Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  He sank to the bed again, closed his eyes. His voice was a slurry whisper. "Most people don't know that side of it. I don't know what they're telling you in the Fleet these days."

  The floor hard beneath her knees, the darkness like a silent bubble, shutting her out from all sound, all contact with the ship around her, Chapel half-felt that she dreamed herself. Softly, she asked, "They did this to you when you entered the Fleet?"

  Roger's voice returned to her, with the memory of moonlight shining on the pale V of his chest against the dark satin of his dressing gown; the smell of the university botanical gardens and the glinting jeweled eyes of Zia Fang, the Rigellian god of healing, whose lumpish stone statue sat in a niche among the wall of wafer storage, ancient scrolls, transcription equipment. You have to realize that there's always a conspiracy somewhere, Chris, he had said. They'll corrupt anything, no matter how good you are, no matter what good you do or try to do. They'll take it over eventually.

  She hadn't wanted to believe it.

  Cooper nodded, his eyes still shut. "Astrogator, impulse and warp. Put the ship in position for the jump and know where you are when you come out. Think about it. They can't let pilots start setting up on their own. Break the Consilium's monopoly on freight. The Master shorts it out. Nanological… repairs itself. Grows back."

  They didn't carve those microservos out of soap, McCoy had said. By the scar tissue, the flesh around the minuscule line of metallic protrusions on Sharnas's neck had been cut many times.

  After knowing Roger, Christine had never quite known what to make of conspiracy theories. She'd heard all the usual ones outlined by rec-room rebels like Brunowski and Bray: Kratisos Shah is still alive and tending bar on Antares IV; the Federation maintains a secret laboratory within a black hole for unknown purposes; certain historical characters (never the same ones) had been retrieved and cloned in hidden installations.

  Even among those, she had never heard of anything called the Consilium.

  Cooper tried to open his eyes again, but Chapel could see, even in the thick gloom, that his eyeballs were drifting, unable to focus. "You have a Vulcan," he mumbled. "Th'Master's mostly Rembegil, spliced onto enough human genes to take the stress. Consilium started doing that when the colony died off. Bred him, trained him for psionics. Served 'em right," he added enigmatically. "It's how he could break their hold on Thad. McKennon's tried to get it back two or three times. McKennon." His face twisted in momentary dread, or remembered pain. Then he shook his head. "McKennon. The Masters didn't leave Thad with much of a brain but he's got a hell of a heart. Consilium's quit growing them now—that strain. That combination. Too much trouble."

  Chapel shook her head, baffled. "I've never heard of the Consilium," she said. "Who…"

  Cooper blinked, trying to get her into focus, trying to see where he was. "Ah," he breathed at last, and the lines relaxed a little from his forehead. "Yeah. The Enterprise." He shook his head. "Forgot where I was."

  According to the readings on the tricorder, the mu-spectrum generator was somewhere in the vast darkness that had once been Recycling. Logical, thought Spock, his head still moving slowly with the attempt to distinguish sound, his eyes still trying to pierce the intense darkness that closed so thickly around him. Because of the needs of the food synthesizers, the main trunk of the computer lines ran through this section.

  Some of the synthesizers themselves obviously still worked, at least to a degree. As he had surmised, the smell of rotting organics was thick in the air, bait to keep the yagghorth in this section, to keep it from wandering to the engine rooms above. It surprised him, however, that none of the doorways he had passed on his way here were barricaded.

  Perhaps they simply knew that barricades were, in the case of a yagghorth, at best a temporary measure. The decking might be holed. It was often found to be, on infested ships.

  Most of the square gray synthesizers were rank with ciroids, fungus, odd and mutant plants, the steamy heat aiding in the transformation of this chamber into an ugly, lightless jungle. Thready curtains of gray growths hung from the conduits that crisscrossed the ceiling, further shortening Spock's field of vision; one of the synthesizers had burst open, and a yellow-tentacled fungus—quite obviously carnivorous as far as rats and boreglunches were concerned—grew from its heart to cover a good eight square meters of floor and surrounding mechanisms. Moisture dripped from the ceiling, and the scritch and patter of vermin sounded everywhere, making it doubly difficult for Spock to listen for the greater danger that lurked somewhere, very close now, in the dark.

  All around the synthesizer chamber the walls and floor were crusted with resin, a slick laminate on the walls higher than his head in places and gleaming vilely in the reflection of his flashlight in the dark. In places it was still sticky—outside in the corridor, he had passed a trail of it still wet. The oily smell was everywhere.

  He glanced again up at the main trunk of the computer feed and power conduit. The central mixer board of Recycling was one candidate for a hook-in source to control the mu-generator. Others on the main trunk might be the games in the nearby bowling alley, or one of the computers in the botany lab. He listened carefully, then stepped out into the corridor again. Nothing yet, though he could feel his pulse rate increase infinitesimally. The bowling alley was the logical place to check next, he thought, replacing the phaser in his belt to readjust the tricorder. The room itself was a virtual dead end…

  He paused, looking at the readings in startlement, wondering if he had adjusted too high…

  The next instant he sprang away from the black mouth of the open turbolift door as a striking tentacle jetted from the darkness. Spock bolted back up the corridor, not looking back, hearing the ghost-whisper of chitin and bone as the yagghorth uncoiled and wriggled from the lift shaft where it had been hiding. He heard it in the corridor behind him, hideously fast; threw himself through the door into the synthesizer chamber and twisted at the manual control. Something fell against the closing door like a gelatinous spider, and Spock leaped for the gangway at the end of the room, only to have something catch around his ankle in a biting grip that nearly broke the bone within the boot.

  A force like a machine whipped him off his feet.

  He struck the floor hard, twisting his body to catch at the hatch handle of the nearest synthesizer. Behind him he could see the black slit of the door, the wet gleam of an eyeless, narrow head trying to force its way through, the wet star of groping tentacles slobbering at the door's edges, the longer tentacles and two thin, multijointed legs squirming in the aperture. The tentacle that had seized his foot ended in a double-padded grip that was already working its way up his leg for better purchase; the next nearest one, not quite yet able to touch him, finished in a razor-toothed mouth.

  The force of the drag was incredible. Spock held to the metal of the hatch handle with both hands, not daring to release even long enough to unship his phaser. He felt the sinews of his hands and shoulders crack. He hacked at the tentacle with the heel of his other boot, knowing it was a useless gesture as far as defense went. The thing shifted another coil onto his calf and made a grab with its rough-padded end for his other foot as well. The razored mouth had moved, groping now around the edge of the door and along the wall toward the manual controls, and Spock realized with surprise that the yagghorth understood how the door worked.

  He released his grip with his right hand and snatched his phaser from his belt, firing even as the yanking strength of it nearly dislocated his left shoulder. He tried to pull himself free, and the jerk of it ripped the skin from his fingers and palm, his left hand slipping on the handle. He fired again, into the center of those black, groping tentacles, though in the darkness he could barely see his target. Pain sliced his left leg, his left shoulder. His grip clenched as hard as it could but the metal ripped from his bloody fingers and his body hit the floor hard. The next instant, it seemed, he was up against the twelve-centimeter gap of the doorway, a tentacle around his waist c
rushing his ribs, and he realized that the thing was simply going to pull him through the door slit, pulping the bones within the flesh as it did.

  He fired the phaser again into the seething mass of bone and organ beyond the doorway, felt it flinch, twist, then slam him furiously against the edges of the metal to drag him through.

  Somewhere in the corridor he heard a woman's voice shout "NEMO!" And then, as consciousness blurred, he thought he heard her add, "Zchliak!"

  Which was the Vulcan word for friend.

  Chapter Seven

  "WE NEED SOMETHING with a narrow end that won't bend under pressure." Kirk wasn't sure why he was whispering, but somehow in the darkness, the utter silence of the blacked-out ship, he hesitated to raise his voice. "Any suggestions? Anyone have anything?"

  "Hairpin's too narrow?" came a female voice—Yeoman Wheeler's, of Security—and the next moment something about eight centimeters long and half the thickness of one of McCoy's tongue depressors was poked into his hand. "It's supposed to be titanium-finished."

  He flexed it between his hands as hard as he could, and felt it bend. "Too weak. And now I'm afraid I spoiled it for you."

  "I guess that means I'm never going to speak to you again, Captain." She took it back.

  "I had a couple of styli in my log pad," offered Ensign Gilden, the assistant historian. "You put two of those together, it might work. The log pad should be on the floor here someplace."

  There was a soft, deliberate scuffling as bodies hunched awkwardly and hands described large, cautious circles on the floor. Kirk had found eight crew members slowly coming out of the effects of heavy stun in various portions of the corridors between Mr. Spock's office and Transporter Room Two, med or transporter techs or redshirts going on shift in Security, or those who, like Ensign Gilden, were simply unfortunate enough to have quarters in the adjacent corridors.

  "How many of them are there?" asked Lieutenant Oba after a moment. The assistant transport chief's voice was soft, like Kirk's, as if he feared that somehow those who had taken over the ship could hear them through the disabled comm links.

  And for all he knew, reflected Kirk, they might be able to.

  "I don't know," said Kirk. "Scanner sweeps of the Nautilus showed no further human life there, but there was heavy shielding on the ship. Some areas didn't register at all. I don't think there's more than six of them all together. Four, now that two of them have gone back to the Nautilus with Mr. Spock. To the best of my knowledge two of those four are in sickbay."

  And one of the remaining two, he added, doesn't look capable of independent action. And somehow, remembering the childlike dark eyes and sweet smile, Kirk didn't think Thad Smith was mean enough, or fierce enough, to kill. At least not on his own initiative. Maybe not at all.

  And that left one.

  Who could be anywhere.

  "Got it!" came Gilden's voice.

  "Over here," said Kirk.

  Shuffling in the dark. Each stylus was eighteen centimeters long and two thick, tapered to a writing point at one end and a blunt, rounded key tapper at the other. They fit easily into the end of the dolly handle, held in place by the tape. Kirk knew the rooms and corridors of the Enterprise almost literally blindfolded, particularly those of the middle decks: the offices, transporter rooms, medical section, and Engineering of Deck Seven, the crew rec and Central Computer areas of Deck Eight, the officers' quarters of Deck Five above. He knew, almost without thinking about it, that there was an emergency kit next to the elevator around the corner from Transporter Room Two. It took him, Oba, and the beefy Ensign Curtis combined to lever loose the magnetic catch that held its cover, but the metal eventually bent and buckled, and they pulled out the long box within like treasure hunters who have finally achieved a pirate's hoard.

  The kit contained, among other things such as medical supplies and a couple of oxygen masks, two flashlights and a degausser.

  "Right," breathed Kirk. "Gilden, Oba, you both have second field experience in computers…"

  "Not high-level stuff, sir," said Gilden. "I can untangle fragmentary historical files, but…"

  "Doesn't matter. I don't know what you'll find when you get to Central." They were walking as he spoke, hurrying to the transporter room by the bobbing yellow gleam of the flashlights, where he degaussed the catch on the maintenance cupboard to remove more flashlights and another degausser. It was in his mind that there was a strong possibility Gilden and Oba would reach Central to find the entire staff unconscious—or worse—under their consoles.

  "Butterfield, I'll need your phaser. Wheeler, go with Oba and Gilden to Central, see what's going on there. Get more flashlights and another degausser from the utility room at the end of that corridor there. Ensign…"

  "If you don't mind, Captain," said Curtis, picking up the discarded yard of steel pipe they'd used for a lever, "I'll stay by the transporter room in case anybody else tries to get off the ship…or onto it." In the upside-down glow of the narrow light beams, his square red face was calm, with a very slight smile.

  "Don't take chances you don't have to," he said—unnecessarily, he knew. They both knew. "And get yourself a phaser as soon as you can. I'll send back whoever I can to relieve you. All of you," he added, to the little group of Security redshirts and ad hoc computer draftees who followed him to the ship's central gangway, "I don't need to tell you to get into as many lockers as you can. Get demagnetizers, flashlights, phasers. We need to find where these people are hiding. They have to have access to lab-quality terminals, and they have to be somewhere on the main power trunk. Paxson, you go with the Central group, they may need medical attention down there. Butterfield, you go with them too, as a runner. I'll be on the bridge."

  He killed and flipped the catch on the gangway's manual cover plate as he spoke, twisted the cog inside. Groaning, unwilling, the door slid back. He stopped on the threshold, his meager troop behind him, listening.

  There were no voices from above.

  Somebody—Sulu, probably—would have made the effort to come down. There were things on the bridge that could be used as levers, if no degausser was available.

  Cautiously, Kirk flashed the light upward. Though there was no sign of danger in the enclosed blackness of the stairwell, only a faint glitter of residual moisture trickling down the side of a vent cover—the vent covers in the gangways weren't maintained as often as those on the rest of the ship—neither was there any sign that anyone had attempted to use the gangway in the nearly two hours that the lights had been out.

  That was very unlike Mr. Sulu.

  Kirk advanced a foot or so into the landing, shone the light down the metal stair below. Nothing. His boots chimed hollowly on the metal as he moved back around, to shine the light upward again.

  Still nothing.

  Very cautiously, he began to ascend.

  "Do I have to mention that if you use that phaser again you're yagghorth chow?"

  "Unnecessary, Rakshanes." Spock rolled over very gingerly and probed the zone of tenderness from pectorals to short ribs under his left arm, the sudden, flinching pain of the lowest two ribs on his right side. The tendons of his right hand ached at the movement of his fingers; his left palm, he saw belatedly, as sensation returned, was stripped of skin in patches, sticky with malachite blood.

  The doorway was open before him. In the small glow of a hand lamp Raksha stood leaning, a bronze statue with a phaser in her hand and the garnets of her stiletto hilt glinting like blood droplets in her hair. Past the dark of her shadow something gleamed, too shiny, like wet cellophane or scar tissue: a squamous black hide stretched over uneven slabs of bone, salted with tiny flashes of gold; exposed organs pulsing thickly within the shield of hooked ribs and barbed legs. Black hair tousled silk, Adajia was making little pinch-and-scratch nips with her fingernails at the dripping masses of tentacles clustered at the front of the huge seahorse head.

  At Spock's movement, fernlike growths slipped out of the leg joints and the small vents on
the head's central ridge, pale yellows and whites against the thing's blackness in the sightless shadows, lacy as a vase of baby's breath on a Klingon mind-stripper. It coiled and retracted its tentacles, the foremost of the bony legs, holding them up mantis-wise, claws spread. As it did so the lamplight from Raksha's hand caught small points of metal along the central, ferny ridge, and down the back of the neck.

  Spock leaned back on his elbows, the pain in his shoulders, his back, his hand and legs forgotten in that tiny line of spangling reflection. He was barely even conscious of deduction; certainly, at this point, not surprised. As if a final piece of data had emerged to link everything he had seen on the ship into a single, shining chain, he said, "People of your time have succeeded in docilizing yagghorth."

  Raksha stepped forward, stooping carefully to pick up the phaser that lay beside Spock's bleeding hand. She tossed it to Adajia, who plucked it from the air like a thrown flower. The yagghorth retracted its sensory organs and hissed. Raksha put down a hand and helped Spock to his feet. His shoulders felt as if they'd been beaten with the blunt side of an ax.

  "You don't know the half of it, pal."

  "Is it permitted to request enlightenment?" He flexed his hand gingerly, his body still reechoing with the aftermath of shock though his mind was striding quickly ahead. With the lamplight more steady upon it, he could see the creature clearly now, well over two meters tall in its current down-slung position, but able to straighten, he guessed, to nearly twice that height, spiderlike legs tucked, vestigal wings half-spread, the three heavy tentacles more closely resembling spinal columns in their bumpy joints than limbs. Nobody had ever succeeded in killing a yagghorth in any fashion that left a skeleton intact; he found himself making mental notes on the anatomy, the forward-slumped stance, the way it kept moving its head, and the almost submarine waving of the sensory fronds.

  He could see, quite plainly, the glint of metal on its spine, like the implants that glittered so evilly on Sharnas's back, on Arios's.