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The fair-haired, Scotland-born writer looked a
“Yeah, but I’m looking up at the stars.”
Pe
“No, but I know they’re there. And they’re lookin’ back at me.” And laughing.
The younger man kneeled and tried to snake his hands under Qui
“Let me help you up,” Pe
Drool spilled from the corner of Qui
Pe
Exhibiting a degree of stubbor
They might have been lumbering along for seconds or minutes—Qui
Pe
Not certain he’d made his point, Qui
Pe
“The hell they ain’t. Busted up some shit real good down at Sha
“I squared that, mate. Paid for what you broke. Got the charges dropped.” As they started up some stairs, Qui
Weaving and staggering down an open-air promenade, Qui
“Settled,” Pe
They stopped in front of a door that Qui
“No. It just means he won’t press charges.” The door opened, and Pe
“Home sweet home,” Qui
Pe
Qui
“Tim . . . ,” he began.
His stomach twisted in a knot, his chest heaved, and he puked a gutful of half-digested food and bile that reeked of sour mash, all over Pe
He was almost grateful to lose consciousness before having to say he was sorry.
Doctor Carol Marcus was on the move and in no mood to stop for anyone or anything. She passed one of her colleagues after another as she circled the main isolation chamber located in the center of the Vault. The recently rebuilt, state-of-the-art top-secret research facility lay deep inside the core of Starbase 47, and it was the most heavily shielded and redundantly equipped section of the entire Watchtower-class space station.
“Watch those power levels,” she said to Doctor Hofstadter as she passed his console. “We can’t afford a spike.” The dark-haired, bespectacled researcher nodded once in confirmation of Marcus’s instruction, then he resumed his work. Striding past another station, Marcus paused long enough to lean past Doctor Tarcoh, a spindly, soft-spoken Deltan man of middle years. She activated a function on his panel. “Remember to keep the sensors in passive mode. I don’t want to feed this thing any signals it can use. You saw what happened last time.” Tarcoh continued his work, duly chastised for his error.
The “last time” Marcus had spoken of, and which every scientist on her team recalled all too vividly, was a disastrous attempt to make contact with a Shedai trapped inside a Mirdonyae Artifact identical to the one still housed inside the Vault’s main isolation chamber. The steps that had been necessary to transmit a signal through the artifact’s baffling subatomic lattices had also enabled the creature snared inside it to replenish its power and exploit damage the Federation researchers had unwittingly wrought in the artifact. That error had led to an explosive episode of escape and the violent destruction of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers vessel U.S.S. Lovell.
As she moved around the laboratory, checking status gauges and second-guessing all her colleagues’ work, her Starfleet counterpart, Lieutenant Ming Xiong, fell into step beside her. “He’s still waiting for you in your office,” Xiong said.
The reminder turned her mood into thin ice—cold and brittle. “Let him wait.”
Marcus kept moving, and Xiong followed her. “He’s showing you a courtesy by coming down here. He could’ve had you hauled up to his office.”
She ignored Xiong’s warning and took a moment to sidle up to Doctor Koothrappali. “Keep an eye on the plasma capacitors. If they redline, dump the charge through the station’s main deflector dish. Don’t ask for permission, don’t wait to be told. Just do it.”
The longer Marcus pretended nothing was wrong, the more apparent Xiong’s anxiety became. “This isn’t a joke, Doctor. And it’s not some mere formality.”
“When did you become such a stickler for rules and regulations?” As soon as she’d said it, she felt a pang of regret, because Xiong’s reflexive wince told her she’d struck a nerve. The young lieutenant had once enjoyed a reputation on Vanguard as a maverick and iconoclast. The last few years, however, had broken his spirit by slow degrees; the final straw had been the recent demise of his friend Lieutenant Commander Bridget McLellan, known to her friends as Bridy Mac. The former second officer of the Sagittarius, McLellan had been reassigned to Starfleet Intelligence as a covert operative attached to Operation Vanguard. Xiong had often spoken of her as his “big sister.” Her death in the line of duty, while on a mission to which he had assigned her, had left him emotionally devastated for weeks.