Star Trek: Pantheon (5 page)

Tarasco cursed angrily under his breath and scanned the corridor in both directions. The monster was loose. He could be anywhere, preying on anyone at all. There was no time to waste.

Pressing the intercom pad next to the brig, the captain gained access to every member of his crew in every section of the ship. “Agnarsson has escaped the brig,” he said, doing his best to keep his panic in check. “He’s already killed three security officers. He is extremely dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. Repeat—”

You’re next, Tarasco.
The words echoed ominously in his brain, obliterating the possibility of any other thought. Tarasco scanned the corridor in either direction, but there was no one there.
After all, what do I need with a captain? Or a crew, for that matter?

Tarasco swallowed back his fear.
Where are you?
he asked the engineer in the confines of his mind.

Not so far away,
came the coy, almost childlike answer.
And getting closer all the time.

At the sound of his adversary’s thought, the captain could feel a wetness between his shoulder blades. Following his instincts, he whirled—but the corridor was still empty behind him.

Then he spun the other way…

And there was Agnarsson, his eyes ablaze with silver light, a cruel smile on his otherwise expressionless face. He had always been a big man, but he seemed even bigger now, more imposing.

You can’t kill me,
the engineer insisted, his voice expanding to fill the hallway.
Much as you want to, you can’t. But I can kill you.

And he lifted his hand to carry out his threat.

However, Tarasco struck first. His pale blue laser beam slammed squarely into Agnarsson’s chest, forcing him back a couple of steps. The engineer’s smile became a grimace as he pitted his mysterious power against the laser’s electromagnetic fury.

At first, he merely stood his ground. Then little by little, with the beam’s brilliance spattering against him, he did even better than that. He began to make his way forward again.

You can’t stop me,
Agnarsson told him, his voice echoing like thunder.
Nothing can stop me.
And he hurled a crackling bolt of livid pink energy at the captain.

Tarasco didn’t have time to duck the discharge or get out of the way. All he could do was try to go limp as the engineer’s power hammered him into the bulkhead behind him.

The next thing the captain knew, he was sitting with his back against the bulkhead, feeling as if he had broken every bone in his body. There was blood in his mouth and a wetness in the back of his head that could only have been more blood.

And it hurt like the devil to draw a breath. More than likely, he had cracked a couple of ribs.

Through tears of pain, he looked up at Agnarsson. The man was gazing at his victim triumphantly, in no apparent hurry to finish him off. Almost reluctantly, he lifted his hand.

But before he could accomplish anything with it, the corridor erupted with a blinding, blue light. It caught the engineer by surprise and sent him staggering into the bulkhead.

The captain squinted and was able to make out two high-intensity shafts. Lasers, he thought. On their highest settings. They seemed to be coming from the opposite end of the corridor.

Forcing his eyes to focus, Tarasco saw that two more of his security officers had arrived. Their laser barrage was pummeling Agnarsson without respite, forcing him to expend more and more of his newfound energy just to remain conscious.

The captain knew that this might be his last chance. Looking around for his laser pistol, he found it lying on the deck less than a meter away. Putting aside the pain that squeezed his midsection like a vise, he dragged himself over to the weapon and took hold of it.

When he looked up again, he saw Agnarsson fighting the security officers’ lasers to a draw. It was difficult to predict which would give out first—the engineer’s stamina or the pistols’ batteries.

Tarasco made the question moot by adding his own beam to the equation. Skewered in the back with it, Agnarsson groaned and crumpled to his knees. Then he fell forward, momentarily unconscious.

The captain turned his beam off. So did his security officers, whom he recognized as Siregar and Offenburger. In the aftermath of the battle, they couldn’t help glancing at the corpses of Pelletier and the others.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked Offenburger, a tall man with blond hair and light eyes.

Tarasco nodded, despite the punishment he had taken. “Fine, Marc.” He managed to get to his feet, though it cost him a good deal of pain. “I need your help, both of you.”

“What is it, sir?” asked Siregar, an attractive Asian woman.

“We need to get Agnarsson to the weapons room,” the captain told them. “And I mean
now.”

Their expressions told Tarasco that they didn’t follow his thinking. But then, Pelletier had been the only security officer to whom the captain had revealed his intentions regarding the engineer.

Strictly speaking, he didn’t owe either Offenburger or Siregar an explanation—but he gave them one anyway. “Agnarsson’s become too dangerous. We have to get rid of him while we still can.”

The security officers didn’t seem pleased by the prospect of killing a fellow human being—a man with whom they had eaten and shared stories and braved the dangers of the void. However, they had seen the engineer’s power, not to mention the bodies of their friends on the floor. They would do whatever Tarasco asked of them.

Kneeling at Agnarsson’s side, the captain felt the man’s neck for a pulse. It was faint, but the engineer was clearly still alive. And that wasn’t the only thing Tarasco noticed.

Agnarsson’s eyes, or what the captain could see of them through the engineer’s half-closed lids, weren’t glowing anymore. They had returned to normal again.

As before, Tarasco was tempted to believe that the crisis was over—that their laser barrage had somehow reversed whatever had gotten hold of the engineer, stripping him of his incredible powers. Then he considered the bodies of those Agnarsson had murdered with a gesture and knew he couldn’t take any chances.

“Pick him up,” the captain told Offenburger and Siregar. “I’ll keep my laser trained on him in case he wakes.”

Tucking their weapons into their belts, the officers did as they were asked. Offenburger inserted his hands under the engineer’s arms and Siregar grabbed his legs. Then they began moving in the direction of the
Valiant’
s weapons room.

There were hatches that were closer to their location. Unfortunately, Tarasco mused, shoving Agnarsson out into space might not be enough. If the engineer was able to survive in the vacuum—and he might be—it was also possible that he could work his way back inside.

The weapons room was a deck above them, which meant they had to use a lift to get to it. It seemed to take forever for the compartment to reach them, and even longer for it to take them to their destination.

After that, they had to negotiate a long, curving corridor. It wasn’t long before Offenburger and Siregar began showing the strain of their efforts. Agnarsson was no lightweight, after all. But eventually, Tarasco was able to guide them through the weapons room doors.

The place was dominated by a pair of missile launchers—dark, bulky titanium devices with long, cylindrical slots meant to shoot atomic projectiles through the void. They were empty at the moment, their payloads safely stowed in a series of obverse bulkhead compartments.

But at least one of them wouldn’t be empty for long.

The captain pointed to it with his free hand. “Put him in,” he told the security officers.

Siregar looked down at Agnarsson and winced at the idea. Offenburger hesitated as well.

“Sir,” the security officer began in a plaintive voice, “there must be a better way to—”

“Do it,” snapped Tarasco, his stomach clenching.

Offenburger bit back the rest of his protest. With obvious reluctance, he and Siregar placed the unconscious engineer in the open launch slot. Then they started to slide the missile door into place.

That was when Agnarsson woke up.

With a cry of rage, he sat up and slammed the missile door open again, filling the room with metallic echoes. Then he vaulted out of the slot and rounded on Offenburger and Siregar.

The captain wasn’t about to let them get hurt—not when he had promised to protect them. Pressing the trigger on his laser pistol, he sent a blue beam slamming into the engineer’s back.

It barely slowed Agnarrson down. He released a bolt of raw pink lightning at Offenburger, sending the blond man flying across the room. Then he did the same thing to Siregar.

Finally, he turned to Tarasco.
I told you,
he said in that strangely expansive voice of his,
you can’t stop me, Captain—not any more than an amoeba can stop an elephant.

And with that, he extended his hand toward Tarasco—not casually, as he had before, but with a certain resolve. The meaning of the gesture was clear. He intended to finish the captain off this time.

Tarasco fired at Agnarsson again, producing another stream of electromagnetic force. But the engineer wasn’t daunted by it. He simply raised his chin and withstood the barrage, and retaliated with a spidery lightning flash of his own.

Fortunately, the captain was ready for it. Ignoring the crushing pain in his ribs, he ducked Agnarsson’s attack and rolled to his right. Then he came up on one knee and fired again.

The engineer actually smiled.
I’m getting stronger with every passing second,
he observed.
You should have done something about me a long time ago. Now it’s too late.

Tarasco saw the wisdom in the remark. He
should
have done something a long time ago. He should have done the hard thing, the heartless thing, and destroyed Agnarsson as soon as he tampered with the ship.

But that didn’t help him now. He had to find a way to slow the monster down, to give himself and his crew a fighting chance…

Suddenly, it came to him.

As the engineer raised his hand again, the captain fired his laser pistol—but not at Agnarsson, against whom it wouldn’t have done any good. Instead, he trained his beam on the deck below Agnarsson’s feet.

After all, this was the weapons room—and the
Valiant
boasted two kinds of weapons. One was atomic. The other was a laser cannon system supplied with power by heavy-duty conduits.

And as luck would have it, one of those conduits ran directly under the spot where Agnarsson was standing.

It took a moment for Tarasco’s beam to punch through the deck plating. The tactic caught the engineer by surprise, causing him to stumble. But he didn’t understand what his adversary was up to, or he would have removed himself from the room immediately.

As it was, he simply levitated himself above the ruined spot in the deck.
You’re grasping at straws,
said Agnarsson, looking regal and supremely confident, his technical training obviously forgotten.
What’ll you do next, Captain? Try to bring the ceiling down on my head?

He had barely gotten the words out when Tarasco’s beam found its unlikely target. Without warning, a gout of blue-white electroplasma rose up and engulfed the engineer.

Agnarsson writhed horribly in the clutches of the energy geyser. Finally, with a prolonged snarl, he hurled himself out of harm’s way and landed on the deck with a thud.

However, the engineer’s exposure to the deadly electroplasma had taken its toll. He was curled up in a fetal position, his clothes burned off, his skin and hair blackened and oozing with blood.

But his eyes still glowed with that eerie, silver light. And as Tarasco looked on, Agnarsson’s flesh began to repair itself. Despite everything, he and his power had survived.

The captain bit his lip. It wouldn’t be wise to try to launch the engineer into space a second time—not at the rate his strength was coming back. And he could think of only one other option.

Cradling his damaged ribs, he raced across the room to the intercom grid. Then he pressed the pad that activated it.

“This is Tarasco,” he gasped. “All hands abandon ship immediately. Repeat, all hands abandon ship.”

There was no time to elaborate, no time to explain. There was only enough time to issue the order and hope his people would follow it, because Agnarsson was already healed enough to focus his thoughts.

That was clever,
the monster reflected through the haze of his pain.
But how many conduits can you open without destroying your ship?

The captain didn’t allow himself to think of the answer. Instead, he aimed his weapon at the deck below Agnarsson and fired again. This time it took a little longer for him to pierce the surface and reach the conduit, but the result was just as spectacular.

As the engineer was enveloped in the seething, blue-white flame, he screamed a high, thin scream. Then he lurched out of the plasma’s embrace and fell to the deck, thin plumes of black smoke rising from him.

Tarasco’s heart went out to the man. After all, Agnarsson hadn’t asked for what had happened to him. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it. In a sense, he was a victim as much as those security officers he had killed.

But as Pelletier had pointed out, this wasn’t about right and wrong. This was about evolution. This was about survival.

And the captain would be damned if he was going to let his engineer shape the future of the human race.

As Agnarsson whimpered and clutched at himself with blackened, clawlike hands, Tarasco tried to rouse Siregar and Offenburger. Both of them were still alive, it turned out, though badly battered.

“Get out of here,” he told them. “That’s an order. Grab the nearest escape pod and get off the ship.”

Offenburger glanced at the engineer, too dazed to fully grasp what was happening. “What about you, sir?” he asked the captain, his words slurred and difficult to understand.

“I’ll follow when I’m certain Agnarsson can’t come after us,” Tarasco assured him. It was a lie, of course. He had no intention of following the security officers.

Siregar’s eyes narrowed. Unlike Offenburger, she seemed to divine his intentions. “Let me stay and help,” she suggested.

“No,” the captain told her. “Now get going.”

Siregar hesitated for a moment longer, loath to leave him there alone with Agnarsson. Then she put her arm around Offenburger and helped him stagger out of the weapons room.

Tarasco turned back to the engineer. To his amazement, the man was almost healed again, his skin raw but no longer charred. Agnarsson glowered at him with eyes that had known unbelievable pain.

You can’t keep this up forever,
the engineer told him.
Sooner or later, I’ll destroy you.

The captain’s only response was to walk over to the launch console and punch in some commands. The first one armed the ship’s atomic missiles, overriding the protocol that would have kept them from exploding inside the
Valiant.
The second command accessed the missiles’ timers.