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Duffy nodded. “Okay. Take a look at the station computer, see if you can figure out what they’ve done to it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Stevens thought about that incident on Blossom IV—the Beast, they’d nicknamed that massive ship that had fought the Enterprise to a standstill and whose uninvited insectoid inhabitants had killed 111. It had been a near thing that they weren’t all decapitated by those things.

P8 Blue then skittered over on all eights. “I have an idea, sir.”

“Good, we could use one,” Duffy said dryly. “The field was disrupted with a level-4, low-frequency phaser blast. The problem is, we can’t just fire on it without risking hitting the core once it’s disrupted.”

“We know all that, Pattie.”

Then something occurred to Stevens, and he went back to the console.

“Right,” Pattie said, “but what I’m thinking is that we can set up one of the rifles to emit a pulse at that level and frequency that would dissipate on impact no matter what.”

“It’s certainly worth a shot—if you’ll pardon the pun,” Duffy added with a smile.

“That’s it!” Stevens cried.

“What is it, Fabe?” Duffy asked.

“I was trying to figure out why these modifications look so familiar. The Androssi have added their own wrinkle to this stuff, but it looks like the same kind of tech that we found on the Beast.”

“The Beast?” Nog asked.

“An alien ship the Enterprise came across,” Duffy said quickly. “We crawled around its guts before we had to blow it up. It was huge, about a thousand times the size of a Sovereign-class ship—more like a planet. Had some pretty nasty weaponry, too, as I recall.”

Pattie was looking at another console. “I think you’re right, Stevens,” she said. “Once you compensate for the dimensional shift the Androssi always use, the match is pretty close.”

“Great, so the Androssi came across a Beast of their own,” Duffy said with a sigh.

“Maybe it was even the same one,” Stevens said, “and they just copied the tech.”

Nog let out a small noise, then said, “It doesn’t matter! We need to find a way to get around it!”

The Ferengi seemed particularly anxious. Stevens remembered that the kid was always a bit high-strung. Then again, with Rom as his father and Quark as his uncle, he could hardly be otherwise. And he’s not a “kid,” he’s a lieutenant.

“Easy, Nog,” he said aloud, “we’ll find a way through it.”

Pattie had gone back to modifying Eddy’s phaser rifle. The security guard, in turn, was pacing the catwalk with a hand phaser.

Stevens, meanwhile, started doing a more detailed scan of the modifications. Now that he knew what he was looking at, he was able to ask the computer the right questions—even this somewhat more limited Cardassian computer. It had been a couple of years since he had to deal with the eccentricities of Cardassian systems, and he hadn’t missed it all that much.

“Modifications are done,” Pattie said, clambering up onto her hind legs while hefting the phaser. She handed it to Eddy. “Would you like to do the honors, Claire?”

Eddy smiled. “Happy to do it.”

Okay, Stevens thought as he ran through the scan, the parts up on the pylons are in the same spot as where we put the weapons upgrades on DS9. No, wait, the ones on the lower pylons are different. Weird. But it looks like—

Oh boy.

Eddy fired her phaser at the fusion core—or, more accurately, at the mesh surrounding it. Stevens noted that it looked like the Defiant’s pulse weapons rather than the standard beam one got from a handheld phaser. It did, however, seem to have the desired effect—the mesh surrounding the fusion core disrupted and then disappeared, but the beam did not continue through to damage the core.

“Yes!” Nog cried, pumping his fist.

“Good work, Pattie,” Duffy said with a grin.

“Uh, Duff?” Stevens said, hating to dampen everyone’s enthusiasm with what he just figured out.

“Yeah, Fabe?” “I think I know what they’ve done here. I’d kinda like you and Soloman to check it over, though.”

Duffy went to the console to examine his findings. Soloman was still