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“The system won’t let me, sir. It’s locked me out!” Rubin banged a fist against the console, apparently causing more damage to himself than to anything else.

“Clever bastards,” Commander Granger said from the tactical officer’s other side. “Why should they attack Andoria solo, when they can force an ally to do it with them in tandem?”

Though dismayed, Dunsel wasn’t completely surprised by this development. He’d been briefed about the Romulan hijack-weapon, though he had always frankly doubted how such a thing could be possible. How could any highly invasive, communications-based weapon, no matter how sophisticated, simultaneously seize every system aboard one of Earth’s most advanced starships? Even now, it just didn’t seem possible. Eager to put that idea to the test, he pressed one of the glowing buttons on the right arm of his command chair and examined the backup digital display that came up in response.

With a grin born of gallows humor, he noted that at least one system seemed to remain beyond the Romulans’ reach, at least for the moment. This system had been installed only weeks earlier, during Challenger’s most recent repair layover at the Proxima Centauri yards. So far as he knew, Challenger was the only ship in the fleet to have received this particular systems upgrade; not even Columbia or Enterprise was so equipped.

Dunsel’s fear that the Romulans might figure out what he was doing in time to put a stop to it neatly canceled out his apprehension about what lay ahead. Buoyed by a renewed sense of purpose, Roy Dunsel pressed another button, then quickly began keying in a sequence of commands.

U.S.S. Yorktown

Still maintaining his vigil at the helm, Mayweather listened to the reports coming in from around the bridge with increasing frustration.

The nearly four minutes that still separated Yorktown from her sister ship and her attacker might as well have been an eternity.

“Challenger is flying in a tandem orbit with the Romulan carrier,” Albertson was saying. “Defenders are scrambling up from the surface, as well as from inner-planet bases and other points in the system, but that Romulan ship could devastate a huge swath of the planet’s surface in the meantime.”

“Why haven’t they done it already?” Mendez said. “Their weapons read hot.”

“Apparently,” Shosetsu said, “because the Romulans have been too busy seizing control of Challenger to do much of anything else yet.”

Like the Romulan ship, Challenger’s weapons tubes were reading hot, even at this distance.

They’re going to use Challenger as a weapon against Andoria, Mayweather thought, horrified. Captain Dunsel won’t be able to do anything except sit on his bridge and watch as his own ship does the Romulans’ dirty work for them. Mayweather wondered how it would feel to be in charge and yet be so helpless, so useless, against such an insidious enemy. Even his own frustrating inability to stop the Romulans had to be almost trivial in comparison.

Could that have been the way Captain Archer felt, he asked himself, when he was trying to decide whether or not to rescue the Kobayashi Maru?

Challenger

The bridge was silent as a tomb and very nearly as dark. Though his sweat-slickened hands shook more than a little, Dunsel typed in the penultimate code-sequence slowly and deliberately.

This procedure would be a lot easier if it could be done with voice commands. Maybe someone would take to heart his own suggestion to that effect, made in his hastily recorded final log entry, before Starfleet released version 2.0 of the software. If, of course, the log buoy had the good fortune to be blown clear of the ship intact instead of being destroyed outright in the coming conflagration.

Of course, it would be best if the first vessel to test out this new system also turned out to be the last, though Dunsel knew this was hardly likely.

The final command prompt came up on the tiny screen on the arm of the captain’s command chair. In response to Granger’s grim concurring nod,