Enigma - Michael Jan Friedman [0]
Captain Greenbriar heard the thud of heavy footfalls from somewhere down the corridor. He saw Grolsch and his fellow survivors exchange looks.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
Grolsch turned to Greenbriar. “Sir?”
It was then that the captain realized he wasn’t going to win this one. The odds were stacked too high against him. It was just a matter of time before the aliens overran his ship.
The realization changed things. He no longer hoped to contain the invaders. His goal now was to get a message out to Starfleet—to let them know what had happened to the Cochise, so they could formulate some kind of plan.
Because if the aliens could do this to his ship, they could do it to a hundred others.
Other Stargazer Novels
The Valiant
Gauntlet
Progenitor
Three
Oblivion
Requiem
Reunion
First Virtue
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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For Julius Schwartz
Chapter One
AS JEAN-LUC PICARD made his way down the long, curving corridor on his way to Transporter Room One, he saw Lieutenant Urajel coming from the other direction.
“Lieutenant,” he said, favoring the Andorian with a nod.
“Captain,” she returned.
But she wasn’t looking him in the eye. She was looking at his head—a common problem of late, as he had been compelled to shave it weeks ago in a place called Oblivion, and his hair was growing back more slowly than anyone had expected.
At the moment, it was little more than stubble, and itchy stubble at that. Rather a nuisance all around, the captain reflected, as he passed Urajel and continued on his way.
Unfortunately, his hair was the least of his problems.
At the end of the corridor, he found a set of double doors, which hissed open at his approach. Beyond them, two of his people were waiting for him.
No, he thought, amending his observation. Just one of them is still mine.
That was Goetz, the red-haired junior operator on duty in the ship’s primary transporter room. She was standing behind the enclosure’s lone control console, awaiting the captain’s authorization to proceed.
The other figure in the room—the one who was no longer Picard’s to command—was standing on the slightly raised transporter platform, dressed in a brown tunic with gray pants and a shirt of the same color. He had left all his cranberry-and-black Starfleet uniforms hanging in his quarters, as it was no longer appropriate for him to wear any of them.
Picard met the man’s eyes. “Mister Nikolas,” he said.
The ensign—no, the captain reminded himself, former ensign—inclined his head. “Captain.”
Andreas Nikolas appeared relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. And no doubt it had been. A couple of days earlier, he had come to Picard with a haunted, hollowed-out look in his eyes—the same look the captain had seen lurking there for the last several weeks.
Ever since Gerda Idun Asmund had left them.
She had arrived on the Stargazer in an apparent transporter accident, one that had shot her from her original timeline into Picard’s own. As it turned out later, her transit was actually part of an elaborate plan