SEEING SULU GO RIGID, the tendons in his neck and hands suddenly standing out in sharp relief, Kirk started to lunge from the command chair toward the helmsman's station.
But the intent had barely formed in his mind, his upper body barely begun to lean forward, when his own body stiffened, his mind submerged in a sea of terror that made his earlier experience with the entity pale by comparison. Suddenly, everyone and everything was a source of deadly but unknown danger. Even his own body had become the stuff of nightmares, an alien physical shell holding him—his mind—a helpless prisoner!
Spock, hearing the involuntary gasps from both Sulu and the captain, turned abruptly, but before he could more than realize what must be happening, he, too, was immobilized by the same impossible, paralytic fear.
Moments later, Ansfield was cursing between clenched teeth at the irrationality of the fear that suddenly gripped her, at the stubborn refusal of her muscles to respond to her commands.
Lieutenant Woida, still at the navigator's station, was caught as he made a desperate stab at the controls Sulu had not been able to reach.
An instant later, Uhura and McCoy and the security team by the turbolift joined the frozen tableau.
And the Enterprise impulse engines surged into life.
For an instant, Kirk's fear-clouded mind assumed with new panic that the entity had, in addition to paralyzing the entire bridge crew, taken over the helm.
But then the spark of rationality that even now remained in a corner of his mind reminded him: the automatic maneuver Sulu had laid in nearly an hour before, the maneuver that would take the Enterprise back through the nexus to the Sagittarius arm if it were not canceled.
"Computer!" he grated, his jaws aching from the effort. The maneuver had to be stopped. He dared not bring home to the Federation an entity that was, if the last few seconds were any indication, far more powerful than any either he or the Federation had yet encountered. "Abort instructions, code alpha three seven—"
But something stopped him.
And for the first time, he realized it was more than terror that was paralyzing his body.
Something—the entity!—was actually in his mind, controlling it, keeping him from acting, just as it was keeping Sulu's fingers from moving that last inch and a half to the controls that would have launched the shuttlecraft.
Terror, any terror, he could overcome, given time, but this he could not.
Not in time …
The gate loomed ahead, filling the screen with its chaotic energies.
The Enterprise plunged into them.
For an instant, there was the remembered freedom of limbo.
And then they were through.
The stars of the Sagittarius arm were spread out around them.
And, behind them, the swirling turbulence of the nexus.
But there was more.
Even through the irrational terror in which the entity was drowning him, Kirk saw that the Sagittarius nexus was no longer alone.
Like jagged wounds, a half-dozen of the leakage gates blotted out great swaths of stars.
And radiating out from the constantly expanding and contracting disk of the nexus itself were a dozen even more jagged, lightninglike rips in space, pulsing with an intensity that outshone the nexus itself.
Even more vividly than before, an image of tornadoes raging across midwestern plains filled Kirk's mind. But where planetbound tornadoes swallowed up trees and houses and cities, these storms, infinitely more far-reaching, more powerful, could—would—swallow up whole planets and suns.
If they weren't stopped.
If the entity wasn't stopped.
"Sulu!" He managed to force the word out against all the opposition the entity apparently could muster.
But then, as he began to form another word, the entity vanished.
As suddenly as it had returned, it vanished.
Within a split second, the fear and paralysis were gone, all muscles suddenly released from teeth-grinding tension.
"Get the shuttlecraft out, set it to broadcasting, now!" The words exploded from Kirk's throat, and only as they battered at his ears did he realize he was shouting.
Without acknowledging, Sulu managed to comply.
And Uhura to open an emergency channel to Starfleet Headquarters.
There was no response.
But as she scanned through the subspace spectrum, the speakers suddenly erupted with static.
And a voice, filled with hate and terror: "Damn you, Kirk! You've destroyed the Federation!"
And a face appeared on the screen.
It was Captain Sherbourne of the U.S.S. Devlin, his dark face haggard, his eyes glittering in the dim light of emergency backup power.
"Sherbourne!" Kirk half shouted, then forced himself to lower his voice. "What happened?"
"As if you didn't know, you and your gates to hell!"
"I don't know, Captain. We've tried the emergency channel to Starfleet Headquarters, but—"
"They can't hear you! They evacuated hours ago! It's probably gone by now, sucked up by these damned gates! They're everywhere!"
"In Federation space? The same as here?"
"Worse, damn it, worse!" Sherbourne's voice choked. "There was one spreading toward Earth, for God's sake! Earth!"
Kirk turned abruptly from the screen, feeling more anger and helplessness than he had ever experienced. "Spock! Isn't there any way to get back to the central nexus? Without waiting for the next cycle? Even if we can't find Kremastor, we could do something!"
"I fear not, Captain," Spock replied, his voice efficient and unemotional even now. "I have already had the computer check Kremastor's maps for alternate routes through the system. If it were fully functional, such routes would exist, but even then the shortest would require five hours and forty-seven point five minutes. There is, however, another possibility, albeit only a theoretical one."
"At this point, any chance, no matter how slim, is better than none at all. Explain."
"Very well, Captain. From my preliminary analysis of the mathematical descriptions of the nexus forces, it is likely that what we call limbo is in reality the extradimensional space outside our own universe, the space in which both our universe and all those other universes are contained. An oversimplified but nonetheless appropriate way to visualize it in more comprehensible terms would be to think of each individual universe as a one-dimensional length of string, existing in three-dimensional space. These strings are apparently twisted in vastly complex patterns, doubling back on each other, touching each other, even knotted together in great tangles. Where the strings—the universes—touch, there is a gate or a potential for a gate. In a nexus, the energies the Risori inadvertently set in motion continually twist or warp one of the universes so that it sweeps through the surrounding extradimensional space, touching each of the hundreds or thousands of nearby universes—or distant points of the same universe—one at a time."
"Which means?" Kirk prompted urgently.
"It merely means, Captain, that in terms of the extradimensional space itself, all points connected by the nexus system are necessarily in close proximity. It is that very closeness that allows the gates—the contact points—to exist. Therefore, if we were able to enter that extradimensional space and navigate within it, we could in all likelihood locate and enter any of those other universes."
"Except," Kirk said grimly, "we can't navigate in it. We're blind and deaf in there."
"Precisely, Captain. Within that space, our own senses appear to be totally disconnected from our bodies, if our bodies, or anything physical, indeed do exist there. The Risori maps provide the computer with the commands that will return a ship through that space to the universe from which they entered, but that is all. The fact that such commands exist, however, does argue logically that physical objects such as the computer—and our bodies—do exist within—"
"What's the blasted point, Spock?" McCoy erupted. "Why the devil are you wasting time telling us about something that can't help us?"
"Aside from the fact that the captain requested an explanation, Doctor, the imparting of knowledge is never a waste of time. In addition, while it is true that I myself cannot logically envision a method whereby we could successfully navigate through the extradimensional space, is it not possible that, if you collectively applied your minds to the problem, the human intuition of which you so often speak might provide a solution?"
"And since when have you become a fan of intuition, Spock?" McCoy snapped. "In any event, it's not the sort of thing you can turn on or off just by snapping your blasted fingers! And if you think—"
On the Devlin, Sherbourne gasped loudly, and everyone on the Enterprise bridge spun toward the screen. Sherbourne's face was contorted, his lips pressed tightly together, his fingers gripping the arms of his command chair like a vise.
"Captain Sherbourne! What—"
"Haven't your creatures had enough fun, Kirk?" Sherbourne grated between clenched teeth. "Do they want the rest of us this time? Is that why you came back, to help them finish us off?"
"They're not—!" Kirk began, half shouting, but he broke off abruptly as Sherbourne's image vanished from the screen.
And then the nexus filled the screen, but it was no longer even circular. It seemed to have shattered, as if it were a plate that had been struck by a bullet. But even as they watched, the breaks healed. The multicolored chaos of energy arced across the gaps, welding the sections together into a misshapen whole.
But before the sealing was complete, a jagged lightning bolt of energy, several times as massive as the dozen that had existed before, erupted from one of the breaks.
And it was headed straight for the Enterprise!
Sulu, not waiting for orders, automatically started to take evasive action, but it was too late.
The runaway energy simply moved too rapidly, covering the distance between the nexus and the ship in fractions of a second.
Briefly, violently, the maelstrom of energies surrounded them, blotting out all the stars, all the other gates, everything.
Then the energies themselves vanished.
And with them, everything else.
Everything was gone—the Enterprise, the stars of the Sagittarius arm, their own bodies, everything.
Except their minds.
Once again, they were in the limbolike nothingness of extradimensional space.