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It only now occurred to him that there was no way they could bring the ship home with them. Okinawa could hardly tow her all the way home, and even under full power, it would take her far too long to limp out of the Zone in her present condition, unarmed, and with the Romulans now alerted to her presence. The contingency plans they’d had in place to protect Heisenberg’s little modifications from prying eyes would have to be enacted, and Sisko would have to be the one to enact them.

“Dr. Heisenberg’s going to be heartbroken,” Sisko said disconsolately, closing the channel.

“Are you in need of assistance?” Tuvok asked. His carry-bag slung over one shoulder, the orchid balanced precariously atop the case of datachips, he was prepared to leave without so much as a glance backward.

“Negative,” Sisko said as Selar and Zetha also arrived, ready for transport. “You all go on ahead. I need to initiate an antimatter breach. And I’d like a minute alone to tell the old girl goodbye.”

He watched first Selar and Zetha, then Tuvok shimmer away in the transporter beam, then went aft to work his magic. When the ship blew, it had to look from the Romulan point of view as if it were an accident. He had no doubt they realized they’d damaged the port nacelle. All he had to do was make them think the damage was enough to cause the antimatter pods to lose their magnetic containment, causing the antimatter to release, interact with the normal matter, and annihilate the vessel structure.

Sisko implemented the sequence just as he’d learned it in reverse at the Academy. He estimated he had about three minutes to get clear before she blew, and hurried to the sleeping quarters for his kit.

Tuvok had left the Romulan transmitter behind.

They had the datachips as evidence, not to mention Zetha. Sisko had overheard Curzon’s agreement with the Romulans to ignore the two transmitters if she ignored Albatross. There probably wasn’t any reason to bring this transmitter along, but for some reason Sisko couldn’t get his mind off it.

Just then he felt the tractor beam release. Okinawa was about to put some distance between herself and the doomed Albatross, he had less than a minute left, and he’d better get moving.

“Okinawa to Albatross,” he heard Leyton saying tightly. “Let’s go, Ben, let’s go!”

Koval watched the starship moving away from the disabled freighter, then watched the freighter implode. Minutes before tactical had informed him that the starship had lowered her shields and made use of her transporter, not once but three times, the third time several minutes after the first two. Koval would study the data later and decide whether he believed the intercepted comm signals, or whether the ship had been destroyed deliberately. Why did he care? he asked himself. Doubtless whoever had beamed onto the starship had taken their evidence with them. Still Koval was not overly concerned. He had enough fallback positions to erase all trace of his involvement in this venture once he returned home. Didn’t he? For possibly the first time in his career, Koval was visited with a little trickle of doubt.

Just his luck that the only ship available to bring him here had been commanded by one of the few officers in the Imperial Fleet who had the intestinal fortitude to defy his order to destroy the freighter and damn the consequences.

What bothered Koval most was how the ungainly little freighter, followed by the starship, had known to come to Renaga. They must have had far more to go on than Cinchona/Thamnos’s sloppy academic paper touting hilopon. Had the idiot’s father blabbed?

That thought led Koval to another uneasy thought: He would have to notify the old man personally that his son was dead and, if necessary, instruct him to remain silent. An unpleasant duty, but one he must perform.

And as he knew his Rigelians, he doubted the lockjawed Papaver had talked. There was something here he wasn’t seeing. What was it?

Leaving the warbird’s bridge, where Tal’s relief, a sardonic old veteran who had lost family to the