M’Benga chortled good-naturedly and started entering the information on Miwal’s chart. Fisher sipped his tea and had started thinking about lunch when the front door of the medical administrative office opened. Captain Rana Desai walked in, data slate in hand. She was followed by a pair of Starfleet security guards. Desai glanced first into Fisher’s empty office and then turned and saw him in M’Benga’s office.

He called out to her, “Morning, Rana. Help you?”

She said to her two escorts, “Wait here,” and proceeded quickly into M’Benga’s office. She shut the old-fashioned wooden door—an anachronistic touch that Fisher had insisted upon for the hospital’s administrative suite. Standing in private with the two physicians, Desai took a deep breath and looked at the floor. “I wish I didn’t have to be here,” she said.

“Don’t be coy, now,” Fisher said. “You came down here to say something. Let’s have it.”

She looked up and took another long breath. “First of all,” she said, “you have to know this is coming down from Starfleet Command. I’m just the messenger.”

Fisher folded his arms across his chest. “All right.”

“Gentlemen,” Desai said, enunciating with the stiff formality of a court officer reading an indictment, “did you, exactly three days ago, petition Admiral McCreary at Starfleet Medical to declassify and release to you the full medical history of Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn?”

The CMO looked over his shoulder at M’Benga, whose calm expression mirrored his own. Fisher looked back at Desai. “As a matter of fact, we did.”

She handed him her data slate, on which was displayed a document thick with tiny type and heavy with legal jargon. “You are both hereby ordered to cease and desist all such efforts to declassify documents related to Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn,” Desai said. “Furthermore, any attempt to circumvent or override security protocols put in place by Starfleet Intelligence will be treated as a court-martial offense. Lastly, you are both hereby prohibited in perpetuity from communicating with any and all parties regarding Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn’s medical history or this order from the Starfleet Judge Advocate General. Is that clear?”

“All except the reason why,” Fisher said.

Desai sighed. “Just sign the top page next to your names.”

Fisher scrawled his signature on the form and handed it to M’Benga, who affixed his own illegible autograph. Desai leaned forward and snapped up the tablet. Then she turned to head for the door. As she reached it, Fisher asked, “Does Diego know about this?”

She turned back. “The only reason you’re not both in the brig is that he refused to press charges for insubordination.” Softening her tone, she added, “I’m really sorry about this, Zeke. Whatever you’ve been doing…stop it.” She opened the door, stepped out, and let it swing shut behind her. It closed with a heavy thud in the doorframe.

“Not exactly the result we were hoping for,” M’Benga said.

“Nope. Wasn’t.” Fisher looked back at his protégé. “Pull everything you can find on Vulcan psychological and neurological disorders. They might not give us her history, but we still have our own data to analyze—and I plan on finding out what it adds up to, whether Starfleet likes it or not.”

Not having been told in advance of the hour or even the day of her departure from Vanguard, Anna Sandesjo was a bit startled when her escorts stepped out of the wall in her bedroom.

A human man and woman, both attired in Starfleet uniforms of black trousers and red jerseys, stood in a narrow, machinery-packed access passage behind the open panel. “I’m Agent Cofell,” said the woman. “He’s Agent Verheiden. It’s time to go.”

Cofell ushered Sandesjo to step past them.

Sandesjo got up from the edge of the bed. “I’m already packed,” she said, moving toward a rolling luggage bag tucked against the wall in the corner.

“Leave it,” Verheiden told her. “You need to make a clean break—the past stays here.”

Having already surrendered everything that had mattered to her, Sandesjo did as she was told. She stepped past the agents into the passageway, which was illuminated by widely spaced, backlit blue panels. The air inside was cooler and drier than in the temporary quarters where she had been living for the past several days. Its claustrophobic confines beat with the low pulse of ventilation systems, hissed with the rush of waste-removal plumbing, and echoed with the regular patter of their footfalls on the metal floor plates.

They passed three junctions as they followed the gradual curve of the passage. Before reaching a fourth junction, Cofell opened another disguised panel, revealing a narrow switch-back staircase. “Eight levels down,” she said, and led the way into the stairwell. Sandesjo followed her, and Verheiden closed the hidden panel behind them.

Their descent was steady and mechanical. Grated metal steps and a narrow gap between the sides of the switchback afforded Sandesjo a view of the space that loomed above her and yawned beneath her. She estimated that the hidden staircase reached from somewhere inside the operations center at the top of Vanguard’s command tower to a level deep inside the station’s power-generation facility in the lower core.

Eight levels down, Cofell unlocked and opened another panel that led into a new maintenance passageway. In a routine that had quickly become familiar, she and Sandesjo stepped clear while Verheiden secured the hatch they had just passed through. Then they continued through the narrow channel between gray walls packed with deeply thrumming machinery.

The uniformity of the surfaces and passages and junctions was disorienting. Only the bulkhead numbers, changing in an orderly and logical manner, gave Sandesjo any sense of where they were inside the station. By her reckoning they were behind the maintenance bays inside the core, along the station’s primary docking bay. Finally they turned left into a short passage that terminated at a bulkhead. Cofell unlocked it, opened it, and stepped through.

Sandesjo exited the passageway into a small enclosed space behind a stack of cargo containers in one of the station’s auxiliary cargo bays. Because the maintenance area was reserved for Starfleet vessels, the containers there were packed with classified or restricted military components and materiel.

Behind her, Verheiden halted a few paces shy of the open hatch. As soon as Sandesjo was clear, Cofell stepped back through the hatch and closed it. For a moment Sandesjo thought that she had been abandoned in an empty cargo bay—then the back panel of the container in front of her detached with a hydraulic hiss and slowly lowered open. She stepped back out of its way. When it was slightly more than half open she glanced over its top edge…and saw T’Prynn standing inside what looked like a Spartan but comfortable windowless apartment with no door.

The panel touched down on the deck with a metallic scrape and a resounding boom.

Rage and longing twisted together inside Sandesjo’s chest and left her speechless. She yearned to reach out to T’Prynn, to seek her touch one last time, but her pride blazed brightly, stung by the Vulcan’s recent betrayal.

T’Prynn spoke as she walked down the ramp toward Sandesjo. “This unit has been equipped to sustain you for a prolonged journey. It is provisioned with food customized for your true physiology, and its climate controls are adjustable. Water and air will be filtered and recycled.”

She stopped in front of Sandesjo, who refused to make eye contact. Sandesjo stepped around the Vulcan and walked halfway up the ramp. She paused. “It’s a lovely jail cell.”

“Its affect is regrettable but necessary for security purposes,” T’Prynn said. “No one aboard your transport vessel will know that you are inside. Only I and the agents who will greet you at your destination will know of your presence.”