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standing beside the young lieutenant, frowning down at the console. He let go a hiss of amazement. “What the hell—?” Kirk strode over to stand beside him; Scott angled his face toward his former captain without taking his gaze off the perplexing readout. “Their life signs are… phasing in and out of our space-time contin-

~~.”

“Phasing?” Kirk asked. “To where?” He stared down at the board, but the data made no more sense than Scott’s words.

Scott did not answer, but moved in to work the controls as the lieutenant gratefully moved aside.

“Sir!” the navigator cried, in a tone as electrifying as the sight on the screen. “Their hull’s collapsing!”

For the second time, the energy tendril engulfed the doomed ship, like a great dazzling python squeezing its prey. As Kirk watched, the Lakul erupted into a fiery hail of spinning debris. He turned at once to Scott, whose eyes held the haggard, defeated look Kirk had come to dread so long ago.

“I got forty-seven of them,” Scott said softly, though in the sudden silence his words seemed to fill the entire bridge. His gaze dropped. “Out of one hundred fifty.”

No time to react with sorrow; the floor beneath Kirk’s feet heaved, hurling him against Harriman’s chair. Somehow he managed to hold on, somehow reacted instinctively to the sound of shrieking metal by shielding his face with his forearm against the sudden rain of sparks and bulkhead fragments.

And then it was over just as quickly, and the ship righted itself with an abrupt hitch that almost made him lose his balance again. He lowered his arm and took in

his surroundings; a scorched bulkhead, but no hull breach, as he’d feared. No serious injuries—except the navigator, who lay sprawled across the console with terrible limpness, his eyes open, his head bloodied, his neck at such an impossible angle that Kirk did not need to check to know that he was dead.

Beside him, dull grief in her eyes, Demora sat stiffly, holding on to her console with white-lipped intensity.

“Report!” Kirk shouted over the klaxon’s howl, as Scott gently moved the dead man aside and took his place.

Demora drew in a visible, gathering breath. “We’re caught in a gravimetric field emanating from the trailing edge of the ribbon.”

This time, Harriman needed no prompting, no advice. “All engines, full reverse!”