Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  Raksha's eyes went from him to the yagghorth, suddenly old. "Sharnas tells me a story about a Vulcan master who met a god at the crossroads," she said. "He asked for perfect enlightenment. The god gave it to him. Gods do things like that. The Vulcan went and drowned himself, because it was the only logical thing to do." She leaned her shoulders against the door, brushed a coarse trail of black hair from her face. "Klingons have a reputation for being stupid. We treasure it."

  Spock put his head a little on one side, his eyes meeting the ink-dark pits of shadowed grief, and for a time there was no sound but their breathing, the heartbeat of the engine, and the drip of moisture in the lightless belly of the haunted ship all around them. "Then you are from the future," he said at last, confirming what he had already guessed.

  Raksha sighed. "Oh, yeah." She rubbed her forehead, her heavy eyebrows pulling together in pain, and shivered, as if suddenly cold. "Yeah. But it's not like you think."

  "It's not a gas." Captain Kirk staggered down the gangway, stripping the oxygen mask from his face. In spite of the breathing apparatus, a few feet up the steps toward the deck above his breath had shortened and strangled, dizziness and weakness overwhelmed him. Wheeler and Gilden steadied him, looked at one another, baffled.

  Butterfield said reasonably, "Could be why we haven't heard from the folks on the bridge."

  Kirk walked slowly around to the door leading into the main hull's emergency bridge, a duplicate chamber directly below the main bridge six floors above. There was another such chamber in the engineering hull, surrounded, as this one was, with backup computers—a protected secondary heart and brain. He degaussed the cover plate and cranked the door open, stepped into the dark chamber, an eerie replica of that above, pitch-dark now that even the small red power lights on the overridden consoles were out.

  The stubby finger of his flashlight's yellow gleam poked around the darkness, bobbed before him as he crossed the room, mounted the walkway to stand before the shut turbolift doors.

  "I guess we have to do this the hard way," he said.

  Thad Smith stood for some time in front of the long, metal-lined opening in the bright blue rec-room wall. He recognized it as a food slot—there was a metal counter in front of it for trays, and a series of buttons above it. Instead of the brightly colored pictures with which he had been familiar all his life, there was writing, as there was in the lounges of the Brass.

  Though the Master and Phil had worked hard during the past year and a half to teach him to read, he still found it difficult to distinguish between I's and J's, H's and A's; difficult to pick out how the letters all made up the sounds of words. These were long words, too.

  Still…

  He glanced anxiously over his shoulder. By the glow of the small battery lamp, Arios sat unmoving at the table they'd dragged to the bank of games, his thin wrists one on top of the other in the semicircle of keypads Raksha had wired together, his green head bowed as if in sleep. Only his breathing, fast and shallow, told that he was not sleeping, but rather in the depths of a trance far longer, and far deeper, than Thad had ever seen him attempt.

  Beyond the bright pond of lamplight the huge rec room was utterly dark, strange gleams lying like water on the glassy floors, the grinning machines. The other games, the comforting brightness of their lights quenched, stared at him with blank, demented eyes. No sound came from the corridor beyond the shut doors, save for the regular grumble of machinery in the other hold and the deeper, more soothing throb of the engines.

  The thought of the engines made Thad shudder. If they didn't get away, if Raksha didn't get the engines of the Nautilus fixed fast, he and the Master would be caught, and very likely given to this ship's yagghorth. If the Master couldn't hold out the psychic defenses he'd set around this place, the illusion and interference he'd established between all the decks of the ship.

  Thad was beginning to fear that he wouldn't. It was a huge ship, as big as the Nautilus and filled with people.

  So, he returned to consideration of the food slot. He knew that sweet things—chocolate, or Klingon caramelized fruit—helped. Gave him back the energy that the illusion drained. Coffee, too. He thought he could spell coffee, but there were four different buttons with that word (only the spelling didn't look quite right) and there were other words besides. Any of them might have been poison.

  Cautiously, he padded to the red-shirted Federation yeoman still stretched on the floor by the railings, his hands taped to a stanchion. Thad tried to think of a way to tear the engine tape off the man's mustache and mouth without hurting him, but couldn't think of any, so he simply grabbed a corner and yanked.

  "How do you get chocolate out of the food slot?" he asked.

  "Hunh?" said Yeoman Effinger.

  "I need to get some chocolate out of the food slot, and it has writing instead of pictures, and I can't read that well." At the Institute, of course, and in all the factories, the food slots in the Secondaries' room were all pictures, which in Thad's opinion were prettier than writing anyway.

  "Oh," said Yeoman Effinger. "Uh—second bank of buttons from the left are all chocolate bars. First one's chocolate with almonds, second one has macadamias, third one's caramel and peanuts, fourth one's that kind of squishy orange nougat that's real nasty so don't eat it, and the bottom one's coconut marshmallow, but the synthesizer doesn't ever get the coconut right."

  "Oh. Thanks. Are all the buttons with coffee on them okay?"

  "Yeah. Top one's black, all the rest have stuff in them. Can you get me an almond chocolate bar while you're there?"

  "I don't think the Master would let me," said Thad. "I'm real sorry. We'll let you go when we escape." He taped up Effinger's mouth again and went to get black coffee and two chocolate bars—macadamia-nut and caramel-peanut—from the food slot. Quietly, he stole to Arios's side.

  "Master?"

  Arios raised his head a little, though his eyes did not open. "Thad?" His lips formed the word without a sound.

  "I got you some candy and some coffee."

  Arios groped blindly for the coffee cup. Thad had to put it in his hand. "It's hot," he warned, but Arios sipped it anyway, then fumblingly broke off a piece of the candy.

  "Thank you." His voice was thick and slurred, like a man speaking in deep sleep. "No word?"

  "No."

  "How long?"

  Thad consulted the chronometer Velcroed to his wrist. Most Secondaries could not be taught to use digital readouts. His was an analog double circle, each face three centimeters across, one for day and one for night, the twelve segments of each brightly colored. It was a common Secondary design. The Master had to set it for him. "An hour and a half," he said, after study and counting.

  Arios said nothing, but the muscles of his jaw clenched, like a man who feels the cut of a whip. He sank into his trance again, his breathing labored, fine lines of pain cut deep into the soft flesh under his eyes. As quietly as he could, Thad took the coffee and the rest of the candy and returned to his post beside the door, consuming it thoughtfully as he listened to the dim echoes of the dark and sealed ship.

  "Mr. Sulu!"

  The voice echoed weirdly in the sounding column of the turbolift shaft, but it was unmistakably the captain's. Sulu flung himself to the open doorway, leaned down, and was rewarded with the sight of a small dot of yellow light below. "Captain! Are you all right?"

  The others crowded up behind him—with the sole exception of Chekov, still at the helm, checking and double-checking the ship's slow movement against the position of the stars.

  "Have you tried coming down the shaft on the safety cables?"

  "Aye, sir," called Sulu. "Same problem as the gangways—I guess you tried the gangways? It isn't gas. . . ."

  "No," said Kirk. "Or if it is, it got through our masks."

  Sulu hunkered down on the threshold of that long, black drop. "Dawe's getting obstruction readings for seven or eight air-vent shafts on various decks. We think that's people who've tried to get
through the vents, past the blast doors or out of rooms. They're not moving. We don't know if they're just knocked out or dead."

  Kirk swore, wondering how many were lying dead in gangways throughout the ship; wondering what and how Arios had managed. "Any other in-ship sensors in operation?"

  "Negative, sir. Dawe says Transporter Room Two activated about an hour ago. Three beamed over to the Nautilus."

  "That was Spock, the Klingon, and the Orion. Have they returned?"

  "Negative, sir."

  "No indication of where Arios is?"

  "Not a one, sir, except that it has to be somewhere there's a terminal."

  Kirk was silent, looking up at that dark cluster of heads in the ocher square of the doorway light. "How far down did you get?"

  "Deck Three, by gangways. Maynooth's up there now trying to figure out what Arios did to the computers."

  "It's astonishing, sir," came the physicist's rather reedy voice. "Simply astonishing. They shouldn't be able to do the things they've done, slipping in and out of the defensive systems as if…Well, it's a marvelously sophisticated slicer program, sir. Orders of magnitude beyond anything I've ever seen." He sounded ready to marry the program's originator.

  "Captain," said Sulu, and there was deep concern in his voice. "Captain, who are those people?"

  Who indeed? An answer had occurred to Kirk already. He should have known, he thought, from the moment Cooper laughed in the transporter room.

  He looked up again, gauging distances and the strength of his throwing arm. "Get down to Deck Three and open the lift doors there," he said after a moment. "Mr. Butterfield…" He turned to the security officer behind him, and held out the degausser. "Get to Security and bring me back some rope. Open every door you can find along the way and get enough people with degaussers and lights to make a general search of all the med labs and of Engineering. Find Mr. Scott if you can, or send someone to find him. And get me a report on those two we have in the security ward of sickbay. Mr. Wheeler, you go with her."

  By the time the redshirt returned with the rope—and a half-dozen of her cohorts who reported that Mr. DeSalle had attempted to make an exit from the small Security messroom through the vent shaft and had not been heard from since—Kirk had gotten status reports from both Uhura and Maynooth, to the effect that the in-ship communication system was being "bled" for the ionization of all hand communicators, through a subtle cross-up of signals within the central computer itself. Like the cutting out of the doors and the lights, the blocking of the turbolifts and the quadrupling of the strength of all magnetic door catches on the ship, the reprogramming of that system was guarded with some kind of lock that left Maynooth speechless with admiration but utterly baffled.

  "I'll get it, though," called down the bespectacled physicist cheerily. "Just give me some time. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and I won't rest till I've conquered."

  He sounded, Kirk thought with a smile, like half the male techs and redshirts on the ship upon their first glimpse of the lovely Yeoman Shimada. He wondered what Lao would make of the system.

  Wondered where Lao was, and what had become of him. Not sitting around on his hands in the darkness, that was certain.

  With Butterfield had come Yeoman Wein, released from a cell in the brig that had previously held Dylan Arios. The redshirt was unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of his inattention, but after the eerie phenomenon of the gangway, Kirk was not inclined to blame him.

  "We've run into aliens who dealt in illusion before this," he said grimly. "If it is illusion we're dealing with and not something else. No, they got out, they did their preliminary setup at the terminal in the briefing room around the corner from the brig, then took off for somewhere they could fine-tune it in private."

  He worked as he spoke, tying the end of the rope Butterfield had brought to the heavy metal ring from a tape dispenser found in the supply cabinet. "It took at least fifteen minutes for Raksha and Adajia to get from wherever they were to Mr. Spock's office, probably traveling by vent shaft most of the way. That says to me Arios is holed up somewhere in the engineering hull. Mr. Sulu?"

  "Aye, sir."

  "Catch!" He flung the ring upward and across the lift shaft with all his strength. It took him four tries to get his range, but on the fourth the helmsman caught the ring easily, hauling up a hefty bight of rope and fashioning a kind of body sling out of it, with the ring as a sliding bolt.

  They were still discussing the logistics of lowering someone to the doors of Deck Eight when those doors opened beneath them, and Lieutenant Organa's voice called out, "Hello up there!"

  "Do you have access to Central Computer?" demanded Kirk at once. "Is everything secure down there?"

  "We've searched this deck," the assistant security chief called back to him. "There's some kind of gas in the gangways so we can't get up or down. It seems to go right through oxygen gear. Looks like it's in the air vents as well, but it doesn't come down into the rooms. Ensign Lao passed out in a vent trying to get to Engineering; we just located him a few minutes ago by tricorder. He seems to be okay but I'd feel better if Dr. McCoy took a look at him."

  "I'm fine!" The broad-shouldered form of Lao Zhiming blotted the light behind her. "Captain, have you had a look at that programming? It's beyond anything I've ever seen, but it isn't alien! I swear it isn't alien! The logic systems are directly traceable. Could those people…"

  "Stow it, Ensign," snapped Kirk. "No further speculation out loud—that's an order." There were two possibilities, and neither of them made him very comfortable.

  He could hear the bafflement, the dawning understanding, in Lao's voice as the young man said, "Aye, sir."

  "Keep at it," Kirk added, more kindly, not wanting to simply slap the young man's face to shut him up. "Find out everything you can, but report it to me."

  "Aye, sir."

  The weak glow of the flashlight gleamed briefly on his hair as he turned back in to the room.

  "We'll send Maynooth down to you," promised Kirk to Organa. "Mr. Sulu, tie him in that sling and lower him as fast as you can. Mr. Organa, when he gets there, come up and take over the search on this deck, but I'm still willing to bet Arios is holed up somewhere in the engineering hull. Mr. Sulu, you have the conn."

  "Aye, sir."

  "Keep runners stationed all along the lift tube. If you need me, I'll be in sickbay. I think it's time I had a little talk with our remaining guests."

  Chapter Eight

  "THE FUTURE." Phil Cooper ran a shaky hand through his hair, regarded the men grouped around his bed with eyes that had long ago ceased to believe in anything they saw. Then he sighed, and looked away. "Yeah," he said. "We're from the future. If you really are who you say you are."

  McCoy's mouth twisted in annoyance. "Who the tarnation else would we be?"

  "Just who you are." Cooper's gaze traveled from the doctor to Captain Kirk, at the doctor's side; to Chapel, still kneeling beside the unconscious Sharnas; to Ensign Lao, armed and almost unseen beside the dark gape of the door. Lao, Kirk knew, had guessed—guessed that the Nautilus was either a visitor from the distant future or a Starfleet project so highly classified as to be unheard of even in rumors. In either case, whatever Cooper was going to say was nothing an ordinary security officer should hear.

  "Starfleet," Cooper went on, and there was infinite weariness in his voice. "You'd have access to old uniforms, old ships, old visual logs about exactly how it was. Anything we've seen in the old logs, you could match. You could even doctor the starfields on the ports. And then I'd get all trusting and tell you about the rebellion, and where the Shadow Fleet's hiding, and how the Master got in touch with them, and what he did to break the docilization codes the Consilium keeps on every captain and astrogator and psionic empath in the Fleet, and we all end up getting ripped to pieces on holovid by whatever alien predator is considered 'the ult' that week." The pulse-rate indicator above his diagnostic bed climbed slightly; clearly he'd seen such
a holovid himself.

  "If we wanted information," said McCoy, almost gently, "we could have pumped you full of lyofane or zimath, you know."

  Cooper chuckled derisively. "Don't you think that's been tried? It's the one advantage I've ever seen in having had my backbone wired. That, and being able to catch the psion jumps before they happen. And to sometimes hear the Master's voice in my head."

  He raised a hand to his temple again, closed his eyes, and bowed forward; a shudder went through him. With the addition of more battery lamps and a couple of flashlights, some of the intense darkness in sickbay had abated, but the room was still dingy with shadow. In the harsh half-light Cooper's face looked strained and old. "I'm sorry," he said after a time, his voice muffled. "You may be who you say you are. We may really have come through that Anomaly to the past, like the Master said we were going to, if we hit it right, if…" He hesitated, fumbling almost visibly for a lie, a cover-up, through the fog of leftover melanex. "…if all the calculations were correct."

  If what? Kirk wondered.

  Wherever he was on the ship, Arios would be tired, too. McCoy's tricorder readings had indicated fatigue greater than one day's rest could overcome. In time, he'd start making mistakes.

  "They can be trusted." The voice from the other bed was barely a murmur; Chapel turned swiftly, reached out to touch the boy's hand, but drew hers back, remembering Mr. Spock's aversion to unnecessary contact. But perhaps because of his weakness, the boy didn't seem to mind. To Cooper, he said, "In my—dreams—she touched my mind, a little. She is not lying. She is not party to any lie. The Vulcan said to be Spock is in fact Spock of the Enterprise. Therefore, that is where we are."

  Chapel felt her whole face heat to the collarbone and she looked away, profoundly glad for the darkness of the room. Blindingly, she remembered the Vulcan ability to make mental connection, and heard Cooper's voice saying again, He was trained as an empath. . . .