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Lt. Commander Duffy had ordered them all to come up here to evaluate their options. The catwalk by the fusion reactor was not ideal for that, and Duffy felt that they all needed a change of scene in any case. Nog found he couldn’t argue, which numbered it among the few things Duffy had said for which that was the case. Nog used to think highly of the S.C.E.—and they certainly handled themselves decently against these Androssi saboteurs—but the Ferengi was well and truly sick of their condescending attitude toward him. As if somehow he wasn’t worthy to be considered a real engineer because he wasn’t part of the hallowed Corps.

Robins and Friesner had beamed back to the da Vinci, along with the two Androssi prisoners. Corsi, Drew, and Eddy remained behind, and were presently standing at the upper level of ops. Stevens, P8 Blue, Soloman, and Duffy were seated around the table with Nog.

“All right, people,” Duffy said, “I want options and I want them now, and I don’t care how ridiculous they seem.”

“Can we not fix the structural integrity field?” Soloman asked.

P8 Blue gave a low-pitched tinkling sound, which, Nog noted, differed from other, like sounds the Nasat made. He wondered what the differences among them were. “Not unless you have Cardassian emitters in your pocket, Soloman. We don’t have replicator patterns for them, and I doubt we’d be able to get Cardassia to ship us some new ones.”

“Even if they could,” Stevens added, “it’d probably take over a week to get here, and several more days to get the thing up to snuff.”

“We don’t have that kind of time,” Nog said anxiously. “Captain Gold just heard from DS9—we have ten days at the most before we’ll have to abandon the station.”

“We know that, Lieutenant,” Duffy said in what the human probably thought was a soothing voice, but which only served to annoy Nog more.

“Can’t you put it in a force field?” Corsi asked.

Duffy shook his head. “Not and tow it at warp, no. And if we stick with sublight, it’ll take a helluva lot more than ten days to get there.”

“Maybe,” Stevens said, “if we use the runabout’s warp engines—create a static warp bubble around the core so it can handle the force field.”

Blue repeated the low-pitched tinkle. “With the SIF in the shape it’s in, the stresses of the warp bubble would rip it to pieces.”

Nog watched as the four engineers threw ideas back and forth, each more incredible than the last. Each suggestion seemed to top the last in being overly complicated and difficult to engineer—almost as if they were taking Duffy’s admonition about ridiculousness to heart—or would require considerably more than the ten days they had left to them.

Then, suddenly, it came to him. An idea more ridiculous than anything the S.C.E. crew had said.

“. . . but there’s no way we could construct a sub-quark resonator for that,” Stevens was saying.

“Besides,” Blue added, “those things only work about half the time anyhow. They’re mostly untested.”

“Okay, that’s out,” Duffy said.

Finally, Nog thought, a lull. “Why don’t we just move the whole station?”

Everyone looked at Nog.

“I beg your pardon?” Duffy said after about five seconds of silence.

“Move the whole station. Get a bunch of ships to tractor it at warp to the Bajoran system.” Already, Nog was imagining the possibilities in his head. In retrospect, he should have thought of this in the first place. Empok Nor was, after all, the perfect place for spare parts for Deep Space 9. They could stick it in orbit somewhere—maybe around Bajor or one of its moons—and have a permanent storage locker. Not to mention a testing place for new upgrades . . .

“Uh, Nog, if I’m remembering right,” Stevens said, “DS9 is about fifteen hundred meters by three hundred seventy meters—and this place has the same dimensions, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to tow it at warp?” Duffy asked, incredulous.

“Low warp, but it can be done.” He thought for a moment. “We’d need twelve ships. One on each pylon and six around the docking ring.”

“They’d all need to be the same general size and class,” Blue said. “If not,