There was a rise ahead, composed of what looked like the exposed sinews of some impossibly giant animal stacked on each other several meters high. Troi scrambled to the summit and disappeared between the massive cluster of leaves that grew there.

   Good climber too, thought Vale. She never missed her footing once-

  Suddenly her mind, her whole being, was flooded with, well, grief was too small a word to describe it. For an instant she felt, all at once, the loss of every friend, the perpetual absence of her father, the pain of every misspoken word or ugly unreasonable thought she’d ever had. It lasted only a second, maybe two, but it hit her hard enough to make her gasp and fall to her knees.

   Titan.

  It wasn’t the shuttle that Ra-Havreii had found after all but the great starship that had been their home for more than half a year. It was no one’s home now. Even the local wildlife kept well clear of this hideous place.

   Titan, what was left of her, lay in hundreds, perhaps thousands of broken twisted bits at the end of a trench that was easily three kilometers long. The pieces were charred black, melted and twisted by the heat of planetfall. What she had seen had been true. Titanwas dead.

  Despite her harsh words, she had been swayed by Troi’s unshaken faith that even this horrible turn could have been avoided or corrected. The scene before them had shattered Troi’s resolve into jagged shreds, and each of those had sliced through Vale.

  Dead. All of them. Dead.

  Troi said nothing, only stood gazing down at it with tears streaming down her face. She had bottled the excess emotion that had hit Vale just before, but you didn’t need to be hit with an empathic broadcast to know she must be dying inside.

  “Deanna,” she said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Troi nodded, a tiny thing, almost imperceptible, but she still had no words. This moment was completely outside anything she had ever experienced or conceived. Even in her darkest moments there had always been a last-minute reprieve or some miraculous rescue to put things right.

  What could ever do that here?

  Keru was like stone. This was, Vale guessed, the face he’d shown when news of the death of his beloved Sean Hawk had reached him. She hoped never in her life to see this face again.

  Ra-Havreii drifted past her and, before Vale could protest, scrambled down the hill of vines, apparently to get an even closer view of the carnage.

  “Keru,” she said, her voice sounding hollow and strange. “Better get after him.”

  “Right,” said the big man after a moment. “Right. On it, Commander.” And then he was off after the engineer.

  The two women stood there silently, hating the sight before them and unable to turn away.

  “We were arguing,” said Troi at last. “Will and me.”

  “Deanna…”

  “We wanted a baby, but there were complications,” she went on, almost as if Vale wasn’t present at all. It was as though the words themselves had to come out, had to be spoken, regardless of how they fell. “There were DNA incompatibilities. Dr. Ree was treating us both. It was invasive, lengthy.”

  “It sounds like a barrel of fun,” said Vale. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It was fine,” said Troi. “We wanted the baby more than anything, but the more procedures we underwent, the more Will and I fought.”

  Troi went on, the words flooding out of her, telling of their battles behind closed doors, about Will’s desire to keep Deanna and the baby they were working so hard to create safe.

  He began shifting her duty schedule, recommending she hand off more and more work to her staff. She would have none of it, of course, and so they fought.

  Was this how he meant to treat her once their child was born, like a delicate, breakable thing? There was no safety to be had in any kind of life and no guarantees about any of it.

  On some very basic level she knew that he understood and even agreed, but, perhaps due to the nature of Titan’s first few missions, some other part of him could not keep the fear of harm coming to her at bay. His mind began to fill with scenarios in which she or their child or both would be somehow killed or stranded or otherwise harmed by the simple facts of life on a deep-exploration ship.

  Never mind that there were already children on Titanand certainly more to come. Never mind that there had been families on Enterprise, going about the business of living, happily, if not always easily. His feelings weren’t rational. This was some animal thing, a vestigial aspect of his primate ancestry maybe, and its grip on him only continued to grow.

  So, they fought and fought and dug that awful chasm between themselves that nothing had ever managed to create before.

  Their last words together had been cold, businesslike. He didn’t want her on this team and she didn’t want to hear another word about her not going.

  She had planned to patch things up on their return from Orisha. She had planned to concede, to accept anything rather than have this rift between them. She had planned many things, not the least of which was their baby. All of it was dust now, charcoal black dust, flaking off Titan’s bones.

   “Keru to Vale,”his voice cut a welcome hole in her reverie. “Dr. Ra-Havreii has something down here you need to see.”

  “What now?” she said.

   “I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he seems pretty happy,”said Keru, obviously perplexed. “It’s something to do with the warp core.”

  “On our way,” said Vale.

  It was worse being there. The blackened remains of Titan, hideous enough from a distance, were like a giant’s charnel pit from within. Vale was grateful that the descent that had burned Titanhad also cauterized the flesh of the crew. There was no stink of death here, at least, only the towering ebony monument to their loss and the absolute, relentless stillness.

  While the jungle teemed with plant and animal life of nearly every description, this area was as tranquil as the graveyard it was.

  The two women moved within the black maze of Titan’s remains in absolute silence, neither daring to break the quiet or disturb each other’s thoughts.

  This lasted all of two minutes before the sound of phaser fire cut through the peace.

  Troi and Vale broke into a dead run, bringing their own weapons up almost in unison. Far ahead of them, tens of meters away, they could see shapes, Keru’s and several others scuffling. Keru’s phaser fired again, slicing a bright narrow slash in the air.

  Whatever they were smashed him to the ground and ran off into the place where the jungle crept closest to the crash site.

  They had almost reached Keru, already back on his feet, before they realized the large black pillar towering over him was Titan’s warp core and that it was somehow still glowing with power.

  “Orishans!” said Keru as he dashed into the jungle after the unseen attackers. “They took Ra-Havreii!”

  His phaser had time to fire once more before Troi and Vale plunged in after him.

Chapter Seven

ORISHA, NO STARDATE

   Jaza had a plan, but Modan didn’t like it. They needed to get the shuttle’s flight capability back and get off the planet sooner rather than later. The longer they stayed on Orisha, the more damage they might do to its natural timeline. They could only hope that Modan had not killed the Orishan soldier who had attacked Jaza or, if she had, that he would have died anyway as a result of the conflict raging around them.

  The plan was simple enough in itself. Titan’s unstable warp core had to be neutralized. The shuttle’s flux regulator had been burned out by the energy discharge, but at least two of its counterparts in Titan’s warp core were still active and could be adapted.