The captain’s mouth had been dry for the past half hour. No matter how much water he drank, he couldn’t seem to get enough moisture. Ever since Dr. Lense had been forced, after a nearly forty-five minute struggle, to accept reality and pronounce Bart Faulwell dead, David Gold had felt strangely drained of everything. One instant they had been talking, the next a man lay dead half inside a turbolift.

Nothing the finest care and technology could prevent.

It had gone beyond madness, Gold thought, getting himself a fresh glass of water from the replicator. He had lost crew before, lord knew. Salek and Okha during the war. 111 on the beast. And twenty-three people in one, horrible incident at Galvan VI. But there, as senseless as so much death ever was, there had at least been a visible cause. A situation against which steps might have been taken, measures tried.

But what did they have now? Peanut butter. Bad luck? He looked at his senior staff, gathered with him in the observation lounge. Did he seriously intend to put forth the theory that this was all on account of simple bad luck? Finishing his water, the captain decided he had better let the others have their say before he dropped that particular bubbemyseh on the table.

“Faulwell’s death,” Gold said, “comes as a shock to everyone. It was as random, as unlikely an event as anyone could have foreseen.”

“So senseless,” said Sonya Gomez, fiercely.

Tev nodded. “What are the chances of an adult with no prior history of a problem developing so severe an allergic reaction to a much-consumed food?”

Soloman said, “Not likely at all. Yet far more so than a replicator producing a kkk’tukkiquith’quattkkk or an unknown isotope.”

“Or anything else that’s been going wrong. Think of it, what are the odds everything goes wrong all the time?” said Nancy Conlon. “This entire mission’s been jinxed from the start.”

“Jinxes do not exist,” Tev said. “Bartholomew did not die from ‘bad luck.’ Luck is not intrinsically good or bad. It is just random chance. It is neither a cause nor an effect. It just is what it is.”

“Besides,” Soloman said, “it’s not as though ‘luck’ or random chance possess physical qualities that can be quantified and manipulated.”

“Bart is dead,” Sonya Gomez said in a soft voice. “He was a dear man and a good friend and now he’s dead because of something as ridiculous as snack food? I don’t think so, people.” She looked from face to face. “There’s something wrong here. And it is bad luck, but something is helping it along. Maybe it’s not anything we can measure, but you all feel it, don’t you? I mean, we’re better than this. All the accidents, the lost and broken tools, the equipment failures. We don’t make these kinds of mistakes, and we sure as hell don’t make them with the recent alarming rate of frequency. Something is influencing events. Something killed Bart.”

Gold said, “What’s left that we haven’t already checked? And with chance against us, how do we propose to reverse our luck?”

“Really, Captain,” said Tev. “You’re not seriously suggesting that we proceed on the assumption of ‘bad luck’?”

“If you have a better suggestion, Tev, I’d like to hear it,” said Gold.

Tev opened his mouth to speak as the ready room door slid open.

Mor glasch Tev stepped into the room, saying, “My apologies for being late, Captain.”

Mor glasch Tev, seated at the conference table, stared in disbelief at himself. “This isn’t right,” he said. “I am never late for meetings.”

In the resultant uproar, the latecomer Tev appeared to slip, or otherwise disappear from the room, but no one could deny he had been present. If only for a moment.

“You, sharing the room with yourself is, without question, an impossibility,” declared Soloman. “What better proof do we need that the very essence of probability is being tampered with?”

The Bynar and Tellarite looked at each other. Tev nodded in agreement.

“Wait…that’s like saying because three plus three doesn’t equal eight, three plus three must equal eight,” Gomez said.

“Not at all the same thing, Commander. When you’ve ruled out all that is possible,” said the Tellarite, “the only remaining possible answer is the impossible.”

“To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes,” Conlon said.

“Its attribution to a fictitious character does little to diminish its fundamental truth,” said Tev.

Sonya paced the shuttle bay, deep in thought. She sometimes came down here, to the ship’s largest open space, for room to move when faced with the seemingly insurmountable. That, and it was the place where Elizabeth pronounced Kieran Duffy dead. Coming here made her remember him, and helped her move on from the grief. Her near-death experience on Teneb had done a great deal to help in the latter regard, but she still liked coming here.

Every now and then, as she walked the length of the bay, back and forth, she found herself stepping over things that shouldn’t be there. Chance had gone haywire, no doubt of that, she thought. Or been made to go haywire. Therefore, the odds of any event happening, no matter how unlikely under normal scientific law, had gone from one in numbers so large even the zeroes couldn’t be counted to pretty much dead even. Like the cartoon cat chasing the cartoon mouse under her feet and out the cargo doors, through the force field and into the vacuum of space to implode into smears of paint. What were the odds of such a thing ever happening?

As mad as it sounded, Tev was right. It seemed the only possible answer.

And yet, what could affect so intangible a something as chance? She couldn’t imagine some Yridan Bad-Luck Ray or Romulan Gotcha Beam being responsible. She couldn’t imagine any technology capable of influencing probability.

And yet, as Bart Faulwell himself had pointed out the day the computer ate his files, “There are more things in heaven and earth…”

Such things as the universe of tech they were investigating, some of which, no matter how hard she might study it, she would never even begin to wrap her mind around. The theories on which they were conceived and the very logic behind the engineering eluded her, the end product too alien for this culture to ever understand. Some, she believed, operated on transdimensional power, although whether they actually traveled between dimensions or siphoned energy from other-dimensional sources she couldn’t quite determine. Others seemed to rely on tachyon streams or the Uncertainty Principle or, in one case, little more than mineral water.

But probability?

Still, what was the Uncertainty Principle but chance? “The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa,” Heisenberg had said. One increased the odds of determining a particle’s position by lowering those on knowing its momentum.

Which, too, came back to Soloman’s earlier playful proposition that all odds could be boiled down to fifty-fifty. The Uncertainty Principle: you know either a particle’s position or its momentum. Fifty-fifty. The same with Schrödinger’s Cat: was the cat inside the box alive or dead? Fifty-fifty. Maybe here, for whatever reason, that had become, somehow, fundamental truth. There was as much chance of a ship outfitted with a drive that altered probability existing as there was for it not to exist.

Fifty-fifty.

She was putting her money on it being out there. And against, appropriately enough, all odds, it had somehow been activated and was screwing with chance.

What were the odds she would be soaked in a brief rain shower while standing in the cargo bay of a Starfleet ship with a controlled atmosphere? Infinitesimal, and yet, as her wet hair and uniform attested, no longer impossible.

“What did you call it?” asked Nancy Conlon.

“An Uncertainty Drive,” said Gomez. “There was a similar, albeit fictitious drive, put forth in a twentieth-century novel by Douglas Adams. It worked, as I recall, by manipulating the laws of probability to move from place to place. But it was a humorous work, not meant to be taken seriously.”

“Nobody’s laughing,” said Fabian Stevens.

“And you’re saying you think that’s what we’re up against here?” asked Captain Gold.

Gomez shrugged and said, “I’ve eliminated the possible. Look, we’re all agreed that chance is, by it’s very nature, random but not capricious. What I mean is, there are rules. As Soloman said, flip a coin a set number of times and it will come out split evenly between heads and tails, every time. In a game of five-card poker, you stand roughly one chance in thirty-one thousand of holding a royal flush. Head a ship in a specific direction under an established mode of propulsion and it will travel at x-speed toward a fixed destination.

“But bypass physical propulsion, establish a set of odds for your vessel to simply arrive at a specified destination in a set amount of time, then manipulate the odds to make that arrival a sure bet, and you’ve got—”

“An Uncertainty Drive,” said Soloman, a bit breathless at the very idea. “But it’s mathematical insanity, Commander Gomez. The amount of processing power is unimaginable, and how would it go about affecting the odds?”

“It may seem insane,” Gomez said, “but it’s possible. I even have evidence.” She touched a control on the table in front of her. The viewscreen on the far wall lit up with a half-sphere decorated with a moderately ornate panel.

“That looks familiar,” Stevens said.

“It should—it was discovered on Deep Space 9 when you were stationed there.”

Stevens snapped his fingers. “Right! That El-Aurian who opened the gambling joint on the Promenade!”

Gold looked at Gomez and Stevens. “You want to fill in for the rest of us, Gomez?”

“The El-Aurian Fabian’s talking about got his hands on a device that altered probabilities.”

Nodding, Stevens said, “It made all the neutrinos near the station spin the same way—and it made a pig’s ear out of ol’ Doc Bashir’s racquetball game.” He shook his head. “I lost a bundle betting on that game with the chief….”

Abramowitz shook her head. “I don’t get it. How can a machine make the impossible possible?”

“Impossibilities are merely things we’ve not yet learned to do,” said Tev. “This very starship, its warp engines, were once thought impossible, as was creating artificial intelligence on par with biological sentience. How many of us come from worlds that once believed the evolution of life on other planets was a statistical impossibility? As one who has himself experienced time travel, another historic ‘impossibility,’ I am inclined to accept that everything we today might think of as impossible just hasn’t happened yet.”

A chimpanzee in a conservatively cut and particularly dignified military uniform paused in their midst, checked something on the clipboard he was carrying, and continued on his way.

“That was different,” said Stevens. He looked up and gave a helpless shrug. “Okay, so we buy the Uncertainty Drive. How do we go about finding it?”

“Already done,” said Gomez. “I ran a broad spectrum scan, tuned to hunt for frequencies similar to the ones given off by that little doodad from DS9.”

“And it worked?” asked Gold.

“What can I tell you?” Gomez smiled. “I got lucky.”