“No,” T’Prynn whispered back. “You are much more than that. More than I am able to put into words…Anna.” She resisted the urge to pull back from the Klingon woman’s intensely magnetic presence. Sandesjo smiled and grazed T’Prynn’s lips with her own. “The information about the Zin’za is time-sensitive,” said T’Prynn. Sandesjo stroked her hands slowly down T’Prynn’s hips. “It should be relayed promptly.”

Gathering fistfuls of fabric from the bottom of T’Prynn’s red minidress, Sandesjo asked in a lustfully breathy hush, “How long till the Zin’za reaches Jinoteur?”

“Eight hours,” T’Prynn said, succumbing to all her most illogical and most taboo emotional impulses.

“More than enough time,” Sandesjo said, hiking up T’Prynn’s dress over her hips and guiding her backward toward her desk.

T’Prynn made only a token gesture at resistance. “I am on duty,” she protested as her raised hands found Sandesjo’s breasts.

“Love’s fire respects not the hour,” Sandesjo said, quoting an obscure Klingon poet whose name T’Prynn had forgotten. “And in love’s fire,” she said as T’Prynn reflexively grabbed and twisted a lock of Sandesjo’s hair, “I burn for you.”

Captain Rana Desai sat in a private office in Starbase 47’s Judge Advocate General Corps complex. The JAG contingent on Vanguard had been allocated more space than they had at first known how to utilize. Even junior lawyers and clerks had been granted private office space, since it was at a surplus. One of those empty offices Desai had appropriated for a special purpose: it was devoted to the investigation and preparation of a single case, one that so far remained her personal obsession.

One room. One case. Seemingly infinite questions.

There were too many connections for Desai to see them all at once. After weeks of looking at lists and timelines, she had decided several days ago that the only way she would ever be able to see the big picture of this case would be to start putting it up on a wall, one piece at a time.

So many names, she lamented. So many faces. Like most such charts she had seen compiled, this one was bottom-heavy. Most criminal organizations were supported by vast numbers of foot soldiers. Gathering data from security agencies on worlds throughout the Federation had been time-consuming but not especially difficult. Acquiring intelligence from neutral planets, or from within the borders of hostile powers, had proved significantly more complicated. Starfleet’s code of justice was very specific about what methods were permissible for obtaining evidence.

Bribery was not one of them. That had closed off several avenues of inquiry almost immediately.

She could accept information from Starfleet Intelligence about foreign subjects and events only if she could prove that the information had not been acquired through extralegal means. Anything obtained through coercion or blackmail was considered tainted and therefore inadmissible. The few Starfleet Intelligence agents that she had dealt with always insisted that their data were “clean,” but when pressed to account for their provenance or chain of custody, they inevitably balked and became impossibly vague. That she had been able to verify any of Starfleet’s intelligence for legal use was nothing short of a miracle.

It was late, nearly 2100 hours. Desai had limited her efforts on this case to her free time. Officially, this project did not exist, and until she had reason to take it public, or was ordered by the judge advocate general himself to take action, this isolated room was where it would remain, shrouded in obscurity behind a locked door only she could open.

A pyramid of names and photographs had completely covered the long wall in front of the room’s solitary desk and chair. The pyramid’s lower tier was packed with Ganz’s retinue of several dozen petty criminals and prostitutes, most of whom carried warrants for their arrest—but none from worlds that had extradition treaties with the United Federation of Planets.

The key players at the next level of Ganz’s operation were Morikmol, a hulking Tarmelite who allegedly had ripped a Klingon’s arms completely out of their sockets during a bar fight on Davlos III; Reke, a drug smuggler notorious for imbibing almost as much of his products as he transported; Zulo, whose specialty was disposing of bodies and eradicating forensic evidence; and Joshua Kane, a human who had eight perfect alibis to explain his coincidental presence on eight far-flung planets at precisely the times of eight spectacular heists.

Above them was Ganz’s “business manager,” Zett Nilric, a dapper and utterly sociopathic Nalori assassin. Zett had moved up in Ganz’s organization after the “disappearance” of his predecessor, Jaeq, who had gone missing after assaulting Starfleet personnel on the station. Ganz’s people, of course, insisted that Jaeq had fled the starbase, but Desai suspected that Zulo was the one responsible for Jaeq’s permanent absence.

Parallel with Zett was an Orion woman named Neera. By all accounts, she oversaw the flesh trade on Ganz’s ship, the Omari-Ekon. Just like all the others, she rarely set foot on the station itself, and under the terms of the Federation’s treaty with Orion, the interiors of Orion-registered starships were sovereign Orion territory, not subject to Federation law. So long as they confined their dealings to their own ship, there was nothing that Desai could do about any of it.

The line that linked Ganz to privateer Cervantes Quinn, on the other hand, was a separate matter. Much of Quinn’s business appeared to be transacted aboard Starbase 47, and the pattern of his activity over the past several months suggested that many of his supposedly legitimate shipments had been used to smuggle Ganz’s assorted varieties of contraband. The customs office so far had found no evidence of smuggling aboard Quinn’s ship, the Rocinante, but Desai suspected that she knew why: the dotted line that bound Quinn to the station’s Starfleet Intelligence liaison, Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn.

No hard evidence had yet been found to confirm that Quinn was an unofficial operative of Starfleet Intelligence, but Desai suspected that it would emerge soon enough. T’Prynn has the authority to protect him from customs and routine patrols, she reasoned. That makes him useful to Ganz and gives her a mole inside the Orion’s operation. If it was revealed that T’Prynn had facilitated or sanctioned criminal activity, the resulting public uproar would all but guarantee a court-martial—which would, in turn, expose the solid line that connected T’Prynn to Commodore Diego Reyes.

This would be the heart of the case, and Desai knew it. Manón had seen Reyes meet privately with Ganz in her cabaret less than twenty-four hours earlier; that merited a solid line from the commodore to the Orion merchant prince. The station’s commanding officer was now linked to a reputed mobster, who in turn lorded over a roguish privateer who also answered to Reyes’s direct subordinate. It was a closed circle.

Assuming Diego compartmentalized his communications, she figured, I probably won’t be able to put Jetanien on the board. She momentarily considered adding the reporter Pennington with a dotted line to Ganz but concluded there was no evidence that he had done anything except exercise his rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Her communicator beeped on her hip. She removed it from its pocket and flipped it open. “Desai here.”

Reyes replied, “Dinner’s almost ready. Are you still coming, or do you have to work late?”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes, Diego,” she said. “Go ahead and open the wine.”

He sounded happy. “Will do. Don’t be long.”

“I won’t,” she said, and closed her communicator.

She stared at the pyramid of suspects and evidence on the wall and at the photo of her boyfriend which formed its apex. This, she admitted to herself, is going to be complicated.