Chapter 9

"Honestly? One minute?"

One minute. It was barely even enough to get a single question answered with any clarity.

"One minute, sir, that's what it says."

La Forge looked apologetic. There wasn't any reason for him to: after all, he'd been the one to find the clause. It wasn't his fault the clause had had a litter of baby clauses and sub-clauses and that they all wanted a piece of the action. Riker gave Geordi a sympathetic grimace and returned to his deliberations.

One minute. It was nothing, absolutely nothing. Riker tried to think of any time when he'd tried to get a point across at school debate club and had managed to keep his time limit. He wasn't coming up with anything encouraging. Admittedly, it was Data he was going to be talking to. As long as he could forestall the usual verbal enthusiasm Data indulged in, he could probably get a lot of useful information in one minute.

And like it or not, it was all they had so far.

"Okay." Riker took a breath. "Okay. Get me my one minute. Right now."

"Getting it, but you're not going to like the conditions."

"The hell with the conditions," said Riker. "And the rest of you, get back to the books. See if you can't find me something that stretches to one minute ten. After all," he added, with a grim shadow of his usual twinkle at Deanna, "our luck's changing."

"I've been thinking about it," said Lore, with a smile.

Picard, who had not yet gained his seat, frowned at him. The android's tone was almost submissive. And something really was most dreadfully wrong: the sense of it hung in the atmosphere like smoke around Picard as he hesitated, hands on the back of his chair.

There were three guards in the room this time. All of them were heavily armed. And all of them were watching Lore as if he were a ticking time bomb.

Although the android was undoubtedly a prize disaster waiting to happen, this was just one more item on Picard's checklist of things that were not right. Many successful leaders have similar mental checklists: two or three items too many and the instincts push for one to withdraw from a situation. The leader, at that point, absorbs those items and, if he's a starship captain at least, continues to investigate. Picard, his mental fedora firmly pulled down over his preservation instincts, acted true to type.

"Why are there more guards watching you?"

"You think they'd tell me? Honestly, Captain. They didn't even bother to tell me what I was charged with."

Picard, aware he was wasting time, switched interrogation targets effortlessly. "Why is this prisoner being additionally guarded?"

"Captain Picard," whispered the aide, "your allotted time is with the prisoner, not his guards. They are not required to answer you."

Picard's list grew another couple of additional items.

"Would you be so kind," he said, levelly, "to tell me who would be required to answer such a question?"

The aide stared at him with dark, shark like eyes. "No-one is required to answer that question," he said. "Prisoners do not need to know why they are guarded, only that they are. It is all in the docking terms and conditions."

"But surely -"

"Captain Picard. You have only eight minutes remaining. Are you sure this is how you wish to spend them?"

The alien face was inscrutable, a mask. The guards hadn't moved even the slightest inch. Behind Picard's shoulder, at the table, Lore snorted.

"And you think I'm the one who's a criminal here?"

Picard rounded on him, unable to keep the creeping sense of doubt out of his head and taking refuge briefly in irritation against a familiar antagonist.

"I know you're a criminal. What I don't know is why, given the sheer breadth of genuine opportunities your life history affords, anyone would bother to try accusing you of a crime you didn't commit."

"I said I'd been thinking about it," said Lore, truculently. "You didn't give me a chance to offer my opinion. Are you sure you don't want to keep on trying to question the guards?"

Challenged identically on two fronts, Picard took his seat opposite and stared Lore down - or at least did his best. The android's gaze was implacable.

Oddly, though, I'm starting to even find Lore more encouraging company than my "hosts". And if I ever tell him that, I've lost.

"Please. Tell me what you've been thinking about," was all he said, aloud. Lore leant back in his chair, evidently pleased with himself.

"You'll be surprised, I know," he said, "when I tell you that to reach my conclusion I had to set aside the assumption that this was actually ever anything to do with me…"

"Astounded," murmured Picard, trying not to roll his eyes.

"Hey, don't touch that!"

Lore looked lazily up from the control panel he'd been tinkering with. The woman was hustling over, her massive belly slowing her down considerably.

"Why not? It's obviously broken."

"I know it's broken. But it's just the equivalent of this ship's "check engine" light. It doesn't mean anything. Just leave it alone."

"Don't you want to check the engine?"

"No, I don't want to check the engine. And I don't want you to check it either. Just sit down and keep your hands to yourself." She had glared at him. "In all meanings of the word. You're still a bastard. I can tell one when I see one."

The ship was old. Really old. Or at least parts of it were: it was a hulking patchwork monster, inside and out. There were brand new parts carefully slotted into place, like bricks, set and shaped and definitely supposed to be there - and then there were other pieces of equipment balanced precariously on edges and shoved into corners, trailing wires that were connecting them tenuously with the innards of the central core. And there were some bits - the bits that interested Lore the most - that looked almost organic.

A ship like this could only ever be one of two things - either indestructible or about to self-destruct. And it wasn't showing any of the usual warning signs of a machine about to explode.

Had he been human, Lore's fingers would have been itching. This thing was a treasure trove. And it was going to Tractusaria.

Proof positive, more than ever, that the universe loved Lore. More than made up for his lack of caring family. The universe itself liked to throw down gems like this one in his path.

Shame about the baggage, but it wasn't anything Lore couldn't handle. If she proved to be a problem, he'd just kill her.

"You want me to get this thing moving?" was all he said. For now. For all he knew she had the thing rigged to blow or responding to bio data commands only.