The second Shedai, whose shape was constantly in flux, lashed out at the one that was holding the Sagittarius. It landed fierce, stabbing blows that impaled the spiderlike colossus, and fiery slashing attacks amputated the creature’s supporting appendages. Its “harpoon” retracted from the Sagittarius as the two titans collapsed in a writhing fury and sank into the muddy brown river.
“Free to navigate,” zh’Firro reported. Then she pointed the ship skyward and accelerated.
Nassir pressed a button on the arm of his chair and opened the intraship comm to the top deck. “Good work up there.”
“Thanks, Skipper,” Ilucci replied. “Main power’s up, but we’re still working on warp speed. You’ll have transporters in two, shields in five.”
“Hours?”
“Minutes, sir,” Ilucci clarified.
“Just what I wanted to hear, Master Chief.”
“Service with a smile, that’s us. Engineering out.”
The captain looked at McLellan. “Start looking for our people on the surface. As soon as we have transporter locks, I want them aboard.”
“Aye, sir,” she said, and walked with a stiff gait to the engineering console. While she worked scanning the planet’s surface, Nassir was relieved to see it recede on the main viewer. The fading away of the blue-green atmosphere to the star-flecked majesty of space felt to him like a homecoming.
“Captain,” McLellan said. “Lieutenant Xiong’s on the surface. I have a lock on his tricorder.”
Nassir moved to her side at the engineering console. “What about Terrell and Theriault?”
“Commander Terrell’s aboard the Rocinante,” she said, pointing at an icon on a map above her station. “They’re in an area with a lot of signal interference.”
Confused, the captain wondered aloud, “What are they doing? Why haven’t they left yet?”
From the other side of the small bridge, Sorak opined, “The most likely answer, Captain, is that they are continuing the search for Ensign Theriault.”
“Bridy,” Nassir said, “can you hail them?”
“It’ll take a few minutes,” she said. “I have to filter out the interference at their end.” Adjusting the dials in front of her, she added, “If it wasn’t for their energy signature, I never would’ve found them.”
Nassir nodded his understanding. “Do what you have to,” he said. “In the meantime, send Xiong’s coordinates to Ilucci. Then signal the lieutenant and have him beamed up. It’s time to go home.”
Gaps began to form in the walls of the alien city, riddling it with impromptu shortcuts, crawlspaces, and nooks. Theriault was grateful for one of those gaps, because it was the only cover near the star-shaped multiple intersection where she’d found herself cut off by battling giants in every passage.
Each physical form that was destroyed seemed to intensify the combat. The hulking bodies slammed each other back and forth with wild abandon, shattering towering ribs in the walls that provided critical structural support. With each cacophonous impact, Theriault worried that the structure would come down on top of her. Fear kept her huddled inside the meter-wide fracture in the wall, out of sight but still close enough to the edge to keep watch in case one of the passages cleared.
Four of the routes away from the intersection appeared to lead outside. A few seemed to lead only to other intersections. But one was unique, and it captivated her. At its end was a vast chamber steeped in a deep violet glow and inky shadows and resounding with a macabre groaning choir punctuated by keening atonal wails of noise. By her reckoning, that chamber was inside the massive domed structure that the Apostate had pointed out to her, the one he had called the First Conduit. If, as she suspected, it was linked to the artifacts that Starfleet had found throughout the Taurus Reach and the device that Xiong had found on the Tholian battleship, she wanted to see it up close.
A broken obsidian body slammed to the floor outside her crevice and shattered into billions of crystalline shards.
She recoiled—and felt something grab her shoulder. Instinct coupled with training made her duck, plant her feet, and throw her elbow backward. It hit something pliant, and she looked back to see a slim, handsome, fair-haired human man in civilian clothes holding his bloodied nose.
“Brilliant,” he said, his voice rendered nasal by the fact that he had pinched his nostrils shut.
Her hands covered her mouth, first out of surprise, then out of amusement. “Sorry,” she said, grinning apologetically. “Are you all right?”
“Mostly,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He offered her his other hand. “Hi, I’m Tim Pennington, journalist at large. I’m here to rescue you.”
She almost laughed out loud.
“You’re kidding, right?” “Um…I don’t think so.”
“Why would Starfleet send a reporter to rescue me?”
He shrugged. “Kind of a long story. I’ll tell it to you when we get back to the ship.”
Still slightly suspicious of this fortuitously arrived stranger, she asked, “How’d you even find me?”
Pennington reached behind him and pulled forward a Starfleet-issue tricorder. “A little help from your friends.”
Her eyes locked on to the tricorder. Making a visual observation of the peculiar chamber under the dome might have merited the risk of pressing on, but the ability to make a scan of it with a functioning tricorder was definitely worth it. She looked back across the intersection. The battle had shifted, and the passageway to the darkly shimmering enclosure was clear. Despite knowing that the situation could change at any moment, it was the chance she had been waiting for.
With a jerk of his head, he urged her, “Come on, time’s running out. Let’s go back.”
“No,” she said, grabbing his sleeve and pulling him with her into the intersection. “Let’s go forward.”
He’s undone us, raged the Wanderer. And for what? Flickers of life. Sparks that fade as soon as they are made.
She was high above the city, a sentient wisp tethered by a gossamer tendril to the dying shell of their collective corpus, watching and reporting on the tactics of the enemy.
She was an obsidian sentinel on a lower rampart, standing firm beside the Adjudicator, locked in a struggle both physical and essential with the unpredictable fury of the Myrmidon.
She was a blade of fire, searing and unstoppable, but already two transmogrifications behind the Thaumaturge, who squelched her blaze with his new body of frigid mist.
Flanking maneuvers, sneak attacks, holding actions. She directed a half-dozen more avatars, some gargantuan, others infinitesimal. Without the legions of the Nameless to keep the partisans of the Apostate in check, those Serrataal loyal to the Maker were taxed to their limits fending off the usurpers, who were more experienced and adept at dividing their essences.
Now the Apostate defends one of the Telinaruul within our own sanctum, she seethed. His blasphemies know no end.
Her mind’s eye sought him out, probed the galvanic textures of the conflict raging around her, questing for the malevolent presence of the betrayer. As she had suspected, he lingered close to the Telinaruul—then she noted with alarm that they were moving toward the heart of the Shedai’s power.
All her diverse forms evaporated like forgotten dreams as she focused herself into a single, fearsome guardian avatar. Rushing to intercept the Apostate and his fragile charges, she issued an urgent summons to the Maker and all her allies.
The Apostate guides the Telinaruul to the First Conduit, she warned them. He must be stopped.
A hundred minds followed hers toward the First Conduit. His treachery has gone far enough, the Wanderer decided. No member of the Serrataal had ever been permanently disincorporated, but the Wanderer resolved that the Apostate would be the first.
Lieutenant Ming Xiong rematerialized on the transporter pad of the Sagittarius before he’d even had time to rejoice at receiving a response signal to his tricorder’s emergency beacon. He had made the fortunate decision to keep the tricorder slung at his side ever since he’d made his survey of Jinoteur’s peculiar energy field and its connection to the planet’s flora; if he hadn’t, there might not have been time to retrieve it before the transporter beam had ensnared him.