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Damn. I did it again, didn’t I? Dax thought. Nervous and anxious, he started chewing the cuticle of his right thumb, but stopped himself as soon as he noticed he was once again doing something that others would see as socially awkward. He constantly had to remind himself not to let his interactions with others get carried away on the wings of his obsessions, as hard as that was during times of stress; as his Symbiosis Commission counselor had pointed out on multiple occasions, it was always better to start a conversation with a flashy card trick instead of a detailed analysis of Andrew Wiles’s proof of Pierre de Fermat’s final theorem.

Sports, he thought. Sports is always a good topic. Aloud he said, “How about that documentary on the London Kings’ last season?”

Both Skon and Pell stared back at him blankly. And neither of them appeared to be in the mood for a card trick. Tough room.

“All right, Tobin,” Underhill said finally, shaking his gray head with a sigh. “I guess that’s enough small talk for now. Can I assume that you’ve already read the packet Captain Jefferies sent us?”

“The terminal in my apartment is not secure,” Dax said, shaking his head. “So I haven’t seen any of the technical specs yet. All I know so far is that Stillwell and Jefferies want us to drop everything for the moment. What I don’t know yet is why, or what they’re expecting us to do instead.” With the Romulans having already gotten to within striking distance of Alpha Centauri, perhaps rendering Earth, or even Trill itself, vulnerable to invasion, Dax was hard-pressed to imagine anything more urgent at the moment than the crash warp-seven-drive program to which he had already devoted most of the past year of his life.

Skon steepled his fingers contemplatively. “Develop a countermeasure to a weapon that the Romulans have already deployed against Coalition vessels on a number of occasions.”

“A weapon that has the apparent capability of seizing control of Coalition ships remotely,” the human physicist added in a tone far graver than any Dax had ever heard him use before.

Dax rarely paid much attention to the news other than its broad outlines, such was his obsession with the technical minutiae of his job. He recognized immediately that the weapon his colleagues were describing must have been the cause of the attack on a local commercial convoy about half a year ago—an attack that only the timely intervention of the Starship Columbia and several Vulcan military vessels had averted.

Dax was finally beginning to understand the urgency of the matter— just as he recognized the likelihood that he would be of little use to Starfleet’s countermeasure efforts. “My specialties are propulsion related,” he said, dejected. “I’m good with phase coil inverters and any other engine component from warp cores on down to subimpulse thrusters. I’m not sure what Jefferies and Stillwell expect me to contribute.”

“Captain Jefferies has just completed a detailed analysis of data submitted from the field,” Underhill continued, sidestepping Dax’s objection. “It came from a number of sources, including the tactical officer aboard Enterprise, a Lieutenant Reed.”

“Enterprise,” Dax said, nodding. He recalled that some of the unsung transporter-beam collimation enhancements upon which he and Skon had collaborated several years ago had been integrated into Doctor Erickson’s basic design, eventually ending up in general use aboard Enterprise and her sister starships.

Skon stepped gracefully into the human physicist’s pause. “Shortly after the attacks that destroyed the freighter Kobayashi Maru, Lieutenant Reed noticed something that has since been corroborated by field data supplied by both the Tellarites and the Andorians following Romulan attacks that destroyed some of their most advanced vessels. The use of the Romulan remote-control weapon causes certain subtle but detectable changes in a ship’s computer hardware, as well as in various related systems.”

“Including propulsion,” Underhill said. “That fact ought to give us a leg up on shoring