Sword of Damocles

Geoffrey Thorne

  What about the ship? Jaza thought at Y’lira Modan. What about Titan?

  Modan? he thought at her again. What about Titan?

  She hesitated. The black ocean seemed to swell and roll around him. For an illusion created in the pocket of his mind, it certainly felt as if he could drown here.

  “You know,” she said, still not wanting to face it herself. “You saw.”

  The memory accosted him then; he’d seen what had looked like an impossibly vast wall of fire sweeping over the ship, consuming it utterly. He remembered Troi screaming.

   “Something’s happened! I can’t feel them! I can’t feel any of them!”

  But he still needed to hear Modan say it-needed to anchor his recollections to reality-for her and for him.

   What happened toTitan, Modan?he thought again, relentless. What happened toTitan?

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either 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.

  Copyright © 2007 by CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. STAR TREK and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from CBS Studios Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover design by John Vairo Jr.; illustration by Cliff Nielsen;

  3D rendering of ship by Ellery Connell

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-3110-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3110-4

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com/st

  http://www.startrek.com

   For Susan, who holds my hand

   For Donal, who gave good counsel

   For Chris and Barbette, who opened the door

Acknowledgments

  This novel could not have been written without the stellar preceding works of Michael A. Martin, Andy Mangels, and Christopher Bennett or the assistance, both literary and moral, of Dayton Ward and Keith R.A. DeCandido.

  It would never have come to fruition without the patience and steady hand of editor Marco Palmieri, who must surely need a massive hair transplant to replace the mane he pulled out over my eccentricities.

  A special, special thanks to Sean Tourangeau for his beautiful and truly inspiring design for the starship Titan.I hope I manage to put a smile on his face as wide as the one he put on mine.

  And of course, none of it would have been possible without Mr. Roddenberry and the rest of the crew giving us all such a wonderful and easy birth.

  The Great Bird lives.

  IDIC.

Historian’s Note

  This tale is set approximately three months after the events described in Orion’s Hounds.

Part One

   We speak it here, ’neath starlight’s sheen,

   One truth that all who live must learn.

   From first to last and all between

   Time is the fire in which we burn.

  -El-Aurian proverb

Epilogue

   The blaze consumed everything it touched, scorching its way through the air and the foliage like wraithwinds fabled in the prophecies. It slithered between the boulders, devoured the vegetation in monstrous serpentine undulations that left only tracks of dark ash in their wake. What it touched it consumed utterly and it touched everything-everything beyond his haven of stones.

  There was thunder out there too, though the sky was essentially clear. Thunder, or something very like. And there were other noises, low and distant rumblings, that made him think of amphitheaters full of chattering crowds.

  He wasn’t sure the sky should be that particular shade of copper, but then he wasn’t really sure of anything just now. Not the lush and sultry vegetation growing in leafy explosions of amethyst beyond the fire, spiraling in great spires toward the amber sky; not the smell of cinnamon that seemed to permeate the air; not the strangely diffuse light from the hot white orb of the local star or the oddly granular texture of the soil beneath him. Nothing was right. Nothing was certain, nothing but the fire.

  Volatile gases or some other fuel kept these flames fed, kept them dancing and licking around the trunks and stones.

  Watching the display, feeling the feverish heat and tremors, even tasting his own blood on the edges of his tongue, he found himself unable to muster the proper concern. It was as if all that impending doom was bearing down on someone else, someone in a child’s night tale, and he was safely elsewhere, free to focus only on the firestorm’s hypnotic motions and kaleidoscopic beauty.

  His mind sought the memory of the moment of his arrival and was happy to find it missing. Like his identity, the event that had left him here, slowly roasting in the encroaching heat, was nowhere to be seen.

   Concussion?

  Somehow he managed to assemble enough facts to form a hypothesis; there had been an explosion, one to which he’d been far too close, and which had taken its toll on his memories. He remembered hurtling through the air and the sudden crunching stop.

  He had been somewhere else just before that, somewhere small and cool and filled with other people. He was mostly sure of that.

  Was it a room? A vehicle of some kind? Who were the people? Where were they?

  Half-formed images- blue or red or gold on black-snippets of conversation- I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like it, Commander-something about a woman made of gold- or maybe that was just the color of her hair?-even music- strange trilling melodies, a chorus of flutes-sparked in his mind and faded again before he could force them to cohere.

  Yes, definitely a concussion. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know that.

  The confusion and the gaps in his awareness were somehow more troubling than the physical pain but not by much. He shifted, hoping to ease at least some of his discomfort, but only succeeded in making it worse.

  Something significant had broken inside him, he could feel it, something that throbbed horribly when he didn’t move and stabbed at him when he did. A broken rib certainly, perhaps two or three.

   Oh,came the wry thought as his lips curled into a grin. Oh, that’s not good.

  He still lay where he’d fallen. Luck had wedged him behind a ring of the oddly conical rocks, his back against something rough and unyielding. He was still close enough to the blaze to see his death coming but far enough away to pretend that the meeting would not happen soon.

  Unsettling images bubbled uselessly up again and again from somewhere at the bottom of his mind. He saw the stern visage of an older man whose name did not arrive with him. The face was familiar-gray eyes, deep set, skin like a well-used cloth sack, wrinkles that became chasms that might have been the result of too much smiling or too much time in the desert sun. It was a familiar face, yes, but also still unknown. The stern man was some kind of teacher, he knew that much, someone to trust. The rest was mud.

  He shifted, instinctively trying again for a more comfortable position, and instantly regretted it.