by Diane Duane
Uhura looked up from her station with an unhappy expression. “Six decks up,” she said. “That’s a long way—”
“Sir—”
They all turned. Khiy was standing there looking extremely upset. “Mr. Scott, let me go with them!” he said. “I’m not much good to you here. But I know how to fight—and it’s my honor that’s been debased too. We swore, the whole crew swore, to be as brothers to you…for a while. Now Subcommander Tafv has shamed us all, betrayed us…and if we don’t get control of the ship back, he’ll surely leave our commander here to die—or kill her himself. I can’t let that happen—none of us can!”
Scotty looked at the young man, thinking how very like Chekov he looked, even with the pointed ears. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take some more of the guns, Khiy. Uhura and I will hold this position down till you three call us from the bridge. Ael’s people were there before everything broke loose; the locked bulkheads should have kept them safe in there, and kept Tafv’s other people away. We don’t dare warn them you’re coming—chances are Tafv has tapped into Uhura’s scrambled ’com. Just get into the bridge and signal us when you’re ready.”
“Mr. Scott—” Chekov looked as unhappy as Khiy. “When Tafv and his people get here and there’s no one but you and Uhura to hold this place—and you transfer control—the overrides will cut in and the bulkheads will go up again.”
“We’ll handle it, lad,” Scotty said, though he had not the slightest idea of how. “Get on with you, you’re wasting time.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sulu went to the door. It slid open, and he peered cautiously out; no one was in the hall—the deck was so far deserted. It was eerie in a ship normally as busy as the Enterprise. There came a shock, and a muffled sound, and all of them looked up in surprise and unease. Explosives, somewhere not too far away, were detonating inside the ship; and they heard the wine of phasers, very remote, but sounding venomous as a swarm of bees.
“Out with you,” Scotty said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Sulu and Chekov and Khiy headed out.
“And if you do,” Scotty said to their backs, more softly, “—sell yourselves dearly.”
They paused—then were gone. The door closed again. “Come on, Nyota darlin’,” Scotty said. “The youngsters will do what they can. Let’s you and I go out there real quick and leave our unexpected guests some presents in the hall.”
“Sounds good,” Uhura said. She got up, picked up a string of sonic grenades, and started setting them for sequential detonation.
Another shudder, much closer, and another explosion, much louder, ran through the fabric of the ship.
“This deck,” Scotty said.
They worked faster.
Chapter Fifteen
“Phasers on heavy stun,” Jim whispered to the group behind him. “Stand by….”
Silent, hardly breathing, his crewpeople waited. And waited, and waited. Jim pulled his head back from the corner he’d been peering around and held his breath. All four parties were beamed down, and it was still that golden period before one group or another started breaking into things, and setting off alarms. This party, of about fifty, was dedicated to securing one side of the computer areas. Right behind Jim stood Spock, and Ael, and Mr. Matlock; then more assorted crewfolk, security people, and crewfolk of Bloodwing, with McCoy and Lia Burke and Naraht and some more security types bringing up the rear. They were all utterly silent, as Jim had never heard such a large group be before. Nerves, he thought. And then, with grim humor: They should be glad they don’t have mine.
Right behind him, Spock was scanning with a tricorder from which he had prudently removed the warble circuits. “The corridor ahead of us is nearly clear, Captain,” he said softly. “Considerable computer activity ahead and for the next two levels down. We are adjacent to the core.”
“And the control areas?”
“If I read this correctly, they are off the main corridor that runs at right angles to the one we’re facing.”
“What about the Intrepid crew?”
“Sir, I do not scan them…and the tricorder is not malfunctioning. Possibly they are in some shielded area; there are many sections of this base that incorporate forceshielding in their wall structure, purpose unknown, and tricorder scanning at a distance is therefore distorted and uncertain—”
“What the—” someone said in amazement from way behind them.
“Don’t fire!” Jim would have hissed had there been time. There was none; seemingly all at once he heard the surprised voice, turned, saw a dark-clad Romulan figure staring at them from the T-intersection at the end of the hall in which Jim’s party stood momentarily concealed. Then he realized, with some astonishment, that he needn’t have worried. The last white shape at the rear of the group leaped away from the wall in a blur, and did something too sudden for Jim to clearly make out—except that when it was finished a blink later, the Romulan was lying on the floor with his head at an odd angle, and slender little Ensign Brand was staring down at him, looking rather shocked.
Jim nodded grim approval at Brand, and mouthed at her, “Stunned? Dead?”
She bent down beside the Romulan, then glanced up again, making a cutting motion across her throat, and a little “Sorry, Captain” shrug of her hands.
He jerked a thumb at the side corridor; Brand, and the Andorian Ensign Lihwa beside her, nodded and began to drag the man out of sight. Jim turned back to Spock. “We’ve got to get moving, Mr. Spock. If a group comes along and finds us here, we might not be so lucky.”
“Affirmative. The corridor ahead is clear for the moment. Scan shows movement in the others, but it seems routine enough, and we couldn’t wait for it all to die down anyway—”
“All right, let’s go.” Jim waved the hand holding his phaser at the column pressed up against the walls behind him, then headed out into the hall.
His people closed in around him from behind. Ael moved silently at his left, a tiny shape looking unusually pale in grays—or perhaps from some other cause. Spock paced to Jim’s right, never taking his eyes off the tricorder. “We turn right at the next intersection,” he said. “Then down to the next left, and ten meters along it to the main corridor—”
A horrible klaxon began howling through the hallways, echoing off the bare white walls. “That’s torn it,” Jim said out loud. There was no use for whispering anymore. “People, let’s go. Close formation, watch the rear, stun first and ask questions later!”
And they were off and running. Unfortunately, at the sound of the alarms, so were the Romulans. Turning right at the next intersection, there came a crowd of Romulans in dark coverall-uniforms, ten or fifteen of them—by bad luck or fast scanning running right at Jim’s party. Jim took his own advice, leaping aside to fire—then became suddenly aware of Ael pounding past him, with Spock pacing her. The Romulans at the head of the group looked at the two, saw ‘Romulans,’ hesitated—and from behind Jim ten or fifteen phasers screamed together. The Romulans went down in a heap.
“Armed,” Jim said. It was upsetting; the Romulans’ response time was too fast. “Destroy their weapons and follow,” he said to Matlock, and led the rest of the party on at a run while Matlock’s people attended to it and then came after. “Where now, Mr. Spock?”
“Past them, Captain, and the next left—”
They ran. And around that corner came more Romulans, not hesitating at all, firing Romulan-style blasters and disruptors. Reacting before he was sure what he was reacting to, Jim threw himself toward Spock—at the same time felt someone tackle him from behind and take him down, so that the three of them crashed to the floor together, out of the way of the massed beams that would have burnt them dead. The three of them rolled to the sides of the hall and came up firing, while behind them Mr. Matlock and his group fired from the hall or from cover, taking the Romulans out one by one. Jim got his feet under him, saw that Spock looked slightly shaken but otherwise all right, and then reached sideways to help
up the person who had knocked him down to safety. There was Ael, scrambling to her feet with a smile on her face and a most dangerous look in her eye. “Thanks,” he said as they helped each other up.
She cocked an eyebrow at him, then turned to Spock, who was leaning against the wall and looking more than just a little shaken. He was going pale. “Spock?” Ael said, a husky whisper through the howling of the sirens.
“Mr. Spock—” Jim said. “Bones!”
“No, Captain,” Spock said, his voice definitely not as strong as usual. “There is something—pressing on my mind. An urge not to move, not to think—making any action pain. The effect got much stronger as we came around that last corner.”
“A person?” Ael said as McCoy and Lia Burke hurried up to join them.
“No. Power of mind—without personality—” Spock actually made an expression, right out there in front of everybody: loathing. “Mindless. An abomination—”
“A machine,” Ael said bitterly, “working through cloned Vulcan brain tissue.”
“Too strong—” Spock said, struggling for control.
“A great mass of brain tissue,” McCoy said, getting a look of loathing very much like Spock’s. “A tank full of Vulcan gray matter cloned from a single brain cell. No personality—but terrible power, programmed for some single purpose, and performing it mindlessly. Just another computer—”
Jim’s stomach turned. “This has to be the weapon they used on the Intrepid.”
“Or one like it,” Spock agreed, straightening, gasping. “Captain, Intrepid’s crew must be around here somewhere. The Romulans would hardly have set this weapon up in expectation that I would arrive.”
“But the Vulcans should have been on another level,” Ael protested.
“Maybe they—” The sound of shouting voices cut that conversation short. Mr. Matlock and about ten of his people leapt past Jim and Bones and Spock and Ael into the main corridor, opening fire before the approaching Romulans could. Jim shouted warning at them, and a few of the security people managed to turn and meet the second group of Romulans who were coming at them from behind. Only several of these were armed; but this second group came crashing in among them with such speed and force that suddenly phasers were useless, there was too much mixing going on, too many chances to stun or kill a friend.
Jim broke into a whirl of hand-to-hand, relishing it terribly as a release for all the anger and tension and helplessness of the past week. He knew he would pay the price later—his body always ached for days after one of these orgies of anger. Or maybe he would pay for it right now, since every one of these Romulans was about as easy to handle, one-on-one, as Spock.
But training regularly with a Vulcan had its advantages; and though the Romulans might have drifted considerably from the Vulcan norm in terms of genetics, physiologically they still had the same weaknesses. The Vulcanid head and ears were relatively vulnerable, and as for leverage, Romulans flew through the air as well as anyone else. Jim busied himself with that—a double chop to the collarbone here, a broken kneecap there, a bit of tal-shaya that Spock had taught him over here. Every now and then he caught a glance of something that would have made him laugh, if he’d had time to breathe: tiny Ael, for instance, slamming a Romulan man nearly twice her height into a wall, putting a foot in his gut, grabbing one of his arms, and neatly relieving the poor man of his sidearm and dislocating his shoulder, all in one quick, rather casual motion. In the middle of a chop-and-kick combination Jim saw Lia Burke come up unnoticed beside a burly Romulan woman who was firing uselessly at the angrily advancing Ensign Naraht. Phasers, at least phasers on the conventional “one” setting, don’t work on Hortas, but the unfortunate Romulan woman didn’t have time to readjust her phaser, even if she knew that was what needed doing. Lia simply reached up a bit—the woman was tall—and swung her slender little fist sidewise into the Romulan’s trachea, like a hammer. Even over the howling alarm klaxon, Jim could hear the crunch of cartilage. Goodness, Jim thought mildly, while breaking a Romulan’s arm backward at the elbow, if Mr. Freeman is this good too, his yearly shots are probably going to be a very interesting event. I wonder if Bones’ll be selling tickets?…
—and suddenly the fight was over, except that there were still shouts coming from further down the main corridor. Jim dropped the unconscious Romulan he found himself holding and looked swiftly around at his people. They were mostly gasping, some still crouched for combat, unable to stop being ready. “Injuries?” he said.
“Lahae’s got a broken arm,” Ael said, jerking her head at one of her people. “But she’s well otherwise.”
“A few burns, Jim,” said McCoy. “Harrison got it bad. I’ve treated him, but we need to get him back topside.”
“It’s going to take a while, Bones. Mr. Athendë, carry Harrison. Spock?”
“Captain,” Spock said, stepping out of a pile of unconscious Romulans, and still looking very unwell, “there is some direction to this mental pressure. That way.” He pointed down the corridor, toward all the noise.
“That’s it, Ael,” Jim said. “The Vulcans are on this level, after all. Evidently this is one of those operations in which everything’s going to go wrong right away….”
“Saves us wondering,” McCoy said. “Spock, can you function?”
“Barely, Doctor. As you delight in reminding me, I am half Terran—and for once that fact is serving me somewhat. My mother’s side of the family has a history of being almost relentlessly non-psi sensitive. But as we get closer to the mechanism, the mind-damper, I will surely grow weaker.”
“There’s no guarantee that the Vulcans will be where the damper is,” Ael said.
“Of course not. But if we can put it out of commission, they’ll be free to try to escape—and that would make the odds a little more even.”
“Well, then,” Ael said, putting her head around the corner—pulling it back quickly and getting shot at for her trouble—“time to do something. Raha, give me a spare phaser, will you?”
One of Ael’s people tossed her a phaser. Ael detached it from the pistol grip, turned it over in her hands. “Where—Oh, here it is.” She twisted the supercharge control on the back of it all the way, and tossed it lightly once or twice in her hand as the upscaling scream that signaled imminent overload began. “How long before it goes?” she said to Jim.
“Five seconds! Ael—”
“Three, two,” she said, and put her head and her arm around the corner again, and threw the phaser right down the length of the corridor—an astonishing southpaw pitch, fastball swift and going a good four hundred feet down the corridor before it even hit the floor. And as the phaser hit, right among the Romulans massed and firing at the end of the corridor, it blew. The station shuddered slightly, and the concussion struck back down the corridor at the Enterprise group, a blast of hot wind and light that knocked Ael back into McCoy’s arms and both of them hard against the wall of the side corridor.
“Now!” Jim shouted, and led the way down the corridor, his people pouring down after him. The corridor’s end was ugly, blackened by the explosion, and spattered green with Romulan remains and Romulan blood where it wasn’t. Oh, God, some part of Jim cried in anguish, but the rest of him was far gone in the necessities of the moment, and paid the pain little heed. There was a large door at the end of the corridor. He tried his phaser on the middle of it; no response. A quick experiment on the walls and the doorframe produced the same result. “Refractory,” he said. “Too thick. Spock, can you gimmick the lock? If we burn it, it’ll probably just seal this permanently shut—”
“Jim,” Bones said, “forget it.” He was supporting Spock from one side, and Mr. Athendë, already carrying the badly burnt Harrison in his tentacles, was holding Spock up on the other; the Vulcan slumped between them, nearly unconscious, trying to fight the mind-damping effect and failing. Little spasms of pain twisted his face as he kept fighting. Until they got this handled he would not think again, much less speak or move.
“Who’s here?” Jim said desperately, for he heard more shouts back in the direction they’d come: a lot more. “Electronics—” But most of his people were security, and the others were from medicine, linguistics, defense—
“Let me try, Captain,” someone said, pushing his way through the group; and there was Mr. Freeman, his usual neatness much the worse for wear. He was singed and smudged and bruised and had a black eye, and his hair was all over the place. But already he was on his knees by the door, snapping open a pouch at one side, fishing for tools. He pushed his hair back in his everyday get-neat gesture while using a decoheser to pop the flush cover off a small panel by the right side of the door. “Oh damn,” he said at the sight of the panel’s innards, an incomprehensible welter of circuits and chips. “It’s all solids.”
“Mr. Freeman,” Jim said grimly. The sounds of approaching Romulans were getting much louder.
“I know, sir—” Freeman said, poking around in the circuitry and doing God only knew what.
It was taking too long. “Lay down covering fire,” Jim said to the people behind him. “Ael—”
“I can’t help you here, Jim,” she said, giving the panel only a glance and turning away. “Not a format I’m familiar with. Hilae, Gehen, Rai, over there to the side. You—Rotsler, Eisenberg, Feder, the other side. Fisher, Remner, Paul—here with me. The rest of you, mind the captain and Mr. Spock, and fire as you like. Mr. Athendë, one of your phasers. Hate to use a trick twice—”
“Mr. Freeman!” Jim said.
“Captain, this isn’t just something you can—”
“Jim,” McCoy said quietly, and rather sorrowfully, “the boy can’t manage it, that’s all. Back off.”
Jim looked up at McCoy in surprise—and so would have missed the look that settled down over Freeman’s face at McCoy’s words, had McCoy not been looking so fixedly at the young man’s back. Jim, who could see Freeman’s face from his angle, saw suddenly written on it a rage so terrible that for a second he wondered if Freeman was going to blow up like an overloading phaser himself. Then Jim wondered if he’d seen the look at all, for Jerry’s face sealed over into an expression as cool as one of Spock’s. Freeman did something brief and precise to the circuitry, changed tools, did something else to a particular logic solid in one quick fierce motion.
