“It’s like matching a key to a lock,” Marcus said, nodding along, riding the tide of his excitement. “This is fantastic.”

“I know!” Elated to finally have someone who appreciated the broader implications of the work that had dominated the past three years of his life, he could hardly contain himself. “Think about it—with this kind of a regenerative matrix, we could heal all kinds of injuries. Lost limbs, deep-tissue damage—the possibilities are incredible.”

Marcus laughed. Then she caught herself and covered her mouth until she regained her composure. “Lieutenant,” she said, as if she were appalled at his reaction, “this is much bigger than fixing a few broken bodies. You said yourself that the entire Jinoteur system was infused with this waveform.”

A feeling of intense dread welled up inside him. “So…?”

“So?” Marcus replied. She called up the sensor readings that Theriault had made of the Jinoteur system before the ship had approached the fourth planet. “That star system registered as less than half a million years old. With a main-sequence star? And every body in the system the exact same age? How is that even possible?” The Jinoteur Pattern appeared on the screen, and a slightly fanatical gleam lit up Marcus’s eyes. “What if this matrix doesn’t just regenerate what already exists? What if it can be used to shape matter and energy into any configuration desired?” She stared at it in awe. “You could build planets from nothing. You could make stars.” She grinned, giddy with excitement, and mimed a supernova explosion with her hands. “Let there be light.”

Xiong finally understood why his pleas for scientific glasnost with the Klingons and the Tholians had been refused so adamantly by Starfleet Command. If Marcus was right about the tremendous possibilities contained in the meta-genome and the waveform, it was a discovery with galactic implications.

In the right hands, it could be the greatest gift ever bestowed upon sentient beings, a boon to life itself.

In the wrong hands, it would be the most barbaric weapon of mass destruction and genocide ever known.

Watching his new colleague gaze in wonder at the mysterious energy waveform on his monitor, Xiong silently wished that he could go back six days in time to that placid, moonlit beach on Jinoteur—and shatter his tricorder against a boulder.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Xiong said softly, “I think I’d like to go and get settled back into my office.” He started to leave.

Marcus’s apologetic tone almost sounded sincere as she broke the news. “That’s not your office anymore.”

Pennington sat cross-legged on the floor in the center of his empty living room. At his side was a half-eaten turkey sandwich and a bottle of lukewarm fruit juice that he had purchased to go from a vendor in Stars Landing’s restaurant district. It was a far cry from the fancy cuisine that he had enjoyed during his brief years as a star reporter for the Federation News Service, but, as his former editor Arlys often liked to say, “the best reporters are the hungry ones.”

A single, tubular lighting element, which he had purchased from the station’s quartermaster with a bit of his meager savings, glowed from the fixture on the ceiling above him. His shadow fell over the screen of the small portable data manager in his hands; he used the device for everything from personal communications to composing his freelance news stories and editing audiovisual data from his recorder.

Though he had watched his video footage from Jinoteur more than a hundred times in the past week, he remained unsure how much of it was good enough to use in his report. Most of the shots he had made—while running from and dodging falling debris—were staticky and blurred, more suggestive than conclusive. The wildly shaking images had barely captured a few clear frames of the creatures he had encountered on the planet. He had made extensive notes about his firsthand observations, but the only person who could corroborate his account of events was Ensign Theriault—who, he had been unsurprised to learn, was under orders not to discuss the mission with anyone.

Not that it would make much difference, he figured. It’s not as if Commodore Reyes would let me file this story anyway.

Voices outside his window—pedestrians passing by—pulled him out of his thoughts. He looked up from his work and realized that he had lost track of time; he had been working for several hours. Outside his window, the darkness of a simulated night had fallen over Stars Landing. Dusky orange lamplight slanted through his vertical window blinds.

Yawning, he stretched his arms over his head. Maybe I’ll go out for a while. See if Quinn’s down the pub.

A knock on his apartment door echoed off his bare walls. Hope triumphed over experience, and he afforded himself a moment of optimism. He had hoped that Theriault would come calling, perhaps to buy him the drink she had promised him. Though he had never actually told her where he lived, it wasn’t as if he were hard to find: like every other permanent denizen of Starbase 47, his residence was listed in the public directory.

He set aside his data manager and stiffly pushed himself back to his feet. A few creaking-kneed steps later, he opened his front door—and felt the enthusiasm bleed from his face as he saw Diego Reyes looking back at him. “Commodore,” Pennington said, masking his hostility with humor. “Time for my inquisition already? I was sure I’d merit at least one night’s reprieve.”

“May I come in, Mr. Pennington?”

The manner of Reyes’s asking surprised Pennington; the commodore had sounded sincere and nonconfrontational. Stepping back from the doorway, Pennington replied, “Of course, sir.”

Reyes took cautious steps into the apartment, as if he were wary of an ambush. He looked around at the barren space and down at the half-consumed meal and beverage. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

Pennington stood behind Reyes and leaned against the wall beside the front door. “I’d invite you to sit down, but I’m boycotting furniture.”

The commodore stepped into the middle of the room and picked up Pennington’s data device. He held it in one hand and looked back at Pennington. “May I?”

“May you what? Read it? Or take it?”

He didn’t expect Reyes’s low-key reaction, a contrite lowering of his eyes. “May I look at it?”

Folding his arms, Pennington replied, “Be my guest.” He watched for about a minute as Reyes reviewed his first-draft text article and the related video clips and images. Every few seconds, Reyes’s eyebrows lifted slightly, or he nodded slowly.

“Impressive,” Reyes said as he turned off the device. “I’d have thought the star system vanishing would leave you behind the eight ball, but you even made that work for you.” He kneeled, set the device back on the floor, and stood again. “I’m sorry I can’t let the Sagittarius officers go on the record.”

“No doubt,” Pennington said, already tired of Reyes’s slow dance around the obvious. “I know why you’re here, Commodore. Do us both a favor, and get it over with.”

At first, Reyes didn’t respond. He walked over to the window and peeked between the blinds, through the amber light, into the artificial evening of the station’s terrestrial enclosure. “Why do you think I’m here, Mr. Pennington?”

A trick question? Pennington hesitated before he answered, “To seize my footage from Jinoteur—and to tell me not to bother filing the story, since it won’t get past your censors.”

“Send it to me,” Reyes said. “I’ll make sure it goes out as written.”

Instantly suspicious of the commodore’s motives, Pennington considered a few possible scenarios at work: an attempt at entrapment, a cruel hoax, or another scheme to publicly attack his credibility. “Why?” he asked. “What’s in it for you?”

“The truth,” Reyes said. “Nothing more, nothing less.” The longer he stared out the window, the more distant his expression became. “Very soon, Tim—perhaps in a couple of days—word’s going to get out that I invoked General Order 24 against Gamma Tauri IV.” He looked at Pennington. “Do you know what that is?” Pennington shook his head no, and Reyes continued, “It’s an order to annihilate the surface of a planet—to exterminate every living thing, blast away its atmosphere, cook its oceans, and leave nothing but a red-hot ball of glass.”