He knew. Knew not only that Spock was who he said he was—that there was no deception in the minds of impartial third parties—but knew also that she wasn't impartial. Knew of the love she had cherished, hopelessly, toward the impassive first officer for years.
For a moment she felt naked, as if the boy had revealed her innermost secrets to the men in the room. From the corner of her eye she saw Sharnas startle and realized that he had read her discomfiture as he had read her love. For a moment she met his eyes, filled with puzzlement and apology, and turning back with an effort, saw in McCoy's face, and Kirk's, and young Lao's, only curiosity about what Cooper had to tell them, not about her at all.
Sharnas began, "The Consilium…" and Cooper shook his head violently.
"No. The Master said no information. None."
The boy's slanted eyebrows dragged together. His voice, ragged from the corrosive gas, was surprisingly deep. "If they knew, they might be able to… to change it. To make it different."
"The Master said no," repeated Cooper, closing his eyes and leaning back again. "McKennon can use anything; you know she was on our trail. I say no."
"You've told us a good deal already," said Kirk, lifting a finger to silence McCoy's remark. "You weren't thinking very clearly at the time, but Nurse Chapel has a lot of what you said earlier down in her medical log. There's enough there for me to make some guesses. About who the Consilium is. About what's happened in the…how many years has it been?"
Cooper sighed, defeated. His body relaxed, as if only tension and pain had been holding his bones together. "I was never real good at history," he said softly. "The Master and I ran from the Academy in forty-six. Twenty-five-forty-six. We…Most people don't believe what the Consilium's doing. Most people never come in contact with laserbrains or psis, or with the gene splicers. But you can't keep it from people in the Academy, no matter how strong the programming is. Everybody going for captain or astrogator is wired. We work with the psionics all the time, with the specials, with the tame scientists who've got tape loops for brain stems. We ran…two years ago."
"That's when you acquired the Nautilus."
Cooper moved his head. "She'd been brought in to be junked. Obsolete after years of hauling ore in some backwater, but she'd been converted to the psi jump at some point, probably right after the Consilium gave the technology to the Fleet. The Master fixed her up."
"And what is the Consilium doing?" asked Kirk, his voice low. He glanced hesitantly at Lao, at Chapel, wondering just how many should know, and what they should know. Three people can keep a secret.…He pushed away the conclusion of the old saw.
"Who is the Consilium?"
Cooper only averted his face from them, lying as if for protection against the wall. Kirk could see the tension in the muscles of his back, the set of his shoulders, as if physically fighting the weight of the horrible decision involved in all temporal paradoxes: to do something or to do nothing, either of which might hasten the future evil.
It was Sharnas who spoke.
"The Consilium pioneered the entire technology of psychoactive neural enhancement through nanotech wiring," he said. He coughed, but winced only a little. The hyperena was finally beginning to take effect, healing as dalpomine lowered the stress level of his system.
"The earliest applications were to docilize the criminally insane," the Vulcan went on, as if speaking of some world other than his own. "Massive documentation, massive checks and balances; implants kept them calm, gave them a reality check when violence started cutting into their minds." He coughed again, pressing his scarred hand to his side. "But after the plague, there were millions, hundreds of millions, who would have died, or for whom there would have been no alternative to extermination, if it hadn't been for the neurological rewiring of their perceptions. It kept whole populations calm and in touch with reality. It saved civilization. Literally. Everywhere."
"Saved it," said Lao softly, into the silence. "Or…turned it? Turned it into something else. Something…that could be controlled." Already he could see what was coming. There was disbelief—or the hope in the possibility of disbelief—in his voice. Tell me what you're going to say isn't true.
"When you're being fed through the bars," replied Cooper, "you don't ask whether the hand that's passing you the food is clean or dirty. You eat and thank God."
Sharnas shook his head, his face grave but his eyes very sad. "For many there wasn't even that choice. Whole populations were wiped out, either by the sickness itself, or by the results of the neurosynaptic breakdowns that the plague caused, or by the fighting that followed, or by the…the things the wars did to the genetic material of those who survived. But twenty years later, it was Fleet captains who had been wired as children, and wired astrogators, who made the…the discovery that led to the psion jump. The literal bending of space to allow a ship to…to go around hyperspace."
"What?" Kirk tried to picture it and failed. "How? I mean…"
"What was the breakthrough?" asked Lao, and for a moment his usual eagerness broke through the dark silence that seemed to have settled upon him. "Research now points to a kind of wormhole theory, but…"
"Better not go into that," said Cooper, a little too quickly. "But it works. And it works faster, lighter, than anything that's been dreamed of now. It's a completely different principle. But it won't work unless you've got a wired astrogator and a wired empath…among other things. And that gave the Consilium control over the Fleet. Over all trade everywhere. It made the warp drive obsolete overnight. For the past sixty years Starfleet—and the Federation Council—has been in the Consilium's desk drawer. They get what they want."
"I suppose," said Kirk, into that terrible silence, "there are members of the Federation Council who are wired, too."
The rain-colored eyes glinted cynically up from the pillows. "You catch on quick."
They get what they want. Kirk had been around the sources of power, the governments of alien planets and small colonies and bureaucracies minor and major too long not to know what that meant.
Outside the open doors of sickbay, firefly lights flitted through the night-drowned halls. Voices called to one another, hushed with the curious impulse to quiet that all of them felt. Someone said, "He's up here," and there was a muffled clashing of metal as yet another enterprising soul was extracted with great care from the air vent he'd attempted to use as an escape passage from some sealed room or blocked corridor. Three such victims were already being gone over by the techs in ICU, apparently completely unharmed once they got out of the narrow space.
Narrow spaces, thought Kirk, with the part of his mind still functioning in the present, still working as the captain of a beleaguered ship.
But it was only surface reaction. In the battle of Achernar, Kirk had seen men go on running after taking a mortal hit.
Starfleet would become the private arm of a private power, used for that power's convenience. The Federation would end as an Imperial Senate at the subtle beck of an inner circle of those who could control other men's minds.
All he had worked for—all his own dreams of future worlds, future justice, future good. Gone.
Gone in slightly less than three hundred years.
If those who came after him wanted to follow his footsteps to the stars, they'd have to do it with wires up their spines and voices in their heads telling them what they must and must not do. Would and would not think.
Sharnas had seen it. Cooper had seen it. The reflection of it was in their eyes.
Beside him, he heard Lao whisper, "No," like a man watching a holovid, watching people he'd learned to love and care about going up in a computer-digital holocaust.
But it was real. It would be real.
He turned, to see the arsenic corrosion of the knowledge at work in McCoy's tired eyes.
We all end up getting ripped to pieces on holovid…
Hyperbole? Paranoia? Kirk didn't think so. There was darkness there he hadn't looked into yet, didn't want
to look into.
"I'm sorry," said Cooper softly. "I shouldn't have told you all that. You did ask."
"Yes," said Kirk. "We asked." Why was it the nature of humankind to ask?
He took a deep breath. Like taking the first step with a gut wound. Like saying the first words to a woman after finding the tracks of the other man. "So the rebellion is centered in the Fleet?"
Cooper nodded. "The Shadow Fleet split off about three years ago. Junkers, mostly. We're the only psion jump-drive vessel they've got. The rest are outgunned and outmaneuvered."
A lie, maybe, thought Kirk, scanning the young man's face. He prayed Cooper was lying, anyway. Another part of him wondered why it was so important to him to believe that it was a lie. To believe that the Rebellion—the Shadow Fleet—was stronger than that. Was capable of winning.
What did it matter, if everybody in it had to be wired anyway?
Why should he care, if it would all happen years after he himself was dead?
"So what brought you here? Why Tau Lyra?"
Cooper shook his head. Sharnas drew in breath, and the astrogator said harshly, "No."
"But…"
"I said no! You trust them, Sharnas. You trust her." He nodded across at Chapel, still kneeling by the boy's bed in the semidark. "I don't. You've seen them program a holodeck. You'd be willing to swear you're eating dinner on the beach or tracking criminals with Sherlock Holmes…or having sex with a chained-up fourteen-year-old or getting your eyes and your entrails ripped out if someone in the Consilium doesn't happen to like you, for that matter.
"You've met Fleet captains McKennon's programmed to believe owe her their lives, so of course they'll destroy themselves and their men at her command. You've met people who've been programmed to believe that they owed their corporate Brass their lives, so of course they'd work sixteen hours a day or be on call or whatever was needed—people who've been programmed to believe their families were murdered by whoever the Consilium wants out of the way. Of course Nurse Chapel could believe that Vulcan guy is Mr. Spock and this is the Enterprise. McKennon could have figured that out when she sent her in here to hold your hand."
Sharnas said softly, "You're wrong. I'd know."
Kirk was aware of Lao's indrawn breath, of the shock in his eyes. He's too young for this, he thought. He has ideals…
He only asked quietly, "And what have you been programmed to believe, Mr. Cooper?"
Cooper met his eyes, but made no reply.
Not unkindly, Kirk went on, "There's no chance your Master is going to get out of here and back to his own ship, you know. He's only got Thad with him now. We'll trace him down with tricorders, if nothing else. We have to know. They're innocent people on that planet, people who don't even know about spaceflight, about other worlds. Why Tau Lyra Three?"
Cooper turned his face to the wall.
"Don't ask him." Sharnas's voice was very low. "And don't ask me. I think he's wrong, but if he's right, what we've told you, McKennon would have known already. She's…the Consilium domina in charge of Starfleet. In charge of crushing the Shadow Fleet, of bringing us back into line."
The diagnostics above the bed showed heart rate up, blood pressure down, the returning symptoms of trauma and shock at the mention of her name. Chapel rose quickly. "Captain, I have to…to ask you not to question him any more. Either of them." In her own face was the shadow of everything she had heard, but with it, the determination to protect her patients no matter who they were or what they knew.
Kirk hesitated, then said, "It doesn't change the fact that we have to know, Nurse. Mr. Lao, get back to Central Computer. Break that block on the computers any way you can and get the controls back. And not a word to anyone—not anyone—of one thing you've heard. I don't think I need to add that goes for everyone in this room."
Lao nodded. Kirk could see in his face the reflection of what he knew was in his own: a hollow inside, a darkness where something had been taken away. Like Bluebeard's seventh bride, they'd opened a locked door, and what they'd seen beyond it couldn't be unseen. He felt as if some internal gravity had been switched off, leaving him to float.
"I'll be with the security party trying to get down the gangways in the pylon," he went on, with a certain amount of effort. He was, after all, the captain. Whatever the others guessed of what he felt—of the sudden death of all the promises on which he'd based his life—he still had the ship to run. The Prime Directive to obey, though it—and everything else—seemed now like some bitter joke.
He was aware, however, that he sounded very tired. "I'll leave Yeoman Wein here as a runner…"
"Captain…!" Sharnas's dark eyes snapped open again, and the diagnostic arrows leaped. He made a move to sit up—Chapel flung out her hand, staying him, forcing him down. "Captain, the Master…" Sharnas wet his lips. His words came slightly thick, a stammer and hesitation. "The Master wants to talk to you." The diagnostic arrows steadied, sank, as he bowed his head, folded his arms about himself as if for protection. When he looked up again, the calm, the logic—the Vulcanness, Kirk thought—had left his face, replaced by that slight angle of the head, the slouch of the shoulders, that Kirk remembered from the briefing room and the brig.
"Captain, I hear Mr. Spock's finished with the engines on the Nautilus." Even the slight roughness was the same, different from the coolant's corrosion. "He'll be coming back…Transporter Room Two. After Sharnas and Phil are sent over to the ship."
"Captain Arios, I'm afraid that's not possible," said Kirk grimly. "Where are you? You can't hide forever, my men are…"
"Your men are running around in the dark with flashlights, and I promise you the ops programs on the lights and the doors are going to stay locked down until all of us are back on the ship and we're the hell away. I've got a timer lock on your tractor beam and your phasers and I'll put one on your main drive if I have to."
"Don't be a fool."
Sharnas's face broke into a curious, and very Arios-like, grin. "Captain, if I wasn't a fool six ways from Sunday you'd be in real trouble. We mean no harm. Not to you, not to anybody on Yoondri. I swear to you we're not going to tamper with their culture or tell them things they shouldn't know. But unless we get there…"
His voice broke off, stammering; Sharnas made a sudden, twitching movement with his hand. The arrows above the bed fluttered with the increase of the pulse.
"Unless we get there…"
"Jim, you can't…" began McCoy in soft-voiced protest.
"Captain, we're in touch with the engineering hull," whispered a voice. Turning, Kirk saw a panting Ensign Giacomo in the doorway. "We're lowering bottles on strings down the dorsal conduit to Air-Conditioning. There's gas in all the gangways and vents down there, too."
"Tell them to get a guard on the emergency transporter rooms on Deck Twenty-two at once." He kept his voice low, wondering how much Arios could hear through his mental link with the Vulcan boy. Wondering how much it mattered. "I don't care how they do it, just do it."
He turned back to Sharnas, who was staring blankly before him, as if facing something in some timeless distance that filled him with both horror and grief. Thin and without breath, he whispered, "Oh, dear God…"
The diagnostics peaked, slammed: shock, trauma, the onset of agony. "Dalpomine," snapped McCoy, and Chapel was already lunging for the open darkness of the door.
Sharnas's breath drew in…
And his face changed. He was Sharnas the Vulcan again, a look of panic in his eyes.
"What is it?" Cooper dragged himself to one elbow.
"He's gone." Sharnas was shaking all over as McCoy pressed the injector of sedative to his arm. "Fainted. Pain…" He looked about to faint himself.
Kirk wheeled, plunged through the open door and around the corridor to the emergency bridge, where a small group still clustered by the door of the turbolift shaft. In addition to the tunnel that led upward through all decks of the saucer, at this point it branched laterally, cutting across the hull to Enginee
ring. Mr. DeSalle stood in the doorway, shouting along the echoing tube, "Just be glad there wasn't a vent shaft to tempt you into crawling out of there, Scotty!" He turned and greeted Kirk with a half-salute. "It's Mr. Scott, sir," he said. "He's been locked all this time in the port-side Engineering head."
"Come on." Kirk strode into the horizontal lift shaft.
The security chief caught him by the arm. "You want to take a rope so we can haul you back when you pass out?"
"Come on," repeated Kirk, jerking his head. "Lao, with me, we may need something on the computer. . . ."
DeSalle shrugged and stepped into the dark tunnel after them.
"Organa, hand me that rope. . . ."
It was forty-five meters along the shaft to Engineering. The redshirt runner who'd tried to walk it had keeled over four or five meters in and had had to be dragged the rest of the way. Kirk, Lao, and DeSalle covered the ground in sixty seconds.
"What the…?"
Kirk turned to shout back down the shaft. "Mr. Organa, muster full security forces for a search of the engineering hull. All locations where there are lab-quality terminals, and extra guards on the emergency transporter rooms. You should be able to get down the gangways now. On the double!"
Lights swarmed along the dark corridors like torrents of luminous bubbles in a stream. At the head of a platoon of security officers, Kirk clattered down the echoing darkness of the gangways. He picked up more personnel at every level of the pylon; a few men and women had been in each of the dorsal lounges when the lights went out, drinking coffee and having a final chat before going on shift. Kirk briefed them on the run: lab-quality terminals, and someplace empty or nearly so in that last hour of the shift.
"How about the bowling alley, sir?" suggested a burly tech in maintenance coveralls. "Those games they have at the back are complicated enough, they have to have labquality circuits or better. Besides, the main trunk from Recycle leads right underneath."
"What games?" Kirk had visited the bowling alley maybe four times in his entire tenure as the Enterprise's captain. He had a vague recollection of pinball and pachinko, but games and game technology were something that existed, in his mind, chiefly in terms of Academy trainers.
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