“We’re not responsible for this,” said Vale, scrambling to see if their phasers had also been left behind with the tricorders. “Your people took their own lives!”

  A’yujae’Tak screamed a clicking chattering response that the translator simply could not decode. Not that Vale needed the help. The Orishan leader’s actions told the story quite effectively.

  She was more massive than the biggest of her soldiers, standing a full meter over Keru, whose burly form seemed almost childlike before hers. Somehow, so far at least, it didn’t seem to matter. She flailed at him, attempting to claw him or tear at him with her talons or shred his flesh with the serrated ridges on the backs of her arms and legs. Nothing seemed to touch Keru, who danced under every swing, swerved away from every lethal blow as if he were playing mag ball with his friends.

  Of course he wasn’t playing mag ball, and he let her know it in short order.

  “Commander,” he said, narrowly avoiding decapitation as he ducked under and between two of A’yujae’Tak’s flailing arms and sweeping her legs with one of his. “I could do with a lot less talk here and a lot more shooting.”

  He managed to land several blows on the Mater’s abdomen as she fought to keep her balance, but because she was covered in a super-dense exoskeleton and he was just flesh and bone, the punches did him more damage than they did her. Keru’s knuckles were already a bloody mess.

  “You will die for what you have brought down on us!” said the enraged Mater, slashing at him, this time missing his throat by millimeters.

  He was good; those Ligonian battle forms he’d been practicing had worked wonders on his already formidable skill at hand-to-hand. Still, eventually he would slip or dodge a second too slowly and she would connect. It was only a matter of time before A’yujae’Tak landed a blow, and all of hers were killing strikes.

  As Vale cast around for something she could use to at least stun the hysterical alien, she caught sight of Troi helping Ra-Havreii back to his feet.

   Tougher than he looks, she thought, getting back to the weapon search and finally maybe spotting the grip of one of the phasers poking out from beneath a fallen bit of crystal.

  “Any time now, Commander,” said Keru, clearly beginning to struggle to keep the pace. A’yujae’Tak seemed under no such difficulty.

  Vale dived across the several dead Orishans that lay between her and the weapon. She landed near it, slid the rest of the way, palmed it, armed it, swung around, and fired just as A’yujae’Tak finally landed a bone-crunching blow to Keru’s chest.

  Keru groaned and fell away even as the phaser beam struck the Mater squarely in the face. A’yujae’Tak made another untranslatable chittering noise and staggered back a few paces, but she did not fall.

   Damn, thought Vale, getting to her feet and keeping A’yujae’Tak square in her sights. She adjusted the weapon to its highest setting and took careful aim.

  “Don’t make me kill you,” she said.

  “You have murdered my world!” bellowed the enraged insectoid, and lunged for Vale. “My entire world!”

  Vale fired again, again catching A’yujae’Tak square in the face with the phaser’s now-lethal beam. Only it wasn’t lethal. The beam’s impact hurt A’yujae’Tak, that was clear, but it didn’t put her down and certainly didn’t kill her.

  “Kill you,” said A’yujae’Tak. She looked a little wobbly on her feet, despite her firm tone, so Vale shot her again. A’yujae’Tak fell first to one knee and then to both before dropping forward to use her upper arms for support.

  This time there were no more threats, only hums and clicks that, even without translation, seemed to indicate that A’yujae’Tak had been pacified.

  Vale edged toward Keru, who groaned in pain as he struggled to rise. It was clear she’d broken a couple of his ribs and perhaps even cracked his sternum.

  Nearby, Troi continued to support Ra-Havreii, who, while in better shape than Keru, was not quite as hardy as Vale had at first thought. His tunic was torn across the chest where A’yujae’Tak had slashed him, and there was blood in his hair from a gash Vale hadn’t seen before. Troi was attempting to clear some of it off his face with her sleeve.

  “You are a [possible meaning: pestilence],” said A’yujae’Tak. “You have murdered us.”

  Looking around her at the destruction and death, at her missing, probably dead teammates, listening to the sounds of thunder and catastrophe outside, which were not nearly as distant as they had been, Vale had to wonder if there was some truth to the Mater’s accusation. How many of these events would not have occurred if Titanhad not come to this place?

  She was still wondering a few moments later when the world around her began to sparkle and she was transported away.

  The next sight she saw was so welcome that she at first thought she might be hallucinating. As the shimmer of transport dwindled and the world became solid around her again, she easily recognized the contours of the Ellington’s hold.

  She could see through the nearby porthole that the little ship was high above the planet, just meters shy of the energy field that had set the sky on fire.

  She rapped hard on the nearest bulkhead, assuring herself of its solidity. This wasn’t a dream or a hallucination. It was real. The shuttle had survived and, in doing so, confirmed that Jaza and Modan must be intact as well.

  She cast around happily, checking on the other returnees. There was Keru, wheezing a bit from his injuries as Troi helped him into the medical cradle. There was A’yujae’Tak, still groggy from all the phaser hits, still fighting to get back to her feet and still failing. Ra-Havreii was not with them.

  “Computer,” said Vale. “Erect a level-two containment field around alien intruder.”

   “Acknowledged,”said the familiar female voice.

  A thin sheet of impenetrable energy rose up around the corner where the Orishan Mater still continued her struggle to remain conscious, to continue the fight.

  “Locate and contact Commander Ra-Havreii,” said Vale.

   “Commander Ra-Havreii is aboard this vessel.”

  The shuttle lurched a bit, causing A’yujae’Tak to stumble backward and to drop the little strip of cloth she had been clutching in her lower left talon. It was a piece of Ra-Havreii’s uniform, torn off no doubt during her ambush of the engineer.

  When she heard a small clattering noise as the strip impacted with the deck, Vale looked and saw that Ra-Havreii’s combadge had come off in the Orishan’s fist as well.

  Emergency auto-retrievals targeted badges, not life signs. The engineer was still on the planet, still in the Spire’s control center where they’d left him.

  Vale hollered up to flight control for Jaza to get a bio-lock on Ra-Havreii and get him out of there. When neither Jaza nor Ra-Havreii appeared, she yelled up again.

  “Jaza! What’s the problem?” she said. “Mr. Jaza, report!” Again there was no answer.

  “What do you mean, he didn’t make it?” said Vale when Modan had climbed down from the upper deck to inform her of Jaza’s status. “Are you saying he’s dead?”

  “Yes, Commander,” she said, and none of them, not even Troi, could read the emotion under the words. It was something new, perhaps unique to her experience. “For quite some time now, I expect.”

  There was also something odd about Modan’s behavior. The pattern of her speech was different, chaotic in a way. It was as if she was randomly shifting between two completely separate idiomatic patterns without realizing it.

  “What do you mean, Ensign?” said Troi, sensing Vale’s confusion and fury and needing to give her time to get it under control. “How did he die?”

  “I don’t know,” said Modan. “I wasn’t there.”