“Absolutely,” said Modan cheerily. “From our current position the message should reach them in about forty-seven years.”

  Keru grumbled something about Jaza’s sense of humor but stayed focused on not letting the shuttle drift into the tesseract’s field.

  Having nothing to contribute for the moment and hating every turn of phrase uttered by Modan that reminded her of Jaza, Vale slid out of the navigator’s cradle and moved back toward the jump seats and Troi.

  “Well,” she said, sliding in beside her. “Looks like you were right. Titansurvived after all.”

  Troi looked up then, and Vale could see she had been crying.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was right all along. Now, if only I had really believed it.”

  They shared a bittersweet laugh at the events of the last few days. There had been so much tragedy and so much loss that there was little else to do but laugh. All that tension had to go somewhere.

  Jaza was gone. Titanhad survived, but the hundreds aboard whichever of her sisters had crashed into Orisha had not. Three-hundred-fifty-plus lives had been snuffed out by the Eye of Erykon. It didn’t matter that most, perhaps all of them, were strangers. And now, with Titanso close they could almost see her, there was still no real certainty that any of them would come out of this alive. Modan would lose access to the knowledge she’d borrowed from Jaza soon. If it happened before they returned to Titan, well, that would be bad.

  You really had to laugh.

  So they did.

  “But the worst thing is,” said Vale, between chuckles, “I still have this awful color in my hair.”

  “I would have mentioned it,” said Troi, also giggling too hard now to keep still. “But I couldn’t tell whether or not you were playing a joke of some kind.”

  “It’s not funny,” said Vale as she erupted into a string of apparently uncontrollable giggles.

  “It’s a little bit funny,” said Troi, following suit.

  Soon the barely controlled laughter developed into full-throated guffaws, loud enough to draw the attention of the other two in the shuttle.

  “What’s the joke?” said Keru. Modan only looked puzzled.

  Before either Vale or Troi could answer, an enormous fluctuation in the tesseract’s field density rocked the shuttle hard to its port side.

  “There,” said Modan, scrambling back into her chair. “It’s right there.” She passed the coordinates on to Keru who, in spite of his better judgment, pointed the shuttle’s nose at the invisible breach and plunged through.

   “There, Mr. Tuvok,”said Dakal excitedly. “It’s right there again! Do you see it?”

  Tuvok informed the cadet that he did indeed see the strange pattern of fluctuation and that there was no need to shout.

  Taking control of the sensor pod’s primary array and synching it with the main sensor grid, Tuvok trained all of Titan’s attention on that one small spot of distortion. It didn’t make sense that the tiny shiver in the Eye’s field would have anything to do with their current difficulty, but as no other culprits had presented themselves, he owed it as close a look as possible.

  Sure enough, on deep inspection, Dakal’s area of distortion did exist. Moreover, it had contours that were too regular to have been produced in nature. Whatever else it was, this thing was artificial, probably mechanical.

  Was it responsible in some way for the Eye or for its ability to offset whatever version of the counterpulse was thrown its way? Further examination was required.

  Narrowing the scan to exclude everything outside the point of distortion gave Tuvok and, tangentially, Dakal a much clearer view of its contours.

  It was shaped like a cube that had had the sharp points of its corners sanded down. There were protrusions of some kind on two of its wider planes: a small oval-shaped bubble on what he arbitrarily designated as the top and, along the bottom, two long slender cylinders running the object’s length.

   “It’s theEllington,” exclaimed Dakal. “Sir, don’t you see, it has to be them.”

  Ignoring Dakal’s excited outburst, Tuvok altered the scan to ferret out signs of a warp core that had been configured according to Starfleet specifications.

  “We’re not going to make it,” said Keru, still wrestling with the controls. He wasn’t able to do much with them just now beyond keeping the shudder to a minimum, and he was quickly coming to the end of that rope as well. “Modan, you’re supposed to be on point. What now?”

  No one aboard the shuttle was laughing anymore. They had plunged into the supposed flaw in the tesseract’s four-dimensional body, and though they had not apparently been forced forward or backward away from their proper time period, they could not push through into normal space.

  “It’s the damned counterpulse,” said Modan. “Every time Ra-Havreii shifts the Veil configuration I have to re-modulate the shuttle’s shields. I can’t do it fast enough to push through to the other side.”

  “Not good enough, Modan,” said Vale. “This is why Ra-Havreii sent you, to get us through this.”

  “I’m trying, dammit,” she said. “Just-just let me think for a second.”

   She’s losing it, thought Vale. Jaza would have solved this already. Whatever she got from him is fading fast.

  “Ranul,” she said. “Hail Titan. See if you can let them know we’re here.”

  “That won’t work, Commander,” said Modan. “The signal won’t penetrate the tesseract field.”

  “Mr. Keru,” said Vale, ignoring Modan. “Hail Titan.”

  As he tried and failed to get a signal through the tesseract, Modan fought to hold on to the skills she’d borrowed from Jaza. Normally she could have counted on days of additional talent, but having to help Ra-Havreii not only solve the dilemma of how to shut down the Veil network but to keep it from failing before they could do it had pushed her to her limit.

  She wasn’t a telepath. Her species had simply learned to link their nervous systems with those of other organisms in order to borrow some of their chemical or genetic information. She’d used this talent to copy those of Jaza’s memories that could have been useful. It was as if she had made an electrochemical model of his scientific knowledge and skills inside her brain. Like any chemical modification, the faster she worked her metabolism, the faster she burned out the changes.

  Orisha had kept her burning nonstop for hours. She had only a little longer before she lost it all, and they hadn’t even gotten back to Titanyet.

   Think, she told herself. You have to hold on to this. Calm down and think!

  It was no use. She could feel the bits of him, his memories, his past, his knowledge of how to save them, all slipping away. All this excitement was burning him out of her too fast, too fast to do what he had sent her to do.

  She cast around the shuttle’s cockpit, as if hoping to find a solution written on one of the displays or magically burned into the air by the power of his Prophets. There was nothing, only the increasing sensation of loss as his memory patterns dissolved into their base peptides.

  She fought it as best she could, trying to use her own memory to reconstruct or approximate his.

   A tesseract, she knew the thought was his but she forced it to be hers. If she could only keep remembering… A tesseract is a four-dimensional object with vertices in both subspace and conventional space with the ratios of the angles corresponding to…to…

  “Modan,” said Vale from somewhere far away. She sounded angry, still obviously furious with the younger woman for leaving Jaza to his fate. But Jaza had told her to do it, had orderedher to-