Oh, no.Riker paused to study Jaza’s readouts momentarily before turning his attention back to the main viewscreen’s tactical display. Please let me be wrong.“Cadet Dakal, hail Captain Tchev and try to warn him. And get me Donatra.”

“Aye, Captain.”

At that precise instant, the viewscreen blip that represented the Klingon vessel abruptly brightened, then vanished.

Ashen-faced, Dakal turned from his console to face Riker. “Captain, the Dugh’s hull has just collapsed. She was completely destroyed in the resulting reactor explosion.”

Deanna told me you were hiding something, Donatra,Riker thought, a white-hot anger searing the inside of his chest as he returned to his seat. And now I think I know what it was.The chair’s autorestraints gently snapped into place across his thighs as the final seconds before the shock wave’s approach ticked away.

Titanrocked again, this time far more violently than before. The bridge seemed to invert completely before righting itself. The lights failed. Darkness enfolded Riker, as though he suddenly had been plunged beneath the frigid waters of Becharof Lake during an Alaskan winter.

He ceased thinking about the Dugh,the convoy, the Vanguard colony, the away team, the Red King, and everything else.

Chapter Twenty

Ensign Crandall looked up from his engineering boards. If the warp core hadn’t suffused the entire engine room with a deep, blue glow, the junior engineer’s narrow, hairless face would surely have looked as white as a mugato.

“Dr. Ra-Havreii, the warp field is destabilizing!”

But Ra-Havreii didn’t need to look at Crandall’s readouts to understand that. The sudden, random syncopations and dissonances now thrumming up and down the length of the two-story-tall matter-antimatter dynamo that constituted Titan’s heart made the trouble obvious enough to him.

Ensigns Paolo and Koasa Rossini busied themselves rerouting a maze of EPS power taps in an effort to lower the warp core’s steadily rising temperature. Nearby, crouched under the alarm-festooned master situation monitor, Cadet Torvig Bu-kar-nguv worked at the matte-black matter reactant injector controls, using both of his telescoping bionic appendages as well as the grasping hand situated at the terminus of his long, prehensile tail. Other trainees and technicians moved to and fro, comparing what was on their padds to the displays that appeared on various consoles.

Klaxons blared. Titanshook. The computer spoke, its manner irritatingly calm. “Warning. Antimatter containment failure imminent. Warning.”

Sweat sluiced down Ra-Havreii’s back, soaking into his uniform, turning his long white hair lank, and flattening his drooping, gray mustachios against his brown cheeks. He ignored this as best he could while grappling with his steadily rising fear.

He tried not to think about how his predecessor Commander Ledrah had died, roasted to death in this very engine room.

He tried not to recall the explosion that had torn through the engineering section of the Luna,the starship that had served as the prototype for Titanand all the other vessels of her class.

He tried not to imagine the treetop canopy of Efros Delta’s forests accepting his dying essence into the eternal bliss of Endless Sky.

He tried not to visualize the soil of his homeworld tearing itself asunder beneath his feet, leaving him to tumble headlong into the much-feared volcanic fires of the Efrosian underworld.

The ship bucked and rocked again, harder this time. “Warning. Antimatter containment failure in thirty seconds. Warning.”

Moving to the duty console that Crandall was using, Ra-Havreii gently pushed the young human aside. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sounds the warp core was making as it strained against the combined influences of interspace, subspace, de Sitter space, and perhaps even his own personal demons and unquiet old ghosts.

“Computer, manual override on antimatter intermix ratios,” he ordered. “Authorization Ra-Havreii Delta Efros Delta Zeta.”

He placed his left hand on the manual intermix vernier and closed his eyes. His hand and his ears became all that existed in the universe. He listened to the deep, increasingly discordant cry of the engine core with the same attentiveness he’d once devoted to learning the tribal lays of Efros Delta’s ancient forest priests. His hand moved gently on the vernier in response to what his ears told him from moment to moment.

This time, he was determined not to fail. Even if success meant ending up as Ledrah had.

Riker was summoned back from the darkness by the shrill peal of klaxons. His eyes opened to the sight of Titan’s bridge, which was bathed in the subdued red tones of emergency lighting.

Until he glanced down at the chronometer’s glowing readout on the left arm of his command chair, he had no clear sense of how long his interval of unconsciousness might have lasted. Counterintuitive though it seemed to him, only moments had passed since the universe had tumbled into oblivion all around him.

Seated behind the ops and flight control consoles set just forward of the captain’s chair, Dakal and Lavena were moving groggily, as though both were recovering from a light phaser stun. His eyes drawn to his right by movement, Riker saw that a shaken-looking Admiral Akaar was helping Eviku up from the deck beside the secondary science station. At the console beside Eviku’s, Jaza was already hard at work, a livid red cut on his forehead providing the only clue that he’d experienced anything the least little bit out of the ordinary. Crewman Kay’re crossed in front of him, shedding feathers as he moved unsteadily toward the port-side ops station from which he had been thrown during Titan’s passage into the rift.

Thoughts of the rift—along with the enigmatic hash of random static now being displayed on the main viewscreen—chased the last of the cobwebs from Riker’s mind.

“Cadet Dakal, kill those klaxons,” he said. “And show me what the hell is going on outside. Jaza, get me sensor readings on our present position, asap.” Until they had some hard data to go on, there was no way to tell whether Titanand the rest of the Oghen rescue convoy had made a successful transit back to near–Beta Quadrant space, or had instead taken a perhaps fatal interspatial detour.

The klaxons abruptly ceased and the bridge fell at once into a subdued silence, which made the faint sloshing of Lavena’s hydration suit conspicuously audible. Moments later the interference on the viewscreen began to clear, like the fog over San Francisco Bay reluctantly retreating from the wan summer sun.

There, dominating the screen, was the Red King in all its multicolored glory. All angry ambers and blood reds, its energetic tentacles seemed to reach directly toward Titaneven as its indistinct boundaries appeared to be expanding, slowly but inexorably, toward the screen’s periphery, gradually painting over the underlying starfield. Whatever this phenomenon had become, one thing seemed clear: it was no longer in a peaceful slumber.

“Looks like our Sleeper may have woken up on the wrong side of the bed,” Riker said quietly.

“But at least weseem to be on the correct side of it,Captain,” said Dakal, turning toward Riker. In the dim, ruddy lighting, the young Cardassian’s gray, almost scaly flesh looked like the patina of corrosion on one of the ancient copper statues in Golden Gate Park. “This is an aft view. We are now moving away from the phenomenon, at warp two point two.”