Not that it mattered, of course. For all the lieutenant’s qualities, he was simply not T’Prynn.

Taking a seat along the tram’s port-side bulkhead, Sandesjo closed her eyes and put the irksome if harmless Xiong out of her mind. Her commute home would take only a few moments, yet she seized the opportunity for a brief respite, knowing that her next task was to communicate this latest plan of Jetanien’s to Turag. It would be difficult to convince her handler of the merits of having Lugok meet with the Tholians, particularly given the current state of animosity that existed between them and the empire.

Still, if Lugok were to take care with regard to the information he provided Ambassador Sesrene, working with the High Council to offer what the Tholian delegation wanted to hear, a few carefully dropped hints and suggestions might lead the Tholian plaQta’right where the empire wanted them to go.

After that, matters could proceed toward satisfactory resolution in a much more straightforward manner.

And where would that leave her? Once her assignment here was complete, what would she do? Her initial feeling was that she would at last be able to return home—finally able to shed her human identity and once again embrace the comfort of her natural visage as well as the culture from which she had been separated for far too long.

But, what of T’Prynn?

A reckoning was coming, of that Sandesjo was certain. The bond she had forged with the alluring Vulcan who inhabited her waking thoughts as well as her dreams already was at odds with her duty. What would happen when her feelings for T’Prynn collided head-on with what she must do here, and a choice had to be made for which path she must follow?

It was a question Sandesjo found herself asking with increasing frequency, and to which she had as yet no satisfactory answer.

24

“Ever see anything quite like this?” Dr. Fisher asked.

“Well,” said Dr. Jabilo M’Benga as he stepped closer to the body of the nude Denobulan male lying atop the examination table, “I’ve seen stabbings, puncture wounds, and impalements, but nothing on this scale.” At the center of the Denobulan’s chest, where his thoracic cavity and its associated organs were once harbored, only a gaping, circular hole remained. The polished steel of the table was clearly visible on the other side of the ghastly wound.

“Me neither,” Fisher replied, reaching to the shelf set against the bulkhead above the examination table to retrieve a fresh pair of sterile surgical gloves. Working his right hand into the first of the gloves, he added, “And after fifty years out here, that’s saying something.”

The two doctors currently were the only living occupants in Starbase 47’s morgue, itself an unassuming area of the station’s four-level medical complex. The morgue was housed within the hospital’s lowest deck and situated near Vanguard’s core and well away from more active sections of the station; its physical placement, Fisher knew, owed much more to the glacial pace of change regarding the traditions of medicine than it did to the facility’s function. While twenty-third-century postmortem medical practices had advanced far beyond the need for such archaic conventions as refrigeration and chemical preservatives thanks to the development of stasis fields and other such useful technology, what still remained was the superstitions and general discomfort of the living that seemed to accompany the physical presence of the dead.

Keep the morgue in the basement,Fisher mused. Can’t be giving anyone the creeps now, can we?As if to hammer home the point, even the temperature in this room seemed to be several degrees cooler than in the rest of the hospital.

As he returned to the subject of his study, however, even Fisher had to agree that the sight of this ill-fated being might be enough to give anyone pause. The Denobulan, stripped of all garments that might have indicated his rank or station in life, lay before them blank-faced and motionless on the examination table extending from one of a bank of stasis units along the rear wall of the morgue.

“I thought you might want to be in on this one, Jabilo,” Fisher said, “given that a physician attached to starship duty might run across this sort of thing more often than those of us bound to a mere starbase.”

Fisher could not resist the sly remark, which he tempered with inflections of good-natured sarcasm in the hope of couching somewhat the underlying edge of bitterness behind it. He had devoted a good deal of his time these past months preparing M’Benga to assume the role of chief medical officer for Starbase 47, a task to which Fisher attended with the true desire of ensuring that the station—and his dear friend Diego Reyes—was left with a capable physician and surgeon upon his impending retirement.

That desire was dashed, however, when the younger doctor filed a request with Starfleet Medical to transfer to the next available physician’s posting on a starship. Fisher had swallowed his disappointment long enough to sign off on M’Benga’s request—but had since put little effort into restraining his words on those occasions when his displeasure at the idea made itself known.

If M’Benga was fazed at all by the jab, he did not show it. Guess his tour of duty in a Vulcan medical ward lends him the occasional stoicism,Fisher thought, or simple indifference to my situation, at least.

“According to his file,” M’Benga said, already down to business, “Mr. Bohanon here was part of the research team on Erilon. Was he involved in an accident?”

Fisher shook his head. “He was attacked. At least, that’s what I was told. By what, I don’t know.” Once more he directed his attention to the massive hole in the Denobulan’s chest, which had relieved the victim of his lungs, his heart, and a significant portion of his spine.

Reaching out to trace the outline of the wound with a gloved finger, M’Benga said, “It looks almost surgical in its precision. Whatever did this, it struck him with tremendous force.”

“If not for the strength of his rib cage,” Fisher replied, “whatever hit him likely would have just torn him in two.” Tapping a control set into the wall next to the table, he activated a spotlight, which he then directed to better illuminate the cavity. “See how it tapers inward from front to back? He was stabbed—skewered, really—by something that got wider as it went deeper.” Dipping his own gloved hand inside the wound, he gently probed its edges with his fingers. “Its sides are uniform and smooth, but it doesn’t seem to be from some sort of heat cauterization.”

“What else might cause that?” M’Benga asked.

Shrugging, Fisher replied, “Acid. An alien enzyme, maybe. It could simply be a function of his being transported almost exactly at the time of his injury, and the transporter buffer just…tidied things up.”

“You’re suggesting he was literally beamed right off the object that killed him?” M’Benga frowned at that suggestion. “If that was the case, then why wasn’t that object, or even a piece of it, brought up with him?”

Fisher nodded in approval at the observation. “Good question, but you’re assuming the deadly force here was inflicted by a physical object. If he was hit—for example—by a shaped antiproton beam, that might explain a few things.”

“But wouldn’t such an attack leave some residual energy that might be detected at the wound site?” M’Benga asked.

“Not if the stasis field that Mr. Bohanon entered on the Endeavourshortly after his death nullified any energy traces we might hope to find.” Fisher smiled, noting the younger physician’s knit brow as he considered that possibility. “It’s a tangled web we attempt to unweave in an autopsy, Dr. M’Benga, but we have one thing going for us.”