Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [210]
Not that the security officer could actually see the Magnians doing anything. After all, they were working solely with the power of their minds, their collective energy amplified by the neurotransmitter Dr. Greyhorse had concocted for them.
The only visible evidence of the colonists’ efforts was the flock of triangular, palm-sized devices they had attached to the tractor node days earlier. The things were humming softly to themselves and throbbing with a bright yellow light.
They had hummed and throbbed the same way during the second battle for Magnia. At least, that was how Joseph remembered it. It frustrated him that the Magnians’ activities were so foreign to him, so alien, and therefore so difficult to monitor.
How was he supposed to keep an eye on Santana if he couldn’t tell what she was really doing? How did he know she was gearing up for the battle ahead and not plotting with her friends to cripple the ship?
The answer, of course, was he didn’t.
Suddenly, Santana turned away from the tractor node and looked back over her shoulder at him. The expression on her face—one of anxiety—made the security officer wonder what the woman was up to.
Pug, he heard in his head, something’s wrong. We can sense someone tampering with a command junction.
Joseph looked at her, wary of a trick. “Who’s doing it?” he asked.
Santana didn’t answer right away. Then she made a single word materialize in his brain: Jomar.
The security officer walked over to the nearest console and tapped into the Stargazer’s internal sensor net. However, there was no indication of any tampering. There wasn’t anyone in the Jefferies tubes at all. And Jomar, apparently, was in his quarters.
He turned back to Santana, wondering what she was trying to pull this time. “No one is anywhere near a command junction.”
She left the semicircle and came over to him. Gazing at the monitor, she saw what he had seen—in other words, nothing.
“He’s there,” Santana insisted. She looked up at Joseph. “Dammit, I can feel him.”
Reacting to the woman’s display of emotion, he put his hand on the phaser pistol dangling at his hip. “I’ll have someone check Jomar’s quarters. In the meantime, you can—”
“No!” she snapped, her dark eyes filled with dread—or so it seemed. “By then, it’ll be too late!”
The security officer drew his phaser, leery of what Santana could do with the doctor’s neurotransmitter flowing in her veins. “Move back,” he told her. “Do it.”
She looked at his weapon, then at him again. “You don’t understand,” she told him.
“Don’t I?” he asked.
Then something happened—Joseph wasn’t sure what. He seemed to lose control of his limbs, his body becoming a heavy and unresponsive mass of flesh. The phaser fell from his limp, paralyzed hand and hit the deck.
And a moment later, the security officer joined it, his mind spiraling down into darkness.
As Picard watched, Gerda Asmund manipulated her controls. A moment later, the viewscreen filled with the image he had been waiting for.
And what an image it was.
In the second officer’s imagination, the depot had been an impressive thing—a large, sprawling facility surrounded by powerful-looking, diamond-shaped warships. It had been equipped with a multitude of cargo hatches and docking ports, everything it needed to facilitate the transfer of food and material goods.
Its reality was even more impressive—and a good deal more daunting. The depot looked more like a fortress than a supply facility, and more like the crown of an ancient king than either, with its circular configuration of diamond-shaped towers and its circlet of weapons ports and its flawless, almost luminescent surfaces.
As prodigious as the enemy’s fighting ships were, the depot was bigger and better-armed by a factor of at least ten. It was perhaps the truest symbol of Nuyyad pride they had seen yet.
“Looks like this is the place,” breathed Ben Zoma.
“You know what they say,” Picard told him. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
“An interesting observation,” the other man noted. “But given a choice, I’ll take big anyday.”
Picard shot