take?”
“Very little.”
Riker was startled. “The shields held?”
Picard took a moment before answering, and Riker knew him well enough to realize bad news was coming. But if his ship, his crew, and Deanna were all right, how bad could it…
Then he knew.
“The Araldii?”
“They saved your life, Will. Your crew and your ship.”
Riker didn’t understand. “How…?”
Picard sighed. “They placed themselves between you and the radiation front, and the instant the front hit them, they went to warp. We think they were trying to take a large volume of the radiation into warp with them, to create an empty pocket in the radiation blast that was heading for the Titan.”
“Their ship exploded,” Riker said slowly, remembering those last awful moments.
Picard’s gaze met his squarely. “But their tactic worked. The Araldii cut the intensity of the radiation hitting the Titan by more than sixty percent. Your… shall we say, ‘audacious’ maneuver with the quantum torpedoes created a counter pressure wave that deflected another ten to fifteen percent. What was left, your shields handled easily. By the time the charged particles and stellar gas reached the Titan, your engineering crew had full impulse restored and were able to outrun them.”
Riker felt simultaneously proud of his crew, and dis-traught over the loss of Fortral’s ship and crew. But one detail remained unexplained.
“Did the engineers install the Titan’s backup warp core?”
Riker saw in Picard’s eyes that that was a detail he’d deliberately withheld.
“No,” Picard admitted. “Under orders from Command.”
Riker instantly made the only logical connection.
“The cores were sabotaged?”
“I wish it were that easy.” Picard sighed again, and tugged his shirt in a needless attempt to straighten its perfection. “The reality is that no one knows what’s happened over the past ten days. Warp cores are malfunctioning, running critical, even breaching, across both quadrants.”
Riker stared at his former captain. He didn’t even know where to begin asking questions.
“For now,” Picard continued, “the best theory is that our section of the galaxy is passing through a region of space-time with altered subspace properties. Starfleet thinks it might be related to the subspace instabilities that build up over well-traveled shipping lanes.”
“But we corrected that problem years ago,” Riker said, struggling with disbelief. “Modified our engines, and…”
Picard didn’t let him finish. “Whatever it is, it’s a different phenomenon. On the plus side, Starfleet hasn’t lost many ships because of our automated warp-core ejection procedures. But dozens of freighters have been lost. Hundreds of private ships. Vulcan shipping is at a standstill. Officially, the Klingons aren’t admitting to anything out of the ordinary, but our listening posts have picked up scores of distress calls.”
“So the Araldii ship…?”
“I’m sure they didn’t intend to sacrifice themselves for you. But whatever happened to the Titan’s warp core also happened to theirs, and they weren’t able to eject it.”
Riker stared up at the sickbay’s overhead, trying to comprehend the implications of all that Picard had told him. But gradually he became aware of another familiar sensation: the heartbeat of the ship he used to serve on.
“The Enterprise is at warp,” Riker said. “I can feel the generators.”
Picard nodded, unperturbed. “Certain types of cores appear to be unaffected. Older ones, especially.”
“This ship isn’t old.”
“Our last refit, after our collision with Shinzon’s vessel… there weren’t enough warp cores to go around. We had a Block Five installed, and I’ve had to listen to Geordi complain about it ever since.”
Riker tried to ignore the pounding in his head and failed. “The Titan has a Block Seven.”
“Not once we get back to Mars.”
“A refit? Already?”
“Starfleet’s replacing warp systems on all affected ships. The program’s likely to take years. Sovereign-, Forrest-, and Luna-class ships have priority.”
“Years?” Riker repeated.
Picard’s next words were even more disturbing. “We’ve lost more than ships and installations powered by static warp-field generators. We’ve lost virtually every major warp-core research and manufacturing facility. Including the Cochrane Institute.”
Riker stared at Picard. “On New Montana?”
“Death toll in the hundreds. Most of them warp specialists.”
Riker’s astonishment quickly changed to suspicion. Warp travel was the lifeblood of the Federation. It was what allowed Starfleet to exist. The fact that warp technology was being denied to both entities, and that the scientists and engineers responsible for creating and improving it had been killed, also led to a single, logical conclusion-but one that Picard had already denied.
“Starfleet’s certain this isn’t deliberate?”
Picard shook his head. “I had my doubts, too. But this is so widespread, across thousands of light-years… what kind of an enemy could strike us like that? By changing the fundamental characteristics of subspace?”
“The most dangerous enemies are those we can’t predict.”
Picard patted the arm of his former first officer. “Nature’s unpredictable, but I’m not willing to call it our enemy yet.”
But Riker wasn’t willing to rule out any enemy.
Not even a force of nature.
8
THE GATEWAY, VULCAN
STARDATE 58562.5
Entering this desert was little different from stepping into a blast furnace, but to Kirk, the searing wind carried treasured memories and the promise of home.
That’s what Vulcan was to him now: a second home, his brother’s home.
He pulled back the hood of his cooling cloak to feel the force of that wind and catch the faint, ozone scent of distant sandfire storms.
“Is that wise?”
The holographic doctor stood with Kirk and Joseph on the viewing platform that was carved into an immense formation of wind-eroded rock. Far below was the haphazard community of low, round, sand-colored hostels and hotels that huddled together at the desert’s edge-their apparently random distribution unusual for Vulcan, a sign of the age of this place, pre-Surak and logic.
Tradition held that from the Gateway, Surak had begun his journey of enlightenment through the desert known as the Forge. From that crossing, taken more than two thousand years ago, the Vulcan pursuit of logic had arisen.
Though the holographic doctor didn’t require it, like Kirk and Joseph he also wore a cooling cloak of red- orange cloth over his projection of civilian clothes, the better to blend in with pilgrims and tourists. In the Doctor’s case, the sophisticated heat exchangers that were woven invisibly through the cloak’s coarse fabric were not switched on.
“Solar radiation levels are considerably higher than on Earth,” the hologram warned.
Kirk knew the Doctor meant well and forgave his concerns. Caution was undoubtedly part of his medical
