It was definitely the same type of ship that had comprised the flotilla that wiped out his father’s military vessels scarcely an Oghenturn earlier.

“So they’ve come back to finish us off,” Fasaryl said, his multiple stomachs gurgling loudly in evident terror.

“Be quiet,” Frane said. “And please try to keep your innards under control.” He had been in close quarters with the Oghen pair for too long, and could tell that he was growing irritable because of it. Immediately regretting his brusqueness, he turned toward the cowlike creatures and continued speaking in milder tones. “The other ships attacked from a much greater distance. This one appears to be only a handful of klomters away.”

“And they have other concerns as well,” Lofi said, one of her sensory stalks crossing over Frane’s shoulder and bobbing close to the glass. “They appear to be towing another ship.”

“How can you tell?” Frane said, squinting into the blackness. Lacking Lofi’s extraordinarily sensitive vision, he thought he’d have to take her word for it.

Then he saw it: a hole among the stars, a slowly moving region of blackness that obscured the tendrils of energy visible within the ragged edges of the Sleeper. A shape that resembled a large vessel of some sort. It evidently lacked the power even for running lights, and had a swooping, tapered shape similar to the profile of the vessel that was apparently towing it.

“They attacked before,” Fasaryl said. “They’ll attack again.”

“We don’t know that,” Frane said, though he had to admit he felt every bit as frightened as the Oghen.

Then Fasaryl vanished in a shimmer of light, followed immediately by Lofi, who shrieked in pain at being teleported away in pieces, since her multipartite body had not been gathered into a single unit when the aliens’ teleportation beam found her. Frane heard g’Ishea lowing in panic, her hooves clattering frantically against the capsule’s floor as she, too, vanished.

Before he could utter a single word of comfort to the terrified Nozomi, the shimmering light returned, claiming them both.

The next several hours were a blur of terror for Frane. He recalled little, except that he had been separated from the other Seekers After Penance, and had been permitted neither to see nor to speak with Nozomi. They had been taken by sallow-skinned men and women who resembled nothing more than the marauding, green-blooded elves from out of the centuries-old legends of the People of Oh-Neyel. His captors had confiscated almost every bodily adornment from him, including his pilgrim’s robe and underclothing, and had struck him when he’d tried to prevent them from snatching away the ancient story bracelet he had removed—had it been only yesterday?—from his father’s corpse. After taking even that, they had drugged him, as best as he could recall through his current state of befuddlement, and had shouted at him repeatedly in a tongue he couldn’t understand.

At some point they had evidently shaved his gray scalp, and a gray-haired, pointed-eared woman with an oddly kind face had attached slender cables to his skull. She spoke several unintelligible commands into a handheld control device.

Red, raging red pain followed, during which he screamed and pleaded and babbled and cried and laughed like a lunatic. He had been a Seeker After Penance, and now he had found a surfeit of it. A black pit of unconsciousness opened next, and he fell gratefully into it, tumbling end over end over end into oblivion.

Then he slept. He dreamed that the Sleeper had at last come fully awake, sweeping away the alien ships, the evacuation capsules.

And every planet his people had ever colonized, exploited, and ruined.

After an eternity, he came awake in a pool of cold sweat, suddenly disappointed that the Sleeper had notrisen to relieve his misery once and for all. The kind-faced elf woman he had seen earlier was staring beneficently down at him. She spoke to him in an almost gentle voice.

To his enormous surprise, he understood her words this time.

Standing beside Dr. Venora, Donatra watched the sleeping alien patient through the infirmary’s one-way transparisteel window. The strange semihumanoid creature, now dressed in a short-sleeved, open-necked infirmary smock, lay unconscious on one of the treatment beds, a rumpled white sheet draped over flesh that looked as gray as that of a Cardassian, and nearly as tough as that of a Nasat.

“You’re sure you’ve overcome the language barrier?”

Venora nodded, a rueful expression on her lined face. Donatra knew that she avoided using coercion on her patients whenever possible. But the doctor had bowed to the necessity of expediting the information-gathering process. And the missing fleet hadto be found, after all.

“The sessions with the mind-probes greatly accelerated the work of our translation matrix,” Venora said, glancing down at the padd in her hand. “It might have taken an entire eisaeotherwise merely to parse his language. We seem to have managed it in just a couple of veraku,possibly because it appears to contain certain elements of Federation Standard.”

Donatra’s eyes widened at this surprising revelation, and she nodded an acknowledgment. “Well done, Doctor. I wonder how the language of the Federation managed to spread so far from its source.”

“I imagine that must have happened the same way their human biosigns got out here.” Venora offered her superior a small, lopsided grin. “But since human migrations aren’t my area of expertise, Commander, I’ll concentrate instead on matters of medicine and physiology. The biomonitors show that he’s regaining consciousness. You may speak with him now. His name is Frane. So far, I’ve had time to learn little else.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Donatra said, then strode toward the infirmary door. Venora followed her to the patient’s bedside, as did a pair of armed guards.

Donatra looked at the recumbent figure on the infirmary bed; the sheet draped over it did not obscure the rough gray hide, the opposable thumbs on its feet, nor the long, thick-thewed tail that dangled limply onto the deck-plating.

“This creature is an Earth human?” Donatra asked quietly, leaning toward the doctor.

“Genetically, though obviously not in phenotype,” Venora said in a near-whisper. “This individual appears to possess a number of adaptations to long periods of microgravity, with traits that resemble those of arboreal primates.”

“I’ve never seen any other humans with such traits.”

“Nor have I, Commander. But there’s no reason these creatures could not have evolved from baseline human stock, just as we split off from our Vulcan forebears, millennia ago.”

Donatra stared in growing wonderment at the slumbering alien. “An Earth human.”

Venora leaned over her patient, studying him with evident concern. “As counterintuitive as that may be, that is the essential truth of it,” she said quietly. “This creature’s genes, or at least most of them, originated on Earth.”

The alien’s stiff, shutter-like eyelids slowly opened then, revealing dark, extremely alert eyes. Those deep brown orbs showed fear at first, until they lit upon Venora, whose presence appeared to calm him, at least somewhat. The doctor had evidently built up at least some degree of trust with the alien already.

“Not…not of Aerth,” the creature said, sitting up in a tentative, cautious manner. The guards stood by attentively only a few paces away, obviously ready to vaporize the alien at the first sign of trouble. The alien’s eyes fell upon Donatra and narrowed with obvious distaste.

“Who are you?”

“I am Commander Donatra, of the Romulan Imperial Warbird Valdore,which you are aboard,” Donatra said, trying to sound both authoritative and nonthreatening.

He nodded. “You want something of me.”

“Only the answers to a few questions.”