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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Entry: The Fault in Our Stars

  I: Ağdam

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  II: Dresden

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  III: Pillagra

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Exit: The Rendering of Allegiant Thanks

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Richie Hertz,

  #33 in your scorecards and first in your hearts, a bright mind with high ideals, a big thinker who sees the big picture, and a man I am honored to call my friend

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

  But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

  —William Shakespeare,

  The Tragedy of Julius Caesar,

  Act I, Scene 2

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For your great graces

  Heap’d upon me, poor undeserver, I

  Can nothing render by allegiant thanks;

  My pray’rs to heaven for you; my loyalty,

  Which ever has and ever shall be growing,

  Till death, that winter, kill it.

  —William Shakespeare,

  The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth,

  Act III, Scene 2

  Entry

  The Fault in Our Stars

  The ground rumbled a moment before the missile lanced through the air toward the clearing at the edge of the vacant city. As the earth quivered beneath his uniform boots, Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu stopped walking, freezing in place after bending his knees and throwing his arms wide to steady himself. At first, the Enterprise helmsman thought that seismic activity shook the land, but then he heard the roar overhead. He peered up to the cloud-studded, blue-green sky to see a slender ebon rocket streak past. His mouth fell open in surprise as he followed its flight. He feared where on the supposedly uninhabited planet the menacing projectile would intersect the surface.

  Sulu dropped his gaze across the patchy spread of sallow scrub grass to the far side of the clearing, to one of the ship’s shuttlecraft and his intended destination, da Gama. In the auxiliary vessel, he had led one of several Enterprise landing parties down to the surface. The boxy craft, about seven meters from bow to stern, rested motionless atop its paired engine nacelles, its access hatch closed. The shuttle sat broadside across Sulu’s path, so he could not see through its forward ports and into the main compartment. He had just enough time to form the desperate hope that the cabin stood empty, but he knew better: at least one of the crew remained aboard.

  An instant later, the missile arced downward and plunged into da Gama. The vessel exploded in a fiery blast, a ball of flame erupting as the bulkheads flew apart. Sulu instinctively raised his arms up before his face, but his limbs provided scant protection. A concussive wave of blistering air struck him hard, driving him from his feet. He landed meters away, supine, the impact forcing the rear of his head to whip backward into the ground.

  Sulu’s view of the sky above him wavered, the feel of the heat from the blazing shuttlecraft wreckage faded, the sounds of debris crashing onto the landscape all around him dimmed. He anticipated pain, but none came. Whatever injuries he must have suffered, the resulting sensations didn’t seem to make their way to his brain.

  He lay there motionless, benumbed, waiting for the normal reactions of his body to return. When that didn’t happen, he attempted to rise anyway. He couldn’t. Just lifting his head off the ground cost him too much effort.

  Weak and overwhelmed, the lieutenant closed his eyes. The simple deed brought him an immediate reprieve, as though the mere act of seeing had proven too intense a task for his battered mind and body. He sought to focus on his breathing, but even that seemed like too great a strain.

  A concussion, Sulu realized. I’ve got a concussion.

  Despite his compromised condition, he understood that his deduction made sense. He’d endured a trauma to his head, and his responses had dulled. More than that, a fog of fatigue began to enfold him, and he knew that he had to fight to push it away. The planet that the Enterprise crew had found—a planet they’d believed a more or less benign environment devoid of intelligent life—all at once seemed something quite different. Sulu therefore needed to see not only to his own well-being, but to that of the crew members forming his landing party.

  With his eyes still shut, he struggled to roll over. It required three attempts, but he finally managed to do so, at the same time sliding his hands beneath the side of his head to cushion it against the firm ground. He wanted to push himself up, but the effort of turning his body had drained whatever fleeting strength he’d found. He took a moment in that position to rest.

  Sulu couldn’t tell whether or not he lost consciousness, but he suddenly became aware of his body trembling. He worried about the possibility of a seizure, a potential consequence of the blow to his head, but then he recognized another roar somewhere in the air above him. Sulu opened his eyes and glanced sidelong at the sky, where he saw a second missile racing beneath the clouds.

  The other shuttles, he thought.

  Captain Kirk had ordered landing parties to the planet on a trio of Enterprise’s auxiliary craft—Mitrios and Christopher had accompanied da Gama to the surface. They’d set down at different points along the outskirts of the world’s lone and enigmatic city, allowing the ship’s scientists to spread out and conduct their investigations in a variety of locales. The crews had hauled a considerable amount of delicate equipment with them to facilitate their research and analysis.

  The sound of distant thunder reached Sulu, but he understood that the din boasted no meteorological origins. He had no doubt that another Enterprise shuttlecraft had been attacked and destroyed. Anger and a sense of urgency filled him as he wondered how many of his shipmates had perished.

  I’ve got to find the others, he thought. We have to protect ourselves.

  It struck him that the surest means of safeguarding the remaining landing party personnel would be escape. Crew members on the planet all carried hand phasers with them, but such weaponry seemed an unlikely deterrent against the rockets Sulu had seen. If he could contact Enterprise, though, he could request immediate evacuation of everybody on the surface.

  Except why hasn’t that happened already? Sulu asked himself. The ship’s sensors would have detected explosions like the one that had destroyed da Gama. In such a circumstance, Captain Kirk undoubtedly would have ordered the landing parties beamed up at once.

  Unless the Enterprise is also under attack. With the ship’s defensive shields in place, the transporters wouldn’t function.

  Feeling the weight of his responsibilities as the leader of one of the landing parties, Sulu worked to focus his mind and gather his energy. Slipping his hands beneath his chest, he pushed himself up onto his knees. A surge of nausea rose within him. He waited a few seconds, hoping that it would pass. It diminish
ed somewhat, and so he struggled to his feet. He staggered once, light-headed, but succeeded in staying upright.

  Ahead of him, fire continued to consume the remnants of the shuttlecraft.

  Sulu reached to the back of his hip for his communicator, but his fingers closed on empty air. He found his tricorder, which he’d been carrying on a strap slung across his shoulder, missing as well. Only his hand phaser remained with him, the palm-sized weapon still secured at his waist.

  Careful not to make any sudden movements, Sulu glanced at the ground about him. The yellowish grass of the clearing grew in wild tufts, dotting the rich brown expanse of the soil. He quickly spotted his tricorder and retrieved it, but it took longer for him to locate his communicator. It lay in pieces on the ground, obviously smashed beneath his body when he’d been thrown down.

  Cut off both from any remaining members of the landing parties as well as from the crew aboard Enterprise, Sulu lifted his tricorder before him and activated it with a touch. Its strap, he saw, had been severed halfway along its length. The lieutenant’s head pounded, but his vertigo and his queasiness had eased enough for him to concentrate on the device’s small screen. He scanned for life signs, beginning in and around the obliterated da Gama. He detected no indication of survivors.

  Deeply saddened, Sulu widened his search. As far as the Enterprise crew knew, they had arrived at a world unpopulated by sentient beings. The ruins of its single city posed a mystery, one that both Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock wanted to explore. With at least two missiles fired, though, the possibility rose that the landing parties might not be alone on the planet after all. Because of that, Sulu did not limit his scans to the species represented aboard Enterprise.

  The western border of the ostensibly deserted city sat near the edge of a deep, wide chasm. The trio of Enterprise shuttlecraft had alighted just outside the urban borders, at each of the three other compass points. A coniferous wood bordered the city to the south, and it had been in a clearing there that da Gama had landed.

  As Sulu swept his tricorder about him in slow arcs, five sets of local readings appeared in its display: four human and one Andorian. It pleased the lieutenant to see robust vital signs, but he read no other indications of life in the vicinity, meaning that he could not account for two members of the da Gama landing party, both of them human. He gazed up at the burning husk of shuttlecraft that the missile had left behind. A knot tightened in his gut.

  Looking back down at the tricorder, Sulu studied its screen. Though divided into a group of three and another of two, the five individuals all moved steadily west, converging on a point outside the city, near the edge of the chasm. The lieutenant knew that a series of caverns descended from the surface there—he’d just come back to da Gama from such a cave—and he suspected that his crew pursued refuge in one of them. Given the unexpected appearance of an air-based threat, it seemed a sound strategy for survival. It also pleased him to read a sixth life sign—undoubtedly Lieutenant Hadley, with whom Sulu had been working—already inside the caverns.

  Despite the pain throbbing at his temples, Sulu worked the tricorder to measure the distances involved. The first group of landing party members sped toward the nearest caves from a quarter kilometer away, and the second from a half kilometer, while he stood an additional kilometer beyond that. With few choices, he started in that direction.

  Previously, Sulu had made his way to and from the caverns via the southwest corner of the city, but under the current circumstances, he chose a more direct, though untraveled, route. At first, he moved with care, trying not to exacerbate the symptoms of his concussion. He crossed the clearing, skirting the destroyed da Gama, and entered the unexplored wood. The temperature dropped by several degrees beneath the old-growth evergreens, many of which rose to impressive heights. Sunlight penetrated to the ground only sporadically, considerably limiting the undergrowth. With most of the trees half a dozen or more meters away from their neighbors, Sulu advanced with relative ease. A browning carpet of fallen needles provided him with soft but sturdy footing.

  Sulu occasionally consulted his tricorder, but mostly he stared ahead and down as he walked, wanting to keep his field of vision narrow and steady. After a couple of minutes, though, the cooler temperatures and softer light seemed to benefit his condition; he no longer felt sick to his stomach, and his dizziness likewise gave way. Though his head still ached, he began to trot. Shortly after that, he broke into a run.

  As he moved, Sulu’s head threatened to split in two, but he refused to slow. Trees slipped past him on either side, benchmarks of his progress darting along his peripheral vision. His movements suddenly seemed untamed, as though his arms and legs pumped beyond his control. He thought he might lose his balance, and envisioned hurtling head-first into the unforgiving trunk of an evergreen.

  But then Sulu emerged from the wood and skidded to a halt. Not far ahead, he saw the rim of the massive canyon that provided the lost city with a striking backdrop. He’d spied the natural formation from a height as he’d piloted da Gama down to the planet, but its considerable extent looked far more imposing from his new vantage. He estimated its depth at a kilometer or more, and it clearly extended far wider than that. Across from his location, a pair of high, narrow waterfalls cascaded in brilliant sprays down to the river coursing along the floor of the great chasm. Amazingly, the beauty of the vista seemed to dull the pulsing pain in his head.

  Checking the tricorder once more, Sulu saw that the members of his landing party had already made it into one of the nearby caverns. He peered about, studying the terrain, until he pinpointed the mouth of the cave. He started in that direction and had nearly reached it when another low-pitched sound became audible in the distance. He stopped and listened, hoping that it would resolve into something else as it grew louder, but soon enough he recognized the roar of another missile.

  It’s headed for us, Sulu thought. For our landing party.

  He didn’t know if all three Enterprise shuttlecraft had been destroyed, but as the missile neared, he understood that the ship’s planet-bound personnel had become the next target. If the members of his landing party descended far enough belowground, they would likely survive such an attack, but Sulu knew that they had only reached the caves a few moments earlier. His tricorder confirmed that they’d had insufficient opportunity to achieve a safe depth.

  Desperate, Sulu attempted to formulate a solution. As he reached to work the controls of his tricorder, his headache returned to its previous, excruciating level. His head hurt so badly that he imagined somebody firing a phaser on heavy stun at him from point-blank range.

  Not just on heavy stun, he thought. It feels like a phaser on overload detonating inside my skull.

  Once more, the land began to rumble. Disregarding his pain as much as he could, Sulu operated his tricorder, setting it to emit the false life signs of a hundred humans and as many Andorians. He didn’t know if the missile tracked its prey via sensor scans, but he had no time to devise another plan.

  As the roar in the sky and the quaking of the ground both increased, Sulu dashed toward the edge of the canyon. He would have to approach the precipice in order to have any hope of success. Estimating his range from the cliff at about ten meters, he figured to cover at least half that distance.

  Sulu stumbled more than once as the earth shook beneath him, but he somehow remained on his feet. As he topped a slight rise, though, the land suddenly fell away where a sizable fissure had been notched into the rock face. Sulu slammed his feet down as quickly as he could. His knees locked as he skidded forward.

  He teetered on the inner point of the fissure, which allowed him an unimpeded view down a thousand or more meters to the canyon floor. His heart seemed to seize up in his chest as he wildly pinwheeled his arms backward. Rocks and clumps of soil kicked forward from beneath his feet and plummeted into the chasm. Sulu barely prevented himself from following them over the edge.

  Aware of his rapid heartbeat, as well
as of beads of sweat streaming down his face, Sulu knew that he had to ignore the fate he’d nearly suffered. Above him, the boom of the missile had grown almost deafening. Without looking up to measure its progress, Sulu grasped his tricorder as tightly as he could with one hand, reached back, and then heaved it forward with all of his might.

  The device sailed out over the fissure, and for a moment, it seemed as though gravity had abdicated its responsibilities. But then the tricorder dropped, and Sulu had to hope that he’d thrown it far enough that it would fall, unhindered and functioning, all the way to the chasm floor. He also had to hope that would be enough.

  Sulu retreated a few steps, back to the top of the incline. He started to turn so that he could run for the cave entrance, but then the cacophony of the rocket reached a crescendo. He glanced up to see the deadly projectile already pointed toward the ground, looking as though it might dive directly onto his location. Before he could react, though, the missile shot past him and down into the fissure, clearly chasing the counterfeit life signs fabricated by his tricorder.

  The explosion came only seconds later. The clamor of the blast sent fresh slivers of pain deep into Sulu’s head. The earth pitched violently beneath him, tossing him from his feet once more. He struck the ground at the top of the incline, and then lurched past it, toward the fissure. His hands clawed at the soil, frantically trying to find purchase.

  Then Sulu tumbled over the edge of the canyon.

  Ağdam

  I

  One

  The red turbolift doors glided open with their characteristic squeak, revealing beyond them the circular enclosure of the Enterprise bridge. Captain James T. Kirk stepped out of the cab onto the raised, outer deck of the compartment. An olio of familiar noises rose to greet him: the background twitter that accompanied the operation of the main viewscreen; the feedback chirps emitted by control stations; the quiet, sporadic dialogue of the personnel present; and the slightly reedy sound of voices transmitted over the intercom. Beneath it all, binding it together, the low-level thrum of the impulse drive suffused the space.