Death,she thought. This is death, come for me at last.

But the fire that lanced her side, the stubborn remnant of the wounds she had received during her recent struggles against the hated false praetor Tal’Aura, argued eloquently that she was anything but dead. The blackness that surrounded her slowly morphed into a deep red. She became cognizant that she still possessed eyes, though she had to expend an extraordinary amount of effort just to force them open.

“Commander!” shouted Seketh, the young female decurion who crouched over her. Seketh’s voice sounded far more shrill than it had ever sounded before.

The remainder of her senses beginning to return to her, Donatra felt the hard deckplates beneath her back. Heat from a smoldering duty station across the room warmed the back of her neck. Ozone stung her nostrils, helping her focus her energies. Emergency lighting cast bizarre shadows across the bridge of the warbird Valdore.The broad central viewscreen, which dominated the forward section of the wide, semicircular chamber, displayed a violent hailstorm of static.

“Report,” Donatra said, her throat feeling as rough as ancient granite as she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Seketh hastened to take her arm, helping her rise to her feet.

“Most of the ship’s systems are functioning only marginally, if at all. All propulsion will be down for at least an entire eisae,and we have hull breaches on B and C decks. Damage control teams have already been dispatched. Reports of injuries are coming in from all over the ship, six of them critical. There have been three deaths, including Subcommander T’Kraith.”

Akhh!Donatra thought as she surveyed the details of the systems report, which were scrolling upward on the nearby operations console. My first officer, gone. Still more death during my watch.She thought she remembered having seen something rush toward the ship from the center of Shinzon’s Folly, the mysterious energy cloud that was already becoming known throughout the Empire as the Great Bloom. What had the Bloom—the remnant of Shinzon’s dreaded, and thankfully exploded, thalaron weapon—done to the Valdore? It seemed to Donatra that the vindictive shade of the dead praetor was still taking the lives of her crew, if only indirectly. And that didn’t even take into account whatever had happened to the rest of the fleet.

She found that completely unacceptable. “What exactly happened to us?” she asked Seketh.

“Something hit us, Commander.”

Now vividly recalling the moment of impact, Donatra frowned at the decurion. “Obviously. Were we fired upon?”

“We can’t rule it out, Commander,” Seketh said. “But if it was weapons fire, it wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

Moving shakily, Donatra headed toward the command chair, which was mounted atop a riser in the bridge’s center. She took her seat in silence, wondering if one of Governor Khegh’s warships might have cloaked itself, then followed the Valdoreand Titanto the Bloom. Had the Klingons then launched a sneak attack while her attention had been occupied by the Great Bloom, and the missing fleet she sought to recover from its maw? She seriously doubted that Titan’s commander, whom she had aided in the battle to bring down Praetor Shinzon, would have employed such treachery.

The Klingons, however, were another matter entirely.

But hadn’t whatever struck the Valdorecome from insidethe Great Bloom? Her best recollection told her that this was so.

Still, her gut warned her that she still needed to stay alert for cloaked Klingons. Khegh’s skillful ascension to the governorship of a Klingon-Reman protectorate in Romulan space made it clear to her now that the Klingon officer’s blustering churlishness was but a tactic calculated to make him easy to underestimate. Tal’Aura might have fallen for the ruse, but Donatra was determined not to be so foolish.

Liravek, a male centurion with somewhat more experience than Seketh, approached Donatra from one of the bridge’s few undamaged consoles. “I can find no trace of the residual energy particles characteristic of weapons fire anywhere on the Valdore’s hull.”

Donatra’s frown deepened. “Then what has happened to us?”

Liravek shrugged almost imperceptibly, his composure far more strained than Donatra had ever seen it. “We appear to have been caught in a natural energy discharge of some kind.”

“Originating where?” Donatra asked, though she was becoming certain that she already knew the answer.

Liravek nodded toward the main viewer, whose static had finally cleared enough to reveal an image that was simultaneously familiar and strange. “From somewhere inside the spatial rift.”

Donatra looked toward the multicolored, fiercely beautiful image of what amounted to a gigantic rent in the fabric of space. The florid, grasping hands of the Great Bloom, the fell thing created by dead Shinzon’s overweening ambition, had evidently turned its fury upon the Valdore,just as she had suspected—and just as it had apparently already done to the fleet she had so carefully hidden just inside the energy cloud’s coruscating periphery. As a result, the several dozen warbirds that she and Commander Suran had painstakingly assembled had vanished without a trace. She was now more determined than ever to locate and recover those vessels, and their loyal Romulan crews.

She wondered: How had Captain Riker’s vessel weathered the Bloom’s wrath? Had Titanbeen drawn here as well?

“Scan the rift and the region surrounding it as carefully as you can for other ships, Centurion Liravek,” she said, her eyes fixed upon the viewer as though her stare alone might tease out the phenomenon’s secrets.

As Centurion Liravek, Decurion Seketh, Centurion T’Relek, and a pair of junior technicians made haste to carry out this order, a chime sounded on the arm of Donatra’s command chair, indicating an incoming message.

“Infirmary to bridge,”said Dr. Venora, the Valdore’s chief medical officer. “We’re being swamped with injuries down here, Commander. What happened up there?”

In spite of herself, Donatra smiled slightly at Venora’s overly gruff tone. Nobody else aboard the Valdorewould dare to speak to her in this manner. Except, perhaps, for Commander Suran, with whom Donatra had served under the command of her murdered lover, Admiral Braeg.

Suran, with whom Donatra had uneasily shared control of the Romulan Star Empire’s combined military forces during the many weeks that had passed since Shinzon’s death.

Suran,she thought. Why isn’t he on the bridge?

“I’ll inform you fully once we’ve found a definitive answer to that question, Doctor.”

A pause. “All right. But I’m quite sure that Commander Suran won’t be satisfied with that. Once he regains consciousness, that is.”

Donatra needed a moment to process this news. Suran’s expertise had been quite useful to her on a number of occasions, so she had no wish to see him die. However, there were also times when he had proved to be a real impediment to the plans she had made to expand the military faction’s influence and resource base. If he were to die in service to the Empire, Donatra would lose the value of Suran’s not inconsiderable experience.

But there would be far fewer challenges to her decisions, in that event.

Like my decision to hide the fleet within the periphery of the Great Bloom?asked a small, accusatory voice in a still back corner of Donatra’s mind.

“What is Suran’s prognosis, Doctor?” she said, forcibly pushing her self-recriminations aside.

“His injuries are superficial, Commander. A concussion and some cuts. It would have taken far worse to keep him out of action for long.”

Relief and disappointment wrestled within her breast in equal measure. How long would it be before Suran was back on the bridge, reminding her that she had placed the security of the Empire in grave peril by losing the fleet?