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show them to whoever sent them here."
"You believe they are communicating with someone
on the other side of their portal somehow?"
"What good would it be if they couldn't?"
"Very little... Zennor says he cannot go back."
"That's what he says."
Silence dropped between them for a few moments,
long enough for them to hear the emptiness of sickbay,
the passive twitter of the diagnostic panel above Spock,
the whisper of some machine in the lab that had been left
on to do whatever it was doing, the mournful presence of
that sliced-up poppet beyond that door over there.
"I am sorry, Captain."
Kirk looked up. "For what?"
Spock's face was cast in regret and he didn't mind
showing it. "I know you have forged a kind of synthesis
with Captain Zennor... a friendship."
Bitter, Kirk gazed at the deck. How often had this
happened to him in his life? To find synthesis, to have
commonality, to make friends with someone, only to
have that friendship blistered and ultimately sundered
by some outside consideration. Competitors at Starfleet
Academy, at Starfleet itself, in space, where his drive for
the win had also driven a stake into the heart of any
chance for amicable feelings when all was over.
And in deep space, there had been flat-out enemies he
wished he could've known better.
But when the smoke cleared, he always stood alone.
Some fences damned mending, and certainly climbing.
He'd had to turn away time after time, leaving animosity!
where he had wished to have comradeship.
That was why, he realized in this moment particularly,
he cherished and so unflinchingly defended and pro-!
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tected both Spock and McCoy. They had stood with him
and never given in to the differences between themselves
and him, as so many others had.
Differences. Differences.
Damned differences.
Suddenly he was mad again. "The friendship's about
to be tested."
"How soT'
"I'll tell you how. I'm beaming over to that ship and
get our doctor back. And while I'm there I'm going to see
exactly what it is that we're up against."
He punched the nearest comm. "Kirk to bridge. Put
Captain Zennor on."
The blade in his voice evidently came across for all it
was worth, because Nordstrom didn't respond.
Very quietly, Spock asked, "Are you going to tell him,
Captain?"
"I don't know. I promised I'd help him .... "
The Vulcan's face was limned with concern. "That
could be most imprudent."
"I know."
"This is Zennor."
"We have a problem. Your Dana and others have
attacked my first officer and kidnapped my doctor."
"Garamanus. . . kidnapped your McCoy?"
"He did and I'm not taking it well." '7 must go to my ship immediately."
"I'm going with you, and I'm bringing a Security
team."
"They will be killed instantly. You must come with me
alone, if you insist upon coming. We can only go there one
time. I will give you the modulation to drop the block of
your transporter beam, but as soon as we go, they will
change it again. But we must go immediately. It is your
McCoy's only chance."
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Chapter Sixteen
"VERY daNgEROUS for you to be here now. If there is
reaction, I cannot protect you."
"I'll take my chances. Where's my chief surgeon?" .
"Come with me. Prepare yourself."
Not very reassuring, as phrases went.
The tour through Zennor's ship was skin-chilling. Like
wandering through a cave behind a suddenly agile bat.
Zennor, who had moved with such cautious reserve
down the broad, bright, open corridors of the Enterprise,
now skirted down shoulder-wide passages coated with
dark velvety moss and overhung with some kind of web.
Kirk stumbled several times until his eyes adjusted,
then stumbled a little less, but the deck was nearly
invisible in the dimness. He felt he was stepping foot by
foot through the chambers of a hornet's nest. Somehow
they had beamed directly into these veins and now were
moving through them.
There was something beneath his feet, not carpet or
deck, but a litter of crunchy and mushy matter, all
different sizes, different textures, as if he were treading
over a dumping ground. Fungus gave under his weight
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and puffballs popped as he stepped on them. Other
things cracked. The air was thick and musky with smells
both plant and animal.
When he thought he couldn't stand another meter of
the cloying dimness and moss that grasped at his hair
and arms, Zennor led him out into a broader cavern,
though still coated with growing plant life--and a sense,
if not a visible presence, of other life, of eyes watching
him. To all outward senses, he and Zennor were alone
here.
But Kirk had spent his life being looked at. He knew
when it was happening. There were beasts in the walls.
No, the walls didn't have eyes, but they did have
punctures, dark recesses from which more of those skulls
peered out, many skulls, but not humanlike skulls. There
were many kinds, some belonging to creatures he hadn't
seen yet but now assumed were here. Unless they were
dragging along the skulls of aliens they met on their
voyages, Zennor's amalgamated crew was even more
amalgamated than Kirk had first guessed. These were
most likely the skulls of fallen comrades.
So they kept the skulls of some, and the "souls" of
others. And who could tell what else? Foreign cultures
could be very complicated.
Suddenly he wanted the chance to get to know them
better, and felt that chance slipping away as he dodged
behind Zennor up their icy slope.
He forced himself to ignore the skull niches as he
hurried behind Zennor, also forcing himself not to
bellow an order to move even faster.
All at once they burst out into a blinding brightness,
creased with the noise of hundreds of voices making
disorganized, wild cheers and chants. Kirk shaded his
eyes and paused until they adjusted, then tried to look.
The chamber was enormous, as big as a stadium and
half again taller, lit with green and yellow artificial light,
and twisting with a white haze created by vents dearly
spewing the stuff near the ceiling. From the configuration
of the Rath, he guessed they were near the aft end. So the
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propulsion units weren't back here, but somehow arranged
elsewhere. He'd have to remember that--
But thoughts of hardware and strategy fled his mind as
he looked up, and farther up.
In the center of the huge foggy chamber stood--yes, stood--a giant mannequin in humanoid form, with a
head, two arms, two legs, like a vast version of one of
those poppers, except that this mannequin was a good
six stories tall and made entirely of slats of wood and raw
tree branches, and veined with braided straw or some
kind of thatch. Its arms stood straight out like a rag
doll's, bound at the wrists with some kind of twine; its
legs ended at the ankles, with only stumps of chopped
matter for hands and feet.
Bisecting the hollow arms, legs, and torso of the
wickerwork giant were narrow platforms -- scarcely
more than slats themselves, but enough to stand upon--and
there, in the middle of the straw giant's see-through
right thigh, Leonard McCoy hovered twenty-five feet
above the deck.
The doctor clung pitifully to the twisted veins of
thatch, looking down upon a gaggle of cavorting beings,
all types of misshapen vagabond demons, from the
snake-headed beings to the horned ones to those more
squidlike than anything else, and the others who looked
as if they had wings.
Evidently this was Zennor's crew, dancing around the
straw legs of the monster, laying more straw and twigs in
heaps around the giant's ankles, and chanting while they
did this.
The Furies. Even if it wasn't them, it described them now.
Kirk stared, measuring the critical elements, consumed
for a moment with astonishment and a bad chill.
He knew a preparation for a bonfire when he saw one.
Stepping forward from the entrance way, he felt the
green-tinted light reflect off the topaz fabric of his
uniform shirt and sensed how bizarre his facial features
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must look with that light cast from below, like something
boys would see playing with tlashlights in a pup tent.
"Jim!" McCoy knelt on the slats and called down,
pushing his face between the veins of thatch.
Kirk turned to Zennor. "What is this?"
Zennor gazed at him with ferrous eyes that held no
apology. "Punishment."
The crew of the Rath, at least the off-duty crew
presumably, jumped and rushed, chanting all the way,
around the giant straw mannequin in a gansly kind of
organization, each going his own way at his own pace,
but all going in the same direction. They deposited
bundles of straw, branches, and even whole trees at the
ankles of the giant. Their metal wristbands, chains,
medallions, bracelets, and belts bounced and rang, creating
a fiendish jangling in the huge hall. On their metal
belts, many of them had those linen poppets, each in the
rough image of the wearer, doing another kind of dance.
As Zennor stood before him in his dominating and
statuesque manner, Kirk was careful to stand still, not
attract any more attention than necessary until he could
size things up.
A sundry train of beings broke off from the dancing
circle and hurried toward him and Zennor. It took all of
Kirk's inner resolve to stand still and let Zennor handle
his own crew.
The horrendous gagsic descended upon them in a rush
until the last four feet, when they skidded to a stop and
made Kirk glad he was still wearing his portable translator,
because they were all speaking at once.
"We're home!" a winged thing said to Zennor.
"The Dana told us the news!" crowed an elongated
creature that seemed to have no bodily mass other than
bones thinly veiled with rubbery brown skin. It would've
looked like a Halloween skeleton, appropriately enough,
except that it had four arms.
A tentade-head repeated, "The Dana told us the
good news!"
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"This is our place!" someone else trilled in a high
voice, clearly meant to congratulate their leader.
"The Dana had no authority, Morien," Zennor said.
His voice had a tenor of bottled rage. "You should be at
your posts."
"But we have a criminal, Vergozen," the tentacled
person said, and looked at Kirk. "Is this another one?"
The "it" gestured at Kirk.
"He is here for the final visitation," Zennor snarled,
and Kirk couldn't tell whether it was sarcasm or not.
Then Zennor motioned for Kirk to move past them.
"Fetch me the Dana."
Morien quickly said "Yes, Vergozen!" and skittered off
into the crowd.
Kirk took his cue and moved toward the wicker
colossus. Other creatures seemed uninterested in him,
though many glanced up in mild curiosity. They were involved in their work and looking forward to what they
were about to do. They didn't seem to care about visitors
who walked in with their captain.
He came to the bottom of one straw leg, as big around
as a warp engine, close enough to speak to McCoy in a
normalish voice, without attracting attention.
"Bones," he began tentatively, "you all right up
there?"
"So far." The doctor gripped the reedy filaments of the
colossus. "Did they hurt Spock?"
"They knocked him off his bunk. Chapel's taking care
of him. I've never seen her so happy."
"Are the Klingons here yet?"
"Just popped onto our long-range. We were about to
make a border run when you turned up missing. Now I'll
settle for anything I can get away with."
Frustrated, McCoy glanced around, then reached
down with a toe and found a lower slat, and climbed
do wn through the wooden webbing until he could stand
inside the giant's right leg, just above the knee. He could
only make it about another seven feet down before the
straw webbing stopped him.
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"Jim... they're going to set fire to this."
Caught with empathy, Kirk nodded and tried to be
clinical. "Yes, I know. I'm working on it."
"I broke their laws with that damn doll. You might not
be able to do anything about it."
"Don't make any bets."
"I don't want to," the doctor said. "Jim, listen--when
they put me in here, they shoved in a lot of other things.
They put my medical tricorder in with me, and all this
other stuff." He maneuvered with difficulty, having to
stand on slats of bowing straw twisted to provide a
foothold that was obviously temporary, and scoop up
bits of material from around him. "There are thigh and
hand bones here ... and hanks of hair, skin scrapings
.. and this bony plate is the back part of a cranium."
"The place is full of skulls."
"Yes, I know. But this skull is Andorian!"
"That's not possible," Kirk said, but it came out with
a terrible resignation that surprised even him.
McCoy raised a long gray bone, scored with cracks.
"And this thighbone... it's human. From Earth. It's a
perfect D.N.A match." He leaned on the slat with one
knee and held up his medical tricorder with his other
hand.
"Could they have acquired it here in the past twenty-four
hours?"
"They could've. Except that they'd have had to raid an
archeology lab for this. It's old as a bristlecone pine!"
"How old is that?"
"As nearly as I can estimate, it's over four thousand
years old. A human bone!"
"Bones, are you sure about this?"
"I've had nothing else to do in here"
"They put those in there with you just now?"
"Just a half hour ago. I think they're raiding their own
coffers and placing things in here that look physiologically
like me. At least to their minds. Some kind of
symbolic connection--who knows?"
"Can you explain the D.N.A link?"
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The doctor scowled. "I'm not saying that humans or
Klingons went out into space and met these people, but
I'm wondering if somehow these people ended up on our
planets a long time ago and affected our beliefs. If a
shipload of Vulcans showed up on Earth in the fourteen-hundreds,
they'd sure be taken for devils."
"And life has been around the galaxy for millions of
years. Is it really any surprise if Earth, Vulcan, the
Klingon homeworld, and a lot of other planets might've
had visitations?"
"Given the numbers, I'd be surprised if they hadn't."
McCoy squirmed for a better grip.
Kirk gripped the straw spokes too, as if to make a
connection. "The dangerous bottom line is that it's
beginning to look like this was their space."
"Then we'd all better get used to carrying pitchforks,"
McCoy said, "because I think that's the conclusion." He
held up the human thighbone and shook it. "Unless they
killed a human in the past twelve hours and somehow
made this bone appear to my readouts as if it were four
to six thousand years old. I think we got that mythological
stuff from our Greeks and Egyptians and druids, but I
think the Greeks and Egyptians and druids got it from them."
He swept the medical tricorder to indicate the circle of
aliens, then reached out between the wood and straw and