Star trek: Captains Table 
Where Sea Meets Sky
Book 6 of 6



Chapter One

EVENING PAINTED the sky orange, and a chill wind off the bay made Christopher Pike shiver as he walked along San Francisco's waterfront. Red and yellow leaves swirled in the air and danced around the other pedestri-ans on the street. Coming toward him, a young couple struggled to keep control of both their hovercart full of baggage and their exuberant four- or five-year-old son, who called out happily as he passed, "We're going to Alpha Centauri!"
"That's nice," said Pike, who had often traveled to Alpha Centauri and beyond. During his ten years as captain of the Enterprise he had gone many places indeed, most of them far more distant--and far more exotic--than Sot's nearest neighbor.
History moves in cycles, he thought as the family swept past. The street on which he walked had once been named the Embarcadero because it ran along the wharves, and it was from the wharves that people embarked on sailing ships in their travels around the world. When the age of ships had given way to the age of the airplane, the street had become a commercial center, full of warehouses at one end and tourist shops at the other, but nobody had set out on long journeys from there. Then had come space travel and the need for a good place to launch and land passenger ships. The airport was already too busy, and acreage else-where was at a premium for living space, so the fledg-ling industry had turned to the last open space near the sprawling city: the Bay. Now, four centuries after the Embarcadero's genesis, the same street was once again busy with travelers. They were boarding shuttles to take them into orbit rather than wooden ships that plied the ocean, but the spectacle of families struggling with overpacked bags looked the same no matter where they were headed.
Pike wished them all well, but he was glad to be on solid ground again. He'd done his time in space, and now he was putting that experience to use as fleet captain, assigned to Starfleet Headquarters right here on good old Mother Earth. He had the best of both worlds: an adventurous past and a position of responsibility on his own home planet.
So why did he feel so unfulfilled?
He'd been telling himself for the last year or so that he was just growing restless. It had been five years since he'd brought the Enterprise back home for refitting and renovation. He'd originally thought he would resume the conn when the ship was ready to fly again, but it had taken two years to replace all the worn and outdated machinery on board and to increase the crew compli-ment from 203 to 430, and by then Starfleet had already promoted him out of the job and given it to James Kirk. Pike didn't begrudge him the post; Kirk was a good officer, if a bit impulsive. He would do well if he didn't get himself killed in some defiant act of bravado. And Pike had come to enjoy his new position, but he had to admit he sometimes missed the thrill of facing the unknown.
Not very often, though. That thrill usually came hand in hand with mortal danger, and even when Pike survived it, other members of his crew often didn't. He had lost more friends than he cared to count during his decade on the Enterprise, and he had no desire to ex-perience that again. Maybe some captains could go on after a crew fatality without blaming themselves, but he had never been able to. Every time it happened he went through days of anguish and self-recrim-ination. And every time he took the ship into danger again he worried that his actions would lead to more deaths.
No, he didn't envy Kirk the job.
Another gust of wind bit through his light topcoat. He had underdressed for the weather. Mark Twain had often said that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco--well, he should have tried it in autumn. The western horizon was clear enough to allow a sunset, but the sky directly overhead threatened rain and the air was humid enough that it felt like mist already. Pike looked at the buildings along the water-front, seeking a store he could duck into to warm up for a moment, and his eyes came upon a sign he hadn't seen before.
It was an old-style wooden sign, with letters carved deep into planks held together with black iron bands. It projected out over a windowless doorway and swung gently in the wind, its iron chain squeaking softly. The orange light of sunset made the words ThE CnernIN'S TABLE stand out in bold relief on its rough surface.
Something about the place seemed inviting, yet Pike hesitated before the door. He couldn't very well just duck into a bar for a minute. He would have to order something, and it was a bit early in the evening to start drinking. That wasn't what he had come down here for anyway. He had merely wanted to get some exercise and some fresh air.
On the other hand, he didn't have any place special he had to be.
The first few drops of rain on his face decided him. He was willing to put up with cold, but cold and wet wasn't part of the plan. He reached for the wrought-iron handle on the solid door and tugged it open, noting a faint tingling sensation as he touched it. A security field of some sort? Or... a transporter? He turned and looked behind him. The Embarcadero was still there~ Not a transport beam, then. It sure had felt like it, though.
"Close the door!" someone shouted from inside. Pike nearly let it swing back into place without enter-ing, but the rain was picking up so he ducked in and pulled the massive wooden slab closed behind him.
He couldn't tell who had spoken. Everyone in the bar was looking at him. There were a dozen or so people, mostly human, seated in twos and threes at tables between him and the bar itself, where a Klingon woman held down a stool and a tall, heavyset man stood on the other side, polishing a beer glass. The glasses were either very small, Pike thought, or the bartender had huge hands to go with the rest of his bulky frame.
Fortunately he also wore a smile to match. "Don't pay no mind to Jolley, there," he said. "That's just his way of saying 'Hello.'"
Pike nodded. He wouldn't. All his attention was on the Klingon woman. Not because of the unusual bony ridges on her forehead, nor her exotic face with wide, full lips and an enigmatic grin, nor even the ample cleavage revealed by her traditional open-chested battle garb, though Pike found the latter alluring enough for a second look. What drew his attention was the fact that she was there at all. The Klingon Empire and the Federation had been in conflict for nearly fifty years. All-out war seemed imminent, yet here sat a Klingon in a bar on the waterfront not a kilometer from Star fleet Headquarters.
She had to be a member of a peace delegation. She had probably Shuck away from their hotel to check out Earth without a chaperone breathing down her neck. Maybe she thought she could seduce someone here in the bar and learn military secrets from them.
She had undoubtedly recognized Pike the moment he walked in. A fleet captain would be well known to the enemy. Well, Pike would keep his eye on her, too. One of the other patrons was no doubt a Secret Service agent assigned to tail her, but it wouldn't hurt to back him up.
He looked for a good place to sit. There was a piano to his immediate left, and a single small table wedged in next to the piano. A lizardlike alien with slits for eyes and talon-sharp fingers was sitting at the table, sipping at a glass full of something red. Pike didn't look too closely; he just nodded and stepped past, unbuttoning his jacket.
Most of the tables were to his left, clustered in a semicircle around a large stone fireplace that popped and flared as if it were burning real wood. The ones nearest the fire were obviously the popular places to sit. Pike didn't see any vacant tables there as he approached the bar.
"What'11 you have, Captain?" the bartender asked. Pike wasn't wearing a uniform, but he assumed the bartender called everyone "captain," after the name of the place. He looked to the mirrored shelves on the back wall to see what kind of stock they kept here, and was surprised to see several bottles of rare and expensive alien liqueurs in among the more common bourbons and gins. He was tempted to ask for Maraltian Seev-ale just to see if they had it, but he wasn't in the mood for the green stuff tonight. "Saurian brandy," he said instead. He had picked up the taste for that on the Enterprise, and it was still his favorite drink.

The bartender poured a snifter full from a curved, amber-colored bottle. Pike took a sip and smiled as the volatile spirits warmed their way down, then turned away to look for a quiet table~ He didn't want to sit at the bar; he would either have to sit right next to the Klingon woman or close to a scruffy-looking fisherman who had taken a stool halfway between her and the wall.
There was a stairway to the right of the bar and two tables in an alcove between that stair and the front door. Neither table was occupied. Pike went over to the smaller of the two and sat facing the rear of the bar at an angle, neither turning his back on the others nor staring at them. He sipped his brandy and examined the decor while conversations started up again at the other tables.
There was plenty to look at. Artifacts from dozens of worlds hung on the walls. Pike saw drinking mugs with handles for nonhuman hands, wooden carvings of unrec-ognizable creatures, and metallic hardware that might have been anything from engine parts to alien sex toys. A Klingon bat'leth stuck out just overhead, its curved blade buried so deeply into the wood that Pike doubted anyone could remove it without a pry bar. A thick layer of dust on it provided evidence that few people even tried. A Vulcan harp hanging from a peg next to it apparently came down more often; there was no dust on it, and the strings were discolored near the fingerboard from use.
That was a good sign. Pike liked music better than fighting, too.
The fisherman belched loudly, then said to the bar-tender, "Another tankard o' grog." He looked over at Pike while the bartender refilled his stoneware mug. Pike looked away--the guy had a drunk and despondent air about him--but when the fisherman got his drink he stood up and walked over to Pike's table anyway.
"You look like a man who's got a lot on his mind," he said as he pulled out a chair and sat down uninvited. Pike could smell the salt and fish and seaweed on him.
"I suppose I might have," Pike admitted, "but I didn't really come here to talk."
The fisherman didn't take the hint. He leaned back in his chair--the wooden frame and leather seat squeaking under his weight even though he was lightly built--and said, "What then? To drink yourself into oblivion? I've tried that. It doesn't work."
Pike laughed softly. "I came in because it was cold outside and starting to rain."
"An admirable reason for a drink," said the fisher-man. He took a gulp of his grog--Pike could smell the rum from across the table--and belched again.
How could he make this guy go away? "Get lost" would probably do it, but for all Pike knew this was the bar's owner. Or the Secret Service agent. "I'd really rather not--" he began, but the fisherman waved a hand in dismissal.
"Now me, I drink because my wife and son were killed on a prison colony."
His statement hung in the air between them like a ghost. The short, brutal intensity of those few words and the deep sadness with which they were spoken left Pike gasping for breath even as he tried to think of a response to them.
"I--I'm sorry to hear that" was all he could manage. "Tortured to death," the man went on. "Right in front of me. A place called Rura Penthe."
What had Pike gotten himself into now? He looked up toward the bar, saw the Klingon woman flinch as she heard the name of the place, but he had no idea why. It meant nothing to him.
"They damned near killed me, too," his unwelcome companion went on. "Forced me to work in the mines, digging nitrates and phosphates for gunpowder while I held the secret that would make their puny chemicals obsolete overnight! I held it, too. Never told a soul. Saved the world, I did."
"I'm sure you must have," Pike said. "But perhaps you shouldn't be talking about it now, if it's such a dangerous secret."
The man laughed, a single, quick exhalation. "Ha! What do I care now? It's apparently old news. Nuclear power! Splitting the atom! The most elemental force of the universe--only two hours ago in this very bar some-one told me it was nothing compared to antimatter annihilation. And that's apparently nothing compared to zero-point energy, whatever that is." He looked at Pike with eyes red as cooked shrimp. "I held my tongue for nothing."
Who was this guy? Talking as if the secret of nuclear fission was something new. Pike looked at him more closely. His clothing was rough, coarse cotton and wool dyed in drab brown and blue, and he wore a red ban-danna around his neck. He had a high forehead and wide-set eyes, and he sported a two- or three-week beard that hadn't been trimmed since he'd started it, but his features underneath it were fair. And young. His general appearance had made him look older, but his hair was still coal black and his skin smooth. He couldn't be much over thirty-five, if that.
"Who are you?" Pike asked him.
"A fool, apparently," he replied. "One who's seen and suffered more than should be required of any man." He slurped noisily at his grog, then said softly, "At first I tried to serve humanity, then when I realized what I had discovered I tried to protect it, but now I find that I despise humanity and all it stands for." He looked Pike directly in the eyes and said, "And a man who despises humanity must needs despise himself as well. Many's the day I've wondered if I should put an end to it all."
Pike heard the sincerity in the man's voice, and his experience as a ship's captain raised the hackles on the back of his neck. Just his luck. He'd come out this evening to dwell on his own problems, and now it looked like he might have to talk someone out of suicide.
"Come now," he said. "Whatever your past, you're safe now. You're a free man, warm and dry with a drink in your hand and a roof over your head. Your future can be whatever you make of it." Especially with a little psychiatric help, he thought, but he left that unsaid.
"Oh, aye, I'm aware of that," said his unwelcome visitor. "I'm clever enough to make a go of it if I choose. I have made a go of it, come to that."
"Oh?" asked Pike. That sounded promising.
The fisherman took the bait. "Well, sir, not to brag, but I masterminded an escape from the prison island. I and twenty men stowed away in empty powder casks and let the stevedores load us on board a warship. It was cramped, but no worse than what we suffered in our barracks at night. And there was no worry of being mistreated in a powder cask!" He grinned, then took a drink. "We waited until the ship was at sea, then rose up in the night and took her. The men pronounced me 'captain,' and we became pirates of a sort, preying on our former captors until they brought in too many ships for us to match. We eventually took damage too heavy to repair ourselves, so we withdrew and set sail here for refitting." The glint faded from his eyes and he shook his head sadly. "It may not be worth the effort. Even if we return to Rura Penthe, no amount of battle has yet managed to vanquish the memory of what I have suf-fered."
The man told his story with the air of someone who believed every word. Yet how could any of it be true? A prison colony, in the twenty-third century? Mining ni-trates for gunpowder? And transporting it by sailing ship? This guy was about four hundred years out of phase with the rest of the world.
Yet he was so convincing that Captain Pike actually looked around the bar again for confirmation that he wasn't somehow in the wrong time. He found it in abundance: the Klingon woman on her stool, the Vulcan harp overhead, the Saurian brandy in his glass. He took a sip of it and savored the tart, smoky explosion of flavor.
His gaze fell on the alien by the door. He had seen a few lizardlike humanoids in his travels, but never one like that. It was from an entirely new species. And its kind had to be fairly common for one to be here on Earth, unescorted, in a hole-in-the-wall bar in San Fran-cisco. Pike wondered how he had missed hearing about them before this.
The fisherman--if that's what he was--noticed where Pike was looking. He shook himself out of his reverie and said, "Yes, strange things are about. But I've seen stranger."
"Have you now?" Pike asked, interested despite him-self.
"Aye, that I have. Under the sea. Even a single fathom below the surface, everything is different."
"So I've heard," Pike said. He had grown up in Mojave, and even after he'd moved away he'd never felt comfortable in the water.
"So I've seen," the seaman said. "Manta rays bigger than sails, fish with lanterns dangling before their noses so they can see in the black depths, pods of whales all the way to the horizon, making the sea boil as they breached and dove."
Now Pike knew the man was having him on. There hadn't been a whale on Earth for two centuries.
Well, if he was just telling tales then Pike had a few of his own to share. And maybe he could get this guy's mind off his troubles for a while. "I saw some whales once," he said. "But these weren't in the ocean."
His companion considered that a moment. "I've heard there are lakes in China where--"
"Not a lake, either. These were in space."
The man snorted, but when he spoke there was an air of sophistication that hadn't been there before. "Sir, you force me to express doubt."
Pike laughed out loud. "I didn't believe them myself when I first saw them, but they were real enough." He took a sip of brandy and settled back in his chair. "It was back when I was captain of the Enterprise. We were out in the Carrollia sector, mapping subspace anomalies and looking for new sources of dilithium, when we received a distress call from a planet called Aronnia. They had a problem with their interstellar fleet. Seems all their starships had run away .... "


Chapter Two

I WAS ON the bridge (said Pike) when the call came in. I had Communications Officer Dabisch put it on the main screen. A floor-to-ceiling image of Commander Brady, from Starbase 7, looked out of the screen at me and said, "Hello, Captain. How far are you from the Aronnia 'system?"
I looked over at my first officer, Lieutenant Command-.er Lefler, whom I generally called "Number One." She had been running the navigation console during our mapping sweep; she would know the figure or be able to retrieve it in seconds.
But Spook, my science officer, beat her to it. Without even consulting the computer he said, "Fourteen point two seven light-years."
Number One gave him a look that said plainly, "Thanks for nothing," but Spock's Vulcan upbringing practically guaranteed he wouldn't understand.
Brady merely smiled at what he no doubt thought was a simple case of one-upmanship among my bridge crew and said, "Close enough. We've just gotten an urgent request for assistance from the Aronnians. They weret admitted to the Federation a few years ago under pecu-liar circumstances; their spaceflight capability is entirely biological. Now they've got some kind of problem with it, and they can't cross interstellar distances. They've asked for the loan of a starship until they can get things straightened out."
"Loan them a starship?" I asked, hardly believing my ears. "Not the Enterprise?" We were the pinnacle of Starfleet, a veritable city on the move. They wouldn't just loan us out as a taxi service, would they?
Commander Brady saw the concern on my face. "I want you to find out what their problem is and see if you can help them solve it. Failing that you can request a cargo transport or whatever's appropriate for them to
use while they work on it themselves." "Understood," I said.
"Very good. Brady out." His face blinked out, and the viewscreen switched back to the starfield we had been mapping.
Number One said, "Biotech? Sounds like a job for Dr. Boyce."
I laughed at the thought of our ship's chief medical officer waving his diagnostic scanners over a spaceship, but I wondered how far off that image would turn out to be. None of us had much experience with biotech. We would soon have quite a bit more, I imagined.
"Set course for Aronnia," I said. "Time warp, factor seven."
"Aye, sir," said Number One. She worked at her controls for a moment, then said, "Course locked in."
"Engage," I said. She fed power to the engines and we leaped away.
At warp seven we would get there in eight days. I hoped that would be soon enough, but I wasn't willing to overload the engines unless I knew for certain we needed to get there sooner, and this situation didn't seem that desperate.
Spock turned to his computer console and busied himself studying what we knew of Aronnia. I gave him a few minutes, listening to the busy bleeps and pings of the ship's instruments while I waited, then asked, "So, what's this place like, Mr. Spock?"
"Aronnia is a class-M planet," he replied. "Surface gravity point nine three standard gees, atmosphere twen-ty percent oxygen, seventy-eight percent nitrogen, and the rest trace gases. Three major landmasses, mostly desert in their interiors. There are twenty-three cities with populations greater than one million, seven hun-dred and--"
"How about the biotech?" I asked. Spoek could get a bit didactic if you let him. "How do these spaceships of theirs work?"
Spock frowned. "The record is incomplete. The Aron-nians were able to demonstrate interstellar flight capabil-ity to the scout team who discovered them, and they were invited to join the Federation on the basis of that ability, but apparently they consider the actual workings of their technology to be classified information. Later investigators were not allowed to board the ships, nor witness their construction."
"Do we have any visuals of them?" I asked.
"We do."
"Put it onscreen."
Spock did so, and I found myself looking at an oblong blob with fins sticking out the sides. It looked like an old-fashioned rocket ship, except it had a blunt nose with an enormous mouth, and the fins ended in tentacles. The fins were big, like the wind vanes on a blimp. In fact, that's what the whole starship looked like: a living blimp. There were eyes about a third of the way back; from the two on the side I could see I guessed there were four of them spaced ninety degrees apart around its circumfer-ence. The body tapered down to a narrow tail with two side-by-side bulges. From the bell-shaped nozzle one was clearly a rocket engine, but the other had no openings.
This wasn't just biotech, using self-replicating and self-healing organisms for various ship functions; this was one complete organism. "Their spaceships are living creatures!" I whispered.
"That is correct," Spock replied unnecessarily.
Its skin was gray-black, hard to spot against the dark-ness of space. A tiny silver bubble looked completely out of place on its back, like a single barnacle marring the smooth line of a ship's hull. Just at the limit of discern-ibility, I thought I could see faint markings on the silver dome.
"What's the scale on this?" I asked.
Spock turned to his computer console and said, "Here is the Enterprise for comparison."
The familiar saucer and warp nacelles of a Con-stitution-class starship appeared above the Aronnian "ship." We were larger, but only by a quarter of our length. That meant the "space whale," as I was already beginning to think of it, was at least two hundred meters long. I had never seen anything like it.
"Expand the silver dome on top," I said. Spock did so, and we could tell now that the markings I had seen were windows and an airlock. The Aronnians had tied a sealed habitat module to the creature's back. If their doors were of average size for most humanoid races, then the entire living space was only ten meters high and twenty across at the base.
"This is what they call a spaceship?" I asked incredu-lously.
"They do have more conventional craft for interplane-tary travel," Spock replied, putting on the screen an image of a winged metal spaceplane. It looked boxy and primitive, with stubby wings for atmospheric flight and oversize reaction control rockets for spaceflight, but it looked like it should work well enough. It had no warp nacelles, though, and without them it would never leave its own solar system.
"But the space whale can travel from star to star?" I asked, just to be sure I was interpreting things correctly.
"That is what the record states," Spook replied. "I theorize that one of the two bulges at the tail of the creaturerathe one without a rocket nozzlemmust be a warp engine."
Number One laughed. "How could a living creature develop a warp engine? Or a regular rocket for that matter? It's ridiculous."
"Yet it exists," said Spock.
There was no denying that.
"It must be the result of genetic engineering," said Dabisch. He scratched his left ear just under his trans-parent cranium. To someone who hadn't seen how many humanoid species filled the galaxy he would no doubt look like a genetics experiment himself, but the Gala-mites had evolved on their own, just like humans had.
"We don't know that," I told him. The clunky look of their interplanetary ships made me doubt that the Aron-nians were capable of something that sophisticated. And if they were, why didn't they just breed smaller versions of the creatures for in-system use? It didn't add up, and we didn't have the information we needed to understand it. "Let's not jump to conclusions," I said. "If we do that we'll arrive with preconceived notions that we'll proba-bly just have to unlearn. We're better off simply asking the Aronnians how it works when we get there."
"They were not forthcoming with information before this," Spock reminded me.
"They weren't asking for help before, either," I re-minded him right back. But he had a point. They weren't likely to tell us any more than they had to, even if we were there to help.

When we arrived, I immediately had Spock scan for signs of the immense biological spaceships, but he re-ported none within sensor range. That meant none in the entire planetary system, since the Enterprise's sensors would certainly have been able to pick up a life-form that large if one had been there.
There weren't many of the boxy in-system ships, either. Nor were there any satellites. Normally there are at least a few defense satellites around any inhabited planet, but Number One brought the Enterprise into a surprisingly empty orbit around Aronnia, and from all appearances nobody there even knew we had arrived until Communications Officer Dabisch hailed them.
His hail was answered immediately by a slender humanoid with large green eyes, silvery hair, and smooth brown skin with dark stripes on the forehead and cheeks. Its wide smile revealed even, white teeth, and its voice was softly melodious.
"I am Consil Perri, director of spaceflight," said the Aronnian. "Thank you for coming to our assistance."
"I'm Christopher Pike, captain of the Enterprise," I said, wondering if I was talking to a male or a female. It probably shouldn't have mattered, but it always made me more comfortable to know, especially when I was talking with someone as close to the human phenotype as this. It made for fewer misunderstandings. Trouble was, you couldn't just ask an alien--no matter how humanoid it looked--what its gender was. Some socie-ties would consider it too personal for discussion with an outsider, and others might consider it an insult. A Klingon would probably try to kill someone who asked that question. I had no idea what an Aronnian would do, so I merely kept my eyes and ears open for clues while I said, "We're told you have a problem with your star-ships."
"That's right," said Perri. "They haven't returned from their annual migration."
"Migration?" I asked. I glanced over at Spock, whose poker face revealed none of the intense interest I was sure he felt. Biotech was different enough, but we did at least have some experience with that on a limited scale. Starships that migrated were something entirely new.

The Aronnian hesitated, evidently unwilling to di-vulge more than was necessary about their technology, but after a moment's consideration said, "Every year the titans leave for a neighboring star system called Dever-nia, where they mate and raise their young. They return here to feed in the atmospheres of our gas-giants planets. For the last few years their numbers have been dwin-dling, but this year the migration stopped completely. We sent messages to the Devernians asking if they knew what had happened, but we got no response, so we sent the few tame titans we had kept with us to go see for ourselves, but they never returned. We are now out of starships, so we are asking you to help us investigate."
"I see," I said, feeling the hair on the back of my neck start to tingle. I hated going into situations where other ships were known to have disappeared, even if those others appeared much less capable than we were of defending themselves from attack. Something had hap-pened to them, and we would no doubt have to face that something as well. It had apparently silenced the Dever-nians, too. If it was anything like what we had seen already, it would be completely different from anything we had faced before.
Headlong into the unknown, with danger waiting when we got there. I knew what I was getting into when I signed up with Starfleet, but at times like these I won-dered if it had been a mistake. Nevertheless, that was what we were here for, so I said to Perri, "Very well, let us beam you aboard and we'll go have a look."

Chapter Three

CAPTAIN PIKE paused in his story. The fisherman, or escaped prisoner or sea captain or whoever he was, had a puzzled expression on his face. "Something wrong?" asked Pike.
The seaman shrugged slightly. "Have you ever experi-enced the feeling that someone is using English but they're nonetheless speaking a foreign tongue?"
"Ah," said Pike. "Sorry. I sometimes forget that not everybody has been in space."
The seaman drained his near-empty mug. "I am still struggling with the idea that anybody has. But you tell a convincing tale, Captain. I am willing to believe in your Enterprise, and in these 'titans' you speak of as well. I want to hear what you discovered at Devernia, but I fear I must replenish my beverage before we continue. May I get one for you?"
This would be the opportunity to say, "My, look at the time; sorry, but I have to be somewhere at seven." Pike considered it, but he had been enjoying his reminiscence despite the somewhat unusual company. And besides, the Klingon woman was still at the bar. She had stopped talking with the bartender and was listening to Pike now, drinking from a pewter tankard of Warnog as she eaves-dropped. When she saw him hesitate, she smiled at him, her pointed teeth making it both an invitation and a challenge. Typical Klingon. Pike glanced at her openly displayed cleavage again before he looked away; if that was typical as well, Klingon men were happier at home than they seemed in public.
Pike felt a bit surprised to realize that he enjoyed her attention. He even enjoyed the seaman's attention. What had started out as a gloomy walk on a rainy day had turned into an interesting, if unusual, evening, one that he was in no hurry to end.
"Yes, thank you," he said to his drinking companion. "I'm having Saurian brandy." Pike drained his snifter and handed it over.
"Very good. I shall return." The seaman stood and walked to the bar, narrowly missing someone who had just come down the stairway. He did a theatrical double take when he saw that he had nearly run down a peach-colored felinoid woman, but when she smiled and said, "Hi there, sailor," in an exaggerated drawl, he merely shook his head and continued on his way.
Pike watched her cross the bar and sit at a table with two young human men. Her graceful body was covered in short fur, but in deference to human custommor maybe just to enhance her natural charmsmshe also wore a tight bodysuit of iridescent material that flashed between white and pale violet when she moved. She laughed at something one of the men said, and Pike smiled at the sound of her voice. He had always been a cat person.
When he looked over to the bar again he saw that the Klingon woman was scowling. That, too, was typical. Klingons hated anything soft or delicate or beautiful. No, that wasn't fair. It wasn't hate they felt, but disdain.
Klingons valued strength and honor above all else, and had little respect for anyone who didn't feel likewise.
Pike glanced at the cat-woman again, then back at the Klingon, glad he could appreciate both kinds of beauty. But he wondered what had happened to the Klingon's forehead. Some kind of accident? If so, it looked pretty serious. That looked like ridges of bone just under the surface.
Beside the Klingon at the bar, the seaman reached into a pocket and withdrew a metal coin, which he held out to the bartender. It shone bright gold in the light. The bartender held out his hands and shook his head, smiling as he did so, and the seaman shrugged and pocketed the coin. Pike wondered once again just who this person was, but his first attempt to ask had been turned aside, and as with the Aronnian director of spaceflight, he didn't want to risk trouble by pushing too hard for an answer. He would learn it in time.
The seaman returned with Pike's brandy and a second snifter of it for himself instead of the grog he was drinking earlier. "I decided to broaden my horizons," he said as he handed one to Pike. "It smells intriguing."
"It is that," Pike replied. "Potent, too. Go easy on it." He held up his glass. "Cheers."
"Cheers," the seaman replied. They drank, and his eyes widened. "Whoo!" he said when he could breathe again. "Whoever the Saurians are, they know a thing or two about brandy."
"True enough," Pike said.
"I did, too, at one time." The seaman's expression faltered, but he settled into his chair and said, "So then, where were we? You were about to face certain death at Devernia, I believe .... "

Chapter Four

So I ~ED, ANYWAY (said Pike). The Aronnian seemed a bit nervous as well, especially after beaming aboard, but I couldn't tell if that was from being reduced to elemen-tary particles and rebuilt in our ship's transporter, or from the prospect of what faced us at our destination. Or perhaps it was the ship itself. I had gone down to the transporter room to welcome our new passenger and offer him a guided tour of the Enterprise, but we had just boarded the turbolift for the bridge when I noticed that his normally wide eyes were even wider than usual and he was clutching the handgrip for dear life.
After seeing him in person, I had decided that Pen4 was male. I still couldn't see any obvious secondary sexual characteristics, but that very lack argued for masculinity. Plus there was something in the way he carried himself, an indefinable combination of attitude and bearing that spoke to me even across the species barrier.
His apprehension in the turbolift didn't change that. I didn't ask what was the matter; that, too, could be a mortal offense in some cultures. I merely said to the computer, "Cancel bridge. Take us to deck six." To Perri I said, "Let me show you to your quarters first. There'll be plenty of time to tour the ship when you've settled in."
Perri laughed softly. "You are most kind, Captain, but I will be fine. It merely struck me how large your vessel must be, in order to need a transportation system just to move about within it."
"It's pretty big," I admitted. "But these beasts you ride--'titans,' you call them?--are nearly the same size. I would think you'd be used to spaceships of this scale."
"Our ships may be large overall, but the passenger space is small. Titans do not like to carry large struc-tures." Petri looked at the marker lights flashing past just beyond the turbolift's translucent window. "As for me personally, this is my first time in space, though I must admit it hardly seems like I've gone anywhere."
"Oh, we're definitely in space," I said. "Your state-room has a nice view directly out the starboard side. We're still in orbit; you'll probably be able to see Aronnia from there."
"I will?" He really hadn't been in space before. You can always tell a dirtsider by the twinkle in their eyes at the idea of seeing their planet from above.
The turbolift stopped at deck six and the doors slid open on the circular corridor that ran around the perim-eter of the Enterprise's saucer section. "Here we are," I said, stepping off and gesturing for Pen4 to follow. As we walked along toward the guest quarters, Perri staring at everything and peeking into every nook and cranny we passed, I said, "I would have thought the director of spaceflight would get into orbit quite regularly. Maybe even live there."
He laughed again. "Oh no, Captain. It's much too d. angerous for that. Space is for the adventurous."
"That's true enough," I agreed, remembering all the dangers I had encountered during my years in Starfleet.
And I had seen what the Aronnians used for ships, both interplanetary and interstellar. I wouldn't want to trust my life to them either. But I didn't really know that much about them, did I? I had been too busy trying to decide whether my passenger was male or female to learn more about the ships.
That, at least, I could simply ask about. I might not get much response, but it was worth a try. "So tell me more about these titans," I said. "Who does ride them? And how do you control them?"
Perri said nothing. I turned to see if I had given offense, but I couldn't detect any difference in his expression. "It's... complicated," the Aronnian said at last. "You see--"
Just then Yeoman Colt came around the bend in the corridor, holding a datapad in one hand while she tugged her strawberry blond hair into a ponytail and tried to tie it in place. She abandoned the effort when she saw me, letting her hair fall down around her oval face to her shoulders as she said, "Captain, I was just heading to the bridge to see you. I have those inventory figures you wanted."
I had been concerned about perishable supplies, since it had been some time since we had put in at a starbase. "Thank you, Yeoman," I said, taking the datapad from her. Nodding to each of them in turn, I said, "Yeoman Colt, Director of Spaceflight Perri of Aronnia."
If I had any remaining doubt over Perri's gender, the looks they gave one another erased it completely. Their eyes might as well have been sending out tractor beams by the way they locked together. Colt's pale skin turned light pink. The dark stripes on Perri's forehead and cheeks grew darker still.
"Um, pleasure to meet you," Colt said, offering her hand.
"Yes," he replied. "It is." He grasped her hand, held it in his for a moment--clearly unsure what our customs weremthen let go and said to me, "My delight with your ship grows with each passing moment, Captain."
Colt blushed even more. I felt myself grow slightly annoyed by the attention he was paying her. She was my yeoman, after all, and he was on a mission that could have serious consequences for his home planet. He had best keep his mind on business if he wanted to accom-plish anything.
I didn't say so, of course. I merely said, "I was just showing Mr. Perri to his quarters."
Colt nodded. "Yes sir. I made sure guest suite number one was prepared. If you need anything else," she said to Perri~ "just ask."
"I will," he replied, and I knew he would.
"Thank you, Yeoman," I said again, and I led the Aronnian away to his quarters.
He forgot all about Yeoman Colt the moment the door slid aside. "Oh," he said, stopping in the doorway and looking out at the starfield beyond the windows. The guest suite has three large windows in each of its two rooms. They lean outward, following the curve of the ship's hull, so a person can actually lie down against them and get the sensation of flying through space. The ship's artificial gravity gets a bit odd that close to the edge of the field, pulling to all sides rather than down, but that merely adds to the impression of free flight. Perri didn't try that right away; it was all he could do to step inside and let the door slide closed behind us.
He stood rooted to the spot for maybe half a minute. I didn't rush him. When a person encounters the vastness of the universe for the first time, he generally needs a while to soak it all in. Perri finally started moving again on his own, taking slow steps closer and closer to the windows until he stood right in front of one, holding on to the edge of the deep-set frame for support.
"Oh," he said again. I came up beside him and looked out. Aronnia carved out a white, blue, and brown arc below us. I noticed that the continents stood out in sharp detail under sparse cloud cover--Spock hadn't been making up that bit about "mostly desert." The atmos-phere blurred the boundary between planet and space ever so slightly, softening the impression a little, but the planet looked harsh and uninviting to me.
Not so to Perri. He took a deep breath and said, "Many have died for a chance to see this. I have often wondered if we were right in pursuing such a risky dream, but now I know. This alone makes it worth-while."
"The director of spaceflight, a skeptic?" I asked. "You surprise me again and again."
He turned away from the window to look at me. "Even the most vocal advocate can harbor doubts. When you control as risky a venture as I do, your doubts practically define your life. I worry about every mission as though my own children were at risk."
I remembered stories from the dawn of human space-flight, when hundreds of controllers would fidget during a manned mission, entire rooms full of people smoking addictive tobacco to calm their nerves while they waited for disaster to strike the astronauts and cosmonauts in orbit. We had come a long way since then, but I imagined that some fleet captains back home still bit their nails to the quick for every starship they sent into the void.
For that matter, I worried enough about my own crew to understand how Perri felt. The Enterprise was far stronger than any of the Aronnians' ships, but we were still a fragile bubble of humanity compared to some of the forces waiting for us in deep space.
One of which might be waiting for us later today. Devernia was only a few hours away.
The sooner we got there, the sooner we would find out what we faced. I said, "It's time we were going. Would you like to accompany me to the bridge, or would you rather watch the trip from here?"
"Oh, the bridge by all means," Perri said, turning nonetheless reluctantly away from the window. I sus-pected he would pull the bed over so the stars were right over his head when he slept here that night.
He seemed completely at ease in the turbolift this time, and when we arrived at the bridge he broke into a big smile. "It's round," he said. "And domed overhead. It looks just like the control pod on a titan." Then he took in all the science and navigation instruments and said, "Considerably more advanced, of course."
I introduced him to the bridge crew. He looked at Spock for a long moment, no doubt wondering about the Vulcan's pointed ears and green hue, but when he looked over to Dabisch his mouth fell open. The Galamite's transparent cranium, glowing fuschia eyes, and scaly purple skin must have seemed like a hallucination.
"Pleased to meet you," said Dabisch, who was used to it by now even though he'd only been on board for a few months.
His voice has a distinctive timbre to it, a hum like a low-frequency carrier wave that his vocal chords modu-lated for sound. "We spoke earlier," Perri replied when he heard it.
"Yes," replied Dabisch. "I did not use video when I set up the call. I have found that it leads to confusion when the rest of the crew turns out to be human."
"I can see how that could be a problem," said Perri. He turned back to me. "You do have an... urn... interesting ship."
"Thank you," I said. Our regular navigator, Lieuten-ant Tyler, was back at the controls. "Mr. Tyler, set course for Devernia, warp factor seven. Let's go see what happened to the titan migration."
"Aye, sir," he said, calculating the coordinates and sending the information to Number One at the helm controls beside him.
I nodded toward the main viewscreen, on which the image from straight ahead was displayed. Aronnia curved away to left and right, and stars glinted steadily above. When Number One engaged the warp engines, however, all that changed in an instant. Aronnia whirled crazily around, first to the left, then overhead as the Enterprise came around to the right coordinates. Then it vanished like a punctured balloon and the stars leaped toward us in long white streaks.
Perri gripped the handrail that encircled the command and helm stations, but internal gravity had kept us from feeling a thing. He let go with visible reluctance, and said, "I don't believe it's this smooth riding a titan."
"I suspect not," I admitted.

Devernia was less than two light-years away, but we still had a few hours to kill before we got there even at warp seven. I let Spock and Dabisch show our guest around the bridge while I went over the supply report that Yeoman Colt had given me; then, when I was satisfied that we wouldn't starve before we reached our next starbase, we went back downship for lunch. Dr. Boyce joined us in the cafeteria, first scanning our guest with his medical tricorder to make sure none of our foods would poison him.
"Stay away from onions and garlic, but otherwise it looks like we're fairly compatible," Boyce told him when he was done.
I smiled when he said that, since I had just been thinking how his white hair was nearly the same color as Perri's. There was a certain similarity about their faces, too, though one was marked with stripes and the other with worry lines. Their size was their biggest difference. Boyce was taller and heavier, big even for a human. He may have been older than the average starship crewman, but he was all muscle. Perri was thin and wiry, but at first glance he and Boyce could have been father and son.
Boyce questioned him like a father grills a son who comes home late from his first date, that much was sure. "What kind of metabolism do these titans of yours have?" he asked before he'd taken his first forkful of
vegetables. "How do you control them? 	How intelli-
gent are they?" And so on.
Petri answered some of his questions, but diverted others. Titans were fairly intelligent, he said, but only in certain ways. They were very territorial, for instance, and would band together to protect their feeding grounds--which presented quite a problem for anyone who wanted to approach one of the Aronnian system's gas-giant planets. The titans scooped raw materials di-rectly out of their atmospheres, dropping out of orbit to make a blazing, meteoric run through the upper regions with their immense mouths unfolded to ten times their body width.
"That must be quite a sight," Boyce said. "What are they going for in the atmospheres? Hydrogen? Or do they filter out life-forms for food?"
"Both," said Perri. "They use the hydrogen for fuel and reaction mass, and the tiny airborne creatures for nourishment."
"Pretty slick system. Must save you a bundle on fuel and construction costs. How'd you develop something like that, anyway?"
Perri was picking at his green beans, but I suspected it wasn't the food he was concerned with. "Urn, yes, it certainly does provide cost-effective spaceflight," he said. "You must understand, however, that I cannot discuss the details of their production. That would compromise Aronnian trade secrets."
"Hmmph." Boyce was a scientist; he wasn't the kind to let trade secrets get in the way of understanding. But Perri was obstinate; he would tell us only that the creatures were a relatively new development, and that the population was self-sustaining once established. "We also use... um... by-products of the technology for manufacturing. It's an important part of our economy. We have considered exporting titans to other star sys-tems," he said, "but naturally we want to make sure we retain control of the technology if we do. From what we've seen of the Federation we're a relatively young race, and that's the only real trade item we have to offer."
Boyce shrugged. "You never know what's useful and what isn't, except of course for booze. That outsells practically everything else. You got any good alcoholic beverages to export?"
"We're introducing a distilled liqueur through an independent distributor named Harcourt Fenton Mudd. He promised us a large return on our investment, but so far sales have been disappointing."
I didn't know this Mudd fellow from Adam, but I said, "Be careful of independent contractors. Most of them are reputable, but there are some shady characters out there. You're better off dealing directly with planetary governments."
"We are beginning to understand that," admitted Perri. "That is why we are proceeding more slowly with the titans."
"How come they migrate?" Boyce asked. "That seems to be a big weakness, especially considering your current situation."
Perri ate the last of his dinner roll and washed it down with coffee, though I could tell from his expression that he didn't particularly care for Centauri roast. "We do seem to have made a miscalculation, haven't we?" he asked. "I can only hope it isn't as serious as it seems." He turned to me. "Captain, it was late evening my time when you picked me up, and I find that this meal has made me somewhat drowsy. Is there time for me to take a short nap before we arrive in the Devernia system?"
"Yes, certainly," I told him. "I'11 wake you before we get there."
"Thank you." He rose from the table, and Dr. Boyee and I got up as well, but he motioned us back down. "You need not interrupt your own meals. I think I can find my way. If not, there seem to be plenty of people to ask directions."
That was true enough. "Very well," I said. "Pleasant dreams."
When he left the cafeteria, Dr. Boyce said, "He's hiding something." "He admits he's hiding something," I reminded him. "I think he's hiding something else."
"Maybe. I'll be taking us out of warp with shields up, that's for sure."
"Good idea," Boyce said. "And I'm going to count our spoons while he's on board. I wish you hadn't given him free run of the ship."
I laughed. "Critical systems are always under guard when guests are on board, you know that. Besides, where can he go? Unless he's got a pocket full of titan seeds--and the whole cargo deck to grow one in--I think we've got him pretty well under wraps."
"I hope so," said Boyce. "But something about him doesn't feel right."
I'd learned to take his opinions seriously. He was one of the Enterprise's first crew members, after all. He'd served under Captain April before me, and he'd exam-ined more aliens more closely than I ever would.
"Okay," I said. "I'll keep my eye on him too. But I'm expecting more trouble from whatever's ahead of us than from him."

My hunch proved correct. When we dropped out of warp, Perri was rested and standing beside me on the bridge. The computer had reported him in his quarters the entire time. Whatever he might be hiding, he had caused no trouble so far, and he was as horrified as I was by the scene we encountered near Devernia.
There was an all-out battle going on. We had ap-proached from a distance, far beyond synchronous orbit around the system's one habitable planet, but that wasn't far enough. The viewscreen was full of titans, their dark bodies eclipsing the stars and their rocket exhaust draw-ing bright lines through the darkness. Smaller spacecraft darted in and out among them, and the flash of deep-space explosions were visible even under low magnifica-tion. The collision alarm sounded almost immediately. "Incoming missile," Spock reported.
"Evasive action," I ordered, but Number One said, "It's too close. It's going to hit us."
"Red alert!" I said. "Brace for impact." I gripped the arms of my chair as the claxon began to wail. Peril, beside me, grasped the handrail. As I had promised Dr. Boyce, we had dropped out of warp with the shields up. They would absorb an explosion, but the inertial damp-ing fields couldn't compensate instantaneously for the shock.
The viewscreen lit up with the flash, then went dark as the outside sensors were momentarily overloaded. The ship lurched, lights blinked, and sparks flew from the navigation controls. Lieutenant Tyler cursed and jumped up from his chair, but a second later he was back at his post, ascertaining the damage. Number One, beside him at the helm controls, had hardly flinched.
The ship steadied out, and the starfield slowly re-turned to view. In it we could see the ion trails of many small spacecraft under power, and hundreds of titans sweeping gracefully around them. Devernia was a bright crescent against the stellar backdrop, peppered with the
black silhouettes of the swirling combatants. "Damage report?" I asked. "Navigation is down," Tyler reported.
"Helm's not responding," Number One said. "Switch-ing to backup control systems."
"Shields at ninety percent and falling," said Spock. "Radiation damage to starboard warp nacelle. Warp engines off-line." The lights blinked again, and his screen filled with more information. "Impulse engines also off-line. Main power off-line."

We wouldn't last long under auxiliary power. I jabbed the intercom switch on the arm of my command chair, years of experience guiding my fingers almost instinc-tively to the right button, and said, "Engineering, get that power back on!"
A moment later I got my response. Unfortunately it wasn't the resurgence of power I wanted, but just a worried-sounding technician who said, "We're working on it."
The air stank of burned electronics. I turned to look at Spock, unsure I had heard him properly. "Radiation damage? What kind of radiation?"
"The missile carried a fission warhead. Relatively low yield--I estimate less than twenty kilotons--but the nuclear reaction produced a neutron and gamma ray flash that was nearly as deadly as the explosion itself."
I could hardly believe my ears. Bombs. The Dever-nians were throwing nuclear bombs at each other.

Chapter Five

THE SEAMAN SLAMMED his brandy sniffer to the table, breaking the pedestal right off the stem. He hardly noticed in his agitation.
"That's exactly what I was afraid off" he said. "The same reaction that could drive a ship around the world on an ounce of fuel could also wipe out a city in the blink of an eye." He noticed his broken glass, drained the brandy in a single swallow, then set the glass upside down next to its pedestal and said, "But your Enterprise was evidently made of sterner stuff. Why wasn't it vaporized in the blast?"
Captain Pike shrugged. "We would have been if we weren't shielded. Even so, we took damage. The shields are mostly good against phasers and photon torpedoes. We weren't ready for the radiation or the electromagnet-ic pulse. That was the real problem. Warp engines are
essentially big coils of wire, you know--"
"No, I didn't," the seaman said.
Pike didn't let the interruption derail his train of thought. "They are. And the pulse induced an enormous current in them. It surged straight down the main power bus into the matter-antimatter reaction chamber, where it diverted the antimatter stream for a moment, which tripped all the alarms and shut down the engines. And that in turn put us on battery power in the middle of a battle. Plus another pulse traveled to the bridge on the navigation control lines and fried our helm."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Klingon woman at the bar and he suddenly realized she was listening intently to his every word. Of course she would be; details of how to cripple a Federation starship would be worth a fortune on her homeworld. "Of course we've upgraded our shield technology to prevent that from happening again," he said loudly.
She grinned at him with her pointed teeth. "Of course," she said. She held his gaze for a moment longer, then turned to the bartender and whispered something to him.
The seaman had contained his agitation. "I apologize~ Captain," he said softly. "It was a great shock to learn that my fears as well as my triumph had already come to pass, but I see that they are apparently old news as well." He shook his head sadly. "I must have been on the prison island longer than I imagined."
Pike didn't know how to respond to that, so he decided to change the subject. "I don't know your name," he said. "Mine's Pike. Christopher Pike."
The seaman nodded. "I gathered that from your tale." He hesitated, frowned, then said, "Considering my cur-rent profession, I fear you will have to call me no one."
"That's not much to call a man you're drinking with," Pike said.
"It is if you spell it N-O-W-A-N," said the seaman. "Nowan is a family name of long-standing nobility."
"It just doesn't happen to be yours," Pike said, not bothering to hide his disappointment. "Ah, but it is," said the seaman. "It describes me, and I answer to it. The rest of my family is dead, so I leave nobody orphaned by my choice. I am Nowan."
Pike couldn't decide whether to point out the psycho-logical implications of what "Nowan" had just said, or simply let it go. The Klingon woman decided the issue for him when she walked over from the bar with two more snifters of Saurian brandy and set them down on the table. "I noticed you were out," she said, gathering up Pike's empty glass and the pieces of the seaman's broken one.
"Thank you," both men said automatically. She didn't reply; merely turned away and walked back to the bar.
Pike took one of the glasses and sniffed it. No detect-able poisons. Of course that left a couple of thousand undetectable ones she might have dropped in it, but he didn't think the odds of that were very high. She wouldn't risk an interplanetary incident just to kill a fleet captain. She was probably hoping to get him drunk and learn more about the Enterprise's weaknesses.
Fat chance of that. Pike hadn't been born yesterday. He raised his glass slightly in her direction, nodded to her, and took a sip. The rush of evaporating spirits on his tongue felt the same as usual.
He wasn't going to get much more out of this Nowan, he could tell. And in truth, that was as good a name as any. So he leaned back in his chair and picked up his story. "As I was saying, we're better equipped to handle fission bombs now, but at the time we were dead in space, with more missiles coming right down our throats .... "

Chapter Six

WE HAD a few seconds before the next impact. We couldn't maneuver, but we did have weapons of our own. "Target phasers on those missiles," I ordered. "Fire."
Number One and Tyler both reached to their weapons controls. Red beams of energy shot outward, spearing the two approaching missiles and exploding them at a safe distance.
As the billowing clouds of superheated gas expanded into nothing, Number One consulted her instruments and said, "Sir, neither of those missiles were aimed at us. Nor the first one either, apparently."
"Who are they shooting at, then?" I asked.
"It looks like the titans. We were just unlucky enough to get in the way. Look." She pointed to the upper right comer of the screen, where the bright spark of another missile reached out for one of the magnificent beasts.
I could hardly hear her over the waft of the red-alert klaxon. "Cancel red alert," I said, "and expand that view." The image grew to fill the screen. The titan was firing its fusion engine, turning to get away from the approaching missile. But it was running the wrong way!
"Go across the flight path, not with it!" I whispered, feeling the agony of anyone who has ever watched a cartoon hero try to outrun a rolling boulder. But the titan was smarter than I had given it credit for; it wasn't just running. It was using its fusion exhaust as a weapon, spraying the million-degree plasma into the path of the oncoming missile.
It would have worked if the missile hadn't been so small. The titan's superheated plume of exhaust swept across it once, but the missile dodged and kept coming, and before the titan could correct its aim, it struck.
For a moment it appeared as if the warhead was a dud, but then I realized it had merely been fused to go off after impact, so it would concentrate its force inside its target. That was an effective strategy; the entire rear half of the titan's body erupted in a white-hot fireball, throwing a spherical cloud of ejecta outward into space. The front half tumbled end over end, spewing blue-green blood and entrails and charred flesh in a vast pinwheel.
Perri, standing beside me, moaned at the sight. Num-ber One frowned and looked away. I felt the contents of my stomach shift, but I forced myself to watch. I might learn something about Devernian battle tactics.
The ship that had fired the missile let the corpse drift without further assault. It was a small, primitive craft like the ones the Aronnians used for in-system flight, but it was light and agile. It darted around among the titans like a bee among flowers, never keeping to a straight path for more than a few seconds. The titans, being so much more massive, couldn't follow it--and for some reason they weren't using their warp drives to get away either.
Agility was about the only thing to recommend the Devernian ship. Its missiles were mounted in racks outside the hull, vulnerable to attack. They used simple reaction drives; I could see black streaks along the fuselage from their rocket exhaust. The ship had no shields, no warp engines, and from the way it maneu-vered on tongues of bright yellow flame I suspected it used chemical propellant. I would have laughed at their rudimentary technology if the Enterprise weren't drift-ing crippled in space because of it.
"The titans," Perri said, his voice full of anguish. "We have to protect the titans."
"We'll do what we can," I said, "but we can't stop that many fighters. Mr. Dabisch, open a channel to one of those ships."
"Yes sir." 1 heard bleeps and whistles as the ship's computer tried to establish a connection, but after a moment Dabisch replied, "No one answers our hail."
"Are they talking with one another? Break into their communications channels."
"There is no regular message traffic. Occasional burst transmissions only. It appears each craft is operating autonomously." Dabisch turned back to his board, say-ing, "There is also considerable microwave emission coming from the titans themselves. I detect no meaning-ful patterns there, either. It appears to be a radar locating system."
"Is that how they navigate?" I asked Perri.
He nodded. "Yes. They also use the questing beam to locate food. And, one would hope, Devernian attackers."
"Doesn't look like it's doing them much good?' I tried the intercom again. "Engineering, what's your status?"
The same junior tech who'd replied the first time said, "Uh... we've got a lot of fried circuitry down here, Captain, but we'll have main power back in a moment. Impulse power should be restored along with it. Warp power will take a bit longer."
"Keep on it," I said. "We may need those engines soon." 
"Understood."
"There goes another one!" Perri exclaimed, pointing at tim viewscreen where a tiny ship had fired a missile at another titan. "Captain, you must stop this carnage."

I didn't really want our first act in the Devernian system to be hostile, but neither did I want to stand by and watch more of this slaughter. And we had tried to communicate.
"Target that missile," I said. "And this time fire a warning shot across the bow of the ship that launched it,
too. Don't hurt them, but I want to get their attention." "Yes sir," said Number One.
The ship's phasers lanced out twice. The missile vanished in a puff of vapor; the second shot came close
enough to fry the paint on the ship's forward hull. "That was probably a bit tight," I said.
"Sorry," said Number One. "I forgot these ships aren't shielded."
The Devernian craft swiveled around with tiny bursts from its chemical thrusters until it was pointed at the Enterprise; then its main engine sprayed flame and it accelerated toward us. "Well, we certainly got their attention, anyway," I said. "Get ready for incoming
missiles. Don't let them even get close to us."
"Yes, sir."
We waited nervously while the Devernian ship drew closer. I glanced over at Perri, who gripped the handrail next to my command chair. He was breathing hard and studying the viewscreen intently, but I thought I could see a faint hint of a smile on his face. Who'd have thought he would turn out to be the type who enjoyed battle? Or maybe he didn't understand how precarious our position was. Two other ships broke away from the titans they were chasing and came toward us as well. "This doesn't look good," I said.
"I detect low-power laser emissions from all three craft," Dabisch said. "Not a communication signal.
Possibly guidance for their missiles."
"Jam it," I told him.
The first ship fired a missile. Number One didn't wait to see if it could lock on to us; she fired the phasers at it as soon as she had a clear shot.
Both of the other ships fired as well. They were farther away, though, so I said, "Hold up a second. Let's see what happens."
Number One waited with her finger poised over the fire button. The missiles raced toward usmbut the first one veered ever so slightly to the left and the second one angled overhead. Our jamming signal was apparently doing something, at least.
"Let them go," I said. "Save power." The phasers drew energy directly from the main power banks; we didn't have much reserve without the matter-antimatter generators on line.
We watched the two incoming missiles search in vain for a target, but then the closest ship fired another one. It was near enough that I didn't want to take a chance. "Shoot that one down," I ordered.
She did so. The two other missiles swerved toward the explosion, then lost their focus as it dissipated. One must have struck a piece of shrapnel; it flared into a yellow ball of flame as its fuel tanks ruptured, but its nuclear warhead didn't explode.
The other one, however, suddenly locked on target and accelerated againmnot at us or at the remains of the other rocket, but straight at the closest of the three Devernian ships.
"Stop that missile," I ordered.
Number One moved to comply, but just then the lights flickered again and her targeting computer lost its fix. The phaser shot went too high, and by the time Number One could fire again more accurately, the missile had nearly reached its target.
The explosion sent the tiny ship fluttering like a leaf. A white fog of escaping air billowed out around it. The hull had been breached.
I hit the intercom switch again, this time a couple of buttons down from engineering. "Transporter room, lock on to the disabled ship off our port bow. Transport any survivors out of there immediately."
"Scanning for life-forms," came the reply. "I've found one. Transporting .... He doesn't look good. Sickbay, Dr. Boyce to transporter room one on the double."
The transporters and sickbay were both on the same deck for just that reason. The few seconds it took to get a patient from the receiving platform into the turbolift and out again could mean the difference between life or death.
Dr. Boyce would save the injured Devernian if anyone could. And just in case he wasn't as badly hurt as it sounded, I sent a security team to meet them and make sure we didn't let a hostile alien loose on board the ship.
In the meantime, we were still under attack from outside.
"That flicker had better have been main power going on line," I said.
"Affirmative," said Spock. "Shields are now at full
strength. Impulse engines are operational again." "Then take us out of here," I ordered.
Number One complied immediately. The safest place in a battle is usually behind your enemy; the viewscreen image swirled around with dizzying speed, then we shot right past one of the approaching ships before it could fire another missile at us. Number One didn't bring us around for a counterattack, however, but continued on into deep space.
"Where to now?" she asked.
"Back into the fray, of course," said Petri. "We must protect the titans!"
"There are thousands of them," Number One said. "And hundreds of Devernian ships. We can't stop them all."
Perri slapped the handrail. "We must! What they are doing here is insane. If we let them continue, they will exterminate the titans, and our livelihood with it."
He had a better opinion of our chances than I did, but I wasn't exactly happy with what I saw, either. I looked at the viewscreen for a moment, trying to get a handle on the situation. Activity seemed centered around the Devernian home planet. The titans had drawn into a dozen or so tight groups for protection from their attackers, a strategy that might have worked fine against an enemy similar to themselves, but against nuclear weapons it was the worst strategy possible. The Dever-nians only needed to shoot into the herd, and they were practically guaranteed to hit something every time.
Space was littered with the corpses of dead titans. At first I hadn't noticed, since their skin was so dark, but the more I looked the more I saw. Thousands--perhaps millionswof slaughtered beasts drifted through space for as far as I could see. I looked to the planet and saw long streaks of light in the atmosphere where some of them blazed in a meteoric funeral pyre.
Perri was right; we couldn't just stand by and let this continue. "Take us into the nearest group of titans," I said, and while Tyler and Number One worked on the course I asked Perri, "What do you call a bunch of them together? A pod? A herd?"
"A fleet, of course," he said, forcing a smile despite the carnage outside. "They are spacecraft, after all."
"Of course." I watched as we drew closer. "Get between them and the Devernians. Number One, you fly; Tyler, you shoot down the incoming missiles. Nucle-ar bombs aren't cheap; maybe after they lose a few dozen they'll decide to talk."
The Devernians knew we were coming. They veered toward us, but Number One easily outflanked them at full impulse power. Tyler didn't even have to fire at their missiles; their chemical rockets couldn't approach our top speed.
The titans saw us coming, too. I suppose I was expecting gratitude, but I realized my mistake the mo-ment we came to a halt amid them. These weren't just strange-looking starships with humanoid crews. There were no control domes on these beasts, no Aronnians inside pulling the reins or whatever they did to direct them. These were wild animals. Panicked wild animals big enough to smash us to pieces, which was just what they tried to do.
Half a dozen of them came at us from all sides. The screen filled with the enormous mouth of the one in front, offering us a view down a gullet big enough to fly a dozen shuttlecraft through in formation. The inside was lined with scaly plates of material hard enough to withstand the intense heat of passage through a gas giant's atmosphere. Those plates were hinged to turn forward as well; it came at us with them projecting ahead like pointed battering rams. Under full thrust it could only produce half a gravity or so of acceleration, but once moving its mass gave it the momentum of a small asteroid.
Shields were no good against something like this. "Evasive action!" I ordered. Number One reached out to comply, but before we had moved an inch the Enterprise shuddered under a blow from behind, then another from the starboard side.
We began to turn aside just as the one in front slammed into us. We lurched backward and heard its jaws squeal against the hull; then Tyler fired the phaser straight into its mouth. He used low power at first, no doubt hoping to drive it away without hurting it, but it hardly felt the blast through all that armor. It lunged at us again, biting down on the edge of the saucer-shaped hull, so he increased power and fired again.
It felt that, but it still didn't back off. The ship rang with its fury as it thrashed and bit; then two more titans struck us from above and below.
"To hell with this," I said, hanging on for dear life. "Ahead half impulse power. We'll knock them loose."
That was easier said than done. The one in front hung on like a bulldog, jerking back and forth in an effort to tear us apart, while more and more of them piled into us from the sides and the rear.
"Full impulse!" I ordered.
The Enterprise leaped forward under heavy accelera-tion. The battering from the sides and behind stopped as the titans there fell away, though one of them must have clung to the starboard warp nacelle for a moment. Unbalanced by its mass, we spun halfway around under full thrust before it dropped off. That motion finally wrenched loose the one in front as well; a deep groan echoed through the hull as it slid free, taking a generous swath of antennas and sensor arrays with it.
Even then we weren't out of the woods. The titans pursued us at top speed, darting ahead on warp drive and rushing us, only to be driven back by Tyler's phaser fire. And the rest of the "fleet," as Perri had called it, joined in the chase.

Chapter Seven

"OH YES," said the seaman, Nowan. "I've seen many a ship battered to pieces by a pod o' whales. They get to playing with you and it's all over."
"These weren't playing," Pike told him. "They were trying to kill us."
"Ah, but that's often play to a man, now isn't it? Who's to say it's not the same to other creatures as well?"
"Point taken," Pike said. "Whatever their motive, these titans had it in for us. We'd already sustained enough damage to cripple the ship and still they came on; I imagined them cracking us open like a crab shell and sucking out the entire crew."
"A nasty image, that." Nowan leaned forward, his elbows on the table. "So what did you do, turn and fight again?"
Pike shook his head. "It wouldn't have done any good. We were hopelessly outnumbered. We had all the advan-tage of superior technology, but it was useless against the sheer bulk and determination of all those angry titans."
He took a sip of brandy and said, "Oh, we probably could have launched a few photon torpedoes at them and scattered bloody pieces halfway across the Devernia system, but we were there to help save them, not kill
them wholesale. I wanted a better option." "Did you have one?" "Barely."
Pike looked up. Every face in the bar was turned his way. Even the felinoid woman seemed interested. He felt heat rush into his cheeks at the realization that he was now the center of attention.
Nowan didn't care. "So what was it?" he demanded. 'tOut with it! Did your Mr. Tyler save the day with his fancy harpooning? Did Dabisch suddenly learn to speak Titan? What?"
Pike laughed. "Nothing so prosaic, I'm afraid. I merely remembered what I had seen the Devernian ships do--darting around like bees--and I realized they had already discovered the titans' weakness. They were bulky, and thus slow to maneuver. The Enterprise wasn't exactly a stunt fighter, but we could outfly a titan. So I order a full stop, a ninety-degree rotation out of the plane of the ecliptic, and a return to full impulse power. That shook off the pursuit--at least for a few seconds .... "


Chapter Eight

WHEN WE WERE once again under way and the titans were still trying to catch up, I hit the intercom switch and said, "Engineering, now would be a very good time to get those warp engines back on line."
This time the chief engineer replied. He was a New Yorker named Michael Burnstein, but I just called him "Burnie." "We're working on it," he said, "but that starboard field generator is in bad shape. We can maybe give you warp two, but the two engines won't be putting out the same thrust. The unbalanced field would tear the ship apart if we tried any more than that."
"Warp two is better than nothing," I said. "Number One, you heard the man; get us out of here."
"Aye, sir," she said. I heard the doubt in her voice, but she didn't question my order. She just entered the command into the helm console, then said, "Brace yourselves, this is liable to be rough."
The Enterprise had already taken a beating unlike anything she'd been designed for. Now we torqued the frame with unequal thrust on top of all her other damage. A deep bass rumble shook us to the core, and we heard the squeal of metal sliding on metal somewhere within the walls, but Burnie knew our limits. The ship held together--and the titans dropped farther behind. Either their biological engines couldn't keep up or they just lost interest in the chase when we made it more difficult, and I didn't care which it was. We plowed on alone for another full minute before I finally said, "That's far enough. Bring us out of warp."
We came to a halt about fifteen light-minutes away from Devernia. Everyone on the bridge held their breath as Spock scanned the space around us, and when he said, "I find four thousand six hundred and twelve titans in the spherical volume of space one light-minute across." I heard a collective groan, but then he added, "But none seem to be concerned with our presence here," and everyone sighed with reliefi
Into the silence I said, "That seems to me like an awful lot of titans."
Perri, apparently deciding that he wouldn't be shaken to the floor again soon, released his death grip on the handrail and said, "During their migration they some-times seem to fill the entire planetary system, but that is largely an illusion. There are seldom more than a few million of them altogether."
"A few million?" I asked, incredulous. The entire Federation didn't have a million starships. The ones we had were more useful than these, to be sure, but still, there was something to be said for sheer numbers. The Aronnians and Devernians were apparently sitting on a gold mine.
Spock turned back to his science station for a moment, then reported, "Sensors indicate seven million, eight hundred and twelve thousand, six hundred and eleven spaceborne life-forms of size comparable to the titans in the Devernian planetary system. There are three million, two hundred and six thousand, four hundred and seventy-six smaller life-forms of one-quarter scale or less. Would these perhaps be their young?"
Perri said, "Three million of them? Impossible. That many have never hatched in one year before."
"Hatched?" I asked, surprised. "I naturally assumed they gave birth to live young. But they lay eggs?"
His brows furrowed, and I realized he hadn't intended to reveal that fact to us. I couldn't see how it mattered, but it was plain that it did to him. It was too late to hide it now, though, so he said somewhat reluctantly, "Yes, they do."
"Where?" I asked.
He looked from me to Spock to Number One, then back at me. "On, urn, small, rocky worlds. Ones with liquid water."
"In other words, habitable planets," Spock said. "Yes."
Spock narrowed his eyebrows. "How do the titans land? Their bodies do not seem designed for planetary surfaces."
"They aren't," Perri said. "They drop their eggs from orbit."
"How large are the eggs?" I asked.
Perri didn't like answering questions, but he had no good excuse not to. "About two or three times as long as you or I am tall, and maybe half that wide. They're oblong, with fins on the back and a heat shield in front for atmospheric entry."
"Fascinating," said Spock. "I surmise that this is how you domesticate them, then? By bonding with them
when they are young?" "That's right." "How do you--"
Just then the intercom whistled for attention, and Dr. Boyce said, "Captain, I've got a very agitated patient here who demands to see you. You want me to put him out until you've got time, or what?"
"Just a moment," I said. I hit the engineering button and said, "How are those repairs coming?"
Burnie replied, "We're just getting started on the warp engine. It'll be three or four hours at least before it's up and running."
Some engineers pad their estimates so they look like heroes when they beat the deadline. Burnie wasn't that type. If he said it would take three or four hours, that's how long it would take.
"All right," I said. "We'll try not to need it before that. Sickbay, looks like we're not going anywhere for a while. I'll be right down." I stood up and said to Perri, "Come on, let's go see what he has to say."
Boyce was right about the "agitated" bit. When we got to sickbay we found the patient strapped to an examin-ing table with wrist, ankle, and chest restraints, and he was still struggling. "You have no authority to hold me!" he shouted. "This is an act of war! I demand to speak to your commanding officer."
"Whoa, whoa," I said, stepping up to his side. "Calm down a minute. Maybe you didn't see what happened out there, but we rescued you from one of your own
people's missiles. You were shooting at us."
"Who are you?" he demanded.
I took a good look at him before I replied. He had the same general build as an Aronnian, the same facial stripes and wide eyes. They were definitely from the same genetic stock. I couldn't tell from a sample of two if their populations still interbred, but it was obvious they at least had common ancestors not long ago.
"I'm Christopher Pike, captain of the Enterprise," I said. "Who are you?"
"Name's Lanned, independent pilot on loan to the thirteenth Devernian attack group. You entered our space without invitation. What is your purpose here?"
I nodded toward Perri and said, "We came to find out what had happened to the titans. It looks like we've found that out, but we still don't know why."
"Why what?"
"Why are you slaughtering them?"
"Because they're Slaughtering us!" He glared at Perfl. "You--you Aronniani You didn't tell them that, did you?"
Pert! swallowed hard. "Of course I didn't, because it's not true. You Devernians have blown the situation completely out of proportion."
"Tell that to the orphans whose parents were eaten by titans," snarled Lanned. "Tell that to the parents whose children were eaten. Tell that to the homeless whose cities were burned."
Perri stepped closer. "The threat is not as great as you make it out to be. If you exercised even the simplest precautions, you wouldn't--"
"You murderous idiot!" Lanned lunged for Perri, nearly jerking the exam table off its mount. His head had the most mobility; his teeth met with a snap only centimeters from Perri's hand.
Perri flinched backward. Lanned said, "You and your precious Federation. 'Got to have star travel to be a member,' you say. 'Got to breed titans to sell on the interstellar market.' Well, every one you harvest comes with a price we have to pay, and we're not going to put up with your greed any longer." He spit a piece of tooth at the Aronnian.
Perri clenched and unclenched his fists as if he might try throttling the Devernian. He actually reached for-ward until I held out my hands--careful to keep them out of Lanned's range--and said, "Gentlemen, gentle-men, let's lower our voices and discuss this rationally. There's obviously a great deal of misunderstanding here."
"Discuss it rationally?" asked Lanned. "While I'm tied to a table?" There was a black gap between two of his front teeth. The broken one must have hurt terribly, but he betrayed none of the pain.

I looked at Dr. Boyce, then back to him. "We'll let you up when you convince us it's safe to do so. But Mr. Pert! is our guest, and if you threaten him you will have to stay under restraint."
He scowled. "Unlike the Aronnians, we Devernians don't want to kill anyone. But we will wipe out every titan in our star system, and neither of you had better try to stop us."
Perri sighed. "He's an extremist. They're all extrem-ists. They refuse to listen to reason."
Maybe so, but I wasn't exactly happy with Petri, either. He'd known what we would find here. This sounded like an ongoing argument, and he'd apparently expected us to sweep in with our superior technology and rout the opposition merely because the Aronnians were members of the Federation.
"I don't like being used," I told him. I drew my hand laser, then nodded to Dr. Boyce. "Let him up."
He looked at me askance, but didn't say anything as he unbuckled Lanned's feet, then his chest, then his hands. Lanned let him do so without hindrance, then slid his legs off the exam table and stood before us, rubbing his wrists.
"Thank you, Captain," he said. "And thank you, Doctor, for repairing my wounds."
Boyce bent down and picked up the fragment of tooth off the floor. "Here," he said, "let me fix this, too. Nobody walks out of my sickbay with a toothache."
Lanned drew a breath to protest, but we all saw him wince as air hit the nerve. "I wouldn't want to compro-mise your reputation," he said, sitting back down on the edge of the table.

A few minutes later, his smile restored, I led Lanned and Perri and two security officers to a conference room. Spock met us there, and we got down to business.
"First off," I said, standing at the head of the table with the star-filled windows behind me while the others sat, "I want to know what happened to the Aronnians who came here before us. Assuming you actually sent the ships you told us you did," I said to Perri.
"We did." The pained expression he had been wearing for the last few minutes intensified. "Captain, you really have the wrong impression of us."
"I think you have the wrong impression of us, too," I told him. "The Federation doesn't intervene in disputes between neighbors. We will assist in negotiating a treaty,
but we won't fight your wars for you. Is that clear?" "Very. That's all we ask," Perri said.
"Yet you deliberately let us come here under the impression that we were investigating a natural phenom-enon, knowing what we would actually find."
"We had no idea what we would find!" Petri said. "That was the whole point of coming here! The Dever-nians didn't answer our signals. None of the titan riders we sent to investigate returned. I told you that."
"But you knew you had a dispute with the Devernians, didn't you?"
Perri nodded slowly. "Y-yes."
"And if your investigators didn't come back, you knew they had probably been killed in battle."
"Not so," he said. "You, with your glorious Enterprise, don't understand how dangerous it is to ride a titan from star to star. We sent eight riders. We expected four to make it here. Of those, we expected two to return with news."
Spock cleared his throat. "You lose half your interstel-lar missions?"
"We do," Perri said defiantly, daring him to comment. But Spock merely nodded and entered something into his datapad.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Half their astronauts were lost in space! Yet people went out anyway, knowing the odds. I didn't know whether to admire them or pity them.
I said to Lanned, "So four of them presumably made it
through. What happened to them when they got here?" "What do you think happened?" he asked. "I think you killed them. Did you?"
He shifted uncomfortably. "Not me personally, no, but we all have orders to shoot anyone who interferes with the eradication effort. If the Aronnians tried to stop us, they would have been fired upon."
"'Would have been,'" I said mockingly. "Were they or weren't they?"
"They were," he admitted.
"Which could only be considered an act of war," I pointed out.
"It was an act of desperation," he protested. "We have no other choice. It's either the titans or us, and anyone who tries to prevent us from doing what we must will be stopped. That includes you, Captain."
Perri snorted. "You have all kinds of choice. People have coexisted peacefully with titans for centuries; there's no reason why we can't continue to do so indefinitely."
Lanned didn't even reply to him. He kept his eyes on me as he said, "Did he tell you how they breed?"
"They lay eggs on your home planet," I replied. "Has he told you what happens next?" "No."
"Let me describe it for you. The eggs fall with the force of a small bomb." He slapped his hand on the table. "They don't usually kill anyone when they hit. Planets are big, and our population is small, which means we generally don't even see where they come down. Most often the first sign we have that one has landed is when the young hatch out.
"You've seen the adults. You've seen the tentacles on the ends of their guidance fins. Well the young ones are all tentacles. That means they're mobile, and as strong as they are they can move fast as lightning. And they're carnivorous. They have to build up a great deal of body mass before they return to space, so they eat practically anything in sightmincluding us."
Spock had opened his mouth, no doubt to correct Lanned for saying "carnivorous" instead of "omnivor-ous," but he stopped with his mouth open when the Devernian~s final words registered.
"It used to be something we'd hear about maybe once a year," said Lanned. "It was always in some other city and everyone would say 'What a shame' and that would be the end of it. But as our population expanded and so did that of the titans, it became more common. Plus, as the titans who fed upon us matured and went into space, it seemed that they deliberately began dropping their eggs near cities. We had to kill them the moment they landed, or the hatchlings would pillage entire towns. They're nearly impossible to stop after they hatch. And if by chance anything survives their depredations, it goes up in flames the moment they launch themselves into space with their fusion engines."
Perri said, "They're not dangerous if you feed them. You could domesticate them if you wanted to. That's what we do with the ones that hatch on Aronnia."
"Oh, yes," said Lanned. "All three of them. We get thousands, and they each eat tons of food every day for weeks while they grow. Where is that supposed to come from?"
Perri shrugged. "We feed them fish. You have far more ocean than we do; that shouldn't present a problem."
"The oceans are barren! The titans ate everything in them before they started dropping their eggs on land."
"Nonsense," said Perri. "If you have trouble with your oceans, it's because of industrial pollution. If you had been more careful the titans would have stayed offshore and you wouldn't have a problem."
"What do you know about oceans?" Lanned asked. "Aronnia is a desert. That's the only thing that has saved you; you don't have enough water to support a breeding population."

"We could breed them if we wanted to. Until you messed things up so badly there was no need."
Perri and Lanned looked as if they might leap up from the table and come to blows, and I wasn't sure if I would bother to stop them if they did. I was rapidly losing sympathy for either side of their argument.
The two security guards by the door lowered their hands to their lasers, but Spock interrupted before the situation could escalate any further. Tapping his data-pad's screen for emphasis, he said, "When the Aron-nians applied for membership in the Federation, you implied that the titans were the result of bioengineering. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that you had no hand in the creation of these creatures, nor even in their husbandry. I suspect that you discovered them already as they are, and merely took advantage of a natural resource. Is that not correct?"
Perri didn't answer. Lanned said mockingly, "Why don't you tell him?" He said to Spock, "The titans came to Devernia about five hundred years ago. To us, not to them. There weren't any Aronnians until a few Dever-nians foolish enough to domesticate the titans strapped airtight tanks to their backs and rode them from our star to theirs. We colonized Aronnia. And now they claim the titans as their own handiwork." He laughed. "And as for 'taking advantage of a natural resource,' do you want to know what they use them for? I mean besides riding around on them like the fools who started it all?"
"I would be happy to learn anything you wish to tell me," Spock said.
"They scoop up their dung."
"Their dung?" I asked to be sure I'd heard him properly.
"That's right. Adult titans feed in the atmospheres of gas-giant planets, and they filter dust and small particles out of the rings of any planet that has them. Devernia only has one gas giant, but Aronnia has three, so the titans migrate there to fatten up before they come back here to breed. But they don't need everything they eat. Their excrement is rich in rare elements, which the Aronnians gather for raw materials."
The stripes on Perri's forehead and cheeks darkened. I wondered if he was blushing, to have us learn this
apparently humbling fact about his race.
"You use it too," he said to Lanned.
"Of course we do. We'd be foolish not to. But we don't base our whole economy on it."
"Nor do we." Perri took a deep breath, then said, "Captain Pike. Regardless of our differences of opinion, you can plainly see that the Devernians have embarked upon a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter that will adversely affect both our planets. As members of the Federation, we have asked for your help in stopping this carnage. You've seen what they're doing here; you can't approve of it."
I looked out the windows. Even from here, I could see the distant flash of nuclear explosions. Devernia was a bright crescent in the far distance. "You're right," I said, "I don't approve of it. But my approval isn't required. All that's required before I act on anyone's behalf is that I understand what's going on, but the simple truth here is that I don't trust either one of you two as far as I can throw you." They both began to protest, but I cut them off. "Save your breath. You've both talked enough. I want to examine the situation firsthand."
Perri looked puzzled. He said, "You have. You are here. What more is there to see?"
I nodded toward the bright planet in the distance. "Devernia itself. When you're looking for a solution, go to the source of the problem."
Lanned said, "You haven't been invited."
I replied, "Then invite us. You need our help just as badly as the Aronnians do. You can't really think hunt-ing them down will work, can you? Spock says there's millions of them out there. Do you have any idea what exploding a million nuclear bombs will do to your environment? Radioactive debris will rain down on you for generations."
"What else do you propose?" he asked. "We won't stand by and let the titans destroy our cities any longer."
"I don't have a proposal yet," I told him. "That's why I want to go have a look for myself. Maybe my crew and I can figure out something more agreeable for everyone involved--including the titans."
Lanned snorted at my presumption, but he said, "Very well, Captain. I will show you Devernia, on one condi-tion."
"What's that?"
He looked at Perri and grinned. "That this arrogant dung-sifter come with us and see for himself what it's like."

Chapter Nine

IN THE Captain's Table, Nowan chuckled softly. "I'll wager he nearly wet his pants at that, eh?"
Captain Pike smiled, but shook his head. "If he did, he hid it pretty well. He spluttered around a bit, of course, said it was a complete waste of time, but in the end he didn't have much choice. Lanned had shamed him into it."
"He no doubt enjoyed that. He strikes me as a rather crude fellow. From your description of him, I fancy he enjoyed laying waste to so many great beasts. No doubt it gave him a sense of power."
"I don't know if he enjoyed it or not," Pike said, "but he thought he had good reason for doing it."
"Oh, aye," said Nowan. "Every man who's ever thrown a harpoon has found some way to justify taking the life of a leviathan, but so many have done it that you will forgive me if I suspect their motives. It sounds to me as if the entire Devernian society had gone a bit mad, if they truly thought they could solve their problem through such massive slaughter."

Pike rocked his brandy sniffer around in a circle on the wooden tabletop. "Like Lanned said, they were desperate. They didn't go out hunting titans just because they wanted to. But yes, I suspect the solution they picked answered an emotional need as well as a practical one."
"That is an easy trap to fall into," the seaman said. "After our escape from the prison island, my own crew wanted to avenge ourselves on every ship that entered the bay, be it civilian or not. I found it difficult to deny them, in part because I felt their desire myself. But a true man will rise above his bloodlust and not let passion rule his actions."
"Spoken like a Vulcan," Pike said.
"How so?"
Pike felt a moment's confusion. How could anybody miss that reference? "They're all logic," he explained.
"They don't give in to emotion at all."
"An admirable trait," said Nowan.
From her stool at the bar, the Klingon woman said, "A cowardly trait, you mean."
Both Pike and Nowan looked over to see her leaning forward with her lips pulled back in a snarl.
"To overcome one's passion is in no way cowardly," said the seaman. "It often requires great courage."
"Passion is part of life," the Klingon replied. "Deny it, and you deny the very core of your being."
"Then you think the Devernians were right to slaugh-ter the titans, merely because they felt the need to strike back at them?"
Her lips pulled back even farther. "The Devernians sound like cowards, too. There is no honor in fighting dumb animals with nuclear weapons. A Klingon would pit himself against them on more equal terms as a test of his honor."
Nowan's eyes narrowed. "Men who need to kill things to prove themselves have no honor," he declared.
The Klingon woman snarled at him, a sound like a lion about to pounce. "What do you know of honor, prisoner? A Klingon would never allow himself to be captured alive."
They stared at one another for a moment, fire smol-dering behind their eyes. Everyone else in the bar had frozen in place, Pike noticed, except for the felinoid woman, who laughed musically and scratched at her left arm beneath its iridescent covering. The Klingon looked over at her with open disdain, but her expression turned to surprise when she saw the tiny hand phaser the felinoid had drawn from its hiding place and now held
with the business end pointed straight at her head. "Zap," said the felinoid. "You're my prisoner." "Hey!" shouted the bartender. "No drawing weapons in here, you know that," but the Klingon didn't wait to see if the cat-woman would put it away. With a scream that chilled the blood of everyone in the bar, she leaped from her stool, picked up a chair from the empty table in front of her, and swung it around in an arc that knocked the phaser from the other woman's grip.
The weapon flew through the air toward the piano, but disarming her opponent wasn't enough. She brought the chair back around for another blow, this one aimed at the cat-woman's head, but the moment she had leaped from her stool Captain Pike had also reacted with instinctive speed. He had his phaser out of his boot before the cat-woman's even hit the floor, and he leaped to his feet and shouted "Drop it!" while the Klingon was still raising the chair over her head.
The Klingon didn't even hesitate. The chair came down in a swift arc toward the surprised felinoid's head, but it never connected. Pike fired as soon as he realized she wasn't going to stop, and the chair vanished in a puff of dissociated atoms.
It was a split-second decision. He could have stunned her instead, but if she was part of a peace delegation that could have terrible consequences. Even disarming her might cost more than humanity was willing to pay, but he couldn't let her hurt someone when he could prevent it.
She whirled around to face him, her face full of rage, but he held his phaser on her and said calmly, "Emotion or logic? Your move."
Just then the fire popped, and one of the men at the table with the cat-woman flinched so hard his chair scooted back with a screech.
Pike felt his finger twitch on the phaser's fire button, too, but he held steady. The Klingon woman held her eyes on him a moment longer, and Pike was just begin-ning to think he might have to stun her after all when she threw back her head and laughed. Her voice rattled the bottles on their shelves behind the bar and her long black hair swung from side to side as she shook her head.
"Well done, Captain," she said, stepping away from the felinoid's table. "I would welcome the chance to spar with you hand to hand."
"Perhaps another time," Pike said.
"I look forward to it." She walked over to the piano and Pike was afraid she was going to go for the cat-woman's phaser, but instead of picking it up she merely crushed it beneath her heavy black boots. Then she picked it up, and carried the pieces back to the cat-woman. "Here's your phaser, dear," she said sweetly. She walked back over to the bar, took a long drink from her tankard of Warnog, then sat down againrebut not in her original place. She deliberately scooted down to the end of the bar closest to Pike, which still left her well beyond arm's reach, but not far enough to suit him.
"DammR, Hompaq," said the bartender, "if you do that again I'll kick you out of here so fast they'll hear the sonic boom halfway around Qo'noS."
Hompaq, Pike thought. Typical Klingon name to go with her typical Klingon bravado.
"I was provoked," she said.
"You were insulting and threatening my customers, and I won't have it. Behave yourself or find another bar."
She shrugged and looked away. Conversation slowly started up again. Pike sat back down and tucked his phaser back in the loop at the top of his right boot.
Nowan watched him in open-eyed astonishment. "I have no idea what I just witnessed," he said, "but I will tell you this: I am no longer inebriated."
Pike smiled. "Nothing like a little adrenaline to burn out the alcohol." He looked around the bar and shook his head. "This place is just full of surprises, isn't it?"
"That it is," said his companion. "That it is. But I fear this particular surprise has diverted you from your story. You had me hooked, sir; I am ready to be reeled in. What did you discover on Devernia?"
Pike had to think a minute to recall where he'd been. Devernia, Devernia. Ah, yes.

Chapter Ten

WE COULDn'T go down immediately, of course. The warp engines weren't repaired yet, and I wasn't about to try running the gauntlet of titans around the planet on impulse power alone. So I took the time to fill in the landing party on what we had learned. To accompany me I chose Spock, one of the two security officers who had already overheard much of our discussion, and Yeoman Colt.
Perri was delighted to see her again, and Lanned seemed equally smitten, but they both expressed sur-prise that I would choose a petite young woman for the mission. I confess that when I had first seen her I had shared their skepticism, but she had long since proven herself to me, and I told them so. She blushed prettily at my words of praise, which only made her seem even more fragile and beautiful, but when I began issuing our equipment she took on a somewhat different appear-ance. A phaser rifle held at parade rest puts a certain edge on anyone's character.
I wondered if rifles would be enough. After seeing how little effect the ship's phasers had on an adult titan, I knew a hand laser wouldn't be worth much against a juvenile, but I wasn't sure if a phaser rifle would be much better. Unfortunately it was the best I could do without hauling around a full-fledged phaser cannon, and I didn't think the Devernians would appreciate that. The rifles were going to be problematic enough.
I asked Lanned if he needed to contact his command-ing officer, but he only laughed and said, "You presume a great deal more order than actually exists, Captain. I haven't had a commanding officer for weeks."
"You haven't?" I asked. "Who coordinates the battles? Who arranges for supplies? You must have some kind of leader."
He shrugged. "I'm sure someone back home fancies himself a leader. There might even be some who follow him. But anyone left who's worth following is out on the front lines in a ship of his own, battling the menace from space."
"Your chain of command has collapsed?" I asked, stunned at the prospect of a leadedess planet in a time of crisis--and at how cavalier he was about it.
"We all know what needs to be done," he said.
"So you think," said Perri. He was looking at our phaser rifles enviously, but I had declined to issue one to him or Lanned. I didn't want to have to protect myself from them as well as from titan hatchlings.
I did outfit everyone with survival equipment: medical kits, a day's rations, warm clothing. With all the activity in space around the planet, I didn't know if the Enter-prise would be able to stay on station continuously. If there was no central authority to grant us permission to approach, there might be times when Number One would have to take her out of orbit to avoid hostilities.
I wondered what kind of reception we would receive on the ground, but Lanned said we would be welcome so long as we didn't try to interfere with their efforts to eradicate the titans. I didn't know whether or not to believe him, but I had little choice but to beam down and see.
At last, after the promised three and a half hours, Burhie pronounced the warp engines ready for flight. I led my landing party to the transporter room, then called the bridge on the intercom and said, "Take us in, Number One."
Lanned had given us coordinates for his home city, a seaport called Malodya on the south end of a large island. I waited nervously while Number One brought us into position directly overhead, darting in at warp three to slip past the titans and the Devernian warships without detection. The moment we re-entered normal space over the planet, however, she said, "Whoops! Here they come. Titans incoming at warp one point six, and Devernians following at full impulse power. We've got about thirty seconds before things get exciting."
"We're on our way," I told her. "Take the Enterprise out of range as soon as we're gone and wait for our pickup signal."
"Aye, Captain. Be careful down there."
"You be careful up here." I stepped up onto the transporter platform, where the others were already waiting. "Energize," I said to the technician at the controls, and a moment later the Enterprise faded away--
into be replaced by a muddy street with gray stone buildings on either side of it. A line of scraggly yellow trees grew between the most traveled part of the street and the face of the buildings, but there was no sidewalk, no demarcation between vehicular and foot traffic. The street had apparently been covered with stones at one timemeither that or it had never been cleared of them--but now so much mud had worked up around them that they presented more of an impediment than an aid to travel.
There were fifteen or twenty Devernians on the street, either walking or riding in ungainly wheeled vehicles that looked like they had all been assembled out of spare parts. No two cars looked alike. Some were improbably tall and narrow and looked like they would tip over at any moment, while others were wider and lower to the ground. They were all angles, apparently made out of stamped sheet metal and riveted or bolted together. The sound of them clanking and rattling down the uneven street assaulted us like an earthquake in a restaurant kitchen, and the air was thick with the aroma of partially burned hydrocarbons.
At least half of the vehicles had no paint that I could see beneath their thick coating of brown mud. The sea air--I could smell the salt from where we stood--was busy rusting them out. Besides the rust, their only common features were wide, large-diameter wheels that presumably helped them churn through the muck. I looked out at the oozing brown surface, then up at the gray sky that threatened to drop more rain on it at any moment, but I held my tongue. I had learned as a cadet that one doesn't criticize alien societies on first impres-sions. Maybe they had a good reason not to pave their roads.
We had materialized in a parking lot. Only one Dever-nian had witnessed our arrivalaan old woman who had been tying down a pile of wooden crates on the back of a flatbed truck. She looked at us curiously, still tugging on the rope; then she narrowed her eyes and peered intently at Lanned. "Ortezi, is that you?" she asked.
Lanned shook his head. "No. I'm Lanned, Ortezi's brother. Ortezi was killed three years ago by a titan."
"Ah," she said, nodding sadly. "I thought so, but the way you all popped up from nowhere, I..." She trailed off and finished tying her knot, asking as she worked at it, "How did you do that?"
Lanned held his hand out toward me and my four crew members. "These people are from the Federation.
That's how they get from place to place. They came here to stop us from killing the titans."
"Did they now?" Her expression grew cold.
"We're here to help you solve your problem," I said quickly. That wasn't strictly true, of course. The Prime Directive prohibited interfering in a society's develop-ment, either for good or for bad. If Aronnia hadn't been a member of the Federation we couldn't do anything at all, but they were and they had asked for help, and Devernia was arguably part of their society, so I felt comfortable at least investigating the situation. Whether or not we acted on it, however, depended on what we learned.
The old woman didn't warm up any, but she said, "Hah. If you could make 'em all vanish the way you appeared just now, you'd be welcome enough. Can you do that?"
"No," I replied. "I'm afraid that's beyond our ability." "Pity," she said. She looked back to Lanned. "Your brother was a good boy. I used to hire him to help me skin trinis at harvest time." She rapped a wrinkled knuckle on one of the crates, and whatever was inside hissed loudly through the vent hole in the side.
Lanned smiled at her. "He showed me the scars. How is the farm doing now?"
She spat on the ground, which was spongy but hadn't given over to mud there in the parking lot. "Can't complain. People still have to eat, even when the sky's falling around 'era. I could do with a bit less rain, though." She looked again at the four of us from the Enterprise and said, "I don't suppose you can do any-
thing about that, can you?"
"No, sorry," I said.
"Not much good to us then, are you?" she asked pointedly.
I saw Yeoman Colt trying to stifle a grin and I gave her a warning look, but that only made it harder for her to contain.
I looked away lest I start laughing too, and our surroundings quickly robbed any mirth from the situa-tion. I said to the old woman, "We'll do what we can."
"See that you do," she said. She checked her knot, then climbed into the cab of her vehicle. The engine started with a belch of black smoke and a whine that rose in pitch until it howled painfully just near the threshold of hearing; then, with a clashing of metal against metal and a momentary spinning of wheels, the woman put it in gear and drove away.
Spock wiped a bit of mud from his pants leg, but considering our surroundings it seemed a futile gesture.
Perri didn't even try to hide his disgust. "What a trini pen!" he said, wrinkling his nose. "How can you people live this way?"
Lanned gave him a withering look. "What's the mat-ter, desert dweller? Can't take a little moisture?"
"It's not the water, it's themthe miasma that's so disagreeable. Have you people no pride?"
"We don't have time for pride," Lanned said. "Unlike youm"
"And we don't have time to stand here insulting each other, either," I said before they could take off on another riff. "Come on, let's have the tour."
Lanned seemed happy to drop it. Perri's comment had apparently stung. I wondered if life here had always been like this, or if we were seeing evidence of the decline Lanned had spoken off He didn't elaborate; he just said, "Very well," and walked toward the street, leaving the rest of us to follow or not as we wished.
It's hard to be unobtrusive when you're carrying phaser rifles. Some of the Devernians carried weapons, but they were usually handguns, and the few rifles we saw were definitely projectile weapons rather than directed energy beamers. At least our dark jackets covered our blue and yellow and red shirts, but people still gawked at us as we marched along the street, stepping carefully to avoid sinking to our ankles in mud. The locals wore mostly subdued browns and grays themselves, probably because they were going to get brown and gray within a block no matter what color they started out. Every horizontal surface was covered with mud, and every vertical one with dark soot. When I caught glimpses of the skyline between buildings I could see plumes of smoke rising into the clouds, smudging the already-dark sky. Even the rain was probably dirty, I imagined.
I tried not to be judgmental. Earth had gone through a period like this. Two of them, actually. We'd climbed out of it once, then bombed ourselves back into it again before Zefram Cochrane invented the warp drive and lifted us out of the squalor once and for all.
I wondered if the titans might do the same for the Devernians, but if Lanned was to be believed then the
titans were responsible for the situation in the first place. Or maybe they were responsible for more than that. I stopped dead in my tracks. Yeoman Colt, who had been speaking quietly with Perri, bumped into me from
behind and jumped back.
"Oh! Sorry, sir."
"My fault," I told her. "Lanned, how old is this city?"
"Malodya?" he asked. "Seventy or a hundred years, maybe. Why do you ask?"
"How old is the oldest city on Devernia?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Old. Maybe four hundred years?"
Four hundred years was old?
"And how long ago was Aronnia colonized?"
Perri answered that. "Two hundred and seventeen Aronnian years ago. That would be about one hundred and eighty-something Devernian years."
Colt said what I was thinking. "You're so young! How could anybody go from the birth of cities to spaceflight in two hundred years?"
Lanned laughed softly. "The spaceships were free. We only had to develop the sealed containers to ride in. And
the titans provided the raw materials for that, too. Their bones are mostly metal, and their eggshells make excel-lent refractory crucibles for smelting it."
That's what I had thought. I could easily imagine tribes of hunter-gatherers or early agrarian farmers watching the creatures come and go on their fusion flames, wondering how they did it and making their own experiments with fire. Two hundred years was fast, but it would be long enough for them to learn to work metals and build the machinery of civilizationteven their own spaceshipstif they had an example to strive for.
Any problem I had with the Prime Direetive paled in comparison to the interference that had already hap-pened here. Now I wondered which would be worse, helping them eliminate the titan influence or leaving them alone.
Spock had been taking tricorder readings since we had arrived. Now he spoke up and said, "Ion dating of the building materials supports Lanned's figures. This sec-tion of the city is forty-seven years old."
"You want to see the oldest part?" Lanned asked. "It might help us understand your culture," Spook replied. I didn't really know what we were looking for, but I supposed looking at the city's history might give us a direction to expand our investigation so I said, "Yes, let's have a look."
Lanned led us down the block to the intersection with another muddy street, turned right, and headed toward a cluster of ten- to fifteen-story buildings that I assumed was the center of town.
I looked at the smaller structures we passed on the way, and I noticed a peculiarity in their design. There were no windows at all on the ground floor, and the doors were heavy sheets of steel, banded for strength. "Are those doors designed to keep hatchling titans out?" I asked.
Lanned shook his head. "Nothing will keep them out if they decide there's food inside. The doors are only designed to delay them long enough for someone on the opposite building to get a shot at them." He pointed to the roof of the building across the street from us, where I saw a notch in the waist-high wall and in the notch the round end of what looked like a medieval cannon pointing at us. It must have had a bore the size of my fist.
I turned to my security officer, Lieutenant Garrett, who nodded grimly. He saw it too. And now that we were looking, we could see them atop every building all the way down the street.
I didn't see anyone up there with the cannons, so I assumed that they were left unmanned until someone sounded the alert. "How often do you need to fire one of those?" I asked.
"We test them every week," Lanned replied. "So far we haven't actually had to shoot a titan this far into town, but there's always a first time. We're ready."
That they were. I shivered at the thought of needing a cannon on every rooftop, but it probably made the city's inhabitants feel safer.
We continued walking toward the downtown area, but we turned aside before we got there. After crossing several muddy cross-streets, we came to a wide, tree-filled park, and the moment he saw it Lanned suddenly smiled and said, "Oh, the big gun! Of course you must see that." He led the way under the canopy of yellow leaves toward a circular pond in the middle of the park.
When we reached the edge of it, Lanned said nothing; he merely turned to look at us, a peculiar smile on his face. I looked at the black surface of the pond, maybe five meters across and ringed in rusting metal about knee high; then I turned once around and examined the park. Wide-leafed trees, bushes here and there, a low ground cover that looked more like tiny fern fronds than grassm but no gun.
Was the pond the remains of its turret, perhaps? Maybe there had been some kind of artillery emplace-ment here and this was all that was left. It was circular enough to be a turret, and the rim of metal around it could be a track...
Or a barrel.
I looked into the black water again, trying to spot the bottom. If there was one, I couldn't see it.
"How deep is that, Mr. Spock?" I asked.
He was already examining it with his tricorder. "I read two hundred and seventy-four point three meters," he said.
I felt my insides tighten up as if I'd just been trans-ported to the top of a cliff. I backed away from the edge and looked to the side to keep my balance. What kind of people would leave a hole that deep in the middle of town without a fence around it? Even if it was full of water. I said to Lanned, "You can't mean to tell me this is a gun barrel."
"Oh, but it is," he said, grinning wide now. He glanced momentarily at Yeoman Colt, then looked back at me. "I'm glad to see that something we did can impress you Federation people."
"You've certainly managed... two hundred and some meters? What in the world did you shoot with it? And what did you shoot out of it?"
"Titans," Lanned said. "Titans to both questions. Their eggs make excellent projectiles going up as well as coming down. We just sent them back upward with considerably more velocity than what they arrived with."
"But straight up? You'd have to be incredibly lucky to hit anything with it."
Lanned said, "Not so lucky as you might think. The eggs shatter under the stress of the explosion, so it's really a cloud of fragments rather than a single egg. That means less impact when it hits something, of course, but when your target is moving at orbital velocity all you really have to do is put the projectile in front of it."
Spock's tricorder made whistling sounds as he continued to take readings. "That would be an effective weap-on. An egg fragment weighing only a kilogram would strike with 28,543,209.88 joules of energy."
"How much is that in kilotons?" Colt asked.
"A lot," I told her before Spock could make an equally precise conversion. "Did it work?"
Lanned nodded. "Oh yes. We shot down twenty-six titans with it before the barrel cracked." "Fascinating," said Spock.
"Of course, that was before we developed our own spaceships. After that we just carried rocks into retro-grade orbit and pitched them out. That meant they hit with twice the power. Much more effective."
"But you gave that up, too, in favor of nuclear bombs," I said. "Why?"
Lanned lost his grin. "We kept hitting too many of our own rocks. Projectiles from the gun fell back into the sea if they didn't hit anything, but orbital debris stays up there for months. Besides, by the time the titans get into orbit, they're already close enough to release their eggs. We had to take the fight farther out."
"You realize, of course," said Spock, "that by attempt-ing to drive them from Devernia you have disrupted their migration pattern and caused them to remain here year-round instead."
"We know that now. We didn't expect it to work that way when we started killing them, but we're trying to take advantage of it and eliminate them while we've got the chance."
I edged closer to the enormous gun barrel and looked down into the water again. My reflection stared back out, just as awed as I. These people weren't afraid to think big, that much was certain.
Just then I saw a flash of light in the sky reflected in the water, and a moment later we heard a whistling sound overhead, followed by a concussion we could feel in the soles of our boots. I blinked and saw another flashw no doubt the afterimage in my retinas. Concentric rings rippled outward into the middle of the flooded gun barrel.
"What was that?" I asked, knowing the answer al-ready.
Lanned confirmed it. "Eggfall!" he said, and the tone of his voice carried both fear and satisfaction.

Chapter Eleven

CAPTAIN PIKE paused to take a drink, and found that his brandy snifter was empty again. So was his drinking companion's. They eyed one another for a moment, then Pike looked over at the bar where the Klingon woman, Hompaq, sat. The other bar patrons had gone back to their own conversations and their own concerns, but she had hardly moved for the last quarter hour. She didn't even look as if she was paying attention to Pike anymore, but he doubted that she had forgotten their confronta-tion. She was probably just waiting for the chance to stick a knife in his ribs.
Nowan knew exactly what he was thinking. "Arm-wrestle you for it," he said.
Pike laughed softly. "No, it's my turn. Be right back." He picked up both glasses and stood up.
"I'm right behind you if there's trouble."
"If there's trouble, I'm probably going to be on my back," Pike said, not really sure he was joking. He squared his shoulders and walked over to the bar any-way, setting the glasses down on the polished wood with a soft click. Hompaq bared her teeth at him, and he felt his skin crawl as she reached down to scratch her bare midriff, but she brought her hand back up empty.
The bartender had been restocking the cooler midway down the bar. He turned his head at the sound, and Pike said, "Two more."
He nodded, but finished transferring dark green bot-tles of ale before he stood up.
"Relax, tiger," the Klingon said. "If I was mad at you, I'd have let you know it before this."
He looked sideways at her. "How? By swinging a chair at my head?"
"I never use the same tactic twice. It's bad form. No, if I were angry at you, I'd probably do something disgust-ingly personal and very painful." She grinned again, showing all of her pointed teeth. "Of course to a Kling-on, that's practically indistinguishable from making love."
"How charming," he said. Was she coming on to him? Impossible. Wasn't it?
The bartender took clown the curved brown bottle of Saurian brandy from the shelf, got two fresh glasses from beneath the bar, and poured.
"Maybe we should just take the bottle," said Pike.
Hompaq chuckled softly. It was all she needed to say; Pike felt warmth in his cheeks.
The bartender shook the bottle gently, said, "Actually, there's not much left in this one," and poured the rest into the glasses, leaving them each a centimeter shy of the top. "Want a fresh one?" he asked.
Good grief, thought Pike. Had he actually drank halfa bottle of Saurian brandy already? On an empty stomach? No wonder he had phasered the chair out of Hompaq's hands. And no telling what he would do after a whole bottle. "No thanks," he said. "That's probably more than we need."
"Try some Warnog," said Hompaq, raising her tank-ard. "It'll grow hair on your chest."
Pike couldn't resist. He looked back at her, let his gaze slide deliberately down from her face to the rounded targets her half-exposed breasts made, and said, "Hasn't worked on you yet."
She looked down in surprise, then burst out laughing. "Ha! Very good, human. I think I like you." She slapped him on the back hard enough to make his teeth rattle.
Pike thought of half a dozen replies to that as well, but he prudently let them all slide. Picking up the brandy snifters, he raised one slightly toward her, said, "Cheers," and went back to his table.
"Well done," Nowan said when he sat down.
Pike shrugged. He'd gotten past her without violence, but he wasn't particularly proud of the accomplishment. There'd been a time when he would have welcomed the chance to wipe the bar with her. That wasn't necessarily better, but he felt somehow let down by the thought that he was mellowing out, and he suspected that Hompaq felt the same disappointment. Nothing would please her more than a good brawl.
She was still watching him. He winked at her. Let her wonder what it meant.
"So now, where was I?" he asked Nowan. "Had Colt fallen into the gun barrel yet?"
"No!" Nowan exclaimed. "Did she?"
"Nope." Pike grinned at him. "Just checking to see if you were listening. You sure you want to hear all this?"
Nowan drew himself upright in his chair. "Sir, if you leave me stranded at this point I will join the scantily clad woman in rending you limb from limb. Proceed at once. The egg had fallen. What did you do?"
"I'll tell you what we shouM have done," Pike said. "We should have run away while we had the chance .... "

Chapter Twelve

BUT OF COURSE we ran toward it. It was hard to tell where it had come down, what with all the buildings in the way, but Spock kept scanning for life-forms with his tricorder and he kept us pointed in the right direction. We couldn't follow the locals; Devernians were running every which way. I eventually realized there was a pattern to their movement--parents and their children going one way and people with guns going the otherm but that wasn't apparent at first. All I saw was a city that looked like a kicked anthill, an anthill full of angular ground vehicles with bad brakes.
We were nearly run over half a dozen times as we sprinted toward the fallen titan egg. Once we came upon an intersection that was clogged with crumpled cars, and I realized with horror that they had no structural integri-ty fields, no artificial gravity, not even crash harnesses to restrain their passengers. Only the poor condition of the streets prevented a worse disaster; nobody could drive fast enough through the rutted mud for a collision to be fatal.
At last we rounded a corner and found the impact site. The egg had struck a building at a low angle and smashed right through a second-story wall, crashed through the floor inside, and come to rest in a ground-floor room on the other side of the building. The cannons from the buildings around it were useless in this situation, but a couple dozen Devernians had climbed to the roof of the one that had been hit and were busy removing the gun from its mount so they could carry it inside to fire point-blank at the egg.
"Make way!" Lanned shouted as we neared the crowd of onlookers on the ground. "Coming through!"
There were hundreds of people milling around with their hand weapons drawn, but so far nobody had fired one at anything. Those nearest to us turned to see who had shouted, and when they saw us following Lanned, armed with our phaser rifles, they backed away. They had probably never seen a phaser before, but the rifles were deliberately designed to look deadly, and that apparently was just what they wanted to see. "Inside!" some of them shouted. "Blow it up! Kill it! Kill it]"
"How longre" I asked, gasping for breath after run-ning so far. "How long before it hatches?"
"Who knows?" Lanned answered. "It used to take about nine days, but now that we're keeping the mothers at bay they're developing further before they drop. Sometimes it's just hours. Others hatch on the way down."
We pushed our way into the building just as a loud boom shook it. We heard shouts from within, and I thought the egg must have hatched, but when we reached the room where it had fallen we saw that it was still intact, an oblong spheroid big enough to hold a full-grown elephant. It was scorched black by its fall through the atmosphere, it surface crinkly and stinking of hot metal and complex organic compounds. Its nose was buried in the floor and its tail stuck up through the ceiling, the fins on the back making it look for all the world like a cartoon bomb.
The noise we'd heard had come from a more realistic bomb that someone had placed beneath the egg and touched off, but that had had no effect other than temporarily deafening everyone in the building and scattering shredded paper like confetti all around the room. It had apparently been an office a few moments ago. I noticed a few other people with clumsyqooking grenades as well as slug-throwing handguns dangling from their belts, but it was clear that those kind of weapons were no match for what we faced here.
"Out!" Lanned shouted, waving everyone away. "Get out of here! We'll take care of it."
Of course nobody left, but nobody tossed another grenade, and the ones closest to the egg backed off to make room for us. Spock stepped forward and ran his tricorder along the surface of the egg. "What's he doing?" someone asked.
"Ascertaining the danger," Spock replied. He stepped around the egg, sidling along the wall where it was a tight fit, his tricorder whirring the entire time. The novelty of it held the Devernians at bay until he had made a complete circuit.
"Well, Spock?" I asked when he didn't speak right away.
"A moment, Captain." We were standing under one of the fins; he frowned at his tricorder's display and moved around