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Crusher kept control over her expression, connecting momentarily with Spock as she stepped across the bridge to Zevon and ran her reed scanner over him. Then she brought up her own tricorder and compared notes with whatever she had collected while she was gone in Romulan space.

Stiles watched her, worried. Over the doctor’s shoulder, Zevon’s fearful eyes met his. He stepped to Zevon’s side, as if he’d never left, as if his presence alone could protect Zevon from the scourge that was apparently inevitable.

Dr. Crusher shook her head. “It’s spreading fast. In forty or fifty seconds, he’ll be completely contaminated. How did this happen out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“Hah!” On the other side of the bridge, Orsova bellowed with joy. “You see? You lose! Your civilization will fall apart now! The Voice is coming! You lose now! You can’t hurt me now! I’m going to be governor of the sector! I won! I won!”

As retorts reeled in his head, Stiles turned toward his old tormenter. Never got the chance, though.

Sykora, until now still fazed by the effects of the stun, came very sharply and dangerously to life. She shoved Travis harshly off his balance and snatched the bloody spike from his hand. As if shot from a cannon, she streaked to Orsova. Before anyone could think of stopping her, she drove the spike through Orsova’s neck with a disgusting pop and a faint crunch of shattered bone.

At Stiles’s side, Zevon gasped and jolted with shock, but made no move toward his wife. She was an imperial subcommander, after all.

Orsova gurgled as frothy blood welled up into his mouth and he clasped at his demolished throat with both hands, blinked in surprise, then couldn’t suck another breath. No one offered to cushion his collapse onto the deck. There, in a puddle of his own fluids, he died. Just like that. Over.

And Stiles was glad. And he didn’t feel ashamed of it either. He promised himself he never would. There were more appropriate things in the galaxy to feel bad about.

Even the sight of Orsova bleeding on the deck couldn’t raise the pall that suddenly descended on the bridge. They’d failed. After all this.

Dr. Crusher huffed in frustration. “He’s right. He won. We don’t have any more alternatives for this mutant doomsday virus. We can’t even get the empress back to her home in time for her to die in her own bed.” Angry, she stuffed her med scanner back in its case and looked snappishly at Dr. McCoy. “Unless you’ve got a rabbit to pull out of your hat, we’re skunked.”

“What do you take me for?” McCoy spread his arms and crowed, “I’m going to stop this venom campaign if it’s the last thing I do-and at the age of a hundred and thirty-odd, everything I do could be the last thing I do.”

“You’ve got something?” Spock stepped to him. “Another uninfected royal family member?”

Invigorated, Stiles pointed at Sykora and blurted, “It’s her, isn’t it? I should’ve known! It’s got to be her! Did he marry his own cousin or something?”

“No, he didn’t,” McCoy denied. “I told you the truth. She’s got no royal family blood at all. Not even close. She’s peasant stock if I ever saw it. Couldn’t be infected if she took a bath in that toxin. But I’ve got something even better.” He looked at Crusher with a winning expression. “You know what they say… fetal-cord blood is about twenty times more potent than the ordinary vein stuff. I won’t even have to wake the little fella up.”

Suddenly the center of attention, Sykora eyed the doctors, then her husband, then Stiles. “What does he mean?” “You’re pregnant, that’s what!” McCoy announced.

“You knew?” Stiles accused McCoy as both Sykora and Zevon gawked in undeniable surprise. “You knew that and you still let Zevon be a target for assassination? A decoy?”

“Well, of course!” The elderly doctor nodded proudly. “After the first eight or nine decades, you learn to keep your mouth shut. Now, I know what you should name him, y’see. You’ve got to pick something flashy and unique. Leonard James Eric Spock Beverly Saskatoon the First.