A mechanical whirring and a loud hiss accompanied the opening of the top hatch. Terrell climbed out, followed by Dr. Babitz. Ilucci and Threx handed a stretcher up to Babitz, passed two large backpacks up to Terrell, then followed the two officers topside and began inspecting the hull.

Babitz ran to McLellan and set down the stretcher. She and Tan Bao spoke to each other in a quiet but steady stream of medical jargon. Terrell strapped on one pack and carried the other toward Nassir and the landing party. Setting down the second pack, the first officer said, “Orders, Captain?”

“Proceed downstream with Lieutenant Niwara and find Ensign Theriault,” Nassir said. “Niwara has the coordinates where Theriault went into the river. She’ll lead you there.”

Niwara nodded to Terrell and tucked her small pack inside the new, larger one that Terrell had brought.

From several meters away, Ilucci called out, “Whoa! What happened to Vanessa? I mean…to Ensign Theriault?” The engineer balked at Nassir and Terrell’s matching glares of reproof, then added in an apologetic tone, “Sirs.”

“I’ll brief you later, Master Chief,” Nassir said, allowing his chief engineer to save face. “Right now, we need to move.”

Terrell asked, “How long do we have to find her?”

“Until we get some antimatter,” Nassir said. “Or until something else goes wrong.”

The first officer flashed a disarmingly wry grin. “Not long, then. Understood.” He stepped quickly toward the river and called out, “Niwara, with me. Double quick-time.” The Caitian woman fell in beside Terrell, and together they jogged briskly along the riverbank, headed downstream.

Nassir turned to see Sorak and Razka helping Babitz and Tan Bao carry McLellan back aboard the Sagittarius. He fell in with zh’Firro and followed the stretcher bearers as they marched up onto the hull of the ship toward the topside hatch. The engineers were the first ones back inside the ship. At the edge of the hatch, the captain and zh’Firro took over for Babitz and Tan Bao while they climbed back inside the ship. Then the stretcher team carefully lowered McLellan into the waiting hands of the medical staff and engineers Ilucci and Threx.

Nassir watched the sky and the jungle for movement while the rest of his crew descended the ladder to the top deck. He grabbed the rungs and slid back down, the last one back inside. “Seal the hatch, Master Chief,” he said. “We’re taking her back down.”

In the span of just two hours, Ming Xiong had concluded that Tholian shipbuilders must be very fond of nooks, crawlspaces, and tight areas. Aside from main engineering, the compartment housing the miniaturized Shedai artifact, and the bridge, most of the interior spaces aboard the Tholian battleship were cramped and difficult for him to navigate.

Following the loss of contact with the Sagittarius, Xiong had spent his first hour of solitude on the Tholians’ bridge. Sending a message had been his first intention. Unfortunately, all the duty stations had looked alike. For all I know, he had reminded himself, they might be identical until configured by their user for a specific purpose.

Accessing the ship’s command and control systems had proved all but impossible. None of the apparent interfaces had responded to his poking and prodding. He had worried that he might accidentally fire the weapons or initiate a self-destruct mechanism while trying to send a distress signal to Vanguard, but his complete failure to make any of the consoles acknowledge his input had relieved him of that concern. His best guess was that the Tholians employed biometric security measures, ensuring that their systems could be operated only by Tholians.

After leaving the bridge, he had begun a methodical search of the ship, one compartment at a time, looking for anything that he could recognize as useful. Most of the ship’s passages narrowed into dead ends. He had probed several compartments packed with rows of honeycomb-like cells. Based on similar structures he had seen in the diplomatic habitat on Vanguard, he surmised that those were quarters for the crew.

An hour of mind-numbingly repetitive search protocols had brought him to a passageway lined with narrow, hexagonal apertures. Confident that the openings were wide enough to permit passage of his bulky pressure suit, he floated through one into a compact space that led to another dead end.

Tumbling awkwardly forward, he was instantly aware that the confined area had zero gravity. Eyeing its glassy black surfaces, he saw that they bore numerous small protrusions. He looked more closely at the edges inside the hexagonal opening. Multiple layers of what resembled hull plating and recessed mechanisms gave him the impression that this was an escape pod.

He decided with a satisfied smile that this was useful. Now I just need to figure out how to release it from the ship, control its descent to the planet, and escape from it once I get there. His hands glided over its various contours and raised surfaces. As on the bridge, nothing reacted to his touch. Stymied again, he let himself float while he formed a plan of action. Two ways to make this work, he concluded. Trick the ship into thinking I’m a Tholian so I can access the controls, or bypass the regular interface and make one of my own.

Xiong examined every square centimeter of the pod’s interior, looking for a way to access what was inside its bulkheads. As far as he could see, there were no removable panels. Damn, he thought with a shake of his head. I’d hate to be an engineer on a Tholian ship.

Questions formed quickly in his thoughts. How did the Tholian engineers make repairs to internal systems without access panels? Did they have some means of cutting through this obsidian surface and then making it whole again when their work was done? Might the ship’s bulkheads be like a mineralized form of smart polymer, capable of being retracted, reinforced, or reshaped by the application of properly modulated energy?

Looking at his multiple reflections on the black surfaces inside the pod, Xiong felt a surge of intuition: Somewhere on this ship, there is a tool that opens up these bulkheads. Climbing out of the pod back into the passageway beyond, he promised himself, Wherever that tool is, I’m going to find it.

Following the muddy river’s twisting path had proved to be the long way from the Sagittarius to the point where Theriault had plunged from a cliff into the rapids. Terrell had wanted to take a more direct route through the jungle, but Niwara had resisted. The rain, she’d said, had almost certainly obscured the trail that she and Theriault made during their flight from the Shedai attack, and she didn’t want to risk becoming disoriented while leading Terrell to the scene of the accident.

They had passed a high waterfall not long after leaving the ship. Since then they had traversed the top of the cliff. At most points along their winding route, there was less than two meters’ clearance between the edge and the tree line. Every few meters, Terrell snuck a look down into the ravine. It was choked with dry, tangled vines that stretched from one side to the other. They formed a thick layer of natural netting over the churning rapids below. He asked Niwara, “Were there vines like these where Theriault fell?”

“Yes, sir,” the Caitian scout replied. “Without them I doubt she would have survived the fall.”

Terrell hoped that Theriault’s ride down the river proved as fortuitous. “How much farther?”

“A few meters more,” Niwara said. She pointed at a bend in the gorge. “That’s where Ensign Theriault fell.”

He looked ahead and noted the gap that the science officer’s plunge had torn in the vines. When they reached the spot, Terrell said, “Hold up. We’ll run our first scan from here.” He lifted the tricorder slung at his side and powered it up. He set it to zero in on Theriault’s communicator signal. Within seconds it registered a lock. “Got her,” he said. “Bearing oh-eight-point-two, distance roughly twenty-one-