It had taken Soloman only moments to locate the particular tribblecom Gomez had requested, but it had taken her several hours of hard work to link her combadge directly into the station communication and computer systems. It was dual access—it would let her talk to the da Vinci via the station’s communication array, and it would allow Soloman, on her command, to upload the tribblecom directly into the station computer’s memory unit. In the meantime, to keep the program busy, and in case what Gomez had in mind didn’t work, Corsi was continuing to “negotiate” with the false Gomez, which added the bizarre note of Gomez’s own voice ranting on in the background as she worked.

At last she was ready. She hoped this would work, because if it didn’t, she was entirely out of ideas. “Okay, Soloman,” she said, “let it rip.”

“Upload commencing,” Soloman replied.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the Gomez on the display screen began to falter, as if searching for her next word. The Gomez image froze, then moved again but in a jerky, unrealistic fashion. It tried to speak, but it’s voice was first garbled, then became more of an incoherent squeak like nails on a blackboard. The screech got loud enough to make Gomez cover her ears, but then the picture on the screen broke up into a random array of tiny squares, each containing a different distorted image of Gomez.

Then the screen went black, and at the same time, the lights on the board in front of Gomez flashed green shields were down, life support was climbing back to normal—and while the systems were running slow, due to the tribblecom, they were holding steady. A noise behind her made her turn quickly, but it was only the control center door sliding open, at long last able to obey the signal from the switch she had pressed…just how long ago it was Gomez wasn’t certain. On the other side of the door stood Tobias Shelt and the three station engineers. All four of them started talking at once, but before Gomez could even start to answer them Captain Gold’s voice came over the comlink.

“You okay in there, Gomez?” he asked.

“Just fine now,” she said, waving the others to silence. That was true. Her headache had vanished the moment the control room doors slid open.

“Glad to hear it,” Gold said. “I’ll let Starfleet know they can call off the prisoner release on Sigma V.”

“Sir,” she said, “I think I figured out who caused all this and why. I’ll want to check this with Commander Corsi, but if I’m right, Starfleet should let the release go ahead.”

“Interesting,” Gold said, “then I’ll tell them to let it continue. Looking forward to your explanation, Gomez. Prepare to be beamed aboard.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tobias Shelt motioned to her as the transporter beam caught her—he was signaling that she should call him. She had time to signal back but didn’t, and then the control center faded out.

Ardack Sprachnee, former finance minister for Sigma V, was not surprised when he was told his thirty-day sentence for drunk-and-disorderly behavior in the council chambers was being commuted. After all, he had not only arranged to be in jail in the first place, he had arranged for his and his fellow prisoners’ release and for the type of transportation that would be provided.

The guards ushered him and his fellow parolees to just inside the large metal bars of the prison gate, and he listened with rapt attention as the warden explained that due to events far beyond his control, the Federation had requested their early release, and that they be transported to Bartha IX by hauler. As the protest started—his fellow prisoners objected, this close to the end of their sentences, to being released so far from home—the warden explained that the Federation had provided return transportation as well.

The warden went on to say that the whole thing sounded as foolish to him as it did to them, but orders were orders, and a free trip to Bartha IX would certainly beat another night in their cells. That, Sprachnee noted, was a point the other prisoners agreed with wholeheartedly, and so did he. So while there was puzzlement among the released prisoners, there was no resistance to the notion, especially when luxury hovercars pulled up to the gate to take them to the spaceport.

There were intoxicating drinks in the hovercars, but Sprachnee left them to his seatmates. He had to keep his wits about him, because this next part was tricky, and his timing had to be precise.

They pulled up to the cargo ship, and were led on board it by guards, but once everyone was in their seats and the door was closed, they were free—and a cheer went up from the crowd. Sprachnee ignored the noise; he was busy looking through the packet of personal effects that had been returned to him. Yes, there it was. He took a certain device in his hand and waited for the sound of engine startup. As the whirring kicked in, he pushed the button on what looked like a small writing implement. The lights on the hauler flickered for a second, but that wasn’t unusual at startup.

The lighting levels returned to full power in moments, but Sprachnee stayed tense until he was certain the pilot hadn’t noticed the drain on the energy levels—and why should he, Sprachnee thought, since this little gadget of mine has tweaked his readouts to ignore the massive cargo he’s just taken on?

While there were times when Sprachnee wasn’t certain whether it was the lure of being fantastically wealthy or the simple intellectual challenge of the thing that motivated him, he usually tilted toward the latter. How to get five billion bars of gold-pressed latinum, the entire wealth of the planetary government, off-planet? That had been quite a problem to solve.

Sprachnee’s position as finance minister was one he had worked long and hard to get because it gave him access to the codes that worked the shielding on the planetary latinum storehouse. Coming up with the rest of the scheme had taken a long time, and many false starts.

Sprachnee relaxed into his seat for the trip to Bartha IX, secure in the knowledge that, per the readout on his little device, the buffer on the cargo transporter of this very ship now contained, in super-compressed coding, all five billion bars of latinum that made up the planetary treasury of Sigma V, and in their place was a hologenerated image that wouldn’t fool people forever, but would for just long enough. When they landed on Bartha, another push of the button and the latinum would be beamed to thousands of mini transporters he had hidden all over the planet on his last vacation. From there it would be a simple matter to recover the latinum piece by piece.

Sprachnee sat calmly in his seat for the entire trip, which took most of a day, not tensing up until the pilot announced their landing approach. As soon as the heat shields were dropped, Sprachnee was ready to push the button, disperse the latinum, and become one of the galaxy’s richest men—under an assumed name and species, of course.

The ship landed, and Sprachnee’s finger was on the button in a moment. Oddly, though, the shields weren’t dropping. Probably just a malfunction. Maybe he should offer to help them resolve it?

Without his noticing their arrival, two Starfleet officers in security uniforms were suddenly flanking him. Both were very large, very strong, and were very polite as each took one of his arms and hefted him from his seat. They patted him down expertly, quickly taking his gadget and all his emergency backups away from him. The taller of them tapped his combadge. “It’s okay, we have him, you can drop the shields.”

Gomez stared at the short little balding man who had caused all the trouble. Sitting sadly in his old-fashioned metal-barred cell, he didn’t look like any kind of a threat. It almost hadn’t been worth the high-speed shuttle run it had taken to get Corsi and herself to Bartha IX, but Gomez just had to meet the man who had done this to her. She needed to learn what she had done to him to make him single her out.

“Are you sure that’s him?” she asked. Corsi nodded. “I’ve never met him before. I have no idea what his beef with me might be.”

“Well, let’s ask him. Hey, Sprachnee,” Corsi said. “Come over to the bars. Somebody here wants to see you.”

The little man stood up and walked over, and it was clear to Gomez that he didn’t recognize her any more than she recognized him. Gomez looked at him, looked him up and down carefully. “Why me?” she asked him.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said politely, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why me?” Gomez asked again. “Why did you pick me for this thing out of the entire galaxy?”

“Oh,” Sprachnee said, “was that you?” The little man paused, then continued. “I was in a cell, remember, I wasn’t able to watch my program play itself out. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Everything that happened was done automatically, by your program?”

“Yes.”

“But,” Gomez was losing patience, “why did the program pick me?”

“Tell me,” he said, “did you get a call on a communications link just after you deleted the tribblecom?”

Gomez thought back. Yes, there had been a call, with no one there. It had asked who she was, then disconnected—oh, no. “Yes. It asked me my name.”

“Well, there you go,” Sprachnee said. “Once the program realized its surroundings were apropos to the mission, it found a target subject, asked for your name, ran your records, found your image on file, located your personal logs, rewrote your journals on the basis of what your mission records said you’d been through, et cetera, et cetera.” He sighed. “It could have been anyone, anyone at all, almost anywhere in the Federation. It was my bad luck, Commander, that it was someone like you. If you hadn’t figured it out…or,” he said wistfully, “if even one of the billions of sentients who have read the tribblecom by now had taken me up on the prima facie offer, I’d be a rich man instead of rotting in a cell, for good this time, I fancy.”

“So my involvement in this was just—bad luck?” Gomez said.

“That’s correct.”

That wasn’t possible. He’d known enough about her daily schedule to track her to Hidalgo Station. Enough to rewrite her journals. Enough to create a simulacrum of her that fooled her closest friends and associates for quite a while. The only way that would have been possible without detailed knowledge of her background and security codes….

“You wrote a multivariant, adaptive, artificially intelligent superworm that can propagate via subspace, penetrate Starfleet security, and invade personal logs? That can, on its own, extrapolate from personal writing style and records exactly how to convince someone’s closest friends and associates that they are talking to them instead of a program? That can run on equipment with as little processing power and memory as Hidalgo Station has? And that works at nanosecond speeds?”

“Well, yes,” Sprachnee said modestly. “I was pretty proud of it.”

Gomez was stunned. He should be proud, she thought. Sprachee had written one hell of a sophisticated program, so sophisticated it had taken her quite a long time trapped in a freezing-cold control center to figure out even part of what he’d done. What she’d realized was that Sprachnee had hidden coding in the text of the tribblecom that was set to activate when someone used a glommer to delete the message. When Gomez deleted the tribblecom, she had triggered the hidden code, resulting in the station shutdown and implementing the entire incident that followed.

If Gomez hadn’t been listening to the conversation between Corsi and the simulation, she would never have known that the planet mentioned in the tribblecom and the planet where the prisoners were being released was the same planet, and that Sprachnee’s name, which was on the bottom of the tribblecom, was also on the list of prisoners. She had almost missed it anyway.

Armed with that knowledge, when Soloman figured out it wasn’t really her on the screen and established communication, she had had Soloman locate Sprachnee’s tribblecom, the one that had started all the trouble. As the tribblecom reentered the Hidalgo computer system through the combadge link Gomez had set up, it clogged up the memory unit again—and crashed the complex program controlling the station, allowing the established station programming to reassert at least intermittent control. Gomez had figured that Sprachnee’s program wouldn’t be set to defend against itself, and fortunately, she had been right.

Back on the da Vinci, with full information in hand, Gomez had suggested, and Corsi and Abramowitz had then confirmed, that the list of prisoners to be released had been set up to manipulate Starfleet and the Federation. The only prisoners on the list who didn’t seem a real threat were the batch of prisoners on Sigma V. It was therefore predictable that Starfleet would offer to release them first—especially predictable to someone who had read the Starfleet negotiation manual, as Sprachnee, Gomez thought, most likely found a way to do.

The records on Sigma showed that Sprachnee had made certain he was among those prisoners by acting out so badly in the council chambers that he would not only be fired, but would be thrown into jail. The tribblecom had also made clear what Sprachnee was trying to get away with—the biggest latinum heist in history. From there, the specification of a hauler-class ship, the only ship class in the area with both a passenger complement and transporter buffers large enough to contain that much latinum, was a dead giveaway.

Gomez looked quizzically at the little man who had caused her so much trouble. “Why’d you bother with all this?” she asked. “Don’t you know how much you could have sold your program for? It would make five billion bars of gold-pressed latinum seem like lunch money.”

Sprachnee waved the notion away. “Where would the fun have been in that?” he asked her. Then he stopped and looked thoughtful. “I don’t suppose we could cut a deal now? I show you everything I know about the program, you get me out of here?”

“We’ll see,” Gomez said. She was angry at what he’d done, to her, to her reputation, the risk to the lives of those on Hidalgo Station. Gomez wrestled with conflicting emotions, but in the end she was an engineer, and the program he’d written would impress the best engineers in the galaxy. “I’ll talk to someone. But don’t hold your breath.” To her own surprise, instead of punching Sprachnee in the eye as she’d thought of doing, Gomez stuck her hand through the bars in a gesture of respect. Sprachnee hesitated for a moment, then took her hand and shook it firmly.

As Gomez and Corsi left the holding area, Gomez wondered what would be next for the strange little genius. “What adjudication facility is he being sent to?” Gomez asked the security chief.

“I’m not sure,” Corsi said. “Why?”

“Because it had better have damn good security tech, or we’ll be hearing from him again really soon.”

Shortly thereafter Gomez found herself back where she had been a week ago, about to beam down to Hidalgo Station. This time she wasn’t going alone—most of the crew of the da Vinci would be visiting the station, some to help put all their systems right, others simply for much-needed shore leave. Gomez was doing a little of both—she would help the day shift with repairs on a part-time basis as well as having some time for herself.

She’d already sent word to Tobias Shelt to clear his schedule for dinner, dancing, and who knew what would happen afterward? Seeing “herself” doing things so far from her character had brought things home to her. She could accept that she wasn’t entirely who she had been. What she had gone through with Duffy had forced her to leave some of herself behind, and that empty space in her would have to be filled with something new. Maybe Tobias Shelt would be part of what filled it. Maybe someday Wayne Omthon would be. Or maybe it would be somebody else entirely. She’d take it one day at a time. Smiling, she vanished from the da Vinci in a cone of light.