“Your mission is to complete this device?” Mekrikuk asked.

“No,” the man said simply. “My mission is to help those who wish to reconnect the Romulan Empire with its progenitors. It is not unlike the construction of the kal-toh.”

Suddenly, the walls seemed to come alive, the images and people displayed there disappearing. Mekrikuk saw that the walls were now covered with beetles, their chitinous mandibles and carapaces beating in an insistent rhythm. As the carpet of insects moved inexorably toward the Vulcan, he looked at Mekrikuk and said, “To help me would be logical, Tenakruvek.”

Mekrikuk shook himself out of his telepathic trance, the insect-covered walls dissolving into the harsher reality of the cellmaze. He saw the crowd leaning in toward the new Romulan, grasping and pulling, stealing from and bruising the unconscious man further. He was sure to be dead within moments.

“H’ta fvau, riud ihir taortuu u’ irrhae alhu kuhaos’ellaer tivh temarr!”Mekrikuk’s voice thundered through the cellspace, and his outburst had the desired effect. The prisoners, having just been duly warned that the next person to touch the new prisoner would be eaten for dinner that night, backed away, some fearfully, some sullenly, some respectfully.

Mekrikuk approached and knelt beside the far-too-warm man who lay on the stone before him. He turned the man’s bruised, battered head and felt his weak, thready pulse. Even though the man looked like a Romulan, he could see that this was the very same Vulcan he had seen in his mind-link.

The man whom he knew was not named Rukath, but Tuvok.

“I will help you,” Mekrikuk said, hoping that Varyet was watching him from the Halls of Erebus.

Chapter Ten

U.S.S. TITAN

“This isn’t exactly what I signed up for,” Kent Norellis said, watching the streams of green bubbles that rose like inverted meteor showers inside his glass.

Cadet Zurin Dakal looked up from his tray of sushi—an obsession he had acquired during his freshman year at Starfleet Academy—and was relieved to see that Norellis, seated at right angles to Dakal on the left, had apparently addressed the comment to no one at the table in particular. Dakal had feared that he personally would be expected to respond to the ensign’s newest complaint, and that was one challenge he was not yet ready to undertake.

All things considered, Dakal knew he should have felt honored to be here. Not only did he have the distinction of being the first Cardassian in Starfleet, not only was his Academy class the first to begin in the aftermath of the Dominion War, not only was he one of only four fourth-year Starfleet cadets privileged to fulfill his required field studies on a new starship at the start of its mission, but now he also seemed to have been unofficially adopted by what was quickly emerging as a tightly-knit and bewilderingly eclectic group of science officers and non-commissioned specialists.

But while he had accepted the group’s invitation to join them for dinner at the Blue Table—the crew’s nickname for the informal weekly gathering of members from the science department in the mess hall, a custom which had started a month prior, after the first of them had come aboard at Utopia—he felt guarded and wary among aliens his kind had so recently conspired to dominate. Dakal was far more comfortable sitting quietly and observing the group dynamics among the gathered scientists than he was participating in their discussions. It was only prudent, he believed, to approach this new experience as he had every other since leaving Lejonis—with caution.

“Kent, what are you going on about?” asked Lieutenant Pazlar, who was seated opposite Norellis, on Dakal’s right. A Martian aquifer fizz—naturally carbonated water drawn directly from the subsurface permafrost outside Utopia Planitia—and a Tarkovian broadleaf salad sat on the table before her.

“Romulus,” Norellis said. “It’s just not the kind of mission I expected this ship to go on, much less on its maiden voyage. And it certainly isn’t what I had in mind when I chose my scientific specialties at the Academy.”

Next to Norellis, Lieutenant Eviku, one of the ship’s xenobiologists, turned his hairless, swept-back head toward him. “Not this again,” the Arkenite said. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t use these dinners as a venue for your complaints?” Eviku’s domed forehead dipped toward Norellis with a slight air of menace.

Norellis held up his hands. “Hey, I’m not complaining. I’m just feeling a little…impatient, is all. After all the emphasis the captain put into outfitting and crewing this ship for exploration, sending us to Romulus feels, I dunno, like a slap in the face. It’s like we’re all on hold until this political nonsense is over.”

“For what it’s worth, Kent, I don’t completely disagree,” Pazlar said. “Don’t get me wrong. Since I joined Starfleet, I’ve had to deal on the fly with everything from a major war to a full-blown, planetary-scale disaster. So I’ll cope with whatever weirdness Titan’s missions throw at us with only minimal griping. All the same, I’d rather be charting unexplored solar systems and new stellar phenomena than settling power-sharing treaties.”

“I second that,”Dr. Cethente said, situated next to Pazlar. Cethente’s simulated voice, translated from the bioelectric impulses that constituted its normal mode of communication, emerged from the combadge belted around the center of its unusual body with an undertone of wind chimes.

The only nonhumanoid scientist present at the Blue Table, astrophysicist Se’al Cethente Qas was also the one that Dakal found the most disquieting—though not for the reasons some of the crew seemed to be reacting to Dr. Ree or the other nonhumanoids aboard Titan,none of whom bothered Dakal at all. What troubled him was the fact that Dr. Cethente looked suspiciously like a lamp that had once belonged to Dakal’s paternal grandmother back on Prime. Cethente was a Syrath, whose exoskeletal body had the same fluted quality that was prevalent in Cardassian design. The astrophysicist was shaped, in fact, a great deal like a three-dimensional sculpture of the symbol of the Union: a high dome on top, tapering downward almost to a point before bottoming out in a diamond formation that Dakal knew was the Syrath secondary sense cluster. Like the primary cluster that was the dome, the diamond was dotted with bioluminescent bulges, glowing with the telltale green light of its senses at work, soaking up information about its environment omnidirectionally. Four slender, intricately jointed arachnid legs extended in four directions from the body’s narrowest point, giving Cethente a solid footing on the deck, while an equal number of tentacles emerged at need from equidistant apertures just under the dome.

In repose, and with its tentacles retracted, Cethente seemed quite the inanimate object. But to Dakal, the doctor looked so much like the lamp in his grandmother’s dwelling—and which had so consistently unnerved him as a child—that after first being introduced to it, Dakal briefly suspected the Federation of having sent a Syrath operative to spy on his grandmother.

Norellis took a sip of his bubbly drink—some form of synthale, Dakal suspected—and turned to the Bajoran who sat quietly at the head of the table, directly opposite Dakal. “You’ve been conspicuously silent on this subject, Commander.”

Without looking up from his salad, Jaza smiled and said, “I’m still collecting data.”