Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [11]
Picard turned to the alien, who lifted his chin as he endured the human’s scrutiny. Finally, he turned back to Serenity. “You did say…Nuyyad Alliance?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“The same Nuyyad Alliance,” said Dojjaron, in a voice that was like pieces of metal grinding together, “that you encountered on the other side of the barrier.”
Picard didn’t understand.
When he last saw Serenity, she was thanking him for his help in freeing her world from Nuyyad domination. Now she seemed to be in league with one of her people’s enemies.
Clearly, something had changed.
“Pardon me for being blunt,” said Picard, “but I am surprised. I was led to believe that peaceful relations with the Nuyyad were…unlikely at best.”
“They were,” Serenity conceded.
“And yet,” said Dojjaron, “here I sit before you.” He made a rasping sound deep in his throat—something that sounded vaguely like laughter, but might well have been something else.
After all, Picard had destroyed some of the Nuyyad’s warships, and then torn apart their supply depot for an encore. He doubted that Dojjaron would find that funny.
Then again, the captain knew precious little about the Nuyyad, and there was no accounting for alien tastes. Unlikely as it seemed, his actions may have been a source of amusement to them.
“Obviously,” said Serenity, “we didn’t dream we would be helping the Nuyyad.” She glanced at Dojjaron. “But then, we also didn’t expect them to come back so quickly from the damage we had inflicted on them.”
Picard frowned. “Did they attack Magnia a second time?”
“No,” said Serenity. “They had bigger game to hunt—the one they had already set their sights on.”
“The Federation,” said Ben Zoma.
“Indeed,” said Dojjaron, without a hint of self-consciousness or restraint, though he was addressing citizens of the very union the Nuyyad had targeted. “Had you simply liberated Magnia and stopped there, we would probably have licked our wounds and looked elsewhere for conquest. But the destruction of our depot was an insult, a hand in the face. It gave us even more reason to look in the direction of your homeworlds.”
Not exactly the intended result, Picard reflected.
Serenity picked up the story. “Less than four Magnian months after our attack on the depot, the Nuyyad dispatched a scout ship across the galactic barrier. Its job was to map out a route for conquest, which the Nuyyad would pursue when they were ready again to make their push.”
“Of course,” Dojjaron noted, “we had never crossed the barrier ourselves, but we often traded with those who had. So we knew enough to shield our crew from the radiation that affected Santana’s ancestors.” He grunted. “Unfortunately, there was an accident in the course of our crossing.”
“Not a big one,” Serenity observed. “But it left one small portion of their vessel unshielded for a couple of moments—and a couple of moments was all it took.”
Picard winced. “Someone was exposed.”
“Obviously,” said the Nuyyad. “A low-level technician named Brakmaktin. As our ship left the barrier behind, he just seemed weak, stunned. But soon after, he began to change.”
Ignoring Dojjaron’s remark, Picard listened with growing concern as the alien laid out the details. They sounded all too familiar, given what the captain knew of Gary Mitchell’s experience some seventy-five years earlier.
Mitchell had been an officer on the Enterprise of that era, a Constitution-class vessel that got too close to the galactic barrier. Its energies amplified his existing extrasensory talents, transforming him into a superman who was eventually destroyed by his own captain.
But the Enterprise wasn’t the first vessel to run afoul of the barrier. Two full centuries before Mitchell’s exposure, a Terran ship called the Valiant had passed through it on a journey of exploration. One of her crewmen became so powerful that the Valiant’s captain blew up his ship rather than allow the fellow to return to Earth.
The survivors of the Valiant,