“Dammit, Bridy,” Cervantes Quinn pleaded via the communicator, “don’t do nothin’ stupid.”
Bridget McLellan—Bridy Mac to her friends—ignored her partner’s advice. She drew her phaser, aimed at the master control panel for the Klingon research facility’s main generator, and fired. Her weapon’s scathing blue beam sliced through the array of buttons, levers, and displays. The slagged console spat sparks and belched smoke. An alarm blared over the compound’s PA system and was followed by a guttural male voice barking orders in Klingon. She lifted her communicator and smiled. “Too late.”
“Goddammit, lady, you love to make my life difficult.”
“It’s a living. Be at the gate in ninety seconds.”
“Already on my way, darlin’.”
Bridy sprinted past a spreading wall of fire that had been ignited by her forced entry moments earlier, winced as flames licked at her face, and bashed open the door ahead of her with her shoulder. Disruptor blasts sliced past her close enough to singe her hair. She tumbled to cover behind the low retaining wall of the landing outside the operations shack’s entrance, at the top of a short flight of stairs. She snapped off a shot without aiming, firing down the stairs and stunning a Klingon soldier who had been standing between Bridy and her escape route. She scrambled past him as he collapsed to the ground.
Energy pulses crisscrossed the Klingon research compound, but most of them weren’t aimed at Bridy—they were converging on the biomechanoid alien artifact around which the base had been constructed. The massive device, which to Bridy resembled a terrifying, four-fingered hand whose talons were plunged into a slab of obsidian, crackled with blue lightning as the shimmering energy being trapped within it struggled for freedom.
Bridy had no idea how or when the Klingons had captured one of the ancient aliens known as the Shedai, but her orders from Starfleet Command had been clear: terminate the Klingons’ research program on Zeta Aurigae IV immediately and with prejudice. At first it had seemed a tall order for two undercover agents such as herself and Quinn. Then she had realized that all she’d needed to do was disrupt the power to the artifact. The Klingons’ captive Shedai would do the rest.
The entity was more than living up to her expectations. Massive ribbons of energy lashed out from within the artifact, cutting down entire squads of Klingons with each stroke and filling the air with terrifying cracks, as if from a giant bullwhip. Blood and viscera sprayed from dismembered Klingon bodies, clouding the air around the artifact with a grotesque fuchsia mist.
Counting off the seconds in her head, Bridy sprinted for the compound’s gate, dozens of meters from the operations shack. Behind her, the screeching of disruptors tapered off and was replaced by the agonized groans of the dying. Her shadow stretched away ahead of her, preceding her to the gate. Then another shadow arced toward hers. She dodged left and dove for the ground.
A javelin-tipped tentacle of shimmering fluid shot past her, close enough for her to feel its rush of displaced air. The Shedai’s pointed appendage tore a long, ugly divot into the ground ahead of her.
I set it free and this is the thanks I get? She rolled away while firing her phaser back at the wildly flailing creature. Talk about ungrateful.
Quinn’s ship, the Dulcinea, appeared from behind a nearby ridge and sped toward the compound’s main gate. Bridy pushed herself up from the ground and ran flat out toward the gate while using her thumb to increase her phaser’s power setting to maximum. The droning of Dulcinea’s engines was drowned out by the Shedai’s roar, an unearthly noise like a thousand rusty horns. The din overwhelmed Bridy, who felt it like needles being stabbed through her skull. Her stride faltered. She fell to her knees and instinctively covered her ears. Then the shrieking was replaced by thunderous impacts that shook the ground.
Bridy looked back. The Shedai was free of the Conduit and pummeling the structures inside the Klingons’ compound into rubble and dust.
She forced herself back into motion and staggered toward the gate. Her gait was sloppy, like that of a drunkard, and as she lifted her arm to aim her phaser, she could barely keep it pointed in the gate’s general direction. Pressing the trigger, she hoped she wouldn’t hit Quinn’s ship by mistake.
A blinding flash of phaser energy vaporized more than half the metal gate and a significant chunk of the reinforced thermocrete wall to its right, creating a gap more than wide enough for Bridy’s escape. She stumbled through, careful not to touch the glowing-hot metal or stone with her bare hands. As she cleared the phaser-cut passageway, the Dulcinea touched down directly ahead of her. Its starboard-side hatchway was open, and its ramp had been lowered.
Through a pane of the cockpit’s windshield, Bridy saw Quinn beckoning urgently, and she heard his voice over the open communicator in her hand: “C’mon, sweetheart! We gotta go!”
Bridy all but threw herself onto the ramp and used its railings to pull herself inside the ship, a state-of-the-art Nalori argosy that Quinn had “inherited” from his late rival, Zett Nilric, after killing the assassin in self-defense a few months earlier. The ramp lifted shut behind her, pushing her the rest of the way into the vessel’s main living compartment. The deck and bulkheads thrummed with vibrations from the ship’s engines as she moved forward to the cockpit. Its door slid open ahead of her, revealing a slowly rolling view of the distant horizon.
“We’re clear,” Quinn said. The lean and weathered former soldier of fortune had one hand on the ship’s flight controls and one on its sensor panel. A small display on the center console between the pilot’s and copilot’s stations showed the Shedai laying waste to the few Klingon structures still half-standing and slaying the remainder of the base’s personnel. Quinn nodded at the image of the berserk Shedai. “Any idea which one it is?”
“The Warden, I think.”
The Conduit on the surface crackled with violent energy, and the Shedai transmuted into a serpent of black smoke. Intense white light flashed in the Conduit’s center, and when it faded the black smoke had dissipated, leaving no trace of the homicidal alien hegemon. Quinn shook his head. “Great. Now that thing could be anywhere in the Taurus Reach. God help whoever finds it next.”
Bridy laid a reassuring hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Let’s just hope it’s not us. The Shedai tend to hold grudges.”
“No kidding.” He glanced toward the planet’s surface as he guided the Dulcinea through a steep, banking turn. Except for the Shedai Conduit itself, nothing remained of the Klingon research base except debris and ashes. “Looks like our work here is done,” he said. “Let’s call in the cavalry and have dinner.”