Admiral Cartwright breathed a sigh of relief when the latest flare subsided with no serious damage. “Final duration and diameter?” he asked.

Lieutenant Kexas answered crisply. “Six point eight three hours, sir. Zero point seven six astronomical units.”

Cartwright traded a look with President Lorg. “At that diameter, the next one has roughly one chance in eight of engulfing Earth. And a not insignificant chance of engulfing Mars.”

Lorg absorbed the prospect of harm to his birth planet stoically. Cartwright knew the president took pride in his heritage as a member of Mars’s small Tellarite community, which had played an often overlooked role in the planet’s colonial history. But he was also a second-term Federation president, responsible for far more worlds than just his own. Cartwright had been by Lorg’s side in enough crises to know that.

“How go the verteron arrays?” the president asked.

The admiral let out a grim sigh. “They’re an antiquated technology. There aren’t many left—we had to haul some out of the terraforming museum on Mars. Morrow’s got the Corps of Engineers working round the clock to repair the ones we have and whip together some modern equivalent for the rest. One of our SCE team heads, Commander al-Khaled, has proposed a way to modify a starship deflector dish to create a similar verteron beam—projected outward, unlike Mister Scott’s idea for a verteron field inside the ship. If we rig enough ships in time, they could form an orbital cordon to help cushion the blow on Earth or Mars, to an extent.”

“Well, that’s something.” Lorg did not appear any less worried, though. “What does the subspace damage look like?”

Cartwright turned to Kexas, who fielded the question. “Local subspace permeability is up fourteen percent from baseline, sirs. Subspace interference is increasing, even between flare events. Even old-style radio communication is growing unreliable. We’ve had to switch to laser communication as a backup.”

The Edoan furrowed her heavy brow ridges as she called up data and simulation results on the master situation table with all three of her orange-skinned hands. “The intervals between flares are growing shorter as well, sir. They’re lasting longer, but the time between their respective midpoints is also decreasing. I believe the greater subspace permeability is making it easier for the plasma beings to punch wormholes through. Or perhaps as the barrier between our time and their more accelerated time erodes, the temporal differential is decreasing, so they appear to come faster.”

“Damn.” Cartwright grimaced. “Which makes it a matter of even less time before Earth or Mars is hit. Get me Captain Spock.”

The Zaranite, Ensign Kozim, shook his bulbous, masked head after a moment. “Too much interference, Admiral. We can’t get through anymore.”

Lorg clenched his fists. “Then we just have to wait and hope they come up with an answer before our luck runs out.”

San Francisco