M’Benga shook his head. “That still wouldn’t explain the absence of accurate baseline data. Without that, it’s impossible for us to tell the difference between chronic conditions and acute ones, and we have no basis for detecting anomalies in her vital statistics. Scans I made during her recent visit to the ER suggested some serious neurochemical imbalances, but I have no way to make a comparative analysis.”
“What are you asking for, Doctor?”
“You have the rank and security clearance to override the classification order,” M’Benga said. “I’m asking you to release Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn’s authentic, unexpurgated medical record, if not to the main medical archive, then on a need-to-know basis. Sir, I have reason to believe she’s suffering from a long-term condition that requires treatment, but I can’t make an informed diagnosis until I have all the facts—and I need your help to get them.”
T’Prynn’s medical file appeared on Reyes’s monitor; in a glance he noted that it looked remarkably spare in details. As the doctor had said, the file had been marked as classified by Starfleet Intelligence. What alarmed him, however, was the identity of the person who had classified it: T’Prynn herself.
There’s got to be a regulation against that, Reyes figured. Considering the serious nature of the doctor’s allegations, he wondered whether he ought to inform M’Benga of T’Prynn’s role in classifying her own medical history. The consequences loomed large in his deliberations. No doubt Zeke’ll want an investigation, Reyes knew. They could take T’Prynn off active duty, hold an inquest—hell, Starfleet Medical might even be able to have her court-martialed. He thought of all the crises that were unfolding on every front at that moment: the Sagittarius downed on Jinoteur and dependent on one of T’Prynn’s unofficial “assets” for its rescue; a clandestine sabotage-
by-proxy operation on Borzha II that Reyes had set in motion from a plan drafted by T’Prynn; and the downward spiral into violence that was threatening to consume the New Boulder colony on Gamma Tauri IV, and hundreds of Starfleet personnel with it. Of all the possible moments to lose T’Prynn’s counsel and expertise, this was one of the worst Reyes could imagine.
If she sealed her own records, she must have had a good reason, Reyes convinced himself. You have to trust her.
He blanked her information from his screen and looked up at M’Benga. “I’m sorry, Doctor…. Request denied.”
17
Finding tools aboard the Tholian battleship had been both more and less difficult than Xiong had expected.
Several compartments off the main engineering deck were packed with a variety of devices, all formed of substances very similar to the glasslike compound of which the bulkheads were made. Large tools and small tools, some shaped like levers and others like hooks or forks, lined the bulkheads. Locating them had taken less than an hour.
Since then, Xiong had spent three hours trying to figure out what any of the devices did or how he might activate them. Pressing their surfaces at various points had been ineffectual. Touching them against bulkheads or machinery or each other had proved equally futile. He had tried pulling them apart, to no avail. In a moment that had been half inspiration and half desperation, he had probed the bulkheads of the engineering deck seeking apertures into which one or more of the devices might be inserted, only to find them solid, smooth, and unyielding.
Though he had long considered himself to be handy with tools, he had begun to realize that in his hands the Tholian gadgets were little more than a collection of exotic clubs. I give up, he decided, and he left the engineering deck.
After slogging up to the passageway intersection on the main deck above, he checked his air gauge. It showed less than five hours remaining. As much as he tried to convince himself that five hours would be plenty of time to find a way off the ship and safely to the planet’s surface, he found it impossible to forget that he had already been there for five hours without making any significant progress whatsoever.
Stay calm, he told himself. Keep it together. Keep moving.
He worked his way aft, checking each open compartment for any sign of loose equipment. In the aft quarter of the ship he found another intersection that led to a higher deck, and he followed it. The obsidian bulkheads on the upper deck were dotted at irregular intervals with asymmetrical fixtures of corrugated metal. Xiong scrutinized one closely but was unable to determine what purpose, if any, it served.
Most of the compartments he inspected while passing by were packed with blocky crystalline pedestals, which were arranged around the rooms’ perimeters or grouped in trilateral formations. He suspected that these might be analogous to any of several duty stations aboard a Federation starship, such as a fire-control center or an environmental support office. One extremely large compartment was heavily partitioned and seemed designed for quarantine procedures. Either a sickbay or a science lab, Xiong concluded, and he kept moving.
Then he passed a nondescript chamber. After doing a quick double-take he stopped and backed up. He entered slowly, as if sensing that there was something special about this place. It had the focused design and economical aesthetic that he knew Tholians associated with rituals. In its center were two wide crystalline platforms that appeared to be melded with the deck. On each platform was a meter-wide hexagon of a different kind of crystalline substance. To Xiong’s surprise, the hexagon was only an empty frame with what appeared to be a handle attached to its central cross-brace. He extended one finger and tried to push it through the empty space in the frame. A flash-crackle of energy repulsed his hand and knocked him backward as it sent a loud burst of static over his helmet’s transceiver.
Shake it off, he thought, staggering forward toward the platform once again. You’re all right; get it together, Ming.
On his second approach he avoided the hexagons and focused on the peculiar, slender objects beside them. He crouched to examine the closer one. It appeared to be made of the obsidian bulkhead substance; roughly twenty-five centimeters long, it looked like a handle for a tool. As he tilted his head to look at it from a slightly lower angle, a glint of light on a microthin blade emanating from the object pierced the shimmering haze of the Tholian ship’s superheated, hyperdense atmosphere.
Now he understood. It was a sword.
A difference of a few degrees could render the blade all but invisible. After studying it for a few minutes, Xiong deduced that it was likely composed of monofilaments. Its meter-long edge was likely so atomically fine that it could cut through nearly anything.
On a hunch, he grasped the haft of the weapon with great care, turned it in his grip so that the edge was poised to cut, and lowered its tip slowly to the deck. He barely felt the vibration of contact. Pivoting slowly, he watched a gouge appear in the black perfection of the obsidian floor. The glimmer of the blade came and went from his vision as he inscribed the cut in a half circle around himself. Lifting the monoblade from the deck, he grinned. Yes, this’ll do nicely.
Carrying it back to the escape pod he had found was more nerve-racking than he had expected. Every time the unfamiliar atmosphere of the Tholian ship caused a slight wobble in his step, he worried that he might amputate a digit or a limb or his head with one careless turn of his wrist. Most of the time he couldn’t really see the blade he was carrying, which made navigating corners and portals hazardous.
He stopped when he reached the hexagonal entrance to the escape pod. Space inside the pod was limited. One careless turn of the monoblade inside there could rupture its hull and render it useless. Worse, the interior of the pod was a zero-gravity environment, which would make it difficult to get the necessary leverage to control the blade’s movement while cutting. It would take only one fumble to cut himself in half while using the blade to access the systems inside the pod’s bulkhead.