Then the big man picked up his head . . . and Tarasco’s jaw fell. Agnarsson’s eyes, normally a very ordinary shade of blue, were glowing with a luxuriant silver light.
Chapter 2
Captain’s log, December 30th, 2069. Tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve. We should be preparing our usual celebration, festooning the lounge and watching Sommers mix her killer punch. Unfortunately, with six of our comrades dead, no one feels much like celebrating. So instead of toasting 2070, we’re delving under control consoles and wriggling through access tubes, trying to expedite the process of bringing basic systems back online. The problem is every time we think we’ve fixed something, a new trouble spot rears its ugly head. And even if we can solve all the little snags, we’ll still be left with a great big one—the warp drive. Chief McMillan says it may be beyond repair this time. And if we’re restricted to impulse power, none of us will live long enough to see Earth again.
Tarasco paused in his log entry, put down his microphone and looked around at his quarters. They were small, cramped—and yet palatial in comparison to those of the average crewman.
They hadn’t seemed so bad when the captain first saw them. But back then, he was contemplating spending six or seven years in the place, at most. Now he was looking at living out his life there.
He recalled the story of Moses, the biblical patriarch who led his people through a wilderness for forty years and brought up a new generation in the process. But in the end, Moses was prohibited from entering the Promised Land with his charges.
Is that how it’s going to be with me? Tarasco asked himself. After all we’ve been through, am I going to be Moses? Have I already seen Earth for the last time?
It was a depressing thought, to say the least. Putting it aside, the captain saved his entry, got up and left his quarters. After all, he was needed on the bridge.
Siregar stared at her fellow security officer as if he had sprouted another pair of ears. “You’re kidding, right?”
Offenburger, a tall, blond man, pulled his head out from under a fire-damaged control panel. “Not at all. I’m telling you, his eyes were silver. And they were glowing.”
“You saw him?” asked Siregar, her skepticism echoing through the Valiant’s auxiliary control center.
“No,” her colleague had to admit. “Not personally, I mean. But O’ Shaugnessy and Maciello were in engineering when Agnarsson lit up, and they both told me the same thing. Silver and glowing.”
Siregar grunted, then returned her attention to the exposed power coupling she had been working on. Normally, an engineer would have taken care of such repairs. However, with all the damage done by Big Red, the engineering staff couldn’t handle everything.
Especially when they were missing two of their best men.
“At least Agnarsson’s alive,” she said.
“For now,” Offenburger added cryptically.
Siregar looked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean? Do they think he’s going to die?”
“They don’t know what to think,” he told her. “They’ve never seen anyone with glowing eyes before.”
“But is he going downhill?”
Offenburger shook his head. “I don’t know . . . but I sure hope not. It’d be nice to see at least one of those guys pull through.”
Siregar nodded. She hadn’t been especially close to any of the victims, but she mourned their loss nonetheless. After she had spent years working alongside them, it would have been impossible not to.
“Yes,” she agreed, “it would be nice.”
Jack Gorvoy completed the last of his autopsy reports, sat back in his chair and heaved a sigh.
Six casualties, the doctor reflected, and each one showed the same characteristics. Severe damage to the victims’ nervous systems, synapses ravaged up and down the line, cerebral cortices burned out as if someone had plunged live wires into them.
Yet none of the victims had suffered external injuries. There were no burns, no surface wounds—nothing to indicate that their bodies had been subjected to electromagnetic shocks.
With that in mind, the open-console theory didn’t seem applicable. Besides, only Rashad and Davidoff had been in the vicinity of sparking control panels when they collapsed. Yoshii, Kolodny, Rivers, and Zosky had been in more secure sections of the ship.
It seemed the phenomenon had found a way to affect the victims’ brains without intruding on any cells along the way. A scientific impossibility, as far as Gorvoy could tell. And yet, he couldn’t think of another explanation for what had happened.
Which led to another question, perhaps bigger than the first. How was it that these six people had died when the majority of the crew had survived unscathed? What was different about them? the doctor asked himself. What was the common denominator?
He glanced in the direction of the intensive care unit, only a small slice of which was visible from his office. He could see Agnarsson, the only patient left to him now that Hollandsworth was well enough to return to his quarters. The engineer was sitting up in his bed, glancing at a printout of his DNA analysis.
Unlike the others who had burned with that strange light, Agnarsson didn’t appear to have suffered any ill effects. Though his eyes had changed color, his vision was still perfect. In fact, the man claimed he felt better than ever before.
Under normal circumstances, Gorvoy would probably have discharged him and pronounced him fit for duty. But he couldn’t—not when the engineer was their best shot at obtaining an understanding of their comrades’ deaths, and by extension, the forces that comprised the space phenomenon.
Abruptly, the medical officer realized that Agnarsson was returning his scrutiny. Like a voyeur caught in the act, Gorvoy pretended to be busy with something else for a moment. When he looked up, his patient was gazing at the analysis again.
No doubt, he told himself, Agnarsson would prefer a novel to an analytical printout. Swiveling his chair around, he examined the lowest shelf of his bookcase, where he kept some of his favorites.
Picking a mystery, the doctor slipped it out of its place and walked it over to the intensive care unit. The engineer didn’t look up from his printout as Gorvoy approached him.
“Here,” said the doctor, offering his patient the book. “You might find this a bit more interesting.”
Agnarsson continued to study the analysis. “Can I see some other printouts?” he asked.
Gorvoy shrugged. “I don’t see why not. But if I may ask, what do you want them for?”
The engineer finally looked up at him, his eyes gleaming with silver light. “Just get them,” he said softly but insistently, “and I’ll show you.”
* * *
As Captain Tarasco entered Gorvoy’s office, he could see the doctor peering at his monitor screen. “You called?” he said.
The medical officer didn’t look up. “I did indeed,” he replied absently. “Have a seat.”
“I’m a busy man,” Tarasco ventured.
Gorvoy nodded. “I heard. McMillan says we’ll be lucky to get the warp drive up and running this century.”
“That estimate may be a little pessimistic,” said the captain. But not by much, he added inwardly.
At last, the doctor looked up. “Take a look at this,” he advised, swiveling his monitor around.
Tarasco examined the screen. It showed him a collection of bright green circles, some empty and some filled in, perhaps a hundred and twenty of them in all.
“I give up,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s a DNA analysis,” Gorvoy explained. “Those circles are traits. Sexual orientation, height, eye color, and so on.”
The captain looked at him, still at a loss. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
“Agnarsson created it,” said the doctor. “From memory.”
Tarasco looked at the screen again, then at Gorvoy. “This is a joke, right?”
“It’s not,” said the doctor.
“But how could he have done
this?”
“I wish I knew,” Gorvoy told him. “About an hour ago, he said he was bored with lying in bed while I ran tests on him, so I gave him something to look at—his DNA analysis. He decided to play a game with himself, to see how much of it he could memorize.”
“And he memorized all of it?” asked Tarasco, finding the doctor’s claim difficult to believe.
Gorvoy smiled a thin smile. “All of them.”
With a touch of his pad, he brought up a different analysis on the monitor screen. Then another, and another still.
“Seven in all,” Gorvoy said. “My analyses of the seven individuals who were afflicted with the glow effect.”
The captain absorbed the information. “Obviously, this has something to do with his eyes.”
“Obviously,” the medical officer confirmed, “but only in that they appear to be symptoms of the same disease—if you even want to call it that. According to Agnarsson he’s never felt better in his life, and my instruments back him up in that regard.”
Tarasco frowned. “I’d like to see him . . . speak with him.”
“Be my guest,” Gorvoy told him.
The captain left the doctor’s office and followed the radiating corridor that led to the center of sickbay, where the intensive care unit was located. Only one of the eight beds was occupied.
Tarasco could see that Agnarsson’s eyes were closed. For a moment, he considered whether he should wake the engineer or wait to speak with him at a later time.
“There’s no time like the present,” Agnarsson said, speaking like a man still wrapped in sleep.
Then he turned to the captain and opened his eyes, fixing Tarasco with his strange, silver stare. He smiled as he propped himself up on an elbow. “My grandfather was the one who told me that.”
The captain felt a chill climb the rungs of his spine. “What made you decide to say it now?”
Agnarsson shrugged. “I’m not certain, exactly. It just seemed to make sense at the moment.”
Tarasco tried to accept that, but he had a feeling there was more to it than the engineer was saying. “The doctor tells me you’ve developed a knack for memorizing things.”
“You mean the DNA analyses?” Agnarsson seemed to be staring at something a million kilometers distant. “To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that hard. I just gazed at them for a while, and suddenly they were the most familiar things in the world to me.”
“That’s pretty amazing,” the captain observed.
The engineer shrugged again. “I suppose you could say that. But do you know what’s really amazing?”
Tarasco shook his head. “What?”
Agnarsson pointed past him. “That.”
The captain felt a whisper of air on the back of his neck. Whirling in response, he saw something silvery sweeping toward him and put his arms up to protect himself from it.
Too late, he realized what it was—a metallic blanket from one of the other beds. As it sank to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut, the engineer laughed.
Tarasco turned to him, uncertain that he could wrap his mind around what Agnarsson had done—and even less certain of how the man had done it. “That wasn’t funny,” he said, not knowing what else to say.
The engineer bit his lip to keep from laughing some more. “Sorry, sir. I just thought . . . I don’t know.”
“That it might be interesting to float a blanket over and surprise me with it?” The captain couldn’t believe he had said that.
Agnarsson met his scrutiny with his eerie, silver stare. “As I said before,” he replied, “it seemed to make sense at the time.”
“I see,” said Tarasco, not seeing at all.
He was trying to effect a facade of confidence and calm, but he didn’t feel those qualities on the inside. He had been prepared to find a lot of things in the vastness of space . . . people as strange as the dispassionate, pointed-eared Vulcans and even stranger.
But this . . . this was the stuff of fantasy.
“I’m not sure you do see,” said Agnarsson. He laid down on his bed again, gazed at the ceiling and smiled an unearthly smile. “But that’s all right, I suppose . . . for now.”
The captain wanted to know what the engineer meant by that—and then again, maybe he didn’t. Mumbling a few words of goodbye, he left Agnarsson lying there and left the intensive care unit.
He felt an urgent need to talk with Gorvoy.
* * *
Mary Anne Sommers was learning what it felt like to be sitting in the eye of a storm.
An even dozen of her fellow crewmen were laboring around her, punctuating their efforts with grunts, sighs, and colorful language. Some of them were trying to repair the control panels that had blown up. Others were removing and replacing burned-out sensor circuits with new ones.
The helm officer wished they could have replaced the warp drive that easily. Unfortunately, she mused, they didn’t carry that spare part.
Sommers would have chipped in some elbow grease, except someone had to keep an eye on the Valiant’s progress. At impulse speed, it wasn’t all that difficult, of course. But with their shields in such ragged condition, they didn’t want to run into any surprises.
“Boy,” said Gardenhire as he walked by with a circuit board, “some people have all the luck.”
The helm officer begrudged him a smile. “Yes, I feel very lucky. I love being stranded a gazillion light-years from home.”
“Hey,” said the redhead, looking past her in the direction of the viewscreen, “watch where you’re going.”
Sommers turned and studied the starfield, with which she’d had ample opportunity to become familiar. To her surprise, Gardenhire was right. They were a half dozen degrees off course.
As she made the correction, she thought she saw something flicker on her monitor. But when she looked down, she didn’t see anything—only the black of a system whose sensors were off-line.
“Uh, Mary Anne?” said the navigator.
The helm officer shot another glance at him. “What?”
Gardenhire pointed to the viewscreen with a freckled finger. “I think you may have overcompensated a bit. You’re seven or eight degrees too far to starboard now.”
Sommers examined the screen again. And to her surprise, her colleague was on the money. The Valiant had deviated from her course in the other direction.
Sommers didn’t get it. Nonetheless, she made the necessary correction. “How’s that?” she asked Gardenhire.
He leaned closer to her. “You celebrating New Year’s a little early this year, Mary Anne?”
She looked back at the navigator, indignant. “No, I am not celebrating a little early this year. For your information, I think there’s something wrong with the helm. Maybe you can look into it after you finish rebuilding the sensor system.”
He chuckled drily. “No problem.” Then he went back to his work.
Sommers harumphed. Of all the nerve, she thought. She checked the viewscreen again to make sure everything was all right—which it was. Then, purely out of force of habit, she glanced at her monitor.
And gasped.
“Something wrong?” inquired Gardenhire, who had stopped halfway to his assigned task.
The helm officer stared at her monitor, her blood pumping hard in her temples. There was nothing there, she assured herself. It’s blank—completely and utterly blank.
“No,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
But she wasn’t at all certain of that. A moment earlier, she thought she had seen a face on the monitor screen. A man’s face, with curly blond hair and a thick mustache.
Agnarsson’s face.
Captain Tarasco regarded the handful of staff officers he had summoned to the Valiant’s observation lounge. “I think you all know why we’re here,” he told them.
“We’ve heard the rumors,” said Tactical Chief Womack, a sturdy looking woman with short, straw-colored hair.
“But rumors are all they’ve been,
” said Pelletier, the perpetually grim-faced head of security. “I’d like to hear some facts.”
“A reasonable request,” the captain noted. “Here’s what we know. During our attempt to get through the phenomenon—Big Red, as some of us have taken to calling it—Agnarsson lit up and collapsed. But unlike the six who shared his experience, he survived.”
“He more than survived,” said Gorvoy, picking up the thread. “He became a superman. Without even trying, Agnarsson can absorb information at astounding rates of speed, pluck thoughts out of people’s minds . . . even move objects through the air without touching them.”
“According to Lieutenant Sommers,” Tarasco remarked, “Agnarsson manipulated her helm controls from his bed in sickbay. And to add insult to injury, he projected his face onto her monitor.”
Womack smiled an incredulous smile. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” the captain told her.
There was silence in the room for a moment. Then Pelletier spoke up. “You want a recommendation?”
“That’s why I called this meeting,” Tarasco replied.
“In that case,” said the security chief, “I recommend you place Agnarsson in the brig and put a twenty-four hour watch on him. And if he tries anything like tugging on the helm again, you have him sedated.”
“That sounds pretty harsh,” McMillan observed, his eyes narrowing beneath his bushy, dark brows.
“We’re out here by ourselves,” Pelletier reminded them, “in the middle of nowhere, with no one to help us. We don’t have the luxury of waiting until Agnarsson becomes a problem. We have to act now.”
“I think you’re forgetting something,” said the engineer. “Geirrod Agnarsson is a person, just like the rest of us. He came out here of his own free will. He has rights.”
“Believe me, Bill,” the security chief responded soberly, “I’m not forgetting any of that. I’m just thinking about the welfare of the other eighty-one people on this ship.”
“So it’s a numbers game,” McMillan deduced.
THE VALIANT Page 2