A soft chime sounded from somewhere, and Presider Hek sat a bit straighter. "We may begin now, if that's all right with you, Jean-Luc Captain Starship Enterprise," he said. "Forgive my sudden formality, but this is official business, and I really should address you by your t.i.tle."

Picard nodded. "As you choose, Hek Portside Hull Patcher, Presider of the Fleet Congress, but I highly value the friendship we have begun to form today, and I would deem it a great honor if you were to continue to accord us the privilege of addressing the three of us informally."

Hek looked surprised, and then pleased. "Very well, Captain Picard. My pleasure-and, please, do the same for us, if you would."

"Certainly, Presider." Picard paused for a moment and then plunged in. "Presider Hek, first I would like to thank you and these six national leaders of your great Krann Fleet for according us such a warm welcome today. We have been as impressed by your expressions of friendship as we have been by the beauty and grandeur of the ships in your mighty Fleet and especially of this truly magnificent flagship." Picard did not dare look at Worf, whom he knew was doing his best to keep his expression blank. "My officers and I are looking forward to what we feel sure will be a series of candid, productive talks."

"As are we, Captain Picard," Hek said for them all. "We know why you are here with us, and we should get right to it, don't you think?"

"Yes, we do," Picard said firmly. "The leading units of your fleet will be in standard orbit range of Nem Ma'ak Bratuna in less than two days. The Lethanta are sure to panic if large numbers of your s.p.a.cecraft begin encircling their world, even if not a single shot is fired by your side."

Hek nodded. "You want to avert a war," he said. "To tell you the truth, Captain Picard, I don't see how you can possibly do that. We've come a long way and have been through too much."

"Tell us your side of it," Picard invited. "We listened very closely to what the Lethanta had to say, Presider Hek. We will listen just as closely here, I a.s.sure you."

The Presider glanced left and right at the national leaders, who nodded. Hek returned his attention to Picard. "Very well, Captain," he said after a moment. "We'll trust you on that point. The story of our people has come down to us from generation to generation, parent to child. It is sacred to us, as I think you will come to understand. Grek, will you please begin?"

The leader of the South Nation nodded. "Yes, Presider," he said. "Captain, we know that long ago we were left to ourselves, and we lived in relative peace. There are legends about wars having been fought among us, but that was very long ago-so long ago, in fact, that there are no adequate records of who fought these wars, or when, or why. We do know that one day, at a time of relative peace, invaders came out of the sky and, soon, they made us slaves. They were the Lethanta, of course."

"We estimate that this occurred about seven thousand years ago," Scrodd put in. "We don't have a date per se for the invasion, but our heredity records are nearly complete despite everything, and they go back much farther than that. Given the number of generations that have pa.s.sed between then and now, we're confident of that number."

"The Lethanta agree with you on that date," Picard said.

"How nice," Hek said dryly. "Please continue, Grek."

"Our people had no idea that there were others in the universe, much less others so nearby," Grek went on. "If we had been sufficiently technologically advanced, perhaps we would have known that the third planet of our home star was inhabited, but we did not even possess the telescope then."

"There were always stories about people being abducted and mysterious lights in the sky," Larkna said. "Who knows if they were true or not? There were also stories about dragons and giants and who-knows-what living in the unexplored areas of our world."

"Even if the stories were true and they had been believed," Pwett said, "there would have been nothing we could have done about staving off the invasion of the Lethanta. We were farmers, Captain-farmers and merchants. The Lethanta possessed s.p.a.ceships and nuclear weapons. We had just invented gunpowder."

Reckkel picked up the story. "The Lethanta came to our world, slaughtered a sufficient number of us to cow any rebellion in the remainder of the population, and put us to work. We were adaptable, Captain Picard. Within less than a generation, we became an industrial army, mining and manufacturing at the command of the Lethanta. They stripped us of our resources, and they poisoned our world with their manufacturing."

"This went on for a thousand years," Hek said. "Thirty generations of my people were slaves, but we never forgot our freedom. There was an underground, always active and very effective in making the cost of our continuing occupation dear to the Lethanta. We waited, and learned, and bided our time. We knew that, eventually, our enslavers had to grow sloppy."

"'Sloppy'?" Troi asked.

"Yes, Commander," Hek replied. "We had faith that their supervision of us would grow lax and that the Lethanta would gradually a.s.sign to us more technically sophisticated ch.o.r.es that they were no longer willing to do. We began to learn things, and we learned very quickly. Generations of my people with no hope of ever seeing liberation in their own lifetimes selflessly dedicated themselves to obtaining the eventual freedom of our people."

"Your eventual rebellion was successful, thanks to them," Picard said. "The Lethanta left your planet and did not return."

"They tried to return again and again," Scrodd said. "We drove them away every time, Captain, but at a terribly high cost. Finally they sued for a permanent peace, and we gave them one. It lasted for about a century and a half."

"What happened then?" Worf asked.

"Our people started dying," Hek said, and Picard and the others could see every Krann face at the table cloud over. "Our entire world was suddenly in the throes of an epidemic of unprecedented severity and mortality. All our people on Ma'ak Krannag were dead within two weeks."

"But some of you lived," Troi said.

Hek nodded. "Some of us were in s.p.a.ce. There were a few thousand of us engaged in mining the moons of the fifth planet in our home system, and there were more thousands aboard military defense stations in orbit around our world. There were even a couple of hundred thousand of us who'd freely chosen to live on Eul Ma'ak Lethantana, and some of them left that world in time."

"In time for what?" Picard asked, already knowing what Hek would say.

"Our military defense stations still had control of our strategic weapons on Ma'ak Krannag," the Presider told him. "They could be launched by remote control. We responded to the bioweapon attack on us by unleashing a nuclear a.s.sault on Eul Ma'ak Lethantana. We intended the planet to be sterilized, and so it was."

"You were successful," Picard said, keeping his tone neutral. "But that left you nowhere to go."

"Precisely," Hek said. "Our people had to leave that star system. We had thousands of interplanetary-capable s.p.a.cecraft, a population of perhaps eighty thousand people remaining, all the recycling and sustenance reprocessing equipment we could ever need, and a very powerful motive. We knew the Lethanta had launched an interstellar colonization effort using asteroid ships at some point not long before their attack on us. Our revenge would not be complete until we located and destroyed the last Lethanta-but we didn't know how fast their ships were going or in which direction. We formed the First Fleet and struck out for one of the more likely stars nearest Ma'ak Terrella, hoping that was the Lethanta's destination. It turned out not to be so, of course."

"There is a G2-type star three point nine light-years from Ma'ak Terrella, Captain," Worf said. "It is uncatalogued at present. That may be the star system Presider Hek is speaking of."

"Thank you, Mr. Worf," Picard said. "Presider Hek, how long did it take your people to travel those nearly four light-years?"

"We don't know, Captain-not precisely, anyway. The trip is said to have taken twenty generations. The archived designs of those original ships seem to indicate that the slowest of them could maintain an acceleration of about a tenth of a gravity, and they had fuel reserves adequate for about two months of acceleration. If they used half their fuel to reach cruising speed and half to stop-and that leaves them no margin for maneuvering-then our First Fleet might have been able to reach a top speed of about twenty-three hundred kilometers per second."

"That would have made the trip about ... about five hundred years long, at a minimum," Picard said. "As you suggest, Presider Hek, it might well have been much longer."

"One can only imagine the privations, the sacrifices, our people made on that first long voyage," Pwett rasped. "They had fled their world in ramshackle s.p.a.cecraft that were never intended to make an interstellar voyage. Many, many of us died-but most of us reached the uninhabited planet we still call Salvation, and we settled there for a long while."

"We were on Salvation for six hundred years," Grek continued. "We prospered there, and our numbers grew. We had the ability and, thanks to Salvation, the natural resources to build newer and better ships of different kinds. After all, some of our people were scientists working in s.p.a.ce at the time of the Lethanta attack, and they and their trained successors had thought about little else other than how to improve the Fleet."

Drappa picked up the story. "It was determined at some point that we would not stay on Salvation but continue on in pursuit of the Lethanta once we had rebuilt the First Fleet into a newer, bigger and better Second Fleet."

"Didn't any of your people remain behind on Salvation?" Troi asked.

Larkna shrugged. "We don't know," he said. "Perhaps. If so, they're keeping their own records."

"We would certainly view any such stragglers as a disgrace to our people," Drappa said.

"Indeed we would," Hek said.

"So you went from star to star, looking for the Lethanta," Picard said. "You've been looking for them for about six thousand years."

"And now you've found them," Troi said.

Hek nodded. "The Fifth Fleet detected radio signals from this star system about seventy years ago, and we quickly determined that they were of Lethantan origin. You cannot imagine the celebration that erupted at the news, Commander Troi."

"Oh, I think I can."

"We were within several years of arriving in a star system about five light-years from here when we detected the signals," Hek continued. "Rather than divert, we stopped in that system briefly and, in an allout effort, built our already vast Fifth Fleet into an even mightier Sixth Fleet. We would not be cheated of our vengeance again."

"How long were you in that other system?" Picard asked.

"Only thirty-two years," Hek replied. "We were in a hurry."

"It was a thirty-five-year trip, this time," Drappa said. "We boosted at a full one gee for as long as our newly designed engines could take it. I myself was only a boy when we heard the signals from this star system, Captain, the signals that told us the Lethanta were here. I'll never forget that day."

Hek nodded. "I was born in that system, Captain, and I was just a boy when we left it," the Presider said. "I'll never forget it-the antic.i.p.ation, the sense of a long, long struggle coming to an end, of justice about to be done."

"Is this truly justice?" Picard asked. "Presider Hek, surely you must realize that the people living on Nem Ma'ak Bratuna are generations removed from those who did such great harm to your people. All this has been so long ago for the Lethanta that, before they detected your oncoming fleet, they had dismissed the age-old tales of oppression and flight as fiction born of superst.i.tion."

Hek's expression turned sour. "Superst.i.tion, eh? Well, we're bad luck for them-I'll give them that much."

Picard pressed his case. "We've met with the Lethanta," he said. "We've talked with them, listened to them. We've seen the shock and horror in their eyes when they described to us what their ancestors had done to your people."

Hek looked at Picard for a moment. "They told you about that?" he asked. "All of it?"

"Yes, they did," replied Picard. "They were extremely frank with us about the matter."

Hek waved a hand in dismissal. "They're frightened," he said. "They'll say anything, do anything, to avoid retribution."

"Not anything," Picard pointed out. "They have not attacked you."

Hek almost laughed. "What can they do against us, Captain?" he said. "We've scanned them inch by inch, and we did a thorough job. We've charted every armament, counted every soldier, located every mine and missile. If the Lethanta deploy everything they've got as effectively as possible, and if they use every bit of it, they might make a small dent-a very small dent-in our numbers and strength." Hek shrugged. "We'll destroy them with the remainder."

"I believe they know that you cannot be stopped," Worf said. "They already know they are going to die."

"Presider Hek," Picard said quietly, "there are two billion people on Nem Ma'ak Bratuna, and not a single one of them has ever done you or your people any harm whatsoever."

"They are the inheritors of enormous guilt," Hek snapped. "They must pay for the crimes of their ancestors."

"These people have done nothing to you," the captain replied.

"Picard, how the hull can I tell the fleet that we are not going to attack the Lethanta?" the Presider suddenly shouted, his frustration clear. "They murdered our people without conscience! We have been pursuing them for that crime for six thousand years! We're now less than two days from our goal!"

"They have it coming," agreed Reckkel, and there was a murmur of a.s.sent from the others.

"Would you stop, Picard?" Grek challenged. "Would you withhold vengeance?"

"I hope I would have the wisdom to do so, yes," Picard replied calmly. "I hope I might have the courage to try."

"Don't accuse us of a lack of courage, Jean-Luc Captain Starship Enterprise," Pwett said, his teeth clenched. "We have been through more misery and deprivation than you will ever see-or so you should hope."

"I intended no offense," Picard said. "Surely, however, you must realize that there must be some alternative here, some way you can avoid murdering two billion people-men, women, and children- who have done you no injury? Cannot the past be pushed aside before it destroys the future?"

"The leading elements of our attack force will be in place in less than two days," Hek said.

"Divert them," Picard said urgently. "Stop them."

"No," Hek said flatly. "There is no reason to do so."

"There is every reason to do so," Picard insisted.

"Such as what?" Hek returned. "What could the Lethanta possibly have to offer to make us stop?"

Picard seized upon the opening. "Since I have been authorized by the Lethanta to approach you, I can, if you wish, find out what they'd offer. Shall I?"

Hek looked vaguely surprised. "Why, yes," the Presider said slowly. "Yes, why not? Go ahead."

"Then," Picard said, "if it is acceptable to you, I will go to establish some basis for negotiation, if possible. I will report back to you in twelve hours." He rose, and Troi and Worf rose with him.

"Wait a minute," Grek said, puzzled and angry. "Did we just make a peace overture? I never voted to authorize any such thing! We attack! That's it!" The other national leaders began to complain loudly over this latest turn of events.

"Quiet!" shouted Presider Hek in a very loud voice, and the leaders quickly settled down. "It will be exactly as I have said-or do I have to remind any of you who is in charge of this body? Captain Picard, please be back here in twelve hours with the offer from the Lethanta, if there is one."

"Excellent," smiled Picard. "I shall be here at that time. Presider Hek, we were a bit disappointed that we did not get to see much of your flagship on our way here to this chamber."

Hek spread his hands. "Well, Captain, I'm sorry, but we did go straight from a landing bay to a car tube and then to the hospitality module. Time was of the essence, or so you told us."

"Yes, but we are also very interested in learning all we can about your people," Picard said. "Yours is a fascinating story, indeed, and we have never before encountered a culture such as yours. I wonder if we might exchange observers over the next day or so. We might learn a great deal about each other that way."

Hek waved a hand. "We don't have the time right now to send anyone over to your ship," he said almost disdainfully. "Frankly, I don't know whom we'd send. Everyone is tied up right now, as I suppose you can imagine."

"I regret that, Presider Hek. Then might I send an observer aboard your flagship and take a look around, to meet with your people and walk about at will without interference? Perhaps in disguise?"

Hek shrugged. "We have nothing to hide, Captain. Feel free to have your observer come aboard. Send two, in fact. They can go anywhere you like, see anything you care to have them see without hindrance."

"Very well," Picard said. "That's very generous of you, Presider Hek. Thank you."

"You're welcome, Captain Picard," Hek replied, "but for what, I don't know. One of the hospitality workers waiting just outside the door will escort the three of you back to the landing bay. If you need to contact me before our next meeting, just call." He smiled tightly. "I'll answer this time."

"I'd appreciate that," Picard said. "Until next time, then."

"Until next time," Hek echoed, and he and the six national leaders rose from their seats as Picard, Troi, and Worf filed out of the room.

When they had gone, Hek turned to his colleagues. "Well done," he said. "That went better than we'd planned."

Drappa looked puzzled. "I thought we were going to-"

"No," Hek interrupted, holding up a finger. "Not yet. There was a last-minute change of plans, dictated by circ.u.mstance. It's just as well, as this observer nonsense gives us a little extra time-which reminds me, Drappa. I want an updated report in my hands within the hour."

"Yes, Presider."

"We're still on schedule?"

"Yes, we are," the intelligence chief replied confidently.

"Good." Hek held up his right hand, holding the thumb and forefinger about a centimeter apart. "We are that close now, Drappa," he said, smiling dangerously. "I don't want any mistakes made."

Chapter Eleven.

"CLOSE YOUR EYES," Beverly Crusher ordered, and Troi did.