But there is no time to stop. I must make it to the transporter while the telepods are still functioning. If they can complete full analysis before this inner sanctum is breached, I'll be on my way to Earth, to the telepod receivers somewhere safe.

I can still feel the station shaking, falling apart, from here, but there are no signs of destruction in the transporter room. I run a quick check on the settings and step into the telepod sender, where my entire microphysical structure is to be analyzed, destructively mapped, and transmitted to the sanctuary of my home world, where receiver telepods will reconstruct my deconstructed self.

While preliminary analysis takes place -- has it always taken this long -- I see (and feel) flash images from the past: the New York city rooftops and enclosed back alleys explored in childhood, the bite of concrete into uncovered knees, the sting of disinfectant, the smell of my father's cigars, his cologne, the taste of bile in my throat when I first got wasted, the feel of the wet cloth a girlfriend at the academy used to distract me from my fever -- the face of my husband in darkness, killed two years ago when the enemy campaigns began. There is no sense to it: a mandala of sensual moments, the scraps that make up a person's past, the parts they never got in my academy bio.

Then F L A S H ! ! ! -- I am taken apart by the telepod . . .

. . . only I'm not. I'm still here. The process is complete -- the telepod computer has finished its loop, but after the flash, and maybe a moment's darkness as my consciousness recovers, I'm supposed to be elsewhere, reassembled in a safer place. That was how it happened the last time I teleported, when they first beamed me to this quadrant.

The lights flicker, the transporter room door is blasted open, and the stormtroopers are on me. I struggle from the telepod, and try to slip past them, hoping that the bulk of their combat suits will trip them up, or slow them down, but one of the bigger pigs knocks me to the floor. I watch the club come down into my face -- another flash -- and darkness.

When I awaken, I am tortured for information, then killed.

Groggy. Confused. Your eyes hurt, and you can't focus. A warm hand takes yours and helps you up. A technician escorts you from the telepod receiver. Earth. Thank God, it worked. You ask the technician if she's heard anything of the battle on Mars. She looks embarrassed and leads you into an office adjoined to the transporter room. Inside a skinny man, with thick old-fashioned glasses invites you to sit, then explains.

The battle on Mars was lost. The signals and images arrived from the security cameras (you hated feeling constantly watched, but you adjusted) at the same time your own teleporter signal hit the reassembler banks. The central computer had been knocked out during the first phase of the attack, and the decentralized sub-units running the telepod sender failed to synchronize the mapping process with deconstruction. You were never destroyed on Mars, yet your signal has fallen to earth, and here you sit.

You watch on the vid-screen: you -- this person who looks like you -- rush from the telepod (the telepod you still remember stepping into) and the enemy surrounds her. She is forced to the ground and beaten. You remember imagining what they would do to you if you failed to escape. Watching it, it is even more horrible.

"I'm afraid the Federation can't recognize you as Captain Kelly,"he says from behind his glasses, "since, as you can see yourself, she died on Mars over an hour ago."