Star Trek: Pantheon (35 page)

As the doctor watched, spellbound, the woman attacked the air around her as if it were rife with invisible enemies. She whirled, struck, gyrated, and struck again, faster and faster, until it seemed her heart would have to burst under the burden.

Then, suddenly, she stopped…and in a spasm of triumph and ecstasy, tossed her head back and howled at the top of her lungs. The sound she made was more animal than human, Greyhorse thought, more the product of the woman’s blood than her brain.

Finally, her chest still heaving, sweat streaming down both sides of her face, she fell silent. Only then did she turn and take notice of the doctor standing by the door. Their eyes met and he could see the raw emotion still roiling inside hers.

He felt he should say something, but speech escaped him. All he could do was stare back at her like an idiot.

The woman drew a long, ragged breath. Then she went to the wall, pulled a towel off the rack there, and stalked past him. A moment later, Greyhorse heard the hiss of the sliding doors as they opened for her. Another hiss told him they had closed again.

Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that the woman was gone. A wave of disappointment and relief swept over him.

The doctor was new on the ship, so he didn’t know many people outside of Ruhalter and his command staff. Certainly, he didn’t know the woman he had just seen…not even her name.

But he would make it his business to find out.

Lieutenant Vigo was sitting in the
Stargazer’
s mess hall, staring at his plate of
sturrd,
when his friend Charlie Kochman sat down next to him and lowered a tray of food onto the table.

“Now that,” said Kochman, who was the ship’s secondary navigator, “is what I call a replicator program.”

Vigo glanced at Kochman’s tray, which featured a large wooden bowl full of hard, gray mollusk shells with dark, rubbery tails emerging from them. “Steamers?” he asked.

“Steamers,” his colleague confirmed with a grin. “It took a while, but the replicator finally got them right.” He glanced at Vigo’s plate. “You’ve got some more of that Pandrilite stuff, I see.”

“Sturrd.
It
is
the signature dish of my homeworld,” Vigo noted.

Kochman held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, buddy…the last thing I want to do is keep a big blue guy like you from eating what he really likes. I just figured you might want to try something else sometime.”

Vigo glanced at his friend’s mollusks, which he didn’t find the least bit tempting. “Sometime,” he echoed.

Kochman chuckled. “To each his own, I guess.” And with unconcealed gusto, he used his fork to crack open one of the clams.

Vigo considered his own food again. One of the other humans on the ship had described
sturrd
as a mound of sand and ground glass smothered in maple syrup. But to a Pandrilite, it was as appetizing as any dish in the universe.

Usually,
he amended. At the moment, Vigo didn’t have much of an appetite.

Kochman noticed. “What’s wrong?” he asked between mollusks.

Vigo shook his head. “Nothing.”

His friend looked sympathetic. “It’s Werber again, isn’t it?”

Wincing, the Pandrilite looked around the mess hall. Fortunately, Hans Werber was nowhere to be seen. “I told you,” he reminded Kochman. “There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”

“Right,” said his friend. “Just like there was nothing wrong a couple of days ago, and a couple of days before that. Admit it—Werber’s on your back and he won’t get off.”

Vigo didn’t say anything in response. He was a Pandrilite, after all, and Pandrilites were taught from an early age not to complain. They shouldered their burdens without objection or protest.

However, Kochman was right. Lieutenant Werber, the
Stargazer’
s chief weapons officer and therefore Vigo’s immediate superior, was a supremely difficult man to work for.

He routinely held Vigo and the ship’s other weapons officers to unrealistic standards. And when they didn’t meet those standards, Werber would make them feel unworthy of serving on a starship.

Kochman shook his head sadly. “Somebody’s got to stand up to the guy. Otherwise, he’ll just keep on making people feel like dirt.”

Perhaps my colleague is right, Vigo reflected. Perhaps the only way to improve the situation in the weapons section is for someone to let Werber know how we feel.

But the Pandrilite knew with absolute certainty that that someone wouldn’t be him.

Standing at his captain’s left hand, Picard watched Idun Asmund bring the
Stargazer
to a gentle stop. Then he eyed the bridge’s main viewscreen and the Federation facility that was pictured there.

Starbase 209 was shaped roughly like an hourglass top, its bulky-looking extremities tapering drastically to a slender midsection. In that regard, it was no different from a dozen other starbases Picard had visited in the course of his brief career.

What’s more, he had seen plenty of ships docked at those facilities. But none of them even vaguely resembled the dark, flask-shaped vessel hanging in space alongside Starbase 209—a vessel whose puny-looking warp nacelles projected from its flanks as well as its hindquarters.

Ruhalter leaned forward in his center seat. “Interesting design, isn’t it?” he asked, clearly referring to the ship and not the base.

“Interesting, all right,” said Leach, who was standing on the captain’s right. “And if I may hazard a guess, it’s the reason we’re here.”

The captain didn’t respond to the remark. But then, he didn’t seem to know much more than the rest of them.

Suddenly, Picard was struck by a feeling that he had seen the flask-shaped vessel somewhere after all…or something very much like it. But if not at a starbase, where would it have been? The second officer wracked his brain but couldn’t come up with an answer.

“Sir,” said Paxton at the communications console, “I have Captain Eliopoulos, the base’s ranking officer.”

Ruhalter sat back. “Put him through, Lieutenant.”

A moment later, the image of a fair-haired man with a dark, neatly trimmed beard appeared on the screen. “Welcome to Starbase two-oh-nine,” he said. “You must be Captain Ruhalter.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Ruhalter. “Your place or mine?”

The casual tone seemed to catch Eliopoulos off guard. It took him a moment to reply, “Yours, I suppose.”

“Done,” said Ruhalter. He turned to Leach. “See to Captain Eliopoulos’s transport, Number One. The command staff and I will be waiting for you in the ship’s lounge.”

The first officer darted a glance at Picard, no doubt wondering why his subordinate couldn’t have taken care of Eliopoulos’s arrival. Then he turned and entered the turbolift.

As the doors slid closed with a whisper, the second officer regarded the viewscreen again. The more he studied the strange vessel, the more familiar it seemed to him. He could barely wait to hear what Captain Eliopoulos had to say about it.

Picard watched the ship’s new chief medical officer enter the lounge with some difficulty. Carter Greyhorse was so big and broad-shouldered, he could barely fit through the door.

“Good of you to make it, Doctor,” said Ruhalter, from his place at the head of the dark, oval table.

Greyhorse looked at him, then mumbled an apology. Something about some research he was conducting.

“Be thankful I’m inclined to be lenient with ship’s surgeons,” the captain told him. “I never forget they can relieve me of my command.”

The doctor’s brow furrowed beneath his crop of dark hair.

“That was a joke,” Ruhalter informed him.

Greyhorse chuckled to show that he got it, but his response lacked enthusiasm. Clearly, Picard reflected as the doctor took a seat beside him, humor wasn’t Greyhorse’s strong suit.

In addition to Ruhalter and Picard himself, five other section heads had arrived before Greyhorse. They included Weapons Chief Werber, Chief Engineer Phigus Simenon, Communications Chief Martin Paxton, Sciences Chief Angela Cariello and Security Chief Gilaad Ben Zoma.

Simenon was a Gnalish—a compact, lizardlike being with ruby-red eyes and a long tail. Everyone else at the table was human.

The assembled officers sat in silence for more than a minute. Then, just as some of them were beginning to shift in their seats, Leach arrived with Eliopoulos in tow.

“Commander Eliopoulos,” said Ruhalter, “may I present my command staff.” He reeled off their names. “Naturally, they’re all most eager to learn why we’ve made this trip.”

“I’m not surprised,” the bearded man responded.

Leach indicated a chair and Eliopoulos sat down. Then the first officer took a seat next to him and said, “Go ahead, sir.”

Eliopoulos looked around the table. “No doubt,” he said, “you noticed a strange-looking ship as you approached the base. It arrived here seven days ago. There were only two people aboard—a man named Guard Daniels and a woman named Serenity Santana.”

“Humans?” asked Werber, a stocky, balding man with piercing blue eyes and a dense walrus mustache.

“From all appearances,” Eliopoulos confirmed. “But from what they told us, they weren’t just any humans. They were descendants of the crew of the
S.S. Valiant
…the ship that went through the galactic barrier nearly three hundred years ago.”

The remark hung in the air for a moment as its significance sank in around the room. Picard, who was more excited by history than most, felt his pulse begin to race.

Three hundred years…

It was then that he realized where he had seen the strange-looking ship before. Or rather, not the ship itself, but elements of it.

Back at the Academy, one of his professors had showed him a picture of the
S.S. Valiant.
He recalled its wide, dark body and its abundance of small, curiously placed nacelles. The vessel hanging in space alongside the starbase could easily have evolved from that primitive design.

Then something occurred to Picard—something that seemed to preclude the claim made by Eliopoulos’s visitors. “Wasn’t the
Valiant
destroyed by order of her captain?”

Ruhalter nodded. “That was my understanding as well.”

The second officer knew the story. For that matter, everyone did. James Kirk, the last captain of the original
Starship Enterprise,
had embarked for the galactic barrier on a research mission in 2265. Just shy of his destination, he encountered an antique message buoy—a warning sent out by the captain of the
Valiant
two centuries earlier, chronicling his experiences after penetrating the barrier.

Though the details provided by the buoy were sketchy, it seemed one of the
Valiant’
s crewmen had become a threat to his colleagues…and to Earth as well, if he lived to return to her. To eliminate that possibility, the
Valiant’
s captain was forced to blow up his ship.

That seemed like a good reason to turn back. And as far as most people in Kirk’s time knew, that was exactly what he had done.

But he hadn’t turned back. He had braved the barrier despite the warning. And in doing so, he had shed some light on the fate of the
Valiant
…albeit at a terrible price.

The man who paid it was Kirk’s navigator, Gary Mitchell, in whom exposure to the barrier had touched off a gradual but startling transformation. Mitchell became a superman, a being capable of increasingly improbable feats of mental and physical prowess…telepathy and telekinesis among them.

Unfortunately, Mitchell’s perspective began to change as well. He came to see his crewmates as insects, hardly worthy of his notice…much less his compassion. In the end, Kirk was compelled to kill him.

Had he hesitated, he might have found himself in the same predicament as the captain of the
Valiant,
who had likely been confronted with a superman of his own—or so Mitchell’s transformation seemed to indicate. Then Kirk too might have been forced to destroy his vessel as a last resort.

“But Daniels and Santana,” Ruhalter continued, “are saying the
Valiant
wasn’t destroyed after all?”

“They agree that it was destroyed,” Eliopoulos replied. “However, they maintain that a portion of the
Valiant’
s crew survived her destruction…then found an M-Class planet and settled there.”

“Hard to believe,” said Simenon, his speech harsh and sibilant. “Hundreds of years ago, escape pods didn’t have any real range. And M-Class planets weren’t any easier to find then than they are today.”

Ruhalter regarded Eliopoulos beneath bushy, gray brows. “Assuming for the moment that your guests were telling the truth, what made them decide to return to our side of the barrier?”

Eliopoulos smiled a tired smile. No doubt, he had grown weary of disseminating the information.

“They say they’re here to warn the Federation about an impending threat—an immensely powerful species called the Nuyyad, which has been conquering the scattered solar systems on the other side of the barrier and sending native populations running for their lives.”

Ruhalter stared at Eliopoulos for a moment. They all did. Then the captain said, “I see.”

“Quite a revelation,” Picard remarked.

“Stunning, actually,” said Leach. He cast the second officer a sideways look. “Assuming it has some basis in fact.”

“You sound skeptical,” Ruhalter observed.

“I’m more than skeptical,” the first officer told him. “I’m afraid—and not of the Nuyyad.”

“Of what, then?” asked Picard.

“Of Daniels and Santana,” said Leach. “Think about it, Commander. If these people’s ancestors went through the galactic barrier more than two hundred years ago, they might eventually have developed some of the same powers Gary Mitchell displayed. And in Mitchell’s case, those powers came with a need to dominate others.”

The second officer smiled patiently. “But that doesn’t mean—”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Eliopoulos interrupted. “The need to subjugate might have been a quirk of Mitchell’s personality. But I have to confess, I had the same concerns as Commander Leach. I had to be careful—I had a starbase to think about.”

Ruhalter cocked his head. “Wait a minute…didn’t Mitchell’s transformation have something to do with extrasensory perception?”

“It did,” Eliopoulos agreed. “He was a documented ESPer and therefore more sensitive to the barrier effect. So, apparently, was the affected crewman on the
Valiant.”

“And so was that other crewman on the
Enterprise,”
Cariello added. “The woman who became Mitchell’s ally…”

“And later turned against him,” said Eliopoulos. “That would be Dehner. And yes, she was an ESPer as well. However, the
Enterprise
had better shielding with which to filter the barrier’s effects. The
Valiant
was all but naked, by today’s standards.”

Picard tried to imagine it. The chaos…the destruction…the blinding flash of powerful, unknown energies…

“For all we know,” Eliopoulos told them, “even a hint of ESP might have been enough to trigger an eventual transformation—and how many humans aren’t blessed at least a little in that regard?”

There was silence around the table. Werber was the one who finally took the air out of it.

“So what did you do with them?” the weapons chief asked. “Daniels and Santana, I mean?”

Eliopoulos scowled. “I did what I had to do. I had the two of them placed in detention cells, pending orders from Starfleet Command.”

He paused, looking just the least bit uncomfortable with his actions. And Picard knew why. The pair was human…and as far as he could tell, they hadn’t done anything to merit imprisonment.

“They seemed disappointed, of course,” said Eliopoulos. “And more than a little displeased, I might add. But not surprised.”

“Why’s that?” asked Ruhalter.

Eliopoulos scowled again. “They said their colleagues had warned them that they would be taking a chance. As they were escorted to the brig, they quoted a twentieth-century Earthman…a fellow named Thomas. Apparently, he’s the one who said, ‘No good deed ever goes unpunished.’”

Picard smiled a grim smile. “It sounds like the type of remark one might make if his ancestors were Earthmen.”

“Or if it served one to create that impression,” Leach added cynically.

“Go on,” Ruhalter instructed the bearded man.

“Naturally,” said Eliopoulos, “I didn’t like the idea that I might be detaining innocent people. But when I contacted Command, Admiral Gardner-Vincent applauded my judgment…and ordered me to run a battery of tests on Daniels and Santana.”

“Tests?” Picard echoed.

“Brain scans, for the most part,” the starbase commander elaborated. “Also, some blood workups.”

“And what did you find?” asked Ruhalter.

Eliopoulos looked at him gravely. “While both Daniels and Santana looked perfectly normal—perfectly
human
—on the outside, their brains were different from those of normal
Homo sapiens.
Their cerebellums, for instance, were a good deal more developed, and the blood supply to their cerebral cortices was greater by almost twenty-two percent.”

“Which suggested what?” Ruhalter wondered. “That they had been born with the mind-powers that Mitchell acquired?”

“That was the inescapable conclusion,” Eliopoulos told him. “With the cooperation of our guests, we performed additional tests designed to gauge the extent of their telepathic and telekinetic abilities.”

Picard leaned forward in his chair, eager to hear the results. Ruhalter leaned forward as well, he noticed.

“Mind you,” said Eliopoulos, “Daniels and Santana could have been holding back and we would have been hard-pressed to detect it. However, what we
did
see was remarkable enough. They could tell me what I was thinking at any given moment, as long as I didn’t make any effort to conceal it. And they could maneuver an object weighing up to a kilogram with reasonable precision for an indefinite period of time.”

Remarkable indeed, thought Picard.

“In addition,” Eliopoulos went on, “Daniels and Santana underwent psychological tests. If we’re to believe the results, they’re a good deal more independent and desirous of privacy than the average human being. Whoever said that no man is an island never met these two.”

“Did you ask them why that might be?” Picard inquired.

Eliopoulos turned to him. “We did. They told us that in a society where people can read each other’s thoughts, privacy necessarily becomes an issue of paramount importance.”

“I’ll bet it does,” said Werber.

“So you were right about them,” Leach observed. “Both of them had powers like Lieutenant Commander Mitchell’s.”

“Like
them, yes,” Eliopoulos noted. “But we didn’t find any evidence that their abilities are as devastating as Mitchell’s were. For what it’s worth, both Daniels and Santana claim that they demonstrated the full extent of what they could do.”

Leach grunted. “And if you believe that, I’ve got some prime land to show you in an asteroid belt.”

Werber laughed at the remark.

“This is all very interesting,” Ruhalter said, his tone putting a lid on his officers’ banter, “but what’s the
Stargazer’
s role in it?”

Eliopoulos looked at him. “Despite our suspicions about Daniels and Santana, we’ve yet to prove they’re telling anything but the truth. As a result, Command wants a vessel to go through the barrier and investigate their story about the Nuyyad invasion force.”

Leach rolled his eyes, making clear his incredulity. At the same time, Werber muttered something under his breath.

Ruhalter eyed them, the muscles in his jaw bunching. “Let’s maintain an air of decorum here, shall we, gentlemen?”

“Of course, sir,” the first officer responded crisply.

Werber frowned and said, “Sorry, Captain.”

But to Picard’s mind, neither of them looked very apologetic.

“I don’t blame your officers for being wary of Santana and Daniels,” said Eliopoulos. “As I said, I was wary too…until I received verification that the Nuyyad exist.”

Leach’s brow creased, just one indication of his discomfort with the announcement. “Verification? From whom?”

“I’d like to know that myself,” said Ruhalter.

“From Nalogen Four,” replied the starbase commander.

Picard knew the place. “There’s a colony there,” he said. “A
Kelvan
colony, if I’m not mistaken.”

Eliopoulos nodded. “Since it was established more than a century ago by refugees, they’ve been accepting other Kelvans from the far side of the galactic barrier.”

“And they’ve encountered the Nuyyad?” Cariello asked.

“One of them has,” Eliopoulos told her. “One of the colony’s more recent arrivals—an individual named Jomar. He told a Starfleet investigator that he had witnessed Nuyyad aggression and atrocities with his own eyes just a few years back.”

“Was he told of the claims made by Daniels and Santana?” asked Ruhalter. “That the Nuyyad were gearing up to cross the barrier?”