Enjoying the show from a discreet distance, Fisher smiled.

I know this music. She must be the captain.

He waited until she broke free of her gaggle of people with problems, and then he emerged from the gap between the containers to intercept her on the move. “Captain Boonmee?”

She answered without sparing him so much as a look. “Who wants to know?”

“Doctor Ezekiel Fisher, Starfleet.” Boonmee stopped and faced Fisher as he added with his best disarming charm, “Retired.” He offered her his hand, and she shook it quickly.

“Captain Khunying Boonmee.” She resumed walking. “You’ve got one minute.”

He hurried to keep up with her. “I heard from one of your debarking passengers that you might have an open cabin for the return trip to the core systems.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Boonmee said. “What’s your final destination?”

She sidestepped to avoid a speeding forklift, and Fisher lost half a step in the course of not getting run over. He jogged to catch up to Boonmee and replied between gasps, “Mars.”

“The good news is, we’re actually planning a stop at Mars. The bad news is, the only cabin I have available on this run is our VIP suite.”

“Why is that bad news?”

“I usually put it up for auction. Current bid’s at eleven thousand.” She swatted a yellow-furred Tellarite in black coveralls and let rip a stream of angry Tellarite verbiage. The crewman nodded furiously, then slipped away, grumbling. Boonmee looked back at Fisher. “As I was saying, if you want to put in a bid, you’re welcome to, but I’m guessing eleven grand’s probably a bit steep for someone on a Starfleet pension.”

“I’ll pay you twenty to close the bidding and sell me the berth right now,” Fisher said. “You can even put me to work if you need a surgeon.”

His offer seemed to amuse her. “We have a sawbones, thanks.” A narrow-eyed, curious stare. “Twenty grand, huh? You must really want to get home.”

“You could say that.”

“Make it twenty-five, and you’ve got a deal.”

Fisher nodded. “Sold.”

The captain grabbed Fisher by his shirt and pulled him clear of another hot-rodding forklift. She screamed a blistering flurry of Andorii profanities at the vehicle’s antennaed blue driver, then made a token effort to brush the wrinkles from Fisher’s shirt. “Sorry about that. One more thing: I hope you’re not in a big hurry to leave. We’re stuck here for at least another three or four weeks, waiting for cargo and passengers coming in from the fringe territories. Can’t leave without ’em, since flying empty is just burning fuel for no good reason.”

“I understand. It’s not a problem. To be honest, yours is the first ship I’ve found in weeks that had an open cabin for the trip home.”

Boonmee smirked. “I wish I’d known that. I’d have charged you more.” She held up open palms. “Just kidding. If you’re ready to book the cabin, we can head inside and find my XO.”

“Sounds great,” Fisher said, gesturing for Boonmee to lead the way.

As she escorted him up the ramp and inside the ship, she said, “I don’t suppose you play poker, by any chance.”

“Just Texas Hold ’em, Omaha, and a few dozen variants of five- and seven-card stud.”

She chuckled. “You’ll fit right in here, Doc.”

An anxious hush settled over the white-jacketed scientists of the Vault who unpacked the first of dozens of shipping containers ferried from Eremar to Vanguard aboard the Sagittarius. Ming Xiong watched with anticipation and fear as the researchers handled the twelve-sided crystal artifacts with silent reverence and transferred them to a number of analysis chambers inside the Vault’s central containment area. Each dodecahedron would be checked for defects or damage as a prerequisite for inclusion in the next phase of the team’s research.

Admiral Nogura stood beside Doctor Carol Marcus a few meters to Xiong’s right. They observed the painstaking process from behind the transparent steel protective barrier that separated the master control console from the workstations that ringed the circular isolation chamber, which housed the artifacts. Lieutenant Theriault stood close by on Xiong’s left, watching the Vault scientists with equal measures of worry and envy.

Standing apart from everyone else, T’Prynn lurked near the lab’s entrance, her motives as inscrutable as ever while she monitored the meticulously choreographed proceedings.

Theriault nudged Xiong with her elbow. “Hard to believe we came back with fifty-five hundred of these things, right? What do you think you’ll do with all of them?”

“We’re hoping to use the visual scans you made of the Eremar Array to create a similar framework here, but in a far more compact form.” Despite the enormity of the find by the crew of the scout ship, Xiong shook his head slowly with disappointment. “I’m still upset the Tholians destroyed the other half of the artifacts before you could recover them. When I think about how much potential each of these objects has, it feels like a major loss to science.”

The young female science officer turned a disbelieving stare toward Xiong. “Are you kidding? If you want to talk about a loss to science, shed a few tears for the Dyson bubble that fell into the pulsar. It was ninety-nine percent gone before the Tholians fragged it, and I still could have spent the next thirty years finding out what made it tick.” Her shoulders slumped, giving her a defeated aspect as she looked back at the growing mass of artifacts inside the isolation chamber. “I sure hope those things are worth it, because I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what I might have learned from poking around on those statites.”

Beyond the protective barrier, the scientists who weren’t directly involved in unpacking the artifacts or configuring them into an array were busy monitoring the first scan results. Deltan theoretical physicist Doctor Tarcoh hovered over a sensor display and pointed out one new string of data after another to Doctor Varech jav Gek. The excitable Tellarite molecular chemist fidgeted madly with each new bit of information, and he seemed to have no idea what to do with his beefy, three-fingered hands, so he just waved them about in between scratching his head or hugging himself, ostensibly to contain his excitement.

Nogura kept his eyes on the activity in the lab as he sidled over to Xiong. There was an undercurrent of concern in his voice. “Lieutenant, are you sure we have enough power and shielding to keep this array contained? I don’t want a repeat of what happened to the Lovell.”

“Based on the readings we made of the first two artifacts, both in tandem and individually, we’re certain the new isolation protocols are more than sufficient.”

The admiral’s salt-and-pepper brow furrowed with doubt. “That’s what you and the Corps of Engineers told me before a Shedai turned a Daedalus-class starship into confetti.”

Xiong clenched his jaw for a moment until he was able to answer his superior officer calmly. “That was because we’d weakened the crystal lattice of that artifact by transmitting an amplified and highly focused subspace pulse into it, while trying to communicate with the entity inside. That’s not a mistake we’ll make again.”

That seemed to appease the admiral. “What do you plan to do with this array once it’s finished and operational?”

“In theory, anything the Shedai could have done with their network will be within our grasp,” Xiong said. “We can harness the Conduits for everything from force projection to real-time communications across distances beyond the range of the strongest subspace signal. And once we have the Shedai contained, we’ll be free to explore and colonize the Taurus Reach, and take our time unraveling the information encoded within the meta-genome.”

Carol Marcus stepped up alongside Nogura, in a hurry to join the discussion. “Hang on, gentlemen. I think we need to start by finding a way to communicate with the Shedai we’re already holding, before we go looking to snare any more.”