Gauntlet

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Nikolas was sorely tempted to laugh out loud—it was that funny-looking. But he knew it would hurt the Binderian’s feelings, so he managed to refrain.

  Then he heard laughter after all. It seemed to fill the gym. And it came from Caber.

  “Boy,” he said, “that’s got to be the most pitiful excuse for a body I’ve ever seen.”

  Nikolas looked at him. It wasn’t like his roommate to be so critical, even in jest.

  Obal, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind the remark. He just smiled as Caber was smiling and went back to his lifting.

  “Come to think of it,” Caber went on, “I’m not even sure that is a body. Bodies have muscles, don’t they? I’ve baited hooks with physiques more muscular than that.”

  Still the Binderian seemed not to take offense. He continued his exercises without a hint of animosity, without the least sign that he was bothered by Caber’s comments.

  But Nikolas was bothered by them.

  It wasn’t that he thought Caber was trying to hurt Obal’s feelings. Anyone who knew the admiral’s son knew he wasn’t capable of that. He was just playing around.

  But the remarks still felt wrong to Nikolas. Unsporting somehow, like hunting flies with a phaser rifle.

  “Hey,” he said, meaning to distract his friend, “all this exercise is getting me hungry. What do you say we hit the mess hall and pump some fried chicken?”

  But Caber didn’t even look at him. He was still too enthralled by the sight of the Binderian.

  “I wonder what he looked like before he started working out.” Caber snickered. “Must’ve been hard to see him at all.”

  “Or some ribs,” said Nikolas, pushing upstream with his suggestion. “I sure could go for some nice barbecued ribs. You are the guy who’s always hungry, right?”

  It was then that Caber finally seemed to notice him. “Yeah,” he replied after a moment. “Ribs. That sounds good to me too.”

  Nikolas indicated the doorway with a tilt of his head. “So what are we waiting for?”

  Caber glanced at Obal as if he were going to shoot one more comment in the Binderian’s direction. But in the end, all he did was grin and shake his head and lead the way across the gym.

  Nikolas followed him, relieved that the incident was over. But before he and his roommate could reach the exit, Obal piped up.

  “Have a pleasant day,” he said, his voice high-pitched and tremulous and nearly as silly as his appearance.

  Nikolas sighed. “You too.”

  But Caber didn’t say anything in return. He just broke out into another wave of laughter, filling the corridor outside the gym with it as he and Nikolas made their way to their quarters.

  Chapter Fourteen

  PICARD HAD NEVER SEEN a Lazarus star in person. And he wasn’t unusual in that respect, considering the scarcity of such stars within the bounds of Federation territory. Nonetheless, he had studied the phenomenon long and hard since their departure from Starbase 32. He had memorized the sequence of events in the life of a Lazarus star—its unremarkable creation, its placid red-giant phase, the violent scattering of heavy elements and blinding luminosity that accompanied its seemingly suicidal supernova, and the almost miraculous birth of a new red giant in the midst of its predecessor’s ample debris.

  Every recorded image that Picard had seen of a Lazarus star showed it to be gauzy and colorless, the reborn sun at its heart all but occluded by the cast-off material floating around it. But as Picard watched Beta Barritus loom on his forward viewscreen, he saw that it wasn’t gauzy and colorless at all.

  It was a thing of sheer, unmitigated beauty—and a remarkably savage beauty at that.

  The star itself was the fiery red eye of a cosmic god, glowering menacingly at the universe around it. It swam in a glittering sea of nested gases, a mammoth iridescence that boasted strands of emerald and lapis and amber.

  And in the midst of that iridescence, hidden by that glittering sea, was the freebooter called the White Wolf.

  Nor was there any question that he was in there. Gerda Asmund had identified his ion trail—the same sort of trail that Picard’s predecessors had discovered and recorded in their sensor logs—and there was no corresponding trail to indicate the pirate’s departure.

  He was in there, all right. And at long last, Picard had his chance to fish the fellow out.

  “Kind of takes your breath away,” Ben Zoma remarked.

  The captain forgot the White Wolf for the moment and again fixed his attention on the spectacle before him. “It certainly does, Number One.”

  Of course, Beta Barritus’s beauty didn’t make it any less dangerous to them. Those ionized gases surrounding it had the potential to wreak havoc with their mission.

  He turned to Idun. “Reduce speed to half impulse.”

  “Aye, sir,” said his helm officer.

  “Shields at full,” Picard directed.

  “Shields at full,” Vigo confirmed.

  Slowly but surely, the system filled the viewscreen with its splendor, blotting out all evidence of more distant stars. Its outermost filaments of color blurred as the Stargazer came closer and finally pierced them, sending a chill up Picard’s spine.

  It’s not the first time you’ve ever entered a solar system, he chastised himself. On the other hand, it was the first time he had entered this one.

  “Lots of debris, sir,” Gerda reported, “just as we were warned. The pieces are too small to see, but they’re there.”

  Picard wasn’t surprised any more than Gerda was. His predecessors’ reports had all mentioned the system’s debris shell—a by-product of the star’s initial, explosive demise, which had destroyed whatever planets originally circled it.

  “The friction is causing an increase in hull temperature,” Idun noted. She glanced over her shoulder at Picard. “It’s as if we’re entering a Class-M atmosphere.”

  “See if you can find a less debris-ridden entry path,” the captain told her.

  Idun did as he asked. But Picard didn’t hold out much hope of her finding such a path. After all, no other helm officer had found one, and plenty of them had looked.

  He said as much to Ben Zoma.

  “Maybe we’ll be the first,” his first officer told him.

  “Maybe,” Picard conceded.

  But after half an hour, Idun still hadn’t had any luck.

  If the captain had wished, his helm officer would have pressed on until she dropped from exhaustion. She had been trained by her adopted family never to admit defeat.

  But Picard had been brought up by members of a more practical species, and he didn’t see any point in placing Idun under such stress. Besides, it wasn’t as if they couldn’t get through the debris field without a path of less resistance.

  They could do what the White Wolf’s other pursuers had done—reshape their shields to minimize the friction and plunge through the region as best they could. But the Stargazer would pay a price for that approach, just as all the other ships had paid a price. And in the end, it would keep them from completing their mission here.

  Clearly, they needed a different strategy—one that would get them through the debris field in better shape than their predecessors. Until they had that strategy in hand, they would have to hover here on the fringes of the Beta Barritus system.

  And the White Wolf would remain free.

  Frowning, the captain turned to Ben Zoma and said, “Convene the senior staff, Gilaad. We’ve got work to do.”

  Admiral McAteer gazed at the mantel clock sitting on his desk, the syncopated movement of its polished brass workings visible through its thin glass walls.

  McAteer loved the clock, a gift from his grandmother on the occasion of her passing. Well, not exactly a gift, he reflected. More of an inheritance, really. But he thought of it as a gift.

  Truth to tell, he hadn’t liked his grandmother very much, nor had she liked him. But that didn’t keep him from loving the clock. It was a symbol to him of precision, of ef
ficiency—the kind that he would instill in Starfleet little by little, until it was the Starfleet he had always had in mind.

  The admiral smiled as he watched the brass gears turn in perfect coordination. Timing was everything, wasn’t it?

  Take his plan for Picard and the Stargazer, and by extension for Admiral Mehdi as well. Its success depended on everything happening just when it should.

  First, he had given Picard his assignment in front of every other captain in the sector. Next, he had foisted those seven new crewmen on him, to distract him and increase the level of difficulty. Finally, with all eyes on Picard, McAteer would pull the rug out from under him.

  Not that he had any choice, really. Starfleet really did have to get that cargo back. And even if Picard had a lifetime to recover it, he would never be equal to the task.

  Contrary to what Mehdi seemed to believe, the man just wasn’t captain material.

  And when that became as painfully obvious to everyone else as it was to McAteer, Mehdi would be exposed as well. He would finally be seen for what he was—a man who had been in power much too long and had begun to make choices to the detriment of Starfleet.

  As McAteer looked on appreciatively, the brass insides of his clock spun and whirled, oblivious to everything but the march of time. Leaning back in his overstuffed chair, the admiral tapped his combadge with a forefinger and said, “Mr. Merriweather?”

  “Sir?” came the response from his assistant, whose office was in the alcove beyond.

  “Send a message for me,” McAteer told him. “Subspace frequency.”

  “To whom, sir?”

  The admiral smiled again. “To Captain Jean-Luc Picard . . . on the Stargazer.”

  Captain Picard scanned the faces of the six officers who had followed him into the Stargazer’s briefing room. Ben Zoma, Wu, Simenon, Valderrama, Idun Asmund, and her sister Gerda barely fit around the room’s black oblong table.

  The captain indicated the hologram of Beta Barritus that floated above a projector built into the center of the table. The star looked like a drop of molten fire, the vast system surrounding it a shimmering blanket of fog.

  “As you’re aware from your study of this system,” Picard began, “the other starships that have tried to deal with the problem of the debris field have all fallen short of their goal.”

  “Because all they did was reshape their shields to minimize the friction,” Ben Zoma offered.

  “That’s correct,” Picard said. “Unfortunately, this approach placed a great deal of stress on their shield generators and gradually wore out their energy reserves.”

  Wu spelled it out for them. “Which in turn reduced their chances of continuing their efforts.”

  The captain nodded. “What we need is a different approach—one that allows us to penetrate the debris field without depleting our energy reserves.” He looked around the table. “Ideas?”

  For a moment, no one spoke. Then Simenon shrugged and took a stab at the problem.

  “We could use our phasers to blast a path for ourselves,” he offered. But the words were barely out of his mouth before he shook his head vigorously from side to side. “No, that won’t work.”

  “Too large an energy expenditure,” Ben Zoma observed.

  “Yes,” said Simenon. “And it would take a ridiculous amount of time to clear enough debris.”

  “What about a tractor beam?” asked Wu. “We could move the debris out of our way as we proceed. And it would require considerably less energy than a sustained phaser blast.”

  “True,” said Ben Zoma. “But it would also limit our rate of speed.” He turned to the chief engineer. “How fast can a tractor clear a path through that stuff?”

  Simenon snorted. “Not very.” His eyes slitting, he made some rough calculations in his head. “We could proceed at fifty kilometers an hour, maybe a little better than that.”

  “So, if the shell is a thousand kilometers deep,” said Gerda, “and our data tells us that it’s at least that, we’re talking about as much as twenty hours.”

  “And during that time,” Picard noted, “our sensors will be completely blind. So if the White Wolf were to exit the system, we would have no way of knowing it. He might be eighteen hours gone by the time we get through the debris field.”

  “Assuming,” said Valderrama, “that he has a way of getting through it in better shape than those who have hunted him.”

  “An assumption we have to make,” Idun remarked. “Otherwise, he would not have concealed himself here so often.”

  “So we have ruled out phasers and tractors,” said the captain. “What other options do we have at our disposal?”

  Again, there was silence around the table. And this time, no one spoke up to relieve it.

  Picard frowned. “It’s late. Perhaps if we sleep on the problem and get a jump on it in the—”

  He never completed his sentence. The word jump had sparked a notion in his brain—one that he was even now turning over and over, inspecting it from all angles.

  And the more he inspected it, the better he liked it.

  “Sir?” said Wu.

  “I believe I have a solution,” Picard told her. “But it’s not without a certain amount of risk.”

  “How much risk?” asked Simenon.

  Picard planted a hand on the briefing room table, leaned toward the hologram of the solar system and pointed to a spot within its gray outer ring. “What I’m proposing is that we execute a very quick, very short subspace jump—which will, if it is successful, place us well beyond the debris field.”

  Glances were exchanged, some of them understandably skeptical. In fact, had someone else come up with the idea, the captain might have been skeptical as well.

  “It’s risky, all right,” said Simenon.

  “If we miscalculate,” Wu told him, “we could find ourselves in the star itself.”

  “Yes,” said the Gnalish. “Or some other inconvenient place.”

  Picard turned to Gerda. “How dependable is our data on the dimensions of the debris field?”

  She considered the question. “Our predecessors’ logs seem to differ somewhat. But they entered the system at different points, and the field may be thicker in some places than in others.”

  “Only a few of them ever reached the inner limits of the field,” Wu chimed in, “much less explored beyond that point. For all we know, there’s another debris field only a bit further in.”

  “If that’s so,” said Valderrama, “it would cut down our margin for error considerably.”

  “Yes,” Simenon agreed. “And there’s also the system’s gravity well to take into account. It wouldn’t be easy to pull this off inside the boundaries of a normal system. With a Lazarus star . . .” His voice trailed off ominously.

  Picard turned to Idun. “What do you think, Lieutenant?”

  The helm officer frowned at the hologram as if she were sizing up an adversary. “As Mr. Simenon says, it will not be an easy feat. There is much we do not know about this system.”

  “But can we do it?” Picard pressed.

  Idun responded as if to a challenge, her eyes steely with resolve. “I believe we can.”

  That weighed more heavily in the captain’s estimate than anything else that had been said. After all, Idun was the one who would have to execute the maneuver.

  He looked around the table. “Any other comments?”

  No one offered any. Not even Simenon, who still seemed more wary of the idea than any of the others.

  “Very well, then,” Picard said. “We execute the maneuver in one hour. Let’s see to it that there are no delays.”

  Everyone got up and filed out of the room. At least, that’s what Picard thought. It was only as he reached to switch off the hologram projector that he noticed someone lingering by the door.

  It was Wu.

  “A question?” he suggested, leaving the projector untouched for the time being.

  “No question,” she said. “Just
an observation. It is a significant risk you’re taking. I thought you were somewhat more conservative in your approach to command.”

  The captain smiled a wry smile. “You’ve been reading my personnel file, I see.”

  “Commander Ben Zoma made it available to me. I felt it was my duty to read it.”

  And so it was, Picard told himself. Nonetheless, knowing Wu had read his file made him feel vulnerable in her presence—much more so than he would have imagined.

  “I will concede that I am deliberate sometimes, Commander—perhaps to a fault. And I will also concede that I have the utmost respect for the obstacles placed in front of me. But make no mistake—I will not shy away from them.”

  Wu looked thoughtful. “I’ll remember that.”

  Then she left him as well.

  Picard looked back at the hologram of Beta Barritus. There was only one thing missing from the three-dimensional representation—the White Wolf that lay at the heart of the solar system, daring the captain to find him.

  The muscles in his jaw rippled at the thought. One step at a time, he counseled himself. That is the way to catch a White Wolf—one small step at a time.

  Then he reached across the briefing room table, switched off the little hologram projector, and returned to what would undoubtedly be a very busy bridge.

  The man called the White Wolf sat in the captain’s chair of his ship and drummed his fingers on his armrest.

  “What is it?” asked Turgis, his Klingon second-in-command, who had come to stand beside him in the lurid red light of their bridge.

  The White Wolf glanced at him, as slyly narrow-eyed as his namesake. “What do you think it is?”

  His second-in-command’s expression turned into one of disgust. “Starfleet,” he spat.

  The White Wolf nodded, a grim smile pulling his lips back from his teeth. “They’re after me.”

  “You’ve picked them up on sensors?”

  “Not yet. But I don’t need sensors to tell me when someone’s hot on my trail.” His nostrils flared. “I can feel them stalking me, Turgis. I can feel the fire in their blood.”