Star Trek: Vanguard - 08 - Storming Heaven by David Mack

Author:David Mack [Mack, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Media Tie-In, Adventure, Star Trek Fiction, Space Warfare, Space Stations, Interstellar Travel
ISBN: 9781451650709
Google: njBUf_rYL6EC
Amazon: 1451650701
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2012-03-27T07:00:00+00:00

19

The Wanderer turned her thoughts to stillness, arresting her motion. Her solitary journey to the Telinaruul’s bastion in the darkness had been arduous, burdened as she was with a ponderous mass of superdense matter. Her native ability to traverse space—a talent that made her unique among the Shedai—normally entailed shifting only her consciousness and an attendant field of energy. Only a few times before then had she tried to bear physical objects across the interstellar void. Even small and relatively insignificant payloads had proved exhausting. It was a testament to her recent increase in power that she had become strong enough to bear a load such as this.

Lingering in the comfort of darkness, she attuned herself to the invisible energies that transited the ether in all directions. This was but one mystery of the great emptiness—that it was never truly empty. Space-time was abundant with unseen forces and extradimensional pockets of dark power waiting to be tapped, if only one understood how to see the universe’s true shape.

She knew she was beyond the reach of the Telinaruul’s mechanical sensing devices, ensuring that her next great labor would not attract their attention. In contrast, their presence was a clarion shattering the silence, a white-hot beacon in the dark. High-energy signals poured like a river from their space fortress. Shining brighter than all of it was the presence of the Progenitor, his essence blazing like a sun despite his imprisonment within an artifact of the Tkon.

How arrogant these Telinaruul were! Who were they to think they had the right to act as jailers for a being who had been an ancient before their kinds’ first ancestors took shape in the primordial soups of their insignificant worlds? To enslave a being who had ruled a spiral arm of the galaxy before their puny races even had language? It was an offense against the natural order.

They will all suffer, she vowed. Soon, the Progenitor will be free, and they will all know the cold fire of our vengeance. If forced to choose between emancipating the Progenitor and destroying the station, the Wanderer knew that the freedom of her people’s great sire took precedence. Pride demanded that the Telinaruul pay for their hubris, but as one of the Serrataal, her duty to the Elder One trumped all other objectives and desires.

The Wanderer focused her essence on the block of raw matter she had borne across hundreds of light-years. Her consciousness penetrated its superdense atomic structure, beheld its ultrastable atomic shells, and marveled at its furious inner storm—particles of every conceivable color, flavor, and spin. Manipulating muons and quarks, bosons and neutrinos, she reshaped the matter by will alone, transforming it into an extension of her desire, an instrument of her impending vengeance. This would be slow work, demanding the most painstaking precision and attention to subnuclear details. This was a labor the Wanderer had undertaken only twice before in her countless millennia, though neither instance had been freighted with such urgency as this. On those occasions, the continued existence of the Shedai had not been at stake.

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