“Kalinda ...” The very notion was so ridiculous that he didn’t even know where to begin. “Kalinda, Robin was assigned to work with me as my aide, that’s all. Now I suppose it’s natural that, when two people work together, deeper feelings can emerge, but it’s artificial. It’s not real. It’s just a result of proximity.”

“I know the difference between artifice and reality, Cwan. I ...”

Abruptly she stopped talking, seeming short of breath. He swiveled his chair to face her, took her by the arm, called her name. His lungs were starting to feel heavy, his head lighter than before. Everything suddenly seemed very amusing for some reason, but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why. He realized distantly that this wasn’t something that had occurred all of a sudden. It had gradually been building toward this point, and he was simply becoming aware of it.

He visualized his willpower as a sword, hacking through the fog that was hanging over his ability to concentrate. There was a tight squeezing on his hand and he realized it was Kalinda. Odd. He’d forgotten she was there for a moment. “Don’t say anything,” he told her.

She ignored him. “Robin loves you, Cwan,” she said, fighting to enunciate each word. “It’s real. And pure. And genuine.”

“Kally ... she doesn’t even like me.”

Kalinda smiled at that. “You don’t have to like someone to love them, Cwan. That’s ... the funny thing about love ...”

He nodded, supposing that she was right. He wanted to ask her about things that she might have regretted, might have done differently. It seemed only fair. He called her name, softly first and then more loudly, but she wasn’t responding. She looked exhausted. Or maybe ...

He shook her. She responded, but very limply, her hand trying to brush away his in annoyance. He had a dim sense that a good deal of time had passed since she’d last spoken, but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure of anything, except that he was actually starting to hear the pounding of his own heart.

I wonder how things could possibly get worse,he said, except he wasn’t certain whether he’d uttered the words aloud or just thought them.

Si Cwan became convinced that he was starting to hallucinate, because it seemed as if space itself was wavering in front of him. Then he leaned forward, blinking his eyes furiously, rubbing at them. He wasn’t wrong; something was occurring dead ahead.

Except it had nothing to do with space itself. Something was materializing in front of them. A vessel of some kind, with great flared wings and some type of extended “neck,” but it was like none he’d seen before, and yet the markings of it were familiar as well. He fought with his floating mind to focus on what was happening, sift through the knowledge there and pull up an answer to what he was witnessing.

The ship was slowly coming toward them, and he pushed away random images of Robin Lefler—he couldn’t even recall why he was thinking of her—to arrive at a realization that did not exactly fill him with cheer.

“Romulans,” he whispered. “You know ... the ‘how can it get worse’ thing ... that was intended to be rhetorical ...”

And as the oncoming Romulan ship bore down on him, he slipped away into blackness.

EXCALIBUR

I.

ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES Mackenzie Calhoun had found to being captain was that people and situations tended to come to him. Whether he was seated in his command chair, gathering senior crew in his ready room, or summoning pertinent advisors into a conference lounge, he was the one around whom others gathered. There was a certain elegance to that status.

So it was an unusual sensation for Calhoun to be pounding down the corridors of the Excaliburin response to an urgent summons from Holodeck A. Soleta had summarized the situation for him, and it barely made any sense to him. But he knew that he had to see it for himself. As a result, crewmen were greeted with the unaccustomed sight of their captain running fast past them. Some of them seemed compelled to say “Hello, sir,” or something similarly innocuous. Calhoun ignored them all, hoping that he wasn’t going to be putting people’s noses out of joint, and promising himself he wouldn’t worry about it too much.

He skidded slightly as he rounded one corner, righted himself before he could take an undignified tumble, ran halfway down another corridor, and arrived at Holodeck A. The doors slid open and he entered without having any real idea what he was going to be witnessing.

Robin Lefler was there, looking as if she’d just been whacked in the face with a tree branch. Soleta was endeavoring to maintain her customary inscrutability, but she was a bit easier to read than Selar was when it came to Vulcan dispassion, and so Calhoun could see that she was quite shaken. Also there was Burgoyne, who must have come as a result of being summoned by either Lefler or Soleta—the latter, most likely—since hir status as the most knowledgeable engineer on the ship might well be of use.

And, as advertised, Morgan was standing there as well, her arms folded, looking extremely impatient. The holodeck appeared shut down, its crisscrossing yellow lines along the floor and ceiling as always. Yet there was Morgan, big as life ... or, in this case, a semblance of life.

The moment Calhoun entered, she turned her full attention to him. “You jettisonedmy body?”she said with open incredulity. “You authorized that, Captain? Did it never occur to you that I might not be finished with it?”

Calhoun stared at her for a long moment and then, without looking away from her, addressed everyone else standing there. “If this is a joke, it’s in exceptionally poor taste.”

“It’s no joke, Captain,” Soleta informed him. “She’s in the computer system.”

“She isthe computer system,” Burgoyne amended. “Her engrams are imprinted throughout the database of the Excalibur.”

“Can we purge the system and reboot?” asked Calhoun.

The question appeared to jolt Lefler from her stupor. “No! You can’t!”she said, turning to Calhoun.

“I think I can,” he countered. “I think I have that right, what with being captain and all. ...”

“What a staggeringly disheartening lack of curiosity on your part, Captain,” said “Morgan.” “Somehow I expected more of you. You disappoint me.”

It was a disconcerting sensation for Calhoun. He’d never been scolded by a hologram before. “Number one, I can live with disappointment. Number two, I haven’t made any decisions yet as to how I’ll handle this. And number three,” and he looked to Burgoyne, “what exactly isthis ... this? It’s not really her ... is it?”

“That’s open to debate,” Morgan said, and before Calhoun could cut her off, she spoke right over him. He was so taken aback that he said nothing, just listened. “Remember we were hooked up to those devices during the time that the saucer section was separated from the main hull. The things that enabled us to have holographic bodies on the battle bridge while we were connected to them, via relays, from the saucer section bridge.”

“Of course I remember,” he said, taking care not to address it by name. Doing so gave it a status and hold on reality that he wasn’t at all prepared to provide.

“Well, when my body got hit by the energy surge blasting out of McHenry’s station, my mind was still literally in two places at once. So I became sort of,” and she shrugged, “stuck. I’m in permanent limbo here.”

“We have to do something,” Robin said urgently.

“Can’t we do something? We can ... we can go try and find her body ...” Morgan took a step toward her and Robin reflexively moved back, obviously still spooked about the entire matter. The simulacrum of her mother stopped in its place and smiled understandingly. “Honey ... the forces that combined to put me in this position were a one-in-a-million combination. I doubt they could be duplicated. And truthfully, even if my body could be found—which I doubt—it’s beyond the ability of medical science to revive.”