspects of engineering, not just their individual specialty, but he said Sonya’s antimatter expertise would prove handy, especially since the Enterprise’s warp drive had gotten a lot more and varied use in the past couple of years than expected. The Galaxy-class was still a relatively new design, after all—though the Borg threat had sent Utopia Planitia into overdrive with new ship concepts—and could, Geordi said, use some hand-holding.

As she ran a diagnostic on the warp core, she thought about Alfredo’s words. She hadn’t really seen herself as influencing Kieran in any way. True, they’d been spending more time together lately. She found she was enjoying his company more and more, in part because he seemed to be taking life more seriously.

Or maybe it was that she was taking life less seriously. The promotion to j.g. had validated what Geordi, not to mention Ella, Lian, Kieran, Wes, and pretty much everyone else on board, had been saying for a year now: she deserved to be here. And she’d learned quite a bit—probably more in one year on this vessel than she had in four years at the Academy. She’d hot-wired an eighty-year-old impulse drive, helped outwit some alien kidnappers, done damage control against foes ranging from Borg to out-of-date Klingons to unknown aliens to a ten-thousand-year-old booby trap, and learned so much about different approaches to ship engineering.

More important though, she had learned what Geordi had instructed her to learn: to relax.

“General quarters. All off-duty and civilian personnel report to quarters immediately.”

Sonya looked up sharply as she entered main engineering to report for her second day of duty as a lieutenant. The computer’s instruction didn’t apply to her, as she had just come on duty, but she wondered what had prompted it. Yesterday, the Enterprise had taken on an Angosian prisoner named Roga Danar, and this morning was transferring him back to a penal colony on one of Angosia’s moons. Sonya’s initial thought—What could possibly have gone wrong?—was immediately suppressed. A year on the U.S.S. Enterprise had wrested out of her the notion that nothing could go wrong almost as fast as the notion that there were things that didn’t have a solution.

From transporter control, Cliff Meyers said, “I don’t believe this—Danar broke out of the transporter field!”

“That’s not possible,” Kieran said.

Geordi ran over to stand behind Cliff. “I’ve seen this guy in action, Duffy, don’t be so sure of that.”

From behind Sonya at the main console, Ensign Koji Oliver said, “Turbolifts are down, security fields going up on the lower decks.” Then he frowned. “Turbolifts are back up.”

“Who ordered that?” Sonya asked.

“The bridge.” Gar sounded as confused as Sonya.

Geordi went over to the main console next to Koji. “Probably a trick—everyone on the ship knows the turbolifts should be down, but Danar may not. If he sees the lifts are working, he might take one and then we’d get him.”

“Sir,” Kieran said, “I’m not tracking Danar at all. Are we sure he’s loose?”

“He’s invisible to sensor scans,” Geordi said.

“Oh. Sorry, sir.”

Sonya sighed. Kieran should have known that.

“Phaser on overload! Seal this deck!” That was Worf’s voice on the speaker. Before Sonya could even register the words, Geordi had pounced on the console and sealed off section twelve of deck thirty-six.

Sonya held her breath as the seconds ticked by.

Then: “Captain, the overload has been averted.”

Everyone in engineering exhaled. Geordi lowered the force fields in that section, but kept the security fields up. Sonya went back to the warp core to see that her diagnostic was done, and the warp core was functioning normally.

“It’ll be okay,” Kieran said. “I’m sure Worf’ll take care of the guy.”

“Hang on, something’s wrong,” Koji said. “One of the force fields on this deck just went down. The bridge didn’t—”

Koji’s words were cut off, and Sonya heard something fall. She whirled around to see Koji being flipped over someone’s back and onto the console by a fast-moving figure who backhanded Geordi hard enough to knock his VISOR off. Both Kieran and Cliff moved to stop him, but they were taken down, too.

Sonya was about to cry out Kieran’s name as he crumpled, broken, to the deck, but before she could, she felt a blow to the side of her head, and the universe went dark.

The next thing Sonya knew, she was lying on a biobed in sickbay, a throbbing, nauseating pain in her head, and Nurse Temple standing over her. “Wha—what happen’?”

“You’re fine, Ensign, just a bump on the head. You’ll be okay in a little while.”

“Kieran…Geordi…engineer—” She tried to sit up. This proved a rather big mistake, as the room started jumping around, bouncing back and forth, and generally behaving in a very silly manner.

She quickly lay back down.

The nurse smiled and said, “Notice I didn’t say you’d be okay now. Rest, all right? The doctor will be by to see you in a second.”

Temple walked off. Sonya looked around, saw Cliff and Gar, as well as Dershowitz from security on three other biobeds, and Koji sitting in the central biobed, holding his right arm gingerly while Dr. Crusher applied a bone-knitter to it.

What happened to Kieran?

Sonya realized that that was the foremost thing on her mind. The last thing she saw before being rendered insensate was Kieran falling to the floor. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and the fact that he might be dead scared her, even more than the notion that Geordi or anyone else might be.

She figured that everything was fine—that Worf caught Danar or, at the very least, that Danar was no longer a threat, since everyone in sickbay seemed fairly calm.

But that left her with her own thoughts, which were primarily of Kieran. I’ve been an idiot, she realized. Not that this was a huge revelation—she’d been an idiot in some manner or other for most of the last year—but that didn’t make it any less so. She’d been making excuses for not pursuing a relationship with Kieran, all of which sounded very reasonable when she’d spelled them out at the corner office, and which sounded completely ridiculous in light of what just happened. What if the Borg come to the Alpha Quadrant? What if the next time we’re in the Romulan Neutral Zone, the captain doesn’t have two Klingon ships up his sleeve? What if one of those weird anomalies we come across blows us to bits? What if the next computer virus sends us the way of the Yamato?

Dr. Crusher finished with Koji and walked over to check on Sonya. A smile on her pretty pale face, she went over Sonya with her scanner. “You’re looking more awake, Ensign. How do you feel?”

“Nauseous, and my head hurts.”

“Perfectly normal.” She pulled a hypo out of her blue lab coat pocket and applied it to Sonya’s neck. Almost immediately, her head cleared and her stomach felt like a stomach again instead of a whirligig. “That’ll mask the symptoms until the concussion subsides. I wouldn’t recommend returning to duty until your next shift starts—which, according to the duty roster, isn’t for another twenty hours.”

Sonya blinked in surprise. It had only been four hours since she’d gone on duty and GQ was sounded. “Thank you, Doctor. Uh, Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“What happened?”

Crusher chuckled. “Sorry, I guess you couldn’t have known. Danar managed to escape. Nobody was killed, thankfully. Worf got a few bruises, Lieutenants Meyers and Costa also got concussions, Ensign Oliver broke his arm, and Lieutenant Duffy cracked a rib. Everyone else was just stunned a bit.”

Sonya felt a profound sense of relief at the fact that Kieran was okay.

“Now get some rest—doctor’s orders.”

Smiling, Sonya lazily raised her right arm in salute. “Yes, sir.”

She let herself drift off to sleep thinking that she needed to talk to Keiko Ishikawa.

The pleasant scent of wild roses from Earth, toyar from Betazed, and fire flowers from Berengaria wafted in the carefully circulated air of the Enterprise’s arboretum on deck seventeen. Sonya stood in the middle of the tree nursery—the flowers in question were in the main part of the arboretum—knowing that what she was doing was crazy.

She had talked with Keiko, who had assured her that she would keep the tree nursery clear from 1900 onward. Keiko had a twinkle in her eye, adding, “It’s about time you two got your act together.” But then, Keiko had recently started seeing Chief O’Brien, so she had such things on her mind anyhow. In fact, Keiko’s recent romantic bent had been one of the deciding factors in her choosing the arboretum as the site for her and Kieran’s rendezvous.

“Rendezvous,” listen to me. Bad enough I lied to Kieran to get him here, telling him there was a symposium. I guess I just wanted to hedge in case he said no, or wasn’t interested. Sonya hadn’t been on a date since she was a young teenager; she’d been too busy pushing herself to the next level, whether it was school, the Academy, or the Enterprise. By deceiving Kieran, it gave him an easy out, in case she’d totally made a targ’s ear out of the whole thing.

She was dressed in civilian clothes—a loose brown blouse and equally loose pants of the same color over black boots. It was, as far as she could remember, the first time she’d worn anything other than her uniform when not in her cabin. Lian had joked that she needn’t have bothered packing clothes when she’d come on board. But it wasn’t right to show up for a date in uniform.

At a little after 1900—being on time had never been Kieran’s strong suit—she went out to stand near the aft door. A few minutes later, Kieran walked up to her. He was wearing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt with a yellow jacket over it, his pants the same color as the jacket. At first she winced, until she realized that the color perfectly matched the toyar, which were in full bloom, and which Keiko had made the centerpiece of the arboretum. That didn’t make the outfit any more palatable, but Sonya resolved to live with it for as long as the clothes remained on.

She found herself hoping that wouldn’t be too terribly long.

He offered her his arm, which she took with a smile, and they both entered the aft door.

“I guess we’re the first ones here,” he said as the door closed behind them with a soft swish.

The smile growing, Sonya reached up and gently turned and lowered Kieran’s chin toward her. His brown eyes were filled with surprise, anticipation, and confusion, all at the same time. She whispered, “Kieran, there’s no symposium.”

Her hand moved up to his cheek and she craned her neck to kiss him full on the lips. To her great relief, he returned the kiss, though it took him until after she’d grabbed the back of his head to pull him closer that he thought to put his arms around her.