And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
- Genesis 1:3
Max Vasser opened her eyes and looked around, then decided she wasn't in the afterlife. She was in West's cabin aboard the Rocinanté lying on the tiny, cramped bunk. She grunted in annoyance. I've cheated death yet again, she thought morosely. When will I ever find peace?
Then events from down on the planet came flooding back into her conscious thoughts. She looked down with dread at her chest and saw a black scorch mark right over her heart where the phaser had struck. She didn't have time to puzzle over it, however, because at that moment the door slid open and the agent of her continued existence sauntered in looking all-too pleased with himself.
"Oh for God's sake, West," grumbled Max, displeasure drawing her face into a deep frown. She sat up in the bunk. "Is that a tribble in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"
Cocking an eyebrow, West reached into his pocket. Max was about to threaten his life if he tried anything repulsive, but instead he withdrew a small, tan, furry object and held it out on his open palm.
"Actually, it was a tribble in my pocket," he said. "Max, meet Gromit. Gromit, meet Max."
The tribble in West's hand chirped amiably and skwunched up and down a few times.
West stuck Gromit on the wall and turned back to Max. She saw concern in his eyes. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "I wasn't sure if I'd snagged you in time."
"Fine," replied Max a little more gruffly than she intended. West's attention was making her uncomfortable. "What the hell happened?"
"You ignored my advice, that's what!" snapped West, surprising both Max and himself with his passion. He visibly calmed himself and a second later was once again the carefree scoundrel Max knew. He began again. "You ran into a welcoming committee. Lucky for me I tracked you and had time to swoop in and beam you out of there before something bad happened."
"It almost did," said Max softly, thoughtfully fingering the burned circle on her uniform front. "The beam must have passed through me just as I was dematerializing. I only caught the very fringes of the disruption effect." She looked at West. "Who were those guys? They had Starfleet-issue phasers."
West's expression darkened. "Section 31," he replied. "Actually, we've been dodging their starship for the last twelve hours; they've got a cloaked Defiant class in the system. I only lost them a few minutes ago."
Max's eyes grew wide. "Twelve hours?!? I've been out twelve hours?!?" She tried to stand but wound up stumbling forward on unsteady legs right into West's strong arms.
"Whoa, easy there, sweetheart. You're still recovering from a phaser hit," said West.
Max's cheeks were suddenly aflame. She tried to convince herself that it was merely embarrassment at her physical weakness, but she knew the terrible truth. It was the realization that finding herself in this man's arms provoked such a torrent of unbidden and intense emotions from her. She could feel the heat from his body, knew that his lips were so close to hers... Her predicament was made all the more intolerable by how obviously West was enjoying himself, if the stupid grin on his face was any indication.
She pushed herself away from West with all her remaining strength and stood leaning against the cabin wall, panting, inwardly hating him for his smugness but hating herself more for her pathetic vulnerability.
West let her go. "Relax, sweetheart," he drawled. "Everything's under control."
From his sideways perch up on the cabin wall, Gromit suddenly began a shrill screeching, and a second later, the Rocinanté's alert klaxon sounded.
"Rats!" muttered West. "Time for romance later, sweetheart. Right now we got trouble. Come on!"
With that, he disappeared back out into the bent corridor in the direction of the control room. Max reluctantly followed behind.
She found West already seated in the pilot's seat when she entered the cramped cockpit. Outside the front windows all she could see was black -- no stars. "Where are we, West?" she asked as she took a seat in the copilot's position.
"At the bottom of a deep fissure on an asteroid somewhere in the main belt. There's kelbanite veins all throughout the rock, so I figured we'll be safe from prying sensor beams until we figure out what we're going to do."
"What was the red alert for?"
West craned his neck and looked up out the big front windows although there was nothing to see but the rock walls of their hole. "The Section 31 ship just decloaked nearby. They're keeping station about a hundred-thousand kilometers from here. They can't find us directly, and they can't just start blasting all the asteroids around here or else they'll never recover the Ancient artifact we have, so they're just going to wait us out. They decloaked just to let us know there's no escape."
"Now that you mention it, what the hell is that thing we found in my father's grave? Why is everyone so hell-bent on getting their hands on some old 6-billion-year-old box?" said Max. "Neither the Orion Syndicate or this 'Section 31' of yours seem the types to be interested in something strictly for archaeological reasons."
"They're not," confirmed West. He reached into his jacket and withdrew the jet-black, oblong object and set in upright on the control console in front of him. "It's what's inside the casing that they're after. The alien machinery and the thing at the heart of the it."
"And that is?"
"Like I told you before -- power."
"What kind of power, specifically?" prodded Max, no longer satisfied with West's conveniently vague explanations.
"Absolute power," said West. "The power of the universe. Power to do anything you want." He turned to the woman sitting beside him. "Understand, Max," he said fervently, "this thing is more than six billion years old and it's still running! This single tiny device has enough stored energy even after all those eons to supply an entire planet with energy for the rest of human history! Can you even imagine that? Can you image what you could do if you learned how it works and how to build more?"
Max couldn't, but she understood about the desperate desire for power in some people and organizations. Anyone who had ships driven by power sources like the one West described would rule the Galaxy! But she still wasn't going to let him get away with not telling her exactly what the device was. "How does it work?" she asked.
"It's... uh... classified," was the unexpected reply.
"Classified?!? By who?"
"By Starfleet at the highest levels," answered West. "Only starship captains and above know about it, and a few of us with Intel backgrounds." He looked sideways at Max and saw that she wasn't going to accept anything except a straight and complete answer. He sighed and said, "Fine, I'll tell you, but you didn't hear it from me." Max nodded.
"About a hundred years ago, a Federation scientist named Dr. Ketteract discovered a new kind of particle. He called it Omega. Ketteract managed to synthesize one single Omega molecule, but it only lasted a fraction of a second before blowing up his entire research station and destroying subspace for a radius of over five lightyears. Starfleet banned any more research into Omega and suppressed all knowledge of it because of the incredible threat it poses to interstellar travel. They issued a secret general order called the Omega Directive that requires any starship captain to use whatever means necessary to destroy any Omega particles they encountered up to and including violating the Prime Directive. That's how serious they took the threat.
"Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the Ancients knew all about Omega. They routinely manufactured the molecules and knew how to keep them stable inside these small cases. Their entire civilization was powered by Omega batteries like this one, though until now no one's ever actually found one." He pointed to the device resting so innocently on the control surface before him. "Omega is believed to be the single most powerful substance in the universe, and some cosmologists believe it existed in nature at the moment of the Big Bang."
Max listened with rapt wonderment; that the Ancients could control an embryonic Big Bang inside such a small container was testament to a technology that was truly staggering. At the pause in West's story, she commented, "So it really is the Fires of Creation."
West nodded. "But just because Starfleet banned Omega doesn't mean anything to Section 31. They wanted the power for themselves. For the good of the Federation, of course," he added cynically. "Twenty years ago they tried to hire me and succeeded in hiring Claude to find one for them, and he did."
At the mention of her father's name, Max perked up. "There's no one buried in my father's grave," she said.
"I know," said West. He smiled that rapscallion smile of his. "I know where he is. Back when we found the Ancient's Omega battery, this was also in the secret compartment in his headstone." He withdrew a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and held it up for Max to see.
"Swell. Another mysterious scrap of paper," was the unenthusiastic reply.
"Ah... -- not so mysterious," said West, grinning smugly. "Look." He reached across the Rocinanté's cockpit and handed the paper to Max.
She snatched it from his hand and glanced at it, but when she saw that it was indeed decipherable, her mood lightened considerably. She actually smiled, and West decided he liked her smile. "This is a space/time vector!" she said with growing excitement.
But as quickly as her smile had come, it was supplanted by an apprehensive frown. "The time index is less than ten hours from now. That doesn't give us a lot of time. Are these space coordinates what I think they are?" she asked West.
"Probably. Why? You got something against 21-dimensional space/time/thought discontinuities?"
"Definitely! The last time I went through the Black Gate with Banshee Squadron we got sent to the other side of the universe, wound up fighting for our lives against creatures from Babylonian mythology, and only made it back because it would have made a terrible ending for the story otherwise. You're telling me that my father is on the other side of the Black Gate?!?"
West chuckled. "Wait -- don't get pissed yet -- it gets better. Take a look at the entry velocity your father says to use."
Max looked again at the calculations on the scrap of paper still in her hand. West was right. If she was upset at hearing of their ultimate destination it was nothing compared to this. "No. Impossible," she declared flatly. "You can't enter a wormhole at warp speed. Anything above impulse leads to catastrophic warp field imbalance and your ship disappears into an unstable artificial wormhole."
"Yeah, interesting, huh?" replied West with a reckless grin. "Create an unstable artificial wormhole inside a wormhole. The ultimate getaway!" Then he grew serious. "Besides," he continued, "it's the only way we're going to find your father."
Max rolled her eyes and sighed. "Fine. You're right. Let's get going."
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