The Illissium made Scott talkative. Chekov couldn't follow above a quarter of what he was saying, but he gathered that the boy had been climbing in and out of the top secret Campbell Laird facility since he'd been old enough to know that threading copper wire liberally through the padding of his parka would confuse the security sensors. His companions were now copying this trick. "And they pick up stray cats so often, the guards mostly don't pay any mind to them when they do show anything," Scott confided, happily sharing a joke at the expense of the local adult population.

"Shut up," Chen told him.

Scott giggled.

Acquiring the pod was proving almost too easy, as if history was a deep canyon you couldn't climb out of however hard you tried. The shielding project, according to their preposterously knowledgeable young guide, had been abandoned a couple of years earlier, when a test flight was instantly detected by an unmanned Romulan border post. Several billion credits went up in smoke, literally, on its first outing. Scott knew there were three of the pods stacked among the assorted junk that couldn't be destroyed because it was, unfortunately, indestructible. Unless you were using Romulan phasers.

Inside ten minutes, Chekov was looking at a very familiar pod. It had seemed alien, sitting in the cargo hold of the Nell. Here, surrounded by other artefacts from the same workshops, it looked at home, but ugly. Clearly, it hadn't been designed to appeal to anyone but defence strategists.

"Is it locked?" Chekov asked.

Scott nodded gravely. "I coded it, just the other day. It's voice operated, but not to any particular voice. It just wants the password, and it'll open for you."

Alleyn leaned forward. "Let me in," she said. "Open up."

"How are we going to get it out of here?" Chen asked. The Asian boy was nervous. He didn't seem to like being in the enclosed yard, full of shadows. Chekov appreciated how he felt, but couldn't shake off the fatalistic conviction that nothing could go wrong.

"Don't worry about that," he said. "This is all I wanted. Give me the password and you can..."

"Not until you pay up," Alleyn said. She advanced on him.

"I don't pay you until I have the..."

She threw herself at him. Chen took advantage of the distraction and grabbed the phaser from his belt. Scott just stood there, grinning.

"Search him," Alleyn instructed.

Chekov sighed. They found the second, much larger bag of Illissium. They found the fragment of the Orion medallion. Alleyn looked at it for a moment, then she threw it at Scott, who fumbled the catch.

"What is it?"

Scott had retrieved it from under the outer casing of a shuttle warp nacelle. He was turning it over and over in his hands. It glinted blue despite the gloom. "I'm not sure. Kirilite, I think. It's not conventional technology..."

"Do you think it's worth anything?"

"It's broken. No. I don't think so. It's interesting..."

"It is just something I carry for luck," Chekov told them. "It has no value to anyone else."

He waited for Alleyn to take the bait, to decide that he was lying to her. Instead, she plucked the fragment out of Scott's grasp and threw it back to him. It ended up on the floor by his feet. "You need all the luck you can get, you stupid bastard. Lie down on the floor."

As Chekov lowered himself to the cold concrete he sighed. He'd obviously been getting in too much practice with falsehoods lately. To cheer himself up, he reflected that he was glad Moray Morgain wasn't here. Alleyn didn't seem to have any secondary motivation for asking him to lie down unless he was offering to pay her.

"What are we going to do to him?" Chen asked. He was holding the weapon with admirable steadiness, aimed squarely at Chekov's chest. The boy seemed to be sizing him up -- and the yard was full of things an imaginative child could use to construct an impromptu torture chamber.

Chekov shook his head, as much at his own overactive imagination as at his captors. "That phaser will not go any higher than stun."

Alleyn laughed. "Scotty, disable the safeties on the phaser."

He took it from Chen and obeyed her. Chekov watched in horror. The child had lost any shred of conscience he might have had to Illissium's cheery complacency.

"You don't think we'll do it, do you?" Alleyn demanded of Chekov. "Have you done it yet, Scotty? Show him. Show him we can do it."

Scott snapped the phaser's case shut, a case that he shouldn't have been able to open without a proprietory tool. He held it up. "Shall I disintegrate something?"

"Yes. That." She pointed to the fins of a heat dissipater unit.

Scott took aim and fired. Alarms immediately shrilled. The boy grinned happily.

Alleyn shrieked, "Run!" and took off between two banks of stacked components. Chen was on her heels, clutching the bag of Illissium to his chest. Scott just stood there, looking between Chekov and his departing friends like a lost but unworried sheep.

"You don't know the password," he said. "You'll need to know the password."

Adult voices sounded somewhere , still distant. Chekov jumped up, took hold of Scott's collar and pulled the boy close to him, grabbing his arm for good measure.

Scott didn't resist. He just stood there, smiling faintly. "I knew if I used the phaser, it would set off the alarms," he said conversationally. "Jessie can be a wee bit of a bully."

"Why are you doing this?" Chekov demanded. "Why do you hang around with those..."

"They know how to get into places," Scott said. "Chen knows how to hack the credit outlets. And Jessie is good cover. Everyone thinks she's minding us. We can do anything. We break into flitters. We even stole a shuttle once. We couldn't take it anywhere much, because I hadn't worked out how to fool air traffic control then, but I could now..."

"But you should be at school, not..."

Scott spat on the floor. "Fuck school."

Chekov looked at a loop of wire hanging off a part-dismantled replicator, just out of reach. If he tied the boy up, so he couldn't get away, so that the security guards would find him, and hand him over to the juvenile authorities...

"You don't know the fucking password," Scott said. He smiled broader. "You let me go, or I won't tell you the fucking password."

"I know the password." Chekov was surprised by the spiteful kick he got out of Scott's annoyance. "'Open Sesame'."

Scott looked as angry as the Illissium would permit. "Fuck."

"Over here!" someone shouted, dangerously close. Scott twisted out of his jacket, and Chekov's grasp, and vanished into the shadows.

Chekov knelt to scoop up the medallion, then touched the communicator, taped to his chest underneath four or five layers of fabric. "Khwaja..."

"You have the pod?"

"Two metres in front of me."

"Well done, kitten."