[snip]

“Miriam,” Glen said, “Tell me, what’s the problem?”

As Glen came in Cross closed the office door ‘’Thanks Captain for coming so soon’’ he could see how agitated she was ‘’That psychiatrist you won’t believe what he has been doing to my state of mind.’’

“Ha! Tell me about it!” muttered Glen, unconsciously touching his forehead where the pain had been.

Cross started pacing from one end of the office to the other ‘’In his first interview this Stanley said that he had never been so insulted in his life and I swear Captain I did not insult him in any way, apparently he has some authority to report to his superiors who ever they are!’’ Cross exclaimed.

“Yes, he does have the authority. I saw all the papers. No signatures, but high enough up that I had to agree!” Glen told her. Though Glen still felt regret that he hadn’t simply refused Wong and sent him packing.

Now stopping in front of Glen went on ‘’I don’t trust him, it looks like he knows what happened, if so I have no idea from where he got the information, its like I’m constantly on a roller coaster ,this psychiatrist work in different ways on how to get information, how ever I respond he first gets angry then tell me to relax ,he’ll make an exception and won’t report me .Stanley told me he knew what I went through....so what does he know exactly?’’ she asked clearly distressed.

“He knows nothing!” Glen replied adamantly. “He does have some documents in his possession but they are redacted…And I specifically told him not to ask you!”

“Its a good thing few crew members are still around when it happened. One last thing Sir, the biological father of my child is no other then the Cmdr, he was the COS back then and when he came back I did tell him I had his child but was abducted. He excepted it and never asked by whom. Now what I’m afraid of is when the psychiatrist interview the Cmdr, I do hope he does not mention it’‘.

“I told him not to ask you or the crew anything!” Glen repeated. “And not just because of Joe’s unborn child, which I already knew about!… I vaguely mentioned temporal changes and Section 31 in the hope that he would get the idea. I told him in no uncertain terms that he should not try to find out… that everything he held dear to him was at stake here. He said that he was here only to treat your mental health symptoms, and that he didn’t need to know anything secret… but… Dr. Hunter?? …Dr. Hunter has been asking questions, and he knows about your augmented genes. Lt. Kahuna told me he had Security Officers on the Bridge reporting back to him. I didn’t really think much of it at the time but Hunter knows quite a lot and could have told him. Or some other crew. There are still enough crew on this ship from those missions. Our crew turnover is really quite low for a Starfleet ship.”

‘’Captain it was some under ground lab, they knew it was unethical what they were doing .The gene I inherited was never a problem to star fleet or they wouldn’t have accepted me as a Cadet ‘’Cross was trying to reason with the Captain ‘’I told the Cmdr that our baby was abducted, he never asked how or by whom. As for Hunter it would be obvious that he would know about the altered gene, he’s a doctor he has the authority to look at medical files but trust me on this, doctor Hunter is not a secret agent, he was acting medical officer for three years before I came back’‘.

That’s when she took a good look at the Captain ‘’Glen you look sick what’s wrong?’’ the female doctor asked now concerned about him ‘’I’ll go and get my medical tricorder you wait here just in case Wong is around.”

“I had another black-out in my ready-room,” Glen replied. “I had to leave the Bridge before the media interviews and the Sybyl arrived and to let Joe take over. The pain in my head came back again, just as it did before when all this got stirred up again. I’m worried that it is more than psychosomatic and that there is actually something physical, some piece of that abomination still inside my head, worming its way around in there. I can’t discuss it with any other Doctor other than you, so please do scan me or whatever you need to do. I have to get it out!”

She bit on her lower lip and nodded ‘’My thoughts exactly ‘’ but Cross reasoned it would be highly unlikely that the thoughts in his brain put there by the worm could be removed *Something is brewing * the female doctor thought.

Cross made her way to the door to bring her medical tricorder She looked back at the man whom she knew she could trust and how patient he had been with her ‘’Captain rest assured I will never reveal all that is classified’‘.

“I know you wouldn’t… and I’m sorry, I should have told Wong to leave the ship. There is still time to ask him to leave. I have several concerns now though and a visit from some kind of temporal police because of these activities of Doctor Wong is probably the least of them. Firstly, if Joe ever found out about the child then he’ll be devastated. He’d want to go off on some foolish mission to rescue the child. I need him on this ship. And no disrespect to Commander Kord, but he’s the best first officer that I’ve ever had. Secondly, what if Doctor Hunter is another spy like the Doctor Kim doppelganger? How much do you know about him? Why is Hunter gathering information from the crew using Security Officers? Then finally, I’m also worried about you and your augments. Having augmented genes is a criminal offence with a life sentence in prison. I don’t agree that children should be punished for the crimes of their father or grandfather, but that’s the Law. There are too many people who know too much, and that won’t keep their mouths firmly shut!”

‘’Joe knows by the time you manage to save me the kidnappers were long gone with the child, I never mentioned their names and you do remember were they had come from? I would urge you to consider speaking with Hunter and hopefully gain his trust…I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to see Kord gone having been your first officer for so many years ‘’ with those last words she left the office to bring her medical equipment.

Glen was satisfied by some of what Cross told him. “So, let me get this straight! Joe already knows about both the child and the kidnapping? And he is really okay with that? I guess I misjudged his Irish-American temperament. You do know about his Starfleet record and his reprimands for striking senior officers? He isn’t a man to cross lightly! And of course I know how hard it would be to travel backwards in time to a distant galaxy, but there are ways to do so, the gravimetric field of the Nexus would be one, if one could catch it up.”

“As for Hunter,” Glen continued, “then I’ll need to trust you he isn’t a secret agent. Maybe I should sit down with him as you suggest and find out what his problems and grievances are? You always kept your augments a secret and it isn’t mentioned in your personnel file, so I just assumed that Starfleet wasn’t aware. You realise that I’ve been keeping it secret all of this time that we’ve know each other, when there was no need to do so. And if it isn’t going to send you to jail, you could get specialist treatment from a Doctor of Genomics? I could still pull some strings for you if you’d like?”

“You do know that what Doctor Wong is trying to do for you isn’t a bad thing either? He simply wants to treat your mental health issues? To stop all your craziness and impetuousness. All the disobedience, and your post traumatic stress. The problem is that it stems from both your augments and those life experiences which he cannot ever know about. It is such a confused and complicated situation that we are in now. The being swore to secrecy is much harder that I ever thought it would be. What was it that Sir Walter Scott wrote: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.’ I don’t really know how to get out of it either.”

“Are you going to perform a scan now?” Glen asked. “In some ways, I hope you do find something physical. If it is just the memory of implanted thoughts that are plaguing me, well then there is no quick fix for the headaches and black-outs! And I somehow don’t think Doctor Wong’s activities with coloured liquids in jars are going to help me much either!”

“I believe you mentioned something before to me regarding reading memory engrams in the neocortex, and how memories can be decoded using imaging scans and computer generated neocortical representations,” Glen added. “However, I told you I had no time to sit around for any of that. I believe that I wasn’t very co-operative at the time.”

Glen, CO