PICARD REGARDED ADMIRAL MCATEER across the shiny black surface of his desk. The admiral, who was scanning the captain’s ready room for the first time, looked faintly disapproving.

“Is that a dictionary?” asked McAteer, referring to a hardbound book lying on a side table next to a bulkhead.

“No,” said Picard, “though I can understand how you might have come to that conclusion. It is an illustrated volume of the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

McAteer made a face. “Shakespeare, eh?”

“Yes,” said the captain. “I gather you are not especially fond of the man’s work.”

“I saw a production of Henry the Fifth back in San Francisco,” the admiral explained. “I didn’t love it.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Picard remarked.

“Not as sorry as I was,” said McAteer, clearly not above chuckling at his own quip.

The captain chuckled too, if only to be polite.

For a moment, silence gathered between Picard and his guest like storm clouds on a hot summer evening. It emphasized that, despite their small talk about Shakespeare, they were not even remotely bound by bonds of friendship.

Finally, McAteer spoke again. “As you may have guessed,” he said, “I’ve got an assignment for you.”

Had those words come from anyone else in an admiral’s uniform, Picard would have been intrigued by them. But this was McAteer, a man who had repeatedly demonstrated an inclination to give the Stargazer the least important missions in the fleet.

“An assignment?” the captain echoed.

“Yes.” McAteer leaned back in his chair. “I take it you’re familiar with the Delta Campara system?”

Picard felt the muscles in his jaw ripple, but he otherwise contained his emotions. “I am.”

Delta Campara was a Cepheid variable star, a rather large and unstable body given to violent bursts of energy at irregular and therefore unexpected intervals. Picard had seen a few such stars in the course of his Academy missions, though none as big or volatile as Delta Campara.

“I’d like you to take a look at it,” said the admiral, “and see what kinds of changes it’s undergone since the Excelsior surveyed it a quarter of a century ago.”

Picard frowned. Under different circumstances, he wouldn’t have minded the idea of a survey. He was as intrigued by stellar phenomena as any captain in the fleet.

But there were more pressing concerns in the sector than a star that had been scanned just twenty-five years earlier. More and more, there were controversies arising from the Ubarrak and the Cardassians. And as always, it seemed the Stargazer was being left out of them.

“Should be interesting,” said McAteer.

It would have been politic to agree. Instead Picard said, “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“Are you sure?” Ensign Cole Paris asked.

“I am,” said Jiterica, using the tinny, artificial voice granted her by her specially designed containment suit.

Paris looked into her eyes—or rather, the illusion of eyes that Jiterica had created for herself behind her helmet’s transparent faceplate. She looked back at him unflinchingly, without even a hint of uncertainty.

Even a week earlier, he might not have relied on Jiterica’s expression as an accurate barometer of her Nizhrak feelings. But she had gotten so good at mimicking human reactions, he allowed himself to be reassured by it.

After all, it was a big step they were taking. He didn’t want to rush it and ruin everything. But at the same time, he could barely wait. His pulse was already racing in anticipation.

“Ready?” asked Jiterica.

What a question. “Hell, yes,” he said.

Taking that as her cue, Jiterica reached up with the gloves of her containment suit and started unfastening her helmet. Her manual dexterity still left something to be desired, so it wasn’t as smooth a process as it could have been.

“Do you need help?” Paris asked.

“No,” said Jiterica. “I can manage it.”

It took her a while, but she finally released the latch and pushed back her helmet. The act exposed her ghostly head, which tilted ever so slightly as she returned Paris’s gaze. For a heartbeat or two, Jiterica remained in her vaguely humanoid shape, even without the help of the suit’s built-in containment field. Then her features twisted away like smoke in a strong breeze, and the suit dropped precipitously to the floor.

But there was a cloud looming over it, a gradually expanding complex of shifting, sparkling particles, which was no less the essence of Jiterica than what had been squeezed into the suit. If anything, the cloud was more her, because she was allowing herself to revert to her natural state—that of a low-density being whose species had evolved in the chaotic upper atmosphere of a high-gravity gas giant.

As Paris watched, spellbound, Jiterica grew to fill the confines of her quarters—and they truly were confines, because she could have easily filled a larger space. But compared with the compression she had endured in her suit, the chance to fill even a modest compartment had to seem like a great relief.

As Jiterica encompassed Paris, taking him inside herself, he could feel her alien touch—first on the exposed skin of his face, neck, and hands, and then all over his body. It reached him right through the fabric of his clothes, cold and sharp as any needle, as if he were standing naked in a shower of ice shards.

Then he heard Jiterica speak to him, not in the suit’s mechanical voice but in a language without sound. And it wasn’t a mouth she was speaking with, but every energy-charged molecule of her body.

Closing his eyes, he allowed himself to hear every word, every sensation, every sentiment. He breathed her in, exhaled, and breathed her in again.

Like fairy dust, Paris thought. Like a deeply intoxicating liqueur, except it was alive and intelligent and basking in an array of unheard-of emotions.

Beautiful, exquisite emotions. The kind he hadn’t imagined he would ever know.

But it wasn’t just the intoxication, or the novelty, or the sense of joining that Paris loved. It was the fact that Jiterica was part of it. With some other Nizhrak the experience might still have been an appealing one, but it was Jiterica who took his breath away.

It was bliss, complete and utter bliss. And somehow, Paris knew that Jiterica felt the same way.

For what seemed like a long time, he drifted on the electric pleasure of her currents, immersed and immersing, embracing and embraced. Then, with a pang of deep regret, Paris felt Jiterica stir as if to withdraw.

Don’t, he thought.

But she gave him the sense that she needed to—that they both needed to. So Paris opened his eyes and watched her go.

He was still in touch with her, if not quite as intimately as before, when she began to force herself back into her containment suit. He had known that it was difficult for her to compress, but he had never appreciated how difficult.

First, Jiterica filled up the suit’s arms and legs, so she would have use of them. Then, with what seemed like an intense effort, she used the gloves to pull her helmet back into place.

As before, Paris was moved to help her, but he could tell that she wanted to do this herself. She had worked hard to gain whatever modicum of dexterity she possessed, and she was determined to put it to use.

Finally, Jiterica closed the helmet latches and turned to him. But her face hadn’t quite coalesced yet. It was still crude, lacking in definition.

Then she took care of that detail as well. Her features clarified, sharpened, became familiar to him.

Only then did Paris ask the question that had been nagging at him: “Why did we need to stop?”

Jiterica smiled. “It’s time,” she said in her artificial voice, “for our next shift.”

“No…” said Paris.

He couldn’t believe it. They had just completed their last shift when they met in Jiterica’s quarters. Was it possible that they had been there for sixteen hours?

He had barely considered the possibility when he felt the encroaching emptiness in his belly, and the thirst, and an unusual stiffness in his legs. And by those signs, he knew that Jiterica wasn’t kidding.

Sixteen hours, the ensign thought, as he smiled back at her. Amazing.

Gilaad Ben Zoma, first officer of the Stargazer and incidentally Jean-Luc Picard’s best friend, had been trying for the last minute or so to concentrate his attention on the oval-shaped data-display device in his hand.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. And that wasn’t likely to change while Admiral McAteer and the captain were holed up in Picard’s ready room.

“They’ve been in there a long time,” observed Elizabeth Wu, the ship’s highly efficient second officer, who had handed Ben Zoma the data-display device in the first place.

He nodded. “They certainly have. I guess they’ve got something…complicated to talk about.”

“Think it’s a mission?” Wu asked.

Ben Zoma smiled a little. “More than that. Starfleet admirals—even those as intrusive as McAteer—don’t come out this far just to give an order. Something’s up.”

Wu frowned. “Something we’re not going to like, I take it?”

The first officer stared at the ready-room door as if he could see through it. “I don’t doubt it.”

Picard had kept his mouth shut for a good long time, but he could keep it shut no longer—which was why he had petitioned his superior for permission to speak freely, unfettered by the restricting bonds of Starfleet protocol.

On the other side of the captain’s desk, McAteer’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. But he didn’t take long to consider the request. “Granted.”

Picard plunged ahead. “There is a tempest brewing in this sector, Admiral. You know that as well as anyone.”

McAteer didn’t disagree.

“In your place,” Picard continued, “I would be deploying the entirety of my resources to address the situation at hand. And yet, with the notable exception of my assignment on Oblivion, in which my involvement was mandated by parties other than yourself, you have consistently relegated the Stargazer to peripheral activities. While other Constellation-class vessels serve as escorts through disputed territory or conduct border patrols, my vessel carries out scientific surveys—and frivolous ones at that.”

The captain leaned forward in his chair. “My crew is ready, willing, and able to handle any crisis that may arise, be it diplomatic or military in nature. We are eager to make the same sort of contributions as any other ship in the fleet—to do the same work and assume the same risks—and we would be grateful if you recognized that fact.”

McAteer smiled through Picard’s diatribe, apparently without resentment. Then, taking his time, he answered the captain’s challenge.

“You say that your crew is equal to any task I may decide to impose upon it. That may be so,” said McAteer. “However, to be perfectly blunt, its commanding officer appears not to be equal to any task.”

Picard felt as if he had been slapped across the face.

“That,” the admiral continued, in an even, almost benevolent-sounding tone, “is the reason I’ve been reluctant to put the Stargazer in the thick of the action—because your personal performance hasn’t earned my confidence.”

The captain bit his lip to keep from saying something he would certainly regret. If McAteer wasn’t confident in him, it wasn’t his fault. He had done everything the man had asked of him, and a good deal more.

His only mistake had been his choice of birthdate. In the admiral’s estimate, Picard was too young to be a captain, too inexperienced, too green.

“And that,” said McAteer, looking as if he were allowing himself to be dragged into unplanned but all-too-necessary territory, “is also why I have scheduled a hearing to judge your competence as a Starfleet captain.”

Picard felt his cheeks suffuse with blood. “My competence?” he echoed, giving the word an ironic spin. “And in what respect have I been incompetent?”

Without a second’s hesitation, the admiral reeled off a list of instances. Bad decisions, he called them, constructed on the uncertain ground of bad judgment.

And they all had to do with the Nuyyad, the conqueror species with whom the Stargazer had clashed on the other side of the galactic barrier. Picard had barely taken the reins of command at the time, assuming the place of his dead captain as the enemy slashed away at the Stargazer.

But there was no mention of mitigating circumstances, no nod to the novelty of the situation. All McAteer cared to talk about were the specific moves Picard had made.

Taken out of context, each one made the captain sound more careless and devoid of judgment than the one before it. But every one of them had been made for a good reason.

Picard said so.

“Those who serve with you disagree,” said the admiral.

Picard was skeptical about that claim, to say the least. He couldn’t imagine that Ben Zoma or Wu had ever spoken to McAteer behind his back. Then who…?

The admiral’s smile deepened. “Former colleagues, to be precise. Commander Leach, for instance—Commander Ben Zoma’s predecessor as first officer of the Stargazer. He provided me with some rather valuable insights into your activities as the Stargazer’s second officer. Then there was Ensign Joe Caber—”

The captain couldn’t help but interrupt. “Ensign Caber was not Starfleet material, as my report on the reason for his transfer clearly indicated.”

“I read it,” said McAteer. “You said he was guilty of bigotry toward one of your other crewmen.”

“Bigotry that quickly accelerated into unwarranted violence.”

“So you said in your report,” the admiral noted. “But Ensign Caber had a different take on his stay here.”

Why am I not surprised? Caber, the son of a highly regarded Starfleet admiral, had suggested as he left the Stargazer that the matter of his dismissal would not be resolved to Picard’s satisfaction.

“As you might expect,” said McAteer, “Ensign Caber’s father has taken a personal interest in your actions. He has asked to be one of the admirals who hear the charges against you.”

Perfect, thought the captain.

Clearly, McAteer had gone to a great deal of trouble to build and fortify his position. He wasn’t going to stop at anything to see Picard relieved of his command.

The admiral sighed audibly. “I hope you know I don’t like doing this. I don’t enjoy raking people over the coals.”

Again, Picard bit his lip. Thanks to one of his friends in Starfleet, he knew that McAteer was lying. He had it in for Picard ever since Admiral Mehdi placed the twenty-eight-year old in command of the Stargazer.

“Of course,” the admiral added in a repulsively avuncular way, “you could simply step down. That would save everyone a lot of trouble—you in particular.”

Picard felt his teeth grind together. You would like me to think so, wouldn’t you?

“I appreciate the offer,” he forced himself to say, “but frankly, I do not intend to give up my command without a fight.” He speared McAteer with his gaze. “I ask you—what self-respecting captain would?”

The admiral’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “As you wish, Picard.” He got up and straightened his jacket. “If you happen to change your mind, you know where to find me.”

“Indeed,” said the captain.