“THE DAMASCUS CONFIRMS RECEIPT of the cargo,” R’Lash said.

M’Rill breathed a sigh of relief. Between the scurrying around the outskirts of the Tezel-Oroko system and the captain’s latest increase in the temperature on the bridge, it had been a very long day. The Caitian pilot tried not to let his jaw hang too far open while he panted to cool himself. He glanced at his navigation panel and took note as the Damascus jumped back to warp speed, headed to Tezwa.

Captain Trenigar stood and stretched with a growl. His fanged outer jaws spread apart, and then twitched slightly. “Dammit, R’Lash!” he bellowed. “We’re flying empty!”

“We just made a fortune,” the first officer said. “I think we can afford it.”

Trenigar swatted the Barzan woman in the face with his open hand. “Stupid lovaach!” She recoiled as he continued, “Never fly empty! It just burns money!”

The enormous Nausicaan’s bootsteps clanged heavily on the deck as he stepped toward the door. “Set course to Ajilon,” he said. “Get us a new contract or get yourself another job.” He walked out the door, which closed behind him.

R’Lash reached up and reset the environmental controls to their default status. Cool air washed through the room like a wave of forgiveness. “Stupid liknul,” she muttered. M’Rill watched her fall into Trenigar’s seat with a heavy fwump. She slumped lazily in the big chair, her elbows propped up on its armrests. “Helm, set course for Ajilon.”

“Aye, sir,” M’Rill said. He plotted the course, confirmed it, and jumped the Caedera to near-maximum warp. All around him, the well-traveled merchantman resounded with the deep, hearty pulse of its well-maintained warp engines. Turning to face R’Lash, he said, “Mind if I get dinner?”

R’Lash waved her hand lazily, as if shooing away an insect. “Go,” she mumbled. “Bring me back something.”

He activated the autopilot and stood up. “It’s Nolram’s day running the mess.”

“Never mind, then.” She aimed her sullen glare at the viewscreen full of warp-streaked stars. M’Rill hoped that her fast might lead to a fortunate accident for Trenigar. I’m sure all the best mutinies were plotted on empty stomachs, he mused.

He left the bridge without saying another word. At the end of the corridor, he carefully eased into the null-gravity tube and grasped the ladder rungs. With a push, he glided downward.

As he passed the berthing deck, he heard the savage, animal wailing and frenzied grunting of Nolram and Saff violating each other, not as an expression of affection but as a desperate response to the tedium of shipboard life. Listening to Nolram’s steady stream of Zibalian vulgarities, M’Rill sighed dejectedly. If today was Nolram’s turn to bed Saff, then M’Rill’s turn wasn’t for another three days, after Gorul and then R’Lash. Saff’s strict schedule of rotation gave their couplings a kind of drab institutional feeling, but its inherent fairness more than compensated for its lack of spontaneity.

With the raging howls of xenocoitus still echoing from two decks above, he bounded out onto the engineering deck. He entered his key code on the door’s com panel. It rebuked him with a low, dysfunctional-sounding chirp.

Tzazil changed the code, the Caitian groused. If M’Rill confronted him, the pusillanimous engineer’s mate would simply claim he had forgotten to send him the revised code. It was that kind of passive-aggressive nonsense which made the normally even-tempered helmsman lie awake at night, thinking of the slowest, most painful way to kill the toadying Kaferian.

M’Rill entered a security override code he had programmed into the ship’s security system, as a safeguard against petty inconveniences such as this. It worked instantly, and the door slid open. He walked into the main engineering compartment and relocked the door behind him.

The noise in the engineering section was louder than on the larger, more comfortably appointed vessels common to Starfleet or even the Klingons. In fact, most military vessels by necessity restricted the acceptable level of ambient noise in an engine room. As a privately owned vessel, the Caedera was exempt from such considerations. Consequently, when Captain Trenigar had been informed of what it would cost to equip the engineering compartment with acoustic dampers, he balked and told Nolram and Tzazil to invest in good protective headphones instead.

At the far end of the compartment, Tzazil was splayed atop the primary heat exchanger, basking in its thermal radiance. M’Rill skulked quickly across the narrow gap between the twin fusion relays, and then slipped into a narrow access space that was tucked into a shadowy corner of the engineering deck.

Shimmying past access panels and various protruding components, M’Rill kept his tail tucked cautiously between his legs. The deck vibrated beneath his feet. Despite the vastly powerful energies coursing through the systems around him, the air seemed remarkably cool and fresh after his most recent sweltering shift on the bridge.

At the end of the access crawlspace was a ladder on the rear wall. Next to it was a data-relay repair hatch. He punched in his access code and opened the wall panel. Tucked securely into the tangled web of optolithic cables and glowing isolinear chips was a small, innocuous-looking signal tap that the organization had provided to him. It was designed to be patched into a general relay buffer, from which it would intercept and keep a duplicate record of every sensor reading, subspace communication, and transporter action aboard the Caedera. Under Captain Trenigar’s command, it was standard operating procedure to wipe all those logs before making port.

M’Rill checked the tap’s data log. The past two weeks’ worth of intercepts were all there. He triggered its data dump. In the span of just a few seconds, its entire record of the Caedera’s activities was sent back to the organization in an encrypted burst of subspace data. Then, just as quickly, it erased any record of its own transmission from the Caedera’s communication logs.

His eyes caught a blur of movement from the far end of the access crawlspace. Tzazil was up and moving around, and had just walked past. There was no way for M’Rill to be certain that Tzazil hadn’t noticed something amiss a moment ago. The suspicious Kaferian might double back at any moment. With Tzazil up and about, M’Rill decided that going back out the way he came in would be too risky.

He climbed the ladder as swiftly and quietly as possible. By the time he reached the top, he was entirely swathed in darkness. Looking down, he saw Tzazil pass by the crawlspace again. The insectoid engineer paused, leaned back, and peered inside. After a few seconds, he resumed his mindless pacing around the engine-room perimeter.

M’Rill opened the hatch at the top of the ladder, climbed into the auxiliary cargo bay, and carefully lowered the hatch closed behind him.

Soon his latest data dump would reach L’Haan. When it did, she might have new orders for him, or she might simply instruct him to submerge back into his cover identity as if none of this had ever happened.

Until her next orders arrived, all he could do was wait. Which, in his opinion, made this an opportune time to go up to the mess hall and have some chili.