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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2003 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

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  Chapter

  1

  No sooner had Susan Haznedl’s head hit her hard pillow than the door to her cabin swooshed open. Dantas Falcão, her roommate and the ship’s new medical technician, entered their small cabin, shook her mane of dark brown hair, and began unzipping her duty jacket before she even cleared the frame.

  “What a shift.” Falcão grinned at her new friend, showing nearly perfect white teeth set against olive skin. Haznedl sighed, since all she wanted was some sleep. Clearly her roommate was too energetic to let that happen. Propping herself on an elbow, she made a face that told Falcão to elaborate on her statement.

  “Starfleet may think they’re done with the refit,” she said, slipping into her nightclothes. “But we’re constantly recalibrating the medical sensors, so something’s wrong.”

  The U.S.S. da Vinci had been nearly destroyed a few months previously and had been only recently returned to active duty. Half the crew was lost in the terrifying hours trapped within a gas giant star, and both Falcão and Haznedl were among the replacement crew. Haznedl had had roommates on her previous posting, the U.S.S. Burbank, but none had Falcão’s excitability.

  “At least I’ve gotten to meet more of the crew,” Falcão continued, brushing her shoulder-length hair. “Dr. Lense insisted on fresh medical workups for everyone, to keep the databases current. We’ll be done by tomorrow, I figure. Hey, let me ask you, have you been able to get the story on Bart Faulwell?”

  Haznedl blinked. “I’ve talked to him in the mess a couple of times. Seems like a good guy, very hard-working. Why?”

  “I find him very attractive,” her roommate replied.

  “Songmin tells me that Bart’s been in a long-term relationship with an officer on Starbase 92 for quite some time, so you’re out of luck.” Haznedl was referring to the alpha shift conn officer, Songmin Wong, whom she sat next to on the bridge, and who had been on the ship since the Dominion War. He had proven a useful source of shipboard gossip. “Do you like older men?”

  Falcão plopped herself at the foot of Haznedl’s bed, causing the ops officer to groan inwardly. She liked Falcão, she did, but wasn’t up for a lot of girl talk right now. Sickbay was not the only area experiencing shakedown concerns. She thought ops was acting sluggishly and had spent her entire shift tracing each circuit to find the problem, with little success.

  “I like all kinds of people, truth to tell. Well, good for Bart,” she said and then seemed thoughtful for a moment. “What about Sabrina Simon?”

  Haznedl rolled her eyes and knew it was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  The following morning, Haznedl was once again concentrating on the operations diagnostic. According to the tricorder, the console was operating within Starfleet specs, but instinctively she knew that something was wrong when they left the Sol system a week ago. She tapped some controls and focused the tricorder on a particular junction grid. A-ha, she thought. There was something amiss—one of the isolinear chips was in danger of burning out, causing relay signals to intermittently die out before completing their connection.

  Tev, their new second officer, was pacing the rear of the bridge, watching the alpha shift go about their business. Tellarites had a reputation for being arrogant and blustery, but Haznedl had served with a few in her time, and none fit that stereotype. Tev, however, more than made up for that. He always seemed to know one thing more than the station officer, and didn’t hesitate to share that knowledge. True, those bits of knowledge had come in handy; she just didn’t want to acknowledge it to his face. On the one hand, she knew he, like Haznedl and Falcão and the other replacement crew, was just trying to fit in, but on the other, he was too smug for his own good.

  At tactical, Anthony Shabalala was frowning at an incoming signal. He toggled a control and beckoned to Tev.

  “We have a signal from Starfleet. I’ve already alerted Captain Gold,” he said crisply.

  “Very good,” Tev said, his voice deep and mellow. He always sounded like that, but managed to slip in a superior tone whenever possible. “He and Commander Gomez should be en route, so he can take it in the ready room.”

  “I’ve already routed it there, sir,” Shabalala said.

  “Of course you have,” Tev said. “Carry on.”

  Shabalala and Haznedl exchanged looks and brief smirks before Tev, now taking the center seat, could see either of them, at which point they put their poker faces back on.

  Moments later, Gold and Gomez entere
d the bridge and immediately went to the ready room together. They were in there for several minutes, and Haznedl went back to focusing on her repairs. The faulty chip had been replaced, and now she was tracing other circuits.

  Finally, the captain reentered the bridge. “I’d like to see the S.C.E. staff in the conference room, Tev,” Gold said, then turned to the fore of the bridge. “Wong, set course for Ludugia, warp five.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wong said. That got a pleased nod from the captain and then he was gone, headed to the observation lounge.

  “That’s not far from Ferengi space,” Wong said.

  “Yeah, it is,” Haznedl replied. “Wonder if this is one of their scams.”

  “Hey, not all Ferengi run scams, you know.”

  Haznedl grinned. “How would you know?”

  “Well, let’s just say I’ve come across a few lately,” Wong said, a gleam in his eyes.

  * * *

  Minutes later, Gold took his place at the head of the curved meeting table. To his right sat Sonya Gomez, to his left, Tev. Dr. Elizabeth Lense, Domenica Corsi, Fabian Stevens, Carol Abramowitz, and Soloman filled out the sides of the table, with P8 Blue in her specially modified chair opposite Gold. To the captain, the odd part was expecting the late Kieran Duffy to be on his left and seeing Tev’s porcine features instead. He chastised himself for not moving past Galvan VI where Duffy and half the rest of his crew met their deaths—it wasn’t fair, especially to Tev. Rachel, his loving wife, had told him it would take time. She just never said how much time.

  “We’ve gotten a signal from Starbase 9,” the captain said once everyone was settled. “Commander Uthlonicam reports complaints from several trading ships regarding navigational hazards near the asteroid belt in the Ludugia system. According to her long-range sensors, they’re chroniton particles.”

  Gomez’s expression immediately deepened into a frown, the lines marking her normally smooth skin. Gold could tell just about everyone around the table stiffened at the mention of chroniton particles. Despite the rise of time-travel incidents over the last century, few seemed comfortable with the problems and paradoxes these opportunities presented. In fact, he had hoped to have nothing to do with time travel during the remainder of his career.

  “Based on her readings, Starfleet was able to match their frequency to the waves encountered by the first starship to make contact with the Guardian of Forever. We’re being asked to find a way to the chroniton source.”

  “You do understand what it means if a second Guardian is discovered?” Tev’s expression was expectant, his dark, sunken eyes agleam.

  All Starfleet personnel knew of the ancient Guardian, found over a century earlier, a device with artificial intelligence that could enable people to travel anywhere in the past. Given the problems it could cause should immoral people make use of the device, it remained one of the most carefully guarded items within the Federation. Unlike that object, this one was in a busy sector of space, near highly traveled spacelanes. Gold could only imagine what would happen should it prove to be true—the political fallout would be intense as well as the belief that if there were two, there might be more.

  Tev interrupted his train of thought. “If I recall, the starship managed to enter orbit despite the temporal waves.”

  “Yes,” Gold replied. “But these seem to be harsher and can pierce standard shielding. It’s a navigational nightmare.” The captain looked around the table. “We’re a day out of the system, so until we learn more, everyone else can relax. I wouldn’t stop your tournament, Doctor.” To help the crew better integrate given the large percentage of newcomers, Lense had organized a board game tournament that had begun only a week earlier, shortly after their Venus mission.

  “Well,” Gomez said with a smile, something the captain had seen all too rarely since Duffy died, “I was about to trounce Bart. Permission to make two moves?”

  “In your dreams, Commander,” Faulwell said with a grin. “I’m just lulling you into a true sense of security.”

  “Then you’re doing a very good job,” Gomez dead-panned.

  Gold added, “And you know Temporal Investigations has already caught wind of this.” There were animated winces indicating the almost universal dislike of that particular division of Starfleet.

  “Anything else we need to know?” Corsi asked.

  Gomez said, “We won’t be that far from the Ferengi Alliance. I’m sure there’s a Ferengi or six who’ll think this is a great business opportunity.”

  Chapter

  2

  A day later, the da Vinci neared the Ludugian system, with its small Type-O star. It had small planetoids circling it, plus the asteroid belt seventeen AUs from the star itself. Gomez stood at one of the aft consoles, Tev alongside her, as the captain instructed Wong take the ship out of warp a safe distance from the edge of the chroniton wave field. She monitored the readings, trying to figure out exactly what was being affected, when, and how.

  “Commander Uthlonicam has cleared the area of all traffic, so we should be able to operate by ourselves,” Gold said. “Confirmed,” Shabalala said from the tactical station. “Best guess is the last ship was in this area eighteen hours ago.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Gomez admitted softly. “Sir, can we ride the wave for better readings? It’s a trick I learned on the Enterprise.”

  Gold turned to look at his first officer with some measure of surprise.

  Gomez continued: “I’m not asking to put the ship at risk, but sometimes you need to feel the problem as much as you need to study the readings.”

  “Tev?”

  “Well, I for one don’t see what we can learn, but I doubt we’d be in danger.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Gomez muttered. Tev was certainly taking some getting used to. It didn’t help that he questioned her authority on their very first post-Galvan VI mission to investigate the Shanial Cabochon in San Francisco, never mind that Gomez’s indecision following Galvan was affecting her abilities. She had enough to prove to herself without being put in a position of having to do the same with her second-in-command.

  “Go ahead, Wong,” Gold said. “Edge us closer so we can feel the distortion, but be ready to pull us back on full impulse.”

  The young lieutenant acknowledged the order and the da Vinci moved forward. Silence filled the bridge as the moments ticked off until finally there was a shimmy, building into a crescendo. Gomez felt the vibrations through her boots and instinctively grabbed on to the bulkhead to her right. The vibrations continued to grow until there was a visible distortion on the screen, and then they dissipated.

  “Conlon to bridge. What’s going on up there?”

  “We’re indulging Commander Gomez,” Gold lightly replied.

  “Good thing we’re using new rivets. We should hold together, but next time we could use a heads-up.”

  “My apologies,” Gold replied. “We’ll tell you the very next time we surf chroniton waves.”

  “Well, what did your finely tuned senses tell you?” Tev asked, looking directly at Gomez.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Gomez admitted through gritted teeth. She studied the readings from the sensors, fine-tuning two of the readouts. Before she could complete her next thought, the next wave arrived and it was faster and harsher than the one before.

  “Time between waves?” Gomez asked.

  “Thirty-seven seconds,” Haznedl answered. “The second wave was almost double the intensity, plus it confused the sensor array with excessive radiation.”

  “Can you still steer us, Lieutenant?” Tev snapped at Wong.

  “Helm’s a little sluggish,” Wong said.

  “Pull us back,” Gold said quietly. “I hope you’ve felt enough, Gomez.”

  “Me too,” she said, and looked past the sneer on Tev’s face to the viewscreen. The radiation and particles were not doing anything to distort the visuals. That told her something, as well.

  Downloading the curren
t readings to a padd, she said, “Captain, I’d like to check something with Lieutenant Conlon.”

  Gold nodded in approval, and Gomez headed to the turbolift. An idea was starting to form….

  * * *

  Time, oddly enough, seemed to pass slowly with little change to the readings before them. Wong kept the da Vinci far enough away that the chroniton waves barely caused the ship to waver. Starfleet Command called to inform Gold that the starship Yeager had been dispatched to follow up on the region once the da Vinci restored safe passage. They just had to solve the unsolvable and move on. About like usual.

  Just then, the doors opened and Gomez emerged, a smile on her face. She went right to Haznedl’s console and entered a set of figures from the padd she carried.

  “We’ll have to reenter the chroniton field and let the da Vinci absorb a significant amount of radiation,” Gomez began.

  “But chroniton radiation is harmful to living tissue,” Tev said, interrupting. Gomez made a face at that and then redirected her attention to Gold.

  “Yes, but as the Voyager discovered three years ago, you can neutralize the radiation with modulated antichroniton particles. I think we can blanket a portion of the asteroid belt with antichronitons and bring the ship to the source.”

  Gold nodded. His first officer had obviously been keeping up with the reports that had been coming in from Delta Quadrant ever since the Pathfinder Project—now Project Voyager—had made contact with Captain Janeway’s lost ship.

  “And has Dr. Lense signed off on the risk?”

  “Not yet,” she said hurriedly. “I wanted to see how much radiation we have to absorb before we can generate the antichronitons to open up the spacelane. Nancy thinks the rebuilt ship is up to some pounding.”

  “So, how much pounding do we take before we can move?”

  “Presuming Songmin can keep us moving forward while being bombarded, about four hours. This is a particularly potent field of chroniton particles so the hull should absorb them quickly.”

  “And how long before you generate the antichroniton field?”