Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  Chuulak, she had said. If he recalled his Orion backcountry dialect correctly, the word referred to public execution by torture for the purpose of discouraging other possible miscreants.

  A somewhat severe penalty for dereliction of duty, particularly for a young man of Thaddeus Smith's obviously limited capabilities.

  Readjusting the tricorder to home on the mu-spectrum energy source, Spock set off in swift silence through the gloom, his mind burgeoning with speculation concerning who these people were, and how they had, in fact, come by the black ruin of a starship of the very newest design.

  Two turnings had branched off to the right, neat black holes in the wan flashlight gleam. Ensign Lao wondered if he'd actually seen two branches on the schematic, or three. It all reminded him very strongly of the survival and intelligence tests they'd run them through at the Academy—that, or the more demanding type of fun houses he'd gone to at carnivals. He wondered also what there was about the circumstance of being trapped in a position wherein it was impossible to scratch one's feet—for instance, crawling with one's hands straight forward in a conduit barely the width of one's shoulders—that automatically triggered inhuman itching in that part of the body.

  He'd have to ask Dr. McCoy about that, he thought, with a wry inner grin. Possibly it had a scientific name.

  He was speculating about it when the first wave of suffocating dizziness struck.

  It took Kirk ten minutes of patient rubbing, scraping, and twisting at the edge of the crate behind him to work loose a corner of the tape that bound his wrists. It seemed like much longer. All the while he was listening, straining his ears in the direction of the unseen doorway—or the direction that he had mentally marked as the doorway before Raksha had shut him into darkness—seeking the smallest sound of voices or movement outside.

  There was none. The blast doors designed to confine pressure loss had sealed one section of corridor off from another, and Raksha and Adajia had been quite thorough with their phaser fire. He worked slowly, trying to still the rage of impatience in his heart at the knowledge that his crew would be at large in the blacked-out ship, looking for him, or for Dylan Arios. Looking despite the fact that, with only a few exceptions, they were less familiar with its layout than he was, and more likely to run into open gangways or whatever obstructions Arios himself had arranged.

  As he worked, he ran over in his mind every word Arios and his crew had spoken, every detail of their clothing, their behavior, their speech. There had to be a clue there somewhere, something to tell him who these people were and what it was they wanted.

  Why Tau Lyra III—called Yoondri by those who lived there, and by all accounts a harmless world of peaceful farms and city-states that hadn't had a major war in decades, perhaps centuries?

  Raksha and Adajia had taken Spock, presumably over to the Nautilus; according to Dr. McCoy, Sharnas of Vulcan was far beyond being able to stand and Phil Cooper was heavily sedated.

  That left only Arios himself at large, and Thad Smith—if Smith was his real name. What was that round-eyed, rather sweet-faced young man—clearly mentally impaired in some fashion—doing with that pack of pirates? Or the Vulcan boy, either?

  Why was there no record of the Antelope, of the mysterious black starship, of Arios himself? A half-caste, like Spock, but half-human, half… what? McCoy hadn't known.

  Ships had disappeared, of course, in the early days of deep-space exploration, even as they disappeared now. A mating with some still-unknown race wasn't unlikely. Still…

  It took some backbreaking maneuvering to kneel and get his boot toe on the corner of the tape, slowly working and wrenching until a few inches of tape were pulled free, enough to catch and wedge on the corner of the crate. Once his hands were free it took another patient, groping search of the wall to locate the half-open cover plate of the fused door mechanism. From there he used the tape like Ariadne's thread, sticking one end to the cover plate and holding the other in hand while he explored along the walls of the hold in both directions, until he found what he sought: a cargo dolly of the manual type, with detachable handles.

  The handles were metal, sections of hollow pipe. The diameter was large enough to fit on the dogged plastic wheel of the door crank and force it over, against the fused mess of machinery and wire on the other side of the wall. With the aid of the lever he managed to push the door open eight inches before it jammed hard.

  Cursing—and thanking his lucky stars he'd been diligent in the gym—Kirk slipped through into the blackness of the corridor. "Can anyone hear me?" he called into the silence. "This is your captain."

  Descending via the gangways was slower and more troublesome than via the turbolift shaft. But, reflected Mr. Sulu as he degaussed the third cover plate and laboriously cranked the protective blast door aside, probably far safer. If nothing else, there were the turbolifts themselves to be considered. The power might return at any time, as unexpectedly as it had been cut, and then the cars would come whizzing back up the narrow shafts at speeds no one could avoid.

  "Of course there was no degausser available in the lab," flustered Lieutenant Bergdahl, the Anthro/Geo lab chief, trotting down the gangway in Sulu's wake. In the dim glow of the flashlight Sulu carried, the lab chief's balding forehead was rimmed with a glittering line of sweat, and his eyes flashed silvery as he glanced repeatedly behind him in the utter dark. Not, reflected Sulu, that there was any possibility of unknown assailants on the two decks above them. Deck Two contained precisely three labs, Deck One nothing more than the bridge. "We keep such things very properly under hatches, unless of course Ensign Adams has been careless again." He glared back at his diminutive clerk, one of the group Sulu had collected in the Deck Two labs.

  "I was trying to link into Central Computer," added Lieutenant Maynooth, shambling anxiously in the rear as they descended the next gangway. The yellow glow of the lamps they bore bobbed and swayed eerily, monster shadows crowding behind them: Sulu had taken the battery-operated emergency lamp from the helm console, to which floodlights had been added from the lab emergency stores.

  "There are some quite startlingly sophisticated program locks in place," the physicist went on approvingly. "Truly beautiful programming; I must admit I kept getting distracted, taking handwritten notes…"

  "Does it look like Arios and his crew are in Central?"

  "They could well be." Maynooth pushed up the thicklensed spectacles onto his birdlike nose. He'd had four operations already to slow the deterioration of his eyes and had long ago become allergic to retinox; in the half-darkness, with his spindly arms and the myopic poke of his head he resembled a six-foot praying mantis in a blue lab smock. "All communication, of course, is cut. They'd need to be somewhere on the main trunk line, and have access to a lab-quality terminal, which limits the places where they could be."

  "Considering the lax fashion in which Security operates," Lieutenant Bergdahl added crisply, "I am not surprised they had so little trouble in …"

  The Anthro/Geo chief halted, gasping, hand going to his chest. At the same moment Sulu's vision swam in the feeble lamp glare. He threw out a hand, catching the wall as his knees turned to water under him. Maynooth, Adams, and Dawe sprang forward to catch Bergdahl as he staggered, and Dawe made a hoarse noise of shock, trying to draw breath. Sulu, eyes blurring, felt the cold in his chest at the same moment he was aware of sweat breaking out all over his body.

  He managed to croak "Back…" and they all stood dumbly, staring at him in the chiaroscuro of patchlight and dark.

  "Back," he repeated, trying to get leaden feet up the metal steps. "Gas …gangway…"

  Bergdahl made a noise like a small engine lugging and slumped limp into Dawe's arms, nearly taking the Ops chief down with him. Adams held her breath and sprang down the two steps that separated her from them and hooked a shoulder under Dawe's armpit to drag him back, and in the yellow glare Sulu thought she, too, looked gray-faced and ill. They backed up the steps together, Sulu feeling better imm
ediately and Dawe recovering quickly enough to halfdrag Bergdahl, although Bergdahl himself moaned and gasped and begged for oxygen and first aid just in case.

  They clustered for a moment by the doors leading back onto Deck Two, looking at one another, then down into the pit of the gangway. Then Sulu advanced cautiously again, a step at a time. Four steps down he felt blinding dizziness overwhelm him, sickness and cold and a sensation of suffocation, a feeling of being about to fall. He reeled back, catching himself with his hands on the steps as he did fall; Dawe steadied him, drew him back. He heard Adams say, "I'll get a tricorder from the lab," and Sulu was dimly aware of her boot heels clicking sharply on the metal steps.

  "There couldn't possibly be gas," Maynooth said. "Where would it be coming from?"

  His head between his knees, his consciousness still swimming in a strange sensation that was not quite anoxia, Sulu managed to mumble sarcastically, "Maybe it's a figment of my imagination."

  Maynooth sniffed at the darkness, the remaining flashlight making huge yellow circles of his spectacle lenses. "Maybe it is," he said. He sounded pleased.

  "Zhiming?" Lieutenant Organa scrambled up to the table in the lamplit, smoky gloom of the rec room, caught the edge of the open vent. "Zhiming, are you there?"

  The yarn thread hung unmoving beside her.

  There was definitely a life-form moving down there. An alien, certainly, thought Spock, remembering the smell that had tensed the muscles of his nape. In spite of the heavy concentrations of mu-spectrum energy, Spock could see it, a blurred and fragmented shadow on the digital. Evidently, even heavy concentrations of mu-spectrum energy were not inimical to life per se.

  That was comforting to know.

  On the other hand, he reflected, it would be comforting to know also if the life-form were carbon-based and more or less humanoid, since an unknown energy might well be absorbed with impunity by a silicon-based life-form and still be capable of doing serious damage to a Vulcan. As he keyed in a Hold on the mu-spectrum settings he reflected that clearly the ship's extraordinary shielding had prevented readings coming through on at least one member of the pirate crew—guessing from the size and mass of the life-form—and possibly more. And if that was the case, Dylan Arios might well be sending for reinforcements.

  The mass was twice average human, and far differently configured. Metabolism readings different, of course. The tricorder's small memory might not be able to give a clear reading if, like Arios's unknown ancestors, the alien was of an unknown race, but…

  The correlation program flashed its best guess on the small digital, as well as the parameters probability.

  Parameters probability was over ninety percent.

  Spock felt his hands grow cold.

  The program's best guess, from information received, was that the creature two decks below him was a yagghorth.

  The Nautilus had picked up a yagghorth.

  No wonder, thought Spock, Raksha and Adajia had told him to stay with them. No wonder Arios had been desperate to keep any of the Enterprise crew off the ship. Not primarily to conceal, but out of genuine concern for their safety. On the other hand, whatever they were hiding on board the Nautilus, it must be desperately important to prevent them from simply abandoning the vessel at the first opportunity.

  Six people could conceivably share a Constitution-class cruiser with a yagghorth for a certain period of time and not come to harm, particularly if they set the food synthesizers to spew the equivalent of fresh meat and blood every few hours in the lower holds to prevent its hunting on the upper, but it was not a situation that could be kept going very long. Uneasily, he switched back an overlay to recheck the position of the thing as well as he could.

  But they had succeeded so far, which put them far ahead of most crews in similar circumstances, and it crossed Spock's mind to wonder, as he slipped through a half-open blast door and down the narrow, boreglunch-smelling gangway into the rising steam from below, whether there was someone or something on Tau Lyra III—perhaps the psychically active savants the planet was supposed to have—capable of dealing with a yagghorth. Considering the proximity of that world to the Anomaly in the Crossroad, it was a possibility.

  In spite of the tightening in his chest with every step of descent, Spock found himself prey to an almost overwhelming curiosity.

  He had said that it was a mistake to theorize ahead of one's data; nevertheless, his mind teemed with alternatives. There was a source of the mu-spectrum radiation on the ship. Somehow they had picked up a yagghorth—though larval infestation was usually postulated, there was, in fact, no case that provided proof—which prevented them from getting to the energy source. . . . Given that seventy percent of the admittedly small sample of known yagghorth infestations occurred in sectors where Turtledove Anomalies existed, thought Spock, moving cautiously through the dripping mazes of old crew quarters, it was conceivable that yagghorth had been drawn to the source of an energy typical of the Anomalies.

  We're real desperate, Arios had said.

  And Raksha had repeated several times, Don't get out of our sight.

  He felt a sudden pang of concern for Adajia, lying unconscious on the deck above.

  But according to the tricorder the yagghorth was still below him, as he stood at the head of another gangway down into darkness. Films of mold covered the metal walls in the gluey heat, fungus clustering in the corners of the stairs. Here and there a lumenpanel survived, shedding a grimy glow that only served to show up the desertion of the place, its utter neglect.

  The source of a mu-spectrum energy generator on board was, of course, thought Spock, only of secondary importance. But it might hold some answers, hold the proof to the theory that had been forming in his mind since he had first seen the engine chamber, first spoken to Adajia there.

  Another thought came to him. He turned from the head of the gangway, his sharp hearing stretching to its limits in the silent ship around him, and walked a few paces down the hall to the open door of one of the empty crew staterooms. Boreglunches scurried through vents long corroded, redblack backs gleaming and long, threadlike antennae projecting from the dark squares of the openings as Spock searched rapidly through the empty drawers of the built-in desks.

  The first room yielded nothing. In the second he found a few small plastic cubes, three centimeters square, which he dropped into the utility pocket of the tricorder case.

  He checked the tricorder again, paused to listen, picking out the scrabbling of small vermin in the darkness and wondering if he would be able to detect the movement of the greater thing lurking somewhere below.

  He heard nothing that answered him. Taking the phaser from his belt, he moved silently down the steps.

  There was even less light on the decks below. The heat was equal to anything on Vulcan, the moisture suffocating, clammy on his skin and condensing on the moldy walls. Fungal growths and heat-loving forms of simple life were rankly evident. The smell of the yagghorth was strong down here, like very old oil, resinous exudations thick on the walls. This close to the energy source, the mu-spectrum color blanked out everything on the digital; after vainly trying to catch a moving shadow, a fractionated form, Spock gave up and concentrated on listening.

  It had clearly been hot and damp down here for a long time. A result of the mu-generator? he wondered. Or a necessity of its operation?

  His mind went back over the articles he had read, articles speculating about the link between mu-spectrum energy and noninstrumentative transportation phenomena over huge distances. A link with the attenuated warp engines, the enlarged impulse drive of the Nautilus and its almost nonexistent power-source controls—controls that occupied huge percentages of the Enterprise engines—was almost certain.

  The only question was…where had the Nautilus acquired a mu-spectrum drive?

  Spock paused again, straining his ears, his mind. A scutter of claws—rats? Big ones, if so. But then of course they might be big ones. He'd seen engine rats on some tramp pl
anet-hoppers not only grown to enormous size, but bizarrely mutated as well. He tried to adjust the tricorder to get a divided reading—half to alert for the yagghorth, half to register the proximity of the mu-spectrum generator—and received an error message and a polite request to recalibrate. The only person he had ever spoken to who had survived an infestation—Commander Kellogg of Starbase 12—had said that the creature was absolutely silent, but some of the visuals from surviving ships seemed to indicate a hissing, a rattle of chitin.

  Adjusting the tricorder for the mu-spectrum lines again—since he had no idea what such a generator would look like—he set his phaser on maximum, and, listening to every sound in the silent darkness, moved forward again.

  "They wired him when he was eight years old."

  Christine Chapel turned sharply, her hands still covering the icy fingers of the Vulcan boy. Phil Cooper had dragged himself up a little in his bed, and was regarding her with drugged pain in his dilated gray eyes. In the near-total darkness of the security ward, his unshaven face looked battered and old beyond his years, and his head nodded with the effect of the melanex.

  "They have to," Cooper went on thickly. "Trained as empaths… trained to the psion drive. The Vulcans make the best. Highest mathematical abilities. They need that. Have to understand what they're doing, bending space from inside rather than warping around it. They tried Deltans and Betazoids and Rembegils. The Rembegils all died. Little glass fairies, they looked like… big green eyes. Long green hair. The Consilium thought they had it made when they contacted Rembegil. Ran a colony of 'em for years, one of their biggest." He pushed a hand through his hair.

  "It's the dreams, see. They put cutouts, limiters, to keep the dreams down. Works for Vulcans and Betas. Wiring…brings the dreams."