Author's notes:

eScapefreak: If Chakotay didn't argue with the captain when she endangered her crew for the higher cause, then where would we be? Odds are liability insurance premiums for USS Voyager are expensive enough already....

Katharina-B: Tension? Cliffies? Moi? You think these are bad? In some of my Hannibal fics I had cliffies at the end of every chapter. Well, there isn't one here, so you ought to be pleased, but there is a surprise.

No one on the bridge spoke. The fissure grew larger, slowly, that eerie whine echoing in everyone's ears. Two security officers had joined the bridge. Every officer held a phaser. Eyes flicked back and forth between the viewscreen and the fissure.

An alien figure slid gracefully from the fissure and looked around. Janeway held her breath and kept her phaser handy but did not fire. It saw her – at least she thought it did – and flew towards her in a hurried arc. The security officers raised their phasers and aimed them at the creature. She could feel sweat trickling down her back and bit her lip. The image of those dessicated crewmen on Equinox flashed across her mind. Even so, she raised a shaking hand. Her voice sounded dry and cracked.

"No one fire," she directed.

The creature hovered just a few feet away. It looked around the bridge, looked at Kim, and seemed to be thinking. Then it stretched out its arms imploringly and emitted an inhuman shriek, exposing needle-like teeth.

"Maybe it wants a hug," Tom Paris said, glancing nervously over his shoulder.

"Belay it, Mr. Paris," Janeway replied, keeping her eyes on the creature. "Harry, get the universal translator on-line."

The creature eyed her thoughtfully. Was it suspicious? Did it recognize Voyager? Could it understand her? Was it just going to go on a killing spree, leaving a mass of Section 31 and Voyager crew alike as dessicated husks in its wake? There were no Ankari to serve as a go-between this time; the nearest Ankari would have been thirty years away at maximum warp. This time, the Voyager crew had to go it alone.

It stretched its arms out again, holding its long fingers out beseechingly. Another high-pitched screech made chills run down her spine. She swallowed nervously and felt her palms begin to sweat.

"We're trying to stop the ones who are killing you," she said. "Just as before. There's a ship out there that we can't detect. It's attacking us."

A computer beeped behind her. She didn't turn, keeping her eyes on the creature. Behind her, Kim cleared his throat.

"The universal translator thinks it's asking for our help," Kim said.

"Did it understand us?" Janeway demanded.

"I don't know. Their language is so different the universal translator is having trouble making sense of it."

She had little choice but to continue while she could. The creature would return to its own realm in a few seconds. She glanced over at Chakotay and then looked again at the creature.

"I've turned off the field generator on Equinox," she said. "They are not the ones who hurt you. Those are the people on the cloaked ship. If you can help us, we can stop them together. Can you see that ship from your realm? Help us find that ship. Help us end this."

The creature tilted its head and stared at her for a moment. It was pondering something. What she had said? How many it could kill? Could it understand? A computer console behind her offered its level best to translate her words into what they knew of the alien language, which wasn't much. They'd been able to break into some of their Equinox records, but most were still inaccessible.

"Incoming torpedoes," Ayala said from the Security station.

As if it understood, the creature turned and glided gracefully into its fissure. As soon as it had vanished, Janeway pointed.

"Shields! Now!"

The forward shields came to life, the numbers ticking up faster than she expected but slower than she would have liked. The aft shields remained down, for now. Voyager would face its foe.

"Shields at thirty-eight percent," Harry reported. It would be enough to take a few more blows.

"Hail Equinox," Janeway ordered. "See if the field generator is offline."

"Equinox reports field generator is offline," Ayala said a moment later.

Janeway eyed the viewscreen. There was still nothing there.

"We've got warp drive, for now," Chakotay murmured.

"Duly noted," Janeway said. "Just give it a minute or two."

On the X5573, Kilbourne frowned. Voyager had managed to get its forward shields up. Nothing had happened for a few moments. What were they doing? There were no signs of them abandoning ship or turning tail and fleeing. He had been afraid they might try that. He could destroy Voyager here in this little pocket of space; he couldn't very well do it in the middle of DS9.

"Sir," his ops agent said, "Grambyo's field generator is offline."

Kilbourne shrugged. The X5573 had a duplicate field generator of its own, just in case. "We have shields," he said. "It doesn't matter. It'll all be over in a few minutes. Weapons agent?"

"Torpedoes locked," his weapons agent said obligingly. Kilbourne nodded.

"Sir?" His ops agent frowned at his console. "I'm getting some very strange readings...,"

The Spirits of Good Fortune knew. The Spirits of Good Fortune sought the light.

Two years ago, thousands of light-years away, a ship named Equinox had begun to kill them. They had fought back, almost destroying their attackers. The crew of the Equinox had been hunted down almost to extinction. Then another ship had come across their path. They had built a device that the Spirits cursed: a strange device which bound them and effectively sentenced them to death in a foreign realm.

Now, it had started again.

The Spirits had known that the killing had begun again as soon as it had started. But they had no power to fight back. They tried, only to discover that the device was back again, and any Spirit who ventured to fight back against being slaughtered was helplessly trapped.

There seemed to be no options. If they did nothing, they were hunted, trapped, and killed. If they attacked, they simply died in greater numbers. The Spirits did not know of the test called Kobiyashi Maru, but they knew the no-win situation very well.

From their own realm, they had frantically observed the differences between this time and the previous one. It was far away, as the other realm counted distance. There were two ships, not one. The humans on the ship called Equinox had survived somehow. Many were creatures of light, not flesh; the few times they tried to attack, their touch no longer killed. The humans simply flickered and resumed their normal activities as if nothing had happened.

There were four humans on the ship who seemed to fear them. Things seemed to be far different this time. Before, all of the humans had acted as one, exterminating them. Now, they could see that the three men were treating the woman in a very strange manner. They disturbed her sleep and drugged her. When she was around, they acted as they had before. When she was not in their presence, they behaved very differently. It did not take long for the Spirits to realize that the woman was being deceived. Why was not something they could figure out; these humans' behavior was inexplicable. Those among the Spirits with a more darkly ironic bent noted that now, they were treating the woman just as the crew of the first Equinox had treated them – as a resource.

Bizarre as it was, the Spirits could not find a way to turn the situation to their advantage. One of them attempted to contact the woman. If she understood that things were not as she believed, perhaps she could help stop the killing – somehow. That, too, ended in failure and simply another death.

The Spirits had reached the point of despair. There seemed to be nothing they could do to stem the tide. All they could do was hold on and watch their fellows tortured and slaughtered.

Then they saw the approach of a familiar ship, a ship called Voyager, which had stopped the killing the first time. This had heartened the Spirits and given them hope. They had held off their attack as the crew of Voyager seized the Equinox. Then, the second ship had attacked Voyager.

The Spirits were afraid; Voyager was the only ship they could trust. They had stopped the killing before. Yet it seemed they could not do so now; they could not see the dark ship. The Spirits could not see the ship itself, either. But they could exist in vacuum, and they could sense the fields of crackling energies that these ships used to protect themselves.

The decision had been made: they must contact Voyager before it was destroyed.

Now, like small children assisting a blind man, the Spirits rushed towards the Equinox. The evil device had been turned off. They did not mean to attack it. They recognized the dark-skinned Vulcan who sat in command of Equinox. The shields of Equinox were up, but the Spirits did not intend to attack it.

No, the Spirits of Good Fortune knew this: where the Equinox was, the dark ship would not be far away. If they had to die, better to die lighting the way for their champions. They ripped holes into the other dimension. They sought the light.

Some of them were able to enter the other realm and return to their own safely. The cursed device aboard Equinox no longer bound them to die. They spread out, attacking in groups, seeking the dark ship, seeking to create light.

The dark ship was not far. Some of the Spirits sensed the silent, thrumming energy of its shields. They flew for it as moths fly to a flame. They ripped open dimensional fissures and crashed against the shields.

They could not break through yet; breaking down the shields of even the first, crippled Equinox had taken a great deal of time and lives. They did not intend to. As the Spirits' bodies crashed against the shields, energy and photons buckled. The shield generators on the ship detected and readjusted. But not before the Spirits' energies and the energies of the shields fought and mixed.

And they created light.

It was the longest few moments of her life as she scanned the viewscreen. There sat Equinox, relatively at rest. She knew the bridge crew on it was busily working to see if there was any way to find the cloaked ship. Tuvok always sought the tactical advantage.

She almost missed the first one. It wasn't much; a tiny flare of light, about the same as one might expect from an emergency flare or a ship's running lights. It was close to Equinox, maybe five hundred kilometers, and off to the side. But it was there, and it was rapidly joined by others as the Spirits of Good Fortune ripped at the cloaked ship's shields. It was there, and there were swiftly more, and they could see it.

"Get a weapons lock on that!" Janeway said.

"No auto lock...wait. I have manual lock," Ayala said.

Janeway smiled tightly at the small bundle of flares on the viewscreen. Her hand came up unconsciously and made a fist. Now it was a fair fight.

"Fire," she breathed.

The torpedoes from Voyager arced through space and struck the collection of sparks that had tormented them so. Barely a few seconds later, a matching set of torpedoes flew from Equinox's torpedo tubes and struck the ship. She could make out the familiar ovoid shape of a shielded ship as the torpedoes detonated one by one.

It was small and hard to see; the ship itself was still cloaked. She would've guessed it to be about half the size of Voyager, maybe less. It wasn't even as big as the Nova-class vessel it had hidden behind.

"That thing kicked our butts?" Paris asked, staring at it even as he drew closer.

Janeway chuckled, grimly satisfied now that she had a chance to hit back. "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, Mr. Paris." She glanced over at Ayala. "Another volley," she directed. "Let's see how they like it."

The X5573 was a spyship. It could tail starships for weeks at a time and remain undetected. It was built to allow it to easily infiltrate heavily guarded areas to insert and extract personnel. Its sensors were better than the Starfleet norm. It could hold prisoners securely while Section 31 moved them back and forth. Marla Gilmore had spent most of her trip to this part of space unconscious within one of its maximum-security cells. It excelled at doing the things it was designed to do.

But it was not a ship built for battle. Its designers had anticipated that a spyship might find itself in combat. It had torpedoes and phasers. But while Starfleet captains stood and fought, Section 31 command agents usually took the approach of fleeing at maximum warp, cloaking, and going about their business once safely shielded from prying eyes.

The first volley of torpedoes were safely absorbed by the shields. A second round followed from Grambyo. Tuvok had ordered his crew to fire only scant seconds after his captain. Grambyo carried photon torpedoes, as he had been exacting in his deception operation. It was some small comfort on a ship that suddenly had very little.

Eight torpedoes in the space of thirty seconds would have hurt any ship, and the X5573 dipped and spun under the barrage. Kilbourne gripped the arms of his chair and bared his teeth. How had Janeway gotten a lock?

"Status!" he shouted. "Weapons agent! Return fire!"

His ops agent sounded urgent. Section 31 ships rarely saw combat. "Sir, our shields are down to twenty-eight percent. Those life forms are nibbling away at us."

"How the hell can they see us?" Kilbourne asked. "We're cloaked."

"They don't have to see us to run into us," the ops agent replied. "Maybe they can sense the shields somehow. Maybe they're just running around until they hit something. But when they hit us they're causing some kind of reaction, and Voyager can see that." He sounded resigned. "Sir, cloak is ineffective. They can see us."

Kilbourne sighed. Standing toe to toe with an Intrepid-class cruiser would have been suicide anyway. With aliens nibbling away at his shields, it was simply quicker.

"We have our own field generator," he said. "Bring ours online."

A slight hum indicated that his orders were being followed. Phaser fire lanced out.

"Sir, field generator is online...but...it's emitting patterns of radiation."

"Can they pick it up?" he asked.

"I'm not sure, sure...it's theta-band...initiating scan now."

Another small group of torpedoes launched from Voyager told him the grim facts: that the enemy ships could, in fact, track those patterns. His best advantage had been neatly checkmated. The cloak was useless. If he raised it, the aliens would lead Janeway to his ship. If he used the field generator to keep them at bay, Voyager could track that.

"Electronic warfare agent, try to seize control of Grambyo's computer systems," he ordered. "Anything you can do to distract them. Shut off life support. Initiate self-destruct. Whatever you have to do to get their attention off us for a minute."

Another explosion rocked the ship. For a few moments, the bridge was plunged into darkness. When the lights came back up, they were dimmer.

"Main power offline. Auxiliary is functional," his ops agent reported.

"I lost connection to Grambyo when main power went down," the electronic warfare agent said. "Re-establishing now."

Dammit. "Helm agent, get us out of here. Maximum warp."

Even as the helm agent began to obey, Grambyo and Voyager were both moving to intercept. Another blast rocked the spyship. Kilbourne sighed. Hadn't it been just five minutes ago that he'd been the one dishing out the pounding?

"Warp drive is down," someone said helplessly.

"So are phasers," someone else chimed in.

"They're hailing us," the agent at Communications said.

"On screen," Kilbourne said. "Block our video output; they can't see the inside of the ship. I'll give them audio."

The image of a redheaded woman appeared on the screen. She frowned at the screen, and Kilbourne knew why. She couldn't see anything except huge boxy pixels. He smiled. Janeway hadn't won everything yet.

"This is Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager," she said sternly.

Kilbourne chuckled. "I'm aware of who you are, Captain."

"Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded. I'll fire again if I have to. Surrender your vessel."

He had no warp and no cloak. He had no phasers. Shields were at sixteen percent and dropping fast, the aliens nibbling away at them. He needed to buy some time.

"I can't let you do that, Captain," he said.

On the screen, Janeway smiled. "I'm afraid you don't have much choice," she said. "I can read my instruments. You don't have much left, Mr...?"

"Kilbourne," he volunteered his own name. She had earned that much.

"Kilbourne. Very well. Mr. Kilbourne, we know about the virus you've been bioengineering, and we know what you wanted Marla for."

Kilbourne chuckled. "You don't know anything, captain. There's no proof."

"There will be. Drop your shields or I'll open fire."

All the secrets on this ship had to be kept. That was greater than Janeway. Section 31 had a long and proud history of silence that had been venerated when Janeway was still in diapers.

"I'm not afraid of that," Kilbourne said easily. Then he sat back in his chair and adopted a relaxed posture. No ideas came to him. If he tried to ram their ship, it would be more likely to damage his ship than theirs. As they closed in, torpedoes became less and less of an option; their backblast would catch him, and he had those damned aliens whittling away at his shields.

There was only one thing he could do. He gestured for his comm agent to mute the connection. Without video, Janeway wouldn't know for a few moments.

"Get everyone to the escape pods," he said.

"They'll catch us," his ops agent noted.

"Yes. Standard procedure. Give your name, answer no other questions, request counsel. Janeway will play by the rules. She's too goody-two-shoes not to."

He turned his head and glanced at Ransom and Burke, standing at the rear of the bridge. They were both leaving, obeying his order. Ransom stopped and looked at him, then down to the deck of the spyship.

"It's been an honor serving with you, sir," he said respectfully.

Kilbourne nodded.

"Tell me, Captain Janeway," he said, for he was legitimately interested in the answer. Why not? He wasn't going to get another chance to ask the question, was he? "You do realize...your Maquis crew are going to go back to prison – at least temporarily. You also realize you've disobeyed orders yourself. Your orders were to conduct a tour of the Federation; you should be on Vulcan. It could be that you're going to lose your command over this. "

"That's hardly your concern, Mr. Kilbourne. Lower your shields."

"No," Kilbourne answered. "Answer me first."

He turned and watched his agents depart the bridge, leaving him alone. It wasn't so bad. He'd had a full life. All the same, it was galling to end it this way. But he had been a Section 31 man for years; the agency was his life. He would stand up for it at the last.

The escape pods, like the ship, were painted in black microcoating. Most of them would be caught, he supposed. A few might get away. But his foe was principled, and that was an advantage for him. He just had to keep her talking long enough to let his crew get away. He pressed a button on his console and waited for the self-destruct screen to come up.

"I'm curious, Captain Janeway. Your Maquis will go back to prison. You could lose your command. And for what? Marla Gilmore? I reviewed your logs of the Equinox incident. Why did you take that kind of risk for a mass murderer?"

On the screen, Janeway seemed amused. "It wasn't just her, Mr. Kilbourne. Part of it was. No one deserves to be kidnapped and disappear into oblivion. That's not a Federation I want to be a part of. I won't let things like that happen if I can stop them. I'll pay the price if there is one to be paid."

This was easier than he thought. Janeway was like a lot of starship captains; if you gave them a podium to pontificate on, they'd blather on until next Wednesday. The self-destruct screen came up on his console.

"You haven't done any favors for the Federation today, Captain Janeway," he said. "We could have had peace and prosperity for decades to come. You took that away. Your grandchildren could have lived comfortable lives free of harm. Now...I guess we'll never know."

He tapped out the code necessary to begin self-destruct.

"You can't build peace and prosperity on a mass grave," Janeway said.

Kilbourne cut the connection. It was time. It was too bad it had to go this way. This operation would be a mark of shame for Section 31 for years. All he'd ever wanted was to keep the Federation safe. He cleared his throat.

"Computer, initiate self-destruct. Authorization Kilbourne. Activation code beta, beta, omega, thr--,"

Suddenly a form shimmered in front of him. It resolved into a blonde woman in a silver jumpsuit. Over one eyebrow a strange implant gleamed. She held a phaser pointed directly at him.

Kilbourne started, but he wasn't faster than photons. The phaser blast struck him in the chest. He felt his knees give and collapse to the floor. Seven strode over to him and looked at him calmly for a moment or two.

"You are not the only one who can gain unauthorized access to a ship's computer system, Mr. Kilbourne," she informed him, and raised an eyebrow.

He saw her reach for the console, and then he lost consciousness.