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The alien grunted in surprise, unsure of what to do next-giving Crusher all the opportunity he needed. Clenching his jaw, he drove the dagger into the side of the Banyanan’s neck.

As the alien clutched at his wound, trying to draw the bloody dagger out, the commander pushed him away and made an attempt to get to his feet. Halfway there, something hit him.

Hard.

Peering up from the bottom of a deep, red well, where the sounds of battle seemed much too far away, Crusher tried to make out his adversary. A being who could have been Old Scowly’s twin hauled him upward, nearly yanking the human’s arm out of its socket in the process.

For a moment, he stood there, his knees too weak to support him for long, and attempted to fire his phaser-only to realize that he had managed to lose it again. Bad, Crusher thought. Very bad.

Then he saw the alien’s mammoth fist come at him in what seemed strangely like slow motion. He watched, fascinated, as it made inexorable progress in the direction of his face.

Very bad, the commander repeated inwardly, bracing himself for the inevitable, devastating impact.

Lir Kirnis was bored.

A master scientist, she was the head of a small band of Melacron who had dared to leave the worlds of their home system to explore the frontiers of science-which was little more than a fancy way of saying they were stuck out here on a distant rock, far away from friends and kin, and had been for a long, long time.

Sitting in her lab above the colony’s enclosed, hundred-meter-long main thoroughfare, Kirnis could see the comings and goings of her colleagues and their families. Somehow, they always seemed happier than she was.

But then, her colleagues had been wiser than she, bringing along their Companions and their children for company. Lir had always been Companioned to her work, not to another living being.

Back on Melacron V, that had been enough to sustain her. But here at this lonely outpost surrounded by a forbidding landscape and volatile weather, there were no fields through which she could stroll while puzzling out a problem. There were no restaurants with good food and wine to satisfy her physical needs, no entertainments to divert her mind.

Nothing but dark, barren mountains and her fellow scientists and the microscopic organisms that continued to elude her scrutiny.

Kirnis heaved a sigh. The creatures had been such a lure at first, such an irresistible temptation. The G’aha of Medicine had approached her with the first findings, taken from an unmanned Melacronai probe. The tiny life forms embedded deep within the rocks boasted a gene sequence that no scientist had ever observed.

Preliminary tests indicated that there might be a way to turn these microscopic entities into instruments of medicine in much the same way that, some three hundred and fifty years earlier, her people had been able to turn common bacteria into cures for a variety of diseases.

The whole prospect was wonderfully exciting. And of all the master scientists at work on Melacron V, Kirnis had been asked to head the expedition.

That was four years ago, she reflected. Four long, frustrating years. Where in the gods’ names had the time gone?

Sighing again, Kirnis called up the latest report and watched it appear on her monitor screen. The log indicated that sample 857230-KRA, obtained from the heart of the volcanic range located at forty-two point four degrees latitude and thirty-seven point zero degrees longitude, had been just as disappointing as all the other samples taken before it.

It simply refused to survive in laboratory conditions. How could one study a microscopic organism if it refused to live any longer than a day-and for no reason anyone could discern?

Four years here, she thought, and all their efforts had been in vain. It wasn’t a record Kirnis was proud of, especially in light of the high expectations that had accompanied her voyage here.

She glanced over at her bright green-and-scarlet scarf, folded reverently,