Picard did not say anything. No response seemed required, or appropriate.
Confidence. Well, that he most certainly had. And the thought of ever losing a crew was an alien one to Picard. That sort of thing happened to commanders who were unprepared, who were caught short or flatfooted somehow. The way to avoid such a fate was, quite simply, preparation, preparation, and more preparation. And that was a commitment that Jean-Luc Picard was more than ready to make.
“Sit down, Picard,” said Talbot, with a trace of his familiar impatience.
Picard did so, very obediently. As always, there was a small, inward sigh of relief that any cadet always gave upon surviving a grilling by Talbot. In such circumstances one always felt that he had come away lucky....
Picard frowned. “Not far,” he said slowly.
Talbot had been in the middle of a sentence and stopped, his mouth moving a moment before it registered that the brain was no longer sending down words. No one, in the course of the semester, had ever had the temerity to interrupt Talbot. Indeed, it had certainly not been Picard’s intention now. This mattered not at all.
There was an aura of anticipation in the room as the other cadets turned with slow incredulity towards Picard. He had been so lost in thought that the perilous nature of his situation was only just dawning on him.
Talbot was slowly coming up the stairs toward him in those ominous, carefully measured strides he effected when he was about to disembowel some helpless student. His heels clicked rhythmically on the steps, one by one, each click being allowed to sound and echo and trail off to be replaced by the next, like the steady drip of a faucet.
Click.
Click.
Click.
He stopped at the aisle in which Picard was seated and just stood there, stood there like a vulture or some other bird of prey attracted by the smell and sight of dead meat.
That, Picard realized with dim dread, was what he apparently was—dead meat.
“Did you,” said Talbot, in a quiet voice tinged with menace, “interrupt me? Because if you did, it had best be something most important. Perhaps you have abruptly determined one of the great secrets of the universe, or even divined the eternal mystery of how cadets believe that they can speak out with temerity.”
“I…” Picard licked his suddenly dry lips. It seemed as if all the moisture from his body had left him and instead concentrated itself in his boots. “I was thinking out loud, sir.”
“Thinking,” said Talbot. He draped his hands behind his back theatrically. “And would you care to tell us just what you were thinking about?”
Picard quickly glanced around the class, feeling that if he could, just for a moment, connect with his fellow students he could draw some sort of emotional support from them. But no. Instead there was cold amusement in their eyes. Picard had hung himself out to dry, and the last thing any of them had any intention of doing was to help bring in the wash.
For the first time, Jean-Luc Picard had a fleeting taste of what the loneliness of command would be like.
“I was just thinking,” said Picard, in a voice that seemed barely connected to his own, “that the planet-eater could not have come from very far outside our galaxy. For example, it could not have come from, say, the Andromeda galaxy to ours. Instead, it had to come from some point not too far beyond the galactic rim.”
“And how,” said Talbot, “did you come to that conclusion?”
“Well, it’s…” Picard cleared his throat. He desperately wanted to cough, but that would have sounded too nervous. “You told us that the planet-eater did just that…it ate planets as sustenance. It needed mass to consume in order to perpetuate its fuel supply. But in between galaxies, there would have been no planetary masses for the planet-eater to consume. There is no record that the planet-killer possessed any sort of trans-galactic speed; in fact, the Enterprise paced it without much difficulty. So if we assume that it was traveling at standard speeds, it would have run out of fuel during any attempts to traverse galactic distances.
“Now, of course, once its fuel supply was depleted, it would have kept on going, since a body in motion tends to stay in motion. But that simple motion would never have been enough to penetrate the energy barrier at the rim of our galaxy—the one the original Enterprise ran into. Without some sort of internal propulsion system, the planet-killer would easily have been repulsed by the barrier and would never have managed to enter. And it no longer would have had a propulsion system because, as the old Earth saying goes, it would have run out of gas.”
“You are conversant with old Earth sayings?” asked Talbot neutrally.
“Yes, sir,” said Picard. “My father uses them constantly. Something of a traditionalist.”
“And is there, as I recall, an old Earth saying about speaking only when spoken to?”
Picard felt the blood drain from his face, but he refused to look down; dammit, he would not look down. Instead, he met Talbot’s level gaze and said simply, “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Remember it in the future.” He turned away, then stopped and looked at Picard thoughtfully. “Good point there, by the way. I daresay it forms the basis for a research paper or three. Nice thinking, Picard.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Try to make a habit of nice thinking, and you might prove to be not too much of an embarrassment to Starfleet in the future.”
Picard sat without another word. He glanced over at Korsmo, feeling a measure of triumph. Korsmo merely shrugged expansively at him in a Yeah, so, big deal manner. Picard sighed inwardly. It was utterly impossible to impress the gangling fellow cadet. Still, Picard could allow himself those small moments of triumph, and in this instance, he was quite content to give himself a mental pat on the back.
And then he saw her again.
She was there, just at the top of the other stairs, at the far side of the room. All cadet eyes were on Picard, or just starting to look away from him. No one saw her, and she was already starting to glide out the door like a shadow.
Picard stood so quickly that he banged his knee on the top of his desk. He gave a short yelp, and Talbot spun on the stairs so quickly that, for a brief moment, he almost toppled down them. He grabbed a railing in support and snapped in exasperation, “Oh, what is it now, Picard?”
Picard’s head snapped around and then back to the rear of the room. She was gone again, dammit, gone again. Not this time, though.
“Permission to be excused, sir; I feel quite ill,” said Picard. He grabbed his stomach for emphasis.
Talbot merely raised an eyebrow and inclined his head slightly. Delaying no further than was necessary, Picard grabbed up his padd and shot up the steps, two at a time.
He burst out into the hallway, moving so quickly that he almost banged into the doors, which opened barely in time. The hallway was empty. He glanced left, then took off to his right, running down the hallway as fast as he could, the youthful muscles of his legs propelling him as if he were entered in a cross-country dash.
He got to the end of the corridor and saw it was a dead end. He spun and looked back. Nothing. Not anywhere.
“What in hell is going on around here?” he whispered to himself.
Picard lay there in bed, staring up at the ceiling.
He’d left the window open this night, welcoming the vagrant breeze blowing in from the San Francisco Bay. It rolled over the bare skin of his chest and caressed it. His hands were folded behind his head, his pillow propped against the wall to one side. Whenever he wanted to think instead of fall asleep, he always did that. He fancied that it aided blood circulation to his brain, and his brain needed all the help it could get, he figured.
Was he losing his mind? Was he?
He was certain he had seen her, yet no one else had. Was it possible that she was some sort of vision appearing only to him? There was a word for something like that. Yes, there certainly was, he thought grimly. The word was hallucination. Not a pretty word, but certainly an accurate one. H
e was hallucinating. That was just great, just fabulous. The strain of his course load and his drive to succeed was threatening to drive him over the edge.
No—he refused to believe that. He had worked too hard, come too far, to fall prey suddenly to some sort of arcane mental distraction. He was not imagining it, blast it—he had seen her. Certainly she’d had an air of unreality about her. But that didn’t mean anything.
Hell, there were theories that the only things in the universe that were real were those things mankind considered unreal. If that were indeed the case, though, then she was unquestionably one of the most real things he’d ever encountered.
He sighed and let his mind wander. And even though he had felt wide awake a moment before, he felt the familiar haze settling on his mind, that dark cloud that told him sleep would be forthcoming shortly.
He thought that far off he could hear the waters splashing around the great tower legs of the Golden Gate Bridge. The air smelled of the sea, and he could almost sense the slow rolling of the waves. That was the great difference between captaining a sailing ship and captaining a starship. You couldn’t even feel the motion of a space vessel. You could hear the distant thrumming of its engines, and the stars would speed past you—dazzling points of light—but there was no gentle rocking. There was no riding up to the crest of one wave and sliding down to the next.
Sea captains sailed by the stars. So did starship captains. The difference was that the latter waved to the stars as they went past.
In his semi-dreaming state, the wind seemed to come up even stronger. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows, but it was as if all strength had left his body. Fatigue had settled in on every joint. He’d been pushing himself mercilessly over the past weeks, and perhaps his body had simply shut down, refusing to do any more of his bidding until he had gotten a proper night’s sleep. Some commander, he thought through the spreading haze. How could he command a crew when he couldn’t even boss his own body around?
The wind grew ever stronger, and it seemed mournful, as if a million souls were moaning at once, crying out to him. Their long, icy fingers were stroking him now, and with each caress came a cry in his head of Help us, save us, avenge us; do not forget us—never forget us.
Picard felt a chill knife through him, and he trembled as if in the presence of something beyond his comprehension. His teeth chattered involuntarily. Madness. His teeth had never chattered in his entire life.
He shut his eyes, as if doing so would still the voices in his head. They pervaded him, invaded him, and he cried out once, ordering them away with a sense of authority that he was only just beginning to feel.
When he opened his eyes, she was there.
It was as if she had stepped sideways from another time. She stared at him with luminous eyes that seemed to radiate a cold darkness. Her skin was dark, quite dark, and her eyes were rounded and slightly farther apart than usual, but they merely enhanced her exotic quality. Her black hair hung down low, to her hips, and seemed to be moving constantly, like a waving field of ebony wheat. Her dress swirled about her, and when she spoke, her voice carried that same, faint whisper of the souls that cried out to her.
“Of course,” she said from everywhere and nowhere. “Of course. From just beyond our galaxy. That’s where it came from. That’s why it was created. To combat them.”
“Combat who?” said Picard in confusion. Again he tried to sit up, and again his body scoffed at his efforts. The wind whipped his words away, and yet he knew she heard him. “I don’t understand.”
“You do not have to,” she said. “It is enough that I do. It is enough that I heard your wise words. And that’s why I’ve come here now: to thank you for your insight. You may have done greater things than you can imagine.” Her voice resonated low, and it was the sound of his mother whispering to him when he was an infant crying in the night. And it was the voice of the first girl he’d ever kissed, and of his first lover moving beneath him and whispering his name in low heat, and it was the voice of the stars calling to him, and the voice of the wind and the waves, and everything that was female that ever called to him and summoned him and nurtured him....
And he forced himself to sit up, stretching out an arm towards her, his fingers grasping. The edges of her garment seemed to dance near him and then away, just beyond reach.
“I will find its origins,” she said. “And I will find them. And I will stop them.”
“What them?” cried out Picard. He thought he was screaming at the top of his lungs, above the howling of the wind.
“I pray you never learn, Jean-Luc,” she said. “I pray you never learn of the ones without souls. I pray to the gods who do not exist and do not care, and who have forsaken me and my kind.”
Every aspect of her was seared into his mind: every curve of the body that revealed itself through the flowing gown; the tilt of her chin, the high forehead, the almost invisible eyebrows; the pure, incandescent beauty of her that was a palpable thing.
“Beware the soulless ones,” she told him. She took a bare half-step back, but it was enough to put her firmly beyond his reach.
His heart cried out because, for just a brief moment, his fingers had grazed the exquisite fabric of her dress. He wanted to pull it from her, to pull her to him, and yet at the same time he felt as if to do so would have been blasphemy.
“Who are the soulless ones?” he cried out.
“The destroyers. The anti-life. The soulless ones. They will destroy you, as they destroyed my kind. As they will destroy all kinds. But I will stop them.” Her voice was dark and filled the air with ice. “I will stop them, no matter how long it takes, and no matter how far I must travel.”
She stepped forward quickly, between his out-stretched arms, and kissed him on the forehead. When her lips brushed against him, it was as if an icicle had been dragged across it. She floated back just as fast, her swirling skirts concealing her movements.
The wind and the chill were everywhere, everywhere, and yet Picard forced himself to stand, forced himself from bed and brought his arms up against the brutal slamming of the wind. “Who are you?” he shouted, and again, “Who are you?”
She floated towards the door and stopped momentarily to turn a gaze on him that was ancient beyond belief.
“I am pain,” she said. “I am loss. I am grief.” And then her voice became diamond hardness, and she threw wide her arms and cried out into the wind, into the souls that chorused with her, “I am implacable, unstoppable! I am passion made into fury, love twisted to hate! I am vendetta!”
The wind came up and knocked Picard back. He stumbled over his bed, and his head smashed into the wall with a sickening thud. He slid down onto his pillow, and even then, all he wanted was one last glimpse of her.
Vendetta whispered in his mind, and then he passed out.
When he awoke in the morning, his blankets were twisted around him, and despite the coolness in the air, there was a thin film of perspiration all over his body.
The dream of the previous night had not faded with the morning sun, nor would the recollection diminish in the succeeding years, although naturally some of the immediacy was lost as time went on.
He never told anyone of the events of that night. At night he would sometimes lie awake, waiting for her to reappear, waiting for her to return and explain the puzzling descriptions of “soulless ones,” and of that mysterious self-description.
He made a study of all the events surrounding the planet-killer, including the frustrating open-ended question of the nature of its origin. The theory was that it had been created by one of two great races locked in combat. But what races? Why were there no traces of them? Had they both wiped each other completely from existence?
Questions. These and dozens more, none of which he was able to satisfactorily answer throughout his Academy career. Eventually he moved on to other things, and the questions were forgotten.
But not the biggest question.
Every so often he wo
uld listen to the winds, but they would not call to him again after that night, and they never whispered that word. The word that would haunt him as much as the woman who came to him that night:
Vendetta.
ACT ONE
Chapter Two
Dantar the Eighth looked across the table at Dantar the Ninth with total satisfaction, his antennae twitching slightly in approval. Dantar the Ninth, for his part, was preparing for the act of drawing a well-honed knife across the torso of the carefully prepared zinator, the animal’s lifeless eyes staring up at Dantar the Eighth and his family.
It was an extended family, to be sure, by human standards. By the standards of the Penzatti, the race of which Dantar was a member, it was merely average. Smaller than average, in fact—thirteen family members, including the three spouses and assorted children. Yes, smaller indeed. Dantar the Eighth was occasionally the butt of jibes from his fellow workers, and he brushed off such japes with brisk comments about quality versus quantity. Secretly, though, he toyed with the idea of acquiring yet another mate, or perhaps simply producing more children with the ones he had. So many choices for a healthy head of a Penzatti family.
Dantar the Ninth, eldest son of Dantar the Eighth, was taking his carving responsibility quite seriously. The zinator had been meticulously prepared by his mother, anointed with all the proper scents and spices for this day of appreciation to the gods. Dantar the Ninth had not suspected for a moment that his father would be permitting him to perform the actual carving.
He paused a moment, taking a deep breath, his tongue moving across his dry green lips. His three fingered hand, wrapped around the blade of the knife, was trembling ever so slightly. But to Dantar the Ninth, it felt as if a massive tremor had seized hold of him and was shaking him for all he was worth. His graceful antennae were straight out and stiff with tension. In his other hand was the long, two-pronged fork, prodding carefully at the pink, uncooked zinator skin—deliciously, delicately raw—and every member of his family was watching and waiting for him to do something, already.