Star Trek: Titan - 007 - Fallen Gods Read online

  Though the United Federation of Planets still reels from Andor’s political decision that will forever affect the coalition, Captain William T. Riker and the crew of the U.S.S. Titan are carrying out Starfleet’s renewed commitment to deep space exploration. While continuing to search the Beta Quadrant’s unknown expanses for an ancient civilization’s long-lost quick-terraforming technology—a potential boon to many Borg-ravaged worlds across the Federation and beyond—Titan’s science specialists encounter the planet Ta’ith, home to the remnant of a once-great society that may hold the very secrets they seek. But this quest also takes Titan perilously close to the deadly Vela Pulsar, the galaxy’s most prolific source of lethal radiation, potentially jeopardizing both the ship and what remains of the Ta’ithan civilization. Meanwhile, Will Riker finds himself on a collision course with the Federation Council and the Andorian government, both of which intend to deprive Titan of its Andorian crew members. And one of those Andorians—Lieutenant Pava Ek’Noor sh’Aqaba—has just uncovered a terrible danger, which has been hiding in plain sight for more than two centuries….

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  COVER ART AND DESIGN BY ALAN DINGMAN

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that, Admiral,” Riker said.

  “I’m not sure I do, either.” Admiral de la Fuego’s tone had become stiff and bracing, discouraging dissent. “The simple fact is that during the months since Typhon Pact–allied Breen agents made off with Federation slipstream technology, Starfleet Command has been more concerned about internal security than at any time since the parasite infestation eighteen years ago. Ever since Andor’s government announced its secession from the Federation, Command has become wary of Starfleet’s Andorian personnel.”

  Riker’s stomach had begun to tie itself into a knot of disgust. “Admiral, I hope you’re not saying that Starfleet Command intends to push its Andorian officers into accepting… forced repatriation.”

  The admiral shook her head slowly. “No, Captain.” A look of thoughtful sadness crossed her face as she trailed off, as though weighing her next words with the utmost care before delivering them. “But Starfleet Command has decided it would be best for everyone concerned if all nonrepatriated Andorian personnel were to accept redeployment to some of Starfleet’s less sensitive positions, at least temporarily.”

  Riker felt his frown deepen; he knew how easy it was for temporary measures to ossify into permanent fixtures.

  “How soon?” he asked.

  “In Titan’s case? As soon as the Capitoline arrives to begin crew rotations.”

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ™, ® and © 2012 by CBS Studios Inc. and Paramount Pictures Corporation. STAR TREK and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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  ISBN 978-1-4516-6062-3

  ISBN 978-1-4516-6063-0 (ebook)

  This book is dedicated to those who showed the courage to put everything on the line for fairness, for justice, and for basic decency, from the shores of Tripoli to the boardroom bunkers of Wall Street.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Interlude

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Interlude

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Interlude

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  The story begins about two months after the conclusion of Seize the Fire, or approximately two weeks after the finish of Dayton Ward’s Paths of Disharmony (roughly stardate 59833.8, or November 1, 2382).

  Trust not in princes—in a son of man,

  For he hath no deliverance.

  —The Book of Psalms, chapter 146, verse 3

  If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

  —Isaac Newton (1643–1727)

  Prologue

  TA’ITH

  With the Thousand standing behind hir in reverent silence, Eid’dyl watched as the Heart of the Cosmos sank ever lower in the purpling sky, its baleful glow throwing long shadows across the ruined minarets and spires of the Sacred City’s expanse.

  Like any able-bodied member of hir tribe, Eid’dyl had ventured from the relative safe
ty of the subsurface Preservationist Arcologies to make the same arduous journey during several bygone Pilgrimage Seasons, mostly during hir youth. Now, as then, skeletal remains of the architectural wonders left behind by the Whetu’irawaru Progenitors stood in broken, snaggled ranks amid eons of accumulated detritus, endlessly repeating a pattern of inevitably encroaching chaos that stretched out to the edge of the long-abandoned necropolis and past the limits of Eid’dyl’s vision.

  But the tableau that Eid’dyl now faced was freighted with neither the stillness nor the silence of those earlier visits. Today the Sacred City’s broad streets and boulevards reverberated with the murmurs and clamor of life and hope. The throng that had begun gathering here today was comprised entirely of Arava’whetu, to be sure, rather than the extinct Whetu’irawaru who had birthed them in the same misty antiquity that shrouded the Sacred City’s founding. Nevertheless, Eid’dyl could almost make hirself believe that the approaching people belonged to the former race rather than the latter.

  “The Deconstructors come, Sachem Eid’dyl,” Garym said unnecessarily, punctuating hir words by gesturing toward the gathering multitude with hir batonlike front-most pair of forelimbs. Garym had served for many Heartlaps as Eid’dyl’s subsachem, hir steady hindlimb in overseeing the business of the Preservationist Council, the body that organized and perpetuated the ceaseless labor of maintaining the tribe’s frustratingly incomplete store of extant Whetu’irawaru knowledge. Despite hir lengthy experience, Garym had never lost hir proclivity for uttering the obvious.

  Deconstructors, Eid’dyl thought with no small amount of distaste. S/he twirled hir midlimbs in a gesture that denoted both acknowledgment and impatience. Trashers.

  “I see them, Garym,” the Preservationist leader said aloud. “Let us hope their new sachem will understand the benefit of leading hir people onto a path they have yet to try.” Eid’dyl had good reason for maintaining this hope. The old leader of the Deconstructor faction had been too full of superstitious fear to so much as consider attending an intertribal summit like the one that was about to begin here today.

  The late-afternoon sky abruptly brightened, giving Eid’dyl a graphic reminder of why such a fundamental change was so critically important for the survival of all who dwelled beneath the Heart of the Cosmos, the dispassionate Giver of Life and Death. The sudden brilliance caused hir to flinch involuntarily, and a collective groan of dismay passed among the Thousand who stood behind hir, and through the ranks of the approaching Deconstructors. In the scant pulsebeat before instinct pulled all four of hir forward sensory stalks beneath their wrinkled dermal hoods—thereby protecting the sensitive vision patches at each stalk’s tip—Eid’dyl noted that the lightgeysers that marked the top and bottom of the Heart of the Cosmos had brightened tremendously, and had grown both thicker and longer. As if that change hadn’t been dramatic enough, the sides of the Heart had swelled noticeably as well, the poles flattening as though the great orb were nothing more than a lump of moist clay set in the center of a crazily accelerating potter’s wheel. Without any conscious volition, Eid’dyl raised a pair of multijointed forelimbs and spread their manipulative petals protectively across hir field of view, even though each of hir sensory stalks had already contracted more than tenfold. Pale orange light rushed in regardless.

  “The Heart grows ever more restive,” Eid’dyl heard Garym observe, hir words carrying a discomfiting air of portentousness.

  Eid’dyl understood as well as anyone on Ta’ith that the Heart of the Cosmos knew all and encompassed all. But interpreting the specific content of the Heart’s innermost thoughts and motivations was another matter entirely. Unwilling to pretend to understand that which might well remain forever beyond Ta’ithan comprehension, Eid’dyl could only wonder.

  But presumptuous though Garym’s words might have been, Eid’dyl found hirself unable to dismiss them outright. Could it be that the Heart’s copious patience had at long last run out? Despite the risk of sacrilege, Eid’dyl couldn’t resist speculating: Had the mighty fireglobe decided to render a final, irrevocable judgment against the Arava’whetu for having fallen so far short of the achievements of their long-dead Whetu’irawaru betters?

  But like hir parents and their forebears, Eid’dyl had always believed that the Heart’s judgment, when it finally came, would be both inescapable and permanent, bearing scant resemblance to the bizarre, fading afterimages that now raced across hir overloaded retinal tissues; though Eid’dyl had glimpsed but a literal eyeblink’s worth of the Heart’s latest eruption, hir visual cortex reeled from a slowly receding onslaught of dark, pyroclastic shapes and splotches of brilliant firecolor.

  “The Heart becomes ever more ferocious as well,” Garym said with a rattling shudder. “Perhaps because the passage of time has diminished its overall size.”

  Eid’dyl vibrated hir metal-rich organic carapace in affirmation until hir shell sang out in several distinct overtone pitches. Thanks to the Old Records, Eid’dyl knew well that the Heart was now but a pale remnant of the Great Daystar that had illuminated the firmament during Ta’ith’s ancient Whetu’irawaru epoch. According to the eons-old Whetu’irawaru records, the Heart had once been both considerably larger than its present size as well as a far more stable source of life-sustaining illumination.

  “You speak true, Garym,” Eid’dyl said quietly. “Sadly, that truth has only grown deeper over the past quarterlap. All Arava’whetu now living upon the face of Ta’ith must credit the Heart not only for their lives—but also for the present sad brevity of those lives.”

  We cannot continue to live with the Heart for much longer, Eid’dyl thought, interlacing hir limbs, a gesture of determination commingled with desperation. And yet we cannot live without it for any length of time either.

  Though Garym’s tertiary thoracic stridulators quavered with audible sadness, the tone and timbre of hir speech—made audible by hir primary and secondary soundlimbs—were free of any evident fear. “And now we stand directly in the path of the Heart’s full fury, without the roofs and walls of the Arcologies to protect us. I wonder if that means we are soon to join our ancestors beyond the Veil.”

  Eid’dyl experimentally relaxed the dermal hood on one of hir sensory stalks, tentatively exposing one of hir vision patches to the western horizon. The Heart of the Cosmos appeared to have set and forgotten its tantrum, at least for the moment. Though the reddening orb remained visibly flattened, its east-west axis and polar lightgeysers still distended as it continued its descent, the angry brilliance of the Heart’s outburst had already declined to a far more pedestrian level of fury. Because the setting Heart had drawn so very near to the horizon, its radiance had to penetrate far more of Ta’ith’s atmosphere than would have been the case a mere quarter-dayturn earlier.

  “For good or ill, Subsachem,” Eid’dyl said, working hard to keep hir speech stridulations calm and even, “I suspect your curiosity will soon be satisfied.”

  Eid’dyl watched silently as the foremost Deconstructor echelons came to a stop a mere dozen bodylengths away, their sensory stalks and forelimbs bent forward at aggressive right angles. Eid’dyl could feel the silent fear and tension of the Thousand who stood resolutely behind hir. Positioning hir own sensory stalks as nonprovocatively as possible, Eid’dyl took a cursory head count of hir approaching adversaries and determined quickly that the Trasher phalanx and hir own Thousand were a fairly even match, at least in terms of numbers.

  “Where are the new Deconstructor leaders?” Garym said quietly—quietly enough, Eid’dyl hoped, so as not to provoke any ill-advised action from the Trashers’ front ranks.

  Eid’dyl watched in silence as Garym’s query began to answer itself. To murmurs of surprise from the Preservationist Thousand, a gap opened up in the middle of the first row of Deconstructors, as though an invisible wedge had driven two of the nearest Trashers apart, forcing those on either side to make way. A moment later the second row behaved similarly, as did the next several, each in their turn
. It was as though the massed Deconstructor ranks had parted down the center in a manner that made Eid’dyl think of the fault-riven magmalands of Ta’ith’s geologically active equatorial region.

  A pair of Arava’whetu, their exoskeletons adorned with numerous multicolored badges of office, emerged from the gap and strode directly toward Eid’dyl. Though their carapaces were pitted and rough in texture, looking more careworn and bowed than those of any but the most ill-fortuned Preservationist, Eid’dyl immediately recognized the new arrivals.

  “Sachem Fy’ahn,” Eid’dyl said by way of greeting after the pair had come to a stop at an uncomfortably close proximity. Taking great care to avoid reacting to the unpleasantly moist nearness of hir adversaries’ respiration plates, Eid’dyl extended one of hir sensory stalks in a gesture of peace aimed at the older and more colorfully decorated of the two Deconstructor leaders.

  Deconstructor Sachem Fy’ahn took no evident notice of Eid’dyl’s formal somatic diplomacy as s/he stridulated a perfunctory greeting-response that might well have been calculated to give offense. “My subsachem, Yrsil,” Fy’ahn said as s/he gestured absently toward hir lieutenant, using several upper right-side limbs. “We come with more than a thousand of our most accomplished weaponwielders so that we might bring the rumbles in the sky to a decisive end.”

  Fy’ahn’s sentiment struck Eid’dyl as risible. Did the Trasher sachem intend to challenge the Heart of the Cosmos to combat? Eid’dyl held hir stridulators quietly rigid for a moment, allowing the temptation to sound an unresolved tritone of ridicule to pass by harmlessly. After all, this was no laughing matter. S/he knew in the deepest meat beneath hir carapace that hir own Thousand, specialized as they were to practice the Preservationist arts, could never stand against a like number of Trashers. Provoking the new Deconstructor sachem in any manner would be unwise in the extreme—especially with the fate of the entire world literally at stake.