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Bo’tex thrust out his chest. “If my smell is so offensive, why do you put up with me?”

The Klingon bared her teeth. “I have a cold,” she told him.

By then, the gecko seemed to have made itself at home. It looked at Picard and blinked.

“It wants to hear the rest of your story,” Robinson quipped.

Picard looked at him. “Far be it for me to disappoint a lizard,” he said and went on with his tale.

The Tale

I WAS STILL testing the operational parameters of the Romulan helm when I received a summons from Red Abby.

I looked up from my console. “Picard here.”

“I’m in the commander’s quarters,” the woman told me. “I need you to take a look at something.”

Returning the helm to Thadoc, I left the bridge and took a lift to the deck in question a residental one, apparently. Then I made my way down the corridor to the commander’s suite.

The doors opened at my approach, revealing a large room with tan and gray walls, in keeping with the ambiance that characterized the rest of the vessel. There was a triangular mirror set into one wall. On the wall facing, a winged predator clutched two globes, one green and one blue a symbol of the Romulan Empire, which claimed the planets Romulus and Remus as homeworlds.

I didn’t see Red Abby right away. It was only after I had looked around for a moment that I found her hunkered unceremoniously between a long Romulan divan and an opening in the wall. A bulkhead panel was lying on the deck beside her, along with the Romulan equivalent of a tricorder.

“You asked to see me?” I said.

She turned away from the cavity in the wall long enough to glance at me. “I’m glad you’re here. Come take a look at this.”

I knelt beside Red Abby, craned my neck, and glanced into the opening. There was something inside a dark mechanism about the size of my fist lodged in a tangled nest of colored circuitry.

It bore a string of raised characters distinctively Klingon characters, I noted which was, I supposed, why the woman had summoned me to see it instead of Thadoc.

“Do you know what it is?” Red Abby asked.

I nodded. “Those characters form a Klingon phrase: Wa’ DevwI’ tu’lu. Translation: There is one leader.”

I thought she might comment on the saying’s applicability to our own situation. She refrained, however.

“That’s nice,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“It’s a threat,” I explained, “meant to intimidate potential mutineers. After all, one may often be tempted to destroy one’s commanding officer especially if one is a Klingon. However, the temptation diminishes dramatically when such an act ensures one’s own destruction.”

Red Abby’s eyes narrowed. “One’s … own destruction? Are you telling me this is a self-destruct mechanism?”

I confirmed that it was. “It’s designed to initiate a sequence of events that will blow up a vessel from within. It became quite popular among Klingon captains several years ago until a couple of ships exploded and the High Council was forced to outlaw it.”

Picking up her tricorder, I took some readings. They allayed my concerns at least for the time being.

My companion shook her head. “But what’s it doing here, in a Romulan warbird?”

I could only speculate, of course. “Perhaps the commander of this vessel had reason to distrust his subordinates. Perhaps he was about to give them reason. Perhaps he was simply paranoid. In any case, he must have obtained the device on the black market and installed it himself, then announced its existence to his staff.”

“So they would think twice about taking him down,” Red Abby noted.

“That’s my guess,” I said. “On the other hand, he might not have mentioned it at all. His only motive might have been revenge.”

“Sour grapes,” she observed. “If I can’t have command of this vessel, no one can.”

“Exactly,” I told her.

Red Abby leaned back against the divan. “Good thing the device isn’t active.”

“Actually,” I pointed out, “it is active.”

She eyed me. “It is?”

“Without question,” I said.

“Then why do you look so damned calm?” she asked.

“There’s no need to panic,” I told her, putting the tricorder on the floor beside