Fleet-issue mind control. Holovision torture that could kill a man in agony a half-dozen times, then bring him back for more. Free-form reality that changed with the Consilium's requirements. And a space-jump technique that would take a ship from Earth to the Barrier in minutes.
There are people who don't believe they seeded Qo'nos and Khedros and Romulus with the plague…
He shook his head. Her eyes tried to read his, tried to gauge the possibility of a lie.
"Captain," she said, "I know from the records that you have experience with temporal paradox. I know—and you know—that there are so many factors that make up events, so many things that can be changed by the ripple effect. . . . Even my presence here, your knowledge, the fact that your crew is speculating, thinking, could lead to disaster that would wipe out civilization in the galaxy. And I know," she added softly, "that this can't be easy for you."
His eyes avoided hers, as if she had read the uncertainty, the indecision, the moments of despair.
"We have techniques now—I'm sorry, we will have techniques—to selectively remove memories. To take things out, to make it as if it had never been. To remove all memory of Arios, and whatever it is he's told you—to remove all memory of the Savasci—from your mind, and the minds of other crew members who might be affected. They don't take very long, but they're one-on-one techniques, and they need the cooperation and consent of the subject. I think they could help you, and others on board."
Bones, thought Kirk immediately, remembering the corroded weariness that even a few hours had etched deep into his friend's face. Lao, struggling with the massive horror of his despair. And, for other reasons, Miller and Maynooth, Spock—though he suspected Spock could be trusted to keep separate what was future knowledge—Chapel, Scotty.
The terrible indecision, the awful sense of wondering what he could do about events so far from his own reach, would be gone. And, if Arios was lying, if McKennon was telling the truth, perhaps events more terrible than the plague could be averted. All things would return to being as they had been before. It would all never have happened.
If he could be sure that was all McKennon, with her Consilium training, would go in and change.
Chapter Twelve
"ENSIGN LAO!"
He spun, saw it was Chapel, made his way swiftly for the door of the dispensary, but Chapel crossed the room in two strides and took him by the arm. He turned like a snake about to strike and for a moment, so vicious, so rage-filled, was his face that Chapel released him, stepped back, afraid for one moment that he was going to strike her.
Stillness lay between them. Then he turned away, wincing, half-raising one hand. "Jesus, Chris—Nurse—I'm sorry. I'm—I'm sorry." He looked back at her, his hand almost shaking as he held it out in apology, as if he could grasp her forgiveness like a tangible thing.
"It's all right," said Chapel, but her eyes were on his face.
Chapel had seen Lao three or four times on her way to and from the lab, where she had been working off her own sleepless restlessness on analysis of possible yagghorth-transmitted poisons in Spock's blood—which so far she had not found—and so knew that Lao had been as sleepless as she. Usually he'd been working in Central Computer, doggedly putting together the information on the burned-out planet of Tau Lyra III: it was always rumored around spacegoing vessels that somebody had figured out a way to get quadruple-caffeine out of the food synthesizers, and seeing him, she believed it.
He'd held up well, she thought, until planetfall that morning. Had it only been that morning? According to the visual logs, he'd done well enough on the planet itself.
But in the briefing he had sat silent and ill, as if what he had seen in that steaming, wind-lashed Hell had been the final straw, the last horror he could stand. He was only twenty-one, she thought, and had been working for three days not to think about what he now knew would be the future of his world. It had to come back on him sometime.
"Did you get some sleep?" she asked gently. "You left right after the briefing. . . ."
He shook his head. "I can't sleep, right now," he said. "I—I came here looking for—for some nedrox. I just need to complete the computer analysis of what we found on the planet. . . ."
"Tomorrow will do for that," said Chapel, but he signed again, more violently, as if waving the thought away. She saw he still wore his uniform, black trousers, gold shirt with an ensign's single band of braid on the cuff, though it was now well into the second shift. After the briefing she herself had gone back to her quarters and slept a little, though her dreams had not been easy, haunted by baking heat and the spectacle of those twisted, mummified bodies, their convulsed arms still clinging to withered and melted shards.
"No, I'll—I'll be fine." He made a move to go, then turned back, the lines deepening again around his dark eyes.
"Do you know what Thad told me?" he asked, in a voice cracked with horror and exhaustion. "I asked him—I asked him if it was true, that the Consilium gene splices, deliberately makes the Secondaries the way they are. He looked surprised that I had to ask. He said they get implanted when they're infants, before the sutures in the skull heal up—pleasure-pain stimulators. They work better, they're more contented…"
He shook his head, like an animal tormented by flies.
"They are on the ship now, aren't they?" he said, after a struggle to calm himself.
Chapel nodded. "One of them. The Domina McKennon."
He pressed his fist to his lips, his eyes squeezed shut. In spite of the exhaustion that aged his face, he seemed to her then very young.
"Zhiming." She stepped close, touched his arm, and this time, though he flinched, he did not pull away. "Zhiming, you're tired. Exhausted. I'm telling you, go to your quarters, and get some sleep. Here," she added. "I'll prescribe something for you, cillanocylene…"
"No," he said quickly. "No, that's all right. I—I will go to my quarters," he went on. "You're right. I do need rest."
He turned, and stumbled out the door. Chapel stood for a moment, hesitant, then went to the dispensary cabinet and checked the white readout on the container of nedrox. The glowing numbers on the window matched the contents as of yesterday, but Chapel recalled that Lao was a computer maven, probably capable of altering the readout. He was usually scrupulously honest, but she knew that he wasn't thinking clearly now. She keyed in her passcode, and counted the capsules of the powerful stimulant manually.
The numbers matched. He hadn't taken any.
She remembered, as she turned toward her own small cubicle, all Zhiming had told her about his older brother, Qixhu. No wonder he felt protective of Thad, furious that anyone would harm him. It was that knowledge, as much as anything he had seen on the ruined planet, coming on him by surprise at the end of the briefing, that had driven him from the room in silent despair.
She tried to put the matter from her mind as she logged in the measurements from the latest IPs of Cooper's, Sharnas's, and Arios's neural wiring. The growth of the cut areas was infinitesimal but definitely present—according to Arios, the wire healed itself every two to three months, "depending." "Depending" on what? McCoy had asked. Arios had looked momentarily blank, then shaken his head.
What would it be, she wondered with a shiver, to know that was inside you, growing inexorably? Wire ends meeting, until you began hearing the voices of the Masters—the sweet, reasonable voice of Germaine McKennon—whispering in your head?
And yet…
She picked up the IPs again, studied them more closely, and then punched up the transcription of her interview with Arios on the subject.
All she got was SECURITY CODE PURPLE.
The transcription—like everything else connected with the future as described by the Nautilus crew—was sealed.
It scarcely mattered, Chapel thought; she'd done the transcription herself. And to the best of her recollection Arios had said that Sharnas's wiring had been cut five or six weeks ago, Cooper's almost eight.
A theory st
irred in her mind. Replacing the IPs in the security drawer of her desk, she made her way to the ambassadorial suite on Deck Five.
The suite was silent when she reached it, so much so—usually it was lively with the rebel crew's good-natured bickering—that for a moment, as she stepped through the outer door, Chapel wondered if the crew had effected another escape. But a moment later she heard Adajia's voice say, "Try the next channel," in the bedroom, and stepping to the doorway, she saw them clustered around the disabled comm-link panel in the wall, Raksha kneeling on the bed, listening to a communicator—which none of them were supposed to have—connected into the comm panel by a hank of wire.
"Pick up anything?" Chapel asked politely, and the Klingon's eyes glinted, half-suspicious, half-wry.
"Just the usual rumors." She unhooked the wires and unself-consciously slipped the communicator into the pocket of her doublet, then stuffed the loose cable back into the comm panel and closed the hatch. From years of friendship with Uhura, Chapel knew there was far more wire there than there should have been, which meant the Klingon had stolen or jury-rigged tools to cannibalize wiring out of some other portion of the walls.
"According to Yeoman DeNoux in the officers' lounge, your captain and the Domina are still drinking soda water and chatting. Tell him to watch out for her, Chapel. She's crystal poison disguised as mother's milk."
"I expect," said Chapel quietly, "that she's saying exactly the same thing to Captain Kirk about Arios. They're going to want that communicator," she added, holding out her hand.
"They took the Master," said Thad, coming over to her, his dark eyes pleading. If what Cooper had told them was right, thought Chapel uneasily, no wonder the poor man always looked half-terrified; no wonder the information that they were on a Starfleet vessel, back in the transporter room four days ago, had driven him to near-panic.
Chuulak, Adajia had said. Public punishment with the intention of deterring others. God knew what they'd done to him.
"Mr. Spock and a security guard came down here twenty minutes ago and pulled him out of here fast," said Raksha shortly. "He seemed to think it was all right. Told us to stay here, anyway…"
Chapel reflected that it was very like the Nautilus crew to have remained in prison not because there was a guard in the corridor outside but because their Master had told them to. "Can Sharnas get in touch with him mentally?" she asked. "At least to see if he's well? Because I'm sure you'll find he is." Above all, she thought, she had to keep this crew from panicking, since Raksha had very clearly found a way to cut into the ship's comm system, and that probably meant she could get into the computer from here as well.
"Not if the Domina's on the ship," said Cooper, perched beside Raksha on the edge of the bed. "We don't know how much your captain's telling her. She can pick up a call, a signal; if Sharnas reached out looking for the Master, she'd feel it."
"Could she detect passive listening?" asked Chapel. "If you listened for him?"
"If the Domina has him," said Phil, "he may not be able to extend his mind."
"But the Domina's still in the officers' lounge with the captain."
"She was ten minutes ago," pointed out Raksha.
Chapel walked into the sitting room, studied the laminated table on the wall beside the unviolated comm-link pad. A little hesitantly—the number was not one she signaled regularly—she touched 5-24.
"DeNoux here." It was the yeoman on duty behind the bar that evening.
"Neil, is she still there?" Chapel lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "What are they up to?"
The grin in his voice was almost visible. "From where I stand, I'd say they're up to her hand on his wrist and him tellin' her stories about his days at the Academy. You know anything about who she is, Chris?"
Poison disguised as milk.
"I never seen a ship like that, but if she's wearin' a translator, it's not one I can see."
"Only what Dr. McCoy told me in the briefing," lied Chapel. "A VIP of some kind…but if you find out anything…She didn't give you any exotic recipes, did she?"
"Fizzy water." A beer man, DeNoux sounded mildly disgusted. "Miller's putting it through the computer for analysis of probabilities."
"Let me know what he finds out."
She tapped out, turned to Raksha. Sharnas was already half-reclined on the other bed, his eyes shut, his breathing light and slow, face relaxing as if in sleep.
"You weren't far off when you said she'd be telling your captain the same things about the Master that we're saying about McKennon—and the Consilium." The Klingon folded her arms, her dark face somber. "Information—and slander—is the name of the game for the Masters. She's probably got him convinced even as we speak that the Yoons suddenly invented spaceflight and phasers, went on a genocidal rampage two years from now, and would have destroyed the Federation if they weren't stopped."
Seeing Chapel's clenched jaw, Cooper said, "You should hear what they're saying about the Organians, now that they're…"
Behind them, Sharnas whispered, "Nemo…"
"I know she was one of the old Constitution-class cruisers, long before they discovered the psion jump." The scratchy echoes of Dylan Arios's voice whispered eerily through the sounding tube of the long cargo corridors of Deck Twenty-three. "You can tell from the engines. God knows where they got her—she'd been hauling ore for years, and you can tell from some of the metalwork that she'd been damaged as hell at some point. But whoever had owned her when the Consilium got the patents on the psion jump sewed up paid to have the engines refitted and put out the credits to have a Consilium empath on board. My guess is that was before the Consilium hiked the price, drove most of the small companies out of business, and took over the deep-space freight market itself."
The lift tube, Mr. Spock guessed, hadn't been in use even then, to judge by the amount of vescens zicreedens growing on the walls and on the corroded doors. They ascended the gangways beside it, like whispering traps of dead air and unidentifiable sounds. The small hatch beside the tractor beam was supposed to open at a coded signal tapped into the recessed hatch plate—the Master had gone straight to the manual opener, to let them in.
"Phil and I escaped the Academy in a ship called the Antelope, but when we went back to get Sharnas we got shot to pieces, no gravity and leaking air in twenty places. There's air up in the saucer, but I'm not taking guarantees on what it smells like."
Spock elevated an eyebrow. They had taken the headlamps from the suits they'd left in the machine room next to the long-disused tractor beam, and the feeble illumination showed him corrosion and stains as well as lichen, the metal of the steps slimy underfoot. In places, beneath the fungoid growths, he could see the metal of the walls dark with old charring or bright with patches; at some point the ship looked to have been nearly gutted. Battle? he wondered. The wars following the plague?
"It is conceivable that the air in the saucer would smell worse than that in the lower holds," he said consideringly. "But if so, I would be interested to see how it could."
Arios laughed, his breath a trail of steam in the firefly light. A deck or two above them, Spock knew, lay the steamy heat of the yagghorth's territory; down here, the crippled heating coils barely functioned. A fortunate thing, in a way, since the cold kept down the smells of the assorted fungi, low-level oxidation, and the vaguely ammoniac stink of boreglunches; Spock was thankful for the thin suit of thermal protection he wore under his uniform. Ahead of him, he could see the Master shivering. The saucer, he knew from his original scans of the vessel, was colder still.
"It doesn't seem to make any difference to the yagghorth how big or small their ships are," Arios went on after a moment. "To them it's all their cyst, their shell…their many-chambered home. I could be bounded in a nutshell…"
"…were it not that I have bad dreams," finished Spock softly. It occurred to him suddenly to wonder whether Nemo, mind-linked to Sharnas, had nightmares as well.
From the darkness below him he h
eard a sound, a very faint blundering, scratching noise. He turned his head, looked down into the infinite darkness of several decks' worth of gangway. His own shadow blocked most of the dim gleam of the lamp. Still, he had an unclear impression of something dark and huge floating weightlessly in the darkness below him, steering itself on its vestigal wings: hairless tarantula legs tucked, tentacles dangling, a sticky glister of claws and teeth and organs.
Logically, he was aware that Nemo was no danger to him. Arios could not operate the Nautilus himself, even if McKennon's version of events was the correct one—for him to murder Spock, or have Nemo murder him, would be the height of foolishness. Spock recalled his own calm as he'd stepped from the lip of the hangar deck into bottomless infinity, knowing he could not fall because there was no gravity. Recalled his own slight impatience with Arios's very evident—and completely illogical—fear. He tried to suppress the adrenaline reaction he felt at the sounds behind him, and the sudden ache in his cracked ribs—and experienced a small qualm of human annoyance at how long it took to do so.
"Nemo," murmured Sharnas. Long lashes threw crescents of shadow on his cheeks as he turned his face, fitfully, as in sleep. "He's—they're—darkness. Steps. Aft gangway." He drew deep breath, let it out. "The egg."
"They're in the Nautilus," said Cooper, frowning. He looked over at Christine, seated on the other corner of Sharnas's bed, almost crowded off by Thad and Adajia. Only Raksha had not left her position on the other bed, close by the comm link; her hands were folded, so as to hide the expression of her mouth.
Cooper explained, "Those turbolifts have been seized shut since God left for Betelgeuse. Most of the gangways don't go all the way, either. They've got to be heading for the Bent Zone—the original yagghorth haunt under the engines—or somewhere around there."
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