by Gene DeWeese
Suddenly, the dizziness began to fade, the sense of spinning to slow, and Kirk wondered if some answers were about to be revealed.
Or if the entity, with or without malice, was about to do whatever it had drawn him here to do.
Tensely, he waited to see where, if anywhere, he would materialize.
The two figures lurched dizzily on the transporter platform, then regained their balance.
"Captain! What happened?" Scott was hurryingm from the controls to the platform.
Steadying himself, Kirk pulled in a relieved breath.
"I was hoping you could tell me, Mr. Scott." He stepped down from the platform and moved with Spock toward the corridor and the nearest turbolift. "The last I remember, Lieutenant Crider was beaming us to the alien ship."
"Aye, Captain," Scott said, and he went on to quickly outline what had happened. By the time he had finished, they were back on the bridge.
"It's my fault, sir," Lieutenant Denslow, Spock's replacement at the science station, said agitatedly the moment they emerged from the turbolift. "I'm sorry. I just didn't see it in time!"
"See what, Lieutenant?" Kirk asked, going with Spock to the science station as Denslow stepped back nervously. "Did the field take another jump?"
"No, nothing like, that, sir. The shrinkage is still accelerating steadily. What happened is that the alien ship developed a field of its own. It doesn't block the sensors entirely, just changes the readings, and it obviously doesn't block the tractor beam. I—I didn't realize what was happening until Lieutenant Crider called from the transporter room, and then it was too late!"
Spock glanced at the readouts and quickly called back a series of earlier readings. "We must share what blame there is, Lieutenant," he said after a moment's study. "The field began developing when we overtook Kremastor's ship, long before I turned the station over to you. That is when the readings pertaining to Kremastor himself first began to change, and I should have noticed. It was only moments after you took the station that the readings pertaining to Commander Ansfield were affected."
"Affected how?" Kirk asked sharply. "Is she still all right?"
"She appears to be, Captain. The changes are not indicative of a change in her condition or, indeed, indicative of any changes in the alien ship."
"Then what—"
"It is the definition that has changed, Captain. The sensor readings are, in effect, being blurred, much as your own vision might be blurred by an intervening substance that is not totally transparent. This field could, in fact, be similar to the one that is closing in on us. The difference could be only a matter of degree."
"Like the difference between something that's translucent and something that's totally opaque," Kirk suggested.
"The analogy is not without merit, Captain."
"But whatever the field is, it blocks the transporters even though it only slightly hinders the sensors," Kirk said. Then he added, frowning, "Could this new field have caused Kremastor's equipment to malfunction? He said it was no longer possible for him to get us back into the nexus, but after the way he tried to run from us, I just assumed he'd changed his mind and was lying."
"Without further information, Captain, both possibilities appear equally likely."
"And there's still no indication where the fields are coming from or what's causing them?"
"None beyond what we have already discussed, Captain."
Kirk shook his head in frustration. "If I didn't know better, I'd say we were the source of the field. The Enterprise is at its center, and no matter how we move, we remain at the center, just the way we remain at the center of our deflector shields when they're on. And now that Ansfield is on Kremastor's ship, it has a similar, weaker field."
"That is true, Captain. Remember, however, that the smaller field is centered on Kremastor, not on Commander Ansfield."
"You're saying Kremastor himself is creating the
fields? Or at least the smaller field?"
"No, Captain. I am only saying that the field surrounding Kremastor's ship originated at precisely the point Kremastor occupied at the time of the field's inception. Whether there is a causal relationship—"
"I take the distinction." Scowling at the screen, Kirk turned abruptly toward the communications station. "Lieutenant Uhura, anything from the alien ship?"
"Nothing, sir."
"Mr. Spock, are its impulse engines still functional?"
"Still functional, Captain, but shut down."
"And our tractor beam?"
"Still holding. It is apparently affected less by the field around Kremastor's ship than are our sensors and transporters."
Turning back to the viewscreen and the image of the tiny ship, Kirk was silent for a moment, then drew in his breath.
"Mr. Scott, are you back on the tractor beam?" he asked abruptly.
"Aye, Captain."
"Then bring that thing in. I want a closer look at it. And at that field around it, before the big one closes in on us all. Get a crew down there to give it a thorough examination, immediately."
"Aye, Captain. I'll have it on board in five minutes at the most."
"Mr. Spock, keep a close watch on those life-form readings. If either of them changes, particularly that of Commander Ansfield, let me know immediately."
"Of course, Captain."
"Mr. Sulu, is the helm still rigged as a remote control for the shuttlecraft we used earlier?"
"It is."
"Then send it out, now. Send it out beyond this field, and we'll see what happens to it."
"Aye-aye, sir."
With the hangar deck doors already opened for the entry of Kremastor's ship, it took barely a minute for a shuttlecraft to reach the still shrinking field and promptly disappear from the sensors.
Like a light winking out, all sensor readings from the shuttlecraft vanished. In the same instant, the subspace link with the shuttlecraft was cut off, and the signals it had been returning to the Enterprise ceased.
But on the viewscreens, the shuttlecraft remained plainly and solidly in sight, radiating brightly in infrared. Its impulse engines, still operating on the last order sent to them, continued to move the tiny vessel forward. The signals from the Enterprise helm, instructing the shuttlecraft to turn around and come back, were ignored, as if they hadn't been sent.
"Ship secured on hangar deck, Captain," Scott reported.
"Good timing, Mr. Scott. Mr. Sulu, overtake the shuttlecraft, and bring it back on board. Mr. Scott, be ready to give it as thorough a check as you're giving Kremastor's ship."
Within another minute, the shuttlecraft had been overtaken. The moment it was back inside the field, it reappeared on the sensors, and its controls once again responded to the helm. Thirty seconds later, it was back on the hangar deck, and Scott and his crew were swarming over both it and Kremastor's ship.
"Time, Mr. Spock."
"The shrinkage accelerated yet again, Captain, when the shuttlecraft reentered the field. The current projection is thirty-one point six minutes."
"Everything we do just speeds it up!" Kirk said, shaking his head sharply. "Mr. Scott, have you found any way into the alien ship? Any way to get at Commander Ansfield?"
"There are no breaks in the ship's surface, Captain."
"And the field around it, now that it's aboard the Enterprise, Mr. Spock?"
"Initially, it began to shrink, but it has now stabilized. It still encloses the ship and, I can only assume, would still block our transporters."
"If it begins to shrink again—"
"Of course, Captain."
"Mr. Scott, how did the shuttlecraft stand up to its
trip?"
"A preliminary check shows all systems fully operational."
"And the records of what its sensors found outside the field?"
"No' a thing, Captain, no' even the other ships. Nor the Enterprise itself It's as if the sensors themselves did no' exist!"
Kirk grimaced and turned abruptly toward Uhura
and the communications station.
"Patch me through again, Lieutenant," he said grimly. "It's time we had another talk with Kremastor. And let Commander Ansfield know what's been going on."
For what seemed like forever to Commander Ansfield, there was only silence. The glaring light and ear-punishing crackling had faded simultaneously, and when she had opened her eyes, she had found herself still in the same featureless sphere. At first she had shouted, but there was no response from Kremastor or anyone else, nor was there any reaction when she pounded on the sphere as hard as she could with her boot heel.
Finally, breathing heavily, she had fallen silent, and since that time she had listened.
But other than a faint humming and her own breathing, there had been nothing to hear.
But now, suddenly, the ship shuddered. Not as violently as the first time, almost gently, and again there was silence.
Until—
"Commander Ansfield, can you hear me?" The voice, like that of the alien, seemed to come from the air around her.
"Kirk, is that you?"
"Yes, Commander. Are you all right?"
"Except for being trapped in what looks like a goldfish bowl, I'm fine. What happened?"
"You were apparently transported into Kremastor's ship."
"I'd figured that much out for myself! I mean since
then."
Hurriedly, he brought her up to date. "You're in the hangar deck now," he finished. "We'll see what we can do about getting you out. In the meantime—Kremastor! Can you still hear me?"
"I can. What is it you wish?" the Klingon voice
replied, sounding totally flat and resigned.
"You could start," Ansfield snapped, "by answering my last question. Are you a computer? You said you'd been watching ships arrive here for twenty thousand years, and no humanoid life-forms I know about live anywhere near that long."
"I am not a computer. For years I had a body not unlike your own, but for several lifetimes I have had only this ship."
"A cyborg, then?"
"Insofar as this ship is my only body, yes."
"If I could make a suggestion, Captain, Commander," Spock said, cutting off another question from Ansfield. "It would be more logical and more efficient for Kremastor to explain who he is and what he is doing here rather than for us to attempt to question him on a series of specific points."
"Just one more specific question," Ansfield said. "Kremastor, do you know of any way of getting me safely out of this ship of yours?"
"I do not, other than for your colleagues to disassemble my ship and, in all likelihood, myself. I would do nothing to hinder such action. After twenty thousand years of terror and futility, I would, in fact, welcome it."
There was a moment of silence, and then Kirk said, "I have one more question, too. What happens when this so-called dead space disappears? Will all our equipment simply stop functioning?"
"That is what has happened to many."
"But not to you? Your equipment has been functioning, you said, for twenty thousand years."
"Only in a very limited fashion. The warp drive is totally inoperable. My sensors show the nexus only as a faint ghost of what it really is. The nullifier—the device that would allow me to reenter the nexus—generates energy of some kind, but it no longer has any effect on the Trap."
"Twenty-six minutes to zero sensor range, Captain," Spock announced.
"And to massive equipment malfunction," Kirk breathed. "All right, Kremastor, tell your story—fast. And hope it gives us some ideas."
Chapter Nineteen
AT LEAST A THOUSAND generations ago, Kremastor began, shortly after his ancestors had discovered a form of warp drive, they stumbled across the nexus system, just as the Enterprise had. They also found the "maps" early on during their exploration of the system, but in their case it was apparently a complete set, not just the "local" ones that so far had been fed into the Enterprise computer. The maps showed that the system consisted of a series of approximately a hundred nexus, each of which was connected to every other nexus and to thousands of individual gates, one of which was the one Kremastor's ancestors had found approximately fifty light-years from their home world. The nexus themselves seemed to be intended primarily to serve as junction points for great numbers of individual gates, as the hub of a bicycle wheel serves as a junction for dozens of spokes. The nexus, however, were apparently accessible directly, and it was one of these, one of the most complex of the lot, into which the Enterprise had originally stumbled, only to pop out of another billions of light-years distant and almost equally complex.
Kremastor's maps were apparently more complete versions of those already in the Enterprise computer. Each nexus and each destination was identified by a code. Each nexus went through a continuous cycle, opening onto a different destination every few seconds. The times at which a nexus had to be entered in order to reach the various destinations were specified. No destination was more than a day distant, even if one had to pass through all hundred nexus to get there.
The set of maps Kremastor's ancestors were given told them how to reach any of more than a million individual destinations.
What the maps did not tell them was the location of any of those destinations with respect to any other destination.
As far as Kremastor's ancestors had been able to determine, not a single destination was anywhere within their own galaxy.
Nor could they discern the slightest pattern in the destinations. It was as if they had been picked at random from anywhere and everywhere in the universe. Of the destinations they explored, some were in the hearts of massive star clusters like the one the Enterprise had first been transported to. Some were in the deadly centers of galaxies that would have dwarfed the Milky Way. A very few were within light-hours of solar systems. Some were on the fringes of galaxies of all sizes. Many were deep in intergalactic space.
And a few—a very, very few—were like the one the Enterprise and all those other ships had found themselves ejected from. They opened on starless, lightless voids hundreds of millions of parsecs in diameter. A few opened on voids so huge that the entire universe seemed empty. No galaxies or stars were within range of the exploring ships' instruments.
For generations, Kremastor's ancestors had explored the nexus system. Just how many destinations they reached, he didn't know. The few surviving records didn't say, but it was obvious they could not have explored more than a few thousand of the more than a million destinations available.
Then, in a solar system only a few light-hours from a gate, they found the remnants of a civilization. It had destroyed itself in an atomic war thousands of years before.
Shortly after that discovery, ships began to disappear, to head out for new destinations and simply not return.
Finally, one of the missing ships did return, but all aboard it were dead. From what little Kremastor's ancestors could learn from the ship's fragmentary log, some form of insanity had come upon them as they emerged from the gate, and it had swept the ship.
Immediately, rigid quarantine procedures were set up. Because of the gate's distance from their home world, the quarantine worked, and when other infected ships returned, some with one or more crew members still alive, the home world remained safe.
Meanwhile, their scientists had been studying the gates, trying to measure and understand the forces that drove them. By the time the infected ships began to return, the scientists had succeeded to some extent in measuring those forces, even manipulating them, but they never came close to truly understanding them.
But manipulating them, it seemed, was enough, at least for the harsh but purely defensive measure Kremastot's ancestors devised. They were able to build the Trap and link it to more than half of the nexus. The Trap itself was a pure energy device that could reach into the limbo that surrounded the nexus, identify virtually any sentient being that had been infected, seize that being and all matter in its vicinity, including whatever ship it was traveling
in, force it out through this or other equally isolated gates, and keep it from reentering. There, millions of parsecs from the nearest star, the ship would be in permanent quarantine. Even if the infected crews survived, they could not spread their infection.
Where the infection—the entities—came from, even what they were, Kremastor's ancestors had no way of knowing. Alone, they registered on no sensors, not even those of the Trap, just as they had registered on none of the Enterprise instruments, only on the minds of its crew. Only when one of the creatures attached itself to a living, sentient being could its presence be detected.
As a result, the Trap was far from perfect. As long as the creatures were not attached to sentient beings, they could roam the system freely, emerging whenever and wherever they pleased.
In the end, either the quarantine procedures that isolated the gate near Kremastor's home world, after generations of inactivity, grew lax, or one of the creatures emerged from the gate unattached and undetected.
Either way, the civilization of Kremastor's ancestors was infected and destroyed, just as that of the Aragos had been infected and destroyed thousands of years later.
But, like the Aragos, Kremastor's people had recovered. Over tens of thousands of years, they had made their way back to civilization, and they had found the records their ancestors had left behind, in permanent orbit around their home world.
And when they found those records, they had wondered: How many thousands of civilizations like their own had been destroyed by these creatures? How long would it be before, despite all their efforts, their own resurrected civilization would be destroyed once again?
So they decided: The only way to end the threat once and for all was to close down the system altogether. For another generation, then two, they studied the forces involved. Finally, though full understanding never came, they devised a way to shut the system down. They built a device that, once taken to the central nexus—the nexus the maps indicated was the source of the entire system—would be capable of destroying the system. When activated, it would literally turn the entire nexus system inside out, setting into self-destructive oscillation its still not fully understood energies. It was crude, the equivalent of Ensign Stepanovich's phaser blast in the Cochise engineering control room, but it was the best they could do.