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Also ignoring him, Duffy said, “Keep your people on alert, and I’ll let Captain Gold know, but we don’t need more security down here.” He smiled. “There’s too many people on this catwalk as it is.”

“Excuse me,” Nog almost shouted.

“What is it, Lieutenant?” Duffy asked.

“Sir, I have already laid out a plan for the extraction of the core and the transporting of it to DS9. If you’ll just—”

Again, Duffy put his hand on Nog’s shoulder. Nog was sorely tempted to brush it off. “Look, Lieutenant, I appreciate you wanting to look good to your superiors, but don’t worry about it. We’re pros. We do this sort of thing every day. We’ll have your core out before you know it. Just sit back and watch us go at it, okay?”

He then turned his back on Nog and went to talk to the Bynar.

I don’t believe this. I spent days on this, and they’re just blowing it off. Who do they think they are?

Before Nog could say anything, though, he heard a strange noise. It was fairly high-pitched, and seemed to be coming from behind him. “What’s that noise?”

Duffy frowned. “I don’t hear anything.”

Nog closed his eyes and focused in on the sound. “It’s over—there!”

He pointed right where Frnats was pacing on the catwalk. She walked a step closer to the edge of the catwalk—

—and then the noise grew louder, energy crackled around her, and suddenly what appeared to be a giant brown mesh appeared in the air.

The Bolian went flying across the catwalk toward Hawkins.

Nog peered at the mesh. It seemed to be covering the entire fusion core. The strands of the mesh were about twenty centimeters wide with small square holes. It was brown, and Nog noticed that it seemed to be—well, flowing. Almost as if it were a running body of water.

What was most fascinating was that the mesh didn’t project out from a source, the way, say, a Starfleet force field could be seen to emanate from emitters in bulkheads. It was simply there, as if it had always been.

“The Androssi.” Corsi, Duffy, and Stevens all said it simultaneously—the security chief with a tone of anger, the engineers with more of an “ohnonot-again” attitude.

Although Nog had heard of the Androssi, he couldn’t recall much at the moment. There wasn’t time to try to dredge the memory in any case, as another high-pitched sound came from the middle of the catwalk, and another form materialized there.

It was the same shade of brown, and shaped like a ball about a meter in diameter. Its surface also seemed to be flowing.

“Androssi Protocol 1, now,” Corsi said, and fired her own phaser. It fired at, of all things, level 2, which was a light stun setting. Nog stared incredulously at the security chief.

However, the other three standing guards followed suit and fired.

Amazingly enough, the ball seemed to disrupt for a moment, fading in and out. Then it came back into existence and arcs of electricity shot out at each of the guards.

Corsi, Drew, and Lipinski managed to duck out of the way, but Hawkins was still standing near Frnats’s prone form, and so was unable to avoid the attack.

“They’ve upgraded,” Drew said grimly.

“Protocol 2,” Corsi said, without missing a beat. Nog ran over to where Hawkins and Frnats were now lying on the catwalk, the former twitching. He hadn’t come armed, but the Bolian wasn’t using her phaser rifle anymore, and Nog hadn’t spent the Dominion War fighting—and losing his leg—in order to stand and watch a fight now.

The Nasat and the Bynar did likewise, the former grabbing Hawkins’s phaser, the latter checking the two guards with his tricorder.

Protocol 2, based on what the Nasat did with Hawkins’s phaser, involved putting the phaser on random mode. All phasers created after Starfleet’s first encounter with the Borg a decade earlier were able to randomly change settings and frequencies.

Okay, so obviously these guys have faced this Androssi security device before, Nog deduced as he changed the settings on his phaser.

As Nog joined the others in firing at random settings on the device and ducking to avoid the bolts of electrical energy that shot around the catwalk, Duffy tapped