“Theriault,” said Terrell, “run a tricorder scan.”

The science officer fumbled with gloved hands to retrieve her tricorder from her suit’s thigh pocket, then she poked clumsily at its controls. A few moments later, she lowered it and shot a flustered look at Terrell. “No good, sir. Too much interference from the pulsar.”

The first officer balled his right hand into a fist. “Meaning we’ll have to go in there blind. I was afraid of that.”

Sorak returned to the doorway and signaled the rest of the team to follow him. Ilucci and the others unfastened their harnesses and clambered out of the rover. As they joined Sorak at the entrance, the Vulcan recon scout said to Terrell, “It appears to be deserted, but I think you and I should do a full search while Theriault and the Master Chief inspect the device.”

“All right.” Terrell motioned for Sorak to head inside. “Lead the way.”

They followed Sorak through a long, zigzagging trapezoidal corridor whose glistening surfaces were all ridged and scaled. It felt to Ilucci like passing through an organic orifice.

Marching into the belly of the beast.

They emerged from its far end inside the aphotic arena, which at first glance resembled a shallow crater of dark volcanic glass. Long tubes radiated from its center, like longitudinal markings on a map, guiding Ilucci’s eye immediately to the pit’s nadir. Forks of sapphire lightning zapped down from the overarching talon-towers, illuminating the spokes of a wheel-shaped onyx frame that held several thousand skull-sized, dodecahedronal crystals identical to the Mirdonyae Artifact secured inside Vanguard’s research lab. Unlike that captured prize, however, these crystals all were perfectly clear, rather than swirling with the eldritch energies of an imprisoned alien life force. Though Ilucci had no words to say why, the very sight of the alien contraption filled him with a sick sense of foreboding.

As Sorak and Terrell split up and began conducting a thorough search of the upper tiers of the stadium’s interior, Theriault shouldered past Ilucci and hurried down the slope of the pit, on a beeline for the crystal wheel. Seeing her rush headlong into peril made Ilucci’s gut twist, reminding him that he’d never really purged himself of his infatuation with the impulsive young Martian woman. Her energetic curiosity was a key ingredient of her charm, and as an officer she was expected to lead by bold example, but he worried about her more than he could ever say. All he could do was pick up his feet and run after her.

By the time he caught up to her, she was circling the thing, trying in vain to scan it with her tricorder. She cursed under her breath, but each profanity was perfectly audible over the comm channel. Ilucci cleared his throat, and she stopped abruptly. “Sorry,” she said. “But I can’t get much on this thing except straight-up visual scans, and even those are coming out pretty rough from all the radiation.” She pointed at the wheel’s hub, a thick trunk of onyxlike stone that appeared to be fused to the ground. “It looks pretty well anchored. I can’t imagine how we’ll ever get this thing out of here. Or fit it into the ship, for that matter.”

He scrunched his brows. “Why the hell would we want to do that?”

A grimace made her lips thin and disappear, then she mustered a weak and unconvincing smile. “Because we were ordered to recover anything we found and bring it back for analysis.”

Ilucci raised his voice in anger as he turned and looked up toward the distant Terrell. “Nice of somebody to tell me!”

“Chief,” Terrell said, sounding diplomatic but not the least apologetic, “we were under strict secrecy protocols. This whole operation’s been on a need-to-know basis.”

The military clichй lit the fuse on Ilucci’s temper. “And why would I need to know, right? I mean, I’m only the goddamned chief engineer! Just the tool-pusher who has to figure out how to cut this thing free and turn it into cargo! Why tell me anything, right?”

Theriault sounded oddly chipper. “Chief, it might not be that bad—look.” He turned back toward her. She was pointing at an empty nook on one of the wheel’s spokes. “This might be where one of the Mirdonyae Artifacts came from. Which suggests . . .” She stepped forward, clutched the nearest crystal on the wheel with both hands, and pulled it free with ease. Stumbling backward, she was filled with innocent glee. “Easy peasy!”

He shouted, “What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?” The impetuous redhead held out the artifact toward Ilucci. Staring at the glibly plucked forbidden fruit being proffered by the object of his unrequited affections, Ilucci thought of Adam in the Garden of Eden. He held up a hand and shook his head. “No, thanks. You keep it.”

“Suit yourself, Master Chief.” She turned to look in Terrell’s direction. “Commander? I can’t get a reading on these things. What do you want me to do next?”

The first officer and Sorak were both on the way down to regroup with Ilucci and Theriault. “Take that crystal back to the rover and find some way to pack it safely for the ride back,” Terrell said. “We’ll dump some of the ship’s cargo so we can use the empty crates to box up the other crystals. Master Chief, we’ll need both rovers to move them to the ship, so have your team get Ziggy ready to roll. We’ll come back with Threx, zh’Firro, Dastin, and Cahow.”

Ilucci stared at the huge wheel, its spokes clustered with artifacts. “This could take days.”

“I estimate it will take us four days and twenty-one hours,” Sorak said.

“Then we’d best get started,” Terrell said. “The sooner we finish, the sooner we leave.”

Ilucci plucked an artifact from its cradle, tucked it under his arm, and started walking back to the rover. He said nothing, but his gut told him this mission would not end well.

12

Captain Khatami jolted awake in her quarters at 0418, instantly aware that something was amiss. The drone of the Endeavour’s warp engines had pitched upward by an octave, and she had felt a subtle moment of disorientation as the ship’s inertial dampers lagged a few thousandths of a second behind the change. She threw aside her bedcovers and was crossing the room to her desk when the intraship comm split the silence with an electronic boatswain’s whistle, which was followed by the voice of the ship’s second officer and gamma shift commander, Lieutenant Commander Paul Norton. “Bridge to Captain Khatami.”

A jab of her thumb on the comm’s controls made it a two-way conversation. “Khatami here. Report.”

“That Tholian battle fleet we’ve been shadowing since it crossed the border just took off at high warp, destination unknown.”

For several days, the Endeavour had maintained a close watch on the Tholian fleet, which until that moment had followed a course parallel to their territory’s border, albeit a few dozen light-years outside it, through the unclaimed sectors of the Taurus Reach. Khatami didn’t know what the sudden change meant, but she suspected it would not be good news.

“Set a pursuit course, then wake up Stano and Klisiewicz. I’m on my way.” She closed the channel and dressed in a hurry without bothering to turn on the lights. In less than a minute she was out the door and squinting against the harsh light in the corridor while she pushed her unwashed sable hair out of her eyes and smoothed it with her hands. A pair of ensigns, one human and the other Vulcan, held the turbolift for her as they stepped out of it. She sprinted into the waiting lift, gripped its control handle, and guided it toward Deck 1.

The doors parted with a pneumatic hiss, and she strode onto the bridge, which was as busy with comm chatter and routine shipboard activity in the middle of the night shift as it was during the day. Norton, a very tall and gangly man whose bald, narrow head reminded Khatami of a Crenshaw melon, vacated the command chair as he noted Khatami’s entrance.