Catching Pennington’s shoulder and backpedaling, Quinn said, “Captain, we’ll catch up with you in a few minutes. I just remembered an appointment I have to keep first.” Pennington shot a confused look at Quinn and followed his stare to T’Prynn.

Nassir looked back, noticing T’Prynn as well. “All right, then,” he said. “Good luck with that. See you upstairs.” Wise enough to extricate himself while he had the opportunity, Nassir slipped into a turbolift just before its doors closed.

T’Prynn tilted her head toward a recessed seating area off the main passageway, in front of an observation window. The focus of her gaze made it clear that she only wished to speak with Quinn. He nodded his understanding to her and whispered to Pennington, “Still got that recorder gizmo?”

“Yeah,” Pennington said. “Why?”

“You might want to fire it up on the sly,” Quinn said. “Just in case she kills me in public or something. Might make a hell of a scoop for you.”

Pennington casually stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. A moment later the tip of the recording device poked out over the edge of the pocket. “It’s running,” he said, and pointed with his chin toward a nook on the other side of the thoroughfare. “I’ll be over there.” He strolled away, leaving Quinn to go and face T’Prynn alone.

When Quinn reached her moments later, she stood with her back to him, facing into the docking bay. He sidled up next to her and pressed his back against the window. “Howdy.”

She didn’t look at him as she spoke. “You’ve done us a great service, Mr. Quinn. Thank you.”

“Glad to help,” he said. “But could you lay off me for a few weeks? I lost a lotta money on this trip, and I need to get back to work. I got debts to pay.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t.”

Expecting another of her patented manipulations, he bristled at the coldness of her tone. “Run that by me again?”

T’Prynn turned to face him. “You have no debts, Mr. Quinn. I’ve settled your accounts.”

“What? For this trip, you mean?” “All of them.”

He was still struggling to figure out what devious angle she was working against him. “You’re saying you bought up all my markers? Now I owe everything to you?”

“No, Mr. Quinn. Your debts are settled. They no longer exist. You owe nothing to Ganz, or to Starfleet, or to me.”

The moment was all too surreal for him to grasp. “You think Ganz’ll just let me off the hook? I didn’t even owe him money—I owed him work and favors. How’d you pay that off?”

“The details are not important.” She dropped her smoky-sweet voice to a warm hush and looked him in the eye. “If you wish to continue assisting Starfleet Intelligence, we will be grateful for your help. If you decide to keep on working for Ganz, that’s up to you. The key detail here is that you are not obligated to do either. Put simply, Mr. Quinn…you’re free.”

Quinn was convinced that he had misheard her, because it had sounded as if she had just told him that he was free.

He tried to ask if she was kidding, but he realized as he started speaking that she probably couldn’t hear him over the explosion in the main docking bay.

Pennington observed Quinn’s meeting with T’Prynn from across the thoroughfare. He was close enough that he could monitor them visually with his portable recorder but not close enough to pick up what they were saying.

His attention was fixed on the Vulcan woman, with a focus so acute that he worried it bordered on obsessive. The deception that she had perpetrated on him a few months earlier, to trick him into filing an easily falsified report about the destruction of the U.S.S. Bombay, still rankled him. When he had confronted her about it, she had insinuated that she knew enough about his private life to blackmail him. By that point, however, her ploy had already wrought so much damage to his personal life and his professional credibility that he’d had nothing left to lose.

I went to Jinoteur hoping to get one up on her, he admitted to himself. Between her and Reyes, I can probably forget about ever getting this story published. At least, not in my lifetime.

T’Prynn said something to Quinn that seemed to catch the man off-guard. She’s certainly full of surprises, Pennington mused. He recalled witnessing, purely by chance, an abortive visit that T’Prynn had made to his Stars Landing apartment several weeks earlier. He hadn’t known the intent behind the visit then, and he still didn’t. She had behaved almost like someone plagued by remorse, but he found that hard to believe.

He checked his wrist chrono and glanced impatiently back at Quinn’s tête-à-tête with the Vulcan. Come on, wrap it up, he mentally implored them. There’s a grateful red-haired lass upstairs waiting to buy me a—

A flash of light filled the docking bay as an explosion thundered and shook the entire station. Red-alert klaxons whooped as pedestrians on the thoroughfare were thrown to the ground. Pennington plucked his recorder from his pocket and sprint-stumbled across the broad passageway toward the observation window. Around him Starfleet personnel and a handful of civilians were scrambling away from the gangways for emergency turbolifts and stairwells.

“Red alert,” declared a male voice over the station’s PA system. “Explosion in the main docking bay! DC and fire-control teams to bay three!”

Pennington hurdled over a row of chairs to reach the window in a minimum of running strides. He pointed his recorder at the pandemonium in the hangar beyond. Deep red flames and thick black smoke billowed from a massive rent in the ventral hull of the Starfleet cargo ship U.S.S. Malacca, docked at the next berth, ninety degrees around the station’s core from the Sagittarius. Mangled hull plates and a storm of loose debris tumbled in the zero-gravity environment of the docking bay. A string of secondary explosions ripped across the underside of the Malacca. The ship listed sharply away from its docking port, which buckled and began to tear apart.

Large clusters of scorched, twisted metal ricocheted off the transparent aluminum observation windows, the ceiling of the docking bay, and the core of the station. Pivoting slowly left to track the path of one especially huge piece of debris, Pennington halted as he and his recorder locked on to a more disturbing and horribly compelling sight.

Only a few meters away, standing between himself and Quinn, T’Prynn stared out the observation window at the fiery carnage. Her right hand was splayed against the window, a gesture of desperation. What fascinated Pennington was her expression—a fusion of shock, horror, and anguish—and the fact that she was, unmistakably, crying.

T’Prynn watched her lies and evasions burn away in the crucible of fire outside the window, leaving only the awful truth.

Staring into the smoldering cavity of the Malacca’s blasted cargo hull, she knew that denial was pointless. She had seen the container loaded onto the ship and had watched as the cargo hold was sealed for the vessel’s imminent departure from Vanguard.

Gazing into the hypnotic dance of flames and smoke, T’Prynn knew that Anna was dead.

Sten’s blade slashes my cheek—

Pretenses and façades fell away, stripping her of decades of mental defenses and a lifetime of indoctrinated emotional paralysis. All the carefully constructed excuses, all the old barriers to candor, crumbled in her psychic grasp.

I feel his pain as I bend his fingers backward and break them at the knuckles—

Debris dispersed in chaotic tumbles from the Malacca, trailing twists and ribbons of smoke through the docking bay.

For the sake of duty, T’Prynn had forfeited Anna’s life. She had not done the deed, but she had forced the Klingons’ hand. Anna’s life had been one imperiled for the sake of many. It was logical.