“Yes, sir.”

“Very good.” After a moment’s thought, Severson asked, “What’s your second point?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“A moment ago, you said you had two points. I heard your first. What was the second?”

Nogura nodded, his memory jogged. “Ah, yes. Don’t ever call me ‘Chiro’ again. Nogura out.” He stabbed the button on his desk that terminated the subspace channel, and his screen blinked back to black, erasing the shocked reaction of Admiral Severson.

Sitting alone with his cold coffee and simmering temper, Nogura dreaded the reaction from the team in the Vault when he relayed Severson’s orders. As much as Nogura disliked being micromanaged by the Starfleet brass, he knew that Xiong was going to hate it far more.

“Are they out of their goddamned minds?” Xiong’s dismay escalated as he read each successive page of the proposed experiments and protocols from Starfleet Research and Development. “It’s like they never read a single word I sent them.”

He sat behind the desk in his office, which overlooked the main floor of the Vault. Klisiewicz sat in one of his guest chairs, and Theriault stood against the wall. All three Starfleet scientists read from data slates on which was loaded the same report. As they pored through its contents, Klisiewicz was aghast and Theriault looked perplexed.

“Question,” Klisiewicz said. “Do they know that none of our software for the array is written to do any of this? ‘Blowing up planets’ wasn’t in the original program specs.”

“I don’t think they care,” Xiong said. “All they know is that we did it by accident, so now they want to be able to do it on purpose.” He hurled his data slate away, and it cracked against the wall. “Dammit! This is exactly what Carol Marcus warned us about!” He kicked his chair back as he stood, so that he would have room to pace behind his desk. “I told her not to worry, that Starfleet would handle this thing responsibly, that they wouldn’t try to weaponize it.”

“Got that wrong,” Theriault mumbled.

Xiong knew her ire was directed at the Starfleet brass, so he let her quip slide. “Yes. Yes, I did. Now we have to deal with this mess.”

“You can’t let them go forward with these experiments,” Klisiewicz said. “Forget that we aren’t set up to run any of them. Half of them run the risk of breaching the array.”

Theriault added, “He’s right. Some of these protocols will drain so much power from the support grid that we could start losing containment.”

“What are the odds of that?” Xiong asked.

“Call it sixty-forty for a breach,” Theriault said.

The new orders were a total nightmare, as far as Xiong was concerned. If he refused them, he was looking at a court-martial and possibly a life sentence in a Federation penal colony. If he obeyed them, there was a good chance he’d accidentally unleash the Shedai, destroying the station, killing thousands, and possibly subjecting the galaxy at large to innumerable horrors. All he’d ever wanted to do was find out who the Shedai really were, and maybe, over time, get them to shed new light on an entire era of history for which little hard evidence or firsthand accounts remained in existence. Pressing them into service as slaves and turning them into a top-secret superweapon of unimaginable power had not been part of his agenda.

He slumped back into his chair. “Y’know, when Carol Marcus came here a couple of years ago and told me we could use the meta-genome and the Jinoteur Pattern to do things like regenerate tissue or extend our subspace communication range, I thought that was cool. But when she started going on about making planets out of nothing, I thought she might be crazy.” He pointed at the data slate in Klisiewicz’s hand. “But these orders raise the bar on crazy around here. Compared to what these idiots want us to do, Marcus’s plan for spinning dark energy into new planets seems almost quaint by comparison.”

“Maybe we need to talk with Commander Liverakos, up in the JAG office,” Theriault said. “Capturing the Shedai was one thing. Enslaving them is another.”

Her suggestion made Klisiewicz perk up. “Can we prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Shedai are essential to the operation of the array?”

“Maybe,” Xiong said. “Without an occupied crystal, we couldn’t interface with the Shedai’s network at all. It seems pretty clear to me that without the Shedai, there’s no machine.”

Eyes wide with hope, Theriault said, “Then that’s our case.”

“I don’t know,” Xiong said. “Sounds pretty flimsy to me. And if we’re wrong, we could be looking at twenty-five to life. Do we really want to take that chance?”

Theriault reproached him with a cockeyed stare. “Would you rather live with these evil experiments on your conscience?”

“I know I wouldn’t,” Klisiewicz said. “I think Vanessa’s right, Ming. We should ask for a legal opinion from the JAG office. If we have any grounds for declaring these orders unlawful, I think we should tell Starfleet Command to stick them back where they got them.”

In his heart, Xiong knew that Theriault and Klisiewicz were right. History was full of casual villains who had rationalized their crimes with the long-discredited excuse, “I was only following orders.” Xiong didn’t want his name added to the list of those who had tried to hide their own weaknesses of character behind an empty appeal to authority.

“I’m not sure who’s going to be angrier,” he said. “Nogura or Starfleet Command.” He took a deep breath that did nothing to calm the anxiety-driven bile creeping up his esophagus, then he stood up. “Who’s ready to volunteer for a free court-martial?” Klisiewicz and Theriault raised their hands with a comical eagerness that made Xiong smile. “All right, then.” As he led them out of his office, he muttered glumly, “Let’s go get crucified.”

27

Three days sober, Cervantes Quinn had no idea what to do next. His last few months had been little more than a hazy wash of intoxicated mishaps, punctuated frequently by afternoons impaired with hangovers brutal enough to kill a bull moose, and occasionally by stints of a day or more in the brig to “dry out,” as the station’s chief of security had quaintly put it. Ever since the mind-meld with T’Prynn, he had felt strangely at ease. His body still craved the anesthetic pleasure of alcohol, but now his mind had the strength to refuse its temptation.

Staring at himself in his bathroom mirror that morning, he had marveled at how much damage he had done to his body in so short a time. After spending nearly two years drilling his middle-aged form back into shape, he had reduced himself to a pear-shaped blob of humanity in a tenth of the time. The only thing masking the return of his jowls and double chin was a heavy growth of salt-and-pepper beard whiskers.

After lingering under the soothing warmth of his first real shower in close to a week, Quinn had spent the morning roaming the station’s seemingly endless circular corridors, riding its many dozens of turbolifts from the uppermost public levels of the station to its lowest. By midday he had taken to wandering the narrow lanes of Stars Landing, peeking through the windows of shops where he couldn’t really afford to buy anything, and averting his eyes from all the places in which he had inebriated and humiliated himself in recent weeks.

Now it was late afternoon, and his stomach growled, his hunger an echo of a more profound emptiness that seemed to define his existence. He knew he wouldn’t starve aboard the station, despite being destitute. If the Federation was good for nothing else, one could always turn to it for a free lunch, topped with a heaping scoop of pity and smothered in self-righteousness. They wouldn’t foot the bill for a decent meal at Cafй Romano, but they’d gladly serve him a tray of reconstituted organic slop in their public cafeteria. I’d rather starve, he told himself, but he knew that was just his pride talking. When he got hungry enough, he would take their charity and wolf down whatever gruel they gave him. And he might even say “thank you,” if he could bear to look anyone in the eye.