“Almost all of it; I’ve been here for ten days. Granted, I only skimmed the hard data, but the abstracts and summaries were so exciting that I couldn’t wait to get started.”
A condescending smirk tugged at his mouth. “Abstracts,” he said. “Summaries.” He shook his head. “In other words, you don’t really know what we’ve found—or what you’re being asked to do.”
“I know more than you think, Lieutenant,” Marcus said. “I understand that we’re talking about an intricate, phenomenally complex genome comprising hundreds of millions of chromosomes. I know that it’s been linked to a set of artifacts on several far-flung planets. And I’m aware that it’s put us into conflict with a very powerful species we don’t yet know how to combat.” She smirked and lifted one eyebrow. “Do you want to quiz me on the genome’s unique chemical markers?”
Xiong rolled his eyes. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. Putting aside his resentment of Marcus’s brusque manner, he grudgingly concluded that it might be useful to have a fresh perspective on the Taurus meta-genome project. “Have you read the report I filed a few hours ago, after the Sagittarius made port?”
“Some of it,” Marcus said.
He activated a monitor on the console between them. “I’ll call it up over here. I’ve been working on it for the last six days, since we left Jinoteur.” He tapped commands into the computer interface and called up the classified report. “There’s a lot of data, but I can sum up the high points for you.”
“Please do,” Marcus said, scrolling through the tricorder readings Xiong had made of Jinoteur’s peculiar energy field.
“You’ve already unlocked part of it,” he said, “shifting pieces of the Shedai body between physical states. The crew of the Sagittarius watched a living Shedai do that in real time, traveling as a gas, becoming a gelatinous liquid for searching and a solid for attacking. In addition, they have sensor readings showing that these beings can control electromagnetic effects, including lightning.”
He pressed some keys on the console desk and patched in a new set of data from his report. “Injuries sustained by Sagittarius officers Terrell and McLellan showed the same kind of crystalline infection that Dr. Fisher detected on the corpse of Endeavour scientist Bohanon. The application of a dampening field attuned to Shedai neural frequencies retarded its spread.”
Xiong reached past Marcus to tie in a new databank, and she moved back to give him room to work as he continued his briefing. “Now for the really exciting part,” he said. “During one Shedai attack, Lieutenant Commander McLellan’s right leg was severed at the knee. Dr. Babitz, applying an energy pulse based on the Shedai carrier wave and partially recoded with McLellan’s DNA pattern, was able to revivify crystallized tissue in the amputated limb—and reattach it to the patient, with a full tissue-regeneration effect.” He replaced McLellan’s medical file with Terrell’s. “The same effort failed to work for Commander Terrell—and I think I know why.”
“The Jinoteur Pattern,” Marcus blurted out.
Her preemptive leap caught him by surprise. “That’s right,” he said. “When the regenerative field was applied to McLellan’s leg, the Sagittarius was on the planet’s surface, surrounded by the Jinoteur system’s unique energy field.”
“But the procedure on Commander Terrell,” Marcus noted, pointing out the detail in Dr. Babitz’s report, “wasn’t attempted until after the star system had vanished.”
“Exactly,” Xiong said. “She had to remove the crystallized tissue surgically.” He closed Terrell’s file and called up the Jinoteur carrier-wave signal. “We’d noted some correlations in this carrier wave to segments of the meta-genome. We were able to use it to construct a means of sending a ‘ping’ to look for other artifacts—which we now know are called Conduits. It gave us only limited insights into decoding the master structure of the meta-genome, but with the Jinoteur Pattern—”
“It’s like matching a key to a lock,” Marcus said, nodding along, riding the tide of his excitement. “This is fantastic.”
“I know!” Elated to finally have someone who appreciated the broader implications of the work that had dominated the past three years of his life, he could hardly contain himself. “Think about it—with this kind of a regenerative matrix, we could heal all kinds of injuries. Lost limbs, deep-tissue damage—the possibilities are incredible.”
Marcus laughed. Then she caught herself and covered her mouth until she regained her composure. “Lieutenant,” she said, as if she were appalled at his reaction, “this is much bigger than fixing a few broken bodies. You said yourself that the entire Jinoteur system was infused with this waveform.”
A feeling of intense dread welled up inside him. “So…?”
“So?” Marcus replied. She called up the sensor readings that Theriault had made of the Jinoteur system before the ship had approached the fourth planet. “That star system registered as less than half a million years old. With a main-sequence star? And every body in the system the exact same age? How is that even possible?” The Jinoteur Pattern appeared on the screen, and a slightly fanatical gleam lit up Marcus’s eyes. “What if this matrix doesn’t just regenerate what already exists? What if it can be used to shape matter and energy into any configuration desired?” She stared at it in awe. “You could build planets from nothing. You could make stars.” She grinned, giddy with excitement, and mimed a supernova explosion with her hands. “Let there be light.”
Xiong finally understood why his pleas for scientific glasnost with the Klingons and the Tholians had been refused so adamantly by Starfleet Command. If Marcus was right about the tremendous possibilities contained in the meta-genome and the waveform, it was a discovery with galactic implications.
In the right hands, it could be the greatest gift ever bestowed upon sentient beings, a boon to life itself.
In the wrong hands, it would be the most barbaric weapon of mass destruction and genocide ever known.
Watching his new colleague gaze in wonder at the mysterious energy waveform on his monitor, Xiong silently wished that he could go back six days in time to that placid, moonlit beach on Jinoteur—and shatter his tricorder against a boulder.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Xiong said softly, “I think I’d like to go and get settled back into my office.” He started to leave.
Marcus’s apologetic tone almost sounded sincere as she broke the news. “That’s not your office anymore.”
Pennington sat cross-legged on the floor in the center of his empty living room. At his side was a half-eaten turkey sandwich and a bottle of lukewarm fruit juice that he had purchased to go from a vendor in Stars Landing’s restaurant district. It was a far cry from the fancy cuisine that he had enjoyed during his brief years as a star reporter for the Federation News Service, but, as his former editor Arlys often liked to say, “the best reporters are the hungry ones.”
A single, tubular lighting element, which he had purchased from the station’s quartermaster with a bit of his meager savings, glowed from the fixture on the ceiling above him. His shadow fell over the screen of the small portable data manager in his hands; he used the device for everything from personal communications to composing his freelance news stories and editing audiovisual data from his recorder.
Though he had watched his video footage from Jinoteur more than a hundred times in the past week, he remained unsure how much of it was good enough to use in his report. Most of the shots he had made—while running from and dodging falling debris—were staticky and blurred, more suggestive than conclusive. The wildly shaking images had barely captured a few clear frames of the creatures he had encountered on the planet. He had made extensive notes about his firsthand observations, but the only person who could corroborate his account of events was Ensign Theriault—who, he had been unsurprised to learn, was under orders not to discuss the mission with anyone.