"THEY'RE OFF." Raksha the Klingon opened her eyes briefly, her hands stilling on the deck of cards that she had been shuffling and reshuffling for half an hour. She reached to touch the wire, with its makeshift earplug cannibalized from parts of the disabled comm link, that ran from the comm, through the remains of the communicator, to her ear. "Transport circuits report nine beamed across, in two batches. Four humans and a Vulcan, first shot; three humans and an unidentified, second shot."
"Who's unidentified?" asked Thad, turning his attention from a holovid of a very bad Western. "And where's the Master?"
In the tank, a squad of Asiatic-looking cowboys fired a laser cannon at a horribly duped-in Cygnian belothmere—a creature which, though quite twelve meters high in the film, was in reality barely taller than a man's knee. Behind a foreground of a prop ranch house and a prop fence, what was quite obviously the Hindu Kush pierced the sky. The belothmere looked acutely embarrassed.
"The Master reads as unidentified on this computer because he hasn't been invented yet," Raksha replied patiently, laying out a ring of solitaire on the table before her. "Rembegil won't even be discovered until…"
She paused, bringing her hand to her ear again, her dark eyes sharpening suddenly and turning hard. Adajia hit the mute button on the remote, though Raksha could monitor the computer's small, tinny vocoder through worse distractions than Terror of The Pecos.
"That's weird."
"You talking about something the computer said, or that belothmere?" inquired Sharnas, who was lying on the couch, half-in, half-out of a subvocal mindlink with Nemo.
"Somebody's running my shield-slicer program." Raksha sat up straighter, covered her other ear. "Small keypad…deep-ops level…" She picked up the communicator, said, "Monitor and report all activity on flowline PN7995. Trace source of activity and report location."
Adajia got at once to her feet and collected a log pad, touching the button on its side to clear the games of tic-tac-toe and hangman that covered it.
"Does that mean Captain Kirk's gonna be sore?" asked Thad, but no one answered and he didn't really expect it. Sharnas, shaken free of his semi-trance, got to his feet and came over beside him, tapping the holovid off. Thad looked inquiringly at the Vulcan boy, but Sharnas shook his head.
"Haven't the faintest…"
"They're setting up a link program with the transporter," said Raksha. "Damn this vocoder, it's cutting off half the sentences every time a new command goes through."
"Who is?" asked Thad, but softly. He'd interrupted Raksha before when she was concentrating and knew not to do it again.
Sharnas shrugged. "It can't be Mr. Spock, if he's gone across to the Savasci," he said. "Logically, it has to be Miller, Maynooth, or Lao. They're the only ones who studied the program."
Thad nodded, after a moment's cogitation. "So what are they linking to the transporter?" he asked. "And why?"
"It looks like," said Raksha after a moment, her eyes closed again in concentration on the small voice speaking in her ear, "they're setting up some kind of an automatic triggering mechanism to be tripped by the transporter's return transmission. In other words, when the captain beams back over, something's going to happen."
"Oh," said Thad. He frowned. "Like what?"
The first thing James Kirk noticed when he materialized in the Savasci's transporter room was that the transporter chamber was separated from the main room by a circular, crystalline shield, with the tech's console on the other side.
Also on the other side was Domina McKennon, beautiful, fragile, and girlish-looking as ever, though she'd dressed her red hair up and wore a sable dress that completely failed to look severe. With her was a small, spare Romulan whose stance and eyes would have identified him as captain of the Savasci even if his uniform markings hadn't; a woman—Vulcan or Romulan, Kirk wasn't sure, but there was a strange glitter of madness in her dark eyes; and a fair and lanky individual whose red sleeve-bands were similar to, but more numerous than, those of the ten identical stalwarts in red-and-black uniforms ranged along the back wall of the room.
Their faces bore the marks of differing experiences; one had a small, sickle-shaped scar on his chin, another a short scar by his left eye. There were some differences in hair length, though head shaving seemed to be in favor, not only with the security guards, but with the Romulan captain as well. Some clearly spent more time in the weight-gym than others did, though all were well muscled. But the eyes were the same. Medium brown, narrow with suspicion, arrogant, and vicious.
The gray eyes of their fair-haired chief were like that, too.
Kirk wondered if this man had identical copies of him floating around the Fleet.
The transparent screen sank soundlessly into the floor. "Captain Kirk." McKennon smiled and held out her hands. "Captain Varos, of Starfleet Interceptor Savasci. Security Chief Edward Dale—Karetha, astrogation tech."
The Romulan woman inclined her head. She had looked almost normal, until she moved. But as she stepped forward she subconsciously gathered her arms up toward her chest, mantislike, and the scarred hands with their huge, curved fingernails spread a little in a fashion horribly reminiscent of the videos Kirk had seen of the yagghorth, backed and hissing in the flames. The way her head swayed, the slump of her back and shoulders—Dear God, how long has she been mindlinked to the yagghorth who is her empath partner? Is that what it does to everyone?
He felt a sick qualm of shock at the thought that one day—if he lived that long—Sharnas would move like that, look like that, too.
She looked like a human in her sixties, though given the longevity of the Vulcanoid races was probably much older. Her black hair, combed and braided into a knot the size of a man's two fists, was heavily shot with gray.
She held out her hand.
Kirk, mindful of the instructions Arios had given him, did not introduce either Mr. Spock or Mr. Scott. No one, not even McKennon, who had met them before and had reason to remember Spock, seemed to notice.
"Captain Kirk." Captain Varos extended his hand. He looked to be in his forties, older than Spock, certainly, though again, with a Vulcanoid it was difficult to tell. "It is an honor and a privilege to meet you."
"I only regret that it has to be under such unpleasant circumstances," said McKennon, stepping close. Kirk found it suddenly very difficult to look at the Romulan empath, difficult, almost, to remember that she was among the party as they left the transporter room, entered the curving, claustrophobically narrow corridor outside. Floor, walls, and ceiling were all covered with a kind of fiber, like spongy carpeting. Though it gave a different tread to his boots, Kirk could not see that it affected the opening of the oddly narrow doors.
"You must admit," the Domina added, seeing Kirk raise his brows, "that your main goal in coming on board was to see if Dylan Arios was telling the truth. Oh, come, Captain…" Her laughter brought to mind kites and picnics and summer days. "You don't think I have enough experience of the man to know that even as a prisoner, he'll have been telling you about how the Consilium has Starfleet in its pocket and has made lackeys of the Federation government? At least that was his story when last I heard. He may have come up with a new reason since then for raising a private army."
Captain Varos said, "I assure you, Captain, Starfleet takes its orders from no one but the Federation Council, as it always has." In his sloe-black eyes there was no deception, no nervousness. From his few encounters with Romulans he knew their culture prized honesty above honor, life, or any amount of social graces.
Or at least it had, almost three hundred years before this man's birth.
"Then who are the Shadow Fleet?" he asked.
Behind them, Security Chief Dale sniffed with laughter. "Cavalry and canvas," he said, and Kirk glanced back at Varos for confirmation.
"In a way, yes." The Romulan captain did not smile, but there was a sardonic light in his eyes. "They're the clippership captains in your own world, Captain, who refused to set foot on a steam-powered vessel; the auto drivers in mine who boycotted bullet trams because they were nuclear-powered. Mixed with a smattering of those in both our worlds who tore out all the light sockets in their houses because they believed that the government could listen to them through electrical appliances. Spinal implants weren't designed to limit personal freedom or to allow the Consilium to take over the galaxy, you know. Civilians don't have them at all, except in certain jobs. They're to increase a ship's efficiency, pure and simple. They enable us to travel unheard-of distances, literally in the blink of an eye."
Kirk glanced sidelong, to where the empath Karetha was swinging her head nervously from side to side, her wrists still carried slightly raised before her. There was nothing human in her stance, her walk, at all. He looked back at the Romulan captain. Where the rucked trough of scar tissue gouged the back of Arios's neck, of Cooper's, of Sharnas's, was only smooth skin, not even marked with the tiny telltale flaws of surgical scars.
He'd have to tell Bones they'd either eliminated cutting altogether or had perfected the renewal of skin. In any case the surgery would have been a long time ago.
"If I'm going into combat," added Security Chief Dale, "and I'm given a choice of whether I want to serve officers who are wired—who can communicate among themselves and their empaths—or officers who're trying to do it by subspace and comm link, believe me, I know which league I want to be fighting in."
Spock raised a protesting eyebrow but said nothing.
"As I told you over that lovely mineral water on the Enterprise," said McKennon gaily, "I'm on board purely in an advisory capacity. Because Dylan Arios is a rebel Consiliar Master, and likely to use his powers against you; and because the Consilium wishes some questions answered about the methods of the rebellion itself."
Kirk wondered if having "some questions answered" involved the horrors of holo torture—unending and lethally real—which Cooper had described.
"Now, come," she went on. "It has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the rebellion, but purely as a commander I'm sure you'll be interested in the bridge. . . ."
Kirk followed. Sometime later he remembered to glance back at his own party, shocked at himself that he had completely forgotten to maneuver a situation in which Spock, Scotty, and Arios could discreetly slip away. It had been, literally, twenty minutes since he'd even remembered that they were there.
And they were gone, of course.
"It all still works on matter-antimatter flux." Arios neat-handedly put finishing touches on taping up the unconscious engineer's hands, mouth, and eyelids while Mr. Scott lovingly removed the hatch cover and contemplated the main power-conversion stem of the Savasci's engines. "They finally cracked the problem of how to carry spare dilithium crystals about twenty years before the psion-jump drive was perfected, but as you can see, the warp engine is only a kind of auxiliary for emergency use. You want to pull that coil there immediately. It's the modulator that lets the empath hook the yagghorth through to the ship for the jump."
"Ach," said Mr. Scott. "Can't have 'em showing up ahead of you at the Anomaly, now, can we? Still," he added, sitting back on his heels to consider the impulse drive while Arios stowed the Savasci's engineer in an inconspicuous locker, "it's such a beauty it's a shame to lay tool to her. Ye can't just cut her out by the computer, Mr. Spock?"
"With the existing shielding on the baseline operations programs," replied the Vulcan, glancing repeatedly from the tricorder's small screen to the screen of the engine-room terminal that he'd cross-wired in, "it's not something I would care to try."
He slipped one of Raksha's preset wafers into the tricorder and tapped through a code; a gratifying stream of numbers flowed down the screen, indicating that, indeed, the Savasci's big cargo shuttle was being programmed for automatic launch, disengage, flight, and landing on the lush and pleasant world of Brigadoon. According to the screen of the engine-room terminal, none of the information was passing through to the ship's main computer, and Spock rather hesitantly tapped through a disconnect signal when the programming was done, in case Savasci's computer had some kind of automatic cycle-and-backup mode, as many ships' computers did.
As Dylan Arios closed his eyes and entered a light trance of listening, Spock inserted the wafer containing Raksha's slicer program and started picking his way through the mazes of guards and locks to first disable the tractor beams, then remove the shielding by which matter-transmission beams could be turned back, all the while reassuring the computer itself—and anyone who might have been monitoring its operations—that nothing whatsoever was going on. It was a program Raksha described as the nobody-here-but-us-chickens function, though the connection between multilevel secondary directory installation and low-cholesterol sources of animal protein escaped him.
It had been, so far—even without the interruption whose statistical likelihood increased geometrically every few minutes—a most interesting experience.
Spock's quick hearing picked up the distant mush of boots in the spongy flooring of the corridor outside; at the same time Arios opened his eyes, raised his head sharply. He still looked slightly unfocused, as he had when they'd slipped away from the security officers; McKennon, absorbed in charming the captain, had not even noticed when they'd slowed their pace. Neither had the hard-faced, identical Security Specials; it was as if they had become, if not invisible, at least very, very inconspicuous.
In the corridor, boots halted. Voices greeted one another, the idle and unnecessary social contact forms of people who had nothing much to say to one another—the man could certainly have punched in a data reading from his own workstation had he truly wanted to know how things were in holo—but wish to establish the fact that they have spoken to one another that day. Two hundred and seventy-nine years had, evidently, not altered that. Early in the voyage of the Enterprise Spock had asked Lieutenant Uhura about this custom of "chitchat" and still did not understand it fully. Did Mr. Sulu, or Mr. Chekov, whose lives he had saved upon repeated occasions, actually believe that he, Mr. Spock, had forgotten that relations between them were cordial if he neglected to speak to them every time they came into proximity after absence?
Spock's glance crossed Arios's, then returned to the door. The Master's dyed brows quirked together; then his eyes slid closed again. Outside, one of the voices said, "Damn!"
"What?"
"I was supposed to meet Cane-Twelve for coffee!"
"Oh." The woman sounded just slightly miffed. Why, Spock could not determine, for she had not been insulted.
"Want to come?"
The footfalls retreated.
"Is this common to your people?" Spock asked, very softly, his eyes still tracking the flow of the numbers on the tricorder. "This ability to turn minds aside?"
"I think so," said Arios, equally low. "I never lived on Giliaren itself, mind you. Rembegil civilization—what's the polite phrase?—didn't survive contact with the Federation. The Consilium kept a colony of us going for about seventy-five years, like they intend to keep the Yoons—they kept an isolated colony of Vulcans, too. We—the Rembegils—had the highest psionic index, but as I said, the ones they tried to make into empaths died during first contact with the yagghorth. I don't look a whole lot like an authentic Rembegil, but they raised me till I was twelve or thirteen."
He glanced over at Mr. Scott, visible only as a slice of scarlet shirt through the hatchway into the impulse engine, then looked back at the outer door. Listening carefully, Spock could hear no one's approach; no one, in fact, anywhere near the impulse chamber.
He wondered how Vulcans and Romulans stood even two-week missions with so much ambient noise.
"They were pretty fragile, physically and mentally. I think they developed psi powers just to compete with whatever was big and mean and stupid in the original ecosystem, whatever that was; almost no records were kept. The Federation didn't have the funds to protect endangered civilizations like you do these days, after the plague. To my knowledge there wasn't even the equivalent of those boxes they're going to beam on board the shuttle in flight …you did program in the pause at the reception point, didn't you?"
Spock nodded.
"I don't even know if there are any Rembegil left in the colony, or just frozen samples in the gene banks. But those don't do the Consilium much good, because all the techniques of teaching, all the exercises and the culture to develop the psi skills, are lost now. That it?"
Scott emerged from the hatch and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Mr. Spock, who had switched the tricorder over to data-absorption mode and was rapidly zip-copying the entire contents of the Savasci's central computer for Raksha's use and analysis later, reluctantly disengaged.
There was now not a moment to be lost.
Yeoman Wein and Ensign Giacomo from Central Computer reached the bridge at the same time, the redshirt standing aside to let the thin young woman in her blue tunic step out of the turbolift ahead of him. Mr. Sulu looked up from his console, where a digital readout of the relative positions of the Enterprise, Savasci, and Nautilus hung in black space wreathed in a galaxy of glowing green numbers. The main viewscreen showed the real-time view of the faintly shining disk of the Savasci hanging in darkness above them and to starboard, like a luminous moon-jellyfish, the barely visible shadow of the Nautilus below and to port. Another screen depicted the three ships in a row against the screen of stars, the ghostly blue shape of the Crossroad like a blowing curtain of gauze. Half a dozen people had made excuses to come onto the bridge and quiz Mahase on the unknown ship's ID codes, and received only her impassive reply that they were classified and she, sworn to silence.
"Mr. Sulu, I thought I'd better come up in person to tell you this," said Giacomo softly. "I just got a weird blip in the readings on the central computer, the same kind we got just before the lights went out." She glanced over at Wein, knowing he was in charge of guarding their guests, then at the screen, which showed a closer view of the Nautilus itself, lightless as a ghost ship riding at anchor in eternal night. "It went away immediately, but …"
"Raksha told me to come up to you and report," said Wein, looking down at the helmsman. "She says she's picked up evidence that someone's gotten into the computer with her slicer program."
"How would she know that?" asked Sulu. "They don't have computer equipment."
"I guess they…uh…got hold of a communicator and rigged a voice breakthrough from that," said Wein, who had noticed some time ago that his communicator was missing but hadn't connected the loss with his charges. "She offered to surrender the communicator but said she was using it to track the interference. She says whoever it is has done a cut-in on the transporter ops."
Sulu muttered a reference to turtle eggs in Tagalog, then said, "Giacomo, get down to the physics lab and see if Dr. Maynooth is there. Wein, check Engineering for Miller. If he's not there check in the secondary hull, but don't use the comm link. Signal me on your communicator instead. Dawe, find out from Mr. Kyle if Lao ever turned up at the transporter room or if he's still missing, and if he is, get DeSalle to put out a search for him… quietly. Nothing over the comm link. Lieutenant Mahase, I'll be with our guests on Deck Four."
The auxiliary bridge at the fore part of the engineering hull had exactly the same dimensions as the main bridge up in the saucer; the same stations and capabilities; the same layout. Duplicate sets of controls linked each console with Engineering, Phasers, Shields, Torpedoes. In the Academy simulator, and later on the Enterprise itself, Lao had worked them all. He knew exactly which wires to cut, which bundles to isolate and relink with bridges so that no telltale blips would show up on the ship's self-regulating system. In the past few hours since the close of the briefing, he'd pulled the schematics files and studied them, even as he'd pulled the files on the precise attachments of the main bridge to this one. Since he was not an engineer, but a computer tech, it required intense concentration to do the job undetected by the ship's computer, even after he'd inserted all the careful baffle programs he'd taken or inferred from the backup recordings of Raksha's files.
Yet he knew he'd do it. He felt the strange, cold lightness he felt sometimes in kata training, or in sparring with Sulu—the sense of being unable to go amiss. This had to work, because it was the only chance he would get.
The only chance to stop the Consilium.
The only chance to save the Federation, and the world he knew, he wanted so desperately to believe in.
And he knew, in some isolated corner of his soul, that only by focusing his mind absolutely into the single cutting laser-point of what he was doing, could he accomplish this salvation.
His hands began to shake again with fatigue. He stopped them.
What he was doing took courage, and it took concentration. Through his exhaustion, he was well aware of this. He suspected that Kirk would approve, though of course his position as captain precluded him from even thinking of this obvious solution. He knew Arios would even assist him, if he had a chance. But it was a task that ultimately had to be done alone. By someone with sufficient courage. And sufficient skill.
Bridging-clips on green wire of the power bundle leading to the deflector pulse amplifiers; cut the wire; reattach. Bridging-clips on the wire to the main phasers…this bundle here, red wire…reattach. He tried to guess how much time had passed and couldn't, couldn't take his mind from his task. It couldn't be long, though with concentration, time seemed to stand still.
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains … Who had said that? Bridging-clips on the yellow wire in the bundle along the back bulkhead under the gunner's console, that controlled the portside phasers, cut…no, check toggle…had he remembered to check the toggle on the transport connector? And there was something else he'd forgotten. . . .
A small alarm flag flared in the back of his mind but he repressed it, not daring to take his concentration off what he was doing. When he was done under here, he'd…he'd…
He remembered what he'd forgotten to do—which was lock the doors of the auxiliary bridge behind him—in the same moment that those doors swished softly open, and a woman's deep voice said doubtfully, "Zhiming?"
"Here." Arios's hands ran lightly along the edges of the door on the third level below the bridge, portside. Spock had been fascinated by the strange layout of the vessel, the oddly uneven spacing of decks and halls, the claustrophobic closeness of the walls. Even more fascinated by Arios's ability to keep the area around himself clear. Three or four times between Engineering and this corridor of guarded holding cells—the guards were sleeping peacefully in the first of them after attempting to give directions to Arios while Spock stepped around behind them—he had heard footsteps approaching in the corridors, and Arios had…done whatever it was that Arios did.
Every time, Spock had heard the footfalls hesitate, as if the approaching crew member had suddenly remembered something urgent, then retreat rapidly in the opposite direction.
What was it Uhura sometimes said? Nice work if you can get it.
An evolutionary plus for a fragile race of "glass fairies" if Spock had ever seen one.
The lock opened to the touch of Arios's hand—presumably coded to a Consiliar Master.
Cold light … cold walls … A flood of recognition washed over him, disorienting and a little alarming. A terrible familiarity, a sense of having been in this room before.
A sense, enormously strong, of having met the fat little toadlike creature standing now before him, stepping out from the midst of a clustered group of its fellow Yoons, blinking up at him with enormous, copper-colored eyes.
And of course, Spock reflected, he had. He knew this person, with startling intimacy in some ways: a long life of sorrow and joy, richly lived; scholarship, loving, delight in a wide circle of friends. He just didn't know his name.
The Yoon, he could see, knew him.
The Yoon made a gesture of raising his four hands—probably to show them empty—and warbled a ceremonious oratorio of whistles and trills. Spock, Arios, and Mr. Scott immediately repeated the gesture, and the Yoon toddled to a low table, on which rested a number of small brass disks. Down on the planet, the charring heat of the Götterdämmerung had seared away all but the naked skin of the dead; Spock was interested to see that the Yoons were covered in long, coarse, silky fur, predominantly green or green-and-orange, though this Yoon, who approached him holding out a disk in its three-fingered hand, was bright yellow, tabbied with an intricate pattern of purple and blue. The fur feathered on the limbs, spread into splendid manes around heads and shoulders; loose-fitting robes, intricately decorated and lavish with pockets, added to the colors.
The fat yellow Yoon—the old man, the grandfather who had entered his mind, who had spoken through him to Arios—held out the disk again, insistent. Spock could not help observing that a long stripe of mane had been shaven from the back of the Yoon's neck.
He had already been wired.
Impatient, the Yoon took his hand—fingers hairless and mildly warm, after the iciness of human touch—and reached up to press the brass disk onto Spock's tunic just over the collarbone. Spock saw that a similar disk decorated the Yoon's robe.
The Yoon spoke again, and this time, in addition to the sweet alto trilling, Spock heard words, spoken very soft and clear, from the disk on his shoulder.
"You are he in whose mind I spoke," said the Yoon. "And he…" He turned, to regard Arios with those enormous, copper-colored eyes, their pleats of green widening and contracting. "He was there with you. He said you would come, to help us leave this place. Is this true?"
"It is true," said Spock. "I am Spock, of the world of Vulcan; this man is Dylan Arios, captain of a starship; and Scott, the engineer of yet another starship. I do not know if you can understand this, or comprehend what has happened to your world…"
"We know that our world was destroyed," said the Yoon, and for a moment, his eyes went bleak. "We know that there is no going back. The Domina explained to us all that she had saved us, and would take us to a place where we would be free to live. But then she took a number of us away—the savants, the sages, the healers—and put us to sleep, and when we woke there were cold metal wires within us, and strange voices coming out of them, whispering quite preposterous things."
He nodded toward Arios again. "According to this…this whispering… he is the one who caused the sun to erupt. But I have seen the inside of his mind. I saw no evil in him."
"This Domina," said another Yoon, mottled green and orange, with long black streaks in her mane, "she practices too much the…" Her word was a single looping whistle, but after a momentary lag the translator registered, "injecting the perfume into rotten fruit to sell it," and then hurried to catch up, "but you can see the rot in the pit of her."
The old yellow grandfather nodded. "I am called Cymris Darthanian," he said. "My granddaughter, Iriane, who spoke to your young friend, she is here somewhere. . . ." He looked around, and at his words a very much smaller Yoon female, bright green ring-straked with paler jade, slipped back through the outer door from where she had been in the corridor outside.
"Grandfather, if we're going to get out of here…"
She paused, turned considering amber eyes on Spock and Arios.
"It is they," she said. "Those who said they would take us out of here. Is this, indeed, what you will do?"
"It is why we came. We…" Spock halted, suddenly listening; aware, far off, of the drumming of feet.
He raised one eyebrow. "It appears," he said, "that we have been detected, and Security seems to be on its way."