“How is our Reman guest?” Ogawa asked.

“Resting comfortably,” Ree said. “He’s a tough one, if a bit of a bleeder. Given the number of scars on his body, it seems he’s endured several lifetimes worth of battles and close calls. At the rate he’s healing, I expect he’ll be mobile again within days.”

The three of them re-gowned themselves, then Onnta switched off the OB/GYN room’s bio-isolation field. They entered the room, and Ogawa was pleased to see that nothing had gotten worse, though Olivia was still clearly in both distress and discomfort. However, it seemed that the combination of morphenolog and asinolyathin was finally easing Olivia Bolaji’s pain.

Onnta set about his job efficiently, and Ogawa took mental notes as they worked together. She suspected that Ree was doing so as well; after all, transporter surgery was one of Onnta’s specialties, and they both could learn a great deal from him. Ogawa rolled the incubator bay closer to the bed as Onnta discussed the procedure with the Bolajis. Here, with a conscious, lucid patient and her husband, Onnta’s bedside manner was impeccable, if ever-so-slightly condescending.

“Do you have any further ques—” Onnta said just before being thrown to one side, along with anything that wasn’t bolted to the deck.

“Something just hit the ship,” Axel said, righting himself even as the deck leveled out.

“Sickbay to bridge,” Ree said into the nearest companel. Of the three medical personnel in the room, he had remained the most stable when the deck had shifted. Ogawa noticed that he was using his tail almost as a tertiary leg, and that Ree’s dewclaws had dug deeply into the carpet.

“Now’s not a good time, Doctor,”Jaza said. “We’re taking fire. Try to lash down the breakables. Bridge out.”

Ogawa prayed that Noah would be safe enough in their quarters.

“You need to get to the bridge,” Olivia said, grimacing from the pain.

Axel clasped his left hand over the top of the one she held his right in. “Aili’s going to do fine up there. If they need me, they’ll call me. But right now, it’s more important for me to be here with you.”

Onnta set about resetting the delicate transporter device. It hung from a radial arm on a wheel-mounted floor stanchion.

Ogawa felt a surge of sickening fear in the pit of her stomach a nanosecond before the room rocked once again, more violently this time. Noah!

After they had all righted themselves the second time, Onnta looked toward Ogawa and Ree. “I can’t work under these conditions. If the ship gets hit again while I’m operating, the transporter might glitch.”

Ree looked up at the display monitor positioned above the biobed, his double eyelids nictitating. “We may not have a choice, Doctor. We don’t know how long the ship will be in combat, and Olivia’s biosigns are already stressed as it is. We may just have to hope that we don’t experience another jolt like that.”

Ogawa watched as Onnta considered Ree’s words, then looked back at the biobed display, which showed dangerously high blood pressure, as well as signs of incipient edema and preeclampsia.

“Okay, we go for it,” he said finally, moving the radial arm back into position, recalibrating it for a second attempt.

Four tense minutes later, a tiny, twenty-five-week male preemie materialized within the incubator bay, and immediately began crying lustily. As Ogawa clamped the newborn’s umbilical cord—which had materialized severed and cauterized as part of the transport process—Onnta concentrated on beaming out the remainder of the cord, along with the placental tissue that had nurtured the child during its gestation.

“Is he all right? Can I hold him?” Olivia asked. She had stayed awake through the whole procedure, fighting off the effects of the anesthetics.

A chime sounded from the wall-mounted comm unit’s speaker. “All decks, brace for impact!”The voice belonged to Captain Riker.

Ogawa barely had time to secure the incubator before the entire room rocked again. She felt herself crash into the biobed as the lights dimmed, and heard Olivia, Onnta, and Axel scream.

His chest was so full of pride that he thought he would burst. None of the work he had done on either theDefiant- orIntrepid- class starship design teams during his years at the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards could even come close to the triumph of experiencing the maiden voyage of the first ship he had designed in toto.

The field tests for the prototypeU.S.S. Luna , the first of its class, had been completed the previous week, and now the newly minted vessel and the eager young personnel who flew her were on their first “real” voyage out of the Sol system. The permanent crew had become a cohesive, well-oiled unit over the last few months of “fit-and-finish” testing, and he couldn’t be happier. He had even begun to date the ship’s hydroponics chief, a winsome—and single—Efrosian woman named Dree, whose long white hair almost reached the floor behind her. She was better for him than the last woman he had been romantically involved with, whose husband had been less than understanding after he had discovered the real nature of their “working relationship.” Unlike Efrosians, humans had rather quaint and curious notions about marital fidelity and sexual propriety.

So now, as he stood on the bridge at Captain Fujikawa’s request, he felt better than perhaps at any other time in his life. He watched the stars rush toward them on the forward viewscreen. Though he had seen this sight hundreds of times before, it all seemed new because of the current circumstances. He could scarcely wait to make love to Dree while viewing those stars from his luxurious guest quarters.

Then, the ship had shuddered, interrupting his self-satisfied reverie. In the instant before the computer systems triggered an alarm, he felt it, a sensation almost imperceptible to anyone not intimately familiar with the vessel’s innermost workings. He knew what had happened even before the computer announced it. An explosion in the engine room. But he didn’t knowwhy it had happened. And he couldnever have predicted what was about to happen next—

“Dr. Ra-Havreii? Are you all right?”

The voice was insistent, calling to him from another time, another place, another disaster. Dr. Xin Ra-Havreii forced himself to open his eyes, feeling pain flaring through his shoulder. The acrid air assaulted his delicate sense of smell, carrying with it a perspiration born of fear. He also inhaled the metallic aroma of ozone, and a bouquet of scents that reminded him uncomfortably of barbecued sweetbreads.

The voice that had awakened him belonged to Ensign Crandall, an eager-to-please young human engineer who talked far too much. But Lieutenant Commander Ledrah liked him, and since it was her engineering team, RaHavreii never said anything untoward to the youthful babbler.

Ra-Havreii had quickly collected his thoughts, taking stock of his physical being as short-term memories flooded back into the forefront of his mind. “Yes, I’m all right,” he said. He had come down to engineering at the first sign of trouble with the Remans, having viewed the approaching conflict from the VIP quarters Commander Troi had provided for him. As always, the gracious—and quite fetching—Ledrah welcomed his aid and advice, especially once Titanhad sustained a direct attack that threatened to compromise not only her shields, but also her structural integrity fields.

A second attack had prompted Ledrah to dispatch the none-too-bright Rossini twins to the bridge to fix the main viewscreen there. Ra-Havreii suspected that the pair had barely passed their engineering classes at the Academy, and would have thrown them off the crew, along with Crandall, at the first available opportunity, had this been his crew. But, as he kept reminding himself, this was nothis team. He felt fortunate that he got any play at all in Starfleet these days, given that the bastards at the Starfleet Skunkworks were less forgiving than a menopausal Betazoid. And he assumed that if he wanted to maintain his welcome aboard Titanfor any appreciable length of time, then he’d best keep his intimate past relationship with one particular menopausal Betazoid discreetly concealed from Captain Riker’s wife.