The doors to the captain’s ready room swooshed open. Kastarak stepped inside. The tank – where Taggart would store his leg, arm and his best friend Kane’s hand – was gone. The photographs, the cubes, the Hellraiser memorabilia were all gone. All that remained were the desk and chairs, but nothing remained in this room of the man who once sat here did. The air was colder than it should have been. The emptiness in the room was like the experience of pressure of a deafening silence.

He remembered the story that Taggart had told him once. Taggart had mentioned the Cenobites and gifted Kastarak the puzzle box. The story was one of pain mistaken for desire, about humanity turning monstrous by longing. Taggart had told it with laughter, but Kastarak had seen the layers below this, being reminded of Vulcan, and of how Romulans – once Vulcans – had turned monstrous and destroyed the Vulcan planet and killed its people.

But Taggart had not been killed. He had not died. And yet he was gone.

Kastarak took a deep breath. He would now ask Vice Admiral Ren directly what Starfleet intended with regard to the command of the Chernov now at this crossroads of a high-priority mission. He would ask whether Maddox’s condition, still unexplained and unchanging, warranted transfer or investigation beyond what they could do aboard. Kastarak needed to speak to Vice Admiral Ren – not as the physician Kastarak deep down was – but as the person temporarily charged with holding this ship together, barely.

The crew had lost a beloved captain with no goodbye, without any warning or communicated cause, and the next had collapsed in front of them before he’d even taken the chair properly. The crew had no closure, and no resolution. The sixteen-day non-stop warp trip under these circumstances had made people restless and drift. The crew couldn’t keep living in limbo. They needed direction. And Kastarak couldn’t keep waiting to be told whether he was permitted to lead.

“Computer, call Vice Admiral Thalor Ren, priority, through the necessary subspace frequencies.”

Kastarak, Lt Cdr
Acting Commanding Officer; First Officer and Navigations Officer