by David Mack
She aimed her second disruptor at him, just to ensure there would be no misunderstandings with regard to who was in control of the vessel. “I’ve put it to the test and found it wanting. But I’m going to give it one last chance to redeem itself.”
His fury decayed into stunned disbelief. “You brought me here to tell me that? To gloat?”
Sadira pitied his inability to see what was obviously the only endgame left to them. “No. I need you and the centurion to prevent our enemies from capturing the Transfer Key.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?”
She prefaced her reply with a sinister smile.
“How else? With a glorious, final act of pure spite.”
Twenty-eight
Taken prisoner: a humiliating end to what had promised to be a glorious career. Mirat seethed as the Enterprise towed his ship away from Centaurus, back into the cold void of space, to face whatever passed for justice in the decadent corruption of the Federation.
The enemy captain’s voice crackled over the intership comm. “. . . repeat, please acknowledge, Velibor. This is Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. Prepare to surrender your vessel and be boarded. If you resist, we will have no choice but to use deadly force. You have thirty seconds to acknowledge, Velibor. Enterprise out.”
No one sent a reply because Major Sadira—the usurper, the fool, the quisling human in Romulan dress—hadn’t ordered one. Instead they all stood like statues, bearing mute witness to the result of her gross incompetence, her arrogance, her unchecked zealotry. Instead, all anyone paid any heed to was the shared effort of Mirat and Creelok, who labored in vain to make the ship’s half-demolished main computer accept their command codes.
The commander sighed. “Let’s try again. Computer, acknowledge Creelok, Commander Tevan. Authorization code seven, nine, green, three, t’liska.”
The synthetic voice of the computer spat back a garbled mess of nonsense syllables. Did that mean it understood the code? Or that its inputs were as fouled as its verbal interface? There was no easy way to tell. Creelok signaled Mirat to continue the process.
“Computer, acknowledge Mirat, Centurion Tulius. Authorization code six, zero, white, four, dhael.” Clicks, scratches, and a long rasp of distortion constituted the computer’s response to his command codes. As before, there was no way to tell what the hashed audio signified.
Sadira stared daggers at the two of them from behind the barrels of her disruptor pistols. “What’s taking so long?”
“The computer’s too badly damaged,” Creelok said. “We can’t tell if it’s accepting our codes for the self-destruct sequence, or if it will know what to do once it has them.”
The human woman trembled with rage. “Can’t you detonate manually?”
Mirat took umbrage at her tone. “We can, but we’ll need to stall the Enterprise.”
“I’ll buy you what time I can. Work quickly.” She opened the intership channel to the Federation vessel and marshaled a cruel smirk as Kirk’s face appeared on the main viewscreen. “We meet again, Captain. I trust you remember me.”
“All too well,” Kirk said. “And I look forward to questioning you in my brig. Tell your crew to stand down and prepare to—”
“I wouldn’t do that, Captain.” Sadira punched commands into her panel on the main console. “I’ve targeted the Transfer Key for one last demonstration. And unless you release this ship from your tractor beam and permit us to depart, I intend to trigger it.”
Kirk’s eyes narrowed. He said nothing, but looked toward someone out of frame. Meanwhile, on the Velibor’s command deck, Creelok and Mirat lifted a deck panel to expose the manual activation controls for the bird-of-prey’s self-destruct package.
The Starfleet captain lifted his chin in defiance. “You’ll find me hard to bluff, Major.”
“Oh, this is no bluff, Captain, I promise you that.” She keyed in another command, and the main screen split into two images: Kirk on the left, and on the right, the pair caught in the crosshairs of the Transfer Key’s targeting mechanism, a Vulcan man and a human woman. With a single tap on her console, she sent the targeting scanner’s image to Kirk’s screen. “If even one of your men sets foot on this vessel, you can kiss those two souls good-bye.”
“Hold your fire.” Under his breath, Kirk passed orders to someone off-screen.
At Sadira’s feet, Mirat’s and Creelok’s labors met with success. The manual triggers switched into place as designed, and the countdown began. Mirat watched the commander look up to catch Sadira’s eye and confirm with a nod that the ship’s self-immolation was under way.
The major kept her expression neutral as she noted Creelok’s signal, then she returned her focus to Kirk. “I applaud you, Captain. Advising the Klingons to scatter was a wise move.”
“I wish I could take the credit. It was Ambassador Sarek’s idea.”
“Really? Then I salute your humility in giving credit where it’s due—or should I say blame?” Her index finger pushed the Transfer Key’s trigger.
What happened next unfolded in the wink of an eye.
The middle-aged Vulcan man and the human woman vanished in a blinding pulse of light that whited out the right half of the viewscreen before it blinked off for the last time.
Aboard the Velibor, the handful of systems still functioning on the command deck dimmed and faded to black. Sadira’s parting shot had left the ship dead and dark.
Acting on nothing more than his last memory of where Sadira had been standing, Mirat sprang through the darkness and seized a wrist. Brittle bones splintered in his grip—it had to be the human woman’s hand. He wrested one disruptor from her control—
She fired her other disruptor and vaporized part of his left hip, along with most of the main console behind him. Then he fired—and the crimson burst showed him the side of her skull cooked off in a fatal blast.
Then all was quiet inside the Velibor . . . all except the synthetic voice of the self-destruct package, an isolated system with its own power supply, capable of operating even when all other systems on the ship had failed. Mirat dropped his disruptor beside Sadira’s corpse, then collapsed on top of her, broken in body but not in spirit.
Creelok kneeled and put his hand on Mirat’s shoulder. “Well done, Centurion.”
“Thank you, Commander. It is . . . an honor . . . to die in your service.”
“The honor is mine, old friend.” He turned a rueful look toward the dwindling digits on the self-destruct’s countdown display. “If only the choice had been ours, as well.”
* * *
“Time, Spock,” Kirk demanded, keenly aware it was running out.
“Twenty-six seconds until the Velibor self-destructs.”
Sulu added, “Five seconds to minimum safe distance from the planet.”
As always, they were cutting this far too close, but Kirk hid his anxiety behind a mask of confidence. “Stand by to deactivate tractor beam, on my mark.” He opened an intraship channel. “Bridge to transporter room. Do you have a lock on the Transfer Key?”
“Trying, sir,” answered Lieutenant Galloway. “It’s a slippery little—”
“Just beam it aboard, on the double.” Seconds ticked away on the ship’s chronometer. “Chekov, deactivate tractor beam. Sulu, keep us just inside maximum transporter range.”
“Releasing tractor beam,” Chekov confirmed, keying in the command. The Velibor glided into frame on the main viewscreen. Its ventral raptor art was scarred and blackened, and burning vapors trailed from its ravaged warp nacelles.
“Fifteen seconds to self-destruct,” Spock said.
Chekov reached for the tactical controls. “Shields up, Captain?”
“Not until we have the Transfer Key.” It was a calculated risk, lingering without shields inside the Velibor’s projected blast radius, but the moment the Ent
erprise raised its shields it would be unable to beam over the alien device.
Spock’s baritone was devoid of inflection: “Ten seconds.”
Kirk thumped his fist on the arm of the command chair. He was about to give the abort order when Galloway’s voice trumpeted over the internal comm, “The Key’s aboard, sir!”
“Shields up! Hard about, full impulse!” The deck and bulkheads sang with the rising hum of the impulse engines pushed suddenly into overdrive, and the Velibor slipped out of sight as the Enterprise veered away. “Chekov, aft angle, on-screen!”
Pinwheeling stars blinked to an image of the bird-of-prey, which shrank to a dot as the Enterprise accelerated back toward Centaurus. The Velibor was little more than a dim gray dot on the curtain of night when it bloomed into a series of fiery white detonations, each larger than the last. Within seconds the pyrotechnics faded; no trace of the Romulan vessel remained.
Spock descended into the command well to stand beside Kirk’s chair. He reported with cool efficiency, “The Velibor has been destroyed, Captain.”
Kirk admired his first officer’s stoicism; despite having seen his father blinked into the alternate universe by the Transfer Key, Spock exhibited no dismay, no agitation. It was an impressive display of emotional control, but Kirk knew it was a charade. Underneath that veneer of calm, he’s got to feel something. Rage? Regret? Worry? There was no point asking about it. The only trait Vulcans seem to prize more than logic is privacy. He stood from his chair. “I’m going down to get the artifact. Spock, you’re with me. Sulu, you have the conn.”
“Aye, sir.” Sulu handed off the helm console to a relief officer and moved to the command chair as Kirk and Spock walked to the turbolift.
The battle was won, but Kirk felt no sense of triumph. Too much blood had been shed and too many lives had been lost for him to call this a victory. Worst of all, the day’s most bitter task still lay ahead.
He had to tell Doctor McCoy his daughter was gone.
Twenty-nine
Una jolted back to consciousness with a start and a gasp, then looked around to get her bearings. Martinez and Shimizu sat on the glassy-smooth floor of what she presumed was a cell, their heads drooped in defeat. A narrow shaft of light angled through a pinhole in a mostly contracted iris that blocked the only means of egress from the dungeonlike chamber.
A tingling sensation lingered on the nape of her neck and sent a shiver down her back. “Guys? Did either of you feel that?”
Martinez’s reply was monotonic. “Feel what?”
“That electric prickling feeling, like cold fire. I’d swear that’s what woke me up.”
“It means someone just passed through the gateway,” Shimizu said.
“You’re sure?” She thought back to the first time she had noticed the peculiar flash that they’d said heralded new arrivals. “Why didn’t I feel it before? Back in the canyon?”
“Maybe you weren’t acclimated yet.” Martinez projected morose disengagement. “None of us noticed it at first, but we all felt it when you arrived.”
She didn’t doubt a word they were saying, but she also failed to imagine how it might be true. What did it mean? What was the significance of becoming acclimated? Why did so much about this place feel off-kilter?
Her limbs and back ached as she stood. Neither of her friends stirred as she walked the perimeter of their cell and examined its walls, floor, and ceiling for any signs of weakness. Even one vulnerability could provide them their first step toward escape and freedom. Hoping to revive her friends’ spirits, she asked, “Tim? How long have we been down here?”
“Who knows? Hours? Days? I can’t tell anymore.”
“Damn it, Tim, get it together. I need you men sharp if we’re going to get out of here.” At the end of her first circuit of the room’s periphery, she moved to its center and looked up. At first she thought her eyes hadn’t adjusted, but then she blinked in surprise. “Where’s the pit?”
Martinez groggily lifted his head. “What pit?”
“The one we fell through.” She pivoted one way, then the other. “Were we moved after we hit the bottom?”
“No,” Shimizu said. “This is where we’ve been the whole time.”
“This is where we’ve always been,” Martinez added. “You, too.”
“Neither of you remembers being on the dais? Or having it swallow us and spit us out down here?” Nothing but blank looks from her comrades. She turned away from them.
What’s going on? Why don’t they remember? Were they mind-wiped? Do the Jatohr know enough about our neural biology to do something that sophisticated?
She plumbed her own memories and made full use of her powers of perfect recall. The atrium chamber, the meeting with Woryan, the dais, the pit—she could recollect it all in perfect detail. It had happened, she was certain of it. But if that was true, where was the pit? How had it vanished, leaving not even the outline of a portal?
Wait, the portal on the dais—it appeared the same way. The dais was smooth and solid one second, spiraling open the next.
Una knew there were a number of smart materials that could do what she had seen. It was reasonable to think a species as technologically sophisticated as the Jatohr should be able to manufacture and control such substances. But that fails to explain Martinez’s and Shimizu’s gaps of memory. Or the strange passage of time in this place. Or our perpetual lack of appetites.
Her thoughts drifted back to their crossing of the gray sea: the way the pathways had appeared without making ripples in the water, the lack of any sensation of movement, of acceleration or deceleration, or of wind resistance as the three of them had sped to the city seemingly without moving. Then she remembered the way one place in this realm would become another, but only when her attention and focus wandered, a psychological phenomenon a Terran psychiatrist had once dubbed “highway hypnosis.”
It’s all so surreal, like a permanent waking dream . . ..
Clarity dawned inside her mind. The very act of recognizing the dream changed her perception of it. She felt its falsity now. As if the stone walls of the cell were nothing more than painted papier-mâché, the forgotten horizon nothing more than an ever-shifting backdrop. It reminded her of the telepathic illusions foisted upon her and Captain Pike years earlier by the Talosians. Those fantasies they had overcome by channeling violent, primal emotions. Might that work here? She cast off her Illyrian discipline and tapped into her deep well of anger.
She walked to the contracted iris barring the cell’s exit. The hole at its center, through which a narrow shaft of light speared the cell’s darkness, was just wide enough for her to slip her index fingers through. Behind her, Martinez and Shimizu got up and loomed at her back.
Shimizu’s voice trembled as he asked, “Captain? What’re you doing?”
“Getting us out of here.” She visualized the iris expanding at her tactile command—then she pushed her fingers apart. With a grinding of metallic plates against stone and one another, the iris dilated and vanished into the walls. She cracked a manic grin. It works!
Shock and wonder pitched Martinez’s voice. “How’d you do that?”
“Lucid-dreaming techniques,” Una said. “Plus a little trick I learned from an old friend.”
Shimizu peeked out the open portal. “What does this mean?”
“That this place isn’t what it appears to be.” Una led her friends out of the cell and down the empty corridor, whose surfaces had the look and texture of bleached, petrified coral. “None of this is real. It’s possible we ourselves aren’t what we think we are, not in this place.”
“I don’t understand,” Martinez said, jogging to keep up with Una’s long, proud strides. “You’re saying we might not be us?”
“No, I’m saying we’ve been changed. I don’t know how, or how it affects our chances of going home, but this universe is an illu
sion. A prison for our minds more than our bodies.”
The corridor terminated in a dead end. Una closed her eyes and pictured the rough coral walls melting into a smooth, opalescent texture, then spiraling open. When she opened her eyes, the wall obeyed her desire and dilated a doorway to the sprawl of the Jatohr city on the other side of a closed lagoon of gray water.
“Amazing,” Shimizu said, his voice a shocked whisper. “Let me try.” He stared at the water. Closed his eyes and creased his brow with strained concentration. He opened his eyes and his face drooped in disappointment. “I guess some of us are better at dreaming than others.”
Stepping forward, Martinez asked, “What were you trying to do?”
“Raise a bridge to let us cross the lagoon.”
“Okay.” Martinez shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Una watched him raise his hand, like a stage illusionist cuing a trick—only to register the same dismay when he opened his eyes to find nothing had changed. “I don’t get it. If we know it’s fake, why can’t we shape it?”
“I don’t know,” Una confessed. “Maybe it’s my Illyrian conditioning or my experience with lucid dreaming and telepathic illusions. But whatever it is, I’m not sure how much difference it’ll make.” She looked out at the city and realized that it, like the rest of this reality, was all just an extension of the same virtual jail. “Wherever we go, we’re still prisoners.”
Thirty
Doctor McCoy stepped onto the bridge and made a beeline for Kirk. “I came as soon as I—”
Kirk raised a hand to forestall McCoy’s question and kept his attention on the main viewscreen, where the bloodied and soot-blackened visages of Councillor Prang and his fellow Klingon delegates regarded Kirk through veils of black smoke.
Prang grinned. “Don’t mince words, Kirk! Is it true? You vanquished the Romulan taHqeqpu’?”
The captain answered without pride, “The Romulan bird-of-prey was destroyed.”