Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (24 page)

“Let me try, Captain,” someone said, pushing his way through the group; and there was Mr. Freeman, his usual neatness much the worse for wear. He was singed and smudged and bruised and had a black eye, and his hair was all over the place. But already he was on his knees by the door, snapping open a pouch at one side, fishing for tools. He pushed his hair back in his everyday get-neat gesture while using a decoheser to pop the flush cover off a small panel by the right side of the door. “Oh damn,” he said at the sight of the panel’s innards, an incomprehensible welter of circuits and chips. “It’s all solids.”

“Mr. Freeman,” Jim said grimly. The sounds of approaching Romulans were getting much louder.

“I know, sir—” Freeman said, poking around in the circuitry and doing God only knew what.

It was taking too long. “Lay down covering fire,” Jim said to the people behind him. “Ael—”

“I can’t help you here, Jim,” she said, giving the panel only a glance and turning away. “Not a format I’m familiar with. Hilae, Gehen, Rai, over there to the side. You—Rotsler, Eisenberg, Feder, the other side. Fisher, Remner, Paul—here with me. The rest of you, mind the captain and Mr. Spock, and fire as you like. Mr. Athendë, one of your phasers. Hate to use a trick twice—”

“Mr. Freeman!” Jim said.

“Captain, this isn’t just something you can—”

“Jim,” McCoy said quietly, and rather sorrowfully, “the boy can’t manage it, that’s all. Back off.”

Jim looked up at McCoy in surprise—and so would have missed the look that settled down over Freeman’s face at McCoy’s words, had McCoy not been looking so fixedly at the young man’s back. Jim, who could see Freeman’s face from his angle, saw suddenly written on it a rage so terrible that for a second he wondered if Freeman was going to blow up like an overloading phaser himself. Then Jim wondered if he’d seen the look at all, for Jerry’s face sealed over into an expression as cool as one of Spock’s. Freeman did something brief and precise to the circuitry, changed tools, did something else to a particular logic solid in one quick fierce motion.

The door sprang open.

Behind Jim there were explosions, cries, shouts of anger and triumph. He ignored them and ran into the room. There was equipment of some kind, three walls’ worth of it, all studded with controls and switch-lights; there was a fourth wall with a great window in it and another refractory door. And there were Romulans. One of them Jim stunned; the other, too close, he kicked right between the legs, where even Romulans are vulnerable, and Romulan females no less than the males. The third he never had a chance at, for Mr. Athendë, while still carrying the burned Harrison and supporting Spock on the side, had swept into the room right after Jim and thrown one of his major handling tentacles and various minor ones around the remaining Romulan’s head and body, squeezing the man’s disruptor right out of his hand so that it clattered on the floor.

“Nicely done, Mr. Athendë,” Jim said to the Sulamid, panting.

The Sulamid curved several stalked eyes in Jim’s direction. “Must protect wounded, Captain,” he said; but even his eternal humor sounded a little grim at the moment.

“All right,” Jim said to the remaining Romulan. “Which of these controls the damper?”

The Romulan, still straining against the tentacles that held him, turned an enraged look on Jim. “I’ll tell you nothing!”

—and the man suddenly gasped and began to turn an astonishing shade of dusky green-bronze. “Suggest you change your mind,” Athendë said sweetly, as the great handling tentacles, as thick as tree limbs, began to squeeze. “Might lose temper otherwise. Or start to feel hungry. Love it when prey struggles.”

The Romulan made a sudden anguished sound for which Jim could see no reason—until he noticed a runnel of green making its way down the lower leg of the man’s uniform, one of the only exposed parts of him. Jim reflected briefly that he still had no idea where a Sulamid kept its mouth, though now the question of whether the mouth had teeth in it seemed to have been resolved.

“Have tasted better,” said Mr. Athendë mildly. “But shame to waste. Better say something fast or will bolt my lunch and get on with work.”

The Romulan shuddered and moaned and gasped, turning darker—then cried out again. “Over there!” he said, his eyes flickering to the leftmost of the consoles.

“Ael,” Jim said. She hurried into the room with several of her people, and together they went to the console and began touching controls, reading screens. “This is it, Captain. We can crash the effect itself easily enough—” and Ael reached out and tapped at a keypad, then hit several switches in rapid succession. “But I don’t see any control for crashing the whole system from here.”

“No matter,” Jim said. “We’ll find the tank with the brain material and stick a sonic grenade in it.” He turned around and gave his attention to that large window. Mr. Freeman was already down on his knees by the door adjacent to the window, working on another circuit panel. Looking through the window, Jim could see why; littered all over the floor of the great room were hundreds of bodies in Starfleet uniforms. Some of them were stirring feebly.

“Captain,” said a weak voice. It was Spock, whom Athendë was still half-cradling in some spare tentacles. McCoy went to him, helping him to stand. “Jim—that mechanism is full of living material—”

“Mr. Spock, I would like nothing better than to transport it out of here and find it a nice home on Vulcan,” Jim said. “But the ship’s screens are up, and she’s not answering anyway, and we can’t do it. If we leave the living material alone, it can be used against us again.”

“Not easily, Captain,” Ael said. “If we destroy this board”—and she touched more switches—“this whole setup will go, and the connections to the brain tissue will fuse. In any case, it’s time that we did one thing or another and got moving. It is getting noisy out there, and not even
our
people can hold that corridor forever.”

“All right,” Jim said. “The computers at least. Everybody out of the way.”

Athendë and the others cleared away from the console side of the room, heading for the door to the large room where the Vulcans had been held. “Get in there and help them,” Jim said. “Mr. Spock?”

“A great pleasure, Captain,” Spock said, unholstering his phaser and aiming at the key computer board. He blew it to bits.

“‘Pleasure’ is an emotion, Mr. Spock,” Ael said from behind them as the last few crackles and fizzes died out.

Jim turned, wondering what that meant, and found Ael looking at Spock with a rather cockeyed expression. Spock gave it right back to her. “So I hear, Commander,” he said, and together they turned and headed for the room full of Vulcans.

Jim hurried after them, for the noise out in the hall
was
getting pretty loud. Many of the Vulcans were on their feet now, and more every moment. From across the room one staggered across to him. It was tall young Sehlk, the
Intrepid’
s first officer, and Jim reached out and steadied Sehlk as he almost fell over upon reaching him. “Mr. Sehlk, are you all right?”

Sehlk stared at Jim, his face (in the cool Vulcan fashion) bewildered in the extreme. “Captain,” Sehlk said with a brief, most unVulcan access of emotion, “it is most illogical for you to be here!”

“Is it really?” Jim said, suspecting that he was going to have to get used to hearing that from every Fleet officer he met for a while. “I’m not doing anything for you and your captain that he wouldn’t probably do for my people, were our places reversed…. Meanwhile, I would rather beg the question—”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Very good. Where’s Captain Suvuk?”

“Not here, Captain,” the young Vulcan said. “The Romulans took him from us shortly after we were brought here. Logic would seem to indicate that they are attempting to force classified information from him—most likely the
Intrepid
’s control codes and command ciphers, that being the only information he would have and we would not that would be of use to them.”

Useful indeed. With those codes and ciphers the Romulans could drain
Intrepid’
s computers dry of all kinds of useful classified data—Federation starship patrol corridors, troop strengths and distributions—“Mr. Sehlk, they didn’t harm him, did they?”

“They tortured him, Captain,” Sehlk said with terrible equanimity. “But that did them no good; mere torture will not break Command conditioning, as you know. The Romulans then attempted to bring their mind-techniques to bear on him. We tried to defend him at a distance, by taking the brunt on our own minds—and for a short while we succeeded in standing the Romulans off. Their techniques so far work better for large groups than for single persons. But the techniques they are using are apparently mechanically augmented in some way; once our interference was discovered, they put us all under the damper at such intensity that some of us, the more psionically sensitive, died of it.” Sehlk’s eyes grew cold. “Can you imagine what it is like, Captain, to lie paralyzed for hour after hour, with a mind forcibly emptied of thought, of volition—though not of the knowledge of what has happened to you, or probably will?”

“Mr. Sehlk,” Jim said, “may those of us who have not be preserved from it.”

“We will see to that,” Sehlk said. “Captain, when Suvuk realized that they were going to use such artificial augmentation to force his mind, he drove himself purposely into
kan-sorn
—a mental state similar to coma, but with this difference, that any attempts on the integrity of a mind in
kan-sorn
will destroy both mind and body. He made himself useless to them—and so he lies, somewhere in here, comatose. Captain,” Sehlk said, “we must find him.” And though the statement was certainly based in logic, there was more to it than that: there was the ferocious, unconditional Vulcan loyalty that Jim had come to know very well indeed.

“We will,” Jim said. “First we have to get you people out of here. Our position at the moment isn’t the best—”

“Acknowledged,” Sehlk said, and detached himself coolly from Jim’s grip, heading off a little unsteadily to see to his own people. They were recovering rapidly, more than half of them on their feet now, going about the room as swiftly and efficiently as they could. Jim spent about half a second simply being astonished at how many different kinds of Vulcans there were. On some level he had become conditioned to their being dark, and usually tall. But here were gigantic seven-foot Vulcans and little delicate ones, Vulcans slimmer even than Spock and Vulcans much burlier—none of them actually being overweight; Starfleet regulations to one side, Jim suspected nonglandular fat of being, as far as Vulcans were concerned, “illogical.” And there were fair Vulcans, blond and ash blond and very light brunette, and, good Lord, several redheads—

Most important, there were four hundred and eight of them. Jim could think of a lot of worse things than having four hundred Vulcans, all coolly furious over the loss of their captain, at his back in a charge down that corridor.

Ael came up beside him. “Well, Captain,” she said, “that’s half our job done.”

“A third,” he said. “Their captain’s not here, Ael—we have to find Suvuk yet. Then the research computers and the genetic-material stockpile.”

“And how are we going to find one Vulcan in this place full of Romulans?” she said, looking askance. “Jim, we’ve already been here more than thirty minutes! The whole population of this station is going to come down on us shortly—”

“Let them,” Jim said. “The numbers are a little better right now.”

“Yes, but these Vulcans aren’t armed! And what about your ship? Why haven’t we heard from Mr. Scott?”

“That,” Jim said, his guts clenching inside him, “is something I intend to find out as soon as possible. In the meantime, your first question—”

Jim turned around to call for Mr. Selhk, but he was already heading toward Ael and Jim, with T’Leiar and the calm round Sobek in tow. “Captain,” he said, “we’re ready to move. What are your orders?”

“Well, first of all we’re going to have to locate Suvuk.”

“Captain,” said willowy T’Leiar, “leave that to us. Several of us have had occasion to mindmeld with the captain before, so we are quite familiar with his basic personality pattern. And now that the mind damper is no longer operational—”

“You can track him,” Jim said. “What do you have to do?”

“Sehlk and T’Leiar will hold the pattern,” Sobek said. “The rest of us, even those not trained in the disciplines, will also be of use; we will lend them—I think the most precise word would be ‘intention.’ We will require several minutes’ concentration to set up and implement the state.”

“Very well, gentlemen, ladies; carry on. I’m only sorry I can’t offer you some peace and quiet for what you’re doing….”

“Quiet is not necessary,” Sehlk said, for a moment looking very like Spock did while he discussed matters Vulcan and private; reserved, intense, and hiding (not well) a great weight of feeling. “And as for the peace, it is inside us, else no outward peace would be of any use.”

Jim looked up. All around, slowly surrounding him and Ael and Spock and McCoy and Athendë and the rest of their party, the Vulcans moved in close. There was nothing mysterious about it, no outward sign as in the personal mindmeld. Sehlk closed his eyes; T’Leiar simply folded her arms and looked down at the floor. But Jim suddenly began to become aware of a frightening sense of oneness settling in around him, as seemingly palpable as the Vulcan’s bodies, as invasive and inescapable as the air. He told himself that it was frightening only because he had not been brought up to it—to this certainty, seemingly common in Vulcans, that any given group was far more than the sum of its parts, and the parts all infinitely less for the loss of one of them.