Admiral Leyton’s blue eyes stared out of the screen as if he wanted to say more, but he simply shifted and the screen returned to the blue Starfleet symbol.
“Well, theregoes all the fun,” Starsa blurted out.
“Be quiet, Starsa!” one of the other cadets ordered. “This is serious.”
A few of the younger cadets were looking at her, so she shrugged and gave them a wry smile. They didn’t smile back, obviously too intimidated by the hushed voices of the other senior cadets.
“Lighten up,” Starsa muttered, jumping back on her grav board, feeling unusually irritated with the world.
Jayme returned from a relaxing vacation with Moll during the midwinter break to find several communiques from Nev Reoh, asking her to contact him. She went straight to his office in the geophysics building.
“Hey,” she said, first thing, “you should get hold of Enor if you want to send anything back to your family on Bajor. She’s going to replace an assistant on the Federation science team at DS9 for a few weeks, monitoring the wormhole.”
Reoh shook his head. “I don’t have any family on Bajor.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jayme said. “You went back for six months that one time, didn’t you?”
“It’s required. Part of being Bajoran means you have to see the holy sites.” He shrugged. “It also made it real to me, to know for certain that we had gotten our world back.”
Jayme remembered how happy he had been last semester when the Bajorans signed a peace treaty with the Cardassians. “Now they’ve got the Jem ‘Hadar breathing down their necks, not to mention all those Klingon birds‑of‑prey flying through their system. I guess that’s what Admiral Leyton meant when he said the failed strike force would change galactic politics.”
Nev Reoh nodded, looking down at his hands.
“So what did you want?” Jayme asked.
“Nothing so important,” Reoh told her, downplaying everything, as usual.
“I have to study, Reoh. What is it?”
“You know that virus that sometimes switches a paragraph from your old personal logs with someone else’s?”
“Yeah, that’s happened since my first year, every few months or so. More often lately. Some glitch, they say, in the Academy computer system.”
“I think I found out what it really is,” he told her.
“Oh? Then maybe you should tell programming–”
“It’s Starsa.”
Jayme’s mouth twisted. “No . . .”
“Yes. I didn’t think about it until this odd sentence appeared in one of my old logs. Then I realized that my logs didn’t start skipping until my third year. The same year I was in the same quad as Starsa.”
“That’s not enough reason to blame her! I know she’s a lunatic sometimes, but that would take . . .”
“A lot of effort, to have kept it up for almost four years.” Reoh called up the skipped paragraph he had found. “Read this.”
Jayme bent closer and read:
“I can’t believe nobody’s figured it out yet. I always have to ask people if their logs have skipped before they start to talk about it.”
She straightened up, furrowing her brow. It’s true, nobody looked much in their old logs, even the most recent ones. And Jayme always seemed to hear about it from Starsa first.
“She wouldn’t dare!” Jayme breathed in disbelief.
“I checked,” Reoh agreed, “and of the three‑hundred‑and‑forty‑seven cadets who have reported this skip virus, all of them were either in one of Starsa’s classes or on a project she worked on.”
“She’s been gathering people for years!” Jayme exclaimed. “That little slime devil!”
Reoh was shaking his head. “I don’t understand why she would expose her own personal logs to the virus.”
Jayme was reading the sentence again, laughing at how much it soundedlike Starsa. “The risk of being caught is part of the fun. Besides, she wants to read someone else’s paragraph as much as we all do. Don’t you run to your logs to check when you hear it’s happened?”
“She has to stop,” Reoh said, ignoring the question.
“Fine, you talk to her.”
“Starsa doesn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t even stop when I told her not to ride her grav board with her cast on.”
“Everyone tried to tell her that,” Jayme reminded him. “She never listens.”
“I’ll have to inform Admiral Brand,” he said slowly. “It wouldn’t be good for Starsa to get away with something like this. Do you think she needs counseling?”
“Hey, we allneed counseling for one thing or another.”
“I’m worried about her,” he insisted.
Jayme tried not to laugh. “Then talk to her. Do what you have to do. But if it happens again, I’lltell everyone it was Starsa who did it.”
Reoh walked her to the door. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Ohh . . . you sounded very professorial there.” Reoh blushed, but it reminded Jayme of something else. “I almost forgot, have you heard anything about this Red Squad?”
“I heard when Johnny Madden made the Squad,” he admitted. “I checked, but it’s not an official Academy designation.”
“Maybe not, but they’re sent on special trips and field training as a group. You have to be recommended by a high‑ranking officer in Starfleet, so it might be something new they formed for us cadets.”
“Have you been asked?”
“No!” Jayme shrugged, figuring she should ask some of her relatives. “I think it’s elitist.”
“I’ll see if I can find out more,” Nev Reoh promised.
Jayme had to smile. “Thanks. With you on the job, I feel I have nothing to fear.”
Reoh tried to talk to Starsa on the grand square, but she only wanted to know how he had discovered the log skips were caused by her. She also wanted to know what Jayme had said, and she kept laughing.
Reoh became impatient, and finally he snapped at her, “Do you want to die, like Titus?”
Starsa blinked at him, then her eyes filled with tears. She sat down on the bench, her head in her hands.
“I’m sorry, Starsa,” Reoh told her helplessly.
“He’s dead!” she said, looking up with a tear‑stained face. “It’s worse now, you know? At first it seemed like I’d see him any day. He’d appear behind me and pull my ponytail or call me a pest. But now I know he’s never coming back.”
Reoh sat down next to her. “Is Titus the first person you’ve ever known who died?”
Starsa nodded, wiping her eyes.
“It’s not something you ever get used to,” he told her. “That’s why I worry about you so much. You do these dangerous things for no reason. It could have been your head you broke instead of your leg when you fell off your grav board. And you could get into real trouble if you keep doing things like sending a virus through the computer system.”
Starsa didn’t look up, her brow furrowed. “It’s just a joke.”
“I don’t understand you, Starsa. You’ve never let your pursuit of fun override your good sense. How many times in the past few months have you made the logs skip? Three times? It’s like you wanted to get caught.”