Two fearsome shapes, dark and symmetrical.
Like the clawed, half-opened hands of a giant, one reached up from the deck, the other was suspended from the overhead. Each was the other’s mirror image. Rising from the deck along the bulkheads were three arches, spaced at 120-degree intervals. They were broad at their bases and narrowed as they curved upward to meet at the top half of the device.
Xiong stared agape at the machine, which pulsed with ruby hues of power. It was a miniaturized replica of the artifacts found on Erilon and Ravanar. “Commander Terrell?”
After a few seconds, he received a stunned reply. “Yes?”
“Please tell me you’re seeing this.”
“Oh, we’re seeing it, all right,” Terrell said. “We’re just not believing it.”
“Believe it,” Xiong said, swelling with the pride of true accomplishment. He was about to say something more, something congratulatory to his comrades aboard the Sagittarius…then a roar of static disrupted the comm channel.
Xiong scrambled to boost the gain on his transceiver to cut through the noise. Seconds later, one sound from the Sagittarius came through—loud, clear, and unmistakable.
Explosions.
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Historian’s Note
Reap the Whirlwind takes place in 2266 (Old Calendar), beginning roughly six weeks after the end of Summon the Thunder and ending before the Original Series episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.”
For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.
—Hosea 8:7
Prologue
The Fire
and The Song
The First World
Come to me….
The Shedai Wanderer extended herself across the void, her thoughts like tendrils: filaments of consciousness in the darkness—seeking, probing, questing, longing for the touch of the Conduit Song, the harmony of the Voice that could not help but answer her call.
So many lie sleeping, she lamented. So many linger in the shadows of oblivion, content to be liberated from mere being. Free of the past, reposed beneath scatterings of dust on worlds long abandoned. Ours was to rule, not fade away.
Gulfs of space-time stretched away from the Wanderer, vast expanses of vacuum desolate and forlorn. The Song was feeble, a weak melody amid the cosmic noise and the rasp of background radiation. Even in the deepest recesses of the universe, there was no silence; peace was a luxury reserved for the grave. She knew that unless the Song could be amplified, the Others would remain lost to the formless night, dissipated essences.
Come closer….
A single Voice could awaken a hundred Conduits and raise a hundred sleepers. To bring the Voices back to the center was the only way. And so the Shedai Wanderer reached out through the First Conduit and enlarged her sphere of thought-space, extended its range, sought out the ancient Voice.
The effort of reaching in all directions was taxing for the Wanderer, but the recent profound incursion of Telinaruul into the realm of the Shedai had convinced her that haste was needed. Already two groups of Telinaruul had shown that they were deliberately seeking out the Conduits of the Shedai and that they intended to plunder them for their secrets. The intruders’ technology, though not equal to that of the Shedai, had proved formidable, and the Telinaruul were coming in numbers. No longer could the Wanderer face this threat alone. Though the planned era of the Second Age was still aeons in the future, she resolved to rouse the Others and summon them home.
Answer me….
Then came the reply: We hear you.
It was not the obedient Voice as it once had been. Gone was its deferential, reverent tone—it had been replaced by suspicion and defiance. Its psychic timbre had changed, had grown deeper, sharper, more complex. Unmistakably, it was the Kollotuul—the Voice of the Shedai. The Wanderer abandoned the exhausting projection of her spherical thought-space and focused herself through the First Conduit toward the Kollotuul. Follow my voice, she commanded.
Day-moments elapsed like shallow breaths. The Kollotuul drew closer, bending the fabric of space-time around themselves much as the Telinaruul had done. A low drone of anxiety preceded them, cold and unyielding in its thinly veiled hostility.
The Wanderer abandoned the burden of her physical prison and roamed into the heavens above the atmosphere, cast her thoughts into space above the First World. Dispersed between its three moons, she perceived the approach of the Kollotuul from multiple vantages. Above the lush blue-green orb of the First World, the Voice’s fragile shell slowed and entered a geo-stationary orbit above the planet’s largest ocean. The vessel’s trilateral symmetry gave it a blocky, wedge-like aspect; it looked solid and formidable. Its energy source, like others the Wanderer had recently encountered, was a matter-antimatter reactor. The ship was also heavily armed—with the same kinds of weapons that had destroyed the world on which she had chosen to sleep for the next two revolutions of the galaxy.
I must be cautious not to provoke them, she knew. They must not be allowed to repeat their sin against our kind. As if assessing the texture of a rough stone, she caressed their minds with her thoughts, taking their measure and counting their number. There were hundreds of them, all bold and bright and tempered in fire, bristling at her touch, more aware of her presence than she had remembered the Kollotuul being capable of. These will not be yoked willingly to the First Conduit, she realized. They will resist and force me to break their will…. So be it.