Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven (23 page)

“So far, only the Empire and the Federation have actively pursued the secrets of this ancient race. The Tholians have taken aggressive action to impede both our efforts, for reasons we don’t yet understand. Starfleet’s scientists seem to have surpassed our own in their understanding of the alien devices, while the Romulans have, until now, apparently been unaware of the reason for this tripartite conflict so far from our respective territories.

“I have reason to suspect Duras and his allies had already stolen a limited amount of information regarding the Shedai. Apparently, that taste merely whetted their appetite. Captain Kutal and the
Zin’za
had been at the forefront of the Empire’s investigation of this sector, and they had amassed a significant degree of raw intelligence about the Taurus Reach. Their involvement had been known only by myself and a few trusted contacts inside the High Command and Imperial Intelligence. But it seems Duras became aware of their role, and he took advantage of Brakk’s proximity to steal the information from the
Zin’za
’s computers.”

Chang’s intense focus made it clear he understood the gravity
of the matter.
“If Brakk has acquired that data, then it most likely has already been passed on to the Romulans.”

“Precisely. Duras and his son might not even grasp the significance of the information until they’ve already traded it for favors. But once the Romulans learn what’s at stake in the Gonmog Sector, they’ll stop at nothing to acquire its secrets—most likely by using Duras and his cronies to do their dirty work.” Gorkon clenched his fists. He wondered for a moment whether he should share his latest findings, then decided he had so few allies, especially on Qo’noS, that someone else needed to know the truth, just in case something happened to him before he could act on it. “There’s something else, Captain: I’ve gathered a great deal of disturbing intelligence from a number of sources. It seems we have underestimated our foes, and quite badly.”

“In what regard?”

He leaned closer to the screen, as if huddling to share a confidence with someone across the table. “The House of Duras has begun consolidating power in the most ruthless and efficient manner I’ve ever seen. Their operatives are moving against anyone they perceive as a rival, an enemy, or even a mere impediment, and they are using every means possible: assassination, extortion, blackmail, bribery, fraud . . . whatever it takes to make themselves unassailable.”

“Have you discussed this with Chancellor Sturka? Perhaps he can—”

“It’s too late for that.” Gorkon simmered with righteous anger toward his former ally and patron. “I’ve uncovered evidence that links many recent actions by Duras to the chancellor himself. Apparently, despite Sturka’s long hatred of the House of Duras, now that their accumulated wealth and political power has reached a critical mass, the chancellor sees more advantage in allying himself with their treachery than he does in opposing it.”

Now even Chang seemed worried.
“How deep are their connections?”

“Their estates and financial holdings are in the process of merging via proxies, and my sources inside Sturka’s House suggest
the chancellor and Duras have made secret betrothals for several of their respective scions, to cement the bond between their Houses.”

“This cannot be allowed to come to pass,”
Chang said.
“If their Houses unite, the Duras family will be like a blood tick on a
targ
’s back—entrenched in the highest echelons of Klingon society for generations to come. And Duras would almost certainly replace you as Sturka’s chief adviser on the High Council.”

Gorkon wondered if Chang thought him a fool who needed to be told the obvious. “I am well aware of the consequences that would attend the ascendance of Duras. That is why we can no longer wait to take action. Duras and his House are on the offensive, which is when one is always at the greatest risk of being off balance. If we can break his momentum now, and goad him and his House into a mistake when they are the focus of attention and envy, it could be enough to put them back in check for the foreseeable future.”

“Whatever service you require of me, my lord, you’ll have it. No matter what the cost to myself or my honor, I will not permit Duras to become chancellor.”

The declaration coaxed a thin smile from Gorkon. “Your loyalty honors me, Chang.”

“I have one concern, my lord, and it’s more for your sake than for mine.”

“Speak freely.”

“If the House of Duras is as powerful, ruthless, and entrenched as you say, we may find that opposing their interests could be considered the same as opposing the chancellor’s, or even the Empire’s. How do we fight such an honorless fiend without being branded as traitors?”

It was a question to which Gorkon had given a great deal of thought during many an anguished and sleepless night. Now, at the moment of decision, he divined the answer.

“By striking at him from a direction he does not expect.”

The Wanderer turned her thoughts to stillness, arresting her motion. Her solitary journey to the
Telinaruul
’s bastion in the darkness had been arduous, burdened as she was with a ponderous mass of superdense matter. Her native ability to traverse space—a talent that made her unique among the Shedai—normally entailed shifting only her consciousness and an attendant field of energy. Only a few times before then had she tried to bear physical objects across the interstellar void. Even small and relatively insignificant payloads had proved exhausting. It was a testament to her recent increase in power that she had become strong enough to bear a load such as this.

Lingering in the comfort of darkness, she attuned herself to the invisible energies that transited the ether in all directions. This was but one mystery of the great emptiness—that it was never truly empty. Space-time was abundant with unseen forces and extradimensional pockets of dark power waiting to be tapped, if only one understood how to see the universe’s true shape.

She knew she was beyond the reach of the
Telinaruul
’s mechanical sensing devices, ensuring that her next great labor would not attract their attention. In contrast, their presence was a clarion shattering the silence, a white-hot beacon in the dark. High-energy signals poured like a river from their space fortress. Shining brighter than all of it was the presence of the Progenitor, his essence blazing like a sun despite his imprisonment within an artifact of the Tkon.

How arrogant these
Telinaruul
were! Who were they to think they had the right to act as jailers for a being who had been an ancient before their kinds’ first ancestors took shape in the primordial soups of their insignificant worlds? To enslave a being
who had ruled a spiral arm of the galaxy before their puny races even had language? It was an offense against the natural order.

They will all suffer,
she vowed.
Soon, the Progenitor will be free, and they will all know the cold fire of our vengeance
. If forced to choose between emancipating the Progenitor and destroying the station, the Wanderer knew that the freedom of her people’s great sire took precedence. Pride demanded that the
Telinaruul
pay for their hubris, but as one of the
Serrataal,
her duty to the Elder One trumped all other objectives and desires.

The Wanderer focused her essence on the block of raw matter she had borne across hundreds of light-years. Her consciousness penetrated its superdense atomic structure, beheld its ultrastable atomic shells, and marveled at its furious inner storm—particles of every conceivable color, flavor, and spin. Manipulating muons and quarks, bosons and neutrinos, she reshaped the matter by will alone, transforming it into an extension of her desire, an instrument of her impending vengeance. This would be slow work, demanding the most painstaking precision and attention to subnuclear details. This was a labor the Wanderer had undertaken only twice before in her countless millennia, though neither instance had been freighted with such urgency as this. On those occasions, the continued existence of the Shedai had not been at stake.

She tried to remember where, when, and how she had learned this delicate art and the arcane science behind it. It was so old a memory that its specifics eluded her. All she could recall was that the process had been imparted to her by one of the elders in the early days of the Shedai’s sovereignty over this part of the galaxy. It had been among the final rituals confirming her status as one of the
Serrataal,
those who had been elevated from the churning hordes of the Nameless in recognition of their innate gifts, their inborn worthiness to be counted among the elite. As a Shedai with a name, the Wanderer had earned the right to share in the hegemony’s most guarded secrets, the foundation of knowledge upon which their sprawling civilization had been erected. Mastery of these secrets had been her final test of worthiness.

Now the future of all Shedai hinged upon her ability to bend reality’s shape to her will, to work the miracle she had been taught two hundred fifty million years earlier, a magic she had worked only twice in the span of an entire revolution of the galaxy. There was no question in her mind that she would succeed. She had vowed to see it done, and its completion was all that stood between her and the sweetness of revenge. It was of no consequence to her that the Sage and the Herald both doubted her ability; she did not require their faith or their approval. Let them mock her and call her youngling; soon she would make them recant their taunts. When the time came, and she proved herself worthy, they would hear the Progenitor’s voice in the song, and they would know she had spoken the truth.
I will be vindicated,
she promised herself.

She trapped a quark strangelet in the porous interdimensional membrane and reversed its spin. Atom by atom, the Wanderer molded the mass of collapsed-star core material until it fit the shape of her imagination. For now it was nothing but a superdense blob of heavy metal, squandering its hard-won energy as waste heat and chaotic radiation, its crude form nothing but a prison for its potential—a bastille to which the Wanderer held the keys.

Cloaked in silence and night, she labored alone, paying no heed to time’s passage; she would work for as long as it took to finish her task. Sustaining herself with starlight and fury, she felt her thoughts take shape and knew that the hour of her wrath would soon be at hand. When her work was done, she and her kin would free the Progenitor, annihilate the space station, and imbue the galaxy’s
Telinaruul
with an old brand of terror, one they apparently had forgotten.

They would be reminded what it is to fear the gods.

“What do you mean you’ve hit a
dead end
?”

Nogura stared down the briefing room table at the sheepish faces of Lieutenants Xiong and Theriault and the glum countenance of Doctor Marcus. He had come to expect results—if not minor miracles—from these three, not excuses, making their latest status update an unpleasant surprise. And it could not have come at a worse time, in Nogura’s opinion, what with Starfleet Command breathing down his neck and demanding progress in the ongoing effort to devise a reliable defense and counteroffensive strategy against the Shedai. Seated at the far end of the table, opposite Nogura, was T’Prynn. She seemed distracted and only half present.

Xiong leaned forward, elbows on the table, and slowly rubbed his palms together. “I know it’s not what you or Starfleet Command were expecting or hoping for,” he said. “But the simple truth is, we’ve hit an impasse. Lieutenant Theriault and I have gone over all her visual scans of the original array at Eremar, and we’ve done everything we can to duplicate its form and function inside the isolation chamber. But so far all it amounts to is a really bizarre work of sculpture. The fact is, there are too many variables we don’t understand.”

“Such as?” The question came out sounding far more flip and confrontational than Nogura had intended, but he had no time to handle his officers with kid gloves.

Theriault leapt into the verbal fray. “For one thing, we brought back only about half the artifacts we found. We don’t know if there are specific configurations or numbers of artifacts that work as an array. Maybe we have too few, or too many, or they’re
grouped wrong. Also, the visual scans I made had tons of interference. We might be missing crucial information.”

“The issue might be that we don’t know how to distribute power through that many linked crystals,” Xiong added. “Or that we don’t know the correct frequency or amplitude.”

“All good evidence,” Doctor Marcus interjected, “that we need to slow down our efforts to turn these things into applied technology, and spend more time on pure research, including making contact with the entity inside the first crystal. I mean no offense to Lieutenants Xiong and Theriault, but I think it was a mistake to even try to link these objects together before we can say for certain what any one of them does individually.”

Wearing a mask of skepticism, Nogura shook his head. “That’s not an option, Doctor. Besides, we’ve already seen what these objects can do. It’s why we wanted more of them.”

Marcus’s face reddened. “Really? Are you a hundred percent certain you know what every last one of those crystals does? How can you be sure? We haven’t tested any of them. We barely examined them before we started jamming them into a jury-rigged array. What if some of them have microscopic variations in their structures that give them different properties? Or lower thresholds for stress? Starfleet would never be so cavalier with technology of its own making, so why is it acting so carelessly with these products of an unknown alien science?”

“Because this ‘unknown alien science’ is all that stands between us and a repeat of the attack that turned your lab into a war zone,” Nogura said. “The Shedai we captured—and which later escaped—could come back at any time, Doctor. We couldn’t track it when it accelerated to faster-than-light speed, which means we’ll have no warning of its next attack until it’s on top of us. Phasers barely affect it, and we have no other way of containing it. So I’m sorry if your principles feel sullied by our work, but I assure you, it’s absolutely necessary.”