Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  Kirk was close enough to touch the yagghorth, flattening back into the gangway as it swung around with that eerie birdlike bobbing motion. It made a noise, indescribably, and reached out with an impossibly long arm and tore the face off a Special who was too shocked, too stunned, to fire; Kirk could hear the bone crunch as it did something else to the body, crouching over it like a misshapen dog. Behind Dale, Kirk heard McKennon's voice scream "Stun only! Don't kill it!" and Kirk wasn't sure if Dale heard, or heeded, but he knew already that it didn't matter. No phaser in the galaxy had ever caused a yagghorth so much as a case of hiccups.

  In any event, it didn't matter. Dale put one shot into the yagghorth at almost point-blank range as the thing tore a Special beside him into three mortal and shrieking pieces, then with an almost whiplike flick of its claws opened the security chief's throat, thorax, and abdomen, ripping the contents forth like a handful of softened rags.

  Arios and Spock dragged Kirk back into the shelter of the gangway door, up the twisting metal stairs. In the narrow space the smell of the blood sprayed from the dead crewmen—gouts of it, soaking into Kirk's satin tunic sleeve and trouser leg—was thick and clammy, sickeningly sweet.

  As they ascended the steps he saw that the lights above the shuttlebay blast doors had turned solid red. The shuttle was out, bearing the surviving Yoons to their new and secret home.

  Then Scott tripped a wire, the gangway door closed; a moment later came the hiss of fusing mechanism, and the engineer came running to join Kirk and his party in their flight.

  There was no pursuit.

  To those flattened, shocked, to the wall around the corner, the silence in the vestibule was even worse than the yagghorth's hissing had been. The air was thick with the stench of blood and voided waste. Then a thin sound began, a kind of hideous, buzzing rattle, speaking of a man not dead who should have been.

  "After them," said McKennon, catching Varos by the sleeve. "Cut them off. They'll know where that craft is headed! Now…!"

  Varos looked around the doorway. The yagghorth was gone. Even with the absorbent duraso, the walls dripped thickly with blood.

  In the middle of the vestibule, Edward Dale was still trying to move.

  Varos took one stride toward his friend, and McKennon's small, vicious hand closed around his wrist like a vise. "He's dead," she said. "It's Arios you need to catch, and Kirk. I should have known he'd get Kirk on his side."

  "Ed is still alive," said Varos, forgetting to use the formality by which he had termed his friend for twelve years.

  "Go!" hissed McKennon.

  "He needs help! We can get him to a freeze box. . . ."

  And the pain hit Varos, pain slicing his nerves, his backbone, his brain; pain and horror that took away his breath, as if, for one second, it was his body flattened helpless before the claws, his flesh ripping. Pain that had no center and no source but those wide, furious green eyes. Pain and a crippling weakness, cold and a sensation in his wired nervous system that he could not have described, was incapable of describing. His eyes darkened and his mind seemed to shut down, as if he himself—the part of him that was Rial Varos, the part of him that had had a friend named Ed Dale—had been thrust into a small room and locked in, while someone else—something else—moved his limbs, his spine, his organs. He stumbled five or six steps down the corridor in the direction of his surviving men—in the direction of the turbolift to the upper levels—before he even realized what he was doing.

  He told himself to turn back, to walk into that crystalline shredder of pain, the acid sea of those eyes. To walk to them to Ed's side, to get him, somehow, down to sickbay, to a freeze box…

  And he couldn't.

  He simply stumbled, staggering into the wall so that he had to catch himself, and without his conscious volition, turned again toward the lift, and the man she wanted him to take.

  "Hurry, damn you! They'll get away!"

  He heard his friend make a sound that could have been his name as he left him behind to die. McKennon followed, her footfalls a small, vindictive squeak on the gray sponge of the floor.

  Chapter Sixteen

  "I TRIED TO FIND OUT who it was." Ensign Lao leaned against the gunnery console, the phaser still pointed, his eyes seeming to glitter in the semidark. "I looked through the records—ran probability matrices. I've been doing that all afternoon. What could have caused that situation, what could have given rise to such an organization, given a galaxywide plague, given mindlink with yagghorth—about whom we know nothing—given power vacuums when key figures died or went insane. Trying to find out who it was, who caused it all."

  The person who started the Consilium is one of your crew.

  Sulu? wondered Christine, as she had wondered, on and off, for the few hours of her own fitful attempt at sleep. Miller, with that deadly combination of computer expertise and engineering know-how? The calmly efficient Organa? She could picture Organa taking over the Federation. Easily.

  At one point she thought that it might be Lao himself.

  Or was it someone unlikely: the feckless Riley, for instance, or Chekov? But surely Chekov was too sweet-natured…

  "It would be easy then." Lao moved his hand, as if to bring it up to rub his eyes. He did not, though. Did not let anything obstruct his view, his aim. "All I'd have to do is kill one person. Even if it was someone I cared for, I'd do it. I'd take the court-martial, gladly, and I wouldn't cause a temporal paradox by explaining. I'd accept my sentence. You know I'd have to do it. But there wasn't enough data to tell."

  "And what about the plague?" asked Chapel, keeping both hands on her knees and her voice as calm, as gentle, as matter-of-fact as she could manage. To her own surprise, she found she could manage rather well. "From what I understand, the Consilium saved civilization from the plague."

  "I'll—I'll warn them about the plague," said Lao, stumbling a little over the words, she thought. "There's something they can do. Quarantine, or—or finding another solution. . . ."

  "What if there isn't another solution?" demanded Christine, forgetting for a moment that she was dealing with a man in a state of serious sleep deprivation. All her work with Roger Corby returned to her—studies of ancient epidemics, their spread and vectors through the history of civilizations long past. "Zhiming, I've studied this, and quarantines never work. Not on a galactic scale. Not if the incubation time is long enough. And you won't even be alive when…"

  "Shut up!" His hand trembled on the phaser, his eyes burning with passion, with rage at what he had seen on the planet, at what he had heard from the Nautilus crew. "Maybe it isn't a fair solution, maybe there are other solutions…but it's best, Chris. Think about it and you'll know it's the only way! These people murdered the Yoons, the whole planet wiped out…"

  "But some of them survived!"

  Lao hesitated, blinking, shaking his head. "They couldn't have."

  "They did. The Consilium took them…" Chapel broke off, seeing the change in his eyes.

  "So they became tools of the Consilium, like everyone else?" There was something—satisfaction? bitterness? regret?—in his voice, and something of Phil Cooper's weary cynicism in the lines of his face.

  "Chris, we can't look away from it and pretend it's not going to happen. I wanted…" He shook his head. He looked exhausted, far worse than he had in sickbay a few hours ago.

  "I wanted to do this the easy way. Set up the wiring, find a place to hide, take the neurophylozine…just fall asleep. I wanted not to know." He produced the parched rictus of a smile. "I guess I won't know anyway. Or you. It'll happen fast." He frowned, his brow folding in pain, and he looked vaguely around him for the chronometer.

  "What time was it when they went over there?"

  Chapel tried to calculate whether a lie would help the situation, and in which direction she should stretch the truth, but it was difficult enough to think as it was. "Twenty-one-hundred hours," she said truthfully.

  "An hour and a half ago," he whispered in his hoars
e, beaten voice. "It won't be long. And it'll be fast. I promise. Nobody—none of us—will feel a thing."

  "Can he trigger it manually?" asked Sulu, regarding the shut—and locked—blast doors of the backup computer room from the corridor outside the Deck Nineteen briefing room. It had taken almost no time to locate Lao and figure out what he had done, once they knew what they were looking for. The auxiliary bridge was the logical venue for an attempt to cause a phaser backfire, and Miller and Maynooth had both been easily accounted for. In fact, both were standing in the corridor now, with Sulu, DeSalle, the redshirt who had initially ascertained that the doors wouldn't open—it happened to be Yeoman Butterfield—Dr. McCoy, and Raksha.

  "Absolutely," said Miller, scanning the ceiling already for entrances to the vents. "My guess is he's monitoring ship's internal communications to let him know if somebody gets on to him, in which case he'll probably take his chances and pull the plug."

  "He's cut out ops," reported Maynooth, who'd just emerged from the briefing room. As the door slipped shut behind him, Sulu could see the lines of amber readout on the triangular table vidscreen. "So we can't simply drain power from the phaser banks."

  "We can do it manually," said Sulu. "That'll also keep him from being alerted to the drain itself until it's too late to do any damage. Any idea who's in there with him? Or what this is all about?"

  Heads were shaken. McCoy looked around at the others—Maynooth and Miller, DeSalle and Butterfield—and said slowly, "I may have an idea of why." He sighed, and Sulu reflected that the doctor didn't look to have slept very well. There was a weariness in the slouch of his shoulders, and air of… not exactly hopelessness. A kind of resignation tinged with anger, the knowledge that there was nothing that could be done.

  It was a look Sulu had seen lately, in other members of the crew. The captain. Certainly Ensign Lao.

  But at Sulu's raised brow he only shook his head. "At a briefing yesterday, just before the…the new ship came into view, Captain Arios gave us a piece of information which may have sent Ensign Lao into…into a crisis. I know he hadn't been sleeping. I prescribed cillanocylene-six for him and come to find two-thirds of my total stock of neurophylozine is gone." He paused, with a look in his blue eyes as if sifting through some knowledge for portions of it that could be disclosed. Sulu saw his gaze cross that of the Klingon woman Raksha and saw the warning shake of her head.

  McCoy sighed. "That's all I can say."

  "That isn't enough," said Sulu.

  Raksha raised a finger. "It's enough," she said. "Lao's actions are logical from his own standpoint. Trying to destroy the ship, and hooking it to the incoming transporter as a trigger. And I think," she added, as Sulu opened his mouth to protest, "that you'll be safe enough draining the phaser power. The last thing the Savasci's gonna do is open fire on you."

  Sulu hesitated, but the warning look was still in me Klingon's dark eyes. Sulu considered a moment, his glance going unobtrusively from the two computer mavens, to the doctor, the security chief, the guard beside him and the other one—near enough, possibly, to overhear—at the end of the corridor. Whatever that information was, that Arios had released at the briefing—and presumably this Klingon woman knew it, too—if it had provoked a crisis of this kind in Lao, it might easily trigger a similar unpredictable reaction in any of the others standing in the corridor with them. Sulu personally didn't think it likely, but he'd seen less likely things in deep space. He wouldn't have thought it of Lao, either.

  "How long will it take?"

  Miller shrugged. "Forty minutes, counting the time it'll take to put up safeguards on the gauges so no sign of it'll show up on the ops board for Lao to read in there."

  Sulu's communicator chirped. Kyle, thought Sulu, flipping it open. The transporter chief had already been alerted not to use the ship's internal comm link.

  "Mr. Sulu, sir, we've got another request from Captain Kirk to be beamed over," came the chief's pleasant baritone. "He sounded pretty urgent."

  "Tell them we're working on it," said Sulu, and nodded to Miller. "Get after it…Tell them we'll get them out as soon as we can."

  And as the assistant engineer loped down the corridor, with Raksha at his heels, Sulu wondered what that piece of information had been, what that final riddle was that had proven too much to take for a man well on his way to becoming the best captain in the fleet. How could information unhinge a man? And he wondered if he really wanted to find out.

  He turned to DeSalle. "Get your men out through the ship," he said quietly. "Try to find out who Lao's contacts were, if he told anyone else this …this piece of information, whatever it was…" He glanced curiously at McCoy, who looked away.

  "I'll be in the briefing room here. No in-ship link—just communicators. But I'd like to know if this—crisis—got him or anybody else to plant any other little tricks around the ship. And I'd like to know if that person in there with him is an accomplice or a hostage."

  Great, thought Sulu, as DeSalle strode off in the wake of the vanished Miller. The captain leaves me with the conn, and in ninety minutes I've stranded him in enemy territory and gotten a maniac trying to blow up the Enterprise. If anything happens to the ship, Kirk'll kill me.

  He went into the briefing room to study what readouts Maynooth could call up for him, and to await events.

  "Forty minutes," said Kirk grimly, and snapped his communicator shut. "This ship isn't that big and they have a larger security force than the Enterprise. " He checked his phaser. The batteries were down to ten percent. The lowroofed storage compartment in which they had taken refuge was poorly equipped as a fort, empty of contents and for cover boasting only the low hedge of a conduit box that ran the width of the room about two-thirds of the way back. Kirk wasn't even sure it would mask a prone man.

  "How the Sam Hill did that—Nemo, was it?—get onto the ship?" demanded Mr. Scott. "Dear God, and they've got the Fleet completely hooked to those things?"

  "Well," said Arios, sitting with his hands pressed to the unconscious Cooper's temples, "that's sort of the point of the yagghorth. Though I've never seen Nemo jump ship-to-ship like that. I didn't know…" He paused, and laughed, a little hysterically. "I didn't know he cared enough about us to try and help us." Cooper, lying beside him, looked grayish with shock; both Darthanian and Iriane crouched on his other side, conferring in soft whistling voices. Yeoman Shimada lay like a dead kitten in the ocean of her black hair, unconscious far too long, thought Kirk worriedly, for normal phaser shock.

  For twenty-third-century phaser shock, anyway.

  "If he doesn't care about you," asked Scotty, puzzled, "then what's he doin' flyin' your ship for you? What's he doin' in the rebellion in the first place?"

  Arios straightened up and gave him a crooked grin.

  "That's the problem. And that's what drives Starfleet crazy. We don't know. He's helping us, but none of us—maybe not even Sharnas—has got the smallest inkling of an idea why."

  "And where's he gone now?"

  Arios only shook his head.

  "They are currently searching compartment by compartment." Spock had pulled a hatch on the conduit and wired the tricorder in as a data-pull, tracking the search through the in-ship com channels. "More to the point, they have begun a systems clearance and replacement, which should close the gap in the transporter shielding in, at most, sixty minutes."

  "And at least?" asked Arios softly.

  "The soonest they could have their transporter shielding in place is five minutes," replied Spock, and the three conscious redshirts all stopped checking the batteries on their phasers and looked up in alarm.

  "We have to move," said Kirk, stepping to the door of the compartment. "And keep moving." His right leg, where he'd taken the glancing hit, ached from instep to groin where it wasn't numb or sparkling with an agony of pins and needles. Iriane shifted over to listen with him as he pressed his ear to the door; he wondered how much the little green warrior heard, or in fact whether she heard the same
things a human heard with the complex, petally clusters of her ears.

  "They're coming." Spock removed the wire from the tricorder, stood with his head lifted, listening. "They're at the top of the gangway. There's a smaller party a level below us."

  "Hmm," said Kirk softly. "Arios, where does that conduit lead, if we could get down it?"

  "Anywhere," said Arios promptly. "It's one of the main lines. But it's a straight drop past that bulkhead, and no handhold but the main coil." He glanced back at Cooper, and reached to touch Shimada's icy hand. "They need anticane. Somebody probably gave the Domina a shot of it, to get her on her feet again this fast. Without it they'll be out for days, and sicker than dogs for weeks."

  "The drop is not a trouble," said Iriane, moving back with an oddly froglike movement. "I will carry your friend down. He's no more trouble than a sack of flour to a higher branch."

  "I, also," Darthanian added mildly. "In time I'll have to desert you—so that I can be found in suitably pitiful circumstances, you understand—but for the moment…"

  "Don't be ridiculous," Iriane snapped. "You're going to have enough problems getting yourself down that tunnel."

  "Captain," Spock called, from where he had gone to listen at the door.

  Kirk scooped up Wolfman's and Cooper's phasers as he passed them, knowing none of them had much charge left.

  Tucked in the waste space at the side of the Savasci's disk, the gangway twisted and wound. Kirk sprang up two flights of steps, two or three at a time, crouched in the elbow of a turning, and fired upward as Varos and a squad of Specials came around the turning above. He ducked back as they returned fire, hearing at the same time more shots echoing below. The light in the stairwell wasn't good, quarter-power or less; had the well been as wide as the gangways on the Enterprise he knew he could never have held it. As it was, the Specials, trained fighters that they were, were bottled up.