Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [62]
“I would be foolish to ignore your counsel,” he told the Ubarrak.
That seemed to pacify the fellow. Without another word, he broke the com link.
Picard drew a breath and let it out. He had shared a good deal of information with Alartos. However, he had also withheld a good deal of information—specifically, what he knew of the barrier, the Nuyyad, and Magnia.
After all, the Ubarrak might be tempted to use the barrier to create supersoldiers. They might decide to recruit the Nuyyad as an ally in their conflict with the Federation. And they might see Magnia as a resource as well.
Alartos’s people had plenty of leverage in their dealings with the Federation. Picard didn’t wish to give them any more.
Nikolas watched Brakmaktin sleep, curled up in a raised alcove on the far side of the cavern.
Minutes earlier, the Nuyyad had walked the perimeter of the firepit, admiring his handiwork as the lava below him bubbled and spat, casting him in a feral red glare. Then, without warning, he had floated up to the alcove and lain down, and closed his eerie silver eyes.
At the time, Nikolas couldn’t figure it out. Brakmaktin was capable of tearing apart starships and digging shafts in solid rock, but he still needed a nap now and then? And hadn’t he said he didn’t need sleep?
It didn’t make sense. However, with the Nuyyad asleep, there weren’t any thoughts Nikolas could capture to get an answer.
Then that changed. There were spurts of mental activity, each one briefer than the one before it. Finally, they stopped altogether, but not before Nikolas had skimmed enough from them to piece together an explanation.
If Brakmaktin looked peaceful and—strange as it sounded—vulnerable, it was because he was. He had entered a low-energy, low-awareness state, just like any Nuyyad who had begun the demanding process of asexual reproduction.
Back on Brakmaktin’s homeworld, he would have been protected by his clan at this time because he wasn’t in a position to protect himself. But he had no clan around him here, no one to watch over him while he was dormant. All he had was the height of the alcove he had created, which would represent a difficult climb—but not an impossible one.
To that point, Nikolas had been unable to hurt the Nuyyad with his pitiful human physicality. But if he tried it now, while Brakmaktin was in dreamland, with one of the stalactites shattered in the Ubarrak’s attack…
Suddenly, the human’s hands snapped together, as if drawn by an invisible force. And though he couldn’t see anything binding his wrists, he couldn’t pull them apart again.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Brakmaktin raised his head and peered at him with eyes that were still half-closed. “Given a chance,” he said in a slurred, sleepy voice, “you would kill me. So you will not be given a chance.”
Nikolas made a sound of disdain. “You’re afraid of me? That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“No,” said Brakmaktin, without the least hint of irony in his voice. “You have heard funnier.”
There was no lying to him, no possibility of it. After all, he knew Nikolas’s thoughts as intimately as Nikolas did.
Brakmaktin put his head down again and went back to sleep. And Nikolas wondered what curses people would use to revile him after the Nuyyad’s offspring overran the galaxy.
Picard considered the image displayed on his viewscreen. It was that of a green and blue world, like many in the M-class category. However, it boasted only a single large landmass, which covered perhaps a third of its surface.
There was an Ubarrak battle cruiser in orbit around the planet, but the Stargazer’s sensors had already determined that she was devoid of life signs. Obviously, that was the vessel in which Brakmaktin had arrived.
And Nikolas as well, if he had survived that long. As to where he was now—on the planet’s surface with Brakmaktin or lying dead on the cruiser—that was still a mystery.
“Thirty thousand kilometers,” Gerda reported, responding