The image came to a stop for a moment, then proceeded down the lower corridor. Terrell gave a quick nod to McLellan, who unmuted the outgoing channel. “Uh, Ming?” Terrell inquired uncertainly. “Isn’t the command deck on the upper—”

“I have to see something,” Xiong replied over the comm. “Give me a minute.”

Terrell looked to his captain, who urbanely arched one eyebrow. “All right,” Terrell said. “It’s your show.”

Nassir leaned toward Terrell and whispered, “Clark? What’s he doing?” The most truthful answer Terrell could give him was a slow shake of his head and a shrug.

A wave of McLellan’s hand snared Terrell’s attention again. He walked over to her station, wearing an expression that he hoped would convey to the second officer how weary he was becoming of this particular ritual. “Yes?” he prompted her.

She spoke in a nervous whisper. “Shedai signals, sir. Origin unknown, but they’re being relayed to all three moons.”

“Have they detected us? Are they arming to fire?”

Switching her controls frantically, she shook her head and answered, “I don’t know. I think those weapons are always ready to fire. Maybe this is just routine activity, but I—”

“Raise shields,” Terrell said. “Now.” He turned and moved quickly back to the center of the bridge. “Sayna, stand by for evasive maneuvers. Theriault, are you reading any signal traffic on the surface? Any energy readings?”

“Nothing unusual, sir,” Theriault responded, “but I’m still getting interference, lots of it.”

Nassir cut in, “Clark, look at the screen.”

Terrell turned his head and saw the image that had his captain’s jaw hanging half open. Xiong had found a compartment inside the Tholian ship that contained a near-perfect, small-scale replica of one of the Shedai artifacts.

Xiong’s voice wavered with apprehension and crackled from static on the channel. “Commander Terrell?”

It took Terrell a few seconds to answer, “Yes?”

“Please tell me you’re seeing this.”

“Oh, we’re seeing it, all right,” Terrell said. “We’re just not believing it.”

“Believe it,” Xiong said.

Blasts rocked the Sagittarius. A fountain of flames, sparks, and debris erupted from an unmanned aft duty station. Lights failed as the inertial dampeners cut out. In the darkness, Terrell didn’t see the corner of the port console until he hit it chin-first.

Nassir lifted his voice above the thunderous din, but he still sounded calm. “Sayna, put us between the Tholian ship and the planet’s moons!” He thumbed the intraship comm on the arm of his chair. “Engineering, damage report!”

“Containment failure!” Ilucci shouted back, his anger more evident than his fear. “Had to dump our antimatter!”

Terrell pulled himself back to his feet. “Master Chief! Can you beam Xiong back?”

“Negative,” Ilucci said. “Transporter’s down!”

From the tactical station, McLellan called out, “Shields buckling, Captain!”

A roaring boom pinned zh’Firro to the helm and threw the rest of the bridge crew forward. Over the comm, Ilucci yelled, “Dorsal shields are gone!”

“Sayna,” Nassir said as he pulled himself back fully into his chair. “Get us out of here!”

Zh’Firro looked over her shoulder. “We can’t get out of firing range in time on impulse.”

“The planet,” Terrell cut in. “Let’s see if they feel like shooting at themselves.”

Nassir confirmed the order. “Sayna, take us down—evasive pattern Bravo. Bridy Mac, send an SOS to Vanguard.” He activated the shipwide comm channel. “All hands, this is the captain. Brace for emergency landing. Bridge out.” More explosions rattled the tiny ship as he closed the channel. Radiant phosphors rained down from sparking systems overhead.

On the main viewer, the blue-green sphere of Jinoteur IV grew larger until the curve of its horizon passed beyond the edge of the screen, and all that was left was the broad canvas of its surface. Golden plumes blazed ahead of the ship as it penetrated the atmosphere. Turbulence quaked the Sagittarius and rattled its damaged hull with deafening bangs of metal against metal.

Zh’Firro glanced back at Nassir. “Landing gear’s jammed. Airspeed dropping. Land or water, sir?”

The captain and the first officer looked at each other.

“A hard landing might breach the hull,” Terrell warned.

Nassir countered, “Breach on a water landing, we’ll sink like a rock.”

“All right,” Terrell said as the deck rumbled violently beneath him. “Split the difference.”

Nassir nodded and said to zh’Firro, “Aim for a beach.”

Terrell presented a stoic mien as the ship plummeted toward the planet’s surface, but as the engines whined and the hull clattered and moaned, he couldn’t help but grind his teeth as McLellan issued the distress call.

“Vanguard, this is Sagittarius! We’re attempting an emergency landing on the fourth planet. We need antimatter! Repeat, we need antimatter! Stand by for final coordinates!”

As the ship dropped below a thick layer of storm clouds, features of the landscape appeared, first hurtling closer, then blurring under the ship as zh’Firro fought to level their flight. “Impulse power fading, Captain,” she said. “We’re losing helm response.”

At the science station, Theriault clung to her chair and stared at the main viewscreen, mesmerized by the rising menace of Jinoteur’s rainswept surface.

“Theriault,” Nassir said. “How far to the coastline?”

His order was enough to snap her out of her fear trance. She turned and gazed down into the blue light of the readout under the sensor hood. “Twenty-three hundred kilometers.”

The Sagittarius dipped abruptly to starboard, and the pitch of the engines’ whine began a swift, steady decline. Terrell leaned on Nassir’s chair and advised him, “We won’t make it.”

“Ensign,” Nassir said to Theriault. “What’s the nearest body of shallow water? Quickly.”

She threw a few switches without lifting her eyes from her sensor readout. “Twenty-one kilometers, bearing two-eight-point-one-six.”

“Helm, make that your course,” Nassir said. Blue-green blurs whipped along the bottom edge of the viewscreen as the Sagittarius skimmed the top of a jungle forest’s canopy. The captain looked up at the grim-faced Terrell and smiled. “Look on the bright side. Now we can do the planetary survey.”

With a sardonic grimace, Terrell replied, “Yes, sir. That was my first thought as well.”

“Cheer up, Clark,” the captain said. “It could always be worse, right?”

Terrell chortled. “Yes, sir. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in Starfleet, it’s that nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.”

“That’s the spirit,” Nassir said.

The Sagittarius slammed through a dense swath of forest toward a flat, muddy brown streak winding through the jungle. Even through the duranium hull, Terrell heard the rapid, sharp cracks of hundreds of trees snapping from high-speed impact.

As the ship nose-dived, Terrell could only hope that the dark brown surface directly ahead of it was water.

After the sound of the explosions faded from Xiong’s helmet comm, there had been nothing on the channel except silence. Several attempts to hail the Sagittarius by increasing the power to the suit’s transceiver had proved fruitless. He checked the chronometer mounted on the left forearm of his suit. Contact with the ship had been lost for more than six minutes.

Xiong stood in the shadow of the unusual alien machinery he had discovered aboard the Tholian ship. It seemed to waver and ripple while he looked at it. The pressure and heat inside the ship made everything look like a mirage.

He glanced at the air and power gauges on his right forearm. Enough air for another ten hours, he noted. About the same reserve in battery power. Ten hours to find a way out of this. Seeds of anxiety that were nestled in his gut threatened to bloom into a fully developed panic at any moment. Stay calm, he reminded himself. Review the facts.