Xiong turned to face Lieutenant Commander McLellan, the second officer. He smiled and set down his duffel. “Bridy Mac!”
The raven-haired woman gave him a brief but friendly hug. “You’re early,” she said.
“I wanted to get settled before the briefing,” he said.
She reached out, pinched a loose bit of his jumpsuit’s sleeve, and smiled. “Looks like you’re already blending in.”
“Captain Nassir did tell me to wear it the next time I came back,” Xiong said. “Is everybody back onboard already?”
McLellan replied, “We’re in full scramble, trying to load up before we ship out.” She motioned for him to follow her. “Come on, you can bunk with Ilucci again.” He picked up his duffel and followed her aft. She moved with swift and graceful strides befitting her experience as a marathon runner. As he caught up to her, she said in a confidential hush, “I went below and took a look at the new toys you sent us. Crazy stuff.”
“Hot off the workbench,” he said. “All prototypes.”
“Experimental gear? Classified briefings? We’re gettin’ into something interesting, aren’t we?”
Xiong couldn’t help but chuckle ruefully. “Trust me, Bridy Mac—you have no idea.”
“All right,” Captain Nassir said to his gathered crew, “everyone settle. We’ve got a lot to cover and not much time.”
Even though the galley of the Sagittarius doubled as its conference room, it was barely large enough to accommodate the entire crew at once. Xiong waited patiently while the group came to order. It still pleased him to see that everyone wore the same style of olive-drab coverall with simple insignia. No one’s uniforms had special markings, not even the captain’s.
Xiong stood in front of the compartment’s one wall monitor. Standing to his left were Nassir and Commander Terrell. Vanessa Theriault and Bridy Mac stood together to Xiong’s right, along with a comely young Andorian zhen, the ship’s helm officer and navigator, Lieutenant Celerasayna zh’Firro.
Seated at the table closest to Xiong were the engineers; all were noncommissioned officers except for one enlisted man. Ilucci sat up front. Behind Ilucci, Threx used a metal pick to clean between his teeth. The sight disturbed Xiong, who reminded himself that the brawny Denobulan had worse habits. Opposite Ilucci were Torvin and Petty Officer Second Class Karen Cahow, a tomboyish blond polymath.
Behind them, at the next table, were the ship’s field scouts, who doubled as its security detail. The lead scout and head of security was Lieutenant Sorak—a lean, tough-looking, white-haired Vulcan man who had recently turned one hundred eighteen years old. With him were Razka and Lieutenant Niwara, a female Caitian whose reputation as a loner was well earned.
Dr. Lisa Babitz and her right-hand man, Vietnamese-born medical technician Ensign Nguyen Tan Bao, sat at the farthest table. Babitz had the impeccable posture of someone who feared that any surface she touched would be rife with germs. Tan Bao, on the other hand, was casually sprawled, leaning back on his elbows, his long, thick hair spilling over his shoulders and framing his boyish face.
Within ten seconds of Nassir’s request, the crew of the Sagittarius fell quiet and turned their attention to Xiong.
“The first thing you need to know is where we’re going,” Xiong said. He pushed a yellow data card into a wall slot to call up a star map on the viewer. “Our destination is the fourth planet in the Jinoteur system, about six days from here at your best speed. The Klingons have tried to go there twice, and they’ve taken a couple of heavy beatings from automated defense systems on the planet’s three moons. We kept a close eye on them both times, and we’re hoping to learn from their mistakes.
“The reason we’re shipping out early is that we detected a Tholian ship there. Unlike the Klingons, the Tholians haven’t been shot at. We don’t know why—but we’ve got a few ideas.” Xiong paused as he saw the Vulcan head of security raise his hand. “Question?”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Sorak said. “What is the strategic importance of the Jinoteur system? Why are we—as well as the Klingons and the Tholians—interested in it?”
Leave it to a Vulcan to ask a simple question that demands a complicated answer. “Its overall strategic role is not yet fully understood,” Xiong replied. “But we believe it to be the element that reconciles a number of mysterious discoveries made recently throughout the Taurus Reach.” He inserted a red data card into a second wall slot connected to the monitor. An image of the Taurus meta-genome appeared on screen. From the back of the room he heard Dr. Babitz gasp softly.
“This,” Xiong said, “is the Taurus meta-genome. It’s a complex genetic artifact, containing hundreds of millions of chromosomes’ worth of chemical information. Only the smallest part of it seems to be used to create living organisms. Most of it appears to be a remarkably complex form of data encryption.” He pushed a few buttons next to the screen to pull different information from the data card. As the image onscreen changed, he continued, “Variants of the meta-genome have been found on three planets so far: Ravanar IV, Erilon, and Gamma Tauri IV.”
He ejected the red data card and inserted a blue one. Side-by-side images of huge, obsidian artifacts appeared onscreen. The longer Xiong had studied them, the more he had come to think that they resembled giant, black-glass spiders suspended over their mirror-reflection counterparts. “On Ravanar IV and Erilon, we also discovered these artifacts. Our best estimates indicate that they could be hundreds of thousands of years old. The Tholians destroyed the artifact at Ravanar, but the crews of the Endeavour and the Lovell secured the larger one on Erilon for further study. We’ve barely begun to figure out what these things do, but at least one of their functions is to serve as the command-and-control hub for a planetary defense system.”
Another raised hand drew Xiong’s attention to Ilucci. He nodded to the chief engineer. “Go ahead, Master Chief.”
“You said the Tholians destroyed the artifact at Ravanar?”
Xiong replied, “Yes.”
With palpable ire, Ilucci asked, “Does that mean the Tholians really did destroy the Bombay?”
For a moment Xiong wondered if he ought to evade the question somehow, but then he decided to play it head-on. Commodore Reyes said to give them the truth. They might as well get all of it. “Yes,” Xiong said. “The Tholians ambushed the Bombay and destroyed it. Certain elements within Starfleet sabotaged the reporting of the incident to give the Federation Council an excuse not to go to war, so that we could continue our covert mission to unlock the secrets of the meta-genome.”
Despite lowering his voice, Threx’s sarcasm was heard by all as he muttered, “Oh, that’s just great.”
“Lock that down,” Ilucci snapped in a harsh whisper.
Xiong sorted through his collection of data cards, chose two more, and put them into available slots beside the monitor. He thumbed a switch to activate the first of them. Probe-captured images of glowing, rocky debris filled the screen. “The planet Palgrenax,” he said. “Or what’s left of it. Our best intel suggests the Klingons found something like the artifacts on Erilon and Ravanar IV. As with the Endeavour at Erilon, a Klingon cruiser in orbit of Palgrenax was fired upon by a planet-based weapons system. The Klingons responded with force—and apparently triggered a response that caused whatever they were fighting to blow up the planet.”
Once again, Sorak raised his hand. After Xiong pointed to him, the Vulcan asked, “Can you tell us who or what the Klingons might have been fighting?”
Unable to prevent the grim shift in his countenance, Xiong said in a grave tone, “Yes, I can.” He activated the second new data card and looked at the monitor. “This.”
Moving images stuttered across the screen. Footage recorded with tricorders during the first and second battles against the black entities on Erilon showed the lethal killing machines from a variety of perspectives. More than two meters tall and vaguely humanoid in shape, they streaked across a bleak gray winterscape, churning up vaporized snow and ice as they went. Their arms ended in conical points that, in more than one image sequence, proved capable of tearing humanoids in half or skewering them with a single blow. A repeated motif of the montage was the utter ineffectiveness of phasers against the beings, who looked as if they were formed from volcanic glass.