Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [4]
Nikolas swore under his breath.
In life, Redonna’s skin had been a series of wild black stripes on a white background. In death, the stripes seemed to have faded, leaving her looking pale and washed out. But that wasn’t the worst change in her appearance. Her cheeks had sunken, her eyes had retreated deep into their sockets, and the skin around her mouth had become dry and cracked.
It was as if she had had the life drained from her. It didn’t make sense, but that was how it appeared.
When she came on to Nikolas the other night, he had rebuffed her. But part of him had been tempted to go along with the idea. She was, after all, an attractive female.
Or had been.
Nikolas knelt on his bruised and battered knees and brushed his fingertips against Redonna’s face. Her flesh felt so cold, so terribly cold, that it was hard to imagine it had ever been any other way.
He had barely known her, but he felt that he should do something for her—that it was up to him to mark her passing somehow. What could he do?
Putting the problem aside for the moment, he decided to walk on, in the hope that he might find another survivor. But as he negotiated the first bend in the corridor, all he came across was another corpse.
It was Murata, one of the engineers. He was human, but he looked a lot like Redonna now, his skin contracted around his bones so tightly it was painful to look at him. And like Redonna, he was well past the point where he might have benefited from Nikolas’s help.
Around the next bend, Nikolas found three more bodies. Sadly, he identified them in his head. Happy-go-lucky Jetraka, who had just celebrated his hundred and seventh birthday. Kroda the Tellarite, who had been so indignant when one of the other crewmen jostled him in a corridor. Yellowstone, the chess player. All of them sucked dry, like ancient mummies.
But not Nikolas. Why not? he asked himself. What bizarre providence had spared his miserable life when all these others had been sacrificed?
Moments later, he came to the doors that gave admittance to the bridge. As he approached them, they whispered open for him, revealing the scene beyond.
The Iktoj’ni’s command center was a good deal smaller than that of a Federation starship. It held only three stations—the captain’s, the helm officer’s, and the navigator’s. There was no room to accommodate a communications officer, an engineer, a sciences chief, or a weapons officer.
Still, the bridge had been a busy place, with personnel coming and going all the time. Usually, Nikolas added silently.
Not now, though. Those who had come and would have gone were stretched unmoving among the beginnings of blue and orange stalagmites, their handheld computer devices spilled from their grasps. And those ensconced in the three control stations were slumped forward in them, as if they had gone to sleep and had yet to wake up.
But they won’t be doing that, Nikolas thought with a sinking feeling. Not if they’ve fallen afoul of the same thing that killed Redonna and the others.
Just to be sure, he approached Captain Rejjerin, who had ignored Starfleet’s warning for the sake of making her ship’s delivery date. A Vobilite, she had ruddy, mottled skin and tusks that protruded from the corners of her mouth. Nikolas felt her neck for a pulse. There wasn’t any, and her skin was icy to the touch.
Just like the others, he thought. There wasn’t a mark on her, but she had clearly been dead for some time.
Is everyone dead? he thought.
And how in blazes had they died? What kind of weapon could rob a person of their life’s energy that way?
Then he saw something else—the configuration of stars on the large, octagonal viewscreen that covered the bridge’s forward bulkhead. It was wrong, it seemed to him, different from what it should have been.
Someone else might not have noticed. But Nikolas had sometimes served as a navigator on the bridges of Federation starships, guiding them through