“Yes, sir,” Sulu said. “To patrol the Neutral Zone?”

“In a matter of speaking,” Mentir said. “Enterpriseneeds to be there for the start of the war.”

Vaughn crawled through the dark, cramped access channel, pulling himself along with his fingers, pushing himself along with his toes. The small beacon he carried in his mouth revealed his surroundings in stark tones, throwing inconstant shadows as he moved past equipment protruding from the bulkheads. The heat, the closeness of the air, enveloped him completely, like cloth strips wrapping a mummy. His elbows and knees, knocking repeatedly against the metal decking and sides of the conduit, felt raw, even through the material of his Romulan uniform. The crew of Tomedclearly used this tube infrequently, if at all; Vaughn suspected that they utilized robotic maintenance devices for such areas of the ship, devices small enough to maneuver through the confined spaces. If true, then it left him less vulnerable to detection, although the narrow passage also caused the completion of his tasks to be both more uncomfortable and more difficult.

At a T-shaped intersection, Vaughn took the beacon from between his teeth and shined its beam down the tube stretching away to his left. He eyed the nearest access panels, trying to pick out the Romulan characters identifying the ship’s systems they covered. He saw a word that translated as Environment,and knew that life-support functions could be found there, though he did not bother to read the words in smaller characters that would have specified exactly which functions.

On the other side of the tube, Vaughn spied what he needed: Communications,and a specific relay that supported it. He stuck the beacon back between his teeth and struggled around the corner. After hauling himself into the intersecting conduit, he paused, setting the beacon down and resting his forehead on the back of one hand. He’d been down here in the bowels of Tomedfor a long time, working to locate and sabotage the ship’s external communications system. That effort had entailed finding and reconfiguring not just one subsystem or relay, but many, including independent backups, so that when the system was brought down, the Romulan crew would not be able to repair it.

Now, finally, Vaughn had come to the last site. He positioned the beacon on the deck so that it illuminated the area in which he needed to work. The access panel came free with a metallic click, and he set it to one side. Inside the bulkhead, fiber-optic clusters twined around various pieces of equipment. Vaughn studied the layout until he positively distinguished the coupling he required. Once he finished modifying it, all the critical points of the ship’s external comm system would be tied together into a single control circuit, and by way of that control, Tomedcould be rendered mute and deaf.

Vaughn retrieved a Romulan scanner from his belt, where it hung beside a sensor veil. He checked the chronometer on the display, verifying that he would have enough time to complete his tasks, then grabbed a small pack of handheld engineering tools. After performing a thorough scan of the coupling, he reached into the bulkhead and set to work.

As Vaughn toiled over the comm system, he felt the slight pulse of its operation beneath his touch. He had executed this same series of modifications several times already, and he used the tools quickly and expertly on the equipment. In just a few minutes, he, Commander Gravenor, and Captain Harriman would be one step closer to completing their mission. Success would justify the significant personal risk, Vaughn knew, but failure…failure would leave the blood of many on his hands.

In recent days, as this scenario had begun to unfold, he had begun to wonder if he had chosen the right career for himself. He recalled his boyhood dreams of exploration, but circumstances and his own natural abilities had conspired to send his life in another direction—in thisdirection. He had enjoyed his years of deskwork and training for Starfleet special operations, his sense of accomplishment particularly high when his efforts had contributed to the success of a field mission.

Still, he had looked forward to his own promotion to field duties with great anticipation, and he’d found his half-decade of service in that capacity more than satisfying, despite the vagaries of special ops work. Proportionate to his talents, Vaughn’s responsibilities had increased quickly and significantly, and as a consequence, so too had the stakes for which he worked. In the last two years or so, he had come to face his own peril almost as a matter of routine. But while he did not wish to die, the possibility of his own death did not scare him; the possibility of the deaths of others, though, specifically as a result of his actions, did.

As Vaughn withdrew one hand from the communications equipment in order to exchange one tool for another, he asked himself whether or not he believed in what he was doing. It did not require a great deal of introspection for him to conclude that he did; he would not have stayed in special ops otherwise. Evil existed in the universe in many forms, and he found not only necessity, but virtue, in fighting it.

The difficulties he experienced now, he realized, lay not only in the cost of failure, but in the price of success, both paid for by wounds heaped upon the innocent, and by death. The destruction of Universehad sent waves of anguish heaving through Starfleet, and though not destroyed, Ad Astrahad endured damage that would probably end up being measured in a life. Vaughn did not like being a party to that. He had never believed that virtuous ends justified anything but virtuous means.

He removed one hand from within the bulkhead and dragged the sleeve of his uniform across his face, wiping away the patina of perspiration that had formed there. The old simile Hot as Vulcanshould have had a companion phrase, he thought: Hot as Romulus.Vaughn would have removed his tunic had there been more room to maneuver within the narrow equipment tunnel.

The modifications took nearly an hour to complete. When he had finished, he replaced the access panel, then packed the engineering tools back inside their case. After gathering up his equipment—tool case, scanner, and beacon—he activated the circuit now controlling the critical points of Tomed’s external comm system. For now, the ship’s Romulan crew had been cut off from the rest of the universe. So too had Vaughn, Gravenor, and Harriman.

Vaughn retreated backward down the conduit, past the intersection, and finally headed back the way he had come. It took him twenty minutes to reach a junction. He burst from the access tunnel as though throwing off fetters. His body spilled onto the deck of the junction well, and he lay there on his back for a second, shining the beacon upward and peering at the various tunnels—some narrower, some wider—that connected into this area. Then he pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned against the bulkhead, resting for a few moments and gathering his strength. Time remained before his scheduled rendezvous with Commander Gravenor and Captain Harriman. As with him, he knew that both officers had been charged with tasks to accomplish once they had stolen aboard Tomed:the commander, to secure the helm, and the captain, to access internal sensors and—

“Alert,”a stilted male voice announced loudly in Romulan, accompanied by the short blasts of an alarm tone. “Singularity containment malfunction. Containment will fail in twenty-nine minutes.”The words rang in the enclosed space.

Vaughn quickly rose to his feet. An artificial quantum singularity—a microscopic, synthetically created black hole—powered the warp drive of Romulan starships, he knew. A complex containment field about the extremely efficient power source prevented the black hole from devouring the vessel, but once the singularity had been enabled, it could not be deactivated. If its containment failed, the ship would be doomed.