Chapter One

Stardate 50368.0

The coffee cup suffused Captain Karen Blaylock’s hands with a cheery warmth as she strode purposefully onto the bridge of her ship, the Excelsior‑class starship Slayton.Though the alpha watch wasn’t due to begin for another ten minutes, she wasn’t at all surprised to see several key bridge officers already hard at work at their consoles, which hummed and beeped agreeably.

Commander Ernst Roget, her executive officer, turned toward her in the command chair and favored her with a reserved smile. “Captain on the bridge,” he said, vacating the seat for her.

Heads turned toward Blaylock, distracted momentarily from their vigilance. These were good officers, science and engineering specialists all, and she hated allowing command protocol to interfere with their work, even momentarily. She often envied them their singleminded dedication to discovery. How ironic, she thought, to have allowed her command responsibilities to come between her and the very thing that had brought her out to the galactic hinterlands in the first place: the pursuit of pure knowledge.

Blaylock nodded a silent as you were,and each crewmember quickly returned to the work at hand. She took her seat and sipped her coffee.

Commander Cortin Zweller approached Blaylock from the science station on the bridge’s starboard side. His thick shock of white hair was belied by the boyish twinkle in his eye. During the nearly four months he had served as chief science officer, he had proven to be a valuable member of the Slaytonteam. Though by no means a brilliant researcher, Zweller was well‑liked by the other science specialists, an administrator apparently gifted with the good sense not to step on the toes of his better‑trained subordinates–unless absolutely necessary.

“The anomaly still seems to be hiding from us,” Zweller said. “So far, at least.”

Blaylock sighed, disappointed. The Slaytonhad last made long‑range sensor contact with the subspace anomaly eight days previously, but had turned up nothing since. Several weeks before that, the Federation’s Argus Array subspace observatory had detected intermittent but extremely powerful waves of subspace distortion that seemed to be coming from the region of space for which the Slaytonwas now headed. Unfortunately, the phenomenon had neither lasted long enough–nor repeated itself regularly enough–to reveal much else.

How wonderful it would have been, Blaylock reflected, to have discovered an entirely new physical phenomenon while en route to a dreary diplomatic appointment on gods‑forsaken Chiaros IV. But Blaylock knew it would be just her luck for the anomaly to return briefly–and then vanish forever–while she and her crew were preoccupied with the tedium of galactic politics.

The captain turned toward Lieutenant Glebuk, the Antedean helmsman. In the year since Glebuk had come aboard, Blaylock had assiduously avoided asking the galley replicators to create sushi, one of her favorite foods. Glebuk, who was essentially a two‑meter‑tall humanoid fish, was notably edgy about such things.

Like most of her kind, Glebuk would have found the rigors of interstellar travel intolerable but for the effects of the cortical stimulator she wore on her neck. Its constant output of vertigo‑nullifying neural impulses kept her from lapsing into a self‑protective catatonic state during long space voyages. Despite this handicap–or perhaps because of it–Glebuk was one of the best helm officers Blaylock had ever worked with.

“What’s our present ETA at the Chiaros system?” Blaylock asked Glebuk.

The helmsman fixed an unblinking, monocular gaze on the captain and whispered into the tiny universal translator mounted in the collar of her hydration suit. “The Slaytonwill reach the precise center of the Gulf in approximately fifty‑three minutes. We will arrive at the fringes of the Chiaros system some six minutes later.”

Blaylock nodded. Almost the precise center of the Geminus Gulf,she thought with a tinge of awe. Three wide, nearly empty sectors. Sixty light‑years across, all together. Nearly two weeks travel time at maximum warp.Even after a decade of starship command, she found it hard to wrap her mind around such enormous distances.

During the long voyage into the Gulf, Blaylock had had plenty of time to familiarize herself with the region. More than enough time, actually, since so little was actually known about it, other than its size, location, and strategic significance–or rather its lack thereof. It waswell‑known, however, that most of its sparse stellar population were not of the spectral types associated with habitable worlds. In the Geminus Gulf, young supergiant “O” type stars predominated–the sort of suns whose huge mass blows them apart only a few hundred million years into their lifespans–rather than the cooler, more stable variety, such as the “G” type star that sired Earth and its immediate planetary neighbors.

But the Geminus Gulf was important in at least one respect; it lay just outside the boundaries of both the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire, and it had yet to come formally into the sphere of influence of either power. Nearly smack in the center of the Gulf’s unexplored vastness lay one inhabited world, the fourth planet of the politically nonaligned Chiaros system. Under recently negotiated agreements, neither the Federation nor the Romulans could establish a permanent presence in the Gulf until invited to do so by a spacefaring civilization native to the Gulf. Blaylock was only too aware that her job was to do everything the Prime Directive would allow to obtain that invitation from the Chiarosans, who comprised the only warp‑capable culture yet known in the Gulf, and thus were the key to the entire region, and to whatever awaited discovery within its confines.

Never mind that there isn’t anythere there,Blaylock thought, absurdly reminded of the 20th‑century human writer Gertrude Stein’s often‑mischaracterized description of an empty region on Earth.

Settling back into her chair, Blaylock smiled to herself. She had already reviewed the Chiarosan government’s preliminary application for Federation membership. Less than two weeks from now, the planet’s general population would formally vote on whether to invite in the Romulans or the Federation. Fortunately, since the pro‑Federation position was being staunchly backed by the planet’s extremely popular ruling regime, it seemed to Blaylock that her mission was already all but accomplished.

Blaylock therefore felt amply justified in allowing her thoughts to return to the matter of the mysterious subspace distortions–and their possible causes. Now that they had piqued her curiosity, she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the bridge for a diplomatic conference whose results were already foreordained.

“Just how important is the captain’s presence at this conference?” Blaylock said, turning toward Roget.

Seated in the chair beside Blaylock’s, Roget leaned forward, his mahogany‑colored brow wrinkled in evident confusion. “It’s crucial, Captain. The natives of Chiaros IV are a warrior people. If you’re not there, they’re likely to take offense.”

Her exec’s discomfiture brought a small smile to her lips. “Don’t panic, Ernie. I’m not planning on going AWOL. What I mean is, how important is it that the captain be present with the first away team?”

Roget appeared to relax at that. Stroking his jaw, he said, “It’s not critical, I suppose. You have to remember, though, that the Chiarosans are very hierarchical and protocol‑conscious.”

“So I noticed,” Blaylock said. “They’ve planned just about every minute of our itinerary while we’re on their planet. And we won’t even meet First Protector Ruardh until our third day on the planet. It’s all just lower‑level functionaries until then.”