“It’s not a question of can’t.You don’t have that luxury, Kaldarren. You have four days. Then the Cardassians come back, and we need to be gone.”

“What about your employer? What if we don’t find the portal?”

“You don’t have to be a mind reader for that one,” said Chen-Mai.

Kaldarren left shortly after, taking the statues with him. Lam Leahru-Mar waited until the Betazoid’s footsteps faded. Then he looked over at Chen-Mai.

“What if he can’t do it?” The Naxeran’s black skin was sweating so much he looked dipped in clear glaze. “Or what if he does, but the Cardassians catch us? We still have to rendezvous with Talma. And what are we going to do with Kaldarren and that boy of his? No witnesses, Chen-Mai, that’s what Talma said.”

Chen-Mai had dropped into a seat across from the Naxeran. Now he fixed Mar with a baleful look. “You let me worry about Kaldarren and the boy.”

“But Mahfouz Qadir…Talma said…”

“Didn’t I just tell you not to worry?”

“Well, I don’t like it.” Mar squirmed. “Kaldarren doesn’t bother me so much, but a boy? No one told me I’d have to do a boy.”

“You don’t have to like it because you won’t have any part of it. You pilot the ship; you get around the Cardassians. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“All right.” Mar swallowed. “Fine. But I don’t want Pahl to know anything about it, you understand? He’s my sister’s boy, and I’m supposed to look out for him. He shouldn’t even suspect…”

“When it’s all over, the only thing you’ll have to tell Pahl is the truth.”

“And that is?”

“Accidents,” said Chen-Mai. He smiled hugely, his tongue working between his teeth. “Accidents happen—all the time.”

Chapter 25

The Draavids, twice as large as the Orion Nebula, were supposed to be beautiful: a maelstrom of photo-ionized gases that painted the blackness of space with brilliant violets, hot pinks, peacock greens, parrot yellows, and indigo blues. But their beauty was lost on Garrett. When they’d arrived at the Draavids two days ago, she’d spared the swirling gases and shimmering white globules that were the cluster’s protostars only a cursory glance. She set to putting her crew through their paces, hoping that work would put things right with her ship. But work hadn’t done squat for Garrett, because, damn it, she couldn’t stop thinking about Nigel Holmes.

She couldn’t sleep either, hadn’t seen the inside of her eyelids for any appreciable length of time since Halak had left three days ago. She toyed with the idea of asking Stern for a sleeper but didn’t because Stern would fuss. Garrett’s mother was a physician, so she knew doctors could be overprotective as hell.

Garrett thought about a good stiff shot of bourbon, too. Bourbon didn’t fuss and didn’t talk back unless she drank too much, and it tasted pretty good. But, in the end, she decided on coffee. (Stern would’ve said something about that being self-defeating, but Garrett hadn’t asked.)

Garrett stepped onto the bridge. The crew was an hour into gamma shift, and Glemoor was OOD, not a surprise since Naxerans didn’t need sleep.

“Anything, Mr. Glemoor?”

“Not unless you’re a stellar physicist, Captain. They’re happy as that Earth mollusk, give me a moment…yes, happy as clams, especially after I shunted power from the mess and laundry to accommodate them.”

“So long as the mess chief has power for breakfast. And I want clean socks. How are our communications?”

Glemoor screwed up his face. “Hash. We can’t even ping the nearest Starfleet subspace beacon. If we had to, we might be able to pierce the interference locally.”

“Not unless someone’s planning on running out with a shuttle.”

“Well, astrocartography might. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be caught out in there. Those jets of ionized molecular gas generated by the protostars, those Herbig-Haro formations? Take you for quite a ride, not to mention radiation, magnetic fields. But we have found a littlesomething.”

“Yes?”

Glemoor moved to the science station. “If you’ll excuse me, Ensign,” said Glemoor to the young man staffing the station who vacated his seat and stood to one side. “We’ve been collating data on infrared and radio emissions.”

Glemoor called up a red-grid schematic of the nebulae cluster on the science station’s viewscreen. “I won’t recapitulate the obvious. As you know, we’re measuring the rate of star formation by studying the conformation of those Herbig-Haros, the lobes of high-velocity, high-energy molecular gas spewed along the axis of a central, accreting disk of the protostar. And we’ve found some unusual bursts of gamma radiation.”

Garrett’s lips turned in an inverted smile. “That’s a problem?”

Glemoor’s frills vibrated. “No, just unusual. Gamma bursts are usually associated with neutronstars, because of the collision of gaseous particles accelerated by the neutron star’s accreting matter. But particles don’t collide in a Herbig-Haro. The gas particles shoot out in narrow jets along the axis of rotation, like strings attached to both the tip and the handle of a…that child’s toy.”

“Top.”

“Exactly, a top, because a right angle is the path of least resistance against the protostar’s gravitational pull.”

“So, if there are gamma rays, are you saying you’ve found a neutron star that’s a gamma ray emitter?” (Garrett didn’t find this very exciting, or unusual. Gamma-emitter neutron stars weren’t exactly unknown.)

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Why not?”

“Because some of those protostars are moving very fast. As you can see,” Glemoor used the tip of his right index finger, “we’re holding position on the periphery and these protostars out by us, here and here, they aren’t moving that quickly, just a hundred kilometers a second, or so. But deeper into the nebulae, the protostars begin to speed up, about 700 kilometers a second. By stellar standards, that’s very fast.”

“Would a neutron star cause the protostars to speed up?”

Glemoor looked dubious. “It would have to be very large, Captain, and that’s not possible because, beyond a certain mass, a neutron star can’t hold up under its own weight. It collapses. For something to exert that much gravitational deformation of time-space andbe a neutron star, well…it would have to be pretty strange.”

“What do you want to do?” (Garrett knew what was required but wanted to give Glemoor the choice. Hadn’t her little voice chided her for not loosening up on the reins?)

“Well, one step by one step, Captain. I would like to launch a probe.”

Garrett thought Glemoor meant first of all,and not one step at a time,but she didn’t call the slip to his attention. “Do it. Let’s see what you come up with. Nice work.”

Glemoor inclined his head at the compliment and preened his frills. After a brief tour of the rest of the bridge stations—all quiet on the Western Front there—Garrett ducked into her ready room for that cup of coffee.

After the familiar blips and sounds of the bridge, the place was quiet as a tomb. She saw a good three inches of coffee still left in her pot from that morning and, after a second’s hesitation, she poured a mug; added cream and two sugars; ordered her replicator to heat only, thanks; and brooded over the machine as it complied (wondering why she was being so polite to a damn machine). Then she slid into the seat behind her desk, called up reports she didn’t feel like reading, and, in two seconds flat, was thinking about the very man she was trying very hard to forget: Nigel Holmes.