Was this reality or just a hallucination created from the cascade of endorphins unleashed by a brain hoping to ease his slide into the dark?

  “You’re not dying on me, Jaza,” said the woman. “I’m counting on you to save us.”

  Then she was cradling him and he was looking up into her turquoise marble eyes, eyes that seemed always to be smiling. He knew her. He remembered her face and he remembered her name.

  “Y’lira?” he rasped, scarcely knowing if all this was just one final delusion before his paghwas set free.

  “Hush,” she said softly, bending closer for what could have been a kiss but wasn’t. The tendrils on her head, not hair as he’d supposed, came alive around them, writhing and undulating like serpents. “I have much to do, and there’s no time.”

  As the first of the serpents touched his forehead, the world went mercifully black.

  He floated in darkness, drifting in an infinite shadow that rolled over and around him like an ocean of ink. He was aware-of himself, of his name, of his life, of everything that he’d thought lost not long before. He was aware of his body, still distant, still not quite there, being repaired. He was also aware of her.

   Y’lira,he thought, somehow knowing speech was both beyond him right now and unnecessary.

  “Modan,” said her voice from out of the black, chiding. “Y’lira is my crиche designation.”

  He did know that and more. He knew she was his colleague, his fellow officer. He knew she was from a planet called Selene. He knew she liked to flirt. He knew she had been with him on the ill-fated shuttle. He knew she was repairing him somehow, bringing him back from the Prophets’ embrace.

   What happened?he thought furiously as he felt his strength returning, his bones and tissue knitting together. The shuttle? The others?

  “You know what,” said her voice. “We crashed. And the others-I-I don’t know.” It was a lie. She did know. He felt it as much as he felt her need not to admit it.

  Something had happened to them, something awful.

  Their faces and names came back to him then, and he wished that they hadn’t. He wouldn’t have felt the loss so acutely had they still been nothing but blurs.

   Troi,he thought. Troi and all the rest.

  “Sshh,” she said, a little too forcefully. He knew somehow that she was busy rejoining his shattered ribs, but he felt there was something pushing her emotions too. Something large and dreadful that she didn’t want to see just now. Or maybe didn’t want him to see.

  All the rest.

   What about the ship?he thought at her, fearing the answer, knowing it even as his mind formed the question. What happened toTitan?

  She hesitated before responding. The black ocean seemed to swell and roll around him. For an illusion created in the pocket of his mind, it certainly felt as if he could drown here.

   Modan?he thought at her again. What happened toTitan?

  “You know,” she said, still not wanting to face it herself. “You saw.”

  The memory accosted him then; he’d seen what had looked like an impossibly vast wall of fire sweeping over the ship, consuming it utterly. He remembered Troi screaming.

   “Something’s happened! I can’t feel them! I can’t feel any of them!”

  But he still needed to hear Modan say it-needed to anchor his recollections to reality-for her and for him. If they were going to keep this new and obviously hostile place from killing them, they had to face every fact together.

   What happened toTitan, Modan?he thought again, relentless. What happened toTitan?

Chapter One

OCCULTUS ORA, STARDATE 58358.1

  T he Starship Titanrolled slowly in the dark, dancing between the invisible jetsam, the ethereal flotsam, like some graceful leviathan swimming a terrestrial sea. All around it the other occupants of this region, the inspiration for the ship’s lingering ballet, also pitched and spun in apparent counterpoint to the vessel’s motion.

   Titan’s astronomers had dubbed the region Occultus Ora for some reason known only to them. The physicists called the things residing here exotic matter plasmidsbut, lately, those who’d been tasked with ferreting out their secrets had taken to referring to the strange objects simply as darklings.

  The image came from a myth Dr. Celenthe had heard on its homeworld of Syrath, something about the Catalysts of creation hiding in the dark.

  The name fit the new objects well. They were invisible to every naked eye, irrespective of species, untouchable by all but the most specifically calibrated sensors, intangible by nearly every measure, yet here they were, in the lee of the Gum Nebula, performing their tandem pirouette, bending gravity into knots in complete defiance of their supposed nonexistence.

  It was sheer luck that Titanhad happened upon them at all even with the fantastic array of devices it sported to facilitate its explorations.

  A weird but consistent spike in one of the lower EM bands during a routine sensor sweep had drawn the attention of the senior science officer and subsequently that of his captain. Another ship would have missed even that.

  “Absolutely, Mr. Jaza,” Captain Riker had said, a broad grin cutting a canyon in the dark hair of his beard as he perused the younger man’s data. “Let’s have a closer look.”

  Jaza had never worked under a commander with as acute an appreciation for the beauty of the unknown as William Riker, never encountered anyone, scientist or artist, soldier or civilian, who had as pure a love for discovery. There was a free-form quality to the way Riker directed Titan’s missions that kept everyone on their toes without giving them all over to chaos. There was always reason guiding Riker’s rhyme, even when it wasn’t readily apparent.

  Over weeks and with much rewriting of code and re-tasking of systems, the darklings came into sharper and sharper relief. To everyone’s delight, they also brought along more mysteries to solve. Days became weeks. A couple of re-tasked systems became a score and soon a good portion of Titan’s crew was focused in one way or another on the strange cosmic formation onto which they had luckily stumbled.

  They were a strain of so-called dark matter, that was obvious, but, unlike the garden variety of the stuff, the darklings’ existence was apparently extremely organized. They were set in a massive ring, evenly distributed and collectively spinning in orbit around a neutron star.

  How had this happened? What sustained the effect? What properties set this form of exotic matter outside the normal bestiary? These questions and hundreds more were asked by Jaza and his staff over the weeks Titan,now rigged essentially for silent running to avoid any stray homegrown rads cluttering their survey, spent sliding between the massive invisible pips.

  It was a good time, the perfect expression of their collective raison d’кtre.

  Which, of course, meant it couldn’t last.

  The day began badly for him: a fitful sleep full of powerful and unsettling dreams, followed by a return to consciousness that put him in mind of the time he’d escaped drowning.

  Caught in a river whose current he had misjudged, he found himself both falling and being swept forward by the pull of something he could neither see nor fight. It had been terrifying then and, even though his father had pulled him out only a few seconds after he’d tumbled from the boat, his time in the water had felt like eternity.

  The dream, what he could remember of it, wasn’t truly terrifying in that way. There was no risk of death, obviously, and he wasn’t drenched or shivering cold. Yet there was the same power in the thing, the same inexorable pull from something invisible and powerful and impossible to touch.