quickly as possible, and Drumain looked forward to making that call sometime before lunch.
At 0759, Drumain polled his team-a group of more than fifty Starfleet and institute personnel. Their responses were instant and reassuring. All systems on the test core were checked and ready. All sensors were operational. The antimatter generator was online and producing the required level of power.
Drumain tugged down on his Starfleet jacket as the final few seconds of the countdown proceeded.
Timecode: zero.
Everything occurred exactly as planned.
For eighteen seconds.
That was when a warning alert flashed on Drumain’s board. A minor power surge.
It wasn’t large enough for the computer safety subroutines to automatically shut down the test, but the warning prompted Drumain to keep his hand over the large red “kill” switch.
His eyes jumped back and forth between the display showing the power graph and the display showing the test core, but except for the soft blue glow of the Cerenkov emitters running along its side, the core was unchanged from its initial condition.
Around him, Drumain could hear his team’s quick whispered conversations as they tried to isolate the reason for the surge.
Mirrin O’Hara was the first to see and report the residue.
At once, Drumain called for the visual sensors to enlarge the view of the core.
What he saw onscreen was puzzling. A dark shadow was forming around the core’s casing, growing as randomly as fingers of frost spidering over a window in winter.
Drumain enlarged the sensor image even more.
At closer resolution, the residue resembled grains of black sand. But now Drumain could see that it was accreting into cubes, the largest no more than a decimeter or so across, the others in a range of smaller sizes, some little more than specks.
O’Hara readily identified the chemical composition of the residue: mostly carbon, with traces of simpler elements, down to and including hydrogen.
The warp-field strength began to change.
Drumain immediately checked the vacuum readings in the chamber-it was still holding. He frowned. The residue wasn’t particulate matter condensing out of the air. There was no air.
The only explanation was that it was being created by the warp field.
And that was impossible.
The impossible, however, continued until 0802, when the warp field flared.
That finally triggered the automatic cutoffs, and then-for no reason that Drumain could establish-all the chamber’s sensors went offline.
He polled his team again. No one had any explanation for what they had seen or what their sensors had measured.
Drumain needed more information. He ordered the chamber repressurized, then motioned to O’Hara to come with him. They took the stairs down to the main entry doors. Because internal sensors remained inoperative, Drumain was careful to use his tricorder to scan the room behind the doors, verifying that the chamber had full atmosphere and no radiation. O’Hara confirmed his findings.
The doors slid apart, and Drumain felt a rush of chilled air as the slight overpressure in the revealed chamber equalized. At once, he smelled something electric, burnt, the odor unnerving to an engineer.
All the chamber lights were out.
Before he could even request it, O’Hara opened a critical-equipment locker beside the doors and retrieved two palmlights. With their twin beams of light sweeping over the distant test core, Drumain took the first steps into the chamber as O’Hara followed close behind. Their footsteps echoed in the metal-clad chamber.
As they drew nearer and their palmlights revealed more details, Drumain saw that the cylindrical core, nine meters long and two meters in cross section, hadn’t shifted from its test bed. But the test bed itself was barely visible. It thrust upward as if trying to escape the mound of dark cubes piled around it like drifting sand poised to engulf a pyramid on Mars.
Black residue clung to the sides of the core like frozen streams of water.
Drumain gestured to O’Hara to circle round the core to the left. He took the right.
Other than the residue, neither of their tricorders detected anything beyond the ordinary.
But tricorders had their limitations.
Drumain reached the front of the core, and nearly dropped the device.
A Starfleet admiral was standing there, waiting.
Before he could even begin to ask her how she could possibly have survived the vacuum and the energy fluctuations of the warp field, the admiral smiled at him.
“Hello, Tresk,” she said.
It wasn’t the tone an admiral used to address a subordinate officer-it was the greeting of an intimate friend. And now that Drumain could see her more clearly in the beam from his palmlight, she seemed far too young to have attained her rank.
“Admiral… did you just beam in?”
The admiral’s warm smile expanded, and Drumain had a sudden realization that explained the familiarity of her voice-Eleanor Stein.
Twelve years ago, in their last year at the Academy, he had lost his heart to her. But she, like him, had valued a Starfleet career more than passion, and after graduation they had taken separate paths. Drumain still dreamed of her, and had always wondered if she dreamed of him.
“I do,” the admiral said, answering his unspoken question.
A wave of gooseflesh swept up Drumain’s spine to prickle the close-cropped hair at the back of his neck and scalp. The admiral took a step forward. With that one movement, she no longer resembled his long-lost love, she became her, just as she had been twelve years ago, her admiral’s uniform now a cadet’s jumpsuit.
Drumain blinked, incredulous. “Eleanor…?”
“Commander… who’re you talking to?” O’Hara came around the front of the core, then stopped dead in surprise. She shone her palmlight into the cadet’s eyes. “Where’d you come from?”
“Mirrin,” the cadet said as she turned away from Drumain to O’Hara.
Drumain blinked again, puzzled, but relieved. The light had played tricks on him. In profile, the admiral looked nothing at all like his memory of Eleanor. Even her jumpsuit looked like a civilian outfit.
“Mom…?”
Drumain recognized a familiar shock in O’Hara’s voice. As if relays closed in his brain, triggering his own internal safety overrides, he switched from engineer to Starfleet officer.
He and O’Hara faced a human where no human could reasonably be-a human disturbingly like a lover he’d never forgotten, yet also like his teammate’s mother.
There could be only one explanation, one thing to do.
Drumain’s finger trembled as he tapped his combadge. He hoped there was still time, but feared there was not. “Drumain to Security. Intruder alert. Test Chamber One.”
The intruder turned, and with that motion her features blurred, then focused. She was Eleanor again.
“Oh, Tresk, that wasn’t necessary. There’s nothing to fear now….”
“O’Hara,” Drumain said urgently, “get out of here. Run.”
Without taking her eyes off Drumain, the cadet held out her hand to O’Hara-
– and that hand stretched through the air like smoke.
Drumain’s breath left him as the dark strand writhed toward O’Hara.
O’Hara’s palmlight and tricorder dropped, clanging on the triduranium tiles, as she clawed at the black substance that swept over her face.
Drumain found his voice. “Let her go!”
The cadet shook her head. “I know she wants this. So do you.”
Drumain heard rustling. He looked down in horror. There, in the slash of light sent by O’Hara’s palmlight across the chamber floor, undulating shadows of black residue flowed from the test core to his boots.
Drumain tried to step back, but he felt resistance. He twisted around.
