Stardate 2260.140

His hands trailed along the sides of her breasts, sending tingles down her spine that put a curl in her toes. He pulled himself up over top of her, exploring her chest and neck with his tongue as he moved. She moaned, pressing her fingertips into the sinewy muscles of his back and drawing her hips upward toward him. It was euphoria.

Their bodies began to rock in tandem to a rhythm that belonged exclusively to them. Soon they were panting and growling, but each time their efforts grew too frantic, he would draw away and become tender again. Dagny craved more.

Tension and anticipation started to build low in her belly, but just before she could surrender herself to the climactic burst of pleasure, something jabbed her hard in the chest.

"Argh!"

Dagny bolted upright, sending Harold tumbling to the floor with a loud yowl and series of hisses. She rubbed her chest where the cat had jumped on her and blinked in the darkness. She was alone and tangled up in her sheets and for the third night that week, she'd been the victim of a subconscious mind obsessed with sex.

How could she be having dreams like that about Voris? She was thirteen weeks pregnant, so it wasn't like the thought of having sex with Voris was that far-fetched, but given the present circumstances, it was just too weird to think about. She barely remembered the night on Aldebaran that had led to this whole mess, but apparently some part of her desperately wanted to revisit it.

Or maybe it was just her hormones running wild. They'd been all over the place lately, making her irritated one minute and weepy the next. She cried at the drop of a hat—just yesterday Zernon had given her a box of strawberries on her way back from a house call and she'd burst into tears at his kindness. Maybe it was just whacky pregnancy hormones making her do and think funny things.

Dagny closed her eyes and instantly saw images of Voris' naked back. She ripped her eyes back open, blushing like an idiot. Did Voris know she felt this way? Every so often she would sense hazy emotions in him, or at least she thought that was what was going on. If she could feel what he was feeling, then it seemed probable he could do the same with her. Or maybe she was just dreaming it.

She grimaced and held her breath, listening hard for any sounds coming from the other side of the dividing curtain between their beds, but some unnamed instinct told her Voris was already up for the day. Dagny had no idea what time it was but she figured she should probably get a move on too. There was a chill in the air that made her reluctant to peel the quilt back, but her bladder felt full to bursting.

She stumbled to the lavatory, ignoring the goosebumps pricking her flesh in protest of the cool air. The clock on the sidewall read 0521 Standard time. It was still early, but she knew from experience that Voris had probably been up for at least an hour, if not more.

Today marked a month at Bergeron colony. Things had settled a bit, but between the fact that the colony of more than a thousand people had gone without professional medical care for four months and the sorry state of the clinic, there was always work to do. Voris was running himself ragged trying to get the pharmacy cabinet stocked and surgical suite up to code, despite the fact that they weren't a sanctioned Federation colony and therefore wouldn't be on the receiving end of any inspections.

Dagny had learned more in a month under Voris' tutelage than she had in four years of being a paramedic on her own. During slower parts of the day, he made a point of having her sit in on his visits with patients and then later in the evening, they would discuss the cases they had seen that day over dinner. Whenever she didn't understand some point, he would stop and give a quick lesson in physiology, chemistry, genetics, molecular biology, or whatever discipline related to the topic at hand. Subjects that had seemed so daunting and impossible when she'd tried learning them on her own seemed more manageable with a patient Vulcan tutor.

Something brushed her calf, causing her to jump. She looked down to see Harold winding his way between her legs, rubbing his whiskers on her as he moved. No doubt the grouchy cat was hungry. He started to meow.

"Alright, let me get dressed first," she groaned, stretching her arms above her head and enjoying the pull of the muscles in her arms, back, and abdomen.

Dagny grabbed a pair of trousers, underclothes, and a light sweater from her dresser and tossed the clothes on her bed. She pulled the nightdress over her head and stretched again, staring at her thin, pale body. She'd put on some weight, but she still didn't really look pregnant.

At least she didn't think so, until she pulled on the trousers and noticed they didn't seem to be fitting right. Dagny had always been thin and lanky and as a result, she didn't wear clothes as much as clothes wore her. But now it was difficult to close the top button of her pants. She stared hard at her stomach, looking for any evidence of a bump in her abdomen but not really seeing one.

She ran her hands along the inside of the waistband, deciding her clothes weren't lying. Her pants were definitely fitting tighter. She smiled. Despite the exhaustion, frequent urination, sore breasts, and awful morning sickness she'd experienced in the initial weeks, she hadn't really ever felt pregnant, only miserable. She rested her hands on her stomach, deciding maybe she did look a little fuller.

"Dagny?"

Dagny yelped and scrambled to cover her bare breasts as she flipped to face the wall. "I'm not dressed."

They had a curtain hanging between their beds, giving them semi-private rooms, but both beds were still exposed to the common area of their quarters. A surge of uneasiness came and then quickly faded away. Whether it was his or hers was impossible to say.

"I apologize. Please excuse me." The sound of his voice told her he hadn't quite made it to the top of the stairs so maybe he hadn't seen her.

"Um, it's fine. Just give me a second," she mumbled, fumbling with her bra.

It was probably stupid to be shy in front of him, all things considered. He was a doctor and had obviously seen breasts before. He'd seen her breasts before, both in a medical context when he'd treated her aboard the Sekla and… that other time on Aldebaran. She recalled her very racy dream and started to feel wretched and embarrassed as she pulled the sweater over her head and wriggled her arms into the sleeves.

"I'm decent now," she called. "Did you need something?"

"I have come for first meal," he said, emerging from the around the corner at the top of the stairs.

"You didn't eat when you woke up?"

"I have been awake for some time. Jester Blakely arrived two hours ago with mild abdominal pain and I treated him for an umbilical hernia."

"I didn't even hear the call alarm go off." The clinic was equipped with a buzzer on the front door for after-hours emergencies, in addition to a direct line to the mining operations center.

"That's because it did not. I was already awake when he arrived."

"Did you even go to sleep?" she asked, walking toward the kitchen counter to find Harold's food so he would stop yowling.

"I slept for approximately two hours before waking to meditate."

She stole a glance at Voris as she leaned over to deposit two scoops of cat food into Harold's bowl. The whites of his eyes were greenish and bloodshot. He looked thinner too. "You can't keep going like this. You're running yourself ragged."

He raised an eyebrow. "There is much work to do."

"There are two of us and 1,100 colonists: there's always going to be work to do. But things are slowing down. All the serious cases have been seen to and we finally have the routine appointments down to four days a week."

"We are still unprepared for many situations."

"It's impossible to be prepared for every eventuality."

"While I agree with the logic of your statement, I am Vulcan. I do not require as much rest as you. I could lose even more sleep and still function adequately."

Dagny wanted to argue with him, but didn't see the point. "There's still some plomeek soup in the preserver from yesterday. I can heat that up for you if you like."

"I am capable of preparing it."

"I know. But I'm hungry too and was already thinking of making some for myself."

Voris nodded and sat down at the small, round table in the middle of the room. A minute later, she set a warm bowl of soup in front of Voris and took a seat across from him, noting the pinch of her trousers around her midsection.

"We are scheduled to conference with Dr. Govorski tomorrow."

"I know," Dagny replied, stirring the broth to speed up the cooling process. A few seconds of silence passed before Dagny realized Voris was staring at her. "Was that a way of asking how I'm doing?"

"I know you have been diligent with your medications. I have observed you appear to be less fatigued and nauseated, but it occurs to me I have not asked."

Dagny had improved a lot. Most of the nausea had disappeared and she was able to eat more, though she still tasted bile in the back of her throat whenever she encountered certain smells. And he was right: she had a lot more energy too. She relaxed a little more with each passing day, but she still checked the baby's heartbeat every morning, just to hear the reassuring sound. "I'm feeling a lot better than I was a month ago."

"I would like to check your hormone levels prior to our conference with her. I would also like to consult with her regarding Mrs. Diels, who is past her due date, as of yesterday."

"Sure." She took a bite of her soup, crunching one of the vegetables between her front teeth. Jacob Diels' wife, a Romulan woman named Khel, was extremely anxious following a previous late term miscarriage and a stillbirth. She came into the clinic often, begging to have every pain and twinge investigated. Dagny always felt happy to oblige her; she knew exactly what it was like to hold her breath and wait for something to go wrong.

Beyond her thoughts of Khel lay more awkward realities. An informal division of labor had emerged between them almost from day one. Dagny had assumed the role of attending to most of the women's health issues that came through the clinic doors, not because Voris was incapable of performing breast exams or delivering prenatal care, but because apparently male Vulcan physicians didn't involve themselves with women's health except in instances of emergency or when there were no female physicians available. Apparently the inverse was true also in that female healers would refer issues of men's health to their male colleagues if at all possible.

Dagny didn't really mind his reluctance but it seemed very silly, old-fashioned, and illogical. Like all doctors, he'd received training in obstetrics and gynecology during medical school. He wasn't squeamish or uncomfortable around females and he certainly hadn't ever hesitated to get involved if Dagny asked. Just last week she'd had to ask for his help with a human patient with abdominal pain that had turned out to have a moderate case of uterine fibroids.

While he was always help a patient if Dagny couldn't and while Dagny was more than willing to assess, examine, and assist every single woman at Bergeron colony with issues relating to their female anatomy, there was only so much she could do for herself. She would give birth in about seven month and though Khel had Dagny to help deliver her baby, Dagny only had Voris. She supposed there was Aisla, the Orion nurse who had become the colony's informal doctor after Velara had died, but it wasn't really the same.

Aisla had four children of her own and had helped deliver the babies of her relations when she'd lived in a collective of Orion females, but her expertise was wrapped around Orion physiology, which was very different than most other species on the colony. She came to the clinic whenever she could to volunteer and learn, and while Dagny and Voris were always grateful for an extra pair of hands to treat minor injuries or help with clerical duties, the clinic wasn't her primary job.

Aside from the end goal of delivering the baby, Dagny was certainly going to need pelvic exams as her pregnancy progressed and Voris was the only other person qualified to give her one. The thought of getting up on a table, putting her heels in stirrups, and letting him probe around the more sensitive parts of her anatomy was not a particularly pleasant one. She wondered what his thoughts on it were. They couldn't avoid the subject forever. She debated just asking him about it right then and there, but the sudden memory of last night's dream flickered into her mind, burning her cheeks with embarrassment.

"Are you well?"

She nearly choked on her soup. She dared herself to look at him and act casually. "Yeah, fine. Why do you ask?"

"Your complexion is reddening."

"I'm ok."

"You are certain?"

"Yes."

She finished off the last of her soup and moved to the freestanding sink to rinse her bowl. Washing everything with water was weird. Bergeron colony carefully rationed energy because the power grid was insufficient to support the demands of the mining operations and so many people. Sonic showers, sinks, replicators, and other technologies that devoured energy were used as sparingly as possible. There were plans to add a third fusion reactor on the sixth corridor next spring with the profits from the next shipment of ore, but that was still months away.

The radio chimed downstairs, giving them both the excuse to turn their attention to work. It wasn't even 0600 hours, but Hadrian Moore was asking for their final requisition request for Sam's approval by the end of the day. Their budget was small and Voris had spent many hours running different analyses on the most efficient way to allocate resources for the clinic.

He sat down at the computer in the corner to review his request for what seemed like the hundredth time while Dagny got to work processing the last of the medications he'd synthesized the night before and stocking them in the pharmacy cabinet. A short time later, the clinic opened for its regularly scheduled hours. It had taken time to arrange a schedule, but they settled on following the colony's standard seven-day week, open for six days and closed on the seventh. They worked from 0630 to 1930 hours to accommodate miners on all three shifts. Three out of the six days, they saw people by appointment, they held a walk-in clinic on two days, and the other day they would alternate making home visits to check in on patients. At least that was the schedule in theory.

In reality, they were open twenty-four hours a day for emergencies and many people still just dropped by without an appointment. Quite often they ended up making home visits at odd hours because many of the miners worked unpredictable shifts. Dagny had even gone down to the mines during the middle of the day to catch people on their lunch breaks if they were too busy to stop by the clinic. People were slowly catching on though and as the weeks went by, things were settling into a routine.

The clinic was always busiest first thing in the morning because many miners on the Alpha shift would come in before work for pain relievers or quick checkups. That morning ended up being busier than usual, with a lot of people coming in with a dry, hacking cough. Voris quickly isolated and identified a new strain of a mild Tellarite influenza virus and got busy designing a vaccine, doing his best to give Dagny a crash course in modern immunological theory as he worked.

Things tapered off at midday and Dagny took advantage of the opportunity to go upstairs and make lunch. When she came down fifteen minutes later with two plates of rice and bean salad and sliced fruit, the first thing she smelled was vomit. Pregnancy had heightened her sense of smell in ways that were really unfortunate.

A boy with a gray complexion sat on the edge of a biobed in the front room, slumped against his mother and holding her hand as Voris examined him. Dagny tried to hold her breath against the vomit smell but another odor caught her nose. It smelled so familiar, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

"Is everything ok?" Dagny asked.

"Mr. Li is suffering from acute nausea."

"The school sent for me because he got sick after lunch," his mother sighed. "It must have been something he ate."

Voris asked them a battery of questions but the answers didn't reveal much. Shen Li had no fever or diarrhea. He wasn't allergic to anything and wasn't taking any medications. The boy started to retch and Dagny grabbed an emesis bucket. As he leaned forward to vomit, she got a whiff of his hair and the same familiar smell assaulted her nose. Suddenly, she suspected she knew exactly what was going on.

She waited until he was done vomiting to ask, "Shen, what were you doing today at lunch?"

"We ate and then played above ground for half an hour like we do every day when the weather is nice," he replied pitifully.

"Yes, but what did you do?"

He glanced at her and shrugged.

"Did you spend time with any friends?"

"Just Saul and Lharess."

"Lharess, is he Caitian?"

"Yeah."

"You know, growing up, I used to live on a salvage ship. We would stop at a lot of ports. We stopped on Cait a few times. It was always really nice to stop at a port and get off the ship." Dagny realized both Mrs. Li and Voris were staring at her, but she continued. "I remember this one time, my brother Benjamin found these boys on Cait and when he came back to the ship for dinner that evening, he was sick as dog, kind of like you are now. He got so sick he had to go to hospital and we thought he was doing to die."

Shen's eyes ballooned to almost twice their normal size. His white knuckles gripped the emesis bucket, but he admitted nothing.

"At the hospital, they finally figured out he'd smoked this Caitian herb. I think it's called kra'shaa? Anyway, I don't remember much else, other than it had this really pungent smell, sort of bitter and minty. It smelled kind of like you smell right now."

"Am I going to die?" Shen blurted, tears welling in his eyes. "Lharess said it was ok."

"You did drugs?" his mother roared. "How could you be so stupid?"

"I don't want to die," Shen sobbed.

"You're not going to die," Dagny said, glancing at Voris. "But for the next day or so, you're probably going to wish you were dead as it works its way out of your system."

Voris searched the databases for information regarding human ingestion and inhalation of kra'shaa, a popular Caitian recreational herb, but like Dagny already knew, there was very little they could do other than keep Shen hydrated and wait for his body to metabolize it. Shen and his mother left a short time later, leaving Voris and Dagny alone to eat their lunch.

They had barely taken their first bite when Khel appeared in the doorway, gripping her back and looking entirely miserable. "I think I'm in labor."

"Let's have a look, shall we?" Dagny said, setting down her fork, wiping her face, and gesturing toward the back of the room where a privacy curtain cordoned off two semi-private exam rooms.

After a few short questions and a pelvic exam, Dagny shook her head. "I don't think you're quite there yet but I have a feeling you're getting close. Could be tomorrow or maybe even tonight."

"You're sure?" Khel sniffed sitting up. "I'm so uncomfortable."

Dagny nodded. From everything she'd studied, there were few differences between the human and Vulcanoid birthing processes. "I can ask Dr. Voris to confirm."

Khel frowned and shook her head. "I believe you. It didn't hurt this much the last time."

"Why don't you go home and I'll try to check on you every two hours and see how you're doing."

Khel only lived six doors down from the clinic, so it would be no real inconvenience. She nodded and accepted Dagny's help in getting down from the biobed. Dagny gazed at Khel's swollen and unbalanced figure as she moved, thinking she wouldn't look much different in a couple of months. What a strange thought.

Dagny had either delivered or helped deliver nineteen babies, including her youngest siblings, Henrik and Tilde, plus four babies since their arrival at Bergeron colony. She wouldn't call herself an old hand at midwifery, but she wasn't completely inexperienced either. But pregnancy and labor were things that had always happened to other people. Seeing Khel so nervous made her nervous because they had a lot in common. They were both young and carrying human/Vulcanoid hybrid babies and Khel had lost two children before this one. Dagny wanted to tell her that everything would be fine but she honestly didn't know if that was true.

A loud crashing sound erupted from behind the curtain, causing both Dagny and Khel to jump. The source of the commotion ended up being the Apras family, a single Gorn mother with her five young boys. Apras, the mother, was holding one of her children in the air by his arm and keeping another one at arm's length to prevent him from assaulting one of his other siblings.

"I should get out of here," Khel groaned, taking a deep breath and skirting the edge of the room until she reached the door.

Dagny promised to check in on her in a few hours and shifted her focus to helping Voris with the disastrous Gorn family. The Gorn were so unlike anything Dagny could wrap her head around. Their vocal cords and tongues made speaking Federation Standard impossible, along with any other Federation languages. Like many of the Romulans, Klingons, and other non-Federation member species at the colony, they communicated through universal translators, but the Gorn UTs were really unusual.

They wore them strapped around their necks like little choker collars and they apparently functioned by detecting the vibrations in their throats and converting them to typical speech. The programming was a little rough though and often delivered sketchy and bizarre translations in stilted speech and awkward syntax.

That wasn't the only weird thing about the Gorn. Samantha Bergeron had said Gorn children were "little monsters" on their first day there, and though she'd assumed she was joking, Dagny was now convinced Sam had meant it literally. Perhaps it was a little unfair to call them monsters; they were more like impulsive feral animals, not as a result of neglect or bad parenting, but because of biology.

As Dagny had learned in the last month after several run-ins with Gorn families, Gorn child development was like nothing she'd ever heard of in other sentient species. Their bodies grew very quickly, usually reaching physical adolescence around age six and adulthood at age thirteen. Their minds matured along a different trajectory however, making them incapable of coherent speech until around age four. Things like higher order reasoning or impulse control didn't kick in until around age eight. As a result, many Gorn children were aggressive, reckless, and impetuous, but they legitimately couldn't help it. Making matters worse was the fact that they were almost impervious to pain.

But the most shocking thing to Dagny was the fact that the Gorn just assumed that only a third of their children would survive to adulthood. Gorn mothers frequently delivered litters of between six to ten offspring and on average, only three survived to become adults. Once their claws hardened during infancy, it wasn't uncommon for littermates to kill each other in the nest, not out of any malicious intent, but out of pure biological instinct to compete for resources. Gorn families did their best to mitigate violence between siblings, but they had simply resigned themselves to the idea that some of their children would die.

The Apras brood was three years old and approximately the size of six-year-old human children with razor sharp teeth, ten centimeter claws, and horrible attitudes. Many of the colonists were wary of Gorn children, which was why the Gorn occupied their own tiny tunnel at the end of the loop, but sometimes the children refused to stay segregated.

It wasn't just the Gorn kids either. The other children on the colony were intrigued by their feral peers and just last week, Voris had to perform surgery on a Klingon boy who'd attempted to capture one of the one of Apras' pups on a dare. Calo, Apras' son, had nearly taken Garlon's arm off after the Klingon had cornered him in a dead-end tunnel and it had caused something of an uproar around the colony. A lot of colonists were tired of being understanding and wanted the Gorn pups either locked up, medicated into compliance, or gone.

Now all five of Apras' children were in the clinic and on the verge of outright rebellion. Two of them had severe lacerations to the face, with one of them clearly missing an eye. Apras roared at them to be still, but it had little effect. Voris was trying to patch up the forehead of a boy sitting on the biobed with a dermal regenerator, but every time his hand came too close, the boy would snap at him and giggle.

Dagny sighed. "Apras, can you please take these three boys outside while Voris and I see to the two with the more serious injuries? I think they're just riling each other up and making things worse."

"That would be appreciated," Voris agreed.

"This I will do to make work smooth. And thank you," the Gorn woman replied. Apras snarled at her pups. She was already holding one in the air by his left arm. She threw him over her shoulder and grabbed the two others by their ears and hauled them toward the door. Gorn mothers were quite rough with their children, which Dagny found unsettling, but apparently it was the only way to get them to comply.

Dagny pulled a dermal regenerator out of the equipment cabinet, but Voris straightened his back and shook his head. "I do not want you coming near them. Leave this to me."

"They're not too big to manage," Dagny insisted, inching toward the biobed. "Not yet, anyway."

"Dagny, no."

His tone made her bristle. He was talking to her like she was a naughty child instead of another medical professional trying to help an injured boy.

It took a lot of patience and a lot of near misses for Voris to patch up Echin, the boy sitting on the biobed, not only because Echin kept squirming and trying to bite Voris, but also because his brother Eury kept taunting him. The end result was an awful maze of bright red marks on his face, but he wouldn't let Voris any closer to do a neater job. Echin would probably have scars, but scars weren't unusual for Gorn pups.

Apras came in to collect Echin and shoved Eury, the boy with the avulsed eye onto the table.

"I am not certain I can save the eye," Voris said, looking at his mother.

Apras shrugged. "His fault, it is. He learns. This learning for Gorn young."

"It might be easier if I sedated him," Voris called after her.

"You be safe," Apras said, pushing Echin out the door. "He sleeps if he sleeps."

"Will you get me a hypospray loaded with four percent improvoline?" Voris asked Dagny, not taking his eyes off Eury.

Dagny handed him the requested hypospray without comment, trying her best to quash the anxious feeling in her gut. There was no telling how Eury would react to being injected with a sedative and there was no explaining it to him or reasoning with him. Voris tried a few times to deliver the shot to his neck, but the boy never took his eyes off his Vulcan opponent. Every time Voris bobbed, Eury weaved, and twice Eury nearly sank his teeth into Voris' hand. After five frustrating minutes, Voris managed to make contact with Eury's neck, but he was just a fraction of a second too slow.

Eury's neck whipped around and his powerful jaws clamped down on Voris' wrist, releasing a bright shower of green blood. Voris leapt back, stiflling a scream. Reality slowed. Eury sprang from the bed and loped around the clinic, howling and shrieking at the personal violation. Dagny ignored him and stumbled forward to Voris.

There was so much blood. She raced to the supply cabinet and tossed things aside looking for a compression tourniquet and after an eternity, she found one and slapped it on Voris' right bicep. His skin was pale but he was alert.

"Going to die?" asked an anxious voice from behind her.

Dagny whipped around to find Apras standing over her, wringing her hands and staring at Voris. She reached for Voris' mangled arm, realizing it wasn't as bad as she'd first thought. He hadn't reached the bone or shredded any of the muscle.

"My condition is unlikely to deteriorate in the next ten minutes," Voris gulped, composing himself. "Tend to Eury while he is sedated. Move quickly."

She wanted to protest, but he was right. She had no idea how much improvoline Voris had administered and there was no way to know how soon Eury would wake up. He had crashed face down in the corner of the room, and despite her shaking hands, Dagny made short work of the deep cuts to his face. A quick examination revealed his left eye was completely missing and Dagny wasn't sure she wanted to hear the story of how he'd lost it.

She checked his vitals quickly and turned him over to Apras, asking her to wait in the clinic until he'd regained consciousness to make sure he was ok. She took him outside with her other children while Dagny tended to Voris. He was sitting in the computer chair with his injured arm draped over the armrest.

"Voris?"

His eyes flicked upward to look at her. "I believe he nicked the radial vein, but repairing it should be simple enough."

"You might find this difficult to believe, but I actually have some experience in treating Vulcan trauma patients," Dagny replied darkly. "Mind if I have a look?"

He leaned back in the seat and wincing, angled his arm so she could get a better look at it. She retrieved an instrument tray from the surgical suite and set it across the arms of the chair, making a table for him to set his arm on. She went to the supply cabinet and extracted a tricorder and tissue regenerator.

"Will you take a painkiller?" she asked, calibrating the instruments for the task at hand.

"I believe I can endure without one."

She had a feeling he'd say that. There were three sets of bite marks running from the middle of his forearm down to his knuckles. Dagny took a deep breath, conscious of the fact that he was studying her. She started by carefully repairing the punctures to radial vein, and when she thought she'd gotten them all, she loosened the tourniquet on his upper arm to check her work.

She expected him to offer guidance or pointers, but he said nothing at all, he only watched her. It took half an hour to repair the damage to his forearm and wrist and when she was done, she turned his arm over to work on his palm. She rested the heel of her hand on his fingers as she keyed up the device to piece his tissues back together.

A memory flashed through her mind of them sitting on a sofa in his quarters on Valder Station the morning after their pon farr tryst. She gulped and fought to keep her hands steady.

"Dagny?" he said, his voice barely a whisper.

"Yes?"

"You are shaking."

She took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. "I was thinking of the last time I did this."

The muscles in his neck tightened.

"You never did answer my question, by the way," she added.

"Explain."

"That morning on Valder Station and the cut on your hand… I asked if you had been trying to hurt yourself."

"It does not matter."

"It matters to me."

"It is in the past."

She considered her next words very carefully. "You also said that we had a bond, one that would last unless we consciously tried to break it off." His body tensed and he shifted his weight in his chair. "Anyway, you said the only way to break it was to avoid future contact and try to meditate it away, but it's not like we can avoid seeing each other."

"No."

She hesitated before saying, "Sometimes I feel like I can feel things. Feelings that aren't mine, I mean." Voris' eyes trailed down to the crook in his elbow. "I guess I'm trying to ask if we still have this bond? And do you spend so much time meditating because you're trying to get rid of it?"

Voris' mouth drifted open. "You are expecting my child. We will share a bond in some form whether we want it or not."

Dagny nodded, biting her lip and sniffing back tears. "But is that why you meditate? To try and… you know… keep me at a distance?"

"I meditate because my life has undergone a rapid transformation."

"So has mine," she retorted.

"I lack your unique variety of human resilience."

His eyes glanced up and by chance happened to meet hers. To Dagny they looked so dark and serious and absurdly emotional. They sat at an impasse, staring at one another, almost daring the other person to speak.

At long last, Voris broke eye contact and said, "Your hands are still shaking."

"That's probably because I'm nervous."

"What cause do you have to be nervous?"

"I don't know," she mumbled, returning to repairing his injured hand.

Ten more minutes with the dermal regenerator and Voris had swaths of smooth, greenish skin where there had been gore less than an hour ago. At his advice, she administered a general antimicrobial agent and blood proliferating serum to accelerate blood production to replace what he'd lost, then she helped him stand and ordered him into bed.

He tried to protest, but Dagny wouldn't hear of it. She did her best to manage the people that trickled into the clinic for the rest of the afternoon and evening and checked in on Khel as she'd promised. At 1930, she trudged up the stairs to their quarters to find Voris fast asleep.

She made herself a light supper and when she set Harold's food down on the floor, she was startled to find he wasn't in their quarters. A search of the clinic and the nearby tunnels turned up no sign of the grumpy cat and though she was worried—Sam had warned them that the Gorn pups had strong predatory instincts—she was too tired to keep looking. Voris had let him roam around New Vulcan without supervision and she got the sense Harold was accustomed to going his own way but even still, would he know how to find his way back to the clinic? She certainly hoped so.

Less than an hour later, she was lost in a forest of dreams, but this time they were neither sensual nor pleasant. She was trying to run away from a black void but the faster she ran, the more she seemed to stay in place. There were voices swirling around in the blackness, and when she realized they belonged to her family, she felt the urge to give in to the emptiness. The moment she did, she was struck with terror so powerful it jolted her awake.

She groped around in the darkness of their quarters, wondering if she was still dreaming or not. She took several slow breaths, noting the dim light of the clock on the wall. It was just a dream. She shifted onto her left side to try and go back to sleep, but she realized her legs were wet. She put her hand between her thighs, shocked at the idea that she might have wet the bed, but the liquid was sticky. A yelp got caught in her throat. "Lights," she gasped.

She threw back the covers to find she was sitting in a huge red spot. She started to shriek. "No! No no no!"

A warm arm slid around her shoulder. Voris. She turned and buried her face in his chest and sobbed, "Please do something…"

Voris stood at the clinic's sonic sink, carefully scrubbing the dried red blood from his nail beds. Dagny had finally drifted back to sleep several minutes ago, probably an effect of the medications he'd administered to keep her immune system in check.

Given the amount of blood that had been on her sheets, he had initially believed that she miscarried until he examined her and determined her cervix was closed and the presence of a strong fetal heartbeat remained. Though he lacked the equipment to perform a detailed scan of her reproductive tissues, he was able to obtain a rough image using a standard tricorder and both the fetus and placenta appeared to be intact, though he'd sent the file to Dr. Govorski for her opinion.

The most likely explanation for the sudden blood loss was a subchorionic hemorrhage, which was cause for concern, but didn't pose a threat to Dagny or the fetus, or at least it wouldn't have, if she hadn't also lost paternally derived cupric blood. Some of the fetus' copper-based blood had leaked out of the placenta and into Dagny, which had the potential to cause hemolytic disease in both mother and fetus.

In a healthy hybrid pregnancy, the cupric blood vessels necessary to sustain a Vulcan fetus in a human body were sequestered away from the lining of the uterus, essentially hiding it from the mother's immune system, but because of this blood loss, now there was the potential for maternal immunization against fetal paternally derived cells—Dagny's body would attempt to mount an immune response against the fetus.

From his research, the placentas of human/Vulcanoid hybrid pregnancies often ended up being abnormal due to the conflicting biochemistries of the mother and fetus and Dagny's pregnancy appeared to be no different. The placenta measured within the normal size range, though from his scan it appeared to be misshapen, which had probably led to the clot that had formed between the placenta and uterine wall, leading to the bleeding Dagny had experienced just hours ago.

There was little they could do but wait and observe. As far as he was concerned, she was on bedrest until further notice, but for now she was stable and so was the fetus. He would miss her assistance in the clinic—a month of working with Dagny had led to many insights into improvisation and building rapport with patients. Unlike most humans he'd worked with on Earth, she rarely complained. She was both eager to learn and easy to teach, but most importantly, the colonists liked her. He did not look forward to answering their queries about her condition in the coming days.

Most species were given to gossip, but news about Dagny's pregnancy and their unusual relationship had spread throughout the colony in fewer than forty-eight hours after their arrival. No one spoke of it, presumably because most people at Bergeron colony had their fair share of past mistakes and embarrassments, but that didn't change the fact that everyone knew. As a Vulcan he preferred privacy, but as a physician to a small colony, he also sensed it was important to maintain certain relationships with his patients and neighbors and he feared that included assuaging their concern for Dagny's wellbeing.

He wandered upstairs, massaging the ache in his right forearm from where Eury had attacked him earlier that afternoon. He was still in his underwear and undershirt—he hadn't even bothered to dress himself once he'd heard Dagny screaming. He had a bit of her blood smeared on the hem of his shirt, but it was too late to wash his clothes with her soiled sheets. They would simply have to go in with the next laundry cycle.

He pulled his shirt over his head, folded it, and deposited it in the basket by the foot of his bed that he used for dirty clothes. It was 0330 and he considered meditating, but he thought of Dagny's earlier remark. He didn't meditate to break their bond as much as he did to ease his guilt over putting her in her current situation. He decided to follow her advice and attempt to sleep for the next two hours, but just as he pulled another gray undershirt over his head, the call alarm rang.

He dismissed a passing feeling of irritation and after glancing at Dagny to ensure she was still asleep, he pulled on his meditation robes and went downstairs to answer the door. It was Vaksur, the lovely Vulcan woman with the playful smile and shining black hair.

"How may I be of assistance?" he asked.

"Aisla sent me to come fetch the woman who works with you," she explained, running her eyes over his satin robes. "Khel is having her baby."

His first thought was of Dagny. He couldn't leave her alone, but nor could he ignore Mrs. Diels' needs. "Can you find Ann Svendsen and ask her to come to the clinic?"

Vaksur frowned. "I'm not a messenger service."

"Dagny is unwell and I require someone to monitor her so that I can attend to Mrs. Diels."

Vaksur shrugged and fluttered her eyelashes. "I'll go wake Ann then. This means you owe me, you know."

"I am grateful for your efforts," he replied, thinking there was something about the beautiful V'tosh katur woman that made him uneasy. Mistrust without reason was illogical, but he could not bring himself to ignore his irrational judgment.

"Say, do you know anything about neuropressure?"

"I do," he replied, wishing to break from the conversation to tend to his duties.

"It's just that I get these headaches and-"

"Come by the clinic during regular hours and I will assist you."

"It's just that it's kind of a private thing, isn't it? Think you could come to my quarters?"

"If you wish," he replied, making a mental note to add her to his next set of house calls. "Now, will you please fetch Mrs. Svendsen?"

Vaksur left and he quickly dressed himself and collected supplies into the kit that Dagny took with her when she attended births. He repressed a small amount of anxiety as he packed. Voris had never delivered a baby without assistance.

He had witnessed and assisted in several deliveries during medical school and his subsequent internship, and he was quite familiar with the relevant biological processes that went along with pregnancy, labor, and delivery, especially after his recent studies. But in more than thirty years of medical practice, he had never participated in a delivery without the supervision of an obstetrician.

He passed Ann on his way out of the clinic and gave a brief explanation of what had happened, urging her to notify him at once if Dagny's condition changed. He wasn't certain where Mrs. Diels lived, but it wasn't hard to figure out: he simply followed the agonized moans directly to her doorway, where he was greeted at the door by Aisla.

"Where's Dagny?" she asked.

"Unwell," he replied, breezing through the doorway.

"I need Dagny," Khel yelped from the next room. "Where is she? I need her. I can't do this without her…"

"You can do this, love," urged her husband. "You can."

Their quarters were slightly larger than his with a separate bedroom to the left of the kitchen. He found Khel on her feet, hunched over the side of the bed while Jacob rubbed her back. "Thank our lucky stars you're here, doc. She's in a pretty bad way."

Khel hissed and started to go weak at the knees as another contraction racked her body. Voris' training began to kick in. "How frequent are the contractions?" he asked, setting his kit in a chair by the door to extract some supplies.

"About four minutes apart," Aisla answered.

He waited for her pain to pass before asking, "Mrs. Diels, will you lie down on the bed so I can examine you?"

He and Aisla quickly pulled a rubber sheet from Dagny's kit and spread it over the mattress. Vulcans would have considered it inappropriate for a father to attend the birth of his child, just as they would consider it inappropriate for a male healer to preside over the delivery, except in extenuating or emergency situations, which this clearly was. Khel had also always seemed just as reluctant at the idea of having Voris provide her with maternity care, but now she appeared to be in far too much pain to care.

Things moved quickly and smoothly though and after twenty minutes of Khel's agony and everyone else's encouragement, Voris held in his hands a slimy, squalling neonate with a tuft of black hair and pointed ears. It seemed to Voris to be a transformative experience, holding this newly born thing as it drew in its first breath. He stared at the infant, a male, marveling at how a pair of immature lungs could produce such volume.

"What is it, doc?" Jacob laughed, bringing him back to the situation. "Boy or a girl?"

"It is male."

"We have a little boy, Khel," Jacob exclaimed, gripping his wife's hand and wiping away a tear.

His wife's pale face beamed. "Can I hold him?" she croaked.

"Certainly," Voris replied. He clamped and cut the umbilical cord, then handed the baby over to Aisla so she could swaddle him and present him to his mother. He shifted his attention back to Mrs. Diels, who was now in the third stage of labor and needed to deliver the placenta.

He was about to tell her what to expect during this next stage, but her contractions hadn't yet begun and she seemed lost to the world as she and Jacob stared into their son's face for the first time. The sight stirred a strange emotion in Voris. He thought of Dagny, asleep in her bed and still supporting the fetus inside her. For now.

Watching the Diels family bond with their new addition made Voris realize just how much he wanted this for himself. He had always wanted children, but because he'd loved T'Sala more than himself, he'd accepted that he would never experience fatherhood. But that was all in the past. The situation with Dagny wasn't ideal but it was what he had, and he was grateful for everything she was. He stood back and allowed the new parents to have their moment with their son, and suddenly felt very desperate to experience the same thing with Dagny and their child.