Behind the opening, tens of meters away, they could make out the crowd of Orishans cowering on the far edge of the doomed structure.

  “A’yujae’Tak!” Vale screamed to be heard over the blow. “Listen to me. We are trying to save your people. Do you understand? We are trying to save as many as we can!” The big insectoid moved forward in her makeshift cell, perhaps trying to get a better look at the scene outside the shuttle, but she didn’t speak. Vale pressed her. “If they don’t come this way, right now, they are all going to die! Do you understand? They have to move toward this ship, right now!”

  There was the smallest of pauses and then, “I understand you,” said A’yujae’Tak.

  Vale ordered the computer to drop the force field that held A’yujae’Tak and watched as the Orishan moved slowly but steadily toward the open hatchway.

  She stopped at the lip and let out a loud piercing burst of chatter that the translator could not decode. As a mass the endangered Orishans began to surge forward. When the last of them was in position, without a word, A’yujae’Tak jumped down to join them.

  Vale hit the manual hatch control, closing the door behind her. A’yujae’Tak would live with her people or die with them.

  “Keru,” she called up to him when the noise had subsided enough. “GO!”

  “We’ve got them, Commander,” he called down as the ship and its cargo rose away from the destruction. “We’re on our way.”

  “Vale to Ra-Havreii,” she said as soon as she was sure they were clear. “Tell me you have good news.”

  He didn’t. In fact, his news was about as bad as it could get. He and Modan had managed to stabilize the network again and were in the process of implementing the timed stepdown of the Spires when the entire network was hit by a powerful energetic pulse.

  “What do you mean, ‘hit by’?” said Vale.

   “A second field, one outside the network, is interfering with the Orishan Veil,”said Ra-Havreii. “I believe it is trying to collapse it.”

  “Is it something you didn’t account for?” said Vale. “Is the tesseract somehow reacting to what you’re doing there?”

   “No, Commander,”said the engineer. “In lay terms the frequency of the counterpulse is too precise to be a natural phenomenon. It has clearly been specifically configured to collapse the Veil.”

  “You think someone is doing this intentionally?”

  “ I think it’s Titan,”said Ra-Havreii. “I believe they have survived and are trying to collapse the tesseract.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “ It’s possible the effects of the eruption that brought us here are expanding,”he said. “In fact, now that I think of it, it’s likely.”

  “What happens if they succeed?”

  “ I’ve already told you, Commander,”said Ra-Havreii. “Tiny chunks of planet where Orisha used to be.”

  “Solution, Xin,” said Vale. “Tell me you’ve got one.”

  “ Possibly,”he said. “You’ll need Modan.”

  “Not you?”

  “ No, Commander,”he said. “I have to stay with the network. Modan doesn’t have the skill to do what’s necessary here. There is an improvisational aspect that-”

  “Fine,” said Vale, cutting him off. “Beaming her out now. What’s Modan going to do for us that we can’t do on our own?”

   “She’s going to get you back toTitan and get them to stop what they’re doing.”

  “Oh,” said Vale, a bit taken back. “All right then.”

  “ Good-bye, Commander,”he said. “If I never see you again, thank you for calling me Xin.”

Chapter Fifteen

   Something was wrong.

  Dakal knew it. He felt it, a strange acidic churning in the bottom of his stomach, as he sat at his station in the sensor pod. He could feel something had gone horribly wrong with the captain’s plan. He had no evidence of any failure, certainly nothing on which he could put a finger. Still the feeling persisted.

   Titanhad learned to protect herself from the worst of the quantum flux. Its systems and crew were back to full capacity or very nearly so. They had come back so far from the edge that the captain was now attempting to remove the author of all their recent troubles rather than prudently cut his losses and run for help.

  It was not a very Cardassian way of handling things, and though he was loath to admit it, the whole business of staying here to attempt to collapse the bizarre knot in space-time made him a little nervous.

  There was good luck, after all, and there was tempting fate.

  He wished Jaza were here. The big Bajoran scientist had a way of putting things in the right perspective even when it wasn’t immediately clear how he was doing so.

  Of course Jaza was dead, along with the rest of his away team. He wouldn’t be there again, ever. It had never occurred to Dakal that he could miss anyone so much before the Dominion war. Afterward he never thought he’d stop missing the people he had lost. His time at the refugee camp on Lejonis and his stint at the Academy had led him to Titanand, strangely, a kind of peace he never thought he would have again.

  There were so many kinds of people here, so many ways of interacting with, well, everything, that he had withdrawn a bit from what he had perceived as chaos.

  Jaza had drawn him back in again.

   I don’t believe in dunsels, Cadet. Never have, never will.

  Jaza with his serenity, his good humor, and his understated manner had somehow managed to put Dakal in the thick of things socially and with people he would never have dared to approach on his own. He had begun breathing again in the old familiar way, had become more of his old self than since well before the war.

  Jaza had been his good friend, though neither of them had ever referred to their relationship that way. After everything their people had been to each other. Friends. Amazing.

  And now he was gone.

  Dakal eyed the TOV rig, sitting dark and dormant in its corner, and wondered if his sometime mentor had enjoyed its use as much as he had.

  “Please don’t dwell, Dakal,” said Hsuuri softly. When the others had gone off shift, she had stayed behind to complete some personal project. Their shipmates had all drifted off to their beds or their poker games or their holodeck adventures as soon as their allotted time had passed. There wasn’t much left for them to do just now, no exotic bodies for them to scan. The bridge was handling everything right now, and the bridge was focused on the Eye of the storm.

  Roakn had actually invited Dakal to join him at poker, which had so surprised the young cadet that he almost forgot to make his refusal polite.

  Now that things were essentially back to normal on Titan, things were essentially back to normal. At least they seemed to be for everyone but Dakal.

  “My apologies, Lieutenant,” he said. “What did you say?”

  “It’s Hsuuri, please,” she said, leaning heavily into one shoulder as her large green eyes watched him. “And I think Mr. Jaza wouldn’t want you grieving like this.”

  “I’m not grieving yet,” said Dakal. “We need a body for that, and we haven’t seen one.”

  She put a soft fur-covered hand on his shoulder and said, “We may never find their bodies, Dakal. It’s likely whatever destroyed Charondestroyed them the same way.”

  “Then I won’t be grieving, I guess,” he said sharply, pulling away from her. He regretted it immediately but couldn’t bring himself to go back over. He didn’t want tenderness right now, not even from her.

  Instead he busied himself with a check of the recent sensor data they’d got back from their scans of the Eye. He’d already checked it, of course, twice, but he needed something to do and it was hours before the new shift assignments would be posted.