She sat a moment, absorbing this. “So I don’t have to come back?”

“Not unless you want to.”

“Well,” she said. “I might, from time to time. Things come up. But you know something?”

“What?”

“Sometimes, I talk to you. In my head,” she added hastily. “I mean, I’m not nuts, I don’t hear voices. But sometimes, lately, I hear you making comments and, sometimes,” she gave him a lopsided smile, “I just tell you where to go.”

“Does this bother you?”

“It should, but it doesn’t. I’ve been arguing so much with myself for so long, it’s kind of nice to have someone new in there.”

Tyvan gave a delighted laugh. “I’ll probably go away eventually, when my opinion stops mattering so much.”

“Probably.” She paused, head cocked. “Does becoming obsolete bother you?”

“No. I’m not a crutch. My job is to become obsolete.”

They shared a brief moment of comfortable silence. Then Bat-Levi smiled, rose, and moved for the door.

“Okay then, thanks. But I’d better get dressed. The captain will have our hides if we’re late.” She hesitated then said, “By the way, you haven’t said anything.”

Tyvan’s brow furrowed. “About?”

In reply, Bat-Levi extended and flexed her left arm. Did it again, twice. Then she saw the confusion on Tyvan’s face clear.

“Wait,” he said. “Your servos. There’s no noise.”

Bat-Levi laughed hugely. “The ship’s not the only thing that needed repairs.”

“My God,” McCoy complained peevishly, “you’re as twitchy as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockers.”

“Mac,” Stern flung over her shoulder as she palmed open her closet, “I told you before. I have to get moving, or I’m going to be late.”

“Making me dizzy, what you flitting back and forth like a bumblebee.”

“Then use audio next time, you don’t like the view,” said Stern, pawing first through her collection of uniforms, and then an array of more casual slacks and a few skirts. She made disgusted sounds. “Now where I did put that thing?”

“You could be better organized.”

“I’m a doctor,” she grumbled, “not a chambermaid. I could’ve sworn I put…ah!” Stern yanked out her dress tunic then dove back for her dress slacks. “Now if I can just find my boots…”

“My God, woman.” McCoy craned his neck as if he could see around the corner of the viewscreen, which he couldn’t. “Are you getting disrobed?”

“Listen to you.” Stern’s fingers fumbled with her belt buckle. “It’s not as if you haven’t seen this sort of thing before.”

“Only in an official capacity. But if you’re offering, come over here where…”

Stern stripped off her uniform tunic. “Watch it, Mac.”

“I’m not the one doing a striptease. Anyway, I thought you’d be interested.”

“I am.You just pick the damnedest times, that’s all.”

“Then why not hop on over, and we can visit? You owe me bourbon.”

“Mac, I’m at a starbase about a gazillion light years away. It’s not as if I’m next door. I’ll get back to Earth soon enough and then we can visit, have a couple drinks.”

“Don’t forget, you owe me an R and R. I aim to collect.”

“I haven’t, and you will.”

“Promises, promises.” McCoy still sounded miffed. “When are you shipping out?”

“Tomorrow.” Stern stepped first her right then her left foot into her dress uniform trousers and pulled. “Repairs are just about done. All we’re waiting on is that transfer shuttle.”

McCoy mmmed. “By the way, I heard a rumor that someone on your ship slipped a subcu transponder into that Halak fellow.”

Now it was Stern’s turn to mmm.She did so as she pulled her hair free of her standard ponytail and began pulling a brush through. Her hair crackled with static electricity and she made a mental note to talk to environmental engineering about adjusting the humidity in her quarters. Too damn dry. “That’s what they say.”

“You wouldn’t happen…”

“Mac,” Stern paused, brush in hand, “open channel.”

“Ah. Well, I hope our little talk about vitamins was helpful.”

Stern grinned at her mirror image. “Very. So what were you so hot to tell me?”

“Oh, nothing much. Only that the data your captain forwarded on to the folks here at Command? From that old tomb site? Looks mighty old. More than ancient: We’re talking thousands of years.”

“Wait a minute.” Stern turned until she was looking at McCoy, properly. “You’re a doctor, not a xenoarchaeologist. Why are you even involved with this?”

McCoy held up a hand. “Hold your horses; it’ll all come clear. Like I said, this place was old. We’re talking either pre-Hebitian, or the Hebitians are a hell of a lot older than even the Cardassians know.”

“Or claim.” Turning back to her holomirror, Stern touched the controls. The mirror shimmered, and then she was looking at the back of her head. She gathered her hair together in her left hand while her right stirred through an array of elastics. “They’re not exactly forthcoming. So you’re saying that the natives were Hebitians?”

“No, and we’re not entirely sure we’re talking Hebitian either, but that’s the working hypothesis. Anyway, this is where it gets pretty interesting. It looks like the natives were an entirely different species. Tomb drawings show two distinct types of people: the ones that were descendents of those Night Kings, and everybody else. So probably there was an indigenous population on the planet, but one that was very primitive by Hebitian standards. Now there’s always been a suspicion that at least some of the Hebitians were telepaths. Even the Cardassian legends talk about that a little. But I don’t think that, on the basis of what you and your captain saw, we can say that every Hebitian telepath was all sweetness and light.”

“Amen to that.” Stern smoothed stray hairs back then keyed in for her holomirror to show alternate views: back, front, each side of her head. She twiddled with her ponytail, centering it snugly against the nape of her neck. “Rogue telepaths, right?”

“Or just common criminals. So how do you control a telepath gone sour? You can either kill him, and that doesn’t seem to have been the Hebitian style, or you can exile him somehow, put him on ice, like stasis only telepath-style. Here, they reduced their neural patterns somehow and put them into a containment field.”

“Like a genie in a bottle.”

“Only these genies got out. Probably an accident: one of these rogues figuring out that a person with a certain genetic makeup could act as a receptacle. So breed a select line of those people but make it mystical, like a state religion, and these rogues get their chance, now and again, to go free. Except you’d dilute the stock over time; happens when there’s a large population. And genetics is funny business. Too much inbreeding, you make the stock weak, and too much mixing with the rest of the gene pool and your chances of getting exactly what you want go down.”

“Makes sense.” Stern replaced her brush and then popped open another drawer and began affixing her pips to her uniform collar. “It would explain the need for the mask.”

“Yup. So here’s the kicker and where you have to use your imagination, take a couple leaps of faith here. Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that these rogues were Hebitian and the Hebitians, as a species, were telepaths. Some were good; some were bad. The Cardassians say they’re descendants of the Hebitians. But Vulcans can’t mind-meld with Cardassians and there are no Cardassian telepaths. None. Zip. Not a one. Okay, your turn.”

“Oh, Mac, that’s a gimme.” Stern turned and ticked off her conclusions on her fingers. “It’s obvious. The Cardassians aren’tdescendants of the Hebitians, but they may have evolved parallelto the Hebitians. Only the Hebitians were the stronger, master race. The Cardassians revered the Hebitians, maybe not like gods, but they build up this religion around access to a higher spiritual Oversoul, Overmind, whatever you want to call it. You know those murals they have around Lakarian City?”