The lounge was almost as big as her stateroom, which Nan found ridiculous. Someday I’ll understand the human need to make everything bigger.

  Present were the “inner circle” of her campaign staff. Seated on the large couch, drinking tea from the service that they took with them everywhere, were her speechwriter and political advisor. The husband-and-wife team of Fred MacDougan and Ashanté Phiri looked nothing alike—he was tall, pale, and bald, she was short, dark, and wore waist-length braids—but regularly finished each other’s sentences. How endearing that was depended entirely upon Nan’s mood. Still, they were both excellent at their jobs, and had been part of Nan’s team from her earliest days in politics on Cestus, when they were interns helping the campaign that got Nan elected as representative of Pike City’s Fifth District. Nan was also the one who, after they’d been dancing around each other for ten years, told them both to stop being morons and get married already.

  Standing at the replicator and removing a plate of donuts from its slot was the deputy campaign manager, Helga Fontaine, whom Esperanza insisted on hiring despite her being too young to have even hit puberty. In truth, she was thirty, but that still made her a toddler as far as Nan was concerned. Helga was talking with the transportation manager, a taciturn Triexian named Bral—if there was any more to her name, Nan had never been informed of it. Curled up in the chair perpendicular to the couch was the tall, lithe, furry form of M’Tesint, the Caitian whom Nan had hired as press liaison at the recommendation of Fred and Ashanté. Nan had to admit that she had done an excellent job so far, so much so that, if she lost, she was giving serious consideration to keeping M’Tesint on as her press liaison on Cestus. Not that there’s anything wrong with Piers, but there’s nothing especially right with him, either.

  And sitting at the large chair on the far side of the room was the short, stocky form of Esperanza Piñiero, her raven hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing a severe outfit that might as well have been a Starfleet uniform, for all that it had no insignia. You can take the woman out of Starfleet… she thought, not for the first time. The outfit and tied-back hair served to harden what would otherwise have been a very soft face, as even all Piñiero’s years in Starfleet couldn’t put lines in her smooth olive skin.

  “Remind me,” Nan said without preamble as the doors whooshed shut behind her, “whose cockamamie idea was it for me to run for president?”

  Esperanza smiled. “Yours, ma’am.”

  “No, it was my idea to run for president next year when the election is supposed to be held. I know that was my idea. I distinctly remember having it, and planning out an entire strategy that would involve months of campaigning. It’s this whole thing where I get five minutes to run for office that I don’t remember agreeing to.”

  Ashanté set her teacup down on the table in front of the couch. “Not like you had a choice. Hell, if you didn’t jump on it now, it’d be four more years before you’d have another shot.”

  “And a lot can happen in four years,” Fred added.

  Helga smiled, the jelly filling from one of her donuts staining her teeth. “Yeah. For example, four years ago, Min Zife was sufficiently popular that he’d win reelection unopposed less than a year later. Today, he’s resigning under dubious circumstances.”

  “What’s dubious?” Ashanté asked. “Hell, I’m amazed he made it this long. Trill, the Ontailians—”

  Fred picked it up. “—the holostrike, the Genesis wave—”

  “—that Iconian con job,” Ashanté continued, “the Selelvians.”

  “Which brings us nicely to the first order of business,” Esperanza said.

  That’s why I keep her around, Nan thought with amusement as she ordered a third cup of coffee from the replicator and took a seat in the large chair on the opposite side of the room from her campaign manager. Helga took a seat next to Fred, while Bral remained standing. Guess when you have three legs, being on your feet isn’t so bad.

  Esperanza continued. “We’re going to get hit with questions on everything Ashanté and Fred just mentioned. If, say, a planetary government is found to be mentally manipulating other Federation worlds the way the Selelvians did, how would President Bacco handle it?”

  Nan rolled her eyes. “Oh, for pity’s sake.”

  “Governor, it’s something we’ll have to face.”

  “And I suppose I can’t just say, ‘How the hell would I know?’ ”

  M’Tesint bared her teeth. “You could, Governor, but that would significantly decrease your chances of being elected.”

  “Right, ’cause God forbid I should tell the truth.”

  “Gee, Governor,” Fred said with a cockeyed grin, “I thought you’d been in politics long enough to know better.”

  “She does.” Esperanza smiled at Nan. “She just hasn’t had enough coffee yet.”

  “She’s right,” Fred said.

  “What,” M’Tesint asked, “about the coffee?”

  Fred shook his head. “No, I mean when the questions do come, we need to be ready. We’re supposed to have contingency plans.”

  “Like more thorough examinations of planets that apply for Federation membership,” Ashanté said.

  “We can throw the Evorans in their face,” Fred added. “The Zife administration let them in during the war, and they turned out to have a huge anti-alien faction on-planet, one that almost succeeded in overthrowing the government.”

  “How does that help with something like the gateways crisis, though?” Helga asked. “There was no way to see that coming, and the Federation’s response was pretty good, all things considered.”

  Ashanté snorted. “Tell that to all the people who got screwed by all those gateways opening at once.”

  M’Tesint straightened in her chair, stretching her already tall form even more so. “I believe we should make it clear that we won’t handle anything rashly. If there’s anything that characterized Zife’s administration, it was haste. A lot of that was necessary because of the war, but the war’s been over for four years. We can emphasize that we’ll be cautious, that we won’t, say, authorize the imprisoning of sentient beings without cause, as happened with some of the Voyager crew when they returned.”

  Helga shook her head. “I’m not sure cautious is the right way to go. I mean, no, we shouldn’t come out in favor of some of the ludicrous things Zife signed off on, but we still need to be aggressive if we’re going to impress people enough to win this.” She turned to Nan. “I know you were being facetious, but to actually answer the question you asked when you came in, one of the reasons why it’s best to run now, as opposed to next year or four years from now, is that your star is pretty bright right now. The treaty with the Metrons was huge, and it’s made you a name people outside the Cestus system might actually recognize. But that recognition will only go so far. If we come across as too tentative or cautious, no one will pay any attention. Or worse, they’ll think you’re another Jaresh-Inyo.”

  Nan leaned forward. “First of all, what in hell makes you think I was being facetious before? And secondly, Jaresh-Inyo was a good person.”

  “Yes, but he let Starfleet fool him into declaring martial law. That killed his political career.”

  “And,” Esperanza added, “paved the way for Zife to get elected. His leadership was a big reason why we won the war.”

  Helga smiled sweetly. “Not the best example to use, Esperanza, given how he wound up.”

  “Zife may not have been the right person to lead in a time of peace,” Esperanza said, “but that doesn’t change that he was very much the right person to lead us in war.”

  “The war’s been over for almost four years now.”

  Nan angrily placed her mug down on the end table next to her. The ceramic on plastiform made a very satisfying clunk. “Anybody else want to mention that the war was four years ago? ’Cause I’m old and I don’t retain facts all that well, so it’s good to remind me every five minutes.” She leaned back in her chair. “All right, fine, tell me this: How would I handle it if half the planets in the Federation suddenly decided to secede? Or if a bunch of energy creatures decided to turn us all into giant newts? I’ve got to admit, I’m pretty damn curious to know.”

  “Governor—” Esperanza started.

  “If you’d asked me six years ago how I’d handle a big Gorn ship showing up in the system and blasting Pike City all to hell, I would’ve gotten a good laugh out of it and said, ‘What a stupid question. We haven’t heard hide nor scale from the Gorn in a hundred years, what makes you think they’ll attack us now?’ Truth is, any answer I give to a question like that is going to be crap, and anyone with half a brain is going to know it’s crap, and frankly I don’t want to be elected by a Federation with half a brain. Do I know how to handle a crisis? Hell, yes, I handled dozens of them. Do I know how I’ll handle the next one? Hell, no. There’s no blueprint for these kinds of things, and to pretend there is one is to just insult people’s intelligence. We can send people through space at thousands of times the speed of light, we can speak instantaneously to people halfway across the galaxy, we can cure most of the ailments and diseases out there, but we still can’t figure out how to predict the future, and until we do, questions like this are just a knuckleball in the dirt, and I’m not gonna swing at it.”

  The lounge was silent for several seconds.

  Fred put down his teacup. “Works for me.”

  “I like it,” Ashanté said.

  Helga looked confused. “What’s a knuckleball?”

  Esperanza quickly said, “Baseball.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  Nan suppressed a chuckle as she dry-sipped from her now-empty coffee mug. They make these damn things too small. Getting up to get a fresh cup from the replicator, she added Helga’s lack of baseball knowledge to the growing list of things she didn’t especially like about her deputy campaign manager. True, Cestus III was one of the few planets in the galaxy that played the sport, though its growing popularity on that world was leading to revivals of the once-dead game elsewhere, but Nan saw that as a feeble excuse. “What’s next?”

  “Good news, actually,” Esperanza said. “We found Bobby.”

  It took a great effort for Nan to keep from stumbling.

  Nan Bacco married Roberto LaManna when she was twenty-two years old. Bobby was thirty-seven at the time, and she thought he was the most wonderful man in the galaxy. Four years later, he walked out on her only as a preemptive strike against her throwing him out. Nan had, it turned out, been the fourth woman the con artist had tricked into marrying him, but the first who had cottoned to him before he could make off with all her worldly possessions.

  He had disappeared decades ago, with Nan’s sole reminder of him the only one she truly wanted: their wonderful daughter Annabella, now living on Luna with her family.

  “You’re sure it’s him?” Nan asked as she gingerly took her seat, trying to keep her hands steady as they held the hot coffee. “Remember the last time?”

  “It’s definitely him,” Esperanza said. “And he’s definitely dead.”

  Nan blinked. “What?”

  “He settled on Rigel VIII a few years back, opened a small tavern. Fairly popular place among the miners.”

  “How’d he die?”

  “Natural causes.”

  Nodding, Nan turned to the others. “We’re stopping at Rigel at some point. Bral, set it up.”

  The Triexian said, “Of course,” even as Helga asked, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “I want to visit the grave—and, honestly, I want to make sure the son of a bitch is really dead.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Helga said. “Not before the election. The whole reason we tracked him down was to make sure he couldn’t hurt the campaign.”

  “He can’t hurt anything if he’s dead,” M’Tesint said.

  “Oh yes he can. Even acknowledging his existence can hurt us.” Helga started waving her arms around as she spoke. “Can you imagine what Pagro would do with the information that your husband—”

  “Ex-husband,” Nan said emphatically.

  “Fine, ex-husband is a career criminal? If you go to his grave, you’ll hand that to them on a silver platter. Worse, you’ll make it look like you miss him, and they’ll twist that.”

  Esperanza sighed. “She’s right, Governor, we can’t afford it.”

  Bastard finally died and I can’t properly enjoy it, Nan mused as she took a thoughtful sip of her coffee. “All right, we’ll wait. But I want confirmation. See if you can get the Rigelians to exhume the body in secret or something. What’s next?”

  “We’ve got to start thinking about endorsements,” Helga said.

  Esperanza shook her head. “They’ll come in due time.”

  “We don’t have due time. The election’s in only three weeks. If we were doing a normal campaign, I’d agree, but we can’t afford to sit around and wait for people to decide they like us.”

  Nan smirked. “So I have to make people like me, is that it?”

  “Actually, that isn’t too far off, Governor.” Helga removed a padd and a stylus from the pocket of her suit jacket. “We should start with the FNS.”

  M’Tesint’s ears flattened. “No.”

  “They’re the most reputable news service out there.”

  “Which is exactly why we shouldn’t start with them. Or finish with them, or do anything in the middle with them. The only thing trying to curry their favor will accomplish is to guarantee that they’ll endorse Pagro. They’ll judge objectively who to endorse based on the platforms and past records, period. Trust me on this.”

  “But—”

  Esperanza stared at Helga. “M’Tesint knows this stuff, Helga. Move on.”

  Helga looked like she wanted to say more but, to Nan’s relief, she thought better of it. “We can write Starfleet off.”

  Nan frowned. “How come?”

  Ashanté answered that one. “Once Ross dropped out, Pagro’s stranglehold on Starfleet was pretty much guaranteed. He’s a special emissary, he knows most of the higher-ups.”

  Fred added, “And every time he goes somewhere it’s with a Starfleet escort, and he’s sure to spend the whole time making friends with the crew.”

  “Fine,” Esperanza said. “Who else?”

  Before Helga could answer, Nan said, “Wait a minute, I’m not so sure about this. You said we should seek endorsements, fine, I can give you one right now: Benjamin Sisko.”

  Helga blinked. “The Sisko?”

  “Well, actually there are several,” Fred said. “His son’s written for the FNS, and his father has this great restaurant in New Orleans.”

  “Yeah, and his brother-in-law’s the cleanup hitter for the Pioneers,” Nan said. “I met Sisko at opening day last year. Gave me a wonderful holoprogram of the last World Series on Earth.” Nan had played that program every spare moment she could—though such moments were few and far between—sitting in the stands with the other three hundred fans as the London Kings and the New York Yankees faced off in a dramatic seventh-game contest at Yankee Stadium. She had the box score memorized, but the thrill of seeing Buck Bokai’s home run in the eleventh inning that eventually won the game had yet to diminish.

  However, that excitement was as nothing compared with what Nan was seeing now in Helga’s blue eyes. “This is huge. If we can get him, we can guarantee pretty much the entire Bajoran sector. He’s a religious figure on Bajor, and he’s the biggest war hero we’ve got.”

  Esperanza nodded. “He’s also greatly respected in Starfleet. It’s worth calling him.”

  “I’ll put the call through to Bajor once we’re done with today’s meetings. What’s next?”

  Before anyone could speak, the intercom beeped. It was the Palombo’s shipmaster, a kindly old gentleman named Derek Fried, who had been running the Palombo for the last seven governors of Cestus III. “Governor, we’re entering standard orbit of Earth. You’ve got a whole lot of messages, and normally I wouldn’t bother you with ’em, just send ’em to Ms. Piñiero, but there’s one I get the feeling you’re gonna wanna see. It’s from Admiral Ross at Starfleet.”

  Nan and Esperanza exchanged surprised glances. Helga’s eyes went wide, and Fred almost spilled his tea.

  “Ross wants to talk to me?” Nan asked.

  “Well, you and Ms. Piñiero, ma’am, yes.”

  “What do you think?” Nan asked her campaign manager.

  Esperanza smiled. “I think it’s a fastball down the middle of the base.”

  Chuckling, Nan said, “Plate. The batters swing when they’re standing at the plate. It’s the other things they step on that are bases.” She stood up. “Derek, call his office back, tell him we’ll speak to him right away.”

  “Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  “If only that were true. Thanks, Derek.”

  Esperanza also rose. “This meeting’s over for now. We’ve got the official statement at noon. Bral, you and M’Tesint go to the site, make sure everything’s set up. Fred, you have the draft ready?”

  Fred winced. “Half an hour?”

  “Give me what you’ve got, at least.”

  “I’d really rather not.”

  Ashanté shuddered. “Don’t do it, Esperanza—you take it now, he’ll spend the next half hour worrying himself inside out instead of finishing it.”

  Esperanza sighed. “Fine, but don’t forget, Klingon is spelled with a ‘K,’ all right?”

  Nan laughed. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  They proceeded back to the stateroom. As soon as the door to the lounge shut behind them, Nan asked, “You sure the Statue of Liberty’s a good place to do this?”

  “It’s perfect. Your first big thing as governor was taking in all those DMZ refugees. What better place to formally announce your candidacy than a statue that says, ‘Give me your tired, your sick, your teeming masses yearning to be free’?”