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Picard looked down at the small bundle of remotes he carried. They seemed innocent as they lay in the crook of his arm, small bundles of circuitry inside casings. But they were deadly.

“In ten minutes, I want you and LaForge to be on the bridge. This has gone far enough.”

The words chimed through the ship, right through the cloth of silence and darkness they’d swathed around themselves, saying quite plainly that the phenomenon was going to have to deal with the captain now.

Before entering the bridge, Picard quietly and privately plugged his remotes into their proper places in the control layout deep within the bridge maintenance loop, a thin corridor of computer access boards behind the actual walls of the bridge itself. Here, new systems were built into the bridge systems, the great hands of the starship, working all the instructions put to it from the gigantic computer core running through the primary hull.

Picard made use of those access boards now, tying them all in to one single button on the arm of his command chair. He had thought about using a code that he could key in from anywhere on the ship, but at last dismissed the idea and created an actual button to be pushed. And in that one place-the command chair. If he was going to put his finger down on destiny, he would be in his rightful place, at the head of this majestic ship, when he did it.

He stalked back onto the bridge, noticeably somber, and into the audience of expectant faces. Riker. LaForge. Troi. Wesley Crusher. Worf. And others, especially those manning the positions he might have expected to see Data manning. The Ops controls or Science 2. He missed the gold-leaf face and the gently innocuous expression. He missed it a great deal. His deep rage grew.

“I’m glad you’re all here,” he said ceremoniously, approaching his command chair. This time, however, he didn’t reach out and casually touch it as he might have otherwise. This time the chair itself was a source of raw power, and he didn’t want to give anything away. “I want to know what you’ve concluded, what our options are, how we can best deal with this invasion. If we have to drain this starship of every last volt and every last moving molecule, we’ll do it. That thing out there has already cost the life of one of us; it will take no more of us. It isn’t going any farther into the galaxy. We’re stopping it here and now.”

Deanna Troi let her eyes drift shut, so deep was her relief and gratitude. Picard saw her reaction and understood it so clearly that he might as well have been the Betazoid. When she raised her head and opened her eyes, they were glazed with tears and she was almost smiling-but then the smile dropped away and her eyes filled with perplexity. She saw into his heart now, he could tell, saw the knowledge and the determination that were foremost in his mind, unhidden from her probing thoughts, saw the remotes now engaged into certain circuits that would carry a certain message to a dozen locations in the lower structures of the ship and do the kind of thing captains thought of only in moments of supreme desperation. She stared at him, then looked down, at the arm of the command chair, at the small patch of controls that tied the captain’s own touch into his ship. And that single blue pressure point, like a poker chip. She knew. Picard watched her, without offering either reassurance or a request for her silence. She would be silent, he knew. They understood one another now.

Riker stepped forward-not exactly a surprise.

“We’re going to chase it down?” he asked.

“We’re going to kill it, Mr. Riker.”

The first officer paused, his lips compressing, then said, “That’s not like you, sir.”

Picard knew what was behind Riker’s eyes and that dubious tilt to his head, and he looked right at him now. “Isn’t it? Is it more like me to allow that marauder to wander the galaxy freely, sucking up more lives?”

That moment saw a charge of excitement. Even Riker realized suddenly how long he’d been waiting