It wasn’t truly blackness that engulfed them. There were halos of every hue sparking and dying pretty much constantly in all directions. Wherever they appeared, their light created the clear silhouette of something that looked like an asteroid but was very much not. It wasn’t the galaxy laid out like diamonds in invisible ether, but it was beautiful in its way.

  What the silhouettes were and how they happened to be here, arranged as they were around their invisible star, was the topic of much interest among Titan’s science specialists. Even Melora Pazlar had been among them at first. Nearly two weeks of diminishing participation in the actual probing had increased her sense of useless isolation.

  “Yeah,” said Bralik, peeking over at the other woman’s padd. “But buck up, angel. We’re nearly done.”

  “I can’t believe I let Jaza talk me into letting him commandeer my entire department for this.”

  “I wouldn’t describe a superior officer ordering you to reset all your equipment to display only exotic matter talking you into something.”

  “You’re right,” said Pazlar with another of her rueful but stunning smiles. “But Jaza doesn’t come at you that way. He’s all enthusiasm and love of pure knowledge. It gets you caught up.”

  “ ‘Jaza,’ huh?” said Bralik, grinning. “Not ‘Najem’?”

  “He gets his name back when I get my stars,” said Pazlar.

  “You’re a tough little thing when you want to be, aren’t you,” said Bralik, showing her own sharp teeth. “Anyway, it sounds more like you’re talking about Captain Riker than our Bajoran friend.”

  “It’s sort of the same thing,” said Pazlar, watching another halo fire up and die and tapping in the appropriate notations. “By the time I realized what he was doing, my stars were gone and I was stuck with this.”

  “Forty-eight,” said Bralik with a chuckle. Pazlar looked up from her padd but didn’t ask the question. Bralik answered anyway. “Rule of Acquisition number forty-eight: The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.”

  They were quiet for a time, each watching the halos’ erratic discharges and making notes accordingly. Bralik had requested they bring an actual sample aboard for long-term study, but Jaza had deemed the darkling matter too volatile to risk danger to the crew. She’d been forced to make do with the holographic sims. Granted they were amazingly detailed and presented their data in the visual spectrum as much as possible, but you really couldn’t ever beat putting your hands on something.

  “Huh,” said Pazlar absently. “That’s odd.”

  “What is?” said Bralik.

  “I’m getting flickers in the boryon range.”

  “Meaning?” said Bralik.

  Pazlar ignored the question and “swam” down to a lower region of the massive display, disappearing briefly behind two enormous clumps of black. When she reappeared, Bralik saw her hovering near several midsized darklings, apparently waiting for something. She watched Pazlar watching as each object’s halo lit up in succession.

  By the time the third flare had come and gone, Bralik knew what had tweaked Pazlar’s interest. So far, without deviation, the darkling halos had been uniformly red or aqua or whatever. This undulating rainbow effect was something new.

  “Well?” said Bralik. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Pazlar, her hands now tapping frantically at her padd. Something was obviously wrong. “Pazlar to Jaza.”

   “Go ahead,”came the immediate response.

  “Can you change the probe’s orientation to grid zed seven and tell me what you see?”

   “Executing,”said Jaza, clearly puzzled. Then, “What am I supposed to be-?”

  He stopped speaking abruptly, and Bralik thought she could see why. The strange halos that Pazlar noticed had returned and brought friends. A largish cluster of the rainbow auras flashed briefly around their respective darklings and faded again.

   “Caves of fire,”said Jaza under his breath. “Tell me that’s not what it looks like.”

  “Don’t go all Red Alert yet,” said Pazlar, her fingers tapping furiously on her padd. “It could be something local, or it could be a glitch in the probe’s transfer signal.”

   “No and no,”said Jaza through what sounded to Bralik like clenched teeth. “Wait a moment.”

  “Should we abort?” said Pazlar, after the moment had passed.

   “Wait,”said Jaza, the stress clearly overtaking him now. Whatever this was, it was something apparently dire. Bralik’s own padd was keyed to interpret only the geological data-information culled strictly from the molecular examination of the darklings. By contrast, Pazlar and Jaza were focused on subatomica.

  “Can you isolate the source of the distortion?” Pazlar asked.

   “Working on it…”

  “It looks like a ripple from some sort of-”

   “The distortion’s clearly artificial, Melora.”

  “But there’s nothing sentient-made out here.” Bralik could tell from her tone that Pazlar was grasping at straws. “Is it possible we missed-”

   “You know what this is as well as I do or you wouldn’t have contacted me,”said Jaza, his anger evident even over the comm. “That lunatic!”

  Unable to help or even participate, the Ferengi geologist contented herself with floating free, watching and listening as her colleagues worked frantically to solve their cryptic problem.

  “Should we abort?”

   “We’re not aborting,”said Jaza.

  “But, if all the data are corrupted…”

   “We don’t know that yet.”

  Time ticked and, though she still couldn’t decipher the meat of their conversation, Bralik felt the tension increase with each moment.

  Just when she was about to ask again what the problem was, the entire display vanished, leaving the two women floating inside a massive gray sphere whose surface was a lattice of overlapping gold and silver grids.

  “ Melora,”said Jaza’s voice, now stripped of any semblance of emotion. “I’d like you and the rest of the team to go over the collected data and isolate any anomalies similar to what we’ve just seen. I need a timeline.”

  “We’ll salvage what we can,” said Pazlar.

  A light chime sounded, indicating that Jaza had switched off. Pazlar tapped her padd once, deactivating it.

  “What just happened?” said Bralik. “Don’t tell me we’re dumping three weeks of work over one little glitch.”

  “Just suspending it for now,” Pazlar corrected, a hint of Jaza’s pique creeping into her tone as well. “Pending data review.”

  “So what’s the big problem?” asked Bralik, drifting down to join the Elaysian.

  “Same problem as always,” said Pazlar. “Ra-Havreii.”

   “Sometimes the worst thing about a day is living through it,”her mother used to say. More than once in both her careers Christine Vale had come to know the wisdom of those words.

  As she stood in the anteroom waiting for Troi to finish whatever was taking her so long, she wished again that something, perhaps some giant bit of alien war tech still roaming the stars in search of prey, would swoop down on the starship Titanand start blasting away. Nothing too fancy or lethal-just a little combat to break up the terrors of the lull.

  It wasn’t that she enjoyed the potential for carnage created by such circumstances. She had no particular bloodlust to speak of. It was just that, during those times, she knew who she was, knew what to do, how to function fluidly when there was chaos all around. It was just easier than, well, this.

  “We’re out here to explore, Chris,” Will Riker said more than once. “Not to fight.” His eyes always sparkled a bit when he dropped one of these epigrams, as if he had a cluster of pulsars stored in his skull instead of a brain. She was all for exploration-hell, that was a large part of why she’d joined Starfleet in the first place: to set her eyes and hands on something really new. The trouble was, war got you used to the rush, the constant possibility of attack or death at the hands of an enemy. Exploration, pure exploration, was often very slow and brutally quiet.