Dwellers in the Crucible

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  "What have you come up with, Jali?"

  Cleante crouched beside her at the rear port; the guards did not seem to mind if they chatted and explored their surroundings as long as they made no sudden moves. Deltans were gifted stargazers, the best navigators after Medusans, it was said, and if anyone could determine where they were it would be Jali. Cleante had always liked Jali; they had sometimes compared notes on the male of the species, a favorite topic of both. Jali made it a point never to approach a female as patently hetero as Cleante.

  Now the Deltan shrugged and turned away from the viewport, swinging her legs over the sides of her seat carelessly.

  "There is nothing here I recognize. We are far beyond any star system with which I am familiar."

  The prisoners had no time to be depressed by this news. The shuttlecraft nosed into a sudden downspiral, and the arcing limb of a planetoid hove into the main viewscreen.

  It was an unpromising dun-colored sphere, clouded by large atmospheric disturbances. Even as they drew closer and land masses distinguished themselves from water, there was nothing here anyone could recognize either.

  Instinctively the Deltans huddled together, and Cleante returned to her seat. Captives and captors alike grasped handrails and braced against the shuttle's downslant. Theras took the opportunity to draw into T'Shael's personal space, his clawed hand gripping her arm, his fevered breath in her ear.

  "We can take them!" he hissed, depending upon the softness of his voice and the acuity of her hearing. "Let the others create a distraction. You and I can take the three, seize a disruptor, then the shuttle—"

  "And then?" T'Shael asked reasonably, staring straight ahead. His touch offended her. Impressions of bloodlust and madness intruded into her consciousness. Block them! she commanded herself. "We are inexperienced. None of us can navigate in a known star system, much less here."

  "Lock into orbit!" Theras hissed frantically, spittle flying. "I am a historian. Military tactics are known to me. We can evade capture, send out distress flares."

  "To be seen by whom? Rihannsu, Klin? Worse, no one? Locked into orbit around an unknown world with limited fuel, weakened by drugs and without provisions—madness! And what of our captors?"

  "Leave them to me!" the Andorian hissed, confirming all the impressions T'Shael had tried to block, tightening his blue talon on her arm.

  "Worse than madness!"

  T'Shael wrenched free of his death-grip with sufficient force to alert the guards. She returned to her trance, if trance it was, though not without making note for future discussion with her computer of every Andorian curse now being rained upon her head.

  The shuttle touched down on the night side, making it impossible for the captives to discern topography, to determine if this place was island or desert, jungle or tundra. One thing was certain. Except for the place where the shuttlecraft had come to rest there was no artificial light source as far as any horizon. If the planet had inhabitants, they did not dwell here.

  It was silent! Cleante noted as the guard led them out of the shuttle one by one. She was always aware of sound or the lack of it. No birds, no night creatures, no far-off rumble that might evidence a city, a heliport, hovercraft, anything. Except for the wind, utter silence.

  It was cold, T'Shael noted, even her usual stoicism unable to control a sudden tremor.

  The shuttle stood in the center of a compound, a cluster of lowslung, apparently recently constructed buildings around a grassless quadrangle, completely fenced in. It was a desolate place.

  He would not be kept here! Theras decided madly, the shreds of his sanity giving way to claustrophobia. With an animal shriek he rushed the nearer of the guards.

  Had he bothered to ask her opinion, T'Shael might have told him the odds against his success. As it was, Theras of Andor never asked anyone anything again.

  "It was an accident, Commander! He tripped the mechanism as we struggled. On my father's life I swear it!" the guard pleaded in a dialect which only T'Shael could follow. He surrendered the offending disruptor, pointing it toward himself should his commander wish an easy solution. The charred and broken body of the Andorian lay crumpled at his feet.

  Cleante remembered screaming. The Deltans had turned inward to block the ugliness of the scene. T'Shael, unmoving and seemingly unmoved, thought a mourning chant. Such death was a waste. Worse than madness.

  "—only another indication that we should never have been party to this in the first place!" the commander raged, the weapon upraised as if he would strike his subordinate across the jaw with it. The blow never fell; it would undo nothing. The Rihannsu had abandoned Standard now; the exchange became so staccato even T'Shael had trouble following it.

  "Oh, my God!" Cleante cried, rocking herself, her face hidden in her hands. "Allah, is that going to happen to all of us? Did they bring us here to die?"

  If she expected reasssurance from T'Shael she got none.

  "Silence!" the Vulcan said harshly, straining to listen. Resh took Cleante into his arms, drawing her into his circle of cousins. T'Shael stood alone.

  The Rihannsu commander whirled on his surviving captives, galvanizing himself.

  "Inside, all of you!" he barked in painful Standard, waving the disruptor toward one of the buildings. His captives offered no resistance.

  The building was a single room, a kind of barracks. The significance of its furnishing would become apparent in time. Three double-tiered bunks lined the unfinished concrete walls. Their design was not identifiably Rom or Klin and the bedding was Starfleet standard-issue, very possibly appropriated from some Starbase warehouse or ship's cargo hold. It was clear that the captors intended to leave no incriminating evidence in their wake.

  Sleeping accommodations for six, the captives noted silently, As if whoever had masterminded this knew exactly who their hostages were to be.

  There were a few windows high up in the thick walls and sealed from the outside; atmosphere-control vents were too small to afford escape. A shower stall and primitive toilet facilities were housed in an alcove which made no pretense of affording privacy. The single entry was a clearsteel partition and opened only from without. This place was for captives who were to be kept under careful observation. But by whom, and for what purpose?

  The second guard brought a large sack from the shuttlecraft and dumped it unceremoniously on the bare floor.

  "Provisions," the commander reported, still in Standard. He seemed to have regained his composure with the language. "You are provided with food and you will be kept here. The rest is out of my hands."

  That thought seemed to shatter his reserve. He reverted to his own tongue, and to a kind of dictatorial screaming.

  "I charge you all!" he shouted in Rihan, and all but T'Shael looked at him blankly. He focused on her, jabbing his finger in her direction. "I charge you! You who cannot lie. You were witness. Tell them how it went, that it was no fault of mine. I am but a cog in the machine. I obey. You will tell whoever follows. I charge you!"

  "I accept your charge," T'Shael replied, and it seemed to satisfy him.

  He ordered the guards out and sealed the clearsteel entry from the outside.

  The captives watched as the Romulans loaded Theras's body into the shuttlecraft and departed.

  Uhura was so completely absorbed in the transmission from Starbase XI that she didn't notice Spock hovering behind her at the comm con. Until a moment ago, she'd had the bridge virtually to herself. She listened intently, disturbed by the content of the message, but smiling her radiant smile across light years of space to the old friend sending it.

  It was hard to explain to the layman how it was possible to become so close to people one seldom met in person, and could reach only by voice and over vastnesses of space. It was perhaps that very remoteness, that lack of physical contact that made it imperative to share gossip and confidences and deeply personal things. Uhura could count among her closest friends beings whom she might never have met face to face, who lived a
nd worked beyond even commpic range, but whose every nuance of mood and voice was known to her.

  Spock watched the frown vying with the smile for possession of the beautiful dark face and nodded thoughtfully. The human face in all its variations never ceased to fascinate him.

  "Affirmative, Mai-Ling. I have the entire message now," Uhura acknowledged, her smile spilling over into her voice. "I'll have it decoded and ready for the Admiral's 1400 briefing. There's been no followup since the abduction?"

  Abduction? if Spock's initial purpose in lingering near Uhura's console had been an aesthetic contemplation of the human face, it had suddenly acquired added dimension. His sharp ears grew sharper.

  The response from Commander Hong on Starbase XI was apparently negative, for Uhura's face succumbed to the frown.

  "Isn't that awful?" she clucked. "Those poor people! Oh, I know, intergalactic ramifications and all that, but I guess my primary concern is the people involved. Affirmative, Mai-Ling. Give my love to Tam. Enterprise out."

  She took the transceiver out of her ear, half-turned in her chair, and nearly jumped out of her skin at Spock's proximity.

  "My God, you gave me a start!" she gasped, her hand over her heart but her eyes dancing at him. "I swear you're getting quieter all the time!"

  "It was not my intention to eavesdrop," he said in that whimsical tone he'd evolved over the years. He was about, Uhura knew, to make one of his oblique, self-deprecating Vulcan jokes. "Unnecessary, of course, since apocrypha among the cadets indicates I can hear through the very bulkheads. Commander Hong is well?"

  "Yes, she is," Uhura twinkled. "She reports that her hydroponic garden is flourishing, thanks to your advice."

  "It is the growing season on her world," Spock observed. "If her garden is any reflection of Ling Hong's personality, one may logically assume that it is flourishing."

  "Oh—and she sends you her love," Uhura added, almost as an afterthought.

  "Indeed?" Spock said, playing at the old formality.

  "Yes, 'indeed,'" Uhura mimicked him fondly, "Did you think we were the only ones who loved you, Mr. Spock?"

  Spock said nothing, and only someone who knew him as well as Uhura could discern in that seemingly unmoved face the slightest tinge of shy appreciation. But his next words gave no indication of his private thoughts.

  "Ling Hong's transmission would seem to have been of a disturbing nature. Was it Security coded, or might one inquire?"

  "If they let me in on it, you can bet it wasn't coded, honey," Uhura quipped, then stopped herself. If she wasn't careful her teasing would earn her some of Spock's wit, which, however infrequently used, could be murderous. "You'll get it at the briefing, just like everyone else. You'll just have to contain yourself for seven minutes."

  "Seven-point-three-five minutes. You made mention of an 'abduction'—"

  "Mr. Spock!" Uhura gasped, mock-horrified. "If I didn't know you better, I'd swear you were guilty of an old-fashioned case of human nosiness."

  "To express an interest in matters of command, Ms. Uhura—"

  "—is in this case to be nosey, Mr. Spock. You'll have to wait for the briefing. No scoops, no special privileges." She smiled seductively. "Unless you'd like to try reading my mind."

  Their eyes locked for an instant and Spock might have smiled.

  "A mass of conflicting impulses," he said solemnly.

  It was an old joke. Uhura slapped at his hand playfully, beaming at him.

  The Klingons arrived with the morning suns.

  This world where the Warrantors had been abandoned by the Rihannsu, whatever its designation, was part of a binary system—two red dwarf stars wheeled sluggishly about each other in a trojan orbit, providing almost as much heat and light as a yellow Sol-magnitude star, though the light had a dull reddish tinge that rendered the sky a muddy brown, and the twin stars cast double shadows, disorienting to the uninitiated. But the dual system explained the Earth-equivalent gravity on such a smallish planetoid, as Jali explained to the others.

  "Limbic curvature at the horizon indicates it is considerably smaller than any of our home worlds," she said with a fluttering of eyelashes.

  "It would appear, at least for our purposes, to be uninhabited," T'Shael added.

  Must you keep bringing that up?" Cleante asked irritably.

  None of them had slept through the long night, but the toll of uncertainty and fatigue was greatest on the human. Now her ears caught a sound that banished everything but terror.

  T'Shael had been aware of the approaching vessel for some moments, but saw no logic in reminding her companions of their helplessness. Whatever came to them now, they owed her a few extra moments of uneasy peace.

  "Klingons!"

  This came from Krn, son of a senior Deltan ambassador, who with his parents and many siblings had spent much of his short life in transit between one embassy and another galaxy-wide. His father had encouraged him in the hobby of collecting models of every vessel he encountered in his travels, and Krn's dorm room at T'lingShar had been a small museum of such pieces, suspended from ceilings, mounted on walls, cluttering shelves and table tops. Before the vessel came clearly into view in the murky dawn light, Krn knew what it was.

  "It is a Kzantor-style longrange, model 75ZX4 with modified forward nacelles. Four passenger," he reported proudly. He bounced down from the upper bunk where he'd been peering out one of the windows. "Meaning that they cannot intend to be moving us, in a 'craft so small. They mean to keep us here."

  "They could always separate us," Cleante said without thinking. Klingons! Allah, what did it mean? She clutched at the hair at her temples the way she did when she was upset or, in this case, abjectly terrified. "Take us away individually, to different places."

  She did not realize the effect her words would have on the Deltans. Nothing so terrified one of this species as the fear of losing physical proximity to the others. The trio had spent the dark hours impossibly intertwined in a single bunk, not sleeping but comforting each other.

  Krn wailed and Jali whimpered; Resh wrung his hands and crushed them to him, glaring at Cleante. She had never seen a Deltan angry before. Outside, the Klin vessel touched down in a maelstrom of ugly yellow dust. Whoever was inside would emerge at any moment, marching toward them. Cleante gasped for air, suddenly understanding poor dead Theras's claustrophobia, wanting to shriek at the Deltans to be still, to pull themselves together.

  T'Shael touched her shoulder, lightly but with the strength of unshakable calm.

  "Control," she said. "We have not time for such indulgence." She turned her gaze toward the threesome, focusing on Resh. "You must calm them. The Klin thrives on the weaknesses of others. You must prepare for this."

  Resh nodded, drew himself up, and placed two fingers on each of his cousins' smooth and unlined foreheads. He began to hum a kind of mantra, to which first Jali and finally Krn added their voices, and together they surrounded themselves with psionic harmony. Cleante watched in wonder and in envy. The linkage lasted only a moment, but the change was remarkable. The Deltans seemed ready for anything. What she wouldn't give for some portion of their tranquility! Cleante thought.

  "I'm frightened!" She whispered, looking to T'Shael, pleading. The worst she could earn was reproach. She heard the harsh crunch of boots on the gravel of the compound. Any moment now.

  Extraordinarily, T'Shael drew close, closer than she had ever come, taking the human's face between her long, cool hands. Eyes like burning coals, hooded eyes in less-than-beautiful face drew the human's soul out into her own.

  "Control," she repeated. "Whatever their purpose, they will look for fear. As I have endeavored to teach you—"

  "Be strong for me!" Cleante pleaded, covering the beautiful hands with her own. "I'll try!"

  "I am here," was all the Vulcan said, and it was enough.

  The door burst open.

  * * *

  "Why does Command send us these things?" Admiral Kirk asked of no one in particular
, pacing the confines of the briefing room irritably. His coffee had gone cold somewhere during Uhura's report. He put the cup down, spilling a little; it was the least of his annoyances. "These damn FYI bulletins—'All Fleet personnel to be informed but no action to be taken.' If Jose thinks I'm going to just sit here—"

  He caught Spock's look and subsided. The others—Uhura, McCoy, Sulu, even Lieutenant Saavik, who was there to observe—sat silently around the table waiting for him to finish.

  "Okay," he acknowledged. "I really didn't call you all here just to listen to me gripe, as some people have put it. Ladies, gentlemen—I need facts, and I need recommendations."

  "One wonders at the merit of our recommendations, Admiral," Spock said rhetorically and out of turn. The others looked at him. "Unless of course they concur with what you have already formulated in your mind."

  "Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?" Jim Kirk snapped.

  "It means, if I may be so bold, Admiral, that you engaged your Knight on White Charger mode the moment you were informed of the abduction of the Warrantors."

  Uhura giggled; Sulu struggled with a smile. McCoy developed a sudden fit of coughing. Saavik, puzzled by the reference, made a mental note to check with Linguistics following the briefing. Kirk glowered. Spock returned the look mildly.

  "It's infuriating, that's all," Kirk said crossly, refusing to be teased out of his mood. "Innocents. Stolen out of the very heart of the Federation. Kidnapped from Vulcan, of all places, where you'd think they'd be safe. Students, some of them mere children, if Command's information is accurate."

  "Only one is a child, Admiral," Spock interjected. He had accessed identities on all six Warrantors while Uhura gave her report, and was presently puzzling over the face of T'Shael on his computer's small screen. She was known to him, he was certain, but in what context? He would have time to cross-correlate later. "Krnsandor L'am is of eleven Deltan years. The others are of adult age."