"CAPTAIN KIRK." The woman who had introduced herself over the viewscreen as Domina Germaine McKennon, small, delicately built, unbelievably pretty, held out both hands as she stepped from the silvery disk of the transporter. She bore no sign of Starfleet insignia, being clothed in what was possibly civilian attire of the twenty-sixth century: a smooth-fitting green dress whose full hem tuliped around her calves, and over it a white tabard of gauze-thin silk that billowed behind her like an enormous cloak. Her only jewelry was earrings—tiny roses of pink-tinted ivorene—and she wore no other decoration save the flower-sized bunch of green and white ribbons adorning the clip that held back the heavy copper waves of her hair.
"Thank you for permission to board."
Kirk found himself taking both of her hands, and a surge of protectiveness warmed him—not something he was used to feeling about women with sufficient authority to direct starship missions. Or at least, not in the past few years. But when he tried to examine the feeling it seemed to dissipate, leaving only the faintest fragrance in his mind.
McKennon smiled up into his eyes. "I did want to speak with you, and as a commander you know how easily even coded transmissions get intercepted by the …wrong people. Forgive my paranoia." She smiled ruefully. "It's—well. Call it the result of dealing with…with unscrupulous enemies."
Her perfume was a reminiscence of something he had once known, then lost: a youth he had never been, perhaps. He had to concentrate to shut it out.
"You mean Dylan Arios."
A small crease marred the startled dove wings of her brows. "He is far from the worst."
Kirk turned, discomfited by her nearness. She was nothing like Arios had led him to expect, nothing like a woman who would order the carnage of Tau Lyra III. Gentleness and an almost spiritual sweetness seemed to radiate from her. Behind him, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy executed small, formal bows. "My first officer, Mr. Spock; Ship's Surgeon Leonard McCoy."
"Delighted." She did not say it effusively, but her smile beamed warmth. Kirk realized that, like Dylan Arios, she had probably seen all of them on the Enterprise's visual logs, the record of this mission logged, like all missions, in Memory Alpha. Seen records of later missions as well, if there were later missions. If they all survived the next three months.
She would have seen them grow old.
She would know what Adajia meant by "Oh—Er—That."
The thought was disturbing; the knowledge that she knew what was going to become of him, of Mr. Spock, of McCoy…
…of whichever member of the crew gave birth to the Consilium.
He pushed the thought away. As he led her along the corridor to the briefing room, he was aware of the turned heads, the larger-than-usual number of crew members who found some reason to be in that part of the ship. Of the crew at this point, only a handful knew what was going on, but everyone knew that something was. The rumor of a ship appearing, literally without warning, without engine vibration on the sensors, without long-range effect on the fabric of hyperspace, had flown like lightning among the crew still speculating about the blackout, the Nautilus, the fate of Tau Lyra.
McKennon looked around her with frank interest, smiling a warm greeting to those they passed. "To tell you the truth," she said, as Kirk stepped back to let her pass before him through the briefing-room door, "there are times when I wonder whether Arios's espousal of the Schismatic cause isn't just a ploy of some kind, a means to get backing for his own ambitions within the Consilium itself. For all his charm, he has always been shockingly ambitious."
"Has he?" Kirk held her chair for her as she sat. We could all stay here and be rich, Adajia had suggested. And be three hundred years ahead of everyone. But it was conceivable that Arios's ambitions took a different form.
"He hides it well," she said, smiling up at him. "But surely you've seen the influence he wields over his crew—which is not, by the way, at all usual in the Fleet. A high-level Master—which is what he'd have become if he'd been willing to accept the discipline—can control not only the actions, but to a large extent the thoughts of his astrogator and his empath. To a degree, their emotions as well. Certainly he has that poor little Secondary he kidnapped completely brainwashed."
She frowned, a look of pain glimmering deep in the sea green eyes. "I expect that in the two years since he quit the Consiliar Institute in a snit he's managed to win a tremendous following among the original dissidents in the Fleet by the same methods. Most of them are wired; it would be pitifully easy for him to do. He likes control," she concluded dryly. "And he likes power."
McCoy and Spock traded a glance. They would be, Kirk knew, replaying every conversation with the Master in their minds, even as he was, looking for clues. For something to tell them where the truth might be found. From beneath her tabard McKennon drew a leather case no larger than her hand, which had been clipped to her belt. Fingers moving with neat precision, she unshipped a white plastic instrument, oval and smooth, and fingernailed one of its small gray buttons. She glanced at the briefing table's three-faced central screen, made another adjustment.
"I think you'd better take a look at this."
McCoy held up a finger. "Before we do," he said, "just what 'methods' are you talking about Arios using?"
McKennon frowned a moment, like a woman seeking the best and most understandable explanation. Watching her face, McCoy, too, was conscious of a sense of protectiveness, for she reminded him of the daughter he had not seen in ten years. Probably her diminutive stature, he thought, her air of fragility. Though there was something about the eyes…
"Bones…" said a soft voice behind his back.
And for one second, his wife was there.
Later, when he thought about it, he couldn't swear he actually saw her, though at the time he was positive he glimpsed her from the corner of his eye. But recognition knifed him in the heart. Sweetgrass perfume, and the deep garnet color of the dress she'd worn when first they met; the wrenching jolt of grief and regret and wanting that almost stopped his breath as he slewed around in his chair…
And of course there was no one there.
The loss was worse than the recognition had been.
"Or there's this," said McKennon, drawing his attention back to her, he didn't quite see how. She had the same quality Arios did, of almost magnetic charm. "But please…I'm trusting you on this one."
As far as McCoy could tell, the Domina did not move, nor alter her expression, nor make a sound. She only sat with her hands folded, her face grave and a little sad. But McCoy felt a wave of absolute disgust wash over him, an utter revulsion as if the woman had just finished making some crass and bigoted remark about his manhood or his background, or as if he had, only a moment before, seen her pick a bug out of her unwashed hair and eat it. The involuntary thought flashed through his mind, My God, how can anything that filthy sit there looking so sickly-sweet…
But she wasn't filthy. Her hair was clean, scented faintly of vanilla.
He couldn't imagine where the feeling had come from, or where it had gone.
"My God," he said softly. Kirk was looking at her with a kind of shaken awe, Spock with an eyebrow raised and a look of deep interest on his face.
McKennon laughed like a handful of chimes in an evening breeze. "My roommates and I back at the Institute used that when men got fresh on dates. But only—only—if we never wanted to go out with that man again …and if we weren't interested in any of his friends. I'm sorry, Doctor. Captain. Forgive me."
"Most fascinating," said Mr. Spock.
"Did you read that as disgust?" McKennon asked him interestedly. "The medullar cues are quite different for Vulcans, but you're half Terran, aren't you?"
Spock inclined his head in assent. "What I found fascinating," he said, "was the choice of emotion to be so demonstrated."
Her green eyes twinkled. "Did you think that, as a woman, I'd have made them both fall madly in love with me? It can be done." The color heightened, ever so slightly, along her cheekbones. "I just…have trouble doing it." She turned quickly, touched the white plastic instrument again. "But this is what I really came here to show you."
On the briefing table's central screen the grainy image of the Nautilus appeared, silhouetted against the sulfurous glare of the star Tau Lyra.
"We were at the extreme limit of our pickup," said McKennon quietly. "Far too distant to stop them. This is top-end magnification."
A slit of dull orange light marked the opening of the shuttlebay doors—something small, rusted, black-painted, and scarcely to be seen glided forth, silent and lightless as a metallic roach. A moment later, a flare of dirty yellow flame, and the thing sped like a dart, straight for the heart of that waiting sun. Almost immediately the battered vessel swung about, began to move off.
"You must have picked them up shortly after that." The Domina folded her well-manicured fingers, that sliver-thin flinch of pain still marking her brow. "A slaved missile like that has the advantage of leaving no evidence in the torpedo tubes. We know they've stolen such things on raids. Our own sublight drive was badly damaged coming through the Crossroad Anomaly. They were out of range before we could even begin pursuit. After that we tried to pick them up again, quartering the sector. We were four or five parsecs away when you registered on our sensors, with the Nautilus in tow. Are they on board still?"
Kirk and Spock exchanged a glance. Kirk nodded. "Yes."
"Confined?" And, the next instant, "No, they wouldn't be, would they? If you tried to confine them," she went on, intercepting Kirk's quizzical glance, "you would have…I don't know what kind of trouble."
McCoy started to speak; Kirk's small gesture quelled the remark unmade.
"They're under room arrest."
In fact, for the three days of the journey to Tau Lyra, the Nautilus crew had been rather laxly confined to the suite of rooms on Deck Four usually reserved for ambassadorial parties. At Arios's request as well as Kirk's, they had kept very much to themselves, though Thad and Adajia had learned to bowl, with Raksha along to make sure no further cases of temporal paradox developed. On the journey to Tau Lyra, Kirk had seen McCoy's face settle into new and bitter lines as he dealt with the knowledge of what would happen to the galaxy he knew; had seen Lao's bright eagerness quenched as the young man withdrew into feverish pursuit of his computer analysis, working far into the nights as if to outrun the dreams that sleep might bring.
A week ago he had known Lao would make one of the finest officers in the next generation of Starfleet. Now he doubted that the young man would re-up after this mission was done.
God knew what he would do.
In his bleaker moods Kirk wondered that about himself, though in his heart he knew. He would be what he was, do what he could—and, he had found in the five years of this mission, there was usually something that could be done, if you stayed ready.
Sometimes he would meet Arios late at night, observing the stars from the Deck Ten lounge; sometimes see the Master and Raksha sitting quietly together there, handfast, quiet after their work on the Nautilus repairs, lovers who had become friends. Two or three times he'd seen Chapel and Sharnas, talking together in the semi-gloom—Chapel another one, Kirk knew, who was sleeping little these days.
McKennon leaned forward. "Do they have—or have they ever had—access to the ship's computers? Through anything—library outlet, food selector, anything?"
"The library readers in their—prison," said Spock, "have been replaced by free-input visicoms, with no connection to the central computer."
She seemed to relax a little, and sighed. "You have to watch them," she said. "Even if you don't think they have, Captain, I would strongly recommend rechecking every line of every operations and information program in your banks and in the backup, and running a multiple virus sweep of the entire system. We can help you with that, if you like. They are ruthless, Captain Kirk, and both Arios and the woman Raksha are extremely clever. Have you been onto the Nautilus? You or any of your crew?"
Spock said nothing. His hands were folded, hiding the still-blotchy permaskin.
Kirk said, "Not yet."
"After five days? Surely you could get their transporter codes with lyofane."
"My science officer warned me about anomalous energy pulses in the ship's secondary hull," replied Kirk blandly. "Arios himself spoke of booby traps. We hadn't decided what the safest course of action would be when our sensors picked up the solar flares. At that point we put the Nautilus crew under restriction and started back to Tau Lyra with the ship in tow. Even if they gave us their transporter shield entry codes, at maximum sublight I wouldn't want to try a beam-through between ships."
"I see," said the Domina.
Kirk nodded toward the central screen, the image of the Nautilus like an angular black bird against the sun. The slash of light, the small black missile gliding forth in silence, then the flare of its propulsion; the hangar deck closing and the Nautilus engines glowing a dull red. No burn in the torpedo tubes. No evidence at all.
Only Arios's word, and his repeated warnings about this beautiful, sweet-faced woman who sat at his side.
"Were you down to the planet?"
McKennon shook her head. Her pink mouth tightened a little, as if to stop trembling. "We didn't realize they were armed with that kind of weaponry until the flares read on our scanners," she said. "The Shadow Fleet only has what it can loot from our arsenals, and pirate from the merchant ships they attack. If we had known, I think we would probably have…I don't know. Disregarded the Prime Directive. Warned them. Something…" Her hand described a small gesture, helpless.
"Why would they do it?" asked Kirk.
McKennon shook her head. "I don't know!" The words burst out of her; her fragile hand bunched in a fist of frustrated rage. "That's the horrible thing about this! They were a perfectly harmless people, from all anyone's ever been able to tell from the records. Simple, kindly…quite primitive in many ways, for all their moderate level of technology. Did they offer any explanation?"
"They said that you had done it," said Spock, after a glance at the captain. McKennon's face twisted in appalled disgust.
"According to Arios," said Kirk, "the Tau Lyrans were a psychically adept race whose help he was trying to recruit for the rebels."
"The Tau Lyrans?" McKennon stared at him. "The…what did they call themselves? The Yoons?" She shook her head, closed her eyes in disbelief. "No, Captain," she said softly. "Yes, the Yoons had a certain level of psychic connection, mostly in language, but they were…exactly what they appeared to be. A simple culture who had managed to invent the radio but never got as far as bombs. Believe me, the Institute has records of every psychically active culture, past and present, in the known galaxy. We're always on the lookout for further possibilities of refinement of our own teaching, our own technique. We would never have committed such an act of…of waste."
She passed her hand across her brow, her mouth taut, as if she had tasted poison. "I can only guess," she went on after a long moment, "that the location of Tau Lyra Three itself was the reason. We knew the planet was a wasteland, of course. Our records showed it as having been destroyed by solar flares sometime in this period. Having discovered a way to make the psion jump through the Crossroad Anomaly, Arios may have been seeking to set up some kind of…of safe base in this time period. Either for the Schismatics in the Fleet, or for reasons of his own. I have no proof of that, but it's the way he thinks."
"You sound as if you know him very well," said Kirk.
Her jaw tightened, and for a moment the dark lashes veiled her eyes. "Yes," she said softly. "I know him." There was a world of unspoken past, of bitter experience, in the sudden, careful blankness of her face as she looked down at her hands, the determined smoothness to the set of her lips.
Silence lay for a moment in the room, like a spot of light in water.
Then McKennon said, "You'll want to speak formally with the captain of the Savasci, Captain Rial Varos."
Kirk raised an eyebrow, but did not comment on the Romulan name. So in two hundred years the Romulans would be part of the Federation?
McKennon went on, "Nominally I'm in charge of this mission—of bringing Dylan Arios and his crew to justice—but it is Captain Varos and his men with whom you'll be dealing. I admit," she added with her fleeting smile, "that I wanted to…to see how the land lay here first. Like any of the Consilium Masters, I am more expendable than a Fleet captain or ship. For all I knew—for all Varos knew—Arios could have gained control of this vessel by this time. Knowing Arios, that isn't an impossibility." The dryness of experience touched her voice.
"No," said Kirk consideringly. "No, it isn't."
The Domina hesitated, studying his face with a trace of anxiety in those beautiful green eyes. "Are you…satisfied with our bona fides?" she asked after a moment. "I know Dylan Arios. I know he's probably told you something that makes you unwilling simply to hand him and his crew over to us… that's his style. Something with just enough truth in it to be convincing. And got you to put modern shielding on your own ship. Whatever proofs you require, Captain, I shall try to provide, to the best of my ability."
"Thank you," said Kirk. He wondered if her pleasantly conciliating attitude had anything to do with the fact that she couldn't simply beam Arios and his crew off the Enterprise, or beam her own strike force on. He rose. "Mr. Spock…a word with you. Please excuse us for one moment, Domina McKennon."
"Captain," said Mr. Spock in a severe undervoice as they crossed from the briefing room to the turbolift, "in the course of that conversation you told quite an alarming number of untruths."
"Deck Three," said Kirk to the lift, and a single bar of green light passed down the black slit of glass. Hands behind his back, Mr. Spock followed his commander interestedly into the physics lab, at the moment occupied only by Dr. Maynooth, deep in an analysis of digitalizations of the records of the Tau Lyra solar flares. Like Lao, the physicist had the appearance of a man who hadn't slept in three days, but in his case he still retained his usual maniac buoyance: what had kept him awake was fascination, not despair. He didn't even glance up as the captain and first officer crossed through the lab to the small, heavily shielded utility room at the rear.
"I presume eavesdropping technology will improve in the upcoming centuries," said Kirk quietly, "so we can only hope the shielding around this room is sufficient. I'm going to ask Domina McKennon to remain on the Enterprise for drinks in the officers' lounge. During that time, I'd like you and Captain Arios to spacewalk—in blacked-out survival suits, since I also presume the Savasci is monitoring ship's transmissions—across to the Nautilus, where I'd like you to have a look at the floor of the hangar deck, and the hangar doors themselves. You said in your report the whole place was caked with moss and the resins extruded by the yagghorth. A missile like that would have left a mark, where they dogged it down at least. If you find anything—scratches on the floor, makeshift dogging clamps, scraping where the doors were opened, anything—I'd like an explanation from him."
Spock inclined his head.
"You'll have to go without a guard," said Kirk. "Two spacewalkers won't be noticed—more might be."
"I assume that even if Captain Arios is the villain Domina McKennon portrays, he still has sufficient logic to know that he cannot operate the Nautilus himself. And even a guard of six or seven would be insufficient protection, should he summon the yagghorth Nemo to overpower me."
Spock had a point. It was just as well, thought Kirk, that none of the security officers who had escorted Spock and Scotty in their repair trips to the Nautilus had known of the existence of the yagghorth.
Kirk started toward the door.
"Captain?"
He raised an eyebrow.
"I have frequently attempted to study the operation of subliminal cues in human motivation. Was the origin of your distrust her choice of repulsion, rather than the more obvious attraction, as a demonstration of a Consiliar Master's power?"
Kirk smiled crookedly. "You mean, she didn't want to make us 'fall madly in love' with her because that's what she was already trying—very subtly—to do?"
If Spock had not been Vulcan he would have smiled. "Indeed," he said.
"Nothing that rational, I'm afraid, Mr. Spock. So I may be wrong. But in the face of this level of lying—on one side or the other—I'd feel better if I had a little firsthand empirical evidence. Now McKennon has committed herself on how she says the missiles were launched…but I'll bet you three moves in our next chess game she doesn't know the state of housekeeping in that ship. And I'll bet you, too, that the faking of visual transmissions will improve a lot in three hundred years."
And he crossed back through the lab to the lift, to return to the briefing room and his lovely red-haired guest.
"It's aye a bit small, for a deep-space vessel." Engineer Montgomery Scott helped Mr. Spock on with his gloves, dogged the seals tight, and cast an inquiring glance over at Dylan Arios, just wriggling his thin form into the blacked-out survival suit.
"You don't need much of a crew in a jumpship," pointed out the Master. "That's a big ship, huge for what they need. Nobody gets tired of each other on a two-week mission from Earth to Rigel and back again, including travel time. You don't even need laundry facilities. Just take your underwear home and have your mother do it."
Mr. Spock looked puzzled at Scott's laughter, but did not inquire. The three men worked quickly in the small chamber beneath the hangar deck's control tower, adjusting the roomy helmets and affixing the jet packs to their backs. Spock had worked in open space before and, moreover, had the physical strength of a Vulcan; he observed from the labored way Arios moved that the Master had not.
"The packs work on the principle of action-reaction," he explained. "Control stick on the front points in the direction you wish to go to change direction. Sharp pressure to stop, pressure again to start, though on this occasion I advise simply thrusting off from the hangar doors in the direction of the Nautilus to minimize light flashes visible from the Savasci."
"Understood," said Arios's light voice in the helmet mike. Scott was dogging down the Master's helmet, and through the smoky one-way visibility of Spock's faceplate Arios was nothing, now, but a vaguely humanoid shape in matte, nonreflective black. "We'll make for the main tractor-beam hatch. I can get that open from the outside, and it's in a part of the ship where we shouldn't lose too much atmosphere before we can seal it again behind us."
Spock and Arios ran through the check sequence of their seals while Scott climbed to the control tower above, the hatchway sighing as it sealed behind him. In order to minimize the possibilities of temporal paradox, the engineer had cleared the area through the simple expedient of inventing a shiftlong make-work project in the main hull, and assigning to it everyone who ordinarily would be in this section.
Spock turned to the visual pickup, signaled an affirmative. The lights in the shuttlebay cut out, leaving only the small glow of a single emergency lamp in the tower's shelter. As they crossed toward the vast curve of the outer bay doors, the line of amber signals above the tower transformed one by one to blinking red, then to solid red as oxygen evacuated; a moment later the floor vibrated softly beneath their clumsy boots. In darkness before them, where the hangar doors loomed huge, a slit of more profound darkness appeared, sugared with isolated light.
Logically, Spock was aware that stepping from the thick lip of the hangar deck into space was no more dangerous than stepping from the edge of the ship's swimming pool into water. Less dangerous, in fact, because sometimes one did sink in water. At some distance to starboard the Nautilus hung in the night distance, lightlessly brooding against the smoky glow of the Crossroad. If all its ships were painted so, no wonder the rebels were called the Shadow Fleet.
To port, and above the level of the Enterprise, the Savasci lay, like the detached saucer of a starship but somewhat smaller, its metal smooth as glass, without visible plate joins and without windows, seeming to shine faintly in the reflected shimmer of the stars.
Their navigator had positioned her so that whatever serial numbers she bore would be out of sight of the Enterprise, either by visual pickup or by line-of-sight from the observation lounges. She hung like a pearlized moon, her smooth perfection the absolute antithesis of the age-scarred black junker she pursued.
Hands resting on the door metal on either side of him—the slit was less than four feet across—Spock turned his attention to the Nautilus, gauging the distance for what was, in vacuum, one single, springing jump across nearly a terrestrial mile of space, over the fathomless infinities of eternity.
To regard the literally bottomless space beyond the lip of the hangar deck as anything other than perfectly safe in weightlessness would have been illogical, so Spock did not. He knew it was impossible to fall, and stepped from the edge and into the sensation of falling with the equanimity of perfect knowledge. He braced himself against the lip of the deck like a swimmer treading water, orienting himself toward his target. The expression on the face of Dylan Arios was, of course, completely invisible behind the matte plex of his blacked-out helmet, but Spock noticed that he hesitated a long time before following into the void.
"I've given every crewman aboard orders not to address you with more than 'Good day, Domina,' and remarks about the weather in this part of space," Kirk assured McKennon, who turned back to him with a startled look and then laughed like a delighted girl. The double handful of junior officers in the Deck Five lounge did their best not to look like they were staring, but Kirk was aware of being the cynosure of a score of surreptitious eyes. McKennon would have to be blind not to miss it, too.
"And I can't even respond, 'Oh, in my time it's so much starrier,' for fear of telling someone something that will change history and make me—and the Savasci and Captain Varos—all disappear."
"Well, you haven't disappeared, so I guess you said the right thing." Kirk guided her to the section of the lounge usually kept clear for the entertainment of guests. It was well clear, now; a conversation square of slightly depressing blue-ray Starfleet couches and a low table had been enlivened by a silver-gray Starfleet-issue bowl containing some of the calmer inhabitants of the Botany section. As Kirk seated McKennon, the yeoman on shift for that purpose came over and asked what they'd like to drink.
"Sparkling water," smiled McKennon. Kirk asked for a beer. The food synthesizers on the Enterprise had the usual consistency problems with such systems, but thanks to the disreputable Yeoman Brunowski's tinkering, the quality of the beer was in general pretty high.
"Yet another temporal paradox," sighed the Domina comically. "Romulan ale hasn't yet been introduced, has it? I probably shouldn't even have asked you that, lest the information that the Romulans are going to enter the Federation one day somehow prevent that event from happening, or change how it happens…"
She shifted her position on the couch, and Kirk felt again, a little stronger, that urge of protectiveness toward her, and that sense of nostalgia. He found himself thinking how much she reminded him of Ruth, the woman he had loved at the Academy.
And he found himself, very slightly, annoyed. Did she really think he was that simple?
"I'm surprised Arios didn't try to reprogram your mixer to produce it anyway," she went on, smiling up enchantingly at the yeoman who brought them their drinks. "He has that arrogance. He'd say it was for your own good."
She sighed and shook her head just slightly. Past her, Kirk saw Mr. Sulu stand up from the table where he was having dinner and put a hand on the yeoman's arm. There were quiet questions and more stealthy glances from Uhura, Organa, and Chekov, who were with him, all clothed in off-shift gear of varying levels of informality—the prize for the evening definitely going to Chekov's startlingly embroidered Cossak shirt. They all saw that they had Kirk's attention and immediately became absorbed in their dinners, like children caught peeking through the potted palms.
Kirk mentally rolled his eyes. Everyone on the Enterprise had been consumed with curiosity about the crew of the black starship from the moment it had been sighted, and subsequent events had only fostered the growth of some of the most startling scuttlebutt Kirk had ever heard.
Kirk had refuted none of it. Not even after Maynooth and Miller had talked about the characteristics of the systems override Raksha had put through the central computer, or Yeoman Paxson had described what her lab reports had turned up about medical scans on Cooper and Sharnas. Better, he had reasoned, to let the occasional true guesses be buried under the avalanche of speculation.
But it was impossible, he knew, to keep the secret for long, There were too many clues, too many people who had worked on one aspect or another of the dilemma of the black ship. Maynooth and Miller had been ordered individually to keep their mouths shut about the incredibly complex systems that had broken the Enterprise's defense codes, but everyone in the Deck Nineteen auxiliary computer room had had a crack at getting through the locks, had seen what they were up against.
It would only be a matter of time before someone else would guess, as he had guessed, as Spock had guessed, as Lao had guessed. They had to admit Mr. Scott to the circle, and though the chief engineer could be trusted, it would only be a matter of time before one person too many had to be told. Before someone asked the question he himself was itching, fidgeting to ask: What happens to me in the future?
Do I bring the Enterprise in safe? Do I get myself—my crew—my friends—killed in month, or a year? How long do I live, and when, and under what circumstances, do I die?
The person who, somehow, started the Consilium was aboard his ship.
No wonder McKennon hadn't attacked them; wouldn't try to take Arios off by violence if there was the smallest chance that there would be a fight. Even if that single person—that unknown X—survived, and for all Kirk knew it might be some minor clerk in Stores, the death of friends, the disruption of environment, might easily influence X's decision to…do whatever it was he—or she—later did.
"Captain." McKennon's soft voice brought him back to the present. Her eyes had followed his, watching the little group at the table clearly engaged in another bout of speculation among themselves while the yeoman went to the wet bar in quest of hand-mixed drinks.
"You know—I know—that a temporal paradox must be avoided at all costs." She laid a cool little hand on his wrist. "If I know Arios, he's told you—things—about the Consilium, things about what he believes is going to be your future. Maybe things about—someone—on board your ship."
Kirk thought, Ah. He said nothing. The green eyes gazed up into his, searching his with a desperate earnestness, trying to make him understand.
"Captain," she said softly, "you must believe me. In spite of what Arios has told you, the Consilium is not some monster conspiracy that's taken over the Federation. We're an independent research and communications corporation contracted to assist with astrogation and the operation of psion jumpships. If it were not for the Consilium—actually, for the research organization that preceeded us, which was called Starfield—civilization in the Federation—in most of known space—would have been wiped out by the plague."
"I understand that," said Kirk, wondering if the pleading in her face was genuine, if his own belief was real, or if it was all something emanating from her wired and augmented brainstem as a series of submedullar cues.
"Did Arios ask you to—do anything—to some member of your crew? Or display any kind of specific interest in someone on the ship? Try to get them alone?"
Kirk was silent for a moment, thinking about temporal paradox.
About Edith Keeler, stepping off the curb into a New York street.
The person who started the Consilium…
About sheets of rain-pounded gray water, floating with crude electronics and round bubbles of melted plastic. About digitalized readouts of frantic radio calls, wondering in baffled horror what was happening to the sun. About charred corpses in a bunker, fallen where they were trying to carry all the treasures of their culture to a safety they could never reach.
Fleet-issue mind control. Holovision torture that could kill a man in agony a half-dozen times, then bring him back for more. Free-form reality that changed with the Consilium's requirements. And a space-jump technique that would take a ship from Earth to the Barrier in minutes.
There are people who don't believe they seeded Qo'nos and Khedros and Romulus with the plague…
He shook his head. Her eyes tried to read his, tried to gauge the possibility of a lie.
"Captain," she said, "I know from the records that you have experience with temporal paradox. I know—and you know—that there are so many factors that make up events, so many things that can be changed by the ripple effect. . . . Even my presence here, your knowledge, the fact that your crew is speculating, thinking, could lead to disaster that would wipe out civilization in the galaxy. And I know," she added softly, "that this can't be easy for you."
His eyes avoided hers, as if she had read the uncertainty, the indecision, the moments of despair.
"We have techniques now—I'm sorry, we will have techniques—to selectively remove memories. To take things out, to make it as if it had never been. To remove all memory of Arios, and whatever it is he's told you—to remove all memory of the Savasci—from your mind, and the minds of other crew members who might be affected. They don't take very long, but they're one-on-one techniques, and they need the cooperation and consent of the subject. I think they could help you, and others on board."
Bones, thought Kirk immediately, remembering the corroded weariness that even a few hours had etched deep into his friend's face. Lao, struggling with the massive horror of his despair. And, for other reasons, Miller and Maynooth, Spock—though he suspected Spock could be trusted to keep separate what was future knowledge—Chapel, Scotty.
The terrible indecision, the awful sense of wondering what he could do about events so far from his own reach, would be gone. And, if Arios was lying, if McKennon was telling the truth, perhaps events more terrible than the plague could be averted. All things would return to being as they had been before. It would all never have happened.
If he could be sure that was all McKennon, with her Consilium training, would go in and change.