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ZERO ZERO ZERO DESTRUCT ZERO.

He pressed “ENABLE.” The thirty-second countdown immediately commenced, marked in silence by the glowing figures that paraded solemnly across the command chair arm’s tiny electronic display.

The clock counted down to five, the point at which an abort was no longer possible.

Dunsel waited in the silent semidarkness with his crew, hoping that his last act would redeem the mood of utter helplessness and futility that had suffused his final log entry....

Bird-of-Prey Dhivael

“All weapons locked on both the industrial city of Laibok and the political capital at Laikan,” ch’Narv reported. “Both the Dhivael and the Ch’lenjer are ready to fire in concert.”

“Outstanding work, Lieutenant,” T’Voras said, his eyes riveted to the image of the planet that would soon bear his name forever. The captured hevam ship could not be seen at the moment; the tractors had brought her quite close to the Dhivael in order to enable the warship’s engineers to make the most detailed possible interior scans before the boarding teams were assembled and dispatched.

But there would be plenty of time to do all of that later in safety, once the hevam crew had been dispensed with. In the meantime, the Earth vessel had to remain close enough to inhibit any enemy effort to destroy her proprietary technology, yet far enough away to prevent the hevam ship’s guns—now firmly under Romulan control—from striking the Dhivael accidentally.

“Open fire with all tubes, ch’Narv.”

The tactical officer scowled at his console, which had just begun flashing with urgent, blood-green alarms. “Commander, I’m getting some strange energy readings from—”

Before the gunner could complete his sentence, the entire universe was suddenly suffused with a rush of heat and fire whose speed far outpaced either screams or nerve impulses.

An equally abrupt darkness followed at almost the same instant.

U.S.S. Yorktown

By the time Mayweather settled the ship into a standard orbit about Andoria, the debris and residual fire from the explosion had spread itself into a weirdly beautiful ring. At least half a dozen Andorian military vessels, ranging from small patrol ships all the way to large ships of war comparable to General Shran’s temporarily disabled Weytahn, had just turned up—too little, too late, to Mayweather’s mind—apparently to investigate the newly formed ring’s shimmering curvature.

Heedless of any observers, the still-spreading band of detritus was already well on its way to girdling Andoria completely, transforming that icy moon into a miniature of the multiringed gas giant it orbited, if only temporarily. Mayweather wondered idly if gravitational interactions with Andoria’s own two natural satellites—one of which had just loomed into view over Andoria’s western limb—would make the ring a permanent feature. Or had the hoop of orbiting shrapnel formed inside Andoria’s Roche limit, so close to the Andorian homeworld that local tidal forces would effectively doom it to an atmospheric death spiral in a matter of days or weeks?

“Any sign of Challenger?” Shosetsu said over Mayweather’s shoulder. “Or the Romulan ship?”

Mayweather turned to the side and saw Giannini shake her head ruefully at the science station. “Just debris, duranium fragments, and traces of polyalloy and plasteel. Gamma and delta ray counts are consistent with large-scale uncontrolled mutual annihilations of matter and antimatter.”

A double warp-core breach, Mayweather thought as he watched the tumbling, drifting debris on the viewer.

“It’s a miracle that the explosion didn’t rip away half the planet’s atmosphere, even this far from the surface,” Mendez said, awe and relief commingled in his expression.

“If Andoria’s magnetic field was only a little bit weaker, then that’s probably just what would have happened,” said Giannini. “They’re likely to have ion storms for weeks.”

Mayweather looked past the debris ring, focusing his attention instead on icy Andoria itself. Only now did