The blue class-M planet that Joh’jym had called Oghen was obviously a busy place. From the brownish-yellow haze that stippled the atmosphere, Sulu concluded that the planet had been one of the Neyel Hegemony’s most heavily utilized industrial sites for at least a century.

And the scores of orbital factories and drydocks, and the thousands of partially-assembled warships he saw everywhere he looked made it abundantly clear to what use the planet’s abundant resources had been put.

War.

Using filters, Tuvok trained Excelsior’svisual sensors on the planet’s primary star, a hot F-type sun whose yellow-white surface rippled with frequent and violent flares and immense, horseshoe-shaped prominences.

Caused, Tuvok quickly theorized, by the close presence of a sizable aperture leading into interspace. Could the fact that this rift connected to the sectors of space controlled by the extremely suspicious, territorial Tholian Alliance be mere coincidence?

“No wonder the Neyel are so bent on destroying the Tholians,” Burgess said. “Maybe they think that the interspatial [278] rift itself is actually a Tholian plot to destabilize their stars and scour all life from their planets.”

“If we were in their position, I wonder if we would have done the math any differently than they did,” Sulu said. He felt a gnawing sadness as he considered the wide gulf of culture that separated this long-sundered branch of humanity from Earth’s civilization. It was arguably a far broader chasm than the even physical distance that lay between Federation space and the Neyel Hegemony’s territory.

“Given the hardships their ancestors had to overcome when they found themselves stranded out here, I doubt it,” Burgess said.

“They’re us and we’re them,” Sulu said quietly, looking to Chekov for a reaction. This time, the exec did not argue the point.

Facing forward, Sulu watched the viewer as a large, oblong shadow came up over the terminator from Oghen’s nightside and continued to rise on its long orbital arc. A few lights and safety beacons lined the object’s exterior, no doubt intended to prevent Neyel spacecraft from accidentally crashing into it.

It slowly emerged into the harsh glare of the sun, which revealed the great rock’s kilometers-long shape and the near side of its rough, battered surface. The object seemed to be composed of both nickel-iron and stone, and bore little resemblance to the relatively smooth, modular orbiting factories and the utilitarian, cylindrical space vessels that Sulu saw just about everywhere else he looked in Oghen’s skies. It reminded him more of one of the moons of Mars, or one of the innumerable rocks that studded Sol’s asteroid belt.

Then he realized exactly what it was he was looking at. “Looks like the Neyel have kept it in pretty good shape,” he said.

“It’s a shrine,” Burgess said. “Like Independence Hall. Or the Peace Dome on Axanar.”

“I never thought I’d actually get to see it,” Chekov said, [279] his eyes riveted to the rocky shape. “It’s like a myth come to life.”

“It’s no myth, Pavel,” Sulu said, shaking his head. “Any more than the Neyel are.”

The sight of the great Vanguard asteroid colony filled his heart with awe and wonder. It was a symbol of both promise and catastrophe. A reminder that the horrors the Neyel intended to inflict upon the Tholians—and vice versa—were, in large part, humanity’s responsibility.

My responsibility,he thought.

PART 8

WAR

Chapter 24

2268. Auld Greg Aerth Calendar

Life aboard Tuskerslayerconsisted predominantly of boredom. From the patrol vessel’s lowliest grunt laborer all the way up to its drech’tor, none aboard could deny that this was the simple truth of the crew’s existence.

Perched in the center of the cramped command deck, Drech’tor Kreutz recalled a joke her predecessor had been fond of making: Boredom, punctuated by tedium.He’d repeated it often enough over the years—even on the very day she had killed him—to make the words all but unforgettable.

But Kreutz was too well trained an officer to give even tedium anything less than her full attention. Tonight, she presided over a third-watch skeleton crew, anticipating a long, plodding march through the ship’s night, as was her wont whenever sleep proved elusive. Tuskerslayer’scurrent mission was shaping up to be a spectacularly uneventful patrol of the vast cometary cloud that bounded the far fringes of the Oghen system.

And what could this patrol possibly be other than uneventful?she thought. The most Aerthlike world yet discovered, the Coreworld of Oghen was the center of the vast [284] KnownconqueredTerritories—the beating heart of the ever-expanding Neyel Hegemony. So close to the innermost enclaves of Neyel influence, the odds of encountering a significant threat were vanishingly small.

Certainly, Hegemony border ships were called upon to answer distress signals from other Neyel vessels from time to time. And they still occasionally came upon lone alien freebooters, or radiation-scorched indigie refugee ships, filled past their capacity with all manner of arguably semisentient M’jallanish trash. Tuskerslayerand her sister ships had made short work of such as these as far back as Kreutz could remember.

Kreutz began to fantasize about finding an indigie refugee ship; she didn’t particularly care what kind of indigies were aboard. Such an encounter would make for a nice surprise. Mrony, the gunnery specialist, could use the target practice.

A sensor-klaxon suddenly blared, prompting the young officer in charge of Tuskerslayer’sremote-sensing apparatus to widen his sleepy, half-shuttered eyelids. His slack tail went rigid, as though he’d accidentally stepped into the ion grid.

“Report,” said Kreutz, her training quickly dispatching her prior listlessness.

The young officer shook his head. “This makes no sense, Drech’tor. The scanners must be damaged.”

Kreutz scowled. “Don’t talk in riddles, lad. What do Tuskerslayer’seyes think they’ve seen?”

“It looks like ... It appears that a seamis unraveling across the cosmos.”

She smacked her tail against the deck angrily. First he spouts conundrums, then poetry.“Still you make no sense.”

The drech’tor’s gesture seemed to have galvanized the young male. “Perhaps I can resolve an image that might render a better explanation than I can provide.”

[285] “Cause it to be so.”

The lightless deeps of Far Oghen vanished, replaced by a highly magnified, computer-enhanced image of what seemed to be a long, slender worm of the purest liquid silver. The tubular shape seemed to twist as it advanced through the surrounding dark, apparently woven from delicate traceries of light. Several faint, tentacular appendages, like meandering river tributaries, branched off from the main body, losing themselves in the eternal night.

“I see it,” Kreutz said, her breath catching in her steel-hard throat. “Now can you explainit?”

“As I said, Drech’tor, it seems best described as a seam. And a torn seam, at that. A juncture between two adjacent regions of space, that is somehow coming unraveled.”

“It sounds like a description of the spreading boundaries between crustal plates back on Oghen’s sea floor.”

“A very good analogy, Drech’tor,” said the young officer. “But an aerthquake fault might make for an even better one.”

Her tail switching back and forth, Kreutz asked, “Might this effect endanger Oghen, or any of the other Knownconquered worlds?”

The officer nodded, looking as somber as death. “It may, Drech’tor, so long as it maintains its present heading. The phenomenon’s apparent motion is determined by the direction, shape, and energy of whatever started the rent in the fabric of the universe in the first place.”