Suddenly Ali was gripping the console in front of her as the world tilted under her. "He's going to destroy them," she gasped.

Spud's eyes widened as she honed in on her friend, barely registering the worried look on Chopade's face. "The taurrans?" She checked and Ali nodded as she rubbed her temples.

Spud tapped her palm to activate her comm. "Sir, Bert's going to destroy Taurr," she relayed.

"What?" Grey's anger and confusion was still palpable even though they only had audio.

"We… have insider information," she said diplomatically. There was a loaded silence as Grey counted to three in his head to stop himself from voicing his frustration out loud, before he called a staff meeting. "You okay?" Spud checked as she tapped again the close the line.

"Yeah," Ali nodded, "peachy," she muttered to herself as she knew what was coming. After their latest discussions there was no way she could argue against Grey's plan for her to exploit her connection to get the codes they needed from Barker. Except that it would probably be a highly distressing experience that had a higher risk than she liked of giving him access to her own mind. She knew the priority was the mission and his impending arrest - or death - and not her health and well being. That didn't mean it didn't scare her.

By the time everyone had arrived at the conference room they were all more than anxious to start discussing not only their theories and plans, but how they knew what they knew. "Spud," Grey indicated to start.

"We think we can work on a way to contain the explosion if we try and destroy the weapon," Spud explained as she brought up the schematics they'd been reviewing on the holo-display in the centre of the table. "However, we can't do it without someone aboard the ship. It might also be possible to jam the signals it needs to function properly."

"How?" Grey asked.

"We'd need to work out what frequencies it utilises and then we flood them with meaningless junk," Spud explained.

Grey instantly turned back to Ali, who had already steeled herself for this. She knew it was coming so she had already started working on the mental walls to shut down the emotions it would invoke. She raised an eyebrow at him defiantly. "How about you just order me to sleep with him?" She challenged. "Would've saved you the trouble of breaking me out of his brig too."

"Ali…" Grey warned.

"Oh, I'm sorry, is this not the part where you ask me - real nice, I'm sure - to try and force my way into his mind?"

Confusion settled on Frost and Lartyne's faces as they looked around the table to try and determine what they were missing as outrage registered on Spud's face. "You wouldn't?" Narla asked quietly, her face as calm and serene as always, but her voice held an edge to it that none of them had heard before.

"We can't afford not to," Grey replied unhappily.

"We can if it spectacularly backfires," Ali corrected.

"Will someone please explain what you're talking about," Frost asked.

"I'm half kentarian," Ali explained as quickly as possible, "as a result my physiology means that I forged a mental connection with Bert Barker back when I was dating him. I think that might've been an attributing factor when I was kicked out of USEP. After all I'm psychic, how could I not know my own boyfriend was plotting the destruction of a planet? Well, that and the whole half-breed thing."

"Ali…" Grey warned.

"What? You gonna kick me out again?" She asked haughtily. "It's an order now, what will it be then? Guilt trip? Duress? At least if I air all the dirty little secrets you can't blackmail me."

"No one can force you to do this," Spud objected. "How could -"

"Do you have a better way to get the codes we need?" Grey demanded. Spud promptly quietened down. "Captain Turner you will get your behaviour in check or I will confine you to the brig again."

Ali shrugged before sinking back into her chair in resignation. "Yes, sir."

There were more than a few concerned looks at her apparent acceptance of the situation. "The moral dilemma aside, what if we don't get the codes?" Wood asked, hoping to somewhat defuse the situation. "Or worse, if Barker finds out our plan?"

Grey looked at Ali. "I can promise nothing. You're asking me to attempt something I've never done before," she said with a shrug.

He turned to Spud and Chopade, silently asking for options. "We're really careful about what we shoot?" Spud suggested. "Without the codes to shut it down remotely we need to either contain the explosion or not risk blowing the whole thing up."

"We'll need more time with the data for the latter, so far we're not entirely sure which systems are critical," Chopade added.

"Exactly, I've never seen anything so interwoven before," Spud agreed.

"What shields does this thing have?" Wood asked.

Chopade brightened up considerably at that question. "That's part of the ship and completely isolated from the weapon," he explained as he shifted through the schematics on the display to better explain. "For the most part the two systems are separate. Though I would be wary about targeting the ship's reactor because I suspect that by now the weapon will have been integrated into the ship's power systems. We can't do too much damage to the ship in case it triggers something in the weapon, or damages it outright. "

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Mishri's right," Spud agreed, raising her own hands to pick out key aspects. "We're talking about two systems built centuries apart, the chances of them being compatible is low - at best. Short term, the options are to physically move the control terminal onto the ship or to rig up a remote control access point. If this was me, I'd go with the physical terminal, hacking a hard wired connection's more difficult."

"That would explain this power spike," Ali added as she tapped a section on the diagram. Spud nodded.

"If I had to guess, I'd say that's his control room," she agreed. "When we get closer Mishri should be able to isolate the lone human biometric."

"Should?" Grey questioned.

"Depends on their shielding capabilities," Chopade explained succinctly.

"How long have we got?" Grey asked, turning to Frost.

"Taurr is a few days away. We're catching up but we won't be in range for at least another day," she explained.

There was a pause before Grey turned back to Ali. "Your tetnar, it's stronger the closer you are, right?" She nodded curtly. "Wait until you think it's strong enough to work, but we need those codes before we catch up to him."

"Yes, sir." With that final tense agreement, Grey dismissed them all.

~-x-~

Normally when Ali had enough drinks to get the haze in her head she currently felt, it was a pleasant feeling, or at least a nice break from reality. Somehow, this time it simply seemed to fuel her melancholy as she stared at the half empty glass in front of her, somehow swaying slightly even though she was sitting down and leaning on her elbows on the bar. She glared at it.

"Is the drink that bad?" Tun'luh asked.

"It's not doing what it's supposed to," Ali replied.

"Which is?"

"My head should feel nice, light. Instead, it's still a crappy day."

"You sound like I should send you to Hajjar."

Ali finally looked up from her drink with a look of confused incredulity. "Aymn Hajjar? He's not retired?" Tun'luh continued to give her his level stare as if questioning why she wouldn't believe him. Drunk or no, she knew tuthus were a species that attached a particularly high social stigma to lying. Ali briefly wondered how their intelligence networks functioned. "Do you even have the authority to send people to the psychiatrist?"

"I have my ways," he replied before heading off to see to another customer.

She was nursing another drink by the time anyone occupied the seat next to her and she didn't even look up as they did. They quickly glanced over the menu before Tun'luh came over and they ordered their usual. "I have a whole menu and you still order the same drink you always have," Tun'luh pretended to scold.

"I looked at it," Wood teased right back, pretending to sound affronted. "Add something that tempts me." Tun'luh would have blown a raspberry through his trunk by way of retort, but that would have been unhygienic whilst he was preparing drinks. Instead Wood glanced at Ali, who was still staring despondently into her drink. "Liquid courage stops working when it just gets you drunk," he joked.

Ali scoffed. "I was attempting to cheer myself up. Didn't work."

"With a depressant?"

Ali rolled her eyes. "If this is why you're here, jog on."

"Actually, I came here for a drink, you just happened to have the same idea and looked like you needed cheering up," Wood retorted. "I don't know why I bothered. It's not like the great Alice Turner would deign to let someone else in on her mission to save the galaxy."

Ali finally turned from her drink with narrowed eyes. "You're accusing me of having a superiority complex?"

"Don't you? What do you share? You don't share responsibilities. You don't share information. You don't share consequences. You think everything's on you to do, so why is that? Hm? Don't trust us to be as good as you?"

For a moment Ali seriously considered throwing her drink in his face, before deciding his drink would be a better idea, then remembered that she didn't have a cat in hell's chance of achieving that in her currently drunk state. "Take the stick out of your arse, Wood, it might let you think properly," she replied instead. "I spent two years on my own. Two years knowing that I could only rely on myself to live through the next job. It's not about what I think other people can and can't do, it was about whether or not I could trust them."

"You abandoned me in an escape pod." He was seething despite being able to keep his voice relatively level. "You could have told me what would happen if that interceptor was destroyed, but no -"

"You ungrateful little…" Ali trailed off before she said something particularly insulting. "That decision was to protect you," she hissed. "What would you have done if I'd have told you? Huh? You were right, to stop Bert we have to be ready to do whatever it takes, but getting us both killed was pointless. You are needed here. I took a gamble that he'd want me alive, even if it was to kill me himself, but I knew the odds and I expected to die. If I did, well, at least that meant I no longer had to worry about a psychotic ex actually getting inside my head."

A tense silence passed between them. Ali knew that she probably should have told him everything rather than keep him in the dark, but she knew that if she had, he would have insisted on coming with her. She already carried the weight of all of the bodies Barker had left in his wake. She couldn't be responsible for anyone else dying even when she knew they'd happily take on the danger. "Fine," he decided tersely, "but perhaps, rather than drinking to drown out your fear, you should be spending your time preparing for exploiting this tetnar."

"What makes you think I'm even going to do it?"

"Whatever it takes, right?" Wood asked with a shrug. "Scared or not you're still the same idiot who flew into an armada in a ticking bomb on the off-chance you could do some damage."

"That couldn't horribly backfire."

"Most people would consider death horribly backfiring," Wood corrected, earning a wry laugh. "Besides, I think providing the key to activating a potentially planet destroying weapon counts as horribly backfiring."

Well, he had her there. She closed her eyes as she took a steadying breath. "True, but neither of them have provided a chance at giving him unmitigated access to my mind and therefore everything I know."

"Then be stronger, be better, than him," Wood corrected, "you know you can be."

Ali sighed as her eyes fell back to her drink. "It took everything I had just to lock him up last time. I don't know how much more I'm willing to give."

"That's for you to decide, but don't make the decision based on self-doubt," he warned, making Ali look up at him again. Anything either of them might have said to that was lost due to the shout from a concerned voice.

"Ali!" Spud called as she made her way to the bar having finally finished her shift in engineering. She easily noted the way that they both quickly turned back to their respective drinks. "Am I interrupting?" She asked rather more hesitantly.

"No, I was just leaving," Wood replied, finishing his drink and leaving them to it.

Spud frowned in confusion at his sudden retreat before turning to Ali who just shook her head. "How're you holding up?" Spud asked as she took the now empty seat. "I can't believe Grey actually ordered you to -"

"Spud…" Ali warned tiredly.

"No, seriously, this is not okay. Narla is livid too," Spud cut in again. "You don't have to do this if you aren't comfortable with it," she assured her friend.

"I know," Ali promised with a weak smile.