The newcomers spread out, nearly surrounding Brakmaktin on three sides. Then, with a nod from the redhead, they brought their weapons up to eye level, intending to catch the monster in a crossfire so he would have nowhere to go.
Nikolas didn’t know who these people were, or what gave them the confidence to face Brakmaktin, but it was contagious. The human’s hopes, all but dashed by then, rose a little. He started to embrace the possibility, no matter how unlikely, that his nightmare might yet be coming to an end.
It was then that he saw Brakmaktin’s eyes open.
Nikolas didn’t know if the Nuyyad had caught one of his thoughts, despite his efforts to submerge them. He might simply have sensed the threat closing in around him. Whatever the reason, he woke from his slumber and glared at his enemies.
But the newcomers were ready. Before the monster could do anything, they opened fire.
Suddenly, Brakmaktin was beset by a swarm of crimson beams. They stabbed at him, battered him, illuminating the entire cavern with the savage splendor of their destructive energy.
But, sad to say, they never reached him.
Less than a meter away from their target, the beams stopped short and splashed back. And though the newcomers kept on firing, their barrage never got any closer to Brakmaktin.
It was as if he had erected a deflector shield to ward off the invaders’ fire. But deflectors were maintained by state-of-the-art machines, drawing on the power generated by the clash of matter and antimatter. Brakmaktin was creating these all by himself.
And a moment later, he showed Nikolas that he was capable of doing more than imitating a starship’s defenses. He was capable of imitating its weaponry as well.
Because the energy bursts that leaped from his fingers weren’t the nets of blue lightning that the Nuyyad had cast at the Ubarrak earlier. Somehow, as impossible as it seemed, they looked and acted like phaser blasts instead.
And they didn’t miss. They skewered the invaders unerringly, without fail.
But somehow, the invaders remained standing. Was it because the beams weren’t as powerful as they looked? Or because the invaders were more so?
Nikolas had no way of knowing. But as he watched, the situation changed—and for the worse. Brakmaktin’s barrage started beating the invaders back. Then knocking them off their feet. Then slamming them against the walls of the cavern.
It was then, as they were pinned against the coarse surface of the rock, that the invaders began to scream.
And for good reason. They were burning up from within. But not with fire—with a pure, white energy that Nikolas could see right through their flesh.
Suddenly, he knew where the energy came from, because the explanation had been planted in his brain. The things inside the invaders were stars—tiny, unformed balls of nuclear fusion. And they were consuming their hosts with a continuous barrage of insane, subatomic fury.
The invaders should have died instantly. But instead they remained alive somehow, shuddering in an agony no living being should ever have known.
Skin and bone turned to white ash, and still the invaders kept twitching under the influence of the unholy lights inside them—their mouths open, their arms raised in a plea for mercy that went unheard. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they began to fall apart, to crumble.
In the end, there was nothing left of them. Nothing at all.
Brakmaktin raised his massive arms and howled like an animal, celebrating his victory over those who had wished to destroy him. And he continued to howl as he floated down from his alcove, making the cavern walls throb with the force of his jubilation.
The web of blue lightning came back and played all around him, glorifying him. As if he were himself a force of nature. No—a god, thought Nikolas. A savage, brutal murderer of a god.
And it wasn’t just the newcomers Brakmaktin had killed, because hope had died with them.
Picard sat in the observation lounge among Serenity, Dojjaron, and several of his officers, and watched Serenity’s facial expression as she telepathically followed the exploits of her comrades on the surface. She looked alert, vigilant, like an animal guarding her young.
Clearly, she would have preferred to be part of Daniels’s team, and there was no question that she would have been an asset there. She was a Magnian, after all. She had powers normal humans did not, and she knew how to use them.
However, she hadn’t been trained as the others had. And her function there was not to fight. It was to coordinate between Picard and Dojjaron above and the task force below.
“What is taking so long?” asked Dojjaron, jarring the others in the room with his presumptuousness.
“Quiet,” said Serenity, an edge in her voice, speaking brusquely to the Nuyyad for the first time in Picard’s memory.
Suddenly she stopped speaking, and her expression changed. Her eyes lost their luster, her skin its color.
“What is it?” the captain asked.
“They’re gone,” she said.
Picard’s jaw clenched. “Not all of them, surely?”
Serenity drew a ragged breath. “All.”
There was a solemn silence as the implications of Serenity’s announcement sank in. Then Picard said, in a voice as steady as he could make it, “What went wrong?”
Dojjaron rumbled a curse. “Brakmaktin’s slumber was too shallow. He should never have woken so easily.”
“But he did,” said Simenon, “didn’t he?”
Picard looked to the Nuyyad to observe his reaction to the gibe. He expected a sharp retort at the very least, if not an all-out physical assault.
But all Dojjaron did was shake his head. “He’s not Nuyyad anymore. He’s something different now. He’s unpredictable.”
“He is still Nuyyad,” Picard insisted, “or he wouldn’t have made this nest of his, or withdrawn in the first place. He is still one of your people. And somewhere in his brain or his body, there is still a weakness we can exploit.”
Dojjaron made a sound of disgust deep in his throat. But he didn’t hit anyone. Instead, he brought his hand up to his face and appeared to weigh what the captain had said.
“There’s got to be something,” Picard said.
The Nuyyad looked up at him with his dark eyes. “Maybe there is,” he conceded. “But there is no guarantee that it will work.”
“Tell us anyway,” said Serenity, pale but still looking determined.
“It may be possible,” said Dojjaron, “to extend Brakmaktin’s withdrawal. To make it more like a normal span.”
“How?” the captain prodded.
“The withdrawal is triggered largely by ambient temperature. By raising the temperature in the cavern, maybe we can put Brakmaktin back to sleep.”
“How much do we need to raise it?” Simenon asked.
“A great deal,” said Dojjaron. And he went on to say exactly how much.
It was a great deal. “In other words,” said Picard, “until it is almost beyond the limits of human endurance.”
The Nuyyad shrugged. “You would know that better than I.”
The captain looked around the table. “All right. We need to raise the temperature in the cavern and we need to do it quickly. Any ideas?”
“I have one,” said Kastiigan. With a deepening of the purple in his jowls, he described it to Picard. “And it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to prepare.”
“Do it,” said the captain.
But before the words had left his mouth, Kastiigan vanished—and he wasn’t the only one. All Picard’s officers were gone, and so was the table around which they were sitting. What’s more, he wasn’t in the Stargazer’s observation lounge anymore. He wasn’t on the Stargazer at all.
He was in a cavern, standing face-to-face with the silver-eyed monster called Brakmaktin.
One moment, Ben Zoma was watching his friend Picard address Kastiigan. The next, the captain seemed to vanish.
It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that
at first Ben Zoma thought the fault lay with his senses. Then he saw the expressions of bewilderment around the table and realized that the captain had indeed disappeared.
“Computer,” he said, “locate Captain Picard.”
“Captain Picard,” came the reply, “cannot be located on the Stargazer.”
Then, right on the heels of the computer’s response, came another. It was from Refsland, the transporter chief.
“Commander,” he said, “the transporter in Room Two just conducted a site-to-site transport. I tried to report it to the captain, but he didn’t respond. He’s—”
“No longer on the ship,” said Ben Zoma, finishing the thought. “I understand, Lieutenant. Just get him back.”
“Aye, sir,” came the response.
“It’s Brakmaktin,” said Santana, confronting what no one else would. Her eyes were wide with pain and apprehension, even wider than when her task force was wiped out.
Dojjaron made a sound of disgust. “This is not going well.”
Ben Zoma felt like slugging him, but it wouldn’t do Picard any good. “Mister Refsland,” he said, trying to contain his anxiety.
“Sir,” said the transporter operator, his voice coming back over the intercom, “I can’t get a lock on him. Something’s blocking our sensors.”
Ben Zoma could feel his heart pounding against his ribs. “Keep trying,” he said.
But he knew it wouldn’t be any use. Obviously, Brakmaktin wasn’t content anymore waiting for his enemies to beam down to him. Now he was beaming them down himself.
“We’ve got to do something,” Santana implored the first officer.
“We will,” he said, pulling himself together. Because if he didn’t, his friend had no chance at all.
It took Picard a moment to accept the fact that he wasn’t on the Stargazer anymore—that he was, in fact, in Brakmaktin’s cavern below the planet’s surface.
And that it was the Nuyyad who had brought him down there.
“Welcome,” said Brakmaktin, his voice beating against the captain’s ears like a clap of thunder.
It was one thing to imagine the transformation the Nuyyad had undergone and quite another to witness it firsthand. It was not just Brakmaktin’s eyes that glowed with a fierce, silver light—it was his body as well.
And it was not merely giving off illumination. It seemed to Picard that it was vibrating as well, as if it contained too much power to remain in phase with reality.
Certainly, the captain had anticipated an attack of some kind, even at as great a distance as that between Brakmaktin and the Stargazer. He had known that was a possibility. But to suddenly appear in Brakmaktin’s presence? That was something he simply had not anticipated.
How did he do it? Picard wondered, needing to anchor himself in something real and concrete.
More than likely, the alien had harnessed one of the ship’s transporter units. Otherwise, he would have had to coordinate all the millions of minute operations required to disassemble a living being, send his molecules streaming across a vast distance, and reassemble him on the other end.
That was impossible, even for a being as powerful as Brakmaktin. Wasn’t it?
Again, Brakmaktin battered the captain merely by speaking. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Captain Picard.”
“You know who I am?” Picard asked.
“I’ve known about you for some time. Your name was one of those I found in Nikolas’s head. That was why I kept him alive so long—so he would eventually lead me to you. But fate seems to have made that unnecessary. It placed you in easy reach, giving me a chance to even the score with you.”
Even the score? Picard thought. For what?
“For the things you did to my people,” said Brakmaktin. “The terrible, inexcusable things.”
Picard couldn’t help thinking: I did what I had to do.
“Liar,” the Nuyyad growled, his voice clamoring menacingly in the confines of the cavern. “You did not have to destroy our ships and our depot—and all those who operated them.”
He went on to give a list of the kinsmen destroyed by the Stargazer—a mother’s brother, a mate’s sister, a relative whose relationship was so distant and convoluted that there were no words for it in Picard’s lexicon. But the captain could tell from Brakmaktin’s tone that these were grievous losses.
“We had no choice,” Picard explained. “Your people were preparing to invade our space. They set a trap for us using the Magnians.”
“It was our right to do so,” Brakmaktin insisted. “It was what we have always done.”
“What about our rights?” asked the captain.
“You have none!” the alien thundered. “You are not Nuyyad! You are weak, and weaklings must be conquered!”
Picard recoiled inside from the display. However, he didn’t expect that he would get anywhere by groveling—not before someone who came from a warrior race. If he had any chance at all of surviving the encounter, it would be by earning Brakmaktin’s respect.
“We showed that we are not weak,” he said. “The Nuyyad outnumbered us, but we fought anyway, and we prevailed.”
It occurred to him that the claim might anger Brakmaktin. But instead, it seemed to arouse a curiosity within him. He tilted his head as if to get a better look at the human.
“Strange,” he said. “You speak like a warrior. Yet you look so frail, so soft.”
In truth, it was the Nuyyad who looked soft. However, Picard refrained from pointing that out.
“Perhaps we are soft on the outside,” he said. “But on the inside, we are as tough as anyone.”
“Really,” said Brakmaktin. “It will be interesting to see if you are as tough as you think.”
Picard wondered what his captor meant by that. Then he began to get an inkling.
He could feel it in his belly—a fullness that hadn’t been there before. A liquid sort of fullness. It was growing, pressing against the lining of his stomach, climbing into his throat—and bringing the sour taste of bile with it.
What is happening? Picard wondered.
He might have tried to ask the question of Brakmaktin, but it was no longer possible. Not when the tide inside him was rising into his mouth, filling it…
And it didn’t stop there. It streamed out the captain’s mouth and nostrils, as if he were a poolside statue at an ornate Rigelian resort. And it kept coming up, liter after liter, spewing over his lips and chin and splashing on the stone floor.
But as quickly as the water was emerging from him, it didn’t relieve the agonizing pressure on his insides. That kept increasing, making him feel as if his stomach were about to burst.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Because as terrible as Picard’s pain was, even more terrible was the fact that he couldn’t breathe. With his mouth and nostrils full of rushing water, there was no place for the air to go in.
He was starved for oxygen, desperate for it. But he couldn’t give in to the urge to inhale, because then his lungs would fill with water and he would start to cough, and that would set off a chain of torment that might kill him altogether.
So Picard stood there and endured Brakmaktin’s torture for as long as he could, his mouth open, his arms wrapped about his middle. But in time, the lack of oxygen took its toll. It began to darken the edges of his vision and rob him of consciousness.
He fell to his knees, gagging, his eyes popping out—fighting the impulse to fill his deprived lungs. His only comfort was the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to keep it up much longer. Soon, he would black out and lose control over his reflexes—and, bizarre as it seemed, he would drown.
Darkness closed around him. His face went numb, and the pain, mercifully, grew more distant.
The captain was almost gone when he came to the strange and wonderful realization that the cascade had stopped. The water wasn’t flowing out of him anymore. And without thinking about it, he had already drawn his first ragged breath.
Unfortunately, it was foll
owed by a violent, water-clearing cough, and then several more. But in time, he got it under control. Only then did he look up at Brakmaktin, who was standing before him with cold fury still burning in his eyes.
Chapter Sixteen
NIKOLAS COULD BARELY bring himself to watch the torture Picard was forced to endure. He wished he could help the captain, or at least end his torment. Unfortunately, Nikolas’s efforts wouldn’t amount to anything. Brakmaktin had shown him over and over again how hopeless it was to try to stop him.
Still, he meant to try. And he would have, except a thought stopped him—Brakmaktin’s thought.
The alien hadn’t sent it. It was just floating there on the surface of his consciousness, where Nikolas’s link allowed him to pick it up. If it could be believed, it explained a lot.
Brakmaktin couldn’t feel anymore—not pain or joy or even satisfaction. He had evolved beyond feelings, and it was driving him insane.
That’s why he was torturing the captain. Not out of hatred or a need for revenge, but because he wanted to feel something. And the only way he could accomplish that was by skimming the mind of someone who could feel.
None of which did the captain any good.
“Perhaps you believe you have proven something,” the Nuyyad said. “But there is only one way for me to see for certain how tough you are inside.”
As before, Picard could only guess what Brakmaktin meant—until his uniform vanished, and he felt a burning sensation in his forearms. Looking down at them, he saw that the skin there was splitting, pulling apart, exposing the wet, red layer of muscle underneath. It hurt worse than anything he could ever have imagined, hurt as if his arms were being slit with a hot knife.
He bellowed in pain—he couldn’t help it.
But the Nuyyad was unmoved. He just stood there, glowering at the captain with his unholy silver eyes, and continued to peel his adversary as if he were a ripe fruit.
Horrified, Picard watched as his skin continued to recede, revealing more and more of what was inside—not just muscle, but blood vessels and bone. He couldn’t move his hands anymore, because the skin was coming away from them too, starting at his wrists and moving toward his fingertips.
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