"We had hardly looked at the capsule before we lost it again," Chekov said, deep in thought. "I cannot understand why the precise design of the case is so important. No... Junction 348D."

Faced with their imminent departure for the future, Scott had found a round dozen systems that needed 'tuning up', or 'modifying', or re-programming. Chekov had drawn Sulu as a partner for more minor maintenance. At first, he was pleased: here was an ideal opportunity to talk things over, and fill in the gaps as far as the other three raids on the Orion houses were concerned. If nothing else, he was intensely curious to know how much of Teacher Golton's story had evolved from his own adventures, and how much derived from Sulu and Brecht's outings on other Orion homeworlds. Sulu, however, was proving unusually untalkative. Handicapped by his injured arm, he was studying the engineer's hastily scribbled schematics and passing components to his more able companion, while answering questions with single words, if at all. Chekov had given up on mere historical matters and moved on to areas where, it seemed to him, important decisions needed to be made.

"Perhaps Khwaja suspects that information concerning the location of the treasure has been leaked..."

"Maybe."

"So, we leave it somewhere different, and send ourselves a message..."

"Mm."

"But we didn't, did we?" Chekov secured a bunch of cables and sat back on his heels, flexing his fingers. "Although, on the other hand, no one else stole the treasure before we got there." He sighed.

"*Because* it was packed up discretely in a Type 41 pod."

At this complete sentence from the helmsman, Chekov almost dropped the arc welder he'd been using. He switched it off and turned to face the lieutenant. "Has the Enterprise ever travelled through time, Hikaru?"

"No."

"I see. Then how many times has the Enterprise *not* travelled through time?"

Sulu crumpled the current schematic up into a ball and threw it over his shoulder.

"Three?" Chekov guessed.

Sulu grimaced.

"Khwaja seemed to be referring to three distinct episodes."

Sulu shrugged. His face creased up at the sudden onslaught of pain. "Fuck you, Chekov. I'm not answering your questions. This is so classified..."

"Then how am I supposed to know what to do?"

"Do what you're told to do."

"By who?"

"Okay... do you believe I'm a Starfleet officer?"

"Of course."

"And do you believe that Khwaja is a Starfleet Intelligence operative, with a rank higher than, or equal to, full commander?" Sulu waited for a reply. "...kitten?"

Chekov considered. His opinion on this matter oscillated wildly from moment to moment. "Probably not."

"Good. Then you can choose to obey me, or Mister Scott. *I'm* telling you to obey *him*. You don't even have to get yourself into trouble thinking about it."

"And... if he, for example, orders me to sleep with the enemy?"

"Chekov..."

"I merely require some guidelines," Chekov said, taking great satisfaction in twisting the knife. "If his orders are clearly illegal, or immoral, or simply dishonorable and disgusting, do you still require me to obey them?"

"Look at it this way," Sulu said. "I'm not asking you to do anything you haven't already done." The lieutenant stood up, brushing insulation fibres off his clothes awkwardly with a single hand.

"That is what I want to know. Is that how it works? How much can we change, and still arrive at the point where we started... Sulu..."

The lieutenant stopped walking away. "All I know," he said heavily without turning, "is that you can't risk changing anything you *know* happened, and the rest is in the hands of fate. So far as I'm aware, that's all that Scotty knows, but he's probably seen reports I haven't seen. Back when I was an ensign, younger than you, I agreed to act as a decoy while Commodore Keane met with an Orion agent because the political fallout if anyone got to hear about the meeting would have been so bad that the damage to my reputation didn't figure. I did my duty. I did what I had to do with the Orions for exactly the same reason. I don't want the Federation to vanish because I wouldn't make nice with some slaver tyrant with bad breath and blood under his finger nails. If you were too 'honorable' to do the same, I'm just grateful Khwaja was there to make you toe the line."

"I did what was necessary," Chekov said defensively.

"Oh, but I did *more* than was necessary, is that what you're saying? That I *enjoyed* it? Maybe you think I enjoyed getting my shoulder ripped apart? God, you annoy me sometimes."

After a moment's hesitation, Chekov caught up with the departing helmsman. "Scotty has some whisky, in the galley."

"What the hell are you talking about now?"

Sulu sounded so angry, Chekov was tempted to let him continue suffering. "For your shoulder. For the pain."

"Oh. Right. Yes. You know, it hurts so much, that hadn't even occurred to me." Sulu took a deep breath. "Thanks."

Chekov hovered uncertainly. "Why's Scotty so annoyed with you?"

Sulu laughed, then swore. "Moray and I had a fight. I called her a whore. It didn't bother her, but he hit the roof. You'd think she was his kid sister or something."

"How do we get home, after we put the device in the capsule? Do you know that too? Is there another way..."

"No more questions until you've poured me a big glass of whisky, okay?"

"Yes." Chekov drew level with the mess room door and stood there, dismayed. Everyone was in there, engaged in what appeared to be a council of war. Goudchaux, face pasty white, had his leg propped on a couple of chairs, supported by pillows. Even Esme had apparently been roused from her sick bed. She was sitting at the table, one hand supporting her head, looking as if she couldn't get comfortable but was determined to stay. Jessie Alleyn and Brecht held phasers. Khwaja seemed to be chairing the meeting.

The empty whisky bottle stood on the table, along with three used glasses.

"Seems we're too late," Sulu said, his tone studiedly neutral.

"There's plenty of Illissium," Morgain said negligently. "If anyone is feeling a little under the weather."

"No thanks," Sulu said.

"Come in, boys," Khwaja invited. "We weren't going to start until you'd finished your chores, but some of us were rather more impatient than others."

"What is happening?" Chekov watched Sulu take a chair and realised there were now no free seats. Ignoring Morgain, who was patting her chair in a clear offer to share, he lounged deliberately against the door frame.

"Move," Scott said. "You'll burn out the sensors."

"Fuck that," Khwaja responded. He pulled another phaser from his belt and tossed it to Chekov. "Stand where you like. Mister Scott is getting cold feet, kitten. Maybe having to listen to that servo grind its guts out will get him talking. He doesn't seem to give a damn for much else."

The phaser was on stun. Chekov waited for further revelations. For a couple of minutes, all he got was silence.

"This is what I'm prepared to do," Scott said eventually. "I'll go down to the shipyard, persuade them to show me where I can find a capsule..."

"Is that what happened?" Khwaja asked.

"I don't remember..."

"Don't fuck with me, Scott. Of course you can damn well remember. And if you can't, I can recite to you your testimony when you were eventually questioned about the theft four years later. 'A human male, dark hair, age about twenty five years..."

"Kids are no good at judging ages. Adults are just adults to them. 'Twenty five' could have been anything from eighteen to thirty five." It was Esme who spoke, her voice dry and weak.

"...With an accent you couldn't identify," Khwaja continued. "What are you planning to do? Talk funny, and run off to the police at the first opportunity?"

"In Aberdeen, anyone who's not local has an accent. It doesn't mean a thing. Look, I don't remember anything significant about the man. I probably made up what I thought they wanted to hear. It was four years in the past then and it's more like thirty now, but given how important this is, or how important you seem to think it is, surely it makes sense to send someone who knows their way around the docks. Someone with a little credibility."

"You don't recall a sling? He didn't seem injured?"

Scott glanced at Chen, who had been sitting with his eyes shut, hands folded in his lap. The pirate was shaking his head slowly. "I'm not sure, but he had difficulty getting through the security beams, to get into the compound. I don't remember why. I wasn't really interested. But..."

"You're a worse liar than Chekov," Khwaja said tiredly. "According to your statement, he gave you 'blue lace' in exchange for the capsule. If I remember my pharmacology, that's just another name for our old friend, Illissium, of which, as Moray just now pointed out, we happen to have a good supply."

Scott examined his fingernails. "Yes. I remember that. We could get a good deal on blue lace back then."

"We're getting somewhere," Khwaja said. "So, next question: where did you get the fifth piece of the medallion, Goudchaux?"

The pirate captain shook his head. "I'm not giving my fences away to Starfleet Intelligence."

"You didn't get it through a fence. One of you had it all along. You got it as part of the exchange for the capsule."

Scott's head shot up. "What makes you think that?"

"Simple. We're going to give it to one of you. I just need to know which one."

Goudchaux's face was a picture of outraged betrayal. "I traded two holds full of prime deltan memory chips, *and* five years of Andorian intelligence files for that. And one of you had it all along?"

"Why would you pay so much for the fifth fragment? It was useless..." Chekov stopped as everyone turned to look at him.

Alleyn answered. "It wasn't useless if you'd already arranged to assemble the other four. The question is, why would you start doing that, if you didn't know you could get your hands on the fifth: the fragment that no one had seen for three thousand years?"

"Looks like Goudchaux must have had it the whole time then. Or maybe he was being primed by whoever *did* have it."

"I didn't have it."

"You see the problem, kitten," Khwaja said conversationally. "They all know *one* of them had to have it. And whoever had it will get the equivalent of two holds of Deltan computer components, plus whatever Andorian military intelligence retails for these days, less Gillespie's twenty percent..."

"I never said it was Gillespie!" Goudchaux objected.

Khwaja shook his head. "Who else has the capital for a deal like that?"

"I *bought* it from Gillespie, but I didn't sell it to him." The pirate captain looked accusingly at his crew.

"In that case, I'm going to want to know who financed the deal," Khwaja said lightly.

Goudchaux looked down the length of his knife-blade nose. "You'd have to ask your friend Brecht about that."

"Hm. And now, they all want it, but none of them wants to admit to double-crossing the rest, and whoever had it wants to hang on to the credits." Khwaja's gaze moved round the compartment, weighing everyone's features. He stopped at Scott. "Except for Montgomery here, who's done quite nicely for himself, and doesn't need any help from Gillespie to top up his Starfleet pension. How many patents do you have in your name, Montie old man? A couple of hundred of them were active last time I looked. Of course, you can't earn anything from them while you're in Starfleet, but I imagine they're building up into a tidy little nest egg for you."

Scott shrugged.

"I wonder just what kind of a deal a skilled patent lawyer could put together if you tried to cash in on them: enough to finance a really big project, do you think?"

"Goudchaux was planning to sell Mister Scott to the Orions," Chekov chipped in.

"Oh, yes. So that was the finance taken care of. Unless that was just a bluff, for your benefit, kitten. Who's to say Bardon Goudchaux and Montgomery Scott weren't working together all along." Khwaja allowed another silence to ripen.

"About twenty five, did you say, Scott?" Brecht asked.

The engineer nodded. "Apparently."

"Then you'd better hurry up and decide who had the shard: Mister Chekov isn't getting any younger."

****

It reminded him of Archangel. The arctic wind, blasting in directly off the North Sea, snapped lumps of ice off the low eaves of the roof and blew them into the shadows beneath. The flitter park was deserted. The few remaining vehicles were clamped down, to stop the storm tipping them over. Down one side of the asphalted field a high fence, topped with razor wire and laser beams, marked the boundary of the Campbell Laird yard. It was only mid afternoon and already the sky was pitch black. Chekov rolled down his sleeves and pushed his hands inside the capacious cuffs of his tunic. His clothes were dark: the most anonymous garments available from the various closets on the Nell. None were designed for Scottish winters. He was wearing two sets of everything.

He picked out a shadowy indent in the long wall of the warehouse and sank as far back into the corner as he could go while still maintaining a view of the gates.

In the end, it had been Esme who gave them the location of this habitual meeting place for the four pirates-to-be. The skin on her face and neck was healing thick, stiff and painful. She could barely close her left eye. The pain stopped her sleeping. Chekov had wondered, as they waited, if Khwaja really had access to more medical supplies, and was letting her suffer simply in order to put pressure on her colleagues. If that was the case, it hadn't worked. She'd told them she hadn't ever been a member of the gang who'd broken into Campbell's to steal the capsule, that she knew the streets and yards of Aberdeen, but not from that period. However, they'd all told her the story, at one time or another. She had no idea who, if anyone, had acquired the shard. It was burning a hole in Chekov's pocket now, next to a bag containing two kilos of Illissium, cut with calcium carbonate and a little aspirin, the way it was sold back then, around the time that his father and mother had first dated.

'If it seems right, let one of them have it.' Khwaja's eyes had looked a little haunted as he mulled over their strategy concerning the troublesome fifth shard. 'That's the only advice I can give you.'

A shadow darted across the white wall of the deserted kiosk by the gate, followed by another, and a third. Chekov waited for a fourth, since Khwaja had said four children had vanished, but there was no sign of another.

He heard soft, unbroken voices as they made their way along the wall toward him. When he judged them close enough, he stepped out of the darkness and into the shadow. "Scott..."

Immediately there was a boy, nearly as tall as himself, with cropped hair, holding a knife to his throat. The teenager's companions, slighter and quicker, stood back to give the attacker room. Chekov didn't move. "I heard that I could do business with you," he said, trying desperately not to sound like a bad thriller vid.

"Yes?" The knife wielder moved fractionally, turning his face up so that Chekov could see, at least, that this wasn't Chen.

Chekov let an Andorian phaser slide out of his sleeve. "Please, put the knife away."

The children obviously had better night vision than he. They realised what he was holding and froze. The boy who would become Chief Engineer of the Enterprise slowly slid his weapon back into his belt.

Chekov realised that none of them doubted he would use the phaser. He gestured them into the cranny where he'd been sheltering, making it difficult for any of them to try and run for it. Out of the meagre shelter, the wind cut through his clothing with renewed ferocity. He moved a little, so that when they looked at him, he could see their faces as more than paler shadows.

Scott was thin faced, serious. Chekov wouldn't have remarked on the resemblance to his now colleague if he hadn't been looking for it. Chen was slight, but already had the thick neck that would remain with him when he grew another twenty centimeters and made some muscle. Moray Morgain was so blonde, she was almost translucent, like an icicle. Then Chekov realised his mistake. This wasn't Moray, but Alleyn. Her hazel eyes were washed out to grey in the dirty light that filtered through the glass eaves. She looked twelve going on thirty, while Scott seemed to be about fourteen. Chen might have been anything from ten to seventeen, Chekov guessed. They were all pinched with cold.

"What kind of business?" Alleyn asked. She raised an eyebrow when Chekov looked surprised. "I'm the brains of the outfit," she said firmly. "These are my bodyguards. The muscle. Don't try anything."

Chekov was almost tempted to laugh. The boys were as scrawny as chickens.

"Jessie..." Scott said softly, irritably. "Dinnae..."

"Let me handle this!" she hissed. She turned back to Chekov. "Don't pay him any mind. He's new to this game, but he'll play along." The girl didn't have any kind of accent beyond the flat twang of a child who'd spent too long watching vids. Chekov was quite glad she'd appointed herself spokesman of the group. He felt awkward enough without having to ask for repeated clarification from Scott.

Chekov kept his eyes steadily on them, aware -- Khwaja had drummed this into him -- that they might as easily steal the drugs and the shard as trade for them.

There was a glass fronted alarm just above the children's heads. Smashing it would bring police, maybe even security personnel from elsewhere on the site. The children would be caught, questioned, supervised.

The Federation would never happen, and these three would probably never be born. Or end up in thrall to the Orions.

He just hadn't expected them to be so young.

"There is something in there..." Chekov nodded at the fence of corrugated steel panels. "...that I need. I'm willing to pay..."

"Credits or goods?" Chen asked. "We don't deal in credits."

"Goods." Chekov swallowed. "Drugs."

"Let me see." The boy pushed forward, confident, eager. He too sounded like a citizen of the galaxy, quite unlike Scott.

"First I need to know if you can get what I need..."

"We know *everything* that goes on in there," Alleyn said firmly. She looked at Scott. "Don't we?"

Scott nodded. "Yes. They're testing shields for..."

"Shut up. He has to pay if he wants to know what happens in there. Don't give anything away. What drugs?"

"I *am* interested in shields, specifically shielding for space ships. Do they have any small test vehicles in there?"

"We don't answer *anything* until we see the goods."

Chekov pulled out the smaller of the two bags of Illissium and held it out to Chen.

"Is this all?" Chen demanded. Chekov wondered when the boy had decided to become the huge, silent type.

"There's more."

The plastic fastener on the bag was unclipped, spinning away into the darkness. Chen dipped a finger in and tasted it. "Illissium." He turned to his companions. "Blue lace."

"Yes," Chekov confirmed.

"Tastes right, but..."

"But what?"

"We need to test it."

"I assure you, it's genuine. Or is there a forensic analyst somewhere near?"

"We don't take your word for anything," Chen insisted. "Here, Scott, you try it."

Scott's eyes opened wide. "Why me?"

"You never had it before, right? If you take it often, it doesn't work so fast. We need a quick test."

Alleyn and Chen both dragged Scott out of the alcove by his wrists, as if they were forcing a reluctant schoolboy to join in at a dance.

"How do I take it then?" Scott asked. "With a hypo?"

Alleyn laughed. "Don't be stupid. The only hypos you can get around here shut themselves down on anything illegal. Or even anything stupid. Wait." She lay down on the ground, in the puddle of standing water, and rummaged under the bottom of the cladding that covered the warehouse. A moment later, she stood up again with a syringe in her hands. "Use this."

"No," Chekov and Scott said at the same moment.

"You're such a baby," Alleyn told Scott. "He's got a phaser. He can sterilise it."

"No," Scott repeated. "No way, Jessie. I'm not doing that." His accent was broadening. Chekov doubted if he'd have understood the boy at all if his meaning hadn't been entirely predictable.

Alleyn glared at Chekov and pushed Scott a few feet away, out into the wind. The ensign could still hear references to 'travel clearances'. The kids wanted to get off Earth then. Drugs, enough drugs, would purchase enough blind eyes to let them do it.

Alleyn returned with Scott at her heels, looking like a drowned bulldog. "Mix it up," she ordered.

Chekov had seen enough drug education vids to know that Illissium was either processed into a fine powder which one could inhale, or could be dissolved in water and injected, the way Jessie Alleyn had offered it to him at Quondar. The latter was more efficient, making a small dose go much further. Maybe Alleyn was being prudent with her new resources, or maybe the powdered form wasn't known here and now. Chekov sighed and wondered why Khwaja's detailed tutorial on drug dealing hadn't included any of this. Maybe he'd known Chekov's stomach wasn't up to it.

"Come here," Chekov said to Chen. In the boy's cupped palm, he mixed a pinch of the drug with a few drops of rainwater caught from the overflowing gutter of the warehouse. He filled and emptied the plastic syringe from the same source a few times, then phasered it enough to gently simmer its contents. Finally, he filled it from the solution in Chen's hand.

'I'm not doing anything that hasn't already happened,' he told himself. Scott looked scared to the verge of throwing up.

"In a vein," Alleyn said. "Or this is going to take forever. I want to get inside. I'm cold. You don't have to phaser it again. Rainwater is okay, and slit-eyes washes his hands most days."

"It will only take a few seconds to cool down," Chekov said.

"Phaser it," Scott croaked out.

"Do you know how to find a vein?"

"Of course I do. I'm not a babbie."

Scott dropped the syringe as he clumsily rolled up his sleeve. Chekov caught it before it hit the puddle under their feet. The light was so bad, he doubted Scott had found a vein at all, but he was stabbing the very tip of the needle viciously into his arm, as if to punish himself for something. "Here, come out in the light. I'll do it for you."

Holding the boy's thin, white arm tightly, so he couldn't flinch away, he peered at the crook of his elbow. "Make a fist."

Scott was shaking. When Chekov emptied the syringe into the vein that had reluctantly showed itself, he felt the boy's knees give. He caught him and dragged him back into the relative shelter of the eaves.

"You'll feel better soon," Alleyn said, in the condescending tone of a grown woman. "Much better." She stuck her tongue out and licked her painted lips. "It'll take a couple of minutes."

Her clothes were soaked and clinging to her hips and breasts. She batted her eyes at Chekov. "If you like, when we're finished here, you can buy me dinner."