As prodigious as the enemy’s fighting ships were, the depot was bigger and better-armed by a factor of at least ten. It was perhaps the truest symbol of Nuyyad pride they had seen yet.
“Looks like this is the place,” breathed Ben Zoma.
“You know what they say,” Picard told him. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
“An interesting observation,” the other man noted. “But given a choice, I’ll take big anyday.”
Picard shot him a disparaging glance.
“Except this one, of course,” Ben Zoma added cheerfully.
“Of course,” the second officer responded. He scanned for the number of Nuyyad vessels. “I’m reading four ships. Can you confirm that, Lieutenant Asmund?”
“I show four as well, sir.”
“It could have been worse,” Picard allowed.
Suddenly, an alert light on the captain’s armrest began blinking red. Noticing it, Picard touched the padd beside it.
“Mr. Vigo?” he asked, feeling an adrenaline rush as he anticipated the weapons chief’s response.
“Aye, sir. I’ve got a problem in the phaser line. Command junction twenty-eight, accessible from Deck Ten.”
“Acknowledged,” said the second officer. He straightened and glanced at his friend. “Let’s go.”
“I’m right behind you,” Ben Zoma assured him.
Together, they entered the turbolift and punched in a destination. Then they removed the phasers they had hidden in their tunics.
When the turbolift stopped at Deck Ten, they got out and pelted down the corridor. Before long, they came to a ladder and a round door that would give them access to the network of Jefferies tubes that permeated the ship.
Picard went up the ladder first, pulled open the door and crawled into the tube. As Ben Zoma had promised, he wasn’t far behind.
It wasn’t easy making progress through the tube’s cylindrical, circuit-studded confines, which forced the Starfleet officers to hunch over as they ran. However, they reached the first intersection more quickly than Picard would have believed possible.
It was then that they heard the clatter of a violent confrontation. Looking in every direction, Ben Zoma finally spotted it.
“There,” he said, pointing.
Following his friend’s gesture, the second officer saw two combatants. One appeared to be Santana. The other was a dark, many-tentacled thing that could only have been Jomar in his natural state.
The colonist was trying to hold the Kelvan off with her arms—the way any human might try to hold off something big and monstrous—and not having much luck. But to Picard’s surprise and dismay, she was also launching a series of tiny, pink lightning bolts at her adversary.
The Kelvan recoiled wherever the tiny lightnings struck, but the rest of him remained unaffected. Flinging one slimy limb after another at his target, he tried to envelop her, to crush her in his powerful embrace. And no doubt, he would have, had it not been for the energy bolts Santana was able to marshal against him.
As Picard and Ben Zoma moved closer, neither Santana nor Jomar seemed able to gain an advantage. In short, their struggle was a standoff—an impassioned and violent one, certainly, but a standoff all the same.
Ben Zoma swore beneath his breath. “For heaven sakes, Jean-Luc, we’ve got to do something.”
Picard nodded. “But to whom?”
Clearly, one of the combatants was the saboteur they had been looking for. But the other was an innocent bystander at worst, and at best a hero who had risked life and limb.
“We’ll stun them both,” Picard decided.
“Done,” said his companion.
As Picard took aim at Santana, he saw her glance in his direction. Her eyes seemed to reach out to him, pleading for understanding.
It was all the distraction that Jomar needed. Lashing out at Santana, he snapped her head back. The colonist went limp. But before she could slump to the bottom of the tube, the Kelvan caught her up in his tentacles.
Picard still didn’t know which of the two was the saboteur. However, he didn’t want to see Santana hurt any worse than she was already.
“Let her go!” he barked at Jomar, his voice echoing raucously along the length of the Jefferies tube.
The Kelvan turned to him and underwent a transformation. He seemed to reshape himself before Picard’s eyes, his tentacles shrinking and consolidating and giving way to arms and legs. In a matter of seconds, Jomar had assumed his human form again.
With an unconscious Santana in his arms, he approached the Starfleet officer. “I have apprehended the saboteur,” he said, his blue eyes steady and unblinking, his voice as flat as ever.
Picard didn’t lower his weapon. After all, there was still a lot that had to be cleared up. “That’s far enough,” he told the Kelvan.
Jomar stopped in his tracks. “Is something wrong?”
Picard declined to answer the question. “Put Santana down and back away,” he said.
The Kelvan hesitated for just a moment. Then he knelt, placed the colonist on the curved surface and retreated from the spot.
Picard pointed to Santana with his phaser. “Gilaad,” he said, “make sure she’s still alive.”
Ben Zoma tucked his weapon away and moved to the woman’s side. Then he felt her neck for a pulse and looked back at his friend.
“She’s still with us, all right. I—”
Before he could get another word out, the tube filled with a hideous, high-pitched scream and Jomar began to change again. Faster than Picard would have thought possible, his human attributes melted away and a swarm of long, dark tentacles took their place.
Picard raised his phaser and aimed it at the center of the monstrosity. But before he could press the trigger, he felt something clammy close around his hand. With a twisting motion that nearly broke his wrist, it wrenched the weapon out of his grasp.
By then, Ben Zoma had drawn his phaser—but he wasn’t quick enough either. As Picard watched helplessly, Jomar snatched the man’s phaser away with one tentacle and lashed him across the face with another.
Ben Zoma crumpled, stunned or worse. Picard started forward to help his friend, but a moist, black tentacle grabbed hold of his ankle and a half-dozen others knocked him off his feet.
Looking up, he saw a pair of tiny, gray orbs glaring at him above an obscenely pink maw. He tried to crawl away, but he was still held fast by the ankle. Unable to escape, he watched helplessly as a swarm of tentacles slithered toward his throat.
Picard fought some of them away, but he couldn’t fight all of them. He felt a tentacle snare one of his wrists, then the other. And finally, as he growled out loud with the effort to free himself, he felt a third tentacle begin to close around his throat.
The Kelvan’s grip tightened and Picard’s breath was cut off. He tried to claw at the muscular piece of flesh around his windpipe, but his wrists were too well constrained. Deprived of oxygen while his exertions made his need for it even more urgent, he saw darkness closing in on him.
Ben Zoma, the second officer thought. His friend was his only chance now—if he was still alive.
Suddenly, there was a flash of red light. Phaser light—Picard was certain of it. But Jomar’s tentacle didn’t let go.
Then he saw the flash again, even brighter than before—and this time, it had some effect. The Kelvan seemed to stagger under the impact and lose his grip on his victim’s wrists and ankle.
A third flash, and Jomar lost his stranglehold as well. Picard slumped to the floor and drew in a deep, rasping breath.
His instincts told him to run—to get out of range of the Kelvan’s deadly tentacles. But he resisted the impulse and did something else entirely. He sought out his captor’s face—if it could indeed be called a face—and drove his fist into it as hard as he could.
The yellow eyes blinked and the pink maw let out a blood-chilling scream—not out of pain, Picard thought, as much as surprise. Apparently, the last thing Jomar
had expected was a punch in the nose.
It threw the Kelvan off-balance and made him that much more vulnerable to what followed—an intense, red stream of directed energy that got through the mess of dark tentacles and hammered Jomar’s grotesque torso.
The Kelvan collapsed, his long, snakelike limbs flying in every direction. He looked disoriented, his maw opening and closing, his gray orbs half-lidded with dark flesh—but not yet out for the count.
Then yet another blast battered his slimy black head . . . and it lolled to the bottom of the tube, senseless.
Picard kicked away a tentacle that lay across his foot and turned to his rescuer. He was eager to thank his friend Ben Zoma for his dramatic and timely phaser assault.
Then he saw that it wasn’t his friend at all. It was Pug Joseph, staring wide-eyed at Jomar with his weapon still in his hand.
Chapter 18
Mr. Joseph?” said Picard.
The security officer looked as much in need of an explanation as the second officer. “Sir?” he responded.
Before Picard could clear up any of the confusion, he had the Kelvan’s other victims to think about. Locating Ben Zoma, he saw that his friend was trying to sit up—a good portent indeed.
Santana, on the other hand, was still stretched out on the bottom of the tube, a sweep of raven hair obscuring part of her face. Kneeling beside her, the second officer took her pulse.
Joseph knelt too, his brow knit at the sight of the stricken woman, his expression giving away his very genuine concern. “Is she . . .?”
“Her pulse is strong,” Picard assured the security officer. “I believe she will be all right.”
But she wouldn’t be participating in any battles anytime soon, he decided. And not just because of the beating she had taken.
Santana had never demonstrated the ability to create pink lightning bolts before—but Gary Mitchell had. Kirk reported that he had seen the man do it more than once. If the Magnian’s new-found ability was a side effect of the doctor’s psilosynine, the second officer was going to shut the experiment down as soon as possible.
Glancing at Jomar, he saw that the Kelvan was still unconscious. However, Picard was uncertain how long he would remain that way.
He tapped his combadge. “Picard to Lieutenant Ang. I need all the security officers you can spare, on the double.”
“Aye, sir,” said Ang. “Where shall I send them?”
“I’m in a Jefferies tube accessible from Deck Ten. Hurry, Lieutenant. I have injured to get to sickbay.”
“On our way,” Ang assured him.
“What happened?” asked Ben Zoma, holding the side of his mottled, swollen face as he staggered to his feet.
“We found our saboteur,” said Picard.
Gilaad Ben Zoma sat on a biobed in sickbay and allowed Greyhorse to inject him with a hypospray full of painkiller.
Eventually, he would need oral surgery as a result of the blow Jomar had dealt him. But for now, he couldn’t afford not to be up and about.
“How do you feel now?” asked the doctor.
“Much better,” said Ben Zoma.
“Then you agree?” asked Picard, who was standing beside Greyhorse.
Greyhorse nodded. “Absolutely. We can’t let the Magnians direct our tractor beam if even one of them is exhibiting unexpected side effects.”
Ben Zoma looked across the triage area at Santana, who was lying on the same biobed she had occupied during her coma. The woman was awake, but dazed—the result of a severe concussion.
Pug Joseph was standing beside her, theoretically to guard against her doing anything rash. But in truth, the security officer looked more concerned than watchful.
As Ben Zoma understood it, Santana had knocked Joseph out in an effort to reach Jomar before he could carry out his latest act of sabotage. When she found herself unequal to the task, she roused the security officer telepathically—something she couldn’t have done without the psilosynine amplifying her abilities—and summoned him to tip the balance.
Ben Zoma was glad she had. And he wasn’t the only one.
“For the time being,” said the doctor, “I’m going to get the other colonists down here and administer sedatives to them. But I can’t make any promises as to the drugs’ effectiveness—”
“So you’ll need security personnel,” Picard deduced. “I understand. Believe me, Doctor, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
The second officer had barely completed his statement when a handful of security officers, led by Lieutenant Ang, escorted Jomar into sickbay. The Kelvan had assumed human form again, Ben Zoma noticed, and didn’t appear to be offering the officers any resistance.
“Bring him over here,” Greyhorse instructed them, tilting his head to indicate an empty biobed.
Ang looked to Ben Zoma first.
“Do as the doctor says,” Ben Zoma told him.
“I am not in need of medical attention,” Jomar protested.
“I will be the judge of that,” said Greyhorse.
As the Kelvan was brought to the bed, Picard put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You are all right, aren’t you?” he asked.
Ben Zoma shrugged. “I’ve been better. Fortunately, my body doesn’t know that right now. How about you?”
“I’ll live,” the second officer told him. He glanced at Jomar. “If only long enough to find out our guest’s motivation for sabotage.”
“I’d be interested in that story myself,” said Ben Zoma. “And now that we’re not headed for the depot any longer, we’ll have plenty of time to hear him tell it.”
Picard looked at him questioningly. “Not headed for the depot . . .?”
“Our secret weapon is kaput, remember? Without the Magnians manning our tractor beam, we don’t stand a chance. And with our saboteur out in the open, there’s no reason to even pretend we’re going.”
His friend frowned. “Perhaps you’re r—”
“Commander Picard?” came a voice over the intercom, interrupting the second officer’s remark.
Ben Zoma recognized the voice as Gerda Asmund’s.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” Picard responded.
“Sir,” said the navigator, “two of the Nuyyad ships have left the depot and are coming after us.”
In the wake of the announcement, the security officers exchanged glances. Greyhorse looked disturbed as well.
The muscles rippled in the second officer’s jaw. “Then again,” he said, “perhaps we’ll be having that battle after all.”
Ben Zoma acknowledged the grim truth of Picard’s statement. The depot was significantly closer to the galactic barrier than the Stargazer was. If they wanted to return to warn the Federation about the Nuyyad, they would at some point have to engage the enemy.
“We can’t resort to the Magnians,” Ben Zoma sighed. “But without them, we’ll be outgunned.”
His friend shook his head. “Two against one, Gilaad. It doesn’t sound very promising, does it?”
“We can still beat them,” someone said.
Tracing the comment to its source, Ben Zoma saw Jomar looking at them from his heavily guarded biobed. The Kelvan’s pale-blue eyes glistened in the light from the overheads.
“I beg your pardon?” Picard replied.
“I said we can beat them,” Jomar repeated without inflection. “That is, if you allow me to complete my work.”
“And what work is that?” asked Ben Zoma.
The Kelvan continued to stare at them. “The work I did in an attempt to minimize the effects of your plasma flow regulator and distribution manifold on your phaser system.”
Ang looked at him. “What . . .?”
But Ben Zoma understood. “I get it now. That secondary command line you were laying in . . . you were trying to streamline our plasma delivery system and beef up phaser power.”
“That is correct,” Jomar confirmed. “The incidents you no doubt attributed to sabotage were inadvertent and . . . unfortunate.”
Jomar looked unimpressed. “The Nuyyad must be stopped, Commander. And I had every confidence that the Stargazer’s plasma conduits could tolerate the modifications.”
The second officer turned ruddy with anger. “It wasn’t your choice to make, Jomar. It was Captain Ruhalter’s—and now it’s mine. But at no time was it ever yours.”
“I stand corrected,” Jomar replied evenly, though it was clear he didn’t mean it in the least. “However, you now have an option that you would not have had otherwise.”
He was right, of course, Ben Zoma reflected. And with a couple of Nuyyad warships on a collision course with the Stargazer, they needed all the options they could get.
Picard must have been thinking the same thing. No doubt, he was leery about working alongside someone who had been trying to choke him a short while earlier—and the Kelvan’s scheme was still a dangerous one.
But the alternative was to take a chance on making Gary Mitchell-style monsters out of Santana’s contingent. And that, in the long run, might be infinitely more dangerous.
The second officer looked at Ben Zoma. What do you think? Picard seemed to be asking.
“Let’s do it,” his friend said.
The commander thought about it a moment longer. Then he turned to Jomar again. “Very well. How much time do you need?”
“Not much,” the Kelvan told him. “Twenty minutes, perhaps.”
Picard nodded. “You’ve got it.”
Once again, Ben Zoma thought, they were putting their trust in someone who had previously proven unworthy of it. In Santana’s case, they had been fortunate enough to make the right choice.
Now they were shooting for double or nothing.
Captain’s log, supplemental. Rather than wait for the enemy vessels to come to us, I have decided to go on the offensive and meet them head-on. I hope Jomar’s phaser enhancement is everything he claims, or we will find ourselves with a great many regrets.
In the dusky scarlet illumination of a red alert, Picard eyed the pair of Nuyyad vessels on his viewscreen.
THE VALIANT Page 23