Star Trek: Pantheon (34 page)

He turned to look at her. “I thought our visitors would bring back memories. Matters I hadn’t quite laid to rest.”

And suddenly, she understood. She’d been so wrapped up with her own ghosts, she’d forgotten the captain had some of his own.

“What about now?” she asked.

“Now,” he said thoughtfully, “I am glad I had a chance to see my old friends again.
All
of them—living and dead.”

She took his arm and squeezed it affectionately. “I know the feeling, Jean-Luc. I know it quite well.”

That was how they emerged from the lift—with her arm tucked into the crook of his. And it was still there when they entered the transporter room, where they found the others already waiting for them.

Jean-Luc Picard regarded his opponent through the fine steel mesh of his fencing mask.

Daithan Ruhalter was tall, barrel-chested, and powerfully built…and for all of that, quick as a cat. Like Picard, he was clad entirely in white—the accepted garb for fencers for the last several hundred years.

At first, Ruhalter just stood there on the metallic strip in a half-crouch, only his head moving as he took stock of Picard’s posture. Then he edged forward with a skip step, lunged full length and extended his point in the direction of his adversary’s chest.

It wasn’t his best move—Picard knew that from experience. It was just an opening salvo, Ruhalter’s effort to feel his opponent out—and Picard, who had been trained by some of the best fencing masters in twenty-fourth-century Europe, didn’t overreact. He merely retreated a couple of steps and flicked his opponent’s point aside.

Undaunted, Ruhalter advanced and lunged again—though this time, he took a lower line. Picard had no more trouble with this attack than the first. In fact, he launched a counterattack just to keep his adversary honest.

Ruhalter chuckled in his mask, his voice deep and resonant. “Let’s begin in earnest now, eh?”

“If you say so,” Picard rejoined.

Suddenly, the other man’s point was everywhere—high, low, sliding in from the left, zagging in from the right. Picard wove an intricate web of protective steel around himself, defending against each incursion as soon as he recognized it.

Ruhalter used his fencing blade the way he commanded his crew. He was aggressive, improvisational, inclined to go with his instincts first and last. Also, he was a devout believer in the philosophy that the best defense is a good offense.

It was an approach that had garnered the man his share of prestigious medals and left more than one hostile species cursing his name. Years earlier, before the landmark Treaty of Algeron, Ruhalter had even gotten the best of the crafty Romulans.

However, Picard was no pushover either. Though his style was to rely on skill, discipline, and a carefully considered game plan, he was so surgically precise that few opponents could prevail against him.

Ruhalter continued to advance against the younger man, relentless in his onslaught. His sword darted like a living thing, a steel predator hungry for a taste of its prey.

Picard had no chance to go on the offensive, no opportunity to drive his opponent back in the other direction. It was all he could do to keep Ruhalter’s point away from himself—but he did that admirably well.

And he knew his adversary couldn’t keep up his intensity forever. Eventually, Ruhalter would have to falter. If I bide my time, Picard told himself, I’ll find the opening I need.

Then, suddenly, there it was…
the opening.

In an attempt to lunge in under Picard’s guard, Ruhalter had failed to extend his lead leg quite far enough. As a result, he had dropped his upper body. Off-balance, he was eminently vulnerable.

Picard moved his opponent’s point out of the way, encountering little resistance. With practiced efficiency, he leaned forward into a forceful but economical counterthrust.

Too late, he saw his error. Ruhalter hadn’t made a mistake after all. His overex-tension had been an act, a ruse designed to draw Picard into a subtle trap…and it had worked.

Thwarting the younger man’s attack with the polished dome of his guard, Ruhalter came at Picard with a roundhouse right. Before Picard could retreat and erect a new defense, Ruhalter’s point was pushing against the ribs beneath his left arm.

“Alas!” the older man barked, making no effort to mask his exuberance.

The best fencing masters in Europe would have been ashamed of him, Picard thought. On the other hand, it was devilishly difficult to deal with someone who was so unpredictable.

“Your point,” Picard conceded drily.

Careful not to forget his manners, he swung his blade up to his mask in a gesture of respect. Then he settled back into an en garde position. Ruhalter, who was smiling behind his mask, did the same.

“You know,” he remarked good-naturedly, “you look a little sluggish this morning, Jean-Luc.”

“Only in comparison to my opponent,” Picard told him.
Though that will change,
he added, resolving to win the next point.

He succeeded in that objective. However, Ruhalter came back and won the next two in succession. In the end, Picard’s determination notwithstanding, he lost the match 5-3.

Ruhalter removed his mask, revealing his rugged features and thick, gray hair. “Thanks for the workout,” he said.

Picard removed his mask as well. “Thank
you,
sir,” he responded, ever the good sport.

“You know,” Ruhalter told him in a paternal way, “you need to trust your instincts more, Commander. A man who ignores his instincts is defeated before he starts.”

Tucking his mask under his sword arm, Picard managed a smile. “I’ll try to keep that in mind, sir.”

He would, too. After all, Ruhalter was more than his captain. He was also the twenty-eight-year-old Picard’s mentor—a man the second officer greatly admired, despite the differences in their personalities.

“Perhaps you would care for a rematch,” Picard suggested.

Before the captain could answer, a voice echoed throughout the gym: “Leach to Captain Ruhalter.”

The captain looked up at the ceiling, as if he could see the intercom grid inside it. “Yes, Mr. Leach?”

Stephen Leach was Ruhalter’s first officer. He had been left in charge of the ship’s bridge while the captain and his second officer took their exercise in the gymnasium.

“You have an eyes only message from Admiral Mehdi at Starfleet Command, sir,” Leach reported. As usual, he projected an air of cool efficiency.

Ruhalter looked at Picard. “Eyes only, eh? I guess I’ll have to ask for a rain check on that rematch.”

Picard nodded. “I understand, sir.”

The captain glanced at the ceiling again. “I’ll take it in my quarters, Mr. Leach. Ruhalter out.” Replacing his mask and sword on a wall rack, he nodded in Picard’s direction and left the gym.

As the younger man watched his captain depart, he wondered what the message from Starfleet Command might be about. After all, it was rare for headquarters to send an eyes only missive to
any
vessel, much less a deep-space exploration ship like the
Stargazer.

The second officer ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked, auburn hair. Few eyes only messages remained that way for long, he mused. He hoped this one wouldn’t be an exception.

Idun Asmund was running a diagnostic routine at her helm console when the turbolift doors opened and her twin came out onto the bridge.

Gerda Asmund was Idun’s mirror image—tall, blond, and eminently well proportioned. Men invariably found the two of them attractive, though the reverse wasn’t true nearly often enough for Idun’s taste.

One of the drawbacks of having been raised among Klingons, she reflected. Unless a man smoldered with a warrior’s passions, she wasn’t likely to give him a second look.

Negotiating a path around the captain’s chair, which was occupied at the moment by the tall, rail-thin Commander Leach, Gerda relieved Lieutenant Kochman at the navigation console. Then, as she sat down and surveyed her control settings, Gerda shot her sister a look.

Idun had no trouble divining the intent behind it. Clearly, Gerda was bored. For that matter, so was Idun.

They had joined the
Stargazer’
s crew with adventure in mind. After all, the
Stargazer
was a deep-space exploration vessel, its mandate to push out the boundaries of known space. However, in more than seven months of service, they had seen nothing but routine planetary surveys and the occasional space anomaly—hardly the kind of excitement they had hoped for. Gerda had even broached the subject of transferring to another ship.

Idun was a bit more optimistic than her sister. And less than fifteen minutes ago, she had been given reason to believe her patience might finally be rewarded.

“Commander Leach?” came a voice over the ship’s intercom system. It was the captain, Idun realized.

The first officer looked up, his dark eyes alert in their oversized orbits. “Yes, sir?”

“Set a course for Starbase two-oh-nine,” the captain said. “And don’t spare the horses.”

Idun saw Leach frown. He was a man who liked to deal in hard facts, not colorful colloquialisms.

“Warp eight?” the first officer ventured.

“Warp eight,” the captain confirmed. “Ruhalter out.”

Leach turned to Gerda. “You heard Captain Ruhalter, Lieutenant. That survey of Beta Aurelia will have to wait.”

“Aye, sir,” said Gerda, bringing up the appropriate cartography on her monitor and charting a course. A few moments later, she sent the results to her sister’s console.

A comment went with it:
Warp eight. Sounds serious.

Idun sent a return communication:
Preceded by an eyes only message not fifteen minutes ago.

Surprised, Gerda looked up from her monitor and glanced at her sister. For the first time in months, a smile spread across her face.

Gilaad Ben Zoma, the
Stargazer’
s chief of security, heard a beep and looked up. “Come in,” he said.

A moment later, the doors to his small, economically furnished office slid apart, revealing a compact, baby-faced young man with short, sandy hair in a uniform that seemed a tad too big for him. He looked uncomfortable as he stepped into the room.

But then, Ben Zoma mused, Lieutenant Peter “Pug” Joseph probably had an idea as to why he had been summoned. The security chief smiled to put the man at ease and gestured to a chair on the other side of his desk.

“Have a seat, Mr. Joseph.”

“Yes, sir,” said the younger man. He sat down, but he didn’t look any more comfortable than before.

Ben Zoma leaned forward. “As you may have guessed, I called you here to talk about what happened last night.”

Joseph looked contrite. “Yes, sir.”

“You know,” said the security chief, “it’s good to be alert, especially when we’re dealing with something as tricky as the inlet manifold. But sometimes, it’s possible to be a little
too
alert.”

“Sir,” Joseph replied, “I thought there was a real danger—”

Ben Zoma held his hand up, silencing the man. “I know exactly what you thought, Lieutenant. And I must say, I admire the quickness with which you responded. But for heaven’s sake, you’ve got to be a little more certain before you sound a shipwide alarm.”

“But, sir,” Joseph argued respectfully, “if there
had
been a problem with the inlet manifold—”

“Then it would have been picked up by our engineers,” the security chief assured him. He reached for his computer monitor and swiveled it around so the other man could see its screen. “Just as they would have picked up that field coil overload you were certain you saw a couple of days ago…and that apparent injector malfunction over which you shut down the warp drive.”

The other man sighed and slumped back into his chair.

“Then,” Ben Zoma went on as gently as he could, “there was the time you called an intruder alert without verifying your sensor data. And the time before that, when you thought an unidentified ship was approaching and it turned out to be a neutrino shadow.”

Joseph hung his head.

The security chief was sympathetic. Not too many years earlier, he himself had been a fresh-faced, junior-grade officer.

“I don’t bring up these incidents to make you feel bad,” Ben Zoma explained. “I just want you to see that you’re overreacting a bit. Granted, a threat to life and limb occasionally rears its head on a starship…but it can’t be lurking
everywhere.”

Joseph nodded. “I see what you mean, sir.”

“Good,” said the security chief. “Then we’ve accomplished something.”

The younger man looked up, his eyes hard and determined. “I’ll do better,” he vowed. “I promise you that.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Ben Zoma.

But in reality, he wasn’t sure at all.

Chief Medical Officer Carter Greyhorse hadn’t intended to walk into the ship’s gym. Distracted as he was, he had believed he was entering the neighboring biology lab, where he meant to review the work of a Betazoid biochemist who claimed to have synthesized the neurotransmitter psilosynine.

The doctor had expected to be greeted by the sleek, dark forms of a computer workstation, an industrial replicator and an electromagnetic containment field generator, all of them packed into a small, gray-walled enclosure. Instead, he found himself gazing at a tall, blond woman in a formfitting black garment pursuing some exotic and rigorous form of exercise.

The woman’s cheeks, he couldn’t help noticing, were flushed a striking shade of red. Her full lips had pulled back from her teeth, endowing her with a strangely wolflike appearance, and her ice-blue eyes burned with an almost feral intensity.

And the way she moved…it took Greyhorse’s breath away. She punched and kicked and spun her way through one complex maneuver after another, her skin glistening with perspiration, her long, lean muscles rippling in savage harmony.

Harsh, guttural sounds escaped her throat, occasionally devolving into a simple gasp or grunt. But they didn’t signal any pause in her routine. Despite whatever fatigue she might have felt, she went on.

In the presence of such passion, such vigor, Greyhorse felt oddly like an intruder. He experienced an impulse to go back the way he had come, to retreat to his safe and familiar world of scientific certainties.

But he didn’t go. He couldn’t.

He was mesmerized.

The woman, on the other hand, didn’t even seem aware of the physician’s presence in the room. Or if she
was
aware of it, it didn’t appear to faze her. She pursued her regimen with uninhibited energy and determination, pushing her finely tuned body to levels of speed and precision that few other humans could even contemplate.

Then she did what Carter Greyhorse would have thought impossible. She turned it up a notch.