It was Centurion Rhai, whose still and lifeless chest was now a charred, bloody ruin.

He heard several other volleys of disruptor fire originating from different areas of the ship, each of them ending abruptly, and each punctuated by the all‑too‑brief silences that preceded the next salvo. Then the barrages ceased, and the entire ship was suddenly wreathed in a tomb‑like silence.

Taith couldn’t look away from his commanding officer’s vacant, staring eyes. A feeling of despair more profound than any he had ever experienced before engulfed his every sense, swamping his soul as though it were the flood plain of the Great River Apnex.

Weeping, he raised his disruptor, placed its muzzle firmly against the base of his chin, and squeezed the trigger.

Theras wept like a disconsolate child after the echoes of the final blasts died away.

Shran could see the Aenar’s tears glistening even in the near darkness of the Romulan vessel’s narrow passageway. The sound of the other man’s sobs was sorely trying what little remained of his patience.

“Well, did it work?” Shran asked, addressing the entire team through his suit’s com system. The psionic bond he shared with Jhamel suddenly stretched taut, then sounded such a deep note of grief within his mind as to inform Shran that his question had been unnecessary.

I need to know for sure,Shran thought. We can’t risk exposing ourselves to their weapons again until I do.

“Give him a moment, Shran,”said Reed, who was standing at Theras’s other side. “Can’t you see he’s been traumatized by what you’ve asked him to do? He’s apacifist, for pity’s sake.”

Shran took a step toward Reed, his fists clenched and his antennae thrusting aggressively toward his faceplate like enraged eels from one of the Zhevra continent’s cold and brackish lakes. “Don’t remind me, Lieutenant.”

“Gentlemen, I suggest you both give Theras a moment of quiet to enable him to collect his thoughts,”T’Pol said in an infuriatingly calm, reasonable tone, a mannerism that vividly reminded Shran why his people distrusted hers so viscerally.

Just before Shran succumbed to a nearly irresistible impulse to grab Theras by the shoulders and shake him, the Aenar spoke, “The Romulan soldiers…will not trouble us further.”

“You telepathically deceived them into firing upon one another,”T’Pol said, not asking a question.

Theras sobbed again. “Yes. And the last of them…just took his own life. Moments ago.”

Reed laid a comforting hand on Theras’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry this was necessary, Theras.”

Shran felt his antennae rising in surprise and pleasure. He did it. The coward actuallydid something.It suddenly occurred to Shran that he might have very badly misjudged Theras; he pushed the thought aside, however, in favor of making it his absolute top priority to complete Jhamel’s rescue, along with that of the other remaining Aenar captives.

After that, the boarding party itself would still have to get off this ship and return safely to Enterprise;he knew that this might prove challenging, since this ship’s bridge crew remained alive, and still could potentially put up a fight should Theras’s telepathy somehow cease concealing the rescue team from their notice.

“Let’s not waste any more time coddling him,” Shran said, addressing both Reed and T’Pol. Then he turned to face the nearest of the two pressure‑suited MACOs. Though their faces were shrouded in darkness, Shran knew they must have been as eager as he was to get the group moving again toward the Romulan vessel’s transporter, from which Jhamel and the others could be sent to Enterprise.

“What will become of us now?”Jhamel said inside his brain, her mind still uncharacteristically disordered because of the sedatives she’d been given, her thoughts feeling jumbled and chaotic. “Too, too much dying here.”

“We still have a job to finish here,” Shran added as he tried to ignore the unfathomable sadness that now flowed freely into him from Jhamel’s obviously still drug‑muzzled brain.

Theras trudged on with the rest of the group. He felt completely dead inside. And wasn’t he, really, so far as his society was concerned? After all, he had become something that his people regarded as anathema: he was now a killer.

A murderer.

He struggled to keep his concentration focused on the twists and turns of the corridors and passageways that he recalled from the minds of the dead Romulans. The route that led to the ship’s transporter.

Theras was thankful, at least, that the boarding party had not come close enough to any of the slain Romulans who now lay scattered throughout the vessel so that his suit’s night‑vision apparatus could reveal them in any amount of detail. But he knew that he would be unable to escape absorbing the horrible visual imagery of what he had done from the thoughts of the other members of the boarding party. Although he recognized that it was cowardly, he nevertheless hoped that the Romulan corpses would never become more than death‑sprawled silhouettes in his memory; even that, he suspected, would be nightmare enough to last for the rest of his days.

He was beginning to be distracted, however, by the feelings of grave apprehension he sensed coming from Enterprise–in space, somewhere near the transport ship–as her crew bravely held the line against the weaponry of two Romulan warships, risking death to enable the rescue party to complete its mission. He wished he could further influence the crews of the Romulan warships, inducing them to believe that Enterprisehad departed, but he was growing steadily more tired, and even now felt wearier than he had in recent memory. He felt that he had already stretched his telepathic talents to their limits, and perhaps even a good deal past them.

Another thing he found disturbing was the sluggish nature of the thought‑auras of the Aenar captives, especially those of his bondmates, Vishri, Shenar, and Jhamel. Had the Romulans drugged them because they feared they might contemplate taking actions such as those he, Theras, had eventually taken?

Defensive actions, such as temporarily “blinding” the Romulans to the presence of the boarding party.

And offensive actions–such as causing the Romulans to slaughter one another while believing they were striking down invaders.

Would Shenar even have contemplated doing such a thing, had the Romulans left him able to do it?Theras thought as the team finally reached the darkened Romulan transporter room and herded him and the rest of the Aenar inside. Would Vishri?

Would Jhamel?

Malcolm Reed had expected to have to spend perhaps a few minutes puzzling out the Romulan transporter’s scanning, range, targeting, and transmission controls, after which he expected to execute a short series of swift beam‑outs back to Enterprise.

What he hadn’texpected was to discover that the now‑deceased Romulan guards had utterly destroyed the transporter with their disruptors, melting both the console and the stage to slag, no doubt to prevent their Aenar prisoners from getting off the ship once they had gotten free of the ship’s detention area.

“What now?”Shran said, exasperated.

Reed sighed. “What about Theras? Can’t he send our coordinates to Enterprisetelepathically?”

“ Perhaps,” said Shran, gesturing toward the environmental‑suited Aenar. “If he hadn’t gone catatonic right after the firefight, that is.”

Reed turned and saw that Theras had slumped next to one of the walls. He sat motionless and limp, resembling an empty environmental suit that someone had neglected to stow properly.

“Firefight,” Reed said with a humorless laugh. “It was a slaughter.”