The Folded World

by Jeff Mariotte

  No answer.

  “Try opening the hangar doors remotely,” Kirk said.

  “But—”

  “She’s a Federation starship,” Kirk pointed out. “There’s no guarantee that the ship will recognize us, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t.”

  Bunker pressed some buttons on his control panel. “No response,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Captain, I—”

  “Wait for it,” Kirk instructed.

  “Aye, sir,” Bunker said. He looked out the forward ports.

  The hangar deck doors were parting.

  “Damn,” Bunker whispered.

  “Put us down gently,” Kirk told him. “Leave room for the second shuttle if you can.”

  “The McRaven still has power,” Spock observed. “At least minimally.”

  “So it appears.”

  “Maybe there are people alive on her after all,” McCoy said.

  “Let’s hope,” Kirk agreed. The hangar deck was empty, but it was also depressurized, so there might have been crew in the control room.

  Bunker set the shuttle down with a gentle bump. After a couple of minutes, everybody disembarked to wait for the second shuttle. The artificial gravity was still working, but the team remained in their environmental suits, phasers or tricorders in hand, depending on whether they were looking for trouble or signs of life. In such a situation, either consideration was equally valid, Kirk believed.

  “Mister Gao, Ensign Romer,” he said, picking two members of the security crew essentially at random, “go up and check the control room. I’d like to know if there’s anybody at the switch.”

  “Aye, sir,” Romer said. She and Gao clomped up the steps, walking heavily in their bulky suits. Kirk watched them go, then turned his attention to the view outside the bay doors. From the anomaly’s inside, the view was no less strange than it had appeared from the Enterprise. Instead of the blackness of space, he looked out through a kind of uneven violet light, ragged at the edges, like clouds trying hard to rain. Energy pulsed through the bizarre sky in brilliant lemon streaks. He thought he could smell something reminiscent of cherries. That was impossible, though. He was imagining things. Olfactory hallucinations.

  Moments later, the security team returned from their scouting mission. “Control room’s empty,” Gao reported.

  “Noted,” Kirk said. He had expected as much. Nothing about this mission was going to be easy. He had already reached that conclusion, and circumstances appeared determined to prove him right.

  Twelve

  The McRaven was empty.

  More than empty. Once they had gotten the hangar deck pressurized and had moved into the rest of the ship, they found rust coating the walls, and greenish mold as thick as Spanish moss draping from the overheads and blotching the decks. The lights were on, but dim, the artificial gravity functional, and the atmosphere breathable. They took their helmets off, but kept them close.

  “This looks like it hasn’t been occupied in two hundred years,” Kirk said.

  “Maybe it hasn’t,” McCoy said.

  “It’s not that old,” Kirk said. “The McRaven’s only five years old. It’s impossible.”

  “Clearly not,” Spock said. “It exists.”

  “I’m having my doubts,” McCoy muttered.

  “What I meant,” McCoy said, “is that we still don’t know the effects of what Spock calls the dimensional fold. Maybe two hundred years in here doesn’t mean the same thing as out there.”

  “Exactly,” Spock said. He and McCoy agreeing so readily was only slightly less implausible than the condition of the abandoned vessel.

  “The ship’s systems seem to be workin’,” McCoy added. “At minimal power, but functional. So what happened to everybody?”

  “If you’re right about the time differential,” Kirk said, “they might have all died long ago.”

  “Or, depending upon the rules of the reality we currently inhabit, they might never have been here,” the Vulcan observed.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” McCoy demanded.

  “Simply that we do not know the limitations of the dimensional fold,” Spock explained. “It is possible that not just dimensions, but universes, intersect here. This McRaven might exist in a universe in which it never had a crew.”

  “You’re makin’ my brain hurt,” McCoy said.

  “That is not my intention.” Once again, Kirk thought he might have seen the beginnings of a smile play across the science officer’s face, a slight crinkling at the corners of the eyes.

  They examined the cabin that Ambassador D’Asaro had used. Most surfaces were covered in the same rust and moist, dark fur they’d found elsewhere. Nothing indicated how long it had been since anyone had been aboard the ship. With the stuttering turbolifts, Kirk’s party made it to the bridge. The minimal power aboard wasn’t adequate to get the ship’s main computer working, so they couldn’t access that for the ship’s records.

  Then a scouting party led by Stanley Vandella returned to the bridge. “Captain,” Vandella said. “There’s something you’ve got to see.”

  “Haven’t I seen enough?” Kirk replied, in jest. He beckoned the rest of the team. “We’ve learned all we’re going to in here.”

  Vandella led the group off the bridge, down to the crew quarters on Deck 6. “We were checking the various crew decks to see if we could find any sign of recent habitation,” he said. “Instead, we found—”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense, man,” McCoy groused. “What is it?”

  “It’s . . . hard to describe,” Vandella said. “You’ll see in a minute.”

  Kirk noticed a strange odor tingeing the air in the corridor. Without his helmet on, he could smell the outside world again. This aroma wasn’t exactly like the one he had imagined earlier, but it was close enough that he had to wonder if he had, in fact, really smelled something. There was an undercurrent of cherries to it, but cherries that were spoiling, and mixed with another odor, at once familiar and strange. It took a while for him to realize that it was reminiscent of exhaust from Uncle Frank’s farm truck.

  Then Vandella stopped before a door, just one more anonymous entry into a standard crew member’s quarters. He punched the control on the outside, and the door labored open with a wheeze.

  And through the door was not crew quarters, but an opening. Into what, Kirk was unsure. Even more uncertain was what comprised the opening. It looked organic, walls and ceiling and floor coated with thick fungus or moss, with pinkish patches beneath, glistening and wet.

  The opening looked, in fact, like a throat, with a pink and green mottled uvula hanging down from the center.

  “What is . . . ?” Kirk began.

  “A passageway into the largest vessel,” Spock said, consulting his tricorder. “This side of the saucer is the only part of the McRaven in direct contact with it.”

  “The ship that’s central to the cluster of ships,” Kirk said. “As if it were exerting its own gravitational pull.”

  “Correct.”

  “Jim, we oughta get out of here,” McCoy said. “Nothin’ good can come of hangin’ around this place a minute longer.”

  Spock raised an eyebrow. “This is a singularly unique research opportunity, Doctor.”

  “It’s a damn death trap!”

  “It’s still a rescue mission, Bones,” Kirk said. “The McRaven is—somehow—joined to that larger ship. Which is where we detected electrical impulses that might be signs of life. We have to check it out.”

  McCoy shook his head slowly, as if he were in the presence of lunatics whose delusions had to be tolerated lest they become dangerous. “All right,” he said. “I don’t like it, but you’re the captain.”

  Kirk turned to O’Meara, who was holding a tricorder at the ready. “Scan past that opening, Mister O’Meara. Since there’s no visible barrier, the atmosphere appears to be safe to breathe, but I’d rather not take chances.”

  “Yes, s
ir,” O’Meara said. He pointed the instrument at the opening, stepping across the threshold. Kirk had a sudden mental image of the throat closing with him inside it, swallowing him whole. O’Meara might have had the same thought, but he did his duty.

  He looked at the tricorder’s display, tapped the instrument’s side gently, then gave it a serious whack.

  “Something wrong?” Kirk asked.

  O’Meara turned back toward the away team. “According to this, Captain, we should be engulfed in flames. This says the atmosphere is almost pure hydrogen, at ninety thousand degrees.” He glanced at the display panel again. “Oh, and it says that you’re all alive, but not even remotely human. Should I be worried, sir?”

  “Apparently the tricorders have fallen victim to the dimensional fold’s usual effect on Starfleet instrumentation,” Spock observed.

  Kirk took out his phaser and fired at the near wall. Nothing. The captain dialed up the phaser from stun to three-quarter power and fired again. The wall showed a scorch pattern. O’Meara flipped open his communicator. “Dead,” he reported.

  “It seems that the fold is affecting all of our instruments,” Kirk observed. “Reset your phasers. And keep close. We need to find out if any of the McRaven’s crew is alive.”

  “Your first assessment still stands,” McCoy said. “The thing’s wide open. We can stand here and breathe. Any reason to think we couldn’t on the other side?”

  “I’ll check,” Tikolo volunteered.

  “Fine,” Kirk said. “Careful, though.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She raised her phaser, ready to fire, and stepped quickly through the opening. The gullet didn’t contract; no giant teeth came down on her like a dentate portcullis. She stopped on the far side and faced the others. “Seems fine. A little humid, maybe, but no apparent ill effects. Gravity seems Earth-normal.”

  Kirk could feel the humidity leaking out to his side of the passage. “If the ship is open to the McRaven and the atmosphere is breathable, we leave our environmental suits here,” he said. “I’m feeling a little cramped in mine.”

  He started to peel it off. Doctor McCoy looked for a second as if he wanted to object, then shrugged and did the same. When everybody was down to their standard duty uniforms, Kirk said, “Let’s find out what’s inside this thing.”

  He stepped through the throat. Spock followed, then the rest. “Mister Spock,” Kirk said, “can you explain this somewhat atypical docking procedure?”

  “I cannot, Captain.”

  “Care to venture a guess?”

  “I have no . . . valid hypothesis.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it,” McCoy said, his tone betraying his amazement.

  “What, Bones?”

  “Something has finally struck him speechless! I was beginning to think it’d never happen.”

  “I am far from speechless, Doctor,” Spock objected. “Unlike some, I simply choose not to fabricate answers when I am unable to provide accurate ones.”

  McCoy started to let the remark slide, then thought better of it. “Jim, I think he just called me a liar.”

  Kirk shrugged. Spock replied, “I did no such thing.”

  “Come on,” Kirk said. “Let’s try to find this monstrous ship’s bridge.”

  • • •

  The ship was like no vessel Kirk had ever seen. It appeared almost ancient in design, like something Jules Verne might have conceived. It had exposed conduit and piping for electrical, plumbing, and environmental systems, doors with heavy, complex latching systems that took considerable effort to open or close, and corridor ceilings, walls, and floors made of some raw metal, without ornament or decoration. Ladders, not turbolifts, joined the various decks. Except for the fact that such an enormous vessel had been capable, apparently, of interstellar travel, it looked like somebody’s first attempt at space flight.

  Of course, if there had been any more elaborate touches, they were hidden beneath the layers of muck and mold and dripping, glistening scum that coated nearly every surface, as if the ship had been submerged in a swamp for a century or two. It even smelled swampy, with the fetid, rank air of decaying life. The tricorders had denied that the stuff that looked so moldy was organic in nature, but Kirk didn’t know what else it might be. Then again, the tricorders couldn’t be trusted.

  The scale and placement of most things hinted at essentially humanoid construction. Acting on the assumption that humans and human-type beings tended to put controls in elevated places, they worked their way up ladders (some rungs, decayed by age and rust, giving out beneath their weight) in search of the ship’s bridge. Dim light glowed from what looked like flat cross sections of some luminescent stone mounted on the walls, providing just enough illumination to find their way around.

  The higher they climbed, the grander the corridors became. They were wider up here, the doors more elaborately constructed. The walls were still slicked with muck, and any paint or other decorative touches had long since been stripped away, but Kirk had the sense that there was a distinct class system at work, and the higher decks had been the territory of the upper classes. It was empty, all of it, but Kirk couldn’t shake the feeling that it had not been so for long, despite appearances. A long-vacant house felt different than one occupied but empty at the moment. The same applied to starships, he thought, and this one seemed to him as if its occupants had merely stepped out, only minutes—or a century—before.

  “Captain,” O’Meara said as Kirk paused before yet another ladder between decks. “The tricorder’s working again.”

  Spock checked his own. “Indeed. The atmosphere is comparable to that inside the McRaven. We are not being slowly poisoned.”

  “Good to know,” Kirk said. “If they’re right this time.”

  “Still no signs of life, outside our own party,” O’Meara reported. “But I am once again picking up those electrical impulses. They’re all around us.”

  “A ship of ghosts,” Kirk said softly.

  “What’s that, Jim?” McCoy asked.

  “Oh, nothing, Bones. Nothing. Let’s see what’s upstairs.”

  Thirteen

  They came early in the morning, out of the rising sun. Aleshia heard the noise from her bed. She stumbled past the snoring form of her father and out of the house. Down the hill, she saw that others had emerged from their homes as well. Everyone looked toward the east, shielding their eyes with their hands and blinking against the brightness. She did the same.

  She saw only vague shapes, at first, their outlines indistinct against the sun’s brilliant orb. As they grew closer, they became more solid. First it appeared to be just one, then that one differentiated into several, then many. They might have been birds, an enormous flock of them, soaring in on outstretched wings, but for the buzz they made. When Aleshia had first heard it, the noise was unfamiliar, metallic and grating. As she stood watching them come ever closer, the noise magnified, intensified to the point that her teeth ached, then her bones. The earth beneath her feet was vibrating. She heard a pattering noise behind her; turning, she saw dust shaken from the eaves of her home and cascading to the ground. The morning air smelled brittle, somehow.

  Father came outside, then, his pants unbuttoned, his shirt thrown on haphazardly. Whiskers sprouted from his chin and cheeks like the first shoots of grass coaxed from once-frozen earth by early spring rains. He blinked at the sunlight. “What is it?” he grumbled.

  “I don’t know, Father, look!”

  “I asked you so I wouldn’t have to look for myself, idiot!” She half expected a cuff, but she had gone too far from the door. He’d have to take several steps to reach her, and that appeared to be beyond his ability at the moment. Unsteadily, he reached for the doorjamb, then leaned back against it. “Noisy, though.”

  “Yes,” Aleshia said. Already, the sound of the approaching . . . whatever they were, was loud enough to drown out normal conversation. She raised her voice. “Yes!” she said again. “They are noisy!”


  Father cast a dismissive glance at the approaching objects, then went back inside, slamming the door behind him. As if, Aleshia thought, mere doors and walls and windows could hold at bay such a din.

  Some of the objects—not birds, she could see now; their wings were far too rigid, and they would have been many times larger than any bird she had ever seen—dropped suddenly, plummeting toward the ground. Others kept their altitude.

  Kistral pointed toward the ones sailing to earth. “They’re landing!” he said. “It’s them, I know it is!”

  He didn’t have to define what he meant by them. Everyone knew.

  The ones who stay away.

  They had, for as long as anyone could remember, purchased any excess crops the villagers raised, and livestock, too. They never came in person, but sent wagons that rumbled fiercely and belched smoke and were drawn by no animals at all. In those wagons were folk from the cities of the Eastern Belt. The people were different each time; Aleshia could only remember seeing a familiar face once, and on his second trip, the young man stayed inside the wagon and let the other, the newcomer, do the talking.

  Everybody knew the crops weren’t meant for those cities, though legend had it that once those glittering places were the village’s only customers. The men and women who came with the wagons made no secret of it. They had enough to eat, if only just. No, the crops were hauled away toward the cities, and somewhere along the way they were picked up by the ones who stay away, those who never deigned to show their faces in the villages.

  • • •

  Aleshia had gone to see Margyan, just a fortnight earlier. It had taken time to steel herself, to drum up the courage to walk into that house’s front courtyard, with its dry fountain and paving stones shattered by the things thrown at Margyan over the years. She was almost universally reviled; stories about her had petrified Aleshia since childhood. But when Aleshia had made herself knock, oh so timidly, on the wooden door, Margyan had opened it almost at once. The crone’s face Aleshia saw occasionally at market or in the road, a mass of wrinkles and graying skin underneath her hood, seemed transformed in the daylight. Margyan wore no hood; she was smiling broadly and her smile smoothed the wrinkles, and late afternoon sunlight erased the gray and gave her flesh a warm glow. Her hair was mostly white with patches of silver, reminding Aleshia of snow flurries in the hills. “Come in, come in,” Margyan had said. “You’re Aleshia, yes?”