[94] Why aren’t any of them trying to help Kasrene?

Looking through the faceplate of Ambassador Kasrene’s suit, Sulu tried to interpret the emotions on the Tholian diplomat’s rigid, unreadable crystalline features. Was she surprised? The burnished red-and-gold planes of her countenance revealed nothing he understood.

Though the moment seemed frozen in time, Sulu and Chekov both arrived at Kasrene’s side almost immediately. They simultaneously caught her heavy body as it began collapsing deckward, the haft of Mosrene’s whisker-thin blade still protruding from the front of her suit. Taking care not to let the blade touch him—the weapon had just cut through the heavy, durable fabric as though it were whipped butter—Sulu strained against Kasrene’s great weight, which felt like a tumbling neutronium wall.

“Clear the room!” Sulu roared as he struggled. “Security!”

“I need a trauma team in conference room four!” Chapel was shouting into a communicator. “And get me some help from that Tholian ship.”

Chekov was already frantically patching into Excelsior’scommunications system to alert Yilskene’s nearby flagship that a Tholian doctor was needed urgently.

Where’s Akaar?Sulu thought. The giant Capellan could probably have lifted Kasrene with a single steel-muscled arm. But a glance over his shoulder confirmed that the security chief was busy fulfilling his primary duty—maintaining order among both the Tholian and Federation delegations. He was directing two small teams of lightly armed security guards as they escorted both groups out of the conference room and into the corridor. Sulu presumed they were being ushered back to their respective quarters until things settled down, but at the moment he didn’t much care.

Aidan Burgess, however, wasn’t going quietly. Clearly determined to reach the fallen Tholian’s side, she all but dared an owl-eyed young security guard to either stand aside or [95] shoot her. She instantly ran afoul of Akaar, who draped a heavy arm across her shoulder. Sulu might have enjoyed the sight of the Federation special envoy being lifted and carried away like a sack of quadrotriticale were he not still in danger of becoming pinned beneath an enormous heap of living—or perhaps dying—crystal.

Two more pairs of hands grabbed at the wounded alien’s suit, making Kasrene’s mass suddenly far more manageable. With the help of Tuvok and Chapel, Sulu and Chekov carefully lowered Kasrene into what appeared to be a sitting position, balancing her on her long, wide tail. The rotten-egg aromas evidently still issuing from Kasrene’s suit were becoming almost overpowering.

Dr. Chapel was already running her medical tricorder over the Tholian’s wounds, her face pinched in concentration.

Sulu eyed the weapon that remained lodged in Kasrene’s thorax. Monomolecular blade,he thought with an inward shudder, glad he’d never faced anything like it in the fencing lanes. Very nasty piece of work, that.

“How bad?” he asked.

“Looks about as bad as it can get,” Chapel said, kneeling beside Kasrene and coughing because of the effluvium escaping from the Tholian’s compromised and imperfectly patched suit. Improvising with a protoplaser, she sealed the breach, thereby preventing the fumes from overcoming every oxygen-breather in the room.

Chapel looked up and gazed significantly at Sulu. “I’m really going to need a Tholian doctor.”

Sulu turned to Chekov, who shook his head. “When I explained to Yilskene’s watch officer that this was Mosrene’s doing, he said ‘the castes must look after their own.’ Then he cut off the channel.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Chapel said. “Then I’m going to need to get her to sickbay, so I can cut off this suit and work on her through an environment forcefield.”

[96] “Where’s that trauma team?” Chekov wanted to know.

At that moment, a trio of med techs rushed into the conference room, a large antigrav stretcher floating between them. Tuvok assisted the medics in hoisting the Tholian’s still form onto the hovering platform, which bobbed and oscillated momentarily as it adjusted to the ambassador’s considerable mass. Kasrene was placed awkwardly on her side, to prevent the still dangerous blade from causing any further injury, either to the ambassador or to the medical personnel.

Akaar and a pair of security guards returned to the conference room then, and the security chief ordered his people to clear a “fast crash-cart route” to sickbay. Holding a phaser, the Capellan looked ready to vaporize anything that got in the trauma team’s way. Sulu guessed that it must have been difficult for Akaar to restrain himself from shooting Mosrene down in his tracks. Aware that the father Akaar had never met had been murdered during a political coup, Sulu knew that the young officer had little love for would-be assassins.

Just as the med techs began moving Kasrene toward the door, one of the ambassador’s gauntlet-clad hands shot out. Before anyone could react, she seized Tuvok’s right wrist in an iron grip.

“Vulcan,” Kasrene said, the chorus of layered voices that formed her translated words now sounding jangled and discordant. “Vulcan. Mind-toucher. Think to you. Touch. Touch.”

Tuvok froze, his expression even more blank and unreadable than usual.

“Save your strength, Ambassador,” Chapel said.

The Tholian’s grip appeared to tighten. Tuvok suddenly looked pained.

“Let him go, Ambassador,” Sulu said. “We can’t help you if you fight us.”

“Dying,” she said. “Vulcan. Is. Only. Help.”

The Tholian’s grip suddenly relaxed.

[97] His face blank once again, Tuvok collapsed, prompting Sulu to dive to catch him before his head hit the deck.

“Bring him along, too,” Chapel said, indicating Tuvok.

Sulu nodded, hoisting the young Vulcan to his feet. Tuvok remained limp as Sulu and Chekov each took one of his arms and bore him quickly through the corridor behind Kasrene’s swiftly-moving stretcher.

“What’s happened to him?” Chekov asked as the group rushed into a wide turbolift.

“Sickbay,” Chapel told the computer before turning to face Chekov. “I don’t know. Maybe he inhaled too much of the leakage from Kasrene’s suit.”

Sulu knew that Chapel was making a purely off-the-cuff guess, since she was preoccupied with her struggle—apparently a losing one—to keep the Tholian ambassador alive.

Still helping Chekov hold Tuvok’s slack form, Sulu listened to the Vulcan’s breathing. It didn’t sound labored, though it was slightly shallow. It seemed unlikely that the hot gases from Kasrene’s suit had seared his lungs.

And yet Tuvok’s open eyes were vacant and glassy, staring off into infinity as though they’d been exposed to something no humanoid had ever seen before.

“Circulatory pressure is crashing, Doctor,” one of the med techs laboring over Kasrene said. “She’s flat-lining.”

“I can read the tricorder, Ensign,” Chapel snapped as the turbolift deposited them across the corridor from sickbay. Everyone dashed through the main doors and into a corner in which the medics quickly improvised a Tholian-compatible isolation chamber. Reaching through the forcefield boundary with a pair of medical waldoes, Chapel wasted no time using a laser scalpel to slice open Kasrene’s suit.

Even to Sulu’s untrained eye, Kasrene’s seeping chest wound appeared mortal. The blood—if indeed that word could be used to describe the escaping viscous fluid—appeared to be a brilliant, shimmering turquoise in color, at [98] least as seen through the dimness and distortion of the isolation forcefield and the class-N atmosphere that lay behind it.

Mosrene obviously didn’t want Kasrene to tell us whatever it was she was about to tell us. What is he trying to hide?Sulu recalled some of Kasrene’s last words before she had fallen unconscious. Vulcan,she had said. Mind-toucher.