“Aye, sir,” Sulu acknowledged from the helm. “She’s coming back around now.”
The incoming ship was of a Federation class Kirk recognized, a sleek civilian passenger liner with a red-and-black nose and a silver body with close-mounted, elongated warp engines trailing back behind it. But the Naazh had modified it in some way, covering it in plated armor whose patterning suggested horns and bones. Fierce, blinding bolts shot out from the prow and flanks of the normally unarmed liner, and the Enterprise rocked again. Sulu returned fire, joined by the Asimov, but the phasers were as ineffectual against the liner’s armor as hand phasers had been against the Naazh’s personal armor.
“She’s circling behind us,” Sulu said. “Targeting the landing bay.”
“Trying to finish what T’Nalae started,” Kirk said to Spock.
“Evidently without concern for her survival,” the Vulcan captain replied.
Captain Blake brought the Asimov in to defend the Enterprise’s rear, but even its sturdy shields could only take so much; one bolt got through and struck its boxy port nacelle, causing its lights and shields to fluctuate. “Enterprise, we can’t hold out much longer,” Blake reported.
“Jim.” Miranda’s hand touched his arm, and he turned to face her. She had dispersed the transmuted armor at some point, but her eyes still glowed, and she seemed to have more gray hairs than he’d noticed an hour before. “You can’t hold out against them. There’s only one option. Move in close around the Chrysaor. As tightly as possible. Quickly!”
He narrowed his eyes. “I respect your concern for the Medusans, Doctor Jones, but a close formation would put them in more danger.”
She gasped slightly at his impersonal address, but she went on regardless. “There’s no time to explain, Jim. I know you don’t feel you can trust me right now, but we need you to. All of us.” She clutched his hand. “Please, Jim.”
He felt the same vulnerability, need, and trust from her that he had known since their first kiss. That, at least, did not seem to have changed. Again, he remembered how cold and superior Gary had become when his eyes had glowed like that … but then he remembered how Elizabeth Dehner’s eyes had glowed too, and how she had retained her compassion and humanity in spite of it.
Maybe it had just been Gary all along.
He turned to Spock, who nodded in acceptance. So he spoke. “Admiral Kirk to all ships. Take up close formation around the Chrysaor, minimum safe range.”
The captains acknowledged, and Sulu began bringing the Enterprise in close to the Medusan ship while the Asimov and Palmares made best speed to join it. All four ships took additional damage from the Naazh liner, for their direct movement made them predictable targets. Kirk just hoped Miranda’s plan would be worth the cost.
Once all three Starfleet ships had matched velocity with the far smaller Chrysaor and drawn as close around it as they feasibly could, Jones said, “Brace yourselves. This could be a bit bumpy.” Kirk was confused, but he put a hand on the bridge railing nonetheless.
“Captain!” Palur called from the science station. “Some kind of dimensional distortion is forming around the Chrysaor!”
Even as the young Argelian spoke, Kirk saw a ripple and flicker of light around the Medusan ship. It surged outward to engulf the other three ships, and the Enterprise rocked slightly, light flashing within the bridge from no apparent source. Kirk felt a wave of extreme sensory distortion, as if all the shapes around him were dissolving into a haze of nameless colors, and himself along with it.
Just as suddenly, the sensation cleared; Kirk felt intact again, and the bridge appeared normal. He looked at the viewscreen—
—and the stars were gone.
In their place, surrounding the four ships, was a field of swirling luminescence. It had a strange duality to it; at one moment, it looked to him like shimmering, waving streaks of red and violet, while at the next, it seemed like a mottled, fractal field of blues and greens. But there was no moment at which it changed from one to the other; his mind simply changed its opinion about what he saw when his gaze shifted, as it would with an optical illusion.
The one thing he knew for sure was that he had seen it before.
Spock had risen from his command chair, and his words confirmed Kirk’s perception. “Admiral, this is the same extradimensional continuum we were flung into ten years ago by Lawrence Marvick’s tampering with our engines.” He turned to contemplate Miranda. “At least … we believed it was Marvick’s doing at the time.”
Jones sighed heavily. “It wasn’t,” she confessed. “But this is going to be a very long explanation.”
Fifteen
“So let me get this straight,” Captain Erin Blake said. “This was the third time the Enterprise left the galaxy?”
Admiral Kirk looked around the briefing room table, taking in the reactions to her question. He, Captain Spock, Doctor McCoy, and Commander Sulu had been joined by Commanders Scott and Uhura from the Asimov, along with its captain, the Palmares’s Captain nd’Omeshef and his first officer Naomi Vega, and Miranda Jones, who spoke for the New Humans while Arsène Xiang was treated for his injuries in sickbay. The human Enterprise veterans looked almost sheepish at Blake’s question, as if not wishing to upstage their fellow officers.
“Not exactly, Captain,” Spock replied. “While we were technically no longer in this galaxy, neither did we leave it in the conventional way.”
“Instead,” Commander Vega said between sips of her coffee, “you ended up in an extradimensional continuum like the one we’re in now.”
“Yes,” Spock replied. “When Doctor Lawrence Marvick was driven into mental instability by the sight of Ambassador Kollos, he tampered with the Enterprise’s engine controls in a way that threw them into an exponential acceleration.” Commander Scott lowered his head, looking ashamed. Kirk knew he had always blamed himself for letting his hero worship of Marvick, one of the designers of the Enterprise, blind him to the evidence of his instability.
“Even though our instruments showed conventional warp factors,” Spock went on, “later analysis showed that the effective velocity equivalents we achieved were far higher.”
“Yes,” nd’Omeshef said. “As I recall, the Corps of Engineers took quite an interest in the ‘transwarp’ configuration that Marvick achieved. They’ve been trying to duplicate it ever since.”
Scott snorted. “A fat lot o’ good it’ll do them. It nearly tore us apart and plunged us into who knows where.”
“Except, Mister Scott, apparently it was not Marvick’s tampering that was responsible for our entry into this continuum.” Spock turned to Jones. “At the time, we hypothesized that the continuum was a dimensional pocket within the negative energy barrier that we had encountered twice before along the nearest border of this region of the galactic inner disk, or else the result of the barrier interacting with the transwarp field to create a dimensional displacement. We had been accelerating in the direction of that barrier, and though our instruments did not show us actually reaching it, we were unable to verify their results due to the observational distortions created by the transwarp effect. But since we were dealing with an unexplained phenomenon, we concluded that it was likely associated with the other unexplained phenomenon we had been approaching, which had created similar sensory distortions.
“However, Doctor Jones has now belatedly informed us that this was not the case.”
All eyes turned to Jones, who took a deep breath and sighed. Her eyes still glistened silver, but the effect seemed more translucent than before. “This is difficult to admit,” she began. “Kollos carried a great deal of guilt for deceiving you all, and for the consequences it had for Spock in particular. But he had no choice—or at least no time to choose a better option.
“As you said, Captain Spock, we were heading for the barrier. And Kollos knew what effect the barrier would have on me if he allowed the ship to cross it.”
Vega’s coffee cup froze just short of her lips. “Yes—I reme
mber now. The report from the Enterprise’s first barrier crossing. All the espers in the crew were killed by the barrier passage. Somehow it burned out portions of their brains.”
“Not … all the espers,” Kirk said. “The two strongest ones—my second officer, Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell, and a medical specialist, Doctor Elizabeth Dehner—survived the barrier passage … and were changed by it. They developed exponential increases in their psionic ability.”
“But only for a little while, if I recall,” Vega said. “Eventually their brains burned out from the strain.”
“It was … more complicated than that.” Kirk, Spock, Scott, and Sulu traded heavy looks. They had kept certain details out of the official logs for fourteen years, but Kirk knew the current circumstances no longer allowed such discretion. “In Mitchell’s case …” He hesitated. “It seemed to be too much for him. The shock, the temptation … he became unstable. Dangerous. It became necessary …”
Spock took over the story, his deep compassion audible only to those who knew him best. “I persuaded then-Captain Kirk that Mitchell had to be put off the ship on the nearby Delta Vega mining planetoid, an uninhabited outpost. Though it was a difficult decision, the captain acted for the greater good of the ship.”
Next to him, McCoy’s eyes widened at his unflinching account. The doctor and Mitchell had served together for a time aboard Kirk’s previous command, the Sacagawea. Once McCoy had joined the Enterprise crew, Kirk had told him the truth about Mitchell’s recent demise; but it must still have been unnerving to hear Spock reiterate the incident and his part in it. At the time, McCoy had been outraged that Spock—whom he had only just met—had seemingly argued in favor of killing Mitchell, in defiance of the Vulcans’ professed nonviolence. Kirk had corrected his misapprehension: Spock had actually been arguing for stranding Mitchell alive, making his case by pointing out that it was the only viable alternative to execution. But McCoy had been unconvinced, and Spock had reciprocated his initial hostility. They eventually learned to trust and respect each other—but by then, they’d come to enjoy their bickering too much to stop.
In any case, the distinction between stranding Mitchell and executing him had turned out to be moot, as Spock went on to explain. “However, Commander Mitchell then escaped, killed our helm officer, and apparently persuaded Dehner—now manifesting her own psionic abilities—to join him. But Captain Kirk prevailed upon Dehner to remain loyal, and she assisted him in containing Mitchell. Regrettably, both Mister Mitchell and Doctor Dehner lost their lives in the resultant conflict.”
“If we’re putting all our cards on the table,” Kirk said heavily, “let’s not mince words. I killed Gary Mitchell. Dehner had weakened him enough to give me an opening, and I dropped the side of a mountain on him with a phaser rifle.”
Into the grave he had dug for me, Kirk recalled. It was that act of theatrical cruelty that had hardened Kirk’s heart against his old friend enough to let him go through with it. And to do what had needed to be done next: exhuming what had been left of the body to make absolutely sure that Mitchell’s powers had not allowed him to survive. At least Doctor Piper’s postmortem had confirmed that the end had been quick—though the remains had then been cremated and dispersed across Delta Vega just in case.
Now he met Miranda Jones’s glowing eyes—which locked on his directly as if she were not blind—and spoke. “He was my best friend, yet his power made him a monster. Tell me, Miranda—is that what the Naazh are so afraid of?”
“It’s not like that, Jim. In fact … the monster may not have been Gary Mitchell at all. Not entirely, at least.”
Kirk stared back, stunned. “Explain,” he finally said.
Jones fidgeted, as though struggling to work up the courage to speak. After a moment, she turned to the Enterprise’s current captain. “Tell me, Spock—didn’t you ever wonder why the barrier burned out the brains of the human espers on board, but didn’t do the same to a telepath as formidable as you?”
Spock straightened, both eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “I have never been able to verify a hypothesis. I initially suspected it was related to the difference between human and Vulcan neurology. But once we appeared to pass through the barrier with you aboard—and without the shield modifications the Kelvans made to block the barrier’s neurological effects during our second passage—it had no evident effect on you either. So I hypothesized that we might have been protected by the Vulcan training we both received—that the ability to shield our minds from others’ thoughts and emotions might also have shielded us from the barrier’s effects.”
Jones gave him a wistful smile. “In a sense, Spock, you were right the first time. It was because you weren’t fully human—or rather, not a human esper. It was because … your telepathy came to you naturally.”
Spock furrowed his brows, and Kirk could practically see the wheels turning behind his eyes. “It has long been a mystery how human telepaths, as well as Aenar, were able to manifest psionic abilities without the paracortex or equivalent neurological formations found in other telepathic and empathic species.”
A new calm came over Jones, a sudden shift reminding Kirk of the transitions between herself and Kollos. But surely that couldn’t be; Kollos had died a year ago.
“The simple fact of the matter is, they can’t,” she said coolly. “Their psionic powers—my powers—do not come from the human brain at all.”
Beside Spock, McCoy stared at Jones with wide-eyed disbelief. “My God, Miranda, what are you saying?”
She crossed her arms, choosing her words. “More than a millennium ago, a group of incorporeal psionic life-forms from a higher-dimensional subspace domain were driven from their home continuum by the genocidal regime that ruled it. For convenience, call their race the Spectres.
“The outcast faction had been declared heretics because they developed the ability to travel to other dimensions, other planes of existence, in order to make contact with the life they found there. This was a violation of the purist, authoritarian doctrines of their domain’s rulers—call them Lords. These Lords saw contact with the corporeal life of other planes to be an abomination, a perversion of the highest nature. The explorers fled from their home plane, but that was not enough for the Lords; to preserve their authority, their absolute domination, every single being who defied their dogmas had to be hunted down and exterminated, as cruelly and painfully as possible, as a warning to others who might follow their example.”
Jones’s silver eyes met those of the others around the table. “And so, in order to elude the hunters, these political refugees needed to find a place to hide. A place where they could lay low as long as the threat remained.”
“My God,” McCoy gasped. “You’re saying they hid inside humans?”
“They needed sentient brains to occupy—neural substrates complex enough to host them and active enough to mask their presence. They chose the Aenar first,” she said. “While Aenar brains didn’t have paracortices per se, their structure was more receptive to symbiosis than that of the other Andorian subspecies—and their history as an outcast minority on Andoria made them more sympathetic to the rebel Spectres. They consented to allow them to live within their brains. They called them thetad—‘sleepers.’ ”
“Fascinating,” Spock said. “And, in exchange, these Spectres gave the Aenar telepathic ability?”
“It was an unavoidable side effect of the sleepers’ presence,” Jones told him. “They could cloak their own characteristic mental signature, but even in a dormant state, they charged the Aenar’s brains with raw psionic energy, making them capable of telepathy. Luckily for the refugees, this galaxy contains enough naturally telepathic species—some in which telepathy is a rare or discouraged trait, as with the Argelians or Arkenites—that the Spectre Lords hunting them couldn’t tell the difference.”
“That still doesn’t explain where human telepaths come in,” McCoy said, “or what any of this has to do with how we ended up in this weir
d universe either time.”
“Unfortunately, the Aenar population was small,” Jones said. “With telepathy had come pacifism, for the Aenar could not bring themselves to harm those whose pain they could feel for themselves. But on those rare occasions when they came into contact with the Andorians whose civilization was expanding across their planet, they were feared and persecuted for their abilities, which seemed like witchcraft to a civilization at that level with no history of telepathy. Since they were no longer willing or able to fight back, the Aenar learned to retreat when the Andorians came—to avoid contact as much as possible. They retreated into smaller and more inhospitable territories, and their population declined. Climate catastrophes and fertility problems compounded the population loss until they were in danger of extinction—along with the Spectres who shared their bodies. Even a fully awakened Spectre can’t easily separate from a host, so the death of the host will usually kill the Spectre as well, unless it has enough advance warning to sever the link.
“So the sleepers began seeking new hosts that they could inhabit. Ideally ones whose brains would not resonate so well with their psionic fields, so that they would be less likely to give their presence away by inducing strong telepathy in their hosts. They found the ideal candidates on the third planet of a yellow star not particularly far from Andoria.
“They found humans.”
McCoy spoke angrily. “Tell me this, Miranda: Did you know this? Did Gary? Or DiFalco, or Logan? Did any of you know?”
Jones was slow to answer. “You must remember—the Spectres were hiding from a genocidal foe that would stop at nothing to see them exterminated. Secrecy was essential to their survival.”
“So they didn’t know! You and every other human esper—all of you were possessed without your consent!”
“The first generation did know,” Jones said. “As I said, the Aenar consented to the arrangement. The first humans the Spectre refugees approached did so as well. But in both cases, they agreed to the provision that their memory of the merger would be suppressed afterward. They would have no awareness of the sleepers’ presence within them, except through whatever psionic abilities they developed, or perhaps in dreams that faded when they awoke.”
The Higher Frontier Page 22