“You don’t have to tell me. The point is, there’s no way to identify who else Portia might be related to. What are the odds that one of the other few female Warborn here, picked randomly out of thousands, just happens to be Portia’s sister?”

McCoy shrugged. “It wasn’t random. They had to pass all the Starfleet entrance exams. You know how tough that is. If one batch of Warborn babies happened to be of particularly clever and adaptable stock, it’s possible more than one of them ended up here—even though they wouldn’t know they were related.”

Sulu grew excited again. “Then we just need permission to access their DNA records!”

The doctor bristled. “It’s not that simple, Sulu! They still have rights in the eyes of the law, even if their creators didn’t think so. We can’t just open up someone’s private genetic records without probable cause.”

“Oh. And we can’t get probable cause without the genetic data. It’s a vicious circle.”

McCoy thought it over. “There is one possibility. If we assume we’re looking for a female Warborn besides Portia, that narrows it down to Rosalind, Viola, and Kate. What I could try is to run a developmental simulation on the DNA sample. Project a range of possible physiognomies based on different possibilities for the missing alleles and epigenetic variations. If any of them match one of the other three, that could give us the probable cause we need.”

“Great! How long will that take?”

“Not long, with Starfleet Medical’s main computer working on it. Fifteen minutes—well, maybe twenty, with this interference. It’s even more powerful than the Enterprise computer.”

Sulu grinned. “I won’t tell Captain Spock you said that.”

“Oh, please do.” McCoy’s grin in return was wicked. He was finally starting to feel optimistic.

Twenty minutes later, his hopes were dashed. Not one of thousands of simulated facial and bodily structures was close enough to any of the three suspects, even given the superficial similarity of Warborn features. And a fair number of them were better than fifty percent matches to Portia’s facial structure.

Still, something nagged at McCoy. It was like there was something he’d noticed unconsciously and forgotten before it percolated to the surface. Probably just my anxiety about Ashley. Jim had better be keeping her safe.

“I really thought we were onto something,” Sulu said. “The reasoning all added up.”

“Oh, it was perfectly logical, Mister Sulu. That’s why I keep telling Spock you can’t rely on logic alone. A chain of argument can fit together perfectly and still be completely wrong. Logic is only as good as the assumptions you start out with. Make the wrong assumption and—”

He broke off, eyes going wide. Sulu peered at him. “Doc? You okay?”