“I must be too sleepy to think straight,” she murmured. “I’ll look again in the morning.”

She lay awake the whole night, afraid she was going mad.

Chapter Five

Starfleet Academy

“I’m not here to give you the answers.”

Portia observed Commander Anjani Desai as the human woman paced slowly before her students, taking care to make eye contact with every member of this study group. The Starfleet Academy ethics professor was a physically unimposing figure, her frame modest in height and displaying soft, pronounced curves rather than firm muscle, her black hair impractically long and carefully styled. Her bronze skin was as unnervingly smooth and taut as an infant’s, a characteristic shared by most non-Arcturian humanoids until they reached advanced age. Still, beneath Desai’s soft-spoken manner, Portia sensed a strong, commanding will that easily held the attention of the students present.

“Starfleet officers encounter many situations that have no precedent in our experience,” Desai continued. “Defining ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in those situations is something you’ll have to decide for yourselves when you face them. Or at least something your commanding officers will have to decide, with your input as advisors. So what I’ll try to teach you in this course is how to ask the right questions—how to learn the habits of ethical judgment that will guide you in shaping those decisions, or making them for yourselves.”

Like Bertram, Portia would have been more comfortable sticking with the subjects she knew she could do well, like unarmed combat, survival training, or piloting. Yet she had succumbed to Horatio’s insistence that all twelve Warborn should take Ethics 101 at the earliest opportunity. She did not share his eagerness to become tame and docile; like it or not, she had been bred to fight, and she accepted that as her nature. Yet the boyish Benedick’s eagerness to learn new things had helped her realize that a warrior should welcome being challenged. Thus, she had accepted Horatio’s challenge to enroll in Ethics and prove she could master the subject as well as he, if not better.

Due to the nature of the subject, the class as a whole had been broken up into these smaller study groups that would meet once a week to discuss ethical questions in depth, led by the professor’s teaching assistants or by Desai, schedule permitting. This group had fourteen students; aside from Portia, Horatio, and Benedick, there were five humans, two Vulcans, an Andorian, a Tiburonian, a Caitian, and an Escherite, a large arthropod whose long, multilegged silver body sat curled up on the floor alongside the others’ seats.