Talbot's voice was laden with disdain, but
Picard refused to back down. One of the first
lessons in command school--the first lesson, in
fact--was that when you made a decision, you stuck
to it. Nothing eroded crew confidence as fast as
waffling.
"Even though, yes, sir."
Talbot continued to circle his desk,
absently rapping his knuckles on the surface,
as was his habit. "I will pray for you, Picard, that
you never have to find out firsthand what it is to lose a
crew. But I fear the prayers are in vain, because
space is a vast and unforgiving mistress. She
does not treat the overconfident especially
charitably."
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 inter-rupt 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, "inter-rupt 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.
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 tend s 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 pad 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.
He 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
&nb
sp; 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 outstretched
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