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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2004 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

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  Chapter

  1

  “Odds are it’s right where you left it, David.”

  David Gold could hear the familiar mix of amusement and exasperation in his wife Rachel’s voice as though she were in his cabin with him. How many times had she said those same words to him in the course of their marriage? How many misplaced socks, coffee mugs, padds, and combadges had elicited that very statement? Not, to David Gold’s mind, that they were particularly helpful words, even if she did locate, finally, the missing object. If he could remember where he had left it, he wouldn’t need to ask her. “It’s right where you left it” ranked up there with “it’s always in the last place you look” on the scale of Useless to Nonsense. But his forgetfulness seemed to amuse his wife, bring out the protective mother-hen in her during his all too infrequent stretches of time home.

  For Rachel’s part, it had taken her a long time to understand how her husband, a solid and steady Starfleet officer, could possibly have attained such a level of domestic absentmindedness. Aboard the U.S.S. da Vinci, he was responsible for the safety and well-being of forty crew and the operation of a ship often tasked with missions of literally world-saving proportions. It was a job that required focus and concentration, the ability to keep a million ever-changing details in mind at once, to make split-second decisions based on often incomplete data, to see not just the trees for the forest, but every last leaf on every tree while simultaneously maintaining a detailed overview of the status of the entire forest.

  Why then, could he not remember where he left his socks?

  Gold smiled at the memory of Rachel sharing with him her theory on that very subject several years back, during one of their rare anniversary celebrations together. “I finally figured it out,” she had said. “It’s because you don’t have the luxury of forgetting on the da Vinci that you need to be able to just relax, to not have to remember every little thing when you’re home.”

  “And,” he said, taking her hand across the table, “because I know if I do forget, I always have you there to remember for me.”

  “And I always will,” Rachel said. She had remained true to her word.

  Which was all well and good, Gold thought while down on his hands and knees to search the floor around his bunk. And for that reason alone, he wished he was indeed back home, because then all he would have to do was shout out, “Rachel, have you seen my wedding ring?” and she would shout back, “Odds are it’s right where you left it, David,” and then, with her lovely face alight with the aforementioned amusement/exasperation mixture, she would march into the room and walk straight, without a sign of hesitation, to the missing item.

  Gold sat back on his heels and puffed out a breath. If asked to testify in a court of law, he would have had no choice but to swear that his ring was nowhere to be found in that room. As captain, he was assigned the largest cabin on the ship, which wasn’t saying much on a vessel the size of the da Vinci. Its small size—not to mention a lifetime of discipline as a Starfleet officer—forced him to keep his cabin squared away. A place for everything and everything in its place, and before he had gone to sleep last night, the place for his wedding ring had been on the shelf where he left all his personal items every night. What were the chances he had defied the habit of a lifetime and put the ring somewhere else?

  The captain glanced at the time and knew he should be getting to the bridge. With the ship gearing up for a new and protracted—albeit fascinating—mission, it would be bad form for the captain to schlep onto the bridge, late for alpha shift. The continuation of his search would have to wait until later, even as the fact of its disappearance would gnaw at the back of his mind for the rest of the day, driving him crazy.

  Straightening his uniform tunic, Captain David Gold stepped through the sighing door of his cabin and into the corridor. Thanks to the futile search he was a few
minutes behind in his morning routine, which usually included walking to the bridge with his first officer, Sonya Gomez. He just assumed the commander would have gone ahead, anxious, as he knew the ship’s senior engineer was, to sink her teeth into their new assignment. But, to Gold’s surprise, Gomez was herself just coming down the corridor, her forehead creased with frown lines as she juggled a steaming cup of tea and two padds in her hands.

  “Good morning, Gomez,” Gold said.

  Gomez stopped dead in her tracks, as though taken by surprise at the sound of his voice. “Captain,” she said, and blinked at him. “I thought I missed you this morning.”

  “I thought the same of you,” Gold said. He nodded at the jumble in her hands. “Problems?”

  “Nothing but this morning,” she said. “First thing off the bat, my padd experienced some sort of fatal error and crashed. It wiped everything.”

  Gold shook his head. “Oh my,” he said with considerable sympathy, knowing that engineers kept half their lives and all their thoughts and ideas on their padds. The captain and commander continued on their way to the bridge.

  “I didn’t think it was that big a deal at first since I back up my padd onto the mainframe every night. But when I tried to download the files to a new padd, the computer said they had been corrupted…not to mention my backup padd also went on the fritz.” Gomez shook her head. “I’ve done a considerable amount of preliminary work on this clean-up job and I need those notes. I just hope Soloman can talk some sense into the computer and help retrieve my files.”

  “I don’t remember the last time I heard of a padd failing like that,” Gold said.

  “I know. And I had two in a row go south on me. What are the odds?”

  “It’s shaping up to be one of those mornings for me as well,” Gold agreed. “I hate to think of it as an omen of things to come.”

  Gomez chuckled. “Why, Captain. I never knew you were superstitious.”

  “Oh, I’ve been known to dabble in superstition,” he said. “Although I’m willing to concede that both our current situations are most likely random acts of capricious nature.”

  “In other words, bad luck.”

  “Exactly.”

  Gold and Gomez exchanged smiles, then stepped onto the crowded bridge of the U.S.S. da Vinci. The captain noted a larger than usual complement of bridge, engineering, and S.C.E. crew present this morning. They were gathered in clusters around different monitoring stations, huddled over padds and tricorders, or simply watching the breathtaking scene spread before them on the ship’s viewscreen. The captain smiled, sharing as he did their excitement for the work that lay ahead. But his was not to stand and gawk in awe—much as he would have loved to join the justifiably flabbergasted observers. His was to keep his attention focused on the big picture so this diverse and brilliant crew could work their respective miracles.

  “Good morning. A status report, please,” Gold said by way of announcing his presence.

  Tactical Officer Lieutenant Anthony Shabalala seemed to be the only member of the crew to take note of Gold’s presence, snapping to attention and saying, “Holding steady, Captain, at half a parsec from the edge of the debris field. We’ve been scanning since our arrival three hours ago and, as expected, have so far found no life signs within range.”

  Gold noted that Gomez had joined a cluster of her fellow S.C.E. crewmates around one of the science stations and was already deep in their animated discussion.

  Right, Gold thought, holding up his hand to cut off Shabalala’s recitation. Time to give these leaf counters a bit of a look at my forest.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain said at a volume that cut through the ambient murmur of some two dozen voices. “Observation lounge. Thirty seconds, if you please.”

  That, Gold noted with satisfaction, got their attention.

  Chapter

  2

  Sonya Gomez was not the least bit surprised to see that everyone arrived at the morning briefing on time. It was a measure of the job that lay before them that this team of scientists and engineers, men and women, humanoid and otherwise, who had traveled the universe witnessing and accomplishing some pretty amazing things, were as excited as they were to get started. Who could blame them, considering what lay spread before the da Vinci across half a light-year of space?

  Even as everyone settled in seats around the conference table, all eyes were glued to the monitor on the wall, glowing with the same image that had captivated the crew members on the bridge. Gomez could certainly understand their fascination and, in fact, shared their excitement. It was impossible not to as she looked upon the breathtaking expanse of hardware that blocked the da Vinci’s way through space.

  For as far as the eye could see and their sensors could scan, there was nothing but ships, hovering motionlessly in an endless band that looked as though it stretched to eternity. Starships. Interplanetary craft. Shuttles. Ships of comprehensible design and purpose. Ships whose purpose would likely take years to determine. Ships of every size and shape imaginable, of materials known and mysterious. Ships powered by solid fuels and solar sails and nuclear engines and warp drives and black hole technology and ships beyond the imaginings of any of the da Vinci’s knowledgeable crew of engineers and scientists. Ancient ships carrying markings that identified them as belonging to races known to have disappeared tens or hundreds of thousands of years before humanity took to the stars. Others branded in languages lost to time and distance. Ships, some of which, preliminary scans showed, were millions—if not more—years old.

  Literally millions of ships…and not clue one as to how they might have gotten here or why this little sector of space had become the repository for millions of years worth of derelicts and wrecks. A cosmic junk-yard whose very existence made the engineer in Sonya Gomez shiver with delighted anticipation of the secrets examination of them would yield.

  Gomez reluctantly tore her eyes from the nearest screen at the sound of Captain Gold clearing his throat. The rest of the crew did the same, but she noticed it was only seconds before they began to cast surreptitious glances back at the silent vista.

  Gold, she thought with a private smile, had also taken note of the crew’s less than undivided attention. “I think it’s safe to assume,” the captain said from his seat at the head of the table, “that all hands are aware that the da Vinci has reached its destination.” He gestured in the direction of the screen, tacit approval for his mesmerized crew to resume looking for themselves. “As you also know, this sector has only recently been opened to travel by Federation vessels. Short of the mapping expedition that first discovered this Sargasso Sea of space, the da Vinci is the first ship through.”

  “The realm was previously in the Breen’s purview,” Lieutenant Commander Mor glasch Tev added. “Once they scurried out of sight when the war ended, many of their claims, including this region, suddenly disappeared.”

  P8 Blue, the ship’s Nasat structural systems specialist, made a clicking sound that Gomez had long ago learned indicated curiosity. “I beg your pardon, Captain,” she said. “That term you used, Sargasso Sea? I’m not familiar with it.”

  Gomez saw Carol Abramowitz, the ship’s cultural specialist, open her mouth to offer an explanation, but Tev spoke up first. As usual, she noted wryly to herself. But she had long since reconciled herself to the Tellarite’s propensity for arrogance that went beyond even the societal norms of his rather blunt-minded species. His was a people who spoke the truth as it was on their minds, to whom such human social niceties as tact and courtesy were just fancy ways of lying, and Tev was way up on the obnoxious scale even by Tellarites’ high standards.

  “It is a Terran term,” Tev said. “A reference to an area of Earth’s North Atlantic Ocean, also known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle,’ a fabled sea of lost ships. Legends,” and here he bit down on the word as if to let one and all know what he thought of unsubstantiated tales of undocumented phenomena, “abound of ships entering this area and disappearing,
some to reappear months or even years later, derelict, their crews gone, often with half-eaten meals still on their mess tables. Aircraft are also said to go missing in the so-called ‘triangle.’ It’s interesting that you mention it, Captain, considering our current location.”

  “Yes indeed, Tev,” said Gold. “I considered its relevancy when I chose it as a metaphor.”

  “Yes, sir, but I understood you to utilize the term in reference to the aggregation of derelict vessels, which is one myth about the Sargasso Sea,” Tev said. “Whereas I refer to a scientific explanation for both the sea and the phenomenon we now face.”

  Gomez fought back the instinct to jump in and reprimand her subordinate for the tone he was taking with their superior officer. She knew Gold wasn’t offended by Tev’s arrogance. All the captain saw was a good officer who was damn good at his job, if a bit unorthodox in his approach to military courtesy.

  “The Sargasso is a sea within a sea, if you will. It’s a two-million-square-mile ellipse of becalmed sea, named after the sargassum, a species of seaweed that covers and is native to the area, several hundred miles off the east coast of the North American continent. The area is surrounded by the Florida, Gulf Stream, Canary, North Equatorial, Antilles, and Caribbean currents, some of the strongest ocean currents on Earth. They all meet and enclose this sea, separating it from the rest of the Atlantic Ocean and creating a stagnant sea. The Sargasso rotates slightly, changing position with the surrounding currents as a result of seasonal changes, but it is otherwise a calm area.

  “Therefore, anything drifting into the surrounding currents will make its way, eventually, to the Sargasso Sea. Once caught there in the essentially still water, it is unlikely to ever drift out. Hence, one assumes, its reputation as an area from which sea craft might disappear, although I fail to understand how the sea currents would account for the disappearance of aircraft as—”

  “Yes, Tev. That’s all very fascinating,” Gold said in an attempt to get his officer back on track.