Harbinger

“A compelling argument, Mr. Liverakos. Let’s go back.” The trio returned to the table. Desai set down the motion for termination and recomposed her demeanor to address the other officers. “This inquiry is in recess pending review of defense counsel’s motion. I’ll hear Lieutenant Moyer’s rebuttal in my office tomorrow at 1400 hours. Adjourned.” She punctuated her declaration with a quick tap of her bell.

The room emptied quickly. Desai gathered her papers into a slim hard-shell case. Moyer and Liverakos paused on their way out to trade quips under their breath. Reyes, Desai noticed, stepped aside with T’Pry

Desai dismissed both queries. The answer, she decided, was probably quite simple: T’Pry

Walking alone back to her office, she couldn’t shake the intuitive hunch that T’Pry

As a lawyer, Desai had learned to trust the law, protocol, procedure, and precedents. But before she was a lawyer she had been a detective with the JAG Corps’s Criminal Investigation Division, and before that she had started her Starfleet career as a security officer. In the wardroom, Liverakos had spoken dismissively of “mere speculation,” but hunches were all about speculation, and being a detective had taught Desai that hunches sometimes took a case farther than evidence.

She had a hunch that T’Pry

Believing it was easy. Proving it would be hard.

The best that Desai could hope for was that playing her hunch would do more good than harm. In her experience, the law was a blunt and clumsy instrument with which to seek the truth.

Unfortunately, it was the only one she had.

It would have to do, for now.

Being dragged by my hair across white-hot coals.

Stepping off the turbolift, T’Pry

A blade piercing my lung.

She knew that her pain was psychosomatic, nothing more than a figment of her imagination. The old Vulcan masters had taught her that there can be no pain if one’s mind does not acknowledge it. If one denied it expression, they said, if one could attune oneself to the body’s true signals, even the most horrific forms of physical suffering could be quelled from within.

Fingernails gouging a path across my cheek.

Pride and instinct made her hide her agony. She didn’t speak of it. Comrades and acquaintances never saw anything amiss, no momentary flickers of discomfort in her eyes, no fleeting twinges or tics to betray her i

The flashing slice of a lirpa across my abdomen.

One step followed another, bringing her at last to the entrance of docking bay ninety-two. The door was locked. She entered her security bypass code, and its two halves parted with a thin pneumatic hiss.

Parked in the middle of the small but austere hangar was Cervantes Qui

The sharp clacks of her boots on the gunmetal-gray deck echoed loudly in the confined, bare-walled space. Ceasing his labors, Qui

“You said you had information.”

“I said I needed to talk to you,” Qui

Skull-cracking pressure ballooning behind my eyes.

“Explain,” she said, in a tone harsher than what she had intended. When the pain flared, her patience faded and anger proved its power to her, over and over again.

“A reporter,” Qui

The splintering break of a knuckle bent backward.

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing, I left him pickin’ up his teeth off the floor.”

Emerald hues of panic as his hands grip my throat.

“How much did he seem to know?”

“Hard to say.” Qui

“I see.” That news concerned T’Pry

“Sure,” Qui

“Do you require medical assistance, Mr. Qui

“Nah,” he half-growled. “Just a bucket and some shut-eye.”

Not wanting to visualize the rest of Qui

The coppery tang of my own blood pooling in my mouth.

Fifty-three years had not dimmed the memories. They haunted her, amplified each year by the injustice of being deprived of the purgative release of Pon farr. Part of her psyche remained trapped in the final moments of that long-ago death struggle, the moment of her emancipation, the begi

Sten’s voice, demanding my surrender to his passions.

Her face was a portrait of stoic calm for the handful of engineering technicians who rode with her to level twenty-nine, and for the communications officer who remained on the turbolift after T’Pry

The crack of Sten’s neck snapping sideways in my grasp.