The black cubes were stacking up behind him, already as high as his knees.
He began to fall, but the cadet was suddenly before him, both arms wrapped around him, just as Eleanor had held him on their last night together.
“Accept…” she said.
Drumain’s pulse fluttered with fear as he stared past his captor to a small mound of utter blackness that was rapidly dissolving into wisps of smoke.
It was all that was left of O’Hara.
“Embrace….”
Drumain looked into eyes that held all the love he had forgotten, the desire he had tried to banish from his life.
“… No…” he whispered, even as he felt his own body absorbing, dissolving…
“Be loved….” Soft lips sought his, and Drumain felt his mouth open wide as black tendrils streamed down to fill his throat and seal his lungs. His vision dimmed, then died as a once-beloved face exploded into dark particles and engulfed him.
At 0808, a Starfleet security team watched helpless in amazement as a slowly moving, cresting wave of black sand began rising in the test chamber. As Tresk Drumain joined Mirrin O’Hara in the Peace of the Totality.
At 0809, the test core exploded.
The surge along the power conduits to the antimatter generator released magnetic containment.
In the next ten seconds, there were seven more explosions. In less than a minute, all thirty buildings of the institute were in flames.
Two minutes later, eight hundred and fifteen personnel perished.
Over the next three days, three hundred and twenty more succumbed to injuries.
Only the fig trees survived. Planted by the man whose genius had made the United Federation of Planets possible, and now the only living witnesses to the beginning of the Federation’s end.
The Totality was finally ready to share its gift with all the species of the galaxy.
And it knew that once that gift was truly understood, it would be accepted without hesitation.
2
U.S.S. TITAN NCC-80102, SALTON CROSS
STARDATE 58552.2
In less than an hour, the star would die.
It would take more than five hundred years for the light of its passing to reach Earth, but long before then the star’s demise would be analyzed and understood by the astronomers on board the starship now orbiting it.
It had taken less than three months for the U.S.S. Titan to reach Salton Cross. And, despite the immensity of space and the multitude of stars, given the unique nature of this one star it was inevitable that the Titan would not be alone.
The Luna-class starship’s classic twin-nacelle silhouette, flattened as if it had been frozen in the moment of its jump to warp speed, was framed both by the immense blue-white star it had come to study and by the gleaming, chrome-finish spikes and vanes of the Araldii ship that had joined it.
The two vessels, their commanders confident in the ability of their ships’ engines, were within the destruction zone of the coming supernova. But where there was danger, there was also the opportunity for scientific discovery. That’s what their mission was this day.
Neither ship’s commander knew of the war that had begun.
As much as Will Riker had enjoyed and treasured his time as first officer of the Enterprise, he had no trouble admitting that being captain of the Titan was even better.
His command was one of Starfleet’s newest class of starships, a return to the ideals of the Federation’s past, built for exploration as much as for military missions. Deceptively small, remarkably efficient in design and engineering, it was also home to a unique community of three hundred and fifty of the Federation’s best and brightest. Riker took pride in knowing that of the twelve Luna-class vessels in service, his ship held the most diverse crew. There were only fifty humans in its company.
That mix of human and aliens of all species-from Ferengi to Syrath, Cardassian to Vulcan, Trill to Pahkwathanh-filled the Titan with a vibrant mood of shared purpose and discovery. There was no greater adventure, no greater calling, than expanding the limits of knowledge, human and otherwise.
For some, Riker knew, the words bordered on cliche, and their grammar was questionable to be sure, but the speech Zefram Cochrane had given centuries ago still served perfectly to define the Titan’s mission-the mission for all beings at all times– “to boldly go.”
Riker couldn’t imagine a better, more fulfilling life. Especially since he shared it with his wife, his imzadi for decades, Deanna Troi.
Today, they were starting their workday as they usually did, in Riker’s ready room, he with his coffee, she with her tea.
Their topic of conversation, however, was a first for the Titan. They were in the midst of planning a formal reception and dinner for the Araldii, the newest species with which the Federation had made first contact.
More to the point, it was the first truly unknown species with which Captain Riker and the Titan had made first contact, without any preparation from Starfleet’s First Contact Office.
Which is why he and Troi had been joined this morning by Ship Leader Fortral, commander of the Araldii ship the Titan had encountered.
“It will be possible to reduce the atmospheric pressure in our reception hall to five hundred torr,” Troi said, referring to the notes on her protocol padd. On the Titan, Troi served both as ship’s counselor and diplomatic officer.
There was a brief lag as Fortral listened to the translator device in her headphones. According to the datastreams the ship leader had provided to the Titan, Aralda was a large world, twice the size of Earth, yet with gravity only two-thirds Earth normal. Its low density was in part responsible for its equally low-pressure atmosphere. The headphones Fortral wore not only fulfilled the need of providing translation functions, they helped diminish what was, to Araldii, the deafening volume and high pitch of human voices and the background noises of the Titan’s environmental systems.
“The low pressure will not cause you discomfort?” Fortral asked in concern. The dark blue, tigerlike stripes that ran horizontally across her pale blue skin glistened as her primary mouth moved. Her secondary mouth, located in what for humans would be the mid-chin region of her face, remained closed, used only for eating and drinking.
Fortral’s own voice was a soft, almost impossible-to-hear whisper. Riker’s and Troi’s universal translators recreated the gentle quality of the ship leader’s speech while boosting its volume.
“No,” Troi said. “Though it will affect the preparation of some of the foods we plan to serve.”
“We appreciate the gesture of goodwill,” Fortral said.
“As we appreciate the data you shared with us concerning the supernova,” Riker replied with a broad smile.
The Titan had arrived at Salton Cross two weeks earlier. The Type O star was eight times larger than Earth’s sun and had been catalogued centuries ago. But only in the past two decades had scientists reached the conclusion that the star was about to become a supernova.
Accordingly, the Titan had been tasked with ferrying a large contingent of astronomers and astrophysicists to the immediate vicinity of the star in order to observe its death throes.
In retrospect, Riker realized, he should not have been surprised to find an alien vessel already on station, waiting for the end; Araldii astrophysicists were the equal of the Federation’s. In fact, they had more detailed acoustic scans of the star’s surface than Starfleet’s automated probes had captured. Fortunately, the Araldii had
