EVEN BEFORE NIKOLAS OPENED HIS EYES and got his bearings, he harbored a feeling that something was wrong. And the more alert he became, the more dead certain he was: Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

For one thing, he was stretched out in a bend of one of the corridors, his head pounding, his brow smarting as if it had been cut. When he touched his fingertips to the offended area, they came away with a thin smear of blood.

He had gotten hurt. How?

Nikolas coughed. There was smoke in the air—not thick enough to see very easily, but more than thick enough to choke on. Why is there smoke? he asked himself.

Then it all came flooding back to him….

The alarm, shrill and insistent, whipping his pulse into a frenzy as it rang through the cargo ship. The impacts that had thrown him off his feet and slammed him against the bulkheads. Then the glare of sparks, and the smell of smoke.

And finally…nothing.

The Iktoj’ni had been attacked, no doubt by the same people the captain had been warned about. And Nikolas had been knocked unconscious. That would explain the cut he had suffered.

But he couldn’t feel any impacts, so the attack was obviously over. Or at least, no one was firing at them any longer.

Then why hadn’t anyone come around to see if he was all right? Where were the emergency medical teams the captain had designated before they set out?

And where was his friend Locklear? He had been right behind Nikolas when they started for the bridge, but there was no sign of him in the corridor.

Nikolas listened, but all he could hear was the hum of the engines. No people sounds, not from medical teams or Locklear or anyone else.

How hard had the ship been hit? he wondered. Were there so many casualties that they just hadn’t gotten to him yet? Or were the medical teams themselves among the victims?

Scanning the corridor, Nikolas located an intercom grate on the bulkhead. All he had to do was contact the bridge and find out what was going on. Then he could lend a hand, do whatever the captain asked of him.

Dragging himself to his feet, he realized that his head wasn’t the only part of him that had taken a beating. His arms and legs were stiff and bruised, and there was a sharp pain in his ribs every time he took a breath.

But Nikolas could deal with it. Especially if some of the other crewmen were hurt worse.

When he reached the intercom grate, he depressed its trio of red buttons in the proper series and opened a link to the bridge. “Captain,” he said, “this is Nikolas. What’s going on?”

He didn’t get an answer. And a second try got the same result.

All right, he thought, no problem. The intercom system must have been damaged. I just need to get to the bridge and speak to someone in person.

Toward that end, he started limping along the curve of the corridor, heading for the nearest turbolift. But he hadn’t gone far before he noticed something strange.

There was a liquid dripping down the bulkhead to his right—something shiny, reflecting the glow of the overhead lights. Moving closer to get a better look, Nikolas touched the stuff and rubbed it between his fingers.

It felt like water, but there were tiny particles of something silver mixed into it. He glanced at the bulkhead again, and shook his head. Where would water be coming from?

They did all their washing with sonics. And when they needed drinking water, they replicated it. So there wasn’t any water supply that could have sprung a leak.

And yet, there was something watery running down the wall. Resolving to ask the captain about it, Nikolas resumed his journey to the turbolift.

By the time he reached it, however, there was water dripping down both sides of the corridor, making slowly spreading puddles on the deck. And as he made his way into the lift compartment, he tracked in wet boot prints.

Nikolas expected it would all be explained when he found the captain. If anyone knew the answer, it would be Rejjerin. With that assurance in mind, he programmed his destination into the compartment’s control panel and watched the doors close.

Feeling the inertia he had come to associate with the Ik’tojni’s turbolift system, Nikolas relaxed. It was just a matter of seconds now before he reached the bridge.

Or so he thought, until the turbolift came to an abrupt halt. Nikolas looked at the readout on the control panel and saw that it was blank, where it should have said BRIDGE.

Funny, he reflected, and punched in his destination again.

But the lift still wouldn’t move. And as Nikolas tried to figure out why that would be, the doors to the compartment slid open and revealed the corridor beyond.

But it wasn’t a ship’s corridor anymore—at least, not like any ship’s corridor Nikolas had ever seen. It was more like a subterranean passage, with orange-and-blue cones of hardened mineral drip rising from the floor and descending from the ceiling like teeth in the maw of some enormous predator.

And in the midst of all those projections sat the damnedest thing: a little pond, reflecting some of the stalactites like a mirror. As if some rainwater had somehow seeped through the ceiling into the corridor and gathered at the floor’s lowest point.

Nikolas swallowed, his throat painfully dry. Was he losing his mind? Had his brain been knocked around in his skull a little harder than he had believed?

How else could he explain his surroundings? How else could he stack it up against what he knew of the universe and make it sound halfway reasonable?

Then, incredibly, he noticed something even stranger than what he had seen already. The cavern’s stalactites and stalagmites weren’t just standing there….

They were growing in front of his eyes!

It wasn’t happening very quickly. In fact, he might not have noticed if he hadn’t been staring at the mineral deposits to begin with. But they were definitely growing, expanding both in length and base diameter.

Suddenly, Nikolas heard something behind him. A scrape, he thought, like the sole of a boot scuffing the rough, uneven surface below his feet.

Whirling, he saw that he wasn’t alone.

The alien who stood peering at him from across the cavern didn’t belong to any species Nikolas knew. He was fleshy, but Nikolas had the feeling that there was a great deal of strength beneath that abundance of flesh. His mouth was a cruel gash in the lower half of his face, showing a few thick, blunt teeth, and the skin of his large, oblong skull was smooth except for a fringe of dark, oily-looking hair.

But what really drew Nikolas’s attention were the alien’s eyes. They were glowing beneath his ledge of a brow—glowing with an eerie silver light.

“I am glad you are awake,” said the alien, his voice a dissonant jangling of stones. “After all, you are going to be a help to me.” He smiled, stretching his mouth from one side of his face to the other. “A big help.”