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The commander winced. That did it.

“From now on…” he said, recalling how beautifully she had moved, how strong and graceful she had been, “from now on, you’re Grace. That is, until you choose a name for yourself.”

The slave girl seemed delighted. Her eyes shone gratefully. “Grace,” she repeated as if it were a toy.

Crusher couldn’t help smiling a bit as well. “So what kind of plan did you have in mind… Grace?”

She told him.

As the door to his guest quarters on Debennius II hissed shut behind him, Gerrid Thul smiled to himself.

After all, the foolish human captain had told him everything he needed to know. The Federation was a toothless beast unless asked to fight, and right now, both the Cordracites and the Melacron were hot for each other’s blood. They would not ask anyone to help them stop it.

Everything was going splendidly, the Thallonian told himself. There was only one more thing that needed to be done before the Cordracites and the Melacron went hurtling over the edge into a full-blown war.

Thul removed his oval-shaped communicator from his tunic and spoke into it. “This is the governor,” he said.

“Kaavin here,” his second-in-command replied crisply.

“I wish to return,” he told her.

A moment later, the air around him with filled with swirls of golden light. The next thing the Thallonian knew, he was standing on a raised pentagon in his vessel’s transporter facility.

The transporter technician inclined his large, hairless head. “My lord,” he said dutifully.

Thul didn’t say a thing. But then, he didn’t have to. On his ship, as in the colony he governed, he could do anything he liked.

As he descended from the pentagon, the doors to the room whisked open and Kaavin entered. Tall, slender and elegant, she stopped and inclined her head as well.

“Accompany me,” said Thul.

He walked out into the corridor, Kaavin at his side. Like any good Thallonian second-in-command, she would remain silent until he demanded something of her.

“Report,” the governor told her.

Kaavin glanced at him, all polish and efficiency. “Everything proceeds according to plan, my lord. No one appears to suspect our role in the massacre of the Melacronai colony.”

He nodded. “Good.”

Naturally, he thought, the Melacron had only seen what Thul wanted them to see-a Cordracite warship bearing down on a defenseless research outpost. That was what their sensors had picked up, what their now-deceased master scientist had screamed into her communications system before she was obliterated by the vessel’s energy fire.

Of course, if the Melacron hadn’t been so ill-disposed toward the Cordracites to begin with, they might have been more skeptical of the circumstances surrounding the attack. They might have looked beyond their loathing, beyond their species-hatred, and analyzed the colony’s sensor data with more sophisticated instruments.

If the Melacron had done that, they would surely have been in for a surprise-for they would have discovered that the aggressor vessel’s ion trail was different from the kind left by Cordracite warships. They would have seen, then, that it wasn’t a Cordracite vessel that attacked and destroyed Lir Kirnis and her esteemed colleagues after all, but another kind of ship entirely, its appearance altered to make it seem like a Cordracite vessel.

The Melacron didn’t have the wherewithal to disguise a spacegoing vehicle. Neither did the Cordracites or any other species in the sector. The Thallonians, on the other hand, had perfected magnetic-pulse imaging technology years earlier.

Granted, it was seldom used. But people only saw things where they thought to look for them. And what would the Thallonian Empire have to gain by exacerbating hostilities in the Kellasian sector?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

So instead of insisting on the truth, the Melacron shouted and screamed and raged at the top of their lungs, accusing the hated Cordracites of destroying a colony full of innocents. And the Cordracites, who of course knew they hadn’t