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  “These will punch holes in our hull, if we let them.”

  Dax quickly stood and gestured to Georgiou. “Maybe you’d better sit here.”

  “Don’t worry yourself. Sit.”

  Georgiou adjusted her collar. For the second time in recent history, Cornwell had provided her with a Starfleet captain’s uniform; the emperor had worn her first one aboard Discovery. It was far too drab for her tastes and not nearly comfortable enough, but it conveyed some authority—especially as Leland had decided it would be best for Finnegan and Dax to dress as her lieutenant and ensign, respectively. The titles were a sham, but Finnegan nonetheless had relished being in uniform again.

  He looked back to Georgiou. The Casmarran vessels were still distant, but approaching fast. “They don’t look too happy to see us. Sure you don’t want to tend the guns?”

  “Your Captain Georgiou would never shoot first. You don’t want me to break character so soon, do you?”

  “It’d still be nice to shoot second.”

  Dax bit her lip. “Enough. I’m hailing them.”

  Georgiou looked away in boredom. “You’re wasting your time.”

  She did it anyway. “This is Ensign Emony Dax, of the Starfleet shuttlecraft Boyington, on a peaceful mission at the invitation of—”

  “Unauthorized,” came the answer in crisp Federation Standard over the comm.

  Dax said, “But I’m escorting a person who—”

  “Unauthorized.”

  “We’ve covered that. Do you know how to reach—”

  “Unauthorized. Unauthorized. Unauthorized. Unauthorized.”

  “Not big on the vocabulary, our Casmarrans.” Finnegan frowned. “Sounds like a canned response. Is there anybody even aboard those things?”

  Georgiou knew the answer. “A sole Casmarran, ensconced within the spine. We found that out when we cracked one of the ships open.”

  Dax stared. “How do they not get dizzy traveling like that?”

  “Their bodies have sophisticated and redundant balancing structures.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We found out when we cracked a Casmarran open.”

  Wincing, Dax looked to Finnegan. “How much of the stuff she says is real, do you think?”

  “I’ve stopped asking,” he replied.

  Georgiou smirked. Now that Finnegan knew what she was—and now that she knew what he wasn’t—he’d grown a bit more reserved where the emperor was concerned. Dax, meanwhile, had stiffened her approach toward her. That was something of a surprise to Georgiou, who’d thought the Trill would refuse to be around her at all following the episode in the shuttlebay. Maybe there’s more to her than I thought.

  Finnegan pointed to a shining star in space, the place where the sentry vessels had originated from. “There. That fella matches the coordinates Quintilian sent you.”

  “Then that’s your destination,” Georgiou replied. It had been her first stop, in her realm. “A quick warp.”

  Dax nervously looked at the Casmarran vessels, growing in perspective every second that passed. “They don’t look willing to get out of the way.”

  Finnegan smiled. “Watch and learn, Emony.” He worked the controls, banking Boyington into a steep curve. The Casmarrans responded, altering direction—only to scatter as he threw the shuttle into two consecutive dramatic turns. It was enough. “Hold on,” he said, punching a control. Boyington snapped into warp—

  —and dropped out three seconds later, awash in light. Not from the formerly distant star; rather, it reflected off the large orb filling its forward port.

  “That’s… unique looking,” Dax said.

  The Casmarran obsession with fives and sixes was expressed topographically on the cloudless planet, with what appeared to be high, bright-colored mountain ranges dividing the surface into darker regions within enormous pentagons and hexagons.

  Finnegan gawked. “I think I just found the football I lost as a kid.”

  Georgiou knew what she was looking at, recalling it from the Terran invasion. The white ranges dividing the polygonal segments of Casmarra’s surface, she already knew, weren’t mountains at all, but rather artificial structures. Massive alabaster cities sat at the vertices where the depressions joined; the kilometers-wide walls dividing them were just more urbanity, wrapping around the planet and separating it into different zones.

  Those zones were riven with pits, the broad expanses almost completely denuded of resources. Casmarra was a place that had been mined out long ago, with the only hint of what the surface might have originally looked like appearing in the area that Quintilian had told them to approach.

  “There’s where we were directed,” she said, pointing to a pentagonal spread of emerald and azure many hundreds of kilometers across. “The Casmarrans call it the Alien Region.”

  The beauty of the area as seen from orbit startled Dax. “Normally people give the outsiders the worst land.”

  “Quintilian talks about it in his correspondence—says the Casmarrans would have ripped up the area long ago had he not bartered for it in exchange for his services.” Georgiou nodded. “That’s where he said to go.”

  “But he was supposed to meet us by now,” Dax said.

  “Well, somebody’s coming,” Finnegan replied, pointing to the Casmarran vessels streaming upward from the planet toward them. Identical to the ones they’d just evaded, in all but one respect: number. “It’s a whole swarm of the boyos.”

  And more approaching from orbit behind, Georgiou realized from the scans.

  Dax fretted. “You’re sure we were invited?”

  Georgiou frowned. “Hail him.”

  Quintilian’s message had promised safe transit and had provided the suggested route for their passage—but he had prefaced it by saying he’d need to guide them in. He hadn’t said anything about what to do if he was a no-show.

  Earpiece in place, Dax frenetically punched commands into her console. “I keep sending messages on the frequency Quintilian gave us. Nothing. And all I get from the Casmarrans is more of the same one-word answers.” She looked back to Georgiou. “Should we turn around?”

  “No. Stay the path to the end.” She pointed over Finnegan’s shoulder to the Alien Region. “Take us down.”

  Finnegan turned the vessel in that direction—only to find that move matched by the incoming Casmarrans. Spooked by the ships swarming toward them, Dax looked urgently at him. “Something’s clearly wrong, Sean. We shouldn’t stay—”

  “Who’s the captain here?” Georgiou asked, showing off the pips on her Starfleet insignia.

  “Those aren’t real,” Dax said. She pointed outside at the approaching vessels. “Those are. Look, Leland’s running silent outside the boundary. We could go back—”

  “And so much for your poor dead friends drained by the Cloud,” Georgiou said. “They’ll just have to be satisfied with your good intentions.”

  “Stop riding me.” Dax pointed to the readout from the scanner. “I meant we can call Quintilian again and find out—”

  Something clanged off the underside of the shuttle. A second later, another sound.

  “Did they just rake the hull?” Finnegan asked. “You said they punched holes.”

  “That’s what they tried with me,” Georgiou said.

  “How’d you stop them?”

  “I brought a fleet of battle cruisers.”

  Finnegan looked to Dax. “So that’s the problem. I left my battle cruisers in my other pants this morning.”

  A third close encounter made it clear the vessels weren’t trying to puncture Boyington; rather, they were anchoring to it. And doing something else, they realized, as the lights went out inside the shuttle. Finnegan and Dax watched with alarm as the displays on their consoles blinked and went dark.

  “That’s flight control,” Finnegan said. He leaned back, done for now.

  More Casmarran vessels passed near the shuttle; the sequel was more metallic sounds, then grinding. Georgiou fel
t a sudden lightness—and then realized the cause. The gravity plating no longer worked.

  “This feels familiar,” Dax said, clutching her armrests. “I guess the high-heeled boot is on the other foot.”

  As seconds passed, ever more of Finnegan’s “skewered starfish” arrived outside, clustering around the vehicle. Dax looked to Georgiou. “You really don’t have a plan? You’re just going to let this happen?”

  She didn’t respond. She was deep in thought, reflecting on the messages she’d read that had gone between her counterpart and Quintilian. He’d mentioned that the Casmarrans had taken possession of Jadama Rohn after its crew died—and she’d definitely remembered seeing factories and landing facilities on the world below, before destroying them.

  “If they wanted to decompress the shuttle,” she said, “they’d have done it by now. They’re preparing to move us.”

  Finnegan agreed. “They’re joining up,” he said, peering outside. “Building a structure.”

  Dax’s eyes widened. “Did you see them do this before?”

  “No,” Georgiou said. She watched as a final addition to the macabre frame around the shuttle blotted out the last bit of light from outside. “We never left enough Casmarrans alive to do something like this.”

  “That settles it,” Finnegan said, stretching. “We’re definitely in the wrong universe.”

  Georgiou nodded. I feel that way every day.

  21

  Vertex 22

  CASMARRA

  “Unauthorized. Unauthorized. Unauthorized.”

  “You said that,” Finnegan said to the tall Casmarran before them on the landing platform.

  “I think it’s saying it once for each of us,” Dax said.

  “How egalitarian,” Georgiou observed. “Almost as sickening as their bodies.”

  Before stepping onto the tarmac, the emperor had warned her companions of the sulfurous smell exuded by the Casmarrans. She hadn’t bothered to prepare them for what they looked like, however; it hardly seemed necessary. They looked exactly like the ships they flew.

  “They’re like walking hydrae,” Dax had said on first encountering them. While the Casmarrans appeared to range from one to three meters tall, every one of the golden-hued creatures was configured the same way: a central trunk, surrounded by six levels of five limbs each. Some arms were more prehensile than others, almost able to function as tentacles. The lowest level of arms sat flush with the ground, gripping it as if with suction—turning each Casmarran into a temporary tree.

  But only briefly, for the beings astonished the new arrivals with their nimbleness. Some traversed short distances by skittering. Others curved their trunks completely over such that their topmost armatures touched the ground, becoming their bases. Georgiou had seen several climbing to the landing platform in this manner. Where metal springs on a staircase could only “walk” downward, gravity seemed no impediment for the Casmarrans.

  And the strangest behavior of all could be seen below the landing platform, on the many broad statue-lined thoroughfares that crisscrossed the Casmarran city. Just as their spaceships had “rolled” through space, so the creatures propelled themselves, tumbling laterally along their highways. “Like wheels on a steamboat,” Finnegan had said.

  The rote nature of the Casmarrans’ speech, observed earlier by Finnegan, had a simple explanation: they had no mouths—or any other perceptible sensory organs at all. The dissections performed by her imperial scientists suggested they might use a sonar of some kind. Artificial speech came from small blue boxes banded around the Casmarrans’ midsections, between the third and fourth clusters of arms. Only certain Casmarrans had them; Dax had guessed that implied some kind of status.

  The Casmarrans had certainly exercised dominance over Boyington’s occupants in short order. Their exit from the shuttle had been compulsory. The Casmarrans had unsealed the vehicle on their own, at which point the smaller vessels that had wrapped around it had activated their engines, shaking it until Georgiou, Finnegan, and Dax had emerged.

  Since then, ever more Casmarrans had crowded onto the landing platform. They evidently understood what phasers were; Finnegan’s had been plucked from his hand by one of the larger specimens’ spongy limbs the second he hit the tarmac. Georgiou still had hers, tucked safely inside her waistband. Any Casmarran that went looking for it would lose a tendril.

  Dax looked back with concern at the creatures filing in and out of Boyington, strewing the expedition’s precious supplies everywhere. When Finnegan moved to prevent one from dumping out his duffel, a larger Casmarran had interceded. “Unauthorized.”

  “We’re from the Federation,” Dax said to the speaker. “We’re looking for information on what may have happened years ago to—”

  “Unauthorized.”

  “The air’s a bit thin here,” Finnegan said. “I could swear he said ‘unauthorized.’ ”

  Dax’s brow furrowed. “I wish I could get through to them.”

  “Do a handstand,” Georgiou said. “That’s how they get around.”

  A loud clattering sound came from Boyington, and more supplies fell tumbling out of the hatch. Casmarrans crowded over the goods, tearing articles of clothing apart with their appendages.

  “They seem a bit peeved,” Finnegan said.

  Georgiou was losing patience. “There’s nothing wrong with them a well-placed meteor wouldn’t cure.”

  “Funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be.” She pointed to the sky, where a couple of little moons were visible in the twilight. “We directed one of those onto the planet. The whole atmosphere burned off in a matter of hours.”

  Dax glowered at her. “You annihilated these people?”

  “ ‘People’ is stretching it, don’t you think? And no—I left one alive. It annoyed me.”

  “Annoyed you how?”

  “It came to me to beg for its people—but it got my name wrong.”

  Dax looked disgusted. “You have a perfectly horrible answer for everything, don’t you?”

  “Experience, my dear. You could live three lives and not see the wretched things I’ve seen.”

  Then she saw something else: the approach of an aerial vehicle. Across the platform, milling Casmarrans moved out of the way to give it room to land. Moments later, Georgiou could tell the airship was disgorging passengers, but too many Casmarrans were standing about to permit her a clear look.

  It was another couple of minutes before the barricade of golden creatures parted, permitting the approach of an entourage whose members walked on two feet. Five disruptor-toting Orions stepped forward first, taking station in front of the Federation visitors.

  “Good to see you,” Finnegan said, offering his hand. “I hope you fellas are better conversationalists.”

  “Hands on your head!” the Orion he’d spoken to shouted.

  Dax complied within a second; Finnegan, reluctantly, followed suit once he figured out the score. But Georgiou did not. She was dumbfounded by the arrival of two more figures who were not Orions. Indeed, they were the only Caitians she’d known to be in Troika space.

  S’satah! And her giant of a son—what was his name? She admitted she didn’t remember. But here they were. Her pirate ally and adult son, back from the dead. It was becoming a regular occurrence for her—and yet one that remained unnerving.

  S’satah’s son saw Georgiou and stormed toward her. “You!”

  “Yes, me.” Georgiou blinked. “Have we met?” It was a genuine question: in this universe, she had no idea.

  “Put your hands up!”

  The Orion guards on either side of her pointed their disruptors at her head. Looking about and calculating her odds, Georgiou slowly raised her hands. The Orions took hold of her wrists, allowing S’satah’s son to frisk her.

  “Aha!” he said as he felt the phaser she was hiding in her waistband.

  She eyed him as he fished for it. “Careful. Some people don’t like that.”

  “Shut up
!”

  “Step aside, P’rou,” said a softer voice. “Let me at her.” Over his shoulder, Georgiou saw S’satah approach. The petite woman looked nothing like the pirate queen she’d remembered; she was dressed in formal business attire, with none of the gaudy jewelry she wore in the emperor’s universe. She carried a briefcase under one arm, and a data slate under the other.

  Interesting, Georgiou thought. Have we gone straight, in this universe?

  S’satah’s eyes locked on hers—and the woman hissed. “I can’t believe you’d come here!”

  “Yet here I am.” Out of the corner of her eye, Georgiou could see Dax and Finnegan staring at her, puzzled. The emperor shared the feeling. She hadn’t remembered anything from Captain Georgiou’s records that indicated that her counterpart had met S’satah before. But there were other matters at hand—and she decided to play her role as intended. “We’ve come a long way. Is this how the Casmarrans greet a diplomatic delegation?”

  S’satah spat on the ground. “They don’t accept them, and you know it.”

  “What else am I supposed to know?”

  “Quiet.” S’satah spun on her heel and strutted over to one of the Casmarrans wearing a blue speech device. The being towered over the privateer-turned-businesswoman, but S’satah showed no indication of discomfort. “Recognize,” she said.

  “Authorized,” it responded. “Authorized Factor.”

  “Greeting-statement, Manager Xornatta.”

  “Greeting-statement, Authorized Factor S’satah.”

  Finnegan whooped. “More words! I knew they were holding out.”

  S’satah ignored him—and gestured to Georgiou. “Intruder, Federation-type.”

  “Intruder, Federation-type,” the Casmarran repeated.

  “Vessel located-platform, convey location-impound, Vertex Two-Two.”

  “Concur.” The Casmarran waggled its limbs at a nearby companion. “Convey vessel, Federation-type.”

  Seconds after the command, Georgiou heard behind her the whirr-snap Boyington’s hatch made when it closed. The Casmarran vessels that had adhered to it fired their rockets, lifting the shuttle into the sky. Finnegan was alarmed. “Hold on, there! That’s ours!”