What Judgments Come

Okagawa frowned. “Do we have anything more on what he was talking about?”

“Blair didn’t go into specifics in his messages,” Nogura replied, “but we can gather that he was talking about some kind of weapon, which the Tholians apparently used on the Klingon colony on Traelus II. If the Tholians wiped out that colony, then the Klingons will want payback.” The Traelus system was close enough to Tholian territory that an imperial presence on the second planet had caused the Tholian government to launch a flurry of protests in the wake of the Klingon colonists’ taking up residence there. It was but one of several aggressive actions the Empire had undertaken since first venturing into the Taurus Reach, to which the Tholians also had objected. Tensions between the two governments had only worsened during the past two years, with both sides becoming ever bolder toward one another, and Nogura was resigned to the inevitable confrontation he was sure would soon erupt. In his mind, it was not a question of if, but rather when. Of course, if the Tholians also were behind whatever fate had befallen the Defiant, then the Federation would find themselves with few options so far as confronting the Assembly was concerned.

And won’t that be grand.

Clearing his throat, Okagawa said, “I’m guessing diplomacy isn’t our best friend at the moment.”

“Did working with those engineers give you a gift for under-statement, Captain?” Nogura sighed, shaking his head.

“You become numb to that sort of thing after a while,” Okagawa replied.

The report Nogura had received from Ambassador Jetanien on the collapse of the joint-venture colony on Nimbus III was not unexpected, but nonetheless disheartening. He knew that Jetanien, working in concert with Klingon Ambassador Lugok and Romulan Senator D’tran, had expended great effort to convince all three parties to cooperate in establishing the settlement on Nimbus III. Skeptics, Nogura among them, had doomed the undertaking to certain failure from the outset, but that had not dissuaded Jetanien. The multitude of external pressures being applied by the respective governments had not helped. Also contributing to the mix were the inherent problems that came from both the Federation’s and the Klingon Empire’s quest for a means of dealing with the Tholian Assembly, and doing so while each party fought not to appear vulnerable to the other. The simple truth was that the Klingons and even the Romulans were more interested in any intelligence avenues that might be exploited via Nimbus III, and Nogura was confident such an agenda had motivated the Federation, as well. No one from any of the three governments would ever admit to this, of course. Some political analysts were even conjecturing that the colony might actually continue in some form for a short while, if only to keep up the pretense of wanting to engage in constructive collaboration. Nogura was curious to see how that might play out, and just how much support the colony received from any of its sponsors.

I’m betting not all that much.

“So, we’ve got the Tholians mad at the Klingons,” Nogura said, “and the Klingons mad or getting ready to be mad at the Tholians, and the Klingons and the Romulans all mad at us. Pretty good, I’d say, for not even being lunchtime yet.”

“What about the Tholians?” Okagawa asked.

Nogura waved away the question. “They were already mad at us. That just leaves the Shedai, and with the luck we’ve been having, they may be on their way here right now.”

There was no way to know what had become of the Shedai entity that had escaped from confinement inside the Mirdonyae Artifact and wrecked the Lovell. The brief contact Xiong and Mahmud al-Khaled had achieved with the creature had yielded little in the way of useful information. The two officers, along with Doctor Carol Marcus, believed that with communication now possible with the entities and if some measure of control could be put in place, some sort of dialogue and negotiation might be feasible. If nothing else, the link at least provided one of the best new avenues of research into the mysterious Shedai that had been discovered since Operation Vanguard’s inception.

All of which might not matter, Nogura reminded himself, given Xiong’s other theory: that the escaped Shedai entity had fled somewhere to regroup, or regain whatever energy it had lost while being held prisoner. The lieutenant had also put forth the unpleasant hypothesis that the Shedai might well be seeking out others of its own kind.

“What if that thing decides to come back?” Okagawa asked. “What if, God help us, it decides to bring friends?”

Reminded of the power just one of these creatures possessed during its attack on the station and the Lovell, and knowing from mission reports what a group of the aliens could do if provoked, Nogura had only one answer. “If we don’t or can’t find anything useful in the Eremar system, then we’re probably going to need God’s help.”

39

Hospitals. Reyes had always hated them.

He had avoided them as best he could throughout his life, and even on those few occasions where he had entered one as a patient, he had done his level best to ensure that his stay was as brief as possible. Although logic reminded him that he should know better and that hospitals generally were dedicated to the preservation of life, he still tended to think of them as places where people went to die, or at the very least to emerge as somehow worse off than when they entered. His dislike went back to one of the more unpleasant memories from his childhood, when his parents would take him to visit his maternal grandmother at a hospice where she had spent the final months of her life suffering from an incurable blood disease. Seeing her, withered and fading with each passing day, had become almost too much to bear, but young Diego Reyes had put on a brave front out of consideration for his mother, maintaining it throughout his grandmother’s funeral and his mother’s mourning. In the years that followed, his choice of career had seen to it that he had spent more than a bit of time calling on sick or injured loved ones and friends confined in such places, and one of Reyes’s deepest regrets was that he had been unable to make the transit to the Sol system to be by his mother’s side when she too had contracted a mortal illness.

Thankfully, his visit to Vanguard’s hospital was with the knowledge that the person upon whom he was calling would soon walk out of here under his own power and one day resume the life that had been so harshly interrupted by one moment’s selfless act.

“They told me you were coming for a visit,” Tim Pe

Reyes shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be doing much good, anyway. I thought Zeke was going to fix your face while he had you here.”

“How do you improve on perfection?” Pe

Nodding in appreciation, Reyes replied, “You’ll get there, Tim.” Though the prosthetic was all but identical to the arm he had lost, Pe