THE FIRST THING Spock noticed, in the Nautilus's engineering hull, was the smell.
It was perceptible over the faint sweetness of leftover rhodon gas, drifting through the cavernous darkness of the shuttlecraft bay, the stench of burned insulation and smoke: a slight fishiness, with an underbite that even through the filters of the mask lifted the hair on his nape. He checked his tricorder automatically, but the life-form readings everywhere were thick. Fungus and cirvoid growths blotched the pipes and conduits high overhead, and the sprinkling of dying reddish power lights showed him the furtive movements of rats and boreglunches in the corners of that vast chamber. Many bulk cruisers picked up that sort of small vermin from their cargoes if they weren't kept properly swept; Starfleet quarantine procedures precluded them almost automatically, but most of the crews on the independents weren't large enough to do proper maintenance, and frequently the transport filters on shoestring vessels were allowed to slip out of perfect repair. Free traders throughout the Federation and along its borders were frequently filthy with such things, and worse. It was one reason the Federation frowned upon free traders.
"I'm telling you this for your own good, Mr. Spock," said Raksha softly, and her voice echoed in the vaulted spaces above them. "Don't separate from Adajia and me. Don't try to overpower us and explore the ship. Don't get out of our sight."
He studied the two women for a moment, the Klingon in her metal-studded doublet with the pry bar over her shoulder like a bindle stiffs, the Orion swinging her razor weapon in one delicate hand. Did the threat come from them, he wondered, or from the booby traps that Raksha claimed riddled the ship?
If the latter was the case, with most of the power gone, how dangerous would such traps be?
The smell troubled him, half-familiar and repugnant as the smells of alien enzyme systems frequently were. He looked around him at the hangar again, noting all signs of long disuse. Dark streamers of leaks wept from every air vent, and the coarse purplish fuzz of St. John's lichen was slowly corroding the decks where oil patches had been. The Enterprise's sensors had showed widely varying zones of cold and heat—a sign of malfunctioning life-support systems—and here in the deeps of the engineering hull the very air seemed to drip with a gluey, jungly heat that stuck his shirt to his back and made stringy points of the women's long black hair.
Residual power fluttered at minimal efficiency in walls, pipes, hatchways. Oxygen levels were low, and he felt the queasiness brought on by fluctuation in the main gravity coil. Without the heavy throb of the engine, the ship seemed horribly silent.
His fingers moved a tricorder dial, and the alien colors of the mu spectrum blossomed across the small screen, throbbing like a sleeping heart.
"This way." Raksha's cat-paw step made no sound on the pitted and filthy deck. She twisted her black hair up in a knot, pulled a sheathed stiletto from her boot to fix it in place. "We'll need to get the pumps fixed and oxygen back in production before anything else. Adajia, keep an eye on him. I'll be up in the computer room, reestablishing the link-throughs as you get the wiring repaired."
She paused in the open doorway—all the doors on the ship seemed to have jammed permanently open, or perhaps there had been so many malfunctions that the Master and his crew had simply left them that way. Her eyes gleamed in the glow of Adajia's flashlight, under the knife-slices of reflection from the steel in her hair.
"And, Mr. Spock," she said quietly, "I wasn't lying about…defenses on this ship. You wouldn't make it to the transporter room. And even if there are only the…three of us…" He wondered why she hesitated on the number. "…aboard, believe me, you wouldn't be able to hide."
Spock raised an eyebrow as Raksha strode away into the dark. "Interesting."
"Sharnas says that," remarked Adajia, leading the way along the opposite corridor and down a gangway whose walls seemed crusted with a green-gold resin that gleamed stickily in the flashlight's tiny glare. "Do you quote odds and tell people what they're doing isn't logical, too?"
"Should the situation warrant it." The smell on the deck below was stronger, perhaps because of the increased heat, and the magenta glare of the mu-spectrum markers glowed up from his tricorder so strongly as to stain the fouled walls. He was interested to note that the engine chambers of the auxiliary hull had been moved down to these lower levels, and wondered why. Structurally the arrangement bore all the appearance of a makeshift job, jury-rigged a long time ago.
Interesting, too, that Raksha had taken the computer end of the job of relinking the engine systems. If she was the computer officer of the crew—and therefore the one who had created such havoc in the systems of the Enterprise—it was no surprise that she'd want to keep him out of contact with the Nautilus's…but he wondered if there was another reason. Something about the computer systems themselves that she did not want him to see.
He reached out to touch the wall again, theory that bordered upon certainty forming in his mind, and he murmured again, "Most interesting."
It did not take long to repair the oxygen feeds and pumps, and to realign the interface with the ship's central computer, which Spock guessed to be also in the auxiliary hull. Over the communicators, which did temporary duty for the silent comm link, Raksha reported clean air coming through within minutes, and by the time Mr. Spock reached the engine room the air there was sufficiently breathable to permit him to remove his filter mask.
This was fortunate, since the engines themselves were configured very differently, cramped and stacked and much smaller and less powerful than those of the Enterprise—a curious situation, considering the Nautilus's more advanced design. Dark tanks and coils of unknown use clustered where the main warp-drive amplification units should have been, and in place of Mr. Scott's monitor console, there stood instead a sort of egg-shaped plex bubble, once crystal-clear but stained with yellows and greens and browns, and dribbled all over with the resin that seemed so stickily ubiquitous on walls, floors, tanks, railings. The fishy, alien smell was thick about it; thick, too, in the intense shadows among the tanks, the cavernous darkness beyond them. Spock found himself listening intently to the silent ship as he stripped and patched the great, dead, burned-out coils of the main generator, listening for some sound other than his own breathing and Adajia's, and the small, tinny voice of Raksha coming from the communicator on the floor at his side.
"You showing any light in the guidance system?" she asked. "That unit on the left," she added, as if she could see his momentary puzzlement. "With the tubes around it and the domed top."
It took him a moment to deduce the systems with which he was familiar from the mass of dark rhodon tubes and the sleek ranks of serial-racked wafers on the left, and his eyes narrowed as he glanced across at Adajia again, perched cross-legged on a rusted-out signal modulator with the phaser held loosely in one hand.
"I see no light anywhere," he reported into the communicator.
"There's a row of hatches along the bottom. Check inside for charring on the ports."
Spock obeyed and found a short in the line. While Raksha was running an interval check he removed his blue pullover, pushed up the sleeves of the thin black undertunic he wore for warmth on the Enterprise, which like all primarily Earth-human vessels was uncomfortably cold by Vulcan standards. Except for the humidity, which he considered excessive, this portion of the hull was more comfortable for him than he'd been in years, and he wondered if Adajia—the child of another desert world—felt the same.
And while he worked he listened still, straining his ears—wondering what was wrong. It took him a moment to realize that down at this level he had heard no scutter of rodent claws on the metal of the pipes, no scrape of boreglunches slipping under the floor.
Chance? The effects of the rhodon gas?
"Your captain said he also acted as engineer?" he asked at last, running a sequence check to align the impulse power with the channels Raksha had reestablished.
Adajia nodded. "He was trained at the Academy, after he got out of the Institute; he's kept this vessel together for many years. Myself, I know little of it. My clan lord only presented me to him last year, after the uprising at the Feast of Bulls, but I know he met Sharnas in the Institute, and Phil at the Academy."
Spock nodded, logging unfamiliar terms in his mind and noting that no uprising had occurred in the Orion systems for at least fifteen standard years. He wondered what service the Master had done for an Orion clan chief, to be presented with what was obviously an expensive concubine, but was aware that his curiosity was frivolous at best.
"And Mr. Cooper was trained as an astrogator?"
He was head and shoulders in one of the repair hatches; he heard her walk closer to him to be heard.
"Yes. The Consilium thought the Master should be trained as an astrogator, too, though he's a better engineer; anyway, that's where he met Phil. They ran together, then went back for Thad. Thad helped get Sharnas out, which I guess surprised the hell out of McKennon."
"McKennon?"
She shivered. "Somebody you don't want to meet." She settled her back against the tank behind her; Spock could see the long, green curve of her leg from where he worked, the phaser on her belt and the gleaming razors of her makeshift mace lying like a long-stemmed rose in her hand.
"One of the Masters at the Institute," she went on after a moment. "They were going to kill Thaddy," she added softly, with a combination of wonder and loathing in her voice. "A chuulak—just for dereliction of duty."
"Who were?" He worked himself out from under the burned-out heat filter. Power had returned to some of the lamps, though they were still far from full. Those in the engine room had been quite visibly wired to augment their brightness, for it was obvious that those in the rest of the ship never got brighter than the murky, brownish semiblindness through which they had come to the engine room from the hangar. It was quite clear from Raksha's rerouting of the signal links that whole lines of powetransmission had had to be abandoned.
"McKennon," said Adajia. "And the Masters. The Masters of the Consilium, but they do what McKennon says."
Upon a number of occasions over the past five years, Spock had seen Captain Kirk utilize a maneuver that he had, at the time, admired for its usefulness, though his own attempts at it had been less than convincing and he doubted he would ever attain his commander's smooth facility at the nonverbal lie. Still, he judged the time to be right. He looked up with what he hoped was convincing suddenness at the doorway of the engine room, which lay beyond Adajia's line of sight where she sat with her back to the tanks. The Orion girl quite gratifyingly spun around, phaser at the ready, to meet whatever threat she considered likely to be roving the corridors of this lightless and near-derelict ship.
Mr. Spock reached out and pressurized the brachial nerve plexus. He caught her as she fell, the phaser ringing noisily on the metal deck, causing him to wince though he knew that the hearing of Klingons was far less acute than that of Vulcans and there was little more than a ten-percent chance of Raksha hearing it over the renewed rumble of the engine.
His first impulse was to tie Adajia, to prevent too swift a pursuit from impeding his investigation of the black ship's final secrets. But as the rhodon gas dispersed the sweetish, dirty-clothes smell of rodents, the filthy stench of boreglunches emerged more strongly. On other derelicts Spock had seen some of the latter nearly the size of his hand. Instead he simply lifted her onto the old signal-modulator console, where the vermin would be unable to reach her, and left her lying unconscious, like a sacrificed virgin, with her hair coil of sable silk trailing almost to the floor.
Chuulak, she had said. If he recalled his Orion backcountry dialect correctly, the word referred to public execution by torture for the purpose of discouraging other possible miscreants.
A somewhat severe penalty for dereliction of duty, particularly for a young man of Thaddeus Smith's obviously limited capabilities.
Readjusting the tricorder to home on the mu-spectrum energy source, Spock set off in swift silence through the gloom, his mind burgeoning with speculation concerning who these people were, and how they had, in fact, come by the black ruin of a starship of the very newest design.
Two turnings had branched off to the right, neat black holes in the wan flashlight gleam. Ensign Lao wondered if he'd actually seen two branches on the schematic, or three. It all reminded him very strongly of the survival and intelligence tests they'd run them through at the Academy—that, or the more demanding type of fun houses he'd gone to at carnivals. He wondered also what there was about the circumstance of being trapped in a position wherein it was impossible to scratch one's feet—for instance, crawling with one's hands straight forward in a conduit barely the width of one's shoulders—that automatically triggered inhuman itching in that part of the body.
He'd have to ask Dr. McCoy about that, he thought, with a wry inner grin. Possibly it had a scientific name.
He was speculating about it when the first wave of suffocating dizziness struck.
It took Kirk ten minutes of patient rubbing, scraping, and twisting at the edge of the crate behind him to work loose a corner of the tape that bound his wrists. It seemed like much longer. All the while he was listening, straining his ears in the direction of the unseen doorway—or the direction that he had mentally marked as the doorway before Raksha had shut him into darkness—seeking the smallest sound of voices or movement outside.
There was none. The blast doors designed to confine pressure loss had sealed one section of corridor off from another, and Raksha and Adajia had been quite thorough with their phaser fire. He worked slowly, trying to still the rage of impatience in his heart at the knowledge that his crew would be at large in the blacked-out ship, looking for him, or for Dylan Arios. Looking despite the fact that, with only a few exceptions, they were less familiar with its layout than he was, and more likely to run into open gangways or whatever obstructions Arios himself had arranged.
As he worked, he ran over in his mind every word Arios and his crew had spoken, every detail of their clothing, their behavior, their speech. There had to be a clue there somewhere, something to tell him who these people were and what it was they wanted.
Why Tau Lyra III—called Yoondri by those who lived there, and by all accounts a harmless world of peaceful farms and city-states that hadn't had a major war in decades, perhaps centuries?
Raksha and Adajia had taken Spock, presumably over to the Nautilus; according to Dr. McCoy, Sharnas of Vulcan was far beyond being able to stand and Phil Cooper was heavily sedated.
That left only Arios himself at large, and Thad Smith—if Smith was his real name. What was that round-eyed, rather sweet-faced young man—clearly mentally impaired in some fashion—doing with that pack of pirates? Or the Vulcan boy, either?
Why was there no record of the Antelope, of the mysterious black starship, of Arios himself? A half-caste, like Spock, but half-human, half… what? McCoy hadn't known.
Ships had disappeared, of course, in the early days of deep-space exploration, even as they disappeared now. A mating with some still-unknown race wasn't unlikely. Still…
It took some backbreaking maneuvering to kneel and get his boot toe on the corner of the tape, slowly working and wrenching until a few inches of tape were pulled free, enough to catch and wedge on the corner of the crate. Once his hands were free it took another patient, groping search of the wall to locate the half-open cover plate of the fused door mechanism. From there he used the tape like Ariadne's thread, sticking one end to the cover plate and holding the other in hand while he explored along the walls of the hold in both directions, until he found what he sought: a cargo dolly of the manual type, with detachable handles.
The handles were metal, sections of hollow pipe. The diameter was large enough to fit on the dogged plastic wheel of the door crank and force it over, against the fused mess of machinery and wire on the other side of the wall. With the aid of the lever he managed to push the door open eight inches before it jammed hard.
Cursing—and thanking his lucky stars he'd been diligent in the gym—Kirk slipped through into the blackness of the corridor. "Can anyone hear me?" he called into the silence. "This is your captain."
Descending via the gangways was slower and more troublesome than via the turbolift shaft. But, reflected Mr. Sulu as he degaussed the third cover plate and laboriously cranked the protective blast door aside, probably far safer. If nothing else, there were the turbolifts themselves to be considered. The power might return at any time, as unexpectedly as it had been cut, and then the cars would come whizzing back up the narrow shafts at speeds no one could avoid.
"Of course there was no degausser available in the lab," flustered Lieutenant Bergdahl, the Anthro/Geo lab chief, trotting down the gangway in Sulu's wake. In the dim glow of the flashlight Sulu carried, the lab chief's balding forehead was rimmed with a glittering line of sweat, and his eyes flashed silvery as he glanced repeatedly behind him in the utter dark. Not, reflected Sulu, that there was any possibility of unknown assailants on the two decks above them. Deck Two contained precisely three labs, Deck One nothing more than the bridge. "We keep such things very properly under hatches, unless of course Ensign Adams has been careless again." He glared back at his diminutive clerk, one of the group Sulu had collected in the Deck Two labs.
"I was trying to link into Central Computer," added Lieutenant Maynooth, shambling anxiously in the rear as they descended the next gangway. The yellow glow of the lamps they bore bobbed and swayed eerily, monster shadows crowding behind them: Sulu had taken the battery-operated emergency lamp from the helm console, to which floodlights had been added from the lab emergency stores.
"There are some quite startlingly sophisticated program locks in place," the physicist went on approvingly. "Truly beautiful programming; I must admit I kept getting distracted, taking handwritten notes…"
"Does it look like Arios and his crew are in Central?"
"They could well be." Maynooth pushed up the thicklensed spectacles onto his birdlike nose. He'd had four operations already to slow the deterioration of his eyes and had long ago become allergic to retinox; in the half-darkness, with his spindly arms and the myopic poke of his head he resembled a six-foot praying mantis in a blue lab smock. "All communication, of course, is cut. They'd need to be somewhere on the main trunk line, and have access to a lab-quality terminal, which limits the places where they could be."
"Considering the lax fashion in which Security operates," Lieutenant Bergdahl added crisply, "I am not surprised they had so little trouble in …"
The Anthro/Geo chief halted, gasping, hand going to his chest. At the same moment Sulu's vision swam in the feeble lamp glare. He threw out a hand, catching the wall as his knees turned to water under him. Maynooth, Adams, and Dawe sprang forward to catch Bergdahl as he staggered, and Dawe made a hoarse noise of shock, trying to draw breath. Sulu, eyes blurring, felt the cold in his chest at the same moment he was aware of sweat breaking out all over his body.
He managed to croak "Back…" and they all stood dumbly, staring at him in the chiaroscuro of patchlight and dark.
"Back," he repeated, trying to get leaden feet up the metal steps. "Gas …gangway…"
Bergdahl made a noise like a small engine lugging and slumped limp into Dawe's arms, nearly taking the Ops chief down with him. Adams held her breath and sprang down the two steps that separated her from them and hooked a shoulder under Dawe's armpit to drag him back, and in the yellow glare Sulu thought she, too, looked gray-faced and ill. They backed up the steps together, Sulu feeling better immediately and Dawe recovering quickly enough to halfdrag Bergdahl, although Bergdahl himself moaned and gasped and begged for oxygen and first aid just in case.
They clustered for a moment by the doors leading back onto Deck Two, looking at one another, then down into the pit of the gangway. Then Sulu advanced cautiously again, a step at a time. Four steps down he felt blinding dizziness overwhelm him, sickness and cold and a sensation of suffocation, a feeling of being about to fall. He reeled back, catching himself with his hands on the steps as he did fall; Dawe steadied him, drew him back. He heard Adams say, "I'll get a tricorder from the lab," and Sulu was dimly aware of her boot heels clicking sharply on the metal steps.
"There couldn't possibly be gas," Maynooth said. "Where would it be coming from?"
His head between his knees, his consciousness still swimming in a strange sensation that was not quite anoxia, Sulu managed to mumble sarcastically, "Maybe it's a figment of my imagination."
Maynooth sniffed at the darkness, the remaining flashlight making huge yellow circles of his spectacle lenses. "Maybe it is," he said. He sounded pleased.
"Zhiming?" Lieutenant Organa scrambled up to the table in the lamplit, smoky gloom of the rec room, caught the edge of the open vent. "Zhiming, are you there?"
The yarn thread hung unmoving beside her.
There was definitely a life-form moving down there. An alien, certainly, thought Spock, remembering the smell that had tensed the muscles of his nape. In spite of the heavy concentrations of mu-spectrum energy, Spock could see it, a blurred and fragmented shadow on the digital. Evidently, even heavy concentrations of mu-spectrum energy were not inimical to life per se.
That was comforting to know.
On the other hand, he reflected, it would be comforting to know also if the life-form were carbon-based and more or less humanoid, since an unknown energy might well be absorbed with impunity by a silicon-based life-form and still be capable of doing serious damage to a Vulcan. As he keyed in a Hold on the mu-spectrum settings he reflected that clearly the ship's extraordinary shielding had prevented readings coming through on at least one member of the pirate crew—guessing from the size and mass of the life-form—and possibly more. And if that was the case, Dylan Arios might well be sending for reinforcements.
The mass was twice average human, and far differently configured. Metabolism readings different, of course. The tricorder's small memory might not be able to give a clear reading if, like Arios's unknown ancestors, the alien was of an unknown race, but…
The correlation program flashed its best guess on the small digital, as well as the parameters probability.
Parameters probability was over ninety percent.
Spock felt his hands grow cold.
The program's best guess, from information received, was that the creature two decks below him was a yagghorth.
The Nautilus had picked up a yagghorth.
No wonder, thought Spock, Raksha and Adajia had told him to stay with them. No wonder Arios had been desperate to keep any of the Enterprise crew off the ship. Not primarily to conceal, but out of genuine concern for their safety. On the other hand, whatever they were hiding on board the Nautilus, it must be desperately important to prevent them from simply abandoning the vessel at the first opportunity.
Six people could conceivably share a Constitution-class cruiser with a yagghorth for a certain period of time and not come to harm, particularly if they set the food synthesizers to spew the equivalent of fresh meat and blood every few hours in the lower holds to prevent its hunting on the upper, but it was not a situation that could be kept going very long. Uneasily, he switched back an overlay to recheck the position of the thing as well as he could.
But they had succeeded so far, which put them far ahead of most crews in similar circumstances, and it crossed Spock's mind to wonder, as he slipped through a half-open blast door and down the narrow, boreglunch-smelling gangway into the rising steam from below, whether there was someone or something on Tau Lyra III—perhaps the psychically active savants the planet was supposed to have—capable of dealing with a yagghorth. Considering the proximity of that world to the Anomaly in the Crossroad, it was a possibility.
In spite of the tightening in his chest with every step of descent, Spock found himself prey to an almost overwhelming curiosity.
He had said that it was a mistake to theorize ahead of one's data; nevertheless, his mind teemed with alternatives. There was a source of the mu-spectrum radiation on the ship. Somehow they had picked up a yagghorth—though larval infestation was usually postulated, there was, in fact, no case that provided proof—which prevented them from getting to the energy source. . . . Given that seventy percent of the admittedly small sample of known yagghorth infestations occurred in sectors where Turtledove Anomalies existed, thought Spock, moving cautiously through the dripping mazes of old crew quarters, it was conceivable that yagghorth had been drawn to the source of an energy typical of the Anomalies.
We're real desperate, Arios had said.
And Raksha had repeated several times, Don't get out of our sight.
He felt a sudden pang of concern for Adajia, lying unconscious on the deck above.
But according to the tricorder the yagghorth was still below him, as he stood at the head of another gangway down into darkness. Films of mold covered the metal walls in the gluey heat, fungus clustering in the corners of the stairs. Here and there a lumenpanel survived, shedding a grimy glow that only served to show up the desertion of the place, its utter neglect.
The source of a mu-spectrum energy generator on board was, of course, thought Spock, only of secondary importance. But it might hold some answers, hold the proof to the theory that had been forming in his mind since he had first seen the engine chamber, first spoken to Adajia there.
Another thought came to him. He turned from the head of the gangway, his sharp hearing stretching to its limits in the silent ship around him, and walked a few paces down the hall to the open door of one of the empty crew staterooms. Boreglunches scurried through vents long corroded, redblack backs gleaming and long, threadlike antennae projecting from the dark squares of the openings as Spock searched rapidly through the empty drawers of the built-in desks.
The first room yielded nothing. In the second he found a few small plastic cubes, three centimeters square, which he dropped into the utility pocket of the tricorder case.
He checked the tricorder again, paused to listen, picking out the scrabbling of small vermin in the darkness and wondering if he would be able to detect the movement of the greater thing lurking somewhere below.
He heard nothing that answered him. Taking the phaser from his belt, he moved silently down the steps.
There was even less light on the decks below. The heat was equal to anything on Vulcan, the moisture suffocating, clammy on his skin and condensing on the moldy walls. Fungal growths and heat-loving forms of simple life were rankly evident. The smell of the yagghorth was strong down here, like very old oil, resinous exudations thick on the walls. This close to the energy source, the mu-spectrum color blanked out everything on the digital; after vainly trying to catch a moving shadow, a fractionated form, Spock gave up and concentrated on listening.
It had clearly been hot and damp down here for a long time. A result of the mu-generator? he wondered. Or a necessity of its operation?
His mind went back over the articles he had read, articles speculating about the link between mu-spectrum energy and noninstrumentative transportation phenomena over huge distances. A link with the attenuated warp engines, the enlarged impulse drive of the Nautilus and its almost nonexistent power-source controls—controls that occupied huge percentages of the Enterprise engines—was almost certain.
The only question was…where had the Nautilus acquired a mu-spectrum drive?
Spock paused again, straining his ears, his mind. A scutter of claws—rats? Big ones, if so. But then of course they might be big ones. He'd seen engine rats on some tramp planet-hoppers not only grown to enormous size, but bizarrely mutated as well. He tried to adjust the tricorder to get a divided reading—half to alert for the yagghorth, half to register the proximity of the mu-spectrum generator—and received an error message and a polite request to recalibrate. The only person he had ever spoken to who had survived an infestation—Commander Kellogg of Starbase 12—had said that the creature was absolutely silent, but some of the visuals from surviving ships seemed to indicate a hissing, a rattle of chitin.
Adjusting the tricorder for the mu-spectrum lines again—since he had no idea what such a generator would look like—he set his phaser on maximum, and, listening to every sound in the silent darkness, moved forward again.
"They wired him when he was eight years old."
Christine Chapel turned sharply, her hands still covering the icy fingers of the Vulcan boy. Phil Cooper had dragged himself up a little in his bed, and was regarding her with drugged pain in his dilated gray eyes. In the near-total darkness of the security ward, his unshaven face looked battered and old beyond his years, and his head nodded with the effect of the melanex.
"They have to," Cooper went on thickly. "Trained as empaths… trained to the psion drive. The Vulcans make the best. Highest mathematical abilities. They need that. Have to understand what they're doing, bending space from inside rather than warping around it. They tried Deltans and Betazoids and Rembegils. The Rembegils all died. Little glass fairies, they looked like… big green eyes. Long green hair. The Consilium thought they had it made when they contacted Rembegil. Ran a colony of 'em for years, one of their biggest." He pushed a hand through his hair.
"It's the dreams, see. They put cutouts, limiters, to keep the dreams down. Works for Vulcans and Betas. Wiring…brings the dreams."
He sank to the bed again, closed his eyes. His voice was a slurry whisper. "Most people don't know that side of it. I don't know what they're telling you in the Fleet these days."
The floor hard beneath her knees, the darkness like a silent bubble, shutting her out from all sound, all contact with the ship around her, Chapel half-felt that she dreamed herself. Softly, she asked, "They did this to you when you entered the Fleet?"
Roger's voice returned to her, with the memory of moonlight shining on the pale V of his chest against the dark satin of his dressing gown; the smell of the university botanical gardens and the glinting jeweled eyes of Zia Fang, the Rigellian god of healing, whose lumpish stone statue sat in a niche among the wall of wafer storage, ancient scrolls, transcription equipment. You have to realize that there's always a conspiracy somewhere, Chris, he had said. They'll corrupt anything, no matter how good you are, no matter what good you do or try to do. They'll take it over eventually.
She hadn't wanted to believe it.
Cooper nodded, his eyes still shut. "Astrogator, impulse and warp. Put the ship in position for the jump and know where you are when you come out. Think about it. They can't let pilots start setting up on their own. Break the Consilium's monopoly on freight. The Master shorts it out. Nanological… repairs itself. Grows back."
They didn't carve those microservos out of soap, McCoy had said. By the scar tissue, the flesh around the minuscule line of metallic protrusions on Sharnas's neck had been cut many times.
After knowing Roger, Christine had never quite known what to make of conspiracy theories. She'd heard all the usual ones outlined by rec-room rebels like Brunowski and Bray: Kratisos Shah is still alive and tending bar on Antares IV; the Federation maintains a secret laboratory within a black hole for unknown purposes; certain historical characters (never the same ones) had been retrieved and cloned in hidden installations.
Even among those, she had never heard of anything called the Consilium.
Cooper tried to open his eyes again, but Chapel could see, even in the thick gloom, that his eyeballs were drifting, unable to focus. "You have a Vulcan," he mumbled. "Th'Master's mostly Rembegil, spliced onto enough human genes to take the stress. Consilium started doing that when the colony died off. Bred him, trained him for psionics. Served 'em right," he added enigmatically. "It's how he could break their hold on Thad. McKennon's tried to get it back two or three times. McKennon." His face twisted in momentary dread, or remembered pain. Then he shook his head. "McKennon. The Masters didn't leave Thad with much of a brain but he's got a hell of a heart. Consilium's quit growing them now—that strain. That combination. Too much trouble."
Chapel shook her head, baffled. "I've never heard of the Consilium," she said. "Who…"
Cooper blinked, trying to get her into focus, trying to see where he was. "Ah," he breathed at last, and the lines relaxed a little from his forehead. "Yeah. The Enterprise." He shook his head. "Forgot where I was."
According to the readings on the tricorder, the mu-spectrum generator was somewhere in the vast darkness that had once been Recycling. Logical, thought Spock, his head still moving slowly with the attempt to distinguish sound, his eyes still trying to pierce the intense darkness that closed so thickly around him. Because of the needs of the food synthesizers, the main trunk of the computer lines ran through this section.
Some of the synthesizers themselves obviously still worked, at least to a degree. As he had surmised, the smell of rotting organics was thick in the air, bait to keep the yagghorth in this section, to keep it from wandering to the engine rooms above. It surprised him, however, that none of the doorways he had passed on his way here were barricaded.
Perhaps they simply knew that barricades were, in the case of a yagghorth, at best a temporary measure. The decking might be holed. It was often found to be, on infested ships.
Most of the square gray synthesizers were rank with ciroids, fungus, odd and mutant plants, the steamy heat aiding in the transformation of this chamber into an ugly, lightless jungle. Thready curtains of gray growths hung from the conduits that crisscrossed the ceiling, further shortening Spock's field of vision; one of the synthesizers had burst open, and a yellow-tentacled fungus—quite obviously carnivorous as far as rats and boreglunches were concerned—grew from its heart to cover a good eight square meters of floor and surrounding mechanisms. Moisture dripped from the ceiling, and the scritch and patter of vermin sounded everywhere, making it doubly difficult for Spock to listen for the greater danger that lurked somewhere, very close now, in the dark.
All around the synthesizer chamber the walls and floor were crusted with resin, a slick laminate on the walls higher than his head in places and gleaming vilely in the reflection of his flashlight in the dark. In places it was still sticky—outside in the corridor, he had passed a trail of it still wet. The oily smell was everywhere.
He glanced again up at the main trunk of the computer feed and power conduit. The central mixer board of Recycling was one candidate for a hook-in source to control the mu-generator. Others on the main trunk might be the games in the nearby bowling alley, or one of the computers in the botany lab. He listened carefully, then stepped out into the corridor again. Nothing yet, though he could feel his pulse rate increase infinitesimally. The bowling alley was the logical place to check next, he thought, replacing the phaser in his belt to readjust the tricorder. The room itself was a virtual dead end…
He paused, looking at the readings in startlement, wondering if he had adjusted too high…
The next instant he sprang away from the black mouth of the open turbolift door as a striking tentacle jetted from the darkness. Spock bolted back up the corridor, not looking back, hearing the ghost-whisper of chitin and bone as the yagghorth uncoiled and wriggled from the lift shaft where it had been hiding. He heard it in the corridor behind him, hideously fast; threw himself through the door into the synthesizer chamber and twisted at the manual control. Something fell against the closing door like a gelatinous spider, and Spock leaped for the gangway at the end of the room, only to have something catch around his ankle in a biting grip that nearly broke the bone within the boot.
A force like a machine whipped him off his feet.
He struck the floor hard, twisting his body to catch at the hatch handle of the nearest synthesizer. Behind him he could see the black slit of the door, the wet gleam of an eyeless, narrow head trying to force its way through, the wet star of groping tentacles slobbering at the door's edges, the longer tentacles and two thin, multijointed legs squirming in the aperture. The tentacle that had seized his foot ended in a double-padded grip that was already working its way up his leg for better purchase; the next nearest one, not quite yet able to touch him, finished in a razor-toothed mouth.
The force of the drag was incredible. Spock held to the metal of the hatch handle with both hands, not daring to release even long enough to unship his phaser. He felt the sinews of his hands and shoulders crack. He hacked at the tentacle with the heel of his other boot, knowing it was a useless gesture as far as defense went. The thing shifted another coil onto his calf and made a grab with its rough-padded end for his other foot as well. The razored mouth had moved, groping now around the edge of the door and along the wall toward the manual controls, and Spock realized with surprise that the yagghorth understood how the door worked.
He released his grip with his right hand and snatched his phaser from his belt, firing even as the yanking strength of it nearly dislocated his left shoulder. He tried to pull himself free, and the jerk of it ripped the skin from his fingers and palm, his left hand slipping on the handle. He fired again, into the center of those black, groping tentacles, though in the darkness he could barely see his target. Pain sliced his left leg, his left shoulder. His grip clenched as hard as it could but the metal ripped from his bloody fingers and his body hit the floor hard. The next instant, it seemed, he was up against the twelve-centimeter gap of the doorway, a tentacle around his waist crushing his ribs, and he realized that the thing was simply going to pull him through the door slit, pulping the bones within the flesh as it did.
He fired the phaser again into the seething mass of bone and organ beyond the doorway, felt it flinch, twist, then slam him furiously against the edges of the metal to drag him through.
Somewhere in the corridor he heard a woman's voice shout "NEMO!" And then, as consciousness blurred, he thought he heard her add, "Zchliak!"
Which was the Vulcan word for friend.