“There is no other way,” T’Prynn said.

The pulling and twisting resumed, and Sandesjo abandoned words for inarticulate roars and screams. A skillful shift of her balance enabled Sandesjo to slip free of T’Prynn’s grasp. She stumbled away, grabbed a wireless lamp from an end table, and hurled it at T’Prynn, who easily sidestepped it. The lamp struck the wall with a soft crunch and a thud. It fell to the floor, its light extinguished.

All at once Sandesjo abandoned the fight. Her knees folded beneath her, and she slumped down onto them. Fury collapsed into defeat. With sagging shoulders and a tired sigh, she seemed to resign herself to T’Prynn’s endgame.

“A security detail will be here in five minutes,” T’Prynn said. “They will escort you to your temporary quarters. There will be no need to pack. All your needs will be provided for.”

Sandesjo glared at T’Prynn. “Not all of them.”

T’Prynn turned away and walked toward the door. She stopped as Sandesjo called out, “You want to know what’s ironic?” T’Prynn looked back. Sandesjo let out a mirthless chuckle and regarded the Vulcan woman with a bitter grin. “Right now I want to cry like a human—but Klingons don’t have tear ducts. Vulcans do have them—but I guess you think I’m not worth crying over.”

The barrage of katra attacks came swiftly, faster than they ever had before, and with enough ferocity to make T’Prynn wince. She replayed the memory of Sten’s neck breaking over and over until she regained control of her conscious mind. Then she coaxed her mien back into a properly Vulcan cipher.

“Do not presume to know what I think, Anna,” she said, and fled her lover’s abode, hounded by Sten’s vengeful katra.

Walking alone through the terrestrial enclosure and then the corridors of the station’s upper levels, T’Prynn could not imagine where she might find refuge. Seeking medical assistance would only increase the likelihood of her val’reth secret undoing her career. Meditation offered no solace. The piano at Manón’s, once a redoubt of tranquility, had proved vulnerable. Her lover’s arms no longer offered any shelter.

She had run out of ways to run from herself. There was nothing left to do but admit that Sten’s taunts had contained at least a kernel of truth: she had betrayed Anna. Though she had buried her shame deep in the tombs of her mind, she harbored no doubt that Sten would unearth it and use it to bludgeon her psyche for decades to come.

T’Prynn returned to her arid quarters, undressed, and made a perfunctory attempt at sleep, fully expecting to find Sten’s malevolent shade waiting in her dreamscape—standing atop an open grave, spade in hand…and gloating.

Part Three

Instruments

of Darkness

29

Six days of reclusive brooding had not assuaged Reyes’s grief. Reading through detailed after-action reports from the captains of the Lovell and the Endeavour had forced him to relive the Gamma Tauri IV tragedy several times over, and each new reading deepened his sense of how indelibly bloodied his hands had become. Eleven thousand colonists, thousands of Klingon scientists, and every living thing on the planet’s surface all were dead and reduced to radioactive glass and vapor.

And what did we learn? He asked himself that question over and over, knowing that the answer was “almost nothing.” The mission to Gamma Tauri IV had gleaned no significant insights into the artifacts, the meta-genome, or the Shedai. Having ended in bloodshed and fire, it was a tragedy for which Reyes knew himself to be directly responsible.

The only good news of the week had been the rescue of the Sagittarius from the surface of Jinoteur IV, and even that was not really a success but just another disaster narrowly averted. In a few hours the ravaged scout ship would return to Vanguard, accompanied by the civilian tramp freighter Rocinante. A heroes’ welcome had been planned, and Reyes clung to the hope that the Sagittarius crew’s debriefing would prove more informative than the abortive mission on Gamma Tauri IV. At the very least, he was looking forward to hearing their theories about how the entire Jinoteur star system had vanished from space-time.

His coffee was still warm, so he took a large sip and reclined his chair while he studied the sector activity chart on his office wall. The Endeavour had been redeployed to the Klingon border on another preemptive patrol, and the Lovell was en route to Pacifica, a beautiful and recently colonized pelagic world deep in the Taurus Reach, to help set up its basic civil infrastructure. Klingon and Tholian fleet activity had increased slightly, but for the moment the local status quo appeared intact.

Things looked calm, and that worried Reyes.

With a steep tilt of his mug, he drained the last of his coffee and turned back to the orderly stacks of data slates and data cards arranged on his desk. Two of his yeomen, Greenfield and Finneran, had obviously coordinated their efforts over consecutive shifts to keep his administrative paperwork straight for him. He stared at the neatly grouped piles of work and couldn’t find the motivation to do any of it.

Set apart from the rest of the items on his desk was a nondescript, thin gray binder. He picked it up, rested it on his lap, and opened it to admire the old picture tucked inside.

It wasn’t a particularly good photo; its composition was awkward, and because Reyes had taken it by pointing the camera at himself and Jeanne from arm’s length, its up-their-noses perspective was somewhat unflattering. In its favor, the light had been good that day in the New Berlin park, filtered through the static boughs of massive trees growing in low gravity, and the smiles that he and Jeanne showed to the camera had been genuine. It was proof that once, long ago, they had been happy and in love, before the routines of marriage and the burdens of rank had accomplished their slow attrition of all that had been good and joyful and honest between them.

I’d give anything to be back in that moment, he lamented, imagining the life he could have had if only every single thing had happened differently for the past twenty years. All we’d had were dreams about what we might be. Now all I have left is the memories of what we were…. It’s not enough.

He traced the outline of Jeanne’s younger features with his fingertip, a delicate, feather-light brush of skin over the matte print, as if he feared inflicting some new misery upon her ghost with his seemingly inverted Midas touch. I’m sorry, Jeanne.

Rationalizations and excuses deserted him, leaving only unanswerable questions. Why did I put the mission above her life? Because some admiral told me to? How many times did they tell us at the Academy that blindly obeying orders was not the mark of a good Starfleet officer? I listened, and I nodded, and I said I understood—but did I? He closed the binder, unable to bear the reminder of a happy memory that he felt he no longer deserved. What am I doing out here? Who am I really doing it for? Why am I doing it at all?

His dark musings were cut short by the buzzing of his desktop intercom. He sighed and jabbed the switch to open the channel. “Yes?”

Yeoman Greenfield replied, “Ambassador Jetanien and Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn are here, sir.”

Feeling antisocial, Reyes snapped, “What do they want?”

Jetanien answered with deadpan sarcasm, “To bask in the radiant glow of your charisma.”

“I don’t turn on the glow till noon,” Reyes said.

“Commodore,” Jetanien said, his impatience mounting, “twice in two days you have declined to receive us. Are we now to conduct our classified business by means of correspondence?”