Titan, Book Two: The Red King (Mass Market Paperback)

Nearby, Riker's uncertain ally, Commander Donatra of the Romulan Warbird Valdore, rescues a young Neyel, the survivor of a mysterious cosmic upheaval that seems at times to be both unraveling and reweaving the very fabric of space...the fulfillment of an apocalyptic vision that has already claimed millions of lives. Titan's science team soon finds evidence that the ravaging of Neyel space is the work of a vast and powerful intelligence: the stirrings of a dormant consciousness that is maintaining the existence of the Small Magellanic Cloud -- and all life within it -- from one moment to the next. And if it should awaken, the consequences are unimaginable.

As Riker considers his options, his new crew struggles with the scientific and philosophical implications of what they've discovered...while the young Neyel in their midst forges a bond with the captain, conjuring old ghosts Riker has yet to lay to rest.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Small Magellanic Cloud, 7 January 2380 (Auld Greg Aerth Calendar)

"Behold," Frane said, unable to keep a slight tremor of awe out of his voice. Or is it fear? he wondered in some deep, shrouded corner of his soul.

But the vista that stretched before the assembled Seekers After Penance took Frane to a place far beyond fear. It was the most beautiful and terrible sight he had ever beheld. Effulgent tendrils of energy reached across millions of klomters of trackless emptiness toward the battered transport craft, like the probing fingers of some great, grasping hand.

Frane heard Nozomi gasp as she cowered behind him, as though the image threatened to reach straight through the cramped vessel's viewer and grab her.

"Have faith," Frane said. As a Neyel who had forsworn his own people's conquest-hardened traditions to live among society's slaves and outcasts, he knew well that faith was often the only thing that sustained him. To comfort Nozomi, he took one of her hands even as her graceful forked tail gently entwined with his. He gently disengaged from the female Neyel after noticing that one of her feet was grasping his leg hard enough to whiten the gray flesh beneath his loose pilgrim's robe.

"I'm keeping station here," said Lofi, the female Sturr who was handling the helm as well as the sensor station. Because she belonged to a race of multipartite colony creatures -- one of the first local peoples, in fact, to be conquered by the ancestral Neyel after their arrival centuries ago in M'jallanish space -- Lofi was able to separate several of her rounded thoracic segments briefly in order to perform disparate simultaneous tasks. Looking toward Lofi, Frane considered how this ability had made the Sturr species so useful to the earliest, most expansion-bent generations of precursor Neyel, the eldest Oh-Neyel Takers who spread throughout the M'jallan region to build the Neyel Hegemony on the backs of dozens of conquered slave races.

Will my people ever expiate the shame of those sinful days? Frane wondered. He feared he already knew the answer.

Eager to chase those dark thoughts away, Frane turned his gaze back toward the great, slowly coruscating starburst of energy that filled the screen before him. He saw that the image was holding the attention of everyone else in the narrow, dimly lit control room.

"Can't we approach it more closely?" g'Ishea said, cuddling up against Fasaryl, her mate. Members of an indigenous species that had been displaced -- and then largely slaughtered -- to make room for the shining Neyel capital of Mechulak City and the other great metrosprawls of the Neyel Coreworld, g'Ishea and Fasaryl had never known a time when their kind had been free to graze unhindered. Frane could only wonder what it was like to live as a forced laborer on what had once been a bucolic paradise, toiling endlessly beneath the Neyel lash and the lidless eye of Holy Vangar, the Stone Skyworld that had orbited their planet since the times of the First Conquests. How would it be, he wondered, to live that way for a dozen generations without any hope of freedom?

Frane cast a questioning glance at Lofi -- or rather at the globular, leathery portion of Lofi to which her primary sensory cluster was attached.

"I would advise not getting any nearer to it than this," Lofi responded, an overtone of fear coming through the vocoder that rendered her guttural native utterances into Neyel-intelligible speech. "That phenomenon is throwing off spatial distortions like nothing I've ever seen before. I can't guarantee this ship will hold together if I let us drift any closer to them."

"Disappointing," Frane said, though he wasn't completely certain that he meant it.

"I'm more than happy to keep my distance," said Nozomi in a quavering voice. Her tail was wrapping nervously around Frane's waist again. He brushed the prehensile appendage aside with his own.

Frane turned toward her, prepared to offer a waspish observation about her tiresome, almost theatrical displays of faintheartedness. Why couldn't she keep her fears to herself, as he did?

"Why has this appeared?" Fasaryl said, pointing the opposable digits of one of his front hooves toward the tendrils of energy displayed on the screen.

"You know why, beloved," g'Ishea said, worrying her dewlap with her wide, rough tongue. "Because the Sleeper has at last begun to awaken." Though g'Ishea's low voice sounded calm, the gurgling noise emanating from her multiple digestive organs told Frane otherwise.

"So everyone keeps saying," Fasaryl said, clearly unsatisfied with the obvious answer.

Since the puzzling energetic phenomenon had abruptly appeared several weeks earlier, just pars'x from the very Coreworld itself, the Neyel intelligentsia had offered countless theories to account for it, as had the clergy, both on the cultural fringe and in the mainstream. To some it was a rare instance of interspatial slippage between adjoining regions of subspace. To others it was merely the beginning of yet another iteration of the cycle of cosmic death and rebirth, a phase that would take the universe billions more years to pass through entirely. To others it was merely a localized natural disaster, a thing of rare beauty and thankfully even rarer violence.

Frane knew that some saw the vast, multihued energy eruption as a cause for fearful rejoicing, because it had destroyed but a single Neyel-settled world.

So far, he thought.

Or was the expansive, colorful energy bloom, as those of a more secular bent had suggested, merely a temporary reopening of one of the long-neglected