Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

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  ISBN: 0-7434-2022-5

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Look for STAR TREK fiction from Pocket Books

  For Erina

  Wherever she may be

  Chapter One

  IT HAPPENED SHORTLY AFTER the start of the evening shift.

  Later on, everyone agreed on that.

  At nineteen hundred hours, forty minutes, on Stardate 6251.1, Captain James Kirk was in the gym on Deck Eight of the Starship Enterprise, sparring with Ensign Lao Zhiming—twenty-one, compact of build, his reflexes as quick as his mind—when the whistle of the comm link sounded and one of the basketball players down at the other end of the big, curved room went to get it.

  A moment later the man called out, "Captain?"

  Kirk ducked a kick, backed off, his hand still raised to guard, panting; Lao relaxed with a grin and teased, "Saved by the bell, sir."

  "Me or you?" Kirk grinned back and lightly ran to the comm link nearest them—there were eight in all in the big, echoey chamber, which curved in a quarter section around the ship's main hull. He did notice that the basketball players hadn't resumed their game. They were inconspicuously loitering, bouncing the ball on the highly polished floor or doing ham stretches on the ribstalls with the air of people not quite eavesdropping, but waiting; just a little—just the tiniest bit—nervous about what it was that the bridge had to convey to the captain after he was off duty for the day.

  As he slapped the comm button, Kirk was conscious that he, too, felt the twinge of adrenaline, over and above what the sparring match had roused.

  Lao kept his distance, but he was listening, too.

  "Captain?" Mahase's deep voice sounded completely neutral, as if it were none of her business. "First-line guard buoys of the Federation proximity zone around the Tau Lyra star system report an unidentified vessel."

  "That's impossible," said Lao.

  Kirk glanced back at him. The boy pushed his straight, sweat-drenched black hair back from his face, his forehead bunched in a frown at the inconsistency of data.

  "We ran scans of the whole quadrant three hours ago, sir, just before we came off shift. You saw them. It's a deserted area. No shipping, no mining, no starbases…No civilizations at all, except what's on Tau Lyra Three. Nothing could have come in range of the buoys in that time. Nothing's that close."

  "Except the Crossroad." The sweat drying stickily on his chest in the open front of his gi chilled Kirk slightly. There was certainly no other reason to feel cold.

  "But there's…" Lao broke off. He was young, a midshipman, just out of the Academy. One day, Kirk knew as surely as he knew his own name, he would be one of the finest captains of Starfleet.

  "There's nothing in the Crossroad Nebula?" Kirk finished his protest for him and gave him another lopsided grin, wry this time, as much at his own memories as at the young man's assumptions about how accurate readings were on the fringes of unknown space. "That we know about, Ensign. That we know about."

  He turned, and slapped the comm button with the heel of his hand. "We're on our way."

  "It's a vessel all right, sir." Lieutenant Tonia Barrows punched up maximum magnification on the long-distance readout, and Kirk tapped the code to put it on the miniature strategic screen on the arm of his command chair. This proving too small to be satisfactory—the strategic readouts had a sublime disregard for anything beyond the range of a photon torpedo—he rose and stepped down to the evening-shift navigator's side. Mr. Spock, who had been reading in his quarters when news came of the potential violation, descended from his position at the Central Computer station to join them.

  Green lights floated in the onyx abysses of the screen. Dim yellow haze marked the first, far-off effects of the star Tau Lyra's cometary field, though the star itself was too distant to show on the screen. The tiny pinlight was the drone buoy that had sent out its alarm, out beyond even the comets; the moving, antlike glow, the approaching craft.

  "Looks like they're heading for Tau Lyra, all right, sir," said Barrows, looking up at Kirk. She was a dark-haired woman, pretty and competent, reputed to play a mean game of poker. In the four years, nine months of the Enterprise's mission, crew members had come and gone, but Barrows was one of the moderate-sized group of those who had been on board from the first.

  Evening shift being smaller, the duties of navigator and helm were combined. "Can't tell for certain, but there's sure nothing else around there that they could be making for. High sublight speeds."

  "Point of origin?"

  "Crossroad Nebula, sir."

  Kirk was silent a moment, gauging, measuring in his mind. He could feel the tension go through the bridge crew; less familiar to him than the day-shift gang, though he made a point of spending several hours each evening on the bridge when he could. He knew that the big, easygoing engineering lieutenant Winfield essentially ran the bridge in his absence; he could see him now, trading a worried glance with Lieutenant Mahase, could sense the weight of the silence in the way Dykstra continued to work at the ops station. It was as if he could hear the pulse of each person in the room—with the possible exception of the unflappable Mr. Spock—slightly quicken.

  He returned to his seat, the Vulcan moving quietly at his heels. "When did the last ship vanish in the vicinity of the Crossroad Nebula?"

  "Three point seven standard years ago, Captain. It was the Federation scout Harriet Tubman, with a crew of twelve, out of Starbase Twenty. Prior to that there is an unconfirmed report of the free-trader Sagittarius, last reported in this vicinity. In addition, three of the Federation observation buoys placed on the outer perimeter of Tau Lyra's proximity zone have disappeared, as have three automated drones sent into the nebula by the Federation Science Institute to determine whether there is, in fact, a Turtledove Anomaly Point within the nebula."

  "And you know all that off the top of your head?" The turbolift doors whooshed softly shut as Dr. McCoy descended to the other side of Kirk's command chair and fixed the Vulcan science officer with a bright, sarcastic blue eye.

  Spock drew himself up a little and replied, "As our current assignment is to release yet another series of instrument packets into the nebula, it seemed logical to familiarize
myself with the potential hazards of the phenomenon. Quadrant Six is largely unexplored. The charts we made this morning are the first since the early Vulcan readings five centuries ago, which also marked the region as p'laaka—prone to unpredictable events. Since that time the Crossroad Nebula does not seem to have enlarged nor unduly shifted position relative to its surroundings. An anomaly, but not a danger."

  "Unless you happen to get too close," muttered McCoy.

  Spock elevated one brow. "The same may be said of a slime devil in one's bathtub. Though data is fragmentary, there is reason to believe that the region was marked on the ancient charts because of unexplained disappearances. Following the disappearance of the Harriet Tubman, the Federation declared the nebula a Standing Hazard. Hence the exploratory drones."

  Not to mention, thought Kirk uncomfortably, the standard warnings in force concerning all planets, inhabited or otherwise, within five parsecs of Anomaly Points.

  "There's an organized exploration slated to begin the year after next," said Ensign Lao. He'd come onto the bridge only moments behind Kirk, like Kirk still shrugging his gold command shirt straight, his wet hair sleeked back and his eyes alight with enthusiasm at the idea of such a mission. "Personally, I want a closer look at that planetary system that showed up on the edge of the nebula this morning. If they'll take me."

  Kirk grinned at the buoyant eagerness in his words. "Well, since you're probably one of the few midshipmen who's even been within spitting distance of an Anomaly, they can hardly leave you out."

  "If Starfleet can budget the funds," grumbled McCoy cynically.

  "Naturally," Spock said, "I have no data on Fleet budgetary projections. And until such an expedition can be mounted, our information must remain fragmentary."

  "But they have found debris," Kirk said.

  Spock inclined his head. Any of the bridge crew—or indeed, most of the four-hundred-odd men and women aboard the Enterprise—knew about the debris. Whatever had produced those disturbing fragments of metal and porcelain the Tubman had reported picking up on the fringes of the nebula, four or five hours before it had vanished itself, had—Kirk was willing to bet—been in the minds of every suddenly idle basketball player in the gym, as it was now in the set of Barrows's shoulders, the angle of Winfield's head. The report was in the central computer and had probably been scanned by everyone on board.

  Technology unknown, it had said.

  Now, for the first time in five centuries that anyone knew about, a ship had emerged from the dark heart of the gas veils, the clouds of glowing dust, the fluctuating screens and fields of mu-spectrum radiation that made the Crossroad almost impenetrable to any form of scans. A ship heading straight for the unprotected, prespaceflight world of Tau Lyra III.

  "We're getting a reading," said Barrows. "Same mass as the Enterprise but a much smaller power output. It looks like the power's falling even now."

  Across the bridge someone said, "Not the Tubman…"

  "Power readings?"

  "Anomalous." Barrows double-checked her data, perplexed. "Looks like some kind of matter-antimatter drive, but the burn rate's lower."

  "Got them on visual," Lieutenant Mahase started to say, then broke off with a gasp. Her eyes widened and she looked helplessly across at Kirk, shaking her head. It took a lot, Kirk knew, to unsettle Mahase.

  "Put it on visual, Lieutenant."

  She whispered, "I don't believe it," even as her fingers tapped in the magnification code.

  The alien ship, the intruder from the secret hidden within the heart of the Crossroad Nebula, was a Federation starship.

  It was painted a matte, dead black, nearly invisible against the velvet pit of space. Only the trapped glow of ambient light in the dust curtain of the nebula backlit it and made it visible at all.

  The viewports across its sides were dark. Dull ruddiness flared in the engine ports, but that was all. Other than that, they might have been looking at a mirror image of the Enterprise, or any of the other eleven Constitution-class starships, save for the stained and rust-streaked black paint. Battered, meteor-dented, and burned, the triangular arrangement of the nacelles, the shape of the command saucer, and the sleek, familiar lines were unmistakable.

  "Fascinating." Spock clasped his hands behind his back and studied the screen.

  "Well, I'll be a pink-eyed mackerel," whispered McCoy, and so absorbed was Mr. Spock in contemplation of the dark ship on the screen that he forbore any obvious rejoinders to this piece of reincarnative speculation.

  "It's…it's one of ours." Barrows sounded absolutely stunned. As well she might, reflected Kirk.

  Behind him, Lao was staring, openmouthed—being too young to have learned, Kirk thought, that anything was and could be possible in the dark starfields that were their unknown world.

  "ID code?"

  "Too far away to tell, Captain. I'm not getting anything, not even static."

  Kirk's eyes hardened. "Then open a hailing frequency. Mr. Winfield, deflector shields up."

  He glanced at his own readouts, more numerous and accurate as the distance between the dark ship and the Enterprise decreased. "Their power's falling, but they might have enough reserve to get off a shot or two." God knew, he added to himself, he'd wrung enough last-gasp bolts from the Enterprise not to trust even the feeblest of crippled starships. And even without phaser reserves, there were still photon torpedoes to be reckoned with.

  They were near enough to the other ship to be able to pick it up without magnification now. Streaks of rust and smoke fouling, the silvery pitting of meteor debris, the long burns of battle covered the black-painted hulls. Under the paint, thick and numerous patches could be seen in the metalwork itself. Whatever serial numbers or names were once there had been scorched and battered away long ago.

  How long? Kirk cast his mind back, trying to call to memory early losses among the starships of the Fleet. This one had clearly been out in space and taking a hell of a beating for decades. Yet the Constitution-class ships were only twenty years old. In a high-stress environment, perhaps…

  But it gave him an eerie feeling, such as he had felt when, during the Gamma Hydra II incident, he had looked into the mirror and seen that aged face staring back at him, had known it for his own.

  Against the faint glow of the far-flung nebular gases, the other starship veered, swung away. At the same moment, Barrows reported, "They're evading…"

  "Stay on them."

  Even as Kirk gave the order the navigator was swinging the helm. The image of the star Tau Lyra, no bigger than a yellow pinhead at this distance, fell away into the inky pit. Ahead, the dark starship was accelerating spongily. Kirk's practiced eye marked the brightening and dulling of the engine glow that told that the matter/antimatter flow was ellipsing. His glance cut back to Spock, bent over his computer again, Lao at his side. "Didn't the drones that vanished into the Crossroad report a power loss?"

  "Affirmative, Captain." The blue light of his station wavered over the angular features. "The Tubman reported anomalous effects up to two parsecs from the edge of the nebula itself. Our own readings of the planetary system we charted this morning were affected by it. I suggest that if the starship approaches it any closer, we exercise extreme caution in pursuit."

  "To hell with caution," muttered Kirk between his teeth. "I want to know who they are and what they're doing with a starship." He knew that Spock was, of course, right. He had no business being drawn into a dangerous pursuit based sheerly on his own impatience, his own need to crack the mystery—particularly in view of the standard warnings in force in this area. There was an outside chance that the black starship was a decoy, sent to lure the Enterprise back into whatever dwelled in the heart of the Crossroad—into whatever caused the strangely variable readings and unknown energy spectra known these days, for lack of a term better than their discoverer's name, as Turtledove Anomalies.

  Spock, who had the excellent hearing of Vulcans, raised an eyebrow. Nobody else heard. Before them, the
black starship swung again, headed for deep space this time, away from the hazards of the nebula, the forbidden Tau Lyra system. Barrows nipped the Enterprise around, cutting down the distance still further. To McCoy, Kirk muttered, "If they think they can flog that thing into warp speed I'd like to see it. . . . Mr. Spock! Names of all Federation starships out of service. . . ."

  "The Constellation, Valiant, and Intrepid were all destroyed at a recent date—definite evidence of their destruction. In fact"—the Vulcan straightened up and glanced from Kirk to the dark shape on the screen before them—"there has never been a case of a Constitution-class starship simply vanishing without a trace."

  "Then who the hell are they?" demanded McCoy, and Spock gave him the eyebrow again.

  "I trust that is a rhetorical question, Doctor."

  "They're losing power, sir," cut in Barrows, and Kirk could see the reddish glow of the other system's engine's waning visibly. "Sensors indicate internal systems may be breaking down. It's hard to tell, there's some weird shielding there."

  "Hailing frequency open, Captain."

  Kirk cut in the mike. "Then let's see what they have to say for themselves."

  The carrier signal was bad, drowning in a flux of static. Kirk sharpened his voice to the hard edge that had the best chance of being heard, and said, "This is Captain James T. Kirk of the United Federation of Planets Starship Enterprise. You are in violation of Federation shipping regulations and of the Federation Prime Directive. Please display identification codes and state your name and your business in Federation space."

  The static swelled, filling the bridge with its harsh crackle. For a long minute there was silence, though Kirk sensed a listening, as if he could see someone standing as he stood, in the darkened bridge of the craft silhouetted against the luminous veils of shifting dust.

  "Are they reading us?" he asked softly.

  Mahase touched the comm set in her ear. "They should be."