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  “Let’s see who the Klingon Empire has sent us, Shabalala,” Gold said.

  The image on the viewscreen shifted, and for a moment the bridge was silent as the crew regarded the ungainly shape bearing down upon them.

  “Haznedl,” Gold said at last, “is there anything in our database about pregnant D-7s?”

  The operations officer tore her eyes from the bizarre ship and rapidly tapped her console.

  “Nothing fits that specific configuration, sir,” she reported at last. “But that does seem to be a modified D-7 attack cruiser.”

  “Shabalala?”

  “Sensors indicate the ship is constructed from components of various ages, evidently from other vessels.” The tactical officer paused, considering his readings.

  “The flattened oblate spheroid under the engineering section is a troop transport module. Those were never used on attack vessels.”

  Gomez frowned. “That looks a lot stubbier than the D-7s I remember.”

  “You remember D-7s?” Gold asked. “I would have thought they were at least a century before your time.”

  “From the Academy,” she said. “History of ship design.”

  “Ah.”

  “Obviously, the mass of the troop transport module alters the dynamics of their warp field,” Tev said impatiently. “They shortened the central pylon by twenty percent to compensate.”

  The moment Tev said it, Gold saw it was true. The central pylon, what he thought of as the “neck” of the ancient Klingon cruiser, was indeed shorter than it should have been. Combined with the “flattened oblate spheroid”—which looked to him like nothing so much as a huge loaf of pumpernickel—it created a silhouette unlike any ship he’d ever seen. No wonder the database had not been able to identify the vessel; he was impressed it had recognized it as Klingon at all.

  “Any response to hails, Shabalala?”

  “No, sir, they’re—”

  “What the hell?” Wong’s exclamation cut him off.

  On screen, the Klingon cruiser swung about in a leisurely arc and took up position off the huge cylinder’s beam. Wong brought up an inset tactical display that showed the Klingon’s warp field in place as the pair passed the da Vinci.

  “Refresh my memory, Wong,” Gold said. “What is the minimum speed of a ship at warp?”

  “Lightspeed, sir.”

  “And they are at…?”

  The tactical inset flickered as Wong reset the sensors. They flickered again.

  “Point seven six light,” he said at last.

  “Theories, Tev?”

  “They are violating several physical laws,” the Tellarite growled. “And ignoring fundamental warp mechanics.”

  “So noted,” Gold acknowledged. “Haznedl, pipe this information down to engineering. Tev, I want you and Conlon working on figuring out how they do this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because these are Klingons,” Gold said. “Unless we can prove we’re at least their equals, they’re going to ignore us.”

  “Why not let them?” Tev demanded. “The object is heading into Klingon space, that’s why they’re here. Why not leave and let them handle the situation?”

  Gold tapped his fingers lightly on the arm of his command chair as he watched the mismatched pair of ships on the screen. “Because I’m not altogether sure I’d like the Klingon solution to the problem of a giant colony vessel on a collision course with Qo’noS.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  By now, Nancy Conlon had steeled herself against Tev’s appearance in her engine room. Within the first few weeks of his arrival on the da Vinci, she came to realize that he would never recognize that he was in her domain. From Tev, she would get no courtesy, nor would she even be treated as a colleague. True, he had more experience and a higher rank, but it was still her engine room. Tev’s predecessor, Kieran Duffy, had always treated Conlon’s predecessor, Jil Barnak, with due deference whenever he came down here, and Barnak as a result gave Duffy a fair amount of latitude in the engine room. Tev, though, acted as if Conlon owed him that latitude.

  When she stood to greet him, therefore, she expressed no surprise when he came around her desk and took her chair without comment as though she’d relinquished her position. He briskly cleared her screens without glancing at them, not noticing the relevant data she’d organized nor her preliminary sketches, and without a word of greeting, launched into a summation of the problems facing them as though she were a classroom full of freshmen.

  “What the Klingons appear to be doing is impossible,” he pronounced, busily adjusting her screens and pulling up some of the same data he’d just removed.

  “Therefore what they are doing is not what they appear to be doing.”

  Conlon listened with half an ear as he ran through a list of warp and physical principles which precluded a stable warp field at sublight velocities. Moving to an auxiliary panel, she called up an inventory of ship’s stores. It took her a matter of moments to locate the components she wanted and flag them. With a few quick taps, she routed her list and orders that they be brought to engineering ASAP.

  “What makes the Klingon feat look impossible is the limitations of human perception,” Tev’s lecture broke in on her consideration of necessary parts they didn’t have. “And instrumentation that assumes the observer is human.”

  He was focused on her desktop display and she realized he was drafting a diagram as he spoke. Though she couldn’t see the image, his gestures were quick and sure. Despite herself she was impressed with his ability to multitask.

  “Human senses perceive any event which takes less than a fifteenth of a second as instantaneous,” he explained. “Tellarites can discern events as brief as one twenty-fourth of a second.”

  And Klingons a thirtieth of a second,Conlon added mentally, and Vulcans something just under a forty-third of a second.

  “As soon as I saw real-time data—numbers, not images—I realized what was happening.” Tev spun her desktop display around so she could see his diagram.

  She was not surprised to see it was very similar to her own. There was no getting around the fact that for all his pomposity the Tellarite knew what he was doing.

  “Not bad,” she said. “But it’s clear you’re not a ship’s engineer.”

  “Oh?”

  If she had been less sure of herself, the frozen tone of Tev’s single syllable would have stopped her.

  “You’ve got the theory,” she said, tapping contacts on the auxiliary board, “but your design assumes unlimited matériel and ideal efficiency.”

  With a grin, she rotated her screen, showing him the schematics of her own design.

  “We have components for three complete assemblies, which my people are already working on,” she exaggerated slightly. “If you have some ideas on what we can substitute here and here”—corresponding points highlighted—“we can have a fourth.”

  Too late she kicked herself for not having a visual recorder going. Tev’s stupefied expression was priceless.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Bart Faulwell was literally two steps from the observation lounge when the meeting was announced. So far there was no need for a linguistics or cryptography specialist on this mission and he’d been prowling, pen and paper in hand, too restless to sit as he worked on his latest letter to Anthony. The process had become more protracted over the years, which suited him fine. The longer he took, composing the letter by hand the old-fashioned way, then recording the actual subspace message, the longer he could hold on to the feeling of spending time together.

  He considered a quick dash to drop the pen and paper off at his cabin, but it didn’t seem worth the trip. Besides, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been the first one to a staff briefing.

  He expected Tev to be next, but it was in fact Soloman. The Bynar favored him with a preoccupied nod before settling down and focusing on a padd of his own.

  Domenica Corsi and Fabian Stevens arrived to
gether, and Faulwell was startled by a sudden stinging of his eyes at the sight of them separating at the door. It took him a moment to realize it had reminded him of Kieran Duffy and Sonya Gomez holding hands under the table in staff meetings—one of their near-comic efforts to keep their romance under wraps.

  He shared the incident and his feelings with Anthony, knowing his partner would understand. When he looked up from his writing, he was surprised to see everyone but Tev had arrived; Pattie was just sliding onto her specially made chair. Across from him, Elizabeth Lense met his startled gape with a smile.

  Captain Gold opened the meeting. “All right, people, we’ve had two hours, but now the other team has arrived. What have we got to show for our head start?”

  “A multigenerational deep space vessel of classic cylindrical design,” Gomez recited briskly. “Propelled by a very basic ion drive. Nuclear rockets rotated the ship, the angular acceleration providing ersatz internal gravity. Right now neither is working; it’s coasting and spinning on momentum.”

  “ ‘Coasting’ at two hundred and twenty-eight thousand kilometers a second,” Stevens said. “With that technology, attaining point seven six lightspeed required centuries of acceleration.”

  Faulwell knew that maddening velocity, over three times full impulse but well short of lightspeed, had created a navigational nightmare for the da Vinci. They had spent an hour repeatedly jumping ahead of the colony ship at warp and scanning it as it passed. Then for the last hour and a half they had been corkscrewing insanely around the axis of its course at warp one to stay abreast.

  “Also considering the technology,” Pattie chimed in, literally, “at least a century went into its construction as well.” She touched a few controls. A schematic diagram of a circle comprising several interlocking rings appeared on the main screen. As she spoke, several sections of the diagram lit up. “The outer hull comprises several hundred meters of fused nickel-iron, probably an aggregate of asteroid material. This is reinforced by a gridwork of dense alloy similar to duranium but with an odd spectral signature.” A molecular model, with a few gaps, and a matching spectral band appeared below the schematic. “The decks we can scan below the outer hull”—Pattie interrupted herself with a crystalline sound of amusement—“or, from their perspective, above the outer hull, are of similar construction and appear to be filled with myriad large, inert items. One would guess long-term storage. The weight distribution problems in spinning something this size are enormous.” The schematic rotated and elongated, becoming a side view of the huge cylinder. Pattie continued to tap controls as she spoke, an apparently random pattern of bright green dots spread across the image. “The builders dealt with it by installing over one thousand nuclear rockets to govern rotation. They seem to have simply been mounted on the surface of the completed ship. Notice spacing is not uniform; their placement reflects internal mass.”

  Pattie paused and on the screen green dots began to go dark. “At least five hundred years ago the system began to fail.” She looked to Gold. “Commander Tev was investigating how and why.”

  “He’s working with Conlon on something,” Gold said. “Is his input essential right now?”

  “No,” Pattie said. “Just curious.”

  She turned back to the panel and tapped a few more commands. What Faulwell took to be stress or force calculations appeared along the top and bottom of the screen. Lines connected the equations to points along the length of the ship that glowed an ominous purple.

  “Without the balancing thrust of the rotational rockets, the entire system is unstable. At this scale something as slight as a point-zero-one difference in density between sections could cause dangerous torque shears.” Pattie paused for a moment, her good humor of a moment ago gone. “Without more complete structural data I cannot say precisely when, but sometime in the next year at most….”

  The numbers bordering the image changed as the purple points became a network of jagged lines. With surprising speed the image of the ship broke apart.

  No one spoke for a moment.

  “What makes that important right now is the interior,” Gomez said at last. “Based on what we could scan through the ends of the cylinder during our initial leapfrogging, the inner surface is designed to emulate a Class-M planet.”

  “The whole thing can’t be full of air?” Faulwell asked.

  “No,” Gomez assured him. “Angular acceleration keeps the atmosphere within a kilometer or so of the surface.”

  “A kilometer or so,” he echoed. “Exactly how big is this thing?”

  “Computer models indicate there are just under twenty-six hundred square kilometers of planetary surface in there.”

  Faulwell’s mind boggled slightly at the figure.

  “Inhabited?” Gold asked.

  “We think so.” Gomez nodded to Lense.

  “Analyzing the life readings, I’ve definitely identified half a dozen animals analogous to Terran mammals,” the chief medical officer said. “Their groupings and proximity would indicate some are domesticated animals and others are the domesticators, though that’s conjecture.”

  “Conjecture you think is accurate,” Gold said.

  Lense nodded, then glanced around the table at the others. “Extrapolating from what we saw through the bow, there are anywhere from thirty to sixty thousand colonists aboard that ship.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  Three fours of days and two before the Quest

  Terant, son of Terant, grandson of Terant, Baron of Atwaan, pretended he did not notice Rajho and Vissint enter the Hall of Memory. He knew they would indulge him this rudeness in his grief.

  Through glassless windows above him the source light streamed in golden shafts to illuminate the brass marqued tombs set in the far wall. He could hear faintly the bells of mourning and the choir of Doctors chorusing a song of comfort. The sounds were of another world. Closer above him he heard the chirp and rustle of birds for whom the rafters of this hall were home. From them he gained greater solace.

  This hall had been one of the first great works of his grandfather. The first Terant had conceived of it as both monument and audience chamber for conducting ceremonies of state. From the rafters hung banners, faded slightly now with dust, of the Houses and Holds that had sworn the new baron fealty.

  Terant the eldest was known to have seen the future and to have been the first to realize access to the hollows meant power. When he, a mere border warden, had deposed the old baron, it had been widely accepted that the blessings of the Giants, and perhaps through them the Builders themselves, had rested upon him. He had gathered others to his banner with promises of wealth, and gained control of all the hollows between the Wilderness and the Great River.

  Terant’s able government and shrewd business skills had brought prosperity to Atwaan. His armsmen—the best paid duskward of the Tetrarchy—provided protection from dangers within and without. In exchange for their comfort and security, his subjects rendered the baron and his son and now his grandson their complete obedience and their lives.

  There was no dust on the trophies, Terant noticed idly, nor droppings from the birds above. For all its air of abandonment, someone kept the hall clean. He wondered who had ordered that.

  Along this wall, in niches and on pedestals, were treasures of uncertain value, oddities no one could identify wrested from the hollows of the Builders. The barony’s wealth sprang from the trade in these curios; treasures of the Builders were highly prized as art and jewelry and even talismans. In the days of pomp, the crowds had kept to this side of the hall, avoiding the misproportioned sepulchres along the farther wall.

  There were no court functions here these days. Terant now did as his father had done and held audience like any Holder, before the house where all who had business could see and approach. His grandfather’s hall was a disused monument, a mausoleum that did nothing to calm his spirit.

  He rested his hand for a moment on the throne of the Builders, a plain chair of m
assive scale, far larger than his grandfather’s ornate seat atop the dais. Only his grandmother had not been foolishly dwarfed by its dimensions.

  As a child he had explored the Hall of Memory seeking mystery, thrilling himself with the fear of ghosts. Now again he came seeking…something. And if there be ghosts, he would be glad for the comfort of their company.

  But there was no comfort here; even the air smelled dead.

  He’d had too much of death.

  Rajho and Vissint were still waiting, carefully just beyond the edge of his vision. The Doctor General and Chancellor of State would not impose lightly on his solitude, and the two coming together boded something pressing, something that needed his attention. Stifling a sigh, he squared his shoulders and turned to face them.

  Both nodded deeply, not the bow his grandfather had required, but the chin to chest of his father, not breaking eye contact. When authority is absolute, one need not add debasement to obedience.

  “What news?” he asked.

  Rajho looked to Vissint, who nodded for him to proceed.

  “Baron, your wife is in good health,” the Doctor said. “The water of the pool is pure, the herbs and unguents fresh and free of poisons.”

  “Wherein then lies the fault?” Terant asked.

  “Perhaps”—Rojha hesitated—“something occurred during the pregnancy?”

  “That—” Terant shouted, then stopped himself, biting back the next words. A deep, cleansing breath; a second. “That is what you said last time,” he said, aware that the preternatural calm of his voice was more terrifying than any rant. “And the time before that; and the time before that.”