THE VALIANT

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Tarasco made the question moot by adding his own beam to the equation. Skewered in the back with it, Agnarsson groaned and crumpled to his knees. Then he fell forward, momentarily unconscious.

  The captain turned his beam off. So did his security officers, whom he recognized as Siregar and Offenburger. In the aftermath of the battle, they couldn’t help glancing at the corpses of Pelletier and the others.

  “Are you all right, sir?” asked Offenburger, a tall man with blond hair and light eyes.

  Tarasco nodded, despite the punishment he had taken. “Fine, Marc.” He managed to get to his feet, though it cost him a good deal of pain. “I need your help, both of you.”

  “What is it, sir?” asked Siregar, an attractive Asian woman.

  “We need to get Agnarsson to the weapons room,” the captain told them. “And I mean now.”

  Their expressions told Tarasco that they didn’t follow his thinking. But then, Pelletier had been the only security officer to whom the captain had revealed his intentions regarding the engineer.

  Strictly speaking, he didn’t owe either Offenburger or Siregar an explanation—but he gave them one anyway. “Agnarsson’s become too dangerous. We have to get rid of him while we still can.”

  The security officers didn’t seem pleased by the prospect of killing a fellow human being—a man with whom they had eaten and shared stories and braved the dangers of the void. However, they had seen the engineer’s power, not to mention the bodies of their friends on the floor. They would do whatever Tarasco asked of them.

  Kneeling at Agnarsson’s side, the captain felt the man’s neck for a pulse. It was faint, but the engineer was clearly still alive. And that wasn’t the only thing Tarasco noticed.

  Agnarsson’s eyes, or what the captain could see of them through the engineer’s half-closed lids, weren’t glowing anymore. They had returned to normal again.

  As before, Tarasco was tempted to believe that the crisis was over—that their laser barrage had somehow reversed whatever had gotten hold of the engineer, stripping him of his incredible powers. Then he considered the bodies of those Agnarsson had murdered with a gesture and knew he couldn’t take any chances.

  “Pick him up,” the captain told Offenburger and Siregar. “I’ll keep my laser trained on him in case he wakes.”

  Tucking their weapons into their belts, the officers did as they were asked. Offenburger inserted his hands under the engineer’s arms and Siregar grabbed his legs. Then they began moving in the direction of the Valiant’s weapons room.

  There were hatches that were closer to their location. Unfortunately, Tarasco mused, shoving Agnarsson out into space might not be enough. If the engineer was able to survive in the vacuum—and he might be—it was also possible that he could work his way back inside.

  The weapons room was a deck above them, which meant they had to use a lift to get to it. It seemed to take forever for the compartment to reach them, and even longer for it to take them to their destination.

  After that, they had to negotiate a long, curving corridor. It wasn’t long before Offenburger and Siregar began showing the strain of their efforts. Agnarsson was no lightweight, after all. But eventually, Tarasco was able to guide them through the weapons room doors.

  The place was dominated by a pair of missile launchers—dark, bulky titanium devices with long, cylindrical slots meant to shoot atomic projectiles through the void. They were empty at the moment, their payloads safely stowed in a series of obverse bulkhead compartments.

  But at least one of them wouldn’t be empty for long.

  The captain pointed to it with his free hand. “Put him in,” he told the security officers.

  Siregar looked down at Agnarsson and winced at the idea. Offenburger hesitated as well.

  “Sir,” the security officer began in a plaintive voice, “there must be a better way to—”

  “Do it,” snapped Tarasco, his stomach clenching.

  Offenburger bit back the rest of his protest. With obvious reluctance, he and Siregar placed the unconscious engineer in the open launch slot. Then they started to slide the missile door into place.

  That was when Agnarsson woke up.

  With a cry of rage, he sat up and slammed the missile door open again, filling the room with metallic echoes. Then he vaulted out of the slot and rounded on Offenburger and Siregar.

  The captain wasn’t about to let them get hurt—not when he had promised to protect them. Pressing the trigger on his laser pistol, he sent a blue beam slamming into the engineer’s back.

  It barely slowed Agnarrson down. He released a bolt of raw pink lightning at Offenburger, sending the blond man flying across the room. Then he did the same thing to Siregar.

  Finally, he turned to Tarasco. I told you, he said in that strangely expansive voice of his, you can’t stop me, Captain—not any more than an amoeba can stop an elephant.

  And with that, he extended his hand toward Tarasco—not casually, as he had before, but with a certain resolve. The meaning of the gesture was clear. He intended to finish the captain off this time.

  Tarasco fired at Agnarsson again, producing another stream of electromagnetic force. But the engineer wasn’t daunted by it. He simply raised his chin and withstood the barrage, and retaliated with a spidery lightning flash of his own.

  Fortunately, the captain was ready for it. Ignoring the crushing pain in his ribs, he ducked Agnarsson’s attack and rolled to his right. Then he came up on one knee and fired again.

  The engineer actually smiled. I’m getting stronger with every passing second, he observed. You should have done something about me a long time ago. Now it’s too late.

  Tarasco saw the wisdom in the remark. He should have done something a long time ago. He should have done the hard thing, the heartless thing, and destroyed Agnarsson as soon as he tampered with the ship.

  But that didn’t help him now. He had to find a way to slow the monster down, to give himself and his crew a fighting chance . . .

  Suddenly, it came to him.

  As the engineer raised his hand again, the captain fired his laser pistol—but not at Agnarsson, against whom it wouldn’t have done any good. Instead, he trained his beam on the deck below Agnarsson’s feet.

  After all, this was the weapons room—and the Valiant boasted two kinds of weapons. One was atomic. The other was a laser cannon system supplied with power by heavy-duty conduits.

  And as luck would have it, one of those conduits ran directly under the spot where Agnarsson was standing.

  It took a moment for Tarasco’s beam to punch through the deck plating. The tactic caught the engineer by surprise, causing him to stumble. But he didn’t understand what his adversary was up to, or he would have removed himself from the room immediately.

  As it was, he simply levitated himself above the ruined spot in the deck. You’re grasping at straws, said Agnarsson, looking regal and supremely confident, his technical training obviously forgotten. What’ll you do next, Captain? Try to bring the ceiling down on my head?

  He had barely gotten the words out when Tarasco’s beam found its unlikely target. Without warning, a gout of blue-white electroplasma rose up and engulfed the engineer.

  Agnarsson writhed horribly in the clutches of the energy geyser. Finally, with a prolonged snarl, he hurled himself out of harm’s way and landed on the deck with a thud.

  However, the engineer’s exposure to the deadly electroplasma had taken its toll. He was curled up in a fetal position, his clothes burned off, his skin and hair blackened and oozing with blood.

  But his eyes still glowed with that eerie, silver light. And as Tarasco looked on, Agnarsson’s flesh began to repair itself. Despite everything, he and his power had survived.

  The captain bit his lip. It wouldn’t be wise to try to launch the engineer into space a second time—not at the rate his strength was coming back. And he could think of only one other option.

  Cradling his damaged ribs, he raced across the r
oom to the intercom grid. Then he pressed the pad that activated it.

  “This is Tarasco,” he gasped. “All hands abandon ship immediately. Repeat, all hands abandon ship.”

  There was no time to elaborate, no time to explain. There was only enough time to issue the order and hope his people would follow it, because Agnarsson was already healed enough to focus his thoughts.

  That was clever, the monster reflected through the haze of his pain. But how many conduits can you open without destroying your ship?

  The captain didn’t allow himself to think of the answer. Instead, he aimed his weapon at the deck below Agnarsson and fired again. This time it took a little longer for him to pierce the surface and reach the conduit, but the result was just as spectacular.

  As the engineer was enveloped in the seething, blue-white flame, he screamed a high, thin scream. Then he lurched out of the plasma’s embrace and fell to the deck, thin plumes of black smoke rising from him.

  Tarasco’s heart went out to the man. After all, Agnarsson hadn’t asked for what had happened to him. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it. In a sense, he was a victim as much as those security officers he had killed.

  But as Pelletier had pointed out, this wasn’t about right and wrong. This was about evolution. This was about survival.

  And the captain would be damned if he was going to let his engineer shape the future of the human race.

  As Agnarsson whimpered and clutched at himself with blackened, clawlike hands, Tarasco tried to rouse Siregar and Offenburger. Both of them were still alive, it turned out, though badly battered.

  “Get out of here,” he told them. “That’s an order. Grab the nearest escape pod and get off the ship.”

  Offtenburger glanced at the engineer, too dazed to fully grasp what was happening. “What about you, sir?” he asked the captain, his words slurred and difficult to understand.

  “I’ll follow when I’m certain Agnarsson can’t come after us,” Tarasco assured him. It was a lie, of course. He had no intention of following the security officers.

  Siregar’s eyes narrowed. Unlike Offenburger, she seemed to divine his intentions. “Let me stay and help,” she suggested.

  “No,” the captain told her. “Now get going.”

  Siregar hesitated for a moment longer, loathe to leave him there alone with Agnarsson. Then she put her arm around Offtenburger and helped him stagger out of the weapons room.

  Tarasco turned back to the engineer. To his amazement, the man was almost healed again, his skin raw but no longer charred. Agnarsson glowered at him with eyes that had known unbelievable pain.

  You can’t keep this up forever, the engineer told him. Sooner or later, I’ll destroy you.

  The captain’s only response was to walk over to the launch console and punch in some commands. The first one armed the ship’s atomic missiles, overriding the protocol that would have kept them from exploding inside the Valiant. The second command accessed the missiles’ timers.

  What are you doing? Agnarsson demanded.

  “That’s simple,” Tarasco told him with an inner calm that surprised him. “I’m blowing up the ship.”

  You won’t do that.

  “Won’t I?” asked the captain.

  He estimated that it had been two minutes since he had given the order to abandon ship. By then, all surviving members of his crew should have cast off, with the possible exception of Offtenburger and Siregar. And even they should have reached a pod.

  With that in mind, he tapped in a detonation time. Then he took a moment to reassess Agnarsson’s condition.

  With an effort, the engineer had propped himself up on his elbow. Slowly, laboriously, he was reaching out in Tarasco’s direction, no doubt intent on blasting him with another energy surge.

  The captain didn’t wait to see if Agnarsson had recovered enough to generate a charge. He simply fired at the deck below the man. As before, it took a few seconds to penetrate the plating and open the conduit.

  A third time, the engineer was bathed in electrocharged fire. And a third time, he escaped its clutches to collapse on the deck, a crisped and bloody thing that barely resembled a man.

  Tarasco almost allowed himself to believe that Agnarsson was dead—that he could deactivate the missiles and save his ship. Then the husk that had been the Valiant’s engineer began to stir again—began to roll over so it could see its tormentor.

  Its eyes had the same startling silver cast to them. And they pulsated with hatred for the captain.

  Damn you, Agnarsson rasped in Tarasco’s brain, you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m your future, your destiny . . .

  If the captain had needed a sign, he had gotten one. He didn’t dare think about turning back.

  So instead, he stood there and waited, counting down the seconds. He watched the engineer recuperate as he had before, but it didn’t seem that Agnarsson was going to mend quickly enough to be a problem.

  Tarasco’s last thought was for his crew. Like Moses, he was going to be denied the Promised Land—but after all his people had been through, he hoped they, at least, would make it back to Earth alive.

  Book Two

  Stargazer

  Chapter 1

  Jean-Luc Picard regarded his opponent through the fine steel mesh of his fencing mask.

  Daithan Ruhalter was tall, barrel-chested, and powerfully built . . . and for all of that, quick as a cat. Like Picard, he was clad entirely in white—the accepted garb for fencers for the last several hundred years.

  At first, Ruhalter just stood there on the metallic strip in a half-crouch, only his head moving as he took stock of Picard’s posture. Then he edged forward with a skip step, lunged full length and extended his point in the direction of his adversary’s chest.

  It wasn’t his best move—Picard knew that from experience. It was just an opening salvo, Ruhalter’s effort to feel his opponent out—and Picard, who had been trained by some of the best fencing masters in twenty-fourth-century Europe, didn’t overreact. He merely retreated a couple of steps and flicked his opponent’s point aside.

  Undaunted, Ruhalter advanced and lunged again—though this time, he took a lower line. Picard had no more trouble with this attack than the first. In fact, he launched a counterattack just to keep his adversary honest.

  Ruhalter chuckled in his mask, his voice deep and resonant. “Let’s begin in earnest now, eh?”

  “If you say so,” Picard rejoined.

  Suddenly, the other man’s point was everywhere—high, low, sliding in from the left, zagging in from the right. Picard wove an intricate web of protective steel around himself, defending against each incursion as soon as he recognized it.

  Ruhalter used his fencing blade the way he commanded his crew. He was aggressive, improvisational, inclined to go with his instincts first and last. Also, he was a devout believer in the philosophy that the best defense is a good offense.

  It was an approach that had garnered the man his share of prestigious medals and left more than one hostile species cursing his name. Years earlier, before the landmark Treaty of Algeron, Ruhalter had even gotten the best of the crafty Romulans.

  However, Picard was no pushover either. Though his style was to rely on skill, discipline, and a carefully considered game plan, he was so surgically precise that few opponents could prevail against him.

  Ruhalter continued to advance against the younger man, relentless in his onslaught. His sword darted like a living thing, a steel predator hungry for a taste of its prey.

  Picard had no chance to go on the offensive, no opportunity to drive his opponent back in the other direction. It was all he could do to keep Ruhalter’s point away from himself—but he did that admirably well.

  And he knew his adversary couldn’t keep up his intensity forever. Eventually, Ruhalter would have to falter. If I bide my time, Picard told himself, I’ll find the opening I need.

  Then, suddenly, there it was . . . the opening.

  In an at
tempt to lunge in under Picard’s guard, Ruhalter had failed to extend his lead leg quite far enough. As a result, he had dropped his upper body. Off-balance, he was eminently vulnerable.

  Picard moved his opponent’s point out of the way, encountering little resistance. With practiced efficiency, he leaned forward into a forceful but economical counterthrust.

  Too late, he saw his error. Ruhalter hadn’t made a mistake after all. His overextension had been an act, a ruse designed to draw Picard into a subtle trap . . . and it had worked.

  Thwarting the younger man’s attack with the polished dome of his guard, Ruhalter came at Picard with a roundhouse right. Before Picard could retreat and erect a new defense, Ruhalter’s point was pushing against the ribs beneath his left arm.

  “Alas!” the older man barked, making no effort to mask his exuberance.

  The best fencing masters in Europe would have been ashamed of him, Picard thought. On the other hand, it was devilishly difficult to deal with someone who was so unpredictable.

  “Your point,” Picard conceded drily.

  Careful not to forget his manners, he swung his blade up to his mask in a gesture of respect. Then he settled back into an en garde position. Ruhalter, who was smiling behind his mask, did the same.

  “You know,” he remarked good-naturedly, “you look a little sluggish this morning, Jean-Luc.”

  “Only in comparison to my opponent,” Picard told him. Though that will change, he added, resolving to win the next point.

  He succeeded in that objective. However, Ruhalter came back and won the next two in succession. In the end, Picard’s determination notwithstanding, he lost the match 5-3.

  Ruhalter removed his mask, revealing his rugged features and thick, gray hair. “Thanks for the workout,” he said.

  Picard removed his mask as well. “Thank you, sir,” he responded, ever the good sport.

  “You know,” Ruhalter told him in a paternal way, “you need to trust your instincts more, Commander. A man who ignores his instincts is defeated before he starts.”