“The fleet will be ready to move out in five of your minutes, Captain,”Donatra said. “SinceTitan is taking the point, we will await your signal to begin. Donatra out.”

Riker sat behind his ready room desk, staring into the viewscreen that had displayed Commander Donatra’s thoughtful visage only moments ago.

From the time of her initial change of heart about assisting with the evacuation of Oghen, Donatra had again proved herself to be an amenable ally. She and her staff had been nothing but cooperative during the several ad hoc meetings that had been convened so that the engineering specialists could determine the safest, most efficient way to tow the Vanguard habitat to the spatial rift—and then back to Romulan space through the aperture Donatra had called the Great Bloom.

Leaning back in the padded chair behind the heavy Elaminite wood desk, Riker wondered how she would react to the tentative plan that Titan’s science and engineering people had devised: a scheme to seal the spatial rift up behind the towing convoy using improvised antimatter singularity bombs.

Improvised,Riker thought, from the warp cores of about two dozen of Donatra’s warbirds.

Considering the plan’s high cost, would Donatra take advantage of a one-time opportunity to put the Sleeper permanently to bed again? Riker could only hope that she would see the plan’s merits. After all, she would lose only the warp cores in the bargain—not her ships or their crews, assuming that everything went to plan—in exchange for closing the spatial rift forever.

If she went for it, the door to the emerging protouniverse would be barred. The peril now facing entire sectors of Neyel space, and perhaps places far beyond it as well, would be neutralized.

Once Cethente finishes his final round of simulations, it’ll be time,Riker thought. I’llhave to ask Donatra to help carry out the plan. And since I can’t force her to sacrifice any of her warp cores, the decision will have to be up to her.

Jaza had already finished working out the final details of the towing operation, aided by Ra-Havreii, Cethente, a quintet of Romulan astrophysicists and engineers, and a handful of other Titanofficers and noncoms.

The plan was to have the entire fleet of Romulan warbirds network their tractor beams and warp fields, in order to tug the Vanguard colony along toward the spatial anomaly at high warp. The job would take approximately two and a half days, not to mention immense amounts of power, and would most likely be risky given the interspatial energy discharges that were popping up with such frequency throughout the expanse between the Oghen system and the rift. Titan’s job would be to keep its enhanced sensor nets alert for those, effectively taking the point and providing early warning to the rest of the convoy.

Only a few years prior, ten ships had performed a similar towing job, ferrying the Cardassian space station Empok Nor across a distance of three light-years. Now, they had to pull a much larger habitat across about twice that distance, though with far more ships and power to apply to the task. Jaza had argued that the Vanguard habitat’s simple, blunt shape made it a far better candidate for warp-speed towing than Empok Nor, whose rococo Cardassian design had made it far more vulnerable to being sheared apart, either by tractor beam stresses or warp-field variances.

Though the science and engineering specialists had debated for some time, they had emerged from their meetings convinced that it could be accomplished.

Besides, this won’t be the first time the old girl has been dragged across the universe at high warp,Riker kept telling himself. The asteroid colony had once served as an Earth-orbiting laboratory, and it had been ejected into deep space as a consequence of a failed twenty-first century warp-field experiment.

Riker had pointed out to Donatra that once the towing convoy was back on the Romulan side of the rift, her fleet wouldn’t need to tow the Vanguard colony any further. At that point, other Starfleet or even Klingon vessels could be called in to take up the slack in towing Vanguard back to Federation space.

He resumed studying the padd that contained the Vanguard towing data for the next several minutes.

From his combadge, the voice of Ensign Aili Lavena interrupted him.

“Captain, your skiff has just docked onto Vanguard, apparently with minor damage. They managed to recover another twenty-two refugees, most of them children.”

“Outstanding, Ensign.”

Good for Akaar,Riker thought with a grim smile. He’d been wary of the Admiral’s plan to use the skiff—which then constituted Titan’s only lifeboat, other than the emergency escape pods—to conduct a perilous rescue mission for which it wasn’t designed. But the old man had apparently succeeded anyway. Guess that’s why he’s still alive—and vital—after so many decades in Starfleet.

Riker rose from behind his desk, exited his ready room, and stepped out onto the bridge. He stopped as he reached his command chair and faced the main viewscreen. It displayed the half-daylit planet Oghen. But instead of a pleasant, blue-green-brown M-Class world, it looked like one of Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of Hell.

“How many ships are still down—”

Lavena turned toward him, interrupting. “Sir, we’ve just received word that the Ellingtonhas been badly damaged.” Her aquamarine eyes were wide behind her close-fitting, transparent hydration mask.

Riker frowned, feeling his pulse jump. “How badly?”

“She’s accelerating from the surface toward orbit now, but she’s losing power fast. I don’t think she’s going to be able to make Vanguard.”

Riker considered his options. Within the next several minutes, they’d be towing the Vanguard habitat away from Oghen orbit. None of the Romulan ships in the towing fleet could be spared as the delicate preparations continued. That left rescuing the Ellingtoneither up to Titanor one of her other auxiliary craft, all of which were now safely back aboard.

“Ensign Lavena, plot an intercept course toward the Ellington.Inform the Romulans that we will be ready to lead the convoy forward just as soon as we recover the last of our shuttlecraft.”

“Aye, Captain,” Lavena and Dakal chorused as they both went to work.

Riker’s combadge chirped. “Cethente to Captain Riker. I have news for you, sir.”

He touched the badge. “Go ahead.”

“The latest simulations were successful, Captain. We can indeed seal the rift, as hypothesized. With Commander Donatra’s cooperation, of course.”

“Well done, Doctor.”

“I trust that you will now, as you humans say, ‘pop the question’?”

Cethente signed off, leaving Riker chuckling despite his mood. On the main viewscreen, the Ellingtonhove into view, struggling its way clear of Oghen’s gravity well.

“Mr. Dakal, open a channel to Commander Donatra.”

As he waited for Donatra’s image to appear before him again, he considered Cethente’s peculiar choice of idiom. “Popping the question,” of course, was a term reserved for a proposal of marriage. Such things were extremely serious.

It occurred to him then that to Donatra, the request he was about to make might seem moreserious than even that.

VANGUARD

Dr. Ree and Dr. Venora were processing the latest group of refugees as they beamed in from the captain’s skiff. As the group milled about, near panic, Tuvok saw Admiral Akaar leaning up against one of the habitat’s walls, wincing.

Tuvok approached him warily, but respectfully. “Do you require assistance, Admiral?”

Akaar stared at him, his gaze inscrutable. It didn’t appear to reflect pain from a physical wound, nor did it harbor the kind of simmering anger that Tuvok had seen in his erstwhile friend’s eyes three decades ago—and over the course of the past week.