The long table in the main conference room of the Victory was half-buried beneath PADDs and the main display had been commandeered by Jevlak to show a tangled web of stars, nodes, and highlighted arcs. The overhead lights had been dimmed to make the projections easier to read. Outside the viewport, the stars slid slowly as the ship adjusted its heading by careful degrees.

Hardy stood at the far end of the table, chair pushed back, hands resting lightly on the polished surface. He had the stillness of a man who had been standing there for some time, thinking. The others had taken their places according to habit and inclination: Kincaid a little off to his right, leaning back with a PADD on one knee; Jevlak near the display; Elkader prowling rather than sitting, hands restless. Ayres stood near the door, shoulders squared, apparently determined to avoid the appearance of ease.

“You will be delighted to hear,” Hardy said, without preamble, “that the universe, with a little help from Lieutenant Jevlak, has finally done us the courtesy of revealing the patterns.”

He gestured and the display shifted. The map zoomed out, showing not just the local lanes but a broad sweep of the Shackleton Expanse. Nodes flared where reliquary activity had been confirmed: Orantei, Pala Ridge, their subspace relay and half a dozen smaller, more anonymous marks.

“These,” he went on, “are the places where we have watched the Pilgrims do their work. Outposts, colonies, stations, all blessed with the presence of our little black cubes. Each node is tied, as we know, into a network that rides our own subspace infrastructure. It was, until very recently, an amorphous mess. Annoying, but hard to get hold of.”

He touched another control. Lines appeared between the nodes: not the usual smooth arcs of standard communication routes, but jagged, thin corridors, similar to the route that Ayres and Parr had traced.

“These,” he said, “are the roads the reliquaries have cut. Captain Ayres has kindly risked his life and possibly his career to map at least one of them for us. Pala Ridge’s mast, in its dying moments as a compliant choir member, gave us further data. When you overlay those on the pattern that we recorded during the diagnostic, you get this.”

The map contracted again, converging on a region of space where the arcs twisted together like the braided strands of a rope.

“First Temple,” Jevlak said. Her voice was dry, but there was a certain grim satisfaction in it. “We have been circling this for weeks. Now we can finally confirm its location.”

Hardy inclined his head.

“At that location,” he said, “there is, with statistically offensive confidence, a structure that is doing rather more than any technology ought to be able. It’s drawing more power than it can reasonably account for and it’s the endpoint of the route that Captain Ayres was following. It is, in short, our friends’ front door.”

Ayres did not move, but his gaze fixed on the highlighted region. “How sure are you about Parr?” he asked.

Jevlak shifted the display again. A secondary window opened, showing a series of signal traces.

“Her embedded message during the diagnostic gave us a relative position,” she said. “Vector, distance from the main backbone. When you drop that into the geometry that we have now, you get a position inside the final location.”

Hardy looked briefly at Ayres. “In short,” he said, “if there is anywhere in the Expanse where Commander Parr is likely to be found, it is there. If she isn’t, then whoever is has gone to a great deal of trouble to pretend to be her.”

Kincaid cleared his throat softly. “That gives us a target,” he said, in his slow drawl, “I’m fond of targets. The question is, what exactly are we hitting when we drop out of warp on that doorstep?”

Jevlak did not bother with any reassuring preliminaries. “An archaeological atrocity,” she said. “We have been examining the data from the cube Commander Parr originally retrieved and filtering through all of the data we have recovered since then. The cubes are not made of stone. It is a Vezda composite.”

Hardy’s eyebrows rose. “For the benefit of those who did not have the misfortune to spend years reading xenological or historical monographs,” he said, “you may care to elaborate.”

Jevlak’s ridges drew together with the expression that on a Cardassian amounted to professorial irritation.

“An ancient species,” she said. “They pre-date the Federation by a very long way. They seeded the Expanse with listening posts and signal processors, using matter patterned into these very specific, very unpleasant geometries. Some of our own subspace theory is based on what little we may have inadvertently recovered of their work over hundreds of years. We call them the Vezda. Starfleet’s past interactions with them would categorise them as extremely malevolent and extremely dangerous.”

She brought up an image: a scan of the surfaces of some of the reliqueries. The patterns slid and shimmered even in static form, refusing to sit still in the eye.

“This,” she said, “is not a decorative panel. It is Vezda technology. The Pilgrims have been chiselling pieces off it and wiring them into systems. Each reliquary is a shard of a larger, semi-sentient structure. They have been building or rebuilding a network that could be considered a distributed brain. Of a Vezda, presumably one long dead, or as dead as this species can be.”

Elkader whistled softly. “So every one of those little boxes has got a bit of dead alien in it,” she said. “No wonder they’re all mad.”

“Not dead,” Jevlak said. “Not exactly. The thing inside is still thinking. Slowly, in a way we would not recognise, but thinking. The pattern is not some emergent property of networked devices. It is the will of the Vezda, spread so thin that I do not believe it is self-aware.”

Hardy studied the image for a moment longer, then dismissed it with a flick of his fingers.

“So,” he said. “We’re not simply dealing with a cult that has gotten out of hand. We’re dealing with a cult that has put a resurrected fragment of a very old, very clever civilisation in charge. That makes it, in my view, a problem that we need to do something about, and quickly.”

He looked round the table. “We have, broadly, three tasks,” he said. “We must get Commander Parr out of that structure alive and, ideally, in possession of enough of her own mind to tell us what she saw. We must prevent the pattern from completing an acceptable level of reconstruction of its original network. And we must do as much of that as possible without slaughtering every one in that structure who have ever worn a reliquary.”

“We hit the temple,” Ayres interrupted. “A small team, hard and fast. We retrieve Parr and place as many as those counter-emitters as are necessary to break the hold on all of the people. And if we have to leave a crater behind, we do.”

Hardy raised an eyebrow. “You’re admirably direct,” he said. “Unfortunately, if we simply leave behind a crater then we’ll not have necessarily countered the effect of all the reliquaries they’ve already scattered across the Expanse. The pattern won’t grow – maybe – but it won’t die either. It may become noisier and less centralised.”

Ayres’s gaze did not waver.

“I’m not proposing we vaporise them from orbit without looking,” he said. “But if we wait too long we may not get another chance at this.”

“That,” Hardy said, “is eminently true.”

He glanced at Elkader.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “If we were to ask the Immortals to hold off a sky full of fanatics while we do something surgical inside, what would you require?”

Her eyes lit with a familiar dangerous pleasure. “A clear ingress,” she said. “A read on whatever orbital defences they have rigged, and permission to be inventive.”

Hardy nodded.

“Very well,” he said. “Now, for the part of this plan that involves someone else sticking their head in the lion’s mouth before we arrive.”

He called up another overlay on the display: a scatter of icons representing vessels that were not Starfleet.

“K’halek,” he said. “Our majesty of the shipping lanes.”

The Klingon’s chosen emblem, a rough crown over a stylised bird-of-prey, hovered near a handful of systems.

“When last we spoke,” Hardy said, “he expressed the view that he liked the trade routes the way they were. He is certainly dangerous, but negotiable. He doesn’t care for the pattern’s attempts to turn them into a one-way pilgrimage. He also, and this is key, knows where the other fragments of the Vezda network are buried and has the tactical brilliance to do something about them.”

Jevlak folded her arms. “You want him to hit the secondary nodes while we go for the primary,” she said.

Hardy smiled slightly.

“Of course I do,” he said. “He has a fleet of ugly, over-armed ships and an inordinate fondness for blowing up anything that interferes with his fun. We, by contrast, have limited resources and should at least try to stay close to Starfleet’s regulations. If we can point K’halek at the outlying fragments, he can make enough noise to keep Pilgrim reinforcements busy while we thread our very delicate needle.”

He touched a control and brought up a communication interface. “I intend,” he said, “to send him a very polite invitation to a hunt.”

He paced as he spoke, half for his own benefit, half for the room.

“‘To K’halek, styling himself King of the Lanes, from Captain Odysseus Hardy of the USS Victory,’” he said. “‘You once told me that where your banners fly, the Pilgrims do not sing. I have found the place where their song is loudest. I propose that you and I strike at our respective ends of their network. I will go for the head. You may take as many of the limbs as you can reach. In return, I offer you an Expanse in which your business may continue without the interference of dead civilisations and a degree of latitude from Starfleet. Please find enclosed co-ordinates and a recommended course of action. Today, King K’halek, is a good day to die!’”

He glanced around the table. “Too informal?” he asked.

Jevlak looked amused. “He will like it,” she said. “It sounds like a challenge rather than a request. Klingons respond well to that.”

Ayres said nothing, but there was the faintest hint of reluctant approval in his expression.

Hardy sent the message and watched the acknowledgement icon blink. “Right,” he said. “That’s, I hope, our external distraction. Now to address the question of how to get inside a temple full of zealots and a half-awake Vezda without being turned into choirboys or dust.”

He turned to Ayres. “You’ve seen how they move between nodes. What, in your considered and entirely non-regulation opinion, is our best way in?”

Ayres folded his arms. “We can’t trust their corridors,” he said. “They’re tuned to the reliquaries. The moment we bring a ship of any size into them, the pattern will feel us. It’ll distort the path, try to bleed power out of our field. And try to crush us. Fighters can ride it, just, if we anchor them with a counter-field. Whereas larger craft will have no element of surprise.”

“So the Victory stays at a respectful distance and we send something smaller,” Hardy said. “Runabouts, fighters, a strike team.”

Ayres nodded.

“A two-pronged approach,” he said. “The Immortals to clear whatever the Pilgrims have in orbit and keep the sky clear. Then a dedicated insertion team in a low-profile shuttle, masked as far as we can manage from the reliquaries’ senses. Then the team navigate the temple using its own maintenance infrastructure. Parr’s message suggested she and one of their engineers have been doing exactly that. If she’s still alive, she’ll have left us something to follow.”

“And once you are inside?” Hardy asked.

Ayres’s gaze did not waver.

“We locate and isolate the Vezda technology. That’s our priority,” he said. “If we cannot destroy the Vezda tech, then we isolate it long enough for you to bring in the Victory and the big guns.”

Jevlak’s eyes narrowed. “You will have to move quickly,” she said. “The moment you start tearing out cubes, the pattern will push back. If Commander Parr is there, you may find that your greatest enemy inside is not the cultists, but the part of her that still answers when the Vezda calls.”

Ayres’s expression tightened. “I’m aware,” he said.

Hardy watched them both for a moment, weighing.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Here is what we shall do.”

He spoke with the crispness of someone arranging pieces on a board.

“We’ll take the Victory to the edge of the temple’s system and park her in a position that gives us maximum coverage of the local lanes and minimum exposure to whatever unpleasant surprises the Vezda can generate at distance. Elkader and the Immortals will lead the initial assault on the temple’s orbital defences, with strict instructions regarding target discrimination. Once we have cleared a path, we’ll send in an insertion team composed of Captain Ayres, a select group of hazard and security personnel, and a contingent from science led by Jevlak to help us intelligently respond to what I’m sure will be a frightening array of responses from an angry, ancient alien.”

“Thank you,” Jevlak said dryly.

“You’re welcome,” Hardy replied. “While they’re busy being brave and resourceful inside, we’ll coordinate with K’halek’s flotilla as they make a horrible mess of the secondary nodes. The objective is to overload the pattern’s capacity to respond. Too many fires to put out at once.”

He let his gaze travel round the table.

“At every stage,” he said, “our priorities will be as follows: first, keep this ship intact enough to continue to act as a control centre; second, prevent the Vezda from completing its reconstruction; third, extract Commander Parr and any other individuals we judge savable from the temple’s influence.”

Kincaid gave a short nod. “Sounds like a day’s work.”

Elkader’s smile was sharp. “My pilots like it when the objectives come in threes. Makes it feel like a proper story.”

Hardy allowed himself the smallest of smiles.

“Let’s hope we get to the end of it,” he said. “Very well. You all know what you have to do. Coordinate with your departments. We’ll be at our chosen staging point in twenty hours. With luck, K’halek will have replied by then with a suitably Klingon battle cry.”