Mel, Fal, Ssleestak, K'tral, Phillip, Jessa, and Peel all suffer from some sort of temporal glitch during the night as a possible temporal signature is detected. They all wake up groggy or worse; Fal has trouble transitioning from Ota Verik and his recipes, while Jessa has to correct which memory goes with which host. The officers investigate and discover a single verteron particle inhabited them briefly, and this particle contained a trace of Jen Kras's DNA. Peel sees the alternate timeline where Phillip killed her father and kicked her; she confronts him about it and he confesses. However, familial homicide apparently leads to sexy times… Later, the affected officers on the bridge have another incident when She-Who-Swims meets Armina and they swear she shrank from the morning meeting. The Varich and the Valiant evade a Tizit prototype warship.