This blaze of unimaginable forces was nothing less than the Sleeper of M’jallanish legend, stirring at last from His aeons-long slumbers. And Frane was here to witness it.

Maybe we haven’t come merely towatch the Awakening,he told himself, almost overwhelmed at the purity and audacity of his purpose now that he was finally able to stare directly down the maw of the Infinite. Perhaps we have come to help bring it about.

So that the Neyel, Frane’s own people, might atone for the many crimes they had committed against virtually every sentient species they’d met in M’jallanish space—at least before Aidan Burgess had come all the way from Auld Aerth and tried to show the Neyel the gross error of their ways.

The Seekers After Penance revered Federation Ambassador Burgess, and it was their devoir to complete what she had begun: to continue teaching the entire Neyel race the lessons of peace to which the long-dead, martyred diplomat had introduced them. Even if the aim of those lessons—atonement—cost the lives of everyone who had participated in the Neyel Conquests. Even if their heirs who perpetuated those injustices even now, knowingly or not, had to suffer—along with native peoples too weak-willed to have even tried to oppose their conquerors.

“Is it true, Frane?” Fasaryl asked. “Is it true that every world in the M’jallan Cloud will vanish when the Sleeper finally comes fully awake?”

Frane nodded. “So say the legends of the His’lant. And those of the Sturr. And the tales of your ancient Oghen forebears as well.”

“The His’lant Taletellers say that the Sleeper dreams all the worlds in the Cloud,” said Nozomi. “And when the Sleeper awakens—”

“The dream ends,” Frane said, finishing her thought. Along with every evil act our people have ever perpetrated against those worlds.

Fasaryl shrugged his thick, bovine shoulders. “Or so say the stories. We won’t know until and unless it happens.”

“We already know that the Sleeper stirs,” said g’Ishea, nodding toward the colorful energy pinwheel that now lay just a few hundred thousand klomters before them. “And that stirring has already wiped out at least one whole world. After Newaerth’s disappearance, I need no further convincing.”

Frane nodded grimly. The truth of g’Ishea’s words was undeniable. Newaerth was no more, having vanished cataclysmically along with its entire planetary system, within days of the initial appearance of the colorful spatial distortions—a beautiful blue world, settled only a century after the arrival of the ancestral Neyel in the Lesser M’jallan Cloud, extinguished by the stirrings of the Sleeper.

“Perhaps the Sleeper will spare us if we conduct the propitiation rituals,” Nozomi said in a quiet, frightened voice.

Unlike Nozomi, Frane had no realistic expectations of being spared whatever divine wrath was about to engulf the entire region. Nor did he believe himself particularly worthy of any such mercies. But he was ready and willing to undertake the meditative ritual, if only on behalf of his companions, whose faith in the efficacy of the ancient native rites clearly exceeded his own. After all, why should his fellow travelers face summary death when it was hisforebears, not theirs, who had truly earned the ire of the cosmos?

While still tending to the ship’s instruments, Lofi detached one of her scaly, rainbow-colored thoracic segments. Its multijointed arms and sensory clusters immediately set about arranging the ritual materials on the deck before the viewer. Scuttling to and fro with purposeful deftness, she covered about a square metrik with a precise arrangement of colorful soils from the Sturr homeworld, mixing them with several large droplets of her own viscous body fluids, secreted directly from glands hidden beneath the arms of her independently operating body segment.

Frane lowered his head, his eyeshutters closing out the vaguely disturbing ritual as Fasaryl began to make a gentle lowing sound. His song chilled the base of Frane’s spine; he knew that the archaic words Fasaryl sang were far older than the Neyel’s most ancient ancestors from Auld Aerth.

Fasaryl reached the end of the ritual utterances within the space of a few dozen heartbeats, as though in anticipation of something momentous. Frane glanced upward, opening his eyeshutters enough to see the energy tendrils that remained displayed on the screen. The image was unchanged. The Oghen repeated the words again, and Lofi’s artificial voice joined in, forming an oddly tinny counterpoint to Fasaryl’s mournful, bass-laden chant.

The image on the screen continued its slow, stately pirouette, stubbornly constant. What was I expecting?Frane thought, chuckling quietly to himself. Was the Sleeper supposed to answer our prayers? Did I really expect Him to come fully awake right at this moment and promise to save us from the destruction that’s coming down upon us?

There would be no engraved invitations to watch the apocalypse from some safe cosmic balcony. When the Sleeper finally awoke, when its mystical dreams no longer served to sustain the very existence of M’jallanish space, Frane expected to wink out of existence along with everything else within at least a hundred pars’x—just as the ancient His’lant physicist-priests had foretold.

An alarm whooped loudly at that moment, startling Frane out of his doleful reverie. Nozomi jumped high at the sound, her tail and bare feet instinctively grabbing purchase on one of the control room’s ceiling-mounted gangways.

“Frane!” said Lofi, an unusual urgency underlying her customarily even, synthetic voice. “I am detecting several ships, closing rapidly on the energy cloud. They are headed straight for us.”

A knot of apprehension began to form in Frane’s stomach. “What kind of ships?”

“Neyel military, cylindrical configuration. They’re warning us to stand down, and to prepare to be teleported aboard their flagship.” Lofi turned an eyestalk directly toward him. “They’re asking for you specifically, Frane.”

The knot in Frane’s belly suddenly tightened like an ancient slavecatcher’s noose. He could think of only one military officer who would have asked for him by name.

“Bring the male Neyel prisoner directly to me,” Drech’tor Gherran said, his eyes remaining fixed upon the strange phenomenon that covered his main control room’s central viewer. He glanced away from the coruscating cloud, looking down at the bracelet of exotic shells and stones and fabric that adorned his left wrist.

“And the woman?” replied Harn, his ever-efficient helmrunner and subaltern. If Harn had noticed how distracted Gherran was feeling at the moment, he betrayed no sign of it.

“Leave her in confinement with the indigies,” Gherran said, gently caressing the bracelet with the spade-shaped tip of his tail.

Harn looked slightly askance at Gherran’s order, but dutifully moved to the communications panel on the opposite side of the control room, where he began carrying out his instructions. Crisply and efficiently, as ever.

Moments later, a pair of black-uniformed Neyel security officers exited the lift tube, a slight, robed figure herded between them, his hands bound behind his back. The guards looked confused at having been told to bring their charge to the ship’s sensitive control room.

The prisoner seemed far too calm for someone in such a vulnerable position. But that came as no surprise to Gherran.

“Release his bindings,” Gherran said. “Then leave us.”

“Sir?” said the senior guard, his eyeshutters opening and closing rapidly in surprise.

“Do it!”

The guards hastened to comply, and seconds later had withdrawn from the control room. The handful of instrumentation officers present watched discreetly as the prisoner stepped toward Gherran, rubbing his just-freed wrists as he moved.