The Folded World

by Jeff Mariotte

  But when they reached the third corner, they found only a blank wall. They fanned out, checked it for gaps or some sort of release.

  “It appears to be solid,” Vandella said.

  “So it does,” Ruiz agreed.

  “I guess he didn’t go this way,” Tikolo said. “I was sure he did.”

  “If the instruments worked . . .” Greene began.

  “Yeah, but they don’t. At least, not with any consistency.”

  “Where to now, Tikolo?” Chandler asked.

  Tikolo jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Back where we came from. See if we can find him some other way.”

  Chandler gave an abrupt nod. Tikolo sensed disapproval flowing off her in waves. She shared Tikolo’s belief that she should have been put in command. She would never say it, never question the captain’s directive out loud, but her meaning was clear enough.

  Tikolo shrugged it off. Captain Kirk had picked her, and that’s the way it would be. She led them back down the hall, through the archway, and—

  And they were no longer in the alien starship, but in a hallway she recognized, though it had been years since she’d been there.

  A hallway at Starfleet Academy.

  Sixteen

  Kirk was the first to step off the bridge, following the route that Bunker, then the search party, had taken. He didn’t know where the doorway led, but given their experience so far, he expected that the destination would not be exactly whatever he expected.

  It was, in fact, not even remotely what he expected.

  He found himself suddenly immersed in a cloud of greenish smoke or fog, cool and damp but with an edge that made his skin prickle. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the rest of the group was similarly engulfed. “Mister Spock?”

  “It does not appear to be a toxic gas,” Spock said. “Not that our tricorders can be relied upon.”

  “But if it was fast-acting,” McCoy added, “we’d be feelin’ it already.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Kirk said. He stepped up his pace, figuring that the sooner he was out of the cloud, the better he’d like it. Others in the party were complaining and asking questions to which there were no easy answers. Those were typically the kinds of questions that made their way to a starship captain, he knew. The easy questions could be answered by anyone. The impossible ones landed on his desk. Sometimes he surprised himself by coming up with answers, but he had a feeling that would not be the case as long as they were inside the dimensional fold.

  With no more warning than when it had appeared, the cloud dissipated. But now, instead of being aboard the big alien ship, Kirk was standing on that green-tinged landscape he had seen from the ship’s bridge. The ground was hard and uneven beneath his feet. A light, warm breeze wafted across him, scented with what seemed to be kiwi and nutmeg and maybe a hint of gunpowder. He could understand why Romer had liked the place, if what he was experiencing was at all indicative of the actuality.

  “This really isn’t possible,” McCoy said, from close to Kirk’s shoulder. “We’re not here.”

  Kirk looked, blinked, shook his head. “You’re not here, Bones,” he said. “That’s for sure.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I can hear you, but I can’t see you.” In fact, he couldn’t see anybody, although he could hear other voices around him. The landscape appeared to be deserted.

  “What in the hell are you talking about, Jim? I’m standing right in front of you.”

  Kirk extended his arm, reaching toward where the doctor’s voice seemed to be coming from. He felt nothing.

  “Watch the eyes, Jim! I need those.”

  “Apparently mine aren’t good for much. At the moment, anyway.” Kirk was trying to project calm. Whatever he and the others were experiencing was almost certainly not real. That lack of reality could have profound consequences, he feared, especially if people became too emotionally invested in their immediate perceptions of reality. He needed to keep the mood light, if he could. “Anybody else needing an eye test?”

  “I could use one, Captain,” a woman’s voice called out. “Unless you really have grown three feet taller in the last five minutes.”

  “Not that I’m aware of. But anything is possible. Literally, anything.”

  “Jim—” McCoy said. He was interrupted by another jolt, like a one-note earthquake. Kirk was already growing accustomed to those. He flexed his knees and rode it out, curious as to what would come next.

  When his vision cleared, he and the crew were inside the most impossible scene yet. They were once again on the alien ship, which he had always believed was the case, but inside one of the wider corridors. He guessed that they remained in basically the same positions they had been “outside,” with two crucial differences.

  Some of them were standing on the deck, some on each wall, and some on the overhead—except that each of those was the deck; there were no visible walls or ceilings. Everyone noticed at about the same time, and although the effect was disconcerting, the gravity in each position appeared equally strong. Nobody was falling.

  The other difference was that this time, they were not alone.

  Those mixed in with them were unmistakably Ixtoldans. Kirk recognized their thick-limbed but graceful bodies, the gold-dusted skin, the tight but flowing manner of dress. There must have been thirty of them, in small knots of three or four, standing on all the same unlikely floors as the Enterprise crew. They held unheard conversations, walked briskly here or there, and when their paths took them in proximity with the Starfleet personnel, they didn’t adjust course or hesitate, but simply walked right through.

  “They’re not here,” Kirk said.

  “Not at present,” Spock agreed. He was almost directly above Kirk. Or below. “Or what passes for our present.”

  “This could . . . make a person question his senses.”

  “If he didn’t,” McCoy said, “I’d have to question his sanity.”

  “They are real, though?” Kirk said. “The Ixtoldans?”

  “I have no reason to believe otherwise,” Spock said.

  “Except that they can walk through us.”

  Spock took four steps to his left and passed through a pair of Ixtoldan females who appeared to be sharing a private joke. “And we through them.”

  “We’ve got to find the others and get off this ship,” Kirk said. “We can’t do this indefinitely.”

  “Agreed,” McCoy said. “But how do you propose we search for them, when we don’t even know where we are?”

  “I’m . . . still working on that, Bones. As soon as I know, I’ll tell you.”

  • • •

  “This can’t be,” Miranda Tikolo said. “It looks just like the Academy.”

  “It is the Academy,” Chandler said. “It’s the floor I lived on.”

  “Are you sure?” Greene said. “I mean, it looks familiar, but—”

  Chandler ran her fingers across a bluish streak on the wall, about waist high. “I made this mark,” she said. “Roughhousing with friends. Mags had just dyed her hair, and it was still damp.”

  “You know how impossible that is,” Ruiz said. “Right?”

  Chandler didn’t seem to register his comment. She was staring at the third door down from the mark on the wall. She had gone rigid, every muscle as tight as a drum. “Eve,” Tikolo said. “Are you . . . ?”

  Chandler’s gaze was distant, focused not on the door but on something beyond it. Her voice was thin. “That was our room,” she said. “Mags . . . she was one of those girls who take things so seriously. Pushed herself, you know? She always had to be the best. She said her parents expected it of her, but I think she expected more from herself than anyone else did.”

  “Nobody joins the Academy to be second-rate,” Greene said.

  “It was more than that, for her. She had to be first, best, and brightest. At everything.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure,” Tikolo said. She had known people
like that at the Academy, too, and after. In some ways, Chandler could have been describing her. “Driven” hadn’t begun to describe her in those days.

  “I was sure Mags could live up to her own standards,” Chandler said. “If anybody could. I didn’t worry about her. Sometimes I teased her about it. I thought that if I didn’t take it too seriously, maybe she would relax a little. Only . . .”

  She let the sentence trail off and took a couple of steps closer to the door. Suddenly, Tikolo was afraid Chandler would open it, and she didn’t want to see what was on the other side. She didn’t know what would be there, but it wouldn’t be good. That much, she knew for certain.

  “Only what, Eve?” she asked. She moved toward Chandler, to block her from the door if she had to.

  “Only she didn’t. Instead of relaxing, she got worse. Tense. Afraid. And then . . . then she failed a big exam. I don’t even remember what class it was for.”

  She started to reach for the door, and Tikolo grabbed her arm. “No, Eve,” she said. Her certainty grew more powerful. That door had to stay closed, no matter what. “You don’t want to go through there.”

  “I came back to the room after class,” Chandler said, as if Tikolo weren’t even there. “And I went inside. The lights were out. I called her name. The lights came on and I still didn’t see her, but she—” Chandler swallowed back a sob. Tears glistened in her eyes, and one glided down her left cheek. “She was on her bed, up against the wall. The wall was smoking, and so was her head. Her phaser pistol was on the floor.”

  Tikolo positioned herself between Chandler and the door. Now she knew basically what waited on the other side: Mags, or a reasonable replica thereof. Complete with head halfway blown off by her own phaser. “That was a long time ago, Eve,” she said. “There’s nothing we need to see in there now. I’m sorry for what happened to Mags, but—”

  “Tikolo,” Ruiz said. “Any idea who they are?”

  She looked past Chandler. Ruiz was pointing back down the hall, in the direction they had come from. The hallway seemed much longer now, and shrouded in shadow.

  Inside the shadows were figures, hunched over, only their eyes and teeth catching any light at all. They were watching the group, and those teeth looked long and sharp.

  Were they real? Was any of this real? If she let Chandler open the door, would Mags be on the other side, or would it be a circus clown, or the surface of the sun?

  Tikolo had been afraid before. She knew what it felt like and was alarmed to recognize its return: the hollowness at her core, her guts twisted into knots, her mouth as dry as the floor of a desert, her heart slamming against her chest like an animal that wanted out. She heard the roar of blood in her ears and all she could think was that she had to get away, she had to get out of here before . . .

  Before what?

  Tikolo didn’t know that.

  She only knew that all of it, this ship, the Starfleet Academy hallway, the creatures in the darkness, it was all too much.

  She knew fear. She was distressingly well acquainted with panic. And panic was returning, rushing up from within her, rising like a tide. When it filled her, if it did, she wouldn’t think clearly. Her world would narrow to a single point and nothing would matter except escape.

  The captain had put her in charge of this mission. She had to find Bunker and get him back to the rest of the landing party. That meant she had to put aside her worries, quell the panic, and get to work.

  She grabbed Chandler again, harder this time. “Come on, Eve. Your Academy days have been over for a long time, and there’s nothing behind that door you need to see.” Then she pointed her phaser toward the shadowed beings. “And you, I don’t know if you’re real or not. But I recommend that you don’t try to block our way, because we’re here from the Starship Enterprise, and we’re coming through!”

  Seventeen

  The ship gave another jolt, and James Kirk saw Paul O’Meara standing before him in chain mail and a helmet, a pike in his metal-gloved hands. Behind him a castle rose from a misty plain, its walls made from heavy gray stones. Mounted knights rode across a lowered drawbridge; Kirk thought he recognized Bones at the front of the pack, Romer behind him, then Spock and the rest of the landing party.

  A jolt and he was alone, floating in the void of deep space, only it was a negative version. The emptiness was pure dazzling white, the visible stars and planets black spots burning through the white.

  A jolt and he was on a windswept landscape that could only be the surface of Vulcan: sheer cliffs in the middle distance with what might have been the constructs of Vulcan hands atop them, vast unbroken plains of ruddy stone, an orange-red sky above.

  A jolt and he was back on the bridge of the Enterprise. But it was different, bigger, with dozens more display screens lining the walls. He didn’t recognize most of the bridge crew, or the uniforms they wore—belted red coats with white detailing, black pants and boots. Those he did know, Chekov and Spock and Uhura and Sulu, were older than the versions he served with.

  A jolt and he was on a Starfleet training shuttle, flown by someone he hadn’t seen since his Starfleet Academy days and whose name he couldn’t bring to mind.

  A jolt and he was at the center of a massive city, with buildings blocking out the sky and so many lights blazing against the dark that it seemed night would never fall again.

  A jolt and he was in a tunnel, deep underground. Wooden beams held the earth at bay, and glowing rocks, placed at regular intervals, provided illumination. Four-armed creatures that might have been molded from the very clay they worked dug at the ground with rough-hewn wooden shovels.

  A jolt and he was once again on the alien ship. The members of the landing party were there, too. Most looked as if they’d been through a war. Haunted eyes, drawn faces, pale skin. In a way, he supposed they had. Not a literal war, but a war against every sense they possessed. He felt the battle fatigue, too, a weariness that seemed to begin at his core and emanate outward.

  “We seem . . . stable,” he said. “For the moment. Everyone all right?”

  “A long way from all right, Captain,” McCoy said. “I expect everyone else feels the same way.”

  Romer shook her head. Her dark hair hung in limp, sweat-soaked curls. “That was the strangest, scariest thing I’ve ever experienced,” she said. “Those—whatever they were—those monsters, with their yellow eyes—”

  “No,” countered Beachwood. “Their eyes were bright green, like light passing through emeralds.”

  Kirk hadn’t seen either of those things. “Never mind that,” he said. “I think we all went different places, saw different sights. Trying to compare will only be more disorienting.”

  “I can’t help worrying about Miranda and the others,” O’Meara said. “If they went through that, too, wherever they are.”

  “We need to track them down,” Kirk agreed. He noticed another member of the security force, Jensen, a burly guy with thick, black hair on his head and showing at his collar and cuffs, who was sitting on the deck, his back against a wall, head down between his knees. He was breathing in short, anxious pants, and his hands were trembling uncontrollably. Kirk inclined his head in the man’s direction. “Bones.”

  McCoy met his gaze briefly, nodded once, and went to the man’s side, crouching beside him. He placed a hand on the man’s arm. “We’re all okay, Jensen,” he said. “So are you. Whatever happened to you there wasn’t—well, I can’t say it wasn’t real. But it was only momentary. You’re here with the rest of us now.”

  Jensen tried to reply, but he couldn’t force words out around his ragged panting.

  McCoy reached into the bag he carried on a strap that cut across his chest. “I’m going to give you something that’ll calm you down,” he said. “Try to take a deep breath, hold it in for a count of three, then release it slowly.”

  Jensen tried to comply, and as he made the effort, McCoy shot a mild sedative into his arm. The man’s breathing started to normalize. �
�It’s just a mild one,” McCoy assured the man. “Can’t afford to have you going to sleep. You never know when we’ll need that strong back.”

  Jensen showed a smile that was at least half grimace. “Thanks, Doc. I’m good now. I think, anyway.”

  McCoy helped him to his feet. The others appeared to have largely recovered; most of the blank stares and gaping mouths were gone, replaced by what Kirk considered a determination to get the job done and get home. But a couple were still glassy-eyed, and he caught more than one fighting to contain tremors.

  McCoy pulled him aside. “We’ve got to get this wrapped up, Jim,” he said. “Much more of this craziness and we’re going to be dealing with some severe psychological trauma.”

  “We can’t just walk out on Bunker and the others, Bones.”

  “I’m not suggesting that. I’m only saying we need to be quick about it.”

  Kirk summoned Spock to join the whispered discussion. “What do you think?” he asked. “Can we resume the search party without that happening again?”

  “I do not know, Captain,” Spock said. As he spoke, Kirk realized that he was as shell-shocked as the rest. His flesh was as pale as Kirk had ever seen it. “I really have no idea how to interpret what just happened. It was most illogical.”

  “Logic and this damn ship have nothing to do with each other,” McCoy said.

  “Maybe not,” Kirk said. “But we’re here and we have to address the situation as it stands. I was hoping maybe you had recognized a pattern that eluded me, Mister Spock.”

  “No pattern at all,” Spock said.

  “You hate that, don’t you?” McCoy asked.

  “I would not use the word ‘hate’ to describe—”

  “That’s exactly the word. You love logic, and we’ve gone down the rabbit hole and left logic behind. You look for patterns, because they’re a way of making sense of the universe, and where we are there is no sense.”

  Spock seemed to realize that McCoy wasn’t taunting him, but trying to engage him. His eyes focused on the doctor’s worn, comfortable face. “You are correct, Doctor,” he said. “I suppose I do hate this ship, if that is how you define the word. I wish we had never come.”