He reached back and palmed a sheen of sweat from the nape of his neck. It felt strange to him that it was so bare; he had been accustomed to wearing his hair longer and leaving it slightly unkempt, but the climate on Gamma Tauri IV had made the shorter, regulation-recommended hairstyle suddenly appealing. Heat normally didn’t bother him very much; he suspected his Middle Eastern upbringing made him less sensitive to high temperatures.

It was a hazy day, and the moment he’d stepped out of his climate-controlled temporary shelter on the outskirts of the colony, the scorching summer air had struck him like a blowtorch. It still beats being cooped up on the ship, he decided. Even though he had come to think of the Lovell as his home, he enjoyed spending time planetside once in a while.

He turned a corner and continued off the colony’s official street grid to a large building set slightly apart from the others: his team’s local operations center. Except for the red pennant of the United Federation of Planets that was painted on the structure’s façade and the Starfleet Corps of Engineers logo emblazoned on the door, it looked like any other prefab shelter erected by the colonists. It was surrounded by a haphazard collection of equipment: antigravs, four-wheeled and six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles for scouting the countryside, seismological and meteorological sensor gear, excavation vehicles, tool sheds packed with construction and drilling equipment, and a shuttlecraft for long-range recon.

As he approached the entrance, a deep thunk from inside the doorframe signaled the release of the door’s magnetic locks. The portal slid aside with a soft hiss, and a low chatter of voices, some belonging to people inside the room, others being received over comms, became audible. Al-Khaled stepped inside. The door closed behind him.

The main room beyond the door was close and cluttered. Three rows of a dozen tables were pressed end to end, with an engineer or other specialist working on either side of each one. Every table was covered with maps of Gamma Tauri IV’s sole landmass—an irregular crescent that stretched nearly two-thirds of the circumference of the globe, reached from subarctic to subantarctic latitudes, and occupied more than thirty-three percent of the planet’s total surface area. Overlying these topographical renderings were various scans and survey results: subsurface water reservoirs, mineral resources, projected weather patterns, plans for expanded civil infrastructure emanating from the New Boulder colony. It was a massive effort to turn this world, which had been unoccupied by sentient life just three years ago, into a self-sufficient civilization that could eventually help feed others.

Moving through the packed room toward a nondescript door at its far end, al-Khaled saw his second-in-command of the S.C.E. team, Lieutenant Kurt Davis, moving with particular haste to intercept him. Davis’s shaved head reflected the overhead lights, which cast harsh glares in the dimly lit, windowless workspace. His path and al-Khaled’s intersected at the end of a row of tables. “Sir,” Davis said, “Captain Okagawa is trying to reach you. He says he has news from Vanguard.”

“I don’t suppose he told you what the news was.”

As he expected, Davis shook his head. “No. But it didn’t sound good.”

“It never is,” al-Khaled replied. “Thanks, Kurt.”

As al-Khaled began to step past him on his way to the unmarked door, Davis said, “Sir, I’d like permission to return to the Lovell.”

The S.C.E. team leader turned back to face his second with a knowing grin. “Afraid your engine room won’t be safe in Luciano’s hands?”

“Not at all,” Davis said. “Margaux knows if I get it back any different than I left it, she’ll be floating home. I just want to go back because…well, I have nothing to do here.” Gesturing at the roomful of specialists, he continued, “These people all know what they’re doing, Mahmud. They don’t need a babysitter. And besides, I’m a propulsion specialist; my skills aren’t exactly in demand down here.”

Al-Khaled sighed. Davis’s request was reasonable, but he was reluctant to grant it. With his own attention consumed by the S.C.E.’s other, clandestine mission to Gamma Tauri IV, he had been unable to devote the time necessary for supervising the colony-support efforts; he had been relieved to know that Davis was filling that role while he had been occupied elsewhere. There was no way to explain the situation to Davis, however, without breaching the mission’s security protocols.

“All right,” al-Khaled said finally. “Finish your shift, then you can beam back up to the Lovell. I’ll have Ghrex take over as beta-shift supervisor. But if there’s an emergency, I might need you back on the double. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” Davis said. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome.”

Davis acknowledged the end of the conversation with a nod, then stepped away to continue moving through the room and making spot checks of the other specialists’ work. Al-Khaled walked to a plain, dark gray door at the back of the room, endured a brief biometric identification scan of his left retina, and stepped through as the portal opened.

He descended a narrow double switchback of stairs to a much smaller command center. Though it looked spare and utilitarian, it was concealed by some of Starfleet’s newest sensor-blocking materials and was equipped with its most advanced computers and sensor technology. The wall opposite the stairs was actually a massive display screen, which provided most of the pale blue light that filled the room. Facing it were eighteen people seated at two short rows of workstations, set one behind the other on raised tiers. Another map of Gamma Tauri IV was displayed on the wall screen; it was marked with a complex assortment of grid lines, color codes, symbols, and statistics.

Lieutenant T’Laen sat in the middle seat of the rear row of workstations, patiently sifting through scads of data on her monitor. Al-Khaled approached the Vulcan cautiously and stood behind her while waiting for her to pause in her work. Several seconds later she stopped and turned her chair toward him. “May I be of service, sir?”

“Do you have anything to report before I contact Captain Okagawa?” al-Khaled asked. He eschewed preambles or niceties when talking with T’Laen, who had no patience for inefficient communication styles.

Highlighting an area of the map on the main viewscreen, T’Laen replied, “We have completed our analysis of grids 2115 south through 2119 south. No contacts and no sign of ambient radiation. However, a biological survey team in grid 3642 north has confirmed the presence of a type-V life reading.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” The news quickened al-Khaled’s pulse. A type-V life reading was the Operation Vanguard code for detection of the Taurus meta-genome, an incredibly complex genetic artifact that was composed of hundreds of millions of unique chromosomes linked by a series of common chemical markers, which Federation scientists currently speculated might act as a kind of checksum for the eventual recombination of all its various strands. So far, unique variants of the meta-genome had been found on such far-flung worlds as Ravanar IV and Erilon—and now Gamma Tauri IV. Though it wasn’t what they had been sent here to find, it was a good sign that they were looking in the right place. So far, both of the ancient artifacts that had been uncovered by Starfleet explorers had been on worlds where the meta-genome had been found. Though it was too soon to be certain that the meta-genome and the artifacts would always be discovered in tandem, the correlation between their discoveries was enough to encourage al-Khaled.

Starfleet’s attention had been drawn to Gamma Tauri IV by its most recent discoveries regarding alien technology captured on Erilon and by continuing research of the Erilon artifact itself. Building upon the work al-Khaled’s team had done a couple of years earlier, during the construction of Starbase 47, a team on Vanguard had succeeded in creating a less powerful but more focused facsimile of the alien “carrier wave” that had been transmitted from the Jinoteur system and had interfered with many of the station’s onboard systems. Hypothesizing a link among the carrier waves, the artifacts, and the alien entities that the Endeavour crew had tangled with in a handful of bloody encounters on Erilon, Xiong’s team on Vanguard had begun sending pulses of the synthesized carrier wave toward a number of planets that fit their search profiles. Something about the response received from Gamma Tauri IV had moved it to the top of Xiong’s list of exploration targets. Commodore Reyes had wasted no time detailing the Lovell and its team to the colony planet to assist in developing the settlement for the benefit of its residents and the Federation as a whole, but they had kept secret their ongoing search for another, possibly hidden alien artifact on the planet’s surface.