This wasn’t supposed to happen,Blackjack thought, and he headed for the navigation console. He was almost there when the room spun again, inertial dampers failing under the stresses of conflicting forces. He sailed backward, leaving his feet. He saw a chair fly past his face, missing him by only centimeters. He waited for the impact he knew would come from behind, and attempted to brace himself for it. In that moment, the alert lighting failed, plunging the bridge into darkness, the only faint illumination coming from the various control stations. Blackjack had just enough time before he hit the bulkhead to wonder whether the consoles would also lose power.

And then everything went black.

Fleet Admiral Aventeer Vokar stared at the main viewscreen and carefully studied the tactical display superimposed there. The powerful shock wave expanded in a three-dimensional arc from its point of origin, hurtling through space with destructive force. His flagship seemed to sit well beyond what would likely be its range, but—

“Shield status,” he said without looking away from the screen.

“Shields functioning at twenty-five percent,” Subcommander Linavil answered at once.

Now Vokar turned in his chair—raised above the deck at the aft end of the oval bridge—and peered over at the subcommander. She sat at the main tactical console, the reflected light of her readouts glimmering on the torso of her uniform. As with all the stations here, Linavil’s faced toward the center of the bridge, allowing her ready sightlines forward, to the main viewscreen, and aft, to the command chair. “Increase to full,” Vokar ordered. His ship would probably be safe this far from the detonation, but he had not risen to his position at the top of the Romulan Imperial Fleet by taking unnecessary risks.

“Sir,” Linavil said. She hesitated only a second before adding, “Yes, sir.” She operated her console, but Vokar understood her almost imperceptible delay for what it was: disagreement, bordering on insubordination. The ship’s cloak required an enormous amount of power to operate, and standard procedure—even during incursions into enemy space, such as this one—mandated minimizing the utilization of other systems, including defensive shields. Linavil knew that, of course, and her hesitation revealed that she believed there to be insufficient cause to alter that strategy. “Shields now functioning at one hundred percent,” she said.

“Yes,” Vokar said, giving a moment’s thought to whether or not it would pay to reprimand the subcommander. She had long been a loyal follower—sometimes almost tooloyal, her militant support of both his command and his other objectives threatening to draw unwanted attention. Still, she possessed other tangible assets, including an uncle in the Senate, and the ear of a centurion in the praetor’s cabinet. At the same time, she had lately taken issue with Vokar, mostly in subtle ways, and he had begun to wonder whether her own personal objectives had come to supersede her support of his.

Vokar stood, descended to the deck, and paced into the center of the bridge, returning his attention to the tactical display on the viewscreen. “Analysis, Sublieutenant Akeev.” Vokar already had his suspicions—more than that, his judgments—about what he was witnessing, but he wanted to hear an unbiased scientific view as well.

“The detonation is massive, Admiral,” Akeev replied from his station near the main viewer. He detailed the output of the explosion, a staggering figure. “Its profile reads almost like the blast caused by the catastrophic failure of a Starfleet warp core, but it is far more powerful.”

Vokar looked over at the science officer. Wearing the gray ensign of military technical disciplines down the right third of his uniform top, Akeev had long since lost the youthful appearance he’d had when Vokar had handpicked him from the Beryk Institute a decade ago. The scientist had graduated at the top of his class, and combined with the military proficiencies he’d shown as a boy in the Youth Guard, he’d been a commodity too potentially valuable for Vokar to overlook.

“ Couldthe explosion have been a warp-core failure?” Vokar asked. They had detected three Starfleet vessels in the area, and a fourth object that had resembled a ship, though he believed that it had likely been something else.

“I don’t think so,” Akeev said. “Besides being too powerful, the explosion was also too focused to have been a random blast.”

“Then what do you think it is?” Vokar asked. The answer seemed perfectly clear to him. Starfleet had spent a great deal of time recently conducting battle simulations at their outposts along the Neutral Zone, as well as upgrading the weapon systems in those installations, both activities obvious preparations for combat. When Imperial Fleet Command had received word of those operations, Vokar had taken his ship into Federation space to observe. Now similar information had brought Vokar and his ship here, and there seemed little doubt that the Federation was continuing its provisioning for a war it professed not to want. The hypocrisy sickened him, but the Federation would be made to pay for its dishonesty.

“I think it’s a weapon, Admiral,” Akeev said. “I think the fourth object out there was a weapons platform Starfleet was testing.”

“Not just a weapon,” Vokar said, looking back up at the viewscreen. The arc of destructive force had lost much of its power, he saw, but not before passing through a considerable volume of space.

“No, not justa weapon,” Akeev agreed. “A metaweapon.”

Vokar looked over again at the scientist. “A piece of information the praetor would surely like to have, wouldn’t you say, Akeev?” He smiled thinly, disgusted by the duplicitous Federation even as he foresaw its downfall. “Something even the Klingons would enjoy knowing.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

Vokar rounded on his heel and strode back to his command chair. “Tactical, return shields to one-quarter,” he said. “Navigation, plot a course for the Arandra Entry. Helm, maximum warp. I want to get a message to Romulus as soon as possible.” Vokar’s officers acknowledged his orders as they set about executing them. “Clear the screen,” he added. “Viewer ahead.”

On the main viewscreen, the tactical display winked off, a starscape appearing in its place. Vokar felt the thrum of the ship’s engines as they engaged, and a moment later, the stars on the viewscreen started to fall away to port. The Romulan flagship Tomedchanged course and headed for home.

Minus Seven: Aftermath

The medical scanner whirred as Morell passed it over her patient, the gentle sound just one of many in this section of Space Station KR-3’s infirmary. The soft, too-slow pulse that echoed the beating of her patient’s heart emanated from the diagnostic panel above the biobed, and a respirator hissed its sad but vital operation. The funeral dirge of modern medical equipment,Morell thought, not without bitterness. She usually appreciated such sounds, thinking of them not as a dirge, but as the accompaniment of the journey back to health of those she treated. But in a case such as this, when her best efforts—when anyphysician’s best efforts—would likely be insufficient, nothing could adequately fill the silence left by a missing voice.

Morell reviewed the scanner readings on a medical tricorder. She saw nothing unexpected on the display, and worse, she saw nothing encouraging. Setting the instruments down on a nearby cart, she took one more look at the diagnostic panel, as though it might show her something different than the scanner just had. Though she’d been a doctor for forty years, this aspect of her work had never gotten any easier. But then, as the first CMO under whom she’d served had told her, it shouldn’tget easier; being unable to save the sick or injured should always be hard.