Star Trek - TNG - Vendetta Read online

  Talbot's voice was laden with disdain, but

  Picard refused to back down. One of the first

  lessons in command school--the first lesson, in

  fact--was that when you made a decision, you stuck

  to it. Nothing eroded crew confidence as fast as

  waffling.

  "Even though, yes, sir."

  Talbot continued to circle his desk,

  absently rapping his knuckles on the surface,

  as was his habit. "I will pray for you, Picard, that

  you never have to find out firsthand what it is to lose a

  crew. But I fear the prayers are in vain, because

  space is a vast and unforgiving mistress. She

  does not treat the overconfident especially

  charitably."

  Picard did not say anything. No response

  seemed required, or appropriate.

  Confidence. Well, that he most certainly had.

  And the thought of ever losing a crew was an alien one

  to Picard. That sort of thing happened to commanders who

  were unprepared, who were caught short or

  flatfooted somehow. The way to avoid such a

  fate was, quite simply, preparation, preparation,

  and more preparation. And that was a commitment that

  Jean-Luc Picard was more than ready to make.

  "Sit down, Picard," said Talbot, with a

  trace of his familiar impatience.

  Picard did so, very obediently. As

  always, there was a small, inward sigh of relief that

  any cadet always gave upon surviving a grilling

  by Talbot. In such circumstances one always felt

  that he had come away lucky. ...

  Picard frowned. "Not far," he said slowly.

  Talbot had been in the middle of a sentence and

  stopped, his mouth moving a moment before it registered

  that the brain was no longer sending down words. No

  one, in the course of the semester, had ever had the

  temerity to inter-rupt Talbot. Indeed, it had

  certainly not been Picard's intention now. This

  mattered not at all.

  There was an aura of anticipation in the room as

  the other cadets turned with slow incredulity

  towards Picard. He had been so lost in thought that

  the perilous nature of his situation was only just

  dawning on him.

  Talbot was slowly coming up the stairs toward

  him in those ominous, carefully measured strides

  he effected when he was about to disembowel some

  helpless student. His heels clicked

  rhythmically on the steps, one by one, each

  click being allowed to sound and echo and trail off

  to be replaced by the next, like the steady drip of a

  faucet.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  He stopped at the aisle in which Picard was

  seated and just stood there, stood there like a vulture

  or some other bird of prey attracted by the

  smell and sight of dead meat.

  That, Picard realized with dim dread, was what

  he apparently was--dead meat.

  "Did you," said Talbot, in a quiet

  voice tinged with menace, "inter-rupt me? Because

  if you did, it had best be something most

  important. Perhaps you have abruptly determined

  one of the great secrets of the universe, or even

  divined the eternal mystery of how cadets

  believe that they can speak out with temerity."

  "I ..." Picard licked his suddenly dry

  lips. It seemed as if all the moisture from his

  body had left him and instead concentrated itself in his

  boots. "I was thinking out loud, sir."

  "Thinking," said Talbot. He draped his hands

  behind his back theatrically. "And would you care to tell

  us just what you were thinking about?"

  Picard quickly glanced around the class, feeling

  that if he could, just for a moment, connect with his

  fellow students he could draw some sort of

  emotional support from them. But no. Instead there

  was cold amusement in their eyes. Picard had

  hung himself out to dry, and the last thing any of them had

  any intention of doing was to help bring in the wash.

  For the first time, Jean-Luc Picard had a

  fleeting taste of what the loneliness of command would be

  like.

  "I was just thinking," said Picard, in a voice

  that seemed barely connected to his own, "that the

  planet-eater could not have come from very far outside our

  galaxy. For example, it could not have come from,

  say, the Andromeda galaxy to ours. Instead, it

  had to come from some point not too far beyond the

  galactic rim."

  "And how," said Talbot, "did you come to that

  conclusion?"

  "Well, it's ..." Picard cleared his

  throat. He desperately wanted to cough, but that

  would have sounded too nervous. "You told us that the

  planet-eater did just that ... it ate planets

  as sustenance. It needed mass to consume in order

  to perpetuate its fuel supply. But in between

  galaxies, there would have been no planetary

  masses for the planet-eater to consume. There is

  no record that the planet-killer possessed

  any sort of trans-galactic speed; in

  fact, the Enterprise paced it without much

  difficulty. So if we assume that it was

  traveling at standard speeds, it would have run out of

  fuel during any attempts to traverse

  galactic distances.

  "Now, of course, once its fuel supply was

  depleted, it would have kept on going, since a

  body in motion tend s to stay in motion. But that

  simple motion would never have been enough to penetrate the

  energy barrier at the rim of our galaxy--the one

  the original Enterprise ran into. Without some

  sort of internal propulsion system, the

  planet-killer would easily have been repulsed

  by the barrier and would never have managed to enter. And it

  no longer would have had a propulsion system because, as

  the old Earth saying goes, it would have run out of

  gas."

  "You are conversant with old Earth sayings?"

  asked Talbot neutrally.

  "Yes, sir," said Picard. "My father uses

  them constantly. Something of a traditionalist."

  "And is there, as I recall, an old Earth

  saying about speaking only when spoken to?"

  Picard felt the blood drain from his face, but

  he refused to look down; dammit, he would not

  look down. Instead, he met Talbot's

  level gaze and said simply, "Yes, sir."

  "Good. Remember it in the future." He

  turned away, then stopped and looked at Picard

  thoughtfully. "Good point there, by the way. I

  daresay it forms the basis for a research paper or

  three. Nice thinking, Picard."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Try to make a habit of nice thinking, and you

  might prove to be not too much of an

  embarrassment to Starfleet in the future."

  Picard sat without another word. He glanced

  over at Korsmo, feeling a measure of

  triumph. Korsmo merely shrugged

  expansively at him in a Yeah, so, big

  deal manner. Picard sighed inwardly. It wasr />
  utterly impossible to impress the gangling

  fellow cadet. Still, Picard could allow himself those

  small moments of triumph, and in this instance, he

  was quite content to give himself a mental pat on the

  back.

  And then he saw her again.

  She was there, just at the top of the other stairs,

  at the far side of the room. All cadet eyes

  were on Picard, or just starting to look away from

  him. No one saw her, and she was already starting

  to glide out the door like a shadow.

  Picard stood so quickly that he banged his knee

  on the top of his desk. He gave a short

  yelp, and Talbot spun on the stairs so quickly

  that, for a brief moment, he almost toppled down

  them. He grabbed a railing in support and

  snapped in exasperation, "Oh, what is it now,

  Picard?"

  Picard's head snapped around and then back to the

  rear of the room. She was gone again, dammit,

  gone again. Not this time, though.

  "Permission to be excused, sir; I feel quite

  ill," said Picard. He grabbed his stomach for

  emphasis.

  Talbot merely raised an eyebrow and

  inclined his head slightly. Delaying no further

  than was necessary, Picard grabbed up his pad and shot

  up the steps, two at a time.

  He burst out into the hallway, moving so quickly

  that he almost banged into the doors, which opened barely

  in time. The hallway was empty. He glanced

  left, then took off to his right, running

  down the hallway as fast as he could, the youthful

  muscles of his legs propelling him as if he were

  entered in a cross-country dash.

  He got to the end of the corridor and saw it was

  a dead end. He spun and looked back.

  Nothing. Not anywhere.

  "What in hell is going on around here?" he

  whispered to himself.

  Picard lay there in bed, staring up at the

  ceiling.

  He'd left the window open this night,

  welcoming the vagrant breeze blowing in from the

  San Francisco Bay. It rolled over the

  bare skin of his chest and caressed it. His hands were

  folded behind his head, his pillow propped against the

  wall to one side. Whenever he wanted to think

  instead of fall asleep, he always did that. He

  fancied that it aided blood circulation to his

  brain, and his brain needed all the help it could

  get, he figured.

  Was he losing his mind? Was he?

  He was certain he had seen her, yet no one

  else had. Was it possible that she was some sort of

  vision appearing only to him? There was a word for

  something like that. Yes, there certainly was, he thought

  grimly. The word was hallucination. Not a

  pretty word, but certainly an accurate one.

  He was hallucinating. That was just great, just

  fabulous. The strain of his course load and his

  drive to succeed was threatening to drive him over the

  edge.

  No--he refused to believe that. He had worked

  too hard, come too far, to fall prey suddenly

  to some sort of arcane mental distraction. He was

  not imagining it, blast it--he had seen her.

  Certainly she'd had an air of unreality about

  her. But that didn't mean anything.

  Hell, there were theories that the only things in the

  universe that were real were those things mankind considered

  unreal. If that were indeed the case, though, then she

  was unquestionably one of the most real things he'd ever

  encountered.

  He sighed and let his mind wander. And even though

  he had felt wide awake a moment before, he

  felt the familiar haze settling on his mind, that

  dark cloud that told him sleep would be forthcoming

  shortly.

  He thought that far off he could hear the waters

  splashing around the great tower legs of the

  Golden Gate Bridge. The air smelled of the

  sea, and he could almost sense the slow rolling of the

  waves. That was the great difference between captaining a

  sailing ship and captaining a starship. You couldn't

  even feel the motion of a space vessel. You could

  hear the distant thrumming of its engines, and the stars

  would speed past you--dazzling points of light--but

  there was no gentle rocking. There was no riding up

  to the crest of one wave and sliding down to the next.

  Sea captains sailed by the stars. So did

  starship captains. The difference was that the latter

  waved to the stars as they went past.

  In his semi-dreaming state, the wind seemed

  to come up even stronger. He tried to prop himself

  up on his elbows, but it was as if all strength had

  left his body. Fatigue had settled in on every

  joint. He'd been pushing himself mercilessly over

  the past weeks, and perhaps his body had simply

  shut down, refusing to do any more of his bidding

  until he had gotten a proper night's

  sleep. Some commander, he thought through the spreading

  haze. How could he command a crew when he couldn't

  even boss his own body around?

  The wind grew ever stronger, and it seemed

  mournful, as if a million souls were moaning at

  once, crying out to him. Their long, icy fingers were

  stroking him now, and with each caress came a cry in

  his head of Help us, save us, avenge us; do

  not forget us--never forget us.

  Picard felt a chill knife through him, and he

  trembled as if in the presence of something beyond his

  comprehension. His teeth chattered involuntarily.

  Madness. His teeth had never chattered in his

  entire life.

  He shut his eyes, as if doing so would still the

  voices in his head. They pervaded him, invaded

  him, and he cried out once, ordering them away with a

  sense of authority that he was only just beginning

  to feel.

  When he opened his eyes, she was there.

  It was as if she had stepped sideways from

  another time. She stared at him with luminous eyes

  that seemed to radiate a cold darkness. Her skin

  was dark, quite dark, and her eyes were rounded and

  slightly farther apart than usual, but they merely

  enhanced her exotic quality. Her black hair

  hung down low, to her hips, and seemed to be

  moving constantly, like a waving field of ebony

  wheat. Her dress swirled about her, and when she

  spoke, her voice carried that same,

  faint whisper of the souls that cried out to her.

  "Of course," she said from everywhere and nowhere.

  "Of course. From just beyond our galaxy. That's where

  it came from. That's why it was created. To combat

  them."

  "Combat who?" said Picard in confusion. Again

  he tried to sit up, and again his body scoffed at

  his efforts. The wind whipped his words away, and

  yet he knew she heard him. "I don't

  understand."

  "You do not have to," she said. "It is enough that I

  do. It is enough that I heard your wise words. And

&nb
sp; that's why I've come here now to thank you for your

  insight. You may have done greater things than you can

  imagine." Her voice resonated low, and it was

  the sound of his mother whispering to him when he was an

  infant crying in the night. And it was the voice of the

  first girl he'd ever kissed, and of his first lover

  moving beneath him and whispering his name in low heat, and it

  was the voice of the stars calling to him, and the voice

  of the wind and the waves, and everything that was female that

  ever called to him and summoned him and nurtured

  him. ...

  And he forced himself to sit up, stretching out an

  arm towards her, his fingers grasping. The edges of

  her garment seemed to dance near him and then away, just

  beyond reach.

  "I will find its origins," she said. "And I

  will find them. And I will stop them."

  "What them?" cried out Picard. He thought

  he was screaming at the top of his lungs, above the

  howling of the wind.

  "I pray you never learn, Jean-Luc," she

  said. "I pray you never learn of the ones without

  souls. I pray to the gods who do not exist and do

  not care, and who have forsaken me and my kind."

  Every aspect of her was seared into his mind every

  curve of the body that revealed itself through the flowing

  gown; the tilt of her chin, the high forehead, the

  almost invisible eyebrows; the pure, incandescent

  beauty of her that was a palpable thing.

  "Beware the soulless ones," she told him. She

  took a bare half-step back, but it was enough to put

  her firmly beyond his reach.

  His heart cried out because, for just a brief moment,

  his fingers had grazed the exquisite fabric of

  her dress. He wanted to pull it from her,

  to pull her to him, and yet at the same time he

  felt as if to do so would have been blasphemy.

  "Who are the soulless ones?" he cried

  out.

  "The destroyers. The anti-life. The soulless

  ones. They will destroy you, as they destroyed my

  kind. As they will destroy all kinds. But I will

  stop them." Her voice was dark and filled the air

  with ice. "I will stop them, no matter how long it

  takes, and no matter how far I must travel."

  She stepped forward quickly, between his outstretched

  arms, and kissed him on the forehead. When her

  lips brushed against him, it was as if an icicle

  had been dragged across it. She floated back just

  as fast, her swirling skirts concealing her

  movements.

  The wind and the chill were everywhere, everywhere, and yet