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As Titus’s body crumpled, Bobbie Ray took up position over him, bowing slightly to the scattered applause. Victoriously, he raised one foot to place it on his prostrate opponent.

Titus’s image flickered and disappeared. “Don’t you dare put your dirty paw on me!” Titus exclaimed as he dropped the handles of the hologame.

Bobbie Ray’s image also disappeared as the Rex stood up, stretching. He had an unbearably smug look on his face. “Something wrong, roomie? It was a fair match.”

“No, it wasn’t!” Titus muttered, handing over the holocontrols.

“Excuse me?” Bobbie Ray drawled. “You picked the weapons. Though I don’t know how your people accomplish anything with a toy like an antara.”

Titus smothered his anger in the face of the laughter from the other cadets who had crowded into their room to watch the match.

“That’s a great hologame,” Jayme told Bobbie Ray. “Did your parents gave it to you during the midyear break?”

“Yeah, they got it from a environmental designer they work with.” Bobbie Ray carefully put the holocontrols in a foam contoured box. “It’s a prototype that won’t be on the market until the end of this year.”

Starsa was sitting cross‑legged on Titus’s bed. “Is there any kind of game you don’thave?”

“I doubt it.” Bobbie Ray was looking unbearably conceited again. Their friends started to drift out of the room, saying good‑bye.

Jayme sidled up to Titus. “You aren’t exactly the poster boy for good losers.”

“It’s hisgame,” Titus retorted. “How can anyone beat him at it?”

Jayme shrugged, grinning. “You were the one who challenged him to an antaramatch.”

Titus turned away. “I’m not used to those controls.”

“Hey, everyone, look!” Starsa called out, “Comm, sound on.”

The small screen over the door routinely ran the Federation news service, along with information that was pertinent to the Academy, like announcements from professors or the superintendent herself. This time it was breaking news from the San Francisco local media station. The announcer had a fashionably shaved head with a blue forehead‑cockade, and she seemed unusually shaken.

“We take you live to the site,” she was saying as the sound came up. The image switched to a view of workers wearing the orange uniforms of the city maintenance department climbing out of an underground tunnel.

“Starsa, who cares–” Titus started to say.

“Look at that?” Jayme exclaimed as the image switched again.

It was a head, like the severed head of a mannequin lying in the dirt. As the camera swung around to view the face, it revealed the blank, golden stare of Lieutenant Commander Data.

The announcer was saying, “Work crews excavating beneath the city of San Francisco today discovered artifacts suggesting an extraterrestrial presence on Earth sometime during the late nineteenth century. Among the artifacts discovered is an object identified as the head of Lieutenant Commander Data of Starfleet. According to isotope readings, it has decayed from having been buried for some 500 years.”

“That’s impossible!” Starsa blurted out, and was shushed by the others.

“Starfleet Command reports that their flagship, the Enterprise‑D, has been recalled to Earth to investigate this anomaly.” The blue cockade bobbed impressively. “Now we take you to the tunnels near the Presidio, home of Starfleet Academy, to view the remains.”

“Remains!” Starsa exclaimed again.

“Will you pleaseshut up?” Bobbie Ray asked with exaggerated politeness, shouldering some of the remaining cadets aside to get a better view.

Titus sat down at his desk, staring out the window at the Golden Gate Bridge. He was just as pleased to have their minds so quickly diverted from the antaramatch. He listened with only half an ear as the announcer described how the workers had discovered the severed head while installing additional seismic regulators in subterranean caverns to control earth movements that were typical along the San Andreas fault.

“Subterranean caverns,” Titus repeated under his breath, realizing what that implied. Impatiently, he waited for the broadcast to end and the last of the cadets to depart to spread the bizarre news.

Finally only Bobbie Ray and Jayme were left, and Titus knew Jayme would probably linger in their room all evening unless he asked her to leave. He had noticed she didn’t like spending much time in her half‑empty room, ever since Elma had resigned from the Academy. Jayme had more than once voiced her hope that a new cadet would fill the space after the half‑year break, but her room was still empty.

“I have an idea,” Titus told them both. “That is, if you want to have some real fun instead of holofakery.”

Bobbie Ray curled one lip at the intended slight. “What’s your bright idea this time?”

“You’ve never had a real thrill until you’ve descended a hundred meter fissure into an underground cavern.”

“You want to go down to the caves?” Bobbie Ray asked in disbelief. “Are you crazy? You know how many security teams they must have posted?”

“We can’t disturb the excavation site,” Jayme agreed. “It could interfere with the Enterprise’s investigation.”

Titus raised his eyes to the heavens. “I’m not stupid. We can explore the caverns without going near the Presidio.” He directly challenged Bobbie Ray. “Unless, that is, you’re too scared.”

Bobbie Ray hesitated, then shrugged, willing to go along with anything, as usual. Jayme briefly considered it before shaking her head. “You don’t know these caverns. They’re dangerous; that’s why they were sealed off ages ago.”

“We’re not worried,” Titus assured her. “It’s better to have three people on an underground exploratory team, but we’ll go duo without you if we have to.”

“Even if I did agree to go, you’d never find a way to get inside.”

“Just leave that to me,” Titus told them, feeling much better now. “I’ll get us below ground. Or I’m not an Antaranan.”

Titus had grown up in the human colony of Antaranan, more in the caves than on the surface, so he figured there was nobody better to find their way through these puny San Franciscan caverns than himself. His mother was a biospeleologist, and had often taken him into the unexplored caverns and passageways that riddled the crust of Antaranan, far beyond the familiar chambers used by the colony to grow the essential fungal‑meats and fragile vegetable matter away from the harmful solar rays.

It wasn’t difficult to access the maintenance records of the seismic regulators under San Francisco, as well as the original surveys of the caverns performed hundreds of years ago. Most of the main access ports were in the heart of the city–the financial district, in Union Square, even the ancient yards of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

When he showed Jayme the map, she shook her head at all of the access ports he suggested. As she liked to tell the other cadets, she knew the city inside out.

“This is where we should go down,” she insisted, pointing to a small auxiliary porthole near the Cable Car Barn Museum.

Bobbie Ray squinted at the print over that area. “Chinatown?”

“I was looking for a more out‑of‑the‑way place,” Titus protested. “That’s one of the most crowded areas in the city.”

“Exactly!” Jayme exclaimed. “Everyone’s too busy and there’s too much going on for anyone to pay much attention to a few people going down the access port.”