Riker tried to make his tone of voice as soothing as possible. “Relax, Mr. Frane. Remember, you’re among friends.”

Frane reached forward and moved one of his rooks. “Checkmate. Thank you for the game.” He stood. “Please excuse me, Captain. I wish to be with Nozomi and the others, to meditate.” And with that, he headed for the exit. Riker watched the Neyel’s retreating back long enough to see Lieutenant Hutchinson from security discreetly following.

Riker continued sitting, and stared dolefully at the board and its scattered game pieces as though he were surveying an ancient killing field.

“How’d it go?” said a gentle voice from across the table.

Riker looked up and saw that his wife had somehow taken Frane’s place without his having noticed.

“I think this is the last time I’ll try working your side of the street, Counselor.”

“That bad?” she asked, extracting his right hand from the wreckage of battle and holding it between both of her own.

“Let’s just say he’s got ‘daddy abandonment issues’ that make mine pale by comparison.”

Deanna, with whom he had been sharing every fact he’d been able to tease out of Frane to date, fixed him with a look of mock surprise. “No. Do you suppose he’s auditioning you as a replacement for his own late, emotionally distant father?”

“Very funny, Counselor. You really think I’m ‘emotionally distant’?”

“Not at all,” she said, squeezing his hand. “But the relationship Frane had with his father strikes me as very similar to the one you had with yours. Maybe he’s picked up on that, and therefore sees you as a kindred spirit.”

Riker shrugged. “There’s a lot more going on with him than father-figure issues, though. He’s also carrying around at least a couple of centuries worth of collective racial guilt on his shoulders.”

“That much was fairly clear to me from the beginning,” she said, nodding. “My impression is that ‘slavemaster guilt’ attitudes such as Frane’s are fairly common among Neyel of his generation. His reverence for the native religious tradition of the Sleeper may even be part of a growing Neyel countercultural movement. And another thing about Frane is even clearer to me now as well.”

“What’s that?”

“I already knew that he doesn’t want to talk to me because he perceives me as untrustworthy because of my empathic talents. But what I didn’t realize until now is just how much he genuinely seems to like you. I think he trusts you on some very fundamental level. Or at least he wants to, if he could only let himself do it.”

Riker chuckled. “He could have fooled me.”

“You’re just hearing his own self-hatred and fear talking. As well as his deep contempt for his people’s past excesses.”

“Why do you think he trusts me?”

“I’ve overheard bits of some of your conversations about your relationships with your respective fathers, and I’ve sensed that you’re right about his issues in that regard. You’ve definitely got that in common.”

“Wonderful.”

“It might not be much, Will, but at least it’s something.Besides, he knows that humans and Neyel are related, and I think he’s drawn to you because of that as well.”

“So what should I do?”

“Keep after him, but go gently.”

He chuckled quietly. “Isn’t ‘gently’ more your department than mine?”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Will. Remember, Frane isn’t as apprehensive of you as he is of me and my staff. That makes you the best chance he has of successfully rejoining humanity. And maybe the best hope his entire people have of successfully finishing what Ambassador Burgess started eighty years ago when she began trying to teach the Neyel how to live without war and exploitation.”

“To think that humanity’s relationship with the Neyel might all come down to whether or not I start giving Frane trombone lessons…” he said, trailing off.

“That might not be a bad idea,” she said, nodding.

Riker thought that Deanna’s assessment of his importance might be more than a little grandiose. Then he considered the dozen-plus Neyel soldiers who were even now sitting in uncommunicative silence in their guest quarters aboard Titan.So far none of them had shared anything of themselves beyond their names, ranks, and the local equivalent of serial numbers.

Maybe Frane reallyis the best shot the Federation will ever get at making a successful re-contact with the Neyel,he thought, wishing, as always, for broader shoulders whenever such a crushing load of responsibility seemed determined to settle onto them.

“He’s obviously projecting his people’s historic motivations onto us,” Deanna continued. “As well as his own related personal feelings of guilt. It’s certainly understandable, considering his cultural baggage. The Neyel have spent the last few centuries building a star-spanning, hegemonic empire across the backs of whole worlds of indigenous slaves. It’s probably difficult for Frane to imagine that our own Federation could have come about in any other way.”

Riker nodded, though he had to suppress an inward shudder. There but for the grace of blind luck and even blinder gods go we,he thought.

“How did your own Neyel-related fishing expedition go this morning?” Riker said, content that there was little else to say at the moment about Frane.

Deanna turned in her chair, apparently to make certain that her subjects weren’t eavesdropping. She faced him again a moment later, and spoke very quietly. “I’m not sure yet. The only thing I amsure of is that Akaar and Tuvok still have some unresolved issue between them, though both refuse to discuss it.”

“Do you sense it might be anything I need to worry about?” Riker asked. What he didn’t need now were distractions stemming from old interpersonal conflicts.

Deanna shrugged. “That’ll have to be up to them.” She gave him a wry smile. “Remember, Will, I’m an empath, not a precog.”

His combadge chirped, interrupting the discussion. “Vale to Captain Riker.”

“Riker here. Go ahead, Christine.”

“You wanted hourly reports on the chase, Captain.Titan andValdore are still slowly closing on the Romulan fleet. We’ll be within transporter range inside of two hours. And none of the ships are showing any sign of having noticed us yet.”

Very strange. “Any challenges yet from Neyel military vessels?”

“No, sir. And Jaza has been scanning constantly. He even found a way to increase sensor net acuity by cannibalizing and replicating some of the circuitry from those Tal Shiar listening devices we picked up back in Ki Baratan, in the Romulan Senate chambers. We’ve detected a few warp profiles, but no Neyel ships have expressed any real interest in us, and they’ve made no active scans.”

That struck Riker as even stranger, given the Neyel’s historic penchant for paranoia and aggression. Perhaps the sainted Ambassador Burgess had done her peacemaking job here a mite toowell.

“Any change in the fleet’s warp field oscillations?”

“Negative. They’re still displaying the same electronic ‘thumbprint’as the Red King.”

Riker exchanged a significant glance with Deanna, and he knew at once that her thoughts were mirroring his own. The intelligence that’s evolving inside our restless new protouniverse reallyhas gone…sleepwalking.

“There’s something else, Captain,”said another businesslike voice. This one belonged to Jaza. “I’ve just completed some new long-range scans on the G-eight star system that lay along the fleet’s heading when we first detected their warp signatures yesterday. The fleet has passed through the system, and the primary star has been…disrupted.”

“Disrupted how?”

Magnetospheric distortions are kicking up huge flares and prominences, some stretching nearly fifty million kilometers from the photosphere.