Sandesjo got up from the edge of the bed. “I’m already packed,” she said, moving toward a rolling luggage bag tucked against the wall in the corner.
“Leave it,” Verheiden told her. “You need to make a clean break—the past stays here.”
Having already surrendered everything that had mattered to her, Sandesjo did as she was told. She stepped past the agents into the passageway, which was illuminated by widely spaced, backlit blue panels. The air inside was cooler and drier than in the temporary quarters where she had been living for the past several days. Its claustrophobic confines beat with the low pulse of ventilation systems, hissed with the rush of waste-removal plumbing, and echoed with the regular patter of their footfalls on the metal floor plates.
They passed three junctions as they followed the gradual curve of the passage. Before reaching a fourth junction, Cofell opened another disguised panel, revealing a narrow switch-back staircase. “Eight levels down,” she said, and led the way into the stairwell. Sandesjo followed her, and Verheiden closed the hidden panel behind them.
Their descent was steady and mechanical. Grated metal steps and a narrow gap between the sides of the switchback afforded Sandesjo a view of the space that loomed above her and yawned beneath her. She estimated that the hidden staircase reached from somewhere inside the operations center at the top of Vanguard’s command tower to a level deep inside the station’s power-generation facility in the lower core.
Eight levels down, Cofell unlocked and opened another panel that led into a new maintenance passageway. In a routine that had quickly become familiar, she and Sandesjo stepped clear while Verheiden secured the hatch they had just passed through. Then they continued through the narrow channel between gray walls packed with deeply thrumming machinery.
The uniformity of the surfaces and passages and junctions was disorienting. Only the bulkhead numbers, changing in an orderly and logical manner, gave Sandesjo any sense of where they were inside the station. By her reckoning they were behind the maintenance bays inside the core, along the station’s primary docking bay. Finally they turned left into a short passage that terminated at a bulkhead. Cofell unlocked it, opened it, and stepped through.
Sandesjo exited the passageway into a small enclosed space behind a stack of cargo containers in one of the station’s auxiliary cargo bays. Because the maintenance area was reserved for Starfleet vessels, the containers there were packed with classified or restricted military components and materiel.
Behind her, Verheiden halted a few paces shy of the open hatch. As soon as Sandesjo was clear, Cofell stepped back through the hatch and closed it. For a moment Sandesjo thought that she had been abandoned in an empty cargo bay—then the back panel of the container in front of her detached with a hydraulic hiss and slowly lowered open. She stepped back out of its way. When it was slightly more than half open she glanced over its top edge…and saw T’Prynn standing inside what looked like a Spartan but comfortable windowless apartment with no door.
The panel touched down on the deck with a metallic scrape and a resounding boom.
Rage and longing twisted together inside Sandesjo’s chest and left her speechless. She yearned to reach out to T’Prynn, to seek her touch one last time, but her pride blazed brightly, stung by the Vulcan’s recent betrayal.
T’Prynn spoke as she walked down the ramp toward Sandesjo. “This unit has been equipped to sustain you for a prolonged journey. It is provisioned with food customized for your true physiology, and its climate controls are adjustable. Water and air will be filtered and recycled.”
She stopped in front of Sandesjo, who refused to make eye contact. Sandesjo stepped around the Vulcan and walked halfway up the ramp. She paused. “It’s a lovely jail cell.”
“Its affect is regrettable but necessary for security purposes,” T’Prynn said. “No one aboard your transport vessel will know that you are inside. Only I and the agents who will greet you at your destination will know of your presence.”
Examining its multilayered metallic skin, Sandesjo speculated, “Scan-shielded duranium composites?”
“Yes,” T’Prynn said.
Sandesjo walked the rest of the way inside the box and stood in the center of its main room. A single-person bed was pressed against the wall on the right. Beside it was a low table. A round-cornered viewscreen was mounted on an adjustable swing arm attached to the wall near the foot of the bed. Tucked into a corner on the other side of the compartment were a food slot and a waste reclamation slot. In the middle of the rear wall was an open door leading to a lavatory and shower. Much of the rest of the interior volume of the large shipping container appeared to be filled with life-support apparatus.
T’Prynn watched Sandesjo fiddle for a moment with the viewscreen. “A variety of prerecorded audiovisual material has been made available for you,” she said, “as well as a broad selection of printed matter. I regret that our catalog of original Klingon works is scarce.”
Every attempted kindness by T’Prynn felt like the twist of an emotional knife in Sandesjo’s heart. Baring her hostility, she said, “I guess you thought of everything.”
“I saw to necessities,” T’Prynn said.
Sandesjo had thought she would have more to say to T’Prynn, but as she looked at her she was unable to put words to her feelings. Bitterness was tangled up with desire, sorrow with resentment, hopelessness with denial. All that was left to her was surrender. “Just close the door,” she said.
For a moment she felt as if T’Prynn might say something, but then the Vulcan took a small device from her belt and pressed one of its buttons. With a low groan and grind, the open side of the container slowly lifted. Sandesjo thought she saw a glimmer of regret on T’Prynn’s face, but then the panel blocked her view and shut with a hollow thud.
All was silent inside Sandesjo’s dull gray purgatory. She sat on the bed and folded her hands across her lap. No one had told her how long she would be inside this portable prison, or even where she was going. Probably some remote dustball at the far end of the Federation, she predicted pessimistically.
A new name, a new face, a new beginning—these were three things she wanted no part of. She had already endured all of them when she gave up being Lurqal and became Anna Sandesjo. How was she to submerge into yet another identity, yet another life?
I’ve already forgotten what I used to look like, she thought. Now I probably won’t even recognize the sound of my own voice. I’ll look in the mirror and see a stranger.
She growled and shook off the numbing comfort of self-pity. Stop whining like a petaQ, she scolded herself. You’ve done this before, you can do it again. Wild things don’t feel sorry for themselves. Be a Klingon.
From outside the container came a bump and a slight lurch. She was in motion. Sandesjo wanted to be brave, to face her circumstances head-on without fear or mercy, and to believe that she was participating in her own destiny. But bouncing around inside a sealed box, being shipped away like an unwanted parcel, she thought of T’Prynn and realized what she was—and what she had been from the moment she first fell in love: a prisoner. Worst of all, she had been condemned, not to a life in love’s thrall or even to death in its name, but to oblivion.
She lay back on the bed and folded her hands behind her head. Like any prisoner, she knew that her future was out of her hands. There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened.
Cervantes Quinn didn’t feel like himself. For one thing, he was sober. He also had showered and shaved, and his clothes were mostly clean. In addition, and to his own surprise, he had shorn off his tangled, shoulder-length white locks, leaving him with a pale gray shadow of stubble covering his round head.
“You look like you’re going to a job interview,” Pennington joked as they walked together along Vanguard’s main hangar deck, where the Sagittarius was berthed.