"ALDRICH!" ANSFIELD SNAPPED into the comm unit. "Any progress on disabling the controls, especially those to the main engines?"
"To the main engines?" Aldrich's voice came back. "It can't be done. There simply isn't any access except within the control room itself!"
Ansfield swallowed once, her face still chalk pale.
"Then we had better start abandoning ship. Captain Kirk—"
Kirk had already turned to the viewscreen, still linked to the Enterprise. Scott, anticipating Kirk's commands, was issuing his own. "Take us back within transporter range, Mr. Sulu, fast. I'm on my way to the transporter room."
"Scotty," Kirk said. "You'll have to use the cargo transporter as well. There are two hundred people—"
"Aye, Captain, I can count as well as any mon. And I'll need their communicators to lock onto."
Even before Scott finished, Commander Ansfield was on the shipwide intercom, instructing everyone to switch on communicators and ordering each deck to gather in a single spot to make pickup quicker and easier. "We have less than four minutes," she finished. "Good luck."
Then, for thirty seconds, there was silence.
"Transporter range." Sulu's voice came from the Enterprise bridge, and almost simultaneously, Kirk's communicator came to life.
"Transporter locking onto bridge personnel, Captain," Scott said.
"Wait, Mr. Scott." Spock, who had been studying the science station instruments since the station had been vacated a minute before, turned and strode to the engineering station on the opposite side of the bridge.
"Wait? Are ye daft, Mr. Spock? We have less than—"
"There is no longer any need to evacuate the Cochise, Mr. Scott." With swift precision, Spock's fingers darted across the engineering station control panel. A moment later, the Cochise shuddered and then was still.
"Cold-start procedure terminated, Mr. Scott."
"Spock!" Scotty's voice crackled over Kirk's communicator. "How the devil did ye manage that?"
"It was not my doing, Mr. Scott. Ensign Stepanovich halted the procedure himself. I merely reengaged the safety locks from the bridge. Unfortunately, the procedure was not stopped in time to avoid serious damage to the engines themselves. The balancing circuits in particular, in attempting to cope with the massive imbalance inherent in a cold start, were almost certainly burned out."
"Mr. Scott," Kirk said sharply. "Have any transfers been completed?"
"The cargo transporter beamed over nearly thirty from the engineering deck."
"Send them back, now!"
"Aye, Captain." Though his voice showed his puzzlement, he obeyed.
"Commander Ansfield," Kirk said, leaving his communicator on so Scotty could hear him as well. "Until we learn differently, we have to assume that whatever was affecting Captain Chandler and Ensign Stepanovich is still present. If it left Ensign Stepanovich, if that's why he was able to terminate the cold-start procedure, then we have to assume it has once again moved on to someone else. I would suggest that while we wait for Mr. Aldrich to force his way into the control room, you conduct the search you were planning to do earlier."
Ansfield nodded, the motion containing an odd mixture of briskness and sadness, and began issuing the orders.
But nothing was found. Everyone on the Cochise, except Ensign Stepanovich and the ensign he had killed, was accounted for. At the same time, a similar search was conducted on the Enterprise—with similar results.
Finally, after more than an hour, Lieutenant Aldrich's group gained access to the engineering control room.
Ensign Stepanovich was dead.
After halting the cold-start procedure, apparently by blasting the control panel with his phaser, he had turned the weapon, still set to maximum power, on himself. His body lay sprawled next to that of the ensign he had killed when forcing his way into the control room. The expression on his face, frozen in death, was one of sheer terror.
As far as anyone could tell, however, whatever had possessed him—if, despite Chandler's denials and Spock's convictions, possession was the right word—had died with him. A second search was conducted of both ships, and once again no hint of any alien presence was found.
Then they turned their attention to the gate itself.
One of the probes the Enterprise had used in its earlier study of the gates in the Sagittarius arm was modified so it would reverse course within less than a second of its passage through the gate. It was launched, but it didn't return or reappear anywhere within the five-thousand-parsec range of the probe's subspace beacon. Other probes, each modified differently, vanished as quickly and completely as the first. The sensors showed no alteration in the size or shape of the gate.
Then, after absorbing a half-dozen probes without a trace, the gate began to shrink. For more than two hours, it seemed to shrivel, as if a jagged wound in space itself had begun to heal. Finally, with a ripple of gravitational turbulence, it vanished completely, leaving not even a scar behind. Nor did it reappear, at least not anywhere within range of the Enterprise's modified sensors.
With both the gate and whatever had come through it apparently gone, Starfleet Headquarters breathed a premature sigh of relief and lifted the quarantine. Within hours, all but a skeleton crew headed by Commander Ortiz were transported off the Cochise, and a tug was dispatched to collect the disabled ship, whose battery power was already running low and whose engines were beyond the repair capability of anything less than a full Starbase facility. The Enterprise was within minutes of engaging the warp drive for its return to Starbase 1 when two messages came in from Starfleet Headquarters almost simultaneously.
The first began by announcing that another gate had apparently been stumbled onto by a private scout ship on the opposite side of the Federation. A distress call had been received by the U.S.S. Eddington, but when it arrived on the scene, all ten aboard the scout ship were dead. Nine had been murdered. The tenth, like Ensign Stepanovich on the Cochise, had been a suicide. The scout's records showed a gravitational burst similar to that encountered by the Cochise, but the Eddington's unmodified sensors could pick up no trace of the gate.
As a result of this new development, the message concluded, Starfleet Command "regretfully" reinstated the quarantine and ordered the Enterprise to evacuate the remainder of the Cochise crew and then proceed immediately to rendezvous with the Eddington and determine whether or not a gate did indeed exist in its vicinity.
The second message was received moments after the Enterprise entered warp drive. It contained the text of a preliminary report from Captain Sherbourne of the U.S.S. Devlin, the ship that had returned the Aragos—those who desired to be returned, at least—to their home world in the Sagittarius arm. Before he had more than glanced at the first few hundred words of the report, Kirk sent out a call to assemble the senior officers, including Chandler and Ansfield of the Cochise, in the Enterprise briefing room. In the minutes before they all arrived, he completed skimming the report.
"As you all know," he said when the group was complete, "the Aragos had a technology almost equal to that of the Federation when the group we found in hibernation originally left their world and passed through the gate. Earlier this century, their planet was surveyed briefly by a Federation ship, and their civilization was found to be planet bound, essentially at a level equivalent to that of nineteenth-century Earth. Sometime in the last fifteen thousand years, their civilization had regressed to a pretechnological state, from which it is only now beginning to emerge."
He paused, indicating the report on the briefing table before him. "We now know when the regression occurred. And we can make a pretty good guess as to why. The Devlin's sensors discovered a series of underground vaults, one of which contained records of that earlier civilization and of its destruction. The time can't be pinned down precisely, but it happened not long after they discovered the gate, probably shortly after the group we found went through. They hadn't had a war in more than four centuries, and within decades they had destroyed their entire civilization."
Ansfield shuddered. "You're saying one of the ships the Aragos were using in their study of the gate became … became 'infected' by these entities that hang around the gates? And it took the infection back home?"
"That's how it appears on the surface," Kirk agreed. "Luckily, enough people survived to keep the race going, and the planet itself was not totally destroyed. It was, however, a long road back."
"It would therefore seem, Captain," Spock said into the silence that followed Kirk's summary, "that the phenomenon presently associated with the gates has been associated with them at least as far back as fifteen thousand years. This information greatly enhances the probability that the chain of wars we encountered in that other galaxy was triggered by this same phenomenon at some still earlier time."
Kirk nodded. "My conclusion as well. The only possibly encouraging aspect of the situation is that the phenomenon—force or entity, or whatever it is—appears to be neither immortal nor capable of endless reproduction. The one on the Cochise seems to have disappeared when its 'host,' Ensign Stepanovich, killed himself. Since the Eddington reports no 'possessions' among its personnel, it would appear that whatever was responsible for the deaths on the scout ship whose distress call it was answering is gone as well. And whatever was brought to the Aragos planet fifteen thousand years ago may have been responsible for starting the wars that destroyed their civilization, but it, too, must have either died or dissipated at some point. The planet, after all, is peaceful enough today."
He paused, glancing toward McCoy before going on. "Even if that chain of destruction we encountered in that other galaxy was originally triggered by a similar force, it, too, must have long since vanished. The combatants we encountered were, under the circumstances, acting understandably, even rationally. If the force had still been active among them, we could never have gotten them to talk to each other or to us."
Kirk paused again, looking around the table. "Any arguments? Comments?"
"Just questions," Ansfield said, and she was echoed by a nod from Chandler. "Tons of questions."
"To which there are no answers—yet," Kirk said. He turned to Spock. "Mr. Spock, have you had any more 'feelings' like the one you described before, the one that occurred as Captain Chandler was being released?"
"None, Captain, and I have remained especially alert for any comparable manifestations. However, as you have pointed out, there is no way at this time to be certain that the source of Captain Chandler's and Ensign Stepanovich's irrational behavior is indeed no longer with us. That it departed—through death or some other form of dissipation—when its so-called host died is problematical at best. Similarly, the theories concerning the Aragos and that other chain of wars remain only speculation at the present time."
Kirk nodded. "Agreed, Mr. Spock. Until we know more about this—a great deal more—Starfleet's quarantine must be rigorously implemented. There's too much at stake to allow the Enterprise or the Cochise—or the Eddington, now—to approach any ship, any Starbase, or any populated planet."
He glanced quickly around the table. "Are we agreed?"
There were frowns, even grimaces, but no one disagreed.
Ten hours later, the Enterprise sensors verified the presence of another of the misshapen gates roughly a billion kilometers from the Eddington. Immediately upon receiving the report, Starfleet Command, as Kirk had hoped it would, ordered the Enterprise to proceed to the vicinity of the original gate in the Sagittarius arm.
"Two more suspected gates were reported while you were in transit," Admiral Wellons explained, "one of them less than a parsec from Starbase 14. God knows how many more are out there that we haven't stumbled across yet. In any event, we feel our best chance of finding some way of understanding and coping with these things is to observe and investigate the gate you passed through and the cluster of smaller gates in the same area. See if you can find some link between them. What we are beginning to fear is that these lesser gates that have been appearing in and around Federation territory could be merely preliminary phenomena, leading up to another situation like the one in the Sagittarius arm."
"It's a possibility that we've considered, Admiral," Kirk said, "as well as the possibility that they are being intentionally created by the same life-form that we feel must have created the other gates."
"I assumed you had, Captain. However," Wellons went on, putting into words some of the same thoughts Kirk had been having since he had first been notified of the Eddington's discovery, "whether these gates are being purposely created by some form of intelligence—hostile or otherwise—or are a natural phenomenon, our most immediate concern is that one of them may appear within range of a populated planet, or that whatever 'infection' they cause will be carried back to a populated planet, as it apparently was in the case of the Aragos planet. We have to learn more about these things, before it's too late. The Sagittarius arm is the only place where a large, stable group of them exists."
So far, Kirk added silently to himself as Wellons signed off.
Within minutes, the Enterprise was on its way.