“Ship’s status?” Picard said, looking Hawk in the eye.

“The warp drive is . . . gone. Completely,” Hawk said, with a touch of embarrassment. But now wasn’t the time for overly detailed explanations; what’s done is done. “We have only minimal impulse power and life‑support. Shields are down as well.”

“Then I gather that Data’s attempt to move the cloaking buoys hasn’t worked.” The screen showed that in the depths of space beyond the rapidly closing warbird, the subspace singularity’s hellish aspect remained unchanged.

Hawk swallowed hard as he watched the warbird grow larger on the screen. Seeing death make such a close approach lent an air of unreality to the entire situation. “I’m not even sure Data was able to transmit the signal before that last direct hit crippled him,” he said.

Picard looked across Hawk’s console at the one light that was flashing there. Reacting to the captain’s quizzical expression, the lieutenant explained what it was, and that he couldn’t shut it down.

Picard sat quietly staring at the light for several seconds as it pulsated. Long flashes alternated with shorter ones, though Hawk could discern no obvious pattern. “You’re right, Mr. Hawk,” Picard said finally. “Data hasn’tsent his transmission. But he hasmanaged to load it into the transmitter’s memory buffer.”

Hawk was puzzled. “How can you tell?”

“Because he just told me. Those flashes–it’s an oldstyle radio code. Morse, I believe it was called. Data is saying ‘transmit buffer data now.’ ”

Hawk’s eyes grew wide as he grasped the idea. Data had assembled the command sequences necessary to move the cloaking‑buoy network and thereby trigger the singularity abort–but his injuries had forced him to dump the command into the memory buffer before he’d been able to take it all the way through his subspace link to the Romulan array.

Hawk’s hands moved quickly across the console. He sighed with relief when he determined that the subspace channel he needed was still open.

“Transmitting,” Hawk said, slapping the final touchpad with his palm.

“Forward disruptor tube is fully charged, Commander,” said the Gal Gath’thong’s weapons officer. T’Veren watched with quiet anticipation as the young woman’s hand approached the firing toggle.

From across the central control room, the grizzled operations centurion spoke up, the customary steadiness missing from his voice. “Commander, something is happening on the security network’s outer periphery.”

The weapons officer paused in mid‑keystroke, and T’Veren’s diagonal eyebrows went horizontal with puzzlement.

“Has the cloaking field malfunctioned?” T’Veren said.

“It appears to have gone into a maintenance shutdown mode, sir.”

“What?”T’Veren roared in outrage. He knew this could only mean that the Apparatus that held the subspace singularity in check was now decloaked and visible. Such a thing should not have been allowed to happen–at least not prior to the Federation’s legally binding withdrawal from the Geminus Gulf.

“The field‑generation pods also seem to be . . . moving,”the decurion reported, sounding perplexed.

T’Veren struggled to keep his voice level. “Moving in what manner?”

“Inward, toward the Core’s containment facility itself. They have remained in formation, and are on a fast approach vector, heading toward the defense‑pod network.”

“The defense pods are becoming active!” the helmsman said excitedly, the crippled scoutship now all but forgotten.

“Tactical!” T’Veren shouted. He wanted a clear picture of what happened as the middle‑level defenses protected the Core from this apparent systems glitch.

On the screen, a tactical diagram appeared, showing the outer spherical array of cloaking generators as it swiftly contracted. Inside that sphere lay a second, stationary globe, composed of hundreds of small but heavily armed defense pods. T’Veren noted that the synchronized collapse of the outer sphere of cloaking generators was accelerating.

T’Veren watched in mute astonishment as the two spheres merged briefly; a moment later, the shrinking cloaking array had contracted so much that it slipped insidethe stationary defense‑pod network. The cloaking devices continued moving in formation, heading even faster toward the Core Containment Apparatus itself.

“Defense pods are turning inward and acquiring target locks,” the centurion said breathlessly. “They are taking aim on the cloaking‑field generators!”

T’Veren felt a rush of cold terror rush up his spine as he realized the full implications of what was happening.

“They’re about to fire directly into the Core,” he said, feeling utterly numb and helpless.

Hawk pointed the scoutship away from both the warbird and the singularity, pushing the single impulse engine to the limit. He was mildly surprised to note that the warbird was not in pursuit; in the condition the scout’s propulsion system was in, they wouldn’t have been at all difficult to overtake.

On the forward viewer, Hawk saw several of the cloaking buoys streak by the scoutship, looking like stars as seen from a vessel passing them at high warp.

“Let’s have a look at Commander Data’s handiwork, Mr. Hawk,” Picard said. His voice was strong, though he looked pale and drawn; Hawk chalked it up to a lingering effect of whatever the engine core’s tetryon burst had done to the captain’s artificial heart.

Hawk switched the forward viewer to a reverse angle, displaying what now lay aft of the withdrawing scoutship. On the screen, dozens of vessels, most of them small scouts and shuttles, dived and swooped to evade salvos from the spherical formation of stationary weapons pods, which were unleashing uncounted fusillades of disruptor fire in the general direction of the singularity’s containment equipment. At the facility’s core, away from the worst of the fighting, the singularity’s accretion disk glowed with a preternaturally angry brilliance, like some ancient war god enjoying blood sports being staged in its honor.

Hawk magnified the small image of the torus‑shaped facility at the core of the cloaked zone–the heart of the array that kept the subspace singularity contained–and saw that the outer edge of the torus was under siege as well. Metal‑eating molecular fires danced across several of its outermost structures.

Then the center of the torus gave off an expanding wave of energy, a deluge of iridescent brilliance that leaped outward in every direction. The phenomenon organized itself into a gigantic horizontal band, a vast and growing sapphire expanse that reminded Hawk of the tsunamis that sometimes struck Earth’s coastlines. It brought to mind holographic re‑creations he had seen of the first human‑controlled thawings of the subsurface Martian aquifers, and the titanic explosion that had devastated the Klingon moon Praxis eighty years ago.

Hawk watched uneasily as the strange phenomenon seemed to grow steadily, though its initial burst of light appeared to be dissipating harmlessly. Still, the thing hadn’t yet shown any sign of quietly disappearing.

“Sir, are you fairly confident that we were right about this?”

“How do you mean, Lieutenant?” Picard asked, his eyes barely open. The captain appeared to be in some pain.

“I mean our theory that a direct attack on the containment field would start an automatic abort and drop the singularity back into subspace,” Hawk said quietly.

“Mr. Hawk, there have been many occasions when I have trusted my life, and even my ship, to my senior officers’ expert judgment. This is simply another one of those times.”

But how many times was the whole universe in danger of being sucked into subspace if they made a mistake?Hawk thought.

Suddenly, the center of the accretion disk started to form a depression, as though some invisible but heavy object had been set down upon it. With agonizing slowness, the edges of the disk began contracting toward the center. The effect gradually accelerated until the phenomenon resembled a crumpled piece of paper. Then it collapsed onto itself completely, abruptly becoming too small and dark for the viewscreen to resolve.