Chapter

For the forty-seventh time in the past eight days, Elizabeth Lense ran her medical tricorder up and down her abdomen and checked the scan results.

Yep. Still pregnant, all right.

She stared at the readout on the small instrument screen, head slightly shaking, still somehow unable to believe what she was seeing. She was already beginning to feel the first physical changes to her body—no nausea, though, thank God; Domenica Corsi would definitely notice her getting up to retch in their shared bathroom every morning. But even with the fatigue, the sensitivity in her breasts, all that, some part of her insisted that it was someone else in this condition. Someone else. Not her.

Which, at least figuratively speaking, was somewhat accurate. After all, she hadn't been in a serious romantic relationship since Starfleet Medical Academy, with a man she now fondly referred to as "that jackass." Their long engagement and blink-and-you-missed-it marriage went a long way toward convincing her to focus on her medical career and forget about any hopes of finding love. Then, she found herself stranded on an unknown primitive planet in an alternate universe, with no hope of being rescued and resuming her previous life, where she found herself drawn to the handsome alien rebel leader who had taken her in, and she finally let down her emotional walls and gave in to…

God, it sounds like something out of a bad romance holonovel, she thought, wincing. All the more reason to consider what had naturally followed from their shared passion as being fictional as well.

Except of course it wasn't. The two subjective months she'd spent with the Jabari were real, even if they did happen in only two objective weeks. The emotional bond she had formed with Saad was real.

She looked again at the image displayed on her tricorder. At the tiny, ball-shaped life growing inside…

"Gold to Lense."

The doctor nearly jumped out of her skin, and immediately snapped her tricorder shut, as if the captain had just snuck up over her shoulder. After an extra couple of seconds to compose herself, and to check that there was no one else in sickbay who might have seen anything, she tapped her combadge. "Lense here, Captain."

"Captain Scott just handed us a new assignment. Staff meeting in ten minutes in the observation lounge."

An eyebrow lifted in curiosity. If this new mission had come from the S.C.E. liaison, it probably wasn't medical in nature. But hopefully, it would still be something to keep her mind occupied. "Aye, sir," she answered.

Once the comlink was closed, she reopened her tricorder, and considered the display once more. She keyed in a sequence confirming her authority as ship's chief medical officer, and for the forty-seventh time, deleted all record of her self-examination from her medical file.

"Work, damn you," Sonya Gomez growled as she gave her computer terminal a good hard smack. None of her S.C.E. colleagues were here to witness this unauthorized technique, though most of them would probably have approved of the notion. Stevens, certainly. Tev, not so much.

"A valid access code is required," the computer repeated, completely unfazed by the commander's use of physical violence.

Gomez growled back. After the debacle at Hildago Station, where her personal logs and files had been hacked and her identity hijacked by a cybernetics-savvy con man, she asked Soloman and Bart Faulwell to create a new protection protocol for her. The team's computer and encryption experts had come through brilliantly, crafting for her a complex system requiring a sequence of passwords and access codes that, layered on top of standard Starfleet encryption, would make access by anyone other than her nigh impossible.

Provided, of course, that she remembered those access codes. Bart told her to find a code phrase that wasn't just a random alphanumeric string, but would not be easily connected to her—no lines from a favorite book or names of childhood pets. She'd picked a lyric from a Lurian folk song Carol Abramowitz had fallen in love with and played for her not long ago. At the time, Gomez couldn't get the insipid song out of her head. Now that she had to remember it, though, to retrieve some personal logs that related to this assignment, the exact line escaped her. There were mountains that were as high as something, but not the sky. Or maybe it was the sky that was as high as the mountains… And to add insult to injury, she now had the stupid wordless melody stuck in her head.

She heaved a sigh and, resigned to relying solely on Starfleet's official reports, headed for the briefing. Sure enough, everyone was already seated around the table, waiting on her. "Sorry," she said, as she slipped into the chair to Captain Gold's immediate right and across from Lieutenant Commander Mor glasch Tev. Tev watched her with a neutral expression, giving no outward indication of the disdain with which she knew he considered her tardiness. This she considered a sign of the Tellarite's progress.

"All right, now that we're all here,…" Captain Gold said once she was settled. "Six hours ago, Starfleet Command received a priority-one message from a human colony in the Ficus Sector. It was sharp, short, and did not allow for the option of any response or request for elaboration."

Gold pressed a tab embedded in the tabletop in front of him, and the lounge filled with a staticky hiss, followed by the voice of a woman, with a Gaelic lilt: "This is Mariposa to the Federation: We want you to come and rid us of this infernal machinery, every last bloody scrap of it!"

Copyright © 2005 by Paramount Pictures.