With thanks to Keith R.A. DeCandido for inviting me along for the ride. Thanks to the Boyz- Dayton, Kevin, Mike, Dave, Christopher, and Howie- for making the ride so much fun.

Dedicated to Thira Grace Corona, just for being herself.

CHAPTER 1

Raya elMora hooked her four thumbs into the buckle of the shoulder harness and snapped it into place.

"Computer? How much time before the Federation delegation arrives in vosTraal?"

"Starship Excelsior scheduled to make orbit in approximately two hours, Jo'Zamestaad," the onboard computer replied crisply. "Estimate time for necessary formalities before beam-down, additional six to twelve minutes."

"Thank you," Raya said, considering.

A Mestikan hour was one hundred and forty-four minutes. A low-altitude orbit of her world, Raya knew, could be accomplished in approximately ninety-six minutes. Side trips to investigate particular phenomena would add to that time. And she did have to land the orbital flyer and get back to her quarters to change from the borrowed flight suit into her diplomatic best before the delegation arrived.

Raya sighed. One orbit it was, then. Waiting while the computer checked wind speed and direction, she adjusted the wing cameras that would gather the information she was seeking, feed it back into the central computers in vosTraal, and digest it into the brief document she would present at the opening ceremonies of the Plenary Council tomorrow. Manually setting course and speed, she allowed the little craft to rise straight up to the desired altitude, then hovered for a moment to look around at her city in the rising sun before the thrusters kicked in and she headed out on her mission.

What she was doing today was an indulgence, she knew. Better-trained pilots scanned the surface of her world daily to report on the progress of its recovery from the passage of a rogue pulsar two twelveyears ago- a phenomenon so devastating that only the intervention of a Federation starship had kept the pulsar- or as Mestiko's citizens, the Payav, referred to it, "the Pulse"- from destroying the planet entirely.

Despite the Enterprise's intervention, the destruction had been considerable, the immediate casualties staggeringly high; and the ensuing nuclear winter, with its toxic atmosphere and frigid temperatures, had claimed still more lives over the ensuing years. The total death toll might never be known.

And yet, the Payav were still here, a proud and stubborn people, aided by that same Federation in recovering their world and their autonomy.

And that, Raya thought, her thoughts grim despite the sheer beauty of the landscape below her, was where the current troubles began- and, she hoped, ended.

In any event, an indulgence. There was enough data from the regular pilots' runs to include in her opening remarks, but she'd wanted to come up here and see for herself. Paperwork had kept her at her desk until the last possible moment, and so these two hours of a pristine morning were all the time she had.

She'd tried not to notice the knowing smiles when she'd shown up in a flight suit just before dawn, the exchanged glances among the veteran pilots that said, Yes, of course. Let the Jo'Zamestaad take the new prototype craft out on a morning survey run. The onboard computer will do most of the work, and if she gets into trouble we can send another craft out to help her. Let her see what we've been doing these past months to catalog every hectare of land on Mestiko and compare what is now with what was and has been since the Pulse nearly destroyed us two twelveyears ago.

Raya knew her piloting skills were only average and a recent acquisition. Her elor had loved to fly, and in homage to Elee after her death, Raya had gradually overcome her own fear of heights and mastered the rudimentary skills. After all, she reasoned, she had been on starships, visited other worlds, even been exiled on one of them. Could learning to fly a craft on her own be that much more frightening?

Besides, the course was laid in automatically, and if she instructed it to, the computer would do everything for her, even sparing her the effort of steering around the occasional flock of birds.

Her first thought was: At least now there are birds. This wasn't always so. Having been introduced from other worlds, they may not look like the birds we of the generation before the Pulse remember, but they are better than skies filled with toxic dust, and no birds at all.

Her second thought- as she said "Computer, manual," and allowed herself to test the controls, dipping the nose and coming back up again just for practice- was: The prototype responds far better than anything the Federation's given us.

Was the thought disloyal to that nation that had saved so many Payav lives in the wake of the greatest natural disaster ever to befall the planet?

It is, Raya thought, and it isn't. And there, as the Dinpayav would say, is the rub. For everything the Federation has done for us, there is, some would argue, more they could have done. And, still others would argue, less they should have done, so that we could claim our recovery for our own.

Raya's elor used to say, "Put two Payav in a room and you end up with three arguments." It was as true in the recovery following the Pulse as it had been before any Payav knew such things lurked in the far reaches of space, deciding in a very short time who would live and who would die.

During the early recovery years, the Payav hadn't had the luxury of argument. Tribal and regional differences were forgotten in the daily struggle for survival. However, that hadn't stopped religious fanatics in the form of the mar-Atyya, represented by her old school chum Asal Janto, from fomenting revolution, sending Raya and those loyal to her into exile for years until they could take their planet back.

Since then, the more their world recovered and returned to normal, it seemed, the more Payav found to squabble about.

And now, Raya thought, banking the little craft to starboard as she cleared the last of the structures in the suburbs and headed out over open land before returning the controls to the computer, we will bring their internecine squabbles under the scrutiny of our neighbors, as for the next month- or longer, if necessary- representatives of both the Federation and the Klingon Empire sit with us in an attempt to determine our future.

Were they ready? As ready as they'd ever be. Left to their own devices, Payav would argue into the next grossyear. Besides, there was a matter of some urgency in the Federation's request for a Plenary Council. It seemed the Klingons had recently suffered a similar disaster, the explosion of one of their moons called Praxis, which had compromised the atmosphere of their homeworld Qo'noS, meaning it would have to be evacuated within the next fifty years.

At least, Raya thought, noting with satisfaction that the forward screen adapted to the light as the small craft turned into the sun, the Klingons have the luxury not only of taking their time leaving their homeworld, but of choosing among other planets within their empire upon which to relocate. We on Mestiko were not so fortunate.

This raised another thought. If the Pulse had never passed their world, might the Payav already have chosen membership in the Federation? Their fate then might have been a very different one. Was this sufficient argument for joining the Federation now?

Because that was the crux of this Plenary Council: for the Payav to decide whether or not they wished to join the Federation.

The Klingons would be there, officially to learn from the Payav how to cope with a disaster of the magnitude of the Pulse or the explosion of Praxis. But there was no mistaking that, if the Payav and the Federation parted company at the end of the Council, the Klingons would be waiting in the wings.

As for whether their intentions were peaceful...Raya had studied the Klingons. If their intentions were peaceful, that would be a first in their long and bloody history.

The whir and beep of the onboard computer "talking" to the wing cameras shook her out of her reverie. The cameras had been programmed to begin gathering data when her little craft reached the first of the areas most devastated by the Pulse.

Below her the Kemong River meandered through its littoral. Once a flourishing agricultural region, later reduced to frigid desert in the wake of the Pulse, the area had at last been restored to grazelands and grain fields. Like most of the planet, it had been reclaimed from devastation, but it would never be the same.

Everything- the number of Dinpayav (humans, Vulcans, Klingons, Kazarites, and a dozen other species Raya didn't even recognize) in the cities and even the remote areas; the introduction of new species, from Dr. Lon's Martian ice-mosses to far more complex forms; the attempts to reintroduce native species- had resulted in a patchwork of failed and successful and partly successful experiments. Good or bad, everything was different.

Was that necessarily good or bad? Raya wondered. Once again, the only answer she could come up with was "yes." And "no."

Monitoring the data-feeds from the wing cameras, she wondered: Did she want her people to decide to join the Federation or not? She honestly didn't know.

Well, if nothing else came of the Plenary Council, she thought, at least it would be good to see James again.

* * *

She stayed out longer than she'd planned, and barely had time to make it back to vosTraal to change into her formal clothes before the arrival of the Federation delegation. After fastening the several small buttons on the cuffs of the first new robe she'd allowed herself this year- with so many of her people still emerging from hardship, after having done without so much for so long, it didn't seem appropriate to acquire more- she checked in with her office staff to make sure everything was still on schedule.

"We've received a communication from Captain Sulu of the U.S.S. Excelsior, Jo'Zamestaad," an aide informed her. "The starship is in synchronous orbit above vosTraal, and the delegation has requested permission to beam down."

"Permission granted, of course." Raya beamed, genuinely excited. "Just give me a minute to get to the reception area without running...."

The Martian scientist Dr. Lon- or Cart etDeja, as he had been known since becoming a citizen of Mestiko- was there ahead of her, as was the Federation's ambassador, the ever-jovial Ana'siuolo named Settoon, and Raya exchanged the traditional two-handed greeting with each in turn. On her way here she had passed through the public corridor, where about a third of the various regional representatives- governors and Servants and tribal leaders of various persuasions- who had been invited to observe the Summit in conjunction between the Zamestaad and representatives of the Federation and the Klingon Empire had begun to gather. The rest would arrive within the next day or two.

Greeting each of them personally, making certain not to slight anyone- tempers were touchy enough, given that many from the more remote regions could not get there for the opening ceremonies and had to be persuaded that their opinions would be taken just as seriously over video feed as they would have been in person- Raya had barely had time to reach the reception area before she heard the familiar-after-so-many-years sound of a Federation transporter.

Three figures materialized before her. She had been expecting four.

CHAPTER 2

Consciously or not, Spock, McCoy, and Uhura had beamed down in the Missing Man formation.

Begun among Earth's air forces during the early era of flight, the tradition of leaving an empty space in a delta formation where a fallen comrade's plane should have been had been carried forward into the era of spaceflight. Not being from Earth, Raya elMora could be forgiven for not recognizing the tradition or its significance and, if asked, Spock himself would have been surprised to find that he and his companions had unconsciously left a space for one more person when they had stepped onto Excelsior's transporter platform.

Raya had last seen Spock in a Starfleet uniform, not civilian clothes. A distinguished diplomatic career, as well as his past involvement with the fate of Mestiko, had made it inevitable that he would be the Federation's chief negotiator at the Summit. On either side and slightly behind him were Dr. McCoy and Commander Uhura. But immediately to his left there was a blank space, as if someone else had once stood there, but no more. Consciously or unconsciously, Kirk's friends and longtime crewmates had left a place for him when they'd beamed down.

Wordlessly, Raya looked to Spock, whose expression was unreadable. It wasn't until she saw the expression in McCoy's eyes that she knew.

James T. Kirk was dead.

* * *

The news had spread throughout the fleet, both via official sources and by word of mouth, from Scotty and Chekov, who were there when it happened, to Sulu aboard Excelsior, to Uhura and McCoy and Spock.

Scotty had been all but inconsolable.

"It should've been me, lass!" Tears coursed unashamedly down his weathered face on Uhura's commscreen. He knew she'd heard it through official channels, but he seemed to need to talk to someone, to explain himself. "But there's him giving orders and me obeying without thinking until it's too late. I thought I'd seen everything in my years, but the sight of open space where he'd been standing only moments before...it sent a shock right through me I can still feel." The veteran engineer mopped at his face and sighed. "Ah, lass, I should've gone myself."

"Sometimes it takes just as much courage to stay as to go" was all Uhura could offer him.

Scotty had muttered something about finding a bottle of Saurian brandy big enough to drown himself in and never setting foot on a starship again, then terminated the transmission.

* * *

On the way to Mestiko, in an eerie repetition of a scene that had taken place in Kirk's apartment on Earth almost a decade ago, the rest of his shipmates had gathered in the officers' lounge aboard Excelsior. This time it was Sulu who led the toast to "absent friends." No one seemed to know what to say after that, until Chekov broke the silence.

"Captain Kirk was a hero," he announced solemnly. "Heroes are not supposed to die."

The voyage to Mestiko was meant to have been a festive occasion, a celebration. Captain Kirk, as the Starfleet liaison to the Payav through all their troubles, was to have accompanied Ambassador Spock to the Summit. Dr. McCoy had been assigned to follow up on his original study of the physical and mental health of Mestiko's inhabitants, and Commander Uhura would be overseeing the final synchronization of the planet's global communications grid with Starfleet configurations. Excelsior was to have brought them to Mestiko, with time for a rare reunion en route.

The reunion had now become a memorial service.

"I disagree," Sulu said somberly. "It's the heroes who step into the path of danger in place of us ordinary mortals."

It wasn't the first time he and Chekov had disagreed about something, and it wouldn't be the last. Not for the first time, Sulu found himself questioning the ambition that had driven him to pursue the captaincy of his own ship even as it separated him from his friends.

"I still can't believe he's really gone" was all Uhura said. "It's as if we expected him to live forever."

The thought had crossed all their minds. How many times had Kirk diced with death and won?

Not this time, apparently.

* * *

It was McCoy who took Raya aside and told her about the accident aboard the Enterprise-B and Kirk's heroic actions, sacrificing himself to save the ship. It was McCoy who took her elbow and steadied her when she paled and it looked as if her knees might buckle.

"The Zamestaad will not be happy," Raya finally said once she'd recovered herself. It was an under-statement, to say the least. Kirk's absence could only complicate an already precarious situation. But Kirk's death could not delay the Summit, which was why his companions, grieving though they might be, were here.

It had been difficult enough settling regional squabbles in order to determine which nations could send how many delegates and which among those hundreds of delegates would be invited to the table and which would have to content themselves with participation by video link. Once Payav were gathered around the conference with Dinpayav, an uneasy spirit of cooperation could be hoped for, but not guaranteed.

We are, Raya thought, back where we were before the Pulse came, haranguing each other over petty things, our decades of suffering all but forgotten. Have we learned nothing from the experience?

In the past she had almost always welcomed Kirk's presence. The sheer brute force of his persuasiveness had kept her people and his from each other's throats, had even prompted them to clasp hands on more than one occasion. Without him...Raya sighed, dashing tears out of the corners of her eyes with both sets of thumbs.

Alone as she had felt once leadership of Mestiko fell on her narrow shoulders, she could always depend on the wisdom of her elor and the support of James T. Kirk. Now that they were both gone, she truly was alone.

* * *

She remembered the day she had returned home after Elee's funeral- the formal state funeral, not the lighthearted balloon trip she had shared with Kirk in memory of a woman who loved any form of flight- and found that the last of the sacred noggik trees was dying. A gift from Sulu, cloned in Enterprise's botany lab, it was the only true specimen known to have survived the Pulse. Once power had been restored to her part of vosTraal, she had kept it in a special environmentally controlled case, watered and fed it and made sure it got enough artificial light.

Even this had been something her people had squabbled over. People were dying, they argued, yet the Jo'Zamestaad wasted resources on a tree, however sacred. Still others had argued that it wasn't just an indulgence, that the tree symbolized the Payav people and its existence gave them hope.

Once communications were restored, Raya had fostered this second opinion by providing weekly newsfeeds about the young sapling as it grew and flourished. When she had been driven into exile on Kazar, she had entrusted the tree to Theena's care, and her young protege had kept it hidden through those desolate years so that the mar-Atyya wouldn't find it and destroy it, for it was a symbol of Raya's regime, which the mar-Atyya had taken great pains to subvert.

Restored to its proper place in Raya's office on her return and apparently none the worse for wear, it had just begun to show evidence of new buds which, it was hoped, could be self-pollinated to produce seed that would breed true. But Raya had returned to work immediately following Elee's formal state funeral, where, knowing that the eyes of the planet were upon her, she had kept her composure. After all, there was not a family on Mestiko who had not lost loved ones, and few had had the luxury of dying peacefully as Elee had. So Raya had not lost control at the funeral, but remained dignified and contained.

She had not felt her control slipping until she had locked herself in her office to go over some paperwork, and saw that the tree was dying.

In the time she had been away- overcoming her fear of heights to scatter Elee's ashes from a balloon over S'rii Tuuliie with James Kirk at her side; turning the event into a celebration, not a funeral; then bidding Kirk good-bye and countenancing the state funeral a week later- the tree's blossoms had shriveled and dropped off, the leaves had turned yellow and the branches had begun to droop the way they ordinarily did only on very ancient noggik trees. The attempt to clone the tree had failed. It was dying, and there was nothing Raya could do.

It was too much. She'd broken down then, curled up in a little ball, her arms wrapped around her delicate-looking skull as if to ward off blows, shaking with sobs as she hadn't since she was a child. After all those deaths, culminating in her elor's, and after not being able to cry in public because of who she was, she could at least cry in private at the sight of the last living thing on the planet that could be said to be unchanged by everything that had happened.

She had been ready to give up, to step aside and let someone else decide her planet's future and savor the victory, such as it was. She could not go on.

Only a subspace message from Kirk that very afternoon, sent from wherever he was about his duties in the quadrant, telling her how much he'd enjoyed the balloon ride, had brought her out of her misery. He was always thoughtful enough to keep track of what time it was in her part of the universe before he called, even if it meant communicating at some ungodly hour where he was, and she'd always appreciated that.

* * *

So it had continued over the years, despite the times they had not seen eye to eye on the future of her world; and not only officially, not only due to Kirk's sense of responsibility to Mestiko, but because he valued Raya's presence in his life. That was why this last time he had contacted her ahead of the official communique, to let her know that Mestiko's time had come.

"You'll receive official communiques from both the Federation Council and the Klingons," he'd told her, his smile strangely shy on such a powerful man. "But I wanted to be the one to surprise you. Ambassador Spock will forgive me a little...self-indulgence."

"Ambassador Spock now?" Raya had responded, her own smile warm. "How wonderful! I look forward to seeing you...all of you...once more."

She had considered what the outcome of the Summit could mean. The future was heady, full of promise, the much-deserved reward for their struggle. She would savor announcing it to her people, regardless of the inevitable disgruntlement from a few corners. She would also calculatedly not announce the demise of the noggik tree, and if anyone asked she would change the subject, saving the bad news for a time when it could be slipped in as inconsequential in light of all the good news she had to share about the future.

She had immediately thrown herself into a frenzy of preparations for the event. When she stopped to think about it, she did not honestly know which choice she would make, if the choice were hers alone. For ultimately, of course, it would be her people who decided.

CHAPTER 3

Assuming her people ever stopped squabbling over who would sit where at the conference table. At least Kirk's conspicuous absence distracted them from that momentarily. But count on the representative from the Tralva Nation to raise a ruckus from the start.

"Where is Captain Kirk?" Deman elKramo demanded in a voice that carried from the back of the crowd of representatives as he elbowed his way to the front. "We were told he would lead the delegation. Is he delayed? Too busy to attend? Ashamed at last for his part in Mestiko's suffering?"

His was not the only dissenting voice.

"Truly, Jo'Zamestaad, Kirk called this Summit, and he doesn't have the grace to appear?"

There were further murmurs, both of agreement and dissent.

"...Kirk is a busy man...."

"...not the only world under his aegis..."

"If he hasn't the time to attend, neither do we...."

"Doubtless there's a reasonable explanation...."

"...not going to tolerate this nonsense...important matters to tend to in our home provinces..."

"We will be on the next transport home!"

Raya counted to twelve before she trusted herself to speak.

"Captain Kirk is dead!" she shouted, her voice breaking at the end. In the stunned silence that followed, she added, "You disgrace yourselves with this behavior! Go home, then! I will find other representatives from your districts who at least have some manners!"

Where she found the words or the voice to carry them through the crowd she would never know. Just as she ran out of words and voice, and before any of her fractious people could demand to know how long she had known and why they hadn't been informed, the sight of a transporter beam- different from the familiar Federation one, and totally noiseless- stunned everyone into silence.

When it ended, a phalanx of seven Klingons stood in their midst. At their head was the most formidable woman Raya had ever seen.

Chancellor Azetbur herself had come to Mestiko.

Flanked by two of her ministers and four bodyguards, each one larger than the next, Azetbur was nevertheless the focus of power within the group. Without saying a word, she commanded. The several dozen Payav ministers, so vociferous moments before, seemed scarcely able to breathe. Even Raya took a moment to remember herself.

"Madam Chancellor," she managed, hoping her voice didn't sound as strained as it felt as she held out her hands in the traditional Payav greeting. "Welcome to Mestiko."

Azetbur, resplendent in a gown that was equal parts leather, metal, and some sort of stiff glossy fabric that might have been satin and that rustled when she moved, stepped forward, taking Raya's hands in her own. The gesture was accomplished- she had studied her hostess's world and its traditions- and the chancellor neither startled at the feel of the two-thumbed Payav hands in her own, nor showed her teeth when she smiled.

"Jo'Zamestaad," she replied flawlessly and with a slight bow. Almost a head taller than Raya, she made it elegant. "I hope we can learn much from each other."

Azetbur then drew back slightly, letting Raya's hands slip out of hers as she acknowledged the other Dinpayav.

"Ambassador Spock, we meet again."

"Madam Chancellor," he replied.

"My condolences," she said. "Kirk was a great warrior, and a man of honor."

How she knew, no one asked. But if the gathered Payav still had doubts, Azetbur's words quelled them.

Spock inclined his head in gratitude. It was the only public acknowledgment he would make of his private pain.

* * *

"Inflicting my thoughts on others will not bring the captain back" was how he explained it to McCoy when the doctor brought it up, as Spock knew he inevitably would.

"No, but it might help them get a little catharsis," McCoy suggested.

"As you have?" Spock asked dryly.

He had a point, and both men knew it. Ever since they'd shared the same brain, McCoy hadn't been able to bluff him.

"I'll grieve when I'm ready to, Spock. I'll thank you to mind your own business in the meantime."

"As I would expect the same from you."

Impasse, then, only one of many. Then McCoy brought up what he'd come here to say in the first place.

"You don't need me on this mission. Uhura caught me in a moment of weakness and dragged me along. There's still time for me to beg off."

Spock arched an eyebrow. "And do what?"

* * *

"It isn't really necessary to bring McCoy along," Uhura did not ask Spock so much as tell him. "Dr. Lon- er, Dr. etDeja- has enough staff by now, supplemented by Starfleet Medical personnel, to do a final assessment of Payav health to be submitted to the steering committee."

She waited for Spock to respond, and he waited for her to finish her thought. "For that matter, the Payav have done a pretty thorough job of restoring the communications grid. Anyone with comm training can help them synch with Starfleet systems. There was no real reason to bring me along to double-check them, except that I might have wanted to see the place again."

"Indeed," Spock said.

Uhura came straight to the point. "You want me to keep an eye on him."

"I am concerned for his emotional state," Spock said. "It has been my observation that he will express his grief either through immersing himself in his work or in less...salutary activities."

"So if we can keep him busy..."

"Precisely."

"Which would also keep me busy."

"Indeed."

"And what about you, Spock?" Uhura remembered how she'd sat very quietly when she got the news, tears flowing down her cheeks, the room growing dark around her without her realizing it. They'd all been close to Kirk, closer than any ordinary crew. But none of them had been as close to him as Spock.

The Vulcan's face was as somber as ever. Not unreadable to those who knew him well, but whatever grieving he would do, he would do alone. Getting no answer to her question, Uhura had the wisdom to let it go.

"I'll do my best to keep Leonard out of trouble," she promised.

How often over the next few weeks would she regret promising that?

* * *

She'd had to literally get him out of bed so they'd be on time for the rendezvous with Excelsior, overriding the lock on the door to his quarters, then running the shower and banging cabinet doors to make enough noise to rouse him from his stupor. It was the sound of breaking glass from one of several bottles of exotic liquors he'd lined up by the replicator to finish off one at a time that finally got him out from under the covers, a baleful look in his eye.

"Goddammit, why can't you let a man die in peace?" he muttered.

"You don't have time to die, Doctor. You've got an assignment and a deadline," Uhura said crisply, returning his glare with one of her own, but handing him a mug of hot coffee at the same time. "Let's get it in gear."

He managed to stagger from Excelsior's transporter platform to his assigned quarters without more than a nod to anyone, only to find that someone had programmed the replicator in his suite so that it wouldn't deliver anything alcoholic. By the time they'd gathered in the officers' lounge to memorialize Kirk, he was sufficiently dried out to function, but he still wasn't talking.

Except to try to weasel out of the assignment.

"I am afraid your presence is nonnegotiable, Doctor" was all Spock had to say on the subject.

"Man doesn't even get a chance to grieve...." McCoy muttered under his breath, then caught himself, remembering Vulcan hearing. By the time they'd made orbit around Mestiko, he was grumbling, for which Uhura was grateful. The quiet McCoy worried her; the grumbling one she could deal with.

CHAPTER 4

The Summit began the following morning with Jo'Zamestaad elMora's opening remarks.

"Honored Guests, Members of the Zamestaad, People of Mestiko," she began from the dais in the Zamestaad's Grand Hall as video feeds captured her from all angles and broadcast her words to every place on the planet that had comm. "Permit me to welcome you all to these proceedings, and to show you what has transpired on our world in recent years."

There was pride in her voice and her demeanor, but also something else not easy to read- hesitancy, perhaps, or even regret, though it was difficult to see, at first glance, what the leader of this battered but emerging world might have to regret.

As she spoke, a series of holos appeared around the room.

"Gentles, you can see here the rebuilding everywhere in our cities and our agricultural regions as our people once more remember what it is like to go out under a sky that is welcoming and a sun that is warm, to breathe fresh air, to smell the scent of growing things, and to feel the rain on our faces. For those who have come of age underground, it is almost as if they have been transported to a new world.

"In fact," she said, her face and voice going solemn, "it can be said that, to almost all Payav, this is a new and not always welcoming world where we find ourselves living.

"In the nearly three decades since the Pulse ripped away our world's ozone layer, plunging it into a new ice age and destroying virtually every living thing, the tireless efforts of many, both Payav and Dinpayav alike, have reclaimed our atmosphere, replenished our food supplies, and restored most of Mestiko to habitability. We cannot begin to express our gratitude to Dr. etDeja and the many who have done this mighty work. However..."

She paused, the years of diplomacy thrust upon her by the passing of the Pulse having taught her perforce how to play to a crowd for maximum effect.

"This is not, nor will it ever be, the Mestiko that we who grew to adulthood before the Pulse remember. We can rebuild the cities leveled in the disaster. We can dredge our waterways and restore our shorelines and reforest and plant crops on purified soil, and we have done so. We can find new and creative ways to utilize the vast regions of topography altered in the original disaster, and we have done so. Ours is now a flourishing world. But while the flora and fauna have been almost completely repopulated, they are...different.

"Wherever possible, Dr. etDeja and his team have been able to preserve and/or replicate genetic samples of the known species on the planet, down to insects, wildflowers, even blue-green algae. But the cloned species tend to have shorter life spans than their donors and, in the more complex species, they often don't even resemble the donors at all."

Again Raya paused. Before the Pulse, she had been a gifted teacher, and the years that followed had only augmented her ability to hold an audience's attention.

"Before the disaster, nearly every Payav child had a beloved pet laanur...." The screens around the room showed a series of images of something with a feline body, lustrous fur in a distinctive blue-and-silver striped pattern, webbed back feet and prehensile forefeet, with the luminescent dark eyes of a lemur, some of the pets gamboling about in a garden, others being cuddled affectionately by children or adults. "But most succumbed to cold and lack of sunlight in the shelters in the early years. Recent attempts have been made to replicate them from stored DNA, but the fuzzy newborn pups have grown into vicious, untamable creatures who live only a few months and more often than not have to be destroyed."

The screens showed several wild-eyed feral creatures with matted fur and bared fangs being held at bay by trained handlers attempting to capture them before they hurt anyone.

"Our revered noggik tree, once native to all of the temperate regions, a religious and cultural symbol sung of in story and legend and featured on many nations' flags, has been replaced by something which, at the genetic level, may be identified as a noggik tree. But what grows on the reforested hills and plains of modern-day Mestiko does not look anything like the trees we remember.

"Dr. etDeja will tell you that native species have been supplemented and interbred with carefully screened imports from other worlds, mostly successfully," Raya concluded. "Except for a few places, all abandoned now, where the scars will take centuries to heal, Mestiko has by and large been restored to a comfortably habitable planet. But as my people emerge at last from their underground shelters, many feel like exiles on a world they barely recognize.

"One wouldn't think that after all we as a people have been through, the simple loss of a pet or the fact that we will never smell the scent of noggik wood again would sadden us so much, and yet it does."

She hesitated, as if she had lost her train of thought. She hadn't meant to end on such a negative note. Kirk's death was affecting her more than she realized.

"I do not mean to sound ungrateful, Gentles," she managed. "But it is necessary for you to understand that the decision whether or not to join the Federation will not be an easy one. Some are concerned that it could mean a continuation of our dependency on your charity...."

There were nods and murmurs from some members of the Zamestaad.

"Others need time to understand exactly what such an alliance would entail, how much more of ourselves and our identity we would need to sacrifice in order to fit in."

Still more consensus from those gathered.

"Ultimately," Raya concluded, "we will hear all arguments and discuss all details, and should the vote end in a tie, I will cast the deciding vote. But in all honesty, as of this moment, I cannot tell you what my vote would be...."

* * *

"Well," McCoy said, watching the proceedings on a feed that Uhura had just patched in to the datacenter where he'd be working for the next few weeks. "At least she's being honest."

"Raya's always been honest," Uhura replied from a comm center across town. "Often to her detriment."

On their respective screens, Raya had stepped down from the podium, and several members of the Zamestaad were already trying to be heard, even though protocol required that both Spock and Azetbur add their remarks to Raya's.

"Let the games begin!" McCoy remarked, then muted the broadcast. He pretty much knew what Spock would say, and anyway he could get a replay later. For now, he had work to do.

He'd been paired with a Klingon healer from Azetbur's party. Their assignment was to review all the medical data on outcomes from the Pulse that had been gathered since the last time McCoy had been here. Where it wasn't heartbreaking- people were still dying of melanomas and respiratory ailments, birth rates were down, there were incidences of blindness and questionable genetic mutations, and the Payav life span overall was still nearly a decade lower than it had been before the Pulse- the work promised to be tedious beyond measure.

The Klingon healer's name was Rajhemda'la, and she eyed McCoy skeptically underneath her brows and shrugged.

"You're almost as thin as a Payav. We'll have to fatten you up. How do you like your gagh?"

"Not at all, thank you," McCoy replied, trying to be civil.

His Klingon counterpart was anything but thin, and as he observed her eating habits over the next two days, he could understand why. She seemed to spend as much time at the replicator as she did at her console. Still, despite his initial grousing, he found he was able to work with her. They divided the sector grids exactly in half, collected the data, and then flagged it for the other to cross-check and verify. There was no small talk, just a lot of demographics flowing by on a screen, and by the end of the second day, McCoy couldn't tell if he was awake or asleep. It was somewhere in that in-between state that he stumbled on something that intrigued him.

"Hello," he murmured, suddenly very much awake. "What's this?"

* * *

Once the initial shock value of having the Klingon chancellor herself on their world had worn off, the Payav lost no time in peppering her with questions, both during the official sessions of the Summit and during press conferences and even casual encounters in the corridors.

"You would have us believe that you are here solely because your homeworld has suffered a similar fate?" Deman elKramo was the principal gadfly, but he had plenty of allies. He made certain always to ask his questions when there were news cameras about. Even the growl and reflexive reach for his weapon on the part of Kra'aken, Azetbur's bodyguard, did not faze the man.

Inwardly, Spock sighed. He had expected that the negotiations would entail a long and arduous process. He hadn't expected open hostilities to erupt quite so soon.

Excelsior and its Klingon counterpart had left orbit as soon as both diplomatic parties had beamed down. Both would return within the month to retrieve their respective parties, regardless of what decision was reached. The month would be spent in negotiating, first with one faction, then another, to try to reach some consensus on what was best for Mestiko.

The first order of business, Spock realized, was to convince the Payav, despite past history, to trust the Klingons.

* * *

After three days surrounded by these hairless, fragile-looking, contentious creatures, Azetbur had stopped trying to tell them apart, addressing each simply as "Minister." It seemed to serve.

"Is that not sufficient reason?" she asked tightly. "Or is the fact that I am Klingon reason enough to suspect my motives?"

"Your people and ours have a past!" an elderly female Payav piped up from the back of the crowd. "A past that cost me several family members. Don't blame us if we are bitter!"

"Bitter about the past?" Azetbur inquired. "So you should be. But neither my father's regime nor mine has ever done you any harm."

"So you don't care if Mestiko joins the Federation in defiance of your empire?" someone else demanded in a non sequitur which made sense, Azetbur supposed, only if one were Payav.

"Frankly it's my belief that you and the Federation deserve each other!" she said with an edge to her voice just as Raya reached for the ancient noggikwood gavel which would, hypothetically at least, restore order to the proceedings.

"Alternatively, you could always ally yourselves with the Klingon Empire," Azetbur said just loud enough to be heard. "What better way to learn how we deal with contentious citizens?"

This caused further uproar, which Raya did quell with a rap of her gavel before adjourning for the first day.

* * *

"I honestly don't know what made me do that," Azetbur told Spock wryly at the small reception in their honor that evening. "But they squabble worse than Romulans. The urge to knock their fragile little egg-heads together..."

"You are playing devil's advocate," Spock suggested, then was compelled to explain the term and its origins.

"Am I?" Azetbur asked, and so it went.

* * *

The Federation, in the person of Spock, became the target of the next day's session.

"Can you restore our world to exactly what it was before this accursed Pulse destroyed it?" one delegate demanded. "Of course you can't. So what are you offering us? It's your fault all of this happened in the first place. We will overlook the loss of our many dead, but unless you can give us back the world we once knew..."

"You are aware, Councillor Jolon," Spock said, and the party in question seemed surprised that he remembered his name, "that restoring Mestiko to its original state is not possible. Nevertheless, every effort has been made to- "

"Then we're not interested!" Jolon shouted. The man did not seem to be able to speak in a moderate tone of voice.

As much as she hated it, Raya let them rant. But by the end of the third day, even she had reached her limit. She pounded the gavel for a full six-minute, long after the last Servant had shouted himself hoarse.

When the room had been brought to silence, Raya waited a judicious moment before announcing, "We will adjourn until tomorrow. Any further grievances, accusations, or simple complaints about the weather will hereafter be delivered in writing, and all such documentation must be read by all of the delegates before any can comment on them. That includes- " She raised her voice slightly over the expected groundswell of muttering. "- comments on my decision that all complaints must hereafter be submitted in writing. We are adjourned until tomorrow." She kept her eye on Deman elKramo and Servant Jolon in particular. "I hope by then you can all remember your equanimity."

That evening there was no reception. All of the delegates retired to their respective quarters for dinner and reflection.

* * *

Spock found both interrupted by McCoy.

"I need to talk to you!" McCoy burst in on Spock with a rudeness tolerable only in someone who had once shared the same brain, and got right to the point. "Assign someone else to the data gathering. There's somewhere else I can be more useful."

It was the most animated Spock had seen McCoy in a very long time. "Indeed?"

"There's an ethnic enclave in the Ayanava province- a tribe, really," McCoy said. "They call themselves and their valley the Nehdi. They refused to relocate when the pulsar passed, even though they were practically in its path. The folks in that region have lived through some of the greatest hardships of anyone on the planet." McCoy paused for breath. "Still, they're a resourceful lot, and they'd adapted, begun to reclaim their land so that they no longer needed to be dependent on government handouts, and now this..."

"'This,'" Spock repeated.

"Some sort of wasting disease that targets the young people," McCoy explained, "those who were children or young teens when the Pulse struck. As soon as they reach early adulthood, they begin to age rapidly for some reason, at a ratio of about a decade to a month. Organs break down, and they die. Local medical authorities are stumped."

Spock considered. "Only the young people?"

"So far," McCoy said gloomily. "I'm hoping it's just a local phenomenon, but I've got to know for sure. I want to go in there and have a look around."

Spock pretended not to notice the spark of interest in McCoy's eye, the slight straightening of his posture, which had seemed stooped with defeat and the burdens of the universe since the news of Jim's death. He was rubbing his hands together in that Let's get down to business gesture of his.

"Have the Nehdi asked for your help?" Spock wanted to know.

"Well, not exactly, but- "

"I am concerned about the completion of the global medical survey," Spock mused. The best way to make McCoy dig his heels in was to tell him he couldn't do something.

"C'mon, Spock. Anyone with a premed degree can stare at those grids and make a determination. You don't need a senior medical officer."

"Perhaps not. But there is also the diplomatic delicacy. There should be a Federation presence of equal rank to Rajhemda'la so that the Klingons will not be offended."

"Nonsense!" McCoy snorted. "As long as no one gets between her and the replicator. Tell you what, that young pup from Excelsior that you brought down as an observer can fill in for me. What's his name, Tuvok? Just on a hunch, Rajhemda'la would be a lot happier sharing the office with a handsome young Vulcan than with an old wreck like me."

Spock seemed to be thinking it over, timing it precisely so that McCoy would not guess he was being manipulated. He waited for the inevitable explosion. It was not long in coming.

"Dammit, Spock! I've been watching the newsfeeds. You and Azetbur and the rest are going to be stuck haranguing with the Zamestaad for weeks. The sooner I can get my hands around this thing, the better. Maybe I can save some lives. What's the usual mode of transportation in that part of the world?"

CHAPTER 5

"I had to ask!" McCoy grumbled as the ancient bus paused for breath at the top of a switchback and some of the stronger Payav got out and began to push.

As the normal change of seasons had given way to two decades of winter temperatures and poisonous atmosphere, transportation on most of Mestiko had been a challenge, but in these far-flung wilder areas it had often been close to impossible. With most roads at first inaccessible under several feet of toxic snow and eventually upheaved and torn apart by permafrost, the locals had learned to improvise.

Every surface vehicle became a multitasker. McCoy and Uhura had traveled most of the way from vosTraal in a wallowing skimmer-van that lumbered a few meters above the surface, picking up and delivering essential goods to certain hub cities along the general route they were headed. It took them three days to reach Ayanava province, but much of what they were onloading were medical supplies and a redi-lab for the new hospital that was under construction in the Ayanava Valley, and McCoy was kept occupied with inventorying and rearranging everything down to the last tongue depressor.

Uhura, for her part, took advantage of the skimmer's leisurely path to make onsite inspections of every communications relay in every town she visited. It was as much a sightseeing tour as an assignment. When McCoy got off in Ayanav, the regional capital at the southern tip of the valley, to continue his journey via local transportation, she would stay on the van as it looped around the entire valley and eventually returned.

She was well on her way, mercifully, before McCoy had a chance to grouse about riding the local bus. That "honor" fell to Sorodel, the Nehdi Elder who had met the van when it touched down in the town square.

"The bus," Sorodel told McCoy, "predates the Pulse. You should be grateful you weren't here during the depths of the nuclear winter. The mountain passes were impenetrable. And it wasn't always possible for the flyers to navigate the poisonous murk. When the airdrops couldn't make it, people starved."

That shut McCoy up for the moment. Whatever discomfort he was feeling, it was nothing compared with what these people had been through.

A particularly stubborn and resilient group, the Nehdi had steadfastly refused to be resettled in the more temperate, better-restored regions of the planet, despite the loss of over half their population in the immediate aftermath and the dreadful hardships of survival in the years following.

"Our ancient myths told that the gods brought us to this valley when the planet was just formed," Sorodel explained as the bus started again with a roar and those who had been pushing scrambled to get back aboard. McCoy, wondering if this leg of the journey was better or worse than the skimmer-van, noticed that the other passengers were pointedly not staring at him, though he imagined they didn't get many Dinpayav in these parts. "And while most Nehdi no longer believe that we will lose our souls if we venture away from our ancestral land, most of us refused to leave.

"The Nehdi have belonged to the Land for as long as it has been the Land, at least as it is written in the ancient lore. Even the Pulse could not drive us away. Partly this is stubbornness, but the rest is about who we are."

Sorodel, McCoy guessed, was about his age, and he found her voice particularly melodious. It soothed his impatience.

"Tell me more," he said as the bus swerved around a hairpin turn and he grabbed the first thing he could reach to keep from tumbling out of his seat. He'd learned enough about the Nehdi Elders to be aware that Sorodel carried the history of her people in her mind. He wanted to keep hearing that voice to take his mind off the jolting of his bones.

"In ancient times," Sorodel obliged him, "it was forbidden for the Nehdi to leave the Land. This is not to say that some did not try. Throughout our history many had gone away to the wider world of Mestiko and not come back."

The bus coughed, stalled, made some sort of horrible gear-shifting noise, started again, and began to move slowly down an improbable downgrade, loose scree scattering under its rear wheels.

"In ancient times, those who left and did not return were spoken of as if they were dead, mourned briefly, then not spoken of again," Sorodel explained. "Those who went away for a time and came back were studied closely by the kin they had left behind, to see if they had lost their souls.

"In ancient times, those whom it was decided had left their souls behind in the wider world would be prayed over. Some would recover their souls, some not. The latter were shunned, forming little groups of their own on the outer borders of the Land.

"There was the occasional muttering that the Alangabi, who live on the other side of the ring of mountains which form the borders of the Land, are descended from those soulless ones, though modern, more urbane Nehdi dismiss that as ancient prejudice.

"In short," Sorodel concluded with a wry and close-mouthed smile, "my people have not always been without prejudice. But the Pulse and its aftermath showed us how petty those ancient feuds truly were."

"So I take it you and the Alan...Alangabi?" McCoy asked, and Sorodel nodded. "Your two peoples are no longer feuding?"

The bus had begun what he hoped was the final descent of the final mountain. He didn't think his innards could take much more of this. He thought he saw buildings in the distance on the hardpanned valley floor, and hoped they weren't a mirage.

Beside him, Sorodel sighed. "The hardships following the Pulse created an uneasy truce between us as we struggled to survive in its aftermath. But now that the world is returning to something resembling normalcy after all these years, the old rumblings have begun again.

"In any event," Sorodel concluded her narrative as the bus did indeed level out and begin to pick up speed across the hardpan, though it seemed to be cutting directly across the desert, and there was no road McCoy could see. "The role of the Elder, even before the Pulse, is to somehow reconcile opposing forces. Not only to make our ancient beliefs compatible with modern life, but also to try to keep the peace between Nehdi and Alangabi without losing her mind. My sphere of influence is smaller than Jo'Zamestaad elMora's, but I know something of what she's going through." She held out her hands to McCoy in the characteristic Payav gesture of welcome, and he returned it- though he noticed that the Nehdi custom called for the arms to be angled inward and for each side to grip the other's wrist tightly. He suspected that this was an older form that the isolated Nehdi had never changed. "And I cannot tell you how relieved I am that you are here."

The bus ground to a halt at last in a kind of central plaza surrounded by the odd mushroom shapes that indicated the entrances to underground shelters, some of them as much as a mile away through tunnels into the nearby mountains. Interspersed among them were older structures, many of them rickety-looking stilt-houses, incongruous in a land now so obviously devoid of water.

As McCoy stepped down from the bus and stretched out the crick in his back, he noticed a group of teens loitering in the central plaza around an assortment of patched-together vehicles that appeared to be part motorcycle, part skateboard, part skimmer. Staring boldly at the Dinpayav doctor for a moment or two, they scrambled onto their vehicles and left the plaza in a roar of badly tuned machinery and a cloud of dust.

Beside McCoy, Sorodel looked rueful.

"Our wild ones," she explained. "Some of our children are still afraid to play out under the sky. Others roam the land as if wondering why it betrayed them. There was a time when we were one with the rhythm of climate and weather. I wonder if we will ever recapture that? As for the wild ones, they are just on the cusp of the age where our young people begin to die of this withering disease. One can hardly blame them for mistrusting us."

"Do you suppose some of them would trust us enough to give me tissue samples?" McCoy wondered. "I'd need them to compare with the sick, with mature adults, children...."

"We will try," Sorodel said. "But first we must make you comfortable. You'll stay with us as our guest. We have plenty of room. My husband Ejo is Leader. He and my grandson Chimeji and I are all that are left of the family. My daughter and her husband were among the first to die of the disease...."

* * *

When the Pulse came, Ejo had been standing at the mouth of one of the underground shelters, making sure his people got to safety before he sealed the entrance behind him. He had not been quite quick enough, and a brilliant flash of lightning had both scarred and blinded him. The livid scars across his face and running down his long neck only accentuated the stark whiteness of the cataracts obscuring his almond-shaped eyes, and McCoy's surgeon's fingers itched to do an intervention on either the scarring or the cataracts or both. But when Ejo had been offered the choice of ocular implants, he had refused.

"I see more this way," he explained with a chuckle in the back of his throat. "Yes, call me a crazy old man, but I can form a mental image of you, Doctor, from your voice, from the sound of your boots on my parlor floor, from the way you look around the room, assessing the many excellent pieces of tribal pottery you see displayed here."

Found out, McCoy stopped fidgeting.

"I see also," Ejo said with a benevolent smile, "that you have come to learn what killed my daughter and my son-in-law and so many more of our young people before it kills them all."

"I certainly intend to try," McCoy said.

* * *

The first thing he did was visit the temporary hospital units set up in tents outside the little town's main building when the wards had overflowed. New construction was everywhere in this part of the world, mostly replacing housing that had been destroyed either by the ferocious winds accompanying the Pulse or by the crushing weight of the snows that followed, but a new hospital complex was also being built just across the plaza from the old one.

"We are not quite sure what to do," Ejo explained. "This is our warm season, and the tents are adequate for now. But given the usual course of the illness, these citizens will not live to see the cold season. If all of our young people die, are we mad to keep building?"

McCoy, having just come from seeing the rows upon rows of cots set up in the bright airy tents, and the silent, wizened forms and vacant stares of the victims, tried to sound more optimistic than he felt.

"We'll find the answer to this thing, I promise you. For now, I've instructed your medical staff to keep doing what they're doing, making the ill as comfortable as they can while I get to work."

While he waited for a lab to be set up according to his specifications, McCoy got in touch with Rajhemda'la.

"Are there reports of anything similar in other regions?" he asked.

"Negative, McCoy. I have completed the global survey, and run your specific algorithm beneath it so as not to arouse suspicion. This thing you are investigating appears to be a localized phenomenon."

"Then likely it's not related to the Pulse, unless it's something specific to Nehdi physiology. But I'll test for it anyway. I hope you don't mind my leaving you in the lurch like that."

"Scientific curiosity is a powerful hunger," Rajhemda'la said sagaciously. Did McCoy only imagine he heard live gagh squirming in the background? "Besides, your replacement, this Tuvok, is quite...efficient," she added with what might have been a giggle.

Satisfied that he'd done his diplomatic best, McCoy went to work.

* * *

It took him a while to familiarize himself with Payav medical equipment, particularly since what the Nehdi had available predated the Pulse by a decade or two and was not in the best condition. He wished Sulu hadn't had to leave so soon, and that he hadn't gotten trapped babysitting Rajhemda'la for the first few days, or he might have cadged some of the top-of-the-line equipment from Excelsior's sickbay.

"Not the first time I've had to make do," he muttered, fiddling with the focus on what passed for an electron microscope in this time and place. That thought took him on a trip down Memory Lane to the hundreds of worlds and thousands of seemingly undecodable pathogens he had studied and, in some cases, cured in his career. A good thing, too, because suddenly what he was looking at under the microscope began to make sense in context.

"Now what does this remind me of?" he asked of no one in particular as a sequence of peculiar-looking nucleotides swam across his field of vision. The terms "suppression of nucleotides" and "life prolongation" echoed in his ears, spoken in Jim's voice. McCoy's eyes blurred; he blinked and sat back away from the microscope. "Of course...Miri's planet..."

There the problem had been a group of scientists tampering with ways to make humans live virtually forever, aging on an average of one month per hundred years. Their serum had become contaminated with a virus which killed off the entire adult population, leaving only the children, children who were centuries old by the time Enterprise discovered them, responding to a distress beacon the adults had left behind hundreds of years before.

All of the humans in the landing party had contracted the virus, and it had been up to McCoy to isolate the virus and develop a cure, all the while fighting the raging fever that was consuming him. Racing against time, he'd done the only thing he could: hoped that the formula he'd concocted was the right one, and injected himself.

Jim had never forgiven him for that one.

Just as he wasn't about to forgive Jim for running headlong into danger on the Enterprise-B.

Shaking those thoughts out of his head, McCoy focused on the situation at hand. Here he was facing the opposite problem from the life prolongation project on Miri's world. In this case it appeared as if someone had programmed a particular sequence of nucleotides- found, as nearly as he could tell by having run comparative samples, only in Payav of Nehdi ancestry- to overpopulate and destroy other cells. The result was that those who were infected aged rapidly, on the order of a decade per month, and died of old age while still nominally in early adulthood.

Well, at least now he knew what he was looking for. And having arrived at that conclusion, he discovered he was not alone.

Nehdi medical personnel were too overworked tending to the dying to lend him a hand. Just as well, since he always did his best work in solitude and quiet. But he found himself being observed by the large, liquid eyes of a rather small Payav.

"Dinpayav doctor," the little boy observed.

"That would be me. Dr. Leonard McCoy." He held out his hands in the Nehdi version of the traditional Payav greeting. "And you would be?"

"Chimeji elPrahno."

"Sorodel and Ejo's grandson. You weren't at the house when I arrived."

"School," the boy said. He seemed to be able to communicate with as few words as possible.

"Chimeji- that's a mouthful. Any objection if I call you Chimmy?"

The boy shrugged, his way of saying it didn't matter. McCoy guessed him to be about seven or eight years old in human terms. He was clearly curious about what the "Dinpayav doctor" was up to.

"Ever look into a microscope?" McCoy asked. The boy made a negative gesture. "Well then, past time you did. Come on up here and have a peek."

From that day on he and Chimmy were inseparable. McCoy made sure the boy was protected from anything that could be a potential pathogen, mostly had him cleaning up and acting as a runner to the medical personnel in the tents, but he also showed him things as he went along. Just as Jim had trained Miri, he realized, seeing the hero worship in Chimmy's eyes. It was there wherever they were, either in the lab or in the evenings during dinner at his grandparents' house. The only time the boy made a fuss was when his grandmother packed him off for bed instead of letting him follow McCoy back to the lab for a late-night shift.

Chimmy's face was solemn, and he rarely spoke. On the third day he asked McCoy the question uppermost in his mind.

"My parents died. Will I die, too?"

McCoy let one hand rest on the small, bald head. "Not if I can help it, son."

* * *

"It's a type of progeria," he explained, watching the look of wonder on the boy's face as he studied the tissue samples under the microscope. "You see, many cells in your body replace themselves. New cells replicate, old ones die. That's what makes you grow, for one thing. But this disease disrupted that somehow, and that's why some of the cells are dying without being replaced. All we have to do is figure out why."

"Is that all?" Sorodel said from the doorway.

She managed to check in on McCoy at least once a day, and sometimes she was able to assist him for a few hours. He'd been impressed with her knowledge of basic medicine.

"Science and religion are one with us," she had explained. "And so many died in the wake of the Pulse that many of us have had to do two or even three jobs. Then, when we started to lose our young people, our Middle Generation..."

Today she was all business. "What have you found?" she asked as Chimmy silently beckoned her over to the microscope to see for herself.

"It's what we haven't found," McCoy said, trying not to sound too frustrated. "First we have to rule out what it isn't. Since every one of the victims was a child or adolescent when the Pulse hit, it's necessary to rule out anything in the combination of assaults on their immune systems while they were still growing which could have triggered a cascade."

Sorodel looked thoughtful. "What is the likelihood of that, Doctor?"

"Well, the good news is, this phenomenon hasn't evidenced itself in any other group of Payav...so far. If it hasn't in over twenty years, it's probably not going to. So my hunch is it's a local phenomenon, either environmental, genetic, or a combination of both. And I need to be as thorough as time allows."

CHAPTER 6

Time might allow, but rumor didn't. McCoy's departure from vosTraal had not gone unnoticed, and someone from the news media had been curious about where he was going and why. It wasn't long before the rumor that something was killing the Nehdi made its way to the ears of the press and, through them, to the councillors at the Summit.

It had taken them a twelveday to finalize the seating plan, rearrange living quarters, see to everyone's dietary needs, make certain every councillor had a chance to air his or her particular laundry list of grievances- in writing, per Raya's order- against the Federation, the Klingons, or both, and finally allow Spock to present the offer on the table: what would be entailed if the Payav voted "yes" on membership, and what would happen if they voted "no."

Not surprisingly, discussion of the latter alternative had taken up a great deal of time and energy. Only when the last of the fears regarding the possibility of intervention, interference, nannying, "keeping us dependent on your handouts," and even invasion and conquest had been tirelessly addressed down to the last jot and tittle had the councillors been prepared to proceed.

This day's meeting was to have been taken up with each of the councillors' making a brief speech outlining his or her reasons for or against joining the Federation. But Raya was still in the corridor making her way to the meeting room when the uproar assailed her.

"It's the resurgence of the old feud between the Nehdi and the Alangabi," someone was saying.

"Who?" someone else demanded. "Until today, I'd never heard of either of them."

"Not surprisingly. There can't be more than a few thousand members of each tribe...."

"'Tribes'? They still refer to themselves as 'tribes'? Well, that explains it."

"Explains what? There were two laureates in the sciences from Ayanava. And you can't tell me you've never heard of the performance artist Rhilnam?"

"How do we know it even has anything to do with the two tribes?" a third party interjected. "None of this was talked about until the Dinpayav doctor arrived. How do we know it isn't a plot on the part of the Federation to keep us dependent on them? Very convenient, if you ask me!"

"And I suppose the dozens of dead even before the doctor arrived were prearranged as well?"

"Then it's a cover-up! We know there were several governments conducting similar experiments...."

"What if the disease spreads to other regions?"

"What if there is no disease, just a ploy on the part of the Nehdi to qualify for more aid than their neighbors?"

"It could be the beginning of a pandemic.... All of our lives could be in danger!"

Deliberately, Raya walked away. She would make no comment, officially or unofficially. Let the reporters talk to the councillors and the councillors talk to the reporters in an endless loop. If it wasn't this it would be something else. She had more important things to do.

Entering the Summit chamber, she made her way to the head of the table. By now the entire room was abuzz with rumor. Raya looked to Spock and Azetbur, observing silently, and made a helpless gesture. As she reached for the gavel, Spock shook his head slightly.

"I would recommend you let them get it out of their system," he suggested. "When they have exhausted themselves, you can make an official statement."

Raya sighed. "You realize that could take days?"

"Indeed."

Raya continued to hold the gavel, but did not bring it down just yet. "I draw the line if they start throwing things," she said wryly.

* * *

"It's all over," Uhura reported to McCoy from a remote outpost in a region lush with tropical vegetation, exotic animals, and pristine rivers full of rapids and cataracts that she thought would make a wonderful tourist spot, as she intended to tell its people once she got them on the grid. "Don't be surprised if- "

"- if every time I leave the lab I'm accosted by reporters?" McCoy interjected. "Too late. They're as plentiful as mosquitoes in August."

It was a slight exaggeration. Perhaps a half dozen had braved the journey over the mountains on the bus to find out what the Dinpayav doctor knew and when he knew it, but what they lacked in numbers they made up for in persistence.

"Just what I need- reporters camped on my doorstep, being in the spotlight when I'm trying to get some work done! Pity you had to be so efficient in getting the global grid up and running."

"Well, I've still got a few more stops to make," Uhura said, ignoring the implication that she'd done it just to annoy him. "What about you? Any progress on this mystery disease?"

"I can tell you what it is," McCoy said. "Got the mechanism of action figured out- it performs really well under a microscope. As for what's causing it or how to stop it..."

* * *

The breakthrough had come that very afternoon.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk, will you look at that?" he'd said, and since he was hogging the microscope, Sorodel wasn't sure if McCoy was talking to her or to himself. "I've never seen a gene sequence literally unravel before my eyes before. Have a look at this."

As McCoy put another sample in the scope field, Sorodel did have a look. What she saw at first distinguished itself as a chain of molecules wrapped around itself like the fibers of a rope, loose at either end, but tightly wound at the center. As she watched, one end of a single sequence began to unwind until the two strands separated and floated apart. Within seconds, they had disintegrated, vanished into nothing, even as their companion twinned strands began to do the same. Sorodel stepped back suddenly, shaken by what she'd seen.

"There's your culprit," McCoy stated grimly. "Now it's just a matter of figuring out why it's doing that, and how to either stop it or reprogram that gene sequence to rewind itself."

"Oh, is that all?" Sorodel mused, catching some of his cynicism.

"Well, no one said it would be easy. Meanwhile, there are several ways to reverse the condition in those who've already developed it, but the damnable thing is, I can't figure out where it's coming from. If it is a gene mutation, it should have cropped up over millennia, not a couple of years, not without a big boost from something environmental. I'll need volunteers to check air samples, water, soil samples, vegetation...."

* * *

Nothing would be accomplished in the Zamestaad that day. With much pounding of the gavel, Raya finally convinced them all to go home. There was no putting the genie of rumor back into the bottle, and she doubted that by now there was a single Payav on the grid who hadn't heard this one. Despairing of doing anything further with the councillors, she exerted her clout and called a press conference, demanding that every reporter and stringer in vosTraal meet with her at once.

"Are you attempting to censor us, Jo'Zamestaad?" one asked.

"I'm asking you to police yourselves!" she said, making sure the cameras were on her and the recorders were picking up every word. "What is accomplished, besides selling a few more downloads, by spreading panic and hysteria? Have you no pride in your world? Where is your dignity?

"Dr. McCoy went to Nehdi to help people. The disease existed long before he arrived. That your employers were too little interested in an obscure story in a remote backwater until now is no one's fault but their own. You will each of you see to it that the rumors are put to rest. The fact that this is a local phenomenon and there is no need to panic will be your lead story tonight. I give you fair warning: I will pull the license of every outlet that refuses. If it's censorship you want, you will have it!"

She stormed off without waiting for them to answer. Not that she expected them to have any answers, though she heard some muttering in her wake. The media were accustomed to asking questions, not answering them.

In the antechamber leading into the council room, Raya tried to calm herself. Just when she thought she had seen and heard everything from her fractious and unruly people, they managed to surprise her, and not in a positive way. Massaging her temples with her thumbs and breathing deeply, she put on an expression of serenity out of old practice and nodded to the guards at the doors to let her pass.

Spock had wisely led the Federation delegation back to their quarters for the day as soon as the Zamestaad had departed. The Klingons, however, were still there. Raya sighed inwardly, wondering how much controversy she could countenance.

She moved toward Azetbur and was about to apologize, but the chancellor's advisers had gathered in a tight knot around her and were engaged in a heated- if quiet, for Klingons- discussion. Raya could not have interrupted if she'd wanted to.

It occurred to her that she was alone in this room with a half-dozen Klingons and was not afraid. Was that a good thing, she wondered, or was she just too weary to care?

* * *

"naDevvo' yIghoS!" Azetbur said. "Leave us, the Jo'Zamestaad and me, all of you. There are too many voices in this room, and I need to concentrate."

"You should not be alone with any of them," Kra'aken muttered.

The chancellor dismissed this with an impatient gesture. "I have no reason to believe any here will harm me. Besides, she weighs no more than a child. With which of her four thumbs will she manage to break my neck?"

"Our people and theirs have a past," Kra'aken reminded her.

"That was a long time ago, it was not me, and no one is holding me responsible for it," Azetbur said tightly. "These people do not have the same sense of honor that we have, or they would not have invited us here. More likely they'd have blown us out of the sky as soon as we made orbit."

She regretted it the moment she said it, caught the glint of suspicion in Kra'aken's eye. There were many who thought her soft, and not only because she was a woman. Too friendly with outworlders, went the murmurs; not Klingon enough.

They would rather die on a Qo'noS gasping for air than do business with anyone who is not Klingon! Azetbur thought with something like disgust. They will be the death of me yet....

"naDevvo' yIghoS," she said again. "Go away. Wait outside the door if you want, but go."

"Madam Chancellor..."

"bIjatlh 'e' yImev!" Would the man never stop talking? "Shut up! Go. Question my orders again and I'll- "

Kra'aken gave the Klingon equivalent of a shrug, saluted, and turned smartly on his heel, drawing the rest of the entourage with him like a comet's tail.

When the door had closed behind them, Azetbur gave Raya a quizzical look and, in a surprising gesture, leaned down to pull off her boots, tilted her chair back, and put her feet up on the highly polished table.

Raya understood the gesture and, with a short, bemused laugh, kicked off her own practical shoes and did the same.

Not for the first time, Azetbur was struck by how fragile Payav seemed, with their reedlike necks and their startling hairlessness. She reminded herself that not all strength was in muscle- consider Andorians, for example- nor was all strength physical. Having studied this Raya elMora and her people before coming here, Azetbur had come to respect her for her sheer endurance, if nothing else.

CHAPTER 7

"I sometimes think," Raya said, pouring them each a cup of the local fermented beverage from the carafe at the center of the table, "that if policy were left to the women..."

"Perhaps," Azetbur said, raising her cup in a salute before sipping. "But then there is the tale of Magna the Magnificent, who began a war that lasted forty years because her husband's mother insulted her gown...."

Raya wondered if the tale was true or just made up on the spot, but found herself giggling anyway. "Perhaps. And you'll note that half of my councillors are women."

Azetbur seemed to be doing a mental head count. "Also true. But surely you, Jo'Zamestaad, appreciate how often women in power have to act like men in order to retain that power?"

Raya touched the rim of her cup to Azetbur's and both women drank ceremonially. Then Raya said what she had been meaning to say from the very first day.

"Why are you here, Chancellor? I mean you, personally. Oh, I know, a Klingon presence was requested by the Federation because of Mestiko's proximity to the Empire; the situation on Qo'noS suggested a study of Mestiko's plight might be helpful. But surely you could have done as President Ra-ghoratreii and sent a delegation. I am most interested in why the Chancellor of the Klingon Empire takes it upon herself to come in person."

"You do not trust me, Jo'Zamestaad," Azetbur answered by not answering. "And in your place, I would not trust me either. I could say I am here solely because of the situation on Qo'noS, but I doubt I would convince you. After all, we Klingons have the luxury, unlike you, of having years to prepare to either abandon our world or try to save it. But I wished to see what the Payav have done, and to learn from it."

Wisely, Raya waited, knowing there was more. A gesture inquired whether Azetbur wished to have her drink refreshed, and a nod from Azetbur indicated she did.

"I could point out, empirically, that my skills at diplomacy are a shade better than Kra'aken's."

This made Raya laugh again. Then Azetbur said something which surprised her.

"But the real reason is that I was curious about you. If you and I are to be 'neighbors'- inasmuch as, while our worlds are parsecs apart, nevertheless the universe is shrinking every day- I wanted to understand what you are like. What I discovered is that you and I have a great deal in common."

"I'm not sure I understand," Raya said, setting her cup down and rotating it idly among her four thumbs.

Azetbur found herself unconsciously doing the same, though she had only two thumbs. "There is a saying on my world. 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.' You did not wish to be Jo'Zamestaad," she said incisively.

"I most assuredly did not!" Raya blurted before she could stop herself. Was it only the drink? Why else had she taken such an instant liking to this Dinpayav, whose people had been less than honorable in their dealings with her own?

No, it was not the drink; it was the fact that Azetbur was right. What might she have become if there had never been a Pulse? A dozen alternatives coiled through Raya's head, all of them easier, less harrowing than the one which had indeed been thrust upon her. And yet, she had never stepped down, never willingly let another take her place. She had gone into exile and fought her way back to stand where she stood now. Why? Because she believed she and she alone knew what was best for her people, or because she was simply too stubborn to let go? When she emerged from her reverie, the look in Azetbur's eyes was knowing.

"Indeed. I at least had some forewarning. My father was grooming me to be his successor. Had things followed their usual course, I'd have had to be approved by the High Council, but when he was murdered..."

The memory was not recent, but the wounds still ached. Wisely, Raya said nothing. The more she could learn about this woman, the better.

"And had things followed their usual course, I might have begged off," Azetbur mused. "Accepted a lesser office, a diplomatic post, even an academic one, though I might have been assassinated anyway, lest I change my mind. I had thought I might marry someday, have children. Not that I necessarily had to do those things, but it might have been nice to have the option. As chancellor, it is impossible. Too many of my enemies would try to get to me through someone I cared for."

Here the paths diverge, Raya thought. At least no one's tried to assassinate me. That's not how we do things. Send a leader into exile and pretend she's dead, yes, but have her killed outright? Not Payav.

And now? she thought, studying the depths of the liquid in her cup and finding unsettling thoughts there. I'm past hope of childbearing, and I've always questioned the wisdom of those who did have children in the immediate wake of the Pulse. If they had not, of course, the Payav would have gone extinct, and yet to bring a child into a world underground because the air outside was poisoned...in any event, it was not for me. Not then, not now.

There was Theena, she reminded herself. But the little girl she had snatched off the street as the Pulse passed and raised as her own had always been wise beyond her years, and their relationship had always been more that of mentor and student than mother and daughter. Until Theena betrayed her trust by siding with Vykul and the Torye.

That thought was painful, and Raya set it aside.

When she and Cadi orMalan had been together in exile on Kazar, she'd thought they might marry, but he had stayed behind when she returned to Mestiko, not understanding her loyalty to the place. And what other man would tolerate the hours she kept, the work she did; and how could she expect him to go for weeks or months or even years without seeing her?

There was one man who might have, given that his own life was as fraught with responsibilities as hers. Well, Raya thought, too little too late.

She looked up to find Azetbur studying her in silence and wondered how long the silence had endured. She found herself wiggling her toes, and wondered if that, too, was only the drink.

"I will be blunt," Azetbur said, tilting her chair forward and swinging her feet back onto the floor. "I cannot tell you how tempted I am to say, 'Leave Mestiko to the Federation- they deserve each other.'"

Raya laughed nervously. "I wish to apologize for my people's bad manners."

"On the contrary." Azetbur's smile contained a hint of teeth. "I find them refreshing. I have had too many dealings with humans of late. They say one thing and mean another. And Vulcans! They either say nothing, or attempt to smother you in words. Oddly, I find myself preferring Payav."

Raya wasn't sure what to say to that, so she said nothing, suspecting Azetbur had more on her mind. She also managed to slide her feet onto the floor and try to remember her dignity.

"A meeting of minds never attempted before," Azetbur was musing. The carafe in the center of the table, meant to refresh half a dozen Summit members, was nearly empty. "Your people, mine, and the Federation, in the person of Spock, who attempted to bring my father to what was to have been the Khitomer Peace Accords. Do you know the story?"

Raya had a vague idea, but shook her head anyway, wanting to hear it from the Klingon point of view.

"...and then," Azetbur concluded her narrative, "there is Kirk. Or, perhaps better to say, there is no longer Kirk. Kirk who restored my father's faith, and mine, but who is no longer with us. I miss him."

"I do, too," Raya heard herself say. "Over the past few days, I've found myself wondering if the negotiations would have gone differently if James were here. Spock is a gifted diplomat- "

"- but sometimes diplomacy needs to yield to the desire to knock heads together," Azetbur suggested dryly, and this time both women laughed. Then Azetbur drained her cup and went looking for her boots.

"We must find a way," she said, on her feet and completely sober regardless of how much of the unfamiliar liquor she had consumed, "to bring a little bit of Kirk back into the room the next time your councillors meet. As my father would say, 'Politics makes strange bedfellows.'"

Raya watched her depart. Whatever else had just happened in this room, she believed she had found in Azetbur someone from the Klingon side whom she could trust.

CHAPTER 8

Uhura's work was almost done. She'd been hopscotching back and forth from orbital stations to comm nodes on the ground, assisting local authorities in bringing Mestiko's entire comm grid in synch, and had just a few more locales to visit. Borrowing a small Federation-issue skimmer left behind by one of Dr. Lon's assistants at her last location, she was on her way to troubleshoot one last tangle of comm nodes that hadn't responded when "tickled" from orbit. While gadding about the planet renewing old acquaintances and seeing how well the recovery was progressing had been gratifying, she was looking forward to returning to vosTraal for some R & R, or perhaps investigating the famed hotsprings of Gelta province, which she understood were accepting visitors again.

Most of the problem sites she had needed to visit were in remote areas and, while the work was tedious, the countryside was varied, and signs of regeneration were everywhere, so very different from her last visit here.

The Payav she met along the way were for the most part friendly, grateful for her presence, because it meant they could watch the video feeds from vosTraal and follow the proceedings of the Summit. Occasionally she encountered Payav who had never met a Dinpayav before. Too polite to stare, they were nevertheless watchful, and Uhura made a point of holding impromptu tutorials while she worked, so that the locals would know exactly what she was doing and why.

It was at one site just on the other side of the hills separating Alangabi territory from Nehdi that she quite literally stumbled upon a group of young people who had transformed one of the relay stations into a kind of clubhouse.

They'd heard her skimmer set down outside and emerged from the bunkerlike structure to investigate. Uhura counted nine of them, six boys and three girls, all sporting the same tattoo of a flowering vine just below the left ear. Silent, they gathered around her in a loose circle and simply stared.

"Dinpayav," one of them said finally.

"Yes," Uhura said hopefully, giving them her best smile. "I'm here to- "

"We didn't do anything!" one of the girls shouted, and as if on some prearranged signal, they bolted as one, disappearing into the underbrush. With the sound of badly tuned engines- some sort of improvised dune buggy- and a cloud of dust, they were gone.

With a shrug of resignation- she really would have preferred to assure them she meant them no harm- Uhura retrieved her tricorder and cautiously scanned the relay station from the outside to determine that in fact it was empty. Inside she found it surprisingly neat, until she remembered that these kids had been born and had lived most of their lives underground. But they had disabled the comm grid, probably scrounging it for parts for their vehicles, and it took her the better part of an hour to set it to rights. She left the tricorder running in case someone decided to come back. That was how she noticed the peculiar readings.

Apparently the aboveground portion of the building was only a small part of it. What Uhura found next, hidden behind a bolted-shut door further hidden by utility shelves stacked with cartons of stem-bolts and coils of antique coaxial cable, set off alarms on more than her tricorder.

* * *

"Water," Ejo elPrahno said from his place at the head of the table, refilling his guest's glass unerringly despite his blindness. "Water that glows in the dark."

McCoy had brought them hopeful news: Several patients had responded well to the treatment, while a few more had at least stabilized. But he was no closer to figuring out what was causing the anomaly, and it was a weary McCoy who could barely keep his eyes open during dinner that evening. Sorodel was too polite to notice, but nothing escaped Ejo's observation.

"Chimeji," he said, as Sorodel brought more homemade biscuits straight from the oven and the boy immediately grabbed one in each hand. "Tell our guest, what is the greatest change in our society since the Pulse came?"

"Water," the boy said as solemnly as he could past a cheekful of biscuit.

"You have seen the stilt-houses," Ejo explained to a puzzled but intrigued McCoy. "And no doubt wondered why they were built in the desert."

"They do seem a little odd," McCoy admitted. He'd thought he was full until the biscuits arrived, but their enticing aroma changed his mind and, emulating Chimeji, he soon found himself with one in each hand.

"Before the Pulse, much of our land was marsh," Sorodel explained. "There was always enough water. But the Pulse changed everything, transforming our world into desert. We have since had to learn about such things as irrigation." She stopped, looking at her husband with great seriousness. "Ejo? You have seen something," she said.

"What does a blind man see?" he asked with a wry smile. "A river that glows in the dark. That is where, Dr. McCoy, you will find the cause of our affliction. I only wish I had seen it sooner...."

* * *

There was, as it turned out, no river on Nehdi land that glowed in the dark, and McCoy filed Ejo's observation away as something from a mystic realm he did not fully understand.

When Uhura woke him in the middle of the night, the pieces began to fall into place.

"Leonard, you've got to see this for yourself."

"In my ample spare time," McCoy groused. "Until we can figure out what the hell's causing this mutation, all I'm doing is- "

"What if I told you I might have your answer?"

"Say again?"

"I'm no medical expert, but I think I'm looking at a roomful of documentation about medical experiments conducted on animals more than fifty years ago. There's one whole file on 'Accelerated Aging.'"

There was a long silence, so long that Uhura checked the frequency.

"Leonard, did you hear me?"

"Damn right I heard you. Where the hell are you? What are you waiting for? Hook me up and relay the stuff to me, can't you?"

"Even if I could, I wouldn't trust it to remain secure. The grid's still too compromised. If the media got hold of it, or- "

McCoy hadn't thought of that.

"Besides," Uhura added. "It's all on paper."

"Old-fashioned paper printouts..." McCoy mused with a kind of wonder in his voice. "Now that's something I never thought I'd see."

* * *

Once more Uhura had had to go and retrieve him, flying low over the hills in the dead of night and spiriting him away in the tiny skimmer. What she'd found was exactly what she'd thought it was, and McCoy was as excited as she'd seen him since this mission began.

It would take a while to read through all of it, but the documentation was all here. The Alangabi government had been conducting bioweapons experiments- long before the Pulse and, according to the stacks of paper McCoy was rummaging through, only on lab animals. But some of their stored materials had disappeared- either lost or stolen- in the chaos immediately following the Pulse.

"And I'm guessing some of that got into the aquifer on this side of the mountains and leached into the underground water supply the Nehdi were dependent on during the nuclear winter," McCoy said.

"Is there enough material here to help?" Uhura asked, scarcely believing their good fortune.

"There should be. Pity it's all on paper; it'll take that much longer to read through, much less the inconvenience of transporting it out of here. Too bad none of Spock's ability to memorize data stuck in my brain. Anyhow, let's put it all together. Shouldn't take more than a couple of trips in the skimmer to get it out of here.

"It never ceases to amaze me," he went on, scooping files into what looked like a wastebasket he'd scrounged from under a table somewhere, "the capacity for otherwise intelligent beings to expend so much of their time and energy playing 'Gotcha!' with people they don't like...."

Having filled the wastebasket, he went rummaging for something else, and came up with a storage box full of odds and ends so dusty they made him sneeze. There were a lot of files.

"...Used to think it was just humans, until I got out into space and realized there's a pattern to the evolution of damn near every species except possibly the Halkans. Scratch and claw for survival for a few million years, then when things get peaceful and you have enough to eat and land to grow it on, you sit around the fire in the evenings thinking of ways to kill your neighbor...."

"Leonard..." Uhura said quietly.

"I know, I know- I'm hurrying! Maybe if you gave me a hand instead of playing lookout in the middle of the night in a facility in the middle of nowhere that hasn't been occupied except by desert rats for at least a generation- "

The slide and click of an old-fashioned disruptor- the kind the Klingons had probably left behind during Traal's brief reign- shut him up. Hyperfocused on gathering as many bulky paper files as he could, he'd neither heard nor seen the return of the wild ones Uhura had frightened off earlier in the day. They filled the small bunker and had their weapons trained on both of them.

"Oh, damn!" McCoy muttered.

He'd been among the Nehdi long enough to know those weren't Nehdi tattoos. The twining red-and-blue thorny-vine below the left earlobe was a distinctly Alangabi design. There was something else disturbing about this group, too. None of them looked well.

Payav as a species, once you accepted the pallor and the hairlessness and the longer necks as a normal part of their body habitus, were for the most part beautiful, from both a medical and an aesthetic point of view. There was something fawnlike about them: large-eyed, graceful, innately gentle- until they started quarreling.

And until the Pulse, which brought many kinds of scarring- burns, blinding cataracts, frostbite, the long-term effects of hunger and lack of sunlight- one hadn't seen any deformities among these people. McCoy had never seen them this way- his first exposure to Mestiko was a couple of years after the Pulse hit- but he'd studied the records gathered by the Federation observation team before the pulsar was discovered. The Payav had been an eminent example of a case in which nature had gotten it right.

Not so these children- and that was really all they were. The eldest, a spindly male at the forefront who was obviously the leader, couldn't have been more than an adolescent on the cusp of adulthood. But in each of them, on the cursory glance McCoy allowed himself past the muzzles of outdated weapons pointed at him by a gaggle of unsteady adolescents, there was something off, something more than the effects of being born and raised in darkness and cold and inadequate nutrition. It wasn't even necessarily anything physical- a limp, a squint, a twisted limb- but some emotional darkness that made the good doctor profoundly uneasy.

Setting the storage box he'd been stuffing full of documents down on the floor beside the overflowing wastebasket, he tried his best grin and the old McCoy charm.

"My guess is y'all are wondering who we are and what we're doing here," he began. "I don't suppose you'd believe me if I told you we're part of a cleanup crew that's- "

"Silence!" the tall spindly one said predictably. "Get away from those papers. Stand next to the female."

McCoy did as he was told. If he'd known how long he'd have to stand there....

Mentally he assessed each of his captors' physical state. Prolonged malnutrition during the growing years for that one, some sort of chronic neuropathic skin condition for that one, poor diet and lack of sunlight for that one.

"What's the matter?" the spindly one said, noticing the scrutiny. "Don't like looking at us? Do we offend you? We're not as pretty as your Nehdi hosts over the mountains. Do you want to know why? It's because in the worst times they would not share their resources with us. They made us this way."

"Not so!" one of the females said suddenly. "What I heard was- "

"Lies!" one of the younger boys piped up. "Government lies, Nehdi lies!"

"Dear God..." McCoy said out of the side of his mouth, shifting his feet restlessly. "I'd rather they killed us outright than argued us to death...."

"They're not going to kill us," Uhura said pragmatically. The youngsters were arguing so loudly they could talk underneath them, and if there hadn't been so many of them and they hadn't been blocking the only way out, some sort of escape could have been attempted. "They need us as bargaining chips. There are still reporters snooping around these parts. I repaired the relay station. If I could just get to the controls..."

She was standing quite still, centered, her eyes on the youngest male, who was probably no older than McCoy's newfound friend Chimeji, and who kept wiping his runny nose on his sleeve. At least the others hadn't trusted him with a weapon; all he had was a long stick. If she could charm him...

"And if they don't get what they want?" McCoy said a little too loudly.

"Let's not get caught up in 'ifs' right now..." Uhura started to say, but suddenly all nine of their captors seemed to be talking at once, in an obscure dialect that McCoy couldn't follow. A barely perceptible shake of her head told him Uhura couldn't understand it, either. But judging from the body language, including a great deal of gesticulating from one of the females, the gist of the conversation seemed to be "Oh, great! Just what we need, hostages! Can't we just burn the papers and send these two on their way? Who's going to believe Dinpayav, anyway?"

This was no doubt followed by, "It's not just the papers, you idiot. The very fact that these two are here means there'll be news crews as soon as we release them. They'll bring in research teams and run tests, and then we're doomed."

"Who's 'we'? This is something that happened in our elors' era. It's got nothing to do with us."

"Your elor or mine?" That was followed by a startled silence. "Yes, now you see the size of the problem. Our people did this. And even if it was a long time ago, people are dying now. We'll be blamed. We can't let these two leave here."

"So who's going to kill them? It won't be me, and I doubt it'll be you. Or did you plan to keep them and feed them for the rest of their lives?"

"Dear God!" McCoy interjected finally, and all nine pairs of eyes turned to him. "Look, I realize we've put y'all in a situation here, but either kill us and get it over with, or put us somewhere while you figure it out- "

"Leonard!" Uhura whispered. McCoy was suddenly grateful he wasn't close enough for her to kick him.

"- because I for one am not a young man, and it's past my bedtime and I need to sit down. We could also do with some food and water and maybe a hot bath after digging through these dusty old papers all night and- "

He'd pushed it too far. The leader made an impatient noise and waved his weapon at them again.

"Quiet! Get in the storage room. Both of you, now!"

Two of the others searched them and confiscated anything that could be used as a weapon or a means of communicating, including the comm unit Uhura had secreted in her boot while McCoy had been speechifying. There was barely enough time to see that the room they were being shoved into was about two meters square and full of gardening equipment and not much else before the door was slammed and locked behind them, plunging them into all but total darkness. A rim of light around the door and the murmur of voices told them their captors weren't going anywhere.

CHAPTER 9

"Can't say I blame them," McCoy said once the door had closed and locked between them and their captors. "Given their history with the Nehdi, the least this kind of information could do is heat up the old hostilities. But with the Summit meeting and the eyes of the quadrant on them- "

"Which is why we have to convince them we're not going to run to the media with this," Uhura said. The door had barely closed when she'd begun groping her way around the walls, looking for...well, she wasn't sure what, but she had to keep moving.

"Exactly. Although how we're supposed to do that from in here...All we want to do is work backwards from the data in those files to- ow!"

"What's the matter?"

"Tripped over something. Feels like a garden hoe. And is that...Oh, please tell me that's not manure!"

Uhura gritted her teeth to keep from snapping at him. "Look, why don't you stay still and let me do this before we end up bumping into each other?"

"No, dammit! You stand still. Go over by the door and try your charms on them. God knows I've failed, but communication is your thing."

Uhura banged her palms on the door. "Hello? Can I talk to you for a minute? Someone? The last thing we want to do is start up old hostilities. We just want that information so we can help the people who are sick. Can't you let us out so we can talk?"

Her words were met by a loud banging from the other side.

"Be quiet in there!" It was the leader again. "We need to discuss this among ourselves. Someone will feed you in a little while, but only if you don't say another word."

With that the murmuring on the other side began anew.

"They're just children..." Uhura said.

"Children with guns," McCoy pointed out, mindful of Miri and her friends. Uhura hadn't been in the landing party that time.

When the haranguing outside finally subsided and one of the females came in with food, Uhura deliberately did not look toward the light from the opening door. That way, she was able to retain her night vision and find an escape route.

"There's a draft from somewhere up there," she told McCoy once they were locked in again and the arguing outside resumed, though with less intensity. "Has to be an air vent, or even a window. I didn't have time to see when they tossed us in here, but I noticed it now. They have to get tired of arguing and sleep eventually."

"Good luck with that!" was McCoy's opinion.

"Actually," Uhura said, already moving while she ruminated, "it might be better to investigate this while they're arguing. That way if we make any noise, they won't hear us...."

"And if they've posted a guard outside?"

"It would just be one of them. A kid. Are you saying we can't sneak up on and overpower a kid?"

"Who's 'we'?" McCoy demanded. "I can boost you up there, but you can't haul me up after you. I'm not going anywhere. Just go!"

"Just long enough to get back to the skimmer and alert the Jo'Zamestaad," Uhura promised. "You know I won't leave you here."

"Whatever," McCoy said. "Let's get on with this!"

There was in fact a window, neither locked nor barred, but half-open and just big enough for Uhura to crawl through. McCoy made a stirrup of his hands, and Uhura scrabbled up the earthen wall and pulled herself up by the window frame, cursing under her breath as she felt several nails break and realized her palms were full of splinters. But she got over and out to discover that, as they'd hoped, the window was at ground level and hidden by overgrown shrubbery. She was free.

"You okay?" she heard McCoy's voice below.

"I'm out," she said. "But- "

"Just go, willya?" he said, not giving her a chance to finish with I don't want to leave you behind. "These are Payav, remember? They won't kill me without arguing about it for at least another three days. I expect you to come rescue me before that."

"You know I will," she whispered, then brushed the dirt off her knees, looked around, and listened for a moment before slipping through the branches and out toward where she thought she remembered the road.

Amateurs, she thought gratefully. There had been no guard, and her little skimmer was right where she'd left it. She risked a short burst of power, just enough to let it roll down the incline for several hundred yards without another sound. Then she fiddled with the comm until she found a frequency she didn't think the Alangabi would use, and patched in to Raya elMora's personal transceiver.

* * *

Matters moved swiftly from there. Bouncing a signal off the nearest comm satellite, Uhura activated the relay station where the kids were holding McCoy, and it came to life. On a secure frequency, Jo'Zamestaad elMora came straight to the point.

"What is your name, Young One?" she demanded of the apparently Alangabi ringleader.

"S-Stenho etLaja, J-Jo'Zamestaad," he stuttered, his cheeks suffusing such an uncharacteristic pink that several of his followers giggled.

"You do realize you're on the verge of causing an interstellar incident, do you not?"

"An inter- what? We are holding two Dinpayav intruders who were attempting to slander our people with accusations of germ warfare. We expected the Jo'Zamestaad to reward us, not accuse us of- "

"One," Raya couldn't resist. Something of James T. Kirk's best persuasive manner arose from her memory, and she used it. "One 'intruder,' or should I say 'hostage'? You haven't even managed to do that much right."

This produced a flurry of activity in the relay station, and finally the youngsters, chagrined that they hadn't even noticed that one of their hostages had escaped, produced a sleepy-looking McCoy, hair and clothes rumpled, blinking in the unaccustomed light.

"Are you all right, Doctor?" Raya demanded.

"I suppose so," McCoy muttered, scratching his head. "Listen, the little I was able to read of that documentation we tried to confiscate- "

Raya cut him off. "- you should not discuss on an open frequency, however secure. First we get you out of there, then we worry about- "

"Forget me! You've got to find the source of the pathogen. My guess is that somewhere around here you'll find the experimental batches that the original scientists left behind. Then you can- "

"Doctor, please shut up!" Raya said tightly. "Let me talk to Stenho again."

When the now obviously completely flummoxed young man returned to the screen, she scolded him the way a mother might a wayward adolescent.

"Now, you listen to me, young man!" Bless you, James! she thought, perversely enjoying the moment despite its seriousness. "Commander Uhura has gotten the global comm grid back online, and I am this close to letting the news media descend on you. You will release Dr. McCoy at once and return him to the Nehdi. You will evacuate the relay center, because at the very least you are trespassing and at the very worst you are impeding an investigation into a catastrophic medical situation. Now, you and your friends have one minute exactly to evacuate the premises. Go! Shoo!"

CHAPTER 10

"There," Cart etDeja said, pointing to the anomaly. From orbit, the river did indeed glow against the dark of the background readout. "Seepage into the aquifer that feeds the Nehdi irrigation system. Something in the pathogen makes it phosphoresce under spectral analysis. When we trace it backwards, we'll probably find a cache of long-forgotten Alangabi chemicals buried somewhere."

And so they did. Hidden within a concrete bunker not far from the relay center where McCoy had spent an uncomfortable night, the missing bioweapons material had been rather hastily hidden, sealed in what at the time were assumed to be damage-proof storage drums. But the years of intense cold following the Pulse, along with seismic activity in the region, had damaged the bunker, allowing the ice and snow in and corroding the temporary containers. Some had seeped into the water table and thence into the underground streams that supplied the Nehdi Valley with water.

The disturbing thing was that the bioweapons did not affect Alangabi, only Nehdi who had inherited a certain gene sequence, causing the mutations that resulted in premature aging and death. While the original experiments had been done only on animals and then abandoned, the intent was clear. Taken to their logical extreme, these experiments had been meant to produce a bioweapon to be used against the Nehdi.

"So all we have to do now is reverse the process," McCoy told Raya, trying to make it sound easy. "I've lost three more patients in the meantime, but with the added data, we should be able to put a stop to this. Now, can you do something to get rid of the reporters camped on my doorstep? It's a nuisance having to step on them every time I go outdoors."

"I'll do my best, Doctor," Raya promised, remembering what it was she'd always admired about this man. "I'll be there first thing tomorrow to...what is the term? 'Kick ass and take names'?"

* * *

It wasn't quite that easy. Raya brought the Elders of the Alangabi to meet with Ejo and Sorodel on neutral ground and try to resolve centuries of enmity in a single morning. In an inspired move, she also brought representatives of the young people, the "wild ones," from both sides to attend the negotiations.

After several days of intensive talks (during which there were rumblings from vosTraal, where Spock, Azetbur, and the Zamestaad continued the Summit in Raya's absence, though some of her constituents were less than pleased to do so), the two sides reached a rapprochement.

The Alangabi agreed to clean up and destroy all traces of the experimental pathogen. In exchange, the Nehdi agreed to offer their medical expertise to heal those like the wild ones who had suffered so much during the aftermath of the Pulse.

Both tribes drafted anyone with even a smattering of scientific or medical background to read through the mountains of paperwork generated by the animal experiments in order to help the Dinpayav doctor McCoy refine his treatment regimens so that the pathogen would claim no more victims.

* * *

Sorodel, watching Chimeji play out under the sun, wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.

"So unnecessary!" she whispered to McCoy. "My daughter and son-in-law should have lived to see this day. So unnecessary..."

McCoy put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her. After all these people had been through, he could find no words that sufficed.

But Sorodel was an Elder, and hers was not the only loss among the Nehdi this day. Her people expected her to be strong, and so she would be. Silently clasping McCoy's hand where it rested on her shoulder, she looked toward the future in the person of her grandson, running free under Mestiko's sky, promising hope.

CHAPTER 11

Raya elMora hooked her four thumbs into the buckle of the shoulder harness and snapped it into place. Checking wind speed and direction, she began to set the shortest course back to vosTraal, then hesitated.

What was the rush?

To everyone's surprise, she had named Deman elKramo as deputy in her absence, and he would speak for her as first Spock, then Azetbur, presented their respective cases for Mestiko's admission to, or independence from, the Federation. The presentations, arguments and counterarguments, could be expected to last at least a week.

All Raya needed to do was to be present at the end in case a tie-breaking vote was needed.

Thanks to Commander Uhura, the global grid was up and running. Raya could listen to the proceedings and still take the leisurely route home.

As a teacher, a small eternity ago, she had traveled occasionally, saving up her salary and taking all the recommended tours to the historic places, gathering up memories, never knowing that in the blink of an eye many of those places would be either gone forever, or rendered uninhabitable without drastic alterations that would render them historic in an entirely different way.

As Jo'Zamestaad, every journey had been one of duty: formal tours to inspect the devastation and make decisions about who needed to be evacuated, who could stay, and under what circumstances. Later there were more inspections to see that the restorations were progressing as promised, that corruption and inertia were kept to a minimum, that people got what they needed.

Since things had been "going well"- that is, since she and her government had returned from exile- it seemed she hardly left vosTraal.

This afternoon, she would remedy that. If she set the skimmer for maximum speed, she could chase the sun around her world, and see vast swathes of it, good and bad, before nightfall. She had rations enough for several days, and if the Jo'Zamestaad herself couldn't sometimes bend the rules, who could?

She logged in a flight plan that would give her an ETA at vosTraal sometime tomorrow evening, and left a channel open to the Summit proceedings, where she could hear Spock's sober, reasoned tone laying out the terms under which Mestiko might join the Federation without losing any of its autonomy as a sovereign planet.

Raya deliberately left the channel on listen-only, not wanting to alert any one of her ministers as to her location or her availability. She did not wish to listen to the objections and reminders of unfinished business she knew would greet her if she let them know where to find her.

As she followed the sun, she somehow felt as if she was not alone.

It was difficult for her to admit even to herself how much she had been looking forward to seeing James again. Primarily, of course, she had been eager to show him how much progress her people had made since the last time he'd been here; but also, in light of that progress, she'd hoped, at last, to be able to take some time for herself, to capture some of what she'd sacrificed of a private life when the Pulse occurred.

Had she been out of her mind to even consider spending some of that private life in the company of Starfleet's living legend, James T. Kirk?

She knew from their years-long correspondence that he still harbored some guilt for his part in failing to stop the Pulse from ravaging Mestiko. She had hoped somehow to help him confront that guilt and begin to heal it.

At the very least she'd hoped to persuade him to stay a little longer on her world than protocol demanded, to linger for a while when the diplomatic mission was over. As her world emerged at last from its years-long nuclear winter into something resembling normalcy, she might have offered him a beach to walk on.

But now he was gone forever. The might-have-been brought tears to Raya's eyes. There had been times when she'd hated him, and said as much, times she'd accused him of not doing enough, until she'd realized that what he was in fact doing was helping her people to do for themselves.

In mourning him, she was mourning everyone she had lost. But was she losing sight of everything her people had done? Its evidence was all around her. Dashing away her tears, she smiled.

"Well, James?" she said aloud. "I think I've learned more from you than either of us ever realized."

The Mestiko of her youth was gone forever. But in its place was a pristine, beautiful world of forests and ice-fields and oceans and fields, of gleaming cities rising from ruins or places where there had never been cities before; and for all the many dead, there were as many living, giving birth, flourishing. It would never be the same, but that didn't mean it wasn't good.

Raya thought of the terrible ordeal she and her people had been through in the wake of disaster, and how it had in some ways strengthened them, and in other ways shown their vulnerabilities.

Not for the first time, she could not help wondering how her life, and all their lives, might have been different if the Pulse had never passed their world. Then again, what if the Federation hadn't been there to first mitigate the effects of the Pulse, and later help the Payav survive and restore their world?

What-ifs, Raya realized, were as dangerous as if-onlys, and she made up her mind at that moment to stop second-guessing herself. Somehow she suspected James would approve.

* * *

McCoy eased his weary bones down onto a stone bench in the quiet rear courtyard of the medical building. The oldest building in town, it had been built many centuries ago of native stone, on a rise above the valley so that there was no need for stilts. The inner courtyards had once been a maze of small gardens. Most were barren now, waiting to be replanted. Nevertheless, it was a peaceful place to spend the latter part of a long day.

It was early evening, and construction on the new housing across the plaza had ceased for the day, restoring the natural quiet. Some of the hospital staff were leaving work, some arriving for the night shift, and they nodded to the Dinpayav doctor without speaking, respecting the man and his solitude, particularly after what he'd been through recently. If there were no words sufficient to thank him for saving an entire generation of their young people, their respectful silence would have to suffice.

Off in the direction of the encircling hills, McCoy could hear birdsong. He wasn't versed enough in the local fauna to know if they were native species that had somehow survived, or some new hybrid species the locals would find as alien as he did. In any event, it occurred to him that he was enjoying the sound.

He was enjoying the view, too. For the first time, he noticed that the medical building had been positioned so that the morning sun graced the elaborate front entrance and the brilliance of the sunset flooded the inner courtyard.

And it was brilliant indeed. There were still some traces in the atmosphere of the noxious elements kicked up by the pulsar; McCoy supposed Spock or that young pup Tuvok could quote him the chemical breakdown to the last molecule, but he didn't care. Whatever the chemistry of it, the sunset was spectacular, and he intended to enjoy it on that level alone, thank you very much.

An odd thought struck him. This was the first time he could remember actually enjoying anything since...since Jim had died.

Oh, he'd gone through the motions, eating and sleeping when he needed to- knowing too well what the consequences would be if he didn't- getting out of bed when it was time to go back to work, putting one foot in front of the other to get where he had to go. And the work itself had been both challenging and meaningful. But he couldn't have described a single meal, or remember lacing his boots or told you whether his socks matched or if the weather on the walk over here had been warm or cold, clear or misty. None of it had mattered.

He'd known it wasn't healthy. How many people had he lost over the years? He knew the five stages of grief and could almost predict their duration each time someone he knew passed on. So many days for denial, so many more for anger, this many for bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. But he'd gotten stuck somewhere in depression this time, a depression, oddly, colored by guilt.

Not the I-was-there-and-should-have-saved-him guilt that Scotty was going through- McCoy made a mental note to stay in touch with the grizzled engineer to make sure he didn't do anything dangerous- but more of an I-wasn't-there-and-should-have-been guilt.

Patently ridiculous, of course. He'd been invited- they all had been- to attend the commissioning of the Enterprise-B, but he'd been up to his ears in a research project, had growled something about dress uniforms and begged off. No one had really expected him to do otherwise.

But if he'd known he'd never see Jim Kirk again after that day...

You'd have done what, you old fool? he chided himself. You don't have psychic powers or even that weird telepathic sense that Vulcans have that told Spock the Intrepid had been destroyed from parsecs away, so why don't you stop feeling sorry for yourself and...

And enjoy the damn sunset, he decided, his shoulders slumping. The fact that he'd even noticed that Mestiko had a sun, and that it set in Technicolor every evening, was, he supposed, a sign the depression was lifting. The final step would have to be acceptance. Yes, James T. Kirk really was dead, and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do to bring him back.

So after a long day of squinting through a microscope- refusing to take the computer's word for the fact that the regen batches were uniform and free of artifacts- McCoy closed his eyes and felt the warming rays on his face, breathed in the clean air of a restored Mestiko the way he'd seen Payav do every time they emerged from an underground shelter, never again to take it for granted...and realized he was not alone.

Chimeji stood beside him, silent, not so much as letting his shadow fall over the old man's face to disrupt his enjoyment of the sunset.

"How do, Chimmy?" McCoy smiled in spite of himself. Until today, the kid had been the only thing on Mestiko to make him smile. "Whatcha got there?"

The boy's grubby fists cradled something small and dirt-covered as if it was incredibly precious.

"Treasure," he said in that blunt, shorthanded way of his, waiting for McCoy to hold his hands out so he could deposit his "treasure" there.

Rocks, McCoy thought at first when he took them. He was holding five uniform-sized roundish lumps, automatically brushing the dirt off them to see what was underneath. Like all kids his age, Chimmy thinks he's found pirate treasure or a gold mine. Do I encourage him in his fantasy, take his mind off his dead parents, or...?

But the objects were too lightweight to be rocks. Hoping he wasn't holding the petrified scat of some long-dead animal, but intrigued in spite of himself, McCoy hauled himself up off the bench and motioned for Chimeji to accompany him inside. Back in the lab, he rinsed the dirt off the "rocks" and scowled.

"Well, I'll be damned! Could these be what I think they are?"

"Computer'd tell you," Chimeji suggested, his upturned face expectant.

McCoy looked down at the boy with renewed admiration.

"It might. But the records from back then aren't complete. We don't want to make any mistakes, get people's hopes up unnecessarily. Sometimes it's better to do things the old-fashioned way." Placing the objects reverently on a specimen tray, he dried his hands and hit the intercom. "Dr. elKanai, are you still on the premises?"

The medical center had a staff of experts in biologicals and herbs. Jana elKanai was not long in arriving. Her eyes widened when she saw what Chimeji had found. She picked the objects up gingerly and examined them for a moment without speaking.

"Could be..." she said carefully, as if trying not to get her own hopes up. "But even if they are, no guarantee they're viable, or that they'll germinate, or that the seedlings will survive any more than..."

She stopped herself, seeing the crestfallen look on Chimeji's face.

"Whatever happens, Young One," she assured him, "you've earned yourself a tattoo for finding these."

"Maybe not," the boy said, looking down at his feet.

"Ah," Jana said. "I can see I'm not being a good scientist. The first thing I should have asked you is where you found them."

Something there was about small boys and construction projects which spanned solar systems and species. Not only did the Nehdi need new homes and shops and offices to replace those damaged and left fallow following the Pulse, but new housing was being built to accommodate the arriving medical and environmental workers, and new construction was everywhere. The soil had finally warmed enough for large earthmovers to dig deep excavations, well below the former frostline, for the foundation of more-than-temporary shelters. And the local kids couldn't stay away.

Playing near the excavation no matter how many times the workers chased him away, Chimeji had apparently found some seedpods buried in the softening permafrost. He didn't have to say a word. Jana knew.

"Your elor will not know whether to scold you or reward you," she suggested.

The boy shrugged. "Probably both."

"So are these what I think they are?" McCoy interjected, strangely excited.

"Indeed they are," Jana concurred. "Whether they've been dormant for centuries or only since the Pulse, they are in fact the seeds of a noggik tree. The scanners should tell us how old they are and whether or not they're the original strain and not a more recent hybrid. Beyond that, we can only hope."

As she proceeded to scan the seedpods, McCoy couldn't help noticing the expression on Chimeji's face, something he hadn't seen before in the brief time he'd known the boy. Hope, indeed.

There's a lesson here, he told himself, about life, death, things of that nature. This youngster's lost a lot more than you have, and yet he can find hope in a little thing like a handful of seed pods. The young heal faster, but still...

"Are they, are they?" Chimeji could barely contain his excitement as the scanner worked its magic. A grin as wide as he could make it without showing any teeth lit up his face. McCoy squeezed his shoulder affectionately.

"Whether they are or not, there's enough dirt on your neck, youngster, to grow a forest of noggik trees...."

Was this acceptance, the final stage of grief? he wondered. It no longer felt like depression, anyway.

Dammit, Jim! he thought, watching Jana and Chimeji clasp hands as the scanner reading showed that, yes, the seed pods dated to around forty years before the Pulse, and that three of them showed 90 percent viability and the other two 40 and 30 percent, respectively. He found himself sharing their delight vicariously. Chekov's wrong, and so's Sulu. Heroes die all the time, usually at a greater rate than us ordinary mortals. You did this deliberately, left us here to mourn you...

...or to carry on your mission, the way Raya's doing, the way the entire population of Mestiko is doing, even as they're working at cross-purposes the way Spock and I used to.

Used to? he asked himself. It was still going on, probably would for the rest of their lives, despite their once having shared the same brain.

And yet they expected the Payav to behave themselves, make nice for the visiting diplomats, and decide with a single voice whether or not to join the Federation.

In any event, he was not a diplomat, and he'd leave it to Spock and the other ambassadors. And it was past time he stopped feeling sorry for himself. Whether or not Mestiko elected to become a member of the Federation, there was good work being done here, and more good work to do. McCoy found himself grinning for the first time since he could remember, reminding himself just in time not to show any teeth.

As a wise man once said, there were always possibilities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARGARET WANDER BONANNO sold her first novel in 1978, at a time when "serious women's fiction" was not an oxymoron. Characterized by one reviewer as "the new Mary Gordon," she followed this first mainstream novel with two more, before the Recession of '82 changed the face of U.S. publishing forever and she, along with several hundred other midlist writers, found herself needing to rethink her career.

A Star Trek fan "from the time of the beginning," Margaret recalibrated her style and wrote first one, then a second Trek novel entirely on spec. That second manuscript became Dwellers in the Crucible, which was followed by Strangers from the Sky.

Following a bit of strangeness which resulted in 93 percent of Probe's being written by someone else, Margaret segued into straight s/f with two trilogies, The Others and Preternatural, and, with Nichelle Nichols, coauthored Saturn's Child.

A bit of pseudonymous fiction here, another mainstream novel there, a bio, ghostwriting and book doctoring, oh my, and Margaret was welcomed back to Pocket Books when Marco Palmieri invited her to participate in the Lost Era series with Catalyst of Sorrows. Most recently there has been the challenge and delight involved in exploring the character of Christopher Pike in Burning Dreams. A native New Yorker, Margaret currently lives on the Left Coast, where she dabbles in bonsai and has found a beach to walk on and a Romulan to walk with her. She has two adult children, and is the cofounder of Van Wander Press, www.vanwanderpress.com. Please visit her website at www.margaretwanderbonanno.com.