THE VALIANT

by Michael Jan Friedman

  If someone had wished, they could have taken advantage of this situation to blow up one of the Stargazer’s shuttles without warning. In fact, they could have blown up all the shuttles.

  Picard looked at the acting weapons chief. “It seems we have a saboteur on our hands.”

  “That was my conclusion too, sir.”

  “Do you have any idea who it might be?” the second officer asked.

  Vigo shook his hairless, blue head. “No, sir. However, I believe there are ways to find out.”

  “See that you pursue them,” Picard told him. “However, you must do so without letting anyone know what you’re doing. We need to keep this privileged information for the time being.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the weapons officer, and left the room with a laudable sense of urgency.

  Picard watched the doors to his quarters slide closed, leaving him alone again. Dropping into a chair, he heaved a sigh.

  Just when he thought the dawn might be in sight, the shadowy figure of a saboteur had appeared on the horizon.

  He needed to think this through, he told himself. But he was too fatigued to do so on his own. Looking up at the intercom grid in the ceiling, he called upon the one man he felt he could trust implicitly.

  “Mr. Ben Zoma,” he said, “this is Commander Picard.”

  “Ben Zoma here,” came the reply.

  “Meet me in my quarters,” the second officer told him. “I’ve learned something you may find interesting.”

  Gilaad Ben Zoma sat back in his chair and considered the problem with which his friend had presented him.

  Finally, he spoke. “There were only two unknown quantities on the ship when we came up with the notion of using shuttles as tactical weapons. One of them was Jomar. The other was Serenity Santana.”

  “Ms. Santana was unconscious,” Picard reminded him.

  The second officer was seated on the other side of his quarters’ anteroom, a cup of hot tea resting on a table beside him. He looked as if he would much rather have gone to bed than begun unraveling a mystery.

  “True,” Ben Zoma conceded. “But do you remember what you told me about her brain activity? How it remained elevated even when she was unconscious? For all we know, she could have been manipulating someone in order to sabotage that shuttle.”

  The second officer tilted his head. “You mean . . . one of us?”

  “A crewman,” Ben Zoma suggested. “You, me . . . anyone, really. They might not even have a recollection of having helped her.”

  “On the other hand,” said Picard, “Santana has already admitted her treachery regarding the ambush. If she had used a pawn to sabotage the shuttle, why wouldn’t she have admitted that as well?”

  “Good point,” Ben Zoma acknowledged. Suddenly, something occurred to him. “Unless she had two different agendas . . .”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What if Santana’s role in the ambush was what she claimed it was—a response to the Nuyyad’s threats—but her sabotage of the shuttle was for a different purpose entirely?”

  Picard mulled it over. “That would explain why her fellow colonist didn’t think twice about bringing our attention to the altered junction.”

  “On the other hand,” said Ben Zoma, arguing with his own proposition, “what could she have gained by blowing up the shuttle?”

  “The same as Jomar,” said the second officer. “Nothing—except possibly the sacrifice of their own lives.”

  “We’re lacking a motive,” Ben Zoma noted.

  “So it would seem,” said his friend.

  Ben Zoma looked at him. “You might want to confront one of them about this. Or maybe mention it to our friend Williamson. One of them is bound to tell you something interesting.”

  The commander considered it. After a while, he shook his head. “I don’t think so, Gilaad. I want to identify the culprit before he or she realizes we have suspicions.”

  “Then we need to keep tabs on them around the clock. Follow their every move until they slip up.”

  “If you say so,” said Picard.

  “I’ll volunteer to hound Jomar,” Ben Zoma offered.

  “And Santana?”

  “I’ll send Pug down to do that. He knows her as well as any of us. And after the way Santana humiliated him, he’ll be that much more determined to catch her redhanded.”

  The second officer took a deep breath. “We need to unmask this saboteur—and quickly. Otherwise, there is no telling when a key system might betray us, repairs or no repairs.”

  Ben Zoma sympathized with his friend. Commanding a vessel was a difficult task at the best of times. In a situation where the ground kept shifting underfoot, it was nearly impossible.

  “We’ll catch your saboteur,” he assured Picard.

  The second officer grunted. “You sound rather certain.”

  Ben Zoma smiled. “I’ve never let you down before,” he said, wishing he were even half as confident as he sounded.

  It was early the next morning, as Picard was getting dressed, that he got a call from Shield Williamson.

  Taking it in his quarters, he saw the Magnian’s face appear on his monitor screen. “Is everything all right?” asked the second officer.

  “That depends,” said Williamson.

  “On what?”

  “On how you feel about having Serenity Santana board your ship again.”

  Picard looked at the colonist. “For what reason?”

  “One of the technicians we planned to send up isn’t feeling well. Santana is the only other Magnian who’s qualified to do the job.”

  Troubled by the proposition, the second officer shook his head. “You must know how this looks.”

  “Like I’m trying to pull a fast one,” Williamson conceded. “Of course, the decision is entirely yours.”

  Picard considered his options—and the old saying came to him: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And it would certainly be a simpler matter for Pug Joseph to keep an eye on Santana if she was working there on the Stargazer.

  “Send her up,” he told the Magnian.

  But even as he extended the invitation, he could feel himself inching further out on the limb he had chosen.

  Chapter 14

  Captain’s log, supplemental. At last, we are ready. Magnia’s defenses have been fully resurrected—and thanks to Jomar, they should be in a better position to withstand the Nuyyad now that their shields will be laced with vidrion particles. The Stargazer’s systems have been restored as well, from our warp drive to our deflector grid. What’s more, the colonists have made use of their technical expertise and their inborn talents to provide us with a couple of tools we didn’t have before—improved sensor and tractor functions. Unfortunately, we have made no discernible progress in our search for a saboteur, but we remain hopeful. After all, we have some of our best people on the case.

  Pug Joseph entered the tiny engineering support room on Deck 26 and spotted Serenity Santana among her colleagues.

  The dark-haired woman was shoulder to shoulder with them on her knees, fitting the forward dorsal tractor control node with devices capable of marrying telekinetic energy to the attractive and repellant forces in a directed graviton stream. Every so often she would glance at one of her fellow colonists and receive a glance in return, then go back to work.

  None of the Magnians said a word. However, they all seemed to know what to do with the equipment they had brought with them.

  Ensign Montenegro, an engineer, was standing in the corner of the room, his arms folded across his chest. Like Joseph, Montenegro was just a spectator. Their guests were the ones applying all the elbow grease.

  The security officer felt uncomfortable being in the same room as Santana. If it had been up to him, he would have left. But he was under orders, so he stayed and kept an eye on the woman.

  After a few minutes, she seemed to sense his scrutiny and looked back over her shoulder at him. He didn’t look away, but he didn’t ac
knowledge her either. He just stood there and did his job.

  Santana worked for another ten minutes or so. Then she got up, stretched her muscles and walked over to Joseph. He felt his jaw clench.

  “Long time no see,” said the colonist.

  The security officer didn’t utter a word in response. He just stood there, returning her scrutiny.

  “I’m sorry for pulling the wool over your eyes,” she said.

  Joseph didn’t give her the satisfaction of an answer.

  “I mean it,” Santana added. “I’ve already told Commander Picard, but I want to tell you as well.”

  Still, he remained silent.

  “You’ve got to want to say something to me,” the woman told him.

  He did. But he didn’t say it.

  Santana looked at him a moment longer, her dark eyes full of what appeared to be pain. Then she returned to her work.

  Joseph didn’t like the idea of hurting her. However, as he had said to himself often enough, he was determined not to give the colonist an opportunity to fool him again.

  Carter Greyhorse had been busy over the last few days, to say the least—busy with Santana and Leach and the less severely injured survivors of their encounter with the Nuyyad.

  And with the exception of a few helpless moments, he hadn’t spent any of that time thinking about Gerda Asmund.

  But when the medical officer returned from Magnia, he hadn’t had the option of burying himself in patient care any longer—and his preoccupation with the navigator had threatened to paralyze him in a duranium straitjacket of despair.

  Despair, because he had no chance with her. He had come to accept that, at least on an intellectual level. They were too different. She was vibrant, vigorous, full of life. And he was . . . not.

  So, in the absence of an urgent need for his medical skills, Greyhorse had come up with another project in which to immerse himself—a project he had begun even before he saw Gerda in the gym. He had renewed his interest in the creation of synthetic psilosynine.

  The doctor had even gone so far as to replicate a batch of the neurotransmitter himself, following the guidelines of the Betazoid scientist who had pioneered the process. And now, having brought the stuff back to sickbay, he was testing its integrity at his office computer.

  It was turning out to be a success, too. Not just the psilosynine itself, but its ability to take his mind off Gerda.

  Just as Greyhorse acknowledged that, he caught a glimpse of someone walking into sickbay.

  Turning away from his screen, he saw that it was Joseph from security. Under normal circumstances, the doctor would have completed his tests, then gone to see what Joseph wanted from him. However, their circumstances were anything but normal these days.

  Getting up from his computer terminal, Greyhorse exited his office and emerged into the central triage area. “Something I can do for you?” he asked the security officer.

  “I hope so,” said Joseph. He looked around. “And I hope you’ll keep this conversation confidential—as a matter of ship’s security.”

  Ship’s security? “All right,” Greyhorse responded, wondering what the problem might be.

  “You treated Serenity Santana while she was comatose?”

  “I did,” Greyhorse confirmed.

  “And you told Commander Picard that you saw her brain waves spike when we were approaching her world?”

  “That’s correct,” said the medical officer. Suddenly, it occurred to him where Joseph might be going with this. “Santana’s all right, isn’t she?”

  The other man looked up at him, jolted from his line of questioning. “She’s fine, as far as I can tell.”

  “Then this isn’t about her health?” asked Greyhorse.

  “No,” Joseph assured him. “It’s about an act of sabotage.” And he went on to describe the way one of their command junctions had been tampered with.

  “But what does this have to do with Ms. Santana?” asked the doctor.

  “Obviously, she couldn’t have sabotaged the shuttle herself. But Commander Picard and Lieutenant Ben Zoma think she might have manipulated someone else into doing it.”

  “Someone else?” Greyhorse echoed, considering the possibility for the first time. “You mean . . .”

  “You,” said Joseph. He looked disturbed by what he was saying. “Or me. Or anyone on the ship.”

  The doctor sat down on the edge of a biobed and thought about it. It was an eerie proposition at best. Unfortunately, he didn’t know enough about Santana’s abilities to confirm the theory or deny it.

  “It’s possible,” he said at last. “But I can’t say for certain.”

  The security officer looked disappointed. “Commander Picard thought you might say that.”

  Greyhorse had an idea. “Have you checked the internal sensor logs? They would tell you who might have approached that command junction.”

  Joseph smiled a tolerant smile. “That was the first thing we tried. But internal sensors aren’t very dependable in the vicinity of the warp engines, which is where the junction was located. And whoever did the tampering was smart enough to take off his or her combadge so we wouldn’t be able to track them that way either.”

  The doctor shrugged. “It was just a thought.”

  “Thanks anyway,” said the security officer.

  But he didn’t leave. He just stood there, his eyes glazing over, as if he had fallen deep into thought.

  “Lieutenant?” said Greyhorse.

  Joseph looked at him as if he had woken from a dream. “Hmm?”

  “Are you feeling all right?” the physician inquired.

  “I’m okay. Just a little . . . preoccupied is all.” The security officer hesitated. Then he said, “Can I level with you?”

  Greyhorse nodded. “Certainly.”

  Joseph smiled again—a little sheepishly, this time. “To be honest, I don’t have a whole lot of friends on the ship. It’s always been that way for me, I don’t know why. But when I was guarding Ms. Santana, I . . . well, I sort of came to like her.”

  “As a friend?” the doctor asked.

  “That,” said the security officer, “and maybe a little more. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think I fell for her the first time I saw her—when she was sitting on her cot in the brig.”

  Even Greyhorse had to chuckle at that. “Quite an image,” he conceded.

  “I thought she liked me too,” Joseph confided. “Maybe not the way I liked her, but at least a little. Then I found out that she was playing me for a chump, right from the start.”

  “Playing all of us,” the doctor interjected.

  “But me most of all,” the security officer insisted. “I mean, I trusted her. I let a pretty face make me forget my training.” He looked embarassed. “I’ll bet that never happened to you.”

  Greyhorse was about to agree with the man, at least inwardly—when a sequence of images flashed through his mind, coming one after the other with jolting familiarity.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone carrying a wounded Gerda into sickbay. Then he took another look and realized that it was Gerda who was doing the carrying, and that it was Leach who had been hurt.

  The doctor’s heart began to pound as it had pounded then. Even if he managed to forget everything else about Gerda, he would never forget that sight as long as he lived.

  Greyhorse regained his composure. “Never,” he agreed, lying through his teeth. “But that doesn’t mean you should be beating yourself up over it. We’re people, Lieutenant, not machines. We have feelings. And sometimes, like it or not, those feelings get in the way of our jobs.”

  Joseph considered the advice. “Maybe you’re right.”

  But Greyhorse knew the security officer didn’t mean it. He would continue to berate himself, advice or no advice.

  Well, he told himself, at least I tried.

  “If you think of anything that might shed some light,” said Joseph, “let me know, all right?”

&
nbsp; “I will,” the doctor promised him.

  But as the security officer left, Greyhorse wasn’t thinking about Joseph’s problem. He wasn’t thinking about psilosynine either. He was thinking about Gerda Asmund again.

  Phigus Simenon looked up at the wedge of blue sky caught between the spires of Magnia’s tallest towers.

  He couldn’t see the Stargazer. But then, he hadn’t expected to. The ship was too far away even to be spotted at night, when the atmosphere of this world wasn’t suffused with its sun’s light.

  Abruptly, the engineer heard his communicator beep. It was what he had been waiting for. Tapping it, he said, “Simenon here.”

  “This is Commander Picard. I’m taking us out of orbit.”

  “Acknowledged,” said the engineer.

  “Good luck,” Picard told him.

  “To you, too,” Simenon replied.

  “Picard out.”

  The Gnalish stared at the sky a little longer. Then he turned to Armor Brentano, who had been attending him patiently.

  “Ready?” asked the colonist.

  “Ready,” said Simenon.

  Then he followed Brentano across the plaza to the elegant pink building that housed the shield control center, where they would bide their time until the enemy arrived.

  Less than seventeen hours after Picard removed the Stargazer from Magnia’s sensor range, he heard Gerda Asmund announce the approach of two vessels she had spotted on her monitor.

  The second officer had been leaning over Vigo’s weapons panel, supervising some last-minute diagnostics. Moving to a position just in front of the captain’s center seat, he gazed at the viewscreen.

  “Can you give me a visual?” he asked.

  Gerda worked for a moment. Then the screen filled with the sight of not one Nuyyad vessel but two, both of them as big and powerful-looking as the ones Picard had seen earlier. Obviously, the enemy believed that would be more than enough to put down the Stargazer.

  We will have to show them the error of their ways, thought the second officer. “Red alert,” he said. “All hands to battle stations. Raise shields and power up phasers.”