"I TRIED TO FIND OUT who it was." Ensign Lao leaned against the gunnery console, the phaser still pointed, his eyes seeming to glitter in the semidark. "I looked through the records—ran probability matrices. I've been doing that all afternoon. What could have caused that situation, what could have given rise to such an organization, given a galaxywide plague, given mindlink with yagghorth—about whom we know nothing—given power vacuums when key figures died or went insane. Trying to find out who it was, who caused it all."
The person who started the Consilium is one of your crew.
Sulu? wondered Christine, as she had wondered, on and off, for the few hours of her own fitful attempt at sleep. Miller, with that deadly combination of computer expertise and engineering know-how? The calmly efficient Organa? She could picture Organa taking over the Federation. Easily.
At one point she thought that it might be Lao himself.
Or was it someone unlikely: the feckless Riley, for instance, or Chekov? But surely Chekov was too sweet-natured…
"It would be easy then." Lao moved his hand, as if to bring it up to rub his eyes. He did not, though. Did not let anything obstruct his view, his aim. "All I'd have to do is kill one person. Even if it was someone I cared for, I'd do it. I'd take the court-martial, gladly, and I wouldn't cause a temporal paradox by explaining. I'd accept my sentence. You know I'd have to do it. But there wasn't enough data to tell."
"And what about the plague?" asked Chapel, keeping both hands on her knees and her voice as calm, as gentle, as matter-of-fact as she could manage. To her own surprise, she found she could manage rather well. "From what I understand, the Consilium saved civilization from the plague."
"I'll—I'll warn them about the plague," said Lao, stumbling a little over the words, she thought. "There's something they can do. Quarantine, or—or finding another solution. . . ."
"What if there isn't another solution?" demanded Christine, forgetting for a moment that she was dealing with a man in a state of serious sleep deprivation. All her work with Roger Corby returned to her—studies of ancient epidemics, their spread and vectors through the history of civilizations long past. "Zhiming, I've studied this, and quarantines never work. Not on a galactic scale. Not if the incubation time is long enough. And you won't even be alive when…"
"Shut up!" His hand trembled on the phaser, his eyes burning with passion, with rage at what he had seen on the planet, at what he had heard from the Nautilus crew. "Maybe it isn't a fair solution, maybe there are other solutions…but it's best, Chris. Think about it and you'll know it's the only way! These people murdered the Yoons, the whole planet wiped out…"
"But some of them survived!"
Lao hesitated, blinking, shaking his head. "They couldn't have."
"They did. The Consilium took them…" Chapel broke off, seeing the change in his eyes.
"So they became tools of the Consilium, like everyone else?" There was something—satisfaction? bitterness? regret?—in his voice, and something of Phil Cooper's weary cynicism in the lines of his face.
"Chris, we can't look away from it and pretend it's not going to happen. I wanted…" He shook his head. He looked exhausted, far worse than he had in sickbay a few hours ago.
"I wanted to do this the easy way. Set up the wiring, find a place to hide, take the neurophylozine…just fall asleep. I wanted not to know." He produced the parched rictus of a smile. "I guess I won't know anyway. Or you. It'll happen fast." He frowned, his brow folding in pain, and he looked vaguely around him for the chronometer.
"What time was it when they went over there?"
Chapel tried to calculate whether a lie would help the situation, and in which direction she should stretch the truth, but it was difficult enough to think as it was. "Twenty-one-hundred hours," she said truthfully.
"An hour and a half ago," he whispered in his hoarse, beaten voice. "It won't be long. And it'll be fast. I promise. Nobody—none of us—will feel a thing."
"Can he trigger it manually?" asked Sulu, regarding the shut—and locked—blast doors of the backup computer room from the corridor outside the Deck Nineteen briefing room. It had taken almost no time to locate Lao and figure out what he had done, once they knew what they were looking for. The auxiliary bridge was the logical venue for an attempt to cause a phaser backfire, and Miller and Maynooth had both been easily accounted for. In fact, both were standing in the corridor now, with Sulu, DeSalle, the redshirt who had initially ascertained that the doors wouldn't open—it happened to be Yeoman Butterfield—Dr. McCoy, and Raksha.
"Absolutely," said Miller, scanning the ceiling already for entrances to the vents. "My guess is he's monitoring ship's internal communications to let him know if somebody gets on to him, in which case he'll probably take his chances and pull the plug."
"He's cut out ops," reported Maynooth, who'd just emerged from the briefing room. As the door slipped shut behind him, Sulu could see the lines of amber readout on the triangular table vidscreen. "So we can't simply drain power from the phaser banks."
"We can do it manually," said Sulu. "That'll also keep him from being alerted to the drain itself until it's too late to do any damage. Any idea who's in there with him? Or what this is all about?"
Heads were shaken. McCoy looked around at the others—Maynooth and Miller, DeSalle and Butterfield—and said slowly, "I may have an idea of why." He sighed, and Sulu reflected that the doctor didn't look to have slept very well. There was a weariness in the slouch of his shoulders, and air of… not exactly hopelessness. A kind of resignation tinged with anger, the knowledge that there was nothing that could be done.
It was a look Sulu had seen lately, in other members of the crew. The captain. Certainly Ensign Lao.
But at Sulu's raised brow he only shook his head. "At a briefing yesterday, just before the…the new ship came into view, Captain Arios gave us a piece of information which may have sent Ensign Lao into…into a crisis. I know he hadn't been sleeping. I prescribed cillanocylene-six for him and come to find two-thirds of my total stock of neurophylozine is gone." He paused, with a look in his blue eyes as if sifting through some knowledge for portions of it that could be disclosed. Sulu saw his gaze cross that of the Klingon woman Raksha and saw the warning shake of her head.
McCoy sighed. "That's all I can say."
"That isn't enough," said Sulu.
Raksha raised a finger. "It's enough," she said. "Lao's actions are logical from his own standpoint. Trying to destroy the ship, and hooking it to the incoming transporter as a trigger. And I think," she added, as Sulu opened his mouth to protest, "that you'll be safe enough draining the phaser power. The last thing the Savasci's gonna do is open fire on you."
Sulu hesitated, but the warning look was still in me Klingon's dark eyes. Sulu considered a moment, his glance going unobtrusively from the two computer mavens, to the doctor, the security chief, the guard beside him and the other one—near enough, possibly, to overhear—at the end of the corridor. Whatever that information was, that Arios had released at the briefing—and presumably this Klingon woman knew it, too—if it had provoked a crisis of this kind in Lao, it might easily trigger a similar unpredictable reaction in any of the others standing in the corridor with them. Sulu personally didn't think it likely, but he'd seen less likely things in deep space. He wouldn't have thought it of Lao, either.
"How long will it take?"
Miller shrugged. "Forty minutes, counting the time it'll take to put up safeguards on the gauges so no sign of it'll show up on the ops board for Lao to read in there."
Sulu's communicator chirped. Kyle, thought Sulu, flipping it open. The transporter chief had already been alerted not to use the ship's internal comm link.
"Mr. Sulu, sir, we've got another request from Captain Kirk to be beamed over," came the chief's pleasant baritone. "He sounded pretty urgent."
"Tell them we're working on it," said Sulu, and nodded to Miller. "Get after it…Tell them we'll get them out as soon as we can."
And as the assistant engineer loped down the corridor, with Raksha at his heels, Sulu wondered what that piece of information had been, what that final riddle was that had proven too much to take for a man well on his way to becoming the best captain in the fleet. How could information unhinge a man? And he wondered if he really wanted to find out.
He turned to DeSalle. "Get your men out through the ship," he said quietly. "Try to find out who Lao's contacts were, if he told anyone else this …this piece of information, whatever it was…" He glanced curiously at McCoy, who looked away.
"I'll be in the briefing room here. No in-ship link—just communicators. But I'd like to know if this—crisis—got him or anybody else to plant any other little tricks around the ship. And I'd like to know if that person in there with him is an accomplice or a hostage."
Great, thought Sulu, as DeSalle strode off in the wake of the vanished Miller. The captain leaves me with the conn, and in ninety minutes I've stranded him in enemy territory and gotten a maniac trying to blow up the Enterprise. If anything happens to the ship, Kirk'll kill me.
He went into the briefing room to study what readouts Maynooth could call up for him, and to await events.
"Forty minutes," said Kirk grimly, and snapped his communicator shut. "This ship isn't that big and they have a larger security force than the Enterprise. " He checked his phaser. The batteries were down to ten percent. The lowroofed storage compartment in which they had taken refuge was poorly equipped as a fort, empty of contents and for cover boasting only the low hedge of a conduit box that ran the width of the room about two-thirds of the way back. Kirk wasn't even sure it would mask a prone man.
"How the Sam Hill did that—Nemo, was it?—get onto the ship?" demanded Mr. Scott. "Dear God, and they've got the Fleet completely hooked to those things?"
"Well," said Arios, sitting with his hands pressed to the unconscious Cooper's temples, "that's sort of the point of the yagghorth. Though I've never seen Nemo jump ship-to-ship like that. I didn't know…" He paused, and laughed, a little hysterically. "I didn't know he cared enough about us to try and help us." Cooper, lying beside him, looked grayish with shock; both Darthanian and Iriane crouched on his other side, conferring in soft whistling voices. Yeoman Shimada lay like a dead kitten in the ocean of her black hair, unconscious far too long, thought Kirk worriedly, for normal phaser shock.
For twenty-third-century phaser shock, anyway.
"If he doesn't care about you," asked Scotty, puzzled, "then what's he doin' flyin' your ship for you? What's he doin' in the rebellion in the first place?"
Arios straightened up and gave him a crooked grin.
"That's the problem. And that's what drives Starfleet crazy. We don't know. He's helping us, but none of us—maybe not even Sharnas—has got the smallest inkling of an idea why."
"And where's he gone now?"
Arios only shook his head.
"They are currently searching compartment by compartment." Spock had pulled a hatch on the conduit and wired the tricorder in as a data-pull, tracking the search through the in-ship com channels. "More to the point, they have begun a systems clearance and replacement, which should close the gap in the transporter shielding in, at most, sixty minutes."
"And at least?" asked Arios softly.
"The soonest they could have their transporter shielding in place is five minutes," replied Spock, and the three conscious redshirts all stopped checking the batteries on their phasers and looked up in alarm.
"We have to move," said Kirk, stepping to the door of the compartment. "And keep moving." His right leg, where he'd taken the glancing hit, ached from instep to groin where it wasn't numb or sparkling with an agony of pins and needles. Iriane shifted over to listen with him as he pressed his ear to the door; he wondered how much the little green warrior heard, or in fact whether she heard the same things a human heard with the complex, petally clusters of her ears.
"They're coming." Spock removed the wire from the tricorder, stood with his head lifted, listening. "They're at the top of the gangway. There's a smaller party a level below us."
"Hmm," said Kirk softly. "Arios, where does that conduit lead, if we could get down it?"
"Anywhere," said Arios promptly. "It's one of the main lines. But it's a straight drop past that bulkhead, and no handhold but the main coil." He glanced back at Cooper, and reached to touch Shimada's icy hand. "They need anticane. Somebody probably gave the Domina a shot of it, to get her on her feet again this fast. Without it they'll be out for days, and sicker than dogs for weeks."
"The drop is not a trouble," said Iriane, moving back with an oddly froglike movement. "I will carry your friend down. He's no more trouble than a sack of flour to a higher branch."
"I, also," Darthanian added mildly. "In time I'll have to desert you—so that I can be found in suitably pitiful circumstances, you understand—but for the moment…"
"Don't be ridiculous," Iriane snapped. "You're going to have enough problems getting yourself down that tunnel."
"Captain," Spock called, from where he had gone to listen at the door.
Kirk scooped up Wolfman's and Cooper's phasers as he passed them, knowing none of them had much charge left.
Tucked in the waste space at the side of the Savasci's disk, the gangway twisted and wound. Kirk sprang up two flights of steps, two or three at a time, crouched in the elbow of a turning, and fired upward as Varos and a squad of Specials came around the turning above. He ducked back as they returned fire, hearing at the same time more shots echoing below. The light in the stairwell wasn't good, quarter-power or less; had the well been as wide as the gangways on the Enterprise he knew he could never have held it. As it was, the Specials, trained fighters that they were, were bottled up.
There was another flurried exchange of shots, then silence.
Then pain hit him, pain and constriction in his chest, burning, dizzying, nauseating. He gasped and heard footfalls above him, forced himself to lean around the corner and fire again, though every move made it feel as if his rib cage were splitting. It's illusion, he told himself. Or something close to it, something imposed from the outside. . . .
Pain sliced up through his groin, his bowels; he leaned around the corner and fired again, and heard the clatter of a man falling, rolling down the stairs toward him. A charge caught his shoulder glancingly as he leaned around and put another heavy stun charge into the Special who rolled to a stop almost under his feet. The pain sickened him and he cursed Germaine McKennon, that pretty, fragile redhead who reminded him of Ruth, and struggled to keep his mind clear, his eyes free of the darkness that seemed to be creeping in around their edges. . . .
"Hang on," whispered Arios's voice in his ear.
The pain lessened. Kirk's mind was so thick with confusion that he had to put his hand back behind him, feel the Master's bony shoulder, before he was actually sure the man was in the gangway with him and not merely projecting his voice and his will.
After a moment, his voice halting, as if he spoke through intent concentration, Arios went on, "She's using the stairwell as a resonating chamber. Darthanian…take Spock with…"
From below came the hissing zap of phasers, two or three being fired at once. Kirk leaned around the corner again and sent bolts sizzling up at the Specials around the door above, covering Arios while the Master reached out and relieved the unconscious Special of his weapon and communicator.
There was another pause in the atta ck, and Kirk, his right arm almost numb, fumbled his own communicator from his belt and said, "Mr. Kyle? Any idea how long that transporter will be?"
A maximum of sixty minutes, Spock had said, which meant that in effect it could be more like half an hour or less before the systems reformat cleared the shield block, stranding them on the Savasci. At that point, Nemo or no Nemo, phasers or no phasers, capture…and whatever McKennon would do to learn the destination of the Yoon ship…would be only a matter of time.
Kyle's voice was apologetic under the strain. "We're working on it, Captain."
"Did you see their faces?" Lao's voice was little more than a whisper in the dimness of the auxiliary bridge, his face in the tiny glare of the red console lights now bathed in sweat. Christine could feel her own perspiration crawling down her back, her nape, waiting, sickened, for the flash and roar of the phaser banks going up, wondering if it would hurt and, if she died instantly, whether that pain would matter.
"Arios. Cooper," the young man went on. "Those eyes that don't trust anything. Those eyes that can't open with wonder because they've learned that anything they see could be a trap."
He gestured around him at the control room, the silent viewscreens, blank windows onto nothingness. "I entered the Academy, I joined Starfleet, thinking…it's all wonder out there. It's all new things, beautiful things. What is it the captain says? Where no one has gone before. Where no one has gone before," he repeated in a whisper. "And now it won't be like that, unless I…unless somebody stops them. Stops them before they begin. I'm not doing it just for Arios and those others, I'm doing it for…for everyone, Chris. Can you understand that?"
"And what else are you stopping?" asked Chapel reasonably. "Yes, the Consilium is one path leading away from this ship. What are the others? Maybe the one that stops the Consilium after the plague that was so destructive; after the discovery of the new jump drive. You can't know…"
"I do know!" insisted Lao. "I can see what's most important, and I… What's that?" He whirled, head coming up, listening, and Chapel's heart slammed hard in her chest with the thought, It's starting. . . .
The silence was like death, like darkness. Neither breathed.
Then after a moment Lao tapped keys on the Central Computer board, the phaser still pointed at her, his eyes leaving her for only moments at a time to check the readouts. She saw his hand fumble at the keys, hit the erase, tap in again.
"Zhiming, you're tired," she said softly, astounded that she could control her voice. "You aren't thinking. . . ."
"I know what I'm doing!" he screamed at her. He stopped himself, breathing hard, the phaser shaking in his hand. More calmly, he said, "It's been over two hours. What's taking them so long?"
"How strong is the structural steelwork of these stairs?" Kirk's sense of suffocation, of nausea and pain, had not departed; he felt that it was slowly growing, slowly closing in on him again, but couldn't be sure. He felt in the grip of a strange fever, disoriented and frantic to move, as he had been when he'd come down with river fever on Iakchos II; his joints aching and darkness seeming to come and go in patches before his eyes. The ache in the arm and leg that had been hit by phaser fire was almost unbearable. Was that, too, real, or only part of the illusion?
"Pretty strong," said Arios, who hadn't spoken for five minutes or so. "You couldn't melt them with phaser fire, if that's what you're thinking."
"Would a phaser overloading take them out?"
"On full banks," said Arios promptly. "Below thirty percent, I'm not sure."
Kirk thought for a moment. There had been no movement recently from above, but he'd felt the pain growing, and knew it was only a matter of time.
A matter of time. Like the shields closing off again.
"Are you in touch with Darthanian?"
The Master nodded.
"I've seen you generate small illusions. The yeoman in the bowling alley said you conjured up the image of a friend of his to put him off-guard. Can you work an illusion here?"
"McKennon would see through it pretty quickly."
"We'd only need it for a few minutes. Tell Spock to put one of the phasers on overload and throw it down at the troops on his side, at my command. I'll do the same up here. Can you and Darthanian work an illusion that the explosion is bigger than it is, the damage is greater than it is, and hold it long enough for us to get into the conduit and down? So at least they won't know which way we've gone?"
It felt strange to be asking. Can you cast a spell…? Arios was a child of feys, raised to use their powers in a deadly game; created by the people whom he now sought to destroy.
"I think so," said Arios. He closed his eyes briefly, and at once the pain, the sense of suffocation, increased. Arios looked close to finished, the sharp brown features lined with stress and running with sweat, like the sweat that soaked Kirk's own face and blood-stiffened satin tunic. Kirk wondered if Cymris Darthanian's exhaustion was catching up with him, too.
"Right," whispered Arios. "Iriane says the last of them is down the shaft…a dark place, she says. Hot, and the noise of engines near by. A lot of cover. Whenever you say."
"Cover us as long as you can," said Kirk softly. "You and Darthanian get down the shaft first. Spock next. I'll go last. At least they can't kill me, if I'm going to affect whoever's on the Enterprise that starts up the Consilium. And I made damn sure I don't know the coordinates of the Brigadoon system."
"They can't kill you," said Arios softly. "But if they take you, we may never be able to trust you again. So don't let it happen." He was silent another moment, his attention turned inward, elsewhere. Then he said, "Ready."
Kirk's hand was steady as he flipped the sequence, essentially doing in miniature what someone (Who? he wondered grimly) had done with the Enterprise itself: programming a dump and blocking the ability to carry it through. The phaser emitted a high-pitched whistle, shrill and furious; through it Kirk counted "Three…two…now!" and threw.
And turning, plunged down the steps.
Even with the phasers at twenty-percent power, the blast shook the confined spaces of the gangway, hot air slamming him forward against the storeroom door, sucking the oxygen from his lungs. He was aware of Spock and the squat yellow form of Darthanian in the dark room before him, Darthanian swinging nimbly into the conduit hatch that seemed far too small for his bulk, like a gaudy-hued Denebian bolbos squeezing into an impossibly tiny hole. The flash of light in the gangway behind him seemed huge, and glancing back, he saw what Varos at the top, and the other Specials at the bottom, saw: a tangle of ripped metal and dangling shreds of plastic covering, gaping spaces of darkness where risers had been completely blasted away, flames licking half-melted plastic and curling back in a dying stink of fumes.
Then he slammed the door shut, crossed to the conduit, gathered the hatch cover as he walked. He fitted it to behind him, clumsily, but he knew the room was dark. There was no further sign there that it had been a refuge, that anyone had passed that way. He wondered if there was some evidence, a sticky thumbprint of blood from his sleeve, a silky strand of yellow or green fur caught in the hatch…
But there was no time to wonder.
The conduit, as Arios had promised, dropped straight down a meter and a half along. The casings that enclosed the bundled wires were more than strong enough to support his weight as he shinned down them like a rope in the dark. The square shaft was narrow enough to brush his shoulders as he descended, filled with the smells of insulation and the fine molds that collected in the vapor traps on the vent filters, the minute bacteria of human lungs and human breathing, the dust of human garments and human food. His right hand was still weak, leaving his left to take most of the weight as he let himself down into darkness. Here and there, pale splotches marked the walls. Thumbprints, or the illusion of thumbprints, left by one of the Yoons to guide him…
A lateral vent. A long crawl in fusty-smelling darkness, and the scurry of boreglunches among the wires. Even two hundred years, he thought, had not served to eradicate those well-traveled pests.
Heat ahead, and the low red throb of light.
And a smell of alienness that lifted the hair from his nape.
"Watch it." Arios touched his shoulder as he emerged from the hatchway into the red-lit swelter of the chamber beyond. Labyrinthine coils and tanks loomed everywhere, dense with shadows; cables looped from the darkness of the ceiling, caught the glow of the bloody lumenpanels like the glistening bodies of snakes and retreated upward to darkness again. There was a wet sheen to everything, and when Kirk touched the wall it was sticky with resin. His mind saw again a drip like amber oil from a tentacle that snaked down from the ripped ceiling. His mind smelled again the terrible pungence of nightmares and blood.
"We can't stay here."
The three ambulatory security guards looked their agreement, kneeling over the bodies of Cooper and Shimada. Even Scotty, looking around him at the strange shapes and the low, burning gleam of the control lights, stayed close and didn't wander, as Kirk knew he would have in some other engine room, some other ship.
This was not the engine room, he thought. But it was the heart of the ship.
Through a dangling screen of hoses he could see a plex bubble, in which there nestled a sort of couch, designed for human contours. The bubble stood before an oval mouth of darkness, like a rat hole or a cave; the sides of it crusted with dried resin, and something brown that looked like stains of blood. More resin clotted the bubble's sides.
The empath sleeps there, thought Kirk. Sleeps during the jump. Sleeps in the mind of the thing that lies in that darkness.
Within the darkness something stirred wetly, and there was the squamous gleam of moving tentacles, moving bone. Then shifting, as if unwinding itself, it emerged: the yagghorth of the Savasci, eyeless, arachnoid, gleaming in the dark, like a great squid brought from its lair by the whisper of food.