Текст книги "The Red King "

Автор книги: Michael Martin

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Praise for

Star Trek Titan: Taking Wing

by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels

“Martin and Mangels wisely know how to balance the character introductions and byplay against a well-written story…[and] how to balance the action with the character moments…. Taking Wingis a great first novel in the Titanseries…. It’s a solid tale rich with character exploration and action, and its follow-up installments should be just as exciting. Sit back and enjoy!”

–Bill Williams, trekweb.com

“Taking Wingis full of surprises. Thoroughly engaging from beginning to end, the story satisfies on every level…. It is always very rewarding when a book you’ve been anticipating lives up to expectations. It’s even better when the book exceeds them. Star Trek Titan: Taking Wingis a superb debut for an original new series.”

–Jackie Bundy, treknation.com

“Based on this first novel, I can’t wait for the follow-up.”

–Kilian Melloy, wigglefish.com

An OriginalPublication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

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

Copyright © 2005 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 1-4165-2476-2

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Cover art by Cliff Nielsen

Cover design by John Vairo, Jr.

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com/st

http://www.startrek.com

While working on this book,

I had the opportunity to serve my local community

in fundraising and leadership arenas.

Many people gave me immense support,

and I dedicate this book to Marc Hoffman,

Steve Suss, Jerry Dahlke, and Rick Watkins & Les Lewis.

Gentlemen and friends,

may your ships always sail true.

—A.M.

This is for: my wife, Jenny,

whose patience during the writing of this volume

deserves special recognition here;

and the space visionaries at NASA,

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

and the European Space Agency

who this very year successfully landed

the Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan,

thereby providing humanity’s first glimpse of the surface

of our eponymous starship’s mysterious namesake.

—M.A.M.

Acknowledgments

The authors owe an enormous debt of gratitude to: John Logan, Rick Berman, and Brent Spiner, whose collaborations on the story and screenplay for Star Trek Nemesisnot only gave Will Riker his much-deserved fourth pip, as well as command of the good ship Titan,but also allowed us to pen the untold tale of the Riker-Troi honeymoon in Keith R. A. DeCandido’s recently released Tales from the Captain’s Tableanthology; Jeff Mariotte, whose Deny Thy Fatherchronicled an important chapter in Riker family history; John Vornholt, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, Robert Greenberger, David Mack, and Keith R. A. DeCandido, the authors of the A Time Toseries of novels, whose collective work so adroitly teed up Titan’s maiden voyage; fellow Titanauthor Christopher L. Bennett for critical insight and sfnal inspiration; Diane Duane, whose novel The Wounded Skyintroduced the concept of de Sitter space to the (literary) Star Trekuniverse more than two decades ago; Jeri Taylor, whose novels Mosaicand Pathwaysprovided some valuable insights into Tuvok’s past; Chris Cooper, who wrote the Star Trek: Star Fleet Academyseries (Marvel Comics, 1996–1998), which chronicled the early career of Lieutenant Pava Ek’Noor (sh’)Aqabaa; legendary TOS scenarist Dorothy Fontana, who midwifed a little bundle of joy named L. J. Akaar (in the TOS episode “Friday’s Child”); the inimitable band leader Dominic James “Nick” La Rocca (1889–1961), whose Original Dixieland Jass (Jazz) Band did much to popularize Captain Riker’s musical instrument of choice, and served as the namesake for one of Titan’s auxiliary vessels; the many fans who told us how much they enjoyed Taking Wingwhile the follow-on volume that now rests in your hands was still largely incomplete; and Marco Palmieri, who believed we were up to the task of launching Captain William T. Riker’s first permanent command, who always immeasurably improves every manuscript he touches, and who never fails to make us look like geniuses.

If seeds in the black Earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?

–G. K. CHESTERTON (1874–1936)

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it is, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

–H. L. MENCKEN (1880–1956)

“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”

Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”

“Why, about you!”Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”

“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’monly a sort of thing in his dream, what are you,I should like to know?”

–LEWIS CARROLL, AKA CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON

(1832–1898), Through the Looking-Glass and

What Alice Found There

Chapter One

SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD, 7 JANUARY 2380

(AULD GREG AERTH CALENDAR)

“Behold,” Frane said, unable to keep a slight tremor of awe out of his voice. Or is it fear?he wondered in some deep, shrouded corner of his soul.

But the vista that stretched before the assembled Seekers After Penance took Frane to a place far beyond fear. It was the most beautiful and terrible sight he had ever beheld. Effulgent tendrils of energy reached across millions of klomters of trackless emptiness toward the battered transport craft, like the probing fingers of some great, grasping hand.

Frane heard Nozomi gasp as she cowered behind him, as though the image threatened to reach straight through the cramped vessel’s viewer and grab her.

“Have faith,” Frane said. As a Neyel who had forsworn his own people’s conquest-hardened traditions to live among society’s slaves and outcasts, he knew well that faith was often the only thing that sustained him. To comfort Nozomi, he took one of her hands even as her graceful forked tail gently entwined with his. He gently disengaged from the female Neyel after noticing that one of her feet was grasping his leg hard enough to whiten the gray flesh beneath his loose pilgrim’s robe.

“I’m keeping station here,” said Lofi, the female Sturr who was handling the helm as well as the sensor station. Because she belonged to a race of multipartite colony creatures—one of the first local peoples, in fact, to be conquered by the ancestral Neyel after their arrival centuries ago in M’jallanish space—Lofi was able to separate several of her rounded thoracic segments briefly in order to perform disparate simultaneous tasks. Looking toward Lofi, Frane considered how this ability had made the Sturr species so useful to the earliest, most expansion-bent generations of precursor Neyel, the eldest Oh-Neyel Takers who spread throughout the M’jallan region to build the Neyel Hegemony on the backs of dozens of conquered slave races.

Will my people ever expiate the shame of those sinful days?Frane wondered. He feared he already knew the answer.

Eager to chase those dark thoughts away, Frane turned his gaze back toward the great, slowly coruscating starburst of energy that filled the screen before him. He saw that the image was holding the attention of everyone else in the narrow, dimly lit control room.

“Can’t we approach it more closely?” g’Ishea said, cuddling up against Fasaryl, her mate. Members of an indigenous species that had been displaced—and then largely slaughtered—to make room for the shining Neyel capital of Mechulak City and the other great metrosprawls of the Neyel Coreworld, g’Ishea and Fasaryl had never known a time when their kind had been free to graze unhindered. Frane could only wonder what it was like to live as a forced laborer on what had once been a bucolic paradise, toiling endlessly beneath the Neyel lash and the lidless eye of Holy Vangar, the Stone Skyworld that had orbited their planet since the times of the First Conquests. How would it be, he wondered, to live that way for a dozen generations without any hope of freedom?

Frane cast a questioning glance at Lofi—or rather at the globular, leathery portion of Lofi to which her primary sensory cluster was attached.

“I would advise not getting any nearer to it than this,” Lofi responded, an overtone of fear coming through the vocoder that rendered her guttural native utterances into Neyel-intelligible speech. “That phenomenon is throwing off spatial distortions like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I can’t guarantee this ship will hold together if I let us drift any closer to them.”

“Disappointing,” Frane said, though he wasn’t completely certain that he meant it.

“I’m more than happy to keep my distance,” said Nozomi in a quavering voice. Her tail was wrapping nervously around Frane’s waist again. He brushed the prehensile appendage aside with his own.

Frane turned toward her, prepared to offer a waspish observation about her tiresome, almost theatrical displays of faintheartedness. Why couldn’t she keep her fears to herself, as he did?

“Why has this appeared?” Fasaryl said, pointing the opposable digits of one of his front hooves toward the tendrils of energy displayed on the screen.

“You know why, beloved,” g’Ishea said, worrying her dewlap with her wide, rough tongue. “Because the Sleeper has at last begun to awaken.” Though g’Ishea’s low voice sounded calm, the gurgling noise emanating from her multiple digestive organs told Frane otherwise.

“So everyone keeps saying,” Fasaryl said, clearly unsatisfied with the obvious answer.

Since the puzzling energetic phenomenon had abruptly appeared several weeks earlier, just pars’x from the very Coreworld itself, the Neyel intelligentsia had offered countless theories to account for it, as had the clergy, both on the cultural fringe and in the mainstream. To some it was a rare instance of interspatial slippage between adjoining regions of subspace. To others it was merely the beginning of yet another iteration of the cycle of cosmic death and rebirth, a phase that would take the universe billions more years to pass through entirely. To others it was merely a localized natural disaster, a thing of rare beauty and thankfully even rarer violence.

Frane knew that some saw the vast, multihued energy eruption as a cause for fearful rejoicing, because it had destroyed but a single Neyel-settled world.

So far,he thought.

Or was the expansive, colorful energy bloom, as those of a more secular bent had suggested, merely a temporary reopening of one of the long-neglected spatial rifts through which the Devilships of the Tholians had launched their savage attacks some ten generations back?

Frane felt certain he knew the true answer to the mystery. The real nature of the thing on the screen. And he knew that the other Seekers After Penance, the natives who had traveled with him to the ragged edge of this lovely, savage manifestation, shared his certainty deep down, regardless of their fears and doubts of the moment. Their own peoples, after all, had compiled the stories, had told and retold them for uncounted thousands of planetary cycles.

This blaze of unimaginable forces was nothing less than the Sleeper of M’jallanish legend, stirring at last from His aeons-long slumbers. And Frane was here to witness it.

Maybe we haven’t come merely towatch the Awakening,he told himself, almost overwhelmed at the purity and audacity of his purpose now that he was finally able to stare directly down the maw of the Infinite. Perhaps we have come to help bring it about.

So that the Neyel, Frane’s own people, might atone for the many crimes they had committed against virtually every sentient species they’d met in M’jallanish space—at least before Aidan Burgess had come all the way from Auld Aerth and tried to show the Neyel the gross error of their ways.

The Seekers After Penance revered Federation Ambassador Burgess, and it was their devoir to complete what she had begun: to continue teaching the entire Neyel race the lessons of peace to which the long-dead, martyred diplomat had introduced them. Even if the aim of those lessons—atonement—cost the lives of everyone who had participated in the Neyel Conquests. Even if their heirs who perpetuated those injustices even now, knowingly or not, had to suffer—along with native peoples too weak-willed to have even tried to oppose their conquerors.

“Is it true, Frane?” Fasaryl asked. “Is it true that every world in the M’jallan Cloud will vanish when the Sleeper finally comes fully awake?”

Frane nodded. “So say the legends of the His’lant. And those of the Sturr. And the tales of your ancient Oghen forebears as well.”

“The His’lant Taletellers say that the Sleeper dreams all the worlds in the Cloud,” said Nozomi. “And when the Sleeper awakens—”

“The dream ends,” Frane said, finishing her thought. Along with every evil act our people have ever perpetrated against those worlds.

Fasaryl shrugged his thick, bovine shoulders. “Or so say the stories. We won’t know until and unless it happens.”

“We already know that the Sleeper stirs,” said g’Ishea, nodding toward the colorful energy pinwheel that now lay just a few hundred thousand klomters before them. “And that stirring has already wiped out at least one whole world. After Newaerth’s disappearance, I need no further convincing.”

Frane nodded grimly. The truth of g’Ishea’s words was undeniable. Newaerth was no more, having vanished cataclysmically along with its entire planetary system, within days of the initial appearance of the colorful spatial distortions—a beautiful blue world, settled only a century after the arrival of the ancestral Neyel in the Lesser M’jallan Cloud, extinguished by the stirrings of the Sleeper.

“Perhaps the Sleeper will spare us if we conduct the propitiation rituals,” Nozomi said in a quiet, frightened voice.

Unlike Nozomi, Frane had no realistic expectations of being spared whatever divine wrath was about to engulf the entire region. Nor did he believe himself particularly worthy of any such mercies. But he was ready and willing to undertake the meditative ritual, if only on behalf of his companions, whose faith in the efficacy of the ancient native rites clearly exceeded his own. After all, why should his fellow travelers face summary death when it was hisforebears, not theirs, who had truly earned the ire of the cosmos?

While still tending to the ship’s instruments, Lofi detached one of her scaly, rainbow-colored thoracic segments. Its multijointed arms and sensory clusters immediately set about arranging the ritual materials on the deck before the viewer. Scuttling to and fro with purposeful deftness, she covered about a square metrik with a precise arrangement of colorful soils from the Sturr homeworld, mixing them with several large droplets of her own viscous body fluids, secreted directly from glands hidden beneath the arms of her independently operating body segment.

Frane lowered his head, his eyeshutters closing out the vaguely disturbing ritual as Fasaryl began to make a gentle lowing sound. His song chilled the base of Frane’s spine; he knew that the archaic words Fasaryl sang were far older than the Neyel’s most ancient ancestors from Auld Aerth.

Fasaryl reached the end of the ritual utterances within the space of a few dozen heartbeats, as though in anticipation of something momentous. Frane glanced upward, opening his eyeshutters enough to see the energy tendrils that remained displayed on the screen. The image was unchanged. The Oghen repeated the words again, and Lofi’s artificial voice joined in, forming an oddly tinny counterpoint to Fasaryl’s mournful, bass-laden chant.

The image on the screen continued its slow, stately pirouette, stubbornly constant. What was I expecting?Frane thought, chuckling quietly to himself. Was the Sleeper supposed to answer our prayers? Did I really expect Him to come fully awake right at this moment and promise to save us from the destruction that’s coming down upon us?

There would be no engraved invitations to watch the apocalypse from some safe cosmic balcony. When the Sleeper finally awoke, when its mystical dreams no longer served to sustain the very existence of M’jallanish space, Frane expected to wink out of existence along with everything else within at least a hundred pars’x—just as the ancient His’lant physicist-priests had foretold.

An alarm whooped loudly at that moment, startling Frane out of his doleful reverie. Nozomi jumped high at the sound, her tail and bare feet instinctively grabbing purchase on one of the control room’s ceiling-mounted gangways.

“Frane!” said Lofi, an unusual urgency underlying her customarily even, synthetic voice. “I am detecting several ships, closing rapidly on the energy cloud. They are headed straight for us.”

A knot of apprehension began to form in Frane’s stomach. “What kind of ships?”

“Neyel military, cylindrical configuration. They’re warning us to stand down, and to prepare to be teleported aboard their flagship.” Lofi turned an eyestalk directly toward him. “They’re asking for you specifically, Frane.”

The knot in Frane’s belly suddenly tightened like an ancient slavecatcher’s noose. He could think of only one military officer who would have asked for him by name.

“Bring the male Neyel prisoner directly to me,” Drech’tor Gherran said, his eyes remaining fixed upon the strange phenomenon that covered his main control room’s central viewer. He glanced away from the coruscating cloud, looking down at the bracelet of exotic shells and stones and fabric that adorned his left wrist.

“And the woman?” replied Harn, his ever-efficient helmrunner and subaltern. If Harn had noticed how distracted Gherran was feeling at the moment, he betrayed no sign of it.

“Leave her in confinement with the indigies,” Gherran said, gently caressing the bracelet with the spade-shaped tip of his tail.

Harn looked slightly askance at Gherran’s order, but dutifully moved to the communications panel on the opposite side of the control room, where he began carrying out his instructions. Crisply and efficiently, as ever.

Moments later, a pair of black-uniformed Neyel security officers exited the lift tube, a slight, robed figure herded between them, his hands bound behind his back. The guards looked confused at having been told to bring their charge to the ship’s sensitive control room.

The prisoner seemed far too calm for someone in such a vulnerable position. But that came as no surprise to Gherran.

“Release his bindings,” Gherran said. “Then leave us.”

“Sir?” said the senior guard, his eyeshutters opening and closing rapidly in surprise.

“Do it!”

The guards hastened to comply, and seconds later had withdrawn from the control room. The handful of instrumentation officers present watched discreetly as the prisoner stepped toward Gherran, rubbing his just-freed wrists as he moved.

“Are you going to interrogate me here, Drech’tor Gherran, right in front of everyone?” the prisoner said in what the drech’tor recognized as a mocking tone. He gestured toward Harn and the other members of the control room crew. Each of them immediately looked away, conspicuously busying themselves at their various consoles.

Gherran pointed toward a hatchway located equidistant between the lift tube and the head. “In my prep chamber. Now.”

The prisoner shrugged and did as he was told. After the hatch had closed, ensuring their privacy, the robed detainee turned toward him, the hard gray skin of his mouth turning up slightly at the corners. “Hello, Father,” he said, an insufferable irony suffusing his words.

“What do you think you’re doing out here, Frane?” Gherran said, struggling to keep his son from seeing how angry he was. He doubted he was succeeding even a little.

“Perhaps I should ask you the same question, Father.”

Gherran sighed, shaking his head. “You know perfectly well that the Hegemony Navy can’t permit interlopers to approach the…phenomenon.”

“Why, Father? Are you afraid we’re going to rouse the Sleeper further?”

Gherran snorted, his tail switching involuntarily behind him. “Nonsense. There’s no Sleeper, Frane. Only ridiculous native legends, kept alive by the fantasy-prone offspring of slaves. And enabled by gullible, bleeding-heart Neyel trash like you.”

“How can you be so certain that the Sleeper’s dreams aren’t reallyall that keeps M’jallanish space intact, Father? Do you have a better explanation for what happened to Newaerth?”

Gherran decided he wasn’t going to let himself be baited. “Why are you traveling with those smelly cattle, and the rest of those alien kaffir,Frane?”

Frane was finally beginning to look rattled, which Gherran found gratifying. “We Neyel are the aliens here, Father. And those ‘kaffir’are my friends.”

“Then you have made a very poor choice of friends,” Gherran said with a long-suffering sigh. Certainly, he wasn’t proud of the excesses of the earliest generations of Neyel. Their tradition of treating native species roughly—a habit developed during the years immediately following their accidental exile from Auld Aerth, when their day-today survival had been uncertain in the extreme—hadn’t really begun to soften until the days of Ambassador Burgess, more than eighty Oghencycles ago.

“What are you planning to do with my friends, Father?”

Gherran offered his son what he hoped was a beneficent smile. “Once our patrol is done, they will be turned over to the civilian authorities on Oghen. The vessel in which we found you all has been reported stolen. If your friends were involved in the theft, they will be punished accordingly.”

Now Frane looked truly distraught; piracy, after all, was punished in the most severe and irrevocable fashion possible. “Let them go. I’m the one at fault. I’m the one who stole that ship.”

“We shall see in due course, my son,” Gherran said, his eyes once again straying to the bracelet wrapped around his left wrist. The bracelet had been in the family for eight generations prior to his own, handed down from Gran Vil’ja, who had received it directly from Federation Ambassador Burgess herself. Every tiny stone and shell and bone and gem and fiber woven into the bracelet’s cloth-and-metal frame represented a story added by each successive generation that had held it. The bracelet itself was an unbroken tapestry that reached all the way back to the far distant Great Pinwheel of Milkyway—and the unreachable orb of Auld Aerth itself.

Gherran saw that his son, too, was eyeing the bracelet. “I must be a great disappointment to you, Father,” Frane said quietly. “Who will you appoint to carry the story bracelet forward into future generations?”

Gherran felt righteous indignation rising within him. “I thought that your bizarre death cult didn’t believe in future generations.”

Frane shrugged. “Look beyond the hull of this vessel. Whether or not there will be a future doesn’t appear to be up to us at the moment.” He looked significantly at the bracelet. “Perhaps you should send our family heirloom somewhere safer than this place.”

Gherran raised his wrist, brandishing the bracelet as though it were a weapon. “Do not mock tradition, Frane. Someone in our lineage must eventually get the bracelet back to Auld Aerth, as Gran Vil’ja and Burgess Herself intended. You know that, at least as well as you know the silly precepts of your sleeping kaffirgod.”

“I suppose we each have always embraced myths of our own choosing, Father,” Frane said, smiling. “Mother always said that you and I were very much alike in that regard.”

Gherran felt his teeth bare themselves involuntarily. He knew that the death of Lijean, Frane’s mother, had devastated both of them equally. Though more than half a decade had passed since the shock of her suicide, Lijean’s absence remained both an unhealed wound and a cause for mutual blame. Even now, her death remained a weapon that both of them still used against one another from time to time.

“How dare you—”

The ship lurched violently, its abrupt movement punctuated by the sharp cry of an alarm klaxon. Harn’s strident yet controlled voice blared across the intraship circuit. “Tactical alert! Drech’tor Gherran to the control room!”

Frane had never before seen his father move so quickly. Gherran used his tail and all four of his opposable-digited hands to vault across his desk and bound through the hatchway back into the control room. Not quite as physically robust as his father—he lacked Gherran’s extensive military conditioning—Frane followed more slowly, though he moved as quickly as he could.

Frane could see that his father had all but forgotten about him as he queried the members of his crew, each of whom worked at least one console with a fervid intensity. No surprise that he’s ignoring me,Frane thought. Duty always did take precedence over family, even when there weren’t any emergencies to deal with.Not for the first time, he wondered if Mother had taken her own life out of sheer neglect and loneliness.

The great cylindrical vessel rocked again beneath Frane’s bare feet, prompting him to turn to face the wide viewer that filled the forward portion of the control room.

The energy bloom was… changing.

“Report!” Gherran shouted to his crew as the room shuddered yet again.

“We’re being subjected to intense gravimetric waves, Drech’tor,” said the young male officer seated at the nearest console. The tip of his tail was assisting his hands as he hastily entered commands. “They’re coming from deep within the phenomenon.”

“Ship’s status?” Gherran queried.

“Our energy screens are compromised and failing, Drech’tor.”

The tendrils of multihued energy shown on the viewer were becoming more agitated and twisted, gnarled like the native scrub vegetation of the Coreworld of Oghen.

Frane allowed a fatalistic smile to cross his face. Perhaps the Sleeper trulyis awakening at last.

He knew that if such was indeed the case, then his own petty family squabbles, as well as the suffering of every species the Neyel race had conquered over the past several centuries, would soon be rendered moot.

Is today the day when it all finally comes to pass, as the prophets of the ancient M’jallan races foretold?

“Hail the fleet, Subaltern,” Gherran said. “We’re withdrawing to a safer distance. I want to put another million klomters between us and the phenomenon.”

But before the subaltern could finish carrying out his orders, Frane noticed something else on the screen. Several dark, swooping shapes were approaching.

Unlike Father’s fleet, however, they seemed to be approaching from insidethe now-roiling energy bloom.

“Drech’tor!” shouted another junior officer, this one a young female. “A number of ships are closing on our position—and their source is the energy phenomenon itself.” She shook her head in disbelief.

Gherran was facing the screen. Though his face was a grim, gray mask, he could not keep the surprise out of his voice. “That’s not possible.”

Frane felt equally surprised. Watching the approaching ships, he supposed his father was recalling old tales of the Tholian Devilships that had preyed on Neyel vessels many decades ago, before Ambassador Burgess had crafted a peace arrangement with them, before both sides had agreed to allow the interspatial fissures that had connected their two distant realms to close from simple disuse.

“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.