She tried to remember where, when, and how she had learned this delicate art and the arcane science behind it. It was so old a memory that its specifics eluded her. All she could recall was that the process had been imparted to her by one of the elders in the early days of the Shedai’s sovereignty over this part of the galaxy. It had been among the final rituals confirming her status as one of the Serrataal, those who had been elevated from the churning hordes of the Nameless in recognition of their innate gifts, their inborn worthiness to be counted among the elite. As a Shedai with a name, the Wanderer had earned the right to share in the hegemony’s most guarded secrets, the foundation of knowledge upon which their sprawling civilization had been erected. Mastery of these secrets had been her final test of worthiness.

Now the future of all Shedai hinged upon her ability to bend reality’s shape to her will, to work the miracle she had been taught two hundred fifty million years earlier, a magic she had worked only twice in the span of an entire revolution of the galaxy. There was no question in her mind that she would succeed. She had vowed to see it done, and its completion was all that stood between her and the sweetness of revenge. It was of no consequence to her that the Sage and the Herald both doubted her ability; she did not require their faith or their approval. Let them mock her and call her youngling; soon she would make them recant their taunts. When the time came, and she proved herself worthy, they would hear the Progenitor’s voice in the song, and they would know she had spoken the truth. I will be vindicated, she promised herself.

She trapped a quark strangelet in the porous interdimensional membrane and reversed its spin. Atom by atom, the Wanderer molded the mass of collapsed-star core material until it fit the shape of her imagination. For now it was nothing but a superdense blob of heavy metal, squandering its hard-won energy as waste heat and chaotic radiation, its crude form nothing but a prison for its potential—a bastille to which the Wanderer held the keys.

Cloaked in silence and night, she labored alone, paying no heed to time’s passage; she would work for as long as it took to finish her task. Sustaining herself with starlight and fury, she felt her thoughts take shape and knew that the hour of her wrath would soon be at hand. When her work was done, she and her kin would free the Progenitor, annihilate the space station, and imbue the galaxy’s Telinaruul with an old brand of terror, one they apparently had forgotten.

They would be reminded what it is to fear the gods.

20

“What do you mean you’ve hit a dead end?”

Nogura stared down the briefing room table at the sheepish faces of Lieutenants Xiong and Theriault and the glum countenance of Doctor Marcus. He had come to expect results—if not minor miracles—from these three, not excuses, making their latest status update an unpleasant surprise. And it could not have come at a worse time, in Nogura’s opinion, what with Starfleet Command breathing down his neck and demanding progress in the ongoing effort to devise a reliable defense and counteroffensive strategy against the Shedai. Seated at the far end of the table, opposite Nogura, was T’Prynn. She seemed distracted and only half present.

Xiong leaned forward, elbows on the table, and slowly rubbed his palms together. “I know it’s not what you or Starfleet Command were expecting or hoping for,” he said. “But the simple truth is, we’ve hit an impasse. Lieutenant Theriault and I have gone over all her visual scans of the original array at Eremar, and we’ve done everything we can to duplicate its form and function inside the isolation chamber. But so far all it amounts to is a really bizarre work of sculpture. The fact is, there are too many variables we don’t understand.”

“Such as?” The question came out sounding far more flip and confrontational than Nogura had intended, but he had no time to handle his officers with kid gloves.

Theriault leapt into the verbal fray. “For one thing, we brought back only about half the artifacts we found. We don’t know if there are specific configurations or numbers of artifacts that work as an array. Maybe we have too few, or too many, or they’re grouped wrong. Also, the visual scans I made had tons of interference. We might be missing crucial information.”

“The issue might be that we don’t know how to distribute power through that many linked crystals,” Xiong added. “Or that we don’t know the correct frequency or amplitude.”

“All good evidence,” Doctor Marcus interjected, “that we need to slow down our efforts to turn these things into applied technology, and spend more time on pure research, including making contact with the entity inside the first crystal. I mean no offense to Lieutenants Xiong and Theriault, but I think it was a mistake to even try to link these objects together before we can say for certain what any one of them does individually.”

Wearing a mask of skepticism, Nogura shook his head. “That’s not an option, Doctor. Besides, we’ve already seen what these objects can do. It’s why we wanted more of them.”

Marcus’s face reddened. “Really? Are you a hundred percent certain you know what every last one of those crystals does? How can you be sure? We haven’t tested any of them. We barely examined them before we started jamming them into a jury-rigged array. What if some of them have microscopic variations in their structures that give them different properties? Or lower thresholds for stress? Starfleet would never be so cavalier with technology of its own making, so why is it acting so carelessly with these products of an unknown alien science?”

“Because this ‘unknown alien science’ is all that stands between us and a repeat of the attack that turned your lab into a war zone,” Nogura said. “The Shedai we captured—and which later escaped—could come back at any time, Doctor. We couldn’t track it when it accelerated to faster-than-light speed, which means we’ll have no warning of its next attack until it’s on top of us. Phasers barely affect it, and we have no other way of containing it. So I’m sorry if your principles feel sullied by our work, but I assure you, it’s absolutely necessary.”

Chastened, Marcus reclined and crossed her arms, symbolically disengaging herself from the conversation. Xiong held up an open hand in an apparently cautionary gesture. “Be that as it may, Admiral, my team and I need a lot more information before we can proceed. And not just about the array, or the artifacts, but the entire theory behind what makes it work. We need a big-picture understanding of it, as well as the nuts-and-bolts details.”

It was a reasonable request, but the thought of any setback rankled Nogura, who knew the Starfleet brass and Federation politicos would give him hell over the delay. “How long do you think you’ll need to get the data you need and bring the array on line?”

Apprehensive looks passed between Xiong and Theriault. “It’s impossible to say,” he replied. “In this case, I have to agree with Doctor Marcus that caution is vital. When we were experimenting on just two of these things, we accidentally blew up eleven worlds—”

“None of them inhabited, thankfully,” Theriault interrupted.

Xiong continued, “—all before we realized what we’d done. But now we have thousands of these artifacts, sir. Making them work in unison will take a lot of power—which means the risks of our making a catastrophic mistake are exponentially worse than before. At this stage, I’d recommend operating on the assumption that we have little to no margin for error.”

Nogura could tell the problems at hand weren’t mere issues of personal motivation that he could rectify with a stern look or a forceful command; he was up against hard numbers and cold realities. “How many members of your team have reviewed Lieutenant Theriault’s records of the Eremar mission?”