Star Trek Vanguard - 05 - Precipice by Star Trek

Author:Star Trek
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781439130117
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Eight weeks of not enough sleep and too much caffeine had left Dr. Carol Marcus feeling frazzled and unfocused. Ever since the Endeavour had returned bearing Ming Xiong and the Mirdonyae Artifact, she and the scores of scientists in the Vault had been working double and even triple shifts to help Xiong unlock the mysterious object’s eldritch secrets.

As she downed the tepid dregs of her fourth cup of coffee for the day, she speculated that her entire department was likely functioning only by the grace of a potent mix of adrenaline and insatiable scientific curiosity.

The reports piled on her desk were too much to face. Stacks of data slates and computer cards threatened to topple over at any moment. When she thought of how hard she had worked to keep her personal work space tidy and organized, the current state of her office felt like a defeat, a surrender to chaos.

It looked like this a year ago, she remembered. Back when I took it over from Xiong. At the time she had prejudged Xiong’s competence based on the muddled condition of his office; now she admitted to herself that she had been too harsh on him. This job could make a basket case out of just about anybody.

Despite the mountains of ostensibly dead-end data their work produced, she and the other researchers had made remarkable discoveries by mining the ancient treasures entrusted to them.

The Taurus Meta-Genome was a complex string of genetic information that, when unraveled, yielded a cornucopia of raw data. Different parts of it had been seeded into seemingly basic life-forms throughout the Taurus Reach, spurring Starfleet to engage in what amounted to an interstellar scavenger hunt.

When coupled with an energy waveform known as the Jinoteur Pattern, the Meta-Genome data was like a key that unlocked one mystery of the universe after another: flawless tissue regeneration, complex matter-energy conversions, and even the first clues to bridging distant points of space-time. Starfleet had documented only part of the waveform’s total pattern, however. Its only known source had been the Jinoteur system, which had been violently destroyed more than a year earlier by a space-time implosion that blinked the system out of existence.

Both the genome and the pattern owed their genesis to a mysterious and dangerous species known as the Shedai. Hundreds of millennia earlier, they had been the rulers of this region of the galaxy. Their civilization had collapsed aeons ago, but the Shedai themselves apparently had lived on, hibernating and hiding, only to awaken when Starfleet began unlocking the secrets of their long-dormant technology.

And now there was the Mirdonyae Artifact—the greatest enigma of them all. It promised to unlock many of the most elusive Shedai mysteries, but Xiong and his colleagues insisted it was not a creation of the Shedai. Alas, after more than eight weeks of subjecting it to every test they could imagine, they seemed no closer than before to explaining who had made it, what it was made of, or where it had come from.

Marcus’s black coffee was now completely cold.

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