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Picard set his glass down. “Not exactly,” he replied.

The Tale

THE PLACE WAS guarded by a single Cardassian one who had obviously been surprised by the opening of the door. As I spotted him, he was still drawing his disruptor pistol.

Leveling it, he fired at me. I fired as well.

Luck was on my side. I dispatched the fellow with my first shot.

Of course, we didn’t yet know he was alone. We had to approach the facility carefully, looking and listening for evidence of other Cardassians. Finally, satisfied the place was secure, we swarmed inside.

Like every other place on that vessel, it was cast in a blue-green glow. Immediately, I located the room’s control console and commandeered it. Presetting as many controls as possible, I obtained a lock on the Romulan ship and waited for its commander to do as I had predicted.

By then, the doors had closed behind us, fortifying us against unwanted interruptions. Corbis came up beside me.

“What now?” he asked.

“Now we exercise patience,” I replied.

“Patience?” he said, as if it were a curse.

I nodded. “That’s right.”

As it turned out, we needed quite a bit of it. The minutes dragged by, unmindful of our anxiety. We looked at one another, searching for answers our comrades couldn’t provide.

As captains of your own vessels, you know uncertainty is a terrible thing. It can gnaw at you until your very sanity gives way. We began to get a taste of that in the Cardassian transporter room.

After a while, we wondered if we had guessed wrong about the Romulans’ plans. Perhaps they had already obtained the information they needed. Perhaps, in destroying our Cardassian captors, they were merely eliminating a competitor for the Hoard.

I had already begun to consider alternative schemes, none of which was particularly satisfactory, when the sensors showed me what I had been hoping so desperately to see. The Romulans had dropped their deflector shields. Almost at the same time, they began to conduct transporter activity on one of their middle decks.

Encouraged, I activated the Cardassian transporter system and darted across the room. The Cardassian version of a transporter pad wasn’t very impressive looking, but it was very nearly as efficient as the Federation model. Taking my place on it alongside Abby, Thadoc, Corbis, and three other men, I drew my phaser and waited.

In a heartbeat, we found ourselves on the Romulan bridge.

The commander of the warbird was sitting in a central chair with a rounded back. He was surrounded by seven or eight officers tending to various duties, their faces caught in the glow of bright green status screens on the bulkheads around them. Before they could register our presence or react to it, the place came alive with a host of diamond-blue energy beams.

Every one of the Romulans fell instantly with one exception, and Thadoc took that one out with a blow to the back of the neck. Worf and the rest of our comrades materialized in the next second or two, but to their chagrin there was nothing for them to do. A bizarre stillness reigned as the magnitude of our victory sank in.

Through sheer audacity, we had taken over the bridge of a Romulan warbird and as far as we knew, no one on the vessel except us had any inkling of it. Of course, that would change soon enough.

Advancing to the Romulan commander’s seat, I moved his unconscious form aside. Then I turned to Thadoc.

“We need a security lockout,” I said. “Can you give us one?”

I was only guessing that he’d had some experience serving on Romulan vessels. Being only half-Romulan, he might not have. It didn’t occur to me that, even if he did have the expertise, he might not be willing to apply it on my behalf.

After all, we were no longer fighting for our lives in some corridor. We were on a bridge again, even if it wasn’t that of the Daring. The situation cried out for a captain and Thadoc turned to the one he had in mind for the position.

In other words, Red Abby.

It was no time for politics. Taking the woman by the arm, I pulled her off to the side, where we could speak one-on-one.

“Listen,