“Is the risk really that great?” It took Chekov a moment to place the speaker as Lawrence Styles, captain of the U.S.S. Artemis. The narrow-faced, high-browed Earthman went on with a skeptical twist to his mustachioed lip. “I mean, it’s called ‘space’ for a reason. Even if the flare hits somewhere around a point in Earth’s orbit, the odds that Earth will actually be there at the time are one in a hundred thousand, and that’s not even counting the margin of error for these things. What happened at Denobula was an incredible fluke. The odds of it happening again here are minuscule.”

“If I may, sir?” Chekov asked Cartwright. The admiral nodded. “With respect, Captain Styles, we are not expecting only a single flare. We believe that whatever research these flares are reacting to was underway while Commander Uhura was at Starfleet Academy. We have no idea how long her efforts lasted, but we can safely assume there will be more than one flare in this system. Possibly quite a few.

“Not only that, but the flares last longer and spread over a larger volume of space each time—and we have no idea what upper bound there is on their size and duration, if any.”

“There’s another possibility.” The speaker was Admiral S’rrel, a brown-furred Caitian male who served as a Starfleet liaison to the Federation Council. “The flares so far have been tracking back through years of the commander’s life in a matter of months—and they have been accelerating. Aside from the backward order, the only correlation is to place, not timing. So for all we know, every flare aimed at Earth could arrive simultaneously. The whole inner system could be engulfed, and the combined surge of radiation and gravimetric distortion could cause massive disruption to ships and infrastructure even beyond the directly affected areas.”

Styles scoffed. “What are you basing that on?”

“That’s the point. We don’t know enough to make assumptions either way. We must be ready for anything.”

Commodore Margaret Song of the Mars Defense Perimeter leaned forward in her seat. “And let’s not forget that there’s more in Earth orbital space than Earth and Luna,” the statuesque, black-haired Martian pointed out. “The various colonies and stations around the L4 and L5 points are spread out across volumes much larger than the Earth itself, meaning that the odds of at least one of them being struck are commensurately greater. Not to mention that the ‘margin of error’ you pointed out, Lawrence, might be wide enough to encompass Mars’s orbit.”

“The risk of that is even slighter, Margaret,” Styles insisted. “And in any case, it’s only a short-term concern. Eventually whatever’s paging backward through this woman’s biography will run out of chapters, and the flares will stop. Maybe all at once, if S’rrel is right.”