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He kissed her then, and for a long time neither of them said anything.

“You said yourself you don’t know where you want to go in your career,” she murmured later, snuggled against his shoulder. “Maybe this mission will help show you the way.”

“I just miss you,” he said, much calmer, settling down toward sleep at last. “Even when I’m with you, I miss you.”

“A man obsessed!” Jennifer repeated with a smile. She waited until his deep breathing told her he’d gone to sleep before she too closed her eyes.

The next morning, Benjamin Sisko scooped Jake up in a bear hug and danced him around the room.

“And how is Captain Jake this morning?”

“Going to kiddergarten!” Jake announced seriously in spite of being spun around and in grave danger of being tickled.

The elder Sisko stopped spinning and matched Jake’s seriousness with his own.

“Kiddergarten, eh? That’s a very important assignment,” he said, lowering Jake to the floor. “Are you fully prepared, Captain?”

Jake stood up as tall as he could. “Aye, sir!”

“Well, then, we’d better get you there at warp speed!” Sisko announced, scooping him up again and carrying him out of the kitchen at a run, amid much whooping and giggling.

Chapter 8

She’ll never get out of dock! was Sisko’s first thought. As he brought the shuttlepod around to view the ship in all her ugly entirety, he tried not to let his despair show on his face.

She was a merchanter, of a class that he thought had been decommissioned nearly a century before, mainly because its designers, desperate to maximize interior space for cargo, had routed far too much of her workings to the exterior, making her vulnerable not only to weapons fire, but even to casual space debris.

She looked like a gigantic horseshoe crab, her engine nacelles tapering aft from the curve of the forward hull into ridiculously narrow finials which, Sisko recalled from a tech manual subheading on how not to design a ship, also doubled as weapons ports. Now there was a brilliant idea! Run your plasma weapons off the same outtake conduits as your matter/antimatter flux and hope every time you fire you don’t blow yourself up in the process. But Sisko assumed the weapons had been deactivated, possibly even removed, for the sake of cover. They were supposed to be peaceful merchants dealing in dry goods and machine parts, not the contraband runners these ships were clearly designed for. Somehow the distinction didn’t cheer him.

Sisko maneuvered the pod under the hulk’s keel, shaking his head in dismay at the number of conduits, holding tanks, and jury-rigged components he could identify, right out there in the open. Talk about a soft underbelly! A kid with a slingshot could damage this ship. It was a flying bomb. Couldn’t Starfleet have done better? Or was that the point-to make this ship seem so hopeless she wasn’t worth investigating?

“Permission to speak candidly, Mr. Sisko,” Uhura said quietly beside him. She’d been watching the play of emotions on his expressive face, and could sense the steam rising under his collar.

“Those stabilizers have seen better days, Admiral,” Sisko remarked tightly, containing himself, his expert eye noticing hairline fractures that would have to be sealed before this thing went anywhere. “And if I had the time and the resources, I’d customize the retro bafflers and do something about streamlining her prow.”

“But since you have neither, you’ll make do,” Uhura said dryly. “You also don’t want to defeat the purpose of this mission by making this thing look like anything other than a hunk of junk. Which, as you’ve obviously surmised, is what it’s meant to be. We want any Romulan who picks her up on long-range and comes alongside for a look to dismiss her as not worth getting his hands dirty. Shall we go aboard?”

It took Sisko a moment to find the docking port amid all the shadows and odd angles and, once he did, he eased the pod up to it as gently as he could, as if afraid a sudden jolt would cause the entire ship to cave in and disintegrate into flakes of rust. Not