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eyebrow still raised. "The captain must be aware that I am a blood relative of T'Prylla."
    "Yes. I'd like that clarified, Spock."
    "She is my father's second brother's daughter by his fourth trilya marriage. She is married to a former pupil of my first discipline master. This situation presents an interesting dilemma, Captain. By now, both T'Prylla and Grake have been ceremonially interred and their social positions refilled. If they are alive, they will have to compete for a new social position—"
    "Were they mourned , Spock?" McCoy asked sarcastically.
    Spock raised his other eyebrow. "That is not the dilemma. Why should the Spyorna have any further interest in a Vulcan they have officially decreed to be akspra— the follower of an inadequate philosophy? It is my guess the Spyorna is about to recognize T'Prylla's kind of logic as useful. This could be very important to Vulcans, Captain; moreso if she is still alive and can guide us in our progress."
    "That's very interesting, Spock, but I'm really interested in your assessment of the difficulties involved in reaching the station."
    Spock assented with a nod to one side. "The Black Box Nebula is one of seven hundred collapsing nebulae accessible to us, Captain. It is by far the largest and most complex, principally because of the extreme turbidity within the nebula proper. The three newly created stars are likely to become hot, middle-size B-class stars. If, as surmised, there are sub-spacial mass anomalies nearby, in their early years they will have released a tremendous amount of Ybakra radiation. Such radiation operates in a fractional space and is not dangerous to normal carbon-based life forms—unless they are in a frozen state associated with suspended animation. Bodily defenses are then incapable of making the minute but constant repairs necessary to the myelin sheaths which act as insulation in both human and Vulcan nerves."
    "Which is where I come in," McCoy said. "If the sleepers haven't been revived, the new equipment in the sick bay might be able to save them. But there's a problem, Jim—"
    "Was that all, Spock?"
    Mason sat quietly in her corner, noting the style of the meeting, and the often informal give-and-take between Kirk and his officers.
    "No, Captain," Spock said, unperturbed. "We know very little about protostar formations of this sort, and with the silencing of the station in the Black Box, there have been no updates until now. The information relayed by the buoy is incomplete and highly inadequate. In short, the Enterprise will be entering unknown conditions, with unknown consequences."
    "Yet again," McCoy said. "How cheering."
    "You mentioned a problem, Doctor?"
    "The equipment. It's easy enough to operate, even within the guidelines of those damned … excuse me, the guidelines of the monitors. It practically runs itself. But I don't think Starfleet has taken the monitors into account in evaluating this situation. The best way I can figure out to save the sleepers is to beam them up frozen, rescue their transient form-memories from the transporter and feed them into the vat, two by two. Mr. Veblen here will tell you the difficulties involved with computer storage of transient form-memories."
    "Enormous difficulties, Captain," Lieutenant Veblen said.
    "Such as, Mr. Veblen?"
    "Transient form-memories are stored by a kind of quantum trick, Captain. There are well over a hundred and fifty million gigabytes of information needed to restore one human body after beaming. All of that is kept in fraction space storage for less than five minutes. It then deteriorates. Any attempt to re-beam from a deteriorated form-memory is disastrous. Until now, there were no facilities to provide a medical back-up for restoration with the failure of a transporter."
    Kirk tapped his fingers on the table. Veblen saw, and swallowed back his expanding explanation. "Sir, we can store the memory of six transporter malfunction victims but we only have facilities to rebuild two