Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [54]
Mehdi? Isn’t he assigned to headquarters on Earth? Obviously, a few things had changed since Nikolas left the fleet.
“It’s Andreas Nikolas, sir, formerly of the cargo hauler Iktoj’ni and the Stargazer, seeking assistance. Your sensors will tell you that I’m piloting an Ubarrak battle cruiser, but there aren’t any Ubarrak aboard.”
A pause. “You’d better explain, Mister Nikolas.”
“An explanation,” said Nikolas, “is on its way, sir.”
Had he offered a verbal one, Brakmaktin might have overheard and taken umbrage with it. That’s why Nikolas had put the full story in data form into a subspace packet, which the alien was more likely to just ignore.
“I’m receiving it now,” said Mehdi. Another pause, longer than before. Then he spoke up again. “Am I reading this correctly, Mister Nikolas? Are you saying there’s a Nuyyad aboard your ship?”
“Yes, sir,” Nikolas confirmed.
“I hope he’s nothing like the Nuyyad who destroyed our colony on Arias Three.”
Nikolas’s mouth went dry. He knew that colony. “Destroyed…?”
“The monster leveled the place, erased all traces that we’d ever been there. And killed more than five hundred Federation citizens in the process.”
Nikolas checked internal sensors. They told him that the armory was empty of life signs. Brakmaktin was gone.
And from what the admiral was saying, he had found his way to Arias III. There couldn’t be two such Nuyyad running loose in their part of the galaxy.
But how could Brakmaktin have left the warship? And how could he have reached Arias III so quickly, when Nikolas’s ship had only just made it within com range?
Nikolas didn’t know. But he did know how the alien had chosen the colony as his destination. He had plucked it out of the human’s mind, just as he had plucked the Ubarrak mining world.
He had allowed Nikolas to think his nightmare was over. But in fact, it had only begun.
“Andreas?” said Gerda Idun.
He turned to her, knowing that she, at least, would understand. After all, she had been with him every step of the way, and she hadn’t suspected treachery either.
Idiot, Nikolas called himself. Of course she didn’t. All Gerda Idun knew of Brakmaktin was what he had told her. All she knew of anyone was what he had—
He stopped in mid-thought. There was something wrong. His mind raced, trying to untangle it.
The admiral who answered his hail just happened to be one he had heard of—even though Mehdi was supposed to be back on Earth. And the colony that had been attacked—by coincidence, that was one Nikolas had heard of too.
And Brakmaktin had done the impossible getting there—slipping off the warship without anyone’s knowing, and reaching Arias III at a speed no spacegoing vessel could achieve.
He was powerful, but was he that powerful? Or was it all an illusion, drawing on the data he had found in Nikolas’s mind—starting with Mehdi’s voice over the com system and continuing with Nikolas’s sensor check of the armory? Certainly, Brakmaktin was capable of that.
Suddenly, the human heard a voice that was at once like Brakmaktin’s and drastically unlike it. “Yes, an illusion,” it confirmed, filling the bridge with its presence. “But where does it begin? And where does it end?”
Nikolas didn’t know what that meant. He turned to Gerda Idun, but she just shrugged.
Then he thought to glance at the navigational monitor on his console, and saw that the ship hadn’t moved from the coordinates she occupied when Brakmaktin revealed his pain. They were in exactly the same place.
But how can that be? Nikolas wondered.
All the time he had spent with Gerda Idun, returning to the Federation at top speed while Brakmaktin appeared to have sequestered himself in the armory…was it possible it hadn’t really happened? That it had all been Nikolas’s imagination?
I’ve been played for a fool, he thought.
Just then, he caught a glimpse of something off to his left—something large and silvery that hadn’t been there before, in the vicinity of the console at which Gerda Idun had been sitting. Feeling his throat constrict, Nikolas whirled to see what was going on.
What