“Warning. Antimatter containment now at 50 percent and dropping. Warp core breach in sixty seconds.”

“Savitri, we have to get out of here, now!”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Bhatnagar muttered, moving toward the towering column of the warp core itself. It pulsed normally, tranquilly. The ejection system really was off line, but…

Suddenly Benitez’s hand was around her wrist, yanking her away from the core. “Commander, we’ve been given the order to evacuate. We have to go!”

Bhatnagar allowed herself to be pulled away from the core, still unable to believe what was happening as she started to run to the escape pod.

Mello’s thumb tensed above the trigger. Her eyes never leaving Kira’s, she tapped her combadge. “Mello to bridge.” No response. “Bridge, this is the captain. Respond.”

“Captain,” Kira said, “you have to listen to me—”

“Shut up,” Mello said, backing toward her desk. Without changing her aim, she activated the companel. “Mello to bridge.”

“They can’t hear you, Captain,” Kira said. “Montenegro’s put your quarters under security quarantine. That means a forcefield over the door, signal jamming, and, I suspect, neutralized phasers.”

Mello tested her phaser on the door. Nothing happened. “Dammit,” she said, tossing the useless weapon aside. Xiang still lay unconscious on the floor. “All right, Colonel. Start explaining to me what the hell is going on.”

“Admiral Akaar sent me a message,” Kira began, and with exacting detail, proceeded to explain the truth about Shakaar and his assassination. “Montenegro must have anticipated that he was in danger of being exposed, because almost from the moment I came aboard, he tried to convince me that something wasn’t quite right with you.How you’d begun to distance yourself, how your personality had changed—all things that I’d seen in Shakaar the last few months. He even had evidence ready for us to discover that you were the one who’d faked the cloaking-device reading. He set me up, Captain, to get us both out of the way so he could take over the ship and carry out an attack against Trill.”

Mello had begun pacing the room. “I attended a classified Starfleet briefing on this parasitic species just after I was promoted to captain, eleven years ago. There was compelling evidence to suggest they might someday return, but I never imagined—” She stopped, cut off by a Klaxon and the computer’s announcement of a core breach in progress.

Kira tested the doorway. The force field was still there. Mello failed again to contact other parts of the ship. “Quarantine field should have come down automatically once the evacuation order was issued.”

“Maybe it would have,” Kira said, “if this were a real crisis.”

“You think Montenegro engineered this?”

“I’m beginning to,” Kira said. “That unexplained crisis in engineering gave him the perfect opportunity to set something up. Think about it. He can’t just take command of the ship without an explanation the crew will accept. Confining you here, even killing you, doesn’t help him. He needs control. But if he gets rid of the crew—”

“He’s leveling the playing field,” Mello realized.

Kira nodded. “The ship can proceed to Trill on autopilot, then all he needs to do is implement an attack program, or voice-authorize manual firing of the weapons systems. It’s what he convinced us you’d be able to do.”

“Warning,”the computer said. “Antimatter containment now at 13 percent. Warp-core breach in fifteen seconds.”

“If you’re wrong, we’re dead,” Mello said. The decks vibrated beneath them. Outside the windows, escaping pods could be seen fleeing the ship.

Kira said nothing as the final seconds dwindled…and then passed. The Gryphoncontinued toward Trill at Warp 9.5 silent as a tomb.

Xiang awoke and took the news of what had happened better than Kira expected. Maybe it was because now at least there was no question about who the immediate threat was. Mello studied the chip with Akaar’s message and the parasite file, which Xiang still carried, while Kira and the doctor searched for a way to break out of the captain’s quarters.

Less than four hours from Trill, the forcefield in front of the door fritzed out. The women took positions in different parts of the room, ready to hit Montenegro from three directions. But the doors didn’t open at once. The panels barely budged before several sets of fingers forced their way into the crack, pulling the doors apart.

Faces started to appear between the doors. Spillane. Bhatnagar. Croth. A half-dozen other officers and crewman Kira didn’t recognize. “Captain,” Spillane said. “Are you all right?”

“Nothing that kicking my first officer’s ass wouldn’t cure,” Mello said. “Why didn’t you evacuate with the others?”

“Blame Commander Bhatnagar,” one of the engineers said. “She convinced us the ship wasn’t about to blow up—the warp core was at optimum.”

“Spillane and I both had similar suspicions,” Croth said. “We were on the bridge when Montenegro came up unexpectedly, just in time for the computer to announce the alert so he could order the evacuation. We were already inside our pod when we started to question the situation. Thirty seconds to core breach, it occurred to us to ask the computer to locate you, but internal sensors suddenly went off-line. That’s when we were sure that something weird was going on.”

“When the ship didn’t explode,” Spillane continued, “we tried getting back to the bridge, but it was sealed off. We started searching the ship section by section for anyone else left aboard, and that’s when we ran into Bhatnagar and her team. They said their tricorders detected biosigns coming from your quarters.”

“Good work, all of you,” Mello said.

“Sir,” Bhatnagar said. “Why is Commander Montenegro doing this? What is he after?”

“Colonel Kira and Dr. Xiang will explain on the way,” the captain said.

“On the way where?” Spillane asked.

“The armory, then the bridge,” Mello said, stepping out the door. “I’m taking back my ship.”

Turbolifts were off-line. They had to take Jefferies tubes from deck to deck, using wrist lights because illumination abruptly cut out through most of the ship while they were raiding the armory. Using phaser rifles, cutting their way into the bridge once they reached deck one was relatively easy. And to Kira’s surprise, nothing hazardous greeted their arrival. The bridge was dark and empty. Dim emergency lights cast stark shadows across the room, making the lights from the crew stations seem all the more intense.

Spillane went to the operations console and studied the ship’s status. “We’re still on course from Trill,” she reported. “Speed is constant at Warp 9.5, and flight control is locked off.”

“Computer,” Mello said at once. “Take the warp engines off line. Authorization Mello-Pi-Four-Six-Two.”

“Unable to comply. Emergency manual override in effect. Warp-engine control only possible from main engineering.”

“Computer, locate Commander Montenegro.”

“Unable to comply. Internal sensors off-line.”

Mello cursed herself for forgetting. “Can we send out a distress call?” she asked Croth.

The science officer made a guttural noise of frustration. “Communications are off-line or disabled, I can’t tell which.”

Bhatnagar and her engineers quickly ascertained the extent of the damage Montenegro had done. Clearly realizing that he was still facing opposition aboard the ship, the first officer had abandoned the bridge while Mello and her team were preparing their assault. Evidently he hadn’t had enough time to assume complete control of the ship, so he had concentrated instead on locking out tactical, communications, propulsion, and flight control from the bridge, routing them to engineering. He’d also sabotaged the control systems for transporters, turbolifts, and the internal security systems, which meant there would be no easy way of tracking Montenegro’s movements, or using the life support system against him.