After the fight-there was no way they could be taken without one-Vale struggled to remain conscious as she and Troi were carried off in different directions by their insectoid captors.

  As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she tried to get a sense of what was happening.

  She was being carried. The bug held her close in two of its four arms, pressed tight to its abdomen, as it scrambled along what looked like an access tunnel of some sort. The dimensions were only slightly bigger than those of her captor, forcing it and its fellows to run single file.

  She could hear them all chattering, skittering along the hard smooth surface- chikkachikkachikkachikka-and was happy when the darkness pulled her down away from the sound.

  She woke again, briefly, now slung like a sack over the soldier’s shoulder. It might have been the same one that had carried her down (she felt it was down somehow) or it might not. They really did all look almost exactly the same.

  This time she got a flash of a huge empty space, a high vaulted ceiling made of the same ceramic that entwined the Spire. Purple and black Orishans crawled everywhere along its surface, climbing in and out of more hexagonal openings, some carrying bundles of some sort, some stopping briefly to chatter at one of their fellows. Some were bigger than the others. Some had wings, clear and veiny, that reminded her of dragonflies.

   I’m underground, she realized, still fighting the losing battle to remain conscious. That’s where the cities are. They built down to get away from the sky. Then the darkness took her again.

  The first thing she thought when she woke was, Deanna! Where have they taken Deanna!?

  The second thing she thought was, Why am I still alive?

  “Do not fight, creature,” said a voice that reminded her of a handful of nails being scraped across a sheet of metal. “Stand, but do not fight.”

  With difficulty she pushed herself off her belly, up to her knees, and then finally to her feet.

  She was not prepared for what she saw. This creature towered over the other Orishans by a good two meters. It was a darker shade of the ubiquitous violet that seemed to be the theme on Orisha. It had the same extra arms and the same armored exoskeleton, but there were bright markings on this one and, in places, protrusions that looked like small bulbous inverted bowls. Its face was more angular than the rounded ones of the soldiers, and both sets of its eyes blazed yellow instead of white.

  “I am A’yujae’Tak,” it said. “I am the Mater of the [possible meaning: guardian] caste. What are you?”

  On every visible surface, Orishans scuttled between giant viewing screens depicting at least two of the Spire’s siblings-one rising from the center of a lake and the other was near what looked like a volcano.

  Notations of some sort appeared and vanished at regular intervals beside each image. Elsewhere in the chamber technicians manipulated what were so obviously power control systems, she almost laughed. The technology was alien, certainly, partly ceramic, partly organic, and partly utilizing the unknown force fields for various purposes.

  Vale could actually see some of the fields flash briefly into the visual spectrum, shift color, and then vanish again.

  Still, as alien as all of it was, she had been in rooms like this regularly for most of her adult life.

  This was the power control center, the same as the engineering deck on any starship. The giant Orishan version of a warp reactor protruding from the distant ceiling was the final giveaway. The oscillating blue-white plasma flowing from two sources into a single pulsating reactor core was also familiar.

   What the hell were these people doing?

  When she didn’t respond right away, one of the soldiers that flanked A’yujae’Tak prodded Vale’s ribs with its lance.

  “Speak when spoken to, creature,” it said. “Obey the Mater.”

  She gave her name, her rank, and the name of her vessel. She tried to answer the flurry of obvious questions that followed as best she could, but she was never certain that the Orishans grasped all of it. There was some aspect of their communication that the universal translator couldn’t grip.

  “You are from above?” said A’yujae’Tak at last. “From another of Erykon’s creations?”

  “In a way,” said Vale. It was obvious this creature believed that the universe and everything in it had been created by its god. “We travel from creation to creation, seeking understanding.”

  “Travel, how?” said A’yujae’Tak. “My seekers found you in the Shattered Place using this device to direct waves at Erykon’s Mirror.”

  The device was obviously Ra-Havreii’s tricorder, but Erykon’s Mirror? Did she mean the warp reactor? These creatures had moved fast, naming both the crash site and the wreckage and folding them into their mythology in only a few days.

  That didn’t stack up in Vale’s mind somehow, but she couldn’t say why. “We were only examining it,” she said.

  “How did you come there?” said the Mater. “The Shattered Place is [possible meaning: taboo] except to those the Mater allows.”

  Vale was thinking that maybe telling her about the battle with the watchdog ship wasn’t the best idea when it struck her that A’yujae’Tak should have already known about that. She should at least have known about the watchdog’s destruction. Why didn’t she? Why didn’t she already know about the shuttle crash and about her own people being obliterated along with Titan?

  “It’s complicated,” she said finally.

  “You have wave devices that we do not know,” said A’yujae’Tak, holding up the tricorder in one talon and the phasers in two of her others. “Weapons that do not kill.”

  “We are peaceful explorers,” said Vale. “We try our best not to kill anything if we can avoid it.”

  This seemed to please A’yujae’Tak. Vale wasn’t sure how she knew that, only that an air of approval seemed to radiate briefly from the alien and wash over her. Maybe it was something pheromonal.

  “What do you know of the Eye?” said A’yujae’Tak after a little. When Vale didn’t answer right away, she took another sharp nudge to the sternum.

  “Answer, creature,” said the soldier. “Do as told.”

  “Less than you, I think,” said Vale. They were in dangerous territory, she felt, wandering close to the religious construct that informed this whole society.

  She missed Troi’s presence even more acutely then. Vale was no diplomat, and this genial conversation could become lethal in seconds if she didn’t handle it exactly right.

  “We know so little,” said A’yujae’Tak almost wistfully. “We try to please Erykon, to let the Eye sleep, but so many times we have failed and it has [possible meaning: destroyed] us.”

  “You seem to be doing fine now,” said Vale.

  “Since the time of the [possible meaning: Oracle], yes,” said A’yujae’Tak. “We have grown and we have hidden ourselves. The Eye sleeps and all is well.”

  A’yujae’Tak sailed into a rambling account of Orishan history, describing how, at intervals, the Eye had opened, looked down on whatever the Orishans had built and, not liking the view, had destroyed it utterly. According to her the Eye had split the earth, burned the sky, and generally wreaked apocalyptic havoc on the poor Orishans below. After each apocalypse the survivors would rebuild, believing themselves to have learned from the recent punishment how to modify themselves to suit their god’s desire.

  Only, nothing worked. It sometimes took a hundred years, sometimes four or five, but, no matter what sort of society the Orishans created, when the Eye looked down upon it, that society was doomed.

  The cycle continued for millennia until-and this was fuzzy to Vale-some sort of supernatural presence appeared and spoke to one of A’yujae’Tak’s ancestors. This Oracle guided the birth of current Orishan society, giving them the concepts of castes-Dreamers who did the planning, Hunters who did the fighting, Weavers who did the building, and the Guardians whose job it was to protect the world and its people.