She reached out, gently grasped his upper arm, and stepped away from the workstations with him. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to say that . . . you know . . .”

“I know what you were trying to say.”

Realizing there was no quick fix for the hurt she’d just inflicted, Marcus chose to change the subject. “All right, you win. Let’s go talk to him.” Over her shoulder, she called to the other scientists, “Everyone, I’ll just be a minute. Don’t start the procedure till I get back.”

Neither she nor Xiong spoke as they walked to her office. The door whished open ahead of her, and she entered her tidy private work space to find the station’s chief of security, Lieutenant Haniff Jackson, standing in front of her desk, facing the door, waiting for her. The broad-shouldered man looked decidedly displeased by the prolonged wait she had inflicted on him. “Doctor. Nice of you to join me. I was beginning to think you’d fled the station.”

“Are you kidding me?” She edged past him to get behind her desk and reclaim the room’s sole power position. Turning back to face him, she continued. “This whole place has been turned into a fortress. Armed guards at the only entrance, weapons systems inside the lab waiting to unleash holy hell, all on the word of someone up in ops. I doubt I could escape if I wanted to.”

The zeal with which she’d delivered her harangue seemed to have embarrassed Xiong, who avoided her gaze, choosing instead to stare at his shoes as if they were the most interesting things he had ever seen. Jackson, meanwhile, seemed not the least bit put off by her tirade. “Doctor, I understand that the enhanced security measures we’ve installed here in the Vault might seem a bit excessive—”

She was livid. “A bit? Reactor-grade reinforced bulkheads? Fast-acting antimatter self-destruct packages built into the floors? Why would I find that excessive?”

“I appreciate your sarcasm, Doctor. Really, I do. But you need to understand that Admiral Nogura doesn’t share my carefree sense of humor. Especially when it comes to violations of the security protocols regarding off-station communications.”

“You mean when I decide my rights to free expression trump your right to censor me.”

Palms upturned, Jackson said, “That’s one way of putting it.”

“I am so sick of Starfleet and its euphemisms,” Marcus said. “Call it what it is: censorship. I, for one, won’t stand for it. I have rights as a Federation citizen.”

Her declaration left Jackson looking pained. “Actually, ma’am, out here, you don’t. Right now you’re on a Starfleet base, which means you need to live and work by our rules.”

Marcus felt a wave of heat prickle her scalp and knew her face had flushed with anger. “That is not what I signed on for, Lieutenant. I never agreed to those terms.”

“It doesn’t matter what you agreed to or think you agreed to. I’m just telling you how it is.” He leaned forward and tapped a data slate that he had left in the center of her desktop. “This is an official warning from Admiral Nogura. Do not share any of your research data with anyone off this station, no matter how innocuous or generic you think that data is.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She looked to Xiong, hoping, perhaps irrationally, that he might leap to her defense if prompted. “Xiong, explain to this man that independent peer review is an essential component of all serious research.”

Xiong lifted his eyes from the floor long enough to glance sheepishly into Jackson’s unyielding stare, then he cast an apologetic look at Marcus. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but I have to agree with Starfleet on this one. We can’t let even one shred of this data out of here. Not yet.”

Jaw agape, Marcus shouted at her colleague, “Are you serious? That’s it? You’re just going to roll over and play dead? I thought you were a scientist, Ming!”

An awkward hush filled the room. Jackson cleared his throat and stiffened his posture. “Please read the memo from Admiral Nogura, ma’am. If you violate the station’s security protocols again, we’ll reserve the right to impose punitive measures in order—”

“Screw your security protocols. And get the hell out of my office. Now.”

Jackson forced a polite if joyless smile onto his face. “As you wish, Doctor.” He dipped his chin toward Xiong. “Lieutenant.” Then he turned on his heel and left the office.

The moment the door closed behind him, Xiong looked up at Marcus with pleading eyes. “Are you crazy? What the hell are you thinking, provoking him like that?”

Disgusted with Starfleet in general and Xiong in particular, she flashed an angry look as she marched past him on her way back to work. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m trying to get fired.”

The night life in Stars Landing was winding down as Pennington ambled homeward, stopping every few paces to kick some newly discovered fleck of Quinn’s emesis from his shoes.

It was late, just after 0215 according to the station’s chronometer, to which he’d synchronized his wrist chrono. Most of the commercial businesses in Stars Landing had closed hours earlier, and now the restaurants and drinking establishments were ejecting their patrons, the courtesies of last call fulfilled. Watching the ordinary folks of Vanguard—enlisted personnel, civilian residents, transient colonists waiting for a chance to depart for some new life—he imagined that Quinn must once have counted himself among their number. Watching his friend and former accomplice in adventure accelerate into a downward spiral saddened him. Quinn’s grief was so raw that it resurrected Pennington’s memories of Oriana D’Amato, his own lost love, who had perished years earlier when the Tholians destroyed the U.S.S. Bombay.

He had thought his own experiences would give him some insight into Quinn’s state, some clue how to guide the man through his labyrinth of mourning and back to the world of the still-living. Instead, he’d discovered the hard way that each person’s path through the valley of the shadow was as unique as their own soul, and that everyone had to make the journey alone.

All I can do is be there and keep him from ending up dead or in jail, he decided. The rest has to be up to him.

Submerged in his own thoughts, he almost failed to notice the faint echo of music from somewhere nearby. He stopped and looked around, and saw that he was outside the front door of Manуn’s cabaret, an upscale establishment that had become one of Stars Landing’s most popular nightspots as well as Vanguard’s de facto officers’ club. The cabaret was closed and dark, and its front entrance was locked when he tried it. Then he put his ear against a window and listened.

Through the glass, he heard a few awkward notes from the cabaret’s baby grand piano. Plink. Plunk. There was no melody, no rhythm to them. They conjured for Pennington the image of someone who didn’t know how to play tapping distractedly at the keys. Despite the haphazard nature of the sound, he was certain he could still sense some kind of emotion behind it—a quiet despair, a longing. He lifted his ear from the glass and tried to peek inside, but the interior blinds were drawn shut, denying him a view of the player.

His curiosity aroused, Pennington circled the building and slipped down the alleyway that ran behind it. Moving in careful, light steps, he approached the restaurant’s rear service entrance and was pleased to discover it slightly ajar. He pulled the door open just wide enough to slip inside, then he eased it back to the way he’d found it.

Once inside, he heard the atonal playing more clearly. He skulked across the kitchen and stopped at the door to the dining room. Peering through its small, eye-level window, he saw T’Prynn sitting at the piano, her fingers hesitating above the keys as if she had never touched the instrument before. Her back was to him, so he couldn’t see her face, but the way she bowed her head and half clenched her right hand spoke volumes to Pennington about the frustration the Vulcan woman must be feeling. Most members of her species were psychologically inscrutable to him, but he had spent several months traveling incognito with T’Prynn after helping her escape Starfleet custody on Vulcan—a ruse that had involved her adopting a fake identity and then marrying Pennington to claim the legal benefits of Earth citizenship, in order to exempt herself from some of her homeworld’s more draconian security policies. As a result of the time they had spent together, he had learned to read the subtle cues of her moods in a way that very few others on the station ever had, or likely ever would.