“Are you going to interrogate me here, Drech’tor Gherran, right in front of everyone?” the prisoner said in what the drech’tor recognized as a mocking tone. He gestured toward Harn and the other members of the control room crew. Each of them immediately looked away, conspicuously busying themselves at their various consoles.

Gherran pointed toward a hatchway located equidistant between the lift tube and the head. “In my prep chamber. Now.”

The prisoner shrugged and did as he was told. After the hatch had closed, ensuring their privacy, the robed detainee turned toward him, the hard gray skin of his mouth turning up slightly at the corners. “Hello, Father,” he said, an insufferable irony suffusing his words.

“What do you think you’re doing out here, Frane?” Gherran said, struggling to keep his son from seeing how angry he was. He doubted he was succeeding even a little.

“Perhaps I should ask you the same question, Father.”

Gherran sighed, shaking his head. “You know perfectly well that the Hegemony Navy can’t permit interlopers to approach the…phenomenon.”

“Why, Father? Are you afraid we’re going to rouse the Sleeper further?”

Gherran snorted, his tail switching involuntarily behind him. “Nonsense. There’s no Sleeper, Frane. Only ridiculous native legends, kept alive by the fantasy-prone offspring of slaves. And enabled by gullible, bleeding-heart Neyel trash like you.”

“How can you be so certain that the Sleeper’s dreams aren’t reallyall that keeps M’jallanish space intact, Father? Do you have a better explanation for what happened to Newaerth?”

Gherran decided he wasn’t going to let himself be baited. “Why are you traveling with those smelly cattle, and the rest of those alien kaffir,Frane?”

Frane was finally beginning to look rattled, which Gherran found gratifying. “We Neyel are the aliens here, Father. And those ‘kaffir’are my friends.”

“Then you have made a very poor choice of friends,” Gherran said with a long-suffering sigh. Certainly, he wasn’t proud of the excesses of the earliest generations of Neyel. Their tradition of treating native species roughly—a habit developed during the years immediately following their accidental exile from Auld Aerth, when their day-today survival had been uncertain in the extreme—hadn’t really begun to soften until the days of Ambassador Burgess, more than eighty Oghencycles ago.

“What are you planning to do with my friends, Father?”

Gherran offered his son what he hoped was a beneficent smile. “Once our patrol is done, they will be turned over to the civilian authorities on Oghen. The vessel in which we found you all has been reported stolen. If your friends were involved in the theft, they will be punished accordingly.”

Now Frane looked truly distraught; piracy, after all, was punished in the most severe and irrevocable fashion possible. “Let them go. I’m the one at fault. I’m the one who stole that ship.”

“We shall see in due course, my son,” Gherran said, his eyes once again straying to the bracelet wrapped around his left wrist. The bracelet had been in the family for eight generations prior to his own, handed down from Gran Vil’ja, who had received it directly from Federation Ambassador Burgess herself. Every tiny stone and shell and bone and gem and fiber woven into the bracelet’s cloth-and-metal frame represented a story added by each successive generation that had held it. The bracelet itself was an unbroken tapestry that reached all the way back to the far distant Great Pinwheel of Milkyway—and the unreachable orb of Auld Aerth itself.

Gherran saw that his son, too, was eyeing the bracelet. “I must be a great disappointment to you, Father,” Frane said quietly. “Who will you appoint to carry the story bracelet forward into future generations?”

Gherran felt righteous indignation rising within him. “I thought that your bizarre death cult didn’t believe in future generations.”

Frane shrugged. “Look beyond the hull of this vessel. Whether or not there will be a future doesn’t appear to be up to us at the moment.” He looked significantly at the bracelet. “Perhaps you should send our family heirloom somewhere safer than this place.”

Gherran raised his wrist, brandishing the bracelet as though it were a weapon. “Do not mock tradition, Frane. Someone in our lineage must eventually get the bracelet back to Auld Aerth, as Gran Vil’ja and Burgess Herself intended. You know that, at least as well as you know the silly precepts of your sleeping kaffirgod.”

“I suppose we each have always embraced myths of our own choosing, Father,” Frane said, smiling. “Mother always said that you and I were very much alike in that regard.”

Gherran felt his teeth bare themselves involuntarily. He knew that the death of Lijean, Frane’s mother, had devastated both of them equally. Though more than half a decade had passed since the shock of her suicide, Lijean’s absence remained both an unhealed wound and a cause for mutual blame. Even now, her death remained a weapon that both of them still used against one another from time to time.

“How dare you—”

The ship lurched violently, its abrupt movement punctuated by the sharp cry of an alarm klaxon. Harn’s strident yet controlled voice blared across the intraship circuit. “Tactical alert! Drech’tor Gherran to the control room!”

Frane had never before seen his father move so quickly. Gherran used his tail and all four of his opposable-digited hands to vault across his desk and bound through the hatchway back into the control room. Not quite as physically robust as his father—he lacked Gherran’s extensive military conditioning—Frane followed more slowly, though he moved as quickly as he could.

Frane could see that his father had all but forgotten about him as he queried the members of his crew, each of whom worked at least one console with a fervid intensity. No surprise that he’s ignoring me,Frane thought. Duty always did take precedence over family, even when there weren’t any emergencies to deal with.Not for the first time, he wondered if Mother had taken her own life out of sheer neglect and loneliness.

The great cylindrical vessel rocked again beneath Frane’s bare feet, prompting him to turn to face the wide viewer that filled the forward portion of the control room.

The energy bloom was… changing.

“Report!” Gherran shouted to his crew as the room shuddered yet again.

“We’re being subjected to intense gravimetric waves, Drech’tor,” said the young male officer seated at the nearest console. The tip of his tail was assisting his hands as he hastily entered commands. “They’re coming from deep within the phenomenon.”

“Ship’s status?” Gherran queried.

“Our energy screens are compromised and failing, Drech’tor.”

The tendrils of multihued energy shown on the viewer were becoming more agitated and twisted, gnarled like the native scrub vegetation of the Coreworld of Oghen.

Frane allowed a fatalistic smile to cross his face. Perhaps the Sleeper trulyis awakening at last.

He knew that if such was indeed the case, then his own petty family squabbles, as well as the suffering of every species the Neyel race had conquered over the past several centuries, would soon be rendered moot.

Is today the day when it all finally comes to pass, as the prophets of the ancient M’jallan races foretold?

“Hail the fleet, Subaltern,” Gherran said. “We’re withdrawing to a safer distance. I want to put another million klomters between us and the phenomenon.”

But before the subaltern could finish carrying out his orders, Frane noticed something else on the screen. Several dark, swooping shapes were approaching.

Unlike Father’s fleet, however, they seemed to be approaching from insidethe now-roiling energy bloom.