Grinning, Chekov added, “Besides, I don’t want to be the captain thatbadly.”

Sulu recalled something that Pavel had said to him earlier: Just remember that taking responsibility for a family member sometimes means having to decide against them when they go astray.

Burgess’s safety had been his responsibility. Perhaps he was punishing himself for having allowed her to persuade him to let her enter the rift and strike out for Neyel Hegemony space. There was no way even to know for sure that she hadn’t developed interspace-madness during transit, or had simply gotten lost and joined the graveyard of ships that tumbled eternally through the interdimensional depths.

But making that journey washer decision, not mine. Just as kidnapping Yilskene and Joh’jym was.

Sulu returned Chekov’s smile, then arrived at a decision of his own. Crossing back to his desk, he was relieved to see that Nogura was waiting patiently, apparently studying [373] something on a padd. Sulu reactivated the audio feed and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

“No problem at all, Captain,”Nogura said. “I was just reviewing some other reports here. And speaking of reports, have you made a decision about what’s to be in yours?”

Sulu looked back at him quizzically. “Report, sir? I’m afraid I haven’t had time yet to complete it.”

Nogura smiled, and pointed directly into the monitor. “Very good, Captain. I’ll expect to see it sometime tomorrow. Nogura out.”

Sulu stood and stretched. He turned to see Chekov staring out the cabin window, holding a newly filled glass of vodka on the rocks. Sulu picked up his glass of wine and joined his friend.

As the stars moved by at warp speed, streaks of light that appeared and were gone in a blink, Chekov hoisted his drink. “Here’s to our next mission. May it be unsullied by both monoblades and diplomacy.”

Sulu grinned, clinked his glass against Chekov’s, then turned to watch the stars fly past.

Chapter 35

2298. Auld Greg Aerth Calendar, the Neyel Coreworld of Oghen

The long war to annihilate the Devils, which seemed to have been raging all her life, was suddenly done.

And Oghen endured, though it was more than a little worse for wear.

Still, Vil’ja could scarcely believe it, nor could most of her classmates. Even Father seemed to have given up hope of victory during the darkest hours before the Treaty.

It’s over,Vil’ja repeated to herself over and over after Father had given her the news. She knew that war was a bad thing. Yet she was both frightened and exhilarated by the sudden wrenching change.

So what happensnow?

Standing beside her father in the early morning chill, Vil’ja grew quiet, as did the rest of the crowd that had gathered today in the capital city’s broad boulevards and courtyards. Virtually everyone was looking skyward, and Vil’ja and her father were no exception.

The compact white ship was landing, descending very slowly on its antigravs toward a wide, brick-paved plaza,which the crowd had sensibly decided to leave clear. Vil’ja’s small, bright eyes were drawn irresistibly to the [375] unreadable—yet somehow vaguely familiar—writing that adorned the sides of the small craft’s spotless hull.

Nudging her father, Vil’ja pointed at the alien vessel. “Do the Devils ever fly ships that look like that?” she asked, feeling a sudden jolt of anxiety at the idea. When she’d first heard about the landing that was to take place this morning, she’d imagined a triumphant Neyel commander would emerge from the ship, holding aloft the head of the leader of the Devil forces. Then she’d had a disconcerting image of the reverse—a Devil brandishing a severed Neyel head.

Looking up at Father, Vil’ja squeezed his hand, drawing comfort from its rocklike solidity.

“No, that’s definitely notwhat a Devil ship looks like,” Father said, smiling down at her. “Remember what the news-net said this morning? This ship is carrying a peace envoy who came all the way from Aerth.”

Vil’ja nodded, even though the notion of a living person from Aerth was hard to accept. The idea of Aerth being tangible, something more than a setting for bedtime tales, would take some getting used to.

Even as the white vessel came to rest beside an ornate fountain carved from black volcanic glass, a pair of small Neyel patrol vessels came to ground nearby. Vil’ja found their presence reassuring, since each of the Neyel craft was much bigger than the compact white ship, and probably also better armed as well, judging from the way Father had always described them.

Hatches on both Neyel vessels quickly opened and several armed troopers stepped out. They marched briskly toward the white vessel, their limbs and tails coming to rigid attention as they took up positions beside what appeared to be a sealed hatch near the small ship’s bow. Their brilliant silver sashes identified them as an official honor guard, as though the being inside the white ship were a high-ranking official from the Gran Drech’tor’s court. But Vil’ja knew that [376] if the creature from Aerth turned out in reality to be some sort of monster, perhaps a Devil in disguise, the troopers—all of them hard-eyed veterans like her father—would be ready for it.

Like many Neyel children, she was well acquainted with the muted yet omnipresent sense of dread and worry that always descended like a low fog whenever a parent was called up to defend Blue Oghen from the Devil scourge. Like so many other parents, Father had done his duty, and had come back to the family afterward with many stories, some of which Vil’ja knew he was withholding from her “for her own good.” Mother, too, had taken her turn fighting the Devils during the later phases of the Rift War.

But Mother had not returned. She had not been so fortunate as Father. Or maybe, as Vil’ja sometimes wondered when Father was lost deep in his cups, it was the other way around.

Still holding tightly to her father’s hand, Vil’ja looked up, half expecting to see a Devil ship come swooping down on the unassuming-looking Aerth vessel, intent on mindless destruction.

Instead, she saw only an azure, almost cloudless sky, now completely free of the intense auroras and magnetic storms that had lately disrupted the broadcast of so many of her favorite tridee programs. Father had blamed these troubles on the effects of Riftspace, from which the Devils had sprung. The Rift, he’d explained, had stirred up violence on the surface of the sun, which created some pretty frightening fireworks in the skies of Oghen. It had gotten so bad that Vil’ja had begun to resign herself to the prevailing belief that only the utter extermination of the Devils could save her people. And perhaps not even that.

Today, everything was different. Now Vil’ja took the sudden complete absence of atmospheric disturbances as a reassuring sign. It showed, as Father had explained, that [377] the Riftmouth was sealing up. It meant that the very fractures in space that had created the Riftmouth were now closing, scabbing over and healing like a sewn and sutured wound.

But Vil’ja knew that this healing also meant that Auld Aerth was now once again out of the Neyel Hegemony’s reach. Perhaps forever. The Aerth of the Neyel’s ancestors would once again fade away into legend.

Except for the white ship. The alien vessel, the ship from the ancestral world of Aerth, was real. Almost disconcertingly so.

Continuing to scan the heavens, Vil’ja noticed something else: the sky contained only the merest hint of its usual yellow-orange discoloration today. Father sometimes called these ubiquitous sunset hues “the fruits of Neyel impatience,” usually after he’d had too much to drink, or had spent too much time alone in his study staring forlornly at old pictures of Mother, or both. Vil’ja wasn’t entirely certain what he meant when he described the sky in this way. But she had an inkling that it had something to do with the numberless resource extractors and foundries and smokestacks that had built this city and all the others that now sprawled across the globe, as well as the massed fleets of Neyel warships that protected the skies and expanded the Hegemony’s reach in every direction.