"Captain, long-range sensors are picking up a life form."

That was, he would reflect later over his glass of Romulan ale, how it all started, and it was fitting, he supposed, that a man who had lost everything when he had boarded a transport bound for the Academy should find it again in the black waste of deep space, drifting through the nothingness like a splinter from some long-forgotten shipwreck.

Jim, slumped in his seat, straightened, suddenly alert. "What kind of life form, Sulu?"

"Hard to say, sir. We're still too far out to get a good read."

"Is it a ship?"

"I don't think so, sir. The readings I can get indicate that it's a single life form."

"Could it be a shuttle?"

"Possibly."

"Captain, as far as I am aware, there are no other Federation vessels in the vicinity." Spock's stentorian voice drifted from his post behind them, and Dr. Leonard McCoy didn't have to look to know that those keen eyes were bright at the prospect of another mystery.

"Could it be an alien vessel?"

"As we have just begun our exploration of this area, anything is possible." Spock descended the small dais that separated him from the bridge proper, hands clasped behind his back. "However, our preliminary intelligence reports indicate that there are no M-class planets in the vicinity."

"So, we've got an interstellar drifter on our hands?" Jim's tone was conversational, but McCoy could sense the excitement underneath, and his own pulse quickened in response. The last time Jim had sounded like that, McCoy had been treated to the distinct pleasure of running through the dense, red forests of Nibiru, dodging rocks and spears and plummeting over a cliff into a churning sea.

So much for a quiet shift, he thought desultorily, and shifted in his seat.

It had been quiet, too. Hell, after the relaunch, the whole damn voyage had been quiet. There were the occasional fights in the ship's bar, when big mouths fed bigger egos and matters were settled with swinging fists and flying decanters, and there was that unfortunate accident with a trainee barber, but it was nothing that a bandage and an analgesic hypo couldn't fix. Weeks when by where he did not see a single patient, and frankly, that suited him just fine. After the Khan debacle, he welcomed a bout of unremitting routine.

And here it was, about to be blown to hell by an unidentified interstellar hitchhiker.

"It is possible, sir," Spock answered, oblivious to McCoy's darkening mood. "It is also possible that it is an escape pod from a recent wreck or other catastrophe."

Jim considered that. "Uhura, get in touch with Starfleet. See if they have any reports of accidents or distress signals from the area."

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Sulu, can we get a visual?"

"I can try, sir." Sulu's nimble fingers flew over the console. "Visual acquired, sir." A moment later, the enormous screen in front of them blossomed with an image of the cosmos that surrounded their ship. An endless expanse of eternal night dotted with pinpricks of light brilliant as polished diamonds. The stars in all their splendor, their light so pure they made his eyes water. Heaven, the dreamers would have called it, and so would his mother, come to think of it. The scientist in him knew better, of course, knew the less glamorous truth of space dust and gases and nuclear fission, but there was a small, tenacious part of him, a part born and raised with pan-fried chicken and his mother's singing on Sunday mornings, that secretly wondered if the dreamers might be right.

And in the middle of the silent, yawning vastness, a speck of silver barely visible to the naked eye.

"Magnify times twenty," Jim ordered.

Sulu complied, and the image narrowed and sharpened. Stars blinked out as the silver speck swelled and swallowed them whole. Jim sat forward and then rose, and he and Spock moved closer to the screen for a better look.

I can't beat 'em, so I might as well join them, McCoy thought with grim fatalism, and followed suit.

"If it's an escape pod, it's a small one," Jim observed.

"I don't think it's an escape pod," McCoy said suddenly, mouth dry. "It looks like another damn cryotube."

The atmosphere on the bridge instantly shifted from one of curiosity to bristling wariness.

"Shields up. Sulu, can you tell me anything else about whoever's in that cryotube?" Jim demanded. His shoulders were high and tight, and his hands curled into tight fists at his sides.

Sulu peered at the sensor readouts. "Readings indicate that it is human, sir."

McCoy's stomach tightened. I'll be damned. Marcus missed one.

Jim's thoughts must have mirrored his own, because he said, "Can you tell if the occupant has undergone any genetic modification?"

Sulu shook his head. "Negative, sir. That's beyond the sensor's capabilities."

"I'd need to examine them," McCoy murmured.

"Captain," Uhura called from her post, "Starfleet has no record of any incidents in this area."

Spock spun sharply on his heel. "Sir, I recommend that we leave this cryotube where it is."

"We can't just leave it here," McCoy protested.

"We very well can, and we should. The last time we encountered people in cryotubes, this ship and Starfleet command were nearly destroyed. We and the Federation have only recently recovered, and a second attack at this juncture would prove catastrophic. The prudent course of action is to leave this cryotube and its occupant to its fate."

"What if it's not one of Khan's people? What if it's just some poor fool that got jettisoned with the garbage by mistake?"

Spock arched an eyebrow at him. "A highly unlikely scenario, Doctor," he replied, and though McCoy could not disagree, his imperious tone still rankled. "As Lt. Uhura has pointed out, there is no record of any vessels in the area. As such, there is no logical explanation for a human presence here."

"Logical or not, there's a human being out there," he snapped, and gestured at the screen with one outstretched arm. "And they're alive. And you're suggesting that we should just leave them there."

"It may be an ambush," Spock persisted with maddening pragmatism.

"A one-man ambush in the middle of nowhere," McCoy challenged. "Come on, man, think."

"I am thinking, Doctor. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Khan would employ such a strategy. Admiral Marcus used a similar one to smuggle Khan's people aboard. Khan is smart and dangerous; he may well have decided to attack the ship by perverting tactics once used against him. If we bring the cryotube aboard, the ship could be compromised from within."

"And if it's not Khan?"

"An acceptable loss. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

"'An acceptable loss?'" he repeated incredulously, and snorted disdainfully. "Of course it is. It's just a number on some tote board in your calculating Vulcan brain. I suppose I shouldn't expect anything different from someone who abandoned a man on a frozen wasteland without so much as a backward glance."

"I did what I thought best," Spock said primly, but McCoy knew he had struck a nerve by the way his back stiffened.

"And we see how well that went. If Jim hadn't managed to pirate his way back on board, we'd all be space dust at the ruined edge of the galaxy."

"I see no benefit in revisiting past errors. It achieves nothing, and it has no bearing on our current situation."

McCoy grit his teeth and fought the juvenile urge to cuff him upside his insufferable head. Instead, he dismissed him with a roll of his eyes and a shake of his head, and turned to Jim, who had been watching their exchange with wry amusement.

"For God's sake, Jim, we can't just pretend we didn't see it. Even if this is one of Khan's people, they deserve the same chance as the others. Bring it in and let me examine it. If it is one of Khan's people, we close it without waking them up and send it on to Seti Alpha 5."

"And if it's hiding a photon bomb or other destructive device?" Spock interjected.

Jim turned to Sulu, hands clasped loosely behind his back in unconscious imitation of his science officer. "Mr. Sulu, are there any readings from that cryotube that would indicate weaponry?"

Sulu glanced at his console. "Negative, Captain. All readings show that it's just a cryotube with a single life form inside."

"Jim-"

"Captain-"

Jim thought, head bowed, and then he said, "Mr. Sulu, engage tractor beams. Uhura, have a security team meet us in Transporter Room Two. Spock, Bones, you're with me."

Bones nodded. Spock scowled, but said nothing. On the screen, the tractor bean extended its quicksilver tendrils to envelop the small capsule. Jim watched it drift toward the screen and the unseen belly of the ship for a few moments, and then he turned and strode toward the door. He and Spock trailed dutifully in his wake.

"Captain," Spock began as soon as the bridge doors had slid shut behind them, "I feel it is my duty as the ship's First Officer to object to this course of action."

"Noted," came Jim's reply as they made their way to the turbolift.

"Captain, I do not believe you appreciate the severity of potential consequences should my hypothesis prove correct," Spock said officiously.

"Your harebrained theory, you mean," McCoy needled.

"My hypothesis is based on sound logical principles, whereas yours is based strictly on admirable but misguided emotional impulse."

"Excuse me for having a little damn empathy."

"Let us hope it does not prove fatal."

"Why, you-"

"Gentlemen," Jim interrupted before McCoy could offer his opinion on Spock's constitution, "let's see what we're dealing with before we start claiming told-you-so trophies." He smirked and stepped into the turbolift.

"Smug, cold-blooded..." McCoy muttered under his breath.

The security team was waiting outside the transporter room when they arrived, four strapping lads with phasers at the hip and faces devoid of all expression. Recruited by the Starfleet posters plastered in every club and dive bar on the planet, no doubt, wooed by the promise of steady pay and a life of adventure in the unexplored wilds beyond the stars. He wondered how many of them had believed it. More than a few, he guessed. Booze had a way of polishing even the grimmest of turds, and even if you were sober enough to see through the bullshit, sometimes desperation left you no choice.

God knew he had been desperate when he had seen the poster dangling forlornly on the wall of some Atlanta dive, yellowed by finger grease and sweat and the booze sweated from countless pores as patrons listed and wobbled to the bathroom on legs gone to tallow and rubber. He had been newly-divorced and destitute, down to his last credit and taking up space on the barstool because he had nowhere to go. The bartender had had more pity than Spock, thank God, had let him stay as long as he pretended to nurse his watered-down shot of Kentucky bourbon, and he had sat there with all his ex-wife and the judge had left him shoved into a duffel at his feet. The poster had caught his bleary, wall-eyed attention only because he had been tired of studying the grain of the synthetic wood of the bar and the deceptively-cheerful glint of the ersatz crystal decanters that lined the shelves behind the barkeep's head.

He had recognized its glossy pictures and bold proclamations as bullshit immediately; he wasn't so crocked that he could not recognize that piquant, distinctive, earthy reek when he got a snootful, but according to a dispassionate judge with a soft Dixie drawl, hangdog jowls, and dead eyes, heaping helpings of shit were all he had to look forward to, at least until the former Mrs. Dr. McCoy became someone else's problem. So he had let his gaze linger on its crisp picture of a beaming, young cadet in a smart, maroon uniform. No military expeditions, the poster had promised, only exploration and inquiry, and, with luck and diplomacy and the winning nature of humans, friendship with other species.

Bunkum, of course. Despite their sudden pretensions to moral respectability in the wake of global nuclear annihilation, humans had an unparalleled knack for wearing out their welcome almost as soon as they stuck their foot in the door. He had thought, as he'd blinked at the poster and clutched his empty tumbler, that when the first humans turned up on their galactic neighbors' doorstep dressed in the Sunday best and with the snuffling, dumb enthusiasm of poorly-trained golden retrievers, the neighbors were likely to extend the cold barrel of a blaster in lieu of hospitality. And, truth be told, he could not fault them for it.

Not the place for him, he had told himself decisively as his dry lips had tried in vain to coax a few last drops of bourbon from his stingy glass. He would have to fly, for one thing, and in a spaceship, no less, and he had not gone to med school just to end up mingled with hull fragments and a still-sizzling warp drive on some godforsaken asteroid.

Prudent advice, especially from a mind busily unraveling several sheets to the wind, and he had congratulated himself on his levelheadedness. And yet, part of him had wanted to believe, to take the poster at its word and hope that mankind's first forays into space would change things for the better, would usher in a new dawn of peace, advancement, and prosperity. It was the same hopeful voice that had talked him into medical school with the argument that his steady, farm boy's hands could stitch the broken back together again.

It also told you that marrying Pamela was a good idea, another, more dour voice had noted. And look how well that turned out.

He had grunted in taciturn concession of the point and turned the chilled glass in his fingers. His wife was gone, as gone as the house and car and most of the credits in their joint account. Gone as the fledgling practice that had just begun to flourish. All she had left him with was his name, and he had suspected that was only because she had had no further use for it anymore. He was not sure he did, truth be told. After his joyful experience with family law, it would not even buy him a pot to piss in, let alone a shabby window to throw it out of.

But for all that, he had not enlisted that night. The bourbon in his belly had fed the guttering fires of his pride, and that naive, hopeful voice had persisted. Instead, he had nodded his thanks to the barman, shouldered his bulging duffel, and taken the car that was soon to be hers for one last ride. But it had proven as fickle and treacherous as his ex, had kicked up its heels and quit in a spume of dust and smoke on the hardpan of the sprawling Mojave. He had cursed his luck and kicked the tires, and then he had hitchhiked into Vegas, duffel hanging dispiritedly from one dusty shoulder.

He had hoped to find work there, but there had been scant call for a green doctor with dust behind his ears. He had tried to catch on with the clinics, had offered his services as a traveling medic willing to rumble all over Hell's half-acre to attend patients too old and too stubborn to tear up the roots their bones had put down so long ago, but they had wanted someone more experienced and so had the patients, who had taken one look at him and seen only his youth and his haggard face.

I'm sure you're a fine doctor, son, they'd croaked at him with their thin, sand-scoured voices. But I'm afraid I can't have someone so damn fatalistic tinkering with my insides.

So that had been the end of that, and he had found himself at loose ends, idle for the first time in his life. He had found piecework here and there, swabbing clinic floors or filling in for sick orderlies, and slept more often than not in the glorified doss houses the Federation had established to help the downtrodden avoid the taste of shoe leather on their tongues, but nothing steady, nothing that brought him peace or satisfaction. To make matters worse(as if they could have been back then, with sand in every unmentionable crevice and the dry, desert air stale as plaque in his mouth), he had begun to fear that his mind would forget its knowledge of the body's various systems and devote itself instead to the remembrance of whiskeys and bitters and cocktails and the nigh-innumerable permutations of black-market rotgut. His restless hands had wanted for the balanced heft of a laser scalpel in his, or a bioscanner, or a hypo.

And so it was that he had found himself staring at that same recruitment poster again, outside the communal living house he had called home this time. The same grinning cadet, the same lurid photos. The same lies draped in the glory of promise. Everything had been the same except him. He had been numb and dispirited and hungry for who he had been before the courts and unkind circumstance had chewed him up and spat him out.

He had still smelled bullshit, but it had no longer been so offensive to his nostrils, and one summer morning, he had presented himself at the recruitment center. It had been a casino once, or so the story went, but that had been centuries ago, before most of the old ways had been obliterated in the searing blast-furnace of nuclear holocaust. By the time he had found it, footsore and thirsty and with sweat trickling down his armpits and prickling in his scalp, it had been a recruitment center and outlying administration archive for the Federation, its formerly grand and sprawling expanse partitioned into a warren of offices and cubicles and filing rooms crammed with database servers and records terminals.

He still remembered the recruiter to whom he had signed away what remained of his life. A once-solid man slowly going soft, with a jovial smile that had not matched the cool assessment in his gaze. You don't look like much, those eyes had said as his hand had pumped his arm in a hearty handshake and his mouth had launched into a spiel polished smooth by thousands of passes through his pale, dry lips.

Need more iron in your diet, he had thought as the man had droned on, but he had had the sense to keep it to himself and take the seat the man had offered with that shit-eating grin and a sweep of his arm.

He remembered the man, but he could recall nothing of the promises made. More bullshit, he supposed, offered to him on a padd passed over the desk, dry bread offered to the grasping, outstretched hand of a man too proud to beg. Nor could he recall what he had told the man in turn. As little as he could manage, if he had to guess. His past was all he had had left by then, and he had been damned if he would lose that, too. A man should be allowed his regrets.

A doctor, huh? the man had said, and leaned back in his chair until the back groaned in protest. Well, we sure could use your type. Most of the kids we get in here are delinquents and snotnosed punks who think they're gonna play space marine or be the next Ferdinand Magellan. We'll need somebody to patch their fool heads up when their bravado outweighs their brains.

A life went pretty cheaply, as it turned out. He had traded three years for a disingenuous handshake and a pass for the next transport to the Starfleet Academy, and three days later, he had found himself strapped into a shuttle next to some cocksure cowboy named James T. Kirk and clutching his hip flask in a white-knuckled grip, its contents burning a slow trail to his panic-knotted belly.

How many of these kids are here because of those same tired promises? he wondered as he glanced at the stern, impossibly young faces of the security detail. More than a few, like as not. Some of them might have been snared by the same recruiter as him, that fisher of men with the dead eyes and the predatory smile. Or maybe they had been snagged by their own Captain Pikes, guilted into it by men with lofty ideals or by the ghost in the family tree, the celebrated hero who died on some sunless rock before they ever coughed the amniotic fluid from their lungs.

Or maybe they were fellow runaways, embittered by life's disappointments and looking for a fresh start. Maybe they were fleeing broken homes or dodging the slings and arrows of unwanted responsibility, cowardly Romeos who had loved naive Juliets and bowed out when they began to talk of curtains and baby bonnets. He had known a few of both during his Academy days; the former inspired pity, but for the latter, he could muster only dull contempt.

Let's just hope they know how to work those phasers they're packing, he thought.

The team fell in behind them as they entered Transporter Room Two. Chekov stood at the ready behind the controls. "Transporter standing by, Captain," he announced with wide-eyed earnestness, a pup eager to perform his best trick.

"Energize," Jim ordered.

"Aye, Captain."

A tap of the console, and the cryotube appeared in a whirl of orange light, insubstantial as mist at first, but soon resolving into a solid cylinder of silver titanium with a registry number on the side in small, black letters.

"Captain, I do not recognize the registry number as any configuration currently employed by the Federation," Spock said.

"Have your phasers at the ready, gentlemen," Jim commanded. He drew his own phaser, and from behind them came the furtive rustle of the security team following suit.

They approached cautiously, knees bent and arms outthrust, phasers trained on the hatch. McCoy strained to hear any sign of movement from the cryotube, but it was silent as the tomb, and just as still. Spock, phaser still at the ready in one hand, produced his tricorder and scanned the cryotube.

"Anything I should worry about?" Jim asked.

"All readings suggest it is what it appears to be," Spock answered.

"So it might not be Khan's. His had those anomalous readings that Miss Marcus detected."

"Yes, but those were caused by the photon torpedoes Admiral Marcus loaded inside the cryotubes. Khan might have devised a weapon undetectable by our current technology."

"There's a happy thought," McCoy muttered, and tightened his grip on his phaser.

"Can you see anything, Bones?" Jim asked as McCoy approached the cryotube.

"Negative. There's too much smoke from the cooling agent. I won't know exactly what we're dealing with until we open her up."

"Then that's what we'll do." Jim motioned for two of the security officers to lift the cryotube from the transporter pad. "Take it to sickbay and set up a containment field around it. Khan or not, there's no guarantee that whoever's in there won't be hostile. The rest of you keep those phasers at the ready."

The security officers designated as pack mules led the procession from the transporter room, pallbearers at a shorthanded funeral. The rest of them trailed behind, phasers held in slackening grips. Passing crewmen turned to watch their progress with avid, curious gazes and whispered to one another. McCoy knew what the topic of conversation would be in the bar and on the promenade of shops on Deck Twenty-Three. The mysterious retinue creeping from the transporter room would take on a lurid life of its own, grow to mythic proportions as it passed from deckhand to engineering crew to shuttle maintenance. A cryotube would become a smuggling operation or a prototype weapon designed to obliterate entire planets with a single anti-matter pulse. and its occupant would find themselves reborn as either a god among mortals or an abomination from the abyss. He would place a gag order on his staff, but he had no illusions about its effectiveness. Good intentions were no match for the need to gossip, to share forbidden knowledge passed from lips stained with wine. If it weren't the nurses, who gathered for drinks and shopping at the promenade at least once a week, it would be the aides, who enlivened the tedium and ignominy of hosing off medical bays and emptying urinals and bedpans with rounds of drinks and late-night poker games.

"This is going to spread like wildfire, you know," he grunted as he kept pace with Jim and Spock. The security officers and their cargo had pulled ahead, spurred by their orders to set up a containment field.

"Let them talk," came the cavalier reply, and McCoy had bitten back a sigh and quashed the urge to roll his eyes.

"The doctor has a point, Captain," Spock pointed out.

"Well, I'm glad you think so."

Spock ignored him. "Rumor allowed to go unchecked could promote an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, especially coming so closely on the heels of our encounter with Khan."

"Relax, Spock," Jim said dismissively. "The crew are Starfleet officers, and I'm sure they'll respond professionally."

"Given my experience, that is not necessarily the case," Spock retorted drily, and McCoy felt a pang of grudging admiration.

Jim only grinned. "Fair point, Mr. Spock," he conceded. "But right now, we have nothing to report. When we do, I'll be sure to disseminate all pertinent information to the crew."

McCoy gave a dubious grunt. Spock's lips puckered in a skeptical moue. Jim merely grinned sedately at them.

I'm following a lunatic, he thought morosely.

The cryotube had been set on a table by the time they entered sickbay, and McCoy noted with absolutely no surprise that all other activity had ceased. The orderlies and med techs were clustered around the empty beds, eyeing the cryotube with avid, uneasy curiosity.

Thank God no one was in need of actual medical attention in here, he thought irritably, but before he could rebuke his gawking staff, Jim spoke.

"Is the containment field ready?" he asked the nearest security officer, a kid who could not be more than twenty-four, and who sported a sparse down of peachfuzz on his pale, rounded chin.

"Aye, sir."

Jim opened his mouth to speak again, but McCoy cut him off. "The only person going inside that field is me." When Jim made to protest, he set his neck and overrode him. "That's the way it's going to be. You're the captain, but this is my sickbay. You can stand there with your phasers if you want to, but everyone else clears the room."

Jim studied him for a moment, searching for a chink in his resolve. When he found none, he said, "Everyone but Spock clear the room immediately."

For a disappointed, bewildered instant, no one moved. Then, the gaggles of onlookers dissolved, and they left the room on shuffling, reluctant feet. The security team were the last to depart, holstering phasers as they went, and the last cast a lingering look at the cryotube, as though he were waiting for its occupant to burst forth in a shower of Plexiglas and liquid nitrogen.

McCoy shared his unease, for what little it was worth, but there was nothing to be done for it now. Sensor readings indicated that there was a human being in there, and he would be damned if he would just leave them in there like a can of peach preserves forgotten in someone's root cellar. He was not some green-blooded Vulcan who could reduce lives to a bloodless calculation of cost and benefit to a greater good that had an alarming way of shrinking to the unenviable lesser for those at the bottom. He was a doctor, and a good one last he checked, and he intended to act like one.

He rolled a tray of scanners and hypos alongside the table. "Turn on the containment field," he said when he had taken up his position beside the cryotube.

Spock moved to the wall beside the dispensary and tapped several commands into the wall-mounted security and environmental controls. "Containment field activated."

"Activate the pathogen filter while you're at it. It's a longshot, but I don't want this whole ship infected if our guest turns out to be carrying some pox or flu."

"Pathogen filters engaged."

Though curiosity burned within him, a low, hot coal low in his belly and lodged behind his breastbone like a bone spur, he proceeded with care and performed scan after scan on the container. This close, the results were more accurate. The guest in the cryotube was, indeed, a human. It was also a woman. There was no sign of infection, contagion, or significant injury, and yet, a few of the readings showed neuromuscular and skeletal abnormalities. His brow furrowed in concentration, and he adjusted its sensitivity in an effort to compensate for interference from the cryotube.

"You got something, Bones?" Jim drew closer, though he stayed outside the containment area.

"I don't know," he murmured, more to himself than in answer to his question. The anomalous readings were increasing. Nothing extreme; just a handful of results that whispered of flesh and bone but uneasily acquainted. Dislocations, but not quite. Joints and bones set in a torsion the human body did not gracefully abide.

It could still be interference from the cryotube, some sort of radiological distortion caused by the life-support and cooling systems.

Maybe, agreed a thoughtful, analytical voice, the voice of dissertations and long study session in the university library, when most of the other students had drifted off to the friendlier haunts of their dorm rooms and he was left with the silence and the solitude and the watery, flickering glow of handheld tablets. But none of your stasis pods cause such anomalies. Granted, this is an older model-a lot older, in fact-but that should make the readings more accurate, not less. The newer scanners have been programmed to counteract outside interference.

I don't think it is interference, he thought as he conducted another skin. There's something wrong with the person inside. It might not be infectious or dangerous, but it's abnormal.

He set his scanner on the nearby tray. "I'm opening the hatch," he announced. He reached out and pulled out and down to release the latch.

A billow of cold, white smoke billowed from the opening, and as the last of it coiled and shifted around the occupant, a restless, white serpent sloughing its skin, he caught a glimpse of crimped, plastic tubing and the thinner line of a nasogastric tube.

Forget old, this is positively ancient, he marveled as he waved away the clinging, white smoke and saw the oxygen mask that covered her mouth and nose. Translucent tape had been placed over her eyes, and there was more on the backs on her hands to secure intravenous lines. Another line snaked beneath a thin, green shift and disappeared between her thin legs.

Catheter, he catalogued with clinical detachment as he examined her.

"It's not one of Khan's," he said distractedly, absorbed in his study of the small form in front of him.

"You're sure?" Jim asked.

"Absolutely. You can turn off the containment shield. She poses no threat."

"Doctor, you cannot be sure of her abilities or her motives at the present time." Spock's voice, dry and droning. He had not moved from his place beside the environmental controls. "I would advise you to proceed with the utmost caution."

"I can't speak to her motives, that's true," he conceded. "But I can tell you that she is physically incapable of posing a threat. She might want to, but it won't matter. Now, turn off the damn containment field."

Spock complied, and then he and Jim promptly moved forward to crowd the table.

"Fascinating," Spock observed as he peered down at the woman in the cryotube.

McCoy did not disagree. She was small and pale and fragile, with slender bones and dainty features. The stuff of fairy tales, or, she would have been, were it not for thinness of her arms and legs and the queer, cockeyed splay of her hands where they rested on her belly. Her legs were coated with fine, downy wisps of blonde hair, and one knee was markedly higher than the other. Her right leg lolled bonelessly toward the left, and when he reached out and gently shifted her patella into a more natural position, there was substantial resistance from the surrounding tissues and ligaments.

That is its natural position, he realized. He released the patella, and it promptly reclaimed its former place. He performed the same test on the other kneecap. This one, too, shifted, but it was stiffer and more centered than its counterpart.

Further examination revealed minor edema of flat feet devoid of arches and possessed of small, discolored toes that fanned and curled. He probed a sole with his fingers. Cold. Cold and purple and fragile. He could feel the tiny, impossibly-thin bones beneath the frigid skin, little more than eggshells. If he closed his hand around them, he could shatter them with a squeeze.

"Is that normal?" Jim eyed her swollen, purple feet.

"No."

"What causes it?"

"Poor circulation. As to what causes that, I'm not sure yet. Could be positional. Preliminary scans don't show any heart defects or venal blockages." He hummed as he gently probed the pitiful, atrophied muscles of her calves. "Her legs are cold, too, though not as bad as the feet. The temperature normalizes once you get past the knees." Her small belly was soft and warm under his palpating hands. He picked up one of her hands and examined the nail beds. They were not as pink as he would have liked, but neither were they the mottled eggplant of her feet.

He pulled down her lower lip. "No signs of cyanosis." This close, he could see wisps of blonde hair peeking from the tight skullcap that adorned her head, fine and bright as gold in the light of the examination table. Her taped eyelids fluttered.

She's dreaming, he thought as he tracked the rapid movement of her eyes behind their pale shutters. Is it a good one? "I want to warm her up, bring her out of stasis."

"Doctor, I-" Spock began.

"She's not one of Khan's. If she was, he would have killed her." His assessing gaze traveled to her scrawny legs and discolored feet. "She's hardly representative of his superior ideals."

"He could have exiled her," Spock theorized.

"No," Jim said quietly. "He has compassion for his people, but only if they meet his ideal. If she was his, he would have killed her with a twist of his wrist."

"Thank you." McCoy tossed his bioscanner onto the tray. "Jim, I want to bring her up."

"All right, but the pathogen filter stays up until her blood analyses come back."

"Certainly," he agreed, surprised at his usually reckless captain's uncharacteristic paroxysm of prudence. "I'm going to need a few nurses."

"I'll summon the nurses," Jim said. "Keep me posted on any changes to her condition?"

"You can count on it," he murmured, mind on information displayed by the various monitors.

Bringing someone out of cryogenic stasis was no small matter of flipping a switch until the blood thawed. It was a complex, painstaking process, and even with the assistance of Mr. Spock, who had stayed to observe and report, and three nurses, it was nearly an hour before the woman was removed from the cryotube and placed on the open bed nearest his desk. The various monitors sprang to life as she was carefully arranged and covered with a thermal blanket to hasten warming, and they showed a strong heartbeat and blood oxygenation levels better than he expected. Her feet, however, remained a deep, mottled purple. His hands itched to chafe them until warmth and the flush of blood flowed into them.

The last time you saw that color, it was in the fetal pigs you dissected in first-year anatomy, a conversational voice in his head reminded him. You'd seen examples of it in the slides and holographic projections in your anatomy and physio classes, but those were historical cases showcasing diseases that had not been seen in two centuries. Heart attacks and diabetic neuropathy and cystic fibrosis and pleurisy. Lung cancer and fatal asthma attacks The most recent cases had been from berylium miners in Santiago, Chile, who had suffered crush injuries and compartment syndrome.

That's not a color meant for healthy, living tissue, not in humans, anyway. That's the color of dead and broken and dying. Yet none of your tests can account for it. You could find something on more specific scans and tests or in the blood tests and urinalysis, but so far, you've got squat. There's some sediment in the kidneys, but that's nothing a course of Certaxalin-12 can't fix, and it certainly wouldn't contribute to the poor circulation in her feet. Lungs and heart are clear, though the former show signs of collapse, and there's a pinprick scar between her breasts that's either a track scar or a memento from a chest tube insertion. No constrictions, no clots, no signs of previous injury. All the same, those feet are cold and blue as a dead pig preserved in formaldehyde and offered up to the scrutiny of med students who were more butcher than surgeons. and who spent the bulk of that week smuggling pig parts out of the labs and into the dormitories and commissaries for use in an ever-escalating prank war that ended with pig scrotums in the olive bar and a minute, hairless, sow's ear tucked inside your pillowcase until the rank, putrefying stench of it drove you out of your bunk in the middle of the night to scour the room from top to bottom. Your roommate, of course, laughed his ass off, propped on his elbow and watching you check beneath your desk with your boxered ass in the air and your nose curled against the oily, porkfat reek.

He put it there, the grinning, guffawing bastard, though you didn't figure that out until the end of term, when, bags packed, he sauntered up, clapped you on the shoulder, and leaned in to whisper, Hope you enjoyed the pork rind I left under your pillow for you, Len, his warm breath cinnamon and clove against your ear. You could cheerfully have punched him then, but you had the increasingly rare sense to think before you act, and you didn't want the resultant disciplinary action on your record, so you kept your hands behind your back and grunted a noncommittal reply, and he grinned stupidly at you and walked out of your life forever. Your paths diverged after that, and the last you heard, he was a much-sought after cardiologist in Phoenix.

Phoenix was light-years and a lifetime away, and wearing out the dusty trails of his memory lane got him no closer to the mystery of those maddening purple feet.

"They are most curious," a voice said from over his left shoulder, and he turned to see that Spock's eyes, too, were on her feet. "I gather that you have yet to discover the cause."

His only response was a shake of the head.

"And what of her other anomalies-the skewed limbs and length disparity between her legs?"

"Not sure. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was congenital. The warped bone structure certainly suggests it's a condition of long standing, and the fragility of her feet and lower limbs tell me they're not accustomed to bearing weight."

"But the last known congenital defect-,"

"Was recorded in 2109," he finished. "I remember my medical history, thank you." He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. "I didn't say it made sense."

Spock cocked his head thoughtfully. "The cryotube in which she was discovered is of older design. It is old enough to date from the early 21st century. Perhaps its registry number will yield more information."

"Do Federation records go back that far?"

"If the date of its manufacture occurred before 2161, then our best hope lies in the historical archives."

Before he could reply, the woman on the bed moaned, a low, glottal rush of breath that brought him out of his chair and to her bedside, scanner in hand. Another, louder moan, and her leg twitched spasmodically.

"She's coming out of the anesthesia." He swore as her arms began to twitch uncontrollably.

"Is she in seizure, Doctor?" Spock stood at the foot of the bed, face impassive as he watched the woman spasm and flail.

McCoy performed a scan, one hand braced on her chest to keep her from tumbling to the floor. "Not according to the scan, but it's like the neurological impulses are scrambled. They're leaving her nerves in the proper sequence, but by the time they reach her brain, they're either scrambled or abruptly terminated. Her body knows it's supposed to do something, but it's not sure what." He swore afresh as she was wracked with a particularly savage spasm that bowed her spine, pulled her lips from her teeth, and drew her arms to her chest. She opened her mouth, drew in a sucking breath, and released it in a thin, keening sob.

She's aware enough to be afraid.

"It's all right. My name is Dr. Leonard McCoy, and you're all right," he soothed, as he had once soothed the skittish horses on his parents' farm.

The thrashing beneath his restraining hand eased, but did not cease. Beneath his palm, her chest rose and fell with panicky rapidity, and the muscles of her sternum fluttered with the promise of another cramp. He did not need the shrill, alarmed beeping of the cardiac monitor to tell him that her heartbeat was much too fast; he could feel its muffled pounding beneath his hand, a sparrow battering itself against the bars of its strangling cage. Tears seeped from beneath eyelids still held shut by tape, and low, frightened cries escaped dry, cracked lips.

"You're all right," he repeated. "I'm going to take the tape off your eyes now." He set the scanner aside and let his fingertips brush the corner of her eye. "Just me," he promised when she tensed and shied. "Just my fingers. Deep breaths. You're hyperventilating."

Bless her, but she tried to obey. She took a deep, ragged breath and tried to expel it slowly through her nose, but it emerged in a single, plosive gust against his throat and chin.

Points for effort. "Again," he ordered. "Try it a little slower." He pinced the edge of the tape between his thumb and forefinger and peeled it back by painstaking degrees.

Her second attempt was better. Beneath his palm, her heartbeat had begun to slow, but her muscles still twitched restlessly.

"Relax." He slipped the tape from her eye. "Relax."

"I c'n." It was a squeaking rasp, as though her throat had been scoured with sand.

"What?"

She swallowed convulsively. "I said, 'I can't," she repeated, frightened and laryngeal. Her arms contracted against her chest, hands fisted so tightly that the short-cropped crescents of her nails bit into the pink flesh of her palms.

He fought the urge to pry her hands open. Instead, he focused on removing the other piece of tape. When it was done, he straightened, but kept his hand on her chest. "It's gone," he said. "You can open your eyes."

She stilled so suddenly beneath his hand that he thought she had lost consciousness, but then her eyelids had fluttered open to reveal watery blue eyes rimed with grit and dried mucous. She squinted against the sudden brightness and relaxed one fisted hand to rub her eyes.

"It'll take a while to adjust," he said, and drew up a wheeled stool. "I'm Dr. McCoy." He sat with prim, practiced efficiency, knees pointed outward.

She blinked owlishly at him. "Dr. McCoy." Soft and slurred, as though anesthesia had not yet relinquished its hold. "Rosalie Walker." Her hands had relaxed and splayed awkwardly on her sheeted belly. "So does this mean you fixed it, then?"

"Fixed what?"

"My CP. That's the reason you and my parents stuffed me into that tin can."

"CP?" he said blankly.

"Moderate quadriplegic spastic cerebral palsy," she said slowly, as though he were a possibly dangerous simpleton. The tension, which had begun to ebb from her, returned. Her hands curled into fists yet again and crept toward her chest. "I'm going to take that as a no," she said in a tremulous, brittle voice.

"CP," he muttered in soft incredulity. "My God..."

There hasn't been a case of CP since 2109. Not since such defects were eradicated through microneurosurgery shortly after delivery. That last sufferer died in 2179, and they dropped its management and treatment options from mainstream med school curriculum in 2202. As far as the medical establishment is concerned, it's a dead impairment, a relic of the past relegated to medical history classes and medical museums where they display the mummified remains of conjoined twins, the silicone breast implants women used to shoehorn into their bodies in the name of vanity, and the clunky, primitive braces worn by polio survivors in the 1950s and 60s.

Have to be careful now, he told himself as he leaned forward and braced his elbows on his quadriceps. If this goes bad, I'll have to sedate her again, and that's the last thing she needs.

"Rosalie, do you know what the date is?"

She snorted. "No. How could I? I've been stuffed inside that tin can for God knows how long." She narrowed her eyes. "How long have I been making like the world's oldest cup of soup?"

"Do you remember the day you went in?"

She nodded. "November 28, 2020."

2020? Jesus, she's been in stasis more than two hundred years. He leaned forward on the stool, mouth dry and stomach hollow. "Well, Miss Walker, I hate to tell you this, but today is April 27, 2255."

She stared at him in mute stupefaction. "Right," she said flatly.

Spock spoke suddenly from the foot of the bed. "Dr. McCoy is quite correct."

She startled at the sound of his voice, fisted hands tightening and bony knees drawing up beneath the blankets. She turned her groggy gaze on him. "Huh. "Elves are real," she said conversationally, and promptly vomited over the side of the bed.

"Well, that could've gone worse," McCoy grunted prosaically as he scooted away from the splatter of watery bile.

"Shall I summon the captain?" Spock asked, unfazed by the mess or the acidic, rotten-orange stink of regurgitated digestive juices.

McCoy nodded. On the bed, Rosalie slumped against the pillows, dispirited and bedraggled. Strings of bile clung to the ends of her hair like strands of spidersilk.

"Sorry," she croaked meekly, dry-lipped and panting.

"It's to be expected," he answered. "You're in for a rough day or so, I'm afraid. Everything in your body when you went under is going to be looking for a way out."

A mirthless titter. "Fabulous," she croaked drily.

It was anything but, and when the spasms seized her again and turned her guts inside out, he had a sick bowl at the ready.

Spock watched it all, seemingly indifferent to her tortured gasps and the wet, strangled sounds of retching, and together, they awaited the arrival of the captain.