He rips hair from my scalp as I gouge his face—

There was no longer any reason for T’Prynn to lie—to Starfleet or to herself. Love—a taboo of unrivaled power in Vulcan culture, revered and reviled in equal measure—had been driving her mad, clouding her logic, feeding her passions, eroding her control. Anna had declared her own love openly several times, but only now could T’Prynn let herself realize that her lover had spoken the truth. A woman with two faces and two names, a Klingon in human guise, a spy turned traitor, had been the only honest thing in T’Prynn’s life.

She loved me.

Hideous pain shot through T’Prynn’s body—sharp jabs in her back, searing heat against her face, suffocating pressure stealing her breath. Her vision darkened until all she saw was the fire burning in the darkness.

She loved me…and I sacrificed her.

The truth looked back at her through the flames, its morbid grin a memento mori, its brilliant silence a scathing reproach. Love was lost, betrayed in the name of country. Hope was gone. All that remained was the fire.

She burns for me.

Grief twisted her face into a grotesque horror mask. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, her mouth contorted and agape.

Sten’s blade sinks into my chest—

Sorrow and rage combusted within her and erupted as a horrible roar, as her katra submerged into the starless night of her own, personal damnation.

Reyes walked alone through the confusion and chaos in the docking bay’s main thoroughfare. The towering emptiness of the concourse reinforced how small he felt, how powerless.

The bay three gangway was closed to everyone except pressure-suited fire-suppression teams and damage-control crews. Nonessential personnel had been evacuated from the level, leaving only the scores of injured lying supine on the deck and their attendant crowd of blue-jerseyed doctors, para-medics, and nurses kneeling beside them.

In the hangar, a massive cleanup operation was under way. Swarms of maintenance pods moved in closely choreographed patterns, collecting wreckage and, to Reyes’s dismay, bodies. Thirty-eight enlisted crew and nine officers had perished aboard the Malacca, and five Vanguard technicians had been killed by blast effects inside maintenance bay three.

Plus one undeclared passenger aboard the Malacca, Reyes brooded. There was no doubt in his mind that the presence of Klingon double agent Anna Sandesjo had been the motive for the attack on the cargo ship. How the assassination had been carried out was a question that would likely take an investigative team weeks or perhaps even months to determine.

The casualty most disconcerting to Reyes, however, was lying on the deck ahead of him.

Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn stared at him with unseeing eyes. Her head lolled to one side, and her body was splayed in an awkward pose. Fisher and M’Benga kneeled on either side of her, and the two physicians were backed by a team of several doctors and nurses. All the medical personnel seemed to be equipped with tricorders that whirred and oscillated with high-frequency tones. One paramedic, carrying a stretcher, approached from the direction opposite Reyes.

Several members of the medical team looked up as Reyes neared. Fisher looked over his shoulder at him.

Reyes asked, “How badly is she hurt?”

Fisher stood and turned to meet Reyes. The elderly doctor’s gaze was hard and unforgiving. “Physically, she’s fine,” he said. “This is something else.”

M’Benga stepped forward and joined the conversation.

“She appears to have suffered a total psychological collapse.”

“Caused by?”

“We’re not sure,” Fisher said, his unblinking glare of accusation trained on Reyes. He stepped closer and blatantly intruded on Reyes’s personal space. “We’d have a better idea what happened if we’d been given her medical history.”

Equally fearless, M’Benga added, “For a Vulcan to have that kind of breakdown, she would have to have been suffering a great deal, for a very long time. Her collapse in sickbay last week—”

“All right,” Reyes snapped. “I get the point.”

“No, Diego,” Fisher said. “I don’t think you do. She came to us a week ago looking for help—and if you hadn’t tied our hands, maybe we could’ve done something.” Contempt edged into his voice. “But everything with you has to be a god-damned secret.” He turned back to the group of medics and nurses. “Put her on the stretcher! Let’s get her up to the hospital!”

Fisher turned his back on Reyes and walked away. The medical team eased T’Prynn onto the stretcher, lifted her up, and followed Fisher and M’Benga toward the nearby turbo-lifts. Reyes watched them leave, unable to think of a single rebuttal to anything Fisher had said. All he could think of was the thousands of lives he had let be snuffed out on Gamma Tauri IV, the fear and the fury in Jeanne’s eyes as he’d watched her die, and now the smoldering carnage in his docking bay and T’Prynn’s shattered mind and blank eyes.

I could have evacuated the colony. Warned Jeanne. Overruled T’Prynn and declassified her medical records…. But I didn’t. There’s no one to blame but me. He spied his spectral reflection in an observation window and hated the man he saw staring back at him. Their blood is on your hands.

Reyes turned away from the physical and metaphysical damage his decisions had wrought on the lives of those around him and tried to walk away from it, back to work and routine and duty. But there was no walking away; the consequences of his actions shadowed his every thought—just as he knew they would, today and every day, for the rest of his life.

He recalled the words of his late mentor and Academy sponsor, Captain Rymer: It’s called being in command.

Pennington and Quinn sat together on a grassy slope on the edge of Vanguard’s terrestrial enclosure. It had been half an hour since they were evacuated from the thoroughfare after summoning medics to help T’Prynn. No one had asked them any questions; they had simply been told to move along and clear the area.

“Should we go to Manón’s?” Pennington had asked.

“I don’t feel much like celebrating,” Quinn had replied, “and I don’t think the Sagittarius crew will, either.”

He’d agreed with Quinn, and they had found themselves drifting aimlessly across the greenswards of the enclosure, past Fontana Meadow, toward the sparsely wooded incline that ringed the park’s perimeter. There had been no deliberate plan, just a shared sense that neither of them wanted to return to the ship in which they’d been stuck for almost a week, nor to the empty set of rooms that Pennington laughingly called his apartment.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Quinn said.

Sketching with a twig in the cool, dark dirt, Pennington replied, “You mean the explosion?”

“No,” Quinn said. “T’Prynn.”

Pennington nodded. He, too, had been shaken by the primal scream that had preceded the Vulcan woman’s collapse. Public displays of torment were unsettling to him even when he expected them; had T’Prynn been human, the horror and pain in her voice would still have haunted him. But to watch a Vulcan, especially one who was so disciplined and controlled, shatter so completely had been heartbreaking.

“What’d she say to you? Before she collapsed.”

Quinn lowered his eyes and seemed to peer millions of miles beyond the ground at his feet. He sighed. “She said I was free.”

“Free?” echoed Pennington. “Of what?”

“Everything. Debt. Ganz. Her…. Just free.”

Pennington pondered this new information. “Because of what we did for the Sagittarius?” Quinn nodded in confirmation.

Hunching forward against his knees, Pennington reconsidered his memory of T’Prynn approaching his apartment door, hesitating to knock, and walking away. She didn’t have to do right by Quinn, he thought. But that doesn’t change what she did to me.