The captain could feel the sweat trickling down both sides of his face now. His uniform was wet, too. He desperately wanted to remove his tunic, but didn't dare-not with the pod jumping and quivering the way it was.
Worse, their deflectors were starting to buckle under the strain. Even with the shields in working order, the temperature in the cabin had risen thirty degrees. If the deflectors deserted them at this speed, they wouldn't survive long enough to see the missile, much less disarm it.
But on the monitor screen, at least, there was good news. One red blip was swiftly overtaking the other.
"Get ready," Picard said.
Archangel moved to the hatch in the side of the pod. "You still haven't told me what to do when I get there," he pointed out.
"I will," the captain assured him.
Little by little, his sensors delivered a more intelligible insight into the mechanics of the cluster. Picard studied them, queried the onboard computer, studied them some more, and queried again.
At last, he got the answer he was looking for. Keeping his eyes on his controls, he described out loud what the mutant would have to do.
"It won't be easy," the captain finished. "But then, you knew that when you volunteered for this."
Like Picard, Archangel was sweating profusely. "At least I won't have to stay here and wilt," he quipped.
Indeed, the heat was getting unbearable. And it wasn't likely to get any better when the captain tried to slow the missile's descent.
A moment later, the red blips on his screen converged. Picard looked out his observation port and glimpsed the cluster through ragged layers of high clouds. The device wasn't more than a hundred meters away.
He decelerated to match its speed. Then, confirming that he had dropped below the altitude of Xhaldia's energy bands, he reached for another set of controls.
"I'm extending tractor beams," he said, wiping heavy drops of perspiration from his eyes.
It was hotter in the pod than the hottest desert the captain had ever known. But in his youth, he had been a marathon runner. He could stand it, he told himself. He would stand it.
With infinite care, he locked the tractors onto the cluster. Then, when he was certain the connection was secure, he began to apply reverse thrusters-not in the hopes of stopping the missile altogether, but to diminish its surface temperature so the mutant could handle it.
Immediately, Picard felt a jolt-an indication of the extra load imposed on his thrusters. The cabin temperature began to climb at a terrifying rate.
However, both the missile and the pod were slowing down. Glancing at his monitors, the captain saw the change in their rate of descent. Four hundred kilometers per hour ... three hundred and fifty ... three hundred ...
"Go," he rasped, fighting to keep from succumbing to the heat.
"I'm gone," Archangel responded.
Picard touched a pad on his panel and opened the hatch, exposing the pod's interior to a blast of frigid wind. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the mutant spread his wings and corkscrew his way out of the cabin.
Godspeed, the captain thought. Then he pushed the pad again and saw the hatch slide closed.
Chapter Twenty-nine.
RIKER KNELT BESIDE the Draa'kon.
The invader was covered with earth and fragments of pavement, one of which had caved his skull in. His eyes were staring, a rivulet of green blood drying in the corner of his wide, lipless mouth.
The first officer looked up at his companion. Storm's hair lifted in the breeze as she gazed at the other Draa'kon in the vicinity. All of them were dead, all partially buried beneath a shattered landscape of dirt and rubble that stretched for a hundred meters in either direction.
"If we dig around," she said bleakly, "we will no doubt find a great many more of them."
"That may be," Riker allowed. He got to his feet. "The question is ... who did this?"
The mutant looked at him pointedly. "Who do you think?"
"You're going to tell me it was the transformed?" he asked.
"Who else could it have been, Commander? The city guards? Do they have weapons capable of creating such upheavals?" With a gesture, she indicated the buildings on either side of the street. "Can they wreak this kind of havoc without breaking a single fragile window?"
The first officer shook his head. He had seen the X-Men in action. He knew people like them could have unusual abilities. But to ascribe such monumental destruction to beings who had barely come to know what talents they possessed ...
Then he recalled what it was like when Q endowed him with virtual omnipotence, and his perspective changed. He had been in control of his powers from the get-go. Suddenly, it didn't seem quite so far-fetched for even a neophyte to tear up a street.
He was about to admit that Storm might have been right when he heard a series of distant cries, followed by a rumbling and an unsettling vibration beneath their feet. Riker's instincts told him an earthquake was underway, but his mind insisted otherwise.
Storm shot into the air, her garments fluttering in a wind that appeared to have come from nowhere. She seemed bent on tracking the thunder in the earth to its source.
"Hey!" he shouted at her. "What about me?"
Glancing back at him over her shoulder, the mutant weighed his question for a moment. Then she executed a tight turn and zeroed in on him.
The next thing the first officer knew, he was soaring in the direction of the dense, gray sky, Storm's slender but strong fingers locked around his wrist. His senses reeled, but he kept his eyes open, not wanting to miss a single moment of it.
When he had had the powers of a Q at his disposal, Riker had never thought of using them to fly. Now, as he and the mutant rose higher than the highest building in Verdeen, he regretted the oversight.
Just a little while earlier, he had sailed over the city in a shuttle. But this was different, he told himself. Very different.
In a matter of seconds, he spotted the scene of confusion and chaos where the cries and the vibrations had come from. So did Storm, apparently, because she changed direction and swooped like a bird.
They bore down on the place with breathtaking speed, slipping past a rooftop and landing on ground that was still level and whole. Then they sized up the challenge ahead of them.
As in the last place they had come across, there were plenty of Draa'kon corpses strewn about, half-buried under earth and debris. But here, there were other corpses as well-the twisted, broken bodies of blue-suited city guards, civilians, and even what appeared to be some of the transformed.
At the center of it all, standing on a high mound of earth that seemed to have risen straight through the pavement, stood a single figure-a tall, slender Xhaldian with a crooked smile on his face.
He wasn't alone, either. Four others, who appeared to be his accomplices, were standing at the base of the mound with Draa'kon disruptors in their hands. Judging by their appearances, at least two had come from the ranks of the transformed.
A little further off, half a dozen plainly terrified Xhaldians were huddled in the lee of an uprooted chunk of pavement. When they saw Riker and Storm approach the scene, hope illuminated their expressions.
"And who have we here?" asked the Xhaldian on the mound, his tone a cruel and disdainful one.
More than likely, he was the one who had caused all this destruction-hard as that was for the first officer to believe. He came forward.
"I'm Commander William Riker of the U.S.S. Enterprise." He pointed to the heavens. "The ship that's fighting for the life of your world up there."
"How helpful," the Xhaldian responded. "Though, as you can see, we freaks are perfectly capable of handling the invaders on our own."
He has a point, the first officer told himself. It was just as Storm had predicted. The transformed had become a bigger threat than the Draa'kon.
"Who are you?" asked the mutant, taking her place beside the first officer.
The Xhaldian's smile turned hard. "My name is Rahatan. I'm the one in charge around here-in case you hadn't noticed."
Her eyes narrowed. "By whose authority are you in charge?"
The Xhaldian glared at her. "By my own."
Suddenly, one of his allies on the ground put his hands to his head and shouted a warning. Whirling, Rahatan found himself eyeing a pair of Enterprise security officers, their phasers extended in his direction.
Wilkes and Calderon, Riker thought. Two of the men from his shuttle.
"Come down from that mound," Calderon told Rahatan.
The Xhaldian shook his head. "Come here and get me."
"Stay where you are," Riker yelled.
Wilkes and Calderon froze, awaiting further orders. But to the first officer's dismay, it didn't save them.
The ground exploded underneath them, flinging them high in the air. By the time they came back to earth, they were too broken and bloody to still be alive.
Riker's resolve sharpened in the heat of his anger; he took advantage of the distraction to fire at Rahatan himself. But something protected him from hitting the Xhaldian-some kind of translucent shielding that deflected the force of the phaser beam.
Looking at the foot of the mound, he could see where it had come from. One of Rahatan's lackeys had reached up and used her power to protect him.
The Xhaldian turned around again to face the first officer. "That was ill-advised," he said in a strangely reasonable tone. Then he began to point in Riker's direction.
"Stop!" shouted Storm.
Intrigued, Rahatan glanced at her. "Why should I?"
"Because you cannot kill him until you have killed me first. And that is something you will never accomplish."
A smile returned to the Xhaldian's face. "Is that a challenge?"
The mutant shrugged. "If you like."
"You've made a mistake."
"Have I?" Storm asked.
"A big mistake," Rahatan told her, reeking of confidence. "You don't know what you're dealing with here."
"I see," she said. "I am overmatched?"
"That's one way to put it."
"I am taking my life in my hands?"
"That would be another way."
Storm's eyes narrowed. "Under the circumstances, what do you propose I do? Give up?"
He shrugged, his expression becoming almost playful. "You're a handsome woman. I think I could find a place for you. Next to me, maybe."
"You are too kind," she told him, her voice free of hostility. "But I think I will take my chances against you rather than alongside you. You see, I have faced your kind before."
"My kind?" he echoed.
Storm nodded. "You are powerful, no doubt. But what you have gained in power, you have lost in visual acuity."
His forehead creased. "What are you talking about? My eyes are as good as they ever were."
She shook her head. "You only see the things your power can obtain for you. You've lost the ability to look into your heart ... and discern right from wrong."
His eyes blazed, and he gestured to the corpses he had buried. "You think it's wrong to kill someone who's trying to kill you?"
"I think it's wrong to kill anyone," Storm insisted. "There is always another way, if one tries hard enough to find it."
His mouth twisted. "I can only think of one way to deal with insects-and that's to crush them underfoot!"
She didn't lose her composure. "Then perhaps you are not as powerful as you have come to believe."
A cry of rage tore from him-and with a sound like thunder, the earth cracked open between Storm's feet. In a heartbeat, the crack became a fissure and the fissure became a gaping crevasse, causing the mutant to lose her footing and slip into the widening hole.
No! thought Riker.
But there was nothing he could do to save her.
"That will teach you to question my power," the earthmover bellowed, shaking a fist at the departed Storm.
Suddenly, Riker saw Rahatan forced back from the edge of the fissure-not by anything solid, but rather by a lusty, howling wind that seemed to emerge from its depths.
The first officer knew it didn't make any sense for a wind to be rising out of newly cracked earth. Still, he wasn't complaining-because a moment later, that same wind lifted Storm into sight, her uniform and silver hair whipping all about her, her head held high.
She's alive! Riker realized. Alive and whole-or at least, no more injured than she had been when this started.
Surprised and frustrated, Rahatan gave voice to his fury. Then he brought his arms up as if he were lifting weights. The ground around him shuddered and groaned miserably, and two large chunks of earth and masonry tore loose from their foundations.
The Xhaldian gestured again, flinging the fingers of one hand in Storm's direction. Instantly, one of the chunks of earth went hurtling at her.