by Gene DeWeese
But something stopped him.
And for the first time, he realized it was more than terror that was paralyzing his body.
Something—the entity!—was actually in his mind, controlling it, keeping him from acting, just as it was keeping Sulu's fingers from moving that last inch and a half to the controls that would have launched the shuttlecraft.
Terror, any terror, he could overcome, given time, but this he could not.
Not in time …
The gate loomed ahead, filling the screen with its chaotic energies.
The Enterprise plunged into them.
For an instant, there was the remembered freedom of limbo.
And then they were through.
The stars of the Sagittarius arm were spread out around them.
And, behind them, the swirling turbulence of the nexus.
But there was more.
Even through the irrational terror in which the entity was drowning him, Kirk saw that the Sagittarius nexus was no longer alone.
Like jagged wounds, a half-dozen of the leakage gates blotted out great swaths of stars.
And radiating out from the constantly expanding and contracting disk of the nexus itself were a dozen even more jagged, lightninglike rips in space, pulsing with an intensity that outshone the nexus itself.
Even more vividly than before, an image of tornadoes raging across midwestern plains filled Kirk's mind. But where planetbound tornadoes swallowed up trees and houses and cities, these storms, infinitely more far-reaching, more powerful, could—would—swallow up whole planets and suns.
If they weren't stopped.
If the entity wasn't stopped.
"Sulu!" He managed to force the word out against all the opposition the entity apparently could muster.
But then, as he began to form another word, the entity vanished.
As suddenly as it had returned, it vanished.
Within a split second, the fear and paralysis were gone, all muscles suddenly released from teeth-grinding tension.
"Get the shuttlecraft out, set it to broadcasting, now!" The words exploded from Kirk's throat, and only as they battered at his ears did he realize he was shouting.
Without acknowledging, Sulu managed to comply.
And Uhura to open an emergency channel to Starfleet Headquarters.
There was no response.
But as she scanned through the subspace spectrum, the speakers suddenly erupted with static.
And a voice, filled with hate and terror: "Damn you, Kirk! You've destroyed the Federation!"
And a face appeared on the screen.
It was Captain Sherbourne of the U.S.S. Devlin, his dark face haggard, his eyes glittering in the dim light of emergency backup power.
"Sherbourne!" Kirk half shouted, then forced himself to lower his voice. "What happened?"
"As if you didn't know, you and your gates to hell!"
"I don't know, Captain. We've tried the emergency channel to Starfleet Headquarters, but—"
"They can't hear you! They evacuated hours ago! It's probably gone by now, sucked up by these damned gates! They're everywhere!"
"In Federation space? The same as here?"
"Worse, damn it, worse!" Sherbourne's voice choked. "There was one spreading toward Earth, for God's sake! Earth!"
Kirk turned abruptly from the screen, feeling more anger and helplessness than he had ever experienced. "Spock! Isn't there any way to get back to the central nexus? Without waiting for the next cycle? Even if we can't find Kremastor, we could do something!"
"I fear not, Captain," Spock replied, his voice efficient and unemotional even now. "I have already had the computer check Kremastor's maps for alternate routes through the system. If it were fully functional, such routes would exist, but even then the shortest would require five hours and forty-seven point five minutes. There is, however, another possibility, albeit only a theoretical one."
"At this point, any chance, no matter how slim, is better than none at all. Explain."
"Very well, Captain. From my preliminary analysis of the mathematical descriptions of the nexus forces, it is likely that what we call limbo is in reality the extradimensional space outside our own universe, the space in which both our universe and all those other universes are contained. An oversimplified but nonetheless appropriate way to visualize it in more comprehensible terms would be to think of each individual universe as a one-dimensional length of string, existing in three-dimensional space. These strings are apparently twisted in vastly complex patterns, doubling back on each other, touching each other, even knotted together in great tangles. Where the strings—the universes—touch, there is a gate or a potential for a gate. In a nexus, the energies the Risori inadvertently set in motion continually twist or warp one of the universes so that it sweeps through the surrounding extradimensional space, touching each of the hundreds or thousands of nearby universes—or distant points of the same universe—one at a time."
"Which means?" Kirk prompted urgently.
"It merely means, Captain, that in terms of the extradimensional space itself, all points connected by the nexus system are necessarily in close proximity. It is that very closeness that allows the gates—the contact points—to exist. Therefore, if we were able to enter that extradimensional space and navigate within it, we could in all likelihood locate and enter any of those other universes."
"Except," Kirk said grimly, "we can't navigate in it. We're blind and deaf in there."
"Precisely, Captain. Within that space, our own senses appear to be totally disconnected from our bodies, if our bodies, or anything physical, indeed do exist there. The Risori maps provide the computer with the commands that will return a ship through that space to the universe from which they entered, but that is all. The fact that such commands exist, however, does argue logically that physical objects such as the computer—and our bodies—do exist within—"
"What's the blasted point, Spock?" McCoy erupted. "Why the devil are you wasting time telling us about something that can't help us?"
"Aside from the fact that the captain requested an explanation, Doctor, the imparting of knowledge is never a waste of time. In addition, while it is true that I myself cannot logically envision a method whereby we could successfully navigate through the extradimensional space, is it not possible that, if you collectively applied your minds to the problem, the human intuition of which you so often speak might provide a solution?"
"And since when have you become a fan of intuition, Spock?" McCoy snapped. "In any event, it's not the sort of thing you can turn on or off just by snapping your blasted fingers! And if you think—"
On the Devlin, Sherbourne gasped loudly, and everyone on the Enterprise bridge spun toward the screen. Sherbourne's face was contorted, his lips pressed tightly together, his fingers gripping the arms of his command chair like a vise.
"Captain Sherbourne! What—"
"Haven't your creatures had enough fun, Kirk?" Sherbourne grated between clenched teeth. "Do they want the rest of us this time? Is that why you came back, to help them finish us off?"
"They're not—!" Kirk began, half shouting, but he broke off abruptly as Sherbourne's image vanished from the screen.
And then the nexus filled the screen, but it was no longer even circular. It seemed to have shattered, as if it were a plate that had been struck by a bullet. But even as they watched, the breaks healed. The multicolored chaos of energy arced across the gaps, welding the sections together into a misshapen whole.
But before the sealing was complete, a jagged lightning bolt of energy, several times as massive as the dozen that had existed before, erupted from one of the breaks.
And it was headed straight for the Enterprise!
Sulu, not waiting for orders, automatically started to take evasive action, but it was too late.
The runaway energy simply moved too rapidly, covering the distance between the nexus and the ship in fractions of a second.
Briefly
, violently, the maelstrom of energies surrounded them, blotting out all the stars, all the other gates, everything.
Then the energies themselves vanished.
And with them, everything else.
Everything was gone—the Enterprise, the stars of the Sagittarius arm, their own bodies, everything.
Except their minds.
Once again, they were in the limbolike nothingness of extradimensional space.
Chapter Twenty-five
SPOCK WAS FREE.
His body did not exist.
Despite the catastrophic circumstances of an instant before, there was a moment when all the turmoil he had left behind was blotted out, when all that mattered to him was this sudden renewal of the freedom he had experienced twice before. There was even time enough for a strangely detached elation to fill his mind. If this is what happens to all who are absorbed by the nexus system, his thoughts told him, perhaps it is for the best. Life-forms, particularly those that call themselves human, are forever being betrayed by their bodies. Here such betrayals would be impossible.
But the elation fled, far more swiftly this time than during his first encounter with the bodiless temptations of limbo. Once again, he realized, though still with a touch of sadness, that he was simply rationalizing. His responsibilities had not vanished with the real world. They still existed, were still as powerful as they had been only moments before, and it would be both dishonorable and illogical to try to ignore them.
And then, as if let loose by a suddenly ruptured dam, the memories of the chaos and destruction that had been left behind in normal space flooded back. The unreal detachment vanished, and a sense of urgency gripped him once again. Starfleet Headquarters had been evacuated, perhaps already swallowed up by the catastrophically failing nexus system. Earth itself, according to Captain Sherbourne, was threatened, if not already absorbed.
And Kremastor, whose ship held the only known solution, was lost.
Or had fled.
By now he could be in any of an unknown number of universes.
Or in the limbo of extradimensional space, where he would be even more inaccessible.
But none of that mattered. He had to be found.
There was, therefore, only one logical course open to Spock: to search for Kremastor. To do otherwise, to not immediately undertake the one course of action that offered even a minuscule chance of success, would be both illogical and irresponsible.
Without hesitation, he reached out, opening his mind as he could never have opened it while burdened with the body that held him captive in normal space.
Though fully aware that the sensation could be mere illusion, Spock felt his mind spread outward like the expanding globe of the ship's sensors.
As he had done during his first experience in extradimensional space, he touched the others—Commander Ansfield, Dr. McCoy, the captain, Uhura, Sulu, Woida, and the hundreds of others who had been on the Enterprise. But this time, instead of attempting any real contact, any communication or comfort, he only allowed their mental patterns to register and then let them slip away as his mind continued to flow outward.
Then another cluster of patterns—Sherbourne and the crew of the Devlin? Was that why the Devlin's signal had vanished? Had they, too, been swallowed up by the chaos of the failing nexus system?
For an instant, Spock paused, knowing they were experiencing this for the first time, but after only the briefest of touches he pulled away and let their patterns fall behind. Even if he could communicate with them, what could he tell them that would help? And whatever time he spent in an attempt to communicate, whether he was successful or not, would only delay his search for Kremastor.
And he could afford no delays.
But would he recognize Kremastor even if he did find him? He had had no mental contact with him, so how could he recognize the pattern?
And what else would he find here? How many others had this limbo swallowed up over the millennia? Through how many millions or billions of mental patterns would he be forced to search?
And what if there were beings native to these dimensions? Could the entities themselves be such natives? Or had they—
Suddenly, without warning, there was contact.
But not with Kremastor.
In an instant, Spock's mind was inundated with blind, unreasoning terror.
In another instant, images from unremembered nightmares swarmed around him, summoned out of the nothingness to provide a reason for the otherwise inexplicable, illogical terror.
It was the entity, of course, perhaps the entire swarm of entities.
Logically, it could be nothing else.
And, knowing the terror's source, Spock also knew that he could control even this unprecedented assault. Particularly here, unburdened by an often treacherous body, he could overcome virtually anything.
Methodically, he began to blank out the hollow, nightmare images, the senseless, illogical images that the human half of his mind had always insisted on manufacturing but which his Vulcan discipline had, until now, been capable of suppressing before they reached his full consciousness.
Meticulously, he began to isolate the terror and lock it away from the logical, reasoning part of his mind, just as he had always isolated and locked his emotions away in a place where they could not affect his actions.
And as he slowly forced the terror to retreat, as he gradually regained full use of his mental capacities, another realization came to him.
He was not alone with the entities.
Another mind was there, another pattern—a pattern that had not been totally left behind with the others of the Enterprise.
Another mind, a human mind, that had almost certainly been savaged by the same irrational terror that had, in those first moments of contact, nearly destroyed even Spock's mind.
A mind that, based on all that he knew of the undisciplined nature of human thought processes, should have been reduced almost instantly to virtual catatonia. Even the captain, who had been able to withstand the lesser assaults when the Enterprise had first come within range of the Sagittarius nexus, could not have withstood this vastly more powerful assault.
But this mind was not paralyzed with fear.
From the moment it appeared, it had literally screamed out another, radically different emotion: exultation!
For an instant, the terror surged back into Spock's mind, and he found himself wondering wildly if the exultation he felt soaring about him could be coming not from the human mind he had sensed but from the entity itself. If, somehow, the entity had finally achieved some millennia-delayed objective and now saw its ultimate victory over all life within reach, it could be the source of the exultation.
But the instant passed, and the exultation remained.
Reaching out, he touched it.
And the mind behind it.
It was, he realized with only mild surprise, the mind of Commander Ansfield.
And in that instant of recognition, there was also a blending, sudden and chaotic, Ansfield's mind sweeping effervescently through his, its memories sparkling.
And he saw what had sparked the exultation, saw what had, suddenly and unexpectedly, flashed into her mind only moments before.
He saw the truth that she had discovered about the entity, and for one glittering moment he shared her exultation, shared her memory of that pulse of intuition. And he shared her even more exotic memory of how something in her mind had grasped the emotional energy previously bound up in terror and somehow turned it inside out, into the exultation that now dominated them both.
Only in humans would such an illogical transformation be possible, his Vulcan half thought with a mixture of envy and relief. Only in humans could love be turned to hate, joy to tears, terror to exultation, in an instant.
And only a human, certainly no Vulcan, could have had the flash of insight—inspired, he wondered, by yet another of her "musty volumes"?—that had revealed the truth to her.
A truth that he re
alized, now that he had shared her triumphant thoughts, was only logical.
And, more importantly, a truth that confirmed his own earlier convictions about the entity's lack of hostile intent.
For it was not malevolence that drove the entity's actions, only a constant, unending terror. For all the millennia it had roamed the nexus system, during all the times it had emerged into the alien universes it stumbled into, it had to have been at least as terrified as any of the life-forms it had encountered.
The entity was, her flash of intuition had told her, from a truly alien universe, a universe where the laws were not merely modified versions of those in a "normal" universe but truly and incomprehensibly different.
And, like all life-forms that cross into other universes, the entity had brought its own universe's natural laws with it. Otherwise, it could not have survived.
And it was the alienness of these physical laws that generated an instinctive terror in whatever life-forms the entity came near. As the alien, eight-legged form of a spider can generate an instinctive fear on a conscious level in humans, the fragments of the alien universe that the entity carried with it generated a much more powerful instinctive fear, a terror that reached into the deepest, most fundamental levels of the mind.
And those terrorized life-forms, unaware of the true source of the terror, reacted by dredging up imagined but familiar sources as rationalizations. Spock himself had reacted precisely that way only moments before he had become aware of Ansfield's presence. Like an imaginative human walking through a graveyard at midnight, he had conjured up a thousand imaginary horrors. To a sourceless fear, he had assigned a source, as had countless others before him.
And in real space, these encounters could only be worse. There the terror could be shunted onto real objects. A fellow crewman could be seen as a scheming enemy. An approaching ship could be seen as a deadly danger. Reflexively, the victims of such terror would strike out violently at whatever their emotion-drenched minds tricked them into believing was the source of that terror.