“Have them recover everything,” al-Khaled said to his room boss. “Then get the samples beamed up to the Lovell. I want forensic scans relayed to Vanguard inside the hour.”

“You got it,” Gabbert said. He set to work whipping the rest of the top-secret operations managers into action. Al-Khaled checked the medical report on Ensign Anderson that had just come in from Dr. Rockey, the Lovell’s chief medical officer. Anderson’s wound had been infected by some kind of peculiar crystalline substance, and it was spreading. Unless some way was found to halt its progress, it would kill the ensign in a matter of hours.

Shaking his head, al-Khaled wondered grimly, What have we stirred up out here?

Gabbert rejoined al-Khaled at the master console. “Ready for some more bad news?”

“Always,” al-Khaled said. “I’m an engineer.”

Nodding upward, Gabbert said, “Colony President Vinueza is upstairs. She wants to talk to you. Says it’s urgent.”

Al-Khaled groaned. Vinueza had arrived less than thirty-six hours ago, but in that short time the new colony president had made a lasting impression on him and the rest of his Starfleet contingent. The woman was boldly aggressive when she wanted something from them and impossibly stubborn when they needed anything from her. An advance file sent several days ago by Commodore Reyes had warned al-Khaled and his senior personnel about Vinueza’s considerable esper talents. When dealing with politicians, al-Khaled was used to being careful about his every word. It was a far greater challenge to exercise the same caution about his every thought. So far he had managed not to compromise the security of Operation Vanguard, but he was fairly certain that Vinueza was now keenly aware of how much he admired her figure and how embarrassed he was that she knew.

“I’ll be upstairs talking to the boss lady,” al-Khaled said. “If I’m not back in an hour, it’s because I’ve either shot the president or committed suicide, or both.”

“I’d stop at the first one,” Gabbert said as al-Khaled left, “but that’s just me.”

Because the ops center was a restricted area, the S.C.E. team maintained an administrative office adjacent to the main operations building. It was little more than a naked gray box consisting of four prefabricated polymer walls, a scrap-duranium ceiling, and a thermoconcrete floor. The desk was made from the same dull gray composite as the walls, and the chair behind it was just as uncomfortable as the guest chairs in front of it.

Al-Khaled entered through the office’s back door and found Jeanne Vinueza, president of the New Boulder colony, standing in his path. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest, and she regarded him with a glare whose equal he hadn’t seen since basic training nearly two decades earlier. “Commander,” she said icily. “How nice of you to finally join me.”

“I came as quickly as I could, Madam President,” al-Khaled said. “It’s been a busy—”

“Commander,” she said, “my people have been asking for Starfleet’s help for more than an hour. I know that a non-Federation colony probably doesn’t rate high on your priority list, but when someone says they have an emergency—”

He held up his hand to interrupt. “Emergency?”

“Yes, Commander, an emergency. Our civil engineers were testing the aquifers out on the Ilium Range this morning. They’ve missed two check-ins, and they aren’t answering hails.” She kept talking as al-Khaled stepped past her to stand in front of the wall-sized planetary map on the opposite wall. “Around noon the sheriff sent two of his deputies to check on them. Now we’ve lost contact with them, too.”

Fighting to conceal his fears from Vinueza, al-Khaled reached toward the map and pressed his finger down on the Ilium Range. The first thing he noticed was its alarming proximity to the site where his survey team had been slaughtered less than ninety minutes earlier. “I’ll send out a shuttle immediately,” he said, afraid that he already knew what the rescue team would find.

Vinueza stepped up close behind his shoulder. A concerned look darkened her expression. She lowered her voice. “You’re worried about something.”

“Of course I am, Madam President,” he said, quickly blanking his thoughts. “You’ve just reported two sets of disappearances in one day at the same site, less than fifty kilometers from the Klingons’ colony. If I wasn’t concerned, I’d be a fool.”

She didn’t look or sound convinced. “A lot of your people are on edge right now,” she said. “I can feel it. Something’s going on, Commander, and I demand you tell me what it is.”

“Ma’am, if you were the president of a Federation colony, I might have clearance to tell you, but you’re not, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.” Softening his tone, he added, “As soon as I know what happened to your people, I’ll be in touch.” He gestured with an outstretched arm toward the door.

“I don’t like secrets, Commander,” Vinueza warned.

“No one does, ma’am.” He stepped ahead and opened the door for her, ending the discussion. “Please, Madam President. Don’t make me call security.”

Vinueza took her time walking to the door. As she slipped past him, she said in a seductively teasing voice, “You wouldn’t call security on me, Commander. You think I’m much too hot for that.” Her knowing smirk imprinted itself on his memory as the door closed. He held that image in his mind as he pulled his communicator from his belt and flipped it open.

“Lovell, this is al-Khaled. Do you read me?”

Captain Okagawa answered, “We read you, Mahmud. Go ahead.”

“Captain, have you beamed up the forensic samples from the attack on our survey team?”

“Affirmative,” Okagawa said. “We just started compiling the data for Dr. Fisher on Vanguard. Why? What’s happened?”

Al-Khaled focused on breathing and staying calm. “We need to get a priority message out to Vanguard, right now. Tell the commodore that the ‘storm’ he warned us about is starting—and it looks like we’re gonna get hit head-on.”

Mogan had been a Klingon warrior his entire adult life, and he had been an agent of Imperial Intelligence for the past decade. He had fought countless battles, walked innumerable battlefields…but this one was the first to give him pause.

The battle’s result appeared to be entirely one-sided. More than a dozen Klingon reconnaissance agents had been slaughtered, dismembered like lingta in an abattoir. Severed limbs and heads lay scattered across the smoldering site at the base of a cliff. Twisted, mangled torsos rested in the blackened dirt beside bodies hollowed out by some terrible force. Every wounded appendage, every liberated skull, was sheathed in a crystalline shroud. Disruptor rifles had been reduced to splinters.

Halfway up the cliff, sixty qams above ground, an obsidian-walled tunnel looked as if it had been cored from the bedrock.

His platoon of QuchHa’ fanned out behind him as he led them across the killing field, watchful for any sign of ambush or a trap. Bootsteps crunched on the gravel as a hot, westerly wind kicked up dust from the rocks and ambered the afternoon light. “Watch the flanks,” he said to his men, who nodded and continued to swivel their heads slowly as they advanced, searching for any sign of Klingon survivors or enemies.

At the cliff Mogan stopped and looked back the way he had come, toward the armored ground transport he and the rest of his men had used to get here from their base camp. “It’s secure,” he declared. Then his eyes sought out the team’s scientist. “Dr. Kamron,” he said. “Start your analysis.”

Kamron, one of the few men under Mogan’s command who was not one of the QuchHa’, kneeled amid a jumble of body parts and began scanning them with a handheld device. Next he chipped off pieces of the crystalline substance and inserted the fragments inside his scanning device for a more intensive analysis.