In Engineering, I worked, waiting for inspiration. I busied myself by repairing damage circuitry, improving the shields, and, of course, realigning the inertial dampers. I had Riker send down Bashir. He was a doctor, not an engineer, but an extra set of hands, even untrained ones, was useful. More useful than he would have been on the bridge, at least.

I looked over the information Kiler had gotten on the assassin-creature. I marveled at the technology contained in her. Built-in weapons, shielding, transporter, and cloak. Devices I could only guess as to what they did. Nanoprobes which could regenerate damage almost instantaneously. Run by some advanced artificial intelligence which received commands through some type of temporal transmitter. The whole thing was sort of eery.

It didn't seem to have any weakness.

The ship, fortunately, was not so perfect.

Unlike the assassin, the ship's components were not perfectly integrated. They had been thrown together at the last minute. My guess was, the Orion ship was only from fifty or a hundred years in our future, while it was modified from technology mpore like four or five hundred years in the future. The temporal jump it had made had placed severe stress on the ship, and I doubted it could make another one.

Of course, there wasn't any reason for it to have to.

Against a contemporary ship, it would probably go up in flames.

Against 24th technology, it was unstoppable. There was absolutely no way we could survive against it.

Unless. . . .

It was a crazy idea. The odds against it were astronomical in a way I had never encountered before. Yet it may have been our only choice. I had to at least explain it to Riker.