The Folded World

by Jeff Mariotte

  “I think that goes for all of us,” Kirk said. He took out his communicator, ready to try again even though he knew what the outcome would be. “Let’s get off it as soon as we can, shall we?”

  • • •

  “Look out!” Greene shouted. He shoved Ruiz into the nearest bulkhead.

  “What the hell, man?” Ruiz responded. He had a bright red spot on his cheek, where it had been slammed against the wall.

  “That thing was about to hit you,” Greene said. “You didn’t see it?”

  “I didn’t see a thing except you ramming into me. What thing?”

  “Like a bat,” Greene said. “Only not really. It was bigger, like a big bird, but it had those kind of leathery wings and erratic flight, like a bat.”

  “There was no bat,” Vandella said. “I was looking right at you guys. If there had been a big bat, I’d have seen it.”

  “Not me,” Chandler said. “Those other guys were blocking my view.”

  “What guys?” Vandella asked.

  “Those ones from the shadows.”

  Tikolo didn’t like the direction the conversation was heading. The beings in the shadows had vanished the first time she’d fired her phaser at them. But since then, they’d been visited by all sorts of apparitions, and she was no longer certain what was real and what wasn’t.

  They had left the corridor that seemed to be a Starfleet Academy hallway, but somehow they found themselves deep in the bowels of the ship, surrounded by equipment she couldn’t even understand: tall racks of computers that went on for what seemed like kilometers, pipes that snaked in every direction, huge banks of gears caked with sludge. Now they were passing through a narrow tube, barely wide enough for them to walk two abreast. All hope of finding Bunker had fled; their only remaining goal was to locate anything familiar so they could get back to the rest of the crew.

  As they made their way through the mechanical maze, semitransparent creatures had emerged from the walls, then disappeared again. They had heard the great, anguished sobs of a weeping woman, but when they rounded the corner behind which she should be waiting, the sound had stopped and there was no one in sight. And now, apparently, different people were seeing different things, instead of all of them experiencing the same vision.

  Nearing the end of the tube—beyond, Tikolo could see that it opened into a cavernous, dimly lit space, though she could see no detail beyond that—she heard the unmistakable sound of a door opening and slamming shut. An old-fashioned door, like the one her grandparents had had in their home when she was a girl, made of wood with hinges of brass that squeaked unless her grandfather remembered to lubricate them.

  “That can’t be,” she said.

  “What?” Vandella was right behind her.

  “That sound. It’s a door. Hear it?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t place it.”

  The door creaked on its hinges as it opened. Then it squealed, shorter but louder, and banged shut.

  “There could not possibly be a door like that on this ship,” Vandella said. “Could there?”

  “The ship looks pretty old,” Tikolo said. “Doesn’t seem likely, but who knows?” She started walking faster, hoping to spot the door when she cleared the tunnel.

  Because the last thing she needed was for there to be no door. It helped that Vandella had heard it, too. Helped a little.

  She had been fighting against the terror that threatened to engulf her, but every apparition, every audio hallucination, everything that looked or sounded or felt real but wasn’t, made her fight that much harder.

  If she discovered that there was no door—or perhaps just as bad, that there was a door but it was opening and closing on its own—that might just be the thing that would finally break her.

  “Miranda,” Vandella said as she approached the tunnel’s end. “Are you holding it together?”

  “What does it look like, Stanley?”

  “You look tense. Like your muscles are stretched too tight. You need to relax a little.”

  She whirled on him, heedless of the others coming up behind. “Relax? Do you even understand how absurd that is?”

  “I don’t mean you should kick off your boots and take a nap. But you’re too wound up. You’re not at your best, and you need to be.”

  “So that’ll help. Criticizing me. That’s perfect.”

  “That’s not my intent, Miranda, you know that.”

  “I used to think I knew a lot of things. I’m not so sure anymore. Not so sure about anything.”

  He moved in close, held her arms, and lowered his voice so only she could hear. “You can be sure that I love you, Miranda. I just want you to be safe.”

  She wrenched her arms from his grasp and caught herself before she drove a fist into his throat. “Damn it, you did not just say that! Now? Come on, Stanley, think!”

  “What? I—”

  Tikolo punched his arm, pulling the blow so she didn’t give it the full force she wanted to, then turned away from him and hurried the rest of the way through the tunnel. At the end, she emerged into a large space, mostly empty, but with a few pyramid-shaped structures in the middle and lots of open air above them. She heard the door bang shut one more time, and then it went silent.

  But there was no door. There was no door and she was lost and she didn’t know what to do anymore.

  And the panic? The panic was going to win.

  That outcome was no longer in question.

  Eighteen

  “I canna understand why she’s so dead-set on destroyin’ that big ship,” Scotty said. “She’s just been after me about it again.”

  He had met with Chan’ya and Gonzales in his quarters, where he had gone for a quick nap. He’d been asleep for less than ten minutes when they came calling, and after they’d left he had not been able to fall asleep again. A man needed his sleep, he knew that. He needed to keep his wits about him, to stay alert and sharp. The landing party had been gone for hours.

  “It’s beyond me,” Sulu said. He somehow managed to look just as crisp as ever, as if he had slept for eight hours, showered, and eaten a full meal. Scotty knew that wasn’t the case. With the captain gone, Scotty had been spending more time than usual on the bridge and less in engineering, and every time he stepped onto the bridge, Sulu was there, in his place at the helm. “But I am no expert on Ixtoldan customs or psychology.”

  “I’m not sure there is such a thing as Ixtoldan psychology,” Chekov offered. “They all seem crazy as loons to me.”

  “We probably seem the same to them, Pavel,” Uhura said. She had spun around in her seat so she faced into the bridge. “We can’t judge what we don’t understand.”

  Scotty lowered himself wearily into the captain’s chair. “I knew Captain Kirk had a hard job,” he said. “But I never appreciated how hard, before. It’s all I can do not to throw the lot of ’em into the brig and let ’em rot.”

  “I do find it disturbing,” Sulu said, “that the Federation seems so eager to admit them, yet they seem so ready to embrace a violent solution. They are certainly not the peace-loving people we were told about when the mission began.”

  “They believe the ship is abandoned, though,” Uhura reminded them. “They’re not saying we should destroy an inhabited vessel.”

  “I suppose not,” Scotty said. “Still—”

  “So we should be trying to figure out what that ship represents to them that makes them so anxious to vaporize it. If it’s not somebody they want to destroy, then it must be something,” Uhura offered.

  “But then you’re back to trying to figure out the Ixtoldans,” Chekov said. “And that just can’t be done.”

  “Has anyone tried asking them?”

  Sulu smiled. “Uhura, you just might have something there.”

  “That’s all well and good,” Scotty said. He closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair. “But who’ll do the askin’?” Nobody answered, and after a few seconds, he opened his eyes again. “What are you all l
ookin’ at me for?”

  • • •

  “Captain?” O’Meara said. They had made it down two decks, but they were taking it slow, stopping and listening for signs of life, checking as many doors as they could. It was a big ship, and searching this way took time. But they couldn’t take a chance on missing anyone; because the ship was so huge, backtracking would take longer than moving cautiously in the first place.

  “Yes, Mister O’Meara?”

  “I don’t think we’re alone here.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s just a feeling, sir. You know, when you feel like there’s someone watching you? Or just somebody in the room? You can’t see them or hear them, but you know there’s someone there.”

  “I’m familiar with it.”

  “Well, I’ve had it since we got here. Instead of going away, it’s been getting stronger.”

  “Me too, sir,” Romer said.

  “Anybody else?”

  Hands went up. Most of the group, including McCoy. Spock didn’t raise his hand, but his right eyebrow arched slightly and he gave a subtle but unmistakable nod.

  “I’ve felt it, too,” Kirk admitted. “Given everything else that’s been going on, I wasn’t sure if I could trust my own instincts. But if we’re unanimous, then it’s probably safe to say that something’s on this ship with us.”

  “What do you think it is, Captain?” Jensen asked.

  “I don’t think any of us can know that,” Kirk said. He led the way through an open door, into a shadowed chamber that looked as if it had been a mess hall. Tables and benches that humans—or Ixtoldans—could have used were jumbled against the far wall as if they’d slid there and piled up in random fashion. He felt, in a visceral way, someone standing directly in front of him, as if daring him to pass. He could almost feel hot breath on his face. But there was no physical presence, and he pushed past whatever it was.

  O’Meara was right, though.

  They weren’t alone.

  Romer came in behind Kirk, then McCoy, then Gao. Kirk was looking around the room, thinking that maybe if he didn’t try so hard to focus on what couldn’t be seen, he might be able to catch something out of the corner of his eye. He watched the crew members pass through the doorway. Gao had barely made it inside when some unseen force knocked him off his feet.

  “Gao!” Kirk shouted. He moved toward the man, but something blocked his way. As he tried to bull past it he saw Gao lifted bodily from the floor—by what, he still couldn’t tell—and hurled back down again. Gao cried out in obvious agony, struggling against his invisible foe. His face was going from red to purple, and Kirk could tell he was being choked.

  Kirk body-slammed his invisible blocker, and felt something unseen give beneath his charge. He continued on toward Gao, but strong hands gripped his arms and shoulders, even twining in his hair, and yanked him back. Other members of the team were similarly hindered. They cried out, fought with everything they could. Kirk fired his phaser at a target he couldn’t see but whose heft he experienced in every muscle that he strained trying to break away from it. The beam from his weapon passed through whatever was there and struck an empty stretch of wall behind it. For the briefest of instants, he thought the grip loosened. He wrenched his right arm free and aimed the phaser again, this time toward where he believed—from the position of Gao’s strained form—his attacker was.

  But it was no good. There were others directly behind. If the phaser beam missed, he would hit his own people. And given that they were under assault by seemingly shapeless, noncorporeal beings that still, somehow, had the ability to physically interact with them, he didn’t dare so much as stun a member of his crew. He would need every hand available.

  And, he saw now, it was too late to help Gao. The man had gone limp, any motion simply the result of the force that still squeezed his neck. His eyes bulged from their sockets, his mouth gaped, and his throat was distorted by the presence of unseen hands.

  Kirk raged against his impossible tethers. “Let me go!” he shouted. He yanked his left shoulder loose, almost tearing the gold fabric of his shirt, then spun and delivered a roundhouse right with all his weight behind it. To his satisfaction, he felt an impact, faint but there nonetheless, and he was free.

  He rushed toward Gao again. As he got close, he converted his momentum into a flying kick, aimed just above the crewman. And again he connected with something less than solid but more than nothing. Gao fell to the deck.

  Then everybody was released, and they gathered around Gao. McCoy shoved the others aside and examined the man. After several long seconds, he looked up at Kirk and shook his head slowly. “He’s dead, Jim.”

  “But . . . how? What were those things?”

  “Ghosts,” O’Meara speculated.

  “Aliens,” Beachwood said. “Noncorporeal but sentient.”

  “The latter is more likely,” Spock agreed. “However, without more data, a definitive answer cannot be known.”

  Kirk scanned the big room. He had not seen their attackers before, and nothing had changed in that regard. “I feel like they’re gone.”

  “So do I,” Jensen said. “Before, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.”

  Given the volume of that hair, Kirk thought, that would be an alarm hard to ignore.

  “Bunker’s not here,” he said. “Neither is the search party.” Another problem had just presented itself: now they had a corpse. He would not leave Gao’s body behind, but neither did he want anyone to have to carry it while they continued searching the ship. They could leave an electronic beacon behind, but they couldn’t trust it to function correctly. “Everybody make a mental note of this location,” he announced. “We’ll return for Mister Gao on the way back to the shuttles.”

  They continued moving through the ship, looking for the rest of their team, Kirk trying his communicator every few minutes. As they searched, he summoned Spock and McCoy closer. “We’ve encountered noncorporeal beings before,” he said. “But they don’t make sense here.”

  “What do you mean?” McCoy asked.

  “Why would they have tables and chairs? Doors that open and close by hand? Controls that use dials and buttons and switches?”

  “Good point.”

  “And,” Spock pointed out, “they have made no serious attempt to communicate with us. A single attack hardly counts as communication.”

  “That we know of,” Kirk corrected. “If they’re so alien that we simply can’t understand them, we might not recognize attempts to open a dialogue. But yes, I think you’re right—whatever is aboard this ship with us is decidedly malevolent.”

  “Mister O’Meara might have had a point,” Spock said.

  “You think they’re ghosts?” McCoy asked.

  “I think we cannot dismiss the idea out of hand.”

  “Now I really have heard everything. Our logical first officer believes in ghosts.”

  “I believe there is much about the dimensional fold that we do not yet understand. What we do know about it suggests that the laws of physics that we take for granted do not apply here. Further, there has long been speculation that ghosts are simply electrical impulses that flee the body at death. Nothing that is can become nothing at all. Even electricity has to go somewhere.”

  “I’ll grant you that,” Kirk said. He pushed open a door, stuck his head into a storage closet of some kind, filled with gear he couldn’t recognize. “So would these ghosts be the remnants of the original occupants of the ship?”

  “That is one possibility. Keep in mind, there are other ships joined with this one. Including the McRaven.”

  Kirk’s thoughts had been moving in that direction, but Spock had gotten there first. The idea of ghosts was hard to accept, but as the Vulcan had pointed out, the ordinary rules weren’t followed here. But the ghosts of his fellow Starfleet personnel, so recently alive and rushing through space on a ship virtually identical to the Enterprise? That was an even more disturbing concept. “Wh
y would they attack us?”

  “I’ve got an idea on that score,” McCoy said. “As you know, I’ve been brushin’ up on psychology recently.”

  In part, to effectively monitor and treat Miranda Tikolo, Kirk knew. She was a good addition to the crew, but she was dealing with a unique set of problems. “Go ahead, Bones.”

  “Well, some of what I’ve been reading talks about different theories of the mind. One twentieth-century Earth theory held that consciousness is present when a critical mass of electrical impulses reaches a certain level of activity and organization. By that standard—since we know by instrumentation and observation that there are such impulses on this ship—we can theorize that perhaps they have reached that level. They’re contained within the ship, which could count as organization.”

  “So you’re speculating that the ship itself is conscious?” Kirk asked.

  “I’m just sayin’, it’s not an idea we should dismiss out of hand.”

  “Mister Spock?” Spock had paused outside another door. “Thoughts?”

  “The doctor’s analysis appears sound.”

  “And there’s one more thing,” McCoy said.

  “What’s that?”

  “If this ship is conscious?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s as mad as a box of frogs.”

  Nineteen

  “Coming, Mister Spock?”

  The captain stood just off his left shoulder. The away team had passed him by as he stood beside a doorway. The logical thing to do was to open the door and see what was inside, but as yet he had not been able to do so.

  “Yes, Captain. But—”

  “Yes?”

  Spock didn’t answer. He couldn’t define exactly what he was experiencing—another insubstantial presence, he believed, but not an aggressive one, this time. Instead, he felt immersed in a warm, welcoming psychic bath. It—he had a vague sense of she—wanted him to accompany it. He was suspicious, but the overwhelming sensation was calming, confidently reassuring. “Captain, I believe . . . I believe that this being wants me to go with it. With her. Into this room.”