Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [32]
But it wasn’t lack of interest. It was shame, because Nikolas had violated his superiority and his solitude, all in one fell swoop, and Brakmaktin hadn’t been able to do anything about it.
Just the way Nikolas felt when the alien pulled out his deepest memories.
He eyed Brakmaktin a moment longer. Then he walked away on his own terms, and found another Ubarrak who needed his attention. With an effort, he slung the fellow over his shoulder and made his way to the lift.
And somehow it seemed easier now than before. But then, Nikolas had won this battle, despite all of Brakmaktin’s power. He had come out on top.
As to whether that would be worth something at any point…he could only hope.
Pierzynski had just finished downloading the last bit of data he could find when Picard received a call from Pug Joseph.
“Go ahead,” said the captain.
“I’m in the main cargo bay, sir, and I can see what happened to the crew—or most of it. There are maybe fifty of them down here, lying side by side in two neat rows. Whoever did this must have cared about them.”
That wasn’t Brakmaktin, surely, thought Picard. Then who could it have been? And where was that individual now—lying dead somewhere himself?
“Remain there,” he told Joseph. “Mister Pierzynski and I will join you momentarily.” He felt compelled to see the scene in the cargo bay with his own eyes.
Then, as expeditiously as they could, they would comb the parts of the ship they hadn’t gotten to yet. Eventually, they would come across the crewman who had laid his comrades out in such dignified fashion.
But they wouldn’t know that it was he who had done it. He would appear to be just another corpse, and the mystery surrounding his actions would go unsolved.
The captain wished he could stay and try to puzzle it all out. However, he had a significantly more important job to do, and time was precious.
The seventh or eighth time Nikolas went to the bridge to pick up an Ubarrak, he saw that the image on the viewscreen had changed. No longer filled with a river of stars, it displayed an M-class planet with all the trimmings.
Blue oceans. Green and brown land masses. Cloud cover. Polar icecaps. The works.
And a population too, though it wasn’t native to that world. It had been brought there generations earlier to reap a harvest of dilithium, which the Ubarrak—like the Federation—used to control the matter-antimatter reactions in their warp drives.
Nikolas knew about this world because it was the one Brakmaktin had pulled from his mind. He hadn’t expected to see it so soon, since it was still a light-year too distant for the warship’s sensors to pick up. However, as the alien had already demonstrated, he could do things others could not.
He had had but one deficiency, and that was his lack of knowledge of this galaxy. But thanks to Nikolas, that deficiency was no more. Brakmaktin had been able to find whatever he needed in the human’s defenseless mind.
Had he restricted himself to the databases on the Iktoj’ni and the battle cruiser, he could have gotten more information than Nikolas could ever give him. But it was easier for him to reach into Nikolas’s mind for it.
And more fun too. That was clear from the expression he had seen on Brakmaktin’s face. It had definitely been more entertaining to rummage through a brain than a computer memory.
Nikolas wished he could press a reset button and make everything the way it was before he left the Stargazer. He wished he could be back there now with Obal and all the others—even Paris, who had begun to open up to him a little.
He wished that he had never heard of Brakmaktin or the Nuyyad or the Ubarrak ship they were on, or the world they were headed for. But most of all, he wished he knew of a way to stop his monster of a companion before he killed anyone else.
“No,” said Brakmaktin. “That is not what you want most.”
Nikolas turned to him. He could tell by the alien’s expression that he had been reading Nikolas’s thoughts.
“I can grant your wishes,” said Brakmaktin. “Can…and will.