“Warp six.”
“We register influx of antimatter.”
“Twenty seconds.”
As Sulu announced Universe now in range of the third probe, she gave thought to how these next few moments would be recorded in history. It energized her to be a participant in such a momentous event.
“Warp eight.”
“Hyperwarp generators are online.”
“Fifteen seconds.”
At the sciences station, an energy waveform suddenly surged across one of the displays. Sulu did not recognize its shape or structure, and she quickly worked her controls to isolate its source and identify it.
“Warp nine.”
“Beginning hyperwarp reaction.”
“Ten seconds.”
As Sulu scanned space for the origin of the energy wave, she also queried the library computer about it. An answer appeared at once on a readout, and Sulu felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach. The only source known to generate such a waveform was a Romulan cloaking device.
“Warp nine-point-three,” Universe’s helm officer, Seaver, said.
“Confirming hyperwarp initiation,” the engineer, Chernin, said.
“Five seconds.” Captain Kuwano.
Sulu opened her mouth to shout a warning to Universe’s crew, to alert them to the presence of a Romulan vessel in nearby space, maybe even to end the test run right now. If the Romulans had sabotaged the field trials—
But in that instant, sensors ascertained the location of the waveform’s source: Universe itself. Somewhere aboard the experimental Starfleet vessel functioned Romulan cloaking technology, or the Federation equivalent. This clearly had been the reason for Starfleet’s security measures with respect to these trials.
“Warp nine-point-five.”
“We’re on track.”
“Three seconds…two…one.”
On the readouts of the probe data, the numbers began to change not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. The readings no longer described a starship traveling at warp velocities. Sulu held her breath.
“We are at hyperwarp, factor one,” Seaver said, and Sulu could tell that the woman had spoken with a wide smile on her face. Sulu exhaled in relief, and then couldn’t resist squeezing her hand into a fist and jabbing the air in celebration. Applause went up on the bridge of Enterprise, and she was sure, on the bridges of the other ships as well.
“Congratulations, Universe,” Admiral Harriman said.
Across the bridge from Sulu, at a starboard engineering console, Rafe Buonarroti said, “Those engines must be le bellezze.” He saw her looking over at him, and he smiled. She smiled back.
“Our joys as wingèd dreams do fly,” Sulu thought, unsure of the source of the quote, but feeling that it applied here. Her father had passed his sense of romance down to her.
“Maintaining hyperwarp one,” Seaver said.
A moment later, Sulu thought she heard someone gasp. Then: “Look at the stars.” It was Captain Kuwano, speaking almost in a whisper.
“Capt—” somebody began to shout, and then a thunderous sound swept across the bridge of Enterprise. In an instant, the sound was gone, and behind it followed only silence.
Sulu looked at the readouts. All of the numbers had dropped to zero. She felt the blood drain from her face and her skin grow cold.
“Universe, this is Harriman,” the admiral roared. “Come in, Universe.”
And still, there was only silence.
“We have no comlink with the Universe,” Kanchumurthi said.
“I’m reading a malfunction,” another disembodied voice said.
“Captain,” Tenger said, “there’s been an explosion.”
Sulu felt as though her heart had stopped in her chest.
“What have we got?” Captain Harriman wanted to know, standing from his chair. “Tenger? Demora?”
Sulu checked the readouts from the probes twice, and then Enterprise’s own sensor readings twice, before answering. Finally, she had no choice but to say the unthinkable. “Captain…the Universe is gone.”
Harriman stood staring at the empty starscape on the viewscreen. For the first time on the bridge of Enterprise, he did not know how to act, what to say. What his crew must be feeling right now…
“Captain,” Tenger said, his tone urgent. “The explosion sent out a shock wave, concentrated in one direction. Ad Astra was in its path.”
“Shields up,” Harriman said, no longer at a loss for words, even as he remembered that there had been another time when he had not known how to act or what to say on Enterprise’s bridge: during the ship’s maiden voyage. “Ad Astra, this is Enterprise. Come in.”
No response.
“The comlink has been knocked out,” Lieutenant Kanchumurthi explained. “Now we’ve lost contact with all the ships.”
“Tenger,” Harriman asked, “can we make it through the shock wave?”
“We’re not in the path of the main wave,” Tenger said.
“With shields up, we should have no problem.”
“Xintal, best speed to Ad Astra,” Harriman said. “Tolek, coordinates from Lieutenant Tenger.”
Linojj and Tolek both responded verbally even as they began working their consoles.
“Ramesh,” Harriman said to Kanchumurthi, “try to raise Canaveral. See if they can assist.”
“Yes, sir,” Kanchumurthi said.
And as Enterprise leaped to warp, Harriman thought the same two things that he had during his vessel’s disastrous first flight eighteen years ago: that he hoped he could rescue the crew of a ship in trouble, and that this hadn’t been supposed to happen.
Blackjack Harriman stood on the bridge of the support vessel Ad Astra and waited to hear the words.
“We are at hyperwarp, factor one.”
Around Blackjack, the other four people on Ad Astra’s bridge—the ship’s captain, the helm and navigation officers, and a sensor technician—all clapped. Over the comlink, Blackjack heard applause from the crews of the other ships as well. He tried to imagine his son’s reaction, then quickly put the thought out of his mind.
“Congratulations, Universe,” Blackjack said, playing his role as the ranking officer in the operation. He looked around the bridge—with barely enough room for its five occupants, the small area would more aptly be called a control room—and saw the Ad Astra officers all exchanging celebratory glances.
Somebody said something unintelligible over the comlink, and then Blackjack heard, “Maintaining hyperwarp one.”
And then somebody gasped, and on the heels of that: “Look at the stars.”
“Capt—” came a shout, clipped off by a deafening noise, followed by a horrible quiet. Blackjack moved past Captain Saren-Sah in the command chair and leaned over the sensor technician. On the scan readouts, he saw that all of the entries had changed to zeroes.
“Universe, this is Harriman,” he bellowed. “Come in, Universe.”
No response.
“We have no comlink with the Universe,” somebody said.
“I’m reading a malfunction,” said Ad Astra’s sensor technician.
“Captain, there’s been—” The comlink ended as abruptly as though it had been sliced in two by an axe.
Suddenly, the deck canted sharply to one side, and Blackjack was thrown from his feet. He brought his hands up, but too late; his chest collided with the arm of Saren-Sah’s command chair. He felt his breath leave him as he tumbled onto the deck. His shoulder struck hard, and even with the din now filling the bridge, he heard the sickening snap of his bones.
He heard yelling, but could not make out any words. Butthen the noise diminished enough that he could hear Saren-Sah issuing orders to the crew: to raise shields, to bring the ship about, to map the shock wave and chart a course into and through it. Blackjack reached up and grabbed for the arm of Saren-Sah’s chair, pulling himself to his feet. His injured arm hung limply at his side. He took a few seconds to catch his breath, and tried to stea
dy his gaze in the badly shaking ship. In the dim red flash of alert lighting, he saw Saren-Sah leaning in over the helm as the other officers all struggled back toward their stations, obviously having been tossed from their chairs.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, Blackjack thought, and he headed for the navigation console. He was almost there when the room spun again, inertial dampers failing under the stresses of conflicting forces. He sailed backward, leaving his feet. He saw a chair fly past his face, missing him by only centimeters. He waited for the impact he knew would come from behind, and attempted to brace himself for it. In that moment, the alert lighting failed, plunging the bridge into darkness, the only faint illumination coming from the various control stations. Blackjack had just enough time before he hit the bulkhead to wonder whether the consoles would also lose power.
And then everything went black.
Fleet Admiral Aventeer Vokar stared at the main viewscreen and carefully studied the tactical display superimposed there. The powerful shock wave expanded in a three-dimensional arc from its point of origin, hurtling through space with destructive force. His flagship seemed to sit well beyond what would likely be its range, but—
“Shield status,” he said without looking away from the screen.
“Shields functioning at twenty-five percent,” Subcommander Linavil answered at once.
Now Vokar turned in his chair—raised above the deck at the aft end of the oval bridge—and peered over at the subcommander. She sat at the main tactical console, the reflected light of her readouts glimmering on the torso of her uniform. As with all the stations here, Linavil’s faced toward the center of the bridge, allowing her ready sightlines forward, to the main viewscreen, and aft, to the command chair. “Increase to full,” Vokar ordered. His ship would probably be safe this far from the detonation, but he had not risen to his position at the top of the Romulan Imperial Fleet by taking unnecessary risks.
“Sir,” Linavil said. She hesitated only a second before adding, “Yes, sir.” She operated her console, but Vokar understood her almost imperceptible delay for what it was: disagreement, bordering on insubordination. The ship’s cloak required an enormous amount of power to operate, and standard procedure—even during incursions into enemy space, such as this one—mandated minimizing the utilization of other systems, including defensive shields. Linavil knew that, of course, and her hesitation revealed that she believed there to be insufficient cause to alter that strategy. “Shields now functioning at one hundred percent,” she said.
“Yes,” Vokar said, giving a moment’s thought to whether or not it would pay to reprimand the subcommander. She had long been a loyal follower—sometimes almost too loyal, her militant support of both his command and his other objectives threatening to draw unwanted attention. Still, she possessed other tangible assets, including an uncle in the Senate, and the ear of a centurion in the praetor’s cabinet. At the same time, she had lately taken issue with Vokar, mostly in subtle ways, and he had begun to wonder whether her own personal objectives had come to supersede her support of his.
Vokar stood, descended to the deck, and paced into the center of the bridge, returning his attention to the tactical display on the viewscreen. “Analysis, Sublieutenant Akeev.” Vokar already had his suspicions—more than that, his judgments—about what he was witnessing, but he wanted to hear an unbiased scientific view as well.
“The detonation is massive, Admiral,” Akeev replied from his station near the main viewer. He detailed the output of the explosion, a staggering figure. “Its profile reads almost like the blast caused by the catastrophic failure of a Starfleet warp core, but it is far more powerful.”
Vokar looked over at the science officer. Wearing the gray ensign of military technical disciplines down the right third of his uniform top, Akeev had long since lost the youthful appearance he’d had when Vokar had handpicked him from the Beryk Institute a decade ago. The scientist had graduated at the top of his class, and combined with the military proficiencies he’d shown as a boy in the Youth Guard, he’d been a commodity too potentially valuable for Vokar to overlook.
“Could the explosion have been a warp-core failure?” Vokar asked. They had detected three Starfleet vessels in the area, and a fourth object that had resembled a ship, though he believed that it had likely been something else.
“I don’t think so,” Akeev said. “Besides being too powerful, the explosion was also too focused to have been a random blast.”
“Then what do you think it is?” Vokar asked. The answer seemed perfectly clear to him. Starfleet had spent a great deal of time recently conducting battle simulations at their outposts along the Neutral Zone, as well as upgrading the weapon systems in those installations, both activities obvious preparations for combat. When Imperial Fleet Command had received word of those operations, Vokar had taken his ship into Federation space to observe. Now similar information had brought Vokar and his ship here, and there seemed little doubt that the Federation was continuing its provisioning for a war it professed not to want. The hypocrisy sickened him, but the Federation would be made to pay for its dishonesty.
“I think it’s a weapon, Admiral,” Akeev said. “I think the fourth object out there was a weapons platform Starfleet was testing.”
“Not just a weapon,” Vokar said, looking back up at the viewscreen. The arc of destructive force had lost much of its power, he saw, but not before passing through a considerable volume of space.
“No, not just a weapon,” Akeev agreed. “A meta weapon.”
Vokar looked over again at the scientist. “A piece of information the praetor would surely like to have, wouldn’t you say, Akeev?” He smiled thinly, disgusted by the duplicitous Federation even as he foresaw its downfall. “Something even the Klingons would enjoy knowing.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
Vokar rounded on his heel and strode back to his command chair. “Tactical, return shields to one-quarter,” he said. “Navigation, plot a course for the Arandra Entry. Helm, maximum warp. I want to get a message to Romulus as soon as possible.” Vokar’s officers acknowledged his orders as they set about executing them. “Clear the screen,” he added. “Viewer ahead.”
On the main viewscreen, the tactical display winked off, a starscape appearing in its place. Vokar felt the thrum of the ship’s engines as they engaged, and a moment later, the stars on the viewscreen started to fall away to port. The Romulan flagship Tomed changed course and headed for home.
Minus Seven: Aftermath
The medical scanner whirred as Morell passed it over her patient, the gentle sound just one of many in this section of Space Station KR-3’s infirmary. The soft, too-slow pulse that echoed the beating of her patient’s heart emanated from the diagnostic panel above the biobed, and a respirator hissed its sad but vital operation. The funeral dirge of modern medical equipment, Morell thought, not without bitterness. She usually appreciated such sounds, thinking of them not as a dirge, but as the accompaniment of the journey back to health of those she treated. But in a case such as this, when her best efforts—when any physician’s best efforts—would likely be insufficient, nothing could adequately fill the silence left by a missing voice.
Morell reviewed the scanner readings on a medical tricorder. She saw nothing unexpected on the display, and worse, she saw nothing encouraging. Setting the instruments down on a nearby cart, she took one more look at the diagnostic panel, as though it might show her something different than the scanner just had. Though she’d been a doctor for forty years, this aspect of her work had never gotten any easier. But then, as the first CMO under whom she’d served had told her, it shouldn’t get easier; being unable to save the sick or injured should always be hard.
As Morell reached up and dimmed the display above the biobed, she heard the door to the intensive-care section sigh open. She turned and headed in that direction, suspecting that she knew who had just come in, and thinking that it would be best if she could move him out of here as quickly
as possible. If she had to, she would quote the technicality that, at this late hour, visitors were not even supposed to be here.
Morell exited her patient’s room—sectioned off, but lacking a fourth wall, the “room” was really more of a bay—and approached the visitor. A nurse at the other end of the intensive-care section had also started in this direction, striding past the other, thankfully empty, bays, but Morell waved him away. “Captain,” she said when she reached the wide door, which had closed behind him. She saw immediately that he had not been getting much rest; his eyes appeared glassy, with dark patches hanging in the flesh beneath them. He also still wore his uniform, though his shift had ended hours ago. “Let me prescribe something for you to help you sleep,” she said. She placed her hand on his upper arm and urged him back toward the door.
“Thanks, Uta,” Captain Harriman said, but he didn’t allow her to lead him away. He slipped his arm from her grasp and glanced toward the bay from which she had just emerged. “How is he?” he asked.
Morell briefly considered suggesting that they talk elsewhere, even thought about ordering the captain out of the infirmary, or at least out of intensive care. But she did none of those things, understanding that nothing would ease this burden for either one of them. “He’s not good,” she said. “The surgery went as well as it could, but there was so much damage to his brain…” She let the sentence trail off, something she did not typically do, and she realized just how tired she also felt. Because of the extent of the head trauma Admiral Harriman had sustained, coupled with the number of injured crew from Ad Astra that she and her staff had needed to treat, Morell had chosen to place the admiral in stasis for most of the time it had taken Enterprise to return to KR-3. They’d arrived back at the space station earlier today, and the CMO here had agreed to allow Morell to continue to treat the elder Harriman. She had spent several hours in the operating theater here, opening up three sections of the admiral’s skull in order for her to remove the subdural hematomata that had been caused by the blunt force to his head. The surgery had been successful, but…“It’ll take some time before we know the permanent effects of the cerebral swelling.”
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