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  To Paul E. Roman,

  a man who lived a quiet life of greatness,

  an unparalleled friend and batterymate,

  with whom I shared

  many priceless and unforgettable moments.

  I miss you.

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  The events of the primary story in this novel begin in ­September 2385, days after the assassination of Federation President ­Nanietta Bacco (Star Trek: The Fall—Revelation and Dust), and they continue into December of that year.

  Deep away, in a distant ebon night,

  Those who would slip the bounds of their darkness

  Gather to consecrate an untried path,

  To behold a fiery sacrament.

  Seeking Truth, they journey toward the Children,

  Carrying paradox along with them:

  They thunder as they search for peace of mind,

  Extinguishing verity as profane.

  They unleash Fire, a penultimate act

  That expands limits in one dimension

  Just as it collapses in another,

  Setting all for the final Ascendance.

  —Akorem Laan

  Revelation and Dust, “The Path to Ascendance”

  Prologue

  Ignition

  Beneath a panoply of stars, the ritual unfolded, a sacrament defined by scripture and recorded by history, but absent from the universe for fifty millennia. Votiq stood at the center of the caldera, the disc of black volcanic glass extending in all directions until it met the rocky slope that led up to the crater rim. He watched with an amalgam of excitement and trepidation as knots of Archquesters slowly descended toward him, methodically arranging themselves in concentric rings. They all faced Votiq, starlight shining through the thin atmosphere of the desolate world and glistening on their silvery exoskeletons. Their fluted golden eyes reflected the capering flames at the heart of the gathering.

  As the leaders of the Ascendants’ Orders came together for the first time in uncounted generations, Votiq stepped away from the circle of fire he had ignited. The warmth on his flesh and the acrid scent of burning chemicals both faded with every stride he took. After ten paces, he joined the innermost ring of Archquesters, taking his place amid the eldest of his kind. On the cusp of finishing his fourth full century of life, he occupied the highest station among them, a cynosure by virtue of his having pursued the Quest for the longest time.

  Over the prior thousand days, Grand Archquester Votiq had coordinated reports from various Orders that many knights interpreted as omens that they would soon locate the True, the Unnameable. Questers and Archquesters alike believed that they stood on the brink of the Final Ascension, when they would at last find their gods, who would judge them, and burn them, and unite with the worthy among their ranks. Votiq hungered for those events, prayed daily for them, but the latest cycles of his life had allowed a nascent skepticism to fester within him. He had always lived with the conviction—with the white-hot certainty—that he would eventually achieve the objective of every knight to join with the Unnameable. Of late, though, his thoughts had lingered on the legions of Ascendants who had come and gone before him, each of whom had undoubtedly trusted that they would reach the Fortress of the True in their lifetime. Not only had the untold dead of ages past been denied that aspiration, but they had, during their far-reaching search, brought their entire race closer and closer to extinction.

  In front of Votiq, the circle of fire at the center of the caldera flared repeatedly, as designed, the flames strengthening as more Archquesters arrived. According to the ancient texts, the Ascendants had not congregated around such a display since they had assembled to deliberate how to contend with the pestilence of the Eav’oq’s heresy. That gathering resulted in the extermination of most of the blasphemers, but the unifying effect on the Orders had been transitory. The crusade against the Eav’oq brought an internecine conflict down upon the Ascendants. Knight turned against knight, allowing the remaining Eav’oq to make good their escape, and resulting in the destruction of the Ascendants’ homeworld.

  The Great Civil War had purified the Orders, purging them of those who would deviate from dogma. Afterward, the surviving Ascendants fled their devastated planet, their hegira turning them into nomads. They escalated their efforts to hunt down the sacrilegious while continuing their search for the True. While some knights traveled in clutches of two or three, and a few others in larger factions, most maintained a solitary existence. Every Quester related their locations, observations, and activities to the leaders of their Orders, who in turn kept the Grand Archquester appropriately informed. The general isolation of individual Ascendants made pairings rare, and as a consequence, their numbers had declined precipitously over time. Votiq did not know for how many more generations his people would endure, but it no longer seemed unthinkable to him that they could perish without ever reaching the Fortress of the True.

  Votiq wondered if his people had grown too single-minded. He loathed considering such a possibility, even if turning the idea over only in his own mind. It made him feel . . . unclean. He had lived for so long, and had spent every moment on the Quest, seeking his gods and defending their sanctity along the way. The mere suggestion that he might be misguided—that they all might be misguided—troubled him greatly.

  And yet, for century upon century, millennium upon millennium, the True had remained out of reach. The Ascendants scoured enormous volumes of space, researched innumerable interpretations of the holy writ, tracked down every potential sign, all to no avail. Votiq always reasoned that each step—and even every misstep—the knights took, that every distance they traveled, no matter how small, brought them closer to the Unnameable.

  But what if I never reach the Fortress? he thought. What if we never reach the Fortress? Have all our efforts been in vain?

  The questions chilled Votiq, and he feared the answers. He knew that he could not tolerate such heterodoxy, even in his own thoughts, and so he pushed back against his doubts. He told himself that, even as he yearned to attain the Final Ascension, his individual success did not matter. He reminded himself that his people would reach the Fortress because it had been foretold by prophecy. Whether or not he lived to stand with them before the True, whether or not he felt the cleansing flames of the Unnameable as he burned beneath their judgment, he had contributed mightily to the Ascendants’ Quest. He had also helped to defend the sacred character of their gods whenever he had encountered the profane—aliens who dared to worship the True, as well as those who deified other beings.

  The Dominion provided an example of the latter, with many member species of the interstellar empire according divinity to the shape-shifters who led it, and the Founders themselves venerating a creature they called the Progenitor. In the face of such heresy, Ascendants would execute any heathens they happened upon, seeking assistance from other knights—and even from entire Orders—when necessary. Encompassing considerable territory and comprising an extensive and varied population, the Dominion had long endured despite the numerous offensives the Ascendants had launched against it. Only recently had Aniq—a young knight who had yet to live out her first century—managed to loose a specialized attack that had crippled the Founders and left their empire rudderless.
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  Votiq knew that, ultimately, the Ascendants would defeat the Dominion entirely, just as it had so many other powers. In recent cycles, knights had eradicated the Reskott, the Anders-vint-Notalla, and the Myshog, all of whom idolized their own pantheons of so-called gods. Such heresies did not equate with the desecration of aliens worshipping the True, as the Eav’oq had, but Votiq believed that the Ascendants could not permit such odious cults to stand.

  But while all knights adhered to the principle that those who falsely revered the Unnameable must be destroyed, not all agreed in the merit of eliminating those who prayed to counterfeit deities. The variance marked just one point of contention in a mounting discord among the Orders. A growing minority of Ascendants catalogued recent events as signposts on the Path to the Final Ascension: the shifting of a region of the galaxy that had caused a realignment of stars, and the rumored return of the Eav’oq that had followed it; the vanquishing of the Founder “god”; and the discovery of another race who worshipped the True. Those who counted such occurrences as harbingers of the End Time had sought a congregation of Archquesters to clarify—and unify—their collective direction. For longer than they should have, they believed, the Ascendants had spread themselves too widely across space, searching in as many places as they could for auguries of the Unnameable, but mostly doing so individual knight by individual knight. As Votiq understood it, those who imagined the Final Ascension close at hand wished to argue that all of the Orders should come together and continue the Quest as a single united force.

  For his part, Votiq opposed such a strategy. Whatever progress the Ascendants had made on their long journey had come from exploring as much territory as they reasonably could, and the Grand Archquester saw no reason to put the pace of future advancements at risk by changing course. Regardless, Votiq recognized that the incompatible interpretations of the alleged signs, as well as the desire to modify the practical details of the Quest, threatened a schism. They could not abide that, any more than they could allow the Eav’oq, if they truly had returned, to go unpunished. The Ascendants must move forward dedicated to one course. All of the Archquesters understood that, and for that reason, had agreed to the historic convocation—even if it led to another civil war and the elimination of one faction.

  A two-toned signal rose in Votiq’s mind like the memory of music once heard. The proximity alert indicated to him that the last of the Archquesters had arrived. He cast his gaze upward, around the rim of the crater, and confirmed that the drift of knights down into the caldera had ended. The time had come to initiate the process that, at worst, would put an end to the division of thought afflicting the ranks of the Ascendants, and at best, would represent the beginning of the final push to reach the Fortress of the True.

  Votiq separated himself from the inner ring of Archquesters and paced toward the fire. His flesh warmed as he neared the circle of flames, and the harsh scent of burning chemicals intensified. The hard soles of his feet clacked along the glassy black surface.

  When Votiq reached the fire, he raised his hand and waved it high, a gesture intended to convey to all the knights present the formal commencement of their congregation. It also served to deactivate the metal ring from which the flames emanated. As the blaze flickered and died, it revealed within it a pyramidal shape. The object, intact and unharmed by the fire that had surrounded it, sat atop a cylindrical base. Its dark triangular faces did not reflect the starlight, but retained a lusterless quality, lending the Ark an impenetrable air.

  Votiq lifted his other arm and gave voice to the words he had so often read throughout his life, but that he never believed he would be called upon to recite. “O Unnameable, O True,” he cried out, his high-pitched, melodic words pealing out across the crater. “O great and holy gods, we, your devoted and genuine worshippers, beseech you to throw wide the portal of your Fortress and reveal yourselves to us.” Votiq paused, expecting to hear the distant echo of his prayer. Instead, only a laden silence greeted him. In that moment, distress washed over him like an awful wave, threatening to drown him in layers of fear. It terrified him to think that the True would not answer his entreaty, and much as he did not want to admit it, it also terrified him to think that they would.

  Before he lost the courage to continue, he appealed to the gods once more. “We implore you to reveal yourselves, O True, O Unnameable. We plead with you to bestow a sign of yourselves to the Archquesters who serve you, who work tirelessly to protect your purity and sacred nature against heretics and blasphemers, and who journey across aeons and vast distances in search of your Fortress. We beg you to make yourselves known to us here and now, and to sanctify this congregation of your faithful soldiers.”

  Votiq closed his mouth and waited, his arms still raised toward the star-bedecked night sky. The assemblage of knights seemed fraught with anticipation and anxiety, with hope and dread. The Grand Archquester detected not a single movement within the silent bands of Ascendants ringed about him.

  Within the stillness, Votiq brought his palms together above his head, his long, dexterous digits pointing upward in a display of piety and supplication recognizable across many cultures. In his own thoughts, he repeated his prayers, willfully shunting aside the doubts that had come to plague him. Finally, he parted his hands and spread his arms wide.

  As though mimicking the movement, two sides of the pyramid separated along their common edge. The Ark blossomed open like a flower, disclosing the blessèd secret held within it. A shape roughly hewn, as though crudely hacked from solid crystal, belled out at the top and bottom from a narrow middle.

  Votiq beheld the Eye of Fire, as he always did, with reverence. For him, his elevation to Grand Archquester had endowed him with nothing more special than his curation of the hallowed object. While the Ascendants looked upon the sacred writings as indisputably true and divinely inspired, they embraced the Eye as something even holier: an indirect physical link to the Unnameable.

  Ages ago, there had been nine of the mystical artifacts, and they had burned with the radiant glow of the True. Ancient annals chronicled the claims of some knights that they had felt the watchful gaze of the Unnameable through the Eyes, while a brace of venerable tales related how two Questers had once peered in the opposite direction, glimpsing the True and being driven mad by their aspect. More often, the historical accounts recorded instances of contact with an Eye imparting visions to a knight.

  But all of that had happened before the Great Civil War left the Ascendants’ home planet with irradiated soil, poisoned water, and ash-choked air. The decimation of their world also claimed all the Eyes of Fire but one, and left the last—the Eye of Prophecy and Change—with its inner light extinguished. It had stayed dark ever since.

  Votiq dropped his hands and turned away from the Ark and its precious cargo. He faced the empty space he had occupied in the innermost ring of Archquesters. With the fire quenched, the eyes of his comrades took on a contemplative stillness. He peered left and right at the serious and expectant faces. Between the knights, he could see the next circle of those convened, and the next past that.

  The Grand Archquester opened his mouth to speak, but then a green glow began to suffuse the exoskeletons of the knights. Votiq watched as astonished expressions bloomed on their faces. He quickly realized that the light emanated from behind him.

  Votiq whirled to see a dazzling flash of white light engulf the Ark and the sacred artifact it contained. As he fell to his knees, he had just enough time to register the image of the Eye of Prophecy and Change radiating an intense green before everything in his field of vision vanished in the overwhelming burst of brilliance. He felt a momentary surge of heat as he raised his hands to protect his head, but even as he did so, the light faded, leaving the surroundings to appear as though they had been scrubbed of any color.

  Directly before Votiq, somebody reached out and closed the Ark by hand. As the Grand Archquester lowered his arms, she turned t
o face him. Smaller than an Ascendant, she stood perhaps three-quarters his own height. Raised ridges ran across her bare, gray flesh in different places, almost like patches of scales. They ran in semicircles around her deep-set eyes, framed her forehead and her jaw, and swept prominently down along the sides of her neck to her shoulders. Unprotected by any natural armor, her body looked vulnerable, but her determined countenance imparted a different impression.

  Into the silence, a voice intruded from off to one side, from the inner ring of Archquesters. “Who . . . are . . . you?”

  Votiq already knew the answer, and it rekindled the passion in his soul. Any doubts he might have indulged melted away like ice beneath the warming rays of a sun. He felt privileged to be present for a moment long prophesied, a marker that heralded the End Time.

  An instant later, the alien looked out over the congregation and confirmed it, speaking as though reciting directly from scripture: “I am the Fire.”

  ILIANA GHEMOR UTTERED the words as though she had been waiting to say them all her life. They did not tumble tentatively from her mouth and drop to the ground unnoticed, but roared out across the black landscape for all those present to hear. The tall, gleaming aliens amassed in circles about her—and one kneeling directly before her—reacted to her pronouncement as though she had physically struck them. They all stared at her, clearly anxious to hear what she would tell them next.

  Ghemor let them wait. She felt no fear, and no uncertainty. She did not know what she would say or do in the ensuing moments, but she had complete confidence that she would choose her words and actions correctly. In longer than she could remember, strength coursed through her mind and body—real strength, individual strength, and not the kind approximated by wealth or technology, by intimidation or force, by the careful planning of strategy or the successful implementation of tactics. Ghemor felt strong in herself.