Two fearsome shapes, dark and symmetrical. Like the clawed, half-opened hands of a giant, one reached up from the deck, the other was suspended from the overhead. Each was the other’s mirror image. Rising from the deck along the bulkheads were three arches, spaced at 120-degree intervals. They were broad at their bases and narrowed as they curved upward to meet at the top half of the device.

Xiong stared agape at the device, which pulsed with ruby hues of power. It was a miniaturized replica of the artifacts found on Erilon and Ravanar. “Commander Terrell?”

After a few seconds, he received a stunned reply. “Yes?”

“Please tell me you’re seeing this.”

“Oh, we’re seeing it, all right,” Terrell said. “We’re just not believing it.”

“Believe it,” Xiong said, swelling with the pride of true accomplishment. He was about to say something more, something congratulatory to his comrades aboard the Sagittarius…then a roar of static disrupted the comm channel.

Xiong scrambled to boost the gain on his transceiver to cut through the noise. Seconds later, one sound from the Sagittarius came through—loud, clear, and unmistakable.

Explosions.

Claret waves of indignation propagated through the Colloquium. Signals in orbit, reported the Shedai Warden. Telinaruul have boarded the Kollotaan spacecraft.

Suspicion and recrimination resonated in the Adjudicator’s query: How did they breach our defenses?

A dampening field, answered the Wanderer. Like the one that wounded me, but more sophisticated.

The Telinaruul learn quickly, observed the Sage.

Unity without hesitation from the legions of the Nameless: Destroy them. Their pronouncement was seconded by the Avenger, who advised the Maker, The trespassers must be exterminated.

The Maker channeled hundreds of disparate wills through the focal node of the First Conduit. The collective power of the Shedai was being marshaled and directed skyward. Spectral light shimmered inside the Conduit’s core, and the Kollotaan screeched in agony as the dark fires surged in response to Shedai fury.

At the threshold of unleashing their reprisal, one word brought the Colloquium to a stunned halt.

Hold, commanded the Apostate.

Cold anxiety rippled through the Apostate’s partisans, all of whom were counted among the ranks of the Serrataal, the Enumerated Ones. The Myrmidon drifted closer to the Apostate’s side in a display of solidarity, and he was followed quickly by the Thaumaturge.

The Maker swelled, expanding her bearing to majestic proportions, and lorded over the Apostate, who found her old tricks less than impressive. Explain yourself, she commanded.

Attacking the Telinaruul serves no purpose, argued the Apostate. Destroy one ship, and many more will follow. Their numbers will only increase.

We will bring them to heel soon enough, countered the Avenger. Once we have mastered them, none will dare attempt our sanctum again. Telinaruul respond best to fear. You know this.

I know that you believe it, the Apostate retorted. And that you lack the wisdom to craft a new strategy. To the Nameless he continued, The Telinaruul have changed. We must change as well.

Protests fused into a wall of angry noise. The Apostate paid no heed to the dismay of the Nameless, but the anger of the Serrataal was equally vigorous. We do not change, insisted the Maker. We are Shedai.

The Apostate projected his dissent with conviction. What if the Telinaruul can be engaged without conflict? Reasoned with?

Countless voices scoffed at his suggestion. The Wanderer retorted venomously, One does not “reason” with beasts. They have trespassed in our domain and must suffer correction.

The Apostate wheeled in a cloud of fury upon the Wanderer. She recoiled in fear as his voice trembled the Colloquium. We gave up our domain for the peace of oblivion aeons ago. All these stars we abandoned, all these worlds we forsook.

Nothing was surrendered, the Maker declared. The seeds of our new genesis were planted. Our slumber was earned; now it has been disturbed by the petty ambitions of the ephemeral.

Bitter sarcasm came easily to the Apostate. The ephemeral, he repeated, deriding the Maker before refocusing his ire on the Wanderer. Brief flickers of life, you call them. You mock them, yet they have bested you twice. It seems the Telinaruul have risen in stature since last we reigned supreme.

The Wanderer quaked with fury, her desire to work violence on him apparent, but he knew that she would not attack; she could not. He was the Apostate, ancient when she was made.

Defying the will of the Maker, however, was another matter. Oldest of the Serrataal, she ruled without compromise. This is not the time for paralysis, she declaimed. Nor is it the hour for debate. The enemy is upon us. We must act with dispatch.

Light poured from the Conduit and cohered into an illusion of the Telinaruul ship in orbit, holding at close station to the Kollotaan ship the Wanderer had lured to the First World. The Maker directed all her thought toward the tiny spacecraft and bade her legion of faithful to join with her in smiting it.

Despite the Apostate’s defiant objection, the Colloquium’s majority had made its decision and stood poised to deliver its judgment. As he turned his own thought-line to the fray, the defensive batteries on the triplet satellites of the First World charged in a flicker of time and opened fire.

Supervising three separate mission initiatives at once had Commander Clark Terrell feeling a bit distracted.

On the main viewer of the Sagittarius’s bridge was a real-time visual feed from Lieutenant Xiong aboard the derelict Tholian battleship. At that moment, Xiong was working his way forward in a central corridor.

At a station on Terrell’s right, Ensign Theriault had started a general sensor sweep of the surface of the fourth planet. The young woman was deeply engrossed in her work.

On the other side of the bridge, McLellan was running close-up, passive visual scans of the artificial structures on the planet’s three satellites. For the third time in five minutes, she waved Terrell over. “Sir, have a look at this.”

“What’ve you got, Bridy Mac?”

The compact screen above her station showed a densely packed array of mechanical apertures. “It looks like a staggered firing array,” she explained. “Part of the reason for the delay between shots at Erilon and Ravanar might have been that those weapons needed time to build up charges in a prefire chamber.” She toggled a few keys on her control panel. The image shifted to a series of graphs, some rendered as waveforms, others as topographical overlays for the moons’ surfaces. “Based on the power signatures we picked up, I think this thing has dozens of prefire chambers, and they’re always primed. Each one charges while the others around it are firing.”

“You’re saying we’d be looking at a continuous barrage?”

McLellan nodded. “Yes, sir. These things could wipe out an attack fleet in no time.”

Terrell sighed and moved back toward the center of the bridge. “Wonderful,” he muttered. He settled at the left side of the captain’s chair and said to Nassir, “You heard?”

“I wish I hadn’t,” Nassir said. “Theriault, anything notable on the surface?”

“Passive scans aren’t getting much,” Theriault said. “There’s a lot of unusual interference. It might be part of the planet’s natural magnetic field. I’m developing a canceling frequency to help us see through it.”

“Very good,” Nassir said. “Keep us posted.”

Terrell nodded and smiled approvingly at Theriault, who returned the gesture and returned to work.

On the main viewer, the visual feed showed that Xiong had reached a point where the passage diverged. Ahead of him was an angled, oval-shaped tunnel that led down to a lower deck of the Tholian ship. The deck he stood on split into two paths that ascended around that passage’s opening and converged above it.