Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [26]
It would be difficult enough to face Brakmaktin as it was. With a warship at his disposal, it might have been impossible.
“Shall I follow it?” asked Idun Asmund, who was manning the helm.
“By all means,” said Picard.
Then he sat back in his center seat, drummed his fingertips on his armrest some more, and waited.
Pushing himself on his back along the Ubarrak access tube, Nikolas counted the tiny doors set into the metal surface above him until he got to the fifth one. Then he pressed his hand against the plate beside it and watched the door swing open, revealing a set of eight small studs within.
Four were black, two were red, and two were green. Using the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he pressed the red studs at the same time. It was, as he had learned through painstaking study, the procedure for manually overriding the battle cruiser’s helm controls and activating her starboard thrusters.
That is, if such an outcome wasn’t made impossible by forces beyond Nikolas’s control.
Indeed, nothing was happening—no growl of moving machine parts, no hiss of forced gas-emission. Releasing the studs, he pressed them a second time. Still nothing.
Nikolas wasn’t surprised. This was only the most recent in a long line of failures.
Previously, he had attempted to shut down the antimatter fuel injectors, sabotage the conduits that sent plasma flowing to the nacelles, and create a feedback wave in the power relays that would fry the warp coils. But nothing had worked. Controls had frozen, borrowed tools had stopped working, and backup systems had materialized where they hadn’t existed before.
No matter what Nikolas did, the alien seemed to have anticipated it and come up with a way to prevent it. Which was why, many hours later, the cruiser’s engines were still running and she hadn’t diverged from her course by even a millimeter.
And yet, despite ample evidence of his meddling, the alien himself was nowhere to be seen. There were plenty of Ubarrak lying in the corridors and the lifts, staring into infinity until their bodies finally shut down from neglect. But no sign of the monster who had stricken them.
At first, Nikolas was glad he hadn’t run into his nemesis, since his only chance was to act surreptitiously. Then he began to wonder. At one point, he even tried to locate the alien by accessing the internal sensor grid. However, the sensor logs didn’t cooperate with him any better than the helm controls had, leaving Nikolas to draw his own conclusions.
And the most obvious one, hard as it was for him to understand, was that the alien had left the ship.
But that begged a question—if he wasn’t on the cruiser, where was he? Certainly not on the Iktoj’ni, which was by far the warship’s inferior when it came to speed and power—and that was before she got beat up.
Hadn’t the alien made a comment to Nikolas about the Ubarrak ship being in good condition? Why would he have said that unless he planned to use her somehow? And why would he have gone to the trouble of transporting Nikolas over from the Iktoj’ni when it would have been so much easier just to kill him?
No, Nikolas thought, the alien is here. He’s got to be. It’s just a matter of looking for him in the right place.
And the human would do that—he would have to, because the world the alien had plucked from his mind was a populated one, with hundreds of thousands of Ubarrak mining dilithium in its crust. The alien couldn’t be allowed to do to them what he had done to the crew of the warship.
His jaw clenching, Nikolas started pulling himself back down the access tube.
Picard rose from his center seat and moved forward toward the viewscreen, where Gerda had moments earlier established a visual of their objective.
It was an Yridian cargo ship, identifiable by her snub nose and her widely spaced nacelles. The captain had seen her like at starbases all across the sector, hauling everything from stem bolts to plasma manifolds.
But he had never seen one in this kind of shape.