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hours old had a way of turning her stomach.
    She credited that to her imagination. It always forced her to see the microbes forming their little colonies inside what was going to be her meal. The imagined problems got worse when she thought about meat.
    Her bolts were resting beside the table, along with a thick towel. She was getting ready to start the game again, although part of her wished she wasn't.
    The reddish blue planet floated outside the windows, filling the mess hall with slowly changing colors. Every time the Enterprise orbited over different sections of the planet, the colors changed. They had been in high orbit now for over twelve hours.
    She'd asked when she had started her duty shift earlier that day if she could start investigating the aliens' biology. But the information they were getting from the planet was too sketchy. Besides, her work was extremely detailed and usually she had to have a sample before she could begin.
    She wanted to get down there now and get a sample, but she would have to wait, just like everyone else. Over dinner, Mayweather had confessed that he had the urge to steal a shuttle and head through the planet's atmosphere. He wouldn't do it, of course. None of them would. But she had had the same urge.
    So close and yet so far.
    Anderson hadn't said much. He'd been spending the day studying the planet's geography and cataloguing the differences between the new planet and Earth. But he was running into the same problems Cutler was. At some point, he'd need to go to the surface to get samples so that he could start a proper geological survey.
    But that point wasn't even close yet.
    Anderson stood in front of the windows now, his hands clasped behind his back. The air in the mess was close and warm. The environmental systems sometimes couldn't cope with the cooking steam and the increased number of bodies at mealtime. Fortunately, most everyone had finished and left.
    Cutler spread her towel over the table and contemplated the game. She'd have to work to make it as interesting as that planet teasing them out there.
    She knew there was little chance that Ensign Hoshi would be returning to the role-playing game while they were anywhere near the Fazi planet. From what Cutler had heard, the language of the Fazi had Hoshi pulling out her hair. Cutler couldn't imagine the brilliant woman being upset about anything, but from all reports, Hoshi was getting more and more that way as this language frustrated her at every turn.
    Cutler could wait until this real-life drama was over, she supposed, but she didn't want to. She needed to be distracted from her fantasies about the life on the planet below. So she had asked Crewman Alex Novakovich if he'd like to join their first adventure to Mars.
    She should have asked him in the first place, but she hadn't thought of it. She avoided thinking about the away mission she had taken with Novakovich. The mission had shaken her to her core, sometimes making her doubt her own mind. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the hallucinations that had so angered her. They had seemed real, even if they were a pollen-induced vision.
    Fortunately, Captain Archer was forgiving, and T'Pol, who'd taken the brunt of Cutler's paranoid ravings, said simply that encounters on strange new worlds took tacks that no one expected. That is why, she had said, looking at Archer, Vulcans always proceed with caution.
    Caution was not one of Captain Archer's favorite words-and that was one reason Cutler liked serving under his command.
    But as bad as the mission had gone for Cutler, it had gone even worse for Novakovich. He was still recovering physically from his emergency beam-out in the middle of a sandstorm.
    Novakovich had materialized with plants and sticks and sand phased into his skin. The very thought of that experience made Cutler shudder. She'd been giving the transporter a wide berth from the beginning, but that berth was even wider now.
    Dr. Phlox had removed all of the