HALF AN HOUR LATER, Mr. Spock confirmed this. "It is not an unreasonable situation," he said, holding one hand out while Dr. McCoy sprayed the abrasions on it with plast that did not quite match his skin tone. The left was more thickly covered with permaskin, which also didn't match, and by the way he moved Kirk guessed McCoy had put some kind of dressing on the gashed leg and cracked ribs. He had returned to the Enterprise—scuffed, bruised, clothing patched with oil and mold—in company with Raksha and Adajia at the news that Arios had been taken. There had been no negotiation, though scans indicated that a new layer of shielding had appeared around the Nautilus—presumably one of Raksha's repairs—making it impervious to outside transporter beams. In spite of his injuries, Spock retained his air of prim neatness, as if it were human—and therefore a point against him—to appear ruffled or in deshabille.
Sharnas, sitting up in bed now with his long black hair braided away from his face, had the same air of catlike neatness, of being above disorder of any sort.
"It is, in fact, logical, once one examined all the elements of the puzzle of the yagghorth themselves," added the boy. "The specimens examined were almost genetically identical, even though they had infested ships or colonies dozens of sectors apart; identical down to nonevolutionary traits like head shape and color bands and dancing behavior. Did you know the yagghorth dance? Yet no instrumentality for transport—not even evidence of sentience—was ever found. But once you had empathic races being wired for psychic contact—in the first instance, Betazoids who had been wired as children to repair the neurological damage caused by the plague—contact with the yagghorth became feasible."
Kirk shivered, recalling things his Academy buddy Maria Kellogg had told him about the yagghorth, and the one infested ship that the Farragut had picked up when he was a young midshipman, not yet out of the Academy. The yagghorth had been destroyed by the time the Farragut had picked up the distress signal—Kirk had helped in getting the bodies of three crew members out of the engine coils where the creature had shoved them. He still remembered the runnels of blood and resin trickling down the walls.
"It was discovered that yagghorth dream dreams about other worlds," Sharnas went on softly. "And go there…" He opened his fingers, like a man releasing a butterfly that has lighted on his hand. "Like that. All they needed, really, were referent points, a modulator coil, and a reason to take the ships with them when they went."
"Their previous referent points being the mu-spectrum energies emitted by Turtledove Anomalies," said Spock. "Energies which they themselves also emit. Fascinating."
"They're no problem as long as they're kept fed," added Adajia, seeing the expression on Dr. McCoy's face. "And Nemo's…kind of sweet."
Kirk felt himself inclined to agree with McCoy but didn't say so. The little band of travelers was gathered in the security ward, Phil Cooper dressed again—in the strangely dyed wool shirt and what looked like combat-fatigue pants in which he'd arrived on the Enterprise—and sitting in one of the ward's several duraplast chairs. Thad Smith was sticking as close to him as he could, his hand protectively over the phaser still in his pocket: Ensign Lao had convinced the Secondary to let him see it long enough to make sure the weapon was set for mildest stun, and that the safeties were on. Sharnas, looking small and thin and horribly young in the blue med smock, was propped on pillows in bed, but for the first time his eyes were clear and free of either pain or drugs. Adajia sat cross-legged in the shadowy doorway of the room next door, which had been left on Open even after the lights and door power had been restored. She kept glancing through to where Dylan Arios's still form could just be distinguished, lying in the bed with the light falling on one thin hand where it rested on his chest, his face in shadow.
Guards were posted outside both rooms, and Security Officers Butterfield and Shimada had accompanied Raksha and Lao to Central Computer, but on the whole, Kirk expected no further trouble from his guests. The ship was settling, rather shakily, into the second watch of the day. Scotty and his team were going over the ship inch by inch to make sure no damage had been sustained, and had so far reported none. Similar teams from Security and Engineering were shaking down the bowling alley, prior to the big upcoming match.
All things were returning to normal.
Except, thought Kirk, for what he now knew. With that knowledge, nothing would ever be quite normal again. Not for him, nor for anyone who'd been in that room.
Kirk had traveled enough in time to know that it was theoretically possible to change the future—if one knew what to change. He could not imagine what could be done at a distance of 250 years, to prevent the plague, to prevent the corruption of the Federation, to prevent the growth of the Consilium. Could not imagine anything that he could do to alter events the causes of which he was absolutely ignorant of.
It was never simple, and any event, building and multiplying through time, had such geometrically accumulating consequences as to make tampering frequently more hazardous than sitting still. Even his knowledge was, in a way, tampering, alteration—but knowledge wouldn't be enough.
He didn't know what would be enough. If anything would.
If, of course, Cooper—and Arios—was telling the truth.
And how could he ever know?
"All it came down to, really, was convincing the yagghorth that the starships were in fact their eggs, and the empaths assigned to them their nestmates," Sharnas went on, as if the matter were the most reasonable in the world. "They link to the empath, and the modulator coil aligns them with the engine itself."
Spock remembered the modulator coil. It was one of the pieces of equipment Raksha had talked him through repairing without explaining what it was. "I was under the impression that the yagghorth were nonsentient," he said.
"It's a subject upon which there is little positive data," replied the Vulcan boy. "Yoruba's 2478 study showed…"
"Here." McCoy came in, trailed by Nurse Chapel bearing a tray with a hypospray and a blood-analysis cuff. "I've got a general gamma shot in case that thing was carrying unknown infections, but I'd like to borrow some blood first to run tests. You seem to be the first person in the history of xenomedicine who's simply been bitten by a yagghorth instead of disassembled into component pieces."
Phil and Thad both averted their eyes from the dark green blood filling the phials; Spock and Sharnas continued to discuss yagghorth as if the one had not almost been torn to pieces by the other's pseudonestmate.
"All straightened out." The door slid open and Raksha came in, followed by Ensign Lao. "Told you it wouldn't take long." The steel on her doublet glinted as she passed through the other door into the room where Arios still lay asleep. She said softly, "Hey, puq," in a voice Kirk hadn't thought Klingons possessed.
"As far as I could tell she didn't add anything to the existing programming when she took the locks out," said Lao.
He looked tired, thought Kirk. Driven. As if burning up inside. As well he might. He was only twenty-one, young enough for anything to seem enormous, final, huge—young enough for the all-darkening despair of the young. Even with years of experience, Kirk was aware of his own sense of helplessness—only seeing the bleak defeat in the boy's eyes did he realize how far he himself had come from that young and passionate ensign on the Farragut, viewing, appalled, what the yagghorth had done. He remembered wondering, at the time, how Captain Gannovich could stand the horror of what they had found. Now he knew that one got used to it, and one went on.
Damaged sometimes—patched like the old black starship that had become the Nautilus—but one went on. One watched for the chance to do what one could.
"Not that I'd be able to tell." Lao passed a weary hand across his face. "I took notes. . . ."
"Destroy them," said Kirk quietly. "Don't even read them yourself."
Lao regarded him in surprise. Nearby, Phil was saying to Spock, "What surprises me is that Sharnas and the Master were able to talk Nemo into deserting and joining the rebellion with us. Because we couldn't have gotten a psionjump ship without him. I still don't understand how they did that."
"We didn't," said Sharnas. "Nemo made the decision. On his own, for his own reasons—and that is what the Consilium does not understand."
"We're dealing with a temporal paradox," said Kirk in a low voice, pitched to exclude McCoy and Chapel, the guards outside the door, and the little group of rebels, with the possible exception of the Vulcan Sharnas, who was still deep in discussion with Spock. "I don't know what's going to come of it, at this point, but Arios was right when he insisted that information be kept to a minimum. I'm confiscating any notes Maynooth, Miller, or McDonough might have made as well."
He paused. In the other room, Raksha stood silent at the foot of Arios's bed, looking down at him with an impassive face and haunted, weary grief in her eyes. Watching Dr. McCoy and Chapel exit, Thad remarked wistfully to Spock, "You know, I like your Starfleet better than our Starfleet."
"Thad," said Phil patiently, "that's the point of the rebellion."
Lao smiled, and some of the weariness left his face.
Kirk went on, "Whatever they've told us about the rebellion—and it might even be the truth—they haven't told us what they wanted on Tau Lyra Three; what they're doing in this sector of the galaxy, why they chose this time; why it's so important that they get there. And no matter what their story is—even if we can verify it independently, which we haven't yet—our orders are clear. Tau Lyra Three is a protected planet with a sentient, nonspaceflight civilization. It is our duty to keep that civilization from being tampered with by anyone, for any reason. To allow that civilization to develop freely in its own direction, for as long as it takes them to achieve spaceflight capability. And what they've told us about themselves can't be an excuse to let them violate that responsibility."
"No, sir," said Lao. He hesitated, struggling within himself, as if seeking words to say, some way to frame his questions and his despair. "Captain …"
Kirk wondered how he was going to answer. There's always something we can do? How could he be sure that that something wouldn't lead to the very situation he sought to avert?
He couldn't. Nobody could. And hope—and despair—were factors like anything else, to be taken account of in the ripple effects of time.
He was spared the necessity of reply by the whistle of the comm link. "Captain," said Uhura's voice. "We have signals coming in from the buoys around the Tau Lyra system. They started while our communications were down; analysis has only caught up with them now."
"Signals?" said Kirk sharply. "What kind of signals?"
Her voice sounded flat, strangely dead. "An hour and a half ago, a major solar flare exploded from the star Tau Lyra. Most of the buoys themselves were scorched out, but according to the signals they picked up…all life on Tau Lyra Three has been destroyed."
All life.
James Kirk stood on the bridge of the Enterprise, watching the delayed playback of information that had reached the ship's paralyzed receptors ninety minutes ago. Saw the filtered yellow corona of the star brighten fitfully, like some huge beast twitching as it dreamed, then fade. . . . Five minutes. Ten. Then it brightened again, the glare growing rapidly, swelling from yellow to white to deadly incandescence as a flare swept out from its surface, blazing streamers of fire, as if the star's furnaces had redoubled their rate of burning, then redoubled it again.
All life.
On the planet, Kirk thought, people wouldn't have known what hit them. Heat and brilliance, driving them indoors…According to reports they'd built astonishing structures of stucco and iron-hard vegetable matter on the arching backs of the strange, banyanlike plants typical of the temperate zones. He had a pile of wafers on the arm of his command chair, a heap of pale green flimsiplast sent up to him by Historical. Articles, surmises, long-distance surveys taken by careful scholars whose life and treasure that planet was… who, true to the Prime Directive, had never set foot on it but looked forward to the day when they might.
Now the day would never come.
Vehicles stopping as animals shied. Arms thrown over eyes to protect them. Communications lines overloaded, breaking down as the insulation burned. On the nightside, those awake reading or singing or watching the odd little flat vids referred to in radio broadcasts, rushing to the windows, marveling as the moon swelled and blazed into unknowable brightness, then faded as the sky itself became lambent with killing light.
Ten minutes of growing panic, terror, prayer.
And then the heat came.
All life.
He closed his eyes.
All life.
It did not escape him that the small chrono on the bottom of the screen showed the identical time that Dylan Arios had passed out in his efforts to maintain the standing theta wave in all open passageways of in-ship communication.
Nor did he forget that the Nautilus, that shadow twin of his own ship, had been in the Tau Lyra system when the arrival of the Enterprise had caused it to flee. True, it had appeared to have only just entered the farthest outskirts of the cometary field, but there was the possibility that the ship had been coming from, rather than going to, the planet.
And Arios had been desperate to get there, or get back there—so much so that he'd risked his life to take on an entire starship.
How much of this could have been averted if he'd known earlier who and what these people were?
If he knew that, even now.
To what degree was he responsible for all those deaths?
He opened his eyes again, watched the display on the screen. It now showed the current status of the star Tau Lyra. The readout numbers of temperature and coronal activity were virtually identical to what they had been a week ago, a month ago, twelve years in the past when the planet had first been scanned.
Only, the inner four planets of its system were cinders now. The civilization the Federation had ordered him to protect—as a matter of course, as a courtesy extended to another sentient race—was gone.
Someone behind him exclaimed in surprise, then cursed. Kirk turned to find Dylan Arios standing behind his chair, with the air of one who had been there some time. Kirk raised his hand to signal the on-duty security yeoman—who was advancing purposefully but with a rather red face—to return to his post by the turbolift door. "It's all right," he said.
"I thought you'd want to see me." Arios folded his arms, canted his head a little to regard the screen before them. He looked exhausted and rather the worse for wear, but his eyes, in their dark rings of sleeplessness, were clear, and infinitely sad. "The rest of the gang are back in sickbay, by the way."
Kirk hit the comm link. "Sickbay," said Chapel's voice.
"Everything all right down there?"
"Yes," she said, slightly puzzled. "You mean with our—er—guests? They're fine." A pause, probably while she looked through a door or switched on a monitor. "Yes, they're all in the ward where you left them."
"Including Captain Arios?" He glanced at the young man beside him; Arios raised wispy green brows.
"I think so. I checked on him just a minute ago."
"The Masters bred me to do this kind of thing." Arios's grin was lopsided, surprisingly sweet. "Bred me and taught me and wired my brain when I was sixteen and would rather have been doing other things. Then they acted real surprised when I used it against them." He turned to watch the replay again: flare, dullness, the onset of hell. Even more softly, he said, "They're here."
"You're telling me the Consilium did that."
Arios nodded. Ensign Lao, working steadily, wearily, over the Central Computer console, half-turned in his chair and seemed about to say something, but turned away again, and resumed work.
"It is theoretically feasible to trigger a solar flare-up by firing sufficiently powerful fusion torpedoes into the heart of a star," said Mr. Spock, stepping from his station, where he had been watching a digitalized readout of the same scene, altering the spectrum analysis as he had earlier on the scans of the Nautilus. "Tau Lyra has always been an unstable star, with long-term cycles of core activity which have showed up on spectroscopic records for three hundred years. It would have erupted into flares eventually in any case."
"How soon?" Kirk felt weary to the marrow of his bones.
"Statistically, any time between tomorrow and the next two hundred thousand years."
"And just what were the odds," Kirk inquired savagely, "that the flares would erupt today?"
Spock regarded him in mild surprise. "The same as on any given day."
Kirk was silent.
"In our time Tau Lyra Three is a wasteland." Arios returned his gaze to the screen, the light of the ruined star harsh on the stress lines that webbed the corners of his eyes. "We knew it was destroyed around this time—records of your mission survive, and you report it destroyed. We came in when we thought would be a little bit before you arrived, hoping we could reach there before it happened."
"Why?"
Arios sighed; Kirk saw the quick jump of the muscles of temple and jaw. Then, looking up again, he said, "The old linguistics analyses pointed to a high level of psychic skills among the people there as a whole, and to some very high-level savants—Masters or above."
"So you went there looking for help against the Consilium." On the screen below the repeating image of the flares, small windows in the blackness gave readouts: spiking levels of radio activity as planetwide communications jammed; humidity levels rising as the oceans first vanished under blankets of fog, then began to boil; spontaneous fires sweeping the thick-growing forest that covered most of the planet's surface. A smaller readout showed Tau Lyra III itself, glaring white with a layer of heaving cloud. The surface would be a hot and rain-lashed Erebus.
All life.
Arios flinched and looked away at the harshness in Kirk's voice. "I thought we'd covered our tracks," he said softly. "We did take precautions not to be followed, you know."
Kirk remembered precautions he himself, and others, had taken, against Klingons, against infection and infestation, against ambush and attack on incomprehensible worlds. Sometimes, precaution was not enough. Sometimes nothing was enough.
"We need people who can stand up to a trained and wired Consilium Master," went on Arios quietly. "We need training ourselves. There has to be an alternative to wiring, to continue the use of the psion drive; there has to be some way of boosting, or training, psychic abilities without opening that door for psychic control. We can't destroy the Consilium—what the Consilium has done—if we continue using their technology, their way. All we'll do is become them, eventually."
"No," said Kirk, knowing that Arios was, at least partially, right.
"And we need some way to fight the wiring itself. We didn't know what we'd find there, but we…hoped. Maybe it was stupid of us."
"No." Kirk shook his head. "No, it wasn't stupid. Mr. Barrows? Lay in a course for Tau Lyra Three."
"Aye, sir." Her hands moved swiftly over the course computer, she looked a little rumpled from having spent nearly two hours passed out in a vent shaft when she'd tried to get from one sealed-off corridor to another, but perfectly alert. While some of the day-shift crew remained on the bridge to sort out the tangle of readings and overloads caused by the blackout, others—like Sulu and Chekov—had retired to belated dinners and the first of what would easily be weeks of postmortems, reminiscence, and horror stories about who was where when the lights went out, and what they did about it.
"What about the Nautilus, sir?"
"We can meet you there," said Arios. "Now that the engines are repaired and Sharnas is up to the jump, we'll make orbit around the planet and wait."
Kirk's jaw tightened. "The hell you will," he said quietly. "Mr. Barrows? Sublight bearing. Keep maximum tractor on the Nautilus. Notify me at once if problems develop with the beam."
"Aye, sir."
"Mr. Spock? Assemble all information about the solar flareup of Tau Lyra, and all information in the library computer about Tau Lyra Three. Meet me with it in the main briefing room at twenty-two-hundred hours."
Spock inclined his head and, turning, flipped the wafer of readouts from his bridge station. The main viewscreen returned to the dark starfield, already moving laterally with the slow swing of the Enterprise as it responded to the helm.
"Lieutenant Uhura? Any pickup of radio signals from the planet itself?"
Uhura, who'd been briefing Mahase, looked around and removed the comm link from her ear. "I have recordings, sir, but they're zipped and garbled."
"How long would it take you and xenolinguistics to unzip and ungarble them?"
Without a blink—though Kirk realized several hours later that he'd just asked his communications chief to skip a well-deserved dinner after a particularly trying day—Uhura replied, "Depending on how much transcript is in the computer banks, between ten and twenty hours, sir."
"Get your people started on it," he said. "If you have anything before twenty-two-hundred hours, relay it to the briefing room. If not, let me know when they do have something."
He turned back to Arios, who still stood behind him, eyebrows raised but no surprise whatsoever in his eyes.
"Your crew has expressed a lot of concern about being deceived—about this ship and everything on it being some giant scam by this Domina McKennon to trick you into believing we are who we say we are," he said quietly. "That works both ways. I accept that you're from the future—those journal cubes Spock picked up in an abandoned stateroom on your ship don't leave me in much doubt. But as for the rest of your story—who you are, and what you were doing in the Tau Lyra system—I have only your word. The Consilium aren't the only ones who might have fired high-compression fusion torpedoes into the heart of that sun. I hope you understand that I'm going to have to keep you on board the Enterprise, and under surveillance, until I at least know whether a starship was in the Tau Lyra system when those flares began. A starship besides the Nautilus, that is."