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  That could have been me. It could have been my ship and crew.

  Perhaps it would be, one day, Sarith knew. On the other hand, the battle could just as easily have gone in the Starfleet captain’s favor, resulting in the loss of a celebrated Romulan commander and his vessel. There were worse things than dying in service to the Empire in order to maintain the security of the Romulan people, including her family. Every officer always was aware of that possibility. Such was the burden of duty. However, there was something to be said for living to continue carrying out one’s duty for another day.

  Today, for example.

  “Continue your research, Centurion Darjil,” said Sarith, after a moment. “Keep Subcommander Ineti informed of any new developments. Notify the sensor officers on the other ships to maintain their observations as well. If and when anything changes, I want to be ready to act.” She had already conferred with the commanders of the N’minecci and the Jarax, notifying them that their sensor crews were to be put at her disposal until further notice.

  The young officer nodded. “Yes, Commander.”

  As they moved away from the centurion and allowed him to return to work, Ineti said in a soft tone, “Somewhere, out there, perhaps in a realm unreachable to us, awaits a great prize.” His voice had taken on that musing, contemplative quality he adopted when he decided the time was appropriate for sounding like the wizened mentor to which she likened him. “Delivering it to the praetor would do much to secure your standing within the Empire, and silence those who would doubt you.”

  “I am well aware of that, my friend.” Sarith was all too aware that fate had provided her an unparalleled opportunity.

  She just needed to be ready to seize it.

  11

  ELSEWHERE

  U.S.S. Enterprise-D

  Though the ready room had been his for nearly a year now, Riker had yet to take true ownership of the small inner sanctum.

  Leaning forward in his chair, he rested his forearms across the polished surface of his desk and contemplated this space. Though it was intended as a secluded workspace for the ship’s captain while still allowing easy, direct access to the bridge, Riker found he could not get comfortable in this room. It had its uses, of course, such as for private conversations with members of his senior staff, or simply a temporary refuge where he might shrug off the stresses of command for a brief time. So far, he had been unable to relax here, feeling as though he might be missing out on some activity or other concern unfolding on the bridge.

  How did you do it, Jean-Luc? How could you just set it all aside, even for five minutes?

  These were questions Riker had asked himself more than once. Jean-Luc Picard, a private and deeply contemplative man in most respects, had found some measure of serenity here. When the Enterprise was involved in a specific mission or task, Picard had often eschewed his personal quarters during off-duty hours in favor of seeking brief rest periods here. This was also where he spent the bulk of his time tending to ship’s business, such as taking advantage of the quiet and solitude in order to complete the latest in an unending string of reports for Starfleet Command. With that, Riker could sympathize, as he forced himself to avoid glancing in the direction of his desktop computer terminal and the incomplete status update displayed upon it. Perhaps if he ignored it long enough, the report would finish writing itself before enabling its own transmission to Admiral Jellico back on Earth.

  I’ll just sit here and hold my breath.

  Though Riker had written his share of similar correspondence during his tenure as the Enterprise’s first officer, the volume and scope of the administrative burden placed upon a starship captain had to be experienced in order to be fully appreciated. It seemed axiomatic that the amount of paperwork required of any Starfleet officer increased in direct proportion to an individual’s rank.

  So I should probably avoid ever becoming an admiral.

  The door chime sounded, breaking Riker from his reverie.

  “Come in,” he called out, and the doors parted to reveal Deanna Troi. As was her habit, she was dressed in professional civilian attire rather than a Starfleet uniform, in this case a teal-blue dress, with her communicator badge serving as the only hint to her formal billet aboard the ship. Like many ship’s counselors, Troi believed that opting for a more relaxed choice of ensemble when carrying out her duties allowed her patients to relax in her presence, removing much of the inherent formality that came with the uniform. Captain Picard had agreed with her views on this subject soon after her arrival aboard the starship, and Riker had never seen a reason to change that position.

  “Hi,” he said, smiling as he straightened in his seat. Seeing her always made him feel better.

  Troi stepped into the room. “Everything all right?” Without waiting for an invitation, she availed herself of the low couch positioned along the ready room’s forward bulkhead, beneath an artist’s rendering of the Enterprise soaring through interstellar space.

  “Everything’s fine,” replied Riker. “Just taking a short breather.” Forcing himself to look at his computer terminal, he added, “Another report for Admiral Jellico. I’m having a hard time coming up with new ways to say we have nothing new to report. I’m thinking I may just change the time stamp on the last message and send it again, just to see if he notices.”

  Though she offered a polite chuckle, Troi still shook her head. “I don’t think that would go over very well with the admiral.”

  “Don’t look at me. It was his idea.” Riker nodded toward the large globe-shaped aquarium occupying the room’s back corner. Swimming in and around the plants and rocks contained within the tank was Livingston, the lionfish that had been Picard’s companion here in the ready room almost from the beginning of the late captain’s tenure aboard the Enterprise. Picard had never explained his reasons for keeping the fish. After Riker assumed command, it had taken him some time to realize he had never thought to broach the subject while Picard was alive. Perhaps it was because whenever he was in this room, on the other side of the desk, it was always for a larger purpose. It was a rare occurrence that Picard and Riker spent any sort of quiet time here, simply talking about things that had no bearing on their individual responsibilities.

  How did that happen?

  Though most of Captain Picard’s personal belongings had been removed from the room during the Enterprise’s refit and repair work while docked at Earth Station McKinley and delivered to his brother, Robert, on Earth, a few items remained. In addition to Livingston, there was also Picard’s prized copy of The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare, containing all of the written works created by the seventeenth-century human playwright. The Enterprise’s first captain had held Shakespeare in high esteem, and Riker had heard him quoting from one of the ancient plays or poems on more than one occasion. Positioned under a glass cover near the ready room’s door and turned to what Riker knew was one of his former captain’s favorite passages from the play Hamlet, it was a memento that seemed to personify Jean-Luc Picard’s diverse interests and passions. Robert Picard had insisted that Riker keep the enormous tome as a gift, telling him that the very essence of what made his brother the man he was could be found tucked within the book’s pages.

  “Are you ever planning to bring any of your own things here?” asked Troi.

  Sensing the question was being asked not just as his lover but also his counselor, Riker offered a knowing smile. “If you’re asking me whether I’m reluctant to replace Captain Picard’s stamp with my own, the answer is . . . maybe a little.” To this point, he had been content to keep the ready room strictly as office space, but now that Deanna had posed the question, he realized he was overcorrecting so far as his desire not to supplant his predecessor. “Sometimes I come in here, and I wonder what he would say or do about a particular issue.” He laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m hoping I’ll gather divine inspiration or something.”

&
nbsp; Troi said, “We all do that in some fashion. There’s nothing abnormal about that, so long as you maintain a proper perspective.”

  “Fair point.” Swiveling in his seat, Riker started to raise his legs so that he might rest them on the desk, then stopped himself. Recalling unpleasant memories of his first hours as captain of the Enterprise, he said, “When he was taken, and after I received the official promotion, I came in here, looked right at this chair, and asked him what he would do in our situation.” He rested his hands on the chair’s arms. “I didn’t get an answer, of course. At least, not from him, but no sooner did I ask the question than Guinan showed up.” He smiled again. “She has that habit, you know.”

  “I do,” replied Troi. “There are times I worry that she’s better at my job than I am.”

  The gentle humor was allowing Riker to relax, and it was something he welcomed. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, but what she said then was something I needed to hear, at least right then. I didn’t know how to fight Picard and to be the captain this ship needed.” He tapped the desktop. “I told her he wrote the book on this ship, and she told me I had to throw that book away. It hurt to hear that, but she was right.”

  “She was right within the context of that situation,” replied Troi. “You needed to sever your feelings for Captain Picard in order to defeat him and the Borg. But that’s over now, and he’s gone. They can’t use him against us anymore.”

  “Can’t they?” Riker frowned. “They still have his knowledge; everything he knew about Starfleet tactics, they took it from him.”

  Troi crossed her arms. “We’ll devise new tactics. We’ll change those things that can be changed, and new Starfleet captains will come up with new ideas; things the Borg can’t yet anticipate. In the meantime, you still have to be Will Riker, and part of who you are is what you learned from Captain Picard. Before, you had no other choice but to cut yourself off from everything he meant to you. Now you have the time to integrate those things back into your life and into your leadership. That’s normal, Will, but you’re fighting it. Yes, you’re the captain of the Enterprise, but you’re not allowing yourself to be the captain. Part of that is taking what you learned from the man who prepared you for that role and making it your own.”

  She was right. Riker had been resisting such feelings, for months. Part of it was concern that he might somehow bring dishonor to his friend’s memory, though he knew on an intellectual level that was not possible. Picard had handpicked him as his potential successor and spent three years preparing him for this day. Yes, Riker had been offered command of the U.S.S. Drake even prior to accepting the assignment as the Enterprise’s first officer, and had chosen the latter because be believed it represented an unparalleled opportunity to serve beside one of Starfleet’s most respected captains. He turned down two subsequent promotion offers, first for the Aries and later the Melbourne. The Aries mission had held great appeal for him, in that it involved a long-duration voyage to an uncharted area of the galaxy, embodying everything that had drawn Riker to Starfleet in the first place. Upon further consideration, however, neither assignment carried with it the prestige of serving on the Enterprise.

  That, and if I’d taken the Melbourne, I’d be dead now.

  The bitter thought came unbidden as he remembered seeing the swath of devastation left by the Borg following Starfleet’s engagement with the intractable adversary at Wolf 359. The Enterprise had found the wreckage of thirty-nine starships, including the Melbourne, adrift in space. Tens of thousands of lives snuffed out in moments by the single Borg cube, which had cut through the armada almost without effort as it continued on its course toward Earth. How close had Riker and the Enterprise crew come to being listed among the dead?

  But they had not died. They were here, and Riker knew he had a job to do.

  “You’re right,” he said, affirming his earlier thought, “and I promise I’ll work on that.” He gestured around the room. “It just occurred to me this is the perfect place to practice my trombone.”

  Smiling, Troi replied, “Having heard you play, I agree.”

  Any chance at a retort was cut off by the sound of the intraship, followed by Data’s voice. “Bridge to Captain Riker.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We have made progress in our attempts to interface with the alien buoy, sir.”

  Riker felt a jolt of fresh energy coursing through him as he pushed himself from his chair. “On my way.”

  With Troi following him, he exited the ready room to find Data, La Forge, and Crusher standing at the rear bridge stations. Lieutenant Worf occupied the ops station in front of the command area, sitting next to Ensign Sariel Rager at the conn position. Ascending the ramp to the upper bridge deck, Riker offered a nod to Lieutenant Yar at the tactical station before moving to join the other officers.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Our attempts to interpret the buoy’s communications signal have yielded some success, Captain.” Data looked to Crusher. “It was Mister Crusher who made the breakthrough.”

  Riker offered the younger man an appreciative nod. “How far did you get?”

  “We were able to access and download a portion of the buoy’s communication log,” replied Crusher. “Some of the data’s encrypted, and other portions of the packets were corrupted, most likely due to the buoy’s state of quantum flux. However, we were able to wash some of it through the computer and the universal translation protocols, and we found something very interesting.”

  Without waiting for further prompting, Crusher tapped several controls on the engineering workstation’s smooth, touch-sensitive panels and the console’s larger display screens began displaying a graph, with a line describing peaks and valleys as it moved across the image. At two points along its path, Riker noted the icons corresponding to time stamps beneath the graph. He recognized the significance of both marks.

  “When the planet appeared and disappeared?”

  La Forge replied, “Right. There’s a definite change in the signal that corresponds to the planet shifting into and out of our dimension.”

  “We found additional log entries that suggest other spikes in conjunction with earlier transitions,” said Crusher. “There’s no real pattern or consistency to the readings, at least not from what we’ve found so far, sir. From the looks of it, the shifts occur at completely random intervals.”

  Riker pondered this. “So, there’s no way to predict when the planet will show up again?”

  “No, sir,” said Data, “but the information at our disposal suggests the planet will return, even if we are unable to forecast the next such occurrence.”

  La Forge added, “That doesn’t mean we’re giving up, sir. There’s still a lot of data to sift through.”

  “We’re not totally in the dark, though,” said Crusher. “The changes in the communication signal are still something we can monitor. Watching for the deviation would give us at least a little advance warning that a shift’s coming.”

  Crossing his arms, Riker reached up to stroke his beard. “All right, then. At least now we’ve got something to look forward to. Tasha, if we move to a point between the buoy and the planet’s expected point of arrival, can you maintain a sensor lock on both areas?”

  The security chief replied, “With our current sensor configuration and along with the automated sensor probes we’ve still got out there, we’ve got good coverage of both targets, sir.”

  “Outstanding,” said Riker. Then, raising an eyebrow, he looked to Data. “Make it so.” La Forge and Crusher smiled in response to the gentle directive, and even Yar turned from her station to regard him with a knowing expression.

  That felt pretty good.

  Having listened in silence to the conversation, Troi asked, “What about the people on the planet? Will we be able to contact them?”

  “Our analysis of the senso
r data we have collected suggests contact through standard communications protocols should be possible,” replied Data. “However, it may be prudent to prepare a message for delivery as soon as the planet reappears, just in case another dimensional shift occurs before we have an opportunity to establish a dialogue with the planet’s inhabitants.”

  Riker said, “Let’s hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Mister Data, you and I can compose that message. If we can establish a dialogue and they can tell us what’s going on, there might be something we can do to help them.” He exchanged glances with each of his officers. “At the very least, this has the potential to be one of the more interesting first contact situations we’ve ever had.”

  “And that’s saying something,” said La Forge.

  A previously unknown species, perhaps hailing from another dimension? What were they like? How had they come to be in their current situation? Were they a potential ally, or a threat? Whatever the answers to those questions, there was no denying the Enterprise had stumbled upon something interesting here.

  And now, we wait.

  12

  HERE

  U.S.S. Enterprise-E

  Picard awoke, startled. It took him a few seconds to recognize the main room of the quarters he shared with Beverly Crusher and their son. Other than dim light from the table lamp next to the sofa he now occupied, and the computer on the nearby desk, the room was cloaked in darkness. He reached for the back of his neck, rubbing away the ache from having dozed with his head resting against the sofa cushion. Blinking several times, he forced away the vestiges of fitful sleep that had managed to seize him, if only for a short time.