“You couldn’t be sure.”
“Could you?” he asked. Kendrow shook his head. “Well, neither could I. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d been given this…vision…for a purpose. Except what that purpose might have been, I could only guess. Was it a warning? A random attempt at torture? Was it something avoidable, or was I supposed to surrender to fate? I remember…” The recollection was painful to him, even after all this time. “My last day there, I stood in front of the Guardian and just screamed and kept on screaming, wanting to know what the purpose to all of it had been. And the thing just sat there, replying in one of its preprogrammed ways that it was there to be my guide. No man should know his fate, Kendrow, or the time of his demise…even the possible time.
“The events that I experienced on that world shaped—‘distorted,’ might be a better word—the way in which I handled the rest of my life up to this point. I had no idea whether I had imagined it, whether it was to happen irrevocably, or whether it was one of the assorted possibilities that trickled through the Guardian but wound up being swept away by the rivers of time. I spent about six months barely functioning as a human being before I pulled myself together enough to carry on with…well, with whatever it was that I was going to be left with.
“But you know what, Kendrow?”
“What, sir?”
Slowly he walked over to the interface console of Omega 9. The flashing pad blinked its hypnotically entrancing lights at him. The pale blue pattern was rather soothing to him. “If not for that experience…it’s possible the Omega 9 might not exist. When your mind reaches a point where it can’t function in its normal patterns, it seeks out new patterns. And my thoughts eventually brought me in the direction of the Omega 9. I saw…possibilities,” he whispered the word. “Circuits, possibilities, revealed themselves to me, one unfolding upon another. And when I saw them, ignoring them was not an option. That’s what brought me to the Daystrom Institute. The years hurtled past, Kendrow. I almost didn’t notice them, because I was so busy working to produce the Omega 9.”
“I just wish…” Kendrow began to say, but then he stopped.
“No, it’s all right, Kendrow.” He folded his arms and leaned back against a console. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well…the top secret turn this entire project has taken.” He gestured around him, at the banks of computer circuitry and nannite growth technology that was in place. “It’s…well, this outpost is fairly remote, sir. Somewhat lonely.”
“I prefer it that way, Kendrow. My theories, my work is off the beaten path. I’d prefer that I remain that way as well. The fortunate thing about the Daystrom Institute is that they understand and respect the concept of creative vision. Once they’re convinced that they’re dealing with a true visionary…such as myself, I modestly admit,” and he laughed at the obvious pretentiousness of the viewpoint, “then they’re willing to provide as much or as little help as required, as much or as little in terms of equipment as needed. And the precise working environment to foster the best work. I wish…” and he shook his head, “I wish I could have met Daystrom himself. Poor fellow. What a tortured genius he was. That incident with the Enterprise a hundred years ago…”
“Sir…about this working environment…” He coughed politely. “To be honest, I haven’t spoken to you about it since I first came here six months ago because of, well…your attitude, and the tension that seemed to, frankly, ooze from every pore. But since we’re being open and straightforward now, I feel inclined to ask…doesn’t our presence here make us something of a target, sir? The Omega 9…?”
“Of course not.” Frobisher laughed at the notion. “The work we’ve developed here is going to be made available to all. There’s nothing for anyone to steal. And even if we did…we have enough internal defenses here to hold them off until help comes. And those defenses were built by very paranoid Daystrom executives who have the exact same mindset as you, Kendrow. You should be pleased…or maybe you should be afraid, I’m not quite sure.” He clapped Kendrow on the shoulder. “Be of good cheer, Kendrow. I feel like I have a new lease on life. Tell you what: Let’s track down that glitch you were talking about, and then we can actually take the rest of the day off from work. Have you put Omega 9 on the trail of this glitch?”
“Oh, sir, that’s kind of like using photon torpedoes to kill an insect. It’s just some sort of elusive little bug. Why waste the O-9’s time on it?”
“Kendrow, for all its advancement, for all the potential it displays…it’s still just a machine. It’s not as if we’re going to hurt its feelings or insult it by asking.”
“Sir, perhaps…”
“Kendrow, for crying out loud, cheer up! Life’s too short.” He walked over to the Interface station and placed his hand against it.
“Interface activated,” came the calm tone of the Omega 9. Despite the ominous name of the computer itself, the machine’s voice was that of a young female, not more than ten years old. One of the scientists back at the main institute, in the early days of the computer’s development, had patterned the voice on his daughter’s as a sort of birthday surprise for her. He had intended to change it subsequently, but Frobisher felt it was so charming that he opted to retain the voice for the Omega 9.
“Interface prepared,” said Frobisher. “Activate nannotech for link.”
He felt the familiar tingling along his palm. The most difficult thing he’d ever had to accomplish in the early days of the Omega 9 was develop the confidence to allow the machine to work as intended. It had taken something of a leap of faith for him, and he still saw it as the one possible drawback in the widespread acceptance of the Omega 9. But he hoped that that, too, would pass.
“Nannotech on line,” the computer informed him. Already he could sense the computer’s voice not outside of his mind, but within. “Link established.”
“Doctor…” Kendrow seemed to be trying to get his attention.
But it was too late. Frobisher’s mind was already deep within the Omega 9. He felt the usual, intoxicating rush that came to him at such times. It took an act of will for him to steady himself, to avoid being swept away into the morass of the complex machine’s innermost workings. The nannotech helped keep his mind focused, and then he turned the Omega 9’s formidable abilities to the fairly minor task at hand.
His mind plumbed the depths of the machine, information coming in from all over, giving Frobisher a link to every part of not only the computer, but the entire station.
At times such as this, Frobisher rarely had any true sense of time. Usually, he felt as if he were inside the machine for at least an hour, perhaps more. Invariably, though, he was there for less than a minute.
This time it was only seconds. But when he emerged from the machine, his eyes were wide and his face pale. Slowly he turned his gaze toward Kendrow. “What…have you done?” he whispered.
“Done, sir?” Kendrow appeared politely confused.
“You’ve…taken down our defenses. Slowly, gradually, subtly…done it in such a way that the computer detected no attempt at sabotage. Rerouted systems, drained away energy…”
Kendrow started to voice a protest, but one look from Frobisher was enough to silence him.
“…and your work…affected the chronometers,” Frobisher continued, as if speaking from a place very far away. “You probably didn’t even realize it. It was an accident, an unexpected side effect of your tampering. It sped the chronometer up. That’s why time seemed to fly by. It wasn’t just subjective. The computer core was actually malfunctioning, shortening hours and minutes, eventually days over the past week or so. At night, while we were sleeping, we lost even more time. At his point, we’ve misplaced about twelve hours. Which means…”
Kendrow’s expression was one of frightened understanding. “I’m…I’m sorry…”
“Which means…today is still my birthday,” Frobisher said tonelessly.
At that moment, the entire station shuddered as something smashed
against the exterior. Frobisher, at one with Omega 9, felt the shock as if it had happened to him personally. Alarms screeched throughout the station, and the Omega 9 registered that a group of unknown beings had just materialized in one of the station’s upper sections. There was a ship, a massive war vessel of some sort with utterly unknown markings, in orbit around the station. The sensors and early detection devices had all been taken off line, as had communications and weaponry.
So…here it was. His destiny, staring him in the face.
Oddly, he had never felt more calm. He had spent so many years worrying, wondering, angsting over his known-but-frightening future, that now that it had arrived, all the fear dissipated. Instead he marshalled his concentration and dove into the Omega 9 with all the speed and precision that he could muster. All the damage that Kendrow had done was laid out before him, and he had only seconds to choose what would be the most effective thing to undo. Shields? Too late. Weaponry? Likewise. That was all created to deal with potential intruders while they were still outside, but they already had unknown enemies rampaging through the station.
Communications. That was the only hope. Again, seconds were what remained to him…but a second for a computer is quite unlike a second for anyone else. Frobisher envisioned himself within the Omega 9, saw his hands moving through the circuitry like an electronic ghost. Like a father gently kissing a scrape on a child’s knee in order to make it feel better, Frobisher untangled the knots of interference that Kendrow had tied. Kendrow, good lord, how could Kendrow have done this to him? He had hand-picked the man out of a field of twenty-seven applicants as the man who seemed most capable, most intelligent, who had the most on the ball. And Kendrow had betrayed him to these…to whoever these people were.
He had allowed his mind to wander. That was pure foolishness, something he should not be permitting himself to do. He had little enough time as it was.
Using the Omega 9, he punched through the comm snarl that Kendrow had created and immediately sent out a distress call. He didn’t have to record it, didn’t have to speak. His mind shouted into the computer, “This is Daystrom Station, we are under attack, repeat, we are under attack. Any Federation vessel in the area, please assist. This is Doctor Elias Frobisher of the Daystrom Station, we are under attack, please assist…”
A comm message suddenly sprang into existence within the computer’s program. That was fast, miraculously fast. Perhaps there might be a hope in hell of salvaging this situation yet. Frobisher’s mind opened the message…
It was from Earth. It had been sent hours ago. There was an elderly couple, smiling at Frobisher. The man looked like an older version of Frobisher himself.
“Elias, darling! It’s Mom and Dad! Happy birthday, son! We ran a little late, but this should still get to you in time, and we wouldn’t want you to think we forgot your very special day!”
And suddenly Frobisher felt himself yanked out of the Omega 9. He fancied that, from very far away, he heard the alarmed cry of a young girl’s voice…the voice of the Omega 9, pleading with him to come back, asking that she not be left alone.
Frobisher staggered, the nannites slipping away from him, scurrying back into their techno hidey-hole. The world around him appeared flat, one-dimensional, as his senses fought to cope with reintegrating themselves with reality. The world snapped into two-dimensions, then three, and Frobisher found himself handled roughly by an alien being of undetermined origin. His skin was brown and leathery, and he had thick tusks jutting from beneath his upper lip.
There were several others nearby, a mixed bag of races, and one being from a race he did recognize, for they had been very much in the news lately. It was a Thallonian. He was very oddly built, however. His head seemed smaller in proportion to his massive body than it should have been. Frobisher attributed it to body armor.
Beg for your life, the suggestion came into his head. You might still get out of this. Beg. Beg to live.
Frobisher was not a fighter, not a hero, and not particularly brave. But he felt an anger, implacable and unstoppable, bubbling up and over. And he realized that all these years of living in fear, all the years of frustration, he had carried incredible resentment within him. The problem was, he had never had anyone to be angry with. No one had done anything to him. No one had forced the knowledge upon him. He had simply stumbled upon it, like a scientist out to probe the secrets of the universe and inadvertently finding more than he had bargained for.
But he resented it nonetheless. Why had the fates done this to him? What in the world could he have possibly done to deserve this awful fore-knowledge of the time of his demise? He had been a good person his entire life. Never cheated anyone, never tried to hurt anyone that he knew of. And yet he had been handed this hideously raw deal.
For years, for more years than he cared to think about, he had wanted someone, anyone he could strike against. A target upon which he could vent his anger, anger which had grown exponentially as years had passed. Wasted, wasted years…
The being who was leering over him was bigger, broader, infinitely stronger than he. It was the kind of situation where, under normal circumstances, Frobisher would have put up his hands, surrendered, and prayed…
…and given over control of his life one more time.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the Guardian staring at him. That thing, that monster, that machine had cast a long shadow over so much of his life. Built by beings unknown, functioning in ways no one knew. The Andorians had their own name for it: The T’Sh’Iar, which meant “God’s Window.”
God had looked through the window, seen Frobisher peering through, and had punished him for absolutely no reason at all. Taken away his destiny by sadistically handing it to him.
Frobisher saw the blaster hanging at the hip of the alien with the brown, leathery skin, the being who looked like a giant serpent. There was a throbbing in Frobisher’s head. The tall red alien nearby was addressing him, but the pounding in his head drowned it all out. All the rage, all the anger, everything that had ever infuriated him over the hopeless wreck that his life had become as time’s inexorable march had carried him unwillingly toward his doom, it all exploded from him at once.
There was no way that Frobisher should have been a threat to the serpent man, no way. The serpent man was paying so little attention to the possibility of Frobisher as a threat that he never even saw the trembling fist that Frobisher’s fingers had contracted into. Furthermore, his skin was so hard that even if Frobisher were to land a punch, he shouldn’t even have felt it.
Frobisher’s years of anger congealed into that fist, and without listening to a word that the red-skinned alien was saying, he spun and swung his fist into a powerful roundhouse. In his entire adult life—for that matter, throughout his childhood and adolescence—he had never thrown a punch in his life. The roundhouse was his very first.
It was perfect.
It caught the serpent man squarely in his lantern jaw. The impact immediately broke Frobisher’s knuckles. It didn’t matter. Frobisher never even felt it. But the serpent man most certainly felt the blow as his head snapped around and he let out a startled squeal that seemed totally at odds with his hulking demeanor. He staggered, and that was all the opening Frobisher needed. He yanked the blaster out of the holster at the serpent man’s side, swung it around and aimed it squarely at the red-skinned man who was clearly the leader.
The red-skinned man looked mildly surprised.
It was the single most exultant moment in all of Frobisher’s life. Given a half second more, he would have fired the blaster.
He never saw the blow from the serpent man coming. The alien swung his fist like a club, and it caved in the side of Frobisher’s head. His arm swung wide. His finger squeezed spasmodically on the trigger and the shot went wide, exploding harmlessly against the far wall. Frobisher collapsed, his head thudding to the floor. He heard a sort of distant buzzing, saw a thick liquid dripping in front of his eyes that he did not recognize as his own b
lood. He reached out a hand, and it touched something warm. He couldn’t tell what it was, but a female voice seemed to be singing to him.
His lips puckered together. He drew in a breath with effort, and then with even more effort expelled it. It rattled from his throat and out through his mouth, and in his mind’s eye he saw candles flickering in front of him. With the gust of breath from his lungs, the flames disappeared. All out at once.
I hope I get my wish, thought Frobisher as he died.
Zolon Darg stared at the corpse on the floor, and then slowly levelled his gaze at Shunabo. Shunabo, for his part, seemed extremely irritated with Kendrow. The brown-skinned, leathery Shunabo approached Kendrow with a stride that was an odd combination of swagger and slink. “You said he wouldn’t be a problem,” Shunabo said, his irritation causing him to over enunciate every syllable. “You told us—you told me—that he was a quiet, reserved, run-of-the-mill human who wouldn’t offer up the slightest resistance.” His soft voice began to get louder. “Oddly, you didn’t happen to mention that he had a punch like a berserker Klingon, or that he was capable of coming within a hair of shooting Zolon Darg’s head off!”
In point of fact, Zolon Darg knew that Shunabo was right. He had been caught completely flat-footed, and this little scientist, this no one, this weakling, this nothing, had nearly succeeded in accomplishing what some of the greatest and most accomplished bounty hunters in two quadrants had not. Darg had gotten sloppy, very, very sloppy, and Shunabo had saved his ass.
It was a situation that had to be addressed immediately.
In two quick steps, Darg was directly behind Shunabo. He slapped a hand around Shunabo’s chest, yanked him backward, grabbed the top of his head and twisted quickly. The sound of Shunabo’s neck snapping echoed through the suddenly silent lab.
There was still a flickering of light in Shunabo’s eyes as Darg snarled in his ear, “I was in no danger. I could have handled him. And you were under specific instructions to keep Frobisher alive.” That last, at least, was accurate, and really, in the final analysis, one point was all that was necessary. Zolon Darg spread wide his arms and Shunabo sank to the floor. Before Shunabo even landed, Darg turned away from him disdainfully. He towered over Kendrow, and he could see that Kendrow’s legs were trembling. Kendrow appeared to be keeping himself standing by bracing himself against a table.