…Elaine, the wall falling against her back, knocking her to the floor, shattering her spine, her last, lingering thoughts of how Nathan will get along without her…

  …Mr. Homn, calmly interposing his body between the destruction of the house and little Barin, to the end his only thoughts those of protecting the child in his care…

  …and then, unable to hold it in anymore, Lwaxana screamed and screamed and screamed…

  …then nothing.

  “There are survivors down here!”

  Lwaxana felt the presence of the medic before seeing her. An Andorian, a medical student on Betazed to spend time with her mother, a teacher at the Art Institute, now volunteering to help in the rescue endeavors.

  She opened her eyes to find herself surrounded by pieces of her home. Tatters of the Eridat rug—the rug that Lwaxana’s great-great-grandmother had commissioned specially as a wedding present for her son, Lwaxana’s great-grandfather—mixed in with shreds of amra skin and other pieces of building material that had been constructed hundreds of years ago, combining the finest elements of Dantric and Torinese in a unique way that was now lost forever. She did not have to look to know that the vase Deanna had given her for her birthday right before she left for the university, the patterned mantelpiece that Ian had designed and had built specially for her when they moved in, the magnificent kitchen that she had had redone for Mr. Homn five years ago, not to mention the Sacred Chalice of Rixx and the Holy Rings of Betazed, were all lost.

  But those were things. Of greater import were the people. Her first action was to reach out to Barin’s mind, to make sure that her son was still alive.

  It was easy to do. Along with the Andorian woman, who called herself Thriss, and a few other rescue volunteers, it was the only mind she found.

  Thriss managed to shift a piece of rubble off of Lwaxana’s leg. Until then, she hadn’t even registered that the rubble was there. Behind her, another volunteer, a Betazoid named Jeea, was holding Barin, going over him with one of those tricorder things that Starfleet was always playing with. The child was crying, poor dear. Lwaxana was amazed that she herself wasn’t doing likewise.

  Thriss had a tricorder of her own. “I’m reading more DNA traces. There may be more survivors.”

  “The—” Lwaxana cut herself off and started coughing. Her throat was raw, and her tongue felt like it was coated in dirt. Thriss handed her a bottle of water, which Lwaxana hungrily gulped down the bulk of.

  “There aren’t any.” Even with the water, her voice sounded whispery and hollow.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have to be sure—”

  Lwaxana grabbed the Andorian child’s arm. “There aren’t any others. Don’t you understand, you stupid girl, I felt them die!”

  “Ma’am, I—”

  “They were guests in my house! I was feeding them lunch and we were just talking and then they came and the house was destroyed and they died! Have you ever felt someone die inside your mind? Have you?”

  Quietly, Thriss said, “No, I haven’t. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re lucky, then.”

  “Right now, ma’am, none of us is lucky. We have to get you to one of the shelters. The Jem’Hadar ground troops are focusing on the city right now—”

  “—but they’ll be getting to the outskirts soon enough,” Lwaxana finished. She could feel the single-minded clarity of the Jem’Hadar soldiers, matched only by the bloodthirstiness of the Cardassians. She found, bizarrely, that she preferred the Jem’Hadar. “We have to go.”

  Lwaxana, you’re alive!

  Enaren? Lwaxana was grateful to hear the thoughts of Cort Enaren. If her cousin survived, perhaps other members of Betazed’s parliament did as well.

  Yes, I’m still alive, though many are not. Sark, Damira, little Cort, and I are heading to the Loneel shelters. Enaren was referring to his son, daughter-in-law, and infant grandson. We should be able to hide from the Jem’Hadar indefinitely there.

  Don’t be silly, we won’t need to hide indefinitely, just until Starfleet takes care of these Dominion creatures.

  I hope you’re right, Lwaxana. I’ll see you soon.

  Jeea handed Barin over to Lwaxana. “He’ll be fine. I was able to clear his lungs of the dust.”

  “Thank you.”

  The group proceeded up the hill that was just down the road from Lwaxana’s house toward a group of ground vehicles parked atop that selfsame hill. Lwaxana was holding the coughing Barin in her arms. She took one glance back at the wreckage of the house she had lived in for so long, the house she raised Deanna in.

  When this is over, I’ll give all three of you a proper burial, I promise.

  The vehicle looked like it was about a hundred years old. Even though she saw the answer in Thriss’s thoughts, she had to ask the question. “We’re taking one of those?”

  “We’re not—you are,” the Andorian said. “We still have several more places to check out. Don’t worry—”

  “I understand, dear. Go, do what you have to do.” Lwaxana read the details in Thriss’s mind. The vehicles were preprogrammed to take any passengers to the shelters, and ground vehicles were necessary because they were less likely to draw the attention of the Jem’Hadar strike ships. The vehicle had massive treaded wheels that Lwaxana assumed allowed them to drive through the forests surrounding the Loneel Mountains.

  “Good luck to you, ma’am,” Thriss said, then moved on with Jeea and the rest of her team, determined to save more lives.

  Lwaxana couldn’t help but admire her dedication. We’ll need people like this in the days ahead, once Starfleet drives these monsters out of here.

  “Don’t worry about me, dear,” she called after them, mustering up her confidence. “I’m a Daughter of the Fifth House. I survived the Sindareen raids, I survived three childbirths, I’ll survive this. This is a terrible day, it’s true, but Betazed will survive. I’m sure of that.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Thriss said, mirroring Enaren’s thoughts, as she and her team continued with their rescue efforts.

  “Of course I am.”

  Lwaxana assumed that the dust in the air would dissipate as she moved farther from the house, but it didn’t. If anything, it grew worse as she walked up the incline. Her eyes welled with tears, and her throat still felt like several layers of sandpaper.

  When she reached the groundcar at the top of the hill, she got a good look at the capital city.

  Or, rather, what was left of it.

  With her eyes, she saw smoking ruins in places where buildings that were built before Betazed joined the Federation once stood. The Parliament House where she had just last week argued against the planetary defense upgrades was on fire and half-destroyed. Byram Hall, the gorgeous neo-Valdane-style structure where she and Ian had their wedding was nothing but a cloud of dust. And small ships of Dominion design flew through the air, firing on more buildings.

  With her mind, she felt the pain of the injured and the cries of the dying and the brutality of their attackers as they roamed the streets.

  Eventually, she was able to turn her eyes away.

  Turning her mind away proved more difficult. But she managed it.

  The door to the groundcar opened at her approach. She climbed in, placing Barin, still coughing, on the far seat, then taking the near one for herself. Straps came out of the sides of the chair to hold her and her son in place.

  “Number of passengers?” the computer asked.

  “Two.”

  “We will arrive in seventeen minutes,” the computer said as the door closed.

  Within five of those seventeen minutes, they were traversing the forest, and Lwaxana could no longer see the wreckage of the capital city. Twelve minutes after that, the groundcar arrived at the fistrium-laden crevasse that hid the entrance to the shelters from view.

  Silently, she brought Barin in through the entrance, down a corridor that had been carved out from the cooled volcanic rock into the tunnels beneath the mountains. The fistrium would keep them invisible to Dominion sensors until the way was clear.

  Halfway down, she stumbled, overwhelmed by the thoughts that pounded past her shields.

  Where is Olfran? (The screams,) My arm! (I can’t drown out the screams,) I can’t feel my legs, (why can’t they stop screaming?) what happened to my legs? (Cardassian bastards,) I saw her die (I remember fighting them in the war,) right in front of me. (it just figures they’d get in bed) Where’s Starfleet? (with those Jem’Hadar monsters.) What happened (It’s gone, all gone.) to the planetary defenses? I spent all my life living there, (Has anyone seen Marit?) I built that house, (Why do they want us?) and now it’s been destroyed.

  “Lwaxana!”

  Shaking her head, Lwaxana turned and saw the haggard face of her cousin. “Enaren. Are you all right?” Behind him was another person Lwaxana didn’t recognize, but read her name as Mara.

  “Not especially. Damira’s hurt, and we’re running out of space down here. Sark’s gone off to explore some more tunnels.”

  “Let me take little Barin,” Mara said. Lwaxana saw in her thoughts that they had set up a section for the children. Risking casting her mind outward, she felt the thoughts of the youths. Interestingly enough, they were less panicked than the adults—though many of them, especially the younger ones, didn’t really understand what was happening. Some even thought this was a simple adventure.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Lwaxana said as Mara took Barin off. “I’m sure Starfleet will—”

  And then she felt it. Through the panic of the Betazoids in the shelter. Through the pain of the Betazoids still trapped on the surface, not to mention the non-Betazoid visitors who, like Nathan, like Elaine, like Thriss and her mother, came to Betazed thinking it one of the garden spots of the Federation, a place that was safe from the strife of the war. Through the bloody single-mindedness of the Jem’Hadar and Cardassian soldiers and their Vorta leaders.

  Through all that, Lwaxana felt the thoughts of Admiral Masc, ordering the Tenth Fleet into retreat.

  “Send a message to Starfleet,” the admiral was telling one of his other officers. “Betazed has fallen to the Dominion.”

  Betazed has fallen.

  In less than an hour, Lwaxana lost her home, her valet, her possessions, her world—everything, except her son. She had gone from having almost everything she could ask for to almost nothing. And what little she had was now in the hands of the Federation’s enemy.

  For the first time, she began to understand what it was that Deanna, Will, Jean-Luc, and the rest of Starfleet had been facing for the last year. Oh, little one, I had no idea…

  We should have been safe, she thought stubbornly. Our defenses should have been enough. But she was unable to cling to that thought, as the memory of Mryax’s horrible death as the Dominion forces tore through their half-a-century-old orbital defenses like tissue paper forced its way into her thoughts.

  She realized that she had been just as delusional as those children who thought they were on an adventure.

  Betazed had fallen.

  Mr. Homn was dead. So were Nathan and Elaine and so many more.

  Starfleet was not coming their rescue, at least not right away, but that didn’t mean they were helpless. I am the Daugther of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed, and I will not be defeated.

  She turned to Enaren. “Gather up as many people as you can, Cort. We need to start organizing.”

  “Organizing?”

  “You’re damn right. We’re about to form the Betazoid resistance. We’ll show the Dominion that taking a world and holding it are two completely different things.”

  Blood Sacrifice

  Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz

  War correspondence: In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Unification,” Ambassador Spock took a personal long-term mission on Romulus to attempt to reunify the Romulans with their sundered cousins, the Vulcans. In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Call to Arms,” the Romulan Star Empire signed a nonaggression pact with the Dominion.

  “Blood Sacrifice” takes place concurrently with the DS9 episode “In the Pale Moonlight.”

  Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz

  Josepha Sherman is a fantasy novelist, folklorist, and editor, whose latest titles include Son of Darkness; The Captive Soul; the folklore title Merlin’s Kin; two Star Trek novels, Vulcan’s Forge and Vulcan’s Heart, together with Susan Shwartz; two Buffy novels, Deep Water and Visitors, together with Laura Anne Gilman; and Mythology for Storytellers. She is working on the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy with Susan Shwartz, the novels The Black Thorn Gambit and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda: Through the Looking Glass, and compiling The Encyclopedia of Storytelling, as well as various other projects. For her editorial projects, you can check out www.ShermanEditorialServices.com. Sherman is also a fan of the New York Mets, horses, aviation, and space science. Visit her at www.JosephaSherman.com.

  Susan Shwartz’s most recent books are Second Chances, a retelling of Lord Jim; a collection of short fiction called Suppose They Gave a Peace and Other Stories; Shards of Empire and Cross and Crescent, set in Byzantium; along with the Star Trek novels (written with Josepha Sherman) Vulcan’s Forge and Vulcan’s Heart. Others of her works include The Grail of Hearts, a revisionist retelling of Wagner’s Parsifal, and more than seventy pieces of short fiction. She has been nominated for the Hugo twice, the Nebula five times, the Edgar and World Fantasy Award once, and has won the HOMer, an award for science fiction given by Compuserve. Her next novel will be Hostile Takeovers, which draws on more than twenty years of writing science fiction and twenty years of working in various Wall Street firms: it combines enemy aliens, mergers and acquisitions, insider trading, and the asteroid belt. Some time back, you may have seen her on TV selling Borg dolls for IBM, a gig for which she actually got paid. She lives in Forest Hills, New York.

  “I say yes! Let us make a full alliance with the Dominion!” Senator Terak, young, thin, and furious, whirled as he spoke, trying to face as many of the other senators as he could. “Let us take the Federation and the Klingon Empire as they claim we have longed to since we had the misfortune to meet them—”

  “Impossible!” shouted a senator who had to be at least two hundred years old.

  “How much did you sell yourself for?” another hissed.

  “More than he is worth,” Senator Oratil, lithe as the warrior she still was, sprang to her feet. Her eyes blazed with scorn. “We know the Dominion has been coaxing us while trying to entice the accursed Breen. If we join the Dominion, and they ally with the Breen…the very thought is more disgusting than allying with Klingon savages.”

  “No! That—”

  “Yes! Better the Federation, better humans, better even Vulcans than Cardassians and Changelings!”

  “Silence!” Praetor Neral’s voice cut through the noise like a blade. “I said, silence! Listen to yourselves. Are you senators, or children squabbling over a toy?”

  They do sound like children, Spock thought. Children who might pull Honor Blades at any moment. But then, on Romulus, politics had always been war by other means.

  Disguised in a citizen’s plain gray hooded cloak, Ambassador Spock sat in the gallery of the Hall of State in the Imperial Romulan capital city, Ki Baratan, and wondered yet again how his genetic cousins could flash from ice to fury in an instant. “There, but for the grace of Surak…” Jim Kirk had once teased him. Surak, Spock had replied, had nothing to do with grace, and everything to do with logic.

  Irrationally fierce as the senators sounded now, so far during the Dominion War, the Romulan Star Empire had chosen neutrality. Shortly before hostilities erupted nine months ago, they had signed a nonaggression pact with the Dominion.

  Possibly because at least four different factions were arguing four different possible actions.

  Logically, they were stalemated. As Jim would have said, it was a standoff.

  The fact that the verbal battles on the senate’s floor also increased Spock’s personal jeopardy was irrelevant. He already faced a death sentence for espionage, working with the Underground on Romulus toward unification of the Two Worlds and Vulcan. If Spock were caught, he would also face charges of sedition and conspiracy.

  The valiant never taste of death but once. Spock remembered Shakespeare’s line from the time he had touched the mind of another captain of the Enterprise. Spock had already proved an exception to that rule. Still, what were capital charges against him compared with even the remote possibility he could persuade the Empire to abandon its neutrality and enter the war on the Federation’s side?

  Spock could almost hear Leonard McCoy’s wry, So much for being a Vulcan, bred to peace.

  A moving shadow fell across him, and he lowered his head, turning just enough that the guard patrolling the upper gallery beneath the hall’s immense dome could not see his face. Spock was, he admitted to himself with Vulcan honesty, as close to worry as it was logical for a Vulcan to be. Saavik, his wife, had been transferred to home duty, healing from a wound received in ship-to-ship action (quick flash of memory: her bemused comment when Captain Howe, her former first officer, had sent her a “get well cactus” that, on Vulcan, was a superfluous xerophyte). Just two days ago, she had sent Spock both her estimate of an 86.987% chance that the Dominion would lay siege to Vulcan in the next six months and the news that she had accepted command of Vulcan’s defenses.

  Her new position, as much as the intelligence she had sent, troubled him. He was gravely concerned for Romulus too: he knew how precarious its economic recovery was.

  Beside him on the long, hard bench, Kerit, a slight young woman, stirred uneasily. One of the most faithful members of the Underground, she didn’t just play the role of dutiful kinswoman attending a slightly eccentric elder in dangerous times; she also guarded him with her knowledge of systems and her “street smarts.” Already this morning, Kerit had identified spy-eyes embedded in the carvings of the gallery’s rails, set like gems into the elaborately patterned mosaics gleaming on the ceiling, and even glinting from the segment of a captured Federation starship’s hull bolted to one wall.