Still trying to work the burn out of his esophagus, M’Benga found T’Prynn’s declaration a bit hard to believe. If his guess was correct, she was masking her symptoms. To confront her about it in front of others, however, would be both improper and fruitless. Matters such as this required tremendous tact when dealing with a patient of any species, but especially so when interacting with a Vulcan. To the others in the room, M’Benga said with his injured rasp of a voice, “Leave us, please.”
The other doctors and the medical technician left quickly, taking the shocked medical student with them. Nurse Martinez hesitated, but M’Benga gave her a reassuring nod and said, “Close the door.” With obvious reluctance, she did as he asked, and he was alone in the exam room with T’Prynn.
She sat up and turned to drop her legs over the edge of the bed. He watched her with a clinical eye, seeking any of a number of subtle cues that were particular to Vulcan body language. In addition to a few signs of hidden discomfort, he detected ephemeral micro-expressions that reinforced his suspicion: a tensing near the mandibular joint, a twinge at the corner of her left eye, an inward curl of her upper lip. “You are in profound distress,” he said to her. “Please relate your symptoms to me.”
“I am merely fatigued,” she said, and he knew it was a lie. Stoic prevarications by patients were not uncommon, but in his experience Vulcans were unlikely to tell such naked falsehoods.
“Lieutenant Commander,” he said sternly, “minutes ago you collapsed in my ER. Your vital signs were highly irregular and not consistent with a diagnosis of fatigue.”
She met his stare. “What is your diagnosis, Doctor?”
“Though it doesn’t account for your unusually high pain indications, your other symptoms are consistent with the peak stages of Pon farr.”
T’Prynn pushed herself to a standing position and wavered slightly as she replied, “Absurd.”
M’Benga asked, “Are you close to your natural cycle?”
“No,” she said. “I am not.”
He lifted his eyebrows and tilted his head in a gesture of concession. “I see,” he said. Thinking back over the reams of medical literature he had studied in ShiKahr, he said, “There have been cases of premature Pon farr. Some were caused by external triggers, such as—”
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, trying to move past him. “But I am not undergoing Pon farr.”
Interposing himself between T’Prynn and the door, he said, “Wait a moment, Commander. Making a diagnosis is my job. I still need to ask you some questions. How old were you when you first experienced the Pon farr impulse?”
“That is a private matter,” she said.
He held up his hands to ward off her protest. “I know. But how can I be certain you’re not suffering premature Pon farr if I don’t even know when your normal cycle would kick in?”
“I have already told you, this is not Pon farr.”
Sensing that she would become only less cooperative if he continued on his present tack, he tried a different approach. “Very well. That still begs the question: Why did you collapse tonight? Was it something you ate? Something you drank? Did you experience any kind of unusual stress?”
His last inquiry provoked another fleeting twinge near her temple, but she kept her eyes locked with his. “As I said, Doctor: I am suffering from fatigue. If you will excuse me, I would prefer to recuperate in my quarters.” She stepped around him and headed for the door.
“I haven’t discharged you, Commander,” he said. “If you leave now, you’re doing so against medical advice.”
As she stepped through the door, she said, “So be it.” Then she was gone, and the door closed after her. Alone in the exam room, M’Benga realized that everything had happened so quickly that no one had been able to create a chart for T’Prynn. Now that she had left the hospital without answering even simple questions regarding her medical history, he would be forced to track them down himself through her official Starfleet medical records. Wonderful, he thought cynically. More paperwork.
“Commodore,” came Yeoman Greenfield’s summons over the intercom. “The Terra Courser’s about to leave spacedock.”
Reyes put down the data slate he had been perusing but not really absorbing, got up from his desk, and walked out to the shadowy operations center. The vast circular space loomed high and wide around him as he made his way up to the elevated supervisors’ deck in its center. Faint comm chatter and the muted voices of Vanguard’s flight-control team gave the command area a steady undercurrent of focused activity. Scores of eyes were turned upward, away from the pale blue glow of dozens of work screens, toward the center’s enormous display monitors, which formed an unbroken ring of moving images along the top third of the compartment’s nine-meter-high bulkheads.
Commander Jon Cooper looked up from his post at the hub as Reyes climbed the steps and bounded onto the supervisors’ deck. “Commodore,” Cooper said, straightening his posture. “What can we do for you?”
Lifting his arm and pointing at the bay one monitor, Reyes said, “Just came to observe a departure, Commander. As you were.” Reyes folded his hands behind his back and stood at ease while he watched the colony ship clear its moorings. Cooper made a show of working for a moment at his duty station before sidling over to a workstation beside Reyes. In a covert tone of voice he said, “The Sagittarius is in position, sir.”
“Good work, Coop. I want you to send a message for me.”
Tapping keys, Cooper said quietly, “Go ahead, sir.”
“Send to Starfleet Command, marked urgent: Sagittarius departure delayed. Require reinforcements for escort…. That’sall. Send it on scrambler India Tango Nine.”
Reyes hoped that the Klingons were not yet aware that Starfleet knew that its IT9 cipher had been broken. For now it could be used to feed the Klingons disinformation.
Cooper confirmed the order with a nod to the communications officer, Lieutenant Dunbar. “Message transmitted, sir.”
That ought to throw the Klingons off the scent for a few hours, Reyes mused. As long as the pilots on the Sagittarius and the Terra Courser don’t do anything stupid, we might just catch a break. Watching the bulky colony transport inch its way out of Vanguard’s spacedock, he tried not to think about the fact that the Sagittarius would have less than three meters’ clearance above and below as it snuck out beneath the Terra Courser’s massive bulk. One miscalculation, and all that would be left of the state-of-
the-art Starfleet scout ship would be a streak of paint on the transport’s belly and some mangled hull plates.
They’ll be fine, he told himself. The station’s tractor-beam systems were guiding both ships out of spacedock, with the main computer making any necessary adjustments to speed or direction. Pilot error was all but eliminated from the equation. Despite knowing that, dread still twisted in Reyes’s gut.
He wondered if there was any way the Sagittarius or her crew could possibly be ready for what was ahead of them on Jinoteur. With each new discovery Starfleet made in the Taurus Reach, the stakes of that exploration seemed to increase. Ravanar, Erilon, and Palgrenax had been stepping stones to something larger, and Reyes was convinced that the something was Jinoteur. Whatever we woke up is willing to destroy starships and blow up planets to keep us in the dark, he brooded. How’s it going to react when we show up on its doorstep?
Reyes knew he had just sent Captain Nassir and his crew into grave danger, but watching the Terra Courser clear the docking bay doors into open space, he knew that the people he was truly frightened for were the colonists on Gamma Tauri IV, and most of all their leader, the woman who had broken his heart seven years ago. We should warn them, protested his conscience. At least Nassir’s people know they’re in danger. His sense of duty shot back, There’s no way to evacuate the colonists without compromising Operation Vanguard. You can’t tell them about the threat without revealing everything—and once it’s public, every moron with a stardrive will come runnin’, guns blazin’, lookin’ to get rich quick or die trying. Emphasis on the “die trying.”