Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  He was interested to note how familiar they were with the ship. True, their own was nearly identical, but the familiarity in her voice as she spoke about Scotty flagged something in his mind, gave him the uneasy sense that she'd been briefed on the personnel of the ship.

  "Here's where we leave you." Her voice echoed slightly in the gallery between the two starboard transporter rooms. "After we transport Mr. Spock back and bring the Master and the others over, we'll tell people where you are. I'm sorry we have to do it this way."

  She might actually have been sorry, thought Kirk, but she didn't sound like she was going to stay up nights soaking her pillow in tears over it.

  "This may not be the only way you have to do it," he said. "Tell us who you are, and what you're up to, and…"

  She uttered a brief, barking laugh. "Captain," she said, "believe me, you don't want to know." Her eyes met his, bitter and dark as Turkish coffee, haunted with old anger, old pain. In a quieter voice she reiterated, "You truly don't."

  A line of cargo holds lay just beyond the starboard transporter rooms. She degaussed the magnetic catch on the cover plate of the nearest door, worked the crank enough to open the door a crack. As a final precaution, she tore a strip of engine tape and affixed it over his mouth, then pushed him through into darkness. His shoulder jarred bruisingly against something—a box or carton—but by the time he'd used whatever it was to work himself to his feet again the door was shut.

  Through the metal he heard the whine of a phaser as she fused the mechanism.

  Barely audible, her voice retreated down the gallery toward the transporter room. "That's seven-one-twelve, Mr. Spock. He'll be fine in there till you get back."

  Kirk kicked the box behind him. God knew what was in it. It could be anything from soil samples to archaeological discoveries to unknown alien artifacts. Slowly, patiently, he turned his back on it and began to explore the edge with his fingers, seeking any sharp corner or projection that could be used to pick at the tape in the hopes of freeing his wrists.

  * * *

  "T'Iana…"

  Christine Chapel turned sharply at the sound of the chemical-scorched whisper from the bed. Station lights called a thread of illumination from the claustrophobic darkness. The orange glow of the illuminated markers on the diagnostic board above the beds was barely strong enough to outline the coarse brush of dark hair on the one pillow, the thin, patrician features on the other. For several hours now the Vulcan boy Sharnas had lain unmoving, his features in repose like a statue's. Now his breathing quickened, lines of pain etched themselves into the sides of the mouth, the bruised, sunken flesh below the eyes. His hands, long and fine and uncallused, twitched and trembled on the coarse, sparkly fabric of the coverlet, and under it his feet jerked as if trying to escape red-hot needles.

  "T'Iana," murmured the boy again, desperation in his tone. "Don't let them. I don't want to. They kill…"

  His hand moved spasmodically, trying to accomplish some dream task; as Chapel knelt beside the bed to take it she saw the thin wrist, the pads of the palm and fingers crossed and covered with pale green cuts and scars of varying ages, some of them running right up under the sleeve.

  For reasons of her own Christine had, for three years, studied the complex tonalities of the Vulcan language. This was the first time she'd spoken it to something other than the teaching computer. "It's all right," she said, hoping her pronunciation of the simple phrase was correct. She collected the clutching fingers in her own, held them still. "You're safe."

  Safe from what? Was T'Iana a clan matriarch? The boy's mother?

  Sharnas thrashed his head back and forth hectically, a thin noise of pain dying in his throat. "Don't let them," he begged, all logic, all Vulcan calm drowning in terror. "Don't let them do it, T'Iana, I don't want to…"

  "You're safe," said Christine again, wondering if that was true. The lights had been out for just over thirty minutes. After that single exchange of voices between Dylan Arios and Captain Kirk, audible over the comm to everyone on the ship, the security ward had been utterly silent. The waiting room, an office, and a good stretch of corridor separated the ward from McCoy's office or any of the labs, and strain her ears as she might, she had heard nothing save, early on, stumbling feet passing in the corridor, and the thump of a body against the wall, which had told her that the rest of the deck, at least, was as blind as she.

  She wondered how long the batteries on the station lights would last, or whether desperation would, in fact, prompt Arios to make good his threat about shutting down life-support. She wasn't sure—her glimpses of him last night and this morning had been brief, and under adverse conditions, certainly as far as he was concerned. She had not had the impression of a cruel man, but it did not take cruelty, she knew, to kill large numbers of people.

  Only a sense of duty.

  Sharnas twisted under her touch, struggling against some unknown foe. "Please," he whispered. "It will…devour. Don't make me…"

  There was a sedative, overdue; at her duty station behind the sealed and unresponsive door, naturally. She stroked the beardless cheeks, clammy with sweat, brushed back the raven wings of hair from his temples. "It's all right," she said, aching with pity for the boy, trying desperately to reach him, to make him understand, to ease his fear. "Nobody will make you do anything you don't want to do." The sentence was a complicated one in Vulcan, and she wasn't sure if she'd said it correctly, or if he heard.

  A nightmare rising out of the black ocean trenches of inner fear? Or the replay of some event that had actually happened?

  His voice came out twisted, a violin string of horror. "T'Iana…"

  Then he sat bolt upright, throwing her hands off him with the frightening strength of Vulcans, his black eyes an abyss of terror, staring into the dark. "It's in my mind!" he screamed, wrenching, clutching at his head, bending his body forward and gripping his temples as if he sought to crush his own skull. "IT'S IN MY MIND!"

  And his voice scaled up into a despairing scream.

  Chapter Six

  THE FIRST THING Spock noticed, in the Nautilus's engineering hull, was the smell.

  It was perceptible over the faint sweetness of leftover rhodon gas, drifting through the cavernous darkness of the shuttlecraft bay, the stench of burned insulation and smoke: a slight fishiness, with an underbite that even through the filters of the mask lifted the hair on his nape. He checked his tricorder automatically, but the life-form readings everywhere were thick. Fungus and cirvoid growths blotched the pipes and conduits high overhead, and the sprinkling of dying reddish power lights showed him the furtive movements of rats and boreglunches in the corners of that vast chamber. Many bulk cruisers picked up that sort of small vermin from their cargoes if they weren't kept properly swept; Starfleet quarantine procedures precluded them almost automatically, but most of the crews on the independents weren't large enough to do proper maintenance, and frequently the transport filters on shoestring vessels were allowed to slip out of perfect repair. Free traders throughout the Federation and along its borders were frequently filthy with such things, and worse. It was one reason the Federation frowned upon free traders.

  "I'm telling you this for your own good, Mr. Spock," said Raksha softly, and her voice echoed in the vaulted spaces above them. "Don't separate from Adajia and me. Don't try to overpower us and explore the ship. Don't get out of our sight."

  He studied the two women for a moment, the Klingon in her metal-studded doublet with the pry bar over her shoulder like a bindle stiffs, the Orion swinging her razor weapon in one delicate hand. Did the threat come from them, he wondered, or from the booby traps that Raksha claimed riddled the ship?

  If the latter was the case, with most of the power gone, how dangerous would such traps be?

  The smell troubled him, half-familiar and repugnant as the smells of alien enzyme systems frequently were. He looked around him at the hangar again, noting all signs of long disuse. Dark streamers of leaks wept from every air v
ent, and the coarse purplish fuzz of St. John's lichen was slowly corroding the decks where oil patches had been. The Enterprise's sensors had showed widely varying zones of cold and heat—a sign of malfunctioning life-support systems—and here in the deeps of the engineering hull the very air seemed to drip with a gluey, jungly heat that stuck his shirt to his back and made stringy points of the women's long black hair.

  Residual power fluttered at minimal efficiency in walls, pipes, hatchways. Oxygen levels were low, and he felt the queasiness brought on by fluctuation in the main gravity coil. Without the heavy throb of the engine, the ship seemed horribly silent.

  His fingers moved a tricorder dial, and the alien colors of the mu spectrum blossomed across the small screen, throbbing like a sleeping heart.

  "This way." Raksha's cat-paw step made no sound on the pitted and filthy deck. She twisted her black hair up in a knot, pulled a sheathed stiletto from her boot to fix it in place. "We'll need to get the pumps fixed and oxygen back in production before anything else. Adajia, keep an eye on him. I'll be up in the computer room, reestablishing the link-throughs as you get the wiring repaired."

  She paused in the open doorway—all the doors on the ship seemed to have jammed permanently open, or perhaps there had been so many malfunctions that the Master and his crew had simply left them that way. Her eyes gleamed in the glow of Adajia's flashlight, under the knife-slices of reflection from the steel in her hair.

  "And, Mr. Spock," she said quietly, "I wasn't lying about…defenses on this ship. You wouldn't make it to the transporter room. And even if there are only the…three of us…" He wondered why she hesitated on the number. "…aboard, believe me, you wouldn't be able to hide."

  Spock raised an eyebrow as Raksha strode away into the dark. "Interesting."

  "Sharnas says that," remarked Adajia, leading the way along the opposite corridor and down a gangway whose walls seemed crusted with a green-gold resin that gleamed stickily in the flashlight's tiny glare. "Do you quote odds and tell people what they're doing isn't logical, too?"

  "Should the situation warrant it." The smell on the deck below was stronger, perhaps because of the increased heat, and the magenta glare of the mu-spectrum markers glowed up from his tricorder so strongly as to stain the fouled walls. He was interested to note that the engine chambers of the auxiliary hull had been moved down to these lower levels, and wondered why. Structurally the arrangement bore all the appearance of a makeshift job, jury-rigged a long time ago.

  Interesting, too, that Raksha had taken the computer end of the job of relinking the engine systems. If she was the computer officer of the crew—and therefore the one who had created such havoc in the systems of the Enterprise—it was no surprise that she'd want to keep him out of contact with the Nautilus's…but he wondered if there was another reason. Something about the computer systems themselves that she did not want him to see.

  He reached out to touch the wall again, theory that bordered upon certainty forming in his mind, and he murmured again, "Most interesting."

  It did not take long to repair the oxygen feeds and pumps, and to realign the interface with the ship's central computer, which Spock guessed to be also in the auxiliary hull. Over the communicators, which did temporary duty for the silent comm link, Raksha reported clean air coming through within minutes, and by the time Mr. Spock reached the engine room the air there was sufficiently breathable to permit him to remove his filter mask.

  This was fortunate, since the engines themselves were configured very differently, cramped and stacked and much smaller and less powerful than those of the Enterprise—a curious situation, considering the Nautilus's more advanced design. Dark tanks and coils of unknown use clustered where the main warp-drive amplification units should have been, and in place of Mr. Scott's monitor console, there stood instead a sort of egg-shaped plex bubble, once crystal-clear but stained with yellows and greens and browns, and dribbled all over with the resin that seemed so stickily ubiquitous on walls, floors, tanks, railings. The fishy, alien smell was thick about it; thick, too, in the intense shadows among the tanks, the cavernous darkness beyond them. Spock found himself listening intently to the silent ship as he stripped and patched the great, dead, burned-out coils of the main generator, listening for some sound other than his own breathing and Adajia's, and the small, tinny voice of Raksha coming from the communicator on the floor at his side.

  "You showing any light in the guidance system?" she asked. "That unit on the left," she added, as if she could see his momentary puzzlement. "With the tubes around it and the domed top."

  It took him a moment to deduce the systems with which he was familiar from the mass of dark rhodon tubes and the sleek ranks of serial-racked wafers on the left, and his eyes narrowed as he glanced across at Adajia again, perched cross-legged on a rusted-out signal modulator with the phaser held loosely in one hand.

  "I see no light anywhere," he reported into the communicator.

  "There's a row of hatches along the bottom. Check inside for charring on the ports."

  Spock obeyed and found a short in the line. While Raksha was running an interval check he removed his blue pullover, pushed up the sleeves of the thin black undertunic he wore for warmth on the Enterprise, which like all primarily Earth-human vessels was uncomfortably cold by Vulcan standards. Except for the humidity, which he considered excessive, this portion of the hull was more comfortable for him than he'd been in years, and he wondered if Adajia—the child of another desert world—felt the same.

  And while he worked he listened still, straining his ears—wondering what was wrong. It took him a moment to realize that down at this level he had heard no scutter of rodent claws on the metal of the pipes, no scrape of boreglunches slipping under the floor.

  Chance? The effects of the rhodon gas?

  "Your captain said he also acted as engineer?" he asked at last, running a sequence check to align the impulse power with the channels Raksha had reestablished.

  Adajia nodded. "He was trained at the Academy, after he got out of the Institute; he's kept this vessel together for many years. Myself, I know little of it. My clan lord only presented me to him last year, after the uprising at the Feast of Bulls, but I know he met Sharnas in the Institute, and Phil at the Academy."

  Spock nodded, logging unfamiliar terms in his mind and noting that no uprising had occurred in the Orion systems for at least fifteen standard years. He wondered what service the Master had done for an Orion clan chief, to be presented with what was obviously an expensive concubine, but was aware that his curiosity was frivolous at best.

  "And Mr. Cooper was trained as an astrogator?"

  He was head and shoulders in one of the repair hatches; he heard her walk closer to him to be heard.

  "Yes. The Consilium thought the Master should be trained as an astrogator, too, though he's a better engineer; anyway, that's where he met Phil. They ran together, then went back for Thad. Thad helped get Sharnas out, which I guess surprised the hell out of McKennon."

  "McKennon?"

  She shivered. "Somebody you don't want to meet." She settled her back against the tank behind her; Spock could see the long, green curve of her leg from where he worked, the phaser on her belt and the gleaming razors of her makeshift mace lying like a long-stemmed rose in her hand.

  "One of the Masters at the Institute," she went on after a moment. "They were going to kill Thaddy," she added softly, with a combination of wonder and loathing in her voice. "A chuulak—just for dereliction of duty."

  "Who were?" He worked himself out from under the burned-out heat filter. Power had returned to some of the lamps, though they were still far from full. Those in the engine room had been quite visibly wired to augment their brightness, for it was obvious that those in the rest of the ship never got brighter than the murky, brownish semiblindness through which they had come to the engine room from the hangar. It was quite clear from Raksha's rerouting of the signal links that whole lines of powetransmission h
ad had to be abandoned.

  "McKennon," said Adajia. "And the Masters. The Masters of the Consilium, but they do what McKennon says."

  Upon a number of occasions over the past five years, Spock had seen Captain Kirk utilize a maneuver that he had, at the time, admired for its usefulness, though his own attempts at it had been less than convincing and he doubted he would ever attain his commander's smooth facility at the nonverbal lie. Still, he judged the time to be right. He looked up with what he hoped was convincing suddenness at the doorway of the engine room, which lay beyond Adajia's line of sight where she sat with her back to the tanks. The Orion girl quite gratifyingly spun around, phaser at the ready, to meet whatever threat she considered likely to be roving the corridors of this lightless and near-derelict ship.

  Mr. Spock reached out and pressurized the brachial nerve plexus. He caught her as she fell, the phaser ringing noisily on the metal deck, causing him to wince though he knew that the hearing of Klingons was far less acute than that of Vulcans and there was little more than a ten-percent chance of Raksha hearing it over the renewed rumble of the engine.

  His first impulse was to tie Adajia, to prevent too swift a pursuit from impeding his investigation of the black ship's final secrets. But as the rhodon gas dispersed the sweetish, dirty-clothes smell of rodents, the filthy stench of boreglunches emerged more strongly. On other derelicts Spock had seen some of the latter nearly the size of his hand. Instead he simply lifted her onto the old signal-modulator console, where the vermin would be unable to reach her, and left her lying unconscious, like a sacrificed virgin, with her hair coil of sable silk trailing almost to the floor.