by David Mack
Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
* * *
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
Publisher's Notice
The publisher has provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management (DRM) software applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This ebook is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this ebook, or make this ebook publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this ebook except to read it on your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: simonandschuster.biz/online_piracy_report.
for the peacemakers
HISTORIAN’S NOTE
The events of this story take place in late 2386, twenty years after the U.S.S. Enterprise 1701-D answered a distress call from Delta Rana IV (Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Survivors”), and a few months after the Starship Titan’s ill-fated mission to aid the Dinac (Star Trek: Sight Unseen).
And blood in torrents pour
In vain—always in vain
For war breeds war again.
—John Davidson
“War Song,” stanza 7 (1899)
February 2366
* * *
Year three of the U.S.S Enterprise-D mission
One
* * *
The world was in order. All was as it was meant to be: the weak kowtowed to the strong; the dregs of the lower castes knew their place.
Escorted from his private shuttle toward the Hall of Governance in the heart of the capital, Royal Treasurer Te-Mazow felt like a master of creation. On the boulevard outside the capital, his inferiors spread their tentacles wide and flattened their bodies to the hot pavement. Te-Mazow, by dint of his office, glided above them on his antigrav pallet, his own tentacles unsullied by contact with the filthy ground, his vulnerable parts hidden from view by the jeweled platform he piloted away from his transport vehicle.
His six guards rushed to keep pace with his floating conveyance. Each of them moved on four of their seven limbs and used their rear tentacle to balance themselves. In their forelimbs, whose ends were trifurcated into nimble digits, they toted weapons to telegraph their deadly authority to all who had eyes to see.
Te-Mazow loved to watch the commoners prostrate themselves. It reminded him of how far he had come in the world, how many rivals he had bested, how much power he had amassed. This was the way of nature, the shape of life. Luxury belonged to the strong, the cruel, the quick. He had no pity for the less fortunate. If they want what I have, they should work as hard as I do. No one is owed anything. He felt great pride and satisfaction as his defenders kicked a pair of young grovelers clear of his sled as it ascended the incline to the royal palace. Move aside, fools.
The current regime had conquered and colonized a dozen worlds in the past twenty cycles, and the future promised to be even more lucrative. The frontier of Husnock space had begun to encroach upon fringe possessions of a classically weak entity known as the United Federation of Planets. The Federation, as its citizens often called it for brevity’s sake, was ripe for domination by the Husnock. Its worlds were soft targets, its people timid cattle. Any culture that wasted so much time finding new ways to coddle the weak and shelter the fearful had no business pushing into the great darkness of the galaxy at large.
Exploration was the purview of the bold.
More importantly, it was profitable—and in the Husnock Star Kingdom, it was Te-Mazow who controlled the flow of wealth. Disbursements for new colonies? For new starships and space stations? For war? All had to be reviewed and approved by Te-Mazow. The king and his counselors might set policy, but Te-Mazow wielded a unique power: he told them what they did and did not have the funds to do. He told them which wars they could afford to wage.
Power had brought perquisites. Like the great majority of his peers, Te-Mazow was mated, and his estate had been earmarked for posthumous division among his registered progeny. That had not prevented him from sequestering significant sums of his personal wealth, hiding them from his legitimate heirs, so that he could maintain secondary and tertiary circles of mates and kin. He felt no shame for his actions. When he thought of the impoverished throngs who could not afford unpolluted seaside property at which to spawn healthy young, he considered it his duty to take up their burden in the propagation of the Husnock species.
Te-Mazow was nothing if not a patriot.
Inside the royal palace the shows of obeisance were even more satisfying, as everyone from supplicants to the royal court to its loyal officers splayed their bodies low to the polished floors as Te-Mazow was escorted past on the way to his office. He knew that soon, before the day was over, he would take his own turn at abasement, but the sting of this knowledge was mitigated by the fact that Te-Mazow lowered himself only before the king and his royal progeny. In a culture that numbered more than fifty billion subjects, he yielded to no more than fifty of them in total. That was a margin of magnitude he could accept.
A line of petitioners waited outside his office as his bier approached. He granted none of them the honor of his notice as he entered.
Today’s line was the longest he had seen in ages. They would consume enough of his time throughout the day with their miserable requests for aid, for research funding, for handouts of the wealth accrued by their betters. He detested them. Still, some of them might make reasonable cases for how his investment in their efforts would benefit the kingdom, redound to its profit, and further burnish his reputation and enhance his power. Those he would grace with royal loans. The rest would be charged fees for wasting his precious time.
It promised to be a most profitable day, indeed.
At the entrance of his office, he collided with an invisible wall of pain.
A hideous burning sensation raged through Te-Mazow’s entire body. It birthed itself deep inside his bulbous head, a fire stoked from the core of his being. Skewers of agony spiraled through his cephalus and radiated into his mantle. His hearts raced. Something was very wrong.
“Help me,” he tried to say, but all his words came out slurred.
Around him his defenders collapsed, their tentacles twitching and flailing. Down the long gilded corridor, all his petitioners lay racked by spasms, froth and dark blue blood pouring from their dilated orifices. What fresh horror was this? Were they betrayed? After more than a millennium of stable rule, had another clan risen up against the Vo-Kesur?
The pain worsened. Every thought in Te-Mazur’s mind shriveled like skin in lava. Screams of suffering and anguish issued from his beaked mouth, only to become lost in the cacophony of shrieks resonating inside the royal palace. It was so humiliating for him to be struck down beside the commoners, as if they deserved to die beside him like his equals.
His pain and terror redoubled—and then his body erupted into flames, as did those of every other Husnock he could see.
Te-Mazow’s world was on fire.
There was no escaping the flames.
In every city on the Husnock homeworld, and on every planet the Husnock had ever colonized, in every starship and space station manned by the Husnock, every single member of their species spontaneously combusted, consumed from within by fires of unknown origin.
Then came the voice, one more ancient than death and older than
time. Its words were the last every Husnock heard as they were devoured by their personal infernos:
“For Rishon.”
One mental image followed every last Husnock to the grave: a world named Delta Rana IV, set aflame by one of their starships . . . an alien female perishing in the blaze of Husnock weapons . . . then the terrifying visage of a Douwd, a being of pure energy, a peaceful creature driven by rage and grief to lay its vengeance upon them all.
Flames turned fifty billion beings to ash in the space of a breath. The skies of two dozen Husnock worlds filled with greasy black smoke . . . but there was no one left to bear witness, and no one left to rejoice. The victims of the Husnock had long since preceded them into extinction. Now the Great Silence enveloped them all. The mighty had fallen—
And the cosmos neither noticed nor cared.
September 2386
* * *
Two
* * *
It was a planet of ghosts. At least, that was what it felt like to Doctor Maxwell Theron. To all appearances it had been a colony planet before disaster struck. There was only one large city on the surface. A smattering of satellite settlements dotted the surrounding area, with the nearest seeming to be the best established and the most remote being the least developed.
One detail all the Husnock areas had in common was a sense of having been depopulated instantly and without warning. Personal transport vehicles of all kinds had crashed and strewn debris in the streets, throughout the countryside, and along the shorelines. Elegantly curving buildings stood gutted by fires long since extinguished. On the city’s outskirts, fusion reactor facilities and starports lay cold and abandoned. In residences and public spaces, personal belongings had been left to succumb to the elements.
Nature had started to reclaim spaces transformed by the now-extinct Husnock. Vines, moss, and grasses festooned the façades of empty buildings and cocooned the twisted husks of wrecked vehicles. Boulevards that once had been paved smooth now were webbed with fissures, from which flowers and fungi sprang and bent to follow the sun’s slow transit of the sky. The resilience of the local flora kindled hopeful feelings in Theron. From death and destruction came renewal and rebirth. It made him reflect on the impermanence of life, the beauty of chaos, and the folly of expecting order to be anything more than a transitory disruption in entropy’s march.
Heady thoughts for such a lovely morning, he chided himself. He sipped hot chai from his spill-proof mug as he crossed the expedition’s campsite. His xenoarchaeology team had established its base camp along either bank of the city’s central aqueduct. Though the camp had started out small, it had grown quickly. There were a few hundred people here, all of them under Theron’s supervision. Only a few were xenocultural experts like himself. Their ranks comprised xenolinguists, engineers and biologists of various specialties, architects, and computer experts, not to mention support personnel including medical staff, cooks, pilots, drivers, and mechanics.
They had entrenched themselves here a few years ago, just a few months after a long-range scout ship had located this world. Starfleet had begun its low-key, classified search for the remains of the Husnock civilization twenty years earlier, not long after receiving Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s after-action report detailing the Starship Enterprise NCC-1701-D’s mission to Delta Rana IV. Summoned by a distress call, the Enterprise crew had found the world’s surface laid waste except for a small patch of land around a pristine house occupied by an elderly couple. The woman, it turned out, had been an illusion created by the man, who in turn was revealed as a Douwd—an energy being who had confessed to the rage-driven instant genocide of the Husnock.
Thus had begun Starfleet’s clandestine search for whatever remained of the Husnock, whom the Douwd had described as “a species of hideous intelligence.”
The search had proved longer and more difficult than anyone had expected. The Federation had possessed no record of the Husnock prior to their attack on Delta Rana IV, and after the extinction of the Husnock their civilization had gone silent and cold, rendering them nearly invisible to most long-range detection methods. Consequently, there was nothing to indicate from what heading or region of the galaxy they had come. Further complicating matters, the Dominion War and the Borg Invasion both had interrupted Starfleet’s exploration of the rimward sectors of the Alpha Quadrant frontier.
It took Starfleet seventeen years to find this isolated Husnock colony world on the edge of the galaxy’s Perseus Arm. It was catalogued as FGC-779852c, and Theron had refused to let any of his colleagues from the Daystrom Institute or their peers from the Vulcan Science Academy attach a new name to it. He was determined to uncover the Husnock’s designation for the planet because he was haunted by the notion that this world without a name was an unmarked grave for those who had died here.
Theron was almost inside the chow tent when Doctor Kilaris fell into step beside him. He nodded politely at the Vulcan woman. “Good morning, Doctor. On your way to breakfast?”
“I ate earlier.” She handed him a padd. “My team and I have made a breakthrough.”
Kilaris, like most Vulcans, was not prone to exaggeration. Theron stopped and faced her. “What kind?” She nodded at the padd. Taking her unspoken cue, he perused the top-level summary. They had unearthed a codex that contained a partial Husnock translation of an alien tome. Though the Husnock written language remained as impenetrable as ever, the alien language seemed to be one already known to the Federation. “Are you sure about this?”
“I waited until three members of my team independently verified the results. The text we found is derived from an ancient dialect of T’Kon. That suggests the Husnock at some point have had contact with an alien species whose language was influenced by the T’Kon.”
All the citations checked out. Theron felt his pulse quicken. “This is a good find, Doctor. How much T’Kon text did you find, and how much was translated into Husnock?”
“The original work appears to be sizable. It should enable us to build a translation matrix for all written Husnock.”
“Our very own Rosetta stone! Superb. I’ll send word back to Daystrom and the VSA after I eat.” His appetite asserted itself, so he beckoned her to follow him inside the chow tent. “How about spoken Husnock? Any leads on that front?”
Kilaris shook her head. “Not yet. We need to wait for the engineers to parse the Husnock’s media formats.” She followed him down the serving line and watched him grab a tray and a plate, which he loaded with scrambled eggs and a warm biscuit. “Have we found any Husnock DNA yet?”
“Not a speck. Whatever form the Douwd apocalypse took, it was thorough.” He led Kilaris to a nearby table. They sat down across from each other. She watched him dig into his breakfast. Between bites, he asked, “Does your team need anything to speed the translation?”
“Priority access on the main computer would be appreciated.”
“Done.” He shoveled down another mouthful of eggs. After he swallowed, he realized she was still watching him. “Something else, Doctor?”
“My team and I will be working late tonight on the new translation matrix.” A sly lift of her elegantly curved eyebrows. A subtle look around for eavesdroppers. “Shall I come to your tent tonight? Or will you await me in mine?”
Looking into Kilaris’s dark brown eyes, Theron kept his expression neutral when all he wanted to do was to grin. “Mine.”
She nodded, stood, and left the chow tent.
He watched her go and let himself smile.
It’s gonna be a good week on the dig, I can feel it.
There was money in the big space station. Cherbegrod knew that much. Why else hide it in deep space, so far from planets? Why make it so dark? Why put traps on the airlocks?
The makers of the space station must have thought their traps clever. Well hidden. But not from Pakleds. Offworlders laughed at Pakleds. Called them slow. But Pakleds were smart. And they knew traps. How to make them, how to find them, how to take them apart.
There were a lot of traps on the space station.
The traps were invisible to the sensing units on Cherbegrod’s salvage hauler, the Gomjar. But Cherbegrod was no fool. He sent out his engineer, Eberleg, to inspect the space station’s airlock before he let the Gomjar dock. That was smart. Bombs and tricks and snares. Some to hurt the Gomjar, some to hurt him and his men. Traps everywhere.
Cherbegrod and his second-in-command, Haripog, watched over Eberleg’s shoulders. The engineer took apart a delicate system with his hands, which had been fat even before he sheathed them in the space suit’s heavy gloves.
The first officer grew impatient. His voice crackled from the talking widget built into Cherbegrod’s space suit. “How long to open door?”
“Soon,” Eberleg said on the same talk-channel. He poked the airlock’s gears with a gadget. “Soon.” He detached another scary-looking thing from a crevice in the airlock. “Now.”
The door rolled open.
On the other side it was dark. Cherbegrod swatted Haripog’s arm. “Make light.”
Haripog fumbled with his light stick. It switched on. He pointed the beam inside the space station. Inside it was wide open, and the ceiling was so far up, the light stick’s beam couldn’t reach it. The three leaders of the Gomjar plodded inside, close together.
There were shelves and racks everywhere, long rows, as far as Cherbegrod could see. All loaded with scary things. Bombs. Missiles. Metal shapes that he couldn’t name but thought would maybe go boom if someone hit them hard enough.
Huge mechanical arms attached to machines on the ceiling dangled but didn’t move. Parked in the lanes between the shelves of exploding things were load lifters and cargo movers, and antigrav pallets lying on the deck, either switched off or out of power.