Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  The old yellow grandfather nodded. "I am called Cymris Darthanian," he said. "My granddaughter, Iriane, who spoke to your young friend, she is here somewhere. . . ." He looked around, and at his words a very much smaller Yoon female, bright green ring-straked with paler jade, slipped back through the outer door from where she had been in the corridor outside.

  "Grandfather, if we're going to get out of here…"

  She paused, turned considering amber eyes on Spock and Arios.

  "It is they," she said. "Those who said they would take us out of here. Is this, indeed, what you will do?"

  "It is why we came. We…" Spock halted, suddenly listening; aware, far off, of the drumming of feet.

  He raised one eyebrow. "It appears," he said, "that we have been detected, and Security seems to be on its way."

  Chapter Fifteen

  KIRK KNEW the instant that things went wrong.

  He was sitting in a café in Paris, the indigo night spangled and patched with molten gold and warm as bathwater. Violins dreamed to a crisp counterpoint of hoofbeats as fiacres passed through the darkness on the other side of the pale stems of the chestnut trees that edged the pavement. His own suit of brown striped wool blended in with the white-coated waiters, the city clerks in their homburg hats and the boulevardiers in natty black frock coats; across the small table, Germaine McKennon looked ravishing in dark green taffeta whose gleams in the gaslight brought out the emerald of her eyes. The air smelled of her perfume, of coffee, of horses and the river.

  She was saying, "Holodeck technology has become increasingly sophisticated. If you were to drink that coffee it probably would keep you awake for forty-eight hours. Those who take a training program on the holodeck frequently develop psychosomatic bruises, if they take a punch or a kick or a blow from a sword. . . ."

  She laughed, a beautiful sound over the soft babble of French, which he could understand far better than he'd ever comprehended it in school. "There are all kinds of stories of men falling in love with Honey What's-Her-Name… a tremendously popular character in what is politely called 'Men's Adventure,' or women developing terrible crushes on the heroes of Ms. Schindler's romances, but I've never actually met anyone who's done either."

  He wanted to ask her if she'd met anyone who'd actually died from the holo-sims of having their intestines drawn out, or of being chewed to death by mheerscha, but he didn't. She'd only laugh that sweet laugh, and tell him exactly who in the Shadow Fleet was responsible for that kind of rumor, and he'd be overwhelmed again with how much Germaine McKennon looked like his first love, Ruth.

  And naturally, nobody demonstrated the sex holo-sims, either: rough, violent, or simply impersonal.

  "Mind you," she added roguishly, with a glance across at the next table, where Captain Varos, Edward Dale, and two identical security officers in the rough sweaters and berets of Parisian workmen watched them, "some of the historicals, and the views of far-flung planets, get a little…less accurate. There's even a holo adventure which takes place on the original Enterprise. I'd be curious to see how closely it matches…"

  Then he saw it; the change in her eyes. They flared wide in the soft, white glow of the gaslight from the café, first startled, shocked, then filled with the devil's cocktail of triumph, spite, and rage. She opened her mouth to speak, but Kirk was faster, ripping the phaser from his belt and hitting her with a full stun charge. At the same moment he wrenched the holo remote—a thin rectangle of plastic half the width of his palm—from her nerveless grip, threw it to the granite-block flagstones beneath his chair, and ground it with his heel. Paris flickered, leaped, jarred, showing disorienting patches of pale gray wall and hatch covers beyond the luminous shadows of the nineteenth-century night.

  It all took only seconds. He identified the exit door at the same moment he opened fire on Dale and Varos, but they were already diving in opposite directions, dodging among fleeing waiters and patrons and tripping over tables that were flickering in and out of reality. Kirk yelled, "Wolfman!," then remembered that of all the rooms on the ship, the holochambers, whatever their size or function, were the only ones completely soundproofed. The images faded around him as he reached the outer door, jabbed the opener, a bolt from a phaser seared the wall close enough to his head to catch him in the disorienting nimbus.

  Outside, one of the guards was down, Wolfman supporting her while the other two tangled viciously with four or five Specials. Kirk ducked, turned, fired at the controls of the door, then put stun charges into the backs of three of the Specials before they had a chance to turn around. Red lights were going off everywhere, alarms sounding. Wolfman brought down another two Specials, then hoisted the downed woman to his shoulders in a fireman's carry and bolted for the end of the corridor, making it through the vacuum shield just before it shut.

  Cooper pressed his hand to his head, wincing as if at a blow. "Shuttle deck," he said. "They got the Yoons. They're on the way down there."

  "I thought your wiring was disabled!" Kirk fired at the shield as it started to open, then headed down the corridor at a run.

  "It's just a locator signal! This way!" He veered down a gangway—there was something, Kirk realized, to what Dale had said about wired commanders and wired troops.

  Which meant, of course, that the Specials would know exactly where to converge.

  He was right. Twice they met parties of Specials, the faint scuff marks of the phaser fire on the gray walls telling Kirk that the phasers of their enemies were set on heavy stun. The corridors of the Savasci were narrow and full of odd turns. He took a hit on the leg and forced himself to run on, stumbling, sick with the pain of it, knowing exactly what would happen to him if he was taken alive for McKennon to deal with—memories excised, changed, altered, though presumably nothing that would cause a temporal paradox, he thought grimly, ducking back behind a corner and returning fire at yet another group. Maybe, he thought—remembering what Cooper had told him of the holo-sim chambers—other things as well.

  And if McKennon had any way of finding out which crewman aboard the Enterprise was the Consilium's point of origin—or if she knew that fact already—nothing would save the security officers who followed him. Unless, of course, they happened to be X's friends. Then they, too, would be changed. And in either case Phil Cooper would be a dead man.

  Kirk heard Spock's voice call out, "Captain!," and he turned, caught a glimpse of the science officer framed in the partly opened door of a gangway. He and his security team ducked through; Spock let the door slam shut, fused the mechanism with a burst of phaser fire. In the near-darkness of the stairwell he was aware of clustering, luminous eyes, of a strong, though not unpleasant, alien smell—of being surrounded by the living, breathing bodies of the race he had only known that morning as charred skeletons, mummified corpses.

  "Where're Arios and Mr. Scott?"

  "Flank guards," said Spock briefly, and handed him a translator disk. "They'll rendezvous in the shuttle deck with us; each of them has half a dozen Yoons with him, armed with phasers."

  "My granddaughter Iriane," whistled Darthanian, "has a great anger in her, a terrible rage—and she has been trained as a warrior. Believe me, these human beings have no idea what it was that they brought on board their starship."

  They streamed down the gangway, hearing, now and then, the thunder of boots in the corridors outside the doors, the hiss and zap of phaser fire. "My guess is that the Yoons' prison itself was booby-trapped," said Spock, as Cooper signaled a halt, removed a vent panel from the wall, and led the way into the duct. "A reasonable assumption on Ms. McKennon's part, if she knew Captain Arios as well as he says she does."

  Kirk, helping the Yoons lift the unconscious Yeoman Shimada into the vent shaft, had to agree.

  "Don't come any closer." From the door of the turbolift, Chapel could see that Lao had a phaser in his hand as he turned from the console beneath which he had been kneeling. "Move around to Navigation and have a seat. This shouldn't take long."

&nb
sp; Even from where she stood, Chapel could see that his hand was trembling. On the floor beside the open console hatch lay an instrument pack; its light seemed very bright in the brown dimness of the auxiliary bridge. There was a strained harshness in Lao's voice, and the way he moved—tightly controlled, jerky with fatigue—frightened her.

  She stepped very cautiously around the raised ring to the analog of the console where Chekov usually sat, took her place in the padded seat. The consoles on either side of her were alive with lights; so were two on the other side of the ring. Engineering was one of those, she thought, picturing Mr. Scott bending over its small, glassy squares of screens and readouts; Dawe manned the other, which would make it Subsystems. She was between Weapons and Central Computer.

  Lao's face glistened with sweat. "What are you doing here?"

  What am I…? thought Chapel indignantly, but she kept her voice level and pleasant. "I saw you just getting into the lift near your quarters," she said. "I was worried about you, and I wanted to ask you about some medications that were missing. . . ."

  Her eyes went to the instrument pack again, picking out the bright-red pills in their twist of plastic. A huge dose, lethal to a dozen men.

  "Zhiming," she said, "don't…"

  "Don't what?" He laughed, a cracked and horrible sound. "The Federation collapses, turns into a…an obscene nightmare where they cripple and lie and murder anyone who dares to even seem like a threat to their power, and you tell me don't? Chris, are you really that blind or are you just trying to get me to put down this gun and unhook the phaser implode?"

  "Phaser implode?" It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. Why he was in the auxiliary bridge. The look on his face when he'd been in sickbay. The way he'd turned away, and hastened out. "Zhiming…!"

  "Down!" he ordered, for she had begun to rise to her feet. "Don't even think about trying to stop me. I've set this for kill. It has to be done," he said softly. "I can't think about it much—I can't let myself—but even Captain Kirk knows that it has to be done."

  Kirk and the security team—Wolfman, Watanabe, Chavez—reached the bottom of the gangway shaft to find, as they had expected, Security Specials waiting around its final turn. Phaser fire sizzled, stinking holes gaping in the gray sponge of the walls; then a confusion of sound below, cursing, and the fall of bodies. Kirk emerged into the vestibule of the shuttle deck to find Yoons everywhere, still springing out of the vent shaft through which they had come to take the Specials from behind.

  The one that Darthanian pointed out as his granddaughter Iriane was systematically breaking the necks of the five unconscious Specials stretched on the vestibule floor. As a member of a tree-climbing species, she had massively powerful arms, and for a moment Kirk saw the actinic glare of lightning, the weaving waterspouts and hellish rain of Tau Lyra III, reflected in her copper eyes.

  Darthanian himself was crouched over the unconscious Yeoman Shimada, eyes half-shut, hands on her temples and wrists. Cooper leaned against the wall next to them, gray-faced with exhaustion. Presumably, thought Kirk, the adrenalase was wearing off.

  "She will be well," said the old Yoon worriedly, looking up. "But I cannot bring her to consciousness just now. An evil thing, these weapons."

  The door that led from the vestibule into—presumably—a corridor was shut; Kirk noticed for the first time that Arios was leaning against it, his eyes half-shut, as if listening. Mr. Scott and Spock emerged from the blast doors of the main hangar deck at a run.

  "Ship's checked out and aye ready to go," Scotty reported breathlessly. "Coordinates are in for transport of yon crates."

  "More than anything," said Darthanian, as the Yoons streamed around them, scurrying, stumbling, running on four and sometimes all six limbs for the shining, bullet-shaped bulk of the enormous shuttle, "we thank you for retrieving those chests."

  He straightened up, chubby and dignified, and looked up at Kirk. "I know what was in them. All the Trees had repositories of the old legends, the old treasures; of equipment and medicines and instructions on how to make more medicines."

  "Why?" asked Kirk, curious, knowing that this was something, also, that all those bereft scholars would want to know. Never, he reflected, had his routine adherence to duty—to seek out new life and new civilizations, even if that civilization had perished—been more startlingly paid in the salvation of the future. "If your people never invented weapons of destruction…"

  The savant looked surprised. "Who told you that?" he asked. "Of course we invented them—in laboratories. In theory. Of course we knew how to kill one another, in huge numbers, if we ever went crazy enough to do so. But what need? And the repositories, no, we only kept those as reference for people who went colonizing other lands; to learn the best ways of surviving under adverse conditions. So they will be glad to have them."

  From a ripped-open wall panel into which he'd plugged the tricorder, Spock called out, "Sensors and scanners blacked."

  Kirk said, "'They'?"

  Darthanian smiled. Five or six other Yoons, mostly as old or older than he to judge by the white streaks in their manes, were walking back from the shuttle toward the vestibule where Kirk and his party stood, and they, too, were smiling. "They," said Darthanian. "These few friends and myself…" He gestured with one hand. "…are going to remain with the Consilium while the others depart to their new world; to go forward with them into their future, as their servants. As you see, all of us have had those silly wires put into our necks. I'm sure the Domina is under the impression that we're taking seriously the dreams and thoughts she sends through them, or that we interpret as pain and grief and rage the little tickles and twitters they register in the brain stem."

  He continued to smile, but suddenly there was a molten grimness in his eyes. "And so we will be her servants," he said. "If we scatter ourselves about the ship, and cry that we were injured, and left for dead by our comrades because we would not go with them, she will undoubtedly believe our good faith. There is nothing, of course, which will avenge what they have done. Still…" He gestured, like a shrug. "It will be interesting to see how much trouble we can cause, before we are caught. Iriane, my granddaughter…"

  He held out his hands to her, where she crouched beside Arios, still at the outer door. She had, according to Spock, immediately assumed duties as his second-in-command of the flank guard, keeping the small group of Yoons safe on their flight to the shuttle with vicious and single-minded determination.

  "No." Iriane's voice was barely a purring from the translator Kirk wore. "Grandfather, I am sorry. You know what I lost—my beloved, and the children I had borne him, and the sister who was closer than a sister to me. Mother, Father…" She shook her head. "My vengeance is unslaked, nor will it be slaked, by flight, and the building of a future life." Her hard, black, hairless hand reached out, and touched Arios's fingers.

  Darthanian's face was sad—like the face of one, thought Kirk, who sees the future, the inevitable currents of time. "You have promise as one of the greatest of the savants, child; trained in all our arts. There are few enough savants in those who will build the new world."

  "The pain I feel would only turn to poison," said the warrior softly. "I cannot teach poison to the children who will be born."

  "They're coming." Arios flinched, brought his hand to his temple in pain. His voice was hoarse. "She's with them."

  "Send the ship away," said Kirk.

  Spock tapped commands into the tricorder; the great blast doors flashed shut, hiding the hangar deck, the smooth white gloss of the shuttle, from sight. Red lights went on, warning as the air cycled out of the deck behind those doors; the Yoon savants were already scrambling back into the vent shafts, to seek the places where they would let themselves be found.

  Metal hissed as phaser fire concentrated on the lock of the vestibule door, like the curses of the Specials gathered outside.

  Kirk flipped open his communicator. "Mr. Kyle? Get us out of here."

  "Uh…I'm afraid there'
s a problem with that just now." Kyle's voice came scratchy through the speaker.

  "Just now?" Kirk demanded. "We're backed into a corner. . . ."

  "We're working on it as fast as we can, sir," said Kyle. "But somebody's linked a phaser-bank dump to be triggered by an incoming transporter signal, then jammed the dump safeties."

  Scotty, standing beside Kirk, drew a harsh breath of shock.

  Unnecessarily, Kyle amplified, "So if you beam over, the ship blows up."

  The corridor doors gave, lurched open to reveal Dale, Varos, and serious reinforcements.

  With them, like a black and copper storm, was Domina McKennon.

  Kirk barely had time to duck back into the door of the gangway, crowding with the redshirts, Arios, Scott. He sent two shots into the crowd of Specials to cover Spock's dash for cover, but knew it was hopeless. Pain stabbed his head, searing him and taking his breath away; a Special made a dash into the room, heading for the controls on the launchcycle, and Kirk shot him, twice, three times. Only concentrated fire from Arios and Scott as well brought him down.

  "Stop it!" Kirk heard McKennon shout from the corridor. "Stop the launch, whatever it takes!"

  A blast of phaser fire stung his hand; beside him, Cooper gasped and sank to his knees. Three Specials ducked into the vestibule, laying down a field of fire that drove Kirk and the others behind the gangway doors, and he glimpsed more, moving up in the corridor behind.

  Then, over his head, he heard a harsh and terrible grating noise, like ripping metal, tearing insulation. The Specials stopped, gazing up, as a section of the ceiling above them peeled back.

  A tentacle fell through, dripping something that looked like honey and smelled like the abysm from which nightmares crawl.

  Kirk felt his breath stop.

  Arios whispered, "Nemo…"

  The next instant it dropped through, black and glistening, a horror the more obscene for the clarity of the vestibule light. The eyeless head swung around. A claw like a straight razor opened the nearest Special from windpipe to pubis in a single casual swipe, and the man made a horrible gurgling attempt at a scream as he pitched forward in a bursting wash of blood.