”Stick together,” the captain ordered, boots already on the ground, eyes already on the horizon.

The planet exhaled around them.. lush, uninhabited, a Class-M world of vast oceans and blooming flora whose air was sweet and heady in a way that felt almost like a warning.

The away team was small and, by any Starfleet measure, a flagrant breach of protocol. Two security officers, Lieutenant Commander Bette Porter, and Captain Kennard herself.

Protocol was clear on this point: a captain belonged on her ship.

It was considerably less clear on what to do when the captain in question had spent three years making her own rules forty-seven thousand light-years from the nearest admiral who might object.

Porter, for all her decorated brilliance as their top science officer, had never wanted to be anyone’s Number One. The posting had found her through grief, through rank, and the worst seventy-two hours in USS Artemis’ short history.

First, the Klingon attack. Then, the emergency warp. And finally, the wormhole that appeared from nowhere and flung them to the far edge of the unknown.

Commander Walsh had made it through the firefight, through the chaos, through the desperate calculations that got them out, but not the Warp. His heart gave out somewhere between universes, and Porter was next in line.

And somewhere along the way, she’d stopped flinching at the captain’s particular brand of reckless necessity and simply started showing up. Today was no different. She’d appeared at the transporter pad ten minutes early, tricorder already calibrated, with that look on her face.

The one that said.. ”where you go, I go.”

Orbital scans showed nothing unusual. A routine botanical survey, two hours at most, and they’d be back aboard before beta shift.

At least.. that was the plan.

Except nothing, the captain had come to realize, rarely stayed routine with her Lieutenant Commander around.

She had felt it for years.. that particular gravity. The kind that didn’t show up on any scanner.

Every time Bette leaned over a lab console, dark curls falling forward, uniform pulling across the line of her back, she felt it like a hand around her throat.

Then there were the late nights in the ready room. That low, focused voice working through xenobotany data like it wasn’t slowly taking Tina apart. But she’d learned to keep her hands to herself. Her face still. Her voice even.