Gauntlet

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “You’re staring out that port again,” Ben Zoma noted.

  Picard chuckled grimly. “I find I do my best thinking here.”

  “You used to do your best thinking in the shower,” said the first officer. “Or so you told me.”

  “That,” said the captain, “was before I had an observation port to stare out of.”

  Ben Zoma found himself smiling. “So what’s on your mind at this advanced hour?”

  “Our approach to catching the White Wolf. I think we need to reconsider it.”

  The first officer pulled up a chair. “I’m all ears.”

  Picard made a fist with his right hand and used his left forefinger to describe a circle above it. As he spoke the circle moved down until it described an equatorial orbit.

  “Right now,” Picard said, “we are descending toward Beta Barritus in a shallow spiral—the textbook approach to finding something in a solar system under less than optimum sensor conditions. The virtue of that approach is the likelihood that we will eventually come across the White Wolf’s position.”

  But there was a downside as well. Picard articulated it.

  “Unfortunately, this may take a very long time. And if the White Wolf is hiding on the other side of the star, which he may well be, catching him will take even longer.”

  Ben Zoma nodded. “No argument there.”

  “What I’m considering,” the captain told him, “is going directly to Beta Barritus—a trip that should take no more than three hours at full impulse. Then, when we’ve come within perhaps a thousand kilometers of the star, we can follow an upward spiral.”

  “Because the White Wolf is probably hiding as close to Beta Barritus as he can,” the first officer noted thoughtfully. “I mean, that’s what I would do—make it as difficult as possible for my pursuers to reach me, much less find me.”

  “Precisely. And if it happens that his sensor capabilities are superior to our radar and he finds us before we find him, he will probably take flight in an outward direction.”

  “Which will eventually flush him out of the system—and make him easy prey for McAteer’s armada.” Ben Zoma grinned appreciatively. “Obviously, you’ve done more than consider this. You’ve thought it through pretty damned thoroughly.”

  “I have,” Picard admitted as he took the seat behind his desk. “So what do you think?”

  Ben Zoma shrugged. “What I think, Jean-Luc, is we ought to put your strategy into action.”

  The captain looked pleased with his friend’s response. “I am glad to hear you say that, Number One.” He tapped his communicator. “Helm, this is Picard . . .”

  And he gave the order to head directly for Beta Barritus.

  “Aye, sir,” said Idun.

  Ben Zoma glanced at the observation port and saw the ruddy glare of the star grow more intense. Idun was bringing them about, putting them on the course Picard had described.

  The captain noticed as well. “There,” he said, and turned back to his friend. “That’s done.”

  Ben Zoma regarded the man on the other side of the desk. “You know,” he remarked, “I’m glad to see you feeling so enthusiastic. For a while there when we first entered this system, you were frowning so hard I thought your face would crack.”

  Picard looked skeptical. “Really.”

  “Really,” said the first officer.

  “Well,” said the captain, “I do feel more in control of the situation. Though, to be honest, I’m anything but in control. I still don’t know what tricks our adversary may be holding in reserve.”

  He had a point, Ben Zoma conceded. It was hard to know how to fight someone when you knew so little about him.

  “Funny,” Picard went on. “I thought our battle against the Nuyyad was our baptism of fire—a fight to the death against a ruthless and powerful enemy. Yet I feel so raw, so untested.”

  “Maybe that’s the way a captain always feels,” Ben Zoma suggested. “No matter how long he’s been in command.”

  Judging by the expression on Picard’s face, that possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “Perhaps,” he allowed.

  The two of them sat in unhurried silence. Finally, it was the captain who spoke up.

  “I should take another look at what we know of the White Wolf. I may find something I have overlooked.”

  Ben Zoma shook his head. “You’ve gone over those logs for days on end. It’s enough. You may be the man in charge here, but there’s nothing more you can do.”

  “There must be something I can—”

  “Go to bed,” Ben Zoma advised him. “That’s what Captain Ruhalter would’ve done.”

  The captain mulled it over, then rejected the notion. “Perhaps not just yet, Gilaad.”

  Ben Zoma’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You just can’t stay away from those logs, can you? You’re going to stay up into the wee hours trying to find something you missed.”

  “Not into the wee hours, I assure you.”

  “You’ll turn in shortly, then?”

  “Absolutely. In just a few minutes.”

  “Scout’s honor?”

  “Without question.”

  Ben Zoma leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Good. I’ll wait.”

  Picard began to protest. “There’s no need to—”

  His friend stopped him with a raised hand. “Honestly, what kind of first officer would I be if I didn’t look after my captain’s health and well-being?”

  Picard shook his head. “Gilaad, I—”

  “And what kind of friend would I be if I let you sit here all by yourself, trying to find a needle’s worth of something useful in a haystack of command logs?”

  The captain sighed. “Believe me, I’m not looking forward to it. I would go to bed if I could.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Ben Zoma replied evenly. But he didn’t move out of his chair.

  Picard was reminded again of why he held his first officer in such high regard. “Can I at least offer you something to drink?” He indicated the half-empty cup on his desk. “Tea, perhaps?”

  Ben Zoma shook his head. “No, thanks. Puts me to sleep. How about a cup of black coffee?”

  The captain rose from his chair to fill his friend’s request. “Coming right up.”

  Gerda Asmund watched the seething red expanse of Beta Barritus slide off the edge of the viewscreen. She didn’t think she would miss it, either—not after staring at its steadily swelling girth for the last three hours.

  The star’s lurid light was replaced by cottony clusters of soft rose and lavender, too dense for Gerda to see through. Fortunately, she didn’t have to see anything. Valderrama’s radar was working like a carefully honed bat’leth, slicing through anything and everything in its way.

  Soon, the navigator thought, they would find the White Wolf. She could feel it in the marrow of her bones. They would find him and put an end to the myth of his invincibility, adding to the glory already associated with the name Stargazer.

  And glory was what made the difference between bloodwine and water, between life and mere existence. Any Klingon knew that.

  Gerda was in the process of refining the course she had laid out for her sister when she noticed something on her radar monitor, something represented by a green blip on the otherwise black field.

  There weren’t any planets or moons in this solar system. There weren’t even any asteroids. They had all been reduced to ions when their original star went nova.

  And it couldn’t be their radar-assist companion probe because that was elsewhere. So if there was an object out there, it was neither one they had brought with them nor a naturally occurring body.

  Which left Gerda with just one inescapable conclusion.

  She turned to her sister and saw that Idun had noticed the green blip as well. Her eyes, which were locked intently on her monitors, were alight with a warrior’s anticipation.

  The navigator looked to the intercom grid. “Captain Picard, this is
Lieutenant Asmund.”

  “Picard here,” the captain said a moment later.

  He sounded tired to Gerda. But then, none of them was getting much sleep these days.

  “There’s something on radar,” she told him.

  A pause. “I’ll be right there,” the captain replied. And he no longer sounded the least bit fatigued.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  PICARD WAS A STEP AHEAD of Ben Zoma as they emerged from his ready room and crossed the bridge. “How far?” he asked as he approached Gerda’s console.

  “Slightly more than a million kilometers,” his navigator told him.

  “Is it a ship?”

  Gerda nodded. “I believe so, yes.”

  Picard looked up at the viewscreen. All it showed him was a nest of blood-red gases.

  Then he peered past his navigator at the screen on her console that had tipped her off. It showed him a black field with a green blip prominently displayed on it.

  There was something there all right, Picard thought. Something that might be the White Wolf. And thanks to Valderrama’s radar, the Stargazer could track it down.

  “Red alert,” he said.

  “Raise shields and power weapons,” Ben Zoma added.

  “Shields up, sir,” Vigo assured him from his weapons console. “Phasers and photon torpedoes ready.”

  Of course, the torpedoes were a last resort. Picard still wanted to bring that cargo home intact—and the White Wolf as well, if he could.

  “Bring us closer,” he told Idun.

  She saw to it. “Aye, sir.”

  His helm officer made the necessary adjustment in their heading. Nothing changed on the viewscreen, but Gerda’s monitors told the captain a different story. There, the object of their attentions was getting closer by the second.

  “Four hundred thousand kilometers,” Gerda announced.

  If it was the White Wolf, he didn’t seem to know he had company yet—and that meant Picard held a big advantage. He could get even closer before his prey knew it was being hunted.

  Unless it’s a trap.

  Picard’s mouth went dry at the unwelcome thought. Could that be it? Could his adversary be biding his time, every bit as aware of the Stargazer as the Stargazer was of him?

  “Three hundred thousand kilometers, sir.”

  Still no reaction from the White Wolf—if it was the White Wolf. The captain was beginning to harbor some doubts.

  “Two hundred thousand,” Gerda reported.

  “Fire when ready!” Picard barked.

  “One hundred thousand . . .”

  And their adversary woke up.

  The White Wolf’s phaser salvo seemed to erupt from out of nowhere. It loomed rapidly on the main viewer, growing in volcanic splendor and magnitude until it blanched the entire screen.

  “Evasive maneuvers!” Picard called out.

  But it was too late.

  The phaser attack bludgeoned the Stargazer with bone-rattling force, causing the deck to lurch beneath the captain’s feet. Grabbing the back of Gerda’s chair, he managed to stay upright, but only barely.

  As Idun sent them twisting away from the enemy, Vigo launched a counterstrike. The Stargazer’s phased energy bolts vanished into the crimson haze, reaching for their unseen enemy.

  “Missed!” Gerda hissed, consulting her radar in conjunction with a computer model of their phaser strike.

  A second time, a ruby-red barrage loomed on their viewscreen. But this time, it swept past them without taking a toll. Obviously, Idun’s helm work was baffling the enemy’s weapons batteries.

  Vigo unleashed another volley of his own. The captain tracked it on Gerda’s monitor, watching it stab across the screen at the green dot that represented the enemy ship. It was as true an attack as a phaser cannon could make.

  But at the last possible moment, the White Wolf banked sharply and escaped unscathed.

  At that point, the pirate might have turned tail and tried to shake them. But he didn’t do anything of the sort. He switched back and went for the Stargazer’s throat.

  Picard glanced at Idun. She was accepting the enemy’s challenge, refusing to change their heading a single degree. But then, she had been raised by Klingons, and Klingons didn’t flinch when an adversary attacked them head-on.

  As a collision became imminent, the captain wished his helm officer had been raised in a slightly less aggressive culture. And he wished so even more when the White Wolf’s vessel became visible on their viewscreen, no longer an abstraction but a fact.

  And yet, for a fact it seemed remarkably ethereal—a ghostly specter emerging from a sea of blood and fire, swimming up from an impossible red depth. Not a massive black bullet like the ship of his nightmare, but a slender, pale wraith.

  And like Idun, the vessel’s helm officer wasn’t flinching. The pirate was on a course that threatened to ram the Stargazer into oblivion.

  “Fire!” Picard barked.

  But the White Wolf had already foiled him by veering off to starboard. And as he darted past the Stargazer, he unleashed a series of phaser blasts at close range.

  The captain was sent sprawling by the fury of the attack. Somewhere behind him a console exploded, spewing sparks and billows of smoke, and he could hear groans of pain.

  But Ben Zoma would see to the console and the injured, Picard thought as he dragged himself to his feet. It was the captain’s job to see to it they didn’t absorb such punishment a second time.

  “Report!” he commanded.

  “Shields down thirty-eight percent!” Gerda growled.

  “Casualties on decks seven, ten, and eleven!” Paxton reported. “Hull breaches on twelve and thirteen!”

  Picard cursed under his breath. They had taken a beating. And to that point, they hadn’t even dealt the enemy a glancing blow.

  The problem was that the pirate was more maneuverable than the larger and more powerful Stargazer. The White Wolf might not have been able to match their firepower or their defenses, but he could certainly fly rings around them.

  Clearly, they needed a new tactic. Gritting his teeth, Picard tried to come up with one.

  But all he could think about was Daithan Ruhalter—not the heroic and inspirational human being under whom he had served, but the strangely wistful Daithan Ruhalter of his nightmare. The latter’s words came to the captain anew, surging from the depths of his memory . . .

  Instinct, the nightmare Ruhalter had said. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. And if you don’t, no collection of sensors and shields and phaser banks is going to help you.

  Picard could feel a bead of sweat meandering down the side of his face. He felt as if all eyes were upon him, waiting for him to say the words that would turn the battle around.

  But he had no such words at his disposal.

  It was too soon, the nightmare Ruhalter had said of Picard. He was too damned young.

  No, thought the captain. He glared defiantly at the viewscreen, which showed him nothing more than billowing scarlet gas clouds. I am not too young, he insisted. I will beat the White Wolf.

  And suddenly, it came to him how he would do it.

  Turning to Idun, Picard said, “Retreat! Full impulse!”

  His helm officer looked at him with an expression of horror on her face. It seemed to him that she was about to protest, right there in the middle of their encounter with the enemy.

  But in the end, she kept from commenting on his choice of tactic. She simply worked her helm controls and carried out her captain’s command.

  A moment later, he saw the gas clouds ahead of them swing to port. Idun was bringing them about, moving them away from the enemy as fast as their impulse drive would take them.

  Joining Gerda at her navigation console, Picard inspected her radar monitor. It showed him that the pirate wasn’t content to let them go—not after they had smoked him from his lair. He was following the Stargazer, pursuing her as quickly as she was running away.

  And why not? The Whit
e Wolf had already proven his tactical superiority. He wanted to end this hunt and end it quickly, just as Picard would have done if their roles were reversed.

  The captain gauged the distance between the two ships—a bit too far for effective phaser fire, he judged. But that could change—and with a grim smile, he demonstrated just how quickly it could happen.

  “All stop!” he bellowed. Then, to Vigo: “Fire phasers!”

  Everything happened so quickly, Picard couldn’t be certain at first whether his gambit had worked or failed. The White Wolf’s ship seemed to surge out of nowhere, looming impossibly large on the viewscreen, even as the Stargazer stabbed it with two seething red phaser bolts at appallingly close range.

  The twin energy lances sent the pirate ship skittering past them at a terrifyingly oblique angle. Picard could almost imagine the White Wolf’s hull scraping that of the Federation vessel. But the miss, narrow as it may have been, was unquestionably a miss. The Stargazer and what was left of her shields remained intact.

  Which was more than the captain imagined could be said of their adversary. Of course, without traditional sensor readings, he had no way of knowing how badly he had damaged the White Wolf. But there was a way to find out.

  “Go after him!” Picard commanded Idun. Then, as the helm officer’s fingers flew over her controls, the captain glanced at Vigo and added, “Ready phasers!”

  The gas clouds slid sideways on the viewscreen as the Stargazer came about and offered pursuit. Turning to Gerda’s monitor, Picard saw the green blip in full flight.

  “Range?” he asked.

  “One hundred twenty-five thousand kilometers,” his navigator informed him.

  Farther than they would normally have attempted weapons fire, even with their normal array of sensors in operation. However, the White Wolf wasn’t bobbing and weaving at this point. His attempt at escape was straight and unswerving.

  Picard gave the order. “Target and fire!”

  A moment later, his forward phaser banks belched crimson fury. It pierced the softly tinted gas clouds ahead of them and was almost immediately lost to sight.

  However, the phaser beams hadn’t ceased to exist. With luck, the White Wolf would soon find that out.