When they fired on the away team, Riker finished the thought. When they killed Deanna. “Set to fire quantum torpedoes, full spread, on my mark,” he said. If these bastards wanted to bang heads instead of figuring a way to power down and maybe find a solution to all this, for once, just this once, he was happy to oblige.

  “That is not advisable, sir,” said Tuvok. “The vessel’s proximity to Titanis-”

  Before either of them could utter another word, the Orishan weapon fired. This time it was not the immensely destructive power beam that erupted from the alien ship but a massive lattice of interlocking energy fields.

   It looks like a net, thought Riker, just before it hit.

   Titanshuddered violently as the new weapon overtook them, but it did not suffer the same jolting that it had during its recent difficulties. The shields, for the moment, held the weapon at bay.

  “Tuvok?”

  “Tractor beam,” the Vulcan reported. “Similar to our own but more powerful by several orders of magnitude, and it is contracting. Our shields are holding it back at this time, but I believe its purpose is to crush us.”

  “Can they do it?” said the captain.

  “Eventually, yes,” said Tuvok. “Shield strength has already fallen by four percent.”

  “So we’re on the clock,” said Riker.

  “Captain?”

  “Time, Mr. Tuvok,” said Riker. “We’re fighting time. Either we get free of that thing and give the Orishans a reason to back off or they crush Titanand us like an egg.”

  Tuvok considered the analogy for a moment before responding. “Yes, sir,” he said eventually. “That is essentially correct.”

   “Sensor pod to bridge,”boomed Lieutenant Roakn’s gravelly voice.

  “Go ahead, pod,” said Riker.

   “If you can spare us one second, Captain,”said Raokn. “We think we may have something for you.”

  Riker didn’t spend much time in the sensor pod. After seeing it for the first time when he’d taken his initial inspection tour of Titan, he hadn’t been up again until they’d begun to map Occultus Ora. Then he’d only stayed long enough to get Mr. Jaza’s report, have a few words with his team, and then head back to the business of running Titanand trying to get his wife to see sense.

  The pod was darker than he remembered, running with emergency lighting to conserve precious power. All he could see of the upper tier was the grid work, and that only barely.

  Jaza’s people-Roakn, the two Benzites, the Deltan woman Fell, the Caitian female Hsuuri, the acerbic Thymerae, and Jaza’s pet project, Dakal-all stood there, expectant, weary, waiting for Riker’s command.

  “Well,” he said, not too gruffly. “Let’s have it.”

  For some reason all of them looked at Cadet Dakal, which was odd considering he had the least experience of the lot. Jaza had taken a shine to the kid, pulling him out of his rotation in systems analysis for duty with this crew.

   “He thinks he’s an operations specialist,”the science officer had written more than once. “But he’s got a mind that’s made for science.”

  Dakal looked as surprised as anyone that the rest of the team expected him to deliver their news, but he sucked it up, put on his best expression of Cardassian detachment, and began to speak, only stammering once at the outset.

  “Space-time, sir,” said the cadet. “Everything the Orishan technology has done has in some way manipulated space-time similarly to the way we use warp fields to travel.”

  “Similarly,” said Riker. “But not the same way.”

  “No, sir,” said Dakal. “At least, not in every case. We’d need to get a look at their technology to see how they’re doing it, but we now know that the instability in this area is the result of multiple folds in the local space-time. Even their weapons are not warping space so much as aggressively folding it. I have to admit that I didn’t know the difference before, but it’s significant.”

  Riker knew the difference. Warp fields created bubbles, relatively small ones, around a given vessel, allowing it to mildly bend physical laws in order to bypass relativistic speed limits. His mind flashed to his Academy days and a lecture hall where a very stern professor had stripped a hard-boiled egg of its shell, squeezed it into a plastic tube that was slightly too small, and then applied suction at both ends.

  The analogy wasn’t exact, of course: the demo had been to show the fragility of any object traveling within a warp field. The technology was so ubiquitous that most sentients forgot very quickly exactly how dangerous it actually was to circumvent physical laws in that way. The image of that egg exploded all over the interior of the tube never left Riker’s mind for long, and with Dakal’s little lecture, it resurfaced.

  Space folds, by contrast, needed no such visual analogies. Their name told the story quite literally. Usually by means of massive manipulation of gravimetric fields, space-time could be folded in on itself in order to bring two usually distant points close together. But the technology to make even simple short-distance folds was so dangerous that most civilizations abandoned it in favor of warp fields early on. Those that didn’t tended to destroy themselves when their folds destabilized their suns or knocked their planets out of their normal orbits.

  “Someone has folded a lot of space-time here, sir,” said Dakal. “Too much for anything like safety, and something has caused the knot they made to unravel.”

  “This is all well and good,” said Riker, trying not to seem too harsh with them. They had obviously been attacking this problem nonstop since the first quantum ripples had been discovered. “But how does that help us now?”

  “Well,” said Dakal. “We think, now that we know the exact nature of the effects in question, as well as the nature of the Orishan weapons, we may have a solution.”

  “A partial solution,” said Hsuuri softly. Dakal nodded.

  “You can get us moving again?” said Riker.

  “Maybe not that, sir,” said Roakn, stepping in to make sure they didn’t give the captain more hope than was warranted. “Local conditions and the ship’s own geometry still make the warp core too unstable to generate a viable bubble around Titan.”

  “But,” said Peya Fell, “we think we can stabilize things enough to get the shields up to full and keep them there. And we can give Titanher phasers again.”

  “What’s the catch?” said Riker.

  “The catch, sir?” said Dakal, looking to the others for assistance.

  “There’s always something, Cadet,” said the captain. “A downside to the plan. Some tiny flaw that makes the course of action we’re contemplating less than appealing.”

  “Time, sir,” said Dakal at last. “It will take us another three hours, minimum, to complete the necessary modifications.”

  “Riker to bridge,” said the captain. When Tuvok responded, he asked the Vulcan how long the shields could withstand the pressure from the Orishan grapple before collapsing.

   “If all local conditions remain constant,”said Tuvok’s voice evenly. “Approximately two hours and thirty-six minutes.”

   Titanlurched violently, forcing all present to grab the nearest stationary object or be knocked to the floor.

   “The Orishan vessel has increased the pressure, Captain,”said Tuvok again. “We now have two hours and seventeen point six minutes.”

  Riker’s eyes fell on the TOV apparatus clustered dark and unused in its designated alcove. He smiled.

  “All right, people,” he said. “Why don’t we see if we can make local conditions a little less constant.”

Chapter Ten

   The second quake was worse than the first, and the third and fourth were worse still. Vale and Ra-Havreii sat, listening in silence to the mounting chaos around them.