“Let me talk to her,” said Ra-Havreii softly.

  There was no time to argue with the engineer or to express their surprise at his stepping up in this way. Either Troi would come back from wherever it was she had gone inside and walk out of here, or she wouldn’t and Keru would carry her.

  The engineer bent close to Troi, cradling her in an oddly fatherly gesture, and began to speak into her ear so softly that Vale couldn’t make out any of what he said.

  She heard the words Rikerand aliveand she might have heard the phrase Rhea or Oberon, but she couldn’t be sure of either. Regardless, after a few seconds of listening, Troi’s posture relaxed into his arms, the life returned to her eyes, and she looked up at Vale.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said at last.

  The damage was worse than any of them had imagined. The bodies of Orishans, large and small, some with wings, some with sluglike protuberances instead of lower legs, lay crushed and broken all around them.

  As they made their way upward from the food storage bins, the extent of the destruction only widened. The few glimpses any of them had had of the subterranean civilization had shown it to be a masterwork of smooth honeycombed arches, massive open causeways spanning from one side of a great cavern to the other, lights and sounds and technologies both strange and intriguing even to their practiced eyes.

  Now all there was to see was death.

  There was smoke everywhere, belching up in huge exhalations through the cavernous cracks in the floors. Great shards of the blue crystals, some as large as the missing shuttle, had broken through the walls, in some places exposing new fissures that reached all the way up to the surface.

  “We’re almost half a kilometer down,” said Ra-Havreii, staring up into one of the enormous tunnels.

  “Look at the sky,” said Keru, though he needn’t have bothered.

  It wasn’t fire, but it did a damned good imitation. Gigantic undulating tongues of it crossed and crisscrossed the sky like some sort of enormous net. Bolts of something like lightning ripped down at the surface, their impacts unseen but their resulting destruction obvious to all.

  And behind it all the strange undulating orb of Erykon’s Eye showing soft and green through the intervening veil of fire.

  If this was the author of the cycle of destruction that had plagued Orisha, it was small wonder that their fear of its attention had driven them to such lengths. To have that hanging over you all the time? Believing it could see every thought, every action, and would punish any misstep with the fires of heaven?

  Vale couldn’t bring herself to hate the Orishans anymore or even muster anger. All she had left was a growing sympathy for an entire civilization that had been so abused, and not a little awe at the sight above her.

  “Is that what you and Jaza saw before?” Troi asked, breaking off to look at Ra-Havreii, at anything, really, other than that terrible beautiful sky.

  “Not exactly,” said Ra-Havreii, puzzlement seeming to win out over all his other concerns. “It seems the destructive field is between the planet and the Eye rather than being projected by it.”

  “We have to stop this,” said Vale quietly. “Whatever else we do, we have to shut this down.”

  It was slow going making their way back to the Spire’s control chamber, with the party having to shift the corpses of dead soldiers from their path or navigate around a sudden chasm that was filled with exposed cables writhing like serpents and spewing lethal energies in random directions. Vale’s memory of the trip down and the near uniformity of the details in the structure itself made for many wrong turns and dead ends.

  Finally they won through to find the place as empty of living Orishans as everywhere else but crowded nonetheless with their bodies.

  The chamber was more or less intact, perhaps having been built with the intention of surviving this sort of cataclysm, with all of its machinery humming and buzzing away.

  The visual displays showed the Spire’s counterparts, now clearly arranged all over the planet, if the multitude of dots blinking on the holographic map were any indication. Whatever this thing had been built to perform was still very much under way.

  Ra-Havreii wanted a close look at the console, finding much of the technology familiar somehow despite the alien pictograms dotting the instrument panels and flickering on and off on every screen.

  “Go ahead,” said Vale.

  As he approached the unattended control console, Ra-Havreii literally stumbled over the tricorders the soldiers had stripped from his hands, still working.

  As the others shifted the bodies and searched for signs of any survivors, Ra-Havreii scanned and examined the alien device.

  “You said they called this the Veil?” he asked at last.

  “Yes,” grunted Vale as she helped Keru move another body from where it had fallen. She, Troi, and Keru moved nearly all of the Orishans into several rows where they could at least rest in apparent repose rather than in the contorted positions in which they’d been found.

  Vale knew it was a useless gesture in some respects. Nothing they had seen had indicated the Orishans cared one way or another about the bodies of the dead.

   Burials are for the living, her mother would say. She understood it now in a way she hadn’t before. Her mother had been in her mind a lot lately, she realized. Now she wondered why.

  “You notice anything?” Keru asked as he hefted his side of the last dead Orishan. He kept his voice low so the others wouldn’t hear. “About the bodies, I mean.”

  “You mean that they haven’t been crushed or burned or whatever like the ones farther down?” said Vale. Keru nodded, dropping the arm he had been using to pull the last soldier into position. “Yes. I noticed.”

  “Suicide,” said Troi, coming up behind them. Keru actually blushed when he realized she’d heard their exchange. “Mass ritual suicide.”

  Vale understood. The Orishans had failed. They had failed to protect their people. They had failed to appease their god. Rather than face Erykon’s awful judgment, they had taken the verdict into their own talons. Was it some final act of defiance on their part or simply acquiescence to what they perceived to be their fate?

  In either case, as she had sat confined in her little cell, Troi had felt each and every death, felt the terror and bleak acceptance of their deity’s will. That more than anything had immobilized her mind. Fear was one thing after all-eventually it could be processed and put away-but the absence of hope? That was worse than dying.

  They stood there for a moment, taking in the sight of all the dead Orishans. There was rumbling in the distance that none of them mistook for thunder. Only Ra-Havreii, occupied as he was with the alien machinery, seemed unaffected by the atmosphere of mass death that still hung over the place.

  “Commander,” he said, looking up from his work. There was something in his eyes none of the others had seen in their time with him. It was a sort of sparkle, as if a giant fire was raging in his skull that could only be seen through the tiniest of keyholes. “I think I may know what-”

  Something large and dark and possessed of an extra set of arms dropped, chittering and screeching, from the darkness above them. It hit Ra-Havreii hard, knocking the wind out of him, its weight and momentum smashing him first into the control console and then to the floor.

  “You!” said A’yujae’Tak, turning on the others even as she lifted Ra-Havreii’s limp form in one massive talon. “You have brought this upon us! The Eye slept until you desecrated this creation!”

  Before the others could move or speak, she launched the engineer’s body at them like a missile. The Mater herself was close behind. Even as Ra-Havreii crashed into Troi and sent her flying, Keru had stepped in to grapple with the enraged alien.