Gauntlet

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Ben Zoma didn’t get it. “Was that the only reason?”

  “It was the only reason she gave me.”

  The first officer frowned. It was highly unusual for anyone to be held that closely to requalification regs—especially while on a mission as potentially difficult as this one.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “For now, you’ll have to comply with the commander’s decision. But I’ll speak with her first chance I get. And when I do, I have a feeling we’ll clear this up to everyone’s satisfaction—yours included.”

  That seemed to calm Idun a bit. “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re welcome,” Ben Zoma replied. Then he sat back in his chair and considered what he was going to say to Commander Wu.

  Pug Joseph had gotten into the habit of checking in with his monitor officer every so often, even when he wasn’t on duty. Fortunately he had never caught one napping, even figuratively.

  Until now.

  Marching into the security section, he didn’t nod to either of the armed officers standing guard in the little anteroom. He didn’t even look at their faces. He just kept going until he reached the hexagon-shaped main security facility.

  That’s where he found Obal sitting in front of the big, concave bank of monitors with its closed-circuit views of every strategically critical area on the ship. It was the Binderian’s turn to stand watch over those critical areas.

  And as Joseph had feared since his routine check-in several minutes earlier, Obal was fast asleep.

  The security chief stood there for a moment, watching the little fellow’s chest rise and fall serenely. Then, not too roughly, he took Obal by the shoulder and shook him.

  The Binderian sat bolt upright with a little cry of surprise, his eyes blinking wildly. Still, it was a second or two before he realized where he was and who was standing beside him.

  “Lieutenant Joseph,” he said, his eyes wide as he began to grasp the nature of his circumstances.

  “Sorry to have to wake you,” Joseph told him. In more ways than one, he added silently. “But I can’t have my monitor officer catching up on his sleep.”

  He might as well have driven an old-fashioned arrow into Obal’s chest. “I—I’m sorry, sir,” the Binderian bleated. “I don’t know what came over me. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

  “Maybe you’ve never stayed up half the night checking phasers before,” Joseph suggested.

  Obal swallowed. “That’s true. Still, I feel terrible about this. Allow me to try to atone for it somehow.”

  By checking the phasers again? Joseph mused. Or maybe the photon torpedo tubes this time? “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Just do the job you’re assigned, all right?”

  The Binderian couldn’t possibly have looked more contrite. “Of course, sir. As you wish.”

  Joseph felt sorry for the little guy—he couldn’t help it. But he wasn’t just a bystander here, he was Obal’s superior. And as such, he couldn’t just dismiss the incident.

  Besides, if he had waited just a few more minutes to call in, one of the other officers might have discovered the Binderian before he did. Then the incident would have become the talk of the ship’s lounge. And though he could have asked his people to keep it among themselves, the story might have leaked out anyway.

  Joseph sighed. It wasn’t just a matter of people respecting Obal anymore. Now it was a matter of people respecting him. Because when the captain read Joseph’s report, he would be forced to wonder what kind of security section his chief was running.

  “Am I relieved of my post?” Obal inquired humbly, wincing as he posed the question.

  Joseph nodded. “I think that would be our best course of action under the circumstances.”

  Without another word, the Binderian slipped out of his chair, thrust out his scrawny chest, and stood there dutifully until his only slightly curious replacement could be called in. Then he left security and presumably made his way back to his quarters.

  As Joseph watched Obal go, a sigh escaped him. He himself hadn’t done a single thing wrong, but he felt every bit as bad about the incident as the Binderian did.

  Maybe worse.

  Picard eyed the viewscreen in front of him. It showed him a massive, dark bullet of a ship bristling with deadly armaments, half obscured by the roiling currents of Beta Barritus.

  “Hail them,” he said.

  Paxton made the attempt at his comm console. There was no response—not that the captain had expected any.

  “Sir,” said Gerda Asmund, sitting at her customary spot behind the navigation controls, “they’re powering weapons.”

  “Red alert,” Picard snapped. “Shields. Phasers.”

  “Shields up,” Gerda confirmed.

  “Phasers ready,” Vigo announced.

  It was then that the captain noticed the two figures standing next to the weapons console, just behind his left shoulder. They comprised a mismatched pair if he had ever seen one.

  One was an older man, his face lined, his hair all but gone. He wore simple, sturdy clothes, the sort one might don to work in the fields, and there were traces of dirt beneath his fingernails.

  The other was a tall, athletic-looking fellow in the cranberry and cream of a Starfleet captain’s uniform. His hair was thick and dark, only beginning to show signs of gray at the temples, and his smile was a beacon of confidence stretching across his face.

  Or rather, across half his face. The other half was a charred, bubbling wound, the result of an explosion in a plasma conduit during his first and only encounter with the Nuyyad.

  The fellow’s name was Daithan Ruhalter. He had preceded Picard as captain of the Stargazer.

  And the other man, the one with the plain, sturdy clothes and the dirt beneath his fingernails? He was a vintner, heir to a long line of vintners. And if he had had his way, his son Jean-Luc would have been a vintner as well.

  “They’re firing, sir,” Gerda called out.

  The viewscreen filled swiftly with a lurid barrage of phased energy emissions. A moment later the bridge bucked and shuddered with the force of the attack.

  “Actually,” said Maurice Picard, “I’ve never approved of this sort of technology. I believe man’s place is on Earth, doing what his ancestors have done for centuries.” He searched for a phrase. “Getting his hands dirty, if you know what I mean.”

  “You know,” Ruhalter said judiciously, “I think you’ve got a point there. You can’t rely too much on machines, even in a battle like this one. It’s the human element that wins and loses wars.”

  “How so?” Maurice Picard inquired.

  “Instinct,” Ruhalter elaborated. “Either you’ve got it or you don’t—and if you don’t, no collection of sensors and shields and phaser banks is going to help you.”

  As if to underline the wisdom of his statement, the ship was bludgeoned again with a phaser volley. Holding on to his armrests, Picard felt his teeth rattle with the impact.

  “Return fire!” he cried.

  “Aye, sir!” came the crisp response.

  The Stargazer lit up the sea of gases with a pair of ruby-red phaser beams. But somehow, though the enemy didn’t seem to make any effort to evade them, they missed.

  Picard’s teeth ground together. “Torpedoes!” he bellowed.

  Again, “Aye, sir!”

  Packets of matter and antimatter plunged through swirling currents, hungry to feed on their prey. But they missed as well and were rapidly lost to sight.

  The crew of the Stargazer paid for the miss with another round of bone-jarring torment. The deck beneath Picard’s feet jerked and shivered once, twice, and again.

  “Fire again!” he roared.

  But nothing happened. And when he turned to Vigo, all he saw was an expression of helplessness.

  “Phasers and photon torpedoes are off-line,” the weapons officer reported numbly.

  “Shields down seventy-five percent!” Gerda snarled.

  Picard felt
his teeth grate together. “Evasive maneuvers!”

  Idun sent them swerving to starboard. Ever so narrowly, they avoided the pirate’s next burst of fury. But without weapons, there was no possibility of their winning this battle.

  “Was it a good year?” Ruhalter inquired of his companion.

  “It was an exquisite year,” said Maurice Picard. “The grapes were sweet, succulent . . . the best I have grown in a long time.”

  “That’s good to hear. I always liked good wines.”

  “Ah,” the vintner sighed, glancing at his son, “but it’s not enough to have a promising grape. It’s what one does with it that makes for success . . . or failure.”

  He had barely gotten the words out when the enemy found them again. The Stargazer lurched hard to starboard under the force of the worst assault yet.

  Without warning, Idun’s control console exploded in a geyser of flame and sparks and the helm officer went flying backward. Even before Picard got to her, he could tell that she was dead.

  “That’s what happened to me,” Ruhalter said.

  The elder Picard screwed up his face in grim sympathy. “It looks terribly painful.”

  “Only if you survive,” Ruhalter noted. “In my case, death came quickly and mercifully.” He stroked the side of his face that had been reduced to blackened ruin. “Good thing I remembered to shave that day. I wouldn’t have wanted to make a lousy-looking corpse.”

  He chuckled at his own joke. And after a moment, Maurice Picard chuckled with him. The sound of their laughter provided a bizarre counterpoint to the hissing of plasma and the exclamations of the captain’s bridge officers.

  Not the least of which were Picard’s own raw-throated shouts. “Commander Ben Zoma,” he cried, “take the helm! Get us out of here!”

  His friend darted to one of the aft consoles and worked like a demon to transfer helm control. In the meantime, the pirate dealt them one savage blow after another, inflicting hull breaches and casualties too numerous to report.

  “I knew he wouldn’t be any good at this,” said Maurice Picard. The lines in his face had deepened with disapproval. “He should have stayed at home, as I advised him.”

  “Doesn’t seem that he learned much from me either,” Ruhalter remarked. “Pity, isn’t it?”

  “The helm!” Picard cried helplessly, perspiration collecting in the small of his back. “Damn it, Gilaad—”

  Finally Ben Zoma yelled, “Got it!” and brought the Stargazer about. But it was too late. Picard could see that. As he watched, spellbound, the enemy fired at point-blank range.

  The volley filled the viewscreen with crimson light, turning everything and everyone on the bridge blood-red. And when it hit, it seemed to plunge everything into darkness.

  Some time later—a second, or was it an hour?—the captain realized that he was lying on the deck. Raising his head, he looked around, but there was nothing but sparks and black smoke and the silhouettes of what had been his officers’ control consoles.

  Then they came walking out of the darkness and the sizzling flashes of light. Not his bridge officers, but they—the two who had no business being there.

  They came to stand over him, both of them. And they had the same look on their faces—a look of heartfelt disappointment.

  “He should have listened,” observed Maurice Picard.

  Ruhalter nodded. “I’ll say.”

  “He had so much promise.”

  “Tons of it. He could’ve been a great captain.”

  “A great man.”

  “It was too soon,” Ruhalter observed, a spurt of sparks illuminating the nightmare side of his face. “He was too damned young.”

  The elder Picard’s eyes filled with pain, just as they had the day his son left Labarre to attend the Academy. He nodded in agreement. “Too young indeed.”

  The captain wanted to answer, but he couldn’t. The words stuck in his throat, choking him like thick, sooty smoke, forcing him to gasp for air, for life—

  Then he realized that he wasn’t on the bridge at all. He was sitting up in his bed, breathing hard as if he had exerted himself, his skin covered with a sheen of sour sweat. It seemed to him that he could hear his room echoing as if he had cried out when he woke, though he couldn’t retrieve any of the words.

  If there had even been words.

  A dream, Picard thought, reassuring himself. All of it, a dream. But it had seemed so real while he was dreaming it.

  So hideously real . . .

  Chapter Eleven

  NORMALLY CARTER GREYHORSE MINDED his own business. But every so often—as in the case at hand—he was compelled by duty to diverge from that policy. “I’m fine,” Picard said once the doors to his ready room had closed, giving him and the doctor some privacy.

  “You don’t look fine,” Greyhorse told him. “You look like you’ve had something big and insistent running through your brain. Something with heavy spiked boots.”

  “Am I that transparent, Doctor?”

  “I’ve seen viewports that are less so.”

  The captain frowned. Then he walked over to his observation port and stared at it. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  “Nightmares?” the doctor suggested.

  Picard turned to look at him, an echo of pain and confusion in his eyes. “A nightmare. Just one.”

  “It must have been a good one.”

  The captain’s chuckle had a distinct lack of merriment in it. “It was. We had found the White Wolf and engaged him in battle. But we didn’t fare very well.”

  “We lost him?”

  “We lost everything,” Picard told him.

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Greyhorse had a feeling there was more to it, but he didn’t force the issue. He just said, “Obviously, you’re concerned about how we’ll do when we find the White Wolf—particularly since we’re operating with a new captain, a new first officer, and a new second officer.”

  “And that’s not cause for worry?” Picard asked.

  The doctor shrugged. “I’m not qualified to answer that question. What I am qualified to tell you is that such dreams are perfectly normal for men with command-level responsibilities—even when they’re not about to face some legendary pirate.”

  “That’s comforting.” The captain smiled a little sheepishly. “I appreciate your putting the matter in perspective.”

  “It’s my job,” the doctor said.

  “Nonetheless,” Picard insisted.

  Greyhorse did his best to ignore the expression of gratitude. Emotions tended to make him uncomfortable, and gratitude was perhaps the worst in that regard.

  “If you have any more trouble sleeping,” he said, “let me know and I’ll prescribe something. Outside of that, just try to relax. I don’t need to tell you that your getting all worked up won’t increase our chances of success.”

  Picard nodded. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  As he left the room, Greyhorse wasn’t sure that he had actually accomplished anything, or that the captain would sleep any more soundly from that point on. But at least he had made the attempt.

  Juanita Valderrama was examining the sensor profile of an asteroid belt on the outskirts of a nearby solar system when Lieutenant Paxton appeared in her office.

  “Got a minute?” he asked her.

  Valderrama swiveled away from her monitor to face him. “Of course. Please . . . have a seat.”

  Paxton came in and allowed the door to close behind him. Then he sat down in the seat next to hers. If his expression was any indication, it wasn’t anything trivial he wanted to talk about.

  It was something rather serious.

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t normally tell tales out of school. But in this case, I think it would benefit everyone concerned.”

  Valderrama regarded him for a moment, wondering what he was talking about. Then she said, “Go on.”

  “Just a little while ago,” Paxton t
old her, “I overheard Chief Simenon talking to someone. It doesn’t matter whom, really. He was saying that he’d had a meeting with you in engineering.”

  The science officer nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You were talking about the sensors?”

  “Yes. Mr. Simenon told me that he had enhanced them with Beta Barritus in mind. I thanked him.”

  Paxton smiled benignly. “But unless I’m mistaken, you didn’t encourage him to do any better.”

  Valderrama’s brow creased above the bridge of her nose. “He’s the chief engineer. I didn’t think—”

  She stopped herself in midsentence. Judging by Paxton’s expression, he believed he had made his point.

  “I didn’t think,” Valderrama sighed.

  “You see what I’m getting at, right?”

  The lieutenant nodded. “I should have pushed him to do better.”

  It’s what she would have done when she was younger and new to the fleet. But over the years, she had somehow stopped caring so much. She had developed some bad habits.

  Habits she was about to break.

  This was Valderrama’s last chance to prove she still had what it took. The captain had placed his faith in her. It was up to her not to let him down.

  “Thanks,” she told Paxton. “I appreciate your going out on a limb for me like this.”

  He shrugged. “You’ll do the same for me one day. Just keep it under your hat, all right? Or no one will trust me when I tell them they’ve got a secure channel.”

  Valderrama smiled. “My lips are sealed.”

  And they would be.

  Pug Joseph was lost in thought—so much so that his colleague seemed to appear out of nowhere.

  This would likely have startled him even if his colleague hadn’t been more than seven feet tall and as blue as the sky on a summer day. “Geez,” Joseph blurted, recoiling in his seat, “did you have to sneak up on me like that?”

  Vigo, the Stargazer’s senior weapons officer, favored him with a broad and well-meaning grin. “I didn’t sneak up on you. At least, that wasn’t my intention.”

  Joseph blew out a breath and looked around the lounge. None of the dozen or so crewmen present seemed to have noticed his jumpiness. Or if they had, they weren’t making it obvious to him.