“You’re aboard the Federation Starship Titan,” Dr. Ree said.
“The captain just told me he’s coming down from the bridge to speak with you. Our senior diplomatic officer will accompany him.”
“Tie-tan,” S’syrixx said, doing his best to pronounce the strange syllables as he heard them.
S’syrixx carefully pushed himself the rest of the way up into a sitting position and allowed his bare, scale-covered feet to swing over the side of the surprisingly sturdy little infirmary bed. He was determined to make a good first impression with this vessel’s captain, as well as to demonstrate his gratitude to the person who was ultimately responsible for his rescue.
“My name,” he said, “is S’syrixx.”
Ree displayed an impressive assemblage of long, sharp teeth. “Welcome aboard, S’syrixx.”
S’syrixx heard a brief pneumatic hiss, which drew his attention to an open doorway that hadn’t been in his line of sight before.
A pair of uniformed humanoids entered the chamber and slowly approached the bed. S’syrixx suddenly felt unsteady. Had something gone wrong with the ship’s environmental systems, or its artificial gravity generators? His claws tore into the bed’s edges as he hung on, suddenly desperate to steady himself.
The room spun, and he felt long, scale-covered fingers and forelimbs pushing him gently back onto the bed.
“Mammals,” he muttered as darkness made another bid for him. “Why did it have to be mammals?”
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.
For Marco Palmieri, who first handed me the keys to Titan, and for Margaret Clark, who invited me back aboard for the current mission.
Historian’s Note
This story begins in early 2381, during the time of the mass Borg assault recounted in the Destiny trilogy, and concludes in late August 2382, more than a year later (roughly coinciding with the principal time frame of Star Trek: Typhon Pact—Zero Sum Game).
Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.
—CLARENCE DARROW
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
—WILLIAM BLAKE, “THE TIGER,” Songs of Experience
Prologue
WARRIOR-CASTE HATCHERY CRÈCHE P152, SAZSSGRERRN, GORN HEGEMONY
First Myrmidon Gog’resssh stood upon the observation footbridge that overlooked the enclosed vastness of the incubation chamber. His claws encircling the railings, Gog’resssh recalled the first time he’d looked upon the room from this high, deceptively solid perch; he’d found the sight almost overwhelming. Apart from the immensity of the starlit nights that blanketed the three Gorn worlds where he’d dwelled throughout his span of twenty-eight Gornar suncircuits, he had never before experienced such sheer hugeness. The great translucent roof that soared overhead had created an irresistible urge to crane his head in every direction, leaving his thick neck pained afterward by several strained muscles.
Far beneath the dome, which admitted only the most benign frequencies of light from Sazssgrerrn’s yellow-white star, stood legions of eggs—the leathery husks that held the developing offspring of the Gorn Hegemony’s warrior caste. Row upon row of ovoid shapes, each roughly the size of a mature warrior’s head, rested in their individual warming chambers, their numbers multiplied out to infinity by the reflective properties of the enclosure’s rounded walls. Gog’resssh took quiet comfort from the humid, sultry air that wafted up around the footbridge out of the chamber below, where it nurtured the orderly, greenish-white ranks of the eggs. Those rows of enshelled younglings represented the future—a future that Gog’resssh was committed to safeguarding from any threat that might arise between now and the day those younglings acquired the ability to fend for themselves.
