The Devil's Heart - Carmen Carter [107]
“No!” A spidery hand pawed at the captain’s arm before he could move. “Do not be so hasty.”
Picard twirled around to face the gaunt figure of the Collector. The spare flesh of her body had not dried yet, but her ravaged face was that of a being near death. On the other side of her own dream, Halaylah was sealed in her chamber.
“Let go of me,” he said, shuddering away from her bony fingers. The sight of her filled him with revulsion. “You died trying to keep the Heart to yourself, but it has passed on to me. I’ll decide its fate now.”
Her shriveled lips contorted into a leer. “You do not comprehend what you are about to throw away. In order to act wisely, you must fully understand its powers, Captain …”
“… Captain.” He could feel the touch of a hand on the sleeve of his uniform.
“Captain?”
Picard opened his eyes and found himself slumped over his desk, head cradled in his arms, with the Heart resting by his elbow. There was a stranger, oddly familiar, leaning over him.
As the dream-induced confusion began to clear, Picard belatedly recognized his first officer.
Struggling to pull himself free of the vapors that clouded his mind, the capt ain sat up in his chair.
“What is it, Number One?”
“We have company.” The first officer pulled away from the desk and assumed a more formal stance while delivering his report. “A long-range sensor scan has detected the presence of a fleet of warp-driven craft at the periphery of our detection range. The total number of vessels is still difficult to determine at this distance, but Data confirmed there are at least twenty ships.”
Picard longed for solitude in which to recall the details of his dreaming, but he forced himself to attend to Jack’s words. “Do you have any idea who they are?”
“All we have so far is a name,” said Crusher.
“According to some stray bits of their ship-to-ship communications, the fleet belongs to a race who call themselves the unDiWahn.”
“The unDiWahn!”
“You know them?”
“Yes, I was warned about them by …”
Picard reached out for a name, but it wasn’t in place. There was a gap in his memory where a person belonged.
“Warned by a dream?” asked Crusher. There was a bitter edge to the question. His resentment of the Heart’s influence over his captain was growing stronger each day.
“Jack …” It was a signal between them, worked out over the years, that Picard needed to talk to him as a friend, rather than as a commanding officer.
Nodding his understanding, the first officer pulled a chair up to the desk and sat down across from Picard. In the decades since they had left Starfleet Academy, Jack Crusher’s boyish face and lanky frame had filled out and grown more rugged; gray had roughened the texture of his hair, and adversity had hardened the look in his eyes; but his smile was still as welcoming now as it had been when they were fellow cadets.
“I’m worried about you, Jean-Luc.
So is Beverly, both as a doctor and as a friend.”
“The Heart is not a danger to me,” said Picard. It was so difficult to explain with fatigue dragging him back toward sleep and the intoxication of more dreams. He reached out to touch the stone, drawing strength from its warmth. “It is sentient, Jack, a being in trouble that needs our help, and I intend to hold fast until the Heart has reached its destination.”
He had been so close to understanding before the Collector interfered. Perhaps the Guardian could complete the instructions in his next dream.
Crusher dropped his head down, burying his face in his hands. When he looked up again, his brow was furrowed as if in pain.
“Jean-Luc, if you look out the window behind you, you’ll see the charred wreckage of two warships.
We haven’t even finished patching the Enterprise back together again from our battle with the Plath, yet if we so much as sneeze we could suddenly be facing an entire fleet of these unDiWahn. The longer we stay out here, the less chance there is that we’ll ever make it back home alive.”
“I intend to do everything in my power