“Your medallion,” the man said, gesturing with his chin toward the mandala resting on Pennington’s chest. “It is quite unusual. How did you acquire it?”
The manner in which the man asked his question made Pennington uncomfortable. “A friend gave it to me.”
“Odd,” the man said. “Such rarities are usually bequeathed only to family members.”
Pennington broke eye contact and tried to sidestep the Vulcan. “You must be mistaken.”
Blocking his path, the Vulcan said, “It comes from the commune at Kren’than, does it not?”
At the mention of T’Prynn’s native village, a technology-free retreat populated by mystics and ascetics, Pennington froze. He suspected the man was not really interested in the medallion. Facing him, Pennington was wary as he said,
“Yes, it does.”
“As I thought,” the man said.
The Vulcan handed him a scrap of fragile parchment that had been folded in half. As soon as Pennington took hold of it, the stranger walked away at a brisk pace and blended back into the earth-toned sea of robed Vulcans crowding the spaceport.
Pennington unfolded the note.
There were three things written on it: a set of geographic coordinates, a precise time, and a date exactly three weeks in the future.
He folded it and put it in his pocket.
Other
Star Trek: Vanguardbooks
Harbinger
by David Mack
Summon the Thunder
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack
Open Secrets
by Dayton Ward
STAR TREK ®
VANGUARD
Precipice
DAVID MACK
Based upon Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
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Art by Doug Drexler
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ISBN 978-1-4391-3011-7
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For my brother:
thanks for always being on my side.
Historian's Note
This story takes place in 2267, beginning in early January and concluding at the end of December, a few weeks after the events of the second-season Star Trekepisode “A Private Little War.”
Good and bad men are each
less so than they seem.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830
Precipice
PART ONE
Such Deliberate Disguises
1
January 3, 2267
Disruptor pulses thundered against the unshielded hull of the Starfleet transport U.S.S. Nowlan.
On the Nowlan’s bridge, Diego Reyes clenched his jaw and winced. The forward bulkhead blasted inward. Reyes ducked behind the command chair as shrapnel flew past and pattered to the deck around him. Fine, metallic dust rained down on his shoulders and into his thinning steel-gray hair.
He looked up from behind the chair and peered through bitter smoke to see the ship’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Brandon Easton, lying on the deck, his gold uniform tunic torn by jagged bits of metal and stained heavily with blood. The dull, unfixed quality of Easton’s stare was one Reyes had seen far too many times: the man was dead.
Reyes looked aft for Lieutenant Ket, the Bolian security officer who had escorted him from the brig to the bridge minutes earlier. To his dismay, Ket was also gone, the victim of a wedge of duranium lodged in his left temple.
At the forward console, two figures stirred.
The first was the female human navigator and helm officer. She had been lying on the floor, apparently stunned rather than dead. Lucky gal,mused Reyes. If she’d been on her feet, she’d have a faceful of shrapnel right now. Sitting up from behind the flickering console, which housed the helm and navigator’s station on the left and the sensor controls on the right, was the sensor officer, a human man with crew-cut blond hair.
The two shaken officers, both dressed in black trousers and gold command shirts with lieutenant stripes on their cuffs, looked at Reyes with desperate expressions. “Sir?” said the woman, pushing her curly brown hair from her eyes. “What do we do?”
Years of command experience snapped Reyes into action. He nodded at the two officers. “Take your posts.” He brushed the grit from the seat of the command chair, then settled into it. “What’re your names, lieutenants?”
“Paul Sniadach.”
“Bronwen Hodgkinson.”
For a moment, Reyes almost forgot that just five weeks earlier he had been convicted in a Starfleet court-martial, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to ten years in a penal colony. All it had taken was a surprise attack by an unidentified and heavily armed pirate vessel to remind him of who he’d been before being branded a criminal: