Star Trek The Next Generation: Planet X

by Michael Jan Friedman

  The pod shuddered and threatened to veer off course, so the captain directed more power to the stabilizers. A bead of perspiration traced a path down the side of his face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  Archangel pointed to the screen with the red blip. Another blip had joined it and was approaching it steadily, though its progress belied the difficulty of piloting the pod.

  “Looks like we’re in the ballpark,” the mutant observed.

  Picard wasn’t a fan of 20th-century sports, but he understood the reference. Seeing no need to reply, he tried scanning the cluster missile. After all, Archangel couldn’t disarm it if the captain couldn’t determine how it worked.

  Unfortunately, his sensors couldn’t tell him much about the missile’s inner workings yet. The energy permeating the atmosphere was getting in the way, giving Picard a distorted and incomplete picture.

  And it was getting hotter. Much hotter.

  The captain could feel the sweat trickling down both sides of his face now. His uniform was wet, too. He desperately wanted to remove his tunic, but didn’t dare—not with the pod jumping and quivering the way it was.

  Worse, their deflectors were starting to buckle under the strain. Even with the shields in working order, the temperature in the cabin had risen thirty degrees. If the deflectors deserted them at this speed, they wouldn’t survive long enough to see the missile, much less disarm it.

  But on the monitor screen, at least, there was good news. One red blip was swiftly overtaking the other.

  “Get ready,” Picard said.

  Archangel moved to the hatch in the side of the pod. “You still haven’t told me what to do when I get there,” he pointed out.

  “I will,” the captain assured him.

  Little by little, his sensors delivered a more intelligible insight into the mechanics of the cluster. Picard studied them, queried the onboard computer, studied them some more, and queried again.

  At last, he got the answer he was looking for. Keeping his eyes on his controls, he described out loud what the mutant would have to do.

  “It won’t be easy,” the captain finished. “But then, you knew that when you volunteered for this.”

  Like Picard, Archangel was sweating profusely. “At least I won’t have to stay here and wilt,” he quipped.

  Indeed, the heat was getting unbearable. And it wasn’t likely to get any better when the captain tried to slow the missile’s descent.

  A moment later, the red blips on his screen converged. Picard looked out his observation port and glimpsed the cluster through ragged layers of high clouds. The device wasn’t more than a hundred meters away.

  He decelerated to match its speed. Then, confirming that he had dropped below the altitude of Xhaldia’s energy bands, he reached for another set of controls.

  “I’m extending tractor beams,” he said, wiping heavy drops of perspiration from his eyes.

  It was hotter in the pod than the hottest desert the captain had ever known. But in his youth, he had been a marathon runner. He could stand it, he told himself. He would stand it.

  With infinite care, he locked the tractors onto the cluster. Then, when he was certain the connection was secure, he began to apply reverse thrusters—not in the hopes of stopping the missile altogether, but to diminish its surface temperature so the mutant could handle it.

  Immediately, Picard felt a jolt—an indication of the extra load imposed on his thrusters. The cabin temperature began to climb at a terrifying rate.

  However, both the missile and the pod were slowing down. Glancing at his monitors, the captain saw the change in their rate of descent. Four hundred kilometers per hour … three hundred and fifty … three hundred …

  “Go,” he rasped, fighting to keep from succumbing to the heat.

  “I’m gone,” Archangel responded.

  Picard touched a pad on his panel and opened the hatch, exposing the pod’s interior to a blast of frigid wind. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the mutant spread his wings and corkscrew his way out of the cabin.

  Godspeed, the captain thought. Then he pushed the pad again and saw the hatch slide closed.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  RIKER KNELT BESIDE the Draa’kon.

  The invader was covered with earth and fragments of pavement, one of which had caved his skull in. His eyes were staring, a rivulet of green blood drying in the corner of his wide, lipless mouth.

  The first officer looked up at his companion. Storm’s hair lifted in the breeze as she gazed at the other Draa’kon in the vicinity. All of them were dead, all partially buried beneath a shattered landscape of dirt and rubble that stretched for a hundred meters in either direction.

  “If we dig around,” she said bleakly, “we will no doubt find a great many more of them.”

  “That may be,” Riker allowed. He got to his feet. “The question is … who did this?”

  The mutant looked at him pointedly. “Who do you think?”

  “You’re going to tell me it was the transformed?” he asked.

  “Who else could it have been, Commander? The city guards? Do they have weapons capable of creating such upheavals?” With a gesture, she indicated the buildings on either side of the street. “Can they wreak this kind of havoc without breaking a single fragile window?”

  The first officer shook his head. He had seen the X-Men in action. He knew people like them could have unusual abilities. But to ascribe such monumental destruction to beings who had barely come to know what talents they possessed …

  Then he recalled what it was like when Q endowed him with virtual omnipotence, and his perspective changed. He had been in control of his powers from the get-go. Suddenly, it didn’t seem quite so far-fetched for even a neophyte to tear up a street.

  He was about to admit that Storm might have been right when he heard a series of distant cries, followed by a rumbling and an unsettling vibration beneath their feet. Riker’s instincts told him an earthquake was underway, but his mind insisted otherwise.

  Storm shot into the air, her garments fluttering in a wind that appeared to have come from nowhere. She seemed bent on tracking the thunder in the earth to its source.

  “Hey!” he shouted at her. “What about me?”

  Glancing back at him over her shoulder, the mutant weighed his question for a moment. Then she executed a tight turn and zeroed in on him.

  The next thing the first officer knew, he was soaring in the direction of the dense, gray sky, Storm’s slender but strong fingers locked around his wrist. His senses reeled, but he kept his eyes open, not wanting to miss a single moment of it.

  When he had had the powers of a Q at his disposal, Riker had never thought of using them to fly. Now, as he and the mutant rose higher than the highest building in Verdeen, he regretted the oversight.

  Just a little while earlier, he had sailed over the city in a shuttle. But this was different, he told himself. Very different.

  In a matter of seconds, he spotted the scene of confusion and chaos where the cries and the vibrations had come from. So did Storm, apparently, because she changed direction and swooped like a bird.

  They bore down on the place with breathtaking speed, slipping past a rooftop and landing on ground that was still level and whole. Then they sized up the challenge ahead of them.

  As in the last place they had come across, there were plenty of Draa’kon corpses strewn about, half-buried under earth and debris. But here, there were other corpses as well—the twisted, broken bodies of blue-suited city guards, civilians, and even what appeared to be some of the transformed.

  At the center of it all, standing on a high mound of earth that seemed to have risen straight through the pavement, stood a single figure—a tall, slender Xhaldian with a crooked smile on his face.

  He wasn’t alone, either. Four others, who appeared to be his accomplices, were standing at the base of the mound with Draa’kon disruptors in their hands. Judging by their appearances, at least two had
come from the ranks of the transformed.

  A little further off, half a dozen plainly terrified Xhaldians were huddled in the lee of an uprooted chunk of pavement. When they saw Riker and Storm approach the scene, hope illuminated their expressions.

  “And who have we here?” asked the Xhaldian on the mound, his tone a cruel and disdainful one.

  More than likely, he was the one who had caused all this destruction—hard as that was for the first officer to believe. He came forward.

  “I’m Commander William Riker of the U.S.S. Enterprise.” He pointed to the heavens. “The ship that’s fighting for the life of your world up there.”

  “How helpful,” the Xhaldian responded. “Though, as you can see, we freaks are perfectly capable of handling the invaders on our own.”

  He has a point, the first officer told himself. It was just as Storm had predicted. The transformed had become a bigger threat than the Draa’kon.

  “Who are you?” asked the mutant, taking her place beside the first officer.

  The Xhaldian’s smile turned hard. “My name is Rahatan. I’m the one in charge around here—in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “By whose authority are you in charge?”

  The Xhaldian glared at her. “By my own.”

  Suddenly, one of his allies on the ground put his hands to his head and shouted a warning. Whirling, Rahatan found himself eyeing a pair of Enterprise security officers, their phasers extended in his direction.

  Wilkes and Calderon, Riker thought. Two of the men from his shuttle.

  “Come down from that mound,” Calderon told Rahatan.

  The Xhaldian shook his head. “Come here and get me.”

  “Stay where you are,” Riker yelled.

  Wilkes and Calderon froze, awaiting further orders. But to the first officer’s dismay, it didn’t save them.

  The ground exploded underneath them, flinging them high in the air. By the time they came back to earth, they were too broken and bloody to still be alive.

  Riker’s resolve sharpened in the heat of his anger; he took advantage of the distraction to fire at Rahatan himself. But something protected him from hitting the Xhaldian—some kind of translucent shielding that deflected the force of the phaser beam.

  Looking at the foot of the mound, he could see where it had come from. One of Rahatan’s lackeys had reached up and used her power to protect him.

  The Xhaldian turned around again to face the first officer. “That was ill-advised,” he said in a strangely reasonable tone. Then he began to point in Riker’s direction.

  “Stop!” shouted Storm.

  Intrigued, Rahatan glanced at her. “Why should I?”

  “Because you cannot kill him until you have killed me first. And that is something you will never accomplish.”

  A smile returned to the Xhaldian’s face. “Is that a challenge?”

  The mutant shrugged. “If you like.”

  “You’ve made a mistake.”

  “Have I?” Storm asked.

  “A big mistake,” Rahatan told her, reeking of confidence. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.”

  “I see,” she said. “I am overmatched?”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “I am taking my life in my hands?”

  “That would be another way.”

  Storm’s eyes narrowed. “Under the circumstances, what do you propose I do? Give up?”

  He shrugged, his expression becoming almost playful. “You’re a handsome woman. I think I could find a place for you. Next to me, maybe.”

  “You are too kind,” she told him, her voice free of hostility. “But I think I will take my chances against you rather than alongside you. You see, I have faced your kind before.”

  “My kind?” he echoed.

  Storm nodded. “You are powerful, no doubt. But what you have gained in power, you have lost in visual acuity.”

  His forehead creased. “What are you talking about? My eyes are as good as they ever were.”

  She shook her head. “You only see the things your power can obtain for you. You’ve lost the ability to look into your heart … and discern right from wrong.”

  His eyes blazed, and he gestured to the corpses he had buried. “You think it’s wrong to kill someone who’s trying to kill you?”

  “I think it’s wrong to kill anyone,” Storm insisted. “There is always another way, if one tries hard enough to find it.”

  His mouth twisted. “I can only think of one way to deal with insects—and that’s to crush them underfoot!”

  She didn’t lose her composure. “Then perhaps you are not as powerful as you have come to believe.”

  A cry of rage tore from him—and with a sound like thunder, the earth cracked open between Storm’s feet. In a heartbeat, the crack became a fissure and the fissure became a gaping crevasse, causing the mutant to lose her footing and slip into the widening hole.

  No! thought Riker.

  But there was nothing he could do to save her.

  “That will teach you to question my power,” the earth-mover bellowed, shaking a fist at the departed Storm.

  Suddenly, Riker saw Rahatan forced back from the edge of the fissure—not by anything solid, but rather by a lusty, howling wind that seemed to emerge from its depths.

  The first officer knew it didn’t make any sense for a wind to be rising out of newly cracked earth. Still, he wasn’t complaining—because a moment later, that same wind lifted Storm into sight, her uniform and silver hair whipping all about her, her head held high.

  She’s alive! Riker realized. Alive and whole—or at least, no more injured than she had been when this started.

  Surprised and frustrated, Rahatan gave voice to his fury. Then he brought his arms up as if he were lifting weights. The ground around him shuddered and groaned miserably, and two large chunks of earth and masonry tore loose from their foundations.

  The Xhaldian gestured again, flinging the fingers of one hand in Storm’s direction. Instantly, one of the chunks of earth went hurtling at her.

  But as Riker had learned, the mutant knew how to take care of herself. She countered with a gesture of her own, destroying the missile with an explosive flash of blue-white lightning.

  Even before all the debris had fallen to the ground, Rahatan hurled the other chunk of earth. But Storm created another lightning bolt and demolished that one as well.

  By then, Rahatan’s allies must have decided the combat wasn’t going their way. One of them, a specimen with luminous eyes, raised his Draa’kon disruptor rifle and took aim at the airborne mutant.

  But before he could press the trigger, Riker nailed him with a phaser beam. The transformed slammed into the mound of earth behind him, his weapon sliding out of his hands.

  Turning to Rahatan’s other supporters, the first officer fired at each of them in quick succession. The one with the green pocks on his forehead was knocked senseless, while the female’s shielding protected her from a second beam.

  She raised her weapon to fire back at him, but Riker wasn’t about to stand there and provide an easy target for her. Dropping and rolling, he squeezed off another blast. It caught his adversary in the midsection, doubling her over this time and taking her out of the fray. Apparently, her shielding could only take so much.

  But there was one more around, the first officer told himself. A powerful-looking Xhaldian in some kind of natural body armor. Some sixth sense told him to turn around. Whirling, Riker saw Rahatan’s last remaining lackey charging at him.

  The first officer sidestepped the charge successfully—but in the process, his foot caught on a piece of upturned pavement, causing him to stumble and fall unceremoniously. Even worse, he lost his grip on his phaser. As he watched, it clattered away and fell into a crack in the pavement.

  Seeing how vulnerable he was, the strongman dove in an attempt to pin him, but Riker threw himself out of the way and scrambled to his feet.

&n
bsp; Unfortunately, he was nowhere near where his phaser had fallen. And without it, he was clearly overmatched.

  Or was he?

  As the Xhaldian in the body armor got up and charged him a second time, the first officer bent and picked up a rock. Then, before the transformed could veer off, Riker reared back and let it fly—striking his adversary square in the forehead.

  At first, he thought it might not have been enough. Then the transformed’s knees buckled and he fell forward on his face.

  The first officer had no time to congratulate himself, however. On the other side of the ruined street, Storm was still facing off with the earth-mover.

  By that time, the Xhaldian had to know how badly he had underestimated his opponent. Still, it didn’t seem to daunt him a great deal. With a battle oath worthy of a Klingon, Rahatan tossed his head back and raised his hands, which had clenched into white-knuckled fists.

  Unbelievably, the ground beneath him began to rise and roll forward, in the manner of a mammoth wave breaking on a seashore. Except the wave had a target, and that target was Storm.

  The Xhaldian rode forward on the wave’s unchanging crest, legs spread wide for balance, fists clenched at his sides. He had a look of almost maniacal glee on his face.

  But Storm didn’t move. She simply floated on her updraft above the mighty crevasse, as if she had already resigned herself to her fate. And all the while, Rahatan’s wave of earth and debris rolled closer, threatening to bury her under its weight.

  Finally, just as her adversary was about to descend on her, the mutant raised a hand to the heavens. As Riker watched, a hail shower seemed to come out of nowhere, pelting the Xhaldian with tiny balls of ice.

  Rahatan threw his hands up to protect himself from Storm’s onslaught. At first, it looked as if he might be able to stay on his feet and endure it. Then the rain of icy pellets grew heavier and heavier, until the barrage drove the earth-mover to his knees.

  But Rahatan wasn’t done yet. Though battered and bruised, he still possessed the strength to try one last gambit.

  The crest of his earth wave, with him on it, seemed to topple backwards for a moment. Then, like a catapult, it shot forward—flinging the Xhaldian across the gulf between Storm and himself.