Chapter Fifty-Six

Procedure

Commodore Charles Tucker III

When I finally – after a few seconds outside the door, just to get my nerve up – walk into the anteroom of the makeshift operating theatre in the Bunker, I can't describe how thankful I am that T'Pol made that suggestion about giving me this mental blocker to help me get through the next hour or so.

Miguel sent me some info on what the procedure will involve. To some extent, he'll have to improvise his techniques, because not only the womb but all the rest of the implanted stuff will have to go too. It's a big, complicated operation and a lot could go wrong, but Mal is adamant that he wants every last bit of the foreign components removed. I suppose I can understand that; his whole sexual identity must have been compromised by finding he'd basically been made into a hermaphrodite.

It's probably not surprising that I've beaten him to it. I can't imagine he'll be in that much of a hurry to do this, for all that he'll undoubtedly be glad when it's done. Miguel is in the far room, prepping for surgery; presumably everything in theatre is set up and ready to go, because Liz is fiddling with the stuff that will be required for anesthesia, and by the way she looked up when I came in she thought Malcolm had arrived.

"Sorry, baby girl. Just me." I need to let her know I'm not offended by the way the smile wavers on her face. "I'm sure he'll be along any minute."

She puts down the hypospray without answering, points me to a set of surgical scrubs waiting on a table, and begins tidying the contents of an already tidy surgical tray. The biggest thing on this is a needle, and even the sight of that makes me a bit queasy. I know what it's for, of course, since she's given me a few pointers beforehand; even modern technology hasn't produced a hypospray accurate enough to deliver a dose directly into the space needed for this particular procedure.

"Are you okay?" When my hands have been disinfected and I've finished getting my gown and stuff on she still hasn't spoken, so I touch the side of her wrist gently with the back of one gloved knuckle.

The way she jerks her hand away from mine answers me before she does.

"Not really." She doesn't look up, but her nervous non-busyness stops. "Commodore, I–."

'Commodore'. Not 'Trip'. Now, that could mean that she's extra worried about the surgery, or that she's got a bone to pick with me. Or come to think of it, it could mean any one of half a dozen other things, because if there's a man breathing who understands what a woman is likely to mean in any given situation, I sure as hell haven't met him.

"Spit it out, Lieutenant." At least I know it has nothing to do with that business about what happened to the baby. She's already said she's forgiven me for that, even if I still can't quite get my head around her having to 'own the action' in order to 'process the emotions.'

I'm glad she has Ginny helping her with that now, though I'm not entirely sure psychology isn't just complicating a fairly simple, if terrible, thing in this case. Whatever Ginny has taught Liz to call it, it sounds to me like she just feels the need to take responsibility for her actions in that situation. I'm actually pretty proud of her for that. I was ready and willing to take the blame for Miguel's benefit, but she wasn't having it. It shows how much she's grown in the last few years that she wouldn't let me protect her from the possible consequences.

"I – I wish you'd stop calling me that. That 'baby girl' thing."

For a moment I honestly don't get what she means. Then I remember that it was what I used to call her when we were all living in fear of the Triad and their spy network, and when the only safe way for us to whisper together was for the two of us to share a bed.

My first instinct is to take offense. Because despite the reasons why we did what we did – and they were damn hard, practical reasons, that probably kept both of us alive – I did my damnedest to make sure I wasn't the only one to get something out of it.

Yeah, I've changed some since then. I'm not sure I could do that anymore, at least not with quite the same cheerful thoughtlessness. But it wasn't like I treated her like a few other women around the station I could name, who in my early days here got the 'privilege' of sharing my bed but not that of playacting instead of delivering the real deal.

Then I notice the nervous way she's glancing up at me, and I have the grace to be ashamed; she may have been playacting, but she was doing it because she had to, mostly in the effort to save the man she loves. It can't have been easy for her – I can guess the word went around that from being Reed's bitch she'd made the move to being Tucker's, probably because nobody normal or good-looking would give her a second glance. So given the snide remarks and sniggers she undoubtedly got, it's probably completely understandable that she doesn't care to be reminded of it. Nobody would dare comment in my hearing that I sure must be desperate if I was reduced to scavenging the major's leavings, but I'm as sure as I can be that was said, too, and probably in her hearing.

"I'm sorry, Liz," I say contritely. "Old habit … I'll try not to use it again."

The relief in her face is enough of a reward for my change of tack. But before she can say anything, the door hisses open again and Malcolm walks in. He's wearing only shorts and a sleeveless top, but he strips off the top and throws it into a corner.

He's always been a bit pale-skinned, but now his face is the color of new milk; and his lean frame, formerly well-muscled, is still so thin, if anyone didn't know better they'd think he was just starting his recovery after a long illness. While he's gained back enough stamina to be able to walk unassisted anywhere within the parameters I've set for him inside the bunker, anyone who knew him before would realize he doesn't move as briskly, finds a seat more quickly when he reaches his destination, and stays in it longer once he's settled. And he's so visibly tense that he even moves awkwardly; he did that to begin with, of course, when he practically had to learn how to walk again, but lately he's started to regain a lot of his ease of movement. Now, however, he looks like every muscle in his body is so stiff his joints will hardly work.

His head turns. His gaze fixes on the bio-bed he's going to have to lie down on and be immobilized on, and he stops dead, like he's run into a brick wall.

I see the muscles in his throat move as he swallows, and I'm guessing that for all he's agreed to go through with this, now he's actually confronting it it's all he can do not to turn and run.

"Let Miguel know he's here," I say softly to Liz, and give her a little nod to tell her I'll handle this.

It probably hurts her like hell to turn away when she can see he's in a bad way like this, but she trusts me. She walks away through the operating theatre doors, and I cross the few paces to Malcolm. "Hey. Mal." I keep my voice very quiet. "You're gonna be okay. You'll get through this."

His arm under my hand is absolutely rigid. "You don't understand."

I'm about to say I do, but of course I don't – in the least. I haven't the faintest damned idea of what it's actually like to be strapped helpless on a bio-bed for months on end, at the mercy of whatever anybody, anybody at all, wants to do to me.

"No, I don't. But for what it's worth, I'm going to be standin' beside you." I draw a deep breath. "I know you still probably have real issues trustin' people, because that's the way you've been for most of your life. But Miguel reckons even when you're dosed up you'll be able to fire straight enough to hit me."

And on that, I take a small disruptor pistol out of my pocket and hand it to him.

It's fully charged, and for all its small size it's a fully working, albeit a low-powered, weapon. It packs enough of a punch to stop an angry Klingon in his tracks, and could still cause fatal damage with multiple direct hits. He'll know that perfectly well.

I watch him go to check the power cell, quite automatically, and stop himself. He looks at the bio-bed again, and swallows a second time. Then, to my absolute amazement, he passes back the pistol, with a hand that isn't quite as steady as he'd probably like it to be. "I realize it's been a while since I … since I've gone 'out of it'," he says huskily. "But I imagine what's going to happen today would be as likely as anything to trigger it." Gesturing to my wristband and his chest, he also adds drily, "And I certainly don't want to share your fate via our electronic connection should I decide to take any of my anxiety or frustration out on you."

Feeling my eyes go wide in shock, I say, "Shit, Mal! I honestly forgot all about that. I just wanted to make you feel a little more secure in there."

I expect him to rail at me, to be furious, to accuse me of trying to manipulate him into somehow hurting himself, but he just looks at me with mild contempt, and says, "Well, you're a bloody fool for wanting to do it this way, Commodore! Do you think if I believed that I had one chance in a million of getting out of here that you'd still be standing there looking like an idiot?"

I feel my face get hot with embarrassment, but there's no way I can argue with him.

Then he gives me that little, snarling smirk he sometimes uses, though somehow it's a little more humorous than usual, and says, "Besides, I hesitate to imagine what might become of my insides if I were to shoot you while your brother-in-law is messing about with them."

"Honestly, Malcolm," I try to reassure him. "I really only did want you to have the confidence of knowing you could stop the procedure at any time."

After a thoughtful look, he says, "Actually, I believe you, but unless I killed you – which would consequently kill me – I'd still be at your mercy when you recovered, wouldn't I?"

And he just shakes his head and says, "Like I said, you're a bloody fool."

He looks at the biobed once again and says, in a strangely small voice, "It's not the surgery, Commodore, it's–"

"It's havin' to trust anybody as much as you are now, after what happened to you last time." I step into his eye line, blocking his view of the bed, and wait for him to look at me, and even though I know he really has nothing to fear from any of us I can't control the visceral stab of pity at the raw terror in his eyes. "Mal, I can't imagine how much courage it's taken you to come here. I can't even begin to imagine what it'll cost you to lie down on that bed and let medical professionals take control of you again. But these are good people and they are gonna put right what those other bastards did to you.

"Yeah, it's gonna be terrifyin' for you." Taking a bit of a risk, I put my hands on his shoulders. "But whatever else you've been called, no-one ever called you a coward. So you can do this. I know you can."

"Fear is a reaction, courage is a decision," he whispers, and it sounds like he's quoting somebody, reminding himself of something he already knows. Then he grips my wrists, quite gently, and releases himself. It's the first time in all the years I've known him that he's ever knowingly reached out to me without the intention to hurt, and I don't know quite what to make of it.

He walks. I'll never know how, but he walks, unsupported, alone, and reaches the bed. I'm close behind him, but I have no idea if he even knows that or whether he's too deep in his own battle to know anything else.

I'm guessing that if he allowed himself one second to stop and think he'd never go through with this. So with one movement he rolls onto the bio-bed and lies down, staring at the ceiling, as stiff as a marble figure on a tomb.

Liz must have been watching, probably via a surveillance feed. The moment he's settled, she comes back in.

With a soft word of reassurance, she starts checking his vital signs. At what she finds, her lips purse with worry. She looks at him, then at me, and then back at him again. I can see her visibly gathering her nerve to tell him something he's not going to like. "Malcolm, I'm afraid I'm going to have to sedate you."

"What?" His head snaps sideways to bring his petrifying glare to bear on her. "I thought I'd only have to have that … that thing done in my back?"

"The spinal block. Yes. That's more than sufficient for pain relief. But your blood pressure and your heart and respiration rates are too high to risk an operation. There would be too much blood loss, too much risk of you going into shock.

"We have to get them down somehow or call off the procedure."

I suppose in the state he is, it's a miracle he doesn't explode off the table and throw something. As it is, he gives out some ungentlemanly language, but aimed more at the ceiling and Fate in general rather than at Liz, who after all is only the messenger.

"You wouldn't have to put him out completely, though?" I press, leaving him to get on with the hissy fit while I try to find some positives.

"Oh no, no," she replies gratefully. "I'd just give him something to make him a bit drowsy, that's all. Just to take the edge off."

"You hear that, Mal? You don't have to be put to sleep. They just need to relax you a bit. 'Cause if my heart's gallopin' I'm damn sure yours is, an' we don't want to take any more risks than we have to."

He darts a murderous glance at me and snarls that the only one 'taking the risks' is him. But he's a realist, and I'll guess that he's already summed up the situation and is just venting a little before accepting the inevitable.

"You know Liz won't do a damned thing to you that she doesn't have to," I tell him quietly. He may have to submit to something that's going to scare him even more, but it won't hurt to help him salvage a little pride by acting like he really does have a choice. "If anyone's on your side, Mal, it's her. Just let her do her job an' keep you safe durin' this."

He grumbles a bit more, mostly for effect while he comes to terms with it, and then growls, "Oh, get on with it then, if you must!"

"Always the gracious Englishman," I remark, mostly to draw his fire in my direction while Liz hurriedly gets together what she needs.

The hiss of the hypospray at his neck interrupts his indrawn breath just after he's gotten it back. Luckily for me, because I don't think what he was aiming to reply would have been all that gracious either. His eyes roll as the drug hits him, but they don't shut, they just go a bit vague and sleepy-looking, and his mumbled 'Oh, fuck off' doesn't really have any force behind it.

"Readings coming back to within safe parameters," she says, looking at the readouts.

"I'm going to get you ready for the surgery now, Malcolm." Her voice is steady even if her eyes aren't. "You'll have to roll over onto your left side so I can administer the anesthetic. I'm sorry. We'll help you if you can't manage."

He manages a nod, and pushes himself over without help. He's now facing me, and I put my left hand flat beside his right, where it's now gripping the edge of the bed. He doesn't respond, or acknowledge my presence in any way, simply lies there staring unseeingly into – well, whatever you do stare into when your waking life turns into the scenario of your nightmares. I can only hope that now he's packed full of sedative, it'll be a bit less real to him than it would have been otherwise.

Neither of us says anything while Liz does whatever needs to be done. She uses a second hypospray to administer the local anesthetic so then of course he doesn't feel anything when the needle is inserted, with the aid of a scanner to make sure it's going exactly where it needs to, into what she calls the 'subarachnoid space'. I watch the little frown of concentration between her brows – it helps to keep my mind off exactly what she's doing.

Apparently the first sign of the anesthesia taking effect is a warm feeling in the feet. After a couple of minutes Mal reports that he can feel this. After another few minutes, a look of growing panic steals over his face and he starts urgently feeling at his hips and belly like he thinks someone might have stolen them when he wasn't looking. "I can't–!"

"It's entirely normal, Malcolm. You'll have no feeling at all anywhere in your lower body until the anesthetic wears off. In the meantime, we have this going to keep feeding in very small amounts to make sure it doesn't till we want it to." She shows him a pump, attached to a fine catheter that presumably leads into this space in his spine, and then competently inserts a drip into his upper arm via a cannula.

"This is just a precaution. In a few cases, anesthesia can cause a drop in blood pressure. We have this set up so we can administer the right drugs to counteract it if that happens. But not, of course, unless it does." She checks the valve, which is safely closed up, and then glances at the monitors again. "Well, everything looks fine. If Miguel's ready, I guess we may as well get started.

"If you're sure you want to go through with this?"

Well. I'm guessing it'd need the contents of your average drugstore to make him want to go through with it, even if he is currently halfway to La-La Land. But he manages a bitter little chuckle, and nods. "I want to … be human again."

=/\=

I concentrate on those words as I push the trolley into the operating theatre – yet again, it helps to have something else to think about other than what's going to happen in the next few minutes. Miguel is ready and waiting, and Liz fills him in on what she's done while between us we get Mal transferred onto the operating table and attach him to the various machines that are going to keep track of his responses throughout. Then she pulls the screen into place, its lower folds resting across the patient's chest to block out his view of what's happening beyond it.

There's a stool put ready by the head of the bed and I park my butt on it. Neither Mal nor I can see either of the other two from here (though I probably could see the top half of them if I sat up straight), but there are faint rustling sounds as protective cloths are positioned around the surgery site. He's lying perfectly still – well, he hasn't much option now, you can't really use your legs if you can't feel them – and staring at the ceiling. We've already been warned that if you look up at the large overhead light you can see stuff reflected in the surface of it, so I'm going to make sure that wherever I look it's not going to be at that. T'Pol's magic mental trickery's doing a good job so far, but I don't want to push the angle.

"I'm proud of you, Mal," I tell him softly. "You've done the hard bit. This is the easy bit. Just lie back there an' think of England."

I surprise a bit of a chuckle out of him, though I don't suppose he really feels much like laughing.

"We're about to start the surgery," Miguel's voice comes from behind the screen. "Please just do your best to relax, General. Ah'm not expectin' any complications, just a nice quick couple of nicks an' you'll be back to normal."

Well. Even I know there's probably a heck of a lot more than 'a quick couple of nicks' involved, but that's definitely not the most tactful thing to point out. Malcolm just nods, and I tell my brother-in-law to get on with the job. It's on the tip of my tongue to joke about not leaving any medical equipment in there when he closes up, but luckily I think better of that as well. I just pat Mal reassuringly on the shoulder.

"You really can't feel anythin'? Anythin' at all?" I ask, keeping my voice down.

"Not a thing." Something that might be the ghost of a smirk passes across his mouth. "They could be doing anything to me behind there."

"They're doin' exactly what they promised they would." The words I want to be human again haven't quite left my mind, and I wonder if this is the time or the place to ask him what he meant by them. Sure, he was surgically and hormonally altered to perform the function of a woman for a while, but as much of a horror as that must have been for him, performed without his consent and completely against his will, it didn't make him other than human. Just about there it occurs to me to wonder whether he's talking about 'being human' in the physical sense, or is making some reference about this being a step towards rehabilitation. But that's a hell of an assumption to make with regard to a guy like General Malcolm Reed, the terror of the Empire, and it will take a lot more than six words to make me sure of it.

His hands are lightly linked on his chest. At a guess, he's having to exert some self-control from trying to lift the screen and check what's going on for himself, though he could always just look up at the reflective surface of the overhead light and I don't think he has so far. He definitely can't be squeamish, but then maybe it's different when it's your own body cut open with all its organs on display.

That thought makes me swallow hard and take a deep breath.

I should be giving him something else to think about other than what's being done to him down there. I open my mouth to ask him how his physiotherapy's coming along, but before I can start, Miguel's voice comes from behind the green curtain.

"You know, Trip, Ah've often wondered over the past few months, so now, Ah'm just gonna ask, what the hell was wrong with your Doctor Phlox?"

I grimace, and give Mal's shoulder a reassuring squeeze; he probably doesn't think about Phlox any more than he absolutely has to, so I'll keep this as short as I can. "Point A, he wasn't my Doctor Phlox. I'd have happily shoved him out an airlock, but I was under orders to accommodate him. I did as much as I had to, to avoid bein' punished, but no more. An' B, you're gonna have to be more specific, Miguel, because there are way too many answers to that question."

The doc chuckles slightly. Not having known Phlox or ever been in the service, he doesn't realize that I'm not being flippant, and probably not even exaggerating about the airlock. If ever anyone deserved to be spaced without a second thought, it was that slimy Denobulan bastard.

"Well, from what Ah can tell, the man was an exceptional chemist and pharmacologist, a gifted surgeon, and understood human endocrinology better than any specialist Ah've ever known."

Then the conversation stops for a bit as he has to concentrate on what he's doing. I'm glad of that for Mal's sake, as his mouth has tightened noticeably while Miguel was singing Phlox's praises, though he didn't say anything.

"Tie that off right there, Ms. Elizabeth...Thank you, and now some suction…Good."

Presumably Miguel's back to doing a part of the job that allows him to get back to conversation, so he resumes. "Ah don't mind telling you, Ah think the man was a medical genius. He'd have to be, in order to adjust a human male's hormones to let him carry a pregnancy, manage the anti-rejection protocol to keep the body from rejecting the necessary transplant, and balance all that with the intravenous drugs and nutrition Liz says the general here was getting."

Mal is definitely getting pissed off now. "You wouldn't admire the warped little fucker half so much if you'd ever been the one on his operating table," he breathes.

"Well, nobody ever said he wasn't smart," I reply sharply. I'll be honest, I'm getting a little irritated myself; it's not like Miguel not to realize how this anthem of praise is going to sound to the victim. I take a wary peek over the screen, just enough so I can give him a warning scowl if he happens to look up. "It just so happens that he was also a complete asshole."

But brother-in-law is apparently so intent on his job that his fascination with the mindset of the guy who perpetrated it in the first place absorbs him. For the moment, at least, he seems to have no thought of it beyond the mere science; either that, or he's deliberately trying to provide Mal with a distraction to keep his mind off what's happening to him. "Even so, and even given the general was an unwilling participant, there were a number of bad medical practices used on him, from the severe restriction of movement leading to atrophy to the long-term, unnecessary use of IV nutrition, which is hard on the blood vessels and could have impacted his digestive tract far more than it did. Ah just don't understand why your… 'scuse me … the late Doctor Phlox would make an already risky procedure that much more dangerous with unnecessarily Draconian treatments."

At this point Mal, obviously annoyed by having to lie still and listen to his surgeon praise the guy who put him here, and probably frustrated with being discussed in the third person, gives an agonized groan and snarls, "He was a monster! What the hell does it matter why he didn't adhere strictly to the best medical praxis? I hardly think Hippocrates would have recognized ninety percent of what he carried out!"

"Retract that just a little more, please? ... Perfect, and hold the basin over here."

There's a wet plop, and my stomach goes flop. I have to swallow hard a couple times and there's a bitter taste in the back of my throat now, but I'm not blowing chunks, so I call it a win.

"Done." Miguel raises his voice again from its confidential murmur to Liz, silently assisting him.

I've never seen him at work before, and keeping the screen carefully between me and what he's actually doing, I take a minute to admire his calm confidence and economy of movement. I'm pleased by how well I'm holding up, too – ordinarily I wouldn't even have the guts to look over the top of the screen, but now, even though I can smell the blood, it doesn't faze me; T'Pol's mind-blocker is still working. I'd still like to catch his eye and warn him off of this particular avenue of conversation, but he doesn't look up.

"Well, even a monster doesn't want his hard work to go to waste, particularly when so much is riding on success. Ah just don't understand why a guy with his skills would have utterly no regard for basic standards of care, General. You don't need me to go into detail about what they did to you, but the real puzzler for me is, why, after all the trouble he took to force your compliance, did he use such an obviously deformed organ for transplantation? Surely, given who he was working for, Phlox would have had access to any number of healthy young women with perfect organs, but he's used one that is patently defective! Only about three percent of human females have a uterine deformity, but bicornuate is far and away the most common abnormality. Surely he would have known this was not normal."

He's obviously done with the extraction part of things, now presumably he has to close the surgical wounds. He nods in the direction of the basin and says, "Liz, you can take that to medical waste disposal."

"Wait!" Mal snaps as she turns towards the door. "I want to see it."

She stops, and glances down at the bowl in her hands.

"Malcolm, no," she says compassionately. "There's no need for you to look at this."

"I have to see it. I have to know that it's out of me. I have to be sure it's gone." For a moment, pitifully, he reminds me of Bert when he was a child, having to check in the closet and under the bed before crawling under the covers, just to be sure there were no monsters.

Liz looks from me to Miguel. (I'll bet Mal doesn't miss that she looks at me first.) We both nod, so she brings it over to him – I know my limitations, so I turn my head away, getting no more than the vaguest impression of a small, bloody, vaguely heart-shaped mass in a stainless steel bowl. He looks at it for a moment, swallows audibly, and nods slowly as though a guess has been finally confirmed.

"You're confused about what kind of doctor Phlox was," he says at last, his voice hard. With an effort, he hoists himself up onto his elbows so he can see across the top of the screen to catch Miguel's gaze. "You think there must have been a 'standard of care' in operation because he was a physician and I was his patient, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is, he was a scientist – an insane scientist – and I was his bloody lab rat.

"He may well have been a genius. Even I knew that he was immensely knowledgeable on any number of subjects, and believe me, he would have been selected to take charge of The Project because he was absolutely the best in the field. That didn't stop him from being the cruellest person I've ever known, and coming from me, that says a hell of a lot. Not only did he not care about pain in his victims, he actually relished it.

"Without his help, I would never have been able to design the Agony Booth that every starship is fitted with. I wanted a weapon to terrorise every member of the crew into obedience, but for me, the pain was a legitimate means to an end. For him, a lot of the time, the pain was the end. It was his idea of entertainment." A short, bitterly derisive snort. "No, if you want the truth, it was his bloody hobby!

"Yes, he took risks with my care. If you want my guess, it was because he wanted to make me suffer, wanted to give me the least possible chance of surviving afterwards. He safeguarded the pregnancy, yes, because it was more than his life was worth to have it discovered he'd taken any chances with it; but me – I was fair game. I wasn't his patient. I was his victim.

"And for all those who might say I deserved it, that doesn't make him any less a monster or what he did to me any less of an abomination."

It occurs to me here that this might be a big moment for Malcolm. All things being equal, nobody ever did anything to General Reed without his consent. He's always worked very damned hard to make himself far too scary for most people to even try. For him to admit aloud to this audience (well, Miguel and me, anyway, I suspect he's been a little more candid with Liz) that he was a victim, that someone was able to do bad things to him… Well, obviously we already know what happened to him, and that he damn well didn't consent to it happening, but actually admitting it, talking about it - I doubt that would have happened without the help of the sedative Liz gave him, and I hope he doesn't regret opening up this tiny crack in his armor later; but I'm damned sure going to tell Ginny about it.

The whole room goes quiet then; for a moment, Miguel even stops working. Then he looks Malcolm in the eye and says gravely, "Ah'm sorry, General, that Ah didn't fully understand what sort of man he must have been, or Ah'd never have spoken about him in your hearin' – especially not praisin' him up the way Ah did. An' Ah'm even more sorry that you had to go through that, and Ah promise to take more care in the future to make sure you never feel that way again under my care."

Mal nods again. "That would be appreciated."

Then, for reasons I doubt even he understands – maybe because he's feeling vulnerable as he can't move from the waist down and Miguel has just finished poking around in his guts, or maybe because the sedative has loosened his tongue – he continues levelly, "I think, if you were to run some genetic tests on it, you would find it's not a deformed human organ at all, but a perfectly healthy one of the genus canis. Though not from any species found on Earth."

There's another dead silence, as the penny drops.

I just can't handle it, thinking of the absolute monstrosity of what has been done to him – thinking of him living for all this time, suspecting, even knowing, what had been transplanted into him. No amount of mental block can save me from the reaction. I grab a nearby medical waste container, and race into the far corner to vomit.

"Oh!" Liz gasps, and when I can finally lift my head again I see her eyes filled with tears, her free hand clasping her mouth.

"Sonofabitch," Miguel whispers. Under his tan, the color has ebbed out of his face. Now, maybe, he'll understand what Phlox was, a whole lot better than he did before: a genius whose talent was put into the service of evil, a doctor who devoted his immense scientific abilities to perfecting the art of inflicting suffering.

Smirking, and looking calmer than he has in days, Mal just lets us all process that for a moment. He seems mildly surprised when I come back to his side in just a minute or two, wiping my mouth and wishing I had a glass of water so I could rinse out. I'm hoping that he has no real idea of the immense pity I feel for him now; more than ever I want to turn him round to my way of thinking, not just to advance my cause, but so he can know what it is to have real friends who would never dream of fucking him over.

Then he says to Liz, "Take one sample, and only one, to confirm my suspicions, and then incinerate it all, the organ and the sample, and delete the data, immediately." Shifting his glance to include me, he goes on, "Destroy any circuitry that processes or stores the data. I don't mean scrap it, I mean shred it, burn it and then space it. I don't ever want it being retrieved."

In a tone that dares anyone to defy him, he adds, "That's an order."

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