Chekov paused in the corridor outside Scott's cabin.

Having reflected, he nodded to himself and headed towards the galley. He needed to think, and for that, he needed coffee.

As the hot water dripped through the freshly replicated and ground beans, the ensign was making lists. The first of these was a list of items whose locations were currently unknown, at least to him: the segments of the medallion and the time travel device being the chief of these.

"Run out of work?"

Chekov fumbled his cup. He set it down securely in its saucer and wiped the splashes off his fingers onto his shirt, scolding himself for jumping like a child caught playing truant. Mister Scott had no right to confine him to quarters, or anywhere else.

Sulu helped himself to a cup of coffee from the jug and joined him at the table. "Well?"

"Well what?"

The lieutenant gestured around the mess room. "I didn't know there were any repairs outstanding in here."

"No."

Sulu frowned. "Look, Pavel..."

"No. You 'look'. It is your turn to answer some questions. What is Mister Scott planning to do now?"

"Well, that's obvious. He's planning for us to raid the treasure houses of the royal Orion families, leaving a chunk of the medallion in each of four of them, so that they can turn up again back in our day..."

"So he has the pieces of the medallion, all of them?"

Sulu narrowed his eyes. "I... assume he does."

"And what does he intend to do with the fifth piece, the one which mysteriously *reappeared* just before all this started?"

"Well... he'll... need to find out where Goudchaux got it from... and make sure it ends up in the hands of whoever sold it to Goudchaux, won't he?"

"And if, say, Goudchaux is killed before he can find out this piece of information?"

The narrowed eyes became a full blown frown. "What are you getting at, Chekov?"

"I am suggesting, that if we were to destroy the fifth segment of the medallion, then we would not change history prior to my shoreleave with Mister Scott on Bidoah, but we would leave Goudchaux with no incentive to..."

"You don't know that. I mean, unless you're suggesting the fifth segment simply turned up in the dregs of Goudchaux's beer five minutes before you walked into that bar..."

"Whatever happened to the segment, I didn't know about it. Nothing that happens to it can change my history before that point. Believe me, I will gladly swap everything that has happened since then for a parallel universe of some kind. It can only be better."

"But... if you don't come back here to destroy the fifth segment... then it'll still turn up in Goudchaux's beer, or wherever, and..."

Chekov waved impatiently. "In theory. It's not as if anyone has ever tried it."

"Um. No, but..."

"But what?"

"It's too big a risk to take. You can't play around. You can't set out to deliberately change the few things we know for certain about this situation.

Chekov looked into his now empty coffee cup as if it might prove to contain a kirilite fragment. "You sound very... certain about that."

"What? Certain that we shouldn't take risks?"

"Sulu, you have done it, right?"

The lieutenant blinked. "Done what?"

"Time travel. When the device was activated, you recognised what was happening. You have done it."

Sulu shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "It's... restricted, like you'd expect. I can't talk about it."

"You're in Special Intelligence?"

"Fuck no. That's a hell of a thing to say about a friend, Chekov." He slammed his cup down, avoiding Chekov's eye. "Okay, it's got nothing to do with any of this, but I admit they approached me, just after I graduated. But I wanted to be a pilot, not a spy. I'm not even supposed to tell you that, but..."

"But they provided a ship for you to follow Mister Scott and me into Orion space? Despite your refusal to join them? I am sorry, but..."

"No. Uh, that's really not what happened, Pavel. Obviously, Starfleet wanted you and Scotty back, and... Would you believe I borrowed the ship from my parents?"

Chekov regarded him with a look of insulted scepticism.

Sulu sighed. "Okay. It happened like this. I... Someone... I called in a favour. From an old friend. I took leave. I wouldn't have got leave, with you being missing, but I told the captain what I was planning to do, and I think he was so damn frustrated that Starfleet wouldn't let *him* do anything, that he let it through."

"A big favour."

"Well..."

"Just to track down Mister Scott and me. Tell me, did Lieutenant Uhura arrange something similar? Perhaps all our colleagues managed to acquire ships and come chasing after us."

"Chekov..."

"I have always thought that perhaps Nyota has a soft spot in her heart for Mister Scott. I'm surprised you reached us before she did."

Sulu set his jaw and didn't answer.

"You must have some reason, to go to such extraordinary lengths..."

"No, I... I had the resources."

"Of course, we all knew that Commodore Keane 'owed you a favour', but..."

"How did you find out about that?" Sulu demanded, clearly startled.

"You just told me."

"I... Oh God."

Chekov felt a twinge of regret. Sulu looked genuinely very upset. But he resisted the temptation to admit just how little he knew. "So, Commodore Keane found you a ship, and Captain Kirk authorised your leave. Do you still expect me to believe that Special Intelligence did not know what was happening?"

"I'm not on their mailing list, Chekov. If they did know, I'd have expected them to show up..."

"Unless they were already involved."

They looked at each other as they both scrolled through the names of probable, and improbable, candidates for the Starfleet Intelligence mantle.

"If they weren't already involved, it would have to be Jessie Alleyn," Sulu declared confidently. "If she was already undercover on Quondar...

"No. They were already involved."

"How can you be so certain?" Sulu demanded.

"It was not in character for Mister Scott to invite me to the Cochrane Institute with him. I am not an engineer. It was not... right."

"You didn't seem to think anything was odd about it at the time," Sulu reminded him.

"That is probably why I was never invited to join Special Intelligence. I don't suspect the motives of my colleagues sufficiently."

Sulu rubbed his chin. "You think he set out to lure you into this whole..."

Chekov was refilling both coffee cups. He brought them back to the table. "I don't... No. Maybe. I was thinking that perhaps Starfleet Intelligence somehow 'dropped a hint', indirectly."

Sulu got up and fetched the sugar bowl. He stirred three generous spoonfuls into his cup. "Let me get this straight. Starfleet Intelligence were aware that Goudchaux and his band of pirates had obtained some, or all, of the medallion. So they thought the best person to put a spoke into Goudchaux's plans was not, maybe, a trained operative, but you? Honestly, I doubt they even knew you existed before the captain reported you missing on Bidoah."

Chekov nodded. "I agree. As far as I am concerned, I have only been of interest to Starfleet Intelligence since after Bidoah, but it is now *before* Bidoah. If there is an Starfleet Intelligence operative on this ship, or your ship, or..." he frowned momentarily, "...or the Orion ship, then there is no reason why they cannot now be informed of my involvement *before* I go missing."

Sulu allowed the disputed Orion ship to pass unremarked. "Okay. But in that case, they'd know a lot more than just that you, and Mister Scott, have been kidnapped by Goudchaux and co. They could have seized Goudchaux's ship any time before he took off with the two of you in his hold."

"And risked changing time."

"Okay, so... what if someone else finds a way to send them a message, not an operative who'll report everything in detail, but someone else. Or a partial message gets through. Anything. All it needs to be is something that refers to you and Mister Scott being kidnapped and taken away aboard the Nell, which they receive *before* it actually happened. That way, they know... Chekov?"

The ensign had turned more than usually pale. "I sent it."

"What? When?"

"I rigged the engines of this ship to broadcast a distress call if they went above warp five. At slower speeds, the message would have been detectable, so... but anyway, we didn't go above warp five... well, we did, but Mister Scott reset the program. Anyway, when we used the time travel device, then..."

"We did. Did we? Remember *I* don't know how the blasted thing works."

"Neither do I, yet," Chekov said stiffly. "But if the device drew the equivalent amount of energy from the warp engines, it would have triggered the subroutine I placed in the computer."

"And your message could have escaped at any point while we were travelling back in time."

Chekov nodded uncertainly. "I think so. Perhaps it has been sitting in a surveillance file for hundreds of years." His eyes grew a little rounder as he considered the implications of this scenario.

"What was the exact wording?" Sulu asked. "Can you remember?"

"Not exactly. I didn't have the opportunity to properly document my procedures..."

"Pav."

"Yes?"

"Could you be a little less belligerent here? I'm not accusing you of anything. No one is."

The ensign snorted. "Very well. It was short, of course. My name, Mister Scott's, the name of Goudchaux's ship, and his crew, and Stuart Brecht, and the Orlan Du. Oh, and the Cochrane Institute, and Bidoah."

Sulu smiled and nodded. "Yes. I can see how it happened. 'Scott' and 'Chekov', two pretty common names, Stuart Brecht, a known Orion sympathiser, a boring Orion legend and a bunch of pirates. There'd be nothing to pin it on until someone input some intelligence about Goudchaux and the medallion, or Brecht and the medallion, and the computer threw out some unbelievable piece of ancient history an Andorian surveillance post picked up half a millennium ago. They'd look at Bidoah, link in the Enterprise, and two officers with the relevant names, and make damn sure that you were both invited to the Cochrane Institute. It fits. It all fits."

Chekov shoved his coffee cup aside and put his head down on the table. "It fits," he agreed in a muffled and disheartened voice, "and it also means, depending on when they made the connection, that almost anyone could be a Starfleet Intelligence operative."