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Then she closed her mouth and shook her head. “Not bad.”

“I beg your pardon?” Russell was moving toward the exit, but stopped to find out what Crusher meant.

Crusher stood up, not wanting to be in a position where she looked up at Russell. “Not bad at all. If you ever give up medicine—well, I’ll dance a jig, for one thing, but you’ll also have a career in rhetoric available to you. That was a very nice job of turning my argument against me. I’m sure you intended it to sting, and for a moment there, it did. You wanted the high and mighty Beverly Crusher to see that she’s no better than the mean and nasty Toby Russell whom she so unfairly condemns. There’s only one problem.” Crusher placed her hands flat against her desk, mainly to keep her from balling them into fists. “I argued against the procedure, but Captain Picard ordered me to implement it anyhow. And do you know why?”

“It was expedient?” Russell asked, a bit snidely.

“No—because it saved lives. People were being killed on the surface—an entire population with no conception of how to cope with violent emotions suddenly found itself feeling passions it had no capacity to process. We needed a quick and dirty solution to keep Delta Sigma IV from going up in flames. And that, Toby, is the difference between you and me. I know that my solution wasn’t the best, but that it was the only one possible under the circumstances, and I will go to my deathbed wondering if I could have done something that might have helped the Bader and the Dorset more. Now then,” she said, sitting back down at her desk and retrieving the padd with Wasdin’s report, “is there anything else, or can I get back to running my sickbay?”

Russell’s lips formed a very small line perpendicular to her nose. Crusher hadn’t seen her this nonplussed since relieving her of duty after the Denver civilian died. “That’s all for now, Beverly—but I do have more questions that only the chief medical officer can answer.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

Without another word, Russell turned and left sickbay.

Whistling a happy tune, Crusher went back to reading the report.

Sabin Genestra looked up at the door two seconds before it parted to allow Christine Vale to enter the observation lounge.

The middle-aged Betazoid had been using the room as his base of operations during the inspection tour. Unlike Captain Scott and Dr. Russell, whose concerns were with a particular physical part of the ship, Genestra’s focus related to personnel and security, which could just as easily be conducted from the relative comfort of this room. It was a space in which his interview subjects felt relaxed yet alert—familiar due to its typical use as a meeting place, but also associated with one’s duties aboard ship.

Genestra would have decorated the room differently, had he any say in the matter. He had no use for the model ships that bracketed the viewscreen on one wall—but then, Genestra had never understood the almost fetishistic affection some had for spacefaring vessels. They were tools, nothing more, and the specifics of their look or design was of very little importance, as far as Genestra was concerned. It was for that reason that he sat on the side of the table facing the viewport to the stars. At present, that view included the sixth planet of the Xarantine system, a gas giant, which Genestra found preferable to the toy ships behind him.

Of course, he could have chosen to sit at the head of the table, but that would imply that he held a position equal to that of Captain Picard, which would put his interview subjects on the defensive. No, better to make them feel they were on an equal footing with him.

He telepathically felt Vale’s approach, and so called up her service record on his padd and greeted her as she walked in.

“Thank you for coming to see me, Lieutenant—or should I say, Commander.” Genestra, of course, had not forgotten her promotion, but he wanted to gauge her reaction to his self-correction.

Predictably she beamed with a certain pride. It was the nature of that