by Diane Duane
It took about ten minutes before this particular knot of station personnel was reduced to unconsciousness or death. It had been some time now since the subject of the ethicality of killing had even crossed Ael’s mind. She ached all over; she wanted to be back in her own bed on Bloodwing so badly that she could taste it; and it would be hours, maybe weary days, before there would be time for that, she knew. The only satisfaction that would come anytime soon was their arrival at the spot where the Vulcan captain was being held. Ael could feel the line inside her, stretched tight toward the man, around this corner and to the left.
“Clear, Captain,” one of Jim’s people out in the hall was saying. Jim grunted softly, pushed himself away from the wall. He had taken a wicked phaser burn along one arm in the intersection before last, and when he knew no one was looking, his face showed the same kind of weary misery that Ael felt. But let someone look at him, and there was suddenly energy in the eyes, erectness about the carriage, power and stern command. Fire and Air, Ael thought. The Fire will burn bright until there is suddenly nothing left….
“We’re close,” Jim said.
Spock was right behind him, looking at Jim with concern, but saying nothing about that; his face was locked in a controlled fierceness much like the other Vulcans’. “Very close,” he said. “On the close order of fifty yards.”
“Tricorder scan—”
“Ineffective, Captain. All these walls are force-shielded.”
“Wonderful. Let’s go.”
The leading part of the group headed around the corner of the T-intersection, going left. Down at the end of the hall was something that surprised them all: nothing. The hall was empty. That was bizarre, for all the way up here, practically every foot of the way had had to be viciously contended. Now nothing—
“A trap,” Ael said. “Jim, have a care.”
“I don’t think so,” Jim said, eyeing the great door at the hall’s end. “Spock, scan it.”
The Vulcan did, and his face grew dim as he did so. “Captain, we have a problem,” he said. “That door and the walls around it are solid hyponeutronium.”
Ael looked up in despair. “Collapsed metal? We have nothing that can possibly break that—”
“Ship’s phasers, perhaps,” Sehlk said from behind them. “Nothing else.”
Ael turned and walked away from the door, reduced to simple annoyance. “There are no guards here because they know they don’t need any,” she said bitterly. “And Suvuk is on the other side of that door somewhere.”
All the Vulcans who had managed to fit into the hallway stood staring at the door as if sheer loyalty or logic would be enough to break it, phasers lacking. Spock and Jim and Sehlk were talking desperately at one another, hypothesizing hurriedly. It will do them no good, Ael thought. We have at last come up against a problem all our fellowship and resourcefulness and cleanness of heart can’t solve….
She walked right up to a wall and thumped it angrily with one fist. It isn’t fair! And as usual, the old cry brought her father’s old reply up: The Elements aren’t fair either….
Elements…it was a silly time to get religious. But what was the old saying? Meet a problem with another problem to make a solution. Meet Fire with Fire, and Earth with Earth, and Water with Water….
Earth!
She ran back down the hall where the many Vulcans and Enterprise people and her own crewfolk leaned against the walls, silent or whispering, waiting for orders. One of them would not be leaning. He would be flat down on the floor, glittering, answering everyone with the same solid, cheerful, gravelly voice….
She had to trip over him to find him, finally, which was all right, for that was how Ael usually came by her solutions. “Mr. Naraht,” she said, catching herself on the wall with both hands, “come quick, we need you!”
“Yes, ma’am!” the rock said, and Ael hurried down the hall with him coming after in a hurry. People got out of Naraht’s way when they saw him coming, knowing by experience (or hearsay, in the Vulcans’ case) how fast a Horta could move when it was excited.
She led him back around the corner and up to the captain and Spock and Sehlk. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I have a question for you.”
They turned to her, and their eyes fell on Ensign Naraht, and Jim looked up at Ael in astonishment. “No,” he said, “I think you’ve got an answer for us!”
He got down with some care on one knee—one of his own people has misaimed a kick, in one of the countless fights behind them, and had nearly crippled Jim as a result. “Mr. Naraht,” he said, “would you see if you can eat through this door in front of us?”
“It is hyponeutronium,” Spock said.
Naraht rumbled and shuffled his fringes about on the floor. “Sirs,” he said, sounding pained, “I don’t know if I can. I’ve rarely eaten anything denser than lead. But I’ll do what I can.”
The Horta shuffled over to the doorway, reared up a little way against it. There was a hissing and a sharp smell of acid in the air; the deckplates under Naraht began to smoke.
“Careful, Mr. Naraht,” someone said from beside Ael. It was McCoy, watching the whole process with tired amusement. “Don’t go through the floor.”
Naraht didn’t answer—just held his position for several seconds more, then slid down. There was a great ragged patch of the dark hyponeutronium metal missing, about an inch thick and shaped like Naraht’s underside.
“Go on, Ensign, you’re doing fine,” Jim said.
“In a moment, Captain,” Naraht said, sounding distressed. “It’s awfully rich….”
Both McCoy’s eyebrows went up. Ael watched Jim get up and turn most carefully away from the door, hiding a terrible smile. “Proceed, Ensign, if you please,” Spock said very gently. “We are quite short of time, and the success of the entire operation may now lie with you….”
Naraht said not a word. He reared up again and laid himself against the door. The hissing and fuming of acid in the air became terrible, so that people had to retreat from the corridor, and McCoy went hurriedly about spraying something into everyone’s eyes to protect them from damage. Long minutes, it went on. Ael got herself sprayed and went out into the corridor again…just in time to see Naraht, with a strangled little cry, flop forward through a two-meter-wide hole in the door. From inside, disruptor fire hit him, ineffective as usual…which was as well, for Naraht didn’t move.
“Now!” Jim shouted, as if all the lost energy had suddenly returned. “Don’t touch the edges!”
And immediately after the captain dove through the door, the sound of phaser fire broke out on its far side; and Spock and McCoy and many another dove through that door after Jim and Ael, none of them being too careful about the edges, and none of them caring. This room was rather like the large control room near which the Vulcans had been kept; full of consoles, control areas and data pads—and only slightly full of Romulans, several of whom lay stunned on the floor. Ael stood with Jim, turning in the smoky room to pick up the directional line again—and found herself looking at a simple, blastable door and being powerfully drawn toward it. She didn’t wait. She blasted it.
She was halfway through the door already by the time the smoke cleared, Jim and Spock and McCoy coming after her. The room was set up as a wretched little barracks—a ’fresher, a food dispenser, and several cots; and on one of the cots lay Suvuk, in fetal position—still unconscious, but alive.
“Bones, take care of him,” Jim said. “Spock, the computers. Ael, please go with him, assist him if you can—we’ve got to get that virus program running. Send Sehlk in here when you have a moment.”
They did not have to; Sehlk pushed in past them as Ael and Spock were heading out. “I will need an input station,” Spock said quietly. “This looks like one—”
“Here’s the initializer,” Ael said, and began touching switches. The computer was not unlike the library computer on Bloodwing, a later model of a brand she knew well. “Astonishing that these things run at all,” she
said, as she brought the main operating system up.
“Lowest bidder?” Spock said.
She grinned and kept working. “There you are. Can you access from this command level?”
“Easily. Now then—” His hands flickered over the keyboard with almost insulting ease. Ael turned from him to see one of the stunned Romulans slowly recovering, looking around him at the incredible wreckage, and (with considerable trepidation) at a roomful of angry Vulcans.
One of them was giving him her particular attention. T’Leiar, with two or three of her security people about her, was holding the man by the front of his coverall and conversing with him in no amiable tone. “You will introduce us,” she said, “to the head of this research project.”
The man glared at her. “I am its head. And it will be my pleasure to see you all executed for the damage you have been doing it—”
“We have not done nearly any damage to the heart of it as yet,” T’Leiar said, “but we shall. And as for the pleasures you expect to enjoy, I suggest you reckon them up quickly. We have business with you after which the probability is high that you will no longer understand pleasure—or anything else.”
The man laughed at them, such a scornful sound that Ael had to admire his courage, while at the same time wanting very much to step over there, relieve T’Leiar of him, and strangle him with one hand. “You think you can force information from me?” he said. “Do your worst. I was one of the first Rihannsu to obtain the Vulcan mind-techniques directly from your genetic material. It was I who assisted in the capture of your ship by the cruiser Battlequeen. Your minds hold no terror for me—”
“Oh, indeed,” T’Leiar said, very softly. “But you were using an enhancer, were you not?—several thousand cubic inches of brain matter added to your own, endowing you with much more reach and scope than you have in your own mind. No,” said T’Leiar, as from outside the room more and more Vulcans slipped in through the hole in the door, “I can feel you striving for control of my mind; but even my own self alone is too much for you. Now you begin to feel the weight, do you not? So we felt under your damper; and worse is to come.”
The air in the room was becoming strained again, full of that awful tightness. There was no affection about this, though, no affinity, no searching, as there had been for Suvuk. This was an inimical pressure, the weight of many minds leaning together, bearing in and down, harder, sharper, their attack narrowing down to a crushing spearhead of thought. “You may tell us the location of the stockpiled genetic material,” T’Leiar said in that light, passionless voice of hers. “Or you may try to withhold it.”
The Rihannsu researcher lay there, his face straining into awful shapes, and twitched like a palsied thing. “No, I—” he said, in a voice more suited to groaning than to speech; and then more loudly, “No!” and again, “No!” almost a scream. And then the screaming began in earnest. No one touched him, no one moved; T’Leiar sat back on her heels beside him, motionless as a carving, her eyes hooded; and still the man screamed and screamed. Ael watched, approving on some levels, but on others horrified beyond words. The screaming went on—
—and then broke. The Rihannsu research chief gasped, and his head thumped down to the floor with that particular hollow, wet sound that Ael recognized as a dead man’s head falling. His eyes stared at the ceiling, wide and terrified, and the Vulcans around him got up, or straightened, and went away, leaving him there.
Ael found herself staring at T’Leiar as she got up. The young woman caught Ael’s glance and said, with utter calm, “He fought us.”
“You didn’t get the information, then?”
“We obtained it.” She started toward the door of the little room where Suvuk had lain, but McCoy came out of it then, with Sehlk carrying Suvuk, and Jim following them.
Jim went straight to T’Leiar. “Well, Commander?”
“We have the locations of the stockpiles,” she said, “and all the basic research data, both hard and soft copy, is here in this shielded part of the installation. However, there is too much of it to be handled by our group. Transporters will handle it—but the Enterprise is still not answering hails.”
“Well,” Jim said, “this station has transporters of its own, Commander.”
T’Leiar looked at him with cool approval. “You are suggesting we secure those, then beam up to Intrepid with all our people—transferring you to Enterprise when it becomes clear what the problem is. If there is a problem.”
“Correct. Mr. Spock, what’s the status of the computer?”
“It is in a sorry state, Captain,” Spock said with satisfaction. “The commander’s parameters for a whole-system virus program were most effective; the system is being subverted even as we speak. Within fifteen minutes there will not be a bit of data left in it. It will make someone an excellent adding machine.”
“Mr. Spock, Commander,” Jim said, bright-eyed and alert again, “my compliments. Bones,” he said to McCoy, who was passing by, “one question. How’s Naraht?”
McCoy scowled genially at the Captain. “Boy’s got the worst case of indigestion I’ve ever seen,” he said, “but he’ll be all right.”
“Good. Mr. Spock, let’s find those transporters and get the hell out of here. I want to know what’s the matter with my ship!”
They headed for the melted door together. As they went a look of doubt crossed Jim’s face—for out in the hall, he could hear their rearguard shooting at something again.
“More company,” Ael said.
“And our phaser charges are running low,” Jim sighed, then grinned again—that fierce, defiant look. “Well, let’s just get out there, do what we can, and hope for the best….”
“Hope, Captain?” Ael said in a soft imitation of T’Leiar’s voice. “Hope is illogical.”
“So it is. Then let’s just go out there and fight like crazy people to shame the devil.”
At that Ael laughed. “Now I understand you very well. Let us shame her by all means….”
They went out together into the phaser fire and the smoke.
Chapter Seventeen
In the tight hot dark of the ’tween-decks crawlway, three shadowy forms lay one behind the other, holding very still. One of them had his ear pressed to the duct’s plating. His open eye, moving as he listened, gleamed momentarily in the dull glow of a circuit-conduit’s telltale.
“What do you hear?” Chekov said softly behind him.
“Disruptor fire,” Khiy said. “But it sounds to be some ways off.”
“Thank God for that,” Sulu said from the rear. “That last little episode was a bit too close for my taste.”
“Easy for you to say,” Chekov muttered. “They missed you.”
“How is it?” Khiy said, starting to inch forward again.
Chekov started to move too, and involuntarily gave Khiy his answer in a word that hadn’t been taught him at Starfleet Academy.
“Hang on, Pavel,” Sulu said. “We’ll get you to sickbay as soon as we find some more people.”
“And retake the bridge,” Chekov said dismally. But he hitched himself along at a good rate. “Where next?”
Sulu had been considering that for a good half hour now, as they wormed their way along between decks, heading toward the turbolift core of the Enterprise’s primary hull. The access to the bridge would be fairly simple from the lift core—always granting that the lifts didn’t come on again at the wrong moment and kill them all. But besides that sticky question, he didn’t care for the odds. Three of them might not be enough to break through the resistance they would surely meet when they had to come out into the real corridors and access the core. Tafv would not be fool enough to leave that route unguarded. Hikaru my boy, he had said to himself some ways back in this seemingly infinite tunnel, there has to be another way. There’s always a loophole, a shortcut, if you can just see it….
“Pavel,” he said, “I lost count. Where the hell are we?”
“Between three and four,”
Chekov said. “Somewhere between administrative and library science, if you’re looking up at three.”
Hikaru closed his eyes to look at the ship in his head, going around the circle of the disk on his mental diagram. “Then below us on four, nacelleward, are the chapel, and dining three and four, and the rec deck….”
Chekov pushed himself up on his elbows a little, an alert movement. “I will bet you there are a lot of people down there—” He shook his head. “Hikaru, if we take the duct from here, that’s a three-story drop to the deck!”
“Sure is. But even if we can’t jump down that far, we can throw them some guns so that they can break out of there…. And I bet we’d get down somehow.”
“Is this wise?” Khiy said softly from up ahead. “Mr. Scott did tell us not to do anything stupid….”
“It’s not too stupid,” Chekov said. “And numbers would be a help. We can’t afford to screw up an attempt on the bridge.”
“‘Screw up’?”
Chekov said another word not usually considered part of the language of officers and gentlemen, one that the translator would nevertheless render more accurately than idiom. “Oh,” Khiy said, and laughed, though so softly as not to be heard by any listener. “Yes, I agree. So where shall we go?”
“Back the way we came, and to the right.”
“You are jesting,” Khiy said. “In this space?”
“It’s no joke, brother,” Sulu said. “Let’s move it.”
It took them fifteen minutes, and besides becoming acutely aware of every bruise and aching joint he already owned, and of new ones that the painful process of turning was adding to the collection, Hikaru was acutely aware of the minutes crawling over and past him like bugs. Time, time, there was too little of it for anything: who knew what was going on down at the station, whether the captain and the landing party and the crew of the Intrepid were still even alive? There was no news from them—and until the situation aboard Enterprise was resolved, no way to get news to them either. Damn, damn, Hikaru thought, bending himself once more into an impossible shape, we’ve got to do something, and fast, and everything’s taking too much time….
