“I know exactly what you’re feeling,” she said.

He lifted one dirty, callused hand and with the delicate touch of a surgeon brushed the tears from her cheeks. He looked almost ashamed. “I’m sorry.”

It was a small gesture, but she felt the compassion in it, the unconditional understanding. She took his hands in hers and with a mental push moved them away from their places of pain to one of peace. Vanguard faded away to a Vulcan desertscape by night. “This is a place not far from where I grew up,” she told him. “Here I learned the tenets of Vulcan mental discipline. Though I can’t teach you all that I know, I can share with you some basic techniques to strengthen your mind and control your feelings, rather than allow them to dominate you.”

“Why would you do that for me?”

“To use a human idiom, you and I both ‘battle with demons.’ Mine are shame and rage; yours appear to be addiction and grief. I cannot cure you of these afflictions, but I can give you an edge in the battle to control your own mind—if you will let me.”

He nodded, and she felt his investment of trust in her. “Let’s get to it.”

When at last the mind-meld ended, and T’Prynn removed her hand from Quinn’s stubbled face, hours had passed. Quinn looked at her with a new understanding. Where once he had seen in her a tormentor or a puppetmaster, now he saw a woman who was as much a victim of circumstance as he. But even more than sympathy, he realized what he felt toward her was gratitude.

“I hope I was able to help you,” Quinn said as he got up.

T’Prynn stood and smoothed the front of her red minidress. “You have, Mister Quinn, a great deal. Starfleet and perhaps the Federation itself are in your debt.”

He chuckled. “You don’t say. Well, if someone wants to clear my bar tabs and float me a line of credit, that’d be a right fine way to say ‘thank you.’” Noting her reproachfully arched brow, he shrugged. “Just a suggestion. Forget I mentioned it.”

He turned and walked toward the door. She spoke as it opened ahead of him.

“Before you go . . .” She waited until he turned back, then she continued. “If you wish, I can help you block out your memories of Commander McLellan. It might make things easier for you.”

“No,” he said. “I lost her once. I don’t think I could take losing her again.”

She raised her hand in the Vulcan salute. “Live long and prosper, Mister Quinn.”

He smiled at her as he walked out the door.

“Right back atcha, darlin’.”

21

“Dammit, Frankie, you’ve got my word on this!” A host of disapproving stares from strangers scolded Tim Pennington for shouting—a faux pas when using one of Stars Landing’s public subspace comm kiosks in the middle of the station’s business day. He leaned closer to the screen and continued in an emphatic stage whisper, “The story’s one hundred percent legit!”

On the small, round cornered screen, Frankie Libertini looked less than convinced. Her thin lips were pursed, and she brushed a lock of her salt-and-pepper hair from her eyes with a hand whose fingernails looked as if they’d been gnawed on by a rabid badger. “Tim, let’s get a few things straight. First, I didn’t ask to be your editor, I lost a bar bet. Second, I don’t actually like you. And third, you’re not giving me a lot to go on here.”

Hand to chest, Pennington pantomimed a fatal wound to his tender feelings. “Frankie! You don’t like me? Say it ain’t so!” She was unamused, so he turned serious. “C’mon, Frankie! I gave you everything: names, dates, places. Hell, I even sent vids.”

“Yes, you did. And I was happy to see they were in focus for a change.” Her lips disappeared into a doubtful frown. “I’m not saying you haven’t done some first-rate work over the last few years, because you have. But look at this from my perspective, will you?”

He was ready to strangle her out of sheer frustration. “What am I looking at?”

“All your sources on this story are confidential. Which I could live with if the whole thing weren’t so damned controversial. I mean, if we run with this, and you’re wrong—”

“I’m not.”

“But if you are,” she continued with a silencing glare, “we could be talking about consequences a lot more extreme than just you getting booted off staff—though I can guarantee that would happen so fast it’ll make your pretty little head spin.”

An insincere smile seemed the appropriate response. “Thank you for noticing how pretty my head is. I spend hours making it like this just for you.”

“Listen to me: this is serious. When this story goes out, if it’s as solid as you claim, heads will roll. And I’m not talking in metaphors, Tim. You’re shining a light on the kinds of people who don’t think twice about solving disputes with duels to the death.” She pressed the side of her fist to her mouth and looked away, perhaps debating whether she wanted to say what was really on her mind. Then the look in her eyes turned fierce, and Pennington braced himself for what he’d known would be in the offing from the moment he submitted the story. “The thing is,” she said, “the last time you turned in a feature like this, it was the Bombay story.”

He felt like throwing his coffee, mug and all, through the vid screen. “That’s crap! The two stories have nothing in common!”

“Yes, they do, Tim. What they have in common is you. Not to mention they’re both politically explosive exposйs that affect the Federation’s diplomatic relationship with a foreign power, and they’re both predicated on the undocumented accounts of a bunch of anonymous sources whose stories can’t be fact-checked on our end. The whole thing’s a bomb waiting to go off. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t spike it right now.”

Leaning in as if they were locking horns, Pennington said, “Do it and I’ll go to INN.”

Pennington derived a perverse satisfaction from watching Libertini’s eyes narrow in contempt at the mention of the Interstellar News Network, the chief competitor of the Federation News Service. “You can’t do that,” she said. “You already gave the story to us.”

“If you spike it, the rights revert,” he shot back. “And my revised contract only gives you right of first refusal—not exclusivity. I don’t do work-for-hire anymore, Frankie.” Just to tweak her temper a degree further, he made a show of examining his own well-manicured fingernails. “So, what’s it gonna be? Run it and dominate the next two news cycles, or get aced by INN?”

She rested her head in one hand, distorting the left half of her face into a caricature of exhaustion. “I’d feel a lot better about this if you’d at least name your sources for me.”

“Sorry, I can’t,” he insisted. “I promised them all complete anonymity and confidentiality. But I sent you all my hard evidence. You can see for yourself it’s rock-solid.”

His insistence seemed to have depleted her will to argue. “All right, fine. It is too good a story to pass up. But I’m warning you, Tim—you’ve already used up your second chance. If this story goes tits up, you’re done as a reporter. You sure you want to take that chance?”

“Positive. Run it. It’s good.”

“Okay, hotshot. Look for it tomorrow at the top of the morning feed.” As she reached forward to terminate the call, she added, “I still hate you, by the way.”

“Sleep well, Frankie.”

The screen went dark, and Pennington took a sip of his coffee only to find it had gone tepid. He left the kiosk and dumped the quarter-full cup into a waste reclamation slot.

It was late afternoon, and the lanes of Stars Landing were busy with visitors of many species—some dining in small restaurants, others carousing in the pubs, a few shopping at the independently owned specialty shops. Pennington considered making his way to the edge of the ersatz village to grab a late lunch at Cafй Romano when he felt a sudden flutter of anxiety about the story he had just filed.