The Final Nexus

by Gene DeWeese

  And it would be effective.

  But whoever undertook to use the device would, in effect, be going on a suicide mission. Even if he survived the action of the device itself—and he almost certainly would not—he would be trapped millions or billions of parsecs from home, with no nexus system to return through.

  A dozen ships with the device were built and sent out, then a hundred. None returned, and the nexus system remained in operation.

  Finally, one of the second hundred—a three-man ship, the minimum possible crew—managed to return. It was infected, with only one of the crew left alive.

  All the other ships, they realized then, had also been infected. The crews had either destroyed themselves or had been caught in the Trap and forced out of the system into the permanent "quarantine" areas.

  A series of cyborg ships was the solution Kremastor's contemporaries devised. Because the brain controlled the ship's functions directly through the computer, a single person—a single brain—could pilot the ship. Because the computer was programmed not to allow the pilot to shut himself down or damage himself in any way, he could not kill himself if—when—he became infected.

  Because they expected the pilot to become infected and be forced out of the system by the Trap, they designed and built the nullifier, a device that could temporarily shut down the Trap. They could only hope that if he did indeed become infected, he would retain enough sanity to use the nullifier and complete his mission.

  But Kremastor never got the chance, and he could only assume that those who had gone before had suffered similar fates.

  He was infected virtually the instant he entered the system. Suddenly, he was terrified of everything, of the ship that was his own body, of the limbo that surrounded it, of his onetime friends and associates who had designed and built the ship and imprisoned him in it and sent him out, alone, to face an eternity of paralyzing terror.

  And then the Trap reached out and grasped him and hurled him out of the system.

  Despite the fact that his "body" was a mechanical and electronic thing, wired for neither pain nor pleasure, he experienced as much pain during the trapping as any fully organic victim ever had.

  But the pain, he quickly realized, had been his salvation. In some way, it had overloaded the circuits of his brain so that when the pain stopped, the fear that remained was somehow tolerable. It still took a tremendous mental effort to overcome it, to work in spite of it, but after the sensory overload of the trapping, he was able to do it.

  But he was not able to reenter the system. The nullifier, he discovered, would not work, nor would half the systems on his ship. His sensors and transporter worked only marginally, and no adjustment he was capable of making helped. If he had possessed a real body, he always thought, he might have been able to take the systems apart, find out why they didn't work, then rebuild and repair them. But working only from the inside, it was as impossible as a human performing open-heart surgery on himself.

  So he had done what he could.

  He had used his ailing sensors to learn what little he could from the hundreds of other ships that had apparently been trapped there before him. More than a hundred, he found, were those of either his contemporaries or his ancestors. Many of those who had gone ahead of him to attempt to shut down the system were here, all long dead, and now he had joined them.

  Unable to shut himself down or even to sleep, he waited, hoping another ship, with a more effective nullifier, would come, not to save him but to complete the mission he himself had failed at.

  But none came, and he soon began to wonder if, despite all the safeguards, his civilization had once again been destroyed by the creatures.

  Finally, another ship had come through, but he did not recognize it. And when he tried to use his sensors on it, he discovered the dead space for the first time. It had blocked his sensors entirely, but it had shrunk and vanished in minutes, and when he was able to probe the ship, he found it crewed by aliens. Aliens who, not unexpectedly, had killed each other.

  Over the millennia, then, more than a hundred additional alien ships had come. But all had been essentially the same.

  Each one had only further confirmed his fears, reinforced his conviction that he was trapped here forever.

  Until the Enterprise.

  The moment the Enterprise dead space had touched him, the nullifier had revived. It had begun functioning, if not normally, close enough to normal to give him sudden hope that, after twenty thousand intolerable years, his mission might yet end in success.

  But then, as they had been about to approach the nexus, the creature had begun to strengthen, and Kremastor's fear, until then under control, had broken free.

  And, belatedly, the significance of the fact that the Enterprise crew, though infected, were still capable of working together dawned on him: they must be allied with the creature.

  Perhaps they were even its creators.

  And if they learned the secret of the nullifier from him, they could destroy the Trap, and they would be able once again to roam freely through the entire nexus system, infecting and destroying.

  "But I could not simply run," Kremastor finished. iWhat if I were wrong? What if there were an innocent explanation for your survival? I tried to take your leader to question, but—"

  "Time, Mr. Spock."

  "Fourteen point seven minutes, Captain."

  "Mr. Scott, are you finding anything of significance, either on the shuttlecraft or on Kremastor's ship?"

  "Just what looks like the shortest route to cut through to reach Commander Ansfield, if it comes ta that. A complete check o' the shuttlecraft shows no change whatsoever because o' its wee trip."

  "All right, Scotty, leave some people there, but you get back up to the engineering deck. I want you there, where you can keep an eye on the situation firsthand, when—if—that dead space closes in."

  "Aye, Captain."

  Cutting off the intercom, Kirk turned to Spock. "I won't make it an order, Spock, but your Vulcan abilities may be the only chance we have to communicate with this entity. If you still feel it is not hostile—"

  "Of course, Captain. If nothing else, I can perhaps persuade it to leave us. Lieutenant Denslow, take the science station."

  Spock was silent then for a brief moment as he stepped back. His features were still impassive, but Kirk sensed unease behind the surface. Then Spock strode past Uhura and the turbolift to the unmanned environmental station. There he lowered himself onto that station's chair. Stiffly, he placed his hands on his knees, palms down.

  "Captain," he said in a voice that was quiet even for him. "I strongly recommend that you keep a phaser, set to heavy stun, trained on me at all times." Without further comment, he extended his arms directly in front of himself, lifted his head slightly, and closed his eyes.

  "Dr. McCoy," Kirk said into the intercom, "to the bridge. We're about to hold a seance, and I think we should have a doctor in attendance."

  Chapter Twenty

  EVEN UNDER THE best of circumstances, touching another mind was disturbing. Where strong emotions were involved, as they would be here, it was doubly disturbing, far more disturbing than mere physical pain.

  But Spock obviously had no choice. Consideration of his own discomfort, no matter how acute, had to be put aside, as he had had to put it aside when he had melded with the Horta in the pergium mines of Janus 6. Her pain and anguish had flooded his mind, nearly overwhelming him, but with those emotions had come understanding.

  And from that understanding had come an end to the killings on both sides.

  Here the stakes were vastly higher. In only the last few days, this entity had been responsible for the deaths of Ensign Stepanovich and the entire crew of the scout ship whose distress call the Eddington had answered.

  Fifteen thousand years ago, the Aragos civilization had been virtually destroyed, and all evidence pointed to the involvement of a similar entity.

  Even more millennia ago, other such entities had i
n all likelihood triggered that chain of wars in a distant galaxy, the chain of wars that had wiped out hundreds of civilizations and countless billions of lives before, finally, the captain had been able to break that chain.

  And here, in this intergalactic graveyard millions of light-years from the nearest star, were nearly a thousand ships whose crews, if Kremastor was to be believed, had fallen victim to the same phenomenon.

  And unless some link, some kind of understanding, could be established—and unless the Enterprise was allowed to reenter the nexus system and find its way home with that understanding—tens of billions of Federation lives were in jeopardy. The final communication with Admiral Wellons at Starfleet Headquarters had convinced Spock of the danger the Federation faced. New gates—new leaks in the gate system—had been appearing daily throughout the Federation, and at least one of the entities had apparently already found its way into Starfleet Headquarters.

  Spock's own feelings, therefore, were of no consequence in the matter.

  His life was of no consequence if, by its sacrifice, the odds in favor of the Federation's survival were increased by even the most minuscule percentage.

  His eyes tightly shut, the physical universe as completely closed out as he could make it, Spock reached out with his mind.

  The hundreds of minds of the Enterprise crew surrounded him like a shimmering web, not seen but felt.

  And everywhere around Spock, flowing around and through the web of minds on the Enterprise, permeating it and yet somehow holding itself aloof from it, was something that he recognized instantly as the entity.

  But now he could sense that the entity was not alone.

  Beyond the web, hovering like a threatening bank of dark and roiling clouds, were countless more entities, each separate yet all linked, tenuously but unbreakably, to each other and to the one that swirled so closely about him.

  And in every one of the countless beings lurked the fear, the distinctive signature of fear Spock had recognized a half-dozen times before.

  But it was the entity that concealed itself within that cloak of fear that he must touch, that he must contact.

  Twice before, contact had been achieved, no matter how briefly, but each time it had been in the limbo that existed inside the nexus system.

  Had those contacts been possible because it was only there that his mind was totally free of his physical body, able to dart and soar at will, like a bird suddenly released from the lifelong darkness of a shrouded cage? Even during those excruciating moments when the illusory pain of Kremastor's Trap had flooded his mind, there had been a feeling of lightness and freedom he had never experienced elsewhere.

  With a massive, draining effort, he tried to recapture that feeling of utter freedom.

  But here, now, in the few short minutes available to him, he doubted that such total mental freedom was possible. No matter how rigorously he isolated his mind, he knew that his body still existed. Its shadow still weighed him down, still blunted his mental abilities. He could feel his chest move as air flowed in and out. He could feel his heart as it beat out its ceaseless, complex rhythm, an unbreakable link to the objective time of the universe around him. He could physically feel the emotions with which the traitorous human half of that body threatened to overwhelm him.

  And yet, despite it all, he once again felt the beginnings of contact.

  Before, during those brief, abortive contacts in limbo, he had suddenly realized, without benefit of words or images, that the entity not only existed and feared but that it needed—desperately yearned for—something. That knowledge—the entity's own emotions?—had simply appeared in his mind, and, logic to the contrary, he had accepted them.

  Those same emotions now reappeared, intensified, and he once again accepted them as quickly and completely as if they had been backed up by volumes of precise mathematical logic.

  But this time there was more.

  Attached to the fear and the painful yearning was an overlay of desperation and frustration, numbing and endless, a desperation that had built up through eon after eon until it was at least as intolerable as Kremastor's twenty thousand years of helpless, terror-filled isolation.

  Slowly, the contact deepened, and Spock felt the entity grow more powerful, more substantial, like a poisonous fog congealing about him, turning from a mist to something clammy and restricting. And the growing fears of the others, of the crew of the Enterprise, were like a thousand invisible needles pricking at his mind.

  And the darkly boiling clouds that were the other entities began to draw closer, the tenuous links growing thicker and stronger.

  And he was able to touch, fleetingly, those other entities.

  And suddenly he knew. They were not only a thousand separate entities.

  They were also one entity.

  Like permanent participants in a Vulcan mind fusion, they were simultaneously one and many.

  And yet they were still incomplete, painfully and terrifyingly incomplete.

  And that incompleteness, he realized in a sudden rush of understanding, was the source of the yearning he had felt so strongly, the yearning to be joined, to be absorbed back into the completeness that had once existed.

  And in that yearning, he saw the route he must take if he were ever to establish a truly meaningful contact. He must allow himself to be absorbed, to become one with them, to lose his own individuality as he—

  Suddenly, something wrenched at Spock's mind, as if a massive electrical charge had jolted through his body, but even as it happened, Spock sensed the cause of the shock: the field was closing in, passing through the entities, and in another moment it would isolate them from him the same way the Enterprise sensors were isolated from the rest of the universe.

  And contact was broken.

  The fear and frustration and yearning that had been the entity's was gone, leaving only the remnants of Spock's own fear and that of the hundreds of crew members, and then even that was blocked out.

  The entity was gone.

  He was alone.

  And falling.

  As in his last moments in limbo, Spock was gripped by an overwhelming sense of chaotic, whirling motion, except that now it was a physical sensation as well as a mental one, and something close to nausea clutched at his stomach.

  Instinctively, his eyes snapped open, and the bridge of the Enterprise appeared around him.

  For an instant, muffled in silence, it wavered, as if he were looking upward through the rippling surface of a lake, and the nausea squeezed his gut more tightly.

  Then his surroundings steadied, and sounds returned, but for another instant the entire bridge was an alien world, its sounds only gibberish.

  As if, he thought abruptly, a tiny fragment of the entity had briefly survived within him and he was seeing the Enterprise through that fragment's fading senses!

  But that instant passed as well, and he saw Dr. McCoy leaning over him, tricorder scanner in his hand. "Spock, are you all right?"

  Behind McCoy, Kirk stood watching, worry evident in his frowning features.

  Spock hesitated a moment before replying, waiting until he could force the lingering nausea to retreat. "I'm quite all right, Doctor," he said finally.

  "I wouldn't want to bet the farm on that, Spock." McCoy gestured at the tricorder. "You looked like you were going into one of your trances, and then all your readings turned crazy, even for a Vulcan."

  "But they are back to normal now, Doctor?"

  "As normal as they ever get. I'd be a lot happier, though, if you'd check into sickbay for an hour or two. But I suppose that would be too much to expect."

  "Under the circumstances, Doctor, it would." Standing, Spock looked past him to the captain. "At least until a moment ago, the entity was still present, Captain, but—"

  "But it's not present now?"

  "I cannot say, Captain. I can only say that something seemed to happen to the entity while I was in contact with it. I suspect that the field that has been closing in
on us passed through the entity approximately then. Whether it was hurt or even killed as a result, or if it has simply withdrawn, I could not tell."

  "But did you learn anything?"

  "Nothing that has immediate practical application, Captain. However, I am now virtually certain that the entity—entities—bear us no malice." Briefly, he went on to describe what he had experienced.

  "A form of hive mind?" Kirk asked when Spock concluded.

  "Not precisely, but that is as accurate a description as is possible at the moment. But there is a strong impression that it is still incomplete, that it is, in effect, searching for the rest of itself."

  "And the reason for the fear it causes?"

  "Unknown, Captain. However, as I have already indicated, I am virtually certain that it experiences the same or even stronger fear itself, and not only when it is in contact with ourselves or some other life-form. This state of fear appears to have existed continuously, without interruption, for tens of thousands of years."

  "But you learned nothing that would help us establish communications with this entity? Or get rid of it so we can reenter the nexus system?"

  "I did not, Captain. However—"

  "Captain!" Lieutenant Denslow, still monitoring the science station readouts, called. "Field radius less than one kilometer. First contact with Enterprise due in thirty seconds."

  "Scotty—" Kirk began into the intercom, but Scott's voice came back instantly.

  "I heard, Captain. I'm ready."

  Spock, moving quickly to take Denslow's place at the science station, took in the sensor readings.

  "The rate of field closure is slowing, Captain," he said. "Also, it is no longer a sphere. It is developing two lobes, the larger of which appears to be centered on the primary hull, the smaller on the engineering hull." He paused a moment, as if performing a mental calculation. "Mr. Scott, the areas of first contact will be the aft portions of the warp-drive nacelles. The field is already largely within the radius of the deflectors. Mr. Sulu, are the deflectors still operational?"