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“Your snout is obviously well acquainted with the dungheaps from which those blowflies take their nourishment,” Brooks said with a polite nod, delivering what she’d hoped was the equivalent of a polite verbal curtsy. “But I am gratified to see that your interest in insect mating habits has not kept you too busy to continue making your rounds across the far reaches of Coalition space.”

“I have a business to run,” Shav harrumphed. “The freight must get through.”

“Even though Romulan ships have recently started stepping up their attacks on freighters and convoys all over the sector?”

“Profits often increase as a function of danger. This is one such time.”

“So you’re saying that the only effect the war has had on you is to increase your business?”

Shav bared his white, tusk-like teeth. “What war? It might look like a war from beneath the mud puddles where most of your race hides, but out here the Romulans don’t seem to be any more troublesome than the occasional band of pirates have proved to be.”

Brooks had conducted enough interviews to recognize high-octane bullshit when she smelled it; bluster, after all, was nearly as important to the Tellarite cultural identity as were insults.

“Really? Even after Calder II and Tarod IX became Romulan military bases in Coalition space?”

Shav waved a three-fingered hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Faugh. Your Vulcan friends have outfitted all the Coalition systems with their warp-field detection devices. And once they finished with that, they set up detectors in so many of the outlying systems that the Romulans can’t so much as sneeze without somebody hearing them.”

“So you’re not worried.”

Shav leaned forward and grinned lasciviously. “Worrying might etch unattractive lines onto my face.”

Brooks answered with a polite sneer. Then a high-pitched squeal stepped on her verbal rejoinder, startling her off her futon in the process. The sound reminded her of the unearthly ululations made by the hog callers at a rural county fair she had attended as a child.

It wasn’t until Shav had got his stubby legs beneath him and had walked over to a communications panel mounted on the wall that she realized the sound had signaled an incoming message.

“What?” Shav barked once he’d shut off the com squeal.

“Come to the bridge, Captain,” one of Shav’s subordinates growled in annoyed tones.

“Why?!” said the captain, sounding unhappy.

“We’ve received a distress call from a ship adrift near the Terran colony world of Deneva. Several sentients are aboard, most of them injured. All are human.”

Shav tossed both of his blunt, stumpy hands into the air in frustration. “Faugh. Let the military handle it. What the hell am I paying taxes for anyway if I have to do their job as well as my own?”

“The ship is rapidly losing atmosphere, Captain. The nearest military ship is still hours away. But we could be there in minutes.”

Shav scowled, and Brooks thought she could see some of the worry lines that the captain had sought to prevent creasing the visible portions of his already wrinkled face.

“Why in the Great Sty are they losing atmosphere?” the Tellarite captain said.

“According to the distress call, they barely escaped a mass attack on Deneva.”

“An attack by whom?”

“Romulans, Captain.”

Shav’s scowl only deepened, along with those beauty-spoiling worry lines. He paused to scratch his flat, porcine nose as he stared at the wall speaker, obviously turning the matter over in his mind.

Brooks could certainly understand Shav’s reluctance to dive headfirst into a hot spot in the Romulan-human conflict. To a large extent she shared it. But for the sake of her fellow humans, she hoped that Shav wouldn’t succumb to the impulse to “chicken out” right in front of her.

Hoping that he would take from her next words the encouragement she intended, she said, “It’s a lucky thing for us humans that you don’t find the Romulans to be all that troublesome.”

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