“Let’s end this,” Diamond said, stepping forward and pulling the stock of her phaser rifle to her shoulder.
Placing a hand on her arm, Xiong called out, “Wait!” Even as he offered the plea, his attention turned back to where the creature had remained since their arrival, offering no hint that it even was aware of their presence.
“What’s it doing?” al-Khaled asked, and Xiong noticed that the engineer had exchanged his own phaser for the tricorder slung over his shoulder. “I’m picking up massive power readings. Not just here but even farther down below us.”
“The self-destruct?” Diamond asked, her voice holding an anxious edge.
Al-Khaled shook his head. “No, this is new, and different. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s as though…”
His remaining words were consumed by an intense rumbling that seemed to come from the walls, the floor and ceiling—everywhere. The illumination offered by dozens of indirect sources embedded into the stone walls flickered as if in response to an immense energy drain, though it did not seem to affect the chamber’s banks of computer screens and consoles.
“What the hell is happening?” Diamond asked, her words a hoarse whisper as she—like Xiong—watched the scene unfold with ever-widening eyes.
The lieutenant’s communicator beeped and he retrieved it from his belt to flip it open. “Xiong here.” He had to hold the unit close to his ear in order to hear the reply.
“ Khatami here, Lieutenant. We’re picking up new power surges from your location. What’s going on?”
“I wish I could tell you, Captain,” Xiong replied, shouting to be heard over the rising din. “We’re watching it happen.”
Standing motionless before the rows of consoles, its arms resting atop two panels, the creature seemed unaffected by anything as the crescendo continued to increase with each passing second. Many of the graphic displays accelerated their scroll of vibrant colors and alien text into a turbulent, unrestrained frenzy. Xiong’s efforts to cover his ears and muffle the disharmonious wail were futile as the noise storm rising up around him began to induce actual discomfort.
Then, as he and the others watched, the creature fell away from the consoles. The instant it broke contact with the smooth, featureless surface, everything stopped, stilled as though a simple switch had been flipped. The only sound in the chamber was the clatter of the humanoid figure as it crashed to the stone floor, collapsing into a lifeless heap.
The silence was so sudden, so encompassing, that Xiong all but staggered back a step at the abrupt shift. “My god,” he said as he stared, openmouthed, at the unmoving form. Activating his tricorder, he held it before him in order to capture detailed readings from the motionless figure. “It’s dead.” Frowning, he added, “At least, I think it is.”
“It did this,” al-Khaled said, holding his arms open to indicate the entire room. “Everything we saw, everything used to attack us. That thing controlled it all from here.”
“One life-form, controlling everything on this entire planet?” Diamond asked. “Including the attack on the Endeavour? That seems pretty far-fetched.” Turning to look around the room for a moment, however, she nodded. “Of course, far-fetched seems to be the order of the day around here.”
Al-Khaled nodded. “The dampening field. It’s possible that it cut off access to the other power sources. We might even have cut it off from whatever it was using to initiate the self-destruct procedure.” Looking around, he exhaled a sigh of profound relief. “Whatever happened, we got damned lucky.”
“Lucky?” Diamond asked. “I didn’t think engineers believed in luck.”
“I do today,” al-Khaled replied.
His focus riveted on his tricorder and the corpse of the alien lying before him, Xiong ignored the banter. According to the readings he was getting, the creature’s physiology was as much crystalline composites as it was living tissue, with one mutual component working to blend the two disparate substances into a seamless, balanced whole.
The meta-genome.
As with the samples he had studied both here and on Vanguard, Xiong easily identified the primary sequence of genetic data common to every sample of the magnificent DNA. Beyond that, his tricorder was registering hundreds of thousands of new components, orders of magnitude more complex than anything they had yet encountered.
It’s all here— waiting.
The force of the revelation was such that it took every ounce of strength and discipline to maintain his composure, lest he offer too much information to al-Khaled and Diamond about his true reason for being here. If his guess was right, if his theory about biometric interfaces being necessary for access to the artifact’s collection of ancient technology had any merit, then the evidence to prove that hypothesis was right here, having been all but dropped into his lap.
With the alien dead, however, validating the idea would still prove a challenge—if indeed it was possible at all.
Xiong could not wait to find out.
41
All things considered, Reyes decided that Desai was reacting well to what she had just been told.
“You son of a bitch,” the captain repeated for the second time, rising from her chair in front of Reyes’s desk and beginning to pace the width of his office. “I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this from me all this time.”
“I had my orders, Rana,” Reyes said, slouching back in his own chair. “You know how that is.”
Waving her hands to indicate the office and—by extension—the rest of the station, Desai said, “So, all of this is nothing more than a sham? That’s why we’re here, to put on a show for curious onlookers? We keep everyone’s attention focused elsewhere while you send out ships to look for who the hell knows what? And what about the Bombay? Did the Tholians destroy it because we were trespassing into their territory?”
“No,” Reyes countered, holding up his right hand and pointing upward for emphasis. “Everything about this station and its role to support new colonization and exploration efforts is absolutely legitimate. The Bombaywas delivering supplies to the Ravanar IV outpost when it was attacked without provocation. That’s the truth.” Of course, it was not the entire truth, but Reyes had already decided that while he needed Desai to know certain facts in order to effectively do her job without making his own responsibilities more difficult, that did not mean he was prepared to lay out every single detail for her. Not today, at least.
Desai stopped her pacing, turning to glare at Reyes as she placed her hands on her hips. “Of course it is. The more truth you mix in with the lie, the easier it is to tell the lie. What’s worse is that I’m part of that lie. Officially, I discontinued the Bombayinquiry because it was determined that the Tholians’ attack was premeditated, but we both know it wasn’t unprovoked. They attacked that ship because they felt threatened by its presence near that planet, and now you seem to be telling me that their actions may well have been justified.”
“It’s not that simple, Rana,” Reyes said, his voice coming off louder and harsher than he had intended. Pausing a moment to clear his throat, he continued, “We don’t know what it is we’ve found here, who’s responsible for it or what other technology they might have created. If what Xiong and his team have managed to figure out is any indication, the possible impacts to science as we understand it are staggering. It should also go without saying that whoever’s behind it all, assuming they’re still around, has the potential to upset the status quo of this part of the galaxy.” If Xiong’s latest report from Erilon was any indication, that statement had taken on an enormous new meaning.