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  It was the cleverest thing he had ever done. And being human, he wanted Urajel to go on complimenting him. But he couldn’t be too obvious about it.

  “You know,” said Ben Zoma, “you’re liable to give me a swelled head with that talk.”

  Urajel made a sound of disdain. “You wouldn’t hesitate to remonstrate with someone who had done a poor job, would you? Then why stint on praise?”

  “Because it’s embarrassing,” he explained.

  The engineer looked at him with a gleam of skepticism in her eyes. “With all due respect, sir, you don’t seem embarrassed in the least. You seem quite pleased.”

  “Only because I’m trying to accept what you’re saying in the spirit in which you’ve said it.”

  “I see. So you’re merely being open-minded, receptive to the perspectives of another culture.”

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  “You’ve got it,” the first officer told her.

  “That might be the most obvious lie I’ve heard all day.”

  The first officer watched Urajel’s gaze flicker over the game’s three boards. “You think so?”

  “Yes, sir. And by the way,” she said, transporting her queen from the third level to the first, “checkmate.”

  Ben Zoma stared at Urajel’s queen, which along with her rook had placed his king in an untenable position. Somehow, he had overlooked that possibility.

  Smiling ruefully, he said, “Next time you say I’m brilliant, it would be nice if you allowed me to believe it for a while.”

  The Andorian nodded. “I’ll try to remember that, sir.”

  Abruptly, the captain’s voice filled the lounge. “Commander Ben Zoma, please join me in my ready room.”

  “Acknowledged,” said the first officer.

  Ben Zoma turned to Urajel again and shrugged. “Duty calls. But I’d like a rematch sometime.”

  “As you wish,” the engineer told him.

  Then Ben Zoma left the lounge and made his way up to the bridge level. As he exited the turbolift and headed for the captain’s sanctum, he exchanged glances with Commander Wu. But she didn’t seem to have an inkling as to why he had been summoned.

  Pausing outside Picard’s door, the first officer waited to be admitted. Then he entered the room and saw his friend sitting behind his desk, a quizzical expression on his face.

  “What now?” Ben Zoma asked as the ready room door slid closed behind him.

  “You won’t believe this,” Picard told him, “but I have just spoken with Serenity Santana.”

  The first officer looked askance at his friend and superior officer. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Not at all.”

  Ben Zoma’s mind raced from the impossible to the merely improbable. “But that would mean…”

  “That is correct,” Picard confirmed. “She is back on our side of the barrier.”

  Chapter Three

  PICARD REMEMBERED how it had been.

  “Soon?” he asked.

  “Very,” she said.

  Then they came over the rise and he found himself looking down on the place she had described. She had come close to doing it justice, but no words could have captured its beauty. As the wind blew roughly through his hair, he said as much.

  “You see?” she said, her smile mischievous in the mountain sunshine, her eyes as soft and dark as liquid obsidian. “I don’t lie about everything.”

  He frowned. It seemed so long ago. And yet it had only been a matter of months.

  As she pulled his shirt off him, her eyes were drawn to his scar. Her fingers, tiny creatures full of curiosity, explored the shape and dimension of the damaged flesh.

  “How?” she asked.

  “An indiscretion,” he said. “A blade in the wrong hands. And an artificial heart.”

  “Don’t your people have cosmetic surgery?”

  “They do,” he said. “And maybe someday I’ll let them take care of it. But for now, I like the reminder.”

  She looked up at him slyly. “And your heart? It’s an adequate replacement for the one you lost?”

  He smiled a little, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. “There is a way to find out…”

  For all he knew, he would never get the chance to see her again. This would be it for them.

  The lake water was cold on her skin. He could tell by the gooseflesh on her arm as she reached up to him.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said. “Trust me.”

  As he lowered himself into its depths, he saw that she was right. The water wasn’t as bad as it looked, the bite of cold quickly giving way to an awakening, as if his every pore were independently aware of everything around it.

  And of course, of her as well.

  She had known the reality of the situation. They were, after all, from different places.

  He opened his eyes and saw her lying beside him on the grass, her skin bronze in the flawless sunlight. He didn’t want to wake her, didn’t want the moment to end.

  But she must have heard him stir, because she reached for him and laid her hand on his shoulder. Her touch was warm and delicate, like the feathers of an exotic bird.

  Covering her hand with his, he closed his eyes again and dreamed of waking beside her.

  It had been like a dream, and dreams were made to end.

  One moment, the light in her eyes was alive. The next, a shadow had swallowed it.

  Setting his teeth against the inevitable, he looked back over his shoulder and saw that the sun had crossed behind a treetop. The day was growing longer, thinner.

  They still had some time together, but not much. Not as much as he would have liked. After all, he had another lover, waiting patiently for him in the star-pricked night that overhung the day.

  And her name was Stargazer.

  But somehow Serenity was back. She had found him, despite the vast gulf of space that separated them.

  The question, Picard thought as he stood on the transporter pad and waited for Ben Zoma, is why?

  A moment later, the doors to the transporter room opened and the first officer arrived. With a nod to Goetz, the red-haired operator on duty, Ben Zoma mounted the pad and took his place beside the captain.

  “Sir,” he said.

  “Commander,” Picard said in return.

  Goetz made some last-second adjustments, then looked up from her controls at the captain. “Ready, sir.”

  “Energize,” said Picard.

  Suddenly, he and Ben Zoma were somewhere else—on a much smaller transporter platform in a dim, dingy cargo hold. There were three figures standing in front of them, a male and two females, all of them dressed in snug-fitting, dark green garb—and all of them carrying weapon holsters on their hips.

  They looked one hundred percent human. But if they were from Magnia, as Serenity was, it was only their ancestors who had been human. They themselves were something more.

  “Captain Picard, Commander Ben Zoma,” said one of the women, “please come with me.” Her tightly braided hair was a pale, pure yellow, her eyes as green as the sea.

  Picard wondered how strong her powers were. Could she move a drinking glass without touching it? Tell him what he was thinking about at that very moment?

  No doubt, Ben Zoma was wondering the same thing. But then, he, too, had met the Magnians before.

  “Very well,” said the captain. Then he allowed the woman to escort him and his first officer out of the hold.

  As they passed the other two Magnians, Picard saw how closely the pair studied him. Their curiosity was understandable. He had helped liberate their world from an oppressor—one they hadn’t been able to resist, for all their power. Had the captain been one of them, he would have been curious too.

  Without another word, the blond woman led the way out of the hold and into a narrow, sporadically lit corridor. Turning left, she followed the bend of the passage for a few moments. Then she stopp
ed in front of a sliding door and placed her hand over a copper-colored plate on the bulkhead.

  After a second or two the door hissed open, and the blonde motioned for Picard to enter. Doing so, he found himself in a lounge of sorts, albeit a cheerless one. In the center of the room, there was a round table at which two figures were seated.

  One of them was Serenity Santana, looking every bit as darkly beautiful as Picard remembered her. Perhaps even more so, if such a thing was possible.

  The other figure was a member of a species Picard had never seen before. He was arrayed in a bronze breastplate and coarse, dark garments—a large, fleshy-looking specimen with tiny black eyes and a fringe of oily-looking hair falling from an otherwise smooth scalp.

  The captain felt an immediate aversion to the fellow. It wasn’t his looks, though they were certainly repulsive by human standards. It was the way he comported himself—as if he were superior to Picard, Ben Zoma, and even Santana, as if he were in fact doing them a favor just by being there.

  “Captain Picard,” said Serenity, getting to her feet and speaking with surprising formality—for the benefit of her companion and Ben Zoma, the captain imagined, since he and she would have had no need to do so on their own.

  “Miss Santana,” Picard responded, in the same vein.

  What he would have preferred to do was take her in his arms, and he believed she would have preferred that as well. But this was neither the time nor the place for such intimacies.

  Serenity turned to Ben Zoma. “Commander. It’s good to see you again.”

  The first officer smiled. “Same here,” he said, though not without a few obvious reservations.

  After all, as Admiral McAteer had taken pains to point out, Santana hadn’t been entirely honest with them the last time they met. It was only fair to wonder what she was up to.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, indicating her hulking companion, “I would like you to meet Dojjaron, Sword-Bearer and Foremost Elder…of the Nuyyad Alliance.”

  For a moment, Picard believed he had heard incorrectly. Then he saw the uncharacteristic frown on Santana’s face and realized he had heard perfectly after all.

  Picard turned to the alien, who lifted his chin as he endured the human’s scrutiny. Finally, he turned back to Serenity. “You did say…Nuyyad Alliance?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “The same Nuyyad Alliance,” said Dojjaron, in a voice that was like pieces of metal grinding together, “that you encountered on the other side of the barrier.”

  Picard didn’t understand.

  When he last saw Serenity, she was thanking him for his help in freeing her world from Nuyyad domination. Now she seemed to be in league with one of her people’s enemies.

  Clearly, something had changed.

  “Pardon me for being blunt,” said Picard, “but I am surprised. I was led to believe that peaceful relations with the Nuyyad were…unlikely at best.”

  “They were,” Serenity conceded.

  “And yet,” said Dojjaron, “here I sit before you.” He made a rasping sound deep in his throat—something that sounded vaguely like laughter, but might well have been something else.

  After all, Picard had destroyed some of the Nuyyad’s warships, and then torn apart their supply depot for an encore. He doubted that Dojjaron would find that funny.

  Then again, the captain knew precious little about the Nuyyad, and there was no accounting for alien tastes. Unlikely as it seemed, his actions may have been a source of amusement to them.

  “Obviously,” said Serenity, “we didn’t dream we would be helping the Nuyyad.” She glanced at Dojjaron. “But then, we also didn’t expect them to come back so quickly from the damage we had inflicted on them.”

  Picard frowned. “Did they attack Magnia a second time?”

  “No,” said Serenity. “They had bigger game to hunt—the one they had already set their sights on.”

  “The Federation,” said Ben Zoma.

  “Indeed,” said Dojjaron, without a hint of self-consciousness or restraint, though he was addressing citizens of the very union the Nuyyad had targeted. “Had you simply liberated Magnia and stopped there, we would probably have licked our wounds and looked elsewhere for conquest. But the destruction of our depot was an insult, a hand in the face. It gave us even more reason to look in the direction of your homeworlds.”

  Not exactly the intended result, Picard reflected.

  Serenity picked up the story. “Less than four Magnian months after our attack on the depot, the Nuyyad dispatched a scout ship across the galactic barrier. Its job was to map out a route for conquest, which the Nuyyad would pursue when they were ready again to make their push.”

  “Of course,” Dojjaron noted, “we had never crossed the barrier ourselves, but we often traded with those who had. So we knew enough to shield our crew from the radiation that affected Santana’s ancestors.” He grunted. “Unfortunately, there was an accident in the course of our crossing.”

  “Not a big one,” Serenity observed. “But it left one small portion of their vessel unshielded for a couple of moments—and a couple of moments was all it took.”

  Picard winced. “Someone was exposed.”

  “Obviously,” said the Nuyyad. “A low-level technician named Brakmaktin. As our ship left the barrier behind, he just seemed weak, stunned. But soon after, he began to change.”

  Ignoring Dojjaron’s remark, Picard listened with growing concern as the alien laid out the details. They sounded all too familiar, given what the captain knew of Gary Mitchell’s experience some seventy-five years earlier.

  Mitchell had been an officer on the Enterprise of that era, a Constitution-class vessel that got too close to the galactic barrier. Its energies amplified his existing extrasensory talents, transforming him into a superman who was eventually destroyed by his own captain.

  But the Enterprise wasn’t the first vessel to run afoul of the barrier. Two full centuries before Mitchell’s exposure, a Terran ship called the Valiant had passed through it on a journey of exploration. One of her crewmen became so powerful that the Valiant’s captain blew up his ship rather than allow the fellow to return to Earth.

  The survivors of the Valiant, who outran her destruction in escape pods, went on to found a civilization of their own—the one from which Serenity and her comrades sprang. They called it Magnia, after a concept put forth by a visionary Terran architect.

  Some of those first Magnians had powers of their own, but not of the magnitude exhibited by Mitchell or their fellow crewman, because their extrasensory abilities weren’t as strong. The same was true of their descendants.

  However, Brakmaktin was like Mitchell, if Dojjaron’s account could be believed. His level of power was significant right from the start, manifesting itself in demonstrations of telepathy, telekinesis, and computer-like manipulations of data.

  “It didn’t take long for Brakmaktin to seize control of the scout ship,” Dojjaron continued. “But like any Nuyyad, he couldn’t be content with what he had. He attacked another vessel on this side of the barrier and boarded it, leaving the battle-scored scout ship behind.”

  “Fortunately,” said Serenity, “there was a survivor on the scout ship, a female who managed to restore the vessel’s shields and take it back through the barrier.”

  “Whereupon she warned us that an aberration was on the loose—just before she perished from her injuries.” Dojjaron nodded approvingly. “She was a warrior.”

  “An aberration,” echoed Ben Zoma. “Interesting way to put it.”

  “You have to understand,” said Serenity, “the Nuyyad are instinctively repelled by physical anomalies, especially those that grant an individual an advantage over the rest of the pack. So the notion of a Nuyyad superbeing running around on the loose was intolerable to them, even if he was all the way on the other side of the barrier.”

  “Brakmaktin is by his nature an affront,” the Nuyyad declared, his wide, peg-toothed mouth twisting savag
ely, “as well as a challenge. And a threat.”

  “I see,” said Picard.

  “Normally,” Dojjaron went on, “we would have hunted him down on our own, as is our custom. But according to the reports we have received from our trading partners, your space is filled with a number of political entities, any one of which might have blundered across us and rendered our mission impossible to carry out.”

  “Blundered,” said Ben Zoma, smiling tautly. “You do have a way with words, Foremost Elder.”

  Picard put a hand on his friend’s forearm and said, “Please go on.”

  It was Serenity who took up the thread. “Under the circumstances, the Nuyyad were most familiar with your Federation. But given the nature of your previous contact, they didn’t think you would greet them with open arms.”

  “We needed a go-between,” Dojjaron expanded, “someone your Federation would be more inclined to trust.” His spin on the word made clear his disdain.

  Refusing to rise to the bait, the captain glanced at Serenity. “Someone like the Magnians, I gather.”

  Dojjaron nodded his massive head. “And her in particular. As you know, she was one of the first two Magnians to make contact with your people. It made sense for her to accompany me here and seek out your Stargazer.”

  “Because,” said Picard, “I was the only Starfleet captain who really knew her, and would consider helping her.”

  “Of course,” said Dojjaron.

  “Naturally,” said Serenity, “we were distrustful of the Nuyyad. They had seized our world, subjected us to their tyranny—and forced us to draw a Federation vessel across the barrier so they could get a look at her.”

  Dojjaron didn’t object to her choice of words. Rather, he seemed to take pride in them.

  “However,” Serenity continued, “we couldn’t see what the Nuyyad had to gain by lying to us. Passage through the barrier? They had already accomplished that without help from Magnia. Contact with the Federation? Maybe—but for what purpose?”

  Off the top of his head, the captain couldn’t come up with a motive either.