Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“Glad to help,” he said. “But could you lay off me for a few weeks? I lost a lotta money on this trip, and I need to get back to work. I got debts to pay.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t.”

Expecting another of her patented manipulations, he bristled at the coldness of her tone. “Run that by me again?”

T’Prynn turned to face him. “You have no debts, Mr. Quinn. I’ve settled your accounts.”

“What? For this trip, you mean?” “All of them.”

He was still struggling to figure out what devious angle she was working against him. “You’re saying you bought up all my markers? Now I owe everything to you?”

“No, Mr. Quinn. Your debts are settled. They no longer exist. You owe nothing to Ganz, or to Starfleet, or to me.”

The moment was all too surreal for him to grasp. “You think Ganz’ll just let me off the hook? I didn’t even owe him money—I owed him work and favors. How’d you pay that off?”

“The details are not important.” She dropped her smoky-sweet voice to a warm hush and looked him in the eye. “If you wish to continue assisting Starfleet Intelligence, we will be grateful for your help. If you decide to keep on working for Ganz, that’s up to you. The key detail here is that you are not obligated to do either. Put simply, Mr. Quinn…you’re free.”

Quinn was convinced that he had misheard her, because it had sounded as if she had just told him that he was free.

He tried to ask if she was kidding, but he realized as he started speaking that she probably couldn’t hear him over the explosion in the main docking bay.

Pennington observed Quinn’s meeting with T’Prynn from across the thoroughfare. He was close enough that he could monitor them visually with his portable recorder but not close enough to pick up what they were saying.

His attention was fixed on the Vulcan woman, with a focus so acute that he worried it bordered on obsessive. The deception that she had perpetrated on him a few months earlier, to trick him into filing an easily falsified report about the destruction of the U.S.S. Bombay, still rankled him. When he had confronted her about it, she had insinuated that she knew enough about his private life to blackmail him. By that point, however, her ploy had already wrought so much damage to his personal life and his professional credibility that he’d had nothing left to lose.

I went to Jinoteur hoping to get one up on her, he admitted to himself. Between her and Reyes, I can probably forget about ever getting this story published. At least, not in my lifetime.

T’Prynn said something to Quinn that seemed to catch the man off-guard. She’s certainly full of surprises, Pennington mused. He recalled witnessing, purely by chance, an abortive visit that T’Prynn had made to his Stars Landing apartment several weeks earlier. He hadn’t known the intent behind the visit then, and he still didn’t. She had behaved almost like someone plagued by remorse, but he found that hard to believe.

He checked his wrist chrono and glanced impatiently back at Quinn’s tête-à-tête with the Vulcan. Come on, wrap it up, he mentally implored them. There’s a grateful red-haired lass upstairs waiting to buy me a—

A flash of light filled the docking bay as an explosion thundered and shook the entire station. Red-alert klaxons whooped as pedestrians on the thoroughfare were thrown to the ground. Pennington plucked his recorder from his pocket and sprint-stumbled across the broad passageway toward the observation window. Around him Starfleet personnel and a handful of civilians were scrambling away from the gangways for emergency turbolifts and stairwells.

“Red alert,” declared a male voice over the station’s PA system. “Explosion in the main docking bay! DC and fire-control teams to bay three!”

Pennington hurdled over a row of chairs to reach the window in a minimum of running strides. He pointed his recorder at the pandemonium in the hangar beyond. Deep red flames and thick black smoke billowed from a massive rent in the ventral hull of the Starfleet cargo ship U.S.S. Malacca, docked at the next berth, ninety degrees around the station’s core from the Sagittarius. Mangled hull plates and a storm of loose debris tumbled in the zero-gravity environment of the docking bay. A string of secondary explosions ripped across the underside of the Malacca. The ship listed sharply away from its docking port, which buckled and began to tear apart.

Large clusters of scorched, twisted metal ricocheted off the transparent aluminum observation windows, the ceiling of the docking bay, and the core of the station. Pivoting slowly left to track the path of one especially huge piece of debris, Pennington halted as he and his recorder locked on to a more disturbing and horribly compelling sight.

Only a few meters away, standing between himself and Quinn, T’Prynn stared out the observation window at the fiery carnage. Her right hand was splayed against the window, a gesture of desperation. What fascinated Pennington was her expression—a fusion of shock, horror, and anguish—and the fact that she was, unmistakably, crying.

T’Prynn watched her lies and evasions burn away in the crucible of fire outside the window, leaving only the awful truth.

Staring into the smoldering cavity of the Malacca’s blasted cargo hull, she knew that denial was pointless. She had seen the container loaded onto the ship and had watched as the cargo hold was sealed for the vessel’s imminent departure from Vanguard.

Gazing into the hypnotic dance of flames and smoke, T’Prynn knew that Anna was dead.

Sten’s blade slashes my cheek—

Pretenses and façades fell away, stripping her of decades of mental defenses and a lifetime of indoctrinated emotional paralysis. All the carefully constructed excuses, all the old barriers to candor, crumbled in her psychic grasp.

I feel his pain as I bend his fingers backward and break them at the knuckles—

Debris dispersed in chaotic tumbles from the Malacca, trailing twists and ribbons of smoke through the docking bay.

For the sake of duty, T’Prynn had forfeited Anna’s life. She had not done the deed, but she had forced the Klingons’ hand. Anna’s life had been one imperiled for the sake of many. It was logical.

He rips hair from my scalp as I gouge his face—

There was no longer any reason for T’Prynn to lie—to Starfleet or to herself. Love—a taboo of unrivaled power in Vulcan culture, revered and reviled in equal measure—had been driving her mad, clouding her logic, feeding her passions, eroding her control. Anna had declared her own love openly several times, but only now could T’Prynn let herself realize that her lover had spoken the truth. A woman with two faces and two names, a Klingon in human guise, a spy turned traitor, had been the only honest thing in T’Prynn’s life.

She loved me.

Hideous pain shot through T’Prynn’s body—sharp jabs in her back, searing heat against her face, suffocating pressure stealing her breath. Her vision darkened until all she saw was the fire burning in the darkness.

She loved me…and I sacrificed her.

The truth looked back at her through the flames, its morbid grin a memento mori, its brilliant silence a scathing reproach. Love was lost, betrayed in the name of country. Hope was gone. All that remained was the fire.

She burns for me.

Grief twisted her face into a grotesque horror mask. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, her mouth contorted and agape.

Sten’s blade sinks into my chest—

Sorrow and rage combusted within her and erupted as a horrible roar, as her katra submerged into the starless night of her own, personal damnation.

Reyes walked alone through the confusion and chaos in the docking bay’s main thoroughfare. The towering emptiness of the concourse reinforced how small he felt, how powerless.

The bay three gangway was closed to everyone except pressure-suited fire-suppression teams and damage-control crews. Nonessential personnel had been evacuated from the level, leaving only the scores of injured lying supine on the deck and their attendant crowd of blue-jerseyed doctors, para-medics, and nurses kneeling beside them.

In the hangar, a massive cleanup operation was under way. Swarms of maintenance pods moved in closely choreographed patterns, collecting wreckage and, to Reyes’s dismay, bodies. Thirty-eight enlisted crew and nine officers had perished aboard the Malacca, and five Vanguard technicians had been killed by blast effects inside maintenance bay three.

Plus one undeclared passenger aboard the Malacca, Reyes brooded. There was no doubt in his mind that the presence of Klingon double agent Anna Sandesjo had been the motive for the attack on the cargo ship. How the assassination had been carried out was a question that would likely take an investigative team weeks or perhaps even months to determine.

The casualty most disconcerting to Reyes, however, was lying on the deck ahead of him.

Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn stared at him with unseeing eyes. Her head lolled to one side, and her body was splayed in an awkward pose. Fisher and M’Benga kneeled on either side of her, and the two physicians were backed by a team of several doctors and nurses. All the medical personnel seemed to be equipped with tricorders that whirred and oscillated with high-frequency tones. One paramedic, carrying a stretcher, approached from the direction opposite Reyes.

Several members of the medical team looked up as Reyes neared. Fisher looked over his shoulder at him.

Reyes asked, “How badly is she hurt?”

Fisher stood and turned to meet Reyes. The elderly doctor’s gaze was hard and unforgiving. “Physically, she’s fine,” he said. “This is something else.”

M’Benga stepped forward and joined the conversation.

“She appears to have suffered a total psychological collapse.”

“Caused by?”

“We’re not sure,” Fisher said, his unblinking glare of accusation trained on Reyes. He stepped closer and blatantly intruded on Reyes’s personal space. “We’d have a better idea what happened if we’d been given her medical history.”

Equally fearless, M’Benga added, “For a Vulcan to have that kind of breakdown, she would have to have been suffering a great deal, for a very long time. Her collapse in sickbay last week—”

“All right,” Reyes snapped. “I get the point.”

“No, Diego,” Fisher said. “I don’t think you do. She came to us a week ago looking for help—and if you hadn’t tied our hands, maybe we could’ve done something.” Contempt edged into his voice. “But everything with you has to be a god-damned secret.” He turned back to the group of medics and nurses. “Put her on the stretcher! Let’s get her up to the hospital!”

Fisher turned his back on Reyes and walked away. The medical team eased T’Prynn onto the stretcher, lifted her up, and followed Fisher and M’Benga toward the nearby turbo-lifts. Reyes watched them leave, unable to think of a single rebuttal to anything Fisher had said. All he could think of was the thousands of lives he had let be snuffed out on Gamma Tauri IV, the fear and the fury in Jeanne’s eyes as he’d watched her die, and now the smoldering carnage in his docking bay and T’Prynn’s shattered mind and blank eyes.

I could have evacuated the colony. Warned Jeanne. Overruled T’Prynn and declassified her medical records…. But I didn’t. There’s no one to blame but me. He spied his spectral reflection in an observation window and hated the man he saw staring back at him. Their blood is on your hands.

Reyes turned away from the physical and metaphysical damage his decisions had wrought on the lives of those around him and tried to walk away from it, back to work and routine and duty. But there was no walking away; the consequences of his actions shadowed his every thought—just as he knew they would, today and every day, for the rest of his life.

He recalled the words of his late mentor and Academy sponsor, Captain Rymer: It’s called being in command.

Pennington and Quinn sat together on a grassy slope on the edge of Vanguard’s terrestrial enclosure. It had been half an hour since they were evacuated from the thoroughfare after summoning medics to help T’Prynn. No one had asked them any questions; they had simply been told to move along and clear the area.

“Should we go to Manón’s?” Pennington had asked.

“I don’t feel much like celebrating,” Quinn had replied, “and I don’t think the Sagittarius crew will, either.”

He’d agreed with Quinn, and they had found themselves drifting aimlessly across the greenswards of the enclosure, past Fontana Meadow, toward the sparsely wooded incline that ringed the park’s perimeter. There had been no deliberate plan, just a shared sense that neither of them wanted to return to the ship in which they’d been stuck for almost a week, nor to the empty set of rooms that Pennington laughingly called his apartment.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Quinn said.

Sketching with a twig in the cool, dark dirt, Pennington replied, “You mean the explosion?”

“No,” Quinn said. “T’Prynn.”

Pennington nodded. He, too, had been shaken by the primal scream that had preceded the Vulcan woman’s collapse. Public displays of torment were unsettling to him even when he expected them; had T’Prynn been human, the horror and pain in her voice would still have haunted him. But to watch a Vulcan, especially one who was so disciplined and controlled, shatter so completely had been heartbreaking.

“What’d she say to you? Before she collapsed.”

Quinn lowered his eyes and seemed to peer millions of miles beyond the ground at his feet. He sighed. “She said I was free.”

“Free?” echoed Pennington. “Of what?”

“Everything. Debt. Ganz. Her…. Just free.”

Pennington pondered this new information. “Because of what we did for the Sagittarius?” Quinn nodded in confirmation.

Hunching forward against his knees, Pennington reconsidered his memory of T’Prynn approaching his apartment door, hesitating to knock, and walking away. She didn’t have to do right by Quinn, he thought. But that doesn’t change what she did to me.

He took the slender, cylindrical recording device from his jacket pocket and set it for playback. The emitter crystal in its base projected a small holographic image in the air between him and Quinn. He skipped past the images of the Malacca atilt and aflame, to the shot of T’Prynn at the window.

Every detail was razor-sharp: the tears rolling from her eyes, grief’s trembling disfigurement of her face, even Quinn’s silent recoiling in the background. Pennington studied the moment, his throat tightening in empathy for her suffering.

He looked at her right hand pressed desperately against the window, as if she had longed to reach through the flames of the crippled ship to save someone. In that instant he saw himself standing in the same pose months earlier, his hand against the window as he’d watched the blackened and broken remains of the U.S.S. Bombay being returned to Vanguard, piece by piece, by the crew of the Enterprise. He remembered grieving for Oriana, his lover, who had died aboard that ambushed vessel. Suddenly, the pain in T’Prynn’s eyes was as familiar as his own, and he intuited the reason for her breakdown: someone she had loved had been on the Malacca.

Despite the fact that the device’s playback was muted, he vividly recalled T’Prynn’s cry of anguish as she threw her head back. Then she collapsed to the deck, and the recording froze on its last frame of data. Quinn and Pennington stared at it for a long moment before the pilot asked, “Now what?”

T’Prynn’s open eyes stared forlornly at Pennington from the holographic freeze-frame. This isn’t news, he decided. This is one person’s tragedy, and it’s nobody else’s business. Not even mine. He selected the portion of the recording from its end to the moment before it first caught sight of T’Prynn and deleted it permanently from the recorder’s memory.

“You could’ve used that, you know,” Quinn said.

Pennington nodded. “I know.” He shut off the recorder and tucked it back into his pocket.

“If she’d done to me what she did to you…” Quinn paused and looked away before he finished, “Not sure I could forgive her.”

“I haven’t,” Pennington said. “But some lines I won’t cross. What she did is on her conscience. What I do is on mine.”

Quinn gave him a friendly slap on the back. “You’re a better man than I am.”

“No, I’m not,” Pennington confessed. “Just a better man than I used to be.”

30

Ambassador Jetanien paced beside Reyes’s desk and reviewed the details of Theriault’s report from a data slate clutched in his clawed manus. In the hours that had passed since the attack on the Malacca, Reyes had grown silent and detached. As a result, Jetanien was finding it necessary to take a more active role in this debriefing than he had expected.

“This is truly remarkable, Ensign,” the Chelon diplomat said. “Considering the violent nature of our past encounters with the Shedai, this might well constitute the Federation’s true first contact with them as a civilization. Splendidly done.”

“Thank you, Ambassador,” Theriault replied. She was seated beside Captain Nassir, in front of Reyes’s desk.

Tapping the data slate with one claw, Jetanien asked, “Are you absolutely certain that the—” He looked down at the data slate and verified the name. “That the Apostate confirmed the link between the Shedai and the Tholians?”

“Yes, sir,” Theriault said.

Jetanien’s beak clicked with excitement. “Fascinating,” he said. Then he turned toward Captain Nassir. “Now, about the entity you confronted on the planet’s surface…did it happen to look anything like this?” He activated a screen on the wall to the captain’s left. On it was a playback of the attack on the New Boulder colony. Dark ribbons of energy and flashes of lightning snared small transport ships trying to make their escape and crushed them or dashed them against the ground.

Nassir’s face paled as he watched the horrific scene. “That’s exactly what came after us on Jinoteur,” he said.

“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?”

“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.”