Possession - J.M. Dillard [25]
“Can you sense the Vulcan?”
She nodded. “He’s there; I sense his calm, his sense of purpose, his center of logic. It’s as if he’s in the eye of a hurricane of emotion. It must be terrible for him.”
Nabon rubbed his face roughly. It was covered with sweat, even as he shivered with the cold. He was sick, he knew—sick at heart. Sick in his soul. But he now understood the value of the artifacts. They had infected him somehow, given him some disease. He was thoroughly confused. The Vulcan Skel had supposedly been working on forcefield technology, not bioagents, but the little shells had given Nabon some ailment. Could it be fatal?
He trembled. It didn’t matter, Dervin—his brother, his friend, his DaiMon—was dead.
In his flight from Skel, Nabon had circled completely through the small ship, barely staying ahead of the crafty alien, frantically trying to seal him behind bulkheads. Every time, the being who had once been their prey escaped.
And now Nabon was back in engineering, standing over the cooling body of his brother. When he first touched him, Nabon feared it had been his phaser shot that had somehow ended his brother’s life, since Dervin lay facedown on the deck, almost exactly where Nabon had left him.
Then Nabon had gently turned the corpse over—and seen the savage bruising that covered his brother’s face, chest, and lower body. Every inch of Dervin’s face and frontal lobes had been crushed as if struck repeatedly with a heavy blunt object.
A phaser?
No, no—I never would have harmed my own brother… .
But then, he had at first thought he’d shoved the artifacts out the airlock.
No. No. This murder had been carried out by someone physically stronger. Dervin’s savaged body told him the frightening truth: Whatever disease was carried by these strange shelllike objects, they had infected the Vulcan. Skel was mad, rampaging around the ship, no longer interested in retrieving his precious artifacts.
All he wanted to do now was indulge his dark fantasies on Nabon.
It was a horrible disease indeed that could turn a peace-loving Vulcan into a crazed killing machine. No one deserved to die like this, not even his beloved brother. Soon, Nabon knew, he would be as crazy as the Vulcan, and he would no longer have the sense to run from his inevitable fate. The lapses into violent fantasies were becoming more frequent—soon they would overtake his conscious mind completely.
He looked at Dervin’s destroyed face again, and instantly images of the Vulcan pounding the life out of his DaiMon came unbidden to his mind. Images so real, so intense, he shuddered from the brutal force of them—despite the simultaneous thrill of pleasure that arose in him.
This was too terrible a disease to foist on any people, even your enemies.
It was good, Nabon reflected, that they would all die here and no one would ever be exposed to it again.
Picard frowned at Counselor Troi’s report; he didn’t like the way things sounded. Still, the Vulcan seemed normal. And who knew about the Ferengi? Troi might sense that kind of chaos from them over a business deal. He didn’t say anything to the crew, but Picard decided that if the disease had already spread aboard the Ferengi vessel, he’d destroy it with all hands aboard—including the Vulcan scientist—to prevent infecting the Enterprise. The political repercussions would be horrendous, but he couldn’t worry about that in the face of a disease that hadn’t been cured in eighty years.
“What about an away team?” Riker, standing at Picard’s side, asked.
“Let’s wait,” Picard decided. “I don’t want to risk exposing our people to danger or disease. We will not bring the ship aboard for the same reason. Mr. Worf, get a tractor beam on that vessel and slowly bring it to a halt.” He touched his comm badge. “Picard to Crusher.”
“Here, Captain.”
“Make sure a quarantine unit is available, Doctor. We may have to beam several patients into it.”
“Aye, Captain. We’ll be ready.”
“Mr. La