“Deck four,” Kirk said.
“What’s ‘short-sheet’ mean?” Joseph asked.
Kirk grinned at his son. “We’re going to learn a lot on this trip.”
Joseph grinned back.
But as the turbolift door closed, Kirk looked again at the command-room door, wondering why Janeway had called his attention to it, and what other secrets she was hiding from him, what other secrets he was yet to discover.
7
COORDINATES UNKNOWN, STARDATE 57483.3
Spock floated in darkness, cloaked in the comfort of logic.
It was all he had left.
He had no concept of time. That had been stolen from him when the Reman attacker had strangled him into unconsciousness.
How long that oblivion had lasted, he did not know. But since his awareness had returned in this environment of sensory deprivation, he had counted out six standard days.
As the first webs of consciousness had been redrawn within him, he had briefly considered the possibility that he was a disembodied katra within the caves of Mount Seleya. But such a remnant of his personality would have no memory of his mode of death, only of the final moments leading up to the transfer of his katra to the chosen repository. He had undertaken such a transfer only twice. Once aboard the Enterprise, with McCoy, and what had transpired after he had placed that ineffable part of him within the doctor’s mind he had no knowledge of. His recollection consisted of melding with the doctor in the engine room, and then slowly awakening in the Temple of Logic, with the wisps of nonbeing slowly dissipating over the months of his recovery on Vulcan.
Of his second katric transfer, he had even less recollection.
But in this case, he remembered the shock of his hands on his attacker’s ears, the realization that the attacker was Reman, and the long fall from darkness into darkness as consciousness fled.
Yet though he floated free of gravity, without even the pressure of clothing around him, he could feel his pulse, hear his blood in his ears, sense the movement of air in and out of his mouth and nostrils. He swallowed saliva, fanned his face to feel a breeze, ran his fingers along his throat to feel swelling there, but no other sign of injury.
He was alive, mind and body joined.
Thus logic insisted that as dire as his current position was, it was not his captors’ intention to kill him.
Torture was a possibility, though most intelligent species had long ago learned that it had little effect on Vulcans.
As for sensory deprivation, Spock suspected that several years in this environment might be enough to induce signs of instability. But the lessons of extended meditation developed by the first wave of Vulcan’s interstellar explorers who had set out on decades-long, sublight voyages to distant stars, had been well learned by subsequent generations. Spock had more than enough accumulated data to keep his mind occupied for years, if that was what was necessary.
A more direct route to torture might simply have been removal of food and water. But Spock had yet to detect any sign of thirst or hunger, even though his body still excreted waste. Since he had no recollection of ingesting anything during the time he had been conscious in this void, logic dictated one of two possibilities: Either his captors had the ability to interrupt his awareness without his knowledge, and during those interruptions they forcefed him; or he was being constantly supplied with water and nutrients with techniques similar to the noninvasive medical-transporter drug-delivery systems being developed at Starfleet Medical.
The latter possibility was the simplest explanation, so Spock accepted it, and concluded that his captors were supported by sophisticated technology.
That conclusion implied that though it was a Reman who had captured Spock, the unknown planners who had set the Reman on his mission were likely not Reman.
After six days in the void, that was as far as logic had taken him: He was in no danger of death, little danger of torture, but with no idea why he had been abducted, or who was responsible.
The only aspect of emotion that Spock allowed himself to contain was his hope that whatever his fate, T’Vrel, T’Rem, Soral, and the others of his support group had been spared it; that he, Spock, alone had been the target of the raid. Unfortunately, given that he had heard disintegrations, Spock feared that if he was the target, then the others were already dead.
“Do I detect remorse, Ambassador?”
Spock listened carefully for the acoustical aftereffects of that question, to determine its likely origin point in relation to his position. At the same time, he created a logical decision tree, addressing the new issues raised. Did the question’s apt timing suggest he was in the hands of telepaths who could probe his mind without his awareness? Did that mention of remorse suggest that his assistant, Marinta, who was not present in the Soltoth Caverns, had also been captured and interrogated?
“It means everything and more, Ambassador.”
Spock calmly accepted that some form of telepathy was in use, and instantly began to employ basic blocking techniques, effective even against highly trained Betazoids.
“Blocking will not be effective.”
Spock decided to test the limits of his captors. He dropped into full meditation, an absolute cessation of all thought.
“I am disappointed, Ambassador. Thought never ends.”
Spock moved to a new technique, created a mindpicture of the mountains near his family estate, the same ones he so often had retreated to as a youth, after arguing with his father. That powerful, looming landscape had always offered comfort to him, and he sought its towering presence now, as a pathway to total peace.
But sudden cold wind shocked him from his meditation, and as abruptly as if he had been slapped, Spock found himself on a frost-rimed ledge of the mountains of his home. He could look down past the foothills and see his family compound, ringed by a low wall of ancient red sandstone blocks, smoke threads from the kitchen chimney untwining in the breeze. All around him were the lofty, shadowed peaks of the protective mountains.
Spock gasped in the cold air; the sudden shift in perspective, the pull of Vulcan gravity, the onslaught of daylight after so long in darkness, all sensations overwhelming the meditative calm he had sought.
“Bring back memories?” a pleasant, familiar voice asked.
Spock turned unsteadily on the ledge, became aware of sharp stones crunching under his bare feet. He glanced down to check his footing, then nearly lost his balance in surprise.
His body had been transformed.
He was a youth again, lean muscles, slight build, long dark hair fluttering across his eyes.
He had on blue denim trousers and a buttoned shirt like those he had seen worn by the humans of his mother’s family; an act of teenage rebellion that had inflamed his father.
“Do you know when you are?” the familiar voice asked.
Spock reclaimed his equanimity long enough to look up at the source of the voice, and even as he saw the Vulcan who stood with him on the ledge, he knew immediately that this was all an illusion.
“What if I said it was not an illusion?” Saavik asked.
Spock hesitated before answering. Illusory or not, Saavik’s beauty overwhelmed him. She appeared the same age as she had been when he had first met her, when she had been an instructor at Starfleet Academy. But instead of the uniform she had worn at the time, she stood before him now wrapped in a traditional Vulcan wedding shawl, as all brides did on the third day of the ceremony, when the couple was at last left to their privacy and the blood fever.
The delicate, transparent fabric flowed around her in the breeze, making it appear as if she floated in and out of Spock’s vision, here in detail, there in suggestion, alluring, enticing, shattering to all constraints of logic.
“I will ask you again,” the illusion of Saavik said. “Do you know when you are?”
Spock’s voice cracked like an adolescent’s as he answered. “My first Plak-tow.” It was the only explanation for the unsettling effect her presence was havi
ng on him.
Saavik held out her hand to him, smiling in the private way reserved for Vulcan lovers. “You can experience it again.”
Spock fought the fire in his blood without giving visible sign. “I recall it perfectly,” he said. “And you were not my partner.”
“But later,” Saavik whispered, “when we had met, when we were free, did you not wish she had been me?”
“You are an illusion,” Spock stated. “I am on a holodeck.”
“How little you know,” Saavik replied as she began to spin on the ledge and her shawl dissolved and—
—as if he had been slapped again, Spock felt the startling onset of free fall, and once again floated. But this time, he was surrounded by stars in all directions.
He looked around, quickly identifying the constellations as they appeared from Vulcan: A’T’Pel, the sword; Stol, the chalice; Sarakin, the crossed daggers dripping with the glowing green nebulae of Plak Marn. All names from deep in Vulcan’s bloodstained history.
But he found no sign of Vulcan’s primary, no brilliant points of light to indicate Vulcan or her system’s planets.
And still he felt the breeze of his hands as he moved them before his eyes.
The holodeck had been transformed from a Vulcan mountainside to a planetarium.
“It is not a holodeck,” another voice said. Not Saavik’s, but the voice that had spoken earlier, from the all-enveloping darkness.
“If there is a point to all of this,” Spock said aloud, “it escapes me.”
He heard chiding laughter in reply.
“A Vulcan admitting defeat?”
“I admit nothing. Merely make an observation.”
“But you cannot draw a conclusion?”
“I can draw several.”
“Tell me.”
Spock was intrigued by the question. “Can’t you read my mind?”
“Telepathy is not at work here, Ambassador. Neither is a holodeck.”
“Then I am at a loss to understand my position, and your motives.”
“Very well, let us try another way.”
Spock braced himself for another abrupt transition, but when it came, it was gentle.
First the stars slowly rolled around him as he felt gravity begin to make its influence known, giving him the sensation that he was lying on his back on a soft surface.
Then the stars rippled and smeared as if they were going out of focus. Other shapes and lights overlaid them.
One shape became humanoid in form. The gravity grew stronger.
Harsh light glared down at Spock. He tried to raise his hand to shield his eyes and see the humanoid.
His hand wouldn’t move.
He was strapped to a diagnostic bed.
He looked around, moving only his eyes, saw the familiar green luminescence of a Romulan glow, decided he was in a Romulan medical facility.
He shifted against his restraints, felt a sharp pain in his inner thigh, looked down the length of his naked body to see an intravenous tube taped to his thigh. A much more primitive solution to nutrition than the transporter-based technique he had postulated.
“It is how we kept you fed,” the voice said.
For the first time, Spock could determine the position of the speaker, just behind him and to the right. The specificity of that knowledge made him accept that after all the illusions he had experienced, this was reality.
He tried to look in the direction of the speaker, but his head was even more firmly held in place than his arms and legs.
“The artificial environments you created for me,” Spock said. “Generated by neural pattern induction?”
He sensed movement to the left, shifted his eyes in that direction, and his eyesight had recovered enough to reveal that the humanoid standing over him was a Reman.
The pale, gray-skinned humanoid wore a red technician’s smock, and angled his head toward Spock, but where he actually looked was unknowable. His light-sensitive eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark data goggles. Spock could just make out the backscatter glow of the images projected on the circular lenses. He interpreted them as basic medical scans of his body.
“Are you a doctor?” Spock asked.
“There are no Reman doctors,” his unseen captor said from behind him. “At best, the Romulan Assessor allows certain trustees to be trained in basic medical procedures related to mining accidents and childbirth.”
Spock made the logical assumption. “Then this is a Reman medical facility.”
“To be accurate, it is a trauma care center. The only full medical facilities on Remus are for the exclusive use of the Romulan Assessors.”
Spock hid his reaction at the logical conclusion that he was now on Remus, and changed the subject. “Will you show yourself to me?”
Light footsteps moved around to his right, and a female Romulan stepped into view, dressed in simple Reman garb.
For a moment, Spock was so certain it was Marinta that he had to consciously fight to keep his expression neutral.
But when the young woman stopped moving, Spock could see that though there was a resemblance, it was only general.
The woman seemed to sense Spock’s misidentification. “Do I look familiar to you?” she asked.
Spock knew that whatever was going on, the Romulan was having this conversation only because she needed something from him. He decided to make her work for it.
“Should you look familiar?”
“We have met before.”
Spock blinked. Aside from the slight resemblance to Marinta, he was certain he had never seen this woman.
“I believe you are mistaken.”
“Never.”
“Then may I ask where and when we have met?”
The woman shook her head. “Better to concentrate on the present.”
Spock took her at her word, certain it would annoy her. “In that case, how is it that you read my thoughts without telepathy?”
His captor patted his hand. “Ambassador, you were never held prisoner in an antigrav chamber. You have been on this treatment bed for—since your capture.”
Spock noted that she didn’t wish to reveal how long he had been held. He set that question aside. “How is that conducive to reading one’s mind?”
“I stimulated the base of your brain, specifically, the pons. You spoke your thoughts aloud. All of them.”
Spock betrayed nothing of the outrage he felt. He decided that whatever was holding his head in position must be a type of induction helmet: a device capable of affecting his neural functions by focusing electrical fields at specific neurons. If any sensory input could be routed directly to the brain, then it was no surprise the false environments he had found himself in were so perfect.
“If you know everything I think, then why am I still alive?” Spock asked.
“Is that why you think I’ve brought you here?”
“It is obvious you require information from me.”
The woman nodded. “That is true.”
“Then have I not provided it?” Spock knew his thoughts had been far-ranging the past six days of his captivity.
“Not yet,” the woman said.
“Have you thought of just asking me what it is you wish to know?”
The Romulan shook her head. “Information flows both ways, Ambassador. Simply by asking my question, I will be providing too much information about myself.”
“Madam, I am your captive. What good will information do me?”
The Romulan thought that over.
“May I ask your name?” Spock prompted.
“You will know it when you remember it.”
“Fascinating,” Spock said.
“You have the same effect on me.”
Spock decided he had nothing to lose by forcing the issue. “Ask your question.”
The Romulan gave his immobilized hand a squeeze. “Given a choice between love and death, why do you so often choose death?”
Spock stared up at her, conv
inced that was only the preamble to a more specific inquiry.
But after several moments of silence, he realized that was, indeed, her question.
For the first time, Spock wondered about the mental state of his abductor, so he answered carefully.
“I am not aware of having chosen death over love in the past.”
“On the mountainside, you could have chosen Saavik.”
Spock narrowed his eyes. Whoever this woman was, he was beginning to suspect she wasn’t Romulan after all.
“That was an illusion.”
“No,” the woman argued. “It was sensory input directly fed to your brain, indistinguishable from those signals processed by your own eyes and ears, pressure receptors, olfactory nerves, pleasure centers.”
“Except,” Spock pointed out carefully, “the situation itself was not logical, and thus unreal.”
The woman shook her head as if confused. “Love and logic?”
Spock was utterly baffled by the conversation. “Madam, am I to understand that you have abducted me for philosophical reasons, not political ones?”
“Ambassador, I have abducted you to save you. To save Romulus and Remus. To save Vulcan. The Federation. The Klingon Empire. The four galactic quadrants, all worlds known and unknown. Life itself.”
Spock’s logical decision tree underwent a sudden pruning as he realized the woman was insane.
“Save us from what?” he asked politely.
She smiled sadly at him, as if she saw through his attempt to humor her. “From your loneliness. From your despair. From your…ignorance of the true reality of existence.”
Spock had dealt with fanatics before. Indeed, it was remarkable that the unsettled conditions on Romulus had not resulted in many more irrational movements achieving prominence.
The secret, he knew, was not to challenge a fanatic’s beliefs, but to gently inquire about them, showing one to be open to enlightenment, encouraging the fanatic to see a chance to bring another into the fold.
“You speak of things I do not understand,” Spock said, “and it is not my intent to cause offense. But may I ask, with respect, what the true reality of existence is?”
For a moment, Spock could see that his tactic worked exactly as he had planned. The woman’s smile transformed, going from a pained and solemn expression to beatific transcendence.
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