“Again, a damned good reason to get out of here,” Dekri said. “Now.”
Cethente chuckled, a sound like winter icicles falling from the poinciana trees at Lake Cataria. “And that might also be a fine way to spread that damage back to Romulan space.”
“And perhaps far beyond,” Jaza said.
“How can you possibly know that?” Tchev said, jabbing a thick finger toward the Bajoran. “You don’t witness the births of these so-called ‘protouniverses’ every day.”
“No,” Jaza said, his patient, level tone calming everyone somewhat. “But Starfleet personnel accidentally brought a very similar phenomenon into the Bajor sector from the Gamma Quadrant about ten years ago. That protouniverse threatened to destroy both Deep Space 9 and the Celestial Temp—” He caught himself, and paused for a moment before continuing. “—the Bajoran wormhole, until DS9’s crew safely relocated the phenomenon.”
Dekri threw her hands in the air. “Why don’t we simply do something like that? Transplant this thing. Hook on a couple of tractor beams and drag it back to wherever it came from in the first place.”
“I’m afraid this particular protouniverse is already at far too advanced a stage of development for that approach to work,” Jaza said, shaking his head sadly. “If we were to attempt to move it with a tractor beam, we might well accelerate its spread. Or create another chaotic energy interaction just like the one that brought us all here in the first place.”
“What if we had more power?” Will asked. “Say, the amount of power that could be generated by all of Commander Donatra’s missing ships?”
“That would give us considerably more options,” Jaza said. “With a couple of dozen warp fields operating in tandem, we might be able to coax the protouniverse back across the rift and into the same extradimensional space where it formed in the first place.”
“But we don’t even know where my ships are,” said Donatra. “We might or might not recover them. So unless it would somehow jeopardize our ability to use the rift to return home, we may well have no option other than simply destroying this thing.”
“Good answer,” Tchev grunted. Troi surmised that the Klingon captain took personally the severe damage the rift had inflicted on his ship, and that he wasn’t above taking a bit of revenge. “A brace of Titan’s quantum torpedoes ought to be ideally suited to the task.”
Jaza and Pazlar exchanged worried glances, and the Bajoran then busied himself by restoring the holographic image of the colorful spatial rift, its bright energy tendrils slowly rotating in the space above the center of the conference table in place of the defunct planet.
“Maybe, or maybe not,” Jaza said. Troi noticed that his emotional aura was growing increasingly jangled as he appeared to consider the risks of poking and prodding the phenomenon. “The truth is, we don’t know what effect destroying an emerging protouniverse would have on the rift itself. Or on the space that contains our ships, for that matter. Or even on the space on the Romulan Empire side of the rift. I have to agree with Dr. Cethente—we can’t do anything that might risk taking this thing’s destructive potential back home with us.”
“To say nothing of the risk of getting us all vaporized because we’ve gone off half-cocked,” Pazlar added. “We’ve already seen the damage the rift’s chaotic energy discharges can do to nearby ships.” Troi heard grumbling coming from Tchev, whose ship and crew had already learned that lesson the hard way, as Pazlar continued. “We need more information before we can do much of anything.”
Vale caught Donatra’s eye. “Speaking of more information, Commander Donatra, I’m curious to hear what your crew has learned about our current, ah, situation. And yours, Captain Tchev.”
“We’ve had little opportunity to do scientific research here,” Dekri said acerbically. “Our ship was incapacitated almost immediately.”
Donatra shook her head. “I’m afraid we’ve uncovered very little data of concrete value either, at least so far.” She turned toward Will and grew more serious. “Other than our scanner readings, which we’ve already transmitted to your staff, everything we’ve learned so far about the Bloom—about the spatial rift, rather—has been rather…metaphysical in nature.”
Jaza looked surprised, and Troi could tell that his curiosity was roused. “Metaphysical?”
Donatra turned and fixed her gaze squarely upon Titan’s sole Neyel guest. “Mr. Frane?”
Frane, who had been studying a tall, red chess piece he had apparently picked up from one of the nearby game boards, returned Donatra’s stare warily, his hooded eyes large.
Setting the piece on the tabletop before him, he looked around the diversely populated room, clearly still overwhelmed by so much alien contact in such a short span of time. Though Troi sensed that her proximity to him was having a calming effect, being called upon to speak was bringing to the fore all of the young man’s intense feelings of trepidation and vulnerability.
His moment of indecision having passed, Frane rose, apparently taking his cue from Jaza, who had remained standing as he oversaw the briefing.
To Jaza, Frane said, “You claim that this…spatial rift is giving birth to a new universe.”
The Bajoran smiled, but shook his head slowly. “Not precisely. Our best hypothesis is that a new universe is emerging from outside the boundaries of this universe—from the same ‘ocean’of de Sitter space on which our own universe ‘floats,’so to speak.”
“De Sitter space?” Donatra asked as the Klingons exchanged blank glances.
“De Sitter space is a meta-etheric medium. A sort of ‘overspace’ that contains this universe, as well as countless others,”Cethente said in clear, crystalline tones. “Federation scientists have named it after the Terran physicist who first hypothesized its existence several centuries ago. At any rate, the rift has become an entry point for a newly formed universe, one that will soon displace a significant volume ofthis universe as the emerging protouniverse expands and develops.”
“New universe form in this manner all the time, by the way,” Jaza added. “They’re a little bit like bubbles that form in water. They come into being somewhere virtually every nanosecond, expanding countless orders of magnitude as they develop. As they grow, these ‘baby universes’ sometimes pass through portions of ouruniverse, or other universes, depending on a given universe’s particular interactions with de Sitter space. An interspatial rift like the one that brought us here represents such a passing interaction.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Tchev observed, looking at Donatra. “Your mad praetor’s thalaron weapon creates a spatial rift in Romulan space, which just happens to toss our three ships here, along with a new universe, only a few weeks later. That sounds like quite a coincidence.”
Cethente chimed in, as it were. “Not really, Captain Tchev. Not when you consider the subspace topology of this region of our universe in relation to many others. Neyel space is ‘downhill’ from our respective origin points, as well as in relation to many other spatial regions in this universe. It appears that this region of our universe lies ‘downhill’ from the perspective of de Sitter space as well. So the ‘baby universe’ out there has simply ‘rolled downhill’ toward us on its way toward being born.”
Frane, once again gripping the red chess piece, seemed to consider all of this for a protracted moment, then shrugged. “That isn’t so,” he said at length.
Jaza’s curiosity was obviously becoming piqued even further. “Excuse me?”
“You say we are witnessing the birth of something new. But uncounted millennia of local legend contradicts this.”
Troi felt Frane freeze as he noticed that the room had again fallen silent—and that everyone’s eyes were suddenly upon him, her own included.
“Go ahead, Mr. Frane,” Troi said.