Silence fell between them. T’Prynn composed herself and faced him again. “Can you ever forgive me for the wrongs I have committed against you, Mister Pennington?”

He handed her the parametric scanner.

“I already have,” he said. “And you can call me Tim.”

19

June 2, 2267

Quinn dismounted slowly from the back of his mellul,a large but relatively docile animal native to Golmira and domesticated by the Denn. The huge, long-bodied quadrupeds had the gracile bodies of hunting cats, and their vulturelike faces were topped by feline ears and surrounded by enormous feathered manes. Their broad and taloned paws seemed well-adapted to traversing the sands of the desert north of Leuck Shire.

The light of two moons spilled brightly across the dune ahead of Quinn as he dropped to his belly and crawled up the slope behind Bridy Mac. They both had adopted native garb over the past few weeks after finding it well-suited to the rigors of desert travel and survival, but the cool coarse sand still got into the robes’ folds—and into everything else, for that matter.

Bridy stopped at the crest of the dune and retrieved a pair of holographically enhanced binoculars from under her robes. She activated the device and peered through it into the night. “There’s our temple,” she whispered to Quinn. “Finally.”

“You say that like it’s my fault this took three months,” Quinn replied as he inched to the dune’s peak and peered toward the ruins a couple of hundred meters away. “I didn’t ask to get socked in by a six-week sandstorm or sidetracked by monsoon season, and I’m also not the one who gave us food poisoning.”

Adjusting her field glasses, Bridy said, “No, but you did lead us smack into that caravan of desert nomads back in the foothills last week, didn’t you.”

He pulled out his own binoculars. “Ain’t my fault Naya and her little farmer friends got dog shit for intel. They said the ruins’d be clear till high summer.”

“It ishigh summer.”

“Well, nowit is. Besides, if we’d just flown here in ol’ Rosie instead of humpin’ it over land on these beaked cats, the delays wouldn’t have mattered.”

She glared at Quinn. “No, but we’d have brought every nomad for twenty klicks down on top of us when they saw the glow from your thrusters landing on their mound of holy rocks.” Continuing her recon of the nearby ruins, she added, “We’re just lucky we were able to fall back before they saw us.” She looked up from behind her binoculars. “Check out the part of the temple visible through that collapsed section, about a third of the way in from the left. Looks like the Denn built a temple around a Conduit.”

Quinn followed the lines of the temple’s decaying stone façade until he found the area Bridy was talking about. He switched to a higher magnification. A second later, the image came back into focus, and he saw the structure inside the stony shell: bizarre fluid whorls cast from what looked like superbly polished obsidian. The same kind of design and material he had seen in the Shedai city on Jinoteur.

“Jackpot,” he said. “Desert kooks, meet your planet’s ticking time bomb.” He looked at Bridy. “What’s our play?”

Bridy squinted as she eyed the temple. “The nomads are all around it, but none of them seems to be going inside it. That’s good.” She put away her binoculars and took out her tricorder. “First we document the find, take detailed readings to send back to Vanguard, and gather samples for analysis on the Rocinante.”

“How you gonna do all that from way over here?”

She scowled at him. They both knew the mission called for her to go inside the temple and scan it from within, but he couldn’t resist poking fun at her.

“We’ll need a distraction,” she said. Pointing to the left, she added, “Maybe a small explosion past that big dune to draw them away. While they’re poking around in the sand, I’ll slip through their camp and into the temple.”

“Okay, sure,” Quinn said. “I could set that up, no problem. But they ain’t gonna fall for the same trick twice. Hell, they might not fall for it once. Say you get inside—what’s your exit strategy? You think they’ll just let you stroll on out?”

Bridy began crawling backward down the dune. “I just figured you’d do something gallant, like let them chase you.”

Shimmying down the slope beside her, he replied, “What in tarnation makes you think I’d do that?”

“Call it a hunch,” Bridy said. Once they were safely out of sight they stood up. Bridy walked to her melluland retrieved a small backpack from her saddle. “How long to set up the explosion?”

“Not long,” Quinn said. “Fifteen minutes, tops. I …” He let his voice trail off as a glint of light from overhead caught his eye. He craned his head back and gazed skyward.

A single star swiftly grew larger, and the air shuddered with the low-frequency roar of fusion engines.

Watching the point of light grow and reveal itself to be a bulky ship on a rapid vertical descent, Quinn remarked, “That don’t look good.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Bridy, who hurried back up the dune.

Quinn crawled as quickly as he was able. By the time he caught up to Bridy and nosed over the sandy peak, a Klingon heavy transport was touching down fewer than fifty yards from the temple—in the midst of the nomads’ camp.

He expected the desert-dwellers to flee. Instead they swarmed around the Klingon ship and brandished their swords, spears, and primitive bows.

A massive bulkhead on the ship’s ventral hull detached and lowered into a broad ramp. Seconds later a battalion of Klingon soldiers marched down the incline in a Vformation. Those in the front rank had their disruptors leveled.

Loudspeakers on the outer hull of the transport blared commands at the natives, who hooted and whooped as they charged up the ramp.

The Klingons held their ground and opened fire.

Quinn winced at the blinding crimson flashes of disruptor fire. When he opened his eyes a moment later, he saw the Klingons continuing to advance—stepping on the charred, smoking corpses of the slain Denn in their path.

A second wave of nomads stood paralyzed with indecision. Another barrage of disruptor fire cut down roughly fifty more of them. The surviving Denn nomads fled in a panic, running in all directions as they abandoned their tents and mounts.

Even from more than a hundred meters away, Quinn could smell the sickly perfume of scorched flesh.

Next came the rumble of motors and the clank of rolling treads. Heavy excavation vehicles started to roll slowly down the ramp from the transport ship. A fresh platoon of Klingons carried large containers stenciled with markings in their native script. Flood lamps mounted on the starboard side of the transport snapped on and lit up the entire temple at once.

“So much for Plan A,” Quinn said. “Unless you still think a little puff-boom over that dune’ll do the trick.”

Bridy frowned. “Not a chance. We’re lucky their sensors haven’t picked us up yet. We should get moving before they do.”

Moving on knees and elbows, she backed down the dune until they were out of sight again. Quinn followed her, and they pulled themselves up into the saddles of their melluls. As they began the loping, swaying gallop back toward Leuck Shire, Quinn quipped, “It’s just as well they showed up now. I always hate when these things are too easy.”

The sun was up but still low on the horizon as McLellan and Quinn reached the outskirts of Tegoresko, the nominal capital of Leuck Shire. “We should go the rest of the way on foot,” McLellan said. “In case the Klingons are here, too.”

“Makes sense,” Quinn said.