TRENIGAR CLOSED the subspace channel by punching his fist through his monitor screen. As he stormed out of the comforting swelter of his private quarters, his roar of fury echoed through the ship’s ventilation ducts and reverberated into every last nook of the Caedera.

Sixteen years I spent making this the best ship in the Syndicate, he raged. Now that undari Ihazs wants me to scrap my own ship because Starfleet issued an arrest warrant.

He stomped down the narrow corridors, swatting aside unevenly stacked boxes that even slightly jutted into his path. Every few meters, another small crate of fruit or sealed provisions was scattered across the deck in front of him. His boots crushed everything with equal malice as he trod toward the null-gravity ladder tube.

It doesn’t make sense, he fumed as he glided up the access ladder to the command deck. W e could just leave Federation space. Make our living in Klingon territory, or the Talarian Republic. Why junk my ship? He considered becoming a rogue, defying even the Syndicate, going into business for himself.

Then he decided it would be faster and less painful to simply put a gun to his head. If Ihazs said to scrap the Caedera, then the discussion was over. The Syndicate gives, Trenigar groused, and the Syndicate takes away. Unfortunately, it only “gives” about one time in four.

Striding through the door to the bridge, he bellowed, “R’Lash, get us—” He stopped as he saw there was no one there. The captain’s chair was empty. The helm was set to autopilot, on course for Ajilon Prime. The Nausicaan captain promised himself that First Officer R’Lash would get a worse-than-usual beating for deserting her post. He fell into his seat like a falling tree and stabbed the intraship com with two fingers.

“Trenigar to R’Lash and M’Rill. Get to the bridge, now.”

A few moments later, M’Rill responded. “Captain, there’s something going on in the aft cargo bay,” the Caitian pilot said. “I think you need to come down here.”

“You don’t tell me where to be, you fuzz-faced lovaach,” Trenigar hollered. “Get to the bridge! That’s an order!”

“Captain, this is important…. R’Lash is meeting with Nolram, Tzazil, and Gorul. Zhod’s guarding the entrance.”

“What the hell are you—”

“Captain…I think they’re planning a mutiny.”

M’Rill lurked behind the corner closest to the aft cargo bay entrance. He heard the soft, approaching footsteps of Captain Trenigar. The hulking Nausicaan crept up behind him. M’Rill motioned to the captain to remain silent, then pointed around the corner. Trenigar edged past the Caitian pilot and noted the presence of the ship’s Gorn enforcer outside the cargo bay door.

“They’ve been in there for nearly an hour,” M’Rill whispered. “Saff went in about thirty minutes ago.”

The captain eyed him suspiciously. “Why didn’t they include you?”

“They did,” M’Rill said. “R’Lash told me to guard the weapons locker. She wouldn’t say why, but I think it’s pretty obvious.”

“If she doesn’t trust you, why should I?”

“Because I’ll kill Zhod,” M’Rill said. “Once the door’s clear, we can slip inside and put them back in line.”

Trenigar grunted. “And what’s in it for you?”

“I want to be first officer.”

The captain nodded. “Done. Go kill Zhod.”

M’Rill walked confidently around the corner and moved in a straight line for the Gorn. Zhod was normally stoic to the point of immobility, so M’Rill assumed the enforcer’s lack of reaction to his approach wouldn’t seem odd to the captain. Of course, in the shadows of the cargo deck, it was unlikely that Trenigar would be able to tell from several meters away that Zhod was already dead and had been propped against the wall with a rifle glued to his hand.

“The weapons locker is secured,” M’Rill said to the glassy-eyed reptilian corpse. Then the Caitian lashed out and thrust his saw-toothed dagger up through Zhod’s jaw, behind the chin. He forced the blade up into the Gorn’s brain pan. That should make Zhod’s “instant paralysis” believable, M’Rill decided. For good measure, he grabbed Zhod’s head, braced himself, then twisted it until several upper vertebrae splintered with a loud crunch.

Zhod’s freshly desecrated dead body sagged to the deck with a meaty thud. M’Rill pulled his dagger free and wiped its blade clean on the Gorn’s tunic. A moment later he signaled Trenigar to move up and join him at the door. The Nausicaan captain eyed M’Rill’s handiwork with the admiration of a fellow craftsman. “Nicely done,” he said. “You’re less useless than I thought.”

“What are your orders, Captain?”

Trenigar ruminated on that for a moment. “The plasma relay will give us some cover when we go through the door. I’ll approach them on the main deck,” he said. “You go up to the catwalk and cover me. Stun the others, but leave R’Lash to me.”

“Aye, sir.”

The captain opened the door. He skulked through, his disruptor in one hand and his sulav knife in the other.

M’Rill slipped through the door behind him, leveled his pistol, and shot off most of Trenigar’s head in a howling flash of light and heat. The Nausicaan’s all but decapitated corpse pitched forward and slammed onto the deck.

The Caitian holstered his weapon and used the cargo bay’s environmental controls to reduce the artificial gravity to one-fifth of normal. He picked up Trenigar’s body with ease, carried it into the cargo bay, and hurled it on top of the rest of the Caedera crew’s corpses. Carrying Zhod was a bit more difficult. The Gorn as a species were heavily muscled and had very dense endoskeletons. Once the bodies had been gathered, M’Rill left the cargo bay and sealed the inside door. He opened its outer door and jettisoned the dead into the vacuum of deep space.

He took from his pocket a small control device disguised as a common tool, and triggered a tracking beacon that would aid Starfleet’s hunt for the ship. Then he signaled his retrieval team. The light on his device changed from red to yellow, indicating they were moving into range to beam him aboard.

I won’t miss this job, he realized, but I will miss Nolram’s chili.

The light changed from yellow to green. As the transporter beam encircled him, he indulged one final pang of regret: I never got my last dibs with Saff…. Damn.