She pulled back the bench a few centimeters and sat down. Placed her hands over the keys. Tried to find her way back to a melody, to a starting point.

There was only silence.

Moving with trepidation, she plunked out one flat note. The sound of it was jarring to her ear. For the first time in her life the instrument felt alien to her. Distant. Unknown.

I remember the notes,she assured herself. I know the songs. Forcing her hands to work from rote memory, she pressed them into service. She struck all the notes in the right order, but it was a struggle to find the grace in them, to feel the attack in the keys, to hear the sustain in the chords.

The melody had become hollow. Empty.

There was no beauty in the music.

She let her hands fall from the keyboard and rest at her sides. Her mind was quiet, her thoughts calm and ordered.

For fifty-three years the katraof her dead fiancé Sten, whom she had slain in the heat of the kal-if-feeto escape an arranged marriage, had haunted her mind. He had brought her nothing but pain and madness. His psychic attacks had clouded her logic and inflamed her passions, eroded her control and dulled her conscience. It had taken her total, public collapse to expose her affliction and deliver her into the hands of Dr. M’Benga and the mystics of her childhood home in Kren’than, with whose help she’d finally cast out Sten’s malevolent spiritual essence.

Free of Sten’s torments she no longer felt any temptation to succumb to base emotions, but she also no longer felt the sweet stirrings of music. Her emotional equilibrium had been purchased at the cost of her only artistic gift.

T’Prynn closed the keyboard cover. Pushed back the bench. Smoothed the front of her red uniform minidress as she stood. Drew a slow, deep breath and let it go.

She thought of all she had sacrificed in the name of duty and self-preservation: her lover, her sanity, her career. If the price of her repentance had to be the loss of her music, she was hardly entitled to protest.

So be it.

Bidding a silent farewell to her muse, T’Prynn turned her back on the piano. Then she stepped off the stage and back into the shadows, where she belonged.

58

December 29, 2267

Abandoning the most boring staff meeting of his life, Admiral Heihachiro Nogura quick-stepped out of his office into Vanguard’s operations center. A shrill Yellow Alert klaxon whooped once in the normally hushed circular compartment.

Nogura hurried up the stairs to the supervisors’ deck. “Commander Cooper,” he called out, announcing his arrival. “Sitrep.”

Cooper looked up from the Hub. “Sorry to interrupt your meeting, Admiral, but we’ve picked up an armed Orion merchantman on approach. Bearing three-eight mark five, range one million kilometers.” Dropping his voice as Nogura drew near, Cooper added, “It’s Ganz’s ship, sir—the Omari-Ekon.”

“Give him credit for having a pair,” Nogura said. “I told him if he ever came back I’d put a hole in his ship, and I meant it. Raise shields, arm and lock all phaser banks, and order Endeavourto stand by for rapid deployment, just in case.”

“Aye, sir,” said Cooper, who turned and swiftly relayed the admiral’s commands to a team of junior officers.

On the lower level of the operations center, the station’s other senior personnel filed out of Nogura’s office. Jackson, Desai, and ch’Nayla followed Nogura up to the supervisors’ deck, while chief engineer Isaiah Farber commandeered a science-purposed workstation for his use.

Ambassador Akeylah Karumé—a striking, colorfully attired, ebony-skinned human woman who had temporarily been promoted into Jetanien’s role as Vanguard’s senior diplomat— seemed content to remain removed from what was transpiring around her. She walked to an open area of the operations level between the supervisors’ deck and the enormous wraparound viewscreen that dominated the high, curving bulkheads.

For the moment, the center viewscreen displayed an image of Ganz’s ship, which was cruising directly toward Vanguard.

Nogura was impatient to know what the hell Ganz was doing. “Hail them,” he said, and Cooper delegated the task to the senior communications officer, Lieutenant Judy Dunbar.

The curly-haired brunette started to key the command into her console but stopped. “Admiral,” she said, “the Omari-Ekonis already hailing us.” She swiveled her chair to face Nogura. “It’s Mister Ganz, sir. He’s asking to speak directly with you.”

Looking at his senior staff to gauge their responses, he was met by a series of near-identical wide-eyed stares. He frowned. “Put him on-screen.”

Buttons were pushed, and one of the center’s three massive screens was filled with the dark green face of the locally notorious Orion crime lord, Ganz. He flashed a smile of immaculate white teeth. “Admiral,”he said. “There’s no need for you to aim weapons at my ship. Our shields are down, and our weapons are not charged. We come in peace.”

“You shouldn’t have come at all,” Nogura said. “I warned you what would happen if you brought your traveling crime spree back into my jurisdiction.”

Ganz lifted his broad, thick-fingered hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “Let’s not resort to threats when I’ve gone to the trouble of bringing you a peace offering.”

Intrigued, Nogura lifted one eyebrow. “And what might that be?”

The burly Orion gestured to someone off-screen. He leaned to his right, out of frame, and returned holding up his hand.

Resting in his palm was a perfectly clear, twelve-sided crystal roughly the size of a human skull. It was identical to the Mirdonyae Artifact, except it appeared to be empty.

“I believe you already have one like it,”Ganz said. “But I hear you might be interested in acquiring another.”

Nogura was so livid he could barely move. When he tried to speak, his jaw felt as if it were wired shut with anger. Recovering his composure, he asked in a tense, low voice, “Where did you get that?”

His question broadened Ganz’s grin. “That,”said the crime boss, “sounds like an invitation to begin negotiating my ship’s return to a semipermanent docking slip on your starbase.”

“The hell it is,” Nogura said. “I’m not going to let you dictate terms to me, Mister Ganz. If you want to discuss financial remuneration for your discovery, fine. But if you think that hunk of rock gives you some license to—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,”grumbled someone on Ganz’s ship who shouldered his way into the frame beside the crime lord. The angle of the transmission adjusted to compensate for the new visual subject, and Nogura’s iron jaw went slack as he saw who was standing beside Ganz.

Diego Reyes scowled at Nogura and said over the comm, “He already knows you have standing orders to acquire anything and everything related to the Shedai, and at all costs, so cut the shit and just make a deal with him already.”

Nogura coped with his surprise by mustering a thin, taut smile. “Well,” he said to Reyes, “this is certainly going to make things more interesting.”

Then he heard Lieutenant Jackson whisper to Captain Desai, “I think you owe me dinner.”

59

Ming Xiong lowered the second artifact onto a new octagonal interface pad inside the Vault’s central experiment chamber. Even through the gloves of his hazmat suit, he could feel the icy coldness of the crystal polyhedron.

“Stand by to patch in the baryonic array,” he said to Dr. Marcus, who was in the chamber with him and also garbed in bright yellow hazmat gear. Their voices sounded flat and mechanical through their suits’ external speakers.