Riker tugged at his beard absentmindedly, studying the numbers and graphics that scrolled down both sides of the main viewscreen.

He didn’t like to give up, but they’d been scanning for other vessels for almost a day now, and they hadn’t found any yet. The interspatial anomaly was still interfering with the ship’s sensors, and they’d found no trace of the Valdoreor any of the rest of the missing Romulan fleet that Donatra had sought when she had requested Titan’s assistance near the phenomenon she called “the Great Bloom.”

“Ensign Lavena, let’s put another five hundred kilometers between us and the anomaly,” he said, “Mr. Dakal, continue scanning for other vessels. Maybe our sensors will be more effective once we’re out of range of the worst of its subspace interference.”

He turned to his right, where his executive officer sat. Vale looked up at him expectantly, lifting her gaze from the chair-mounted padd console on which she had been studying various readings.

“The bridge is yours, Commander,” Riker said. “I’ll be in my ready room. Call me when you have some good news.”

As he strode toward the doors of his sanctum, he hoped that his final phrase had sounded optimistic enough. Not “if” there’s good news. “When.”

He felt a familiar presence.

It was a warm red splashed across the dark canvas of his consciousness.

Other colors had been there before, but he subsumed them.

Turned them dark.

Pushed them away.

Solitude was comforting.

But the red splashed, again and again.

STARDATE 57026.4

Returning to the bridge after the recent accidental collision with the Reman ship had been a bit of an embarrassment to Aili Lavena. After all, the shielded face mask of her hydration suit had cracked when she’d been flung from her chair and onto the bridge deckplates. The resultant rupture hadn’t caused her any permanent harm, though the Selkie conn officer had been forced to spend almost her entire subsequent shift recuperating, first in sickbay, and later in her own water-filled quarters. Even now, the twin gill-crests that ran along her cranium ached slightly, though they steadily continued to heal.

The particular suit she wore now didn’t fit her quite as well as the damaged one had, and she found herself unconsciously fidgeting as she sat at her station. She hoped the others hadn’t noticed. Instinctively, she was aware that the loud sloshing sounds that her self-contained liquid environment made all around her as she moved were virtually inaudible even to those nearest to her. Still, the noises made her a bit uncomfortable and more than a little selfconscious at being the only water-breather living and working aboard Titan.

Quitgretzing, Aili,she thought, gently scolding herself. You wanted a bridge job, you got a bridge job. If you’re unhappy, go be asepkinalorian, like your fourteen siblings.She shuddered. That job was mind-numbing, and she suspected she’d rather be a meal for Dr. Ree than return to Pacifica and its expectations of mundanity.

Seated at her immediate right, Cadet Zurin Dakal scowled down at the screen of his ops control panel.

“What is it, Zurin?” Lavena asked.

“I’m getting some strange readings here. Reallystrange.”

Lavena tapped her own console, and the screen before her filled with a myriad of numbers and sine-rhythms. She studied them for a moment, then turned back toward the center of the bridge.

“Commander Vale, Commander Jaza, we’ve found something highly unusual.”

Vale cocked an eyebrow. “On screen.”

Two smaller images opened to the starboard side of the forward viewscreen. One was nearly black, the other was filled with the same scrolling coordinates and other information that both Lavena and Dakal had just seen.

“Analysis?” Vale asked, and Lavena saw both the haggard-looking Vulcan, Tuvok, and the Bajoran science officer, Jaza Najem, running diagnostics at nearby science stations.

Jaza didn’t look up as he spoke over his shoulder. “Commander, I’m finding widespread spatial instabilities throughout this region. Entire sectors of the Small Magellanic Cloud are being affected to varying degrees.”

“Affected in what way?” Vale asked.

“The black portion of the screen shows a segment of space that should have something there. But there’s nothing there. No stars, no planets, no gases, no debris, no energy fields, no readings whatsoever. It’s a complete void. I can’t even find any sign of virtual particles popping in and out of existence. That shouldn’t happen even in the emptiest parts of intergalactic space.”

“How can that be? If it’s a void, wouldn’t whatever surrounds it be rushing in to fill it?”

Jaza waggled his hand from side to side. “Yes and no. But nothing’s coming into or out of this void.”

Lavena half-expected Vale to tell her to chart a course closer to that sector of space; many starship captains would have done just that. She was relieved then, to hear the ship’s first officer instead tell her to pull back.

“One interspatial anomaly at a time for this crew,” Vale said, half under her breath. She tapped her combadge.

“Bridge to Captain Riker.”

The captain’s voice issued immediately from the tiny speaker. “Go ahead.”

“You’re needed on the bridge, sir.”

As the doors to the ready room slid open, Lavena turned back to the conn, studiously avoiding making eye contact with the captain. She hadn’t had much direct interaction with him since she had first come aboard weeks ago. Given their checkered—if brief—history together, it was probably better that way.

After Vale and Jaza had finished briefing the captain on what they had learned so far, Tuvok turned to address all the bridge officers at once. “This ‘void,’ for want of a better term, has been reordered on an elementary particle level. Put simply, nearly half a cubic parsec of space containing what washas been replaced—by utter nothingness.”

“Which is pretty much the definition of a ‘void,’ ” Dakal said quietly. Lavena supposed that she wasn’t the only one who heard him, however, since her aquatically adapted hearing wasn’t particularly acute in the bridge’s prevailing M-Class environment. She also wasn’t sure what had triggered the sarcastic timbre of Dakal’s voice. Did the cadet have some personal issue with the commander, or was he simply living up to his people’s reputation for arrogance? She decided she would have to let time determine the answer to that question.

“What do those readings there mean?” Riker asked, pointing to another window-inset image that had been opened on the forward viewscreen’s port side.

“That’s an analysis of several other points we’ve been scanning throughout this portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud,” Jaza said. “Some of them are showing unusual activity. Whether this is also being caused by whatever created the void is unclear.”

“So, essentially we have a huge volume of local space that has been erased from existence,” Riker said.

“Except for the empty space itself, yes, that’s correct, sir,” Jaza said.

Riker nodded. “And we also have widespread spatial instabilities that are threatening other local regions.”

“Apparently, sir,” Jaza said. “I can’t explain it just yet. Not without resorting to the metaphysical, that is.”

“This pocket of the universe doesn’t seem terribly friendly to starship crews or other living things,” Vale said wryly.

Though Lavena found Dakal a bit difficult to understand, she decided then that Vale and Jaza were anything but. Noting how close together the two of them were standing at the main science station, and how often that seemed to happen, she wondered how anyone else could have failed to notice it.