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Ych’a took a deep breath, in tandem with Terix, before withdrawing her hands from Terix’s face, which slackened further as his post-mind-meld slumber deepened, the therapeutic blocks in his memory presumably growing stronger.

Or so Trip hoped.

Looking up at Trip, Ych’a finally answered his question. “Tevik of Vulcan is as ready for the coming mission as either of us are.”

Tevik, Trip thought with no small amount of regret. Because of the months of tampering Ych’a had performed inside the mind of Romulan Centurion Terix, the man now thought of himself as Tevik of Vulcan, a V’Shar agent who had dedicated his life to gathering intelligence on the Romulan Star Empire. As far as Tevik knew, Centurion Terix was merely another of the many aliases he had used during a long and distinguished espionage career. If Tevik’s own memories seemed to belie that convenient fabrication from time to time, well, that was only to be expected given the V’Shar’s routine use of telepathically implanted false memories on some its deepest-cover operatives.

Necessary though this sort of thing might have been given the danger posed by the Romulans, Trip couldn’t help but feel guilty for having abetted Ych’a’s ongoing subversion of the integrity of another man’s identity.

Apparently sensing Trip’s discomfiture and finding it distasteful, Ych’a stepped to the hatch that connected Terix’s cabin with the rest of the freighter and opened it. As she exited, she motioned for Trip to follow her out into the corridor.

They walked in silence along a passage that seemed wide, at least in comparison with what Trip had grown used to aboard Enterprise. When none of the Vulcan freighter’s crew was nearby, she said, “Tevik is as prepared as it is possible for me to make him, Sodok.”

It still took Trip a moment to grasp that she was addressing him when she used his Vulcan cover name. If the concept of Sodok, a Vulcan dealer in kevas and trillium, hadn’t yet become second nature to Charles Tucker, then why should anyone assume that a similar fake identity would work any better when involuntarily imposed on a battle-hardened Romulan soldier like Terix?

“He’s as ready as he’s ever gonna be?” Trip said quietly, only barely restraining the nervous imperative he felt to raise his voice until it echoed throughout the ship. “Is that what you’re telling me? That we have to do this thing now whether we’re ready or not, just because time has finally run out?”

Ych’a stopped walking and faced him, fixing him with her piercing dark eyes. “Mister Sodok, your emotional control borders on the execrable at times.”

“Sorry,” Trip said, trying to get back into character. “My apologies. I’ve been a bit... spacesick on this voyage.” Yeah, that’s the ticket, he thought, hoping nobody was listening to them who shouldn’t have been.

“Understandable,” she said. “But the time for such misgivings is long past. Captain T’Vran will deliver us to Achernar II in two standard hours. We will find ample resources there to carry out the task that awaits us.”

She didn’t need to outline those “tasks” aloud, both for security reasons and because Trip was thoroughly familiar with the current mission’s objective, having spent the last several interminable months preparing and training for it. During that time, Ych’a had been methodically building up the psychic bulwark of “Tevik’s” personality and memories.

Using the Kiri-kin-tha’s commercial itinerary for both cover and the bulk of their transportation, their mission was to slip into a clandestine shipyard located near the Achernar system and destroy the warp-seven prototype vessel the Romulans were in the process of preparing for its initial test flights.

To that end, the V’Shar had obtained fairly detailed plans of the shipbuilding facility’s layout, which Trip had committed to memory as though they were elementary warp plasma-flow diagrams. He had taken enormous pains to get every detail right, at least so far as they could trust their intel, which looked reliable inasmuch as it