35
Billions of radiant specks swam in the frigid darkness that surrounded Ming Xiong. Demonic howls and wails assailed him, but his eardrums were still ringing with tinnitus from the sharp crack of the isolation chamber’s reinforced door exploding away from its frame and pealing the distant bulkhead like a church bell.
He couldn’t bring himself to scream as the Shedai erupted in a torrent from the isolation chamber and gathered around him in a great cloud, a storm of ice and shadow. His mind was numb, his very existence reduced to a state of inarticulate horror. All he could do was cling to his pedestal-shaped console and watch the real-time sensor readouts.
The Enterprise and the Endeavour were still too close to the station for him to risk triggering the self-destruct system. Why haven’t they gone to warp? He feared with each passing moment that he might have to condemn them to share his fate.
At the same time, except for a small force of ships that were pursuing the Endeavour and the Enterprise, the Tholian armada was redeploying into a close-range heavy bombardment formation around the station. As devoutly as Xiong wished he could have left this matter to them, he couldn’t trust their weapons to even affect the Shedai, much less guarantee their destruction. Worse, their impending barrage might damage the Vault’s self-destruct system enough to prevent it from unleashing its maximum yield at the moment of detonation, so he would have to trigger the autodestruct package as soon as they resumed fire on the station, regardless of whether the Endeavour and the Enterprise had escaped the blast zone.
And still, all he wanted to do was run.
A dark flash of motion, a black blur in the shadows, and he felt the sharp bite of an obsidian blade as it slammed through his torso. His knees buckled, and then he felt as if he were standing on rubber legs. Blood, warm and tasting of tin, gurgled up his esophagus and spilled over his chin. He looked down and saw the broadsword-sized, jagged-edged mass that had impaled him. Following its edge back toward its source, he saw that it became translucent within a meter of his body, and after that it gradually changed states, first to a dense liquid and then to a tenuous mass of vapor extended from the great cloud of Shedai.
The tentacle jerked back, yanking its black blade from Xiong’s body in an agonizing blur that left him clutching at his belly with one hand and hanging onto his console with the other. Where he expected to find his blood and viscera spilling out, he found a freezing cold mass of quartzlike stone covering his wound. Then he felt its deathly chill traveling across his skin, and he realized it was spreading. An icy, stabbing sensation inside his gut alerted him to the substance’s cancerlike progression through his internal organs. Cold suffused his body, and he felt his strength ebbing along with his body’s heat.
Then he became aware of other presences, distinct entities, drawing near to him. Hunched giants of smoke and indigo light, they wore auras of arrogance and malice like crowns of evil. The unholy host of spectral figures pressed inward. Then one spoke with a voice that wed the roar of an avalanche with the fathomless echoes of a Martian canyon. “Foolish little spark.” Rich with condescension, its Jovian baritone shook the station. “What made your kind think it could ever contain such as us? You are but glimmers in the endless gaze of time. Weak minds trapped inside sacks of rotting flesh and fragile bone. You are nothing.”
Xiong wished he had some irreverent reply, some witty retort for its taunts, but all he had was a mouthful of blood and a body shivering with hypothermia and adrenaline overload.
“So? Who are you?”
“I am the Progenitor, the wellspring of all that is Shedai. First among the elite.”
“Good for you.”
He stole a look at the console. Endeavour and Enterprise remained at impulse. Come on. Go, already!
The Progenitor loomed over him, its countenance one of perfect darkness, a black hole surrounded by sickly hues and pestilent vapors. Its approach sent frost creeping across Xiong’s console. “All your worlds will pay for your trespasses. Your kind will learn to fear us like never before.” A tentacle of smoke coiled around Xiong’s throat and solidified into a substance that felt like solid muscle sheathed in cold vinyl. Then it lifted him up against the ceiling and started choking him by slow degrees. “Beg for mercy, and I will grant you a swift death. Defy me, and I will keep your consciousness alive to witness every horror and atrocity we visit upon your pathetic Federation.”
The Tholian armada was in position. Its final siege was only moments away.
Xiong could barely feel his hands as he clutched at the Progenitor’s black tentacle. Looking down in terror and anguish, he glimpsed his console, which was now blanketed by a paper-thin layer of frost. He could no longer see the sensor readout’s fine details, but he could still see two bright blue points of light that he knew were the escaping Starfleet ships.
Then both dots vanished from the display. They’ve made the jump to warp!
He forced out a desperate whisper, “Mercy . . .”
The Progenitor dropped him. He rolled as he hit the floor, coming to a stop in front of his console. Fighting past the torturous sensation of a hundred needles of ice drilling through his intestines, Xiong fought his way back to his feet and slumped against his console. He had planned to do so as a ruse, but it had become a necessity.
“So,” the Progenitor mocked, “it’s to be a quick death, is it?”
Xiong looked up at the Progenitor and flashed a bloodied grin. “You have no idea.”
He pressed the autodestruct trigger, and his pit of darkness turned to light.
Bruised and aching, Admiral Nogura stepped out of the turbolift and onto the bridge of the Endeavour, only to be brusquely shouldered aside by the ship’s surgeon, Doctor Anthony Leone, and one of its nurses, who together carried out an unconscious and maimed young lieutenant on a stretcher. “Out of the way,” Leone said, his nasal voice tolerating no argument. The short, sinewy physician seemed to regard Nogura not as a flag officer but as an obstacle.
The turbolift doors hissed closed behind Nogura as he inched toward the center of the bridge. Captain Khatami appeared to have suffered her fair share of lacerations from airborne debris. Blood trickled down from above her hairline and seeped from a cut beside her right eye; numerous bloodstains tainted her gold command jersey in flecks and streaks.
Apparently having caught sight of Nogura out of the corner of her eye, Khatami swiveled her chair toward him. “Admiral, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Though I might have to court-martial Lieutenant T’Prynn. Again.”
A curious look. “For what?”
“Saving my life,” Nogura grumbled.
Khatami looked slyly amused. “Good luck getting a conviction for that.”
“Did you finish evacuating the station?”
“Yes, sir, thanks to Kirk and the Enterprise. We—” A sudden flash on the main viewer snared her eye and snapped her back into command mode. “Klisiewicz, report.”
The science department chief stared with haunted eyes at the sensor display. “It’s Vanguard, Captain. It blew up and took most of what was left of the Tholian armada with it.”
The image on the main viewscreen changed to show an incandescent cloud of fire blooming against the starry sprawl of deep space, its rolling blazes littered with chunks of the once-mighty starbase and the broken husks of dozens of Tholian warships. Within seconds the storm of superheated gases had already begun to dissipate into the endless darkness.
The autodestruct, Nogura realized. Xiong must have triggered it from the Vault. He descended into the command well. “Are there any Shedai life signs, Lieutenant?”