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“Truly?” Cretak considered it. “How ironic!”

“What?”

“That I am in training to be a diplomat, yet this is an aspect of diplomacy that I had never considered.”

“There’s a jewel in the bottom of every Pandora’s box.”

“Pandora’s box? What an interesting expression. What does it mean?”

Uhura told her.

Cretak tilted her head like a bird, considering this. “A moral, no doubt. There are many such tales in my culture as well.”

“Which shows we’re more alike than different,” Uhura suggested.

For the first time, the young Romulan smiled. “If only it were that simple!”

“It can be,” Uhura said. “Azetbur and Kirk have just made peace. And so have you and I.”

“And so with that the two of you became lifelong friends,” Curzon suggested dryly.

“Hardly,” Uhura sighed. “You know how they say timing is everything? Just then a whole flock of Andorians came fluttering through the door and, as if we’d rehearsed it, Cretak slipped outside, I checked my hair in the mirror one last time to give her time to put some distance between us, then I went back to join my crewmates.”

Whom she found, just on a hunch, diligently working the buffet, rounding up traitors having had no noticeable effect on their appetites. The only one missing was Spock, whom she couldn’t find at first in the crowded room. Escorting Valeris into custody, Uhura assumed, not wanting to think of what that scene must have been like. It really was a shame. Such a bright young woman, her whole career ahead of her…

Two things happened simultaneously. First, Uhura spied Spock at last, talking rather seriously to a portly Romulan senator at the far side of the room. Among the senator’s staff, most of them female, most of them young, she caught a glimpse of Cretak, who, as if sensing she was being watched, glanced briefly in Uhura’s direction, and as quickly looked away. Or had she been watching her, Uhura wondered, ever since she’d entered the room?

The second thing was that she suddenly found her path blocked by a very tall female officer with captain’s bars whom she didn’t know but who seemed to know her, and who didn’t waste time on formalities.

“Commander Uhura? Unfair of me to stop you on the way to the buffet after the day you’ve had, but a word alone?”

They beamed blind onto a ship whose identity Uhura never did learn but which, judging from the fact that there were only two transporter pads, she surmised to be about the size of a scout or a frigate. The transporter room was empty. So was the small soundproofed briefing room directly off the transporter room, which was all she ever got to see.

Without being invited, she took one of the two chairs on either side of a bare table in the center of the room and watched, fascinated, as the captain, who still hadn’t given her name, ran a hand-held debugging device over the bulkheads (on her own ship?) before she spoke again. In that amount of time, Uhura studied the captain.

Humanoid, but not Earth human. Judging from her pallor and the shape of her skull, possibly a Rhaandarite. Uhura scanned her memory for all the captains whose names she knew, and none of them was a Rhaandarite. Maybe she shouldn’t have accompanied her so readily.

“There’s no need to look for escape routes,” the captain said as if reading her mind, setting the debugger to scramble and putting it on the table between them. “If you can’t trust me, it’s too late now.”

Uhura said nothing, just watched and waited. The captain produced two porcelain mugs and a thermos from somewhere, and took the chair on the other side of the table.

“I’ll make this simple. Before the night is over, the command crew of Enterprise will be formally debriefed on the events of the past twenty-four hours, but I’m due elsewhere by then, and I wanted to talk to you personally before I left. We’ve had a listen to your conversation with the Klingons on the way to Rura Penthe-and yes, against orders, in violation of treaty, et cetera-and, no, this time you’re not in trouble. Command’s