Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [69]
I am dead, Picard thought. Or I might as well be.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the process began to reverse itself. His skin stood up and began to fold itself back onto his body, starting with his feet and his legs and gradually working its way up.
His hands were last. He used them to feel his face, to assure himself that it was back where it had been. It was. He was whole again, intact, as if he had never been dismantled in the first place. Even his clothes had been restored.
And the pain he thought would never end…was gone.
“You endured that well,” Brakmaktin observed.
The captain believed he understood now. It wasn’t enough for Brakmaktin to merely kill him. Perhaps in someone else’s case that would have been enough, but not in Picard’s. The monster wanted to torture him, humiliate him—reduce him to a shuddering gobbet of flesh and bone in order to exact his full measure of revenge.
“Look,” Picard said, his voice echoing, “I don’t blame you for being angry with me. But had our positions been reversed, you would have done the same thing.”
The Nuyyad shook his head. “No. I would not have stopped at destroying the depot. I would have gone on to destroy every Nuyyad I could find, until I myself was destroyed.”
“Then you understand,” said the captain.
“I do,” Brakmaktin told him. “I understand that you are the enemy. And the enemy must be conquered.”
And he started to raise his hand.
“Listen to me,” Picard said, remembering a tactic that had worked for a different captain against a different superbeing. “You are intent on giving birth here, in this lair you have created. But what will happen when your offspring start to grow?”
The Nuyyad looked at him, his eyes narrowing.
“They will each become as powerful as you are,” Picard continued, “but without your wisdom. There is no telling the sort of damage they will do—initially only to each other, perhaps, but later on to you as well.”
Brakmaktin thrust out his chin. “You think they will conspire against me? Try to destroy me?”
“Just as soon as the opportunity presents itself,” the captain assured him.
“I agree,” Brakmaktin spat, a look of amusement taking over his alien features. “They will try to topple me—and they will succeed. I would expect no less from a brood of true-bred Nuyyad.”
Damn, Picard thought. What else could he say? How could he reason with a being capable of pulping him with a single thought—and reconstructing him with another?
Maybe he couldn’t. But I can push that being over the edge. “Your children will be aberrations,” he cried out, allowing a note of revulsion to crawl into his voice. “They will be outcasts and monsters, just like you.”
As the echoes of his prediction died, it appeared that he had given Brakmaktin pause. And since his bones hadn’t yet been turned to jelly or his heart to stone, the captain pressed on.
“Is that how you want your clan to think of you?” he demanded. “As the monstrosity who remade a galaxy in his abhorrent image?”
Brakmaktin looked stricken. He put a meaty hand over his face, hiding it from sight.
Is it possible that I got through to him? Picard wondered.
Then Brakmaktin removed his hand, and the captain could see that his adversary’s eyes were glowing more brightly than ever.
“Yes,” the Nuyyad hissed, filling the air in the cavern with a crackling blue fury, “that is exactly what I want.”
Then he held out his hand, palm up, all four thick fingers outstretched—and Picard knew by the nucleus of pain growing inside him that this time his ordeal would be a fatal one.
Nikolas was getting ready to rush the Nuyyad, regardless of the outcome, when he spied a glimmer of light in a remote part of the cavern—a part that hadn’t had the benefit of illumination previously. At first, he thought it was his imagination, a result of the