“What’s the word on the computers, Gomez?” Captain Gold asked.

Sonya Gomez looked up from the console, keeping the penlight aimed at the ceiling. “Working on it, Captain,” she replied. “We’re downloading the data and should have them ready to go in about an hour.”

Corsi checked the security sensors one last time. Looks like they were calibrated to only pick up intruders with enough mass to be a threat. Might even have been able to have the hologram do a human projection and it wouldn’t have picked it up.

That reminds me.

She began visually scanning the upper edges of the central command chamber, looking for signs of the charring from the plasma rifle. She finally found it, directly over the subspace relay controls. A smattering of charred parts were scattered over the top of the unit. Corsi gathered them up in one hand, and shoved them into a small shoulder bag she’d had sent over from the da Vinci.

“What’s that, Commander?” Gomez asked, looking up so her light hit the scorched spot on the wall.

“Parts of Fabe’s little toy,” Corsi replied. “It would have worked if Luaran hadn’t shot it. Figured I should bring it back for a fitting burial in space.”

Gomez chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” Corsi asked.

“Bart. He says now Fabian may finally shut up about you co-opting his experiment.”

Corsi glowered at the camera over Gomez’s right ear. “Yeah, right. Faulwell, tell Stevens he can kiss my entire ass. No, he might actually enjoy that. Never mind. I’ll be happy to pay him back for that when I get back to the ship. Have you figured out whether or not she’s got more of those things out there?”

Gomez looked back down at the consoles that surrounded her. She reached toward one with her left hand, working a few controls. “I can’t find any more references to it in the database. Looks like the one that we got was the prototype. Tellow’s ship didn’t show any sign of any copies being made.”

Corsi looked around the small control chamber. “All of this, just to create one stealth weapon? What about test subjects? She couldn’t have sent that thing out without testing it on someone first.”

“With the gravitational field of a gas giant to work with? I’m guessing that she’s dumped all of the bodies into the planet’s atmosphere.”

Clambering down from the console, Corsi said, “What about the nanites?”

Gomez smiled. “Already got it covered. I’ve shunted them all into one portion of the computers’ drive. There should be enough for them to chew on in there to last a week or two. That’s enough time to take care of them.”

“So, what do we do with nonsentient nanites that are programmed to build weapons?”

Gomez shrugged. “We’ll think of something.” Something on the display seemed to catch her attention.

“What?” Corsi asked.

“She did get lucky, didn’t she?”

That only served to confuse her more. “What? How?”

“The book.”

Corsi walked around to look at the console. “Just looks like a bunch of cryptic symbols to me. What’s Faulwell say?”

“He says it’s a development log. Apparently Luaran spent months looking for something she could attach the weapon to, and wasn’t able to move forward until Tafock Navar Relal became popular and traffic started coming back into the Gamma Quadrant through the wormhole.”

Corsi stared at the display. “We got all of them; DS9 is purging the nanites from its system, and they have no record of the program being downloaded to anyone. The Wadi ship and the Musgrave both came up clean. We’ve purged it from our system. The three padds that actually contained the thing are in custody. I think we’ve got all of them.”

Gomez raised her head, a wide smile on her face. “Nice work.”