Even if McAteer put any faith in Serenity’s story, which seemed highly unlikely, he would place the assignment in the hands of a more experienced captain. Greenbriar, for instance. Or Vayishra. Or Van Loon.
But Picard was the one who had crossed the barrier and seen Magnia. He alone, of all the captains in the fleet, knew what Serenity’s people were capable of. And he alone had a feel for how far they could be trusted.
Clearly, he was the captain best qualified for this undertaking. It was his duty to take the initiative—and assume the accompanying risk to his career.
After all, what did he have to lose? Thanks to McAteer, he was already on the verge of forfeiting his command.
Of course, he would still transmit a message outlining the situation. If Brakmaktin was indeed the threat Dojjaron made him out to be and Picard failed to defuse him, the rest of the fleet would need to know what had happened.
However, it would be strictly a one-way communication.
Nikolas searched the Iktoj’ni slowly and painstakingly, wandering through corridor after long, dimly lit corridor, but he couldn’t find his friend Locklear. He came across the corpses of a great many other crewmen—all of them stiff and dead, their bodies contorted and their faces drained of blood.
But not Locklear.
Seeing that his friend wasn’t in the corridors, Nikolas looked in the cargo hauler’s service shafts and cargo bays. But he couldn’t find Locklear there either. It was as if he had left the ship, impossible as that seemed.
Still, Nikolas had to find his friend. He couldn’t just let him lie somewhere, twisted and pale and forgotten. He had to find him and say good-bye to him.
There were fifty sleeping compartments on the cargo hauler, though he couldn’t imagine how anyone could have slept through an attack. But one by one, Nikolas went through those as well. He discovered a few more crewmen and a small horned quadruped that wasn’t supposed to be on board. But it was as dead as everyone else, so the breach hardly seemed to matter anymore.
He sat down with the animal and stroked its soft, furry back. It felt stiff and cold underneath its fur.
Suddenly, Nikolas realized that he wasn’t on the Iktoj’ni anymore. Somehow he was back on the Stargazer instead, wearing his cranberry-and-black Starfleet uniform, and the animal he had found was nowhere to be seen.
Allowing that he might have been confused, and that Locklear might have been on the Stargazer instead, Nikolas began his search anew. But he still couldn’t find his friend, no matter how hard he looked or how many places he checked.
Locklear wasn’t in the mess hall or the gymnasium. In sickbay, Nikolas found Greyhorse sitting in his office, but the doctor said that no one had brought Locklear in. Captain Picard and some of his officers were on the bridge, but none of them appeared to have even heard of Locklear.
Finally, as Nikolas was about to admit defeat, a sixth sense told him to look back over his shoulder—and to his relief, there was his pal Locklear. Miraculously, he wasn’t even dead. He was standing there grinning as if it were all a big game—the attack on the ship, the alien, even the bodies of their fellow crewmen.
“Why are you smiling?” asked Nikolas.
“I’m not smiling,” said his friend. “How can I smile? I’m dead.” And right before Nikolas’s eyes, the color drained from Locklear’s face until he was as pallid as all the other victims of the attack.
Nikolas shook his head and took a step back. “No…”
Then Locklear crumpled and hit the deck. But his body didn’t make a sound. It was as if he lacked substance, as if he weighed no more than the air around them.
Nikolas knelt beside his friend and saw that his eye-holes were empty. No, he thought, correcting himself—Locklear’s eyes were still there, lurking in the darkness of their sockets. They had just shriveled like raisins.
“Andreas?” said a voice.
It was different from Locklear’s—soft and strong at the same time, and ever so feminine. And the woman to whom it belonged was somewhere nearby.
Nikolas looked up and saw her standing by herself at the far end of the corridor. She had yellow hair twisted into a single braid and startling blue eyes, and a face that made his heart pound in his chest.
Gerda Idun…? he thought.
“Is that you?” he asked, his voice echoing.
“It’s me,” she said, taking a step toward him, and then another. “I know how bad you feel about your friend, and I want to make your pain go away.”
He did have pain, almost too much to bear. And if anyone could assuage it, was Gerda Idun.
But she had gone back to the universe she came from. He had watched her fade away on the transporter platform, enveloped by a column of light.
“How—?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She just came forward to embrace him. But the closer she got, the more her expression began to change.
Nikolas started to fear that Gerda Idun would die too, just like Locklear and Redonna and all the others. He didn’t think he could stand it if that happened.
However, she remained solid and vital, her cheeks flushed with life. She’s not dying, he realized with a pang of relief. But she looked as if she was in some kind of pain, and it seemed to get worse with every step.
“No,” he breathed, and got up to help her, though he didn’t know what to do. If he couldn’t help Locklear or the others, what could he do for Gerda Idun?
But as he came for her, she recoiled and put her hands up. It was as if she didn’t want him near her.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “I don’t care what happens to me. I just want to hold you again.”
Still, she shrank from him. It was then that he realized it wasn’t Gerda Idun who was changing. It was him.
His hands were becoming pale and clawlike, and his legs were growing weak—too weak to hold his weight. The life was going out of them. As he sank to his knees, he saw the look on Gerda Idun’s face—one of horror and disgust—and that was worse than anything else that could happen to him.
“Please,” he said, though his throat was suddenly too dry to utter anything else. “Please…”
But the corridor was growing dimmer. It was getting harder and harder to see Gerda Idun. And he was too weak to hold himself up any longer. As he fell forward, helpless to stop himself, he knew with a certainty he had never felt before that he would be dead well before he hit the deck….
Suddenly, there was light all around him—light that was too bright for his eyes. And to Nikolas’s surprise, he didn’t feel weak anymore. Propping himself up on an elbow, he shaded his eyes and blinked until he could get some idea of where the light was coming from.
It took a while, but he got his answer. It was coming from everywhere—the walls as well as the ceiling. But on the Stargazer, the only lighting strips were overhead.
Which meant that he wasn’t on the Stargazer. He was somewhere else, he told himself, as the cold sweat of his nightmare began drying on his skin.
And it wasn’t the cargo hauler. That much was becoming clear to him, because he didn’t feel as if he were in a cavern. But it wasn’t until he got to his feet and looked around that it struck him where he might be.
On the Ubarrak ship.
Nikolas could tell by the pictograms cut into the walls. Now that he could see them, there was no mistaking them. They looked exactly like the designs he had studied back at the Academy.
He didn’t know how he had gotten there. But clearly, the alien had had something to do with it.
Getting to his feet, Nikolas looked down the corridor in both directions. They looked equally promising to him—which was to say not very. In the end, he picked one direction at random and followed it, his footsteps echoing wildly, until he found something resembling a turbolift.
Getting inside, he took it to its highest level, which was where he knew he would find the ship’s bridge. When the doors opened, he found himself at the end of a short hallway with heavily inci
sed bulkheads. There was but one door at the other end.
The last time Nikolas had come out onto a bridge, it was full of corpses slumped over their consoles. He prepared himself for something like that here…
And was faced with much the same kind of tableau. There were nearly a dozen thick-necked, uniformed Ubarrak scattered about the command center, some still seated behind their control consoles, others sprawled on the stalagmite-peppered deck—and all of them silent as a tomb.
He moved to get a closer look at one of them, a female who was slumped over a control panel, her face caught in the strobe effect of a dozen blinking lights. Her gaze was vacant, her slitted yellow eyes unfocused in their oversized sockets, lending support to the human’s supposition that she was dead.
But a thread of spittle was still descending from the corner of her mouth. And when Nikolas felt her neck, he discerned a pulse under his fingertips. Damn, he thought, she’s alive.
He tried the Ubarrak at the next console—a male this time—and got the same result. What seemed like a corpse at first glance was a still-living being, albeit without awareness of what was going on around him.
Then he remembered what the alien had said, though it seemed like a very long time ago: “It’s difficult to fire when your mind has been erased.”
And Nikolas hadn’t been misled. The Ubarrak all looked brain-dead, their bodies still functioning at some basic level though their minds had been destroyed.
Somehow, Nikolas found that even more horrifying than the slaughter of his friends aboard the cargo hauler. It was one thing to die and be removed forever from torment and indignity, and another to remain among the living as mute testimony to an enemy’s power.
Easing the male to the deck, Nikolas took his place behind the control panel. It had but one oval-shaped monitor displaying a chart that might have been a fuel consumption trend. It was difficult to say.
Fortunately, Nikolas knew a little Ubarrak. It took him a while, but he was eventually able to punch in the right command to bring up a graphic of the vessel’s course.
It appeared as a bright red line on a green and black grid, with the star systems along its path represented as yellow circles. Though it took some doing, Nikolas managed to divine the line’s direction—and therefore the battle cruiser’s.
The alien was taking them deeper into Ubarrak territory, pursuing the objective he had laid out for himself earlier—the planet whose identity he had plucked out of Nikolas’s head.
With his adversary somewhere else, the human took the opportunity to try to bring the vessel about. But the helm wouldn’t respond. Apparently, he had been locked out of the controls.
Bastard, he thought.
Next, he accessed the operations function and looked for a way to disable the cruiser’s engines. But the alien had placed roadblocks in those command paths as well.
Nikolas’s stomach clenched. He hadn’t willingly done anything to help the monster, and yet it was his fault that the warship’s crew had been turned into vegetables—and his fault as well that the alien was about to descend on an innocent and unsuspecting planetary population.
Unless, of course, Nikolas found a way to stop him.
Chapter Five
LIEUTENANT NOL KASTIIGAN, the purple-jowled Kandilkari chief of the Stargazer’s science section, was hardly the most accomplished navigator on the ship. That designation belonged to Gerda Asmund, hands down.
However, Kastiigan was a connoisseur of even the most esoteric sensor data, an expertise that enabled him to make more of that information than most other people. It was with this talent in mind that the captain had asked him to lend Gerda a hand.
They knew from the Nuyyad scout’s sensor log that she had attacked another vessel and that Brakmaktin had left her at that point. But they didn’t know where he had gone. And before they could figure it out, they had to determine the coordinates at which contact with the second vessel had taken place.
The scout’s stellar positioning data should have made the task a relatively simple one. However, the pertinent files were far from perfectly preserved. The scout had sustained quite a bit of damage in her battle with the second ship, and the positioning data was only one of the casualties.
Fortunately, the scout had recorded other kinds of information as well—data on plasma waves, neutrino activity, gravimetric imbalances, and so on—all of it gathered through the vessel’s long-range sensors. Stored in a different set of logs, it had come through the battle almost completely unscathed.
If Kastiigan could identify a part of space that exhibited the same long-range readings as those picked up by the Nuyyad scout, he might be able to point Gerda in the right direction. At the very least, the captain had believed it was worth a try.
“Anything yet?” asked Daniels, a Magnian with a red mustache who appeared to be Serenity Santana’s second-in-command. He had been hovering over Kastiigan for the last half hour or so, ever since he had entered the science section with his security escort.
The science officer turned from his instruments and smiled at the fellow. “Nothing yet. But I assure you, if I do discover something promising, I will let you know.”
Daniels nodded. Then he left Kastiigan and joined Bender, one of the other science officers, at her console. Bender had been through some difficult times recently. However, she seemed enthralled by Daniels’s presence.
And she wasn’t the only member of the crew fascinated by the Magnians. Kastiigan had seen a number of his colleagues exhibiting the same reaction, stealing wide-eyed glances when they thought their visitors weren’t looking.
It was understandable. These were people endowed with abilities about which other sentients could only dream. The power to manipulate matter with their minds, for instance. Or to resist energy blasts that would kill lesser beings. Or to absorb information at what seemed like an impossible rate.
Kastiigan was intrigued by the Magnians as well, but not because of their superhuman powers. He was captivated by the fact that they would soon be laying their lives on the line against a threat almost too powerful to imagine.
There was a chance that they would die fighting. A good chance, no matter how heroically they acquitted themselves, no matter how ferociously they struggled. And if Brakmaktin prevailed, their sacrifice would eventually be forgotten.
But if Brakmaktin fell somehow, thanks to the Magnians’ efforts or otherwise, they would be revered for what they had done. Their story would be told to children by starlight, and its details coveted like precious stones.
They would enjoy a life in death much greater than anything they had before, a life reserved for those who had paid the ultimate price. And because of that, they would never die.
How Kastiigan envied them.
Pug Joseph, acting head of security on the Stargazer, was concentrating so hard on reviewing the list of security personnel he had assigned to the Magnians that he almost collided with a Magnian there in the corridor.
As luck would have it, it was the only one he really knew—Serenity Santana, the woman who had dragged Joseph and his crewmates into the thick of her people’s battle with the Nuyyad.
Lieutenant Pierzynski was right there with her—a good thing, since the captain had said he wanted their guests accompanied by security officers at all times. It was an order the Magnians hadn’t questioned.
“Mister Joseph,” Santana said as she got closer, an unmistakable note of pleasure in her voice. “How are you?”
Damn, but she was beautiful. The security chief had managed to forget how beautiful.
“Fine,” he said. “And you?”
A shadow crossed her face. “A little tired. But then, we’ve been moving rather quickly.”
“To stop this Nuyyad,” he said.
“Yes,” said Santana. Suddenly, she seemed to shrug off her mantle of care. “I understand you’ve been promoted.”
“Not exactly,” said Joseph, with a glance at Pierzynski. “I’m just the acting head of
security.”
Santana shrugged. “I’d be willing to bet that’s only a temporary situation.”
He looked at her askance. Did she know something he didn’t? She was a telepath, after all. She might have dipped into the captain’s mind and read his intentions.
Just as she might have been reading his at that very moment. The realization made him blush.
“It was just a figure of speech,” Santana told him. “Sorry if I got your hopes up.”
“It’s all right,” he assured her.
But it wasn’t, not completely, and he knew that she could tell. She had those powers, after all.
“Well,” Santana said, “it’s good to see you. I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”
“No doubt,” said Joseph.
He nodded to Pierzynski. Then he continued down the corridor, doing his best not to think anything at all.
Simenon hefted the phaser rifle—a design that was decidedly different from any he had seen before, with its shorter, thicker barrel, its single handle, and its blue-black casing—and then handed it back to the Magnian. In the soft lighting of the engineering section, the weapon glistened like the hide of some dark, lean-muscled predator.
“It feels lighter than ours,” the Gnalish observed.
Vigil O’Shaugnessy nodded, loosening a lock of her sleek brown hair. “That’s because it doesn’t have a trigger, a keypad for making adjustments in beam width and intensity, or a subspace transceiver assembly.”
Simenon looked at her. The subspace transceiver built into every handheld phaser on the Stargazer facilitated communication with the ship’s computer, preventing phased emissions more powerful than “heavy stun.”
In other words, O’Shaugnessy could blow a hole through the Stargazer’s hull if she wished. It made Simenon squeamish just thinking about it.
“And you know about our phaser rifles…?” he asked.
O’Shaugnessy smiled. “It wasn’t by studying the blueprints, I can tell you that.”
Simenon tilted his scaly head to the side. “All our ordnance is—”
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