The First Temple hung in space like a forgotten relic. On the Victory’s viewscreen it was little more than a dark knot against the stars: a rough disc of metal and stone grafted around an old asteroid, its outer surface studded with docking collars and the ugly protrusions of bolt-on modules.

No ships circled it.

Hardy studied the picture in silence for a long moment. The bridge was very quiet. Even Elkader, hands resting on the back of the flight officer’s chair, had stopped fidgeting.

“No picket,” Kincaid said at last. There was something almost offended in his tone. “No patrol craft, no converted freighters, no little gnats buzzing about. Just us and them.”

“Scans?” Hardy asked, without looking away from the screen.

“At this range, I am reading internal power at moderate levels,” Jevlak said. “Life-support is functioning. The temperature is hospitable. What we now know is a Vezda transmission is… humming. There are several hundred life-signs on board. They are not moving as much as one might expect.”

“Catatonia?” Hardy suggested.

“Enthralment,” she said. “Their brain-wave patterns show a degree of synchronisation that would impress the Borg. If I were to surmise, captain, I would say that the temple is listening very intently.”

Hardy’s mouth tightened. “So,” he said, “either K’halek has done his work rather more enthusiastically than I expected and every available Pilgrim is chasing him around. Or our Vezda friend is sufficiently confident in itself that it no longer feels the need for an outer guard.”

“Or both,” Elkader said quietly.

Hardy inclined his head, acknowledging the point. “Either way,” he said, “it appears the front door is open. Let’s assume the welcome inside will be less than warm.”

He turned his head. “Captain Ayres.”

Ayres had been standing, again, at the rear of the bridge, close enough to see the temple and far enough not to crowd the command well. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Your party is ready?”

He nodded.

“Hazard team bravo, two security squads, Jevlak and one of her scientists on the Trafalgar – ably piloted by Lieutenant Paccelli – and three of the Immortals as escort,” he said. “Elkader wants to come, but you’ll need her up here if any Pilgrims deign to turn up.”

“I’m glad at least one of you is capable of thinking in terms of boring contingencies,” Hardy murmured. “You’ve reviewed Commander Parr’s map of the maintenance levels?”

“As much as one can review something hastily transmitted,” Ayres said. “We’ve transmitted our arrival and some of our intent over the same encrypted system they used to transmit to us. If she’s still alive and not fully given over, we told her to try to meet us in the maintenance areas.”

He looked back at the screen. The temple sat there, quiet and malign.

“We may have to fight our way through several decks full of innocent people, controlled by a malevelent alien,” he said.

Hardy nodded once. “You have your portable emitters,” he said. “If the Vezda is the main choir, the reliquaries and the people wearing them are its handbells. Deafen them if you can, remove them if you must. Your primary objective is to shut down as much of the Vezda’s transmission’s capacity as possible. The secondary objective is to locate and extract Commander Parr. Then try not to die in the process because, captain, it wreaks havoc with the paperwork.”

Ayres’s mouth twitched, despite himself. “We’ll do our best not to inconvenience you, captain.”

Hardy stepped down from the centre seat, closing the distance between them by a pace.

“And Michael,” he said, more quietly, “remember that we’re here with you. With you and Emilia. It’s not all on you.”

Ayres held his gaze for a moment. “Thank you, Odysseus,” he said. “Wish us all luck.”

The Trafalgar was a New Atlantic-class runabout, configured with a stealthy tactical module that reduced its sensor profile and its interior had been stripped of non-essentials to run as silently as possible.

Ayres stood at the forward bulkhead rather than taking a seat, hand braced against a strut as the pilot, Lieutenant Paccilli, guided them in towards the temple’s shadow. It felt like an age since Paccilli had discovered Ayres in the Valkyrie. He had mixed emotions as to Paccilli piloting them on this mission. But, Ayres recognised, the man was a gifted pilot and using the Trafalgar had improved their probability of success.

Arrayed in the seats around and behind him, hazard team bravo sat strapped in, helmets on, rifles cradled. Gallagher met his eye briefly through her visor and gave a small, firm nod. Jevlak and the security team carried a combination of weapons and emitters. The other scientist, a young Vulcan with an inordinate number of tools hanging from his harness, checked the readouts on his tricorder.

The Trafalgar bucked once as they crossed the outer perimeter of the temple. The pattern’s alterations to subspace made for a peculiar turbulence, even this close to the source. Ayres rode it out, teeth gritted.

“The temple isn’t actively repelling us,” Paccilli said. “The docking ring designated sigma is still lit and showing open. No-one is hailing us. I think we’re going unnoticed, captain.”

“Take us in,” Ayres said.

The docking collar loomed: a simple ring of metal grafted onto the structure of the asteroid, its guide lights pulsing faintly. The runabout mated with a soft thud that transmitted through the frame.

“Hard seal,” Paccilli reported.

Ayres checked his phaser rifle’s setting – heavy stun – and keyed his comm. “Victory, this is Ayres,” he said. “We’re docked and no observable opposition yet.”

Hardy’s voice came back. “Very good, Ayres,” he said. “We’e holding position and watching the perimeter. Our internal scans still show high coherence but no obvious movement. Looks like no-one has noticed you. Good hunting.”

Ayres nodded to Gallagher. “Open her up,” he said.

The air that greeted them on the far side of the hatch smelled something like incense. The corridor beyond was lit at half-strength, the guidance strips glowing soft amber. Pilgrim iconography had been painted over the original markings: circles and lines and stylised eyes layered over hazard stripes and deck numbers.

No one waited to greet them.

Ayres signalled two security officers forward. They slipped out, checked both ways, and gestured the all-clear. The rest of the party followed, spreading into the T-junction. Gallagher’s visor displayed the route overlay Jevlak had provided: a series of waypoints leading down through service passages and maintenance shafts towards the lower levels.

“Remember,” Ayres said quietly, “we’re ghosts until we haven’t a choice. We stun and we don’t kill unless we absolutely have to. The people wearing the boxes are victims.”

Gallagher turned left, leading them towards a narrow stairwell marked in faded letters. The Pilgrims had painted one of their symbols over the sign, but they had not sealed the door.

As they descended, the sense of pressure in Ayres’ skull increased. He felt, distantly, the shard pushing against the counter-field on his belt, eager and uneasy. It wanted to be nearer to the core and away from the counter-field. He ignored it.

On the second landing, a sound drifted up from below: voices, chanting in a low, monotone rhythm. The words were not in any known language, but the cadence was unmistakable. Prayer, or something like it.

Gallagher raised a hand and the party halted. “Two ahead,” she murmured, consulting her scanner. “Pilgrim signatures. Low movement. They’re stationary.”

Ayres moved down another step, peering around the curve. Two figures knelt in a small side-chapel, backs to the stair: robed, heads bowed, reliquaries at their throats glowing faintly. The walls around them were covered in crude paintings of starfields and stylised cubes. They rocked gently in time with the chant.

He could have stunned them where they sat. Instead he signalled the others to hold position and eased past, keeping to the shadows. The pilgrims did not look up. Their eyes were half-closed, faces slack.

The chant brushed his awareness. It occurred to him, with a slightly hollow feeling, that the temple’s mind might not even register his presence until he did something that mattered. More like the Borg than they realised.

They pressed on.

The maintenance levels were a labyrinth of narrow corridors and low-ceilinged rooms. In some, old equipment hummed away, jury-rigged into the Pilgrims’ new systems. In others, black glass cubes and alien filaments had been grafted on, pulsing gently. They passed a sleeping chamber where a dozen pilgrims lay on mats, reliquaries bright, and a refectory, empty save for the remains of a meal abandoned halfway through.

At the junction before the old operations centre – now, according to Parr’s report, the cult’s main hall – Ayres paused to check his bearings.

That was when he felt it: a flicker, like pressure pushing back against his own, in the opposite direction. He turned his head. A figure stood in a side passage, half in shadow.

For a moment, his heart leapt against his ribs so hard he thought he might actually hear it. Emilia Parr leaned against the bulkhead, arms folded, reliquary at her throat dim, eyes sharp and very clear.

“You took your time,” she said.

Her voice was dry, hoarse with fatigue, and absolutely herself.

He moved before he thought, two long strides, one hand reaching as if to touch her shoulder and stopping just short. Her gaze flicked to the hazard team behind him, then back.

“Good,” she said, taking them in with a soldier’s assessment. “You brought friends. Good to see Starfleet isn’t too cross with us.”

Ayres let out a breath and a small laugh of relief.

“A Captain Hardy of the USS Victory has prepared the paperwork for my court martial,” he said. “At present, however, he’s very busy helping us find you and put an end to all of this. Are you?”

He broke off the question because it was stupid and inadequate.

She understood anyway.

“Intact enough for now,” she said. “The shard is unhappy with me. I’m returning the favour. Tayis and I’ve been sabotaging them from the inside, but we can’t get close enough to the Vezda without something like what you’ve brought.”

She nodded at his belt, at the emitters in the hazard team’s packs.

“You know,” she said simply, “what’s under us.”

“Jevlak has made an educated guess,” Ayres said. “You have confirmation?”

She hesitated, just for a heartbeat. Then she nodded.

“A Vezda tomb,” she said. “Part of a larger network, torn from its original home and wedged into this rock, maybe millennia ago? The Pilgrims found it. They started chipping pieces off and wiring them into anything that looked like a control system. The reliquaries are fragments. The pattern is the Vezda’s crazy memories, or something like it?”

Gallagher shifted, eyes widening behind her visor. “Well,” she said softly, “that is… not at all disturbing.”

Parr’s gaze flicked to her. “We have very little time,” she said. “The Vezda knows you’re here. It doesn’t yet know what you’re capable of, but it’s paying more attention than is good for any of us. If we’re going to cut its voice off, we need to do it in the next hour.”

Ayres’s hand tightened on his rifle. “Can you get us to it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I have a route. There’s one complication.”

“Of course there is,” he said. “Why would anything be simple?”

She gave him a look that was so familiar it hurt, then jerked her head.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll explain on the way.”

The route she led them on was not quite the same as the one she had taken alone. She avoided the worst of the devotional spaces, keeping them to the maintenance arteries wherever possible. Once, they had to stop and press back into a side-niche as a small group of Pilgrims passed: a pair of armed sentries and half a dozen unarmed colonists in work clothes.

Parr watched them go. “They’re bringing more converts down to the wall,” she murmured. “They think if enough of them stand near it, the pattern will be realised sooner.”

“You said complication,” Ayres reminded her.

She glanced at him. “It feels you,” she said. “More strongly than the others. The shard in your head is louder, or closer in phase, than most. I guess it’s what happened to us at Orantei, or how… close, we are. So if we go too near the Vezda without some kind of field in place, it’ll try to claim you properly. It’ll certainly try to reclaim me. So whatever you’re planning with those emitters, you need to be ready to switch it on the moment we reach the chamber.”

The Vulcan science officer, who had been trailing them with the air of someone quietly recording the end of the universe, cleared his throat.

“I have been studying the readings,” he said. “In theory, if we can place four emitters at the cardinal points of the chamber and tune them to establish a phase-inverted field around the tomb, we can create a localised null in the Vezda resonance. It will not destroy the structure, but it will sever its ability to maintain coherent links with the reliquaries.”

“In practice?” Ayres asked.

The Vulcan’s eyebrow twitched infinitesimally.

“In practice, it may cause a degree of discomfort,” he said. “The first time we tested a similar configuration on a minor node, several subjects reported an unpleasant sensation of absence. However, the reliquaries ceased to resonate.”

“He is correct,” Jevlak studied them all, more alert even than her usual Cardassian bearing. “And the team will be on their guard around you. Both.”

“I’ll take discomfortingly quiet over the status quo,” Parr said. “You’ll need to work quickly. There’s a side access that will get us into the chamber without going through the main doors. That’s how I got in before.”

Ayres looked at her sharply. “You’ve been in there on your own,” he said. “Of course you have.”

She met his gaze levelly.

“We can argue about my decision-making after we argue about your decision making. And both can wait until after we’ve done something useful,” she said. “For now, follow me.”

The side access was the same cramped service shaft she had used before, its grille still bent where she had forced it. This time Ayres went first, with two hazard officers behind him, Gallagher, Jevlak and the Vulcan bringing up the rear. The others waited in a narrow, dusty passage, watching their backs.

The crawl felt longer with others in tow, the sound of their movements loud in the confined space. The pressure in Ayres’s skull built with every metre. The shard strained towards the centre of the temple, towards the feeling of the tomb. The field generator growled in response, its counter-song a teeth-hurting whine.

He reached the end of the shaft and pressed his eye to the gap.

The chamber was much as Parr had described in her report: low, its walls of carved Vezda composite shimmering with slow, unnatural light. The patterns in the stone twined and pulsed in ways his eyes did not like to follow. Reliquaries lay in their niches. The arch at the far end yawned like a mouth.

There were people here now. A cluster of Pilgrims knelt near the wall, heads bowed, hands laid on the stone. Their reliquaries glowed brightly, in time with a deep, thrumming pulse that seemed to come from within the wall itself. A robed figure stood near the archway, watching them, where his eyes should be, there were only empty cavities. There were three of the larger cube-frames wired into the room: one near the ceiling, one set into the floor, one in a freestanding mount.

Ayres felt a surge of nausea so sudden it was almost vertigo. The tomb was close, pushing against his senses. It did not speak in words.

Join, it pressed. Join and we will be whole. You are already a piece. You are wasted like this.

He jerked his head back, teeth bared.

Parr’s hand was suddenly on his calf, steady and grounding.

“Don’t look at it for too long,” she murmured. “It notices when you stare.”

He swallowed, nodded. “Your side entrance,” he whispered back. “Where?”

She wriggled past him in the shaft with the ease of someone who had done this before. Her body brushed his, a jolt of contact.

She reached down, fingers finding the bent grille, and eased it further aside. There was a narrow ledge beyond, just enough space to slip out behind a bank of old filtration units. From there, he realised, one could reach the corners of the chamber without crossing the Pilgrims’ central line of sight.

She slid out, moved like a shadow, and was gone from his view. One by one, the hazard officers, then the science officers, followed. Ayres went last, muscles tense against the tomb’s constant pressure.

Gallagher’s voice came softly over the channel. “Positions one and three are clear,” she said. “Pilgrims are focused on the wall. They’re in some kind of trance. No sign of Leth or Corin.”

“The archivist is probably in the control room,” Parr’s voice cut in. “And Leth will be wherever he thinks there’s a threat. If he’s not here, he’s either dead or guarding outside.”

The Vulcan science officer moved beside him, clutching an emitter unit, hastily constructed, that was now almost as tall as he was. His face was calm, which Ayres found vaguely offensive.

“We must place these at approximately ninety-degree intervals around the tomb,” the Vulcan said quietly. “I estimate we can do so without entering the Pilgrims’ immediate field of awareness if we move along the walls.”

“Do it,” Ayres said. “I’ll take the last one.”

He shouldered his rifle, set it on its strap, and pieced together the next emitter. It was heavier than it looked, its frame dense with field coils and crystal elements. It vibrated faintly in his grasp, eager to be switched on.

They moved.

Gallagher took the far corner, sliding along the wall behind the Pilgrims with the quiet grace of a professional. The Vulcan set his emitter down, made quick adjustments, and moved to the next position. Ayres kept low, every nerve in his body shouting at him that he was too close, too visible.

The robed figure by the arch stirred.

“Someone is there,” he said suddenly, voice sharp.

Heads lifted. The Pilgrims’ chant stuttered and broke. Faces turned, eyes strange and unfocused.

Ayres dropped his emitter into place and swung his rifle up in the same motion.

“Now,” he snapped.

The Vulcan slapped his control. Gallagher hit her switch. Parr, from somewhere near the entrance, enabled hers.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the air tore.

The field surged into existence like a wave breaking around a rock. The emitters’ harmonics collided and locked, the interference pattern forming around the tomb in a shimmering, invisible shell. The hum in Ayres’s skull cut off with such violence that he staggered, catching himself on the emitter frame.

The reliquaries screamed.

Not audibly. There was no sound, no rise in pitch. There was a sensation like a thousand threads snapping all at once, a cascade of tiny shocks. The cubes in the room flared white, then went dark, their inner light extinguished.

Across the temple, unseen, other reliquaries answered. In shrines and corridors and sleeping chambers, at watch posts and in control rooms, the little boxes sputtered and died. The links they had maintained, the reassuring presence of the pattern at the edge of every thought, vanished.

The kneeling Pilgrims convulsed as if struck. One pitched forward onto his hands, retching. Another grabbed at her throat, eyes wide.

“What have you done?” the robed man gasped. His reliquary hung around his neck like a dead stone. His voice had lost its layered echo. It was just a man’s voice now, shrill with panic.

Parr stepped out from behind a column, her own cube sitting dark against her collarbone.

“Freedom,” she said.

The man flung out a hand, as if to call something to his aid. Nothing came. The shard in Ayres’s head lay quiet, stunned.

He lifted his phaser.

“Lie down,” he said to the robed man, very evenly. “Now. Hands behind your head.”

The man stared at him, breathing hard. “You have killed him,” he whispered. “You have killed the voice. We cannot hear him. We cannot…”

His words choked off, as if memory was rushing in to fill the space the pattern had left. His shoulders sagged. He sank to his knees.

“I remember,” he said hoarsely. “I remember the first cube. I remember the bodies. There was so much blood. We said he wanted it. We said it was necessary. Oh…”

He folded in on himself, hands over his face.

Around the chamber, the others were reacting in similar ways. One Pilgrim stared at her hands, turning them over as if they were foreign objects. Another rocked, muttering apologies under his breath. A third simply sat down hard, eyes empty.

On the ship, Hardy’s voice cut in on the open channel.

“Ayres, this is Victory,” he said. “We’re seeing something rather dramatic up here. All reliquary-related emissions inside the temple have dropped to near zero. The pattern’s node resonance has collapsed. I’m also observing a very sudden change in the neurological activity of everyone on board. Care to tell me that we’ve been successful?”

Ayres swallowed, blinked against the dull ache in his temples, and forced his voice steady.

“We’ve got a field around the Vezda tomb,” he said. “The cubes are cut off. The Pilgrims are themselves, for the first time in a long while.”

There was a brief silence.

“Well,” Hardy said at last. “That’s one way to clear a congregation. Can you hold the field?”

Ayres looked at the emitters. They hummed steadily, their status lights bright and reassuring.

“For now,” he said. “I’d not like to bet on how the tomb will adapt if we stay too long. It’s clever and I can bet it’s angry. But we’ve bought ourselves a window.”

Parr moved to stand beside him. Up close, he could see how drawn she was, the lines around her eyes deeper, her hair pulled back any old way. There was dust on her robe, a faint smudge on her cheek.

“It’s already dead,” she said quietly. “It was not reincarnating, either. Whatever shaped them when they were living, the memories are so powerful that the affect it has on us, on our technology, is more than should be possible. If we walk away and turn this field off, it’ll start again. Slower, perhaps. Cautious. But it won’t stop.”

Ayres met her gaze.

“Then we don’t turn it off,” he said. “We find a way to keep it caged until someone, sometime in the future, designs a way to safely dismantle the thing.”

“We can argue with the archaeologists, scientists and engineers later,” Hardy returned over the comm. “For the moment, Ayres, your priorities remain. Secure the tomb chamber and any key cult personnel who’ve not dissolved into an existential crisis. Then once secure, you and Commander Parr can get back up here. We need to work out how many of these poor devils we can help.”

In the chamber, one of the Pilgrims looked up, blinking.

“What… where?” he stammered. “I was in the fields. There was a ship. We came to trade. Then… singing. It hurt. I killed someone, I think. I… oh, ancestors.”

He put his hands over his mouth, eyes filling.

“We need counsellors, not phasers,” Parr said under her breath.

“Both,” Ayres replied. “We’re still in their temple. The absence of the pattern won’t make everyone suddenly reasonable. There’ll be those who can’t bear the silence.”

He looked at her, allowed himself, finally, a flicker of naked relief.

“You are all right,” he said softly.

Her mouth curved, quickly, fiercely. “I’m angry,” she said. “I’m tired. But my mind is my own again. That’ll do for now.”

He nodded once. “Then let’s finish.”

He turned to Gallagher.

“Hazard team, secure the chamber. Jevlak, start working out how we can plug these emitters into the temple’s own power grid so we can start finding a permanent solution. The sooner we do it, the sooner we can get away from all these nightmares carved on the walls.”

Ayres looked around the chamber: at the extinguished cubes and at the Pilgrims beginning to sob or stare or simply sit.

Above their heads, the Vezda tomb lay in its stone, cut off from its scattered fragments for the first time since a gang of ambitious scavengers had hammered it open. In the corridors and halls of the temple, men and women who had walked in borrowed thoughts found themselves abruptly alone.

Freedom, he thought, was rarely gentle. But it was better than the alternative.