At least for those who’d managed to survived the nuclear strikes and bioweapons attacks of the Third World War,Riker thought. He would never forget the devastation that had still been evident on his home planet only a decade after the outbreak of that horrible conflict, having seen it up close during the Enterprise’s mission to stop a Borg attack on twenty-first-century Earth.

“Do not judge them too harshly, Commander,” Akaar said to Vale. “From what little we were able to glean from their history, the progenitors of the Neyel found basic survival to be an extreme challenge after they were cut off from your homeworld.”

Tuvok nodded. “Indeed. Had they not used gene manipulation—to add microgravity-adapted grasping tails and feet to their phenotypes, for example, or to increase their resistance to hard radiation or accelerate their maturity to reproductive age—they might have died out more or less immediately, or at least been rendered sterile.”

“Right after we first arrived here, you said something that struck me as fairly ominous, Commander Tuvok,” Vale said. “You compared the Neyel to the Romulans. Since we might find ourselves stuck here in Neyel territory for at least a little while, I hope you were just being melodramatic.”

“Vulcans are never ‘melodramatic,’ Commander,” Tuvok said, tipping his head in what might have been either curiosity or umbrage. “We found the Neyel to be highly aggressive, ethnocentric, territorial, and paranoid in the extreme.”

“That’s understandable, considering the lousy hand they were dealt,” Riker said. “Their ancestors were a relative handful of humans who were suddenly forced to live on their own in a totally unexplored universe, dependent on an L-5 habitat that wasn’t designed to be completely self-sufficient. Yet they left the Sol system years before Archer did—hell, before Cochranedid—and settled a huge swath of space that no other human would visit for centuries. Along the way, they must have faced all sorts of dangers no human had ever seen before.”

Riker wondered momentarily what hewould have done in their place. Though the forebears of the Neyel had been presumed killed, they had survived and persevered, utterly isolated from the relentless march of human history. And while they had been preoccupied first with survival, and later with conquest and empire-building, the main branch of mankind back on Earth had progressed from its early post-thermonuclear-war phase to the creation of a grand interstellar democracy that would eventually span more than one hundred and fifty worlds.

One branch had yielded an idealistic Federation, born of cooperation. And apparently another branch had instead created a hegemonic empire, forged in the fires of conquest.

But Riker knew that Earth’s upward social evolution had by no means been inevitable. Only a few years before the destructive Romulan-Earth War of the twenty-second century, and the subsequent coalescence of the Federation, first contact with the Xindi had cost millions of human lives. The Xindi attack on Earth had spawned the xenophobic Terra Prime movement, and might very well have placed human culture on precisely the same distrustful, aggressive trajectory that Neyel civilization had evidently taken.

And the Neyel path was never set in stone either,Riker thought. Their empire grew out of the decisions they made both as individuals and as a society. And those decisions would have created consequences of their own as time went on.

That idea brought to mind a salient question.

Turning toward Akaar, he said, “Excelsior’s reports said nothing about follow-up Federation contact with the Neyel after 2298.”

Akaar nodded. “That is because no such contact has occurred.”

Riker smiled, relishing the prospect of gently correcting the admiral whose presence had made Titan’s maiden voyage so much more difficult than he had anticipated.

“That isn’t entirely true, Admiral. A good deal of human-Neyel contact may have gone on for some time after 2298.”

A look of comprehension dawned in the large Capellan’s dark eyes. “Burgess.”

Tuvok again raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Indeed.”

“Who or what is Burgess?” Vale asked.

“Aidan Burgess was a Federation special envoy whom Excelsiorferried to a diplomatic meeting with the Tholians,” Tuvok explained. “She ended up settling a war between the Tholians and the Neyel, using rather unorthodox means.”

Akaar nodded. “Means that included appropriating one of Excelsior’s shuttlecraft and taking it on a one-way journey through the rift that linked Tholian space with the region in which we now find ourselves.”

“I can only think of one reason any human diplomat might do something that extreme, Admiral,” Vale said. “This Federation envoy must have planned to live among the Neyel and teach them how their human cousins deal with their problems without A: wiping each other out or, B: trying to conquer the known universe. Am I right?”

“Essentially,” Akaar said. “Or so we have hoped all these years.”

Vale offered the admiral a thin smile. “So how did the ambassador’s plan work out?”

Akaar answered with a mirthless smile of his own. “We are the first Starfleet personnel since the time of Excelsior’s encounter with the Neyel who may have the opportunity to answer to that question.”

Riker’s combadge chose that precise moment to chirp. “Engineering to Captain Riker.”

“Go ahead…Dr. Ra-Havreii,” the captain said after tapping the badge. He had almost used the name of Commander Ledrah, Titan’s recently deceased original chief engineer, and hoped that no one had noticed his near-lapse.

“The repairs and replacements of the burned-out bridge stations are all nearly complete, Captain. And the shield generators will all be back on line within the next three hours. All other systems are already working within acceptable norms, though I believe we can still improve engine performance a great deal.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Commander,” Riker said. Titan’s new Efrosian chief engineer would take some getting used to, but not because Riker had any real concerns about the man’s competency. Xin Ra-Havreii had, after all, been Titan’s principal designer at Starfleet’s Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards, and therefore knew the vessel’s every specification better than any other living sentient being did.

“The damage control teams have already put right the new hull breach deck five sustained during our passage through the anomaly, Captain,”Ra-Havreii continued, reminding Riker once more of the recent battle over Romulus, which had not only placed the Efrosian in charge of Titan’s engine room, but had also left Lieutenant Commander Keru, Titan’s tactical officer and security chief, critically injured. During that skirmish, the deck in question had taken a fair amount of damage; although the engineering teams had sealed that breach within hours of the battle, Titan’s abrupt transit to this region of space had evidently stressed those same weakened portions of the hull beyond their tolerances yet again.

“A lot of the repairs still don’t look very pretty,”Ra-Havreii went on. “But in a few hours I expectTitan to be essentially ‘ship shape’ once again.”

“Good work, Commander. And thank you. Riker out.”

His errant recollection of the death of Titan’s first chief engineer reminded him that he had another duty to perform, and that it had to be tended to very soon. The timing of this sad task was dictated not by a duty roster or a Starfleet regulation, but rather by certain strict cultural requirements of the planet Tiburon, the homeworld of the late Lieutenant Commander Nidani Ledrah, who had perished horribly during the recent skirmish between Romulan and Reman forces.