A long silence fell between them. Two moons continued their slow transit of the sky. The wind whispered over the dunes.

Pennington confirmed with a sidelong glance that T’Prynn remained at his side. A question nagged at him, and he had to give it voice.

“Why did you set me up with that fake story about the Bombay? Did you know it’d ruin me as a journalist?”

She bowed her head. “I was aware of the potential negative consequences,” she said. “At the time I believed such harm was necessary. Because you had a reputation for competence and fairness, being able to discredit a story written by you would discourage other, lesser reporters from pursuing the matter.”

“And you think that made it right? Wasn’t there some other way you could have persuaded the Council not to go to war?”

She inhaled deeply and looked toward the horizon. “Yes.” After glancing in his direction, she added, “I took the easy way out by using you to expedite my task. The Federation Council needed to cast doubt on what was an otherwise incontrovertible fact: that the Tholians ambushed and destroyed a Starfleet vessel without provocation or just cause. It might have been possible to devise other explanations, but they all would have required more time than we had, and they would have entailed a greater number of variables subject to falsification, thereby increasing the risk that our deception would be exposed.”

Holding the reins on his anger, Pennington said, “I see.”

“I am not telling you this to excuse what I have done,” T’Prynn said. “After telling so many falsehoods, however, I feel I owe you the most truthful account of my actions.” She bowed her head again. “With a combination of threats and violence, I coerced your friend Cervantes Quinn into planting the false evidence about the Bombaythat I had prepared for you. And those offenses are in fact the least of my sins.”

Halfway up the side of a sand mountain, she stopped, and Pennington halted beside her. She turned to face him. “I have extorted and blackmailed others into my service,” she said. “I have inflicted serious harm on unarmed persons. I have condoned acts of sabotage and assault against our enemies that, if they had been exposed, could have led to war. And I have killed.”

She looked away as she continued her confession. “For decades I was imbalanced by Sten’s katra. My logic was impaired, and too many times I let fear or anger guide my actions. When others tried to help me, I obstructed their efforts. That is why I tampered with my Starfleet medical records, to hide my mental illness.”

T’Prynn met Pennington’s gaze with a cool, unblinking stare. “The tragic irony of my situation is that I face court-martial charges not for my most heinous violations of personal liberty, privacy, or sovereignty; not for my acts of violence or for the life I took; but for the comparatively minor and self-serving crimes of altering my medical file and going AWOL. My greatest transgressions have been all but sanctioned by Starfleet Command.”

“So what does all that have to do with us walking through a desert in the middle of the night?”

She resumed climbing the slope with Pennington by her side as she replied, “If our mission here is a success, it might be enough to expiate my recent, minor offenses and redeem my career as a Starfleet officer. But to atone for my true crimes …” She frowned and added, “That will be the work of a lifetime.”

Pondering his own shameful history, Pennington replied, “Yeah … I know what you mean.”

43

Quinn fought the urge to look up. With the help of Lirev and her band of free nomads, he had disguised himself as one of the enslaved Denn workers and infiltrated the excavation site at the temple ruins in the desert.

The midday sun felt to Quinn as if it had been focused through a giant magnifying glass and aimed straight at his head, which was hidden by a deep-hooded cowl. He carried a full backpack on his shoulder and kept his eyes on his feet and those of the worker in front of him as they marched inside the temple as a single file of laborers. As he’d expected, the Klingon sentries paid no mind to the slaves trudging past them.

A few meters beyond the main entrance, Quinn spied an open doorway to a dimly lit staircase. He slipped out of line and stole up the narrow flight of steps. Though he took care to tread softly, his feet scraped on the stairs’ covering of fine desert sand, and the dry sound echoed off the rough stone walls.

He slowed as he neared the top of the flight and peeked out the next doorway, which opened onto a narrow balcony level overlooking the main chamber of the temple.

Moving in a low crouch, he inched up to the low wall that ringed the balcony level and peeked over it.

Most of the temple’s floor and decorative elements had been smashed apart and carted away to reveal the eerily smooth and reflective obsidian surfaces of the Shedai Conduit over which the temple had been built. Only a dozen thick sandstone columns had been left untouched. Looking up, Quinn saw why: the ornately carved octagonal columns were the sole support for the temple’s upper levels and its roof.

Perfect targets,he thought with a diabolical smile.

He scuttled to the nearest column. After casting wary glances around the balcony, he opened his bag and removed the first of several compact demolition charges designed for shattering load-bearing supports. He tucked it in the corner where the column met the balcony’s low wall.

One down, eleven to go,he mused as he doubled over and jogged to the next column. Though he might never set off these charges, in his experience it never hurt to have options when seeking an exit strategy.

In about ten minutes he had mined nine of the columns and was on the opposite side of the balcony. Below him, workers had been delivering equipment the Klingon scientists had been setting up. On their way out, the Denn slaves pushed carts laden with sand and chunks of broken stone.

As Quinn set the tenth of his charges into place, there came a commotion from the main level. He ducked behind the column and peeked through an opening in the balcony wall. Beneath him, the scientists stood at a portable console while a squad of soldiers ushered out all the workers. There was a great deal of shouting, followed by the familiar slap of a rifle stock being slammed across the back of someone’s head. When the last of the soldiers left the chamber, the scientists all faced the glowing artifact, which once more had been placed upon the small pedestal in front of the console.

Quinn snuck to the eleventh column and set his next-to-last charge. Then he heard the terrified shriek of a female voice, and he glanced back through a fissure in the balcony wall to see what was happening underneath him.

A pair of Klingon soldiers dragged in what looked like an adolescent female Denn. Judging from her clothes, Quinn suspected she wasn’t one of the nomads but a youth taken from one of the surrounding Shire settlements. She thrashed wildly in the Klingons’ grip but couldn’t break free. The two hulking brutes slammed her backward onto an obsidian slab beside the glowing artifact and locked her to it while the scientists began entering commands on their jury-rigged interface.

A blood-chilling groan reverberated through the obsidian structure and shook a rain of dust from the ceiling high overhead. A black wall to the left of the scientists began to pulse with deep violet light, revealing symbols in a script that Quinn had never seen before. He reached under his robe, pulled out his borrowed Starfleet tricorder, and began gathering sensor data.

Then he stared in horror as tendrils that looked like living smoke rose from the gleaming black floor around the pedestal and snaked toward the girl on the slab. Her hands were manacled together through a gap in the slab’s base, leaving her unable to even turn away from her fate. All she could do was shut her eyes and scream.