by Various
“Something. Yes.” She gestured vaguely toward the upper reaches of the vessel. “They probably don’t hear it or feel it. They’re not Terran. Kalinda does, though.”
“Kalinda…?”
“The chief engineer.” Elizabeth snorted disdainfully. “Engineer. That’s a laugh. She knows nothing about how engines work. Then again, the engines and power source of the Stinger aren’t like any other. She’s probably the only person in the house of Cwan who’s able to…”
“Able to what?”
“Understand it. Siphon it. Control it, presuming it can be controlled.”
“But we can sense it. We’re Terrans. We’re more closely connected,” said Robin. “It’s always there in the backs of our heads, like…like machinery. Maybe Xenexians have that same kind of…sensitivity.”
“Not particularly,” said Muck. “I’ve just always had a knack for knowing when there’s trouble. A feeling for danger. So it might be related to that.”
“You’re a very interesting person, Muck,” Elizabeth said. “Would you mind telling us how in the world you wound up associated with Romulans?”
“No,” he said flatly.
“No, you wouldn’t mind?”
“Just no.”
“Ah.”
There was a short silence, and then Muck leaned in close toward Elizabeth. She felt as if he were undressing her down to her soul with his eyes. “Tell me what it is I’m sensing,” he said.
“I’ll do better.” She glanced nervously at Robin, as if looking for moral support, and Robin nodded. “I’ll show you.”
14
M uck had not known what to make of these women.
He had felt immediate sympathy for them when Si Cwan was making a point of humiliating them. Some of that certainly stemmed from his own experiences, his own hardships and heartbreak.
But it wasn’t in his nature to sustain such concerns for long. Whatever softer emotions he felt for anyone, be it those women or Soleta or whomever, usually gave way to a sense of anger at the world so ingrained that he had literally forgotten what it was like not to be angry all the time.
So when he had encountered them in his wanderings and snooping around the vessel, his first reaction had been deep disgust. They lived in a slovenly state and they never had any hope or ambition for more than this. Granted, his own living conditions had been no better when he’d been condemned to the pit. But at least he had enough personality to hate all those who had done it to him, and contemplate what it would be like to avenge himself upon them. These women just seemed to have given up. On that basis, whatever sympathy he might have had for them, however minimal, had burned away.
Still, he did find the slightly conspiratorial attitude they were now displaying to be interesting. And if anyone was going to know the secrets of the Stinger, it was going to be these women who knew it inside and out. They were leading him now through more of the service ducts, these far narrower than the ones he had traversed to get there.
“Why don’t you destroy it?” he asked at one point.
“It? What ‘it’?” asked Elizabeth, who was crawling ahead of him. Robin was behind.
“The ship. You likely know the weak points. You could exploit them. This life is no life for you. End it and take them with you.”
She stopped and twisted around so she could see him over her shoulder. “You’re serious.”
“Yes. Why not?”
“Because we dream of something better,” Robin spoke up. “And we’re not ready—or at least, I’m not ready—to give up my dreams.”
“Then you’re wasting your time and your life.”
“It’s ours to waste.”
He shook his head in disgust at their lack of strength. “You feel the same, Elizabeth?”
“No.”
Robin gasped slightly, clearly startled by Shelby’s reply. “Then why not?” demanded Muck.
“Because of what you’re about to see,” she said.
She started moving again without another word, and Muck followed her. He did not offer more questions, for he sensed that she was not going to answer them. So behind her he went in silence, although he found himself mutely admiring the shape of her rear. That was odd, and yet it shouldn’t have been that odd. His involvement with Soleta, the sex they’d shared, had awakened something deep and hungry within him, and he was looking at women differently than he had in the past.
He started to feel something beneath his hands before he heard it. It was a deep, regular, thrumming vibration, as if he were crawling toward a gigantic heart pumping blood through a system. It caused the duct to vibrate steadily, and then he began to hear it as well. The sound matched up perfectly with the trembling of the shaft under his hands. “What is that?” he asked, dropping his voice to a whisper even though no one had told him to do so.
“You’ll see,” she told him.
Whereas before they’d been climbing at an angle, now they were moving in a horizontal manner. Furthermore, the sound was changing, sounding deeper and more hollow. It appeared to be originating from some sort of vast chamber ahead of them.
And there was more to it than even that. That vague sense of despair that Muck had been feeling was becoming even more focused. Whatever its origin, it was directly ahead of him.
There was some grillwork up ahead, and Elizabeth, straightening her legs and arching her back, crawled over it without once touching it. She gestured for Muck to follow her and indicated that he should look through the grillwork. At first he couldn’t quite make out anything, because the room he was staring down into was dim. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he wasn’t certain he understood what it was that he was looking at.
Seeing the confusion in his face, Elizabeth said, in a hushed voice, “That’s the null sphere. It’s the source of the ship’s abilities.”
“Abilities? I don’t understand.”
“It’s the Stinger’s power source. It’s what causes the ship to move…to think. It thinks for the ship.”
“But ships don’t think.”
“This one does, because he does.”
“He?”
That was when Muck finally spotted it. Spotted him.
The null sphere was little more than a gigantic ball, filled with some type of liquid. There were tubes and circuitry connected to all sides of it, running off in all directions. The distant pulsing that the chamber had been generating sounded like a heart for good reason; it was not dissimilar from that organ at all.
It was the contents of the chamber, beyond the fluid, that was the most shocking to Muck. There was a man within, naked and bald, curled up in a fetal position, his eyes closed.
“The fluid in the null sphere—they call it a positron flow—taps into and conducts the bioenergy he creates, amplifies it, and feeds it through to the ship’s generators. The vessel runs on that bioenergy.”
“But…who is that in there? How can it be that a whole ship runs on energy generated by one person?”
“His name’s McHenry,” Robin told him. “He’s a Terran. When he was just a child, he got scooped up into a scientific experimentation program. He was a guinea pig.”
“A what?”
“A lab animal. He was found to have almost godlike powers. They never knew why, or where the powers came from. But they spent years filling him with drugs, stripping him of a personality, until they reduced him to…to this. Turned him into raw fuel.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because,” Elizabeth said with grim amusement, “it’s easy to hear things when people are accustomed to acting like you’re not there.”
He nodded, finding that easy to believe. He went back to staring at the pathetic creature called McHenry, floating in his own little world. “So he powers the ship?”
“He is the ship,” Robin told him. “He just floats there with no sense of his own identity and outputting enough energy to light up Vulcan.”
“So the ship couldn’t function without him.”
/>
“It’s designed around him.”
“What if he dies?”
“From what I’ve heard,” Elizabeth said grimly, “he’s functionally immortal. The ship will wear out before he does…at which point they’ll probably just build another one around him.”
“How does he survive?”
“I’m not sure. I think they introduce nutrients into that…that concoction they have him floating in.”
Muck studied it, drumming his fingers thoughtfully, and then he pulled experimentally on the grating. It lifted up with no effort.
He saw the panicked look in Shelby’s eyes. “No. You can’t,” she said urgently.
“I have to see him closer.”
“And what? Talk to him? You can’t. It’s impossible.”
“Have you tried?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know.”
“I…” She looked to Robin for help in trying to convince this madman of the folly of his notion. Robin just looked at her helplessly, shaking her head.
Muck didn’t bother to wait for Robin to come up with something to say. He pulled open the grating and insinuated himself through the hole.
Elizabeth was desperately trying not to panic. The drop from the duct to the floor below was too far, much too far. There was no doubt in her mind that Muck was going to break his damned legs and lie there, writhing in pain until someone came along, found the fool, and blew his brains out in order to put him out of his misery.
“Stop!” she hissed at him, but it was too late. Muck released his hold and dropped to the floor. She closed her eyes, unable to watch, even as she waited for the inevitable loud thud.
There was nothing. The only thing she heard, after a couple of seconds, was Robin’s startled gasp. She opened her eyes and looked at Robin questioningly. “He must have hollow bones or something,” Robin said. “He landed like he weighed nothing. He fell into a crouch, rolled forward, came right up onto his feet. Unbelievable.”
Elizabeth now peered down and, to her amazement, Muck was walking with perfect ease toward the null sphere. She wasn’t sure how it was at all possible. Robin was still incredulous, and she’d actually witnessed it.
Meantime, unaware and uncaring of the astonishment with which the women above were watching him, Muck approached the source of that despairing sensation he’d experienced when he first stepped aboard the ship. It was amazing to him that the others on the vessel couldn’t sense it. Moreover, it put the lie to what Elizabeth and Robin had said to him earlier: that this McHenry had been stripped of all claim to personality. No one who was without a sense of himself would be able to feel or project the sort of things that Muck was perceiving. They must have known that. Perhaps they simply chose to ignore these contradictory pieces of information so that they were spared having to deal with the hopeless cruelty of what was going on.
It wasn’t just the brutality of what Muck was witnessing that compelled him to draw closer, to connect with this poor bastard. Instead his thoughts were driven to what the women had been saying to him earlier, about encountering people again and again in various lives. He didn’t believe a word of it, and yet…
And yet he felt connected to this McHenry somehow, in some way that he couldn’t begin to articulate. Every fiber of his being told him that what he was witnessing not only was wrong, but flew in the face of what should have been or at least could have been.
He knew it wasn’t within his power to fix things, but he could still do something. Something. He just didn’t know what.
Slowly Muck placed his hands on the curved surface of the vast container. He wished that he had the capability to project thoughts and perceive them the way Soleta did. In his time with her, he had experienced the true strength of his own mind, in that he was still capable of keeping her out of his thoughts through the sheer ferocity of his own personality. He also had that uncanny ability to perceive danger. So he wondered if it wasn’t possible that he had the vaguest rudiments of the ability to go the other way and project his thoughts. Not to anyone who was “normal,” certainly, but who knew the capabilities of this McHenry creature? It was Muck’s hope that, through sheer force of will, he might somehow be able to connect with McHenry and stir him to…
To what?
Muck wasn’t sure. He was still working out much of what he was doing even as he went ahead and did it.
He focused his thoughts on McHenry. Can you hear me? Are you in there? I want to help you. He paused, uncertain of what he was waiting for in terms of response. My name is Mu… He stopped, and then corrected himself. My name is M’k’n’zy. I’m Xenexian. What they’ve done to you is barbaric, and I want to help. But I don’t know how. You need to help me in aiding you.
Long minutes passed as he kept at it. He mentally repeated much the same thing, over and over, and the longer he went without perceiving any sort of reply, the more frustrated and dispirited he became.
They say you have no personality. They say that there’s nothing left to you. I don’t believe it. I think you’re there, all right, but you’re hidden. Hidden so deep that no one can hurt you. I can understand that, better than probably anyone here. But you have to reach into yourself now. Reach in and find the real you, and bring it out to me where—
He thought he felt something. He couldn’t be sure; it might have been self-delusion, a mental response to wishful thinking. It wasn’t words or coherent thoughts. It was a sort of tickling in the back of his head, the most preliminary of contacts. Or maybe it was nothing. Nothing at—
Down!
It might have been McHenry who had “said” that to him, or else it might well have been his own finely honed inner early warning system. Either way, it prompted Muck to drop to the ground just as something passed with vicious speed over his head. Instinctively he thrust upward with his legs. His feet slammed into something and he sent a body flying.
Instantly Muck was on his feet, just in time to see the object of his two-footed offensive strike roll onto its back and then up onto its feet. He recognized Burgoyne instantly.
Burgoyne’s lips were drawn back in a snarl and hir long fingers were fully extended with fearsome claws. S/he didn’t ask what Muck was doing down there; instead s/he came straight at him with such terrible speed that Muck barely got out of the way. As it was, s/he brought one of hir clawed hands sweeping around and shredded the front of Muck’s shirt. Muck wasn’t certain whether he’d just barely managed to get out of the way, or if Burgoyne was toying with him.
He slammed a foot upward toward Burgoyne’s midsection as s/he flashed past, but this time the Hermat was ready for him. S/he caught the foot by the ankle, twisted hard, and sent Muck slamming to the ground. Muck started to get up immediately, but Burgoyne was atop him cat-quick, and hir claws were suddenly an inch from Muck’s face. Muck sharply drew a breath and remained bolt still.
“Try it!” Burgoyne dared him with breathless ferocity. “Make a move! Struggle! Try to get away! Give me an excuse!”
Realizing that it was his only chance for survival, Muck didn’t make the slightest move.
“Come on! You know you want to!” Burgoyne urged him.
The hell of it was that Burgoyne was right. Every instinct in Muck’s being was telling him to fight back. But he was resisting it because he wasn’t certain he could win, and even if he did, the long-term results would be disastrous, particularly when they had ramifications upon Soleta and Rojan. As it was, any fallout from this could be attributed to Muck’s being out and about and acting like an idiot. Even if he were able to kill Burgoyne—which he wasn’t entirely certain was the case—the impact it would have for the Romulans would be gargantuan. He couldn’t allow that to happen. Not yet, at any rate.
So, overcoming his instinct, he remained exactly where he was.
Burgoyne stayed atop him, hir claws poised and ready to rake down, hir breathing harsh and ragged in hir throat. Then, very slowly, s/he managed to compose hirself. Hir face twisted in d
isappointment over Muck’s refusal to provoke hir further. Finally s/he said, “I thought you had more nerve than that,” and stepped back and off him.
Slowly, never taking his gaze from hir, Muck got to his feet. They stood there, face-to-face, although Burgoyne was still in the ready-to-spring pose that might better have suited a wild animal. Finally, hir voice husky in hir throat, s/he said, “What did you think you were doing? How did you get here?”
Muck said nothing. He saw no advantage in answering any questions that Burgoyne might have to pose. Not at this point, at least. If later on it became necessary to explain himself, then he would. But he’d be damned if he’d knuckle under to the demands of this…this creature.
Burgoyne seemed to sense that Muck wasn’t about to answer hir questions. “I could just tear you apart until you tell me what I want to know,” s/he pointed out.
“You could try,” replied Muck.
“Ah. So finally he speaks.”
Burgoyne looked as if s/he was weighing the advantages and disadvantages of pressing the matter: the effectiveness and practicality of attacking Muck as opposed to it simply not being worth hir time. Certainly the prospect of a prolonged battle didn’t seem to weigh into hir decision; s/he wasn’t the least bit intimidated by Muck. And Muck supposed there wasn’t really any reason s/he should be. Muck didn’t look particularly imposing, and certainly didn’t have fangs and claws with which to rend an opponent.
Yet Muck found himself hoping that Burgoyne would make the move. He didn’t know if he could beat hir, but he was extremely interested in finding out.
Finally Burgoyne sheathed hir claws and took a deep breath, composing hirself. Then s/he glanced upward. Muck did as well.
The metal grating which he had set aside when he dropped through had been put back into place. There was no sound from overhead. The likelihood was that Elizabeth and Robin were still there, but completely immobilized—afraid to make the slightest move lest Burgoyne detect them.
