I pause on the holosuite’s threshold, knowing in a rush that I will leave feeling uplifted rather than downcast. For Vic is singing a nearly five-century-old anthem, an ode to the struggles of oppressed minorities everywhere. And I sing it with him.
“We Shall Overcome.”
JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #J-53
Federation Starship Tucker, near the Hobus Nebula
Although the Excalibur-class starship that has carried me out to the ragged edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone has been in service for nearly twenty years, its design is of relatively recent vintage. Originally commissioned back in ’ninety-one, the simple, clean lines of this vessel evoke a simpler, more Romantic period in the Federation’s nearly quarter-millennium-long history—a time when a mere dozen Constitution-class heavy cruisers plied a largely unexplored galaxy, doggedly expanding a volume of known space that the Federation’s present territory now dwarfs.
Being one of Starfleet’s most versatile ships of the line, the U.S.S. Tucker has drawn the job of performing the Federation Science Council’s mandated annual survey of the Hobus Nebula—and the mysterious, still-active stellar remnant (now known as the Hobus Cinder) that pulsates at the center of the mysterious, parsecs-deep shell of expanding gas, plasma, and radiation that comprises the remains of the infamous Hobus supernova. I am fortunate to have timed my interview to coincide with this week’s survey mission, whose subject is of considerable historical and scientific significance; back in 2387, Hobus caused one of the worst catastrophes in Beta Quadrant history—the utter destruction of Romulus and Remus, the co-orbiting central worlds of the Romulan Star Empire. The repercussions of this event made the infighting that followed Shinzon’s assassination of the Romulan Senate in 2379 look like a holiday on Risa by comparison.
Admiral Kathryn Janeway, in command of the Tucker for the duration of the current scientific survey mission, greets me warmly in her ready room, rising from behind a surprisingly spartan desk to shake my hand. The holoimages I had seen of the admiral had me expecting someone with a much sterner manner; certain pictures of Janeway, evidently taken early in her command career, had shown her shoulder-length brown hair gathered into a bun so severe as to make me imagine her ship’s barber and chief engineer working together frantically to adjust its tension to prevent it from injuring any innocent bystanders. I’d always thought she’d be taller as well, literally larger than life.
But whatever Janeway might lack in physical stature she more than compensates for with the air of authority and sheer presence that surrounds her. Kathryn Janeway comes off as a tough, veteran flag officer, tempered by the U.S.S. Voyager’s legendary seven-year sojourn in the Delta Quadrant. The passage of time since that voyage ended has made her a silver-haired Starfleet eminence—albeit one with an unmistakable glint of self-effacing humor in her questing and ever-curious scientist’s eyes.
During our discussion, Janeway pauses periodically to gaze toward the ready room’s wide transparent aluminum window, through which we can both see the faint, rhythmic oscillations of the Hobus Cinder through the distortion of the surrounding nebula’s amber haze. The supernova’s gradually cooling corpse seems to twitch metronomically, pulsating like a distant, sinister heartbeat. The effect is both horrific and hypnotic.
Janeway seems to have to work as hard as I do to tear her gaze away from the apparition in the window. Then she focuses her full attention on the art of explaining this complex subject with simplicity and clarity. As I listen, I begin to understand why she excelled as a science officer during an early phase of her Starfleet career. But I also get a sense of how formidable a command officer she is when some of my more probing questions regarding war, peace, and the Undine appear to strike a nerve. Though she appears to have no problem keeping a deep, smoldering anger in check behind her enigmatic smiles, I have to wonder how many times she may have asked herself many of the same questions I’m raising today—and whether she privately blames herself for failing to enact an early and lasting peace with the Undine.
After all, history has given her most of the credit—some might say blame—for making humanity’s first contact with the Undine.
Thank you for allowing me to observe your present mission, Admiral.
Delighted to have you aboard, Mister Sisko.
This isn’t the first time you’ve investigated the remains of the Hobus supernova, is it, Admiral?
You might say that. I oversaw one of the first short-range surveys of the Hobus stellar remnant back in ’eighty-eight, nearly a year after the initial event. It took that long for the hard radiation and subspace effects to die down enough to let us risk getting any closer than two light-years from the Hobus Cinder itself. Prior to that, we had to settle for whatever data we could collect from the MIDAS* array.
Isn’t it unusual for a supernova’s effects to linger for such a long time?
Yes and no. I mean, the actual explosion of a star into a supernova usually peaks, tapers off, and then fades into the background after a fairly short time. But during the few weeks or months while the actual “kaboom” phase of the supernova lasts, the blast can emit as much energy as Earth’s sun will produce over the course of its entire ten-billion-year lifespan. Which is why approaching an active supernova requires extreme caution. You shouldn’t try this at home.
Aren’t the chances fairly remote that a supernova like Hobus can endanger inhabited planets?
That’s a tough one to answer, since before the Hobus disaster* nobody had ever seen a supernova behave the way this one did. But I can say that an inhabited world getting snuffed out by a regular, garden-variety supernova is very definitely a low-probability event. Hobus, though… Hobus was—is—an entirely different breed of cat.
Apart from what it did to Romulus, how, specifically, was the Hobus event different from the typical supernova explosion?
The problem with Hobus is that it’s so unlike anything else known to science. So let’s start by taking a look at some of the more typical stellar explosions. Our galaxy usually experiences one of those about twice every century.
I’m surprised to hear they’re that rare. My layman’s impression is that they occur a lot more frequently than that. I mean, a whole clutch of them happened during your time in the Delta Quadrant. And closer to home, there was the Beta Stromgren supernova about forty years ago, and the one that almost wiped out the Bynars at Beta Magellan a couple of years before that—
I can see you’ve done your homework, Mister Sisko. And yes, during recent decades we may have seen a few more supernovae than you’d normally expect to see. But that overabundance turns out to be statistically insignificant when you factor in the intervention of the Q Continuum. The so-called collateral damage from their civil war back in the 2370s touched off a whole series of supernovae in pretty quick succession.
Did the Q cause all those supernovae deliberately, or was it an accident?
I was never able to settle that question. I think the best answer is to believe whichever answer costs you the least amount of sleep.
I start to experience the same queasy-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach feeling I always used to get whenever the wormhole aliens—the Prophets of Bajor—would monkey around with my father’s so-called destiny. There’s something about functionally omnipotent beings, whether they be Prophets who manipulate the lives of individuals, or Q superintellects who blow apart entire solar systems the way children tip over dominoes, that offends my fundamental sense of the fairness of the universe. I try to push the notion of mad or careless gods out of my mind even as I struggle to keep my gaze from drifting back to the Hobus Cinder. I renew my concentration on the admiral, who is continuing in Former Science Officer Lecture Mode.
Luckily for us, the Milky Way is a very big place, which means that most of the time life manages to dodge the bullet whenever a supernova occurs. And that bullet takes the form of intense bursts of highly energetic radiation, including gamma rays. Fortunately, class-M worlds typically have two significant laye
rs of protection—their local stellar magnetosphere and their own planetary magnetic fields.
So the incoming supernova radiation just gets turned aside, the way a starship’s deflector shields ward off incoming phaser beams.
Exactly. Unless, of course, the supernova happens close enough to a planet so that the radiation output simply overwhelms that planet’s “shields.”
How close would a supernova have to be, typically, in order to do that?
That depends on which type of supernova we’re talking about. And that, in turn, depends upon its mass and composition. In general, the larger the stellar mass, the shorter the stellar lifespan—the time from birth to “boom”—and the bigger the explosion at the end of the star’s life. Without going through the whole supernova bestiary, let’s just say it’s now common wisdom that the Ordovician mass extinction on Earth nearly half a billion years ago was the result of a supernova that occurred at about a one-hundred-light-year distance. That one stellar event wiped out almost sixty percent of Earth’s ocean-dwelling species, and the effects of that extinction lingered for tens of millions of years afterward.
In spite of myself, I glance again across the desk at Hobus’s glowing carcass. Suddenly I feel as though I’m sitting way, way too close to the thing. In my mind it’s become a predator that merely lies injured rather than safely dead.
One hundred light-years away, and it still did that kind of damage. Is that fairly typical?
Again, that depends on the exact kind of supernova we’re talking about here. A Type II specimen would have to be around a quarter of that distance from a class-M world to start doing really significant ecological damage to it. On the other hand, one of those dim, sneaky Type Ia supernovae could cause the same amount of havoc from over three thousand light-years away.
Hobus was something like five hundred light-years away from Romulus. Shouldn’t that have been a wide enough separation to keep the Romulan Empire’s twin homeworld safe?
Safe from anything except a Type Ia supernova—and Hobus, as we discovered the hard way twenty years ago.
And something else has just occurred to me: Even assuming that the Hobus supernova’s effects were bound to cross the five hundred light-years or thereabouts that separated the explosion from Romulus and Remus, shouldn’t those planets still have been safe for at least… another five hundred years? I mean, natural phenomena aren’t supposed to be able to beat light in a foot race, right?
Mister Sisko, you just put your finger on the major difference between Hobus and every other supernova that’s ever been observed. The first thing that bothered me about the Hobus Event was the fact that its effects were somehow propagating through space at multiwarp speeds. As a general rule, that’s impossible. With the exception of certain spaceborn cosmozoa,* natural phenomena simply can’t travel faster than the speed of light.
The Romulan Senate must have been counting on that general rule as well, since they rejected Ambassador Spock’s analysis of the Hobus threat out of hand shortly before the supernova occurred. They even ignored warnings about Hobus from their own Romulan Mining Guild.
It was far easier for them to believe that the Federation was trying to fool them with some elaborate ruse than it was for them to take Ambassador Spock’s warnings at face value. But let’s be fair. Without the benefit of hindsight, their reaction is easy enough to understand. You have to take into account the isolationist psychology they’ve embraced for so long, almost since their ancient ancestors first migrated from Vulcan.
That also explains the accusations that Proconsul Sela made against us after the supernova wiped out Romulus—that the disaster was really caused by some new Federation weapon. As it turned out, that charge was pure psychological projection. Sela blamed us for Hobus in order to cover up her own illegal weapons experiments—experiments that were probably the real cause of the Hobus explosion.
I wonder if the jury might still be out on that one.
I’m surprised to hear you say that, Admiral. From what I read in the logs from your original Hobus survey mission, it seems pretty clear that the Romulans were secretly working on new armaments at that time. You caught them trying to cover up a program aimed at adapting captured Borg technology into powerful subspace weaponry—in a program that blatantly violated several treaties the Romulans had signed.
Oh, I’m not disputing any of that. They were violating the weapons clauses of those treaties. I’ve just never been entirely convinced that whatever experiments the Romulans lost control of right before the Hobus Event were quite powerful enough to have touched off a supernova explosion of that kind. Something else might have been behind it.
Something else? Or someone else? Like maybe the Undine?
I wouldn’t go quite that far, at least not yet. Not until I find some real proof.
You’re speaking in the present tense, Admiral. Does that mean you’re still looking for that evidence?
Let’s just say I’ve always been inclined to keep an open mind about the subject.
You must have seen something on that first survey mission back in ’eighty-eight—perhaps something that made you suspect that the Undine may have played a role in setting off the Hobus supernova. Do you mind talking about that mission?
Certainly. We took a small vessel, a variant of the original Delta Flyer that Tom [Paris], B’Elanna [Torres], and Harry [Kim] designed when Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant.
Wouldn’t a small ship have been more vulnerable to the effects of the supernova than a larger vessel would have been?
It was a calculated risk, but it was one we were all willing to take given the advanced multiphasic shielding the shuttle was carrying. Besides, a larger vessel ran the risk of attracting unwanted Romulan attention, and our relations with what was left of the Romulan Star Empire at that time weren’t exactly cozy. Starfleet needed precise measurements of the Hobus phenomenon, and our task was to gather them as quickly—and as discreetly—as possible.
A small ship means a small crew. Who did you take with you?
I brought along a small group of volunteers, all of them seasoned Starfleet veterans. They’d begun working with me shortly after the astrophysics people started analyzing the first long-range sensor scans of Hobus the previous year.
And after you ran an analysis of your own, I’d imagine. Without getting too technical, can you spell some of your tentative conclusions out for us?
Let’s just say I had the misfortune of noticing that the sensor profile of the Hobus Event bore a strong resemblance to that of the McAllister C-5 Nebula, back when 8472 was using it as a portal from fluidic space to our own universe. It’s ironic, really. Despite their superficial similarities to each other—both nebulae are essentially gas-and-dust clouds that surround a central mass—they’re very different phenomena. The expanding Hobus Nebula is essentially a shroud around a corpse, while the collapsing McAllister Nebula is more like a blanket swaddling a stellar infant. They’re at opposite ends of their respective life cycles, a burned-out cinder and a growing protostar. But either object was a plausible candidate for having developed a spatial rift that 8472 might be able to exploit.*
I’d like to talk for a moment about your crew on that first Hobus mission, Admiral—specifically, about their prior experience with the Undine.
Actually, none of them had ever had any direct contact with 8472. At least not at that point in their careers. But they had all read the unclassified portions of Voyager’s Delta Quadrant logs.
So they knew about the secret fake Starfleet training facilities that the Undine had set up throughout Delta Quadrant space back in the 2370s.
The terraspheres. Species 8472—the Undine—built and operated at least a dozen of them. They were deep-space habitats, each of which contained pretty damned convincing duplicates of San Francisco and Starfleet Headquarters—including a simulacrum of Starfleet Academy. This was where 8472 brought their infiltrators-in-training up to speed on how to live undetected in human form
, even among trained Starfleet officers. Not even the Founders of the Dominion, with their own shape-changing abilities and their penchant for subterfuge, had ever tried to infiltrate us on such a massive scale.
I’ve read your reports about Voyager’s encounter with Terrasphere 8, at least the ones that are part of the public record. It looked as though you had reached some kind of agreement with the Undine back in 2375. You appear to have left them convinced that the Federation didn’t pose a threat to them, and that they therefore didn’t need to prepare for war against us.
I thought so, too, at least for a while. Obviously I only managed to convince one small segment of 8472 to leave us alone, if that. After all, there were at least eleven other terraspheres out there that we never encountered. At least 8472 proved that we humanoids don’t have a monopoly on paranoia.
Your reports about the Terrasphere 8 encounter make it pretty clear why the members of your initial Hobus survey team volunteered for the mission—even if they hadn’t yet had any direct contact with the Undine.
Because they had read the very same reports that you did, each member of my team knew that they had already been touched by 8472—despite their never having seen one in the flesh. Those reports motivated Captain Valerie Archer and Commander Kinis to volunteer to be my pilots. Lieutenant Commander O’Halloran, an astrophysics specialist, rode herd on the specialized sensor package we were carrying because of what he read in my reports. And Lieutenant Commander David Gentry volunteered to handle tactical, just in case we encountered anything that was in the mood for a fight.
That was because each and every member of that crew knew that an 8472 infiltrator had “borrowed” his or her identity on Terrasphere 8. Hell, even [Starfleet Academy groundskeeper Liam] Boothby told me that if he was thirty years younger he’d have asked me to bring him along, too.
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