A sip of black coffee proved a few degrees too hot for Desai’s tongue. She swallowed quickly, winced, and said, “Very good. Anything else?”

“The station’s chief of security is outside and waiting to see you. And before you ask—no, he doesn’t have an appointment.”

Desai cast a longing glance at her breakfast, then grimaced. “I need to let my coffee cool anyway. Send him in.”

“Yes, sir.” Lenger stepped out and motioned the chief of security inside Desai’s office.

Haniff Jackson was a man of average height and impressive physique. His red uniform tunic was stretched taut by his biceps and pectorals. He kept his black hair cropped close to his brown head, and he had recently shaved off his goatee, without which he looked younger than his thirty-six years. He strode to Desai’s desk and stood at attention before it. “Captain.”

“At ease, Lieutenant. Have a seat.”

“Thank you, sir.” Jackson pulled back one of the guest chairs and settled into it. Only then did Desai notice the red data card tucked into one of his massive palms.

She folded her hands on the desk. “What can I do for you?”

“For the past year, I’ve been investigating the bombing of the U.S.S. Malacca,” he said. “I’ve been combing the witness statements, the forensic reports, the internal sensor logs, flight-recorder data from the ship, everything.” He handed her the data card. “I think I’ve found a new lead in the case.”

“A new lead?” She looked at the card in her hand. “It’s been almost a year. I’d think the trail would be cold by now.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Jackson said. “But with everything else that’s happened here since then, we never really gave this case the attention it deserved. So I did some checking. All the logs and physical evidence we collected are still here, and any personnel we thought might be material witnesses have been kept on—no one’s transferred off this station without my permission since the bombing.”

Sliding the data card into a slot beside her computer, Desai asked, “And what is this new lead?”

“I have witnesses who link certain suspects to an ongoing smuggling operation involving the Orions on the outside and some of our own people here on the station.”

Curious, she accessed the information on the card. Just as Jackson had said, he had several confidential but on-the-record statements from witnesses who alleged pockets of corruption were active within Starbase 47. “Has any of this been corroborated?”

“Only on a circumstantial basis,” Jackson said. “That’s why I need warrants for arrest, search and seizure, and analysis.”

She admired his zeal for the job. “Consider them granted. You’ll have them all in hard copy by oh-seven hundred tomorrow.”

He stood and extended his hand. “Thank you, Captain.”

She shook it. “You’re welcome, Lieutenant. Good hunting.”

Jackson nodded and left the office.

As the door closed, Desai reveled for a moment in the silence and solitude. She took a bite of her pastry and wiped a fleck of frosting from her upper lip.

Then she looked at the framed photo perched on the corner of her desk of a craggy-faced middle-aged man in a moment of serene repose, and she remembered why she felt so alone all the time, no matter how many people accosted her before breakfast.

Diego Reyes, the man she loved, was dead.

Desai put down her pastry and pushed the plate aside.

She wasn’t hungry anymore.

Lieutenant Ming Xiong knew his monthly report to the brass was off to a bad start when the station’s commanding officer, Rear Admiral Heihachiro Nogura, kicked it off by saying, “Stick to small words, Xiong. I’m in no mood for technobabble today.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Xiong said, wondering how he was supposed to convey the critical details of his presentation without using any of the terminology he had developed to define them.

Seated next to the admiral, and just as eager to hear Xiong’s report on the latest research findings from the Vault—Vanguard’s top-secret research lab devoted to the Shedai—was Xiong’s civilian supervisor, Dr. Carol Marcus.

Marcus and Nogura were like night and day. She was blond and curvaceous, fair-complexioned with smooth skin. The Asian flag officer was thin and lean. His tanned face was lined with age and the burdens of office, and his brush-cut hair, once black, now was surrendering to waves of gray. Both had blue eyes, though of different shades—hers were sky blue, and his were closer to the deep bluish gray of tempered steel.

Seated side by side in Marcus’s office—which had been Xiong’s office before Marcus was placed above him in the chain of command more than a year earlier (a slight that still had Xiong seething with resentment)—the scientist and the admiral each held a fresh cup of hot coffee. The rich aroma of French roast filled the tiny room, reminding Xiong he still hadn’t been able to make time to get his first cup of the day.

“Over the past several weeks, my team and I here in the Vault have suspended all other projects to focus on the Mirdonyae Artifact,” Xiong said. He used a small remote control to activate a wall monitor, which displayed the visual portion of his briefing. “I’m happy to say we’ve made a number of interesting discoveries about this amazing object.”

An image of the artifact appeared on-screen. It was a twelve-sided polyhedron; each face of it was shaped like a symmetrical pentagon. “At first, we speculated it might be a key for unlocking Shedai technology, because it certainly provides an unprecedented level of access to their systems, but that wasn’t enough to explain some of its more bizarre properties.”

Xiong called up some comparative diagrams of energy readings from the object. “For instance, it seems to telepathically trigger a fear response in most humanoids who come within a few meters of it. We ruled out infrasonic frequencies as the cause, and then we found it was pumping out beta waves at a level we’ve never seen before. That’s what was provoking the constant sensation of anxiety and sometimes even terror that people reported while working with it. We’ve contained the phenomenon by bombarding its isolation pod with inverted waves, which cancel out its effects.”

He called up his next data screen: a complex chain of particles. “When we got down to the sub-nucleonic level of its surface material, we found the same multiphasic properties we’ve come to associate with the Shedai avatar, except it’s been uniquely polarized to inhibit the passage of high-energy particles from its interior. This might have been accomplished by reorganizing atoms of a superdense transuranic element in a modified dilithium nanomatrix, but so far we haven’t been able to look deeply enough to map its structure. Doctor Hofstadter has proposed a new kind of analysis that might help. It’s called an icospectro-gram, and I’d like to encourage you both to have a look at his proposal and consider prioritizing—”

Nogura said, “Xiong, I don’t mean to minimize the fine work you and your team have done, but I’m afraid I need to cut this meeting short. Doctor Marcus led me to believe you had major developments to share. If you would be so kind as to sum up, I promise to read your unabridged report this evening.”

“Yes, sir,” Xiong said, secretly relieved to skip the more tedious sections of his report. He switched the image on-screen to one that resembled a ball of fire with burning tentacles flailing in all directions. “This is what lies at the center of the Mirdonyae Artifact. It’s the source of the beta wave, and the reason the object can access any piece of Shedai technology it contacts. What you’re looking at, sir, is a living but currently disembodied Shedai.”

Nogura’s eyebrows arched upward. “Really?” He got out of his chair and walked to the screen. Staring at it up close, he seemed quietly impressed. “That’s veryinteresting.” He looked expectantly at Xiong. “Dare I ask what your second major discovery was?”