Khatami rose from her chair. “Route it to Science Two,” she said, climbing the steps to the bridge’s upper ring. The captain and first officer converged on the backup science station and keyed in their security clearance codes. Tense seconds passed as the two women huddled over the console and conferred in whispers. Klisiewicz couldn’t hear what they were discussing, but he held a sufficiently high security clearance to know that Victor-Alpha was the current designation for matters related to Operation Vanguard.
Stano and Khatami turned toward the main viewscreen. “McCormack, report,” Khatami said.
“No populated systems on the Klingons’ current bearing.” The navigator added a projection of the Klingon ships’ course to the image on the forward screen. “They seem to be heading into deep space.”
The captain and first officer exchanged grim and knowing looks, then descended together into the command well. “Mister Estrada,” Stano said, “what was the time stamp on that message from the Dulcinea?”
“Nine minutes ago, sir.”
“Raise them on subspace, Lieutenant, priority one.”
“Aye, sir.”
Khatami sat down in her chair, and Stano stood ready on her right. The captain’s mien was serious, her voice stern. “Helm, set course, bearing one-six-one mark one-zero-four, maximum warp, and stand by to engage on my order.”
Lieutenant Neelakanta, an energetic young Arcturian, entered the new heading with speed and precision. “Course laid in, Captain. Standing by.”
The captain looked back at Estrada. “Report.”
“No reply, Captain. Repeating the hail.”
Anticipating the captain’s next request, Klisiewicz initiated a long-range sensor scan of the Dulcinea’s last-known position. Only then did he realize that the civilian ship’s last coordinates lay in the path of the approaching Klingon ships.
At the communications console, Estrada shook his head. “No response, sir.”
Klisiewicz glanced into the blue glow of the hooded sensor display, then looked up as Khatami turned toward him. “No sign of the Dulcinea,Captain.”
Stano and Khatami traded worried looks. The first officer asked Klisiewicz, “Is it possible they warped out of sensor range?”
“Not unless they can move at warp eleven.”
Khatami leaned forward. “Mister Neelakanta”—she pointed dramatically at the main viewscreen—“engage.”
14
In all his years of piloting small starships, Quinn had never heard anything like the din surrounding him as the Dulcineahurtled in a mad spiral through the wormhole. The ship’s hull moaned like an angry ghost, her engines screamed like frightened children, and her consoles crackled and spat sparks every which way.
Despite his best efforts to control the ship’s wild pitching and rolling, it grazed the blinding, blue-white swirl of the wormhole’s membrane and then caromed off, its movement made even more erratic by the fleeting impact.
A hiccup in the inertial dampers or artificial gravity (or some other system Quinn always took for granted until it was gone) knocked Bridy on her ass. Clawing her way up from the deck, she growled, “Dammit! Keep her steady!”
He glared at her. “Great idea, sweetheart! Why didn’t Ithink of that?”
“Watch our yaw!”
Quinn keyed compensating maneuvers into the helm faster than he’d ever done before, but the ship reacted like a turtle slogging through mud. No matter how hard Quinn tried to get ahead of the wormhole’s horrendous gravitational distortions, he remained fractions of a second too slow to prevent the worst from coming to pass. He grabbed his armrests. “Hang on!”
Dulcineacareened off the side of the wormhole’s throat. A screech of stressed metal was drowned out by a deafening boom of collision. Overhead lights and console displays stuttered and went dark, leaving the cockpit illuminated by the spectral blue radiance of the wormhole.
Bridy stretched past Quinn to reach the copilot’s console, her movements strobed by the wormhole’s flickering light. Then she patched in the ship’s auxiliary power, restoring the lights and most of the controls. “Mains are fried,” she shouted over the howling chaos. “Losing antimatter containment!”
Dead ahead, the terminus of the wormhole was little more than a pinprick of white light at the end of a churning maelstrom. “Just give me a few more seconds!”
“We won’t make it!” She armed the fuel-pod-ejection trigger.
“Don’t! We’re almost clear!” Space-time distortions rocked the ship as the wormhole’s far mouth spun open, spat it out, and sent it tumbling madly into a firestorm. All Quinn could see outside the cockpit was half-molten rocky debris, glowing-hot clouds of ionized gas, and multihued flashes of lightning.
Every gauge in the cockpit redlined. “Containment’s failing,” Bridy said as she ejected the ship’s antimatter supply.
“All power to shields!”
“Patching in reserves.”
The universe flared white, and then a thunderclap pummeled Quinn like a sonic hammer. All around him, the ship’s onboard systems let out sad, whimpering noises before expiring with a slowly fading hum. At least the helm’s still responding,Quinn consoled himself—before it, too, began deteriorating. Coaxing every bit of performance possible from his wounded vessel, he guided it through a passage between two quarters of a shattered planet whose scattered chunks were gradually being pulled away from one another. Dulcineatrembled as boulder-sized hunks of rock and ice were deflected by its navigational force field.
Without taking his eyes off their perilous environment, Quinn said to Bridy, “I need a damage report, a-sap.”
“On it.” She got up and moved from one cockpit console to another. “Warp drive’s down. We’ve got a few minutes before the impulse coil fails. Life support’s barely there. And we lost the subspace antenna.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the cargo?”
“It’s fine.”
“All right, then. We just need to find a place to set down and patch this ol’ girl back together.” Outside, the haze of radiant dust began to dim. “We’re almost out of this soup. See if you can get the sensors running and find us a planet—preferably one with a breathable atmosphere.”
Bridy was staring slackjawed into space. “Uh, Quinn . . . ?”
“What?”
“Look.”
He followed her gaze. “I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly.”
When he turned his attention back to the view outside the ship, he understood. Then his jaw dropped half open in shock. “There are no stars.” Beholding the empty heavens with dread, he muttered, “Where the hell are we?”
Bridy looked perplexed. “No idea. We might be so far from the center of the universe that none of its light has reached here yet, or we might be in a pocket universe branched off from our own.”
“A universe with no stars? Eternal darkness? I’m not what you’d call a believer, but are you sure we didn’t die and go to hell?”
“No, I’m not.” Bridy perked up as she pointed at the sensor display. “Hang on, correction: There isone star—a white dwarf, temperature ninety-seven hundred Kelvin. Bearing one-seven-seven mark one-five-oh, distance one hundred eight-point-six million kilometers.” She cast a fearful glance at Quinn. “And it has one planet, orbiting at a distance of five-point-two-four million kilometers, right in the middle of the habitable zone. Atmosphere is M-Class nitrogen-oxygen.” Then she called up another screen of data, which showed a familiar energy waveform. “It’s the Jinoteur Pattern. And guess where it’s coming from.”
Quinn swallowed, only to find it difficult because his mouth had gone dry. “What do you wanna bet that ain’t a coincidence?”