Nebula

"I thought you were supposed to be taking a break?"

Svetlana looked up at the dark-skinned Trill woman who had stopped her on her way to the Endeavour's forward lounge. Ledzia seemed more puzzled than accusatory, but even so, Svetlana found the question odd.

"I am," she replied, "two days, while we stop over here."

"I thought you'd be down on the planet by now?"

"Oh, I see," replied the Czech woman, understanding dawning. "No, Risa didn't seem very interesting, so I thought I'd take the time to catch up on some of the latest astrophysical research papers," she held up her PADD as evidence, a slightly nervous smile on her face.

"I'm not sure that was quite the idea."

Svetlana recalled that Lt. Ral had said something about her getting away from work for a while, and the unexpected award of leave indicated that he had persuaded the Chief Science Officer accordingly. Now that she thought about it, he had probably been hinting that she should get away from the ship altogether, and actually take some time on Risa's famous beaches. That would have been so dull... although, in fairness, he could have hardly have stopped her taking the PADD and its backlog of papers with her.

"Oh, well..." she said, "perhaps tomorrow. It is two days. And I was going to the lounge. I'm not officially working."

"Yes, that's probably a good idea," agreed Ledzia.

Before they could say anything further, though, they had to stand aside as a couple of security officers passed them in the corridor, heading for the transporter room. Even Svetlana could see that they looked to be on business, rather than heading down to the planet for leave. She raised an eyebrow.

Ledzia shrugged, "I know as much as you do. The Endeavour wasn't originally stopping at Risa so that we could take leave... rumour is we have a rendezvous with some other ship, but it all seems a bit hush hush."

"Strange place for a rendezvous, isn't it?"

"Unless somebody else was already on leave..." agreed the Trill.

They waited for a moment, glancing towards the door that the two security officers had passed through. Perhaps the reason for the unexpected stopover was about to be revealed.

In fact, it took less time than she had expected. For, just moments later, the door hissed open and a woman Svetlana had never seen before strode through.

The first thing that she noticed was that the woman was tall - over 180 cm by Svetlana's guess, easily towering over the human ensign, and even over Ledzia, who wasn't exactly short. The next thing, however, was that the woman was evidently a Romulan.

She had almost no trace of the usual eyebrow ridges that normally distinguished Romulans from Vulcans, but her race was clear enough from her demeanour. The woman appeared haughty and determined, her long legs setting a rapid pace as she walked down the corridor. The security officers, who must have had to turn around as soon as they entered the room, looked a little flustered, and were actually struggling to keep up with her pace.

Svetlana had to suppress a grin at that; she was always having to walk quickly to keep up with taller colleagues, and it was amusing to see someone else having to do it for a change.

The Romulan was, she had to admit, striking, if far from classically beautiful. She had a long face with high cheekbones, accentuating her slender frame, but strong-looking shoulders and an athletically toned body. Her reddish-brown hair was cut to perhaps five or six centimetres in length, showing off her slender pointed ears.

She was also, judging from her clothing, a civilian. Svetlana didn't think that she had ever seen a picture of a Romulan out of uniform before, and she had certainly never met one in the flesh. But this woman, already passing her down the corridor, was wearing a light wrap-around dress that looked ideally suited for Risan weather. She had some sort of insignia on a shoulder brooch that could have been a communicator, but it wasn't the usual Romulan eagle.

She also, it had to be said, had legs to die for.

"Could you just...?" began one of the security officers, but the Romulan woman cut him off.

"Do keep up," she told him, in a tone that suggested she was used to being obeyed, even by Starfleet officers, "we don't have all day."

Svetlana and Ledzia looked at one another, the Trill shrugging as if to say she was equally confused. At that moment, though, the door to the transporter room hissed open, and looking towards it, the human woman's heart leapt into her throat.

Two more Romulans were just exiting the room, forcing the security officers to split up as one stayed behind to watch them and the other one disappeared down the corridor after the woman who had to be their leader. One of the newcomers was a man, pale skinned for a Romulan, albeit with the usual dark hair. He was evidently an engineer, dressed in brown overalls festooned with pockets and pouches over a light coloured T-shirt, and looked as if he had forgotten to shave for the last couple of days.

But it was his companion that had caught Svetlana's attention. She was, in a word, gorgeous. Her face was pleasant and heart-shaped, with wide brown eyes, a slightly prominent, rounded nose, and lustrous black hair braided to accentuate her ears. She was also not that much taller than Svetlana herself, certainly no more than 150 cm, and dressed in tight trousers and top that showed off a perfect hourglass figure. A green velvet waistcoat strained to contain her bust.

Svetlana looked down, not wanting to be caught staring, and soon enough she and Ledzia were alone in the corridor again.

"I wonder what this is about?" wondered the Trill.

Svetlana did not reply. Her mind was filled with the vision of a stunning alien woman. It even made her forget the paper she had been going to read on the photosphere of Wolf-Rayet stars, at least for a while.

--***--

But only for a while; it was not much later that Svetlana was ensconced at a small table in the ship's main lounge, scrolling through the paper, annotating the equations and the data on spectral lines. This was a large part of why she had signed up for Starfleet, the thrill of seeing the universe in all its richness, the dance of mathematics made physical reality. Isotopic composition, nuclear fusion reactions, resistive magneto-hydrodynamics at finite electron diffusivities... everything was so much more beautiful when you knew how it worked, when you could admire not just the view, but the symmetry and complexity of the processes underlying it.

It was a shame that so few people seemed able to truly grasp that.

Of course, there had been other options. She could have taken the regular postgraduate track and found a post on a ship run by one of the science academies. But Starfleet offered so much more, and were more often the first into uncharted areas of space. There was a galaxy out there, and if she suspected that she wasn't really cut out for command at the highest levels, there was much to be done on a Starfleet science vessel, especially one with the prestige and size of the Endeavour.

"Do you mind if I join you?"

Svetlana looked up, not having even noticed anyone approaching, so engrossed was she in her work. It was the Romulan woman - the younger, prettier one, in the tight green top. Glancing about the lounge, she saw that the other two Romulans had just sat down at another table, half way across the room, and weren't even looking in her direction. Confused, as much as anything else, it was all the human woman could do to nod her assent, unable to think of anything sensible to say.

The Romulan had a cup of something in her hand, a brown liquid that steamed gently. Some alien drink, perhaps? She knew about Romulan ale, and this certainly wasn't that, but presumably a planet-wide species had managed to come up with more than one tipple.

The other woman caught her glance, and a slight smile twitched on her green lips (lipstick? had to be; their lips weren't normally that colour, were they?)

"Tea," she offered, "Russian Caravan, apparently. I don't think your replicator does the Romulan variety."

"Uh... Romulans drink tea?" It seemed as good a start to the conversation as any.

"It's made from the leaves of a different plant, obviously. But, yes, it's the same idea. And the taste is... similar."

"Oh. Good." She wanted to say 'what are you doing here?' but was worried that it might come across as rude. As it turned out, she need not have worried.

"We're traders," offered the alien woman, in reply to the unspoken question, "or at least we are now. I have had plenty of opportunity to try human drinks before. Among those of many other races. But you're the astrophysicist, right? Ensign Nemesek? Am I pronouncing that right?"

"Nemeček," she said automatically, "with a hacek. Um... how do you...?"

"My name is Satra," said the Romulan, "I am the sensor operator on the For'sans. Which is as close to a science officer as you'll find on a trade freighter. We're often on the edge of explored space, so I get to do my own private research from time to time. As for your question, one of your senior officers recommended you. We would probably have needed a proper science officer, anyway, but I suspect that they want one of their own for the mission."

Svetlana put down her PADD and sat up straighter in her chair. Satra had her full attention now. Something was very definitely going on, and apparently, it involved her.

"What mission?"

"You'll be finding out soon enough, "replied the Romulan, "but between you and me..."

Satra leant forward on the table, a movement that unconsciously emphasised her impressive bust, and Svetlana quickly looked up, to focus her gaze on the woman's face instead. She had deep blue eyes, she noted, similar to her own. That was unusual in a Vulcan, and doubtless so in Romulans, too, and all the more striking for it. Restraining a silent inner sigh, she had to forcibly drag her attention back to what the other woman was actually saying.

"Years ago, the Romulan government placed listening stations in Federation space. They were monitoring traffic, sublight communications, all that sort of thing. It was all illegal under the terms of the Neutral Zone treaty, of course, but that never stopped the Tal Shiar. Anyway, the Federation found them all eventually - at least, so far as I know - and shut them down or destroyed them."

"One of the ones that was shut down... Starfleet re-purposed it. It used to be called PKRr-19, because the Tal Shiar weren't noted for their poetry, but it's now an unmanned astronomical observatory. We'd placed it in a nebula, you see, to help hide it, but it turned out to be an interesting one, scientifically speaking. Not interesting enough for the Federation to build anything there themselves, but if there's an automated station already in place, why not just use it?"

"And we're going there?" asked Svetlana, intrigued by the scientific aspects, even if she wasn't much interested in the history of past spying, "why?"

"Because it's been behaving strangely. Sending out nonsense, instead of what it should be. It's probably nothing much, but, since it was all Romulan built, they needed people who understood the technology, and that's us. Along with some of your people, including you, Ensign Nemeček." She smiled, once again emphasising her distance from the stereotype of the cold, sinister, Romulan agent, and "what do you think about that?"

Svetlana frowned. This didn't quite seem to add up. "Why 'some' of my people? Isn't the Endeavour just going there with all of us?"

--***--

The gas that comprised the nebula was, on any human scale, essentially a vacuum; you couldn't see it up close. And yet, looking out the front viewport of the shuttle, you could see it all around you, a complex cloud-like pattern of pinks and green flooding the sky in every direction. That was what happened when you looked through literally light years of ionised molecular hydrogen and accompanying trace elements.

Yet that same ionisation played havoc with ships' systems. That was unexpected, since nebulas normally did nothing of the sort, and that was part of the reason why the Federation had decided to co-opt the old listening post as a scientific monitoring station. It also meant that it was difficult to get a large starship in close... but a shuttlecraft was a different matter, at least so long as you had a good enough pilot.

Which explained why Svetlana was sitting, not on the Endeavour, but on the shuttlecraft Chandrasekhar, plotting a path through the molecular clouds towards the tiny station. The shuttle could only hold six passengers, limiting the size of away teams such as this one to eight, if you included the pilot and co-pilot.

To be honest, Svetlana felt that she really should have been in the co-pilot's seat. Not that she knew how to fly the thing, beyond attending the few basic courses at the Academy that were part of the mandatory curriculum. But, on this occasion, she was needed to help plot the path, analysing the emission spectra of the clouds around them, forming, as they did, an unusually complex and tightly packed internal structure to the nebula. That would have been a lot easier had she been sitting at the console.

Instead, her PADD was hooked up the flight systems, and she was reading off the data at it streamed in, allowing the pilot sitting directly in front of her to plan the route ahead... which was no mean feat when you considered that the warp-capable shuttlecraft was currently travelling at several times the speed of light. The whole experience was a little nerve-wracking; even for a shuttle, this journey was far from safe and routine, and rescue would be very difficult if anything went wrong.

As the craft moved into a relatively stable and open patch, the petite astrophysicist took the opportunity to glance up at her fellow passengers, and see how they were taking it. She had to confess that she did not know any of them very well, having usually been too absorbed in her own work to have many friends outside the science division.

Dorel, the large Rigelian security officer, was impassive, his oddly lined and rugged face unreadable. Akilah Al-Mirrikhi, sitting across from him, and the only human besides Svetlana on the team, was quite the opposite. She was constantly fidgeting in her chair, dark eyes fixed on the viewport as if something out in the patterns of glowing gas could tell her what was happening. The nurse did not seem frightened, exactly, the Czech woman thought, but she was obviously far from comfortable.

If anyone knew what all the others were thinking, though, it was Jaliba, the Betazoid engineer. The ebony-skinned woman seemed calm, but alert and interested, sometimes glancing about at the others. For a moment, her eyes met Svetlana's, and she gave a nod and a smile of encouragement.

The remaining passengers were all from the Romulan crew. She couldn't see Renat, Jaliba's counterpart as engineer, from where she was sitting, as he was directly behind her. Captain Sienae, of course, was the one who had taken the co-pilot's seat, apparently just because it was up front. She sat up straight, looking every inch the commander - although, so far as Svetlana understood, her ship only had a total complement of twelve - and, from the little she had said so far on the trip, was clearly accustomed to being obeyed. If she was tense about the flight, she didn't show it; perhaps she didn't think the gas clouds would dare to get in her way.

Satra, on the other hand, appeared to have gone to sleep. Initially, she had tried to help out with monitoring the passage through the nebula, but it was clear that she didn't have the depth of knowledge of her human counterpart. So now, so far as Svetlana could tell, she was just dozing, leaning back in the seat, eyes closed, ample chest slowly rising and falling.

"Have we still got clear space?" asked the pilot suddenly, "don't want you nodding off like our Romulan friend."

"Yes, we're still fine," replied Svetlana, forcing her eyes back to the PADD, although not before noting the glare that Sienae sent across to the woman in front of her "although... wait, there is something else, just showing up now. On the edge of scanner range, so we have a while before reaching it. But dead ahead. It's quite a concentration of energy, so we'd really want to avoid it. Turn five degrees to starboard, heading..."

"I hate to break it you, but that's not going to work."

"And why not?" asked Sienae icily, speaking before Svetlana could get a word in.

"Because that's where the station is. It's dead ahead for a reason."

"There's something directly around the station?" That was Akilah, her tone higher pitched than usual.

"Yeah, and Ensign Nemeček here is about to tell me how to get through to the middle of it without frying the engine or cooking the life support. Whereupon my brilliant piloting skills will save us all, assuming I can get a bit of quiet. So..." the Tellarite poised her stubby fingers over the console as if about to play a difficult piano concerto, "what have I got to do, Svetlana?"

It was at times like this that Svetlana was glad that, attitude aside, Lugmilla was a bloody good pilot.

--***--

The station had clearly not been intended for long-term habitation. When they'd arrived, life support had been switched off, and they'd had to spend an uncomfortable hour in the shuttle waiting for it to come back on line. Even then, once they'd entered, the temperature felt a few degrees too warm to Svetlana; she wasn't sure if that was a glitch in the system or whether the Romulan builders had set it that way by default. Nobody else seemed concerned though, so she didn't mention it.

The station was built on five levels, connected by ladders rather than a turbolift, and the one level dedicated to living quarters was little more than a bunk room, a replicator, and a bathroom, suitable for an overnight stay or two, but no more than that. Everything else was designed to run with minimal supervision, which made it doubly odd that it didn't seem to be working properly.

"You are sure that the station is not simply picking up this cloud of energised particles that we happen to be surrounded by?" asked Sienae, arms folded across her chest, and with disapproving look on her face.

Akilah and Dorel were up in what passed for the control room, and Lugmilla was back on the shuttle, leaving the Romulan commander with the scientists and engineers in the second level of the station, surrounded by banks of computer and sensor equipment. Svetlana tapped away at her PADD as Satra examined the displays, and the other two bent over a set of crystals and circuit boards.

"The readings don't match what the shuttle's sensors picked up," she told the taller woman, "and it keeps changing. There has to be a fault with the monitoring equipment on the station."

"Perhaps they're just better than Starfleet equipment?"

"No, she's right," mused Satra, "the readings are not all consistent. They're not even consistent with each other. It's a hardware issue."

"I'm afraid so," said Renat, the Romulan engineer, "there's definitely something wrong in here. Probably something Starfleet did to the systems when they took over. No appreciation for superior technology."

"It's not our equipment that's fritzing," broke in Jaliba, "the problem's deeper than that. Perhaps it's not hardened properly against the nebula's radiation."

"Of course it's hardened," snapped back the Romulan, "besides, it's a nebula, not a neutron star; the radiation isn't that intense. It's your Starfleet interface that's the problem."

"I'm telling you, it's..."

Sienae scowled at the pair of them and raised her voice, "what do we have to do to fix it?"