Rha’djemi rolled her eyes; she had no interest in religion, and likedinflicting pain. But she made no comment, being too eager to begin the strike. “Yes, Elder,” she said in a hurry, already whirling to address the crews. “Communication teams, confirm synch! Propulsion teams, ready for dewarp! Stinger teams, keep them hot but keep them focused! Ready…ready… strike!”

But even as she spoke, Che’sethri began to realize something was wrong. The skymounts were already starting to move, away from where the subfleets would emerge. It was almost as if they knew an attack was coming. But that was not possible.

The sensation wall blurred as the warpfield collapsed. After a moment, it cleared again…and by now it was definite that the skymounts were fleeing. “Fire, fire! Compensate, do not let them slip away!” Rha’djemi was calling. He heard surprise in her voice, but she kept it firm and steady, focusing the crews, keeping them from losing their rhythm in the face of this unexpected turn.

But the skymounts had already picked up a fair amount of speed and were pulling away. “Pursue, best speed!” the huntsmistress snapped. “Divert energy to sublight propulsion!” Now the quarry began to tumble and shimmer, their armor slowly materializing. By the time the attacking mounts drew close enough, the armor was in place, the stings absorbed.

“Keep firing!” Rha’djemi cried. “The armor cannot hold long!”

But something strange was happening. The sting blasts were not even reaching the armor; instead they splashed off of shield envelopes that shimmered just above the prey’s skin. Rha’djemi emitted a squawk of surprise, but promptly swallowed it and rallied herself. “Compensate for that! Scan for the shield frequency, recalibrate the stings! Maybe we can pierce them!” She had enough experience battling Fethet raiders and planet-dwellers’ fleets (always so protective of their imaginary borders) to be able to cope with deflector shields.

He sensed her frustration, shared it. This was to have been a triumph, the hunt of a lifetime, and now they’d be lucky to bag two or three before the rest warped away. What had happened? How had it gone so wrong so quickly?

“Concentrate on the weak spots! Be bold, draw close, remember they will not fire back!” Despite her dismay, Rha’djemi kept her focus, and the determination in her voice brought Che’sethri renewed confidence. Perhaps this would not be the kill of a lifetime, but it could still be a good kill, and that was what mattered. They had a duty, a sacred task to perform, and with Rha’djemi guiding the hunt there was no question of success.

But then he saw Rha’djemi shimmer with violet light and disappear, her voice falling silent in midcommand. He looked around wildly, saw the others shimmering out along with her. A moment later, the violet glow engulfed him.

Then he saw Rha’djemi’s form before him once again, and he was relieved. Except in the next moment, he realized that behind her, all around her, was open space. Her mouth moved, but he heard nothing. Her eyes were wide with a fear he’d never seen in them before. The sight was even more painful to him than the rush of air torn out of his lungs in the next moment.

At least, Che’sethri reflected in his final moments, he had managed to keep her with him until the end.

Part Two

Titanomachy

Thus moving on, with silent pace,

And triumph in her sweet, pale face,

She reached the station of Orion.

Aghast he stood in strange alarm!

And suddenly from his outstretched arm

Down fell the red skin of the lion

Into the river at his feet.

His mighty club no longer beat

The forehead of the bull; but he

Reeled as of yore beside the sea,

When, blinded by Oenopion,

He sought the blacksmith at his forge,

And, climbing up the mountain gorge,

Fixed his blank eyes upon the sun.

—“The Occultation of Orion”

Chapter Nine

When Will Riker had gotten his promotion to full commander, nearly two decades ago back on the Hood,Captain DeSoto had taken him into his ready room for a private talk. “At this rate,” he’d said, neither of them recognizing the irony at the time, “you’ll be a captain within five years. I don’t know if you’ll still be on this ship when the time arrives, so I figure there are some things I should let you in on now.”

The list had been short but insightful, typical of Robert DeSoto. But the last item had been the most important, he had stressed. “When you get your own ship, and go on your first mission…you will make a serious mistake, one that will have lasting consequences. Not ‘could,’ not ‘might’—‘will.’ Or ‘shall,’ I guess,” he amended with a smirk, to make it clear he wasn’t addressing Will by name. “Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying I lack faith in you. It happens to every captain. It’s how people learn, it’s necessary. The catch is, the mistakes you make as a captain can do a hell of a lot more harm than the mistakes of commanders, lieutenants, and other mere mortals.”

“And there’s nothing you can do about it?” Riker had asked.

“You will make the mistake, that can’t be helped. But if you remember that, if you accept it, then you can probably keep the mistake from being too big.”

Now, today, Riker was wondering if too much time had passed since he’d heard that advice. Already, only a few months into his first command, he’d made more than one mistake of truly epic proportions. In the Small Magellanic Cloud, his decision to purge the Red King’s intelligence from the Romulan fleet it had taken over had forced its energy matrix back into the substrate of surrounding spacetime, triggering an expanding spatial distortion which had destroyed the Neyel homeworld of Oghen and snuffed out its population of two billion—and possibly the populations of several other worlds to boot, if the subsequent closure of the interspatial rift had not damped out the distortion wave as theorized. True, if Riker and his crew had not intervened, the emergence of the Red King’s protouniverse would have wiped out those worlds anyway, along with most of the rest of the SMC, in a sort of localized ekpyrotic Big Bang. But the thought still haunted him that if he’d acted less precipitously, gathered more information before attempting to interfere with an unknown and profoundly alien phenomenon, two billion deaths might have been averted. Starfleet and Deanna had assured him there was nothing he could have done differently, as had Picard when he’d sought his former captain’s advice over subspace. And intellectually he knew they were right. But he still couldn’t help wondering.

And now, on his very next mission, he’d made another mistake which could devastate an entire civilization. The species itself would presumably adjust, but its culture would be changed forever. Whatever he may have thought of the Pa’haquel’s way of life, he couldn’t see its forced abandonment due to his precipitate actions as anything but a catastrophe.