Phil and Thad both averted their eyes from the dark green blood filling the phials; Spock and Sharnas continued to discuss yagghorth as if the one had not almost been torn to pieces by the other's pseudonestmate.
"All straightened out." The door slid open and Raksha came in, followed by Ensign Lao. "Told you it wouldn't take long." The steel on her doublet glinted as she passed through the other door into the room where Arios still lay asleep. She said softly, "Hey, puq," in a voice Kirk hadn't thought Klingons possessed.
"As far as I could tell she didn't add anything to the existing programming when she took the locks out," said Lao.
He looked tired, thought Kirk. Driven. As if burning up inside. As well he might. He was only twenty-one, young enough for anything to seem enormous, final, huge—young enough for the all-darkening despair of the young. Even with years of experience, Kirk was aware of his own sense of helplessness—only seeing the bleak defeat in the boy's eyes did he realize how far he himself had come from that young and passionate ensign on the Farragut, viewing, appalled, what the yagghorth had done. He remembered wondering, at the time, how Captain Gannovich could stand the horror of what they had found. Now he knew that one got used to it, and one went on.
Damaged sometimes—patched like the old black starship that had become the Nautilus—but one went on. One watched for the chance to do what one could.
"Not that I'd be able to tell." Lao passed a weary hand across his face. "I took notes. . . ."
"Destroy them," said Kirk quietly. "Don't even read them yourself."
Lao regarded him in surprise. Nearby, Phil was saying to Spock, "What surprises me is that Sharnas and the Master were able to talk Nemo into deserting and joining the rebellion with us. Because we couldn't have gotten a psionjump ship without him. I still don't understand how they did that."
"We didn't," said Sharnas. "Nemo made the decision. On his own, for his own reasons—and that is what the Consilium does not understand."
"We're dealing with a temporal paradox," said Kirk in a low voice, pitched to exclude McCoy and Chapel, the guards outside the door, and the little group of rebels, with the possible exception of the Vulcan Sharnas, who was still deep in discussion with Spock. "I don't know what's going to come of it, at this point, but Arios was right when he insisted that information be kept to a minimum. I'm confiscating any notes Maynooth, Miller, or McDonough might have made as well."
He paused. In the other room, Raksha stood silent at the foot of Arios's bed, looking down at him with an impassive face and haunted, weary grief in her eyes. Watching Dr. McCoy and Chapel exit, Thad remarked wistfully to Spock, "You know, I like your Starfleet better than our Starfleet."
"Thad," said Phil patiently, "that's the point of the rebellion."
Lao smiled, and some of the weariness left his face.
Kirk went on, "Whatever they've told us about the rebellion—and it might even be the truth—they haven't told us what they wanted on Tau Lyra Three; what they're doing in this sector of the galaxy, why they chose this time; why it's so important that they get there. And no matter what their story is—even if we can verify it independently, which we haven't yet—our orders are clear. Tau Lyra Three is a protected planet with a sentient, nonspaceflight civilization. It is our duty to keep that civilization from being tampered with by anyone, for any reason. To allow that civilization to develop freely in its own direction, for as long as it takes them to achieve spaceflight capability. And what they've told us about themselves can't be an excuse to let them violate that responsibility."
"No, sir," said Lao. He hesitated, struggling within himself, as if seeking words to say, some way to frame his questions and his despair. "Captain …"
Kirk wondered how he was going to answer. There's always something we can do? How could he be sure that that something wouldn't lead to the very situation he sought to avert?
He couldn't. Nobody could. And hope—and despair—were factors like anything else, to be taken account of in the ripple effects of time.
He was spared the necessity of reply by the whistle of the comm link. "Captain," said Uhura's voice. "We have signals coming in from the buoys around the Tau Lyra system. They started while our communications were down; analysis has only caught up with them now."
"Signals?" said Kirk sharply. "What kind of signals?"
Her voice sounded flat, strangely dead. "An hour and a half ago, a major solar flare exploded from the star Tau Lyra. Most of the buoys themselves were scorched out, but according to the signals they picked up…all life on Tau Lyra Three has been destroyed."
All life.
James Kirk stood on the bridge of the Enterprise, watching the delayed playback of information that had reached the ship's paralyzed receptors ninety minutes ago. Saw the filtered yellow corona of the star brighten fitfully, like some huge beast twitching as it dreamed, then fade. . . . Five minutes. Ten. Then it brightened again, the glare growing rapidly, swelling from yellow to white to deadly incandescence as a flare swept out from its surface, blazing streamers of fire, as if the star's furnaces had redoubled their rate of burning, then redoubled it again.
All life.
On the planet, Kirk thought, people wouldn't have known what hit them. Heat and brilliance, driving them indoors…According to reports they'd built astonishing structures of stucco and iron-hard vegetable matter on the arching backs of the strange, banyanlike plants typical of the temperate zones. He had a pile of wafers on the arm of his command chair, a heap of pale green flimsiplast sent up to him by Historical. Articles, surmises, long-distance surveys taken by careful scholars whose life and treasure that planet was… who, true to the Prime Directive, had never set foot on it but looked forward to the day when they might.
Now the day would never come.
Vehicles stopping as animals shied. Arms thrown over eyes to protect them. Communications lines overloaded, breaking down as the insulation burned. On the nightside, those awake reading or singing or watching the odd little flat vids referred to in radio broadcasts, rushing to the windows, marveling as the moon swelled and blazed into unknowable brightness, then faded as the sky itself became lambent with killing light.
Ten minutes of growing panic, terror, prayer.
And then the heat came.
All life.
He closed his eyes.
All life.
It did not escape him that the small chrono on the bottom of the screen showed the identical time that Dylan Arios had passed out in his efforts to maintain the standing theta wave in all open passageways of in-ship communication.
Nor did he forget that the Nautilus, that shadow twin of his own ship, had been in the Tau Lyra system when the arrival of the Enterprise had caused it to flee. True, it had appeared to have only just entered the farthest outskirts of the cometary field, but there was the possibility that the ship had been coming from, rather than going to, the planet.
And Arios had been desperate to get there, or get back there—so much so that he'd risked his life to take on an entire starship.
How much of this could have been averted if he'd known earlier who and what these people were?
If he knew that, even now.
To what degree was he responsible for all those deaths?
He opened his eyes again, watched the display on the screen. It now showed the current status of the star Tau Lyra. The readout numbers of temperature and coronal activity were virtually identical to what they had been a week ago, a month ago, twelve years in the past when the planet had first been scanned.
Only, the inner four planets of its system were cinders now. The civilization the Federation had ordered him to protect—as a matter of course, as a courtesy extended to another sentient race—was gone.
Someone behind him exclaimed in surprise, then cursed. Kirk turned to find Dylan Arios standing behind his chair, with the air of one who had been there some time. Kirk raised his hand to signal the on-duty security yeoman—who was advancing purposefully but
with a rather red face—to return to his post by the turbolift door. "It's all right," he said.
"I thought you'd want to see me." Arios folded his arms, canted his head a little to regard the screen before them. He looked exhausted and rather the worse for wear, but his eyes, in their dark rings of sleeplessness, were clear, and infinitely sad. "The rest of the gang are back in sickbay, by the way."
Kirk hit the comm link. "Sickbay," said Chapel's voice.
"Everything all right down there?"
"Yes," she said, slightly puzzled. "You mean with our—er—guests? They're fine." A pause, probably while she looked through a door or switched on a monitor. "Yes, they're all in the ward where you left them."
"Including Captain Arios?" He glanced at the young man beside him; Arios raised wispy green brows.
"I think so. I checked on him just a minute ago."
"The Masters bred me to do this kind of thing." Arios's grin was lopsided, surprisingly sweet. "Bred me and taught me and wired my brain when I was sixteen and would rather have been doing other things. Then they acted real surprised when I used it against them." He turned to watch the replay again: flare, dullness, the onset of hell. Even more softly, he said, "They're here."
"You're telling me the Consilium did that."
Arios nodded. Ensign Lao, working steadily, wearily, over the Central Computer console, half-turned in his chair and seemed about to say something, but turned away again, and resumed work.
"It is theoretically feasible to trigger a solar flare-up by firing sufficiently powerful fusion torpedoes into the heart of a star," said Mr. Spock, stepping from his station, where he had been watching a digitalized readout of the same scene, altering the spectrum analysis as he had earlier on the scans of the Nautilus. "Tau Lyra has always been an unstable star, with long-term cycles of core activity which have showed up on spectroscopic records for three hundred years. It would have erupted into flares eventually in any case."
"How soon?" Kirk felt weary to the marrow of his bones.
"Statistically, any time between tomorrow and the next two hundred thousand years."
"And just what were the odds," Kirk inquired savagely, "that the flares would erupt today?"
Spock regarded him in mild surprise. "The same as on any given day."
Kirk was silent.
"In our time Tau Lyra Three is a wasteland." Arios returned his gaze to the screen, the light of the ruined star harsh on the stress lines that webbed the corners of his eyes. "We knew it was destroyed around this time—records of your mission survive, and you report it destroyed. We came in when we thought would be a little bit before you arrived, hoping we could reach there before it happened."
"Why?"
Arios sighed; Kirk saw the quick jump of the muscles of temple and jaw. Then, looking up again, he said, "The old linguistics analyses pointed to a high level of psychic skills among the people there as a whole, and to some very high-level savants—Masters or above."
"So you went there looking for help against the Consilium." On the screen below the repeating image of the flares, small windows in the blackness gave readouts: spiking levels of radio activity as planetwide communications jammed; humidity levels rising as the oceans first vanished under blankets of fog, then began to boil; spontaneous fires sweeping the thick-growing forest that covered most of the planet's surface. A smaller readout showed Tau Lyra III itself, glaring white with a layer of heaving cloud. The surface would be a hot and rain-lashed Erebus.
All life.
Arios flinched and looked away at the harshness in Kirk's voice. "I thought we'd covered our tracks," he said softly. "We did take precautions not to be followed, you know."
Kirk remembered precautions he himself, and others, had taken, against Klingons, against infection and infestation, against ambush and attack on incomprehensible worlds. Sometimes, precaution was not enough. Sometimes nothing was enough.
"We need people who can stand up to a trained and wired Consilium Master," went on Arios quietly. "We need training ourselves. There has to be an alternative to wiring, to continue the use of the psion drive; there has to be some way of boosting, or training, psychic abilities without opening that door for psychic control. We can't destroy the Consilium—what the Consilium has done—if we continue using their technology, their way. All we'll do is become them, eventually."
"No," said Kirk, knowing that Arios was, at least partially, right.
"And we need some way to fight the wiring itself. We didn't know what we'd find there, but we…hoped. Maybe it was stupid of us."
"No." Kirk shook his head. "No, it wasn't stupid. Mr. Barrows? Lay in a course for Tau Lyra Three."
"Aye, sir." Her hands moved swiftly over the course computer, she looked a little rumpled from having spent nearly two hours passed out in a vent shaft when she'd tried to get from one sealed-off corridor to another, but perfectly alert. While some of the day-shift crew remained on the bridge to sort out the tangle of readings and overloads caused by the blackout, others—like Sulu and Chekov—had retired to belated dinners and the first of what would easily be weeks of postmortems, reminiscence, and horror stories about who was where when the lights went out, and what they did about it.
"What about the Nautilus, sir?"
"We can meet you there," said Arios. "Now that the engines are repaired and Sharnas is up to the jump, we'll make orbit around the planet and wait."
Kirk's jaw tightened. "The hell you will," he said quietly. "Mr. Barrows? Sublight bearing. Keep maximum tractor on the Nautilus. Notify me at once if problems develop with the beam."
"Aye, sir."
"Mr. Spock? Assemble all information about the solar flareup of Tau Lyra, and all information in the library computer about Tau Lyra Three. Meet me with it in the main briefing room at twenty-two-hundred hours."
Spock inclined his head and, turning, flipped the wafer of readouts from his bridge station. The main viewscreen returned to the dark starfield, already moving laterally with the slow swing of the Enterprise as it responded to the helm.
"Lieutenant Uhura? Any pickup of radio signals from the planet itself?"
Uhura, who'd been briefing Mahase, looked around and removed the comm link from her ear. "I have recordings, sir, but they're zipped and garbled."
"How long would it take you and xenolinguistics to unzip and ungarble them?"
Without a blink—though Kirk realized several hours later that he'd just asked his communications chief to skip a well-deserved dinner after a particularly trying day—Uhura replied, "Depending on how much transcript is in the computer banks, between ten and twenty hours, sir."
"Get your people started on it," he said. "If you have anything before twenty-two-hundred hours, relay it to the briefing room. If not, let me know when they do have something."
He turned back to Arios, who still stood behind him, eyebrows raised but no surprise whatsoever in his eyes.
"Your crew has expressed a lot of concern about being deceived—about this ship and everything on it being some giant scam by this Domina McKennon to trick you into believing we are who we say we are," he said quietly. "That works both ways. I accept that you're from the future—those journal cubes Spock picked up in an abandoned stateroom on your ship don't leave me in much doubt. But as for the rest of your story—who you are, and what you were doing in the Tau Lyra system—I have only your word. The Consilium aren't the only ones who might have fired high-compression fusion torpedoes into the heart of that sun. I hope you understand that I'm going to have to keep you on board the Enterprise, and under surveillance, until I at least know whether a starship was in the Tau Lyra system when those flares began. A starship besides the Nautilus, that is."
Chapter Ten
HOT RAIN slammed like bullets into water the color of a bruise. Typhoon winds nearly took Kirk off his feet as he and the landing party stepped around the broken wall in whose shelter they had materialized. Above them, around them, the blackened arches of the Tree of O
obast groaned and swayed. Much of it had already fallen, a perilous mangle of wire, steel, glass beneath the carpet of stinking ash.
All life, thought Kirk, the words repeating themselves in his mind with the bitter taste of recrimination, of wondering what, if anything, could have been done. All life.
Towing the Nautilus, it had taken them three days to reach Tau Lyra at sublight speeds. During that three days Uhura, Gilden from Historical, and Lao operating the computers had put together as much of a reconstruction of the planet as they could, seeking out the likeliest places where some might have survived and running redoubled scans and probabilities in the vain hope of finding life. They had found none so far.
Uhura had also combed every piece of data, every spectrographic record, every transmission still extant from the burned-out buoys, in search of evidence that would point to the presence of another starship in the Tau Lyra system at the operative time.
But there was nothing. Only the antimatter trails of the Nautilus's dirty-burning impulse drive, and a track of engine residue leading back into the heart of the Crossroad Nebula.
"A psion-jump ship wouldn't have left any residue at all," Arios had pointed out, when confronted with the information. "Their impulse engines would be in better shape than ours were, after the pounding we took coming through the Anomaly in the heart of the nebula. A Fleet jumpship could have materialized inside the buoy ring, fired its torpedoes, and jumped out. They could be seven systems away watching you on a long-range scanner and never leave a swirl of dust."
Kirk still didn't know whether to believe him or not. On his orders, Spock had checked every torpedo tube in the ship, and found them choked with decades of ciroids and corrosion—but there were, he knew, other means of launching weapons.
The landing party consisted of Kirk, McCoy, Russell from Historical, Adams from Anthro/Geo, Ensign Lao with a vid pickup, three security yeomen, and Dylan Arios, almost unable to stand in the pounding wind. Fragmentary data put together by Gilden and Lao had indicated that only one of the large cities was still above water—Oobast—and that only marginally. "City" was probably not the best word.
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