By simply swapping a few isolinear chips from less important components to those they needed, and reattaching or sealing a few wires here and there, he was able to get the Ellingtonback up to nearly eighty percent of full functionality. The remaining problem, now that the ship was actually running, was to get it flying again.

  Not being an engineer, it would take him hours, perhaps days, to figure out precisely what was wrong with the propulsion system and then determine if that thing could be fixed.

  As she lowered him into the rehabilitation bed and he felt the beams of healing energy course through his body, he told her how to use the computer to fix their location so that they would have some idea at least of where they were.

  “I will, Najem,” she said as the sedation beams sent him into the dark. “And maybe I can find a spare uniform now that some of this junk as been cleared away.”

  “Uniform,” he asked as he drifted off. “What…?”

  “Mine got shredded when I transformed,” she said, moving out of his field of vision. He could hear her rummaging. “Why did you think I didn’t shift back? I’m naked.”

  His dreams were dark flitty things, full of ugly portents, which he was pleased not to retain once he came back to himself. The pain in his abdomen was little more than an ache by then. His skull no longer throbbed, and she had cleaned the blood off his face. He felt like himself.

  “Modan?”

  “Here, Najem,” she said, and she was. Clad in the white and gray undermesh of an EVA suit, she looked like the old Y’lira Modan, and he was glad. “You look much better now.”

  “I feel better,” he said and even his voice had more strength in it than before.

  He tried to sit up, but the rush of blood to his brain made him dizzy.

  “Wait,” she said soothingly. “Try again in a moment.”

  “That’s a good plan, I think,” he said and relaxed again. He might be healed, but it was wise to let his body realize it before he forced it to do too much.

  He tried again more slowly, and was rewarded with a smile from his golden companion. It was hard to picture her the other way now, and he was glad of that as well.

  “All right,” he said, swiveling his legs off the recovery table and facing her. “Did you fix our location?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have done something wrong.”

  He got up under his own steam this time and made his way to the science station, still lit up from Modan’s recent use. She hadn’t made any mistakes. The sensors were online and had fixed points for the local sun, using it as a central reference from which to generate star maps and, from them, generate a location mark relative to the Federation. Travel through the strange vortex could have deposited them anywhere.

  “What in the-?” he said, checking and rechecking the sensor data.

  “Yes,” she said. “According to this, the stars are in the wrong places. It must be a malfunction, yes?”

  “No,” he said as the realization of what had happened washed over him. “No, it’s not a malfunction.”

  “But this says we are on Orisha, Najem,” she said. “This can’t be Orisha. There are no cities, no high-level technology. These warriors are killing each other with crude projectile weapons and fuel bombs.”

  “It’s not a malfunction, Modan.”

  “And the stars?” Her confusion was quickly devolving into the fear she’d displayed during their bumpy flight. How odd to see her so fierce in combat and yet cowed by these more abstract concepts. “It has all the stars in the wrong positions. Fractionally so, but still.”

  “They’re not in the wrong positions,” he said. “I think-I think weare.”

  His fingers tapped in a few frantic commands and requests, asking the computer to verify his deepening apprehension.

   “Verification,”said the computer. “Analysis is confirmed.”

  He sat there for a moment, letting the words sink in. He hadn’t really needed the computer to verify the charts and extrapolations. Just looking at the data had told him all he needed to know.

  He sat there, feeling his limbs, still weak despite their healing, sensing Modan’s increasing agitation. He wondered if her Pod Mothers had designed her this way or if it was something unaccounted for. Then a thought came to him that made him smile first and then laugh.

  “Najem,” she said, visibly shaken by his outburst. “Are you well?”

  “Fine, Modan,” he said when the last fit was done. “I’m just laughing at the joke the Prophets have played on me. On us, I suppose.”

  “The Prophets?” she said. “The beings your people revere as gods? What have they to do with this?”

  “They made me a promise a long time ago,” he said, swiveling to face her. “And this is how they keep it.”

  “Najem, I don’t understand you.”

  “This is Orisha, Modan,” he said. “This is the planet Orisha. That energy mass we discovered was obviously some kind of temporal aperture.”

  “We have traveled through time?” she said slowly, feeling the weight of it and its truth as well.

  “Looks that way, yes.”

  “No,” she said, aghast. “Oh, no.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We should have died. We should have smacked into this place and burned like Titan, like our friends, but because of the promise the Prophets made to me, we’re here, alive, a thousand years in the past.”

  “And this makes you laugh?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Because, no matter what else happens, we absolutely have to get off this planet, as soon as we can, and we have absolutely no way to do it.”

  Her golden head tilted slightly to one side as she tried to determine if he was not still a little delirious from his injuries.

Chapter Six

ORISHA, STARDATE 58449.1

  I t took Vale almost twenty minutes to disentangle herself from the vines, much of which time was also spent making sure she didn’t free herself too soon. Sudden release would have sent her plummeting twenty meters to the jungle floor.

  Seen from above, the place had looked lush, bubbling with ambient moisture that rose off the violet flora in thick rolling clouds, but also somewhat peaceful. Now, in the thick of it, her body nearly immobilized by the spiderweb of sticky grasping vines, she was forced to revise that opinion. Everything moved here. Everything was not only alive but actively so. The vines, some as thick as a human arm, twined themselves in their multitudes around larger growths that, to her surprise, were themselves nothing more than enormous stalks. The thinner tangles that held her seemed to resist her exertions to get free, inspiring a few moments of panic. But with effort and patience, she managed to loose herself from their grip.

  Pulling herself onto the lip of one of the thicker vines, she took a look around. The jungle stretched in all directions without a sign of a break anywhere. She could see stalks in the distance that rose up to a canopy higher than the tallest buildings on Izar.

  There were scores of insects, birds, reptiles, and at least one creature that looked like a hodgepodge of several mammals crossed with a cactus. It stopped a few meters away to stare at her out of bulbous milky-white eyes.

  “Vale to Troi,” she said, tapping her combadge. No answer. She tried again with Keru and then with the rest of the team with the same result. Either her badge was damaged or something was interfering with the signal.

  Or she was alone.

  She knew the longer she stayed at this height, the worse her chances for avoiding a deadly fall. But going down also meant losing any hope of keeping her bearings; little daylight penetrated to the ground, and she knew, without instrumentation of some kind, that it would be brutally hard to navigate a way out of this on foot, much less to find the others. They should have all materialized in the same vicinity. Emergency transports were meant to put the entire team and their supplies on the surface of a target world without damage. Clearly something had gone wrong.