The fire faded, the observation lounge melted away, and then Quinn stood at the edge of another of T’Prynn’s memories, a spectator to her final moments with Anna Sandesjo—the assumed name of a surgically altered Klingon spy named Lurqal, who had been both T’Prynn’s double agent and her lover. The two women faced each other inside one of Vanguard’s auxiliary cargo bays, surrounded on all sides by a mountain of cargo containers. Anna stood inside one that had been modified to act as a scan-shielded residential module in which she would be smuggled off the station . . . aboard the Malacca.
“Just close the door,” Anna said.
T’Prynn yearned to reach out to her, to apologize for everything she had done—for using her, betraying her, abandoning her—but most of all for what she hadn’t done: admit the truth.
I loved you.
She and Quinn were back in the observation lounge. Scorched wreckage and burnt bodies floated past the towering transparent steel window. T’Prynn pressed her hand against it and felt hope and love burn away inside the distant crucible of her betrayal. Tears fell from her eyes as she looked at Quinn, who stared back at her, stricken and mute in the face of her anguish.
“I know exactly what you’re feeling,” she said.
He lifted one dirty, callused hand and with the delicate touch of a surgeon brushed the tears from her cheeks. He looked almost ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
It was a small gesture, but she felt the compassion in it, the unconditional understanding. She took his hands in hers and with a mental push moved them away from their places of pain to one of peace. Vanguard faded away to a Vulcan desertscape by night. “This is a place not far from where I grew up,” she told him. “Here I learned the tenets of Vulcan mental discipline. Though I can’t teach you all that I know, I can share with you some basic techniques to strengthen your mind and control your feelings, rather than allow them to dominate you.”
“Why would you do that for me?”
“To use a human idiom, you and I both ‘battle with demons.’ Mine are shame and rage; yours appear to be addiction and grief. I cannot cure you of these afflictions, but I can give you an edge in the battle to control your own mind—if you will let me.”
He nodded, and she felt his investment of trust in her. “Let’s get to it.”
When at last the mind-meld ended, and T’Prynn removed her hand from Quinn’s stubbled face, hours had passed. Quinn looked at her with a new understanding. Where once he had seen in her a tormentor or a puppetmaster, now he saw a woman who was as much a victim of circumstance as he. But even more than sympathy, he realized what he felt toward her was gratitude.
“I hope I was able to help you,” Quinn said as he got up.
T’Prynn stood and smoothed the front of her red minidress. “You have, Mister Quinn, a great deal. Starfleet and perhaps the Federation itself are in your debt.”
He chuckled. “You don’t say. Well, if someone wants to clear my bar tabs and float me a line of credit, that’d be a right fine way to say ‘thank you.’” Noting her reproachfully arched brow, he shrugged. “Just a suggestion. Forget I mentioned it.”
He turned and walked toward the door. She spoke as it opened ahead of him.
“Before you go . . .” She waited until he turned back, then she continued. “If you wish, I can help you block out your memories of Commander McLellan. It might make things easier for you.”
“No,” he said. “I lost her once. I don’t think I could take losing her again.”
She raised her hand in the Vulcan salute. “Live long and prosper, Mister Quinn.”
He smiled at her as he walked out the door.
“Right back atcha, darlin’.”
21
“Dammit, Frankie, you’ve got my word on this!” A host of disapproving stares from strangers scolded Tim Pennington for shouting—a faux pas when using one of Stars Landing’s public subspace comm kiosks in the middle of the station’s business day. He leaned closer to the screen and continued in an emphatic stage whisper, “The story’s one hundred percent legit!”
On the small, round cornered screen, Frankie Libertini looked less than convinced. Her thin lips were pursed, and she brushed a lock of her salt-and-pepper hair from her eyes with a hand whose fingernails looked as if they’d been gnawed on by a rabid badger. “Tim, let’s get a few things straight. First, I didn’t ask to be your editor, I lost a bar bet. Second, I don’t actually like you. And third, you’re not giving me a lot to go on here.”
Hand to chest, Pennington pantomimed a fatal wound to his tender feelings. “Frankie! You don’t like me? Say it ain’t so!” She was unamused, so he turned serious. “C’mon, Frankie! I gave you everything: names, dates, places. Hell, I even sent vids.”
“Yes, you did. And I was happy to see they were in focus for a change.” Her lips disappeared into a doubtful frown. “I’m not saying you haven’t done some first-rate work over the last few years, because you have. But look at this from my perspective, will you?”
He was ready to strangle her out of sheer frustration. “What am I looking at?”
“All your sources on this story are confidential. Which I could live with if the whole thing weren’t so damned controversial. I mean, if we run with this, and you’re wrong—”
“I’m not.”
“But if you are,” she continued with a silencing glare, “we could be talking about consequences a lot more extreme than just you getting booted off staff—though I can guarantee that would happen so fast it’ll make your pretty little head spin.”
An insincere smile seemed the appropriate response. “Thank you for noticing how pretty my head is. I spend hours making it like this just for you.”
“Listen to me: this is serious. When this story goes out, if it’s as solid as you claim, heads will roll. And I’m not talking in metaphors, Tim. You’re shining a light on the kinds of people who don’t think twice about solving disputes with duels to the death.” She pressed the side of her fist to her mouth and looked away, perhaps debating whether she wanted to say what was really on her mind. Then the look in her eyes turned fierce, and Pennington braced himself for what he’d known would be in the offing from the moment he submitted the story. “The thing is,” she said, “the last time you turned in a feature like this, it was the Bombay story.”
He felt like throwing his coffee, mug and all, through the vid screen. “That’s crap! The two stories have nothing in common!”
“Yes, they do, Tim. What they have in common is you. Not to mention they’re both politically explosive exposйs that affect the Federation’s diplomatic relationship with a foreign power, and they’re both predicated on the undocumented accounts of a bunch of anonymous sources whose stories can’t be fact-checked on our end. The whole thing’s a bomb waiting to go off. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t spike it right now.”
Leaning in as if they were locking horns, Pennington said, “Do it and I’ll go to INN.”
Pennington derived a perverse satisfaction from watching Libertini’s eyes narrow in contempt at the mention of the Interstellar News Network, the chief competitor of the Federation News Service. “You can’t do that,” she said. “You already gave the story to us.”
“If you spike it, the rights revert,” he shot back. “And my revised contract only gives you right of first refusal—not exclusivity. I don’t do work-for-hire anymore, Frankie.” Just to tweak her temper a degree further, he made a show of examining his own well-manicured fingernails. “So, what’s it gonna be? Run it and dominate the next two news cycles, or get aced by INN?”