Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  Chapel made her way into the dispensary, blinking a little with tiredness in the bright glare of its lights. It seemed like days since she'd spoken to Lao here—crowded days filled with anxiety. Weeks since the morning, suiting up to go down to the scorched hell that had been Tau Lyra III. Please, God, she thought, let them get them off that ship. . . .

  Over the general comm, she heard Mahase's voice say, "Ensign Lao, Yeomen Wolfman, Shimada, Watanabe, Chavez, please report to Transporter Room Two. Ensign Lao, Yeomen Wolfman, Shimada, Watanabe, Chavez, please report to Transporter Room Two. . . ."

  And as she turned back to the wall of small plastic cases with their red, digitalized windows, Chapel noticed a nick in the plastic of one of the last containers on her right. A nick that she was ready to swear hadn't been there that morning.

  Someone had forced a window cover plate.

  Chapel walked over, frowning, and checked the infolabel.

  Neurophylozine. A narcotic, carefully monitored and fatal in large doses. She touched the register switch; fifty capsules there yesterday, fifty there at the moment. Quickly she tapped in her code, slid the container itself from its socket.

  There were not fifty capsules in it. She dumped them on the central table, made a swift count. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…

  Thirty-three missing.

  Thirty-three!

  "Ensign Lao, please report to Transporter Room Two. . . ."

  Chapel whispered, "Oh, my God. Oh, Zhiming…" She dumped the remaining capsules in their container, replaced it in the wall, Lao's haggard face, his trembling hands, his bitter despair, all flooding back to her with horrible clarity. He'd been in here—when? They'd come up from the planet at about 1400; the briefing had been almost immediate. Then the shining ship, the red-haired woman with her dazzling smile—Lao in here, looking for something to keep him awake, he'd said…

  Even then, she knew he was lying.

  Chapel strode from the room, heading at a rapid walk for Lao's rooms, dreading what she would find.

  Very few people on board the Enterprise cared to visit the laundry and recycling facilities on Deck Eight.

  Asked, most of them would say that there wasn't all that much to see: a big room with a line of particle shakers down the middle and folded heaps of red shirts, blue shirts, black trousers, and assorted articles of Starfleet clothing. Beyond it, an even bigger room full of clanking machinery, with the massive square conduit of the food conveyor from the engineering hull's even larger recycling facilities crossing the ceiling and necessitating a duck or a crouch every time you crossed the center of the room.

  Even those who worked there—Lieutenant Dazri's two yeomen, Brunowski and Singh—had gotten Ensign Miller to rig them warning systems that would alert them to their supervisor's approach or hail, so they could return, or at least respond, from more congenial haunts.

  Working L&R was the least desirable job on the ship. On Earth and on most of the major Federation planets, it was relegated to those incapable of any other task.

  Qixhu worked the particle shakers in one of the massive facilities in Yemen City, thought Ensign Lao, stepping through the door into the dim, throbbing cavern of the recycling room. He was supposed to be very good at his job, having no hope of bettering himself, no qualification for any other task.

  No wonder, Lao reflected bitterly, the Consilium would go on to create so many like him.

  Darkness like a hand clutched at his heart.

  "A laser tennis team? Whaddayamean, a laser tennis team?" complained a distant voice from the tree-grown chamber behind him, known to the entire crew—with the exception of Mr. Spock—as "Central Park." Track shoes scrunched on the gravel pathways; against the pungence of the hydrogen-carbon, oxygen-nitrogen mix came a drift, as the door closed, of water and grass. "The Enterprise needs a laser tennis team like I need a spare gallbladder. Now, if we could field a decent ball club…"

  "Oh, come on, virtual baseball is like virtual sex. . . ."

  Ensign Lao crossed the room soundlessly, musing through the darkness in his heart that the real reason people avoided L&R was that they didn't want to be reminded about what the food in the food slots was recycled from. Even that turned in his mind to darkness, to a memory that hurt like physical pain. People never wanted to be reminded that men like Qixhu existed, worked for them unseen in places like this. In the future, people would not want to be reminded of people like Thad.

  Yeoman Brunowski was absent. Lao followed the massive pipe of the food conveyor down the length of the room, to where it ran into the wall, the bulkhead where the main hull attached to the ship's massive dorsal. Just beneath it, almost invisible in the gloom at that end of the chamber, a large access hatch permitted repairs.

  With a bitter smile, Lao flipped the cover plate and released the hatch, crouching to crawl through. A jungle of wire and cable, of fiber-optic bundles and the plastic-covered hawsers of power lines, confronted him. A faint smell of dust and the thick residues of lubricants and the stink of the sludge that the conveyor brought up from below.

  Above the access hatch the shipwide comm came into life with a muted, ambient hiss. Lieutenant Mahase's voice said, "Ensign Lao, please report at once to Transporter Room Two. Ensign Lao, please report to Transporter Room Two."

  Her voice, he knew, would be everywhere in the ship.

  From the pocket of the utility belt he wore, he removed a pale green flimsiplast chart, a series of bridge wires, a pin welder, and a cutting tool. Though the rest of the chamber was dim, there was a worklight here, among the massive ganglia that united the main hull with the engineering hull below. Feeling cold and strange and queerly perfect and no longer tired at all, Lao began to match up the schematic with the wiring before him, the spinal cord of the ship itself.

  Behind his head in the quiet gloom, Mahase's voice sounded again. "Ensign Lao, please report at once to Transporter Room Two."

  "Most curious." Mr. Spock folded his communicator and clipped it once more to his belt. "It is unprecedented in my experience with him that Mr. Lao should either be late or be without his communicator."

  Kirk looked uneasily from the chronometer on the transporter-room wall, to the small group gathered beside the main console. Mr. Kyle. His assistant Mr. Oba. Mr. Scott, indistinguishable from the small squad of security guards, which also included the repigmented Dylan Arios and Phil Cooper.

  "It wouldna take long to search the ship, Captain," suggested Scott, who, though he'd already had experience with the Nautilus's impulse engines, had spent the past few hours studying Arios's schematics of more standard twenty-sixth-century technology. "If Spock's right, and it isn't like him to be late…"

  "We're the ones who can't be late, if we're going to keep suspicion down," said Kirk quietly. "And I know just how long it can take to find someone on this ship." He hastily canvassed in his mind the computer mavens of the crew familiar enough with Raksha's programming to work the changes necessary: Dan Miller was taking Scotty's place in the engine room, and Lieutenant Maynooth was so physically incompetent that requesting his presence on such a mission as this would be tantamount to murder.

  "Mr. Spock, I'm going to have to ask you to join the boarding party," he said at last. Spock inclined his head and reached for the small utility pack, which included a doctored tricorder, converted to a very efficient subminiature zip-and-record autotransmitter and data copier.

  "Take the first opportunity you can to disarm the ship's transporter shielding—we may have to beam out of there fast. Don't black out the sensors until you're just about to get the cargo shuttle away. Take out the Savasci's impulse engines before you do that. If there's trouble, rendezvous at the impulse-engine chamber; we'll cover you as well as we can. If you can do it, you're to tap the Savasci's central files; Raksha has preprogrammed the likeliest file names in the autoslice file. Arios—you're sure you can get him and Mr. Scott away from the main party undetected? You're sure McKennon is the only Master on the ship?"

 
"Standard procedure is one." Arios was watching Phil, a little worriedly, but the adrenalase still seemed to be working. In response to Kyle's nod, Mr. Oba removed his red shirt and handed it to Mr. Spock. The arms were slightly too short, but would have to do. "It's the Specials you'll have to watch out for, but they're wired—and gene spliced—to make them receptive to psychic command, so with luck I can get them to look the other way when I need to. I don't like this business of Lao disappearing, though…"

  "Neither do I." Kirk crossed to the door and tapped the comm code, and a moment later a voice said, "Bridge here. Mr. Sulu." Despite the lateness of the hour, Kirk had requested that the helmsman remain, guessing that they might need some top-grade navigational work fast.

  "Mr. Sulu," said Kirk, "Mr. Spock is accompanying Mr. Scott and myself to the Savasci. Alert Mr. DeSalle to institute a shipwide search for Ensign Lao; also to double the watch on the Nautilus crew."

  Cooper started to protest, and Arios signed him silent.

  "You have the conn, Mr. Sulu."

  He turned back, and nodded toward the transporter disks. "Gentlemen… shall we go?"

  Chapter Fourteen

  "THEY'RE OFF." Raksha the Klingon opened her eyes briefly, her hands stilling on the deck of cards that she had been shuffling and reshuffling for half an hour. She reached to touch the wire, with its makeshift earplug cannibalized from parts of the disabled comm link, that ran from the comm, through the remains of the communicator, to her ear. "Transport circuits report nine beamed across, in two batches. Four humans and a Vulcan, first shot; three humans and an unidentified, second shot."

  "Who's unidentified?" asked Thad, turning his attention from a holovid of a very bad Western. "And where's the Master?"

  In the tank, a squad of Asiatic-looking cowboys fired a laser cannon at a horribly duped-in Cygnian belothmere—a creature which, though quite twelve meters high in the film, was in reality barely taller than a man's knee. Behind a foreground of a prop ranch house and a prop fence, what was quite obviously the Hindu Kush pierced the sky. The belothmere looked acutely embarrassed.

  "The Master reads as unidentified on this computer because he hasn't been invented yet," Raksha replied patiently, laying out a ring of solitaire on the table before her. "Rembegil won't even be discovered until…"

  She paused, bringing her hand to her ear again, her dark eyes sharpening suddenly and turning hard. Adajia hit the mute button on the remote, though Raksha could monitor the computer's small, tinny vocoder through worse distractions than Terror of The Pecos.

  "That's weird."

  "You talking about something the computer said, or that belothmere?" inquired Sharnas, who was lying on the couch, half-in, half-out of a subvocal mindlink with Nemo.

  "Somebody's running my shield-slicer program." Raksha sat up straighter, covered her other ear. "Small keypad…deep-ops level…" She picked up the communicator, said, "Monitor and report all activity on flowline PN7995. Trace source of activity and report location."

  Adajia got at once to her feet and collected a log pad, touching the button on its side to clear the games of tic-tac-toe and hangman that covered it.

  "Does that mean Captain Kirk's gonna be sore?" asked Thad, but no one answered and he didn't really expect it. Sharnas, shaken free of his semi-trance, got to his feet and came over beside him, tapping the holovid off. Thad looked inquiringly at the Vulcan boy, but Sharnas shook his head.

  "Haven't the faintest…"

  "They're setting up a link program with the transporter," said Raksha. "Damn this vocoder, it's cutting off half the sentences every time a new command goes through."

  "Who is?" asked Thad, but softly. He'd interrupted Raksha before when she was concentrating and knew not to do it again.

  Sharnas shrugged. "It can't be Mr. Spock, if he's gone across to the Savasci," he said. "Logically, it has to be Miller, Maynooth, or Lao. They're the only ones who studied the program."

  Thad nodded, after a moment's cogitation. "So what are they linking to the transporter?" he asked. "And why?"

  "It looks like," said Raksha after a moment, her eyes closed again in concentration on the small voice speaking in her ear, "they're setting up some kind of an automatic triggering mechanism to be tripped by the transporter's return transmission. In other words, when the captain beams back over, something's going to happen."

  "Oh," said Thad. He frowned. "Like what?"

  The first thing James Kirk noticed when he materialized in the Savasci's transporter room was that the transporter chamber was separated from the main room by a circular, crystalline shield, with the tech's console on the other side.

  Also on the other side was Domina McKennon, beautiful, fragile, and girlish-looking as ever, though she'd dressed her red hair up and wore a sable dress that completely failed to look severe. With her was a small, spare Romulan whose stance and eyes would have identified him as captain of the Savasci even if his uniform markings hadn't; a woman—Vulcan or Romulan, Kirk wasn't sure, but there was a strange glitter of madness in her dark eyes; and a fair and lanky individual whose red sleeve-bands were similar to, but more numerous than, those of the ten identical stalwarts in red-and-black uniforms ranged along the back wall of the room.

  Their faces bore the marks of differing experiences; one had a small, sickle-shaped scar on his chin, another a short scar by his left eye. There were some differences in hair length, though head shaving seemed to be in favor, not only with the security guards, but with the Romulan captain as well. Some clearly spent more time in the weight-gym than others did, though all were well muscled. But the eyes were the same. Medium brown, narrow with suspicion, arrogant, and vicious.

  The gray eyes of their fair-haired chief were like that, too.

  Kirk wondered if this man had identical copies of him floating around the Fleet.

  The transparent screen sank soundlessly into the floor. "Captain Kirk." McKennon smiled and held out her hands. "Captain Varos, of Starfleet Interceptor Savasci. Security Chief Edward Dale—Karetha, astrogation tech."

  The Romulan woman inclined her head. She had looked almost normal, until she moved. But as she stepped forward she subconsciously gathered her arms up toward her chest, mantislike, and the scarred hands with their huge, curved fingernails spread a little in a fashion horribly reminiscent of the videos Kirk had seen of the yagghorth, backed and hissing in the flames. The way her head swayed, the slump of her back and shoulders—Dear God, how long has she been mindlinked to the yagghorth who is her empath partner? Is that what it does to everyone?

  He felt a sick qualm of shock at the thought that one day—if he lived that long—Sharnas would move like that, look like that, too.

  She looked like a human in her sixties, though given the longevity of the Vulcanoid races was probably much older. Her black hair, combed and braided into a knot the size of a man's two fists, was heavily shot with gray.

  She held out her hand.

  Kirk, mindful of the instructions Arios had given him, did not introduce either Mr. Spock or Mr. Scott. No one, not even McKennon, who had met them before and had reason to remember Spock, seemed to notice.

  "Captain Kirk." Captain Varos extended his hand. He looked to be in his forties, older than Spock, certainly, though again, with a Vulcanoid it was difficult to tell. "It is an honor and a privilege to meet you."

  "I only regret that it has to be under such unpleasant circumstances," said McKennon, stepping close. Kirk found it suddenly very difficult to look at the Romulan empath, difficult, almost, to remember that she was among the party as they left the transporter room, entered the curving, claustrophobically narrow corridor outside. Floor, walls, and ceiling were all covered with a kind of fiber, like spongy carpeting. Though it gave a different tread to his boots, Kirk could not see that it affected the opening of the oddly narrow doors.

  "You must admit," the Domina added, seeing Kirk raise his brows, "that your main goal in coming on board was to see if Dylan Arios was telling the truth
. Oh, come, Captain…" Her laughter brought to mind kites and picnics and summer days. "You don't think I have enough experience of the man to know that even as a prisoner, he'll have been telling you about how the Consilium has Starfleet in its pocket and has made lackeys of the Federation government? At least that was his story when last I heard. He may have come up with a new reason since then for raising a private army."

  Captain Varos said, "I assure you, Captain, Starfleet takes its orders from no one but the Federation Council, as it always has." In his sloe-black eyes there was no deception, no nervousness. From his few encounters with Romulans he knew their culture prized honesty above honor, life, or any amount of social graces.

  Or at least it had, almost three hundred years before this man's birth.

  "Then who are the Shadow Fleet?" he asked.

  Behind them, Security Chief Dale sniffed with laughter. "Cavalry and canvas," he said, and Kirk glanced back at Varos for confirmation.

  "In a way, yes." The Romulan captain did not smile, but there was a sardonic light in his eyes. "They're the clippership captains in your own world, Captain, who refused to set foot on a steam-powered vessel; the auto drivers in mine who boycotted bullet trams because they were nuclear-powered. Mixed with a smattering of those in both our worlds who tore out all the light sockets in their houses because they believed that the government could listen to them through electrical appliances. Spinal implants weren't designed to limit personal freedom or to allow the Consilium to take over the galaxy, you know. Civilians don't have them at all, except in certain jobs. They're to increase a ship's efficiency, pure and simple. They enable us to travel unheard-of distances, literally in the blink of an eye."

  Kirk glanced sidelong, to where the empath Karetha was swinging her head nervously from side to side, her wrists still carried slightly raised before her. There was nothing human in her stance, her walk, at all. He looked back at the Romulan captain. Where the rucked trough of scar tissue gouged the back of Arios's neck, of Cooper's, of Sharnas's, was only smooth skin, not even marked with the tiny telltale flaws of surgical scars.