Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [5]
“That does it,” growled the masked man, who seemed to have recovered already from the blast he’d taken earlier. “Ya want a fight that bad, I’ll be glad ta oblige!”
“No!” cried the remaining female, a tall, dark beauty with hair that looked like spun platinum.
Her comrades stopped dead in their tracks—even the man in the mask, though he grumbled about it. Obviously, they were accustomed to taking orders from the woman.
She turned to Chief Clark. “This is unnecessary,” she said.
“I’ll go along with that,” the chief agreed. She glanced at the stranger with the tail, her dark eyes blazing. “Of course, you’ll have to return that phaser if you want to keep this cordial. And I want your friend—the girl—back where I can see her.”
The woman with the silvery hair nodded to the one with the tail. “Give it back, Nightcrawler.”
“Your wish is my command,” he replied. And with a casual air, he tossed Palmieri’s phaser to him.
The man with the wings then turned to the floor. “It’s all right, Shadowcat. You can come out now.”
Before Palmieri’s wondering eyes, the younger woman’s head floated up out of the deck surface. Then, when she was satisfied there wasn’t any danger, she ascended the rest of the way.
Palmieri shook his head. Who are these people?
“Wait a minute,” said another of the strangers—a fellow with closely cropped red hair, decked out in yellow and green. He took a couple of steps toward Clark.
“That’s far enough,” she told him.
Suddenly, the redhaired man grinned. Then he turned back to the woman with the silver hair and indicated Clark with a gesture.
“D’ye not see it?” he asked, in what Palmieri was beginning to recognize as an Irish brogue.
The woman’s eyes narrowed, then widened again. “Yes,” she answered at last. “It’s the same uniform, isn’t it? And the same insignia.”
“Exactly th’ same,” the redhead confirmed. He turned to Clark again and spread his hands in a gesture of peace. “Tell me, Lass … would ye happen t’ know a lad by th’ name of Picard?”
The name sounded familiar to Palmieri. Then he realized where he had heard it before.
Jean-Luc Picard was the captain of the Enterprise, the flagship of the fleet. If the stories about the man were true, he had saved the Federation from destruction more than once.
“What do you want with him?” Clark asked the man with the brogue.
The redhead smiled. “Believe it or not, he’s a friend o’ ours.”
Chapter Two
PRADDIS AMON, ESTEEMED Chancellor of the planet Xhaldia, paced his high-ceilinged summer office with a heart full of trepidation. He no longer had to study the rounded monitor on his desk to know what kind of reports were coming in—and at what seemed like an ever-accelerating rate.
In Brellos Province, a woman named Nikti Eilo had nearly killed her newborn twins when her body began drawing heat and light out of everything and everyone around her. Two hundred miles away, in the city of Cardriil, a mental patient named Tessa Mollic had thrown his ward into chaos when he began incinerating beds with the power of his mind.
Off the Nornian Coast, a recreational fisherman was lucky to escape with his life after accidentally punching a hole in the bottom of his boat. A Mercasite gymnast had come close to suffocating when she somehow encased herself in an impermeable, metallic skin. And at Otros Paar, in the midst of an adulthood quest, someone named Erid Sovar had inadvertently blasted several prayer perches to dust with energy beams.
Such bizarre incidents were taking place all over the globe, if the reports could be believed—and as much as Amon didn’t want to believe them, it appeared he had little choice in the matter. After all, they had been filed by sane, reliable regional administrators.
People turning invisible, indeed undetectable except by the most sophisticated instruments … moving more quickly than the eye could follow … and one who could create illusions so real, so powerful, she had already caused a fatal hovercar accident.
The fact patterns