The Soldiers of Fear (11 page)

"Is there any way to isolate the fear response and block only it?"

"I have several theories," she said, "but I have had no time to focus on them."

"How long would it take to bring one of your theories to fruition?"

"Give me an hour."

The captain nodded. "Then make it so, Beverly. Blocking our own fears would be the best line of defense against this first attack by the Furies."

"I agree," she said.

The captain turned from her to face all his officers. His decisive movements led Worf to believe that the captain had a plan. Whether he did or not was immaterial. The fact that he acted as if he did mattered most. It engendered hope in the officers, which would then inspire the crew.

"There is one more potential problem," the captain said. "While we might assume that these five ships are the only ships we will face, we cannot believe that assumption. These ships might be the advance guard for an invasion force. If that is the case, the Starfleet vessels, the Klingon Birds-of-Prey, and the T'Pau will not be enough to keep the force from sweeping into the quadrant."

A chill ran through Worf. "Have you evidence of this, Captain?"

"It is only a theory at this point, Mr. Worf."

"I believe this theory to be accurate," Data said. "The evidence suggests that the five ships are waiting for something. Most likely a second, larger force."

Worf nodded. That would be simply good tactics. A small advance force before risking a larger one.

Picard focused his intense gaze on all of them, and Worf straightened his shoulders.

"I do not want an invasion force to come through that wormhole," Picard said, his voice firm. "In fact, I do not want any more Fury ships to come into this quadrant. Therefore, in addition to finding ways to prevent the Furies from attacking us, we must find a way to close the wormhole."

The silence in the room was palpable.

Until now, it seemed, no one had really thought about what all-out war with the Furies would mean. But the thought of an invasion force seemed suddenly very real to Worf. These ships needed to be stopped now and the wormhole closed. Worf understood and he felt ready for the fight.

The captain walked around the table and stopped behind Data. "Mr. Data, I want you to make that wormhole your primary source of study. I need to know the most effective method to close it. And I need it fast."

"Aye, sir," Data said.

The captain made eye contact with each of his officers. When his gaze rested on Worf, Worf nodded back. The captain's confidence was restoring Worf 's confidence. He could feel it giving him strength as each minute went by.

"I don't think I need to impress upon you all the importance of what we do here," the captain said. "We are the Federation's flagship, and I have never worked with a stronger, more capable crew in my entire career. The Enterprise defeated the Furies once. She shall do so again."

And somehow, for that moment in time, Worf believed that what the captain said was true.

THE SHIP WAS GROWING COLD, the air thin, and the food scarce. Some minor functionary was not doing his job.

Again.

Vergo Vedil unfolded his body from the command chair and groaned as he did so. The bridge of the Erinyes had been designed by Ak'lins. Web-footed and secure, they had never thought that a leader might be a Zebub. He had to struggle to keep his hoofed feet from sliding out from underneath him.

It was not dignified for the Vergo of the Erinyes to slip and fall on his spiny backside. He scratched behind one of his horns, nearly breaking a nail, and then sucked at the air, catching sweetmeats in the thin strands of saliva that coated his mouth. He glanced around and could almost see the entire distance across the bridge. The atmosphere was far too thin. In a moment he would see that fixed, and someone would pay for the oversight.

He slowly stretched his muscles. This bout of waiting seemed interminable. He had thought the advance guard would have all the pleasure of the invasion. He had not realized that the hours between his first attack and the arrival of the fleet would be long, and filled with emptiness.

Ythion had argued against keeping the live one, and Vedil had had too much fun killing the others. The presents he left for the Unclean should have frightened them beyond their capacity for reason. And if they had had their souls with them, he would have scattered them to air, cutting them open.

He lightly brushed the doll likeness of himself hanging on his side. It felt thick and full, as his life had been to this point. His soul was safe, but it reassured him to check it at times.

He faced the front viewscreen and stared at the Unclean ship hanging in space. They had contacted him again. Perhaps his approach had been too narrow. He had used what the Unclean captive had thought of as a Terran attack. He should have noted that a sweep of the Unclean's mind informed him that many races from heaven filled the ships now. Perhaps Vedil should have allowed one of the Sakill, with their ridged foreheads and long braided hair, to accompany him. Or even a Jequat, a one-eyed stone giant, to squint at the puny captain of the Unclean.

That would have silenced him forever.

The Unclean ship had not attacked yet. Perhaps it never would. Perhaps he would remain, guardian of the Entrance to Heaven, leader of a battle that would never occur.

"Vergo, they have received another transmission." His first assistant bowed before him, the snakes in her hair floating around her, their mouths opening and closing in the ever-thinning air.

He scooped a maggot from his cheek, watched the creature climb in the curve of his longest nail, and then scraped the nail against his left fang. The maggot was sweet and juicy, cool against his tongue.

The rest of his staff watched him, knowing that when he ate so obviously in front of them he was breaking etiquette and showing his displeasure. Hands, claws, and flippers rested against controls, waiting for his next command, or his next outburst.

"And of course we know, Dea, what that transmission said." He swiveled his head until the tip of one horn brushed against the nearest snake.

She jumped away as if burned. "No, Vergo, but we are working on it."

"Working on it. Such an old-fashioned, out-of-date term. These communications are not sophisticated. We have their ancient codes from the ship of Kirk. We should be able to understand what they are saying."

She swallowed, and all the snakes floating about her head closed their mouths, as if in sympathy. "Yes, Vergo."

"I am glad we understand each other," he said, and used his horn to decapitate the snake he had been toying with. Green goo billowed in the atmosphere along with tiny bugs, half a dozen or more. He sucked them in through his teeth.

She blinked in obvious pain. "I will do better, Vergo."

"You will have to," he said. "Since I am now removing your badge of power. You shall go to the food tanks below, see what is thinning the air, and double the level of edibles in the atmosphere."

She nodded. The snakes all watched him, as wary as she was. "Below, then, Vergo." She pivoted on one small, Unclean-like foot, and crossed the bridge. As she stepped into the mobile stairs, the snakes on her head dove at the single snake carcass. They ripped and shredded it in their haste to devour the remains.

Much like his people when they sensed weakness.

"B'el," Vedil said. "You shall monitor the Unclean ship."

B'el bobbed the center of his three heads. The others were already too busy watching the screens. "Vergo," said the first head, "the Unclean are trying to communicate with us again."

Vedil snorted. "Do these creatures do nothing other than talk?"

This was the third attempt at communication. It disturbed him. After their discovery of the outpost and its dead crew, and especially after his first transmission, this Unclean ship should have been his.

"O'pZ," he said to the Ak'lin at the science console. "Has our beam shut off?"

"No, Veeerrrgo." Her beaklike mouth often got stuck on sibilants. He had almost given her a position where she need not talk in the heat of battle. But Ak'lins had a gift for engineering, architecture, and science. O'pZ was the most talented scientist he knew.

And therefore extremely valuable.

"What evidence have you of the beam's effect?"

She lowered her scaly head and hunched her ridged back forward, as if protecting her soft underbelly. "None, Vergo. It is as if the beam is having no effect."

"We should destroy the Unclean ship," her lover, Prote, said. His useless wings unfurled at the thought, nearly hitting B'el.

"And if we do that, we lose all the precious knowledge they hold in their minds and in their electronic systems." Vedil steadied himself against his chair. His feet slid against the slick floor, and he had to struggle for a moment to keep his balance.

He glanced around, then decided. "Increase the beam's intensity. We have ten hours to conquer them without destroying their ship. I would prefer to give this vessel to the fleet as a prize when they come through, rather than have them fly through a ring of debris."

"Vergo, the debris from one puny vessel will not make a difference to two hundred of our ships," Prote said.

Vedil lowered his gaze and glared at Prote. "And the loss of one navigation officer will not make a difference in our return to heaven."

Prote's wings curled and he bowed his head. "Yes, Vergo."

"I thought the beam would work quicker than it has," the Ak'lin said. "I thought it would be easier to enslave them."

"It will be easy to enslave them," Vedil said. "You forget the ease with which we captured their outpost. Once they see us face-to-face, they will be unable to resist our dominance."

He grinned at his crew. They watched him warily.

"We shall toy with the Unclean for another hour or so, and then we shall make them ours. But I would like to remind them how powerless they are against us, and an hour or two of futile struggle is all we need."

"When the fleet comes through, the Unclean will know we are conquerors," Prote said, obviously trying to make up for his earlier mistakes.

"They will know it before the fleet comes through," Vedil said. "By the time the fleet joins us, this tiny Unclean vessel shall lead us into the promised land, its crew eager to share its enslavement with its companions in the stars beyond."

REDBAY FOCUSED on the screens in front of him. If he concentrated on work, his fears the memories of that horrid year when he lost his family and scavenged through the remains of Nyo colony alone didn't overwhelm him. Sometimes they caught him in the throat or the gut. Sometimes he felt shivers running through him, and once he thought of asking Ensign Moest for a hug. Well, not really. She was beautiful, and he wouldn't mind a bit of female comfort at the moment, but he had learned his lesson early: never start a shipboard romance. If the thing went sour, there was nowhere to hide.

He grinned to himself. Thinking about women was a lot easier than thinking about the past.

But he needed to focus on the task at hand. The quicker they blocked whatever the Furies were doing to them, the better things would get.

Or so he kept telling himself.

He was doing tests on types of subspace carrier waves, hoping to stumble on something. To him, subspace or interspace seemed the only two logical ways the Furies could send some sort of fear trigger. If the captain's supposition was right, the Furies had the capability to form wormholes. They clearly understood more about the physics of subspace and interspace than the Federation did.

The tests appeared as multicolored light on his screens. Those light patterns sent shivers through him. Multicolored light used to send him screaming from his safe room for years after his parents died. The Federation investigated the deaths on Nyo, but never found evidence of the light creatures. Some counselors believed that Redbay had made them up to cope with the trauma. Those counselors believed that everyone had died of disease or some undetectable cause.

Not genocide.

But he hadn't made it up. His memories were still clear. He had seen those creatures and he had hidden from them, and he had been the sole survivor.

But he was here now. On the Enterprise.

Looking at multicolored light patterns he had made.

And then he squinted. The effort it took him to block his fears delayed his own understanding of the pink cone he saw on the screen before him.

"Geordi," he said, his voice shaking with awe. "I found it."

La Forge left his seat and hurried to Redbay's side, leaning over his shoulder.

"Look. Right here."

Redbay put a finger on the screen. In his search, he had changed the look of the screen to a variety of different computer models. This one looked like a two-dimensional representation used long before computer imaging came into play. He had only called it up after exhausting the other options.

On it, the Furies' ships showed up as black dots near the yellow, glowing Furies Point. Brundage Station was another black square with a bit of silver light trickling off it, as if it had been raining in space, and now the rain was dripping dry. He had his theories about that, but they weren't important just yet. What was important were the multicolored light waves that ran across the screen, representing the Enterprise's search for the source of the fear.

And, as the light passed over the main Fury ship, a cone of pink light appeared, enveloping the Enterprise.

"Wow," La Forge said when the cone became visible. "Can you freeze that? Can we study it as it is?"

Redbay pushed a few buttons. His multicolored light waves disappeared and only the pink cone remained.

"At our position," he said, "the radius of that cone is over a thousand kilometers and it extends beyond our sensor range."

"But what are they projecting?" La Forge asked more to himself than to Redbay. He bent over the nearest panel, running his own checks.

Redbay matched it, fingers shaking. "I don't have a reading yet on the content of that beam, but this is clearly how they're manipulating our emotions. At this frequency in interspace, the beam goes through everything, including our heads."