Red Alert!

More alarms went off, and Nog started to announce something. “That was a bloody photon torpedo hit,” Scotty cut him off. “Red Alert!” Qat’qa was already throwing the ship into a roll, but Scotty called out to her anyway. “Evasive maneuvers, Kat!” It was more for the benefit of the rest of the bridge crew, so that they would know he was on top of things. Kat didn’t reply, but Scotty could see her grin from where he was lowering himself into the center seat.

What the bloody hell are the Klingons playing at? he wondered. Stepping back into history was nice enough, but not when it meant going back to the bad old days of conflict with the Klingons.

The ship rocked again, less severely this time, and the Klingon warship momentarily flitted across the main viewer, swooping toward Intrepid and her cluster of support shuttles and runabouts. “There’s something a wee bit off about that ship,” Scotty mused aloud. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, beyond that it was attacking two Federation ships. He still had to remind himself that it was an unusual act for Klingons in this era.

“Lieutenant Nog, I want a spread of torpedoes up that ship’s jacksie before they can do any more damage. Try to cripple their engines, so we can have a wee chat with them, if we can.”

“Aye, sir.” Nog glanced across his tactical board.

The screen tilted, and the Klingon ship weaved across it again. It was a familiar shape, with two drooping warp nacelles and a long neck stretching out from its infernal red and yellow hull. “That’s it,” Scotty snarled. . . .

Pocket Books
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Cover design by Alan Dingman

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-4516-0615-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-0628-7 (ebook)

I wandered through the wrecks of days departed

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A lot of people deserve a shout-out for this, starting with Marco Palmieri, who gave me my first Treklit assignment, On the Spot; Margaret Clark, who edited Reservoir Ferengi and worked on this; Jaime Costas, who bought this book; and Ed Schlesinger, who saw it completed.

Also, props to Christopher L. Bennett, Dayton Ward, and especially to the artist at Simon & Schuster who came up with such a great cover.

PROLOGUE

Jason Lambert was amongst the stars, and all the happier for it. He knew that most of his crew felt that just being aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid was being amongst the stars, but it wasn’t Lambert’s definition of the term. Wearing a pressurized environment suit, standing on the plating of his ship’s saucer-shaped hull, he was truly amongst the stars.

Inside the ship, even sitting in the center seat on the bridge, he was just aboard a ship, not really a space traveler. Out on the hull, with just the suit between him and the void, it was more real. This way, he was one with the universe.

The Intrepid was alone in the darkness, and Lambert was looking astern at the warp nacelles. The two cylindrical engines might be what pushed the Intrepid through the void, but from here it felt more like they were streamers flowing out from behind a kite as it flew.

Growing up, he remembered looking up at the stars over the Nullarbor Plain. If there was a place on Earth from which the stars were more clearly visible, and less distorted by the Earth’s atmosphere, he had never heard of it. Even so, the view out here made the view from his childhood home seem as if he had been looking at the stars through smoke and fog for all those years. He could feel the grin on his face every time he came outside, and suspected it would be impossible to remove even by surgery. Going back inside was the only, and sadly inevitable, cure.

He turned, focusing his attention on the engineers who had come out to replace some damaged hull plates with newly fabricated ones. The four of them were clomping around just below the large “X” of the ship’s registry number; NX-07 was emblazoned proudly across the saucer, though from Lambert’s viewpoint it appeared to read “LO-XN” which he supposed might well be a word in somebody’s language. If they ever met a race with such a word in their vocabulary, Lambert hoped it would approximate something closer to “G’day” than to anything more contentious or insulting.

He walked across to the engineering team, trying not to look too stupid as he carefully engaged and disengaged the soles of his magnetic boots with the hull. The others turned as he approached. His steps were silent in the vacuum, of course, but the vibrations were transferred to the four engineers through the soles of their boots. The copper-colored EV suits worn by everyone out on the hull were totally anonymous, but Lambert would recognize his chief engineer’s stance and bearing anywhere, and he angled himself to face her. “How’s it going, Anna?”

“Exactly as I said it would, Captain,” she replied. The speakers in Lambert’s helmet flattened her Cuban accent, making her sound tinny rather than musical. “We should be done by the end of this watch, no problem.”

“Not a difficult job, then?”

“Replacing a few damaged hull plates? Hell no. Just slow, is all.”

Lambert nodded, knowing she’d see the gesture through his faceplate. “No worries; take as long as you need. I don’t think anyone will be upset if we’re late getting the decorators in.”

“I’d hardly call the upgrade program ‘decoration.’ They say the engine upgrades will enable warp six as a cruising speed, and the new transporter firmware has greater safety margins.”

“Yeah, I don’t doubt it. And warp six sounds pretty handy.” Lambert pointed down at the “X” upon which he stood “Rumor has it that, as well as the transporter and engine upgrades—”

“And the torpedo yield improvements and crew rotation.”

“—they’re going to be redecorating the ship.”

That made her pause. “Redecorating it? You’re serious. . . .”

“All the NX-ships, and the new Daedalus-class are getting a makeover, or so says Johnny Archer. Painting the hull. Changing the registry. All the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo and make-work that comes with switching over to being the United Federation of Planets.”

“A change of government’s a pretty big thing,” Anna pointed out.

“I hear they’re gonna change our ‘NX’ here to ‘NCC.’ Of course they’ll have to move the Oh Seven round a bit as well, or it’ll be lopsided.”

“I’d have thought they’d have more important things to concern themselves with. Like I said, it’s a big thing to become part of a new type of government.” Her brow furrowed. “What’s wrong with lopsided anyway?”

“Search me. Maybe they think having a ship that wears a half-drunk expression will have a negative effect on first contact situations.”

“And what does NCC stand for anyway?”

“I dunno. Could be Not Cloud Cuckoo-land, for all I know.” Lambert made as if to scratch his head, belatedly remembering that he couldn’t, not with the EV suit and helmet on. “I think I’ll ask, next time I talk to—” A flicker out of the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he turned around just in time to see a bright flash against the blackness between the stars. It was already fading, and there was nothing to gauge its distance against; it could have been a flashbulb a few meters away, or a supernova a few dozen light-years off. “What the hell was that?”

“Captain?” Anna was looking in the same direction as he, but she’d turned in response to his exclamation, and by that time there was no more to see.

“Didn’t you see that? A flash? Right over that way.”

“No.”

“Anybody?”

“Oui, Capitaine,” Georges Toussaint said. “Just for a second.”

“At least it’s not just my eyes going crook.” Lambert reached for the comm button on his wrist, to call in to the bridge and ask if the sensors had picked anything up, but his crew were way ahead of him. Lieutenant al-Qatabi’s voice filled Lambert’s helmet. “Captain,” the tactical officer said urgently, “lateral sensors have registered an energy spike consistent with the detonation of a Class Four Romulan mine.”

“So that’s what it was. . . .”

“Sir?” she asked.

“I saw the flash, just a moment ago. What was the distance?”

“Thirty-two thousand kilometers.”

Well out of harm’s way as far as the Intrepid was concerned, but Lambert knew better than to assume that a mine would be a lone threat. “Go to Tactical Alert; I’m coming in.” He broke off the connection to the bridge, and turned back to Anna. “It might be best if we all—”

“Hardly, sir.”

“If there are other mines closer to us—”

“Then the last thing we want is to risk encountering a proximity detonation with a gap in our hull plating.” She grinned through her helmet’s faceplate. “It will make much more sense to finish the job out here as quickly as possible.”

“Okay, but no hanging around sightseeing, just in case. Get the plates swapped out, and get your arses back indoors ASAP.”

“No argument from me, sir.” Anna turned back toward her team. “So, you heard the captain. Let’s get this done.”

Lambert was out of the pressurized EV suit and back in his uniform jumpsuit in record time. The bridge was busy, but hushed and tense; low voices exchanged urgent updates on sensor readings, weapons readiness, engine status, and the myriad other issues that a Tactical Alert brought to the crew.

Zeinab al-Qatabi looked up from her control board as Lambert entered. “Any further energy bursts?” he asked.

The deceptively petite lieutenant shook her head. “I’ve begun charging the phase cannons, but I don’t want to polarize the hull plating while Commander Byelev and her team are still outside.”

“If the plate replacement was put on hold, how much of a weakness would there be when the hull was polarized?”

“Overall percentage-wise, hard to tell,” she replied, “but a hole in one’s armor is a hole in one’s armor. Then again, armor with a hole is probably better than no armor. I’d recommend bringing the engineering team back in, and polarizing. Just in case.” Lambert sympathized entirely, but Anna had made a good point also. He took the center seat, and called over to Harry Croft, “Is there any indication that we’re already within a minefield, if that really was a Romulan Class Four that just popped off?”

The mahogany-skinned Englishman at the science station shrugged his massive shoulders. “No indications either way. I’ve set up a scan to look for gravitional micro-lensing that might indicate a cloaked object, but you know how they are about homing in on the source of active sensors.” He pursed his lips. “I’ll figure out a workaround to get more data out of the passive sensors.”

“Figure it out quick, Harry.” Lambert next turned to Gustav Larssen, the hefty blond man at the communications seat. “Gustav, get me Starfleet on the blower.”

Lambert knew that some captains preferred to hold conversations with Starfleet in their ready rooms, but in his opinion anything that concerned the ship concerned the whole crew. He also thought about what al-Qatabi had said, and pushed the button that gave him a link to the work party outside. “Anna, change of plan. Stow your gear and get inside. I’m notifying Starfleet, then I’ll want to release a probe and back off to a safer distance to complete the repairs.”

“Understood, Captain.” Her voice was professional, but he could hear the disappointment in it.

After a few moments, Larssen cleared his throat and said, “I’ve got Admiral Collins on the line, sir.”

Collins looked a little tired on the viewscreen; not bone-tired or woken-in-the-wee-small-hours-tired, but he had that look that desk jockeys wore when there was less than an hour before they could leave the office. Lambert was under no illusions that the admiral’s role was much more than office-based; the admiral was wearing a two-piece variation of the uniform jumpsuit, which had a blazer-type collar. “Jason,” the admiral acknowledged. “What’s troubling the Intrepid?”

“Romulan mines, Admiral,” Lambert began. “Lieutenant al-Qatabi is transmitting our position back to you now. We’ve observed the detonation of a Class Four cloaked mine, about thirty thousand clicks away. Harry is looking out to see whether there are any more—”

“They don’t usually go solo,” Collins said with a sigh. “There’s probably a field.”

Lambert nodded. “I wanted to check with you whether there had been any communication from the Rommies that might throw a light on the mines here. For one, how does their presence tie in with the new treaty?”

“Well, under the terms of the armistice, they agreed to disable any mines in disputed territories specified in the treaty, and that certainly includes your location.” Admiral Collins paused. “The detonation wasn’t near enough to you to do any damage?”

“No, sir, but it’s still brown trousers time knowing they’re out there.”

“Sirs,” al-Qatabi broke in. “Some types of mines are given a finite life span, and others have had remote detonators for decommissioning after a conflict. Is it possible that what we’ve seen here is actually part of the process the Romulans are using to disable their mines? We know they’d rather destroy their matériel than let us take it.”

That made sense to Lambert, and he could see the admiral nod, all the way back in San Francisco. “I’ll have the diplomatic corps see if they can get a response out of the Romulans,” Collins said, “as to whether this is actually a decommissioning act.”

“It better be,” Lambert grumbled. “We’ve all got enough medals already, and if Johnny Archer earns any more, his dress uniform will collapse under their gravity.”

Admiral Collins smiled at that. “I’ll tell him you said that. In the meantime I suggest you mark the limits of the field.”

“I’ll get Harry on to it. Unless you want to send Enterprise out here to do it, and we’ll—”

Jason Lambert never even knew that he didn’t get to finish his sentence. He also never felt himself move, and never felt the first or last molecule in his body deform and rupture. All things considered, it was a merciful death.

Anna Byelev mentally cursed as she gave Lambert a prompt “Understood, Captain,” and shook her head inside the EV helmet. She looked out in the direction in which Captain Lambert had said he’d seen the flash. She didn’t doubt that he’d seen one, but there was no sign of anything there now. Anna half imagined that the stars were flickering: since there was no atmosphere to refract their light, they were being distorted by cloaking fields. She had never had that much of an imagination; halfway was as far as she went before reminding herself that the human eye couldn’t see a cloaking field that far away, and that being in zero-g meant that the cells suspended in the liquid center of the eye had the chance to move in front of the retina and distort distant tiny pinpoints like stars.

“All right,” she said to her team, “you heard the captain.” She gestured toward the framework that held a sandwich of four hull plates and the compartments of equipment needed to maneuver them into place and fix them there. “We’ll magnetically secure the plates where they are, and get back indoors out of the cold before any wolves come along to disturb us, eh?”

Her team chuckled at the comparison, but Anna herself was dismayed at not being able to get the job over and done with. “Georges,” she said to the Frenchman, “Hand me the magnetic drone, and then you take the opposite corner of the support frame.”

“Here you are, Commander,” he replied, holding out the C-shaped tool toward her. She reached out to take it.

It wasn’t there, and, suddenly, neither was Georges.

Anna had just enough time to be baffled, as she realized she was wasn’t stepping across the Intrepid’s hull any more. The stars spun wildly, and she saw an EV suit with a cracked faceplate hurtle across her field of vision. Her ears were ringing with a scream from somewhere, and she couldn’t tell if it was her own, or one coming through the comm system from one of her team. Before she could recognize her situation for what it truly was, or feel any of the terror that would have resulted, the stars flashed white. In fact, the universe flashed white, and, for Anna, that was the last thing that ever happened.

The sun was getting low over the ocean view from Admiral Sean Collins’s office at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, turning the distant horizon to blood. “I’ll get Harry on to it,” Jason Lambert said on the admiral’s wall screen. “Unless you want to send Enterprise out here to do it, and we’ll—” Static snapped out of, the screen, replacing Lambert and the bridge of the Intrepid as completely as if they had never been there. Collins started at the suddenness of the change.

“Jason?” He reached for the communications controls at the edge of his desk, trying to get the signal back. When that failed, he called down to the communications department.

“Admiral,” the duty officer began, “I was just about to call you. We’ve lost the signal from Intrepid.”

“I noticed. Any indications as to why?”

“Could be anything. Equipment failure at their end, subspace interference, stellar activity . . . It’s not that rare.”

Collins could hear the unspoken “but” on the horizon. “Go on.”

“The computers automatically analyze incoming signals, and they flagged an anomaly just as the Intrepid’s signal went offline. There was some kind of power drop-off, as if the signal source was moving, or was being sent by an array whose elements were diffusing. But that’s not what happened, as they don’t have an array that large, and it was too quick. Instantaneous, in fact.”

Collins took a deep breath, knowing instinctively that he wouldn’t be going home tonight. “Who do we have close enough to go and take at look at Intrepid’s position?”

“No Starfleet vessel is within a week of the co-ordinates, sir. There is a Vulcan ship, the Ni’Var . . .”

“How quickly could they reach the coordinates?”

“A couple of days.”

Collins nodded slowly. “Let’s ask them.”

“Aye, sir,” the duty officer acknowledged, and then he vanished from Collins’s screen. The admiral turned back to his office window, watching the sky darken.

It took three days before spotlights pierced the blank gaze of Anna Byelev’s faceplate, and illuminated her half-open eyes. She didn’t smile at the prospect of rescue. She didn’t so much as blink, and her pupils didn’t react to the light.

A Vulcan medical technician in an EV suit with a flight pack attached jetted out to steady her spinning form. With a deft touch of the maneuvering thrusters set into the pack, he was aligned with her, and slowed her movement. Then he was able to fly her body back to the Ni’Var’s airlock, which was situated in the base of the blade-shaped hull, near the warp ring that surrounded it like a hilt guard.

Hers was the third body recovered, and the Ni’Var’s sensor officer believed there was only one more in the area. A humanoid form was small and hard to detect in the vastness of space, and it had taken eighteen hours to find three bodies and two panels of hull plating. As the sensor officer narrowed the field of blackness which, if his calculations were correct, could contain the last body that was recoverable, he could hear the captain softly acknowledging the recovery of the most recent.

A moment later, the captain’s voice was directed to him. “How long do you calculate before the final cadaver is recovered?”

“We should detect it within the next twenty minutes.”

“Then I shall order the navigator to prepare to resume course, and inform Starfleet of our progress so far.” The captain paused, then stepped down from his station to the sensor booth. “There are no indications of further Romulan mines?”

“None, Captain. But they were in the indicated area. Radiation readings confirm this.”

“Thousands of kilometers away, but not here . . .”

“Captain?”

“The two hull panels are all that remain of the Earth ship?”

“Indubitably. I have recorded the courses of their drift and plotted their exact point of origin. If any other wreckage or materials from the ship had come from that point, we would have detected them no less than five hours ago. Since we have not, they are not there.”

“Even were the mines in contact with the ship, they could not have destroyed every part of it so completely,” the captain mused. “Intriguing. I wonder how the humans will interpret this matter?”

“Logically, they will interpret it as having been destroyed. They may yet be correct.”

“And they may not. I believe it will be more accurate for us to simply report the vessel lost, as there is no evidence of the true cause of its destruction.”

The sensor officer nodded in agreement. “Though there is as little evidence that the ship ever existed at all.”

“That is something to which Starfleet would not react well.”

Two Weeks Later

There was noise and chatter in the background of the Hidden Panda bar in Trenton. It was lunchtime, so most of the booths were occupied by men and women taking the weight off and enjoying the bar’s famous Chinese food deals. The lunch crowd kept an eye on the 3D projection that was tuned to the Federation News Service. It hung from the ceiling above the large squared-off enclosure of the bar, projecting the news anchors’ heads above the bar staff. Though there were four expanses of bartop, only three people were seated there. A lanky man in his late thirties was watching the news with a keen interest. He was dressed casually, in loose slacks and an even looser shirt and overshirt, and his high forehead creased a little as the newsreader continued her report.

“The Vulcan ship Ni’Var recovered only four bodies. A memorial service is being held in San Francisco today. There is no solid evidence as to what caused the disaster. The proximity of a Romulan minefield so close to the Intrepid’s position has led Starfleet to declare the ship to be a casualty of the minefield’s automated decommissioning . . .”

“Damned Romulans,” Jo the hostess grumbled. She was Anglo-Korean, and had kept her looks past her fortieth, with an athletic build. “Decommissioning my ass. This treaty is giving them the chance to do what they feel like to our ships, and we’ll bend over and take it. ‘Thank you, sir, may I have another?’ Two-headed bastards. Am I right or am I right, B.R.?”

“Very likely, Jo. Very likely. Well, apart from the two-headed thing. They could have three heads, or none.” B.R. remembered a competition the local newslink had held a year or two back: draw a Romulan. Most of the entries they showed had depicted fanged and clawed monsters with tentacles. A few had depicted the president, or unpopular celebrities.

“Well, yeah. But you know what I mean. Bastards.”

The woman round the corner of the bar didn’t pay any attention, but the other man, who was nursing a drink away from the lunching workers, looked up. He was short and stout, dressed in dark tweeds, with a dour, lined face; in every way the opposite of the tall and thinning-haired B.R. He looked like a history professor from the university, whose campus was a couple of blocks over.

“The Vulcans, Andorians, Klingons, Orions, and Denobulans are all humanoid, so why wouldn’t the Romulans be the same?” the professorial man asked.

B.R. blinked. “I suppose there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, but there are non-humanoid races out there too, like the Xindi bugs. And they attacked us. Maybe the Romulans fought us because they’re not humanoid.”

The professor looked like he was about say something else, but then he closed his mouth. “Logical, I suppose,” he said at last. “Show’s you’re a thinker. That’s good.”

“A thinker, yes,” Jo agreed, “that’s our B.R. He’s a scientist, you see.”

“At the university?”

“Private enterprise,” B.R. said. “In the field of research and development.”

“Ah.” The professor-dude nodded sagely. “An inventor! And what do you invent?”

B.R. thought for a moment, resisting the urge to be honest and say, Nothing that works yet. “I think I’d like to invent something that makes starship travel a little less dangerous. Mine detectors, maybe, or more effective shielding.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jo said, sounding a lot more serious. B.R. recalled that she had a brother on a freighter out there.

The professor-dude nodded in vigorous agreement. “I certainly can’t disagree.” He raised his glass. “A toast to inspiration!”

B.R. raised his glass in return. He looked back up at the screen, which was now showing file images of the recovered dead from their Starfleet personnel files. If they had detected the mines earlier or had stronger protection, they wouldn’t be mere denizens of a file archive now. “Here’s to inspiration.”

PART I

CHALLENGER

1

Captain’s log, Stardate 60074.2. The Enterprise is conducting a survey of the Agni Cluster, a group of G-class stars in Federation space near Ferengi territory. The presence of a group of main sequence yellow stars suggests that there will also be Class-M planets, which may be suitable to create new colonies for some of the populations still affected by the Borg invasion of almost two years ago.

The duty is not likely to prove, shall we say, exciting, but it is a very important one nevertheless. Aside from the numbers of refugees still seeking new homes, it is important that the Federation continues to explore and expand.

Golden light from the nearest star, a hundred and twenty million kilometers to port, gave the Sovereign-class Enterprise’s sleek surface the healthy glow of an athletic creature. Even coasting through a solar system, the ship was poised, proud, with the attitude of a racing thoroughbred.

Like all such thoroughbreds, the Enterprise was driven by a large and powerful heart. The warp core pulsed at the center of her three-story main engineering chamber with a reassuring throb as it held in the energies of matter/antimatter annihilation, and only released them under tight control. The sound always brought a smile to Commander Geordi La Forge’s face when he walked in.

“You appear singularly pleased, Commander,” Lieutenant Taurik observed, as Geordi stepped beside him to cast a glance over the dilithium matrix monitor. “Has the tuning of the dilithium matrix been completed to you satisfaction?”

“The dilithium matrix is fine, Taurik,” Geordi replied. Truth to tell, he had been getting a little frustrated trying to think of the right things to say in a message he wanted to send to the U.S.S. Lexington. He had only just got used to Tamala Harstad being around when she had been transferred there, and he had spent his off-duty hours of the last couple of days trying to think of just the right way to tell her that she was out of sight but definitely not out of mind. He hoped she’d stay that way, and wouldn’t slip further away. He needed a break from thinking about the message, and, as always, being in the vicinity of the warp core put his mind at ease. “Just listen to her.”

“Her?” The Vulcan’s features assumed a slightly quizzical expression, and then cleared. “Ah, you’re referring to the Enterprise herself.”

“I guess so, though really I mean the warp core specifically. Can’t you hear that purr she makes?”

“I hear the sound, but I would not have interpreted it as a purr.”

Geordi chuckled.

“I’ve noticed that most humanoid species feel a sense of pleasure from being exposed to rhythmic sounds of a certain depth and low frequency.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that too. Counselor Troi used to say it’s something about being back in the safety of the womb.”

“Logical. Fortunately I am not affected.”

Geordi had been around Vulcans long enough to know better, but settled for saying, “I guess that’s your loss, Taurik. There’s a reason they call it pleasure.”

“Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” Jean-Luc Picard gave the order by habit, and then took the cup when it materialized in the replicator’s slot on his ready room wall. He sat with it behind his desk, and returned to the reports that he was triaging. Only some of the planetary surveys would be forwarded on to Starfleet Command. Choosing which were to go and which weren’t was an important duty, but a far from interesting one.

He sipped his tea and turned his attention to the report on Indra IV, a gas giant in the region, which the Enterprise’s probes were surveying remotely. A jovian planet would never be one upon which to place a large civilian population, but there were two Mars-sized moons that looked suitable for terraforming.

Picard had just decided to attach the report on Indra IV to the possibles list that he would send on to Starfleet Command, when there was a chime over the communications system. “Captain Picard to the bridge.” Worf’s voice filled the ready room.

“On my way,” Picard responded, saving the file, and draining his tea. He stepped through and walked onto the bridge of the Enterprise. If the engineering decks and staff were the heart of the thoroughbred, then its brain was the bridge, on the top level of the saucer section. Here the decisions were made, based on the sensory input it had received.

The burly Klingon in the center seat vacated it as Picard approached, and the captain noted that the main screen displayed a normal starfield. Whatever had attracted his first officer’s attention either wasn’t visible or wasn’t in range yet. “What is it, Mister Worf?”

“Lieutenant Choudhury has detected an object in our path.” He indicated the Indian woman at the tactical console.

“An object?” Ordinarily, Picard might have been irritated at being called to the bridge for such a vague reason, but not when it meant a respite from the survey reports. From the carefully bland expression on Worf’s face, he could tell that the Klingon officer knew that very well. “All right, what kind of object?”

“A metallic mass,” Jasminder Choudhury announced from her tactical station, “almost directly ahead. It’s approximately two hundred meters long, and masses eighty thousand tons.”

“An asteroid?”

“Possibly, but . . .” She looked over the sensor readings that scrolled across her display. “The object appears to be composed of a mixture of nickel, titanium, a limited amount of duritanium . . . If it’s an asteroid it must be hollow.”

“Hollow?” Picard looked over her shoulder. “A two-hundred meter geode . . .” He smiled faintly. “That would be quite a rarity as paperweights go, wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant?”

“Definitely. An asteroid of that composition, over two hundred meters long, should have a much higher mass than eighty thousand tons.” Choudhury frowned at something in the readouts, and shook her head. “But, frankly, sir, I doubt an asteroid with that composition could even exist naturally. The alloys are artificial.”

“A vessel, then?” The smile stayed on Picard’s features, but his tone became much crisper and more alert.

“Almost certainly.”

“That is why I called you to the bridge, Captain,” Worf explained.

Picard thought for a moment, looking at a display of the Enterprise’s current position and heading. “You said it was ‘almost’ directly ahead . . . How almost is almost?”

Worf brought up a navigational display. “If we were to intercept, we’d have to adjust our heading to three-five-two mark four. It would take us approximately an hour out of our way.”

“Well, we’re in no particular hurry . . .” Picard turned to the helm, where a Bolian was at the controls. “Ensign Trell, adjust your heading to three-five-two mark four, and increase speed to warp factor four.” Picard sat, Worf taking his place in the seat on the captain’s right.

“I trust the reports are going well, sir,” Worf rumbled after a moment.

“No rest for the wicked.”

A few moments passed, and then Choudhury spoke up again. “I’m getting clearer sensor returns from the object, sir. Definitely a vessel, and, going by the strength of the return for duritanium, almost certainly of Federation origin.”

That surprised Picard. “Federation? Are you certain of that, Lieutenant?”

“The numbers don’t lie, sir.”

“Maintain present course and speed. I’d best finish with the survey reports before we reach your mystery object, Mister Worf.” With that, he rose and returned to his ready room.

It took Picard around half an hour to skim through the remaining survey reports, forward his recommendations to Starfleet, and return to the bridge. He noted that Worf had moved to one of the science stations against the wall of the bridge. Rather than take the center seat, Picard walked to the science station. “Something about our mystery asteroid?”

Worf nodded. “Since the idea of it being a Federation vessel has already been broached, I asked the computer to match the object’s composition with any known starship designs.”

“And found a match,” Picard surmised.

Worf grunted an affirmative. “Several Federation starship classes were constructed of those materials in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries. The NX-class, Daedalus-class, and so on. Some Andorian ship classes also match.”

Picard nodded. “And which do we think this object is?”

“From the dimensions of the object, the most likely match is the twenty-second century Starfleet NX-class. That would have the correct composition, the same mass, and a length of two hundred twenty meters.”

“Close enough to the approximate length of the object.”

“Aye, sir.”

“NX-class?” Picard gazed at the main viewer, as if he could somehow focus on the ship ahead, even though it was yet to come into visual range. “With the recovery of Columbia, I thought they were all accounted for.” He paused for a moment. “There were, what? Fifteen or sixteen ships in the class, in the end?” He paused. “Computer, do any NX-class vessels remain listed as missing in Starfleet records?”

“Negative,” the voice came from the air. “No NX-class vessels are listed as missing.”

Worf glowered. “I took the liberty of accessing Starfleet records on the NX-class. With the salvage of the Columbia, as you say, all the NX vessels constructed are now accounted for. All of their fates are known.”

“I see . . . Then either Starfleet’s records are in error, or . . .” Picard left the sentence hanging, open to suggestions.

“Or the vessel ahead is a duplicate or replica of some kind. Either a copy or, at best, a vessel reverse-engineered from an original.”

“And, given the era from which the class dates, the only people in a position to reverse-engineer such a vessel from one that had been salvaged would have been—”

“The Romulans,” Worf confirmed, voice dripping with venom.

“Romulans of two centuries ago,” Picard reminded him.

“The Romulans of two centuries ago were still Romulans, and they did begin a war with Earth and its allies. Captain, I find it very convenient that the vessel is set so close to our position. Convenient and suspicious. Perhaps we were meant to find it.”

“A trap, you mean? Something to draw us in . . . It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve so lured the Enterprise, would it?” Picard shook his head doubtfully. “But for what purpose?”

“I do not know, but the Romulans have shown an interest in Starfleet propulsion systems in recent months.” Worf gave that hesitant grimace that Picard was so used to. “I do not like it,” he grumbled. “The presence of such an old Starfleet vessel appearing in our path . . .”

“Such things do happen, Mister Worf.”

“Indeed, but,” the Klingon pointed out, “they tend to happen with ships whose fates were previously a mystery.”

“That much I can’t argue with, but . . .” Picard couldn’t quite put his reasoning into words, perhaps because it wasn’t really reasoning. His previous experience with the Romulans was feeding directly into his gut. “This doesn’t feel like a Romulan trap, Worf. If they were so keen to lure a Federation starship, there are many more effective methods. They could create a disaster to which we would be bound to respond, for example.”

“If not the Romulans, then perhaps some other race.”

“Even if it turns out to be a vessel constructed by others, it could simply be a race who once encountered an NX vessel and were . . . suitably impressed.” Worf merely gave Picard a skeptical look. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Mister Worf. A very old Earth saying.”

“A phrase coined by the imitators, I presume.”

“Very likely, but that doesn’t make it any less of a truism.” Picard straightened his uniform. “Let’s be very careful, just in case.” He nodded to the young man at ops. “Scan the system thoroughly, Ensign, and take particular care to look for signs of cloaked vessels.” He turned back to Worf. “Number One, prepare for the possibility of using shuttles to set up a tachyon detection grid if we have to.”

“Aye, sir.”

“We’re in visual range of the object,” Choudhury announced.

“On screen.” A tiny gray bug seemed to be flying toward them, carried by the Enterprise’s own forward motion. It took only a few seconds to resolve itself into a disc-shaped forward section, with two cylindrical units trailing behind. “Well,” Picard breathed softly, allowing himself a small smile. “That’s no paperweight, Worf.”

“No, sir.” Worf sounded impressed, and Picard couldn’t blame him. Klingons revered the past at least as much as humans did, and Picard suspected that some of his own passion for archaeology might have rubbed off on Worf. The captain watched the image grow on screen, and felt doubly sure that the sensor sweeps for any sign of a trap would come up negative. It just looked too natural, hanging there in the vacuum, if a metal spaceship could in any context be considered natural.

The drifting ship was essentially a thick saucer, with a deflector array cut into the leading edge. Two humped fairings on the aft section were attached to a flattened “W” of a wing-like structure, and the warp nacelles were mounted on either side of that.

The outer hull, which in its day had shone bright with steel and silver, was now the dead gray shade of Earth’s moon. It looked as if it was made of frozen rock, the nowmatte plating pitted with micrometeoroid impacts.

“NX-class,” Picard said softly, his eyes glued to the image. “Just as you predicted. I never thought to see one of those in the wild, so to speak.”

“It looks ancient,” Worf rumbled.

“It certainly seems well-worn to say the least,” Picard agreed. “Magnify. Let’s see if we can get a view of her registry, and identify which ship she purports to be.”

The view on the screen zoomed in to the top of the saucer section, forward of the bridge. The hull plating was scored and pitted, the surface layer of the metal chipped away, but enough of the registry and name remained to be legible.

“NX-07,” Picard murmured, “Intrepid.”

“Or a copy thereof,” Worf reminded him.

“Hm.” Picard wasn’t ready to revisit on that theory. “Worf, you said that all of the NX vessels’ fates are known, and accounted for. What do the records say happened to Intrepid? If she isn’t listed as missing in Starfleet’s records, what presumed fate had been assigned to her?”

Worf glanced momentarily at a display. “She is recorded as having been destroyed by a Romulan mine—shortly after hostilities had ceased at the end of the Earth-Romulan War. Very little wreckage was ever found, and only four bodies were recovered.”

“She doesn’t look destroyed to me.” Picard stood, and stepped closer to the screen. “What made Starfleet think that a Romulan mine was responsible for the loss of Intrepid?”

Worf tapped at his display. “Captain Lambert was in the middle of a transmission to Starfleet when contact was lost. The subject of the call was to the effect that the Intrepid had observed the detonation of a Romulan mine nearby, and that he intended to investigate the extent of the field.”

Picard turned in surprise. “Wouldn’t this have constituted a violation of the ceasefire treaty?”

Worf shook his head curtly. “The field is thought to have been laid early in the war. The detonation witnessed by the Intrepid was probably one of the last mines auto-destructing as part of the treaty stipulations.”

“Then there definitely was a Romulan minefield in the Intrepid’s vicinity?”

“Yes, sir. The Vulcan ship Ni’Var, one of the vessels that searched for the Intrepid, confirmed that a minefield was in place at the edge of the system. It had already been decommissioned by the time they got there. Standard Romulan procedure would have been to decommission emplaced weapons by self-destruction,” Worf went on. “They have never enjoyed the risk of others studying their weapons technology.”

Picard nodded, and sat, never taking his eyes off the image of the Intrepid. “So it was assumed, given all the available evidence, that a mine had self-detonated right under the Intrepid, and destroyed her.”

“Yes sir. The Ni’Var is also the vessel which recovered the bodies of four of the Intrepid’s crew.”

“Only four bodies, but no real wreckage? Didn’t that strike anyone as a little bit odd?”

“It was theorized that a new model of mine was responsible, designed to leave as little trace as possible. Of course when signals were sent through diplomatic channels to try to ask the Romulans about that, there was no reply.” It was clear from Worf’s tone that he was neither surprised nor impressed by that fact.

“The ship looks ancient enough, but . . . How does it look from a tactical point of view?”

“There is no obvious sign of weapons damage,” Worf said. “No torpedo blast points, no phaser scorch marks, no carbon scoring.”

“He’s right, sir,” Choudhury agreed. “Sensors don’t read any elevated particle levels that would suggest any form of energy weapon impact.”

“But, after two hundred years, any such levels would almost certainly have returned to normal anyway.”

Choudhury frowned. “The best way to tell would be to take a boarding party across, and conduct more detailed close-up scans for any residual particle stress patterns in the structures. But . . .”

“I would caution against a boarding party, sir,” Worf interrupted. “At least until we’ve conducted more thorough scans of both the ship and the area. It could still be some kind of fake.”

“Conduct the most thorough scans possible,” Picard ordered, “both of the ship and of the surrounding area.” Picard returned his attention to the Intrepid. It was worn and gray, cold and dead, but it retained a certain beauty, as everything that survived long enough seemed to do. Perhaps it was in the nature of the universe for time to transform into art everything it touched, or perhaps it was just his own personal bias showing. Picard knew that he would be a liar if he said he didn’t feel the pull of the ship out there, or if he said he didn’t want to board her, and tread those ancient deck plates.

He smiled, and called out, “Commander La Forge, report to the bridge.”

2

Intrepid looked fossilized. Where the Enterprise gleamed and shone with light like an angel swooping to greet its aged ancestor, the Intrepid was a dark stone, looking as if it had been carved from a single piece of ore. Her hull was dull and matte, pitted with scratches and holes, and her viewports were as black as the void all around, as if the ship was interwoven with it, and part of the void itself.

In spite of all of that, she was beautiful.

La Forge could feel his breath catch in his throat when he came onto the bridge and saw her there, framed in the main viewscreen. He had recognized the shape at once, of course, but bringing himself to believe his eyes took a little bit longer. “That can’t be what it looks like . . .”

“My thoughts exactly,” Worf rumbled.

“According to our scans, it can indeed be what it looks like,” Picard said firmly. “An NX-class vessel hundreds of light-years and two centuries from where, history tells us, she was destroyed by a Romulan mine.”

Geordi patched the sensor readings that Choudhury had been taking through to the bridge’s engineering station. “It doesn’t look like there’s any sign of what actually did happen to her.”

“Indeed. She is something of a mystery.” La Forge could hear Picard’s interest and excitement in his tone. The captain always enjoyed a historical puzzle, as much as Geordi enjoyed an engineering one. He let himself smile, infected by the love of a good mystery.

“There is a lot of weathering by micrometeoroids and radiation, but no sign of anything like a major collision, no sign of weapons damage . . . and no hint of energy remaining in the Intrepid’s systems.”

“Not that our sensors can register.”

La Forge was already thinking ahead. “There may be something in internal storage, but we’ll need to go and take a closer look to be absolutely certain one way or the other.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say, Geordi. So far there’s no sign of other vessels in the vicinity, but I’d like you to assemble an engineering team and go across and investigate this . . . derelict.”

“And see if we can wake her up?”

“First and foremost to ascertain definitively whether this is indeed the vessel it appears to be. If so, to find out how she came to be here.”

“And if not . . .”

“If not . . . then I should very much like to know what this ship actually is, and for what purpose it was put here.”

Geordi understood. “In case it’s a sprat to catch a mackerel, huh?”

“Precisely.” Picard turned to Choudhury. “Jasminder, assemble a small security team to accompany Mister La Forge’s team. It’s unlikely that there would be a threat over there, but . . .”

“But why take the chance?” Choudhury gave an approving nod. “I’m on my way.”

The corridor was momentarily illuminated by the transporter beam; stray molecules that had been captured along with the travelers, giving up their energy in the visible spectrum as they dissipated. Geordi La Forge barely had time to register the light on the Intrepid’s interior surfaces before it faded.

He and the entire away team were wreathed in white, like ghosts in old fiction; their faces turned bloodless blue by the gentle lighting around the edges of their helmets’ faceplates. The white EV suits were molded to the individual, making them tight-fitting but comfortable, and were designed to prevent the wearers from becoming the ghosts they already resembled.

Choudhury was the first to activate the sims beacons set onto her helmet, the others following a second later. La Forge had brought three engineers with him, all with equipment belts around the waists of their EV suits. Choudhury had brought two security guards with her. The seven of them were now standing in the central corridor on B deck, and Geordi was surprised by how narrow it was in comparison to the companionways on the Enterprise. The walls, overhead, and deck were all a dark gray, though the specs Geordi had downloaded suggested that there were once color variations.

“No atmosphere,” Choudhury announced, consulting her tricorder. Her voice came through the helmet speakers quite crisply. There was no gravity either, but the suits’ magnetic boots held them to the floor quite effectively.

“No surprise,” La Forge responded, glancing at his own tricorder’s display. “Temperature is the same in here as it is outside the ship. There must be quite a few breaches, probably all very small.”

“Weapons fire?” Choudhury asked. “I mean, old-style projectile weapons?”

La Forge shook his head, forgetting that his helmet wouldn’t respond with the movement. “The system’s Oort cloud, more likely.”

“Shields and navigational deflector control must have been down.”

“Shields? Not in those days. They had to polarize the hull plating back then. Shields were, well, not exactly science fiction, but definitely something that was not in Starfleet’s arsenal.” He turned, directing his beam in both directions along the corridor. “As for the navigational deflector, I’m guessing that must have been out of commission long before the ship got to this system.”

Choudhury’s two guards moved to either end of the corridor, their phaser rifles held ready, but not raised. The engineers spread out, consulting their equipment. Taurik, closest to La Forge and Choudhury, showed them the readings on his tricorder, which had been configured to read radiation levels. “Commander, the radiation on board is above background level, but not severely so. The decay pattern suggests it has been higher in the past.”

“Not much higher, though.” La Forge watched a line track across the tricorder’s screen, and brought up some recorded benchmarks to compare it to. There was a trace for background radiation, a trace for the ship’s own EM background, and a trace for the output of the parent star of the system they were now in. He tapped his suit’s comm unit. “La Forge to Enterprise.”

“Go ahead, Geordi,” Picard’s voice answered.

“Captain, the radiation pattern here is consistent with the Intrepid having drifted across this system for two hundred years.”

“And the micrometeoroid damage?”

“If the ship drifted in through the Oort cloud, with no shielding, that’d probably match up too, Captain. Though we’d have to double-check the composition of the cloud.”

“I’ll have that arranged,” Picard responded, then Geordi could just make out his voice ordering someone to launch a probe, before returning to address the away team. “Geordi, is it your opinion that the vessel is genuine?”

“We’ve only seen some corridor space so far, Captain, but it’s definitely old. If this isn’t actually the NX-07 then it must be a reverse-engineer job contemporary with the original. I don’t have any doubts that this ship has been drifting here for two centuries. It’s definitely not a modern vessel placed here for our benefit.”

“Understood. Picard out.” La Forge could hear the relief in the captain’s voice, and a hint of the same pleasure that Geordi felt, at the increasing certainty that this was a genuine piece of history.

“Where do you want to go first, Commander?” Choudhury asked.

“The bridge and engineering. Taurik, engineering takes up the aft sections of D and E decks. Take Vargas with you, and check out just how cold the engines and the power systems are. I’ll take Khalid and look at the bridge.”

“Aye, Commander.”

Choudhury addressed her people. “Go with Taurik, just in case. I’ll accompany Commander La Forge.”

As Taurik, Ensign Emilia Vargas, and the two security men set off toward the aft end of the corridor, Geordi led Choudhury and Ensign Leon Khalid a few steps in the other direction. He stopped at a man-sized access panel. “There’s no power for the tubolifts, so we’ll have to climb.” He felt around the edges of the panel, the EV suit’s gauntlets making it harder to get a grip, and heaved with all of his strength.

The panel remained closed. “It seems to be fused shut. Khalid, hand me a pry bar.” The ensign drew a stout metal bar from his equipment belt and handed it to La Forge. With some effort, Geordi popped the panel free, and Choudhury helped him move it aside. They shone their lights into the space beyond, which was a black hollow like the socket of a recently pulled tooth. The lights picked out the glinting lines of a ladder at the back of the space, leading upward.

“This should take us up to A deck.”

“Perhaps I should go first,” Choudhury suggested.

“If you want, sure.” He gave her a phaser-cutter. “At the top, you’ll have to cut through the door.”

“Understood.” Choudhury ascended the ladder, and, after a moment, Khalid and La Forge followed her. It was only a four-meter ladder, but by the time Geordi reached the top he could see the light of the phaser-cutter. A roughly oval section of the door, its edges still glowing, toppled outward with a heavy thud that La Forge could feel through his boots.

The three of them ducked through into the bridge, careful not to stumble. The crisp clarity of their sims beacons in the sterile chamber picked out horseshoe-shaped stations on either side of the forward part of the bridge, with the helm console between them. The main viewscreen was smaller than Geordi had expected, and totally matte-black. The captain’s seat should have been in the center, of course, but only the base of its mounting was there. More stations were set behind the center position, including a table-like affair recessed at the rear of the bridge. There was no sign of the crew that Geordi could see.

There were a surprising number of handholds around the bridge, and the control consoles had a lot more buttons and switches than La Forge had seen in a long time. It was a good thing, he realized, as they’d never even see the label on a smooth LCARS console if it was as dead as these boards. Maybe, he thought, they had the right idea back in the day.

He moved to the center of the bridge, standing over the stump of the mount for the captain’s chair, and turned a slow three hundred and sixty degrees. One part of his mind was concentrating on directing his light at points of interest, looking for any sign of a member of the crew, or for any sign of energy, or for clues as to what happened to the ship. The other part of his mind was just drinking in the fact that he was standing on the bridge of an NX-class ship, inside a piece of history. He got a sudden flash of what Counselor Troi’s abilities as an empath did, as he felt, or at least imagined he felt, Captain Picard’s envy at his being over here.

“There aren’t any visible breaches here,” La Forge noted. “and the Enterprise’s sensors didn’t register any lifeboats or escape pods as missing, so what happened to the crew?”

Choudhury managed to make her shrug visible through the EV suit. “Maybe another ship took them off at some point?”

“Before or after the Romulan minefield?”

“Before or after she ended up here?”

“Take your pick.” Geordi walked further across the bridge, playing his lights into every corner. With no atmosphere to scatter the light, the discs of brightness projected onto walls and floor were beautifully pure and illuminating, but not very informative. On the starboard side of the bridge, tangled nests of steel basketry cast angular inky shadows. It took Geordi a moment to realize that they were the mangled remains of the bridge’s chairs. “I wonder how much force it would take to rip the center seat mounting apart.”

“Without leaving any other marks on the ship,” Choudhury added. “A bomb or grenade in here might have done it, but there’s no shrapnel damage.”

“Whatever happened in here, it wasn’t an explosion. If any of the crew survived you’d think they’d need to have replaced the chairs for their stations. And if not . . .”

“Then who moved the bodies?” she said, finishing the thought for him.

“Exactly. Khalid,” La Forge ordered the ensign, “scan the structural framework around the bridge, and let’s see whether we can get a handle on what stresses it’s been under, and when. Also look for any signs of microscopic breaches. If we can pressurize the bridge at least, that’ll make checking out the rest of the ship a lot easier.”

“Aye, sir,” Khalid said, and began attaching deep-scanning nodes to the wall. They would send their questing signals into the structure, and link the results back into a tricorder. It was slower than a standard tricorder scan, but a lot more precise. While he did that, La Forge walked around to the engineering station, and opened a panel.

He probed the circuitry inside with a handheld unit, introducing power to the ancient systems in the hope of seeing where it would flow and where it would leak. It simply didn’t react at all. He let out a sigh, thinking that he may as well have tested the energy flow in a rock. Geordi resigned himself to the idea that this was going to take a long time.

While La Forge and Khalid went about their business, Jasminder Choudhury made her own survey of the bridge. It was empty, sterile, and, in her opinion, creepy. Even an empty ship usually had some remnant sense of the people who had been living aboard. Sometimes new ships even held an intangible mood of expectancy as they anticipated the arrival of their crews. Intrepid didn’t feel like either of those. Choudhury thought that it simply felt like an unreal thing, out of place and not belonging. Worse still, it felt like it couldn’t possibly stay, but would disappear from their sight and their memories at the first opportunity.

Just like her crew seemed to have done.

Shivering inside her EV suit, she searched in vain for any sign of deliberate violence or weapons damage. There was none, but something else drew her attention. The walls, imploded monitor screens, and console surfaces in this part of the bridge seemed to be coated with something. Choudhury couldn’t tell what it was just from looking, but it gave her a most uncomfortable sensation. It was solid, like a thin layer of crisp sandstone, and showed black and gray when she cast her flashlight over it.

“Commander,” she said, “there’s something odd here.”

“Odd?” La Forge put the power unit back in his belt and came over to her.

She drew her finger along just above the layer of sediment. “There’s a coating of some kind on this half of the bridge. The walls, the consoles, furnishings, everything. It’s like some kind of fungus, maybe. I mean, something that grew here two hundred years ago.”

“Whatever this is, it’s been here for a lot longer than two hundred years . . .” He reached out a hand to touch it, but Choudhury stopped him, suddenly sure that she shouldn’t let him disturb it. It didn’t look infectious, or anything like that, but something in her subconscious warned against messing with it.

“Commander . . . maybe we should have this stuff checked for biological agents. Just in case.”

La Forge looked at her for a long moment, then looked back at the material on the wall. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. La Forge to Taurik.”

“Taurik here.”

“Taurik, is there any sign of energy remaining in the systems down there?”

“Negative, Commander. I would venture that even a cold start would not revive the engines. They are almost fossilized.”

“That’s about what I figured,” La Forge sighed. “Another thing. We’re seeing a sort of petrified mold or something, in parts of the bridge. Is there anything like that where you are?”

There was a long pause, and Choudhury could hear a faint shuffling as Taurik’s comm system picked up his moving around; no doubt he was looking for the encrustation. “Yes, Commander, I see some material that fits this description.”

“Okay, Taurik. Don’t touch any of it for now.”

“Understood, Commander.”

La Forge thought for a moment, his enthusiasm for this piece of history waning. “La Forge to Enterprise,” he said at last. “We’ve discovered some material spread across some of the surfaces over here. It may be some kind of mold or fungus.”

“Growing in the vacuum?” Picard’s voice came back.

“No, sir, it seems to be completely dried out—petrified, like stone—but I’d like to have it checked out for biomatter.”

“Stand by, Geordi.”

A couple of minutes later, silver light blazed in the center of the bridge, and Doctor Beverly Crusher materialized in an EV suit, carrying a medical case in one hand. “You asked for a house call, Geordi?”

“I guess I did,” Geordi said with a grin. He led her to a large patch of the petrified material on the port side door. “This stuff definitely isn’t part of the ship, and it looks like it might be some kind of biomatter.”

Beverly took a medical sensor from her case, and directed it at the material. A faint spread of light from the device vaporized the surface molecules of the material, which sparkled in the beam. Almost immediately the device flashed to announce that it had analyzed the particles. Through the faceplate of her helmet, Geordi could see Beverly’s expression take on a grim sadness. There was no sign of surprise in the expression, though.

“Organic material,” she confirmed.

“Is it safe to touch?”

“Safe, yes.” Beverly extended a hand, and gently rubbed at the organic matter. It rubbed away easily, crumbling to dust that sparkled in the beams of their lights. Under it, a darker patch was revealed. It was a fragment of blue cloth, which Geordi didn’t recognize at first. Then he remembered that, back in the days of the NX-class, Starfleet’s uniforms were all blue jumpsuits.

“Damn,” he whispered. “Is that what I think it is?”

“I’m afraid so, Geordi. This biomatter is not a fungus or microbial growth. It’s the remains of the crew.”

“How can it—” Geordi bit off the question. “Inertial dampening failure.”

“I think it’s pretty clear-cut, Geordi.” Crusher shivered, the motion visible even through the EV suit. “The impacts at near-relativistic velocities have put visible dents in the walls, and, well, you can see how it has affected the cells of the crew’s bodies.”

“Like dropping a tomato off a skyscraper . . .”

“Unmistakable.”

“Damn,” Geordi whispered again.

Listening to Doctor Crusher’s explanation, Choudhury felt a chill. Her urge to avoid touching the biomatter had been right, but for the wrong reasons. The stuff wasn’t a threat, but it was human remains, and so ought to be treated with respect.

She looked around the bridge with a new viewpoint. The ship didn’t seem so unreal now. It wasn’t a thing out of its time, it was a war grave, and demanded a certain reverence.

“I’ll collect samples of the remains from as much of the ship as we can reach,” Doctor Crusher was saying. “Hopefully I can identify specific DNA markers and pass on the word to the descendants of the crew.”

“Understood,” Picard’s voice answered. “I’ll let Starfleet Command know what we’ve discovered so far. Picard out.”

After several hours, La Forge had been glad to return to the Enterprise. Discovering the remains of the crew had been oddly reassuring, but Geordi had put in enough time trying to get power into Intrepid’s circuits to know that it was going to be a long and frustrating job, if it was even possible.

The engineer had returned in a somber mood, and was still feeling that way when he reported to Captain Picard on the bridge. “There’s no sign of enemy fire. From the condition of the remains, it looks like a massive failure of the inertial dampening system killed the crew. Whether that was caused by the shock wave from a mine, there’s just no way to tell without accessing the automatic logs. Obviously that’s something we’ll be focusing on.” La Forge hesitated. “I—” he shook his head. “I dunno, but if it was caused by a mine, right after the ceasefire . . .”

Picard nodded understandingly. “It’s a sad truth, and one with no consolation to it, that someone must always be the last casualty of a war. All too often it’s an even more unfortunate truth that the last casualty of a war occurs after the armistice has been signed.”

Worf, sitting at Picard’s right, nodded sagely. “There are always units at the frontline too far away to receive the message at the same time.”

“Indeed. I wonder if it would have made a difference to the relatives of the Intrepid’s crew, to know that their loss was not that of being a post-armistice casualty of war.”

“They still died in the line of duty,” Worf said approvingly. “Whatever happened to them, they bear no shame because of it.” La Forge didn’t think that made much difference in the end, but appreciated Worf’s sentiment. “For what it is worth, the bodies recovered at the NX-07’s last known position were those of Chief Engineer Anna Byelev, and Ensigns Yukio Kawazana, Georges Toussaint, and Roland Brazzi. All members of Intrepid’s engineering section.”

“Had they abandoned ship?” La Forge asked. “Taurik didn’t report any sign of hull breach on the engineering decks.”

Picard shrugged. “The records don’t say; however, all four were wearing environment suits, and we know that some repairs were scheduled.” He looked thoughtfully at the ship on screen. Members of the medical staff were still over there, collecting samples, and the engineering investigation had been put on hold. It was, as Choudhury had pointed out in her report, a war grave. “We don’t even know, as of yet, how many of the crew died on board, let alone why.”

“It’d definitely be worth further investigation, Captain.”

“In EV suits?”

“Everything’s dead over there. There are a few meteoroid punctures that could use patching, but once that’s done . . . There’s no reason we couldn’t pressurize the interior from a portable system. The bridge is still sealed, and could be pressurized right now.”

“I understand that,” Picard said, “but Doctor Crusher has recommended that the ship remain as a vacuum for the moment, to prevent further decay of the crew’s remains, at least until they’re all identified and the relatives informed.”

“How long is that likely to take?”

“I’ve no idea,” Picard admitted. “Let’s ask her.”

Doctor Crusher had brought back numerous samples from the Intrepid’s bridge, in sealed sterile containers. She didn’t want any of the remains contaminated by exposure to cells floating around in the Enterprise’s atmosphere.

She was analyzing a group of samples in the biopsy lab off sickbay when Jean-Luc and Geordi entered. Samples that had already been tested were placed, still in their sterile vials, on a tray to one side of the analytical equipment. “Captain, I was just about to call you.”

“You have results?”

Crusher indicated the sample of fossilized organic material on the tray. “I’ve been able to date the remains.”

“How old are they?”

“Two and a half thousand years.”

Geordi was brought up short. “That’s impossible,” he blurted out. “The ship itself isn’t that old.”

Picard frowned. “Beverly, I thought you said these were the remains of the crew. Are you now suggesting that it was perhaps some more ancient organic samples brought on board and released—”

“No, the DNA matches up with the service records of Intrepid’s crew. The biomatter adhering to the walls is their remains.”

“Then the dating must be wrong,” La Forge insisted. “They can’t have been there for ten times longer than the ship.” The very idea was absurd.

“It’s not. I ran a level one diagnostic on the analyzer and it’s working perfectly. I don’t know how it’s even possible, but these are the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old remains of people who lived and died two hundred years ago.”

“Could they have traveled through time? Could the Intrepid have been thrown back in time as we now know that Columbia was?” Picard’s voice had become tight, his eyes urgent, and Beverly understood all too well why that would be. Columbia’s time travel had, eventually, led to the creation of the Borg, and Jean Luc’s history with the Borg ran deeper than his own blood did.

“I wish I could say, but in this condition, there’s no way to tell. The cellular side-effects of exposure to chronitons just won’t show in such damaged samples. The Intrepid itself will hold more clues to that than the remains will.”

“Does that mean I’m clear to go and look?” Geordi asked.

“I think so,” Beverly said. “We’ve identified matter from all of the crew that were on board when Intrepid was lost. We still have to decide what to do with the rest of the remains, but if you can test pieces of the ship that don’t have biomatter on them, then I don’t see why not.”

“Believe me, Doctor, I’ll be a lot happier to test parts that don’t have remains on them. Captain?”

“Make it so. Call a senior staff meeting as soon as you have results.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The senior staff meeting was held in the briefing room aft of the bridge. Geordi barely even noticed the golden models of prior vessels named Enterprise on most days, but today his eyes were drawn to the simple lines of the first warp-capable Enterprise, the NX-01. Today it reminded him of the ship that remained off the Enterprise’s port beam.

The past, Geordi thought, encroaching on the present. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Picard was already seated at the head of the slightly curved table, Worf beside him. Beverly was opposite Worf. Geordi took a seat as the captain asked, “Mister La Forge, do we have results on the matter of this discrepancy between the ages of the Intrepid and the remains of her crew?”

Geordi nodded. “We’ve thoroughly scanned the Intrepid’s structure down to the subatomic level, looking mainly for temporal stresses.”

“And?”

“Using a chronotron refraction index.”

“Chronotron?” Picard echoed. “Don’t you mean chroniton?”

Geordi tilted his hand in a so-so gesture. “Sort of. When we pass energy through the chroniton particles it generates chronotron radiation, and its temporal spectrum—”

Worf glowered, and Picard winced, holding up a hand. “Your conclusions will suffice, Mister La Forge.”

The engineer suppressed a smile, feeling a little more at ease about the strange mix of pasts that the samples and scans had revealed. “The stress patterns in the structure of the vessel show that there was definitely a massive failure of the inertial dampening system, and that this seems to have happened around two and a half thousand years ago. It looks like Doctor Crusher was right.”

“Then the Intrepid traveled through time before her demise?”

“Not necessarily. All we know for sure is that she experienced a chronological duration of two and a half thousand years in what, to the rest of us, is only two hundred and twenty or so. There are quite a few ways in which that could have happened, from relativistic effects to interference by the Q.”

“Surely the Intrepid’s internal logs would provide a clue,” Beverly suggested.

“They would, but we’ve no way to access them right now. She’s not just a dead ship, she’s . . . fossilized.”

“Speaking of fossilization,” Picard said. “This petrified material on board. The remains of the crew. You suggested the cause of death may have been a failure of the inertial dampeners.”

“The organic matter coating the internal surfaces of the vessel fits with a sudden—instantaneous, in fact—catastrophic failure of the internal inertial dampeners,” Crusher confirmed.

Worf pointed out, “No one would go to warp knowing the inertial dampeners were offline.”

“So, perhaps the failure was as they went to warp. Might something in their power systems have caused a loss of dampeners when they engaged the warp drive? Those vessels didn’t have the degree of multiple redundancies in their systems that we have today.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think they were just making the jump to warp when whatever happened . . . happened. If they were, all the—” La Forge paused, took a breath. “All the remains would have been . . . distributed, on the aft bulkheads. In fact we’re seeing a greater concentration of organic matter on the port side of each occupied room. That would suggest the ship was oriented with the starboard side leading in the direction of travel.”

Picard nodded thoughtfully. “Then the Intrepid may have been engaging in maneuvers at what for that era was high warp.”

“Could be,” Geordi agreed. “Then they tried a maneuver that was too violent for their tolerances, and something gave out.”

“They must have considered their situation to be rather desperate, if they were willing to make such a risky maneuver.”

“It was the era of the Earth-Romulan war,” Worf reminded them. “Perhaps they were engaged in a dogfight, or at least under attack and pursuit.”

La Forge shrugged. “The fact is, we just don’t know. All we know is that the inertial dampeners failed totally, and the ship was being led by its starboard side at the time. Again, we need to access the on board logs to be sure, and that means restoring power over there.”

Picard steepled his fingers “What are the chances of bringing the Intrepid’s systems back online?”

“Less than zero, Captain. Our systems just aren’t compatible. It would be like trying to start a steam engine with impulse power.”

“Columbia’s systems were brought online during her recovery.”

“After several years,” Geordi said pointedly, “and with specialist equipment. There wasn’t as much radiation damage and she was planet-bound. The Enterprise just isn’t equipped for that kind of operation. Maybe if Starfleet can send a salvage vessel with equipment calibrated from Columbia . . .”

“I’ll notify Starfleet of our discovery, and see if they concur.”

“I hope they do. It would be a shame—actually maybe even a crime—to leave the Intrepid out here.”

“I definitely concur with that, Geordi,” Picard said with a nod. He rose. “Now we just have to wait for Starfleet’s response.” That, Geordi knew, would be the hard part. Waiting instead of doing was never easy, and he could hear in the captain’s tone that he felt the same way.

As they all filed out of the briefing room, La Forge decided that it was time to check in on engineering. If nothing else, at least the heartbeat of the Enterprise would make him feel better.

Off-duty, while the Enterprise stood watch over Intrepid, La Forge didn’t feel in the mood to socialize. The age of Intrepid and her crew nagged at him, competing with the melancholy that came with realizing one was walking among the dead.

He had also been working for something like twelve hours straight, and could use sleep more than anything else, so he returned to his quarters, showered, and went to bed.

Geordi had almost fallen asleep when he remembered that he still had that damn message to compose to Tamala on the Lexington. He had never been much good at putting his emotions into words, at least not where romantic relationships were concerned, and had the sneaking suspicion that anything he said in his attempt to reassure her that she was foremost in his thoughts would have exactly the opposite effect. It always seemed to be the way, that anything he said or did to make things better between himself and a partner just made things worse instead.

Maybe, he thought, I should try making things worse and see if that actually makes things better.

He wondered what Tamala would have made of the Intrepid and her crew. She was in the medical division, so the remains would have been of more interest to her, he supposed. Maybe he should tell her about them in his message? Tell her about the inertial dampeners, and the age of the structure of the ship, and how amazing it was to walk in the starship architecture of a bygone age, and feel the switches between thumb and forefinger.

He was out of bed before he even realized that he intended to get up, and in a few minutes he was in an EV suit and beaming across to Intrepid.

He materialized on the bridge, which was exactly as he had left it earlier. It felt like standing in a tomb, not as a grave robber, but as the explorer. This must have been how Howard Carter felt when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.

Carter had said he could see “wonderful things” when the tomb was first opened, and Geordi, casting his light around the Intrepid’s bridge, thought that the buttons, switches, and handholds were, in their own way, wonderful things. They were wonderful because they had survived.

There was a discolored patch on the wall directly below the main viewer. It was a dull bronze rectangle, and Geordi realized after a moment that it was the ship’s dedication plaque. Another wonderful thing. He knelt down by it, and rubbed the petrified remains aside with as much care and respect as he could.

The plaque read Intrepid. NX-07. San Francisco, Earth. Per Ardua Ad Astra. Through hardship, to the stars. It suited the ship, as she had certainly undergone untold hardships, and yet remained among the stars, with her crew.

The gray matter stuck to the fingertips of his EV suit’s glove, and he was glad he was wearing it; the thought of having the remains of the crew rubbing on his skin was repulsive. In a weird way, the fact that the organic matter had faded and gone gray somehow felt worse. It was as if it had been some alien spore growing over anything, rather than the remains of the crew, which at least would be something he could make a connection with.

The longer he looked at the grayness on his gloves, the more creeped-out he felt. Was all the organic material on his gloves from one person, or was it a composite of particles from everyone on the bridge that had drifted since the ship’s gravity failed, and eventually settled in a homogenous layer? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Worf was right about one thing,” Picard’s voice said, startlingly loud in his helmet speakers. Geordi jumped, and saw that the captain was standing next to the helm console, in his own EV suit. Geordi hadn’t even noticed him beam in. “It’s an irresistible lure. One I freely admit I couldn’t pass up.”

“I was just thinking about Howard Carter, and Tutankhamen’s tomb.”

“Ah, ‘wonderful things.’”

“Exactly,” Geordi chuckled.

“So . . . what brings you back across here while you’re off duty?”

“I couldn’t sleep, and, to be honest, something about this ship . . . I dunno, it’s like it’s under my skin. The wonderful things, I mean, not the crew’s remains.”

“Sometimes,” Picard said, “it’s not just the treasures that draw us to the past, but a human connection. When we view the artifacts of Tutankhamen we don’t just admire the artistry and ingenuity of the people who created them, but we also pay our respects to who they were. We remember them.”

La Forge looked at the remains on the walls. Some of it had been removed for analysis and identification, but that just meant that more fragments of uniform were exposed to his light. Blue cloth with occasional red or yellow piping. “I think a lot more people will be remembering the crew of Intrepid.”

“Indeed they will.” Picard stepped closer, looking at the dedication plaque. “Being able to step into that which we ordinarily just read in history texts is marvelous enough, but to be able to add a new page . . . That’s a special thing, Geordi.”

“I guess it is.”

“We’re standing in our own pasts, so to speak, only that past isn’t the past we thought it was.”

“Now we just have to work out what past it actually is.”

Picard gave a little chuckle. “That, I’m content to let Starfleet work out.”

3

La Forge awoke to the insistent chime of his alarm call from the ship’s computer, and felt surprisingly refreshed considering how late he had eventually gone to sleep after returning from his visit to Intrepid.

He decided to take breakfast in the Enterprise’s mess, rather than have a replicated dish in his quarters. Ordinarily the mess was used for diplomatic functions, but there were always a few people who preferred to have their food prepared by a chef. He was finishing off his coffee when he heard, “Commander La Forge, please report to my ready room.”

He hurried up to the bridge immediately, and over to the ready room. Picard was behind his desk, but looked up as soon as La Forge entered. “Geordi,” Picard began, “we’ve had a response from Starfleet about the matter of the Intrepid.” La Forge noticed that Picard was keeping a stern expression on his face more so than usual, and wondered whether this was a good or bad sign. There was certainly a tension in the air, and a slight hesitancy. “Starfleet is sending a specialist ship, the Challenger, to take over investigation of the derelict. They feel that it warrants a long-term study.”

“Sounds like the right approach.”

“A medical forensics team on board will remove the biological remains of the crew for repatriation back to Earth, while the engineering specialists attempt to reactivate Intrepid’s systems and determine what happened to her.”

Geordi nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly what I’d recommended, Captain.”

Picard hesitated. “They have also . . . requested”—there was that tension again, giving lie to the “request” part—“that you be transferred to the Challenger on an extended attachment to the team being assembled to investigate Intrepid.”

La Forge felt a sudden chill. “Transferred? Off the Enterprise?”

“Temporarily attached to the Challenger,” Picard emphasized. “I’m sorry, perhaps that was a poor choice of words on my part. Starfleet believes that you have valuable skills and experience that will make you uniquely qualified for this mission. Aside from being the Enterprise’s chief engineer of many years’ standing, you have experience with the technology of other eras. You even had a hand in Earth’s very first warp vessel, the Phoenix.”

Geordi spread his hands in an appeal. “I know I’ve seen and done some things, but being chief engineer on the Enterprise is where I always wanted to be. It’s taken me years—”

“And Starfleet appreciates that, but Command also wants the best person for the job on Intrepid.” Picard’s expression lightened, a twinkle appearing in his eye. “And, to be fair, I read in your report that it was you yourself who insisted that such a mission be formed.”

“That’s true enough, but—”

“Geordi,” Picard said, dropping the mask entirely, “let me ask you one question. Would you be happy never setting foot on Intrepid again?”

Geordi took a deep breath, remembering the conversation he and Picard had had aboard Intrepid. He knew Picard remembered it too. “No. No, I’d love to be able to take her apart and put her back together again. Feel the decking vibrate when her warp core comes on line . . .”

“So would I,” Picard said softly, “but I’m not being offered the opportunity.” His tone and expression lightened. “There’s one other point I ought to mention. The request for you to join the team was made by an old friend of yours, Montgomery Scott.”

“Scotty?!” That was better news. It had been a while since Geordi had seen the legendary miracle worker.

“Challenger is Mister Scott’s pet project, a starship retrofitted as an engineering test-bed. It seems that he’s been following your career and he’d like to involve you in the Challenger’s mission.” Geordi didn’t reply, because he didn’t need to. He knew the captain could read his conflict. He wanted to breathe Intrepid’s air, but didn’t want to leave Enterprise to her own devices. She was, after all, the one lady he could rely on to always be there for him. “Geordi, I won’t order you to go, but I would say, as your friend, that if you don’t, you will probably beat yourself over the head with it for the rest of your life.”

“‘Beat yourself over the head’? The captain actually said that?” Worf sounded as much surprised as amused. He was sitting next to Geordi at the bartop to one side of the Riding Club, with a range of drinks and snacks in front of them.

“Yes,” Geordi confirmed.

“Impressive. I do not believe the captain has ever used such terminology with me.” Worf moved some of his snack onto a smaller saucer. Some of it tried to squirm back off.

“What are you doing?”

“A warrior shares his rations.” Geordi was momentarily baffled, then the realization made him grin. “You mean Spot.”

“The sharing of a kill is an important ritual,” Worf said solemnly. “But you did not sit here to discuss Spot. I can see the indecision in your face, and hear it in your voice.”

“I dunno, Worf. It’s . . . I mean, it’ll be great to see Scotty again, and the Challenger is doing some great work, but the Enterprise is home.”

“Home is merely where you live.”

“Well, that’s true, but—”

“Geordi,” Worf said, with surprising gentleness, “I understand how it can be difficult to leave a posting, even for a period of detached duty. But, in my experience, it simply means that the return to duty on the Enterprise is so much—”

“Sweeter? You mean a change is as good as a rest?”

Worf nodded. “Exactly. If you want to look at it from the view of duty, it is your duty to do what is best for Starfleet. And Starfleet thinks you are best used elsewhere. They are honoring you and your skills.”

“I can’t say I feel particularly honored.”

Worf dipped his head slightly. “If Deanna were here, I believe she would ask, ‘What you do feel?’ ”

“What do I feel? I’m not sure, actually. It’s not as if the Enterprise’s current mission is either exciting or taxing. And I would like to, frankly, take Intrepid apart and put her back together in working order.”

“Even though she is not a new creation?”

“That’s kind of the point. I grew up making models of the old NX- and Constitution-class ships, and studying the progress of how warp drives have been developed from those old designs to the drives of today . . .”

“It sounds to me as if you are looking for a reason not to appear to have the desire to investigate the Intrepid.”

“Really, Counselor Worf? And why might that be?”

Worf grunted, and poured some more prune juice. “Because you do not want people to think that you are bored with our mission, or with your position on the Enterprise.”

“I’m not bored—”

“I know. So what is stopping you?”

“You think I should go.”

“Captain Picard is an excellent judge of character. You would have regrets if you did not take the opportunity to study the Intrepid. Even if you do not have a . . . companion, with whom to share your discoveries.”

“I guess I have been kind of moping a little about Tamala . . .”

“Yes. Most unbecoming.”

“Intrepid has been taking my mind off that.”

“Good.”

“And Taurik can keep the engines ticking while I’m away . . .”

“He’d better, or he will answer to me.”

“I’d better let Captain Picard know that I’ll be going, and get the transfer arrangements made.”

Worf looked along the length of the Riding Club and nodded in the direction of the doors. “You can tell him now.” La Forge turned, to see Picard looking in their direction. As soon as he saw them, the captain strode over.

“Captain,” La Forge began, “if you’ve been looking for me—”

“Actually, I was looking for Beverly. We’d agreed to share lunch, but I seem to be a few minutes early.”

“Well, it’s handy that we bumped into each other. I’ve been thinking about the Challenger’s mission, and I’ve decided to agree to Starfleet’s—and Scotty’s—request.”

Picard’s face lit up. “Excellent.”

“The Challenger will be stopping at Starbase 410 en route to our position,” Worf said, suddenly all business again. “We will be passing there on our way to the next survey site.”

“Good thinking, Worf,” Picard said with a nod. “I’ll notify Starfleet that we’ll drop you off there to rendezvous with the Challenger.”

“That sounds like the best way of doing things,” La Forge agreed. “I’ll brief Taurik for what needs to be done while I’m away.”

La Forge sat at a sidewalk café looking up at the vast expanse of the planet Wexx. A storm was heading toward one of the southern islands, and it looked so much like one of the whorls on the surface of his raktajino that he almost had to pinch himself. Challenger had been delayed, and so he had found himself with forty-eight hours to kill on Starbase 410.

Every starbase was different, and Geordi had seen plenty of them during his years in Starfleet. Some were purpose-built space stations, often modeled on Earth’s old Spacedock. Others were hollowed-out asteroids, stations leased from local governments, or even ground-based complexes on planets.

Starbase 410 was a small moon of Wexx, connected to the planet by an orbital tether and elevator. Unlike most starbases, the facility was actually leased from the Klingons, as up until a few decades ago the planet had been within the Klingon Empire’s border. To honor its heritage, the place was administrated by a Klingon matriarch, QiQ’as, who took a daily tour of the facilities, to make sure that things were running as efficiently as befitted a Klingon facility.

The café was near the tether terminal down to the planet, but from a point of view on the moon’s surface, the planet was above. Geordi had found, almost as soon as he arrived, that this position gave a good view of ships passing between the starbase and the planet.

As he watched now, a Vesta-class ship, all stretched lines and an eyeful of speed, swooped around the planet. He knew that it wasn’t the Aventine, but at this distance he couldn’t see the name on her hull. She wasn’t the double E, but she was a beauty nonetheless.

“That she is, Geordi.” The voice was warm and soft; it sounded the way caramel would if it was sound instead of a texture and flavor. It was immediately familiar.

“Guinan?” He leapt to his feet, spinning around. The woman behind him had a wide-cheeked Cheshire cat smile, and eyes so filled with a passion for life that they almost knocked him back down into his chair. Her hair was hidden by a hat that was rather more saucer-shaped than the primary hull of that Vesta-class.

“Hello, Geordi. Fancy meeting you here.”

“This is great! Hey, sit down and have a—Oh, unless this is your place now?”

“No, this isn’t my café. But I do know the Nausicaan who runs it.”

“A Nausicaan runs this café?” Geordi had only noticed humans and a couple of Bajorans and Bolians among the staff. He looked around at the clean chromed décor and art. “It doesn’t look like a Nausicaan’s idea of a drinking establishment.”

“He’s good people. Besides, Q’Hap won’t tolerate trouble on her station.”

“You know her too?”

“She’s good people. I like to know good people.” Guinan sat, and ordered an iced tea. “I wasn’t sure it was you, just from the back of your head, but when you were admiring that ship . . .”

La Forge’s eyes narrowed. “That reminds me, how did you know I was thinking she was a beauty?”

“Because you didn’t just think it. And the Vesta herself is a beauty, obviously.”

“Oh . . .” He hadn’t even realized he had spoken out loud when he had seen the ship. “Sorry.” At least he now knew which ship it was.

“You’re sorry for admiring a ship?”

“For looking like a loon, talking to myself.”

“It would have been obvious anyway; it was written on your face.”

“That obvious, huh?”

Guinan nodded. “Capital letters, three meters high. In neon.”

“It is a beautiful design.” Geordi laughed. “Anyway, what are you doing at Starbase 410?”

“The same thing you are.”

“Well, I’m waiting—No . . . ?”

She nodded, with that smug, cat-that-got-the-cream smile. “Waiting to join the Challenger.”

“You never showed any interest in engineering before.”

“I have a lot of interests. Sometimes I let them lapse, and then sometimes I pick them up again.”

“So, you’re saying you do have, or did have, an interest in engineering?”

“Not really,” she admitted with a grin. “My father was the one with the predilection for tinkering with electronics. But I do count some engineers among my friends, and maybe it’s time to give them some of my time.” Geordi could feel his ears start to burn slightly.

“Besides,” she went on, “how was I supposed to resist the opportunity to spend some time on a Galaxy-class ship again?”

Geordi froze in mid-reply. “Challenger’s Galaxy-class?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“There are so many ships . . .”

“I know, it’s hard to keep track of them. I’m glad I don’t have to.”

“But you want to spend some time on one.”

“With some friends. And, this may sound a little weird, but it’s the closest thing I have to something that really feels like a home. In this part of the galaxy, anyway.”

“No,” Geordi said firmly, “that doesn’t sound weird at all.”

“I imagine you have pretty much the same feeling about it.”

Geordi wasn’t sure whether he would or not. “I’m pretty used to the Enterprise-E now.” He looked at her, feeling a little guilty about using his cybernetic eyes to read her skin galvanity and temperature. He told himself he was just trying to judge whether she was being serious, not whether she was telling the truth.

He stopped looking. It didn’t matter why she was going on the Challenger, just that there would be another familiar face on the mission. That it was a familiar face which also had a sympathetic ear on either side was oddly reassuring. Geordi raised his raktajino in a toast. “Well, here’s to Challenger, and her mission.”

Guinan raised her iced tea. “Here’s to her engineers.”

4

When the call came through to La Forge that Challenger was arriving, he made for the observation lounge to watch the starship crawl majestically to its docking umbilical. The lounge was on the opposite side of the moon from Wexx itself, and looked out on both the buoys that guided suitable vessels into the underground docking bays, and the stubby gray towers that gave access to vessels too large to pass into the interior bays.

A square-sectioned tower had been lit up for the arrival of the Challenger, and the docking umbilical and gangway corridor had been extended. Gravity waveguides built around the base of the tower were modifying the local gravity, which otherwise would have been around half Earth normal, so that the approaching ship could float safely above it.

La Forge couldn’t see Guinan yet, but was willing to bet that she had more luggage to see to than his two hold-alls. Uncertain whether he felt nervous or excited, he wasn’t even sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that he couldn’t see Challenger yet. Either way, he was surprised. The ship should have dropped out of warp some distance out, and be making its final approach well below sublight.

He was almost on the point of calling the starbase’s operations office to ask whether Challenger was delayed, when, suddenly, it was there, filling the observation windows.

It was not crawling in majestically.

La Forge’s heart leapt into his mouth as the six hundred and forty meter, four and a half million metric ton starship hurtled out of the darkness on an arc that surely must send it crashing through the orbital tether and down into the planet. With only seconds to go until impact, La Forge jumped to his feet, ready to lunge for an alarm button.

As he did so, his heart triphammering all the way up to warp nine, the Challenger spun about her vertical axis, now hurtling sideways toward the docking tower. In the couple of instants it took La Forge to calculate where the impact would be, and how many people would die, the ship had somehow slowed to a near halt with full-impulse braking.

An instant later, the ship’s main lock smoothly kissed the docking umbilical at a sedate ten centimeters per second. That was a letter-perfect textbook docking. La Forge took a shaking breath and forced his pulse and breathing back to normal. Off to one side, a hearty laugh filled the lounge. When La Forge looked, he saw the stolid form of Q’Hap applauding. Most of the other people in the lounge displayed an impressed mix of amazement and amusement. He had to admit himself, it had been a pretty good show, if insanely reckless.

Now that the ship had settled into its place, La Forge could feel the grin spreading across his face at the sight of the Challenger. It definitely gave him a faint shiver of pleasure to be looking at a Galaxy-class ship again. True, it wasn’t the old Enterprise, but it was close enough to make him feel like he was stepping back into his own past.

There were differences from the Enterprise-D, of course: the thermal and energy signatures his cybernetic eyes could pick up were running a little differently than he remembered the Enterprise doing. Even in the visible spectrum, the outermost plates on the hull were in a slightly different pattern. The registry number was different, NCC-71099. Despite all of this, La Forge could feel a lump forming in his throat. He had served on the Galaxy-class Enterprise too long not to be affected.

He also still wondered whether, had it not been for his VISOR, the Enterprise-D might not have still existed. Maybe it would have been decommissioned with full honors, and sent to the Fleet Museum. Counselor Troi had told him there would be times when he would feel that way, and that he shouldn’t feel guilty, but knowing a fact and feeling an emotion were two very different things, and the first didn’t always control the second, no matter how much effort he put into it.

“This one’s a beauty too,” Guinan said at his side. He hadn’t heard her approach, and indeed had rarely done so in Ten Forward back in the day. She seemed to have a talent for it. “Just like the old Enterprise.”

“Yeah. Are you going aboard now?”

“There’s no time like the present. Usually. My luggage is already being carried over, and I don’t want to let it out of my sight for too long.”

“Luggage? Anything special?”

She made a so-so gesture. “A few cases of single malt Scotch. Some Rekellian Kaspra—you get the idea.”

“I get the idea,” he confirmed with a laugh. They continued to talk as they walked through a set of heavy metal doors into an authorized-personnel-only corridor, whose simple white walls funneled them toward a small lobby that faced the Challenger’s main airlock doors.

Challenger’s doors were already open, and a smattering of people were moving in and out. “I guess I’d better go on forward,” she said, “and see how they’re unpacking things.”

“I expect I’ll be in soon enough.” They exchanged grins, and then Guinan moved into the beige lobby of the Challenger’s airlock before rounding a corner. As La Forge followed, he saw her exchange a few words with a uniformed commander. Geordi paused where he was, thinking that he could at least report aboard formally before going to look for Scotty.

When the commander was done talking to Guinan, he spotted La Forge and approached with a ready smile and an outstretched hand. He was slightly built, with short but rather spiky hair. Deep lines at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes belied his otherwise youthful features. “Commander La Forge?” he began in a northern English accent. “I’m Tyler Hunt, Challenger’s executive officer.” They shook hands.

“Permission to come aboard?” Geordi asked.

“Permission not only granted, but insisted upon. Hopefully your wait here was all right. We expected to arrive a little earlier.”

“It was fine. It’s a pretty unusual starbase, but well run.”

Hunt nodded. “That’s Klingon efficiency for you.”

“When you arrived, I thought the ship was going to crash . . .”

“Yes, I always think that too. Our helm is . . .” Hunt trailed off, looking as if he was casting around for the right word. “Well, you’ll see. Come on, let’s get you settled in your quarters. Captain Scott is eager to catch up with you.” They walked toward the nearest turbolift.

“The feeling is definitely mutual. I haven’t seen Scotty since . . . Well, it’s been a couple of years.” La Forge paused in the corridor. The familiarity of the sand and pastel tones of the corridor ahead had struck him like a fist in the face. Memories of the Enterprise-D came flooding back, and swirled through his head in a mix of fondness and sadness. It was the strangest feeling Geordi had ever experienced, and it caught him and carried him along in a tumbling rush.

The Galaxy-class was so much of him that he felt uncertain whether he was taking a step backward, into his own past. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or sad, and knew that he couldn’t not be either of them. He shook his head with a sigh. “Is something wrong?” Hunt asked.

“No, I was just hit by my memories of the Enterprise-D. And when I say hit, I mean punched in the face.”

“I know the feeling. Every time I go back to Manchester, it really freaks me out. Don’t worry, a trip to Nelson’s will put your mind at ease.”

“Nelson’s what?” Did Hunt mean a planet?

“Oh, the lounge. I think the Enterprise’s was called Ten Forward? What can I say? British captain and first officer, who else were we going to name it after? I think you’ll get on with our hostess.”

“That I can guarantee. Guinan knows how to put people’s minds at ease.”

“Ah, you already saw Guinan on the starbase? As I understand it, she’s in the process of making changes.” A turbolift arrived, and they entered.

A thought struck La Forge. “One thing I didn’t get the chance to ask yet, Commander—”

“We’re equal ranks, Commander. Call me Tyler.”

“Geordi.”

“Well, I’m glad we got that over with painlessly.”

“Yeah.” La Forge laughed. “That’s actually kind of what I was about to ask about. It seems to me that the Challenger is fully staffed, and I assume you already have a chief engineer . . . Not that you really need one, with Scotty aboard, but . . .”

“But someone has to look after things day-to-day. Yes, we have a chief engineer. The best in the fleet, present company excepted, of course.”

“So exactly what’s my status here?”

“Well,” Hunt said, “officially you’re being listed in the position of ops and second officer.”

“You don’t have an ops officer or a second officer?”

“Transporter Chief Carolan was about due to take that position on this tour, but when we knew you were coming, we kept the slot open so that there was a suitable position for your rank. In practice, though, we really want you as a mission specialist who’s had experience with historical vessels. And, I think, on some level Scotty just likes to recruit people whose work he admires.”

“Doesn’t every captain?”

“Pretty much.” They stopped at a door, and Hunt keyed it open. “These will be your quarters.”

“Thanks,” La Forge said slowly, a little fuzzy because the room and its place in the saucer section was identical to the location of Data’s quarters on the Enterprise-D.

Hunt noticed. “Another memory punch? You look a little . . .”

“I’m okay. I guess I’ll get used to it soon enough.”

“I’ll let the Captain know you’re here. He’s down in engineering, of course. Vol will probably be ready to strangle him by now—” Hunt’s combadge chirped. “Hunt here, go ahead.”

“Commander,” a woman’s voice said, which sounded strangely familiar, though Geordi couldn’t quite place it. “I’m looking over the stasis storage installation and I think it’s usable, but we could use a spare. Do you think you could check with the starbase’s quartermaster about getting another one?”

“Yeah, I can do that, Doc.” He signed off, and gave La Forge an apologetic look. “Looks like I have some more organizing to do. I hate to leave you in the lurch, but I’m assuming you know the way to main engineering.”

“I think I can find my way, don’t worry.”

“See you later.” Hunt raised his hand with a vague wave and trotted off, leaving La Forge in his new quarters. The sloping ceiling was familiar, as was the bathroom to his right and bedroom to his left. In Data’s old quarters, Geordi realized, the bathroom had been converted into an office, and there were no windows. Maybe it was his imagination, but the air smelled a little different too.

“Everything old is new again,” he murmured to himself. La Forge wondered if the reverse would be true as well, when he returned to the Enterprise. If I return to the Enterprise, he thought with a sinking feeling in his gut. Second officer wasn’t usually a temp posting.

He dumped his bags on the bed, but didn’t unpack yet. Maybe getting down to business would help him get in the right frame of mind.

“Hand me that plasma inducer, then.” A familiar brogue carried across main engineering as La Forge walked in. Once again, he felt as if he was stepping back into his own memories. The master situation monitor screen on the forward wall was mostly the same as the Enterprise’s had been, and the warp core toward the aft section, though smaller than the one on a Sovereign-class, throbbed with just as much power.

The flat, table-like master systems display console was absent. In its place, a sunken tank in the deck, and similar indentation in the ceiling above, confined a dazzling array of holographic displays and data in the air between them. La Forge couldn’t resist passing a hand through them, but quickly pulled back when they flashed. He didn’t want to start his first day on Montgomery Scott’s ship by setting off a cartload of alarms, or changing any vital settings.

“Hand you?” another voice replied. It sounded coarse and tough, yet somehow artificial. “Are you just trying to be offensive?”

“I can do that or not, lad, but I’d never just try.” If any of the ten or so people working in engineering thought there was anything odd about the exchange, they certainly didn’t show it, and neither voice sounded spiteful. La Forge got the impression that this was the banter of two old friends, and made a mental note to be careful not to over-react. He followed the voices, and the sounds of a working plasma inducer, around to where the chief engineer’s office ought to be. Instead of a partitioned-off office there was a circle of free-standing consoles like some kind of high-tech Stonehenge. Most of them were partially dismantled, and circuits and optronic cabling were piled up in a way that managed to be disorganized without being completely random either.

Standing in the midst of the technological jumble was a stout figure with neatly parted white hair, and rather sad eyes over a still fairly dark mustache. He was wearing a pocket-covered engineer’s vest over a white roll-neck, rather than a standard uniform-tunic: Starfleet’s oldest and longest-serving officer—that La Forge knew of—and certainly its oldest and longest-serving engineer.

Montgomery Scott.

A grin spread under Scotty’s mustache, and he hurried over, stuffing the plasma inducer in a pocket so that his hands were free to shake Geordi’s. “Commander La Forge! Welcome aboard, laddie.”

“It’s good to be aboard, Scotty.”

Scotty’s eyes narrowed, and he tilted his head. “Ah, but ye miss the Enterprise already.”

“Does it show?”

“It doesn’t have to. I’ve been chief engineer on two Enterprises, and nothing else is quite the same. Ye’d be a heartless man if you were no’ just a little disappointed to be somewhere else.” He gave La Forge a look of mock-seriousness, and said, “Now, be honest with me, lad, leaving the Enterprise was like havin’ teeth pulled?”

“Definitely,” Geordi agreed, “but seeing some familiar faces makes it a lot easier. And you know what they say, a change is as good as a rest.”

“And they’re right about that. If retirement means a rest, then I have to say, retiring from Starfleet was the biggest mistake I ever made, except maybe for that time I bleached my hair blond, and I’m glad to have rectified it.”

“Sounds like a pretty big mistake. But since you spent most of that retirement stuck in a transporter buffer, I guess you didn’t get too bored.” La Forge pointed upward. “I guess the hair liked its change better as well.”

Scotty laughed. “Maybe I did give it some ideas.”

“Could be worse, mate,” the other voice said from somewhere above La Forge’s head. “You could have done a Sisko with it.”

Geordi looked up, and was startled to see a pallid leathery creature dropping toward him from the upper catwalk around the warp core. It had thrown a thick tentacle over the rail, and now the surly red central mass of it was descending on another couple of tentacles which remained secured to the upper catwalk. Octopedal, it was a mixture of arachnid and crab, and could have scuttled from almost anyone’s nightmares. La Forge knew better than to give in to the moment’s revulsion he felt, as he saw that the tool belts it wore around the thick upper tentacles were in Starfleet uniform colors, and one of them had a combadge while another had a Lieutenant Commander’s rank pips.

Geordi had never seen the species before, but that wasn’t too surprising, as it was a big galaxy.

“This is Lieutenant Commander Voloczin,” Scotty said by way of introduction. “The Challenger’s chief engineer.”

“Hullo there, mate,” Vol greeted him, in the voice that he had heard bantering with Scotty as he came in. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t shake hands, obviously.”

“Of course.”

“Vol’s the only Voloczin in Starfleet, and he’s a damn fine engineer, if he doesn’t mind me sayin’ so.”

“So, Voloczin is both the species and an individual name?”

“Not exactly, mate,” Vol replied. “The syllables vol, o, and czin are just the only ones that humanoids tend to be able to hear or pronounce. The rest of our names are made up of awkward little noises and color tones that you wouldn’t be able to register. But, we’re a pretty rare bunch, and there are so few of us knocking about that you’re not bloody likely to meet two, so we all just call ourselves Voloczin when we deal with other races.”

“And, to continue the introductions,” Scotty added, “Vol, this is Commander La Forge, chief engineer of the Enterprise.”

“Enterprise, eh?” Vol sounded impressed. “Sovereign-class, that’s the life, eh?”

“It’s been pretty good so far.”

“I wouldn’t mind a chat about that, when you’re free. A real beauty, the Sovereign-class. More power all round, more efficient warp field, coils that sing . . .”

“I’m missing it enough already, thanks,” Geordi chuckled.

“I’ll bet.” Vol turned a large watery eye to Scotty. “That reminds me, those new coils we installed are tuning up a treat, but I could do with re-calibrating the injectors as well, because they really don’t get along with the newbies, if you catch my drift.”

“I’ll have a look at them myself,” Scotty promised. “While we’re docked here at a starbase,” he added to La Forge, “I can get down here and do some real work. Ye’ll probably try it yourself, if I don’t miss my guess. But before that, I suggest you check in with sickbay to be sure your records all got transferred, and then go on up to the bridge and tailor the ops station to the way you’d like it best. We won’t be gettin’ under way for a few hours, so there’s plenty of time.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks.”

The ship’s medical department was exactly as La Forge remembered the Enterprise-D’s sickbay, at least as far as size, layout, and décor were concerned. The actual biobeds and medical equipment in the room were newer models, the same as Beverly had on the current Enterprise.

There were two familiar faces waiting for him in sickbay, as well as Tyler Hunt, and he began to wonder where he really was. The mixture of past and present was starting to have a dream-like effect.

The first familiar face was a fellow engineer. A little taller than Geordi, but with a similar build, and thinning, floppy hair. He was, with Hunt, examining a cylindrical stasis module the size of a holdall. “It should be fine for any desiccated biomatter, Commander. The material of the casing won’t interfere with the stasis field.”

“Good work, Reg. We’ll need quite a few of these things when we reach Intrepid.”

“Reg?” La Forge was slightly embarrassed to hear that his voice betrayed exactly how surprised he was. Reg Barclay turned, his expression surprised and delighted.

“Commander!”

“What are you doing here? I thought I heard you were going to the Delta Quadrant with the Voyager fleet.”

“I did.” Barclay looked at the floor in characteristic embarrassment. “But Captain Scott has a lot of influence, and a love of experimenting with transporters.” He shivered.

“Long story,” Hunt interrupted. “He adapted the Pathfinder project. Captain Scott recruited him, as he recruited you, because Reg was with you on at least one trip through time.”

“The flight of the Phoenix.”

“Exactly. So we know he’s got a good grounding in working with equipment and tools from past eras. Which should come in handy on Intrepid.” La Forge nodded. It was a good idea, and he looked forward to working with Reg again. “It should be just like old times, eh?”

La Forge thought about those times for a moment. Borg invasions, holodeck fantasies, super-expanded brains. He caught Barclay’s expression, and saw the same thought in it. “Well, hopefully not quite like old times,” he said hurriedly.

“No, not quite,” Barclay said, nodding in vigorous agreement.

“So, Pathfinder? Transporter relay stations?”

“That’s right, Commander. Not really pleasant, I think.”

A woman’s voice, the same one La Forge had heard call Hunt earlier, said, “Oh, I think they both know what you mean, Tyler. And I know what they mean.”

It was a petite and pretty Asian woman who took the stasis module and put it on a biobed out of the way. She wore a white coat, the centuries-old badge of a doctor, over her uniform. “Hi, Geordi.”

“Hi, Alyssa. Or should I be saying Nurse Ogawa?”

“I wish. Unfortunately you should actually be saying Doctor Ogawa.”

“Doctor Ogawa is our chief medical officer,” Hunt explained. “She joined us from the Titan some time ago.”

“Doctor Ogawa? I like the sound of that, but . . . I thought you didn’t want to be a doctor?”

“Nurse Ogawa was just fine, and head nurse was all I ever wanted to be, but . . .” She shrugged her shoulders. “Sometimes life throws us curve balls.”

“So how come you’re now the Challenger’s CMO?”

“Mainly for Noah’s sake. Exploring dangerous and unknown corners of the galaxy is a good life for a Starfleet officer, but it’s not really the best way to bring up your son.”

“And an engineering test-bed is? Isn’t there a lot more risk of things blowing up on the Challenger than there is on the Titan?”

“I suppose there is, but at least Challenger has a home base at Starbase 410. So Noah can live with his grandparents, and go to a proper school on a proper planet, and I still get to go home and see him, most weekends.”

“I guess that makes a big difference.”

“Huge. Enough that I bit the bullet and let Starfleet Medical make me an MD. The training for all medical staff, doctors and nurses, has been standardized since the Dominion War, to make it easier to put someone in the right gap, wherever. So, I’d already done the training. Which means now everybody I meet thinks I spent my whole nursing career with that ambition.”

“Only people who don’t know you.”

“Well, that narrows it down to everybody in the universe except for a handful of people.”

“I don’t think anyone will hold it against you,” Barclay said.

“No, it’s just one of those things. Anyway, Geordi, I guess you came down to check on either the stasis modules, or whether your medical file had been transferred across safely.”

“The latter, but now that you mention the stasis modules . . . Are they for the remains of the Intrepid’s crew?”

“That’s right. Starfleet has requested that all the remains be recovered, kept in totally sterile conditions, and separated out for repatriation to the families of the crew. I’ve had a second stasis unit added to the morgue with enough separate modules for two hundred sets of remains, which should give us a good safety margin on top of the Intrepid’s crew.”

“That sounds good.”

“Commander,” Barclay said. “Commanders. I have to go supervise the loading of the other stasis unit. Will you . . . ?”

“Excuse you? Sure.” Alyssa shooed him away with a smile.

“And I have the ops console to configure,” Geordi said. “Nice to see you again, Alyssa.”

“You too.”

Stepping onto the bridge, Geordi was again assailed by the dizzying sense of déjà vu. The caramel colored seats, the long sweep of the rail that held the tactical console as well as enveloping the three center seats, the lightly scented air, and so on. The only people on the bridge were a Bolian monitoring one of the science stations, and two people consulting something on the tactical console on the main rail that separated the aft bridge stations from the three center seats.

One of the people at the tactical station was a short but very serious-faced Ferengi in a yellow-trimmed Starfleet uniform, while the other was a tall and athletic Klingon female in a form-fitting black jumpsuit with silver and gold trim, which wouldn’t have looked out of place on some sort of palace guard. Her typically long Klingon hair was auburn and tied in a ponytail, which reminded La Forge of Worf, though he didn’t recall Worf having any living female relatives, so he doubted that they were actually related.

As Geordi arrived, the Ferengi looked up, and stood to attention. “Can I help you, sir?”

“No, it’s okay. I just came up to configure the ops console to the way I like it. I’m Commander La Forge,” he added, belatedly remembering that he ought to have said as much first of all. “But you know that—it’s Lieutenant Nog, right?”

“Lieutenant Commander Nog,” the Ferengi said. “Security and Tactical on the Challenger.” Geordi was surprised. A Ferengi was the last species he expected to see assigned to security on a Federation starship.

“And who’s the maniac who brought the ship into dock like that?”

Nog looked alarmed, and opened his mouth to answer, but too late. The Klingon woman swung around at Geordi’s words. “I am Qat’qa, of the House of Qang,” she said coldly.

Geordi felt immediately guilty, having thought the helm officer wasn’t in the room. “I’m sorry. Look, when I said maniac, I—”

She barked a laugh. “You were quite correct. I have a mania, a passion, for flying. That’s what makes me so good at it.”

“And so dangerous?” La Forge was trying to think of anything that could come closer to causing a disaster, and came up short.

“A Klingon should be dangerous.”

“Not to her own ship.”

“There was no danger, Commander.” Her voice and her gaze remained icy. The turbolift doors opened, allowing Scotty onto the bridge just in time to hear the last few words of the exchange.

“If you can’t see the dangers in what you were doing—”

“Geordi,” Scotty said quickly. “Let it go, lad. She knows what she’s doing.”

La Forge bit off the urge to press on with his argument. “I hope so.”

“Will ye trust my judgment on it?”

“I guess so.”

“Good, then we’ll say no more about it. We’ve got a lot to catch up with.”

“Qat’qa’s not in uniform—is she a civilian specialist?”

“I am not in Starfleet,” Qat’qa confirmed. “I am on secondment from the Klingon Defense Force, as part of a long-term exchange program.” Qat’qa put on a slightly wide-eyed and innocent expression, at least by Klingon standards. “I have no objection to serving under a Starfleet chain of command, but I suspect that if I were to actually take a commission in it, my grandfather would come back from Sto-Vo-Kor to berate me.”

Scotty nodded in agreement. “And the old devil would be as proud of you as he’d be affronted by the idea.”

“This, also, is true,” she admitted.

La Forge decided this was an appropriate point to bow out of the conversation, since it seemed to have turned in a direction more suited to those who were already familiar with each other, and he knew that, as always, he’d most likely end up feeling left out. “Well, I did come to the bridge to configure the ops console, so . . .”

“Right, Geordi,” Scotty replied. “We won’t be leaving till morning, so ye might as well take the rest of the night off.”

“Thanks, Scotty.”

A couple of hours later, La Forge was satisfied that he had the displays on the ops station the way he wanted them. It wasn’t just the ship’s operational systems, and the sensors, but he’d arranged a tie-in to various databases and archives that might be useful in handling an NX-class ship.

His legs carried him on autopilot to the door of his quarters, but, to his surprise, the door refused to open. He pressed the call button, hearing the chime inside. “Just a minute.” This voice was one La Forge recognized instantly, the way he would recognize a punch in the gut. Except that a punch in the gut couldn’t feel as paradoxically exciting as it was shocking and painful. The door opened to reveal a woman in a crisp civilian suit of different shades of gray and blue, and her hair was neatly shaped into a cluster of not unattractive buns. Leah Brahms raised one eyebrow. “That didn’t take long. I didn’t expect to see you until either we were both on the bridge, or bumped into each other in engineering or Nelson’s.”

“I’m sorry,” La Forge managed to say at last. “Nobody told me you were—”

“I asked them not to.” Another punch in the gut. Did she think that he would have let her presence distract him from his duty, or indeed try to distract her?

“I didn’t come here deliberately—That is to say, I just got a little confused, I guess. My homing instinct isn’t up to much, and I guess it led me here to the chief engineer’s quarters instead of to—”

“Your quarters?”

“My quarters. Which I associate with being Data’s quarters . . . I guess my legs think they’re back on the Enterprise-D.”

“Don’t worry about it! Actually, I’ve been kind of looking forward to chatting with you.”

“Kind of?”

“Half looking forward to, and half dreading.”

La Forge nodded slowly. “I know exactly what you mean.” It was exactly how he was feeling right now.

“This isn’t the best place for us to catch up,” she said pointedly. “Maybe we should meet in Nelson’s.”

“I could use some dinner, and a stiff drink,” he admitted. The icy ball in the pit of his stomach was now hatching butterflies.

“Me too.”

“Give me an hour?”

Leah kept her expression frustratingly neutral. “I’ll be waiting.”

Nelson’s was in the forward section of deck ten, and roughly the same size and layout as the old Ten Forward of La Forge’s fond memories, though the décor was a little different. There were 3D images and artworks of various historical engineering projects on the walls, from the Great Pyramid to the Vesta-class starship. Other mementoes included a rivet from the Forth Bridge, a cog from the Skybridge of Vanalis, an access panel from Zephram Cochrane’s Phoenix, and various other engineering milestones.

Guinan already had a table with some drinks set up when Geordi arrived. He wasn’t sure whether Leah had primed her, or whether she had just known or figured out the right thing to do. She gave him that Cheshire cat look as he approached, but flitted back to the bar without speaking. Her look had said all she needed to, and Leah was already there too.

“I should probably apologize for not meeting you when you boarded, but I thought it might be a little . . .”

“Awkward?”

“Distracting. You came here to work, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He wasn’t sure what to say next, mainly because he wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear.

“You seem to be of two minds.”

“Not about that. It’s just the ship, and the faces. Not just you, but Reg and Alyssa . . .”

“You spent a long time on the Enterprise-D.”

“And they were good times. Being here is like being back in those days, and not. And I don’t know whether I’ve taken a step forward or back.”

“Forward, believe me. The Challenger is all about moving forward.”

“To the twenty-second century?”

“We have new techniques to try on the Intrepid. Archaeological techniques, forensics techniques, data and energy recovery . . .”

La Forge nodded. “Sounds fun. Maybe my luck’s changing after all.”

“For the better, I hope.”

“I’m still not sure yet. Leaving the Enterprise, even for a little while, feels like bad luck, especially with some of the other things that have happened lately.”

“Such as?” Geordi opened his mouth to answer, but then thought better of it. She didn’t want to hear about Tamala. Leah’s eyes narrowed at his hesitation. “All right, at least tell me her name.”

“Tamala,” Geordi said resignedly. “She was transferred to the Lexington a few weeks ago. Just when things looked like they might be getting interesting.”

“Tamale?”

“Tamala. Tamala Harstad.”

“Oh.”

“She was an intern on the medical staff.”

“Serious?”

“Maybe heading that way, but . . .”

“But . . . she got transferred?”

“No. I mean, yes, but even before that . . .”

“It didn’t last?”

“I wouldn’t say it wasn’t lasting, but I think that, given time, it would have . . . stopped lasting.”

Leah nodded. “It’s your confidence.”

“My confidence?”

“Or lack of it. You never quite found that balance between being confident and not counting your chickens before they’re hatched.”

“Okay . . . And that would mean . . . ?”

“You were saying you already thought the relationship wouldn’t last. If you were afraid Tamala—Dr. Harstad—was going to lose interest—”

“No, that’s not what I meant at all. Actually I just think that with her being transferred, and then me being transferred . . . that maybe it all worked out for the best after all.”

Leah frowned. “Wait a minute . . . You mean you were going to lose interest in her?”

“Not exactly. We could have been happy, we were good together. It’s just that there’s always the thought at the back of my head that . . .”

“That . . . ? Come on, Geordi, what was the downside. What was she not?”

“She wasn’t Leah Brahms.”

“Oh.” The mask came down again, hiding her thoughts.

“Yeah.” All things considered, he’d rather not have said as much straight out.

“Well, I guess that shows something.”

“Yeah,” Geordi sighed, “I guess it shows you were right. I can’t get that balance between confidence and—Well, anyway. I’m sorry.”

“For what? I was going to say I guess it shows commitment. Or stubborn denial.”

“Why don’t we just call it a compliment.” He raised his glass. “To Doctor Brahms.”

She raised her glass in return. “To Intrepid. And the mission to revive her.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Geordi agreed.

5

La Forge felt weird sitting at the ops console, watching the Challenger’s main viewer. When he had first joined the crew of the Enterprise, he had been the conn officer, despite his already established proficiency in starship engineering, because that was the only slot available for him at the time, and because of his fervent desire to serve on the Enterprise.

Now here he was, back on a Galaxy-class ship, and almost but not quite back in the past. The only difference was that he was in the left-hand seat instead of the right-hand one. Maybe looking into the past was just like looking into a mirror.

A note came up on his console, and he turned to face the center seats. Scotty was in the captain’s chair, with Hunt and Dr. Brahms on either side. “The Agamemnon is moving into formation with us.”

Scotty perked up. “About bloody time too. Kat, drop us out of warp. Transporter room, are you ready to bring aboard our final team member?”

“Ready,” a woman’s voice replied.

“Geordi, Leah, would you like to accompany me down to transporter room one and greet our latest guest? Mister Hunt, you have the bridge.”

La Forge and Brahms immediately rose and made for the turbolift with Scotty. Geordi couldn’t help but wonder who the Agamemnon had brought, and what specialty he or she would bring with them. He found himself hoping it might be Miles O’Brien, who was the best practical engineer he could think of other than Scotty himself.

In the turbolift, Scotty glanced at them both. “I hear from Guinan that you two were catching up in Nelson’s.”

“I’ve found a few familiar faces aboard,” La Forge said. “It’s nice to catch up with friends I haven’t seen for a while.”

Scotty nodded, in mock-thought. “I’m glad to hear it. A crew needs to be a family, if you know what I mean. The best starship crews always are.”

The turbolift doors opened, just short of the transporter room door. A female chief of medium height with graying hair was waiting at the console. “Have Agamemnon signaled their readiness to transport, Carolan?” Scotty asked.

“Just a second ago.”

“Right you are then, go ahead and energize.”

Carolan deftly brushed the controls, and a figure shimmered into being on the shining transporter pad. The new arrival was tall and lanky, with a wide, angular face and spiky gray hair that was cropped short. He wore loose clothing and a rather irritating smug expression.

La Forge was horrified. “Rasmussen?! Berlinghoff Rasmussen is on this team?”

Brahms nodded, looking surprised at his reaction. “Yes, do you know—Oh, of course you do, he was apprehended by the Enterprise, wasn’t he?”

“‘Apprehended’ isn’t quite the word I’d use. Caught red-handed is more like it.”

Rasmussen stepped down from the platform, shaking hands with Scotty, then caught sight of Geordi. “Wait, wait, I remember you! Lieutenant La Forge.”

“It’s Commander La Forge now.”

“Ah, sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you belowdecks, so to speak.”

La Forge tapped the pips on his collar. “Three pips, Rasmussen. I don’t know what a Commander’s insignia was in your time, but—”

“Same, actually, but they were more sort of . . .” He patted the right side of his chest, just below the collarbone. “Here.”

“I must apologize for the welcome, “Leah interrupted. “Commander La Forge is—”

“Oh, think nothing of it, Doctor Brahms,” Rasmussen said with a beatific, and slightly contrite, smile. “The Commander’s reaction is perfectly understandable, under the circumstances. I doubt any of his shipmates from the Enterprise would have really been happy to see me again. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“You made quite an impression,” La Forge said pointedly.

“An unfortunate and unpleasant one, I know. And I regret it, and offer my unreserved apologies. I know that any of you from whom I tried to steal would be unhappy to see me again. Well, apart from Mister Data, of course, who isn’t really capable of unhappiness. He might understand, actually.”

“I doubt it.”

“Really? He seemed quite—”

“Data’s dead.” Geordi didn’t even realize until the words had escaped his lips that he wasn’t hesitating over whether to say dead or deactivated.

“Dead?” Rasmussen looked genuinely surprised. More incredibly, he looked genuinely dismayed as well. The smile faded from his face. “I’m sorry to hear that. He was quite an incredible . . .”

“Piece of merchandise?”

“Creation.” Rasmussen looked lost for a moment. “He was an incredible creation.” That was an opinion with which Geordi couldn’t disagree.

Rasmussen couldn’t blame Geordi La Forge for being unsociable. His reaction to the offer of a drink in the ship’s lounge was a bit more than unsociable, but Rasmussen couldn’t really blame him for that either. After all, he had tried to steal his stuff, his shipmates’ stuff, and kidnap his friend.

Frankly, Rasmussen thought, if I was one of the Enterprise crew, I’d have slugged me on the spot. He hoped that thought didn’t belatedly occur to La Forge, or anyone else now on this ship, who had been on the Enterprise back then.

Back then. The phrase was a sick joke. Even back then was two hundred years in his own future.

He looked around the cabin they had given him, and was vaguely reminded of his trip to the Enterprise nearly fifteen years ago. It probably wasn’t exactly the same as the accommodation there, even though this was the same class of ship, but he wasn’t familiar enough with it to notice the differences. He did, however, notice the differences between it and in the penal colony in New Zealand.

Actually, now that he came to think of it, the penal colony gave him a bigger room. And an outdoors. He suspected, though, that the extra room was so that there would be space for the endless parade of historians and the like who had come to gawk at him like some kind of resurrected Neanderthal. Not that they had treated him badly, but he knew he was an attraction to them, like a zoo animal.

That some of those historians had been rather pretty mitigated his capitivity, though. He couldn’t fault the twenty-fourth century for its women. They were among the few things that didn’t depress him these days.

When he first came to this century he thought it would be wondrous and magical, with advanced technology he could take back, “invent,” and amaze people with. After so many years eating mostly replicated food, he found he wished he’d never heard of that particular device. And he was amazed that they still used transporters, in spite of all the horror stories that the free press had been disseminating back in the 2150s when they were invented.

The novelty, basically, had worn off, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that, even though he was a scientist, and an engineer of sorts, he didn’t understand a word of the technical journals to which he had subscribed. When he met a few schoolchildren who knew more about warp theory than he did, he knew he didn’t have what it took to get up to speed.

Then came the offer of this trip, and he knew it was his calling. A ship from his own time. A ship and a technology he knew and could understand. How could he refuse the chance to be useful again?

How could he refuse the chance to meet more lovely ladies of Starfleet?

As Nog left the bridge at the end of his shift, Tyler Hunt ran to catch the same turbolift. “Hold up, Nog!”

Nog stuck a leg between the doors to prevent them closing. It was his heavier leg, the biosynthetic prosthesis that he had been stuck with since the Battle of AR-558 during the Dominion War. “What can I do for you, Commander?”

As the doors snapped shut, Hunt called out, “Elevator halt.” Then he turned to Nog. “That Rasmussen bloke worries me.”

“Me too. He reminds me of the kind of people my uncle always used to do business with.”

“You know what I mean. He’s not just a guy who made a mistake once and got himself in too deep. More like it’s in his blood, you know?”

Nog knew exactly what he meant. “I think so. I’ve known quite a few like that. Before I joined Starfleet.”

Hunt canted his head. “If my formative years were filled with people like that, I think I’d have seen the service as the quiet life.”

“You didn’t join Starfleet for the ‘quiet life,’ then?”

“Nah. Joined up to see the galaxy, really. Belong to a family, of sorts.”

“What about your own family?”

“Orphan.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” Family was everything, as far as Ferengi were concerned. If you didn’t have family, how did you learn to negotiate and do business? Exploitation, after all, began at home. “I wonder if the captain would let me put a guard on him.”

“Somehow I doubt it. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.”

“Elevator resume. Deck ten.”

“Nelson’s?”

“Where else?”

“Good thinking. Promotion material. Wish I wasn’t still on duty.”

The turbolift deposited Nog a short distance from Nelson’s, before taking Hunt back up to the bridge. Even though it was now packed, it was a long-held tradition that the senior staff would be afforded seats, and Nog quickly found his way to the table at one end of the windows, where Commander La Forge was sitting with Qat’qa and Barclay. Qat’qa saw Nog and beckoned him over, then turned to whisper something in the ear of the nearest seated junior officer.

Said junior officer leapt to his feet and slid the chair across before disappearing into the standing throng. “We saved a seat for you,” Qat’qa said.

“Thanks.”

“If you studied engineering, how did you come to be a security chief?” Qat’qa asked.

“It was the position that was open. I’d been a ground pounder in the Dominion War, and chief engineer on Deep Space 9. Now when the chief engineer slot opens up on Challenger, I’ll apply.”

La Forge understood. “It happens that way on a lot of Starfleet ships,” he said to Qat’qa. “When I first joined the Enterprise, it was as flight controller, because that was the slot I was rated for. After a year, the chief engineer position became available.”

“What made you want to become a starfleet engineer?” the Klingon asked.

“That’s really two different questions,” Nog said.

“It is?”

“I wanted to join Starfleet because of the officers I got to know on DS9, mainly Chief O’Brien and Captain Sisko. When I saw the things they did, and the way they worked together, for a greater good . . . I wanted to do that too. It’s a sort of project that’s inside, and feels good. Engineering . . . I always had a talent for it, like my dad.”

“Your father’s an engineer?”

“He was.”

“Was? Oh, he’s not—”

“No, no . . . I didn’t mean that. He was an engineer on Deep Space 9. Now he’s . . .” Nog looked a little embarrassed. “Well, he changed jobs. He’s not an engineer any more.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“It’s a shame, because he was really, really good at it. I mean, he never had any formal training, he just learned as he went along. But he had a natural talent, an instinct.”

“Innate talents are things to cherish,” Qat’qa proclaimed.

“Absolutely.”

“So why did he give it up?”

“Circumstances changed. It’s a long story.”

6

As the Challenger entered the Agni Cluster, Tyler Hunt was pulling a double shift, to ensure that every department was ready for the job it would have with regard to the Intrepid, and to ensure that those departments not involved didn’t lose any productivity on their own projects. Most people showed signs of strain when they pulled such a long shift, but Hunt actually lived for it.

Scotty fell into step beside him as he walked, and Hunt slowed down slightly, to keep step with the older man’s pace. “Captain.”

“What’s up, Tyler?”

“I’ve arranged a schedule for away teams to the Intrepid.” He handed Scotty a padd with the details. “Starfleet was pretty clear about making sure the remains of the crew are taken care of before any other work begins.”

Scotty gave an approving nod. “And rightly so.”

“I agree, we need to take things slowly and with respect.” Hunt looked relieved. “I was kind of afraid that you’d want to push on ahead.”

“Don’t worry, Mister Hunt. Respect for the past isn’t something I’m likely to disregard.”

“Aye, sir. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking about it from that angle.”

“So, what’s your schedule?”

“Doctor Ogawa has assembled a medical forensics team to recover the remains of the crew, and bring it back to the Challenger to be separated out into individuals. Barclay and I have checked over the stasis units and their separator modules, and they’re perfect for the job. Starbase 410 have done us proud, actually.”

“What did ye expect from Q’Hap? Call a meeting of the senior staff in the briefing room for twelve hundred. I want to go over the status of the Intrepid before we reach her.”

“Aye, sir.”

Scotty preferred to be in engineering when he could get away with it, but that was disappointingly infrequent these days. There were too many responsibilities as captain for him to be down there as often as he liked.

Since the ship could be controlled from the master systems console in engineering, he had been tempted, when he took command of the ship, to move everything to there. Back on the old Enterprise, with Jim Kirk, he had been able to tell the state of the ship by the vibrations from the deck plates. On a Galaxy-class ship, he couldn’t, but he could tell how healthy the engines were from the sound the warp core made, just the way a doctor could listen to a person’s heartbeat if there were no medical tricorders around.

At least he could sit by the bridge’s engineering station, and keep an eye on things from there. He was pleased by what he saw, and could tell that Vol was doing him proud. A chronometer chimed on the display, reminding him that it was time for the briefing.

Scotty settled into the chair at the end of the briefing room table, which was, to his mind, the most comfortable chair in any of the ship’s working areas. Perhaps it wasn’t as comfortable as his favorite chair in his quarters, but it was a damn sight better for his back than the center seat on the bridge.

He cast a look around at the people gathering round the table. On his left, in front of a wall displaying models of previous vessels named Challenger, were Tyler Hunt, then Nog and Ogawa. On his right, sitting by the curved windows that looked out on one of the cluster’s orange suns, were Leah, Geordi, Barclay, and Qat’qa. Vol sat at the far end of the table. “Mister La Forge,” Scotty began, “you’ve been on Intrepid, so how would ye describe the state of the ship?”

“The hull is more or less intact, barring a few punctures, and the interior has been left as it was on the day she was lost. The thing that throws a spanner into any normal salvage plan is that, physically, the structure of the ship is a couple of thousand years old, not a couple of hundred.”

“That’s impossible,” Barclay protested. “Unless someone was building NX-class ships before we did.”

Alyssa Ogawa shook her head, and tapped the padd that was in front of her on the table. “I’ve got Doctor Crusher’s report here. The DNA analysis of some of the organic matter coating the interior surfaces matches known medical records of a number of her crew. It’s definitely the Intrepid which was lost in 2161.”

“Could it have traveled back through time?” Vol asked. “Something like what happened to the Columbia.”

Hunt shrugged. “Maybe, but surely it would have been found before.”

“Space is pretty big, and the ship pretty small. It was pure chance that the Enterprise detected it,” La Forge reminded them.

“Aye, there is that,” Scotty said. “But Leah and I have had a wee chat about this, and run some numbers.” He touched a control set into the tabletop, and a holographic display sprang to life in the air above the center of the table. It showed a standard illustration of a gravity well as a weight dragging down the center of a rubber sheet. “Everybody knows time runs slower at the bottom of a gravity well.”

“Starfleet Medical uses the effect quite extensively when stasis fields can’t be used,” Alyssa said with a nod. “A few hours for the patient near a suitable gravity well can give his doctors weeks, or even months, to prepare his treatment.”

Leah spoke up. “Exactly, and what Intrepid encountered was the reverse of that effect.”

“Gravity can only get as low as zero,” Nog pointed out. “Even what we call negative gs are just gravity pulling a change of direction. How can it reach such negative numbers to have an effect like this?”

Scotty leaned forward. “It canna, in normal space.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Hunt said.

“But . . . in some of the quantum slipstream experiments, we found that slipstream matrices intersectin’ a gravity well in subspace sometimes created the opposite or the reflection of a well.”

“A gravity peak?” Barclay asked.

“Right. We’ve nicknamed it a subspace gravity spike.” Leah leaned forward and adjusted the hologram. The ghostly image came to life, stretching upward in a mirror-image of the gravity well. “An object at the peak of the gravity spike will experience accelerated time.”

“In the case of Intrepid, two millennia . . .” La Forge nodded understandingly.

“Exactly,” Brahms said. “And if we project a course between where she was lost, and later found, I’m willing to bet we’ll find a large gravity well at some point, probably closer to her original position than here. But that’s not the real mystery. This effect was discovered during the development of the slipstream drive. And it happened to Intrepid two hundred years earlier.”

La Forge froze, his features settling into a granite mask. “There were no slipstream drive experiments in the twenty-second century.”

Scotty grunted. “Not by any known Alpha Quadrant species. Nobody had technology at that level back then . . .” he said, pausing for emphasis, “that we know of.”

“But there are a lot of people we don’t know . . .”

“Ye’ve hit the nail on the head, Geordi. That’s what Starfleet is interested in, and that’s why they sent Challenger.” Scotty cleared his throat. “Where did Intrepid originally disappear?”

“In the vicinity of star system G-231,” Qat’qa reported.

“That’s a fair distance from here,” Hunt pointed out.

“About four hundred light-years.” Leah tapped a point on the display, which obligingly wobbled and flashed. “I thought as much. On the other side of the black hole in the Bolus Reach. It’s only about six parsecs from G-231.”

“It could never have drifted so far,” Hunt said, “even in two thousand years. It would take millions of years for an object to drift even the tiniest fraction of that distance.”

“I agree,” La Forge said. “But it didn’t. It would be nice to know how.”

“And what about afterwards?” Nog asked. “Are you suggesting that Intrepid somehow negotiated its way through a black hole, and out the other side? That’s insane.”

“The ship’s existence is insane,” Vol countered. “The gravitational stresses should have torn her apart.”

“Perhaps Starfleet built them out of sterner stuff in those days,” Qat’qa said facetiously.

“No, lass,” Scotty said, “they didn’t. The NX-class was ancient history when I was chief engineer on the Enterprise, but we still had all the blueprints on file.”

“We still do, actually,” Leah reminded him.

“Aye, but in those days we still read through the old files now and again. There were enough old ships still around, dating that far back, that we might run into.”

“Not so much nowadays,” Barclay said.

“Not with twenty-second century ships, but Starfleet was still using the old Miranda- and Oberth-class ships until a decade ago, and they were from my era. And the Hood is still in service, isn’t she?” Scotty asked.

“Yes. And private owners can run ships of any age, if they can prove they’re spaceworthy,” Vol stated.

Barclay nodded. “And the Klingons still use the B’rel-class Bird-of-Prey, and there are a few K’t’ingas left in service.”

La Forge sat back, staring at the hologram. “The Intrepid couldn’t have flown through a black hole. It’s physically impossible to survive falling into the singularity . . .”

“Unless it’s a rotating black hole,” Barclay suggested, “and they somehow managed to orbit the singularity and slingshot back out.”

“Impossible,” Leah said flatly.

“Similar things have happened,” La Forge said.

“Aye, lad,” Scotty said with a grin, “the old Enterprise that I served on survived two slingshots round a black star, but that was only Warlock Station’s Type 3 singularity, not something with the gravitational power of a true black hole.”

“But if their orbit was far enough out?” asked Barclay.

“Which it couldna be, lad. You’re forgetting the big differences between the Connie-class and the NX-class: Firstly, the materials the Intrepid is constructed of wouldn’t have survived the torsional stresses, and nor, for that matter, would warp five be quick enough to get the job done. Secondly, and even more importantly, the crew of the Enterprise were alive and at their posts, whereas the crew of the Intrepid were already all dead.”

“Do we know that for a fact?” asked Qat’qa.

“That’s what my forensic technicians will attempt to confirm,” Ogawa said. “The walls will speak for themselves.”

“I appreciate that the crew died instantly due to a catastrophic failure of the inertial dampeners. What I’m asking is whether that failure couldn’t have been caused by the slingshot effect. You did just say, sir,” Barclay said, “that Intrepid couldn’t have taken the stresses of such a maneuver. And we know that something gave.”

“I didn’t just say her systems couldna have taken the strain, Mister Barclay; I said the materials she was built out of couldn’t. Her actual frame and hull would have broken up like an eggshell in a food blender. No, the Intrepid did not fly through a black hole.” Scotty paused for a moment, thinking about the state of the ship they were about to visit. It was old, it was fragile, but it could still be made to get back up and running again. It sounded like himself, and the thought amused him. “All right, so when we arrive, the engineering team wants to be looking for signs of having encountered a subspace gravity inversion, and slipstream. That sounds like a good place to start, so I’ll leave it up to all you to get it seen to.” He stood. “I’ll be seeing if I can arrange a look at G-231 while we’re at it.”

As everyone filed out of the briefing room, La Forge ended up following Qat’qa through the door back onto the bridge. “I wonder how impossible surviving a slingshot through a black hole would really be with current technology,” the Klingon pilot said thoughtfully.

“Personally, I’d rather never find out, if it’s all the same to you,” Barclay volunteered as he walked past them, before disappearing into the turbolift.

Qat’qa continued, “I understand the mechanics of the slingshot effect, and I’ve studied its use in the past. It’s quite rare, but effective.”

“How rare?” La Forge asked as they walked down to their stations.

“Captain Scott has survived the process half a dozen times or so. I believe that’s still a record.” Her eyes took on a hungry gleam. “I have set many flight records in the Empire, but one such as that eludes me.”

“But you’d like to try?”

“Or to make an achievement of equal stature. An elusive achievement is a challenge, and I have always risen to challenges.”

“I’m glad to hear it, I think.” As La Forge cast an eye over the status displayed on the ops console, Scotty tapped him on the shoulder and nodded toward the ready room door. Geordi followed him through, and Scotty sat behind his desk. La Forge was amused to note that where Picard used to have a fish tank, Scotty had a shield and a couple of claymore swords.

“Don’t worry about Qat’qa,” Scotty began. “She’s ambitious, stubborn, and, well, you know how Klingons are about takin’ on a challenge—but she’s not stupid, and she’s not crazy.”

“I’ve seen her piloting,” Geordi said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t so sure.

“Ye don’t get to be the most decorated test-pilot in anyone’s service by being stupid or crazy. Aye, ye need to be crazy enough to want to fly untried contraptions in the first place, but you also have to be stable and professional enough to take note of everything, and to take a ship to its limits without wrecking it and wastin’ all the time and effort that was put into making the beastie to begin with.”

“She’s the most-decorated helm in the Empire?” La Forge was suitably impressed.

“Test-pilot, yes. I dare say there are a lot of other Klingons with more decorations for service in battle, but none for trying out new vessels and new maneuvers.”

“So how did you manage to get her into the exchange program? I’d have thought she’d be too valuable to the Klingons, and have too many state secrets in her head.”

“I expect she does, but I have a little influence with one of two Klingon families on the High Council. Maybe not as much as Captain Picard, but I’ve done my bit. I was there at the Khitomer Conference. As a matter of fact, I shot the would-be assassin who was trying to shoot Chancellor Azetbur.”

La Forge nodded. “I remember reading about that.”

“Her house still remembers me. And then I also ran into Qat’qa’s paternal grandparents once or twice, and their House has this view that, while the Enterprise crew might have been enemies at times, we were worthy and honorable enemies.”

La Forge thought of Worf’s attitudes, and found himself nodding again. “I understand.”

“Right, now let me see what I can find out about G-231 . . .”

When La Forge had gone, Scotty keyed his companel and hailed another engineer/captain. After a few moments, a very pretty black-haired Hispanic woman appeared on screen, sitting in the center seat of a starship’s bridge. Scotty put on his most winning smile. “Captain Gomez, it’s always a pleasure.”

She grinned. “Likewise, Scotty.”

“Sonya, I was just wondering whether you’re free to do me a wee favor?”

“How ‘wee’ a favor did you have in mind?”

“How soon d’ye think the da Vinci could reach star system G-231?”

Sonya Gomez looked behind her, to where a stocky Tellarite was consulting a screen. “About eighteen hours,” the Tellarite said.

“That sounds good enough, lass.”

“What did you have in mind for us to do there?”

“I need a full subspace scan of the whole system. Look for anything . . . odd.”

“It’d help if you could define ‘odd’ a little more specifically.”

“Wormholes, subspace distortion fields, gravimetric distortions . . . Anything that might indicate the use of slipstream technology—”

“Okay, that’s pretty clear—”

“—two hundred years in the past.”

Her eyes widened. “Two hundred years? You must be joking.”

“Everythin’ leaves a trace o’ something, Sonya. I just have the suspicion that if there’s anything there, you’ll know it when you find it.”

“All right, we don’t have anything that’s a priority, and you did put me in this seat. I’ll get back to you when we arrive at G-231.”

“Thanks, lass. I owe you one.”

“Single malt this time, Scotty. Da Vinci out.”

The Challenger dropped out of warp ten thousand kilometers from the buoy that the Enterprise had left behind to mark Intrepid’s position, and sailed the rest of the way on impulse power.

Everyone who could think of a reason to be on the bridge was there for the first sight of Intrepid. Ogawa stood out of the way in a corner, while Barclay kept trying to look over people’s shoulders at what they were doing. Even Vol had squeezed himself into a turbolift and come up on the pretense of running a diagnostic on the bridge’s engineering console.

Qat’qa turned in her seat. “We are at the location marked by the Enterprise, Captain Scott. Intrepid is fifteen kilometers from the marker buoy.”

“Right, then,” Scotty said. “Let’s have a look at the grand old lass, eh?”

Beside him, Hunt touched a control on his armrest, and the main viewer switched to a closer view of the NX-class vessel. La Forge had already seen it, but he got a thrill out of seeing Scotty’s expression react to the sight. “There she is, just the way I left her.”

“Ah, she’s a beauty to be sure,” Scotty breathed. “It’s fair enough to go to the fleet museum and see one of these, but out here . . . Out here it’s a whole different ball game, isn’t it?”

“Kind of makes you feel that you’re part of that era,” Geordi agreed. “It’s like the difference between seeing a rare animal in captivity or in its natural environment.”

Brahms stood and walked over to the main viewer, resting a hand on the back of La Forge’s seat. “We’ve no idea how long it might take to get life support back up on Intrepid, or even if it’s actually possible at all. So we’ll dock our runabouts and shuttles at the other airlocks to use as base camps for the work crews, as well as a source of power for any systems we can get working.”

Geordi nodded. “Once the breaches are repaired, we should be able to use a shuttle’s life support system to re-pressurize the Intrepid.”

“That’ll be useful,” Hunt agreed. “The sooner the away team doesn’t have to be wearing EV suits, the happier—and less clumsy—they’ll be.”

“Exactly what I’m thinking,” Leah added.

“First things first,” Ogawa said. “We need to recover the remains of the crew before life support is restored.”

“That could take a while.”

“It could, but it’s going to be easier and more hygienic to remove the remains before an atmosphere can act as a biological or bacterial vector. When that happens, the material adhering to the wall will begin to decay, and, leaving aside any issues of contamination, it will stink.”

“We’ll send the runabouts Clyde and Thames to the main locks on either side of the saucer,” Hunt said. “We’ve already swapped out the standard mission modules for workshops.”

Leah nodded. “And if we can get Intrepid’s power grid to where it’ll actually carry an energy supply, we can use the warp cores from the runabouts to start it up.”

Ogawa came around to address Scotty. “Captain, if the medical forensic team can make use of one of the runabouts . . .”

“Agreed,” Scotty said. “Use the Clyde, Doctor. Concentrate on recovering the remains from the bridge and engineering first. That’ll help Mister La Forge and his team get to work sooner.”

“That sounds most sensible to me anyway. The three locations with the most jumbled up remains will be the bridge, engineering, and the crew’s mess. The biomatter from those locations will need the longest time to separate out into individual remains. The remains in the cabins should belong to no more than four people per room.”

“Right, then, the crew mess will be your third priority. We shouldn’t need to use it at all, of course, so it’s less of a priority from an engineering viewpoint.”

Ogawa nodded, and left to prepare to go across to the other ship. La Forge looked up at Brahms. “She’s a pretty sight, isn’t she?”

“Pretty, but very out of date. Just look at what passes for her nacelle radiators. . . . It’s a product of a bygone age that’s rightfully bygone.”

“Oh, come on, Doc,” Vol protested. “Those are classics. Proper, solid, hardwired technology.”

“Which broke down as often as not. It belongs in the museum that we’ll put it in, where we can look at such primitivism in a safe environment.”

“And be relieved that starship construction and design has moved on since that one was built,” Hunt added.

In Nelson’s, Guinan stood by the huge forward windows and looked out on the Intrepid. It was an era through which she had lived, but the ship wasn’t one she had any familiarity with. That said, she tended not to take too much notice of the exteriors of ships, and the interiors tended to blend together after the first couple of centuries.

She heard a wistful sigh a few feet away, and turned. There were only a couple of other people in the lounge area, mostly looking tired after finishing a long shift, but one person was leaning forward, his hands pressed against the windows. He was looking at Intrepid with the expression of a man who had returned to his childhood home and found a favorite old toy still in a corner. It was a mix of amazement, wonder, and infinite sadness at what had been lost or left behind.

She slipped closer to him, and he didn’t notice. “You must be Rasmussen.” The man started, looked like he was about to snarl at her, then caught himself.

“Uh, yes. Berlinghoff Rasmussen’s the name. Have we met?”

“On the Enterprise. Nobody else would be looking at Intrepid with your expression.”

“Nostalgia, eh? It’s a wonderful thing.”

“Actually I wasn’t thinking nostalgia. Nostalgia’s a good feeling that people like to seek out because it reminds them of the good times. You look more . . . sad. As if you’d lost something.”

Rasmussen turned his gaze upon her, and flashed a very charming smile. “You’re a very perspicacious lady, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Oh!” Rasmussen brightened, and gestured toward the bar. “Maybe a drink for the lady . . . ?”

“I have one already.” It was a long time since a criminal offered to buy her a drink, and that was another nostalgic feeling. “I do have a certain nostalgia for the era, though.”

“Oh, you’d have liked it, I think. It was a good time back on Earth.” He seemed to realize something. “Are you from Earth yourself?”

She shook her head. “But I’ve been there a lot. Not during the twenty-second century, though. I was busy elsewhere.” His expression momentarily froze, so she breezed past the moment by asking, “You must remember a lot about the missions of these ships.”

“Well, not the classified material, but I remember the news reports, yes.”

Guinan looked across to the door as La Forge entered Nelson’s and made a bee-line for Rasmussen. “I’ve been looking for you,” he began, then caught himself. “Do you remember any news reports about the disappearance of the Intrepid?”

Rasmussen shrugged. “I was a civilian, after all, and not really a party to Starfleet’s logs and records. At least not until they were released to the public.”

“So, what did they release to the news services? What did they report?”

“To be honest, I tended to tune out during the reports. When the first warp five vessel was launched there was a lot of interest, but after a while, public interest waned, just as it did with the Apollo moon landings and the space shuttle, and the Mars-Venus project, and all the rest of it.”

“You wouldn’t think something as important would become so—”

“Boring?” Rasmussen offered.

“I was going to say ‘commonplace.’ ”

“That’s human nature, Geordi. Something is unusual only until it becomes usual. Then, very quickly, it becomes commonplace, and then boring.”

“When you think of the effort it took to get out here . . . the technological advances . . .”

“Yet once we’re out here we’re just . . . here. How long have you been chief engineer of the Enterprise?”

“Nineteen years, on two Enterprises. Why?”

“How often do you stop and think, ‘Wow, I’m off of humanity’s homeworld, in a starship crossing the universe?’”

“I’m always aware that—”

“How often do you think, ‘Hey, it’s time to clock in for my shift in engineering,’ or ‘When I get off work I’ll go and have some dinner?’” La Forge didn’t need to reply. His expression spoke volumes. “Exactly. It’s everyday, boring, humdrum.”

“It’s more than that! I had to work my butt off at Starfleet Academy, and—”

“And now it’s your everyday job. Don’t feel bad; like I said, it’s human nature.”

La Forge nodded toward the window. “Is that commonplace to you?”

Rasmussen glanced at Guinan again, and she knew it was anything but. “Not anymore,” he said at last.

7

Alyssa Ogawa led the first forensics team, in the runabout Clyde. It docked with the Intrepid’s starboard lock, and the pilot, a bluff New Zealander named Carter, remained aboard to make sure that the transporter and replicator were fully functioning while docked with the dead starship. He would also look after the stasis modules as they were returned to the runabout. When enough were aboard, he would fly them back to Challenger, rather than risk mixing up the remains’ already delicate molecular state by transporting them. Two med-techs were carrying the stasis modules off the runabout, which thankfully weren’t too hard to carry in the zero gravity aboard Intrepid.

The medical forensics team that Ogawa had assembled, though wearing EV suits with helmet lights, were grateful that the engineers had set up chains of lights in the main areas of the ship. The doctor knew that the Thames was docked at the port lock, and would remain there as a base of operations.

The lights were stuck high on the walls of the bridge, engineering, mess hall, and sickbay, and evenly spaced along the main corridor of each deck. The lights were impersonal and cold blue-white, and reminded Alyssa of the coldness of space.

Individual cabins, preserved with a sterility beyond that of ancient desert tombs, still needed to be searched, but the public areas of the ship had the most amount of biomatter coating the surfaces, and therefore the forensic team would handle them first.

“Let’s get this done,” Ogawa said to her people. “It should be quick, if we use the mass-attractors.” She had issued her team tools that generated a local gravity field over a few inches of space, in effect working as vacuum cleaners would if there was air in the ship.

Someone said, “The hard part comes later.”

Ogawa took a calming breath. “Let’s bring these people home.”

Aboard Challenger the next morning, La Forge grinned and gestured toward the main viewer. “We’ve got a good seal between the runabout Thames and the Intrepid’s port lock. We’ll be able to pressurize Intrepid from there.”

Scotty nodded. “No need to extend our shields or atmosphere shield around Intrepid?”

“None. We’ve scanned her down to the molecular level both inside and out. All breaches have been sealed.”

A broad smile spread below Scotty’s moustache. “Well, then. We only need Doctor Ogawa’s say-so.”

“The forensic recovery should be complete pretty soon.”

Leah Brahms ran a diagnostic on a near-fossilized circuit junction that had been brought back from Intrepid. Even though it had been sitting in Challenger’s calming warmth for several hours, it still felt icy cold to the touch, and Leah was beginning to think that it always would. The holographic master systems display in engineering sprang to life. Wisps of energy swirled and flowed, but always came up against barriers.

“It’s not our equipment,” she said to herself.

“You did say Intrepid was primitive,” Vol pointed out.

“The energy is entering the system, so the backwards compatibility isn’t in question. Something’s blocking the flow of energy within Intrepid’s systems.”

Vol’s eye peered at the display. “Looks like corrosion to me. It’s all bunged up. Happens a lot with the classics.”

“Well, let’s figure out how we’re going to un-bung it. Geordi, let’s—” She broke off, remembering that La Forge was on the bridge. She sighed. “Even on the bridge . . .”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, Vol. I was just . . . Nothing. Let’s keep working on this. Maybe Rasmussen can help.”

“Or the captain.”

“If nothing else, he’d love the excuse to come down here.” She thought about it for a moment. “All right, I’ll go across to the Intrepid and find some more pieces of circuit to bring back for testing. You get Scotty and Rasmussen down here, and see what they come up with.”

“Okey-dokey, Doc.”

The stasis unit that Alyssa Ogawa had chosen to contain the organic remains recovered from the Intrepid was a squat cylindrical tower with several access drawers, built into the corner of the Challenger’s sickbay. She watched as a pair of med-techs slid the last canister into one of the drawers. She stepped up to watch through a transparent panel as a servo arm slotted the canister into a free space like a bottle into a wine rack.

“Thanks,” she said to the techs, and then she tapped her combadge. “Doctor Ogawa to Captain Scott.”

“Scott here.”

“The last of the biomatter is safely in stasis. You can pressurize the Intrepid now.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Ogawa out.” The doctor returned to the viewport to look at the silver canisters that were all frozen in the timelessness of the stasis chamber. No bacteria would be able to grow, if any contamination had occurred during their transport from the Intrepid, nor would the cells be able to decay any further.

The remains were still a homogenous jumble, and would need to be sorted into their respective individuals. That would be her grim task for the next few days, while the engineers enjoyed themselves playing with the antique ship.

Brahms arrived in the transporter room, where La Forge and Barclay were already waiting. As they materialized on the Thames, La Forge told them, “We’ve got the go-ahead to re-pressurize the Intrepid.”

“Right away, Commander.” Barclay sounded as delighted as Geordi was at the idea of being able to go aboard without the cumbersome EV suits. Of course it would still be cold on Intrepid, even though the air that he was about to begin circulating would warm the ship. But a nice warm field jacket was a lot easier to live with than a claustrophobic EV suit that magnified every sound and smell the body could make. Barclay squeezed in behind a bulky console that had been set up in place of the Thames’s conference table, and began operating it. A deep howling whoosh began to sound.

“Why am I here?” Brahms asked.

“I thought you might like to be the first person to board Intrepid without an EV suit.”

“You know all the romantic things to say, don’t you?”

La Forge chuckled, but knew she would want to leave that subject quickly. “I wasn’t thinking romantic, just efficient. It’s going to be a lot easier to work in there without the EV suits.” Magnetic boots would still be needed, of course, until gravity was restored.

“There’s enough pressure for you to go in,” Barclay said.

“Shall we?” La Forge moved to the Thames’ s airlock and opened it. He gestured for Brahms to go through.

The Intrepid’s corridors were restored to their original colors, browns and grays, though the surfaces were matte and dull, with bumps and dents everywhere. A warm breeze was easing gently through the ship. “That feels nice,” Brahms said. The air smelled fresh.

“Yeah, it’s like being on a beach.”

“Once we get power back on line and Intrepid’s environmental support takes over, there’ll be no need for air to be circulated from the Clyde.”

“And then she’ll truly come alive.”

Scotty walked into engineering with Rasmussen, trying to tune out the man’s constant yapping. He hadn’t shut up about the wonders of the twenty-second century since Scotty had called for him, and it was beginning to get annoying.

“Vol,” Scotty said with relief, “what’s the problem?”

“The circuitry we brought over from the Intrepid to test is stone-cold dead.”

“Corrosion?”

“That’s what Leah thinks.”

“And what do you think?” Scotty doubted Brahms was wrong, but it always paid to get as many opinions as possible.

“I think she’s probably right.” Vol wrapped a tentacle around the circuit junction that had been brought across, and held it up. “Just look at it, frozen solid for a couple of thousand years.”

“I thought,” Rasmussen said carefully, “that corrosion required oxygen, or at least some compound to react against.”

“Radiation,” Scotty said. “It’s probably been subjected to enough to spark a growth of material inside the connectors.”

“Aw, no,” Vol exclaimed. “You bloody know what that means! We’ll have to re-fabricate every bloody circuit on the ship!”

“Aye,” Scotty said sadly.

“And how long will that take,” Rasmussen asked, “just out of interest?”

“With replicator technology, not long at all.”

“It’s the all-the-king’s-horses-and-all-the-king’s-men bit that gives me the willies, mate,” Vol grumbled.

“Maybe we’d better take a look for ourselves,” Scotty mused. He turned to Rasmussen. “In as few words as possible, laddie, are ye up for steppin’ back into your past with Vol and I?”

Rasmussen blanched, then cleared his throat. “I suppose so. That’s what you wanted me for, after all.”

Ten minutes, and a ride in the Clyde, later, Scotty stepped aboard Intrepid for the first time. It was different from his old Enterprise. Smaller, more cramped, with duller décor. He bumped his magnetically booted foot on the lower edge of a door lintel, and cursed. When had starships stopped having bulkhead edges around the doors? He found that he didn’t know, and felt a moment’s guilt. He had never thought about the matter before, but now it would be stuck in his mind every time he went through a door.

In engineering, he, Vol, and Rasmussen found La Forge and Brahms poring over the warp engine control board, and Barclay leaning into an open access panel in the side of the hulking warp core, his head and shoulders fully inside it. The man was as daft as a brush, he thought, wishing he could have done it first. “Some kind of crystalline growth in the connectors,” Brahms was saying. “It must be the material they used back then.”

“Yeah,” La Forge agreed, “it looks like monofilament keramide. Once the hull polarization was down, long-term exposure to solar radiation could have started crystal growth inside.”

“That’s what we thought as well,” Scotty said. La Forge and Brahms straightened, while Barclay scrambled out of the inspection hatch. “There’s no two ways about it, we’re gonna have to replace the lot.”

“That’s impossible,” Brahms protested. “We’d have to dismantle the whole ship to do that.”

“It depends on how much of the system is affected.”

Vol took Barclay’s place, and somehow squeezed half his bulk into the hatch. “The whole kit and caboodle,” his muffled voice said. “The whole connector system’s about as much use as a dead rat in—”

“I get the idea.”

Vol levered himself back out of the hatch. “It’s totally bollixed up in there. He started pulling tools from the belts around his tentacles. “But if it’s dismantling you want, then . . . no time like the present.” He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice.

“Just a minute,” La Forge interrupted. “We need to replicate a new connector web, right?”

“Aye.” Scotty could hear something in La Forge’s tone; the man was about to spring an idea on him. “Go on.”

“The replicator uses a transporter matter-synthesis system, right? So couldn’t we modify, say, one of the cargo transporters, to feed the replicator’s output directly through into a transporter beam, directed here?”

Scotty saw instantly that they could. It was a simple enough solution. “We’ll need to use pattern enhancers to be sure that everything lines up to within a micron. I’m sure Carolan will do us proud.”

“I’ll need to use the holodeck,” Carolan said, as she looked at a padd with the schematics of Intrepid’s power distribution nodes. She and Hunt were in transporter room one, trying to determine how best to beam the new connector material to Intrepid.

“How come?” Hunt asked.

“It’ll need the transporter to be running on a continuous cycle,” she explained, “beaming the old connector material out and the new material in. It’ll be easier to do it from a scaled-up schematic, using contact with the lines as the energizing control.”

“Where will you be beaming the old material to?”

“I’ll have the pattern buffer divert it to replication storage. Basically it’ll recycle the old connector material as it goes along.”

“Sounds good,” Hunt said with a nod. “Let’s set up a holodeck.”

Five minutes later, Carolan was standing in holodeck two, at the heart of an oversized-schematic of the Intrepid’s connector network. She raised a hand, and touched it to one of the lines, which tingled and buzzed slightly. She had set it to do that just enough to let her know when she was in contact with it.

Slowly, Carolan began walking the length of the room, keeping her hand on the line. As she did, the holodeck read her hand position and transferred it to the transporter’s targeting scanners.

“What’s she doing?” Guinan asked Hunt. She had hoped to make use of the holodeck, but found it occupied.

“Repairing a starship by touch,” Hunt told her.

La Forge could hear a faint sparkling whine, but it took him a while to work out where it was coming from. He slid down the metal steps to the floor of the Intrepid’s engine room in search of the source, and tracked it down to a deck panel. His cybernetic eyes could make out a flare of familiar energy through the floor plate.

“What is it, Geordi?” Scotty asked.

La Forge knelt and levered up the floor plate. A silver rain of transporter energy was moving along a power conduit, consuming the dull and near-fossilized material, and leaving gleaming new connections behind. “You’re right. Carolan is a magician with a transporter.” Everyone in the room grinned enthusiastically, and even Vol flushed a pale gold.

By evening Vol was a thundery gray, and was using two tentacles to hold the inspection hatch apart, while a smaller pair tested the fit of some parts inside. “Well, this is a right pickle, innit Guv?”

Scotty tried to peer past him. “That it is, but I’m sure Mister Rasmussen here will be able to advise and assist.”

“Anything I can do to help,” Rasmussen said brightly.

“Can you tell us anything about this dilithium chamber?”

“I already said I was only a civilian. This sort of thing was classified.” He paused. “Now that the connector web has been replaced I don’t see any reason why you can’t switch it on.” He hesitated. “Oh, maybe one reason. They used dilithium, even back then.”

“Tell me another,” Vol grumbled.

“Actually that is the reason. Your—I mean our—twenty-fourth-century dilithium is much purer and better refined. It may be allowing the system to overload.”

That sounded sensible enough to Scotty. It would be like trying to drink pure ethanol instead of neat—but diluted at the distillery—Scotch. “He could have a point, Vol. If you put rocket fuel in an ancient internal combustion engine, what would happen?”

“Flame out?”

“Aye.”

“So you’re telling me we need some rubbish dilithium,” Vol said dubiously.

“Aye. And since there’s not enough left of Intrepid’s own supply, we’ll have to make some of that as well.” Scotty ran a thumb through his mustache as he thought. “We can’t just replicate dilithium, but if we run some of our reserves through a transporter buffer and purposely allow the pattern to degrade, say by . . .” He turned to Rasmussen. “How pure was dilithium back in your day? In mine it was refined to 99.25% but it must have been more impure before.”

“I haven’t a clue,” Rasmussen admitted. “Never worked with the stuff. But I imagine you have historical files with all those handy-dandy details.”

“We do,” Brahms said.

“I think it would be wiser if Geordi and Leah looked into this downgrade,” Scotty said decisively. “You two go back to Challenger and give me dilithium of the appropriate impurity. Then get down to engineering so you can keep an eye on the power we’ll need to transfer to this warp core.”

“A jump-start?” Rasmussen commented appreciatively. “Nice.”

La Forge tapped his combadge. “La Forge to Ente—Challenger. Two to beam over.”

Brahms and La Forge materialized on the Challenger’s transporter pad, and nodded to the ensign on duty. “I think this should work,” La Forge was saying. “We direct suitable energy directly into the Intrepid’s power distribution system, and her own warp core should be able to take over pretty quickly.”

“Don’t count your chickens, Geordi. Let’s focus on the task at hand, and celebrate later.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic, Leah.”

“There is when it’s too far ahead. That’s always been your problem.” La Forge merely grunted. She was right about that. “When we get a response from Intrepid’s systems, then we can become hopeful.”

They walked into engineering, and La Forge called up the specs for twenty-second-century dilithium use. “98.47% purity ought to do it.”

Leah nodded. “I’ll get a supply of dilithium and adjust the transporter buffer settings.”

When the dilithium matrix materialized in Intrepid’s engine room, it took Vol only a few moments to install it. Having so many arms, Scotty reflected, was an advantage for an engineer. It would have taken him at least ten minutes. “There you go, Guv. All is smooth and sweatless.”

Scotty looked over the main board. “We’re receiving power from Challenger. Switch on the inducers, Reg. Let’s get that power cleared through into the new matrix.”

“Aye, sir.” As Vol pulled himself up to squat on top of the warp core, Barclay gently moved the main switches into their first position. Scotty listened expectantly for the sounds of a starship in good health, while Barclay and Rasmussen looked up, waiting. Nothing happened. “It’s not working.”

“Because you’re being as timid as a dormouse,” Vol said pointedly.

“I’m being cautious.”

“This doesn’t need caution, mate, it needs a boot up the backside.”

“You don’t have any boots,” Barclay mumbled.

“Look, mate, that’s neither here nor there. I’m telling you it’s all about power. Come on, give it some welly! More power!”

“I’m giving it all she’s got!”

“No, you bloody aren’t.” Vol reached a tentacle down and yanked the main switches. “Maximum power! Let’s shock her back to life.”

“You’re crazy! You could blow the whole—Oh, hang on, something’s happening.”

Vol turned a smug beige. “I told you. Power.”

“The master circuit’s showing energy . . . I’m getting some power flow . . .”

The lights set into Intrepid’s corridor walls at floor, ceiling, and middle height fluttered, beginning to glow dimly.

In engineering, a dull light, as gray and flickery as a cloudy sky before a storm, suffused the two-storey chamber and the long flattened cylinder of the main engine.

Sickbay brightened, becoming a little closer to the pristine white that it had once been, back when the ship was in service.

On the bridge, a few of the monitors that were still intact on the walls of the communications and engineering stations flashed into static-filled life.

Throughout the ship, gravity began to take hold, and objects that weren’t properly balanced began to fall, as did loose wall panels. The occasional bang and clatter through the corridors made people jump as if ghosts and specters had leapt out at them.

In engineering, Scotty slapped his combadge. “She’s alive, Geordi! And what a beauty she is!”

La Forge and Brahms could see what was happening in the master systems hologram, and Geordi had to agree that Intrepid was a beauty. So was Leah, he thought, as was the beatific smile that beamed across her features as she watched.

He was debating whether to give her a celebratory hug when she spun on her heel and hugged him first. It was only for a second, but it felt like a day. “Is that a response, I see?” he asked.

“It’s a typical human response to a happy situation.”

“Okay.”

Scotty called everyone together for a quick lunch aboard the Thames, bringing La Forge, Brahms, and Qat’qa across. “What’s our first priority, Captain?” Barclay asked eagerly. He put his hands together, fingers interlocked, and cracked his knuckles like a concert pianist about to attempt a particularly difficult concerto.

“We’ll want access to the main computer, so that we can download their flight records, logs, anything that can shed a light on what happened to her back in 2161.”

“What about warp speed?”

“Let’s hang fire on that for now, Reg, just in case some kind of warp malfunction played a part in whatever it was that happened to her.”

“Uh, yeah, yes, sir.” Reg nodded, clearly embarrassed at not thinking of that particular caution himself.

“The main computer core cuts through D and E decks, if I remember correctly,” Rasmussen said, finally breaking his silence. Scotty and Barclay looked at him dubiously. While Scotty locked eyes with Rasmussen, Barclay glanced at his padd, scrolling through files. “Adjacent to the transporter on D deck, and in the center of the science labs on E deck, I think you’ll find it, Mister Barclay. On what I presume is a handy little schematic you’ve got in your files.” He smiled winningly.

Barclay looked up, nodding. “That’s right. The schematics on file agree with Mister Rasmussen.” Rasmussen smiled, and Scotty wondered if he was only imagining the hint of superiority ghosted through the expression. He hoped so, because otherwise it looked like some of the arrogance La Forge had reported in him was starting to show through. “Well, Mister Rasmussen, it’s time to earn your keep.”

“My pleasure, Captain.”

Rasmussen led them through the cold and Spartan corridors, pointing out where the escape hatches and access panels were. In the armory, he was able to lift out some phase pistols and rifles, none of which worked. Scotty immediately had them transported back to the Challenger.

The EV suits were looser than the ones used nowadays, but not too different. When it came to the catwalk over the warp coils, however, Rasmussen was less sure of himself, and it showed. “This section doesn’t look like anything I’d see without clearance, and I suspect it’s probably something that’s been borrowed from the Vulcans.”

“If that’s the case,” La Forge said, “there’ll be records in the Vulcan science archives. We shouldn’t have a problem requesting copies of the specs.”

“It won’t be Vulcan,” Brahms said immediately. “It’ll be a Harker-Wade patterned coil. They were used in all the later warp-five vessels.”

“But the plasma injectors will be of the T’Lani Bureau type,” La Forge said. “That’s a Vulcan design.”

“Only fitted to vessels in the 2164 refit,” Scotty added. “So they aren’t going to be on Intrepid.”

Vol glowered a vague red. “I could arrange that, Guv. A full set of T’Lanis. And maybe replace the core with a new—”

“Vol,” Geordi said, “the object of the exercise is to restore Intrepid—”

“Yeah, better than new, mate. Come on, Captain,” he urged, “let me at least upgrade the—”

“I’m sorry, Vol. Geordi’s right, we want to be restoring this beautiful old lady to her original condition, not turnin’ her into some kind of hybrid.” Vol turned a patchy gray, but didn’t say anything else.

When they reached the bridge, Qat’qa looked around. There were still no seats, and a lot of dented and missing control sections. “Are you going to want me to fly this?”

“If we can get the drive systems operational,” Scotty said.

“And how likely is that?”

“Columbia’s systems were operable, but her condition was pretty different than this, going by the Aventine’s reports. But if we can, then, yes, you’d get first dibs to fly her.”

“Be still my beating heart.”

Geordi was surprised at her downbeat tone. “You don’t think it’d be pretty interesting to fly her? A challenge?”

“Interesting, yes, but a challenge? Hardly. Even at full spec she has no power compared to today’s vessels. A Korvallen freighter could outrun her.” The Klingon woman flicked a few switches on the battered helm, trying to gauge how complex—or otherwise—the controls were, and how comprehensive the range of maneuvers might be. “And don’t even get me started about what we could expect from the handling. It’d be easier to fly a brick.”

Scotty clapped her on the shoulder, and nodded sagely. “And since when did you ever fly anything easy?”

8

It was the morning briefing in main engineering aboard Challenger, and various engineering teams had been working all night on the Intrepid. “All right,” Brahms asked, presiding over the briefing, “what have we got so far?”

Barclay stepped forward. “We’ve got basic minimal power generation from the warp matrix. Enough for lighting, environmental control, and intra-ship communications if the connectors weren’t fused. The computer is powered up, but not active.”

“Priorities? Apart from computer recovery.”

La Forge called up a hologram of the Intrepid and pointed out the headway they had been making. “I suggest we make drive startup our next priority. Aside from giving more security to the life support and environmental systems, it’ll be handy if we need to move the ship.”

“We’re also going to have to replace a lot of parts,” Barclay added, “especially on the bridge. Very few screens survived, and they’ll have to be replaced.”

“All the specs are in the database, so we should be able to replicate them.”

“Excellent.” Brahms turned off the display and handed everyone a padd. “Geordi, if you and Reg could take charge on the Intrepid, that’d be ideal. I’ll ask Mister Rasmussen if he has anything to add about the replication of replacement parts.”

As the group of engineers broke up, La Forge drew Brahms aside. “Leah, keep an eye on Rasmussen.”

“I’m old enough to choose my own clothes, Geordi, which means I’m old enough to decide who to talk to. Besides, he’s a surprisingly charming man.”

La Forge most definitely did not like the sound of that. “Well, after you’ve been charmed I’d recommend you check to make sure you still have all your belongings.”

“He’s reformed, Geordi.”

“I hope so.”

Geordi headed for the turbolift, and found Rasmussen already in it when it arrived. “Good morning, Commander La Forge!”

“Morning.” Rasmussen exited the turbolift, letting La Forge in. Barclay and a few other engineers were waiting by the runabout Clyde when he reached the shuttlebay, as was Lieutenant Nog. La Forge was delighted to see the Ferengi, and walked straight over to him.

“Nog.”

“Yes, Commander?”

“Are you taking a tricorder with you?”

“Yes, sir. I may be security chief, but I’m also an engineer at heart.”

“I’d like you to do something for me.”

“What kind of something?”

“Well, it’s not exactly an order, but . . .”

“It’s about Rasmussen, right?”

La Forge was relieved that Nog understood where he was going. “I’d like you to scan him for technological devices, both on leaving the Challenger, and returning.”

“You think he might steal something.” It wasn’t a question.

“I have to say he was something of a kleptomaniac when he visited the Enterprise.”

“He has been rehabilitated.”

“If you can say that like you actually believe it, I’ll rescind my request.”

“I don’t believe it, sir. Not with him. I mean, I know rehabilitation has a good record, and a person is innocent until proven guilty, but . . .”

“But . . . ?”

“He reminds me of my uncle Quark’s business associates.” Nog looked around, as if afraid of an eavesdropper. “To tell you the truth, sir, I’ve already been scanning him discreetly, every trip.”

“Has he kept his nose clean?”

“As far as I can tell. I scanned him several times, and he hasn’t stolen anything.” Nog looked uncomfortable. “Sir, I . . .”

“Go on.”

“I feel a little . . . guilty about this. It’s exactly the kind of harassment that Security Chief Odo used to put my father and my uncle under on Deep Space 9. I’m not sure I can keep on doing it.”

“Thanks anyway, Nog.”

Berlinghoff Rasmussen was a little disappointed that the Challenger’s engineers hadn’t replicated any of the phase pistols, which looked a lot more businesslike than the phasers their security teams carried, but he was impressed by how perfect the replacement panels and chairs for Intrepid were. They looked like they had slid off a production line in 2160.

He debated with himself whether to try to impress Doctor Brahms with his adulation of the work, but decided against it. Geordi La Forge disliked him enough as it was, and he didn’t want to give the guy any more excuse to keep an eye on him. He settled instead for electing to accompany the new furniture to Intrepid.

When the runabout Clyde docked with Intrepid, he paused before exiting, and slid a padd under a seat cushion, where nobody would look for it. Then he went out into Challenger’s shuttlebay, and let the deceptively diminutive security chief run a tricorder scan to be sure he hadn’t pilfered anything. He didn’t mind that they did this, but it amused him all the same.

They thought he still needed to steal things, when, well, things were different now than they had been fifteen years ago. He had told them often enough, but of course he wasn’t believed. He didn’t particularly care whether they believed him or not, because he was having too much fun.

On the cramped bridge, which was pooled with deep shadows, La Forge was for once actually glad to see Rasmussen. He reflected that, for one thing, Rasmussen’s presence on Intrepid meant he wasn’t bothering Leah, Guinan, or anyone else on the Challenger. For another thing, Geordi had gotten the ship’s computer powered up, but still had no access to its files.

La Forge had a way with modern computers, but this one was so dated that it might as well use punch-cards, and his knowledge simply didn’t go that far back. Rasmussen, on the other hand, would surely see this computer as state of the art, and have more chance of being familiar with how to access its data.

“Mister Rasmussen,” he called out, “I could really use your help here.”

“Really?” Rasmussen sounded delighted. He threaded his way past a couple of ensigns who were fitting the center seat and console panels that the Clyde had just brought across.

“Really.” Geordi tapped the top of the master display table that stood at the back of the bridge. “I have computer power, but no way to access the files.”

Rasmussen came over, and looked down at the tabletop screen. “The operating system has probably degraded over time. But if I can get a command prompt . . .” He tapped a long series of instructions into the computer, and its screen went suddenly blank.

“Hey!” La Forge exclaimed. “You’ve shut it down. We need that computer online.”

“It still is.” Rasmussen kept typing, and text began to flicker across the screen. Only one line showed, constantly replaced a new one line, but now Geordi saw what Rasmussen was doing with it, and his momentary sense of panic subsided. “If they used the same file setup as most of the universities and private industry did, I should be able to navigate to the logs.”

“Any records the captain and crew made would be handy.”

Rasmussen frowned, that high forehead of his creasing up. “I don’t think this is a simple captain’s log.”

Geordi looked at the string of numbers Rasmussen had pulled up. “It looks more like it’s some sort of file dump from elsewhere in the ship’s network. Could be part of their operating system, or anything.”

“Not quite anything. From its position in the computer’s file tree, I’d say it’s most likely sensor logs.”

“Can we decrypt them?” Both men knew he didn’t really mean we.

“If you can get the workstations online with those new screens and the power grid we already installed, they should replay perfectly well here on Intrepid.”

“I can do that,” La Forge said firmly, and moved across to the science station, where he began moving circuits around. “The main viewer should be online in a second.” True to his word, the recently repaired screen flickered, buzzed, and then showed the Challenger, hovering nearby. “There we go,” he whispered. “Can you feed that log, or whatever it is, through to here?”

“I think so.”

After a moment, the main viewer flashed to static again, and then a man appeared on it. The image was grainy, with pixel artifacts running up and down the recording, but it was unmistakably a blond-haired man in a blue jumpsuit. “Jason,” a voice said from somewhere. “What’s troubling the Intrepid?”

“That must be Captain Lambert,” Rasmussen said, his astonishment clear in his voice. “And the voice we heard is Admiral Collins.”

“Romulan mines, Admiral,” Lambert began. “Lieutenant al-Qatabi is transmitting our position back to you now. We’ve observed the detonation of a Class Four cloaked mine, about thirty thousand clicks away. Harry is looking out to see whether there are any more—”

“They don’t usually go solo,” Collins said with a sigh. “There’s probably a field.”

La Forge found he was glued to the screen. It was as if they were really having this conversation right here, and right now. At the same time, he was very glad that this was only a recording, because he already knew how it ended.

Lambert nodded. “I wanted to check with you whether there had been any communication from the Rommies that might throw a light on the mines here. For one, how does their presence tie in with the new treaty?” Rasmussen looked as if he was seeing a ghost.

“Well, under the terms of the armistice, they agreed to disable any mines in disputed territories specified in the treaty, and that certainly includes your location.” Admiral Collins paused. “The detonation wasn’t near enough to you to do any damage?”

“No, sir, but it’s still brown trousers time knowing they’re out there.” La Forge couldn’t disagree with Lambert’s sentiment.

“Sirs,” a pretty Eurasian girl, presumably al-Qatabi, broke in. “Some types of mines are given a finite life span, and others have had remote detonators for decommissioning after a conflict. Is it possible that what we’ve seen here is actually part of the process the Romulans are using to disable their mines? We know they’d rather destroy their materiél than let us take it.”

“I’ll have the diplomatic corps see if they can get a response out of the Romulans,” Collins said, “as to whether this is actually a decommissioning act.”

“It better be,” Lambert grumbled. “We’ve all got enough medals already, and if Johnny Archer earns any more, his dress uniform will collapse under their gravity.”

“I’ll tell him you said that. In the meantime I suggest you mark the limits of the field.”

“I’ll get Harry on to it. Unless you want to send Enterprise out here to do it, and we’ll—” The screen went black so suddenly that La Forge rocked on his heels as if he had felt an impact. He looked across at the other people on the bridge. The other engineers looked as if they’d stepped off a cliff, and Rasmussen was looking pale and shaky.

“Damn,” Rasmussen whispered. “They showed it so many times, on all the news feeds.” He shook his head. “I never watched someone die before they showed that.”

“You didn’t know for sure that he, or anyone else aboard, was dead,” Geordi said reasonably.

“Not intellectually, no,” Rasmussen admitted. “But in our hearts, everyone who saw it knew. Romulans . . .”

“We know it wasn’t the Romulan mine,” Geordi pointed out. “The ship’s still here.”

“I bet they were still behind it somehow.”

When Rasmussen had gone across to the Intrepid with the newly replicated replacement parts, Brahms had taken her chance to catch some lunch in Nelson’s. She could have eaten from the replicator in her quarters, but she was hoping to talk to Guinan. It was easy to talk to Guinan, even about things she thought she wouldn’t normally talk about aloud.

“I know Geordi can be a little obsessive, but I never thought he could be vindictive.”

Guinan frowned, a rare and rather sad vision. “Vindictive? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him vindictive.”

“You haven’t seen the way he looks at Rasmussen, or heard the way he talks about him.”

“Ah, Rasmussen . . .” There was a long story in her tone. Leah might not be a Listener like Guinan, but she knew the signs when she heard them.

“You know what I’m talking about?”

Guinan blinked slowly. “Unfortunately I do. I was on the Enterprise when Rasmussen visited, and I remember him pretty well.”

“He is a memorable person.”

“In all the wrong ways.”

Brahms was disappointed by Guinan’s tone. Of all the people she thought would understand, Guinan topped the list. “Not you as well?”

“Rasmussen stole from a lot of my friends. He tried to kidnap Commander Data. He pretended he could help save a planet under threat but was refusing to do so.”

“He couldn’t have actually helped.”

“No, he couldn’t, because he wasn’t from the future. He could just have said he didn’t know what happened. Even if he wanted to stick with his story about being from the future, he could have said it wasn’t his field, or the records had been lost, or something. But he seemed to take a great pleasure in giving the appearance of being happy to refuse to use knowledge.”

“You seem to be suggesting that if he had been from the future, and did know what happened, he’d have been right to refuse.”

“Yes, he would. But he wasn’t.”

“Do you think I should stay away from him?”

Guinan hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t think he’s cruel or violent. He’s a thief, but I couldn’t see him deliberately harming anyone.”

“And Commander Data?”

“I’m pretty sure that, from Rasmussen’s perspective, he was stealing, not kidnapping. He just saw Data as an invention, not as a person.”

“Thanks, Guinan.”

“For what?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Leah admitted.

“If I wasn’t seeing this with my own eyes, I would never have believed it,” Scotty breathed.

“That’s exactly what I thought, Scotty,” La Forge agreed. He, Barclay, and Brahms were in the lab that had been set up aboard the runabout Thames, reporting on the data recovered from Intrepid’s computer core. “In fact I almost wonder if it couldn’t be some kind of modern fake, like Worf thought.”

“Placed there how? Intrepid’s files have been bricked for centuries,” Brahms said.

“If Rasmussen was an expert in quantum slipstream mechanics, I’d wonder if he couldn’t have somehow introduced these readings while we were bringing the sensor logs online.”

“But he isn’t.”

“No, and the date stamps all match up perfectly.”

“Slipstream, but not slipstream . . . I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Scotty said. “It could be natural, or it could be artificial . . .”

“Either way, it’s definitely worth thinking about.”

Scotty nodded. “Aye . . . I don’t know which idea is worse, it bein’ natural, or it bein’ artificial. Leah and I worked on the Vesta-class test-beds—but if this data truly was artificial, it’d have to be far beyond . . . Is there anything more like this in Intrepid’s files?”

“We’re downloading and decoding as much as we can, now that Rasmussen has gotten us into the system, but there are a lot of corrupt files,” La Forge said.

“Do your best.”

Scotty and Barclay left the lab, and La Forge looked at the data again. “It looks like Rasmussen has actually done us some good.”

“Is that so surprising?” Brahms asked. “Starfleet did assign him for a reason.”

“I guess they did. I still don’t have to like him, though.”

“He may have been a liar and a thief, but he doesn’t seem violent.”

“He kidnapped my friend at gunpoint,” La Forge said hotly.

“Ineffectually,” she reminded him.

“He didn’t know that. Besides, there’s the matter of how he got that time pod in the first place.”

“How did he get it?”

“I don’t know,” Geordi admitted, “but the implication was that its original owner was in no condition to use it again.”

“You mean he’s dead. Was dead. Will be dead, if he’s from the twenty-sixth century . . .” Brahms groaned and rubbed her temples. “Whichever.”

“I mean there’s a good sized doubt over how Rasmussen came into possession of the pod. There’s a very good chance that he may have murdered that professor from the twenty-sixth century.”

“But you don’t know that.”

“Data thought that Rasmussen was implying it, when he tried to kidnap him. And Data wasn’t prone to flights of fancy.”

Outside, Rasmussen had been about to go in and enjoy the credit for discovering the sensor logs, when he heard the conversation turn to his previous life.

He had never forgotten the professor whose time pod he had inherited, and he never would.

He hadn’t forgotten much about those days.

It wasn’t for want of trying.

9

The leaves were turning red and gold in Trenton, and Berlinghoff Rasmussen was starting to notice a slight chill in the air at nights. The days were still almost warm enough for summer, so he preferred to work in his garage, with the big door rolled open.

That was where he preferred to work, but in general he preferred to be either down in the riverside park, or lunching at The Hidden Panda, where the bar was as relaxed and filled with as much variety as the Chinese menu was. As his new molecular cutter sliced through another neoprene square, Rasmussen felt like he was about thirty seconds from going there and drowning his sorrows as well as, hopefully, feeding his muse.

The device was basically a tubular laser-cutter, intended to use a reactive plasma as part of the cutting torch. He had a test object, made of layered steel, neoprene, plastic, and Kevlar, mounted on a frame in the center of the garage. In theory the cutter should slice through the metal only, and not through the materials used in EV suits for space walks. It would therefore be safer to use while wearing an EV suit.

That was the theory. In practice, the damned thing would cut through anything, and he couldn’t quite figure out how to tune it to the right molecular structures. He tried again, with a new setting and new test object. The cutter burned through it all, and the test object clattered to the floor in two halves.

Rasmussen felt his shoulders slump, and he dropped the cutter back onto the worktop. He wondered whether perhaps he should start calling it the flop-top. He sat down and glared at the prototype. “Lunch. We’ll see what we can do with you after lunch.”

In a few minutes, he was walking across a small green park toward The Hidden Panda, occasionally glancing up at the shuttlepods that came and went from the university’s transport pool. Those were exactly the sort of vehicles that his devices should be installed aboard.

A few comnet pads were dotted around on The Hidden Panda’s tables and in booths, all keyed to only function inside the establishment. Rasmussen glanced at a couple as he came in, without picking one up. Most of the headlines were about the state of the economy in the wake of the Romulan War, and the resurgence in exploratory missions. Stories about the appointments to Federation posts barely rated a sidebar.

Jo was at the center bar when he entered, and he was glad to see her. The day didn’t seem so bad when she smiled at him. “Hi, B.R. The whatsit still not working?”

“How did you know?”

“You only come in here at this hour when something’s gone wrong with it.”

“Oh, bravo. Well observed, Holmes, now rack ’em up.”

“The usual?”

“Yeah, the usual.”

She slid a cappuccino and a bourbon across to him. As usual, Jo had the Federation News Service on above the bar. Some talking head was beaming brightly, as she told everyone, “In Federation news, the Vulcan Science Council has announced a review into the possibility of whether time travel might someday become possible. In concert with representatives from Earth and Tellar—”

“Time travel,” Jo echoed, shaking her head. Rasmussen didn’t notice so much as a single gray hair, and he’d been looking for them as long as he’d been coming here. “First thing I’d do with a time machine is go back to my bachelorette party and give myself a ticket to somewhere a long way from New Jersey. You know what I mean, B.R.?”

Berlinghoff Rasmussen knew exactly what she meant. He had met Jo’s husband. “If it was me, I’d put money on a lot of World Cup games. Always helps with the travel funds.” He smiled at the thought.

Jo laughed. “Good thinking, my man. Good thinking.” She slid Rasmussen a cappuccino without being asked. “Oh, the buffet’ll be starting in about ten minutes, if you’re interested.”

“It is one of the two reasons I come here.” He caught himself, fearing he’d said too much.

“That thing you’re working on being the other?”

“There’s no thing,” he said, putting a finger to his lips, and tapping the side of his nose. “Not yet, anyway, but hopefully in a couple of days, always assuming our new über-government doesn’t find someone else working on the same thing first.”

“Uber-government? Oh, you mean the Federation. I don’t think they’re in charge of New Jersey . . . just offworld.”

“You say that now, but . . .” He brightened, and laughed. “It’s better than having new Romulan overlords.”

“The war’s over.”

“For now. Wars have a way of coming back.” Rasmussen cursed himself, not having intended to give the conversation such a depressing turn. “I mean, imagine if they invented time travel first. They could come back and change the outcome of the war.”

“I can’t see the Vulcan Science Council sharing their results with the Romulans, can you?”

“No, I can’t, really.” He turned to see a man he’d noticed once or twice over the past couple of months come into the bar. It was the small, middle-aged guy who looked like a professor. The university was a hotbed of AI and cybernetics development.

The man saw him, and came over. “Hello there. It’s B.R., isn’t it? I remember you from yesterday.”

“Yesterday? It was more like eight weeks ago I last saw you.”

“Was it?” He glanced at his watch. “Oh, terribly sorry. I thought I saw you yesterday, but I may have got just a tiny bit distracted. Must have been someone else.”

“I wasn’t out of the house yesterday, I’m afraid.”

“Ah, inventing! Anything good?”

Rasmussen was simultaneously pleased and suspicious at the attention, and he strove to find the right expression. “Well, it’s got potential. Like everything.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“So, what have you been working on, er, Prof? Doc?” He offered a palm.

“Professor. Dominic Kent.” He shook Rasmussen’s hand. “I’m in the history department, over at the university library.”

“I see. I work on the future, you work on the past.” It was as Rasmussen had thought. The guy practically had “dusty history professor” tattooed on his forehead.

“Exactly, yes. And I also love to work on the buffet in here, if you catch my meaning. There’s nothing quite like it,” he added to Jo.

“Best in Trenton,” she agreed. “And, by the way, guys, it’s open.”

“Excellent,” Kent crowed. Rasmussen couldn’t disagree. They almost raced each other to the buffet.

Rasmussen saw Professor Kent twice more that week, exchanging a few pleasantries with the guy both times, but it was the third time that stuck in his mind. There was no chit-chat this time, because, Rasmussen was sure, the prof hadn’t seen him.

Rasmussen had gone over to the university to consult some books in the library, and, when he came out a couple of hours later, he had noticed a familiar figure struggling to free his rental groundcar from a steel clamp around the wheel. Rasmussen laughed to himself as he thought of the staid professor illegally parking.

His laughter stopped, as Kent glanced both ways down the road, then knelt beside the wheel and drew a stubby metallic cylinder from his pocket. It was a laser-cutter, but when Kent drew it across the wheel, only the metal structure of the clamp fell off. The rubber of the tire not only didn’t puncture, but seemed totally unaffected by the cutting beam.

Rasmussen recognized the concept immediately. He had, after all, been working on it for months. And here was this stuffy professor with a working model. Could he be an inventor too, and the story about being a historian just some bull to put Rasmussen off the scent while he stole the invention? Or had someone else already invented and even sold them?

A few hours on the comnet was enough to convince him that the prof didn’t buy his cutter. That only left the possibility of his having invented it, or copied the concept from Rasmussen.

Rasmussen hadn’t really intended to start following the professor around then, but somehow he just fell into it. It seemed the most logical way to make sure the guy wasn’t following him.

It was kind of fun following Kent, and Rasmussen began to see what attracted people to being cops or private eyes. The novelty would wear off, he knew, but it was fun while it lasted. Every night for a week, the prof turned into the parking lot of a U-shaped beige-colored building, with fake red tiles on the roof, and a veranda around the inside of the U. A holographic sign projected from the ceiling proclaimed it to be the Cheep’N’Cheerful Motel. It wasn’t exactly top class, but it wasn’t a flea trap either. It was middle of the road, clean without being flashy, cheap without being seedy or dangerous. It was, Rasmussen thought, anonymous and safe. Exactly the sort of place you’d go if you didn’t want anybody to take any notice of you.

One morning, Rasmussen got there early, to watch Professor Kent leave. The cutter prototype that he had brought along made short work of the door lock, its handle and a part of the door. The room was neat, tidy, and boring. It took Rasmussen about fifteen seconds to decide that there was nothing of the remotest interest in it. Then he went to check the garage that was beneath the room. The cutter removed the lock and part of the door again. He expected to find a workbench and tools. He didn’t expect to find a car, because the prof had just driven away in his rental.

There was, bizarrely, a shuttlepod. For a moment Rasmussen thought he was hallucinating, but the jagged-edged silver craft remained resolutely solid.

He touched it, felt metal, and that was reassuring. He couldn’t find a control to open the door, nor could he see in through the darkened windshield. He didn’t expect the cutter to have a problem getting him in.

It didn’t even warm the surface.

“So, when are you from?” Rasmussen asked the instant Professor Kent pushed his door open. The prof was still reeling from the sight of the hole in the door, and Rasmussen went straight for the kill while he was off-balance.

“What?”

“It’s a simple enough question, I’d have thought. When do you come from?”

“You mean where do I come from. That’d be Cambridge.”

“I meant when exactly are you from?” Rasmussen laughed companionably at Kent’s attempt to look puzzled. “Oh, come on, you don’t have to be coy with me. I’m a scientist, an inventor . . . I have had the occasional thought about the possibilities of time travel.”

“There’s still a market for science fiction in the entertainment industry. You could make a fortune—”

“Professor, please. I’ve watched you over the past few weeks. I followed you after I saw you cut that wheel clamp. I’ve seen your . . . whatever that thing in the garage is, that’s made of some substance I’ve never seen before.”

“You had no right to do something like that! What are you, some kind of stalker?”

“Actually,” Rasmussen said, “that’s what I just thought you were. I thought you’d followed me, stolen my cutter invention, and made it work. So I wanted to steal it back. But then I figured out the truth. Besides, I have as much right as you to walk into a motel. All right, I maybe have less right than you to walk into this particular little room that you’ve rented, but I’m glad I did.”

“You admit to breaking and entering? I should call security—”

Rasmussen gave a magnanimous wave. “Go right ahead, don’t mind me.”

“What?”

“Go on, if you want to. See, I don’t think you can, really, because they’d ask you for identification, and while you’ve presumably got sufficiently legit ID to rent the room and the garage, I’m guessing you don’t have ID that would stand up to a really thorough background check.”

“You’re drunk. And offensive, I might add.” Kent tried to usher Rasmussen out, but the taller man didn’t budge.

“I don’t think it’s offensive to hold the belief that a man who hasn’t been born yet won’t be able to produce a valid birth certificate. So, when are you from?”

“I’m . . . an alien.” Rasmussen shook his head at that.

“No, you’re human. You left a newspaper from next week on the chair too.”

Kent slumped, and flopped into a chair. “All right, you win. Yes, I’m from the future. Fine. Isn’t that enough? Does it matter exactly when?”

“Let’s have a drink at The Hidden Panda, and maybe some lunch, and talk about that.”

“Er . . . All right. Let me just change my coat.” The professor hurried out, and Rasmussen followed him lazily. Kent was standing in the garage when Rasmussen caught up with him. The empty garage.

“What have you done with my—with my property?!”

“Anyone can hire a truck.”

“Not anyone did this. You did.”

“Well, I can’t have you zipping off back to whenever you come from without first having that chat.”

Drinks calmed things down. For once, Rasmussen wasn’t paying much attention to Jo.

“What if you brought a lot of technology back? You could become rich! Invent all those—”

He broke off as Kent shook his head vehemently.

“Can’t do that. You’d be risking a violation of the conservation of reality.”

“The conservation of what?!”

“Reality.” The prof took a drink and sniffed. “Look, it’s like this. Some people think that there might be an infinite number of parallel universes, and that every action, however small, is just one of however many possibilities, and there’s a universe for all of them.”

“Okay, so far so good. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well. Look at this drink. Bourbon, a decent brand. What if it was a different brand of bourbon? Is there a separate reality, a separate fourteen-billion-year existence of a universe for each brand of bourbon in that glass at this moment?”

Rasmussen felt his head start to spin. He didn’t think he’d had that much to drink yet. “That would seem rather excessive, but that’s the natural—and may I say wonderfully so—world.”

“Exactly!” He nodded and took a sip. “Except it’s probably a load of bollocks.”

“It is?”

“The theory of the conservation of reality goes like this: Time and space as we know it both came into existence in the first couple of seconds of the Big Bang, right?”

“That’s what I was taught,” Rasmussen agreed.

“They’re both pretty elastic. If a new planet forms out of a nebula, the universe can accommodate it, it’s not a problem. With me so far?”

“So far.” Just, Rasmussen thought.

“Right, so, if I come back and, say, drink this bourbon, thus causing the alcoholic who would have drunk it otherwise to not do so, and have a hangover, and not make it to work . . . Time can absorb that too.”

“Okay . . .”

“But, if I come back with, say, a Klingon battle fleet of four hundred years hence and make sure the Federation never existed . . .”

“Time can’t absorb that?”

“No. It’d have to cough it up and spit it out. A new timeline.” Kent emphasized the words with a jabbing finger.

Rasmussen followed that fine. “Right. But, from the way you’re talking, I’m presuming there’s some kind of limit below which that doesn’t happen?”

“Exactly!” Kent seemed delighted at Rasmussen’s understanding.

“And what sort of limit is it?”

Kent shrugged. “Buggered if I know. It’s not an exact science, really. Oh, there are those who’ve made up little names for discrete units of unreality or paradox, but they’re all just guessing like the rest of us. Smaller is safer though.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Don’t be too sure. Smaller is safer now, but may not always be, or have been. Depends on whether there’s anything to the homeostatic factor of the universe.”

“The what?” Rasmussen had never heard of that.

“There appears—in my time anyway—to be some truth to the homeostatic universe theory, which says that anything might exist or not exist according to whether the universe needs it to maintain its own best-balanced existence.”

“You’re drunk.”

“No, no, no . . . So for example, magic and dragons. If the universe needs magic and dragons to exist, then they exist. If it needs them not to exist, then they don’t. If it needs them to have never existed—even if it and they previously did—then they never existed. Even if it and they, et cetera, et cetera . . . You’re right, I’m a little bit rat-arsed, aren’t I?”

“Just a tiny bit. Not so much that anybody else will have noticed.”

“I need . . . medicine.”

Two weeks after their conversation in The Hidden Panda, Rasmussen was still pressuring Professor Kent to share his knowledge of the future in an equal partnership, and making sure he didn’t find his time pod. He had hoped that encouraging the prof to talk about the laws of causality and conservation of reality would loosen his tongue enough to let slip about other historical events and technological developments.

If he could reverse-engineer something so advanced as to be magical, he could make his fortune. Sadly, Kent was still taking the conversations away from those issues, and getting more out of Rasmussen about the recent Romulan War than Rasmussen was getting out of him.

He had at least inadvertently provided Rasmussen with some reading material. There had been a data slate—a current commercial model—in his pocket, but it was filled with files and reports about people with names like Picard, Seven, and Gowron. It was fascinating stuff, and he could have filled whole shelves in a library with these reports of starships and space stations in distant areas of the galaxy that no one had ever heard of.

Now Kent was, as far as Rasmussen was concerned, playing the sick card.

At least the prof was saving money, as Rasmussen had let him move in to the spare room. He lived alone, since his wife had left him five years ago.

“I’ll get you some medicine. There’s a pharmacy two blocks away, and there’s the university hospital if there’s a more specialized problem.”

“No, no hospital.” Kent laughed uncomfortably. “Identification might be a problem, and as soon as they take a blood sample . . . They might see some things they really oughtn’t to see.”

“The pharmacy, then.”

“They won’t have the medicine I need. The condition won’t be discovered for another three hundred years, because it will be almost that long before the random mutations occur that allow the condition to arise. There is no medication for it in this century. I need the medicine from the pod.”

“Oh no, no. That’s just a little convenient, isn’t it?” Rasmussen said. “No, I don’t buy that one, Prof!”

“Look, you bloody twat, I have to—”

“No.” And that, Rasmussen thought, was the end of it.

At least Kent wasn’t snoring or wheezing the next morning, which was a nice change.

“Come on, Professor, it’s a bright new day in beautiful downtown Trenton!” Kent didn’t stir. “I’ve got sausages and tomatoes and mushrooms on the stove. That’s what you Brits like for breakfast, isn’t it? The full English. At least they do in this century, so I hope they still have that in your time . . .”

There was still no reaction from the older man, and the joke was wearing a bit thin, as far as Rasmussen was concerned. “All right, come on. Joke’s over, and it’s time to get your ass out of bed and get to work.” He reached down and grabbed the professor’s shoulder, to shake him awake.

He instinctively knew something was wrong, even as he hauled the man over. By the time the professor’s slack, pale face slumped into view, Rasmussen’s brain had caught up with how cold the guy’s skin felt under his hand.

The professor’s eyes were stuck slightly open, and a trail of dried drool ran down his cheek from the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t breathing, putting a dampener on Rasmussen’s joy at his silence.

Every curse and swearword that Rasmussen had ever heard of tumbled through his head, fighting for airtime that none of them got. There were just too many of them for one to take control of his tongue, and he found that he suddenly couldn’t shift the breath in his chest either. The best Rasmussen could manage as a eulogy was a rather strangled little gasp.

How did one get rid of a corpse? Worse, how did one get rid of a corpse that had never been alive, or at least not yet? Rasmussen knew he couldn’t just take the prof to a hospital, lest some doctor discover something about future medicine. He couldn’t let that happen unless he had already formed a partnership with the doc to share any patents and royalties.

He also couldn’t just dump the prof somewhere, because pretty soon he’d be tracked down on suspicion of murder.

In the end, he took the body, in the middle of the night, to the shabby and run-down self-storage garage that he’d hired to keep the time pod in. It sat gathering dust on the grimy cement floor, with only a freezer, a steel filing cabinet, and a couple of moldy cardboard cartons for company.

This was the first stroke of luck he’d had in a month, because, as he was dragging the corpse toward the freezer in the back of the room, its hand flopped across and brushed the side of the time pod, just for a moment.

The time pod made a clunk.

Rasmussen froze, dropping the feet of the corpse, and turned slowly to look at the time pod. The door, at long last, and with painful slowness, lifted open. Rasmussen could hardly bear it, and crouched down with his head cricked to one side to see the fabulous revelations as early as possible. This was, after all, the first true time machine, or at least it would become the first once he “invented” it.

Just how advanced was such a vehicle? Would it have anything he would even recognize as technology, or would it be as far beyond his understanding as a warp reactor would be beyond a Victorian steam engineer? The anticipation was killing him.

The door edged up and out, and Rasmussen drank in the sight that he beheld. There was a small cargo space, the walls and ceiling all quilted with some kind of shining metallic mesh, but otherwise little different from the back of a van or a shuttlepod. A couple of seats at the front gave the user a comfortable position from which to operate the controls on the dashboard console.

Rasmussen’s smile froze on his face. Regular seats and a dash. Somehow it wasn’t as magical as he had hoped. It was one thing to go along with Clarke’s Law, and accept that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, but it was strangely disappointing when said advanced technology was indistinguishable from the downright commonplace.

He sighed. “Should have expected it, I suppose,” he muttered to himself. Ever since humans had started building enclosed vehicles, the layout had always been the same. Two seats in front of a dash, whether they were in a ground car, a truck, an airplane, a shuttlepod, or a time vessel.

There was a data slate lying on the seat, and he hoped it contained a user manual.

Forgetting about the body cooling on the cement, he picked up the slate and began to read. He already knew where, and when, he wanted to visit.

10

Scotty and La Forge walked through the corridors of Intrepid’s D-deck, admiring the handiwork of the engineers. The ship looked as good as new, as far as Scotty could tell, with not a speck of dead biomatter remaining. It was a cold ship, though, as if its bones were still frozen somewhere deep inside.

“It’s like steppin’ back a hundred years,” Scotty whispered in amazement. “Right into history.” He wondered if Geordi would feel the same way about his Enterprise, the original NCC-1701.

“More like two hundred,” La Forge said, “but you’re right, I feel like it’s 2162 today.”

Scotty reached out a hand, letting his fingertips brush across the handle that was set into the circular buttress at his side. “Aye . . . I never thought I’d be aboard a ship that both of us are equally out of place on.”

“Frankly, I wasn’t sure we could actually get her powered up again.”

Scotty, if he was honest with himself, hadn’t thought it was possible either, but if there was one thing he’d learned about getting people to continue doing their best, it was to never express surprise at their success. At his own success, yes, but not at other people’s. “If our people hadn’t had a wee bit o’ practice by bringin’ Columbia home, we might never have managed it, but I guess everything’s easier the second time.” They stopped by the door to engineering, which La Forge unlocked and pushed open. Scotty remained astonished to see a starship door that actually swung on hinges. “Bloody hell, lad, next we’ll be seeing that the shuttlebay doors are sealed with a padlock.”

“They always said the past is another country.”

“Gettin’ an entry visa is always the tricky part, isn’t it?”

La Forge laughed as they entered the engine room. The central reactor and warp core were encased in bronze-colored panels, rather than being transparent and glowing as he was used to. Reg Barclay turned from the main panel as they entered. “Commander, Captain. We’re, uh, pretty sure the warp core is good to go. We’d like to run some more tests before trying to move the ship, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t go to warp right now.”

“We’re in no hurry,” Scotty assured him. “Take as much time as you need.” It was nice to be able to be generous with time, and not have to be rushing to jury-rig things.

“Really?” Barclay seemed surprised, and Scotty supposed it was because he was so used to those kinds of emergencies in his career.

“Really.”

“Besides, Reg,” La Forge added, “we’ve got a long way to go to get full computer control, and we won’t be moving until we do. The logs can tell us what happened here, and if it was an internal problem, we don’t want it happening to us.”

“You’ve no arguments from me on that, Commander.”

Scotty smiled and nodded. “Good. It sounds like you know what needs to be done here, Geordi. I’ll return to the Challenger and see whether we can slave the Intrepid’s computer to ours, and bring it online that way.”

“Okay.”

Scotty tapped the combadge on his vest, and said, “Scott to Challenger, one to beam over.”

As Scotty stepped out of the turbolift and onto the Challenger’s bridge, a proximity alarm blared. Scotty looked over to Nog.

“Klingon vessel decloaking, sir. Vor’cha-class.”

“Put her on screen.” Scotty made for his seat, but didn’t make it there before he was knocked almost off his feet.

The bridge shook with an echoing thud, and Scotty and Nog both had to hang on to the rail to stay upright. Brahms almost fell from the seat at the engineering station, where she had just sat down ten minutes earlier. More alarms went off, and Nog started to announce something. “That was a bloody photon torpedo hit.” Scotty cut him off. “Red Alert!” Qat’qa was already throwing the ship into a roll, but Scotty called out to her anyway. “Evasive maneuvers, Kat!” It was more for the benefit of the rest of the bridge crew, so that they would know he was on top of things. Kat didn’t reply, but Scotty could see her grin from where he was lowering himself into the center seat.

What the bloody hell are the Klingons playing at? he wondered. Stepping back into history was nice enough, but not when it meant going back to the bad old days of conflict with the Klingons.

The ship rocked again, less severely this time, and the Klingon warship momentarily flitted across the main viewer, swooping toward Intrepid and her cluster of support shuttles and runabouts. “There’s something a wee bit off about that ship,” Scotty mused aloud. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, beyond that it was attacking two Federation ships. He still had to remind himself that it was an unusual act for Klingons in this era.

“Lieutenant Nog, I want a spread of torpedoes up that ship’s jacksie before they can do any more damage. Try to cripple their engines, so we can have a wee chat with them, if we can.”

“Aye, sir.” Nog glanced across his tactical board.

The screen tilted, and the Klingon ship weaved across it again. It was a familiar shape, with two drooping warp nacelles and a long neck stretching out from its infernal red and yellow hull. “That’s it,” Scotty snarled, cursing himself for not having noticed the obvious immediately. He’d had more than enough dealings with the Klingons in his time to know what their ships ought to look like. “That’s no bloody Klingon Defense Force ship. Not in those colors.”

“No, sir,” Qat’qa agreed.

Nog touched a control and looked up. “It’s not transmitting a Klingon transponder code.”

“Of course not,” Qat’qa scoffed.

“If it’s not Klingon, who does it belong to?”

“No one who deserves to be flying it,” Qat’qa said firmly.

“It could be almost anyone,” Tyler Hunt commented from the seat at Scotty’s right hand. “Since the Klingon Civil War quite a few vessels loyal to the Duras found their way onto the black market, and that has only become more common since the Borg conflict. There are a lot of salvageable ships out there.”

“Klingon vessels are robust enough,” Scotty mused, “but they tend not to be state of the art.”

“They’re popular because they have cloaks. Orion and Ferengi entrepreneurs are reported to have flotillas of ex–Klingon vessels, dating back to the old D-7s.”

“Cloaks are always going to be popular with smugglers, right enough,” Scotty agreed.

“They’re getting more popular with younger warp civilizations too. After the Dominion War and the Borg, people think being able to hide from the predators is a pretty good idea. I can’t honestly say they’re wrong.”

“They’re coming about,” Nog reported.

“Not for long,” Qat’qa added, sending the Challenger into a lurching spin as Nog launched a spread of torpedoes.

Intrepid shook violently and without warning. La Forge’s head snapped up from where he was examining the underside of the main engine control board. “What was that, Reg?”

Barclay looked around like a startled rabbit. “It wasn’t anything we did.”

“Challenger to Intrepid,” Hunt’s voice came over the communications relay, “brace yourselves!”

“What’s happening, Commander?” La Forge shouted, though in his heart he already knew. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce the painful truth.

“We’re under attack. Stand by.”

“Under attack?” Barclay echoed.

“That’s what he said.” La Forge headed for the nearest door. “Keep an eye on things here, Reg. I’ll be on the bridge.” He was the senior officer aboard Intrepid, which meant he was in command of her, and that meant his place was on the bridge.

Nog looked up from the unsettling news on his tactical board. “They’re targeting Intrepid.” He could feel an embryonic fear creeping up on him, telling him that he should be a proper Ferengi and trade, not fight, but he ignored it.

Scotty nodded. “Kat, get us between them and Intrepid.”

“Aye, sir, on our way.” She didn’t look up from her board.

Scotty turned to tactical. “Mister Nog, as soon as we’re in range, extend our shields around Intrepid.”

“Ready, sir.” Nog had anticipated the captain’s order and set it up already. The Intrepid had no shields, which meant only Challenger’s shields could protect her. A new blip appeared on the tactical sensors, and Nog checked its identity without even thinking. “Captain, the runabout Clyde has undocked from Intrepid.”

“What the hell is Carter playing at?”

The runabout Clyde shot off toward the Klingon ship, raising her shields and arming her weapons.

Lieutenant Carter, the broad-shouldered, freckle-faced New Zealander, had been checking over the connections between the Clyde and Intrepid’s environmental controls when the attack began, and he quickly realized that the runabout’s weapons were Intrepid’s only defense.

“Carter,” La Forge’s voice called. “Pull away! You don’t stand a chance!”

“If I can keep them off of Intrepid—”

The Clyde took a photon torpedo hit, and her port nacelle sparked with energy discharging out along the structure’s length instead of being carried safely along the waveguides to propel the vessel.

“Damn! Shields are down! EPS grid is—”

“Take evasive action!” La Forge, Scotty, and Hunt yelled at exactly the same time. They were all too late. A second torpedo punched the now unshielded runabout in the gut, and the ship disintegrated in a cloud of superheated debris.

Scotty glared at the dissipating wreckage, and felt the urge to do someone some damage. “Mister Nog. No more mister bloody nice guy.”

“Our shields are extended around Intrepid.”

On screen, the enemy ship heeled over, launched a couple of torpedoes from her aft tubes, and leapt to warp.

“Track her course,” Hunt ordered. “Long range scan in case they’re just trying to make us think they’re running, and have only made a short jump to the edge of the system.”

“Scanning,” Leah called from her station at the rear of the bridge. “They’re at warp, but it looks like a curved trajectory. They’re probably coming back.”

“Not if I can help it,” Scotty growled. “Commander La Forge,” he called out, giving the ship’s computer a couple of seconds to route the call through to Intrepid. “What’s your status over there?”

“A little shaken up, Captain, but we seem to be undamaged.” La Forge’s voice was calm and controlled.

Scotty hesitated. If he left the Intrepid alone, and lost track of the attacking ship, it could double back to hit them again. If he caught it, however, he could put a stop to this right now. “Good. Carry on, Mister La Forge. We’ll be back with you shortly.”

“Understood,” La Forge replied.

“Pursuit course,” Hunt told Qat’qa with a nod.

“Aye, sir,” she said with audible relish.

In Intrepid’s half-restored bridge, La Forge and Rasmussen watched the Challenger hurtle forward, warping after their attacker. La Forge knew that the Intrepid was capable of supporting the eleven people on board comfortably, and she could even move if she had to.

Rasmussen cleared his throat. “What do you think we should do now, Commander?”

La Forge grimaced at the idea that it was Rasmussen asking that. “Same thing we’ve been doing, only quicker. The sooner we’re able to move on our own, the better.”

“Uh-oh,” Ensign Balis said from the science station. He was Bolian, and flushed a deeper blue as he watched the sensors. “Sir, two ships are decloaking.”

“On screen!” The main viewer flickered, flashed, and spat static. Then, through the fog of randomized pixels, a long-necked ship with inverted goose wings painted in fiery red and gold swept past, followed by a larger, hunched crab of a vessel, which was the color of Martian dust.

“K’t’inga-class Klingon battle cruiser,” Balis said, looking at the sensor displays, “and—”

“And a Ferengi marauder,” La Forge said. “I see them. Hail the Challenger and tell them—”

Balis rattled the communications controls. “We’re being jammed.”

“Damn. Can we polarize the hull plating yet?”

“I think so, sir.” Balis started throwing switches. “But I don’t know how much good it’ll do.”

“Not a hell of a lot, against twenty-fourth century weapons,” Rasmussen commented. “But don’t let that put you off. The morale element should—”

“Thanks,” La Forge said curtly.

Rasmussen shrugged. “Space combat isn’t really my area of expertise, though the thought does occur that we’re a sitting duck with the shuttles still docked.”

La Forge winced, realizing that he should have thought of that himself. “Get the crews out. Blow the docking latches. We can catch up with the shuttles later, or Challenger can recover them.”

A shuttle drifted free from the Intrepid, and was almost immediately sliced open by a disruptor beam. It ripped apart, the on board atmosphere burning itself out in a momentary bloom of fire before it dissipated too far to sustain a flame.

As several more shuttles fell away from the Intrepid’s air-locks, propelled by emergency release charges, the K’t’inga-class ship looped around. It swung back toward the dispersing cluster of shuttles, green disruptor beams stabbing out and spearing the shuttles like moths against an entomologist’s wall. In a matter of seconds, there was nothing left of the shuttles but a few clouds of gas and sparkling debris.

The marauder slowed as it approached, looming over the tiny silver shape of the Intrepid.

Red whirlwinds deposited a Ferengi, two Klingons, and two Breen into the bridge of Intrepid, and the room began to feel overcrowded. La Forge started to reach for a phaser that he only wished he had. Nobody had anticipated the need to be armed on a derelict.

All of the new arrivals carried Klingon disruptors, which they kept covering the Starfleet crew. The Breen wore red refrigerated armor, the Klingons wore nonstandard leather and metal jerkins. The Ferengi, who looked more athletic and muscular than any Ferengi that La Forge had ever seen, glanced to either side. Apparently satisfied that his men had their prisoners effectively covered, an assessment with which Geordi ruefully agreed, he lowered his weapon and approached La Forge.

“You were sensible not to resist.”

La Forge said, “If we had anything to resist with, we’d have given you all the resistance you could handle.”

“That’s good to hear. I’d hate to have wasted my time on cowards. Now, Commander La Forge . . .” The Ferengi laughed at Geordi’s immediate astonishment. “Yes, I know who you are. You have been speaking to Challenger on open channels, after all.”

“I guess you have the advantage.”

“Yes.” He smirked. “Now, a question. How many people are aboard?”

“If you couldn’t scan the ship before you beamed in, I don’t see a reason to tell you.”

“Of course we did. Consider it a test.”

“La Forge, Geordi, Rank: Commander—” The Ferengi silenced him with a raised finger, then drew his disruptor again, and leveled it at Rasmussen’s eye.

“Eleven,” Rasmussen yelped, his eyes bulging at the business end of the disruptor. “The four of us here, four in engineering, one looking after sickbay, two . . . exploring the ship.”

“Very good. Exactly what our sensors told us.” He nodded to the two Breen, who herded the Starfleet officers, and Rasmussen, to the rear of the bridge. The two Klingons took the science and helm stations. “You,” he said to Rasmussen. “Was LaForge lying about not having the where-withal to resist?”

Rasmussen shrugged. “He’s not lying. Intrepid’s weapons systems are still offline. No power to the phase cannons, and the servos that traverse and elevate them are still fused solid anyway.”

“Photon torpedoes?”

“The photonic torpedoes have decayed beyond usability. They could probably still be fired, but they’d be no better than cannonballs, as projectile weapons go.”

“No warheads?”

“Nothing that would actually go off. A good sneeze would have a larger yield than what’s currently in the armory’s launch bays.”

“Lucky me.” The Ferengi raised a communicator to his lips. “The Intrepid is secure. Lock on with tractor beams and prepare for docking procedures.”

“Acknowledged,” a voice crackled, but Geordi could barely make it out. A few moments later, La Forge’s stomach lurched as the tractor beam took effect on the ship, interfering with her gravity, and then there was a distant and muffled clang somewhere. The Ferengi and the two Breen prodded La Forge and Rasmussen past the briefing area. Geordi remembered to step down.

The tubolift opened, and another Ferengi emerged. He wore a civilian suit cut to look like a daimon’s uniform, and La Forge instantly recognized his thin-lipped demeanor of revulsion, and the embers that burned in his hollow eyes. “Bok . . .”

The hollow-eyed Ferengi stopped immediately. “You know me?” He turned moved closer, looking coldly over Geordi’s features. He paused as he met La Forge’s eyes, then raised his hand and put it, edge-on, between his own eyes and Geordi’s. He nodded, and smiled slowly. “Ah . . . I remember a man with a visual aid device across his eyes like this . . . On Picard’s Enterprise, yes?”

“I used to wear a VISOR, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’d forgotten the rest of your features . . .”

“A lot of people do. They just saw the VISOR.”

Bok’s expression veered between a smile and a sneer, as if he was unsure which approach would be most intimidating. “Is that why you got rid of it? Vanity, perhaps, or to make you feel better? Or perhaps it was simply a vulnerability, exploitable by your enemies?”

“The technology improved.” He couldn’t deny that Bok’s third suggestion had some merit. Both the Romulans and the Duras sisters had used his VISOR to attack the Enterprise and its crew. “The device was also painful to use.” Over time he had got used to the pain, and didn’t really register it any more, but as soon as Beverly Crusher had given him the new cybernetic eyes, the freedom from the pain had been a revelation.

“Painful? Well, every latinum lining has a cloud.” He drew a phaser from his belt and turned to Rasmussen. “Let me show you what I mean,” he said, and raised the phaser.

“No!” La Forge shouted. Rasmussen was a pain and a thief, but he didn’t deserve to be executed in cold blood. “Whatever you think Captain Picard did to you, this man had nothing to do with it.”

“You’d be surprised what this man has to do with,” Bok said with an evil grin. He stepped closer to Rasmussen. “And now I’m going to give him what he deserves.”

“No!”

Bok hesitated, obviously enjoying Geordi’s discomfort, then reversed his grip on the phaser, and handed it to Rasmussen. For half a second, Geordi almost thought he was surrendering, but then he realized the truth, as Rasmussen gave a little “ah” of triumph.

“You and La Forge know each other?” Rasmussen sounded as amazed as he looked.

“We have met,” Bok said.

“Wow. I mean, I knew that this is a much smaller universe than mine was back in the good old twenty-second century, but even so . . .” He spread his hands apologetically. “I’m sorry, Geordi, I really am, but, you know . . . The Starfleet life just isn’t really for me.” He looked at Bok. “I’ll be over . . . here.” With that, he stepped up onto the bridge, leaving a shocked and angry La Forge staring at his captors.

“What do you want this time, Bok? Do you think that you can get some advantage over Captain Picard by taking this ship?”

“A simplistic notion, which could have proved an amusing diversion, but, no. We have a much more profitable business venture in which to engage.” As he spoke, La Forge noticed a couple of Ferengi carrying crates onto the bridge. In fact, traffic onto the bridge had been pretty high while they had been talking.

“We? You can’t mean you and Rasmussen?”

“Mister Rasmussen is remarkably wise and approachable for a hew-mon. The merger we have made should provide profit beyond imagining.” Bok chuckled. “Though I can imagine a lot.”

La Forge couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “How long has it been since you really did anything for profit? You even spent time in jail for trying to seek unprofitable revenge on Captain Picard.”

“Revenge upon Picard would have profited my . . .” He trailed off, as if unable to think of the right word.

“Soul?”

Bok looked puzzled for a moment, as if trying to translate the word, or the concept, then snorted. “Such a concept is vaporware. My sense of well-being, perhaps.”

“And you just happened to stumble across us?”

Bok shook his head. “Actually we’ve been waiting for several days, shielded from you by the star’s photosphere.”

“Several days? What were you waiting for?”

“What do you think?”

“For us to get Intrepid up and running?” Bok nodded. “But your engineers—”

“Are not the specialists that Starfleet’s Corps of Engineers would send. They can get a ship running, or even improve it, but restore such an ancient vessel? No. Not in the time available.” Bok grinned nastily. “Allow me to congratulate you on the excellence of your work.”

Another Ferengi approached Bok. “Daimon, everything is aboard, except Sloe. The Starfleeters are being held in the mess for now.”

“Good. Escort Mister La Forge to join his comrades, and then tell Grak that he can undock.”

Rasmussen put a hand on the center seat that had been installed to replace the original, and tried to shove it back and forth, just to test that it was secure. Satisfied that it didn’t snap off from its mounting, he sat in it, shuffling around until he was comfortable. “Hm, I could get used to this.” He opened his mouth to give an instruction to the Breen at the helm, but then hesitated.

He had seen the news reports, and, in this century, viewed enough records and holoprograms about starship captains to last a lifetime, and he would have been a liar if he had told his prison psychiatrist that he had never tried to imagine what sitting in the center seat of a starship was like.

“All right,” he said to the Breen, “so I’m a liar.”

Rasmussen had tried to imagine what it was like, and thought he had succeeded, but now he realized he was wrong. He had never actually imagined what it was really like. It was both wonderful and thrilling, and scary, and, in the end, just a slightly uncomfortable chair. He shifted in it some more, knowing he would have to get a cushion to put at the base of his spine if he was going to sit here for extended periods over the next few days.

Bok stepped next to Rasmussen, who couldn’t resist giving him a high-five. There were a couple of distant thuds. “Is that Grak?” Rasmussen asked.

“Yes, he has undocked. We are free to move.”

“Excellent!” Rasmussen grinned to himself. “Helm,” he said at last, “lay in a course for star system Delta Five in the Gamma Zeta Alpha cluster.” The suited Breen fiddled with some switches and buttons, then sat still. It took Rasmussen a moment to realize that the course was laid in, and the pilot waiting for the next order. “Aren’t you supposed to, you know, say something like ‘Course laid in,’ or ‘Okay, what next?’ Or something like that?” The Breen didn’t reply, and in fact didn’t even turn around. Rasmussen found himself wondering if there was actually a living being under that armor.

Rasmussen sighed, rolling his eyes. “All right, warp factor four.” The Breen’s hand was already moving. “Let’s go.”

“There is more to commanding a ship and crew than just sitting in the center of the room, Ras-mew-son.” Bok chuckled to himself as he moved toward the communications station. He reached across the newly fabricated box-like console units and opened a channel. “Grak, this is Bok.”

“Grak here. Go ahead, Daimon.”

“We’re ready to get under way. Engage your cloak, and follow us, just in case.”

“Understood. Cloaking now. Out.”

La Forge was relieved to see that everyone who was seated in the mess was mostly unharmed, though there were a couple of black eyes and one broken nose in the room. He had wasted no time telling Reg Barclay and the other eight Starfleet personnel about who had handed over their prize.

“He seemed like such a nice guy, too,” Reg said.

“I’m sure Colonel Green was loved by his dog.” Geordi looked around the mess. It wasn’t cramped, however the galley equipment was something they hadn’t thought to restore. It hadn’t seemed necessary, since they had assumed that they could always just beam back to Challenger to eat, or at least use the replicators on board the Thames or Clyde.

A deep vibration thrummed through the floor, and La Forge and Barclay swayed to one side for a moment under the pressure of acceleration before the inertial dampeners kicked in. “Well, we’re under way,” Reg said.

“And just when I got used to her.” Geordi sighed.

“Challenger? She’s a fine ship—”

“No, Leah.”

“Oh. I, uh—I’m sorry, Commander.”

Geordi laughed mirthlessly. “Don’t worry about it, Reg. Challenger is a fine ship. Not as fine as the Enterprise, though.”

11

Scotty watched as Leah Brahms slid into the ops seat. It had been her preferred place on the bridge since the project began, even though the Challenger was as much her baby as anyone else’s and so she merited one of the three center seats.

He knew she liked ops because its displays were a lot better than the tiny ones the center seats had in their armrests, and she liked to be able to monitor everything about the engines and power systems. If he was a hundred and twenty years younger, he reflected, she’d probably be his ideal woman.

Tyler Hunt dropped into the seat next to him. “Intrepid should be safe, at least. I wonder what this guy was after over there. What could they want with a two-hundred-year-old ship?”

“Good question,” Nog said from his position at tactical. “Could there be something aboard? Something valuable?”

“Like what?” Scotty asked. “Technology? Dinna be ridiculous, man. It’s two centuries out of date.”

“Classified material? Military secrets?”

Scotty shook his head. “Again, still two hundred years out o’ date. The only classified materials aboard would be their orders at the time, and mebbe some technical readouts that they’d have wanted to keep safe from others. A way to protect their systems against the Romulan telepresence weapon they had back then. But none of that would be worth a damn thing to anybody today.”

Hunt frowned. “A person, then? A life-form?”

“If that’s what they want, they’d have been better just asking us. I’d have beamed them aboard and wished them the best of luck sponging the object of their search off the walls.”

“More likely they were after us than Intrepid, surely,” Leah said. “We’ve got a lot of experimental projects and systems on board. Valuable research in a lot of places.” That sounded about right to Scotty as well. Even in his own career he’d seen that much. Strife with the Klingons over dilithium-rich planets, with the Romulans over borders, and then there was the whole Genesis Device business. Always planets, technical advances, or something that would give one a hand up in those two things.

“Whoever he is,” Qat’qa said, “he’s pretty good, but he’s inexperienced. Fresh from training, I suppose.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Only for them.”

“If they are after us,” Nog pointed out, “we’re probably walking into a trap.”

“Don’t worry, lad,” Scotty said grimly. “This ship has a lot more power under the hood than that Vor’cha does.”

“He’s coming about,” Qat’qa reported.

“Strange that he doesna cloak.” Scotty said thoughtfully. He didn’t like the oddity, not one bit.

“He knows he has a fight on his hands, so why waste the energy?” Hunt suggested.

“Well, the gloves are off now.”

The former Klingon ship rolled over as it banked, and spat torpedoes and disruptor bolts. The shots went wide, as Challenger barrel-rolled off to the side.

Challenger returned fire, the golden beams of her phasers flaring against the shields of her enemy.

Then the attacking ship did something unexpected.

Challenger lurched, and Nog knew instinctively what had happened. He had felt it often enough aboard smaller ships during the Dominion War. “They’ve got us in a tractor beam.”

“Break us free, Kat!” Scotty growled.

Qat’qa’s hands flew across the smooth panel in front of her, and the bridge trembled slightly. Nog could feel himself gently pushed first one way and then the other. The ship rocked back and forth as Qat’qa pushed more power into the maneuvering thrusters and the inertial dampeners struggled to keep up. “Lateral thrusters are doing no good,” she snarled. She sounded offended, as if the thrusters were personally insulting her. “The tractor beam is too strong!”

Hunt braced himself against the edge of a science console and sat down to look at power readings that were scrolling up on the station’s main display. “She’s right. It’s the strongest tractor field I’ve seen outside of mining stations.”

Scotty cursed. “And what, apart from the obvious, have they got us by, Mister Hunt?”

“The forward port quarter of the secondary hull, aft of deflector control.”

“They’re arming more torpedoes!” Nog called.

“Kat!” Scotty prompted her. “Get us free.”

“You must break the tractor beam, sir! Unless . . .”

Nog looked up from his board. “Torpedo incoming, running true!”

Hunt moved forward, as if being closer could make Qat’qa’s job easier. He checked the controls she was using, and was surprised to see that she wasn’t pouring on throttle power, or steering. “What are you doing?”

“Initiating emergency saucer separation!” Qat’qa snapped. Scotty’s eyes widened, gleaming as he grasped her idea. “Go right ahead,” he ordered.

“Torpedoes still incoming,” Nog reported. “Five thousand kilometers . . . Two thousand . . .”

Scotty gripped the armrests of his seat, bracing his legs against the floor and hoping they didn’t cramp up on him. He could feel the physical tension of everyone grabbing hold of the nearest wall or console and bracing themselves.

The huge saucer lifted away from the curved neck of the Challenger’s stardrive section. For a moment, they were both encased in the same shield envelope. Then there was a flicker of power spilling out into the visible spectrum as the shield envelopes of each part of the ship sealed themselves, sparking against each other for an instant before the saucer rose away from the stardrive section.

A fraction of a second after that, three blazing torpedoes, their outer casings already shedding hard radiation in the run-up to detonation, skimmed under the saucer’s surface. There was only a ten-meter gap between the two sections of the Challenger, but it was enough to allow the torpedoes through.

They were well past the ship when they detonated.

“Nog,” Qat’qa said without looking around, “the power distribution center is on the ventral surface of that petaQ.”

Nog smiled tightly. “Get me in position where I can target the lower surfaces and I should be able to knock out their shields.”

“You heard the man, lass,” Scotty agreed.

“Do not miss, Ferengi,” Qat’qa said grimly. She swept her hands across the flight console as if she was playing a concerto. Her deft touch rotated the Challenger ninety degrees around its y-axis, and then set the ship spinning around the x-axis as it rushed toward the swooping enemy ship.

Even with the inertial dampeners operating at peak efficiency, she could feel a tug on her back and a dizzying sensation. From the expression on Leah’s face to her left she could tell that everyone else on the bridge was feeling it too. She could also tell that none of them were enjoying it as much as she was, and resisted an urge to laugh with the joy of it.

Challenger spun with the aft ends of her impulse units carving out tracks on a surface that existed only in Qat’qa’s imagination, like a figure skater pirouetting across the ice.

In no more than two or three seconds, the ventral surface of the Klingon-built ship would pass across the Challenger’s nose.

Nog was ready, and delighted that Qat’qa had given him exactly what he had asked for. He launched a spread of three torpedoes ahead of the enemy’s direction of travel. Then, in the couple of seconds before the torpedoes reached their point of impact, he began a phaser barrage.

The bright phaser beams flashed against their opponent’s ship’s shields for an instant, and then the torpedoes detonated. The Klingon ship slowed, shaken by the triple detonation. Her systems automatically strengthened the forward shields, to protect against radiation damage or a second wave of torpedoes.

The strength of the shields around the rest of the ship wavered, and dropped for a moment. Then the Challenger’s phaser beams were through the weakened shield, carving an intricate spiral tattoo across the ship’s ventral hull.

Metal glowed and melted, and power junctions exploded.

“This is one of Odo’s favorite tricks,” Nog said with a tight grin as his fingers danced across the tactical console.

All eyes turned to the main viewer, expecting to see phaser beams impale the other ship at its most vulnerable points. Instead, the ship started to drift. Nog chuckled from the tactical station. “Perfect!”

“You haven’t fired,” Hunt pointed out.

“I didn’t need to,” Nog said smugly. “I’ve transported their bridge crew directly to our brig through the gap in their forward shields. Odo’s favorite trick.”

Scotty began to laugh. “Well done!”

Hunt tapped his combadge. “Hunt to security team beta; post duty officers in the brig. We have prisoners to look after.”

“It won’t take long for the rest of their crew to realize what’s happened and get replacements to their stations,” Scotty pointed out. “Let’s make sure that doesna happen, Mister Nog.”

Nog was already on his way to the turbolift. “Security team alpha to transporter room one. Issue phaser rifles, and pick one up for me.”

Tyler Hunt followed him into the turbolift. “Security team delta to transporter room two. Rifles all round.” He looked at Nog. “I suggest you beam into the bridge, since you’ve already emptied it, and I’ll take a team to the engine room. It wouldn’t do if they’ve got an auxiliary or battle control center there.”

“I agree, sir.”

Nog was glad to see that the security team was already waiting for him on the transporter pad. An athletic-looking human male and female, a deceptively willowy Andorian, and a thick-set Benzite. All carried phaser rifles and wore hand phasers at their waists.

The Benzite handed Nog a rifle as he took his place. “Chief Carolan,” he said to the elfin human woman at the transporter console, “if you could set the controls to activate the center pad three seconds from my mark, and the rest of us two seconds after that, I would be very grateful.”

“I can do that,” she replied with a smile. “Just tell me when you’re ready.”

Nog used his free hand to manipulate the settings on a metallic globe until it chirped. He set it on the center pad, and straightened up, readying his rifle. “Mark.” Carolan tapped a control, and the sphere vanished almost immediately. Nog tensed, ready for his turn. “Energizing,” Carolan said, and a silver whirlwind turned the room around Nog into a dim bridge of Klingon architecture.

Two bodies were just hitting the floor, joining three that were already there, knocked down by the stun grenade that had beamed in first. Nog stepped over a groaning body that was slumped at his feet, just as the door to the neck section opened, and two Ferengi did double-takes in the doorway. They belatedly tried to raise phasers, but Nog and Kovac were faster, dropping the pair with well-placed shots on heavy stun.

A Nausicaan on the far side of the bridge was on his knees, but hadn’t quite gone all the way down under the stun grenade’s effect. He looked up at the sounds of footfalls and phaser fire, and froze. He had a Klingon disruptor pistol at his belt, but clearly thought better of going for it, as he was looking down the business ends of a couple of phaser rifles. Slowly and rather unsteadily, he raised his hands, but stayed on his knees.

While the Bolian security officer put restraints on the Nausicaan, Kovac bounded across to the door and hit the emergency seal, cutting off the bridge from anyone else who might try to come and investigate what was going on.

Nog quickly surveyed the bridge before slinging his rifle across his back. Like the bridges of most Klingon-built vessels, it was dimly lit in infernal tones, but the heavy shadows between the stout industrial furnishings weren’t hiding any conscious members of the crew. Apart from the two Ferengi who had been stunned next to the double-doors to the neck section, there were two more Ferengi, a human, and a Tellarite, all recumbent at various stations. They all wore simple but practical jerkins and jumpsuits, in various colors. Satisfied, Nog slapped his combadge. “Nog to Challenger, enemy bridge secure.”

Tyler Hunt took a few deep breaths in the instants between his stun grenade dematerializing and the transporter beam sweeping him across the void after it. It wasn’t fear, per se, but a habit he had long since gotten into, which he was vaguely convinced kept his nervousness at bay.

Then the silver and gray mist swirled around him, and the transporter room vanished, resolving into the much larger hall of a Klingon engineering deck. Harsh actinic lights illuminated both the elephantine generators and horizontal warp core, and three twitching bodies on the floor. Two of the semiconscious bodies were Ferengi, and the other was Klingon. They all wore basic jumpsuits, covered in scorch marks and chemical burns. Unfortunately, the bright lighting, presumably intended to reduce injuries while working on the complex machinery also happily illuminated Hunt and his security team.

A disruptor bolt flicked past Hunt’s head, and sent him diving to the floor. One of the security team with him picked off the gunman, a Nausicaan on an inspection cat-walk above, with a lucky shot. The heavy stun wasn’t quite enough to send the Nausicaan tumbling, but a second was. Unfortunately, he wasn’t alone.

Hunt rolled onto his side, loosing a couple of shots in the direction of the clatter of approaching boots. His instincts had served him well as a Klingon in furry civilian garb tumbled forward, unconscious before his body stopped running.

Gold and emerald beams slashed viciously through the air overhead, and Hunt could almost imagine that the whine of the weapons was really the screaming of the air as it was cut and scarred. Beside Hunt, Ensign Michaels’s thigh popped open with a puff of gases that used to be solid muscle and liquid blood. He fell with a grimace, still firing his rifle with one hand while trying to drag himself to cover with the other.

Hunt darted out, laying down covering fire in the direction of an equipment bay from where two shadowy figures were shooting at his men. The attackers were well-sheltered, and he couldn’t tell for sure what species they belonged to, but one was smaller than the other, and he thought the small one might well be a Ferengi. Hunt had to be more careful with his shooting than the enemy, as he was trying to shoot past the warp core and didn’t dare risk hitting it. Blowing up the ship with himself on board wasn’t the plan he had in mind to neutralize the Challenger’s foes.

Grabbing Michaels’s free arm, Hunt hauled him behind a dense metal buttress. He lobbed another stun grenade down the hall, and heard some satisfying thuds. Moving cautiously forward, he found that the last resistance was now safely unconscious. “Hunt to Challenger, medical transport required. Beam Michaels directly to sickbay.” He could hear the sound of the transporter beam even as he continued. “Engineering and auxiliary control secure. The ship is ours.”

Nog and Hunt walked along the line of cells in the Challenger’s brig, looking at the crew of the captured vessel. Some of them were still aboard her, confined to quarters, but a Starfleet security team was also on board. The most vital components of the engines and weapons had been removed, and the replicator system destroyed. The crew would have to sit where they were until Starfleet came for them.

The bridge crew had been comprised of three Klingons, two Nausicaans, and six Ferengi, including the captain. Nog was surprised to see the Ferengi in charge of the attack. It just wasn’t the Ferengi way, though he knew there were mercenaries among his people. The Klingons and Nausicaans had resisted talking for a short while, but finally admitted that the Ferengi were in charge of the ship. Hunt and Nog both believed them.

“Getting the Ferengi to talk might be more difficult,” Nog said as they walked.

“I’d have thought the Klingons or Nausicaans would have kept quiet longer,” Hunt admitted.

“They’re just mercenaries,” Nog pointed out. “There’s no family or cultural loyalty for them. It’s just a job.”

“I see what you mean.”

“But it will be a different matter with the Ferengi. They’ll keep their mouths shut as long as it profits them.”

“Then we have to convince them that talking will be a better idea.”

Nog was already thinking along those lines. “I think I know how to handle them. But first I need to change out of my uniform.”

When he returned to the brig, Nog was wearing his finest and most garish civilian suit, which had been a present—at a very reasonable price—from his father. He nodded to the looming human guard. “Let me into number three.”

The guard deactivated the forcefield holding the Ferengi captain, allowing Nog to enter. The captain was thick-set with small lobes and blunt teeth. Nog gave him the broadest, coldest smile he could manage. “So, Captain Kren, isn’t it?”

Kren glowered at him. “What if it is? And who are you, anyway?”

“Who I am isn’t important,” Nog said dismissively. “What is important is the profit you’ve been earning.” He leaned in threateningly as he spoke.

“What profit would that be?”

“The profit that I’m sure you haven’t declared, or paid taxes on.”

“We’re a long way from Ferenginar, and you’re not wearing a liquidator’s medal,” Kren said dismissively, a hint of uncertainty hiding in his tone.

“Ah.” Nog understood. “You think the FCA can’t reach you here?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing aboard this hew-mon ship, but—”

“Is that what they told you?”

“What?” Kren froze.

“They told you this was a hew-mon ship. A Starfleet ship.”

Kren nodded toward the uniformed guard. “Starfleet.”

Nog let his grin widen, and shook his head slowly. “Oh, the ship is ex-Starfleet, an older model, and there is a Starfleet crew aboard, but it’s so much more valuable than that.” He leaned forward conspiratorially, and Kren did likewise. “You know the FCA now has treaties in place with the Federation.” Kren nodded. “We have a ship exchange program also. This is my ship, and I don’t like you trying to depreciate it by damaging the finish!” Nog ended with a yell.

“But—”

“No buts, Kren! Didn’t they tell you who you would be dealing with?”

“Starfleet engineers—”

“Do I look like a Starfleet engineer?” Kren shook his head, his eyes wide and confused. “Who do I look like?” Nog asked, suddenly quiet and calm.

Kren thought hard. “I dunno. I suppose you look a bit like—”

“Nog, son of Rom.”

Kren brightened. “Yeah, that’s right. You look a bit like the son of the Grand Nagus—” He blanched. “Actually, you look exactly like the son of the Nagus.”

“That’s because I am!”

Kren panicked. “But Daimon Bok said that—” And Nog had his answers.

As they returned to the bridge and went on through to the conference room, Hunt shook his head in amazement. “That Ferengi is terrified of you. In fact, they all are . . .”

“Good. If they respect us, we’ll get further, right?” Uncomfortable with the issue, Nog flashed a faltering smile.

“Right, but it’s not just respect. I can’t put my finger on it, but they look at you the way a prisoner might look at an executioner. A bribable executioner, now that I think about it . . .”

“Don’t worry, sir, I’m not bribable. Or an executioner.”

“I know, and I’m not worried. Just wondering what so impressed them.”

They sat down with the rest of the senior staff around the table. Nog explained that Kren had given up the identity of his paymaster as another Ferengi criminal, Daimon Bok, and that he had three cloaked ships, two of which were now with the Intrepid for reasons that had apparently never been explained to Kren and his mercenary crew.

Scotty sat back in his seat and mulled the information over. “Nog, do you know this Daimon Bok?”

“Not personally. I do know that he’s twice tried to kill Captain Picard. After the second attempt, he served time at Rog Prison before buying his way out.”

“I’m more curious,” Hunt said, “as to how a disgraced former daimon could still swing the kind of power that would enable him to get hold of cloaked ships and crews.”

“I did a little digging about his prison time in Ferengi records. During his incarceration, he made contact with the Shadow Treasurers.”

“The who?” Hunt asked, looking as mystified as everyone else at the table.

“The Ferengi criminal underworld.”

Hunt blinked in surprise. “The Ferengi have an underworld? Isn’t that an oxymoron? No offense.”

“None taken.”

Scotty tapped on the tabletop. “How dangerous is this Daimon Bok, Nog?”

“To the Ferengi he is like a . . .”

“Traitor?” Hunt suggested.

“Worse. His quest for revenge went against everything a Ferengi believes in.”

“Ah, a heretic, then.”

Nog nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Bok is a heretic for putting revenge before profit.”

“I’m sure there are Ferengi over the years who’ve been wronged, or think they have, and gone looking for revenge,” Leah said.

“Of course,” Nog agreed. “But Ferengi get revenge by costing their enemies profit, not by trying to kill people at the expense of their own opportunities for profit.”

“So, he’s unstable.”

“Very. He’s obsessed with Captain Picard.”

Scotty stood. “Then let’s not leave him alone with Intrepid. We’ll rejoin the drive section, and get back to the Agni Cluster as fast as we can.” He adjourned the meeting with a nod.

Qat’qa held back until everyone except she and Nog had left the room, then blocked the door to keep Nog in. “Hunt says the Ferengi were scared of you.”

“I guess they’re just not used—”

“To warrior Ferengi? No. You must have at least suggested cutting off lobes, or—”

Nog sighed. “They’re afraid I might tell my father about them.”

“Your father? The ex-engineer?”

“Yes.”

“Why would they be afraid of you telling your father?”

“Because he’s . . . Well, because he’s now the Grand Nagus.”

“The Grand—” Qat’qa’s eyes widened, stunned. “The Grand Nagus? Your father is the Grand Nagus?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell us?”

“No, and I don’t want you telling people either,” Nog said with urgency.

“Are you not proud of him?”

“Of course I’m proud of him! But I don’t want people to think I got where I am because of his influence. It was his career as an engineer that inspired me to become a Starfleet engineer, and that was long before he became Grand Nagus. He was a private contractor, and then, a member of the Bajoran Militia.”

“As an engineer, not a soldier.”

Nog grunted. “You haven’t met my father. My uncle Quark always called him an idiot, because he didn’t have the knack for turning a profit. But he did have the courage to know what he could do, to dare to be a different kind of Ferengi—with a different kind of project. That’s what inspired me.”

“You have courage.” Qat’qa nodded toward his bio-synthetic leg, a consequence of combat during the Dominion War. “And you wish to be judged only by your actions.” Qat’qa smiled approvingly. “A Ferengi who has earned scars, and honor, and wisdom, in war. She stepped through the door, onto the bridge. “I shall see if I can find you a better battle.”

12

Intrepid cruised through space, away from the Agni Cluster. Stripped of their combadges, Geordi La Forge and Reg Barclay were taking apart an intercom in her mess hall. “If we can tap into a subspace link,” Geordi was saying, “we might be able to contact Challenger.”

“They’re probably out of range,” Barclay predicted gloomily.

“They’ll be coming after us.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Rasmussen’s voice said from the doorway. Geordi had the urge to go for his throat, but the Klingon who was standing behind him with a disruptor rifle discouraged such notions. “We have a ship laying false warp trails.”

“You’ll—” La Forge was about to say “never get away with this,” but then realized how stupid the cliché sounded. He decided to see whether Rasmussen was still in a chatty mood, which his presence suggested he probably was. “How did Bok know where to find Intrepid?”

“I told him.”

“You told him? How?”

“Well, I must confess I’d have prefered to just contact him from the Challenger, but with you all watching me all of the time . . .”

“And rightly so!”

“All right, I can’t really hold that against you, can I? The fact is, being in a rehab colony put me in contact with other people who also needed rehabilitation.”

“So you got contacts with the Ferengi and others.”

“Yep, but I had no real need for them even after I was released. I was just hanging around, trying to live out my life in this century. But then Starfleet poked their noses into my life again, asking me to take a look at Intrepid. That’s when I came up with a plan. I couldn’t use Challenger’s communications system to contact Bok, at least not without alerting you Starfleet folks to what I was doing, who I was doing it with, and what we were planning.”

“But Intrepid’s communications system is a lot more limited.”

“To you, maybe. But remember, Commander, this is from my era. I know this gear, and how it works. I know how to work around it, and use it without you knowing about it.”

“And you let Bok know where to find us.”

“Exactly.”

“So . . . What about us?”

“What about you?”

“What are you going to do with us?”

Rasmussen looked surprised to be asked the question. “Nothing.”

“You can’t expect us to—”

“I expect you to do exactly what you came on board to do. Oh, I daresay Bok will have his guards watching you, to make sure you don’t interfere with our project, but other than that it’s the same mission. Only the support vessels have changed.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that Bok just came here to perform a scientific service.”

“Of course not. What he has in mind . . . is a business venture, and it won’t harm anyone. Anyone else, I suppose I should say. Poor Ensign Carter . . . This was supposed to have been done bloodlessly.”

“Yeah, right.” Carter’s family would be delighted to hear that.

“If you don’t believe me, come on up to the bridge. The science station is free for you to use. Well, Bok’s locked out the flight and command controls, but you can play with the sensors and the Intrepid’s archives to your heart’s content.” Rasmussen extended a hand. “Come on, let’s see what Bok’s up to.”

La Forge and Barclay exchanged a glance, then rose. “So, what’s this business venture?”

“Oh, that?” Rasmussen beamed excitedly. “It’s great! I’d love to tell you, but you know how Ferengi are about that kind of thing. You’ll love it when you hear, though. Seriously.” He hesitated, and shrugged. “Well, maybe not love it, but you will be impressed with the ingenuity of its execution.”

“Maybe I should just ask Bok himself,” Geordi said sourly.

“Maybe you should. He’s not such a bad guy, you know. He just has his own way of putting things across. He’s what we used to call damaged goods.”

“We still call it that,” La Forge said drily.

“Then I’m sure you understand what he’s like. Me, I don’t mind so much.”

“So you’ll tell me what this business deal is?”

“No . . . Geordi, you know, I feel a kinship with you. I’m an inventor, and you’re an engineer . . . I sometimes have to engineer things, and I daresay you’ve invented a thing or two in your time.”

“Yes,” La Forge said, playing along.

“Exactly, which means it’d just be unfair to you to tell you what we have in mind.”

“Unfair?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you ought to not know, or anything like that. I have no secrets from you now. It’s just that you’ll feel so much better to have worked it out for yourself than if I tell you.”

“Really?” La Forge was revisiting the idea of throttling Rasmussen, and damn the consequences.

“Of course! I really wish I could just tell you, but . . . Where would the challenge be if I just told you what I’m doing? When you work it out you’ll get such a buzz! I can’t take that away from you.”

“You told them what?” Bok demanded.

Rasmussen relaxed into the Intrepid’s center seat. “Look, you said yourself that your engineers couldn’t have gotten Intrepid up and running. These are the experts who did. They’ll be invaluable.”

“For interfering!” Bok knew the dedication of Starfleet far too well. Or perhaps, he thought, it was a hew-mon thing. Maybe he was wrong to go into partnership with a hew-mon. He was, after all, of the same make as Picard, the son-killer.

“For running essential systems that are not a security threat. Deflector control, sensors, and so on. It wouldn’t do our venture any good if we”—Rasmussen slapped one fist into a palm—“went face-first into a planet, would it?” Bok merely grunted, thinking about all the ways in which letting the Starfleeters live could cause problems. Mainly it was that they would try to sabotage the ship, and contact Starfleet.

“We’re going to need them when we reach the Infinite,” Rasmussen pressed. “And they are experts.”

Bok nodded reluctantly. “Very well. They can work on the sensors and other systems, but nothing that can be used to affect our navigation and flight control, and nothing that can be used to send transmissions. And always under armed guard.”

“Works for me,” Rasmussen agreed.

La Forge was tempted to refuse to order his staff to help Bok, but if it meant even the slightest chance to contact Challenger, it was worth it.

“Balis,” he said, “take charge of deflector control monitoring. Reg, you’ll aid the crew from the marauder that’s flanking us. I’ll take the sensors on the bridge. Everyone else . . . take a look at the environmental controls. They still need work.”

There was a chorus of “Yes sir.” Then the Starfleet crew-men left the mess and went back to work.

Barclay found Bok and Rasmussen standing in the corridor facing the segmented, copper-colored, three-meter diameter vertical bowl that was Intrepid’s transporter platform. Rasmussen stood as far away from it as possible, shaking his head. “I’m glad we’re not using this thing to travel.”

“Me too,” Reg agreed.

Bok snorted. “There’s nothing to fear about a transporter.”

“Not now that there’s been two centuries of technological advances, but back in Intrepid’s day . . . They weren’t used for people that often. And this one’s been out of service for a couple of millennia.”

“Upgrades,” Bok said thoughtfully. “What a concept, making people buy the fixes to make their purchases work a little closer to the way they were supposed to . . .”

Rasmussen gave him a sidelong look. “Or a little safer. You know, in my century there was a real belief that transporters copy a person and kill the original. And you know how a copy of something degrades every time you copy it.” He shuddered.

“That’s not how transporters work.”

“Not now.”

“They’re much safer now,” Barclay agreed, half disbelieving. “Relatively speaking, that is. I mean, now and again you get the odd anomaly.”

“Anomaly?” Rasmussen echoed.

“Sometimes the pattern can be deflected by ion storms, or reflected back from atmospheric conditions, and then you find yourself in another reality, or that there are . . .” He coughed. “Two of you.”

“And when’s the last time anything like that happened?” Bok sneered.

“Well, actually, just a couple of years ago, we were experimenting with transporting active holograms, and power surge through the transporter caused a matter echo . . . But we really don’t like to talk about that. It’s funny how, just when you think you’ve seen the worst, something even more distressing happens.” Reg shivered at the memory. “Then you have to find something for the other person to do, like join the Maquis, or explore the opposite side of the galaxy . . .”

“Opposite side?”

Bok turned away with a wave, and drew his communicator. “Enough monkey-brained opinions. Grak, is Sloe ready with his cargo?”

“Ready, Daimon.”

“Energize.”

As the three men watched, the transporter floor and ceiling lit up, and a human materialized, along with a bulky metallic tower-like device covered in metal and crystalline tubing. The device was on a small grav-sled, and the man had one hand on the handle of the sled. The man was around Rasmussen’s age, but had youthfully bright eyes in contrast to lank graying hair tied in a rough ponytail. He was tall, and wore drab clothes that he had probably bought new half a century ago and never needed to replace.

“Welcome aboard, Sloe.”

“Daimon.”

“Is the cloak ready to install?”

“It tested fine back on the marauder. Of course, that was with modern power systems, not twenty-second century ones. But I see no reason why it shouldn’t work as well here.”

“Excellent. I’ll need you to install it as quickly as possible.”

“It shouldn’t take long, really. It’s an older model, not such complex connections to deal with.” Sloe patted the device as if it were a pet.

“Older, but hopefully no less effective.”

“The original model dates from before the Klingon civil war, so it’s bound to have been penetrated at some point, but more likely by the Romulans than by Starfleet.”

“Then let’s hope the Romulans didn’t share their data,” Rasmussen grumbled.

“Well, just in case they did, I’ve made a few modifications.”

“Modifications?” Barclay asked.

“This is Reg,” Rasmussen said to Sloe. “He’ll be assisting you.”

“But don’t let him touch the cloak itself,” Bok warned.

“Oh, right,” Sloe said. “Well, I’ve introduced an automated random modulation to the phase discriminator, and one or two other little tweaks. If anyone does get a peek through the cloak, the modulation should mean it doesn’t last very long, and they lose us again straight away.”

“Good,” said Bok. “Now stop wasting time. Get down to D deck and install it.”

La Forge powered up the long-range sensors on the bridge, and quickly scanned for some sign of Challenger, or any other Federation ship. There was nothing, and that made him uneasy.

He caught himself wondering whether he ought to have just asked Leah where they stood when he had the chance. It would be ironic if she had been waiting for him to make a move, and he now might never have the chance. He told himself to stop thinking like a lovesick teenager, and concentrate on the situation.

Slowly he looked around the bridge, not just in the visible spectrum, for any sign that the mercenaries might be nervous enough to make mistakes, but everything looked normal. Then, La Forge turned his attention to the sensors, which gave him navigational information, but without the ability to affect the ship’s course. They were heading to a system near Ferengi space, Delta Five Gamma Zeta Alpha. It wasn’t one he knew, but the designation was vaguely familiar.

He felt his Klingon guard step closer, and decided it was time to start doing things the Klingon would recognize as engineering. Opening a toolkit, he started reconnecting a damaged monitor screen to a control panel fabricated back on Challenger.

Some time later, Bok slid down the short stairway next to the main reactor, and approached the humans who were working there. “Sloe, Barclay,” Bok snapped. “How is my cloak progressing?”

“Quite well, actually,” Sloe replied, sounding surprised. “That’s Klingon workmanship for you. Built to last, which I suppose anything used by a Klingon has to be.”

“Good.” Bok leaned forward, right into Sloe’s face. “Now tell me what the problem is, or I’ll be terminating your contract the practical way.” It would be a pleasure, Bok decided.

“Why should there be a problem? This is all good solid workmanship, Bok.”

“You told me the cloak would be online an hour ago. It isn’t.”

Sloe managed a crooked smile, and waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, that problem. No, it’s okay actually, it’s all fixed now. No more problems.”

“What was it?”

“A compatibility issue. Klingon and Starfleet technology can be cobbled together easily enough, but this ship is ancient. The power subsystems are completely different from anything used in the past hundred years.”

“You’ve solved this?”

“I had to get Reg to adapt a few bits and pieces from—”

“Enough! If it works, it works. That’s all that matters.”

“Oh, it’ll work,” Barclay promised.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Bok reminded him. “Just do it.” Bok climbed back up out of engineering, and returned to the bridge. Grak was there, consulting with the Breen at the helm. “Grak, when you return to the marauder, keep your sensors focused on any pursuit by Challenger.”

“Do we expect a pursuit?”

Bok grunted. “You can feel free to think that they’ll give up, but they’ll try hunting us down. These Starfleet types are like a tumor, coming back again and again.”

“That’s true.”

“Besides, the mercenaries we hired are the best available, and they have a formidable vessel, but the Challenger is a very powerful ship. And Kren has not checked in as agreed.”

Grak scowled. “I told you we should have tried to acquire a Romulan warbird. The D’Deridex-class would be more than able to hold her own against a Galaxy-class starship.”

“The attempt would have got us all killed. The Romulans have always been paranoid.”

“Then you’re going to need that cloak. Perhaps it’s possible to extend our cloaking field over Intrepid—”

Bok waved the suggestion away. “Sloe assures me the cloak will be online momentarily. Once that is the case, we needn’t fear Challenger following us.”

“Assuming they don’t penetrate the cloak. Such secrets and technologies are notoriously short-lived.”

“Exactly why I have our other ship laying false warp trails across half the sector. Challenger can follow one of those for as long as it likes.”

At that moment, Sloe hurried on to the bridge, wiping his hands with a rag. “Daimon Bok, the cloak is ready.”

“When you say ready, you had best mean ready to use, not just ready to test.”

“It’s fully functional and fully powered. Or at least as powered up as anything on a vintage beauty like this can be.”

Bok held his gaze for a moment, trying to gauge whether the human was right. He was fairly certain that Sloe wouldn’t lie to him, but he was considerably less certain that the man had the talent and ability to perform such a complicated task right. Sloe nodded slowly, and held out a padd displaying graphics of the cloak’s power flow and status. Bok was no expert, but it looked good to him.

Bok turned and snapped a finger at the mercenary manning the tactical console. “Engage the cloak.”

Sitting in his cabin, comparing one of Challenger’s padds to one from Intrepid, and trying to work out just how to spin the former as a natural development of the latter, Rasmussen felt a sudden shift in his perception, as if everything suddenly felt slightly queasy, and off-balance. It was like being seasick, and he realized that he could use a drink. Rum, maybe, since that used to be issued to sailors. He supposed it must be good against seasickness.

He ran to the bridge, as internal communications still weren’t working. “What just happened?”

Bok, Sloe, and Grak looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“There was a . . . I just felt this . . .”

“Oh,” Sloe said, “you mean the cloak. We got it working, and it’s pootling away quite nicely now—”

“Is it always like this?”

“You’ll get used to it,” he promised.

La Forge had experienced the feeling only a handful of times, but that was often enough to recognize it for what it was. “We’ve cloaked.” Everyone who had been returned to the mess had clearly understood that, even if they hadn’t experienced it before.

“Will Challenger be able to pierce the cloak and find us?” Balis asked.

“If anyone can, it’ll be a ship full of engineers.”

13

Challenger hurtled through space, speeding toward the center of the Agni Cluster at high warp. On the bridge, Scotty could feel the irritation building in his gut, and he couldn’t help getting up and pacing around lest he end up sitting there twitching with impatience. “Intercept?”

“I have the Intrepid’s position marked,” Qat’qa said. “We should be there in a matter of minutes.”

“Good,” Scotty replied.

“Sir,” Nog said, his tone cautious. “I’m not detecting any sign of Intrepid . . . There are several indications of possible warp trails.”

“One of them must match Intrepid’s engines, lad. Pull up the records on the NX-class warp signature.”

“Checking . . . Yes, sir. There are two warp trails consistent with the NX-class.”

“And I can’t see there having been a visit from another NX ship here, can you?”

“No, sir, I can’t.”

“So they’re trying to fool us. Work out the most probable pursuit course. We need the real NX’s trail.”

“Aye, sir.”

Rasmussen was in the captain’s cabin when Geordi found him. The largest cabin on the ship, it was one-quarter the size of the average modern cabin. “What is it, Geordi? Oh, and congratulations on the sensor work.”

“Thanks.”

“Was there something you wanted to ask me? Or tell me? I can tell from your expression you’ve got one of those rather boring authoritarian lectures in mind.”

La Forge didn’t bother to argue. “Please listen, Rasmussen, and let me tell you something about this partner of yours. The first time the Enterprise encountered him, he used a mind controlling device to try to force Captain Picard to fight a battle against the Enterprise. Bok did that with the help of an old Starfleet ship he’d found, the Star-gazer.”

“He knows something about old ships. That’s handy, don’t you think?”

“Bok’s crew didn’t know what he had in mind. They thought he had a straightforward scheme to bring them profit. He was lying to them, not telling them that he really wanted revenge.”

“He’s pretty unusual for a Ferengi, I’ll give you that.”

“The point is, he was lying to the rest of his crew.”

“He was a daimon then. He didn’t have to tell his crew what his motives were. Isn’t that the rule even in Starfleet?” Geordi didn’t want to reply, but his hesitation spoke for him, much to his annoyance. “See. That’s what I thought.”

La Forge clenched a fist, but forced himself to unclench it. He wasn’t a violent man, and this wasn’t a situation where it would do him any good. “The second time Enterprise encountered Bok, he had genetically tampered with a boy to make him seem to be Captain Picard’s son.”

Rasmussen looked interested. “Some kind of blackmail scheme?”

“Not exactly. He wanted to kill him, to make the Captain feel what Bok felt when he lost his own son.”

“What we’re doing here, Geordi, has nothing to do with Picard or Bok’s son.”

“Everything Bok does has to do with his son! Somewhere, somehow, it’ll lead back to his dead son.”

Rasmussen tilted his head first one way, and then the other. “Maybe, yeah, actually I can see how it could . . . So?”

“He’d lied to the crew of the ship he was using. He crossed them to try to get what—”

“I think I see a pattern developing.”

Geordi gave a curt nod. “It’s bound to repeat itself. What makes you think you can trust Bok—?”

“I don’t trust Bok. At least, not in the way you mean. But I can trust knowing not to trust him. And he can trust not to trust me.”

“The difference is that I doubt you’re planning to double cross him in order to hurt someone else. He will be planning to do that to you. You can’t trust Bok, and he will cross you.”

“I’m flattered that you worry about me, but, really Geordi, you don’t have to.”

Geordi saw a flicker of something in Rasmussen’s eyes. Guilt? Libido? La Forge vaguely recalled that Rasmussen had tried to hit on Deanna, Beverly, and almost every other human female on the ship. “Leah, Guinan, you get on well with them, right? You were making friends?”

“There are plenty more little stars in the galaxy,” Rasmussen said with a smile. “Plenty more.” He looked at his chronometer, “and plenty more sensors to watch them with. You really should be on duty now.” His smile iced slightly. “Really.”

Challenger slowed to impulse in a system where a red giant had blossomed, swallowing any planets that had once orbited it in its younger days.

“The trail stops here,” Qat’qa announced.

Hunt frowned. “How can it stop if Intrepid isn’t here?”

“It cannot, unless she either entered a wormhole—”

“I’m not reading any of the neutrino levels that a wormhole in the area would leave.” Leah frowned. “I have another warp trail, though. A different one. It looks like the signature of a Klingon warp coil to me . . .” She checked the computer’s readings. “K’t’inga-class.”

“Bollocks,” Scotty muttered. “We’ve wasted half the day followin’ a bloody decoy!”

“I am setting course for the Agni Cluster,” Qat’qa said quickly. “We should still be able to pick up the other trail when we get there.”

Bok dozed in the center seat on Intrepid’s bridge. He had originally intended to claim the largest and, no doubt, most luxurious cabin on the ship, which had previously been the quarters of her original captain. When the door to the captain’s cabin had opened, Bok had felt his heart sink and his bile rise, passing each other quite uncomfortably on the way. The cabin, far from being spacious and luxurious, was exactly the same size and color as his cell had been at Rog Prison. It wasn’t any more luxurious than his cell had been either.

True, there weren’t three other Ferengi squeezed into it, but it had brought back unpleasant memories all the same. There had been the ignominy of being fleeced for every strip of latinum in the reception tavern when he arrived, and then the weight of debt put upon him as part of the penal servitude. Each day he was in the prison, he was debited a few slips for the cost of his upkeep. It wasn’t much at a time, but of course he had nothing after the inaugural deposit was forced from him, and then the weight and pressure of it built up steadily over time.

The hew-mons had an ancient torture, something called “Chinese water torture,” in which the steady dripping of tiny water drops onto a prisoner’s forehead slowly drove him insane. The accumulation of these debts had the same effect on inmates of the Ferengi prison system.

It was all worth it, of course. No price was too high to pay for making amends for what had happened to his son.

“The NX warp trail ends here.” Qat’qa’s announcement was the last thing Scotty wanted to hear. If he could just build a better bloody sensor . . .

“Another decoy?”

“There’s no other warp trail in the system,” Leah said. “But there’s an increasing distortion in the warp trail we’ve been following.”

Scotty’s breath caught in his throat. Could the distortion have meant a disaster? “What are ye thinking, Leah?”

“I’m thinking the distortion looks like a cloaking field beginning to overlay the warp trail.”

“Ye think she cloaked?” That might be a good sign—the ship laying the false warp trails hadn’t left a signature of being cloaked.

“Yes.”

Hunt frowned. “Were any NXs equipped with cloaks? Those were the days before the Treaty of Algeron.”

“No. But there’s no reason why one couldn’t be fitted.”

“The ship that attacked us was Klingon, with a cloak. So, if they had a spare . . .”

“Any of us could fit a cloak to a starship if we had one to spare. The first thing we need to do is penetrate the type of cloak they’re using.”

“Cloaking technology is always evolving,” Qat’qa said. “It is one of the shortest-lived technologies, actually. Anyone who has served on a Klingon vessel can tell you that.”

“Aye, lass, that it is. It was straightforward enough back in my day, if not easy. The Klingons had cloaks on their Birds-of-Prey, and the Romulans had cloaks on theirs.” He shook his head. “Nowadays, everybody and his granny has some kind of cloaking technology, and they all need a different countermeasure. And that’s even if the cloak we’re facin’ isna a new variety.”

“It won’t be,” Nog said confidently.

“Why not?”

“Because Bok is Ferengi. The cloaks on his ships will be ones that he has bought.” Nog grimaced. “Secondhand goods.” He seemed to pull himself up slightly “He wouldn’t pay market value, so any cloaks he bought were old models.”

Qat’qa grunted. “That still leaves a lot of different possibilites.”

“Unless one of our prisoners knows where he got them,” Nog said.

“D’you think any of them might be willing to tell?” Scotty asked.

“I think I might be able to persuade them. With your permission, sir?” Scotty nodded, and Nog went to change into his best suit again. Since the Ferengi prisoners would only talk to the son of the Nagus, that was how he would go to them.

14

“That’s weird . . .” La Forge was looking through the Intrepid’s original sensor logs, in what had become the Starfleet pen, the meeting area behind the center seat.

“Commander?”

“Reg, take a look at this. What does it look like to you?”

“If I didn’t know better . . . No, it’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s really impossible, Reg. What if you didn’t know better? Pretend you don’t.”

“Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d say the upper band of this subspace signature looked as if it had been disturbed by something like a slipstream drive.”

“That’s what I thought, but I couldn’t believe it either. Thanks for the second opinion.”

“But this reading was taken two hundred years ago . . . Nobody used slipstream drive then.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before too . . . And like I said before, nobody that we know of. But there are a lot of civilizations out there that we don’t know of.”

“The rest of the readings don’t look like any slipstream signature I’ve ever seen, though.”

“No, but they do look familiar somehow. I wish I had access to the Hera’s data banks. We could compare these sensor readings with everything in the Starfleet rec—” He stopped as he noticed the baffled expression on Barclay’s face. “Reg? What’s up?”

“You said . . . I’m sorry, Geordi, maybe I misheard.”

“I said what?”

Reg looked uncomfortable. “You just said you wished we could access the Hera’s database. Not Challenger.”

“I did?” Geordi was surprised. He hadn’t thought about the Hera in a while, and couldn’t imagine why he’d have thought of it now.

Reg nodded solemnly. “The Hera disappeared years ago. Did you know anyone on her?”

“My mother was the captain . . .”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Commander, I didn’t mean to . . . well, to bring back any bad memories.”

“No worries, Reg. It was a long time ago. Why would I think about the Hera now? Except I wasn’t thinking about it, so maybe I mean what is my subconscious trying to tell me?”

“Maybe it’s something to do with these sensor readings. Do they remind you of the Hera?”

“Not consciously . . .” Geordi sat back in thought. “When the Hera originally disappeared, I was so certain that it was still in one piece . . . She had to be still in one piece because that way my mother would be still in charge, and, well, still alive.”

“That’s understandable,” Barclay said quietly.

“So, I wanted to find her, and I thought I knew where to look. But to be sure, I got ahold of everything I could about the Hera’s most recent movements . . . All the telemetry that Starfleet received before her disappearance.”

Reg looked at the display doubtfully. “The Hera was Nebula-class, wasn’t she?” Geordi nodded. “I can’t see a Nebula-class ship having put out telemetry like this, no matter what kind of engine modifications were installed.”

“Me neither. And these readings are from two hundred years ago.”

“Then what made you think about her?”

“I dunno, Reg. There must be something, if I could just think.”

“Did the telemetry from Hera include her sensor logs, or reports?”

Geordi tried to remember. “Yeah . . . you know what, I think it did.”

“Then maybe those sensor logs had a reading like this somewhere,” Barclay suggested.

La Forge mulled the idea over. “That’s not a bad idea. If I could just get access to them again, I could check.”

“Which brings us back to access to Challenger’s database.”

“Yeah, which we haven’t got.”

Challenger was still at warp, both active and passive sensors searching for even the tiniest glimmer of Intrepid.

Nog was almost ready to go off-duty and in search of raktajino, when a hiss and a moment’s chatter came and went on the communications sector of his tactical console. “What the . . . ?”

Scotty twisted around the center seat, his face lighting up with hope. “Something?”

“I thought I heard a transmission.”

“From Intrepid? It could be Geordi or Barclay trying to contact us.”

Nog tried to find the signal again. “It wasn’t directed at us. I think I just caught the edge of the transmission.”

“What did it say?”

“I’m not sure. Wait, there it is again.” Nog patched the signal through, a high-pitched squeal. Everybody on the bridge winced, Nog most of all. “It’s highly compressed.” He ran it through a database. “Definitely not of Federation origin.”

“Can you determine where the transmission is being sent from, or to?” Tyler Hunt asked. “Bok has used probes before, when he tried to make Picard think that boy was his son . . . If this transmission is something to do with him, it could point the way to the Intrepid.”

Nog worked the console, never taking his eyes or ears off what it was giving him. “I think I can narrow the source of the transmission to within a couple of meters. It’s small. Probably just to a relay station.”

“That would fit with Bok as well. Pipe its coordinates down to cargo bay two.”

Hunt rose, calling out, “Commander Hunt to transporter chief Carolan. Meet me in cargo bay two.” He darted into the turbolift, and directed it to the cargo bay. Carolan was already there when he arrived in the enormous chamber, and was powering up the cargo transporter console.

“I’m ready for whatever it is you want to transport.”

“Good. Can you get a transporter lock on a cube of space, say four meters wide at these coordinates?” He tapped the display that had been funneled down from Nog’s station.

“Need you ask?”

“All right, then, go ahead and beam in everything in that volume of space. Every particle, yeah?” Hunt could feel a buzz in his gut. It was an instinct that this cube would be important.

“Every particle,” Carolan agreed, operating the controls. After a moment, the familiar transporter whine filled the chamber, and a silvery shimmer rained down in the center of the room, leaving empty air behind. “That’s odd.”

“Wasn’t there anything there?” The few molecules in such a small volume of empty space would have been as close to nothing as made no difference, but empty space didn’t transmit signals.

“According to the transporter log, we received one hundred and thirty-six kilograms of matter.” Carolan looked baffled. “It can’t have been a stray singularity, as that would have played havoc with the annular confinement beam.”

“Not to mention local gravity.” Hunt frowned. That much material couldn’t just disappear. The first officer walked carefully toward the wide transporter pad, picking up a self-sealing stembolt from a crate as he passed it. A meter from the pad, he stopped and tossed the stembolt toward it with a gentle underhand throw.

The bolt arced gently over the edge of the pad, then bounced off nothing with a solid clang and fell to the deck. Pleased that his instinct was right, Hunt rubbed some stembolt grime from his hands. “Cloaked.”

“What is it? Some kind of buoy or satellite?” Carolan stretched out a hand to pat the invisible object.

“Maybe a probe.” He went in search of a phaser. “It’s small enough that a wide, low-power beam should overload its cloak.” He set the phaser to a medium stun setting, and washed the beam across the air above the platform until blue sparks rippled through the air, and then all of a sudden there was a two-meter-wide object sitting on the circular pad. It was a squat, stubby tube about twice the size of a photon torpedo casing, and it was a soft but dense black.

Hunt and Carolan exchanged a baffled glance. “Well well, what have we here?”

On the bridge, Leah tried everything she could think of that would detect a warp field through a cloak. When none of them worked, she started thinking up new techniques. Something was bound to help find Geordi and the others.

“There you are . . .” The something was only a few stray protons, but that was all that it needed. “Scotty, I have an energy leakage.”

“Intrepid?”

“Definitely a twenty-second-century engine.”

Scotty sat forward. “Can we tell where they are, and where they’re heading?”

“If the leakage is to be believed, Intrepid is on a heading of two-four-four mark six-three, at roughly warp three point five. Pretty slow for a getaway.”

“Aye, lass,” Scotty agreed, “but that’s about warp five on the old scale. Close to Intrepid’s maximum speed.”

“Old scale?” Nog asked.

Scotty nodded. “The warp factor scale definitions and method of calculation were changed in 2312. That’s a hundred and fifty years after the Intrepid was originally lost.”

“Then we can catch him.”

“Aye, if we can see him. But there’s a better way; if we can plot his course, and work out where he’s going . . .”

“I think we have enough information to know where Intrepid is headed,” Qat’qa said.

“Good! Where’s the scunner going?”

“On a course of two-four-four mark six-three, the only stellar body he can be making for is Delta Five in the Gamma Zeta Alpha group.”

The name was vaguely familiar to Scotty, but all those alphanumeric designations were infuriatingly familiar without being truly memorable. Names were always better. “Is that a pulsar . . .”

It was Leah who provided the name he had been trying to remember. “The Split Infinite.” She called up a file image, and put it up on the main screen. A mercurial silver ball slashed open by red and gold power. “The image was taken by a sensor array three parsecs away from the Infinite, nearly two decades ago.”

“That’s a pretty remarkable stellar phenomenon,” Nog said.

“Pulsars and neutron stars aren’t that rare.” Qat’qa opined.

“It’s not the star that’s remarkable,” Leah said, “but the fact that it shares its position with one of the very few cosmic strings whose positions have ever been recorded in normal space. The string intersects with the neutron star, producing a wormhole that could theoretically give direct access to the string—”

Scotty’s eyes narrowed. “Of course . . . That’s why Rasmussen has come here.”

“For a rotating cosmic string?” Nog asked.

“Not such an unlikely idea,” Leah said slowly. “There’s a lot of energy tied up in there, but he doesn’t have the equipment to collect it in any usable form.”

“He doesna need a collector for what he wants,” Scotty said, his voice leaden. “It’s a natural Tipler cylinder,” Leah said suddenly. “That’s why he’s come here. We’ve all been looking at Bok the wrong way.”

“In what way?” Nog looked blank.

“We’ve all viewed Bok as being obsessed with Jean-Luc Picard, and obsessed with revenge. But that’s not it at all. His obsession is with his son’s death.”

“Caused by Captain Picard.”

“Yes, but the subsequent obsession with avenging himself on Picard isn’t the actual obsession. It’s just the only thing he thought he could do in relation to his son’s death. A grief he can’t get over.”

“And now he’s found something he can do about it,” Scotty said, understanding. “Mister Nog,” Scotty began decisively, “would ye kindly put in a call to the people at the Department of Temporal Investigations. I’d like to think that our friend Rasmussen there is somebody that they will have been takin’ some interest in.”

15

Intrepid slowed to impulse power on the outskirts of the Delta Five Gamma Zeta Alpha system. Far ahead, at the system’s heart, a shrunken silver eye burned dully. The poles of the neutron star were visible in most spectra, but the center of it was obscured by far greater energies, which somehow seemed to both originate far beyond the neutron star and blaze out ahead of it.

Wherever the Intrepid went, the star always looked the same. The two arcs of the neutron star were above and below, providing a frame through which a wormhole vortex was seen. Deep in the heart of the vortex, which itself tore at the star without diminishing it, a blazing serpent twisted madly, spinning thousands of times a second. It spun a web of golden energy, which beamed out from the wormhole, obscuring the rest of the star.

Close to the star and its anomalies, the stony remnants of planets had formed several crossed bands, dancing between each other under the effects of tremendous gravitational forces.

The silver and golden light cast from the anomalous star played out from the main viewer and across the faces and furnishings on Intrepid’s bridge. Bok, standing in front of the screen, gazed at the light playing across his hand, and felt his heart skip a beat. His hand looked as if it were made of gold-pressed latinum, shining and powerful. “Impressive,” he murmured.

“The stuff that dreams are made of,” Rasmussen agreed. He flexed his fingers.

“It’s beautiful,” Barclay whispered. His expression was somehow as muted and hushed as his tone. He and La Forge were, under the watchful gaze of a Breen guard, monitoring the master systems table at the rear of the bridge, and were just as affected by the sight on the main viewer.

“La Forge had seen a lot of beautiful and strange astronomical phenomena over the years, but none quite as radiant a jewel as this. “The energy readings coming out of there are like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“What about planets?” Rasmussen asked.

Geordi shook his head. “The level of gravimetric forces centered on the star is whole . . . levels of magnitude greater than anything a planet could withstand. They’re just so much rubble now.”

“Most neutron stars have a few dead planets orbiting them,” Reg said.

“Most neutron stars don’t have all that other stuff pouring out of them.” Geordi indicated the figures scrolling across the tabletop screen. “Elevated neutrino and chroniton readings. . . . It’s a wormhole, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.”

Barclay made a few calculations on another screen. “I think it just loops round and goes to where it already is, but that can’t account for the gravitational power we’re seeing.”

“What is that at the center of the star? Beyond the wormhole.”

“I suppose . . . No, it’s impossible.”

“In my experience most of what we think is impossible are just things we haven’t come across yet. Go ahead, Reg, what are you thinking?”

“Readings suggest a cosmic string, but its throwing off kinetoplasmadynamic readings like nobody’s business.”

“It’s moving?” Geordi was surprised.

“Spinning, I think. Incredibly quickly too.”

“A cosmic string?” Geordi tried the thought out for size. “Intersecting with a neutron star . . .” The thought was disturbing, on too many levels. Between radiation and gravitational instability, this was not a good system to be in.

“And the gravimetric interference patterns between them create a wormhole link from point to point, allowing energy to come off the string . . .” Reg’s eyes widened. “The Split Infinite!”

La Forge could have kicked himself. “Right! I knew the system designation was familiar.” How could he not have remembered the name?

“The radiation levels are off the scale,” Reg went on. “Only a gamma ray burst could flood the system more.”

“Yeah, which makes me wonder . . .” La Forge lowered his voice further. “What the hell are Bok and Rasmussen doing here?”

Reg shrugged. “Wait . . . Bok is obsessed with getting revenge on Captain Picard, and Rasmussen wants to steal technology and claim the credit for it . . .”

“Right. But what could they want that they could get here?” La Forge asked.

“The radiogenic particles flooding out of it could be collected, I suppose . . . used for fuel?”

“Or as a weapon.”

“But neither Intrepid nor their marauder is equipped for that sort of energy collection.”

“It would take some really specialized equipment to harvest the particles or the energy, Reg. So . . . they’d have to wait for it.”

“Wait?”

“Yeah, Reg. A rendezvous is the only reason I can think of for someone to come here. Whether it’s a rendezvous with something to collect the energy coming out of the Infinite, or just with another ship for smuggling or to pass along the Intrepid to a private collector of antiquities I don’t know.”

“Scientific study?” Barclay offered.

“Rasmussen may be a scientist of sorts, but Bok doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who’s that much interested in scientific research.”

Bok suddenly turned his attention to the two Starfleet engineers. “You don’t know why we’re here? That’s disappointing, coming from two of Starfleet’s finest engineers.”

“Maybe you’d like to gloat as you tell us,” Geordi said sourly.

Bok smiled tightly. “I think I prefer enjoying the fruits of my labors over talking about them.”

“You’re expecting to make a profit?” That was the Ferengi way, though La Forge couldn’t see where profit would come from here.

“Oh yes, La Forge. More profit than you can dream of.”

“Nobody in Starfleet dreams about profit. It’s not why we join the service.”

“Perhaps, then, I should say more profit than Ras-mew-son dreams of.”

“I think Rasmussen can dream of quite a lot,” said La Forge.

Bok laughed. “I’m sure he does. But he doesn’t think of what you would call the big picture.”

“You mean your plan’s a little different than his.” La Forge had expected as much. It was Bok’s way.

Bok scowled, glancing back at the entranced Rasmussen. “That is not what I said.”

“Does he know that you’re thinking of a bigger picture?”

“He knows what he needs to know.”

“I guess that’s a ‘no’ then.”

“What we are doing originated with him. This began with his plan.”

“But it ends with your plan, right?”

Bok grabbed Geordi by the collar and shoved him against the wall. Barclay moved forward as if to intervene, but the Breen guard stuck the barrel of his rifle into Reg’s gut, none too gently. “Don’t think for one second that you understand me, hew-mon!”

“Maybe you can explain,” La Forge gasped.

Bok’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, you’re trying to rile me? Make me let something slip? This isn’t a game of tongo, La Forge.”

“Whoever you’re waiting for here—”

“Waiting for? You’re in for a great surprise.” He shoved La Forge aside, and turned away. Bok paused to speak to Rasmussen for a moment before leaving the bridge. La Forge considered whether this was a suitable moment to try to take some action to remedy the situation they were in, but the guards were taking even more interest in them now. He decided to wait. This ancient bridge was dark enough to make misinterpretations of movements all too easy, and he didn’t want to get shot for scratching an itch. Fighting smarter, rather than harder, was always for the best. He couldn’t sabotage Bok’s scheme before knowing what that scheme was, or how it was supposed to work.

“Commander,” Reg said cautiously, “I’ve been thinking about string. I mean, the string. It’s spinning, right, and also a cosmic string is the only thing we know of that can be infinitely long. Or at least, can stretch across the length of the universe’s timeline . . .

Ice seemed to be crystallizing around La Forge’s back, and he felt goose bumps rise on his skin. “That gives me a really nasty idea, and I hope it’s not the idea that Bok and Rasmussen have had.”

“The string is spinning, and if it’s long enough . . .”

“It could act as a Tipler cylinder.”

“A doorway into the past.”

“Yeah . . . That would fit with Rasmussen’s being here. He might see it as a way home. But Bok . . . ?”

“I dread to think what Bok might do in the past.” La Forge stepped away from the table, and stepped up to address Rasmussen, who slouched in the center seat. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want to take Intrepid through time. Enter through the wormhole, and fly a spiral course back along the string, at warp.”

Rasmussen applauded. “I knew you’d figure it out! Now, be honest, Geordi, it gives you a buzz to have worked out the right answer yourself, even if it’s an answer you’d rather not have?”

La Forge didn’t want to make himself a liar, so, dodging the question, he said, “Intrepid wasn’t built to be a time machine. She’s not designed for expeditions to grab future technology or to take it to the past.”

Rasmussen shrugged. “All I intend to do is take Intrepid home.”

“That’s where she would be going anyway. We’ll fly her back to Earth—”

“No, Geordi, you don’t get it. I intend to take her properly home.” La Forge felt the blood drain from his face, and a pit open in his stomach. “Next stop, 2162.”

“So, all this is just another scam to take back future technology into the past so that you can ‘invent’ it and get rich?”

“The Intrepid isn’t future technology,” Rasmussen protested. “It’s a ship from my time that wasn’t destroyed as the authorities thought it was.”

“It’s also got a twenty-fourth-century Klingon cloak aboard, not to mention all the upgrades and tools we brought over from Challenger.”

“Ah, there are a few knickknacks, I admit. Poor Mister Nog, going to all that trouble to scan me every time I stepped out of a runabout, and never looking at the stash of souvenirs I had left in the runabout. They’re just a bonus, really, though. Not the objective of the exercise.”

“A pretty big bonus.”

“And, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t care if none of them were on board. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to look that gift horse in his mouth, but . . .” His voice saddened a little, La Forge thought. It was a good act, but he wasn’t going to be fooled by it.

“Okay, it’s a bonus. So, for a bonus you’ll be ‘inventing’ our gear, and trying to force us to help you?”

“Yes and no, respectively.” Rasmussen spread his hands magnanimously. “If you want to disappear off to some remote Alaskan isle and never be noticed by history, I won’t stop you.” Geordi didn’t believe a word of it.

“Commander La Forge . . . I just want to go home. I want to go and eat at the Hidden Panda’s buffet, and drink bourbon served by Jo—Well, you don’t know her anyway.” He turned away with a shake of the head and a wave of the hand. “I want to smell and taste the air I grew up with. Walk down the streets and the riverside that always used to inspire me. Don’t you understand?”

“I think I do, but . . . Sometimes you just have to accept that your past is . . . past. Once you’ve left your home, it can never really be home again.”

“I didn’t really leave New Jersey by choice.”

“Stealing a time ship sounds like a choice to me.”

“I only ever intended to briefly visit a few places, and return home. I no more intended to leave Earth than I intend to leave home forever when I go grocery shopping. But the time pod had its own ideas . . .” His habitual and annoying supercilious smile had gone, and La Forge thought this time that Rasmussen was telling the truth.

“Commander . . . I know you think I’m just a thief and a conman, and you’re not totally wrong, but . . . I’ve been living out of my own time for over a decade, and it’s time to go home.”

“Is there anything about the way we live our lives now that you don’t like?”

“Not really, no. Replicators, holodecks, all those things are fabulous, and I’ll probably miss them.”

“Then why, if it’s not for the chance to try to get rich or powerful or famous, do you want to go back and live without those advances?”

Rasmussen turned away for a moment. “Everyone I know is dead, Geordi.” He sighed deeply. “It’s not just that they’re dead because they lived two hundred years ago. I didn’t . . . I don’t even know how to phrase what I’m trying to tell you . . .”

La Forge understood. “We all have people we didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to, Rasmussen.”

“Not all of them are people we can get back.”

Guinan stepped cautiously onto the Challenger’s bridge, receiving some surprised looks in the process. Scotty rose immediately, all Celtic charm as he offered her his seat. “It’s all right, Scotty,” she said, “I just wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Go right ahead.”

“In private.” Scotty wondered what she meant by that, but didn’t mind.

“Let’s go into the ready room.” They stepped through, and Guinan paused to admire the ornaments on the walls. “Raktajino, double cream, twice,” Scotty said to the replicator. “What’s so important that it brings ye to the bridge?”

“I’ve been thinking about Rasmussen, and the Split Infinite.”

Scotty knew nobody had formally informed her of what was happening, but wasn’t surprised that she knew. Typical ship’s scuttlebutt and a member of a species nicknamed Listeners made for an inevitable conclusion. “Ye remember Rasmussen from your days on the Enterprise?”

“I do.”

“But have ye ever heard of the Split Infinite before now?”

“It’s quite famous where I come from. You know what I’d like to know?”

“Ye strike me as the kind o’ lady who doesn’t need to ask many questions in order to know what needs to be known. But, well, what did ye have in mind?”

Guinan half-closed her eyes, the smile of a pleased cat. “If Rasmussen is just trying to go back in time, why come all the way out to the Split Infinite to do it?”

“Those old warp five engines on Intrepid canna take the strain of a slingshot round a star—”

She shook her head sharply, the cat-gaze now more focused. “You know what I’m asking. Why doesn’t he use that big old talking donut? You know the one I mean.”

“I’m sure I don’t, lass.” He hoped he sounded affronted enough.

“You’re a miracle worker, Scotty, but you’re a rotten liar. All right, let me try three little words for you: Guardian. Of. Forever.”

Scotty dropped the pretense of ignorance. “Those are highly classified words, Guinan. How would you happen to have heard of them?”

Guinan gave him a coquettish look. “I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve listened to a lot of people. The question still stands: Why doesn’t Rasmussen try to use it?”

Scotty nodded gently. “Aye . . . As I said, those are highly classified words. It’s not very likely that he would have had access to the kind of information that mentions the Guardian. And even if he did, the location is even more secret.”

“Ferengi have a way of buying secrets, and I remember Bok from my days on the Enterprise as well. I’d be surprised if he hasn’t at least heard of it.”

“The Guardian is also well guarded. Not least by itself. It’s like that.”

“I hoped it would be.”

“Well, what else do you imagine? It wouldna do for the Borg to have got ahold of it, or for, say, the Romulans to start messing around with it.” He gave her what he hoped was a reliable and reassuring smile. “Time travel might be more common than we believe, but it’s nowhere near as easy as some people would like to think.”

“Who’d have thought time travel would be so easy?” Rasmussen reflected in his cabin.

Bok grunted, trying to catch the movement of the walls out of the corner of his eye. He was sure this room was even smaller now than when he had first seen it. He nearly shivered, but suppressed the sign of weakness. The profit he was making here was worth a little discomfort. “The riskier the road, the greater the profit.”

“Is that one of those Rules of Acquisition I keep hearing about?”

“Rule sixty-two.” Let the hew-mon think he was referring to time travel, rather than to being in this upright coffin that barely deserved to be called a room. “We should get rid of the Starfleeters now.”

“There’s no need. Besides, I already told you they’re useful for continuing to keep the ship up to standard.”

“They are also useful at interfering. They will not stand by and let us complete our mission. And even if they did, what about when we arrive in 2162?” He knew Rasmussen wasn’t keeping them alive out of a fondness for them. It was obvious to Bok that the man wanted to cut some private deal with them to “invent” things in 2162.

“What about it?”

“The more people taken back, the greater the risk of violating the conservation of reality.”

Rasmussen shook his head, making a soothing gesture. “No, no, no. They won’t.”

“They will, because interfering is what Starfleeters do.”

“They will not, because Starfleet has not just a Prime Directive, but a Temporal Prime Directive, and a Department of Temporal Investigations. They’re specifically trained and forbidden, if they should somehow happen to end up back in their past, from doing anything that would alter the timeline.”

“So what will they do?”

“Either try to get a ship to jump forward again back to now, or hide themselves away and not make waves. That’s a standing order. Oh, they may or may not be persuaded to help with a little DIY project or two, but once we’ve transited through the Infinite, the worst they’ll do is go away and live out quiet lives.”

“Without making profits on their situation?” As far as Bok was concerned, that was all the more reason to remove them from the universal gene pool.

“I know. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“That’s not the word I would use,” Bok said, and left the cabin at last. He was so glad to be out of there and back in the drab and dim corridor that he almost walked straight into La Forge.

Geordi La Forge thought it was only fair to try reasoning with Bok the same way he had tried reasoning with Rasmussen. He didn’t expect it to work, but a divide and conquer strategy might make things a little easier. He hoped so, anyway.

He had come down on a pretense of checking a power junction, accompanied by a Breen guard, and had contrived to remain within a couple of meters of the door to the captain’s cabin so he could hear Bok and Rasmussen.

When Bok emerged, La Forge let him almost stumble into him, and then fell into step beside him. The Breen guard followed a couple of paces behind.

“I just can’t believe you’re willing to help Rasmussen go back home.”

“No? Not even if there’s some profit in it?”

La Forge barked a short laugh. “You can’t pull that one with me, Bok. You may be a Ferengi, but, last I heard you did time for not putting profit ahead of revenge.”

“Perhaps I’ve found a way to gain both.”

“In the past? You mean by changing history?”

“Ah . . . Now there is a dangerous game.”

“That tends not to stop people who are obsessed.”

“Very true.”

“What are you going to do? Blow up Earth just to get rid of Captain Picard’s ancestors?”

Bok laughed. “It’s revenge—and profit—I want, Commander. Not meaningless carnage. I know you think I’m an obsessive, crazy murderer. I also know that you do not know me that well. Not as well as, say, I know Picard.”

“I was there both times when you’ve tried to avenge yourself on him. I think I can say I know you well enough.”

“I have no intention of making huge changes to the past, La Forge, because I’m not stupid. Certainly not stupid enough to risk doing anything that would negate my son’s existence. Likewise I have no intention of violating the law of conservation of reality, and trapping myself in an alternate timeline, leaving my son still dead in this one. I also have a few other matters to attend to in the twenty-second century.” Bok tapped a padd. “I have here a list of investments to make, banks offering high-interest deposits. Two hundred years’ worth of yield should prove most profitable, even by hew-mon standards.”

“Let me guess, that’s the Shadow Treasurers’ side of the deal.”

“They wanted something in return for the hiring of the vessels and mercenaries. A small price to pay.”

“And the thought of trying to take Captain Picard out of history never occurred.”

Bok halted. “Ah, now there’s a precious idea, beyond the dreams of avarice. Make sure there is no Jean-Luc Picard. With no Jean-Luc Picard, there is no Battle of Maxia. With no Battle of Maxia, my son remains alive.”

“With no Jean-Luc Picard there’s no defense against the Borg incursions of the past—”

“With no Jean-Luc Picard, there’s no provoking the Q into introducing an Alpha Quadrant vessel to the Borg,” Bok countered instantly. “That means no Borg invasion. As you can see, removing Picard’s existence would be doing the Federation some much-needed favors also.”

“Is that all that matters to you, Bok? Revenge?”

“No, hew-mon, not revenge. Family.”

“Family.”

“Nothing is more important than blood. Not profit, not latinum, not the Nagus, and not your Federation.” La Forge felt a bizarre mix of sympathy and astonishment. He had never heard a Ferengi put anything ahead of profit, other than Bok’s own drive for revenge. “Have you never lost a member of your family, hew-mon?”

La Forge momentarily imagined he could see his mother’s face one more time, and that there was a hint of her perfume in the air. “Everybody has.”

“True, but I mean, shall we say, before their time. Suddenly and far away, leaving you no chance to prepare for the adjustments that must be made to your life . . . and no chance to say goodbye,” Bok finished quietly.

“Yes,” La Forge admitted cautiously. “I do understand. There’s an old saying, from one of the largest regions on Earth, that the greatest curse the gods can bestow is for a parent to outlive their children.”

“Then there is some wisdom on Earth, and misfortune, to have learned such a lesson so well. Do your people have anything to say about revenge?”

“There’s one about first digging two graves before setting out on revenge.” La Forge hesitated. “You know that getting revenge won’t bring your son back.”

“A lot of people have told me that, over the years, and it took a long time for me to realize that they were right. Revenge will not bring my son back.” He clenched his fists, but then shook his head and unclenched them with a wave. “I realized that I was looking at the matter the wrong way. I should have been looking at how to bring my son back.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible.”

“And the ends justify any means?” La Forge shivered. “How much damage would you inflict to get the ends you want?”

“Ends, beginnings . . . I will do whatever it takes.” Bok peered at Geordi, his smile widening. “You’re afraid, La Forge? Terrified, for the future, for the very existence of your precious Federation?” Bok laughed. “Understandable. A man with a grudge and a time machine would be something it would be wise to be afraid of.”

“Is this your way of gloating, Bok?”

“Gloating . . .” Bok shrugged. “Perhaps. It would feel better to be saying such things to Picard, but his lackey will have to do. If it’s reassurances you want, let me reassure you that I’m not planning to do anything that would jeopardize the existence of my son.”

“Apart from creating whole new timelines.”

“No!” La Forge was surprised by the sudden flash of rage in Bok’s eyes. The Ferengi grabbed him by the throat, his nails digging painfully into La Forge’s neck. “No new timelines! I will not tolerate a timeline in which my son does not live, and I will not bear having his life be shuffled aside into some alternate timeline!” La Forge stared into the snarling face of a madman. Bok released him after a moment, pushing him away. “You may be reassured,” the Ferengi continued stiffly, “that I am bearing in mind the law of conservation of reality.”

“Conservation of reality?” It was rare that La Forge heard of a scientific law that was new to him, but this was definitely one. “You mentioned that before.”

“Twenty-sixth-century science, La Forge. Beyond your comprehension.”

“If it’s not beyond yours, it’s not beyond mine.”

Bok sighed, and almost seemed to shrink, though he lost none of his grim intensity. “I am not going to erase Picard from history, though it was amusing to let you think so.” Geordi felt momentarily dizzy, though he wasn’t sure whether it was from Bok’s apparent change of heart, or being half-throttled. “I am going,” Bok continued, “to ensure that my son does not attend the Battle of Maxia.” He gave a dismissive wave. “Let Picard kill some other Ferengi, while my son stays safe on Ferenginar to earn his own profits. That is the change I will make to the timeline. The protection of my son’s life, arranged two hundred years in advance.”

16

The only place on the ship where the guards didn’t have their eyes on the Starfleet officers was in the washroom that had been set up in what was originally Intrepid’s decontamination suite. Blue lighting gave the shower stalls a bizarre and headache-inducing tone that made the place feel cold and impersonal.

It was the perfect place to meet to plan. Reg and Balis were already waiting, Balis’s blue skin was a terrifyingly corpse-like gray by the light, when La Forge walked in and explained what Bok had told him.

“To be honest,” La Forge admitted, “Bok’s so obsessed with what happened to his son that I’m surprised he’s never tried something like this before.” He fixed Reg and Balis with a look of grim determination. “We have to regain control of Intrepid. Or . . .” He gritted his teeth, wishing he didn’t have to say the words. “Or destroy it.”

“At least we’re not alone.”

“We’re not? We look pretty alone to me, Reg.”

“On this ship, yes, but Challenger will be following, you said so yourself. Scotty is—”

“A miracle worker, I know. And if anyone can follow a cloaked ship, he can. But even if they follow us to the Split Infinite, we’re still going to have to prevent Bok from taking the ship in, and I doubt we have much time. We’ve been here long enough already.”

“Their guards are watching us all the time,” Balis said. “How are we going to get the chance to do anything?”

“We’ll have to make our own chances,” Geordi said.

On the bridge, a Ferengi hurried over to Bok, crouching obsequiously. “Daimon, we’ve located Kren’s ship. It is dead.”

“Kren has finally managed to get his ship destroyed?” The man was always too eager for his own good.

“No. We’re still receiving telemetry from their warp core. The ship still exists, at least.”

“Either way, Challenger will begin pursuing us.”

“If they have any idea where we were heading.”

“They have enough engineering brainpower aboard to have a good chance of tracking us.”

“We should have destroyed them,” Sloe pointed out.

Bok grimaced. “That would have been nice, yes, but a Galaxy-class vessel is infuriatingly powerful. Delaying them gives us a much better margin of success.”

“I hope you’re sure of that.”

“Experience makes me sure,” Bok reminded him. He moved over to the communications console, and opened a channel to the K’t’inga-class ship that was in his employ. “Harga, this is Bok.”

“Harga here, Daimon.”

“Challenger has neutralized Kren’s vessel. Backtrack and make sure that the Federation ship is not following. If it is, do what you can to hold it in check.”

“Consider them checked.”

Rasmussen was waiting outside the decontamination section when La Forge, Barclay, and Balis emerged, just in time to see Sloe run to greet him. “It’s time for the test.”

Rasmussen clapped his hands together. “I’m on my way.” He turned. “Geordi, Reg, you might want to come along and watch the test.”

“Test?”

“The scientific method, Geordi. You don’t seriously think I’m going to risk flying into the Infinite without first making sure that the trip can be done?”

“You mean Bok didn’t already test it from his ship?”

“He would have attracted too much attention.”

Rasmussen and Sloe led them to the armory, which was now just a gray box, since Commander Hunt had transported most of its contents back to Challenger. The crates that Bok’s men had brought with them were stacked in one corner, cut off from everyone by a portable forcefield generator. La Forge would dearly have loved to know what was in them, and what they had to do with Bok and/or Rasmussen’s plans, but the guards raised their weapons toward him as soon as he took a step in the direction of the crates.

Bok glared at him from the depths of his hollow eyes, and waggled a finger warningly. “Next time, La Forge, the guards will just shoot.”

Stepping aside, Geordi wondered what anything in here could have to do with traveling through the Infinite.

As Bok supervised, two Ferengi maneuvered a torpedo-like probe on a cradle into the room. Unlike a photon torpedo casing, its matte surface was curved and bulging with sensor nodes and lenses. They slid it into the center of the armory, and stopped before Bok. “The probe is ready,” one of them said, somewhat unnecessarily.

“Good. Ras-mew-son?”

Rasmussen handed Sloe a guidance chip. “The course is pre-programmed already. All we have to do is point and shoot.” He made a pistol gesture with his fingers, then blew across the tip of his index finger. Sloe nodded, and slotted the guidance chip into an access panel on the probe’s surface.

Bok drew his phaser and adjusted it to a low setting, then used the beam to scrawl his name across a blank piece of the probe’s surface in Ferengi script. “That should be sufficient as a test.”

“And automatically a collectible,” Rasmussen pointed out.

Bok glared at him for a second, then grinned nastily. “Profit before we even begin. Surely an omen.”

Sloe closed up the access panel and nodded to the two Ferengi handlers, who moved the probe toward the torpedo bay.

By the time everyone returned to the bridge, the probe was reported in position, and ready to fire. Sloe took the tactical position, with Bok and Rasmussen flanking him. La Forge and Barclay waited by the conference table. Bok and Rasmussen were hopping with excitement as Sloe acquainted himself with the tactical controls. “Whenever you’re ready, Sloe,” Bok prompted.

“Well, if I’m reading these controls right—”

“Then you’ll get to live,” Bok intoned through gritted teeth. “Get on with it.”

“Target the Infinite,” Rasmussen said, “but along the vector we already calculated from this position. If we’re even a fraction off, we’ll never know if it works.”

Sloe nodded, manipulating the controls, pausing before he hit the fire button. Intrepid trembled slightly, and everyone on the bridge instinctively looked to the screen. A blazing pinpoint of light streaked away from the ship, and arced gracefully toward the eye-bending multidimensional flower of plasma that bloomed ahead.

“Probe running true,” Sloe reported. “Entering the Infinite in sixteen seconds.”

Rasmussen remained where he was, his gut twisting into tense knots, desperate to know already what would happen. Bok stepped around and sat in the center seat without removing his eyes from the screen.

“Eight seconds,” Sloe said. “This is jolly exciting—”

“Terrifying, you mean,” Rasmussen grumbled.

“Three seconds . . . two . . . one . . . contact with the Infinite.” Sloe’s voice was tight with suppressed excitement. He looked up. “Contact with the probe lost, on course at loss of contact.”

“Now comes the interesting part,” Rasmussen said. “And by interesting I really mean boring and laborious.” He took the science station, and beckoned Barclay over. “You can help me out here. If our calculations are right, we need to scan an area from ten to fifteen thousand kilometers off the port beam, but we don’t know what’s happened in this system over the past two hundred years, so something might have thrown it off even if we’re right . . .”

Leah hadn’t wanted to leave the ops position, not while Intrepid was still missing, with Geordi and the others aboard. Eventually, Scotty had pointed out to her that she’d be no good to anyone if she fell asleep at her post, and sent her to rest and eat. All of the bridge crew had stayed on duty well past what should have been the end of their shifts, and her going was the trigger for everyone else to realize that they were allowed to stand down and trust the beta shift team.

Without thinking about it, Leah found her way to Nelson’s, where Guinan was sitting by the huge windows, leaving her shaven-headed and maroon-blazered deputy to look after the few people who needed anything.

“You look like you’ve got a lot of weight on your shoulders,” Guinan said.

“Eleven people and a historical treasure in the hands of a time-traveling conman and a vengeful Ferengi mercenary. I’d call that cause to worry.”

Guinan nodded sympathetically.

“It’s just that . . .” Leah shrugged. “If it was a drive technology problem, or an engine design problem, I know I could do something. Find a solution. But this . . .” She rested her head in her hands. “This makes me feel like the most useless person on the ship.”

“Would you be surprised if I told you Scotty feels that way?”

“I don’t know that I’d believe you.”

“It’s true. I hear you’re doing well with the sensors. You knew what the Split Infinite was.”

“I just hope Geordi’s all right. And Reg, and the others.”

“I think they’ll be just fine. For now, anyway.”

“For now?”

“I think . . . I think things are going to become difficult for Geordi, and I think that’s why I came on board.”

“You think?”

“I feel, rather than think. It’s a long story, Leah.”

Leah thought about what she’d heard about why Guinan left the Enterprise. “The Nexus, right?”

“A part of you never leaves the Nexus. I see, hear, and have memories of things that have happened, and of things that haven’t happened yet, but could. And I remembered a moment of being on a starship with Geordi, when he learned . . . Well, never mind. It wasn’t a memory of today.”

“At least, you don’t think so.”

“There’s an old quotation that ‘Time is like a river.’ In the Nexus, I learned the river can change course. In the Nexus, it can flow uphill.”

“I always thought—” Leah was interrupted as the Red Alert klaxon began to blare, cutting through Nelson’s like phaser fire, and sending everyone out of their seats.

“Senior staff to the bridge,” Carolan’s voice called.

Leah and Guinan could see what the source of the alert was. Hurtling right towards Nelson’s huge bay windows, the first torpedo was already blazing in the direction of the Challenger.

Intrepid gleamed as it heeled around, turning its dorsal surfaces toward the rippling late glow of the Split Infinite. She had spent several hours moving away from the Infinite, in a tireless search pattern.

La Forge ignored the beauty on the main viewer, concentrating on the sensors. He was using a low-band active sensor, and directing as much power to the lateral arrays as possible without being noticed. It was probably too much to hope that the sensors would be detected by Challenger, but a slim hope was always better than none.

Something pinged on the monitor he was using. He was disappointed to see what it was. He considered not calling it out, but Sloe was moving toward the monitor anyway, so he announced, “Sensor contact off the port bow! Seven thousand kilometers.”

“Sloe?” Bok asked.

Sloe nudged La Forge out of the way and double-checked the reading. “Whatever it is isn’t generating any energy, but it is about two meters long and its composition matches that of our probe.”

“Beam it aboard,” Bok ordered hungrily.

“Klingon battle-cruiser decloaking! Firing torpedoes!”

Scotty couldn’t help feeling that Tyler Hunt’s words were something of a blast from the past, and immediately regretted it as the first shattering photon torpedo exploded under the saucer section, rocking the ship upward like a boxer on the receiving end of an uppercut. The shields held, but Scotty knew there would be more than bruises on the forward decks.

Nog and Qat’qa ran in, relieving their beta-shift counterparts, who immediately went to standby consoles at the rear of the bridge, to give support to any section that needed it.

“It must be the one Kren told us about,” Nog said.

“No kid gloves this time, Nog. Try to disable them, but if ye have to destroy them, do it.”

“Understood,” Nog acknowledged solemnly.

Qat’qa had already thrown the Challenger into a wide barrel-roll, neatly dodging the second and third torpedoes.

Nog couldn’t quite get a bead on any vital systems, so he settled for testing their shields with a selection of phaser blasts as they passed. The enemy shields were quick to react. “Kat, their shields seem to be weakest below the neck section.”

“I will line you up.”

Challenger side-slipped under the enemy ship as it tried to come around for another attack run, and Nog let rip with full phasers and torpedoes, concentrating on the underside of the long neck-boom. The mercenary ship’s shields flared and dropped. “Shields are down. I’ll try Odo’s trick again.” Nog reached for the link to the transporter controls, but they didn’t work. “They’ve got a transporter inhibitor running.”

“Ye know the best way to kill a snake,” Scotty said, pointing at the Klingon vessel on screen. “Cut off the head, and the body will die.”

Qat’qa looked around at him, and grinned like a jungle cat at the watering hole. Scott ordered, “Nog, treble the strength of the forward shields. Use power from the ventral and aft shields if you have to.”

“Sir, you’re not thinking of . . . ?”

“Aye, lad,” Scotty said, with a look to match Kat’s. “That I am!”

The Klingon ship started to roll, her shields flickering back to minimal life, but too late. Her crew doubtless expected another phaser exchange, and perhaps an attempt at capture.

They did not expect the leading edge of Challenger’s saucer to hurtle toward their ship’s neck like a guillotine blade.

Leah, Guinan, and the few other people in Nelson’s leapt for whatever cover they could find, knowing that it wouldn’t do them any good if the shields failed, but they were unable to stop themselves from taking the action anyway.

Grabbing on to whatever was fixed down, and holding on for dear life, they had a first-rate view of the approaching flame-painted neck section of the enemy craft. Searing phaser fire stabbed out from above and below the windows, and a couple of burning torpedoes soared up from below, converging on the neck of the Klingon battlecruiser.

The Klingon’s shields flickered out, and hull plates began to peel off, hurled toward Nelson’s by spreading explosions. Then the burning gases dissipated into the vacuum as Challenger’s triple-strength forward shields punched into the exposed corridors and conduits.

Their shields flared white hot, blinding them for a moment. Then structural spars and charred corpses flew above and below the windows, as Challenger severed the other ship’s command section from its larger secondary hull.

Then there were stars in front of the windows again, and Leah could scarcely believe that she, and everyone else, was unharmed.

The ancient twenty-second-century transporter sparkled and spat, whining as it tried to bring something on board for the first time in centuries. Barclay shuddered. He had just about gotten over his transporter phobia, but such an ancient machine was quite likely to bring on a relapse.

After several agonizing seconds, a cylindrical shape materialized on the pad. It was cold and dark, but recognizably the same probe they had so recently launched.

Bok approached cautiously, tracing his finger over the signature he had carved into it. “It is the same probe . . .”

Sloe opened an access panel on the surface, then removed and examined the probe’s internal chronometer. “The internal chronometer records that the probe was active for forty-seven standard years, and ceased to function some hundred and twenty years ago.”

“Perfect! It’s here—still here at the correct time!” Bok exclaimed as Rasmussen whooped for joy.

“It works! It works!”

“As soon as the nonessentials are removed back to the marauder, we can make the transit ourselves.”

Rasmussen let the thought wash over him, bathing in its beauty. “It’s time to go home.”

17

Barclay scrubbed some chemical cleansers from his hands in the decontamination section, while La Forge took the chance to perform some maintenance on his eyes. “Something’s bothering me about all of this.”

“What is it, Reg?”

“Bok . . . he wants to go back in time, right? And he’s found a spatial phenomenon that will work as a Tipler object, to enable him to do it without having to worry about acquiring technology that’s too well-guarded . . .”

“Yeah, so?”

“Why the Intrepid? I mean, I know Rasmussen is happy with a ship from his time, but what about Bok?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he has modern-day ships. A D’Kora-class marauder, fitted with a Klingon cloak, a K’T’inga-, and Vor’cha-class, so . . . So, why is he so bothered about taking this fossil ship back? If he took his own ship back, it would be decades—centuries, even—in advance of everyone else.”

“I think because he’s paranoid,” La Forge said slowly.

“Paranoid?”

“Think about it, Reg: he got this whole idea from Rasmussen, who was able to time travel after stealing a vessel from the future. I think Bok’s being very cautious to make sure that the same thing that happened to that twenty-sixth century professor doesn’t happen to him.”

“His ship being stolen.”

“Exactly. The Intrepid is from the era he’s going to, so it’ll blend right in. If he took a modern ship back, there’d be too much risk of someone else using it to mess with the timeline in a way other than what he has in mind. And since he wants to change things with his knowledge, he doesn’t need twenty-fourth-century hardware to do that.”

“It sounds like all the more reason to—” Barclay looked unhappy, but continued, “all the more reason to stop him.”

“There’s definitely no time like the present,” La Forge said, all too aware of the irony.

“Bok’s thugs are right outside, and they seem pretty trigger happy.” Barclay paced in an irritating fashion, as he always did when he was thinking something through. La Forge let the irritation slide off of him; anything that helped them work things out was fine with him. “I know it’s irrational, but I felt that coming over here was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, you did, Reg.”

“It’s a ghost ship. I remember I said that too.”

“Yeah, you did. But Reg . . .” La Forge stopped. Something about that phrase struck a chord.

Ghost ship.

Ghost.

He felt a shiver run through him. He had been a ghost once. Literally so. “That’s it! You’re a genius, Reg!”

“I am?”

“This is a ghost ship, and it needs some ghosts to haunt it.”

Reg looked at him uncertainly. “How . . . do we get some ghosts?”

“Adapt the transporter’s phase inverter to produce chroniton interference from the cloak.”

“Make ourselves out of phase with the ship?” Barclay grasped the idea at once.

Geordi nodded. “It happened to me once on the Enterprise. No one could see or hear me, and I could walk through walls. Ro Laren was with me, and it happened to her too, and to a Romulan. We could interact with each other, but nobody else could.”

“Isn’t that a bit like . . . being consciously dematerialized?” Reg went pale.

“Look on the bright side, Reg: you won’t have to worry about remembering to step over those door lintels every time we walk into a room on this ship.”

“But how will we get back to being . . . solid?”

Geordi was remembering the event in more detail as he thought about repeating it. “When Ro and I were put out of phase, it took a bombardment of anyon particles to combat the effect of the chronitons and bring us back into phase.”

“But we won’t be able to touch any consoles, or trigger an anyon bombardment. Unless we already had something like a timer set up. Then we could pre-program it to sweep the ship—”

“And risk being caught in the middle of a wall when the anyon field comes online?” La Forge shook his head. “Uhuh. What we need is a portable device that can itself be phased, which we can carry and use to generate the anyon particles when we’re ready.”

“Would that work? I mean, if the device was phased already, would it still function?”

“It should. The Romulan who was phased at the same time as us had a disruptor that worked fine, even though it was phased as well. It would only work on phased matter, but that’s perfect for our purposes.”

“So, what sort of device do we need for the anyon field? A tricorder?”

“I’m not sure a tricorder could generate a dense enough field to bring us back into phase. What we need is a phaser or disruptor that we can modify to fire an anyon beam.”

“What about a photon flare? There are some in the escape hatches. I don’t think Bok thinks they were usable as weapons.”

“Perfect. We can use a tricorder to modulate the flare’s output to an anyon flash, and it’ll recharge in a few minutes so we can use it again.”

“Okay. How do we phase ourselves?”

“You get to the cloak, adjust its temporal diffraction index to a variance of somewhere between point three and point four-seven nanometers. That should allow it to leak chronitons inside the ship, but not at a level the sensors will detect without being calibrated to look for it specifically. I’ll adjust the transporter’s phase inverter to react with the chronitons. I’ve already told Balis and the others to behave normally. They’re less likely to miss just the two of us.”

“What about the guards? We’ll be watched.”

“I doubt they’ll understand what we’re doing, so if they ask, it’s a Jefferies powerloop.”

“There’s no such thing,” Barclay pointed out.

“Not in this century . . .”

“Not in . . . Oh, our people will know.”

“You want to do what?” Sloe asked Barclay in engineering.

For once, Barclay wished that he only had a Breen or Klingon mercenary to deal with. He felt confident of lying to one of them and getting away with it, but Sloe was the man who had installed the cloak, and thus had some chance of actually recognizing and understanding what Reg wanted to do with it.

He decided at last that telling the truth would be the best lie. “I uh, I need to adjust the temporal diffraction index. I’ve been getting interference from it on the sensors.” He showed Sloe a tricorder recording of a reading suggesting that the cloak was leaking chronitons of a detectable level.

The reading, of course, was false.

Sloe looked at it, and grumbled, “I thought I’d bloody fixed that.” He shook his head. “Bloody Klingon technology. It just doesn’t have the finesse of a Romulan cloak.”

“I’m sure you don’t want to be leaving a trail of chronitons across half the sector,” Barclay said sympathetically.

“No, we don’t.” Sloe looked at the readings again. “It looks to me as if, should we happen to adjust the temporal differential to round about point four, it’ll solve the problem . . .”

Barclay stepped forward eagerly. “I’ll take care of that, if you like.”

Sloe held up a hand. “No. I’m sorry, old chap, but you know how it is. I’d best handle it myself . . .” Barclay could hardly believe his luck, and turned away before Sloe saw his grin.

The transporter section was unmanned when La Forge and his Breen guard arrived. No one had raised any objection to his working on the transporter to fix “the leak” since no one wanted to travel through it anyway.

He had barely started work on the phase inverter, when Barclay arrived. “That was quick.”

“Actually I haven’t had to do anything. Mister Sloe insisted on doing the work himself.”

La Forge grinned. “That makes things easier.”

Barclay darted his eyes briefly and nervously in the direction of the Breen guard, who had moved to stand beside the transporter’s dish-shaped stage, so as to keep a better watch over La Forge, and not risk stepping into the platform. “And what about . . . ?”

“What he doesn’t know . . .” La Forge abruptly pushed Barclay to the ground, and threw a switch on the transporter console. A massive electrical spark arced out of the rear wall of the transporter, the parabolic shape of the enclosure focusing the discharge squarely onto the Breen. Before he could even fully raise his rifle, he erupted in sparks and fire, like a flame. “. . . can definitely hurt him.”

The charred and smoking body hit the floor, and Geordi forced down the vomit. Reg didn’t manage to hold it down.

La Forge pulled some circuits from the console. Then he handed Barclay a photon flare and a Ferengi communicator, keeping one of each for himself. “It would have been handy if I’d been able to steal a phaser or disruptor as well, but these will have to do.”

Barclay looked as sick as La Forge felt, but managed a nod. “Won’t they hear us talking on these communicators?”

“Not once we’re phased. I wasn’t thinking of using them as communicators, but as transporter locks. If we’re in phase with the ship and need to get out of phase in a hurry, these will act as remote triggers that will only de-phase us, rather than everybody on the ship.” He adjusted some more controls. “I’ve locked out the console as a means of controlling the transporter, just in case.”

Barclay nodded glumly. “Commander . . . Do we really have to use this transporter? It’s . . .”

“I know, Reg. Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.” La Forge wished he didn’t have to put his friend through this, but this was their best hope of stopping Rasmussen and Bok. He pressed the button on his communicator. He felt a faint tingling, and a sudden wave of nauseating dizziness.

Barclay obviously felt it too, because he reached out a hand to steady himself against the iron-gray wall, and his hand went clean through it. He pulled it back as if bitten, and looked at Geordi in horror. “It worked.”

“Yeah, this takes me back, all right.”

“What should we do first?”

“Let’s find out what’s in those crates that Bok brought on board. If it’s a weapons supply, it’ll make re-taking the ship a lot easier.”

Reaching the armory was easy. La Forge found that not having to lift his feet over the old-style door lintels was a relief. They walked clean through the forcefield that protected Bok’s mysterious crates. La Forge instinctively reached out to open one, and cursed as his hand went deep into it with nothing more to show for the effort than a vague buzzing sensation. “I guess it’s time to test the anyon flares,” he told Barclay.

Geordi triggered his flare, and felt a slap of exhausting nausea ripple through his body. He fell to his knees, which hit the ancient deck plates with a strangely reassuring solid pain. As he and Reg struggled to their feet, they found that the crate wouldn’t open, but there was a pry-bar within reach.

Glancing around one more time and half certain that somebody would come in at any second, La Forge made another attempt to free the lid. This time it popped loose, with a sound that Geordi was sure had been heard all the way to the bridge.

Barclay moved the lid aside and whistled softly. “Commander . . . look at this.” He scooped up a handful of gold bars, feeling the slight motion of the liquid latinum within them. “Gold pressed latinum. I’ve never seen so much in one place.”

“And if that other crate contains the same . . . Maybe Bok wants to disprove the idea that you can’t take it with you.”

“It doesn’t make much sense, taking today’s currency back into the past.”

“Doesn’t it?” Geordi hefted a few bars. “There are a lot of civilizations that use compound interest. Deposit an amount in, say, 2180, and multiply your money a dozen times by today.”

“But surely today’s money, even Ferengi money, wouldn’t be accepted in the past. It’d be dated wrongly.”

Geordi examined the bar. “I don’t think Ferengi money goes by dates, just by purity of the latinum. And there are always going to be places to invest precious stones or minerals, especially in a pre-replicator era.”

“What are you two doing here?” Rasmussen was standing in the doorway. He came over and used a handheld device to turn off the forcefield. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

Barclay shot a guilty glance at his tricorder, but La Forge blocked Rasmussen’s view of him. “Rasmussen, listen. I don’t know Bok that well, and I don’t know the Shadow Treasury at all, but I do know that neither of them will want to leave us around to either interfere with their part of the scheme, or tell anybody about it.”

“If you’re trying to tell me there’s no honor among thieves, that’s all right, I already know.”

“I’m trying to tell you that as soon as you’re through that Split Infinite, there are going to be no living humans on this ship.”

Rasmussen grinned and waggled a finger at him. “Ah, come on now, Geordi. You can’t kid a kidder. Do you think I don’t recognize a divide and conquer scenario when I see it?”

Geordi bit down on the frustration that was building up in him. “Right now I’m thinking you wouldn’t recognize a one-way street if it hit you in the face. Which is exactly what it’s about to do!”

Barclay by now had half-dismantled a communicator and a tricorder, and was using some tools to cross-connect them together.

“Listen to this,” Barclay said. “I’ve managed to unscramble Bok’s private channel to the marauder.”

“Grak,” Bok’s voice said, “remember the schedule. At entry minus five thirty minutes, I’ll have the prisoners, and Ras-mew-son, executed, and then the rest of the crew will evacuate to your ship. I will proceed through the Infinite alone.”

“Understood, Daimon. Will you need any extra personnel to take care of the hew-mons?”

“No. The Starfleeters are under guard, and Ras-mew-son still thinks he’s going home.”

Rasmussen’s eyes widened, and La Forge pointed to Barclay’s makeshift descrambler. “All right, so you won’t believe me when I tell you that Bok will cross you. Will you believe it from him?”

“The bastard!” Rasmussen squawked.

La Forge nodded. If you want to live longer than another couple of hours, you’re going to have to help us.”

“We were supposed to be partners!”

“Let me guess. He told you that whatever you invented, he’d use the Ferengi Commerce Authority to sell it across the galaxy, not just on Earth?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“What’s his interest in going to 2162?”

“Who even says he actually has 2162 in mind?” Barclay pointed out. “I mean, this ship wouldn’t be out of place any time between 2155 and 2220 or so.”

La Forge shivered. “That’s a good point. We don’t really know for sure where he’d want to go back to, or why.” He frowned, as that thought reminded him of a question he had meant to ask earlier. “How did you ever get mixed up with Bok anyway?”

Rasmussen sighed. “After my visit to the Enterprise I was sent to a rehabilitation colony. It was all very civilized, much nicer than prison would have been in the twenty-second century, but one thing it shared with historical prisons is the opportunity to network.”

“Network?”

“You see, every day while in prison—sorry, rehab—I’d meet someone who knew something interesting. Mostly, of course, it was just about everyday life in the late twenty-fourth century. Stuff the historians’ files in the time pod didn’t cover. It stopped me feeling too homesick, and helped me adjust.”

“That’s pretty much the point of rehab.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is, and I’m just as sure that most of those people were sent my way for exactly that reason. And don’t think I’m not grateful to Starfleet for putting me there, because I adjusted to this century a lot quicker than I would have on my own.”

“Again, that’s pretty much the point.”

“Exactly. But there were other stories, and other conversations. Ones that maybe were less encouraged.”

“Such as?”

“There would be the occasional smuggler, or whatever, who’d talk about the deals she’d done, or the jobs he’d performed for certain individuals or organizations. The Orion Syndicate, the Shadow Treasurers, the Nausicaan cartels, that kind of thing. Names would be mentioned.”

“Contacts?”

“Contacts,” Rasmussen confirmed. “So, when I was released, I already had a pretty good idea of how things worked, but also who to talk to about what I could do when I got out, both honestly and otherwise.”

“A shame you didn’t get such an idea of who to trust. It sounds to me like Bok’s left you with a clear choice of you or him.”

Rasmussen scowled. “You better believe it’s not going to be me.”

That was what Geordi was waiting for. “Then help us stop him. I know you don’t like living in this century, but at least it is living.”

Rasmussen hesitated. “I’ll . . . I’m not sure what to do, actually. Insurgency isn’t really my field.”

“What do you know about the ship’s security systems? Intruder control?”

“There’ll be the standard motion sensors and anaesthetic gas . . . But I don’t know if the gas will have survived the time Intrepid has been drifting. Unless you replaced it?”

“No, and it wouldn’t do any good against the Breen anyway.”

“There is a sonic disruption field available. That should knock out Ferengi, the Klingons, and the Breen. As well as humans, obviously.”

La Forge nodded. “Okay, then, Rasmussen. If you can tell us how to activate the disruption field . . .”

“I can do better than that.” Rasmussen drew a quick diagram of the appropriate controls on a padd and gave it to Geordi.

“All right. You get stimulants from a medical kit, ready to wake up the rest of our people, and Reg and I will trigger the field.”

“Won’t you need ear protection or something?”

“Trust me, we’ll be immune,” La Forge said, enjoying Rasmussen’s mystification. “Now, go on ahead of us. We’ll follow you out.” He pushed Rasmussen gently toward the door, and out. As soon as the door closed again, Geordi used his stolen communicator to de-phase himself and Barclay. “Nice work, Reg,” he said, when he recovered from the stomach-churning transition.

“Thanks, Commander.”

“I didn’t think Bok would be crazy enough to discuss his plans over a channel like that, but I’m glad he did.”

“Actually, Commander, there’s something I should tell you . . . The descrambler doesn’t work.”

“What?”

“My tricorder was still recording when Bok came aboard, and I kept it running. All I had to do was re-edit his words together, if you see what I mean.” He gave a sly grin, which La Forge matched.

“That’s beautiful, Reg!” Barclay managed a bashful but grateful expression. “Come on, let’s get to intruder control.”

Intrepid had made good time closing in to the Split Infinite after the probe test had proved successful. Bok stood in front of Intrepid’s main screen, watching the heavenly fires that swirled ahead.

His son would have found a good market for something like this, he reflected. Tourism, energy collection, or something else Bok couldn’t even imagine. Someday, in his future but the galaxy’s past, his son would come here and admire what he had done.

Let Picard kill a thousand Ferengi sons, who then wouldn’t be competition for his son’s pursuit of profit.

“Entering the Infinite’s outer neutrino band now,” Sloe announced, interrupting his reverie. As if in response to the words, the consoles and control boxes all around the bridge began to rattle and shake.

“Polarize the hull plating.”

“Also, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid I’m picking up a distress signal from Harga’s ship.” Bok spun around angrily, eyes wide. “The ship has broken up, and Challenger is on its way.”

“Have Grak lay an ambush between our position and the Challenger’s vector.” He had promised himself he would do whatever it took to preserve his son’s life, and if the destruction of Kren’s ship, Harga’s ship, and the Challenger was what it took, then it would be a well-spent investment.

The Intrepid was clattering and rattling so raucously that Barclay was certain it was going to fly apart at any second. The ship, as Scotty would no doubt say, just couldn’t take the strain. He tried to lean against the wall and grab hold of a pillar to catch his breath and steady his nerves, but had forgotten that he couldn’t. He stumbled, his shoulder and hand disappearing into a structural buttress. Luckily they came out apparently unharmed.

“We must be entering the Infinite,” La Forge murmured. “We need to be quick.”

Barclay nodded, turned the corner, and almost walked straight through a Ferengi, who was clearly as shocked at the encounter as Barclay was. The Ferengi yelped, and quick-drew a phaser. Reg had no time to dodge as the beam lanced clean through him.

He didn’t even feel it.

The Ferengi obviously felt something, and it looked very much like mortal terror. He screamed, firing again and again, but the repeated shots passed as harmlessly through Reg as the first had done, and burned into a bulkhead at the far end of the corridor.

Finally regaining control of his limbs, Reg darted sideways, through the corridor wall. Geordi came through a second later. “What happened?”

“A Ferengi saw me!”

“The phasing effect must be more limited further away from the transporter. The targeting scanners are pretty old . . .”

“Now you tell me!” An alarm began to blare throughout the ship, echoing through the corridors as Barclay and La Forge ran into intruder control. It was a cramped and dark room filled with monitors and security control panels.

“Let’s just hope Rasmussen’s diagram is accurate.”

“What’s happening?” Bok demanded. Even the silent Breen helmsman looked up.

“I saw a ghost,” a Ferengi mercenary was saying. “It was the hew-mon, Barclay, and he went through the wall!”

“Ghost my lobes,” Bok snarled, slapping the other Ferengi. “More likely a hologram.”

“None are on board,” Sloe pointed out. Comprehension dawned slowly on his face. “The cloak’s temporal differential variance . . .”

“What?”

“He said . . . Dammit, he tricked me. That’s no ghost, it’s some phase trickery!”

“Find him and kill him!” Bok was almost purple with rage. “In fact kill all the Starfleet prisoners, right . . . now . . .” He winced, as something seemed to buzz around his head. “What is . . .” His vision was blurring, and he couldn’t tell the difference between Sloe and the Breen helmsman.

The person standing nearest to him suddenly toppled to the floor, and Bok wasn’t long in following him.

All over the ship, mercenaries and Starfleet prisoners alike staggered and fell. Ferengi, Klingon, Breen, human, and Bolian, they all went down within a few seconds of each other.

The only exceptions were La Forge, Barclay, and Rasmussen.

La Forge went to secure the bridge. Everyone there was out cold. Satisfied, La Forge triggered his anyon flare, and became solid once more, so that he could push the lifeless Breen out of the helm seat. He throttled back the ship, and began to pull up and away from the Infinite. He touched an intercom button, calling down to engineering, “Reg, are you there?”

“I’m here, Commander.”

“How are you doing?”

“It looks like everyone here is out cold.”

“Good. Reg, I need you to find Rasmussen and wake up Balis and the others. We might have control of Intrepid right now, but that marauder’s still out there somewhere, and they’re not going to want to let us hang on to Bok.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Reg, this is not going to be the best day to be aboard a ship built before they invented shields. Our troubles are only just beginning.”

18

Challenger dropped out of warp just inside the Oort cloud. “Entering the Delta Five Gamma Zeta Alpha system, Captain,” Qat’qa reported.

“Is there any sign of the Intrepid?” Scotty asked.

At ops, Leah brought up the sensor displays on her board. “Scanning. No immediate indications, but, seeing as we know they have a cloak, they could already be here.”

“Even if they’re not cloaked, they could be well hidden by the energy emitted by the Infinite,” Nog pointed out. “It’s almost drowning out the sensors.”

“Between plasma storms, elevated neutrino waves, gravimetric distortions, and plain old hard gamma, anything on one side of the system won’t have a hope in hell of detecting a ship on the other side,” Hunt said.

“And that’s without even taking into account the asteroid population that’s threaded through the system,” Leah added.

Scotty sighed. “Aye, which might be a good thing. Intrepid’ll be hard put to detect us through all that high energy soup.”

“Might be pretty reasonable to assume that we’ve gotten here first?” Qat’qa asked.

“Never assume anything,” Leah said with a faint smile.

Scotty agreed. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time in Starfleet, it’s that the more certain you are of an assumption, the more likely it is that said assumption is wrong.”

“Captain.” Nog looked up from his console, his features taut and grim. “The decryption team I set to decoding the signal that was transmitted by the stealth probe has a result.”

“And?”

“It’s Romulan.” A chill silence rolled across the bridge.

Scotty shook his head. “They have to get their noses into everything, don’t they?”

Hunt came up the ramp and around the bridge rail to double-check the decryption on one of the science station consoles. “This Romulan signal . . . Does this mean that they’re behind Rasmussen? Or behind Bok?”

“Rasmussen’s a liar and a conman, but I canna see him being in league with the Romulans.”

“Why not?” Qat’qa demanded. “It is their way; to lure the dishonorable into alliance with them.”

“Because of the time he comes from. Remember that in Rasmussen’s time, Earth has just emerged from a bloody nasty war with the Romulans. Coming from that society, he’s unlikely to be well-disposed to them.”

Hunt trotted down to the ops station, and leaned over Leah. “Program the sensors with the probe’s cloaking and transmission frequencies. If there are any more of them, I want to know.”

“Commander . . .” Nog said, “if this probe is Romulan, there might be Romulan vessels in the area as well.”

“That’s what worries me. If there’s a warbird out there . . .”

“If there’s a warbird out there,” Scotty pointed out, “we’ve got big problems. Nog, do you think Bok is likely to have made some kind of deal with the Romulans?”

“It’s not impossible. But if anyone has made a deal with the Romulans it would more likely be someone much higher in the Shadow Treasury.”

“They’re the ones who backed his plan, though, aren’t they?” Hunt said. “Bankrolled it, at least.”

“I suppose,” Nog said slowly, “it’s possible that they might have sent along some backup beyond the vessels we already know about, but I’d be inclined to doubt it. Our prisoners say Bok had three ships. Two Klingon-built vessels and his marauder.”

“Might a Romulan ship have been included without Bok’s knowledge?”

“Maybe, but I doubt the Shadow Treasury would have agreed to it. If they’ve got some sort of information exchange with the Romulans, then more likely the Romulans have sent a ship on their own.”

Leah turned. “They could have done that just from eavesdropping.”

“Which we know they’re doing because of the probes,” Hunt agreed.

“Which suggests there are more likely to be only more probes.”

Hunt nodded, smiling. “That’s good, logical thinking.”

“I think I’ve got something, actually,” Leah continued. “Not on a Romulan frequency. I’m detecting a disruption in the neutrino waves being put out by the Infinite. It might just be a gravimetric distortion from the string itself, but it just might be caused by the passage of a cloaked ship.”

Scotty was immediately alert. “The Intrepid?”

“I don’t think so. If it is a cloaked vessel, her mass is too large for an NX-class ship. And too small for a Romulan warbird,” she added, before anyone could ask.

“Give me your best guess. Don’t hold back.”

“From the likely mass? Something big and bulky. Given that we already know there are Ferengi involved, a D’Kora-class marauder would fit.”

“Bok’s ship?”

“That would make sense,” Hunt mused aloud. “He stations it as a picket ship, near the Oort cloud, to keep us out if we get past the Klingon ship he sent to stop us tracking him here.”

“He must have known we were more than a match for the Klingon ship,” Nog said.

Hunt laughed mirthlessly. “He did. He just wanted to buy the time.”

“Is there any sign that they’ve detected us?” Scotty asked.

Nog double-checked his readouts. “Impossible to tell. They’re a little closer to the Infinite, and further along in orbit, so the interference put out by it will be affecting their sensors worse than it affects ours. Assuming it is a Ferengi marauder and not just a gravimetric eddy.”

“I have a wee hunch that it’s Bok’s friends right enough, and that they’ll know we’re here. I can feel it in my water.”

The bridge of the marauder had no center seat, but there were several consoles arranged around a central spherical viewer. Grak preferred to command from the ship’s tactical console, so that if violence became necessary, he could take personal charge of that side of the business. Grak took his seat at the weapons board, and brought the marauder’s firepower online.

He stroked the top of the console, looking forward to unveiling to Starfleet the modifications he had made over the years.

“Challenger is changing course and arming weapons,” one of the Ferengi reported. “They undoubtedly see us.”

“Drop the cloak.” There was no sense in continuing to pretend they weren’t here, especially when decloaking closer to the Challenger would mean they were more vulnerable to attack before they could fire. Much better to decloak now, and meet Challenger on more even terms. “Hail them.”

After a couple of seconds, the lined face and white hair of an elderly hew-mon appeared in the center sphere. “This is Captain Montgomery Scott of the Starship Challenger. Stand down your weapons.”

“Captain Scott, I will not do that. You’ve killed a number of my friends today, but that’s all right, since my crew now inherits their shares of the fee for this mission. So, I’m feeling generous. Turn your ship around, and leave this system. You don’t have to go for long. Come back tomorrow if you want. I won’t be around to stop you.”

Trust a Ferengi to try cutting a deal, Scotty thought. “Not a chance, laddie. That NX-class is not going where Bok wants to take it. I’ve never been a man to be bullied by starship captains, even the ones I respect, so ye’ll be getting no satisfaction from me.”

The Ferengi on the main viewer gave a remarkably human shrug. “I make the same profit either way. It’s your funeral.” He disappeared from the screen.

“Captain,” Nog said in alarm, “that marauder is carrying a lot more weaponry than Ferengi ships usually do. Phaser and disruptor banks, plasma torpedoes, photon torpedoes . . .”

“The best defense is not to be where the impact arrives!” Qat’qa exclaimed. “Do not worry so.”

“I’m not worried. There is some good news, I’m reading Intrepid, on an intercept course.”

“Mister Hunt, do we have Intrepid’s prefix code on record?” Scotty asked, sitting up with a calculating expression.

“It’ll be in the historical database.”

“Prefix code?” Qat’qa echoed.

Scotty nodded. “Up until the Excelsior-class, Starfleet ships all had a remote prefix code, so that if something happened to the crew, a rogue ship could be brought under control. If necessary her shields could be dropped by remote control so that a ship with a dead crew could be boarded and brought under control.”

“A dead crew. . .” Leah shuddered. “Geordi . . .”

“Lass?”

“I was . . . I guess Intrepid qualifies on the grounds of its original crew being dead. Her current crew’s status is open to question.”

“That’s a question ye needn’t worry yourself about.”

“Intrepid is approaching.” Not trusting the sensors in this system’s interference, Grak glanced over to check the veracity of his subordinate’s report, and saw that it was true. The ancient Earth ship was indeed moving away from the Infinite, and had dropped her cloak for all to see.

“Keep us between them and Challenger. If Bok wants a share of the glory, we’ll do what we can to accommodate him, but we mustn’t let Challenger get close.”

“Understood.”

“Hail the Intrepid.”

“No response.”

“Why aren’t they talking?” A thought struck Grak. “A lot of these old Federation ships used to have a prefix code for remote control of some systems . . . Have there been any transmissions to Intrepid from Challenger?”

“Not yet.”

“Jam them, just in case.” Grak switched to a more secure communications channel. “Grak to Intrepid. Grak to Intrepid. Daimon Bok, please respond.” Only static answered him.

“Intrepid is changing course,” Grak’s subordinate warned. “Moving to join us.”

“Grak,” a voice said. Rasmussen’s features appeared in the main viewing sphere. “We’re having some difficulty maintaining the cloak, and we have no shielding. Can you extend your shield around us as soon as possible?”

“Yes, I can do that.” Grak briefly wondered why the human was making the request instead of Bok himself, but since the two were partners in this particular business venture, it wasn’t his to ask why. He nodded to the Ferengi at the engineering console.

Intrepid’s bridge was a dark place of confusion and foreboding again, now that they had turned away from the Split Infinite, and the heavenly light wasn’t beaming in upon them. Barclay and La Forge had by now recovered their combadges, as well as taken weapons from the unconscious mercenaries who had been dumped in the brig.

Upon hearing Grak’s agreement to extend the shields, Barclay couldn’t have looked more astonished if he’d tried. “They’re actually going to do it?”

Rasmussen chuckled at the question. “They’ve no reason not to.”

“Commander,” Barclay began, “shouldn’t we let Challenger know that we’re in control of the ship?”

La Forge was tempted. “Not while the marauder’s listening in.” He thought for a moment, knowing that now that they had the initiative, they should keep it. “Reg, do we have anything we could use as a weapon against the marauder?”

“We’ve managed to use parts of the probes that Bok’s men brought aboard to reactivate two photonic missiles, but the yield will be, um, not large.”

“It doesn’t have to be, now that we’re inside their shield envelope. Arm a photonic torpedo, and target the marauder.”

The marauder’s engineering officer looked around the side of his console, at Grak. “Something’s—Intrepid is arming what weapons they have.”

“Good, every little bit helps.”

“And they’re lighting us up!”

“What?!” Grak couldn’t believe his ears.

In the main viewing sphere, a missile blazed out from Intrepid and grew in a flash, filling the sphere as it rushed headlong straight for the marauder.

“Withdraw our shields!” Grak yelled frantically. “Minimum distance from the hull!” He was just a little too late, and the photonic torpedo slammed into the port side of the marauder’s hindquarters, exploding in a flash of vaporized hull plating. The ship juddered, and Grak and his bridge crew hung on to their consoles just to stay upright as the floor lurched and dipped. “Damage report!”

“Hull breach in cargo bay seven, no casualties, no damage to systems.” Grak slumped back, relieved.

“Targeting Intrepid.”

“No! Bok is still aboard. We daren’t risk it.”

The other Ferengi all looked at him in shock. “The Starfleeters must be in control of the ship,” one said.

“Starfleeters don’t kill prisoners, which means Bok is still aboard. We’ll need to concentrate on making sure he is safe.”

Tyler Hunt huddled over the tactical station with Nog. “What can we expect from the captain of a marauder? Aggression, caution, deviousness . . . ?”

“Ferengi tend to treat everything as business. Even combat. They’ll want to maximize their return on investment.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means they’ll be thinking of the profit they want to make.”

“They’d want to take this ship as a prize?”

“I doubt they’ll expect that to be possible,” Nog admitted. “They’re not pirates, they’re businessmen. They’ll want to encourage us to stop trying to interfere with the Intrepid, so they’ll probably concentrate on diverting us away from the Split Infinite, rather than trying to destroy us outright.” Nog looked away for a moment. “Really, they should have laid mines.”

“Area denial.” Hunt understood and nodded. “So we’ll want to keep as close to the Infinite as possible, and maybe even try to keep the Intrepid between us and them.”

“They definitely won’t dare fire on the source of their profit, sir,” Nog agreed. “They’re not Romulans, who’ll destroy their own forces when their mission fails.”

“Right. Start programming attack patterns. We’re going to need them.”

Leah, not for the first time, wished that she could simply solve the problem by some technological means. She thought about that for a moment. It wasn’t just power that was distributed by engineering systems. Food, morale, tasks, the right people were all things that needed to be distributed correctly for a ship to function at its best.

She turned from the ops console. “Scotty, I’ve been thinking. If we bring some of the beta shift personnel on duty, we can staff the battle bridge and auxiliary control right now. If they’re all properly briefed, it should quicken our response times when the marauder attacks.”

“Ye’ve been thinking about duty rosters?” Scotty could conceal neither his amazement nor his appreciation.

“The crew are parts of the starship just like the engine components. They need to be tuned . . .”

Scotty laughed. “It’s a valuable lesson that we all learn at the Academy. If ye’re not careful, you’ll make a decent officer someday.” He smiled slyly. “That would even things up between you and Geordi, now, wouldn’t it?”

“I’ll stay civilian, if it’s all the same, Scotty.” Leah blushed red, and went to call people to duty.

19

Intrepid banked away as the marauder’s shields contracted around the Ferengi ship. The marauder then rotated to keep her scoop-like nose on an orientation that could face both Intrepid and the oncoming Challenger.

On the bridge, La Forge sat in the center seat. He felt tense, but didn’t show it. “Hail the marauder.”

Grak’s voice responded instantly. “Go ahead.”

“Grak, this is Commander Geordi La Forge. The Intrepid is Starfleet property. Cease your attack and withdraw.”

“Where is Bok?”

“Bok and his crew are disarmed and in our brig.”

“Alive?”

“So long as you do what I tell you. If you press your attack, Bok will die.”

“Starfleeters don’t kill prisoners,” Grak said stubbornly.

Rasmussen cleared his throat as he stepped beside Geordi. “Erm, that’s true, Grak, but, as you know, I’m not Starfleet, and I’ve served my time in prison, just like you and Bok. Commander La Forge is somewhat preoccupied running the ship, and so are the other Starfleet technicians, but I find myself as something of a fifth wheel around here, and well . . . I think if I were to go down to the brig with a disruptor and have some target practice with Bok, none of them would really have the free time to come and stop me. You do see where I’m going with this, don’t you, Grak?”

“Yes, I see where you’re going.” There was a long pause. “This isn’t over, welcher.” The comm went dead. La Forge got up and moved to stand with Balis at tactical, where he could see that the marauder was backing off, but only slightly. Their weapons were still armed, but on a standby cycle.

“Looks like we’ve bought ourselves some time.”

On the larger and better-lit bridge of the Challenger, smiles of relief rippled around the senior staff. They had all heard the exchange between La Forge and Grak. Scotty slapped the arm of his chair in a little moment of triumph. “Can we contact Geordi directly?”

“We’re still being jammed,” Nog informed him. “And I’m having trouble filtering out the random interference coming out of the Infinite.”

“EM interference is only to be expected—”

“No, sir, it’s not just radiation and EM interference. There are actual signals, snatches of conversations . . . I think they’re signals passing through the system, which have been deflected through the Infinite.”

Leah’s eyes widened, and her tone grew hushed and reverent. “Messages from the past and the future . . .” Scotty understood how intrigued she was, because he was equally interested. “I’ll record them. We might learn some things about both history and future technological developments.”

Nog had lowered his ear to the tactical console, listening closely to the signals. “I don’t think we’ll learn much. It’s all just single words and sounds, out of context. Not complete sentences.”

“There’s no harm in saving everything we can,” Leah said firmly.

A similar conversation was taking place on Intrepid, where Barclay was also recording the signals. “Wow . . . Commander, look at this.”

“Sensor readings, Reg?”

“More than that. Fragments of signals passing through this system have been caught in the Infinite. Some of them are really old, I mean decades, or even centuries. A couple are even from the future.”

“The future?”

“Listen.”

“. . . Stardate 72238.5 en route . . . Qap’la!. . . birthday greetings . . .”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be listening to that, Reg.”

“Yes we should!” Rasmussen piped up.

“Shut up,” Barclay and La Forge both snapped, as one.

La Forge suddenly caught something. “Wait, stop!”

“What is it?”

“I know it’s impossible, but I thought . . . I thought I just heard the IFF transponder code of the Hera.”

“It’s not totally impossible, Commander. These are sensor returns that have traveled through time.”

“That’s not the impossible part.” Geordi spooled back the transcript of recorded signals. “Look, I found it.”

Barclay looked. “You’re right, that’s the Hera, but I don’t see what’s so impossible about it.”

“Look at the date stamp,” Geordi urged. “Stardate 47221.3.”

“So?”

La Forge looked stunned. “So, the Hera’s last known transmission was on Stardate 47215.5. This signal dates from after she was reported lost.”

In the brig, the now unarmed mercenaries were beginning to wake up. The Breen seemed to have been the most affected by the sonic field, and Bok thought that at least one of them was actually dead.

When Bok first woke, his head was filled with an agonizing pain that quickly refocused itself into a raging fury. So now this La Forge, Picard’s lackey, would condemn Bok’s son! He should have killed the hew-mon in the first place. He should have killed all of them, including Rasmussen.

“Bok . . .” It was Sloe. A hew-mon just like all the other child-killers. Bok turned on him, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him against the metal bunk.

“We can re-take the bridge—” Sloe managed to gasp.

Bok fought to control his anger, and eventually let his grip loosen. He released Sloe with a derisory shove. Remember your son, he told himself. Your son is all that matters, and his fate isn’t sealed yet.

“Why bother?” Bok took a small electronic device from his pocket. “I took the liberty of preprogramming our course.” He pressed a control on the device. “Which is now locked in.”

“We’re changing course,” the ensign at Intrepid’s helm said. He seemed to be struggling with the controls.

“Change it back,” La Forge ordered.

The ensign’s hands swept across the controls, and then he shrugged helplessly.

“I tried. Helm isn’t responding.”

Barclay hurried past. “Let me look at the navigational computer.”

“Be my guest.”

“We’re going to a preprogrammed course,” Barclay said after a moment.

La Forge stood, looking over Barclay’s shoulder at the navigational computer. “Can you override the program?”

Barclay’s hands were a blur across the console. “Yes . . . No. Every override I try looks like its going to work, but then . . . nothing,” he finished, his voice blending apology, anger, and frustration.

“It must be locked in . . . Encrypted. Can you find a workaround?”

“No, all the executables are being triggered from a secure separate unit. Most likely it’s hardwired into the main engine panel and activated remotely. Maybe even by a tricorder or communicator.”

“Then . . .”

“We’re programmed to follow the same course as that probe they sent through the Infinite. Whatever happens we’re on a one-way trip to 2162.”

La Forge accepted the news with a fatalistic expression. “We need to rig the dilithium matrix to destabilize.”

“Will you be making sure we’ve got time to get away?”

“If it’s possible, Reg.”

Barclay nodded somberly, then frowned in concentration. “What if we link the antimatter containment field to the gravimetric ambience. We could arrange for the engine to overload only under a specific gravitational condition, like entering the Infinite.”

“Not a bad idea, but I think we can tweak it to make it even better. We’ll balance the containment field to collapse when the gravitational shear drops below a certain point.”

“Below?”

“When the ship tries to come out of the Infinite, if it ever goes in there.” He disappeared through the doors.

Bok patted his pockets for his communicator, and used it. There was no barrier on Intrepid to signaling his ship. “Grak, are you there?”

“Yes, Daimon.”

“The Starfleet ship will try to prevent us from entering the Infinite. You must keep them occupied until we are gone.”

“Their ship is powerful. I can’t guarantee that we can destroy it.”

“That’s not as important as keeping it away from us.” Bok paused. “But first, can you beam us directly to the bridge of Intrepid?”

“Which ‘us’?”

“Sloe and myself. You can beam the rest of the men back to your ship.”

“Yes, Daimon.”

As the harsh red transporter beam coalesced into Bok and Sloe in the center of Intrepid’s bridge, the bridge crew looked up, tensing, ready to defend themselves. “You may as well stand down,” Bok said. “It was a brave effort, La Forge, but doesn’t make a difference now. Whatever happens, we’re on our way to 2162.”

La Forge returned to the bridge and raised a disruptor to cover Bok and Sloe. “Deactivate whatever you’ve done.”

Bok pursed his lips as if thinking, then gave a curt shake of the head. “I can’t do that.”

“I mean it, Bok—”

“When I say I can’t do that, I mean it physically cannot be done.” He tossed the remote control to La Forge. “See for yourself.” Geordi took it suspiciously, and saw that it was dead. “Once activated, the course is hardwired into the engines. You’d have to destroy them to stop our journey, and we made sure to disable the autodestruct systems when we boarded.”

“What happens to us then?”

“I don’t care. Ras-mew-son might have some ideas about what to do with you.” Bok gave a smile filled with false apology. “I’m afraid you missed your window to escape.”

20

Pursued by the marauder, Challenger swept up and around Intrepid, keeping the precious relic between themselves and Grak’s vessel as much as possible. Grak’s helmsman was pretty good, and they never quite snookered it for more than a few seconds at a time.

“Captain,” Nog said, “I was thinking about how we dealt with the first ship, that Vor’cha?”

“Odo’s favorite trick?” Scotty said. “Aye, that was a good one.”

“The Intrepid doesn’t have shields,” Nog reminded him.

“The hull can be polarized to scatter coherent energy transmissions,” Scotty pointed out. “It was intended to protect the ship from energy weapons, radiation storms, and so on, but it plays absolute hell with a transporter’s annular confinement beam. They wouldn’t even have to depolarize to operate the cloak, the way a shielded ship would have to drop their shields.”

“They’ll have to polarize the hull plating to survive the radiation in the Infinite,” Nog said urgently, “but they haven’t yet.”

Scotty looked up, a moment of hope frozen on his usually dour features. “If we can separate out our people from theirs . . .”

“We can either beam our team home, or take a security detail over to retake the Intrepid.”

“I don’t fancy the idea of trying to beam anyone through that mess. But of the two options, beaming our people home is the least dangerous.” Scotty rose. “I’m going to transporter room one. Let me know when you think you’ve got a fix on our people.

Rasmussen wouldn’t have moved if he’d had time to think about it, but a lurch of the ship had sent him lunging in Bok’s direction anyway, and it was easier to go with the flow than try to back off and do something else. He swung wildly at Bok as he all but fell into the Ferengi. The blow didn’t connect as such, but it surprised Bok, and then the impact of the larger man’s stumble forced him back.

“Welcher!” Bok snarled, and tried to backhand Rasmussen in the face. Due to their height difference, it only caught him in the chest. Rasmussen’s eyes widened in surprise and anger at the thudding blow. Rasmussen swung a roundhouse punch into Bok’s ear, and started fighting in earnest.

Bok howled, and kicked out at Rasmussen’s knee, forcing him down. Enraged, Bok fought down the pain in his ear and focused on darting in to repeatedly punch Rasmussen in the gut. Bok was no warrior as such, but he hadn’t survived six years of prison without learning a few things about looking after himself.

Rasmussen, on the other hand, had spent his years in Federation rehabilitation and re-education on a New Zealand farm learning nothing more physical than how to shear a sheep.

La Forge, Barclay, and Sloe lunged forward, trying to pull the pair apart. “What’s the point?” Sloe shouted. “We’re all going the same way anyway!”

If only he knew, Geordi thought.

“This welcher betrayed us,” Bok shouted. “He left my son to die.”

Rasmussen got in another kick at Bok. “You wanted to kill me!”

In Challenger’s transporter room, Scotty was patching Nog’s tactical readout through to Carolan’s transport console. It looked promising, the Scotsman thought, as he saw the signal returns from eleven Starfleet combadges on the Intrepid. There was no guarantee that their owners were alive, but he wasn’t going to leave them behind.

“There are four signals on the bridge,” Carolan said. “The rest are scattered throughout the ship.”

“Beam the four from the bridge here. The others to transporter room three.”

Carolan set up the targets, and swept a hand over the controls to energize the transporter.

Bok felt a sudden tingling in his hands, and reflexively let go of Rasmussen. Everyone stumbled backward as if they’d let go of a spinning carousel. A whine of energy became louder, and the bridge was suddenly a brighter silver.

Bok and Sloe looked at each other, then darted backward, away from the grasping hands of the Starfleeters.

“No!” Bok shouted.

“There’s interference from the Infinite,” Carolan warned. Scotty leaned past Carolan, adding his hands to the controls to try to stabilize the targeting sensors. “I’ve got them.”

“Aye, and I intend to keep them!”

One moment La Forge was in the middle of a melée, with everyone trying to get leverage over everyone else, and then suddenly he was staggering, as the calmer environment of the Challenger’s transporter room took over. He blinked, hardly daring to believe that he had truly been snatched from the Intrepid.

Barclay, Balis, and Rasmussen were on the pad with him, looking around in a mixture of exhausted relief and sheer bafflement.

“The others?” La Forge asked.

“Transporter room three,” Scotty said, “and may I say welcome aboard.” His eyes narrowed as they fell upon Rasmussen. “Except to you. Balis, escort Mister Rasmussen here to the brig. Reg, go help Vol in engineering.”

Scotty looked at Geordi. “The bridge awaits.” They jogged out of the transporter room. “What’s the situation over there?”

“Bok and his scientific adviser are on a preprogrammed course for 2162. Reg and I sabotaged their warp core, but he’s got a pretty smart engineer named Sloe. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they’ve undone our sabotage.”

“Then we’d better see where they’re going.”

Intrepid was rattling and shaking like a mining cart, but Bok didn’t mind in the slightest. His son was going to be not just protected and safe, but greater than he ever would have been before. He would be the guardian of the Shadow Treasurers’ investments, and a rich man. He would never serve as a daimon on a dangerous expedition.

Bok would, at last, have been the good father he always wished he had been.

Sloe coughed, drawing Bok back to the present. “Our temporal course projection is deviating from the program,” he said apologetically.

“How is that possible?” Bok lunged forward to examine the readings on the helm.

“I don’t really know, to be honest,” Sloe admitted. “But it’s definitely happening. There’s a temporal variance of point zero four thr—”

“What caused the variance?”

“I’m not sure, but the only thing the program didn’t already take into account is the transporter beam when Challenger snatched the Starfleeters back.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“It means we’re not going to the year we should be going to,” she said with a shrug.

Bok’s eyes flashed dangerously. “What? How late will we be?”

“Actually, not late at all. The variance is dragging us further back in time.”

Bok straightened, excited. “How much further?”

“Several decades at least, but the effect is exponential. The longer it lasts, the further back we’ll be going.”

“That means, things will be more primitive, but our knowledge will be even further advanced . . .”

Bok relaxed. In fact he felt a thrill of pleasure. “Grak,” he said into his communicator, “destroy the Challenger by whatever means takes your fancy. And farewell, faithful employee. I’m enabling access to your account dated from tomorrow.”

Laughing, Bok sat back to enjoy the flight into yesterday.

21

Scotty and Geordi bolted from the turbolift and onto Challenger’s bridge. Geordi paused only long enough to grab Leah in a tight hug, to which she didn’t protest, and then dropped into the seat at ops. “I’ll need to know Intrepid’s precise heading.”

“Patching it through now, Geordi,” Hunt said.

La Forge glanced at the numbers, then did a double-take. “Hang on a minute, Scotty, these”—he tapped in the numbers he recalled from Intrepid’s helm, and a different course projecting was generated—“are the coordinates that Intrepid was heading for. They’ve changed.”

Scotty quickly brought up a display of the Intrepid’s course, and rechecked the numbers. “You’re right, Geordi, it has changed. They’re not quite following their projected course in the wormhole.”

“No, and it’s more than that, Scotty. They’re not following their programmed course.”

“They’ve changed their program?”

“Not a chance. Once it was engaged, there was no way even for Bok to change the program. Which means it must be an external factor that’s affecting their course.”

“The gravimetric shear?” Qat’qa offered.

“Their program takes the natural forces in the Infinite into account.”

Scotty snapped his fingers. “The transporter beam . . .”

“What? How?”

“It’s the only other external factor. I don’t know how it could have happened, but it has to be something to do with the transporter.”

La Forge looked at the course projection on his console, and the spiral loop around the cosmic string for some of its length. “It looks like it made her get a shade closer to the string, which means she’ll take longer to come out of the closed timelike curve . . . She’ll be further back in the past! Able to make more changes.”

“Aye, maybe . . .” Scotty seemed surprisingly sanguine about the whole idea, but La Forge couldn’t take it so calmly.

“There’s no maybe about it, Scotty. The further back Bok goes, the more time any ripples from the changes he makes will have to take wider effect.”

“Only if he can get out of the CTC at a point where he can do enough harm . . .” An evil glint appeared in Scotty’s eye.

“What are you talking about?”

“The transporter! If a beamout affected his temporal course, then maybe locking on the annular confinement beam to the Intrepid will keep him stuck for even longer.”

“That’s a pretty thin idea.”

“Not at all. We just saw the transporter beam have exactly that effect when we beamed you out.”

“Okay, well, it’s the only idea we’ve got anyway.”

“That’s the spirit, laddie.” Scotty frowned. “But we’ll need a stable position on the edge of the Infinite, and they won’t want to give us that . . .”

“Separate the ship,” La Forge said simply.

“Captain,” Grak’s helmsman called. “Something strange is happening to Challenger. It’s as if she’s breaking up.”

Grak felt a moment of exultation. This meant a handsome bonus! “Show me!”

A distant, magnified view of the Challenger appeared in the main viewing tank. The huge saucer that made up the bulk of Challenger was arcing away from the door-wedge form of the secondary hull. Grak’s elation vanished in a heartbeat. “Idiot! It’s not breaking up, it’s separating into two vessels.” He had all but forgotten that many Federation starships could perform such a maneuver.

Grak hesitated, watching the stardrive section come about, while the saucer section of the enemy ship rose out of view. Which target should he engage? “Intercept the stardrive section,” he ordered. That part of the ship was more powerful, and thus more of a threat, both to his own vessel and to Intrepid.

It had been a number of years since he had piloted the Enterprise’s saucer section on its own, but La Forge still remembered how it was done. “I hope we can trust Tyler to keep that marauder off our backs.” Challenger’s XO, Qat’qa, and Nog had been assigned to take control of the stardrive section.

“If anyone can, it’s Mister Hunt.” Scotty bent over the ops console. “We need to be within transporter range of the Infinite, or at least the wormhole’s threshold.

La Forge was already pushing the saucer to full impulse, and trying for a little bit beyond that. The deck was beginning to vibrate slightly as they plunged through the gravimetric distortions radiating from the Infinite. “I can take us to the edge of the wormhole, but I don’t dare get too close to its spatial manifold. If we cross that, either we’d be history, or we’d be in history.”

“We’d be completely banjaxed,” Scotty agreed. “The saucer section doesna have the warp power needed to fly a course around the string and into a CTC.”

The battle bridge was smaller than Challenger’s main bridge, and its walls and floor were all bare plastiform and metal surfaces. There was only a single command chair, which Hunt had dropped into. The other consoles were a lot closer together. Overall, the whole room was almost as cramped as the bridge of the Intrepid.

Qat’qa could feel the difference between flying the whole ship, and just the stardrive section. Freed both from the mass of the saucer section, the need to expend energy shielding it, and the tactical implications of the vulnerable civilians aboard it, Challenger’s stardrive section was a leaner and meaner fighting machine, faster and more agile, with power to spare.

Veritable waves of torpedoes were spraying out from the marauder’s mandible-like forward section, while the claw-like disruption emitters on her rear section fired lance after lance of searing energy at the Challenger.

Qat’qa flipped the stardrive section from side to side, neatly dodging the beams, but couldn’t quite avoid all of the torpedoes. One exploded against the rear quarter of the port shielding, and the port nacelle flickered. “What the hell are you people doing to my engines?” Vol called up from engineering. “Bloody philistines! Don’t you know these are classics?”

Hunt ignored him, but couldn’t resist a grin. “We need to get in closer,” he shouted. “Don’t give them time for a torpedo run.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Qat’qa agreed. She dipped the front end of the stardrive, and ducked under the on-coming marauder. This time, her maneuver was, ironically, too quick. Before anyone knew it, the stardrive section of Challenger was right under the marauder’s bow, and almost literally in its jaws.

The collision alert sirens exploded into life, and Qat’qa threw the ship into a spin. Tyler Hunt ducked instinctively, even though, intellectually, he knew it wouldn’t make a difference.

He was too late, anyway.

There was a tremendous booming sound, and the rear port quarter of the ceiling was plowed clean through by the edge of the marauder’s scoop-like forward hull. Nog instinctively gripped his console, hanging on like grim death, and Qat’qa managed to wedge her legs under her flight console, but not without being buffeted backward by the fleeing air. She yelled, a mix of pain and rage, as she fought to stay wedged in her seat, at the risk of having her thighs broken.

Hunt was even less fortunate. Caught in midstep, he was hooked under the armpits by an unraveling cable. Before he could even start to untangle himself, the cable slithered up and away into the blackness, taking the struggling man with it.

“Where’s the emergency forcefield?” Qat’qa shouted, barely audible over the scream of outrushing air.

“It’s failed!” Nog cried. “Trying for . . . the override!”

Nog hauled himself across the tactical console, trying to reach the emergency override control on the environmental board a few feet away. The ship’s ventilation system was pumping breathable air into the bridge as fast as it could, to try to keep the chamber pressurized while a forcefield automatically sealed the breach. With the forcefield not activating, however, the air was a torrent grabbing at Nog and Qat’qa, trying to hurl them out into the void.

Nog could feel himself being prised away from the console, his arms and shoulders aching with the strain as his body was pulled upward. He was acutely aware of the danger of reducing his grip on the console by the tiniest fraction, and his fingers clamped onto the edges of it as if they were trying to dig their way through it. He had to fight the instinctive grip, knowing that if he didn’t get the forcefield up soon, then the air supply being pumped in would eventually run out, and they all would die.

With every instinct in his being telling him that the short-term risks outweighed the long-term gains to be made, he forced himself to take the opposite view. It was a choice of speculate to accumulate, versus certain loss. Spurred by the thought of the latter, he flung himself forward and wrapped his forearm around one corner of the console as his feet left the floor.

Qat’qa was snarling curses as she began to be dragged out of her seat in spite of the way she had braced herself in position. Nog looked across at her, seeing another asset about to be lost. As his head moved, the rushing of air suddenly left a vortex over his left ear, and he could feel something pop inside. It felt as if someone had jammed a spike into the side of his skull, and as if his brain was leaking out.

The back of the helm seat broke with a loud crack, under the leverage that Qat’qa’s effort to stay in place was exerting. Suddenly Qat’qa was flying upward, and Nog hurled himself across his console with a scream of frustrated anger, throwing himself bodily at the environmental console, and the forcefield control on it.

As soon as he was moving, he began to rise, as quickly as Qat’qa, and he stabbed an arm out, willing it to stretch far enough, even if it had to take his shoulder with it, to reach the panel.

Cold smooth plastic rapped his knuckles, stinging more than he would have expected, and then he was, mercifully, falling.

He slumped against the environmental console with relief, as Qat’qa slammed to the floor with a muffled curse a few feet away. Overhead, the emergency forcefield had finally come on, and blue static was sparkling across the hole in the ceiling.

Nog pulled himself up, to see Qat’qa dart back to the helm seat. “Are you all right?”

She looked back, her expression fevered and wild. “Yes!”

“Where are they?”

“Behind us.” She flipped the vessel, and suddenly the marauder’s huge, curved engine section was upside down, right in front of Nog’s eyes on the main viewer.

Nog had a sudden flash of inspiration. “Vol? Are you all right down there?”

“Ish.” He sounded a little shaky and sickly.

“Good enough. Can you transfer all our power reserves, and as much drive energy as you can spare, through the main deflector?”

“What, now?”

“Yes, now!” The marauder was already starting to turn.

“All right, you’ve got it.”

Nog saw the energy levels on his tactical console light up with more power than he’d ever seen on a weapon.

He stabbed at the firing control.

The Challenger’s main deflector dish flared up, and speared a solid beam of energy right into the port quarter of the marauder’s engine section.

The marauder simply disappeared, exploding into nothingness in a single nova-like flash. A few moments later, pieces of debris rattled what was left of the stardrive section’s shields, but this last assault by the marauder wasn’t enough to do any damage. The pieces were too small.

Nog caught his breath and leaned on his console, trying to disguise the fact that he needed it to prop him up. Qat’qa let out a long shuddering breath, and slumped in her seat. “So, which of us is in command now?”

“Good question,” Nog admitted. He shrugged. “You know what you need to get the ship back together, so I suggest you just tell me what you want done.”

Qat’qa held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. “I’m setting a course to rendezvous with the saucer section.”

Scotty was happier than he had been in days, lying on the floor of a transporter pad, his head and shoulders down in the workings of it. Leah knelt next to him, working on the circuitry behind a wall panel. Geordi had dismantled half the console on the other side of the room, and was trying to lock on to the Intrepid, but he sounded frustrated as he worked. “The transporter just doesn’t have the range to reach into the Infinite and down the closed timelike curve.”

Scotty levered himself out of the hatch he was in. “What we need is some kind of booster.”

“Transporter pattern enhancers?”

Scotty scoffed at the idea. “What? Just fire them out of the torpedo tubes or something?”

“A shuttle, then? We could use the shuttle’s transporter system as a relay?”

“It’d be a suicide mission.”

“Actually it’d be a one-way trip, but into the past.”

“That’s worse,” Scotty grumbled. “It’d mean someone else with a chance of changing things. Anyway, a shuttle would never survive the stresses of the Infinite, let alone the trip through the CTC. We need a transporter relay, just like we used to bring Mister Barclay home from the Voyager fleet for this mission.”

“You adapted the Pathfinder project to bounce a transporter signal between relays, rather than just compressed data like a holoprogram?” Scotty nodded an affirmative. “And Reg agreed to that?” La Forge was amazed.

“Aye, but he still got beamed through under sedation. Now we need something that can handle a lot of transmission power and bandwidth over a very long range.”

“The Romulan probe,” Leah said slowly. “It is designed to handle a wide range of transmission bands.”

“And it has the range.” Scotty agreed. “It’s set up to transmit all the way to Romulan space.”

“We can ignore most of the probe’s systems anyway. We only need it to support a carrier signal.” She jumped to her feet. “I’m on it.”

Minutes later, her voice came through in the transporter room. “The probe’s ready, and in the tube.”

“Fire,” Scotty ordered, and he imagined he heard a distant thud as the probe was launched.

“Probe away. Crossing the wormhole threshold in three, two, one. Now entering the Infinite.”

Scotty ran to the transporter console. “Right, now, let’s give that big-eared bastard the severe Malky,” he said aloud, and slid his hand across the controls, energizing the beam to maximum power. “He wants time travel, he’s got all the time travel he can handle.”

22

When Scotty and Leah returned to the bridge, waves of gravimetric interference were reaching out like claws to try and drag the saucer into the wormhole. There was enough mass in the string to form any number of black holes, and that mass pulled inexorably on the Challenger.

“We need warp power for a stable position,” La Forge reported from the helm. “I don’t think impulse is going to be enough.”

Scotty took the center seat. “Keep us as steady as you can, regardless, Mister La Forge. I’ve visited the past enough times in my career.”

“I’m trying. I’ll rotate the saucer and step up the impulse power, but really, we need that stardrive section back.”

“It looks as if the marauder has been destroyed,” the ensign at tactical reported. “The stardrive section is returning.”

“Thank heavens for small mercies.” Scotty punched the communications control. “Mister Hunt, well done. Now I could do with my ship being put back together in one piece. We need your warp power to keep ourselves stable while we’re transmitting the annular confinement beam into the Infinite.”

Nog and Qat’qa made almost identical grimaces. “Captain,” Nog called back, “I’m afraid Mister Hunt is dead.”

“Thank you, Mister Nog.” Scotty’s voice was muted. “Are ye able to re-combine with the saucer section?”

“The automatics are damaged,” Nog said. “And, anyway, I don’t think there’s time for the usual re-combination procedures.”

“No time?” Qat’qa echoed. “The very words I live by.” She regarded the approaching saucer for a few seconds, then began working her console. “Nog, tractor beam.”

“Ah,” Nog said with an approving nod. “Good thinking, Kat. Vol, give me tractor power . . .”

The bridge vibration eased slightly, and La Forge suddenly found that the controls were much more responsive. He turned to Scotty. “It’s the stardrive section, they’ve got us in a tractor beam.”

“That should help in keeping our position steady.” He pressed the communication button again. “Good work, Mister Nog. Hold us in position. Vol, use the warp engines to counter the gravimetric waves.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

On the bridge of the Intrepid, the heavenly light pouring in through the main viewer was no longer the golden hue of pressed latinum. Now it was cold and blue. Bok and Sloe had expected that, as they were beginning to travel back in time, and the light was accelerating toward them.

Sloe cursed suddenly, and Bok immediately looked up. “What’s happening?”

“Interference again!”

“What sort of interference?”

“Some kind of transporter signal. An annular confinement beam.”

“How is that possible?” Bok couldn’t imagine that Challenger had followed them into the Infinite.

“I don’t know . . .”

“Is it affecting our course?”

“Yes,” Sloe said, with a grim finality.

“We can’t keep up the transporter signal indefinitely,” Leah warned.

La Forge risked looking away from the helm console for a moment, now that the stardrive section was giving them stability in the face of the gravitational distortions and energy bursts. “We don’t have to. The longer Intrepid is looping around the string, and the faster she heads back in time, the more effort she’d need to break free of the closed timelike curve.”

“Which means we only need to keep altering their course until we pass the point where they can’t get an escape velocity from it?” Leah asked.

“Aye!” Scotty said.

“How long?”

“Not that long.” La Forge answered. “Those old engines are nothing like as powerful as modern ones.”

Intrepid’s bridge was filled with a cacophony of alarms that was agonizing to Ferengi ears. “Radiation alerts, Bok! They’re off the scale . . .”

“This is an old ship; the scales probably don’t go far.”

“According to this, the external temperature is—That’s impossible!” Sloe’s expression was a mix of horror and awe.

“Impossible?”

“Ambient normal space temperature outside the CTC is over one billion Kelvin!”

“What?” Bok was no scientist, but even he knew that that was far beyond the temperature at the heart of even the hottest suns.

“And the hydrogen density is over one Earth atmosphere.”

“Does the CTC emerge in a star? A gas giant?” He couldn’t help asking, even though he knew better.

“No . . .” Sloe raised his hands from the computer in a gesture of helplessness. “Some kind of quark-gluon plasma. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Break us free!”

“I can’t! We’re being held in the CTC by external pressures. That damned transporter beam.”

“What’s our temporal course?”

Sloe called up a navigational readout. “All it says is ‘Primary.’ ”

“Primary? What use is that? Primary what?” Bok wondered if the ancient ship’s computer was failing.

“I don’t know. The main something, or the first someth—”

Bok suddenly felt very cold and very sick. The ship rattled around them, the ancient panels clattering at the seams.

“Hydrogen pressure wave! More pressure waves ahead,” Sloe proclaimed. “Leptons, hadrons . . .”

“What’s a lepton?” asked Bok.

“Elementary particles that filled the universe in the second to tenth seconds after the Big Bang.” Sloe’s face drained of all color. “Hadrons were mostly created and destroyed in the first second . . .”

Bok slumped back into the command chair. The image of his son was frozen in his mind. A newborn, a new employee, an heir to the family business and an inheritor to the family’s profit. A child who would now always be dead. “No . . . It can’t be . . .”

“. . . of the Big Bang,” Sloe finished.

The cosmic string didn’t exist yet, and so neither did the closed timelike curve. Freed from it, Intrepid’s warp core exploded, disintegrating the ship down to the subatomic level in no time at all, because time itself didn’t yet exist. Bok would never know that he hadn’t had time to even register that fact before everything he had ever known both ended and began.

The Split Infinite wasn’t merely split any more, it was ripped asunder, tearing itself apart in an eruption of cosmic energies.

The neutron star that had coalesced so long ago at the poles of the Infinite was already dissipating in a blazing cloud of plasma, while the wormhole turned itself inside out and vomited forth the raw energies of creation in a spectacular blast that looked like it would spread forever. Somewhere inside, Challenger’s sensors claimed, the cosmic string was unraveling, and energy discharges from its contacts with stellar and wormhole matter were sparking still more colossal detonations.

Scotty saw the danger first. “That’s it, it’s been there long enough. Disconnect everything!”

“What?” La Forge was momentarily puzzled. Even if the transporter beam had reached the minimum level needed to do its job, what harm was there in leaving it a few moments longer, just to be sure?

“Disconnect the transporter and tractor beams. The energy will feed back along the string.”

It was too late. Tentacles of quark-gluon energy, driven by the power of the first and biggest explosion in the universe, lashed out along the beams, and hammered into the Challenger’s saucer.

Energy shorted out between the transporter pads and the energizing coils in the ceiling, ripping each transporter room to shreds. The transporter consoles exploded, and buckled the transporter room doors that barely managed to contain the explosions.

On the bridge, lightning crackled across the consoles, shattering the laminated surfaces. Shrapnel scored across everyone in the room, and Scotty was hurled across the bridge, to lie crumpled at the base of the main viewer.

As the decks tilted, furniture hurtled wildly across the room in Nelson’s, sending shelves of bottles crashing to the floor, and shards of glass into the air. Tables tumbled across the room, one slamming into Guinan and jamming her against the wall.

Nog and Qat’qa could see the saucer wreathed in crackling energy, and starting to slide out of position.

“They’re losing power,” Nog said. “Can you dock manually with the saucer?”

“I have never tried,” Qat’qa replied, in a tone that suggested this was an oversight she had long wanted to rectify. “Secure yourself. This may be as bumpy as my forehead.” She nudged the stardrive section forward.

“Do you need the tractor beams on or off?”

“Keep them on!”

The saucer descending toward the connectors on the stardrive section should have been a reassuring sight, but watching the immense gray-blue surface approach the gaping hole in the ceiling was more nerve-wracking than Nog had expected, especially as it was shuddering and bouncing unpredictably.

It was hard to read Qat’qa’s expression, as her face was pretty much masked by the concentration required to dock with the saucer at exactly the right rate to engage the locks, and not so quickly that the mass of the stardrive section batted the saucer aside.

Rasmussen was certain that the ship was about to explode. He had been lifted from one ship about to be torn apart and dumped into another—how unfair was that? He was almost resigned to the idea, when he realized that the forcefield across his cell in the brig had gone out when a power junction exploded.

Perhaps he was still fated to continue his journey after all. The fates had brought the professor and his time pod to him, then the Enterprise, then Challenger and Intrepid, so why not another ship?

The shuttlecraft in Challenger’s shuttlebays weren’t that different from the ones in his day, and in fact were almost certainly easier to fly. They were designed to be used by almost anyone.

Even though he had thought it all through, he was still surprised at how easy it was to steal a shuttlecraft. No one was watching for him, or keeping an eye on the shuttles.

As he had suspected, the tiny but warp-capable craft was easy to fly, and he had no problems in sweeping out and into space.

As he oriented the shuttle away from the new nova where the Infinite used to be, he saw that Challenger was complete once more, and beginning to turn. Not wishing to give them the chance to grab him in a tractor beam, he pointed the nose at a random star, and jumped to warp two.

Challenger’s warp nacelles flared into life, and the ship plunged forward into warp, leaving behind the spreading nebula, and the eruption of elementary particles, which were limited to the speed of light.

23

“Are we about done here, or are you still sending me more casualties?” Alyssa Ogawa had rarely been so tired, or seen so many cuts and broken limbs in her sickbay in a single day, even as head nurse on the Enterprise. At least she would have an interesting story to tell Noah when she saw him. More importantly, she was still here to tell it.

“I think we’re out of the worst of it,” Scotty told her, with a look that said he hoped that was true. He sat, slumped forward to catch his breath, on a biobed, while a medtech prepared a hypo for him.

“That’s a relief. Most of these injuries are pretty minor, but there are simply so many that I’m running out of space in sickbay. If there are any more casualties I’m going to have to look at finding somewhere else to put them.”

“How about a holodeck?” Barclay suggested, as a nurse applied a boneknitter to his wrist. They looked at him askance. “No, I’m serious. A holodeck can re-create any environment, and the computer can patch internal sensors through to the sickbay computer systems, so the holographic biobeds can function as real ones.”

“There’d be a bit of a time lag,” Scotty said.

“Only a couple of nanoseconds. Nothing that would prevent swift action.”

“From a holographic doctor?” Ogawa asked skeptically.

“Well, I have a certain influence in those matters,” Barclay said slowly. “If you want—”

“It’s all right, Reg, I think my medical staff is up to it. Space is the problem, not staffing.”

“Oh, okay.” They laughed together, and then Ogawa showed Scotty through to her office, where they could have some privacy.

“All right, lass, give me the bad news.”

“What makes you think there’s bad news?”

“I’ve been injured before, and I know how it feels. And I can see it in those concerned eyes of yours.”

“Well, the bad news isn’t exactly bad news per se. There are a lot of people in here with worse injuries than you’ve sustained. But . . .”

“But there isn’t another human crewmember of my age,” Scotty said bluntly.

“I don’t want you to think I’m in any way casting your age as a negative, Captain, but I can’t lie to you either. You’re not going to heal as quickly or as easily as a younger person with comparable injuries. Nor for that matter, will you heal as quickly, or as likely, as someone who didn’t spend eighty years in a transporter buffer. The damage isn’t serious, but it’s a contributing factor.”

“Don’t worry, Doctor, I can see where you’re going with this.”

“Where I’m going with this, is that I’m going to need to have you in here for cellular regeneration treatment every forty-eight hours. That spleen of yours took a nasty knock, and it’s not an organ that heals easily in the best of cases.”

“Every forty-eight hours?”

“That’s something you’re going to need to think about.” She hesitated, seeing the sadness in his eyes. “There are . . . regulations. I won’t quote them, but sooner or later . . .”

“Ye mean sooner?”

“Yes.” She forced a smile. “But for now, I prescribe a good single-malt painkiller, just like I did for Geordi’s cuts, and Guinan’s broken ribs. I gather Guinan has declared Nelson’s a special analgesics dispensary, and that’s fine with me. Go on down to Nelson’s. That’s an order, from the only person aboard who can give you orders.”

The Split Infinite had stopped expanding. Scotty leaned against one of the big support pillars in Nelson’s and allowed himself a smile. “Well, she’s a beauty now, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” La Forge said, and fell silent. There were a hundred other comments he wanted to make, but just couldn’t, because he could feel his voice starting to tremble too much. “Did we just do what I think we just did?”

Scotty looked at him, serious reflection vying with eagerness to control his expression. Eventually he let out a sigh. “Who can say, Geordi? Either their warp core breach was swamped by the explosion they were running into, or the warp core breach triggered it. Either way, Bok’s just as dead.”

“Yeah, but as a eulogy goes, ‘Let there be light’ has a more poetic sound than ‘Give him the severe malky’ or whatever.”

Scotty chuckled. “That’s true enough. But not as appropriate, I think.”

“What is a malky anyway?”

“It’s an old Scottish expression that means to do some damage to somebody. Serious harm, I mean.” Scotty looked a little uncomfortable, or, Geordi thought, embarrassed. “Truth to tell, I’m not sure why it’s actually called that.”

“It’s rhyming slang,” Guinan’s voice came across the restaurant. She walked over to the window gracefully, a twinkle in her eye. Her feline smile broadened as she saw Scotty and Geordi’s surprised and baffled expressions. “Malky is short for Malcolm, and it means Malcolm Frazer—a razor. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, open razors were the preferred weapon of street gangs in Scotland.”

Scotty and La Forge exchanged a look, their eyebrows raising further in open astonishment.

Guinan grinned openly now. “Oh, come on, Geordi! I first met you in nineteenth-century San Francisco.” La Forge realized immediately where she was going with this. He had forgotten that, from her perspective, they technically had first met then. It was all too easy to think that they had both first met each other aboard the Enterprise. “And it never occurred to you that I might have visited other parts of the planet?” They laughed.

“All right,” Geordi said at last. “I think I ought to go see Leah.”

“And I need some sleep,” Scotty added.

Guinan raised her glass. “And I see some more people in need of painkillers.”

Guinan was waiting with a drink when Nog reached the bar, but was holding the glass low. Raising a hand any higher than the height of her own nose was agonizing. She forced a smile, because it was her duty. She wasn’t just hostess of Nelson’s, she listened. “Kat tells me your father is the Grand Nagus.”

“Don’t hold that against him. Or against me.” He grimaced. “I asked her not to tell anyone.”

“Well, she didn’t exactly tell me. I just listened to the gaps between the words in what she did tell me. You’d be surprised how much you can learn by doing that.”

“I’m not really interested in—” He cut himself off.

“Listening? Learning? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Eavesdropping,” he said sourly.

“Ah.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to use that term. I know it’s not what you were doing, but . . . But I can’t really think of the right word. It comes from growing up with Odo always spying on us.” Nog looked a little nervous. “You’re not going to tell me you know Odo as well?”

“Okay. Is your father a good Nagus?”

Nog was somewhat taken aback by the question. “I . . . I guess so. I mean, he has some funny ideas, but when he gets to looking at the economy as an engine, he can see how it ought to work.”

“As an engine? I’d never really thought of it like that.”

“Oh, but it is.” Nog was quickly warming to his subject. “You fuel it with investment, it generates a sort of cultural solvency field—”

Guinan laughed, and this time didn’t notice whether it hurt or not. “You sound like you’ve got a good grasp of it as well.”

“It’s in the blood.” He paused. “Was your father an engineer?”

Guinan hadn’t expected the question, and it threw her. “My father . . .”

“Oh,” Nog said quickly, “you don’t get along. I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right.” She was genuinely pleased that he had asked. “I suppose he was, in a way.” The thought was a pleasant surprise. “I never really . . .” Got along with him? No, that wasn’t really fair. “I never really thought of him that way.” The pain in her side seemed to fade. “Thank you, Nog. You’re a very perspicacious Ferengi.”

There was no “who is it?” when La Forge rang the chime on Leah’s door this time. She simply opened it. A new scar above her right eyelid drew his attention, and he couldn’t help feeling that it was a sad thing.

“Is it that bad?” she asked, catching his gaze.

“Actually, it just sets off the rest of you even more perfectly.” He paused. Maybe it was a mistake to come here, but he desperately wanted to bring up something else that had been sticking in his mind since she mentioned it. “You said you didn’t want anyone to tell me you were aboard until I already joined. Were you that worried that I’d come knocking on your door first thing?”

“You did come knocking on my door.”

“By accident!”

“I wasn’t worried that you’d come looking to talk to me.” Leah’s expression softened. “I thought if you knew I was here, you’d refuse reassignment.”

“Why would I do that?” Geordi couldn’t imagine.

“Because we’ve had issues in the past.”

“When we worked together, on the Genesis Wave problem, those issues seemed to have fallen behind us.”

“I did say they were in the past,” she said, and smiled.

24

Challenger, her stardrive and saucer sections reunited, and hull damage patched, orbited the new supernova at a safe distance. Every sensor aboard the ship was recording the energies that were blazing out into the universe.

It was a beautiful sight too, with many different colors shimmering across the flower of light where the Split Infinite used to be. Leah Brahms, sitting in Nelson’s, knew that it was a valuable source of information on the conditions at the beginning of the universe, and that astronomers and physicists would be delighted by the data, but it wasn’t an engine. It was unlikely to impact directly on the development of new starship propulsion, and so, as far as she was concerned, it wasn’t that interesting.

“Leah?” It was Geordi. “I thought I’d bring you something to cheer you up.”

He slid a padd across the table to her, along with a Cardassian Sunrise.

She picked up the padd with a faint smile, which broadened as its subject matter caught her attention. “Where did you get this?”

“From Intrepid’s sensor logs. Reg and I have been working to restore them, and I think we’ve got most of the degradation cleared up now, so we should be able to examine them for any signs of either the Romulan mine that supposedly destroyed the ship, or”—he raised his glass—“for this new subspace distortion, which I think you’ll agree looks a like a slipstream wake.”

Leah studied the padd, feeling an uneasy familiarity. There was a similarity in the padd’s display to results she’d seen during the design of the Vesta-class, but it was also different, and chillingly alien. “You’re right, it does . . .”

“Then, after you drink up, I’d like to show you something in the conference room.”

Intrigued, Leah followed Geordi up to the briefing room, where he brought up a display on the tabletop hologram. Scott, Barclay, and Vol were already there too. “Something seemed really familiar about this slipstream signature, and I just knew I’d seen it somewhere before. So, I ran a computer cross-reference, and similar readings have been detected over the years, and . . . Look at this.” He brought up the first wavefront analysis on the padd. Data scrolled past, while a three-dimensional image of a waveform rotated below it. “This is a reading from the sensor logs that Reg and I cleaned up from Intrepid’s computer. “It shows what seems to be a quantum slipstream effect in subspace, only it’s way beyond the parameters of any slipstream technology we know.”

“Not so much slipstream as . . . Trans-slipstream?” Barclay suggested.

“It’s as good a phrase as any. And this reading is one of the last things picked up by Intrepid’s sensors before every system on the ship went offline.”

Leah looked doubtful. “To be honest with you, I’m fairly surprised Intrepid’s sensors were even capable of picking it up. Her sensors are hardly better than a ship’s telescope, compared to what we have today.”

“I’m not,” La Forge said. “The question isn’t whether the event was of a magnitude to be registered, which it obviously was, but whether the Intrepid’s computers—or any of her crew—could have interpreted it.”

“They’d have just seen it as a massive subspace disturbance without being able to understand what caused it,” said Scotty.

“Which we still don’t know for sure,” Geordi admitted, “despite all our theorizing. Nor do we know what it represented in terms of technical advancement.”

Vol blinked slowly. “All right, so this trans-slipstream wavefront hit Intrepid at G-231, and knocked her all the way over to the Agni Cluster?” Vol asked.

“It certainly had enough power behind it,” Barclay said, admiration in his voice as he looked at the data.

“And the Romulan minefield?” asked Vol.

“What would happen if this magnitude of a wavefront hit a mine?” prompted Scotty.

Leah shrugged. “A mine has less mass than a starship. If the wavefront could carry Intrepid, it would have carried the mines as well, farther and more easily. Except that they’d have detonated in the process.”

La Forge snapped his fingers. “That’s what mines are designed for, isn’t it? To go off when disturbed. So, let’s imagine that this trans-slipstream wavefront hits the mines, detonating them as it rips them out of their positions, and then hits Intrepid, throwing her from G-231 to the Agni Cluster through subspace by way of a subspace gravity inversion in the Bolus reach.”

Leah walked around the display. “Between the impact of the wave and the energy from the mine detonations, the Intrepid’s inertial dampeners are totally—” She caught herself. “Irrelevant, against those kinds of energies.”

“Cool,” Vol said. “Well, now that that’s cleared up—”

“It isn’t,” La Forge said. “All right, so now we know what knocked out Intrepid’s inertial dampening and killed the crew, but we don’t know what caused the trans-slipstream wave.”

Leah waved a hand toward the numbers showing the magnitude of the wave. “Could it be some kind of natural phenomenon? Numbers like that pretty much suggest a stellar cause.”

Geordi shook his head. “I think it’s a wake.”

“A wake implies a ship created it, surely? Maybe wake’s the wrong word. We should stick with wavefront as a safe course.”

“No, and this is why I brought this data for you to see. I’m sure wake is the right word. From the form of it that we have on this reading, it’s definitely spreading out behind something in motion.”

“What could it be? I mean, what could do that?”

La Forge spread his hands with a sigh. “I don’t know, but I do know that, whether it’s a natural phenomenon or a technological one, what happened to Intrepid wasn’t a unique occurrence.” He brought up another display, almost identical to the first. “I knew I’d seen this type of reading before. It was round about the time my mother and the Hera disappeared. At the time I was so sure the Hera was still safe somewhere that I got ahold of every record she had sent back to Starfleet. Back then I was looking for clues to the Hera’s fate so I wasn’t paying much attention to her earlier reports. But I remembered this.”

Leah leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “This is from the Hera?” La Forge could smell the scent on her hair, and reminded himself that he was working.

“This sensor reading was included in surveys the Hera made of the Kaladian system three months before she disappeared.” Geordi brought up a third display. “And this one was included in the last telemetry received from the Hera.”

“All the same kind of wavefront. Or wakes . . .” Vol said, as everyone stared at the trio of displays.

“And that’s not all. I looked at these last night, and saw the similarities. So I tried searching through the computer for any Starfleet records that showed the same thing.”

“And?” Scotty prompted.

“And . . .” Geordi touched a control and the screen broke up into a flurry of copies of the same waveform. “I found quite a few.”

“Dozens . . .”

“Dating back centuries.” Silence washed round the briefing room. Geordi sat down at last. “Most of the time these were just long-range sightings, but there are a couple that tie in to ship losses as well.”

“Including the Hera?”

“Intrepid and Hera, yes. If the Hera was carried somewhere by one of these trans-slipstream wakes . . . She might still be out there.”

“She?” Leah hesitated. “Do you mean the Hera, or your mother?”

“I don’t know. I just . . . do not know.”

When the door chimed in La Forge’s quarters, he had the immediate impression that it would be Leah. He had taken off his jacket but still wore his uniform shirt. He was surprised to see Scotty after he called out, “Come on in.” The captain had a dressing on his forehead and a couple of stitches in his cheek, and a bottle of Scotch in his hand.

“Scotty!”

“Were ye expecting someone else? Doctor Brahms, maybe?” he suggested, with a twinkle in his eye. “If so, I can’t say I blame ye. She’d be a fine catch for any engineer.”

“Let me guess—if you were twenty years younger . . .”

“More like a hundred and twenty!” Scotty sat in a chair, put the bottle down on a table, and said, “I’m presumin’ ye have some glasses.”

La Forge chuckled as he had the replicator form two glasses. “What can I do for you?”

“I was thinking about these trans-slipstream wakes, and that got me to thinkin’ about the Intrepid, and how it was carried away.”

“The wakes, yeah.” He wondered where Scotty was going with this, but he had a shrewd suspicion that he already knew. He wondered if Guinan had put Scotty up to this. “And that led you to thinking about other ships that might have suffered the same fate.”

“Aye, or mainly the one. The Hera.”

“The readings looked pretty clear to me.”

“They looked clear to me too, which is just as well. Guinan tells me that ye’ve had a bee in your bonnet about the Hera, and understandably so.”

“If you’re wondering whether I’m going to let the possibility of the Hera’s survival interfere with my—”

“No.” Scotty shook his head, with a reassuring expression. “I know ye won’t get too distracted to do your duty. But I do wonder if ye might get too obsessed to unwind when you’re off-duty, and that would get in the way.” He poured two large measures. “So, here’s some unwinding.” He raised his glass. “To Captain La Forge of the Hera.”

“I don’t think I—” He paused, composing himself. “I don’t think I’m going to get my mother back, if that’s what you think I’m thinking. I made my peace with her loss. But if there’s a chance to know why I lost her, what happened to the Hera, I have to try to find out. If nothing else, whatever happened to the Hera might happen to other ships—hell, if the Intrepid’s sensors are right it definitely has.”

“It certainly could prove a navigation hazard,” Scotty said thoughtfully, “but let me ask you one thing. Would you be as determined if it was, say, the Lexington that had disappeared?” La Forge immediately thought of Tamala Harstad, and felt an instant stab of guilt that this was the first time he’d really thought about her since coming aboard the Challenger. He couldn’t even remember what she looked like.

“No,” he admitted at last. “I think there’s a little bit of the child in all of us that—”

“That just wants one more chance to say hello to mum or dad, or granny and granddad? I think you’re right there.” La Forge gave a sad, silent nod. “That’s the thing. When someone you’re close to dies, you wish you could have them back, but you never think that if you get them back, someday you’ll probably lose them again. And, the second time around, it’s worse.” Scotty looked at his glass from various angles. “After Jim Kirk was lost from the Enterprise-B, it was Guinan who found me and tried to tell me that he wasn’t really gone.”

“That he was suspended in the Nexus.”

“Aye. Of course, I didna believe a word of it. I thought she was just telling me something to take the sting off. I thought I started believing it on the Jenolen. The ship had crashed, life support was about to go down, and I thought about what she had said about Jim Kirk being still there, suspended in the Nexus. I think maybe that’s what put the idea into my head of suspending that poor lad and myself in the transporter buffer until we were rescued.” He chuckled slightly. “I didn’t have this Nexus thing of Guinan’s handy, so I improvised with what I had.”

La Forge unconsciously raised a hand toward where his VISOR used to sit, as if to adjust it. “I think I’d have had an easier life if Soran had decided to just jump into a transporter buffer . . .”

“Life isn’t easy, or fair. If it was, we’d all be presidents of Pacifica.”

Geordi couldn’t help but laugh. “When we found you, you did say something about thinking Captain Kirk had sent us.”

“I was still in that last bit of belief that he’d survived, and had popped back out somewhere else.” He sighed and took another drink. “And then the belief wore away. I stopped believing it. Until it turned out to be true, and by the time I heard that . . . It was too late, and the captain really was dead.” He set the glass down. “I thought it would be easier to deal with, then. After all, I’d had years of having passed the mourning stage.”

“Wasn’t it?”

The older man looked up with eyes that had seen far too many years, and said, “What do you think?”

Alyssa Ogawa wasn’t looking forward to her appointment with the captain. She sat in her office and wished she could just be out in the main part of sickbay, getting on with treating patients. She was happier doing that, and it was all she had ever wanted to do.

She reminded herself that what she was doing now, she was doing for Noah. Having the responsibility of extra paperwork and tricky decisions was worth his safety and education.

Scotty came in slowly, and sat heavily opposite her. “Sorry I’m late, lass. I had some doctorin’ of my own to do.”

“Self-medication isn’t such a good idea.”

“Don’t worry, it was Geordi I was medicating.” He looked her in the eye. “Well now, I guess it’s time we had that little chat that you wanted to have last night.”

“Captain,” Ogawa began.

“I thought I had made it clear that all the senior staff were to call me Scotty.”

“I know. I just . . . Look, this is hard enough as it is.”

“Don’t worry, Alyssa, just spit it out.”

“It’s not something anyone on a starship could ever feel comfortable about, telling their captain that . . . that he’s not going to pass the minimum requirements for command fitness.”

“Ah. And ye don’t just mean because of my injuries, do you?”

“No. They’re a contributing factor, obviously. I’m sorry, Captain . . . Scotty, but a younger man would recover from these injuries more quickly, and need less aftercare.”

“And I’m not a younger man, by any means.”

“I’m sorry.” Ogawa wanted to shrivel up and disappear. She wondered how Beverly Crusher managed to do this.

“Don’t be, lass. You’re doing a fine job, and if you’re worried that you’ve somehow offended me, then you needn’t be.”

“I don’t want to put you through testing. I’d rather spare you that.”

“That’s kind o’ ye, lass. There was a time once before when I retired from Starfleet, I thought it was ninety years ago,” he said with a rueful smile.

“Ninety years ago? That sounds like a pretty good comeback.”

“Aye, but nothing lasts forever, does it?”

“Captain—”

“Please, Scotty. If nothing else, you’ll have to get used to saying it when I—” He slumped a little in the chair, and, for the first time Alyssa could think of, looked his age. “When I’m not the captain.”

“Scotty,” she said carefully, looking for an out for the decision one of them had to take. “The command fitness requirements only apply to command.”

“There are minimum requirements for the service at every level,” He reminded her. “And, truth to tell, it’d be harder to stay and step down than to retire at the top.”

“I thought you might see it that way.”

“Challenger’s my project, and the Corps of Engineers is too. I suppose I have enough pull to step across to being a civilian specialist.”

“Well, I don’t see you being kept out of anything you want to do.”

Guinan had a neat Scotch ready as Scotty entered Nelson’s. “I thought you might need this.”

“You wouldna be reading my emotions, would you, Guinan? I didn’t think you were a Betazoid.”

“I don’t need to be a Betazoid to read expressions, or to listen to what’s in the offing.”

“Unless there’s been a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality I’m not sure what there is to listen to.”

“Oh, no, Alyssa wouldn’t do that. But a starship has its own voice, it’s own tone. Conversations kind of get trapped in the walls and ripple through the air. You’d be amazed what you can hear if you just listen.”

“Ah. And what have you heard on what passes for the wind on Challenger?”

“That she’s going to have a new captain in the morning.”

Scotty nodded. “That she is,” he said. The words came more calmly than he expected.

“It’s not going to be easy.”

“I retired once before.”

“It’s not going to be temporary this time.”

“I bloody know that!” Scotty exploded. He slumped into a seat, but didn’t touch the Scotch. “I didn’t come here for that. I came here because . . . I need to be able to say things the way I really don’t want to say them. Things like ‘I don’t bloody want to retire,’ or ‘I wish tae—I wish I could make ye see that I’ve still got what it takes even though I know I haven’t.”

“A good man knows his limitations.”

“Who said I was a good man?”

“Everyone who knows you.”

Scotty blushed. “Aye, well, that’s as may be, but sometimes even a man who knows his limitations needs to . . . to rail against them.”

Guinan sat across the table from him. “I’m listening.”

La Forge rose from the center seat on the bridge as Scotty emerged from the turbolift for the first shift of the next day. Scotty beckoned to him, not stopping as he limped straight through and into the ready room. La Forge followed, and for once had the impression of how it must feel to be a Betazoid. There was a heavy cloud around them that couldn’t be seen, but he could feel it radiating off Scotty in waves and weighing down on his shoulders.

Scotty didn’t sit, but just waited for the doors to close behind them. “Geordi, we need to talk.”

“Is this about your resignation?” Everyone knew the regulations, and what they meant.

“Aye. And I won’t be beatin’ around the bush, I’ll just tell you straight out. I want you to take command of Challenger.”

“Me?” La Forge held up his hands “But . . . I’m not really in Challenger’s chain of command. I’m just on attachment, and I’m happy as chief engineer—”

“Aye, and I don’t blame you. I’ve never been happier than when I was chief engineer on the Enterprise, and by that I mean the original 1701, with no bloody alphabet afterwards. But things always change, and if they don’t—if you don’t—you stagnate. And before ye know it ye’re goin’ backwards.”

“The Corps of Engineers, and Challenger, hardly seem like going backwards.”

“Exactly. I moved on from one ship and made a bigger difference. And I might feel I was happiest before all that, but I certainly canna say I’ve been unhappy since.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest La Forge was about to vocalize. “I already contacted Starfleet, and they agree with my proposal to promote you to captain of Challenger.”

“Leaving aside my position on the Enterprise, I only just came aboard a couple of weeks ago.”

“That’s no bar, especially considering the situation. You’re the finest engineer I’ve met in this century.”

“You probably just haven’t met enough of them.”

“There’s a practical issue as well. Ordinarily the first officer would step up to the plate, but of course Mister Hunt is . . .”

“Yes.”

“You’re second officer, which automatically makes you next in line anyway. Kat’s not a member of Starfleet, so she’s out. Leah’s a civilian, so she can’t take the center seat. Nog’s too good at tactical to take away from there . . . You get the idea.”

“I guess so,” La Forge heard himself say.

“Good.” Scotty forced a cheery grin. “Besides, how else was I going to get the excuse to get out of that center seat and back down to engineering where I belong?” He pulled the pips from his own collar. Three of them he pressed into La Forge’s hand, and the other he attached to his collar. This close, La Forge could see the tears in his eyes. “I stand relieved,” Scotty said quietly, “Captain La Forge.”

There were a few formalities to take care of, such as the transfer of authorization codes, but within five minutes, Scotty had returned to engineering as a civilian specialist, like Leah, and Geordi had called for Reg Barclay to come to the ready room.

“Reg, I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure, Geordi . . . I mean, Captain. Yes, sir.”

“It’s all right, Reg, I can’t believe it myself.” Geordi fingered the fourth pip on his collar as if it was an irritation. “I just wanted to talk to you about the position of first officer.”

“I don’t want it, sir.”

That, Geordi thought, at least made what I have had to say a little easier.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, the job of first officer really needs a good organizer, and I know I’ve got some . . . Well, whatever I am, I know I’m not a good organizer. And so I know I’m not right for that job.”

“Reg, seeing that we’ve known each other for so long, you might like to know that I did think about offering you the post . . .”

“Before deciding against it.” It wasn’t a question, and Reg didn’t look upset or disappointed. “It’s all right, sir. It’s not really my field.”

“Right. But I do need to shuffle the senior staff, and I do now need an ops officer and second officer, and that place is yours if you want it.”

“That sounds wonderful—I mean, thank you, sir.”

Geordi clapped him on the shoulder. “Well done, Reg.”

“Chief Carolan.” La Forge was in transporter room three, where she was supervising repairs. “I know that my coming aboard kind of cheated you out of your promotion to ops and second officer. I’d like you to accept a promotion to lieutenant commander, and the position of first officer.”

“Sir, Lieutenant Nog is surely ahead of me.”

“Captain’s prerogative. Besides, Nog is just too damned good at tactical, and he’ll make a great chief engineer someday.”

“In that case, sir, it would be my honor.”

By the next day, everything was signed and sealed. Starfleet’s approvals had been entered into the ship’s logs. La Forge had risen early, and knew that this was the last time he’d see these quarters. By the time he was off duty again, the few possessions he had brought to the Challenger would have been moved to the captain’s quarters, his quarters.

Geordi looked at himself in the mirror. Objectively there wasn’t a lot of difference from when he went on duty yesterday, but his eyes were drawn straight to the fourth pip on his collar, and the collar itself was now command red instead of engineering gold.

It seemed almost like a blemish, and he toyed with the idea of wondering whether there was a malfunction in the circuitry of his eyes. Maybe the pip had been magnetized somehow and was affecting them, making them focus on it to the exclusion of all else.

He knew better. He didn’t need Ogawa to check out his eyes, or a counselor to tell him what his psyche was doing. He needed to show his face on the bridge. Walking to the turbolift, and riding it up to the bridge, he almost felt that he was riding the tumbril toward the guillotine.

He hesitated for a moment, feeling all eyes on him as he crossed the bridge. After a moment, he sat in the center seat. Leah was in the seat on his left, and Carolan on his right. Reg and Qat’qa looked over their shoulders at him, expectantly.

“Engineering, are we back up to full power?”

“Everything’s cushti,” Vol’s voice replied.

“He means the warp core is ready for anything ye ask of it, Captain La Forge,” Scotty added.

Geordi nodded. “Qat’qa . . . Set course for Starbase 410.”

INTERLUDE: ROMULUS

Some weeks ago

Subcommander Saldis emerged from the elevator on the lowest level of his building’s underground offices. On the surface, the building was a simple ten-story office block for the civilian workers and assistants to the Senate, but below ground level were another twenty floors of offices and workspaces belonging to the Tal Shiar.

Like all intelligence services across the galaxy, the Tal Shiar was a bureaucracy that generated an immense amount of virtual paperwork, and it maintained several regional offices across Romulus itself, as well as on other Romulan worlds.

There were no interrogation cells or training facilities in the building where Saldis was based, but there were the offices of analysts, policy-makers, communications experts, and so on. Saldis had his own office on the fifth floor, but had been summoned down to one of the secure communication rooms. Here, the equipment was kept at precisely the correct temperature and humidity levels.

The technician who had called him was seated at a tightly curved console which controlled the recording telemetry from stealth probes in a range of star systems. She turned as Saldis approached, and made as if to stand. “Subcommander—”

“It’s all right.” Saldis gestured for her to remain seated. “You said there was a priority downlink?”

“Communication intercept from Earth to Ferenginar.” She brought up a view of the encoded data. “It has an automated flag for the attention of a qualified case officer on the Short-Change project, and you were the first available.” She met his eye, and Saldis could see that she was glad that he had been the one chosen.

“Let’s see what we have.” He took the data crystal she offered, and returned to the elevator.

Back in his own shielded and soundproofed office on floor five, Saldis skimmed through the data on the crystal. Most of it was boring chatter between various Ferengi scheming against each other, but Saldis had a good eye and ear for more important phrases, and picked up the first heartbeat before the computer red flagged it for him.

“Rasmussen” was the word. Saldis knew it wasn’t a Ferengi name, and it took only a few moments to recognize it as fitting human naming conventions. Humans and Ferengi together was worth keeping an eye on.

Although it was the first red flag, it wasn’t actually surprising, as the project itself was devoted to monitoring human-Ferengi interactions without Starfleet or FCA boundaries. This Rasmussen’s name had come up several times, in connection with a known Ferengi criminal named Bok. Saldis had spent several days researching both individuals, and was intrigued by the fact that the human, Rasmussen, was from two centuries in the past. That Bok had served time in prison was less interesting, but his connections to the Ferengi underworld were worth looking at. If nothing else, the ability to know who to contact in that circle could prove valuable when trying to place intelligence-gathering assets in Ferengi territories.

As Saldis kept reading, his blood began to tingle, his instincts telling him that something unusual was happening. Unusual and of possible benefit to the Romulan Star Empire.

After a couple of hours of searching, he found the thing he knew was there. He had no idea what it would be until he found it, but he had known it was there all the same.

“Time travel,” quickly followed by “return Rasmussen home. Home to the twenty-second century.”

The praetor had always had an office in the Tal Shiar headquarters, which was more an operational control room than an office for paperwork or holding audiences. It was ideal for briefings with the Empire’s security experts. Saldis, being an analyst rather than a policy-maker, had only been in a handful of briefings there—enough to be comfortable, and not let the praetor’s presence make him nervous.

Gell Kamemor’s personal security, however, did make him nervous. She had thus far treated the Tal Shiar well, and the rest of the services fairly, but one never knew when an overzealous bodyguard would misinterpret an innocent motion as the beginning of an assassination attempt. To avoid any such errors, Saldis carried his padd and data crystal in his hand, rather than risk reaching into a pocket in view of the pair of bodyguards.

The heads of several Tal Shiar directorates were also present, along with the chairman, a general, and an admiral. Saldis smiled at this; it proved to him that he was correct in suspecting that this set of signals was important, and that he was right to bring it to high-level attention.

“Subcommander,” Kamemor said by way of beginning the briefing. Her hair shimmered as she turned to him. “What do you have for us?”

“Signal interceptions between Earth and Ferenginar, and subsequently between both planets and a number of vessels. The signals were all routed through various proxies and relay stations, but our systems were easily able to follow the communications.” He held up the data crystal and padd. “Copies of all the relevant signals are here, and I have also compiled a thorough analysis and report that summarizes the relevant details.”

Kamemor nodded, reaching out a hand. Saldis fancied he could see, or at least feel, the bodyguards tense as he passed the padd over to her. He then slid the crystal into a slot on the workstation before him, bringing up holographic displays in front of the other attendees. “What you’re looking at,” Saldis announced, “is a series of encrypted signals between criminals in both the Federation and the Ferengi Alliance. Most of them are related to matters of little interest to the security of the Empire. However, these”—he touched a control, and some lines being displayed turned from blue to yellow—“are of much greater interest.”

“Why?” the chairman asked softly. “Because of a human making inroads with the Shadow Treasurers?”

“No. Because of a human scientist from another century attempting to enlist the Shadow Treasurers’ aid in returning him home. Home, that is, to his time of origin.”

“Time travel?”

“It has been achieved several times, in different ways,” the head of the Technical Directorate pointed out. “None really repeatable.”

“It goes without saying,” the admiral added, “that a Federation ability to conduct a four-dimensional campaign would be a clear and present danger to the security of the Empire. And a Shadow Treasury ability to do likewise would be—”

“Even more of a threat,” Praetor Kamemor said. “Their services would be for sale.” Heads nodded around the room, Saldis’s included. “And your recommendations?” She looked around at the other faces, her gaze staying away from Saldis.

“You invite us to suggest the military option,” the general said, “but only so you can tell us why not. Who would we use it against? The Federation? Only one man matters, and it’s easier to simply remove a man in the dark than to go to war for him.”

“Likewise,” the admiral agreed, “the Ferengi underworld is by definition a hidden society, not one the fleet can engage.”

“Well spoken,” the praetor said. “And yet we cannot allow this threat to go unchecked.” A chorus of nods circled the room.

“We need more data,” the technical director mused aloud. “More about where and how these criminals think they can gain such a power. We need to study them, track their movements, and monitor their communications more closely.”

“Exactly the recommendation Saldis has made.” Kamemor brandished the padd he had given her. “Excellent work, Subcommander. I’m afraid I must punish this good deed by giving you a taxing and dull duty. We shall arrange to send out cloaked probes to follow the progress of this criminal matter. You shall remain as case officer on the program, and report daily on everything that is discovered, no matter how apparently innocuous.”

“Thank you, Praetor.”

“You may go, Saldis. Jolan tru.”

“Jolan tru, Praetor.” And, with that, Saldis was out of the gaze of the trigger-happy bodyguards, and back to work.

Three days later

A D’Deridex-class warbird dropped out of warp in a nameless system through which a number of the intercepted signals had passed. It remained cloaked, and began to launch probes. As the first wave of probes spread out from the warbird’s launchers, it made a short warp-jump to the opposite side of the system. There, it repeated the process.

After a few moments, during which time its crew checked that the probes were all functioning properly, the warbird leapt back into warp, heading for the next system on its itinerary.

No sensor on the Ferengi marauder which was orbiting the fourth of six planets registered the arrival or departure of the warbird, or the existence of the probes.

One month later

“What does this part of the signal mean?” Subcommander Saldis asked the operative from the Technical Directorate. They were in the downlink room on the lowest level of Saldis’s building, and Saldis had sent the duty officer out so that the pair could converse alone.

“These are copies of sensor logs. Presumably the ship that transmitted this message had attached them.”

“Sensor logs . . . Can you interpret them?”

“Given time. There are two sets of sensor logs here, both Starfleet in origin. One set are two hundred years old, dating from the Earth war. The other is current. These have already been decrypted?”

“Yes. I just need the sensor data interpreted,” Saddie said.

“We have emulators for Starfleet systems on floor ten. Join me there in an hour, and we’ll see what they say.”

Exactly an hour later, a very excited technical operative welcomed Saldis into a computer lab filled with what looked to be Starfleet science computers. “Subcommander, the praetor will shower you with rewards!”

“I take it that the sensor logs are of some value?”

“Some value? Have you no idea—no, of course you haven’t, or you wouldn’t have needed me. The sensor logs appear to show something similar to the wake of a slipstream drive in subspace. But not actually slipstream.”

“How different?”

“As far beyond slipstream as slipstream is beyond warp.”

“Trans-slipstream . . .” Saldis murmured to himself.

PART 2

MÖBIUS TRIP

25

Captain’s Log, Stardate 60214.1. Since Tyler Hunt’s memorial service and the completion of the Challenger’s repairs, we have been on an extended detachment to test a new transporter upgrade that’s intended to provide near-instantaneous transport. No visible materialization phase, just pop, and you’re there. I’m sorry that that doesn’t really sound technical enough, but it’s the most accurate description of that I’ve heard so far. The ideal is that the full dematerialization and dematerialization phases should, together, take no more point zero two of a second. So far, the technology works, but the pressure differential caused by so quick a departure or arrival has—according to the results from testing with human-analog test objects—burst eardrums and caused other pressure-related problems. As a result, the program has gone back to the drawing board at the Daystrom Institute, and Challenger, I hope, will be free to resume a duty that, I don’t mind admitting, I find more appealing.

Captain Geordi La Forge sat in Scotty’s—no, he forced himself to admit, his—ready room and greeted the on-screen image of Admiral Halliday with a pleasant face. “What can I do for you, Captain La Forge?” the Frenchwoman asked.

“Admiral, I was wondering if there was any objection to Challenger looking into the source of the trans-slipstream wakes that we discovered while dealing with the Intrepid.”

“If these are natural phenomena, they may be something we regularly encounter without really noticing.”

“Perhaps, sir, but given what happened to Intrepid, it looks like there’s something more to them than just a natural phenomenon. I’ve transmitted all the relevant data, and Mister Scott, Doctor Brahms, and our chief engineer all agree that there’s enough evidence that these wakes are being caused by some technological means.”

“The word wake implies a ship,” Halliday prompted. She canted one eyebrow in an almost Vulcan gesture.

“That’s exactly what we think, that some kind of vessels are causing these.”

“So you’re still sure there’s a technological discovery to be made here, then.”

“We do. At the very least, even if there were no ships and the effects were all natural, the fact that Intrepid was lost to one suggests that, if nothing else, they are a possible navigational hazard. And if it’s the result of the use of a technology . . .”

“Well, you are the go-to people for drive technologies,” Halliday acknowledged. “Go find your trans-slipstream wake, Captain.”

La Forge kept the urge for a triumphant exclamation to himself. “Thank you, Admiral.”

“Halliday out.”

Scotty sat on a biobed in sickbay, while a nurse adjusted the cellular regenerator over his head, and Alyssa Ogawa read through the results of his latest tests. He had got back into the habit of wearing his old uniform trousers from the 2280s, with the red stripe down the side, and a gray pullover and suede vest. They were definitely more comfortable than the modern uniform.

“That spleen seems to be coming along nicely,” Alyssa commented. “I doubt it’ll ever be a hundred percent again, but . . . Your heart worries me more. Have you been getting out of breath lately?”

“I have, yes.” Scotty didn’t need to ask how she knew; she was a doctor and so it was her job to know, or find out, these things.

“That’s the legacy of your exploits in the Jenolen’s transporter.”

“Let me guess,” he said, putting on the charm, “the electrical rhythm of the nerves that make the heart pump is out o’ whack.”

“You should go into medicine.”

“Nothin’ to it, lass. I know just exactly how much the matter stream in a pattern buffer both affects and depends upon the electrical field of the body. Normally it’s so small it’s harmless, but . . .”

“Even over nine decades it was fairly harmless, and not even detectable by Doctor Crusher’s examination back on the Enterprise. But it was a cumulative effect, and when you took enough knocks . . .”

“That’s always been the way.”

“Don’t worry.” She peeled the backing off of an adhesive patch, and slapped it onto the back of his hand. “There you go. The patch radiates a radiogenic field tailored to your heart. It’ll need to beswapped once a week or so.”

“Thanks, lass.”

“So, how are you enjoying being a civilian specialist?”

“Too bloody much,” he admitted.

When the day’s treatment was over, Scotty intended to pop into Nelson’s, but he found La Forge waiting for him outside sickbay. “Hi, Scotty.”

“I was just going for a drink, laddie. You wouldna’ care to join me, would ye?”

“I think I could put up with that.” So they went in to Nelson’s together. Guinan’s bullet-headed deputy was in charge, so they took a seat by the big windows, safe in the knowledge that nobody was likely to disturb the captain and the legendary engineer.

“I was hoping we could get together,” La Forge began. “We’re going to go looking for the trans-slipstream wakes again.”

“I thought we might. They’re a remarkable thing. I didna’ think Starfleet would object.”

“I wish I could have been so sure.” La Forge looked out of the windows at the distant stars. “I’m not sure I’m the right person to be making those kinds of choices.”

Scotty understood perfectly. “Ah, command decisions. They aren’t as easy as engineering ones.”

“No . . . At least in engineering there’s a physical result, cause and effect. No need to worry about repercussions of feelings or politics.”

“Aye. Command is all about harder choices; which means thinking harder.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“Ye won’t know, Geordi, until you’re in it. That’s the only way to find out. The first thing I always find myself wondering is: ‘What would Captain Kirk do?’” Geordi chuckled, as Scotty continued. “But then I remember that Captain Kirk would probably be on the landing party that’s in the middle of the trouble in the first place, and I’m too old and too in love with the engines to be in that position.”

“So then you have to think for yourself.”

“Aye, but I can count myself fortunate to have learned from the best; Captain Kirk and Mister Spock, both. And it’s not just me; I’m pretty certain that serving under them is what made Mister Sulu such a good captain when they gave him Excelsior.”

“So, when Captain Kirk was on an away—I mean a landing party—and you had the conn, how did you work things?”

“By the book, by the captain’s wishes, and—from time to time—by threatening to drop a barrage of photon torpedoes.” Scotty punctuated his remark with a wicked and wolfish grin. “We always find ourselves affected by the commanders we serve under, and they always color our own command styles. You’ll be the same, Geordi.”

“You mean, ‘What would Captain Picard do?’ ”

“Aye. Unless, of course, ye deliberately set out to do the exact opposite, you’ll be influenced by how your captain did things, even if only subconsciously.”

“Well, I’m not Captain Picard . . .”

“And I’m not Jim Kirk. And Jim Kirk wasn’t Captain Garrovick, but every captain always finds their own voice. You will too, and someday somebody will be askin’ themselves what Captain La Forge would do.”

Geordi looked away absently. “I think part of the issue I’m having is that I already wonder that myself.”

“Really?”

“What would my mother do? I guess whatever happened to her has been preying on me a little recently. It’s like the Hera is . . . haunting me.”

“It’s only natural that you’d think about her when signs of her ship showed up, after all these years.”

“There was a time when I thought maybe she . . . maybe the Hera was out there somewhere, and that if I kept looking, I’d find it. In the end it was just a dream. I was obsessed beyond the ability to think rationally. Worse,” he admitted, as much to himself as to Scotty, “I was beyond the ability to accept what had happened and move on.”

“Grief messes with everyone’s senses.”

“I know, and after a while, with the help of Counselor Troi, I got past that. I accepted that the Hera was gone, and my mother was dead. It wasn’t easy.”

“It never is.”

“And, now, all of a sudden . . .” LaForge shook his head. “Now it looks like maybe I was right the first time. Maybe I should have kept looking, back then.”

Scotty sighed. “It’s a bloody awful thing to happen to you, Geordi, and I wish I knew the right things to say.”

“I still don’t know yet whether it’s really an awful thing or a good thing. Or both.”

“Both, without a doubt.” Scotty leaned forward, and his face took on a serious demeanor. “Let me tell you something from my experience. When someone you care about dies, you wish you could just have them back, because you think that will be easier, and things will be better again. And, sometimes, you get that wish. Sometimes the person is only missing, or for whatever reason they’re restored to you.”

“And it turns out not to be easier or nicer?”

Scotty’s eyebrows shot up at the suggestion. “Oh, no, not at all. It feels great. You’re together again, and what could be wrong with that? What could be unpleasant?”

“But there must be a downside. I can see that much in your face.”

“Well, most beings of most species have a finite lifespan. They’re not immortal, and sooner or later, they die.”

“Again . . .”

“That’s right. From your point of view, they die again. You lose them again. And you think it’d be easier, because this time you’ve had time to prepare, or you think you did your grieving the first time round.” He shook his head. “And I’d love to be able to say that was true and that that’s how it works, but it isn’t.”

It was obvious to La Forge what was coming next, and he didn’t really want to hear it, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything to stop it.

“It’s worse.”

“How can it be worse?” La Forge could hardly hear himself.

“Because this time you know, with double the certainty, that’s it’s over, it’s final . . . And you’ve had that much more time and love to power the grief.”

Breakfast for La Forge, the next morning, was coffee and waffles with Leah in his cabin. “You convinced Starfleet about the need to track down the source of the trans-slipstream wakes,” she was saying.

“I think finding the Intrepid has offered us a chance to learn about the next stage of slipstream technology.”

“And the Hera.”

“Maybe. It’s always possible that the hints we got are all that there is, but . . . I think maybe it’s a meaningful coincidence. Serendipity.”

“You know, this focus on the Hera could be seen as . . .”

“Obsessive?” He had been there before. It was like a drug, both destructive but irresistibly comforting.

“Just a little. I mean, I don’t think it’s something that needs medical attention. In fact it might be something good.”

“I’ve never heard of obsession being a good thing.”

“You can’t be passionate about something without being a little obsessed with it, and I’m sure you’ll agree that passion is a good thing.”

“When it’s something like love, yes, but . . . Look at Daimon Bok, and there’s an example of passionate hatred.”

“I understand it quite well, Geordi. Look at me. I have a passion for engines. I have a passion for technology. And I don’t think it’s done me any harm. Sometimes obsession is a sign of illness, but I think there’s also a type of obsession that’s a driving force, like the mental equivalent of slipstream.”

“You say the nicest things . . . but I wonder what sort of wakes mental slipstream leaves, and what damage it does?”

“Let’s try not to find out.”

26

Guinan was waiting for La Forge in his ready room when he came on duty, which surprised him. He could only remember her coming up to the bridge once or twice during all the years she had spent on the Enterprise.

“Guinan . . . Is there some problem?”

“Actually, I came up here to ask you that.”

La Forge allowed himself an understanding smile. “Ah, you’ve heard about our assignment.”

“Looking for the trans-slipstream wakes. I won’t presume to ask if you’re sure it’s something that the Challenger should be doing. You’re the captain.”

“I can hear a ‘but’ coming.”

“But . . . just let me ask you one thing, Geordi.”

“Anything, go ahead.”

“Are you looking for the source of these wakes, or are you looking for the Hera?”

“You think I’m using the wakes as an excuse to . . . what? Indulge in wishful thinking?”

“I just remember a time when you were a little . . . eager to find the Hera, for very understandable reasons.”

“Truth to tell, Guinan, I’m not entirely sure. I think . . . I tell myself that there are a lot of good reasons to find out what’s causing these wakes, and what we can make of it, and I think I make a pretty good case to myself. But at the same time, I remember how I felt when the Hera first disappeared, and I wonder if maybe there isn’t some subconscious urge at work.”

She smiled warmly. “It sounds to me like you have a good balance of motives.”

“And it’s not just us. Not just Challenger. Starfleet has distributed a general call for reports of sightings of these kinds of events. It’s become a pretty important issue.”

“Then I’m glad I’m getting the chance to see how things turn out.”

“For me, or for Starfleet?”

“Both. Starfleet’s in the history-making business, but it’s always good to see friends get the good stuff too.”

“The good stuff! Well, that’s one way of putting it. Reg will probably see it that way . . .” He rose. “Which reminds me, I have to go talk to him.”

“Then I’ll see you later, Geordi.”

“Nelson’s does have something of a monopoly on board.”

She leaned in conspiratorially, as if to impart a great secret. “That’s the way I like it.”

Barclay was seated at the ops console, so Geordi didn’t have to go far to make his appointment. “Reg, how’s the search for the wakes looking?”

Barclay brought up a sensor calibration display on his console. “I’ve reprogrammed these sensor nodes to register the waveform of the wakes, and trigger an alert if any are detected.”

“Distance?”

“They’re scanning subspace up to three light-years. I figured it was best to use the long-range sensors, since these wakes are dangerous to be around.”

“Good thinking.”

“Captain La Forge,” Nog said from the back of the bridge. “We’re being hailed by the U.S.S. da Vinci. They’re asking . . . This is weird . . .”

“Out with it, Nog.”

“They’re asking if you want hot chocolate.”

Geordi laughed. “Tell them yes, and arrange a time.” He doubted that anyone else aboard the Challenger, with the possible exception of Guinan, would have understood the reference.

A few minutes later, the da Vinci dropped out of warp beside the Challenger, and both ships cruised side by side. “You have the conn, Carolan,” Geordi said, and went down to transporter room two to greet the visitor from the da Vinci.

Still curvaceous and vivacious, Sonya Gomez had matured from a slightly clumsy engineering officer to the captain of the da Vinci, and one of the mainstays of Starfleet’s Corps of Engineers. “Sonya! Long time no see!”

“Geordi! So you finally made Captain.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’ll try not to spill hot chocolate on you.”

“Very wise. You know Captain Picard’s been plotting the same fate for you since you took command of the da Vinci.”

“I still have nightmares about that day, you know.”

“So does he.” He didn’t add that it probably had more to do with Q introducing him to the Borg than with an embarrassing spill. “Why don’t you come on down to engineering and tell us what’s brought you to our door.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Engineering wasn’t busy, and both Scotty and Vol looked delighted to see Gomez. La Forge knew that Scotty had a hand in making her captain of the da Vinci, but had no idea that she knew Vol as well.

“Scotty originally asked you to look for anything weird in G-231 . . .”

“I don’t know if I’d call what we found weird, but definitely unusual.” She gave Vol an isoliner chip, and he brought the data on it up in the holographic display that filled the center of main engineering. It showed a subspace map of a star system, with a strange gritty pattern to it that La Forge had never seen before. “There’s an elevated background level of subspace distortion there. It’s a sort of subspace granulation on a quantum level.”

“Have you seen anything like this before, Scotty?” Geordi asked.

“Never.”

“Me neither. Is there any specific pattern or location to it, within the system, I mean?” Vol asked.

“Not that we can determine,” Gomez said. “It looks like it’s some kind of long-term effect that’s built up over centuries. We were wondering if there might be any correlation between your waveform and this general subspace granulation?”

“It doesn’t look like it to me, but anything’s possible,” La Forge said.

“Our thoughts exactly, so we ran some comparisons. We compared the subspace granulation and your trans-slipstream waveform, and there is a connection.”

“Excellent! What’s the link?” Scotty asked.

Gomez pointed to the way the grit elements of the pattern lined up. “Our granulation is a diffraction pattern. When we overlaid the waveform on the granulation we could see points lining up. The granulation is the hangover from lots and lots of wakes crossing each other over a long period of time.”

“Just like wakes from boats crossing and making peaks in the water?” Scotty suggested.

“Exactly. Whatever’s causing these wakes, either there are a lot of them, or it’s been through G-231 a lot of times. Gradually the repeated crossings of these wakes have caused a quantum granulation in subspace across the whole system.”

“Why there?” La Forge wondered. “Is there any strategic element to it?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it looks as if the black hole in the Bolus Reach is being used as a navigational buoy,” Vol said.

“That’s a hell of a buoy,” Scotty added.

“That’s our opinion too.” Gomez yawned. “Anyway, it’s been a long day, and we’re on our way to build a planetary deflector shield against a gamma ray burst, so I’ll have to dump data and leave.”

“Thanks, Sonya,” Scotty said, with feeling.

“Don’t be a stranger,” La Forge added.

“Make good use of the data,” Gomez called back, as she headed in the direction of the transporter room.

Scotty, Vol, and La Forge looked at each other, and at the holographic display. “What do you think?” La Forge asked Scotty after a few long moments.

“I think I’d like to hear Leah’s opinion on this.” That was a request with which La Forge heartily agreed.

La Forge looked out through the window in his ready room just in time to see the da Vinci bank away and leap to warp. Across his desk, Leah leaned forward, going through the data.

“This subspace granulation doesn’t quite say slipstream to me, but there is an element . . .”

“You’re the expert on quantum slipstream. If you don’t think it’s that, then I guess we have to look at other explanations.”

Leah held up one hand in a “halt” gesture. “Like I said, there’s an element of the slipstream matrix that’s . . . hinted at by this granulation. But a slipstream drive as we understand it couldn’t have caused this. Certainly not on its own, and certainly not over time.”

“That’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

“The time scale?”

“Yeah.” La Forge sat down behind his desk. “If it’s damage that’s built up gradually over two hundred years, I’m wondering if it could actually be a buildup of damage from warp engines of a couple of generations back.”

“Definitely not. As you can imagine, the symptoms of that kind of subspace damage are something that’s deeply ingrained in those of us who design and develop starship engines.”

“What about some kind of natural phenomenon?” Geordi asked.

“I don’t know. There’s a lot about subspace that we still don’t know. Anything’s possible.”

“What would you think best fits the facts?”

Leah was silent for a long time, and La Forge knew that, given the choice, she’d prefer not to jump to any conclusions, but to arrive at them logically and correctly. “Traffic of an unknown type, with an unknown engine profile.”

“Unknown?”

“And totally new.” She pushed the screen away, and met his eyes. “You were right. This looks like a totally new form of propulsion, and the traffic powered by it uses the Bolus Reach for navigation.”

La Forge had already come to the same conclusion, and it seemed obvious what his next move should be, if he wanted to learn more about the wakes and what caused them. He moved to the communicator switch on the table. “Bridge, this is the captain.” Damn but it still felt unreal and disturbing saying that. “Set course for the star system G-231. Warp six.”

27

Captain K’Vadra stomped onto the bridge of the I.K.S. Iw’Bat, a B’rel-class Bird-of-Prey, and received the salutes of his tactical officer and helmsman. “Report!”

“Sir,” the tactical officer growled, “a subspace distortion has been reported near a pulsar in the Garath system. It seems someone is probing our borders.”

K’Vadra licked his lips hungrily. “Intercept course!”

The Iw’Bat banked, her wings dropping into a combat configuration, as her crew probed the source of the mysterious energy ripple in subspace. As they drew closer, the ripple faded, rather than growing stronger, which puzzled K’Vadra.

“Whatever it was has gone,” the tactical officer confirmed.

“Or has cloaked?” Cloaking probably meant Romulans, and K’Vadra hadn’t fought a Romulan for years. It was a pleasure he missed.

“Possibly.”

K’Vadra paced the bridge, too excited to sit in the command chair. It wasn’t long before they reached the coordinates where the distortion had originated. There was nothing in sight, except for a strange reading at the very edge of sensor range. It was almost as if the sensors were passing through something; as if whatever it was wasn’t just hidden by a cloak, but wasn’t really there. Whatever it was was also huge, but K’Vadra didn’t mind that, as he knew the Romulans had some very large ships.

“What is that?” He hoped for the name of a Romulan ship class.

The tactical officer wasn’t giving the results he hoped for. “Unknown, sir.”

K’Vadra scowled, more disappointed than anything else. “Check the tactical database.”

“Checking . . .” She straightened, spitting a curse. “Impossible!”

“What is impossible?” He wanted facts, not opinions. Whoever was out there was in Klingon space without permission, and would learn the error of their ways at the earliest opportunity. He didn’t want to hear how unlikely the situation was.

“The computer says it is a Chariot of the Fek’lehr.”

K’Vadra spat. “I said check the tactical database, not the literature—”

“This is the tactical database.”

K’Vadra leapt over to the tactical console and pulled her aside so that he could enter the query himself. “Idiot! I shall—” He broke off, as the computer responded to his own question with the same result. “Qu’vatlh!”

He let go and stepped down to his command chair, overlooking the helm and ops pit. “Well, if it’s the Chariot of the Fek’lehr, he’s in the world of the living without my permission, or that of the High Council, so let’s send the bastard back to Gre’thor where he belongs.” He pointed a finger at the screen. “Helm, intercept course.”

The Iw’Bat swooped down upon the distant vessel. K’Vadra took the tactical console himself. “Give me a mark when we’re in firing range.”

“Firing range in nine thousand,” the helm reported. “Closing.”

On the angular main screen something suddenly appeared, but the stars were still shining through it. “Firing range!” K’Vadra loosed a single torpedo and a short burst from the wingtip disruptors, neither willing to waste energy at this range, nor to wait until he was closer. The torpedo ran true, and went clean into the heart of the shark-like form ahead.

To K’Vadra’s amazement and delight, the leviathan disappeared in a flash. His pleasure lasted only a moment, however, as he realized that the torpedo had gone straight through it without detonating, and would soon self-detonate.

He thumped the console with both fists. “Where did it go?”

“Unknown, but that subspace distortion is back, and off the scale. It’s as if there was a waveform or . . .”

“A slipstream ship? Federation?”

“No, but . . .” The tactical officer looked up, her face a mask of puzzlement. “There is some similarity to slipstream spoor, but far beyond anything we know is possible. There’s something else. The computer reports that any sightings of this type are to be reported to the High Council immediately.”

K’Vadra thought about that for a moment. Perhaps there was some kind of new Romulan ship, one with its own slipstream drive . . . That would certainly be of great importance to the High Council.

“Report it, then.” He turned to the helmsman. “Return to our patrol course.”

La Forge didn’t know who to expect when his door chimed. “Come in,” he called. He was off duty and in civvies, ready to take Leah to Nelson’s for a proper meal, but he had a few minutes to spare while she got ready.

Qat’qa entered, proffering a padd. She was the last person he would have expected. “I received this from the High Council. It is a report of an attack made by a Bird-of-Prey upon a supposed vessel in Klingon space. Scans made at the time show signs of the subspace distortion we’re searching for.”

“Why did they pass it on to you personally, rather than forwarding it through channels?”

“Because family is quicker than bureaucracy.”

“I can’t argue with that. Thanks, Qat’qa.”

It was another two days before the official version report from the Klingon High Council filtered through to the Challenger. Carolan brought it to La Forge’s attention in his ready room, during the regular morning status meeting.

“What’s this?” he asked, when she handed him the communications file.

“A collation of reports of trans-slipstream wakes detected in various parts of the Alpha Quadrant over the past few weeks. That Klingon sighting is in there, one from the Aventine, and even a report from Cardassian space.”

“Cardassian space?”

Carolan shrugged. “Apparently so. Something disturbing a communications relay in an otherwise uninhabited system. The Klingon one’s weird though.”

“Weird how?”

“They’re passing it off as some kind of . . . folklore in action. Calling it a sighting of D’Vey Fek’lehr.”

“A . . . devil ship? You mean like a UFO sighting on Earth, or the Loch Ness monster?” Geordi didn’t think the Klingons were big on seeing things.

“Close enough,” she said with a shrug.

“Well, I guess we asked for these. Call a senior staff meeting in five minutes. We’ll see what everybody thinks.”

“Aye, sir.”

Scotty, Leah, Vol, Nog, Barclay, and Qat’qa joined them around the obsidian-topped table in the conference room, and Carolan repeated her information about the list of trans-slipstream wake sightings from Starfleet.

Taking the floor, La Forge said, “I guess the next question is whether all these sightings give us enough of a pattern. Something that might lead us to where we can monitor these wakes for ourselves.”

“That’s easily done,” Barclay said, as he brought up a holographic star chart above the table. “If I download the locations and vectors of all these sightings to astrometrics . . .” a series of flashing points appeared, joined by faintly glowing lines that crisscrossed in several areas, most of which were systems with high-mass, high-gravity objects. “There.”

“It looks like a power flow chart,” Leah commented.

“Adjusted for the times of the sightings, it’s clear that some of them”—Reg touched a control, and a few of the lines turned red—“are some kind of . . . spoor, all of the same thing, proceeding from one location to another in a downright impossible timeframe.”

“Impossible by any current technological standard, you mean,” Leah pointed out.

“That’s impossible enough for me,” La Forge said.

“And so is this.” Leah stuck her hand into the hologram, drawing a curved line with her fingertip.

“A projection of where they came from?” Vol asked. Leah nodded an affirmative.

“Outside the galaxy,” Qat’qa whispered, as the trail went past the limit of the display.

“What?” Scotty was astonished.

“They must have come from outside the galaxy if those vectors are correct, unless they just appeared out of a different time,” Qat’qa stated.

Barclay deleted the image of one trail going outside the galaxy. “That wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe they’re using those high-gravity objects for a temporal slingshot.”

La Forge couldn’t take his eyes off the display. “It’s always possible, but it strikes me that it would be a coincidence that stretches credulity too far for whoever this is to always arrive in our time and in a place that looks exactly like they flew in through the galactic barrier.” He touched a marker for a dense neutron star at the conflux of several lines, and it flashed obligingly. “These points where the lines cross . . . I’m willing to bet that we’d find subspace granulation there.”

Leah met his gaze. “I’d be surprised if we didn’t,” she agreed.

“And if you’re traveling into a galaxy, the higher the mass and gravity of a point, the better a marker it would make from outside the barrier,” Vol said.

Qat’qa threw up her hands. “They cannot have just—”

“We couldn’t, but we don’t have this . . . trans-slipstream,” Barclay said.

“The galactic barrier,” Scotty mused. “I wouldna say it was impossible to cross, seeing as I’ve done it a few times, but it’s bloody hard, and even more bloody unwise.”

“How did you cross it, back in the twenty-third century?” Leah asked.

“Unintentionally. Oh, we tried it on purpose the once, but even with the warp engines perfectly balanced at their maximum output, and the shields specially uprated, it wasna’ quite possible to do it under our own steam.”

“It took something more? Alien interference?” Leah asked.

“Exactly. One time, these scunners from the Andromeda galaxy—they called themselves Kelvans—hijacked the Enterprise, and modified my puir wee bairns to force them through the barrier, by usin’ a machine they’d brought along themselves.”

“And how did it work?”

“How does it work, Scotty?” James T. Kirk asked.

Scotty looked helplessly at the chrome and shining mechanism that had been implanted into the control room that overlooked the main engineering floor on the U.S.S. Enterprise. He fought back the nausea and headache that were assailing him from the previous night, when he’d had to consume far too much alcohol in the name of duty.

Four Kelvans, aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, had taken on human form and hijacked the Enterprise. They had modified the engines with a device of their own, which had also been capable of reducing most of the crew to desiccated polyhedrons, and crashed through the vast energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy, in an attempt to return home. Scotty had drunk one of them under the table in order to steal his control for the device, and now he was paying the price.

Thankfully the Kelvans had discovered that they had adapted to being human too well to be able to return home, and turned the Enterprise around.

“It works . . . too bloody well, is how it works, Captain.”

Kirk grimaced, and Scotty knew that he had been expecting an answer along those lines. Mister Spock, however, wasn’t going to let it lie. “Mister Scott,” he said heavily, “if the Kelvan device can be reverse-engineered, it would be a great technological boon.”

“Plus,” Kirk said, “it would mean we would have a lot more control over our trip home.”

Scotty understood his feelings well enough. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to passing through the barrier again. Although he was glad that, this time, the Kelvans’ desiccation of the crew had meant there were no opportunities for anyone to develop rogue psi abilities like poor Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner had done when the ship first tried to penetrate the immense and incomprehensible waves of energy that enfolded the galactic rim.

Truth to tell, sitting in the conference room of the Challenger over a hundred years later, Scotty liked the idea of tangling with the galactic barrier again even less than he had back on the Enterprise. Even with all the advances in technology, it was still a potent force.

Aloud he said, “I daresay we’ll find a way.”

“Right,” La Forge said decisively. “What’s the nearest of these high-gravity points to our current position, excluding the Bolus Reach?”

Leah touched a glowing orb in the hologram. “Pulsar Alpha Six-Four. It’s quite near the edge of the Neutral Zone,” she warned.

La Forge nodded somberly. “Qat’qa, set a course for there. Let’s see if the area has the same subspace granulation as the Bolus Reach and G-231.”

“Consider us on our way, sir.”

28

On Romulus, politics didn’t stop simply because the Praetor, Gell Kamemor, was making a state visit to her homeworld of Glintara. She wasn’t going alone either; along with her ship, the fleet was represented by one of her newest warbirds, Remus was represented by a ship, and the Tal Shiar were represented by the Valdore-class Stormcrow, as if they needed to remind anyone of their eternal and watchful presence.

The Praetor knew that no chairman of the Tal Shiar liked to be seen in public, but it was unavoidable that some state occasions meant such important people had to be included in the diplomatic functions.

It had been over a year since the chairman of the Tal Shiar had left Romulus, and she found that she relished the chance to do so. Her office had almost become a prison. True, it was spacious and luxurious, and she had more power than any ship’s master, but it was an unchanging place, with no opportunity to see the new.

“Madam Chairman?” A deep voice drew his attention. It was the captain of this ship, an iron-haired commander named Marist. The chairman had made sure to read the political files of all the ship’s officers before coming on board—knowledge was, after all, power—and judged the man to be a loyal subject. Not that this meant he was automatically trustworthy. Trust had to be earned personally, as far as the chairman was concerned.

“Commander Marist,” she said. “You have a fine ship.”

“Thank you, Madam Chairman.” He swelled with genuine pride.

“Walk with me, Commander.” He fell into step beside his ultimate superior.

“These diplomatic functions are a nuisance,” the chairman said, “but sometimes can be an opportunity as well. I’ve admired your work for some years.”

Marist was delighted and surprised. “Thank you, Madam Chairman.”

They arrived on the Stormcrow’s bridge, where Marist, dismissed by a smiling chairman, went to confer with a woman who was a little taller than average, and slim with whip-like muscles. “Thank you, Subcommander Voktra,” he said in response to her report. He turned back to the chairman. “We’ve reported ready to the Praetor, Madam Chairman. As soon as she gives the signal, the squadron will go to warp. It’s three days to Glintara at normal cruising speed.”

“I know, I’ve been there before.” Everyone took their seats, and, after a few minutes Praetor Kamemor appeared on the main viewer, and gave the command to go to warp. The four ships, and their escorts, responded immediately.

Three days later, three of the ships on the state visit dropped out of warp in Glintara’s solar system. The Stormcrow, however, did not. In fact she had gained speed, and continued to do so. Marist was baffled, and harried his chief engineer, Voktra, to find out what was wrong.

Marist didn’t say anything, but all aboard knew why he was so frantic. The chairman of the Tal Shiar was aboard, and the Tal Shiar was never forgiving of failure. After several shifts, Voktra brought Marist the news he didn’t want to hear. “Sabotage, Commander,” she snarled. “A worm was inserted into the warp core’s software, and triggered when we tried to drop out of warp. It’s scrambled the navigational controls, helm, and it’s overloaded the warp core.”

“Pull the plug,” Marist ordered.

“It’s booby-trapped. If I do that, the forced quantum singularity will be loosed. Whoever did this was a technical genius.”

“Contact the praetor and the rest of the fleet, and inform them of our situation.” Marist ordered. The centurion at the communications console was already doing so, but stopped, startled, when a face that only two people aboard would recognize appeared on the main viewer.

“Director Vellil,” the chairman hissed, a cold anger rising in her.

The head of the Tal Shiar’s Technical Directorate smiled. “Madam Chairman. I’d be a liar if I said I was sorry to hear of your current technical difficulties.”

“What is the meaning of this?” Marist demanded.

“It’s a message to the chairman, from the late Chairman Rehaek. He says, ‘See you soon.’ ” With that, Vellil was gone, but the ship was still hurtling out of control.

“Commander,” the helmsman shouted, “I’ve corrected for the corruption in the navigational computer, and we’re well into the Neutral Zone.”

“Turn us around,” Marist snapped.

“Helm not responding. And, sir, we’re locked on course for a collision with a pulsar, Alpha Six-Four.”

“That’s in Federation space,” the chairman said.

“There’s something approaching us,” Voktra saw on a sensor monitor. “Approaching at incredible speed, like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Federation?”

“The signal is strengthening,” Voktra saw and reported. “If these readings are accurate . . . They suggest a type of slipstream—” Her words were silenced by an enormous judder, which snapped the bridge around in a dizzying spin, hurling Voktra, Commander Marist, the chairman and everyone else pinwheeling across consoles and slamming painfully into walls and pillars. Everything went momentarily black.

On the main screen, a green slash of wing tumbled end over end away from the ship. Alarms blared, and the lighting on the command deck turned dark red. “What happened?” the chairman demanded.

“We’re venting plasma!” a voice called. “Decks four through nine have lost pressure. All power lost!” But those weren’t the worst things. Voktra hauled herself to her feet and staggered across to the master systems display. She almost tripped over Commander Marist, and saw that he was dead. His head was missing.

“Report,” the chairman snapped again. “What hit us? What weapon?”

“No weapon, Chairman . . . A collision.”

“Collision? With what? A Federation ship?”

“Impossible to tell, as sensors are down. Chairman . . . we’ve lost the port wing. Sheared clean off.”

“Go on, Voktra.”

“Main power is offline, shields and weapons offline, cloak offline—”

“That’s too many damned offlines. What do we still have online?”

“Life support, replicators, and main power. Oh, no.” Voktra couldn’t quite bring herself to believe what she saw there, but she could feel a pit open up in her stomach anyway with the approaching horror of it.

The chairman saw her expression. “What is it?”

“Main power is online but there’s a feedback loop. The singularity is irreparably destabilized. Its spin is wobbling, and out of control.”

“How serious?”

“The singularity will break free from any possible confinement in less than an hour.”

“Eject the core!”

“Ejection systems offline.”

“And then we explode in an hour . . .”

“We implode in an hour.” The chairman scowled at her. Voktra hated to make the suggestion, but as senior officer now that Marist was dead, it was her responsibility to do so. “Chairman . . . We ought to abandon ship.”

“Send a distress signal,” the chairman said at last.

29

Challenger hurtled toward Pulsar Alpha Six-Four at warp five, when Nog broke the news. “Captain, I’m picking up a distress signal, on all frequencies. Audio only, but it’s a strong signal, which means they’re close.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“. . . the warbird Stormcrow. We have suffered a collision with an unknown vessel, and are losing atmosphere. All power lost, and our warp core is unstable. Implosion is estimated in . . .”

“Warbird? In the Neutral Zone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, we can take that up with them afterwards. For now, set a course for the Stormcrow’s position, maximum warp.”

“Course laid in, maximum warp,” Qat’qa echoed, her voice reeking with disappointment and revulsion.

La Forge knew exactly why she would be dismayed at the idea of going to rescue Romulans. He wasn’t sure if he’d earned the right to use the diminutive of her name yet, but judged that it was an appropriate moment to try. “Kat . . . I served with Worf for a lot of years, and I know how you feel about Romulans, but . . . a distress signal is a distress signal. Even in the Neutral Zone.”

“If it really is a distress signal, and if they see things that way, sir.”

“Don’t worry, that thought occurred to me too. Nog, let’s keep the shields up, and weapons ready, just in case.” He thought for a moment. “Qat’qa, join me in my ready room.” She handed over her console and followed the captain in.

“Sir, if you are thinking of giving me a lecture on interspecies relations, and my duty on this ship . . . I will not let my hatred interfere with my duty. That is not my way.”

La Forge was glad to hear it. “That’s not why I wanted to talk to you. I wanted you to understand that . . . I don’t trust Romulans either.”

“Sir?”

“I’ve been a prisoner of the Romulans.”

Qat’qa looked shocked, and he was pretty sure it was on his behalf, as a kind of sympathetic shock. “They tortured you in . . .”

“No, actually they didn’t. At least, I don’t think they did.”

“You don’t think? I would have thought that being under the thumb of the Romulans would be a very memorable experience.”

“No . . . actually it was an intentional part of what they did.” He paused, recalling her personnel file. “You lost family in the Klingon civil war, didn’t you? When the Duras family, backed by the Romulans, tried to take over the Empire.”

“My elder sister and both brothers.” She said the words as if they were a mantra, or something that motivated her. He was sure that was exactly what they were, as in his experience, that was the Klingon way.

“As a prelude to the war, the Romulans tried to drive a wedge between the Federation and the Empire. I guess they hoped both to weaken any resistance to their expansion, and to stave off Federation interference in their . . . king-making with the Duras.”

“Interference which, thank Kahless, happened.”

“Yeah. What the Romulans did was to abduct a Starfleet officer. They used psychosurgical techniques to program him to assassinate a Klingon governor, and spark hostilities between the Federation and the Empire. The EM bands that linked his brain and his prosthetic vision device were used to control him.”

“You.”

“Me.”

“But you . . . you didn’t kill any governor?”

“No. I didn’t even know what I was doing, I didn’t remember being a prisoner of the Romulans . . . All I remembered was taking a really fun vacation on Risa.”

“We are siblings in pain,” Qat’qa said slowly. “I understand. May I speak freely?”

“Granted.”

“I did not give you permission to call me Kat.” She shrugged. “An oversight, which I correct now. Please feel free to call me Kat.”

“Thank you, Kat.” La Forge meant it from the bottom of his heart. He knew how seriously Klingons took the matter of names. “Now, we have some Romulans to rescue.”

The crew of the Stormcrow could hardly breathe between the leaking coolant and fire suppression gas contaminating the atmosphere. Static from the communications system provided an appropriately hissy accompaniment. The chairman wondered whether she would asphyxiate before the singularity at the heart of the warp core crushed the ship.

“Ten minutes,” Voktra said, too coolly. The chairman couldn’t help wondering if there was some Vulcan blood in that one. Without warning, the static broke up into fragments of speech. For a moment the chairman thought she was hallucinating, but then she saw that Voktra was also hearing it.

“. . . len . . . r spon . . . call. I repeat, Romulan vessel, this is the U.S.S. Challenger responding to your distress call.”

A Federation ship, the chairman thought. It would have to be, wouldn’t it? She sought out Voktra’s eyes, and saw hope there. She nodded slowly to Voktra, accepting the inevitable. “Hail them and apprise them of our situation.”

Voktra collapsed to her knees, slamming them painfully into the hard transporter pads, as soon as the beam freed her. She was one of half a dozen Romulans who stumbled off the pad, gasping for breath.

She had waited to be one of the last ones off, to be sure that as many people were evacuated from the ship as possible. She knew it would take a while for the toxins to get out of her lungs. But now she could breathe again. A human with four pips on his collar—the captain—and strange eyes, which she quickly recognized were cybernetic implants, helped her up. “We’ve got sixty-eight survivors, including yourself. Is that all of you?”

Voktra shook her head, but it was a tiny motion. “Our passenger would not leave until all other survivors had been rescued.”

“It looks to me as if that’s what’s happened. Your passenger doesn’t need to go down with the ship.”

“No.” Voktra raised her communicator. “Chairman, this is Engineer Voktra. All survivors are now aboard the Federation ship. Are you ready to transport?”

“I’m ready,” the resigned voice came back.

A shiver ran down La Forge’s spine as he helped Voktra toward a waiting medical tech, but he couldn’t quite work out why. “Bring their passenger across,” he ordered the ensign at the transporter console. He wondered what sort of VIP passenger wouldn’t be first off. One they might not want in Starfleet hands, perhaps.

As the Romulan VIP shimmered into form on the transporter pad, La Forge understood why he had this sense of foreboding. It was the voice that he had found familiar, and now the sight of the uncharacteristically straw-colored hair shaped in the familiar Romulan bob. He knew the face that he would see, even before she turned around to face him.

“Captain La Forge,” Sela said, with a rather strained but wolfish smile. “Always a pleasure.”

Under Kat’s assured hands, Challenger swept up and out of the Neutral Zone and made a brief jump to warp. The hull of the Stormcrow flashed and burned, and then crumpled into oblivion.

Chairman Sela wasn’t someone that Geordi would have chosen to walk on Challenger’s bridge, but she was, like it or not, a high-ranking member of a foreign government, and therefore entitled to full diplomatic treatment and respect. He quickly escorted her to the conference room.

“Thank you for saving our lives,” Sela began. “Now, I formally request that you take me and the crew of the Stormcrow to rendezvous with one of our vessels in the Neutral Zone. I presume you have notified Romulus as well as Starfleet about this incident.”

“We have.” Geordi wanted to get straight to the point. “What were you doing in the Neutral Zone?”

“I only really need to give you my name, rank, and service number.”

“How about I tell you what you were doing.” She gave him a faux-encouraging smile, so he continued. “According to our sensor reports on your warp trail, you were out of control, heading for the pulsar. That means either engine failure or sabotage. Since the ship was a well-used design, I’ll vote for the latter.”

“Well done, Captain La Forge.” She sounded genuinely impressed. “A political accident, shall we say.”

“You must have a lot of enemies, especially among engineers.”

“Suffice it to say that a full investigation will get underway as soon as I return to Romulus. And, all things being equal, that had best be soon. I don’t think the Senate will appreciate my absence any more than your government would appreciate the chief of Starfleet Intelligence being a guest of ours for an extended period. They have a tendency to get—”

“Antsy.”

Sela laughed, but couldn’t deny it. “Perhaps it could go easier for you—for Starfleet as a whole—if I could speak to my government, and reassure them about my safety.”

La Forge nodded. “Of course.” That was a perfectly normal right that visiting dignitaries had. It was hard to think of Sela as a dignitary, but, in all legal ways, she was. Chairman of the Tal Shiar was at least the equivalent of a cabinet position in the Federation’s government, as far as he could tell. “I’ll have my first officer arrange that immediately, and the same for the ship’s crew, if they want to let their families know they’re all right, and if your government allows it.”

“They’ll allow it. The Stormcrow’s crew have at least one friend in high places.”

“It must be a good job, being chairman of the Tal Shiar.”

“Oh, it is.”

“And stressful when people arrange accidents for your ships.”

She gave him a coquettish look that dripped insincerity. “So many professions have an associated risk of injury. Anyone who’s been in the military is used to such things.”

Within the hour, Chairman Sela was in touch with Praetor Kamemor, who was still on Glintara. La Forge had promised her that any connection she made would be secure and not monitored by Starfleet, and she at least believed that he believed that. Sela hadn’t risen to the chairmanship by being so naïve; she knew that everyone was monitored by someone.

“Chairman Sela,” Kamemor said. “I’m relieved to see that you’re safe.”

“I am, but the Empire has lost a fine ship, Commander Marist, and many members of the Stormcrow’s crew.”

“Commander Marist?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Ah, great pity. He was one of our more reliable captains. What happened, Sela?”

“I’d like Director Vellil to look into that,” Sela said carefully. “Formally,” she added.

“I’ll pass that along to your staff, assuming I haven’t just done so,” Kamemor said with a crooked smile. “We must arrange your return. I’ll have Commander Varaan meet the Challenger at a set of coordinates suitable to both us and Starfleet. Proconsul Tomalak knows the best channels to arrange it.”

“I understand, Praetor.”

Carolan pressed the door chime to the ready room, and entered when La Forge called her through. “News from Starfleet?” he guessed aloud.

“Coordinates to rendezvous with a Romulan ship in twenty-four hours. It’ll take that long for their ship to get here, but we’re only two hours from the rendezvous.”

“Plenty of time to complete our scan of the system, then,” Geordi decided. “So long as Sela keeps out of our hair, that’ll suit me just fine.”

A pair of security guards escorted Sela to sickbay. La Forge stood next to Nog until they were gone.

“While Rasmussen was untrustworthy,” Nog said, “Romulans are far worse.”

“It won’t be for long,” La Forge promised. “Carolan has notified both Starfleet and the Romulan ambassador. As soon as we’re done scanning this system, we’ll arrange their repatriation home.”

“Until then, Captain, I’d like to keep all security staff on double shifts until they’re gone.”

“That’s probably for the best.” La Forge stepped away, casting a glance to see how Qat’qa was reacting to Sela’s presence. The Klingon woman was studiously facing front, like a statue. That too, La Forge thought, was probably for the best.

He stepped into the turbolift and went to engineering. There, Vol was cursing while trying to feel his way around a circuit, which he couldn’t possibly see, inside a wall. Scotty was working on what looked like a class ten probe’s guidance unit, but he came over when he saw La Forge.

“Are ye looking for Leah?”

La Forge couldn’t deny it. “Is she here?”

“Upstairs.” Scotty indicated the upper balcony around the warp core. “She’s fiddlin’ with the injectors, I think.”

“Lucky her.”

“The pressures of command gettin’ to ye? Or just the presence of the Romulans on board?”

“Take a wild guess, Scotty.”

“Don’t worry. The Romulans will probably keep quiet, but,” he added, “only so long as they know ye’re watching them like a hawk. And I don’t mean letting them think you’re watching. I mean properly watching.”

“We are. Nog’s doubling all security shifts.”

Scotty nodded approvingly. “That wee Ferengi’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’ll keep things right.”

La Forge nodded, and took the little platform lift up to the balcony.

Leah saw him, and immediately put down her tools and stood up from the panel she had been working in. “You seem . . . tense.” Tense, depressed, and sliding back toward that obsessive look that she’d learned to recognize since he came back into her life.

“Yeah, it’s . . .”

“If Scotty didn’t think you could handle the stress, he wouldn’t have appointed you captain.”

“Yeah.”

“And if Starfleet didn’t think you could handle it, they wouldn’t have approved the appointment.”

“Yeah.”

“And I know you’ve been in worse situations than having a ship full of rescued Romulans.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to say anything except ‘yeah’?”

“Y-Yes. It’s not just that they’re Romulans, it’s . . . her.”

“Sela.” La Forge nodded. Leah wasn’t crass enough to jokingly suggest that Sela was an ex from hell, but the thought crossed her mind. She knew better. “She looks a lot like your friend, Tasha.”

“It’s not just that.”

“Tell me.” He still hesitated. “Geordi . . . We had secrets from each other when we first met”—a generous way of putting it—“but not since. Whatever it is, I’ll understand.”

“I know you will, it’s just . . . It’s something that I can’t really understand. Or remember.”

“Remember?”

“You know about my being a prisoner of the Romulans, and being programmed like a remote to assassinate a Klingon governor?”

“Yes.”

“She’s the one who did it.”

Leah was too stunned to think of a suitable response. Going to visit Sela with a plasma welder didn’t sound particularly suitable, thought it was a very attractive idea. “I’m so sorry . . .”

“She was in command of the mission, and gave the orders. She didn’t perform the surgery.” He ran a hand across the top of his head.

“You know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished.”

“So I’ve heard, thanks for reminding me.”

Leah’s expression softened, and she took him by the arms. “Geordi.”

“I know.”

“I just can’t really say it to her the way I’d mean it, without causing a diplomatic incident that the Federation Council wouldn’t really thank me for.”

“Female of the species, huh?”

“On this occasion, yes.”

“It’s not just who she is that’s bothering me—it’s what she is now. Chairman of the Tal Shiar.”

“That’s a big-picture player.”

“It’s one they’re not going to let stay with us for long,” Geordi said. He fell silent, wondering just how much trouble the disappearance of such a high government figure would cause.

30

Challenger circled Pulsar Alpha Six-Four at one-quarter impulse power. Both governments had agreed that this was a suitable location for a Romulan delegation to come and recover their people.

“There’s not a lot of the Romulan ship left,” Nog reported from his tactical console. “The wing that was severed in their crash is the only piece larger than a slip of latinum.”

“Thanks Nog.” La Forge turned to Sela, who was waiting with a pair of the Challenger’s security guards just outside the turbolift. La Forge shivered, thinking that she looked like she belonged on the bridge. Whether because of Romulan arrogance, or because she looked so like her mother, who had once held the Enterprise’s tactical position, he wasn’t sure. “Do you want us to tractor the wreckage we’ve located? We can bring it in for you if you—”

“No.” It sounded like an order rather than a response, and he actually felt the tiniest glimpse of an urge to follow it. Maybe it was a remnant of what she had once done to him. Maybe she was testing to see how much of the conditioning remained.

“It’s your choice,” Geordi said with a shrug, “but the offer’s there.”

“Thank you.” She glanced at the main viewer, where the pulsar turned rapidly. “I think I’d best see the warbird’s crew now. I’m sure they’re being treated well.”

“They are.” La Forge bit off the urge to make a point about Starfleet treating its captives civilly. He didn’t want her to see that kind of reaction from him. “The injured are in sickbay, and we’ve turned cargo bays two and three into makeshift accommodations. These officers will take you anywhere you want to go.”

“Anywhere? That’s very generous.”

“Anywhere within reason.” He nodded to the security guards, who escorted Sela into the lift. He was relieved to see her go, and surprised to find that he had dug his nails into his palms without even noticing.

Leah, in what had been the counselor’s seat on the Enterprise, leaned in toward him as he took his seat. “Captain,” she whispered for his ears alone. “Maybe whatever hit them might still be in the vicinity. Considering the state of the Romulan ship, any such mystery vessel might also be damaged.”

“Or destroyed.”

Leah shook her head. “I think if it was destroyed we’d have found wreckage from it as well as the Romulan ship.”

“Unless all the wreckage went into subspace.”

“There’s a subspace element to whatever these things are, but they can’t exist just in subspace, or the Romulan ship could never have sustained that kind of physical damage.”

“Fair point.”

“If it’s damaged, it might be leaking energy, or radiation, or plasma, that we can search for or track. And that’ll be the best way to look, because it’s probably either cloaked or otherwise not immediately recognizable.”

“The Romulans obviously didn’t see it coming,” La Forge agreed.

“It probably traveled on further, and maybe it didn’t stop at all, but any energy leakage will be more discernible as we move away from the site of this explosion.”

“I agree, Qat’qa. Plot a search pattern. A spherical expanding spiral search.”

“Apple peel, sir?”

La Forge was momentarily surprised at Qat’qa’s comment, then laughed. “Exactly. Engage search pattern apple peel, on one-quarter impulse.”

“Aye, sir.”

“I’ll adjust the sensors to scan for subspace kinetodynamic energy signatures,” Leah said, rising from her seat. “That’s the most likely wake this thing will have left.”

“Make it—” Geordi caught himself. What Picard would do was one thing, but what Picard would say was another. “Go right ahead.”

“Chairman Sela, almost lost?” Gell Kamemor still couldn’t believe what had happened. If the Tal Shiar chairman was one thing and one thing only, she was secure. She had had to be, as her position was vital to the Empire. “What happened?”

“We’re not certain yet, Praetor,” Proconsul Tomalak replied. “We know that the vessel she was aboard was sabotaged, and sent out of control. The intent seems to have been to crash the ship into a pulsar, with the chairman aboard. An overthought assassination plan, in my opinion. Not efficient.”

Kamemor frowned and said, “Could there have been Federation involvement in the sabotage?”

“We know the saboteur was Director Jano Vellil of the Tal Shiar’s technical directorate. He claims to have acted to avenge the late chairman Rehaek, but if he colluded with Federation agents to do so, our interrogators will soon find out,” Tomalak promised.

Saldis had never actually left Romulus, nor even seen the world from orbit, until the trip to Glintara. As soon as he had materialized on the warbird Tomalak’s Fist, he had rushed to find a viewport and looked down at the planet below. He knew that words such as “down” and “below” meant nothing other than that he was surface-centric and thought the same way that most Romulans did.

It was quite beautiful, he thought. Pale green and blue, wreathed in white. The grimy sodium and mustard ball of Remus was off to the left, far behind the homeworld. Both planets suddenly looked so small and fragile. It was hard to believe that even the most loyal servant of the Empire, such as himself, could keep such a fragile jewel secure and safe. The tiniest quirk of infinity—a comet here, a meteor there—and all the Tal Shiar and military combined wouldn’t make a difference.

None of which made his duty any less worthwhile.

“Subcommander Saldis, I presume?” A crisp voice drew his attention. It was a man in the uniform and insignia of a commander in the fleet. He was older than Saldis, as evidenced by lines around his deep-set eyes, and taller than Saldis by half a head. He looked lean and fighting fit. “When they told me you were one of the people who keeps an eye on our homeworlds, I didn’t think they meant it so literally.”

That had been four days ago, and so much had changed since then. Now he felt like a loose end, while his superior, Chairman Sela, was in the hands of Starfleet. He didn’t blame Starfleet, not yet; they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or did they? Perhaps they were backing Jano Vellil in his assassination attempt. Perhaps it never was an assassination, but all a plot for the Federation to kidnap the head of the Tal Shiar and drain her knowledge.

Either way, Saldis wished he could get his hands around Vellil’s throat right now. Then he felt a sudden calm, and decided he was wrong. He was glad that he didn’t have the traitor in his grasp. Throttling him would be too much of a mercy. The techs in the Information Recovery Directorate were the right people to have him. He hoped they were having fun.

“I found it!” Barclay leapt from his seat at ops, then sat back down with a hint of embarrassment.

“You found . . . whatever hit the Romulan ship?”

“Captain, I’m reading subspace kinetodynamic energy patterns. They’re fading already, which is making it difficult to tell which direction they’re coming from and which way they went.”

“There’s no difference in the strength?” La Forge asked.

“Not that I can tell. It is definitely aligned with a trans-slipstream wake. I thought I’d check for a wake between the implosion site and a vector that would have caused the Romulan ship’s wing to attain its current position, and”—Barclay cut himself off, seeing the impatient expression on the captain’s face—“whatever caused the wake caused the energy pattern.”

“So, definitely a ship . . .”

“And definitely a form of drive technology totally unknown to us,” Leah added, sounding impressed, and Geordi knew exactly how rare that was. “This could be an ideal next step after quantum slipstream. I wonder how they’re generating the—”

La Forge’s next words were knocked from him, along with every air molecule in his lungs, as he was suddenly pitched sideways over Leah. Mercifully, everything went dark and silent before he could have heard the dull thud of his own head slamming into the wall.

“It’s beautiful,” Captain James T. Kirk commented. “Quite deadly, but beautiful all the same.”

“Indeed, Captain,” Spock agreed.

Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott was at the bridge engineering station to Kirk’s left flank, and he was as entranced as they were by the shimmering golden and purple curtain that was stretched across their path. It was made of immense levels of some energy that even Spock’s sensors couldn’t identify. It was so dense and bright that it looked like several layers of translucent rubber bands, ready to spring anything back the way it had come.

“It may be beautiful,” Scotty grumbled, “but it’s between us and home.”

“Rojan was sure that his engine modifications will work to get us through,” Kirk said.

Scotty doubted it. The barrier was too damn good a repelling field. He wondered if the Kelvan machine was actually carrying them through at all, or whether it had somehow carried them around. Maybe in subspace . . .

“Subspace?” Kirk echoed, and Scotty realized he had spoken aloud.

“Aye . . . I’m just wondering if that machine of Rojan’s somehow takes us between normal space and subspace.”

“You are suggesting,” Spock said, “that the device has a partial phasing effect, to let us through the barrier.” He raised one eyebrow in thought. “Logical, Mister Scott. It is clear that the barrier is impenetrable in normal space.” He peered into his viewer. “However, I am not detecting any sign of the Enterprise being phased in any way.”

“Just because ye canna detect it, that doesn’t mean it’s not there, Mister Spock.”

“It is impossible to prove a negative,” Spock agreed. “But if it is beyond our capability to detect, then it is beyond our capability to replicate, or to exploit.”

Scotty nodded sadly. “Aye.”

Challenger wasn’t there. Empty space stared back out of the main viewer, mocking Varaan and Saldis. A few scraps of wreckage from the Stormcrow were the only artificial objects near this part of the Neutral Zone border, and there was no sign of the Challenger.

Varaan sat in his seat on the bridge, his features an unreadable mask, but Saldis couldn’t keep his outrage in check. “Where are they? The Federation has lied to us!”

Varaan nodded slowly. “And they’ll pay for that. But we must report back what has happened. Cooler heads must plan our strategy.” He rose. “Scan the system thoroughly. I want to know everything that has happened here. Weapons fire, engine trails, everything.”

Still orbiting Glintara, the conference room aboard the praetor’s personal flagship was a hive of angry chatter. “What is happening?” Gell Kamemor demanded of the admirals and generals in the room.

“We’re not certain yet, Praetor,” Proconsul Tomalak replied. “We know that the Starfleet vessel Challenger took her and a warbird’s crew aboard and promised to return them, but now the Challenger has herself disappeared. Either the Starfleet ship has abducted our people—including the chairman, who must be a priceless prize for their interrogators, or has been destroyed herself. Commander Varaan reports finding no wreckage near the coordinates, other than that of the Stormcrow.”

“Why would they let us know they had the chairman, if they intended to keep her?” Kamemor wondered aloud. “It makes no sense.”

“Humans rarely do, in my experience,” Tomalak said. “But it is clear that they had her, and must still have her. Their reasoning is largely irrelevant in the face of that simple fact.”

Kamemor nodded. “Has Starfleet issued a statement?”

“They claim to have lost contact with the Challenger and that they do not know what has happened to her. Which could simply be a play for time.”

“The simplest explanation is usually the correct one,” one of the generals agreed.

“We should prepare to take action,” an admiral said. “This happening on the anniversary of your accession can’t be a coincidence. It’s a test of our resolve.”

Kamemor had thought of that herself. If there was a war coming, the Empire would face it with confidence, but she had no desire to start it. “Issue instructions to the fleet. Find the Challenger and establish her role in this. Then take any action deemed appropriate.”

Aboard Tomalak’s Fist, Saldis was doing his best to help out with the scan of the Alpha Six-Four system, when he noticed an interesting subspace reading. It was a sort of granulation that he had seen mentioned in intercepted Starfleet signals. “Commander,” he called, “look at this. I think it’s a wake, of sorts, left by a drive signature.”

“Challenger? A new drive?”

“Perhaps. All I do know is that ships encountering this effect have been reported damaged.”

“Then I must set my engineers to study it, and strengthen ourselves against it. Then, perhaps, we can follow Challenger wherever she has taken our people.”

On the command deck of his ship, Varaan sat back in his large command chair, digesting his orders. Avenge the half-blood. Not Kamemor’s words, but his interpretation. An interesting concept, to avenge someone who was not truly Romulan. When Sela was alive she was respected as an officer, and more recently as chairman of the Tal Shiar, because she did her duty and had connections. But she was not truly trusted or liked. Not by Varaan. There was too much human in her.

“Something troubles you, Subcommander?” Varaan’s first officer, Tornan, scowled when he saw the orders. For a long moment, Tornan remained silent, but his lips thinned. “There are no secrets between us, Tornan,” Varaan reminded him softly. “Speak your mind. You don’t much like our new assignment, do you?”

“My likes and dislikes don’t matter, Commander. I’ll do whatever it takes to ensure the mission is a success.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t mind if you speak freely. I like to know your opinion, whether or not it offers me any insights. I know it will not affect the performance of your duties. So, speak up. That’s an order, if it makes you feel easier about being critical of the praetor.”

“The purpose of the assignment . . . Does it sit easy with you?”

“To risk trouble with the Federation? No.” Varaan laughed. “We’ve been at odds, on and off, for two centuries. Why should—”

“I don’t mean that side of it.”

“Ah.” Now Varaan understood. “The half-blood.” He would never dare say the words aloud when the chairman of the Tal Shiar was alive. She had ears everywhere.

“Yes . . . If the Federation had killed you, or Tomalak, or any of a horde of others, that would be one thing, but to avenge the half-blood . . .”

“You don’t think the chairman of the Tal Shiar should be avenged?”

“And the Stormcrow’s crew, yes. But she was not Romulan, was she?”

“Her father was Romulan.” Varaan nodded to himself. “I understand where you’re coming from, Tornan. So much of her mother in her. The hair color. The stubbornness. But so much of her father too. Her loyalty, her service . . .”

“I just wonder if it’s enough to make her worth the effort.”

“I thought about that myself, when our orders came in. Don’t think I didn’t have a few doubts.”

“What did you think?”

“At first I thought as you did. She was a half-blood, she didn’t count. Then again, she did her duty, and died for the Empire. That makes her death worth something.”

“Worth honoring.”

“Yes. It certainly makes her Romulan enough for her death to be worth avenging.”

“When you put it like that, Commander, yes, it does make sense to me.”

“If you hear anyone in the crew express dissatisfaction with our assignment, pass that interpretation on to them. It may make them feel a little easier about risking their lives.”

“As you say.”

31

Four and a half million metric tons of metal, plastics and ceramics floated alone in a blackness deeper than she had ever traversed before. No light shone from Challenger. Her Bussard collectors and warp core were dark and cooling, and there wasn’t so much as a gleam from a single window.

Guinan awoke in darkness so complete that, for a moment, she thought she hadn’t actually opened her eyes. She blinked a couple of times, focusing on the slightly sticky feeling of her eyelids parting. Then at least she knew that they were open.

The darkness around her was utter and total, and so, she realized after a moment, was the silence. Nothing she could hear was mechanical in nature. None of the sounds were of the ship. She could hear breathing and voices, the rustle of clothing, the scrape and thud of limbs moving against the floor or walls, or even the ceiling.

People were being sick, unaccustomed to the sudden lack of gravity. The fluids in the inner ear behaved very differently in zero-g, ruining people’s sense of balance, and making them feel as if they had permanent vertigo. It was dizzying and nauseating for a lot of people who weren’t used to it.

Guinan didn’t mind it so much, but the smell of vomit was another matter. Globules of it touching her skin made her retch, and her recently healed ribs burned with a fire she had never expected. Maybe they seemed worse because of the lack of sensory stimuli to distract from the agony.

“Is anybody hurt?” she called out. “Sound off!”

That was when people began to scream.

La Forge woke up in a totally dead bridge, lit only by a couple of hand-held beacons. Luckily, his cybernetic eyes didn’t need the light. He could see warm figures trying to keep themselves stable in a green fog generated by his eyes. “What happened?”

“Something hit us . . . ?” Carolan’s voice, La Forge thought, steady but dizzy.

“The Romulans . . .” Qat’qa spat. “They must have done something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know . . . sabotage. They must have done something to the inertial dampeners.”

Geordi tried flexing his muscles. It was agonizing, but they all moved and he didn’t seem to have broken anything more than maybe a toe or two from the feel of things. “Whatever happened, I don’t think it was the Romulans Report.”

“Officially?” Leah asked. “I haven’t a clue. Unofficially, my gut says we found one of those trans-slipstream wakes we were looking for.” Her voice sounded strained, as if she was in pain, and her face was tense.

“You’re probably right.”

“Your gut tell you that?” Leah asked.

“My gut’s telling me it wants out through the nearest orifice,” Barclay said.

“Yeah, I get that as well,” Nog added.

“The first order of the day is always survival,” Carolan said firmly, “and that means getting systems back online. We have to prioritize which systems we want to concentrate on first.”

“Life support, obviously.”

“Actually, that’s not so obvious. As long as we’ve no hull breaches we should have breathable air for a day or two.”

“What about temperature and radiation?”

“The hull insulation is enough to keep the temperature within tolerances, and to protect us from solar or cosmic radiation.”

“For how long?”

“Well, long enough that we’ll asphyxiate before needing to worry about it.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much better.”

La Forge wedged himself between a seat and the rail that held the tactical console. Nog had lost a few teeth, and Qat’qa had broken her left arm. Barclay was bleeding from both ears, and his nose.

“The Enterprise once hit a quantum filament, and lost main power, computer control, and life support, but even then . . . We still had auxiliary power, lighting, and gravity.” A thought struck him. “Antimatter containment! If we’ve lost everything here, then what’s happened to antimatter containment?”

“It must still be on, or we’d be dead,” Nog pointed out.

Making assumptions wasn’t good enough for La Forge or Leah. “We need to check on it,” they said as one.

“None of the consoles are working.”

Barclay coughed and spat blood, which tumbled across the bridge in slow motion, making La Forge glad for the sake of the others that they couldn’t see it. “Just a minute, though . . . we’re asking ourselves the wrong question.”

“How do you mean, Reg?”

“If we’ve lost all power we would have lost antimatter containment, but since that hasn’t happened . . .”

La Forge understood. “The question is how come we’re still alive, and, more or less, in one piece.”

Vol felt as if he was back home in the clouds of the gas giant where his species had evolved. He had no problem keeping himself oriented in zero-g, and, in fact, felt more comfortable and more agile than usual. He also, however, recognized the problems that the lack of gravity foisted upon the other species aboard, and their difficulty was something he wanted to deal with as quickly as possible. His one great eye was receptive to thermal images in the visible spectrum. All the better to see through the methane clouds, he thought.

He flew across to Scotty, who was lying against the underside of the upper balcony around the inactive warp core. The man was still breathing, but his heat pattern looked different than normal, and Vol’s first instinct was to call for a medical team. He stopped himself from wasting the time, knowing that, under these conditions, internal communication would be down.

Even the alarms that should be sounding weren’t doing so. Vol carried Scotty down to the floor and secured him between two consoles, so that he wouldn’t fall if and when the gravity was restored. Then he turned his attention to the darkened warp core, and the matter-antimatter intermix chamber. “Right, then. What are you playing at, eh? Why aren’t we all dead?”

Doctor Alyssa Ogawa woke to the sounds of hoarse screams and, more chillingly, the hollow and depressed moans of those who were past the screaming stage.

A couple of the nurses had managed to get emergency lights out of a locker before Ogawa had woken, and the lamps illuminated enough of the chaos in sickbay to guarantee her nightmares for weeks to come. Overly bright blue-white beams picked out drawn and pain-twisted faces floating at different orientations, and turned them into bloodless ghosts.

Globules of blood and vomit sailed lazily through the beams, providing startling color for a moment before vanishing into the blackness.

“Use the restraints,” Ogawa ordered. “We need to get the patients secured into beds. And get hold of some magnetic boots. We can’t treat anyone while we’re floating around.”

Carolan had already raided the emergency storage compartment secreted in one wall of the bridge and found EV suits and magnetic boots. The suits weren’t yet needed even with life support down, but the boots and lights were immediately useful, so she had doled them out. Nog, Barclay, and Qat’qa all took boots and lights, which made assessing the situation a lot easier.

She had, quite sensibly, offered the captain and Dr. Brahms magnetic boots, but they had refused. The ability to stick to a surface would have impeded the journey that La Forge had decided to make.

It would have been a long and tiring climb through the Jeffries tubes for the pair, but the lack of gravity made it quicker and easier. They simply swam through the air in whichever direction was necessary.

Vol was waiting for them when they got to engineering, announcing his presence with a hearty cheer of “Ow, turn that bloody light away, you donut!” He blinked his huge eye several times.

“Sorry, Vol,” La Forge called back. He directed the light toward the floor, seeing Scotty there, secured between two consoles of the main console ring that had replaced the chief engineer’s office. His heart skipped several beats. “Is Scotty—”

“Still ticking,” Vol said.

“First question,” La Forge said, as it was the most urgent matter, “how come we’re still here if there’s no antimatter containment power?”

“He happened.” Vol pointed the tip of a tentacle at Scotty. “He’d installed a stator backup for the intermix and antimatter storage chambers. I just found out myself two minutes ago, when I looked at them.”

“Then we do have warp power?”

“We have the capability to generate it, but we don’t actually have it.”

“What happened to the gravity grid? The stator should have given us a good four hours of at least three quarters gravity even with the EPS grid dead.”

“Six hours, with our current upgrade, not that it matters.”

“Could we have been unconscious for six hours?” Leah asked.

“Not unless the chronometer in my tricorder stopped for the same length of time. That’s not why the gravity went down. The containment fields have a stator backup—so instead of keeping the gravity on, the stator is maintaining antimatter containment.”

Leah was incredulous. “For six hours?” It might take days to get power back.

“Yep. Sorry, mate.”

La Forge said, “Okay, Here are our priorities. We need life support and gravity back online. We also need to be able to inform everyone when we get the gravity grid back.”

“I’d have thought they’d notice.”

“I don’t want to drop everyone on their heads without warning.” La Forge thought about where they might find some power. “The portable generators we used to power up the Intrepid. Where are they?”

“Cargo bay one,” Leah replied.

“I’m thinking that if we can patch them into EPS grids to power the containment fields, life support, communications, and the gravity grid, that’ll buy us time to find a more permanent solution to the rest of our problems without worrying that the ship will explode in six hours.”

“I’ll see to it,” Vol promised, and he flew off into the darkness.

Leah and La Forge looked first at each other, then at the unconscious Scotty. Maybe it was the color his eyes generated to compensate for the lack of light, or the effects of the lack of gravity, but Scotty looked frail, for the first time that La Forge could think of.

Leah voiced the thought that was in his mind. “Let’s get him to sickbay.”

In the guest quarters Voktra shared with a couple of other Romulan officers, Sela wedged herself in the corner between a bulkhead and a structural support. “What happened, Voktra?”

“The same thing as happened to our ship, I think.”

“I doubt there’s any point in wondering who’s going to rescue this ship, then.”

Voktra didn’t bother to reply. Sela’s sense of humor had always seemed off to her. “Orders, Chairman?” Technically, Sela was a passenger, and Voktra the senior surviving officer of the Stormcrow’s crew, but she wasn’t foolish enough to try to push it.

“We can’t be sure how many casualties the Federation crew have sustained, or what shape this vessel is in . . .”

“If we’ve lost all power,” Voktra said, “then the vessel’s antimatter containment field will be a problem.”

“Take a group to main engineering and ascertain the security of the containment field. I’ll lead a group to the bridge, and see what can be done from there.”

“What do we do about the Federation crew?”

“Ignore the dead or injured. If they try to imprison us, deal with them appropriately. If they’re engaged in getting systems back online, then give them all the assistance you can. It makes me sick, but it is our best chance of survival.”

One of the other officers approached. “If it is necessary to take control of the ship, when will we make our move?”

“I’m sure it will be necessary, but not quite yet. When the time comes, you’ll know it.”

“We’ll need a signal, so we know to initiate the strategy.”

Sela nodded. “When I use the phrase, ‘as the crow flies.’”

“If we’re to take over the ship, we’ll need weapons, and we don’t have many.”

“This is a Galaxy-class starship. It may have been somewhat modified for a more experimental use, but it has a security team and tactical officer, and that means it will still have an armory.”

“Which will have security measures in place.”

“If there’s power to run them,” Sela reminded him.

“And guards.”

“Starfleet security,” she mused. “We’re fortunate that my mother was tactical officer on a Galaxy-class vessel. There are a few things I remember that might be helpful.”

If she had been asked to judge based only on first sight, Alyssa Ogawa would have sworn Scotty was dead when La Forge and Leah floated him into sickbay. His skin was split with cuts from the structural supports of the balcony, his internal wounds had reopened, according to a tricorder scan, and his skin was as white as polished bone. His limbs drifted limply as the captain and Leah maneuvered him to the surface of a biobed. They held him there while Ogawa reached under the bed and stretched a couple of restraints across him.

“How is he?” Leah asked.

“I don’t know yet.” None of the biobed’s sensory or treatment functions were active, but at least she could keep an eye on him. Alyssa prepared a hypo of suitable compounds—anticoagulants and painkillers—but knew that there was no chance of putting his spleen, or other damaged internal organs, back together without the cellular regenerator array above the biobed.

“Is there anything we can do?” La Forge asked.

“I could really use power to get this place up and running again.”

“We’ll get you some. Come on, Leah.”

They left, and, a few moments later, Scotty opened his eyes groggily. “Doctor Ogawa?”

“Yes. You’re in sickbay.”

“Considerin’ all the possible alternatives, that’s a relief.” He tried to sit up, and found himself held down by the straps across his legs and chest. “What’s the meanin’ o’ this?”

“Nothing personal, Scotty. The gravity is down, and I don’t want my patients floating away.”

Scotty was already picking feebly at the restraints. “I don’t want to float away, lass, I want to get back to engineering and get the power back on!”

“And do you think you’re in any condition to do that?”

He looked at her with a cunning expression, and she could tell that he was experienced in having this kind of debate with doctors. “Let me ask you a question. Am I doin’ any good here?”

“You’re doing yourself good. You know: healing.”

“So ye’ve treated me already.”

“As much as I can. But without the cellular regenerator and biobed systems—”

“Then there’s no more you can do for me now, but you’ve made me able to stand on my own two feet—gravity excepted.”

“Yes.”

“And who d’ye think might have the best chance of gettin’ the power for your biobeds back online?”

“You can barely stand!”

“I’m fine, lass. And if I don’t help I won’t stay fine. Ye just said as much yourself. So if you can give me a pair o’ gravity boots . . .” Alyssa debated whether to spare a pair of the boots for Scotty. There weren’t enough for everyone in sickbay, but he was right about one thing. The painkillers and treatment she’d given him would keep him upright for a while at least, and he did have a good chance of fixing the problem, if half of the things she’d heard about him were true.

Scotty grinned, and she could see in his eyes that he knew she would grant his request.

When he clumped out of sickbay in a pair of the boots, the nurse from whom he had borrowed them turned to Alyssa. “Do you really think he should be out there working in his condition?”

“No. But I think that trying to keep him in here would do more harm than good.”

32

“Ah, um, testing, testing. Can anyone hear me?” Reg Barclay’s voice echoed tinnily throughout the rooms and corridors of the U.S.S. Challenger. In the darkness of areas where there were no lights available, it cut through the moans, cries, and conversations like a blade. In Nelson’s it brought hope.

“Reg?” Guinan answered. “Is that you?” She had been cleaning minor cuts with the alcohol she normally kept for special customers, and tying tourniquets when the call came. In fact, she had organized a veritable production line of rough and ready field medicine, with the least injured people trying to help the most injured.

“Testing,” Reg repeated, and Guinan realized that the voice was coming not through the intercom speakers, but through her combadge. In fact it was coming through the combadges of everyone who was floating in the room. Guinan tapped her badge and tried again. “Reg, this is Guinan. We hear you. We all hear you!”

“Excellent!” Reg exclaimed. “Where are you?”

“Nelson’s?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. What’s the situation like?”

“We have injured people, no gravity, and only a few lights. We need medical assistance.”

“I hear you,” Ogawa’s voice cut in. “I’ll send up help.”

“Reg?” La Forge’s voice asked. “Where are you?”

“Ah, in a shuttlecraft, sir. It’s an independent system, so I thought I might be able to route communications through it.”

“Brilliant work, Reg!”

In engineering, La Forge paused to think for a moment. “Handheld devices operating off their own independent power supplies are fine. So lights, tricorders, phasers, that kind of thing all work. I’ve got Vol looking at switching antimatter containment, life support, and the gravity to the portable generators.” He tapped his combadge. “Carolan?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Status report. Let’s find out where our people are and, most importantly, tell everyone to find a secure spot on the deck. We’re about to bring the gravity back online in a few minutes. I’ll make a ship-wide announcement when we’re ready.”

“Will do.”

“Vol,” Barclay called. “How are those generators coming?”

“I got one hooked up to the containment field five minutes ago.” Vol’s reply came not through La Forge’s combadge, but from somewhere above in the darkness. It was followed by a metallic clunk, and a muttered “Bollocks!” There was another clunk, and a slithering sound. “I can bring the gravity online any time. It’ll last longer if it’s on a lower setting, though.”

“Thank you.”

“Bridge to Captain,” Carolan’s voice came through. “All sections report secure for gravity restoration.”

“Acknowledged.” Then La Forge ordered, “Half a g, Vol. Switch on now!”

Immediately, Then La Forge dropped to the ground. It was an odd sensation to be at half gravity. It wasn’t low enough to enable great long leaps, but it wasn’t enough to feel quite normal either. It was like walking in a swimming pool.

When Scotty reached engineering, he was hugely impressed with Barclay’s ingenuity. “I don’t know that I’d have thought of that one myself,” he admitted. “How far can we take the idea?”

“Scotty?” Leah asked.

“What I mean is: how much of the Challenger’s systems can we run off a runabout’s warp core? The Thames is still in the main shuttlebay.”

She grimaced. “The runabouts weren’t designed for that, but I suppose it depends how long we do it. And how to connect them is the issue. We can’t use a power transfer beam without active circuitry at the receiving end.”

“Then we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way—with cables, like on Intrepid.”

“We could, but we can’t just plug into the EPS grid in the shuttlebay. We’ll have to have the runabout’s power supply entered into the EPS network through the warp core’s distribution node, and that means running cables from the shuttle bay to main engineering.”

“Can we help?” It was a Romulan woman. Three Romulans had entered engineering. “I am Voktra, chief engineer of the Stormcrow. These officers are also engineers.” Geordi hesitated, then nodded.

“We cut a direct channel through to the secondary hull to the EPS main,” La Forge suggested. “Fly the runabout outside the ship, magnetically grapple onto the exterior of the secondary hull, and cut directly.”

“That could work,” Scotty said.

La Forge turned to Barclay. “Reg, take one of the Romulan engineers with you. We’re all in this together.”

“I’ll go,” Voktra said, looking disdainfully at Barclay.

As Barclay and Voktra hurried out of engineering, Scotty approached La Forge and Leah. “What exactly happened to us? One moment I was workin’ in here, and the next, I woke up in sickbay. Was it some kind of collision, like happened to the Romulan ship?”

Leah shook her head. “Not quite. That collision sliced the Romulan ship almost in half. A direct impact would have destroyed Challenger as well.”

La Forge held up a padd, showing two sets of subspace sensor readings. “One of these is from the Intrepid’s sensor logs, and the other is from just before the lights went out.”

“Both trans-slipstream wakes?” asked Leah.

“It looks to me like we were caught in one, and dragged, or thrown—”

“I think we should all be grateful that inertial dampening technology has advanced in two hundred years,” Scotty said.

“This is what happened to Intrepid?” asked Leah.

“I think so,” La Forge said.

“Where are we, anyway?” Leah asked.

“Without sensors, or the main viewer—” La Forge started.

“Laddie,” Scotty said firmly, “have ye not thought to look out a window?”

Nelson’s had become an emergency field hospital by the time they arrived, but the wounded and the damage weren’t what drew the attention of La Forge, Scotty, and Leah.

They walked to the huge bay windows, looking out at the impossible sight before them. “Bloody hell . . .”

“You can say that again,” La Forge whispered, stunned.

Guinan joined them, wiping her hands on a bar towel. “I’ve traveled a lot in the last five hundred years, but this is the first time I’ve seen a view like this.”

None of the others could bring themselves to speak.

Outside, there was nothing. No stars, no nebulae, no anything. Except for a single shining light to port. There, the galaxy glowed with a pearlescent beauty. Edge on, it looked not unlike the profile of the saucer section of Challenger herself, and it was no wider than a saucer held at arm’s length.

33

Challenger still drifted in the depths of the intergalactic void, but it was no longer completely powerless. The runabout Thames was now magnetically attached to the underside of the secondary hull, just forward of the aft torpedo launcher.

While Barclay and Voktra had monitored things from the cockpit, two Romulans in borrowed Starfleet EV suits had removed a floor hatch from the runabout, and cut through the hull plating of Challenger.

“You’re sure they don’t mind doing this?” Reg had asked.

Voktra had raised an eyebrow. “Cutting holes in a Federation starship? You must be joking; this is probably the most fun they’ve had in months.”

“Really?”

“It’s long been an ambition of mine,” she admitted. “Though I imagined that, if it ever happened, it would be under more politically unpleasant circumstances.”

“Oh.”

Once the Romulans had made a temporary air seal between the underside of the runabout and the underside of Challenger, Barclay and Voktra took over, leading the cables through the gap, remembering to turn around halfway as the gravity inverted where Challenger’s gravity grid took over from that of the runabout, and met with Vol at the aft end of the main power transfer conduit. Then they were able to leave Vol to link up the power from the runabout’s warp core to Challenger’s power distribution system, and bring the EPS network back online.

The runabout’s warp core wouldn’t be enough to take Challenger to warp, but it would give them back lighting, life support, main computer functions, and power to areas that were particularly in need, such as sickbay.

On the bridge, Leah used science station one to check that the computer had rebooted properly. Qat’qa tried out the helm, to see how much maneuverability they had. Scotty was at the engineering station, checking on Vol’s progress, and, of all the senior staff, he was happiest in the lower gravity. It was less painful to move around, and his injuries troubled him less.

“I had wondered earlier,” Kat admitted, “if the Romulans were responsible for what just happened, but obviously not.”

Scotty didn’t look around, but looked amused. “Lass, if anyone could have made a starship’s warp engine go through the galactic barrier like a cocktail stick through an olive, I’d have had the bugger working for us from the day I took command of the Challenger, Romulan or no!”

“I’m still concerned that they’re bound to try to take some advantage of the situation. We should put them under guard.”

“They’re our guests, not prisoners,” La Forge said from the center seat.

“That was when we had a fully functioning starship. Right now, the situation has changed.”

“Captain, Kat has a point,” Nog put in. “The Romulans have always been at their most dangerous when responding to—”

“When responding to an effect that they carefully set up or provoked. That isn’t the case here. There’s no way they set this up,” La Forge said.

“They’ll still be working out how to turn this to their advantage, because they’d be stupid not to,” Nog pointed out.

“We need the cooperation of our guests. But . . .”

“I’ll keep an eye on them, sir,” Nog promised solemnly.

Guinan felt uncomfortable, and it wasn’t just from injured ribs or painful cuts. It was looking across at Sela. Even for a member of a race known for listening to and reading people, Sela was a puzzle. Her expression could have been simmering anger, or just challenging arrogance. Maybe it was the Romulan blood in her that made it hard to tell, or maybe it was just Sela herself; her upbringing having marked her.

“Hello, Guinan.” Sela’s tone was unreadable.

“Sela.” Guinan wondered why she had come to Nelson’s alone. “Can I get you something?”

“I doubt you could give me what I want.”

“Try me.”

“You’re thinking of her now, aren’t you?”

“Her?”

“My mother.”

Guinan was indeed thinking of Tasha Yar. The resemblance between mother and daughter was too strong for her not to think of the woman she had never known, yet had heard so much about, when she saw this Romulan. “You look a like her picture.”

“Too much.”

“They say that every woman eventually becomes her mother, in some way or other.”

“Really? And which ‘they’ is this ‘they’? No, wait. Don’t tell me. Humans.”

“I’ve heard it said by the Klingons, the Ferengi, and even the Romulans. I wish I’d known her.”

“She remembered you, you know. Well, another you, from another timeline. I’m not even sure you’re the right you to be talking about this to.”

“Are you blaming me for your mother’s death?” Guinan felt guilty in spite of herself. She knew the story, and knew that another Guinan had tried to give someone who was dead a chance to live.

“No. At least not in the way you mean.”

“I know the story, Sela. I heard it from Picard. Tasha Yar would still have been dead if that other me hadn’t said anything. If that other me hadn’t even known that her existence in that timeline was wrong.”

“A Starfleet officer would still have been dead. But she wouldn’t have been my mother.”

“No, and you wouldn’t exist.”

Sela leaned in close. “That’s what I blame you for.”

“Your existence? And what’s the punishment for that?”

Sela stood. “I have an appointment in the conference room.”

The Tal Shiar chairman’s appointment was with the Starfleet captain who passed her a padd with the data on the trans-slipstream wakes. “What is this?” she asked.

“It’s a sensor log of a trans-slipstream wake. Please, Sela, don’t make a fool of yourself by pretending you’ve never seen one before.”

Sela’s expression went cold and flat. “I’m not a fool, Captain. Fools don’t rise in rank in the Empire.”

“No, I don’t imagine they do . . . But I wanted to know if you have seen this type of reading before. Before the cause of it crashed into you.”

“What makes you think that I’ve seen it before?”

“That’s not a denial,” La Forge pointed out.

“Would you prefer a denial?”

“Ever since we first detected this waveform, we’ve been in communication with Starfleet about it. We distributed the record to others, who’ve been watching for it. We know you’ve had probes listening in on our communications, because we found one while Bok was in charge of the Intrepid. It’d be an insult to Romulan technology if those probes hadn’t eavesdropped on the messages. All even without Ferengi smugglers and criminals blabbing all over the galaxy.”

“If you have a point, make it.”

“A wake has to be caused by something. A vessel of some kind. We’ve been trying to identify it, and you were looking for it too. You had to, as it represents a drive technology beyond slipstream.”

“A Tal Shiar officer called Saldis has been working on this. I’ve read his reports and immediately recognized what brought us here.”

La Forge hesitated. “This trans-slipstream wake, two hundred years ago, destroyed a Romulan minefield, and threw the NX-07, Intrepid, hundreds of light-years. Another wake caused the disappearance of the U.S.S. Hera a dozen years ago. A third hit us and brought us here, as you say.”

“So?”

“My mother was captain of the Hera. The ships that caused these wakes killed her. I just thought . . . I thought we needed to establish a common ground, since we’re now on a shared mission, Chairman.” The word stuck in his throat.

“So we both have dead mothers?” Sela scoffed. “The same mission I’ll grant you—to return home. The difference is that I didn’t just sign on a dotted line somewhere that I would uphold the rules of the service I was joining. I was raised into that service. It’s a privilege, not just a duty.”

“Your father was an admiral, wasn’t he?”

“What of it?”

La Forge couldn’t resist a sad smile. “You think you’re the only person who was inspired to come out into space because of your parents? My mother became the captain of that starship, and my father is in Starfleet as well. I knew from the time I was old enough to hold a toy starship where I wanted to go and what I wanted to be.”

“As did I, in spite of my mother.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” La Forge meant it. “Chairman of the Tal Shiar is a bigger job than being proconsul, I hear. She’d have been proud of you for doing so well, even in a foreign government.”

“In the end I was better off without her. Perhaps other people might be too, especially humans.”

“No, I don’t think they would be. In fact, I don’t think you were better off without her. I think you were probably better off because you remember a time when she was there.” He tried to wrap his head around Sela’s viewpoint, but, truthfully, wasn’t sure that he could. “Somehow, her death drove you forward, and even did you good, but it can’t have done that without her having been there in the first place.”

“I killed her, Captain.” Sela’s voice was momentarily strained, and exactly how he remembered Tasha Yar’s. It was like hearing a ghost. The moment passed as she continued. “At least I was responsible for her execution. And I never looked back. All the way up the ladder.”

“We’re getting away from what we need to be discussing,” La Forge said.

“Survival is what we need to be discussing.” Sela frowned. “Is it my imagination or is the gravity getting a little stronger?”

“We haven’t adjusted the setting . . . There isn’t enough power to spare.” He raised himself on his toes experimentally. “No, but you’re right, I feel a little heavier than I did a few hours ago . . .” They went out onto the bridge, where La Forge checked the environmental control station. “Point six g . . . but we’re only generating point five.”

“The only reason we could be experiencing an increase in local gravity is if the Challenger is accelerating,” Sela pointed out.

“Which it’s not going to do unless we get out and push.”

“No . . . Which means we must be accelerating toward a mass of some kind. But what?”

“The questions are, ‘What is it? And how soon before we hit it?’”

34

“Wotcher, Doc,” Vol called up from engineering.

Leah, knowing that she was the doctor Vol was calling to, answered, “Go ahead, Vol.”

“The sensor net is cooking with gas now. External sensors only, though.”

“Externals are perfectly adequate, Vol. With any luck we can identify the gravitational attractor that’s pulling us.” She brought the sensors online and began scanning in the direction in which Challenger was accelerating by point one g. There was nothing in range. She knew it was only a matter of time however, and set the computer to notify her when it had a result.

Then she started scanning for trans-slipstream wakes.

This time the results were immediate, and she called La Forge over. He leaned in beside her at the ops station. “What have we got?”

“The trans-slipstream wake signature. Actually, more than one. I’m reading a whole lot of them.”

“If there’s a gravitational attractor in the area . . . Let’s scan the area for that quantum granulation in subspace that Sonya reported was everywhere in G-231.”

“Any particular reason why? Or this just a hunch?”

“There was a lot of granulation in the vicinity of the black hole near G-231, which means a lot of trans-slipstream wakes, which means a lot of traffic by whatever causes them, if they’re using high-mass objects as marker buoys.”

“Right.”

“So, why near the black hole? It’s a natural navigational buoy.”

“This gravitational attractor isn’t on the same level as a black hole.”

“But it’s the only attractor around, so a species that uses gravity wells as navigational markers, and comes out here, isn’t going to pass up the only marker for thousands of light-years. It’s as big a deal out here as a supermassive black hole would be in a stellar-dense area.”

“That’s a pretty big assumption, Geordi. Just because they seem to have used the Bolus Reach, and we’ve ended up here, that doesn’t necessarily mean they use gravity wells that way on a regular basis.”

“It’s not just that. The report the Klingons sent was about something matching the trans-slipstream wake spotted near a black hole. The Cardassians saw something resembling it in a dead system with a super-dense neutron star.”

“All high-mass gravity wells.”

“It’s the only common factor, and that has to be significant.”

“It looks like you’re right,” she said slowly, as the numbers scrolled past major subspace granuation. “The peaks and troughs are off the scale. This is definitely a major hub for the ships that are causing the wakes. It’s a regular traffic jam.”

“Then all we need to know is what the attractor is, and where.”

“I’ve set the computer to call me when it has that information.”

“Then it’s time we had lunch.”

“You’re thinking about lunch at a time like this?”

“I’m thinking about blood sugar and alertness levels. Nobody’s any good if they’re not properly fed and rested.”

Half asleep in their dining chairs in Nelson’s, La Forge and Leah listened to the faint creaks and pops of distant metal cooling in space, which would normally be drowned out by the sound of the engines. In fact, they were sounds which would rarely happen when the ship was fully powered.

“I’ve been thinking . . .” La Forge began.

“Me too.”

“We’re already pretty much sharing quarters. I wondered if, when we get home . . .”

“Do you think we’ll ever get home?” The words came out a little more anxiously than she intended.

“I can’t let myself think that we won’t.”

“Me neither,” she lied. “So . . .”

“I was hoping that someday our arrangement might become more permanent.”

“Every probability curve must have a far end,” Leah said.

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

“Some days,” Guinan’s voice interrupted softly, “working the night shift brings its own rewards.”

“Anything you just imagined you heard,” La Forge said without opening his eyes, “is classified information.”

In engineering, Barclay was a flurry of hyperactivity, helping Vol with this, helping Voktra with that. Anyone who didn’t know him would have taken him for a super-efficient worker with no sense of fear.

That, of course, was exactly the impression he was striving for. He didn’t like for his crewmates to see his anxiety at the best of times, and he sure as hell didn’t want a group of Romulans to see him afraid or nervous. They could probably smell fear, but he was going to do his damnedest to uphold the image of a Starfleet officer.

“We’re outside the galaxy,” he was saying, “which means that sooner or later we’re going to have to go back through the galactic barrier.”

“How could we have passed through the barrier in the first place?” Voktra asked.

“It has been known to happen, but almost always by accident. No one has ever developed a drive and shielding that could allow it on a regular, repeatable basis.”

“Haven’t they . . . ?”

“No one that I’ve ever heard of.”

“What about whatever dragged us here? I don’t see it crippled beside us.” Voktra let herself smile, and Barclay was taken aback. He’d never seen a pretty Romulan before, nor had he ever thought of one that way. “Think of the strategic advantages of being able to exit the galaxy, travel around through empty space, and re-enter at a point of your choosing, without passing through hostile space in between.”

“You mean circumvent borders.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. No one’s going to look for warbirds entering their space through the galactic barrier.”

“And was attracting one of those things worth the chance to do that?” Barclay asked.

“We didn’t attract whatever hit us.” She frowned, puzzled. “What are you suggesting?”

“You’re sure? We know they use high-gravity bodies as navigational markers, and you have an attractive body.” Barclay blushed furiously, and waggled his fingers as if to wave away the slip. “I mean, a forced quantum singularity, in your engine core. That might have attracted—”

“Romulans are not in the habit of attracting other species,” Voktra stated flatly.

“Er, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry, that came out a little . . .”

“Strangely?”

“It’s a stressful situation, and my mind is rather preoccupied.”

“Oh, I know exactly what you mean.”

“Good.”

“So,” Barclay continued hesitantly, “what exactly happened when your ship was hit?”

“We were trying to locate and neutralize sabotage set by one of the chairman’s political rivals. The warp core had been rigged to overload—or overfeed—the singularity.”

Barclay nodded, understanding. Voktra’s story made a lot more sense to him than Qat’qa’s suspicions. He looked at his hands, relieved that they weren’t shaking. “You know, you don’t seem like a Romulan.”

“I’ll try not to take that personally.”

“I meant in a good way.”

“You don’t seem like a Starfleeter.”

“Oh.” He was disappointed. His efforts to uphold the image must have failed.

“You’re not as lazy.”

Barclay beamed.

“I have tested out our maneuvering capabilities,” Qat’qa reported when La Forge and Leah returned to the bridge, slightly refreshed for having eaten. “The power we’re drawing from the runabout is giving me a delay in response to controls, but it is workable.”

“Plot a series of orbital courses we can use, and take us into the best stable orbit you can manage around the attractor.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Once we’re in orbit we should be able to catch our breath and see what kind of shape the Challenger is really in, and figure out what to do next.” He turned to Leah. “What kind of sensor readings are we getting from the gravitational attractor?”

“None.”

“None?” That was weird; every high-gravity phenomenon La Forge had heard of put out hard radiation. “Not even X-rays or hard gamma?”

“No, no X-rays, no gamma rays, nothing I’d expect to see from any natural source.”

“Nog, launch a probe toward the attractor. I want to see what it is we’re about to start hanging around with.”

Nog keyed the appropriate command on his console. “Probe away.” After a few moments, Nog reported, “Still no sensor readings from the probe, other than in the visual spectrum. We can see the attractor.”

“What is it?”

Nog hesitated for a heartbeat. “It appears to be a starship.”

“On screen.”

The main body of the ship was the same size and shape as the Challenger’s own primary hull. It was lightless, but a faint edge of galactic light picked out the shape. A wedge on one side clamped two nacelles to the disc, while a triangular structure stood above the opposite surface.

“It’s Federation . . .” Qat’qa exclaimed.

“Nebula-class,” Nog confirmed.

La Forge hardly dared breathe. “Let’s see if the probe can shine some light on her, Nog.”

Nog manipulated more controls, turning on a powerful light source built into the probe. He guided the probe over the upper forward section of the saucer, casting its light over the registry number. “NCC-62006.”

“The Hera,” La Forge breathed. His eyes filled with tears. “It’s the Hera.”

35

La Forge was awestruck, in every sense of the word. It was not just a great joy but an emotional tsunami that crashed over him. “I don’t believe it . . .”

“I thought it was exactly what you were hoping to find,” Leah said, puzzled.

“Hoping is one thing, but I never actually expected it. I mean, not to find the Hera so intact. It’s like . . .” He didn’t even know what it was like, really. To have come to the end of a personal quest that had been a shadow over his life for so many years, whether he admitted it or not. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail.”

Scotty was delighted for La Forge. The lad deserved his closure, and, in any case, to find the ship all the way out here was something of a miracle. Enough of one, Scotty thought, that anybody in the crew could appreciate. And this was the massive gravitational attractor? He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that could be the case, but he couldn’t wait to find out. It would beat thinking about how many cellular regeneration treatments he had missed.

“I’ve been in Starfleet for over a century,” he said when he came to the bridge, “and I’ve never seen the like.”

“This is what I joined Starfleet for,” Nog agreed. His voice was filled with amazement.

Sela watched the probe’s telemetry on a screen in her quarters. The sight was impressive, but the only thing that she could think was this couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. La Forge’s mother’s ship, brought here by the trans-slipstream wakes years before they were supposedly discovered by Starfleet?

She didn’t believe a word of it. She knew Saldis wouldn’t have believed it either.

“So,” she said to her junior officers, who were gathered around. “This is proof that the Federation has been experimenting with the trans-slipstream technology all along.”

“It seems obvious,” one of them, an eager young centurion agreed.

Sela didn’t reply. I wonder if they sacrificed his mother, the way they sacrificed mine?

“Captain La Forge, can I see you in private?”

Guinan’s request was sufficiently unusual that La Forge immediately responded. She wasn’t in Nelson’s but in her quarters. The cabin was hung with silken drapes, and filled with incense. For the first time ever, La Forge saw her without a hat.

“What is it, Guinan?”

“I needed to talk to you about what’s happening, and what’s about to happen. And about why I came aboard the Challenger.”

“Back on Starbase 410, you said you wanted to give your engineer friends your time.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Maybe you’re thinking about it too much.”

“There’s something about the way you’ve been watching, and talking. It’s as if you’re waiting for something. Or someone,” La Forge said.

“Maybe I am.”

“Who, or what?”

“I don’t know yet. But it’s why I needed to talk to you.”

“You’re waiting for someone or something that you don’t even know?”

“That’s right. It’s happened a lot in my life, actually. At least for the past hundred years.”

“Hundred years? Since you were pulled out of the Nexus?”

Guinan nodded. “Sometimes I just know that I ought to be in a particular place at a particular time, because something important will happen there, or then.”

“Your connection with the Nexus tells you these things?” La Forge supposed.

“Tells is too strong a word. Hints would be more like it. Or maybe suggests, guides, arranges behind my back.”

“But if you were beamed out of the Nexus a hundred years ago, how can it still have an effect on you? Was it that strong an experience, or . . . Did you see an expanse of future history—”

For once, she looked serious. “It was the strongest experience of any kind I’ve ever had. Stronger and more real than anything in what, for want of a better word, I’ll call my real life. But it wasn’t a matter of just seeing some display of prophecy and trying to remember all the dates and places. It’s a far more vague, and deeper, connection.”

“Like a Vulcan mind meld?” La Forge offered.

“Yes, that sounds not too far off. But it’s not a meld with another person, or with the energies of the Nexus itself. It’s more like a mind meld with my own shadow. With a memory of myself.”

“What sort of memory?”

“When I was beamed out of the Nexus, I fought to stay there. I willed myself not to go, not to give in to the transport beam. And something of me did stay behind. An echo, a shadow . . . Whether it’s because I so desperately wanted to stay there, or whether the Nexus does that to everyone who enters it, or some mix of both and the energy of the transporter . . . I don’t know. I just know that to my . . . shadow, all time is one, and it feels that I should be here on the Challenger.”

“Because something important will happen?”

“I guess so. But the definition of important may vary. It could be saving the universe from invading aliens, or discovering the perfect cocktail recipe that uses kanar.” Her eyes twinkled. “There must be something that kanar’s good for.”

“I’ll take your word for that.” La Forge let himself relax. Guinan had deftly turned the conversation around, and he was grateful, because he didn’t really want to pursue anything too deep right now. “If you find it, they’ll probably inaugurate an all-new culinary Z Magnees Prize just for that.”

36

Challenger swung gently into a distant orbit around the Hera, settling into a stable course, that was no longer under acceleration, so the gravity had stabilized back to half a g.

“Nog,” La Forge asked, “has there been any communications traffic from the Hera?”

“None, Captain.”

“Not even a distress signal?”

“Nothing. They’re completely signal-dark.” Nog spread his hands helplessly. “Their power may be as dead as Intrepid’s was.”

“A starship’s automated distress signal has a separate power source just in case of exactly that kind of total power loss. It should be able to keep transmitting for decades.” La Forge gritted his teeth, frustrated. “It’s been a dozen years since the Hera went missing, but the automated distress call should still be running.”

“Unless it was deactivated manually,” Leah suggested.

Nog agreed. “Maybe they abandoned ship and went somewhere else. They wouldn’t need the distress signal to be running if they thought they were safe.”

“Where could they have gone? Kat, are there any planetary systems within sensor range?”

“Nothing, Captain. No stars, no planets. Just whatever gravitational attractor was pulling us in the direction of the Hera. I can’t even seem to get a reading on the interior of the Hera.”

“No life signs?”

“No. I read the usual physical makeup of a Nebula-class hull, with tritanium, duranium, and so on, but I get no sensor readings at all beyond the hull substrate. It’s as if . . . It’s as if there is no interior. Or the interior is cloaked.”

“You’re right, that is odd.” La Forge thought for a moment. “Keep trying, but modulate the sensor wavebands you’re using. Scan for anything that might show signs of a malfunctioning cloak on board, just in case.”

“A cloak,” Leah asked, “on a Federation starship?”

“Do we have enough power restored to run the astrometrics lab?” La Forge asked.

Leah nodded. “Just about.”

“Then we might get a few answers.”

Challenger’s astrometrics lab was a holodeck, with a ramp jutting out into a three-hundred-and-sixty degree space. Projections were displayed into the interior of the room, giving a true display of space.

“Is this just a pretext to get me alone?” Leah asked as she and La Forge entered.

“Believe me, that’s the last thing on my mind.”

“I was joking, Geordi.”

“Sorry.” He brought up a display of local space, showing Challenger orbiting Hera. “What we need is a projection of the gravitational effect we’re under. Something that shows the position of the center of the gravity well.”

“I’ve got readings from when the sensors came online, and at regular intervals until now.”

“We know we’ve been pulled in this direction since we arrived in this region. We know the gravitational force has gotten a little stronger, so we should be able to project the source.” Nothing new appeared in the display, but the Hera swelled slightly. “That’s impossible. It’s showing as no further away than the Hera.”

“Unless . . . could it be the Hera herself?”

“I don’t see how. Maybe if it were a Romulan ship, the singularity in their warp core could have begun to consume matter and grow, but I can’t think of any way a Starfleet warp reactor could react that way. Can you?”

Leah barely suppressed a laugh. “I’ve been designing warp engines for a long time now, and I’ve never seen anything artificial that could generate a gravitational field of that magnitude. No matter how far something went wrong.”

La Forge could feel a tightness in his kidneys, and a spreading chill. “All right, I don’t doubt for a moment that you’re right and it’s impossible, but . . .” He touched a console button. “La Forge to Nog.”

“Nog here, Captain.”

“Can you give me a sensor reading on the Hera’s mass?”

One moment . . .” There was a slight gasp, almost a squeak. “Captain! It’s impossible, but . . .”

“I kind of expected it would be, Nog. What’s the mass of the Hera? I’m guessing it’s not the three million metric tonnes that it should be.”

“Forty-seven hundred . . . solar masses.”

Leah and Geordi exchanged a look. “Impossible!” Leah exclaimed. “There wouldn’t be a ship there. Only a supermassive black hole could have a mass like that. And its attraction would be a hell of a lot greater than it is.”

“I wish Data were here,” La Forge said with feeling as they returned to the bridge. The android could run numbers quicker than any living man and had a decidedly non-mechanistic instinct for having and playing hunches. La Forge could have used that kind of ability right about now.

Scotty sympathized entirely with Geordi’s thought. He had been quite impressed with the android officer aboard Enterprise, and was saddened to hear of his death. At least Spock was still alive, but it was a damned shame that there was no way to get hold of him and bring him out here.

If they could have done that, he reflected, they wouldn’t actually need to. It was a frustrating paradox, and one of too many that Scotty had experienced over the years. He stepped around the bridge rail to stand beside Nog.

“A penny for them?”

“What?”

“Your thoughts,” Scotty explained. “Ye looked a little lost in them.”

“I was just wishing Jadzia Dax was here . . .”

Sela looked out of the viewport of her quarters, and saw only her own reflection. Her mother’s image, which followed her everywhere, haunting her.

She closed her eyes and, when she opened them again, focused on seeing the Romulan standing before her. It was a shame that it wasn’t another Romulan. Or, preferably, a warbird or two.

Reinforcements would have been very useful in her current situation. Very useful indeed.

Scotty and La Forge stood in the circle of consoles in main engineering, running numbers. Vol hovered above them, enjoying the lighter gravity. “There’s an oddity about this gravitational attraction of the Hera,” La Forge was saying.

“Apart from the existence of a gravity well or the continued existence of the Hera in the same space?” Scotty said. “But ye’re right. It doesna’ have the gravitational power that four and a half thousand solar masses would. Maybe the sensors are a wee bit buggered.”

Vol lowered himself, upside down, to peer at the figures. “Well . . . maybe the one oddity is an explanation for the other.”

La Forge looked up at the octopoid’s single eye. “I’m open to ideas. Go ahead.”

“Sensors indicate that the gravity well’s spatial manifold is well inside the Hera’s hull. Actually it’s barely fifty meters across, if the readings are reliable.”

“Which they may not be, considering the shape we’re in,” Scotty said.

“And considering the anomalous nature of the . . .”

“Anomaly?” Geordi interrupted. “I think as captain I should outlaw the use of that word.”

“The thingy, then,” Vol suggested. “The point is, though, it means the hull isn’t an absolute event horizon. It should be possible to make physical contact with it, and maybe take samples.”

That, Geordi thought, was an interesting idea. He would have been a liar if he tried to say he hadn’t thought of visiting the Hera as soon as he saw it. An away team to the Hera. It was an irresistible idea.

“Let’s assemble a team.”

37

“Status of the transporters?”

“Still offline,” Scotty said apologetically. “We canna spare the power to run them. Though I wouldna recommend using the transporter in any case.”

“If we could beam across to the Hera—”

“We’d be beaming onto a spatial manifold, and that’s a one-way trip if ever there was one.”

“If there’s no interior space to beam into, right?” La Forge sighed. “Can we spare one of the shuttles for a trip to the Hera?”

Scotty sucked on his teeth. “They’re all tied into the EPS grid now. Maybe if we dropped the internal sensors, and restricted turbolift use . . .” He made a few quick calculations. “Aye, that would do it.”

“Then I’m going across to the Hera.”

“What makes you think you’re going to lead the away team?” Leah demanded. She had not responded well to his announcement when he spoke to her in his ready room.

“It’s my mission—”

She cut him off with a chopping gesture. “First off, you’re the captain now. That makes it unwise. Secondly, you’re emotionally compromised. Conflict of interest, whatever you want to call it. That makes it extremely unwise. Thirdly, under the circumstances, you’re a lot more necessary to hold things together while we’ve got both damage and a potentially hostile set of guests. That makes it stupid.”

“All those are good rational reasons, but—”

“Do you want an irrational reason?”

“Do I need one?”

“All right, an emotional reason then. I don’t—” She shook her head, almost wincing. “I already know what it’s like to be widowed. I don’t need to repeat the lesson.”

He held her for a moment. “I understand, but . . . I have to go.” He walked out onto the bridge.

Leah followed. “Nog, tell the captain why he shouldn’t lead this away mission.”

“Your leading the away team to a dangerous anomaly is tactically unsound, Captain.”

“See?”

“It’s my decision to make,” La Forge said.

“Is it?” Leah tapped her combadge. “Doctor Brahms to Doctor Ogawa.” Geordi froze, unable to believe that she’d do this to him. “The captain is considering leading an away mission.”

“To his mother’s ship?” Ogawa’s voice was as concerned as it was disbelieving.

“All right.” La Forge held up his hands. “I surrender.” Leah slumped in relief, rather than triumph. “I guess it needs someone with a clearer head.”

“I’ll go,” Scotty said. La Forge looked up at him, standing behind the bridge rail. “I’ve been on more dodgy landing parties than you’ve had hot dinners.”

“Are you sure you want to go?”

“Who else would you trust?”

La Forge didn’t deign to reply to that. He trusted all of his crew, but saying so would have insulted Scotty, and singling him out would have insulted everyone else.

“I’ll join the away team too, with your permission,” Barclay said hurriedly.

“Ye’re welcome to come, Mister Barclay.”

Voktra, who had been assisting Barclay, cleared her throat. “Permission to join the mission?”

Barclay turned. “Are you sure you want to come?”

“You don’t expect us to let you Starfleeters discover the Hera’s secrets alone, do you? Chairman Sela will insist on a Romulan presence on any away mission.”

“She has a point, sir,” Nog said. “I volunteer as well. Someone will have to keep an eye on the Romulans.”

“Then we’ll meet in shuttlebay one in an hour,” Scotty declared. “I don’t know about you, but I intend to get a good breakfast before going.”

A safe distance along Nelson’s bar from Barclay and Voktra, Nog related the story of the choice of away team to Guinan.

“I think those two have different motives for going,” he finished.

“From each other?”

“No, that’s the same, I think. From everybody else.”

“Nog,” Guinan said in a mock-warning tone, “You’re not suggesting that Reg is a little sweet on his Romulan counterpart?”

“I think so.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I expected tension between our people and the Romulans, but . . .”

“But not sexual tension.”

“He’s mad,” Nog judged.

“He could be heading for heartbreak,” Guinan agreed, “but stranger things have happened.”

“Humans and Romulans?”

“Just ask Sela about that one.”

“And I thought Father marrying Leeta was weird enough.”

“Leeta?”

“A Bajoran dabo girl.”

Guinan folded her hands and took on a sage-like demeanor. “Sometimes the alien is attractive. There’s a difference between the alien individual and the alien as a collective. One, individually, tends to be admired, or something to aspire to. An outsider who doesn’t have to fit in with the day-to-day life that we’re used to. An outsider who does things differently. Unusual and exotic. But collectively, the alien isn’t exotic, it’s threatening—a wave of threat to the standards and way of life we’re used to.” She looked at Reg and Voktra again. “It all has to do with how we see our own identities. Me as an individual versus me as a member of my society, crashing headlong into the alien as an individual versus the alien as a member of their society.”

“You mean when Reg thinks of the Romulans, they’re the enemy and he’s scared of them, but when he thinks of a Romulan—”

“That Romulan.”

“—he finds her exotic and attractive?”

“Pretty much. It takes people that way sometimes. The really funny part is, neither of them probably see it themselves yet.”

Nog grunted. “Let’s hope they live to find out.”

La Forge had never found the center seat of a starship less comfortable than now, watching the shuttlecraft with its half dozen occupants coast away from the ship.

As it began to drop toward the Hera, he realized he was digging his fingernails into the armrests of the seat again, out of pure frustration. Leah laid her hand on his, and gently lifted it away.

“I should be going with them,” he said tightly.

“No you shouldn’t.”

Instead of replying, he said to the ensign at ops, “Follow them all the way on the main viewer.”

“Aye, sir.”

As the image on the viewer tracked the shuttle, something suddenly flashed across it. Whatever it was had a triangular section, and was ten times the length of Challenger. “What was that?”

The proximity alerts began to sound. “A vessel has . . . arrived,” the ops ensign squawked.

“Is it going after the shuttle?”

“No, its on the opposite side of the Hera, and outside our orbit. It’s left a trans-slipstream wake where it arrived.”

“Show us the new ship.” The ops ensign worked his console, and the main viewer was filled once more with the enormous and shark-like hull of a design La Forge had never seen before. Narrower at the bow than the aft, it was patterned in zigzag colors, and seemed to flex as it moved.

La Forge had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that it was looking back at him as he watched it. For a moment he wished Deanna Troi was sitting next to him so that he could ask her if he was just imagining things.

“Go back to the shuttle,” he told the ops ensign. The image on the viewer changed immediately to show a closer view of the Hera’s upper surface. There was no sign of the shuttle. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know sir . . .” The ensign looked up helplessly. “The shuttle has disappeared completely. It’s almost as if it’s just been swallowed up by the Hera’s hull plating.”

38

“What is it?” the centurion asked. The Romulan survivors of the Stormcrow who weren’t working on repair crews at the moment were watching the alien vessel through the windows of their quarters.

It looked to Sela like one of the predator fish that her grandfather—her father’s father, of course—had liked to hunt in the western ocean of Romulus. They were a great delicacy and a feared hunter. One had eventually taken his arm, and Sela had long suspected that the enforced retirement from hunting them had been the cause of the broken heart that he eventually died from.

It had been agonizing to watch him wither away, his will to live lost along with his livelihood. Saying goodbye to him, hoping against hope for a response in his uncaring eyes, was the worst thing that Sela could remember from her childhood, short of the night that her mother tried to kidnap her and take her away from her father.

What was it? she asked herself. An alien ship? One of the things that had brought them here?

“It may just be our way home,” she said.

“The Starfleet crew won’t like that idea.”

“I’m not going to ask them to like it. Just to accept the necessity.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They will. One way or the other.”

The centurion grinned wolfishly, and she knew which way he would prefer the Starfleet crew to accept things. He was a good centurion, and that attitude was probably one of the reasons that the Stormcrow’s commander had requested his presence on her crew.

He would enjoy his work, when the time came.

“And the aliens?” he asked.

“An alliance would be to our advantage, I think. We must find a way to contact them.” Trans-slipstream would put the Empire well ahead of the other Alpha Quadrant powers, and allow it to truly dominate the Typhon Pact.

“The Federation people will be doing the same thing.”

“Absolutely, but for different reasons. They have slipstream already. We must be ready when the time comes.” Sela thought quickly. “In fact, perhaps it would be to our advantage for the Federation people to make contact . . .”

“You want to what?” La Forge couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He sat at his ready room desk, the alien ship visible through the window behind him.

“Challenger has no warp power,” Sela was saying, “and the alien ship has some kind of trans-slipstream drive. They could carry us home.”

“Us?”

“All of us. Your crew and mine. We should demand that they take us. It is their responsibility, after all.”

“Demand? We can’t even talk to them yet.”

“Have you tried?”

“All hailing frequencies. Carolan’s been on the communications board for hours.”

“Perhaps you’re saying the wrong things. Why don’t I have my communications officer try?”

“So you can propose some sort of deal?”

“Are you monitoring our—”

“No, I just know you too well, but thanks for confirming it,” La Forge said coolly. Anger flashed across Sela’s face. “We’ll continue to try to establish contact. Don’t worry.”

Hours later, La Forge retired to his quarters. There had been no word from the away team, and the alien vessel remained impassive and silent. It had not remained alone, however, and there were now three of the ships, holding at a distance away from the Hera and the Challenger.

When he slept, he dreamt of giant sharks biting at starships, and Romulans stabbing each other in some sort of coliseum. He dreamt of dead faces of those he knew, and loved: his mother, Scotty, Data, Leah.

When he awoke, Leah was sitting by the bed, watching over him, and at first he thought he was still dreaming. This Leah was alive and vibrant, however, and it was a privilege for him that her face was the first thing he saw when he woke. If anything reassured him that at least some things were still right with the universe, that was it.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“You seemed pretty distressed even in your sleep, but I didn’t want to wake you. I think bad sleep is better than none.”

“Sleep I can go without, so it doesn’t really matter whether it’s good or bad. Seeing you . . . That’s what matters.”

“You see me every day.”

“Seeing you when I first wake,” he specified. “I dunno if I could face today without that.”

“You make yourself sound very dependent.”

“Not every day, Leah. Just this day.”

Sela walked, with a Starfleet escort, along the corridor that led past the battle bridge. As she walked past, on her way to engineering to check up on her people’s work in assisting Challenger’s octopoid engineer, her hand flickered out and stuck something to the wall next to the sealed battle bridge door.

Her Starfleet escort never noticed.

Once in engineering, she took the centurion aside from where he was checking on connections. “I’ve attached a marker to the door of this ship’s auxiliary control center, the so-called battle bridge,” she told him in a low voice. “When the time comes, and it will come, you will go directly there and secure the room.”

“I understand, Commander,” the centurion whispered in response.

Even as Sela was talking to the centurion in engineering, the battle bridge doors opened, and Qat’qa emerged. She stepped out into the corridor, and quickly found the tiny marker.

She nodded to herself. “I knew it.”

39

The gray-blue expanse of the Hera’s saucer section spread out further and further to either side of the approaching shuttle’s underside.

“Ten meters,” Nog reported as he guided the shuttle in. Beside him, Scotty leaned forward in the co-pilot’s seat, his eyes bright with curiosity, and a half smile sheltering under his mustache. “Eight meters . . . Seven . . .”

Behind them, Barclay spared a nervous glance at Voktra, who was looking out of the forward viewport with tired eyes. She glanced over at him, and nodded slightly. The remaining Starfleet people and Romulans watched the approaching ship stoically. Barclay suspected they were thinking that they could be of more use helping with repairs on Challenger. Or, in the case of the Romulans, perhaps they thought they could be more useful plotting against the Challenger crew. Either way, Barclay was wondering why he volunteered.

Voktra looked at him, and he remembered that this away mission was a vital part of his duty.

“Three meters,” Nog continued. “Two . . . Docking now—”

There was a tremendous boom, and suddenly Barclay was falling. Wind was rushing past his ears, and he realized in horror that it must be the shuttle depressurizing. There was a scream somewhere as he tried to grab hold of the back of the pilot’s seat, which felt like it was a hundred klicks away and that he could never fly so far in order to reach it.

The screaming grew louder, drowning out any alarms that were sounding. He wasn’t sure if it was Voktra, or himself, or the air squeezing through a rupture, or Nog doing that screech Ferengi sometimes did when they were in mortal terror.

The screaming was so loud now that it must surely rupture his eardrums, but somehow it didn’t. Then he was jarred awake, and rolled to a sitting position. His left shoulder, hip, and his whole back felt as if he had been kicked by an elephant.

Barclay got to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain, and satisfied himself that nothing was broken. He was about to call down to sickbay when he realized he was standing in the open air.

There was a night sky above his head, clear, cloudless, and filled with stars. Barclay blinked, confused. Challenger had been thrown into intergalactic space, and there were no stars there. He spun around two or three times, taking in the starlit landscape, and the figures of the rest of the away team. For a moment, he leaned toward Voktra, offering a hand, but she was already on her feet, and he could see Scotty still on the floor beyond her.

Rushing over, Barclay got to him at the same time as a dazed-looking Nog, who clutched a tricorder in a swelling hand. Barclay felt a moment’s guilt about not having immediately gone to check up on the older man.

The pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats grew out of a carpeted platform on the ground. The structural skeleton of the shuttle lay open and naked like the bony fingers of a skeleton’s grasping hand. ODN cables snaked across a field of shattered metal, with collections of optronic circuits dotted like bushes in the scrubland.

“What the hell?” Barclay managed to say, on behalf of everyone.

Scotty walked stiffly to the pilot’s seat and examined it, then turned to the hedge of circuitry lined up in front of the two seats. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have to say that the shuttle has been turned inside-out.”

“That’s what it looks like,” Voktra agreed, “but it’s impossible.”

“Aye, the impact needed to rupture and flatten the shuttle would have been one none of us could have walked away from.”

“Maybe we didn’t,” Barclay suggested. He looked around nervously. “I mean, this definitely isn’t the interior of the Hera. Do you think we could be . . . I mean . . .”

“Don’t be daft, laddie. We’re not dead, if that’s what you’re suggesting. This is a real place. Besides, if we’d crashed, the shuttle wouldn’t just be inside out, it’d be scattered over a piece of real estate the size o’ Belgium.”

“Oh.”

“And this shuttle might be inside out but it’s all together, all in proportion . . .” Scotty reached out and touched a control, but nothing happened. “It’s still assembled right, but inside out.”

“No power, though.”

“Aye, and that’s another puzzle. Why didn’t we explode when warp field containment went?” Nobody seemed to have an answer.

“Sir.” Nog raised a hand. “Could we be in one of the Hera’s holodecks?” He gestured around the group. “Maybe none of this is real, and the shuttle a holographic fake.”

Scotty nodded thoughtfully. “I doubt it could be the Hera’s holodeck, not with that spatial manifold taking up half her decks, but it could certainly be a holodeck.”

Nog immediately straightened. “Computer, end program.” He maintained his expectant expression for about five seconds. Barclay hoped that might work, but he knew in his heart that it wouldn’t. This wasn’t a holodeck, because if it was, he would have known. He would have felt the old thrill and the old reassurance, and he would have noted the little giveaways that years of training and experience—both on and off duty—had given him.

“It could still be a holodeck,” Scotty said, “but there’s no guarantee that it’s a Federation one, or that a computer running it would understand Federation Standard, or have a universal translator built in.”

Scotty led the group away from the inside-out shuttle, and up a low ridge that opened out onto a plain. They stopped and spread out along the edge of the ridge, everyone taking scans of what they saw there. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like we’re not in Kansas any more . . .”

There was a city of sorts spread out before them. Stacked arrangements of rooms and corridors were all open to the air. Towering beams of some metallic elements curved upward and over the junctions of metal-floored roads and sidewalks.

The starlight glittered on the pseudo-city, giving just enough light to make it clear that the place was constructed by an advanced people out of recognizable and advanced technology, but not enough to lay it all open to easy inspection from a distance. Even so, Scotty could see fixtures, fittings, and even materials that were all very familiar to him. None of it left him in any doubt where the materials, or even the whole parts, had come from.

Walking down into the outskirts of the city, hands on tricorders and weapons, everyone had wide eyes and nervous twitches. Even walking this short distance had drenched everyone in sweat. It might be nighttime on this planet, but it was as hot as a mid-summer day in the Sahara.

Barclay directed his tricorder toward a curving metal arm that stretched heavenward, wrapped in a rocky growth that grew all around it. “This is pretty odd, Scotty. The main column is an alloy of tritanium and duranium. The growth around it isn’t growth, it’s aluminum crystalfoam, and polyduranide. I’m reading molybdenum in the mix too, sir.”

“That’s a familiar sounding mixture, don’t you think, Mister Barclay?”

“It sounds like the structure materials used in most Federation starships over the past several decades. Uh, specifically the Excelsior, Galaxy, Nebula, and Akira-classes.”

“And the Hera was a Nebula-class ship.”

The conclusion was inescapable. “It’s the Hera.” Barclay shivered, visibly. It was, in retrospect, obvious. The walls were made of the same materials and in the same colors as Challenger’s, and the Galaxy and Nebula-classes shared their main saucer design and manufacturing. “Someone must have spent years dismantling the pieces of the interior, and then using them to build this.” Barclay was impressed. The skills required to dismantle the complete interior of a starship and then rebuild it in such a perfect working form on the surface of a planet were almost beyond his imagining. Whoever had done it, he would like to shake them by the hand, if they had hands.

“No,” Scotty said. “They didn’t.”

“They didn’t?” Barclay couldn’t believe his ears. The citadel was right there, and . . . “It didn’t just appear like that!”

“Ah, but it did, Reg. That’s the thing of it. It did just appear like that. Just the same as the interior of our shuttle appeared when we docked.” Scotty kept walking, puffing a little as he tried to walk and talk in the thin air. Barclay didn’t like the sound of it, but supposed it was unavoidable.

“You mean this is the Hera’s interior, just turned inside-out?”

“Just as our shuttle was, aye.”

“How is that even possible?” It was totally ludicrous, as far as Barclay knew.

“It isn’t, as far as I know. Which means I don’t know everything, and that’s a relief.”

Voktra raised both of her eyebrows this time, looking, Barclay thought, surprisingly innocent in the process. “It’s a good thing to not know things?”

“If I knew everything there’d be no point coming out here, would there? We’d all be as well retiring en masse to Norpin Five and vegetatin’ for the rest of time.”

“Sounds like a fate worse than death,” Voktra opined.

“Speaking from experience, you’re right, it is.” Scotty reached up to touch the dark rock that was wrapped around the lower half of the nearest metal spar. “This rock that’s encrusting the spar . . . What is it?”

Barclay scanned it quickly. “According to my tricorder, a simple basalt.”

“Then, if this is the interior of the Hera, how come this rock has already made so many inroads?”

“The ship must have materialized partly inside some rock outcroppings.”

“I don’t think so . . .” Scotty stepped down from the rock, brushing the dust off his hands. “We’re definitely not in a holodeck.”

“Then where are we? There were no planets within sensor range,” Nog said.

“Laddie, ye must have noticed that we’re a lot further away than sensor range.” Scotty pointed upward. “We’re in the galaxy.”

“We’re in a galaxy,” Voktra said quietly. Barclay looked at her in horror, wishing she hadn’t thought of that. “Another wake?” he asked.

Scotty grimaced. “I don’t think so. A wake would have cracked the shuttle like an eggshell, and not had it so neatly turned inside out.”

“Where then?”

“If I were to think, dare I even use the word, logically, I think I’d have to assume we’re on the other side of that spatial manifold.”

Reg’s gut turned to ice, crushed in a frozen fist. “How?”

“I hav’nae a clue, but the interior of the Hera is here with us.” Scotty paced around for a moment, then knelt to start scribbling equations in the dust. “If it were a toroidal continuum fold, that might do the trick . . .”

“So, we could be anywhere in the universe.”

“Aye, lad, that we could. It’d be nice to think we were back in our own galaxy, and there’s maybe a chance of it, with it bein’ so close to where the fold is, but there are no guarantees.” Scotty straightened up with a wince and a grunt. “If somebody would like to take some astronomical readings, maybe we could confirm one way or the other if we’re in our own galaxy.”

“I’ll do it,” Nog said.

While Nog tried to get a fix on their position, and Barclay continued examining the city that had once been the interior of the Hera, the two Romulan soldiers walked away in opposite directions to form the best defensive perimeter they could manage.

Voktra, meanwhile, set her tricorder for an environmental scan. “These readings make no sense,” she complained to no one in particular.

Scotty heard her. “In what way?”

“The amount of heat for one thing.”

“I don’t need a tricorder to see that it’s hot.” Scotty jerked his head in the direction of the horizon, at the visible ripples of heat haze rising from the parched earth.

“Yes, it’s hot, but what I mean is, why is it hot?”

“Aye, that’s a puzzler right enough. There’s no sun in the sky, and no signs of volcanism.”

“All the rock and ground looks old. I’m no geologist, but I don’t think there can have been any seismic or volcanic activity here for years.”

“So, why is this place so hot?”

“I can only think of one answer,” Barclay called from where he was, “and, to be fair, people do sometimes tell me to go there.”

Scotty laughed. “Aye, I know what ye mean. And I can think of at least one Satanic-looking gentleman who’d probably feel right at home here.”

There was more than just rock to the planet. Voktra’s tricorder readings had indicated massive life-form readings. They had found that, outside of the plain where the Hera-city stood, there were dense forests of greenery and yellow.

Since there was no sign of a threat on the plain, and no inhabitants in the starship city, Voktra sent her two soldiers to investigate the edge of the forest.

Watching them walk, Scotty eyed the distance, and judged that the horizon was probably around fifteen miles away, making the planet considerably smaller than Earth. The size of Earth’s moon, or thereabouts, he decided.

Something pulled at the hairs on the back of his hand, and he saw that the patch that was supposed to keep his body’s electrical field in sync had fallen off, expired. With all that had happened over the last couple of days, he had forgotten it, but it reminded him of something else. He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting off the throbbing that was starting to ache in his gut and his chest. He wondered whether he might find a working cellular regenerator and a supply of radiogenic particles somewhere, wherever what used to be the Hera’s sickbay was now.

How many treatments had he missed now? Two? Three? As far as he could remember, it was three, and he was starting to feel it.

There wasn’t much point to moping over the matter. He’d always thought it was better to get on and get things done. “Nog, are ye having any luck?”

“No, sir. If we are in our own galaxy, we must be in the Delta Quadrant, or maybe the far side of the Beta Quadrant, but I can’t say for certain.”

“All right lad.”

“This is an impossible planet, sir,” the Ferengi went on. “It doesn’t fit with anything we know about planetary geology. Not planetary formation, not plate tectonics, not astrophysics . . .”

“Then I suppose we have to live with the notion that we don’t know quite everything about everything yet.”

“I suppose we do.”

“I reckon Starfleet would be largely out of a job if, all of a sudden, there was nothing left to discover any more.”

“There’s a quotation they taught us at the Academy. ‘And Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.’”

Voktra tilted her head to one side, as if listening to the quotation over again. “This Alexander of yours sounds . . . ambitious.”

“That’s puttin’ it mildly,” Scotty murmured.

“There’s a similar saying on Romulus, that I’d heard Proconsul Tomalak use in the past. ‘Pity the man who fulfills all his dreams.’”

“Scotty! Scotty!” Barclay was yelling excitedly as he ran out from behind a corner, and over to the trio. “I’ve found something we’d all better look at.” Scotty set off toward him, Nog and Voktra following.

Barclay led them a short distance, to a bizarrely-oriented wall with now-unusable shelves, which must have once been part of a cabin. Set into the ground at the base of the wall was a viewport. A layer of dust half an inch thick had blown across the viewport, and now there were marks where hands—presumably belonging to Barclay—had wiped most of the dust away.

Scotty knelt at the edge of the viewport, using his hands to lower himself down stiffly. He tilted his head, peering through the thick transparent aluminum set into the ground. His face went white, and he whispered, “In the name o’ the wee man . . .”

Nog leaned forward to see what had such an effect on Scotty. The sight stunned him so much that he almost stumbled and fell onto the viewport.

Instead of showing earth or rock underneath the transparent aluminum, or even the darkness of a cave, the viewport looked down into the blackness of the intergalactic void. A distant spiral galaxy provided the only natural light. Closer in, but still a long way beneath the viewport, the Challenger sailed smoothly along in her orbit. “I know we’ve been saying it alot, but that really is impossible.”

“I only wish it were,” Scotty said quietly.

As they watched, something flickered past behind the Challenger, dwarfing it. It was an utterly alien construction, vaguely shark-like, and it moved with a sinuous motion. “Is that . . .” Nog trailed off.

“It probably must be. The thing that brought us here.”

A second vessel joined the first that he had spotted and, together, they simply vanished. “They must have used the gravity well at the Hera to meet up. That clinches it. There’s only one explanation that makes any kind of sense. And I admit I’m using the word sense in its loosest possible definition. It has to be a toroidal continuum fold that’s intersected with the Hera.”

Barclay paced around, tracing little diagrams in the air, “It can’t be a spatial fold on its own. It has to be a . . . a wormhole of some kind, with the particles that cross over it quantum tunneling through to an end-point within the—or a—galaxy.”

“That’s what I thought at first,” Scotty said with a nod, “but it canna be right or the shuttle would have been brought through whole. And then there’s the gravitational anomalies.”

“Gravity here feels about four fifths of Earth normal.”

“Aye, but what do you get if you scan the Hera’s interior?”

Barclay fumbled his tricorder out of its holder. “Four and a half thousand solar masses?”

“It’s reading the fold, which is swampin’ the true local gravity level.”

“But four and a half thousand solar masses, sir? We’d be squashed like—like—like bugs.”

“That we would. But look.” Scotty took the tricorder and made an adjustment for range. “It’s actually a large gravitational mass a couple of dozen meters under the Hera’s remains.”

“That’s still close enough to—”

“Remember when we scanned the Hera from Challenger.”

“It showed a four and a half thousand solar mass attractor of about a hundred meters across, inside the Hera. Yet there wasn’t that level of actual attraction, was there?”

“No . . .” Reg suddenly became excited. “No, there wasn’t, but that means the mass must have been on the other side of the wormhole, or the manifold, and that means it must be this planet, which isn’t that massive.”

“Aye, and the readings from here show the exact same thing—a huge mass on the other side.”

Reg’s jaw dropped. “On the other side, where Challenger is. But we know that isn’t the case. And from that side . . .” He snapped his fingers. “The mass is always on the other side, never on the observer’s side!”

Scotty nodded grimly. “Somehow, and don’t ask me how, it’s always being held in balance. Two sides of a spatial manifold, each with fairly normal gravity for the area, but a supermassive attractor on the other side.”

“Challenger was drawn to the Hera by a genuine gravitational attraction,” Voktra pointed out, “but not such a huge gravity.”

“This planet’s mass, I should think,” Scotty said. “That’s what drew Challenger here, but it’s the false mass of the fold that’s drawing the aliens. That’s why they come here, and that’s how Challenger ended up out there.”

40

On Challenger, everyone who had seen the two alien vessels was talking about nothing else. Guinan had seen them too, and they seemed vaguely familiar, but less so than the way people were talking about them. The hushed tones, the disbelief and uncertainty, they were all present in the same way people reacted when they reported religious experiences.

These were no mythical figures, though, but vast leviathans that easily dwarfed the Challenger.

“There you are,” La Forge said to Sela, watching a replay of the aliens’ arrival and departure on a large screen that had been set up behind the bar in Nelson’s. “You wanted to find out what we were looking for, and I guess that . . . There they are.”

“They’re back.” Guinan pointed toward the windows. True enough, both of the alien vessels, which had left, had now reappeared. Ten times the length of the Challenger, they were covered in multicolored crisscrossing diamond patterns.

Sela’s eyes were wide, and she looked more human than usual. If Geordi didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was afraid. No, he thought again, not afraid, but intimidated, as if she’d bitten off more than she could chew. “I’ve never seen ships like that,” she admitted.

“Neither have I. Which is kind of the point of Starfleet. Nobody’s ever been out here before—”

“Except for the Hera.”

“And no one has met . . . whoever they are.”

“Tell me, Captain La Forge,” Sela began silkily, “have we any idea how far outside the galaxy we are?”

“About half a million light-years.” A quarter of the way to Andromeda, Geordi thought.

“That’s a long way. Even if Challenger’s engines were working.”

“A couple of hundred years, even at maximum warp.”

“And you’re content for it to take that long to get home?”

“We don’t seem to have much of a choice, do we?”

Sela walked over to the windows, her voice trembling slightly. “We have several choices, Captain. They’re all sitting out there, coming and going in the wink of an eye.”

“The alien ships?”

“One brought us here in a matter of minutes. They’re not going to take centuries to travel back into the galaxy.”

“No, they’re not. But they’re not us.” He understood her concern, or thought he did. “It wouldn’t be the first time a starship was stuck far from home, with low energy and a multi-generational trip to look forward to.”

Sela turned back to him again. “You’re referring to Voyager?”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Naturally.” Her arrogance returned, along with the feigned camaraderie. “Actually the Tal Shiar first heard of it several years before it went missing in the Delta Quadrant. At the time we thought the officer who reported the contact had suffered some kind of mental breakdown.”

“Well, the point remains that Voyager faced a journey of seventy thousand light-years, which, considering the limitations of running an engine at maximum, worked out to a seventy-year journey home. But they knuckled down, got on with it, and got home in seven years instead of seventy.”

“And your point is? That if we all behave like nice little Starfleet drones, and maybe get lucky enough to stumble across an old transwarp conduit or two, we might get home in only a couple of decades instead of a couple of centuries?” She shook her head sharply. “I’m sorry, but that is most definitely not an option.”

“I wasn’t really discussing practical options yet.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I was just pointing out that being far removed from our home quadrant, or even our home galaxy, doesn’t automatically mean certain doom.”

“I never thought it did. I just happen to think that we need another ship, unless you have a means to attract Starfleet’s attention all the way out here.”

“We have a ship, in case you hadn’t noticed. The one we’re currently aboard.”

Sela chuckled lightly, a surprisingly pleasant sound. “We’re standing in a vessel, Captain La Forge, yes. But I don’t think I’d exaggerate things by calling it a ship as such. Ships have engines, and take you to places. This is just a sheltered space station right now.”

“We’re working on getting engine power back up to sustainable levels. Leah and Vol are pulling double shifts—”

“And it’s not going to do any good. They know that, you know that, and I know that. Even if we lived long enough to make it all the way home to our own galaxy, do you think for a moment that Challenger is in any shape to make it through the energy barrier?”

“That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it.”

“That’s a bridge we’ll never reach, Captain. This vessel is done as a transport. We all know it.”

“So, what’s your alternative?”

“Take control of one of the alien vessels.”

La Forge laughed out loud. “Are you kidding? You must have noticed how far ahead of our technology they are.”

“Believe me, I’ve noticed that, yes.”

“Okay, and have you considered that maybe their weapons technology is just as far ahead? And if it is, there’s very likely to be nothing you, or I, could do to hurt them, and probably a lot they could do to hurt us.”

“Or maybe they rely on their speed to keep out of trouble, and are as vulnerable to weapons fire as anyone else.”

“Do you want to risk all our lives on that gamble?” Seeing her expression, La Forge held up a hand to cut her off. “Or, let me put that another way: do you want to risk your life on that gamble?” She didn’t answer. “I didn’t think so. So far they haven’t shown any hostile intent, and I have no intention of provoking them to do otherwise.”

“Have you considered the possibility that maybe the reason why they haven’t shown any signs of hostility is because they don’t have the means to do so?” she countered.

“So, you think the Challenger is pretty much out of commission as a ship, but you think it’s up to taking on an unknown alien vessel that was capable of dragging us here?”

“If we compact the power requirements, yes. We still have our sensor readings of what happened, and we’ve shared the readings from Challenger’s sensors.”

“And how would you plan to compact the power?” La Forge asked.

“By sacrificing the saucer section.”

“What?”

She leaned forward in a comradely fashion eerily reminiscent of Tasha Yar. “If we only have the stardrive section to worry about, we can use a lot more of our available power for shields, weapons, and maneuvering.”

“Chairman, we have no idea what their capabilities are. What do we do if they trash the stardrive section? Retire to the saucer and live out our lives in the dark?”

Sela had no answer to that. Not yet, anyway.

As Geordi and Sela spoke, more of the alien ships were arriving. Already there were over a dozen, and, although they were keeping their distance, they were still making Guinan nervous.

Guinan wasn’t used to feeling nervous, and she didn’t like it. Pain was one thing, because it represented physical damage, but nervousness was a whole other matter entirely.

The worst thing about it was that she didn’t know why. She couldn’t remember ever seeing anything like this before. And then it hit her. She wasn’t remembering something from her past, but from the Nexus. A mental image of a distraught La Forge, a Galaxy-class ship, and a gigantic alien vessel that prowled the void; these were the half-remembered Nexus dreams that had drawn her to join the Challenger in the first place.

With that realization, Guinan passed out.

She woke up with Alyssa Ogawa bending over her. “What happened?”

“Geordi says you just keeled over.” Alyssa was scanning her with a tricorder. “I think it’s just a mild allergic reaction to the painkiller I prescribed for your ribs. We’ll switch to a different one, and you’ll be okay.”

On the bridge, Carolan was in the center seat, supervising the beta shift crew at their posts. “Can we get any readings of the interior of the alien vessels? Especially life signs?”

“Nothing, Commander,” the junior lieutenant at ops said. “They’re totally blank to our sensors. Like ghosts. Maybe they really are Flying Dutchmen or something.”

“Somehow I doubt it,” Carolan said. Flying Dutchmen, she thought. It’s as good a designation as any. “Keep scanning our Flying Dutchmen, and record everything.”

41

Despite the hours they had spent on the planet, there was no sign of sunrise yet, and Scotty wasn’t even sure that it would have one, as the stars above hadn’t changed, which suggested that the planet wasn’t rotating.

The Romulans had returned with news that they had found another settlement on the fringes of a moss forest, and that this one had proper, if makeshift, buildings.

Scotty couldn’t move too quickly, but they managed to walk to the settlement in about three hours, with rest stops to catch their—or at least Scotty’s—breath on the way.

The settlement was a fort, of sorts. The walls were about three meters high, and made from wall panels taken from a starship, silver and metallic on the outside, tan on the inside. Since there were no other starships around, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they had come from the Hera.

At each corner, a wide tower, only slightly higher than the wall on either side but made of the same materials, looked out over the desolate plains. The towers were pentagonal, giving overlapping fields of view—or fields of fire, Scotty thought darkly—along the walls to either side. Simple stairs bolted together out of tubing led up the interior walls to wide platforms on the towers. The walls themselves had no walkways at the top.

A handful of buildings clustered inside the walls. They were made of the same materials as the exterior walls, with simple flat panels as roofs. A thin layer of dust was visible on each roof. Scotty picked a building at random, and opened the door. The interior was dusty and cool, but surprisingly comfortable-looking. The tables and chairs were clearly from the crew quarters of the Hera.

Another building was a dormitory, with beds from both crew quarters and sickbay. The biobeds weren’t connected to anything, and were clearly being used simply as beds. Scotty grimaced, knowing he wouldn’t be receiving any treatment here.

“Mister Scott!” Nog called out. “Look at this!”

It was a separate walled enclosure, but this one had no defensive towers, and no buildings inside.

The residents of this enclosure, however, hadn’t left. They remained, permanently, under markers fashioned from duranium plates. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty graves.

Voktra knelt to examine the names scorched into the duranium marker plates. “Serval, Ensign, a Vulcan. Baker, Michael, Lieutenant. T’Pren, Commander, another Vulcan.”

“Wait, look at this one.” Reg knelt, and brushed away the dust. The sight stirred a mixture of feelings in him. “La Forge, Silva, Captain.”

“Captain La Forge,” Nog echoed.

“Aye, lad,” Scotty said sadly, putting a hand on Nog’s shoulder.

Barclay couldn’t take his eyes off the plate. It would sadden Geordi, of course, but it would be a good thing for him to have closure on the mystery of his mother’s fate. Barclay just wished there was some way to let Geordi know what they had found, or to bring him here to pay his last respects.

When he looked up, he saw that Scotty had sat down on a stone, looking flushed. The others were more widely scattered, so Barclay took the opportunity that he’d been waiting for for a few hours now. “Scotty, can I talk to you?”

“Ye are talking to me.”

“I meant about, um, I’m not sure how to put this, but you don’t seem . . . well.”

“Ah, that.” Scotty smiled faintly.

“Aye, that. I mean, yes, that.” Barclay hesitated. “I’m no medical expert, but as a recovering hypochondriac I’ve read up on a few things over my life and . . . You look as if your heart—”

Scotty managed a wan smile. “I have neuro-electrical damage from spending ninety years in a transporter buffer, and organ damage from when the Split Infinite went nova. I’ve been on a program of treatments every forty-eight hours in sickbay, but . . .”

“With the power down . . .”

“I’ve missed a few.”

Barclay’s heart sank. “I thought as much. Is there anything we can do with the field kit from the shuttle?”

“I’ll be fine once we get back to Challenger.” Reg didn’t dare offer his opinion on how likely he thought that was.

“Sir, you really shouldn’t have come on this mission, should you?”

“No,” Scotty admitted quietly. “But if I didn’t, Geordi would have come instead, and that would be so much the worse because Challenger needs her captain if the crew are to have a chance of ever makin’ it home.”

“Don’t you think you would have given the ship—”

Scotty looked Reg in the eye and shook his head slowly. “A ship needs a captain who’s not dyin’, lad.” He waved a hand around at the duranium grave markers. “I guess all I need is here, if it comes to it, and we canna get back to the Challenger.”

Barclay shook his head, more to shake away the upset he felt than to indicate a negative. “You can’t be dying, Scotty.”

“It’s all right, Reg. I’ve had over a hundred and fifty years. I’m well up on the average.”

“But—” Barclay’s protestation was cut off by a deep rumble. “What’s that?”

Nog, Voktra, and the Romulans were running back toward them from the edge of what looked like a forest, but was actually a thick layer of moss, with furry extrusions the size of fence-posts crammed together for kilometers.

The ground was shaking, and it was hard to tell whether it was causing the low rumble, or vibrating in sympathy with the sound. “Groundquake!”

As the away team fought to stay upright, one of the graves near Nog swelled up like a blister in the earth. The thin layer of topsoil split and began to run away, disgorging a thrashing mass of wet green and brown tendrils. To Reg’s horror, the thing immediately rose upright on two legs, and turned toward him.

It was roughly humanoid in shape, and was composed mostly of slick roots and damp moss, with shining skeins of crystalline rock threaded through it. Pieces of the moss sloughed off it as it moved, revealing bone underneath.

One of the Romulans snapped into a classic shooting stance, one hand under the other, and fired his phaser at the creature. The blazing beam slashed past Barclay and seared away the moss and roots on the left side of its head. There was a—now charred—human skull underneath. A wisp of smoke from the burned moss drifted out through the exposed eye socket, and it turned from Barclay and lunged for the Romulan. He blasted it again, and this time the moss and roots that were threaded around its spine and packed into its ribs burst into flame.

With preternatural silence, apart from the crackle of the flames, it grabbed hold of the Romulan and began to try to twist his head off. He screamed as the flames dug into his uniform.

More swollen graves began to weep moss and twisting roots, and suddenly there was another creature, and another, and another. In a minute, there were a dozen of them.

Nog exchanged a glance with the other Romulan. Their eyes met, and a moment of understanding passed between them, as two warriors in the same unpleasant situation, who both have similar training about what to do.

“Fall back by twos,” Nog shouted, leveling his phaser at the approaching creatures.

“I’ll give covering fire,” the Romulan called back.

They shuffled backward, taking potshots at the moss-powered zombies. Nog had remembered from horror-themed holonovels that aiming for the head and destroying the brain was the best way to deal with a zombie, but that was fiction, not in exobiology. When the Romulan had attacked the first creature, it seemed clear that setting fire to the densest clumps of moss was the best option. Even then, it took some very long moments for the fire to burn away the roots that bound the skeletons together, and for the zombie to finally collapse into blazing wreckage.

The phaser shots flickered through the darkness, igniting the spongy green hearts and turning the oncoming figures into walking flambeaux.

“Aim for the thickest clumps of moss!”

The screech and whine of their weapons accompanied harsh burning beams slicing into the rushing creatures. Lurching bodies fell, engulfed in flames. More of the zombies kept coming, claws of bone and quartz swiping at the away team.

Nog shot a creature in the face, hoping the bones of La Forge’s mother weren’t somewhere inside, and then ignited it with a wider beam. He scuttled backward, desperate to avoid the wildly waving torches that now passed for its arms.

Voktra swung left, right, and center, firing the shortest flashes of phaser fire that she could. She had worried for a time that joining the engineering corps of the fleet would lead to her martial skills deserting her, and that she wouldn’t be able to pull her weight when lives were in the balance. She needn’t have worried. As she cut down her first moss zombie, she was still terrified, but by the third one she was relieved. She was a scientist and engineer first, and a soldier second, but at least she was still a soldier, and still a worthwhile member of the Romulan military.

Blazing figures ran blindly, though it didn’t look to Scotty like they were caught in either terror or panic. They simply no longer functioned as hunters, and had only an instinct to flee their own destruction.

He saw one of them go blindly back into the press of the other zombies, igniting many of them. Others stumbled on as they were consumed in flames, until they shriveled and the bones inside cracked.

Whenever one fell, another took its place. As the away team reached the edge of the moss forest, the thick green depths of it began to writhe and try to entangle the visitors’ feet, holding them tight as the zombielike creatures closed in remorselessly.

42

Suddenly the moss-zombie creatures slowed, spinning around and waving their limbs as if they had been plunged into darkness. Nog hesitated, looking around for whatever might have affected them. Somehow, he didn’t think that being scary to these things was necessarily a sign of being benevolent to the away team.

A figure had emerged from a narrow cutting near the creatures who looked most affected. It didn’t seem to be doing anything, and its arms were hanging loosely at its sides. It seemed to be humanoid, and wore a rough, homespun robe with a cowl.

A second humanoid followed the first one out of the cutting, and the creatures grew more sluggish. One of them simply faded away into the moss forest as if it was merging with it, and another dematerialized into a cloud of specks, which in turn vanished, as completely as a hologram that had been deactivated.

Nog suddenly felt a presence at his elbow, and turned sharply, the breath catching in his throat as a stern face loomed above him. He was halfway toward raising his phaser when he realized it was a Vulcan, wearing a blue-green tunic with black shoulders.

“Do not be afraid,” the Vulcan said. “Fear only provokes further attacks.”

“They’re slowing,” Nog gasped.

“Our ability to control our emotions seems to repel them.”

“Do they feed on fear?”

“I don’t believe so, but they are able to use it to track their prey. Come with me. As long as we are with your party, we will cloak your emotions with our discipline.”

As Nog followed the Vulcan, he saw that the other figures that had emerged from the cutting in the moss forest were also all Vulcans.

The Vulcans were wearing a type of uniform that had been discontinued some years ago. It was a mostly black jumpsuit with shoulders in their department’s colors. A couple of them even wore the two-piece uniforms older than that, which had black shoulders and a torso in the department colors.

The Vulcans led the group back to the fort-like settlement. “I apologize for our absence when you arrived,” the leading Vulcan said. “We left in the belief that you were a threat to us. Clearly that is not the case.” He raised an eyebrow in that way that, Scotty sometimes thought, they must train their children to do from their first day in school. He’d never met a Vulcan who didn’t use it as their main means of nonverbal communication. “Your uniforms are unusual, and yet . . . Starfleet?”

“Aye. Yes,” Scotty hastily corrected himself. “I’m former Captain Scott, this is Lieutenant Commander Barclay. We’re from the Starship Challenger.”

“Challenger? Galaxy-class?”

“Aye. She’s not the latest model, but she’s got it where it counts. At least, she did have, before one of those leviathan ships carried us here.”

“The damage is, no doubt, considerable.”

“Considerable, but we’re getting her fixed.”

The Vulcan stood at attention. “I am Commander Savar, first officer of the Hera.”

“The same thing happened to the Hera, didn’t it?”

“Yes, Captain Scott. We were caught in what we later discovered was some form of trans-slipstream wake. We lost all power, and crashed into a gravitational anomaly—”

“A toroidal continuum fold, I think ye’ll find.”

Savar nodded an acknowledgment. “And before we could take any further evasive action, we found ourselves on this . . . quite unique planet, thirteen standard years ago.”

“It’s unique, all right,” Scotty agreed. “It’s too hot for nighttime.”

“This planet has no sun,” Savar said. “It is a rogue world.”

“Tell me, would ye know where this planet is? In our own galaxy?”

“No. The analysis we were able to make with astronomical equipment salvaged from the interior of the Hera suggests we are in the galaxy NGC 4414, approximately sixty two million light-years from our own galaxy.”

Scotty had expected this kind of news, but it was still a shock to hear it. “How many of you are there?”

“Forty-seven of us remain. Thirty-nine Vulcans, six humans, one Bolian, and one Caitian.”

“Forty-seven? Out of seven hundred and fifty?”

“Out of seven hundred and sixty-three in total, yes.”

Nog stepped forward. “How did you manage to find food out here? We’re reading life signs, but not seeing much life, apart from the moss forests. I’m not sure if those zombie things count.”

“There is limited life on the surface,” Savar said. “The atmosphere contains both water moisture and sufficient chemicals to support bacteria. There are edible mosses and so on. However, we were most fortunate that several replicators remained online and could be kept running with the surviving portable generators.”

“Handy.”

“That being the case, the microbiological life has been most useful to us as raw material for the replicators. Water has been less of a problem. It condenses readily with temperature change, as on most planets, and there are occasional rains.”

Another Vulcan brought a medical kit, and began to prepare a hypo for Scotty. “You seem affected by the atmosphere,” he said. “A tri-ox compound should be of use.”

As he applied the hypo to Scotty, the non-Vulcan survivors began to appear. Scotty thanked the Vulcan medic, and Barclay turned to Savar. “What are those things that attacked us? Some kind of zombie apocalypse?”

Savar gave him a pitying look. “They are not the undead. This planet is psycho-reactive and it responds to uncontrolled emotions by generating hostile bioforms out of locally available materials.”

“There are bones in them!” Voktra exclaimed.

“Then what are they? Animating our dead in the hope we won’t fight back against them? Or just desecrating them for fun?” Barclay asked.

“Neither,” Nog said. “I should have realized it before. It’s a good engineering idea.”

“Engineering?” Voktra echoed.

“Moss and roots, or whatever that stuff is, isn’t going to be able to run or fight. But wrap it around an articulated armature . . .”

“The skeletons?”

“A handy articulated frame,” Nog agreed, “for a puppet.”

“Controlled by that moss?” Voktra’s tone dripped with skepticism.

“I don’t know. Controlled by something. Savar, could that moss be intelligent? Or perhaps the crystalline material that was in it.”

The Vulcan seemed to consider. “The moss is high-protein and very elastic, optimized for incredibly rapid growth and contraction. Almost like muscle tissue, and that is the purpose it plays.”

Scotty thought over all that he’d been listening to as the tri-ox compound took effect, and his breathing eased. “A skeleton as an armature, moss for muscles, rock crystal for mass, and roots to hold together . . . But what’s the driving force? Where’s the intelligence?”

“And why attack us?” Barclay asked.

“Perhaps because you are new,” Savar suggested. “The attacks on our settlement have reduced over the years, as we have adjusted our minds to the situation.”

“Maybe . . . But it would surely take some kind of intelligence to generate such reactions. Processing power at least,” said Scotty.

“There is no technology here,” Savar pointed out. “No computers other than the ones we brought. And we run them rarely.”

“After some rest, I’d like to show you something,” Scotty said, unable to keep his eyes open any longer.

“As you wish, Captain,” Savar agreed.

A few hours later, the surviving Challenger visitors, plus several Vulcans and one Caitian, had returned to the city formerly known as the Hera. Scotty led them like a tourist guide, pointing a hand around the raised plateau that surrounded the city-like interior of the Hera, pausing as his finger angled toward the various rock outcroppings that were growing up around the structural spars, and encrusted the bases of the ground-level walls.

“The interior seems to have arrived partially inside the surface.”

Savar looked where Scotty was pointing. “That is how it appears, but it was not the case when we arrived.”

“It wasn’t? But this is rock, it couldn’t have just grown in twelve years.”

“And yet it has.”

“I wonder how that happened . . .”

“Is it important?” Voktra asked. “I don’t see how it impacts on our situation, and we do have a limited time.”

Barclay took a deep breath, evidently trying to play it cool. “When you’re explorers, everything new that you find is important. And when you’re trying to survive, anything that’s out of the ordinary, or might have a tactical implication, is important.”

Voktra nodded curtly. “You are correct. I apologize.” She hesitated, then offered a slightly wavering smile. “And I have to admit, it’s curious from a structural engineering viewpoint.”

“Yes, yes it is. I knew you’d see it my way,” Barclay said.

“Your way?” Voktra asked.

Scotty took Savar to the base of the structure. “The ground itself is growing around the Hera’s structure.”

Barclay felt vindicated. “Like I said when we arrived, the geology on this planet makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The heat without either sunlight or volcanic activity, the hill growing up around and through the Hera . . .”

Scotty drew a tricorder and activated it. It began to warble, and a regular waveform began to scroll across the screen. “Do you see this?”

“The planet’s magnetic signature?” Savar nodded. “I have seen it many times.”

“Not on a medical tricorder,” Scotty said slyly. He handed the tricorder to Savar. “This is set to scan for alpha rhythms, natural brainwaves, but just look at the scale!” Scotty continued. “I thought of it last night—well, before I slept, when you used the word psycho-reactive. Psycho. Why is it psycho-reactive?” Scotty suddenly kicked the rock that was growing around the spar from the Hera. “And as for this bloody thing, it’s a scab!”

“What?”

“Don’t ye see? It’s scar tissue! It has to be. The heat is body heat, the magnetosphere shows the rhythms of brainwaves . . .”

“You’re saying we’re not on a planet?”

“I’m saying the planet is a life-form. It’s alive, man! A living brain that’s grown itself a protective casing the size of Luna.”

“That’s insane!” Voktra protested. “A living organism, the size of a planet . . .”

“Why not? What sort of natural predator would it have?”

“What about the L-374 system’s artifact?” Barclay said. “Didn’t they call that the planet-killer?”

“Aye, lad, that it was. But it was a machine, a manufactured weapon; ye couldna call it a planet’s natural predator.” Scotty pointed to the rocky growth again. “Now think about the damage the toroidal continuum fold must be causing. From the Challenger’s side of the fold, it’s several meters inside the surface of the planet. Inside the skin of a living creature!”

“Which would mean the fold, and the interior of the Hera, is, what, a tumor in the skin of this . . . planet-creature?” Barclay asked.

“That’s exactly what it means.”

“I dread to think what Doctor Ogawa will say.”

Scotty laughed mirthlessly. “She’ll say it’s only natural for a living form to create antibodies to fight infection. Like us.”

Savar paced a few feet away, deep in thought. “Not us,” he said thoughtfully. “Our minds, and our emotions.” He looked up. “Strong emotions have always drawn stronger attacks, and you were attacked in our garden of remembrance. I presume you were upset.” He looked at Voktra. “And Romulans are a very passionate people.”

“I’ll look after her,” Barclay said defensively. He stepped in front of Voktra, and saw that her hand was shaking. “I didn’t think Romulans were afraid of anything.”

“Who said I was afraid?”

“You’re a little—Well, trembling a little.”

“Are you sure its not you who’s trembling?”

“Well, actually, no, I’m not so sure. Maybe a little. But that’s not a denial.”

“No, it isn’t. So, are you afraid?” the Romulan asked.

“No. Yes. I mean, sort of, but I’m not going to let it get between me and doing my duty. And you?” Barclay asked.

“You may rest assured that I will do my duty.”

“Even if you’re afraid.”

“Especially if I’m afraid, which, as it happens, I’m not.” Voktra insisted.

“Oh. But you’re still . . . trembling.”

“That isn’t fear.”

“Then what is it?”

“It is . . . inappropriate right now.”

“Oh. Ah.”

Savar spoke quietly to Scotty. “Emotion will draw more attacks. Fortunately we are far enough from the moss forest that we may be safe here.”

“Then we’d be better making our camp here.” Scotty looked toward the viewport set into the floor. “This is where the fold is, so this is probably where we’ll have the best chance of getting back.”

“There is no means of leaving the planet,” Savar proclaimed.

“Are ye sure?”

“As sure as is possible to be. Under the command of Captain La Forge, we spent the first eight months of our enforced exile here seeking a means to leave.

“But did she know we were on the wrong side of a toroidal continuum fold?”

“No,” Savar admitted. “None of us had determined that. Most of our engineering officers were killed in the crash.”

“Aye, I thought as much.” Scotty considered how best to put across the conclusion he had reached. “Have ye ever seen a fella make balloon animals?”

“Of course.”

“Imagine such a man blows up a balloon, and twists a part of it so he can shove it back inside the main part of the balloon. That’s what we’ve got here, but balanced both ways. So as well as the smaller bubble being inside the main part of the balloon, the main part of the balloon is inside the smaller bubble.”

“And the actual twisted part is the fold,” Barclay added helpfully, having returned to the main group with Voktra.

“Ye’ve got it, Reg. A chunk of the universe is trapped as a bubble on the other side of the spatial manifold inside the Hera’s hull, but the rest of the universe is also trapped as a bubble in this part, under that interior of the Hera.” Scotty stood on the viewport, and stamped his foot on it, kicking up dust. “Essentially the universe is kind of like a Möbius strip. What happens when you join two Möbius strips together is you get a Klein surface, or, as it’s more usually called, a Klein bottle.”

“Why the discrepancy?” Savar asked. “Is it important?”

“Not at all. It’s a mistranslation to Standard from the German words flache and flasche. A Klein bottle is a type of manifold that only has one side. Both the interior and exterior of the bottle are the same side. The important thing is that the universe itself is analogous to a Möbius strip. By definition it only has one side, or surface. But as soon as you have two of it . . .”

“They’re stuck together as a Klein bottle,” Barclay explained.

“A Klein bottle cannot exist in three dimensional space without intersecting with itself,” Savar pointed out.

“And you just hit on the key words, Savar. Intersecting with itself.” Scotty stepped back off the viewport. “The universe is a Möbius strip, the bubble is a Möbius strip, and because they’re tied together they’ve formed a Klein bottle. But because this is a physical thing, in real space, there has to be an intersection with itself.”

“The Hera.” Comprehension began to dawn in Savar’s eyes.

“Aye. The spatial fold occupying the same space as the Hera, is where the universe intersects with itself.”

43

“How could this spatial fold have formed?” Savar asked Scotty.

“It couldn’t. Not naturally, anyway.”

“Artificially?” offered Savar.

“Not with any technology either the Federation or the Romulans have.”

“Something else,” Voktra suggested, “sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic?”

“Maybe, or something else even more advanced than those things . . . whatever they are. The alien ships out there with Challenger.” Scotty paused. “Let me guess. You’re thinking that’d be a technology worth seeking out? Maybe worth copying or stealing? The next Genesis Project?”

“As a means of advanced propulsion I’d say the drawbacks outweigh the potential gains, wouldn’t you?” Voktra replied.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Scotty agreed.

“For the moment,” Voktra said quietly, “I’m thinking that the only thing worth seeking out is a way back to where Challenger is.”

“That is impossible.” Savar repeated his earlier claim.

“Oh, is it?” Scotty waggled a finger at the Vulcan. “If it’s possible to travel one way through the fold, it ought to be possible to travel the other way, seein’ as we know mass-detection works both ways.”

“And yet—”

“Have ye ever considered that maybe the reason you’ve found it impossible is because the psycho-reactive effect is making it impossible, because that’s what, on some level, you fear?”

Savar was silent for a long moment. “There may a certain logic in what you say. I must . . . consider this.”

“Consider it quickly, Commander.”

One of the alien leviathans flexed slightly, and moved with effortless grace toward the Challenger. Carolan, on the bridge, calmly called a Yellow Alert. La Forge and Sela arrived a moment later. “Captain,” Carolan began, “one of the aliens is approaching us on an intercept course.”

“Are they arming any weapons?”

“Not that we can tell, sir, but we can’t tell anything about them.”

“I wonder what they want?” La Forge said.

“Not to destroy us.”

La Forge was surprised to hear Sela react with something other than Romulan paranoia and hostility. “No.”

“If they wanted that, they would have attacked already,” Sela pointed out.

“Unless they’re just trying to get a measure of us.”

Sela shook her head. “They’ve been watching us for some time . . . I can feel it. Call it instinct if you want.” La Forge glanced sidelong at her, as she echoed the feeling he had when the first alien ship appeared. “We need to contact them somehow.”

“So you said earlier.”

“The Federation doesn’t have a monopoly on first contact situations. Every planet, every race, has them.”

“I’d love to read a copy of Romulan first contact protocols.” La Forge’s attention was drawn by the hiss of a turbolift door—the only lift still operating, while the shuttle was away. He was getting progressively less surprised to see Guinan walk in each time.

“I’m a little busy right now, Guinan.” He hated having to say that to her, but didn’t feel he had a choice.

“These things seem familiar somehow. I can’t even say why,” she said. “But I think I may be able to get in touch with them.”

That really grabbed his attention, and immediately meant he wasn’t too busy to see her after all. “How?”

“I’m not really sure . . . yet. It’s just a feeling I get.”

“A Nexus-type feeling?”

“Maybe.”

“If Counselor Troi were here, she’d be able to make some kind of mental contact, but you—”

“I don’t need empathic or telepathic abilities, Geordi. I’ve been traveling the galaxy for five hundred years, and I’ve listened to a lot of people and a lot of stories . . .”

That was a point he hadn’t considered up till now, but it was a valuable one. “Could you have met these aliens before? Or at least heard of them?”

“They seem familiar, so I think so. But five hundred years is a long time, and that’s a lot of memories to try to sort through.”

“You don’t remember everything?”

“Do you remember every person you spoke to, or heard about, over your lifetime?”

“No . . .”

“Neither do I. You know there was a politician on Earth once who used to get that a lot, so to stave off embarrassment when he met someone he knew he’d met but didn’t really remember, he’d always just say ‘Of course I remember you, and you were right after all.’”

Geordi couldn’t help but grin. “That’s one way of introducing yourself, but I don’t think it’ll work so well on . . . whoever they are. But if you’ve heard anything at all about these ships, or the race who controls them, we like to know what you know,” La Forge said.

“They’re legends, tall tales . . . When I first met you, it was in San Francisco, a major seaport. Everywhere you went you’d hear tall tales of sailors catching an enormous fish that got away, or seeing squid big enough to drag a ship to the bottom of the ocean, or sea serpents.”

“Like the Loch Ness monster?”

“Exactly. The Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, the North American Thunderbird . . . or maybe the Flying Dutchman, or the Klingon D’Vey Fek’lehr if you want a legendary ship for comparison. All the creatures were seen by travelers, but never proven to exist. On the other hand, the giant squid was proven to exist. When I met you in San Francisco, the gorilla was still just one of these traveler’s tales as well. So, sometimes the legend becomes fact.”

“So, these ships have been sighted? But sea serpents and monsters were things that sailors back in the day could tell were different from everyday creatures, and the Flying Dutchman was supposed to be ghostly and glowing, definitely different from a regular ship. So what makes these things . . . Dutchmen?”

“They’re always seen at a distance, for one thing. Never close up, just ghosts at the edge of sensor range. No one has ever seen a member of their crew.”

“That could just mean they belong to a race who prefers to keep themselves to themselves.” La Forge stopped suddenly. “D’Vey Fek’lehr—that was the phrase used by a Klingon captain in his report about finding a trans-slipstream wake just a couple of weeks ago.”

“Then it is the same phenomenon. A legend, that some people think is a ship, and some think is a being itself.”

Another alien vessel decelerated rapidly, swinging past the crippled Challenger, and angling to take position in a high orbit around the Hera.

“Another one,” Leah said darkly. “How many of these things are going to come here?”

“It’s a big enough fleet already,” Qat’qa opined. “They can surely only be mustering for some kind of military action.”

“An invasion? Of where?”

“Their wakes are being reported throughout our region of the galaxy . . .”

“The galaxy’s a big place to try to invade with only a few dozen ships,” La Forge pointed out. “And they aren’t very large ships at that.”

“We do not know—” Qat’qa broke off. “What in Kahless’s name—?”

“Another ship, Captain,” the ensign at tactical said urgently. “It just appeared in sensor range. No decloaking, no warp signature—”

“Carried along by that most recent alien.”

“The new ship is of a design I’ve never seen before. Much larger than us.”

“One of the aliens?”

“No . . .”

“Let’s see it on screen.”

“Sir, their shield harmonic is—”

“Romulan,” Sela finished the sentence, as Tomalak’s Fist loomed on the main viewer. She sat back on the edge of one of the science station consoles, apparently unnoticed as her hand had touched a communications switch. “It looks to be about thirty thousand kilometers away, as the crow flies.”

The new arrival was huge. A beaked bird-like head as large as Challenger’s stardrive section was thrust out proudly ahead from a pair of curved bows that looked almost large enough to be drawn by Orion the Hunter himself. Warp nacelles that looked as big as the Enterprise-E were at the ends of the bows, high above and far below that vicious, hungry beak.

Varaan came to at the foot of his command chair, which loomed over him as a reminder of his duty. He pulled himself up into the seat and looked around. His helmsman was wiping blood from a smashed nose that had been slammed into his flight console. The communications officer was unmoving on the floor, and everyone else on the bridge was hauling themselves to their feet or into their chairs. Nevertheless, Saldis’s data had been useful in preparing the ship for this.

On the angular main viewer, the alien vessel was shrinking into the distance on its way to join a group of others like itself.

“Report!”

“Thirty-six alien vessels are within sensor range. Two Federation vessels also. One Federation ship is derelict. No life signs, and sensors suggest it has been here for over a decade.”

“And the other?”

“Challenger.”

“Ah, the experimenters themselves, good. Tornan, give me a situation report on Challenger.”

“They have no warp power, no weapons, minimal shielding. They are all but crippled. Shall I target them?”

Varaan almost said yes, but caught himself. If they killed the Tal Shiar Chairman, he wanted to parade them on Romulus for a show trial. “Mark them as a secondary target. They’re not an immediate threat.”

“Sir.”

Varaan looked around his command deck, which was already back to normal operations. Saldis’s analysis of the available data on the trans-slipstream wakes had enabled Varaan’s engineers to prepare the ship to withstand the effects of running into one. They had shut down systems that would have been vulnerable to power surges, strengthened and added multiple redundant backups to the inertial dampening systems, shields, and the gravity grid.

As a result, they were already back to strength and able to punish the aliens for their attitude, and, hopefully, to bring Sela’s assassins to justice.

Varaan pointed to the ship on screen. “Target the alien vessel that carried us here, and lay in a pursuit course, best possible speed.”

“Our warp drive is offline. Full impulse is available.”

“Then full impulse it is,” Varaan said with an imperious wave of the hand. “Let’s waste no more time.” As the helmsman smoothly accelerated the Tomalak’s Fist, Varaan turned back to his first officer. “Weapons status, Tornan?”

“Primary disruptors are offline. Torpedoes are available.”

“Excellent. Arm them and prepare to engage the enemy. And hail Challenger. Tell them they are now prisoners of the Romulan Empire.”

44

Sharp yellow-green torpedoes spat across the void, as Tomalak’s Fist swept majestically in toward the most recently arrived alien vessel. The two ships were almost the same size, but the alien proved far more maneuverable. It turned neatly, and let the torpedoes sail harmlessly past.

For a moment Sela expected the alien on Challenger’s viewer to return fire, but it simply continued on its new course. The Romulan ship adjusted to follow suit.

“Kat,” La Forge shouted, “draw their fire.”

Qat’qa immediately set the controls to lift the ship out of orbit on impulse. Nothing happened. “Captain! Helm control is not responding!” Qat’qa thumped the console with her fist. “It has been re-routed.”

“Where to—?”

“Tactical is offline,” the ensign interrupted.

“Rerouted to the battle bridge,” Kat snarled. “By her!” As she spoke, two Romulans, armed with Starfleet issue phaser rifles, emerged from the turbolift, covering the Starfleet officers with the weapons. Sela smiled with genuine happiness. “I’m sorry, Captain La Forge, but I have priorities over yours.” She called down to the battle bridge. “Centurion, set an intercept course,” Sela ordered. “Put us between Tomalak’s Fist and the alien vessel.”

“Between?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Yes, Chairman.” The Challenger began to move, darting toward a gap between the Romulan and trans-slipstream vessels.

“All right,” La Forge said, “I didn’t expect that.”

“My priority is to get home, Captain, not allow an underling to blow the means of getting home into a million pieces.”

A torpedo skimmed past the Challenger, close enough to rattle the teeth of everyone on the bridge. “Tomalak’s Fist . . .” Sela mused to herself. “That’s Varaan’s ship. Hail them.”

La Forge nodded to the tactical ensign, who said, “You’re through.”

“Commander Varaan, this is Chairman Sela of the Tal Shiar, in command of the former Federation Starship Challenger.”

“The half-blood?” Varaan was genuinely surprised, a new experience, and one he tried to avoid.

“Could she have turned, Commander?” Tornan asked. “She is half-human.”

“Not her,” Varaan scoffed. “She might be half-human, but she’d no more turn to them than you’d take the side of a disease that ravages you.” He thought for a moment. “This is Varaan. Go ahead, Chairman.”

“Stand down your attack, Varaan.”

“The alien vessel attacked us first.”

“The alien vessel is the objective of a Tal Shiar operation. We must make an attempt to secure their technology as it is our only way home.”

“Understood. Varaan out.” He nodded to Tornan. “You heard the half—” He stopped himself.” You heard the chairman. Stand down weapons.”

“What the hell are you doing, Sela?” La Forge glared at her as she sat in the center seat.

“Believe it or not, Captain, I just saved all your lives.”

“I’ll choose not.”

She sighed. “Varaan will have believed you were holding me prisoner, or had killed me, until I spoke to him, and so he would have opened fire, and I think we both know that Challenger is in no state to engage a Romulan vessel of that size and power.” Geordi didn’t need to answer. “By placing myself in command of Challenger, I have saved it.”

“Thank you, then. I’m glad that—”

“Don’t be,” she snapped coldly. “Understand this, La Forge: I am not acting out of some idea of Federation-style nobility. I intend to go home, and if I can secure the trans-slipstream technology then that will be an excellent bonus. If I can make an alliance with these aliens for it, I will. If I have to steal it, I will. If I have to force it from them, I will.”

“And if you can’t, you’ll let Varaan destroy it.”

“I don’t believe it will come to that, do you?”

“Would you have put your warbird between Varaan’s ship and the aliens?”

“Of course not,” she replied blandly. “A Federation ship is something I’d be all right with sacrificing if something went wrong.” She hailed Varaan again. “Varaan, do you have transporter power?”

“Yes.”

“Beam me aboard.” She gave La Forge a little wave with her fingers as the Romulan transporter beam took her away.

Varaan was waiting in the transporter room when she materialized. “I hadn’t expected to see you again, Madam Chairman,” he said. “You were reported dead, the Stormcrow destroyed.”

“It was. One of those alien vessels collided with it.”

“And Challenger picked up survivors.” He paused. “You’re looking well.”

“So are you.” He was unsure whether she sounded pleased or displeased at that fact.

Varaan shrugged. “My orders were to find out what happened to you. Since I’ve now done so, I’m at the Tal Shiar’s disposal.”

“Good. I was worried you might try to play politics.”

“We’ve never seen eye-to-eye, Sela.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Your mother stole my father. How am I supposed to feel? Every time we see each other, I see that human in you.”

“You think that’s enough? I see the image of a traitor every time I look in the mirror. Unlike you, I can’t just turn and run away from the stink of humanity that’s on me. You think you hate them? You’re not infected by them. You can’t feel their taint on you, every waking moment.”

He preferred her when she spoke this way. It showed her loyalty to the Empire. “What are our plans, Madam Chairman?”

“Guinan on the Challenger thinks she may know how to contact the aliens. If she succeeds, we want their trans-slipstream technology. We also have a missing away team.”

“Do you want me to send more soldiers to Challenger and take her as a prize?”

Sela looked tempted for a moment. “No. It’s damaged beyond repair. I think we should bring the Stormcrow survivors over here. I’ll give La Forge his useless ship back, and let Guinan make her attempts at contact, on the proviso that I stay there and take part.”

“And you expect him to not throw you in his brig?”

Sela smiled. “As I say, we have a joint away team missing. And Starfleet has rules about visiting foreign dignitaries. La Forge knows the ramifications of my well-being.”

“He might just kill you anyway. Out here, who’d know the difference?”

“No, he can’t harm me. That’s a piece of programming I had buried in his head a long time ago. Standard psycho-surgical procedure.” The expression on her face chilled even Varaan to the bone.

45

It had been, La Forge reflected, probably the shortest capture of a Starfleet vessel in history. Ten minutes after Sela had dematerialized from Challenger’s bridge, the two Romulans had done likewise. Qat’qa had immediately run for the battle bridge, to check for damage there. She had quickly explained that she had found Sela’s radiogenic marker there, and that she had planned to set a trap for the Romulans, as Nog might have done.

Not knowing their code-word rendered her efforts moot.

Two minutes after she had gone, Sela re-materialized. Carolan had a phaser on her immediately, but she ignored it. “Captain La Forge, I apologize for, briefly, taking over your ship, to protect it.”

“Why have you come back? Don’t you have a nice working ship now?”

“I do, but I still have a mission as well, and it’s the same mission as yours. We both need the use—or the help—of these aliens if we’re to get home. Tomalak’s Fist has fully working warp drive, but as you said yourself it’s a two-hundred-year trip to the galactic barrier.”

“What is it you want?”

“To pool our resources. I’ve withdrawn my people from Challenger, but will continue to offer assistance. We do have a joint away team to recover as well,” she reminded him.

“And what is it you want in return?”

“Just to remain on your bridge, and take part in any communications that you and Guinan establish with the aliens.”

La Forge’s first instinct was to toss Sela in the brig, but he knew that first instincts and knee-jerk reactions were usually wrong. Years of Starfleet training and experience told him that working together was always for the best, and she did have a point about both the away team and the need for assistance in returning to their home galaxy. Besides, placing the head of a foreign government’s intelligence arm in custody could start a war.

“All right. But one sign of trouble, and you’re in the brig.”

“You can trust me,” Sela promised.

Leah sat at the ops console, trying not to look at Sela. She wasn’t certain that she could hold her tongue if she looked the Romulan torturer in the face. For that matter, she wasn’t sure she could hold her fists or feet in check either.

So she concentrated on doing everything she could to get a sensor reading on the aliens. Anything she could find that would help make contact might help them get home.

She was tempted to try massaging her temples to see if direct physical stimulation would get her head into gear, but she knew from long experience that it didn’t work that way. Her mind was a frustrating blank, and it shouldn’t be. She was a starship designer, an engine designer, and as such she should have some idea of how to read those damned things out there.

The alien ships were sensor-dark even when they moved, and they shouldn’t be. They left enough trails in subspace and slipstream space.

That’s it, she realized. Perhaps they radiated energy, or communicated, in subspace rather than through subspace as most technological cultures did.

Swiftly, Leah phased the active sensors to read energy signatures in subspace, and there they were. It was so simple, and yet it had taken her so long that she just wanted to scream at herself.

“Captain,” she said. “I think I’ve finally got some sensor readings on one of the alien ships.” She brought up a set of waveforms on screen, which were layered within each other in multiple nested sub-channels.

“I’ve never seen an engine signature like that before, have you?”

“Never. No engine signature, no EM output, nothing like that. She cursed the fact that Scotty, Reg, and Nog were all missing. One of them would surely have seen something like this much earlier.

“Can you patch it through to Tomalak’s Fist?” Sela asked.

“Do it,” La Forge ordered. “The more people look at this, the better chance of someone recognizing it.”

“Aye, sir.” Leah began sending copies of the waveforms. “I’ll also patch it through to as many screens on this ship as possible. Maybe Vol will recognize it.”

“Excellent.” La Forge returned to Guinan, and her tales of myth and legend. “What about making contact with them? Have you heard of that being done?”

“I know it’s been tried. Some stories say it works, some say it doesn’t.”

“We’ve been trying regular hailing frequencies with no luck. If they’re a spaceflight-capable race there must be something—”

“I don’t know, Geordi, they could just be too . . . alien. It happens sometimes. The clue’s in the name.”

“It’s at times like this that I wish Deanna was on board.”

“There are a couple of Betazoids in the crew. And Vulcans,” Carolan said.

“None of them are trained for the sort of contact we need, but if someone can talk to them and get them to help out, that’d be great,” La Forge said.

“I’ll see to it,” Carolan said, and left the bridge.

“What about radio on 21.1 hertz, or gravity waves?” Leah mused aloud.

“Sickbay to Captain La Forge.” Ogawa’s voice was urgent.

“What is it, Doctor?”

“These waveforms that are being patched through. Are they important?”

“They’re the only energy readings we can pick up from the alien ships. It’s some kind of drive signature neither Leah nor I have ever seen before.”

“That’s not a warp signature. Or any other kind of technological energy signature.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because I see this kind of reading every day. It’s a set of alpha, delta, and theta rhythms.”

“You mean like brain waves?”

“Exactly like brain waves.”

“Then those ships out there . . .” Leah could see the same frustrated regret in him that she felt in herself a few minutes ago. Geordi was realizing that he should have seen the truth long before now, and she wished she could just go and make that feeling leave him.

“Aren’t ships,” Ogawa confirmed. “They’re spaceborne life-forms. Can you come down to sickbay? I think I have an idea.”

Doctor Ogawa was standing by one of the few unoccupied biobeds. Helped by a tech, she was positioning a dome-shaped neuroscanner at the head end of the bed when La Forge, Sela, and Guinan came in. She patted the biobed. “Have a seat, Guinan. We’re just about ready for you.”

“You do know I feel perfectly fine, don’t you?”

“You look the picture of health to me,” Ogawa agreed.

“Then what’s with the brain scanner?” Guinan asked.

“You’re trying to communicate with the spaceborne aliens?”

“Yes,” said La Forge.

Ogawa patted the scanner. “The brain gives off electrical energy which we can monitor with this. We can also input electrical impulses into a brain. The receptor circuits transmit neuro-electrical energy into your visual cortex, and that cortex forms the images you see.”

“Okay, so how does this help us talk to these aliens?”

“If we can scale up the effect, we should be able to make them understand us.”

Sela was fascinated by the idea. “You mean directly access their cognitive centers? Perform psycho-surgery on them?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that, but . . .” Ogawa helped Guinan off with her broad hat as she sat on the biobed. “We can use this to calibrate our shields and the deflector array to mimic the neuro-electrical appearance and signals of the aliens.”

“They’ll think we’re one of them?” La Forge asked.

“Possibly. More importantly, with Guinan’s brain-waves as a control baseline while she establishes contact, we should have a translation matrix available very quickly. Then we can feed our—Guinan’s—responses back to the alien by way of the main deflector.” Ogawa blinked and looked from face to face. “Is that all right?”

“Alyssa, that’s genius! You’re in the wrong business.”

“Not really. The body’s just a bio-chemical machine in need of engineering. Or maybe I’m just on the right ship.”

“Let’s find out,” Guinan said from under the neuro-scanner. “You’re not going to be shooting neural energy into me, are you?”

“Only a little, directly into your auditory cortex. What they beam back onto our shields, if they reply at all, you’ll hear as words and can relay to us.” Alyssa handed Guinan a small device. “Press the button when you’re talking to the aliens, so the system knows to patch you through. Let it go when you talk to us. When there is enough data the communications system will cut in.”

“Okay,” Guinan said, sounding uncertain, if not actually outright suspicious. “Let’s talk to them. What do you want me to say?”

“How about hello,” La Forge suggested.

“Hello?”

The alien nearest to Challenger, and in a direct line with the deflector beam’s signal, spun on its axis without warning.

On the bridge Qat’qa and Leah didn’t like the look of it. “Captain,” Leah said into the communications system, “one of the aliens is approaching. I’m reading more activity in those brainwaves . . .”

“That means it’s responding,” Alyssa said. “Do you understand these signals, Guinan?”

“Sort of, I think. There’s a good reason why my people are called listeners. Every species explores its environment in a different way. Some use radio signals, or telescopes. Some dissect other species, or observe them. We listen, and so we learn about the universe around us.”

“What does the alien say?” Sela demanded.

La Forge didn’t know what he expected to hear from it. A hello, an order to leave, a welcome, an expression of surprise?

Guinan frowned before passing on the message. “You are not the Valken,” she said.

“The Valken?” Sela echoed. “What’s the Valken?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know whether it was a statement or a question. It was a toneless voice.”

“That’s probably the fault of the system,” Alyssa said apologetically. “I had Vol put it together far too quickly.”

“Either way they’ll expect a response,” Sela said.

La Forge agreed with that sentiment. “Since we’re not the Valken, I guess we should say so.”

“Aren’t we?” Guinan asked.

“What do you mean, ‘Aren’t we?’”

“If we don’t know what the Valken is or are, maybe we are it. Maybe it’s their word for humanoid. Maybe it’s their word for crew. Or for themselves. Who knows?”

Sela folded her arms, considering this. “She’s right, and there’s something else: We also don’t know whether whatever the Valken is is good or bad. Perhaps not being the Valken will provoke an attack.”

La Forge was exasperated by this. “Then we’d better hope that your friend Varaan has quick trigger reflexes. Tell them we’re not the Valken.”

“We are not the Valken,” Guinan said. Then, a moment later, “They say beware the Valken.”

“What are the Valken?” Geordi asked.

“Beware the Valken,” was the only reply.

“Can you ask them why they don’t go around our ships?” La Forge asked.

“Ships? What are ships?” This time the voice came through the comm system.

“The vessels like this one,” Guinan explained.

“You never spoke before.”

“Not for want of trying—don’t say that!” La Forge said. “Are you from Andromeda?”

“We are from every . . . pool.”

“Pool?”

“Pool of stars.”

“Galaxies,” Ogawa murmured. “They must visit a lot more galaxies than just ours.” That made sense to La Forge. The distances involved were almost unimaginable, but if they could travel five hundred million light-years in a matter of minutes, there must be millions of galaxies within their reach. “A truly universal life-form.”

“Do you know the harm you sometimes do?” La Forge asked.

“Harm?”

“Many of our people died when you brought us here.”

“We saw no people. Until you spoke.”

A suspicion grew at the back of Geordi’s mind. “We are a person, a life-form?”

“Evidently.”

“And the Romulan ship, which attacked you, what of that?”

“Inert debris.”

La Forge had thought as much. He looked up at Ogawa and Sela and felt comfortable knowing that Leah was listening in from the bridge. Hell, half the ship was probably listening in. “They don’t recognize us as life-forms. We’re like ants to them, and our ships no different than . . . asteroids.” It was clear that everyone in the room agreed. “We were debris, until we spoke?”

“Yes. But now we know you are alive.”

“The other piece of debris is also alive. It cannot speak, but we speak for it.”

“We understand.”

“Sometimes . . . when you travel into our galaxy, you bring debris along with you.”

“It is an effect of our wish to go. We are, of course, careful to not disturb life where we find it.”

“But you have been disturbing life,” La Forge said urgently. “Much of the debris you pick up on the way through our . . . pool, is life, not debris.”

“We . . . mean no harm. We apologize.”

“You said you don’t disturb life when you find it. How do you avoid disturbing it?”

“We move more carefully in our wishes.” That was the answer La Forge was hoping for.

“We would ask, on behalf of our pool . . . Could you move more carefully when you visit it? There is much life there that you may mistake for debris.”

“Of course. We will be more careful.”

“And that was it?” Leah asked, when they returned to the bridge. “We asked them nicely to be more careful, and they agreed?”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Guinan responded. “They seem to be a very nice people. They didn’t know they were doing any harm.”

Sela was fuming, pacing around the bridge. “This doesn’t help our mission. We need that trans-slipstream drive.”

“Are you still thinking of forcing it out of them?” La Forge asked.

“Why not? Now that we know how to talk to them, we can offer an alliance.”

“Which they’ll ignore, if they understand the idea at all,” Guinan said.

“This isn’t the first time the Romulans have tried to snatch a living ship, or a living technology,” La Forge pointed out.

Sela looked like she was trying hard to remember. “You’re referring to the entity called Gomtuu?”

“The Tin Man, yes.”

“This species’ technology is far beyond that.”

La Forge couldn’t remain reasonable with Sela any longer. He had wanted to give in to his feelings of anger toward her since she first beamed on board, and now was the time. “They have no technology! Don’t you get that yet? They’re not like the Tin Man; that had mechanisms, warp drives, but these don’t. It’s not technology, it’s a natural ability. I always knew that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and I’m sure they have a similar saying on Romulus.”

“Of course.”

“But what we’re seeing here is . . . the opposite,” said La Forge.

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology?”

“Well, that’s one way of putting it. I think a more precise way of putting it would be that these . . . ships, beings, whatever they are, have a sufficiently advanced nature, maybe a sufficiently advanced biology, to be indistinguishable from technology. Or maybe it’s the word technology that’s wrong. The quotation should say that any sufficiently advanced scientific property or method is indistinguishable from magic.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Sela said frostily.

“All right, not magic, because it’s still science, but it’s the natural sciences. Exobiology. We use technology to do what we can’t do naturally, but if we could . . . For some species, I guess maybe we should say that there are some sufficiently evolved abilities that can be indistinguishable from magic.”

“Then perhaps we should look at harnessing the ability.”

La Forge laughed out loud. “Harness the ability? Do you think they can teach you how to do this?”

“They don’t have to. The Gomtuu entity had crew spaces; perhaps these can be modified to do so.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Humans harnessed other life-forms on Earth, to provide transport. I think they’re called ‘horses.’”

“The difference is that those . . . whatever they are, are so far beyond humans or Romulans, or damn near anybody else as we are beyond . . . ants. Let me put it another way: yes, humans ride horses, and trained dogs to do jobs, but trying to get those things to be your mount would be like trying to train an Organian to be your flashlight. And I don’t think you’d get very far.”

46

Scotty walked out into the clear space in front of the Hera’s interior, away from, well, anyone who might have a chance of reading him either by Vulcan telepathy, logical deduction, or just being too close to the right interpretation of his expression.

The Hera cityscape was, as he suspected, the safest region on the planet. The living planet could create antibodies anywhere, except on the scab over the wound it had sustained.

He wanted to find a place where he could walk and give in a little to both the good and the bad about where he was and how he felt. Being on a planet was always a nice change of pace, but he missed the sounds of a starship, and the vibrations in the wall panels and deck plates. You didn’t get those reassuring sensory stimuli on a planet, except maybe if you could hear the surf at the coast, or the rain drumming on the roof.

The moss forests on the hills that Scotty could see reminded him of the Highlands, where the areas that hadn’t been re-forested over the years still rose up out of the earth. He was amused by the irony that he was involved in building starships these days, and the original forests in the Scottish Highlands had largely been cleared to build the ships of the ancient Royal Navy.

“Mister Scott! Mister Scott!” Barclay hurried across to Scotty, carrying a heap of tricorder parts and circuitry that the Hera’s survivors had found useful. “I’ve done it! At least, I think I’ve done it!”

“If you don’t calm down you’ll end up doin’ it again,” Scotty warned. He sighed when he saw Barclay’s blank look. “All right, Mister Barclay, what is it ye think ye’ve done?”

“I’ve figured out a way to communicate with the Challenger.” Scotty was immediately interested.

“That’s great!”

“You see I got to thinking about the spatial fold, and the mass readings we’re getting from it.”

Scotty understood immediately. “There must be some level of background radiation seepage through the fold. And it has to work in both directions, because we get an anomalous mass reading from this side. So if we can send narrow-focus gravimetric—”

“—pulses in an orbital pattern through the spatial fold, we can talk to Challenger,” Barclay finished excitedly.

“If they know to look for a signal in that form,” Scotty said, dour caution taking over.

“I’ve thought of that. They’ll be constantly monitoring the gravitation from the Hera, so I’ve encoded a signal that the astrometrics computer will flag with an alert to the bridge.”

“In that case, Reg, it’s time to get back to our own corner of the universe.”

“It is? I mean, it is, but . . . How is it even possible?”

“I’ve been thinking about how to reunite this bubble of the universe with our bubble of the universe.”

“But aren’t they the same universe? I mean, if we knew where this planet was in relation to Challenger, and imagining that Challenger could travel to other galaxies as easily as from Earth to Vulcan, in theory Challenger could fly from where she is now to here, without intersecting the fold.”

Scotty nodded approvingly, like a teacher giving a good grade. “That’s right.”

“Then there’s no need to re-unite the universe with itself, surely?”

“Ah, but there is.”

“Maybe if we could establish a wormhole . . .”

“By artificial means? With quartz and moss to work with?” Scotty shook his head. “I may be a miracle worker, but I think you’ll find that’s a wee bit beyond even my level.” He started walking back to the Hera. “Let’s go talk to the others.”

Scotty had everyone gather in a big circle around him, while he stood on the viewport that opened onto intergalactic space, where the alien vessels were now a shoal around the Challenger.

“Mister Barclay, Miss Voktra, Commander Savar. The first thing we’re going to need is a way to contact the Challenger.”

Savar raised both eyebrows this time. “To what purpose, if I may ask?”

“To the purpose of getting you poor buggers off this planet, and getting the universe back to the shape it’s supposed to be in. I have an idea that ought to work just fine, but we’ll need the Challenger, and that means we’ll need to be able to tell her crew what it is that we need them to do.”

“And what is it you’re not telling us?” Barclay asked slowly.

“What do you mean?”

Barclay beckoned Scotty over and whispered into his ear, “I can see it in your face, sir. I’m afraid I could see it when you told us you were recovering from your injuries, and that’s something I won’t mention to the others, by the way.” Barclay hesitated, perhaps a little embarrassed. “But I can see that worried look on you now too. There’s something you don’t want us to know, or . . .” Perhaps it was his long experience with counselors that gave him the insight, or perhaps it was being in the vicinity of so many Vulcans exercising their mental disciplines, but Barclay suddenly knew that Scotty wasn’t trying to hide something from them. “Or that you don’t want to think about yourself.”

Scotty’s sad eyes locked with Reg’s eyes, and bored deep into his soul. “Ye’re a lot smarter than you usually get credit for, especially from yourself.” He nodded slowly. “There’s something in what you say. On both counts.”

Scotty gave Reg the most reassuring smile he could muster and turned back to the group. “There’s something that we haven’t thought about yet, with the universe intersecting with itself here. How can the larger part that’s trapped inside the smaller part stay that way? Wouldn’t the smaller part rupture?” He had their attention now. “Sooner or later it has to. So far I’m thinking that each part of the universe, when scanned from the other side, is compressed more densely into a smaller space. That’s why they’re both reading as those incredible masses, because the sensors are trying to cope with the amount of universe on the other side of the manifold.”

He made quick diagrams with his hands. “Eventually the smaller bubble of the universe won’t be able to hold the rest of it. The main part of the universe won’t be able to be compressed any further, and the smaller part will be ruptured.” The movement of his hands to illustrate this was all too simple and brutal, his hands coming apart, fingers splayed.

“That sounds apocalyptic,” Savar said.

“Aye, and it gets worse. There’s no way to tell which half is which.”

“What?”

“All we can know with the level of technology we’ve achieved is that a sizable percentage of the universe will be torn apart by the impact of the rest of it. It could be this piece of it right here, or it could be the half we came from.”

Everyone remained silent. Scotty continued, “I do have a scheme that I’m pretty bloody sure will set things to rights, but it will require the . . . well, the sacrifice of the Challenger. And without another ship to replace her, that leaves us—”

“Up a certain minor tributary without an appropriate implement,” Savar said.

“Not exactly the way I would phrase it, but close enough.”

La Forge was asleep when Vol woke him up with a call. “Guv! I mean Captain!”

“Vol?”

“I’ve received a signal from the away team, skip. They’re okay. Well, apart from one of the Romulans. Anyway, they also have forty-seven survivors of the Hera!”

Geordi shot bolt upright. “Is my mother—?”

“Sorry sir, but no.”

“All right. Call the senior staff to the bridge.”

He and Leah dressed quickly, and were on the bridge in two minutes.

“We have contact with the away team,” Carolan said as she rose from the center seat. “Audio only.”

“Put them on.”

“Captain La Forge!” A cheery Scottish brogue called out.

“Scotty! What happened to you?”

“That’s a long story, Geordi. And it’ll have to wait, because I’ve got a job for you, Leah, and Vol, and it’s more important than you can imagine.” He explained about the situation with the two bubble sections of the universe. “We need to restore the Klein bottle of two bubble universe Möbius strips back into being one universal Möbius strip.”

“You want to re-engineer the universe itself?”

“What we need to do to put things right is to remove the intersection. We have to collapse the toroidal continuum fold.”

La Forge could see the flaw immediately. “The first problem is going to be actually accessing the fold. Whichever side we’re on, the fold is on the other side. Which means we need something that can contain both sides of the fold at the same time . . . Oh no. You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”

La Forge could damn well hear Scotty’s roguish grin. “I’d like to think I am.”

“The Challenger’s warp field.”

“We extend the shields around and through the Hera to their maximum extent, and then generate a static warp shell just within the inner limits of the shield.”

“But if the other side of the fold is on a planetary surface—”

“If we put enough power into the shield extension it’ll go up to a hundred kilometers above the surface.”

“A hundred kilometers is more than enough of a corridor to fly a ship through.”

“A rescue party, d’ye mean? I doubt Challenger herself could stand the strain, but if there’s another ship available . . .”

“Some of Sela’s friends have arrived.”

“More Romulans?”

“Yes. For the moment, they seem to be willing to help.”

“Maybe your friend Sela thinks she owes us one. Which doesn’t sound very Romulan to me, but I’ll take all the help we can get.”

“Well, there are Romulans in the away team. At the very least they would want to rescue them.”

La Forge stood outside the door to the quarters that he hoped were still occupied by Sela. She said she would remain on board for any future conversations that Guinan might have with the aliens. It had occurred to Qat’qa that Sela might try to steal the modified neural scanner, so she had armed guards outside sickbay.

He kept pressing the button for the chime until, after several minutes, Sela opened it. There were two uniformed Romulan guards inside as well. La Forge eyed them but said nothing. The chairman of the Tal Shiar was a position that demanded loyal guards.

“This is an unexpected pleasure, Captain. Do come in.”

“There’s . . .” He hesitated. If there was anyone he would be less keen to ask this of, La Forge had no idea who it could be. “I know we have some issues . . .”

“You have.”

“Yes, dammit, I have! Kidnapping, brainwashing . . . you having that face—”

“This face.”

“That face belongs on another person. A good Starfleet officer. A friend.”

“I am a good officer, Captain,” she said with surprising mildness.

La Forge took a deep breath to steady himself. “I have a responsibility to my crew, even to the members of your crew on the ship or away team.”

“I understand, Captain. Believe me, I was dismayed that a Federation ship answered our distress call. But I am still grateful that you came.”

“I’d like to ask for Challenger’s crew to be evacuated to Tomalak’s Fist.”

“Is that all?” She seemed amused.

“No, I lost my mother too. And, maybe, if I’d been quicker to realize—to find out what had happened, I’d have been able to look for the right things. If I’d done that, maybe we’d have found the Hera in time. If I’d done that, maybe she’d still be alive.”

“Maybe. But who can say?”

“What I’m saying is . . . I can’t pretend to know how you feel about what you did as a child. I can’t pretend to know how much stronger a Romulan’s emotions are. But I do know that somewhere, on some level, we both wonder what might have been.”

“I didn’t lose my mother, as you put it,” Sela replied. “I killed her, by scre—by alerting the guards when she tried to take me from my father.”

“You didn’t kill your mother by yelling out when you thought you were going to lose your father,” said La Forge. “He maybe killed her, because he had to. In the end, politics killed her. Someday they’ll kill you.”

“And you. You’re telling me you killed your mother by not finding a clue in time? That’s guilt.”

“Yes it is. It’s guilt because I miss her.”

“I don’t miss my mother. She was human, she was Starfleet—”

“If you don’t miss her, then why do you feel guilty about her being gone?”

“I don’t.”

“Then what makes you think you were responsible?”

Sela closed her eyes for a moment. “Let’s go talk to Varaan.”

“We have a plan to retrieve the survivors of the U.S.S. Hera, and also recover the away team, made up of a mix of Starfleet personnel and Romulan personnel.”

Varaan gave La Forge a thin half-smile, but no more than that. “I was under the impression that the away team was now in a remote part of the universe. It all sounded rather final. Unless you’re simply engaging in a morale-boosting exercise.”

Sela turned from where she was looking out of a viewport at the alien vessels back to the comm. “I hate to admit such a thing, Varaan, but I—and the Tal Shiar—will vouch for La Forge having the ability to do the things he says he intends to do. And Captain Scott is . . .”

“Oh, the Miracle Worker. I had no idea he was still in the Starfleet.”

La Forge stepped into the comm pickup. “We’ve already been able to discuss it over a communications link and we both agree it’s our best hope.”

“Hope isn’t a strategy I can use. If you have something practical to say, go ahead, but I don’t need the Federation propaganda speech.”

“I need you to bring Tomalak’s Fist closer to Challenger and Hera. We’ll extend our shields around your ship and through the Hera, and then create a static warp shell within the extension. That way we’ll have a single field on both sides of the spatial fold, and it’ll expand into that space. We’ll then drop shields, but keep the static warp shell in the same configuration. That’ll mean you can fly through the fold and into orbit somewhere between around seventy and a hundred kilometers above the surface.”

“That’s treetop-skimming in a ship the size of ours.”

“If your helmsman isn’t sure about it, I’m perfectly willing to lend you mine.”

Varaan grunted. “Once I’m through, what then?”

“You should have no problem beaming up the survivors from the surface. You should then be able to fly back through that hundred-kilometer fold, to where we are now. How much capacity does Tomalak’s Fist have?”

“It was designed for long-range scouting missions, but her interior space is larger than that of Challenger. What is your crew complement? I understand the typical Galaxy-class complement is around fourteen hundred.”

“We have six hundred and five people right now.”

“And the Hera’s survivors?”

“Forty-seven.”

“We have the room.”

Three hours later Geordi and Leah were walking in the half-gravity through a near-empty ship. Carolan had supervised the transport of the crew to Tomalak’s Fist. The energy budget was less of a problem without the need to move the ship or support the crew.

Qat’qa had put the ship firmly in the required position, and engaged automated station-keeping systems before evacuating the ship. Doctor Ogawa and Guinan had taken the neural scanner and makeshift communications setup with them, to where a Romulan named Saldis was installing it on their ship.

Only Vol was left, down in engineering, setting up the static warp shell.

“Originally I didn’t want to come aboard,” Geordi reflected, “and now I’m going to miss her.”

“Me too. I built her, and now I’m going to kill her.”

“You’re not going to kill her. Not personally. You’re going to see her off.”

“Yes. The Galaxy-class was designed to last for a hundred years, you know.”

“I know.”

“She’s had such a short life.”

“We all do,” Geordi said softly.

“Who gets to extend the shields?”

“I do.”

She stopped, and looked at him closely. “Don’t get any funny ideas about going down with the ship.”

“Not a chance.”

She kissed him, hoping it wasn’t going to be the last time. “I’ll see you on the Romulan ship.”

La Forge stood alone at the tactical console, one of the few systems still running. This would be the second Galaxy-class ship he had lost.

On the main viewer, Tomalak’s Fist loomed large, the raptor-like head of the command section appearing to peer into the Challenger through the viewscreen.

“Vol,” he said, “are you ready?”

“Hot to trot, Guv.”

“Varaan?”

“When you give the word, Captain La Forge.”

Geordi took a deep breath, activated the shields at maximum power, and extended them around the Romulan ship. He further extended them forward, stabbing invisibly through the hull of the Hera. “Shields extended.”

“I read you.”

“Vol, initiate static warp shell.”

“Right you are.”

Almost immediately, there was a flicker around the ships, and the Hera began to melt, bleeding forward like a badly copied vid image. The Hera’s hull smeared around the edges as it was enveloped by the shields and static warp shell like oil. It also faded, and Geordi could see stars through it, and, dead ahead, a Luna-sized planet, inflating like a balloon.

“Transport now, Varaan.”

The Challenger’s bridge vanished from around Geordi, and he felt distraught knowing that he would never see her again.

As Vol and Geordi materialized in one of the transporter rooms aboard Tomalak’s Fist, the ship began moving forward, into thin layers of stars between the void and the planet’s surface.

Slowly at first, but quickly accelerating to a majestic swoop, the great green raptor smoothly dodged the planet’s surface, and then rose once again into star-filled skies.

Everyone on the planet’s surface hit the dirt as the city-like structure made from the Hera’s interior began to bleed into the sky. Pieces of debris stretched both up into the heavens and down into the depths as the last remnants of the Hera vanished into the storm.

A few seconds later, something gigantic and green accelerated overhead and upward with a painful subsonic rumble.

Scotty’s combadge chirped. “This is Commander Varaan of Tomalak’s Fist. Do you have a Mister Scott I could speak to?”

Scotty was half amazed that the plan had actually worked. “Scott here, Commander Varaan.”

“I am orbiting the planet, and should be back in transporter range of your group within three minutes.”

Even the Vulcans among the group looked as if they couldn’t believe their ears. The Caitian, Lieutenant M’Rsya, let out a long screech of joy.

Three minutes later, true to Varaan’s word, Captain Geordi La Forge, Guinan, Doctor Leah Brahms, and Chairman Sela materialized on the dust bowl plain where the Hera had so recently been.

La Forge was enjoying catching up with Scotty and Nog again, and hearing about their discoveries on the planet. “Wait a minute. If this planet is a life-form . . .”

“It is, lad. Trust me on this.”

“I’m not disagreeing, I’m just thinking. All those beings, the living creatures that have been creating the trans-slipstream wakes by thinking themselves across the galaxy . . . Why do they congregate here instead of just navigating by it?”

“You mean on the other side of the fold?”

“Exactly. Where the planet should be. Or maybe that spot should be here. Either way, they have a connection to this world.”

“It may be their homeworld, I suppose, or just their wee but an’ ben.”

“It may just be that, but if this whole planet is one huge life-form, maybe they’ve got a personal biological connection to it.”

“Are ye suggesting it’s their mother?”

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” La Forge said forcefully “Why not? There’s obviously a connection between them, and it’s not a hostile one.”

“There’s no evidence for it.”

“There’s no evidence against it either. If we could get a good sensor reading of one of them as well as the planet, and compare them . . .”

“Maybe we could talk to it.”

“To the planet?”

“I don’t know that it’s capable of communicating in the way that the ship-creatures are, but why not? There’d be no harm in trying, would there?”

Savar interrupted. “If communication with the planet were possible, we would have sensed it, in our minds.”

“And there’s been no sign of that?”

“None,” Savar said. “Your hypothesis about the relationship of the planet to the spaceborne creatures you describe is logical, but merely demonstrates that we don’t have enough data to form a concrete theory. It’s just as likely that this planet, to them, is a source of nourishment, perhaps like the milk cow of Earth. They share a connection, but it is not necessarily familial.”

La Forge, Silva, Captain. The words were burned into Geordi’s brain and heart as permanently as onto the duranium plate. “How did she die?” Savar didn’t answer for a moment, and Geordi got the feeling that maybe he was reluctant to upset his rescuer with an unpleasant tale. “It’s okay, Commander. I . . . I made my peace with her being gone a long time ago.”

“Captain La Forge was killed in a landslide, approximately fourteen months after our arrival on this planet.”

“A landslide?” Geordi had never imagined that. He wasn’t sure whether it sounded like a good death or a bad one. Right now, he wasn’t sure whether there was a difference. “Was it . . . Did she suffer?”

“I do not believe so,” Savar said carefully. La Forge was well aware that Vulcans praised truth quite highly, and couldn’t help wondering whether Savar’s avoidance of a simple yes or no was related to that. The Vulcan seemed to see the uncertainty in his eyes, and continued. “She was missing overnight, and we found her dead amidst the landslide the next day. There is no way to be certain how instantaneous her death was. However, the slide was not far from our camp. I believe that, had she been mortally injured and in pain for any length of time, we would . . .”

“Have heard her screaming.”

“We would have known,” Savar finished softly, with a slight nod.

La Forge nodded. Leah squeezed his hand, while Guinan just knelt and laid a flower on the grave. Geordi had no idea where she had got it, but it was a peace lily, his mother’s favorite.

Sela looked at it. “My mother has no grave,” she said quietly. “After the execution, the body was disintegrated.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” La Forge said.

“What would I do with a grave anyway?”

“Visit it,” Guinan suggested. “Talk to her.”

“She’s been gone a long time.”

“Sela,” Guinan said quietly and seriously. “Everything exists, just as long as the last person who remembers it.” She squeezed Sela’s hand now. “You’re living proof of that.”

There was a faint rumbling from belowground, and Savar looked around like a startled rabbit. “The planetary entity is reacting to us. We must go. Now.”

Geordi tapped his combadge. “This is La Forge. Five to beam up.”

47

“Welcome aboard Tomalak’s Fist, our newest long-range exploration vessel,” Chairman Sela said to Savar as they stepped off the wide rectangular transporter platform.

La Forge almost laughed at her choice of terminology. “Exploration, huh?”

“Show me a spacefaring race that doesn’t have either a desire or a need to find new resources, living space, or scientific discoveries. Anyone who doesn’t look for something would never be out in space. They could stay at home and sit and talk over their old achievements. And never make new ones.”

“There’s another problem that none of you have addressed as yet,” Varaan said, quietly but firmly as he stepped around from behind the transporter console. “Even assuming we succeed in removing this intersection, or spatial fold, and evacuate everyone safely to the position where you first discovered the Hera . . . it’s a very long journey back to the galaxy, and when we get there we’ll just run face-first into the Barrier.”

La Forge paused. “Actually, Chairman Sela and I have discussed the issue of travel time back to the galaxy . . .”

“What did you decide?”

“That we agree to differ.”

“I think I’d have been shocked otherwise.” Varaan smiled.

“The galactic barrier has been breached before. It’s purely an engineering problem.”

“We shall have two hundred years before we reach it. I’m sure that’s more than enough time to develop a solution.” Varaan sighed.

Varaan held Sela back for a moment when everyone else had left the transporter room. “There’s another issue in question,” Varaan said lightly. “The Federation . . . witnesses.”

“It wouldn’t have been my choice for them to see this vessel.”

“And it certainly wouldn’t have been mine.”

“We need them. They will have to be on the bridge. Is your cloak damaged?”

“Not any more. It was, when we arrived.”

“I’ll take it under consideration.”

“As Madam Chairman, or as Sela?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

On the green and beige command deck, Varaan moved to stand between the command chair and the tactical consoles that were under the main viewer, with his hands behind his back like some ancient seafarer braving the wind and water on the prow of his ship. Sela, meanwhile, was in the command chair, leaning forward tensely.

“Three vessels are approaching,” The Romulan tactical officer reported.

Varaan raised an eyebrow. “Where did they come from? Were they cloaked?”

“They must have been . . .”

“A fourth vessel is—”

“Is what? Decloaking?”

“I think . . . forming. Assembling, maybe,” Leah offered.

“More antibodies,” Scotty said grimly.

“Antibodies?”

“When a body is attacked, it forms antibodies from cells. In this case it’s forming defensive craft from the wreckage of the Hera now orbiting the planetoid,” Savar explained.

Sela’s face was a calculating mask. “How many could it form?”

“There’s no way to tell without extensive study, and I doubt they’ll give us the time,” Scotty said.

“Do you have any good news?” Varaan asked.

“It doesn’t look like they’re under conscious intelligent control,” the tactical officer said.

“Captain La Forge,” Ogawa called urgently from the Romulan sickbay, “it makes sense for them not to be consciously controlled. They’re antibodies, which means they’ll be acting independently on an instinctive level.”

“That’s the good news?” asked Sela.

“It is if you’re worried about whether they’ll be piloted by good tacticians.”

Varaan had been listening closely. “So what will they do, instinctively?”

“Home in on this ship and the Challenger, and try to destroy them by brute force. They’ll just try to lock on and give us everything they’ve got.”

“What’s the bad news?” Scotty asked.

“There’s a lot of debris orbiting the planetoid, and all of it could be used to form new antibodies. Any that we break down will rejoin the pool of available material and can be reformed, given time.”

“You mean it has infinite resources for these things?” Sela asked

“Not infinite. Nothing short of a Q could have infinite resources. But a planet has a lot more energy stored up in it than we do. If we don’t find an escape route, we will run out of energy before they do.”

“Then we’re dead.” Varaan said simply.

“Yes.”

“I’m not reading any weapons signatures,” Tornan said, his thick brow furrowing. “Whatever they are, they’re coming closer.”

“If they have no weapons, they may not be hostile,” Savar said.

Nog wasn’t buying that. “Or they may be weapons themselves. They could still ram us.”

“Suicide vessels? I’m not reading any life-forms aboard either. They’re purely mechanical,” Saldis said.

“Drone vessels, then.”

“I doubt that’s the right word, somehow . . .” Barclay commented.

“One of the vessels is in visual range.”

“Let’s see it,” Sela ordered.

The nearest approaching vessel looked like a large gyroscope set within a thick metallic framework. Pieces of rock were suspended within incomprehensible conglomerations of piping and tubing.

As they watched, the chromed silver circles of the gyroscope-like arrangement at the heart of the vessel began to rotate and spin. They moved faster and faster, and, within a few seconds, they were just a translucent blur.

And that was when it released the first bolt of blazing golden fire.

Saldis couldn’t believe his eyes. “They’re converting the rock into high-energy plasma bolts!”

Qat’qa was impressed. “It makes for a pretty good improvised weapon.”

“Too good! If they can wear down our shields, their plasma bolts will go clean through the ship from one side to the other!” Saldis exclaimed.

Varaan seemed unperturbed. “Then let’s make sure we keep the shields up.”

La Forge said, “Vol, Reg, help out in any way you can.”

Varaan remained calm. “Activate the cloak—”

“Don’t waste the energy,” La Forge said quickly. “You could use the extra power to shields and weapons.”

“You don’t think invisibility is worth more than that in terms of a tactical advantage?”

“Those ships out there, whatever they really are, are tapped into our minds.”

Varaan understood immediately. “They don’t need to see the ship to know where we are.”

Sela snapped, “Divert cloak power to shields.” She rose from Varaan’s seat. “We’d have to decloak to fire anyway, so why waste the time? Varaan, how good is your helmsman?”

“My best pilot is in surgery. The others are competent.”

The suggestion leapt out of La Forge’s mouth before he could stop himself. “Qat’qa can take over.” Varaan and Sela looked offended.

The moment passed. “Do it,” Sela said with a curt nod.

Varaan was amazed. “Are you out of your mind?”

“No more than you are.” Sela’s voice was cold. “Commander,” she added pointedly.

Varaan blanched. “My apologies, Madam Chairman. I spoke out of turn, but I’m not turning control of a new ship of the line to a Klingon.”

“There have been alliances with Klingons before. We used to use their ships, even before we sponsored the Duras family.”

Varaan was moderately amused by her use of the word “we” in regard to the technology exchange of more than a hundred years earlier. Varaan had been only a child back then, and barely remembered it. He vaguely remembered his father taking him on board one of the stormbirds once, but he hadn’t retained any impression of the ship. Like so much the Klingons made, it was a tool, built for rough handling not to be memorable.

“Being the power behind their throne, or even using their materials for our own use, is one thing. Giving a Klingon control of this ship is another. And she is working for the Federation crew.”

“Much as I hate to admit it, we did cooperate with the Federation against the Dominion—” Sela reminded him.

“We sent ships to aid theirs, and we had a few people placed on Federation vessels. Again, that’s one thing. Having Federation people rooting through our systems, on our ships . . . that’s another matter. Frankly, I’m surprised you’re defending the idea.”

“Not as surprised as I am, Commander. Believe me, there can be few in the fleet who despise Starfleet as much as I do.” Sela held Varaan’s gaze. “It’s an irony, isn’t it, Commander?”

“I’ve seen a lot of ironies in my life. Which did you have in mind?”

“You were just thinking about my . . . relationship, with Starfleet.”

“Your mother was Starfleet,” Varaan said.

“An organization only, not a species. They don’t call me half-blood because my mother was a Starfleet lieutenant. They call me half-blood because she was human.”

“It must rankle.”

“Being a half-blood?” She knew that wasn’t what he meant, and that he meant being called the name. “Yes. Not a moment goes by that I don’t feel the taint of my mother’s blood. In every breath I take, in the sound of my own voice . . .”

“In the name they call you?”

She laughed. “Half-blood. Like the glass is half full. But the glass is full, Varaan. Full.” He thought, then nodded. “Of Sela’s blood. Her own.”

La Forge sidled closer to Guinan, at the back of the command deck. “Guinan . . . These antibody ships, could they be the . . . what was it? The Valken?”

Guinan thought for a moment. “They could be. But I don’t think so.”

“Instinct?”

“More or less. I got the impression from the context of what they were saying that Valken was synonymous with . . . finality. Death.”

“You mean something inimical, fatal.”

“I mean something culturally representative of a final end. As far as I can tell, the Valken is, or are, their Grim Reaper. The more I think about the context of what they were saying, the clearer it is that they weren’t talking about a being or a ship or a species.”

“You mean it was more of a cultural term for them?”

“Exactly. The Valken wasn’t some creature or alien or person. The Valken is . . . the other side.”

“You mean an afterlife? Shakespeare’s undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns?”

“Well, in a negative view, yes.”

“Hell.”

“Their interpretation of it. Hell, or just oblivion.”

Tomalak’s Fist reverberated under a shower of plasma bolts. “Shields down to twenty percent! Another half dozen hits and we’ll start taking hull damage.”

“Qat’qa, get this thing moving!” La Forge ordered. “Worf keeps telling me at his mok’bara sessions that the best block is to not be there when the strike arrives.”

“Excellent advice, sir,” Qat’qa shouted back. “But this piece of Romulan degH handles like a targ that’s swallowed an anvil.” Despite her words, and the situation, her tone sounded terrifyingly cheerful.

“Target the planetoid,” Sela ordered. “Scan for any energy sources.”

“What good will targeting the planet do?” La Forge asked

“It’s a life-form, isn’t it?”

“So?”

“If it lives, it can die,” Sela stated.

“How?”

“It must have central organs of some kind. Something analogous to a heart or lungs or a brain.”

Savar’s nostrils flared slightly as he looked at Sela. “We have determined that the life-form is, in essence, a brain only. A conglomeration of neurons, axons, and dendrites. It has no heart or lungs as we would understand the term. It does not need them.”

“Then it must have ganglia, or some kind of central nerve plexus.”

“Almost certainly, but they will be deep within the planet.”

“Savar has a point, Sela,” La Forge said. “The planetary crust and mantle are hundreds of miles thick. Your disruptors just don’t have the power to cut that deeply into it.”

“We must do something,” she snarled.

The Romulan sickbay was more spacious, and almost as advanced as that of the Challenger. Doctor Ogawa was curious about a lot of the gleaming black and silver equipment, but was polite enough not to interfere with it. All she was really interested in was checking up on the wounded and especially Scotty. She had attached another neurogenic patch to the back of his hand and the Romulan doctor had allowed her to give him a much belated cellular regenerator treatment.

Ogawa didn’t think it had worked, and she could see, in his eyes, that he knew.

Guinan came in, and sat beside Scotty. “Ribs?” Alyssa asked.

“Yes.”

“How are things going on the bridge?”

“Sela wants to target the living planet. Geordi doesn’t think it’ll work.”

“And even if they did, it wouldn’t be a good idea.” Ogawa immediately called the bridge to say so.

Chairman Sela didn’t sound happy to be interrupted. “Is that your considered medical opinion, Doctor Ogawa? I thought you were a physician, not a geologist.”

“I’m just trying to tell you to think about what happens when a body is attacked.”

“It produces antibodies, which are the problem we’re trying to deal with.”

“And if that antibody production isn’t working, and the body is further attacked, it will produce even more antibodies. A bombardment of the surface won’t stop them. At best it would make no difference, because hundreds of miles of rock would prevent it from even noticing that it was being attacked, and if it did notice, we’d be a lot worse off.”

On the bridge, Qat’qa ignored the debate, and concentrated on throwing the ship around in ways its designers had never envisioned in their worst nightmares.

“Still,” La Forge said slowly, “mapping its activity, and looking for nerve clusters and vulnerable points isn’t entirely a bad idea. If nothing else, we might be able to correlate which areas are being used with the movements of the antibody vessels, and that might allow us to predict their arrival and their tactics.”

“Sensible,” Varaan agreed, nodding to his science officer.

Scotty sat quietly, waiting for Alyssa to return her attention to him. “Alyssa.”

“Scotty, I’d like to try the cellular therapy again—”

He held up one hand, and locked his sad eyes with hers. “Tell me honestly,” he said softly, so no one else could hear. “The treatment isn’t going to work again, is it?”

She stuttered slightly. “The . . . Anything’s poss—”

“Honestly. Please.”

Her eyes dipped toward the floor and the fringe of her hair trembled slightly. It barely qualified as a movement at all, but it was enough for Scotty. “You missed too many,” she whispered. “And the conditions on the planet—the thin air, the heat—have only exacerbated the problem.”

Scotty tried to ignore the tremble he felt in his ribs, and the moistness in his eyes. It wouldn’t do, and he wasn’t about to give the Romulans the satisfaction either. “Can you give me something that’ll hold me together for a couple of hours?”

Ogawa fetched a hypo in silence, and administered it. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to talk to Geordi.” He managed a faint smile. “Goodbye lass, and thank you for bein’ the finest starship CMO of your generation. And the finest nurse.” He stood. “Thank Guinan for me too when she wakes.”

“You can thank her—”

Now a tear rolled down his cheek. “No, I can’t.” And then he walked out of the Romulan sickbay.

Tomalak’s Fist hurtled around the planet like a mad bull in a china shop, Qat’qa sending it weaving and spinning, ducking between the antibody craft, while Nog and Tornan competed to let fly the flashiest shots.

Plasma bolts and disruptor shots sliced through the atmosphere to catch low-flying antibodies unawares, and stabbed into the darkness to trigger the most beautiful and briefest blooms of energy.

It was magnificent. Qat’qa was a joy to watch as she swayed at the helm as if she was lost in playing a concerto, but it was becoming clear to everyone that it couldn’t last forever.

48

Scotty stood alone on the step up to the Romulan transporter pad when La Forge ran into the room. “Scotty, what the hell are you doing? Alyssa was almost—” He skidded to a halt when he saw the silver tear-streak that scarred the old miracle-worker’s mask of Celtic grimness. “No,” he said bluntly, and hollowly.

“The fold has to be collapsed, Geordi.” They both knew what that meant.

“I know but—”

“And it has to be collapsed after this ship has gone back through.”

“Vol and I have been talking about this. We’ll program the Challenger’s computer to—”

Scotty shook his head of tousled white hair. “No point, laddie. The failsafes for what we’re going to do are hardwired into the ODN circuitry, and then the dilithium cradle will have to come out. It’ll take a strong pair of hands to physically pull the circuits out in order to disable the safeties and trigger the collapse.”

“You’ve got a hologrid in engineering in place of the master systems display. We could activate an EMH—”

“No.” Scotty was calm, smiling. “This is my ship, and my responsibility.”

“Actually, Scotty, it’s my ship,” La Forge pointed out.

“And you are a serving Starfleet officer, of great value to the service. I, on the other hand, am a dying old man, and, what’s more, a civilian. That means I’m not in the chain of command, and ye canna give me orders.”

“That means I have an extra responsibility to evacuate you from danger—”

“To a Romulan ship?” He stood, and stepped up on to the platform. “I’d say I’d rather die, but . . .”

“Don’t joke about this! Just . . . don’t!”

“Och, don’t worry. There’s definitely a very slim chance I’ll survive.” Scotty’s tears suggested otherwise. “You need a miracle, and where can ye find a miracle worker out here?”

“If you think I’m going to beam you over there, you’re going to be severely disappointed.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. That’s why I set a timer-delay before you came in. Goodbye, Geordi.” La Forge dived behind the transporter console, only to find he was locked out. “Make an honest woman of Leah. You’re made for each other.”

And then Montgomery Scott was gone.

Qat’qa grinned, lips peeling back from her teeth, as she sent Tomalak’s Fist hurtling into a corkscrew course between two of the antibody vessels. The ship was big and heavy, and slow to get going, but the Romulans had fitted her with huge and powerful engines that made her surprisingly fast once she was actually moving. Now, she decided, it was time to see if the Fist could deliver a punch worthy of the name.

“Divert as much power as we can to shield the nacelles,” she shouted into the general hubbub of the bridge. Qat’qa didn’t bother listening for an acknowledgment or a query, but lined up the ship the way she wanted it as it approached the pair of antibody vessels.

“Nacelle shielding increased by—” the amount was drowned out by alarms and yells, and a tremendous crashing that filled the bridge as one nacelle slammed down onto one antibody, and the other nacelle smashed upward into the second antibody. Both antibody vessels crumpled and flew apart, pieces of them skipping along the shields, and being flung off into space.

Qat’qa laughed. “This is a powerful ship, Commander. I like it.”

“Don’t get too attached to it,” Varaan said drily. “And, perhaps you’d find using the weapons more to your . . . satisfaction next time.”

Varaan stepped closer to Sela, and they exchanged a look that Barclay would have loved for Worf to have been able to see. “Klingons,” Varaan sighed.

“Believe me, Varaan, I know.”

La Forge ran onto the bridge, quivering. He had tried to use the transporter to bring Scotty back, but the sly old devil had rigged it so that nothing he could do would make it work.

“Kat!” Everyone turned, shocked at the quaver in his voice. “Set course for the Challenger, and through the static warp shell, right now!” Nobody questioned him, and Qat’qa heeled the ship around.

In Challenger’s main engineering, Scotty was a busy man, pulling out the failsafe chips from the consoles. He could barely see the bloody things for the tears in his eyes.

With each Isolinear chip he pulled out, he could feel the static warp shell weaken around the ship. Space was starting to slip and slide around it, and it wouldn’t be long before the breach that the Challenger had opened squeezed shut on its own.

Scotty couldn’t let that happen, in case the fold remained. It had to be snapped with power.

Ahead, the Challenger appeared to be receding, even though every instrument on the Romulan helm and tactical consoles said it was still in exactly the same place. Space around it was changing in a way none of them had ever seen before. It seemed to be a different shade of black, somehow, and the stars were smeared and blurry.

La Forge’s cybernetic eyes couldn’t make much more sense of it than anyone else’s. There was a buzz to space around the Challenger, or an energetic potential of gray static, as if the universe was preparing to overlay a new picture on to that part of reality.

Challenger herself was also beginning to distort, narrowing here and bulging there, as if the dimensions of the areas that different parts of it occupied were shifting and changing.

Nog and Tornan kept shooting, picking off the antibody drones that tried to pursue them, while Qat’qa dodged the ones that came at the ship, without losing her line on Challenger.

Tomalak’s Fist was beginning to shake.

There was only the dilithium articulation frame to go. It was a metal cradle roughly the size of a crock pot, and normally it could only be removed when the power was off.

The power in the warp reactor was still being funneled through the runabout Thames’s reactor, and there was no real intermixing going on in the Challenger’s main core, but there was enough energy in it to collapse the fold.

Scott had accepted his own death, and yet his brain was still racing. It was a blessing and a curse. Unexpectedly, that racing mind slammed headlong into something Geordi had said.

“Computer,” he said hurriedly, “activate EMH.” What was the point, he asked himself, of having a hologrid in engineering and only using it for bloody diagrams?

The EMH was a Mark I, and Scotty suspected that Reg Barclay had installed it. Reg had a fondness for that model because of his dealings with Voyager’s EMH, Scotty knew.

The EMH raised a hand, looking as if he’d never seen one before, and said, “Please state the nature of the—” He broke off and grabbed Scotty’s jaw, bobbing his head to peer into both of Scotty’s eyes. “Oh, I see. That’s, well, very very not good . . .”

Scotty pulled the EMH’s hand off his face in annoyance. “The emergency isn’t with me, laddie. I know I’m as good as dead.”

“I see . . . Then is there anything I can do for you while we wait? A quick hand of bridge perhaps? No, we need two more people for that—how many holograms does the engineering grid support?”

Scotty grabbed the EMH by the collar, dragged him over to the articulation cradle, and put both his hands on it. “I’m going to the transporter room. When I call you and shout ‘EMH, now!’ you just yank that cradle right out of there. That’s all there is to it.”

“You want me to yank your crank?”

Scotty was already gone.

By now everyone knew where Scotty was. The mood in the Romulan command deck was somber, the conversation muted. Sela pointed to the approaching and lopsided-looking Challenger. “There’s not going to be enough room to pass by Challenger.”

Qat’qa didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “I didn’t expect there to be.”

“Then what . . . You can’t ram the Challenger!”

“No need.”

Tomalak’s Fist swooped toward the venerable Galaxy-class ship, gaining velocity as she went. Like many Romulan ships, she was designed to resemble a predatory bird, and today she dove headlong at her natural prey.

From the bridge, Challenger appeared to be listing to one side, though this was just an effect of Qat’qa’s delicate touch on the Romulan pitch controls.

La Forge found himself gripping the arms of his seat so hard that he thought his fingernails would buckle and crack. Glancing around the bridge, he saw that everyone was reacting the same way; temperatures raised, skin damp.

Scotty frantically switched circuits in and out of the console in transporter room three, hoping that he was right. The problem was going to be range. Where could he transport to from halfway to Andromeda?

The answer had struck him as he felt space distort around the ship. When the fold closed, space would return to where it should be. It would move, and maybe, just maybe, it could take him with it.

If not, he didn’t mind. He had accepted his death, and this wasn’t, to his mind, so much an escape attempt, since he was dying anyway, but a bit of tinkering to fill his last minutes while he waited for the Romulan ship to get to safety.

Challenger grew larger and larger, filling the viewscreen, and spreading beyond it. Gasps, curses, and maybe a few prayers were bitten off around the bridge, as people’s hearts pulsed with what they felt surely had to be their final beats.

Exhausted, whether from the hurried work, or from Doctor Ogawa’s treatment wearing off, Scotty slumped in the center seat on the bridge and watched the Romulan ship fill Challenger’s main screen. The sight of such a leviathan hurtling toward him on a collision course gave him goose bumps, but he reminded himself that Qat’qa was at the helm, and trusted her to know what she was doing.

The Romulan ship’s raptor-like head flashed past just under Challenger’s saucer section, and the vast wings momentarily embraced Challenger, with only a few meters to spare on either side.

Then those wings had sped past, and now the Tomalak’s Fist was rushing away from Challenger. As the Romulan ship receded into the distance, she clearly waggled her wings, first one way then the other.

“Aye,” Scotty said, not sure if Kat could hear him. “Goodbye to you too, lass.”

Qat’qa felt her spirits sink as she settled the ship back into stable flight. Scotty had deserved the salute she was able to give him.

Scotty had already given EMH its order, and preprogrammed the transporter. He stood, watching the rapidly receding ship.

“Computer,” he said. “Energize transporter in three seconds from my mark. Mark. EMH. Now!”

In engineering, the EMH obediently pulled out the articulation cradle with a single heave, and disappeared, along with the warp core and the rest of engineering.

On the bridge, Scotty raised an imaginary glass. “Yours, aye,” he said, wondering whether the bright light and tingling buzz that was unraveling through him was the modified transporter beam, or a transition of a different, and inevitable sort.

Space around the Challenger blurred and twisted as the Romulan ship sped away from it, and the alien vessels scattered. Then, in a nanosecond, the Challenger crumpled up into a tiny speck.

49

The stars on the main viewer of Tomalak’s Fist were a welcome dusting of life-giving jewels. The spaceborne alien with whom Guinan had communicated with—this time from the Romulan ship—had promised to be much more careful on this trip into their galaxy and had deposited the ship safely and undamaged back near the Pulsar Alpha Six-Four system.

La Forge’s emotions were mixed, but the stars of home helped. Leah was gazing at them with wonder, since once she thought she would never see them again. “You look pretty happy for someone who’s probably going to be spending the rest of her life in a Romulan prison camp.”

“Believe me, I can’t think of anything that would make me less happy than being a Romulan prisoner.” Leah hesitated. “Actually, perhaps I can.”

“Whatever it is, I’ll do my best to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

“Good. I’ll be glad of that.”

“So, what is it that would be worse than being in a Romulan prison?” La Forge asked.

“Being alone in a Romulan prison.”

La Forge held her gaze for a moment. “You didn’t ask why I’m happy despite our situation.”

“I don’t think I have to.”

“We have a cadre of Starfleet engineers, Chairman Sela,” Varaan was saying. “All specialists in their fields. Dammit, we have the woman who designs their ships and their warp drives. How much more of a prize could one hope for?”

“We’re representatives of Praetor Kamemor, Varaan, not pirates and freebooters. Prizes aren’t part of the Praetor’s new regime.” Sela didn’t sound particularly convinced. “Today, it seems we must be diplomats.”

“We should turn around and take our prisoners home.”

“Will you mutiny for that?”

“No.”

“Then find me the Enterprise.”

It took two days before the Enterprise was sitting before Tomalak’s Fist. There was no sign, as it cruised across the main screen, that it had detected them.

Sela grinned, a thoroughly self-satisfied expression. “I wish I could be a fly on the wall of Enterprise’s bridge for this. Just for the sight of Picard’s expression . . .” She nodded to Varaan. “Decloak, and hail them.”

Aboard the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard was about to go off duty when Choudhury’s voice stopped him in his tracks. “Romulan vessel decloaking, Captain!” Picard had been expecting and dreading those words for days. Ever since the Challenger had disappeared, with the chairman of the Tal Shiar on board, the Romulan border had been in a state that used to be called a phoney war, just waiting for someone to shoot for real.

At least, waiting for someone to whom blame could be made to stick. The main viewer came to life just in time to display the towering form of a jade-colored Romulan leviathan shimmer into solidity ahead of the Enterprise. Picard’s mood was chilled further when a familiar face appeared on the screen. “Good evening, Captain Picard.”

“Chairman Sela!” Picard was uncharacteristically stunned, unsure as to whether the chairman’s sudden appearance was good news, or, more likely, the revelation that everything had been one of her schemes all along. “What is the meaning of this trespass into Federation space?”

“A rescue, Captain.” Picard’s skeptical expression could have burned through stone. “You may have noticed that Starfleet is missing one of their ships. The Challenger, to be precise.” Picard felt a cold sweat begin, but didn’t let the slightest hint show on his face. Sela waved someone forward, and Picard was astonished to see that it was Geordi. “As luck would have it, one of our vessels was in the area and able to effect a rescue of the Challenger’s crew. They have all been well-treated, and, in fact, have earned our gratitude in some ways.”

“It’s true, Captain,” Geordi said.

Extensive debriefings were conducted at Starbase 410, which La Forge didn’t mind in the slightest. Nor did Qat’qa, who could spend some time regaling her aunt with tales of her battle honors.

Afterward, when the debriefing had proved that their story was true and no one had been brainwashed into becoming a Romulan agent, the senior staff of Challenger met up one last time, in the café where La Forge and Guinan had waited to join the ship, so long ago. “Where are you headed, Reg?” Geordi asked.

“Back to Jupiter Station first, and then probably the Voyager fleet.” He shivered. “Voktra and I have agreed to petition our governments to engage in more, er, cooperative programs. We both think there’s a decent chance, if only so that the Tal Shiar and Starfleet Intelligence can sneak agents into the teams.”

“Good luck with that, Reg.”

Guinan was also leaving, and had less luggage this time. “I guess this is goodbye.”

“Going traveling again?”

“I’ve been thinking. There are still diplomatic channels that offer a person a chance to visit the Romulan Empire. I think the Senate could use a good hostess. Chairman Sela has provided a visa.” She paused. “Oh, before I go, I can take a wild guess as to how such an impossible feature as that toroidal continuum fold became real.”

“I’m listening. No pun or offense intended.”

“Sometimes the Q don’t get along.”

“They don’t really get along with anybody,” La Forge pointed out.

“That’s true, but sometimes they also don’t get along themselves. There’s been at least one civil war in the Continuum that we mere mortals know about.”

“Yeah . . . that’s right! Voyager’s logs mentioned it. There was a report to Starfleet by Kathryn Janeway about a Q civil war,” Barclay said.

“I believe it. I’ve had dealings with Q,” Guinan reminded him.

“And do you know anything more about this civil war?” La Forge asked.

“No, but I know them. It made me think about the kinds of weapons they might use.”

“Anything they think can be made real,” said La Forge.

“So, if things like this spatial fold are lying around the galaxy like a mine field . . .” offered Guinan.

“That’s a scary thought,” Barclay said.

“No, that’s not the scary thought. The scary thought is if that’s what’s left lying around by the Q, what else could there be?” With that Guinan got up and left.

Leah and Geordi went over to the table where Kat, Nog, and Vol were sitting. “Any plans?”

“The same plan I’ve always lived by,” Nog said. “I call it the O’Brien strategy: Fix it and go home alive at the end of the shift.” Vol and Kat laughed uproariously, and then all five of them drank to that particular plan.

By the end of the night, only Leah and Geordi remained. “Geordi . . . Why don’t you come back with me? Work on new engines and new starships. You’d be such a great asset to the development program.” She hesitated. “There’s an opening for a head of the design bureau at Utopia Planitia, and you’d be per—”

He let his head droop slightly before answering softly. “I can’t, Leah. The Enterprise is home. So many star systems to visit, so many cultures’ engineering methods to learn about . . .”

“I thought you might say that.”

“You could come with me. Back to the Enterprise.”

She took his hand sadly. “I couldn’t tie myself to one engine, and one ship.”

“Oh.” La Forge couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice, even though he completely understood her position. “Could you . . . tie yourself, as you put it, to one—”

“Person?”

He wasn’t even sure until she finished his sentence for him that that was what he was going to say.

“Could you?”

“That I could do,” she said.

EPILOGUE

Geordi and Leah materialized aboard the Enterprise and were greeted by Picard and Worf. “Welcome back, Geordi.” Picard’s smile was genuine but not large, as the memorial service for Scotty was due to be held that evening aboard Enterprise. It was La Forge’s first day back as chief engineer, and not one he had been looking forward to.

“Doctor Brahms,” Picard continued, “to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”

As if he didn’t know, Geordi thought. Worf could hardly keep a straight face.

“Doctor Brahms has agreed to stay with me for a little while, Captain.”

“A little while?” Worf echoed.

“Congratulations, Geordi,” Picard said softly. “Now there is one other matter we have to attend to. We must do something about your rank.”

“Yeah, Captain, don’t worry. I’m perfectly happy to—”

“Do you know what a post captain is?”

“No . . .”

“In the eighteenth-century Royal Navy, a man could be promoted to the rank of captain without having a ship. When he was assigned a ship he was a post captain.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Until then he was retained at half pay. Now, I do not propose to restrict your benefits and privileges for no longer having a ship of your own, but I have found that there is a rank in Starfleet of captain of engineering.”

“Scotty’s rank.”

“And now yours. Starfleet has approved and amended your service record appropriately.” Picard offered him a hand to shake. “Welcome aboard, Captain La Forge.”

The memorial that night was a solemn affair. La Forge had expected to see various members of the Corps of Engineers at the memorial, and sure enough Sonya Gomez and her Tellarite first officer were there, but La Forge had not expected to see the tall man who held himself apart from the crowd.

Geordi walked over, trying to figure out how to apologize for getting Scotty killed, or at least for not looking after him well enough. As he approached, the man shook his head slightly, and caught La Forge’s gaze with calm, wise eyes. “You do not need to make any special statement before me, Captain La Forge,” Ambassador Spock said. “Mister Scott knew, as do we all, that our occupation is not entirely safe. You have nothing to explain.”

“I just wish I could have done something—”

“But there was no more you could have done. The actions of the spaceborne entities, and indeed the fact of their existence, were an unpredictable factor.” Ambassador Spock’s craggy face softened as he allowed an eyebrow to rise slightly. “In my experience, Mister Scott has always been, shall we say, a man of great ingenuity.”

“A miracle worker, in fact.”

“Indeed. In his own way, he is as adept at finding ingenious solutions to his apparently certain fate as was Captain Kirk.”

La Forge nodded. “Captain Kirk still died, on Veridian III.” He fell silent, remembering how close everyone on the Enterprise-D had come to dying there.

“Every probability curve must have a far end. Nevertheless, if there was any means to escape the destruction of the Challenger, Mister Scott will have found it.” Spock continued, “There are certainties in life, Captain La Forge, but they are finite in number. Extremely finite, in fact. The possibilities, however, are not. There are always an effectively infinite number of possibilities.”