It was funny. During their troubles with the flux and the attack by the Orishan ship, Dakal hadn’t thought of Jaza once, only of his own duties and, maybe, how they might all survive this latest incident.

  Now, no matter how he tried to focus on other things, his mind kept looping back to Jaza.

  “When a hunter dies on Cait,” said Hsuuri, remaining where she stood, letting him move if that’s what he needed or not move if not. “Even if her body is never recovered, her entire pride gathers to sing and tell stories of her great deeds. Some of them are even true.”

  “Sounds lively.” But not very dignified, he thought bitterly.

  “It can be,” she said. “Which I guess is sort of the point.”

  “That’s not how we do it on Prime,” he said. “Our way begins with the body.”

  He thought of Jaza Najem, pumped full of preservative chemicals or inside a stasis field, laid out on a death couch, undergoing the four days of testimonials, readings of personal anecdotes, and listing of the members of the family tree that comprised the bulk of a traditional funeral rite on Prime, and he smiled.

  Dakal had no idea yet how Bajorans marked the end of a life, but he was pretty sure it didn’t involve family insignias or tithing to the central authority.

  “It’s good to see a smile on you,” said Hsuuri, completely mistaking its meaning. “Mr. Jaza liked smiles.”

  “That’s true,” he said, and then fell silent for several long minutes as he appeared to busy himself with the sensor logs.

   We’ll make a scientist of you yet, Zurin.

  The minutes dragged between them then to the point where he became uncomfortable with her eyes on him. He enjoyed that look very much under normal circumstance and the occasional touch of her hand or whisk of her tail, but just now he felt too exposed somehow to be seen by her.

  “I’m sorry,” they said in unison, causing him to go silent again while she managed a little silken laugh.

  “It’s all right, Dakal,” she said. “Everyone grieves, or doesn’t grieve, differently. If you would like to learn another way Caitians have to honor Mr. Jaza’s life, or all life, please let me know.”

  She left him there with his thoughts and his sensor logs, and it was a long time before he realized what she had said or that she had gone.

   Dammit, thought Riker, looking at the readings again. There’s something wrong.

  There shouldn’t have been, but there was. The information they’d gotten from the Orishan vessel’s upload had been more than enough to generate the algorithms necessary to recalibrate Titan’s main deflector.

  The instant the modifications were complete, Riker had ordered the ship to begin projecting the counterpulse that would inspire the Eye to collapse.

  Everything had gone according to plan until it suddenly hadn’t. The Eye was not collapsing. The effect of its last expulsion of force and energy continued to spread. Something was definitely wrong, and so far, they had no idea what that something was.

  “It’s as if the Eye is compensating for the counterpulse,” said Tuvok. “Each time it shifts its vibrational frequency, we compensate. Each time we compensate, it shifts again.”

  “You make it sound like there’s somebody in there, Mr. Tuvok,” said Lavena, holding Titansteady in the face of the Eye’s continuing undulations of force.

  “I am currently at a loss to explain it,” said the Vulcan. “But the Eye is behaving as if driven by some intelligence.”

  Even as he said it, the Eye’s frequency shifted again though not by very much. It was as if it knew that a minor change in its field density would be enough to block Titan’s counterpulse but that a large shift might cause it to collapse without prodding.

  There was no possibility that this cat-and-mouse game was the result of random phenomena, and yet Tuvok could not allow himself to accept that the Eye was, in fact, in some way sentient after all. There had to be another rational explanation.

  “Talk to me, Mr. Tuvok,” said Riker, watching as the Eye continued not to collapse under Titan’s onslaught. “What did we do wrong here?”

  “One moment, Captain,” said Tuvok as he reset the main sensor array. His face never betrayed it, but internally he was extremely concerned.

  This stalemate couldn’t last forever. Eventually the constant shifts in force and frequency might inadvertently cause the Eye to collapse, but it was just as likely that this tug of war would inspire another of the massive eruptions. Titan’s shields had held so far, especially after adding Orishan-inspired modifications to Torvig’s, but there was no guarantee they could withstand another of the explosions.

  The chances of survival were lower in fact, now that Captain Riker, deeming the close-range attack to be best, had ordered them nearer to the Eye.

  “Bridge to sensor pod,” said Tuvok.

   “Cadet Dakal here, sir. Go ahead.”

  “Are you monitoring the wave fluctuations of the Eye?”

  “ No, sir,”said Dakal. “I can have Lieutenant Roakn up here in just a-”

  “There’s no time for that now, Cadet,” Riker chimed in. “You’re elected. Give Mr. Tuvok whatever he requires.”

   “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  In short emotionless bursts, Tuvok rattled off a series of calibrations and coordinates for Dakal to input into the pod’s ultrasensitive scanning array.

  He was sure he had missed something, some apparently minor characteristic of the Eye that allowed this bizarre stalemate to occur, but the main sensors had come up empty.

   “Sensors aligned, sir,”said Dakal. “Initiating first sweep.”

  There was silence on the bridge as the young cadet trained the array on the Eye. They had less than an hour before the distortion wave reached the sun. Once it did, the star would either supernova several billion years before its time, flash-frying everything within light-years, or it would instantly implode, crunching itself down to a dwarf of some kind with the sort of extreme gravimetric pull that would crush the ship and everything else in the system just as quickly.

  “Dakal,” said Riker. “What have you got?”

  “ I’m not sure, sir,”said the Cadet’s voice. “There seems to be a very small point of distortion in the Eye’s lower anterior hemisphere.”

  “Can you pinpoint it?” said Tuvok.

   “Adjusting,”said Dakal. “Please stand by.”

  “I don’t see how this can work,” said Vale, peering out at the multihued aurora currently enveloping them. They had passed through the layer of apparent fire that still surrounded Orisha and were now zipping back and forth a few meters from the tesseract’s event horizon looking for an exit.

  They had to be extremely careful not to try to pass through the thing at the wrong junction of angles or they would be shunted along its vertex to some point either forward or backward in time.

  “It’s simple,” said Modan, fretting over the science station. “If you think of the tesseract like a gem with solid facets and permeable flaws, you just have to understand that we’re looking for a flaw.”

  “And the shield modulation?”

  “That’s to help us punch through when we find it, Chris,” Modan said, and winced when she realized her mistake. “I’m sorry. Commander.”

  All at once the shuttle suffered a massive jolt and Keru had to fight to regain control. It was the fifth such event, and everyone was sick of them.

  “That just never becomes fun,” said Keru as he leveled off again.

  “ Titan’s counterpulse is affecting the field’s coherence,” said Modan. “As long as Commander Ra-Havreii can compensate quickly enough, we should be all right.”

  “Can’t we just open a channel to Titanand tell them to hold off for a few seconds?”