Bersh glov Mog shouldered through the chaos, moving from one urgent repair to the next, checking his crew’s work and making sure no important corners had been cut. They had spent the past four days shaving minutes off each bit of overdue damage control, sacrificing perfection in the name of having the ship ready for combat before the Tholian armada arrived. The Tellarite chief engineer didn’t know what troubled him more at that moment: the need to tolerate substandard workmanship aboard his beloved starship, or the knowledge that in a few hours there was a high probability it would all be destroyed in a Tholian crossfire.

His snout wrinkled at the stench of melting duotronic cables, and he spun toward its source to see smoldering globs dripping from an open panel in the overhead. “Faran!” He cornered the enlisted engineer’s mate who was ducking away from the molten circuit junction. “You can’t use plasma cutters near the relays! I’ve told you a hundred times!”

“Sorry, sir,” said the frazzled Efrosian, whose drooping blond handlebar mustache and swooping golden eyebrows were sullied with grime, just like his pale hands and his red shirt.

Mog grabbed an extinguisher from an emergency locker, aimed it, and snuffed the fire before it spread past the slagged junction. Then he tossed the extinguisher to Faran, plucked his communicator from his belt, and flipped open its antenna grille. “Mog to—” He stepped barely clear of a pair of gunner’s mates rushing by with another pallet of torpedoes, then tried again. “Mog to Stegbauer. We need a new circuit relay on Deck Five, Section Three.”

“Copy that,” replied the lieutenant, who had distinguished himself by doing outstanding work under tremendous pressure in the past few days. “I’ll have it back on line in thirty minutes.”

“Good man. Shield status?”

“All back to full except aft port ventral. T’Vel and Burnett are working on it.”

Mog nodded to himself. “All right. Impulse systems?”

“Up to ninety percent.”

Not perfect, Mog figured, but good enough for now. “Phasers?”

“Still not getting the power we should. We need to swap out the main coupling.”

The mere suggestion raised the fur on the nape of Mog’s neck. “Absolutely not! We’ll never put it back together in time!”

Stegbauer didn’t sound any happier about it than Mog felt. “In that case, the best we can hope for is seventy-five percent efficiency on forward phasers.”

That was not going to be remotely good enough. Mog walked to a nearby wall companel and checked the chrono. It read 1324. “What’s the Tholians’ ETA?”

“Last update from Vanguard says four hours, nine minutes.”

The chief engineer’s thoughts filled with unspeakably vile Tellarite profanities. “All right, swap out the main coupling. Pull anybody you need to get it done before 1700.”

“Acknowledged. Engineering out.” The channel closed with a soft click.

Mog moved on and continued his inspections—hoping as he went that he hadn’t just signed Endeavour’s death warrant.

“People, please! Form lines!” Chief Petty Officer Ivan Vumelko was a fireplug of a man, squat and solid, with bulging eyes and meaty hands. In his decades of Starfleet service, he had never been easy to push around. Now, however, with only hours until the expected arrival of the Tholian armada, the paunchy customs inspector felt like a boulder being swept away by a tsunami of panic. “Everyone, proceed to your transports in an orderly—”

Something collided with his protruding gut and knocked the breath out of him. He kept trying to force words out, but all he produced were empty gasps. Civilians and noncombatant Star-fleet personnel surged around him, and the flood-crush of the crowd carried him away toward the three small ships parked behind him in the docking bay. Stumbling and fumbling, he weaved through the headlong mass of running bodies until he was clear of it.

Vumelko watched as desperate people scrambled up the gangways of the recently arrived civilian ships, their arms laden and backs burdened with the few personal possessions they had chosen to salvage, only to reach the top and be forced to abandon their duffels and bags in exchange for passage. Every cubic meter of space on these ships had become precious, and only living beings and the bare necessities to sustain them were being taken aboard. A steady rain of luggage tumbled to the deck, each impact reverberating in the cavernous space.

Standing apart as a witness to the madness, Vumelko knew that he was supposed to be heading for one of those transports. Technically, he was considered a noncombatant and had been put on the list for mandatory evacuation aboard the passenger ship Kenitra.

He slipped out of the docking bay and sprinted for the turbolift, determined to put his early training as a gunner’s mate on the starship Tamerlane to good use in a few hours’ time.

Evacuate, my ass, he stewed. If it’s a fight the Tholians want, I’ll give ’em one.

Vanguard’s security center was a bedlam of shouting voices and constant alarms. Standing in the center of the chaos, Haniff Jackson felt as if every crisis he resolved spawned two more.

“Tahir, we’ve got a riot brewing in Docking Bay Sixty-one! Get a squad down there!” Another monitor on the wall to his right flashed a warning. “Holmgren, we’ve got a GTS in progress! Lower Pylon, Slip Two. Lock down the docking clamps and tell Seklir to get over there, RFN!” He had taken to using the acronym GTS for the offense of grand theft starship because the increasing frequency of the crime over the past two days on Vanguard had rendered usage of the formal term burdensome.

More alarms sounded to his left, and he saw several of his deputies were responding to reports of looting in Stars Landing. He shook his head in disgust. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to fence the goods, and no way off the station with anything more than the clothes on their backs. So what the hell are those idiots thinking?

The dim ambience of computer screens in the darkness was momentarily washed out by a spill of harsh white light from the corridor as the door opened behind Jackson. He turned to see Ming Xiong enter, and he waved the scientist over to his station in the middle of the U-shaped ring of duty stations. Xiong rushed to his side and sounded winded, as if he had run all the way up from the Vault. “What’s up? You said it was urgent.”

“I had an idea,” Jackson said, calling up tactical plans on his master control screen. “Scuttlebutt on the command deck is that you guys wasted a planet with that gizmo of yours.”

Xiong backed up half a step. “I can’t discuss that.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s classified, I get it. Forget that for a second.” He showed Xiong a simulation of the Tholians’ likely attack plan. “If we could direct just a fraction of the power from your setup to a handful of key points, we could break their momentum before they—”

“It won’t work,” Xiong said. “Bringing the array to full power is a risk under the best of circumstances. And the truth is, we just don’t have the kind of precision control we’d need to use the array as a close-range tactical system. If we tried to do something like this, we’d probably blow ourselves up in the process.”

Jackson held up one hand while he loaded another simulation. “Okay, I thought you might say that. So, look at this. What if you target their fleet right now, while they’re still on approach in tight formation? Just hit an area of effect and—”

“The timing on the effect isn’t precise to within more than twenty seconds. We could barely target a planet in a slow orbit. No way we can hit a fleet moving at warp speed.” He added with a measure of sympathy, “Got a Plan C?”

“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Run like hell.”