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Frowning, Fisher shook his head. “Give the boy some credit, Rana. He’d know if you were shirking your responsibilities in order to ease tension, either what’s between you two or whatever he’s carrying around on his own. He’d never forgive you for that.”
“Now you’re talking like a doctor,” Desai said, rising from the bench. “I should make appointments to see you more often.”
“Come by anytime,” Fisher replied, smiling. “Don’t even need to call ahead first.” Standing up, he regarded her in that mentoring ma
After leaning in to give her a peck on the cheek, the doctor turned and walked out of the room, leaving Desai to finish gathering her belongings as well as her thoughts. In his customary fashion, she realized, Fisher had managed to offer comfort, confidence, and support, all without really conveying anything in the way of helpful advice.
How does he do that?
Meanwhile, Desai knew she was faced with a choice. She could strive ever more diligently to ensure that her relationship with Reyes did not suffer because of their sometimes conflicting responsibilities, or she could surrender to what many might consider to be inevitable. It would, after all, be easy to concentrate solely on her work, committing herself to the career she had chosen and allowing the professional gap to widen between them, taking with it any chance for personal harmony and happiness.
Most troubling to her, Desai realized, was that the question seemed to possess no easy answer.
8
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her quarters, her back straight and her hands clasped gently in her lap, T’Pry
And the second time, she failed. As with the first attempt, the serenity she sought within her own mind was interrupted by a single, pervasive demand.
Submit.
The voice of Sten, her long-dead fiancé, called to her as it had almost constantly since that day fifty-three years earlier when, while enveloped in the violent yet passionate embrace of Plak tow,T’Pry
Submit.
Since that moment, fueled as it had been by long-suppressed emotions run amok—anger, betrayal, unrequited lust—Sten’s living spirit had dwelled alongside T’Pry
Submit.
While there scarcely was a moment during which T’Pry
An intriguing notion, that,she mused.
Still, the occurrences were not unknown, and in the past T’Pry
Submit!
Despite their best efforts, however, the Adepts had been unable to rid her of Sten’s constant, hammering attacks against the fortification she had erected around her consciousness. All such attempts had failed, with the high masters informing T’Pry
I will not submit to you!Her mind all but screamed the rebuke. I will never surrender.
Deciding with no small amount of irritation that further attempts to meditate would meet with the same result, T’Pry
“Computer, lights.”
In immediate response to her commands, a quartet of recessed red lights, one set at eye level into each of the room’s four walls, glowed to life and cast their harsh crimson glare toward the ceiling. As she crossed her quarters to the small, austere desk that occupied the corner nearest her bed, she opened the closure of her meditation robe, removing the garment and folding it carefully before laying it on the edge of her bed. “Computer, display docking-bay departure schedule,” she said, pausing long enough to retrieve her uniform before continuing on to her desk.
Atop the workstation sat a standard-issue bulky gray computer terminal. A collection of data cards, each labeled and ordered with meticulous care, rested within the storage niche molded into the terminal’s base, but aside from that the polished surface of the wood desktop was bare. In accordance with T’Pry
Her plan to conscript the freighter pilot carried no guarantees of success, of course. She was confident that the Klingon sensor drone, one of however many such devices dispatched into the Taurus Reach by battle cruisers of the empire, would be at the coordinates she had calculated based on information gleaned from a furtive review of intercepted Klingon subspace communiqués. While she initially had doubted Qui