“Are you seriously suggesting that I allow an Orion vessel to make port here?” Reyes asked, frowning.

“So long as they’ve committed no crime,” Desai said, “that is precisely what I’m suggesting. Once they’re here, if they get out of line, you’re free to rescind their authorization to dock, but you cannot do so preemptively.”

Glancing at the data slate in her hand, Reyes asked, “I suppose you’re able to provide the proper legal and procedural references to support this?”

“Yes, sir,” Desai replied. “I am.”

Reyes released a deep sigh. “Assuming I agree with whatever precedent you can pull out of that thing, I want there to be no mistake about what they can and can’t do while they’re here.”

“What about our people?” Dunbar asked, looking up again from her station. “Is the ship off limits to station personnel?”

Desai replied, “Declaring it off limits probably wouldn’t send a very nice signal to the Orion government, or our own.”

“But it’d make my life a hell of a lot easier,” Reyes said, making his way around the Hub. He started down the stairs, gesturing for Desai to follow him.

“That’s another thing,” she continued. “The ship is sovereign Orion territory, so we’d have no jurisdiction there. Essentially, whatever happens there stays there.”

Grunting in irritation, Reyes stepped off the stairs and began heading toward his office. “If this is your best sales pitch, Captain, you’re not doing a very good job of convincing me.” Crossing the ops center main deck, he entered the area designated as his outer office and assigned to his still-nonexistent assistant. “Okay, so the regs say we have to let them dock, at least until such time as they give us reason to boot their asses off. Fine, but here’s how we’re going to play it: I want every member of the station’s crew briefed on what’s expected so far as their own conduct is concerned, and I want that ship’s captain told in no uncertain terms that if any of our people encounter any trouble there, I’ll place it off limits until such time as I rescind their authorization to be here in the first place. Fair enough?”

Desai nodded. “I’ll make the formal response a bit more diplomatic than that, sir, but otherwise I think that’s more than fair.”

Lowering his voice, Reyes added, “There’s one other condition.”

Her expression turning to one of confusion, the JAG captain asked, “What’s that?”

Reyes paused, looking around to make sure none of the ops center staff might overhear him. “Have dinner with me.”

The blunt statement seemed to take Desai by surprise, if the look on her face was any indication. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You, me, dinner,” Reyes said. “Nothing fancy. Just a quiet meal away from all of this.” He gestured toward the ops center. “It can be a bit overwhelming, and I like to get away from it at least for a little while every day.” It was not like him to be so forward, but there was something about Rana Desai that fascinated him. He also considered whatever perceptions might be held by members of his crew if and when they observed him and Desai interacting in a social setting, but he decided there was no reason to worry. He was only talking about a simple dinner in the officers’ mess.

For the moment, anyway.It was an addendum that surprised even him.

Despite her apparent determination to maintain her bearing, Desai eventually smiled, her features relaxing as she nodded. “Invitation accepted.”

“In that case,” Reyes said, “bring on the Orions.”

T’Prynn sat in her office, staring at her computer monitor and the distressing information displayed on it. After careful review and examination of the data she had been compiling for the past several weeks, she had finally come to the point where only one conclusion could be reached.

Starbase 47 was harboring a spy. Of that much, T’Prynn was certain.

What remained a mystery, despite her best efforts to this point, was the identity of the clandestine operative, or even if there was more than one. She did not know to whom the agent pledged loyalty, or if he or she was simply a hired mercenary with no allegiances beyond the monetary.

Most distressing.

Discovering proof of covert activity had proven a challenge even for T’Prynn’s formidable investigative talents, in itself another issue that gave her cause for concern. The spy was well trained and quite adept at concealment. The search protocols T’Prynn had created to monitor the station’s main computer and communications systems had been working for weeks, hunting for references to any of the numerous key words and phrases she had included as search criteria. Additional algorithms had been deployed to look for signs of encryption, or even messages that appeared to contain nonsensical passages, which of course might indicate a low-level form of encoding designed to thwart attempts at eavesdropping. Every correspondence transmitted to and from the station, no matter its contents, was subjected to the audit. Even though other parties might balk at this infringement of their privacy, for T’Prynn the measures were both prudent and logical so far as maintaining the starbase’s operational security was concerned. Safeguarding the truth behind Operation Vanguard was her paramount concern, and the station’s presence in the Taurus Reach, situated as it was between two contentious Federation adversaries, invited all manner of clandestine activities. She had decided from the moment she undertook this assignment that she would make use of any and all resources and methods at her disposal—ethical and otherwise—to carry out that duty.

Despite the effort T’Prynn had expended in the development of the various search routines, she did not expect any of them to yield any tangible results. Any spy of worth would avoid such obvious routes for passing information, electing instead to utilize some other surreptitious means to contact a superior or to receive instructions. It was therefore surprising when one of her watchdog programs did in fact find something.

Her program had detected a single message, divided into multiple data packets that in turn were embedded within other messages transmitted from the station more than three weeks earlier. To the casual reviewer, such information components could easily be dismissed or mistakenly viewed as portions of the communiqués in which they were inserted. Only by piecing together several of the packets did a pattern emerge, and even then it was but a portion of the entire message. While the search program reported finding more than two dozen such data fragments, its findings remained incomplete. As for the segments that had been discovered, they of course were written in some form of code, which T’Prynn was faced with attempting to translate. It had taken her in excess of six hours to decipher enough of the message that her suspicions could be confirmed: someone was reporting on the station’s activities to what remained an unknown benefactor, though examination of other data fragments was leading T’Prynn to conclude that the recipient of this information either was a Klingon, or someone working for the Empire.

A logical development.

That concession was only strengthened upon her decrypting a partial reference to the U.S.S. Sagittariusand its current assignment to reconnoiter the Traelus system. The Klingon Empire’s seemingly sudden interest in that system now made sense, as did the Sagittarius’s running afoul of a Klingon scout vessel while carrying out its survey mission. Other segments T’Prynn had reviewed appeared to contain references to the movements of other Starfleet and civilian vessels between Vanguard and destinations throughout the Taurus Reach. Even information collected by the station’s long-range sensors with respect to Tholian ships passing through the region was mentioned. The amount of intelligence this agent was able to gather was as impressive as it was disconcerting.