by Gene DeWeese
Virtually the entire crew was being snatched from the Enterprise, leaving it a derelict! Or, worse, under the control of whomever was operating these transporters!
Automatically, Kirk took in his new surroundings, hoping against hope there would be something he could use, something that would give him even a hint about who was doing this and what he could do to counteract it.
Overhead, in the center of the otherwise featureless, arched ceiling nearly a hundred feet high, was a circular, faintly glowing formation that might have been part of the transporter equipment. Other than that glow, he couldn't locate the source of the relatively dim light that filled the entire room. Everything was visible, but, as if it were an overcast day on a planet's surface, there was no single source of light and not a single shadow anywhere.
"Spock!" Kirk called loudly while most of the massive room was still gripped by stunned silence. "McCoy! Uhura! Chekov! Scott! Tomson! Over here!" There was, he noted automatically, virtually no echo or reverberation, despite the hugeness of the room and the high, arched ceiling.
Everywhere in the room, faces turned toward Kirk's voice, but for the moment, except for those whose names he had called, there was only dazed silence in response. Spock and the others threaded their way through the disoriented crowd toward him, Spock slowing once to more closely observe another crew member—Ensign McPhee, it turned out—as he materialized less than a yard in front of him.
"Do any of you have a communicator?" Kirk asked when they had all gathered around him. "A phaser? A translator? Tricorder? Any equipment at all?"
Hands darted to belts but came away empty. Apprehensive or angry frowns creased all brows but Spock's, whose arched eyebrow was as eloquent as any of the other words or expressions.
"We seem to be on the receiving end this time, gentlemen," Kirk said when it became obvious that none of them had retained a single piece of equipment through the transport operation. "Whoever brought us here has separated us very neatly not only from the Enterprise but from anything we could use to defend ourselves, analyze our surroundings, or communicate with anything or anyone other than ourselves."
"Apparently, Captain," Spock said, looking slowly around. By now, the materializations seemed to have stopped, and the faint glow had disappeared from the massive transporterlike formation in the ceiling. The crew members—the entire four-hundred-plus ships' complement, from the look of it—were beginning to regain their voices.
"The question is," Spock went on, raising his voice to be heard above the growing din of hundreds of other incredulous and puzzled voices, "where are the ones who brought us here? Who are they, and what do they want? And of even more immediate concern, are they now controlling the Enterprise, and if so, are they aware that its damaged deflectors make it virtually defenseless or that portions of the Hoshan and the Zeator fleets will in all likelihood arrive within less than one standard day?"
"Brilliant, Spock," McCoy grated. "I don't suppose you've got any answers to go along with the questions."
"Not at this point, Doctor, but if you will be patient—"
From somewhere in the mass of milling people, an angry, incoherent shout cut Spock off in midsentence. Kirk, frowning as he turned toward the sound, heard a second shout, and then a scream.
Suddenly, there was silence everywhere except for the continued shouting—the cursing, Kirk now realized—from the one area. Wordlessly, he strode toward the distant voices, Spock and the others following, the crowd largely evaporating from his path as they recognized him.
As he neared the site of the disturbance, he caught the word "Crandall," sounding very much like an epithet itself, and he increased his pace. Crandall must have been picked off the Enterprise along with the regular crew members, and now, deprived of the protection of his detention cell, he was obviously fair game for those who, rightly or wrongly, blamed him for their present predicament. Within seconds, Kirk and Lieutenant Tomson were forcing their way through a tightly packed ring of more than a dozen angry men.
"Break it up, gentlemen!" Kirk snapped, and at the sound of his voice there was sudden silence.
Inside the ring, two ensigns had a flushed and battered Crandall between them. One was gripping Crandall's green tunic front and lifting him until he stood on tiptoes. "This yellow son of a—" the other began, his voice stiff with fury, his balled fist drawn back to strike again, but Kirk cut him off sharply.
"That's enough, mister! Both of you, let him go! Now!"
"But Captain—"
"I said now!"
With obvious reluctance, the one lowered his fist and the other untwined his fingers from the crushed fabric of Crandall's tunic front.
"We will deal with Dr. Crandall once we are safely out of here," Kirk went on, "and not before. For the moment, he is in the same boat as the rest of us, and I won't have any more of this undisciplined behavior! All our efforts—repeat, all our efforts and concentration must be focused on understanding the situation we're in. Otherwise, we may never have a chance to get safely out of here and back to the Enterprise. Is that understood, gentlemen?"
"But he's the one who got us into this mess in the first place! What if he—"
"Dr. Crandall has acted foolishly, perhaps maliciously, and he's caused us problems, including damage to the ship. He is not, however, solely responsible for our being here, perhaps not even partially responsible. We will keep an eye on him from now on. You—all of you!" he said, raising his voice to a shout that carried throughout the huge room. "All of you will observe and listen and, above all, think! Is that clear?" For a long moment there was total silence, but then, first from the two men directly in front of him and finally, like a rush of murmuring echoes, from everywhere in the room: "Yes, Captain, we understand."
Grasping Crandall's arm, Kirk marched him out of the now dissolving knot of spectators, bringing him to a halt in the middle of the group of officers a dozen yards away.
"As for you, Dr. Crandall—"
"Why didn't you let them finish me?" Crandall asked, an odd tone of defiance in his voice, anger in his bruised features. "It would have saved you a lot of trouble!"
"You may be right, Dr. Crandall," Kirk said coldly, "and if you try to pull anything else, I will let them finish you. In any way they see fit. Understood?"
For a moment, the defiance from Crandall's voice seemed to glitter from his eyes, but then he slumped and averted his gaze. "I understand, Captain," he said, his voice as subdued as his new posture.
"I hope you do, Crandall, I sincerely hope you do," Kirk said. "Lieutenant Tomson, don't let him out of your sight."
"Captain!" A single voice, high-pitched and excited, pierced the newly rising hum of voices that was beginning to fill the room. "Our phasers and communicators—everything's over here!"
The one who had called—a young ensign, her assignment on the Enterprise her first post out of the Academy, Kirk remembered as he saw her—was waiting eagerly at the edge of the huge circle of Enterprise personnel. Beyond her—beyond an edge defined by the transporterlike circle in the ceiling—the cavernous room extended another fifty even more dimly lit feet. "Ensign Davis, isn't it?" he said automatically.
"Yes, sir," she said, freezing under his gaze, momentarily positive that, somehow, by just looking at her, he would become aware of her earlier disloyalty, her foolishness in believing, even for a few days, the insidious hints and half truths that Crandall had tricked her with.
"There," she said, breaking the grip of the guilty delusion as she turned abruptly and pointed into the dimly lit emptiness. "They're out there, but I can't get at them! There's some kind of barrier!"
"Good work, Ensign," he said as he looked in the direction she was pointing and saw, in a recessed area of one wall, where the light was the dimmest of all, hundreds of pieces of equipment—communicators, phasers, tricorders, medikits, planetary survival equipment, universal translators, virtually every portable item from the Enterprise and some never meant to be portable. They appear
ed to be suspended in midair in the recessed area, as if lying on invisible shelves.
Frowning, Kirk took a cautious step toward the equipment.
Immediately, he felt the barrier. Obviously a force field of some kind, it felt not like a wall but, at first, like a gentle wind in his face.
"Keep back," he said, motioning the others away. "Spock, be ready to pull me out of this thing, if it looks like I'm in trouble. I'll keep up a running account as I go."
"As you wish, Captain," Spock said, experimentally extending one arm to reach past Kirk, deeply into the field, then withdrawing it.
"Jim!" McCoy protested, but fell silent as he saw the determined look on Kirk's face. "All right," he said after a second, "but just remember, all my medical equipment is back on the Enterprise. Except for the tricorders and medikits, which appear to be on the other side of this invisible wall."
Nodding his acknowledgment, Kirk moved another short step forward and began talking.
The wind, no longer a gentle breeze, mounted with each inch, until it was no longer a wind but a steadily increasing pressure, mounting until it felt like a smooth, nonviolent version of the pressure air exerts against a hand that's extended out through the window of a moving vehicle. The pressure was not against any single point or group of points, but uniformly against every square centimeter of the front of his body. Getting enough breath to describe the sensations became harder with each inch he moved forward.
Abruptly, he stopped trying to move, and in the instant that he did, the pressure vanished. "It's gone," he said. "The pressure, whatever it is, went away as soon as I stopped pushing against it."
"Fascinating," Spock said. "Obviously it does not work on the same principle as our tractor or repulsor beams."
Slowly, Kirk lifted his arms, but when he tried to reach forward with one hand, the pressure returned abruptly and fully, not just against his hand and arm but his entire body. With each inch his hand was extended, the greater the pressure became; and as the pressure increased, he began to have even more difficulty breathing, as if it really were a perfectly steady but extremely strong wind blowing in his face, taking his breath away.
"Fascinating," Spock repeated. "And, Captain, notice that your sleeve is apparently not affected, nor is the material of the rest of your uniform. The force would appear to act directly on one's body but not on one's clothing."
Spock was right, Kirk realized instantly. Otherwise the sleeve of the extended arm would have been forced halfway back up his arm. Lowering his arm but continuing to lean into the pressure, he looked down at his uniform and saw that the folds in the material, the trouser legs that flared out over his boot tops were likewise untouched by the pressure.
For a long moment, he stood still, relieving the pressure and catching his breath. Finally, he sat down and removed one boot and, pushing against the sole, slowly slid it top first along the floor into the barrier. As before, the pressure built up against his hand and body, but not against the boot, the top of which extended a good thirty centimeters beyond the farthest point he could force his hand.
Retrieving his boot, he started to slip it on. "Any thoughts, Spock? Anyone?"
"If I had a good old Georgia fly rod," McCoy said, "I might be able to snag some of that stuff. Unless there's a field around it that blocks out inanimate objects."
"They're obviously supported by a force field of some sort," Spock said, "or perhaps embedded in it."
"Yes, but—" Kirk, still seated on the hard, plastic-like floor, frowned, stopping in the middle of pulling his boot back on. For a moment, he ran his fingers over the insulating inner lining.
"Something happened to this boot while it was in the barrier," he said. "Or on the other side."
The others leaned closer as he removed the boot again. The inner surface, instead of being smooth and seamless, was rough, as if it had been scraped by some harsh abrasive. It was still soft, like the dark foam rubber it resembled, but the surface texture was totally changed.
"Let me see your hand, Jim," McCoy said quickly. "If it was something in the barrier—"
Still frowning, Kirk withdrew his hand from the boot and looked at it with McCoy. It was, as far as either could tell, unchanged.
Meanwhile, Spock had leaned down and picked up the boot and was examining it. After a second, one eyebrow arched slightly and he glanced briefly through the barrier.
"A vacuum, Captain," he said. "There would appear to be a vacuum on the other side of the barrier or, at the very least, extremely low air pressure."
"How can you know that?" McCoy asked skeptically.
"It's quite simple, Doctor. As you know, the insulation in our boots contains, as does most insulation, thousands of minute bubbles of inert gas. Many of those bubbles appear to have burst, as they would do if exposed to a vacuum. The rupturing of those bubbles is the cause of the surface roughness."
Kirk took the boot back and examined the inner surface again. "At least," he said after a second, "it's still wearable. However," he went on, resuming the task of replacing the boot, "escaping through the barrier would not appear to be a viable option."
"I fear not, Captain. Nonetheless, I would suggest a close inspection of the entire perimeter. We do not yet know what conditions prevail in other areas, nor even that openings do not exist."
Standing, Kirk nodded. "Quite right, Mr. Spock. Scotty, Chekov, Sulu, you go that way. Spock and Uhura and I will go the other and meet you on the far side. Lieutenant Tomson, you bring Crandall and come—"
Abruptly, Kirk's words were cut off as he felt the clammy tingle of a transporter beam gripping him.
"Spock!" he snapped. "It's happening again! If I don't return—"
Again his words were chopped off, this time by the momentary paralysis that precedes the actual transporting process.
And then, with the same quickness he had noted before, the room and everyone around him faded into nothingness, and he waited tensely to see what would replace them.
Chapter Eighteen
ONCE AGAIN, KIRK had little time to wait. Within fractions of a second, his new surroundings leaped into view.
For just an instant, the thought flashed through his mind that he had been somehow returned to the Enterprise's transporter room, so similar was the dimly lit area he found himself in, but the illusion quickly faded as he saw the dark-skinned, bearded man who stood at the transporter controls, his shadowy eyes fixed on a metallic, switch-laden box that looked remarkably jury-rigged. It was, however, perched on the edge of a control panel whose levers and buttons vaguely resembled the Enterprise's transporter controls.
The platform on which Kirk stood on was also different, higher than the one on the Enterprise and equipped with only three transport units, not six. And, like the giant circle in the ceiling of the room he had just been snatched from, a faint red glow hovered around the upper, overhead section of each unit.
Cautiously, he tried to move and found that, for all intents and purposes, he was rooted to the spot. It was as if, he thought helplessly, he had been dumped into the middle of one of the barriers, one that kept him not only from moving forward but from moving more than two or three inches in any direction. He could breathe easily enough, and move his limbs and his head, but that was all.
Returning his attention to the operator, Kirk saw that he was wearing a dark, starkly plain tunic and trousers. If it was a uniform, there was no visible insignia of rank. His fingers cautiously worked a half-dozen of the switches on the jury-rigged box and then worked the other controls.
A moment later, one of the other two transport units glowed more brightly, and the air above it filled with a tightly contained volume of swirling fog that quickly metamorphosed into the shape of a woman, dark-skinned and short-haired like the operator, and dressed in the same featureless tunic and trousers. In her hands, she carried a small device that in general appearance reminded Kirk of a tricorder, except that it, too, had ajury-rigged look about it.
Unrestra
ined by whatever held Kirk, she stepped off and went to stand at the edge of the transporter platform. As she motioned with one hand, a panel slid up in one of the walls, revealing a window or viewscreen of some kind. Watching the screen, she tapped a series of instructions into the tricorderlike device she held.
As she did, an image appeared on the screen—an image of herself. A moment later, she spoke. Her voice was deep but somehow melodic, and the sound she made sounded to Kirk's ear like "Aragos." At the same time, what could have been a graphic representation of the sound appeared on the screen below her image, and a series of previously unseen, multicolored lights next to the screen flickered briefly.
Another series of instructions was tapped into the tricorderlike device, and her image vanished, only to be replaced by one of Kirk himself. Instead of speaking again, the woman turned to look at Kirk directly, with an expression that very well could have been eager expectancy.
Had she been introducing herself? he wondered with a frown.
"James Kirk," he said, watching the screen's graphics form and fade and the lights next to the screen flicker. "I am captain of—" he started to continue, but a sharply upraised hand silenced him.
Hastily, she tapped something else into the device, accompanied by more graphics and flickering lights, and he couldn't help but wonder if she were somehow erasing what he had said.
Then another image appeared, this time of the device she was holding, and again she spoke and again the graphics appeared and the lights flickered. When they faded, she nodded to the operator, and a moment later the air above the third of the transport units clouded and then cleared, revealing one of the Enterprise's medical tricorders suspended in midair. Simultaneously, its image appeared on the screen, and the woman looked expectantly toward Kirk once again.
