Reap the Whirlwind

To his surprise, the entire facility had been rearranged.

When he had left weeks earlier, the Vault had been partitioned into multiple small workspaces; its open floor plan and liberal usage of walls composed of transparent aluminum had given it an impressive feeling of vastness. Now he beheld a single vast enclosure inside a shell of transparent aluminum, beneath a grid of ceiling-mounted sensor arrays. Within it churned snaking coils of matter that transmuted from indigo fires to shimmering liquids peppered with sparkling motes, and from there into blades of obsidian that slashed with relentless futility at the sides of their science-spawned prison. Xiong immediately thought of Theriault’s account of Tholians snared inside a Shedai Conduit and felt a pang of guilty recognition.

Gathered around the box’s exterior and monitoring a score of sensor displays were all the members of Xiong’s top-secret research group, plus someone he had never seen before: a blond woman in her late twenties, dressed in civilian clothes, trim and attractive but also serious and intently focused on the work being done by the rest of the team. She walked slowly from station to station, checking each scientist’s work and making sotto voce comments before moving on.

Xiong walked directly toward her as she stopped beside Dr. Varech jav Gek, the team’s leading geneticist. From a few meters away he heard her say to the Tellarite scientist, “Try to isolate the trigger in that chromosome, then we’ll run the catalyst sequence again.” The gray-bearded Gek nodded and began entering commands on his console. The woman turned in Xiong’s direction and started to walk to the next workstation when he intercepted her. “Excuse me,” he said to her. “What’s going on here? Who are you?”

She flashed an insincere smile that he knew was not an overture of friendship. “I’m your new partner,” she replied. Extending her hand, she added, “Dr. Carol Marcus.”

With reluctance he shook her hand. “Lieutenant Ming Xiong.”

“I know who you are,” she said, walking past him.

He followed her. “Then you know that I’m in charge of the Vault.” He gestured at the transparent enclosure. “And that I have to approve all new research projects.”

“Things change, Lieutenant,” Marcus said. “It’s not always a bad thing.” At the next workstation, she reached past Dr. Tarcoh, a paunchy Deltan theoretical physicist in his late sixties, and adjusted a setting on his console. “Look for changes in its mass,” she said, patting Tarcoh’s arm. “I’m betting it has an extradimensional component.” On the move again, she said over her shoulder to Xiong, “We’re already working on your data from Jinoteur. Quite a breakthrough.”

For Xiong, keeping pace with her was easy; keeping his temper in check was proving increasingly difficult. “You’re not Starfleet,” he said. “Who sent you?”

Marcus replied, “I’m here at the request of the Federation Council. Someone’s worried that the work you’re doing is too important not to have civilian oversight.”

Xiong gave a cynical smirk. “How thoughtful.”

She maintained her veneer of unflappable calm. “I’ve been told to make copies of your data, debrief you on what you and the Sagittarius crew learned at Jinoteur, and make regular reports to the Council about our findings. And I think you’ll find that you have orders to give me your full cooperation.”

They arrived at a long row of master-control consoles behind another thick protective wall of transparent aluminum. Marcus stood in the middle, her eyes pa

While Marcus busied herself making minor adjustments, Xiong used a secondary console to access his personal communications cha

As he logged off, she glanced at him. “Satisfied?”

He frowned. “How much of our research have you been able to review?”

“Almost all of it; I’ve been here for ten days. Granted, I only skimmed the hard data, but the abstracts and summaries were so exciting that I couldn’t wait to get started.”

A condescending smirk tugged at his mouth. “Abstracts,” he said. “Summaries.” He shook his head. “In other words, you don’t really know what we’ve found—or what you’re being asked to do.”

“I know more than you think, Lieutenant,” Marcus said. “I understand that we’re talking about an intricate, phenomenally complex genome comprising hundreds of millions of chromosomes. I know that it’s been linked to a set of artifacts on several far-flung planets. And I’m aware that it’s put us into conflict with a very powerful species we don’t yet know how to combat.” She smirked and lifted one eyebrow. “Do you want to quiz me on the genome’s unique chemical markers?”

Xiong rolled his eyes. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. Putting aside his resentment of Marcus’s brusque ma

“Some of it,” Marcus said.

He activated a monitor on the console between them. “I’ll call it up over here. I’ve been working on it for the last six days, since we left Jinoteur.” He tapped commands into the computer interface and called up the classified report. “There’s a lot of data, but I can sum up the high points for you.”

“Please do,” Marcus said, scrolling through the tricorder readings Xiong had made of Jinoteur’s peculiar energy field.

“You’ve already unlocked part of it,” he said, “shifting pieces of the Shedai body between physical states. The crew of the Sagittarius watched a living Shedai do that in real time, traveling as a gas, becoming a gelatinous liquid for searching and a solid for attacking. In addition, they have sensor readings showing that these beings can control electromagnetic effects, including lightning.”

He pressed some keys on the console desk and patched in a new set of data from his report. “Injuries sustained by Sagittarius officers Terrell and McLellan showed the same kind of crystalline infection that Dr. Fisher detected on the corpse of Endeavour scientist Bohanon. The application of a dampening field attuned to Shedai neural frequencies retarded its spread.”

Xiong reached past Marcus to tie in a new databank, and she moved back to give him room to work as he continued his briefing. “Now for the really exciting part,” he said. “During one Shedai attack, Lieutenant Commander McLellan’s right leg was severed at the knee. Dr. Babitz, applying an energy pulse based on the Shedai carrier wave and partially recoded with McLellan’s DNA pattern, was able to revivify crystallized tissue in the amputated limb—and reattach it to the patient, with a full tissue-regeneration effect.” He replaced McLellan’s medical file with Terrell’s. “The same effort failed to work for Commander Terrell—and I think I know why.”

“The Jinoteur Pattern,” Marcus blurted out.

Her preemptive leap caught him by surprise. “That’s right,” he said. “When the regenerative field was applied to McLellan’s leg, the Sagittarius was on the planet’s surface, surrounded by the Jinoteur system’s unique energy field.”

“But the procedure on Commander Terrell,” Marcus noted, pointing out the detail in Dr. Babitz’s report, “wasn’t attempted until after the star system had vanished.”

“Exactly,” Xiong said. “She had to remove the crystallized tissue surgically.” He closed Terrell’s file and called up the Jinoteur carrier-wave signal. “We’d noted some correlations in this carrier wave to segments of the meta-genome. We were able to use it to construct a means of sending a ‘ping’ to look for other artifacts—which we now know are called Conduits. It gave us only limited insights into decoding the master structure of the meta-genome, but with the Jinoteur Pattern—”