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“I—I’m sorry, First Speaker. I—I failed.”

“You did no such thing, Reger. On the contrary, you showed tremendous courage.” And you may be the only hope we have , she thought. Saying that aloud was equally inadvisable.

Supporting the young man—who started shaking as they began to walk—Ansed moved back outside into the cold, hoping that the trip to the hospital wouldn’t exhaust her.

For thousands of years, Eerlik had prospered. There had been no reason to doubt that the golden age brought on by the construction of Ganitriul would ever end.

Now, the First Speaker of Eerlik had to wonder if that golden age was over—and if it was, whether the Eerlikka could survive its ending.

CHAPTER

2

Captain David Gold was dreaming of his wife’s matzoh ball soup when he was awakened by the duty officer on the bridge of the U.S.S. da Vinci . There was an urgent message from S.C.E. Command.

Gold blinked the sleep out of his eyes and said, “Screen on.” The viewscreen in his quarters flickered to life, first with the Starfleet logo, then with a familiar visage.

“Did I wake you? Sorry about that, lad,” said Captain Montgomery Scott. “Bloody time differences.”

Gold waved a hand dismissively. “Fact of life.”

“I can give you a few minutes if y’need it.”

Shaking his head, Gold said, “No need. Rachel’s the one who needs four cups of tea to get going. When I’m up, I’m up.”

“Good. There’s a wee bit of a crisis on a planet called Eerlik. You’ll need to set a new course there right away.”

Without hesitating, Gold contacted the bridge and requested the course change, with speed at warp 9. “How long’ll it take to get there?” he asked the duty officer.

“Fourteen-and-a-half hours at this speed, sir.”

“Good. Gold out.” He turned back to the image of the head of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. “So, you gonna tell me what this is all about?” he asked with a small smile.

Although Scotty wasn’t biologically that much older than Gold himself—about seven years, which at their age wasn’t a significant difference— Scotty had, in fact, been born eighty-one years before Gold, which was the only reason Gold let him get away with referring to him as “lad.” Scotty had spent some seven-and-a-half decades in a bizarre sort of suspended animation, as a regenerating transporter pattern, until he’d been freed a few years previous. Scotty had done a fine job of whipping the S.C.E. into shape. After all, who better to supervise Starfleet’s “fix-it” squadron than the original miracle worker himself?

In answer to Gold’s question, Scotty said, “I’m sendin’ you the full mission profile, but the short version is that Eerlik’s in a right fix, an’ the S.C.E. needs to get ’em out of it.”

“They’re not part of the Federation, are they?”

“No, but we do trade with ’em. Turns out their entire bloody planet is run by one big sentient computer on their moon. Problem is, the computer— they call it ‘Ganitriul,’ whatever that means—is breakin’ down. The planet’s in a state o’ chaos. The problem is, they’re completely cut off from the moon—whatever’s bollixed up Ganitriul is keepin’ their transporters, comm systems, an’ ships from workin’ right. In fact, we didn’t get the distress call from Eerlik—we got it from Ganitriul itself.”

“Really?”

Scotty nodded. “It knows it’s broken, but it can’t fix itself.” Shaking his head, the older man said, “In my day, when we saw a planet that had been taken over by one’a those— Ah, but that’s neither here nor there. Your priority is to get the thing up an’ runnin’, pronto. No time to report to Starbase 505.”

Gold said, “But I’ve got crew to replace—and one to drop off.”

“Aye, I heard about the Bynars. Extend my sympathies to 110, will you?”

“Of course. And we need a new computer specialist.” He had been about to finish that sentence with the words, to replace 110 and 111 , but that wouldn’t be possible. They’d find someone to fill the position, but Gold doubted that he’d find anyone who could fill their shoes. A damn shame, too , he thought. The Bynar pairing wasn’t even Starfleet;