One singer among them burned brighter than the others; his thoughts colored those around him. He is the leader, the Wanderer concluded, and she took him first. Ringing tones of panic chorused inside the Kollotuul’s ship as a wrinkle of space-time enfolded its commander, moving with invisible power at the whim of the Wanderer. Clamorous alarm grew pitched as she snatched up the crew, taking some singly, others in groups. She shifted them instantaneously to the planet’s surface, releasing them into the core of the First Conduit, whose dark energies were already pulsing to life. A flicker of time, and the Kollotuul were her prisoners, as helpless as their ancestors had been hundreds of millennia earlier, when the Maker had plucked them from a volcanic crevasse on a hothouse world with an atmosphere composed of caustic acids and high-pressure gases.

Even secure in her grip they struggled. She marveled at what they had become, at the fury they mustered. Strength would be important for her Voices, she knew. Subjects who were too weak would prove unable to survive the rigors of the First Conduit. But too much strength was potentially even worse; a Voice blessed with too great a capacity to resist could defy the will of the Shedai and use the Conduit’s power for itself, as the Kollotuul had done long ago, during the Age of Grim Awareness. Complicating the matter was the fact that these were not the Kollotuul of old; they had evolved. A better name for them, the Wanderer speculated, might be Kollotaan: “new Voices.” If the Kollotuul had evolved into Kollotaan, they might no longer be compatible with the Conduits.

There was only one way to know for certain.

The Shedai Wanderer selected the strongest of the Voices, their leader. Wrapping him in coils of fire from within the First Conduit’s core, she separated him from the others and bound him to a node, one that would speak to the farthest reaches of the Shedai’s possessions. She focused herself through thought-space and projected the Song toward him with a simple command: Amplify.

He resisted, responding in measures equal to her effort. The harder she tried to force him to be her clarion calling out in her voice to distant stars, the more violently he defied her. The fires of the Conduit blazed hotter and darker, enveloping the Kollotaan leader, who thrashed in its grip and emitted piercing, metallic screeches of agony.

Speak with my voice, the Wanderer demanded.

Twisting and shrieking inside the lightless inferno of the First Conduit’s strongest node, the leader did not surrender to the Wanderer’s will. Whether he was merely unwilling or in fact unable to yield himself was unclear. Then the immensely powerful forces inside the Conduit reduced him to dust and vapor, and the question of whether his substance or his spirit had been the stronger was rendered immaterial.

Finding the right Voices for the Conduit would take time, the Wanderer now understood. Striking the necessary balance between strength and malleability would be a matter of simple trial and error.

She looked to the gathered mass of Kollotaan, selected the next-strongest specimen she could identify, and yoked him to the same node inside the First Conduit.

From the first lick of dark fire, the Voice filled the Conduit with an eerie, high-pitched wail of terrified noise. A jolt of agony brought it under control.

Speak with my voice, the Wanderer commanded. Or die.

Part One

The Brink of

Shadow

1

Dr. Ezekiel Fisher reclined in the chair at the desk inside his quarters aboard Starbase 47. It was late for him to be awake, a few hours into the third duty shift. His coffee had become tepid during the hour he had spent composing his latest letter to his daughter, Jane, the youngest of his three children. The missive was almost finished, and he paused to read it over.

“Dear Jane,” it began, prosaically enough. “I hope this letter finds you well, and that Neil and your boys are on the mend from that bout of Argelian flu you told me about. I’ve been keeping my vaccinations up to date, so here’s hoping I don’t meet any viruses more clever than myself.

“Life and work here on Vanguard remain busy; I know it must seem funny to hear me say that, since there’s rarely any mention of us in the news—nothing, in fact, since the loss of the Bombay. As much as I wish I could tell you everything that I’ve seen out here, it’d be a waste of effort: all our outgoing mail is censored…. Such measures must seem draconian on a world like Mars, but the truth is that it’s for the best. At least, I hope it is.

“What can I tell you? For starters, my retirement plan has been nixed. Jabilo M’Benga, my handpicked replacement, put in for starship duty. His reasons make sense, I suppose. As it turns out, I’ve had a couple of months to get used to the idea, which is pretty much what I’d expected. We’re pretty far from home, and even in the core systems it would take time to get this kind of thing approved. First, he has to tell Starfleet he wants a transfer. Then Starfleet has to see what billets it has open and whether anybody else put in for them first. Then some joker with a lot of braid on his cuff has to give his okay and cut new orders, which might take a few days to reach us.”

Fisher picked up the data slate on which he had composed the letter. He carried the slate in one hand and continued to read while he took his coffee into his kitchenette to dispose of it. “And just to convince you that I’ve started losing my marbles,” the letter continued, “I’m actually reconsidering retirement altogether. I admit, I’d have thought that after more than fifty years in a Starfleet uniform, I’d have had my fill by now. Before I came out here with Diego last year, I was starting to think I’d seen everything, that the galaxy was out of surprises. But, as you never tire of reminding me, I was wrong.”

He dumped his leftover coffee into the sink and ran the water for a moment, then resumed reading as he ambled to his sofa. “It’s hard to say if I’ll ever be allowed to write or talk about the things I’ve seen here. My guess is, probably not. It’s not like I have a shortage of stories at this point, but this assignment would make for some you’d never forget. That’s not why I’m thinking of staying on, though. Truth is, I’m beginning to see that this is one of the most important assignments I’ve ever been given. We’re on to something out here, something big. Even if M’Benga wasn’t planning on warping away to the great unknown, I’d probably want to stay on to see this through. At this point, any lingering regrets I have over his transfer are grounded in simply being sorry to lose such a fine physician from my staff and feeling pity for him—because he’ll probably never know what he’s missed.”

A yawn stretched Fisher’s brown, weathered face. He gently rubbed the fatigue from his eyes and stared back down at the data slate. The letter wasn’t long; it had taken an hour to write, because every time he’d thought of something to say, he’d realized that it would never make it past the Starfleet censors. He couldn’t tell Jane about his role in the analysis of an alien corpse with meta-genome-laced liquid crystal for blood or the bizarre effects that had been inflicted upon a Starfleet officer attacked by the creature. All the tense rumors of a brewing political eruption among the Klingons, the Tholians, and the Federation would be excised as a matter of diplomatic policy, no doubt on Jetanien’s orders. Scratching absentmindedly at the gray tuft of beard on his chin, he pondered how to end the letter. After staring at an empty line along the bottom of the slate for a few minutes, he realized that an obvious and simple valediction would be just fine, so long as it was sincere.