For the forty-seventh time in the past eight days, Elizabeth Lense ran her medical tricorder up and down her abdomen and checked the scan results.

Yep. Still pregnant, all right.

She stared at the readout on the small instrument screen, head slightly shaking, still somehow unable to believe what she was seeing. She was already beginning to feel the first physical changes to her body—no nausea, though, thank God; Domenica Corsi would definitely notice her getting up to retch in their shared bathroom every morning. But even with the fatigue, the sensitivity in her breasts, all that, some part of her insisted that it was someone else in this condition. Someone else. Not her.

Which, at least figuratively speaking, was somewhat accurate. After all, she hadn’t been in a serious romantic relationship since Starfleet Medical Academy, with a man she now fondly referred to as “that jackass.” Their long engagement and blink-and-you-missed-it marriage went a long way toward convincing her to focus on her medical career and forget about any hopes of finding love. Then, she found herself stranded on an unknown primitive planet in an alternate universe, with no hope of being rescued and resuming her previous life, where she found herself drawn to the handsome alien rebel leader who had taken her in, and she finally let down her emotional walls and gave in to…

God, it sounds like something out of a bad romance holonovel, she thought, wincing. All the more reason to consider what had naturally followed from their shared passion as being fictional as well.

Except of course it wasn’t. The two subjective months she’d spent with the Jabari were real, even if they did happen in only two objective weeks. The emotional bond she had formed with Saad was real.

She looked again at the image displayed on her tricorder. At the tiny, ball-shaped life growing inside…

“Gold to Lense.”

The doctor nearly jumped out of her skin, and immediately snapped her tricorder shut, as if the captain had just snuck up over her shoulder. After an extra couple of seconds to compose herself, and to check that there was no one else in sickbay who might have seen anything, she tapped her combadge. “Lense here, Captain.”

“Captain Scott just handed us a new assignment. Staff meeting in ten minutes in the observation lounge.”

An eyebrow lifted in curiosity. If this new mission had come from the S.C.E. liaison, it probably wasn’t medical in nature. But hopefully, it would still be something to keep her mind occupied. “Aye, sir,” she answered.

Once the comlink was closed, she reopened her tricorder, and considered the display once more. She keyed in a sequence confirming her authority as ship’s chief medical officer, and for the forty-seventh time, deleted all record of her self-examination from her medical file.

“Work, damn you,” Sonya Gomez growled as she gave her computer terminal a good hard smack. None of her S.C.E. colleagues were here to witness this unauthorized technique, though most of them would probably have approved of the notion. Stevens, certainly. Tev, not so much.

“A valid access code is required,” the computer repeated, completely unfazed by the commander’s use of physical violence.

Gomez growled back. After the debacle at Hildago Station, where her personal logs and files had been hacked and her identity hijacked by a cybernetics-savvy con man, she asked Soloman and Bart Faulwell to create a new protection protocol for her. The team’s computer and encryption experts had come through brilliantly, crafting for her a complex system requiring a sequence of passwords and access codes that, layered on top of standard Starfleet encryption, would make access by anyone other than her nigh impossible.

Provided, of course, that she remembered those access codes. Bart told her to find a code phrase that wasn’t just a random alphanumeric string, but would not be easily connected to her—no lines from a favorite book or names of childhood pets. She’d picked a lyric from a Lurian folk song Carol Abramowitz had fallen in love with and played for her not long ago. At the time, Gomez couldn’t get the insipid song out of her head. Now that she had to remember it, though, to retrieve some personal logs that related to this assignment, the exact line escaped her. There were mountains that were as high as something, but not the sky. Or maybe it was the sky that was as high as the mountains…And to add insult to injury, she now had the stupid wordless melody stuck in her head.

She heaved a sigh and, resigned to relying solely on Starfleet’s official reports, headed for the briefing. Sure enough, everyone was already seated around the table, waiting on her. “Sorry,” she said, as she slipped into the chair to Captain Gold’s immediate right and across from Lieutenant Commander Mor glasch Tev. Tev watched her with a neutral expression, giving no outward indication of the disdain with which she knew he considered her tardiness. This she considered a sign of the Tellarite’s progress.

“All right, now that we’re all here,…” Captain Gold said once she was settled. “Six hours ago, Starfleet Command received a priority-one message from a human colony in the Ficus Sector. It was sharp, short, and did not allow for the option of any response or request for elaboration.”

Gold pressed a tab embedded in the tabletop in front of him, and the lounge filled with a staticky hiss, followed by the voice of a woman, with a Gaelic lilt: “This is Mariposa to the Federation: We want you to come and rid us of this infernal machinery, every last bloody scrap of it!”

The initial reaction, as the message abruptly ended, was to stare around the table at one another in confusion. Tev was the first to form a response. “That’s it?” He wobbled his head in disbelief. “What in Phinda’s name does that mean? What ‘infernal machinery’? A weapons system gone amok? An artificial intelligence gone insane?”

“And ‘every bloody scrap’?” P8 Blue interjected. The low-pitched clacking sound she made as she spoke indicated she felt much the same as Tev about the amount of detail contained in the message. “Without knowing the scope of what they’re asking—or any specifics at all, for that matter—how can they expect the kind of thoroughness they’re apparently asking for?”

“Clearly, for whatever reason, the woman was panicked,” Carol Abramowitz said. While the cultural expert was no less bewildered by the message, there was a milder undertone to her reaction. “We could sit here and pick the message apart word by word for whatever limited information we can glean, but what it’s all going to boil down to is, something has gone very wrong on Mariposa.”

“Though, if you’re not going to pick it apart word by word, I may as well leave,” Bart Faulwell said, feigning a move for the lounge door.

“Stick around, Faulwell,” the captain said with a genial smile. “We’ll try to find something to occupy you.”

“What do we know of these Mariposans,” Tev asked, “if anything?”

Gold cued the rest of the room by turning his attention to Gomez. She nodded, took a brief glance down at her padd, then began: “In 2123, the S.S. Mariposa, a DY-500-class spaceship, launched from Earth bound for the Ficus Sector, carrying two parties of colonists. The main group, composed of molecular biologists, geneticists, neurologists, and other specialists, eventually settled on the planet that now bears the name of the ship. The second group were members of a ‘back-to-nature’ movement who disavowed all modern technology—most older technologies, too—and adopted a preindustrial, agrarian way of life. That group settled another planet in the Ficus Sector, which they called Bringloid. Unfortunately, almost all records of this expedition were lost, and the two colonies were forgotten until—”

“Lost? Forgotten? All record of hundreds of humans?” Soloman’s dark deep-set eyes bulged outward. “This was only two hundred and fifty-four years ago, during Earth’s Stage IV Computing Age, and well after your last world war. How would such a thing be possible?” If the Bynar didn’t already have such a pale complexion, Gomez thought he would have blanched. Given his culture’s heavy reliance on computerized data, he must have considered the matter-of-fact acceptance of this gap in the historical record scandalous.

It was Abramowitz who addressed the issue. “In many ways, the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries was one of the most unstable periods in Earth history. The reestablishment of civil society and rule of law after World War III happened in fits and starts. More than a generation after the end of the war, there were still places where local warlords were employing drug warriors and kangaroo courts to maintain control over their citizens. Even after first contact with Vulcan in 2063, when humanity realized there was a larger universe to deal with, there was significant resistance to the idea of a united human race. That’s what led a lot of the early émigrés, like the Conestoga, Terra 10, and Katowa Expeditions to leave Earth in the first place; they were afraid their cultures would be subsumed by the coming ‘New World Order’.”

“Yes, well, as fascinating as the history lesson is,” Tev grumbled, “it doesn’t appear to bear any relevance to the present situation.”

Gomez shot Tev a pained look. “I’m afraid I need to fascinate you some more, Tev. The Bringloidi colony was rediscovered eleven years ago, after their sun went into a period of intense electromagnetic flaring. An old emergency distress beacon the Mariposa had left was triggered, and the Enterprise—the Enterprise-D, I should say—was sent to investigate, and then evacuate the planet.”

“Hold on,” Fabian Stevens interrupted, one eyebrow raised curiously. “The Enterprise, eleven years ago?”

Gomez deliberately avoided Stevens’s eyes as she answered, “Yes, this was during my tour aboard the Enterprise.” Not to mention, it was also during the late Kieran Duffy’s time on the Enterprise engineering staff as well. Please, don’t mention that, Fabe, she thought at him. As one of Duff’s closest friends, Stevens had made the connection immediately, but she didn’t think anyone else in the room would. She hoped not, anyhow; the last thing she wanted was a lot of questions about her emotional state through the course of this mission.

For once, Sonya was glad to have Tev interrupt. “Again, I must ask what these reminiscences have to do with the current situation?”

Gold fixed Tev with a steely glare. “There’s someplace more important you need to be, Tev?”

Tev hesitated a split second before saying, “No, sir. I apologize for the interruption.”

Gomez accepted the apology with a nod. Maybe there’s hope for him yet. “It was the Bringloidi who sent us searching for their sister colony,” she continued. “We soon found Mariposa, and…to make a long story short, Captain Picard convinced the Mariposans to allow the Bringloidi to resettle on Mariposa, and to integrate them into their society.”

“I’m sorry?” Abramowitz leaned forward in her seat, lines of concern creasing her forehead. “You relocated a technophobic society onto a world inhabited by a scientific colony, and expected the two to integrate themselves?”

“That might explain why now they want to be rid of their machinery,” Pattie mused.

The rest of the team started nodding at the logic of this conclusion—except for Lense, who seemed lost in her own thoughts, much as she had since the end of her ordeal with Dr. Bashir on the Jabari planet. Gomez shook her head adamantly, though. “Their forebears were technophobes. The Bringloidi themselves, once we brought them aboard the Enterprise, were actually quite quick to accept the wonders of modern technology, and were eager to have their children receive advanced educations.”

“I suppose cowering in a cave while the sun threatens to swallow up your planet would make most people reconsider the benevolence of Mother Nature,” Faulwell said.

“But then, why Mariposa?” Pattie asked. “Why not bring them back to Earth? Or better yet, an agricultural world like Gault or Sherman’s Planet, where they could ease into modernity at a more comfortable pace?”

“Well, because the Mariposans needed the Bringloidi…for…they weren’t able…” Gomez paused. She hadn’t really wanted to sidetrack the briefing with the big contentious issue, but…“The population of Mariposa was made up entirely of clones.”

Eight sets of eyes locked on Gomez for a silent moment. Then Stevens shook his head and said, “See, it’s these juicy parts that get lost when you make a long story short.”

“Clones?” Lense asked, suddenly fully engaged in the conversation. “An entire colony?” Gomez could see her thoughts jump to warp behind her eyes. “Huh…”

“What does that have to do with the Bringloidi?” Tev asked. “And why would it have bearing on the request to remove all their technology?” He seemed annoyed that Lense understood something he didn’t.

Lense looked back at Tev. “If they’ve been cloning themselves for all these years, and then cloning from clones of clones, the point will come where the replicative fading of their DNA is going to make any further cloning impossible. Their race would die out.”

“And so they were hoping the Bringloidi would help them carry on their culture,” Abramowitz said, frowning thoughtfully. “I suppose there’s a certain amount of sense in that.”

“Oh, yes,” Tev grumbled, “it makes perfect sense…if Picard’s primary goal was to rid himself of these refugees as quickly as possible.”

Captain Gold raised a bushy eyebrow at Tev, but didn’t say anything. Tev had been off ship the last time the Enterprise rendezvoused with the da Vinci, during their business with Rod Portlyn. It was possible that he was unaware that Gold and Picard had been friends since their Starfleet Academy days. Though, it was just as possible that, to his mind, it made no difference.

“And now,” Tev continued, “it would seem the clash between the two cultures has effected some major, possibly deadly, crisis.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Gold said. “We have a few facts and a lot of speculation only.” He paused then to tap at his combadge. “Gold to bridge. Any luck getting a response to our hails from Mariposa, Haznedl?”

“Negative, sir,” responded the operations officer.

Gold sighed. “Keep trying. Constant hails, all frequencies.”

“All right,” Gomez said. “Pattie, Carol, Domenica: I’ll give you what we have on the Mariposans and Bringloidi. Let’s get a picture of where these people stand in terms of their technological infrastructure, what sort of society is likely to have developed since their joining, and how we’re going to deal with that society if it is, in fact, on the verge of falling apart.”

With that, the briefing was adjourned. As everyone stood to leave, Gomez moved around the table to intercept Faulwell. “Bart, I’m sorry, you probably are going to be a little bored during this assignment.”

He shrugged. “That’s how it goes. I suppose you already know mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly?”

“Yeah.” Gomez smirked. “But actually, there is something you can do. Something that could mean the difference between success or failure this mission.”

Faulwell gave her a slow, knowing nod. “I knew you were never going to remember that song lyric.”

“Oh, shut up…”