“Right, sir. No pressure.” She vanished into the murk.

He gave her until the three-hour mark. When he ducked his head underwater, he could still distantly hear her voice, faint but distinctive against the counterpoint of squalesong, so he knew she was alive and well. But he couldn’t call her back, and he couldn’t wait for her any longer. He ordered Ra-Havreii to deploy the underwater klaxon.

With the speed of sound in seawater around a kilometer and a half per second, give or take, Riker estimated it would take under fifteen minutes for the sound to reach his location. Maybe sixteen minutes later, Aili shot to the surface. “Help me into the boat, quick!” He pulled her in, and she sank weakly onto the deck. Riker realized she was exhausted; she would have been out of breath if she still breathed. He began helping her into her hydration suit. “Never mind that, get the motor running. As soon as I heard the clamor of squale calls from the deep sound channel, I knew the beacon must’ve been deployed…. I lit out of there just before the security goons tried to grab me again. We’ve got moments, and I don’t know if fear of tech will stop them this time.”

Riker moved back to activate the engine, but then he looked around him. “I think it’s too late, Aili. We’re surrounded.”

“And by two pods’ worth. I think they called in another security team.”

Luckily, the squales that ringed the gig seemed content with a blockade for the moment. “They’re wary, sir, but I don’t think they want to hurt us. They’re just protecting themselves.”

Lavena spent a futile half-hour singing to them in Selkie, trying to reason with them. Meanwhile, Riker contacted the Gillespieand requested backup, figuring a shuttlecraft would be sufficient to frighten the squales away. But before the shuttle arrived, Pazlar contacted him. “The klaxon’s gone down, sir. The squales sent some kind of large, armored creature to intercept and wreck it. They’re returning to the area.”

Riker sighed. “Go back and try again. Stay as long as necessary to get the message across.”

“But sir, what about you and Aili?”

“We should be able to ride out the shock waves safely at this distance. Those squales can’t.”

“Aye, sir.Gillespie out.”

Lavena, floating in the water again, looked up at Riker. “I just hope they appreciate what we’re doing for them when this is over.”

“So do I, Aili.”

“Well, maybe Titanwill come through and deflect it after all.”

Riker looked skyward. He could feel Deanna’s presence through their empathic link, even at this distance, but she seemed distressed, maybe even hurt. He prayed their baby was all right. “Let’s hope so.”

CHAPTER N

INE

TITAN

When the two shuttles from Droplet arrived at Titan, which was still coasting along with the asteroid, Vale immediately assigned them to help the captain’s skiff in its attempt to thrust the asteroid off course. The big rock’s trajectory was changing, but with aching slowness. The La Roccawas built for diplomatic functions and recreation, not for power, and the engines and shields of Ellington IIand Marsalishad been rigged for aquashuttle mode. All told, it finally became evident that the asteroid’s course could not be changed enough; at most, they had made its angle of entry shallower. That might ameliorate the impact to some degree, but not enough to spare the Dropletian lives down there.

So with less than an hour to go, Vale proposed a last-ditch plan. “We didn’t want to blow it up for fear that might do more harm than good,” she told the staff, back on the bridge now that the shielding was restored. “But we can’t prevent the harm anyway, so maybe blowing it up is the only option we have left. We’ve seen how well those bilitrium deposits can amplify an explosion—maybe we should be using that to our advantage.”

She proposed a variation of Panyarachun’s earlier suggestion: instead of trying to detonate shuttle warp cores against the surface of the asteroid, they would position the antimatter canisters from two shuttles as close as possible to the largest and deepest bilitrium deposits they could reach. “With luck, it’ll amplify the blast enough to turn that thing to rubble, and most of it will burn off in the atmosphere.”

“The problem there,”said Cethente, “is that the intense radiation still emanating from the asteroid would render our sensors useless.”

“Not all of them,” said Chief Bralik, who’d been called in to consult on the geology. “I can rig a good old-fashioned gravity sensor. It can find the parts that match the density of bilitrium. Just like everything else in this system, it’s just a case of going back to the way they did it in the old days.”

Vale nodded. “All right. Do it.”

SHUTTLECRAFT MARSALIS

Within twenty minutes, Bralik had beamed over to the Marsaliswith her gravity sensor. As soon as that had been accomplished, Titanbegan thrusting away on impulse, falling behind the asteroid, both to gain distance from the explosion and to decelerate for orbital insertion. Under Bralik’s supervision, Ensign Waen piloted the shuttle into the fissure blown by the previous explosion. The Ferengi cast her eyes about at the rock formations that glittered in the shuttle’s spotlights. “A fortune in transuranics, and we’re about to blow it up,” she lamented.