"Testing one, two, three. Huh. Well, that's creepy."

"I don't know, I think it's an improvement."

Lorca fixed Benford with a look. They were in the ready room running a final test of the fake Peter Bhandary: a live-rendered image of Bhandary mapped on top of Lorca's expressions and movements, with fake kelbonite interference to mask any imperfections. Benford grinned back at Lorca. "You haven't looked that good in, well, ever!"

Lorca pointed at the display and the image in the display pointed right back. "You really think this asshole looks better than I do? And remember, I am your captain."

"Well, when you put it that way, he looks ten times as good as you."

"Jack!" said Lorca, exasperated but laughing.

Benford laughed, too. "If you didn't know how good-looking you were, the universe would be a much better place."

It was a blatant lie. It had to be, because Benford had used Lorca's good looks to his own advantage in various bars over the years before he'd gotten married. "I didn't know you found me attractive," Lorca shot back.

Benford raised an eyebrow. "Ah, I didn't say that. I think what I said was you find yourself attractive? And that is a dangerous thing."

Lorca snorted. There was nothing to be gained by arguing the point. "All right, let's turn on the audio filter." He cleared his throat.

"Ready when you are."

"Jack Benford is the worst." As Lorca spoke these words aloud, the computer rendered the speech into a tone and pitch matching Bhandary's voiceprint just a smidge of a second behind real-time, so it sounded like two people saying the exact same thing at the same rate in near-unison. It was, for Lorca at least, markedly disconcerting hearing another voice at virtually the same time as his own. He specifically chose a few unusual test sentences to push the limits of the speech algorithm. "Rubber baby buggy bumpers. This fortune cookie intentionally left blank. Not for all the horses in Andalusia."

"Now that's creepy," declared Benford, muting the audio. "But it's working. You want to go over any more lines?" They'd spent much of the past ninety minutes running through various conversational scenarios in preparation for the main event.

"Nope. Let's get Lalana up here and go." Benford sent the summons and double-checked everything one more time.

While he waited for Lalana's arrival, Lorca ran his hand through his hair and was annoyed to see Bhandary's image do the same. Luckily he wouldn't be looking at the image during the actual transmission, because Bhandary's smug face still irked him. He scrunched up his own face and tried to make it look like Bhandary was crying.

An incoming commlink interrupted this diversion. It was Ek'Ez. "Yes, doctor?"

"Captain, I have discovered the most amazing thing about lului!"

"Is it an emergency?"

"I—no, captain. Not an emergency."

Lalana arrived with her security escort. Lorca motioned for her to wait and the escort stepped outside. "Is it anything that will change in the next ten minutes? Or that I need to know right now?"

Ek'Ez paused. "No. It is nothing of the sort."

"Then I'll talk to you again in ten minutes." He terminated the comm link.

"Captain!" said Lalana cheerfully. "I am so happy to be able to help you."

"Yep," said Lorca, slipping in the earpieces that would let them pass him any pertinent information in a manner that wouldn't distract him from the task at hand. Lalana wasn't, strictly speaking, necessary to this part of the plan, but on the off chance something came up, it was better she be present to provide her insight into the Dartarans on demand, and if nothing else, Lorca knew she'd be an appreciative audience.

Benford went over the procedure for the transmission one more time with Lalana. Lorca stared into the monitor and smiled. Here went nothing, do or die. "Initiate transmission."

The answer wasn't immediate, but it came. T'rond'n's face appeared onscreen. Because they were copying Bhandary's previous transmission codes from the Dartarans' archives, T'rond'n expected exactly what he saw: Peter Bhandary, albeit with significant visual interference.

Lorca affected a tone he thought fit the conceited persona of a smarmy socialite like Bhandary. It came out like a bad cross between a California valley girl and a mimicry of foppish, old school British aristocracy, with a smattering of sycophantic insincerity thrown in on top for good measure. Of course, the computer made it sound like Bhandary, but the emotion and cadence of the performance came through to add that extra layer of scumbag. "T'rond'n! You're alive! I'm so glad to see you! When I heard what happened... "

"Peter," said T'rond'n, apparently all the greeting Lorca was going to get. "This is unexpected."

"I heard Starfleet destroyed your ship!" The words had been carefully chosen to convince the Dartarans of the impetus for Bhandary's contact, and having the facts of the matter appear diluted through a small game of interstellar telephone gave it the ring of truth. It wouldn't do to have Bhandary seem too well-informed and make the conversation smell like the setup it actually was. "Is Margeh...?"

"Margeh is here. We were not on the ship that was destroyed."

"Thank goodness. Who was on it?"

T'rond'n shifted but did not immediately answer. Margeh came into view. "A thief," she said, appraising the interference on the transmission. "Where are you?"

Lorca wouldn't have minded trying the whole conversation on T'rond'n, but luck wasn't with him. From everything he knew about the couple, Margeh was the savvier of the two, and he would have to tread carefully to get this conversation where he needed it to go. Of course, that was why he'd insisted on doing it himself. "Sorry about the picture quality. I'm at a kelbonite mine. In fact, if you're in the market for any..."

"No, thank you, Peter," said T'rond'n, gruffly but not angrily.

Lorca switched right back to the chase. "So the thief stole your ship?"

Margeh hissed angrily. "Our lului was stolen. The ship was... circumstantial."

Lorca was pleasantly surprised to have Margeh come out and say it. He'd had four other lines prepped to convince her to reveal the fact, and now that he didn't have to use them, he could jump right into the next part. "The lului? Really? Did you get it back at least?"

"No," said T'rond'n, in something like a sigh. "She was on the ship that was destroyed."

"No! Oh, that's a shame." Lorca's voice practically oozed concern. It was maybe a tad overwrought, but Dartarans were notoriously stoic and tended to think of humans as emotional, and Lorca knew Bhandary was an emotional enough person to stay up late crying, so may as well play up to their expectations. "It was such a charming creature. The way it changed colors on command... Really impressive." Lorca imagined Lalana was probably having a good laugh right now. Of course, Margeh was not so kindly disposed towards her former pet at this point, since the thief and the stolen goods were one and the same. "Will you get another one?"

"Unlikely."

Minor setback, but expected. Margeh had to be led to the idea in such a way that it felt like her own. She was almost a harder nut to crack than Billingsley. (Lorca wondered if Margeh might be susceptible to the same sort of icebreaker he'd applied in the chief engineer's case. Probably not.) "That's right, I remember, you said they were almost impossible to catch. Such a shame. You probably won't get that lucky again."

Margeh jerked her head in affront. There it was. "Luck had nothing to do with it," she said. "Hunting is about skill, preparation, patience, and knowledge of your prey. Luck is for amateurs."

"Of course, you're right, my apologies. I'm sure no one knows more about lului than you at this point." Ha. "You could probably catch as many as you wanted. At the end of the day, you don't need any proof. You know you had a lului, and that's all that matters. No one can take that accomplishment away from you. And if anyone ever doubts it, you can call me, and I'll set the record straight." He smiled.

Most people could have found comfort in that sentiment, but from everything Lorca had heard and read about Margeh, she was not most people.

As a general rule, Dartaran society split certain certain roles down gender lines, as many human societies once had in the past. The difference was that the Dartaran split persisted into the present day. Some sociologists theorized that it did so because while the two genders were seen as fundamentally different, they were both equally important and present in Dartar's overall political, societal, and historic landscape. Co-dominance, Starfleet's file called it. A subtle but distinct difference from true egality.

The split was this: male Dartarans mostly handled logistics, production, and trade, while females governed sciences, culture, and spirituality. They were called the Hand and the Head in Dartaran philosophy respectively. Starfleet's sociological profile included a foundational Dartaran axiom, "Without the Hand, the Head cannot act, and without the Head, the Hand has nothing to do." (It was additionally worth noting that Dartaran culture was slightly more monolithic than most, as Dartar featured but a single supercontinent that had unified under the Head and Hand banner around the time that Caesar walked the Earth.)

It wasn't a hard rule, and there were plenty of figures in Dartaran history who defied these gender norms, but that didn't mean there wasn't pushback when someone did break the mold, simply because it was seen as abnormal.

As a successful merchant, Margeh had broken that mold and had the chip on her shoulder to match. Her entire life, she had been motivated by the need to prove herself to everyone around her, and this still held true today. To doubly undercut something she had accomplished by suggesting she needed a human male to back her up on it as proof...

"Anyway, I've taken up enough of your time. I'm just so glad you're both safe. Let me know if you're in the market for a new ship. I've got a line on some Vulcan shuttles. They're not cheap, but they're very fast." Nice little dig at the slow speed of Margeh and T'rond'n's transports, just in case they still weren't feeling inadequate enough to motivate Margeh to compensate.

"Yes," said Margeh softly, her mind clearly elsewhere.

"Thank you, Peter," said T'rond'n, almost mechanically, and the transmission terminated.

Lorca removed the earpieces and turned around. Benford had his padd under his arm and was clapping slowly. "I don't know that they took the bait, but..."

"It really looked like you were Peter Bhandary!" said Lalana excitedly, hands rotating.

"Don't say that," groaned Lorca. If he never had to see Bhandary's face again, it would be a day too soon.

Her hands paused. "Why? Was that not the point?"

"Yes, but..."

Benford snorted and explained, "He thinks his face is much better looking than Bhandary's is." The reveal was his little way of getting back at Lorca .

"Oh, without doubt!" agreed Lalana, earnestly and without hesitation. "Your face is the best."

Lorca's disgruntled glare at Benford was replaced by a look of surprise and delight. "Look at that, even Lalana agrees."

"How do you mean?" asked Benford suspiciously, wondering how a lului could possibly gauge human attractiveness when the two species were so incredibly different.

"I have noticed that humans do not express with movements very much, because you don't have tails and fur, so instead you put the things that you feel on your faces. And you have the most things of any human on your face."

The sentence was so ridiculous, Lorca's shoulders shook with silent laughter and he covered his face with his hand. He had the most things on his face? What did that even... Perceiving her comment had made Lorca happy, Lalana resumed rotating her hands.

"I think you've got that backwards," Benford said, thinking lului probably expressed so many emotions with their hands and tails because their faces were largely incapable of expression. They were basically two eyes and a mouth that switched between an upside-down V shape when closed and a diamond when open. They could not smile, squint, or even blink. "But more importantly, captain, what about Margeh and T'rond'n?

"What about them?" His tone was jovial, even nonchalant.

"Their response was a little... lackluster, maybe?"

Lorca snorted with amusement. "Tell me, Jack. You in a gambling mood?"

Benford had learned a long time ago: never, ever bet against Gabriel Lorca. "I guess you saw something I didn't!"

Probably several things, thought Lorca, but said diplomatically, "If they haven't made their overture by the end of the day, we'll call it a bust. But they will. Now, if you'll give me the room... and sorry I didn't end up needing you, Lalana, but you can never be too prepared for a curveball."

"Oh, that is no trouble, captain, it was my pleasure. But what is a 'curveball' and how do we 'give you' the..." Lalana began saying, but Benford ushered her out.

Lorca glanced past his reflection in the window and drummed his fingers, expression blank. He also needed to check in with Dr. Ek'Ez. He may as well do that first, in case it was something worth reporting to Starfleet. He took a moment to crack a cookie as a quick snack, then opened a visual comm line to sickbay. "Dr. Ek'Ez, you had something to report?"

"Captain!" Though it had been several minutes now, Ek'Ez's excitement and enthusiasm had not waned one bit. "In my most recent battery of tests, I have discovered the most amazing thing!"

Lorca hadn't given Ek'Ez permission to run any tests. He hadn't forbidden it, but he hadn't approved it, either. "I thought you were just running decon."

"Well, yes, captain, but Lalana kept insisting it was not necessary, and once I determined the reason she thought this, it merited scientific exploration."

"Well don't leave me in suspense, doctor," said Lorca. Trying to get succinct answers out of Ek'Ez verbally was every bit as hard as trying to parse his rambly, meandering written reports.

"Captain, Lalana is, and I apologize for the inadequacies of language in communicating this, but she is a many-celled organism."

Lorca blinked slowly and took a breath. Almost all forms of life were cellular in origin, with the higher forms being comprised of trillions and trillions of cells. "Anything else?"

"Ah, I am not explaining it right. She is many cells unified into a single, coherent organism." This cleared absolutely nothing up. "She is cells!" Lorca began to wonder if this was some sort of mental breakdown. Ek'Ez turned his head. "Sam! Will you please come and explain this?"

Li's face came into view, her dark eyes staring with disturbing lifelessness at Lorca. "She is the cells, captain," said Li. It was a subtle difference of a single word, but it was enough of a difference that Lorca realized what Ek'Ez was trying to say. Li further clarified, "Individually and collectively."

"Are you saying she's a trillion self-aware cells?" he attempted.

"Not quite! Yes, in that she is aware of herself on a cellular level, and that all her cells are part of a neural network, and no, in that there is what could be described as a central neural structure which is the core of her consciousness... Allow me to back up a moment." Ek'Ez blinked his eyes repeatedly, something he did when he was clearing his mind. Lorca winced, expecting this would get worse before it got better.

"In most species, cells are differentiated into tissue types, and form unique biological structures, which we call organs."

Lorca wanted to smack Ek'Ez. "They do teach biology at the Academy," he deadpanned. "Even to meatheads."

"Yes, of course, I apologize. I simply want to make sure the distinction here is clear. While Lalana possesses several differentiated tissue structures — her eyes, for example, and bone structure, and her central neural structure — the majority of her tissues are not differentiated. She does not have blood, or a heart, or a liver, or even what you and I would call a stomach. Rather, her body is made up of a mass of multipurpose, unspecialized — or perhaps more accurately, multi-specialized — cells which perform all the basic biological functions at once, configured as an interlocking lattice of cells and operating as a diffuse network transmitting nutrients and information through connections of the cellular membrane!"

There was an accompanying graphic showing a lului cell and the pipelike structures on the cell's outer membrane which connected to other, identical cells with the same features.

Lorca knew Lalana had no heartbeat from their conversation on the Tederek moon, and had seen firsthand the lack of blood in the wound on her leg, but hadn't put those two facts together until now. She was literally heartless.

"It's like she's made up of stem cells," offered Dr. Li from off-screen. (Lorca wished she would just decide if she wanted to be in this conversation or not, and behave accordingly.)

"Yes, they do have a progenitive nature. The medical implications, captain!"

The medical implications were what, exactly? This was interesting and all, and Lorca hardly wanted the doctors to condescend to him with infantile explanations, but... They already knew Lalana was strange. She was an alien. It was sort of the point, to seek out strange, new life.

Ek'Ez continued, oblivious to Lorca's disinterest in the unnamed implications. "If only her cells were more robust. My research was completely confounded while you were gone with her."

"If it's a question of keeping the cells alive," said Li, trailing off mysteriously.

"Would you like to join this conversation, Dr. Li?" Lorca said finally, and was rewarded by Li moving into view just behind Ek'Ez. (In so much as Li's dead-eyed face could be considered a reward of any kind.)

"The problem is," Ek'Ez began to explain, as if Lorca had asked him for an explanation (he had not), "the tremendous cellular decay rate. When lului cells are disconnected from the central matrix, they quickly begin to die. The samples survive for mere minutes, captain." He closed his eyes in disappointment.

"We can easily solve this by studying the cells without removing them," said Li, more to Ek'Ez than Lorca.

Ek'Ez was reluctant. "That is true, but..."

Lorca understood perfectly what Li was suggesting. They'd just rescued Lalana from captivity, and Li wanted to subject her to live experimentation. Sometimes Lorca wondered if Li had become a doctor because she was interested in curing infectious diseases or causing them. Technically-speaking, Li had a heart, but the word "heartless" suited her even more than it did Lalana. "Have you spoken to Lalana about this?"

Li nodded. "Yes, she was amenable."

Of course she was amenable, it was Lalana. "I really wish you hadn't," said Lorca. "You understand she's our guest? We're taking her back to her planet?"

"I wish to mount a medical research mission on that planet when we do!" said Ek'Ez.

Lorca suspected that was why Ek'Ez had contacted him, really: not to share the news of his discovery, but to ask Lorca to petition Starfleet on his behalf to lead a research mission before someone else of more importance learned about lului and tried to do the same.

One big problem with that. Two, actually. "Doctor. Has Lalana told you the history of Luluan?"

"History, captain?" Ek'Ez's inquiries had been entirely centered around medical and biological subjects, not history. Problem one: lului historically did not welcome aliens who used technology, and Ek'Ez had clearly missed the memo on the type of greeting such visitors tended to get.

That wasn't all. "You understand her people aren't warp-capable?" Understatement of the day, there.

"Well, yes, but as they have already been interfered with... by other parties..." Ek'Ez realized what he was saying and trailed off. "I see." Problem two: General Order 1. While it wasn't fully intact in this case, that didn't mean it didn't merit applying after the fact, especially if it was what the lului wanted for themselves.

"I'll do what I can, doctor, but no promises. Whether or not you get any sort of research expedition out of all this, I can't say. Best make use of the time you have now."

"The facilities on this ship, captain... they are..." The Triton wasn't a research ship. It wasn't even an exploration ship. Its medical and science facilities were, compared to most ships in the fleet at this point, rudimentary at best.

"It may be the only chance you get. Anything else?"

"Mm, no. Thank you for your time, captain."

Two down, one to go. Lorca double-checked San Francisco local time out of habit and requested a channel.

To his surprise, Cornwell appeared on the other end of the line. "Hello, Gabriel."

Her greeting indicated this wouldn't be an entirely formal conversation and he responded in kind. "Katrina. Wasn't expecting you."

"Are you ever?"

Lorca thought a moment. "No. You are a singularly surprising woman any man would be a fool to try and wrap his head around."

She looked immensely satisfied by the compliment. "Coming from the great Gabriel Lorca..." They'd had plenty of conversations in the past about Lorca's tendency for self-aggrandizement and Cornwell was well within her rights to make light of it. "Admiral Wainwright's at a conference on Rigel IV. He appointed me full admiral pro tem in his absence."

"Moving on up in the world, aren't we?"

She gave a short laugh. "I like to think so! At any rate, tell me how it went."

His childhood love of exploratory fiction served him well as he outlined the events of the Tederek mission. He knew exactly which parts to mention, which parts to gloss over, and how to phrase it all in a way that made Cornwell's eyes go wide with awe. He made sure to include Billingsley's fall from the ladder for the comedy and heroics, the gruesome joke that was the leskos for the drama and adventure ("galaxy's most murderous herbivore," he called it), and the encounter with the mind-eaters for a dash of horror and a second helping of heroism. He did not mention the near-miss with T'rond'n in the bathroom, or the giant gaping hole in Lalana's leg. Neither mishap had affected the mission's outcome, and he already knew they did not appear in Morita's writeup

She laughed and shook her head at the end of the tale, trying to picture Lorca impersonating an interstellar socialite. "So what's why you needed those files!"

"What did you think I was going to do with them?"

"Honestly?" she said, fixing him with a look. "I thought you might try to track him down and kidnap him, or detain him and have him do the outreach to the Dartarans."

"That was Plan C at best," he offered, and she laughed, despite the fact she suspected the joke wasn't far from the truth.

Something occurred to Lorca. "Say, you wouldn't happen to be the reason Admiral Over-My-Dead-Body signed off my little project, would you?"

Cornwell snorted, amused but disapproving. "Maybe we don't call him that in his office, even if he's not here."

It wasn't an answer. Lorca lifted an eyebrow.

Cornwell relented. "I only said he might give you a little leeway and see what you'd do with it. And that you wouldn't disappoint if he did."

"And have I disappointed?"

"Not yet," she smiled, "but you still don't have a direct line to the merchants."

"It's coming."

"So you say." Her tone was more lighthearted than worried. If Lorca said it was forthcoming, she believed him. But she did have another concern. Her expression darkened as she leaned forward and asked, "Be honest with me now, if Admiral Wainwright had said no to this whole mission, would you have accepted it?"

"He didn't say no."

"If he had."

"Focus on the road you're on, not the road you didn't travel," said Lorca. Cornwell recognized a fortune cookie when she heard one and frowned in response. Lorca knew he had to give her more than that. "If I'd thought I wasn't going to get the go-ahead, I wouldn't have checked in with command in the first place, I'd've exercised my discretion as captain. But I knew you'd have my back."

Cornwell mentally kicked herself for inadvertently enabling the whole charade. "So the whole point of you informing Starfleet in the first place was just to show off."

Lorca scoffed with feigned offense and smiled. "You got me." A moment later he was serious again. "I would have accepted Starfleet's orders, but I knew you wouldn't let Wainwright or anyone else stop me from doing the right thing." The right thing, in this context, meaning whatever he wanted to do. "A whole planet, Katrina, and they need our help."

"Your help, you mean."

Lorca shrugged as if it made no difference. "Right place, right time. That's all."

"Seems to happen a lot with you," she observed. "Careful now. Karma might balance the scales one day."

It was an entirely different aspect to karma than the one he'd talked about with Lalana, and while Lorca didn't fully ascribe to the idea as Cornwell was presenting it, there was a fortune cookie that read, All jokes have a kernel of truth. "That's why I'm on a starship. Karma will never catch up." She rolled her eyes at him. Lorca felt the tiniest pang. "You know, you're missed out here on the far reaches of civilization."

Cornwell smiled and shook her head. "Someone has to maintain the inner reaches, or else what's the point? Anyway, it was good to see you, Gabriel."

"Oh, I'm sure it was. Apparently, I have the most things of any human on my face."

Momentary confusion colored Cornwell's face. "What?"

"Nothing," said Lorca, smiling to himself. "Something our alien guest said."