Shepard closed the valve and began toweling off. She pulled her clothes on, trying not to look at the conspicuous black and yellow hexagons and wishing the Illusive Man had provided a more varied wardrobe.

She stepped out of the bathroom, just as there was a knock at the door.

She tapped its unlock button. It opened, revealing Garrus. He looked different in civilian clothing, lean and vulnerable.

"Hey. I brought wine, best I could afford on a vigilante's salary."

She smiled. "I thought you wanted to wait?"

"Uh... I did, but then I talked to Worf, and he... he told me to just give it a shot."

Somehow, she managed not to laugh, but her facial expression said it all.

"Er... anyway, how about some music?" he asked.

"May we be of assistance, Garak-Elim?" asked Legion.

"It's just 'Garak.' Plain, simple Garak."

One of the plates above Legion's optic sensor twitched slightly.

"Do you reject your given name because Tain-Enabran banished you?"

Garak turned away from the laptop, focusing his full attention on the geth.

"Well..." He seriously considered the question. "I suppose there's no point in lying to you, since you already know everything anyway."

"Yes, there is not."

"I've never harbored any real anger towards my father, of course. No, it's simply force of habit. My first name isn't particularly dangerous information on its own, but that's no reason to be careless."

The plate twitched again.

"If there is no point in lying to us, why are you doing so? We know you and your father were not on good terms until he was on his deathbed."

"Again, force of habit. Now, did you want something?"

"We have been contacted by Normandy. EDI has noticed your hacking attempts and diverted your connection to a series of honeypot databases. What were you attempting to do?"

"I noticed a slight irregularity in the Normandy's weapon systems, and had hoped to correct it. In retrospect, I probably should have just told Garrus about it, but this seemed faster and easier."

Legion nodded.

"EDI assumed you were attempting to download information about your universe, and asked us to assist you with extranet research instead. We will inform her of her mistake." Legion turned away as if to leave.

"Wait!"

Legion faced him again.

"I'm sure Captain Sisko would be most pleased if I gathered all the strategic intel for him in one place," said Garak.

"This extranet site has all the data you will need," said Legion, tapping at an omni-tool. The site appeared on Garak's laptop. "It is considerably more detailed than anything in Normandy's databases and does not require you to break through Normandy's firewalls."

"Dax, talk to me," said Kira.

"I don't like it, but it'll fly," Dax replied.

"How are the engines?"

"To minimize power consumption, we've adjusted engine profiling and removed all warp field generators. It can do full impulse, but only for a few hours on end. We'll also be subject to time dilation, but for such a short trip, it'll be tactically insignificant."

"Good. What about other systems?"

"No transporters, minimal shields. I removed the subspace radio and installed a conventional one. We do have phasers, but I doubt we'll get off more than half a dozen shots before we run out of power. I'd advise against using them until we're in the Tasale system."

"Are we going to make it?"

"I plotted our trip on that star chart. It looks like we'll have about ten minutes to spare."

"That's not a lot of time, Dax."

"That's the time to get to Illium. Just getting to the Tasale system is a ten minute trip, since the mass relays are close together and have almost no traffic right now. Once we're in the system, we can immediately send the Normandy a tightbeam message. That will have a time lag of about 50 minutes, so they'll have an hour of warning time. But we won't actually get there until ten minutes before the event."

Kira thought about this for a moment.

"Fair enough. You and the chief prepare for takeoff. Nog and I will be there shortly."

"The IFF is now fully operational," said EDI.

"I thought you said we had another two hours," said Joker.

"Correct. While the IFF is online and active, we must conduct integration tests to ensure it will not interfere with the Normandy's systems. I am also detecting some strange readings. We will need to determine their cause. I estimate about two hours for both test suites."

"If you're only detecting the readings just now, how'd you know to leave time for them?" asked Joker.

"It was an anticipated contingency. While I did not know about this issue in particular, I expected some extra delays and compensated accordingly."

"You padded your estimate?"

"Shepard said rounding up your maintenance reports was acceptable. How is this any different?"

[Here's some quick fanwank about where Dax's numbers came from:

I was unable to find hard numbers on how fast "full impulse" is. According to Memory Alpha, the TNG episode "Suspicions" established full impulse on an Enterprise-D shuttle to be about 0.025c. However, that number is slower than every other example by at least an order of magnitude. Since shuttles are generally warp-capable, I find it very hard to believe there's that much of a difference in engine output between shuttlecraft and proper ships. Furthermore, that speed would be very slow for short-range interplanetary jaunts within a system, which seems downright bizarre to me. I'm therefore going to estimate that "full impulse" on a Defiant shuttle is 0.50c, considerably slower than Voyager (between 0.66c and 0.80c), but fast enough to be interesting. This is probably inaccurate, but it's precise, which is good enough. I've done my best to make all the numbers physically reasonable under that assumption without messing up the plot too much. This does make the Tasale system a little smaller than I'd like, but I see no way to fix that without making the shuttle implausibly fast.]