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He stood up to his full height, not intending to intimidate, simply prepared to refuse the assignment and leave. He hadn’t counted on having the wind knocked out of his sails by The Look.

“I want to tell you, Commander, it was the expression on your face more than the phaser that backed me into that closet,” Lieutenant Heisenberg had told her a lifetime ago, Spock’s lifetime to be precise, when she had volunteered to man the most remote transport station in the Sol System in order to help Kirk and company steal Enterprise out of Spacedock and bring Spock’s katra home.

“What are you talking about?” she’d said, suppressing a chuckle, though she knew darn well.

She’d been hoping to have the station to herself that night, but not a half hour before Kirk and Sulu broke McCoy out of the loony bin and stormed out of the turbolift onto the transporter pads, this big galoot had shown up.

“Heisenberg, Scott, here to assist you, ma’am,” he’d said, fuzz-faced, tall, and gangly, with a knack for putting his foot in his mouth.

“I don’t need any assistance, Lieutenant.” She’d frowned. The duty roster had indicated this to be a one-man station. Did someone upstairs suspect something? All of Kirk’s crew had felt Command’s eyes on them since leaving Spock behind on Genesis. Had Heisenberg been sent to keep an eye on her? “I’m supposed to be assigned here alone. There must be some mistake.”

Heisenberg, meanwhile, had been sizing up his new assignment. “Oh, this is great, just great! I wonder whose toes I stepped on to get relegated to this dump?”

“Do you frequently step on people’s toes, Mr. Heisenberg?” Uhura pretended to busy herself with a Level-1 diagnostic, probably the first one these battered controls had had in ages. She wished the big lunk would sit down and stop prowling around. Everything depended on timing. If Scotty and Chekov had infiltrated Enterprise by now, if Kirk and the others showed up on time, every second she spent trying to sidetrack her unwanted assistant could put the mission in jeopardy.

She’d secreted a phaser under the edge of her console when she came on duty, just in case. Just in case of what, she hadn’t been sure, but anyone trying to stop Kirk from getting to Enterprise once he was here would have to get through her first. She contemplated the back of Heisenberg’s head and wondered if she could just stun him while he wasn’t looking. Just then he finished scowling at the charred and battered walls and swung around toward her.

“Yeah, that’s me. Open mouth, change feet. Bad enough they used to call me Uncertainty back in the Academy-you know, as in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?” he’d explained, and this time Uhura almost did burst out laughing. “- but bad luck follows me everywhere. Not that I mind being here with you, ma’am, a Starfleet legend and all that, but-“

“Well then, why don’t you light somewhere before you trip over those feet as well?” she asked him. Nothing made her feel older than when the younger generation started that Starfleet legend nonsense. “Since you’re here, you may as well help me with this diagnostic.”

He’d parked himself in the empty chair at the duty station, but made no effort to assist her. Then he’d made that remark about her career winding down, and she’d frozen him in his tracks with what would become known as the Uhura Look.

It wasn’t much. Just a pause for about the length of a breath while she stopped whatever she was doing and slid her eyes sideways under those long eyelashes, fixed her victim with them, and raised her head slightly, as if to say “I know you didn’t say what I just heard you say.”

She’d sworn she could hear Heisenberg’s jaw snap shut. She would have liked to see how long that would last, but then Jim Kirk had burst through the door, giving Heisenberg something else to think about.

Months later, after Spock had been restored, and they’d saved the whales and Earth in the bargain, and the flood waters had receded and the “Trial of the Enterprise Seven,” as the media dubbed it, was over, she’d run into Heisenberg in