Her gaze seemed to soften as she scanned the remnants of her crew, her disordered red hair catching light from the Romulan monitors. She was taking some care in selecting her words.

"I want to thank everyone on this bridge as well," she said. "Without you, I'd still be holed up in that gul's quarters, waiting for the Romulans to come and drag me out. As long as I live, I'll never forget your loyalty or your courage. And with luck, I'll still be able to reward you for what you've done ... with Dujonian's treasure."

I was touched by Red Abby's words. Judging by the looks on their faces, I'd say my comrades were as well. At that moment, inspired by her grat.i.tude, they would gladly have followed her into h.e.l.l.

Or, at the least, through Hel's Gate.

Corbis, perhaps, was the lone exception to the rule. He stood in the corner, scowling. But if he was less than electrified by his captain's speech, he kept it to himself.

"Now, then," Red Abby went on in a more businesslike tone, "we'll need to a.s.sess damage and make repairs. If we run into another hostile ship, Romulan or otherwise and at this point, it wouldn't surprise me in the least I don't want to get caught with our pants down."

"Nor do I," I replied. "On the other hand, we need some sleep. We've barely shut our eyes in the last two days."

"I agree," said Red Abby.

She set up a schedule of duty a.s.signments. Thadoc and I would eventually take turns at the helm though until I familiarized myself with the Romulan control panel, we would have to work together.

Worf and Dunwoody would switch off at tactical. The remainder of the crew would try to effect repairs as best they could, with at least two teams roaming the warbird at any given time.

Whoever wasn't on duty would find a place to sleep. Whoever was on duty would find something useful to do. There were no exceptions not even Red Abby herself, apparently. To make that clear, she volunteered to begin the first shift by leading a repair squad.

I was pleasantly surprised by the woman's egalitarianism. After all, I had seen her reluctance to cede me the captain's chair even temporarily.

Then again, as I noted earlier, we were no longer on the Daring. We were ensconced aboard a Romulan vessel, with which Red Abby had little familiarity. It made sense for her to help however she could.

"If there's the least sign of trouble," she told Thadoc pointedly, "contact me immediately."

"I will," he a.s.sured her.

Then Red Abby departed with the repair teams, leaving Thadoc, myself, and Worf on the bridge alone. While my lieutenant busied himself running diagnostic routines at tactical, Thadoc taught me what he knew about the Romulan helm console.

As it turned out, it wasn't so different from the Klingon version, which I had come to know in my dealings with the Empire. Nor did the similarity come as a surprise to me.

As you may know, the Klingons and the Romulans were allies for a while, in the middle of the twenty-third century. During this period, they pooled their expertise in a great many areas of military technology, ship design being only one of them.

"It's quite simple, really," Thadoc told me.

I nodded. "Of course, I won't feel comfortable until I've performed some maneuvers myself."

He shrugged. "There's no time like the present. Perform some maneuvers now, if you like."

I took Thadoc up on his offer. Without diverging substantially from our course, I put the warbird through one rigor after another, testing the precision of her steering system and the responsiveness of her engines.

I was pleased with the results. While the Romulan helm looked like its Klingon counterpart, there was no comparison between the two systems in terms of performance. The Romulans had clearly outdistanced their former allies over the last hundred years.

"She turns on a dime," I said.

Thadoc looked at me quizzically.

"An old expression," I explained. "It means she handles well."

He grunted softly. "That, she does."

His eyes lost their focus for a moment. It seemed to me Thadoc was lost in some long-ago memory.

"You served on a warbird," I noted, guessing that that was what he was thinking about.

"I did," he confirmed. "For six years."

"As helmsman?" I asked.

"Eventually," Thadoc told me.

"But you left."

He nodded. "I did indeed."

"Didn't you like it anymore?" I asked.

Thadoc looked at me. "I was good at what I did, make no mistake. Still, I was not held in wide esteem. Perhaps it was the Bolian blood in me, I don't know. A few years ago, shortly after the Klingon Civil War, our warbird ran into a Federation vessel in unaligned s.p.a.ce."

I thought for a moment. "The Potemkin?"

He seemed impressed with my knowledge of the incident. "Yes. In any case, we lost the encounter. My commander needed a scapegoat so he wouldn't have to take the blame himself."

I understood. "And he made you that scapegoat."

"I was accused of incompetence," said Thadoc, "and a failure to heed my commander's orders. All I could do was exercise my right of statement and deny the charges. In the end, it did me no good whatsoever."

"You were sentenced to death?" I asked.

He shook his hairless, blue head. "My commander knew I had done nothing wrong, and he was not entirely without conscience. He saw to it I was sent to a penal colony instead."

"Charitable of him," I commented.

"En route there," said Thadoc, "our transport vessel ran into a subs.p.a.ce anomaly. There was considerable damage to the ship hull breaches and the like. Casualties ran heavy. As luck would have it, most of the survivors were prisoners like myself."

He stopped himself. After a moment, he frowned.

"No," he decided. "They were prisoners but not like myself. The others were violent, desperate men, guilty of the crimes for which they were to be punished. I alone was innocent."

I asked him what happened then. Thadoc told me, dredging up memory after vivid memory.

"The prisoners took over the ship, but it was useless to them. The engines had been damaged irreparably by the anomaly. We couldn't go anywhere. Worse, we discovered a buildup of energies in the artificial singularity that powered the warp drive. You're the captain of a starship; I don't need to tell you what kind of threat that represented."

"You were in danger of being destroyed," I said.

"Precisely," he confirmed. "Fortunately, the buildup was a slow one. We sent out a distress call and hoped for the best. Days went by, with no response. We wondered if our communication equipment had been damaged as well, in some way we couldn't detect."

"Entirely possible," I remarked.

"Time pa.s.sed painfully," said Thadoc, "with no improvement and none in sight. Tempers flared. There were arguments and bloodshed, even among the prisoners. Every day, it seemed, someone was found dead in some corridor. The last of the guards was killed just for spite. And all the while, the singularity grew more and more unstable."

h.e.l.lish, I thought. But I didn't want to interrupt.

"There were several attempts on my life," he noted, "though I kept mostly to myself and offended no one. The first few times, I was able to ward off my a.s.sailants. In time, however, I was forced to kill them to keep them from killing me."

"Then the energies in our power source, which had been building slowly to that point, began to accelerate. If we were lucky, we realized, we had a few hours left. With no possibility of survival and no fear of punishment, my shipmates tore at each other like fiends, their hatreds fueled by the pettiest of slights."

"Except for me. I alone fought to defend myself, though I had no more reason to hope than they did. I sequestered myself on the bridge, which no one else seemed to care about any longer, and endured the sounds of the others slaughtering one another."

"It was fortunate that I was there," said Thadoc, "and not somewhere else, or I might have missed the communication that lit up the tactical console. Apparently, someone had received our distress call and responded. What's more, they were nearly in transporter range."

He looked at me. "It was the Daring."

I nodded. No wonder the helmsman was so loyal. Red Abby had taken him off a doomed ship. She had saved his life, and perhaps his sanity as well.

"At great risk to herself and her vessel," he told me, "the captain transported me off, along with the others who still lived. There were shockingly few of them left."

"Once our injuries were treated, we were invited to tell Red Abby our stories. Mine was the only one she believed. She put off the others at the nearest port of call, giving them a chance to make of themselves what they could. I, on the other hand, was invited to join her crew."

"Unable to return to Romulus, faced with the possibility of having to sign on with someone less scrupulous, I took Red Abby up on her offer. Nor," said Thadoc, "have I ever had reason to regret it."

I smiled. "Not even now? With our numbers depleted and Hel's Gate looming on the horizon?"

He didn't hesitate to answer. "Not even now."

Madigoor PICARD WAS ABOUT to say more ... when something long and green skittered across the table.

Suddenly, the intruder stopped and looked around with almost comical intensity. It was some kind of lizard, it seemed a gecko, unless the captain was mistaken and contrary to his earlier a.s.sessment, it wasn't entirely green after all. In fact, it wore a sprinkling of bright yellow spots.

Bo'tex pushed his chair back, his face twisted with loathing. "What is that?" he demanded.

"It's a gecko," said the Captain of the Kalliope.

Picard nodded. "That's what I thought."

"As I recall," said Robinson, "the little fellows are found in the tropics. And don't worry, Captain Bo'tex. As fearsome as they look, their diet is restricted to insects."

The Caxtonian scowled. "Very funny."

"Where did the thing come from?" asked Dravvin.

"Where indeed?" said Flenarrh. "In all the time I've been patronizing this place, I've never seen anything like it."

"Could it be someone's pet?" asked the Captain of the Kalliope.

"I don't know how else it could've gotten in here," Bo'tex replied.

"That's true," said Robinson. "Unless it's a captain in its own right, and we simply haven't recognized the fact."

Hompaq chuckled. "Too bad it doesn't have a little more meat on its bones. It looks like it would make a tasty snack."

Bo'tex grimaced. "You want to eat it?"

The Klingon grinned. "I'd eat you, my plump friend, if I wasn't loathe to catch your stench."

The Caxtonian harrumphed. "I told you, dammit, it's not a stench it's a mating scent. On my homeworld, other males envy me. They'd kill for a bouquet like mine."

"That may be true on your homeworld," said Hompaq. "Here, people are willing to kill to get away from you."

Bo'tex thrust out his chest. "If my smell is so offensive, why do you put up with me?"

The Klingon bared her teeth. "I have a cold," she told him.

By then, the gecko seemed to have made itself at home. It looked at Picard and blinked.

"It wants to hear the rest of your story," Robinson quipped.

Picard looked at him. "Far be it for me to disappoint a lizard," he said and went on with his tale.

The Tale I WAS STILL testing the operational parameters of the Romulan helm when I received a summons from Red Abby.

I looked up from my console. "Picard here."

"I'm in the commander's quarters," the woman told me. "I need you to take a look at something."

Returning the helm to Thadoc, I left the bridge and took a lift to the deck in question a residental one, apparently. Then I made my way down the corridor to the commander's suite.

The doors opened at my approach, revealing a large room with tan and gray walls, in keeping with the ambiance that characterized the rest of the vessel. There was a triangular mirror set into one wall. On the wall facing, a winged predator clutched two globes, one green and one blue a symbol of the Romulan Empire, which claimed the planets Romulus and Remus as homeworlds.

I didn't see Red Abby right away. It was only after I had looked around for a moment that I found her hunkered unceremoniously between a long Romulan divan and an opening in the wall. A bulkhead panel was lying on the deck beside her, along with the Romulan equivalent of a tricorder.

"You asked to see me?" I said.

She turned away from the cavity in the wall long enough to glance at me. "I'm glad you're here. Come take a look at this."

I knelt beside Red Abby, craned my neck, and glanced into the opening. There was something inside a dark mechanism about the size of my fist lodged in a tangled nest of colored circuitry.

It bore a string of raised characters distinctively Klingon characters, I noted which was, I supposed, why the woman had summoned me to see it instead of Thadoc.

"Do you know what it is?" Red Abby asked.

I nodded. "Those characters form a Klingon phrase: Wa' DevwI' tu'lu. Translation: There is one leader."