Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  Dakal, his participation neither requested nor required for this sensitive work, sat on a chair under the lowermost tier, listening to the others grouse.

  He wasn’t fooled by their banter. They were as nervous about the outcome of their investigations as he. That much work, that much time wasted due to the irresponsibility of a single engineer-it was hard for Dakal’s mind to fathom.

  On Cardassia people like Dr. Ra-Havreii-iconoclasts, individualists-used to disappear after their first public misstep. Where they went or what happened to them there was a mystery that failed to interest most of the citizenry. It was enough that the irritant was gone with minimal disruption to the flow of normal life. Those ways were done, certainly, but one couldn’t dismiss the level of efficiency achieved by the old state.

  “Hey, Dakal,” said Roakn, his great dark drum of a head peering down from the upper tier. “Quit moping and make yourself useful.”

  “How can I assist you, Lieutenant?” said the young cadet, instantly snapping to.

  “You’re Cardassian, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Dakal with practiced regulation decorum. He’d gotten used to nonhumanoids having difficulty distinguishing him from a Vulcan or a Trill. From their point of view a humanoid was a humanoid was a humanoid, at least when it came to appearance.

  “Cardassians are good at pattern recognition, right?” Roakn’s people had never had any direct dealings with Dakal’s, but that didn’t mean some of the more popular stereotypes hadn’t trickled down.

  The Cardassian government had proven itself adept at code-making and clandestine operations so, obviously, to Roakn at least, that meant every individual Cardassian had the gift. Lovely.

  “I wouldn’t say it’s an actual genetic trait, sir,” said Dakal, being careful not to imply his superior was expressing a racial slur. “More of a cultural-”

  “Whatever,” boomed Roakn, waving Dakal’s remarks aside as if they were a swarm of gnats. “Take a look at the time-lapse record of the visual EM translations. And play back at triple speed or you’ll be at it another month.”

  “What am I looking for, sir?” said Dakal.

  “Anything anomalous, Cadet,” said the wide stony face. “Just like the rest of us.”

  Were Roakn not a lieutenant, Dakal would have argued that the visual translations were, at best, approximations of what the sensors were actually seeing. The lapsed-time recording, in particular, was almost completely useless for providing anything forensically meaningful.

  Dakal might have pointed these things out and he might have gone further to say that, as a member of a species that was little more than a collection of animated boulders, Roakn ought to be a bit more reluctant to assign work based on racial stereotype.

  Besides, Dakal knew what was truly at work here. The reason he’d been assigned the useless duty was to impress upon the young Cardassian how insufficient his skills were to the team effort. Cadet Dunsel, some of his younger crewmates called him. It was Starfleet slang, a term Dakal had been forced to look up the first time he heard it.

   “Dunsel: a part that serves no useful purpose,”the linguistic database had informed him. Roakn had changed Dakal to Dunsel as some sort of joke. How amusing.

  Two minutes into the playback Dakal knew he’d had enough. At triple speed the halos seemed to explode across his screen like a sort of natural fireworks display. Except there was only one sort of explosion and they never lasted longer than a second or two. “Dull” simply didn’t come close to describing it. If triple speed was desirable to detect a pattern in the playback, septuple or octuple would be more so.

  Above him the chatter continued between the officers. Unable to give attention to the actual words, his peripheral awareness still managed to detect the tone of conversation as it swung from guarded optimism to total defeat and back again.

  “…wasted time,” said someone, probably Hsuuri.

  “…damned engineers,” said one of the Benzites.

  “…nothing but gears for brains.” That was aMershik for sure. He was well into yet another of his dissertations on the futility of optimism when something on Dakal’s display leaped out at him.

  A weird shimmering distortion had appeared in the darkling halos, faintly at first, but with steadily increasing effect.

   “Hope is an illusion,”aMershik droned on above him.

  Slowing the playback to its normal rate of progression caused the variances to disappear. Whatever they were, they inspired only minute incremental changes in the scans. They were nothing the sensors, even Titan’s sensors, would detect in the moment, but they stood out sharply when viewed at hyperspeed as he had done.

  This effect wasn’t new then and, therefore, probably not the result of the engineers’ tinkering.

  Accelerating the playback again to septuple speed brought out the pattern, now growing even more distinct as the time stamp progressed.

  He’d started on day one of their examinations and was now up to the dawn of day five. The distortion pattern vanished for several hours, only to reappear at roughly the same time as when it had made its debut. It vanished again at approximately the same interval and subsequently reappeared.

   “Hope in one digit cluster,”said aMershik. “Excrete in the other. Observe which fills first.”

  aMershik’s pronouncements were consistent if nothing else, but Dakal now had his own little maxim in mind, a Cardassian one.

   Pull the thread and watch the curtain unravel.

  The fireworks sped by, now very clearly examples of the same pattern of distortion discovered by Melora Pazlar. They vanished and reappeared at the same regular intervals but, sometime around the middle of day twenty, they became more severe, randomly shifting the colors of the halos from one end of the spectrum to the other.

  It was certainly unusual, but was it significant? If there was a hidden meaning to the pattern of the distortions, Dakal couldn’t see it.

  “What have you got there, Cadet?” said Jaza, suddenly standing beside him. Dakal had been so enraptured by the fiery halos he hadn’t heard the senior officer reenter the pod. From the sound of aMershik’s tedious monotone and Fell’s occasional pithy retorts, none of the others had either.

  “I’m not sure I know, sir,” said Dakal a bit more slowly than he would have liked. “It looks like some kind of quantum distortion, but it’s so diffuse-” He meant to slide into an explanation of the chore Roakn had set him, but Jaza was already nudging him aside.

  “Quick playback. Quantum distortion translated to the visual. Got it,” said Jaza absently, his hands whipping across the console so fast they were almost a blur. “Did you cross-link this with Pazlar’s boryon scans?”

  “I didn’t think to,” said Dakal. “I only just discovered this.”

  Jaza disappeared into himself for a few seconds as he processed what he saw, made changes and additions to the software he employed to dissect the data. When he looked up again he seemed like his normal self, as if this new mystery had somehow inoculated him against the fallout from the destruction of the original search. “Jaza to stellar cartography.”

   “Pazlar here. Go ahead.”

  “I’m linking you with the sensor pod’s documentary files of our mapping venture, Melora,” Jaza said. “Tell me what you see.”

  There was a short silence as Pazlar’s systems aligned themselves with Jaza’s, accepting and incorporating the new data. Then, simply, “Wow.”

  “Notions?”

  “ Sped up like this, it looks like EM spill from a faulty sensor beacon,”said Pazlar. “That could explain the boryon issue and the uniformity of the intervals, but it doesn’t account for the fluctuations in the distortion itself.”

  “Or why it’s spread out over weeks,” he finished for her.

   “But it definitely looks like a kind of signal-to-noise effect,”she said.

  It was obvious to Dakal that Commander Jaza was a good five steps ahead of Lieutenant Pazlar on that score. He was already shutting down most of the more esoteric sensor modifications in favor of those that specifically related to the boryon emissions and midrange quantum fluctuations.

  “Lieutenant Roakn!” said Jaza suddenly, loud enough to announce his presence to the whole room.

  “Sir!” boomed Roakn’s voice from above. Instantly he was peering over the edge of the upper tier, looking down at Jaza and Dakal. The rest of the team’s chatter was suddenly absent, as if the others’ voices had been blown into the vacuum beyond Titan’s hull. “You’re back.”

  “Yes,” said Jaza. “And I’d like to ask you why I found Cadet Dakal down here, running playback of the EM record instead of up there with the rest of the team.” Roakn’s hide roughed with embarrassment as he opened his mouth to reply, but Jaza cut him off. “Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. Right now, I need a probe reset to track quantum rippling.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yesterday, Mr. Roakn,” said Jaza, now splitting his attention between the viewer and the various control consoles around him. “I need it done yesterday.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Roakn. The upper tier actually vibrated beneath his feet as he thundered off to do as he’d been told.

  Forgotten again, Dakal contented himself with watching the senior officer work. Jaza’s fingers danced, systems deactivated or rerouted or realigned, causing the attendant displays to darken or spark, depending. All with a speed and precision Dakal would have never guessed the older man capable of achieving.

  On Cardassia he had once seen a broadcast of a performance of the virtuoso Winim Teekat. Teekat was the acknowledged master of the kynsleve, an instrument of hundreds of filaments strung tight in a sickle of therabone.

  When plucked by the maestro’s nimble fingers, it made the most haunting melodies. Watching his digits skip across the various control consoles, Dakal was sure that Jaza would be a natural for the kynsleve.

   “Bridge to sensor pod,”said a brisk voice.

  “Jaza here. Go ahead, Mr. Tuvok,” said Jaza, still working away.

   “It seems that you are, once again, reorienting ship’s main sensors into a new and fairly esoteric configuration.”

  “Yes,” said Jaza, distracted by a set of unexpected symbols that had appeared on a nearby display. “I was just about to inform you.”

   “In future, Commander,”said Tuvok. “Please apprise me of such modifications before implementation rather than during or after.”

  “Special circumstances,” said Jaza. “We’re tracking a signal, possibly sentient in origin.”

   “Then it would be logical to incorporateTitan ’s communication grid into your recalibration, would it not?”

  “That was next on the list,” said Jaza.

   “Proceed, Mr. Jaza,”said Tuvok. “I will adjust the communication system to fit your needs.”

  “Probe five prepped and in the tube, sir,” said Roakn from somewhere unseen. “Launching.”

  The others on the upper tier, intent on their original tasks, quietly buzzed among themselves. Dakal listened to them passing data, comparing hypotheses-if the distortions were the result of a signal of some sort, could their effect be scrubbed from the original darkling scans, thus salvaging their month of work?

  Even aMershik, all four of his digit clusters gesticulating wildly, now seemed filled with uncharacteristic optimism. He and Pell, their habitual enmity forgotten, were running a tandem simulation to describe the parameters of the distortion. Hsuuri and the rest were engaged in similar activities.

   Attack the new mystery, Dakal thought, watching them all approvingly. But save the old if you can. Something to remember.

  What he didn’t understand was why they were all so frantic about it. Whatever the effect was, it had been progressing for weeks. Indeed the distortion had grown stronger over that time, allowing the latest effect to be seen by Pazlar in real time. Why now all this haste to ferret its secrets?

  He returned from his musing to find Jaza staring at him with the queerest expression on his face.

  “Back with us, Cadet?” he said. Dakal nodded. “Good, because I need you to run the probe for me.”

  “Sir?”

  “Everyone here is checked out on the TOV rig, but the others all have their hands full,” said Jaza, half pulling the stunned cadet toward the central dais. The various control stalks rose silently from the floor around him as the central ring lit up. “Except Roakn. Anyway, his head’s too big for the VISOR.”

  “Yes, sir, but, I mean, wouldn’t you prefer-”

  “You’re elected, Cadet,” said Jaza, grinning now. And, in that grin, Dakal saw what he was up to.

  “Sir,” he said. “I appreciate this, but I am not the appropriate person for this duty. I don’t even know exactly what all this talk about quantum rippling means. Why do you think it’s some kind of signal?”

  Jaza spoke quickly as he adjusted the control harness and the TOV for Dakal’s slightly smaller dimensions. “There are two ways to get around relativity when it comes to communications, Dakal,” he said. “One is subspace, which every world in the Federation uses to keep in contact with the others. The other is quantum broadcasting, which Starfleet uses for long-range emergency beacons and in limited fashion with sensor probes.”

  If the TOV was too small for Roakn’s giant Brikar body, it was a bit loose on Dakal’s slender frame. The helmet in particular seemed to sit precariously on his head, threatening to fall off and shatter against the deck with his every slightest movement.

  “There are only two sources of quantum rippling in nature,” Jaza went on, pulling the straps of the harness tight. When he was done Dakal looked as if he’d been transformed into some sort of enormous marionette, his cut strings sagging onto the circular platform. “Wormholes and pulsars. Both create a regular ripple or distortion in the quanta. They never, ever, shift or increase. So, either our distortion is caused by some sentient-made device, or…”

  Jaza let the sentence dangle until Dakal realized he was meant to pick it up. “Or it’s something we’ve never seen before,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Jaza. That made sense to Dakal, but it was clear his presence in the TOV gear still did not. “I don’t believe in dunsels, Cadet. Never have. Never will. Now get to work.”

  On Titan’s bridge, two men pretended. Captain William Riker pretended not to be pacing back and forth, and Commander Tuvok, his chief security and tactical officer, pretended not to notice.

  Tuvok hadn’t served with the captain long, but he’d made tentative assessments about his personality that, thus far, had been borne out.

  After witnessing his behavior in multiple mission scenarios ranging from military to exploratory, Tuvok had found Captain Riker to be courageous, decisive, and intelligent (for a human), with an exceptionally flexible and improvisational mind.

  Despite his large size and proficiency at hand-to-hand combat, Riker was at his core a thoughtful being, serene in his sense of self, confident in bearing, and jovial in disposition. He was not one to pace. Yet, at Tuvok’s count, the captain had crossed, recrossed, and crossed again the bridge’s deck twenty-three times since coming on duty that morning.

  Riker did a passable job of concealing this activity from the rest of the bridge crew-pretending to peer over the helmsman’s shoulder (“A little tighter on those arcs, Aili. Impulse engines need a firm hand.”) or to move in on the main viewer for a closer look at the screen (“Amazing. There’s an entire stellar system sitting right there, and it’s completely invisible to the eye.”).

  None of it fooled Tuvok for an instant. Something was occupying a good deal of the captain’s attention, and it had nothing to do with their current mapping mission or its recent odd permutation.

  “You seem irritated, Mr. Tuvok,” said Riker, moving in beside him at tactical control. “Mr. Jaza’s hijinks getting to you?”

  “Not at all, sir,” said Tuvok, projecting the appearance of complete focus on the task before him. “Even if irritation were not an emotion of which I am incapable, sudden modifications to established mission parameters are, as humans say, the nature of the beast.”

   “Modified probe approaching target coordinates,”said Cadet Dakal’s voice.

  “Acknowledged,” said Tuvok, his brow knit ever so slightly as he methodically recalibrated one system after another. “Patching universal translator into probe control.”

   “Thank you,”said Jaza’s voice. “Probe will be in position in five seconds. Three seconds. One.”

  The countdown finished and nothing much happened. Titancontinued forward in its gentle ellipse, Ensign Lavena deftly navigating the ship between the invisible and intangible darklings.

  Riker drifted away from tactical, taking a position at the vacant science officer’s station, where he could watch the proceedings without a filter.

  Displayed before him was the telemetry from Jaza’s modified probe, now set to scan for and isolate the incredibly diffuse signal the team in the sensor pod had discovered.

  Riker hadn’t had a chance to try out the TOV harness yet, but watching the probe’s lifelike dips and spins as Dakal adjusted its positioning, he made a promise to add himself to the pilot roster the next time the probes were needed. Captain’s prerogative.

   Could have used that distraction now, he thought, running one hand slowly through his beard. This thing between him and Deanna had grown to elephantine proportions in only a few weeks. Their schedules had kept them mostly apart lately, but when they were together, things were increasingly frosty between them.

  He would press– Deanna, you know I’m right about this-and she would evade or dig in– Dammit, Will, let it go-and little by little, their ability to talk had dwindled almost to nil.

  After years of nearly complete openness about every subject or emotion, the growing chasm between them might actually do what all the maniacal conquerors, apocalyptic phenomena, and interstellar warfare had been unable to accomplish.

  The worst thing was that they both knew his attempts to press her were ultimately benign. The manifestation was unpleasant, friction making, but he just couldn’t seem to stop.

   “Signal acquired,”said Dakal’s voice. He sounded almost giddy. “Uploading to pod.”

   “Scan under way,”said Jaza. “Hold steady, Cadet. You’re bobbling.”

  Hundreds of lines of coded data began to dash across Riker’s monitor. At first it was all hash-random symbols denoting as yet unknown information-but once the UT really sank its teeth in, the chaos began to resolve.

  One by one, the symbols transformed into those he could understand. Two recognizable symbols became three, became ten, became an entire line of deciphered code, all of which Riker began to find unsettlingly familiar.

  “Tuvok?” said Riker. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “I am aware of the situation, sir,” said the Vulcan. “As, I suspect, is Mr. Jaza.”

   “Transcoding now,”said Jaza’s voice, but his tone was as grim as the Vulcan’s.

  A few seconds later, with nearly seventy percent of the signal acquired, they were all thinking the same thing.

   “That’s the best we’re getting, Captain,”Jaza reported. “There’s too much distortion to sift out the rest.”

  “Run what we have,” said Riker, moving quickly from the science station to the captain’s chair. “Let’s see this thing.”

  “The visual component is too corrupted for reliable translation,” said Tuvok mechanically.

  “Give me what you’ve got, Mr. Tuvok.”

  “Reconstructing audio.”

  A hush fell over the bridge as everyone waited to hear what some of them-those who’d paid attention in communication class at the Academy-had begun to dread.

  “*********** TITAN************* SENTIENTS ******* RECEIVE *************** DANGEROUS ********* EXPANDING ********** ******** ATTACK ********* HOSTILE ACTION ******** SPECIES ****** UNKNOWN ****************** *********************”

  The alert sounded near the end of Vale’s meeting with Counselor Huilan. She’d chosen to conceal the fact that it was a meeting by having the little psychologist accompany her as she walked the ship’s corridors, ostensibly on her way to the mess hall. If anyone asked, they were grabbing a quick snack before going on duty.

  Involving Huilan in her Plan B was not the course she would have taken had she not felt compelled, but of course that’s what Plan B’s always were-the less desirable alternative of first resort.

  Huilan had been reluctant to accept portions of the duty she was assigning, but when she spelled out the full picture, most of his misgivings vanished.

  “You’re mistaken about one thing,” he said in his growling chirp of a voice. “There’s no way I could be concealed inside a satchel or carried anywhere by most members of the crew. I’m small, Commander, but exceedingly dense.”

  Vale had actually smiled at that. Huilan was a S’ti’ach. To human observers, his people resembled small, blue, four-armed bears.

  On most Class-M worlds, such creatures were relatively unremarkable. S’ti’ach, by contrast, was a hyper g planet and, while its flora and fauna were compact by Federation norms, their molecular structures were another matter entirely.

  Though Huilan’s head barely reached Vale’s knees, his mass exceeded hers by a factor of four or five times. He’d be more likely to lift her than the converse. Hell, he could probably toss her from one side of the cabin to the other without much effort.

  “So, what do you suggest?” she said. “There’s no way either of them is going to sit down with you and bare their souls.”

  “Yes,” said Huilan thoughtfully. “Counselor Troi has been fairly blinkered about this matter.”

  It would have been stupid for Vale not to expect that Huilan had pegged some of the same symptoms in Troi and the captain as she. He was a professional, and he worked as closely with Troi as Vale did with Will Riker.

  She was both gratified and disappointed to know that her misgivings weren’t the result of generic XO paranoia. Something was happening with Riker and Troi, something unpleasant that neither of them would divulge.

  Vale and Huilan found themselves at the galley, suddenly assaulted by the clamor from within. The shift change meal was one of the noisiest, and this was no exception.

  “I’m not asking you to spy on anyone,” she said, fighting to be heard over the cacophony of chattering voices. “I just want you to get a look at them together, make an evaluation, and submit your recommendations to me.”

  “I don’t know, Commander,” said Huilan, clearly still somewhat dubious about the whole thing. “Clandestine therapies are extremely problematic. As is diagnosis without a close interaction with the patient.”

  Vale was about to counter with some Pakled axiom about using the tools one had, but before she could, the alert sounded.

   “All decks, go to Yellow Alert,”said Tuvok’s voice. “This is not a drill.”

  As the mass exodus from the galley got under way, Vale’s combadge chirped. Riker’s voice summoned her to the bridge.

  “On my way, Captain,” she said, heading out.

  “It’s one of ours. You’re sure?”

  “The signal was fragmented, but it had a Starfleet signature, Chris,” said Riker as she slid into the first officer’s chair beside him. “And whoever they were, they called Titanby name.”

  “So, we’re already under way,” she said as the dwindling black mass of Occultus Ora was reabsorbed into the larger pattern of streaming stars on the main viewer. “Any idea which ship it is?”

  “Not yet,” said Riker. “Aside from the fact that the signal itself is almost completely shredded, the gravity distortions in Occultus Ora prevented us from getting a directional lock.”

  “Clearing darkling system now, Captain,” said helmsman Lavena.

  “Thank you, Ensign,” said Riker, then, turning to his tactical officer, “Tuvok?”

  “The signal seems to have originated somewhere in or near the region of FSR-B2157, also called the Elysia Incendae system,” said Tuvok as the data came through. “A moment, Captain. Mr. Jaza and I are-” Tuvok stopped speaking and moved from tactical to the science station. “There is still some interference preventing us from pinpointing or communicating with the sender.”

  “What’s causing it?”

  “That is unknown at this time, Captain,” the Vulcan said coolly. Vale envied him his composure. Her own pulse was already beating more quickly than she liked, and she hadn’t even heard the distress signal herself.

  “Ensign Lavena,” Riker said, “what’s our ETA to the Elysia Incendae system?”

  “Twenty-seven hours at warp six, sir,” said Lavena.

  “Set course and engage.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lavena said as her sheathed fingers danced over her navigation console.

  “You think it’s Charon, don’t you?” said Vale, leaning in for a private whisper with her captain.

  “She’s closest,” was the grim response. “But it could be any of them.”

  Vale’s mind flashed immediately to the rest of the fleet. Including Titan, Starfleet had four identical Luna-class vessels exploring the reaches of the Beta Quadrant. The ships were spread across the region like microscopic pearls on an infinite ebony beach.

  The nearest of them, the U.S.S. Charon, was many parsecs away the last time her mission updates were transmitted.

   That was weeks ago, thought Vale. By now Charonshould be somewhere deep inside the Ring Nebula, not loitering around these parts.

  “What do we know about the Elysia Incendae system, Mr. Jaza?” Riker called out.

   “The cursory survey on record lists FSR-B2157 as a G1 star orbited by five planets, one of which is located in the habitable zone for Class-M life. However, the presence of such life has never been confirmed.”

  “The words sentientand specieswere both in the transmission,” Riker said.

   “True, sir,”Jaza acknowledged. “But we cannot know with any certainty in what context they were being used.”

  Riker turned to Vale. “Is Drakmondo or Fortis captaining Charon?” said Riker.

  “Captain Bellatora Fortis,” said Vale, punching up their sister vessel’s personnel files on her chair display. “Born on New Riyadh. Graduated the Academy three years ahead of me. Got her pips after the Second Battle of Chin’toka.”

  “Battlefield promotion,” said Riker, frowning slightly. Vale understood. She remembered Fortis now: Tall, pale, and slender to the point of being reedy, she was no one you’d would expect to enter, much less survive, a fight. But when a Breen attack had taken the life of her captain and first officer on the U.S.S. Sparrowhawk, it was Bellatora Fortis who’d kept the nearly crippled ship in the fight. And it was Fortis who brought her home. Her reputation was that of a good soldier but not one possessed of the most flexible mind. The necessities of the war had put a lot of people in the captain’s chair without giving them the chance to truly develop space legs as explorers. Vale hoped Charonhadn’t stumbled into something too complex for her captain’s linear sensibilities to navigate.

  “Give me warp seven, Ensign,” Riker said.

  “Warp seven, aye.”

  “Nice color, by the way,” Riker said quietly, and Vale suddenly realized he was speaking to her again. “Brings out the red in your uniform.”

  “Very funny,” she said, not the least bit amused by the joke, but grateful to see some glimmer of the old Riker emerge. He was quiet after that. The entire bridge was. The stars, transformed to pinprick strokes of white by the ship’s warp field, streamed past Titan’s main viewer as silent as the void that held them.

  Vale had wanted some external force to arrive and snap them back into cohesion. Now she’d got it, and it stuck going down.

  What was it her mother always said?

   “Be mindful of wishing, Christine. You might get what you ask for instead of what you want.”

Chapter Three

  T he pulse hit Titanten hours into her journey, slapping the vessel out of warp the way a Klingon fist knocks teeth out of an enemy’s mouth.

  The tidal forces created by Titan’s return to what should have been normal space shorted out systems, disrupting everything utterly, washing over and through the ship as if its amazing catalogue of defenses were nonexistent.

  Before the gravity reasserted, a fair number of the crew were slammed into bulkheads or ceilings by their own pent-up inertia. The most durable or agile of them were unfazed, snapping into duty posture even before the Red Alert klaxons directed them to their stations.

  The more fragile crew members-the primates, the smaller reptiloids, the relatively spindly Dr. Celenthe-took the brunt. Ensign Torvig spent a harrowing fifteen minutes forcing his cybernetic enhancements back to heel after nearly all of his primary control subroutines had been wiped by the pulse.

  Contrary to appearances, the pulse hadn’t come out of nowhere. Both Tuvok and Jaza managed to belt out timely but ultimately fruitless exclamations of warning in the second or two before the ship was overcome.

  They had been studying the pattern of the distortions that led them here, seeking its point of origin, but while there was evidence of some sort of massive quantum disturbance throughout this region, there was as yet no sign of its cause. The interference itself defied analysis.

  Just as they were calling Ra-Havreii to get his input on the problem-perhaps it lay not with the phenomenon but with Titan’s sensor nets-the pulse hit.

  When the emergency lights came on and the shouting died to sporadic spikes in the post-disaster pall, there was a single question in the minds of Titan’s crew.

  “What the hell was that?” Riker asked, picking himself up off the deck as the emergency lights came on. “Status report!” He watched as Vale climbed back into her seat and immediately began to pull information from her console.

  “Secondary systems are still initializing, Captain,” Vale said, the crimson light casting her in harsh black shadows.

  “Helm control is wobbly,” said Lavena, after righting herself. “Warp engines are offline.”

  “The hull is intact,” Tuvok said, as other systems came online. “No breaches reported. Minor torque striation on the port nacelle strut.”