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  “Maybe twenty minutes later. We can continue to collect chronitons from the rear hull while emitting the antichronitons before us until we find the source.”

  “And do you think we can handle five plus hours of being shaken around?” The captain realized his voice was sounding incredulous, but he disliked the notion of banging up the ship so soon after the refit. They’d already taken a pounding from the Nachri and the Venusian atmosphere in the short time since being released from McKinley Station.

  “Yes, sir, and Conlon agrees with me,” Gomez emphatically added. She sounded convincing and clearly had worked out the science behind the scheme before returning to the bridge. It was at times like this the captain had to make a command decision less on the facts and more on his faith in the crew. And he trusted Gomez wholeheartedly.

  “Begin your plans,” he finally said. “Tev, have Dr. Lense do random checks to make sure no one is succumbing to the radiation. Also, let’s have Soloman down at the computer core to make certain everything functions normally. We’ll enter the field in fifteen minutes.”

  Everyone began busying themselves and the commotion made for a pleasant sound to the captain. He sat back, looking over Gomez’s research and even indulged in reading the Voyager logs that held the answer to the current dilemma. The time passed quickly enough and Gold had already alerted the crew to secure loose objects.

  “Entering the chroniton field now,” Haznedl said. Gomez was standing beside her, hands braced on the console.

  “Hull absorbing chroniton particles on schedule,” Gomez announced after thirty minutes.

  “Bridge to engineering.”

  “Conlon here, Captain.”

  “Everything holding together?”

  “I guess they found tighter nuts and bolts at McKinley, sir, because we’re airtight.”

  “Carry on,” the captain said.

  “Sir,” Tev said some minutes later, “I’ve been able to track the waves back to their source. I’m forwarding the coordinates to the conn. We should be there in another three hours.”

  “Swell,” Gold said through gritted teeth as the ship bucked under another wave.

  * * *

  Captain Gold was not at all surprised to see that the plan Gomez and Conlon had put together worked. It took the starship eighteen minutes longer than projected to absorb enough chroniton radiation, but there was finally a sufficient quantity to process the antichronitons required to spew forward, creating a clear passage. He was sure the entire crew was looking forward to a smoother passage to the asteroid Tev identified as the cause of the phenomenon. He now had to begin thinking about how to explore this root cause and who to send. When dealing with the Shanial Cabochon, he was on Earth, and when they helped out Pas Saadya’s terraforming project, they were on Venus—he had the comfort of knowing backup was nearby. Here, once more among the stars, he was back to asking people to take risks without a net. Gold had lost crew before, he’d given commands that led to death, and he would again. Still, there was just a moment’s hesitation, and he knew that he had to get past that to remain effective. Here, the hesitation was forgiveable; there was, ironically, time. But hesitate in a firefight, it might mean sudden death for both ship and crew.

  “Ready to transmit antichronitons,” Conlon reported from engineering. She sounded confident, which pleased the captain.

  “Transmit,” Gomez commanded and then watched the viewscreen. In seconds, a golden haze filled the screen as antichronitons met, battled, and defeated their counterparts.

  “The waves are breaking up,” Haznedl said from her station. “We can proceed straight to the target asteroid.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Gold ordered. From the center chair, he could feel the bucking lessen and then vanish. Now he could fully concentrate on what lay ahead. “Shabalala, full sensors on the asteroid.”

  “Already on it, sir,” he replied. Of course he was, Gold knew. No doubt, he was eager to see what was behind all this. “I’m reading one life-form, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, and an awful lot of technology. I don’t recognize all the energy patterns, but whatever’s in there is big and active.”

  “Tev?”

  At the captain’s question, the second officer studied his readouts, making some small noises that Gold realized were quite characteristic of his new colleague.

  “It seems we have a new puzzle,” he finally said. “I can’t place the readings, myself.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll need to beam over to investigate. One life-form, lots of tech.” He turned to Gomez and said, “Minimal away team to start, I think.”

  Gomez nodded and moved to the turbolift. “Lieutenant Commander Corsi, report to Transporter Room 1.”

  “Be careful,” Gold called as the doors snapped shut.

  Chapter

  3

  Gomez had Laura Poynter, the new transporter chief, beam them to a small chamber some ten meters away from where the life-form was located. There remained just enough radiation in the area to making identifying the race impossible. To be careful, Corsi opted to bring a phaser rifle rather than a pistol. Gomez had her tool case and a phaser tucked in a pocket.

  The air was chilled, the security chief noticed. There were also two different mechanical hums working in harmony, both in the distance, heard beneath the floor plating. Gomez already had her tricorder out and began studying the composition. She shook her head at the readings, took more samples near the door, and then studied the results.

  “This is at least five centuries old,” she said.

  “And still working,” Corsi added.

  Gomez nodded. “It’s a metallic composite I can’t pinpoint, but everything is uniformly manufactured. There’s a lot of power running beneath us, a constant flow. It’s not chroniton-based, but it probably powers the machine that creates the waves.”

  “What do I need to know?” Corsi asked, approaching the door, tightly gripping the rifle.

  “None of this matches what we have on record for the Guardian,” Gomez said, more to herself than her partner. “That means this is something very different—and a lot more recent. Everything seems to be designed to provide power to one main machine in the other room. I’m scanning a tremendous reservoir of pooled energy to prevent power interruptions.”

  “What about the person in the other room?” Her time on the da Vinci had taught Corsi to be patient and ask the right questions if she was ever to get anything resembling a useful bit of intel out of an engineer.

  Gomez checked her tricorder again. “It’s a Ferengi.”

  “Oh goody,” Corsi muttered. Shouldering the rifle so it rested against her back, Corsi went to the door, examining it for latches or controls. Running an index finger around the frame, she found a depression on the left side and pressed.

  Soundlessly, the door opened and the humming sounds grew in intensity and the air was even more chilled. For a moment, Corsi wondered how the Ferengi, with his sensitive ears, could handle such a high decibel rate. Perhaps he was using ear canal inhibitors, which would make it easy for her to approach safely.

  They emerged into the larger, louder, cooler, and brighter room. Corsi, knowing her companion, paused to let the engineer take it all in. There were holographic projections with all manner of data scrolling past at three-meter intervals along two walls. The machine was directly before them. It was irregularly configured, with lots of jagged protrusions and no seating. You had to stand to control it all, and it seemed designed for a being larger than a humanoid. The Ferengi seemed to have built a platform to reach all the controls, which had pieces of tape, with the diagonal and oddly attractive Ferengi script stuck to almost every knob, lever, screen, and button.

  Before the Ferengi, who was wearing the usual garish, closely tailored suits they favored, was a stack of latinum slips. He seemed to be counting and entering the information into a device. Numbers on a holographic projection before him kept rising, and he was laughing.

  Corsi tapped him on the right shoulder
with the phaser’s tip and the Ferengi whirled about, a look of utter terror on his face. Spluttering, he said, “What are you doing here? It’s mine; I found it by the rights of salvage.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to talk about it aboard the da Vinci,” Corsi said amiably.

  “And leave all this?” he asked, gesturing broadly, trying to encompass every bit of machinery in sight. He really did think it all belonged to him.

  “I’ll give you a receipt,” she said, her tone growing sharper.

  The Ferengi hopped down from the platform and shrugged his shoulders in one of the recognized forms of groveling the race had mastered over the centuries. Corsi stood behind him while Gomez studied the readouts being projected in the air directly over their heads.

  They had gone no more than three feet when the Ferengi ducked and bolted to his right, moving quite quickly. He reached the far end of the room and stood on tiptoe to grab at a spheroid object, hovering above a column, bathed in an orange light. Once it was in his hands, he stabbed at some hidden control and planted his feet firmly on the floor. By this point, Corsi was only a few meters from him, figuring there was nowhere for him to go and she didn’t want to fire the phaser if she could avoid it, for fear of damaging the unknown equipment. If she did that, she knew Gomez would have cardiac failure. Engineers hated it when you broke things.

  Red, pink, and orange sparks filled the area around the Ferengi, each glowing brighter by the second, and the air seemed to hiss. The sparks blended as they swirled around and around, gaining speed, until he was no more than a silhouette bathed in the light.

  “Do I shoot?” Corsi screamed.

  “No!”

  Corsi expected the response and watched, just barely hearing the tricorder’s distinctive tone. Gomez was capturing the readings, which should prove helpful, in some way. Corsi herself was breathing hard, annoyed at letting the Ferengi get past her.

  And then he winked out of sight. The sparks flared once more and then they too vanished.

  “What happened?” she snapped.

  “Time travel,” Gomez said, snapping the tricorder closed.

  “Damn. I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

  The two walked over to the column above which the orb had floated. They heard the sound of machinery moving and within seconds, a new orb appeared from the column’s top. Slowly it rose until it lifted off the column and floated, a perfect replacement for the one the Ferengi used.

  Gomez studied it for a few moments and then walked back to the main console. Stepping atop the platform, she gazed at the readouts, occasionally comparing them with the ones recorded on her tricorder.

  Finally, tired of the silence and the waiting, Corsi testily asked, “Well?”

  “From what I can tell, that is a portable unit for going back into the past.”

  “This asteroid’s past? Makes no sense.”

  Gomez fiddled with her equipment, tentatively reached out to touch some controls and then checked her readings. “This isn’t just a time machine—it’s a long-range transporter, too. Based on what the universal translator’s telling me, it looks like the Ferengi has mastered how to send himself back a decade and to Ferenginar. Maybe that’s why the chroniton particles appear richer, and denser, than the ones in the databanks. Which means—”

  “Oh no,” Corsi said.

  “We might be able to saturate ourselves in the radiation, and also travel back to the same coordinates and find him.”

  “And we want to do that why?”

  “Given that these coordinates are locked in somehow, he’s clearly been going back to Ferenginar and doing something. By using the equipment, and I would guess he’s only been doing it for the two weeks the navigational troubles have been noted, he’s been manipulating something…for his own profit.” She picked up a few slips of latinum and hefted the device he had been using.

  “Of course he has,” Corsi said. “And we have to stop him instead of Temporal Investigations because…?”

  “That’s what we do,” Gomez said matter-of-factly. “Should he lose that node, and someone back then finds it, things could just spiral out of control. Wow, he’s accumulated quite a bit of wealth in just a few weeks, if I read this right.”

  “Who built this and why?”

  “I wish I knew, Domenica. Right now, though, we need to tell the captain.” Quickly, the two women contacted the da Vinci and briefed Gold on the latest developments. While Corsi enjoyed action, she didn’t like question marks. This equipment was one, and the Ferengi’s motives an even bigger one. She was somewhat annoyed that Gomez seemed more worried about the lost technology, but then again, that’s what she was trained to worry about.

  “Before anyone goes anywhere, we need to find out what has changed. Let me send Abramowitz over to help you. Expect her shortly. Gold out.”

  In minutes, Carol Abramowitz, the ship’s cultural specialist and closest expert on the Ferengi, arrived in the central chamber. By then, Corsi was studying the node that floated placidly above the column. Two other columns were inactive besides that one, and she had already figured out how to turn them on but left them deactivated.

  Abramowitz, shorter than the others, with dark hair framing her face, nodded to her colleagues and began looking at the coordinates Gomez had translated and consulted one of several padds she carried with her. They worked fairly silently for several minutes, with Gomez occasionally explaining something about the technology. Corsi began to pace the chamber, at first looking for anything that resembled a defense system or hand weapon and then pacing because she had to do something.

  “I think I have something,” Abramowitz said softly. “He’s been going back to the capital city repeatedly. No doubt he’s been using his current knowledge to enhance his fortune on the Ferengi exchanges.”

  When she explained this to Gold, the next voice she heard was not his, but Songmin Wong’s. The conn officer excitedly called out, “He must be Lant!”

  “Who’s Lant?” Gold asked.

  “The darling of Ferengi commerce right now,” Wong said.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Corsi demanded.

  “I inherited a few bars of latinum last year,” he began. “So I’ve been dabbling in the markets. The financial net is filled with stories about this Lant guy’s amazing rise in prosperity. He hasn’t made an investment mistake in the last six months.”

  “And now we know why,” Gold chimed in, sounding grim. “Whatever he’s been doing for six months worked, but for the last two weeks something’s been wrong. This is bad and needs to be fixed. Gomez, can you program one of those nodes?”

  Gomez was already studying the tricorder translation of Lant’s postings. As she did so, Tev spoke up:

  “Captain, does this become a Prime Directive issue?”

  Corsi’s teeth started to grind. The only thing she hated more than engineering doubletalk was philosophical and ethical debates—especially from Tev, who, Corsi was learning, was more pedantic than the entire rest of the S.C.E. crew combined.

  To the security chief’s relief, the captain said, “If they’re going back only a short time, and after contact with the Federation has been established, then our away team will have some flexibility. But the Ferenginar of the recent past was even more male-dominated than it is now. You’ll have to beam over and join the team. Assemble your equipment and head over there.”

  Corsi had to admit to herself that adding Tev to the team made sense. Ferenginar had only recently begun enacting social reforms to undo countless generations of female subjugation. As she recalled, women couldn’t hold much in the way of jobs and were usually kept out of sight except to family.

  Abramowitz completed her look at the equipment and had called up data on that era of Ferengi society, even as the stout Tellarite beamed down. He held a satchel that seemed to be filled with equipment. His black eyes looked around the chamber, taking in the equipment, and he nodded to himself.

  “Aren’t you a bit
out of uniform, Mr. Tev?” Gomez asked. Tev was standing with a bright orange shirt, open at the neck to show tufts of fur, with chocolate brown pants that tucked themselves into nearly knee-high boots. Slung over one shoulder was an all-purpose carryall, devoid of Starfleet markings.

  “To blend in on Ferenginar, I can’t be in uniform. But I am prepared.” He opened up the collar of his shirt, and on the reverse side was his Starfleet combadge.

  “What about the rest of us?” Gomez asked, but he ignored the question and proceeded with instructions.

  “The captain wants us to go after Lant, find out where he caused the change in the timeline and undo it. We might have to ruin him financially in the process,” he said. “But that’s an acceptable loss.”

  “To you, maybe,” Abramowitz said. “To Lant, that’s possibly worse than death. They live and die by the deal and the size of their holdings. It was a heady time for these people. Formal contact had been made with the Federation not long before, and this was seen as the opening of a huge new market. The piracy of a century previous was curtailed, and people sought business ventures, partnerships, brokering, and whatever else could be used to earn a slip of latinum.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Gomez said as she programmed the node, “is how the Federation economy grew flexible enough to accommodate the Ferengi mercantile system.”

  “Ever take an economics course at the Academy?” Tev asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, that explains that,” he replied and turned his attention to a display on his right.

  Gomez instructed Corsi to grab the first of the nodes, letting another rise for programming. The first officer repeated the procedure until all four possessed nodes, which were small enough to fit into Tev’s bag.

  “Gomez to Gold.”

  “Gold here.”

  “We’re ready to head back after Lant. I can’t tell you how long this will take.”

  “Let’s be careful with time. Take twelve hours and check back in. Do your best and good luck. I’m sending Blue and Soloman over to continue studying the tech.”