THE FIRST THING Yeoman Wein of Security knew about Dylan Arios's escape from the brig some eighteen hours later was when he heard, in the corridor behind him, the hissing breath as one of the security doors slipped shut. Startled, Wein sprang to his feet. He was conscious that he'd drifted into momentary reverie triggered by the sight of the lovely Yeoman Shimada turning the corner into the Security lounge a few minutes before, but knew his mental abstraction hadn't lasted long. Besides, how on earth could Arios have escaped and where could he have gone?
The brig corridor—at whose head the guard had his small desk—was thirty meters long and bare of cover, curved just slightly with the hull but not so as to provide any place that was out of the desk guard's line of sight. Wein went to check the first door opposite him. Through the crystal-hard plex of the door he saw the Klingon Raksha inspecting the cell visicom: an independent unit unattached to the central computer, for obvious reasons.
The second cell, in which Arios had been incarcerated, was empty under the soft white glare of its floodlights, save for something that gleamed on the floor just to the left of the narrow bed.
With a startled curse, Wein hit the door combination and strode in.
When he came to in sickbay afterward, Wein admitted he should have punched the Backup button at his desk first, then gone into the cell to check how Arios had escaped and what it was that he'd left on the floor. Wein had no explanation for why he hadn't noticed that Arios had not, in fact, left the cell; at least, he hadn't left it at that point. In fact, Arios did leave the cell within moments of Wein's opening the door, just as soon as he'd manhandled the security officer's unconscious body onto the bed and covered him with the light blanket, relieving him in the process of his phaser.
There was, of course, no small, shining object on the floor, nor had there ever been.
"ChadHom…" Arios pressed up against the communications grille of the security cell, whispered Raksha's pet name even as he was pulling the faceplate off the touchpad. He'd already raided the drawer of Wein's desk for a cable, which he hooked into the terminal. Through the hard crystal of the door he saw her step close.
"Try IMP/RAN/NUM," she breathed. "And don't call me chadHom."
Arios stepped back to the terminal, rapped out the commands quickly, shook his head.
"IMP/RAN/NET."
Another blank, and Raksha muttered, "Animals copulating all over the place," in Klingon. She thought a moment, then said, "NET/TEST."
The door hissed open.
"I told you it was magic," said Arios, as Raksha strode to the terminal, ripped free the cable, and began rapping out swift strings of commands. "All you've got to do is say the right spell."
"Remind me to explain the extent of your errors the next time we have three uninterrupted days." The black stormcloud of her hair fell forward over her face as she worked, big hands pecking swiftly, delicately over the keys. Arios took two steps down the corridor, then stepped back to gather her hair into his two hands and bend to kiss the nape of her neck.
"The time after that," he suggested, and she looked back and up at him, into eyes bright as sunlight laughing through leaves. Her own smile turned her face briefly beautiful, and briefly young.
Then he strode off down the corridor, slapping through the code on Thad and Adajia's cell—which Raksha had gotten out of the computer moments before—while the Klingon pulled tight the belt on her doublet and shoved into the resulting pouch not only the cable, but every tool and piece of replacement hardware in the desk drawer. Adajia leaped up from the floor where she'd been sitting—having learned the uses of chairs only recently and not very completely—as the door slid open, and Thad almost flung himself into Arios's arms with a hug of desperate relief. Neither spoke, both having a healthy distrust of hidden microphones; by the time they reached the door of the brig corridor itself Raksha had cross-coupled the programming on the visual pickup to display its own loop, and the four slipped past the door of the Security messroom—contrary to Wein's belief, quite empty—and around the corner to an inspection corridor that would lead, eventually, to Engineering and its attendant shops.
Dr. McCoy stood for a long time looking from his two charges—prone, unconscious, and still naked to the waist from his examination, on the dark plastette of the diagnostic beds—to the bright-colored rectangles of the schematic display, which glowed like the windows of some bizarre cathedral on the screens beside each bed.
He had, quite literally, never seen anything like it in his life.
Under the burn dressing, Phil Cooper's ribs rose and fell gently with the rhythm of his breathing. Eighteen hours of rest and semisedation had stabilized his readings considerably, and his system was starting to respond to the hyperena and other metabolic accelerators. Sharnas T'Gai Khir still barely seemed to live at all. Only the steady movement of peaks and valleys of the brain-wave and heartbeat monitors showed that the boy was not, in fact, the corpse that he looked. His long hair had been brushed aside, and the pattern of messy olive green scars, like the spoor of incompetent butchery, ran from between his shoulder blades up to the base of his skull. Only when studied closely did the delicacy of the technique reveal itself, the sureness with which the incisions followed the nerves themselves. Arios, if it was he who had done this, had known exactly what it was he was looking for and where to look for it…whatever it was.
According to the delta and IP schematics, the wiring in both men extended beyond the cut zone, merging with breathtaking imperceptibility into the spinal nerves themselves. Even after nearly a day of continuous study, McCoy wasn't certain how to enter his observations in his log.
God knew what it was for.
It's Fleet issue, Cooper had said, and the weariness, the resignation, in his voice had shocked the doctor almost more than the implications of the implants themselves. The unspoken, Oh, that stuff.
You guessed it. You've seen it before. Therefore, you should know who I am.
According to his tricorder readings, taken during the morning's medical exams in the brig, Arios was also heavily wired—and scarred along the back of the neck—and there were some kind of implants in Thad's brain as well.
Some forms of retardation, McCoy knew, were correctable by implant. But the implants themselves were exterior, smooth metal casings several centimeters thick and about a third the area of a man's palm. The technology required to install an interior implant, much less communicate with it, would be extraordinarily advanced. In any case, it didn't seem to have eliminated Thad's condition, though it may have allieviated it—if that's what it was for.
McCoy wasn't entirely sure of that.
The door shut behind him and he returned to his office, where copies of the IPs he'd taken last night and today lay on his desk along with every kind of analysis and schematic he could come up with regarding Arios's physiology, DNA, and probable ancestry.
Those, too, were deeply disquieting in their implications.
"Journal digest," he said to the computer, settling into his chair and reaching for that morning's now-cold coffee.
The screen brightened at the sound of his voice, a plain, blank silver, unbesmirched by letter or line.
"Journal digest," repeated McCoy irritably, glancing at the chronometer. Lags occurred seldom, and only at times of absolute peak use, usually two to three hours into the first two shifts.
It was an hour from the end of the first shift. Everybody would be closing down recreational readers or games now, or gearing workstations over to evening shift. There should be no problem.
"I'm sorry," said the computer. "Please repeat request."
McCoy repeated himself, and the screen blossomed with the red and blue lettering of the index of journal digests. "Give me anything you've got on nanosurgical neurology over the last three Standard months," said McCoy, realizing despairingly how long it had been since he'd had time to thoroughly scan the digests, let alone study the articles themselves.
During his first year on the Enterprise McCoy had managed to keep up with them fairly well, as the computer absorbed the stacked and zipped transmissions every time they made port at a starbase and everyone read through the journals and digests at their leisure in between times. But—and McCoy was aware that Chapel, Paxson, and the techs had this problem, too—during the months and years of the starship's voyage, so much new information came in from the exploration of new civilizations, new biospheres, that had to be written up, studied, catalogued, transmitted, that current research by others tended to slip more and more by the board.
Given a choice between reading about someone else's research on genetic manipulation, or artificial optics, or improvements in warp drive physics, and studying a tankful of Kurlanian seedfish, or the fossilized remains of an Elthonian android's eye, McCoy knew what choice he'd make. And had made, repeatedly, over the past four years.
There were only so many hours in a day.
In three months the Enterprise would be returning to Earth. Then he'd be faced with the real decision: to re-up for another five-year mission, or to settle down at one of the major universities for the years it would take to analyze and study all that he'd gathered.
He found he didn't like to think about what settling down would mean.
Almost without thinking, he said "Come" to Chapel's signal; the tall woman stood behind his chair, looking over his shoulder at the listing of articles in the digest index. She held a log pad cradled in one elbow, with her own copies of the schematics. He hadn't seen her so fascinated, and so troubled, by a problem in years.
"It might be something so new that it isn't in the journals yet," she surmised, after it became clear to them both that no digest mentioned anything about radically new techniques of central nervous system augmentation, or neurological control, or whatever it was. "And it might be classified, if Starfleet is behind it."
She hesitated a moment, then asked, "That couldn't be true, could it?"
McCoy looked up at her, startled.
"Roger…" She brought out the name of her dead lover and mentor—"the Pasteur of archaeological medicine," he'd been called on the infovids, the man for whose sake she'd given up her own career in biomedicine—uncertainly, syllables she hadn't spoken since that weird, terrible, claustrophobic confrontation with what was left of the man on Exo III.
"Roger told me once about…I don't know, what he called 'conspiracies' in Starfleet. People who'd take any development, any knowledge, no matter how good or lifesaving it was in itself—and use it to add to their own power. I never knew how much of that to believe." Her quick, rueful grin vanished as swiftly as it appeared.
"At the time it always seemed to be conspiracies headed by other scientists to take away credit from Roger's discoveries. But could there be . . . some kind of conspiracy to establish neurological control over members of Starfleet?"
She sounded troubled, as well she might, thought McCoy. For four years Starfleet had been her refuge, her home, the only place she had left to go after Roger's death.
McCoy, who had been in a similar position after his own divorce and the collapse of his life, knew exactly how she felt.
"If it were, Chris…" McCoy shook his head, touched the screen-through key. "Technology like that would show up somewhere. It would leave tracks. Not the neural wiring itself, but the manufacture of the wire, the research and development that created it, if it is wire. Even a conspiracy couldn't cover that. And it's not reading like any metal I've ever seen on the IPs. You'd see improvements in hologame design, in security system monitoring, in autocleaning of microducts. Something. Somebody didn't carve that hardware out of a bar of soap. Whoever's selling nonferrous nanotechnology that fine, and that efficient, to Starfleet would be selling it elsewhere, for other purposes. Analysis of the wiring itself shows it's literally growing, remaking itself out of minerals in the blood. . . ."
"Please repeat request," said the computer.
"What the hell's the matter with this thing today?" muttered McCoy.
"Please clarify question."
"I wasn't talking to you," he snapped. "Just give me listings on nanosurgical neurology for the past three Standard months. . . ."
After that, the computer appeared to behave, and McCoy—taken up with the problem of where Starfleet might have gotten the wiring from in the first place, much less why it had done what Phil Cooper claimed it had done—thought nothing further of it.
"I can't believe these safeguards." Raksha tapped neatly through the two double-wired keyboards in the safety of the Number 7-3 storage hold, which backed onto the branch line that fed the computers of the portside engineering workrooms. "Hasn't anybody told these people that you don't keep ferrets out of a building by lowering a portcullis?"
"Maybe it's a trap?" suggested Adajia, looking up from the weapon she was making out of engine tape, a small pry bar, and spare wire-stripper blades she'd found in a workbench drawer.
"I didn't know they allowed ferrets on starships," said Thad worriedly. "The Consilium wouldn't let us have cats in our quarters at the Institute. I thought that was mean of them."
"It was mean of them," agreed Adajia. "The Consilium are mean people, Thaddy. Almost as mean as Klingons."
"Naah." Arios emerged from a small access hatch in the wall, pin welder in one hand and a straggling bundle of spare wire wound like a stole around his shoulders. A night's sleep and a couple of meals had taken the tremor out of his hands, but he still looked close to spent. "Nobody's as mean as a Klingon."
"You're straight on course about that, puq," agreed Raksha mildly.
"I'm convinced," said the Master, crossing to Raksha and considering the pin welder he held in his hand. "This really is the Enterprise. With that wiring it couldn't be anything else."
"We're just about done here." Raksha put the final touches to her codes, began disconnecting the keyboards. "Where's the most inconspicuous plexus on the main trunk for doors, lights, and gravity control?"
"Bowling alley," said Arios. "Deck Twenty. We can get there through the central dorsal vents."
"What's a bowling alley?" inquired the Orion, testing the balance of the quite savage-looking weapon she had made, then spinning it lightly around the sides of her hand.
Arios explained, "You balance pieces of high-impact plastic up on end and then try to knock them down from fifty feet away by rolling a ball at them."
"What if you can't get them to balance?" asked Thad, still worried, and Adajia said, "The Federation conquers the galaxy, crosses the stars, and fights the Romulans to a standstill, and they occupy themselves with that in their spare time?" Her earrings glittered as she tossed back her hair.
Arios grinned, shoving wires in his pockets. "The bent area on the Nautilus used to be the bowling alley," he said, irony bright in his green eyes. "But on this ship, it should be perfectly safe."
"Please repeat request."
Spock glanced from the starfield analysis hardcopy he was studying with a frown. "High-band scan results of sensor readings on the Nautilus, broken down in incremental bandwidths." He had always considered the whole voder-activated command system on the computer inadequate to the needs of any civilized intelligence, and this afternoon's particularly bad performance seemed to him typical of the kind of problems that could evolve in such a system. Humans, he reflected, seemed willing to go to almost any lengths to avoid specifics in their dealings either with one another or with machines. . . .
His quick ears picked up a familiar tread slowing down outside his door, and the word "Come" was out of his mouth almost before the chime sounded. "Captain," he greeted his friend.
"What've you got?"
The lab-quality display screen above Spock's desk had already manifested a proof sheet of sensor schematics, augmented where possible to adapt to the black ship's shields. Captain Kirk folded his arms and considered the images over his first officer's shoulder, noting differences between the designs of the Enterprise and the Nautilus that had been less obvious through the viewscreens against the blackness of space.
"Unless I'm mistaken," he said softly, "I've seen that shorter hull proportion on the very newest designs, stuff that isn't even off the drawing boards yet. But that's years' worth of pitting on that thing—decades' worth. Even on the places where the saucer's been repaired."
He was silent for a time, studying the repeated images: green shadows on one outline, yellow on another, depending on what the sensors were picking up. Several of the schematics showed no more than the bare, pale blue skeleton of the ship itself, either because the sensors found nothing of what they sought, or because that oddly massive shielding cut out all trace of certain bandwidths.
The Enterprise had looked like that, he thought, to all those who had studied her—and humans—for the first time.
The first Federation starship, shaped like a massive globe. The vicious but ultimately communicable Gorns. The Romulans, playing their silent game of cloaked chess.
To seek out new life, and new civilization, thought Kirk. And what had that new civilization thought, in all these five years, about being sought out?
"That's a lot of ambient heat they've got in the nacelles," he remarked at last. "Even given the fact they blew their coolant system."
"The pattern is a common one for derelicts in which life-support remains operant." Spock touched through a series of commands, and that particular schematic, with its cloudy patterns of yellow in some unexpected areas, enlarged itself to take up most of the center of the screen. Another chain of finger touches—Spock did it without even looking at the keyboard: "for swank," Kirk could almost hear McCoy saying—took the schematic forward through time, showing no change in the heat distribution.
"Fungus, mostly," said the Vulcan. "Vescens ceolli or zicreedens. It generally indicates that areas of the ship have been out of use for two years or more. This was the reading I wished you to see."
Another schematic enlarged. Red pixels shifted as the computer framed the image forward through time. Kirk's mind snapped back from the puzzle of the huge amounts of yellow on the preceeding diagram to the changing pattern of the red on the current one.
"What is that?"
"Mu-spectrum energy, Captain." Spock settled back in his chair, folded his arms, and tilted his head a little to one side. "Neither light nor heat, though some species seem able to detect it as color, others as sound. It is, as you noted earlier, characteristic of the Turtledove Anomalies."
Kirk watched the zones of red slowly broaden through the engineering hull and the nacelles, then contract. Broaden and contract. Broaden and contract, like the bloody beating of an alien heart. "Is that surge effect mechanical?"
He didn't know why he knew that the answer to that question was no. Certainly Spock would say that he had insufficient data.
But for a long time the Vulcan did not reply at all.
Kirk let the silence run, sink. Spock's hesitation to answer was significant. Before them the color spread, shrank; spread, shrank.
"Is that real-time forwarding?"
"Affirmative. You will observe there appears to be no time lag."
Kirk nodded. The bloom started in the nacelles at the exact moment it began in the engines. "Can you get me a finer time breakdown on that?"
"Time increment to point five," instructed Spock. "Two-second freeze." But his hand strayed toward the keyboard as if subconsciously ready to back up with more specific instructions.
They studied the slow blink of the schematic. Kirk thought about the thin, green-haired young man who had lied so calmly to him, prisoned behind the crystalplex doors of the brig. The Klingon woman with her watchful eyes and her air of having seen everything before. Don't go on board the Nautilus without me or Raksha with you.
Booby traps, Raksha had said. DeSalle had produced reports and examples of lethal sheaves of them.
He wondered if he was looking at one now, or at something else.
"Increment to point one," said Kirk.
The color still started at exactly the same moment.
"That's a hell of a synchronization."
But it wasn't, he thought. The energy in the engine deck was the source of the energy in the nacelles. He didn't understand why he was so sure of that.
"Any theory?"
"Negative, Captain."
"But something's bothering you."
Spock looked up at him in surprise. "It is a capital mistake to theorize ahead of one's data," he said. "At the moment, the data is insufficient and the patterns apparently contradictory."
"Subliminal clues are data, too." In four years, nine months of dealing with his literal-minded science officer, Kirk had learned to avoid the word hunch. "Do you have the—illogical—feeling that the source of that energy is organic?"
Their eyes met. Spock's dark gaze was usually inscrutable, but far in the back of it, Kirk could see the Vulcan adding the fact of Kirk's conviction—equally baseless and illogical—to the fact of his own.
Then the screen before them flickered and blanked, like a window whose view has suddenly been jerked far away into a single spot of fading brightness. The bland contralto voice of the computer said, "Please repeat request."
Spock's eyes sharpened and hardened as he swung his head around to suspiciously regard the screen.
During the last hour of any shift, the bowling alley on Deck Twenty invariably closed down. The cleaning of the snack bar and hologames area, and the waxing of the lanes, could have been easily done without completely closing the place, as during that last hour even such diehard bowlers as Jefferson and the two Adamses—the cargo chief and his brother in Astrophys—went to shower, eat, and change their shoes preparatory to going on shift. But Lieutenant Mbu was fond of neat edges and routine, and so she had the place closed. She would reset and check the line of hologame terminals, adding up the totals played to make sure that those which had fallen from popularity were replaced, and then retire to her office to write up shift logs and time-and-motion analyses for the massive study she was doing on recreational patterns in Starfleet, leaving Yeoman Effinger to check the pin setters and wax the lanes.
The pin setters, of course, had self-calibrating and self-correcting modules, and the Enterprise bowling alley possessed two very efficient Dack and Homilie waxers—the lanes being highest quality Martian quasi oak and cared for old-style—but Effinger, though he had no mistrust of machinery per se, did not trust it one hundred percent. Digital settings were accurate to program, but they lacked, in his opinion, the fineness of human artistic judgment. It was his custom to tinker with the setters manually two or three times a week, to perfect tolerances too delicate for the self-correct modules to read, and when he followed the waxers onto the lanes—in his stocking feet, naturally—he would frequently kneel to add extra polish to the right-hand side, where the majority of bowlers landed their strokes.
This was what he was doing when he heard a voice call out from the direction of the doors, "Piglet!"—his old nickname, spoken in tones of amorous delight. Looking up, he saw Yeoman Shimada—who never bowled—coming toward him, holding out her hands and smiling, beautiful as a little porcelain doll with the winter-night torrent of her hair unloosed from its customary clips and shivering around the hemline of her short red skirt. The look of pleasure in her brown eyes almost stopped his breath.
The next minute his breath did momentarily stop, as Adajia of Orion's green hand and arm appeared from out of the suddenly opened air duct in the ceiling overhead. Whatever else could be said about her—and a good many things could—Adajia was a deadly shot with a phaser.
Arios, Raksha, Thad, and Adajia dropped one by one from the duct into the alley inhabited by no one now except the comprehensively unconscious Yeoman Effinger. The illusory Yeoman Shimada had vanished in an eyeblink. Arios and the Klingon went straight to the rank of hologames while Thad and Adajia used engine tape to tape Effinger's mouth and eyes shut and fasten his hands around a stanchion of the alley railing; it took Arios only moments to pull the main hatch cover behind the games.
"Which one of these you leaving me?" asked Raksha—unnecessarily, as the lights on all but one of the brightly colored screens went dead. She perched on the seat and spent all of about a minute shortcutting the game itself and slicing into what the game module really was: a very elaborate lab-quality terminal.
Thad had already taken off his boots and was making long, experimental dashes to each of the alleys in turn, for the sheer joy of sliding down the waxed quasi oak in his stocking feet.
"System error check," said Spock. "Display."
Columns of blue lettering poured upward against the silver of the screen: communications batch files, execs that regulated the rate of matter-antimatter conversion in the pods, flavor-mix documentation for recycling, temperature-regulation parameters for every lab, stateroom, and shower cubicle on the ship, including the swimming pool on Deck Twenty. Holoshows, novels, letters, scientific and technical journals, logs of every imaginable section chief and automated system, backup logs of the logs. Monitors of beds in sickbay and cells in Security. Internal sensor readings from the lowest cargo holds to the bridge itself. Regulations as to the amount of wax in the bowling-alley waxers, the brightness of the sun lamps in the rec room, the strength of the coffee in Captain Kirk's cabin tap, and the power of the magnets holding shut the hatches of every supply cupboard and the cover plates of every manual door release on the ship.
"No error in any system," said the computer in a voice that Captain Kirk thought sounded just slightly smug.
Spock shook his head, puzzled. "Cause of…" he began, and Kirk said, "It's lying."
The captain turned, strode to the door, and had to pull up short to keep from smacking himself on the nose when it didn't open.
"Maintenance! Maintenance!" Dr. McCoy abandoned the comm link on the wall—which had the slight ambient echoic quality of an open line but which wasn't receiving anything at all—and slapped the recalcitrant office door with his open hand.
Not much to his surprise, that didn't cause it to open, either.
"Och, hell," said Mr. Scott. The doors of even the smallest rooms on the Enterprise—and he was in one of the smallest rooms on the Enterprise—all had manual backups, but the magnetic catch on the discreet cover plate that hid the one in front of him seemed to have spontaneously glued itself shut.
A malfunction in the current controlling the strength of the magnet, Scotty guessed. Who'd have thought it?
He touched the comm-link button, knowing he'd get the ribbing of his life about this one. "Maintenance, this is Mr. Scott. There's a jam on the door of latrine number…" He checked the serial number above the transcom. ". . . latrine number fourteen-twelve. Maintenance? Maintenance?"
There was no reply.
Instead a light, slightly gravelly voice, which Mr. Scott vaguely recognized, came over the comm. "Captain Kirk? This is Dylan Arios." There was a momentary pause, during which Mr. Scott wondered, for just a moment, whether the malfunction that had quadrupled the magnetism in the manual cover-plate catch had also crossed the wires of some private communication.
Then Arios went on, "We've—uh—taken control of your ship."