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The ensign guided the landing party through a spiraling maze of pods. After two minutes, Giotto held up a hand.

“Do you hear that, Captain?” he asked.

Chekov could barely make out an irregular noise. It sounded like something metallic being pulled over a stone floor.

“Something is moving, Captain.”

“Chekov, can you tell what it is?”

Chekov shook his head. “No, sir. I think I am picking up active life signs. It could just be a tight cluster of cryopods.”

“Guards?” asked Kirk. “The ones who took Yüksel?”

“Or killed him,” murmured Giotto, so quietly only the captain and Chekov could hear.

Chekov’s tricorder bleeped, overly loud in the relative silence of the cavern, so he slipped it into silent mode. “Captain, I am picking up an unusual life sign to our right. Not Farrezzi, but I cannot tell what it is.”

“Human?” Kirk asked.

He shook his head. “Unclear. It is in suspended animation.”

“Mister Chekov, you and Tra check out that new reading. The rest of us will continue ahead.”

Chekov nodded. “Aye, sir.”

“Make sure you stay out of trouble,” the captain said with a small smile. “If this is a first contact, I want it to be a smooth one. Don’t let them know you’re there, if you can avoid it.”

“Keep him out of trouble, Tra,” Giotto added.

“I’ll do my best, sir.” Tra took point, squeezing through a gap between two pods. Moments later, darkness enveloped Chekov once more.

Luke Hendrick died while McCoy was operating on him.

After finishing with Sulu, McCoy had moved on to a new patient with severe internal bleeding—a young woman in a maintenance coverall by the name of Golaski-Lawrence. When she was secure, her internal bleeding stopped and her biosigns stable, McCoy rushed over to the biobed where his next patient had just been laid.

Nurse Chapel was already there, looking grave. The man had serious abrasions covering most of his skin. His uniform shirt sported a central patch of still-wet blood. As McCoy approached, Chapel turned to face him. Her mouth had turned into a thin line, and there was a look of grim determination about her. She shook her head sadly. McCoy studied the man’s readouts. “What happened?” he asked.

“He was thrown from the observation station in the shuttlebay,” Chapel said. “Extensive damage to the spinal cord and vertebrae, as well as four fractured ribs. One of them pierced his left lung.”

McCoy glanced at the data slate she offered him. “I hope whoever brought him here took great care,” he grumbled. Spinal injuries were a damned difficult business, if you didn’t know what you were doing.

“They did. Messier was with them.”

Ah, good. One of his most capable med techs, Magaly Messier wouldn’t have let anybody mishandle a patient.

All right, then. There was no time to lose. “Get me an emergency cart!” he shouted in the direction he’d last seen Brent disappear in. Mere moments later, the cart was delivered, and Brent stood next to him, waiting for further instructions.

“Nurse, you’ll have to assist me,” McCoy said. This was a very delicate operation that needed two pairs of hands.

McCoy couldn’t avoid feeling a little uneasy; despite the almost miraculous nature of most modern treatments and surgery techniques, a damaged spinal column wasn’t easily healed. You needed to be well trained and highly experienced, especially when the patient had suffered a horrific fall like Hendrick.

You’re not that good a doctor, not today. Probably won’t ever be. Just an ordinary country doctor, way out of his depth.

The self-doubt that Jocelyn’s voice put into words stopped him from beginning the operation. After a while, he became aware of Chapel looking at him expectantly. He shook his head in a futile attempt to dislodge the phantasm and breathed in deeply. “Right,” he said, “let’s get on with it.”

McCoy lost himself in the operation. It occupied the entirety of his mind, left no room for Jocelyn to interrupt and insult him. Before long, the vertebrae showed no sign of ever having been broken, and he’d taken the first steps in splicing together the ends of the spinal cord that had been