“I thought Excelsiorwas in the vicinity of the Tholian Assembly when it entered the rift that took it here,” Riker said, recalling the decades-old reports he had reviewed shortly after Titan’s arrival here. He pointed up at the vast energy bloom that now filled over half of the lab’s volume. “The other end of this thing is located inside Romulan space, over three-hundred light-years away from the rift Excelsiorencountered. It seems like quite a coincidence for two spatial rifts located so far away from each other to end up in the same place.”
“Not really,” Pazlar said as she typed another series of instructions into her control unit. “Not if you take into account the multidimensional interspatial topology of this part of the universe.”
A complex schematic diagram replaced the image of the energy anomaly. To Riker’s untrained eye it looked for all the world like a collection of thick blue pipes running into and around each other in an arrangement so busy and complex that it might have given the ancient Earth artist M. C. Escher a headache.
“What, precisely, are we looking at, Lieutenant?” Tuvok asked Pazlar, raising an eyebrow.
“A little something that Jaza, Cethente, and I spent the last two hours putting together while the computer was verifying our initial scans. It’s a map of the subspace topology of a volume of space that encompasses both the Small Magellanic Cloud and most of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants of the Milky Way Galaxy. The mathematics are complex.”
“No kidding,” Vale said, punctuating her observation with a low whistle. “Makes me glad I never opted for the sciences track at Starfleet Academy.”
Riker was growing impatient to get at the meaning of the cryptic diagram that loomed overhead. “Can you get to the point of this, Lieutenant?” he asked, gesturing toward the bizarre tubular agglomeration.
Pazlar nodded. “Certainly, Captain. The reason that two widely spaced interspatial fissures in our galaxy both ended up here, is—as near as we can tell so far—because the Small Magellanic Cloud seems to be ‘downhill’ from almost every location in the Milky Way. Interspatially speaking, of course.”
“Logical,” said Tuvok.
Akaar nodded. “I agree.”
Riker let out a low whistle of his own, wondering whether his senior science officer and stellar cartographer had just invented a mathematical proof of the nonexistence of coincidence—or if they had instead proved that coincidence itself amounted to a previously undiscovered fundamental force of nature.
“Captain, what about Donatra and her ship?” Vale asked. “The Valdorewas only a few kilometers away from us when we were drawn into this…‘Great Bloom,’ or whatever the hell that thing out there is. Is it possible that the Romulans were thrown here as well?”
“That’s hard to say,” Pazlar said. “Jaza and Dakal are still scanning for any sign of the Valdore,or the fleet Donatra believes she lost inside the energy rift. So far, no one has turned up so much as a scrap of debris. Either Donatra’s ships all somehow managed to escape being sent here, or else the phenomenon is still generating too much interference for us to completely trust our sensor readings.”
Riker hated to think that Donatra, who not only had been instrumental in the defeat of the mad Praetor Shinzon weeks ago, but had also just helped him hammer out a tenuous peace between the rival political factions in contention over control of the Romulan Star Empire, might have been killed by the same energy phenomenon that had displaced Titan.He also knew that until the fate of Donatra and her lost fleet was definitively understood, any attempt to return home via the rift would pose an unacceptably high risk.
“Stay on it,” he told Pazlar. “I don’t have any intention of remaining out here indefinitely. We’re going to get Titanback to the other side of that rift. But we need to make an accurate assessment of our chances of re-crossing it in one piece before we can seriously think about going back in there.”
“That’s Jaza’s top priority,” Pazlar said, sounding somber. “As well as mine, and everybody else in astrosciences.”
Silence filled the room for the next several moments, until Riker broke it. “Well, until that’s worked out, we ought to spend some time considering the locals: specifically, the Neyel.”
“ ‘Locals’ is perhaps not the most accurate way to describe the Neyel, Captain,” Akaar said. “Have you taken the time yet to read Excelsior’s official reports about them?”
Riker nodded. “I have, Admiral. But apart from Mr. Tuvok’s original astrometric observations and Dr. Chapel’s medical and biological reports, they didn’t take long to read. In fact, they left me with a lot more questions than answers. So I’m going to have to rely on your prior experience with the Neyel.” He trained his gaze on Tuvok next. “And yours as well, Commander.”
Both Akaar and Tuvok nodded, but didn’t look at one another.
Vale shook her head, looking embarrassed. “With the repairs I’ve been coordinating and all the other emergencies I’ve had to deal with since Titangot dumped here, I’m afraid I still know next to nothing about these Neyel—other than the fact that they’re supposed to be a long-lost offshoot of terrestrial humans.”
“One might accurately describe them that way,” Tuvok said. “Despite their alien outward appearance, the Neyel were— are—entirely human at the genetic level.”
“According to Excelsior’s reports,” Riker said, “the Neyel were the descendants of the scientists and engineers who worked aboard one of Earth’s early L-5 colonies.”
“One of the hollow-asteroid spacehabs that Zefram Cochrane’s team used to develop his prototype warp drive?” Vale asked.
“The same,” Riker said. “The Vanguard colony had been thought destroyed in an accident during a warp-field test several years before First Contact. Instead, its imploding warp fields sent it on a very long voyage. Of course, no one on Earth knew that at the time.”
“The Neyel had been cut off from Earth for nearly two and a half centuries when Excelsiorfirst encountered them,” Tuvok said. “However, they had already evolved into a form that bore almost no outward resemblance to the mainstream branch of humanity that went on to participate in the founding of the Federation.”
“But how can that be?” Vale said. “How could they have evolved such a fundamentally different physical form in such a short time?”
“Genetic engineering,” Riker said.
Akaar nodded. “Apparently born of rather urgent necessity.”
“Amazing,” Vale said, her eyes widening. “You’d think their ancestors would have remembered the lessons of the Eugenics Wars at least as well as we do. I mean, those times had to still be within the living memories of at least some of the Neyel’s ancestors when they left Earth.”
At least for those who’d managed to survived the nuclear strikes and bioweapons attacks of the Third World War,Riker thought. He would never forget the devastation that had still been evident on his home planet only a decade after the outbreak of that horrible conflict, having seen it up close during the Enterprise’s mission to stop a Borg attack on twenty-first-century Earth.
“Do not judge them too harshly, Commander,” Akaar said to Vale. “From what little we were able to glean from their history, the progenitors of the Neyel found basic survival to be an extreme challenge after they were cut off from your homeworld.”
Tuvok nodded. “Indeed. Had they not used gene manipulation—to add microgravity-adapted grasping tails and feet to their phenotypes, for example, or to increase their resistance to hard radiation or accelerate their maturity to reproductive age—they might have died out more or less immediately, or at least been rendered sterile.”
“Right after we first arrived here, you said something that struck me as fairly ominous, Commander Tuvok,” Vale said. “You compared the Neyel to the Romulans. Since we might find ourselves stuck here in Neyel territory for at least a little while, I hope you were just being melodramatic.”