Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  "Maybe it's a trap?" suggested Adajia, looking up from the weapon she was making out of engine tape, a small pry bar, and spare wire-stripper blades she'd found in a workbench drawer.

  "I didn't know they allowed ferrets on starships," said Thad worriedly. "The Consilium wouldn't let us have cats in our quarters at the Institute. I thought that was mean of them."

  "It was mean of them," agreed Adajia. "The Consilium are mean people, Thaddy. Almost as mean as Klingons."

  "Naah." Arios emerged from a small access hatch in the wall, pin welder in one hand and a straggling bundle of spare wire wound like a stole around his shoulders. A night's sleep and a couple of meals had taken the tremor out of his hands, but he still looked close to spent. "Nobody's as mean as a Klingon."

  "You're straight on course about that, puq," agreed Raksha mildly.

  "I'm convinced," said the Master, crossing to Raksha and considering the pin welder he held in his hand. "This really is the Enterprise. With that wiring it couldn't be anything else."

  "We're just about done here." Raksha put the final touches to her codes, began disconnecting the keyboards. "Where's the most inconspicuous plexus on the main trunk for doors, lights, and gravity control?"

  "Bowling alley," said Arios. "Deck Twenty. We can get there through the central dorsal vents."

  "What's a bowling alley?" inquired the Orion, testing the balance of the quite savage-looking weapon she had made, then spinning it lightly around the sides of her hand.

  Arios explained, "You balance pieces of high-impact plastic up on end and then try to knock them down from fifty feet away by rolling a ball at them."

  "What if you can't get them to balance?" asked Thad, still worried, and Adajia said, "The Federation conquers the galaxy, crosses the stars, and fights the Romulans to a standstill, and they occupy themselves with that in their spare time?" Her earrings glittered as she tossed back her hair.

  Arios grinned, shoving wires in his pockets. "The bent area on the Nautilus used to be the bowling alley," he said, irony bright in his green eyes. "But on this ship, it should be perfectly safe."

  "Please repeat request."

  Spock glanced from the starfield analysis hardcopy he was studying with a frown. "High-band scan results of sensor readings on the Nautilus, broken down in incremental bandwidths." He had always considered the whole voder-activated command system on the computer inadequate to the needs of any civilized intelligence, and this afternoon's particularly bad performance seemed to him typical of the kind of problems that could evolve in such a system. Humans, he reflected, seemed willing to go to almost any lengths to avoid specifics in their dealings either with one another or with machines. . . .

  His quick ears picked up a familiar tread slowing down outside his door, and the word "Come" was out of his mouth almost before the chime sounded. "Captain," he greeted his friend.

  "What've you got?"

  The lab-quality display screen above Spock's desk had already manifested a proof sheet of sensor schematics, augmented where possible to adapt to the black ship's shields. Captain Kirk folded his arms and considered the images over his first officer's shoulder, noting differences between the designs of the Enterprise and the Nautilus that had been less obvious through the viewscreens against the blackness of space.

  "Unless I'm mistaken," he said softly, "I've seen that shorter hull proportion on the very newest designs, stuff that isn't even off the drawing boards yet. But that's years' worth of pitting on that thing—decades' worth. Even on the places where the saucer's been repaired."

  He was silent for a time, studying the repeated images: green shadows on one outline, yellow on another, depending on what the sensors were picking up. Several of the schematics showed no more than the bare, pale blue skeleton of the ship itself, either because the sensors found nothing of what they sought, or because that oddly massive shielding cut out all trace of certain bandwidths.

  The Enterprise had looked like that, he thought, to all those who had studied her—and humans—for the first time.

  The first Federation starship, shaped like a massive globe. The vicious but ultimately communicable Gorns. The Romulans, playing their silent game of cloaked chess.

  To seek out new life, and new civilization, thought Kirk. And what had that new civilization thought, in all these five years, about being sought out?

  "That's a lot of ambient heat they've got in the nacelles," he remarked at last. "Even given the fact they blew their coolant system."

  "The pattern is a common one for derelicts in which life-support remains operant." Spock touched through a series of commands, and that particular schematic, with its cloudy patterns of yellow in some unexpected areas, enlarged itself to take up most of the center of the screen. Another chain of finger touches—Spock did it without even looking at the keyboard: "for swank," Kirk could almost hear McCoy saying—took the schematic forward through time, showing no change in the heat distribution.

  "Fungus, mostly," said the Vulcan. "Vescens ceolli or zicreedens. It generally indicates that areas of the ship have been out of use for two years or more. This was the reading I wished you to see."

  Another schematic enlarged. Red pixels shifted as the computer framed the image forward through time. Kirk's mind snapped back from the puzzle of the huge amounts of yellow on the preceeding diagram to the changing pattern of the red on the current one.

  "What is that?"

  "Mu-spectrum energy, Captain." Spock settled back in his chair, folded his arms, and tilted his head a little to one side. "Neither light nor heat, though some species seem able to detect it as color, others as sound. It is, as you noted earlier, characteristic of the Turtledove Anomalies."

  Kirk watched the zones of red slowly broaden through the engineering hull and the nacelles, then contract. Broaden and contract. Broaden and contract, like the bloody beating of an alien heart. "Is that surge effect mechanical?"

  He didn't know why he knew that the answer to that question was no. Certainly Spock would say that he had insufficient data.

  But for a long time the Vulcan did not reply at all.

  Kirk let the silence run, sink. Spock's hesitation to answer was significant. Before them the color spread, shrank; spread, shrank.

  "Is that real-time forwarding?"

  "Affirmative. You will observe there appears to be no time lag."

  Kirk nodded. The bloom started in the nacelles at the exact moment it began in the engines. "Can you get me a finer time breakdown on that?"

  "Time increment to point five," instructed Spock. "Two-second freeze." But his hand strayed toward the keyboard as if subconsciously ready to back up with more specific instructions.

  They studied the slow blink of the schematic. Kirk thought about the thin, green-haired young man who had lied so calmly to him, prisoned behind the crystalplex doors of the brig. The Klingon woman with her watchful eyes and her air of having seen everything before. Don't go on board the Nautilus without me or Raksha with you.

  Booby traps, Raksha had said. DeSalle had produced reports and examples of lethal sheaves of them.

  He wondered if he was looking at one now, or at something else.

  "Increment to point one," said Kirk.

  The color still started at exactly the same moment.

  "That's a hell of a synchronization."

  But it wasn't, he thought. The energy in the engine deck was the source of the energy in the nacelles. He didn't understand why he was so sure of that.

  "Any theory?"

  "Negative, Captain."

  "But something's bothering you."

  Spock looked up at him in surprise. "It is a capital mistake to theorize ahead of one's data," he said. "At the moment, the data is insufficient and the patterns apparently contradictory."

  "Subliminal clues are data, too." In four years, nine months of dealing with his literal-minded science officer, Kirk had learned to avoid the word hunch. "Do you have the—illogical—feeling that the source of
that energy is organic?"

  Their eyes met. Spock's dark gaze was usually inscrutable, but far in the back of it, Kirk could see the Vulcan adding the fact of Kirk's conviction—equally baseless and illogical—to the fact of his own.

  Then the screen before them flickered and blanked, like a window whose view has suddenly been jerked far away into a single spot of fading brightness. The bland contralto voice of the computer said, "Please repeat request."

  Spock's eyes sharpened and hardened as he swung his head around to suspiciously regard the screen.

  During the last hour of any shift, the bowling alley on Deck Twenty invariably closed down. The cleaning of the snack bar and hologames area, and the waxing of the lanes, could have been easily done without completely closing the place, as during that last hour even such diehard bowlers as Jefferson and the two Adamses—the cargo chief and his brother in Astrophys—went to shower, eat, and change their shoes preparatory to going on shift. But Lieutenant Mbu was fond of neat edges and routine, and so she had the place closed. She would reset and check the line of hologame terminals, adding up the totals played to make sure that those which had fallen from popularity were replaced, and then retire to her office to write up shift logs and time-and-motion analyses for the massive study she was doing on recreational patterns in Starfleet, leaving Yeoman Effinger to check the pin setters and wax the lanes.

  The pin setters, of course, had self-calibrating and self-correcting modules, and the Enterprise bowling alley possessed two very efficient Dack and Homilie waxers—the lanes being highest quality Martian quasi oak and cared for old-style—but Effinger, though he had no mistrust of machinery per se, did not trust it one hundred percent. Digital settings were accurate to program, but they lacked, in his opinion, the fineness of human artistic judgment. It was his custom to tinker with the setters manually two or three times a week, to perfect tolerances too delicate for the self-correct modules to read, and when he followed the waxers onto the lanes—in his stocking feet, naturally—he would frequently kneel to add extra polish to the right-hand side, where the majority of bowlers landed their strokes.

  This was what he was doing when he heard a voice call out from the direction of the doors, "Piglet!"—his old nickname, spoken in tones of amorous delight. Looking up, he saw Yeoman Shimada—who never bowled—coming toward him, holding out her hands and smiling, beautiful as a little porcelain doll with the winter-night torrent of her hair unloosed from its customary clips and shivering around the hemline of her short red skirt. The look of pleasure in her brown eyes almost stopped his breath.

  The next minute his breath did momentarily stop, as Adajia of Orion's green hand and arm appeared from out of the suddenly opened air duct in the ceiling overhead. Whatever else could be said about her—and a good many things could—Adajia was a deadly shot with a phaser.

  Arios, Raksha, Thad, and Adajia dropped one by one from the duct into the alley inhabited by no one now except the comprehensively unconscious Yeoman Effinger. The illusory Yeoman Shimada had vanished in an eyeblink. Arios and the Klingon went straight to the rank of hologames while Thad and Adajia used engine tape to tape Effinger's mouth and eyes shut and fasten his hands around a stanchion of the alley railing; it took Arios only moments to pull the main hatch cover behind the games.

  "Which one of these you leaving me?" asked Raksha—unnecessarily, as the lights on all but one of the brightly colored screens went dead. She perched on the seat and spent all of about a minute shortcutting the game itself and slicing into what the game module really was: a very elaborate lab-quality terminal.

  Thad had already taken off his boots and was making long, experimental dashes to each of the alleys in turn, for the sheer joy of sliding down the waxed quasi oak in his stocking feet.

  "System error check," said Spock. "Display."

  Columns of blue lettering poured upward against the silver of the screen: communications batch files, execs that regulated the rate of matter-antimatter conversion in the pods, flavor-mix documentation for recycling, temperature-regulation parameters for every lab, stateroom, and shower cubicle on the ship, including the swimming pool on Deck Twenty. Holoshows, novels, letters, scientific and technical journals, logs of every imaginable section chief and automated system, backup logs of the logs. Monitors of beds in sickbay and cells in Security. Internal sensor readings from the lowest cargo holds to the bridge itself. Regulations as to the amount of wax in the bowling-alley waxers, the brightness of the sun lamps in the rec room, the strength of the coffee in Captain Kirk's cabin tap, and the power of the magnets holding shut the hatches of every supply cupboard and the cover plates of every manual door release on the ship.

  "No error in any system," said the computer in a voice that Captain Kirk thought sounded just slightly smug.

  Spock shook his head, puzzled. "Cause of…" he began, and Kirk said, "It's lying."

  The captain turned, strode to the door, and had to pull up short to keep from smacking himself on the nose when it didn't open.

  "Maintenance! Maintenance!" Dr. McCoy abandoned the comm link on the wall—which had the slight ambient echoic quality of an open line but which wasn't receiving anything at all—and slapped the recalcitrant office door with his open hand.

  Not much to his surprise, that didn't cause it to open, either.

  "Och, hell," said Mr. Scott. The doors of even the smallest rooms on the Enterprise—and he was in one of the smallest rooms on the Enterprise—all had manual backups, but the magnetic catch on the discreet cover plate that hid the one in front of him seemed to have spontaneously glued itself shut.

  A malfunction in the current controlling the strength of the magnet, Scotty guessed. Who'd have thought it?

  He touched the comm-link button, knowing he'd get the ribbing of his life about this one. "Maintenance, this is Mr. Scott. There's a jam on the door of latrine number…" He checked the serial number above the transcom. ". . . latrine number fourteen-twelve. Maintenance? Maintenance?"

  There was no reply.

  Instead a light, slightly gravelly voice, which Mr. Scott vaguely recognized, came over the comm. "Captain Kirk? This is Dylan Arios." There was a momentary pause, during which Mr. Scott wondered, for just a moment, whether the malfunction that had quadrupled the magnetism in the manual cover-plate catch had also crossed the wires of some private communication.

  Then Arios went on, "We've—uh—taken control of your ship."

  Chapter Five

  "THE HELL YOU HAVE!" roared Kirk, pounding the comm button with the hammer of his fist. "Where the hell . . .?"

  The husky, slightly hesitant voice came on again. "You can reach me on direct comm at—uh—the Deck Eleven lounge. It's the only comm line on the ship still open."

  "Deck Eleven lounge," repeated Security Lieutenant Organa, scrambling lightly down the pyramid of tables that had been erected—with startling speed and efficiency, considering how astonished everyone in the rec room had been—to bring her close to the air ducts in the ceiling. "Shimada, there'll be degaussers in Engineering. Once we can get the manual cover plates off, we'll be able to move. Anybody know the schematic of the air vents between here and Engineering?"

  They had already ascertained that the computer wasn't giving out files of anything anymore.

  "I do." Ensign Lao turned from his puzzled tapping at the keyboard of one of the rec-room visicoms, designed to access the library but, under Lao's expert manipulation, displaying some very strange data indeed. Across the room, Second Engineer Danny Miller was investigating the stubborn cover plate on the manual release. Like most of those trapped in the rec room, he was in uniform, red engineering coveralls in his case, but the pockets had not contained a degausser, simply because such devices frequently—despite safety catches—tended to disable the programming of other electronic hand tools.

  "But they're lying to you about the Deck Eleven lounge," went on Lao, crossing to the pile of tables. "They've got to be doing this from a lab-quality termina
l and there aren't any on Deck Eleven. They must have cross-wired the comm stations."

  He nodded back toward the visicom. "It looks like they've sealed all the blast doors in the corridors as well."

  "But we got the league bowl-off tonight!" protested Yeoman Jefferson. "They keep us from whippin' those slime devils in Engineering…"

  "You watch who you're callin' a slime devil, mold frog," retorted Miller good-naturedly.

  "So they could be anywhere," said Organa in disgust.

  Abruptly, the lights went out.

  "I'm monitoring sickbay," Dylan Arios went on. "I'll know if anything happens to either of my men there, and believe me, Captain, I'll start shutting down life-support. We're real desperate, and I'm sorry, but that's how it is right now. All right?"

  Kirk groped for the comm pad, cursing. At the Academy he'd taken the required survival courses, but it had been a long time since he'd even thought about touching through pad numbers without looking at them. Fortunately the Deck Eleven lounge was an easy one to remember—11-1. He didn't want the entire ship privy to the remainder of this discussion.

  "What do you want?"

  Behind him in the darkness he heard the rustle of Spock's clothing, then the biting whine of static as Spock flipped open his communicator. Arios, and whoever was with him, must have wired through the ship's pickup system to lay down a blanket field of electronic flak.

  "We want you to take us to Tau Lyra Three," said Arios.

  "Can you get a fix on him of any kind?" Mr. Sulu glanced over his shoulder, to where the dim glow of an emergency-kit flashlight outlined Lieutenant Uhura's long legs, projecting from beneath the communications console. At any other moment, he reflected, the view would have been worth lengthy contemplation.