Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  "And it might prevent the plague," added Adajia. "And cut off the Consilium before it has a chance to form."

  "It might," agreed Arios. "And it might change the course of certain battles, and showdowns, and confrontations arising in the next thirty years or so with various other military powers in the galaxy so that the plague wouldn't spread because large segments of the population of every Federation or Klingon world had already been wiped out."

  Adajia, Kirk could have sworn, looked across at him with startled enlightenment—memory of history still unwritten—in her dark eyes, and she said, "Oh. Er—yeah. That," in a way that made him feel suddenly very strange.

  "Second," said Arios, "in addition to having the only psion-drive jumpship in the twenty-third century, we have the only psion-drive jumpship in the Shadow Fleet."

  "You think that's gonna make you points when Starfleet finally runs us down, I suggest you review the chapters about Starfleet in your handbook," remarked Raksha, a crooked expression on her mouth.

  "And third," said Arios, folding his insectile hands, "the Consilium is here. McKennon followed us through the Crossroad Anomaly. She's already destroyed one planet, God forgive us. We've got to get her to chase us back through before she starts thinking she can go into the temporal-paradox biz."

  He turned back to Kirk. "If it meets with your approval, Captain, I'd like the Enterprise to escort us back to the edge of the Crossroad Nebula. I'm guessing McKennon's ship will pick us up at some point and follow us. I'll show you how to adjust your standard shields so she can't just put a beam on your ship and snatch us if she shows up while we're still on board. On the edge of the gravitational well around the Anomaly, you pull the Enterprise out. We'll make a run for the singularity shear and hope their phaser targeting is thrown out of calibration by the gas clouds' ion fields long enough for us to make the jump. They'll have to follow."

  Spock raised an eyebrow. "You display startling confidence in the structural integrity of your ship."

  Arios smiled. "I display a startling grasp of the fact that there isn't a damn thing I can do about the Nautilus's structural integrity right now."

  Spock raised the other eyebrow concedingly.

  "And what's McKennon going to do while we're escorting you?" asked Kirk grimly. "Sit back and watch? If your contention is correct, Captain Arios, she just destroyed a civilization of close to a billion innocent people. Shielding or no shielding, what makes you think she'll hesitate to attack a starship with weaponry three hundred years behind her own?"

  Arios looked down at his folded hands. "They won't attack you."

  "Is that a convenient way of saying we won't see them? That we'll still be without proof of their existence? Without any proof beyond your word?"

  "I think you'll see them," said Arios slowly, with an air of a man picking his words carefully. "The reason they haven't shown themselves so far, at a guess, is because they didn't want to risk a battle; didn't want to risk damaging you. You should see them when they start shooting at us, the minute we're clear of the Enterprise."

  "The minute you're free of our tractor beams?" Kirk pressed him. "Free to go where you wish and do what you want? If these people are as evil as you say—if they have, in fact, done things like seed planets with diseases and genetically manipulate populations to make them more amenable to mental control—I have a little trouble in picturing them sparing their enemies out of consideration for the four hundred and thirty people on board this vessel."

  "Well, for four hundred and twenty-nine of them, anyway," responded Arios, not looking up. "But you see, Captain, the person who gave the Consilium its start is one of your crew. And the Consilium knows it."

  Into the shocked silence that followed this information, the comm link whistled, and Lieutenant Uhura's voice came over the speaker. "Captain…" She sounded shaken. "A vessel has…appeared…in our sector. No warning, no…no sensor pattern, no antimatter trail, not even a hyperspace doppler. Just…here. They're hailing us on a Starfleet frequency. They say they want to talk to you."

  Chapter Eleven

  "CAPTAIN KIRK." The woman who had introduced herself over the viewscreen as Domina Germaine McKennon, small, delicately built, unbelievably pretty, held out both hands as she stepped from the silvery disk of the transporter. She bore no sign of Starfleet insignia, being clothed in what was possibly civilian attire of the twenty-sixth century: a smooth-fitting green dress whose full hem tuliped around her calves, and over it a white tabard of gauze-thin silk that billowed behind her like an enormous cloak. Her only jewelry was earrings—tiny roses of pink-tinted ivorene—and she wore no other decoration save the flower-sized bunch of green and white ribbons adorning the clip that held back the heavy copper waves of her hair.

  "Thank you for permission to board."

  Kirk found himself taking both of her hands, and a surge of protectiveness warmed him—not something he was used to feeling about women with sufficient authority to direct starship missions. Or at least, not in the past few years. But when he tried to examine the feeling it seemed to dissipate, leaving only the faintest fragrance in his mind.

  McKennon smiled up into his eyes. "I did want to speak with you, and as a commander you know how easily even coded transmissions get intercepted by the …wrong people. Forgive my paranoia." She smiled ruefully. "It's—well. Call it the result of dealing with…with unscrupulous enemies."

  Her perfume was a reminiscence of something he had once known, then lost: a youth he had never been, perhaps. He had to concentrate to shut it out.

  "You mean Dylan Arios."

  A small crease marred the startled dove wings of her brows. "He is far from the worst."

  Kirk turned, discomfited by her nearness. She was nothing like Arios had led him to expect, nothing like a woman who would order the carnage of Tau Lyra III. Gentleness and an almost spiritual sweetness seemed to radiate from her. Behind him, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy executed small, formal bows. "My first officer, Mr. Spock; Ship's Surgeon Leonard McCoy."

  "Delighted." She did not say it effusively, but her smile beamed warmth. Kirk realized that, like Dylan Arios, she had probably seen all of them on the Enterprise's visual logs, the record of this mission logged, like all missions, in Memory Alpha. Seen records of later missions as well, if there were later missions. If they all survived the next three months.

  She would have seen them grow old.

  She would know what Adajia meant by "Oh—Er—That."

  The thought was disturbing; the knowledge that she knew what was going to become of him, of Mr. Spock, of McCoy…

  …of whichever member of the crew gave birth to the Consilium.

  He pushed the thought away. As he led her along the corridor to the briefing room, he was aware of the turned heads, the larger-than-usual number of crew members who found some reason to be in that part of the ship. Of the crew at this point, only a handful knew what was going on, but everyone knew that something was. The rumor of a ship appearing, literally without warning, without engine vibration on the sensors, without long-range effect on the fabric of hyperspace, had flown like lightning among the crew still speculating about the blackout, the Nautilus, the fate of Tau Lyra.

  McKennon looked around her with frank interest, smiling a warm greeting to those they passed. "To tell you the truth," she said, as Kirk stepped back to let her pass before him through the briefing-room door, "there are times when I wonder whether Arios's espousal of the Schismatic cause isn't just a ploy of some kind, a means to get backing for his own ambitions within the Consilium itself. For all his charm, he has always been shockingly ambitious."

  "Has he?" Kirk held her chair for her as she sat. We could all stay here and be rich, Adajia had suggested. And be three hundred years ahead of everyone. But it was conceivable that Arios's ambitions took a different form.

  "He hides it well," she said, smiling up at him. "But surely you've seen the influence he wields over his crew—which is not, by the way, at all usual in the Fl
eet. A high-level Master—which is what he'd have become if he'd been willing to accept the discipline—can control not only the actions, but to a large extent the thoughts of his astrogator and his empath. To a degree, their emotions as well. Certainly he has that poor little Secondary he kidnapped completely brainwashed."

  She frowned, a look of pain glimmering deep in the sea green eyes. "I expect that in the two years since he quit the Consiliar Institute in a snit he's managed to win a tremendous following among the original dissidents in the Fleet by the same methods. Most of them are wired; it would be pitifully easy for him to do. He likes control," she concluded dryly. "And he likes power."

  McCoy and Spock traded a glance. They would be, Kirk knew, replaying every conversation with the Master in their minds, even as he was, looking for clues. For something to tell them where the truth might be found. From beneath her tabard McKennon drew a leather case no larger than her hand, which had been clipped to her belt. Fingers moving with neat precision, she unshipped a white plastic instrument, oval and smooth, and fingernailed one of its small gray buttons. She glanced at the briefing table's three-faced central screen, made another adjustment.

  "I think you'd better take a look at this."

  McCoy held up a finger. "Before we do," he said, "just what 'methods' are you talking about Arios using?"

  McKennon frowned a moment, like a woman seeking the best and most understandable explanation. Watching her face, McCoy, too, was conscious of a sense of protectiveness, for she reminded him of the daughter he had not seen in ten years. Probably her diminutive stature, he thought, her air of fragility. Though there was something about the eyes…

  "Bones…" said a soft voice behind his back.

  And for one second, his wife was there.

  Later, when he thought about it, he couldn't swear he actually saw her, though at the time he was positive he glimpsed her from the corner of his eye. But recognition knifed him in the heart. Sweetgrass perfume, and the deep garnet color of the dress she'd worn when first they met; the wrenching jolt of grief and regret and wanting that almost stopped his breath as he slewed around in his chair…

  And of course there was no one there.

  The loss was worse than the recognition had been.

  "Or there's this," said McKennon, drawing his attention back to her, he didn't quite see how. She had the same quality Arios did, of almost magnetic charm. "But please…I'm trusting you on this one."

  As far as McCoy could tell, the Domina did not move, nor alter her expression, nor make a sound. She only sat with her hands folded, her face grave and a little sad. But McCoy felt a wave of absolute disgust wash over him, an utter revulsion as if the woman had just finished making some crass and bigoted remark about his manhood or his background, or as if he had, only a moment before, seen her pick a bug out of her unwashed hair and eat it. The involuntary thought flashed through his mind, My God, how can anything that filthy sit there looking so sickly-sweet…

  But she wasn't filthy. Her hair was clean, scented faintly of vanilla.

  He couldn't imagine where the feeling had come from, or where it had gone.

  "My God," he said softly. Kirk was looking at her with a kind of shaken awe, Spock with an eyebrow raised and a look of deep interest on his face.

  McKennon laughed like a handful of chimes in an evening breeze. "My roommates and I back at the Institute used that when men got fresh on dates. But only—only—if we never wanted to go out with that man again …and if we weren't interested in any of his friends. I'm sorry, Doctor. Captain. Forgive me."

  "Most fascinating," said Mr. Spock.

  "Did you read that as disgust?" McKennon asked him interestedly. "The medullar cues are quite different for Vulcans, but you're half Terran, aren't you?"

  Spock inclined his head in assent. "What I found fascinating," he said, "was the choice of emotion to be so demonstrated."

  Her green eyes twinkled. "Did you think that, as a woman, I'd have made them both fall madly in love with me? It can be done." The color heightened, ever so slightly, along her cheekbones. "I just…have trouble doing it." She turned quickly, touched the white plastic instrument again. "But this is what I really came here to show you."

  On the briefing table's central screen the grainy image of the Nautilus appeared, silhouetted against the sulfurous glare of the star Tau Lyra.

  "We were at the extreme limit of our pickup," said McKennon quietly. "Far too distant to stop them. This is top-end magnification."

  A slit of dull orange light marked the opening of the shuttlebay doors—something small, rusted, black-painted, and scarcely to be seen glided forth, silent and lightless as a metallic roach. A moment later, a flare of dirty yellow flame, and the thing sped like a dart, straight for the heart of that waiting sun. Almost immediately the battered vessel swung about, began to move off.

  "You must have picked them up shortly after that." The Domina folded her well-manicured fingers, that sliver-thin flinch of pain still marking her brow. "A slaved missile like that has the advantage of leaving no evidence in the torpedo tubes. We know they've stolen such things on raids. Our own sublight drive was badly damaged coming through the Crossroad Anomaly. They were out of range before we could even begin pursuit. After that we tried to pick them up again, quartering the sector. We were four or five parsecs away when you registered on our sensors, with the Nautilus in tow. Are they on board still?"

  Kirk and Spock exchanged a glance. Kirk nodded. "Yes."

  "Confined?" And, the next instant, "No, they wouldn't be, would they? If you tried to confine them," she went on, intercepting Kirk's quizzical glance, "you would have…I don't know what kind of trouble."

  McCoy started to speak; Kirk's small gesture quelled the remark unmade.

  "They're under room arrest."

  In fact, for the three days of the journey to Tau Lyra, the Nautilus crew had been rather laxly confined to the suite of rooms on Deck Four usually reserved for ambassadorial parties. At Arios's request as well as Kirk's, they had kept very much to themselves, though Thad and Adajia had learned to bowl, with Raksha along to make sure no further cases of temporal paradox developed. On the journey to Tau Lyra, Kirk had seen McCoy's face settle into new and bitter lines as he dealt with the knowledge of what would happen to the galaxy he knew; had seen Lao's bright eagerness quenched as the young man withdrew into feverish pursuit of his computer analysis, working far into the nights as if to outrun the dreams that sleep might bring.

  A week ago he had known Lao would make one of the finest officers in the next generation of Starfleet. Now he doubted that the young man would re-up after this mission was done.

  God knew what he would do.

  In his bleaker moods Kirk wondered that about himself, though in his heart he knew. He would be what he was, do what he could—and, he had found in the five years of this mission, there was usually something that could be done, if you stayed ready.

  Sometimes he would meet Arios late at night, observing the stars from the Deck Ten lounge; sometimes see the Master and Raksha sitting quietly together there, handfast, quiet after their work on the Nautilus repairs, lovers who had become friends. Two or three times he'd seen Chapel and Sharnas, talking together in the semi-gloom—Chapel another one, Kirk knew, who was sleeping little these days.

  McKennon leaned forward. "Do they have—or have they ever had—access to the ship's computers? Through anything—library outlet, food selector, anything?"

  "The library readers in their—prison," said Spock, "have been replaced by free-input visicoms, with no connection to the central computer."

  She seemed to relax a little, and sighed. "You have to watch them," she said. "Even if you don't think they have, Captain, I would strongly recommend rechecking every line of every operations and information program in your banks and in the backup, and running a multiple virus sweep of the entire system. We can help you with that, if you like. They are ruthless, Captain Kirk, and both Arios and the woman Raksh
a are extremely clever. Have you been onto the Nautilus? You or any of your crew?"

  Spock said nothing. His hands were folded, hiding the still-blotchy permaskin.

  Kirk said, "Not yet."

  "After five days? Surely you could get their transporter codes with lyofane."

  "My science officer warned me about anomalous energy pulses in the ship's secondary hull," replied Kirk blandly. "Arios himself spoke of booby traps. We hadn't decided what the safest course of action would be when our sensors picked up the solar flares. At that point we put the Nautilus crew under restriction and started back to Tau Lyra with the ship in tow. Even if they gave us their transporter shield entry codes, at maximum sublight I wouldn't want to try a beam-through between ships."

  "I see," said the Domina.

  Kirk nodded toward the central screen, the image of the Nautilus like an angular black bird against the sun. The slash of light, the small black missile gliding forth in silence, then the flare of its propulsion; the hangar deck closing and the Nautilus engines glowing a dull red. No burn in the torpedo tubes. No evidence at all.

  Only Arios's word, and his repeated warnings about this beautiful, sweet-faced woman who sat at his side.

  "Were you down to the planet?"

  McKennon shook her head. Her pink mouth tightened a little, as if to stop trembling. "We didn't realize they were armed with that kind of weaponry until the flares read on our scanners," she said. "The Shadow Fleet only has what it can loot from our arsenals, and pirate from the merchant ships they attack. If we had known, I think we would probably have…I don't know. Disregarded the Prime Directive. Warned them. Something…" Her hand described a small gesture, helpless.

  "Why would they do it?" asked Kirk.

  McKennon shook her head. "I don't know!" The words burst out of her; her fragile hand bunched in a fist of frustrated rage. "That's the horrible thing about this! They were a perfectly harmless people, from all anyone's ever been able to tell from the records. Simple, kindly…quite primitive in many ways, for all their moderate level of technology. Did they offer any explanation?"