“Engaging transition now,” Lieutenant Daniels said, sounding fearful.

Outside, the nightmare replayed across the ship as the great vessel transitioned out of dimensional space and was flung across time and space by the ship’s powerful engines. Weston’s thoughts echoed infinitely through his awareness, locked in time and mind by the ship’s passage through the universe: I sure hope this gets easier with practice.

CHAPTER 4

APPARENTLY, IT JUST wasn’t going to get any easier. The Odyssey reentered dimensional space with emergency alarms blaring. The sound penetrated aching skulls and got even the sickest of the crew moving, as much in the hopes of shutting the things off as anything else.

“Sensors! What’s going on?” Weston barely finished his sentence when the vessel rocked violently, forcing him to clutch the command chair.

“Debris field, sir! Shouldn’t be here, though!” Waters’s replacement, Ensign Bremen, muttered fearfully.

Apparently, the sensors aren’t going to be much help, either.

“We came in well clear of system Trojans, sir.”

“He’s right, Captain,” Daniels said. “I specifically set our course to keep us safely away from any Lagrange points. Whatever this is, it hasn’t been here very long!”

“Hold on, data coming in,” Bremen spoke up before falling silent with a shocked look on his face.

Weston prodded the young man. “Ensign? What is it?”

“It’s…It’s wreckage, sir. Sweet Jesus! It looks like an entire fleet died out here,” Bremen said, his voice struck with a kind of awe and horror all at once. “Still reading heat dissipating from some of the wrecks, sir. They’ve only been here days at most, if they use the same materials we do.”

Silence reigned on the bridge for a long moment. Weston could see on their faces the question that was on the mind of every person on the bridge: What have we gotten ourselves into?

Weston was the first to break the silence, checking a monitor beside his chair. “Bremen, I want a complete scan of the system. If whatever did this is still here, I want to know it. Daniels, triangulate and plot a course for the tachyon source.”

“Lost the signal, sir,” Lieutenant Daniels said, face downcast. “Best I can do is a general area—about two-and-a-half-thousand-kilometer diameter.”

Weston grimaced. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. “All right, take us to the area and initiate a search grid.”

Weston slumped back into the chair, acknowledging multiple reports from the various stations regarding negative contacts in each sector. Reports were still coming in from the labs concerning the tachyon signal and its peculiar modulation. Palin still swore it was an SOS, and judging from the debris they had just seen, that conclusion didn’t take a rocket scientist, as the old expression went.

“Captain! We just picked up something along the search pattern. Looks like a ship.”