Possession - J.M. Dillard [23]
“No.” Nabon wheezed, his entire arm trembling as he suppressed the urge to lift it and the rifle high. “He is my brother …”
The sensation passed as abruptly as it had appeared; Nabon opened his grip and let the weapon clatter to the deck. At the same instant, the Vulcan moaned softly and stirred. Nabon swallowed back the panic and, clutching the phaser, backed away quietly as the alien pushed himself into a sitting position. Blinking, the tall Vulcan peered around, obviously searching for the only thing of any importance to him.
The Vulcan turned his head, once more staring into Nabon’s eyes. “Bring them back,” Skel demanded, his lower lip curling in a most un-Vulcanlike fashion. “Give them to me. They are mine.”
(Yes, give them back.)
(We must be protected at all costs.)
“No,” Nabon whispered. “This is a trick. A Vulcan telepathic trick! Get out of my head!”
Shoot him, Nabon, he urged himself. You have the phaser, you have the opportunity—use them! Now! Kill the Vulcan!
(The Vulcan must not be harmed.)
Yet, try as he might, he could not change the setting from stun to kill, could not even manage to squeeze the trigger—as if the Vulcan gripped him even from this distance. With a terrified yelp, he spun on his heels and raced for the nearest airlock. Even as he fought with himself to increase the stun setting on the phaser, he could hear the quiet sounds of the Vulcan scrambling to his feet and setting off in pursuit.
“It’s true we’re well within scanner range now, sir,” La Forge admitted, “but I can’t really tell you what’s going on. The readings are chaotic. There are two Ferengi and another reading that I’m pretty sure could be Vulcan. But there seems to be complete confusion on board! It looks like the ship is just moving along on a preset course—to where I can’t say—while at least two of the people on board are running all over the ship!”
Picard considered that for a moment. “Any chance of beaming the Vulcan out of there?”
“Not at this range, sir. We’ll have to get a lot closer.”
Picard nodded. “Increase speed to maximum.”
“You think they might have been exposed to the disease?” Riker asked softly.
Picard turned and gave him a pointed look. “We don’t know enough about it. The Ferengi are … an excitable people. Anything could be going on. The Vulcan could be fighting them for possession of the artifacts. We’ll just have to wait until we’re closer.”
As he huddled in a storage closet, Nabon reflected sourly on the amount of damage a few phaser blasts had done to the workings of their small ship. The random shots had hit the engineering control panel and disrupted almost every single function of the ship. Only with enormous physical effort had he managed to get one airlock open and send the gleaming ebony shells out into space. Communications were dead. The tractor beam—one of their most valuable assets in their salvage operations—was pulsing wildly for no reason, draining their batteries of power. Not that it mattered: The engine controls were dead, and the ship was traveling on sheer impulse and would continue to do so until something or someone stopped her.
Nabon lapsed into fantasy: hundreds of years from now, an unknown alien race would come upon their ghost vessel, where his essence would still be racing through the corridors, hiding from a deranged Vulcan who, if he ever caught him, would surely kill the young Ferengi who helped bring him here.
He’d managed to elude Skel long enough to get to an auxiliary control panel. But there was no hope. Nabon could not override the huge amount of damage that had been done by the phaser blasts. Why had Dervin turned the setting so high? Did he believe it took that much power to control a Vulcan?
Nabon touched the pocket that held the alien artifacts, the objects that had caused this disaster …
And a fresh surge of terror washed over him. The artifacts! Hadn’t he just jettisoned them out the airlock? If so, what were