“Captain, We’re Too Steep! We Won’t Be Able to Break Away!”

As if to confirm Glemoor’s words, Garrett felt her stomach drop in free fall as the ship took a sudden plunge, slammed from above by what felt like a solid belt of hypercharged particles and compressed gases.

“Captain, the gravity!” Bat-Levi shouted. The ship rocked, and the artificial gravity hiccupped enough to send her backpedaling on her heels, off-balance, and slamming into the guardrail. She wheeled around, clutching for support. “It’s sucking all the matter in this region toward the black hole!”

Garrett didn’t need her to spell out the rest. With the increased compression and electromagnetic winds, the ship would be slow to respond, like trying to turn on a dime in a pool of molasses.

Garrett whirled on her heel. “My ship, Mr. Castillo!” My ship:an age-old command, one used by pilots of planes, not starships, but Castillo needed no translation. He jumped to one side as Garrett leapt to the helm and activated first the starboard, then port thrusters.

“Forty degrees.” Glemoor threw a quick glance at his captain then back at his instruments. “Forty-five. Hull stress increasing, Captain. Approaching tolerance limits…”

“Captain, we’re close,” said Bat-Levi, “and if we pass too close to the gravity well…”

“Fifty!” shouted Glemoor, the Naxeran’s calm breaking at last. “Impulse power at three-quarters! Hull stress at tolerance! Captain!”

Almost there.Garrett blinked sweat from her eyes and winced at the sting. Come on, girl, come on, don’t let me down, don’t quit on me now.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

An OriginalPublication of POCKET BOOKS

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This book is for Dean Wesley Smith—editor, writer, mentor, colleague—and for David, with love, always.

Historian’s Note

This story is set in the year 2336, forty-three years after the presumed death of Captain James T. Kirk aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise-B in Star Trek Generations,and twenty-eight years before the launch of the Enterprise-D in “Encounter at Farpoint.”

Prologue

Ishep was dreaming, and that should have been a mercy because bad dreams always end. Then Ishep would have awakened and known that this was all in his head.

In his dream, his father, the Night King, wasn’t in his tomb deep underground in a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the Red Mountains, and Ishep should have been happy. In his dream, there should have been bright sunlight and grass so green and beautiful his heart hurt—and there was, and it did—and he should have stood with his father by the shores of a deep, clear lake that was clean and still—and he did, because Ishep, who was a bastard, had loved his father more than Prince Nartal, who was First Son and a coward, ever had. But Ishep knew everything was wrong, and it was as if his dream knew that, too. In the next instant, the sky melted, and the lake turned to stone, but Ishep’s heart still hurt because his father, the Night King, was dead.

He saw then that his father had no eyes. The worms had eaten them. One worm that was very thick and clotted with black blood oozed from the hole where his father’s right eye had been and slithered down his father’s cheek, leaving a single, glistening trail like that of a tear. The skin over his father’s face was brown and tight as old leather with age and decay, and flaps hung in tatters like torn curtains because the bones of his skull had ripped through as easily as…well, as easily as sharp bone slices through wasted skin thinner than paper.

Yet, as Ishep watched, his father moved, shuddered…then groaned. The naked white bone of his jaw unhinged, and his mouth dropped open. For a wild moment, Ishep thought that maybe it was all a mistake and his father wasn’t dead after all and Prince Nartal hadn’t left Ishep behind, lost and alone, in the tombs, but that this was some horrible game because this is a dream, ithas to be a dream, I don’t want to die down here.But then his father vomited—no, no, something thick as a man’s arm and milky like the bloated belly of a rotted fish bulged and writhed in his father’s mouth, like a fat, obscene tongue. The thing spooled out from the dark place inside his father and drooled over his jaw, and Ishep saw the thing’s muscles undulate and ripple like waves beneath its too-white scales.