Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  “It’s going to be bumpy,” he told her as he set the Ellingtonin a wide, downward-looping arc. “You’d better strap in.” She did as he asked quickly, hollering for Troi to do the same below.

  There was one harrowing moment when the black plume of smoke from one of the burning geysers enveloped them, completely stealing their view of the world outside. To his credit, Keru only grunted and altered the descent trajectory by a few points.

  They emerged from the black fog almost instantly and much closer to the trouble below. When her eyes were able to focus on the dying Orishan city, Vale almost wished she’d stayed behind with Ra-Havreii.

  From the air it bore a horrible resemblance to the maw of the creature that had tried to make a meal of Vale two days before. Instead of row after row of teeth, however, this opening was ringed with giant structures, buildings of some sort, most of which now either tottered at hellishly odd angles or, worse, had already slid down into the sinkhole at the center of the growing abyss.

  There were people down there. She could see them now. Some, those with wings, were attempting to fly their fellows out of danger in ones and twos, but the added drag on the gossamer-thin appendages mostly resulted in both rescuer and rescuee being sucked back down. They were the lucky ones. The mass of the Orishans were wingless and were thus forced to scramble and cling to anything that offered even a moment’s purchase. A few, too few to inspire hope, had managed to climb or fly up to the lip, but the majority of them were stuck screaming below.

  Troi was right. If they weren’t helped somehow, soon, all these people were going to die.

  “What’s the plan?” Keru asked her, wrestling to maintain control of the shuttle as another chunk of the crystal whizzed past them.

  “Closer,” said Vale, trying to think. “Get closer. We’re no good up here.” She activated the shields and, in doing so, gave herself an idea.

  “That’s only a field patch, Commander,” said Keru as the shields came up. “This thing wasn’t designed for maneuverability. Whatever you want done we’d better get to it.”

  “Easy,” she said, looking for the right candidate. Then, seeing it, “There! Ten o’clock! Go!”

  As he guided the shuttle that way, Keru tried to see what it was she planned to do. They were headed to the far edge of the canyon, where a row of the strangely curved structures was teetering like a ship sinking at sea.

  Hundreds of the Orishans had made it to the top side of the nearest edge and then realized to their obvious horror that there was no way to cross from that position to the relative safety of the solid ground. What was worse was the sight of so many of those still on the lower levels simply cowering in fear and not even attempting to save themselves.

  It was clear that was where Vale wanted him to go so Keru threaded a path between the flying rocks and crystals and the jets of exploding gas to bring the shuttle within a few meters of the target.

  “What are you doing?” he said as he noticed her hands inputting codes into the computer.

  “Changing our shield configuration,” she said. “There!”

  She told the computer to extend the new shield configuration to encompass the area ahead of them. Nothing happened in the visual spectrum but, via instruments, Keru could see that the shuttle was now at the apex of a giant, egg-shaped force field, the Ellington’s shield.

  He was about to protest that the shield would cut through the structure, that moving now would send the whole thing into the abyss when he realized that was precisely what she wanted.

  “Take us up,” she said.

  The shuttle rose and, as he had predicted, only took with it the part of the structure enveloped by the shield/ tractor combo. The rest, after straining to maintain coherence, broke off and fell tumbling away into the darkness below.

  The extra drag made navigation even more difficult, but Keru managed somehow, carrying the massive section of building and its many occupants to the relative safety of a wide flat area of veldt that, thus far, had not been touched by the tremors.

  With surprising delicacy he set the whole thing down there and, once Vale released the shields, watched as several hundred Orishans streamed gratefully out onto solid ground.

  “Nice work, Commander,” he said. “That was inspired.”

  “Nice work, yourself,” she said, grinning.

  “Now what?” he said.

  “Now we do it again, Ranul,” she said. “That was only a couple hundred. There are thousands of them down there and we don’t have much time.”

  They performed their strange ballet seven more times, scooping up nearly three thousand very surprised, very grateful Orishans in total. It wasn’t perfect or even close; as they raised their meager few to safety, they were forced to watch thousands more plummet to their ugly doom in the depths.

  On the eighth and probably final attempt they ran into trouble.

  “I can’t get closer,” said Keru, trying to do it in spite of what he said. “These damned gas jets are too powerful.”

  The last of the surviving structures, a sort of corkscrew tower now bent perpendicular to its normal position by the shifting ground, was only seconds away from falling in.

  A large cluster of Orishans, maybe six or seven hundred of them, stood and knelt at the farthest edge and wouldn’t budge. Either they hadn’t seen the previous rescues or they were all simply too petrified with fear to help save their lives.

  The shuttle’s modified shields could only extend so far and that limit was just shy of the area in which the Orishans now stood. They had to move forward, toward the danger if they were to be saved. Thus far none of them had, and Keru was antsy to get the shuttle clear as their luck at avoiding the flying debris couldn’t possibly hold out forever.

   “Ra-Havreii to Vale,”said the engineer’s voice.

  “Can it wait, Doctor?” she said. “We have our hands full now.”

   “Maybe,”said the Efrosian, clearly struggling with something of his own. “A very few minutes, Commander. No more.”

  “We have to leave them,” said Keru, meaning the Orishans. “There’s no time.”

  “We’re not leaving them,” she said, unhooking herself and heading for the access ladder. “Open the rear access hatch.”

  “Are you insane?” he said. “Commander, we have to go!”

  “Now, Lieutenant,” she said, and disappeared below.

  She found Deanna safely strapped to one of the emergency jump seats and flung herself into the other. Even as she closed the last buckle, the rear hatch opened, exposing the entire hold to the outside. A gust of hot air rushed in along with the cacophonous sounds of destruction that had been muffled before by the shuttle’s thick hull.

  Behind the opening, tens of meters away, they could make out the crowd of Orishans cowering on the far edge of the doomed structure.

  “A’yujae’Tak!” Vale screamed to be heard over the blow. “Listen to me. We are trying to save your people. Do you understand? We are trying to save as many as we can!” The big insectoid moved forward in her makeshift cell, perhaps trying to get a better look at the scene outside the shuttle, but she didn’t speak. Vale pressed her. “If they don’t come this way, right now, they are all going to die! Do you understand? They have to move toward this ship, right now!”

  There was the smallest of pauses and then, “I understand you,” said A’yujae’Tak.

  Vale ordered the computer to drop the force field that held A’yujae’Tak and watched as the Orishan moved slowly but steadily toward the open hatchway.

  She stopped at the lip and let out a loud piercing burst of chatter that the translator could not decode. As a mass the endangered Orishans began to surge forward. When the last of them was in position, without a word, A’yujae’Tak jumped down to join them.

  Vale hit the manual hatch control, closing the door behind her. A’yujae’Tak would live with her people or die with them.

  “Keru,” she called up to him when the noise had subsided enough. “GO!”

  “We’ve got them, Commander,” he called down as the ship and its cargo rose away from the destruction. “We’re on our way.”

  “Vale to Ra-Havreii,” she said as soon as she was sure they were clear. “Tell me you have good news.”

  He didn’t. In fact, his news was about as bad as it could get. He and Modan had managed to stabilize the network again and were in the process of implementing the timed stepdown of the Spires when the entire network was hit by a powerful energetic pulse.

  “What do you mean, ‘hit by’?” said Vale.

   “A second field, one outside the network, is interfering with the Orishan Veil,”said Ra-Havreii. “I believe it is trying to collapse it.”

  “Is it something you didn’t account for?” said Vale. “Is the tesseract somehow reacting to what you’re doing there?”

   “No, Commander,”said the engineer. “In lay terms the frequency of the counterpulse is too precise to be a natural phenomenon. It has clearly been specifically configured to collapse the Veil.”

  “You think someone is doing this intentionally?”

  “ I think it’s Titan,”said Ra-Havreii. “I believe they have survived and are trying to collapse the tesseract.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “ It’s possible the effects of the eruption that brought us here are expanding,”he said. “In fact, now that I think of it, it’s likely.”

  “What happens if they succeed?”

  “ I’ve already told you, Commander,”said Ra-Havreii. “Tiny chunks of planet where Orisha used to be.”

  “Solution, Xin,” said Vale. “Tell me you’ve got one.”

  “ Possibly,”he said. “You’ll need Modan.”

  “Not you?”

  “ No, Commander,”he said. “I have to stay with the network. Modan doesn’t have the skill to do what’s necessary here. There is an improvisational aspect that-”

  “Fine,” said Vale, cutting him off. “Beaming her out now. What’s Modan going to do for us that we can’t do on our own?”

   “She’s going to get you back toTitan and get them to stop what they’re doing.”

  “Oh,” said Vale, a bit taken back. “All right then.”

  “ Good-bye, Commander,”he said. “If I never see you again, thank you for calling me Xin.”

Chapter Fifteen

   Something was wrong.

  Dakal knew it. He felt it, a strange acidic churning in the bottom of his stomach, as he sat at his station in the sensor pod. He could feel something had gone horribly wrong with the captain’s plan. He had no evidence of any failure, certainly nothing on which he could put a finger. Still the feeling persisted.

   Titanhad learned to protect herself from the worst of the quantum flux. Its systems and crew were back to full capacity or very nearly so. They had come back so far from the edge that the captain was now attempting to remove the author of all their recent troubles rather than prudently cut his losses and run for help.

  It was not a very Cardassian way of handling things, and though he was loath to admit it, the whole business of staying here to attempt to collapse the bizarre knot in space-time made him a little nervous.

  There was good luck, after all, and there was tempting fate.

  He wished Jaza were here. The big Bajoran scientist had a way of putting things in the right perspective even when it wasn’t immediately clear how he was doing so.

  Of course Jaza was dead, along with the rest of his away team. He wouldn’t be there again, ever. It had never occurred to Dakal that he could miss anyone so much before the Dominion war. Afterward he never thought he’d stop missing the people he had lost. His time at the refugee camp on Lejonis and his stint at the Academy had led him to Titanand, strangely, a kind of peace he never thought he would have again.

  There were so many kinds of people here, so many ways of interacting with, well, everything, that he had withdrawn a bit from what he had perceived as chaos.

  Jaza had drawn him back in again.

   I don’t believe in dunsels, Cadet. Never have, never will.

  Jaza with his serenity, his good humor, and his understated manner had somehow managed to put Dakal in the thick of things socially and with people he would never have dared to approach on his own. He had begun breathing again in the old familiar way, had become more of his old self than since well before the war.

  Jaza had been his good friend, though neither of them had ever referred to their relationship that way. After everything their people had been to each other. Friends. Amazing.

  And now he was gone.

  Dakal eyed the TOV rig, sitting dark and dormant in its corner, and wondered if his sometime mentor had enjoyed its use as much as he had.

  “Please don’t dwell, Dakal,” said Hsuuri softly. When the others had gone off shift, she had stayed behind to complete some personal project. Their shipmates had all drifted off to their beds or their poker games or their holodeck adventures as soon as their allotted time had passed. There wasn’t much left for them to do just now, no exotic bodies for them to scan. The bridge was handling everything right now, and the bridge was focused on the Eye of the storm.

  Roakn had actually invited Dakal to join him at poker, which had so surprised the young cadet that he almost forgot to make his refusal polite.

  Now that things were essentially back to normal on Titan, things were essentially back to normal. At least they seemed to be for everyone but Dakal.

  “My apologies, Lieutenant,” he said. “What did you say?”

  “It’s Hsuuri, please,” she said, leaning heavily into one shoulder as her large green eyes watched him. “And I think Mr. Jaza wouldn’t want you grieving like this.”

  “I’m not grieving yet,” said Dakal. “We need a body for that, and we haven’t seen one.”

  She put a soft fur-covered hand on his shoulder and said, “We may never find their bodies, Dakal. It’s likely whatever destroyed Charondestroyed them the same way.”

  “Then I won’t be grieving, I guess,” he said sharply, pulling away from her. He regretted it immediately but couldn’t bring himself to go back over. He didn’t want tenderness right now, not even from her.

  Instead he busied himself with a check of the recent sensor data they’d got back from their scans of the Eye. He’d already checked it, of course, twice, but he needed something to do and it was hours before the new shift assignments would be posted.

  It was funny. During their troubles with the flux and the attack by the Orishan ship, Dakal hadn’t thought of Jaza once, only of his own duties and, maybe, how they might all survive this latest incident.

  Now, no matter how he tried to focus on other things, his mind kept looping back to Jaza.

  “When a hunter dies on Cait,” said Hsuuri, remaining where she stood, letting him move if that’s what he needed or not move if not. “Even if her body is never recovered, her entire pride gathers to sing and tell stories of her great deeds. Some of them are even true.”

  “Sounds lively.” But not very dignified, he thought bitterly.

  “It can be,” she said. “Which I guess is sort of the point.”

  “That’s not how we do it on Prime,” he said. “Our way begins with the body.”

  He thought of Jaza Najem, pumped full of preservative chemicals or inside a stasis field, laid out on a death couch, undergoing the four days of testimonials, readings of personal anecdotes, and listing of the members of the family tree that comprised the bulk of a traditional funeral rite on Prime, and he smiled.

  Dakal had no idea yet how Bajorans marked the end of a life, but he was pretty sure it didn’t involve family insignias or tithing to the central authority.

  “It’s good to see a smile on you,” said Hsuuri, completely mistaking its meaning. “Mr. Jaza liked smiles.”

  “That’s true,” he said, and then fell silent for several long minutes as he appeared to busy himself with the sensor logs.

   We’ll make a scientist of you yet, Zurin.

  The minutes dragged between them then to the point where he became uncomfortable with her eyes on him. He enjoyed that look very much under normal circumstance and the occasional touch of her hand or whisk of her tail, but just now he felt too exposed somehow to be seen by her.

  “I’m sorry,” they said in unison, causing him to go silent again while she managed a little silken laugh.

  “It’s all right, Dakal,” she said. “Everyone grieves, or doesn’t grieve, differently. If you would like to learn another way Caitians have to honor Mr. Jaza’s life, or all life, please let me know.”

  She left him there with his thoughts and his sensor logs, and it was a long time before he realized what she had said or that she had gone.

   Dammit, thought Riker, looking at the readings again. There’s something wrong.

  There shouldn’t have been, but there was. The information they’d gotten from the Orishan vessel’s upload had been more than enough to generate the algorithms necessary to recalibrate Titan’s main deflector.

  The instant the modifications were complete, Riker had ordered the ship to begin projecting the counterpulse that would inspire the Eye to collapse.

  Everything had gone according to plan until it suddenly hadn’t. The Eye was not collapsing. The effect of its last expulsion of force and energy continued to spread. Something was definitely wrong, and so far, they had no idea what that something was.

  “It’s as if the Eye is compensating for the counterpulse,” said Tuvok. “Each time it shifts its vibrational frequency, we compensate. Each time we compensate, it shifts again.”

  “You make it sound like there’s somebody in there, Mr. Tuvok,” said Lavena, holding Titansteady in the face of the Eye’s continuing undulations of force.

  “I am currently at a loss to explain it,” said the Vulcan. “But the Eye is behaving as if driven by some intelligence.”

  Even as he said it, the Eye’s frequency shifted again though not by very much. It was as if it knew that a minor change in its field density would be enough to block Titan’s counterpulse but that a large shift might cause it to collapse without prodding.

  There was no possibility that this cat-and-mouse game was the result of random phenomena, and yet Tuvok could not allow himself to accept that the Eye was, in fact, in some way sentient after all. There had to be another rational explanation.

  “Talk to me, Mr. Tuvok,” said Riker, watching as the Eye continued not to collapse under Titan’s onslaught. “What did we do wrong here?”

  “One moment, Captain,” said Tuvok as he reset the main sensor array. His face never betrayed it, but internally he was extremely concerned.

  This stalemate couldn’t last forever. Eventually the constant shifts in force and frequency might inadvertently cause the Eye to collapse, but it was just as likely that this tug of war would inspire another of the massive eruptions. Titan’s shields had held so far, especially after adding Orishan-inspired modifications to Torvig’s, but there was no guarantee they could withstand another of the explosions.

  The chances of survival were lower in fact, now that Captain Riker, deeming the close-range attack to be best, had ordered them nearer to the Eye.

  “Bridge to sensor pod,” said Tuvok.

   “Cadet Dakal here, sir. Go ahead.”

  “Are you monitoring the wave fluctuations of the Eye?”

  “ No, sir,”said Dakal. “I can have Lieutenant Roakn up here in just a-”

  “There’s no time for that now, Cadet,” Riker chimed in. “You’re elected. Give Mr. Tuvok whatever he requires.”

   “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  In short emotionless bursts, Tuvok rattled off a series of calibrations and coordinates for Dakal to input into the pod’s ultrasensitive scanning array.

  He was sure he had missed something, some apparently minor characteristic of the Eye that allowed this bizarre stalemate to occur, but the main sensors had come up empty.

   “Sensors aligned, sir,”said Dakal. “Initiating first sweep.”

  There was silence on the bridge as the young cadet trained the array on the Eye. They had less than an hour before the distortion wave reached the sun. Once it did, the star would either supernova several billion years before its time, flash-frying everything within light-years, or it would instantly implode, crunching itself down to a dwarf of some kind with the sort of extreme gravimetric pull that would crush the ship and everything else in the system just as quickly.

  “Dakal,” said Riker. “What have you got?”

  “ I’m not sure, sir,”said the Cadet’s voice. “There seems to be a very small point of distortion in the Eye’s lower anterior hemisphere.”

  “Can you pinpoint it?” said Tuvok.

   “Adjusting,”said Dakal. “Please stand by.”

  “I don’t see how this can work,” said Vale, peering out at the multihued aurora currently enveloping them. They had passed through the layer of apparent fire that still surrounded Orisha and were now zipping back and forth a few meters from the tesseract’s event horizon looking for an exit.

  They had to be extremely careful not to try to pass through the thing at the wrong junction of angles or they would be shunted along its vertex to some point either forward or backward in time.

  “It’s simple,” said Modan, fretting over the science station. “If you think of the tesseract like a gem with solid facets and permeable flaws, you just have to understand that we’re looking for a flaw.”

  “And the shield modulation?”

  “That’s to help us punch through when we find it, Chris,” Modan said, and winced when she realized her mistake. “I’m sorry. Commander.”

  All at once the shuttle suffered a massive jolt and Keru had to fight to regain control. It was the fifth such event, and everyone was sick of them.

  “That just never becomes fun,” said Keru as he leveled off again.

  “ Titan’s counterpulse is affecting the field’s coherence,” said Modan. “As long as Commander Ra-Havreii can compensate quickly enough, we should be all right.”

  “Can’t we just open a channel to Titanand tell them to hold off for a few seconds?”

  “Absolutely,” said Modan cheerily. “From our current position the message should reach them in about forty-seven years.”

  Keru grumbled something about Jaza’s sense of humor but stayed focused on not letting the shuttle drift into the tesseract’s field.

  Having nothing to contribute for the moment and hating every turn of phrase uttered by Modan that reminded her of Jaza, Vale slid out of the navigator’s cradle and moved back toward the jump seats and Troi.

  “Well,” she said, sliding in beside her. “Looks like you were right. Titansurvived after all.”

  Troi looked up then, and Vale could see she had been crying.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was right all along. Now, if only I had really believed it.”

  They shared a bittersweet laugh at the events of the last few days. There had been so much tragedy and so much loss that there was little else to do but laugh. All that tension had to go somewhere.

  Jaza was gone. Titanhad survived, but the hundreds aboard whichever of her sisters had crashed into Orisha had not. Three-hundred-fifty-plus lives had been snuffed out by the Eye of Erykon. It didn’t matter that most, perhaps all of them, were strangers. And now, with Titanso close they could almost see her, there was still no real certainty that any of them would come out of this alive. Modan would lose access to the knowledge she’d borrowed from Jaza soon. If it happened before they returned to Titan, well, that would be bad.

  You really had to laugh.

  So they did.

  “But the worst thing is,” said Vale, between chuckles, “I still have this awful color in my hair.”

  “I would have mentioned it,” said Troi, also giggling too hard now to keep still. “But I couldn’t tell whether or not you were playing a joke of some kind.”

  “It’s not funny,” said Vale as she erupted into a string of apparently uncontrollable giggles.

  “It’s a little bit funny,” said Troi, following suit.

  Soon the barely controlled laughter developed into full-throated guffaws, loud enough to draw the attention of the other two in the shuttle.

  “What’s the joke?” said Keru. Modan only looked puzzled.

  Before either Vale or Troi could answer, an enormous fluctuation in the tesseract’s field density rocked the shuttle hard to its port side.

  “There,” said Modan, scrambling back into her chair. “It’s right there.” She passed the coordinates on to Keru who, in spite of his better judgment, pointed the shuttle’s nose at the invisible breach and plunged through.

   “There, Mr. Tuvok,”said Dakal excitedly. “It’s right there again! Do you see it?”

  Tuvok informed the cadet that he did indeed see the strange pattern of fluctuation and that there was no need to shout.

  Taking control of the sensor pod’s primary array and synching it with the main sensor grid, Tuvok trained all of Titan’s attention on that one small spot of distortion. It didn’t make sense that the tiny shiver in the Eye’s field would have anything to do with their current difficulty, but as no other culprits had presented themselves, he owed it as close a look as possible.

  Sure enough, on deep inspection, Dakal’s area of distortion did exist. Moreover, it had contours that were too regular to have been produced in nature. Whatever else it was, this thing was artificial, probably mechanical.

  Was it responsible in some way for the Eye or for its ability to offset whatever version of the counterpulse was thrown its way? Further examination was required.

  Narrowing the scan to exclude everything outside the point of distortion gave Tuvok and, tangentially, Dakal a much clearer view of its contours.

  It was shaped like a cube that had had the sharp points of its corners sanded down. There were protrusions of some kind on two of its wider planes: a small oval-shaped bubble on what he arbitrarily designated as the top and, along the bottom, two long slender cylinders running the object’s length.

   “It’s theEllington,” exclaimed Dakal. “Sir, don’t you see, it has to be them.”

  Ignoring Dakal’s excited outburst, Tuvok altered the scan to ferret out signs of a warp core that had been configured according to Starfleet specifications.

  “We’re not going to make it,” said Keru, still wrestling with the controls. He wasn’t able to do much with them just now beyond keeping the shudder to a minimum, and he was quickly coming to the end of that rope as well. “Modan, you’re supposed to be on point. What now?”

  No one aboard the shuttle was laughing anymore. They had plunged into the supposed flaw in the tesseract’s four-dimensional body, and though they had not apparently been forced forward or backward away from their proper time period, they could not push through into normal space.

  “It’s the damned counterpulse,” said Modan. “Every time Ra-Havreii shifts the Veil configuration I have to re-modulate the shuttle’s shields. I can’t do it fast enough to push through to the other side.”

  “Not good enough, Modan,” said Vale. “This is why Ra-Havreii sent you, to get us through this.”

  “I’m trying, dammit,” she said. “Just-just let me think for a second.”

   She’s losing it, thought Vale. Jaza would have solved this already. Whatever she got from him is fading fast.

  “Ranul,” she said. “Hail Titan. See if you can let them know we’re here.”

  “That won’t work, Commander,” said Modan. “The signal won’t penetrate the tesseract field.”

  “Mr. Keru,” said Vale, ignoring Modan. “Hail Titan.”

  As he tried and failed to get a signal through the tesseract, Modan fought to hold on to the skills she’d borrowed from Jaza. Normally she could have counted on days of additional talent, but having to help Ra-Havreii not only solve the dilemma of how to shut down the Veil network but to keep it from failing before they could do it had pushed her to her limit.

  She wasn’t a telepath. Her species had simply learned to link their nervous systems with those of other organisms in order to borrow some of their chemical or genetic information. She’d used this talent to copy those of Jaza’s memories that could have been useful. It was as if she had made an electrochemical model of his scientific knowledge and skills inside her brain. Like any chemical modification, the faster she worked her metabolism, the faster she burned out the changes.

  Orisha had kept her burning nonstop for hours. She had only a little longer before she lost it all, and they hadn’t even gotten back to Titanyet.

   Think, she told herself. You have to hold on to this. Calm down and think!

  It was no use. She could feel the bits of him, his memories, his past, his knowledge of how to save them, all slipping away. All this excitement was burning him out of her too fast, too fast to do what he had sent her to do.

  She cast around the shuttle’s cockpit, as if hoping to find a solution written on one of the displays or magically burned into the air by the power of his Prophets. There was nothing, only the increasing sensation of loss as his memory patterns dissolved into their base peptides.

  She fought it as best she could, trying to use her own memory to reconstruct or approximate his.

   A tesseract, she knew the thought was his but she forced it to be hers. If she could only keep remembering… A tesseract is a four-dimensional object with vertices in both subspace and conventional space with the ratios of the angles corresponding to…to…

  “Modan,” said Vale from somewhere far away. She sounded angry, still obviously furious with the younger woman for leaving Jaza to his fate. But Jaza had told her to do it, had orderedher to-

   Tachyons move backward in space-time, no slower than the rate of C. The Vulcan physicist Stang has postulated five potential means of harnessing them for practical use.

  What were they? What help could those five theories be now? Was it something to do with the space fold or just some random bit of errata that meant absolutely nothing? She couldn’t think. She had to think. She couldn’t.

  “Ensign,” said Troi’s voice, also from somewhere far outside the chaos inside her. “Ensign are you all right?”

   No, dammit, she thought. I’m losing it. I’m losing everything Jaza gave me and we’re all going to-

  Suddenly she felt hands on her, pulling her back from the control console. Keru was yelling something about turbulence, Vale was shoving past her to get into the other pilot’s cradle and Troi was-