"Gentlemen," Admiral Dakunia greeted them from the screen, looking tired and rather apprehensive himself, much to McCoy's satisfaction, although the doctor in him wasn't exactly proud of the feeling.

"Admiral," the three officers returned the greeting, and Kirk added a polite, "Thank you for coming back to us so quickly!"

"You didn't exactly leave me a choice there, did you?" the admiral frowned. "Not if I wanted to keep Hope safe, anyway."

"Excuse me?" the captain asked, sounding as perplexed as McCoy felt at Dakunia's last statement.

"You heard me right, Jim," the admiral sighed. "You have no idea what you're getting into here. The sleeping tiger you're about to wake. This is not about keeping secrets from you. Or her. This is about protecting Hope."

"By keeping her in the dark about her own past? About who she really is?" McCoy blurted out, feeling even more unsettled now that Dakunia claimed to be concerned for Hope's safety, indicating that she was in some kind of danger.

The admiral looked from the doctor to Kirk and Spock, and then back at McCoy.

"Exactly," he said eventually. "Although I can see how that would be difficult to understand. But believe me, gentlemen, you don't want to open that particular Pandora's box. You'll have to trust me there. Like you, I only have Hope's best interests at heart."

"If you expect us to believe that," the doctor scoffed, more than mistrustful of Dakunia's motives, "you'll have to do better than that. Just tell us! What's so terrible about her past, what happened to her, what did she do, that you felt you needed to suppress her memories?"

"We never did that!" the admiral exclaimed, looking genuinely appalled, and McCoy briefly wondered, if this could really all be an act. "In fact, it's completely beyond me how she could even have memories - suppressed or otherwise - from after 1991. She wasn't there!"

"That's not what we found," Kirk took over again. "We have evidence that she lived on quite happily, well into old age, with only a two-day gap in 2016. Care to explain that?"

Dakunia heaved another sigh.

"You don't understand," he sounded exasperated now. "Yes, I kept that from you. But it's not what you think, I did it for Hope. And we certainly never did anything to supress her memories. We simply assumed she'd only remember her life up to her physical age. That she might have memories after that didn't even occur to us!"

"You are talking in riddles, Sir, as the human expression goes," Spock spoke up, clearly sensing that Kirk's and McCoy's rather emotional approach wasn't getting them anywhere. "May I ask you to be more precise?"

The admiral nodded reluctantly.

"All right," he muttered under his breath, "never mind Pandora or that sleeping tiger. You've asked me for the truth about Hope, and I'll give you as much as I can. This whole matter is strictly classified, after all."

"Oh please, don't hide behind the 'classified' excuse," McCoy cut in, getting tired of watching Dakunia beating around the bush, stalling for time. "Surely, Hope would be given access to her own files, if she requested it? Why not just tell us the whole truth now and save us the trouble of opening an official investigation?"

"You might want to think twice before doing anything rash, Doctor," the admiral replied, sounding calmer than he looked, his intense gaze somewhere between a warning and a plea. "Unless you wish Hope to live the life of a lab rat or worse. Because that's what I've been trying to prevent all this time."

McCoy's jaw dropped.

The life of a lab rat? What's the man even talking about?

But then Hope's allegedly cured leukaemia, which inexplicably hadn't left the slightest trace in her system, suddenly came to mind, as well as her mysterious immunity to that nasty virus, an explanation for which he still had to find in her blood, and the doctor felt his own blood run cold.

"I've come to know Hope as a very bright and lovely young woman," Dakunia went on, "and I wouldn't want to see her unhappy any more than you do, gentlemen. So, let's make a deal. I tell you as much as I possibly can, and you drop all further investigation into this matter for the sake of your lieutenant."

McCoy looked uncertainly at Kirk, his heart pounding hard against his ribs.

"You know I can't agree to that," the captain said determinedly. "Not until I can be sure that it really is in Hope's best interest. That's what we all truly care about, isn't it?"

"Fair enough," the admiral relented. "But before we start, I need to know more about those strange memories Hope has. Because it really shouldn't be possible. At least not scientifically."

"What she remembers foremost, are her children," Spock answered Dakunia's question, and McCoy wanted to kick him.

Why did the damn Vulcan always have to be so honest? Didn't he see that instead of answering their questions, the admiral was trying to extract more information from them?

As if sensing the doctor's thoughts, Spock cast McCoy a cautionary glance, prompting him to keep his mouth shut. Heaven knew, the first officer usually had good reasons for his actions, and the doctor dearly hoped that today wasn't an exception.

Dakunia took his time to consider Spock's words. And when he finally murmured, "I see, but we'd better keep this to ourselves for now!" before finally launching into a more thorough explanation of Hope's situation, McCoy had to admit that giving away this small piece of information had actually done the trick.

-x-x-x-x-x-

"Okay, so, this whole affair actually started almost a century ago," Dakunia began hesitantly, pausing to take a sip from his coffee, "when Starfleet's Section 31 set out on a time travel mission back to the year 2016." *

"Wait a minute!" McCoy cut him short. "You've lost me already. Section 31? Since when is there a Section 31?"

"There isn't," Kirk said flatly, and the doctor didn't miss Jim tensing up and shooting Dakunia an almost challenging look.

"You're right, of course, Jim," Dakunia agreed, his face grave now, "there isn't. Yet, I'm their contact in Starfleet Intelligence."

McCoy felt a cold shiver run down his spine. Starfleet Intelligence? All of a sudden, this whole business sounded huge. And ominous. When had finding out about Hope's past turned into a major – terrifying – affair?

"Can anyone please enlighten me?" he barked, trying to keep his voice from cracking as he glanced questioningly from Dakunia to his friends. "Is there, or isn't there a Section 31, and who are they, anyway?"

"Well," Spock turned to the doctor, when the admiral didn't offer an explanation, "there have been rumours about a secret branch of Starfleet Intelligence referred to as Section 31. But it is all hearsay, and to my knowledge, nothing has ever been confirmed."

"Not just secret, Spock," Kirk added, hard eyes on Dakunia, "but gone rogue. And certainly not a crowd you'd want to get involved with."

McCoy's alarm was growing at warp speed, and so was the knot in his stomach.

"Enough, dammit!" he hissed, glaring first at Jim, and then at Dakunia. "So, there is a Section 31. I get it. For God's sake, just tell us who they are and what the hell Hope's got to do with them!"

"I will, if you stop interrupting me," the admiral said mildly, his eyes fixed on McCoy with something almost akin to compassion. "Let's just say that Section 31 has been taking care of potential threats to the Federation since the middle of the last century."

"Are you saying that Hope was a threat to the Federation?" the doctor was gaping at Dakunia in shocked disbelief.

So much for not interrupting. But this was truly outrageous!

"Not to begin with," the admiral went on, unperturbed, "but unfortunately, she interfered with a mission of keeping some time-travelling fanatic from meddling with the politics of the time. Something about presidential elections that year. I can't give you details, but that fanatic was the actual threat, and Section 31 was to prevent him from carrying out his plan. Regrettably, even today, most people still don't get that changing past events, however understandable, or even commendable, the wish to do so might be, affects all of history. That it's not about right or wrong, but about leaving everything exactly the way it was in order to preserve our timeline."

And how well we know that! McCoy thought sadly, exchanging glances with Kirk, who was quite obviously thinking the same thing, the doctor's own pain clearly reflected in Jim's eyes, as they both remembered that awful day they'd had to watch Edith Keeler die in the name of restoring history. **

"And where exactly does Hope come in?" Kirk asked, his grief turning into impatience. "The mission was successful after all, I take it?"

"You don't have to concern yourself with that, Jim," Dakunia replied curtly. "Suffice it to say that Hope was at the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to be a hero."

Hearing that, McCoy was gripped by a terrible sense of foreboding, picturing Hope in a similar situation to the one he'd been in with Edith. He'd never forget how he'd felt when Jim had deliberately held him back from saving the woman, whose expression of surprised disbelief, as the car hit her, would forever be etched in his mind. It may have been a 'necessary' sacrifice, but the guilt would stay with him as long as he lived. Just like the question of who was to decide what was necessary, which timeline to preserve, in the first place.

"She didn't have the faintest idea of what she'd stumbled into, of course," Dakunia went on, oblivious of Kirk's and McCoy's painful memories. "All she saw was a young man of colour, as they still called them then, in trouble, being attacked near the back door of a diner in New York City. So she went to help him, nearly ruining the mission and getting herself killed in the process."

McCoy froze in horror, registering Kirk's equally shocked gasp right next to him.

"Her wounds were too severe to be successfully treated in the early 21st century," the admiral continued, "therefore, not knowing who she was and how her death would affect history, the agents took her aboard their ship and back to 2191, the year they'd started from."

A cold hand seemed to squeeze McCoy's heart, as it hit him how close Hope had come to ending up as just another random murder victim, another dead body in the backstreets of then still barbaric New York City, and he felt hot anger rise inside him, when he realised that it hadn't been concern for her life, but simply fear of her death somehow altering history, that had led to her rescue.

And all just because she'd wanted to help someone. So very Hope. Tears stung at the back of his eyes, even as a strong sense of pride and affection surged through him, when it struck him that trying to help others was probably still going to be the most likely cause of death for Hope.

"What happened then?" Spock asked, seeing that his friends had apparently lost the power of speech.

"Well, Hope was kept sedated until her health was fully restored, and the plan was to simply return her to her own time. Unfortunately, however, due to some technical glitch that's difficult for us to reconstruct, they not only took her back exactly 200 years instead of the intended 175, but after realising they'd arrived in the wrong time, somehow ended up beaming an additional twenty-year-old version of Hope back up to their ship. To this day, we haven't been able to determine with certainty, whether this was the consequence of some strange transporter malfunction, some time-anomaly, a rift in the space-time continuum at the exact time of the beam-up, or the fact that Hope had been brought to a time where a younger version of her already existed. The latter seemed the most likely explanation at the time, since the ship's sensors hadn't picked up any anomalies, and they couldn't find anything wrong with the transporter, either. So, on discovering that the young woman was, in fact, a duplicate, with her alter ego still on the surface, completely unaware and happily going about her life on Earth in 1991, they took both versions of Hope back to 2191 to deal with, and possibly even undo the chaos they'd created."

McCoy's head was spinning, when Dakunia finally paused to give the three officers time to let his words sink in, and from the frowns of concentration on his friends' faces, the doctor could tell that even Spock had a hard time keeping track of events and processing this whole, preposterous tale.

If he'd been floored by Hope's original story of spending three hundred years in stasis to be cured of leukaemia, this revised version certainly threw him for a loop. Yet, the doctor felt in his heart, that, this time, Dakunia had told the truth.

Jenny, a duplicate? Some kind of clone?

McCoy didn't know what to make of this, couldn't even begin to grasp this new concept and all its possible ramifications, or what it could possibly mean for Hope to find out. Let alone how he was supposed to tell her. Just the thought of how this would affect her, frighten her, turn her whole world upside down and put everything she believed in into question, broke his heart. Hell, he had no idea how to even deal with this himself!

Pandora's box, indeed!

Hope was the most kind-hearted and giving person he knew. She'd never harmed anyone in her life, only ever brought joy and happiness into other people's lives, always trying to help in her sweet, caring way. So, why was nothing ever easy for her? Why did she have to go through one traumatic experience after the other? Why was her life a never-ending stream of unpleasant surprises?

Despite being aware that she didn't even know about any of this yet, all McCoy wanted to do at that moment was to go find her. To be with her, hold her, comfort her, protect her. Make sure that this was the last time she'd ever have to go through something like this.

But Dakunia wasn't done yet. By the looks of him, he still had a lot more to say. How much worse could it get? The doctor felt like running off and taking Hope to the nearest inhabitable planet to hide there from all further news. Just the two of them, together forever, living a simple and quiet life. But things weren't that simple, were they?

"In the end," the admiral broke into McCoy's thoughts, "they managed to take Hope, the original version, back to 2016, leaving a two-day-safety margin, so as not to repeat a possible duplication effect, and making sure that she could go on living her life the way she was meant to."

"And what about the 'duplicate'?" McCoy asked, his voice barely more than a whisper, desperate to know, yet not sure he was ready to hear the details of what they'd done to his darling Hope.


*) I borrowed Section 31 from DS9.

**) Reference to the TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever".