“How many ships approach us?” the drech’tor wanted to know.
“Several dozen, Drech’tor,” the subaltern said. “And I have detected directed-energy weapons signatures.”
A raptor’s smile cracked Gherran’s military impassivity as he cast a brief glance at Frane. “So. We face no sleeping god here, do we? We are up against a new wave of invaders. The Devilships of old.” To his subaltern, he barked, “Level one tactical alert. Make challenge as we fall back. And charge all weapons batteries. Be ready to fire on my command.”
“No response to our challenges, Drech’tor,” said another junior officer a few moments later, her voice hard and businesslike.
As the alien ships grew swiftly larger on the screen, Frane’s initial impression of them became ever stronger. With their sleek, winged shapes and iridescent gray-green hulls, they truly didresemble nothing so much as a flock of predatory birds on the hunt. And they were bearing down on Gherran’s ships, flying in a wedge-shaped formation that implied a merciless sense of purpose. Frane couldn’t help but admire their grace and coordination as they moved as one, as though guided by a single, resolutely determined mind.
“They don’t look like any Devilships I ever saw,” Frane said to no one in particular, and no one replied. Neither he nor his father had been alive during the Devil Wars that Burgess had ended, but they had both seen pictures from that era.
Each of the alien ships’ forward weapons tubes now emanated a menacing emerald glow. As the interlopers drew closer, Frane could see several small but agile Neyel destroyers approaching them on a gently curving intercept course. At Gherran’s direction, the forward tubes of the Neyel ships released a lethal braid of bright red particle beams and a fusillade of armored projectiles.
The initial Neyel salvo seemed to have little effect on its targets, whose own glowing weapons ports responded by unleashing powerful streams of directed energy. The alien vessels’ armaments blazed as brightly as the heart of a star, forcing Frane to look away momentarily, despite the viewer’s light-filtering system.
A sidelong glance moments later confirmed the worst: the aliens were tearing through Gherran’s ships as though they were defenseless. Within moments, three destroyers had flared up in roughly spherical, roseate eruptions of fire, vessel and crew alike vaporized in an instant commingling of molecular fire and hard vacuum.
As Gherran rattled his terse, precise orders to his own control room staff, the foremost of the alien ships loosed their weapons for a second salvo, their formation passing by without so much as pausing, as though their opposition was unworthy of the invaders’ valuable time. A loud BOOM! shook the control room, as though the vessel it drove had just collided with an asteroid. The deck lurched perhaps forty-five degrees before the inertial compensators set things more or less right. Frane instinctively grabbed a nearby railing, which glowed in the suddenly dimmed lighting. His tail wrapped tightly about one of the railing posts as an added measure of security.
The ship rocked yet again, ringing like some great duranium bell as a console exploded nearby, singeing Frane’s hair and causing his eyeslits to slam shut involuntarily. Fierce heat scorched him, even through his hardened Neyel skin.
When he opened his eyes, he saw clouds of acrid-smelling coolant hissing into the smoky air as various crew members busied themselves putting out fires all around the control room, while simultaneously running the ship’s defensive and offensive systems. On the viewer, another pair of Neyel ships tore themselves apart, their extensive battle wounds finally yielding terminal conflagrations.
Coughing, his stinging eyes watering, Frane noticed a pair of bodies sprawled beside the wreckage of the exploded console, both in the unmistakably awkward postures of death.
One of the corpses belonged to his father.
Not knowing what else to do, Frane knelt beside Gherran, feeling for his carotid artery. His father, the man who had sired and then abandoned him and his mother in favor of his endless duties to a corrupt and belligerent Hegemony, now lay lifeless on the soot-smeared deck. He took one of Gherran’s still, gray hands.
And noticed the bracelet.
Without knowing why he was doing it, Frane took the bracelet and slipped it into a pocket in his robe. He was, after all, his father’s son. And that meant he was next in line to take possession of the bracelet, whether future generations were fated to be or not. If the Sleeper wakes and wipes us all from existence, then this will all be moot anyway,he thought, not certain whether the act of taking the bracelet represented faith or its repudiation. Perhaps that, too, didn’t matter.
Frane noticed only then that his father’s subaltern—Harn, was it?—was shouting at him, his words only barely comprehensible over the blare of klaxons, the beating of Frane’s own heart, and a surreal sense of time-dilated confusion.
“—said we have to get everyone to the evacuation capsules now!” Harn was saying, apparently annoyed at having to repeat himself. “We’re about to vent our ceeteematter. Our Efti’el drive will go critical in mennets.”
One of Frane’s hands was still in his robe pocket, where he worried the beads and stones of the bracelet with quaking fingers. He could see the viewer, which displayed the aft sections of the dwindling alien ships; they were flying on into the space that lay beyond the stirring Sleeper, apparently uninterested in all the death they had so casually dealt. As the strange vessels receded into the distance, like a pack of hunters with sated appetites, their formation remained as perfect as the moment they had first appeared. It made Frane think of encounters with deadly, implacable forces of nature, like the Sleeper itself—encounters which were apparently survivable, at least sometimes.
But he knew he’d received only a momentary reprieve at best.
“You have to evacuate my friends,” Frane shouted to the subaltern, momentarily putting aside his anticipation of the end of the world.
Chapter Two
U.S.S. TITAN,STARDATE 57024.0
“There’s been no mistake, Captain,” Lieutenant Melora Pazlar called with an incredulous shake of her head. Her fine, pale blond hair swayed like the fronds of a shallow-water Betazoid oskoid as she floated unfettered amidst a holographic simulation of the Small Magellanic Cloud, calling attention to the microgravity that prevailed within the stellar cartography lab’s broad, parabola-shaped expanse. It was an environment to which Pazlar—the lone Elaysian in Titan’s varied 350-member crew—was uniquely adapted, and which she insisted be maintained within the lab whenever she was present, which was most of the time.
Gripping his control padd, William Riker also drifted in freefall, a few meters away from the gentle one-sixth g that prevailed on the lab’s central observation platform. He relished the rare feeling of freedom, of unrestrained, uninhibited flight among these simulacra of the stars that lay beyond Titan’s hull. This was a sensation alien to his ordinary experience, and he found it exhilarating. He noted that Pazlar wore only a standard duty uniform, without the antigrav exo-suit that permitted her to function in the ship’s standard one-g sections. It struck him then that the lieutenant, a humanoid whose species had completely adapted to microgravity—“ordinary” one-g environments caused Elaysians excruciating pain and made antigrav technology indispensable to them in such conditions—must feel far more liberated by weightlessness than he could ever imagine.
Silhouetted against the numberless hosts of stars, as well as wide lanes of bright gas and coal-black dust, Pazlar moved with the nimble grace of a desert bird, drifting down toward the observation platform, where the other officers in attendance had gathered. As Pazlar descended, Riker saw in her eyes the verdict he was hoping most not to receive. He entered a command into his padd, and the room’s network of directed forcefields responded by moving him gently toward the platform until he felt the tug of lunar gravity beneath his boots. “It turns out that our initial guesstimate was completely on target,” the stellar cartographer said, hovering just out of the reach of the platform’s artificial gravity. “Unfortunately.”