"What the hell is he doing on the Nautilus?"asked Adajia.
"Spock's with him," said the empath after a moment. "Nemo…breathes his mind…" A line of concern twitched into being between the slanted eyebrows, and he fell silent again.
"Maybe Spock left a plug driver when he fixed the engine?" suggested Thad brightly.
"I can see sending the Master over to the ship if the Domina's here," said Cooper, "but…"
"No," said Chapel softly. "They have to be looking for something."
"Voices," said Sharnas suddenly. "Nemo…absorbs…from the darkness…" He flinched, his face twisting in sudden pain. "I can't…I feel…They're the voices from the mine. Voices from the mine. I hear them …"
Raksha and Cooper exchanged a puzzled glance; Chapel felt herself get utterly cold. She leaned forward, not wanting to touch Sharnas, not wanting to break his trance, but her heart slammed harder in her chest.
"What voices?" she asked, as gently as she could. "The voices of the dead?"
"Voices. . . ." His words came out as a hoarse breath; his hands had begun to shake. "I hear them. Nemo…drinks…them. Reaching with his mind he finds them, takes them to himself. Voices like those I heard in the mine. The Yoons."
He drew in a harsh breath, his features twisting with pain and horror; his hands groped out, and she caught them in hers. They were ice cold.
Impossible, she thought, impossible—yet she saw him again, standing knee-deep in filthy water in the deeps of the mine of Ruig, while all around her lay the heaped bodies, contorted in death. And in her helmet mike she heard him whisper hopelessly, I hear their voices. Voices of the dead.
"The Yoons are calling." His voice was thin, strained as it had been when in nightmares he had cried his mother's name. "The psychics, the savants, the teachers. They're alive. They're trapped. They're calling out for help."
From the darkness within the Enterprise's hangar deck, the black infinity of space, dusted with a luminous powder of stars, seemed very bright. A crack of eerie light opening out of a denser night, even casting a pallid line of shadow, which stretched like an obscure allegory across the pale concrete of the floor. From the darkened control tower, Christine Chapel watched the two minute human forms darken the lowest fraction of that slit, awkward with the sudden reacquisition of gravity.
She knew, by his height and by the way he stood, which was Spock.
She thought she would know him anywhere.
Beside her, Mr. Scott tapped a key on the board. The dragon-eye slit of the hangar doors slipped closed, shutting out the dream of space.
Prosaic red warning lights came on, then began to blink with the oxygen cycle. By the intermittent glare Chapel saw Spock and Arios stride clumsily for the shelter of the gallery under the tower, jet packs swaying like camel humps behind the anonymous, blacked-out spheres of their helmets. The lights had gone amber by the time they reached the tower door. Scott tapped the work lights on as the cycle finished, and Chapel followed him down the pierced metal slats of the stair.
"Ye find what it was ye're after?"
"Indeed we did, Mr. Scott." Spock lifted the clumsy headgear down, his own head emerging, sleek and dark and rather small-looking, in the gray metal of the shoulder ring. He saw Chapel and nodded her a polite greeting. "Nurse Chapel."
He had only once called her Christine—once, when he felt he owed her an apology, an explanation. Of course, he almost never called the captain by his name either, and over the years they had come as close to being friends as the Vulcan would admit. It was simply not in him to do so. It was not part of being a proper Vulcan.
She said, "Mr. Spock, when you have a moment there's an urgent matter I need to speak to you on. Captain Arios, too."
Spock raised an eyebrow halfway, but only asked Scott, "Are you aware whether the Domina McKennon is still on board?"
"Word has it the captain just walked her back to the transporter room."
Across the quarter-acre of open cement, the inner doors slid apart. Spock and Scott looked around sharply; Yeoman Wolfman had orders to keep everyone from the hangar. Chapel had only been admitted by application via comm link to Dr. McCoy.
Captain Kirk strode across the gray surface like a hunting lion, impatient power in every movement of shoulders and head. Chapel recognized the symptoms. Like poor Lao, he was a man fighting, in his own way, against what he knew. Scott, helping Arios with his clumsy glove seals, made a move to withdraw; Kirk signed him to stay.
"What did you find?"
"The doors of the Nautilus hangar deck were fused shut with rust and ciroid growths," reported the science officer. "The decking was covered in several centimeters of resins, lichens, and St. John's mold. All cargo dogs and cradles were thick with fungus, obviously unused for at least thirty-eight standard years."
Arios shrugged. "At the Institute they were always all over me for not keeping my room clean."
Kirk stood still for a moment. Then he closed his eyes briefly, and his breath left him in a gusty sigh. "Finally," he said softly. "Finally, some kind of evidence about who's lying, and who's telling the truth."
He held up a small device of white plastic. "This is faked, then." He extended it to Arios. "It's a visual record of the Nautilus releasing a slaved missile with high-compression fusion torpedoes via the shuttlecraft deck, to fire into the star Tau Lyra. The computers can detect no doctoring."
"Tcha!" Mr. Scott's mouth twisted in disgust. "So much for the butter not meltin' in that lass's mouth."
"You going to send another party back to check the doors tomorrow?" Arios eeled out of the pressure suit, rumpled the sweat from his hair. "Because I'll lay dilithium to little green apples they'll have been opened by then."
"I wouldn't even lay little green apples on it," said Kirk grimly. "I'm due to go aboard the Savasci at twenty-one-hundred hours, to speak with Captain Varos. If they have armament capable of destroying all life on a planet, God only knows what else they can do. The question is, how can we get the Nautilus away to the Crossroad and back through to your own time without the Savasci opening fire?"
Scott smiled. "Well, Captain, given you can get me ten minutes alone with her engines…"
"Captain," said Chapel. "There's another problem as well. Sharnas says Nemo has picked up mental transmissions that sound like those Sharnas felt in the mine on Tau Lyra. He's pretty sure some of them survived."
* * *
Nineteen hours, ten minutes. And beam-over to the Savasci was at 2100. Captain Kirk sighed, and rubbed his eyes, weary down to his bones.
"We'll need psychic amplification to get a strong enough link with Nemo from here," Arios was saying, folding his arms around his drawn-up knees. In the low light of the ambassadorial suite, sitting on the floor between Raksha and Phil, he looked very alien, seeming to have joints where humans did not, and the sweat still matting his green hair slicked it to the shape of an alien skull. Rembegil DNA spliced to enough human to stand the stress of empathic wiring, Cooper had said. True Rembegils had died at first mindlink with the yagghorth. Kirk wondered what else the "independent research and communications corporation" had done along those lines.
"How could the Yoons be trapped in mines deep enough to survive the heat?" Chapel, who stood beside Kirk in the doorway of the bedroom, leaned across to him and spoke softly below Arios's voice. "I was there. I ran a tricorder scan of the entire area. All the deeper tunnels were flooded."
"They could be trapped in the upper end of a sloping gallery, in an air pocket," Kirk replied, with an inner cringe at the thought of what it must be like in such a place, after five days. "I'm not a geologist, but I do know that high concentrations of certain metals can interfere with tricorder readings. I'd have to check what ores were present in the mine to be sure. There was heavy ion interference, too."
What he was wondering was how to get rescue parties down to the planet and across to the Nautilus undetected. How to explain such delays to the Domina.
"…Oh, hell," Arios was saying. "T
he Yermakoff Psychic Index went out with antimatter. We'll need someone with a point-seven or higher on the Ghi'har Scale."
"Mr. Spock," said Sharnas, with a small inclination of his head. "It is, I understand, a serious matter, to ask you to enter mindlink with a yagghorth. Even with your help it may not be enough, to make clear contact with those trapped on the planet. But we have no choice. We have to get them away."
"I understand," Spock said softly, and took his place at the small table with Sharnas and Arios as Cooper turned down the lights.
Silence settled, their breathing deepening, as if in sleep. Spock flinched once; Arios's fingers tightened to keep him from breaking his grip. Kirk shivered, remembering the vids he had seen, the dark and terrible thing framed by fire, ripping men to pieces casually, like a gardener tearing up dead vines. It had almost killed Spock, materializing out of the Nautilus's clammy darkness, a mindless and silent hunter.
That thing was walking, with its bobbing head and spiky, insectile stride, down the corridors of Spock's thoughts.
Kirk glanced again at the chronometer. Nineteen hours twenty-one minutes. In a short time he would have to leave, to ready himself for the official reception on the Consilium ship. Twenty minutes, if nothing happened before then, he told himself. In the first year of the voyage, Spock had taught him techniques of relaxation, of meditation, to separate him from his emotional involvement in events, to put anger, or pain, or grief from his mind.
He'd used them on a number of occasions. He suspected he'd need them now.
Someone on the ship was responsible for the Consilium.
He wondered about that train of events, that person, that X, wondered if X was someone whose life he had saved at some point in the past five years—the past few months—making him responsible for Thad, for the swirling hell of heat and water and death on the planet below them.
To simply destroy, or to turn aside, the person responsible for the Consilium might condemn billions to death from the plague, as McKennon had said—and certainly McKennon and Arios both had been absolutely cagey about identifying anyone as responsible. And Kirk himself knew very well that the "let's kill his mother and then he won't be born" school of temporal paradox was absurdly simplistic and hideously dangerous—the kind of thing that only those who had no knowledge of human relationships, of economics and social forces, would invent.
There might be nothing he could do that could keep the plague from happening, that could keep cascading events from forming the chains that would one day bind the Federation. But there was jolly well something he could do to help those rebels, whose births all lay so many centuries after his own death, something distant enough from the center of events that it would not interfere with the halting of the plague.
"Nurse Chapel," said Kirk softly, and at his nod she stepped into the corridor with him.
"If they haven't made contact with the surviving Yoons before I have to go aboard the Savasci, let Mr. Spock know that my orders are to take whatever steps are necessary to send a rescue party to the planet." He spoke in a low voice, to exclude the guard posted a few meters away. "Tell him to keep information about what's going on to as few personnel as possible, on a need-to-know basis only. But tell him to get those people. Bring them back here and keep them alive, at any cost."
"Yes, sir." Chapel glanced at the guard also, and looked as if she would ask him something, tell him something. Then she seemed to change her mind, asked only, "Can the other ship trace our beam to the planet? Follow the rescue party down?"
"According to Arios they have limited personnel," said Kirk. "Tell Spock to send five parties down to different areas, four decoys as well as the rescue team. Tell him to send whatever security personnel he thinks he'll need."
"I'll tell him, Captain." Both were conscious that it was information that couldn't even be allowed into the computer.
"After we've gotten them off the planet, I'll work out the details of what to do with them, and of getting the Nautilus away. We'll probably have to keep them in some kind of shielded compartment, to prevent scanner identification. It'll be…"
"Where are we?" Sharnas's voice came from within the suite's parlor, harsh and breathless. Kirk stepped quickly through the door to see him bow his head almost to the table, his whole body trembling. "Where are we, Grandfather? What has happened to us?"
"The world screamed." Spock's brow furrowed suddenly with concentration, his dark brows convulsing together. Again his hands moved to pull free of the link, and again Sharnas and Arios kept the fingers gripped tight. In the low illumination, his face was ghastly with shock. "Sinaida, my beautiful one, my wife! Litas—Telemarsos—Indipen…My children. My beloved ones…"
"Dead," whispered Sharnas. "Dead, Grandfather, they died…they screamed out…What has happened to us?"
"Tell me where you are." Arios spoke without opening his eyes, his face filmed with sweat. "We are here, we are listening. Tell us what you feel, what you hear, what you smell. We can find you if you tell us. What is around you?"
Spock shivered profoundly; Sharnas's head sank forward again, long hair hiding his face.
"What do you see?" asked Arios again.
"Cold." Spock's voice was thick, like that of a man deeply hypnotized. Kirk and Chapel exchanged a startled glance. Even a mile below the surface, the mines had been like a slow oven.
"Cold…light," breathed Spock, as if fighting for every word. "Cold …walls. Cold air that smells of metal and chemicals. Nothing living, no plants, no trees. Hard bare walls, beds made out of things that never were alive."
"Others are here," murmured Sharnas. "Grandfather…I feel their minds crying. Other savants…Farmers, too, some…Aunt Tsmian the blacksmith and her son. All in little rooms. They're…near us. Cold, hard walls. They heard them die, too. Their families, their children, screamed out their names." His voice came suddenly fast, stumbling over the words. "Grandfather, I woke up in the night and there were things in my room, things that grabbed me. One of them just touched me on the arm and I don't remember anything after that. I couldn't fight, I…I woke up here."
"Iriane." The word came out of Spock's mouth a dreamy mumble, and he shook his head, like a man trying to come out of sleep. "Iriane, my child…"
"Grandfather…"
"Who are you?" Spock tried to raise his head. The lines of his face changed, altering it shockingly. His mouth seemed to widen and flatten; his eyes, though still closed, seemed somehow larger, rounder; his shoulders slumped. "I've been…drugged. We've all been drugged. This mind…this yagghorth that I feel dreaming of us. I was in my garden, on the balcony, I was just going to go inside with Sinaida. Then I was dreaming, dreaming about hearing her scream. Seeing her die. I know she's dead, they're all dead. Those of us who are here…a hundred, a hundred and five. Why us, why not my Sinaida, why not the rest? Iriane. Who are you who hears us?"
"Rest," whispered Arios. "Rest. We'll come and help you, come and get you out."
Raksha said something truly vicious in Klingon, and Cooper murmured, "I don't believe it. Those lying skunks."
"Where are they?" whispered Chapel. "They didn't say…"
"They didn't need to." Kirk felt his own body alight with a surge of rage. He, too, had his memories of the planet's heat.
"How are you going to find them?" asked Thad, looking at Kirk in puzzled shock, then from face to angry face. "If they're down on the planet someplace…"
"They're not," said Kirk softly. "McKennon sent someone down to the planet before the Savasci fired its torpedoes. They wanted to keep you from getting in touch with the savants of the Yoon, but they decided to go one better. They kidnapped a group of the Yoons themselves."
Chapter Thirteen
"THEY'VE DONE IT BEFORE," said Arios. He tried to turn his head to look at Kirk, who stood, arms folded, by the door of the ship's surgery; McCoy rapped his patient lightly on the back of the skull with his forceps, and Arios obediently resumed his original position, head rather uncomfortably
held by the operating table's face cradle. His voice came strangely muffled.
"Everybody travels by transon net anyway—dial your destination, hit the switch, and you're in Cleveland. Places that aren't on the net just don't exist. Except there are huge stretches of territory with—officially—nothing in them. I know about this, I was brought up in a colony of Rembegils that had no contact with the outside world, aside from what the Consilium allowed it. Once they get the Yoons settled in one they probably won't know there are humans on the same planet."
"And you think you can locate them on the Savasci?"
"I think so, yes." Arios's body, naked to the waist and prone on McCoy's laboratory table, had been dyed the dark brown of a South Indian Dravidian native. Cut short and straightened by the ship's barber, his hair was now black, long enough to conceal most of the nape of his neck but short enough to reveal unblemished skin to the casual eye.
It was the skin McCoy was testing now, tugging very gently with the small forceps on the edges to test the permaskin's bond over metal and scars.
"I'll have to go by the layout of the ship rather than any kind of mental signals, though I can keep anyone from noticing me or Mr. Scott or Lao when we split off from the main group," Arios went on. "Sharnas burned out my wiring recently enough that McKennon can't detect me unless I signal her, which I promise you I'm not about to do." He spread his fingers, like a shrug, against the leather padding of the bench. "If the good doctor'll give us a dose of dalpomine and another one of adrenalase, I'll burn back Phil's wiring while you're getting into your dress uniform, just to make sure…"
"Can you manage?" asked Kirk, shocked. "My guess is he shouldn't be on his feet at all."
"It's only minor surgery," said Arios. "And Phil's made it through firefights ten minutes after I've pulled his wiring, without adrenalase, haven't you, Phil?"
"I have," said Cooper, from the corner of the surgery where he was admiring a very convincing artificial mustache in the mirror. "I'd rather not do it again."
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