"Hologames, illo-spex," said Lao, springing along beside him like a young cougar. "The phantom-league baseball's been going for nearly four years. Mario's right, I've watched the techs reset those games. Those are lab-quality, and high-end at that. They could easily have cut into Central through one of them."
Serves me right, thought Kirk dourly, for spending my off shifts playing chess with Spock in the rec room instead of hanging out with the beer-and-pretzels crowd downstairs. He wondered what else he might have missed.
The engineering hull was always more sparsely populated than the main saucer, and there were huge sections where the blast doors were still down, where the population of technicians and researchers were still trapped in whatever small areas they'd been occupying when Raksha's locks had gone into the ship's internal systems. There was, Kirk noticed, very little panic. Lamps had been improvised out of oil in every rec room and mess hall that had access to food slots and enough string for wicks, and the whole ship smelled of burning grease. On Deck Sixteen, Lieutenant Bistie had rigged an electrical coil from a welder in one of the maintenance shops powerful enough to degausse the magnets on the cover plates. The staff in the backup computer room that surrounded the Deck Nineteen auxiliary bridge hadn't even tried to escape—Kirk and his party opened the doors to find them clustered around two or three terminals, working at the program locks and internal loops with the patience of the machines they cherished.
"We haven't been able to get anywhere with them, sir," said the thin, arrogant computer chief McDonough, who had happened to be trapped there when the doors locked up. For once he sounded, if not humble, at least awed. "This is stuff I've never seen before. It's like our own programs…I don't know, had holes in them or something. Their commands just slipped on through between the cracks. I've never seen something that sophisticated."
"Of course he hasn't," said Lao grimly, as he and Kirk strode on their way. "They've got a two-hundred-and-fifty-year jump on the defenses. What the hell kind of defenses must they have in the future, against systems like that?"
Throughout the engineering hull, they encountered small parties of rescuers taking people out of vent shafts, gang ways, and both vertical and horizontal turbolift shafts—people who had attempted to move through the ship's smaller capillaries when the blast doors came down across every corridor. Narrow places, thought Kirk again. Some kind of psychic resonating field? The ability to project theta waves, enhanced by wiring, training, technology? He'd seen similar powers in alien cultures, seen what it did to civilizations where such powers had evolved.
No such wave effect occurred now.
They clattered down the final gangway, the huge cavern of Recycling picking up the ring of their boots on metal. The flashlight beams picked out the corners of row after row of synthesizers, grumbling to themselves, like unquiet tombs in the dark. Kirk wondered, unshipping his phaser, what they would meet. Even if Arios had regained consciousness, would exhaustion prevent him from using the full force of his mental powers, whatever those were? He had at least one companion with him, but it was a toss-up whether the young man would surrender, or feel himself obligated to fight to the death.
The yellow circles of flashlight beams converged on the cover plate next to the bowling alley's door. DeSalle degaussed the catch, and an officer stood on either side, phasers at the ready, as he cranked it open. From within a voice called, "Don't come any closer!"
The men stopped. Kirk leaned over to Lao, asked softly, "Would Arios have been able to rig some kind of fail-safe code on the computer that would let Thad trigger a life-support shutdown?"
The young man nodded. "If he could get into the base exec, he could do it with a batch program. He'd have to mark the keyboard with tape, so Thad would know which one to hit, since he probably couldn't remember under pressure. If Arios has known him for long, he'd know that about him. It's a possibility."
Kirk's eyes narrowed as he regarded the dim glow of lights beyond the slitted door. "With all the safety bulkheads opened there wouldn't be any danger of suffocation, but the gravity and the heat could give us problems."
"Just keep things calm and slow, sir," said Lao softly. "Don't panic him, and don't confuse him. And don't blame him for being what he is."
Kirk glanced at him, hearing experience in his voice—hearing, too, both concern and rage that anyone would make a pawn of someone like Thad. He walked forward to the door alone and called out, "Smith? Thaddeus?" He remembered Thad probably wouldn't recall that his name was supposed to be Smith. "Thaddeus, it's Captain Kirk."
There was a long silence, in which Kirk heard the barest whisper from the echoing room beyond. "Master? Master, please wake up!"
He stepped through the doorway. DeSalle, Lao, and the guards remained where they were.
A yellow bubble of electric light illuminated one end of the bank of arcade games at the far side of the thirty-five-meter hall. Gaudy posters surmounted the game consoles. SMUGGLER'S TREASURE. ASTEROID MONSTERS. GALLERY OF AMAZEMENT. Three of the programming consoles had been unshipped from beneath the games and rewired in front of the largest of the game screens, the now dark NECROBLASTER 989. At this makeshift console, Dylan Arios was slumped in a chair, a scarecrow bundle of rags like a dead elf, graying green head resting on one crooked arm.
Thad straightened and whirled, phaser gripped in both hands, pointing toward Kirk in the shadows. The round, childlike face was sweat-bathed and grim, the dark eyes deathly scared.
"Stay back!" Stress cracked his voice. "I'll kill you! I really will!"
Kirk held up his hands to show them empty, though he had a phaser clipped to his belt behind his back. "I'm not here to hurt you," he said.
"That's what McKennon said. . . ." Thad's voice shook, and he forced it back under control. "That's what they always say."
Kirk looked over at the unconscious Arios. "What's wrong with him?"
"I don't know!" Thad sounded desperate, terrified. "He was talking thorugh Sharnas, he'd just heard from Nemo on the Nautilus that the engines were fixed. . . ."
"The same way he talked to Sharnas?"
"Uh-hunh." The gun was shaking visibly in the sweaty hands. Kirk wondered what the setting on it was.
"Who's Nemo?" he asked, keeping his own voice conversational. Neither of the women had been wired, Kirk recalled. Scanners had shown no human life on the black ship, though with the shielding it was difficult to tell.
Thad said quickly, "No one. Uh—nobody. Uh—I meant he'd—he'd just heard from—from Adajia." He glanced back at Arios, his face twisting with anxiety and distress. "Then he just…he just collapsed. He said, 'Oh, my God,' and…and looked out, like he saw something, something awful."
"He needs to get to sickbay," said Kirk gently, feeling like a betrayer. "He needs to be taken care of. Neither of you will be harmed. I swear it, I promise. You can't escape anyway, you know," he added, as Thad looked from Arios around the dark cavern of the room, desperately trying to figure out if there was a way to escape. "My men are back in control of the ship. The only thing we can't do is turn the lights on." Or make the turbolifts run, he reflected. Or operate the main computer, or communicate. But Thad doesn't know that.
Thad looked almost in tears with indecision and fear, the success of what was obviously a desperately critical operation thrown upon him, knowing he was incapable of planning ahead.
"I'll let you keep the phaser," Kirk added. "How's that?"
The Consilium didn't leave Thad with much of a brain, Phil had said on Chapel's transcript. But he's got a hell of a heart.
And a hideous, all-consuming terror of the Consilium that had done to him whatever it had done.
Thad cast one more agonized glance at Arios, then looked back at Kirk, trying to come to the right decision and knowing that he couldn't. At last he said wanly, "All right." He looked around for someplace to put his phaser, then stuffed it awkwardly into the pocket of the baggy coverall garment he wore. Kirk hoped the safety was on.
&nbs
p; "Mr. DeSalle," he called out cautiously, and the security chief appeared behind him in the doorway. To the chief's eternal credit, thought Kirk, he also had put his phaser out of sight. "We're taking Captain Arios up to sickbay. Post a man here to watch the setup and make sure nobody comes near it. I've told Thad he can keep his phaser for now."
Two more redshirts appeared, also unarmed. Thad watched in hand-twisting apprehension as they lifted Arios between them and started toward the door. "You'll be all right," said Lao gently, coming over to stand beside him. "You did the right thing. All the way through."
"Did I?" Thad looked wistful. "I'm not very good at it—I mean, I'm just a Secondary. Most of them didn't even want me in the rebellion. But I do try." They started after Kirk and his little procession. "He's probably gonna want some coffee and some candy when he comes to," added Thad, nodding toward his chief. "He does after the psion jump, usually, and he said this was going to be lots worse. Oh, and let that guy go." He nodded toward the single yeoman who'd been on duty at the bowling alley, sitting resignedly by the alley railing with his hands taped around a stanchion, trying to pick off the tape that had been slapped over his mouth.
It wasn't until they were carrying Arios into one of the convalescent wards in sickbay that he seemed to come around a little. Kirk had quietly instructed DeSalle not to let Thad or the Master have any contact with Sharnas or Cooper; they passed the door of the security ICU without comment and moved on through the dark to the corridor beyond. Through one open door—curious, thought Kirk, to see so many open doors, to hear the babble of voices—yellow flashlights glowed, and he heard McCoy say, "No, you seem to be fine, too."
"I told you I was fine," said Lieutenant Sue's voice.
DeSalle said, "Doesn't look like anyone who got caught by that… whatever it was in the gangways and vent shafts…was harmed."
"Oh, no," said Thad earnestly. "It was just a standing theta wave to keep everybody from moving around. The Masters can do that in closed spaces." He touched the back of his head. "With us it's worse. They can trigger the pain-center implant almost at maximum, and we're not…Secondaries can't shake it off, the way regular people can. It's got something to do with being smart. McKennon…" He flinched, and let the subject trail away.
Kirk put his hands on his hips, looked down at the little man. "So 'Master' is really a Consilium title."
Thad nodded. "Is Phil all right?" he asked suddenly.
"He'll be fine." Kirk flashed his light into an empty two-bed room, nodded to DeSalle. "Can your Master get in touch with the Nautilus? You said someone there told him the engines were fixed."
Thad hesitated, then said apologetically, "I'm not supposed to talk about it."
"Nemo?" Arios stirred, groped out with one hand as the officers laid him on the bed. Then, desperately, "Nemo…"
"Who is Nemo?"
"It's all right if you tell us," said Lao. "Sharnas looked into the minds of some people here, and he said we really are who we say we are."
Thad sighed but looked relieved; Kirk couldn't repress the thought that it was no wonder the other members of the Shadow Fleet weren't enthusiastic about the Secondary's inclusion in the rebellion. Then he said, "He's our yagghorth."
He sat down on the other bed, looked resignedly up at Kirk, who was staring down at him in horror and shock.
"Don't you have a yagghorth on the Enterprise?" Thad asked in surprise. "I thought that's what Mr. Spock did. That he was the empath who partnered your yagghorth."
And, seeing that everyone in the room was looking at him with baffled incomprehension, he said, "That's how the psion jump works. The yagghorths do it. They just take the ships along."
Chapter Nine
HALF AN HOUR LATER, Mr. Spock confirmed this. "It is not an unreasonable situation," he said, holding one hand out while Dr. McCoy sprayed the abrasions on it with plast that did not quite match his skin tone. The left was more thickly covered with permaskin, which also didn't match, and by the way he moved Kirk guessed McCoy had put some kind of dressing on the gashed leg and cracked ribs. He had returned to the Enterprise—scuffed, bruised, clothing patched with oil and mold—in company with Raksha and Adajia at the news that Arios had been taken. There had been no negotiation, though scans indicated that a new layer of shielding had appeared around the Nautilus—presumably one of Raksha's repairs—making it impervious to outside transporter beams. In spite of his injuries, Spock retained his air of prim neatness, as if it were human—and therefore a point against him—to appear ruffled or in deshabille.
Sharnas, sitting up in bed now with his long black hair braided away from his face, had the same air of catlike neatness, of being above disorder of any sort.
"It is, in fact, logical, once one examined all the elements of the puzzle of the yagghorth themselves," added the boy. "The specimens examined were almost genetically identical, even though they had infested ships or colonies dozens of sectors apart; identical down to nonevolutionary traits like head shape and color bands and dancing behavior. Did you know the yagghorth dance? Yet no instrumentality for transport—not even evidence of sentience—was ever found. But once you had empathic races being wired for psychic contact—in the first instance, Betazoids who had been wired as children to repair the neurological damage caused by the plague—contact with the yagghorth became feasible."
Kirk shivered, recalling things his Academy buddy Maria Kellogg had told him about the yagghorth, and the one infested ship that the Farragut had picked up when he was a young midshipman, not yet out of the Academy. The yagghorth had been destroyed by the time the Farragut had picked up the distress signal—Kirk had helped in getting the bodies of three crew members out of the engine coils where the creature had shoved them. He still remembered the runnels of blood and resin trickling down the walls.
"It was discovered that yagghorth dream dreams about other worlds," Sharnas went on softly. "And go there…" He opened his fingers, like a man releasing a butterfly that has lighted on his hand. "Like that. All they needed, really, were referent points, a modulator coil, and a reason to take the ships with them when they went."
"Their previous referent points being the mu-spectrum energies emitted by Turtledove Anomalies," said Spock. "Energies which they themselves also emit. Fascinating."
"They're no problem as long as they're kept fed," added Adajia, seeing the expression on Dr. McCoy's face. "And Nemo's…kind of sweet."
Kirk felt himself inclined to agree with McCoy but didn't say so. The little band of travelers was gathered in the security ward, Phil Cooper dressed again—in the strangely dyed wool shirt and what looked like combat-fatigue pants in which he'd arrived on the Enterprise—and sitting in one of the ward's several duraplast chairs. Thad Smith was sticking as close to him as he could, his hand protectively over the phaser still in his pocket: Ensign Lao had convinced the Secondary to let him see it long enough to make sure the weapon was set for mildest stun, and that the safeties were on. Sharnas, looking small and thin and horribly young in the blue med smock, was propped on pillows in bed, but for the first time his eyes were clear and free of either pain or drugs. Adajia sat cross-legged in the shadowy doorway of the room next door, which had been left on Open even after the lights and door power had been restored. She kept glancing through to where Dylan Arios's still form could just be distinguished, lying in the bed with the light falling on one thin hand where it rested on his chest, his face in shadow.
Guards were posted outside both rooms, and Security Officers Butterfield and Shimada had accompanied Raksha and Lao to Central Computer, but on the whole, Kirk expected no further trouble from his guests. The ship was settling, rather shakily, into the second watch of the day. Scotty and his team were going over the ship inch by inch to make sure no damage had been sustained, and had so far reported none. Similar teams from Security and Engineering were shaking down the bowling alley, prior to the big upcoming match.
All things were returning to normal.
Excep
t, thought Kirk, for what he now knew. With that knowledge, nothing would ever be quite normal again. Not for him, nor for anyone who'd been in that room.
Kirk had traveled enough in time to know that it was theoretically possible to change the future—if one knew what to change. He could not imagine what could be done at a distance of 250 years, to prevent the plague, to prevent the corruption of the Federation, to prevent the growth of the Consilium. Could not imagine anything that he could do to alter events the causes of which he was absolutely ignorant of.
It was never simple, and any event, building and multiplying through time, had such geometrically accumulating consequences as to make tampering frequently more hazardous than sitting still. Even his knowledge was, in a way, tampering, alteration—but knowledge wouldn't be enough.
He didn't know what would be enough. If anything would.
If, of course, Cooper—and Arios—was telling the truth.
And how could he ever know?
"All it came down to, really, was convincing the yagghorth that the starships were in fact their eggs, and the empaths assigned to them their nestmates," Sharnas went on, as if the matter were the most reasonable in the world. "They link to the empath, and the modulator coil aligns them with the engine itself."
Spock remembered the modulator coil. It was one of the pieces of equipment Raksha had talked him through repairing without explaining what it was. "I was under the impression that the yagghorth were nonsentient," he said.
"It's a subject upon which there is little positive data," replied the Vulcan boy. "Yoruba's 2478 study showed…"
"Here." McCoy came in, trailed by Nurse Chapel bearing a tray with a hypospray and a blood-analysis cuff. "I've got a general gamma shot in case that thing was carrying unknown infections, but I'd like to borrow some blood first to run tests. You seem to be the first person in the history of xenomedicine who's simply been bitten by a yagghorth instead of disassembled into component pieces."
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