The minute he picked up a Starfleet warp signature on long-range sensors, Nathan Blake turned the bow of the Oscar Wilde towards the system’s asteroid belt. They were on him much faster than he was expecting, especially since he’d searched his cargo thoroughly for any bugs or trackers. An experienced go-between for sensitive cargos that his buyers wished not to track, Blake wasn’t new to this dance—he’d spend a day or so eluding whatever old patrol ship the local starbase had sent after him, and then he’d be on his way with a new transponder signal. Even if he did miss a bug, the kelbonite in the asteroids would keep him shielded from sensors—if he could make it there in one piece.

“This is the Federation starship Achilles. Power down your engines and prepare to be boarded,” came a woman’s voice over the ship-to-ship comm array.

Before Blake could even open communications to respond, he felt his small ship rock around him. He’d shrugged off his share of hits in the past, and this definitely hadn’t come from one of the Starfleet clunkers he was used to encountering out that far. His shields were already down to fifty percent.

“Hey, hey! That’s not fair!” Blake exclaimed as he launched Ju’Day-class freighter into a series of rolls to avoid further targeting.

The Achilles dwarfed the freighter, and its brand-new high-powered phaser arrays meant business. Luckily for Blake, it seemed to be relatively sluggish at impulse speeds as he was able to put some distance between him and the Starfleet cruiser. Ahead, he could see the asteroid field. As he got closer, the cruiser turned its fire on the floating rocks, a few of which vaporized instantly under the withering barrage coming from the Federation ship. It was a clear sign to turn back and a clear sign to Blake that he should get there as fast as he could.

As the hail continued to come in, Blake ignored everything except getting his ship out of range of the cruiser. There was too much riding on this shipment for him to get caught, and he had no desire to spend the next few years of his life in a Federation rehabilitation colony, cushy as they were rumored to be. As he was entering the edge of the asteroid belt, his proximity alarm went off again. There was another Starfleet vessel incoming.

Blake glanced at the tactical display—the transponder was labeled Apollo. As he dodged and weaved through the asteroids, more and more of them began to explode.

“Are those fucking torpedoes?!” Blake cursed as the second cruiser began to pummel the asteroid field into oblivion. “These people are insane.”

With the kelbonite ore now a cloud, Blake’s own sensors were beginning to malfunction. He was operating purely on visuals and his own intuition to stay out of harm’s way. He began to reevaluate the wisdom of stealing from Starfleet, but every inkling he had to just surrender was tempered by the thought of the massive fortune he’d been promised for safe delivery to the Orions. His survival instincts continued to be out-voted by his sense of greed. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed an unusual radiation spike, but he had little time to think about that before he saw an opportunity.

The inertial dampeners of the Oscar Wilde struggled to keep up as the acceleration pressed Blake back into his seat while he put himself on a direct course for a large, nearly spherical asteroid. He reasoned that a gravity-assisted slingshot would put him on the dark side of the planetoid long enough for him to cut power and hope to blend in with the environment. It was a textbook flight maneuver that took the winged freighter away from the lumbering cruisers. Reasonably sure he was on a path that was free from debris, he cut his engines. And that definitely would have worked in any other situation than the one he found himself in then.

Ignoring the ruse entirely, the cruisers were still on a direct beeline to the Oscar Wilde. It made no sense to Blake. He was absolutely sure nothing on his ship was transmitting, and there were no power signatures. Then it hit him: the radiation surge. He’d been tagged.

“What has got these guys so pressed?!” Blake muttered, powering everything back on at precisely the last second before the larger ships could get in range.

Achilles and Apollo were coming around opposite sides of the planetoid, so Blake dove his ship straight down. It wouldn’t be enough to lose them, but now he was aware enough of their capabilities to know that avoiding their weapons fire for long enough would allow the trace radiation to dissipate. It would just mean that he had to play the game of cat and mouse a little longer, or so he thought. Waiting for him under the planetoid was yet another Starfleet ship, the Theseus, which greeted him with a spread of torpedoes set to proximity blasts—a gentle invitation to stand down. He could tell from its power signature and the lines of its hull that it was another brand-new ship like the Achilles and Apollo. Whomever he’d offended at Starfleet Command wasn’t pulling any punches to get ahold of him.

With left, right, and up now unavailable to him, the only thing Blake could think to do was to head out of the asteroid field. He didn’t want to think of the level of strain he was putting on his engines, but he was counting on Starfleet captains being more conservative than he was on his willingness to engage his warp drive so close to an asteroid field. Just as the field was beginning to clear, he realized how badly he’d miscalculated. With a flash of light, the starship Arcturus dropped out of warp directly in front of him, looking as angry and impressive as a starship could look. They had him right where they wanted him and scooped up the Oscar Wilde with a pair of industrial-grade tractor beams.

“This is Captain Michael Lancaster of the starship Arcturus. If you do not power down your engines, your ship will be ripped apart,” came a much more direct assessment of his situation than the initial hail he’d gotten. “Cut your engines now.”

Blake frantically looked around the tiny bridge of his ship as he thought about his options. He’d never been caught before, and he wasn’t going to let his first time be then. All the screens and controls around him began to get blurry, though, and he instinctually hit full throttle. Alarms began to sound, and he was now fully panicking.

“You are breaking up! Lower your shields!”

“Computer, lower shields,” Blake managed.

With not a second to spare, Oscar Wilde’s shields went down. Blake felt him snatched away in a transporter beam as his ship exploded around him. It was the most unusual sensation he’d ever experienced, going from the feeling of certain death to emerging out of the transporter beam in the gleaming blue and gold environs of a Starfleet transporter room. A fancy Starfleet transporter room. He blinked as he looked up to see two guards in Starfleet Security body armor pointing phaser pistols at him. They were flanking a very handsome Orion man wearing a gold uniform.

“Welcome aboard Arcturus, Captain Blake,” the Orion said, a teasing tone to the way he emphasized Blake’s erstwhile title. “I’m Lieutenant Commander Ferellan Tornellis. Starfleet Intelligence has been very interested in meeting you.”

Blake swallowed; the type of shenanigans he normally got into had never brought him face-to-face with Starfleet Intelligence. For all of the many ways in which the Federation was benign—beneficent, even—Starfleet Intelligence still had a reputation as being deeply committed to ensuring the Federation’s security to a degree that wouldn’t match the Cardassians or Romulans in their methods, but certainly in their zealousness.

“You could have just called on subspace,” he managed.

“We thought a more personal touch was necessary in this case,” Tornellis quipped, black eyes looking him over. “These two have strict orders not to hurt you, but they will definitely stun you if you do anything silly. We’re past that, right?”

“I’m out of tricks,” Blake confirmed. “I’ve never actually been caught by Starfleet before, so I don’t know what happens next. Is this the part where I beg for mercy… or… compliment your eyes to try to get out of this?”

Tornellis chuckled, capturing both amusement and incredulity with one sound. “No, this is the part where I formally place you under arrest for piracy, and you meet your lawyer,” he explained

“Piracy? No, I’m a smuggler—” Blake started, but Tornellis held up a hand.

“You have the right to remain silent, so I suggest that you make use of it,” Tornellis advised before reading out the rest of Nathan Blake’s rights under Federation law.

He barely heard that, though, as he reeled from the accusation of piracy being lobbied against him. He was a swindler, a rogue, and a conman, but not a pirate. At least not so far as he could remember.