by Diane Duane
The door sprang open.
Behind Jim there were explosions, cries, shouts of anger and triumph. He ignored them and ran into the room. There was equipment of some kind, three walls’ worth of it, all studded with controls and switch-lights; there was a fourth wall with a great window in it and another refractory door. And there were Romulans. One of them Jim stunned; the other, too close, he kicked right between the legs, where even Romulans are vulnerable, and Romulan females no less than the males. The third he never had a chance at, for Mr. Athendë, while still carrying the burned Harrison and supporting Spock on the side, had swept into the room right after Jim and thrown one of his major handling tentacles and various minor ones around the remaining Romulan’s head and body, squeezing the man’s disruptor right out of his hand so that it clattered on the floor.
“Nicely done, Mr. Athendë,” Jim said to the Sulamid, panting.
The Sulamid curved several stalked eyes in Jim’s direction. “Must protect wounded, Captain,” he said; but even his eternal humor sounded a little grim at the moment.
“All right,” Jim said to the remaining Romulan. “Which of these controls the damper?”
The Romulan, still straining against the tentacles that held him, turned an enraged look on Jim. “I’ll tell you nothing!”
—and the man suddenly gasped and began to turn an astonishing shade of dusky green-bronze. “Suggest you change your mind,” Athendë said sweetly, as the great handling tentacles, as thick as tree limbs, began to squeeze. “Might lose temper otherwise. Or start to feel hungry. Love it when prey struggles.”
The Romulan made a sudden anguished sound for which Jim could see no reason—until he noticed a runnel of green making its way down the lower leg of the man’s uniform, one of the only exposed parts of him. Jim reflected briefly that he still had no idea where a Sulamid kept its mouth, though now the question of whether the mouth had teeth in it seemed to have been resolved.
“Have tasted better,” said Mr. Athendë mildly. “But shame to waste. Better say something fast or will bolt my lunch and get on with work.”
The Romulan shuddered and moaned and gasped, turning darker—then cried out again. “Over there!” he said, his eyes flickering to the leftmost of the consoles.
“Ael,” Jim said. She hurried into the room with several of her people, and together they went to the console and began touching controls, reading screens. “This is it, Captain. We can crash the effect itself easily enough—” and Ael reached out and tapped at a keypad, then hit several switches in rapid succession. “But I don’t see any control for crashing the whole system from here.”
“No matter,” Jim said. “We’ll find the tank with the brain material and stick a sonic grenade in it.” He turned around and gave his attention to that large window. Mr. Freeman was already down on his knees by the door adjacent to the window, working on another circuit panel. Looking through the window, Jim could see why; littered all over the floor of the great room were hundreds of bodies in Starfleet uniforms. Some of them were stirring feebly.
“Captain,” said a weak voice. It was Spock, whom Athendë was still half-cradling in some spare tentacles. McCoy went to him, helping him to stand. “Jim—that mechanism is full of living material—”
“Mr. Spock, I would like nothing better than to transport it out of here and find it a nice home on Vulcan,” Jim said. “But the ship’s screens are up, and she’s not answering anyway, and we can’t do it. If we leave the living material alone, it can be used against us again.”
“Not easily, Captain,” Ael said. “If we destroy this board”—and she touched more switches—“this whole setup will go, and the connections to the brain tissue will fuse. In any case, it’s time that we did one thing or another and got moving. It is getting noisy out there, and not even our people can hold that corridor forever.”
“All right,” Jim said. “The computers at least. Everybody out of the way.”
Athendë and the others cleared away from the console side of the room, heading for the door to the large room where the Vulcans had been held. “Get in there and help them,” Jim said. “Mr. Spock?”
“A great pleasure, Captain,” Spock said, unholstering his phaser and aiming at the key computer board. He blew it to bits.
“‘Pleasure’ is an emotion, Mr. Spock,” Ael said from behind them as the last few crackles and fizzes died out.
Jim turned, wondering what that meant, and found Ael looking at Spock with a rather cockeyed expression. Spock gave it right back to her. “So I hear, Commander,” he said, and together they turned and headed for the room full of Vulcans.
Jim hurried after them, for the noise out in the hall was getting pretty loud. Many of the Vulcans were on their feet now, and more every moment. From across the room one staggered across to him. It was tall young Sehlk, the Intrepid’s first officer, and Jim reached out and steadied Sehlk as he almost fell over upon reaching him. “Mr. Sehlk, are you all right?”
Sehlk stared at Jim, his face (in the cool Vulcan fashion) bewildered in the extreme. “Captain,” Sehlk said with a brief, most unVulcan access of emotion, “it is most illogical for you to be here!”
“Is it really?” Jim said, suspecting that he was going to have to get used to hearing that from every Fleet officer he met for a while. “I’m not doing anything for you and your captain that he wouldn’t probably do for my people, were our places reversed…. Meanwhile, I would rather beg the question—”
“As you wish, sir.”
“Very good. Where’s Captain Suvuk?”
“Not here, Captain,” the young Vulcan said. “The Romulans took him from us shortly after we were brought here. Logic would seem to indicate that they are attempting to force classified information from him—most likely the Intrepid’s control codes and command ciphers, that being the only information he would have and we would not that would be of use to them.”
Useful indeed. With those codes and ciphers the Romulans could drain Intrepid’s computers dry of all kinds of useful classified data—Federation starship patrol corridors, troop strengths and distributions—“Mr. Sehlk, they didn’t harm him, did they?”
“They tortured him, Captain,” Sehlk said with terrible equanimity. “But that did them no good; mere torture will not break Command conditioning, as you know. The Romulans then attempted to bring their mind-techniques to bear on him. We tried to defend him at a distance, by taking the brunt on our own minds—and for a short while we succeeded in standing the Romulans off. Their techniques so far work better for large groups than for single persons. But the techniques they are using are apparently mechanically augmented in some way; once our interference was discovered, they put us all under the damper at such intensity that some of us, the more psionically sensitive, died of it.” Sehlk’s eyes grew cold. “Can you imagine what it is like, Captain, to lie paralyzed for hour after hour, with a mind forcibly emptied of thought, of volition—though not of the knowledge of what has happened to you, or probably will?”
“Mr. Sehlk,” Jim said, “may those of us who have not be preserved from it.”
“We will see to that,” Sehlk said. “Captain, when Suvuk realized that they were going to use such artificial augmentation to force his mind, he drove himself purposely into kan-sorn—a mental state similar to coma, but with this difference, that any attempts on the integrity of a mind in kan-sorn will destroy both mind and body. He made himself useless to them—and so he lies, somewhere in here, comatose. Captain,” Sehlk said, “we must find him.” And though the statement was certainly based in logic, there was more to it than that: there was the ferocious, unconditional Vulcan loyalty that Jim had come to know very well indeed.
“We will,” Jim said. “First we have to get you people out of here. Our position at the moment isn’t the best—”
“Acknowledged,” Sehlk said, and detached himself coolly from Jim’s grip, heading off a little unsteadily to see to his own people. They were recovering rapidly, mo
re than half of them on their feet now, going about the room as swiftly and efficiently as they could. Jim spent about half a second simply being astonished at how many different kinds of Vulcans there were. On some level he had become conditioned to their being dark, and usually tall. But here were gigantic seven-foot Vulcans and little delicate ones, Vulcans slimmer even than Spock and Vulcans much burlier—none of them actually being overweight; Starfleet regulations to one side, Jim suspected nonglandular fat of being, as far as Vulcans were concerned, “illogical.” And there were fair Vulcans, blond and ash blond and very light brunette, and, good Lord, several redheads—
Most important, there were four hundred and eight of them. Jim could think of a lot of worse things than having four hundred Vulcans, all coolly furious over the loss of their captain, at his back in a charge down that corridor.
Ael came up beside him. “Well, Captain,” she said, “that’s half our job done.”
“A third,” he said. “Their captain’s not here, Ael—we have to find Suvuk yet. Then the research computers and the genetic-material stockpile.”
“And how are we going to find one Vulcan in this place full of Romulans?” she said, looking askance. “Jim, we’ve already been here more than thirty minutes! The whole population of this station is going to come down on us shortly—”
“Let them,” Jim said. “The numbers are a little better right now.”
“Yes, but these Vulcans aren’t armed! And what about your ship? Why haven’t we heard from Mr. Scott?”
“That,” Jim said, his guts clenching inside him, “is something I intend to find out as soon as possible. In the meantime, your first question—”
Jim turned around to call for Mr. Selhk, but he was already heading toward Ael and Jim, with T’Leiar and the calm round Sobek in tow. “Captain,” he said, “we’re ready to move. What are your orders?”
“Well, first of all we’re going to have to locate Suvuk.”
“Captain,” said willowy T’Leiar, “leave that to us. Several of us have had occasion to mindmeld with the captain before, so we are quite familiar with his basic personality pattern. And now that the mind damper is no longer operational—”
“You can track him,” Jim said. “What do you have to do?”
“Sehlk and T’Leiar will hold the pattern,” Sobek said. “The rest of us, even those not trained in the disciplines, will also be of use; we will lend them—I think the most precise word would be ‘intention.’ We will require several minutes’ concentration to set up and implement the state.”
“Very well, gentlemen, ladies; carry on. I’m only sorry I can’t offer you some peace and quiet for what you’re doing….”
“Quiet is not necessary,” Sehlk said, for a moment looking very like Spock did while he discussed matters Vulcan and private; reserved, intense, and hiding (not well) a great weight of feeling. “And as for the peace, it is inside us, else no outward peace would be of any use.”
Jim looked up. All around, slowly surrounding him and Ael and Spock and McCoy and Athendë and the rest of their party, the Vulcans moved in close. There was nothing mysterious about it, no outward sign as in the personal mindmeld. Sehlk closed his eyes; T’Leiar simply folded her arms and looked down at the floor. But Jim suddenly began to become aware of a frightening sense of oneness settling in around him, as seemingly palpable as the Vulcan’s bodies, as invasive and inescapable as the air. He told himself that it was frightening only because he had not been brought up to it—to this certainty, seemingly common in Vulcans, that any given group was far more than the sum of its parts, and the parts all infinitely less for the loss of one of them.
Or is it so strange? he thought, as all around him the many parts reached for the one in whom their wholeness best rested, and ever so slightly, mind-blind as Jim usually was, he found himself caught up in the search. Ael’s crew has certainly done the same kind of thing for her. And how many times has mine done it for me? Always, always we’re more alike than we dare to admit—
The air was singing with tension and resolve, though physically no one moved. Outside, the sound of the explosions, the cries and the phaser fire, all sounded very far away. The battle was inward now, one great mind swiftly turning over the thoughts of many smaller ones—some inimical, some desperate, some valiant or preoccupied or blood-mad, all frightened in one way or another. Very few parts of the great searching mind knew anything just now but a terrible, cool, controlled anger they would have rather not admitted to. One part knew that brand of anger, and other emotions as well, and accepted them all together. Two other parts knew mostly rage, and fear for their crews and their ships. All together the power of their emotions, admitted or not, and the power of their intention, wound together, reached outward, pierced—
“There!” cried T’Leiar, and as suddenly as it had coalesced, the great mind fell apart. But the memory and direction of what it had found—a single unconscious Vulcan mind—lingered still. Jim opened his eyes—amazed to find they had been closed—and felt as if he were attached to a rope, with the other end of it fastened to Suvuk. He could have found the man with his eyes closed. Involuntarily he looked up at the ceiling.
“Two levels up,” he said. “Next door to the master research computers. Ladies and gentlemen and others, let’s go!”
Chapter Sixteen
Mostly Ael knew about Vulcans what she had been taught as a child. Their remote ancestors had also been the remote ancestors of the Rihannsu; they were a Federation people now; and like all Federation peoples, they were hopelessly spoiled—rich, soft, and unable to take care of themselves. The inability was a matter of ancient history. There had come a time, long ago, when they could no longer cope with the constant fighting that was the inevitable heritage of a warrior people. Those who could cope had been “invited” to leave the planet. Leave it they had—supposedly without much regret. And those who remained had embraced a frightening, demeaning, bizarre discipline of nonemotionality—bottling inside them emotions that they began pretending not to have, as if that would make them go away. The Rihannsu, hearing about this after all the thousands of years, found it a choice irony. The meek had, after all, inherited Vulcan; the Rihannsu had gone out and conquered the stars.
There was nothing wrong with logic per se; it could be as uplifting as song, as intoxicating as wine, under the proper conditions. But it was hardly bread or meat—there was no living a whole life on it. To throw out love, hate, pain, desire, ambition, hunger and hunger’s satisfaction, that was asking too much. That was to turn life into a thin, etiolated shadow, lived like one long, dry, joyless mathematical equation.
Or so Ael had always thought. After first meeting Spock, she had begun to wonder whether her preconceptions had anything to do with reality at all. But then Spock was half Terran, and Terrans, though nearly as soft as Vulcans, still had virtues; courage and joy and wit and many other useful or delightful attributes. Spock, she had thought, would probably not be truly representative of a Vulcan. His inner divisions, his lights and shadows, and the reconciliations he had made among them, had turned him into far too complex and powerful a character.
Now, though—as she raced up a hall surrounded by living, breathing Vulcans, and not by her ideas about them, Ael wondered with some shame whether her brain (as her father had repeatedly insisted) was in fact good only for keeping her skull bones apart. The people around her spoke and moved and fought with a frightful cold precision that spoke more of the computer than of the arena; yet at the same time their ferocity matched that of the angriest Rihannsu she had ever seen. Their courage, as they charged unstoppable down hallways full of Rihannsu firing at them, was indomitable. And as for skill, phaser beams seemed to simply miss them, and if the station personnel threw grenades at them, the Vulcans simply managed somehow to be elsewhere. Some of it might be the mind-disciplines that seemed so much like magic to a Rihannsu. She wondered if their embrace of peace might somehow, paradoxically, have made their fierceness more access
ible to them. But in any case Ael began to suspect that her belated perception of the Vulcans’ virtues was like that of a child who grows up and finds, abruptly, that her parents aren’t so stupid as they used to be when she was younger.
It was an annoying realization, but it was the truth; and as such, she wouldn’t have given it up for anything.
She stopped at the head of one more endless corridor, leaned up against the corner, and put her hand back. This had been something of a ritual for the past four corridors, and was proving a great success. Into the hand Ael reached out, someone—perhaps Jim, or Spock, or one of her own people—slapped a phaser or other small disposable object. Ael tossed it out into the corridor. If nothing happened—well, that step would be handled as it came.
Nothing happened.
She put her hand back again. Another object: a Rihannsu disruptor, this time.
She threw it out there. And white light and heat blew up practically in her face as a disruptor blast from down the hall exploded the disruptor she’d thrown.
“There they are,” she said to the people behind her. “Jim?”
“Right,” he said. And out they went into the corridor, as they had the last three times: diving, rolling, shooting, throwing overloaded phasers and whatever else seemed useful. There was a limit, though, to how many overloaded phasers they could use. Ael was praying for an armory somewhere around here. In the meantime, the Elements did for those who did for themselves, and who stayed alive to keep doing it. She concentrated on staying alive.
