"WE NEED SOMETHING with a narrow end that won't bend under pressure." Kirk wasn't sure why he was whispering, but somehow in the darkness, the utter silence of the blacked-out ship, he hesitated to raise his voice. "Any suggestions? Anyone have anything?"
"Hairpin's too narrow?" came a female voice—Yeoman Wheeler's, of Security—and the next moment something about eight centimeters long and half the thickness of one of McCoy's tongue depressors was poked into his hand. "It's supposed to be titanium-finished."
He flexed it between his hands as hard as he could, and felt it bend. "Too weak. And now I'm afraid I spoiled it for you."
"I guess that means I'm never going to speak to you again, Captain." She took it back.
"I had a couple of styli in my log pad," offered Ensign Gilden, the assistant historian. "You put two of those together, it might work. The log pad should be on the floor here someplace."
There was a soft, deliberate scuffling as bodies hunched awkwardly and hands described large, cautious circles on the floor. Kirk had found eight crew members slowly coming out of the effects of heavy stun in various portions of the corridors between Mr. Spock's office and Transporter Room Two, med or transporter techs or redshirts going on shift in Security, or those who, like Ensign Gilden, were simply unfortunate enough to have quarters in the adjacent corridors.
"How many of them are there?" asked Lieutenant Oba after a moment. The assistant transport chief's voice was soft, like Kirk's, as if he feared that somehow those who had taken over the ship could hear them through the disabled comm links.
And for all he knew, reflected Kirk, they might be able to.
"I don't know," said Kirk. "Scanner sweeps of the Nautilus showed no further human life there, but there was heavy shielding on the ship. Some areas didn't register at all. I don't think there's more than six of them all together. Four, now that two of them have gone back to the Nautilus with Mr. Spock. To the best of my knowledge two of those four are in sickbay."
And one of the remaining two, he added, doesn't look capable of independent action. And somehow, remembering the childlike dark eyes and sweet smile, Kirk didn't think Thad Smith was mean enough, or fierce enough, to kill. At least not on his own initiative. Maybe not at all.
And that left one.
Who could be anywhere.
"Got it!" came Gilden's voice.
"Over here," said Kirk.
Shuffling in the dark. Each stylus was eighteen centimeters long and two thick, tapered to a writing point at one end and a blunt, rounded key tapper at the other. They fit easily into the end of the dolly handle, held in place by the tape. Kirk knew the rooms and corridors of the Enterprise almost literally blindfolded, particularly those of the middle decks: the offices, transporter rooms, medical section, and Engineering of Deck Seven, the crew rec and Central Computer areas of Deck Eight, the officers' quarters of Deck Five above. He knew, almost without thinking about it, that there was an emergency kit next to the elevator around the corner from Transporter Room Two. It took him, Oba, and the beefy Ensign Curtis combined to lever loose the magnetic catch that held its cover, but the metal eventually bent and buckled, and they pulled out the long box within like treasure hunters who have finally achieved a pirate's hoard.
The kit contained, among other things such as medical supplies and a couple of oxygen masks, two flashlights and a degausser.
"Right," breathed Kirk. "Gilden, Oba, you both have second field experience in computers…"
"Not high-level stuff, sir," said Gilden. "I can untangle fragmentary historical files, but…"
"Doesn't matter. I don't know what you'll find when you get to Central." They were walking as he spoke, hurrying to the transporter room by the bobbing yellow gleam of the flashlights, where he degaussed the catch on the maintenance cupboard to remove more flashlights and another degausser. It was in his mind that there was a strong possibility Gilden and Oba would reach Central to find the entire staff unconscious—or worse—under their consoles.
"Butterfield, I'll need your phaser. Wheeler, go with Oba and Gilden to Central, see what's going on there. Get more flashlights and another degausser from the utility room at the end of that corridor there. Ensign…"
"If you don't mind, Captain," said Curtis, picking up the discarded yard of steel pipe they'd used for a lever, "I'll stay by the transporter room in case anybody else tries to get off the ship…or onto it." In the upside-down glow of the narrow light beams, his square red face was calm, with a very slight smile.
"Don't take chances you don't have to," he said—unnecessarily, he knew. They both knew. "And get yourself a phaser as soon as you can. I'll send back whoever I can to relieve you. All of you," he added, to the little group of Security redshirts and ad hoc computer draftees who followed him to the ship's central gangway, "I don't need to tell you to get into as many lockers as you can. Get demagnetizers, flashlights, phasers. We need to find where these people are hiding. They have to have access to lab-quality terminals, and they have to be somewhere on the main power trunk. Paxson, you go with the Central group, they may need medical attention down there. Butterfield, you go with them too, as a runner. I'll be on the bridge."
He killed and flipped the catch on the gangway's manual cover plate as he spoke, twisted the cog inside. Groaning, unwilling, the door slid back. He stopped on the threshold, his meager troop behind him, listening.
There were no voices from above.
Somebody—Sulu, probably—would have made the effort to come down. There were things on the bridge that could be used as levers, if no degausser was available.
Cautiously, Kirk flashed the light upward. Though there was no sign of danger in the enclosed blackness of the stairwell, only a faint glitter of residual moisture trickling down the side of a vent cover—the vent covers in the gangways weren't maintained as often as those on the rest of the ship—neither was there any sign that anyone had attempted to use the gangway in the nearly two hours that the lights had been out.
That was very unlike Mr. Sulu.
Kirk advanced a foot or so into the landing, shone the light down the metal stair below. Nothing. His boots chimed hollowly on the metal as he moved back around, to shine the light upward again.
Still nothing.
Very cautiously, he began to ascend.
"Do I have to mention that if you use that phaser again you're yagghorth chow?"
"Unnecessary, Rakshanes." Spock rolled over very gingerly and probed the zone of tenderness from pectorals to short ribs under his left arm, the sudden, flinching pain of the lowest two ribs on his right side. The tendons of his right hand ached at the movement of his fingers; his left palm, he saw belatedly, as sensation returned, was stripped of skin in patches, sticky with malachite blood.
The doorway was open before him. In the small glow of a hand lamp Raksha stood leaning, a bronze statue with a phaser in her hand and the garnets of her stiletto hilt glinting like blood droplets in her hair. Past the dark of her shadow something gleamed, too shiny, like wet cellophane or scar tissue: a squamous black hide stretched over uneven slabs of bone, salted with tiny flashes of gold; exposed organs pulsing thickly within the shield of hooked ribs and barbed legs. Black hair tousled silk, Adajia was making little pinch-and-scratch nips with her fingernails at the dripping masses of tentacles clustered at the front of the huge seahorse head.
At Spock's movement, fernlike growths slipped out of the leg joints and the small vents on the head's central ridge, pale yellows and whites against the thing's blackness in the sightless shadows, lacy as a vase of baby's breath on a Klingon mind-stripper. It coiled and retracted its tentacles, the foremost of the bony legs, holding them up mantis-wise, claws spread. As it did so the lamplight from Raksha's hand caught small points of metal along the central, ferny ridge, and down the back of the neck.
Spock leaned back on his elbows, the pain in his shoulders, his back, his hand and legs forgotten in that tiny line of spangling reflection. He was barely even conscious of deduction; certainly, at this point, not surprised. As if a final piece of data had emerged to link everything he had seen on the ship into a single, shining chain, he said, "People of your time have succeeded in docilizing yagghorth."
Raksha stepped forward, stooping carefully to pick up the phaser that lay beside Spock's bleeding hand. She tossed it to Adajia, who plucked it from the air like a thrown flower. The yagghorth retracted its sensory organs and hissed. Raksha put down a hand and helped Spock to his feet. His shoulders felt as if they'd been beaten with the blunt side of an ax.
"You don't know the half of it, pal."
"Is it permitted to request enlightenment?" He flexed his hand gingerly, his body still reechoing with the aftermath of shock though his mind was striding quickly ahead. With the lamplight more steady upon it, he could see the creature clearly now, well over two meters tall in its current down-slung position, but able to straighten, he guessed, to nearly twice that height, spiderlike legs tucked, vestigal wings half-spread, the three heavy tentacles more closely resembling spinal columns in their bumpy joints than limbs. Nobody had ever succeeded in killing a yagghorth in any fashion that left a skeleton intact; he found himself making mental notes on the anatomy, the forward-slumped stance, the way it kept moving its head, and the almost submarine waving of the sensory fronds.
He could see, quite plainly, the glint of metal on its spine, like the implants that glittered so evilly on Sharnas's back, on Arios's.
Raksha's eyes went from him to the yagghorth, suddenly old. "Sharnas tells me a story about a Vulcan master who met a god at the crossroads," she said. "He asked for perfect enlightenment. The god gave it to him. Gods do things like that. The Vulcan went and drowned himself, because it was the only logical thing to do." She leaned her shoulders against the door, brushed a coarse trail of black hair from her face. "Klingons have a reputation for being stupid. We treasure it."
Spock put his head a little on one side, his eyes meeting the ink-dark pits of shadowed grief, and for a time there was no sound but their breathing, the heartbeat of the engine, and the drip of moisture in the lightless belly of the haunted ship all around them. "Then you are from the future," he said at last, confirming what he had already guessed.
Raksha sighed. "Oh, yeah." She rubbed her forehead, her heavy eyebrows pulling together in pain, and shivered, as if suddenly cold. "Yeah. But it's not like you think."
"It's not a gas." Captain Kirk staggered down the gangway, stripping the oxygen mask from his face. In spite of the breathing apparatus, a few feet up the steps toward the deck above his breath had shortened and strangled, dizziness and weakness overwhelmed him. Wheeler and Gilden steadied him, looked at one another, baffled.
Butterfield said reasonably, "Could be why we haven't heard from the folks on the bridge."
Kirk walked slowly around to the door leading into the main hull's emergency bridge, a duplicate chamber directly below the main bridge six floors above. There was another such chamber in the engineering hull, surrounded, as this one was, with backup computers—a protected secondary heart and brain. He degaussed the cover plate and cranked the door open, stepped into the dark chamber, an eerie replica of that above, pitch-dark now that even the small red power lights on the overridden consoles were out.
The stubby finger of his flashlight's yellow gleam poked around the darkness, bobbed before him as he crossed the room, mounted the walkway to stand before the shut turbolift doors.
"I guess we have to do this the hard way," he said.
Thad Smith stood for some time in front of the long, metal-lined opening in the bright blue rec-room wall. He recognized it as a food slot—there was a metal counter in front of it for trays, and a series of buttons above it. Instead of the brightly colored pictures with which he had been familiar all his life, there was writing, as there was in the lounges of the Brass.
Though the Master and Phil had worked hard during the past year and a half to teach him to read, he still found it difficult to distinguish between I's and J's, H's and A's; difficult to pick out how the letters all made up the sounds of words. These were long words, too.
Still…
He glanced anxiously over his shoulder. By the glow of the small battery lamp, Arios sat unmoving at the table they'd dragged to the bank of games, his thin wrists one on top of the other in the semicircle of keypads Raksha had wired together, his green head bowed as if in sleep. Only his breathing, fast and shallow, told that he was not sleeping, but rather in the depths of a trance far longer, and far deeper, than Thad had ever seen him attempt.
Beyond the bright pond of lamplight the huge rec room was utterly dark, strange gleams lying like water on the glassy floors, the grinning machines. The other games, the comforting brightness of their lights quenched, stared at him with blank, demented eyes. No sound came from the corridor beyond the shut doors, save for the regular grumble of machinery in the other hold and the deeper, more soothing throb of the engines.
The thought of the engines made Thad shudder. If they didn't get away, if Raksha didn't get the engines of the Nautilus fixed fast, he and the Master would be caught, and very likely given to this ship's yagghorth. If the Master couldn't hold out the psychic defenses he'd set around this place, the illusion and interference he'd established between all the decks of the ship.
Thad was beginning to fear that he wouldn't. It was a huge ship, as big as the Nautilus and filled with people.
So, he returned to consideration of the food slot. He knew that sweet things—chocolate, or Klingon caramelized fruit—helped. Gave him back the energy that the illusion drained. Coffee, too. He thought he could spell coffee, but there were four different buttons with that word (only the spelling didn't look quite right) and there were other words besides. Any of them might have been poison.
Cautiously, he padded to the red-shirted Federation yeoman still stretched on the floor by the railings, his hands taped to a stanchion. Thad tried to think of a way to tear the engine tape off the man's mustache and mouth without hurting him, but couldn't think of any, so he simply grabbed a corner and yanked.
"How do you get chocolate out of the food slot?" he asked.
"Hunh?" said Yeoman Effinger.
"I need to get some chocolate out of the food slot, and it has writing instead of pictures, and I can't read that well." At the Institute, of course, and in all the factories, the food slots in the Secondaries' room were all pictures, which in Thad's opinion were prettier than writing anyway.
"Oh," said Yeoman Effinger. "Uh—second bank of buttons from the left are all chocolate bars. First one's chocolate with almonds, second one has macadamias, third one's caramel and peanuts, fourth one's that kind of squishy orange nougat that's real nasty so don't eat it, and the bottom one's coconut marshmallow, but the synthesizer doesn't ever get the coconut right."
"Oh. Thanks. Are all the buttons with coffee on them okay?"
"Yeah. Top one's black, all the rest have stuff in them. Can you get me an almond chocolate bar while you're there?"
"I don't think the Master would let me," said Thad. "I'm real sorry. We'll let you go when we escape." He taped up Effinger's mouth again and went to get black coffee and two chocolate bars—macadamia-nut and caramel-peanut—from the food slot. Quietly, he stole to Arios's side.
"Master?"
Arios raised his head a little, though his eyes did not open. "Thad?" His lips formed the word without a sound.
"I got you some candy and some coffee."
Arios groped blindly for the coffee cup. Thad had to put it in his hand. "It's hot," he warned, but Arios sipped it anyway, then fumblingly broke off a piece of the candy.
"Thank you." His voice was thick and slurred, like a man speaking in deep sleep. "No word?"
"No."
"How long?"
Thad consulted the chronometer Velcroed to his wrist. Most Secondaries could not be taught to use digital readouts. His was an analog double circle, each face three centimeters across, one for day and one for night, the twelve segments of each brightly colored. It was a common Secondary design. The Master had to set it for him. "An hour and a half," he said, after study and counting.
Arios said nothing, but the muscles of his jaw clenched, like a man who feels the cut of a whip. He sank into his trance again, his breathing labored, fine lines of pain cut deep into the soft flesh under his eyes. As quietly as he could, Thad took the coffee and the rest of the candy and returned to his post beside the door, consuming it thoughtfully as he listened to the dim echoes of the dark and sealed ship.
"Mr. Sulu!"
The voice echoed weirdly in the sounding column of the turbolift shaft, but it was unmistakably the captain's. Sulu flung himself to the open doorway, leaned down, and was rewarded with the sight of a small dot of yellow light below. "Captain! Are you all right?"
The others crowded up behind him—with the sole exception of Chekov, still at the helm, checking and double-checking the ship's slow movement against the position of the stars.
"Have you tried coming down the shaft on the safety cables?"
"Aye, sir," called Sulu. "Same problem as the gangways—I guess you tried the gangways? It isn't gas. . . ."
"No," said Kirk. "Or if it is, it got through our masks."
Sulu hunkered down on the threshold of that long, black drop. "Dawe's getting obstruction readings for seven or eight air-vent shafts on various decks. We think that's people who've tried to get through the vents, past the blast doors or out of rooms. They're not moving. We don't know if they're just knocked out or dead."
Kirk swore, wondering how many were lying dead in gangways throughout the ship; wondering what and how Arios had managed. "Any other in-ship sensors in operation?"
"Negative, sir. Dawe says Transporter Room Two activated about an hour ago. Three beamed over to the Nautilus."
"That was Spock, the Klingon, and the Orion. Have they returned?"
"Negative, sir."
"No indication of where Arios is?"
"Not a one, sir, except that it has to be somewhere there's a terminal."
Kirk was silent, looking up at that dark cluster of heads in the ocher square of the doorway light. "How far down did you get?"
"Deck Three, by gangways. Maynooth's up there now trying to figure out what Arios did to the computers."
"It's astonishing, sir," came the physicist's rather reedy voice. "Simply astonishing. They shouldn't be able to do the things they've done, slipping in and out of the defensive systems as if…Well, it's a marvelously sophisticated slicer program, sir. Orders of magnitude beyond anything I've ever seen." He sounded ready to marry the program's originator.
"Captain," said Sulu, and there was deep concern in his voice. "Captain, who are those people?"
Who indeed? An answer had occurred to Kirk already. He should have known, he thought, from the moment Cooper laughed in the transporter room.
He looked up again, gauging distances and the strength of his throwing arm. "Get down to Deck Three and open the lift doors there," he said after a moment. "Mr. Butterfield…" He turned to the security officer behind him, and held out the degausser. "Get to Security and bring me back some rope. Open every door you can find along the way and get enough people with degaussers and lights to make a general search of all the med labs and of Engineering. Find Mr. Scott if you can, or send someone to find him. And get me a report on those two we have in the security ward of sickbay. Mr. Wheeler, you go with her."
By the time the redshirt returned with the rope—and a half-dozen of her cohorts who reported that Mr. DeSalle had attempted to make an exit from the small Security messroom through the vent shaft and had not been heard from since—Kirk had gotten status reports from both Uhura and Maynooth, to the effect that the in-ship communication system was being "bled" for the ionization of all hand communicators, through a subtle cross-up of signals within the central computer itself. Like the cutting out of the doors and the lights, the blocking of the turbolifts and the quadrupling of the strength of all magnetic door catches on the ship, the reprogramming of that system was guarded with some kind of lock that left Maynooth speechless with admiration but utterly baffled.
"I'll get it, though," called down the bespectacled physicist cheerily. "Just give me some time. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and I won't rest till I've conquered."
He sounded, Kirk thought with a smile, like half the male techs and redshirts on the ship upon their first glimpse of the lovely Yeoman Shimada. He wondered what Lao would make of the system.
Wondered where Lao was, and what had become of him. Not sitting around on his hands in the darkness, that was certain.
With Butterfield had come Yeoman Wein, released from a cell in the brig that had previously held Dylan Arios. The redshirt was unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of his inattention, but after the eerie phenomenon of the gangway, Kirk was not inclined to blame him.
"We've run into aliens who dealt in illusion before this," he said grimly. "If it is illusion we're dealing with and not something else. No, they got out, they did their preliminary setup at the terminal in the briefing room around the corner from the brig, then took off for somewhere they could fine-tune it in private."
He worked as he spoke, tying the end of the rope Butterfield had brought to the heavy metal ring from a tape dispenser found in the supply cabinet. "It took at least fifteen minutes for Raksha and Adajia to get from wherever they were to Mr. Spock's office, probably traveling by vent shaft most of the way. That says to me Arios is holed up somewhere in the engineering hull. Mr. Sulu?"
"Aye, sir."
"Catch!" He flung the ring upward and across the lift shaft with all his strength. It took him four tries to get his range, but on the fourth the helmsman caught the ring easily, hauling up a hefty bight of rope and fashioning a kind of body sling out of it, with the ring as a sliding bolt.
They were still discussing the logistics of lowering someone to the doors of Deck Eight when those doors opened beneath them, and Lieutenant Organa's voice called out, "Hello up there!"
"Do you have access to Central Computer?" demanded Kirk at once. "Is everything secure down there?"
"We've searched this deck," the assistant security chief called back to him. "There's some kind of gas in the gangways so we can't get up or down. It seems to go right through oxygen gear. Looks like it's in the air vents as well, but it doesn't come down into the rooms. Ensign Lao passed out in a vent trying to get to Engineering; we just located him a few minutes ago by tricorder. He seems to be okay but I'd feel better if Dr. McCoy took a look at him."
"I'm fine!" The broad-shouldered form of Lao Zhiming blotted the light behind her. "Captain, have you had a look at that programming? It's beyond anything I've ever seen, but it isn't alien! I swear it isn't alien! The logic systems are directly traceable. Could those people…"
"Stow it, Ensign," snapped Kirk. "No further speculation out loud—that's an order." There were two possibilities, and neither of them made him very comfortable.
He could hear the bafflement, the dawning understanding, in Lao's voice as the young man said, "Aye, sir."
"Keep at it," Kirk added, more kindly, not wanting to simply slap the young man's face to shut him up. "Find out everything you can, but report it to me."
"Aye, sir."
The weak glow of the flashlight gleamed briefly on his hair as he turned back in to the room.
"We'll send Maynooth down to you," promised Kirk to Organa. "Mr. Sulu, tie him in that sling and lower him as fast as you can. Mr. Organa, when he gets there, come up and take over the search on this deck, but I'm still willing to bet Arios is holed up somewhere in the engineering hull. Mr. Sulu, you have the conn."
"Aye, sir."
"Keep runners stationed all along the lift tube. If you need me, I'll be in sickbay. I think it's time I had a little talk with our remaining guests."