Everyone present was suddenly slammed to the ground as the earth above and around the chamber did its best to rip itself to bits. The noise was thunderous, impossible. It lasted long enough that Vale actually thought this might be the planet shaking itself apart, but as quickly as the quake had begun, it vanished.

  She barely felt the claws of the soldiers hefting her back to her feet, barely noted the Mater ordering someone to give her a visual shot of the world outside.

  “The sky,” said A’yujae’Tak. “Let me see the sky!”

  There was another flurry of workers running to obey, and then, slowly, the field of solid white on the main viewer gave way to an image of the sky above the Spire.

  Vale knew it wasn’t possible, that what she saw there was only the visual display of massive cosmic forces banging against each other, but it looked like fire. It looked exactly as if the sky over Orisha was burning.

  Vale lay on the floor where they had dropped her, unmindful of the bruises and cuts she’d sustained on the way down from the control chamber.

  She couldn’t hate them or weep or feel anything really beyond the wide black chasm opening up inside her and sucking her down and down and down.

  This was twice now that Titanhad died in front of her, but unlike the first time, this last destruction had been her fault. She had been too thick or too clumsy or not enough something to make the Orishans see in time what they were about to do.

  They were all dead, again, and as soon as the quakes had subsided, the Mater had assured her that she and the rest of her companions would join them.

  “You will feed our larvae,” she had promised Vale.

   Yes, she thought. I’m sure we will.

  So she lay there, waiting for it, feeling the occasional rumble in the walls and listening to-

  Somebody was humming.

  “Hello, Commander,” said Xin Ra-Havreii from some dark corner of the little cell. “When you are ready to hear it, I believe I have some news.”

  He went on humming after that and she went on listening, this time without the critical ear she’d given him previously. None of that mattered now. His eccentricities were trivial things, as were most of the frictions that had plagued them before.

  The melody was actually quite pretty, she realized, as was his voice, which was not deep, but full and somehow sensual. She’d heard him humming it so often in the last few days but had been too irritated by the fact of it to ask him what it was. She did so now.

  “It is an aural schematic of a Luna-class starship, Commander,” he said. “ Titan, specifically. I’ve been deconstructing and reconstructing it for days.”

  She recalled how his people on Efros Delta had been required to develop a predominantly oral tradition as they weathered the rigors of their world’s ice age. An entirely oral means of storing data necessitated an entirely aural means of deciphering it.

  She laughed then, bitterly. All the time she’d thought he was becoming less and less sane, becoming more and more intractably eccentric, he had, in fact, been carrying the entire schematic of the starship Titanaround with him in the form of this tune.

  Her laughter became hysterical at that, wrenching out of her in long shuddering jags that could just have easily been sobs. When she was done she looked over at him, sitting on the floor with his legs folded just so.

  “So what’s your news?” she said.

  “I was confused at first,” he said. “When I examined the ship’s wreckage, there was so much missing, so much that was destroyed, that I could feel the ghosts of the Lunareaching out for me. This is not an exaggeration, Commander. I’m sure Counselor Troi has kept you somewhat abreast of my…situation.”

  “It’s come up,” said Vale.

  “And rightly so,” he said. “Though I doubt it will again.”

  “Probably not,” said Vale, thinking of the hungry larvae.

  “I have aural schematics of all of the Luna-class vessels committed to memory,” he said. “Though they all leave drydock essentially the same, very soon their music changes as they experience different events.”

  “All right,” she said, picturing the starships swimming through the void, singing to one another like whales.

  “I have them all in my mind,” he said. “And specifically I have the music of their warp cores committed to memory.”

  “The news, Ra-Havreii,” she said, happy to feel something as mundane as irritation with his wandering conversation.

  “I listened to the warp core at the crash site, Commander,” said the engineer. “And I can tell you that, beyond any doubt whatsoever, while that is certainly a crashed Luna-class Starfleet vessel spread over the ground out there, it is, just as unequivocally, not the Starship Titan.”

Part Two

   Then Soon Now Once

   Once Then Soon Now

   Now Once Then Soon

   Soon Now Once Then

  -Tholian Axiom, First Iteration

Chapter Nine

   There was a split second-just long enough for everyone who was watching to realize what was coming-and then the wave hit.

   Titanscreamed as the surge of energy washed over it and through it as well. Metal twisted, software spiraled chaotically, and every member of her crew scrambled to protect whatever they could from the onslaught, mostly to little avail.

  The effect went through them all like a wave, inspiring everything from nausea and disorientation in some to catatonic neural shutdown in more than a few.

  Every device or system that dealt with or utilized energy fields as a matter of course buckled or shut down or exploded.

  Engineers blanched as the warp core bubbled and seized, riffling though the color spectrum until the plasma inside was nearly translucent.

  Rossini barked orders at his subordinates, including for someone to heft the stricken Ensign Torvig up from where he’d fallen on the deck and get him to sickbay ASAP. As it had before, the pulse had hit Torvig as hard as it had any of Titan’s mechanical systems-perhaps harder, as his mind certainly knew what was happening to his body. Titan, at least, couldn’t feel pain or terror.

  As he tried not to focus on the frail body of his friend twitching and writhing on the floor, his cybernetic appendages flailing wildly, Rossini couldn’t help but think that Torvig’s condition mirrored that of Titan.

  All around him there was pandemonium as those few who hadn’t been slammed into bulkheads or pitched over high railings ran to get their machines back under their control.

   Ten people trying to do the work of forty, he thought. Good luck.

  He didn’t feel he was ready for this, despite having survived Titan’s other harrowing adventures, but with the chief engineer off-ship and Baars having been knocked unconscious when he’d fallen from one of the upper tiers, he didn’t have time to let his insecurities reign. It was him or no one. He’d always hoped his time as chief engineer would follow years of climbing up through the ranks, after which he’d get assigned to some small research vessel where he could learn by doing and not have to worry too much about being killed.

  His greatest fear had always been of being given too much responsibility before he was confident he could handle it, and now here he was, living the nightmare. Although he might not be living it long if Titan’s warp core kept behaving as it was.

  His eyes stayed focused on the core as he prayed for it to return to its normal blue-white oscillation. If it settled in the next few seconds, thirty at most, they might have a chance of not being killed. If it didn’t settle, well, best not to think too much about that.