The Stuff of Dreams
Author: James Swallow
Date: 2013-03-25 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Star Trek
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Historian’s Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For Sue, Carole, Darren, and Phil

HISTORIAN’S NOTE

This story takes place in the year 2384, some months after the events of the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Cold Equations #3: The Body Electric.

1

There was a quality to the light unlike anything Jean-Luc Picard had ever seen. The peculiarity of its warm and ethereal glow cast soft waves of color across the bridge of the Enterprise and the upturned faces of his crew. He had forgotten about it, in the pitch and moment of the swift journey here, in the work of being captain and all that entailed.

But now, as he laid eyes upon the phenomenon for the second time in his life, Picard felt something that stirred a little of the poet in his soul. The motion and pace of the object, the way it writhed through space like a windborne pennant of star-stuff . . . It gave him pause to watch it chart its slow, steady passage, and those thoughts grew heavy when he remembered all the suffering and distress that surrounded it.

Still, the questions that had come to him in that first moment returned. Where did it come from? What confluence of cosmic events had combined to invest such a thing with existence? Does it live in some sense? Is it intelligent in a way we can never perceive? Or is it a device, a tool of minds infinitely superior to ours, now lost and forgotten?

“Captain?” Worf’s voice broke his reverie, and Picard turned to glance over his shoulder to where his first officer was standing. He and the Klingon were the only ones on the bridge who had seen the phenomenon before, and the silence, the held breath in the throats of the rest of the duty officers, made plain their awe at the alien sight. “What are your orders?” continued the commander. Worf’s stance was stiff and wary; he disliked anything that he couldn’t grasp in a rational manner, and the band of coruscating light was very much that.

Picard straightened and turned back to the viewscreen. “The nexus,” he said, and giving the energy ribbon its name seemed to break its spell. “Lieutenant Faur, range to object?”

At the flight control by his side, the woman blinked and nodded at the question. “Four thousand kilometers to the outer phase nimbus, sir. We’re moving in parallel now.”

“Look sharp,” he offered. “Don’t let it fool you. It’s as dangerous as it is beautiful.”

“Aye, sir,” said Faur, nodding again.

Worf glanced at a readout. “Commander La Forge reports no adverse field effects from our proximity to the object. Warp core remains stable.”

Picard nodded, accepting the information without comment.

“Sensors are reading the U.S.S. Newton on the far side of the object,” said the Cardassian at ops, the other forward console. “They’re holding outside the engagement perimeter, as per standing orders.” The young exchange officer seemed slightly out of place on the bridge, the only one of them dressed in a non-Starfleet uniform.

Picard nodded. “Thank you, Glinn Dygan. Maintain course and heading. Lieutenant Chen?” The captain signaled to the woman at the aft systems panel with an incline of his head. “Show me the Newton.”

“Yes, Captain,” offered the Vulcan female. Her hands danced over the panel, and the main screen shifted to show a Starfleet Nebula-class cruiser.

The other ship was moving in a slow lockstep with the nexus, the thick upper equipment module at its stern angled to present its full dorsal surface toward the eerie light of the phenomenon. Picard saw dense rows of advanced scanner arrays and whiskery antennae lining the Newton’s sensor pod, all of them active, all drinking in gigaquads of new data every second on every aspect of the energy ribbon.

Whereas Enterprise was a multirole starship, the Newton was a dedicated science vessel, her interiors filled with laboratories and analysis suites of every conceivable kind. She had a larger than normal contingent of civilians on board, scientists engaged in Starfleet’s offworld research programs, and a crew of some of the Federation’s brightest minds. Picard knew the ship’s captain—a curt fellow named Thom Bryant—by reputation only. Bryant had graduated from the Academy the year before Picard, and his record spoke of an exemplary career as an engineering officer before he rose to a command of his own. This would be Bryant’s show, any questions of seniority notwithstanding, and in truth, Picard was willing to let another officer take the lead here. His experiences with the nexus thirteen years ago at Veridian III had left an indelible mark on him, and he was in no rush to revisit it.

“The readings coming off that . . . thing . . .” said Dygan, his lined face twisting in a grimace. “If I didn’t know better, I might think I was looking at the start of a catastrophic sensor malfunction.”

“The nexus doesn’t exist in the same sense as we do.” At the science station, Lieutenant Dina Elfiki offered an explanation. She made a complex shape in the air with her hands. “It’s atemporal, out of phase with our space-time. Transdimensional, even.” She shook her head. “Quite remarkable. And infuriatingly difficult to understand.”

Picard nodded to himself. The Newton’s presence as the shepherd of the nexus was part of the Federation’s attempt to gather some of that elusive understanding. During the incident with the El-Aurian renegade Tolian Soran, and his ruthless attempts to divert the course of the nexus, Picard had learned of the energy ribbon’s strange qualities through firsthand experience. The nonmatter of the phenomenon was literally psychoactive. It responded to the wants and desires of intelligent minds in direct contact with it. When contained “inside” it, a living being was insulated from the passage of time, suspended in a bubble of unreality that built itself out of the being’s memories. For those within, the nexus was a kind of Elysium. Like being inside joy, Guinan had said.

Picard’s old friend had experienced that timeless paradise, just as Soran had, but Guinan had returned to reality, while Soran never truly did. In the years that followed, the El-Aurian constructed a scheme to return to that place of immortality and perfection—a scheme that exacted a heavy cost, to the very death of suns and worlds . . . and one of Starfleet’s greatest heroes.

He knew why Soran had done those things. Picard’s memories of the nexus, of the moment when he was subsumed into it, had been buried deep. Now they returned, and he quickly smothered an irrational pang of regret, remembering how hard it had been to break away from his own private, perfect world there.

Picard’s report to Starfleet Command after the fact and his subsequent debriefing by the Department of Temporal Investigations were the reason why Newton was here; for not only did the nexus possess the capacity to construct synthetic realities out of pure thought, but its atemporal nature had the potential to act as a gateway to anywhere or anywhen. Such power could not be allowed to move through the galaxy unchecked.

And yet for a time, it had. On a steep elliptical orbit that took it up and out of the galactic plane of the ecliptic, the nexus had been free to drift through the empty void of intergalactic space, monitored only by autonomous probes as it completed its 39.1-year cycle. A massed Borg invasion and a handful of other crises took the Federation’s attention, and the nexus became lost in a sea of troubles as Starfleet fought wars and disasters. The nexus should not have returned until the second decade of the twenty-fifth century; but it was becoming clear that the effect wrought upon the energy ribbon by Soran’s influence had changed it in ways that could not have been predicted. The orbital path of the nexus had been radically altered, and the crew of the Newton was still trying to fathom the degree of those changes. Enterprise was here to assist. Those were Picard’s orders, but he couldn’t escape the sense that there was more lurking beneath them. The thought did not sit well with him.

A chime sounded from the first officer’s panel, and Worf bent to study it. “We are being hailed,” he announced. “It is Commander Rhonu.”

“On-screen,” Picard ordered, looking up as the image of the Newton changed to a view of the science vessel’s bridge and the ship’s executive officer, a middle-aged Betazoid woman with shoulder-length auburn hair and the deep black eyes characteristic of her species.

“Captain Picard, welcome,” she began. “Captain Bryant sends his apologies, but he’s engaged in an experiment down in Lab Six right now and couldn’t be here to greet you.”

“I understand,” he replied, ignoring the minor breach of protocol. “The Enterprise stands ready to assist, Commander. My astrophysics and engineering teams are at your disposal.”

Rhonu nodded. “We’re ready to brief them. Your timing is perfect, sir. We’re a day away from proceeding to the last phase of our operations here.”

“Oh?” Picard exchanged a look with Worf. The commander’s comment had a ring of finality to it. “I don’t follow you.”

Her smile tightened a little. “It would be best if the captain explained.”

“Very well. I will beam over with the team leaders. There’s no time like the present.”

“We’ll be waiting. Newton out.” The image flicked back to the view of local space and Picard turned away.

“Last phase,” he echoed, as Worf came closer. “Number One, I don’t recall anything in Starfleet’s orders about concluding this research mission.”

“There was not,” confirmed the Klingon. His lips thinned. “However, our orders were considerably more indefinite than usual.”

“Yes,” Picard agreed. The phrase captain’s discretion had cropped up a number of times. Neither officer was overly enamored of such vagaries, and Rhonu’s comments had only deepened the captain’s growing concern. “I think we’ll put an end to that.” He tugged his tunic straight. “You have the bridge, Commander. Inform Mister La Forge I’ll be joining him in the transporter room.”

*   *   *

The hatch hissed open and Picard entered Lab Six’s observation room. The compartment was essentially a large balcony extending out over the deck of the wide, two-story chamber. Below, on the lower level, technicians and engineering officers worked at a large holographic projector matrix connected to banks of data stacks, making last-second adjustments with probe-like tools or locking glowing cables into place.

Thom Bryant stood at a control lectern, peering over it to take in the work of his crew. His attention flicked back and forth between the action beneath him and a data padd in his hand. The Newton’s captain absently brushed a loose curl of ice-gray hair out of his eyes and frowned. “Are we ready to go again?” he called. The man was broad-shouldered, but with a spare frame. Bryant’s oval face was firm and unsmiling, and his gaze betrayed an intensity that his junior officers doubtless saw as intimidating. “I’m reading green across the board here.”

A Cygnian woman wearing a lieutenant commander’s rank called back up to him. “Aye, sir. On your word.”

“Begin.” Bryant turned and caught sight of the other captain for the first time. There was a momentary flash of dismay, but he covered it quickly. “Picard. Welcome aboard.”

“Captain Bryant. I thought it best to speak with you as soon as possible.”

“Of course.” He beckoned him closer. “Take a look. We’re about to sample the nexus. Virtually, I mean.”

Picard took in the systems display in front of him, grasping the nature of the experiment immediately. “Holographic mapping. You’re trying to scan a portion of the ribbon down to the molecular scale and build a digital simulacrum.”

“That’s the idea.” Bryant glowered at the padd, then indicated the Cygnian. “My chief engineer, Tanna Vetro, and I collaborated on the design of the modeling matrix.” He paused. “It’s been a challenge.”

“I don’t doubt it.” The holograph activated as the words left his mouth, and suddenly the empty air over the projector unit rippled with floods of false-color pixels. Tiny motes of light converged and coalesced into something resembling a truncated section of the nexus phenomenon; but the image was unstable, dropping in and out of focus. Picard glanced at the display and saw a torrent of information flooding through the simulator matrix as it tried to duplicate the form of the energy ribbon.

Red warning flags bloomed across the screen, one after another, and Bryant cursed under his breath. “Vetro!” he snapped. “Increase the processor speed to compensate. We’re going to lose parity in twenty seconds!”

The engineer’s body language spoke for her, the stiffening of her shoulders making her annoyance clear. “No good, Captain,” she reported. “It’s coming through faster than we can compensate. Same as before. The fractal structure is just too dense.”

The holo-image shimmered and burst like a firework in one moment of brilliant destruction before it vanished. A pane of text replaced it, turning slowly; on it were the words Automatic Shutdown Initiated.

Picard felt the tension vent from the lab, to be replaced by a sullen silence. Bryant let the padd drop to the panel and let out a breath through his teeth. “All right,” he said, addressing his staff. “Confirm failure. Salvage what you can and we’ll look again at trying another reset.” He eyed Vetro. “Lieutenant Commander, report to me when you’re ready for the next attempt.”

“Like trying to catch lightning in a bottle,” offered Picard.

Bryant nodded. “It’s incredible. But then you’d know better than I, you’ve been inside.” Before Picard could reply, the other captain went on. “I had hoped we’d be able to get something—even a snapshot of the ribbon’s form—but we’re working in the dark. The outer structure is just too complex for the ship’s computers to simulate, even fractionally.” He sighed. “Whoever built it was a lot smarter than us.”

“You think the nexus is an engineered artifact?”

“Don’t you?” Bryant snorted. “I don’t believe in deities or coincidence, Picard. The nexus is simply too intricate to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. Someone made it—they just forgot to leave the operating manual where we could find it.”

Picard folded his arms behind his back. “Captain. My orders were to bring Enterprise to the nexus to assist you in your research. But Commander Rhonu intimated that isn’t the case.”

The other man looked away, running a hand through his hair. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

*   *   *

The Newton had a small observation lounge on the ventral side of the hull, a line of wide and low windows looking out toward the nexus. The compartment was empty, and Bryant led Picard through it to a table before the magnificent view.

“Two years we’ve been here now,” he said. “Shadowing that thing through empty space, running every kind of test in the book on it, even making up new ones along the way. Do you know what we’ve learned?” Again, Bryant didn’t wait for an answer. “That we are like cavemen poking at the innards of a warp engine. The scans alone will take decades to decipher. Understanding them could take generations.”

“That’s the mission,” noted Picard. “To seek out.”

“I’m aware.” Bryant’s reply was brusque. “But now we don’t have that luxury anymore. As much as we want to remain explorers, circumstances force us into different roles.”

“What do you mean?” The other captain sounded troubled.

Bryant answered quietly, “The Newton continually tracks the orbit of the nexus in real time. For some months we’ve seen an increasing trend toward a path that will take it outside its previous thirty-nine-year orbit and on to a totally new trajectory. Right now, we’re in empty, unclaimed territory. But in less than a month, the nexus will exit this region and cross into a zone claimed as sovereign space by the Holy Order of the Kinshaya.”

Picard’s blood ran cold. He didn’t need to ask Bryant if he was certain; the Newton’s captain wasn’t the kind of man to make such a statement without having triple-checked the facts personally. Although the Kinshaya theocracy’s militaristic bent had softened in recent times, they were still considered by the Federation to be a potential antagonist state—and it was rumored that hard-line factions within the Order were vying for a chance to return to their earlier superiority. But more than that, as a member nation of the Typhon Pact, what fell into Kinshaya hands could also become a tool of that interstellar rival to the United Federation of Planets.

Bryant read Picard’s train of thought in his eyes. “Now you know why the orders were vague. Starfleet’s trying to keep a tight lid on this, and we don’t want word of our intentions leaking out to any Pact spies who might be listening. If they take control of the nexus, if they figure out how it works, they’ll have a free ticket to rewrite history. A single operative, properly briefed, could stop the Federation from existing . . .”

Picard folded his arms. “I’m not sure the nexus would let that happen.” He said the words before he was aware of them.

“No?” Bryant eyed him. “Weren’t you the one who used it to change history?”

“What I did was small . . . on a cosmic scale.”

Bryant pointed at the ribbon. “Look at that thing. Can you tell me it works on any scale that we understand?”

Picard nodded slowly. “You may have a point.” He paused, considering. “Perhaps we could look on this as an opportunity instead of a problem. If we made overtures to the Kinshaya, made them aware of the potential danger the nexus represents—”

“The diplomatic approach has already been discussed and discarded. We can’t take the risk.” Bryant walked closer to the windows, watching the ribbon as it shifted and moved.

“All right,” said Picard. “Another option, then. My crew have a wide range of experience of unusual and anomalous events. I’ll put the full weight of their expertise on this. We’ll find a different solution to the dilemma.”

Bryant shook his head. “No. That’s not why you’re here. I’ve already made my recommendation to Starfleet Command and they have approved it. Your chief engineer, La Forge—by now he will have been given a secure data packet containing everything he needs to know to begin an immediate modification to the Enterprise’s main deflector dish.”

“To what end?” Picard bristled at the other captain’s matter-of-fact tone.

“When the adjustments are complete, Newton and Enterprise will take up stations at optimal distance from the ribbon. We’ll synchronize our deflectors to send out a modulated subspace pulse, directly into the core of the nexus. The phase effect of the ribbon should destabilize and trigger a collapse into n-dimensional space.”

“You want to destroy it?” He was aghast at the suggestion. “It’s a unique object, unlike anything else we’ve encountered!”

“It’s a threat,” Bryant replied flatly. “I’m not ignorant of the ramifications of this, Picard, be certain of that. But I am pragmatic. And if the choice is between nullifying the nexus or handing a group of religious fundamentalists the keys to a time machine . . .” He paused. “It’s really not a choice at all, is it?”

“There has to be a better answer,” Picard retorted. “You have no idea what kind of side effects a subspace pulse would have on the ribbon! It could be catastrophic.”

Bryant’s expression did not change. He had clearly anticipated this conversation, and already decided he would not be swayed. “Frankly, I didn’t want Enterprise to be a part of this. I told Starfleet that your personal experiences with the nexus might cloud your judgment. But Command felt your insight would be valuable. I have operational authority here, Picard. I’ve made my decision and Starfleet has authorized it. Is that clear?”

“It is.” He bit out the words. “But you should know I will formally protest these orders.”

“I expected no less,” Bryant told him. “But I also expect you to comply.” He paused for a moment, and briefly his expression lost its hard edge. “You know where we are. You know better than I what the Federation has been through over the past few years. The threat of the Machine, the Borg invasion, and the rise of the Typhon Pact . . . Starfleet is still on the back foot, still trying to recover. We’ve lost a lot of good people. We cannot afford to supply the ships and the manpower to deal with the nexus and the ongoing threat it represents. The simplest solution is to take it out of the equation. Once the nexus is gone, so is the danger.”

Picard’s thoughts raced in the silence that followed. Suddenly everything about the assignment that had rung a wrong note, every small inkling of misgiving he had sensed, all of it snapped into sharp, hard focus. We have been called here to demolish something beautiful, he told himself. I cannot let that go unchallenged.

“Captain Bryant,” he began, “I have my oath to the service and I’ll follow it, and you, if that is what Command wants. But I also swore an oath to explore and to preserve all that I found along the way. The nexus represents one of the most extraordinary objects ever encountered by the Federation. We must make every possible attempt to preserve its uniqueness.” He advanced on the other officer. “I want a chance to offer an alternative.”

“Some of the best theorists in the Federation have already tried and failed. What makes you think the Enterprise’s crew can do better?”

Picard straightened. “I think our reputation speaks for itself.” He met the other man’s gaze. “At least let my people try, Bryant. We have the time.”

“No,” he replied, “we really don’t. The clock is running. Our sensors have picked up remote probes of Kinshaya design observing the Newton and the nexus for several days now. They’ll have ships here soon. They’re going to want to take a closer look, and this is unclaimed space, so we can’t stop them.” He frowned again. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours. After that we’re committed.”

*   *   *

Bryant made his excuses, and Picard found himself in the company of a solemn Caldonian ensign summoned to escort the captain back to the Newton’s transporter room; but when the turbolift doors opened, a more familiar face was waiting for him out in the corridor.

“Jean-Luc!” The Styrisian was typical of his species, an angular humanoid dressed in short, layered robes, with a bicolor flesh tone in lines of russet shades arranged like the stripes of a Terran tiger. The scientist was the very opposite of such a creature, however: a mild-mannered soul but an intense thinker with it. He and Picard had known each other since the earliest days of the latter’s captaincy of the Enterprise-D, although in recent years their occasional communications had tapered off to almost nothing.

Nevertheless, Picard was pleased to see his old friend. “Kolb.” He patted his palm to his chest twice in the traditional Styrisian manner of greeting and the scientist reciprocated. Despite the circumstances, he felt a surge of warmth at seeing the man again. “This is a surprise. . . . It’s been too long! I wasn’t aware you were on board. I thought you were still with the Daystrom Institute.”

“I am. I’ve been seconded here to Starfleet. Astrophysics takes you to many places.” Kolb shot the ensign a wary look and then fell in step with them as they walked down the corridor. “Fourteen months on the Project Nexus team,” he admitted. “I have to say that this has been one of the most incredible research projects I’ve ever taken part in.” He paused, his eyes narrowing. “I’m sorry I’ve been so remiss about contacting you. But there’s been so much work, and then all the other . . . issues. . . .” He trailed off.

“We’ve all had more than our fair share to deal with,” Picard replied, and left it at that. Hard times make our priorities change, he reflected.

“I was elated when I heard that the Enterprise was coming,” Kolb went on. “Jean-Luc, we must speak.” He eyed Picard’s escort again. “Privately.”

Something in Kolb’s tone made it clear he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“Ensign?” The captain tilted his head to look up at the tall, thin-framed Caldonian. “You’re dismissed. I can find my way to Transporter Room Two on my own.”

The junior officer hesitated for a long second, then bowed her head and walked away. The moment she was out of earshot, Kolb leaned close, speaking quickly and intently.

“Don’t think poorly of me, but I don’t want to talk for old times’ sake. This isn’t about catching up.”

“I suspected so,” Picard said dryly. “Let me hazard a guess and say you’re unhappy with Captain Bryant’s plans for the nexus?”

“Unhappy?” The word burst from his lips. “My friend, there’s practically a rebellion brewing among the civilian science contingent. Angry exchanges, letters of complaint, a stack of formal protests to Starfleet Command!”

“Do tell.” Picard mused on the addition to those protests he would be sending on his own, not that it would make any difference at this point.

Kolb’s face soured. “Bryant is a fine officer, that’s not in question. But he’s an engineer, not a scientist. He takes a mechanical view of everything. What is that human phrase you use? He sees everything in white and black.”

Picard nodded his agreement with the astrophysicist’s evaluation. “Perhaps so. But Starfleet gave him operational command of this mission, and the Federation Science Council approved that choice. If you’re asking me to overrule him, Kolb, I can’t, as much as it concerns me.”

“I know you, Jean-Luc. I know you have history with the nexus. And I also know you abhor the thought of obliterating something amazing and unique.”

The captain sighed. “All true. But short of following in Tolian Soran’s footsteps and blowing up stars to shift the nexus ribbon’s path, there’s little we can do to preserve it.”

“Not so,” said Kolb, seizing on his words. From the folds of his robes he drew a complex tricorder, a heavily modified custom model tailored for high-level scientific operations. He thumbed open a panel on the device to reveal a small holo-emitter, and with a couple of deft taps, the tricorder projected a series of data panels, floating in the air like a fan of cards. Kolb manipulated them with his long fingers. “I’ve been working on something that could solve the problem for some time. A resonant verteron membrane, self-regenerating, capable of encompassing the entire span of the nexus effect!”

The calculations were extremely complex, even for a man of Picard’s expertise, but he caught the thrust of the idea. “An energy sheath, impenetrable from the outside.”

“Yes!” Kolb nodded sharply. “We could, in effect, lock the nexus shut. The verteron membrane would draw energy from the radiation output of the phenomenon itself and make it impossible for anyone to access its atemporal matrix! The nexus would drift through Kinshaya space and out the other side, untouched.”

“And afterwards you could open this . . . lock?”

“Theoretically, yes. If we program a specific quantum frequency, the membrane could be made to dissipate after the fact. Anyone who didn’t know the correct frequency pattern—the key, if you will—would not be able to gain entry to the nexus.”

Picard folded his arms. “If you can do this, then why haven’t you?”

Kolb’s face fell, and an almost childlike look of despair came over him. “I have failed in every attempt I have made to initiate the verteron membrane.” He held up the tricorder. “The plain truth of it is, I am missing vital data elements. Without them, I’m guessing.”

“Data from where?”

“Past the outer edge of the nexus. From within it.” He sighed. “Our probes never return. And Starfleet has forbidden us to send a manned expedition into the effect.”

“On my recommendation, Kolb,” Picard insisted. “With good cause, believe me.”

The Styrisian’s head bobbed and his gaze went distant. “I know, I know. I don’t aim to change that. But I want you to take this.” He plucked an isolinear optical chip from the tricorder’s casing and pressed it into Picard’s hand. “Your engineer, La Forge, your crew . . . they’re held in great regard by everyone at the Institute. All I ask is that you have your people look this over, try and fill the voids in my figures.”

Picard looked down at the rod, turning it over in his fingers. He knew that La Forge and his engineering staff would be working multiple shifts to prepare the Enterprise’s deflector for the subspace pulse, and by rights he shouldn’t trouble them with this distraction. When Bryant had told Picard he had a day to come up with another solution, he had known the Enterprise crew would not have a moment to spare.

It’s moments like this, thought the captain, that I wish Data hadn’t decided to leave us. “Very well. But I can’t promise you anything, Kolb.”

“It can work,” insisted the scientist, “I know it.”

*   *   *

“It’ll never work,” said Commander Geordi La Forge, pushing the padd across the table with one hand and pinching the bridge of his nose with the fingers of the other. “The theory is solid, but the equations are full of holes.” Picard’s second officer spoke quietly so as not to disturb the captain’s wife in the other room. Beverly was singing softly to their son as she put him down for bed; little René’s sleep had been troubled in recent days.

Picard sipped at the tea in front of him and frowned. “I was afraid of that.” He shook his head. “I think I knew the moment Kolb handed me the data. He was desperate—I saw it in his eyes. The same look he had on the day we first met.”

“The Anchilles fever outbreak on Styris IV.” La Forge nodded. “I remember.”

He tapped the padd with his finger. “Do you think you could patch the gaps?”

“Give me a month or three, maybe. By tomorrow? Not a chance, not even with Lieutenant Elfiki’s help. It’s as much guesswork as it is solid science. About the only useful material in there is the shield harmonics data.”

“How so?”

“Kolb figured out a way to modulate force shields to protect an artificial object crossing over the nexus event horizon. But it’s a moot point, because all the remote probes sent in never return.”

“No living minds to guide them back out,” Picard mused. He set down the tea. “All right, Geordi. Thank you for trying. What about the subspace pulse?”

“I’ve got Taurik running test models right now. We’ll be ready to go when Bryant gives the word.”

“You think that will work?”

The engineer nodded ruefully. “Oh, the pulse will work all right, Captain. With a big enough hammer, you can break anything.” He paused. “I should tell you, I made my own pass over the nexus data, sir.”

“And?”

“I’m sorry I don’t have anything to offer as an alternative. I looked into the creation of a gravimetric shear as a way of changing the course of the object, but we’d need the output of a G-type star to power it. We could try seeding the path of the nexus with microsingularities to pull it into a different trajectory—”

“Starfleet is not going to let us scatter black holes across the sector, Commander, no matter how small they are.”

“No.” The engineer blinked with fatigue and looked away.

“Geordi, how long has it been since you slept?”

Picard looked up to see Beverly standing in the doorway.

“A while.”

She showed him the same face she gave René when he was less than truthful about something. “As of now, you’re off duty, doctor’s orders. Stay in bed until alpha shift.”

“Captain?” La Forge looked to Picard for support, but he shrugged.

“My wife has already sent one young man to his repose, Mister La Forge. I’ve learned it’s best not to argue with her.”

“Aye, sir.” La Forge stood up and made for the door. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

As the door slid shut again, Picard let out a breath. “You heard what he said?”

“I did,” said his wife, padding over to the replicator for a glass of water. “What are you going to do?”

“What can I do?” he retorted, with frustration. “It’s a fait accompli. I can’t countermand Thom Bryant just because he’s being cold-blooded about this. Everything he said about the risks posed by the nexus is true.”

“That’s not what’s eating at you,” she said, and not for the first time, he marveled at Beverly’s unerring ability to see right to the core of him. “This is about what happened to you on Veridian III. It’s about Soran and Kirk.”

“Yes, more than I’d like to admit.” He paused, staring into the middle distance, recalling the living dream of a perfect Christmas Day. “I have to wonder, am I so opposed to this because of my experiences within the nexus? Did Soran feel something like this, but more acutely?” He got up, suddenly compelled to go to her, to make certain she was real. They touched hands for a moment, and she gave him a worried look. His smile made it fade, and Picard pulled away, walking to the entrance to his son’s room.

René was in there, already sprawled across his bed and fast asleep, the soft gasp of his breathing rising and falling. A grim thought, all hard edges, pushed its way to the front of Picard’s mind. If the nexus was abused by an enemy of the Federation, all history could be undone. Everything changed, taken away.

Everything we’ve made here could be lost.

He frowned. “We will do what we must.”

2

Enterprise drifted slowly to its assigned station, the massive bulk of the sleek starship nudged gently into position by the push of ion thrusters arranged along the flanks of its hull. If it were out of position by so much as half a nacelle’s length, the precious synchrony required for the operation would be lost. The vessel’s oval saucer section rose gently until the glowing disk of the main deflector dish was aimed directly at the writhing snake of energy that was the nexus.

Directly opposite the Enterprise, the Newton was already in its active position, the glow of the science vessel’s deflector growing stronger as the subspace pulse program went through pre-discharge preparations. Without ceremony or pause, the two Starfleet ships prepared to end the existence of the alien phenomenon.

*   *   *

“All systems are green,” said La Forge from the bridge’s engineering console. He shot a look at Lieutenant Elfiki and she nodded her assent to him. “We’re ready to commit, Captain.”

Picard gave a solemn nod and leaned forward in his chair, his hands coming together, his fingers forming a steeple that he pressed to his lips. “Status of the Newton, Number One?”

“On station,” rumbled Worf. “Commander Rhonu reports they are waiting on our word.”

The captain felt a sudden impetus to say something, but for a moment he wasn’t sure what it should be. A eulogy for this unique object? There should be more memorial to the nexus than just a cloud of dissipating particles.

He wondered where Kolb was at this precise moment. The Styrisian scientist had not reacted well when Picard told him that his data was too patchy to use. There had been cross words, something that had never passed between them in all their two decades of friendship.

He sighed. “Moment of truth, then. Lieutenant Chen, if you would? Signal the Newton. Tell them we are ready to begin.”

“Aye, sir,” said the woman. “Starting the clock . . . now.”

Picard eyed the small monitor at his side. A countdown was falling quickly toward zero, perfectly in step with a similar display on the bridge of the other vessel. He wondered if Bryant was sharing the same misgivings as he was. Unlikely, he thought. The Newton’s commander wasn’t even on the bridge of his ship; instead, Bryant was below on the engineering decks, personally overseeing the deployment of the pulse effect.

He looked to his own chief engineer just as La Forge spoke again. “Power levels at sixty-six percent and climbing. Discharge matrix ready. No issues reported.”

“All decks, stand by for subspace pulse.” Worf spoke into the ship-wide intercom. Elsewhere on the Enterprise, the vessel’s sensitive systems were already going into stand-by mode or temporary shutdown to weather the brief, controlled spatial storm that was about to occur.

“Power levels are optimal,” said La Forge. “Ready to activate.”

Picard watched the last few seconds drop away, and his gaze shifted back to the main viewscreen and the shimmering ribbon of energy. He smothered an impulse to avert his gaze.

“Four seconds. Three. Two.” Worf counted off the last moments of the nexus’s existence. “One.”

“Activate.” The captain bit out the word, and a brilliant stream of silver-blue light erupted from the Enterprise, slamming into the nexus with incredible force. A second ray, identical in form and color, connected the Newton to the alien object.

At the points of intersection, sickly flares of energy erupted from the writhing surface of the nexus, showering the void around it with fat sparks of radiation. A shuddering tremor ran up and down the length of the ribbon, and it began to disintegrate. It seemed to slowly crumble, shedding pieces of itself that dematerialized and faded into nothingness.

An alert chime rang at La Forge’s console and he spun to investigate. “Captain . . . I’m reading a phase imbalance.”

“In the nexus?”

“No, sir. Aboard the Newton. Their pulse beam is starting to fluctuate. It’s drifting outside the safe parameters.”

“Can we boost our beam to compensate?” Worf broke in with the question, knowing full well what would occur if the Newton’s pulse lost coherence. If the two beams moved out of synchronization, the effect could be severe.

“Negative!”

“Chen, hail the Newton,” snapped Picard.

“Trying, sir. No response,” said the lieutenant. “Could be interference from the—”

Before Chen could finish her sentence, something in the other ship’s energy beam rippled and contracted, the solid river of color flickering and warping.

“Reversion effect!” La Forge called out. “Their pulse is collapsing!”

“Commander La Forge, initiate emergency disengage.” Picard gave the order without thinking; if the other ship’s pulse was lost, then the feedback effect through the nexus could rebound on the Enterprise, and there was no way to predict what damage it could do. “Cut us loose!”

“Pulse disengaged,” reported Worf. “Sir, the Newton . . .”

Picard looked up in time to see the other ship battered by a whip of energy that cut away from the nexus and struck back at the science vessel’s hull. He knew immediately that Rhonu had been a heartbeat too slow in giving the critical order. Time seemed to stretch as the shock effect slammed into the Nebula-class ship and threw sheets of blue lightning over the primary and secondary hulls. An intercooler on one of the Newton’s warp pontoons went dark and burst in a scattering of glassy matter. Lights flickered and faded in patches across the curve of the main saucer.

A second tendril of star fire lashed out toward the Enterprise, but the starship lurched to one side as Lieutenant Faur gave the vessel an ugly but effective thruster shunt to port. The energy whip cut through empty space, the tip glancing off the outer umbra of the ship’s deflector bubble. It set the vessel shaking.

Enterprise’s captain was suddenly on his feet. “Report!” barked Picard.

“We’re okay,” said La Forge. “Deflectors off line but no hull breaches, no other system outages . . .”

“Scanning the Newton,” offered Glinn Dygan. “Detecting power failures across multiple decks. Severe damage to the ventral hull. They’re losing atmosphere.”

“Confirmed.” The engineer frowned. “Cascade systems collapse in progress. Sir, it seems as if there was a major malfunction on board.”

“Yellow Alert. Damage control and medical parties to the transporter rooms.” Picard gave the commands in rapid order as he strode to the helm console. “Lieutenant Faur, take us closer.”

Worf was already working his console. “Captain, I have Commander Rhonu on the comm.”

“On-screen.”

The view of the wounded Newton snapped to a bleak, smoke-wreathed window into the science vessel’s bridge. The Betazoid woman winced in pain as she drew herself up, attempting to maintain her composure. “Enterprise,” she breathed, “can you assist? Our mains are off line and we’re adrift. There was a feedback discharge along the pulse. It overloaded our systems . . .” She broke off, coughing.

“We’re coming to you, Commander,” Picard confirmed. “We’ll take you in tow, stabilize your ship with our tractor beams. Stand by to receive support teams.”

“Thank you, sir . . .” Rhonu looked away as another of Newton’s officers appeared in view and thrust a padd into her hands. The woman’s face fell as she read what was written on it.

“Commander?”

When Rhonu looked back up at him, her dark eyes were filled with sorrow. “The first casualty report, Captain. Six wounded, eight dead, including Lieutenant Commander Vetro . . . and Captain Bryant.”

Picard felt a grim and familiar sensation settle upon him. “Understood,” he replied. “Hold fast, Newton. Help is coming.”

*   *   *

He folded his arms behind his back and looked down. From the observation lounge, Picard could see part of the dorsal hull and the sensor pallet of the other starship, tethered beneath the Enterprise by a glittering beam of light. Both craft were bathed in the pinkish-amber glow of the nexus ribbon, which tumbled on regardless of them, its course unchanged. According to Elfiki, scans of the energy ribbon showed that the disruptive effects of the incomplete subspace pulse were already being undone by some unknown manner of self-repair at work inside the phenomenon. The nexus had shrugged off their attempt to destroy it, and Picard wondered what would have happened if the malfunction aboard the Newton had not stopped them too soon.

Worf completed his summation of the current situation aboard the science vessel on a hopeful note. The injured crew members struck by the aftereffects of the feedback blast were all well on the road to recovery, thanks to the timely intervention of Beverly Crusher and her assistant chief medical officer, Doctor Tropp. The Newton’s medical team had been grateful for the use of Enterprise’s sickbay after their own had been rendered dark and powerless by a blown EPS conduit. But that still left eight people who would never go home to their families, eight lives snuffed out in an instant.

Thom Bryant had not died well. Trapped under a fallen stanchion, the captain of the Newton suffocated as the air in his compartment fled through a hull breach. The young engineer, Vetro, had lost her life trying to save him.

And now, through accident and catastrophe, the burden of all this was squarely on Jean-Luc Picard’s shoulders. He had a duty to carry out, one that filled him with dismay, but still a duty he could not shirk from.

“Commander La Forge remains on board the Newton for the time being,” Worf went on, as Picard turned back to his assembled officers. “He informs me that the ship will be able to move under low impulse power within the next three to five hours.”

“What about warp drive?” The question came from Lieutenant Aneta Šmrhová, her Czech accent firm under the words. “Shields and weapons?”

Picard raised an eyebrow. “Is the latter a necessity, Lieutenant?” Šmrhová had recently taken the role of Enterprise’s tactical and security chief, in the wake of the loss of her predecessor, Jasminder Choudhury. She was settling into the job, but she still had a tendency to go straight for the jugular on some matters. “You feel we’re under threat out here?”

“Most emphatically yes, Captain,” she responded. “If I may?” Šmrhová indicated the controls for the conference room’s holographic screen, and Picard gestured for her to continue. “You’ll recall that Captain Bryant mentioned the presence of Typhon Pact probes in the region . . .” She called up a data set, and the screen lit to show a tactical plot and a fuzzy, low-resolution scan of a torpedo-like object, caught as if moving at high speed. “This is a Kinshaya Missionary Remote, a model typical of their crusader fleet forces. Usually deployed to conduct surveillance on forward targets before a full assault by manned vessels.” She tapped the controls, and the image switched to an equally blurred object that was quite clearly spherical in design—the standard construction template for Kinshaya starships. A second orb-like craft was visible in close formation with the first. “These are Iconoclast-series liberators, roughly approximate in tonnage to a Starfleet Steamrunner-class cruiser. This pair are operating under a rather poorly maintained emission cloak at the far edge of our sensor range.”

“Watching us,” mused Dygan. “Waiting for an opportunity, no doubt.”

“They have every right to be here,” Picard broke in. “We have no quarrel with the Kinshaya . . .” He turned his attention to Šmrhová and Worf. “Or do we?”

The two officers exchanged looks. “Not yet,” said the Klingon. “But the day is young.”

“That’s reassuring,” Picard’s response was dry. “Let’s concentrate on the problems we do have before we think about the ones we might have,” said the captain. “Worf, I want you to personally lead the accident investigation aboard the Newton. I need to know exactly what went wrong over there.”

“Do you still intend to go ahead with Captain Bryant’s mission, sir?” Lieutenant Elfiki leaned forward over the conference table.

“Our orders are clear-cut,” Picard told them, but he was unable to keep his own sense of disquiet from the words. “It could be weeks before another Federation starship arrives out here. We’re parsecs off the galactic plane. We have to work with what we have.” He nodded once. “Report to your stations.”

His officers dispersed, but Worf lingered a moment. “Captain. If the Kinshaya decide to initiate an aggressive reaction to our presence, we will be at a grave disadvantage. The Newton is in no state to defend itself.”

“I’m well aware, Number One. But we’re not at war with the Holy Order or their compatriots in the Typhon Pact. We’ve seen nothing to indicate any hostile intent toward us.”

“As I said a moment ago, the day is young, sir. I am Klingon, and my race has known nothing but Kinshaya hatred and aggression for centuries. Whatever promises of moderation they have spoken of in recent times, I warn you not to give them the benefit of your doubt, Captain. They do not deserve it. If they see weakness, they will seek to exploit it.”

Picard looked back out at the nexus. “Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.”

*   *   *

The first officer bent to enter the wrecked engineering bay, stooping low to avoid striking his head on the collapsed sections of the overhead. Worf threaded between a pair of broken stanchions and moved deeper into the ruined space. The acrid tang of burned hyperpolymers and scorched ODNs stung his nostrils, and the air was bitter. Part of the outer hull was missing, opened in a ragged wound from outside, and darkness showed through. Only a portable field generator was holding out the vacuum and the deathly cold, but it was not enough to keep the bay from having a wintry chill to it.

Worf acknowledged Lieutenant Taro with a nod as he passed her. One of the Enterprise’s legion of engineering officers, the Bajoran woman was working with a trio of Benzites from the Newton’s crew complement; they were conducting a structural scan of the section, looking for the places where the feedback shock had tested the science vessel’s hull beyond its limits.

He frowned. The Newton’s damage was severe enough to warrant spacedock time, and the nearest starbase that could supply it was still quite distant. The ship would have a long, slow journey ahead of it, unable to risk even the shortest passage at high warp velocities.

He found Geordi La Forge in the center of the wreckage, crouched over the broken remains of what looked like a power regulator module. “Commander?”

La Forge looked up, and his expression was etched with concern. “Worf. Thanks for coming down here.”

“I was supervising the forensic sweep of the ship’s logs. What is it that requires my presence?”

The engineer came closer. “I didn’t want to broadcast it. Not until I was certain.” He held up his tricorder for Worf to see. “The phase variance that disrupted the Newton’s pulse began right here. This power regulator is one of five on the engineering deck. There was a momentary loss of energy at a critical juncture, enough to set up a collapse. It should have knocked the pulse off line, but the resonance was already affecting the nexus when the loss occurred. The pulse couldn’t just switch off . . .”

“And so the feedback effect was created.” Worf took this in. He knew his comrade and friend well enough to guess that this was more than just the tragic but ultimately prosaic story of an unfortunate technical fault. “What have you not told me, Commander?”

“Most of the regulator was destroyed by the shock, but there’s enough for me to reconstruct part of the control matrix. At first I thought I was looking at thermal trauma, but it doesn’t match the pattern of any of the other damage.” He lowered his voice. “Worf, this was an act of deliberate sabotage. Somebody purposely tampered with the regulator.”

“That is a grave assertion, Geordi,” said the first officer. “You can prove this?”

La Forge held up the tricorder. “It’s all in here.”

“Have you informed Commander Rhonu or any of the Newton’s crew?”

“Not yet. If there’s a saboteur on board, security might be compromised.” He paused, thinking. “We need to get Aneta over here. If I’m right, then this whole area has just become the crime scene.”

Worf thought about that for a moment. “Not yet. The arrival of a security detail could alert the culprit. We must be cautious.” He removed his own tricorder and activated it. “Have you scanned for organic molecular traces?”

“Not yet.”

The Klingon nodded and set his tricorder to bio mode, sweeping it back and forth. The device beeped, lines of data streaming down its tiny screen. Worf’s eyes narrowed, and he tapped his combadge. “Worf to Enterprise sickbay. Doctor Crusher, may I speak with you?”

He walked away a step or two, toward an empty part of the compartment, taking care to pick his way over the broken remains of computer consoles. “Crusher here,” came the reply. “Mister Worf, can this wait? I’m about to go into surgery.”

“I need only a few moments of your time, Doctor. Please access your main medical display. I am forwarding you bio-organic scans from my tricorder.” He tapped a series of keys, and the data was immediately mirrored on Crusher’s screen aboard the other starship.

“I have it,” she replied. “Two partial DNA traces . . .” The doctor fell silent for a moment. “Worf, these are badly corrupted by radiation. What am I looking at here?”

“I would like you to tell me,” he replied.

“All right . . .” He heard the note of wariness in her voice. “The first trace is the most degraded of the two. It’s humanoid, carbon-based. . . .” She paused again. “I can attempt to reconstruct the genetic sequences and get more definition, but it’ll take some time.”

“Please proceed. What is your evaluation of the second trace?” Worf peered at his tricorder; the second scan was murky, and he wasn’t certain of what he was looking at.

Crusher’s response confirmed his concerns. “That’s odd. . . . There’s a conflicting molecular structure here. This is a pair of traces, not a single one.”

“Two DNA readings mirroring each other. How is that possible?” But he already had an inkling.

“Someone was attempting to mask their true genetic identity. Worf, I think this trace could be of Orion origin. . . .”

Worf nodded grimly to himself. “Doctor, run a full analysis of the data I sent you as soon as possible, and hold all information under security protocols.”

“Confirmed. I’ll put Lieutenant Mimouni on it immediately.” She paused again. “Worf, does this mean what I think it means?”

“As soon as possible,” repeated the first officer, his thoughts churning with the import of this grave discovery.

*   *   *

An hour later, the Enterprise’s first officer stood before Picard’s desk in the captain’s ready room, his hands folded behind his back, as his commander pored over the summary Worf had hastily assembled.

Picard’s hawkish expression tightened, his eyes narrowing. He read in silence before finally speaking aloud. “There’s no mistake here.” It was a statement, not a question. “Sabotage.” The captain said the word as if it were a curse.

“Doctor Crusher believes that an Orion male, concealing himself beneath a genetic mask, is masquerading as another humanoid species aboard the Newton. However, the DNA traces are too badly corrupted to ascertain any further information.”

“Meaning, this person could be almost anyone. He may be a deep-cover agent, or someone operating under a co-opted identity. We can’t even rule out gender alteration.”

“Aye, sir,” said Worf. “If we have a suspect, an intensive genetic scan would reveal the truth in moments. But short of individually checking every member of the Newton’s crew one by one, we cannot narrow down the pool of suspects.”

Picard put the padd down on his desk. “In other words, we can’t trust anyone on that ship until we verify their identities. And if we begin a program of scans or deck-by-deck searches, the saboteur will know it and react accordingly.”

“Orion agents are adept at operations like this one.” The commander’s lips curled at the thought of such honorless subterfuge. “An escape route would be part of any plan.”

“The Kinshaya ships . . .” mused Picard. “What if they’re not just watching us?” He considered that for a moment. “Employing a freelance spy would be in keeping with the Holy Order’s martial culture. Given the appearance of their species, one of them would hardly be able to infiltrate the crew of a Federation vessel without drawing notice.”

Worf nodded. He had heard the Kinshaya described by Terrans as resembling a creature from Earth’s ancient mythology, a beast called a griffin, a four-legged mammal with broad wings, a tail, and a striking, savage face. Even a personal holo-cloak would not be able to hide one of them inside the close quarters of a starship’s decks. “It raises the question: Is this spy in the employ of the Typhon Pact or the Holy Order?”

Picard nodded. “The Kinshaya are rather the poor cousins in the Pact, from what Starfleet Intelligence has gleaned. Their recent internal political conflicts have kept them from making a greater play as part of the Pact’s united front. . . . That could explain why this operative is an independent mercenary instead of, say, a Breen agent. That may indicate the Kinshaya are doing this without the knowledge or approval of their Typhon Pact allies.” He paused again. “We can dwell on the exact nature of the reasoning later. Right now, we have to isolate and interrogate this infiltrator. If he is responsible for the explosion on board the Newton, he could very well be capable of something worse.”

“I took the liberty of informing Lieutenant Šmrhová of the situation. She’s assigned additional security staff to all sensitive locations aboard the Enterprise.”

“Thank you, Worf. But I fear a reactive stance is the wrong one. With the Newton’s internal damage, the Enterprise engaged in repair operations, and the nexus still in motion, time is against us.” Picard’s frown deepened. “I was afraid of this, Number One. Captain Bryant was right: the nexus is being coveted by those who will do whatever they need to in order to possess it. And it galls me that we have to keep this from Commander Rhonu.”

“For the moment, at least,” agreed Worf. “In the meantime, Doctor Crusher’s team continues to work on the other genetic trace. It may have come from one of the Newton’s crew, but until the reconstruction modeling is complete, we cannot be certain.”

“We can’t afford to sit and wait. With each passing moment, the nexus is moving closer to the Holy Order’s territory . . . and if they did facilitate the sabotage of the Newton, we may well be looking at an act of war.” Picard stood up and crossed to the window, staring out into the darkness. “We need to go on the offensive, Number One.”

Despite himself, Worf smiled thinly. “I am always ready for that, Captain.”

Picard turned to face him, tapping a finger to his lips. “We need to shake the tree, Commander. Force the hand of this spy. It’s a risk, but we don’t have a lot of choice.”

“What do you propose, sir?”

The captain met his gaze. “I think we should take a leaf out of Will Riker’s playbook. Specifically, poker.”

*   *   *

They materialized without warning on the Newton’s bridge, six columns of blue-white light that dissipated to deliver Captain Jean-Luc Picard, his first officer, chief of security, and an armed detail of security officers.

Commander Rhonu was on her feet as Šmrhová signaled her men with juts of her chin, sending them to take up stations at the two turbolift doors to port and starboard, and the alcove at the aft of the compartment. “Captain Picard?” said the Betazoid. “What is the meaning of this?” But even as she asked, the woman was sensing something of the reason for the unexpected arrival, her telepathic senses touching on his surface thoughts.

“Please, all of you, remain still.” Picard held up a hand and nodded to Worf. “Go ahead, Commander.”

“Commencing,” said the Klingon, producing a tricorder. He proceeded to run a swift scan of all the Newton officers at their stations.

Picard looked up to see that Doctor Kolb was also present at one of the freestanding consoles, apparently in the middle of a consultation with the Newton’s Vulcan science officer.

“Jean-Luc, what’s going on here?” Kolb exchanged an anguished look with Rhonu, but she appeared not to notice.

“Captain, I insist that you explain yourself!” she demanded.

“All clear,” said Worf. “Gene scans are normal, no evidence of bio-masking present.”

Picard nodded. “Thank you, Number One.” He turned to the Betazoid. “I apologize for the sudden arrival, Commander. It was necessary to maintain the element of surprise.” Lieutenant Šmrhová was already at the main tactical panel, pushing her way past the Tellarite duty officer standing before it. “My crew have uncovered something disturbing, and this was a crucial step in resolving the situation.”

“You have a saboteur on board your ship,” Worf said bluntly, and the tension on the Newton’s bridge leapt by degrees.

“Th-the explosion in the engineering bay?” said Kolb. “Do you expect us to believe it wasn’t an accident?”

“I agree,” said Rhonu. “What makes you think that was deliberate? And even if it was, that the culprit is on board this vessel?” She squared off before the Enterprise’s captain. “I remind you, sir, that the cascade failure took place well after your vessel arrived out here.”

“We have proof.” Picard produced the padd that Worf had given him earlier and handed it to Rhonu. She studied him, and he knew she was reading his intentions. The captain allowed it; he wanted her to see his resolve. Slowly, a realization crept across her expression, the first inklings of understanding pushing away her irritation at his breach of protocol. “I need to address your crew, Commander,” he told her.

At length, she nodded. “Intraship,” she ordered. “Go ahead, sir.”

Picard stiffened. “Attention all decks, all crew. This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise. As senior officer on site, I am hereby exercising my rank and placing the U.S.S. Newton under my temporary command, as per Starfleet regulations. A hazardous anomaly has been detected on board the Newton, and in order to isolate and neutralize it, the ship must be subjected to an intensive isophasic scan. Stay at your stations or remain in your quarters until you receive the all-clear. Scan will begin in five seconds. Picard out.”

“Isophasic?” echoed Rhonu, raising an eyebrow. “Is that a new protocol, a new scanning system you have aboard the Sovereign-class ships? I don’t recognize it.”

Picard said nothing, glancing at his first officer. Worf studied his tricorder. “Three. Two. One. Mark.”

The Newton bridge crew visibly braced themselves for some kind of effect, but nothing came. Rhonu glanced up at the Enterprise on the main viewscreen, hanging over the smaller ship. No bright sensor beams or probing energy waves were being visibly emitted from the other vessel.

She eyed the other captain, touching his thoughts once again, and caught some measure of the truth. “I’ve never played the game myself,” she told him, fishing for a response.

“You should,” Picard told her. “If you could find the right opponents.”

Kolb bent over the science console, grimacing. “Sensors register no scans in progress. Jean-Luc, I don’t understand—”

Šmrhová’s combadge chirped and she tapped it. “Go ahead, Enterprise. What do you have, sir?”

Commander La Forge’s voice answered from the bridge of the other vessel. “We read an aspect change on one of the Kinshaya ships. It’s picked up speed, moving in on a parabolic trajectory.”

Rhonu stepped down to the ops station near where Picard was standing and looked over the shoulder of the helmsman seated there, reading his instruments. “Yes. There it is. Port quadrant, mark two. Closing at high impulse, running with weapons cold.”

“A stealth approach,” said Worf. The Klingon turned to Picard. “It appears our target has blinked, sir.”

Picard nodded. “Now we have his tell, let’s use it.”

“There’s no such thing as an isophasic scan,” said Rhonu flatly. “No ‘anomaly.’ You’re trying to flush out our saboteur.”

“Correction, Commander,” said Šmrhová. “We have flushed out our saboteur.”

“And put my crew at risk!” Rhonu said, her voice low and intense. “This is reckless, Captain Picard.”

“You may lodge a formal complaint with Starfleet Command if you see fit,” he replied. “But in the meantime, I would suggest you use the Newton’s internal sensors to scan for an ultralow-frequency subspace burst. That Kinshaya ship is responding to a signal, Commander.”

“They’re coming to rescue the spy,” she said, following the train of logic. Rhonu turned and shot the Vulcan a look. “You heard him, Sallos. Look for any subspace radio emissions.”

The pale-skinned science officer set to work without comment, with Kolb watching worriedly at his side.

“Kinshaya ship is still closing,” reported La Forge. “If they maintain present course and speed, they’ll pass within transporter range in just under two minutes.”

Rhonu looked to Picard. “If we go to Red Alert, the spy will be trapped. He won’t be able to beam through our shields.”

“He’ll know that, and he’ll have planned accordingly, perhaps prepared a secondary sabotage,” replied the captain. “Raise shields now and it could trigger another systems failure.”

The commander scowled. “Then how in the name of the Rings do we catch him before he flees?”

“Unauthorized transmitter located,” reported Sallos, his tone dull and flat. “Deck Four, Section Six.”

“That’s how,” Šmrhová said, with a feral grin. “Captain?”

“Mister Worf, take the lieutenant and go after the target.” Picard looked to his first officer. “It is imperative we capture him for interrogation, is that clear?”

“Aye, sir.” The Klingon pocketed his tricorder, exchanging it for the phaser holstered at his hip.

Rhonu snapped her fingers and gestured to her own tactical/security officer, a dark-skinned Deltan. “Lieutenant Haln, go with them.” As Worf led them out, she turned on Picard, her dark eyes sharp and challenging. “I think you need to tell me exactly what is going on and what you know, sir.”

*   *   *

The turbolift deposited them on Deck 4, and Worf was the first out into the corridor, his phaser drawn and ready. Šmrhová and Haln were a step behind. The Deltan had a tricorder raised, using it to trawl for the microsecond-fast pulse from the subspace transmitter.

“The trace is degrading quickly,” reported Haln.

“Which way?” Worf looked up and down the corridor. This was one of the Newton’s residential decks, for the moment empty of personnel after Captain Picard’s earlier announcement.

Haln pointed and Šmrhová set off at a run. “Three cabins here,” she said, as they came upon quarters assigned to some of the science vessel’s married crew members.

The Deltan’s face soured as the tricorder emitted a low tone. “Trace is gone. It’s one of these two.” He indicated a pair of cabins.

Šmrhová pressed her ear to the doors one at a time, and at the second she froze. “I hear voices,” she whispered.

Worf indicated the door. “Mister Haln, If you would?”

Haln nodded and ordered the Newton’s computer to release the lock. The door hissed open and the three of them shouldered into the cabin, weapons raised.

Inside was a family of three Boslics in the middle of a meal, and they stood in panic at the sudden intrusion. Every one of them began talking at once, until a curt growl from Worf threw silence across the room.

Šmrhová ran a bio-scan. “Nobody here seems like they are preparing to jump ship,” she offered. “Tricorder says they are what they seem to be.”

“What is going on?” demanded the Boslic female, one of the ship’s medical officers.

“You are the victim of a ruse, Ensign,” said Haln grimly, crouching by a low planter filled with Kaferian peony plants. He reached underneath it and revealed a hexagonal object small enough to fit in his palm. Haln held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s Orion design, all right. I recognize the manufacture.”

“A relay module.” Šmrhová took the device and scowled at it. “Our spy must have planted it here to throw us off the scent.”

“He must be close,” said Worf, thinking it through. “Such relays only have a short range. I would surmise our target is somewhere else on this deck.”

“How long until the Kinshaya are in transporter range?” said Haln. “Sixty seconds?”

“I have an idea,” said Šmrhová, and she quickly attached the relay unit to her own tricorder. With a few quick keystrokes, she accessed the device’s functions. She shot a look at Worf, Haln, and the Boslic family. “Everyone cover your ears, this will be loud.” She tapped a control and suddenly the relay module gave off a piercing, static-laced shriek as the security chief forced an overloaded feedback spike through the circuitry.

Worf immediately caught an echo of the same noise coming from behind a cabin door a meter down the corridor.

*   *   *

The site-to-site transport put the Enterprise’s first officer in the ’fresher cubicle at the exact same moment Haln and Šmrhová entered the cabin. He saw an Arkarian male in civilian clothes spin toward the doorway, the brassy shape of a meson pistol in his fist. The Klingon didn’t hesitate. He threw himself at the infiltrator and slammed into him at full force, the body-check shoving the spy into a wall. Worf grabbed his wrist and gave it a savage twist. The meson pistol fell heavily to the floor as the Arkarian cried out in pain, slumping.

“We don’t have long,” said Haln.

As Worf drew his tricorder, Šmrhová leveled her phaser at the man’s head and gave him a hard stare. “In ten seconds, I’m going to shoot you.”

The Arkarian—or according to Worf’s tricorder, the Orion that had been surgically altered to appear to be Arkarian—threw a cocky grin back at her. “Do it. Because in thirty seconds I’ll be beamed out of here, conscious or not. And you’re not going to put up the shields, because if you do, the interrupt I planted will cause an emitter overload.”

“Fine,” said Šmrhová, making a show of resetting her weapon. “I’ll just kill you, then.”

“You won’t,” he spat back. “You’re Starfleet. That’s not how you operate!”

“War has a way of changing people,” Worf said, and without meaning to, his words grew heavy with sudden honesty.

“Twenty seconds to range,” reported Haln.

Worf spun the infiltrator around and glared at him, searching his face for the truth. “There is no interrupt,” he said, menacing the other man. “You have not had time to plant one.”

“You think so?” The spy tried to maintain an air of defiance, but there was a most fleeting nerve tic at the corner of his lip. “Try to stop me and this ship will explode!”

“You have a way of letting the Kinshaya track you.”

“You’re deluded, Klingon—”

Worf snarled and tore open the infiltrator’s tunic. A pocket ripped and a second hexagonal device, similar to the relay module, fell away. The spy panicked and tried to grab for it, but he was too slow. Worf’s boot came down hard on the mechanism and shattered it into pieces.

A moment later, Šmrhová’s combadge beeped and she tapped it. “Security team here.”

“Lieutenant?” It was La Forge. “Whatever you just did over there, it had an effect. That Kinshaya liberator has just performed a fast one-eighty and reversed course.”

The faux Arkarian heard the words, and his shoulders fell.

Worf eyed him. “You were saying?”

3

Worf looked up as Picard entered the compartment and he turned away from the open wall of the holding cell. The Klingon offered him a padd, and Picard gave it a quick once-over.

“Een Norgadd.” Picard read the name aloud, the smiling face of an Arkarian male looking back up at him. “A research assistant from the University of Vega.”

“We are checking into the Norgadd identity now,” confirmed Worf. “Initial data indicates that it is genuine and not a fabricated cover.”

The captain looked past Worf’s shoulder to where Haln and Šmrhová stood side by side before the humming energy barrier separating the cell from the rest of the compartment. The same Arkarian face peered back at him from inside, but he knew immediately, instinctively, that it wasn’t the same person behind that visage. “He replaced an innocent man?” Picard didn’t wait for a reply to the question; the answer was obvious. “Commander Rhonu will join us in a moment. Good work, Number One. I wasn’t looking forward to turning this into a shooting match with those Holy Order warships. Capturing this man has at least bought us some time.”

Worf eyed him. “The Kinshaya will be back, sir. You may count on that. They are considering their options, but it will inevitably lead to an attack.”

Picard handed back the padd. “A fine bluff, by the way, pressuring him about the shields. Will would be proud of you.”

“I admit I have appreciated the opportunity to practice.”

The brig door slid open and Rhonu entered. Her face was lined with fatigue and irritation. “Let’s take a look at him, then,” she said, striding past them toward the cell.

Haln and Šmrhová stepped back from the field wall as the other officers approached.

“Has he said anything?” asked Rhonu.

Šmrhová cocked her head. “Something about being innocent, sir. He obviously thinks we’re all idiots.”

The Betazoid commander glared at the prisoner. “Stand up and come closer, Mister Norgadd, or whoever you are.”

“I’m fine right here,” he replied, sitting cross-legged on the cell’s pallet. “And that name will do for now.”

“How did you get through Starfleet’s vetting process?”

“More easily than you’d think, Commander.” The spy offered a sly, practiced smirk.

“I have my security team going through his quarters as we speak,” said Haln. “We’ve already found some interesting evidence.”

“Such as?” asked Picard.

“Copies of the command staff’s duty rosters. Our friend here seemed to pay a lot of attention to Commander Rhonu’s schedule in particular.”

“Of course,” she broke in. “I’m a full Betazoid. The only telepath on the Newton. He knew that if we were in close proximity to each other for any length of time, I would sense his intentions.” Rhonu folded her arms. “That goes a long way toward explaining how I don’t know his face. He’s been avoiding me.”

“It’s nothing personal,” said Norgadd. “So. Shall we get down to the heart of it, then?”

Picard nodded. “Indeed. I suggest you cooperate with us, or—”

“Or what?” The smile became an oily grin. “You’ll set your pet Klingon on me again? I admit, you got one over on me before, but I’m wise to you now. There’s no terror in your threats.”

“I think I could change that opinion,” said Šmrhová coldly. “If everyone else would just like to step out into the corridor for a little while.” Her eyes bored into the prisoner’s, and he blinked.

“You can’t lie to us,” Rhonu snapped. “You can’t lie to me. I’ll know it before you even open your mouth. Do yourself a favor. Earn some goodwill. Start by telling us who you work for, and why you are here.”

Norgadd’s smile faded. “I’m an independent espionage contractor, based on Rigel. But then you surmised that already, didn’t you?”

“You’re part of the Orion Syndicate?” said Picard.

“Not exactly. I pay them a fee for my . . . work permit. But that’s all. In return, they assist me with support, equipment, new identities—”

“Like Een Norgadd’s?” demanded Worf. “The man whose face and life you stole is most likely dead.”

“I honestly don’t know.” He tried to shrug off the accusation. “I try not to dwell on that sort of thing.”

Picard studied the prisoner. “The Kinshaya. What do they want?”

“They want what I know.” The spy paused, eyeing Rhonu as he considered his next words. “That ribbon-thing, the nexus? There have been rumors that it has temporal properties. And if the Federation want so badly to protect it, it must be valuable. They want to know what makes it tick.” He spread his hands. “I was paid to infiltrate this ship and gather intelligence. If you want to know exactly what I learned, I suggest you offer me a larger fee than the . . .” He paused, almost faltering. “Than the Holy Order did.”

Rhonu seized on his words. “What were you going to say?”

Picard glanced at her. “What is it, Commander?”

“He was about to say something else, but he caught himself in time.” She leaned in closer. “Who are you really working for?”

“I told you, the Kinshaya!” he spat back. “That’s not a lie!”

“No,” admitted Rhonu, “but it’s not the full truth either.”

From the very start, there had been a nagging suspicion in the back of Jean-Luc Picard’s mind over the appearance of the Kinshaya in this area, something that didn’t tally with his understanding of the Holy Order’s current political status. According to what the Federation knew, the once hard-line fundamentalist zealots of the Kinshaya theocracy had been unseated by the more moderate Devotionalist movement, who eschewed the violence and xenophobia of their forebears. A blatant act of espionage like this was hardly in keeping with their newer, less belligerent outlook, and Picard said so. “Kinshaya warships typically deploy in packs of four or more. And yet there are only two nearby.” He turned to study the prisoner. “I don’t think we’re talking about the legitimate Order government here at all. I think this man is working for the zealots, the remnants of the old Kinshaya Episcopate.”

The Orion spy grimaced and Rhonu nodded, reading his thoughts despite his best attempts to conceal them. “They still consider themselves to be the legitimate government,” said Norgadd. “They hate the Devotionalists even more than they hate outsiders. They want a return to the old ways.”

Picard exchanged a look with his first officer. And what better method to turn back the clock than with a temporal gateway like the nexus? Worf nodded slightly, thinking the same.

“That would explain the fewer vessels. The hard-liners are on the outs, underarmed and undermanned,” noted Haln. “Even the rest of the Typhon Pact are giving them a wide berth.”

Norgadd blew out a breath. “There. You have what you want. I cooperated. Now let us have a conversation about me. I want to be released.”

Šmrhová gave him a pitiless look. “Into space, I hope. Without an environmental suit.”

He ignored her and went on. “I am an Orion citizen and I am not subject to your laws! You can’t hold me. I demand you turn me over to my own government!”

“In my experience,” said Haln, “Orion law is more about how deep your pockets are than justice and due process.”

“You have committed serious crimes aboard a Federation vessel,” said Picard, as what remained of his tolerance for the spy faded. “You have put hundreds of lives at risk, willfully caused injury . . . and you are guilty of the premeditated murder of Starfleet officers! You, sir, are going to answer for what you have done. In full.”

“What?” Norgadd’s face dropped in a moment of genuine shock. “You . . . you think that I was responsible for what happened in the engineering bay?” He spat out a bitter laugh. “I am an infiltrator, not an assassin!”

“But you were there,” Worf insisted. “We found DNA traces that match the genetic mask concealing your Orion physiology.”

“Yes . . .” He blinked, raising his hands in a gesture of self-defense. “The Kinshaya . . . they wanted me to sabotage the attempt to destabilize the nexus, but I couldn’t get access to the power regulator subsystems. Someone else came into the bay and I was interrupted. I had to flee in order to preserve my cover!” The spy shook his head. “And frankly, if I had interfered with your vessel, I would have made a better job of it! Why would I put my own life in danger from an uncontrolled power surge?”

“A transparent lie,” rumbled Worf.

“Actually,” said Rhonu, her words grim and serious. “It isn’t.”

Picard glanced at Worf. “The other DNA trace you discovered . . .” The captain shot a look at the prisoner. “Who interrupted you? Did you see them?”

Norgadd shook his head. “I had to get out of there or risk compromising myself. I never saw who it was.”

Commander Rhonu turned away and walked a few steps toward the far side of the brig. Her expression was a mixture of anger and frustration. “Every word of that was the truth,” she said as Picard came after her. “The Orion was there, but he didn’t sabotage the power regulator.”

“If not him, then who?” said Worf.

Picard nodded slowly. “And why?”

*   *   *

The captain found his chief medical officer hard at work in her office alcove, just off the Enterprise’s sickbay.

“Jean-Luc?” Once again, she saw immediately that he was troubled, and she reached out a hand to rest on his as he took a seat opposite hers. “What’s wrong? La Forge said you caught an infiltrator on board the Newton . . .”

“We did,” he told his wife, “only to discover that he is innocent.” He paused. “Well, innocent of the sabotage, at least.”

She called up a file and turned the monitor screen in front of her so Picard could see it. The display showed two broken strings of DNA. “Your erstwhile Mister Norgadd is a perfect match for the second trace Worf discovered. Once I had a complete bio-scan, the comparison was clear.” Beverly overlaid another pair of DNA strings, these whole and untouched, on top of the others. The scan program pronounced them identical. “One baseline trace showing hidden Orion biology, one a synthetic mask creating a false return that reads as Arkarian. With skin pigmentation changes and some minor dermal surgery, he could pass all but the most invasive of scans.”

They were alone, so Picard allowed himself a moment to let his guard down. He frowned and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “We made our bluff and we won. But we didn’t realize there was another player at the table. The real player.” He leaned forward. “The other trace, the more degraded one, that has to belong to the culprit.”

Crusher sighed. “I wish I had better news for you, Jean-Luc. But I’ve been going over Lieutenant Mimouni’s report and I can’t fault her conclusions. There’s simply just not enough material remaining to rebuild the structure. All we could extract were a few partial genetic markers.”

“Can you show me?”

She nodded, and worked the touchpad beneath her screen. “With this, we’re effectively back to square one. A full bio-scan of each crew member would be needed to find even a partial match. And even with that, I’d guess that more than a dozen of the Newton’s crew would share these markers, and twice that many on board the Enterprise.”

Picard’s features threatened to harden into a stony scowl. “I left Worf on the bridge before I came down here. Glinn Dygan informed me that our Kinshaya observers have decided to take a more proactive stance. They’ve dropped their emission cloaks and raised shields.”

“Do you think they’re going to attack us?”

“They refuse to respond to any hails.” He shook his head. “It’s just saber rattling, for the moment. Although my first officer is quite enamored of the idea of a punitive first strike against them.”

“The Kinshaya have always reviled the Klingons. Their holy texts talk about them as if they are demons, creatures that are less than alive. It can’t be easy to face that kind of blind hatred.”

“Yes. But the Holy Order have never been fools. They won’t attack unless they think they have the advantage.” He paused. “If it were us just against them, Enterprise could hold its own. But if we have to keep one eye on the wounded Newton . . . we lose our edge.”

“Here.” Crusher turned back the screen once again, and this time it was a trail of genetic markers, arranged like the keys on a piano. Many were missing entirely, lost and undetectable, others smudged as though they were corroded. Only a few were intact.

Picard’s gaze ran along the list, scrutinizing every single entry, trying to find something that connected—

He stopped suddenly. “Beverly . . .” He tapped the screen, highlighting a series of markers. “These traces . . . What would cause them to appear?”

“Do you see something?”

“I’m not sure.” But an ice-cold sensation was building in Picard’s gut, the onset of a possibility that disturbed him greatly.

Crusher read the screen. “Markers like these would be present in people with minor genetic drift mutations. They’re caused by some benign varieties of correctable birth defects, or left behind in survivors of certain kinds of viral infections. . . .”

“A virus?”

The next things he heard were the strident, hard-edged words of his first officer. “Bridge to sickbay!” Commander Worf’s voice boomed over the intercom. “Captain Picard, respond!”

He tapped his combadge. “Bridge, this is the captain. Report.” Picard’s gut tightened; he almost knew what would come next before it was spoken.

“Emergency signal from the Newton, sir. Their ventral shuttlebay doors were forced open. The runabout Cam has been launched without authorization, one life sign on board.”

He felt the weight of grim certainty settle on him. “On what heading, Commander?”

“A direct intercept course with the nexus. The Cam has raised shields and is emitting a scattering field to fog our targeting sensors. We cannot establish a tractor beam lock.”

“Of course,” said Picard, almost to himself. “He would have anticipated that. . . .”

“Orders, sir? Shall we pursue?”

The captain bolted to his feet and made for the door. “Negative, Mister Worf. Hold station. I’m on my way up.”

“Jean-Luc, what is it?” Beverly looked at him, then back at the screen. “What do you see?”

“Someone . . . I thought I knew,” he said.

*   *   *

By the time he reached the bridge, Worf had taken them to Yellow Alert. Picard strode to the captain’s chair but did not sit. His first officer was conferring with his chief engineer at one of the support consoles.

“Captain,” said La Forge. “The Cam will enter the gravimetric distortion zone around the nexus in three minutes. Once the runabout passes that point, there’s no way we’ll be able to haul it back out.”

“Options, Number One?” Picard shot Worf a questioning look.

“We cannot tractor the Cam, but it may be possible to disable it. A phaser strike could knock out the power core.”

“But if you’re off by a fraction of a degree, you’ll open the hull to space!” Without waiting to be asked, Lieutenant T’Ryssa Chen offered her opinion. “Sir, the flight path of the runabout is somewhat erratic. I’d say that indicates the pilot on board is inexperienced . . . and unpredictable.”

Worf saw something in Picard’s eyes and his lips thinned. “Sir. Do you know who is on board that craft?”

Picard nodded with regret. “The analysis of the other DNA trace shows that it bears the aftereffect of a disease. Something we’re familiar with: a virus known as Anchilles fever.”

Worf stiffened. “The Styris IV emergency. And there is only one Styrisian assigned to the Newton.”

“Doctor Kolb?” From her console, Lieutenant Elfiki shot a glance at the main viewscreen and the receding image of the Cam. “Kolb sabotaged the Newton?”

“I fear so.” Picard sighed. “He was adamant that Captain Bryant’s plans to disperse the nexus were wrong, but I never suspected he would do something like this. It must all be some misguided attempt by him to preserve the phenomenon.”

“I don’t understand,” said La Forge. “Kolb was standing ten feet away from Commander Rhonu when we beamed onto the Newton’s bridge. Why didn’t she sense his thoughts?”

“Styrisian brain structure is resistant to telepathic resonance,” noted Elfiki. “No Betazoid could read him.”

“When he realized we were close to finding out the truth, he fled the ship.” Worf went to the tactical console. “Captain, you must let me take the shot. We cannot allow him to enter the energy ribbon.”

Picard let the request hang. “Lieutenant Chen, hail the Cam. I want to talk to him.”

She worked her console. “No response, Captain.”

“What about the runabout’s prefix code?”

Chen shook her head. “It has already been scrambled, sir. He probably did it before he took off.”

“Why is Kolb doing this?” said Faur, at the conn. “The Cam will be ripped apart when it gets too close to the ribbon.”

“No, it won’t,” noted La Forge. “Kolb has reformulated the shield modulations to resist the temporal flux of the nexus, at least for a short time.” He hesitated, then turned to Picard. “Sir, there is one other option. The altered shield pattern has a microsecond emission-cycle drop when the deflectors are at their weakest. It might be enough to punch through with a matter stream.”

“You can transport Kolb out?”

La Forge shook his head. “No, the scattering field won’t allow it. But I think we could beam something onto the Cam.”

“A canister of anesthezine gas.” Worf’s answer was immediate. “We could render him unconscious.”

“Which would leave us with an unpiloted, out-of-control runabout on a collision course with a volatile space-time anomaly.” Picard shook his head, making the decision even before it had fully formed in his thoughts. “There’s another approach we can try.”

“No.” The word slipped out of Worf’s lips before his captain could say anymore. “Your courage is admirable, sir, but if any member of the crew is to attempt that transport, it must be me.”

“Oh?” Picard arched his eyebrow. “Mister Worf, the last officer I called Number One also tried that argument on me, and it didn’t take then. It won’t take now.”

Worf drew a small type-1 phaser from a hidden pocket on his belt. “I can beam aboard the Cam, neutralize Kolb, and regain control of the runabout.” He drew himself up. “I remind you, sir, this man has already killed. He must be considered dangerous.”

Picard’s manner sharpened. “I know him, Commander. Kolb is not a murderer!”

“Correction, sir,” said Worf. “You knew him.”

“Our window of opportunity is closing fast.” La Forge broke in, gesturing at his console. “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it right now.”

“I’m going, Number One,” said Picard, and his eyes were as hard as flint. “That’s an order.”

On a Klingon ship, Worf might have coldcocked a captain who made such a risky choice and gone on anyway; but Jean-Luc Picard was no fool, and he was never reckless. He would not have said the words if he did not believe he could stop the errant scientist. “Very well, sir.” Worf held out the phaser. “Take this.”

“I won’t need it. That man is a friend of mine.”

“Are you certain?”

His question cut Picard deeply, and after a moment of hesitation, the captain reached out and took the weapon. “Mister La Forge,” he called. “Initiate a site-to-site transport. Energize when ready.”

“Here we go,” said La Forge, as he bent over his panel. “It may be a little . . . bumpy.”

“You have the bridge, Number One—”

Picard’s words were stolen away as he disappeared into a column of blue-white light.

*   *   *

Jean-Luc Picard had traveled by transporter so many times in his life that he had lost count. From ship to surface, from place to place, using Federation systems or those of a dozen other races, he was far beyond the point of experiencing any novelty to it. The crawl of energy over his skin, the peculiar displacement in those fleeting moments of true dissipation before his molecules were reassembled in a new location; he paid them no mind. It was almost unconscious on his part.

But this was different. In some way, he was more aware of the action of beaming away from the Enterprise and across the vacuum to the speeding target of the Cam. Picard’s last sight of the bridge—and of Worf’s worried scowl as the transporter effect took hold—seemed to shimmer and fade, becoming a torrent of sparkling energy that washed over him, around him, through him.

A thought, sluggish and heavy, formed in his mind. I should not be able to witness this. His brain, like all the rest of his body, should have been dematerialized and suspended in the matter stream. How could he still be thinking if his organic mind was a haze of particles?

He felt a strange tidal push-pull on his ghostly form, a wave of not-gravity that seemed to come from nearby. Was it the nexus? Did it discern him somehow? Picard wondered if it could recognize his approach. Did the ribbon sense him out here, coming close? One of those who had passed through the doorway it represented, and rejected what lay within? There had to be very few who could lay claim to that distinction.

Then the moment of nothingness was gone and Picard felt his physicality returning to him, fraction by fraction. But this transport was not the painless shift he was used to. Instead, lines of agony lanced up through him as he began to regain his form, but he had no mouth with which to cry out. For a moment, it felt as if he were being physically repelled, like the pole of an opposed magnet. The command cabin of the runabout wavered before him, a heat-haze mirage instead of true solidity. He could do nothing but trust that La Forge would get him through the tiny chink in the Cam’s protective force field, intact and whole.

The pain surged, becoming a burn across his flesh, even as he felt the certainty of the runabout’s deck plates becoming real and firm beneath his boots. The ringing cascade of the transporter effect reached its apex and then died away. Mercifully, the pain went with it and in a heartbeat the agony was a bad dream, forgotten and gone.

Picard staggered, blinking to clear his vision. Across the cabin he glimpsed the shape of colored robes dangling down over the sides of the pilot’s chair, and he started forward. The little hand phaser Worf had pressed into his palm was still there, and he raised it warily.

“Kolb? It’s Jean-Luc Picard.”

Something wasn’t right. Too slow, still shaking off the dizzying effect of the forced transport, he saw that the pilot’s seat was actually empty, the traditional robes of the Styrisian science caste draped to give the illusion of someone sitting there. Picard heard a noise behind him, felt the rush of air as something moved. He turned. But he was too slow. Still too slow.

“Get away!” Kolb had a medical kit in his hand and he swung it like a club, slamming Picard across the shoulder and face. The captain stumbled and lost his footing, cursing silently. He struck the deck, the impact knocking the phaser from his grip.

Kolb threw the cracked case away and bolted to the weapon, scooping it up before Picard could stop him. The scientist’s bicolored face was lined with streaks of livid red. “No,” he spat, “you shouldn’t have come here! Go back! Go back, now!” He aimed the phaser, his hands shaking.

Picard righted himself and climbed slowly to his feet, palms up and fingers spread. “You know I can’t do that. Kolb, this has to stop.”

“I . . .” Kolb’s face creased and he seemed about to burst into tears. He swallowed a sob and shook his head. “Just let me go, Jean-Luc. Get away, beam back to the Enterprise. And then when I am gone, when I am in there, you can do whatever you want to! Destroy it!” He jabbed a finger at the canopy. Beyond it, the spinning rope of the nexus filled the view off the Cam’s bow, growing larger with each passing second. “It won’t matter then.”

“I can’t allow that to happen.” Picard took in the cabin, his eyes finding the runabout’s helm console and the autopilot settings displayed on its screen. If he could get to them . . .

“Don’t stop me,” pleaded the other man.

“Kolb, my friend. Please, put down the phaser. What do you hope to achieve? You’ve only made the situation worse. We must go back. Stop this before it goes too far.”

“I don’t want you here!” Kolb shouted, becoming angrier. “Have your ship transport you off, do it now!”

“I can’t,” he replied. “Not unless you stop the Cam and drop your shields.” Picard took a step closer, keeping his voice level, his manner moderated. “Please. Explain it to me. Why have you done all this, Kolb? What possessed you?”

“You should understand!” Kolb yelled back at him. “More than anyone alive, you should know why!” He shook his head wildly. “You’ve been inside, Jean-Luc. I read the reports you wrote! I know what you saw!”

“The nexus is not what you think it is,” Picard shot back, still edging closer. “It is not life. It is a shadow, Kolb. The greatest and most insidious illusion.” He sighed. “It’s not meant for us. We’re not ready for it.”

“No,” Kolb repeated, tightening his grip on the weapon.

“Why are you doing this?” Picard repeated. “Explain it to me.”

Kolb hesitated, on the verge of replying, but in that moment a musical tone sounded from a device on the scientist’s belt—the same custom tricorder Picard had seen earlier. A proximity warning, he guessed, we must be at the event horizon.

It was enough to distract the scientist, splitting his focus for crucial seconds. Picard took the opportunity and threw himself across the cabin at Kolb, colliding with the Styrisian and knocking him off-kilter. The two men grappled and Kolb struggled to hold on to the phaser; he was stronger than Picard had expected, but he had no skill to speak of. The captain’s unarmed combat training came back to him easily, and he caught Kolb’s wrist, twisting it so the phaser was aimed away.

But then Kolb cried out as a vivid flash of light filled the cabin, throwing jumping shadows across the consoles. For an instant, Picard thought the scientist had fired the weapon into the ceiling, but the deluge of brightness was streaming in from outside the Cam’s cockpit.

He glimpsed a curling filament of energy, sun-bright, burning a blurred afterimage into his retinas. The nexus was reaching out for them.

The glowing strand of star-stuff uncoiled and lazily stroked the barrier of the Cam’s deflector shields, illuminating them in a haze of radiation. Red warning flags bloomed across every panel on the flight deck, and the runabout shuddered, ringing like a struck bell.

Picard knew the ship was doomed. He felt the filament carve through the remodulated shields as if they were not there. He saw the sudden explosion of tritanium and electroplasma venting out from starboard as the surge ripped into one of the runabout’s warp pontoons and destroyed it. The Cam spun out of control into a tumble, falling toward the blinding heart of the ribbon that filled everything before it.

*   *   *

Despite his orders to the contrary, Worf had kept the Enterprise on station for less than a minute after Captain Picard’s departure. As de facto commander, he overruled the order and had Faur and Dygan guide them in as close to the nexus as they dared.

At the console in his chair, Worf had access to a constant stream of data, vital information on the composition and behavior of the energy ribbon gleaned from months of the Newton’s research, even reports from the first Starfleet ship to encounter the phenomenon, the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-B. Captain John Harriman’s Enterprise, the direct-line ancestor of the vessel that Worf now commanded, had almost been obliterated by the nexus over ninety years ago. It was only the sacrifice of another Enterprise captain that had prevented that ship from perishing with all hands on her maiden voyage. And in a way, the nexus had also been responsible for the eventual end of the Enterprise-D, a vessel that Worf had come to consider his home. He leaned forward in his chair; he was determined that he would not allow this accursed phenomenon to claim anything more from the Enterprise legacy.

“Report!” he barked. “Where is the Cam now?”

“Difficult to be certain . . .” said Elfiki, her hands flying over the sensor panel. “It’s crossing the event horizon. . . . The runabout is moving out of phase with us. Quantum interference is spiking!”

At his station, La Forge nodded at her words. “I’m trying to compensate.” The engineer’s console emitted a chorus of alert tones, flagging warning after warning. “Worf, we’re losing them.”

There were only two lives on board the runabout. The correct thing to do would be to hold back the Enterprise, keep the starship and its complement of officers, crew, and civilians out of harm’s way.

He could not. Even at the grave risk, Worf could not stand by and do nothing. How many times had Picard challenged the odds to save a member of his crew? How many times had he done it to save Worf’s life?

“Full impulse! Take us in past the safe zone, bring the tractor beam on line!” He turned to La Forge. “Get them back. Target by luck if you must, but get them back.”

“Gravimetric surge!” shouted Dygan. “Brace for—”

The nexus made its presence known by letting a lash of coruscating energy whip out and back, pushing before it an invisible bow wave that collided with the Enterprise and shunted it across the blackness. Worf’s hand clamped onto his chair and his powerful fingers cracked the casing as he used it to stay righted, even as the ship’s inertial dampers struggled to keep the vessel on an even keel.

The gravity wave passed and Worf bared his teeth in annoyance. “Status?”

“Undamaged,” reported La Forge.

“The runabout,” he demanded, “where are they?”

Elfiki’s expression darkened as her scan played back and forth over the length of the energy ribbon. “There was another filament . . .” she began, then halted. The lieutenant was trying and failing to find the right words. Finally, the answer fell from her lips in an untidy rush. “Commander Worf, we didn’t make it. The Cam is gone.”

“Destroyed?” He said the word in a dead voice.

“No . . .” La Forge was reading the same data, and he spoke as if he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. “No wreckage, not even microparticles. The runabout is just . . . gone.”

Worf stood. “Pull us back into the safe zone. Intensive scan of the phenomenon, now! We may have missed something—” A warbling tone from Šmrhová’s tactical console interrupted him and the Klingon rounded on the woman, his eyes alight with fury. “What now?” he bellowed.

“The Kinshaya,” she reported, keeping her tone level. “They’ve just entered combat range. Their shields are at full power and all their weapons are in pre-fire mode.”

“Incoming hail,” noted Chen. “Finally, they’ve decided to stop ignoring us.”

Worf drew himself up and took control of the high emotions churning inside him. He moved to the center of the bridge and nodded at the viewscreen. “Show me,” he said.

The screen rippled and became a portal into an ornate chamber that resembled a place of worship more than it did the command deck of a starship. The domed cathedral space was festooned with gaudy banners and pennants. Operations pits—shallow bowl-shaped depressions in the deck—were manned by cowering Kreel helots or the griffin-like Kinshaya themselves. Each of the equine-avian beings sported varicolored wings and wore sashes and medallions that appeared to denote rank or status.

Glaring out from the center of the display was an older Kinshaya—a female, if Worf was not mistaken. The luster of her feathers was grayed and faded but the ready hatred in her dark eyes was undimmed. Even though the alien was decidedly nonhumanoid, Worf could still interpret enough of her expression to see that she was utterly repulsed by what she saw on Enterprise’s bridge. As if to underline the point, the Kinshaya commander turned her head and spat. “Demon-thing, unlife, and worthless creature. You soil the majesty of this vacuum with your presence.”

“We have as much right to be here as you,” he shot back. “I am Commander Worf of the Starship Enterprise. Identify yourself.”

The Kinshaya flared her wings. “Insolent heathen maggot. You dare demand my name? I would not have you sully it by uttering the words.” She glared at him. “You are done in this place. Take your vessels and run home to your Federation. Or remain.” The commander snapped her beak. “Remain, and engage me in violence. I would relish it.”

Worf folded his arms across his chest, giving nothing. “You have no authority here, Kinshaya. This is unclaimed space.”

“We claim it now!” she hooted. “By the right of the Holy Order’s will!”

He saw an opening. “But you are not agents of the Holy Order, are you? You are the zealots, rejected by your people. You have no right to claim anything.”

Worf’s gambit worked, and his retort sent the Kinshaya commander into open fury. “The Devotionalist heretics, cowards and fools all! They are not the true Holy Order. We are. We are the truth and the way!”

“Our ships will not leave this area.” The Klingon pressed on, goading the alien. “Ours is a peaceful scientific mission, and we are . . . engaged in a rescue operation at this time.”

“I witnessed the path of your subcraft into the anomaly. Your crewmen are dead, demon! Destroyed by the hand of righteous fury!”

“I do not agree,” Worf replied, iron beneath the words.

“And I do not care!” hissed the Kinshaya. “Heed me, for I will say this only once. We declare that anomaly to be the work of the Gods. It is a holy thing and sacred to us. Approach it again, and you will be judged for your temerity, in fire and blood.” The alien gave an order in its native language.

“Both the sphere-ships are taking up attack postures,” reported Lieutenant Faur. “They’re targeting the Newton.”

“Back away, animal,” growled the alien commander. “Or we will obliterate your cripple-ship and then turn our cannons upon you.”

His Klingon blood sang in his ears, eager for the chance to go to battle and test the mettle of this arrogant adversary. Slowly, however, his clenched fists relaxed and he metered his breathing. “Helm,” he began, “withdraw to take station with the Newton. One quarter impulse power.”

“There is another matter.” Worf had been about to sever the communications link with a throat-cutting gesture, but the Kinshaya had more to say. “You have something that belongs to us, demon. The Orion is our property. Surrender him. Then you will be free to leave undamaged.”

Worf and La Forge exchanged glances. “This is the Federation flagship. You believe you are a match for us?”

“I believe we are a match for you. This ship, and the six others that will be here within one rotation.” The signal cut abruptly.

Šmrhová leaned against her console. “Does anyone know if the Kinshaya play poker too?”

4

“Oh, come on, Jean-Luc. You can’t be that tired. At least stay awake to the end of the evening!”

His wife’s voice snapped him back to full awareness and he grinned. “I was just thinking . . .” The grin became brittle and faltered. Thinking . . . about what?

Across the table, Beverly’s expression became one of concern. “Is something wrong?”

She looked older and yet she was ageless. Still the brilliant, vital, warm woman he had fallen for so long ago. In that moment, he could not have loved her more. “Nothing is wrong.” He smiled again, taking in the room.

The pavilion erected in the garden was lit by hundreds of flickering candles—the real thing, not holographic, as Beverly had insisted—all of them warding off the sultry shadows of the evening. The smell of cool air, good food, and fine wine was in the atmosphere, and all around, the wedding guests were laughing and joking. A few danced, most talked. The place was joyful.

“As if joy were a tangible thing,” Picard said the words, uncertain of where they had come from.

“Like you could wrap yourself up in it?” asked Beverly, looking at him with a quizzical smile. “Is that what you were going to say?”

“I really don’t know.” It was strange. He was happy, and he wanted to surrender to it . . . but there was something else, a small tug on the edges of his thoughts. As if his spirit were gossamer, wanting to drift freely, but a thread of it lay snagged upon a thorn.

A chair scraped across the brick floor and he turned as his stepson sat down, an easy grin on his face. “Hey, you two.”

“Hello, Wes,” said Beverly, and her face lit up in a way that only her firstborn son could bring out.

Wesley tapped Picard on the shoulder. “Look at you. I never thought civilian life would agree with you so well.”

“And I never thought I’d see you back in a Starfleet uniform.” He nodded at the younger man’s dress whites and the captain’s insignia at his throat. “Plus ça change.” His stepson laughed and for a moment Picard was reminded of Wesley’s father, Jack, when they had both been younger men. If not for the beard, Wes would have been the double of Beverly’s first husband.

“Have you danced with the bride yet?” she asked.

Wesley gave a mock-serious nod. “René was very adamant that I did. Duties of the best man and all that.”

Picard frowned. “I haven’t had the chance yet. . . .” He looked away, across the pavilion to where his son, elegant and tall in his formal tails, was talking animatedly with the Rikers. René’s new wife—my new daughter-in-law, he thought—had her back to him and for one odd, dislocated moment he found he couldn’t recall her face. His son looked so handsome, so confident. Picard felt a great swell of pride for René. He was a fine man and he would be a good husband and father. He was all Picard wanted him to be, and more.

“This is some party,” Wesley was saying, toying with a place setting on the table before him. Each was a small model of an object connected to the Picard family’s history: a bunch of grapes, a sailing boat, a hot-air balloon, a starship. “I’m glad I could make it back.”

“Where . . . are you off to next?” Picard found it hard to draw his gaze away from René’s wife. Her name. He did know her name, didn’t he?

“Styris IV,” came the reply.

“No shop talk,” Beverly admonished. “Otherwise you’ll have him reinstating his commission before the night is out.”

The woman in the wedding dress would not turn around. He kept looking at her, waiting for it to happen, but she would not turn. The smile on Picard’s face became brittle and crumbled. “This . . . is not right,” he muttered. He felt warm, suddenly too warm for the sultry Labarre evening. All at once, the sound of the party seemed loud and invasive, the laughter forced, the scent of the nearby vineyards cloying in his nostrils.

“Is this that good merlot you told me about?” Wesley was pouring a generous glass of the heady red for his mother and his former captain. “Shall we toast the new couple? To peace and long life?”

Beverly took her glass as Picard turned back to look at her. “That’s perfect. Isn’t it, Jean-Luc? Perfect. Idyllic. Safe.”

Picard took the glass offered to him without thinking about it. “Safe . . .” he repeated, and the others made the toast and took a drink.

Wesley nodded appreciatively. “That is lovely. The stuff of dreams.” He gestured around. “Just like this place. I envy you, Captain.”

“He’s not captain anymore,” Beverly noted.

“I’m not . . .” Picard felt something come loose inside his thoughts. “I’m not here.” He stood up suddenly, and his head swam. He put out his hand for balance and it came down on a brittle thing that cracked under his weight.

“Oh,” said his wife. “You broke your little ship.” The words echoed in his mind, from a different time and a different voice.

The place-setting model was of a Danube-class runabout, and he had inadvertently snapped off one of the warp pontoons.

Wesley gathered up the pieces. “We can fix this.”

“No . . .” Picard shook his head, stepping backward. “We can’t.” A rising tide of anxiety built in him. “I have to go.”

“You won’t stay for a dance?” said Beverly.

He didn’t answer. Instead, Picard walked away as quickly as he could. The other wedding guests parted before him, flowing out of his way. He reached the back of the house, grabbed the handles of the big French doors, and turned them. Picard almost fell into the dim, cool interior of the house.

All at once the doors closed behind him and the ambient noise of the party was gone.

The house he was in was not his house, not the home where he had grown up. That building was gone, gutted by fire, lost to ashes. This house was unreal, like the illustration from some aged volume of Dickens. A period piece, oddly in the now and yet also in an idealized past out of the books Picard had loved as a youth.

There was no illumination but the dull glow of moonlight across the windows. As he moved through it, he felt different. Younger.

A moment ago, he had been an old man, decades hence. Now he was himself again, or so it seemed. His boots crunched on the carpet and he looked down. He was in a Starfleet uniform, but of a design he hadn’t worn since before the Borg Queen’s attack on Earth and the temporal incident with Zefram Cochrane’s Phoenix.

Crumpled wrapping paper, once bright and gaily colored in red and green, disintegrated under his heels. His eyes adjusted to the gloom and he picked out Christmas decorations, the debris of unwrapped gifts, and a tree decked in tinsel and baubles. Everything looked old and faded, the colors drained as if they had been bleached by the sun. All that was missing to complete the image of great neglect and abandonment was a layer of dust and the silken threads of cobwebs.

He knew instinctively that this place was utterly empty, populated only by the ghosts of his memories. And Picard did remember now.

He remembered being in this room, a blindfold falling from his eyes as his wife and his children greeted him, as René came and took his hand. Not his son, though, but the boy for whom he had been named. The nephew lost in the flames along with Jean-Luc’s brother Robert.

Deep regret, strong and potent, welled up in him. He held on to it tightly, because he knew it was real. “Not like this place,” he said aloud. “None of this . . .”

The nexus. Pieces of memory snapped back into order, a jigsaw of moments reassembling itself. It was harder this time, harder than it had been to resist the pull of the dream the first time he had fallen into the unreality. In the days after that initial encounter, in the aftermath of the Enterprise-D’s destruction and the final death of James T. Kirk, it had been easy for Picard to fill his thoughts with deeds to be done and reports to be made. But in the quiet moments, in the period between that mission and his eventual reassignment, there had been times when the pull of the illusion had weighed on him. In the darkest hours, he had even found some measure of understanding about what force had driven Tolian Soran to such dire lengths, to return to the nexus at any cost, no matter how terrible. Deanna Troi had helped Picard make sense of those thoughts, and for that he remained eternally grateful to her.

But now he was here again, and all that he had put behind him was stripped away. What he had feared the most about coming face-to-face with the nexus once more had come to pass.

I can’t stay here.

He looked around, moving from room to room in the deserted house. “Guinan?” She had been there before, and that echo of his old friend had served as Picard’s compass, his guide. But there was no reply this time, and he slowly realized that whatever Guinan had left behind in the nexus to lead him out before, it was no longer there.

A measure of understanding came to him. “Kolb . . .” Yes, that was what he was here for. Not for himself, but for his misguided friend. “I have to find him.” Kolb was lost, and in more than one sense.

With regret, Picard went to the front of the house, to the big oak door that led out to the gardens beyond. It was hard to move at first, the wood swollen and stiff with disuse, but he put his shoulder to it, and with a squeak of rusted hinges, it came open.

He caught a hot, arid wind in the face and brought up his hand to shield his eyes from a dazzling flood of yellow sunshine. Instead of stone, grass, and earth, sand gave under his boots and he stumbled forward.

Picard half-turned and saw that there was nothing behind him, no house but a shallow rise of dunes, falling down to a wide stretch of open amber beach and blue sea. He cast around. In the other direction there were foothills and craggy mountains with an earthy brown cast—and a short distance from him, a cluster of domed tents and yurts around a stand of trees and a shallow lake. Life was there: people in loose, gray-purple clothes moved back and forth, some busy with animals, others engaged in conversation.

Picard was still deliberating what to do when one of them, a woman with golden hair falling down to her shoulders, caught sight of him atop the dune. Even at this distance, he saw the change in her body language, the flash of a wide smile. She raised a hand and waved hello. Without thinking, Picard returned the gesture. The woman beckoned.

“She’ll have something to drink we could share,” said a voice.

Picard turned, startled by the sudden appearance of another person. A man stood behind him, above on one of the higher ridges. His clothes were similar in style and coloration to the people in the tent village, and the fat yellow sun was above the man’s shoulders, casting him in half silhouette. He wore a thin hood that shadowed the features of his face.

“You look thirsty. The air here can dry you out, if you’re not used to it.” The voice. Picard knew the voice, the murmur of it and the quiet intensity, but he could not place it. “I think you’re looking for someone. Am I right?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I know you.”

“In a way.” One of the man’s hands vanished into the folds of his tunic and when it returned, Picard was surprised to see he was holding a vintage pocket watch, clearly of Earth origin. He flicked open the cover and scrutinized the time; then, like a conjuror working a trick, the watch disappeared again and he looked up, reaching for his hood as he walked down the line of the dunes. “It will be high sun very soon. We shouldn’t be out in the open.”

The hood dropped and Picard’s breath caught as he found himself staring into the face of a man who had destroyed stars, tortured his crew, and in one iteration of history, killed millions of innocents. A man he had seen die in fire and flame. “Soran . . .”

“In a way,” repeated the El-Aurian. “Come on, follow me. And we’ll see about helping you find your friend.”

*   *   *

Warily, Picard followed him down the slope of the dunes to the wadi and the tent village surrounding it. The people were all El-Aurians, and they greeted Soran with nods and smiles. Picard didn’t see a single sorrowful face; everyone here seemed content and at peace. It was like the mood in the wedding pavilion, but different. Another kind of joy, perhaps.

The woman with the golden hair greeted Soran warmly and led them both into a large domed tent. Picard was momentarily startled when two young children—both girls—exploded out of the shadows and hurled themselves at the El-Aurian.

Soran’s face split in a peal of laughter as he let them bring him down, and for a moment they played at a little good-natured roughhousing before they let their father go.

Father. Picard knew it was so without needing to ask. And the woman, his wife? She smiled back at him, offering a tray with a glass jug and drinking bowls. “Altair water?” she said. “It’s cool.”

“Thank you.” Picard took the bowl and sipped at it; it was pleasingly refreshing after the arid air outside.

“I’m Laya,” she said. “Welcome to our home.”

Soran leaned in and kissed her. “My love, could you give us a moment? Jean-Luc and I have some things to discuss.” He seemed so alive, even in this small, ordinary moment, so different from the driven and severe man Picard had met years ago on the Enterprise-D.

She nodded. “Come on, girls, help me with the chores.”

The two children both made halfhearted groaning noises, but they went on their way, back through the tent flap, trailing behind their mother.

Picard watched them go. “They are quite beautiful. I’m so sorry.” He recalled the look in Soran’s eyes, there atop the rocky outcrop on Veridian III, the spike of pain in his voice as he had talked about the family that had been taken from him.

“Don’t be,” said Soran, offering him a seat on a low, oval cushion. “Here, sorrow doesn’t exist.”

“But what does?” Picard sat and studied the other man. “You’re not him. I . . . saw him die.”

“You killed him.” It was merely a statement, not an accusation. “I know he gave you no other choice.” Soran shook his head ruefully. “There was such pain in his heart, Captain. I think you saw that.”

“You are the . . . echo of Tolian Soran, then?”

A nod. “I’m part of him. All that is left now. I am what he left behind, the first time he entered the nexus.” He gestured out toward the village. “They are, too. Some of them were on the same ship as I was, taken through the gateway before the vessel exploded. Others are the echoes, as you call them.” Soran paused. “I think you understand him a little better now, don’t you? Now you have seen Laya and the girls, you know what it was he was trying to come back to.”

“Yes.” Before, Picard had never really experienced the power of the tie between husband and wife, between father and child. Even though he had once lived an entire lifetime as a parent through a Kataanian memory trace, that had never been as real as the experience of marrying Beverly and fathering René.

“I’m not asking you to forgive him,” said Soran. “Just understand.” The El-Aurian sipped at his water. “Tolian Soran lost something of himself in the nexus that first time. I think it might have been the better part of his spirit. Without it, without them—” He nodded toward the tent flap. “He fell into the darker reaches of himself. Do you know, when he came back, after Veridian III, he couldn’t recapture that peace?”

“How is that possible?” said Picard. “That event never happened. History was altered.”

“It was. But possibility is infinitely malleable in this place. Soran got his wish. He came back. But it was too late. He had changed too much.” The man sighed. “And now I am all that remains of a good soul broken by fate and time.”

What Picard saw before him was like some strange parallel reflection of the man who had done such terrible things at Amargosa and Veridian. This Tolian Soran was who he could have been if his life had followed a different path, a man at peace. “Is that why you are here, now?” he asked. “To explain this to me?”

Soran shook his head. “No. I’m going to help you. You have returned because you are looking for someone.”

Picard nodded. “A friend. His name is Kolb. I don’t know why he has done this. I have to bring him back.”

“Do you?” Soran cocked his head. “You know how the nexus works, Captain. If you want to leave it, you need only express the wish. If Kolb wants to stay, why not let him? Allow him what he wants and go back alone.”

“He has to answer for what he has done.” Picard’s expression darkened. “Lives were lost.”

“And you must know, yes?” Soran put down his bowl. “You are compelled. You can’t leave until you know his reason why.”

Picard nodded. “That’s part of it.”

The El-Aurian stood up and idly brushed sand from his tunic. “I can take you to Kolb, if that is what you want. Just promise me you won’t judge him. Let him make the choice that he needs to.”

“I will try.” Picard got up. “Where must we go?”

“This way.” Soran walked to the tent flap and opened it. Blinding sunlight flooded in as Picard followed him, and for a moment he was overwhelmed, unable to see anything.

*   *   *

He blinked and the glow faded, and with it went the arid sands, the wadi, and the El-Aurian village.

Soran was leading him through a lush parkland of perfectly manicured green-blue grass, a vast leisure space set out in the middle of a modern cityscape. Picard glanced around, seeing the white towers of glass and steel skyscrapers out past the lines of tall, willowy trees that bordered the park. Sections of the commons were marked with statue gardens and large, freestanding art pieces, most of them abstract geometric shapes or spindly rectilinear forms. Overhead, a blue sky was populated by clumps of white cloud and the crisscrossing paths of skimmers and air-trams. Picard followed Soran down a stone path, and he nodded absently as another Starfleet officer passed him, walking the other way. The captain realized that he and the officer were in the more recent iteration of the fleet uniform, the gray shoulders accenting the crimson-colored tunic beneath.

“You know this planet,” said the El-Aurian. “You’ve been here several times.”

He had expected to find himself on Styris IV, Kolb’s homeworld, but this planet was too temperate, and there was only a single star in the sky. Picard’s gaze found a range of white-capped mountains in the far distance and suddenly he knew. “Those are the Kodian Peaks,” he said. “This is the colonial capital on Deneva.” Picard’s breath caught in his throat. “At least, it was.”

“Not anymore,” said Soran. “Not outside the nexus.”

“No,” Picard admitted. Deneva as it was in reality was no more than a ball of irradiated rock, sheathed in drifts of ashes beneath a ragged, tenuous atmosphere no longer capable of supporting life. A massed Borg assault a few years earlier, part of their final, brutal campaign of eradication, had claimed the planet in a horrific attack.

A shadow crossed over them, something huge passing in front of the sun, and Picard’s skin crawled with a sudden chill. He looked up into the sky, his heart drumming, fearful that he would see the first of the enormous Borg tactical cubes pushing into orbit over the planet; but it was only the shade cast by a cloud, high up and caught by the wind. The shadow drifted away, and the warm touch of the Denevan sun returned.

He heard deep, throaty laughter, and turned toward the sound. There, a few feet away from them in a sculpted knoll, a Styrisian woman and a young boy had bolted to their feet among the pieces of a picnic set spread on the turquoise grass. Doctor Kolb was emerging from a nearby copse of trees, open delight on his face.

“Husband!” said the woman, smiling. “What a surprise! I didn’t know you were going to be on planet!”

“I decided that I couldn’t be away from you two a moment longer,” he told them, pulling her into an embrace, then reaching out to touch his son’s head.

“I understand him,” said Soran. He halted in the lee of a tall, oblate sculpture of white stone, and Picard stood close by. “Your friend and I have shared the same horror.”

“His family were on Deneva. . . .” Picard frowned, drawing it all into a whole. “If they were there when the Borg came . . .” The thought was unsettling. “I didn’t know. He never spoke of it.”

“What you have is real, Captain,” Soran told him. “Your wife and your son. You could re-create them here with a thought, and as perfect as they would be, you would always know in your heart that they were false. It would gnaw at you.”

“Yes, the knowledge that Beverly and René were . . . outside. That they would go on without me. I couldn’t live with that.”

The El-Aurian pointed toward Kolb, who was sitting now, enjoying a fruit and joking with his son. The boy couldn’t have been much older than René. “Kolb has only the opposite of that to return to. The certain knowledge that all those he loved dearly are dead, and nothing he can do will ever bring them back.”

Picard looked up again. The sun seemed to be moving far quicker than it should, and the daytime was changing too fast into early evening. “This is the day it happened,” he surmised. “The day the Borg destroyed Deneva.”

“Kolb won’t allow that to happen,” said Soran. The evening became a brief flicker of night and suddenly the sun was rising again, slowing back to normal speed. No one seemed to notice the shift. “He will live this day over and over, timeless and perfect—”

“And safe.”

“Yes.” Soran pulled out the pocket watch once more and studied the face. “I’ll leave you here. This isn’t the end of the story, Captain. What happens next is up to you.” He gave Picard a nod. “Good-bye.”

Picard caught him before he walked away. “Soran. I want you to know. I regret what happened with . . . you.”

“I know,” he said, walking on without looking back. “So do I.”

*   *   *

Kolb had a chill-bottle of iced tea in his hand as Picard emerged from behind the sculpture and into the scientist’s line of sight. He saw the Styrisian’s mouth widen in a moment of shock. Kolb dropped the container, letting the contents spill across the grass.

“Father, are you all right?” Kolb’s son grabbed at the bottle to right it before all the tea glugged away into the dirt. The boy turned to follow Kolb’s panicked gaze and saw the Starfleet officer approaching him. His expression soured. “Is that man here to take you away again?”

“No,” Kolb said firmly, getting to his feet. “There’s a mistake!” He strode out to meet Picard before he could come too close.

“Kolb—”

“I am not going back!” he snarled, and before Picard could say more, Kolb was prodding him angrily in the chest. “You can’t make me! You shouldn’t even be here!”

Picard kept his expression and his tone neutral. “I’m here because of you,” he said. “What did you expect, old friend? That I would just let you go?”

“Yes.” The reply seemed small and weak. “Why did you have to interfere?”

The captain’s manner hardened. “Because you committed an act of willful sabotage aboard a Federation starship—an act that directly led to the loss of innocent lives.”

Kolb’s frame seemed to sag under an invisible weight, and he cast a worried look back at his family, who were proceeding with their picnic, unaware anything was awry. It was almost as if Kolb were terrified that they would dissipate like vapor if he didn’t keep watching them.

“I’ve done a terrible thing,” he said, swallowing a gasp. “And I swear to you, Jean-Luc, I never meant to hurt anyone, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

Picard nodded toward the wife and son. “The Borg?” He didn’t need to say any more.

Kolb’s lip trembled and he nodded. “Delka and Mortod were here when the invasion struck. Delka was visiting a former teacher. She was looking for a new publisher for one of her monographs, and we both thought Mortod would enjoy a trip to another world. I couldn’t leave. I was busy.” He almost choked on the last words. “They perished here along with every other living being on Deneva. My life was destroyed in that instant, Jean-Luc. All of it shattered.”

The bright, cloudless day faded, becoming darker, as if Kolb’s words were shifting the mood of the world around them. Picard found he could say nothing. Like Soran, Kolb had been robbed of all the joy in his life by the predations of the Borg, and he had not healed from the grief. For a moment, Picard tried to conceive of the dimensions of the pain he would feel if it were Beverly and René that had been taken from him, and his mind shrank from the monumental horror of it. He put himself in Kolb’s place and felt a pang of incredible sorrow, a vulnerability that made his heart pound against his ribs.

When he spoke, his mouth was dry. “You never told me.”

“I never told anyone,” Kolb replied. “Not all the details. In the chaos after the Borg assault, there was so much confusion. It was months before the Federation got back on an even footing. You know, you were there. After they were gone, I was just . . . numb. I threw myself into my work. I tried to lose myself in it.” He shook his head. “At first I was crippled with survivor’s guilt. I contemplated suicide. I couldn’t go on without them.” He shot another look toward his wife and child. “But then by chance I came across a file, part of a top secret research program.”

“Project Nexus.”

Kolb nodded again. “Imagine my surprise when I saw my old friend Jean-Luc Picard’s name on the log records and reports.” He glanced up at the captain, and there was a flicker of new passion in his gaze. “I pored over every word you wrote. I knew that this phenomenon was a chance for me to find them again.” He grabbed Picard’s arm. “They are parts of my soul, Jean-Luc! Pieces of me that I lost. You understand that, don’t you? Perhaps not before, but you understand now.”

Picard found himself nodding. He wondered how Kolb had managed to fool Starfleet’s evaluation board; someone who had suffered such a trauma would never have been allowed to go anywhere near a temporal anomaly without passing a battery of psychological tests.

“I kept the memory of them locked up in here,” said Kolb, tapping a finger on his forehead, guessing Picard’s thoughts. “I would only weep when I was alone and unseen.” The scientist’s hand dropped away. “I planned it so perfectly. Years to get myself involved with the project, and then many months building my scheme, making it airtight and infallible. I was going to cause a transporter accident, make it look like I had been lost in transit.”

“When in fact you would enter the nexus.”

“Correct. I would be listed as dead, and no one would ever know where I had gone.”

“Bryant ruined all that, though, didn’t he? You had no idea he was planning to suggest the dissolution of the nexus to Starfleet Command.”

“No.” Kolb’s face soured. “With one order, everything I had set in motion was rendered useless. My carefully engineered plan was in tatters. Then you arrived with the Enterprise and I panicked. I had to stop you from destroying the nexus, so I interfered with the power regulator and sabotaged the subspace pulse.” His voice rose. “ I miscalculated! I never meant for people to be hurt—not Bryant or Vetro or anyone else! Please, you must believe me!”

Picard didn’t answer. He was trying to square the memory of the compassionate man he had first met during the Styris emergency with the fretting, conflicted person standing before him. Once again, he looked at Kolb and saw a warped reflection of Tolian Soran. “I cannot remain here,” he told him. “And neither can you.”

“No,” Kolb shook his head, “No. This is what I want.”

“Is it?” Picard glanced at the illusory versions of Delka and Mortod, who seemed content and carefree. He felt a shock of empathy, and for the briefest of moments, the faces of Kolb’s family seemed to shift and reform into those of Beverly and René. Picard forced himself to look away before the nexus could read into the fears and hopes in his thoughts, and find a way to entice him to stay. “We leave so many things unfinished in our lives.” The words came to him across the gulf of memory, and they sounded odd coming from his lips. “Kolb, all this around you is ephemeral and unreal. It is the stuff of dreams, an illusion.”

“A perfect illusion!” Kolb retorted. “Better than the reality could ever be.”

“But a falsehood nonetheless,” said Picard. “I never met Delka and Mortod, but I know that you loved them dearly. I can see that now, in every word you say.” He pointed. “But that is not them. They are gone, and their loss is what makes you love them even more. Our memory of the ones we care for defines them when they leave us, and it defines us in turn. If you choose to live in this moment, in this timeless space, you do them a disservice. Delka and Mortod become nothing more than images, replicas. They will truly cease to live, Kolb, because you will cease to live. You will exist here, suspended in the past, and both you . . . and their memories . . . will be gone forever.”

For a long moment, the scientist said nothing. He tried to find the words to express himself, but he failed. Then, Picard watched his friend slowly crumble, the energy that had animated him fading away; and finally Kolb wept, releasing his pain.

“It is a hollow victory,” he said, composing himself. “I always knew that. All I wanted was to be with them, at the end.” Kolb looked up, and the pure anguish in his eyes aged him decades in moments. “They died and I wasn’t there with them, Jean-Luc.”

“You could not have saved them,” Picard said gently. “You cannot blame yourself.”

“I know,” he replied. “But of all the things I have left unfinished in my life, that moment corrodes my very soul.” Kolb looked back at his family once more. “I was so lucky to share my life with them,” he said. “And each time I think the pain can cut me no deeper, a greater depth is revealed.”

“Will you come back?”

“You are right, Jean-Luc. I must not stay here.” Kolb began to walk away, back toward the towering white stone sculpture.

“Husband?” Delka called out to him as Picard fell into step with the scientist. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s all right,” Kolb called back. “We’ll be together.” He turned toward the captain and opened a fold in his robes. “Jean-Luc, before we leave here, there’s something I would like you to have.” The scientist pulled his custom tricorder from an inner pocket and pressed it into Picard’s hands.

The captain glanced down at the device. The screen was alight with trains of complex readings and data strings. “What is this?”

“The nexus,” said Kolb, as they walked along the park’s stone pathway, “as seen from within as well as without. Take this back to Enterprise, to La Forge. It’s everything I was unable to get from all the probes sent into the ribbon, a true window into the structure of this phenomenon.”

Picard halted and paged through the memory store, which was filled almost to capacity with dense fields of information, enough raw data to keep the analysts of the Daystrom Institute busy for years. “This will fill the gaps in our knowledge. We could use it to complete the equations for your energy membrane. . . . We could lock the nexus shut.”

“I believe so,” Kolb told him, an unreadable cast to his gaze.

He suddenly had the sense that his old friend was burying something deep once again, but this time it wasn’t emotion or sorrow, but intent. Kolb backed away, gathering his robes to him. Picard raised his hand. “Wait,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“What I should have done all along,” said the Styrisian. “Don’t follow me, Jean-Luc. This isn’t for you.”

“Kolb, stop!” Picard reached out for the other man, but suddenly a white flare of light erupted from the very air itself, right in front of the scientist. Impossibly, the curtain of brilliant energy opened and became a shimmering, glassy portal. Picard tried to peer into the hazy glow. The light-force buffeted him back, as if it were a solid presence, but Kolb seemed unaffected by it. He summoned it, Picard realized. The nexus is psychoactive. It responds to us.

“No more illusions,” said Kolb. “I’m going to be with my family.” He gave Picard a rueful smile and stepped across the threshold, into another identical Denevan park, on another perfect day.

*   *   *

A shadow passed over the sun, but it was only the shade cast by a cloud, high up and caught by the wind. The shadow drifted away and the warm touch of the Denevan sun returned.

Kolb couldn’t help but smile and then laugh as he stepped out from behind the copse of tall trees above the knoll. His wife and son looked up at the familiar sound, and the mingled looks of delight and surprise on their faces were the most perfect thing he had ever seen. He wanted to weep, but this time for joy. All the years of loss that had passed were gone in a moment, undone.

Delka came to him, sharing his laughter. “Husband! What a surprise! I didn’t know you were going to be on planet!”

“I decided that I couldn’t be away from you two a moment longer.” He pulled her into an embrace and reached out to tousle Mortod’s dark hair. “Hello there.”

The boy was happy, but he was a little nonplussed. “I thought you were at home, on the other side of the quadrant. . . .”

“I was,” Kolb admitted, “but now I’m here.”

Another shadow, this one angular and slow, began to inch its way across the parkland. In the far distance, the faint howl of emergency sirens sounded, and closer at hand, the voices of other people in the park were becoming agitated and fearful.

Kolb drew his wife and son close, holding them to him so that they did not look up and see the end approaching.

“This is where I am supposed to be,” he told them.

5

One instant he was reaching out to Kolb; the next there was an intense feeling of motion, of dislocation, and Picard’s senses were briefly overwhelmed by a wash of brilliant white light.

When the glow died, he stumbled forward a step, blinking as his eyes readjusted, and he felt the firmness of a solid deck beneath his feet. Doors hissed open at his approach, and the captain found himself stepping out of a turbolift and onto the bridge of the Enterprise.

Home. The thought pulled at a faint smile on his lips; but then the moment went away as he realized that the ship was in the middle of a Red Alert, sirens keening and his crew engaged at their duties.

Worf turned to see his arrival. “Captain on the bridge!” he called.

Picard had a hundred questions, but he held off for the moment and strode toward his first officer. If the nexus had released him here, then it had been by his will, conscious or not. “Report, Commander,” he demanded.

The Klingon gestured toward the viewscreen. “We were about to commence the subspace pulse when the Newton suffered a main power failure across the board.” The science vessel was visible, listing and adrift off the Enterprise’s port bow. Some distance ahead, the turning mass of the nexus continued its unhurried progress across the void. “Initial scans suggest the malfunction was caused deliberately.”

“It was,” Picard confirmed. He suddenly remembered the tricorder he was holding in his hands, and gave it a brief look. “Number One, what are the whereabouts of Doctor Kolb?”

“Who?” The furrows on Worf’s brow deepened. “I don’t know the name.”

“The Styrisian astrophysicist.”

Lieutenant Elfiki looked up from her console, sharing the commander’s confusion. “We don’t have any natives from Styris on board the Enterprise, sir. Neither does the Newton.”

“No . . .” Picard nodded to himself, thinking aloud. “Of course. He was never here. He never interfered with the pulse.”

“Someone did,” Worf retorted. “Captain, do you know what is going on?”

“I have an idea,” he replied. “Hail the Newton.”

“Opening a channel,” called Lieutenant Chen.

The screen switched to a view of the other ship’s bridge, and Thom Bryant. Very much alive and clearly annoyed, he shot Picard a hard look. “Enterprise, can it wait? We’re a little busy here.” Over Bryant’s shoulder, the Newton’s command center was in chaos as Rhonu and the other officers tried to get their vessel back on line. Dim emergency lighting cast the compartment with long, deep shadows.

“It can’t,” Picard snapped, rolling over Bryant’s dismissive tone. “Listen to me. Your priority must be to restore your shields and motive power immediately.” If history had been altered and Kolb was no longer present on the science vessel, then there was only one other explanation as to who was responsible for the Newton’s condition. “You have an infiltrator on board your ship, sir. An Orion agent, disguised as an Arkarian named Een Norgadd.”

“Norgadd?” Bryant shot Rhonu a look, but the Betazoid was already calling up data on a flickering console.

“Our internal sensors are still operable,” Rhonu was saying. “Tracking. . . . Found him.” Her expression changed to one of alarm. “That’s not right. He’s in the shuttlebay, but that area is off-limits to civilian science staff. Captain, I think he’s trying to access the runabout!”

Bryant slapped at his combadge. “Security to Shuttlebay One, on the double. Lock down that compartment. No one leaves!” He looked back at Picard. “An Orion spy? How the hell did you know that?”

“Captain Bryant,” Picard insisted. “Your shields. Otherwise Norgadd will be transported off your ship by his employers and he’ll escape with data on Project Nexus. That cannot be allowed to happen.”

The other captain grimaced. “Vetro is working on it now, but it’ll take a few minutes. We could use some help.” The last he added with great reluctance.

La Forge spoke up from his engineering station. “I can extend the Enterprise’s deflectors to patch the gap until they’re ready.”

“Do it,” said Worf. Picard’s first officer turned to study his captain as La Forge set to work. His eyes narrowed. “Captain Bryant’s question stands, sir. You seem to suddenly be in possession of knowledge the rest of us do not share.”

“Explain yourself, Picard,” added Bryant.

Picard held up Kolb’s tricorder. “The short answer is . . . temporal anomaly.”

“The nexus? You went back in there?” Bryant was incredulous.

“He did,” offered Rhonu, reading Picard’s expression and his surface thoughts across the distance between them. “Against his will, I think.”

Worf regarded him, grim-faced. “Did the ship get destroyed again?”

“Not this time,” admitted Picard. “I will be making a full report to both Starfleet Command and the Department of Temporal Investigations once we are secure. But for the moment I must beg your trust.” He crossed to La Forge’s station and handed him the tricorder. “Geordi, can you download the contents of this device’s memory? It contains readings of the inner workings of the nexus phenomenon.”

The engineer nodded and slotted the tricorder into an input port; immediately the torrent of data gathered by Kolb began to unfold on one of the tertiary panels. La Forge gave a low, appreciative whistle. “This is the mother lode,” he said. “More than we could have gleaned from years of external scans.”

“You’ll also find a set of equations in that memory core, projections to create a self-regenerating verteron membrane—”

Picard’s words were cut short by a cry of alarm from Lieutenant Faur. “Kinshaya warships approaching at attack speed, three-one-six mark three!”

“On-screen!” He spun as Worf gave the order.

Spherical vessels rippled into clear view from beneath the haze of emission cloaks, and the two alien craft let fly with a cascade of energy bolts. The bright spears of power cut through the darkness and creased the Enterprise’s shields, but the main body of the barrage was clearly aimed toward the Newton.

“Jackals!” spat Worf. “The Kinshaya always seek the weakest targets first.”

“Return fire,” said Picard. “Warn them off.”

“Engaging attackers,” reported Lieutenant Šmrhová from the tactical station.

Lines of orange-red fire lanced from the collimator ring on the Enterprise’s upper hull, shearing across the globe-shaped liberators; but they rolled away, shifting on their axis, absorbing the hits across the spread of their shields.

“They’re turning. Coming around for another pass,” reported Glinn Dygan. “Orders, Captain?”

Picard pointed. “Move us closer to the Newton, try to put us between the Kinshaya craft and Bryant’s ship. We need to buy him more time.”

“Quantum torpedoes loaded in all tubes and ready to launch,” said Šmrhová. “I have firing solutions. We can take out the lead ship with a single salvo.”

“Let’s not make this any more of a shooting match than it already is,” Picard demurred. “If we can avoid any loss of life . . .”

“Wait for it,” said Worf, picking up on his plan. “The Kinshaya are a predictable foe.”

A chime sounded from Chen’s panel. “Incoming hail. It’s them.”

“Keep your finger on the trigger,” Picard told Šmrhová. “Just in case.” He glanced at Lieutenant Chen. “T’Ryssa, put them on.”

He watched the image of the domed command pulpit reform in place of the exterior view, and with it the angry, beaked scowl of a bishop of the Kinshaya Holy Order. The gray-feathered female let out a snarling shriek that the universal translators could not parse into common speech, but the tone carried the meaning well enough. She turned her head and spat in disgust. “Get away,” she snapped. “Leave this place now, heretics. You dally in the territory of the Holy Order at your peril.”

“I am Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise, and we are in unclaimed space. You have no jurisdiction here, Ay’eh.”

He had thought that using the traditional Kinshaya honorific would mollify the alien, but the result was the exact opposite. The bishop-captain flared her wings in a show of martial fury. “You dare speak my sanctified title without permission? I will gut you for your temerity, and regurgitate the remains to feed my nest-clutch!”

“I meant no disrespect,” he replied. “There is no need for further violence here.”

“I will be the judge of what is needed,” came the strident reply. “You bring a demon into our presence.” She glared out of the screen at Worf. “We should render you to atoms and sing a hymn to the splendor of it. Count yourself lucky, human, that we deign to give you the Holy Order’s grace this day. Take your vessels and run home to your Federation. This will be your only chance to leave with your lives.”

“That is a generous offer,” said Picard, and he almost sounded as if he meant it. At his side, he saw Worf look down at a nearby monitor screen.

“The price for this gift is the Orion. Surrender him to us and you are free to go.”

“Oh.” He put on a rueful, contrite smile, and from the corner of his eye he saw La Forge give him a nod, tapping Kolb’s tricorder. Picard glanced at Worf, and Chen automatically muted the channel. “Status of the Newton?”

“Commander Rhonu reports shields and impulse power will be operable in a few moments, but no warp drive,” said the Klingon swiftly.

He looked back at the viewscreen; the bishop didn’t appear to have noticed the moment of silence. “I’m afraid that your . . . employee . . . will not be available. He has to answer for his actions.”

“We have made him a counteroffer,” rumbled Worf. “A small, comfortable cell.”

The Kinshaya commander’s talons audibly clattered against the metal decking of her bridge, and she clacked her beak twice as if she were biting at the air. “Then you will all perish. I declare the ribbon anomaly to be the work of our Gods and name it as a sacred object. Your violation of this blessed entity is the highest heresy that only blood will wash away.”

“Captain . . .” Šmrhová’s voice was low and grim. “We’re detecting six more Kinshaya liberator-type ships at extreme range, on approach vectors.”

“Die now,” said the Bishop, and cut the signal. In the next second, star fire filled the void.

A renewed bombardment cut across the dark and slammed into the Enterprise’s shields as the two Kinshaya ships converged their fire on the same point. They were trying to maximize their attack potential by overwhelming the starship’s deflectors at one location, enough to break through and strike the vessel proper. Had the combat been a direct two-against-one, Picard knew that they would have rebuffed the assault easily; but, forced into the role of protector for the Newton, the Enterprise could do little more than stand and take the beating.

He turned toward the tactical station. “Lieutenant, give them a bloody nose, see if that will make them back off.”

“Firing,” said Šmrhová.

A pair of quantum torpedoes leapt from the forward launcher tubes and homed in on the enemy craft. Each one detonated with a sunburst flash, the first a direct hit, the second a glancing shot.

“The secondary vessel’s shields are down fifty percent,” said Worf. “Lead ship absorbed the majority of the blast, still coming.” He looked at his captain. “They will keep at us until we retreat or destroy them.”

Picard took the center seat as the Enterprise rocked under another salvo. “We’re not going to leave just yet.”

“Report from the Newton,” called Chen. “Sir, they’re raising shields but their weapons are still inactive.”

“A Nebula-class ship in that condition is no match for two Kinshaya liberators,” said Dygan.

Picard nodded grimly. “I know.” He glanced at La Forge. “Geordi, do you have the verteron membrane projections?”

The engineer tapped his panel with a finger, his artificial eyes wide. “Aye, sir. I was looking at developing something similar myself, but the data I had was incomplete. . . . Captain, you understand what will happen to the nexus if we use this?”

“It will be sealed off from the outside. Locked shut, in effect.”

Worf frowned. “Captain Bryant won’t agree to that.”

“I didn’t plan on asking his permission, Number One,” Picard replied. He thought about Kolb, wherever or whenever he was. If they could complete the work the scientist had started, it would rebalance the scales of power in this situation and render the nexus inaccessible . . . for the foreseeable future, at least.

“If we do this, we may not be able to reverse the lock effect again,” added Lieutenant Elfiki.

“We’ll take that chance.” Picard leaned forward in his chair. “Reconfigure the main deflector dish to project the verteron initiator discharge.”

“We will need to get closer,” said the engineer, working his console. “We’ll only get one shot at it.”

“Then let’s make it count.” The captain gestured to Dygan and Faur. “On my mark, full ahead, take us to the outer penumbra of the nexus.” He looked toward Šmrhová. “All power to the forward shields, Lieutenant. Punch us through.”

“Ready,” they replied, one after another.

“Engage.”

*   *   *

The Enterprise’s thruster coils flared with power and the starship burst into motion, going from a standing stop to maximum impulse speed in nanoseconds, testing the structural integrity fields as it vaulted away from the Newton. The science vessel set off at high speed on an escape vector, but the Enterprise dove straight into the heart of the enemy formation, cutting through the Kinshaya attack pattern like a saw blade.

The orb-shaped liberators reacted quickly, a testament to the attentiveness of the Kreel crew-slaves at their helms; a moment slower, and the ships might have collided. Impulse grids gushed fusion fire as the Holy Order vessels initiated emergency maneuvers to get clear of the Federation starship’s surprise gambit. The hulls of the Kinshaya ships were studded with dozens of turret hemispheres, each home to a lethal energy cannon or missile battery. The turrets twitched and tracked Enterprise, firing their war-shots into the path of the Sovereign-class vessel. The reinforced shields flashed as the ship punched through the enemy line. Phaser fire tracked back down the lines of attack and reduced several of the automated gun cupolas to oily black smears across the hulls of the Kinshaya sphere-craft.

Spinning in her wake, the Holy Order ships were buffeted by the backwash from the Enterprise’s drives, and they lost vital seconds recovering as their target vessel streaked away, racing toward the nexus.

*   *   *

The energy ribbon loomed large on the main viewscreen, and Picard’s hands tensed on the arms of his chair. A part of him recoiled from what the nexus represented, the open gateway into a world of utopian dreams and endless peace. It was difficult to admit, but every second he had been inside the nexus, the power of it had dragged on him like a tidal, gravitational effect. It was something no one should have to face.

“Time to target?” he asked.

“Twenty seconds,” said Worf. “Mister La Forge, are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” replied the engineer. “Main deflector reconfigured. Verteron discharge is ready to release.”

A strident tone sounded from Lieutenant Faur’s console. “The Kinshaya are closing the distance. They’re locking weapons.”

Enterprise rocked as it crossed over the outer edge of the nexus’s gravity shadow, the stresses and tensions from the turbulent forces at work inside the ribbon pressing on the ship’s protective shields. Ropes of plasmatic material lashed at the darkness, reaching out like plant tendrils groping toward sunlight. This was as close as they dared to come; any nearer and they risked plunging into the phenomenon, like the Cam or the ill-fated El-Aurian ships before it.

The order was there on Picard’s lips, but he hesitated for a fractional moment. Staring at the spinning thread of the nexus, he couldn’t help but wonder what would happen when he gave the command. What would happen to Soran’s echo and all the other beings who still existed within the phenomenon, suspended in timelessness?

This isn’t the end of the story, Captain. Soran’s words came back to him, and he drew himself up. “Commander La Forge. Initiate discharge . . . now.”

*   *   *

A flickering pinpoint of emerald fire gathered in the center of the Enterprise’s deflector dish, in seconds growing to become a seething ball of energy. As it reached a point of critical mass, the writhing clump of captured verteron particles shot away and distorted. The accumulation opened, unfurling into a skein of gossamer, jade-colored lightning that sparked violently as it brushed the energy tendrils issuing out from the nexus.

The two phantasmal energies came together in a pulse of light and force that flared brighter than a supernova. A shock-front of liberated radiation exploded from the nexus in a perfect sphere, and the Enterprise was caught by it as the ship tried to turn away. Gathered up like a piece of flotsam on the swell of a wave, the vessel was carried off course and away, its thrusters useless against the discharge. The shock hit the two Kinshaya ships in close pursuit and spun them about, dragging them along with the expanding radius. Neither of the Holy Order’s craft had been ready, and they suffered damage as outer hull plates buckled and engine intercoolers were blown open.

For long seconds the dizzying, turbulent wave rolled on before finally losing potential; it dissipated into a wash of sparkling, short-duration particle effects. Enterprise pulled out from a lazy yawing tumble, angling back toward the Newton, whose crew had stood witness to it all. The Kinshaya ships floated in the blackness, drifting in slicks of spilled breathing gases and hull fragments.

Beyond them, the nexus changed.

*   *   *

Picard winced and got slowly to his feet. The shock effect had been far stronger than he had expected, and the shifting gravity slammed him into the arm of his chair with such force that his arm was now a mess of purple bruises.

“Captain, are you all right?” asked Worf, pulling his baldric straight across his chest.

Picard waved him away, searching the faces of his crew. “Report . . .” The word faded on his lips as his gaze found the image on the main viewscreen.

The energy ribbon was different. The motion of its movement, almost like a living thing, was unaltered, but now there was a ghostly green haze that flickered about it, like some kind of cosmic St. Elmo’s fire. As he watched, the edge-effect tendrils of the nexus brushed the interface between the cowl of verterons. Flashes of light marked the collision, but no secondary shock waves were emitted.

“I think it worked,” offered La Forge.

“Scanning,” said Elfiki. The aft display screen showed a graphic of the object, and rendered around it was a vaguely ovoid shell of shimmering particles. “Confirmed. The verteron membrane is in place. It’s self-sustaining—decay rate is near zero-point-zero percent.” Her lip curled. “Huh. The nexus is now officially closed for business.”

“What will happen if any ships make an approach?” asked Worf.

“They’ll run into an increasing gravity gradient the closer they get,” La Forge explained. “It’ll push them back the way they came, like a surge tide in an ocean.”

“Good work, Commander La Forge,” said Picard, favoring his arm. He turned to Worf. “Number One, secure the ship, bring us alongside the Newton.”

“Captain Bryant will not be happy,” noted the Klingon.

“I don’t doubt it. But we’re getting closer to Kinshaya space with every moment, and those other liberators are still coming. We’ve done enough. It’s time for us to go.”

Chen’s console emitted a chime. “Incoming hail from our friend the bishop, sir. Shall I let her eat static?”

Picard straightened his uniform tunic and shook his head. “Let’s not be rude.”

The Kinshaya commander appeared on the screen, and it was clear her ship was the worse for wear after the passage of the shock front. She shrieked with open fury. “What have you done, heretic animal? How dare you interfere with a holy object—”

At Picard’s side, his first officer’s rigid stance made it clear that he had taken more than he was willing to tolerate of the bishop’s constant posturing. “You have no right to lay claim to the nexus, or label it ‘holy’ on a whim so that you may do so! We are protecting the energy ribbon from those who would abuse it!”

“Tell your masters this,” said Picard, meeting the black-eyed gaze of the Kinshaya commander. “The nexus is not yours. It belongs to no one. We have placed it out of your reach. You are free to study it at a distance as it passes through your space, and if you wish we will gladly open a dialogue toward mutual scientific understanding of this unique object.” His tone hardened. “But whatever plans your faction may have had to exploit it, to regain the upper hand in your society, will not be allowed to progress.”

“This is an act of war!”

“Against whom?” Picard demanded. “The Typhon Pact? I doubt the Pact’s ruling council is even aware of your presence in this sector. The lawful Devotionalist government of the Kinshaya? You do not speak for them. At best, you are a small band of hidebound agitators unwilling to accept progress and change.”

“We are the true Kinshaya!” roared the alien. “We will take our rightful place once again and expunge the usurpers, and you will pay for your interference.” She glowered into the image pickup, her face filling the screen. “You have made a powerful enemy this day, human.”

“I’m sure you think so,” Picard replied coldly, gesturing to Chen. “Close channel.”

He found Worf looking at him with a wry smile on his lips. “That was almost Klingon of you, Captain.”

“Almost?”

“Indeed. But a Klingon commander would have followed up so cutting an insult to their prowess by also obliterating their ships.”

Picard waved the comment away. “They’ve lost, and they know it. Their ships are dead in space, so let them lick their wounds and practice their bluster without us.” He looked back out at the energy ribbon; forever moving, its path unending, it carried on heedless of the conflicts and the questions it left in its wake. “The nexus will return . . . and we’ll be waiting.”

*   *   *

“You went against my orders,” said Bryant, glaring at Picard from across his ready room. Behind him, through the tall window, the Enterprise’s captain could see the leading edge of the Newton’s saucer section as the science vessel kept pace with them, set against the light-displaced stars of warp speed. La Forge and Bryant’s engineer, Vetro, had managed to get the other ship’s drives up and running in short order, and now both craft were crossing the border back into Federation space.

Picard could only nod. “It seemed the correct choice at the time.”

Bryant folded his arms. “I would be within my rights to lodge a formal complaint with Starfleet Command.”

“That is your right,” said Picard. “I won’t try to dissuade you.” The irony of this reversal of their earlier conversation did not escape him.

“You had just exited a temporal anomaly,” continued the other officer. “Did it not occur to you that your judgment might have been compromised?”

“It occurred to me,” he countered. “But I’ve been through that experience before, Captain. There was little time to act, so I took the initiative. Now the nexus is . . . a matter of détente. We don’t have it, and they don’t have it.”

Bryant’s scowl deepened. “Your report makes some entertaining reading, Picard. According to you, in this original timeline of events, I and several of my staff were dead.” He paused, thinking it through. “I suppose I should thank you for rewriting history.”

“I regret I couldn’t convince Doctor Kolb to return with me.” Picard glanced at the scientist’s tricorder, inert now and lying on his desk.

“Federation databases from Styris IV indicate that there was an astrophysicist named Kolb resident on that planet. But he apparently went missing around the same time the Borg invasion took place.” Bryant paused again. “Odd, considering that the Styris system didn’t suffer any direct attacks by the Borg assault.”

“Time adjusting itself, perhaps,” suggested Picard. “I’m sure the investigators from the DTI will have a theory about that.”

“They won’t be pleased to see you again. You’re getting close to matching Kirk’s record for temporal infractions, I hear.” Bryant’s hard expression lessened a degree or two. “I understand why you locked the nexus, Picard, even if I don’t like what you did. You’ve been in there, you know what it is capable of better than any of us. Perhaps, when the ribbon’s orbit takes it out of Kinshaya territory and back into open space, we can return to it. Try to pick up where we left off. . . .”

Picard sensed something unsaid in the other man’s manner and studied him. “You want to ask me something.”

Bryant nodded. “Answer me honestly. Do you think we should leave that thing shut away from the galaxy for good?”

“I think we’ll know when we are ready for it,” he replied.

“Let’s hope so.” The other captain straightened, becoming formal. “Good sailing, sir.”

“And to you, sir,” said Picard, with a nod.

Bryant’s holographic avatar shimmered and vanished, leaving the Enterprise’s captain alone in the cabin. He looked again to the window and saw the Newton change course and peel off from the formation, turning to head away toward the nearest starbase.

He let himself get lost in the view for a time; and then after a long moment, Picard tapped an intercom panel and sent a message to his wife.

*   *   *

René knelt down in the grass, and with the exacting care that only a two-year-old boy could muster, he cupped the seed head of a dandelion in his small hands and blew gently on it. The feathery seeds flowed into the air and he burst out laughing, as if it were the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

Watching his son from nearby, Picard shared a smile with Beverly, and he reached into the picnic hamper for a bottle of white wine and the corkscrew.

“This was a nice surprise,” said Beverly. “I was going to cook dinner tonight. . . .”

“Let the replicator do the work this once,” Picard replied, opening the bottle. He poured a measure of wine, sampled it, and pronounced it good, and then attended to his wife, filling her glass. “I wanted a change from eating in our quarters.”

She eyed him, and he knew she was reading him as easily as any telepath might. “But why here?” Beverly gestured at the curved walls of the Enterprise’s arboretum, the gardens of plants set around the support stanchions of the starship’s hull, and the tall, wide windows looking out into the depths of space. “There are so many parks we could have visited in the holodeck’s memory banks, from dozens of worlds. Earth, Andor, Pacifica . . .”

He frowned briefly. “I wanted something real,” he explained, putting his hand on the ground, feeling the texture of the blades of grass against his skin. “I’ve grown tired of illusions.”

Beverly moved closer to him and set down her wineglass. “Tell me,” she said, without preamble, her hand touching his face.

Tell you what? He almost said the words out loud, the automatic rebuff coming to him without conscious thought; but it would have been foolish to pretend that he had nothing to say to her. She was his wife and his friend and she knew him better than anyone.

“You read me like a book,” he said quietly.

“Only if you want me to,” she replied.

Picard let out a slow breath. “Kolb. My thoughts keep returning to him, to what he did . . . and his reasons for doing it.”

Beverly instinctively glanced toward René, who was now investigating an ant crawling over his fingers. “He lost so much,” she said. Beverly had read the same report that Picard had given to Bryant, and she knew about the conversation the two men had shared inside the nexus.

“I can’t help but wonder what I would have done in his place.” He looked out at the stars. “Would I have made the same choices under the same circumstances? I want to say no . . . but that feels like a lie.”

“We give all for those we love,” she said. Picard turned back, and Beverly met his gaze. “Jean-Luc, what did you see in there? The report was vague . . . deliberately so. Was it different from the family you saw the first time?”

“Very,” he admitted. “Before, the wife and the children, my nephew, the home at Christmas . . . it was unreal, a true fantasy. It was the synthesis of dreams and half-remembered stories.”

“But this time?”

“This time it was you.” He took her hand and nodded toward René. “And him. And Wes, Will and Deanna and Tasha, Worf, Data, Geordi, and everyone we call friend, all well and content. Older, wiser, but still here with us.”

Beverly hesitated. “It sounds . . . perfect.”

He held the moment, unable to find the words, and then suddenly Picard felt a laugh break free from his lips, a peal of good humor straight from the heart. It was infectious; his wife grinned and his son echoed him. “No,” he told her, “it wasn’t really perfect at all.” A sudden and certain moment of clarity came to him, the insight so sharp it almost took his breath away. “The dream didn’t take, and now I know why.”

“Tell me,” said Beverly. “I want to hear you say it.”

“The dream I saw,” he said, reaching up to brush a stray thread of terracotta-red hair from her face, “it was no better than the reality I actually have.” Picard leaned in and kissed her. She was alive and real and this . . . this moment was perfect.

“Did Papa go away?” René was walking toward them, a thoughtful look on his young face. He pointed at the stars out beyond the windows.

“I did,” said Picard, welcoming his son into an embrace. “For a little while. But I’ll always come back.”

This is where I’m supposed to be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to David Mack, Christopher L. Bennett, David R. George III, Rick Berman, Ronald D. Moore, Brannon Braga, Larry Nemecek, Rick Sternbach, Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Debbie Mirek for their works of fiction and reference; my most patient editor, Margaret Clark; and with much love to my own dream girl, Mandy Mills.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Swallow is a New York Times bestselling author and BAFTA nominee. He is proud to be the only British writer to have worked on a Star Trek television series, creating the original story concepts for the Star Trek Voyager episodes “One” and “Memorial”; his other Star Trek writing includes the Scribe award winner Day of the Vipers, Cast No Shadow, Synthesis, the Myriad Universes novella Seeds of Dissent, the short stories “The Slow Knife,” “The Black Flag,” “Ordinary Days,” and “Closure” for the anthologies Seven Deadly Sins, Shards and Shadows, The Sky’s the Limit, and Distant Shores, scripting the videogame Star Trek Invasion, and over 400 articles in thirteen different Star Trek magazines around the world.

As well as a nonfiction book (Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher), James also wrote the Sundowners series of original steampunk westerns, Jade Dragon, The Butterfly Effect, and novels in the worlds of Doctor Who (Peacemaker), Warhammer 40,000 (Fear to Tread, Hammer & Anvil, Nemesis, Black Tide, Red Fury, The Flight of the Eisenstein, Faith & Fire, Deus Encarmine, and Deus Sanguinius), Stargate (Halcyon, Relativity, Nightfall, and Air), and 2000AD (Eclipse, Whiteout, and Blood Relative). His other credits feature scripts for videogames and audio dramas, including Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Battlestar Galactica, Blake’s 7, and Space 1889.

James Swallow lives in London, and is currently at work on his next book.

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