Declassified

“Of course it is.”

“Along with my tricorder.”

He scowled. “Anything you didn’tlose?”

“Just my good looks.”

“And your sense of humor.” He got up and moved to her side. “But I don’t think you’ll be laughing for long.” With a gingerly touch, he examined her injured leg and paid attention to her pained reactions. “The good news is you’ve got a simple fracture. The bad news is we’ll have to treat it the old-fashioned way.”

Bridy grimaced. “This is go

“Oh, hell yeah. In a few seconds you’ll wish I still carried a flask.” He removed his gloves, then clapped his hands and set them in position. “Ready?”

“No. Do it anyway.”

“All right. I’m go

Bridy’s piercing scream of pain filled the cavern. Then she punched Qui

“No, I said I was go

“Say ‘three’ and I’ll knock your teeth out.”

Qui

“I’m not going back to the ship. Not yet, anyway.”

“Why? You got a death wish or something?”

“The source of that signal is less than two hundred meters from here, straight down that passage. I didn’t come all this way to turn back now.”

“You keep saying that, but I don’t think you realize how crazy it sounds.”

“If you’re willing to carry me to the ship, then a few hundred yards more won’t matter, will it?”

He started gathering up the rope. “What if we aren’t alone down here? Have you thought of that? If we get into trouble, how can we retreat if you can’t even walk?” He stopped and faced her. “Hell, even if we arealone down here, what’s the point of finding the signal source when we don’t have a tricorder?”

“Dammit, I just want to seeit. Let’s do a quick recon. Then we can head back to the ship, fix my leg, and come back with the spare tricorder.”

He put away the coiled rope and sealed his pack. “If this all goes wrong, do I get to say ‘I told you so’?”

“No.”

“Let me rephrase: Do you want to crawl the rest of the way?” She seethed for a moment. “All right, you can say it once. Now, can we please get this show on the road?”

“Your wish is my command.” He took her hand, helped her up, and draped her arm across his shoulders so he could support her weight. They moved together, taking care to synchronize their strides.

Bridy wore an amused expression. “You shouldn’t be such a pessimist. What’re you go

“That’s easy,” Qui

Ten minutes later, Bridy clung to Qui

Qui

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a minor obstacle.”

“Honey, it’s a wall of ice. To me, that says, ‘Do not enter.’ ”

“Oh, come on.” She gestured at the dark, semitransparent barrier. “I can see flickers of light from the other side. Whatever we came to find is there.”

“Sure it is. But I don’t feel like hacking my way through the galaxy’s biggest ice cube to get to it”—he nodded at her broken leg—“especially since I’d be doin’ all the work, on account of you being a gimp.”

She rolled her eyes. “I swear, sometimes it’s like you forget we live in the twenty-third century.” Then she drew her phaser, set it for wide beam and high power, and fired at the ice. The blue beam lit up the ice for a fraction of a second, and then the frozen wall transformed into a dense cloud of sultry, gray vapor. Seconds later, the hiss of boiling water ceased, and Bridy took her thumb off the phaser’s trigger.

He scowled. “Oh, well, sure. If you’re go

“Let’s go.”

Qui

The first thing Bridy saw was the machine.

Every piece of it was in motion. Delicate elements composed of silvery crystal spun at many different speeds on a variety of planes, all orbiting a core consisting of equal parts hard angles and fluid curves. Ribbons of prismatic energy snaked through the machine’s open spaces, crisscrossing one another’s paths, sometimes intersecting in flashes of white light.

Rotating in the center of all that motion was an object unlike any Bridy had ever seen. Made of the same silvery crystal as the rest of the machine, the core element was in a constant state of flux, expanding into dramatic stellations of varying complexity and reverting to a simple icosahedron once every several seconds before repeating the cycle of transformations.

Warmth radiated from the titanic device. As she and Qui

She looked away from the machine only because Qui

Her jaw went slack as she beheld the most beautiful and terrifying being she’d ever encountered: a giant nearly seven meters tall, its body formed from multicolored mist that concealed its lower half. A brilliant glow obscured its face, streams of shimmering motes circled its torso, and a great halo of golden light framed its head. As clouds of vapor rolled behind its back, Bridy saw fleeting glimpses of majestic shapes she was almost certain could only be wings.

Its voice was a stroke of thunder and the roar of the sea. “Welcome.”

Qui

“I think it is.”

The resplendent colossus interjected, “Yes. I am Shedai.”It spread its arms. “It is I who summoned you, and who have awaited your coming.”

Bridy took a cautious step toward the towering being. “I’ve seen your kind before. Which one are you?”

“I am the Apostate.”

16

Every nerve in Qui

In other words, it was exactly what he’d been afraid they would find, and he would already have been ru

“You say you summoned us,” Bridy said. “You mean, with the signals we picked up from the wormhole? The ones containing the Jinoteur Pattern?”

“Correct. Of all the Telinaruul,your faction has evinced the keenest grasp of our technology. Though your understanding continues to be limited, I trusted you to recognize my invitation.”

Bridy hobbled a few steps closer to the Apostate, dragging Qui

“A universe of my own creation—a redoubt forged from the shattered remnants of the Jinoteur system and sequestered here to shield the last vestiges of its power from my exiled kin.”

Growing impatient, Qui