Xiong said to Knight, “I need your tricorder. Now.” She lifted her tricorder from her hip, ducked out from under its strap, which had crossed the front of her blue minidress, and handed the device to Xiong. He handed it to Jackson. “Patch into your security logs and confirm the exact moment Ezthene started going berserk. Hurry, please. It’s important.”

Jackson worked quickly, and several seconds later he said, “His seizure, or whatever we’re calling it, began at precisely nineteen seconds past 1622 hours.”

“That is definitely not good,” Xiong said, feeling as if the floor had dropped out from under him. Inside the habitat, Ezthene ceased his wilding and slumped back to the deck, his narrow limbs once again retracted like a clutching talon around his segmented torso. Xiong reopened the comm channel. “Ezthene? Are you still conscious? Can you hear me?” He thought he heard the scratching sound of a reply from within, but the translator remained silent, so he increased its audio sensitivity. “Ezthene? Can you repeat what you said?”

“Must . . . silence the voice . . . .”

A final twitch and then he was still. Jackson scanned him with the tricorder. “He’s alive.” He squinted at the tricorder’s display, then turned it upside down. “At least I think he is. I can’t make heads or tails of his biology.”

Knight plucked the tricorder from his hands. “Let me.” She checked the readouts, “Ezthene appears to be in a catatonic state. It might be part of his healing process.”

Xiong didn’t like the sound of that. “Might be?”

“It also might be a sign that he’s suffering a nervous collapse.”

Jackson chided her, “I thought you were an expert on Tholians.”

“I am,” she said. Then her bravado faltered. “Just not ones that are still alive.” She recoiled, hyperactive and defensive. “Well, I never had a chance to study a live one before!”

“Oh, that’s just great,” Xiong said. He turned off the intercom. “Rest assured, if he dies, you’ll be the first person I call.” He stepped away to a nearby companel on a wall, entered his security code, and then punched in the code for the Vault.

A soft beep over the comm and then, “Theriault.”

“Vanessa, it’s Ming. Shut down all experiments involving the array, take the interface off line, and route all available power to the containment system.”

“Roger that. But what if we get orders to continue?”

“Ignore them. I’ll explain why when I get back. Right now, I have to head up to command and tell the admiral why I pulled the plug. Xiong out.” He switched off the companel and walked back to Jackson and Knight. “If there’s any change in Ezthene’s status, raise me on my communicator immediately. And not a word of this to anybody else, understood?”

Jackson’s relaxed body language telegraphed his answer: “Whatever you say.”

Xiong nodded his thanks and ran for the turbolift.

As the doors closed and he grabbed the control handle to guide the lift to ops, he wondered who was about to have a worse day: him, Ezthene, or Admiral Nogura.

Pondering the worst-case scenario, he realized it would likely be a three-way tie.

They were all going to lose.

The dire implications of Xiong’s news dominated Nogura’s thoughts. His headache began a few seconds later, inflicting viselike pressure on his temples. “Are you sure about the timing of the two events? Is there any chance it was a coincidence?”

“It’s possible,” Xiong said, “but damned unlikely.” He pointed at the side-by-side time comparisons he’d routed to Nogura’s computer monitor. “At the exact second we triggered the pulse that vanished that planet, Ezthene suffered a violent seizure and collapsed, and he’s been getting worse ever since. Considering when we last saw this kind of correlation between Shedai-related activity and Tholian meltdowns, I don’t think we should be taking any chances.”

“Agreed.” Nogura didn’t need Xiong to elaborate. He’d read the full reports of Operation Vanguard when he’d assumed command, so he was aware of the widespread incidents three years earlier of Tholians suffering simultaneous violent seizures during a brief moment of unshielded emissions from the first Conduit that Starfleet had tinkered with. He also remembered well the subsequent consequences of that early misstep. “The last time the Tholians got worked up like this, they sterilized Ravanar IV and destroyed the Bombay,” he said. “So what I need to know, Ming, is whether the effects of our experiment were limited to our friend Ezthene—or if we’ve just taken a torch to a hornet’s nest.”

“Our best bet would be to check in with someone on Earth,” Xiong said. “Maybe the Starfleet liaison to the president, or someone at the Department of the Exterior. If the Tholian delegation to Paris just had a seizure, we’ll know we’re in trouble.”

It was worth a try, Nogura figured. He activated the intercom to his yeoman. “Lieutenant Greenfield, I need a real-time priority subspace channel to the secretary of the exterior.”

“Aye, sir. I’ll have Lieutenant Dunbar route it to you as soon as we make contact.”

“Thank you.” He switched off the intercom. “The one flaw in this plan is that the Tholians tend to sequester themselves inside their embassy except when they visit the Federation Council or the Palais on official business. Even if they have felt the effects of our array, unless they were out and about when it happened, there might be no way of confirming our hypothesis.”

Xiong’s brow creased as he considered their dilemma. “Well, it would take longer to get any answers, but if we had to, we could contact Ambassador Jetanien and ask him to look into it. He might have access to sources of information that we don’t.”

“Let’s hope better options present themselves,” Nogura said.

The intercom buzzed. “Admiral, they need you out here,” Greenfield said. “It’s urgent.” Nogura and Xiong traded stares of alarm, then they hurried out of his office.

The normally busy atmosphere of ops had become outright frantic. Yellow Alert panels flashed on the walls, and junior officers were scurrying from one duty station to the next, collecting reports and handing them off, each in turn, to Commander Cooper. Nogura cleaved a path through the Brownian chaos of moving bodies, bounded up the stairs to the supervisors’ deck, and caught up with the soft-spoken executive officer at the Hub. “Report.”

“Long-range sensor buoys have picked up major movement along the Tholian border,” Cooper said as he keyed commands into his panel on the octagonal command table. Star maps graphically annotated with fleet deployment information and the positions and headings of known threat vessels appeared on one of the level’s enormous, curved situation monitors. “It looks like the armada the Endeavour detected is on the move. They’ve left their space and are crossing the Taurus Reach at high warp—heading straight toward us.”

Nogura didn’t need to ask what time the armada had started moving; that much he could now guess. There was a more pressing question on his mind. “What’s their ETA?”

“Four days,” Cooper said. He lowered his voice, no doubt in the interest of preserving morale for as long as possible. “Admiral . . . Starfleet Command estimates the armada represents more than twenty percent of the Tholians’ active combat fleet. They’re coming in with more than five times’ enough firepower to wipe us off the map. . . . Orders, sir?”

“Show me every Starfleet vessel within four days’ travel at high warp,” Nogura said, doing his best to project confidence and calm authority. “We need every ship we can get.”

Cooper adjusted the deployment information on the large wall screen. It painted a grim picture: there were no reinforcements close enough to reach Vanguard before the Tholian armada arrived. Only two ships, both of which were already assigned to the station, were in range to join the station’s defense: the frigate Buenos Aires was three days away, and the cargo transport Panama was one day out. The Enterprise was just outside of response range, and it was also engaged on a high-priority assignment. That left only the Endeavour and the Sagittarius, both of which were still several days shy of finishing their repairs due to the late arrival of needed parts and equipment. It was an impossible situation, so Nogura had no choice but to start giving impossible orders and have faith in his crew to carry them out.