Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  Thad began protestingly, "But Master, the…" and received a sharp glance from Raksha.

  Kirk's eyes returned to the fugitive captain again, noting once more the odd, alien bones that seemed to have more joints than they should have, the grass-colored hair. "Have you any explanation for this?"

  The green eyes met his: then Arios shook his head. His eyelashes were green, too. "Not at the moment, no."

  "Nor for the fact that no Federation starship is listed as missing?"

  "Convergent evolution?" suggested Raksha snidely, and Thad began, "What's convergent…?"

  Arios signed them both silent. "I don't understand it either," he said, with a good imitation of frankness. "But we did find the vessel derelict. We have done nothing wrong."

  Thad startled noticibly and Adajia became absorbed in turning one of her jeweled bracelets to the proper position on her slender wrist; the Klingon, Kirk observed, was watching the faces of those around the table intently from under long black lashes. For what, he would have given a good deal to know.

  Arios continued quietly, "If you wish to hold us and check for criminal records with the Federation, by all means do so. . . ."

  Thad blenched but said nothing.

  "…but you'll find that none of us has a record of any sort."

  Kirk's eyes narrowed. "You may not have," he said. "But as of now you're detained pending investigation of charges of piracy and suspected intent to violate the Prime Directive. Mr. DeSalle…"

  The security chief stepped forward, and Arios rose, signaling the others to do the same.

  "Place Captain Arios and his crew in the brig. Send in Dr. McCoy to see them under appropriate guard. Mr. Spock, prepare to come with me over to that ship…"

  "NO!" Arios, Raksha, Thad, and Adajia almost overset their chairs springing up; Arios caught Kirk involuntarily by the sleeve. Then the Nautilus's four crewmen looked at one another hesitantly, not sure what to say next.

  "Probably not a good idea." Raksha leaned casually on the end of the table, trying to pretend that no one had seen the momentary alarm and horror in her eyes. "We had trouble with built-in defenses on the ship. It's honeycombed with booby traps…"

  "And stinking with reactor fumes," added Adajia brightly, unhooking a raven curl from where it had tangled in an earring.

  "Captain Kirk," said Arios, "I'd advise against it." The hand that he'd put on Kirk's arm, as if to forcibly keep him from going out the door, he removed now, but Kirk could see the bandaged fingers shaking with exhaustion and strain. "As Raksha says, when we went aboard we found some pretty nasty defenses built in. We haven't had nearly time enough to explore the ship, let alone disarm half the defenses we did find. If you're going on board, take me along."

  Kirk studied him for a long moment, trying to fathom the genuine fear he saw in the Master's green eyes. Beyond him, he was aware that Raksha had lost her air of cynical detachment; there was fear there, too. Surely more fear than of discovered contraband? And what contraband would be worth death by cold and suffocation in a dying ship?

  Fear of what?

  "I'll take that under advisement," Kirk said thoughtfully. "Mr. DeSalle, take them away."

  "Promise." Arios pulled away from DeSalle's hand on his shoulder. "Don't go on board the Nautilus without me or Raksha. Please."

  "Lock them up," Kirk said. "Raksha and Arios in separate cells; Adajia and Thaddeus can stay together." Both of them had given him looks of appalled horror, and Adajia, further, backed a step toward the corner as if she'd make a fight of it. "Mr. Spock?" He turned to the Vulcan as the crew of the Nautilus was led from the briefing room.

  Mr. Spock, while everyone else had been grouped around the door, had remained seated, flipping screen after screen of information through the terminal on the table. Now, as the others departed he looked up, the reflected blue glow highlighting the odd bones of his face.

  "No record of any ship—Federation, free trader, ally—named the Antelope," he reported. "As previously noted, no record of any starship missing, nor of any partially constructed but uncommissioned starship unaccounted for. Analysis of the Nautilus's outline indicates the most recent innovations in starship design. No match on retina or DNA scans of either of the men calling themselves Phil Cooper or Thaddeus Smith; naturally, no records available on either the Orion or the Klingon; preliminary scanner analysis of Captain Arios indicates human—alien hybrid with some as yet unknown alien race. And the T'Gai Khir," he added, steepling his long fingers, "are relatives of mine, the affilium currently entitled to use the name consisting of five ancestors over the age of two hundred and fifty, a matriarch, four daughters, and a son in the Vulcan Science Academy who is forty-seven years old, unmarried, and whose name is not Sharnas."

  Chapter Three

  "HE'S RESTING EASIER NOW." Christine Chapel touched a stylus point to her log pad to note the readings on the diagnostic above the sleeping Vulcan boy's head, checked the feed gauge on the measured dosage of antishock, and turned back to the lanky young man slumped in the chair against the wall.

  Phil Cooper's head jerked up sharply. He'd been dropping off to sleep. "Good." He rubbed a hand over his unshaven face. "God knows he took the worst of it, when the coils blew. At least the rest of us were on the bridge."

  "What was he doing down in the engineering hull?" asked Chapel softly. Even with him in deeply sedated sleep, the ghost of pain shadowed the boy's bruised eyelids and odd-shaped lips. His hair, long enough to braid away from the narrow temples, framed a face that had the yellow-green cast Mr. Spock's did, when Spock was hurt.

  "I've heard of boys that young being apprentice engineers, but he should never have been down there alone."

  "No…I mean yes. I mean…Sharnas is…is sort of an… Well, he had to be down there." Cooper shook his head tiredly. "Dylan—the Master—is the engineer, but he had to be on the bridge, you see. He's kept that impulse drive together for two years with engine tape and spit, but coming through the Crossroad was like being rolled down a hill in a barrel of rocks." He rubbed his face again, his hand shaking with fatigue. His color was bad, too, his brows and the dark stubble of his beard standing blackly against a bloodless, exhausted face.

  Chapel made no comment on the discrepancy between the Master keeping the Nautilus's impulse drive together for two years with engine tape and spit, and the Master's own contention that he'd found the black ship four days ago like a bottle half-buried in sand at the beach.

  "Nurse Chapel." McCoy came in from the lab next door, the colored sheets of digitalized internal photographs in hand and an expression of bafflement on his face. He halted for a moment, studying Cooper, then said, "I think you could stand a once-over yourself, Mr. Cooper."

  Cooper waved dismissively. "I'm fine." He was younger than he looked, thought Chapel, studying his face in profile. The gray eyes were already netted with deep-cut lines of strain as well as laughter, and there was gray in the stiff brown hair.

  "The hell you are." McCoy handed Chapel the sheaf of IPs and brought up his scanner. Cooper stiffened, as if in spite of being at the limits of his physical endurance he was readying for an attack. "This shows you're suffering from low-level rhodon poisoning and borderline shock due to trauma. Burns, from the reading, and pretty severe ones…"

  The young man flinched back as McCoy moved toward him, and said again, "I'm fine. The Master told me to look after Sharnas. . . ."

  "We'll look after Sharnas," said McCoy firmly. "It's our job. You need rest, and if I have to use a jolt of lexorin to give it to you, I will."

  Chapel, who had been looking at the top shot of the pile, raised her head, baffled. It was a readout of the Vulcan's nervous system, an early one taken—by the look of the electrosynaptic patterns—before the antishock and relaxants had gone into effect.

  But it wasn't the blurry galaxy of synaptic firings that caught her eye. Among the pinks and blues of the central nerve column itself could be seen a series of white dropout shapes, spreading out into a me
sh of threads in the medulla and up into the cortex itself.

  Cooper, who'd started to his feet as McCoy came toward him, settled back on the lab stool where he'd been, but he still looked ready to attack if McCoy got within arm's reach of him, which, Chapel noticed, the doctor was careful not to do. For a man with as good a shucks-I'm-just-a-country-doctor act as McCoy had, her colleague had picked up a fine-tuned reflex for self-preservation in his four years on the Enterprise.

  McCoy looked up from the tricorder, his blue eyes narrow and hard. "Turn around," he ordered.

  Cooper only regarded him warily.

  "Turn around," McCoy reiterated. "I want to see what that is on the back of your neck. Your friend there has it, too…" He nodded toward the sleeping Vulcan. "…and from the preliminary readings, so does Captain Arios, so turn around and let me look at it or I'll call Yeoman Wolfman in here and have him turn you around."

  Cooper's hand slipped down to grasp the leg of the stool, and for a moment Chapel, gauging the distance to the Emergency button that would have summoned the security officer in the next room, thought he'd start swinging. McCoy didn't move, nor did his eyes flinch from his patient's. Then Cooper relaxed, and said quietly, "What the hell. You've probably guessed anyway."

  He turned around on the stool and bowed his head, his arms folded across his chest. Where the dark hair parted to fall on either side of his bent neck Chapel could see a chain of ragged, X-shaped scars and the dull glint of metal protruding from the skin.

  "It's Fleet issue," Cooper said in that same low, resigned voice. "The Master keeps it open and short-wires the receptors every couple of months. He does it for Sharnas, too, as well as he can." He turned his head slightly, and in spite of the sweat that stood suddenly on his face, and the chalky grayness of his lips, there was a gleam of cynicism in his eyes. "But if you want my real name and my Starfleet ID number you're just going to have to run a DNA scan."

  McCoy stared at him, nonplussed. "You're telling me Starfleet did that to you?"

  "It wasn't the fairies at my christening." Cooper turned around and leaned his shoulders against the wall again. His eyes were slipping shut; he shook his head sharply, to keep from nodding. "How else are they gonna keep folks like us in line?"

  McCoy sprang forward as Cooper began to slip sideways; Chapel dropped the charts and strode to help him. The Nautilus's astrogator didn't even open his eyes as Chapel and McCoy carried him to the other bed; McCoy dug out his hypo and administered a dose of antishock, checked his tricorder readings, and said, "Get me a vial apiece of masiform and dalpomine, and the burn kit."

  When Chapel came back, McCoy had rolled his patient over and stripped off his shirt, revealing, as he'd guessed, that the trauma readings resulted from two long strips of blistering flesh across the right shoulder and down Cooper's back, the sort of burns that result from falling cables in a blowout. As she helped McCoy strip the makeshift bandages someone had put on them back on the Nautilus, Chapel's eyes were drawn once again to the half-healed line of slashes and scars that ran from the first thoracic vertebra up through the cervical and into the sweat-damp hair.

  "Starfleet…" she said softly. "Doctor, experiments in neurological control—if that's what that is—are outlawed."

  "Even if they weren't," replied McCoy, spraying the burned area with traumex and neatly cutting feathercap dressing with the eye of an artist, "those implants are so far beyond anything I've even heard of that I'm not sure how they'd work. His look simple—I'm going to run another scan of them while he's out—but by the look of the IPs, the boy's run on up into the conscious centers of the brain. God knows what they're for."

  He stepped back, surveying his patient, then turned and looked over his shoulder at the bobbing golden triangles on the readout above the Vulcan boy's still form.

  "But either he's run into an alien civilization that has convinced him—or programmed him—to lie…or there's something very strange going on in Starfleet."

  Clothed in close-fitting black exercise togs, his sweat-damp black hair hanging in his eyes, the Enterprise's first-shift helmsman looked very different from his usual efficient self on the bridge.

  TAU LYRA III

  Status—Level 1 Protected

  Highest technological level—Electricity level 3

  General technological level—Steam level 5

  Civilization Class K—Unified-diversified

  Planetary type M

  Cultural zones—20

  Radio linguistic count—8

  Climate—Moderate polar/tropical

  Forest cover 45%

  Water cover 73%

  Sentient Civilized species—1

  Sentient Noncivilized species—2-4 (?)

  All information based upon flyby probes (SD 1547.8, 1790.11, 2018.3)

  Planet Tau Lyra III was flagged as potential protected SD 1798.9 on the basis of radio signals, granted Federation Level 1 protected status, standard proximity zone established at cometary field. (See minutes, Prime Directive Committee, Federation Council, 9-7-2261 and Promulgations, 2261.) Sentient Civilized Species refer to themselves as Yoons, planet most commonly referred to as Yoondri in radio broadcasts. (See broadcast analysis report #3—Tau Lyra III). According to Dr. Feshan Kznith of the Vulcan Science Academy, analysis of radio signals is difficult because of suspected high telepathic component of the language. In the twelve standard years of observation no major conflicts have been observed, and flybys indicate no evidence of major military violence for at least fifty standard years, perhaps two or three times that long. Neither have any major advances in technology been reported or observed, though because of telepathic component of the language it is difficult to determine this.

  Tau Lyra III has no strategic, military, or commerical importance. Location could possibly be used should observation of the Crossroad Nebula become necessary, but artificial station in cometary field is at least as economically feasible, depending on cultural receptivity of the Yoons.

  Standard warnings apply to all planets in the system. See journal articles…

  "So what would they want there?" asked Mr. Sulu, flipping a screen-split and touching in the code for the well-circulated files concerning standard warnings, Standing Hazards, and the Harriet Tubman.

  Navigator Pavel Chekov came back from the rec room's dispenser with three cups of coffee balanced in his hands. "Just our luck that it happened off our watch."

  He shook his head, and Lieutenant Uhura, graceful in her bright-colored warm-up tights, pointed out, "Tonia and the others should be off in an hour. We can ask them."

  In the far corner of the almost deserted rec room, Christine Chapel all but felt the young navigator's glance cross to her, but Uhura raised one slender finger, stilling whatever suggestion Chekov would have made about questioning her. For that she was grateful. McCoy's speculations—and her own, regarding what Cooper had said, the readings she'd been getting on the IPs and delta scans of the two strangers in sickbay—had troubled her deeply.

  For four years now, Starfleet had been her home, the only place she had left, it seemed. It contained her only friends—and the man she loved. She wondered what the information—the ambiguous possibilities that those fragments of speculation had revealed—meant to the choice that was coming closer and closer.

  She looked wearily at the reader screen in front of her.

  RETURN TO CIVILIAN STATUS?

  Yes

  No

  DESTINATION OF OUT-MUSTER?

  San Francisco—Earth

  Memory Alpha

  Vulcan—Central Port

  Other _________

  PREFERENCE FOR REASSIGNMENT?

  Planetary (list in separate annex file in order of preference)

  Starfaring (list in separate annex file in order of preference)

  There's something very strange going on in Starfleet. . . .

  At this hour—shortly after 2230—the big rec room on Deck Eight was clearing out. Small groups sat around the scat
tered tables, playing cards or eating a late dessert, some in uniform if that was their habit, others in exercise clothes, or the civilian togs from their homes. Quite a number, Chapel saw, were occupying the reader screens.

  Three months, she thought, and the voyage would be over. The five-year mission would be done.

  They would all have to choose anew.

  On the viewscreen above the table where Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu sat, the piped-in image of the Enterprise's main viewscreen hung like a square of diamond-studded velvet, the black shape of the Nautilus a nearly invisible riddle in the darkness.

  "There's no dilithium reported on the planet," Sulu was saying. "No metebelite, no brain-spice, no rare elements at all. From any starting point you care to name, it's a backwater, the end of nowhere."

  "Could be a smuggler's drop, maybe?" suggested Chekov, putting a foot on a chair and leaning his elbows on his knee.

  "Why choose a system where the whole shebang is ringed in a proximity zone?" Uhura sipped her coffee, frowning a little at the screen. "There are other deserted worlds in this system with the same atmospherics and gravity, aren't there?"

  "Gamma Helicon Two's almost identical," agreed Sulu.

  "Almost." Chekov seized on the word. "Maybe we should see where the differences lie? That might have something to do with their choice."

  "If they had a choice."

  Chapel, her eyes already returning to the form on her own reader screen, almost laughed at the aptness of the phrase. If they had a choice.

  The last definite choice she had made—to abandon her biochemical studies, to turn her energies to the painstaking, heart-killing business of searching for the man she had then loved in all the vastness of eternity—had ended for her in such bitterness, in such confusion and pain, that for years now she had simply drifted.