by David Mack
Over the comm, one of the Endeavour’s transporter chiefs was in a panic. “Vanguard! What happened? We’ve lost your man’s signal!”
“Stand by,” T’Prynn said. “I’m trying to isolate his life signs using the internal sensors, but he’s inside a heavily shielded area of the station.”
“Make it quick,” the chief said. “We’re being told it’s time to go.”
Massive interference from the starbase’s overloading reactors and numerous radiation leaks from battle damage made it difficult for T’Prynn to get a clear reading from the station’s lower core levels. Then the signal resolved for a moment—long enough for her to confirm that the Vault’s antimatter-based self-destruct system had been armed, and that the secret laboratory was awash in the most concentrated readings of Shedai life signs she had ever witnessed.
If Xiong was doing what she suspected, then speed was now of the essence.
A final check of her panel confirmed that all the other personnel who had made it to the evac sites had been beamed out. She reopened the channel to the Endeavour.
“We’ve lost Lieutenant Xiong,” she said. “Retreat at maximum speed as soon as I’m aboard. One to beam up. T’Prynn out.”
Kirk swelled with admiration for his crew. Asked to do the impossible, they had carried it off with aplomb, unleashing the Enterprise’s formidable arsenal against the Tholian armada despite being locked into a circular flight pattern with no margin for evasion or error.
Even as the ship had lurched and shuddered beneath a devastating series of disruptor blasts and plasma detonations, chief engineer Montgomery Scott had kept the shields at nearly full power, and helmsman Hikaru Sulu hadn’t wavered an inch from the close-formation position Kirk had ordered him to maintain between the Enterprise and the Endeavour. Ensign Pavel Chekov’s targeting had been exemplary—not only had he dealt his share of damage to the Tholians, he had even picked off several of their incoming plasma charges, detonating them harmlessly in open space several kilometers from the ship.
Every captain thinks his crew is the best, Kirk mused with pride. I know mine is.
Lieutenant Uhura swiveled away from the communications panel. “Captain, we’re being hailed by the Endeavour. Captain Khatami’s given the order to withdraw at best possible speed.”
“Then it’s time to go,” Kirk said. “Sulu, widen our radius, give them room to break orbit. Set course for the convoy, warp factor six.”
Spock stepped down into the command well and approached Kirk’s chair. “Captain, sensors show the Endeavour’s warp drive is off line. She will not be able to stay with us.”
“Sulu, belay my last.” Kirk spun his chair toward Uhura. “Get me Captain Khatami.”
A thunderous collision dimmed the lights and the deck pitched sharply, sending half the bridge crew tumbling to starboard. Kirk held on to his chair until the inertial dampers and artificial gravity reset to normal. “Damage report!”
Spock hurried back to his station and checked the sensor readouts. “Dorsal shield buckling. Hull breach on Decks Three and Four, port side.”
Uhura interjected, “I have Captain Khatami, sir.”
“On-screen,” Kirk said. As soon as Khatami’s weary, bloodstained face appeared on the main viewscreen, Kirk asked, “How long until your warp drive’s back on line, Captain?”
The transmission became hashed with interference as Endeavour weathered another jarring hit. Khatami coughed and waved away smoke. “Any minute now. Go ahead without us.”
“With all respect, Captain: Not a chance. Signal us when you’re ready for warp speed. We’ll cover you till then. Kirk out.” He glanced at Uhura and made a quick slashing gesture, and she closed the transmission before Khatami could argue with him. “New plan. Sulu, stay on the Endeavour’s aft quarter and act as her shield until they recover warp power. Chekov, concentrate all fire aft—discourage the Tholians from chasing us. Spock, angle all deflector screens aft. Everyone else, get comfortable; we’re in for a very bumpy ride.”
35
Billions of radiant specks swam in the frigid darkness that surrounded Ming Xiong. Demonic howls and wails assailed him, but his eardrums were still ringing with tinnitus from the sharp crack of the isolation chamber’s reinforced door exploding away from its frame and pealing the distant bulkhead like a church bell.
He couldn’t bring himself to scream as the Shedai erupted in a torrent from the isolation chamber and gathered around him in a great cloud, a storm of ice and shadow. His mind was numb, his very existence reduced to a state of inarticulate horror. All he could do was cling to his pedestal-shaped console and watch the real-time sensor readouts.
The Enterprise and the Endeavour were still too close to the station for him to risk triggering the self-destruct system. Why haven’t they gone to warp? He feared with each passing moment that he might have to condemn them to share his fate.
At the same time, except for a small force of ships that were pursuing the Endeavour and the Enterprise, the Tholian armada was redeploying into a close-range heavy bombardment formation around the station. As devoutly as Xiong wished he could have left this matter to them, he couldn’t trust their weapons to even affect the Shedai, much less guarantee their destruction. Worse, their impending barrage might damage the Vault’s self-destruct system enough to prevent it from unleashing its maximum yield at the moment of detonation, so he would have to trigger the autodestruct package as soon as they resumed fire on the station, regardless of whether the Endeavour and the Enterprise had escaped the blast zone.
And still, all he wanted to do was run.
A dark flash of motion, a black blur in the shadows, and he felt the sharp bite of an obsidian blade as it slammed through his torso. His knees buckled, and then he felt as if he were standing on rubber legs. Blood, warm and tasting of tin, gurgled up his esophagus and spilled over his chin. He looked down and saw the broadsword-sized, jagged-edged mass that had impaled him. Following its edge back toward its source, he saw that it became translucent within a meter of his body, and after that it gradually changed states, first to a dense liquid and then to a tenuous mass of vapor extended from the great cloud of Shedai.
The tentacle jerked back, yanking its black blade from Xiong’s body in an agonizing blur that left him clutching at his belly with one hand and hanging onto his console with the other. Where he expected to find his blood and viscera spilling out, he found a freezing cold mass of quartzlike stone covering his wound. Then he felt its deathly chill traveling across his skin, and he realized it was spreading. An icy, stabbing sensation inside his gut alerted him to the substance’s cancerlike progression through his internal organs. Cold suffused his body, and he felt his strength ebbing along with his body’s heat.
Then he became aware of other presences, distinct entities, drawing near to him. Hunched giants of smoke and indigo light, they wore auras of arrogance and malice like crowns of evil. The unholy host of spectral figures pressed inward. Then one spoke with a voice that wed the roar of an avalanche with the fathomless echoes of a Martian canyon. “Foolish little spark.” Rich with condescension, its Jovian baritone shook the station. “What made your kind think it could ever contain such as us? You are but glimmers in the endless gaze of time. Weak minds trapped inside sacks of rotting flesh and fragile bone. You are nothing.”
Xiong wished he had some irreverent reply, some witty retort for its taunts, but all he had was a mouthful of blood and a body shivering with hypothermia and adrenaline overload.
“So? Who are you?”
“I am the Progenitor, the wellspring of all that is Shedai. First among the elite.”
“Good for you.”
He stole a look at the console. Endeavour and Enterprise remained at impulse. Come on. Go, already!
The Progenitor loomed over him, its countenance one of perfect darkness, a black hole surrounded by sickly hues and pestilent vapors. Its approach sent frost creeping across Xiong’s console. “All your worlds will pay fo
r your trespasses. Your kind will learn to fear us like never before.” A tentacle of smoke coiled around Xiong’s throat and solidified into a substance that felt like solid muscle sheathed in cold vinyl. Then it lifted him up against the ceiling and started choking him by slow degrees. “Beg for mercy, and I will grant you a swift death. Defy me, and I will keep your consciousness alive to witness every horror and atrocity we visit upon your pathetic Federation.”
The Tholian armada was in position. Its final siege was only moments away.
Xiong could barely feel his hands as he clutched at the Progenitor’s black tentacle. Looking down in terror and anguish, he glimpsed his console, which was now blanketed by a paper-thin layer of frost. He could no longer see the sensor readout’s fine details, but he could still see two bright blue points of light that he knew were the escaping Starfleet ships.
Then both dots vanished from the display. They’ve made the jump to warp!
He forced out a desperate whisper, “Mercy . . .”
The Progenitor dropped him. He rolled as he hit the floor, coming to a stop in front of his console. Fighting past the torturous sensation of a hundred needles of ice drilling through his intestines, Xiong fought his way back to his feet and slumped against his console. He had planned to do so as a ruse, but it had become a necessity.
“So,” the Progenitor mocked, “it’s to be a quick death, is it?”
Xiong looked up at the Progenitor and flashed a bloodied grin. “You have no idea.”
He pressed the autodestruct trigger, and his pit of darkness turned to light.
Bruised and aching, Admiral Nogura stepped out of the turbolift and onto the bridge of the Endeavour, only to be brusquely shouldered aside by the ship’s surgeon, Doctor Anthony Leone, and one of its nurses, who together carried out an unconscious and maimed young lieutenant on a stretcher. “Out of the way,” Leone said, his nasal voice tolerating no argument. The short, sinewy physician seemed to regard Nogura not as a flag officer but as an obstacle.
The turbolift doors hissed closed behind Nogura as he inched toward the center of the bridge. Captain Khatami appeared to have suffered her fair share of lacerations from airborne debris. Blood trickled down from above her hairline and seeped from a cut beside her right eye; numerous bloodstains tainted her gold command jersey in flecks and streaks.
Apparently having caught sight of Nogura out of the corner of her eye, Khatami swiveled her chair toward him. “Admiral, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Though I might have to court-martial Lieutenant T’Prynn. Again.”
A curious look. “For what?”
“Saving my life,” Nogura grumbled.
Khatami looked slyly amused. “Good luck getting a conviction for that.”
“Did you finish evacuating the station?”
“Yes, sir, thanks to Kirk and the Enterprise. We—” A sudden flash on the main viewer snared her eye and snapped her back into command mode. “Klisiewicz, report.”
The science department chief stared with haunted eyes at the sensor display. “It’s Vanguard, Captain. It blew up and took most of what was left of the Tholian armada with it.”
The image on the main viewscreen changed to show an incandescent cloud of fire blooming against the starry sprawl of deep space, its rolling blazes littered with chunks of the once-mighty starbase and the broken husks of dozens of Tholian warships. Within seconds the storm of superheated gases had already begun to dissipate into the endless darkness.
The autodestruct, Nogura realized. Xiong must have triggered it from the Vault. He descended into the command well. “Are there any Shedai life signs, Lieutenant?”
“Negative, sir. Only a few Tholian life signs, and they’re retreating at warp speed.”
Khatami remained on edge. “What about the ships chasing us?”
McCormack replied, “They’re changing course, sir. Breaking off and heading back toward Tholian space at warp eight.”
That news seemed to bring a wave of relief to everyone on the bridge except Nogura. He stared at the fading glow of the antimatter-fueled explosion that had just wiped Starbase 47 and every remaining member of the Shedai out of existence, and wondered whether, in the long view of history, this five-year covert operation would be deemed a success or a failure, and if the innumerable lives sacrificed in its name would be hailed as heroes and martyrs, or as victims of a national-security misadventure run amok.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter, he decided. It would fall to future generations to judge this undertaking and its consequences with the benefit of hindsight. There was nothing left for him to do now but file his final report as the commanding officer of Starbase 47 and await new orders.
Officially, as of that moment . . . Operation Vanguard was over.
EPILOGUE
A BRAVER PLACE
CALDOS II
Pennington sat in the stern of Reyes’s narrow skiff, clutching the gunwales with both hands. His coat was pulled tightly closed, and his legs stretched toward the middle of the small boat. Reyes sat facing him on the center bench, rowing the five-meter-long watercraft with slow, powerful strokes through the limbo of predawn fog that surrounded them. Reyes’s oar blades cut gentle wakes, and the handles creaked inside the oarlocks. It was impossible to see more than a few meters in any direction, and all Pennington saw was the rippled water of the lake.
“You really didn’t have to do this,” Pennington said.
Reyes’s long hair swayed with the tempo of his rowing. “Yes, I did.”
“I could have waited another hour for the ferry.”
The former Starfleet officer drawled, “I just wanted you out of my house.”
Pennington chuckled. “Suits me. You were out of whiskey, anyway.” Except for the soft splash of water against the boat and the wooden groans of the oars, the world seemed utterly still. Then, even though he couldn’t yet see the mainland, he caught a faint scent of pine and a distant lilt of birdsong from the vast sprawl of virgin forest that ringed the lake.
Exertion deepened Reyes’s respiration, and his exhalations added ghostly plumes to the morning’s heavy shroud of pale vapor. Catching his breath, he asked, “So, I meant to ask: What was the fallout from the Tholians attacking Vanguard?”
“Less than you’d expect.” Pennington dug his hands into his coat pockets to keep them warm. “The Tholians made a stink in Paris about ‘the crimes of the Taurus Reach,’ or some such twaddle. The Federation Council passed off the attack as a ‘benevolent Tholian intervention’ to help Starfleet contain the Shedai threat after an accident aboard the station.”
Reyes chortled and cracked a cynical smile behind his salt-and-pepper beard. “And who blew the lid off that lie? You or the Tholians?”
“Neither. Starfleet started jamming and censoring all transmissions out of Tholian space, and the editorial board at FNS ran with the official spin from the Palais.” He strained to see anything through the fog, mostly as an excuse to avoid eye contact with Reyes as he added, “That was when I handed in my resignation and went to work for INN.”
“And they broke the story.”
“Nope. They’d been co-opted, too.” The memory still made him angry. “Sometimes, I think the whole galaxy’s in on the lie, and I’m the only one left who cares about the truth.” Suddenly recalling that Reyes had been court-martialed years earlier for helping Pennington expose some of Starfleet’s shameful secrets, he added, “Present company excluded, of course.”
A dour glance let him off the hook. “Naturally.” Reyes looked down at the compass resting between his feet and adjusted his stroke to make a minor correction in the skiff’s course. “Speaking of which, whatever happened to my successor?”
“Just what you’d expect for a man who had a Watchtower-class starbase shot out from under him: He got promoted.” That drew a short but good-natured laugh from Reyes, and then Pennington continued. “Since I know you’re probably dying to ask, Captain Khatami and the Endeavour are exploring the T
aurus Reach, and so are Captain Terrell and the Sagittarius.”
Reyes looked pleased. “Seems only fair, after all the legwork they did.” He glanced over his shoulder, as if he expected to find something there, then he turned back toward Pennington and continued his slow-and-steady rowing. “Did you keep tabs on anybody else?”
“Everyone I could,” Pennington confessed. “Doctor Marcus and her civilian partners are in some top-secret location—nobody really knows where—doing God-knows-what. Probably learning how to stop time or turn old chewing gum into black holes. Your old pal Jetanien’s still living on that backwater rock, Nimbus III. When I asked him why, he said he was there ‘for the waters.’ Rumor has it the old turtle’s finally lost his mind.”
A thoughtful frown. “What about T’Prynn?”
“No idea,” Pennington said. “Vanished into her work at SI, along with every last shred of proof the Shedai ever existed. I figure at least some of those artifacts must have been taken off the station before it went up in flames, but I’ll be damned if I can find any trace of them.”
“Probably all boxed up in a warehouse on some airless moon at the ass end of space. I doubt they’ll ever be seen again—at least, not in our lifetimes.”
“Maybe that’s for the best,” Pennington said. “I just wish I could find a lead on my old mate, Quinn. He not only disappeared, he erased himself from history, like he was never born.”
Reyes stopped rowing to mop the sweat from his creased forehead with the sleeve of his insulated red flannel shirt. “Take it from me, Tim: some people don’t want to be found.”
Pennington grudgingly saw the wisdom in Reyes’s point. “I know. It’s just my nature to dig at these sorts of things.”
The older man resumed rowing while eyeing him with open suspicion. “True, but you don’t usually do it for free. At least, you never used to. So . . . who paid you to dig me up?”
He tried to deflect the question. “Who says anyone did?”