“Yes, sir,” O’Meara agreed. “On the other hand, anybody could service it with a big enough wrench and maybe a hammer. Convenient for a long trip, in case the engineers don’t survive.”
He had been about to close the door again when Kirk heard a soft, clanking noise deep in the room’s bowels. “Shh!” the captain ordered. O’Meara froze. A moment later, the noise repeated, joined by the low murmur of conversation.
“It’s them,” O’Meara whispered.
“Not necessarily,” Kirk countered. He summoned the others from the hallway and explained. In a moment, they were moving silently through the big room in small groups, each one taking a different aisle through the machinery.
The room had gone absolutely silent. Kirk thought the first noise he’d heard had been someone walking through the aisles and bumping into the machinery. Chances were that, quiet as they had been, someone had heard the Enterprise crew coming in, and the listeners had gone to ground and were waiting for an ambush opportunity. The captain had conceded that advantage by dividing his team, but he had to balance caution and the necessity for finding his missing people. If in fact the noise had been made by Tikolo and her squad, then no harm done. If it was more Romulans, then they would be ready for battle.
Romer’s voice shattered the silence. “Here!” she cried. The sound of phasers firing followed, then the slightly different pitch of disruptor rifles returning fire, and the crackle of shots going astray.
The others converged on that aisle. Kirk went over the machines instead of around, and from that vantage point spotted half a dozen Romulan soldiers taking cover behind a bank of heavy equipment. He had an angle that allowed him to shoot over the top of their shelter, and he used it. Two Romulans fell quickly, but then he had to dive from his perch, because it also gave them an easy shot at him. Disruptor rays blasted where he had just been, tearing metal and sending sparks flying.
He touched down in the aisle that Romer and McCoy had been in from the start. The others had joined them, and from behind their own covered positions, were blasting away at the Romulans.
He tapped Beachwood and O’Meara and motioned toward the left. They understood, and followed him underneath a bank of machinery, then around the end of the next row. From there they worked their way quietly past the Romulans and cut over again.
The Romulans were still engaged with the Starfleet crew when Kirk once again climbed up on banks of machinery. When the other two crew members were in position, he shouted. “Hey, you guys! Up here!”
Two of the Romulans spun around. Kirk’s first shot took one in the chest. He ducked return fire, then Beachwood got the second. The last two Romulans tried to break and run, but were cut down by fire from the main Starfleet group.
With the fight over, Kirk, Beachwood, and O’Meara rejoined the main group. O’Meara called out Tikolo’s name, and Kirk let him, knowing that the shout would draw in any remaining Romulans.
“Is that wise?” said a deep voice from close by.
“Mister Spock, is that you?”
“It is indeed.”
Kirk went around the end of the equipment bank and saw Spock walking toward them. “I thought you were supposed to stay put.”
“I was,” Spock said. “But I learned something that I thought you should know. Since you did not appear to be returning in a timely fashion, I decided to find you.”
“Glad that you did that. If you could find Tikolo’s group, and Bunker, as easily, we could get off this ship.”
Twenty-five
“The passengers on this ship,” Spock said as they continued their quest, “were the real Ixtoldans.” He, Kirk, and McCoy spoke in low tones. The captain would decide what part of Spock’s news, if any, to share with the rest of the crew.
“Define ‘real,’ please,” Kirk said.
“Original.”
“There are original and nonoriginal Ixtoldans?”
“Indeed there are, Captain. Those we think of as Ixtoldans—including Chan’ya and her retinue—came to Ixtolde from another planet in their system, which had been known previously as Ixtolde VII. And they did not come as friends.”
Kirk opened a door and glanced inside, but it led only to a small storeroom, the contents of which were scattered all over the floor. “Are you saying they invaded Ixtolde?”
“Not at first, but eventually. First they came as trading partners. Ixtolde VII was far more technologically advanced than Ixtolde, whose inhabitants were, shall we say, technologically naive. They were a bucolic people, although there were a few cities of moderate size. Ixtolde VII had wealth and the capability for interplanetary travel. But their planet was far from the system’s sun. Scientists there had discovered forces at work that would move their world into an orbit that would cool it further, making it uninhabitable. Already, they could no longer sustain an indigenous agriculture. Working through agents in Ixtoldan cities, they arranged to buy huge quantities of Ixtolde’s surplus of crops and livestock, and for a time, that satisfied their needs.”
“For a time.”
“Eventually, however, the residents of Ixtolde VII knew that their planet was unsustainable. They needed a new world, and they decided that the planet that had been their breadbasket would be the ideal place. Except for one minor inconvenience.”
“Let me guess,” McCoy said. “The planet’s original population was in their way.”
“You are correct, Doctor. The leaders of Ixtolde VII had two goals, which they did not believe were mutually exclusive. They were developing the technology that would allow them interstellar travel, but their planet was dying. They wanted a new home, and they wanted one of the primary benefits of interstellar capability.”
“Federation membership?” Kirk suggested.
“Yes. It must be granted that the planet’s leadership was forward-thinking. The Federation would not look kindly upon a race that attacked another planet and slaughtered or enslaved its populace.”
Kirk shook his head. “That’s an understatement, Mister Spock.”
Around them, the rest of the team kept checking doors as the party kept moving forward. They always came back empty-handed. Kirk was beginning to wonder if the missing crew members had somehow left the ship.
“But they had a plan,” Spock said. “They would invade in stages. At first, no one on Ixtolde knew what was happening to them. Aleshia says—”
“Aleshia?” Kirk asked.
“The woman who shared this knowledge with me.”
“Now there’s a woman?” McCoy asked. “Funny you didn’t mention this right off the bat.”
“Aleshia is noncorporeal,” Spock explained. “But quite impressive, just the same. She told me that the first assaults came in the form of aerial shelling. She and her fellow villagers believed they were under attack by giants, because their legends included stories about malevolent giants storming around the countryside, crushing everything in their path.”
“And they weren’t technologically sophisticated enough to know the truth?”
“No. Giants fit into their belief set. Interplanetary war did not. And after the giant attacks came the acid rains.”
“Not an uncommon phenomenon,” Kirk said, “but usually one connected to an advanced technology with poor pollutant controls.”
“This acid was not merely destructive,” Spock said. “It was deadly. Aleshia still is unsure how it was accomplished, but I believe it could have been done fairly simply, through appropriate cloud seeding. Its effects were short-lived, so the planet’s soil and livestock stores could be easily renewed. In fact—”
“Spare us the details,” McCoy said.
“Very well, Doctor.” Spock watched as another room was cleared. “The next stage involved actual contact, for the first time. Ixtolde VII sent ships to the surface to round up those who had survived thus far. They were taken to a central processing facility, and loaded onto this ship. Aleshia learned the healing arts, from the writings of a village wise woman named Margyan, a
nd she did her best, within her limited means, to keep the ship’s population healthy.”
“Why didn’t the invaders simply kill them?” Kirk asked.
“As far as they were concerned, they were merely doing what had to be done to preserve their own population. They did not consider themselves evil, and they were not conquering just for conquest. They wanted only to clear away any impediment to their settlement of Ixtolde. This was not the typical genocide, which is often marked by race hatred and includes such atrocities as widespread rape. None of that happened here. Instead, this killing had been coldly calculating: the simplest way to take over the planet was to drastically reduce the number of inhabitants, to eliminate any possibility of planetary self-defense. By launching the survivors into deep space on a century ship, built to carry them for generations, instead of killing every last one of them, they were able to assuage any guilt. They told themselves that they were only displacing the Ixtoldans, and that the ship would keep their race alive for centuries, until they found a new home and established themselves there.”
“So banishment to a spacebound prison vessel was supposed to make them feel good about what they’d done?” McCoy asked, horrified.
“I am not justifying their actions, Doctor, merely explaining them as Aleshia explained them to me.”
“How did she communicate all this, Spock?” Kirk asked. “Since she is, as you say, noncorporeal?”
“Through her writings, largely. She has put together a fairly substantial history of the entire affair. The rest came through a mind-meld.”
“You melded with a being who has no physical form? Wasn’t that dangerous?”
“Her lack of material substance was less dangerous, I believe, than the fact that she is part of the energy that makes up this ship’s group-mind. And as Doctor McCoy correctly put it, that mind is insane. However, the mind-meld was successful, and Aleshia’s personality, her presence, is strong enough that she was able to shield me.”
“Sounds like you made quite the connection,” McCoy said. “When are you gonna introduce us?”
Spock ignored the gibe. “The journey did not work out as planned,” he said. “Instead of traveling through space for generations, the ship entered the dimensional fold and became trapped here. As we know, time and space in here are not what they are elsewhere. On the planet Ixtolde, a few generations have passed, and the invaders are firmly established as the sole inhabitants of the planet. Here on the ship, however, thousands of years have passed. More to the point, those years have passed in a chaotically random fashion characteristic of the dimensional fold. What we have encountered over the last several hours, the Ixtoldans have been dealing with for centuries. They have long since died, but due to some property of the fold I have not had a chance to explore, death is not final here. Electrical impulses remain. As we speculated, those impulses have organized into something we would call a group-mind. That group-mind is insane. The ship is not safe; all others who wander into the fold, such as the crew of the McRaven, find themselves drawn here and destroyed, either by dangers existing on the ship or by those manifesting from their own subconscious minds. Aleshia was one of the last to die; she was able to watch and record the whole unpleasant process.”
“We need to get out of here,” Kirk said.
“The longer we are here, the fewer of us there will be,” Spock replied. “We will all die. The calculation is as simple as that.”
“How much time do we have?” Kirk asked.
“That cannot be determined with any specificity. We might already have reached that point.”
“Can’t this girl help?” McCoy asked.
“Aleshia, Doctor. She already has. She has shared knowledge, and knowledge, as they say, is power.”
“At this point,” McCoy countered, “all knowledge is gonna do is make sure we die informed instead of ignorant.”
“Then,” Kirk said, “we’ll just have to make sure we don’t die.”
“You got any foolproof ways around it, Jim?”
“I only know one way, Bones. Living.”
• • •
During a period of relative calm, Miranda Tikolo had learned the names of the people she moved through the ship with, and what their intended destination was. The tall woman was Eve Chandler, the big man was Cesar Ruiz, and the one who seemed to be her lover was Stanley Vandella. Jamal Greene was the one who had died. They were looking for a Captain Kirk, whom they had left on one of the upper decks when they followed someone named Bunker.
She gleaned most of it through carefully phrased questions that didn’t let on—she hoped—how ignorant she was about her situation. Some came from her own memories, which occasionally reflected back at her, like shards of a broken mirror catching the beam of a flashlight as it plays around a darkened room. Tikolo no longer had to wonder if she had been with these others. They were Starfleet, and so was she. Their enemies were the Romulans who were scattered about the ship they seemed to be trapped inside.
Those things she remembered now, or had pieced together. What she couldn’t remember was everything that had preceded their arrival here. She didn’t know where they were, what starship she was assigned to, or what the mission was.
Details could wait. What was important at the moment was survival, and then finding this Captain Kirk. Once her safety was assured, she could worry about the rest.
She was climbing a ladder, and was almost up to a small hatchway when the attack came.
Ruiz was behind her. Chandler and Vandella had already gone through, and Vandella was looking down through the opening, lowering a hand to help her up. She wondered how she ever could have put up with a man so solicitous, as if she couldn’t be trusted to even climb a ladder unaided. She was fit, she was strong, and in spite of her momentary memory lapse, she was certain that she was mentally capable as well. Tikolo was waving his hand away when the disruptor beams struck Ruiz. He screamed in pain.
“Miranda!” Vandella cried. “Your hand!”
But she had made a snap judgment of her chances. The Romulans were on the deck they were just leaving. Going up would put distance between herself and them, but it would also leave her vulnerable, her upper body through the hatch, lower body exposed, with no way to know precisely where the enemy was.
Instead of reaching for Vandella, she released her grip on the ladder and dropped to the deck below.
Ruiz was still on his feet, blasting away at a trio of oncoming Romulans. His chest had a gaping wound, and she couldn’t believe he had the strength to stand. She added her own phaser to the mix, and together they dispatched the Romulans. When the last of them had fallen, Ruiz turned toward her. His dark eyes were already glazing over. “Thanks, Miranda,” he said. “Take care of . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. His strength left him all at once, and he collapsed, falling forward into her arms. He weighed a ton, and she squatted to set him down.
And that was when the rest of the Romulans showed up, filling the far end of the corridor. Twenty of them or more, she guessed, coming her way at a fast clip.
“Miranda!” Vandella cried.
“Shoot ’em!” she shouted.
She didn’t wait for him to comply. Beyond the ladder, the corridor continued. It looked like it made a sharp turn not far ahead, so she darted that way. The Romulans were firing at her, but she weaved as she ran and their blasts missed her. Vandella and Chandler returned fire from above, holding off the Romulan advance for just long enough.
Tikolo made it to the bend and skidded into the far wall, then bounced off and continued running. She could hear the Romulan forces split up, some engaged with Vandella and Chandler, others chasing after her.
An open doorway led into an enormous space where some sort of heavy equipment had been stored. Nothing appeared connected to anything else. Storage, she thought, spare parts for the machinery used to run the ship. There were places to hide, but she couldn’t see any way out except that open doorway she had entered th
rough.
The Romulans weren’t far behind. If they trapped her in here, they could hunt her down and she would have no place to go. There had to be someplace better, somewhere she could go to ground.
After a minute, she found a hatchway on her left. She wrenched the handle up. It stuck, then gave. The footfalls of the Romulans were growing louder as they neared the doorway. When they reached it, they would spot her.
The hatch was jammed shut. She tugged on it, then pushed off the wall with all her weight, and finally it swung free. She slipped through and pulled it shut behind her. It stuck in place again and she didn’t worry about securing it. Chances were the Romulans wouldn’t even notice it, and if they did, they would have to come through one at a time.
She was in some sort of access compartment for whatever was above her. It was pitch black, without the flat, glowing stones that illuminated the rest of the ship. The air was close and smelled heavily of lubricant, clotted and thick. She felt solid, complex structures in the dark, piping and ductwork and more. If there was another way out of the space, she would never find it.
The Romulans went past the hatchway. She willed them to keep going. At first they did; she could hear them lumbering, heavy in their battle gear. But after a few minutes they seemed to understand that she wasn’t ahead of them, and they doubled back.
She was on her stomach, beneath whatever the unidentified objects were. The floor was slick with grease, and she slid farther back. Terror once again gnawed at her, the fear of the dark, of being alone. She was locked in a small space with someone dangerous outside it, and that was at once familiar and horrifying. She knew that fear had to come from somewhere, but along with most of the details of her situation, the source was lost to her.
Tikolo didn’t mind, at the moment. She was certain that if she could remember what spurred the borderline panic she felt, it would escalate into the full-blown variety. She gripped her phaser in both hands, wishing they would stop trembling. She had it pointed toward where she thought the door was, but in the dark, slipping and sliding beneath low-hanging pipes, she could no longer be entirely sure of its location.
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