“Minimal damage, sir,” the cadet replied. “Stabilizing pitch control.”

Spock reflected that matters could be far worse. Thanks to Commander Scott’s verteron field, only four microflares had penetrated the bridge in the seventeen minutes since entry into the flare field, and all had been relatively mild. They had also been nearly instantaneous, for Spock had ordered T’Lara to dive into the flare field at high impulse. The theory was that the microflares would be able to do less damage to any compartment, apparatus, or crew member they passed through if they only intersected it for a few hundred nanoseconds. The fact that such near-instantaneous passages still generated such heat and noise was a testament to the intensity of the primordial energy leaking through the micro-wormholes, even with the verteron field damping their frequency and average intensity. Indeed, the visible streaks of light came not from the microflares themselves, which were present too briefly for the eye to register, but from the incandescent, ionized atmosphere they left in their wake.

With this in mind, Spock had ordered the ship’s internal air pressure reduced to minimum safe levels to lessen atmospheric transmission of shock and thermal damage, not to mention acoustic effects. Were the bridge at normal pressure, Spock and T’Lara would probably be deaf in their left ears by now.

The one place he had left at full pressurization was the communications lab, so as not to alter the conditions Commander Uhura relied on for memory assistance. Still, that was a gamble, for the lab was no more immune to microflare penetration than anywhere else on the ship. This would not be a good time for Uhura to suffer impairment of her exceptional hearing, or an injury should a microflare pierce her directly.

He had ordered all nonessential personnel to lie on the decks with their feet pointing toward the bow, to minimize the profile they presented to the oncoming microflares (or rather, the stationary microflares that the Enterprise passed through). This mission had a fairly small crew complement, though, so few were nonessential. It was only a matter of time, statistically speaking, before someone in the crew sustained a direct hit.

A proximity alert sounded. “A sizable cluster is forming in our path,” T’Lara reported, her voice raising only slightly. “Diverting… insufficient time to clear it.”

Spock opened the shipwide channel. “All personnel, brace for microflare cluster.” He leaned forward in the command chair, and the other bridge personnel hunkered down as best they could. It seemed almost quaint to defend against a subspatial quantum phenomenon using the same methods primitive Vulcans would have used to face a sandstorm or a hail of arrows. But the mathematics of probability and surface area were universal.