The first thing Gomez realized when they entered the alien structure was that there were too many tall people on her team. O’Brien, Bart Faulwell, and three of the four security guards—the exception being Krotine, a wiry Boslic with golden skin and cherry-red hair beneath her gravsuit cowl—were nearly scraping their heads against the ceilings, and having to duck through doorways. “This may not have been designed by humanoids,” Abramowitz observed.

“There are short humanoid species,” O’Brien observed. “Like Ferengi, or Kaldun.”

“But the corridors and doorways are wide and arched as well,” Abramowitz went on. “And the door controls don’t seem to be shaped for a humanoid hand.”

“That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Faulwell asked. “That high-gravity dwellers would be shorter than most species?” That was one blessing—O’Brien’s gravsuits worked like a charm, making them feel they were walking in normal gravity—although the tight suits did restrict movement somewhat, and they had to keep a firmer grip on their tricorders.

“Not necessarily,” Gomez said absently. “Long limbs would give you more leverage for fighting higher gravity.”

“Sometimes,” Pattie said. “But it’s important to stay low so falls don’t hurt as much. As for the leverage, well, you don’t think all these legs are just for sex appeal, do you?”

Somehow Pattie’s joke fell flat. In fact, all their conversation was feeling a little strange, full of awkward pauses, as though everyone’s timing was off. Gomez realized what it was—everyone kept expecting to hear a patented Duffy wisecrack, and got thrown off when none came.

“You know, I think Stevens and Commander Tev were right,” O’Brien ventured as they entered a new chamber. “This doesn’t look anything like a troop carrier or any kind of military facility. There’s practically no internal security.” He looked down the length of the room, which contained several tiers of low tables facing a podium of sorts at the front. “And I’ll turn in my teaching credentials if this doesn’t look like a classroom.”

“Then where are the chairs?” Corsi asked. “All this gravity and nowhere to sit?”

“Maybe they sit on the floor, like in Japan,” Abramowitz suggested.

O’Brien grunted. “Keiko’s decorated the house with a Japanese theme. Tatami mats, low tables, the works. Looks nice and all, and the kids love having things on their level—but my back hasn’t been the same since.” He threw Gomez a long-suffering grin. “The things we do for love, eh, Commander?”

“Wha—? Oh. Sure,” she said distantly.

The grin changed to apology. “Oh…sorry, Commander. I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot.”

She offered an apologetic look right back. “It’s okay, Chief. You’re lucky you have someone like that.”

“Well, most of the time,” he grimaced. “Some days are better than others, and sometimes…but, well, that’s nothing next to what you must…umm…I’ll scout on ahead, if it’s all right with you, Commander.”

“Go on, Chief. Thank you.”

“Hawkins, Krotine, go with him,” Corsi ordered, coming up alongside Gomez. Once they’d gained some privacy, the taller woman asked, “Are you okay?”

Gomez frowned. “You mean, am I too distracted? Not showing enough leadership?”

Corsi bristled a bit, then reversed herself, speaking with a softness few people heard. “I mean, are you okay?”

Now it was Gomez’s turn to be embarrassed. She’d forgotten—this wasn’t just “Core-Breach” Corsi, the coldhearted, no-nonsense security chief. This was her friend Domenica, with whom she’d been through hell recently. (Come to think of it, after what had happened at Galvan VI, maybe it was time to retire that “Core-Breach” nickname—it wasn’t very funny anymore.)

“I don’t know, Domenica,” she sighed. “I mean, I’ve grieved. God, how I’ve grieved. I got it all out, I worked through it like they say, I felt better, all…cathartized and everything. Is that a word?”

“Hell if I know. Faulwell’s the linguist, not me.”

“So I got through it, came out the other end, decided, you know, it’s time to move on. Kieran’s gone. I accept the loss. It still hurts like hell, but I accept it, and it’s in the past, and what I need to do now is focus on the future. On rebuilding my life.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Yeah, but…” She gazed up at Corsi imploringly. “I don’t know how. I look at my life, at the pieces that are left, and I don’t know how to put them together into something new. They just…don’t fit. Because there’s this one huge piece that’s missing, that’s never going to be there again. And without that piece, none of the others make sense.” She shook her head. “The strange thing is…even when Kieran was around, I wasn’t really sure how he fit into my life.”

Corsi smirked. “He wasn’t exactly a standardized component.”

“Yeah, I guess they broke the mold after they made him.”

“After? I was thinking before.”

Gomez glared…but saw a rare flash of humor and understanding in Domenica’s ice-blue eyes. She was mocking her own past disapproval of Duffy, and thus in an odd way apologizing for it. Sonya accepted the apology with a look, knowing she wouldn’t want to make a big deal out of it. “Whatever. All I know is, as little sense as our relationship made to me, my life makes no sense without it. I just don’t know what to do next.”

Corsi mulled it over. “Well, I’ll tell you this, Commander: I’ve seen you take a meaningless jumble of parts and build them into something functional more times than I can count. Even if they were missing the most important piece, you found something that’d do the trick in its place, or a way to rearrange things so it wasn’t needed after all.”

“Yeah, but that’s engineering. This is life, and emotion, and…it’s not the same thing.”

“So I keep telling you guys. Well, except for the emotion part. We all know I don’t have any.”

“Of course not.” Gomez smiled.

“Well, maybe the thing to do is start with what’s in front of you. You’ve got a job to do. A team to lead and protect. Maybe a city or a planet to keep safe. Focus on solving their problems—maybe it’ll be a start to solving your own. At least…” She faltered, shrugged a bit. “At least it’ll distract you from your own, and sometimes that’s enough.”

Gomez looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, until Corsi fidgeted and shook her head. “Hell, I don’t know. First Stevens, now you—do I look like a counselor?”

“All right.” Gomez clasped her shoulder briefly, but her voice was businesslike. “So we have this job to do. This place to explore.”

“Yes, we do. And since you brought it up, Commander,” Corsi went on, becoming all business again, “do we have any sort of a plan, or are we wandering aimlessly? A little more leadership actually wouldn’t hurt about now.”

Gomez accepted the chastisement. “You’re right. We need to find the answers to some questions,” she went on more loudly, taking in the rest of the team. “Like, where is everybody? We’ve found plenty of sleeping quarters, cafeterias, and the like, but we haven’t seen any people.”

“They were here,” Konya said, “and not long ago.” He gestured to his tricorder. “The DNA residue’s still fresh, and there are still heat signatures in the floor, like someone was sitting or walking on it. Odds are they were here until just before the thing appeared—maybe even shortly after.”

“Well, the building was damaged in the blast,” Abramowitz said. “Maybe they evacuated.”

“To where?” Corsi asked. “Out into the caverns? They’d have been spotted.”

“Beamed out?” asked Pattie.

“Again, to where? And how could they do it undetected? Certainly no hostile ship could’ve gotten close enough to beam them without being intercepted first.”

Gomez changed tacks. “Bart? Have you been able to get any information from their writing?”

The middle-aged linguist shook his head. “It’s hard to translate writing without some context, without knowing anything about the spoken language, the species doing the writing. I can tell you what symbols mean ‘open door’ and ‘close door,’ but extrapolating further meaning would take a lot of time, trial and error. I’ll be more help if we can meet somebody who’ll talk to us.”

Gomez sighed. So much for constructive leadership—she couldn’t accomplish much if the universe didn’t give her anything to work with. “Okay, I guess we’ll just keep looking. Maybe Scotty’s team outside will have better luck figuring this thing out.”

Blasted meetings, thought Scotty as he strode into Cemal Iskander’s mobile command center, where he’d been summoned by the director. Waste of time, the lot of them. “I’m not a spring chicken anymore, y’know! I can’t be bothered wastin’ what time I’ve got left in meetings!” He barely noticed his transition from thinking it to saying it aloud, or cared much. One advantage of being a Living Legend, and just generally an Old Cuss, was that you could get away with telling people exactly what you thought, even when they outranked you. That was a lesson he’d learned from Leonard McCoy—though come to think of it, Leonard had been just as outspoken at forty.

“I think you’ll find this a productive meeting, Scotty,” said Iskander, who sat behind a central desk filled with monitors and readouts, while Admiral Ross and Captain Gold stood nearby. “We’ve been contacted by someone with information about the alien construct. A member of a species called the Nachri. Ever heard of them?”

“Nachri…Nachri,” Scotty repeated, the aspirated “ch” fitting neatly into his brogue. “It sounds familiar.”

“Probably from history class,” Gold told him. “If I remember right, they were a little before your time—a two-bit empire the Federation ran up against in the late twenty-second century. I think Starfleet had a hand in overthrowing their government.”

“That’s right,” Ross said, reading from a file he’d called up on his padd. “That was before the Prime Directive was firmly established. Starfleet backed a rebel movement that drove out the dictatorial, expansionist regime and set up a representative government. They’ve pretty much kept to themselves ever since, declining to join the Federation, though we’ve had a friendly trade relationship the whole time. Yes, I remember now; they supplied some relief materiel during the war. Nothing combat-related, though; they’ve left that pretty far behind.”

“So you’d say they’re trustworthy?” Iskander asked.

“Worth hearing out at least,” said Gold.

“That’s my conclusion too. I have their representative standing by.” He opened the comm channel. Replacing the Federation seal on the big screen was the image of a tall, sleekly built humanoid covered in short gray fur. His head was somewhat avian, with a beaklike muzzle underneath a pair of large eagle eyes, and topped by a triangular, pterosaurian fin. He wore a uniform and seemed to be seated on a starship bridge.

“My prayers to you all in your time of crisis,” he began in a rich baritone. “I am Captain Zakash of the Nachri Defense Group.”

Iskander returned the greeting and introduced the others with him.

“As I told your director earlier,” Zakash went on, “we observed the news broadcasts of the San Francisco catastrophe and immediately recognized the design of the alien structure. We are already en route to Earth and eager to offer our assistance against this enemy.”

“Enemy?” Iskander repeated intently. “So it is a hostile force?”

“Yes,” he told them solemnly. “Their species is named the Shanial. They are ruthless, hideous creatures, too alien to coexist with species like yours and mine.”

Scotty frowned at that, and noticed Gold doing the same.

“My people had the misfortune of encountering them early in our interstellar age, before we met the Federation. These large domes would mysteriously appear on our colony worlds, displacing the surrounding earth and atmosphere to produce a devastating shock—an opening blow against population, infrastructure, and morale. The structures are at once a kind of homing beacon and staging area, a ready-made base for launching their invasion when they arrive soon thereafter. This is why we immediately launched our Defense Group toward Earth—you have limited time before the invasion begins.”

“I knew it,” Iskander exclaimed, though his voice remained level; he was too good a Muslim to let anger overcome him.

“But why wait so long before attacking?” asked Ross.

“Presumably so that you will let your guard down.”

“Then why get it up in the first place with this initial attack? Why ruin the element of surprise?”

Zakash fidgeted. “Who can understand the motives of such alien creatures? They do not think the way we do. I concede we can only speculate about their motives, but their actions are clear.”

“How come we never heard about this Shanial menace?” inquired Gold.

“We fought a fierce war against them over two centuries ago,” Zakash told him. “It was that struggle that began our conquering period. We finally drove them from our space, but had become so used to fighting,” he went on ruefully, “that we just kept at it, finding new enemies to battle even after the original foe had vanished.”

“Vanished?” Gold echoed.

“Yes, Captain. They abandoned their strongholds, disappeared back to wherever they came from. I see now they were just biding their time. Perhaps seeing a prime target like the Federation, still weakened by recent warfare, has renewed their appetite for conquest.”

“You see, Bill?” Iskander said. “It’s as I’ve said. Now more than ever we must remain alert to enemies, to vultures hoping to prey on our weakness. The struggle to preserve our way of life is never-ending.”

“Captain Zakash,” Scotty asked, “do you know how they pull off their appearin’ act?”

“Our scientists never fully determined that, but our analyses from the time are at your disposal. Together, hopefully, we can find a way to defeat them once and for all.”

“And can you tell me…if these structures are designed for poppin’ in and blastin’ away the earth around them, how come they aren’t built to handle such a shock? And how come they aren’t defended? Surely after the first attacks, you’d have blasted the later ones as soon as they appeared.”

Zakash had grown increasingly impatient as Scotty spoke. “Director, why are we wasting time with all these questions? I’m sure my technical people and yours can work these side issues out later. Right now there is imminent danger.”

“I agree,” Iskander said. “There’s a time for analysis and a time for action. Captain Zakash, your Defense Group is welcome, as is your assistance.”

“We should be there within three hours,” Zakash assured him. “Defense Group out.”

Iskander turned to Ross. “Admiral, I recommend doubling the size of our defensive cordon around the Shanial structure.”

“I’ll begin the arrangements.”

Turning to Scotty, Iskander added, “And Scotty, you should pull your team out. It’s too dangerous for them to be in there.”

“Cemal, they’ve seen no sign of any danger. The place is abandoned.”

“You heard Zakash. The Shanial could materialize at any moment.”

“Aye, I heard what he claimed. Whether I believe him—that’s another matter.”

Iskander frowned. “Scotty, I admit we only have his word to go on, but it’s a word we have no reason to doubt—and can’t afford to ignore. And one thing is clear—we have been struck a harsh blow. Dozens of innocent people have been killed, including some of your own.” He strode over to a window, gestured out at the onlookers. “Look at that crowd. The people are angry, afraid. Less than a year has passed since the war, and now we’ve been assaulted again. Those people aren’t going to be content to have us sit around asking questions—they want us to do something that will keep them safe. And I intend to heed their voices. That structure is dangerous, and the people who sent it are dangerous. That much is certain. We can sort out the reasons why later, but for now we have to protect ourselves. Pull out your team.”

“Not without a clear and present danger, Cemal. We’ve got a transporter lock on ’em at all times. If things get hot, we’ll pull them out in a jiffy. But unless that happens, I say they’re in the best position to give us some real answers. To confirm Zakash’s story—or not.”

“I agree,” Gold said. “They’re my crew and my responsibility.” He shook his head. “Lord knows, after what we’ve been through recently my first impulse is to yank them out at the first sign of trouble. But if I did that they’d never accomplish a damn thing. They go into danger because that’s where they’re needed, where they can do the most good. If I forget that…I betray the memory of all the ones who gave their lives doing good for others. I say they stay, as long as there’s a chance they can help.”

Stevens and Tev absorbed the information Scotty passed on to them (and to the rest of the team, over the open comm) with very different attitudes. Tev hardly seemed interested, concentrating more on reviewing the blast analysis they’d been working on when Scotty was called away. “How can you be so stoic?” Stevens asked the older officer. “It’s just been confirmed that we’re about to be attacked! I don’t know many Tellarites who’d take that sitting down.”

“First,” Tev responded, “I have a job to do, and histrionics don’t help. Second, it’s been alleged, not confirmed. I don’t place stock in intangibles—only in what I can handle, test, and prove. Third, I’ve been sitting less than you have—I should talk to the captain about enforcing the physical fitness requirements.”

Stevens gaped, but restrained himself from saying what he wanted to say. Not only was Tev his superior, but Scotty was standing right there and he didn’t want to look bad in front of the big boss. Indeed, Scotty was chuckling. “He has a point about one thing, lad—all we have is one man’s word.”

“But why would he lie?”

The S.C.E. chief shook his silvery head. “That’s for him to explain, if it turns out he is. All I know is, his story feels as phony as Harry Mudd’s handshake.”

“Leave the politics to those who can understand it, Technician,” Tev told him. “What we have here is a delightful engineering puzzle. How does an eight-story building appear out of nowhere?”

“Delightful?” Stevens echoed in disbelief. “Dozens of people died!”

“As they did on Maeglin, Eerlik, BorSitu Minor, Kursican, Sherman’s Planet, and many other places the da Vinci has visited. Tragic, of course, but it doesn’t change what we do—solve the puzzles the universe gives us. You can’t tell me you don’t enjoy the mental achievement.” He grinned. “Have I thanked you for this assignment, Scotty? It’s a dream job, the chance to go out there, pit my mind against the strangest technologies, the toughest crises. So much better than that laboratory job I almost took. Wonderful luck, that this position opened up when it did.”

To hell with respect for superiors, Stevens thought—the self-satisfied look on Tev’s face as he said that was the last straw. “That position opened up because my best friend died!” he shouted in Tev’s face. “You think that’s good luck? Do you?”

“How good is your luck, Technician?” Tev fired back. “You’ll need it if you persist in that tone.”

Stevens felt Scotty’s hand on his shoulder, his grip surprisingly firm. “Settle down, laddie. Tev didn’t mean it that way.”

“Yeah?” Stevens said, struggling to control himself. “Well, he could show a little more respect.”

“Respect for the dead?” Tev asked. “A strange custom, since they don’t care one way or the other.”

“How about respect for the loss their friends are going through?”

Tev was silent for a moment, studying him thoughtfully. Then he turned away. “Not my business,” he said brusquely. “I didn’t know the man—can’t offer any meaningful sentiments. So let’s drop it and get back to work, shall we?” He grew animated again. “We have a mystery to solve. How do you penetrate a defense grid that can’t be penetrated?”

After a moment, Scotty’s eyes widened. “Maybe you don’t!” At the others’ puzzled looks, he said, “Think about it, lads! If it’s here, inside the grid, and nothing can get through the grid from outside—”

It hit Stevens. “Then it wasn’t outside to begin with!”

“Rather,” said Tev pedantically, “it must have been placed here before the grid was erected.”

Stevens glared, but he had greater concerns. “Could the Breen have left it during their attack? Are these Shanial allied with them?”

“I have a suspicion, lad,” Scotty replied, “that it was here much earlier than that. Ask yerself—where did it burst from?”

“The sinkhole.”

“Aye, and what was there before the ground caved in?”

“The Starfleet Museum.”

“Exactly!” Scotty smirked. “Since becoming a historical relic myself, I’ve taken quite an interest in museums. I used to visit that one all the time. There was a wealth of alien artifacts there, some of which nobody ever figured out the use of. I spent many a day tryin’ to eke out some answers of my own from ’em. Many of ’em are gone forever, alas—but many were just buried under the rubble.”

Stevens frowned. “So what are you suggesting? That one of them was some kind of, maybe a wormhole terminus that opened up to let the structure through?”

“Aye, that’s one possibility. I’m sure we can come up with dozens, just standin’ here brainstormin’. But as an ancestor o’ Mr. Spock’s used to say, it’s a mistake to theorize ahead o’ the facts. I say we go to the new museum, study their records of the missing artifacts, and see what we can find that might give us a clue.”

Gomez, listening in over the comm, had winced when Tev and Stevens had gone at it. She hadn’t known which side to take—certainly Tev’s callous cheerfulness infuriated her as much as it did Stevens, but she couldn’t condone an enlisted crewman talking to an officer in that way. She could feel the knot forming in her shoulders, followed by a twinge of despair when she remembered Kieran’s massages were a thing of the past now. She was grateful that Scotty had broken it up, and changed the subject back to business. “Good idea, sir,” she told him after his museum suggestion. “We’ll start scanning in here for any evidence of wormhole generators, or similar equipment.”

“Keep an eye out for symbols, too,” Faulwell suggested. “Perhaps something at the museum has similar markings to the ones we’re finding here. I’ll upload what I’ve scanned so far to your tricorder, Captain Scott.”

“Good lad.”

“Commander?” That was O’Brien, calling from a nearby intersection. “I’m scanning something strange here. A subspace reading I didn’t get before.”

Gomez and the others gathered around him, confirming the readings on their tricorders. “Was it shielded?”

“Hard to say. Maybe just too faint to read from a distance.” They homed in on the signal and began moving toward it, fanning out as much as possible to get a better sensor baseline. O’Brien frowned as his tricorder brushed the corridor wall. “Hang on.” He placed the sensor array against the wall. “The readings are stronger in the walls themselves.”

“Are they generating it?” Corsi asked, looking around suspiciously.

“No, I don’t think so…more like the subspace waves are being channeled through them, isolated within them, so that we didn’t read them in the corridors.”

“Like a light pulse in a fiber-optic cable,” Gomez said.

“Exactly. The cortenum in the wall is confining them. We thought it was just for holding up against the gravity, but it’s more like it’s functioning as a gravitic wave guide. I think this whole structure is designed to channel gravimetric energies—which probably means it can create subspace distortions, like a warp coil.”

“It should’ve been obvious,” Gomez said, chastising herself. “The cortenum.”

“Not really, Commander. Cortenum’s useless for warp drive without verterium in the mix. As far as we knew, it was just inert building material.”

“So this isn’t a warp engine—but it must be something similar.”

“Something that went in a different direction from our science.”

“Never mind the lecture, Professor,” Corsi said. “Are you telling us this whole structure around us is active, generating some space-warping effect?”

Gomez studied her own readings. “It looks more like a resonance—like it’s picking up emissions from somewhere else, the way the da Vinci’s warp coils resonated with the blast. The actual source must be what the chief picked up before.”

“Which means,” Corsi said, “that we’re close to the source.” With a glance, she put her security team on heightened alert.

Soon they came to a large, heavy portal. Sonya placed her hand against the surface—it was literally vibrating with gravitic energies. “Bart, the control panel?”

Faulwell examined the markings and made some efforts to open the hatchway, with no success. “I don’t think we’re authorized users,” he said dryly. “Perhaps the P-38s?”

“Try it.” Gomez nodded to O’Brien and Pattie, who extracted their trusty door-openers from their kits and went to work.

“Just call me P-38 Blue,” Pattie muttered.

“Where are we?” Abramowitz asked. “Within the structure, that is.”

Gomez studied her map. “Pretty much dead center. No clear reading of what’s inside—it scanned like a solid mass.”

“Maybe…” O’Brien grunted as he strained at the portal. “Maybe an equipment core…with just some maintenance crawlways inside.”

“Then why the big door?” Abramowitz asked.

“You’re the culture maven, you tell us,” Pattie said, not panting in the least, since her speech apparatus didn’t depend on breath.

“Anyway,” Gomez continued, “whatever’s in there is no bigger than the da Vinci’s bridge. It’s probably pretty important, though, considering—”

She cut off as the door finally sprang open. They gazed inside, to behold…

A huge indoor plaza, nearly as wide and high as the whole structure they were in, its roof supported by tier upon tier of heavy columns. Through the spaces between the columns could be seen large domelike buildings, braced with flying buttresses and holding thousands of windows, many lit from within. Between the buildings ran roadways that stretched into the distance.

They all just stared dumbly, until Corsi glared at the impossibility and cracked, “So—is that a city in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”