Breeding stock.

Gold cringed as those words echoed in his mind. They had been there in the Enterprise’s mission recordings all along, but being familiar as he was with Kate Pulaski and her blunt, plainspoken personality, he’d let the phrase roll right over him. But taken by itself, and disregarding the rationalizations and justifications that had surrounded it, the ugliness of the phrase struck hard.

“Are you telling me that you think this girl’s actions were justified?” Wilson Granger asked, his jaw slack in disbelief. Brenna Odell, sitting to his left on one side of their kitchen table, made a valiant attempt to shoot phasers out her eyes at both Gold and Abramowitz.

“I absolutely am not arguing that her actions were justified, and she will, of course, have to face justice for her actions.” How such justice could be carried out, Gold wished he knew. “But, I am telling you that the fears that drove her to her actions are real.”

“Captain, I may not be a young girl anymore,” said Brenna Odell, “but I daresay I’m more familiar with their feelings than you. I wasn’t all that keen back then on the idea of taking three husbands and bearing them all children. But that was what we needed to do.”

“Actually, it really wasn’t,” Abramowitz said, frowning. As unhappy as she was about the Enterprise’s interference here before, now her disdain for the legacy Picard had left on this world was completely undisguised. “The establishment of the three-spouse arrangement served only one purpose: to allow for the proliferation of Mariposan genes in this new society. The Bringloidi genome was—and is—broad and healthy; there was no reason they couldn’t continue monogamous relationships. But a united colony requires a uniform set of rules, morals, and mores, so polygamy was demanded across the board. With the inability of Mariposan genes to propagate, however, there is no justification for this social arrangement.”

“But,” said Granger, “you can give us that ability. You said Sandra’s research could still hold promise.”

“That’s right, I did,” Gold said. That was one of the few questions he’d bothered Lense with before beaming down here. “The question is, should we?”

“What?” Granger slammed his hands on the table and launched himself up out of his chair. “You can’t be serious! You would bring us right back to where we were eleven years ago? You would let us all just die?”

Gold stayed seated, and in a calm voice said, “You told me earlier that you regretted what you’d done to the Enterprise officers in the name of preserving yourselves. That with your wife and her children, you’d found an aspect of your humanity more important than what was encoded in your DNA.”

Brenna Odell raised an eyebrow at that, while her husband answered, “Yes, Captain, but—”

“Then think about what you’re passing on here, Mr. Granger,” Gold said. “You’d be passing on the idea that Mariposan genes are superior to Bringloidi genes. That a Bringloidi woman’s most important function is to help propagate the Mariposan race, no matter her wants, talents, or abilities.”

As Granger mulled that over, Abramowitz leaned in, eyes on Odell. “And you—”

“What, me?”

“The one thing the Mariposans have been able to pass on to your children is their knowledge. You strip that from this world, what have these young people left? The gang that attacked our people did so because they were afraid of what they were going to lose.” Odell looked unmoved, though she did give her husband a quick glance out of the corner of her eye. “You’d be putting the same kind of limits on these young people’s potential, where the best they can hope to do is scratch out the same hard simple life your people were so eager to put behind you over a decade ago. Do you really want to leave them with that kind of hopelessness?”

And in Odell’s eyes, Gold saw the first cracks in the hard shell of her resolve. It was a look he was all too familiar with—the look of realization that everything you thought or believed up until that moment was mistaken. She found herself with nothing to say, her eyes moving around the room as if searching for her fading certitude.

Gold relaxed his facial expression, and waited for Odell to glance back his way. “I know you only want to do what’s best for your people,” he said, addressing Odell and Granger both. “That’s what we all want. Let us help you figure out how to do that. The Federation owes you at least that much, after getting you to this point.”

“How did Da make this look so easy?” Odell whispered to herself, just barely audible. Then she lifted her head, and looked from Granger to Gold. “What if they say we should split the two colonies up again?” she asked.

Gold reacted to that with surprise, but not quite as much as Granger did.

“They couldn’t force you to be isolated from each other, not if you didn’t want to be,” Abramowitz answered, registering no small amount of surprise herself.

Odell looked to Granger again. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to hear these diplomats out?” she said, then offered him a wisp of a smile.

Granger returned her smile. “I can’t see how it would,” he said, placing his left hand on her right.

For the first time since their arrival at Mariposa, Gold felt hope that the union would be preserved.

“Captain, this has been an emotionally trying day for me; maybe we could put this off another day or two?” Lense laughed at herself, the sound echoing off the narrow walls of the extendable gangway tunnel linking the da Vinci to Starbase 73. “Yeah, that’ll work.”

The airlock hissed, and she reboarded the da Vinci. She took the left corridor, heading for the captain’s quarters, even though she felt she would have been perfectly justified in begging off their appointment, given the task she’d just performed.

Between Gold and the prime ministers, it was decided any kind of trial or criminal proceedings against Kara McClay would only incite more ethnic conflict. So the decision was that she would be exiled, forbidden to return to Mariposa for at least twenty years, such travel restriction to be enforced by the Federation.

It was really the best Kara could have possibly hoped for—and Lense, too. Despite all that had happened, despite all her conflicting emotions, Lense genuinely did hope the young woman would be able to fulfill her potential, and somehow find a way to atone for what she had done.

Kara had been quick to accept all the terms of her exile, but the reality of her sentence didn’t truly dawn on her until they’d reached the heart of the starbase. Suddenly finding herself in the middle of a surging ocean of aliens and other strangers, Kara realized how totally alone she now was, and that there was no going backward. Lense sympathized.

She reached the captain’s door, and hesitated before pressing the door chime. A second later, the door slid open, and she entered Gold’s quarters. “Good afternoon, Captain.”

“Good afternoon, Lense. Come, sit.” Lense took a seat as the captain stepped to the replicator. “Get you anything?”

“Tangerine juice?”

He keyed his requests into the pad, and a moment later handed her a chilled glass while he held a steaming mug of green tea. Sitting, he raised the mug in a toast. “To the mother-to-be.”

Lense hesitated, then touched her glass to the captain’s mug. “You know, Captain, I was planning to tell you…”

“Sometime before the kinder’s high school graduation, I’m certain. The question I have: Who have you told? Your mother, at least, I hope.”

Lense shook her head, and the captain “tsked.” “So far it’s just you, and Julian Bashir.”

“Well, you didn’t tell me so much as I found out in spite of you.”

“Yeah, that’s actually pretty much how Julian found out, too,” she said with a small laugh. “I just…first there was just this shock, and disbelief. Then reality slowly seeps in and you realize you have to face it—”

“And you do all you can to avoid thinking about it. Rachel, she would cook. You never saw such meals.” Gold smiled as he revealed this memory, but then shifted to a more serious mien. “With you, though, Elizabeth, you do the same to avoid any personal grief. It took a direct order for you to open up, after two years, about Commander Selden. To this day, I don’t know what happened with you right after Galvan VI. And I find it disconcerting that, after all the time you put in on that Shmoam-ag ship, you’ve talked so little about the boy.”

“Sir? I did an entire paper on Dobrah and the Pocheeny virus,” she reminded him. It was that paper that earned her the nomination for the Bentman Prize, and set this whole thing in motion.

“Yes, a paper,” Gold said. “A cold, professional paper with big, impressive, award-worthy doctor words. But you don’t talk about the boy.”

He was right, of course. The time she spent with that lonely little boy (two hundred years old, yes, but still very much a child) had touched her like nothing in her life ever had. Her third day there, she’d had to wake him to run some tests, and in his half-sleep, he’d looked up at her and said “Mama?” That had hit her right in the heart.

Now reflecting on Gold’s words, reflecting on an entire lifetime of pushing her own emotions away and doing everything she could not to deal with them, she felt a new pain growing there.

As if he were reading her thoughts, Gold reached over and put a hand on her forearm. “Elizabeth…I know it’s your nature to be concerned about everyone except yourself. That’s what makes you a good doctor, and part of what is going to make you a wonderful mother.” He leaned back into his chair and picked up his tea again. “That’s also what will make you meshuggeh ahf toit. You’re not alone. You’re part of a family here. You just have to decide not to be alone, hiding in that shell of yours.”

Lense smiled a tiny smile, even though she’d always taken a bit of a jaundiced view of calling any group of nonrelated people a “family.” Friends, maybe. People she’d put her life on the line for, definitely. But the da Vinci was not a Galaxy-class ship or a starbase. It was not designed for families. When the time came, she knew, Starfleet would have her somewhere else, and this “family”…

“So,” the captain said, switching to a lighter tone, “when do you plan on sharing the good news with everyone?”

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I haven’t even thought…”

She trailed off, and Gold shrugged slightly. “This hasn’t been a very happy mission for anyone. The engineers stuck most of the time sitting on their hands, Abramowitz all bent out of shape, and now having to turn the whole megillah over to another ship without having resolved any of the big issues…we could all use something to get together and celebrate.”

Lense couldn’t help but laugh at the captain’s transparent psychological ploy. If Lense won’t come out of her shell for her own sake, maybe she will for the crew.

Then she laughed again, this time a little more genuinely, because—well, hell, the old momzer was dead right. “Yeah, sure, why not?” she said with a grin. Besides, if she did in fact only have a limited time before having to leave the da Vinci, then she should make the very most of the time she had left with these people. “Let’s celebrate.”