During the outdoor services, Paris had stood with his friend and shipmate Harry Kim. Tom's father, Owen Paris, though he'd come to the memorial, had remained distant and avoided him. Despite the cool, breezy weather that had graced the event, the skies over San Francisco had been unusually clear that day, and the sunlight had beaten down on their dress-white uniforms with great ferocity.

The crowd had been packed with familiar faces, including people Paris hadn't seen since graduating from the Academy. He'd even stolen a glimpse of captains Picard and Calhoun, standing together in front of the gleaming pillar that had been erected in Janeway's honor.

But there had been no sign of B'Elanna.

He'd understood her reasons for leaving. The fact that their child had been hailed as the messiah-aka the Kuvah'magh-by an obscure Klingon religious cult was a better reason for separating than most couples could claim. But it didn't make her absence or her silence any easier to bear.

If the separation had plunged Paris into new depths of melancholy, it had rocketed his father to new heights of recrimination and wrath. The admiral had excoriated his son without mercy when Paris had first broken the news, and only the strict decorum of Janeway's military funeral had likely prevented Owen from an encore performance at their last meeting.

They hadn't spoken since. Paris had received a few messages from his mother, each carefully crafted to make no mention of his father, except one noting his transfer to take command of Starbase 234. A few times, he had considered writing to the old man, but he'd never been able to find anything to say. The situation with B'Elanna was what it was, and nothing he could tell his father was going to change it.

So he sat alone in a compartment of gray bulkheads, darker-gray carpeting, and inst.i.tutionally drab taupe furniture replete with rounded corners for his safety. His food tasted like cardboard, and going to sleep meant waking up to find each day a little bit darker than the one before.

And I'm supposed to be in charge of morale on this ship, he thought with grim amus.e.m.e.nt. How's that for irony?

He stood, picked up his plate, and carried it back to the replicator to dispose of it. As he placed it back in the nook from which it had come, a soft double tone from the overhead comm preceded the voice of Ensign Lasren, the ops officer.

"Bridge to Paris."

"Go ahead," Paris said, activating the matter-reclamation sequence. The plate dissolved and vanished in a whorl.

"You've received a priority signal from your-" Lasren changed course in midsentence. "-from Admiral Paris, sir."

Paris wondered what would be important enough to make his father break his silence after all these months. He a.s.sumed the worst. "Patch it through." He crossed the room quickly to his desk and activated the comm screen.

A prerecorded image snapped to life in crisp colors and sharp shadows. His father sat at a desk in an office; Paris presumed it was his father's office at Starbase 234. An unsteady percussion of explosions was like a subliminal track underneath Owen's halting words.

"Tom," he began. He paused and looked around in confusion before he continued. "I had meant to do this the right way, son. Not like this. But we don't always get to choose, do we?"

Objects trembled on the shelves in the background of the shot as Owen continued. "I said terrible things when you told me about B'Elanna, Tom. Stupid things. It wasn't my place." Lights stuttered for a few seconds, distracting the admiral. "I was so upset about my granddaughter being taken from me that I forgot it was your daughter being taken from you. It's just that-dammit-we were all so happy not so long ago. How'd it go so wrong?"

The question, though probably rhetorical, stung Paris. It was something he'd asked himself daily since B'Elanna and Miral had left him behind on Earth, a family man with no family.

"Can you forgive a dumb old man for words spoken in anger? Can you believe me when I tell you that it kills me to know how much you must miss your wife and little girl?" In the s.p.a.ce of a breath, Owen was on the verge of tears. "I don't know how I'd live if I lost your mother. I don't think I'd want to."

Owen rubbed his eyes and forced himself back into a state of composure. "I was wrong to blame you for what happened. It's your marriage, not mine, and I shouldn't have said anything, except that I'm sorry...and that I still love you, no matter what. But most of all, just that I'm sorry." He flashed a bittersweet smile at the screen. "For everything."

His composure began to slip again as louder, closer explosions rocked the image. "No matter what happens, Tommy, you'll always be my boy. Take care of yourself." A dark expression descended on him. He reached forward, said, "Good-bye, son," and terminated the recording.

The screen cut to black, and Tom Paris had the icy feeling of gazing into the void or the depths of a grave. Unable to contain his alarm, he called out, "Paris to bridge!"

Harry Kim replied immediately, "Bridge. Go ahead."

"Harry, get me a channel to Starbase 234, now!"

The delay before Kim's response was long enough for Paris to antic.i.p.ate what his old friend would say, and dread swelled in his heart even as he prayed that he was wrong. But he wasn't, and he was already sinking into shock, tears streaming down his face as Kim broke the news, his voice freighted with remorse.

"Tom...Starbase 234 is gone."

16.

The desert swelled around Lieutenant Lonnoc Kedair and seemed poised to reclaim the husk of the Columbia in its shifting embrace. She stood near the top of the downed ship's saucer section, watching the evacuation grind forward by degrees.

She tapped her combadge. "Kedair to Hockney. How much longer till you're ready to beam up?"

Through the beige veil of the growing sandstorm, she looked aft and saw the harried engineer turn and look her way as he answered over the comm, "A few more minutes." The wind howled and whistled, and he had to shout to be heard over the wail. "We're rounding up the last of the small stuff."

"Quickly, Ensign," Kedair said. "We're scheduled to break orbit in an hour. It'd be a shame to have to leave you here."

Hockney replied, "Just a few minutes, I promise."

"Notify me the moment you're ready. Kedair out."

Below, the engineer turned away and resumed work, helping researchers and their enlisted a.s.sistants carry equipment out of the Columbia through an aft hatch on one of the lower decks. The crates were gathered in a neat, stacked cl.u.s.ter several meters from the ship, between its broken and off-kilter warp nacelles. Through it all, the wind whipped sand at Kedair's face.

Raging winds, shifting sands...the desert was ever-changing, but the desert never changed, as if it were a cousin of the sea. Kedair had remained on the surface during the overnight shift and through the dawn. The deep watches of the night had settled, starry and frigid, on the broken bones of the Columbia until it coaxed out the away team's breaths in huffs of thin mist. The gray majesty of predawn twilight had been short-lived, blasted away by the swift ascent of one sun and then another.

Another blistering afternoon had seemed to be in store until minutes earlier, when the leading edge of a kilometers-wide sandstorm hove into view, turning the sky the color of burnt umber. It was hurling the desert at Kedair and the away team, and the force of it felt like millions of flying insects slamming against her uniform from every direction. She felt the sand working its way into everything-her boots, her uniform, her hair, her ears, her mouth, her nostrils-and it was still better than spending even another minute inside the Columbia.

She preferred the blinding stings of the storm to the rank odor of decaying flesh and blood, the grotesque perfume of scorched tissue, and the sharp stink of burned hair. After spending the night belowdecks with the forensic investigators, Kedair was relieved to be free of the bowels of the Columbia, and she had no intention of going back inside, not even if this d.a.m.ned storm buried her alive.

The section of D Deck where Chief Komer and Crewman Yott were killed had been sealed less than an hour earlier. The investigators had collected so many samples and sc.r.a.pings that they'd nearly scoured the deck plates clean. All that evidence was now secured aboard the Aventine, where it was being subjected to an endless, ad nauseam battery of tests-none of which had so far yielded a single clue to the ident.i.ty or even the nature of the killer.

Kedair blamed herself. As far as she was concerned, her shipmates were all under her protection, and it was her job to prevent tragedies like this. And she'd failed.

If only they weren't all so fragile, she lamented. Of all the moments of culture shock she had endured when she made the decision, upon reaching adulthood sixteen years earlier, to emigrate to the Federation and apply to Starfleet Academy, none compared with her discovery that most of her cla.s.smates-indeed, most of the species she would meet from then on-were absurdly delicate organisms when compared to Takarans. Specialized internal organs, limited disease and toxin resistance, no cellular stasis abilities-their myriad shortcomings astounded her. She had a.s.sumed that all species were like hers, with distributed internal anatomy, resilient hides, and tissue-regeneration genes. Instead, she had found herself living in a galaxy of hopelessly vulnerable people. Even relatively st.u.r.dy species, such as the Klingons, the Vulcans, and the Andorians, could be slain easily enough if only one knew where to strike.

Defending them, she'd realized during her first year at the Academy, was her charge to keep, her purpose for being. The deaths of Komer and Yott had been a painful reminder of that duty. In the hours since the attack, she had tripled the security presence in and around the Columbia. Armed guards had shepherded every research team, open channels had been maintained, and everyone had been made to stick together.

The last warm bodies on the planet's surface now were herself, the two rifle-toting guards down below, and the four engineers and two scientists they were protecting.

"Hockney to Kedair." The engineer's voice, filtered through her combadge, was all but lost in the roar of the wind and the white noise of sand scouring the hull of the Columbia.

She shielded her eyes and squinted aft through a crack in her fingers. If Hockney was still down there, she couldn't see him. "Go ahead," she said.

"Stand by to beam up in sixty seconds," Hockney shouted over the storm. "Cupelli and ch'Narrath are upgrading the cargo transporters to quantum resolution to preserve our biosamples. As soon as they're done, we're outta here."

Lifting her own voice, she replied, "Thank you, Ensign. Kedair out."

She hated to leave while the deaths of her shipmates remained unsolved. Abandoning the ship, letting it be swallowed up by the sands, felt to Kedair like a dereliction of duty. If the answer was still in there, it might be lost by the time the wind next deigned to liberate the Columbia from its shallow desert grave. But orders were orders. It was time to go.

Another voice squawked, weak and hollow, from her combadge. "Aventine to away team: Stand by for transport."

Her muscles tensed and she closed her eyes while she waited for the hazy white embrace of the transporter beam. Buffeted by the dry, hot gale and stinging granules, she held her breath and focused on continuing the investigation, by whatever means were available, when she returned to the ship.

Did we find anything here that was worth two people's lives? Kedair wondered. Or was this all for nothing?

She suspected that, at that very moment, on the Aventine, Captain Dax was learning the answer to that question.

"That doesn't answer my question, Lieutenant," said Dax, who was starting to think the briefing was going in circles.

Helkara stood in front of a diagram of the subs.p.a.ce tunnel phenomenon on the conference room's wall monitor, his mouth slightly agape. "I'm sorry, Captain," said the Zakdorn science officer. "Which question didn't it answer?"

"Any of them," Dax said. "We've suspected since day one that a subs.p.a.ce phenomenon carried the Columbia here from the Beta Quadrant. I want to know how it entered the phenomenon, as well as where and when."

Another stymied pause. Helkara cast bemused looks at the other officers seated around the table behind Dax: Mikaela Leishman, Sam Bowers, and Nevin Riordan, a young computer specialist with a slight build and a disheveled bramble of short, spiky white hair. Then the Zakdorn said, "I don't have the data to answer that question right now, Captain."

And we're back at square one, Dax grumped to herself. "Why not?" She directed her next statement to Riordan. "I thought we recovered all of Columbia's logs and databases."

"We did, Captain," Riordan said. "But as I was saying before you-" He stopped as he noticed Bowers's warning glare, but he'd already crossed the conversational Rubicon and had to continue. "-before you cut me off-we detected a gap in their log chronology. Eight months separate their last data on the ambush from the start of their sensor logs about the phenomenon."

As much as Dax wanted to be upset with the ensign for his impolitic reproach of her, she knew, in hindsight, that he was right. She had run roughshod over him in her impatience to reach some answers. To make some progress before the clock ran out and it came time to break orbit.

She asked Riordan, "Is it possible that it was a malfunction, or the result of damage?"

Riordan shook his head. "No, sir. No sign of damage or erasure. It's as if the ship's sensors just got turned off for eight months, then snapped back on inside the phenomenon."

Turning back to Helkara, Dax said, "What are the last regular entries in the Columbia's log?"

"A Romulan ambush," Helkara said. "Based on the dates, it looks like the Romulans were testing some new tactics right before the start of their war with Earth. The ship's chief engineer tricked the Romulans into thinking the Columbia was destroyed, but it was left without communications or warp drive, a few light-years from Klingon s.p.a.ce."

Dax drummed her fingertips on the tabletop. "Any indication what their next plan of action was?"

"None," Helkara said. "The last entry in Captain Hernandez's log is that their engines and subs.p.a.ce antenna were irreparable."

Leishman leaned forward and added, "The damage in their warp reactor and the internal components of their comm system still hadn't been fixed by the time they crashed here."

Helkara continued, "For what it's worth, Captain, the data from their pa.s.sage through the phenomenon was completely intact, and as detailed as sensors of that era could be."

"All right," Dax said, surrendering to the realization that her other questions would have to wait for another time. "What, exactly, do we know about their journey through subs.p.a.ce?"

Bowers took over the briefing from Helkara, who returned to his seat as the first officer got up and stepped over to the wide companel monitor. "The Columbia was inside the phenomenon for just over forty-five seconds," he said. "There were thirty-one human life signs on board at the start of its journey, and one Den.o.bulan. That leaves ten of its crew unaccounted for."

Dax interrupted to ask, "Could they have been killed during the Romulan ambush?"

Bowers looked to Helkara, who said, "The logs identified fifty-three ambush casualties and forty-two survivors."

Satisfied, Dax nodded to Bowers, who continued. "Once the ship pa.s.sed inside the phenomenon, it got kicked around pretty good. The subspatial stresses were more volatile than those inside a wormhole or a controlled warp bubble."

"I can see the difference between this and a warp bubble," Dax said. "But what makes this different from a wormhole?"

Again, Bowers nodded to Helkara. The Zakdorn used a touch-screen interface in front of him on the tabletop to display animations on the large wall monitor. "Topologically, not much. Both, in essence, serve as pa.s.sages for rapid travel between distant points in the same universe, or possibly different universes. Both are tubes with a topology of genus one, with a mouth, or terminus, at either end, and the throat, or tunnel, between them. The chief difference is where and how they exist."

He enlarged one of the schematics. "This is the Bajoran wormhole, a relatively stable shortcut through normal s.p.a.ce-time. Its structure is made possible by a twelve-dimensional, helical verteron membrane and a series of verteron nodes, which tune its as-yet-unknown energy source to maintain its tunneling effect through s.p.a.ce-time."

Switching to the second schematic, Helkara continued, "This is the subs.p.a.ce tunneling effect the Columbia encountered. Its shape is basically identical, but there are two major differences between this and the Bajoran wormhole. First, it doesn't exist in normal s.p.a.ce-time, it only exists in subs.p.a.ce. Second-and I just want to say that this next point is pure conjecture, because no one has ever seen this work before-all of the Columbia's data suggest this phenomenon is powered by dark energy drawn from normal s.p.a.ce-time." He highlighted part of the display. "We think that's what led to the deaths of the crew."

Dax asked, "They were killed by the dark energy?"

"Not directly," Helkara said. "It was the by-product that did them in: hyperphasic radiation."

Bowers made a clicking noise with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "That would do it. How fast did it hit?"

"I'd estimate every organic particle on the ship was disintegrated within twenty seconds of entering the subs.p.a.ce tunnel," Helkara said.

"But the ship spent forty-five seconds inside the phenomenon," Dax said. "Yesterday, Mirren said the ship's autopilot had been engaged. When did that happen?"

Bowers answered, "About fifteen seconds after the ship exited the subs.p.a.ce tunnel and returned to normal s.p.a.ce-time."

"In other words," Dax said, doing the math in her head as she spoke, "about forty seconds after every living thing on that ship was dead."

Her first officer c.o.c.ked one eyebrow and responded with a crooked grin. "Give or take."

"And there's no record of who or what triggered the autopilot," Dax said, and Helkara and Riordan nodded in confirmation. "Maybe it's some kind of creature that lives out of phase most of the time. Could it be the same thing that attacked Komer and Yott last night?"

With a shrug, Bowers said, "We don't know yet."

"Captain," Helkara said, "there's one more important note I'd like to share about the subs.p.a.ce tunnel."

She nodded. "Go ahead."

He got up and walked to the companel and pointed out some details as he spoke. "The energy field inside the tunnel was remarkably stable, much more than a conventional wormhole would be. If my a.n.a.lysis of its graviton emissions is correct, I think there's a very good chance the subs.p.a.ce tunnel is still there."

Dax looked at Bowers, who seemed as surprised by this news as she was. Intrigued, she asked Helkara, "Are you sure?"

"I'm almost positive," he said. "If we can locate the terminus and make a successful pa.s.sage of the tunnel, we might be able to figure out how it was created. It could open up new areas of the galaxy for exploration-maybe the whole universe."

As if Dax needed more convincing, Bowers added, "If it leads back to a point in the Beta Quadrant, it might also be a major strategic discovery for Starfleet."

"Okay," Dax said. "How do we find the terminus?"

"I have a few ideas," Helkara said. "It's too soon to say which approach will work. But if I'm right and it's still there, with Lieutenant Leishman's help, I'm fairly certain I could track it down in a few hours."

She frowned. "We're supposed to be heading back now. I can hold us here for an hour, maybe two at the most. You have that long to find the subs.p.a.ce tunnel and figure out how to open it."

"You know," Bowers said with a mischievous gleam in his eyes, "if we find it and it still works, we could be back on the line in Federation s.p.a.ce today instead of next week."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Dax said. "The tunnel's still flooded with hyperphasic radiation."

Leishman waved away the problem. "I can work around that. A properly harmonized multiphasic frequency channeled into the shields should be able to cancel out their effects." She flashed an expectant look at Dax. "So what's the word, Captain?"

Dax grinned. "The word is go. Mikaela, get to work on those shields. Gruhn, start looking for the subs.p.a.ce tunnel. Sam, think up some excuse I can give the admiralty for why we're not out of orbit yet." She got up from her chair. "If there's-"