Picard absorbed the information. “Our sensors tell us he is no longer on this vessel. Having created such an environment, would he leave it behind?”
“Of course—because he can’t complete his labors in the confines of a ship. There is more to creating a safe-cavern than fabricating a few mineral columns. He needs more space in which to work—and he won’t stop until he finds it.”
“Then why create the mineral deposits at all?” the captain asked. “Was he merely exploring the extent of his abilities?”
“That,” said Dojjaron, “is a question for Brakmaktin.”
Picard understood. Until then, no Nuyyad had ever had the option of manufacturing his own safe-cavern. It was difficult for even Dojjaron to explain Brakmaktin’s behavior.
“Thank you,” said Picard, and terminated the link. Then he contacted Joseph and asked for a progress report.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, sir,” said the security officer. “The engine room’s been transformed into a cave. Not just made to look like one—I mean actually turned into one. And the warp reactor…you can barely see it, it’s so caked over.”
The captain sympathized with Joseph’s reaction. “We encountered the same sort of environment in the vicinity of the bridge. Continue your investigation, Lieutenant—and if you come across even the slightest indication that Brakmaktin is aboard, let me know immediately.”
“I will, sir,” Joseph promised.
Picard knew his acting security chief would exercise the utmost care. But he knew also that if Brakmaktin wanted to remain undetected, he could probably do so.
After all, he was powerful enough to turn an engine room into a cave. What would stop him from getting into an adversary’s head and creating a convenient illusion?
The captain looked around the bridge. It appeared empty but for Pierzynski and himself. Yet Brakmaktin could have been standing right next to him, watching him, biding his time…
The thought made the hairs on the back of the captain’s neck stand up. Placing his back against a bulkhead, he put his hand on his phaser and waited for Pierzynski to finish his work.
One thing was certain: Santana had been telling the truth about Brakmaktin and his superior abilities. What had happened on the Iktoj’ni was ample proof of it.
Nikolas hadn’t intended to relocate the bodies of the Ubarrak as he had relocated his crewmates on the Iktoj’ni. The Ubarrak weren’t dead, so it didn’t seem right to lay them side by side in a cargo hold. But the more he saw of them, the harder it was to leave them where they were.
Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer. Hefting an Ubarrak onto his shoulder, Nikolas lugged him into a lift and brought him down to a mess hall he had discovered in his travels.
By the time he came back for a second one, winded and perspiring because Ubarrak were so much heavier than humans, Brakmaktin had made himself comfortable on the bridge. He was sitting in the center seat, surrounded by an entourage of half-formed mineral pillars, and staring at the viewscreen.
All it showed were the stars streaming past. However, Nikolas allowed for the possibility that Brakmaktin saw more in what was on the screen than he did. Or maybe the alien didn’t see anything at all—it was hard to say.
And Brakmaktin wasn’t exactly a font of information. In fact, he was no more talkative than the Ubarrak whose intellects he had so casually erased.
Nikolas had seen species that were violent by nature—the Klingons, for instance—and those that killed without quarter. But he had never seen anyone sit in the midst of the fallen and act as if they weren’t there.
Swearing softly, the human planted himself by another of Brakmaktin’s victims and hooked his hands under the fellow’s armpits. He was about to drag the Ubarrak to his feet when the poor bastard began to tremble.
Before Nikolas knew it, the trembling evolved into a series of jerks, the Ubarrak’s head pounding the deck as if he were trying to free himself from his benefactor’s grasp. Though the Ubarrak was brain-dead already, Nikolas couldn’t let him smash his skull to pulp. Slipping beneath the Ubarrak’s head, Nikolas held on to him and absorbed the impacts as best he could.
As it turned out, they didn’t last that much longer. A minute at most. Then the Ubarrak just went limp in Nikolas’s arms.
The human pressed his fingers against an artery in the Ubarrak’s neck, feeling for a pulse. There wasn’t any. The Ubarrak wasn’t just brain-dead anymore—he was dead altogether.
And Brakmaktin continued to sit there with his back to them, staring at his screen.
Something snapped in Nikolas then—not just because of what had happened there on the battle cruiser, or even what had happened on the Iktoj’ni. It was because of what hadn’t happened.
Sliding the Ubarrak off him, Nikolas came forward and planted himself in front of Brakmaktin, blocking his view of the screen. The alien looked at him, his eyes moving almost imperceptibly, but he didn’t say anything. Being a telepath, he may have believed he didn’t have to.
But Nikolas wasn’t a mind reader. He wanted—needed—to ask his questions out loud.
“You destroyed everyone except me,” he spat, his eyes as hot as coals in their sockets. “Why?”
The alien remained silent, his features as immobile as those of a stone sculpture.
Nikolas grabbed the console that separated them and leaned forward until his face was centimeters from Brakmaktin’s. “What do you need me for?”
Again, no answer was forthcoming.
“Why do you keep me around?” the human demanded, his voice taut and strained.
Still no response.
“There has to be a reason,” he insisted.
If there was, Brakmaktin didn’t seem inclined to share it with him.
Consumed by anger and frustration, Nikolas did something he wouldn’t have done in a calmer and wiser state—he pounded his fists on the console, daring the alien to take offense.
But Brakmaktin still refused to acknowledge him. He just went on staring as if Nikolas weren’t there.
No, the human resolved. You’re not going to get away with that. Not anymore.
He didn’t care what Brakmaktin did to him. He just wanted to wipe that condescending expression off the alien’s ugly face.
“You know what I think?” he said, his voice ringing from one end of the bridge to the other. “I think you’re scared. I think you look out at the universe and all you see is not-you, and it scares the living hell out of you.”
The alien made a sound he no doubt intended as a gesture of dismissal. But Nikolas heard something in it that told him he was on the right track.
“And you need someone like me,” he went on, “to remind you what it was like to be just Brakmaktin—before he gained all his power and became someone else.”
The alien’s nostrils flared, but the rest of him remained as it was. And Nikolas couldn’t stand that.
“Go ahead,” he snapped in Brakmaktin’s face, “prove I’m wrong, dammit! Destroy me!”
The words were out before he realized how stupid he was to utter them. What was he trying to accomplish—other than getting himself killed, maybe?
But somehow, he didn’t feel that he was in any jeopardy. He felt that he was right. And if that was so, Brakmaktin wouldn’t kill him any more than he would kill himself.
The monster glared at him with his silver orbs, his brow ledge lowered in restrained fury. Destroy me, he echoed ominously in the human’s mind.
And for just a second, Nikolas’s blood ran cold, because he thought Brakmaktin might actually do it. Then the alien turned away, as if he were no longer interested in the topic.
But it wasn’t lack of interest. It was shame, because Nikolas had violated his superiority and his solitude, all in one fell swoop, and Brakmaktin hadn’t been able to do anything about it.
Just the way Nikolas felt when the alien pulled out his deepest memories.
He eyed Brakmaktin a moment longer. Then he walked away
on his own terms, and found another Ubarrak who needed his attention. With an effort, he slung the fellow over his shoulder and made his way to the lift.
And somehow it seemed easier now than before. But then, Nikolas had won this battle, despite all of Brakmaktin’s power. He had come out on top.
As to whether that would be worth something at any point…he could only hope.
Pierzynski had just finished downloading the last bit of data he could find when Picard received a call from Pug Joseph.
“Go ahead,” said the captain.
“I’m in the main cargo bay, sir, and I can see what happened to the crew—or most of it. There are maybe fifty of them down here, lying side by side in two neat rows. Whoever did this must have cared about them.”
That wasn’t Brakmaktin, surely, thought Picard. Then who could it have been? And where was that individual now—lying dead somewhere himself?
“Remain there,” he told Joseph. “Mister Pierzynski and I will join you momentarily.” He felt compelled to see the scene in the cargo bay with his own eyes.
Then, as expeditiously as they could, they would comb the parts of the ship they hadn’t gotten to yet. Eventually, they would come across the crewman who had laid his comrades out in such dignified fashion.
But they wouldn’t know that it was he who had done it. He would appear to be just another corpse, and the mystery surrounding his actions would go unsolved.
The captain wished he could stay and try to puzzle it all out. However, he had a significantly more important job to do, and time was precious.
The seventh or eighth time Nikolas went to the bridge to pick up an Ubarrak, he saw that the image on the viewscreen had changed. No longer filled with a river of stars, it displayed an M-class planet with all the trimmings.
Blue oceans. Green and brown land masses. Cloud cover. Polar icecaps. The works.
And a population too, though it wasn’t native to that world. It had been brought there generations earlier to reap a harvest of dilithium, which the Ubarrak—like the Federation—used to control the matter-antimatter reactions in their warp drives.
Nikolas knew about this world because it was the one Brakmaktin had pulled from his mind. He hadn’t expected to see it so soon, since it was still a light-year too distant for the warship’s sensors to pick up. However, as the alien had already demonstrated, he could do things others could not.
He had had but one deficiency, and that was his lack of knowledge of this galaxy. But thanks to Nikolas, that deficiency was no more. Brakmaktin had been able to find whatever he needed in the human’s defenseless mind.
Had he restricted himself to the databases on the Iktoj’ni and the battle cruiser, he could have gotten more information than Nikolas could ever give him. But it was easier for him to reach into Nikolas’s mind for it.
And more fun too. That was clear from the expression he had seen on Brakmaktin’s face. It had definitely been more entertaining to rummage through a brain than a computer memory.
Nikolas wished he could press a reset button and make everything the way it was before he left the Stargazer. He wished he could be back there now with Obal and all the others—even Paris, who had begun to open up to him a little.
He wished that he had never heard of Brakmaktin or the Nuyyad or the Ubarrak ship they were on, or the world they were headed for. But most of all, he wished he knew of a way to stop his monster of a companion before he killed anyone else.
“No,” said Brakmaktin. “That is not what you want most.”
Nikolas turned to him. He could tell by the alien’s expression that he had been reading Nikolas’s thoughts.
“I can grant your wishes,” said Brakmaktin. “Can…and will. But only one. The one you desire above all the rest.”
Nikolas wondered which wish that was, but only for a moment. Then, as the answer dawned on him, he got the feeling that there was someone standing behind him.
No, he thought. It’s not possible…
Whirling, he saw the woman he thought he would never see again. The woman he loved. The woman who had come from another universe and returned to it the same way, taking his every possibility of happiness with her.
Gerda Idun.
Nikolas shook his head. Brakmaktin was powerful, but he couldn’t reach across the barriers separating one dimension from the next. No one could.
Still, it was Gerda Idun standing in front of him, exactly as he remembered her, wearing the same gray leather vest and boots in which she had first transported onto the Stargazer.
But how could it be her? She had gone back where she came from, to a universe where humanity was fighting for its life against an alliance of Klingons and Cardassians.
He knew that with a certainty. And yet, he couldn’t help drinking in the sight of her.
“Andreas,” she said, in a voice that was unmistakably hers. Her brow furrowed. “I’ve missed you…”
Nikolas felt a tingle travel the length of his spine. Despite what he knew, he wanted Gerda Idun to be real—wanted it as he had never wanted anything in his life.
Crossing the bridge, he approached her. And the closer he got, the more obvious it became that she was real—a being made of flesh and blood, just like Nikolas himself.
Not an illusion or a dream. A reality.
Stopping in front of her, he looked into her sea-blue eyes. They were real, too. And he couldn’t deny the spark of intelligence that resided in them.
“Andreas,” she said again, and smiled. Then she brushed his hand with her own.
He reached for her fingers, to intertwine them with his. “It’s me,” he confirmed. “But how—?”
Before he finished getting the words out, he realized that something was wrong. Gerda Idun was fading, becoming unsubstantial. He grabbed at her hand but felt nothing there.
“What’s happening?” she asked, dread and disappointment mingling in her tone.
Nikolas didn’t know. But then, he didn’t know how she had gotten there in the first place.
“No!” he insisted. He turned to Brakmaktin, heat rising in his face. “No, dammit!”
But it didn’t help. When he turned back to Gerda Idun, she was airier and more poorly defined than a hologram.
“Stop!” he shouted, as if he could will her into existence as Brakmaktin had. “Come back!”
She kept fading, though, eluding his attempts to make her whole. And in a heartbeat, she was gone altogether.
Nikolas whimpered like a dog. She had been there. He had felt her. It wasn’t an illusion—it was her.
And now she was gone again, returned to whatever place Brakmaktin had plucked her from—wondering how she had seen Nikolas again when that was impossible, and what it all meant.
He slumped against a bulkhead, feeling desolate, hollowed out. It was even worse than the first time he had lost her. And then it occurred to him—that was exactly what Brakmaktin had intended.
Darting a glance at the alien, he saw that he was right. Brakmaktin was studying his misery with a certain satisfaction—the kind a child might take from crushing an ant.
Destroy me, the alien said in Nikolas’s mind.
He was taking his revenge for what the human had said about Brakmaktin needing him, cruelly reminding Nikolas of who had power over whom.
Like a child, the human thought again. A petty, irrational child.
For a while, it had seemed that Brakmaktin was growing more distant, more aloof. Not anymore. Now he was becoming the kind of being who derived pleasure from the pain of others.
And that made him more dangerous to everyone alive.
Chapter Eight
PICARD STOOD IN THE Iktoj’ni’s main cargo bay and surveyed the corpses laid out before him. Joseph was right, he told himself. They could only have been assembled this way by someone who cared about them.
The away team had discovered fifteen other corpses scattered about the ship, either in their quarters or elsewhere—three in the mess hall, three more
in the cargo hauler’s modest sickbay, and one in a turbolift.
Picard had opted to leave them where he and his officers found them. Unlike the individual who had transported so many of his friends to the cargo bay, the captain didn’t have the time to perform such services.
As for Brakmaktin…if he was hiding, he had done a superlative job of it. It seemed more likely to Picard that the alien had left the Iktoj’ni on the vessel that attacked her, exchanging ships as he had done with the scout.
“Mister Ben Zoma,” the captain said, again employing the com device in his helmet.
“Aye, sir,” said the first officer. “Ready to beam out?”
Picard was about to reply in the affirmative when Pierzynski said, “Hang on, sir. Something doesn’t jibe.”
The security officer was studying his tricorder, a look of consternation on his face. The captain asked Ben Zoma to stand by, then moved to Pierzynski’s side and took a look.
“This is the crew manifest,” said Pierzynski. “I downloaded it when we were up on the bridge. There are fifty-nine names here. But we’ve only accounted for fifty-eight bodies.”
“We could have missed one,” said Iulus.
Joseph shook his head inside his helmet. “I don’t think so. We were pretty thorough.”
“Even if we have overlooked someone,” Picard observed, “there is nothing left for us to accomplish here. We need to return to the Stargazer.”
But before he had finished, he saw Pierzynski’s eyes open with surprise. “This can’t be right,” the officer muttered.
“Lieutenant?” said Picard.
Looking up at him, Pierzynski handed over his tricorder. Its screen showed the captain a column of names.
And the one at the top was Andreas Nikolas.
It wasn’t exactly a common name. And though Picard didn’t know what had become of the ensign after he left the Stargazer, it wasn’t unusual for those who left the fleet to turn to commercial shipping as an alternative.
But everyone on the away team had known Nikolas. If they had come across him, they would have known it—and said something.
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