David Mack - Star Trek: Vanguard #3: Reap the Whirlwind

Historian's Note

Reap the Whirlwind takes place in 2266 (Old Calendar), beginning roughly six weeks after the end of Summon the Thunder and ending before the Original Series episode "The Corbomite Maneuver."For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

- Hosea 8:7

Prologue

The Fire

And The Song

The First World

Come to me....

The Shedai Wanderer extended herself across the void, her thoughts like tendrils: filaments of consciousness in the darkness- seeking, probing, questing, longing for the touch of the Conduit Song, the harmony of the Voice that could not help but answer her call.

So many lie sleeping, she lamented. So many linger in the shadows of oblivion, content to be liberated from mere being. Free of the past, reposed beneath scatterings of dust on worlds long abandoned. Ours was to rule, not fade away.

Gulfs of space-time stretched away from the Wanderer, vast expanses of vacuum desolate and forlorn. The Song was feeble, a weak melody amid the cosmic noise and the rasp of background radiation. Even in the deepest recesses of the universe, there was no silence; peace was a luxury reserved for the grave. She knew that unless the Song could be amplified, the Others would remain lost to the formless night, dissipated essences.

Come closer....

A single Voice could awaken a hundred Conduits and raise a hundred sleepers. To bring the Voices back to the center was the only way. And so the Shedai Wanderer reached out through the First Conduit and enlarged her sphere of thought-space, extended its range, sought out the ancient Voice.

The effort of reaching in all directions was taxing for the Wanderer, but the recent profound incursion of Telinaruul into the realm of the Shedai had convinced her that haste was needed. Already two groups of Telinaruul had shown that they were deliberately seeking out the Conduits of the Shedai and that they intended to plunder them for their secrets. The intruders' technology, though not equal to that of the Shedai, had proved formidable, and the Telinaruul were coming in numbers. No longer could the Wanderer face this threat alone. Though the planned era of the Second Age was still aeons in the future, she resolved to rouse the Others and summon them home.

Answer me....

Then came the reply: We hear you.

It was not the obedient Voice as it once had been. Gone was its deferential, reverent tone- it had been replaced by suspicion and defiance. Its psychic timbre had changed, had grown deeper, sharper, more complex. Unmistakably, it was the Kollotuul- the Voice of the Shedai. The Wanderer abandoned the exhausting projection of her spherical thought-space and focused herself through the First Conduit toward the Kollotuul. Follow my voice, she commanded.

Day-moments elapsed like shallow breaths. The Kollotuul drew closer, bending the fabric of space-time around themselves much as the Telinaruul had done. A low drone of anxiety preceded them, cold and unyielding in its thinly veiled hostility.

The Wanderer abandoned the burden of her physical prison and roamed into the heavens above the atmosphere, cast her thoughts into space above the First World. Dispersed between its three moons, she perceived the approach of the Kollotuul from multiple vantages. Above the lush blue-green orb of the First World, the Voice's fragile shell slowed and entered a geo-stationary orbit above the planet's largest ocean. The vessel's trilateral symmetry gave it a blocky, wedge-like aspect; it looked solid and formidable. Its energy source, like others the Wanderer had recently encountered, was a matter-antimatter reactor. The ship was also heavily armed- with the same kinds of weapons that had destroyed the world on which she had chosen to sleep for the next two revolutions of the galaxy.

I must be cautious not to provoke them, she knew. They must not be allowed to repeat their sin against our kind. As if assessing the texture of a rough stone, she caressed their minds with her thoughts, taking their measure and counting their number. There were hundreds of them, all bold and bright and tempered in fire, bristling at her touch, more aware of her presence than she had remembered the Kollotuul being capable of. These will not be yoked willingly to the First Conduit, she realized. They will resist and force me to break their will.... So be it.

One singer among them burned brighter than the others; his thoughts colored those around him. He is the leader, the Wanderer concluded, and she took him first. Ringing tones of panic chorused inside the Kollotuul's ship as a wrinkle of space-time enfolded its commander, moving with invisible power at the whim of the Wanderer. Clamorous alarm grew pitched as she snatched up the crew, taking some singly, others in groups. She shifted them instantaneously to the planet's surface, releasing them into the core of the First Conduit, whose dark energies were already pulsing to life. A flicker of time, and the Kollotuul were her prisoners, as helpless as their ancestors had been hundreds of millennia earlier, when the Maker had plucked them from a volcanic crevasse on a hothouse world with an atmosphere composed of caustic acids and high-pressure gases.

Even secure in her grip they struggled. She marveled at what they had become, at the fury they mustered. Strength would be important for her Voices, she knew. Subjects who were too weak would prove unable to survive the rigors of the First Conduit. But too much strength was potentially even worse; a Voice blessed with too great a capacity to resist could defy the will of the Shedai and use the Conduit's power for itself, as the Kollotuul had done long ago, during the Age of Grim Awareness. Complicating the matter was the fact that these were not the Kollotuul of old; they had evolved. A better name for them, the Wanderer speculated, might be Kollotaan: "new Voices." If the Kollotuul had evolved into Kollotaan, they might no longer be compatible with the Conduits.

There was only one way to know for certain.

The Shedai Wanderer selected the strongest of the Voices, their leader. Wrapping him in coils of fire from within the First Conduit's core, she separated him from the others and bound him to a node, one that would speak to the farthest reaches of the Shedai's possessions. She focused herself through thought-space and projected the Song toward him with a simple command: Amplify.

He resisted, responding in measures equal to her effort. The harder she tried to force him to be her clarion calling out in her voice to distant stars, the more violently he defied her. The fires of the Conduit blazed hotter and darker, enveloping the Kollotaan leader, who thrashed in its grip and emitted piercing, metallic screeches of agony.

Speak with my voice, the Wanderer demanded.

Twisting and shrieking inside the lightless inferno of the First Conduit's strongest node, the leader did not surrender to the Wanderer's will. Whether he was merely unwilling or in fact unable to yield himself was unclear. Then the immensely powerful forces inside the Conduit reduced him to dust and vapor, and the question of whether his substance or his spirit had been the stronger was rendered immaterial.

Finding the right Voices for the Conduit would take time, the Wanderer now understood. Striking the necessary balance between strength and malleability would be a matter of simple trial and error.

She looked to the gathered mass of Kollotaan, selected the next-strongest specimen she could identify, and yoked him to the same node inside the First Conduit.

From the first lick of dark fire, the Voice filled the Conduit with an eerie, high-pitched wail of terrified noise. A jolt of agony brought it under control.

Speak with my voice, the Wanderer commanded. Or die.

Part One

The Brink of

Shadow