"ENSIGN LAO!"
He spun, saw it was Chapel, made his way swiftly for the door of the dispensary, but Chapel crossed the room in two strides and took him by the arm. He turned like a snake about to strike and for a moment, so vicious, so rage-filled, was his face that Chapel released him, stepped back, afraid for one moment that he was going to strike her.
Stillness lay between them. Then he turned away, wincing, half-raising one hand. "Jesus, Chris—Nurse—I'm sorry. I'm—I'm sorry." He looked back at her, his hand almost shaking as he held it out in apology, as if he could grasp her forgiveness like a tangible thing.
"It's all right," said Chapel, but her eyes were on his face.
Chapel had seen Lao three or four times on her way to and from the lab, where she had been working off her own sleepless restlessness on analysis of possible yagghorth-transmitted poisons in Spock's blood—which so far she had not found—and so knew that Lao had been as sleepless as she. Usually he'd been working in Central Computer, doggedly putting together the information on the burned-out planet of Tau Lyra III: it was always rumored around spacegoing vessels that somebody had figured out a way to get quadruple-caffeine out of the food synthesizers, and seeing him, she believed it.
He'd held up well, she thought, until planetfall that morning. Had it only been that morning? According to the visual logs, he'd done well enough on the planet itself.
But in the briefing he had sat silent and ill, as if what he had seen in that steaming, wind-lashed Hell had been the final straw, the last horror he could stand. He was only twenty-one, she thought, and had been working for three days not to think about what he now knew would be the future of his world. It had to come back on him sometime.
"Did you get some sleep?" she asked gently. "You left right after the briefing. . . ."
He shook his head. "I can't sleep, right now," he said. "I—I came here looking for—for some nedrox. I just need to complete the computer analysis of what we found on the planet. . . ."
"Tomorrow will do for that," said Chapel, but he signed again, more violently, as if waving the thought away. She saw he still wore his uniform, black trousers, gold shirt with an ensign's single band of braid on the cuff, though it was now well into the second shift. After the briefing she herself had gone back to her quarters and slept a little, though her dreams had not been easy, haunted by baking heat and the spectacle of those twisted, mummified bodies, their convulsed arms still clinging to withered and melted shards.
"No, I'll—I'll be fine." He made a move to go, then turned back, the lines deepening again around his dark eyes.
"Do you know what Thad told me?" he asked, in a voice cracked with horror and exhaustion. "I asked him—I asked him if it was true, that the Consilium gene splices, deliberately makes the Secondaries the way they are. He looked surprised that I had to ask. He said they get implanted when they're infants, before the sutures in the skull heal up—pleasure-pain stimulators. They work better, they're more contented…"
He shook his head, like an animal tormented by flies.
"They are on the ship now, aren't they?" he said, after a struggle to calm himself.
Chapel nodded. "One of them. The Domina McKennon."
He pressed his fist to his lips, his eyes squeezed shut. In spite of the exhaustion that aged his face, he seemed to her then very young.
"Zhiming." She stepped close, touched his arm, and this time, though he flinched, he did not pull away. "Zhiming, you're tired. Exhausted. I'm telling you, go to your quarters, and get some sleep. Here," she added. "I'll prescribe something for you, cillanocylene…"
"No," he said quickly. "No, that's all right. I—I will go to my quarters," he went on. "You're right. I do need rest."
He turned, and stumbled out the door. Chapel stood for a moment, hesitant, then went to the dispensary cabinet and checked the white readout on the container of nedrox. The glowing numbers on the window matched the contents as of yesterday, but Chapel recalled that Lao was a computer maven, probably capable of altering the readout. He was usually scrupulously honest, but she knew that he wasn't thinking clearly now. She keyed in her passcode, and counted the capsules of the powerful stimulant manually.
The numbers matched. He hadn't taken any.
She remembered, as she turned toward her own small cubicle, all Zhiming had told her about his older brother, Qixhu. No wonder he felt protective of Thad, furious that anyone would harm him. It was that knowledge, as much as anything he had seen on the ruined planet, coming on him by surprise at the end of the briefing, that had driven him from the room in silent despair.
She tried to put the matter from her mind as she logged in the measurements from the latest IPs of Cooper's, Sharnas's, and Arios's neural wiring. The growth of the cut areas was infinitesimal but definitely present—according to Arios, the wire healed itself every two to three months, "depending." "Depending" on what? McCoy had asked. Arios had looked momentarily blank, then shaken his head.
What would it be, she wondered with a shiver, to know that was inside you, growing inexorably? Wire ends meeting, until you began hearing the voices of the Masters—the sweet, reasonable voice of Germaine McKennon—whispering in your head?
And yet…
She picked up the IPs again, studied them more closely, and then punched up the transcription of her interview with Arios on the subject.
All she got was SECURITY CODE PURPLE.
The transcription—like everything else connected with the future as described by the Nautilus crew—was sealed.
It scarcely mattered, Chapel thought; she'd done the transcription herself. And to the best of her recollection Arios had said that Sharnas's wiring had been cut five or six weeks ago, Cooper's almost eight.
A theory stirred in her mind. Replacing the IPs in the security drawer of her desk, she made her way to the ambassadorial suite on Deck Five.
The suite was silent when she reached it, so much so—usually it was lively with the rebel crew's good-natured bickering—that for a moment, as she stepped through the outer door, Chapel wondered if the crew had effected another escape. But a moment later she heard Adajia's voice say, "Try the next channel," in the bedroom, and stepping to the doorway, she saw them clustered around the disabled comm-link panel in the wall, Raksha kneeling on the bed, listening to a communicator—which none of them were supposed to have—connected into the comm panel by a hank of wire.
"Pick up anything?" Chapel asked politely, and the Klingon's eyes glinted, half-suspicious, half-wry.
"Just the usual rumors." She unhooked the wires and unself-consciously slipped the communicator into the pocket of her doublet, then stuffed the loose cable back into the comm panel and closed the hatch. From years of friendship with Uhura, Chapel knew there was far more wire there than there should have been, which meant the Klingon had stolen or jury-rigged tools to cannibalize wiring out of some other portion of the walls.
"According to Yeoman DeNoux in the officers' lounge, your captain and the Domina are still drinking soda water and chatting. Tell him to watch out for her, Chapel. She's crystal poison disguised as mother's milk."
"I expect," said Chapel quietly, "that she's saying exactly the same thing to Captain Kirk about Arios. They're going to want that communicator," she added, holding out her hand.
"They took the Master," said Thad, coming over to her, his dark eyes pleading. If what Cooper had told them was right, thought Chapel uneasily, no wonder the poor man always looked half-terrified; no wonder the information that they were on a Starfleet vessel, back in the transporter room four days ago, had driven him to near-panic.
Chuulak, Adajia had said. Public punishment with the intention of deterring others. God knew what they'd done to him.
"Mr. Spock and a security guard came down here twenty minutes ago and pulled him out of here fast," said Raksha shortly. "He seemed to think it was all right. Told us to stay here, anyway…"
Chapel reflected that it was very like the Nautilus crew to have remained in prison not because there was a guard in the corridor outside but because their Master had told them to. "Can Sharnas get in touch with him mentally?" she asked. "At least to see if he's well? Because I'm sure you'll find he is." Above all, she thought, she had to keep this crew from panicking, since Raksha had very clearly found a way to cut into the ship's comm system, and that probably meant she could get into the computer from here as well.
"Not if the Domina's on the ship," said Cooper, perched beside Raksha on the edge of the bed. "We don't know how much your captain's telling her. She can pick up a call, a signal; if Sharnas reached out looking for the Master, she'd feel it."
"Could she detect passive listening?" asked Chapel. "If you listened for him?"
"If the Domina has him," said Phil, "he may not be able to extend his mind."
"But the Domina's still in the officers' lounge with the captain."
"She was ten minutes ago," pointed out Raksha.
Chapel walked into the sitting room, studied the laminated table on the wall beside the unviolated comm-link pad. A little hesitantly—the number was not one she signaled regularly—she touched 5-24.
"DeNoux here." It was the yeoman on duty behind the bar that evening.
"Neil, is she still there?" Chapel lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "What are they up to?"
The grin in his voice was almost visible. "From where I stand, I'd say they're up to her hand on his wrist and him tellin' her stories about his days at the Academy. You know anything about who she is, Chris?"
Poison disguised as milk.
"I never seen a ship like that, but if she's wearin' a translator, it's not one I can see."
"Only what Dr. McCoy told me in the briefing," lied Chapel. "A VIP of some kind…but if you find out anything…She didn't give you any exotic recipes, did she?"
"Fizzy water." A beer man, DeNoux sounded mildly disgusted. "Miller's putting it through the computer for analysis of probabilities."
"Let me know what he finds out."
She tapped out, turned to Raksha. Sharnas was already half-reclined on the other bed, his eyes shut, his breathing light and slow, face relaxing as if in sleep.
"You weren't far off when you said she'd be telling your captain the same things about the Master that we're saying about McKennon—and the Consilium." The Klingon folded her arms, her dark face somber. "Information—and slander—is the name of the game for the Masters. She's probably got him convinced even as we speak that the Yoons suddenly invented spaceflight and phasers, went on a genocidal rampage two years from now, and would have destroyed the Federation if they weren't stopped."
Seeing Chapel's clenched jaw, Cooper said, "You should hear what they're saying about the Organians, now that they're…"
Behind them, Sharnas whispered, "Nemo…"
"I know she was one of the old Constitution-class cruisers, long before they discovered the psion jump." The scratchy echoes of Dylan Arios's voice whispered eerily through the sounding tube of the long cargo corridors of Deck Twenty-three. "You can tell from the engines. God knows where they got her—she'd been hauling ore for years, and you can tell from some of the metalwork that she'd been damaged as hell at some point. But whoever had owned her when the Consilium got the patents on the psion jump sewed up paid to have the engines refitted and put out the credits to have a Consilium empath on board. My guess is that was before the Consilium hiked the price, drove most of the small companies out of business, and took over the deep-space freight market itself."
The lift tube, Mr. Spock guessed, hadn't been in use even then, to judge by the amount of vescens zicreedens growing on the walls and on the corroded doors. They ascended the gangways beside it, like whispering traps of dead air and unidentifiable sounds. The small hatch beside the tractor beam was supposed to open at a coded signal tapped into the recessed hatch plate—the Master had gone straight to the manual opener, to let them in.
"Phil and I escaped the Academy in a ship called the Antelope, but when we went back to get Sharnas we got shot to pieces, no gravity and leaking air in twenty places. There's air up in the saucer, but I'm not taking guarantees on what it smells like."
Spock elevated an eyebrow. They had taken the headlamps from the suits they'd left in the machine room next to the long-disused tractor beam, and the feeble illumination showed him corrosion and stains as well as lichen, the metal of the steps slimy underfoot. In places, beneath the fungoid growths, he could see the metal of the walls dark with old charring or bright with patches; at some point the ship looked to have been nearly gutted. Battle? he wondered. The wars following the plague?
"It is conceivable that the air in the saucer would smell worse than that in the lower holds," he said consideringly. "But if so, I would be interested to see how it could."
Arios laughed, his breath a trail of steam in the firefly light. A deck or two above them, Spock knew, lay the steamy heat of the yagghorth's territory; down here, the crippled heating coils barely functioned. A fortunate thing, in a way, since the cold kept down the smells of the assorted fungi, low-level oxidation, and the vaguely ammoniac stink of boreglunches; Spock was thankful for the thin suit of thermal protection he wore under his uniform. Ahead of him, he could see the Master shivering. The saucer, he knew from his original scans of the vessel, was colder still.
"It doesn't seem to make any difference to the yagghorth how big or small their ships are," Arios went on after a moment. "To them it's all their cyst, their shell…their many-chambered home. I could be bounded in a nutshell…"
"…were it not that I have bad dreams," finished Spock softly. It occurred to him suddenly to wonder whether Nemo, mind-linked to Sharnas, had nightmares as well.
From the darkness below him he heard a sound, a very faint blundering, scratching noise. He turned his head, looked down into the infinite darkness of several decks' worth of gangway. His own shadow blocked most of the dim gleam of the lamp. Still, he had an unclear impression of something dark and huge floating weightlessly in the darkness below him, steering itself on its vestigal wings: hairless tarantula legs tucked, tentacles dangling, a sticky glister of claws and teeth and organs.
Logically, he was aware that Nemo was no danger to him. Arios could not operate the Nautilus himself, even if McKennon's version of events was the correct one—for him to murder Spock, or have Nemo murder him, would be the height of foolishness. Spock recalled his own calm as he'd stepped from the lip of the hangar deck into bottomless infinity, knowing he could not fall because there was no gravity. Recalled his own slight impatience with Arios's very evident—and completely illogical—fear. He tried to suppress the adrenaline reaction he felt at the sounds behind him, and the sudden ache in his cracked ribs—and experienced a small qualm of human annoyance at how long it took to do so.
"Nemo," murmured Sharnas. Long lashes threw crescents of shadow on his cheeks as he turned his face, fitfully, as in sleep. "He's—they're—darkness. Steps. Aft gangway." He drew deep breath, let it out. "The egg."
"They're in the Nautilus," said Cooper, frowning. He looked over at Christine, seated on the other corner of Sharnas's bed, almost crowded off by Thad and Adajia. Only Raksha had not left her position on the other bed, close by the comm link; her hands were folded, so as to hide the expression of her mouth.
Cooper explained, "Those turbolifts have been seized shut since God left for Betelgeuse. Most of the gangways don't go all the way, either. They've got to be heading for the Bent Zone—the original yagghorth haunt under the engines—or somewhere around there."
"What the hell is he doing on the Nautilus?"asked Adajia.
"Spock's with him," said the empath after a moment. "Nemo…breathes his mind…" A line of concern twitched into being between the slanted eyebrows, and he fell silent again.
"Maybe Spock left a plug driver when he fixed the engine?" suggested Thad brightly.
"I can see sending the Master over to the ship if the Domina's here," said Cooper, "but…"
"No," said Chapel softly. "They have to be looking for something."
"Voices," said Sharnas suddenly. "Nemo…absorbs…from the darkness…" He flinched, his face twisting in sudden pain. "I can't…I feel…They're the voices from the mine. Voices from the mine. I hear them …"
Raksha and Cooper exchanged a puzzled glance; Chapel felt herself get utterly cold. She leaned forward, not wanting to touch Sharnas, not wanting to break his trance, but her heart slammed harder in her chest.
"What voices?" she asked, as gently as she could. "The voices of the dead?"
"Voices. . . ." His words came out as a hoarse breath; his hands had begun to shake. "I hear them. Nemo…drinks…them. Reaching with his mind he finds them, takes them to himself. Voices like those I heard in the mine. The Yoons."
He drew in a harsh breath, his features twisting with pain and horror; his hands groped out, and she caught them in hers. They were ice cold.
Impossible, she thought, impossible—yet she saw him again, standing knee-deep in filthy water in the deeps of the mine of Ruig, while all around her lay the heaped bodies, contorted in death. And in her helmet mike she heard him whisper hopelessly, I hear their voices. Voices of the dead.
"The Yoons are calling." His voice was thin, strained as it had been when in nightmares he had cried his mother's name. "The psychics, the savants, the teachers. They're alive. They're trapped. They're calling out for help."
From the darkness within the Enterprise's hangar deck, the black infinity of space, dusted with a luminous powder of stars, seemed very bright. A crack of eerie light opening out of a denser night, even casting a pallid line of shadow, which stretched like an obscure allegory across the pale concrete of the floor. From the darkened control tower, Christine Chapel watched the two minute human forms darken the lowest fraction of that slit, awkward with the sudden reacquisition of gravity.
She knew, by his height and by the way he stood, which was Spock.
She thought she would know him anywhere.
Beside her, Mr. Scott tapped a key on the board. The dragon-eye slit of the hangar doors slipped closed, shutting out the dream of space.
Prosaic red warning lights came on, then began to blink with the oxygen cycle. By the intermittent glare Chapel saw Spock and Arios stride clumsily for the shelter of the gallery under the tower, jet packs swaying like camel humps behind the anonymous, blacked-out spheres of their helmets. The lights had gone amber by the time they reached the tower door. Scott tapped the work lights on as the cycle finished, and Chapel followed him down the pierced metal slats of the stair.
"Ye find what it was ye're after?"
"Indeed we did, Mr. Scott." Spock lifted the clumsy headgear down, his own head emerging, sleek and dark and rather small-looking, in the gray metal of the shoulder ring. He saw Chapel and nodded her a polite greeting. "Nurse Chapel."
He had only once called her Christine—once, when he felt he owed her an apology, an explanation. Of course, he almost never called the captain by his name either, and over the years they had come as close to being friends as the Vulcan would admit. It was simply not in him to do so. It was not part of being a proper Vulcan.
She said, "Mr. Spock, when you have a moment there's an urgent matter I need to speak to you on. Captain Arios, too."
Spock raised an eyebrow halfway, but only asked Scott, "Are you aware whether the Domina McKennon is still on board?"
"Word has it the captain just walked her back to the transporter room."
Across the quarter-acre of open cement, the inner doors slid apart. Spock and Scott looked around sharply; Yeoman Wolfman had orders to keep everyone from the hangar. Chapel had only been admitted by application via comm link to Dr. McCoy.
Captain Kirk strode across the gray surface like a hunting lion, impatient power in every movement of shoulders and head. Chapel recognized the symptoms. Like poor Lao, he was a man fighting, in his own way, against what he knew. Scott, helping Arios with his clumsy glove seals, made a move to withdraw; Kirk signed him to stay.
"What did you find?"
"The doors of the Nautilus hangar deck were fused shut with rust and ciroid growths," reported the science officer. "The decking was covered in several centimeters of resins, lichens, and St. John's mold. All cargo dogs and cradles were thick with fungus, obviously unused for at least thirty-eight standard years."
Arios shrugged. "At the Institute they were always all over me for not keeping my room clean."
Kirk stood still for a moment. Then he closed his eyes briefly, and his breath left him in a gusty sigh. "Finally," he said softly. "Finally, some kind of evidence about who's lying, and who's telling the truth."
He held up a small device of white plastic. "This is faked, then." He extended it to Arios. "It's a visual record of the Nautilus releasing a slaved missile with high-compression fusion torpedoes via the shuttlecraft deck, to fire into the star Tau Lyra. The computers can detect no doctoring."
"Tcha!" Mr. Scott's mouth twisted in disgust. "So much for the butter not meltin' in that lass's mouth."
"You going to send another party back to check the doors tomorrow?" Arios eeled out of the pressure suit, rumpled the sweat from his hair. "Because I'll lay dilithium to little green apples they'll have been opened by then."
"I wouldn't even lay little green apples on it," said Kirk grimly. "I'm due to go aboard the Savasci at twenty-one-hundred hours, to speak with Captain Varos. If they have armament capable of destroying all life on a planet, God only knows what else they can do. The question is, how can we get the Nautilus away to the Crossroad and back through to your own time without the Savasci opening fire?"
Scott smiled. "Well, Captain, given you can get me ten minutes alone with her engines…"
"Captain," said Chapel. "There's another problem as well. Sharnas says Nemo has picked up mental transmissions that sound like those Sharnas felt in the mine on Tau Lyra. He's pretty sure some of them survived."
* * *
Nineteen hours, ten minutes. And beam-over to the Savasci was at 2100. Captain Kirk sighed, and rubbed his eyes, weary down to his bones.
"We'll need psychic amplification to get a strong enough link with Nemo from here," Arios was saying, folding his arms around his drawn-up knees. In the low light of the ambassadorial suite, sitting on the floor between Raksha and Phil, he looked very alien, seeming to have joints where humans did not, and the sweat still matting his green hair slicked it to the shape of an alien skull. Rembegil DNA spliced to enough human to stand the stress of empathic wiring, Cooper had said. True Rembegils had died at first mindlink with the yagghorth. Kirk wondered what else the "independent research and communications corporation" had done along those lines.
"How could the Yoons be trapped in mines deep enough to survive the heat?" Chapel, who stood beside Kirk in the doorway of the bedroom, leaned across to him and spoke softly below Arios's voice. "I was there. I ran a tricorder scan of the entire area. All the deeper tunnels were flooded."
"They could be trapped in the upper end of a sloping gallery, in an air pocket," Kirk replied, with an inner cringe at the thought of what it must be like in such a place, after five days. "I'm not a geologist, but I do know that high concentrations of certain metals can interfere with tricorder readings. I'd have to check what ores were present in the mine to be sure. There was heavy ion interference, too."
What he was wondering was how to get rescue parties down to the planet and across to the Nautilus undetected. How to explain such delays to the Domina.
"…Oh, hell," Arios was saying. "The Yermakoff Psychic Index went out with antimatter. We'll need someone with a point-seven or higher on the Ghi'har Scale."
"Mr. Spock," said Sharnas, with a small inclination of his head. "It is, I understand, a serious matter, to ask you to enter mindlink with a yagghorth. Even with your help it may not be enough, to make clear contact with those trapped on the planet. But we have no choice. We have to get them away."
"I understand," Spock said softly, and took his place at the small table with Sharnas and Arios as Cooper turned down the lights.
Silence settled, their breathing deepening, as if in sleep. Spock flinched once; Arios's fingers tightened to keep him from breaking his grip. Kirk shivered, remembering the vids he had seen, the dark and terrible thing framed by fire, ripping men to pieces casually, like a gardener tearing up dead vines. It had almost killed Spock, materializing out of the Nautilus's clammy darkness, a mindless and silent hunter.
That thing was walking, with its bobbing head and spiky, insectile stride, down the corridors of Spock's thoughts.
Kirk glanced again at the chronometer. Nineteen hours twenty-one minutes. In a short time he would have to leave, to ready himself for the official reception on the Consilium ship. Twenty minutes, if nothing happened before then, he told himself. In the first year of the voyage, Spock had taught him techniques of relaxation, of meditation, to separate him from his emotional involvement in events, to put anger, or pain, or grief from his mind.
He'd used them on a number of occasions. He suspected he'd need them now.
Someone on the ship was responsible for the Consilium.
He wondered about that train of events, that person, that X, wondered if X was someone whose life he had saved at some point in the past five years—the past few months—making him responsible for Thad, for the swirling hell of heat and water and death on the planet below them.
To simply destroy, or to turn aside, the person responsible for the Consilium might condemn billions to death from the plague, as McKennon had said—and certainly McKennon and Arios both had been absolutely cagey about identifying anyone as responsible. And Kirk himself knew very well that the "let's kill his mother and then he won't be born" school of temporal paradox was absurdly simplistic and hideously dangerous—the kind of thing that only those who had no knowledge of human relationships, of economics and social forces, would invent.
There might be nothing he could do that could keep the plague from happening, that could keep cascading events from forming the chains that would one day bind the Federation. But there was jolly well something he could do to help those rebels, whose births all lay so many centuries after his own death, something distant enough from the center of events that it would not interfere with the halting of the plague.
"Nurse Chapel," said Kirk softly, and at his nod she stepped into the corridor with him.
"If they haven't made contact with the surviving Yoons before I have to go aboard the Savasci, let Mr. Spock know that my orders are to take whatever steps are necessary to send a rescue party to the planet." He spoke in a low voice, to exclude the guard posted a few meters away. "Tell him to keep information about what's going on to as few personnel as possible, on a need-to-know basis only. But tell him to get those people. Bring them back here and keep them alive, at any cost."
"Yes, sir." Chapel glanced at the guard also, and looked as if she would ask him something, tell him something. Then she seemed to change her mind, asked only, "Can the other ship trace our beam to the planet? Follow the rescue party down?"
"According to Arios they have limited personnel," said Kirk. "Tell Spock to send five parties down to different areas, four decoys as well as the rescue team. Tell him to send whatever security personnel he thinks he'll need."
"I'll tell him, Captain." Both were conscious that it was information that couldn't even be allowed into the computer.
"After we've gotten them off the planet, I'll work out the details of what to do with them, and of getting the Nautilus away. We'll probably have to keep them in some kind of shielded compartment, to prevent scanner identification. It'll be…"
"Where are we?" Sharnas's voice came from within the suite's parlor, harsh and breathless. Kirk stepped quickly through the door to see him bow his head almost to the table, his whole body trembling. "Where are we, Grandfather? What has happened to us?"
"The world screamed." Spock's brow furrowed suddenly with concentration, his dark brows convulsing together. Again his hands moved to pull free of the link, and again Sharnas and Arios kept the fingers gripped tight. In the low illumination, his face was ghastly with shock. "Sinaida, my beautiful one, my wife! Litas—Telemarsos—Indipen…My children. My beloved ones…"
"Dead," whispered Sharnas. "Dead, Grandfather, they died…they screamed out…What has happened to us?"
"Tell me where you are." Arios spoke without opening his eyes, his face filmed with sweat. "We are here, we are listening. Tell us what you feel, what you hear, what you smell. We can find you if you tell us. What is around you?"
Spock shivered profoundly; Sharnas's head sank forward again, long hair hiding his face.
"What do you see?" asked Arios again.
"Cold." Spock's voice was thick, like that of a man deeply hypnotized. Kirk and Chapel exchanged a startled glance. Even a mile below the surface, the mines had been like a slow oven.
"Cold…light," breathed Spock, as if fighting for every word. "Cold …walls. Cold air that smells of metal and chemicals. Nothing living, no plants, no trees. Hard bare walls, beds made out of things that never were alive."
"Others are here," murmured Sharnas. "Grandfather…I feel their minds crying. Other savants…Farmers, too, some…Aunt Tsmian the blacksmith and her son. All in little rooms. They're…near us. Cold, hard walls. They heard them die, too. Their families, their children, screamed out their names." His voice came suddenly fast, stumbling over the words. "Grandfather, I woke up in the night and there were things in my room, things that grabbed me. One of them just touched me on the arm and I don't remember anything after that. I couldn't fight, I…I woke up here."
"Iriane." The word came out of Spock's mouth a dreamy mumble, and he shook his head, like a man trying to come out of sleep. "Iriane, my child…"
"Grandfather…"
"Who are you?" Spock tried to raise his head. The lines of his face changed, altering it shockingly. His mouth seemed to widen and flatten; his eyes, though still closed, seemed somehow larger, rounder; his shoulders slumped. "I've been…drugged. We've all been drugged. This mind…this yagghorth that I feel dreaming of us. I was in my garden, on the balcony, I was just going to go inside with Sinaida. Then I was dreaming, dreaming about hearing her scream. Seeing her die. I know she's dead, they're all dead. Those of us who are here…a hundred, a hundred and five. Why us, why not my Sinaida, why not the rest? Iriane. Who are you who hears us?"
"Rest," whispered Arios. "Rest. We'll come and help you, come and get you out."
Raksha said something truly vicious in Klingon, and Cooper murmured, "I don't believe it. Those lying skunks."
"Where are they?" whispered Chapel. "They didn't say…"
"They didn't need to." Kirk felt his own body alight with a surge of rage. He, too, had his memories of the planet's heat.
"How are you going to find them?" asked Thad, looking at Kirk in puzzled shock, then from face to angry face. "If they're down on the planet someplace…"
"They're not," said Kirk softly. "McKennon sent someone down to the planet before the Savasci fired its torpedoes. They wanted to keep you from getting in touch with the savants of the Yoon, but they decided to go one better. They kidnapped a group of the Yoons themselves."