“Why would the Federation be interested in helping us?”

“Because we share a mutual interest, my friend,” Captain Lewis explained, his face betraying nothing. “We too recognize the threat posed by the Underspace.”

“Who said anything about a threat?”

“Don’t play me for a fool,” Captain Lewis shook his head, growing frustrated with the incessant back and forth. He was making no more progress with the Cardassian commander than in their first call. It was time to push the point. “You didn’t load that platform of yours with all those coils and emitters to not use them, and you didn’t instrument the corridors to do nothing with them.”

“You catch on quick, but what’s happening here is not your problem.”

“The Underspace is all our problem if someone – the Klingons, the Romulans, or how about the Founders even – decide to use it against us,” Captain Lewis countered, appealing to the distrust he knew ran thick with the Cardassians ever since the Dominion War. “Like you, I too lived through the War, and I have no interest in seeing another.” His eyes grew dark as he spoke, one warrior appealing to another. “We want the same outcome as you.”

“We will handle this, Starfleet. Go home and let us clean up the mess.”

This was going nowhere quick, Captain Lewis knew. Cardassians could be so damn stubborn. However, before he had a chance to respond, Lieutenant Commander Eidran approached with a PADD in his hand. The look in his eyes suggested that it was important.

“If you’ll hold for a moment,” Captain Lewis said towards the viewscreen before signaling Lieutenant Gadsen to suspend the link. 

The screen was quickly replaced by the seal of the United Federation of Planets.

Once the line was cut, Captain Lewis accepted the PADD from his Executive Officer. “What’ve you got for me?” he asked as he began to read.

“The Admiral, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran offered. “She’s a madwoman.” When they’d first received the flash from the Polaris, he’d had to reread it a couple times just to make sure he was reading it right.

“No, the Admiral is just the right amount of dangerous,” Captain Lewis chuckled as he finished reading the PADD. Her plan was a bit mad. The Betazoid wasn’t wrong there. But then again, this whole affair was a bit mad, and if anyone would see them through it, it would be Allison Reyes. “Now we really need to convince our new friends that they need our help.”

“How?” Lieutenant Commander Eidran asked, somewhat aghast. “By telling him that there’s an Alita heavy cruiser and a flock of Klingon birds coming to trash the place?” This whole thing had gone from problematic to insane. Were they really about to ally with the Cardassians, only to doublecross them?

“By kindly convincing them to be somewhere else,” Captain Lewis said, his tone remarkably unconcerned. “And to take us with them so we can pass along more targets for Captain Vox.”

“And how on earth are we going to do that?”

“We need something that draws them back into the Underspace,” Captain Lewis suggested as he glanced over at their science officer. Lieutenant Commander Sena might now wear the pips of a Starfleet officer and play the role of a Research Fellow in Xenotechnology, but back in the day, she was something far more devious and menacing. “Any ideas, Miss Sena?”

“Have you considered why they’re just hovering here by their platform?” the Romulan asked, the gears already turning in her head.

He shook his head. Admittedly, he had not.

“If I’m them, and I don’t want my plan to be discovered, I’m not going to park two warships out front,” Lieutenant Commander Sena pointed out. “This place is so nondescript, and the platform so low on its emissions that, even if we passed within an AU of this place, we’d never pick it out of the cosmic background radiation… not unless there were two Keldons hovering beside it.”

 “What are you getting at?” Captain Lewis asked, somewhat embarrassed that he hadn’t thought about that himself. Still, he didn’t see how it helped them.

“Take a look at their power draw,” Lieutenant Commander Sena continued as she casted some telemetry up onto the main viewscreen. “It’s through the roof.”

“But they’re just sitting there…” Lieutenant Commander Eidran jumped in.

“Exactly. But you see, Cardassian replication systems have always been quite inefficient,” Lieutenant Commander Sena posited. “My hypothesis is that, since the Keldon class does not have a particularly large probe complement, they’re holding position here while they fabricate the additional probes that they need to continue instrumenting the Underspace.”

“That’s quite a leap,” the Betazoid warned. “Do you have anything more to back your guess?”

“You got anything better?” the Romulan shot back with a cold stare.

“It’s enough to work with,” Captain Lewis jumped in before the duo strangled each other. He turned back towards his operations officer. “Lieutenant Gadsen, get me our new friend again.”

A moment later, the Federation logo vanished and the Cardassian Gul reappeared.

“Sorry about that,” Captain Lewis apologized nonchalantly. “My XO here, he was just letting me know that we’re almost done with the repairs to our EPS distribution network.” That little lie cleaned up his earlier lie.

“That’s good. You’ll be on your way then, I trust?”

“Really, I was hoping to tag along with you,” Captain Lewis replied with a smile. But the Cardassian looked less than impressed by that idea.

“To do what?”

“We know you were instrumenting the Underspace when we ran into you, and we want to help,” Captain Lewis offered. He wouldn’t leap straight to Sena’s hypothesis, in case she was wrong or that it might spook him, but rather he took a more delicate tact. “Scan our ships. The USS Ingenuity is a research cruiser with fabrication facilities bar none for its size, and my ship isn’t half bad herself.” They were both, he knew, far more capable than the Cardassian clunkers. “If you send us the specifications, we can help you deploy more probes more quickly than you could ever accomplish on your own.” 

“Why are you offering to help us, Captain?”

“I told you already,” Captain Lewis reminded him. “You may have more of the pieces figured out as to how to stop this thing, but we don’t want this future any more than you do. We are at your service.”