“A compelling argument, Mr. Liverakos. Let’s go back.” The trio returned to the table. Desai set down the motion for termination and recomposed her demeanor to address the other officers. “This inquiry is in recess pending review of defense counsel’s motion. I’ll hear Lieutenant Moyer’s rebuttal in my office tomorrow at 1400 hours. Adjourned.” She punctuated her declaration with a quick tap of her bell.

The room emptied quickly. Desai gathered her papers into a slim hard-shell case. Moyer and Liverakos paused on their way out to trade quips under their breath. Reyes, Desai noticed, stepped aside with T’Prynn and shared a hushed conversation with her as they exited. Suspicion nagged at Desai’s thoughts: Why was the commodore so quick to confer with his intelligence officer? And why had T’Prynn taken such a keen interest in what was likely to be a mundane proceeding?

Desai dismissed both queries. The answer, she decided, was probably quite simple: T’Prynn had needed to make a time-sensitive report to Reyes and so had waited to speak with him as soon as he was free of the protocols of the inquiry. Occam’s razor, Desai reminded herself. The simplest answer is usually the best one. Then her inner voice of experience retorted, Not for a lawyer, it isn’t.

Walking alone back to her office, she couldn’t shake the intuitive hunch that T’Prynn’s presence in the wardroom had not been coincidental. There was no empirical evidence to suggest that she had any vested interest in the inquiry’s outcome, but something about the quiet intensity of the Vulcan woman’s attention to every detail had left a subtle but uneasy impression on Desai. She wasn’t there to see Reyes. She was there to observe the depositions, and not out of idle curiosity.

As a lawyer, Desai had learned to trust the law, protocol, procedure, and precedents. But before she was a lawyer she had been a detective with the JAG Corps’s Criminal Investigation Division, and before that she had started her Starfleet career as a security officer. In the wardroom, Liverakos had spoken dismissively of “mere speculation,” but hunches were all about speculation, and being a detective had taught Desai that hunches sometimes took a case farther than evidence.

She had a hunch that T’Prynn—quiet, pretty, “isn’t she a great pianist” T’Prynn—was connected to the loss of the Bombay.

Believing it was easy. Proving it would be hard.

The best that Desai could hope for was that playing her hunch would do more good than harm. In her experience, the law was a blunt and clumsy instrument with which to seek the truth.

Unfortunately, it was the only one she had.

It would have to do, for now.

Being dragged by my hair across white-hot coals.

Stepping off the turbolift, T’Prynn reflected on her decades-old training in the disciplines of logic and repeated to herself that pain was only a matter of perception. It could be mastered, it could be channeled, and, even when it could not be eradicated, it could at least be rendered impotent.

A blade piercing my lung.

She knew that her pain was psychosomatic, nothing more than a figment of her imagination. The old Vulcan masters had taught her that there can be no pain if one’s mind does not acknowledge it. If one denied it expression, they said, if one could attune oneself to the body’s true signals, even the most horrific forms of physical suffering could be quelled from within.

Fingernails gouging a path across my cheek.

Pride and instinct made her hide her agony. She didn’t speak of it. Comrades and acquaintances never saw anything amiss, no momentary flickers of discomfort in her eyes, no fleeting twinges or tics to betray her inner torments. Masking distress, whether emotional or physical, was one of the first lessons Vulcan children were taught on their long journey toward mastering the Kolinahr—a goal few achieved.

The flashing slice of a lirpa across my abdomen.

One step followed another, bringing her at last to the entrance of docking bay ninety-two. The door was locked. She entered her security bypass code, and its two halves parted with a thin pneumatic hiss.

Parked in the middle of the small but austere hangar was Cervantes Quinn’s battered old Mancharan starhopper, the Rocinante. Quinn was hunched under an open panel in the craft’s nose section. Assorted loose parts and tools were scattered like flotsam at his feet. Both his hands were plunged deep inside the ship’s inner workings and tinkering loudly with something. T’Prynn’s sensitive hearing discerned his every muttered expletive with perfect clarity.

The sharp clacks of her boots on the gunmetal-gray deck echoed loudly in the confined, bare-walled space. Ceasing his labors, Quinn pulled his head out of his ship and looked at T’Prynn, who stalked toward him. “Don’t you knock, lady?”

“You said you had information.”

“I said I needed to talk to you,” Quinn said. He stepped out from beneath his ship and wiped off his hands with a towel looped around his belt. “You got an information leak.”

Skull-cracking pressure ballooning behind my eyes.

“Explain,” she said, in a tone harsher than what she had intended. When the pain flared, her patience faded and anger proved its power to her, over and over again.

“A reporter,” Quinn said. “Name of Pennington. Cornered me in Tom Walker’s place, asking about the Bombay.”

The splintering break of a knuckle bent backward.

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing, I left him pickin’ up his teeth off the floor.”

Emerald hues of panic as his hands grip my throat.

“How much did he seem to know?”

“Hard to say.” Quinn walked toward his ship’s gangway, kicking a path through his tools, which clanged across the deck. “He didn’t ask anything specific.”

“I see.” That news concerned T’Prynn. A reporter who had no questions, only vague inquiries, usually was waiting for someone to let slip something that confirmed leads already in hand. If Pennington knew as much as she suspected he did, his intrusion into the matter could undo years of careful preparation and jeopardize thousands of lives. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” she said. “Avoid contact with him in the future.”

“Sure,” Quinn said, clomping haphazardly up the ramp. “Will do. You got it.” He looked disoriented and unstable.

“Do you require medical assistance, Mr. Quinn?”

“Nah,” he half-growled. “Just a bucket and some shut-eye.”

Not wanting to visualize the rest of Quinn’s evening, T’Prynn let herself out and walked back to the turbolift. She turned the throttle grip. “Level twenty-seven, section six.”

The coppery tang of my own blood pooling in my mouth.

Fifty-three years had not dimmed the memories. They haunted her, amplified each year by the injustice of being deprived of the purgative release of Pon farr. Part of her psyche remained trapped in the final moments of that long-ago death struggle, the moment of her emancipation, the beginning of her bondage to a personal demon more vivid than the pale schemes of the living who surrounded her daily.

Sten’s voice, demanding my surrender to his passions.

Her face was a portrait of stoic calm for the handful of engineering technicians who rode with her to level twenty-nine, and for the communications officer who remained on the turbolift after T’Prynn stepped out. Crewmates and strangers passed by her in the corridors, taking no notice of her unhurried pace or her Zen-like countenance. She arrived at her quarters, let the door close behind her, and walked to the center of the room. There, she remained still and allowed her agony to gnaw at her from within. Then she plumbed the crypt of her memory and trained her mind on the one moment that would silence the darker fires of her nature, even if only briefly.

The crack of Sten’s neck snapping sideways in my grasp.