Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [137]
Once they were in the privacy of the conveyance, Picard cleared his throat. “To be perfectly candid,” he said, “I was a little apprehensive myself.”
Crusher saw him in a new light. “You were apprehensive? For godsakes, why?”
He turned to look at her. “I thought our visitors would bring back memories. Matters I hadn’t quite laid to rest.”
And suddenly, she understood. She’d been so wrapped up with her own ghosts, she’d forgotten the captain had some of his own.
“What about now?” she asked.
“Now,” he said thoughtfully, “I am glad I had a chance to see my old friends again. All of them—living and dead.”
She took his arm and squeezed it affectionately. “I know the feeling, Jean-Luc. I know it quite well.”
That was how they emerged from the lift—with her arm tucked into the crook of his. And it was still there when they entered the transporter room, where they found the others already waiting for them.
Epilogue
Guinan gazed out of Ten-Forward’s observation port at the huge, blue disc of Daa’V. Picard and the others had arrived there minutes earlier, having beamed down to the planet’s surface for Morgen’s coronation ceremony.
Guinan couldn’t help feeling bad about Greyhorse. She had met him years earlier, on the same occasion when she met Ben Zoma, Joseph, Simenon, and the Asmund sisters.
Had she listened to the doctor a little more closely then—really listened—she might have picked up his obsession with Gerda Asmund, and stopped him from becoming someone driven to murder his friends.
For that matter, Guinan reflected, she might have kept Gerda from committing the crime that landed her in a penal facility. And if Gerda hadn’t committed that crime, Greyhorse wouldn’t have had a reason to kill.
“If,” she whispered, and heaved a sigh.
But at the moment Guinan’s path crossed the Stargazer’ s, she had been laboring under problems of her own, and her level of awareness wasn’t anywhere near what it might have been. She just wasn’t doing much listening in those days.
Except to Picard, of course.
She chuckled. After all, that Picard wasn’t the veteran who commanded the Enterprise-D so deftly now, plying his course with the kind of grace and wisdom other captains could only dream of. Not by a long shot.
The Picard whom Guinan knew back then was still new at the game of commanding a starship. He was raw, untested, making the best decisions he could.
And they weren’t always the right decisions. Even in those days, he would probably have conceded that.
But then, Fate had thrust Picard into the limelight well before his time. It was a wonder, Guinan supposed, that her friend had survived the ordeal at all….
Part Two
United Federation of Planets Starship
U.S.S. Stargazer NCC-2893
2333
One
Jean-Luc Picard regarded his opponent through the fine steel mesh of his fencing mask.
Daithan Ruhalter was tall, barrel-chested, and powerfully built…and for all of that, quick as a cat. Like Picard, he was clad entirely in white—the accepted garb for fencers for the last several hundred years.
At first, Ruhalter just stood there on the metallic strip in a half-crouch, only his head moving as he took stock of Picard’s posture. Then he edged forward with a skip step, lunged full length and extended his point in the direction of his adversary’s chest.
It wasn’t his best move—Picard knew that from experience. It was just an opening salvo, Ruhalter’s effort to feel his opponent out—and Picard, who had been trained by some of the best fencing masters in twenty-fourth-century Europe, didn’t overreact. He merely retreated a couple of steps and flicked his opponent’s point aside.
Undaunted, Ruhalter advanced and lunged again—though this time, he took a lower line. Picard had no more trouble with this attack than the first. In fact, he launched a counterattack just to keep his adversary honest.
Ruhalter chuckled in his mask, his voice deep and resonant. “Let’s begin in earnest now, eh?”
“If you say so,” Picard rejoined.
Suddenly, the other man’s point was everywhere—high, low, sliding in from the left, zagging in from