To her dismay, Yott seemed immune to humor. "I don't drink raktajino," he said. His eyes scanned the ceiling. "Can't you feel it? Like a charge in the air? It smells like ozone."

Komer wondered uncharitably, How'd this kid ever make it through basic training? "I'm not reading anything unusual," she said, hoping her matter-of-fact tone would calm him. She pivoted as her scan continued. "No bio signs in this section but us."

"There are things tricorders can't read," Yott said. "Trace elements, exotic energy patterns, extradimensional phenomena-"

"And paranoia," she interrupted. "I can't believe I really have to tell you there's no such thing as-" A flicker of blue light behind a bulkhead caught her eye, and Yott's as well.

He cried out, "You saw that! You saw it!"

Taking a breath to suppress her irritation, she focused the tricorder in the direction of the flash. "Residual energy," she said, her tone one of mild rebuke. "Just a surge in the lines. Makes sense when you think about how much juice we're pumping into this old wreck."

"Not down here," Yott replied, and he lifted his tricorder to show her a schematic on its screen. "The main power relay was severed in the crash, and both the backups are slagged. There's no power on this deck." He pointed at the nearby bulkhead. "So where did that come from?"

Another groan of hot, dry wind pushed through fractures in the bulkheads. Crackles of noise echoed off the metal interiors of the pa.s.sageway, growing closer and sharper. Then a light fixture on the overhead stuttered momentarily to life and flared brightly enough to force Komer to shut her eyes. Its afterimage pulsed in myriad hues on her retina.

"Chief!" shouted Yott. He tugged on her sleeve. "Come on!"

Shielding her eyes with her forearm, she backed away from the glare and tapped her combadge. "Komer to-"

Twisted forks of green lightning exploded from the light, in a storm of shining phosphors and searing-hot polymer shards. The synthetic shrapnel overpowered Komer and Yott, peppering their faces with bits of burning debris as the bolts of electricity slammed into their torsos and hurled them hard to the deck.

A steady, high-pitched tone rang in Komer's ears. Spasms wracked her body, but she barely felt them-she was numb from the chest down. Her mouth was dry, and her tongue tasted like copper. As the last of the light's glowing debris fell to the deck and faded away, darkness settled upon her and Yott.

Then a spectral shape formed in the blackness, as pale and silent as a gathering fog. It descended like a heavy liquid sinking into the sea-spreading, dispersing, enveloping the two downed Starfleet personnel on the deck.

For a moment, Komer told herself that she was imagining it, that it was nothing more than a trauma-induced hallucination, another afterimage on her overtaxed retinas.

Then Yott screamed-and as the ghostly motes pierced Komer's body like a million needles of fire, she did, too.

Lieutenant Lonnoc Kedair strode quickly through the sepulchral darkness of the corridor, toward the cl.u.s.ter of downward-pointed palm-beacon beams. A charnel odor thickened the sultry air.

Four Aventine security officers stood with their phaser rifles slung at their sides, facing one another in a circle. Kedair nudged past them and stopped as she saw the two bodies at their feet. Both corpses were contorted in poses of agony and riddled with deep, smoldering cavities. In some places, the two engineers' wounds tunneled clear through their bodies, giving Kedair a view of the deck, which was slick with greasy pools of liquefied bioma.s.s.

Kedair turned to Lieutenant Naomi Darrow, the away team's security supervisor. "Who were they?"

"Yott and Komer, sir," Darrow said. "They were collecting evidence for a.n.a.lysis."

Kedair squatted low next to the dead Bolian and examined his wounds more closely. "What killed them?"

"We're not sure," said Darrow. "We picked up some residual energy traces, but nothing that matches any known weapons."

Pointing at a smoking divot in Komer's abdomen, Kedair said, "These look like thermal effects."

"Partly," Darrow said as she pushed a handful of her flaxen hair from her face. "But we think those are secondary. The cause of death looks like molecular disruption."

The security chief shook her head. "I've never seen a disruptor do this. Did you check for biochemical agents?"

"Yes, sir. No biochem signatures of any kind."

It was a genuine mystery-exactly what Kedair hated most.

Everyone on the Columbia had heard the bloodcurdling shrieks emanate from the ship's lower decks and echo through its open turbolift shafts, but Kedair was determined to contain and compartmentalize as much information about this incident as she could. She asked Darrow, "Who's been down here?"

Darrow swept the beam of her palm beacon over the other security officers on the scene: Englehorn, T'Prel, and ch'Maras. "Just us," she said.

"Keep it that way," Kedair said. "Have these bodies beamed to sickbay on the Aventine. I want Dr. Ta.r.s.es to start the autopsies immediately."

"Aye, sir," Darrow said.

"And not a word of this to anyone," Kedair said, making eye contact with the four officers in succession. "If anyone asks-"

Englehorn interrupted, "If?"

Correcting herself, Kedair continued, "When you are asked about what happened, the only thing I want you to say is that there was an incident, and that it's under investigation. Don't mention fatalities, injuries, or anything else. Do not mention Yott or Komer by name. Is that understood?" The four junior officers nodded. "Good. I want you four to secure this deck. Move in pairs and maintain an open channel to the Aventine." She looked down at the bodies. "If you encounter anything that might be capable of this, fall back and call for backup. Clear?" Another round of heads bobbing in unison. "Make it happen."

Darrow pointed at the other security officers as she issued their orders. "Englehorn, sweep aft with T'Prel. ch'Maras, forward with me." She looked at Kedair. "Sir, I suggest you beam up to Aventine and track our search from there." To the others she added, "Move out."

The four security officers split up and walked away in opposite directions, with one member of each pair monitoring a tricorder's sensor readings while the other kept a phaser rifle leveled and ready. Kedair remained with the bodies as her team continued moving away. Their shadows spread and then vanished beyond circular section bulkheads in the curved corridor. In less than a minute Kedair was alone, her solitary palm beacon casting a harsh blue glow over the dead.

I was so focused on not fueling their fears that I failed to protect their lives. Bitter regrets festered in her thoughts. I should have kept an open mind, no matter what they told me.

Kedair still didn't believe that the two-hundred-year-old wrecked starship was haunted-but the twisted, horrific corpses in front of her left her no doubt that she, and her away team, were definitely not alone on the Columbia.

2156-2157.

6.

Stygian darkness pressed in on Erika Hernandez as she made her slow descent into the frigid abyss of the Columbia's aft turbolift. Her breath misted as it pa.s.sed over the plastic-sheathed chemical flare clenched in her teeth.

She had underestimated the effort involved in climbing from the bridge portal on A Deck to the entrance of main engineering on D Deck. The blue glow of the flare was fading slowly after having burned for more than an hour. It was still bright enough to let her see the rungs under her hands, but her feet probed the cold blackness for each new, unseen foothold.

Above her, and attached to her by a safety line that was secured on the bridge, was Lieutenant Vincenzo Yacavino, the second-in-command of the ship's MACO detachment. At the request of Commander Fletcher-who, like most first officers, was quite protective of her captain-he had climbed up from the MACOs' berthing area on C Deck to escort Hernandez safely belowdecks. A necklace of variously colored emergency flares was strung around his neck. He called down to her, "Are you all right, signora?"

"Mm-hmm," Hernandez mumble-hummed past the flare in her teeth. Then, a few meters below, she saw flickers of light.

She quickened her pace and reached the open turbolift portal of D Deck. Using handholds and a narrow lip of metal that protruded from the shaft bulkhead beside the opening, she eased her way off the ladder and onto the catwalk at the forward end of main engineering. As soon as Yacavino had joined her on the platform, she unfastened the safety line that he had looped in a crisscross pattern around her torso. She would rather have borrowed one of the MACOs' tactical harnesses, which were designed and reinforced for rappelling, but most of the spares had been lost in the same blast that had crippled her ship.

Almost every available emergency light on the Columbia had been brought to bear in its engineering compartment, but because most of the lights were focused on specific areas of interest, the majority of the deck remained steeped in smoky shadows. An acrid pall of scorched metal put a sharp tang in the air.

Karl Graylock, the chief engineer, stood with warp-drive specialist Daria Pierce at a control console on the elevated platform behind the warp reactor. The surface panel of the console had been removed, exposing half-melted circuit boards and blackened wiring. On the lower deck, more than a dozen engineers removed heavy plates from the reactor housing, decoupled enormous plasma relays, and sifted through a dusty pile of crystal shards and debris.

No one paid much attention to Hernandez as she walked down the stairs from the catwalk and continued toward Graylock.

"Try cross-circuiting to A," he said to Pierce as he made a minor adjustment to something inside the console. He watched Pierce make a few changes of her own. They both stared intently into the mangled workings of the console, then shook their heads in shared frustration. "Nothing," Graylock said, his shoulders sagging in defeat.

"Karl," Hernandez said. Normally, he snapped-to at the sound of her voice. This time he sat back against the railing opposite the control panel and looked down at the captain with a weary expression. "Ja, Captain?"

"Good news," she said with a tired grin. "Looks like your plan worked. If the Romulans had figured it out, we'd probably all be dead by now."

Graylock's dour frown was steady. "Is that your idea of cheering us up, Captain? Because if it is, you suck at it."

"I take it things aren't going well down here?"

"You could say that," Graylock replied. He climbed down from the platform and led Hernandez on a slow stroll down the length of the reactor. "The warp drive is irreparable," he said. "All that's left of the crystal matrix is dust and splinters. At least half the coils in each nacelle are ruptured, maybe more. And the ventral plasma relays were all severed in the last explosion."

Hernandez glanced inside the reactor through a gap left by a detached pylon conduit. She could see for herself that Graylock wasn't exaggerating. The damage was extensive.

"So what are we looking at? Do we need the Enterprise to bring us a whole new warp drive?"

The stocky chief engineer turned and folded his arms over his chest. "Ja, that would help." He leaned back against the oblong reactor housing. "And if you can think of a way to ask them, or anyone else, I will be most impressed, Captain."

It took her a moment to deduce his implication. "Subs.p.a.ce communications?"

"Kaput," he said. "The virus corrupted our software and firmware, and the explosion that covered our escape destroyed both our shuttlepods and the transceiver array. We can send and receive lightspeed signals, if you don't mind waiting the rest of your life for a reply."

"Wonderful," Hernandez muttered. "Isn't there something we can raid for parts to fix the subs.p.a.ce antenna?"

Graylock gestured vaguely around the compartment. "We don't have enough working parts to keep the lights on, and you want me to reinvent subs.p.a.ce radio?"

Hernandez sighed. "Since you brought it up, when can we expect to have the lights back?"

"It depends." He looked back at his engineers, who were tinkering with an a.s.sortment of broken or deformed components that looked more like sc.r.a.p metal bound for reclamation than like the essential components of a starship's warp propulsion system. "If we can all stay awake, maybe ten hours."

"Make it six," Hernandez said. "I want the turbolifts running before alpha shift goes to their racks."

"Jawohl, Captain," Graylock said with a nod. "I'll keep Commander Fletcher informed of our efforts."

She returned his nod. "Carry on."

None of the engineers looked up from their tasks as she walked back to the catwalk staircase and rejoined Lieutenant Yacavino at the open portal to the turbolift shaft. "Time to head back up to A Deck," she said to the fit, dark-haired MACO. "Let's get ready to climb." He picked up the safety line and started paying out slack to wrap around her. As he reached behind her back to loop the end of the tether around her thigh, she gave him a teasing grin. "And watch your hands this time, Mister. I want to keep our relationship professional."

Commander Veronica Fletcher waited until the door of the captain's ready room closed before she said, "It's worse than we thought."

Captain Hernandez pushed her chair back from the small desk tucked into the corner of the compartment. She crossed her legs and nodded to another chair. "Have a seat."

Fletcher pulled out the chair and sat down. She handed a small clipboard to Hernandez. "We lost more than half the crew in the attack, and most of the MACOs were killed setting off the diversionary blast."

"d.a.m.n it," Hernandez whispered. "Where'd the jump take us?"

"Kalil plotted our position against the known shipping lanes," she explained as the captain looked over the second page of the brief report. "We're well outside normal sensor range. And with the convoy gone, there probably won't be much friendly traffic out here for a while."

"If ever," Hernandez said.

The captain's downbeat manner troubled Fletcher. "Being a bit pessimistic, aren't you?"

Worry lines deepened on Hernandez's brow. "If yesterday's events are any guide, this entire sector is likely to be under enemy control soon." Her countenance darkened. "This was only the beginning-the first salvo in a war with the Romulans."

"You don't know that," Fletcher said. "It might have been an isolated skirmish, or-"

"They ambushed us," Hernandez interrupted. "They came in numbers, and they turned our own weapons on the convoy. This was planned. They've been preparing for a long time, and now they're making their move-and we're stuck out here, with no way home and no way to send a warning." She launched herself from her chair and then halted, a coiled spring with nowhere to go. Turning away to look out the compartment's single, small viewport, she added with simmering frustration, "The G.o.ddam war's actually starting, and we're stuck on the sidelines."

Fletcher sighed. "So, what are we supposed to do?"

Several seconds pa.s.sed while Fletcher waited for the captain's answer. The exposed overhead conduits, normally alive with a low buzzing, were silent, exacerbating Fletcher's sense of the ship's predicament. Finally, Hernandez turned away from the window and back toward her first officer. "We survive," she said. "If the war has begun, Earth won't have any ships to spare on a search-and-rescue mission this far from home. Whatever else happens, we have to a.s.sume we're on our own now."

Fletcher wasn't ready yet to embrace the worst-case scenario. She asked, "What if Earth does send a rescue ship? Our best bet of being found would be to return to our original course, at any speed."

"That's also our best chance of being found by the enemy," Hernandez said. "They knew our route well enough to hit us with almost no warning. Using the same route to limp home strikes me as a bad idea." She covered her eyes and ma.s.saged her temples with one hand. "Besides, without the transceiver array, we're mute. Even if someone came looking for us, we can't respond to their hails. At anything less than close range, we might be mistaken for an alien ship that doesn't want to make contact."

The captain stepped past Fletcher and crossed the cramped room to another short desktop wedged into the opposite corner. She poked through a jumble of papers and bound volumes on the shelf above it, then pulled down and opened a large book. "Have a look at this," she said to Fletcher, who got up and joined the captain at the other desk. Hernandez continued, "This is from our last mapping run before we met the convoy."

Studying the dense cl.u.s.ter of symbols and coordinates on the map, Fletcher was unable to antic.i.p.ate the captain's plan. "What are we looking for?"

"The basics," Hernandez said. "A nice Minshara-cla.s.s planet where we can stock up on food and water. Preferably, one with enough expertise to help us make some repair parts for the warp drive." She planted her finger on an unnamed star system that so far had merited no more than a brief footnote in the galactic catalog. "That's what I'm talking about. Nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, liquid water, and subs.p.a.ce signal emissions."

Fletcher shook her head. "Shaky readings, sir. And at that range? They could have been caused by a sensor malfunction."

"All right," Hernandez countered. "How do you explain the high-energy particles flooding out of that system?"

"It could be anything," Fletcher said. "That star's pretty dense. For all we know, we might be picking up signals from a system behind it, due to gravitational lensing."

The captain looked unconvinced. "I don't think so," she said. "If we were seeing a lensed signal, there'd be other distortions. These readings may be scarce, but they're clear. There's a planet there with the resources we need, and it's the closest safe harbor in the sector."

"We don't know that it's safe, and 'close' is a relative term," Fletcher said. "It's eleven-point-four light-years away. How are we supposed to get there without the warp drive?"

Hernandez shut the book with a heavy slap. "We still have impulse engines, and I mean to use them."

As the captain put the book back on the shelf, Fletcher was compelled to ask, "Are you serious? Even at full impulse-"

"Forget full impulse," Hernandez cut in. "I want the main impulse system in overdrive. We need to get as close to lightspeed as we can without hitting it."

Fletcher was aghast. "You're talking about time-dilation effects," she said.

"Yes, I am," Hernandez said. She returned to her desk in the other corner. "Don't give me that look. Think about it for a second, and you'll see why we have to do this."

The captain's urgent tone made her point clear to Fletcher. "To ration our provisions," she said, and the captain nodded in confirmation. The Columbia had been fueled and supplied for a two-year deployment before leaving Earth. Without warp drive, interstellar travel to a world capable of restocking the ship's stores and repairing its damaged systems might take years or even decades. "What fraction of c are we talking about?"

"Within one-ten-thousandth," Hernandez said.

After a quick round of mental calculations, Fletcher said, "So, a time-dilation ratio of about seventy-to-one?"