A glance toward the Sagittarius confirmed that Ilucci was on his way back in Roxy, having completed the delivery of another fully packed crate of artifacts to the ship’s cargo hold. With an empty crate secured to Roxy’s flatbed and only Ilucci aboard, the tough little rover sped and bounced across the barren waste that separated the ship from the Pit. Terrell thought the bleak vista reminiscent of a salt flat, minus the warmth and homey charm.

Theriault and zh’Firro packed away their latest contributions to Ziggy’s hold, and Terrell made two more check marks on his data slate. That brought the total number of recovered artifacts to nearly fifty-five hundred. They had been working around the clock, six-person teams operating in four-hour shifts, for three days, yet they had harvested fewer than half the artifacts they’d found inside the Pit. The work would have gone faster had they been able to drive the rovers all the way down to the machine, and faster still had they been able to use the transporter, but since neither option was available, they had done the best they could.

While he watched Ilucci pull up and park Roxy, Terrell pondered ways to enable his people to haul more than one artifact at a time out of the Pit. Backpacks were a bit too cumbersome to add to their environmental suits, and trying to carry the orbs one-handed was too risky—they’d already dropped and damaged one due to careless handling. Terrell wondered if it might be practical to attach woven-net pouches to the ends of poles they could carry across their shoulders, or perhaps attach up to four pouches to a pole that would be carried by two people, thereby doubling their productivity. He was about to ask Ilucci if he could jury-rig one when the ground under their feet lurched violently, knocking both men off their feet.

Sprawled beside Terrell, Ilucci looked appropriately alarmed. “What the hell is that?”

“Feels like an earthquake,” Terrell said, even though the notion was ludicrous. The statite was an artificial construct; it couldn’t be geologically active. Could it?

Another jarring vibration rocked the statite, and the two rovers lurched several centimeters off the ground, as did Ilucci and Terrell. The surface continued to shake and heave as the rest of the landing party scrambled empty-handed out of the Pit. Terrell looked up, fearful that one of the inward-curving towers above the Pit might have started to collapse, but the alien arena seemed unaffected by the tremors. The stars above, however, began to shift . . . and then he realized the stars weren’t moving—the statite was. If it turned far enough to expose the landing party to the full force of the pulsar’s fury, they would all die instantly.

“Everybody into the rovers! Now!” As the landing party sprinted back to the ATVs, Terrell closed and secured the partially full container on the back of Ziggy, then he hopped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Another quake trembled the vehicle and fissured the landscape between the Pit and the Sagittarius. He looked over his shoulder at his staggering landing party, who fought to keep their balance as they crossed the last few meters to the rovers. “Move it, people! Time to go!” Threx and zh’Firro piled into the back of Terrell’s rover as Razka and Theriault clambered aboard Roxy with Ilucci. As the passengers raced to strap themselves in, Terrell stomped on Ziggy’s accelerator. “Punch it, Master Chief!”

The two vehicles were off like shots, swerving and fishtailing through the superfine dust on the statite’s surface as the ground rocked and the stars wheeled precariously overhead.

Over the helmet comms, Threx shouted, “What’s happening?”

He was answered by a distant, eerily silent eruption of broken rock and twisted metal riding a plume of orange fire and blinding light, and then another explosion, and another, each closer than the last. As jets of fire tore up the ground between the rovers and the Sagittarius, Terrell and Ilucci were forced to swerve apart and chart new slalom routes back to the ship.

“Either we tripped a self-destruct switch,” zh’Firro replied while hanging onto Ziggy’s roll cage for dear life, “or someone’s shooting at us.”

Smoldering, glowing debris rained down and littered the path ahead of the rover, and Terrell fought to keep the vehicle from rolling as he swerved madly around one obstacle after another. Huge chunks of superheated rock and metal rolled erratically, cutting deep gouges in the ground that threatened to snare the ATVs unless they were traversed at just the right angle. A steep dip into one smoking trench was followed by the scrape—felt but not heard—of Ziggy’s front bumper striking the far slope and being torn off in the bargain. Two quick jolts shook the ATV as it ran over its own shed parts, leapt clear of the trench, and sped toward home.

The open aft ramp of the Sagittarius was less than fifty meters away, and the two ATVs were closing in fast—but so was a series of explosions that looked like chain reactions, tracing a fiery path across the shadowy surface toward the ship. Boulders trailing smoke slammed down onto the Sagittarius, denting its primary hull and warp nacelles.

Then a massive flare of light burst over the far horizon, and for a moment the terror of being exposed to the pulsar washed away every other thought in Terrell’s mind. Then he saw the expanding debris cloud that followed the flash and realized what he was seeing was the destruction of three of the statite’s solar sails. It took half a second before he asked himself why the Sagittarius was no longer between him and the horizon.

Twisting to his right, he realized that Ziggy, Roxy, and all their occupants had been sent aloft by a sudden interruption of the statite’s artificial gravity. Both rovers were floating away into space, and their strapped-in passengers were along for the ride, wherever it might lead.

Watching the ground and the Sagittarius recede, Terrell hoped Captain Nassir would embrace cold reason, abandon the landing party, and save the ship. But as towers of flame ripped apart the statite around the stationary starship, Terrell feared it might already be too late.

Distant explosions flashed on the Endeavour’s viewscreen. Watching with her fists and jaw clenched in fury, Khatami felt like an overwound spring being twisted tighter by each new bit of bad news her bridge crew reported, torqued one step closer to breaking by every crimson bloom the Tholians’ weapons ignited on the statite. Then, all at once, the Tholians’ massive barrage ceased—but the statite continued to fracture and flare with internal eruptions.

“What am I looking at?” she demanded.

Klisiewicz stared into the blue glow of the sensor display. “The Tholians have deployed six devices onto the underside of the statite. The devices have embedded themselves on the surface at roughly equidistant points from the center, approximately sixty degrees apart.”

She eyed the magnified image on the forward viewscreen. “What are they?”

The science officer straightened and turned toward her. “There’s nothing like these things in the memory banks. They’re generating harmonically reinforcing interphasic distortion fields. In about five minutes those things’ll rip the statite to shreds.”

“Did you say ‘interphasic’ distortion fields?” The word jogged Khatami’s memory of a classified briefing disseminated recently to Starfleet captains throughout the fleet. The Enterprise had encountered an interphasic rift that had proved highly dangerous to navigation. Though a general alert would eventually go out to the public, so far the phenomenon was still classified as top secret while Starfleet investigated all its possible properties and effects. The report filed by the Enterprise’s captain had suggested the interphasic rift might be a natural anomaly, but if the Tholians were wielding such forces as weapons, this was valuable intelligence that needed to be relayed to Starfleet Command immediately. “Estrada, have you raised the Sagittarius yet?”