He reached up and touched the intricate, thumbnail-sized design. The marking was all the Halkan Council had permitted him to take with him into his permanent, irrevocable state of exile. Had the Orions attacked Kotha Village just a few weeks earlier, I would have been denied even this.

Lojur heard the doors hiss open behind him. He saw the huge reflection of the approaching Akaar an instant later.

“Computer, lower room illumination by seventy-five [163] percent.” At once, the lights dimmed and the reflections abruptly vanished, replaced by the endless vista of space. Lojur did not wish to allow anyone, even a close friend like Akaar, to watch him pining over things that could not be changed.

He turned and faced Akaar, who towered over him. The giant Capellan maintained his distance, his large hands clasped behind his back as though he didn’t know what else to do with them.

“I thought I might find you here,” Akaar said, his voice deep and resonant despite its muted volume.

Lojur offered his friend a wan smile. “You could have asked the computer to locate me.”

“A hunter should rely upon his wits,” Akaar replied. Despite their Starfleet training and their respective home-worlds’ diametrically opposite philosophies—Akaar was the product of a warrior society, while Lojur’s Halkan culture had inculcated total pacifism—Lojur knew that they both preferred not to use technology gratuitously. This shared eccentricity, as well as the mentoring they had both received over the years from Captain Sulu and Commander Chekov, had provided the initial impetus for their unlikely friendship.

“True enough,” Lojur said. Though Halkans did not hunt for game animals, they did gather wild plants as well as cultivate tame ones. Neither pursuit was very kind to idiots.

Lojur studied Akaar, who had adopted an even more stoic demeanor than usual. It brought to mind the grave-faced village Elders who had banished him eighteen years ago.

“You should know that Lieutenant Docksey died bravely,” the Capellan said at length.

Lojur nodded, feeling numb and blasted inside as he revisited, yet again, the brutal fact of Shandra’s death. He had already known that she was off duty during the battle with the Neyel; immediately afterward, photon torpedo specialist Pitcher told him most of the rest. Shandra had stepped into [164] the breach, first assisting in one of the torpedo bays, then taking over for an injured member of one of the forward phaser crews.

Then she’d been blown out into space when the final Neyel salvo tore through both the shields and the hull plating directly outside her temporary post.

“Chief Pitcher told me that Shandra died instantly, L.J.,” Lojur said. “She probably didn’t have time to become frightened.” At least I hope that’s so.

Tears of rage and shame stung Lojur’s eyes, prompting him to turn again toward the window. He stared at the Neyel ship, placing his hands behind his back, where they clasped one another as tightly as airlock seals.

Akaar could hardly have missed his roiling emotions. “You wish to punish them,” he said. It did not sound like a question.

Lojur shook his head. “Violence is not in the Halkan character. It has no place in the Halkan heart.” He turned to face his friend, fixing him with his most withering don’t-forget-that-I-outrank-youglare.

Akaar was undeterred. “And yet violence is the very reason you have no place on Halka.”

Lojur wanted to roar at the Capellan, but restrained himself. Barely. “That’s enough, Lieutenant.Dismissed.”

Akaar nodded, then walked back to the door. He paused a moment near the threshold after it opened. “I understand. I know I cannot compel you to discuss your loss, or what it might drive you to do.”

Why wouldn’t Akaar leave it alone? “That’s exactly right, L.J.,” Lojur said with an exasperated sigh.

“That is why I have asked Commander Chekov to do so,” Akaar said, placing his hand over his heart and extending his open hand. Then he departed, leaving Lojur alone with his fiercely churning thoughts.

A moment later, the intercom sounded. Lojur sighed, [165] resigned to what was to come. He pushed the button. “I’m on my way, Commander Chekov.”

“What are you bringing me now, battle trophies?” Chapel said as the med techs antigravved the corpse into the pathology lab adjacent to the main sickbay.

“Ensign Fenlenn beamed this body aboard after the sensors picked it up drifting in space right after the battle,” said one of the medics, a well-muscled human woman named Caitlin Bersentes. Chapel was pleased to see that she and her colleague, a human male named Beck, were treating the dead alien with apparent respect. “Evidently a few of the Neyel were blown out into space, like poor Shandra and the others.”

The body the med techs deposited onto the examination table was large, gray, and unlike anything Chapel had encountered before. Though essentially humanoid in shape and size, its unclothed form was adorned with a muscular tail nearly as long as its body. Its torso was long and slender, and each of its four equally graceful limbs was equipped with opposable thumbs, recalling the hands and feet of a nonhuman Earth primate. The top of its head sported short, bristly black hair; its dark gray, coarse-textured epidermis had the approximate consistency of tree bark, though she noted that it was gracefully arranged in articulated, interleaved sections that Chapel guessed were as tough as the hide of a Vulcan dunewalker. Even the eyelids, closed in the repose of death, suggested apertures in the battlements of some impregnable wooden fortress.

“These folks are obviously built to last,” Chapel said, her researcher’s natural curiosity now fully roused. She reached for a medical tricorder and made a few cursory scans, noting that most of the vital organs—none of which showed more than the residual activity of the very recently deceased—didn’t seem overly mysterious. That wasn’t a surprise, since the humanoid body plan, including most of the internal [166] biological architecture it required, seemed to have arisen independently in so many disparate parts of the galaxy.

Next, she directed the med techs to set up the portable deep-tissue probe, which she carefully calibrated to focus on the creature’s unique biomolecular and DNA features. She tapped a few commands into the device’s keypad, instructing it to feed the results to her tricorder.

While the scanner worked and the results of the scans were being collated through the main sickbay computer and routed back to her tricorder, Chapel walked to the food slot in her office and ordered a cup of hot, black coffee. She sipped from her cup as she returned to the alien corpse. A green light on the portable probe reported that the first scans were finally complete. Still holding her cup, she thumbed the tricorder one-handed to see the results.

When she saw the initial readings, Chapel gagged on her coffee, almost dropping both cup and tricorder. She set them down on a nearby instrument tray while she coughed and sputtered, gently waving away Bersentes and Beck as they offered to help her. Those readings aren’t possible.After recovering her breath, she rechecked the settings on every piece of equipment involved in the scan, including the tricorder, which she replaced just in case it was malfunctioning.

This time accepting some assistance from her staff, Chapel ran the test four more times to eliminate any possibility of error. Nothing. changed. Her two assistants looked stunned, obviously having worked out the implications for themselves.

Chapel crossed to her office, where she tapped the intercom on her desk. “Chapel to Captain Sulu.”

“Sulu here.”

“I’ve just finished my initial examination of the Neyel corpse Fenlenn found. I haven’t even started the invasive autopsy yet, but I’ve already learned something rather ... startling about our alien friends.”