Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

Would she have been better off, or worse, if the Enterprise had never made planetfall on Exo III? If she'd never known whether Roger Corby was alive or dead? If she'd never found him? At least, she thought wearily, she'd still have the search.

  She'd made friends on the Enterprise. Uhura, jigsaw buddy and confidant of a thousand late rec-room nights. Dr. McCoy, more a friend than a boss—she wondered where he would be signing on again. If he'd mind her continuing as his nurse, his second-in-command of whatever ship's medical department he wound up leading…If he chose Starfleet again.

  Spock…

  Her heart seemed to squeeze up inside her, as if crushed by a giant fist, and she felt defeated and utterly lost.

  Her biomedical credential incomplete, she was only borderline qualified for a Science Department position—and there was no guarantee that if she asked for the ship of his next posting, she'd get it.

  And she knew it was a childish thing, a schoolgirlish thing, to do anyway.

  Follow your heart, Uhura had said to her once—more than once. Only Chapel suspected that her heart had a broken navigation computer.

  "Could they be tracking some kind of space debris?" Uhura suggested, leaning forward to study the map Sulu had called up to the single—and now badly overloaded—reader screen beneath the dark viewscreen of the silent ship. "Maybe they're following some kind of unknown component, like the Tubman reported finding, and it drifted down to Tau Lyra Three. . . ."

  "And didn't burn up in the atmosphere?"

  "Come on, Pavel, you have no idea what kind of shielding it might have!"

  "Christine?"

  She looked up quickly, to see Ensign Lao Zhiming standing at her side.

  He was still in uniform, his log pad still under his arm. He must have just come from the captain's second briefing with Spock and Mr. Scott—probably covering almost the identical points of speculation being indulged in around the reader screen by the first-shift bridge crew at this very moment. There was a slight line of worry, of concentration, between his brows.

  "Anything decided?" she asked. "Or did they ask you not to say?"

  Lao shook his head, pulled up a chair beside her. "I don't think it's anything classified," he said. "They're going to run scans on the ship before going across—Mr. Scott brought out his whole collection of schematics for Klingon booby traps, and with the shielding on that ship there's no telling about some of them. But in the end someone's going to have to go over."

  He sounded hopeful. Chapel had to smile.

  "Has Dr. McCoy examined the others?" he asked, after a moment's hesitation. "Or—questioned them? About what they're doing on that ship?"

  Chapel shook her head. "Tomorrow," she said. "Most of them dropped off dead asleep the minute the doctor finished the preliminary scan." She frowned, seeing the worry in his eyes and remembering…

  "Thad," she said, suddenly understanding his concern, and what it was he was trying to find out.

  He nodded.

  "He doesn't have any of the DNA markers for Pelleter's syndrome, or Tak's," she said, a little diffidently. "I understand those are the only two kinds that they haven't found a way to treat."

  "Yet." He raised his head, and his eyes were bright with a kind of defiance, hope, and anger mingled—anger at fate, at those who accepted fate. "Yet." Then he sighed, and some of the banty-cock flash of energy seemed to go out of him. He folded his arms around the log pad and looked down at the floor for a time.

  "Your brother has Pelleter's syndrome, doesn't he?"

  Lao nodded. Chapel remembered going with Lao on a massive raid on a toystore on Andorus, watching the young man buy everything in sight with his usual delighted ebullience—a scene that would have been genuinely funny had not the intended recipient of the toys been thirty years old.

  "Smith doesn't seem nearly as bad as Qixhu," he said, after a time. "He might have started off worse but have a condition which can be augmented up, but the thing is, I've got no idea how he could have ended up in a spacegoing crew. Even somebody like Smith would be kept an eye on by Assist Services, to make sure nobody takes advantage of him. A smuggler or a pirate crew would have to go to a lot of trouble to get someone like him on board."

  Something very strange…McCoy's words flashed through Chapel's mind again.

  Lao was looking at the re-up form on the reader screen, his dark, straight brows drawn down with something akin to pain.

  "My mother says he asks about me every day. When am I coming back? How long have I been gone? He doesn't understand."

  He shook his head. "He never could understand why I could go into space and he couldn't. He didn't like the training to operate a machine—which is all he's able to do, really—and the drug therapy made his head hurt. He used to cry when they wouldn't let him follow me to school."

  He was silent, as if, through the darkness of the screen, he was looking to some other scene: to a big, awkward boy in a padded blue coat, standing in the Beijing snowfall, watching his small brother walk away from him.

  "I didn't like to leave him on Earth. I know Assist Services takes good care of him, and he has a job, and people to look after him…but it isn't the same. I know it isn't the same." His eyes closed, as if he could not look at that scene, could not look into his own guilt. "But I had to make my choice."

  "We all do," said Chapel softly. She reached over, and flipped off the reader screen, unmarked, unchosen, unsaved. "We all do."

  Chapter Four

  THE FIRST THING Yeoman Wein of Security knew about Dylan Arios's escape from the brig some eighteen hours later was when he heard, in the corridor behind him, the hissing breath as one of the security doors slipped shut. Startled, Wein sprang to his feet. He was conscious that he'd drifted into momentary reverie triggered by the sight of the lovely Yeoman Shimada turning the corner into the Security lounge a few minutes before, but knew his mental abstraction hadn't lasted long. Besides, how on earth could Arios have escaped and where could he have gone?

  The brig corridor—at whose head the guard had his small desk—was thirty meters long and bare of cover, curved just slightly with the hull but not so as to provide any place that was out of the desk guard's line of sight. Wein went to check the first door opposite him. Through the crystal-hard plex of the door he saw the Klingon Raksha inspecting the cell visicom: an independent unit unattached to the central computer, for obvious reasons.

  The second cell, in which Arios had been incarcerated, was empty under the soft white glare of its floodlights, save for something that gleamed on the floor just to the left of the narrow bed.

  With a startled curse, Wein hit the door combination and strode in.

  When he came to in sickbay afterward, Wein admitted he should have punched the Backup button at his desk first, then gone into the cell to check how Arios had escaped and what it was that he'd left on the floor. Wein had no explanation for why he hadn't noticed that Arios had not, in fact, left the cell; at least, he hadn't left it at that point. In fact, Arios did leave the cell within moments of Wein's opening the door, just as soon as he'd manhandled the security officer's unconscious body onto the bed and covered him with the light blanket, relieving him in the process of his phaser.

  There was, of course, no small, shining object on the floor, nor had there ever been.

  "ChadHom…" Arios pressed up against the communications grille of the security cell, whispered Raksha's pet name even as he was pulling the faceplate off the touchpad. He'd already raided the drawer of Wein's desk for a cable, which he hooked into the terminal. Through the hard crystal of the door he saw her step close.

  "Try IMP/RAN/NUM," she breathed. "And don't call me chadHom."

  Arios stepped back to the terminal, rapped out the commands quickly, shook his head.

  "IMP/RAN/NET."

  Another blank, and Raksha muttered, "Animals copulating all over the place," in Klingon. She thought a moment, then said, "NET/TEST."

  The door hissed open.

  "I told you it wa
s magic," said Arios, as Raksha strode to the terminal, ripped free the cable, and began rapping out swift strings of commands. "All you've got to do is say the right spell."

  "Remind me to explain the extent of your errors the next time we have three uninterrupted days." The black stormcloud of her hair fell forward over her face as she worked, big hands pecking swiftly, delicately over the keys. Arios took two steps down the corridor, then stepped back to gather her hair into his two hands and bend to kiss the nape of her neck.

  "The time after that," he suggested, and she looked back and up at him, into eyes bright as sunlight laughing through leaves. Her own smile turned her face briefly beautiful, and briefly young.

  Then he strode off down the corridor, slapping through the code on Thad and Adajia's cell—which Raksha had gotten out of the computer moments before—while the Klingon pulled tight the belt on her doublet and shoved into the resulting pouch not only the cable, but every tool and piece of replacement hardware in the desk drawer. Adajia leaped up from the floor where she'd been sitting—having learned the uses of chairs only recently and not very completely—as the door slid open, and Thad almost flung himself into Arios's arms with a hug of desperate relief. Neither spoke, both having a healthy distrust of hidden microphones; by the time they reached the door of the brig corridor itself Raksha had cross-coupled the programming on the visual pickup to display its own loop, and the four slipped past the door of the Security messroom—contrary to Wein's belief, quite empty—and around the corner to an inspection corridor that would lead, eventually, to Engineering and its attendant shops.

  Dr. McCoy stood for a long time looking from his two charges—prone, unconscious, and still naked to the waist from his examination, on the dark plastette of the diagnostic beds—to the bright-colored rectangles of the schematic display, which glowed like the windows of some bizarre cathedral on the screens beside each bed.

  He had, quite literally, never seen anything like it in his life.

  Under the burn dressing, Phil Cooper's ribs rose and fell gently with the rhythm of his breathing. Eighteen hours of rest and semisedation had stabilized his readings considerably, and his system was starting to respond to the hyperena and other metabolic accelerators. Sharnas T'Gai Khir still barely seemed to live at all. Only the steady movement of peaks and valleys of the brain-wave and heartbeat monitors showed that the boy was not, in fact, the corpse that he looked. His long hair had been brushed aside, and the pattern of messy olive green scars, like the spoor of incompetent butchery, ran from between his shoulder blades up to the base of his skull. Only when studied closely did the delicacy of the technique reveal itself, the sureness with which the incisions followed the nerves themselves. Arios, if it was he who had done this, had known exactly what it was he was looking for and where to look for it…whatever it was.

  According to the delta and IP schematics, the wiring in both men extended beyond the cut zone, merging with breathtaking imperceptibility into the spinal nerves themselves. Even after nearly a day of continuous study, McCoy wasn't certain how to enter his observations in his log.

  God knew what it was for.

  It's Fleet issue, Cooper had said, and the weariness, the resignation, in his voice had shocked the doctor almost more than the implications of the implants themselves. The unspoken, Oh, that stuff.

  You guessed it. You've seen it before. Therefore, you should know who I am.

  According to his tricorder readings, taken during the morning's medical exams in the brig, Arios was also heavily wired—and scarred along the back of the neck—and there were some kind of implants in Thad's brain as well.

  Some forms of retardation, McCoy knew, were correctable by implant. But the implants themselves were exterior, smooth metal casings several centimeters thick and about a third the area of a man's palm. The technology required to install an interior implant, much less communicate with it, would be extraordinarily advanced. In any case, it didn't seem to have eliminated Thad's condition, though it may have allieviated it—if that's what it was for.

  McCoy wasn't entirely sure of that.

  The door shut behind him and he returned to his office, where copies of the IPs he'd taken last night and today lay on his desk along with every kind of analysis and schematic he could come up with regarding Arios's physiology, DNA, and probable ancestry.

  Those, too, were deeply disquieting in their implications.

  "Journal digest," he said to the computer, settling into his chair and reaching for that morning's now-cold coffee.

  The screen brightened at the sound of his voice, a plain, blank silver, unbesmirched by letter or line.

  "Journal digest," repeated McCoy irritably, glancing at the chronometer. Lags occurred seldom, and only at times of absolute peak use, usually two to three hours into the first two shifts.

  It was an hour from the end of the first shift. Everybody would be closing down recreational readers or games now, or gearing workstations over to evening shift. There should be no problem.

  "I'm sorry," said the computer. "Please repeat request."

  McCoy repeated himself, and the screen blossomed with the red and blue lettering of the index of journal digests. "Give me anything you've got on nanosurgical neurology over the last three Standard months," said McCoy, realizing despairingly how long it had been since he'd had time to thoroughly scan the digests, let alone study the articles themselves.

  During his first year on the Enterprise McCoy had managed to keep up with them fairly well, as the computer absorbed the stacked and zipped transmissions every time they made port at a starbase and everyone read through the journals and digests at their leisure in between times. But—and McCoy was aware that Chapel, Paxson, and the techs had this problem, too—during the months and years of the starship's voyage, so much new information came in from the exploration of new civilizations, new biospheres, that had to be written up, studied, catalogued, transmitted, that current research by others tended to slip more and more by the board.

  Given a choice between reading about someone else's research on genetic manipulation, or artificial optics, or improvements in warp drive physics, and studying a tankful of Kurlanian seedfish, or the fossilized remains of an Elthonian android's eye, McCoy knew what choice he'd make. And had made, repeatedly, over the past four years.

  There were only so many hours in a day.

  In three months the Enterprise would be returning to Earth. Then he'd be faced with the real decision: to re-up for another five-year mission, or to settle down at one of the major universities for the years it would take to analyze and study all that he'd gathered.

  He found he didn't like to think about what settling down would mean.

  Almost without thinking, he said "Come" to Chapel's signal; the tall woman stood behind his chair, looking over his shoulder at the listing of articles in the digest index. She held a log pad cradled in one elbow, with her own copies of the schematics. He hadn't seen her so fascinated, and so troubled, by a problem in years.

  "It might be something so new that it isn't in the journals yet," she surmised, after it became clear to them both that no digest mentioned anything about radically new techniques of central nervous system augmentation, or neurological control, or whatever it was. "And it might be classified, if Starfleet is behind it."

  She hesitated a moment, then asked, "That couldn't be true, could it?"

  McCoy looked up at her, startled.

  "Roger…" She brought out the name of her dead lover and mentor—"the Pasteur of archaeological medicine," he'd been called on the infovids, the man for whose sake she'd given up her own career in biomedicine—uncertainly, syllables she hadn't spoken since that weird, terrible, claustrophobic confrontation with what was left of the man on Exo III.

  "Roger told me once about…I don't know, what he called 'conspiracies' in Starfleet. People who'd take any development, any knowledge, no matter how good or lifesaving it was in itself—and use it to add to their own power. I neve
r knew how much of that to believe." Her quick, rueful grin vanished as swiftly as it appeared.

  "At the time it always seemed to be conspiracies headed by other scientists to take away credit from Roger's discoveries. But could there be . . . some kind of conspiracy to establish neurological control over members of Starfleet?"

  She sounded troubled, as well she might, thought McCoy. For four years Starfleet had been her refuge, her home, the only place she had left to go after Roger's death.

  McCoy, who had been in a similar position after his own divorce and the collapse of his life, knew exactly how she felt.

  "If it were, Chris…" McCoy shook his head, touched the screen-through key. "Technology like that would show up somewhere. It would leave tracks. Not the neural wiring itself, but the manufacture of the wire, the research and development that created it, if it is wire. Even a conspiracy couldn't cover that. And it's not reading like any metal I've ever seen on the IPs. You'd see improvements in hologame design, in security system monitoring, in autocleaning of microducts. Something. Somebody didn't carve that hardware out of a bar of soap. Whoever's selling nonferrous nanotechnology that fine, and that efficient, to Starfleet would be selling it elsewhere, for other purposes. Analysis of the wiring itself shows it's literally growing, remaking itself out of minerals in the blood. . . ."

  "Please repeat request," said the computer.

  "What the hell's the matter with this thing today?" muttered McCoy.

  "Please clarify question."

  "I wasn't talking to you," he snapped. "Just give me listings on nanosurgical neurology for the past three Standard months. . . ."

  After that, the computer appeared to behave, and McCoy—taken up with the problem of where Starfleet might have gotten the wiring from in the first place, much less why it had done what Phil Cooper claimed it had done—thought nothing further of it.

  "I can't believe these safeguards." Raksha tapped neatly through the two double-wired keyboards in the safety of the Number 7-3 storage hold, which backed onto the branch line that fed the computers of the portside engineering workrooms. "Hasn't anybody told these people that you don't keep ferrets out of a building by lowering a portcullis?"