As soon as dawn breaks, I am at the window, opening the heavy shutter and swinging it back, looking out towards the east. I squint into the sunrise, across the fields, and eventually I spot movement - a toiling figure descending the slope of a hill.
One figure. I shoot a worried glance at Zazaru, standing beside me. "I'm going out to see what's happened," I say.
She consults her tricorder. "There's no sign of the, umm, whatever they are, sir," she says, "but I'm reading two non-Klingon life signs."
"Two? I guess that's a good sign - all right, I'm on my way." I check my phaser. I doubt it will do me the slightest bit of good, but the weight at my hip is a reassurance. I head for the door.
Outside, the air is fresh and clear, and the main buildings of the steadhold are starting to stir with life. The child, Nejje, gives me a cheery wave as I lope off across the fields. The stumps of the khala plants look a little taller, already.
I run towards the figure on the hillside, quickening my pace as I make out the details.
Rrueo has rigged a sort of travois, a framework of branches lashed together with some sort of vines, and she is using it to half-carry, half-drag the inert shape of Harley Haught across the ground. She is moving slowly, with immense care and deliberation, her wiry feline frame almost vibrating under the strain. She bares her teeth in greeting as I approach.
"About time," she says. "He is heavy."
Haught's face is pale and waxy, his eyes half-closed, his breathing harsh and irregular. I stand next to Rrueo, and she shuffles sideways to let me take some of the burden. "What happened?"
"We were attacked, by the servitors. Little cloaked shadows, with blades on their arms. No minds, or nothing that Rrueo could touch. Harley Haught was stabbed. Rrueo has done what she could with her field medkit, but there are deep penetrating wounds, and he requires more care."
"How did you escape?"
"Rrueo has thoughts about that. Rrueo will explain, once we are done here."
We drag the travois together, down the hill and across the fields, and I try to close my ears to Haught's groans as, no matter how careful we are, we jostle him or jolt him on some unexpected obstacle. Rrueo's breathing hisses beside me. The Ferasan is tense, and tired... and, from her body language, very, very angry.
Zazaru and the KDF medic Siowxayer are waiting for us. "Two deep stab wounds, in the abdomen," Rrueo snaps at the Lissepian. "Take precautions for bacterial infections, and do what you can about the loss of blood." As we hand Haught over, she leans close to him, her face close to his. "Harley Haught," she says, "listen to me. You are not going to die. You do not have my permission to die." Haught's lips twitch in a ghost of a smile. We watch as the medics take him into the building.
"Rrueo needs water," Rrueo says. Her tail cuts the air as it switches to and fro. I pass her a canteen, and she drinks, greedily.
"We tried to kill you," she says, once the canteen is empty.
I stare at her, hard. "What?"
"Rrueo tells you the worst first, so that you will know Rrueo speaks the truth now. We tried to kill you." Her lip curls in a feline sneer. "You are, after all, still the enemy." Then her expression turns sullen. "Or you were. We have other problems now."
I fight down a rising anger - she is right about the other problems. "Do you want to explain?" I snap at her.
"We doctored the record of R'j's court martial. The carriers exploded at a distance of one hundred and twenty kellicams. Not fifty."
"I see." My nostrils flare. "So you got me to take King Estmere in past that safe limit."
"We did not know if it would work, and in fact it did not." Rrueo strokes her whiskers with one claw. "There were other edits - little things. The names of the lost carriers, for instance. It does no harm for Starfleet Intelligence to think some ships are destroyed when they are not. And, of course, it helps that Mlkwbrians are impossible to lip-read." She pronounces the name of R'j's species with ease.
"What else-?"
Rrueo sighs. "The plan was to stage-manage Federation involvement in Tiaza Zephora. Initially, we wanted to infiltrate R'j aboard your ship or the Falcon, pretending that she was a potential defector - she would then have been in a position to guide your investigations and report on them. Your sudden arrival at Duselva WX rather derailed that plan - we have been improvising ever since." Her tone suddenly sharpens. "The important thing you should know - is that Rrueo scanned the Duselva WX system before your arrival. Rrueo scanned it thoroughly. There were no ruins on the third planet."
My anger fades as the implications of that wash over me. Bits of Rrueo's behaviour suddenly start to make sense to me - "No wonder you've been tense," I say slowly.
Rrueo nods. "The sleeping giant is a reality manipulator on a prodigious scale," she says. "Rrueo's suggestion, to be honest, would be to leave it and hope it continues to sleep - but that is not R'j's way. Rrueo takes it, by the way, that there has been no sign of the ships?"
"No. And we don't have a subspace transmitter capable of reaching Starfleet -"
"We are thrown upon our own resources, then. Fortunately," she adds, "there is hope. You wondered how Rrueo survived the night intact?"
"I did."
"So did Rrueo. Rrueo has a high estimate of her own capabilities, but she does not believe she is more formidable than Juregh's entire assault force. The question arises, then, what makes Rrueo so special that the sleeping giant's servitors do not dare to attack her? Rrueo had many hours to contemplate that question."
"And?"
"What is different about Rrueo? What happened to Rrueo, that did not happen to Harley Haught? Let Rrueo give you a clue: Rrueo can still smell it on her fur."
My eyes narrow. "The chiral compound?"
"It plays some role in the sleeping giant's... biology, for want of a better word. The mirror image version is necessary for it in some way... this version, though, is - noxious, perhaps. That is why it needed the colonists and their chemical processing machines. The extensions of the sleeping giant's will - the hands, or the claws, of the overlord - cannot interact with it directly."
"So," I say, "we have a potential defence, then."
Rrueo grins, exposing her fangs. "Yes. And a potential defence - is a potential weapon."
---
Inside the guest house, they have laid Haught down on a table, and the medics are clustered around him. Zazaru looks up at me briefly, flashes a thumbs-up sign, and turns back to her work.
I walk to the little office, sit down, and start to think. We need to investigate the chemical plant more thoroughly - to discover how the waste compound is processed, once it is extracted - to get as much of it for ourselves as we can -
And there are other things we must try to discover. If we can work out how the entity - the sleeping giant - distorts the molecule of the tellurium compound... then maybe we can work out how it affects space-time itself, how it manipulates reality... and maybe we can defend ourselves against that.
I shake my head. We are dealing with a being that can materialize a continent-spanning artifact at a range of several parsecs - and all we have is our paltry few pieces of field equipment -
There is a knock at the door. I look up. It is T'Shomep. "Sir," she says.
"Yes?"
"I have been engaged in study of the colony's history," she says. "I have discovered something which may be of interest."
"What is it?"
"I have established the date of the overlord's arrival on the planet," T'Shomep says. "In converting it to standard Federation stardates, I became aware of a coincidence. In the circumstances, I believe it may not simply be a coincidence." She pauses. "The date of the entity's arrival is the same date that the USS Jayhawk, under the command of then Captain Grau, entered the temporal anomaly known as the Stygmalian Rift."
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