There was another flurried exchange of shots, then silence.
Then pain hit him, pain and constriction in his chest, burning, dizzying, nauseating. He gasped and heard footfalls above him, forced himself to lean around the corner and fire again, though every move made it feel as if his rib cage were splitting. It's illusion, he told himself. Or something close to it, something imposed from the outside. . . .
Pain sliced up through his groin, his bowels; he leaned around the corner and fired again, and heard the clatter of a man falling, rolling down the stairs toward him. A charge caught his shoulder glancingly as he leaned around and put another heavy stun charge into the Special who rolled to a stop almost under his feet. The pain sickened him and he cursed Germaine McKennon, that pretty, fragile redhead who reminded him of Ruth, and struggled to keep his mind clear, his eyes free of the darkness that seemed to be creeping in around their edges. . . .
"Hang on," whispered Arios's voice in his ear.
The pain lessened. Kirk's mind was so thick with confusion that he had to put his hand back behind him, feel the Master's bony shoulder, before he was actually sure the man was in the gangway with him and not merely projecting his voice and his will.
After a moment, his voice halting, as if he spoke through intent concentration, Arios went on, "She's using the stairwell as a resonating chamber. Darthanian…take Spock with…"
From below came the hissing zap of phasers, two or three being fired at once. Kirk leaned around the corner again and sent bolts sizzling up at the Specials around the door above, covering Arios while the Master reached out and relieved the unconscious Special of his weapon and communicator.
There was another pause in the atta ck, and Kirk, his right arm almost numb, fumbled his own communicator from his belt and said, "Mr. Kyle? Any idea how long that transporter will be?"
A maximum of sixty minutes, Spock had said, which meant that in effect it could be more like half an hour or less before the systems reformat cleared the shield block, stranding them on the Savasci. At that point, Nemo or no Nemo, phasers or no phasers, capture…and whatever McKennon would do to learn the destination of the Yoon ship…would be only a matter of time.
Kyle's voice was apologetic under the strain. "We're working on it, Captain."
"Did you see their faces?" Lao's voice was little more than a whisper in the dimness of the auxiliary bridge, his face in the tiny glare of the red console lights now bathed in sweat. Christine could feel her own perspiration crawling down her back, her nape, waiting, sickened, for the flash and roar of the phaser banks going up, wondering if it would hurt and, if she died instantly, whether that pain would matter.
"Arios. Cooper," the young man went on. "Those eyes that don't trust anything. Those eyes that can't open with wonder because they've learned that anything they see could be a trap."
He gestured around him at the control room, the silent viewscreens, blank windows onto nothingness. "I entered the Academy, I joined Starfleet, thinking…it's all wonder out there. It's all new things, beautiful things. What is it the captain says? Where no one has gone before. Where no one has gone before," he repeated in a whisper. "And now it won't be like that, unless I…unless somebody stops them. Stops them before they begin. I'm not doing it just for Arios and those others, I'm doing it for…for everyone, Chris. Can you understand that?"
"And what else are you stopping?" asked Chapel reasonably. "Yes, the Consilium is one path leading away from this ship. What are the others? Maybe the one that stops the Consilium after the plague that was so destructive; after the discovery of the new jump drive. You can't know…"
"I do know!" insisted Lao. "I can see what's most important, and I… What's that?" He whirled, head coming up, listening, and Chapel's heart slammed hard in her chest with the thought, It's starting. . . .
The silence was like death, like darkness. Neither breathed.
Then after a moment Lao tapped keys on the Central Computer board, the phaser still pointed at her, his eyes leaving her for only moments at a time to check the readouts. She saw his hand fumble at the keys, hit the erase, tap in again.
"Zhiming, you're tired," she said softly, astounded that she could control her voice. "You aren't thinking. . . ."
"I know what I'm doing!" he screamed at her. He stopped himself, breathing hard, the phaser shaking in his hand. More calmly, he said, "It's been over two hours. What's taking them so long?"
"How strong is the structural steelwork of these stairs?" Kirk's sense of suffocation, of nausea and pain, had not departed; he felt that it was slowly growing, slowly closing in on him again, but couldn't be sure. He felt in the grip of a strange fever, disoriented and frantic to move, as he had been when he'd come down with river fever on Iakchos II; his joints aching and darkness seeming to come and go in patches before his eyes. The ache in the arm and leg that had been hit by phaser fire was almost unbearable. Was that, too, real, or only part of the illusion?
"Pretty strong," said Arios, who hadn't spoken for five minutes or so. "You couldn't melt them with phaser fire, if that's what you're thinking."
"Would a phaser overloading take them out?"
"On full banks," said Arios promptly. "Below thirty percent, I'm not sure."
Kirk thought for a moment. There had been no movement recently from above, but he'd felt the pain growing, and knew it was only a matter of time.
A matter of time. Like the shields closing off again.
"Are you in touch with Darthanian?"
The Master nodded.
"I've seen you generate small illusions. The yeoman in the bowling alley said you conjured up the image of a friend of his to put him off-guard. Can you work an illusion here?"
"McKennon would see through it pretty quickly."
"We'd only need it for a few minutes. Tell Spock to put one of the phasers on overload and throw it down at the troops on his side, at my command. I'll do the same up here. Can you and Darthanian work an illusion that the explosion is bigger than it is, the damage is greater than it is, and hold it long enough for us to get into the conduit and down? So at least they won't know which way we've gone?"
It felt strange to be asking. Can you cast a spell…? Arios was a child of feys, raised to use their powers in a deadly game; created by the people whom he now sought to destroy.
"I think so," said Arios. He closed his eyes briefly, and at once the pain, the sense of suffocation, increased. Arios looked close to finished, the sharp brown features lined with stress and running with sweat, like the sweat that soaked Kirk's own face and blood-stiffened satin tunic. Kirk wondered if Cymris Darthanian's exhaustion was catching up with him, too.
"Right," whispered Arios. "Iriane says the last of them is down the shaft…a dark place, she says. Hot, and the noise of engines near by. A lot of cover. Whenever you say."
"Cover us as long as you can," said Kirk softly. "You and Darthanian get down the shaft first. Spock next. I'll go last. At least they can't kill me, if I'm going to affect whoever's on the Enterprise that starts up the Consilium. And I made damn sure I don't know the coordinates of the Brigadoon system."
"They can't kill you," said Arios softly. "But if they take you, we may never be able to trust you again. So don't let it happen." He was silent another moment, his attention turned inward, elsewhere. Then he said, "Ready."
Kirk's hand was steady as he flipped the sequence, essentially doing in miniature what someone (Who? he wondered grimly) had done with the Enterprise itself: programming a dump and blocking the ability to carry it through. The phaser emitted a high-pitched whistle, shrill and furious; through it Kirk counted "Three…two…now!" and threw.
And turning, plunged down the steps.
Even with the phasers at twenty-percent power, the blast shook the confined spaces of the gangway, hot air slamming him forward against the storeroom door, sucking the oxygen from his lungs. He was aware of Spock and the squat yellow form of Darthanian in the dark room before him, Darthanian swinging
nimbly into the conduit hatch that seemed far too small for his bulk, like a gaudy-hued Denebian bolbos squeezing into an impossibly tiny hole. The flash of light in the gangway behind him seemed huge, and glancing back, he saw what Varos at the top, and the other Specials at the bottom, saw: a tangle of ripped metal and dangling shreds of plastic covering, gaping spaces of darkness where risers had been completely blasted away, flames licking half-melted plastic and curling back in a dying stink of fumes.
Then he slammed the door shut, crossed to the conduit, gathered the hatch cover as he walked. He fitted it to behind him, clumsily, but he knew the room was dark. There was no further sign there that it had been a refuge, that anyone had passed that way. He wondered if there was some evidence, a sticky thumbprint of blood from his sleeve, a silky strand of yellow or green fur caught in the hatch…
But there was no time to wonder.
The conduit, as Arios had promised, dropped straight down a meter and a half along. The casings that enclosed the bundled wires were more than strong enough to support his weight as he shinned down them like a rope in the dark. The square shaft was narrow enough to brush his shoulders as he descended, filled with the smells of insulation and the fine molds that collected in the vapor traps on the vent filters, the minute bacteria of human lungs and human breathing, the dust of human garments and human food. His right hand was still weak, leaving his left to take most of the weight as he let himself down into darkness. Here and there, pale splotches marked the walls. Thumbprints, or the illusion of thumbprints, left by one of the Yoons to guide him…
A lateral vent. A long crawl in fusty-smelling darkness, and the scurry of boreglunches among the wires. Even two hundred years, he thought, had not served to eradicate those well-traveled pests.
Heat ahead, and the low red throb of light.
And a smell of alienness that lifted the hair from his nape.
"Watch it." Arios touched his shoulder as he emerged from the hatchway into the red-lit swelter of the chamber beyond. Labyrinthine coils and tanks loomed everywhere, dense with shadows; cables looped from the darkness of the ceiling, caught the glow of the bloody lumenpanels like the glistening bodies of snakes and retreated upward to darkness again. There was a wet sheen to everything, and when Kirk touched the wall it was sticky with resin. His mind saw again a drip like amber oil from a tentacle that snaked down from the ripped ceiling. His mind smelled again the terrible pungence of nightmares and blood.
"We can't stay here."
The three ambulatory security guards looked their agreement, kneeling over the bodies of Cooper and Shimada. Even Scotty, looking around him at the strange shapes and the low, burning gleam of the control lights, stayed close and didn't wander, as Kirk knew he would have in some other engine room, some other ship.
This was not the engine room, he thought. But it was the heart of the ship.
Through a dangling screen of hoses he could see a plex bubble, in which there nestled a sort of couch, designed for human contours. The bubble stood before an oval mouth of darkness, like a rat hole or a cave; the sides of it crusted with dried resin, and something brown that looked like stains of blood. More resin clotted the bubble's sides.
The empath sleeps there, thought Kirk. Sleeps during the jump. Sleeps in the mind of the thing that lies in that darkness.
Within the darkness something stirred wetly, and there was the squamous gleam of moving tentacles, moving bone. Then shifting, as if unwinding itself, it emerged: the yagghorth of the Savasci, eyeless, arachnoid, gleaming in the dark, like a great squid brought from its lair by the whisper of food.
Chapter Seventeen
"MR. SULU, do you have an estimate on how long it will be before the problem with the transporter is resolved?"
When Kirk had asked that question before, Sulu had heard the vicious crackle of phaser fire in the background, the suggestion of movement, of bodies taking cover. Now the only thing he heard was the dim pulse of machinery, and, briefly, a soft, ophidian hiss. The captain spoke quietly. There was no other sound.
For some reason that was worse than the clamor of battle.
"Between ten and fifteen minutes, Captain." Sulu, also, spoke quietly. From his post in the corridor outside the auxiliary bridge, he could see through the secondary computer room to the fore bulkhead of the ship itself, where Miller's legs projected from the service hatch. Maynooth knelt beside him, crouched over a patched-in terminal. Only moments before Kirk's signal, the bespectacled physicist had signed to him that thirty percent of the ship's phaser power still remained in the banks.
Behind him in the corridor, DeSalle exchanged a few quiet words with one of his redshirts, below the level of hearing. Dr. McCoy grumbled something in reply. DeSalle went to the door of the computer room and signed to the squad of officers grouped around the auxiliary bridge's emergency door, ready to break in as soon as the power level dipped below critical—or anything happened that might possibly alert the man within that the game was up.
Sulu recognized them from his martial-arts classes: Organa, Butterfield, Inciviglia. DeSalle's fastest and toughest, and the best shots, if it came down to beating Lao to the wires of the weaponry console.
Over the communicator, Kirk's level voice held a hint of strain. "Mr. Spock asks me to remind you that the Savasci is undergoing a sweep-replacement of all systems, which will eliminate our block on their transport shields, with a probability rate increasing all the time." Still he did not raise his voice, almost as if he feared to be heard. Perhaps, thought Sulu, he did.
In the background, something hissed again.
"It's for Qixhu that I'm doing this."
Lao raised his head, after a long time silent. Though he had stood bowed over the Central Computer console for a long time, tapping through display after display with the green and orange lights streaming up onto his face, he had not been so absorbed, or so tired, as to lose track of what happened in the room around him. Once Chapel, her shoulders aching with tension, had moved to ease them, and he'd swung around upon her with his phaser at the ready, his eyes like a cornered panther's.
There was no chance, she thought, of getting the phaser away from him.
"Qixhu…is one of about point-five percent, you know," he went on, his voice distant, as if he were reading the words with his mind on something else. "Most people—like him—they can do something about before they're born. Enzyme injections. Augmentation therapy as an infant. Implanted cerebral storage. But there's still that point-five percent they can't do anything about."
"Yet," said Chapel gently, and Lao gave a bitter laugh.
"Yet," he echoed. "Yet. He asked Mother once why if I was younger than him, I was smarter. Why I got to go into space, and he had to learn how to run a particle shaker. He said he wanted to go into space with me." He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the memory. Rid himself of the guilt of being a fourteen-year-old genius saddled with the care of a man of twenty-two whose mind would never be older than seven.
His dragging intake of breath sounded to Chapel like a frantic effort to loosen not only his rib cage but some bond around his heart.
"They have to be stopped, Chris." His face twisted with a kind of pain. "If I knew it was going to take this long I'd have just pulled the wire myself."
"Percentage of completed replacement up to seventy-two," reported Spock softly.
In the red darkness in front of them, the Savasci yagghorth swung its disproportioned head, the fragile-looking sensory fans waving as if in currents of water. Flattened against the curving side of the tank behind which the others had dragged the wounded, Kirk shifted the Special's captured phaser—turned up now to its highest setting—in his hand.
"Are the fronds sensory?" he whispered to Arios. "If I burned them off, could I keep it from finding us?"
Arios shook his head. "The fronds are sensory, yes, but it would find us without them. As long as the fronds are out it's not going to attack."
He wondered if there was a dee
per place on the ship to go to. If there was any place but this left to run.
Darkness within the cave mouth stirred again, like the slow unraveling of snakes. Kirk's first thought, his heart in his mouth with horror, was that the Savasci yagghorth had reproduced. That there were now two.
Arios whispered, "Nemo…"
Most of the blood that had spattered the larger yagghorth's hide was gone, but the smell of it remained, thick and vile in the room's close air. Nemo moved his tentacled head, like an unclean snake, making small strikes at the Savasci yagghorth with his thick-clawed lesser mouths. The other yagghorth fidgeted aside, nipped back with a mouth like a handful of dripping razors. Kirk swallowed, sickened, but beside him Spock whispered, "Fascinating. On the Nautilus I observed Nemo engaged in the same kind of play-biting with Adajia."
Kirk remembered Karetha's curving fingernails, and the cuts on Sharnas's hands and arms.
From the head of the metal steps came a soft clanking, a dim exchange of voices. The Savasci yagghorth ducked its head, hissed, swung again in the direction of the Enterprise party, and Kirk heard the hot spatter of phaser fire on the other side of the door.
"Key in priority for beam-off," he said softly into his communicator. "Arios, Cooper, the Yoon Iriane, Shimada…" He glanced back into the shadows, the thin green light catching strangely in Cymris Darthanian's eyes where he crouched beside Spock, watching the numbers on the patched-in tricorder screen turn from green to amber.
"Grandfather?" said Iriane softly, and there was a stirring of fur and robes as she clasped two of his hands. "You will not come with us?"
The old Yoon put another hand to the side of her face. "On the whole, child, I think I—and my few friends—can do far more damage where we'll be."
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