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"What is it?" asked Janeway.

"This is a homing beacon, to guide the fleet of cloaked vessels directly to Voyager. They have found us, Captain."

"HOW MUCH TIME DO WE HAVE?" JANEWAY DEMANDED.

"It all depends on how long they have been aboard the vessel," Telek replied.

"It can't be very long," Janeway said. "We only just detected the transmission."

"They could have been here for several hours, perhaps even days, Captain," Telek replied. "The fact that they are here at all indicates that Chairman Kaleh and Lhiau have a good idea where we might be. The transmission serves to pinpoint our position. They will be upon us soon. We must leave this area of space at once!"

"We're not going anywhere until we've retrieved our warp core." Janeway tapped her badge. "Janeway to engineering. Status report."

'Torres here." B'Elanna's voice was faint and she

sounded tired, but at least she was at her station. "We've gotten the warp core back safely. Now all we have to do is install the thing."

"How long will that take?"

Over the link, Janeway heard a sputtering sound and a cry of pain. 'Torres? What's happening?"

"Dammit!" Now Janeway's chief engineer sounded like her old, robust self. "A piece of diagnostic equipment just exploded in Carey's hands. Carey, you all right?"

A terrible suspicion began to seep through Janeway. Stepping in front of Telek, she began to tap the keys of the console and called up a schematic of the ship.

"Computer," she said, "isolate areas of largest concentrations of mutated dark matter aboard the vessel and in the surrounding area of space. Display all such areas in red."

In a heartbeat, the computer had responded, and there they were-three large, fluctuating, crimson areas that indicated huge masses of the deadly matter. One of them was right here in sickbay and was clearly the Romulan centurion they had captured. Another splash of scarlet was outside the ship, riding it almost like a parasite.

A third was in engineering.

Telek R'Mor caught her gaze and nodded. "It would make sense," he said. "We would do everything possible to disable the ship in preparation for boarding. Loss of lives-Romulan lives-would be avoided as much as possible."

"Shields, weapons, the warp drive-all would be

key areas in stopping the ship and rendering us unable to fight back," said Janeway. "And here we were, not trusting the computer, when all along it's been telling us exactly what's been happening. One centurion was going around the ship taking our weapons systems off-line and forcing us to eject the warp core. The other one was hiding in a quiet, out-of-the-way area to set up the homing beacon once his partner had accomplished his goal."

She slammed a fist down on the console. 'Torres, listen to me. Get your people out of there now and shut down the area."

"Captain?"

"Do it!" cried Janeway. "Janeway to bridge. Chakotay, I've ordered a complete evacuation of engineering. Once everyone's out, I want you to flood the area with anesthezine and erect a level-ten forcefield. Go to Red Alert, and," she added, with a glance at Telek, "keep an eye out for approaching warbirds."

Rusan T'Kami huddled in a comer of engineering, too weak to even try to move and dodge the humans' bustle. It was all he could do to tap in the controls on his equipment and send out a burst of energy to make the instrument in the man's hand explode. He was certain these Federations would hear his labored breathing.

He wondered, idly, how much longer he would live.

The nausea had come first, a complete inability to keep anything in his stomach. For his companion Shurak, it had been headache and a parched mouth.

Later, they bad both experienced intense pain, in bones, limbs, joints, skin, organs. Most alarming had been the times when one or the other had no recollection of the actions they had taken or of what had occurred.

There had been