“Sonya, good, I need you to—”

Before Geordi, who had just arrived from the bridge, could finish his sentence, Sonya said, “I’ve realigned the warp coils and run a level-two on the deuterium injectors. They looked a little spotty.”

Geordi stopped in his tracks and shook his head. “I was just going to mention the warp coils. What was wrong with the injectors?”

Sonya shrugged. “Nothing major, just a point-one reduction in the flow. I figured it was best to check. The diagnostic’ll be finished in half an hour.”

“Great.” Geordi grinned. “You’re gonna work me out of a job, Lieutenant.”

Again, she shrugged. “Just doing my job, Commander.” Not that it’s much of a challenge. She wasn’t so impolitic as to say that out loud, of course. “Of course,” right. Two and a half years ago, I would’ve blurted that out, along with fifteen other stupid things.

But that was when she had reported on board. She had slowed down, and she’d learned not to babble—at least not so much.

More to the point, though, she had learned the Enterprise—inside and out. She knew every trick of the warp drive, she knew every plasma conduit, every injector, every ODN conduit, every isolinear chip in the engine room, if not the entire vessel.

There’s nothing left to learn.

That wasn’t entirely fair. The ship had its share of surprises, from the faulty replacement piece from McKinley that caused a warp-core breach—and, indirectly, a witch-hunt on the Enterprise, before Picard put a stop to it—to Wesley’s experiment that trapped his mother in a warp bubble.

Wesley was gone now, finally having enrolled in the Academy, which had disappointed Sonya, but had thrilled Tess Allenby, who had taken over at conn on alpha shift, only to transfer to the Lexington shortly thereafter, along with Gar Costa. The corner office had been reduced to herself, Kieran, and Helga, and had left the latter feeling like a third wheel.

And then Helga had died rather brutally during the Enterprise’s encounter with some odd dark matter that had been phasing parts of the ship out of existence for brief seconds. The floor under Helga Van Mayter had done that, and rematerialized while she was in the middle of falling through it. It was one of the most grisly deaths Sonya had ever encountered, and it still gave her nightmares, which usually ended with her screaming and Kieran comforting her.

With Tess, Lian, Wesley, and Gar gone, and Helga and Denny dead, Sonya found that she didn’t really have anyone left on board to talk to except for Geordi and Kieran. There were lots of new faces, including Martin Kopf and Robin Lefler, both recent Academy graduates who were thrilled to be assigned to the flagship. Sonya recognized their excitement from a distance, as she realized with a start that she no longer felt it. Indeed, she’d found herself avoiding Kopf and Lefler because they reminded her too much of how she used to be.

The shift went uneventfully—a welcome respite after the tumult of their disastrous mission to the Melona IV colony and subsequent pursuit of the crystalline entity responsible for the planet’s destruction—and Sonya went back to her cabin, asking the computer for messages. She barely registered the usual litany of journals, personal messages from Mami and Papi, and various duty-related queries, but was shocked to hear the computer conclude the list with: “A communiqué from Captain Schönhertz of the U.S.S. Oberth.”

Sonya blinked. I didn’t know the captain got the Oberth. Her old professor had always sworn she’d never take starship duty again, and Sonya wondered what had changed her mind.

“Computer, play comm from Captain Schönhertz.”

The round face and thick, curly blond hair of Katrine Schönhertz appeared on the small comm screen on her desk. “Hello, Sonya. I hope this message finds you well. I’ve been hearing good things about the work you’ve been doing on Enterprise. You’re probably wondering why I’m calling from a ship, since I said I’d never take starship duty again if my life depended on it. Well, my life doesn’t depend on it, but I got an offer I really couldn’t refuse. It’s a one-year project that will be studying some new ways of dealing with antimatter. We’ve got one slot left on the team, and I brought up your name. I’ve appended the missions specs to this message. This position is for a full-grade lieutenant who knows her way around an antimatter injector, so you fit the bill nicely—or, rather, you will shortly.” Schönhertz’s eyes suddenly went wide, and she said, “Okay, I wasn’t supposed to tell you about your impending promotion, but your CO’ll probably be giving you the good news in a day or two.”

She barely listened to the rest of the message. I’m getting promoted! She was thrilled to see that her hard work had paid off and that she’d be advancing—

—to another position on the Enterprise that wasn’t likely to be qualitatively different from the one she had now.

Worse, even the vessel’s missions had become mundane. No, that’s not fair—nothing that happens on this ship can possibly qualify as mundane. But her complaint to Geordi that she wanted to be there when the Enterprise came across what was out there was now three years old, and after two Borg attacks, getting involved in a Klingon civil war, playing host to everyone from primitive colonists to Vulcan diplomats to transcendent aliens to Acamarian thugs to Counselor Troi’s insane mother, encounters with Shelliak, Romulans, Ansata terrorists, Gomtuu, Tallarians, two-dimensional creatures, and more spatial anomalies than she could shake a stick at, not to mention regular visits from Q, Sonya began to grow weary of it. Too many of those missions had body counts attached to them.

Besides, she had her career to think of. Where could she go from here? Geordi wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and that pretty much cut off her only real avenue of advancement. If she was going to be a chief engineer, which was something she truly wanted, it wasn’t going to happen here unless something happened to Geordi, and that didn’t bear thinking about.

And then there’s Kieran. With a shock she realized that she hadn’t even thought about him until now, which was horribly unfair, as Kieran had become very important to her. Indeed, he was pretty much the only thing tying her to the Enterprise right now.

That’s not enough. It was a thought that left her sad. But she had worked too hard to become the best Starfleet officer she could. For three years, that meant learning the ropes on the flagship. Now, though, the best thing she could do for her career was move on.

Schönhertz had said there was only one position, so Kieran couldn’t come with her. Besides which, Kieran had already made it clear on numerous occasions that he had very little ambition within Starfleet, which jibed with his slow promotion track. He’d be lucky to make lieutenant commander by the time he was forty. And he’d also said numerous times that he had no interest in leaving the Enterprise.

Of course, that was before we started dating.

Taking the transfer would mean breaking up with Kieran. Or at least separating from him.

No, breaking up. She could barely keep up with duty and a relationship with somebody she served with. Subspace relationships were never, in Sonya’s experience, successful. The only ones she’d seen work were people who were already married or otherwise committed before the separation, and she and Kieran weren’t anywhere near that level yet.

I have to tell him, she thought, and only then realized that she had already mentally packed her bags for the Oberth.