Most of the time Xiong found himself at odds with his commanding officers, but this time he couldn’t have agreed more.

Dr. Jabilo M’Benga toweled his hands dry as he exited the scrub-out room beside the operating theater. He had endured a long day of treating emergency cases. Now the last of his critical patients was on the way to recovery, and M’Benga was free to deal with the mountain of paperwork that had accumulated in his office.

In the past twenty-four hours, M’Benga had seen a variety of cases, each one coming on the heels of the last. A civilian cargo handler had suffered internal injuries after being pinned under a falling stack of filled crates, which had been knocked over by a colleague’s inept control of a load-lifter; a mechanic in Vanguard’s starship-maintenance complex had accidentally amputated three of his fingers by failing to obey proper safety protocols for storing his plasma cutter; one of the station’s operations officers had slipped on a diving board in the Stars Landing natatorium, breaking her left ulna and giving herself a concussion and an intracranial hemorrhage; and a nine-year-old girl from the colony ship Centauri Star had been rushed into the ER in a state of anaphylactic shock after discovering the hard way that she was allergic to Ktarian eggs.

In other words, a slow day in Vanguard Hospital.

A hot cup of coffee and a warm raspberry croissant were in the forefront of M’Benga’s thoughts as he walked through the parting doors of the ER and into the brightly lit blue-gray corridor outside. He turned right toward the turbolift that would take him back to his office. Before the ER doors closed behind him, the nasal drone of a nurse’s voice squawked over the hospital’s intercom. “Code Two in the ER. Repeat, Code Two.”

M’Benga turned about-face and sprinted back inside. Code Two meant that one of the station’s senior officers was in need of medical assistance. Code One would have meant that Commodore Reyes himself was in distress.

He scrambled past nurses and patients, weaving his way toward the main admissions area for the ER. Despite having been at the far side of the complex when he’d heard the call half a minute earlier, he was still the first doctor to arrive. A nurse and a medical technician had gathered around a crumpled form on the floor, a dark-haired female Vulcan officer in a red minidress. Pushing his way into the circle, M’Benga lifted his medical tricorder and started running a standard diagnostic scan on the unconscious Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn. “Nurse Martinez, report,” he said.

Martinez continued her own tricorder scan as she answered. “She walked in and collapsed, Doctor. Her pulse, body temperature, and neural activity are all elevated.” The young brunette adjusted her tricorder. “There’s no sign of injury, but synaptic patterns in her somatosensory cortex are consistent with extreme pain.”

The data on M’Benga’s tricorder screen confirmed Martinez’s report. He looked up to see that other members of the hospital’s staff had belatedly joined the huddle around T’Prynn. “Someone get me a stretcher,” he said. “We need to move her to a biobed.” As the people around him hurried to fulfill his request, he puzzled over T’Prynn’s bio readings. They were unlike anything he had seen during his residency on Vulcan. Despite his wealth of experience in treating Vulcan-specific afflictions, he was at a loss to pinpoint the nature of T’Prynn’s malady.

“Stretcher comin’ in,” said Dr. Gonzalo Robles, who was assisted by a fourth-year Andorian medical student named Sherivan sh’Ness. Martinez and the med tech stepped aside while Robles and sh’Ness eased the stretcher under T’Prynn. M’Benga helped them straighten the Vulcan woman atop the stretcher. He beckoned to another doctor. “Steinberg, give us a hand here.” To the group he declared, “Let’s move her to exam one.” With six sets of hands on the stretcher, they lifted T’Prynn easily from the floor and carried her in a well-practiced march to a nearby exam room. Gently they set the stretcher on the biobed. Martinez, sh’Ness, and Robles worked in concert to lift T’Prynn just enough to slide the stretcher out from under her. M’Benga activated the biobed and watched the fluctuations in T’Prynn’s vital signs.

“Nurse,” M’Benga said. “Prep five cc of asinolyathin.” Martinez nodded and moved to a pharmaceutical cabinet to load up a hypospray. Robles and Steinberg hovered on the other side of T’Prynn’s bed, while sh’Ness and the medical technician watched from a few meters away.

Robles eyed the cardiac indicator on the display board above the bed. “Look at that,” he said with amazement. “It’s like she’s in the middle of a workout.” He pointed at the pain-level indicator. “Good Lord, her pain reading’s off the chart.”

“Weird,” Steinberg said, folding his arms over his chest. “I’ve never seen a Vulcan have an anxiety reaction like this.”

As he accepted the hypo from Nurse Martinez, M’Benga said to the two physicians, “Her condition is not the result of anxiety. Of that I am quite certain.” He injected the light dosage of analgesic medicine into T’Prynn’s jugular vein. In less than two seconds, the pain indicator on the board dropped from its maximum level to within a few notches of normal. “That seems to have dealt with the symptom,” M’Benga noted, “but as for the cause, we’ll have to run some—”

T’Prynn’s hand shot up and locked around his throat. Her grip was viselike, and her open eyes were ablaze with fury. The speed of her attack caught everyone in the room off-guard. It took a very long second for Steinberg and Robles to start scrambling around the bed to M’Benga’s aid. Martinez overcame her surprise and rushed forward to restrain T’Prynn while the medical technician hurried to a wall panel to summon security. The medical student remained paralyzed with fear in the doorway.

Before anyone could finish what they were racing to do, T’Prynn let go of M’Benga’s throat. The fire in her eyes abated, and she took a deep breath. Everyone stopped and waited to see what she would do next. M’Benga coughed twice, then gasped for air as he massaged his throat.

In a calm but alarmingly uninflected tone, T’Prynn said, “Please forgive me, Doctor. My reaction was one of reflex.” Her eyes traveled from Martinez to the other two doctors. “There is no cause for concern,” she said to them. “It is not necessary to restrain me. I am in control of my actions.”

Still trying to work the burn out of his esophagus, M’Benga found T’Prynn’s declaration a bit hard to believe. If his guess was correct, she was masking her symptoms. To confront her about it in front of others, however, would be both improper and fruitless. Matters such as this required tremendous tact when dealing with a patient of any species, but especially so when interacting with a Vulcan. To the others in the room, M’Benga said with his injured rasp of a voice, “Leave us, please.”

The other doctors and the medical technician left quickly, taking the shocked medical student with them. Nurse Martinez hesitated, but M’Benga gave her a reassuring nod and said, “Close the door.” With obvious reluctance, she did as he asked, and he was alone in the exam room with T’Prynn.

She sat up and turned to drop her legs over the edge of the bed. He watched her with a clinical eye, seeking any of a number of subtle cues that were particular to Vulcan body language. In addition to a few signs of hidden discomfort, he detected ephemeral micro-expressions that reinforced his suspicion: a tensing near the mandibular joint, a twinge at the corner of her left eye, an inward curl of her upper lip. “You are in profound distress,” he said to her. “Please relate your symptoms to me.”

“I am merely fatigued,” she said, and he knew it was a lie. Stoic prevarications by patients were not uncommon, but in his experience Vulcans were unlikely to tell such naked falsehoods.