"We're ready," Scott said.

Chekov looked up from the astro charts. They were twenty light years from where Quondar would be, but away from the main trade routes that led between the port and dozens of worlds that traded, legally or illegally, with the Orion merchants who used Quondar. The ships that hurried back and forth, laden with precious elements and less savoury, sentient cargoes, would be too far away to register on the Nell's sensors, and they hoped the reverse was true.

"There are... two stars of the correct magnitude," Chekov said. "One of them has two habitable planets, but no recorded..."

"Choose the other one," Khwaja said.

"It's not so simple," Chekov said stubbornly. "The other has a broad asteroid belt."

"Mister Chekov," Scott said, taking the ensign's padd away from him and examining the display. "Our own star has asteroids and inhabited planets and it was good enough for Captain Kirk. Take the second." He tapped the screen. "You have all the information you need, stellar mass, planetary orbits?"

"If the information in the computer is accurate," Chekov conceded.

"I never skimped on navigational data," Goudchaux said. "I hacked this database from a Starfleet cruiser. Only the best for my ship and my crew."

"Well then, we're ready," Scott repeated. "Mister Chekov?" He gestured to the navigation console.

Chekov took his padd back from the engineer and walked over to his post. Sulu was seated at the helm, looking a little concerned. Khwaja and Goudchaux had been chosen to watch out for the pirates' interests, while the rest of the crew were planning to endure what might be a rough ride in their cabins.

It started as a rumbling vibration, the engines trying to rip themselves free of the ship that shackled them to reality, and rose until it became painful, then numbing, then bright, then transparent, and they crashed through it, back into now.

"Where are we?" Scott snapped.

When Chekov didn't answer, shaking his head to dislodge the otherness, blinking the timelight out of his eyes, Sulu pushed him aside and started demanding sense from the computer. "Sensors aren't functioning. I'm looking for nav beacons. Can you pick anything up through comms?"

Goudchaux had picked the comm station as a safe seat, out of the way, during the slingshot. "No. No comms."

Chekov glanced round the bridge and wondered why everyone seemed so much less disorientated than him. Trying to keep his eyes and his mind open to track their course through nowhere had probably been a mistake. He shook himself again and stared at the navigation panel. It was blinking randomly at him.

"Nothing at all?" Scott demanded. "Not even on subspace?"

"Nothing," Goudchaux confirmed in a peevish tone. "That bypass you put in after Chekov commed his girlfriend must have burned out."

Chekov gave up on the auto-restore routines and got down on his knees to look at the damage inside the console.

"It doesn't matter," Scott decided. "As soon as we have sensors, we can adjust those to scan for beacons."

"I could use the comm system in the Shonagon," Sulu offered. He stared at the disruptor Goudchaux was suddenly pointing at him.

"Planning to use it to notify Starfleet of our arrival, were you?" the pirate suggested. "I think you'd better just stay here, Mister Sulu."

"Aye," Scott agreed. "Work on visuals if you want to do something useful. We don't want to send messages out. We just want to check where we are. Khwaja, do we have weapons?"

"I can't tell. The diagnostics have failed."

"Then the only way to find out is to test-fire them," Scott announced. "We'll be able to tell by the..."

A tremble of focused power ran through the ship and a brilliant flare pulsed out of the grey soup on the viewscreen.

"...power consumption."

"I'd say they work," Khwaja announced. The ship rocked as if it had run into a speed hump. "And something is firing back."

"We've no shields," Scott said grimly. "Fire again, man, while we still have weapons."

"Hold on," Sulu objected. "This is a completely unprovoked attack..."

"The history of the galaxy is at stake, Mister Sulu." Scott hammered at the controls on his console. "We just need to hold them off while I get the engines back on line. Half power only on phasers, Khwaja."

"We can't move?" Khwaja turned to Chekov. "Can you pick them up with the navigation sensors yet? Whoever it is, if they realise we're firing blind, they'll just come in and finish us off."

Chekov wriggled out from under the navigation console and looked at the results of his hasty repairs. "I have some navigational data now. We're on target. Our attackers... they are moving at point three four one c, on a heading of..."

The ship shook again. Chekov swallowed and continued relaying information to Khwaja.

"That's the engines on line," Scott announced with satisfaction. "Now we can..."

The engineering station suddenly exploded in a blaze of sparks. Scotty toppled backwards, knocking Sulu to the floor.

Cursing, the helmsman wriggled out from under and turned to check that his colleague was alive. "That was a direct hit to the starboard engines," Scott gasped. "We're holed on deck three." He glanced round the shaken, soot smudged faces. "Chekov, Khwaja, keep firing while I organise an evacuation. We need long enough to get the pod and everyone into the Shonagon. Hold them off while we do that, then we'll let them think they've blown us apart and cloak the Shonagon at the same moment. That should do the trick." He hauled himself painfully to his feet. "And try not to kill whoever it is," he added, almost as an afterthought. "Even if they are only Orions. Sulu, Bardon, you're with me."

For a wonder, the lift was still working.

"Chekov," Khwaja said through clenched teeth, "can you feed your nav sensors over to this station, and do we still have the port engine?"

The ship shook again as Chekov complied with Khwaja's first request. Staggering when the unstabilised ship reacted to another hit, he crossed over to the helm. "Yes. I can give you a fraction of impulse, nothing more."

"I want the best evasive pattern you can manage. Try to be unpredictable, for once in your life."

The sense of being comrades under fire evaporated. "Fuck you too, Khwaja. Why aren't you down there with everyone else, loading the jewels into the Shonagon?"

"I think I hit them," Khwaja said, sounding surprised.

The damage alarms, rather belatedly, decided to go off. Chekov cursed. "That was probably the navigational deflector. I've lost all readings again."

A muffled explosion sounded from elsewhere in the ship. A jet of flame burst out of the ceiling and as quickly died down again. The soft hiss of nitrogen sounded in a moment of quiet.

Then the ceiling panels collapsed.

The one that hit Chekov wasn't too heavy, being mostly a ventilation grille. He shook the white snow of insulation material out of his eyes and realised that Khwaja was pinned under the weight of the ventilation shaft itself, and the fan that had been mounted in it.

For a long moment, he savoured the possibility of doing nothing to help.

Khwaja could obviously read his mind, because he said, "What was it you promised me, for rescuing you from Budrin?"

Chekov lifted the heavier components aside but didn't help the pirate to rise. Khwaja shook his head disapprovingly. "Undying gratitude obviously wasn't included. I'm still intending to collect, you know. Don't think you've just paid me off." He sniffed the air and struggled to sitting, then to standing. Another crackle of sparks surged from a severed cable overhead and narrowly missed the pirate.

"The captain's log." Khwaja gestured to the comm station.

"What about it?"

"Get recording, kitten. How much longer do you think this lady is going to hold together?"

"But..."

"It ain't over till it's over. Do it."

"What's the point..."

Khwaja was leaning over the weapons console by now. "The other ship is moving away. I guess we're already dead enough for their purposes."

"You mean, we've stopped firing on them," Chekov pointed out grimly, but he already had his thumb over the *record* button. "I can't remember what I said..."

"Good. Say what comes naturally. Now."

Glancing across at the pirate, alerted by something novel in his tone of voice, Chekov realised Khwaja was injured. His dark shirt was clinging damply to his back.

"Once I record this, you have no further reason to keep me alive," Chekov said.

Khwaja shook his head. "No, no, no. You've got it all wrong. If you refuse to record the message, I have to kill you and Sulu, and rationalise a reason why you were both lying to us about the message all along. Probably you invented the whole stupid message simply in order to force me to keep you alive at all costs. Kitten, you're too clever for your own good. If you don't record it, I'm going to have to kill you." He laughed at Chekov's expression.

Chekov took a deep breath. Another dull boom echoed through the Nell and more flakes of insulation toppled lazily through the air.

"Sulu..." he began. "And Chekov. Go home now. Don't attempt to rescue Mister Scott. Summon assistance from Starfleet." It was hard to say it with any conviction. He felt like leaning in to the little camera and pleading with them to listen to him. "Just go while you have the chance..."

"Watch out!" Khwaja yelled. There was a roar of noise and a blast of hot air, and then the back bulkhead of bridge turned white and collapsed inwards with a sigh.

"Oh, hell." Chekov determinedly turned his back on the fire that was about to engulf him and put all the conviction he could muster into saying, "Just do it."

****

When Chekov came round he was unable to remember where he was, or how he'd arrived there. It was dark and smelled of barbeques. The only light was a feeble reflection of a safety lamp off a shiny piece of metal. He squinted at it and tried to work out how far away it was, without success. Little tremors ran through the deck beneath him, but he was held quite securely in someone's arms, and felt strangely safe. Any moment now, the rescue teams would arrive. They drilled regularly for this kind of situation, and their efficiency ratings were always the highest in the fleet.

He had only to wait. The person holding him was breathing calmly, and Chekov consciously adopted the rhythm of their breaths. He tried to work out who it was, but there were no clues.

In. Out. In.

Out.

He waited. He took the next breath himself, still waiting.

Still waiting.

It gradually sank in that he was cradled in the arms of a dead man.

He rather thought he ought to move, but his legs felt utterly lifeless too. He tried to move his hands, and found one of them was clutching a small rectangular object so tightly that when he relaxed his grip, his fingers were stabbed with the pain of returning circulation.

"It must be important," he said aloud.

Somehow, knowing the rescue teams were already too late for one casualty made him doubt they would turn up at all. He wondered what he ought to do.

So far as he could remember, his affairs were in order. He'd made all the necessary declarations in regard to his remains, his dependants (none that he could recall) and his assets. He'd even recorded the customary final message. He sighed. He hadn't updated it, and it was horribly... naive. When he recorded it, he had only been aboard the Enterprise a week, and thought he knew everything. He'd learned so much since then. He settled absently back into the corpse's friendly embrace and began to review his career. Apollo, Harry Mudd, Tamoon... it was quite difficult to know if he was beginning to hallucinate, or if it had really happened. Perhaps, he thought, it was all a dream, and at any moment, he'd wake up...

There was an awful crunch and grind of deformed doors moving on bent tracks. He blinked furiously as a flashlight was shone straight into his eyes and away again.

"Chekov..." Hands grabbed him and he groaned as they hauled him upright. It felt like his body was full of shrapnel. "Can you move on your own, lad? We're short of time."

He tried to shake the tears of pain out of his eyes. "I'm okay," he whispered, and then his legs folded under him. Mister Scott caught him and swung him over a shoulder. More agony was the result. His surroundings greyed out for a moment. When they firmed up again, he was being half carried, half dragged, down a smoke filled corridor.

"There was someone else. In the lift," he objected. "We can't leave him..."

"Khwaja's dead," Scott told him. "Don't you worry about him."

Khwaja. He'd died in Khwaja's arms.

No, that was wrong, but he wasn't quite sure how to put it right.

He wondered who Khwaja was.

"The bridge blew up," he said, the memory resurfacing as he spoke. "Khwaja made it to the lift, but I didn't. Something knocked me down. He came back for me, and then the fire burst through the deck..."

"Aye, it cut straight through from engineering. The whole of that side of the ship's gone."

Chekov felt the box in his hand. It was the tape he'd made. It was important, and he still had it. Khwaja would be pleased.

He wondered again who Khwaja was. He couldn't remember ever seeing him before.

Khwaja had picked him up and thrown him bodily into the lift, then fallen in after him. As the lift doors had closed, he'd realised Khwaja's legs had been burnt through to the bone almost up to his groin.

That was when he'd passed out.

Scott let him down onto his feet and pushed him forward through an airlock. A fierce hissing announced a leak in the seals. Chekov wondered vaguely why Scott wasn't bothered by that.

"Is Sulu here?" Scott yelled to someone.

A female voice answered. "No. He went back for that bloody fool Brecht."

"What do the sensors show?"

Chekov was pushed into a seat and ignored by both the occupants of what seemed to be a small yacht. He caught glimpses of a woman with close cropped blonde hair at the controls.

She looked round at them briefly. "The anti-matter containment is about to blow. We have maybe a couple of minutes margin, then it could go at any time."

Chekov remembered the name of the yacht, the Shonagon. It was Sulu's. It was nice that Sulu had a yacht, and useful, in the circumstances.

Scott joined the woman, peering at a sensor display. "Can you pinpoint where Sulu is?"

Chekov remembered the woman's name, Jessie Alleyn. She was an old friend of Scott's, perhaps an old lover.

"No."

She was also, he recalled, a madame. She didn't look like one at the moment, dressed in an ill-fitting boiler suit, with smears of blood and lubricant on her face. Chekov reflected on the unlikeliness of his situation, and remembered that there had been pirates too.

"What in God's name possessed him to go back for Brecht? The man's nothing but an Orion stooge."

Brecht, Chekov recollected, was not exactly one of the pirates, but just as bad.

"That's his cover, certainly," the woman said, leaning over to adjust something.

Scotty grabbed at her arm. "What do you mean? Cover for what?"

"He's in Starfleet Intelligence, unlike Khwaja, who just likes to tell people he's in Starfleet Intelligence."

"Liked."

"Past tense?" Jessie Alleyn asked cautiously. "Did Chekov kill him?"

"No. The fire did."

She uttered a short little laugh. "Four dead so far. This is beginning to remind me of the Lydia Lee."

"If they're not here in the next twenty seconds," Scott said, "there'll be two more."

"I'm firing up the engines."

"Stand by to cloak when I tell you. Fifteen."

"You should get strapped in, Scotty. We're likely to get thrown around when the Nell goes up."

"No, I'm going to stand by the hatch till the last... Sulu! Get in here!"

Two bedraggled bodies stumbled in through the inner door of the airlock. One, Sulu, fell into the seat next to Chekov. Brecht settled for bracing himself against the bulkhead between the cockpit and the main cabin. He put his feet flat against the front edge of the seat between the two Starfleet officers and grinned shakily at them.

Scott slammed the inner hatch shut and dived through into the cockpit. The engines, already humming sweetly, roared into life.

"Mister Sulu," Brecht said. "It seems I'm making a habit of allowing you to rescue my career."

"My pleasure," Sulu said leadenly.

An unhappy silence settled over them. Chekov continued to piece things together in his mind.

"Is everyone else dead?" he asked eventually.

Sulu turned and looked at him. "You're alive... just, by the looks of it. Goudchaux, Esme and Chen were blown away when deck 4 decompressed. They shouldn't have been so greedy. We already had most of the treasure aboard, but they wanted the last few baubles."

"Oh, yes," Chekov said. "We lost the treasure. I remember."

Sulu frowned. "No, we've got the treasure. The Shonagon is stuffed to the gunwales with treasure. What happened to Khwaja?"

"I don't know. He might have been in Starfleet Intelligence..."

"No, he wasn't," Brecht interrupted. "I know he wasn't."

"How do you know?" Chekov asked irritably. "I suppose you are in Starfleet Intelligence."

Brecht winked at Sulu and held out his right hand to the ensign. "Commodore Landau Keane, Office in Chief, Starfleet Special Intelligence Services. At your service, Admiral."

Chekov pretended he couldn't see the proffered hand. "He knew things. He would have to be in Starfleet Intelligence to know things."

"Not necessarily," Brecht/Keane said. "You'd be surprised how much intelligence there is outside SI sometimes. Is the medical kit on this yacht completely empty too?"

"Yes."

"Damn. And is it my imagination, or is the admiral here 'wandering' a little?"

Sulu unstrapped himself. If the Nell blew now, the shockwave would be attenuated by distance. He ran his fingers through Chekov's hair, looking for head injuries, and found only a single tender lump of no great size. "Do you hurt anywhere else?"

"Khwaja's dead," Chekov told them. "I died in his arms."

"I knew it was true love," Brecht/Keane said, his face very straight.

"He saved my life," Chekov insisted.

"Chekov, you hate Khwaja. I mean, you hated him. Really, he was just another pirate. He was playing mind games with you. And it worked." Sulu patted the ensign's arm reassuringly.

Chekov remembered that he hated Khwaja. Confused, he folded his arms and glowered at Keane.

"Shock," the commodore said knowingly. "You'll be fine in a few hours, Chief."

"We didn't record the message," Sulu said suddenly. "And there's no way we can fake it here." He stood up. "Do you think the Nell is still in one piece? We could go back..."

Chekov held out the box that was so important. The box that Khwaja had given to him. Even with his legs destroyed, Khwaja had rescued Chekov, retrieved the box and saved the Federation. Other memories were beginning to surface, conflicting memories. Chekov shut them out.

Keane ignored the tape cartridge. "You're sure it was the bridge of the Nell you saw? You'd never been aboard..."

"It was the bridge of the Nell," Chekov confirmed. "This is the tape. Khwaja saved it."

"You've taken quite a shine to Khwaja all of a sudden, *kitten*," Keane said. "Makes me wonder if he did anything else we don't know about..."

Chekov narrowed his eyes and refused to take the bait. Further discussion was halted by Scott's emerging from the cockpit. He looked at the three men. "You two look a mite knocked about."

"I've been worse," Keane said cheerily.

"I hope you've thanked Mister Sulu for going back for you. It was beyond the call of duty, or common sense."

Keane smiled. "Whereas you, of course, were forced to go back for the admiral because he hadn't yet recorded the vital message." He leaned forward and plucked the tape from between Chekov's fingers. "How do we install it in the pod? I assume there's a message beacon of some kind."

Scott frowned, then accepted the fortuitous arrival of the tape with his characteristic lack of imagination. "Aye. Give me that and I'll install it. What was the activation code again, Chekov?"

"My birthday. 140922437."

Scott looked puzzled for a moment. "Oh, check digit." He walked to the rear of the compartment and opened a hatch into what Chekov assumed was a cargo hold. The ensign followed him. In the cramped space, the engineer was bending over the pod. Dim emergency lighting grew stronger as the hatch swung closed behind them.

"The password is..."

"I know. I installed it. Remember?"

Chekov realised he did. His head had cleared enough to let him remember everything. "Oh, yes."

Scott was opening a small panel and making a connection to the tape holder. "Chekov..."

"Yes?"

"I don't know how Mister Sulu and Stuart Brecht are going to feel about this, but there's something we need to do."

"Oh?"

"We still have the device. We can use it to change things, d'you see, just a little."

"No, we can't."

"They were friends of mine. And shipmates to you. Loyalty between shipmates is more than just a matter of being friends, as you'll come to appreciate."

"They were pirates!"

"Because you made them pirates, don't forget." When Chekov didn't argue, Scott glanced back at him. "I know they didn't treat you with kid gloves, but that was mainly Khwaja and Brecht, you know."

Chekov's mouth dropped open. Then he remembered that Scott had been out of things at the beginning, when he'd been treated worst. "Goudchaux was intending to sell you to the Orions."

"He might have told you that. He might have told Brecht that."

"On Bidoah, were you planning to meet Goudchaux and the others?"

"What?" Scott looked impatient, as if he'd cut this conversation short if he didn't need Chekov's cooperation. "No. I'd met an old acquaintance..."

"Someone from Starfleet Intelligence?" Chekov guessed.

"What are you trying to say, Mister Chekov?"

"I made you a pirate, but you led me into a trap, and Starfleet Intelligence probably organised far more of this than we will ever understand. We have been helpless from the start, and now you think you can take control."

Scott closed the access panel and turned round. His expression was stubborn. "Yes, I do," he said. "When you stop believing you can do anything to make a difference, you might as well be dead."

"The device is not compatible with the Shonagon's engines."

"That doesn't matter. If we keep the device, we have all the time in the world to find another ship, carry out the rescue..."

"You saw Khwaja. He was dead. How can you rescue him?"

"I have no intention..."

"No. You will rescue those who you want to rescue. You'll play God." Chekov realised his voice was shaking.

"And you're telling me you wouldn't do the same, if three people who were like family to you were lying dead..."

"The commodore won't let you," Chekov interrupted, suddenly remembering that he had a potential ally.

Scott was surprised by that. "What bloody commodore? What are you talking about?"

"Commodore Keane. Stuart Brecht is Commodore Keane."

"But the commodore is..." Scott stopped to think the revelation through. "Well, no wonder Sulu went back for him."

"You cannot change history to be what you want it to be."

"Esme saved my life more than once," Scott said determinedly. "And Chen... you couldn't ask for a better second in a fight. Even Bardon Goudchaux..."

"Yes?" Chekov prompted. "On what grounds are you planning to canonise Goudchaux?"

"Okay, Goudchaux was a right bastard." Scott sniffed. "But we were like brothers, Bardon and me. So close, you couldn't put a feeler gauge between us. When you're that close to someone, whatever they do is right. What someone else thinks doesn't matter." He paused for a moment. "You wouldn't understand."

"I understand enough to know that Goudchaux was shit. Chen was a torturer, Esme was a medic who ran drugs and Moray Morgain was a whore."

The crack of Scott's hand across his face sent Chekov back into the bulkhead.

"Keep your mouth shut," Scott said. "I'm thinking."

"Even if they were worth saving, you could not risk trying to change things. It's too complicated and you will..."

"For God's sake, man, be quiet for two minutes!"

Chekov obeyed. He sucked his bruised lip and looked round the tiny hold. It was not much more than two metres square, and barely high enough for Scott and himself to stand upright. Beside the capsule, which lay on the floor of the hold, dull black-brown, like an overgrown seed pod , there was a second large container. A row of coloured status indicators glowed at one corner. The green one blinked steadily, like a slowed up heartbeat. Using the light as a metronome, Chekov estimated one hundred and twenty seconds.

"Mister Scott, what is that?" He pointed at the second container.

Scott sighed. "Stasis unit."

"Moray Morgaine."

"Aye."

"Why her? Why save her?"

"Because the other three were beyond saving."

The utilitarian answer took the wind out of Chekov's sails. Preferring Moray Morgaine over anyone else was debatable; saving a life was simply what one did.

Scott touched the pod with the toe of his Starfleet boot. "We're all ready then. We just have to drop this thing in place and keep out of the way until it's picked up." He pointed at the hatch, and was hard on Chekov's heels as the ensign exited into the main compartment, narrowing his eyes against the harshness of the lights.

"I hope Chekov talked you out of using the device one last time to put everything right?" Keane asked cheerfully, handing each of them a mug of coffee from the little dispenser set into the aft bulkhead.

"Of course not," Chekov lied without thinking.

Scott shot him a hostile scowl. "Shut up, Brecht."

"That'll be Commodore Keane to you, Mister Scott."

Scott froze. He looked down at the coffee as if it might be poisoned. "Fuck that. You are *not* Landau Keane."

"He is," Sulu said apologetically, but Keane waved him into silence.

"Let's not argue about it now," he said. "It doesn't actually make any difference to what we all have to do, and we're all a little over emotional, I think. We've a ten hour flight to the coordinates where we leave the pod, and we can do with some sleep." He looked round the compartment with a grimace. "Remind me to sack my PA when I get back to to Headquarters, Hikaru. I told him to get you a yacht, not a tender."

"It's not so bad," Sulu said hastily. He opened up the single bunk. Unfolded, it half filled the compartment. He took a slender pillow and a blanket from a locker. "Are we taking it in turns to sleep?"

Keane pursed his lips. "Two hours each is worse than nothing. I know." He leaned into the cockpit. "Jessie, can you and Scott share a single bunk without squabbling?"

"I should think so," she said, coming to the door and looking through at the sleeping arrangements. "We've years of practice. What about the rest of you?"

"We'll all squeeze in the cockpit and give you four hours quiet. Okay?"

"Sure, Stuie."

"Commodore Keane will do, thank you, Commander Chalmers. Our... colleagues are aware of my true identity."

She looked blankly at him for a moment. "Oh. Well, good for them. Did they work it out for themselves, or did they check the name labels in your shirts?"

Keane shook his head at her. "We should be back in Federation space in less than forty eight hours. Maybe you should start reviewing your Federation manners." He pushed the blanket into her arms, gestured Sulu and Chekov through into the cockpit and slid the door across behind himself as he joined them. Almost immediately, a furious argument started, only to be cut dead as the door snicked into place. Keane sat in the pilot's seat and crossed his legs.

"Well, sit down," he urged his companions. "Four hours sleep isn't much. You might as well relax now."

Sulu perched hesitantly at the co-pilot's station and Chekov folded down the spare third seat behind him. There was a long silence. Eventually, Chekov spoke. "What will we do after we have left the pod?"

"Head for home," Sulu suggested.

"Not quite, although you can work out our course if you want to. The Nell was attacked shortly after you found the pod. We don't know who carried out that attack, and frankly, from what I know now about the positions of all the players, I can't even make an intelligent guess. We don't want the Nell to be too badly damaged. I think we should stay around and make sure everything happens according to plan."

"Or the Nell might not be damaged badly enough," Sulu said slowly. "And then we'd have no reason to use the device..."

"I see you're one step ahead of me, Hikaru." Keane smiled paternally. "It's good to know that the young man who..."

"Please, Chekov isn't taken in for a moment. He knows that whole charade was a..."

"Charade," Chekov supplied helpfully, when Sulu fell silent.

"Dear me," Keane said. He looked over his shoulder and smiled broadly at Chekov. "Still, I'm sure we can rely on the admiral's discretion."

"So you think we have to hang around in order to fire on ourselves and make sure we go back in time?"

"You've more experience of time travel than I have, Hikaru. That kind of paradox should be second nature to you."

"More than you know," Sulu said.

Chekov leaned forward. "What do you mean?"

"You know I told you we were attacked, Miss Alleyn and I..."

"You mean Commander Chalmers?" Chekov asked with a lavish helping of sarcasm.

"Whatever. We left the port at Quondar and we were cloaked, making good speed towards the coordinates. Then we came under attack. We were keeping a pretty close lookout -- we knew we didn't have too good an idea of what you were involved in, Chekov, so we were being careful -- but we weren't careful enough. Or they really did come out of nowhere." Sulu glanced at Keane and shrugged. "We only took a glancing hit to start with, but it was enough to take our cloak out. It's not too robust. We fired back as a matter of course, and tried to hail whoever it was..."

"But you received no answer," Keane put in for him.

"Exactly. At that point, our speed was point three four one c." Sulu paused to see if Chekov would make the connection.

"It was you who fired on us." Chekov folded his arms and leaned back. "I should have known..."

"And now it's going to be us who fires on us again, and wastes the treasure..."

Keane shook his head. "Only we're not losing the treasure. It's going to Starfleet, for Federation negotiators to use in making a long term peace with the Orions. It'll all be worth it, everything you've been through, in the end. I promise you."

Chekov swallowed. "Khwaja... was he an intelligence agent?"

Keane was silent for a moment. "One of the best. One of the best. And now... let's get that course computed, Mister Sulu. Chekov, since it looks like we're going to be taking on the Nell one more time, God bless the old girl, I need you to finish the maintenance checks on shields and weapons that Commander Scott was working on earlier."

****

As they neared the coordinates, the tension increased exponentially. Sulu and Chekov napped fitfully on the narrow bunk for the last few hours, and woke to join the others. Keane and Scott had cleared out the cargo compartment, battening down the few loose items in there so that the pod could be launched by simply opening the rear access hatch and firing a small booster pack. The taped message was set to replay the instant it received the necessary code. Meanwhile, the real treasure was packed securely in the storage lockers under the deck of the main compartment.

"One thousand kilometres," Sulu called back from the helm. Keane stuffed the last corner of a slab of cake into his mouth, washed it down with half a cup of coffee and told Chekov to get out of the co-pilot's seat.

"Three hundred."

"Take her down to one quarter impulse. Chekov, I don't want your eyes to leave that sensor screen for a second. We're cutting it fine. We can't afford an unscheduled run-in with the first Shonagon."

"Don't worry, Commodore," Chalmers/Alleyn said brightly. "If it didn't happen, it's not going to."

"I'm not sure I'm very much in favour of that way of thinking." Keane made a slight adjustment to the navigation readout. "You can never be sure that the gods aren't going to get tired of playing this particular loop."

"Fifty."

"One tenth. Cloak off." The Shonagon's cloak was obviously a quite different technological animal to the Romulan inspired version on the Nell. Only the faintest 'electrical' shiver in the skin on his back told Chekov that the Shonagon was no longer invisible.

"And... X marks the spot, to within a kilometre or so."

Scott and Chalmers were together in the doorway. "Those Campbell Laird engineers certainly knew what they were doing," Scott sighed. "You must have been sitting not half a mile from the pod when we first saw you, Sulu."

"I'm a helpless victim of temporal forces beyond my understanding," Sulu said without humour. "You can't blame me."

"Go sit down," Keane said tolerantly over his shoulder. "There's going to..."

The ship rocked as the pod blasted free. The engineer and the latest addition to the roster of intelligence agents grabbed at one another for support. Chekov watched them kiss as they separated.

'It's like a stupid fairy tale,' he thought. 'All the bad people are dead, the dead people who weren't bad are heroes, and everyone else is going to live happily ever after.' His stomach cramped sceptically.

"Recloak, Mister Sulu, and pull us back to ten thousand kilometres."

"Heading?"

Keane rubbed his chin. "It doesn't matter. We have to come back and finish this off. Sulu, let Chekov take the helm for a while. Admiral... oh, sorry. Force of habit. Choose your own heading. And I think it's my turn to sleep now."

***

"There she is."

Chekov came awake with a start. He took the first of several controlled, calming breaths. "Is something happening?"

"There." Sulu pointed to the hint of a shimmer on the sensor display. "This cloak really only works if no one's looking for you. That's the Shonagon. She's bang on target."

"How long were you waiting there?"

"Chekov, there's no need to whisper. About five minutes."

"I hate this waiting."

"Yeah. It's even more excruciating if you're awake."

Chekov punched him on the shoulder in a half-hearted attempt at horseplay.

"What are you going to do when we get back to the Enterprise?" Sulu asked after a moment.

"You think they'll let us back on board? Starfleet will want to debrief us..."

"They won't want to do anything that draws attention to us, believe me."

"I forgot you were such an expert."

"Yeah, well..."

"I'm sorry."

"No, go on. Make cheap jokes at my expense. It passes the time. You'll be comming Britta, I imagine."

"I don't even know if she took Khwaja's advice."

"You must have *some* idea."

"She was English. I could never tell what she was thinking."

"Do you think she'll lose it all, now the information has dried up, or..."

"Sulu."

"Yes?"

"Surely we're breaking some fundamental law of the conservation of matter. If we're here and there at the same time." Chekov gestured at the shimmer.

Sulu stretched the kinks out of his back and shoulders. "Either we're not, or it's not really a fundamental law after all."

"Did you know all along that Stuart Brecht was Commodore Keane?"

The helmsman laughed. "No. When I realised... I felt pretty damn stupid, I can tell you. All those years thinking my famous affair was with a *woman*. Trust me to be the last to know."

"You think it's funny?"

Sulu shrugged unworriedly. "I reckon only... a couple of dozen people at Command know anything about the commodore beyond the name and the tall stories. And they were the ones who probably knew the whole thing never happened." He frowned at Chekov's sceptical expression. "Why does this bother you so much? Because of Khwaja? That guy wasn't interested in you. He was just keeping you off balance. And making a very good job of it."

"He wasn't the only one who was confusing me," Chekov said defensively.

"Mmm." Sulu nodded. "I always thought our Mister Scott had surprisingly little to say about his background. Sure, the accent, and the whisky, but no mention of family or anything like that. I really never knew any more about him than I did about Mister Spock..."

"You think Mister Spock might be..."

"God, no, Chekov. I'm just saying, Scotty always kept things close to his chest, compared to most of the humans on board."

A light began to flicker on the sensor readouts. Chekov pointed to it.

"Okay, bring her up on the screen," Sulu said.

"The Nell." Chekov clenched his fists on a slight tremor as he hit the display controls.

"Believe me, being in two places at once has no unpleasant side effects."

The door slid open and Scott slipped through, letting it close again behind him. "I reckon..."

"Yes, she's there, Mister Scott." Sulu gestured at the bright spot of light on the screen that was starlight reflected from the hull of the Nell.

"Gives you the willies, knowing you're in two places at once," Scott said. He turned to Chekov. "How are you feeling, lad?"

Chekov looked up, surprised. "Why?"

"You look like a ghost."

"So? Why does that matter now?"

Scott shrugged.

"I know. It matters now because in two or three days, we will all be expected to account for our actions. And you are afraid of what I might say."

The engineer shrugged again. "If that was all I cared about, I could dump you out through the airlock now and stop worrying, couldn't I?"

"They've activated the message," Sulu said.

Chekov folded his arms tightly across his stomach to try and still the panicked cramping. "Why don't you?" he asked.

"Why don't I what?"

"Kill me, and Sulu, and Brecht, or Keane, or whatever his name is, and take the treasure? You could pay for whatever treatment you need to put Moray Morgain back together, and live happily ever after."

"Aye." Scott folded down the third seat and slid into it. "I suppose I don't care too much about the treasure because I've no one left to share it with., and because there'd never be enough of it to let me buy myself a ship to match the Enterprise... and if I did, I'd have to waste my time deciding where to go and what to do with it rather than just enjoying it for what it was. As for Moray... I promised her mother I'd look after her. God knows why, seeing as Danny never showed any interest herself in looking after her daughter. I suppose I was just a kid with romantic ideas whose friends were being gunned down in cold blood... I thought. Looking back now, I can see the other side of it."

"You've decided you'd rather be an honest engineer than a pirate, then?" Sulu prompted.

"Honesty's nothing to do with it," Scott said. "You can't lie to your engines."

Chekov turned up the magnification on the viewscreen.

"They're not going anywhere, Chekov. In another... two minutes, I reckon, they'll start reeling the capsule in."

"That's ridiculous. What about free will, what about taking responsibility for your actions? If I never had any choice about what happened over there in the Nell, are you saying I don't have any choice over what I do now? I could go and turn the stasis unit off." Chekov looked defiantly over his shoulder at Scott. "And say I had no choice."

"What the hell did Moray Morgain do to you, Chekov?" Sulu demanded.

"Nothing. It's none of your business."

A shriek of mechanical rage burst out of the main control console, and Scott elbowed Sulu bodily out of his seat. "Blast it to hell. The regulator coil's fucked. We're going to be emitting like a bloody lighthouse in two minutes. I'll have to shut down the engines. Chekov, power everything down. Everything."

The door started to open but stopped again as power to its circuits was cut. Keane could be heard swearing furiously on the other side.

"Brecht, get back to the auxiliary control panel. Turn off emergency life support."

"Why?" Keane demanded. "What's going on?"

"We're going to have to restart the engines off backup power. We'll need every scrap of energy we can save. Bloody hell... Sulu, get into the secondary functions under here and turn everything off, everything."

The screen went blank and black just as the cabin lights faded to pale amber.

Alarm signals started and faded out in an electronic fugue.

"We lost our cloak the moment the coil went," Sulu said worriedly.

"So we don't move. We don't even talk out loud," Scott ordered.

"They'll pick us up the moment we power up our engines." Sulu was twisting awkwardly to reach something under the console. Scott lifted his feet out of the helmsman's way. "Thanks."

"We just have to be ready to go to warp and full phasers the moment we power up. Chekov, what's the power reserve level?"

"Twenty nine point seven..."

"Damn."

"Down to twenty nine point six eight..."

"What? I told you both to turn everything off. Where the hell is the energy drain? Brecht! Brecht, what's still using power out there?"

They heard someone falling over something, accompanied by colourful curses. "Everything's off," Brecht said, sounding as if he'd broken a tooth and was exploring the damage with his tongue.

"Everything isn't bloody off," Scott contradicted. "Chekov, find a circuit tracer. There must be one somewhere..."

"The stasis unit," Chekov said, nausea solidifying to ice in his stomach as historical inevitability threatened to unravel.

"Stasis units have battery backup," Sulu said confidently. "And they don't take much power anyway..."

"But this one doubles as an auxiliary transporter pad," Chekov explained. "So it probably takes all the power it can get. And Goudchaux stole everything else he could carry out of sickbay. Do you really think he left a powerpack behind?"

No one said anything for a full minute. Then Chekov felt a hand on his shoulder. "Mister Chekov..."

He glanced round. "Yes?"

"Would you do something for me?" Scott asked.

"What?"

"The stasis unit is drawing power from the lateral engine feed. It's an non-interruptible connection, for obvious reasons. But I think you'll find you can disable the whole circuit. There should be a control point under your console there."

Chekov looked at Scott. "You want me to turn it off?"

"I don't particularly want to do it myself." He waited. "As a favour. I'd be grateful if you'd do it."

Swallowing deeply, Chekov leaned down and found the cover of the maintenance hatch in the bulkhead by his seat. There were three levers, all in the conventional upward 'on' position. He slammed them down one by one and straightened up. "Done."

"What are the power readings now?"

"Steady at twenty nine point six one."

"Right. I'll take up the deck and reinitialise the feedback coil, by hand." Scott snorted impatiently. "And hope we don't freeze to death before it's time to scare the Nell into yesterday. Brecht, I'm going to force this door. Give me a hand."