A huge fire blazed in the enormous central hearth of the long-hut. The rough-hewn tables were arranged in a roughly symmetrical pattern around the hearth. The beaten earth floor and rush roof combined to give the whole a musty, herbal odour.

The Viking long hut shimmered and ran and was replaced by the lacquered walls and simple, low cushions of a Japanese Imperial Palace. The wind rippled the silk screens as it came off the sea, bringing with it snatches of conversation from the fishermen in the bay.

The Imperial dining room faded to be replaced a Vlastafloorian Festival hut with accompanying warriors and languid maidens dressed in very little.

The Festival hut was replaced by a Mercurian Bobo camp, a Vulcan ceremonial room and finally a huge Victorian dining room, complete with fireplace, mahogany table, old retainers, silver tea service and cruet sets and... Vlastafloorian serving-maids wearing very little.

'Neelix,' Kes said sweetly. 'If you do not remove those... women, I shall not speak to you for a week.'

Muttering to himself, the diminutive Talaxian pressed a few keys on the control panel and, with a meek wave, the serving-maids disappeared.

'Now, to prepare my specialities,' said Neelix as he put his arm around Kes' waist and led her to his galley.

'I'd like to thank you for helping restock my ship, Captain,' said Janeway to Euan as they made their way to the mess for the special Delta Quadrant banquet.

'No problem, Kathryn. Happy to be of service and all that,' was her reply. Euan enjoyed eating more than almost anything else, and was even willing to swap a few quantum and photon torpedoes if it meant a chance to try some new kind of food.[31]

The rest of the command crews from the two vessels were likewise talking and making their collected way to the mess. It was, therefore, quite a shock when they arrived to find that the tables was bare, and in fact gave no evidence of the food promised. As they were all hungry from their ordeal,[32] they naturally began to voice their displeasure. It was at that point that Neelix stuck his head around the door.

'If you ladies and gentlemen would like to follow me to holodeck two, I will be serving your first course shortly.'

Confused, and more than a little curious, the various officers filed out of the door and made their way to the specified holodeck.

The holodeck doors opened to reveal an old retainer, looking like he could have been left over from the Victorian age himself.

'If you would care to follow me, ladies and gentlemen,' he drawled in an accent that is actually taught at the better domestic help colleges.

Once everyone was seated, the old retainer nodded to some of the statuary around the table, which turned out to be stock-still servants, and wine was poured.

Despite years of attending Starfleet diplomatic functions and drinking Redeye from glasses[33] Euan felt compelled to comment.

'It is Armenian wine,' said the butler from the other side of the room with an air of distaste that was all but visible. Euan looked suitably admonished.

'Erm...' said Ruth, not really wanting to spoil this lovely air of shame that her Captain was probably feeling, but finding herself to unable to let this slide. 'Isn't Armenia on Earth, which - if my Galactic Geography doesn't fail me - is in the Alpha Quadrant.'

The butler gave a chuckle so dry several of the people around the table had to have a sip of water.

'I believe, Miss, that what we have here is an inevitable consequence of probability. The two areas, though separated by many thousands of light-years, have experienced an almost identical evolution of language and society, except where the Armenians of Earth are but a country, the Armenians of - Uh-huh - Armenia, populate an entire planet.'

'So,' began Val, eager to avoid a circular conversation, 'when will the food be served?'

He moved over to the sideboard and rang a small, silver bell. Four maids entered the room bearing huge trays on which were what appeared to be large, flattened, beetles with a selection of leaves and shoots on their backs. Each person seated around the table had a beetle placed before them and they all exchanged looks.

As the maids left the room, Neelix entered. He could hardly fail to notice the lack of ingestion and commented on it.

'Well,' began Chakotay, trying to remember why he had agreed to this in the first place, 'it's not that we don't appreciate the effort.' He had to pause to prevent his plate knocking over his wine.

'The dish is one of ancient Zebreegan origin. The beetles are reared from hatching to be discerning vegetable connoisseurs. They select only the finest leaves and once they have amassed enough, they feast. The skill in the serving is knowing when you will have the most leaves, and when the beetle will not begin eating its cache,' he glanced at the table. 'I believe our chef has excelled himself.'

The assembled crews began - reluctantly at first - to eat the salad in front of them. The eating began with a process that was - with a much faster time-scale - quite similar to the progression of ethnic tensions into civil war.

At first there were sporadic fits of munching, from some of the more gastronomically adventurous or lunchically distant members of the crew. When it was seen that they didn't immediately die of beetle salad disease, the others tried small pieces of their greens. Soon there was a veritable frenzy of consumption, chief amongst its perpetrators being Ratbat, who seemed to have found a new zest for food. In fact, it was only because Euan was happy to see her eating and noticed a hungry look in her eyes that her beetle was saved.

The beetles were cleared and the crew awaited - with no little degree of trepidation - the next course.

The maids all brought forth large, white dinner plates. In the middle of the plates - nouveau cuisine-style - was what appeared to be a single, tiny prawn (if prawns were star shaped and blue) with a drizzle of deep red sauce. The crews looked at their place settings and, after taking more or less the same time to do the mental connection, looked at the next utensils. It would appear that they were expected to eat their current course with... a miniature pair of stirrups.

As one, and almost unconsciously, they turned to the butler, who sighed and began some more culinary exposition.

'The animal is the Flanian star crab. I would advise that you fit the stirrups thusly,' and he extracted from his pocket a pair of identical silver stirrups. He held them in his hands in such a way as they resembled Indian punching daggers. 'I think is important to mention that it isn't dead yet, and you should be quick when you pierce it.'

At the mention of their food's mortal status, the crew looked down. Hesitantly, they grasped their stirrups. Paris looked about the room and, shrugging, plunged his into the heart of the crab.

It became painfully apparent - literally - that he had failed to kill his dinner. The crab moved with one of its legs and picked Paris up by his stirrup and flung him against the wall. It then stood up on its two bottom legs and leapt through the air toward Janeway who - being unused to attacks from foodstuffs - was totally unprepared.

The phaser beam neatly vaporised the star crab and all eyes looked to Ruth. The security chief herself was rather taken aback by the attack, and had no weapons evident. Eyes turned back to the butler as his hand returned from inside his jacket and he smoothed the lines.

When everyone turned back to their plates, it was to find Ratbat - a crab on each stirrup - licking sauce from her lips.

The dinner progressed quite smoothly from there. The foods lessened in lethality but increased in weirdness. After the salad, the reaction to the food went steadily downhill. The only exception was Ratbat who was putting it away like there was no tomorrow and today was nearly done. Her normally worryingly-anorexic-looking frame was actually beginning to take on a few bulges.

Unfortunately, the Green Flame wasn't able to completely concentrate on either this newfound gourmet excellence, or the conversation Euan was having with her about which actor had played Batman the best.[34] The matter of rounding out her sexual experiences was plaguing her mind. But which woman to choose? With ratio of females to males on the Compromise being something like 70-30, she was kind of a bit spoilt for choice. Well, assuming any of them wanted to sleep with her. But who to pick? An Angel? A buntie? A security lovely?

Ah, Ruth. There was an idea. She might be known for her psychopathic side, but they had known each other for a very long time, and this would also be the perfect opportunity to ask her why she had been so semi-distant since her return to the present. Could be dangerous, of course, but...

Ratbat twiddled in her head with words for a moment, before her eyes drifted across the room and she caught sight of the ever-demure Ambassador Buj. 'Erm, nothing...I'll...uh, doesnae matter.'

Back on board the Great Pink Eyesore, in 10-Foreplay, two of the catering staff were pondering the question on the lips of many members of both crews.

Hal just shrugged and wiped down the last of the tables. 'Don't know. You really think it matters?'

'Well, from what I heard, it was that Collette chick who was going on about it. And if she's after it so bad, it can't be good. You know what she's like. Mad as a magazine at Batti for pinching her girlfriend or something.'

Hal scowled. 'Is that why?' He went to wipe the piano, but Tony glared at him and the waiter kept his distance.

Matt nodded. 'Yeah. See, Sam from security told me that it was during the Second World War. And that Collette came home on their seventh anniversary, to find her and Batti screwing like handymen on her favourite couch.'

'There's nothing happening here. Why can't we all go over to the banquet on Voyager?'

Emma looked around. Save for Tony tending to his piano, the bar was empty. 'Yeah, let's go,' she decided.

'Say, Emma,' asked Hal as the three of them were leaving. 'You don't know anything about this Epithing, do you?'

'Oh well. Maybe someone at the banquet has found something out about the Epicentre...' With that, they had left. After a few minutes, Tony got up from his piano.

'Hey,' he said. 'Did someone say they wanted to know about the Epicentre? I know all about that!'

Val looked up, smiling, into the face of a slightly nervous-looking Commander Sigma.

As she sat down, Ratbat grimaced, and muttered something that sounded to Val like 'Poor choice of words'.

Ratbat fiddled about for a moment before getting to it. ''Ere, Val. I think it would be best if I'm blunt.'

'Might I suggest just saying what you're thinking and assuming that I'll try not to take offence?'

Val was thunderstruck for a moment, but she rallied beautifully and took a sip of her coffee.

'By "sleep together", I assume you aren't talking about cohabitation of the same bed for the purposes of slumber.'

'You are, in fact, talking about sharing a sexual experience with myself, at some point. Probably in the not-too-distant future, unless I miss my guess.'

There was a longer pause, about as long as it took Ratbat to pass the whole conversation through her head seven times.

'OK, OK. I understand. Gurl, ye didnae exactly hesitate. You had to think a total of...no seconds before answering.'

'Don't you want to hear my reasons?' Ratbat hadn't gone to all the trouble of working up internal psychological anxieties just to have them dismissed by some padd-pusher.

'Yes, I remember. I had to experience it when Ambassador Troi was aboard.'[35] The light shone in her mind. 'Oh, and so you thought you'd try it and see if you like it. Finally with neither extenuating alcoholic nor emotional - for want of a better word - circumstances.'

'No, I'm just not that bad at diplomacy and working out what people are thinking as people, well, think.'

'I would have thought that you'd ask Leila. Or maybe one of the other Recycled Virgins.'

'Well, ye know, Leila and I...we kind of, back on Vlastafloor 7. Let's just say I wanted some fresh ground.'

'Ah. Bobbi. Well, dinna go screechin' this to the world or anything, but she's a mite...erm...straight.'

'Aye. Och, she did try it with something female, I think... Anyway, she's out, and like, no-one minds, but...well, y'know'at I mean?'

'Hmm.' Val pondered. 'Oh. I guess I'd kind of suspected, but...you know, I don't think I've ever actually met one before...'

'So,' said Val brightly, secretly enjoying the fact that the unphasable Ratbat was now as phased as a theatre lighting rig,[36] 'your place or mine?'

'Good point. All those posters of kd lang, Boy George and that girl from The Crying Game might just cause some confusion. How does tomorrow sound? Shall we say twenty-hundred hours?'

Val downed her coffee, and got exactly two corridors, one turbolift ride and three decks away before what she had just agreed to hit her.

The lift, unsurprisingly, stopped, and Val bent double, her hands on her knees, trying to stop herself from hyperventilating. Her thoughts were going through her mind like curry through a football hooligan, and although they were far from unpleasant, the sensation wasn't.

What are you going to do? She yelled at herself. She couldn't back out - didn't want to, if truth be told - but she hadn't been with a woman in well over a century. How could she suddenly present the best - for want of a much better word - argument when she hadn't been with a woman for one hundred and sixty years. It was funny how that revelation brought with it pangs of regret, but there was no time for that now.

She needed help. Who did she know who could be trusted with the sensitivity of this dilemma and who was - incidentally - very good at woman-to-woman...relations. Who?

'The Epicentre?' mused Lieutenant Paris. He shook his head. 'Doesn't mean a thing to me.'

'Oh.' Terri shrugged. 'Ruth and the RVs've been stressing out over it ever since we got back. I just thought, since you've been off in the Delta Quadrant...'

'And if that guy's Gallifreyan, then he could easily...yeah, I see what you mean.' He shrugged. 'Sorry. Maybe we should ask the computer.'

Tom paused. True, they'd happened upon the door to his quarters, but... '...it's only 1900 hours,' he told her.

Terri looked straight at him. 'Then I guess we'll just have to leave out the sleeping part.'

Tom smiled and slid the door open. 'You're right. We'd better give it some serious thought. And don't worry - I've got more than enough thinking caps.'

Euan and Ksenia were having much the same problem as Terri and Tom - at least as far as the Epicentre was concerned.

'Maybe it's not the Epicentre,' supposed Ksenia. 'Maybe it's the epicentre of something.'

'Umm...she said it like it had a capital letter?' Damn. It had all seemed to obvious when he'd had the intelligence of the other three to back him up.

The doors to the observation lounge hissed open, revealing Janeway and Chakotay. 'Any luck, Captain?' the tattooed man asked.

Chakotay smiled. 'When you've had almost nothing besides Neelix's cooking for almost two years, Commander, you can start to find it's very--'

'Filling,' cut in Janeway. She looked at the database that was occupying so much of Euan and Ksenia's attention. 'The Federation databases don't have anything?'

'Thousands of things are simply known as "the Epicentre",' explained Ksenia. 'A rock group on Earth, a sexual position on Neelablan, an office of political power on Nunk, an entertainment complex o--'

Ksenia shrugged. 'Add cross-references and proper-noun interpretation to that, and it's a big list when all you have is a name.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said a new voice from behind them. 'I think I might be able to give you a hand...'

All four officers - three Starfleet, one Maquis - turned in the direction the voice had come from. Then Janeway just sighed and said one word.

Suzy was currently standing by a table covered with an immodest selection of Tantric and other tomes. The effect of an evil night's debauchery was rather spoiled by the notes taken on a padd and the pieces of paper marking sections the reader had obviously thought interesting or especially pertinent.

Val was sitting on her couch with her hands clasped in her lap and her head hung low, giving her the impression of a very naughty school student talking to a principal.

'Because she asked me,' Val said, slightly louder than the low pulse of the warp engines.

'Well...she did ask. And it was very flattering...and it has been a hundred and sixty years...and, well, you're telling me you aren't just a little curious?'

'I'm a little curious as to what it feels like to get vapourized in the warp core, but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it.'

Suzy paused for a moment and tried to let rational thought pervade. Ratbat had asked Val! Why Val? What did Val have that Suzy didn't?[38] And in bigger supply. Still, she was a majordomo, so it was time to dom.

'OK. You want to go ahead, so does Ratbat.[39] You also want to do the best you can, to show the side up, as it were. I'm guessing Ratbat would like the best possible performance, so I can see two solutions. One, you take a learning-boost to cover all that's in those,' she gestured toward the table. 'Or, I could talk you through it.'

'How? All you've got to do is make sure she doesn't nibble your ears. Which wouldn't be a good idea anyway, not with those teeth.'

'What would a learning boost entail?' Val had learnt everything she knew the old-fashioned way.

'Oh, what's the matter, dear Kathryn? You don't look so glad to see me.' Q adopted a poutful expression.

Janeway glared at him, but it was Chakotay who spoke. 'If it isn't our favourite deus ex machina.'

'Play?' repeated Q. 'Oh, goody - so you do enjoy my company.' He leaned over conspiratorially to the first officer. 'You know, you always were rather bad at hiding it.'

'Do you want something, Q?' asked Ksenia. 'Or d--' Q snapped his fingers and she fell asleep. The nigh-omnipotent being was suddenly several shades more serious as he straddled a chair at the head of the table.

'Then spit it out, Q.' Euan had barely encountered this being before, knowing little besides what he'd read in the NSF briefings, but he knew that the best way to deal with him was to drive him straight to the point.

The others paid attention. 'You will?' said Janeway cautiously. But Chakotay had read the expression on Q's face.

'It's Continuum technology, isn't it? Whatever this Epicentre is, the Q created it.'

Q sighed. 'There might be hope for you yet, Chuckles. It isn't "technology" in any sense you'd understand, but yes, we developed it. We were just trying to make sure no-one found out about it.'

'When you're a race that's old when the universe is still young, you find it's quite easy to get bored. With no-one except a few other continua for company, you start to realise the universe isn't quite up to what it could be. And so - you try to compensate. To cut a long story short, the Epicentre was a way for things - or beings - to live up to their full potential.

'At first it worked splendidly. Q used it in conjunction with a race of semi-evolved felines on a struggling planet, turning them into a race of peaceful, advanced intellectuals overnight. But sometimes you just can't fight nature.'

'Funny,' interjected Euan. 'I thought you were always telling that you could - and that you'd always win.'

'And normally, my gumbo-ingesting friend, you'd be hearing nothing else. But while the Q might be able to beat Mother Nature with a clean KO in the first round, the internal nature of a sentient being is another matter.'

'That race did have the potential to become that peaceful - and that advanced - but not for some time. Even the Q couldn't make them adapt to having been brought up to speed so fast. Before we knew it...two centuries, maybe three...they'd wiped themselves out in atomic wars. And as for the Q themselves... The next Q to use the Epicentre was a less-than-shining example of our kind. If it wasn't for these extreme circumstances, I certainly wouldn't be telling you about her. In reaching her potential, she wiped out forty-seven star systems across the Andromeda galaxy.

'When that happened, the Continuum realised that it might not be long before some being got hold of the Epicentre, and made sure we were just a memory.'

'The arrogance of aged youth, then. So we banned its use, and found a clever way to hide it. And it worked...up until now. Using a almost infinite machine like a TARDIS, combined with what he was doing to your life essences was a rather grotesque plan of the Master's, but ultimately effective.'

Janeway frowned. 'Almost like trying to make a powerful enough computer to hack into the Continuum mindset.'

Q almost looked surprised, then nodded thoughtfully. 'An unsurprisingly crude, yet strangely appropriate analogy.' Q pointed to the monitor, and a series of co-ordinates appeared on it. 'That's where you'll find the Epicentre, Captains.' He spoke grimly as they read.� 'I know what the Epicentre can do. And I know what that Collette woman is like. I suggest you get your ships there as fast as possible.'

Euan turned back to him. 'Why don't you j--' But Q was gone. Done a Batman. Damn.

Beside him, Ksenia yawned and sat up. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I think I dozed off. Did I miss anything?'

'Bath oils. Satin sheets. Honey liqueur. Ear-piece and microphone. Yes, that's everything.'

'In about fifteen minutes. Why did you suggest that I should wear my dress uniform?'

'Sir - you should always dress nicely when you're eating out.[40] Now, like we said last night. I'll be in the cupboard. Don't open the door! Very little spoils the mood quite like an unwelcome interruption, OK?'

'She's early!' they both hissed. Suzy bolted for the cupboard as Val called out.

Taking one last look at herself in the mirror, Val straightened her uniform and opened the door.

Outside was a Ratbat who was shaking (more than usual) with nerves, and holding one of the biggest bouquets Val had ever seen. Seeing her like that, Val's own tension seemed to pale into insignificance and disappear. It's hard to notice the torch you're holding when someone else brings a spotlight. She smiled in a way she hoped was reassuring.

'They're fine,' said Val as the door hummed shut. 'Would you mind if I put them in some water?'

'I'm afraid you're going to have to give them to me if I'm to put them in water, Ratti.'

Reluctantly, Ratbat handed over the flowers, to reveal what they had been hiding.

She was wearing a bright green dress. In accordance to the occasion, it was quite low-cut. In accordance with the fact that this was Ratbat, however, she was also wearing a green undershirt. Val was momentarily taken aback.

The evening progressed. Val, at Suzy's discretion, served a platter of seafood, and made small-talk while Ratbat got more relaxed. She had uncrossed her arms, and relaxed her legs a bit when Suzy suggested now might be a good time to bring things closer to the aim of the night. Val moved closer to Ratbat on the couch and gently placed a hand on her arm. She flinched a bit, but didn't draw back. It was, after all, her idea. If she pulled out now, it would kind of ruin the exercise.

Ratbat nodded. Val took her drink with her free hand and placed it on the table. Then she looked back up.

Val smiled nervously, and leaned slowly forward until their lips met. Ratbat could taste the wine and the seafood on Val's lips. She had stiffened slightly as the kiss had begun, but now she relaxed. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the feeling of the kiss. It was not unpleasant, and she began to relax even further. She lifted her arms and put them around Val, drawing her closer.

'Okay, Val. How do I say this tactfully? I guess I don't. It's time to open your mouth.'

With little warning, Ratbat suddenly found Val's tongue in her mouth. She pulled back, the relaxed sensation she had felt leaving her as she looked at a very sheepish Val.

Val mentally shook herself. She was getting distracted. If she was going to get through this without making a twit of herself, she needed to concentrate. She eased Ratbat back onto the couch as she slowly and gently kissed her.

Ratbat concentrated. This kiss was slightly different, she decided. Val was gently exploring her mouth with a rather hesitant tongue. She filed the experience away for further study at some later point. At the moment, Val seemed to have other things than serious cogitation on her mind. In fact, she was moving. Val gently slid off the couch and knelt between her legs, never allowing their kiss to break.

There was a muted thumping sound, as of a head hitting the inside of a cupboard door. Fortunately, Ratbat was too confused and disoriented to hear it.

'You know! A bath, relax in some nice hot water. Enjoy some essential oils, come on!' And she turned and walked toward the bathroom. Ratbat stood, a little unsteadily, and followed.

'Sir, please. I respect you, but will you please - for my sanity at least - calm the FUCK DOWN!'

'Don't worry,' Ratbat said, watching the flow of water around Val's hand. 'I'm nervous enough for both of us.'

'So, what do we do now?' She tried to convince herself that this wasn't a bad idea.

'Well,' said Val, pouring some drops from a small bottle into the running bath, 'now would be an excellent juncture to get undressed.'

'Look,' said Val, standing and putting her arms around her, 'you really don't have to do this if you don't want to, but I think you do. At any time, just say "uncle", OK?'

If this was what her crewmates got up to on what appeared to be (for Euan at least) a regular basis, how did they stand it?

She could feel the material of her dress begin to stick to her back, as she realised that she was sweating quite a bit. This was a remarkably rare occurrence for Ratbat. For probably the first time ever, she began to wish that she'd left the undershirt off.

Val was doing something again. What was it? What was she doing down there? Oh. Kissing things. Was this expected? Or was it just something Val did? And was it supposed to make one feel aroused?

As Ratbat stood in thought, Val stood again, and leaned down until her lips where all but touching her ear, and Ratbat surely must have been lost in the moment, because she thought she heard Val whisper twice, 'May I?' as her hand brushed the zip at the back of her dress.

Unable to speak, Ratbat just nodded, not knowing whether she was supposed to return the favour or not.

The sound of the zip was quite loud over the soft gurgle of the bath. The dress flowed away from her body, leaving her wearing her shirt and green boxers. The dress piled by her feet and she stepped out, into Val's waiting arms. Val knelt slowly, her hands tracing the contours of Ratbat's body, and then were gone. Ratbat opened her eyes to see Val kneeling in front of her, hugging her dress.

'Shit!' Val called as she leapt up and turned off the taps, dropping Ratbat's dress into the bath in the process. 'Fuck!' Ratbat was about to mutter something conciliatory when she heard a door bang open behind her.

Whirling around, she saw Suzy striding through Val's bedroom toward them. She was too shocked even to cover herself up.[42]

'I said "hold her close". Hold her close! For Miyazaki's sake, what is wrong with you?!'

Val just stood meekly in the growing puddle. Ratbat was looking from one of them to the other, the feeling of confusion and embarrassment slowly fading from her, when she caught sight of Suzy's florid cheeks and flaming eyes, and it was right back, in force.

'You're in here,' Suzy declaimed, waving a finger at Val as she did so, 'alone with an,' her gaze swept over to Ratbat, and her finger suddenly wavered, 'not entirely unattractive woman, and you...cock...it...up. No pun intended,' she finished.

Val looked from Suzy to Ratbat. Suzy was glaring fiercely. Ratbat was blushing. The two didn't seem to be willing to forgive and forget.

Suzy threw her hands up into the air. 'You're absolutely hopeless! I'm going to have to do this myself, aren't I?'

She collected Ratbat's sodden dress and drained some of the water from the bath, then thrust the wet silk in Val's face and shoved her out of the bathroom and slammed the door.[43]

'Right,' she said, turning to Ratbat and rolling up her sleeves. 'Let's get to it.'

Captains Janeway and Bowen, and Commanders Forde and Chakotay, had decided that the two ships - and crews - would remain together to see through the matter of the Epicentre. As orders were about to be issued to the crew, however, Janeway asked Euan a question.

'This Chick Collette. Why do you find her so dangerous? What's she done?' She leant closer. 'And why do you and your crew know her so well?'

Euan grimaced. 'The Evil Bunnies...and Chick Collette...we've got a bit of history. Something happened between her and Commander Sigma...and it kind of spread to the rest of us.'

'Matters concerning us, especially Ratbat,' continued Ksenia, 'make her a little unstable.'

'It was just ages ago,' began Ksenia. 'Ratbat and Bobbi had briefly started going to some posh public school in England, and...well, Euan knows the story better than I do.'

Euan sighed, and the Dark Virgin told a tale some four-and-a-half centuries old.

The chiropteran glanced over her script a final time. 'OK,' she told Ratbat. 'You and Lezanne - in position for the final scene. And Bobbi, I want the sound effects ready this time.'

'Everything,' replied Chick. She deliberately glanced over at Ratbat as she said it.

Ratbat sighed. 'Fair enough.' She beckoned to her fellow actress Lezanne, and the two of them went to their places.

While her actual face has the appearance of detached interest, inwardly Chick was grinning like a maniac. The combination of serendipity and careful planning that had been the past three months was about to come to a head.

The school's drama production had a final scene whose climactic point was the two lead characters (played by Lezanne and Ratbat) kissing.

Now, if Chick had been aware of this from the start, she would have signed up for Ratbat's role rather than that of the play's director. For Chick had a very deep, and very unrequited love for Lezanne M^cSerachev.

Chick Collette had no plans of being resigned to her fate. She decided that since Urac Sigma was going to be a lead in the play, it would be best if she had an understudy. And who knew the play better than the director? Chick herself, thereby, would become the understudy.

At this point in her career, though, Chick was a creature of little malice. She actually had to hope that Ratbat was going to meet with an accident, rather than have one conveniently happen to her. That's where the serendipity came in. Chick had initially noticed that there was something a little strange about the other chiropteran girl. At first she thought it was mostly that both Sigma and Scholes were evidently older than any of the other students. Then, in Ratbat's case, it became more clear. Sexuality: N/A. Ratbat just wasn't into pairing up with anyone.

So she'd hardly like to be giving another person a highly passionate kiss on stage now, would she?

No - they'd get to the big rehearsal, the moment would come, Lezanne and Ratbat would come closer, and then... she'd baulk. Unable to participate in such a grossly physical interaction, Ratbat would want out. Of course, that would be a nuisance, but at least there was an understudy, right?

So, Chick would be in that play, she'd be in that final scene, she'd get to take Lezanne in her arms, draw her into that kiss, and then...well, after a kiss like Chick had in mind, who knew where it might lead them!

'Chick?' Bobbi's prompting voice from offstage broke her out of her fantasy - and with good timing too, considering that Chick was about to move to physical enactment. 'We're ready.'

Chick all but ignored the scene as they played it out. They knew the lines backwards, and now that Ratbat had got out of the habit of saying them that way, they scarcely needed her guidance for them.

Lezanne delivered her line, and Chick waited for Ratbat to spring back with twice the speed that she'd leant forward.

A kiss that Chick would have given half her life for - wasted on someone for whom it meant nothing more than theatrical professionalism.

Chick's face hardened and she barely noticed the remainder of the scene. All she saw, over and over again, were Lezanne's lips, wrapped around those of some...aged hag!

Oh, but Urac Sigma was going to pay for this...maybe that long-haired moron with her, if that was what it took.

Bobbi stepped forth from the wings. 'Then you must have been pretty appalling. Because judging from the look on our beloved director's face, something just pissed her off pretty bad...'

Graham was, all things considered, a quiet sort of man. So he was less than appreciative of being grabbed from behind and impolitely invited to take a rather restrictive position against the holodeck wall.

Ruth turned to stare into the face of Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram. 'What?'

'"This". It's a pronoun. It's certainly not a verb.' The hologram beamed sarcastically.

'Dr Zee' (as Ruth and numerous other Compromisers nicknamed many an EMH) simply shook his head. 'Or what, Lieutenant? You're hardly in a position to harm a hologram.'

Dr Z considered a moment, then looked across the room. 'Ah! The Delaney sisters. You know, I can't remember when I last chatted to them. Um...excuse me.' He quickly left the two alone.

Ruth stood back and read from something in her hand. '"Miss July. This nubile nubian might be Small by name, but not by nature. Nadya is quick with her phaser, but she can be slow when she needs to be!"'

'What about it?' asked Graham innocently. 'The Babes of Security 2376 calendar. It's just a bit of harmless fun!'

'Then maybe you'd like to tell me why these thoroughly-consented photos are obviously taken from the point of view of the surveillance camera in the lovelies' bathrooms!'

Graham floundered. 'A bit of still life! Come on, where's the damage? I was going to give them out at the New Year's Eve party!'

As Ruth continued to unleash verbal punishment on Graham in a preparation that it become physical, Lieutenants Bowen and Vincent watched from the next table.

'You used to work in security, Rachael,' said Callum. 'Is she really so bad all the time?'

Rachael frowned. 'Only when some sleazy doctor's decided to make an exhibition of naked photos of her staff...'

There was the boop of an internal page. 'Janeway to all personnel, both Voyager and Compromise. I apologise to any of you who may still be celebrating, but I must ask all of you on duty to report to your stations...and, Compromise crewmembers, to your own vessel.'

Ruth growled, but a call to duty was a call to duty. 'You'll keep, Henstock,' she told the Nasty Man, and stalked off to find a transporter.

Graham just sighed,[44] waited for her to be gone, and followed the rest of his crew out.

Ratbat made her way to the bridge, intending to discover just what it was Euan had meant when he'd just made an announcement while mucking about with the Universal Translator. The whole thing had come out in 3rd-century colloquial Chinese, a lingo Ratbat had to admit wasn't amongst her stronger suits.

And now her brain had to assess things in the wake of both a male and a female encounter.[45] Probably not the thing she should be doing under the present work-related circumstances, but seeing as even now she was probably the crewmember to have done it with the fewest of her fellows, she didn't think it would be entirely out of order.[46]

'Captain!' Ratbat called as the turbolift ejected her onto the bridge. 'What was all that about?'

'See where kissing girls gets you?' winked Chakotay as he disappeared into the lift behind Ratbat.

'Konnichiwa,' said Suzy, obviously somewhat distracted. 'God, I don't know...' she said to herself. 'The things I do for that dozy diplomat...'

'Next time,' Suzy answered. 'I just leave her in there with a plate of oysters and a DIY guide from Betazed.' She shook her head again and went into another room.

'It's true,' Niki said to the spot where she had been standing. 'You really have gotten stranger since I married you.

'Course laid in, Captain,' reported Tom. 'But the charts say there's nothing there but an asteroid with a stable orbit.'

'Then that's what we're looking for, Mr Paris. Now, as soon as Commander Chakotay gets back...'

'I'm sorry, Captain,' said Chakotay as he emerged from the lift to Voyager's bridge. 'But the Compromise transporter chief will talk your ear off as soon as look at you.'

'Judging from Captain Bowen said, Mr Kim, if we don't go in this trip there may not be an Earth.'

'I can think of about a thousand other things I'd rather be doing,' complained Leila as she got onto the transporter pad.

'Well, you can stay behind and do them if you want,' rejoined Bobbi. 'You did volunteer.'

Bobbi shook her head and sighed. This really was going to be one of those missions. She joined Leila, along with Euan, Graham, Ruth and Ratbat, on the pad. Across from them, Noomy looked up from her console. 'OK, I've got the co-ordinates for the Voyager team, so I'll set you down in the same place as them. Well, not the same place, obviously. I mean, if it was exactly the same place, you'd, like, die and that wouldn't be good for the mission at all, and the Voyager people'd probably be quite pissed off as well, anyway, so I'm putting you down near where the Voyager people are going to be, well, pretty near I think, there's always a margin for error with these kind of transports, probably just as well I'm so on the ball and intelligent...'

'Noomy, energise, please,' said Euan, politely trying to cut through the chatter-stream.

'....but then all the molecules and everything would just go, like, everywhere and it's be worse than a frog in a blender, I can tell you. That's one of the first things they teach us at transporter school...'

Ksenia checked and re-checked the console before her. Oh, that wasn't good. The notion that there was a spatial anomaly surrounding the Epicentre hadn't surprised her. In fact, it had surprised her that it had been so comparatively mild, as anomalies went. It hadn't even been worth worrying about trying to transport through it.

Now the anomaly was pulsing quite nastily. Some kind of last-minute Q defence system, she didn't doubt. It would be just like the Q - especially the Q as they were all those millennia ago - to leave a fence that didn't go up until after you'd passed it.

'Ksenia...is there something I should know about the space around that asteroid? Only the transporter lock has just dropped off, and I can't get it back.'

Ksenia sighed. 'I thought you might have been going to say something like that,' she said. 'Keep trying. I'm going to see if I can work out what's going on. Forde out.' She paused, then opened a new channel.

Ratbat squinted. 'The transporter was supposed to put us down in the Epicentre. Could this be it?'

They were standing in mid-air, in the middle of a vast black tunnel. A soft wind was sighing overhead, making a hollow groaning sound in the immensity of the tunnel.

'Unlikely. The Epicentre was scanned thoroughly by our science crews before we beamed over. I would say that it is more probable that a random tertiary element has been introduced into the transporter signal, meaning that we have beamed down here.'

'What does that mean?' Graham muttered to Euan as Tuvok and Janeway continued to scan the strange place.

Janeway snapped her tricorder shut. 'Very well. I suggest that we try to find our way out of here. Comms with the ships appear to be down, and we're getting nothing from the tricorders to tell us where we are. Unless you have any objections, Captain, I would like to lead the way.'

Euan realised after a brief pause that she was talking to him, and coughed. 'Um. Yes, of course.' He tugged at his uniform.

The motley crew continued onward. Captain Janeway was scanning the tunnel for any clues as to what or where it might be. The floor of the tunnel was almost indiscernible from the surrounding blackness, giving the peculiar sensation of walking in thin air. Although they had arbitrarily decided on the direction they would take, there didn't seem to be as much distance behind them as there ought to have been. There was a distinct feeling of walking along in thin air and getting nowhere.

Harry mooched along grumpily. Being so close to home and yet so completely caught up in this mission was getting on his nerves. All he wanted to do was go home to Libby and sleep for a while, preferably two or three years. And all he ended up doing, it seemed, was to walk nowhere along a huge black tunnel that shouldn't have even been there. It would have made things easier if the captain wasn't so damned interested in it.

The blackness ahead was paling to grey, a dim light becoming visible as they continued along.

They all looked down. The floor of the tunnel was now covered with water. As they continued, it got deeper and deeper until they were wading in it.

'Goodness. A boat in the middle of a river. What will they think of next,' remarked Ruth acidly.

'Your stint in the sixteenth century didn't improve your temper much, did it?' said Bobbi.

'I suggest we take advantage of this opportunity to increase our speed,' said Tuvok.

With much grumbling and comment, the crew managed to squeeze themselves into the boat. Tuvok placed himself at the stern, where there was a pole to push the boat along with.

'I detect from your expressions that something is wrong,' he said. 'Is there a problem with this boat? My assessment is that it will speed our progress considerably.'

'No,' said Ratbat slowly. 'The boat isn't a problem, but that guy sitting behind you could be one.'

Tuvok, many years of Vulcan mind control exercises preventing his panic, turned around slowly.

'I beg your pardon. We have no currency to give. And you were not here a second ago. From where did you appear?' Tuvok kept his cool in a way none of the other crew could have managed.

She got up, seriously threatening to capsize the boat. 'Here, Mr Charon.' She held out her hand.

The main screen on Voyager was set for, well, split-screen. On the left was the bridge of the Compromise, on the right the current view of the Epicentre. Lieutenant Hick sat on her chair with a view much the same, except she was looking at Voyager and the Epicentre. The general effect was of a large conference call.

'The anomaly is now sending out pulses every second. If they get any more intense we'll have no chance at all of getting the transporter lock back.'

'I have no idea. I keep thinking I've got them and then they slip through again. It's worse than soap in the bath.'

'Well, my science department says we could collapse the anomaly with a combined phaser burst and quantum torpedo barrage.'

Chakotay was about to express how this didn't help him when B'Elanna got quite excited.

'Chakotay! The Epicentre just pulsed out a concentrated burst of neuro-psychic energy.'

'Okay. Ms Hick, I am about to back off a bit and I would suggest you do the same.'

'How does moving back to thirty-five thousand klicks sound? Can you still try to lock onto them from that far, Noomy?'

'Sounds good to me, Ms Hick. Mr Paris, come about and move to thirty-five thousand kilometres from the asteroid.'

As Voyager turned around and began to move, the terse voice of the EMH came over the bridge speaker.

'Mr Chakotay, I know that you are very busy at the moment, and that any interruption is probably most unwelcome, but I think it worth noting that my nurse has just collapsed.'

'It would appear that the last burst of neuro-psychic energy affected Kes in quite a negative way. I have her stabilised on a biobed, but she took rather a nasty blow to her temporal lobe.'

'I'm sure you are needed on the bridge, I just thought it worth informing you. Might I suggest we try and solve this situation quickly?'

�'Chakotay! The anomaly is growing and is now pulsing at four times a second.'

'If I can convince Neelix to stop trying to wake her up I think she might make it through. Her brain is fine, and it would appear that--' A muffled alarm sound came over the speaker. 'I think I may have to re-evaluate my last message. I'll get back to you.'

Tuvok poled the boat along the ever-widening river. All the way, Janeway and Bobbi kept scanning their surroundings for any hint of where they might be. The tricorders, however, remained obstinately unresponsive.

'Are you referring to the disconcerting nature of not knowing where you are?' asked Tuvok.

Graham rubbed his face all over her. She squeaked and tried to push him away. 'Hang on!' She leaned over the side of the boat. 'We're being followed!'

Lying almost full-length along a piece of wood was a pale creature with enormous eyes, paddling along with long webbed feet. It was muttering and hissing to itself.

'Is ours, precious, yes it is. Nasty creatures, what has it got in its pocketses, yes? Our birthday present! Yes, precious. Our birthday present, given on our birthday, yes, precious...'

They listened to the curious tirade for a few minutes. The creature eventually passed them and faded into the gloom.

The tunnel was quite wide here, and the infrequent lighting showed an old man in a white toga, sitting on what appeared to be nothing. He was writing industriously on a scroll.

She leaned over and looked at his scroll. 'You've misspelt "inasmuch". There's only one N.'[47]

'Bollocks!' he swore. 'Now I'll have to start all over again.' He looked up. 'So who are you and what do you want?'

He broke into a beatific grin. 'Ah, the most profound of personal dilemmas. Now, were I one of the Empiricists, I would doubtless vouch that we are in what appears to be a big black tunnel. The Stoics would probably say that there is no way out so why should we even bother, the silly fools. I, on the other hand--'

The old man's grin got even wider. 'Why, yes. I am. Could it be that you have heard of me?'

'Of course I have! How could I not? I simply adored your Symposium. And I have a very good edition of The Republic. I've read it eight times!'

Plato blushed. 'Well, I wrote them to be read, my dear. Tell me, what did you think of The Republic?'

Leila smiled. 'On the whole it was very good. I was particularly impressed with the allegory of the cave. But I've got to tell you, Plato, your proof for the immortality of the soul was absolutely full of it.'

The pleased grin vanished from his face. 'I beg your pardon? And you would know how much about the subject?'

'It's easy. You know the good old Aristotelian logic tables? Well, one of them would prove in ten seconds flat that your proof was way wrong.'

'Well, you said that fear, anger, jealousy and so on couldn't destroy the soul, yeah? Therefore the soul was indestructible, right?'

'Well you missed out all the things that might destroy the soul that we didn't know about when you were writing. Like cheap tit-flicks made in southern California. Or re-runs of Married with Children. That kind of thing. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.'

'Oh very well done, Leila! You vanished him! Now we'll never find out where we are!' Euan stuck out his lip.

Leila glared at him. 'Look, he was never really there. I have a feeling somebody's testing us. I think we may have just passed.'

The tunnel seemed endless, stretching on through the black emptiness. Euan sat in the prow looking out over the water, watching for any sign of the end, or of a bend, or anything. He was out of luck. The river was as featureless as a blank wall.

'Not me.' She lifted her head and listened. 'Whoever's singing, though, is really bad.'

A patch of grey in the darkness revealed a quintet of girls in scanty costumes. They were singing.

As the boat approached, though, they stopped the singing and started squabbling.

The animosity instantly gone, the girls smiled seductively at him, reaching out hands. 'Come with us,' said one. 'We can show you earthly delights you have never dreamed of...'

Reaching out to him, the girls started singing again. 'You will be with us, in heavenly bliss, forever....'

'Doesn't sound particularly heavenly to me, if you can't get in tune,' Leila said.

The boat drifted past the disorganised quintet, leaving them to their arguments.

'Yes. I feel right at home,' said Ruth sarcastically. 'It's just what I wanted to come home to; complete insanity.'

'Well how is it any worse than what you left, Ruth?' asked Ratbat. 'The sixteenth century sucked.'

Ruth choked back a cry. She knew she had to tell Ratbat at some point; there was no way around that. But here, on the middle of a river to nowhere, and in front of all their friends, just didn't seem right.

Although there was never any sensation of the river curving or bending in any way, they couldn't see any of the people they'd passed. Janeway had many theories as to why this was so, but no one seemed particularly interested in hearing any of them.

This latest figure was a bit of a poser, though. Half man half bull, it was sitting on a section of stone wall which jutted out from the side of the tunnel. And, against all logic, it was crying quite loudly.

'Oh, more visitors,' the creature said through its tears. 'Well go on, make yourselves at bloody home!� It's not as if I matter or anything!'

'It's not my idea of fun, you know. Sitting here in the middle of bloody nowhere waiting for people to just turn up and act like they own the place! And then when they see me, it's always screams of terror and running away, never a kind word, never a how d'you do or a thank-you for your hospitality. Anyone would think I was a bloody monster!'

'And the few who don't run away, well all they want to do is butcher me and skin me and hang me up on the wall! It's not fair, I tell you. A man should be allowed to control his own destiny, should be able to decide who he spends his time with and how he spends it, and all that. I never get invited to parties, you know. Everyone always says, oh yes, and we'll invite Mr Minotaur, of course. Pillar of the community, and all that. But they never do. They all hate me.'

'I was trying to get a table in a restaurant last week, you know. Three quarters of a bloody hour, I had to wait! They served seven people before they could be bothered to get to me! It's speciesism, that's what it is. Just because I'm not pretty and white like Mr bloody Pegasus, they all think I'm a second-class citizen. Well, bollocks to them, that's what I say!'

The diminutive security chief jumped from the boat to the section of wall. 'People might like you a bit better if you stopped bloomin' complaining all the time, you useless piece of shit!' she bellowed.

'Oh, that's right. Insult me. Just what I was expecting. Everyone always insults me, you know. Horny beast, they call me. Whinging bastard. Mr Spiky-Head. Never a nice word to say about me, any of them. It's not fai�'

The Minotaur looked confused for a moment, then fell off his wall and rolled into the river.

Ruth hopped lightly back into the boat. 'Let's move on, shall we?' she said brightly.

Although the needless display of violence had calmed her nerves, Ruth was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. Certainly, the Minotaur had been very annoying and would probably have kept them there all day, for all that time mattered here. But she felt wrong about kicking him. Would Clifford have approved of such a thing? Probably not. Maybe that was it. Maybe being a mother had mellowed her. Was that it? No, that wasn't right...

She sighed and put her chin in her hands. It wasn't the best of days, she reflected.

The tunnel narrowed again. It seemed to do that quite a bit; first getting very wide to the point where it was almost a lake, then narrowing into a thin stream with only just enough space for their boat to pass through. This was the narrowest it had been, though. The walls were scraping the boat with every push of Tuvok's pole.

Up ahead, blocking the tunnel completely, was a large platform. And sitting on top of it, looking contented, sly, and rather malicious, was a sphinx.

'Ah. Good evening,' it said, each word dropping into place in perfectly formed English. 'How nice to have visitors again.' The sphinx's lazy grin widened. 'Because you won't be going past me.'

Janeway stood up. 'Please, Mr Sphinx. We have no quarrel with you. We simply seek passage through this strange land.

The sphinx raised a haughty eyebrow. 'Nobody passes here unless they first answer my riddle.' It grinned again. 'And nobody ever has.'

The sphinx fixed him with a cold eye. 'I think I shall eat you first, ye furry of face.'

'Mine is not furry. It is solid granite.' The sphinx glared at the party. 'Very well. Here is my riddle. It is very difficult, so you may as well give up now.'

'Well, we haven't heard it yet, have we? Let us be the judges of that!' said Graham.

'The sphinx stared at Graham. 'In that case, what walks on four legs at the start of the day, two legs in the middle of the day, and three legs in the evening?'

Graham opened his mouth. He closed it again. He scratched his beard. 'Is this some kind of weird starfish you're talking about?'

'No, seriously, I do. I know the answer.' She pulled herself up proudly. 'It's Graham!'

The sphinx opened its mouth to declare her wrong, before its brain caught up with its ears. 'I beg your pardon?'

'Well,' Leila began proudly. 'First thing in the morning, he's always walking around on all fours, looking for his glasses in all of last night's Guinness cans. This usually takes a couple of hours, at least. Then when he finds them, he usually walks around pretty normally for most of the day, on two legs. And then at night, when the third leg gets into action...' She drifted off with a slightly embarrassed glance at the rest of her crewmates. 'Well, so I've been told, you know.' She gave a nervous laugh. 'So there you go: it's Graham.'

The sphinx thought this over. 'This is most vexing, you know. The correct answer, of course, is "a man", you know, the riddle being an allegory for the plight of the human condition. But it seems that you have given an alternative answer which is just as valid.'

'Quite. So my only choice is to let you through. Really, you might have got it wrong, just to be polite. There's no consideration these days, that's what I always say.'

With great aplomb, the sphinx dragged itself up off the platform, and pulled it out of the way to let them go past.

'You're not wrong. What a stupid riddle! What happened to the good ones about nuns walking into bars?'

As Graham enlightened Bobbi further, Harry sighed. He was grumpy, that was for sure. The jokes that the Compromise crew seemed to enjoy were just a little tasteless for him. He thought of all the things he would do when he got back to Earth. He would take a long, slow walk in the park, then buy a mocha at the caf� on the corner before going home and having dinner with Libby. She would be waiting for him, dressed in red. Red, the colour that made her look like a dusky rose.

Harry looked around himself in surprise. There was nobody else in the boat. Where there had been a mixture of Compromise and Voyager crewmembers, there were a collection of eight cute pink pigs.

He looked up in shock. A tall slender woman was hanging in the air in front of him. 'Beg your pardon?'

She brushed back her long blonde hair. 'We're alone, now. There's nobody to disturb us.' She smiled seductively. 'We can be together in perfect bliss forever and ever...'

Her hand reached down and cupped his chin. Harry realised that his mouth was hanging open. 'Erm, I'm sorry, I think you've mistaken me for somebody else,' he squeaked.

'No, I haven't, Harry Kim. I know you very well, and I can be everything you want me to be...'

Her hanging draperies, a lustrous green colour, changed gradually to be a deep, glowing red. 'Look familiar?'

'H-ho-how about a nice game of dominoes?' he babbled. 'Or we could try two-handed whist if you like. I was always quite good at Boggle...'

The expression on her face was not promising. In fact, it was downright threatening. 'I am the sorceress Circe. You will be mine, forever. You don't have a choice in the matter, Mr Kim.'

Circe sat back on the prow of the boat. 'You're impossible. What the hell is wrong with you?'

Harry giggled nervously. 'Well, I've got a girl waiting back home, you see, and we want to get married and have a family and a dog and three budgies...'

'No.' The flowing clothes she wore vanished, to be replaced by a skimpy, slinky bodysuit in red silk. It clung to the delicate curves of her body in a way that made Harry's mouth go dry. 'Can you honestly say that you don't want me? That your girl,' she spat the word contemptuously 'could ever compete with me?'

Harry sat staring at the emptiness ahead of him. Had he passed some kind of test? Or had he failed it?

Harry turned around. The crew were sitting where they had been all along, acting as if nothing had happened.

There was no real sense of time on the boat. The water swirled, Tuvok pushed against the pole, and they moved, but it was as if there was no actual time that this was taking place in. They seemed to be in limbo; stuck between the Compromise and the Epicentre.

Up ahead of them there was a strange, dim radiance. The people they had passed before had been lit from an unidentifiable source in the ceiling. This figure was actually glowing.

'Hello, my-- ha ha ha -- friends,' he chortled. 'Please exc-- hee hee-- excuse me.' He clutched his sides in a paroxysm of mirth. 'It's just-- ha he ha he ho ho-- so very amusing, ha ha ha, don't you know?'

'People-- hee hee hee-- keep tickling my tummy--ha ha ha-- and it makes me-- ha ha-- laugh!'

The plump deity looked puzzled between giggles. 'I don't see--- hee hee hee--- the problem.'

'Which is why they keep tickling you, yes I know. But you yourself haven't been manifested yet.'

As far as it was possible, the Buddha looked annoyed. 'Sakyamuni-- heh heh heh heh-- gave the game-- ha ha-- away really well, hee hee, didn't he? Explaining everything to-- ha ha ha ha-- people is a bad idea!'

'Look out for your karma!' called the Buddha as they passed him. 'My-- hee hee-- my karma ran over your-- ha ha-- dogma!'

'How d'you know all this stuff about Buddhas and philosophers and sphinxes and everything?' asked Euan.

'Starfleet Academy electives. The history of Philosophy and Millenarian movements 101.'

Another figure was just becoming visible in the gloom. He was tall, muscled, and wearing tight leather shorts. He was also flexing his muscles and doing ridiculously melodramatic poses with a two-handed broadsword.

The demigod rested his sword on the ground and grinned. 'Yes, I am! Hercules, the son of a god! And that god says, you stop here!'

'Wow!' Ratbat looked up at him with starry-eyed adoration. 'The strongest man in the universe!'

'Do you think...' Ratbat's fangirl act was amazing everybody, but Hercules, not being blessed with imagination or intelligence, was completely fooled. 'Do you think you could maybe give me a little demonstration of how strong you are?'

'Ooh!' she squeaked. 'But Hercules, I'm not very big. Suppose you try picking up our entire boat and putting it down... over there?'

The people still in the boat were mildly shocked when he picked them up and placed them nearly fifty metres further down the tunnel.

'Oh, Hercules! What a man you are!' Ratbat clasped her hands. 'Please, will you give me one more demonstration?'

'If you want me to.' Out of nowhere, Hercules produced a ferret. 'Now then, Nicky, be good.'

Looking back, they saw Hercules trying to pursue them despite the vigorous wriggling that was coming from the vicinity of his crotch.

Tuvok pushed on and on, never tiring. Although his Vulcan mind prevented shock or surprise at any of the events they had encountered, he couldn't help noticing that this was not the normal way a day should proceed. In any correctly ordered universe, a demigod should not be persuaded to put a ferret down his pants by a mere mortal.

'Looks like we've reached the end of the river,' said Bobbi. 'I suppose we walk from here.'

The ground was the same indistinguishable black as it had been at the beginning of the tunnel. Featureless and oppressive, it seemed to go on forever.

A figure in black was standing in a pool of light. She wore black cut-off jeans and a tanktop, and was standing blocking the tunnel.

'Well haven't you ever been into a holodeck? The things there are pretty solid, aren't they? This is just the same principle, except they aren't computer generated.'

The young woman turned to Janeway. 'Why don't you listen? I just said I wasn't a human. But in a way I am definitely connected to humans. I'm just here in case I'm needed later.'

The girl folded her arms. 'It's my job to turn the lights off after everyone's gone.'

'You may remember. Last time I saw you, I was wearing a grey robe, like this,' she was replaced by a shapeless grey robe with a hood. 'and I TALKED LIKE THIS. Remember me? She popped back to her former shape and smiled.

'In a way. But don't be scared. I'm not here for any of you, at least not yet. I'm here because of her.'

Death stood aside. Lying on the floor behind her, curled up in a foetal ball, was Emma.

The former transporter chief was not in good shape. Her eyes were glazed, her face twisted in an expression of horror. She stared solidly at nothing, while she clasped her knees and rocked back and forth.

'Captain!' Leila called to Janeway. 'I need your tricorder. Emma, can you hear me?'

'She's not here either!' Leila jumped up and turned to Death. 'Where is she? What have you done with Emma? And where the fuck are we? I spent ages trying to get her patched up, if you've gone and done something else to her, I swear to god I'll kill you!'

Death took a step backward. 'Hey, calm down! I haven't done anything to her yet. I might not even need to. And you can't kill me, I'm Death. So don't be silly.'

'Emma is close by. And as for where we are, well, we're anywhere she wants us to be.'

'Didn't think so. But I can give you a bit of advice. I'm not really supposed to do this, but you've all been so close to me over the years, I think I like you. All the people you've encountered were designed to confuse you, distract you, or just plain stop you. You've got pretty far by getting to us, so all you need to do now is find the exit.'

Death drew a doorway in the air. It appeared in glowing, incandescent fire. She stepped through it and, with a wave, disappeared.

'What a frustrating woman,' remarked Graham. 'Didn't say anything useful at all.'

'Well, we're stuck here, wherever that is.' Janeway was scanning the darkness. Where there had been a tunnel there was now just a blank wall. There was also no way out; they were stuck in a small circular room.

The apparition of Emma was lying on her side, staring at nothing. Although they knew she wasn't the real Emma, it was hard to ignore someone who looked to be in such mental agony. Leila gently patted her arm. 'Come on, Em. Give us a clue. How do we get out of here?'

'There is a considerable chance that the environment in which we are now situated is in fact a macrocosm of this young woman's mind. Whatever is happening in her subconscious is being reproduced here, as physical substance. Somehow, concepts from her thoughts are being used as a defence: to keep us from the Epicentre.'

'Very interesting, Mr Vulcan, but it doesn't actually help our situation at all.' Ruth kicked the side of the room.

Tuvok sighed. He had a perfectly good name, why did people keep calling him Mr Vulcan? It was so illogical.

'The name of a planet spelt wrong? Yes, of course.' Ruth glared at him. 'Are you getting to a point or what?'

Euan held out a finger and touched it to the wall. He drew it from head height down to the floor. It left a glowing fiery line. 'It's all imaginary, right? Even if it is mostly Emma, we should be able to count for something. Draw a door. Death said that the way out was wherever we wanted it to be.'

They stepped out of the opening. It was like a slit in thin air; like a doorway into another dimension, which, in effect, is what it was.

The bare, rocky asteroid wasn't very big, but projected a feeling of having more geography than was really possible for its size. This led to an uneasy feeling of being sort of twisted between dimensions.[48] Towards the centre of the space - and it only seemed to be the centre because there was no real way it could be the edge - there was a large, thick shaft of light. It seemed incredibly bright, yet it wasn't painful to look at.

Ratbat narrowed her eyes. She was getting that feeling again. 'More stuff from a TARDIS,' she speculated.

Tuvok was also looking at his tricorder. 'Captain. I am picking up a life sign.'

It wasn't long before they found something behind a small wall of rock. Here was a rather unpleasant device which all of them recognised.

Most of the Compromise crew regarded it in mild trepidation. When you've already been killed before, it's not pleasant to suddenly come upon the place where it happened.

'This is where the life sign is coming from,' said Janeway. 'Could it be the machine itself?'

Ratbat shook her head. 'I don't think so. There's a kind of sentience there, but it's not life. Which means...'

They slowly walked around the machine, knowing what it was that they'd discover, but not wanting to.

He and Bobbi, carefully moving around the rudimentary life-support mechanism, tried disconnecting some of the wiring that held Emma firmly in the machine.

'I don't know how you got here, but I'm not going to stand for it! It's mine!'

Ruth reached for her phaser rifle. Chick, seeing the movement, shot her. She fell backward.

Losing patience, Chick quickly adjusted the setting on her phaser, and shot them all with a wide-angle stun.

'Stupid bastards. Always spoiling everything,' she remarked to the world at large.

[31] It wouldn't be the first time, either. But that's another story.

[32] Getting killed and resurrected in the space of a few hours can really take it out of you.

[33] Strange, I know. But it does lend the act a certain dignity usually not present in the standard 'Must have sugar and caffeine' rush to imbibe the aforementioned liquid.

[34] Of course, Euan couldn't say 'Michael Keaton', lest he be relieved of command.

[35] Man, we all had to experience all kinds of rubbish when Ambassador Troi was aboard.

[36] Enjoying it enough to gloss over the fact that she wasn't so great with homonyms.

[37] Yes, but Val doesn't know what it is.

[38] Decorum, from the looks of things.

[39] Suzy somehow knew that this conversation was going to be an exercise in remembering not to add 'God knows why' at the end of every sentence.

[40] Gross. Gross gross gross gross gross.

[41] She actually wanted to move it, but Val was sort of sitting on it...

[42] Even though wearing boxers and an undershirt isn't exactly what one would call naked.

[43] This should be impossible with an automatic sliding door, but Suzy managed it.

[44] 'You'll keep' sounds less impressive when the same person says it to you consistently over a very long time and never does anything about it.

[45] Though she wasn't sure if she shouldn't just count Suzy as both.

[46] Suzy had been considerate enough to inform Ratbat that saying 'How was I?' straight afterwards wasn't the best of etiquette. Although Ratbat didn't quite see how this fitted with Suzy requiring from her a 700-word written review for her 'own purposes'.

[47] Even in Ancient Greek, apparently.

[48] Try to imagine a solid, physical substance Picasso. It has a tendency to make one's brain hurt.