by Gene DeWeese
At least, he thought as he hobbled forward, there is no barrier around the equipment, as they had feared there might be. Crandall had proven that. Those in charge undoubtedly considered the vacuum and the barrier around the prisoners sufficient protection.
As Spock moved, his slitted eyes scanned the equipment, but it was only as he was passing Crandall's crumpled, bleeding body that he located a translator.
Lurching to one side, he grasped it from its invisible shelf.
Turning, seeing the captain and Dr. McCoy and Mr. Scott pressing against the barrier, he raised his arm to throw.
But even as he did, he realized it was too late.
Without the preliminary clammy tingle—had it, too, been blocked from his mind along with the havoc being wreaked upon his body by the vaccum?—the momentary paralysis of the transporter-beam lock-on gripped him.
And he was back in the alien transporter room.
The shock of the sudden return of normal air pressure hit him almost as hard as had its removal less than a minute before, but the instant he could move, he flicked on the translator, grimacing mentally as the faint pulsing light that indicated the Enterprise's computer was out of range came on. A moment later, as the sound of the Aragos voices came to him, he realized with some slight relief that, while his ears were badly plugged, the eardrums had not burst. He also realized that, if the field he was embedded in had not held him upright, he would have fallen.
On the second transport unit, the collapsed form of Dr. Crandall, blood now running freely from nose and ears and even eyes, took shape.
Unable even to lower his arm, so tightly did the field grip him, Spock waited helplessly, expecting the woman to step up and take the translator and the survival gear from him or the man to do something with his transporter controls that would send the two items back to join the rest of the Enterprise's equipment.
But the woman did not move toward him.
Nor did the man do anything to the transporter controls, though his fingers hovered closely over them.
The woman, now standing next to the man, was talking to him, gesturing angrily.
Suddenly, to Spock's amazement, the translator began speaking.
"It is not a weapon!" it said, apparently translating the woman's words. "Did you not see it in his thoughts?"
It was, of course, impossible, but it was happening. It took hours or days for the translator, isolated from the main computer on the Enterprise, to analyze a new language. The language, therefore, was not new. It was one already in the translator's own memory. The Aragos, therefore—
And he remembered.
Even as the blocks he had established against the pain began to dissolve and his mind threatened to retreat into oblivion before the assault, the reason for the nagging familiarity of the name and for the performance of the translator came to him. Aragos was the name of one of dozens of races—planetbound humanoid races—discovered by earlier expeditions into the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way galaxy, where the gate had been. As with most planets that did not have space travel, particularly those at such great distances, there had been no contact beyond the gathering of data, including languages. Distance and the Federation's noninterference policy virtually forbade anything more.
But here, countless light-years from that planet, was incontrovertible evidence that, at some unknown time in the past, this particular race had had not just space travel but interstellar travel.
They had found the gate, and they had passed through it.
But those thoughts flashed through Spock's besieged mind in an instant, and almost before the translator's last words faded, he was forcing himself to call out to the Aragos.
"She is right!" he said, the words slurred from the strain and from the effects of the vacuum on his throat and tongue and lips. "It is a translator, to allow us to speak with each other!"
Virtually simultaneously, the alien words issued from the translator.
The woman fell silent, spinning to face him. The man's jaw dropped as his eyes darted to the translator.
"We mean no harm," Spock said, "as I know now that you mean none to us. We need your help, as I suspect you need ours."
The woman's eyes widened as the translation came, but then, abruptly, she turned to the man.
"Release them!" she said.
The man hesitated, his eyes darting from the woman to Spock and back, but then his fingers moved across the controls.
A moment later, deprived of the support of the restraining field, Spock crumpled, unconscious, to the floor.
Chapter Twenty-One
"DATA TRANSFER TO auxiliary memory complete, Captain."
Spock, a greenish-red tinge to his eyes and an odd raspiness in his voice the only outward signs that remained of his ordeal after Dr. McCoy's hurried and harried ministrations, tapped a final code into the science station controls as he spoke. Standing by the padded handrail behind Spock, the leader of the Aragos—Ckeita, the woman from the transporter room—watched, as interested in the Vulcan's apparent recuperative powers as in the Enterprise's equipment. Below on the engineering deck, a half-dozen of her scientists and technicians were working with Scotty to jury-rig the modifications that would enable the sensors to pinpoint the location of the gate.
"Analysis for relevant information underway," Spock said a moment later. "We will soon know if the pattern for the gate's behavior can be extrapolated to the present time with sufficient precision.
"Excellent, Mr. Spock," Kirk said, "but how soon is soon?"
"Impossible to make a reliable estimate, Captain. There are thousands of years of data to be sifted and analyzed."
"Understood, Mr. Spock. Just see that it's completed before the Hoshan and Zeator are able to cut us off from the gate."
"I will do what I can, Captain," Spock said. "I must point out, however, that they may well possess far more ships than the ones we have already encountered. If so, such additional ships may already have been deployed in the area of the gate, the approximate location of which we had supplied to both parties."
"I know," Kirk said, grimacing as he looked away and then punched the button that activated the engineering deck intercom. "Progress, Mr. Scott?"
"Aye, Captain. Wi' those six down here, I dinna think Starfleet will recognize the sensor circuits when we get back, but if what they're doing does get us back, I'll no' complain."
"And the dilithium they supplied us with? Is it compatible with our own?"
"Aye, it can be used to replace our own crystals, but we would have only impulse power while the replacement was being carried out. And new dilithium crystals will do no' a thing for the damaged deflectors. Those still need several days for a complete overhaul of the generators."
"What you're saying, then, Scotty, is that we're better off sticking with the damaged crystals and hoping for the best?"
"Aye, Captain, unless ye want to take the chance o' being dead in the water for more than a standard day."
"All right, Mr. Scott, so be it. Be prepared to replace them the moment we're safely through the gate. We'd be years from the Federation without them. Mr. Sulu, take us to the gate, maximum warp that's consistent with the condition of our crystals."
"Aye-aye, sir."
"And Scotty, how are the life support systems holding up under the demands of our nine-hundred-odd hitchhikers?"
"The air might get a wee bit thin in a few months, but there'll be no problems before."
"If we're all still on the Enterprise then, that will be the least of our problems." Kirk paused just long enough to activate the sick bay intercom. "Bones, what's the prognosis for Crandall? Will he make it?"
"If we can get him to a starbase hospital, he will," McCoy's voice grated from the speakers, "but otherwise it's doubtful. He's on full support, and that will keep him alive, but he needs too many new parts for me to reassemble him here. And tell Spock—again!—that I want him back down here in no more than one hour! No matter how tough his Vulcan hide is, I
want to keep very close tabs on all that chemical baling wire I used to keep his numerous loose parts from falling off."
"All right, Bones. Now, if—"
"Thirty ships have just come into sensor range, Captain," Chekov broke in. "They are both Hoshan and Zeator, and they are not fighting with each other."
"Heading?"
"They are moving directly toward the planet we just visited ourselves, sir. They must be following our original course."
"On our present course, will we come within their sensor range?"
"No, sir."
"Steady as she goes, then, Mr. Sulu."
Ckeita looked around. "Are these the ships of the ones who destroyed these worlds? The ones who attacked us and stranded us here?"
Kirk shook his head as the words emerged from the translator. "No," he said. "They've only had interstellar flight a few hundred years."
"Then who—" the Aragos began.
"I don't know," Kirk said, "but from what the Hoshan and Zeator told us and from what you say happened to you more than five thousand years ago, I'm beginning to have a theory. You said that, like us, you came here through the gate at that time and were attacked without warning?"
"Five thousand years…" For a moment, Ckeita stood perfectly still, her gaze focusing on something none of the others could see. "That is the hardest fact of all to accept. To us, it is no more than five years, even less to those who were put under first and were not awakened for any of the false alarms."
Shaking her head in a very human gesture, she seemed to force that train of thought away. "What you say is correct, Captain Kirk," she went on. "We were attacked with something very much like your phasers. We were a scientific expedition, not a military one, so all we could do was run. It was only sheer luck that the ones who attacked us were themselves attacked, and further luck that the two were evenly matched and totally destroyed each other."
"Each other or themselves," Kirk said. "If the ones you ran into are anything like the current combatants, they may have simply disabled each other. Then, each fearing what the other—or you—would do or learn if they were captured, they may have done the final job of destruction, not on each other but on themselves. Mutual suicide."
The woman was silent a moment, as if trying to remember. Then she nodded, not quite the human up-and-down motion but a circular bobbing of her head. "I find such actions difficult to credit, but little more difficult than the mindless attacks they subjected us to. And it would, if true, explain why the ships were destroyed some time after the battle appeared to be over. We assumed some internal damage had been done during the battle, damage that only after an interval resulted in the explosions of their antimatter engines. But to purposely destroy themselves—" She shivered.
"You've explained how you avoided destruction by the two ships," Kirk said, "but how did you end up where we found you? Or, more accurately," he added with a faint smile, "where you were when you found us. And how your expedition came to be here at all, for that matter."
"More luck, I fear, Captain Kirk," she said with a grimace, "as was virtually everything associated with our expedition. The gates themselves had been discovered purely by accident."
"As we discovered them ourselves," Kirk said.
Ckeita nodded, the same almost circular bobbing motion she had used before. "Yes, they are the product of a science far beyond yours or mine, Captain Kirk, so accident is the only way those of our level could discover them. As you know, however, once we were aware of their existence, we were able to devise methods of locating them—and observing them in a limited way. We studied the shorter-range ones for years, both those with surrounding gravitational turbulence and those without. But we had only marginal success in calculating the patterns they followed and a total failure to learn anything at all about the one that brought us here, except that, like the others, it varied in size and was, on average, by far the smallest of the lot. From our fragmentary findings on the others, there seemed to be an inverse relationship between a gate's size and the distance it transported an object, so we assumed—guessed, really—that the smallest one possessed a much greater range than the others.
"Finally, curiosity won out over caution, and a group of us committed ourselves to a full-scale expedition to try to satisfy that curiosity. We didn't know where it would take us, except that it would probably be millions of parsecs from our homes. Nor did we have any guarantee that we could return. Some of the shorter-range gates operated in both directions, but not nearly all, and not with any consistency. It was this possibility—probability, even—that we would never return that prompted us to make our expedition so large. If, as many of us suspected, we found ourselves stranded in another galaxy or even another time, we would be a large enough group to survive, even to colonize any habitable worlds we were lucky enough to find. If we had suspected even the possibility of the existence of the kind of madness we encountered—"
Ckeita broke off, shaking her head again. "Once we recovered from the shock of the incredible density of the star population," she resumed, "we began exploring. But we found only dead worlds—devastated worlds, by the hundreds—and soon we were ready to return to the gate. It might not return us to our home, but it might at least let us escape whatever madness existed here.
"But we were too late. We had barely begun our return when the first attack came. When it was over, even though all we had left was impulse power, we fled. What else could we do? But then a third ship appeared and began pursuing us. Fortunately, we were within sensor and transporter range of the planet you found us on, and by the time the attack finally came, our instruments had detected the artificial caverns, the power sources, and the breathable atmosphere. Even as our ship was being destroyed, we transported ourselves down, along with whatever equipment and material we had time for, including the dilithium from the already useless warp-drive engines. Whoever was attacking us apparently did not possess transporter technology, so they did not know we were no longer in the ship when it was finally totally destroyed.
"In any event, we found ourselves in the retreat, much as it is today. Since we were virtually all scientists and engineers, we were able to discover the uses of some small portion of the retreat's contents, including the suspended animation chambers and that part of the computer that controlled them. And the transporters and sensors, as you know. They were, again perhaps by luck, perhaps by scientific necessity, very similar to our own, though far superior, so it was not as difficult as you might imagine.
"Nor was it that difficult to recognize and understand much of the equipment we found set up in the caverns to monitor the gate. It, too, was similar to ours, except that it was much more advanced, apparently able to monitor not only the gate's activity and size but its strength and several other characteristics we were never able to fully understand. We even found that certain of the monitoring equipment was linked to the computer's suspended animation control circuits, so that, whenever something came through the gate, someone would be awakened. We had no idea why this was so, but it suited our purposes as well as if it had been designed for us. If we were ever to be rescued, it would have to be by our own people coming through the gate, and this computer was already set to awaken us if that happened."
"So that was why you awakened not long after we came through," Kirk said. "I didn't think it could be a coincidence."
"No, not a coincidence. Some of us have been awakened a half-dozen times in what you tell me is the past five thousand years, but yours is the first living ship. One derelict, completely alien but also completely useless, its warp-drive engines dead for hundreds of years, came through two hundred years ago. The other arrivals were all simply debris, rocks that happened to drift through."
Ckeita paused, glancing at the forward viewscreen and then at Kirk again. "But you said you had a theory, Captain. A theory to account for all this madness."
He nodded. "One that's already been at least partially borne out," he said, going on to outline what th
e Hoshan and Zeator had said, that each had first entered space peacefully only to be attacked blindly and ferociously by unidentified ships that refused all attempts at communication.
"It's possible," he concluded, "that these attacks are only a small part of what could be, literally, a millennia-spanning chain, including not just the Hoshan and the Zeator but every race that's come out into space in this sector in the past several thousand years. Each one is attacked and each one, of course, retaliates, until, eventually, they reach the state the Hoshan and the Zeator were in when we arrived. They trust no one, and anyone who is unable to respond to their own specific recognition code is automatically assumed to be the enemy and attacked without warning, without mercy."
"But something had to start it, Captain Kirk. How could something so terrible ever begin?"
"I don't know about your people," Kirk said, "but on my own planet, earth, there was a time when something very like it would have been all too easy to start. Even with constant communications between nations, hardly a day went by for centuries when there wasn't a war going on somewhere. In space, where fear of the unknown is always a factor, and where communication between races just discovering each other is difficult under the best of circumstances—"
He shook his head again. "No, at first I didn't want to admit it, even to myself, but the more I've thought of it, the more I've realized that such a thing is easily possible. All it would take would be one purely evil force to start the chain reaction. Earth had its Hitlers. The Federation has the Klingons. Or it could have started simply with a misunderstanding, the way it almost did between the Federation and the Gorns.
"But however something like that starts, unless communications are somehow established between the two factions, it can end only with the total destruction of one side or the other. But with all of space for an enemy to hide in, how could the victor be positive that his enemy's destruction was total, that the enemy was truly gone? Were there colonies that survived? Could there be fleets of enemy warships returning from a conquest a thousand parsecs away?