Vale tensed. “Hull metals. Ship debris?”
“Possibly.” Jaza shrugged. “There’s too much spatial distortion right now for me to say for certain. I’ll try to boost the sensor net’s resolution further, but I’m not sure how much more I’ll be able to squeeze out of it. It’s too bad the anomaly doesn’t lie directly along our present heading.” He resumed working over his console, intent on his stream of scrolling data. On Jaza’s monitor, a false-color image of the anomaly began to take shape between the columns of numbers. It was an irregularly shaped green-and-orange cloud that reminded her of an angry lobster.
“Keep me apprised,” Vale said. Something about the anomaly’s appearance nudged at the back of her mind, giving her a vague feeling of unease.
Spatial anomalies and starships never seem to be a good mix, she thought, considering the hull metals Jaza had detected. She found she was unable to think of any pleasant, happy ways they might have gotten there.
Leaving Jaza to his work, Vale stepped down from the science station and took a seat in the command chair. Her eyes trained on the wide forward viewscreen, she studied the void that lay between Titan and Romulus, grateful for the sight of its countless—and mercifully nonanomalous—stars.
“I’m certain he didn’t mean anything by it, Will,” Troi said in a hushed tone. She was nearly overwhelmed by his intense feelings of frustration.
“I wish I could believe that, Deanna,” Will said just as quietly, his brows rising like thunderheads as he walked alongside her down the corridor. “But he’s been critiquing my command style since the moment he came aboard.”
Troi put her hand up to his arm, stopping him. “No, Will,” she said once she was satisfied that they were alone in the curved passage. “I’m certain he didn’t mean anything by it. You have to grant that I can read into these things a bit more reliably than you can.”
She could hardly wait for this element of their first mission to be over with. This morning, uninvited, Admiral Akaar—all spit-and-polish, as usual—had joined them for breakfast in the mess hall. His unsolicited criticism of Titan’s off-duty casual clothing policy had rankled Will, leading to their hasty departure after the meal.
Troi lowered her voice. “Look, Will, I’m not wild about his presence here either, and neither is Christine. And I know how he feels about your placing me in your command crew. But until the conclusion of this mission—your mission—you need to ignore his slights and to focus. It’s not worth the frustration to dwell on this.”
Will let out a long breath through his nose, his puffed-up chest and shoulders deflating a bit. His expression softened as well, and he appeared to be about to say something when an odd gurgling noise came from the doorway just ahead of them down the corridor.
The door slid open, and the gurgle became louder as Ensign Aili Lavena stepped out, drops of water from her boots spattering the carpet in the corridor. She was attired in her modified uniform, which included the hooded hydration suit that kept her skin from drying out in Titan’s standard M-class environment areas. The door to her quarters closed behind her, once again muffling the aqueous background noises coming from within.
Lavena looked down the corridor and saw Will and Troi standing there. “Good morning, Captain. Counselor.” Her voice sounded slightly muted behind the transparent rebreather mask that loosely covered her face. A small cloud of vapor rose around its edges as she spoke. “I hope the waterlock system didn’t startle you. Some of the landlubbers seem to find it a little disturbing.”
Troi recalled having seen the engineers making the retrofits that had enabled the Selkie conn officer to enter and exit her nonstandard-environment quarters. But neither she nor Will had actually heard Lavena’s customized ingress/egress system in operation before. It certainly stood to reason that the tons of Pacifican seawater the system had to restrain wouldn’t be completely unobtrusive. It sounded disconcertingly like the flushing of a humanoid commode.
“Not at all,” the captain said. “We were just having…” He paused momentarily, and Troi noticed a peculiar if fleeting emotional undercurrent that almost broke the surface before vanishing utterly.
“We were just having a conversation,” he said, his composure once again rock solid.
“Very good, sir,” Lavena said, her head cocked to one side. “I’ll see you both on the bridge.” As the ensign turned and walked away, Troi glimpsed a transitory emotional highlight coming from her as well.
Though short-lived, it was not unlike the one Will had just quashed.
Will began walking forward again, but Troi placed a hand on his arm, holding him in place. Once Lavena had rounded a bend in the corridor, she turned him toward her.
“What was that about?” she said, keeping her voice low even though no one else was within earshot.
He surprised her by actually blushing slightly. “Leave it alone, Deanna. It’s nothing.”
She smiled, her eyes narrowing involuntarily. “It’s not nothing. I felt something coming from both of you.” The sentiment she had barely glimpsed in them both was finally beginning to make sense to her. “It was almost…carnal, for lack of a better word.”
“Deanna,” Will said, his voice deepening, imploring. He was clearly becoming intensely uncomfortable.
No wonder Pacifica was always such a popular shore-leave destination for dashing, unattached young Starfleet officers, she thought. Grinning, she slugged her husband playfully on the shoulder. “You dog! You and Lavena on Pacifica?”
Will resumed moving forward down the corridor, his blush intensifying and spreading to his ears. “It was a long time ago, Deanna,” he said in a near-whisper. “Just once, and right out of the Academy. And I only just now recognized her.”
She hurried to catch up with him, savoring the all-too-rare discomfiture her otherwise easygoing husband was displaying. “Ah, so now there are two people in your bridge crew you’ve been intimate with. I wonder what the admiral would think about that?”
Will shot her a withering glance, but said nothing else aloud. I’m embarrassed enough about this, Imzadi , she felt him say through the empathic bond they shared. Leave it alone, Deanna. Please. His chagrin burned in her mind as brightly as a sodium flare.
Arriving with him at the turbolift, Troi struggled to stifle the fit of giggles that had arrived unbidden. They stepped aboard, and as the doors closed, the empathic bond they shared delivered her an actual concrete image; it was a crystal-clear shard of memory.
It surprised her, but somehow failed to shock her. After all, she knew he’d occasionally been something of a “wolf” very early in his Starfleet career. But because their level of mutual trust and sharing had been so deep and intimate for so long, she simply couldn’t justify holding a more than twenty-year-old incident against him.
It happened before we even knew each other, she thought. And he must not have given Lavena a second thought after he and I met during his assignment to Betazed.
But that didn’t mean she found his charming emotional roil any less enjoyable.
Riker hoped that his flushed face wouldn’t be noticeable as the turbolift doors opened and he stepped onto the bridge. Despite his request, he knew Deanna wouldn’t let his decades-old liaison with Lavena stay buried completely. Her job revolved around talking, and she would certainly want to talk with him further about this. On top of that, she seemed to love to tease him, and often wouldn’t let go of embarrassing facts for years, if ever. At least he could count on her professionalism and public discretion as his diplomatic officer and chief counselor, not to mention as his spouse.
Fortunately, he already knew from experience that she wasn’t unduly bothered by his bygone romantic entanglements. One couldn’t easily keep such old episodes hidden from her Betazoid empathy anyway, and he was grateful that she had the good sense not to be scandalized by them. She had, after all, been raised by the unabashedly free-spirited Lwaxana Troi; Deanna therefore demonstrated very few sexual inhibitions.
; At least that had been so until recently, he reflected glumly. Ever since the psychic assault that Shinzon, through his viceroy, had committed against Deanna while she and Riker had been making love nearly two months ago, she had become far more sensitive and introspective than usual in the bedroom. Even their honeymoon had been haunted by the specter of Shinzon’s violation, and Riker sensed that she still had some healing left to do even now.
As Vale stepped toward him and handed him a padd, Riker re-focused his thoughts on the business of running Titan. Taking his place in the command chair, he scanned the reports on the padd and listened as his exec told him about Donatra’s cargo information request and a number of other matters that would demand his attention during his final duty shift prior to Titan’s arrival at Romulus.
“Captain, Commander, I have some additional readings from the anomaly we’ve been observing,” Jaza said, calling over to Riker and Vale from the main science station.
“Put it on the screen, please, Lieutenant,” Riker said.
The forward viewscreen’s default image of warp field–distorted stars was replaced by a long-range view of another, more static, starfield. The image was of lower-than-usual resolution, but glowing, crackling, gracefully tapered and braided ribbons of energy were clearly visible despite the somewhat grainy quality of the picture. Text and numbers scrolled at the bottom of the screen, fed directly to the viewer from the Bajoran science officer’s console.
“It’s producing some truly powerful spatial and sub-spatial distortions, as well as a great deal of gravimetric shear at its event horizon, Captain,” Jaza said.
“Does it pose any danger to the convoy?” Riker asked, though he knew Vale would have advised him were there any real cause for concern.
“Negative, sir. Our current heading won’t take us close enough to it to cause us any problems. But thanks to some pretty exotic chemistry in the debris cloud surrounding the anomaly, it’ll probably give us some fairly spectacular fireworks displays.”
Riker nodded. The shifting bands of colors and lightning-like discharges reminded him of the thunderstorms and auroral displays he used to see in the skies over Valdez, Alaska, during his childhood.
“What sort of ‘exotic chemistry’ have you found, Mr. Jaza?” Riker asked.
“Heavy transuranic elements and alloys that probably couldn’t have occurred here naturally. Duranium, polyferranide, polyduranium.”
“Materials used in building starship hulls and engine components,” Vale said.
“Exactly,” said Jaza. “And I’ve also detected traces of cobalt, molybdenum, tripolymers, highly ionized cortenide, and something that strongly resembles polyalloy.”
Riker recognized several of the chemical compounds Jaza had listed. And he knew of only one source from which they all might have come. Something very cold slowly ascended his vertebrae.
“It’s amazing,” Jaza continued. “I only wish I had a chance to take our new sensor nets a lot closer to this thing.”
“Maybe you will, Jaza,” Vale said, “on the way back to Federation space.”
On the way back to Federation space, Riker thought. Of course.
“I certainly hope so, Commander,” Jaza said to Vale. “This thing’s almost as mysterious as the Celestial Temple. I haven’t been able to find any previous record of this specific anomaly anywhere. Even Lieutenant Pazlar’s stellar cartog section is stumped. It’s apparently a spatial rift of some sort. And it has a background thalaron radiation signature that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”
Thalaron, he thought, closing his eyes momentarily as he considered how close Earth had come to being flensed of all life by this lethal form of radiation, which had been harnessed by the mad usurper Shinzon.
Opening his eyes again, Riker slowly swiveled in his chair and took a long, slow look around his bridge. He saw looks of sad recognition on Deanna’s face, as well as on those of Ranul Keru and Christine Vale. Although Vale had not been aboard the Enterprise during the battle against Shinzon, Riker knew that she had made herself almost obsessively familiar with everything that had occurred on that fateful day. Only Lieutenants Jaza and Rager seemed oblivious to the subdued feelings of everyone else.
Of course. Neither of them were part of the crew of the Enterprise that day.
“The reason this anomaly hasn’t been charted yet, Mr. Jaza, is because it wasn’t even here until a few weeks ago. You’re looking at the remnants of the late Praetor Shinzon’s illegal thalaron weapon.”
And the echoes of the explosion that took Data from us forever.
Jaza bowed his head momentarily in apparent prayer. Riker thought the Bajoran must have just realized that he had been observing a graveyard. He wondered which losses of his own Jaza was now contemplating.
Riker resumed studying the phenomenon on the screen. His eyes moist, he bade his dear, dead friend Data a silent farewell. Though his longtime shipmate had been vaporized rather than buried, he now had a permanent monument of sorts.
Deanna, her eyes also bright with unshed tears, silently reached out and squeezed Riker’s hand.
He hoped that neither Titan nor her escort convoy would suffer any similar losses before this mission was finished.
Chapter Thirteen
SOMEWHERE DEEP IN ROMULAN SPACE
Space itself twisted into gigantic shimmering whorls and glowing iridescent loops before Commander Donatra’s fascinated eyes. What she saw was a thing of both beauty and power. A monument to the heroism of many.
And to the overweening ambition of one.
The Great Bloom. Here is where the thalaron explosion finally rid us of Shinzon, she thought , along with his plans to spread still more death and destruction across the galaxy.
Surveying the bridge of the warbird Valdore, she watched her crew as they busied themselves scanning and monitoring the phenomenon displayed on the viewer. Turning back toward the Great Bloom’s spectacular image, she reflected that this region of space had nearly become a cemetery for her own ship and crew, as well as for Shinzon. How many noble Romulan soldiers, as well as subordinates of Captain Picard, had died in the battle to stop the upstart praetor’s dishonorable rampage?
Now, many weeks after a truly dreadful weapon had been turned back upon its wielder, the site of Shinzon’s denouement still blazed furiously. Commander Suran had recently confided to her that he regarded the Great Bloom as a cosmic warning about the deadly consequences of wielding power unwisely—and of choosing allies poorly. It was obvious now to Donatra that she and Suran had chosen poorly indeed when they’d made their initial alliance with Shinzon and his Reman faction.
Just as Tal’Aura chose poorly, she thought, when she threw in with Shinzon. She remained convinced that Tal’Aura could never have assumed the praetorship without first conspiring to enable Shinzon to eliminate Praetor Hiren and every important member of the Romulan Senate save herself.
Donatra continued staring into the ever-shifting recesses of the great tear in the spatial fabric known as the Great Bloom. She couldn’t bring herself to disagree with Suran’s assessment of the thing’s significance. But she preferred to see another dimension to it as well: it was also a testament to the sacrifices that both Romulan and Federation nationals even now stood ready to make for the ever-elusive cause of peace.
Perhaps it is also a monument to redemption. Donatra wondered if she would ever expiate the guilt she still felt for having once supported the man who had slain every member of the Romulan Senate except for the one who now called herself the Empire’s praetor.
It is indeed a hopeful sign that we have found a constructive use for this remnant of Shinzon’s folly, Donatra thought, watching in silence as orderly patterns of dots carefully arranged themselves at strategic positions between the glowing loops of thalaron-tortured space-time. She sincerely hoped that taking advantage of the phenomenon’s newfound utility would give additional meaning to the lives of all the soldiers and senators whom Shinzon’s horrible weapon had
slain.
Each of the more than two dozen tiny shapes on the viewer’s tactical display represented a D’deridex-class or Mogai-class warbird, every one of them equipped with armaments, shields, and engines comparable to those of their flagship, the battle-scarred Valdore. Those potent armaments included not only scores of disruptor banks and hundreds of photon torpedoes, but also large complements of small but lethal attack fliers.
Every one of these vessels had already been officially written off as seized or destroyed during the brief Reman uprisings that had flared up immediately after Shinzon’s assassination of the Senate. If the commanders and crews of these vessels took care to maintain their distance from the spatially-riven event horizon that lay close to the center of the Great Bloom’s expanse, those ships would find a safe and discreet port here, remaining undetectable from any appreciable distance. The space-time distortions caused by the Great Bloom’s intense gravitational lensing effects would see to that. Now our “ghost fleet” but awaits either my or Suran’s command to pounce upon whoever prevails in the struggle for civilian power, be it Tal’Aura, Pardek, political moderates, or even those vile, cave-dwelling uaefv’digae from Remus.
The aft turbolift door hissed open. Out of the corner of her eye, Donatra saw Commander Suran enter at a breathless near-run. “We need to speak, Commander. Privately.”
Donatra suppressed a harried sigh. She wondered how many more times she would have to soothe Suran’s misgivings about hiding so many ships within the Bloom’s energetic shadow. He had objected from the beginning that the Bloom, as good a hiding place as it was, lay too far away from Romulus to allow for a sufficiently fast deployment should the need to do so arise unexpectedly. But he had never presented a better alternative. Although Suran was ostensibly on her side in the Empire’s ongoing power struggles, there were times when she wished she could simply pull rank on him rather than having to explain and persuade. But even if I could just order him about, what assurance do I have that he would do as I command?
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