“Then our adversary is even more potent than we had feared,” Jetanien said. “Ensign, your report states that you believe the Apostate was solely responsible for the disappearance of the Jinoteur system?”
The science officer nodded. “Yes, sir. He didn’t say so explicitly, but when we left he seemed to be calling the shots. I think it might have been his endgame in what he called a war for control of the Shedai.”
“Well, he appears to have done us a tremendous favor,” said Jetanien. “Though it’s a pity to be deprived of such a unique object of study as the Jinoteur system, being rid of the Shedai is a boon well worth—”
“Sir,” Theriault cut in, “I wouldn’t count on being rid of anything—at least, not yet.” She nodded at the data slate in Jetanien’s hand. “Remember that the Shedai can shed their bodies and move their essences through the Conduits. The Apostate said there were tens of thousands of these artifacts scattered across several sectors. There’s no telling how many Shedai escaped Jinoteur, or where they went. And from what he said of their hierarchy, I’d guess that most of the ones who escaped were members of their elite, the Serrataal. There could be hundreds of them awake and free throughout the Taurus Reach right now—and it’s a good bet they’re all holding grudges.”
Reyes chortled sarcastically and set down his coffee mug. “We’re in rare form this week, eh, Jetanien?” He reclined his chair and stared glumly at the ceiling. “We fragged a planet, lost a solar system, roused a legion of angry godlike beings, and then unleashed them on the galaxy.” He winced. “Oh, yes—and we got attacked in our own docking bay.”
Jetanien looked at the two Sagittarius officers. “Captain, Ensign, thank you both for your time. Dismissed.” Although the privilege of dismissing them was technically reserved to Reyes, Nassir and Theriault quickly accepted Jetanien’s invitation to leave. He waited for the door to close behind them before he turned and confronted Reyes. “Conduct most unbecoming, Diego.”
“Sometimes the truth isn’t pretty, Jetanien.” Reyes got up and walked around his desk to stand in front of the full-wall sector chart. “We’ve barely got a foothold in the Taurus Reach, and already we’ve let loose a terror we don’t know how to fight without turning planets into glass.” A rueful pall deadened his expression and his voice: “And it’s just a matter of time till it comes looking for us, Jetanien. Just a matter of time.”
Ming Xiong unlocked the door to office CA/194-6 and stepped inside. Everything was exactly as he had left it two weeks ago before shipping out with the crew of the Sagittarius. Its untouched state was hardly remarkable, however, because the office was nothing more than a place for people to see him entering and leaving, as if he actually worked there.
The door locked behind him. He stepped around the drab gray Starfleet-issue furniture. Standing behind the broad, empty desk, he placed his hand against the compartment’s rear wall. A sensor pad under his hand glowed red; its light was intense enough that he could almost distinguish the silhouetted bones of his hand as the machine completed its biometric scan to confirm his identity. He removed his hand. The wall slid aside without making a sound to reveal a pair of red doors, which in turn parted open, granting him access to the brightly lit corridor beyond. He shielded his eyes from the intense, stark white glare as he walked forward. The red doors shut behind him.
At the end of the fifteen-meter-long corridor, Xiong arrived at a pair of transparent sliding doors. A hidden sensor scanned him once more, and the clear panels slid apart. He stepped out of the tubular passage into the buzzing activity of Vanguard’s clandestine research laboratory, known to its twenty-two permanent residents as the Vault.
To his surprise, the entire facility had been rearranged.
When he had left weeks earlier, the Vault had been partitioned into multiple small workspaces; its open floor plan and liberal usage of walls composed of transparent aluminum had given it an impressive feeling of vastness. Now he beheld a single vast enclosure inside a shell of transparent aluminum, beneath a grid of ceiling-mounted sensor arrays. Within it churned snaking coils of matter that transmuted from indigo fires to shimmering liquids peppered with sparkling motes, and from there into blades of obsidian that slashed with relentless futility at the sides of their science-spawned prison. Xiong immediately thought of Theriault’s account of Tholians snared inside a Shedai Conduit and felt a pang of guilty recognition.
Gathered around the box’s exterior and monitoring a score of sensor displays were all the members of Xiong’s top-secret research group, plus someone he had never seen before: a blond woman in her late twenties, dressed in civilian clothes, trim and attractive but also serious and intently focused on the work being done by the rest of the team. She walked slowly from station to station, checking each scientist’s work and making sotto voce comments before moving on.
Xiong walked directly toward her as she stopped beside Dr. Varech jav Gek, the team’s leading geneticist. From a few meters away he heard her say to the Tellarite scientist, “Try to isolate the trigger in that chromosome, then we’ll run the catalyst sequence again.” The gray-bearded Gek nodded and began entering commands on his console. The woman turned in Xiong’s direction and started to walk to the next workstation when he intercepted her. “Excuse me,” he said to her. “What’s going on here? Who are you?”
She flashed an insincere smile that he knew was not an overture of friendship. “I’m your new partner,” she replied. Extending her hand, she added, “Dr. Carol Marcus.”
With reluctance he shook her hand. “Lieutenant Ming Xiong.”
“I know who you are,” she said, walking past him.
He followed her. “Then you know that I’m in charge of the Vault.” He gestured at the transparent enclosure. “And that I have to approve all new research projects.”
“Things change, Lieutenant,” Marcus said. “It’s not always a bad thing.” At the next workstation, she reached past Dr. Tarcoh, a paunchy Deltan theoretical physicist in his late sixties, and adjusted a setting on his console. “Look for changes in its mass,” she said, patting Tarcoh’s arm. “I’m betting it has an extradimensional component.” On the move again, she said over her shoulder to Xiong, “We’re already working on your data from Jinoteur. Quite a breakthrough.”
For Xiong, keeping pace with her was easy; keeping his temper in check was proving increasingly difficult. “You’re not Starfleet,” he said. “Who sent you?”
Marcus replied, “I’m here at the request of the Federation Council. Someone’s worried that the work you’re doing is too important not to have civilian oversight.”
Xiong gave a cynical smirk. “How thoughtful.”
She maintained her veneer of unflappable calm. “I’ve been told to make copies of your data, debrief you on what you and the Sagittarius crew learned at Jinoteur, and make regular reports to the Council about our findings. And I think you’ll find that you have orders to give me your full cooperation.”
They arrived at a long row of master-control consoles behind another thick protective wall of transparent aluminum. Marcus stood in the middle, her eyes panning quickly across the dense cluster of displays and gauges. The panels beneath the monitor banks were packed with multicolored buttons, sliders, and other tried-and-true manual controls.
While Marcus busied herself making minor adjustments, Xiong used a secondary console to access his personal communications channel. Just as Marcus had said, he had received a prioritized order from Starfleet Command directing him to comply with Marcus’s requests for information and granting her the authority to initiate and direct research inside the Vault. It appeared that, wherever she had come from, she had come to stay awhile.
As he logged off, she glanced at him. “Satisfied?”
He frowned. “How much of our research have you been able to review?”