“Are you sure, Spock? We can just check it and move on.”
“There is something different here,” Spock replied. “This presence is not like those we have previously encountered. And there is a sense of urgency I cannot resist.”
“I’ll leave someone here with you,” Kirk said. “We have to come back this way anyway, to retrieve Mister Gao.”
“That is not necessary.”
“We at least have to look inside.”
Spock opened the door and peered into a room containing shelves of physical books, and computer stations surrounded by what looked like some sort of storage media arranged on racks.
“It’s a library,” McCoy said.
“So it would appear. Perhaps here, I can learn more about our situation.”
“You can’t read Ixtoldan, Spock.”
“You are only partially correct, Doctor. I cannot read Ixtoldan yet.”
“I don’t like it, Spock,” Kirk said. “Dividing up our forces more seems like a bad idea.”
“I understand your concern, and its validity. Nonetheless, this presence assures me that this is where I need to be.”
“When we come back, we don’t even know if this room will be here,” McCoy argued. “It could be a cornfield or a nightclub or something.”
“The hope of learning something valuable has to take precedence over less likely possibilities. I am convinced that I will be safe here.”
The captain’s jaw worked. He wanted to say something more, but he seemed to recognize that Spock’s mind would not be changed. “All right,” he said at last. “But don’t go anywhere.”
Spock didn’t answer. The presence was tugging him, almost bodily, into the library. Behind him, Kirk and McCoy went to rejoin the rest of the group, waiting to advance down the corridor. Spock passed through the doorway and was flooded by a surprising, almost thoroughly human emotion.
He felt as if he had come home.
• • •
Miranda Tikolo was hopelessly lost.
Trying to retrace their steps, the team had instead found themselves in an area of narrow passageways between rusted steel walls inset with gauges and dials and even hand cranks that all served a purpose she could not begin to discern. The ceilings were so low that Chandler could reach up and brush them with her fingertips. The course twisted and hooked back on itself and felt, to Tikolo’s hyperactively anxious mind, like an ambush waiting to happen.
With every step, she fought to quell her rising panic. It would be easy to give up, to accept that they would never again find Captain Kirk and the rest. The ship was impossible, its physical properties constantly in flux. Her heart was thudding rapidly in her chest and ears and throat, her breathing was shallow, and she had a hard time holding on to a thought for more than an instant.
But the captain had put her in charge, and until she could no longer function, she had to do her duty.
“This section can’t last forever,” she said, although it felt like it already had. “I guess we’re in engineering or something, but we’ll get back to the crew decks soon enough.”
“What about Bunker?” Greene asked.
“He’s on his own, I’m afraid. For all we know, he’s already found the others.”
“I guess that’s possible.”
“Of course it is.” Tikolo turned yet another corner and looked down an incredibly long, straight stretch, still narrow but with dark spaces along its length that might have been side passages. Terror welled up again; anything might be lurking in those shadows.
Then the ship gave a powerful lurch and everything turned black. The floor fell away beneath her feet and a rasping scream tore from her throat.
Light returned in brilliant flashes, showing a range of scenes that could not be: the nearby surface of a sun, with flares reaching out toward her; a tunnel formed of pure color, shifting and blending faster than thought; a thick, lush jungle draped in mosses and vines, birds screeching in alarm.
The darkness came back abruptly, and this time it stayed. Tikolo wasn’t falling, but neither could she detect any solid surface beneath her feet. She was suspended in the complete absence of everything.
And it wasn’t the first time.
The shuttle, off Outpost 4. Same thing. She had killed all her power so the Romulans wouldn’t detect her. The tiny craft had been floating in space, the blackness inside it absolute. After several hours, the oxygen had grown thin and she had restored enough power to stay alive, but not enough to turn on any lights or gravity or other comforts.
All the while, the Romulans had been pounding the outposts, obliterating them, one after the next. Killing everyone she knew there, everyone she had worked with.
While she waited, floating, in the dark.
Abruptly, the lights came back on.
And there they were.
“Romulans!” she screamed.
“Where?” Greene asked.
“Miranda!” Chandler cried. “There aren’t any Romulans here!”
“Didn’t you feel that impact? Their phaser batteries are pummeling us!”
“Those bumps have been happening since we got here,” Vandella said. “They’re atmospheric disturbances or something, not Romulan phasers.” He put a hand on her shoulder that she supposed was meant to be soothing.
She brushed it off. “You don’t know that! How could you?”
“Miranda, I know because I’ve been here as long as you have. They come and they go, and when they come strange things happen. Like this.” He waved a hand at their surroundings: a stark white laboratory space. The equipment that had once been used here was scattered around the place, smashed into pieces so small they weren’t recognizable. The room itself had been spared the decay and seemingly organic growth that had taken over most of the ship.
“What about it?”
“Don’t you remember? Before, we were in a long, tight hallway of some kind. Then it went dark, and now here we are. Completely different place. Romulans didn’t do that. It’s the dimensional fold, that’s all.”
“Aaagk!” She let out a brutal, wordless cry and whipped her head from side to side. “Liar! Stop it!”
“We’re on your side, Miranda,” Chandler assured her. “We’re just trying to get back to the captain, that’s all.”
Tikolo thought she knew the people who were talking to her, but their names fled from her consciousness and she was suddenly not so sure. Their faces no longer looked familiar, and then they no longer looked human at all. They were shape-shifters, pretending to be her comrades, to get her guard down. They were, no doubt, in league with the Romulans outside, punishing the starship from the safety of their bird-of-prey.
She broke free from the circle they’d made around her, ignoring their shouts and their phony concerned expressions, and darted for the nearest door.
“Miranda!” somebody cried. She didn’t stop. The doorway was just ahead; she raised her arms and battered through it. On the other side, she burst into a wide lobby-type area, with staircases joining the decks above and below.
Behind her, she heard the clatter of running feet, and those people, her so-called friends, flooded into the lobby.
And from the staircase leading up, Romulan soldiers opened fire.
Twenty
Kirk and his team left Spock, reluctantly, and continued their search. They had cleared the deck they were on, so they had started down the ladder to the one below when they heard the sound of shuffling feet, the soft creaks and rustles of uniforms, even a murmur of quiet voices.
“Tikolo?” Kirk called. “Bunker? Who’s there?”
The response was a guttural shout, and the careful footfalls changed to the sound of running feet.
“That’s not Tikolo,” Kirk said.
“That was Romulan, sir,” Romer said.
“We’re a long way from the Romulan Neutral Zone. Are you sure?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Retreat,” Kirk said. He was less than halfway down t
he ladder, and most of the away team had not started down it yet. Better to stick to the high ground than to split their forces. “Retreat!”
Romer, and Beachwood above her, scrambled back up. Kirk followed close behind, drawing his phaser as he reached the deck. “I don’t know how many there are,” he reported. “But there appear to be Romulans heading this way.”
The Romulans might have been just another illusion, but they couldn’t afford to count on that. They took cover behind ruined fixtures and other debris, weapons pointed toward the top of the ladder. A few moments later, a dark-haired head appeared there, with arching brows over dark eyes. Three phaser beams blasted it, and the Romulan fell heavily to the deck below.
Almost immediately, the sounds of Romulan disruptors welled up from below, and the deck shook with the force of the weapons’ beams hitting it. Those certainly seemed real. Given the condition of the ship, Kirk knew, it was only a matter of time before those guns tore through the flooring and exposed them.
“Return fire!” Kirk called.
A couple of his people moved closer to the opening, so they could fire through it. Disrupter blasts came back up; Jensen had to dive to the side to avoid one. More of them pounded against the floor.
Kirk went as close to the opening as he dared. “How many, Jensen?” he asked.
“I saw four.”
Kirk held his phaser at arm’s length and poked it into the opening, firing several times in a loose figure-eight pattern. He heard someone cry out in pain. As he was shooting, he risked a hurried glimpse over the side.
He saw five Romulans, wearing battle armor. Two were already down. One pointed up at him and growled a warning, but Kirk drew his head back before he fired.
Three remaining. Of course, he didn’t know how many there might be beyond his angle of view.
But they were down there, and he and his crew were up here. They couldn’t come up, but he couldn’t go down.
Disruptor blasts continued to hammer the floor. If they broke through, he realized, then the Starfleet personnel could fire phasers down through the holes, with more accuracy than those shooting up from below.
“Help them out,” he said. He aimed his phaser down at one of the spots he believed the Romulans were targeting, and demonstrated. Sparks flew as the phaser’s beam chewed through the flooring material.
In another moment, he’d made a hole. Others in his crew did the same. A disruptor blast came up through the hole, but harmlessly continued toward the ceiling above. As soon as it was gone, Kirk jammed his phaser into the opening and fired at the Romulan aiming his way. The soldier fell. Kirk rushed away before the returning fire came, but then phaser beams from other weapons, also angling down through holes in the floor, took out the last two Romulans.
Kirk peered through the hole again, shifting his view to encompass as much of the lower deck as possible. “That looks like all of them,” he said.
“It could be a trap,” McCoy warned.
“Could be. But we have to find out. Petty Officer Tikolo and the others are down there somewhere.”
“Unless the Romulans got them, too,” Beachwood said.
“Don’t!” O’Meara blurted out.
“I’m just saying—”
“They’re fine,” O’Meara said. “I know they’re fine.”
“We’ll never find out if we don’t go down,” Beachwood observed.
“I’ll go first,” O’Meara said. “Cover me.”
He started for the ladder. Kirk stepped into his way. “I’ll go first, Mister O’Meara. You cover me.”
O’Meara looked as though he wanted to argue, but he reined it in. “Aye, sir.”
Kirk returned to the ladder and started down once again. This time, he kept his phaser in his hand, and as soon as his head cleared the deck, he bent over, almost double, to look for any more living Romulans. He didn’t see any, and the dead ones looked very dead, indeed. He descended another step, and then another, his back to the ladder, looking in every direction with every rung he reached.
There did not appear to be any more Romulans. Which raised a series of significant questions. Where had the Romulans come from? Outside the fold? And how? If they had come past the Enterprise—well, scratch that, he thought, Scotty wouldn’t have let them come past him.
But the very existence of the fold opened up new possibilities. The question might have been less Where did they come from? and more When did they come from? The past? The future? The uniforms and weaponry he could see as he stepped off the final rung looked contemporary, but they could have come as easily from yesterday or tomorrow as next year or a hundred years ago.
That question was not likely to be answered soon. Nor were the others: What were they doing here? Had they been able to navigate within the fold, or had they been attracted by the Ixtoldan ship’s apparent gravitational field? Did they know there were Starfleet personnel aboard, or had Kirk’s shout been their first indication that they weren’t alone? Had they been here when the Starfleet shuttles landed, their cloaking devices somehow concealing their presence? There had been what looked like a Romulan bird-of-prey, attached to the cluster of ships gathered around the Ixtoldan one. But they couldn’t have cloaked this ship, even if they had been able to prevent Starfleet instruments from reading their own. So they hadn’t been on board the Ixtoldan vessel when it had been scanned.
The most important questions, though, were: Were there really only five? And had the other team, or the missing Mister Bunker, encountered any?
“All clear,” he said. “Come on down.”
The others descended one at a time. Jensen came last, and he paused at the top of the ladder. “What about Mister Spock, Captain? Should we make sure he’s safe?”
Kirk considered the question briefly. Spock was not only the best science officer he had ever known or heard about, he was also a friend, and a very close one. He would no more want something to happen to the Vulcan than he would want to lose his own life.
But sending someone back to stand guard over him would mean further dividing their small group. Any Romulan attack that could defeat Spock could almost as easily defeat Spock and one other, and he only had seven people left, including himself, which meant he could spare no more than two at the outside. And they still had to find Tikolo and her group, and Bunker.
Besides, they had searched that deck, and the one above it, thoroughly, finding no Romulans. The only Romulans so far encountered had come up from below. If any more tried to get up to where Spock was, they would have to go through Kirk and the others.
Finally, there had been the look on Spock’s face when he sent them away. He had looked comfortable, at perfect ease. Something—some aspect of this mad, mad starship, Kirk guessed—had convinced him of his safety.
And one of the things one could safely say about Mister Spock was that he was hard to fool. If his safety had been guaranteed, that guarantee could likely be trusted.
“No, Mister Jensen,” Kirk finally said. “Mister Spock is fine. We keep searching.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Jensen said. As he descended the ladder and stepped onto the deck, he looked a little relieved. Kirk knew that his question had been more than that: it had been an offer that, if accepted, would have required him to return by himself to the library where they’d left Spock. Kirk didn’t blame him for not wanting to make that trip; on this ship, he wouldn’t want to, either.
They moved carefully toward the dead Romulans. Kirk nudged one with his toe, to make sure the corpse had substance and wasn’t simply one more construct thrown his way by the dimensional fold. It did, or seemed to, though he knew the evidence offered by touch could be no more fully trusted than that of any other sense. He wished there were some other way to confirm their reality, but the tricorders couldn’t be trusted. He gathered up their weapons, which seemed solid enough. Romer joined him. “Should we bring these with us, sir?” she asked.
“No, I think our phasers are adequate,” he said. “I just don�
�t want anyone else who might pass through here to find them. At least, not without a struggle.” He cast his gaze about the visible part of the deck and saw a pile of clutter—broken-up furniture, he guessed—in one corner. “There,” he said. “We’ll toss them into that mess.”
He and Romer carried them over and did as he said. The disruptors blended with the debris, until even he could barely see them there. “Good enough,” he said.
Everything about this deck was smaller than the one above it; the corridors were narrower, the ceilings and doorways lower. Even the lighting seemed less bright, though he couldn’t tell if that was because the walls were darker or more covered in that moss or mold he was quickly getting used to, or if the change was real.
“We can be sure they’re not in the immediate area,” he said, “or they’d have heard the fight.”
“Which way, Captain?” Beachwood asked.
All these decisions, Kirk thought. If I weren’t here they’d make them without hesitation. Since I am, they have to ask. It was a captain’s lot, he knew. And he didn’t mind, not really.
But some days, it was more tiresome than others.
Twenty-one
Scotty had enjoyed the noisy chaos of engineering—so restful, compared to the relative quiet of the bridge—for less than an hour before Uhura’s voice came over the intercom, summoning him back. She kept her voice level, as she always did, but he detected a hint of urgency there just the same. “I’m comin’, lassie,” he replied. Ought to have my head examined, is what I ought to do, he thought. I wonder if I can get myself demoted? And how soon?
When he exited the turbolift, he was pleasantly surprised to see no Federation diplomats or Ixtoldans in evidence. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, after all. One look at the glum faces confronting him, though, disabused him of that hope. If the matter hadn’t been sensitive, they wouldn’t have called him up. He felt the knot in his stomach, which his time in engineering had only begun to unsnarl, start to form again.
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