"Give or take," Hernandez replied.

"So why not just make a run for home?"

Hernandez raised her eyebrows in a gentle expression of mock surprise. "Because 'home' is over eighty light-years away. I'd rather not waste the better part of a century getting there. If I'm right, we can find what we need to fix the warp drive in that star system and get home while at least a few people we know are still alive."

The prospect of twelve years being transformed by the laws of relativity into a short-lived purgatory disturbed Fletcher, but the notions of starving to death in deep s.p.a.ce or returning home as a centenarian troubled her even more. "I'll get Graylock to work on the impulse drive," Fletcher said. "It'll take a few hours to remove the safeties before we can overdrive the coils past one-quarter c."

The captain nodded. "Tell him to beef up the main deflector, too. At the speeds we're talking about, the ma.s.s and kinetic energy of oncoming particles'll be pretty intense."

"And once we hit relativistic speeds, our sensors'll be blind to just about everything," Fletcher said. "We'll also become a serious X-ray source."

Hernandez smirked. "I prefer to think of it as becoming our own interstellar emergency flare."

Fletcher chortled. "We'd just better hope we don't get noticed by the Romulans or the Klingons."

"They'd probably mistake us for some kind of primitive colony ship," Hernandez said. "Maybe we'll get lucky and be taken prisoner aboard a ship that actually has a working warp drive. Now, if you want something to worry about, try the hard radiation from blueshifting."

Fletcher nodded. "We'd better have Dr. Metzger start us all on radiation-treatment protocols. And I'll have Thayer restrict access to the outer compartments."

"Good thinking," said Hernandez.

With a tired grin, Fletcher added, "Then the only things we still need are a deck of cards and some good books. If you like, I can loan you the first six Captain Proton novels."

"Thank you, Number One," said Hernandez, who no longer seemed to be paying attention. She sounded unusually somber.

"Are you sure you're all right, Captain?"

A rueful grimace twisted the captain's mouth. "I'm fine," she said. "It just bugs me that the time when Earth needs us most is the one time we can't be there." She turned her gaze out the viewport. "All we can do is hope that when we finally bring our ship home, there's still a home worth bringing it to."

Stephen Foyle pivoted from one foot to the other while he dribbled the basketball from hand to hand, turning his body to keep his opponent at bay. Sweat dripped from above his hairline, tracing winding paths out of his gray brush cut and down his face. A thick sheen of perspiration on his arms and legs caught the glare of the overhead lights in the ship's gymnasium.

Gage Pembleton taunted him in a tone of crisp superiority. "What are you waiting for, Major? An invitation?"

"Patience, First Sergeant," Foyle said. He lurched forward, and Pembleton matched his stride. Then Foyle pa.s.sed the ball backward between his own legs, spun, and slipped behind Pembleton's back for a drive at the basket. By the time the younger, brown-skinned man had caught up to Foyle, the major had made a graceful layup, banking the ball off the backboard.

The orange ball hushed through the net, and Pembleton caught it off the bounce. "Not bad," he said. He tossed the ball with a single bounce at Foyle. "But it's still eleven-eight."

Foyle checked the ball and pa.s.sed it back. "For now."

A musky scent of deodorant overpowered by exertion trailed Pembleton as he dribbled the ball back to the top of the key to start his possession. "What time is it?"

The major smirked. "Getting tired?"

"No, I want you to sing me 'Happy Birthday' at 1340 hours."

"That's not funny," Foyle said, irked to be reminded of Captain Hernandez's decision to send them all on a slow-time cruise into oblivion. He imagined that he could feel an hour slipping away with every minute, days vanishing into every hour.

At the center-court circle, Pembleton turned and waited for Foyle to strike a defensive pose. The lanky Canadian started dribbling and pivoted to show Foyle his back. "I'll spot you three points if you can take the ball before I score," he said in his drawl of a baritone. "Give you a chance to tie it up."

Foyle grinned. "Don't go getting-"

Pembleton was off the deck, spinning in midair, hefting the ball high over his head with his long, wiry arms and ma.s.sive hands. Foyle sprang to block the shot, hands flailing, but the ball was gone, sailing on a long and poetic arc into the basket. It slapped through the net, bounced twice off the deck, and rolled behind the end line as Foyle watched with a tired frown.

"Thirteen-eight," Pembleton said. As the major opened his mouth to protest, the sergeant pointed at their feet and added, "Behind the line, two points."

"Now you're just showing off," Foyle said. They walked downcourt together to retrieve the ball. The major's nostrils filled with the funky stench of his sweat-soaked tank top and sodden socks, and his thighs and calves felt as if they were tying themselves in knots and turning to wood. He palmed the excess perspiration from his face and dried his hands on his cotton athletic trunks. Then he squatted to pick up the ball and was unable to stop himself from exhaling a pained grunt. "I think I need a time-out," he said.

"No time-outs in one-on-one," Pembleton taunted. Unfazed by Foyle's bitter glare, he added, "Your rules."

Foyle tucked the ball under his left arm and walked toward the benches at the sideline. "Don't make me pull rank."

"It's your game, Major. I just play in it."

Pembleton followed him to the bench and sat down on the other side of a stack of soft, white towels. He kept his back straight and his head up, and his breaths were long and slow.

Foyle slumped as soon as he was seated, and he reached under the bench for his squeeze bottle of water. The major lifted the nozzle to his lips and clamped his hand tight, filling his mouth with a stream of cool liquid. He downed a third of the bottle in half a minute. "I can't believe she's doing this," he said after catching his breath.

The sergeant maintained an attentive silence. He picked up a towel and dried his shaved head as Foyle continued.

"There has to be some way to get a signal back to Earth. We could've cannibalized something to fix the transceiver array and sent a Mayday to Starfleet-or even to Vulcan, if we had to." He took another swig of water. "Instead, she's got us sitting out the war. Didn't even ask me before she put us all on the slow boat to nowhere."

Pembleton chided him, "She didn't ask you? Tell me, Major, when did the ship become a democracy? Do I get a vote, too?"

"You know what I mean, Pembleton," Foyle said, weary and frustrated. "It's the same old story. She thinks just because we're MACOs, we don't need to know. h.e.l.l, even the illusion of being consulted would be nice once in a while."

"So, if she had let you speak your mind, and then did the same thing anyway, you'd be fine with that?"

The question forced Foyle to stop and think for a moment. "No," he admitted, "I wouldn't. I mean, what if this planet we're going to can't help us? What then? Should we just keep making these near-light trips while the galaxy changes around us at warp speed? It's just so d.a.m.ned stupid. There has to be a better answer than wasting twelve years of our lives."

"It's not our lives she's wasting," Pembleton said. "It's everyone else's. I was supposed to be home in time to see my oldest start school. He'll be in college by the time we drop back to normal s.p.a.ceflight. I feel like I've missed his whole life." He dried his arms and then tossed away the towel. "For us," he continued, "this'll just be a couple of boring months. But for my wife and my boys...I might as well be dead."

That same thought haunted Foyle, as well. They were five days into their journey, and he knew that home on Earth, his wife Valerie was likely marking the anniversary of the last time she had seen him or heard his voice. The Columbia and its crew had been missing in action for more than a year in Earth time.

She won't have given up on me yet, he a.s.sured himself. But she won't wait forever. Sooner or later, she'll go on with her life, without me. I might get home while she's still alive, but it won't matter, because my life will be gone. Our life.

"There's still time for a change of plan," Foyle said. He watched Pembleton to measure his reaction. "If we drop the ship back to quarter impulse, we can focus on repairing the transceiver, maybe get a message home before everybody we know gives up on us."

Pembleton smirked. "Nice idea," he said. "But if that was a possibility, I have to think we'd be doing it already."

"Maybe," Foyle said. "But what if it's just that Graylock needs to take orders from someone who knows how to motivate him?" He glanced at Pembleton.

The sergeant kept his expression a cipher. For as long as Foyle had served with him, Pembleton had been a master at encrypting his feelings. "It might take a pretty big shakeup in the command structure to cause a change like that," the sergeant said. His eyes betrayed nothing as he returned Foyle's stare. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

"Granted."

"Considering the amount of damage to the ship, and the skill we've seen Graylock use to keep it running, I'm inclined to believe him when he says the transceiver can't be fixed. And if the captain thinks this is our best shot, I'd say trust her."

Foyle responded with a slow nod. "So, you don't think a change in strategy or leadership would be in our best interest?"

"Under these circ.u.mstances? No."

Something about the tenor of that answer prompted Foyle to press on. "And if, at some future juncture, our circ.u.mstances were to change...?"

Pembleton shrugged and replied with an ominous nonchalance, "Well...that's a different question."

2381.

7.

Melora Pazlar felt as if she were the stillness at the center of everything. Floating in the womblike zero g of t.i.tan's stellar cartography lab, she was surrounded by a holographic sphere of stars, a virtual front-row seat to the universe.

Aloft and held in place by tractor beams so gentle that even her fragile senses couldn't feel them, she turned in slow degrees. She manipulated images of science-department reports and sensor a.n.a.lyses that were superimposed over the holographic backdrop, rearranging them with fluid arcs of her arms and subtle turns of her wrist. It was like a silent ballet.

She marveled at Ra-Havreii's handiwork. He really is a genius, she thought with admiration and delight. Then she remembered their almost-kiss and her reflexive retreat. She had pondered it for the past several hours while she worked, and she still didn't know why she had rebuffed him. The Efrosian was handsome and charming, and had a whispered reputation among the ship's female humanoids as a considerate companion. He had everything going for him, and he clearly was more than a little interested in her, and she knew that a few years earlier she might have welcomed him eagerly.

Now, however, she couldn't imagine letting his lips touch hers without a shiver traveling down her spine. The idea of his hands on her flesh made her pull her arms to her sides, and her entire body tensed and began to fold in on itself.

Bending forward, she propelled herself into a slow tumble around her center of gravity. She forced her arms wide, as if to take the stars and nebulae into her delicate embrace, and she cleared her mind while drawing deep breaths. Tuvok had taught her well how to master her emotions and calm her mind. He had even imparted some wisdom in the area of self-defense, by emphasizing styles and techniques based on evasion. She had become expert at slipping away from people.

A soft but insistent synthetic tone beeped in quick triple pulses, breaking her moment of reflection. The sound made bright echoes against the unseen surfaces of the holotank. Pazlar used bend-and-stretch gestures to arrest her forward rolling. It took a few seconds for her to become still once again. All the while, the computer's alert continued chirping at her. When at last she was steady, she stretched out her arm and waved her hand in a semicircle to halt the shrill signal. "Computer, report."

"Anomalous energy signature detected," replied the feminine voice of the ship's computer.

Pazlar tried not to get her hopes up. t.i.tan's crew had charted many unusual energy signatures in this region, and few had proved worthy of even a cursory follow-up. "Elaborate."

"Concentrated pulses of triquantum waves with a subspatial distortion factor of four-point-six teracochranes."

This was something new. "Have we identified the source?"

"Affirmative. Bearing 335.46, mark 291.14, distance eighteen-point-two light-years."

"Show me what we have about the pulses' point of origin," Pazlar said. "Provide a false-spectrum display of the pulses' trajectories and superimpose over my starmap interface. Prepare secondary data displays." More focused now, Pazlar began her fluid ch.o.r.eography of data screens as she called them into existence. "Particle a.n.a.lysis of the wave pulses." Down and to the left. "Cross-reference with past energy emissions from this sector." Right and up diagonally.

The luminosity of her holographic environment became blinding as several beams of laser-intense white light radiated in all directions from what looked like an empty point in deep s.p.a.ce. Pazlar squinted against the glare. "Computer, tone it down a bit, please." The beams faded to a dim blue, and she was grateful that Ra-Havreii's user interface had been programmed with a sophisticated grasp of idioms in several languages.

There was nowhere in the holotank that Pazlar could position herself without being intersected by multiple beams. "Computer, estimate the power level of these bursts."

"Unable to comply. Power levels have exceeded the limits of our sensor capacity. Severe subspatial distortion is interfering with scans of the origin point."

Now Pazlar was worried. Subspatial distortion? At that power level? Not good. She pulled the empty sector-grid chart to the front of her array of screens. "Pazlar to Lieutenant Rager."

t.i.tan's senior operations officer answered over the comm, "Go ahead."

"Sariel," Pazlar said, "I need a priority rea.s.signment of the main sensor array." She felt a low-power force field give her tactile feedback as she entered commands on her holographic interface. "I'm sending over a grid reference, and I need to see every last bit of it in maximum detail as soon as possible."

Rager was apologetic. "Melora, I can't do that. Some of the scans we're running were ordered by Commander Tuvok. If you want to cancel his a.s.signments, you'll need approval from the XO." A computer feedback tone was audible over the channel. "Hang on, I just got your file." A few moments later, Rager muttered, "You sent me a blank grid reference? You want me to drop everything to point the main array at nothing?"

"I don't think it's nothing," Pazlar said. "Something at those coordinates is sending out high-energy bursts in every direction. More to the point, it's something we can't see." She sent over her readings of the wave pulses and waited until she heard the chime of its arrival through the open channel.

"All right," Rager said. "That is interesting. I can b.u.mp a couple of the research projects and let you have the gravi-"

"Sariel," Pazlar snapped, "look at the energy profile for the pulses! Now look at the ambient readings in the center of that grid reference. Are you looking?"

Anger put an edge on Rager's voice. "Yes, but I don't..." She paused for a few seconds. Then she answered with understanding and alarm, "Triquantum waves."

"Also known as a telltale sign of transwarp conduits."

"The array's all yours."

"Spell it out for me," Riker said to Pazlar, whose holographic avatar sat at the conference table with the rest of t.i.tan's senior bridge officers. "How close are these pulses to Borg transwarp signatures?"

"Similar, but not identical," Pazlar said. "Their energy levels are greater than anything we've ever seen the Borg use, but their subspatial distortions share a number of properties with transwarp conduits. They might be related."

Keru leaned forward to look at Riker. "I agree, Captain. It's possible the Borg have developed a new form of transwarp to replace the network they lost."

Riker was troubled by Keru's speculation, but at the same time he was grateful to have something to work on. It was just after 2300 hours, nearly the end of beta shift, his normal time for retiring to bed with Deanna. This situation would give him a reason to stay awake a few more hours and let her go to sleep first, before he returned to their quarters. He looked at Lieutenant Rager. "Do we know what's generating these pulses?"

The brown-skinned woman shook her head. "No, sir. We've made the most detailed scans we can from this distance, and so far we haven't seen anything at the pulses' origin point. But we have come up with a few anomalies."

"Naturally," Keru quipped. "Never a shortage of those."

After shooting a glare at the chief of security, Rager continued, "Most of our scans showed the sector as empty, except for a pretty harsh radiation field. But when we mapped the currents of cosmic particles pa.s.sing through the sector, we found this." She entered a command on her padd, and a computer-generated animation appeared on the conference room's wall-mounted viewscreen. It showed countless overlapping streams bending around a central point. "Even though we can't read any sign of s.p.a.ce-time curvature in that area, particles moving through it have their directions and velocities altered as if they'd run into something big."

Intrigued and worried in equal measure, Riker asked, "Big like a Borg transwarp hub?"

"No," Pazlar said. "Big like a star system."

"All right," Riker said. "I remember seeing a planetary cloaking device during my first year on the Enterprise. It's not hard to imagine someone taking it to the next step."

"The question, then," Keru said, "is who that someone is."

Rager keyed in more commands on her padd and changed the animation on the viewscreen to show the trajectories of several of the energy pulses. "It's worth noting," she said, "that a few of these bursts appear to be targeted at Federation s.p.a.ce. The energy signatures taper off after about twenty light-years from their point of origin, so if they are the leading ends of transwarp conduits, there's no telling where they let out."

Riker looked at his first officer, who had been unusually quiet so far during the meeting. "Chris? What do you think?"

Vale addressed her reply to Pazlar. "Sounds like you might have stumbled onto a Borg installation," she said. "This might be how they've been bypa.s.sing our perimeter defenses."

"Hang on," Rager said. "Don't you think we might be jumping to conclusions here? She only said there are similarities to Borg transwarp frequencies."

Tuvok added, "I concur with Lieutenant Rager. There is no evidence that the Borg have ever ventured into this region of the Beta Quadrant. Furthermore, if we are dealing with a cloaked star system, such an undertaking would, presumably, take a great deal of time to accomplish. Because we are within eighteen light-years of the pulses' source, the cloaking would have to have occurred at least eighteen years ago, or else light from the star would still be visible to us."