Star Trek The Next Generation: Planet X

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “Now that,” the mutant said, “is more like it.” He looked at the counselor. “Where’s Picard?”

  Troi gestured for Wolverine to come along.

  Then, with the mutant at her side, she followed Lt. Clark back to the admiral’s ready room.

  * * *

  As Commander Riker entered Transporter Room One, he saw Lt. Robinson manning the controls. Nodding in a friendly way to the willowy brunette, the first officer took his place beside her.

  After all, the captain and their newfound guests would be beaming aboard in less than a minute. Picard had called from the starbase to say so only a little while ago.

  “Sir?” said Robinson, as she checked her monitors.

  Riker turned to her. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  She looked up at him. “Are these people—these X-Men—really as super-powerful as people say they are?”

  The first officer began to say that Robinson would know as well as anyone. Then he remembered.

  The lieutenant, a veteran of the Enterprise-D, hadn’t remained with the crew when it launched the Enterprise-E. She had spent some time on Earth first—and had thereby missed the ship’s crosstime battle with the Borg, not to mention its encounter with the X-Men.

  “They have some unusual talents,” said Riker. “One of them can teleport himself around. Another one can dent duranium with a single punch, and the youngest can travel through solid matter.”

  “I heard one of them can fly,” Robinson told him.

  The first officer chuckled. “Like a bird.”

  “Hard to believe a man can do that,” she said.

  Riker shrugged. “Not when you put them in context.”

  Robinson looked at him. “Context, sir?”

  “Think about some of the other beings we’ve run into in our travels. Take Q, for instance.”

  Their frequent visitor from the Q Continuum had demonstrated his amazing powers for them time and again. Once, he had even granted the first officer a taste of them.

  “Or the Traveler,” he continued, “who can manipulate the very fabric of space and time. And don’t forget the Douwd, who was able to wipe out an entire race with a single thought.”

  Riker wasn’t done. In fact, he was just warming up.

  “Then we’ve got the Founders of the Gamma Quadrant, who can reshape themselves into anything they can imagine. And our own Mr. Data—who’s as fast or powerful as any of the X-Men.”

  The transporter operator smiled. “Actually, I was thinking more in terms of other humans.”

  He looked at her. “What makes you think the X-Men are human?”

  “Well,” said Robinson, “they’re from Earth, aren’t they? Maybe not our Earth, but something a lot like it?”

  “They’re from Earth, all right,” Riker confirmed. “But apparently that doesn’t make them homo sapiens. As I understand it, some people consider them a different species entirely.”

  The lieutenant absorbed the information. “Interesting.”

  Suddenly, she looked down at her control console. “They’re on their way,” she reported.

  Just then, the doors to the room slid open and Worf walked in. He nodded to the first officer and took up a position beside him.

  “Come to renew old acquaintances?” asked Riker.

  The Klingon grunted. “I seem to be doing that a lot lately.”

  Before he had finished his comment, the transporter platform came alive with a half-dozen pillars of sparkling light. In a matter of moments, they solidified into Data, Troi, and four of the X-Men—Nightcrawler, Banshee, Colossus, and Wolverine.

  The first officer smiled at them. “Welcome aboard.”

  Nightcrawler stepped down from the platform. He walked with that strange, bowlegged gait Riker remembered.

  “Vielen dank,” said the mutant. “It’s nice to be aboard.”

  “Worf,” grunted Wolverine.

  Coming forward, he held his hand out to the Klingon. Worf grasped it enthusiastically—and no wonder. In their last meeting, he had developed quite a respect for Wolverine’s prowess as a warrior.

  “You are well?” asked the Klingon.

  “Well enough,” the mutant told him. “Ya don’t have a brig on this bucket, do ya?”

  Worf’s brow creased. “In fact, we do. Why do you ask?”

  Wolverine waved away the question. “Never mind. Now that I’m here, howzabout you show me that game you were tellin’ me about—the one we didn’t have time to play last time?”

  “Game?” said the Klingon.

  “Yeah, what’d ya call it … some kind o’ holowhoozis?”

  Worf suppressed a grin. “Ah, yes. My calisthenics program on the holodeck.”

  The mutant pointed to him. “Yeah. That’s the one.”

  He hooked Troi by the arm.

  “Hey, Counselor—wanna join us fer some calisthenics?”

  Troi sighed. “Maybe another time.”

  As she moved away, Wolverine leaned closer to the Klingon. “Is it me, or has the counselor gotten a little stuffy all of a sudden? She needs to lighten up—be more like you, Worf.”

  “Please clear the platform,” said Robinson. “Captain Picard and the others are ready to beam over.”

  Banshee sighed and motioned to Colossus. “Come on, Piotr. I think we’re standin’ in th’ way o’ th’ fast lane.”

  As Riker watched, they stepped down and stood alongside their teammates. A moment later, three more columns of light appeared. In short order, they gave way to Picard, Storm, and Shadowcat.

  “The gang’s all here,” said Wolverine.

  The captain approached Riker. “Number One, would you see to quarters for our guests?”

  “It’d be my pleasure, sir,” said the first officer.

  “In the meantime,” Picard told him, “I’d like to have a word with Storm.” He turned to the silver-haired leader of the mutants. “If that’s all right with you.”

  Storm nodded. “It is not as if I have urgent business elsewhere.”

  The captain smiled. “I suppose that’s true.”

  Riker looked at his commanding officer. He hadn’t seen that kind of expression on Picard’s face in years. He was pleased and more than a little intrigued to see it now.

  Pondering the possibilities, the first officer led all the X-Men except Storm out of the transporter room.

  Chapter Six

  PICARD ESCORTED STORM into his ready room. Offering her a seat, he went over to the replicator unit built into the bulkhead.

  “Something to drink?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Some tea? Herbal, if you have it.”

  “On the Enterprise,” he replied, “we have everything.” Selecting a blend of rosehips, orange peel, and blackberry leaves, the captain programmed the replicator to manufacture it. Then he added an Earl Grey for himself.

  A moment later, there were two steaming cups of tea on the grid in front of him. He removed them and set them down on his desk. Then he came around and sat down opposite Storm.

  “There’s a problem,” she said, “isn’t there?”

  Picard knew exactly what she meant. “Getting you home,” he replied. “Yes, if the information I received from Admiral Kashiwada is accurate, it appears there is.”

  The mutant smiled bravely. “I had a feeling.”

  “As I understand it,” said the captain, going over what he had learned just to be certain, “your timehooks malfunctioned—and then disappeared.”

  “That is correct,” Storm replied. “Obviously, the timehook you used produced more satisfactory results.”

  “Eminently more satisfactory,” said Picard. “It worked perfectly, returning us to our own time and place. Nor did it disappear, as yours did.”

  “Then why is there a problem?” asked the mutant. “Can you not use that timehook to help us?”

  “Actually,” he said, “we shipped it off to Starfleet Command on Earth, for testing. As it happened, it was then sent back to the Enterprise.
But war with our enemies broke out and … well, a few things were misplaced. The timehook was one of them.”

  “But … can it be still be retrieved?” she asked.

  “I do not believe that will be a stumbling block,” the captain told her. “It is simply a matter of tracking it down.” He paused. “On the other hand, there may be a problem with your using it. You see, if the other timehooks failed to work for you, there is every possibility this one will fail as well.”

  Storm nodded soberly. “I see.”

  “When the admiral first notified us of your presence in our universe,” Picard said, “we speculated that our timehook had somehow dragged yours along with us. However, you would then have appeared at the same point in time and space that we did.”

  She sighed. “And you probably appeared light years away from Starbase 88.”

  “Light years in space,” he confirmed. Then he imparted the bit the woman would undoubtedly find more jarring. “And nearly twelve months ago, Federation standard time.”

  Storm looked at him, surprised. “Twelve months? You mean …”

  “It has been nearly a year since we returned to our timeline,” the captain explained, as gently as he could.

  The mutant shook her head, appearing to wrestle with the concept. “So you haven’t seen us for quite some time … though it seems to me as if I saw you the day before yesterday.”

  “Indeed,” said Picard.

  Storm grunted softly. “No doubt, you were surprised to hear from us.”

  “I was,” the captain agreed. “Though to be honest, I often found myself thinking about you.”

  He realized how that must have sounded and felt his cheeks flush. It was not a pleasant sensation.

  “That is,” he added quickly, “about your group. To be honest, I had never encountered anyone quite like you.”

  The mutant took a sip of her tea, her blue eyes gleaming with reflected light. “As much as a man like you must have encountered, I imagine that is saying a lot.”

  It was—but that didn’t make it any less true. In all his years of space exploration, Picard had never come across anything exactly like Storm—or, for that matter, her fellow X-Men.

  Then, on his way back from a confrontation with the Borg in Earth’s 21st century, the captain had found himself embroiled in a scheme by someone named Kang the Conqueror to disrupt established timelines—not only the one to which Picard himself belonged, but also the one where the X-Men fought oppression and injustice.

  With the mutants’ help, the captain and his crew had crossed timelines to thwart Kang’s scheme. Then, using the villain’s own timehook device, they had returned to their proper time and place. The X-Men had employed Kang’s timehooks as well—with very different results, it seemed.

  Picard leaned forward in his seat. “Rest assured, Storm, we will do everything in our power to find a way to get you home—and to do so as expeditiously as possible. Even without the timehook devices, there are other methods … other options at our disposal. However, finding the right one will require your cooperation.”

  “Ororo,” she said.

  He looked at her, puzzled by her response. “I beg your pardon?”

  “My name is Ororo,” she told him. “Storm is just my nom de guerre.”

  The captain smiled. “Ororo, then.” He resisted inviting her to call him Jean-Luc. “As I was saying, we will require your cooperation if we are to help you. We need to determine why the Enterprise returned to its programmed time and place and your X-Men did not.”

  “What sort of cooperation did you have in mind?” she asked.

  “Dr. Crusher and Commander La Forge would like to conduct some tests,” Picard explained. “They will be painless, of course. But with any luck, they will tell us why you were deposited in our timeline.”

  The mutant thought for a moment. “I cannot say I love the idea,” she said, “but I do not think these tests will pose a problem.”

  The captain nodded. “Good.”

  Storm glanced at one of the observation ports, where she could see stars streaking by. “Do you deal with things like this all the time?” she wondered. “Cross-temporal anomalies and such?”

  “More often than I would like,” Picard admitted.

  She turned to him again, able to joke despite her team’s plight. “Then whatever they pay you, it is not enough.”

  “Since we aren’t paid, as such, certainly not,” he said.

  The mutant glanced at the observation port again. “We are moving at a considerable rate of speed. I take it you have been assigned a mission.”

  “Only in the broadest sense. I have been asked to attend a planning meeting on another starbase. It pertains to an ally of our Federation known as the Klingon Empire.”

  “Commander Worf’s people?”

  “The same,” the captain told her, pleased that she had made the connection. “Fortunately, neither Dr. Crusher nor Commander La Forge will be involved in the planning meeting, so your problem will not be neglected. In any case, I hope you and your comrades will make yourselves comfortable while you are here.”

  “Thank you,” Storm replied. “You are very kind.”

  For a second or so, neither of them spoke. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence by any means. Strange as it seemed, Picard felt as if he had known the woman all his life.

  “May I ask you a question?” she said at last.

  “By all means,” he responded.

  The mutant leaned forward. “Do you never get lonely here, so far from the planet of your birth?”

  The captain shook his head. “Not at all. I chose this life. In fact, I aspired to it.” He smiled. “Nothing gives me more pleasure than traveling from star to star, seeing what no one has seen before.”

  She smiled, too. “I cannot say the same.”

  “And why is that?” he asked.

  “I have a bond with Earth’s biosphere,” Storm explained. “It is an essential component of my mutant powers. I find it … difficult to be away from Earth for too long.”

  Picard regarded her. “You would have gotten along with my brother, Robert,” he said.

  She tilted her head to one side. “Would have?”

  “He perished in a fire,” the captain told her. “Along with my nephew. It took me a long time to accept their loss.”

  Silence again. And again, it was Storm who ended it.

  “I know what it is like to lose people close to you. I lost my parents when I was very young.”

  Picard saw the pain in the woman’s eyes. “It must have been hard for you to go on.”

  “It was,” she answered frankly. “Very hard. Even as an adult, I have nightmares about it.”

  The captain was surprised to see how vulnerable Storm could allow herself to be. To this point, he had seen her only as a warrior and a leader. Now he saw the lonely child in her as well, and he felt privileged to have the opportunity to do so.

  Her eyes seemed to lose their focus. “How lovely,” she said.

  Picard didn’t understand. “To what are you referring?”

  Storm pointed to the Ressikan flute he kept on his desk. A small, simple instrument made of a tinlike material, it was one of the few personal items he had been able to salvage from his quarters on the Enterprise-D.

  She turned to him again. “Do you play it?”

  The captain nodded. “On occasion. I love the music that comes out of it—but it represents another tragedy, I’m afraid. The death of a civilization on a planet called Kataan.”

  “You mourn the death of an entire civilization?” Storm asked.

  “In a way,” he said. “You see, when the people of Kataan were dying, they wanted desperately to be remembered—so they sent out a space probe containing the memories of an ironweaver named Kamin. As it happened, I was the one who received Kamin’s memories, as well as the flute and the knowledge of how to play it.”

  She looked at him. “There is more.”

  “More?” Pi
card asked, surprised.

  “Yes. Something about the flute you have not mentioned.”

  Suddenly, he realized what she was talking about. “I had … a friendship with someone a few years ago. She played an instrument as well. We enjoyed participating in duets.”

  Funny, the captain thought, how dry he managed to make it sound. How lifeless. But then, he was unaccustomed to opening up to someone as he was opening up to the mutant.

  “You no longer have these … duets?” Storm asked. It wasn’t so much a question as an observation.

  “No longer,” he said. “Our careers got in the way of our …”

  “Friendship?” the mutant suggested, using Picard’s word for it.

  “Yes. I found I could not act effectively as her commanding officer and care for her at the same time.”

  Storm digested the remark. “Leaders seldom enjoy stable relationships. It is one of the burdens one must bear when one assumes responsibility for the lives of others.”

  “So I learned,” the captain responded.

  “Except …” she said.

  He looked at her. “Except?”

  Storm returned his scrutiny for what seemed like a long time. At last, she shook her head.

  “Nothing,” she told him at last. “Sorry. I did not mean to pry so into your personal life.”

  Rising, she picked up her cup and saucer and returned them to the replicator slot. Then she turned to Picard and smiled.

  “Thank you again,” Storm said. “For everything.”

  The captain stood, too. “It is nothing,” he assured her.

  With a last glance at him, she crossed the room and left through the sliding doors. A breeze seemed to attend her, making her hair and her garments undulate in response.

  Picard sat back in his chair and sighed. He would have given much to know what thought Storm had declined to finish.

  Chapter Seven

  HIS ARMS FOLDED across his chest against the late-afternoon chill, Erid watched the shadows lengthen in the fortress’s yard. They had already reached the opposite wall and climbed halfway up its stone surface.

  Soon, the guards would call down to the transformed and send them back to their rooms. It was difficult enough to keep an eye on the growing prisoner population during the day; at night, it would be nearly impossible. At least, that was how the transformed interpreted the situation.