Yet, the wave did not destroy her. It didn’t even touch her. It ripped through everything else, rolling out into the larger Void, seeking other creations on which to spill its wrath, but it had left A’churak’zen alone and filled with that same familiar question.

  Why?

  Why hadn’t she been killed with the rest? Why had the Eye not closed again? Why, why, why, why, why?

  She had almost opened her poison sacs then, seeking to follow her people into oblivion. Then the vessel informed her of another group of soulless beings, farther out toward the rim of this creation, living in another of the metal boxes.

  She had decided that this was some test, that if she could destroy this second nest of soulless intruders, Erykon might take pity on her and let her sisters and their lovely little world return. Even her Mater, dead and eaten all these long cycles ago, could come to her again.

  Only these creatures, like the first, stubbornly refused to be killed. They chattered on about names she didn’t know and concepts and places she didn’t understand, but they continued to thwart her efforts.

  Via the many inorganic senses the ship fed her mind, she was able to watch the little orb they had fired putter its way toward her.

  The soulless creatures were clearly both stubborn and stupid. She was a ghost. Whatever this thing was, she could tell it was solid matter and would pass through her body as harmlessly as any meteor.

  And then, very soon, their resistance would end. They would be crushed, and Erykon would give her her reward.

   “Probe is in position, sir,”said Dakal’s voice, still cracking a bit despite the flawless performance he’d just given.

  The modified probe now sat in the heart of the ethereal Orishan vessel, which seemed as impervious as ever.

  “Begin quantum broadcast,” said Riker.

  Pain lanced through every part of A’churak’zen as the strange little orb began to scream inside her vessel, inside her.

  The scream cut through her, searing the phantom parts of her body, of the vessel’s body, like the hot focused light the Weavers sometimes used to bind metal to metal. It was like nothing she had ever experienced.

  She thought she was being torn to bits. Parts of the vessel seemed to rip and tear at one moment, only to be pristine and working in the next. The vessel’s voice, her constant companion since their bonding, spoke nonsense in her mind. She felt she was going mad, that Erykon was finally meting out her punishment for not destroying the soulless beings quickly enough.

  She thought she heard her Mater’s voice and her siblings playing hop-skip nearby, but it was only a fantasy. The burning inside her became a series of soul-rending pains, each more excruciating than the last.

  Suddenly the vessel spoke to her again, telling her that they were being somehow forced out of the ghost state by the scream of the alien orb.

  Even as she processed that news, she and the vessel were solid again. This time when the vessel screamed, she screamed along with it.

  The storm of destructive waves that had been unleashed when the Eye had awakened, the chaos from which the ghost state had protected her, now ripped through A’churak’zen as it had everything else in this creation.

  It was worse, far worse, than the shrieking of the alien orb. Worse even than the pain of being bonded to her vessel. This was agony beyond understanding, beyond thought, beyond questions.

   This, she thought as her torment shredded her rationality. Can this be death?

  But it wasn’t death. It was only pain and therefore something she understood. They had forced her back into Erykon’s creation, which, of course, made her subject to Erykon’s wrath.

  She was pounded as they had been, buffeted as they had been, the contours of her vessel scored and battered as theirs had been. She had watched them suffer and had found pleasure in it. She had made them suffer a little herself and had found it just. But, if that was justice, what was this? Was Erykon’s punishment so indiscriminate, so random and impersonal?

  She wondered, before the pain overwhelmed her senses, how they had done this to her, how they had thwarted Erykon’s will and wrath. She couldn’t. She couldn’t escape or thwart or do anything but suffer and fear her god’s next inscrutable whim.

   “The Orishan vessel is in phase with normal space,”said Tuvok’s voice in Riker’s ear. Not knowing what sort of conditions to expect on the alien ship, he and his team had been outfitted with tactical EV suits. “They are experiencing catastrophic failures to many key systems. Stand by.”

  The team stood beside him on the transporter pad-Rriarr, Denken, Pava, and Hriss-while a somber-faced Lieutenant Radowski looked over his controls as he waited for the go order.

   Titanlurched suddenly, and before he could be asked, Tuvok said, “The Orishan grappler has disengaged. Shield strength is returning to previous levels. All internal systems nominal.”

  “Put us as close to their bridge as possible, Lieutenant,” said the captain. “I don’t want to lose anyone fighting our way in.”

  Radowski nodded and began tapping in commands. Presently a look of puzzlement crossed his face.

  “Sir,” he said. “I don’t read anything like a bridge over there. It may be distortion from the quantum flux, but the whole place seems to be tunnels and crawl spaces. No decks or specialized areas at all.”

  “What does that mean?” said Pava without too much obvious trepidation. “It’s like a Borg ship?”

  “Inconclusive,” said Radowski still trying to make sense of what he was seeing. “Frankly, Captain, with all this distortion, it’s lucky we’re able to get a solid lock in there at all.”

   “Lieutenant Radowski is correct,”said Tuvok’s voice. “Sensors indicate a network of thin interlocking tunnels radiating from a single aft chamber.”

  “How many aboard?”

   “One, sir. Sensors read one living being aboard the Orishan vessel.”

  The Orishan ship was nothing like a Borg cube. It was brightly lit, its tunnels easily large enough to accommodate the members of the team walking two abreast. It was, aside from them, empty.

  Everywhere there was light. Some came from obvious sources like the faceted blue crystals embedded at intervals in every wall. The rest seemed to be an effect of some sort of esoteric energy exchange between various systems.

  Every aperture was hexagonal, giving many of the visible surfaces a honeycomb appearance. Delicate webs of microfilaments crisscrossed half of them, some seeming to emerge from the walls and disappear again into the deck.

  “Oh!” said Pava, running one graceful hand along the wall nearest to her. “There’s a pulse.”

  Indeed there was. They could all feel it now; a steady staccato beat thrumming through every surface that was very much like the pulse of a living thing.

  The whole place smacked as much of organism as machine, Riker thought, but in a perfectly synergistic way. Whatever else they might have done, the Orishans had apparently created a unique technology that melded organic and inorganic materials in a manner that somehow seemed more, well, natural than anything the Borg had achieved.

  Telling the others to form on him, Riker moved ahead. His phaser, like all of theirs, was already in hand. He hadn’t known what sort of resistance to expect, but he had expected some. Perhaps a few attack ’bots or automated traps. He’d been on enough hostile alien vessels to be ready for anything.

  But there was nothing, only the sound of their footfalls on the deck and the hum of the alien machines.

  They found the probe, or half of it, still sparking on the deck. The rematerialization of one of the walls had cut the thing neatly in two as they had tried and failed to occupy the same space.