Chapter One

He was from one of the outer colonies of the Torrr-mri, a terraformed planet named Risst. He shifted his wings to get more comfortable - a recently developed advantage for living in the craggy, mountainous region of his homeworld - and pushed his turquoise mane from his only slightly bluer eyes. He pulled his feline muzzle back into a feral grin, fangs displayed. He carried a deadly payload in his torpedo tubes, something which was key to ending the war once and for all.

Only a small squadron of defenders blocked his way to his destination - no match for the dreadnought and its complement of fighters which served as his escort. After today, the galaxy would belong to the Kentron Alliance. He knew he was but one piece in a far grander scheme meant to wipe out the dreaded QaAni and their claims of godhood forever, but he also knew he was one of the key pieces.

He slipped through the pitiful planetary defenses with almost laughable ease; obviously the QaAni counted too much on keeping their homeworld's location a secret. He reached a point near the pole and targeted the key areas. With a roar of triumph, he pressed the firing button four times.

For two heartbeats, nothing happened. Then, a white flash, a thin line encircling the planet, widening to become a sphere, engulfed the planet. It was done.

Grratreh docked his fighter in the landing bay of the dreadnought, the KAS Divine Hammer. His part was over, as was that of the crew. They were of various races, each chosen because they were the best their planet had to offer. But all any of them could do now was wait. . .and return to the artificial planet that was the Alliance's capital, leaving behind the red husk which had once been a verdant world.

The mood on the ship was appropriately jubilant, Grratreh's part in the mission growing to heroic proportions even in the three weeks it took to reach Kentron Prime. Grratreh himself refused to speak of his part, only smiling and saying he merely did his duty.

Upon reaching Kentron Prime, however, it was obvious the rest of the operation had not gone so smoothly. The planet looked as if a giant had taken a bite out of it. It was far from dead, though, and the voice which granted permission to land was ecstatic.

The Divine Hammer's crew spent the next two days being debriefed. The QaAni had been eradicated as planned, but not without heavy losses to the Alliance. Many of the allied races - including the Torrr-mri - lost their homeworlds in those final battles. Losing their homeworld and supply planets only made the QaAni that much more fierce in battle.

"Did you destroy the Garden Planet as well?" General Krik asked, clicking out the hard consonants. He was grizzled for an avian, as though it were part of the job requirement.

Grratreh shook his head. "No, sir. We found two likely planets, but no trace of sentient life in the system; it seemed useless to destroy two innocent worlds."

Krik clacked his curved beak and ruffled his golden feathers beneath his heavy, grey uniform. Then, he let out a soft sigh. "The only reason I won't court-martial you is that destroying the Garden Planet was not a direct order. I hope what's left of the Alliance doesn't come to regret your decision."

Grratreh was given a hero's welcome when he at last returned to Risst. The governor herself greeted him at the spaceport and a small horde of reporters from various news agencies begged him for his story. He merely smiled at them and insisted he couldn't tell until he saw his family.

"Grratreh!" a sweetly familiar voice called out. "Grratreh!" He looked, and pushed his way through the crowd to the source of the call - a tigress with lovely purple locks and matching wings. Her ice blue eyes, a stunning contrast to her summertime tawny fur, twinkled as she saw him coming near. "Grratreh!" He ran to his mate, oblivious to everything, including the pair of young adults standing slightly behind her.

He pulled her into his arms and held her close. "Aissys!"

Aissys Tri'awl bolted upright from the bed, sending the bookworm she had been viewing across the room. "What?!"

"Sorry to interrupt your viewing of family legend," the ship's soft voice was anything but apologetic, "but you asked to let me know when we neared our destination."

Aissys sighed to herself as she found the bookworm and put it back in the library. The legend was an old one, one of the few from before the Great Fall, when Risst's geothermal heating systems failed.

"Time factor, Rirrh?"

"Two days, four hours, and twenty minutes." The ship's voice reverberated from all the walls of the small room which sereved as living quarters. They were a special part of the Rissteran Imperial Fleet; they served as scouts, a first contact team, and negotiators all at once. There were few such teams in the fleet, fifty at most. It was an unglamorous job and had stringent requirements as well.

"That's not exactly what I would call 'near'."

"You told me last time that you needed at least two days to prepare." The ship's voice was petulant.

Aissys sighed. She had indeed told the ship that. "Have you been able to gather any data this far out?"

"I've been getting a lot of radio wave messages, I'm not sure how old, though. A lot of it is obviously just entertainment vids, too."

"Try to filter it to obvious news feeds and see if you can come up with something resembling a history."

"That will take approximately six hours."

Aissys, more commonly known as Spark by the tri'hai she befriended, nodded absently. Maybe she should go and take another look at the artifact which lead her to this remote part of the galaxy.

Spark padded around the object for what seemed like the millionth time. There wasn't enough of the thing left to really make heads or tails of it. Then, she noticed a gold glimmer standing out from the grey and black steel.

Working very carefully, she managed to extract the gold from the rest of the hulk. It was disc-shaped, apparently some form of primitive data storage. She examined the wreckage, looking for some sort of device to retrieve the data, but found nothing obvious. She stared at the disc; an idea dawned on her.

"Rirrh...see what you can make of this." She tossed the disc at a wall, which absorbed it.

"It will take at least a day to decipher."

The next day found Spark headed towards a remote arm of the galaxy and learning about a peculiar, almost furless race called "humans".

"Grratreh, you served our Empire and our World bravely during the war with the QaAni. You destroyed their homeworld with the Spark Stealer missles, destroying the atmosphere and stealing the spark of life from the planet, which will surely never come again.

"And, so, Grratreh, you shall be the Spark Stealer. You are now Grratreh Tri'awl; your children are Maesao Tri'awl and Yem Tri'awl; and you and your family are given the Koh'taimi province of Sh'ralt Kraa and the fifth seat on the Council of Lords. Rise, Grratreh Tri'awl."

Now that she knew in general what the thing was, she felt more confident about figuring out the specifics. However, she doubted anything she could glean from it would be useful to her. Still. . .she had to try.

Spark walked out of the hold 5 hours later, rubbing her forehead. "G'tyllai, what a headache. Rirrh, make a warm bath for me in my quarters."

"In your quarters or in a room connected to your quarters?" the ship asked.

Spark sighed. That ship could be impertinent to the point of distraction some days. "You know very well what I meant. At least *act* like you have more sense than a fighter."

"Hrmph." From the thoughtwaves passing through their psychic link, Spark could tell the ship's feeling were genuinely hurt. An all too easy thing to do, given their childlike mentalities.

"I'm sorry, Rirrh. Looking at all that stuff again just got on my last nerve. I shouldn't have taken it out on you."

There was silence for a second as Rirrh sifted through Spark's mind to discern if she was truly sorry. "Okay!" She responded in a bright tone. "Your bath will be ready in a minute."

"I'll be timing you," Spark teased.

The ship gave a mental raspberry.

As she passed through the large chamber which served as the living room portion of her quarters, Spark stretched her blue and violet wings to their full twenty-three foot span. She then lay down on the floor for a proper stretch of all her limbs, tail twitching madly, almost vibrating. She stood up slowly and examined each wing in turn.

She let out a heartfelt sigh. Someday she'd have the room to fly again. She idly wondered how much Rirrh would have to consume inorder to grow a flight gallery room. "Not much. Maybe a mid-sized asteroid. I could stop and eat one on the way."

Sparkstealer preened some of the blue-violet feathers midway down her variegated wings as she thought about that. She wasn't exactly in a hurry, but testing of the artifact showed it was around 50 years old, the species may have outgrown their usefulness by Rissteran standards. Then again, a few days more or less wouldn't make much of a difference. "How much time would it take?"

"A day and half for consumption and another half day for construction. My mothers warned me this would happen some day." The ship giggled as it opened a small apeture in the wall opposite Spark. "Your bath is ready."

All ships in the Rissteran fleet were female and capable of at least limited shapeshifting. The scouts were the masters, able to shift forms to anything larger than a half-grown child. The warships were the least capable, able to manage only slight alteration to their form, such as the gender shift necessary for reproduction.

"Your mothers warned you, eh?" Spark asked as she stepped into the bathing chamber.

"Apparently all you Sh'raltai request a flying area sooner or later."

"Heh," was the only response Aissys gave; she was too busy taking in the sight of the bath alcove.

It was one of Rirrh's more artistic creations; usually she only made a bare room with a hemispherical depression of water. This one, however, seemed to be more of a grotto, with a tall waterfall opposite the "door". The bathing depression was deeper than usual and filled with warm water. The stream connecting the pool to the waterfall was lined with rock, as was the pool itself. Spark purred appreciation. "Very nice, Rirrh. You should keep this one."

"Really?" The ship beamed pleasure through their psionic link. "I was practicing for the gallery."

Spark nodded absently. "I've got to stop doing that," she muttered to herself as she sat carefully in the pool. "You've got a good eye...so to speak."

Rirrh busied herself with plans for the flight chamber and Spark got down to the serious business of bathing. Sure, she could and did use her tongue to really get clean, but wading in a pool of water gave a pleasure all its own.

With a deep breath, she submerged herself completely under the water, her mane forming an icy blue nimbus around her head. She watched her long, white and black striped fur dance in the pool's currents and wondered if her sister and brother were doing the same. She didn't miss her littermates often, but she'd been in a reflective mood lately. Maybe she should make a visit home after this next planet.

Rising slowly out of the water, watching it stream off her fur, Spark thought of something. "Rirrh? There any music in those radio waves you've been intercepting?"

"Yes...quite a bit. Quite a wide range of styles and instruments, too. I've been using some of it as inspiration. By the way, the history you've requested will be available in an hour."

Spark folded her arms across a convenient rock and nodded to herself. "Good." She rolled in the water so her back rested against the stone. "Play some of that music for me, will you?"

There was a minute pause as Rirrh searched for a suitable piece. Soon, a rousing, brassy sound filled the room. It was loud almost to the edge of pain for sensitive Rissteran hearing, but somehow appropriate to the piece. Spark smiled and leaned back, wings lightly flexed, and daydreamed longingly of flight. Maybe these bald creatures would be more valuable than she thought.

The selection that followed was far more mellow, played with deep-toned woodwinds at a much softer volume; Spark got down to the serious business of bathing with toungue and claw.

"This is giving me a headache," she muttered. She pulled the bookworm off, and fished in the library for another. After the first day of history pulls, Spark had Rirrh make a separate 'worm with strictly entertainment vids from the last 500 human-years, about the time the probe was made. With only a little trouble, she found what she was looking for and placed the 'worm to her forehead.

And ripped it off not fifteen minutes later. "Ugh. Recycle any vids with anything resembling that..that...trash. I hope they have less painful entertainment on some of these other worms." She cocked her head as she sensed the ship cease her normal skimming of space-time. "Rirrh..?"

An image of an albino Sh'raltai, about seven feet tall, with solid, pearly white eyes shimmered into existance in front of Aissys, whose fur immediately stood on end. "Sorry. I was just experimenting."

Spark clutched a clawed hand to her right breast and breathed heavily, miming a heart attack. "Give some warning next time you're going to experiment like that, all right?"

The Rirrh-image nodded meekly. "Yes, ma'am."

Regaining her composure, Spark ran her claws through her mane. "Why are we stopping?"

"Oh." The ship blinked. "I found a suitable asteroid I can use to make a flight gallery. It'll take a couple of days to complete."

"Well, it's not like I don't have plenty of material to study." Spark made her way to her bookworm library. "You get on with your job, and I'll get on with mine."

"To where? The homeworld was destroyed decades ago in the Qa'ani-Kentron Wars. We lost contact with the other colony worlds several years ago. No other worlds in this system are habitable, not that we have the resources for a global evacuation of the planet, anyway." The prime minister gave the scientist a wary look. "If your hypothesis is correct."

"We send those we can to Ssissli, and everyone who is left to search for another planet." He slumped wearily into the chair. "Minister Tri'awl, you know the data as well as I."

The prime minister sighed, equally weary, and leaned back, indigo tresses hanging lifelessly around her shoulders. "Yes, and I've had it double-, even triple-checked. Still..."

Rorrrstri stood and clasped the prime minister's shoulder. "You also know we can't ignore it and hope it will go away."

Sm'rintra Tri'awl nodded slowly. She looked up into the emerald eyes of one of her closest friends. "No, we can't," she finally said, quietly, deliberately. "But. . . this is not a decision that the queen alone, or even with the Council, can make. We must bring the facts before the people, present them with our options. The people must decide."

"The people who look to Queen and Council to lead them?"

Sm'rintra shook her head. "This is far beyond our duties, old friend. You know that. Take ten months. . .the two of us will choose a committee to come up with viable solutions. Ten months from today, we will tell the people your news."