My Enemy My Ally

by Diane Duane

  "A person?" Ael said as McCoy and Lia Burke hurried up to join them.

  "No. Power of mind—without personality—" Spock actually made an expression, right out there in front of everybody: loathing. "Mindless. An abomination—"

  "A machine," Ael said bitterly, "working through cloned Vulcan brain tissue."

  "Too strong—" Spock said, struggling for control.

  "A great mass of brain tissue," McCoy said, getting a look of loathing very much like Spock's. "A tank full of Vulcan gray matter cloned from a single brain cell. No personality—but terrible power, programmed for some single purpose, and performing it mindlessly. Just another computer—"

  Jim's stomach turned. "This has to be the weapon they used on the Intrepid."

  "Or one like it," Spock agreed, straightening, gasping. "Captain, Intrepid's crew must be around here somewhere. The Romulans would hardly have set this weapon up in expectation that I would arrive."

  "But the Vulcans should have been on another level," Ael protested.

  "Maybe they—" The sound of shouting voices cut that conversation short. Mr. Matlock and about ten of his people leapt past Jim and Bones and Spock and Ael into the main corridor, opening fire before the approaching Romulans could. Jim shouted warning at them, and a few of the Security people managed to turn and meet the second group of Romulans who were coming at them from behind. Only several of these were armed; but this second group came crashing in among them with such speed and force that suddenly phasers were useless, there was too much mixing going on, too many chances to stun or kill a friend.

  Jim broke into a whirl of hand-to-hand, relishing it terribly as a release for all the anger and tension and helplessness of the past week. He knew he would pay the price later—his body always ached for days after one of these orgies of anger. Or maybe he would pay for it right now, since every one of these Romulans was about as easy to handle, one-on-one, as Spock.

  But training regularly with a Vulcan had its advantages; and though the Romulans might have drifted considerably from the Vulcan norm in terms of genetics, physiologically they still had the same weaknesses. The Vulcanid head and ears were relatively vulnerable, and as for leverage, Romulans flew through the air as well as anyone else. Jim busied himself with that—a double chop to the collarbone here, a broken kneecap there, a bit of tal-shaya that Spock had taught him over here. Every now and then he caught a glance of something that would have made him laugh, if he'd had time to breathe; tiny Ael, for instance, slamming a Romulan man nearly twice her height into a wall, putting a foot in his gut, grabbing one of his arms, and neatly relieving the poor man of his sidearm and dislocating his shoulder, all in one quick, rather casual motion. In the middle of a chop-and-kick combination Jim saw Lia Burke come up unnoticed beside a burly Romulan woman who was firing uselessly at the angrily advancing Ensign Naraht. Phasers, at least phasers on the conventional "one" setting, don't work on Hortas; but the unfortunate Romulan woman didn't have time to readjust her phaser, even if she knew that was what needed doing. Lia simply reached up a bit—the woman was tall—and swung her slender little fist sidewise into the Romulan's trachea, like a hammer. Even over the howling alarm klaxon, Jim could hear the crunch of cartilage. Goodness, Jim thought mildly, while breaking a Romulan's arm backward at the elbow, if Mr. Freeman is this good too, his yearly shots are probably going to be a very interesting event. I wonder if Bones'll be selling tickets? …

  —and suddenly the fight was over, except that there were still shouts coming from further down the main corridor. Jim dropped the unconscious Romulan he found himself holding and looked swiftly around at his people. They were mostly gasping, some still crouched for combat, unable to stop being ready. "Injuries?" he said.

  "Lahae's got a broken arm," Ael said, jerking her head at one of her people. "But she's well otherwise."

  "A few burns, Jim." said McCoy. "Harrison got it bad. I've treated him, but we need to get him back topside."

  "It's going to take a while, Bones. Mr. Athendë, carry Harrison. Spock?"

  "Captain," Spock said, stepping out of a pile of unconscious Romulans, and still looking very unwell, "there is some direction to this mental pressure. That way." He pointed down the corridor, toward all the noise.

  "That's it, Ael," Jim said. "The Vulcans are on this level, after all. Evidently this is one of those operations in which everything's going to go wrong right away. . . ."

  "Saves us wondering," McCoy said. "Spock, can you function?"

  "Barely, Doctor. As you delight in reminding me, I am half Terran—and for once that fact is serving me somewhat. My mother's side of the family has a history of being almost relentlessly non-psi sensitive. But as we get closer to the mechanism, the mind-damper, I will surely grow weaker."

  "There's no guarantee that the Vulcans will be where the damper is," Ael said.

  "Of course not. But if we can put it out of commission, they'll be free to try to escape—and that would make the odds a little more even."

  "Well then," Ael said, putting her head around the corner—pulling it back quickly and getting shot at for her trouble—"time to do something. Raha, give me a spare phaser, will you?"

  One of Ael's people tossed her a phaser. Ael detached it from the pistol grip, turned it over in her hands. "Where—Oh, here it is." She twisted the supercharge control on the back of it all the way, and tossed it lightly once or twice in her hand as the upscaling scream that signaled imminent overload began. "How long before it goes?" she said to Jim.

  "Five seconds! Ael—"

  "Three, two," she said, and put her head and her arm around the corner again, and threw the phaser right down the length of the corridor—an astonishing southpaw pitch, fastball swift and going a good four hundred feet down the corridor before it even hit the floor. And as the phaser hit, right among the Romulans massed and firing at the end of the corridor, it blew. The station shuddered slightly, and the concussion struck back down the corridor at the Enterprise group, a blast of hot wind and light that knocked Ael back into McCoy's arms and both of them hard against the wall of the side corridor.

  "Now!" Jim shouted, and led the way down the corridor, his people pouring down after him. The corridor's end was ugly, blackened by the explosion, and spattered green with Romulan remains and Romulan blood where it wasn't. Oh, God, some part of Jim cried in anguish, but the rest of him was far gone in the necessities of the moment, and paid the pain little heed. There was a large door at the end of the corridor. He tried his phaser on the middle of it; no response. A quick experiment on the walls and the doorframe produced the same result. "Refractory," he said. "Too thick. Spock, can you gimmick the lock? If we burn it, it'll probably just seal this permanently shut—"

  "Jim," Bones said, "forget it." He was supporting Spock from one side, and Mr. Athendë, already carrying the badly burnt Harrison in his tentacles, was holding Spock up on the other; the Vulcan slumped between them, nearly unconscious, trying to fight the mind-damping effect and failing. Little spasms of pain twisted his face as he kept fighting. Until they got this handled he would not think again, much less speak or move.

  "Who's here?" Jim said desperately, for he heard more shouts back in the direction they'd come: a lot more. "Electronics—" But most of his people were Security, and the others were from Medicine, Linguistics, Defense—

  "Let me try, Captain," someone said, pushing his way through the group; and there was Mr. Freeman, his usual neatness much the worse for wear. He was singed and smudged and bruised and had a black eye, and his hair was all over the place. But already he was on his knees by the door, snapping open a pouch at one side, fishing for tools. He pushed his hair back in his everyday get-neat gesture while using a decoheser to pop the flush cover off a small panel by the right side of the door. "Oh damn," he said at the sight of the panel's innards, an incomprehensible welter of circuits and chips. "It's all solids."

  "Mr. Freeman, Jim said grimly. The sounds of approaching Romulans were getting muc
h louder.

  "I know, sir—" Freeman said, poking around in the circuitry and doing God only knew what.

  It was taking too long. "Lay down covering fire," Jim said to the people behind him. "Ael—"

  "I can't help you here, Jim," she said, giving the panel only a glance and turning away. "Not a format I'm familiar with. Hilae, Gehen, Rai, over there to the side. You—Rotsler, Eisenberg, Feder, the other side. Fisher, Remner, Paul—here with me. The rest of you, mind the Captain and Mr. Spock, and fire as you like. Mr. Athendë, one of your phasers. Hate to use a trick twice—"

  "Mr. Freeman!" Jim said.

  "Captain, this isn't just something you can—"

  "Jim," McCoy said quietly, and rather sorrowfully, "the boy can't manage it, that's all. Back off."

  Jim looked up at McCoy in surprise—and so would have missed the look that settled down over Freeman's face at McCoy's words, had McCoy not been looking so fixedly at the young man's back. Jim, who could see Freeman's face from his angle, saw suddenly written on it a rage so terrible that for a second he wondered if Freeman was going to blow up like an overloading phaser himself. Then Jim wondered if he'd seen the look at all, for Jerry's face sealed over into an expression as cool as one of Spock's. Freeman did something brief and precise to the circuitry, changed tools, did something else to a particular logic solid in one quick fierce motion.

  The door sprang open.

  Behind Jim there were explosions, cries, shouts of anger and triumph. He ignored them and ran into the room. There was equipment of some kind, three walls' worth of it, all studded with controls and switch-lights; there was a fourth wall with a great window in it and another refractory door. And there were Romulans. One of them Jim stunned; the other, too close, he kicked right between the legs, where even Romulans are vulnerable, and Romulan females no less than the males. The third he never had a chance at, for Mr. Athendë, while still carrying the burned Harrison and supporting Spock on the side, had swept into the room right after Jim and thrown one of his major handling tentacles and various minor ones around the remaining Romulan's head and body, squeezing the man's disruptor right out of his hand so that it clattered on the floor.

  "Nicely done, Mr. Athendë," Jim said to the Sulamid, panting.

  The Sulamid curved several stalked eyes in Jim's direction. "Must protect wounded, Captain," he said; but even his eternal humor sounded a little grim at the moment.

  "All right," Jim said to the remaining Romulan. "Which of these controls the damper?"

  The Romulan, still straining against the tentacles that held him, turned an enraged look on Jim. "I'll tell you nothing!"

  —and the man suddenly gasped and began to turn an astonishing shade of dusky green-bronze. "Suggest you change your mind," Athendë said sweetly, as the great handling tentacles, as thick as tree limbs, began to squeeze. "Might lose temper otherwise. Or start to feel hungry. Love it when prey struggles."

  The Romulan made a sudden anguished sound for which Jim could see no reason—until he noticed a runnel of green making its way down the lower leg of the man's uniform, one of the only exposed parts of him. Jim reflected briefly that he still had no idea where a Sulamid kept its mouth, though now the question of whether the mouth had teeth in it seemed to have been resolved.

  "Have tasted better," said Mr. Athendë mildly. "But shame to waste. Better say something fast or will bolt my lunch and get on with work."

  The Romulan shuddered and moaned and gasped, turning darker—then cried out again. "Over there!" he said, his eyes flickering to the leftmost of the consoles.

  "Ael," Jim said. She had hurried into the room with several of her people, and together they went to the console and began touching controls, reading screens. "This is it, Captain. We can crash the effect itself easily enough—" and Ael reached out and tapped at a keypad, then hit several switches in rapid succession. "But I don't see any control for crashing the whole system from here."

  "No matter," Jim said. "We'll find the tank with the brain material and stick a sonic grenade in it." He turned around and gave his attention to that large window. Mr. Freeman was already down on his knees by the door adjacent to the window, working on another circuit panel. Looking through the window, Jim could see why; littered all over the floor of the great room were hundreds of bodies in Starfleet green and blue and orange. Some of them were stirring feebly.

  "Captain," said a weak voice. It was Spock, whom Athendë was still half-cradling in some spare tentacles. McCoy went to him, helping him to stand. "Jim—that mechanism is full of living material—"

  "Mr. Spock, I would like nothing better than to transport it out of here and find it a nice home on Vulcan," Jim said. "But the ship's screens are up, and she's not answering anyway, and we can't do it. If we leave the living material alone, it can be used against us again."

  "Not easily, Captain," Ael said. "If we destroy this board"—and she touched more switches—"this whole setup will go, and the connections to the brain tissue will fuse. In any case, it's time that we did one thing or another and got moving. It is getting noisy out there, and not even our people can hold that corridor forever."

  "All right," Jim said. "The computers at least. Everybody out of the way."

  Athendë and the others cleared away from the console side of the room, heading for the door to the large room where the Vulcans had been held. "Get in there and help them," Jim said. "Mr. Spock?"

  "A great pleasure, Captain," Spock said, unholstering his phaser and aiming at the key computer board. He blew it to bits.

  "'Pleasure' is an emotion, Mr. Spock," Ael said from behind them as the last few crackles and fizzes died out.

  Jim turned, wondering what that meant, and found Ael looking at Spock with a rather cockeyed expression. Spock gave it right back to her. "So I hear, Commander," he said, and together they turned and headed for the room full of Vulcans.

  Jim hurried after them, for the noise out in the hall was getting pretty loud. Many of the Vulcans were on their feet now, and more every moment. From across the room one staggered across to him. It was tall young Sehlk, the Intrepid's First Officer, and Jim reached out and steadied Sehlk as he almost fell over upon reaching him. "Mr. Sehlk, are you all right?"

  Sehlk stared at Jim, his face (in the cool Vulcan fashion) bewildered in the extreme. "Captain," Sehlk said with a brief, most unVulcan access of emotion, "it is most illogical for you to be here!"

  "Is it really?" Jim said, suspecting that he was going to have to get used to hearing that from every Fleet officer he met for a while. "I'm not doing anything for you and your Captain that he wouldn't probably do for my people, were our places reversed. . . .Meanwhile, I would rather beg the question—"

  "As you wish, sir."

  "Very good. Where's Captain Suvuk?"

  "Not here, Captain," the young Vulcan said. "The Romulans took him from us shortly after we were brought here. Logic would seem to indicate that they are attempting to force classified information from him—most likely the Intrepid's control codes and command ciphers, that being the only information he would have and we would not that would be of use to them."

  Useful indeed. With those codes and ciphers the Romulans could drain Intrepid's computers dry of all kinds of useful classified data—Federation starship patrol corridors, troop strengths and distributions—"Mr. Sehlk, they didn't harm him, did they?"

  "They tortured him, Captain," Sehlk said with terrible equanimity. "But that did them no good; mere torture will not break Command conditioning, as you know. The Romulans then attempted to bring their mind-techniques to bear on him. We tried to defend him at a distance, by taking the brunt on our own minds—and for a short while we succeeded in standing the Romulans off. Their techniques so far work better for large groups than for single persons. But the techniques they are using are apparently mechanically augmented in some way; once our interference was discovered, they put us all under the damper at such intensity that some of us, the more psionically sensitiv
e, died of it." Sehlk's eyes grew cold. "Can you imagine what it is like, Captain, to lie paralyzed for hour after hour, with a mind forcibly emptied of thought, of volition—though not of the knowledge of what has happened to you, or probably will?"

  "Mr. Sehlk," Jim said, "may those of us who have not be preserved from it."

  "We will see to that," Sehlk said. "Captain, when Suvuk realized that they were going to use such artificial augmentation to force his mind, he drove himself purposely into kan-sorn—a mental state similar to coma, but with this difference, that any attempts on the integrity of a mind in kan-sorn will destroy both mind and body. He made himself useless to them—and so he lies, somewhere in here, comatose. Captain," Sehlk said, "we must find him." And though the statement was certainly based in logic, there was more to it than that: there was the ferocious, unconditional Vulcan loyalty that Jim had come to know very well indeed.

  "We will," Jim said. "First we have to get you people out of here. Our position at the moment isn't the best—"

  "Acknowledged," Sehlk said, and detached himself coolly from Jim's grip, heading off a little unsteadily to see to his own people. They were recovering rapidly, more than half of them on their feet now, going about the room as swiftly and efficiently as they could. Jim spent about half a second simply being astonished at how many different kinds of Vulcans there were. On some level he had become conditioned to their being dark, and usually tall. But here were gigantic seven-foot Vulcans and little delicate ones, Vulcans slimmer even than Spock and Vulcans much burlier—none of them actually being overweight; Starfleet regulations to one side, Jim suspected nonglandular fat of being, as far as Vulcans were concerned, "illogical." And there were fair Vulcans, blond and ash blond and very light brunette, and, good Lord, several redheads—

  Most important, there were four hundred and eight of them. Jim could think of a lot of worse things than having four hundred Vulcans, all coolly furious over the loss of their Captain, at his back in a charge down that corridor.