The Teros sun was somehow bright yet anaemic at the same time, shining a pale gold hard enough to blind down on the surface but never bringing as much warmth as might be expected. As she watched staff from the Redemption bustle around the new aid station and its construction, Sophia Hale had to keep on both sunglasses and a thick jacket to be comfortable.

‘Aw, man,’ sighed Greg Carraway, stood next to her. ‘This is a little hard.’

She glanced over at the counsellor, whose support she’d asked for in the delicate engagement with traumatised locals. ‘Hard?’

‘Yeah, I mean – only two years ago, Endeavour was here doing the same thing.’

‘This time, it’ll last,’ Hale said gently.

‘That’s what I mean. Last time, it didn’t. We worked so hard – people died – and we can’t go back to the old aid station without triggering a fight with locals.’

Hale hesitated. The loss had to hit harder because most officers, including Carraway, didn’t know why Endeavour had been forced to abandon their mission. All they’d known was they had to hunt down leads on the Tkon Empire, with no understanding of the Omega molecules seeping into the galaxy at large. The stakes couldn’t have been higher, but without it, it was easy to feel like Starfleet had been neglectful or failed. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

‘You mean a fight with the Rebirth Movement,’ she said instead.

‘The Rebirth Movement are locals,’ Carraway protested, and her gut eased because he’d taken her bait and changed the subject. ‘We treat them like they’re a supremacist organisation, as if their culture hasn’t faced a mass-extinction event and…’ But his frustration was, as always, short-lived, and he sighed. ‘All we can do is move forward. It’ll be better this time.’

‘It will.’ Hale checked her wristwatch. ‘Zhatan should be here by now.’ They had asked the locals they were working with to visit them this late morning, come to the outskirts of the shanty town of Sanctuary District A to where dust and stone were being transformed into something that could help them anew. It was not like the Romulan elder to be late.

‘She’ll be here,’ Carraway reassured them, but then another twenty minutes passed and there was no sign of the envoys.

Lieutenant Sterlah of the USS Redemption didn’t look happy when Hale flagged him down and explained the situation, because the sturdy Andorian was enough of a veteran to know the next step. ‘You want to go looking for her.’

Hale gave her most reassuring smile. ‘I thought you’d like to know before I wandered into the Sanctuary District, yes, Lieutenant.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t. But you’re the one with rank.’

‘I can’t order you to do anything, Lieutenant.’

‘And I can’t order you to not, Ambassador, but it’ll be my head if anything happens.’ Sterlah folded his arms across his chest. ‘You get just me, or you get four of my people.’

Carraway gave an awkward smile. ‘You think you’re worth four?’

‘I think if something goes wrong, I need to see it for my own eyes or I need to make it damn clear I took it seriously.’

Hale raised a placating hand. ‘I don’t want to cause disruption in the district. There’s been no sign of violence. Rather than marching me in to the home of people we’re building a friendship with surrounded by security officers, why don’t you come with us, Lieutenant?’

‘I thought you’d say that,’ said Sterlah, and needed promptly talking out of bringing a rifle.

Sanctuary District A had once been built by the finest of Starfleet prefabricated structures to house refugees from Romulus temporarily until they could be relocated somewhere more permanent. Sixteen years later, sturdy metal buildings had been weathered, torn down, and put back up again in a Frankenstein’s monster of a village, adding in remains of ship hulls, some local stone, and anything that could make a wall, a door, a roof. Hale found that one moment she might walk a narrow street that felt lived in, with signs of the homes people had built over the last decade and a half. The next, she was face to face with some of the most destitute ways of living she’d ever seen as people tried to live in dangerous buildings with no amenities, or simply huddled on the street. The population only grew, and the facilities did not. But people lived. The district had an ebb and flow of activity, of its own sense of commerce and community. Which meant that it was very odd to enter the streets of the district and find them empty.

They walked for long minutes, the diplomat and two Starfleet officers, and while there was the odd movement at a window suggesting someone was indoors and watching them, there was little sign of life. Eventually, a hubbub was heard ahead, and as they reached one of the main roads heading through the heart of the district, they saw Romulan locals in their ones and twos moving in a gentle ebb to some shared, final location.

It was Carraway who approached one. He’d spent as much time in the district as he could, offering the sort of psychological support nobody included in aid packages, and while Hale believed he was seen as a bit of a joke talking about feelings when people were starving, he was at least seen as harmless. ‘Hey, what’s going on?’

For once, the glint in the eyes of the Romulan he’d addressed looked hopeful, not scared or defeated. ‘The Rebirth are gone. Vortiss is gone. They’re out of the old aid station.’

Sterlah mumbled something under his breath about having just built a new one, but Carraway pressed on. ‘Gone?’

‘They were chased out. Got transport off-world.’

Hale looked up at Sterlah. ‘We didn’t chase the Rebirth out, did we? I feel I’d have noticed.’ At his stern shake of the head, she grimaced. ‘And I feel I’d have noticed if someone was gearing up to take them down.’

‘This is where everyone’s heading, though.’ Sterlah jerked his head down the road. ‘The old Endeavour aid station.’

Carraway had to jog to catch them up after he was done with the local. ‘This could be a game-changer. The Rebirth gone? Our job could be about to get a lot easier.’

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself, Counsellor,’ Sterlah said ominously. ‘The Rebirth wouldn’t just leave.’

‘I’m not sure who can move in to take their place,’ said Carraway with a shrug, ‘who could be worse.’

Which was the point they heard the shouting and jeering in the distance. Hale took a sharp step ahead to make sure Sterlah couldn’t grab hold of her or block her way, and all the security officer could do was grumble in her wake as he picked up the pace to follow.

The crowd around the gates to the old aid station went twenty people deep, with the yelling from all of them an indeterminate noise of complaint. Heart sinking at this apparent rage against people who seemed to have displaced the thoroughly unpopular Rebirth, Hale had to move to the side of the street and clamber onto a crate to get a better view of the gates and the aid station itself.

What she saw took her breath away. ‘My God.’

Carraway, by her side, looked up. ‘Ambassador?’

Across the sign above the gate, no more could she see the words ‘aid station’ in the clear stencilling letters. The gate, sign, walls, facilities, had all stood out for the past two years, the newest and cleanest part of the sanctuary district, all taken over by the Rebirth mere days after Starfleet’s withdrawal. They had kept it to maintain a chokehold on the district, controlling the main source of resources to make lives better. That they were gone, no longer blocking Starfleet’s capacity to help Teros, should have been good. But Hale’s heart rose enough to choke her at what seemed to have slipped into its place.

Daubed across the sign in slick red, the words GANMADAN IS NOW dripped above them all. Hammered beside it was the sad, twisted body of the small, goat-like creature, one of the limited livestock on the planet, that had to have provided the blood.

As they watched, a Romulan man emerged through the gate. His clothes were torn and bloodied, though the gashes on his skin could not account for it all. By his side he held a disruptor rifle loosely, a battered weapon Hale suspected had seen recent use, but as the crowd fell silent on his approach, he raised it above his head.

‘Those who thought themselves masters are gone!’ he called in a hoarse voice. He had to be young, she thought, but the sallow cheeks and sunken eyes of the refugees of Teros never made that easy to tell. ‘Witness their downfall!’

There was a low thunk. A ruffle of shadows. Then over the walls of the old aid station, three bodies were hurled over the outside to hang by ropes and crash against the metal walls. Broken and battered, they did not look like they had died easy.

Sterlah muttered an oath. ‘Those are Rebirth thugs.’

‘The Brothers have awoken once more!’ the speaker continued, voice hoarse and rent by now. ‘Stand by them and enter the world anew, or be consumed in the Day of Grief!’

As the crowd broke into more yelling, Sterlah reached up to all but drag Hale back down to the ground. ‘Ambassador, I really don’t like this.’

Carraway looked at her, aghast. ‘What’s going on?’

She planted her feet, stopping Sterlah from pulling her away, and set her jaw tight. ‘And when the gods have broken all their oaths, and the last of their pledges has been forgotten, then the time of the gods will come to an end,’ she murmured.

‘What?’ snapped Sterlah.

‘Ilqoant Telant. The Book of Uncoverings, Lieutenant,’ said Hale, her chest tight. ‘The myths that explain, among everything, the beginning and end of the world. And, oh. Oh, so many gods have broken their oaths and forgotten their pledges, no?’

Carraway looked back at the crowd, at the old aid station. ‘Apocalypse cults rising to make sense of calamity, embrace the catastrophe, act as if they have some sense of control over utter desolation… it makes sense.’ Then he frowned. ‘Hey, what’s -’

The flash of light hit them first. Erupting brighter than the sun, the billowing cloud of flame burst from the heart of the old aid station as the explosion surged forth, consuming everything within the walls. It raced out, heat and fire, surging forth to break against the barrier but billow from the gate. The youth who’d spoken merely turned towards the fire, arms outspread, before it consumed him.

Then it raced towards the crowd, and towards them. And the last thing Hale knew before things went black was the strong form of Lieutenant Sterlah tackling her to the ground, and covering her with his body.