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Ro drew a heavy breath and sighed. “That sounds like an old Bajoran proverb my father used to say.”

The doctor smiled. “Wise people, you Bajorans. Defiant, too.”

“Really?” Ro answered with a smile of her own. “I hadn’t noticed.”

She took another sip of her green tea, and glanced at the data piled in front of her, all of which translated in her mind into strategies, tactics, and tricks.

“So what are you going to do, Laren?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But I guess we’ll find out in”she glanced at the chronometer“five hours, fifty-three minutes.”

Isaac came to awareness gradually, his mind fogged with discordant sensation. Was this what organics called “pain”?

He was surrounded by darkness. Or so he thought, until he realized that his visual sensors were just now coming back online. Little by little his visual acuity returned.

His sensors were confused, his processing muddled, but he deduced that he was lying flat on his back on some hard surface. Kinesthetic information was confused, and he had trouble processing data about the atmospheric pressure on his epidermis, the pull of gravity, or ambient temperatures.

A dark shape above him resolved into a Romulan shock trooper, armed with a disruptor. At his side, an organic Romulan officer ran a sensor over Isaac’s chest cavity. As near as Isaac was able to determine, his body was intact, still in one piece, but he had the impression that some of his ports and access panels had been opened.

“Excuse me,” Isaac said, his voice sounding strained in his own auditory receptors. He managed to turn his head fractionally to one side, and saw two other bodies lying beside him. “May I ask where I am?”

In response, the shock trooper simply pointed the disruptor at Isaac and fired, and the world disappeared once more in pain and darkness.

9

In one of the recessed alcoves along the ten-sided perimeter of the control chamber, a gateway no larger than the palm of Sito’s hand hung in midair, just at eye level, and she peered through it like a child at a keyhole, or an ancient submarine commander at a periscope.

“No sign of Isaac and the others,” she reported. She glanced over her shoulder at the hairless android by the controls. “Change target-gateway orientation ninety degrees along the y-axis, thirty degrees along the x-axis.”

“Acknowledged,” the android said with precision.

“Now watch what happens,” Crusher told La Forge, both of them hunched over a tricorder. “See how the sine wave alters amplitude when he changes the orientation? That’s the gravitational constant changing.”

Sito saw the look on La Forge’s face. “Wes, that’s impossible,” the first officer said.

Crusher shrugged, and pointed to the miniature gateway hanging in front of Sito. “And that just spells 'possible’ to you? Come on, Geordi, it’s the only explanation.”

Sito smirked. She’d known Crusher since the academy, and the fact that, on the outside, he looked more or less like a regular guy led her sometimes to forget what a freak of nature he was underneath. In their warp theory classes, Crusher had intuitively grasped concepts that even their instructors still had difficulty wrapping their heads around, and it was whispered when Crusher wasn’t around that he might well be a genius of geniuses, another Einstein, or Cochrane, or Soong. Of course, in a fleet filled with genius-level Soong-type androids, even an Einstein might find it difficult to stand out, and so it was perhaps not such a surprise that instead of rewriting the laws of physics from some ivory tower, Crusher had instead ended up in the engineering section of a starship. But Sito knew that there was nowhere that Crusher would rather be. The Enterprise was home to him in a way that no place could ever be for her, the place where he’d had so many formative experiences as a child, and the place where he finally became an adult.

But it might well be a home to which none of them would ever return again, if they didn’t find a way out