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trapped his feet, and held him fast as the world around him once more faded into brilliant, deadly white.

Geordi ran through the corridors of engineering on pure adrenaline. Yet despite the chaos before him— the blur of fleeing bodies, the shouts, the screaming klaxonmhe heard nothing but his own ragged breath and the pounding of his heart. His mind seemed detached from his body, which operated on pure instinct; the faster he moved, the more time seemed to slow, the more he became overwhelmed by the sense of unreality.

In his time aboard the Enterprise, he had lived through experiences he could not have anticipated in his wildest flights of fantasy. But in spite of all the drills, of all his preparation for this terrible moment, he had never believed it could happen: never believed that he would ever see the deadly plume of white-hot gas spewing from the warp core, that he would be the last to duck beneath the emergency isolation door as it descended.

His body was cold with fear, but his mind was utterly calm, perceiving each instant with almost unbearable clarity. He saw each millimeter of bulkhead, of deck, each console as he passed with the acute awareness that he would never see it again. He had confronted his own impermanence against a backdrop of darkness, broken only by Soran’s soft voice and the ticking of a watch; and he thought himself prepared now for death~~but he was not prepared for the thought that the Enterprise herself was mortal, that engineering, the part of the ship in which he had spent the best years of his life, was about to be destroyed in a blinding millisecond. He remembered suddenly Montgomery Scott, and how the old engineer

had once spoken of the grief he’d experienced a~~er losing the original Enterprise ….

Beyond the stream of moving uniforms in front of him, a buzzer sounded as a second isolation door began slowly to descend. Geordi forced his legs impossibly faster, knowing from years of drills that he would have seconds, nineteen seconds, to make it past to the civilian corridors beyond; in his mind, he heard the ticking of Soran’s watch, and the scientist’s soft voice. Time is running out, Mr. La Forge ….

The burst of speed caused him to step on the heel of a dark-haired fleeing lieutenant—Farrell, with whom he’d served for years, with whom he’d joked the past fifty drills or so because somehow, they’d always managed to wind up the last two to make it out of engineering. Plus there was the fact that splay-footed Farrell ran like a duck. A running joke, Farrell had called herself last time, and Geordi had grimaced at the pun.

Farrell stumbled, half turned; there was no humor in her wide, stark eyes now. At the sight of La Forge behind her, she proffered a hand, tried to pull Geordi along with her.

“No!” Geordi shouted, waving her off. “Keep mov-ing!” The longer they took to evacuate, the more danger the saucer would be in—if it could afford to wait.

But Farrell remained until La Forge was alongside, and they ran together at full tilt, knees and elbows pumping.

The isolation door was halfway to the deck by the time they arrived. A small group of engineers crouched there, struggling through. Geordi ducked and let himself run into them, pushing them through the vanishing doorway.