After the incident, Harriman had gone to his father and convinced him not to empanel a court-martial for the actions of either starship’s captain. But relations between father and son had cooled after that, and a few silent months later, it had become clear that their relationship had foundered. They had spoken during the years since, but only in their official capacities within Starfleet, including some important meetings within the last year or so. Two days from now, though, their respective roles in the Universeproject would require more interaction between them than they’d had since…well, since all those years ago.

And maybe that’s affecting me more than I’ve been willing to admit,Harriman thought. Maybe—

No.He had long ago come to terms with his estrangement from his father. For despite all of the time they had spent together on the various starships to which his father had been assigned, they had never really shared a father-son bond. Even as a boy, Harriman had been treated more like a subordinate than like a child; Blackjack seemed to have been grooming him for service in Starfleet even then.

He pushed up from the sofa, but he didn’t move from there, his feet remaining planted and his thoughts remaining in the past. By the time Harriman had graduated the Academy, his father had attained the rank of rear admiral, a position that had allowed him some influence in forwarding his son’s fledgling career. Doors of opportunity had opened early and often for Harriman, more so than his performance—as good as it had been—had merited. More so than anybody’sperformance would have merited. He had initially felt divergent emotions about this: on the one hand, he had appreciated the chance to rise rapidly through the Starfleet ranks, but on the other, his pride and personal ethic had made him want to earn his promotions solely on the basis of his accomplishments and abilities. He had also resented that his father had not apparently believed him capable of such a career on his own.

Except that his father had thought him neither capable nor incapable, Harriman had eventually realized; the admiral’s actions had been motivated not by his opinions of his son, but by his opinions of himself.Blackjack had worn his son’s career as he would have a medal, as something that reflected upon him. It had taken Harriman a long time, but on that day seventeen years ago when the admiral had essentially taken command of Enterprisefrom him and had prepared to fire on the undefended Excelsior,he—Harriman—had finally faced the depth of his father’s self-involvement. He wished it were otherwise, wished that his father were different from the man he was, but in actuality, Harriman did not really like or respect him, and so also did not miss him.

But if this feeling of segregation from the crew was not about his father, as awkward as it might be to work with him in the next few days, and if it was not about Amina, much as he loved and missed her, then what was it about?

He paced across the room to his desk. He reached over it and turned the desktop computer interface around so that he could see it, then toggled it on. The image of Enterpriseappeared on the display. “Computer,” he said, “show me U.S.S. Universe,NX Twenty-nine Ninety-nine. External views, bow and starboard.”

“Please state identity and authorization code,”the computer responded in its mature, female voice.

“Identity: Harriman, Captain John J.,” he said. “Authorization: beta thirty-one meteor green.”

“Voiceprint and security code confirmed,”the computer said. “Displaying requested data.”

On the computer screen, the Enterprisevanished, replaced an instant later by split-screen images of Universe;a view from in front of the vessel sat on top, and a view from the side on the bottom. With a particularly wide beam and shallow depth, the starship looked as though it had been compacted top to bottom, and spread port and starboard. The primary hull, a narrow ellipse with its major axis running fore and aft, had no rise to it at its center. The secondary hull, another level, narrow ellipse, but smaller, connected to the primary hull directly, the forward section of the former lying directly below the aft section of the latter. A pair of thin struts, angling backward, connected each of the two warp nacelles to the secondary hull. The nacelles themselves were flat and wide, flaring out broadly from their midpoints aft. The two-hull, two-nacelle alignment suggested a resemblance to other Starfleet vessels, but departed dramatically from those other designs in execution.

This is what’s troubling me,Harriman thought. He circled around his desk and sat down in the chair behind it, pulling the computer interface around as he did so. This is what’s dividing me from my crew.Not the work to be done with Blackjack, not the goodbye with Amina. This.

He stared at Universe,a ship he had taken a key role in planning, from its unconventional appearance to its unorthodox employment of cloaking technology. The threatening uncertainty with the Romulans and the Klingons—and particularly with the Romulans ever since they had occupied the Koltaari world—had led him to this perilous course. And although his crew understood that they would be assisting in the final flight trials of the strange ship, Harriman knew that they did not comprehend the full importance of those trials. Billions of lives in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants depended on the success of this mission.

Harriman reached forward and jabbed at a control on the computer interface, blanking the screen. Not Blackjack, not Amina,he thought again. His own knowledge of the importance of the Universetrials was what separated him from his crew.

That, and the fact that he knew that they would only have one opportunity to get this right.

Ensign Borona Fenn sat at her sciences station on the bridge of Enterprise,studying two readouts. With her left eye, she scanned a geographical abstract from the library database, and with her right, the sensor readings provided by a series of class-one probes. Her eyes functioned independently of each other, and the structure of the Frunalian brain allowed her to process both sets of information simultaneously.

The title Bonneville Salt Flatsheaded the geographical précis, which also included historical notes about the area. Existing in a region of Sol III’s North American continent called the Great Basin, she read, the twelve-thousand-hectare desert formed during the final desiccative phases of an ancient inland lake. The old lakebed continued to be remade annually, though, when a shallow volume of snowmelt evaporated slowly from the salt surface, as winds leveled it into an immense, extremely flat plane. Because of the unusual evenness of the surface, humans had utilized the area four centuries ago to set land speed records; incredibly, wheeled ground vehicles had traveled faster than a thousand kilometers per hour there.

That explained the nickname that had been given to this region of space, Fenn realized. Starfleet traditionally field-tested new starship and engine designs here, with experimental vessels often surpassing velocity benchmarks. Of course, while it seemed reasonable that the word salthad been omitted from the area’s moniker, it made little sense to her that the word flatshad been retained; the space-time continuum could hardly be described as two-dimensional.

Humans,she thought, smiling, amused yet again by their proclivity for imprecision. Her roommate at Starfleet Academy, a human himself, had insisted that the proper term for such mental inexactitude was poetic license,but Fenn believed that distinction to be merely semantic, not substantive. Still, despite the recurrent assaults on her natural Frunalian instinct for meticulousness, she remained content with her decision to take her scientific studies into Starfleet. In the seven years since she had graduated the Academy, Fenn had relished her part in conducting scientific exploration—although there had been little of that recently. Her duties aboard Enterprisehad required her to function in a wide array of disciplines—including such diverse fields as geology, chemistry, cosmology, and physics—and she had found the experience intellectually and emotionally fulfilling.