“Criticality in seven… six… five… four… three…”
Burke’s countdown was interrupted.
Two seconds ahead of her best estimate, Salton Cross went supernova.
Over the past few weeks, Riker had come to know Burke well enough to realize that she would be thrilled to have miscalculated and would already be mentally revising her model of the star’s interior processes.
The main viewscreen went white.
Thanks to the preparatory sessions Burke’s team had conducted for interested Titan crew, Riker understood why. Slightly less than four minutes and twenty-seven seconds away, a deadly wave of radiation was streaming toward his ship. It would be followed by a slightly slower though even more destructive wall of ejected solar plasma.
The radiation had the capability to knock out every system on Titan, including the shields. And if those failed, every member of the crew would be fatally irradiated within seconds. A few minutes later, when the shock wave hit the ship, the Titan would be shattered, likely into its component molecules.
Riker had no intention of waiting for any of that to happen.
“That’s it, Aili… take us out, warp factor point nine five.”
“Point nine five it is, Captain.”
Riker leaned back in his chair, smiled at Troi. “Best seats in the house,” he said.
In that same instant the main alarm sounded and red lights flashed.
The Titan violently pitched forward, then down.
Riker swiftly scanned his bridge. Under present conditions, the strength of that lag in the inertial dampers could mean only one thing: The ship had dropped out of warp as quickly as it had jumped to it.
“Report!” he said, but already his eyes had found the source of the trouble: Every warning light at the engineering station flashed red.
Riker’s conn officer fought to keep Titan’s dampers and structural-integrity field in alignment.
“Engineering reports warp core offline,” Tuvok calmly announced over the alarms.
“Maximum impulse!” Riker ordered. Though they couldn’t reach light speed on impulse alone, increasing the distance between the radiation shock wave and the ship would buy his ship a few more seconds. “Bridge to engineering!”
The Titan’s chief engineer, Doctor Xin Ra-Havreii, answered at once, voice uncharacteristically tense. Riker could hear shouted commands and rapid conversations in the background. “Engineering, Captain.”
“How soon can you bring warp drive back online?” Riker asked, urgent.
“It is online-the core’s building toward a breach! This is a full-scale– ” There was a pause, then Riker heard the Efrosian engineer swear in one of his homeworld’s more obscure dialects.
“Stand by, Captain! Initiating emergency core ejection!”
Riker’s ship shuddered. All alarms switched off.
“Warp core away,” Ra-Havreii said.
A moment later, the ejected core detonated less than a kilometer from the ship.
The too-close explosion drove subspace concussion waves into the Titan, overloading its shields and sending a compression pulse through all major circuits.
The lights on the bridge flickered off.
The main viewscreen winked out.
The ship’s computer network was down.
Riker was on his feet. Battery-powered emergency lights glowed, but the display screens at all stations flashed with random static.
All hands on the bridge turned to their captain for his orders.
But the Titan hung dead in space.
And less than four minutes away, a wall of radiation raced forward at 300,000 kilometers each second to ensure the same fate would soon befall her crew.
3
S.S. BELLE REVE, VULCAN
STARDATE 58552.2
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you court-martialed,” Admiral Janeway said. “In fact, I could use a good reason for not just chucking you out of the airlock right now.”
Captain James T. Kirk sat back on his bench in the narrow galley of the Belle Reve and realized he had no answer for the admiral-at least, not one that he’d accept if he were in her position.
He wasn’t surprised by Janeway’s frustration with him. He knew it had been building for several months, so he couldn’t even feign innocence, which was usually one of his better strategies.
He was guilty as charged and that was all there was to it.
A year ago, when he had been on board Captain Riker’s Titan, Janeway had given him the ship he now commanded. Then, it had been called the Calypso, but as the ship’s new master he’d changed her name to Belle Reve-Beautiful Dream.
What better name could there be for a ship that sailed among the stars? Except, perhaps, for Enterprise.
According to the central registries, the S.S. Belle Reve was a commercial freighter of Rigelian registry. Her main hull was a blunt-nosed cylindrical module about the same size as a single nacelle from an old Ambassador- class ship. She had a slightly tapered bulge at the rear of her ventral hull, and two swept-back, outboard warp nacelles. The nacelles were also cylindrical. To Kirk’s eye, they gave his ship the look of an antique.
But, more significantly, what the old-fashioned configuration hid was a cleverly engineered distributed- phaser system. Its critical components were spread throughout the ship so that they could be powered up without being detected. Binary quantum torpedoes shared the same characteristic: They didn’t go “live” until their warhead components were mated just two seconds before launch. Until that last moment of assembly, even the sensors on Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise would have trouble detecting such uniquely arrayed armaments.
When its Defiant-class warp engines were added to the mix, making the small ship vastly overpowered and exceedingly fast, all the ingredients for being one of Starfleet’s best Q-ships were in place.
In the vernacular of an earlier time, Kirk’s Belle Reve was a spy trawler that sailed where Starfleet chose not to fly its colors.
“I’m waiting,” Janeway said.
Kirk decided to rely on a tried-and-true technique: He answered the question he felt she should have asked him.
“I think I’ve done a good job of fulfilling my obligations to you.”
Janeway blinked as if she hadn’t heard him correctly.
“Captain,” she said, more than a hint of irritation in her tone, “I came all this way because you haven’t fulfilled your obligations.”
Kirk spoke lightly, but his words carried serious intent. “Is that what you really think? Or is that what Starfleet told you to say?”
Janeway leaned forward, punctuating her words by tapping her finger against the galley table. “I gave you this ship so you could be the eyes and ears of Starfleet where and when we can’t send an identifiable ship of our own.”
“You gave me this ship so I could investigate Spock’s disappearance.”
Janeway would not be deflected. “Captain Kirk… Ambassador Spock is dead.”
Kirk felt his chest tighten, but he restrained any show of frustration. It had been years since he had been subjected to Starfleet’s chain of command, even longer since he felt he owed it any particular allegiance.
“We don’t know that,” he said. The dream was vivid in his memory: Do I have your attention?
“I read your report about the events on Remus.”
