The images swirled by, each one painful. He kept saying he could have saved them, that he should have, that he should have acted sooner. He winced away from them, not wanting to see. The image of Vulcan disappearing still haunted him, and more than once he had pondered Khan's words, and he wondered if, somehow, he could have found a kinder fate for him, and wondered how he could have been so blinded by Marcus.

"Yeah, and what's your point?" he asked, falling back on his usual belligerence, his shields coming up because humor failed him at this juncture.