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“I hear it, too,” Archer said as he swung his bare feet onto the deck in his quarters, whereupon he felt it as well.

We’ve dropped out of warp.

Cinching his robe around himself, Archer brought his cabin lights up to one-quarter intensity and strode to his desk.

The intercom whistled just before his hand reached the button.

“Engineering to Captain Archer,” said a voice he recognized immediately as that of Mike Burch.

“Just the man I was going to call,” Archer said. “Whatever you’re doing down there just woke up my dog.”

“Sir?”

“We’ve just dropped out of warp, Lieutenant. Why?”

“The warp engines have been running almost nonstop ever since we left the Gamma Hydra sector, Captain.”

Archer scowled. They’d been through all this before, on a number of occasions. “I understand, Mike. But it can’t be helped if we’re going to get back to Earth before the Romulans start building summer homes there. Now why aren’t we moving?”

Burch paused for a moment before replying, as though adjusting his composure. “We just came a lot closer to a core breach than I ever want to see again, sir.”

Archer sighed and slumped into his desk chair. “Report.”

“The magnatomic flux constrictors are shot, along with the intercoolers, and those failures allowed the warp coils to get partially flash-fried by the plasma stream before I got us out of warp. Warp five or even warp four are totally out of the question now—at least until I can get a week or more of dry-dock time to do a thorough rebuild of the entire propulsion system.”

Damn.

It was Archer’s turn to pause in order to calm down. He was glad the conversation was audio only. “Do we still have any warp capability, Lieutenant?”

“Almost half the plasma conduit system will have to be bypassed just to keep any warp capability at all, sir. Give us twelve hours, and we’ll have the warp drive juryrigged back into service. But warp three will be our absolute limit until after we can lay over somewhere for repairs.”

Archer slowly counted to ten before answering.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. I know you’ll do everything you can. Archer out.”

Command was a lonely place to be even when everything aboard ship was five-by-five. But now, sitting alone in the semidarkness of his cabin, Archer felt the distance that separated him from his crew grow exponentially, multiplied by the unimaginable volume of emptiness that still separated Enterprise from home. Ever since the setback the Romulans had dealt to Starfleet at Berengaria VII—effectively scuttling, at least temporarily, a plan to establish a parsecs-spanning network of starbases—space itself seemed to have gotten a whole lot bigger and darker.

Let’s just hope we don’t run into any more Romulans before we get our sheets back into the wind, he thought.

And as he opened another channel, it occurred to him that in all the vastness of space that still lay within his lamed vessel’s reach, he had no idea where the nearest friendly port might be found.

“We are quite fortunate,” T’Pol said.

Archer knew he hadn’t slept well last night, so he was going out of his way to be cheerful so as not to aggravate what appeared to be a fairly glum state of morale on the bridge. T’Pol’s last sentence, however, strained his efforts to remain pleasant just a little bit past any reasonable person’s endurance capacity.

“My ship is still crippled, Commander,” he said in measured tones. “Mister Burch says that won’t change for at least another four hours, and once it does the best we can hope for is warp three. Somehow, that all points to a decidedly less than ‘fortunate’ outcome.”

T’Pol approached from her port science console and came to a stop beside his command chair. “Nevertheless, Captain, we are indeed fortunate, at least according to Vulcan maps of this vicinity of space. The planet known on Vulcan charts as Haurok leh-keh lies only four days from our present position at warp three. We should find everything we need to regain full operational status there.”

She handed