I went to Jinoteur hoping to get one up on her, he admitted to himself. Between her and Reyes, I can probably forget about ever getting this story published. At least, not in my lifetime.
T’Prynn said something to Quinn that seemed to catch the man off-guard. She’s certainly full of surprises, Pennington mused. He recalled witnessing, purely by chance, an abortive visit that T’Prynn had made to his Stars Landing apartment several weeks earlier. He hadn’t known the intent behind the visit then, and he still didn’t. She had behaved almost like someone plagued by remorse, but he found that hard to believe.
He checked his wrist chrono and glanced impatiently back at Quinn’s tête-à-tête with the Vulcan. Come on, wrap it up, he mentally implored them. There’s a grateful red-haired lass upstairs waiting to buy me a—
A flash of light filled the docking bay as an explosion thundered and shook the entire station. Red-alert klaxons whooped as pedestrians on the thoroughfare were thrown to the ground. Pennington plucked his recorder from his pocket and sprint-stumbled across the broad passageway toward the observation window. Around him Starfleet personnel and a handful of civilians were scrambling away from the gangways for emergency turbolifts and stairwells.
“Red alert,” declared a male voice over the station’s PA system. “Explosion in the main docking bay! DC and fire-control teams to bay three!”
Pennington hurdled over a row of chairs to reach the window in a minimum of running strides. He pointed his recorder at the pandemonium in the hangar beyond. Deep red flames and thick black smoke billowed from a massive rent in the ventral hull of the Starfleet cargo ship U.S.S. Malacca, docked at the next berth, ninety degrees around the station’s core from the Sagittarius. Mangled hull plates and a storm of loose debris tumbled in the zero-gravity environment of the docking bay. A string of secondary explosions ripped across the underside of the Malacca. The ship listed sharply away from its docking port, which buckled and began to tear apart.
Large clusters of scorched, twisted metal ricocheted off the transparent aluminum observation windows, the ceiling of the docking bay, and the core of the station. Pivoting slowly left to track the path of one especially huge piece of debris, Pennington halted as he and his recorder locked on to a more disturbing and horribly compelling sight.
Only a few meters away, standing between himself and Quinn, T’Prynn stared out the observation window at the fiery carnage. Her right hand was splayed against the window, a gesture of desperation. What fascinated Pennington was her expression—a fusion of shock, horror, and anguish—and the fact that she was, unmistakably, crying.
T’Prynn watched her lies and evasions burn away in the crucible of fire outside the window, leaving only the awful truth.
Staring into the smoldering cavity of the Malacca’s blasted cargo hull, she knew that denial was pointless. She had seen the container loaded onto the ship and had watched as the cargo hold was sealed for the vessel’s imminent departure from Vanguard.
Gazing into the hypnotic dance of flames and smoke, T’Prynn knew that Anna was dead.
Sten’s blade slashes my cheek—
Pretenses and façades fell away, stripping her of decades of mental defenses and a lifetime of indoctrinated emotional paralysis. All the carefully constructed excuses, all the old barriers to candor, crumbled in her psychic grasp.
I feel his pain as I bend his fingers backward and break them at the knuckles—
Debris dispersed in chaotic tumbles from the Malacca, trailing twists and ribbons of smoke through the docking bay.
For the sake of duty, T’Prynn had forfeited Anna’s life. She had not done the deed, but she had forced the Klingons’ hand. Anna’s life had been one imperiled for the sake of many. It was logical.
He rips hair from my scalp as I gouge his face—
There was no longer any reason for T’Prynn to lie—to Starfleet or to herself. Love—a taboo of unrivaled power in Vulcan culture, revered and reviled in equal measure—had been driving her mad, clouding her logic, feeding her passions, eroding her control. Anna had declared her own love openly several times, but only now could T’Prynn let herself realize that her lover had spoken the truth. A woman with two faces and two names, a Klingon in human guise, a spy turned traitor, had been the only honest thing in T’Prynn’s life.
She loved me.
Hideous pain shot through T’Prynn’s body—sharp jabs in her back, searing heat against her face, suffocating pressure stealing her breath. Her vision darkened until all she saw was the fire burning in the darkness.
She loved me…and I sacrificed her.
The truth looked back at her through the flames, its morbid grin a memento mori, its brilliant silence a scathing reproach. Love was lost, betrayed in the name of country. Hope was gone. All that remained was the fire.
She burns for me.
Grief twisted her face into a grotesque horror mask. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, her mouth contorted and agape.
Sten’s blade sinks into my chest—
Sorrow and rage combusted within her and erupted as a horrible roar, as her katra submerged into the starless night of her own, personal damnation.
Reyes walked alone through the confusion and chaos in the docking bay’s main thoroughfare. The towering emptiness of the concourse reinforced how small he felt, how powerless.
The bay three gangway was closed to everyone except pressure-suited fire-suppression teams and damage-control crews. Nonessential personnel had been evacuated from the level, leaving only the scores of injured lying supine on the deck and their attendant crowd of blue-jerseyed doctors, para-medics, and nurses kneeling beside them.
In the hangar, a massive cleanup operation was under way. Swarms of maintenance pods moved in closely choreographed patterns, collecting wreckage and, to Reyes’s dismay, bodies. Thirty-eight enlisted crew and nine officers had perished aboard the Malacca, and five Vanguard technicians had been killed by blast effects inside maintenance bay three.
Plus one undeclared passenger aboard the Malacca, Reyes brooded. There was no doubt in his mind that the presence of Klingon double agent Anna Sandesjo had been the motive for the attack on the cargo ship. How the assassination had been carried out was a question that would likely take an investigative team weeks or perhaps even months to determine.
The casualty most disconcerting to Reyes, however, was lying on the deck ahead of him.
Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn stared at him with unseeing eyes. Her head lolled to one side, and her body was splayed in an awkward pose. Fisher and M’Benga kneeled on either side of her, and the two physicians were backed by a team of several doctors and nurses. All the medical personnel seemed to be equipped with tricorders that whirred and oscillated with high-frequency tones. One paramedic, carrying a stretcher, approached from the direction opposite Reyes.
Several members of the medical team looked up as Reyes neared. Fisher looked over his shoulder at him.
Reyes asked, “How badly is she hurt?”
Fisher stood and turned to meet Reyes. The elderly doctor’s gaze was hard and unforgiving. “Physically, she’s fine,” he said. “This is something else.”
M’Benga stepped forward and joined the conversation.
“She appears to have suffered a total psychological collapse.”
“Caused by?”
“We’re not sure,” Fisher said, his unblinking glare of accusation trained on Reyes. He stepped closer and blatantly intruded on Reyes’s personal space. “We’d have a better idea what happened if we’d been given her medical history.”
Equally fearless, M’Benga added, “For a Vulcan to have that kind of breakdown, she would have to have been suffering a great deal, for a very long time. Her collapse in sickbay last week—”
“All right,” Reyes snapped. “I get the point.”