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“It’s getting too dangerous to stay here,” he said.

Soloman nodded. “Phase shifts will be occurring . . . throughout the ship, sir.”

Gold moved to the turbolift, pulling his manual door opener from a suit pocket as he went. “We can’t do anything more from here, so we might as well move. Gomez, are you listening?”

“Yes, Captain,” Gomez replied.

Forcing the turbolift doors apart with the opener revealed the darkened walls of the turboshaft. Leaning in, Gold directed the lights of his helmet downward and they illuminated nothing except more of the vertical conduit. Only a pair of narrow maintenance ladders, one on both the front and rear walls of the shaft, interrupted its smooth texture.

“Where’s the auxiliary control center?” he asked.

Gomez’s response was immediate. “Deck seven, sir. I’ve already begun routing power to that location. All you have to do is get there. We can . . .”

The rest of the engineer’s report was drowned out by the sounds of rushing air. Even muffled as it was through his helmet, Gold immediately recognized the source of the sound.

Decompression!

Spinning around, he saw that a section of bulkhead near the main viewer no bigger than a desktop LCARS terminal had disappeared entirely. The area was expanding rapidly and the sounds of escaping atmosphere were growing louder.

“That’s it,” he shouted over the rush of departing air. “Time to go!”

Grabbing Soloman by the arm, Gold pulled the Bynar close to him and hurled them both into the yawning darkness of the turboshaft.

Sonya Gomez and P8 Blue worked feverishly at the master systems console in main engineering, trying to divert power from damaged or unresponsive areas of the ship to those that could still be useful. Alarm indicators illuminated across the board, bearing mute testimony to the severity of the situation.

“Bridge systems have gone totally inoperative,” Pattie reported as she consulted one display. “I am seeing power fluctuations in the remaining generators.”

“Cut the feed,” Gomez ordered. “Stand by to route whatever’s left to deck seven, section 21-Alpha.” With three of the away team’s five generators committed to the ship’s warp engines, the remaining units were being tasked with providing power for the other systems Gomez had determined were necessary to control the ship and complete their mission. Now more than ever, the vessel’s design was working against her. Though well-constructed and possessing a performance record nearly unmatched in the annals of Starfleet history, Constitution-class starships had never been intended to rely on small, localized power distribution schemes. The huge power plants normally used to drive the ship and its multitude of onboard systems were, of course, unavailable to her, so she would simply have to make do with what she had.

“Sonya,” Elizabeth Lense called out from the other end of the bank of consoles, “I’m reading a massive feedback in the other generators.”

It had been a gamble, Gomez knew, tying the generators directly into the warp drive. Forcing the momentary burst of energy required to jump-start the ship’s mighty engines was definitely not something the power units were designed to do.

A massive explosion rocked the engineering room, slamming Gomez and the others into consoles and bulkheads. The concussion wave was still washing over them when two more blasts erupted in the chamber, sending flame and shrapnel in all directions. Gomez could hear it burrowing into the walls and the control panels around them, but they were partially protected from the explosions by a wall separating the master console from the rest of the engineering area.

“Is everybody all right?” she called out as she regained her feet. No one reported any injuries as Gomez tentatively stepped around the wall and peered into the main engineering area. A scene of utter destruction greeted her.

The overloaded generators ultimately had succumbed to the tremendous energy impulses forced back into them from the Defiant’s warp engines, unleashing