Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [19]
Getting inside, he took it to its highest level, which was where he knew he would find the ship’s bridge. When the doors opened, he found himself at the end of a short hallway with heavily incised bulkheads. There was but one door at the other end.
The last time Nikolas had come out onto a bridge, it was full of corpses slumped over their consoles. He prepared himself for something like that here…
And was faced with much the same kind of tableau. There were nearly a dozen thick-necked, uniformed Ubarrak scattered about the command center, some still seated behind their control consoles, others sprawled on the stalagmite-peppered deck—and all of them silent as a tomb.
He moved to get a closer look at one of them, a female who was slumped over a control panel, her face caught in the strobe effect of a dozen blinking lights. Her gaze was vacant, her slitted yellow eyes unfocused in their oversized sockets, lending support to the human’s supposition that she was dead.
But a thread of spittle was still descending from the corner of her mouth. And when Nikolas felt her neck, he discerned a pulse under his fingertips. Damn, he thought, she’s alive.
He tried the Ubarrak at the next console—a male this time—and got the same result. What seemed like a corpse at first glance was a still-living being, albeit without awareness of what was going on around him.
Then he remembered what the alien had said, though it seemed like a very long time ago: “It’s difficult to fire when your mind has been erased.”
And Nikolas hadn’t been misled. The Ubarrak all looked brain-dead, their bodies still functioning at some basic level though their minds had been destroyed.
Somehow, Nikolas found that even more horrifying than the slaughter of his friends aboard the cargo hauler. It was one thing to die and be removed forever from torment and indignity, and another to remain among the living as mute testimony to an enemy’s power.
Easing the male to the deck, Nikolas took his place behind the control panel. It had but one oval-shaped monitor displaying a chart that might have been a fuel consumption trend. It was difficult to say.
Fortunately, Nikolas knew a little Ubarrak. It took him a while, but he was eventually able to punch in the right command to bring up a graphic of the vessel’s course.
It appeared as a bright red line on a green and black grid, with the star systems along its path represented as yellow circles. Though it took some doing, Nikolas managed to divine the line’s direction—and therefore the battle cruiser’s.
The alien was taking them deeper into Ubarrak territory, pursuing the objective he had laid out for himself earlier—the planet whose identity he had plucked out of Nikolas’s head.
With his adversary somewhere else, the human took the opportunity to try to bring the vessel about. But the helm wouldn’t respond. Apparently, he had been locked out of the controls.
Bastard, he thought.
Next, he accessed the operations function and looked for a way to disable the cruiser’s engines. But the alien had placed roadblocks in those command paths as well.
Nikolas’s stomach clenched. He hadn’t willingly done anything to help the monster, and yet it was his fault that the warship’s crew had been turned into vegetables—and his fault as well that the alien was about to descend on an innocent and unsuspecting planetary population.
Unless, of course, Nikolas found a way to stop him.
Chapter Five
LIEUTENANT NOL KASTIIGAN, the purple-jowled Kandilkari chief of the Stargazer’s science section, was hardly the most accomplished navigator on the ship. That designation belonged to Gerda Asmund, hands down.
However, Kastiigan was a connoisseur of even the most esoteric sensor data, an expertise that enabled him to make more of that information than most other people.