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  For Leonard Nimoy,

  whose legacy will live long

  We all try to live according to our principles, but we cannot control whether history will ­remember us as heroes or villains. ­Sometimes, those of us who take the boldest actions in ­support of our beliefs are destined to be ­remembered as both.

  —Samuel A. Kirk,

  The Forgotten Enterprise (2190)

  2165

  Prologue

  July 8, 2165

  U.S.S. Vol’Rala AGC-7-10

  Captain’s starlog, Thirdmoon 1:4, FLY 474.

  Captain Reshthenar sh’Prenni recording.

  We are making progress in our mission to liberate the remaining victims of the Ware technology. Two phases ago, Captain Reed of Pioneer reported that Science Officer Banerji’s remote awakening protocol successfully revived the captives of a Ware trading post without the need for a boarding operation. This corroborates the previous success reported by Captain th’Zaigrel of Thelasa-vei against a drone fleet. This is heartening news, as Vol’Rala has detected a sizeable Ware facility in orbit of a nearby Fesoan-class planet. It is my hope that we can liberate as many survivors as possible and come one step closer to ending the Ware scourge for good.

  “YES, WELL, I’LL BELIEVE IT when I see it,” Commander Giered Charas said once sh’Prenni shut off the log recorder. The gruff Thalassan leaned back against the starboard tactical console with arms crossed, his thick, rear-mounted antennae spreading skeptically. “The day I trust Banerji’s scientific tricks over good, honest soldiering is the day I hand in my commission. I say we should stick to proven methods—board the station with a strike team and liberate the survivors. We’ve done it twice now with no casualties. My teams have it down to an art.”

  “And each time, the Ware gains more experience with our methods and unleashes some new deadly trick to try to stop us,” Hari Banerji replied from the science station just aft of Charas’s post, rotating his stool to face the executive officer. The lieutenant commander, an older human with brown skin and a fringe of hair as white as an Andorian’s around his otherwise bare pate, replied to Charas’s barbs with his usual avuncular cheer. “We’ve been lucky to avoid fatalities so far—­I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “I’m sick of your human notions of luck. Victory comes from planning and self-control.”

  “Which is exactly the purpose of the awakening ­protocol—to let us take more control of the situation.” Banerji chuckled. “By your own argument, you can’t object to that.”

  “Why, you red-blooded, flat-headed . . .”

  “All right, you two, enough,” sh’Prenni advised them. “You’re setting a bad example, you know.”

  Charas straightened. “Of course, Captain. Apologies.”

  As usual, Banerji’s response was more relaxed. “Sorry, Thenar. You know I’m not much for hand-to-hand, so I have to get my sparring practice in somehow.” Charas restrained himself from a riposte, but his antennae spoke his irritation clearly. Still, Ensigns Breg and zh’Vethris, seated together at the forward console, were chuckling softly at the exchange, and sh’Prenni resisted the urge to join them. Over her left shoulder, Commander ch’Gesrit kept his gaze on the screen above his engineering console, but she could sense amusement in his bioelectric field. The whole bridge crew knew that, for all their endless bickering, Banerji and Charas were more similar than they would ever admit. The science officer was the only human in a crew of Andorians, and the XO was one of the few Thalassan Andorians in the mostly Talish crew. Both men took pleasure in standing out from the crowd. The laughter their arguments provoked only encouraged them to keep up the performance.

  Only Tavrithinn th’Cheen, standing stiffly at portside tactical, remained above the general amusement. “With respect to Mister Banerji,” the lieutenant said in the polished, haughty accent of the Clan of Cheen, “I’m not convinced the Ware is intelligent enough to learn from our tactics. I’m honestly starting to get bored with fighting mindless machines. The faster we can wrap this up and take on a real challenge—like the Klingons, perhaps—the happier I’ll be.”

  “I’m sure the innocent victims of the Ware appreciate your concern for their plight, Vrith,” Kitazoanra zh’Vethris replied in her usual wry, soft-spoken tones.

  “Of course I meant after we liberate them, Zoanra,” th’Cheen told the young navigator. “I’m sure they’d agree that the less time we waste, the better.”

  Zh’Vethris pursed her exquisite lips, unable to dispute the sentiment. Beneath the bridge crew’s banter was a keen awareness of the suffering and death they had seen over the past few moons, all in service to the mindless demands of the Ware.

  The threat had first been discovered fourteen Lor’veln cycles ago by Jonathan Archer, then the commander of the Earth ship Enterprise—the namesake of Vol’Rala in the language of United Earth. Following a crippling first contact with a Romulan minefield, Archer had learned of a nearby repair station, completely automated and equipped with highly sophisticated matter-replication technology that had repaired his vessel in record time. But when Travis Mayweather, the ship’s pilot, was apparently killed in an accident, Enterprise’s doctor had soon discovered that the station had abducted him and falsified his death with a replicated corpse. Upon rescuing Mayweather, Archer and his armory officer, Malcolm Reed, had found that the pilot was one of multiple captives whose brains the station had co-opted to provide the processing power for its remarkable feats—at the cost of progressive neural deterioration and eventual death. Archer had destroyed the station to spare others that fate.

  Much had changed since then. The Earth Starfleet and the Andorian Guard were now sister services within the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets, and Reed and Mayweather were now captain and executive officer of the U.S.S. Pioneer. Late last cycle, Pioneer had encountered another such station while exploring uncharted space. The local peoples referred to the technology as the Ware, but they had no knowledge of its origins or its true danger. Reed and Mayweather had assisted them in liberating some of the stations’ captives, but Pioneer had been badly crippled by drone warships sent to retrieve the Ware’s “stolen property.” In response, Reed had convinced his former captain—now Admiral Archer—to assemble a task force to return to the uncharted sector and deal with the Ware before it became a threat to the Federation. Pioneer had taken the lead, investigating and making contact with local populations, as befitted its role as a member of Starfleet’s exploratory arm. Meanwhile, seven ships from the defensive arm, the Andorian Guard, had stood by in reserve and joined the fight as needed.

  Pioneer had found multiple pre-spaceflight worlds enslaved or devastated by the rapacious technology, which had been seeded by a people called the Pebru. In time, Pioneer’s engineering team had devised a signal that would awaken the captives, transmitting it throughout Pebru territory and shutting down all their Ware in one blow. Yet the Pebru were not the Ware’s creators—merely more victims who had managed to direct its appetites toward others to spare themselves. The task force had made a sizeable dent in the Ware’s spread, but the greater threat remained, so the mission continued.

  The banter died down as the Ware station came int
o clearer view on the large semicircular screen at the fore of the bridge. The gray-white station, illuminated by the stark white primary star of the ringed, gaseous planet it orbited, had a fittingly skeletal appearance: three spherical data cores and the angular slabs that enclosed them were linked by narrow struts to one another and to three pairs of cylindrical docking lattices, each one able to expand to accommodate ships of many different shapes and sizes. The Ware facilities’ great adaptability, including the ability to match their internal environment to any conceivable biology, was one of their primary lures, no doubt intended to maximize the number of living brains they could acquire.

  “Target coordinates in eight,” Ensign Breg reported in her strong Alrondian drawl. Ramnaf Breg was an Arkenite, orange-­skinned with bright green eyes, a bulbous, tapered skull, and pointed ears that put a Vulcan’s to shame, but she was Andorian by nationality, a native of the Arkenite community on the Alrond colony. It was a heritage she took pride in despite the upheavals on Alrond in recent years, and it shaded her vowels as she counted down to target.

  “Neutralize warp,” sh’Prenni ordered at the end of the countdown. “Go to battle alert.” The pair of status dishes flanking her command chair altered their EM fields to a frequency that promoted alertness in the Andorian crew. Breg’s own magnetic senses let her feel the change as well, leaving only Banerji blind to the sensation; but the light rods within the dishes changed from orange to blood-blue, serving as a visual cue that he could read. Not that he needed it; despite his relaxed, playful manner, Hari had one of the most focused minds sh’Prenni had ever encountered.

  The crew put the fruits of that mind to good use as Vol’Rala burst into normal space and swooped down upon the Ware station. By the time the station’s powerful sensor beams pierced the vessel’s shields and excited the air within to a dazzling glow, th’Cheen had already fired two modified probes toward it. The probes—hardy Andorian models designed for gathering combat intelligence—homed in on the central spheres and struck their hulls with some force, piercing deeply enough to connect with the internal circuitry that pervaded the automated facility. As soon as contact was made, they put all their power into an intense signal, using the peripheral circuitry itself as an antenna to amplify the pulse. This was the trick Banerji had devised to enable the pulse to penetrate to the shielded cores of the spheres.

  The first element of the pulse was a recognition code used by the Ware for transmitting software patches and upgrades. Once the data core responded with the proper handshake protocols, the probes transmitted the awakening command devised by Philip Collier, a civilian consultant serving as Pioneer’s acting chief engineer. Collier had realized that if the people held captive within the Ware were restored to consciousness while still in interface, they would be able to shut the technology down from within. Indeed, once awakened, the captives had gone even further than Collier had anticipated, interfacing with other Ware facilities and passing the awakening protocol along, until all the captives in a given Ware network were revived and the network was deactivated. Some Ware stations were interfaced with only a few others, but the Pebru’s particular network had been fully interconnected, allowing the sleepers to shut down the Ware throughout Pebru space.

  Sh’Prenni found it beautiful that her Starfleet colleagues had managed to devise a weapon that gave the Ware’s victims the power to defeat their own oppressors. It embodied the spirit of justice and empowerment that defined the United Federation of Planets and made her proud that Andoria had been one of its founding members. She had joined the Imperial Guard (as it was then known) to serve her people, but at the time, she had seen little future for herself beyond conflict with Vulcans, Coridanites, Arkenite separatists, Nausicaan and Klingon pirates, and the like. But most of those conflicts had died down, largely through Jonathan Archer’s diplomatic efforts, as sh’Prenni had risen through the ranks. And though the Romulans had then emerged as a major threat, the humans had managed to beat them back to their space—with no small assistance from the Andorian fleet at the decisive Battle of Cheron, in which sh’Prenni had fought as executive officer of the I.G.S. Thalisar. The subsequent founding of the Federation had heralded a new era of peace and cooperation, and sh’Prenni had been proud to devote her career as a Starfleet captain to constructive causes and the defense of the innocent. The Ware mission had already brought her greatest triumph; the defeat of the Pebru had liberated billions of sentients in one swift blow. But sh’Prenni would not rest until every last victim of the Ware was freed—or at least put out of their misery.

  But while th’Cheen reported a textbook launch and impact of the probes, they failed to have the expected effect. The station remained functional, deploying robot arms to detach the probes from their impact craters. Banerji, who handled communications, reported an incoming signal from the station. “Please follow proper docking procedures,” the cool, pleasant feminine voice of the Ware computers intoned. “Any damage to these facilities will be charged to your vessel.”

  Charas shook his head. “I knew it. Banerji’s drones are a bust.”

  “Now, now, let’s not jump to conclusions,” the wizened human replied, studying his readouts. “Hmm. Hmm, yes, that’s most interesting.”

  “Would you care to share it with the class, Professor?” sh’Prenni asked.

  “Well, not to blow my own horn, m’dear captain, but before those ill-mannered robot arms put paid to my probes, the readings I received from their sensors were consistent with a successful reawakening of the abductees.” He leaned back in evident surprise. “In fact, these biosigns are unusual—not just two to four viable sleepers per data core, but a couple of dozen apiece, judging from these encephalographic readings. Remarkable! Most of them should be too neurologically degraded to revive . . . Why, this is astonishing!”

  “But if they’re all awake,” Charas insisted, “why aren’t they pulling themselves out, shutting the station down?”

  “He’s right,” ch’Gesrit said. “It’s just not consistent. Are you sure it isn’t some kind of sensor artifact?”

  “I am reading a kind of . . . fluctuation in the station’s activities,” the human replied. “No sign of an impending shutdown, more just sort of a . . . hesitation, followed by a slightly more unstable power flow. Almost as if the control switched from automatic to manual.”

  “What are you saying?” the captain asked. “That they’re conscious inside the Ware, but somehow unable to take the next step and revive themselves?”

  “Or unwilling,” zh’Vethris suggested.

  Breg frowned at the navigator’s suggestion. “If you woke up inside one of those things, a prisoner in your own body, would you be content to stay that way?”

  “No,” Zoanra replied with a querulous tilt to her antennae. “But they aren’t me. We don’t even know what species they are.”

  “Then let’s find out,” Charas advised. “Whatever the reason, they aren’t coming out on their own. And that means it’s time to do it my way. Take in a team, get them out.”

  “Dozens of them?” countered Banerji. “That’s almost as many sleepers as we have people aboard. We don’t have enough shuttles, and you know transporters can’t breach the cores.”

  “We can at least mount an exploratory raid,” th’Cheen proposed. “Take one of the cores, liberate as many as we can, then bring them back to question.”

  “Yes, yes, excellent idea,” Banerji told him. “Once we have some real answers, we can decide how to proceed from there.”

  Sh’Prenni wasted no time, nodding to Charas. “Take your raiding team. Proceed as discussed.”

  “Yes, Captain!”

  “And Giered—be careful.”

  “As always, ma’am.”

  As the tactical officer headed out the portside exit door, the captain traded a knowing look with Banerji. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Oh, he’ll outlive us all,�
� Hari reassured her. “He’d never let me get in the last word.”

  1

  Klingon privateer SuD Qav

  CAPTAIN LOKOG DID NOT REALIZE how deep a rut he had dug himself into until his lover tried to murder him.

  Vhelis had been in bed with him at the time, and he had been confident there had been no part of her body where she could possibly have been concealing a weapon. That, he realized in retrospect, had been a symptom of his complacency; he hadn’t considered that she might have a garotte woven into one of her hair braids until he’d felt it bite into the flesh of his neck.

  The second sign of his weakness was that he’d only escaped death by luck. Vhelis was a capable enough fighter for her size, but that size was slight next to his, and her work as a sensor officer meant she rarely participated in raiding parties. By all rights, she should have been easy to overpower even with surprise on her side. But Lokog had been unable to land a decisive blow as he stumbled around the room, her legs wrapped about his waist from behind while the wire dug deeper into his throat. It had been by mere chance that one of his last desperate flails as consciousness faded had dislodged his prized HomneH from the wall and caused the club to fall upon Vhelis’s head.

  By fate, Lokog had recovered marginally faster. His HomneH was a cheap copy made of imitation klongat bone, not as solid as the real thing and good for little more than decoration; but Vhelis, a QuchHa’ like himself and all his crew, lacked the protective cranial plating of a healthy Klingon, making her more vulnerable to head strikes. Still, she had remained conscious enough to feel it when he wrapped the garotte around her own throat in return. “Why?” he had demanded, giving her just enough breath to rasp out her answer.

  It did not deter her bile, though. “Because you are a coward! First . . . you flee the fight for our people in the Empire, then you flee the spread of the Federation. Now we wander . . . deeper into wild space, looking for weaklings to pick off . . . retreating from any real fight!”