In response to Pazlar’s padd manipulations, the mass of stars on the screen abruptly receded thousands of parsecs into the intergalactic void, as though viewed from the portals of a ship capable of virtually instantaneous travel, regardless of distance. The stellar cartography lab’s viewpoint had changed to a long, wide-angle view that showed the vast stellar formation from a vantage point far above its galactic north pole, with the periphery of the Milky Way looming deep in the background.
Riker had had no doubt that the readings and measurements taken by his Bajoran senior science officer, Jaza Najem—and repeated several times over the past several, emergency-filled hours—were indeed accurate, much as he would have preferred otherwise. He knew that Jaza would have asked Chaka, Titan’s arthropod-like Pak’shree computer specialist, to subject the initial cartographic findings to the most rigorous computer analysis regimes possible. And Dr. Cethente, a tentacled, exoskeletal Syrath with an uncommon grasp of spatial relationships, would certainly have examined all the astrophysical details very closely as well. There was simply no refuting the conclusions reached about Titan’s abruptly altered whereabouts.
The captain looked around the room toward the three others who had accompanied him down to stellar cartography. Fleet Admiral Leonard James Akaar wore his customary impassive expression. His iron-gray mane, which was usually pulled back into a single, tidy ponytail, trailed behind him, unfurling to shoulder length. A meter to Akaar’s left, Commander Tuvok stood attentively; he was still serving as Titan’s temporary security chief and tactical officer while Ranul Keru lay comatose in sickbay. The Vulcan’s brow was only slightly furrowed, though Riker couldn’t tell whether or not this was because of Pazlar’s report or something else entirely.
For much of the past day, Riker thought he had noticed a fair amount of mutual discomfort in both Akaar and Tuvok, both of whom seemed to be carefully avoiding making eye contact with one another even now. Before they had left Romulan space, Akaar had confided to Riker that a decades-old personal conflict had interrupted a close friendship between these two men, a relationship that had begun during their service together aboard Hikaru Sulu’s Excelsiormore than eighty years ago. Although the admiral hadn’t revealed the specific circumstances behind this falling-out, he had given Riker the impression that both men were now prepared to let bygones be bygones; Akaar had, after all, been eager to rescue Tuvok from Vikr’l Prison, and Tuvok had shown Akaar a Vulcan’s typically reserved gratitude during their subsequent reunion aboard Titan.
But now, judging by the apparent unease between them, Riker was no longer so sure that they had set aside their old differences. Maybe being married to a veteran counselor is just making me hypersensitive to body language,he thought. But I think I could cut the tension between those two with abat’leth.
“So Titanreally hasbeen tossed clear out of the galaxy,” said Commander Christine Vale, Titan’s ever-efficient executive officer.
“The stellar-cartographic records don’t lie,” Pazlar said, spreading her delicate hands in a helpless gesture. She had come to a full stop along the same plane the platform occupied, though she remained a good two meters beyond the effects of its artificial gravity. “And neither do the multiple sensor-scans Jaza and Dakal did in every bandwidth all the way from subspace radio to X-rays. According to the relative locations of every pulsar detectable from here to the Milky Way’s Orion Arm, we’ve just been thrown two hundred and ten thousand light-years from our previous position in Romulan space.”
“Into a completely different galaxy,” Vale said, clearly still trying to get her mind around the idea.
“We’re actually well inside one of the relatively small, irregular satellite galaxies that orbits our own,” Pazlar said as she entered another series of manual commands into her padd. “Elaysian astronomers refer to it as the Minor Outlier. But the more familiar Federation designation is the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
The stars and nebulae and dust lanes of the Small Magellanic Cloud abruptly vanished, replaced by a much tighter view of the same place—specifically, the precise portion of the Cloud in which Titanwas now located. The lab was filled with a holographic image of the spatial rift that had brought Titanhere.
The multicolored, tightly braided tendrils of energy covered hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space. Titanhad withdrawn to a position nearly seventy-five thousand klicks from what Jaza had judged to be the anomaly’s event horizon. Riker had taken this precaution both to protect Titanfrom inadvertently being caught up again in the rift’s embrace, and to get far enough away from the interference generated by its energetic discharges to enable the ship’s sensor nets to obtain some usable scans of the thing’s mysterious interior.
So far, however, the phenomenon was doing a very good job of maintaining its secrets. Riker was thankful at least that it had apparently begun to settle down during the four hours since Titanhad been flung unceremoniously from the energy cloud’s depths. The starship’s bumpy passage had evidently caused considerable disruption to the phenomenon itself, judging from the initial virulence of its energy output compared to its current relatively quiet condition.
Staring up at the image, Vale sighed. “Okay. I can accept that we’re here because I haveto accept it. What I still don’t understand is exactly howit happened.”
“Evidently the spatial disturbance we were helping Commander Donatra investigate within the Romulan Empire,” Tuvok said, “has the capacity to link widely distant regions of space.”
“Like the stable artificial wormhole that connects the Bajor sector to the Gamma Quadrant,” Akaar said.
Pazlar nodded. “It’s a similar phenomenon. But also different.”
“Different how?” said Riker.
“Well, in spite of the strange energetic readings the phenomenon is still giving off even now, we haven’t picked up even the faintest trace of the verteron particles associated with the Bajoran wormhole. If this thing really werea stable artificial wormhole, it would have verterons, as Dr. Bralik might say, ‘coming out the wazoo.’ ”
Riker cracked a small, fleeting smile at that; judging from the few brief encounters he’d already had with Bralik—and from the bits of shipboard scuttlebutt he’d overheard in the mess—he could easily imagine the ship’s often salty Ferengi geologist using that very turn of phrase.
“So if it’s not quite a stable wormhole, then what is it?” Vale wanted to know.
“Perhaps it is an interspatial fissure of the same type that drew Excelsiorhere eight decades ago,” Tuvok ventured, casting a glance at Akaar, who nodded solemnly.
Riker considered that for a moment. He had to concede that Tuvok, a veteran of the U.S.S. Voyagerduring its seven-year Delta Quadrant sojourn, knew at least as much as he did about being hurled instantly to remote parts of the universe. So, for that matter, did Akaar, who had served alongside the Vulcan eighty years ago on Excelsior,the last Federation starship to visit these parts, under circumstances rather similar to those that had swept Titanhere.
Nevertheless, he found something bothersome about Tuvok’s “interspatial fissure” notion.