Jackson stepped aside and motioned for Xiong to take his place. “See for yourself.”
Xiong pressed up against the window and peered into the ruby mists of Ezthene’s habitat. “Where is he? I don’t see him.”
“Look down,” Knight said.
As indicated, the expatriate Tholian was lying on the deck in front of the inner hatch, below a unique interface panel that had been designed to enable Ezthene to initiate contact with those outside his segregated compartment. His orthorhombic limbs were all curled inward, as if to shield his abdomen and thorax. Xiong asked, “Has he moved?”
“A couple of times,” Jackson said. “He alternates between—”
Ezthene sprang from the deck and flailed about in wild, jerking movements. His piercing screech shrilled over the open intercom channel like a diamond drill cutting through duranium. He slammed his body against the walls and the inner hatch, and his ponderous thuds of impact were audible through the reinforced bulkheads. Xiong recoiled by instinct as Ezthene threw himself violently against the transparent barrier.
Hoping to end the tantrum, Xiong reached over and spoke into the intercom. “Ezthene! Calm down, please. It’s me, Ming Xiong.” Ezthene continued his display, his ferocity undiminished. “Ezthene, can you hear me? It’s Xiong. Please respond!”
“The voice!” shrieked Ezthene, his words sounding as harsh from the universal translator as they did in his native language. “The voice!”
He kept repeating those same two words, over and over, until Xiong turned off the intercom. “That’s not good,” he muttered.
Knight turned her baffled stare in his direction. “You know what that means?”
“I have some idea,” Xiong said. “But please don’t ask. I guarantee you really don’t want to know.” He turned toward Jackson. “Have you been maintaining surveillance on Ezthene?”
“Twenty-four seven,” Jackson said, “just like the admiral ordered.”
Xiong said to Knight, “I need your tricorder. Now.” She lifted her tricorder from her hip, ducked out from under its strap, which had crossed the front of her blue minidress, and handed the device to Xiong. He handed it to Jackson. “Patch into your security logs and confirm the exact moment Ezthene started going berserk. Hurry, please. It’s important.”
Jackson worked quickly, and several seconds later he said, “His seizure, or whatever we’re calling it, began at precisely nineteen seconds past 1622 hours.”
“That is definitely not good,” Xiong said, feeling as if the floor had dropped out from under him. Inside the habitat, Ezthene ceased his wilding and slumped back to the deck, his narrow limbs once again retracted like a clutching talon around his segmented torso. Xiong reopened the comm channel. “Ezthene? Are you still conscious? Can you hear me?” He thought he heard the scratching sound of a reply from within, but the translator remained silent, so he increased its audio sensitivity. “Ezthene? Can you repeat what you said?”
“Must . . . silence the voice . . . .”
A final twitch and then he was still. Jackson scanned him with the tricorder. “He’s alive.” He squinted at the tricorder’s display, then turned it upside down. “At least I think he is. I can’t make heads or tails of his biology.”
Knight plucked the tricorder from his hands. “Let me.” She checked the readouts, “Ezthene appears to be in a catatonic state. It might be part of his healing process.”
Xiong didn’t like the sound of that. “Might be?”
“It also might be a sign that he’s suffering a nervous collapse.”
Jackson chided her, “I thought you were an expert on Tholians.”
“I am,” she said. Then her bravado faltered. “Just not ones that are still alive.” She recoiled, hyperactive and defensive. “Well, I never had a chance to study a live one before!”
“Oh, that’s just great,” Xiong said. He turned off the intercom. “Rest assured, if he dies, you’ll be the first person I call.” He stepped away to a nearby companel on a wall, entered his security code, and then punched in the code for the Vault.
A soft beep over the comm and then, “Theriault.”
“Vanessa, it’s Ming. Shut down all experiments involving the array, take the interface off line, and route all available power to the containment system.”
“Roger that. But what if we get orders to continue?”
“Ignore them. I’ll explain why when I get back. Right now, I have to head up to command and tell the admiral why I pulled the plug. Xiong out.” He switched off the companel and walked back to Jackson and Knight. “If there’s any change in Ezthene’s status, raise me on my communicator immediately. And not a word of this to anybody else, understood?”
Jackson’s relaxed body language telegraphed his answer: “Whatever you say.”
Xiong nodded his thanks and ran for the turbolift.
As the doors closed and he grabbed the control handle to guide the lift to ops, he wondered who was about to have a worse day: him, Ezthene, or Admiral Nogura.
Pondering the worst-case scenario, he realized it would likely be a three-way tie.
They were all going to lose.
The dire implications of Xiong’s news dominated Nogura’s thoughts. His headache began a few seconds later, inflicting viselike pressure on his temples. “Are you sure about the timing of the two events? Is there any chance it was a coincidence?”
“It’s possible,” Xiong said, “but damned unlikely.” He pointed at the side-by-side time comparisons he’d routed to Nogura’s computer monitor. “At the exact second we triggered the pulse that vanished that planet, Ezthene suffered a violent seizure and collapsed, and he’s been getting worse ever since. Considering when we last saw this kind of correlation between Shedai-related activity and Tholian meltdowns, I don’t think we should be taking any chances.”
“Agreed.” Nogura didn’t need Xiong to elaborate. He’d read the full reports of Operation Vanguard when he’d assumed command, so he was aware of the widespread incidents three years earlier of Tholians suffering simultaneous violent seizures during a brief moment of unshielded emissions from the first Conduit that Starfleet had tinkered with. He also remembered well the subsequent consequences of that early misstep. “The last time the Tholians got worked up like this, they sterilized Ravanar IV and destroyed the Bombay,” he said. “So what I need to know, Ming, is whether the effects of our experiment were limited to our friend Ezthene—or if we’ve just taken a torch to a hornet’s nest.”
“Our best bet would be to check in with someone on Earth,” Xiong said. “Maybe the Starfleet liaison to the president, or someone at the Department of the Exterior. If the Tholian delegation to Paris just had a seizure, we’ll know we’re in trouble.”
It was worth a try, Nogura figured. He activated the intercom to his yeoman. “Lieutenant Greenfield, I need a real-time priority subspace channel to the secretary of the exterior.”
“Aye, sir. I’ll have Lieutenant Dunbar route it to you as soon as we make contact.”
“Thank you.” He switched off the intercom. “The one flaw in this plan is that the Tholians tend to sequester themselves inside their embassy except when they visit the Federation Council or the Palais on official business. Even if they have felt the effects of our array, unless they were out and about when it happened, there might be no way of confirming our hypothesis.”
Xiong’s brow creased as he considered their dilemma. “Well, it would take longer to get any answers, but if we had to, we could contact Ambassador Jetanien and ask him to look into it. He might have access to sources of information that we don’t.”