Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (26 page)

The man laughed at them, such a scornful sound that Ael had to admire his courage, while at the same time wanting very much to step over there, relieve T’Leiar of him, and strangle him with one hand. “You think you can force information from me?” he said. “Do your worst. I was one of the first Rihannsu to obtain the Vulcan mind-techniques directly from your genetic material. It was I who assisted in the capture of your ship by the cruiser
Battlequeen.
Your minds hold no terror for me—”

“Oh, indeed,” T’Leiar said, very softly. “But you were using an enhancer, were you not?—several thousand cubic inches of brain matter added to your own, endowing you with much more reach and scope than you have in your own mind. No,” said T’Leiar, as from outside the room more and more Vulcans slipped in through the hole in the door, “I can feel you striving for control of my mind; but even my own self alone is too much for you. Now you begin to feel the weight, do you not? So we felt under your damper; and worse is to come.”

The air in the room was becoming strained again, full of that awful tightness. There was no affection about this, though, no affinity, no searching, as there had been for Suvuk. This was an inimical pressure, the weight of many minds leaning together, bearing in and down, harder, sharper, their attack narrowing down to a crushing spearhead of thought. “You may tell us the location of the stockpiled genetic material,” T’Leiar said in that light, passionless voice of hers. “Or you may try to withhold it.”

The Rihannsu researcher lay there, his face straining into awful shapes, and twitched like a palsied thing. “No, I—” he said, in a voice more suited to groaning than to speech; and then more loudly, “No!” and again, “No!” almost a scream. And then the screaming began in earnest. No one touched him, no one moved; T’Leiar sat back on her heels beside him, motionless as a carving, her eyes hooded; and still the man screamed and screamed. Ael watched, approving on some levels, but on others horrified beyond words. The screaming went on—

—and then broke. The Rihannsu research chief gasped, and his head thumped down to the floor with that particular hollow, wet sound that Ael recognized as a dead man’s head falling. His eyes stared at the ceiling, wide and terrified, and the Vulcans around him got up, or straightened, and went away, leaving him there.

Ael found herself staring at T’Leiar as she got up. The young woman caught Ael’s glance and said, with utter calm, “He fought us.”

“You didn’t get the information, then?”

“We obtained it.” She started toward the door of the little room where Suvuk had lain, but McCoy came out of it then, with Sehlk carrying Suvuk, and Jim following them.

Jim went straight to T’Leiar. “Well, Commander?”

“We have the locations of the stockpiles,” she said, “and all the basic research data, both hard and soft copy, is here in this shielded part of the installation. However, there is too much of it to be handled by our group. Transporters will handle it—but the
Enterprise
is still not answering hails.”

“Well,” Jim said, “this station has transporters of its own, Commander.”

T’Leiar looked at him with cool approval. “You are suggesting we secure those, then beam up to
Intrepid
with all our people—transferring you to
Enterprise
when it becomes clear what the problem is. If there is a problem.”

“Correct. Mr. Spock, what’s the status of the computer?”

“It is in a sorry state, Captain,” Spock said with satisfaction. “The commander’s parameters for a whole-system virus program were most effective; the system is being subverted even as we speak. Within fifteen minutes there will not be a bit of data left in it. It will make someone an excellent adding machine.”

“Mr. Spock, Commander,” Jim said, bright-eyed and alert again, “my compliments. Bones,” he said to McCoy, who was passing by, “one question. How’s Naraht?”

McCoy scowled genially at the Captain. “Boy’s got the worst case of indigestion I’ve ever seen,” he said, “but he’ll be all right.”

“Good. Mr. Spock, let’s find those transporters and get the hell out of here. I want to know what’s the matter with my ship!”

They headed for the melted door together. As they went a look of doubt crossed Jim’s face—for out in the hall, he could hear their rearguard shooting at something again.

“More company,” Ael said.

“And our phaser charges are running low,” Jim sighed, then grinned again—that fierce, defiant look. “Well, let’s just get out there, do what we can, and hope for the best….”

“Hope, Captain?” Ael said in a soft imitation of T’Leiar’s voice. “Hope is illogical.”

“So it is. Then let’s just go out there and fight like crazy people to shame the devil.”

At that Ael laughed. “Now I understand you very well. Let us shame her by all means….”

They went out together into the phaser fire and the smoke.

In the tight hot dark of the ’tween-decks crawlway, three shadowy forms lay one behind the other, holding very still. One of them had his ear pressed to the duct’s plating. His open eye, moving as he listened, gleamed momentarily in the dull glow of a circuit-conduit’s telltale.

“What do you hear?” Chekov said softly behind him.

“Disruptor fire,” Khiy said. “But it sounds to be some ways off.”

“Thank God for that,” Sulu said from the rear. “That last little episode was a bit too close for my taste.”

“Easy for you to say,” Chekov muttered. “They missed
you.
”

“How is it?” Khiy said, starting to inch forward again.

Chekov started to move too, and involuntarily gave Khiy his answer in a word that hadn’t been taught him at Starfleet Academy.

“Hang on, Pavel,” Sulu said. “We’ll get you to sickbay as soon as we find some more people.”

“And retake the bridge,” Chekov said dismally. But he hitched himself along at a good rate. “Where next?”

Sulu had been considering that for a good half hour now, as they wormed their way along between decks, heading toward the turbolift core of the
Enterprise
’s primary hull. The access to the bridge would be fairly simple from the lift core—always granting that the lifts didn’t come on again at the wrong moment and kill them all. But besides that sticky question, he didn’t care for the odds. Three of them might not be enough to break through the resistance they would surely meet when they had to come out into the real corridors and access the core. Tafv would not be fool enough to leave that route unguarded.
Hikaru my boy,
he had said to himself some ways back in this seemingly infinite tunnel,
there has to be another way. There’s always a loophole, a shortcut, if you can just see it….

“Pavel,” he said, “I lost count. Where the hell are we?”

“Between three and four,” Chekov said. “Somewhere between administrative and library science, if you’re looking up at three.”

Hikaru closed his eyes to look at the ship in his head, going around the circle of the disk on his mental diagram. “Then below us on four, nacelleward, are the chapel, and dining three and four, and the rec deck….”

Chekov pushed himself up on his elbows a little, an alert movement. “I will bet you there are a lot of people down there—” He shook his head. “Hikaru, if we take the duct from here, that’s a three-story drop to the deck!”

“Sure is. But even if we can’t jump down that far, we can throw them some guns so that they can break out of there…. And I bet we’d get down somehow.”

“Is this wise?” Khiy said softly from up ahead. “Mr. Scott did tell us not to do anything stupid….”

“It’s not
too
stupid,” Chekov said. “And numbers would be a help. We can’t afford to screw up an attempt on the bridge.”

“‘Screw up’?”

Chekov said another word not usually considered part of the language of officers and gentlemen, one that the translator would nevertheless render more accurately than idiom. “Oh,” Khiy said, and laughed, though so softly as not to be heard by any listener. “Yes, I agree. So where shall we go?”

“Back the way we came, and to the right.”

“You are jesting,” Khiy said. “In
this
space?”

“It’s no joke, brother,” Sulu said. “Let’s move it.”

It took them fifteen minutes, and besides becoming acutely aware of every bruise and aching joint he already owned, and of new ones that the painful process of turning was adding to the collection, Hikaru was acutely aware of the minutes crawling over and past him like bugs. Time, time, there was too little of it for anything: who knew what was going on down at the station, whether the captain and the landing party and the crew of the
Intrepid
were still even alive? There was no news from them—and until the situation aboard
Enterprise
was resolved, no way to get news to them either.
Damn, damn,
Hikaru thought, bending himself once more into an impossible shape,
we’ve got to do something, and fast, and everything’s taking too much time….

He finished turning first. Chekov was having even more trouble, being bigger than Hikaru, and poor Khiy, the largest of them, was in torment; but there was nothing Hikaru could do for either one. “Pavel,” he said, “the clock’s running. I’ve got to take some of those guns and go ahead.”

“Go on,” Pavel said. “Hurry. We’ll catch up. Khiy, try it again, you’re close, but this time don’t put your boot in my eye!”

Hikaru headed back the way they had come, crawling on raw hands and elbows, pushing four or five phaser rifles ahead of him and trying to ignore the renewed pain of all the phasers and grenades hung about them as they dug into his ribs and belly. He had never been fond of tight enclosed spaces; they were becoming positively hateful to him now, and he suspected he was going to have to have a long talk with Dr. McCoy at the end of all this. If there was an end to it that would leave any of them talking.

He bit his lip, watching for the turning he wanted as he went. The prospect of death had faced him often enough before; but it had always seemed oddly tolerable with his helm console in front of him and his friends and superior officers around.
Suppose something should hit us right now,
he thought miserably.
For all our trying, we die right here, crawling through a hole in the dark—or in a hundred other stupid ways, all over the ship. No battle, no valor, everything wasted, and no one will ever know what happened….

There was a peculiar horror in the thought. Theoretically Hikaru knew perfectly well that courage was courage whether anyone saw it or not; it was of value, and the universe lived a little longer because of it. Well, there was no proof of that last part, though it was still what he
knew.
But theory and that calmer knowledge, so often his in meditation, were a long way from him now. What he mostly felt could have been summed up in a single thought:
If I have to die, let me do it with my friends, and in the light!

That turning—
Hikaru wriggled around the corner, pushing hard, hurrying. He was close. There was sound here, too; not disruptor fire, but rather the low murmur and rumor of many voices, reflecting vaguely through the ducts.
A lot of people,
he thought, and at the prospect of being about to do something besides crawl, he forgot his horror. He hurried faster.

The voices had a sound he had never heard aboard
Enterprise
before—the sharp rasp of many, many people being angry all at once, at the same thing. It infected him; grinning, he practically shot the last twenty or thirty meters down the duct and came up hard against the grille at its end. Oh, the lovely light, the pale gray walls of the rec room, seen from right by its ceiling; and the big windows of the observation deck above, and through them, the stars….

He pounded on the grille. It wouldn’t give, and he didn’t think any of the hundred or so people milling around down there could hear him.
Oh well,
he thought with nearly cheerful desperation. He backed away down the duct, picked up one of the phaser rifles, and blasted the grille away.

He didn’t bother waiting for the smoke to clear, or the floor and walls of the duct to cool down—just scrambled forward again. And nearly got shot for his pains; just before he reached the spot where the grille had been, phaser fire came lancing up at him and hit the roof of the duct. He convulsively covered his head and eyes, but there was nothing to be done about the burns he took on the back of his scalp and the backs of his hands.
“No, you idiots, don’t shoot,”
he yelled, for the moment forgetting courtesy and discipline and everything else,
“it’s me, it’s Hikaru Sulu!!”

There was a moment’s silence from outside. “Move forward very, very slowly,” said a stern voice, “and let’s see.”

Very slowly indeed he poked his head out and looked down. There stood Harb Tanzer, at the head of those hundred people, aiming a phaser at the duct. He was the only one of them armed with anything deadlier than a pool cue or a bowling ball; but Romulans and
Enterprise
people alike, they all looked quite ready to do murder. Until the
Enterprise
folk recognized him. Then there was cheering.

“Oh God, I could have killed you!” Harb said, tossing someone else the phaser. “Come down from there, man. Hwavirë, how long are those tentacles of yours? If you stand on something, can you reach? Get that table over here and put that other one on top of it—”

It turned out to be rather more difficult than that. At the end Hikaru was simply glad that he knew how to fall properly. He added several bruises to his collection, but even so couldn’t care much about them when he found himself lying on a heap of his friends, and still hugged tight in the tentacles of one of his Sulamid junior navigators, Ensign Hwavirë. “Didn’t know you cared, Hwa,” he said. “Thought we were just good friends.”

“Don’t tempt,” Hwavirë said, with a bubbling laugh, as he put Hikaru back on his feet. “Not bad looking for hominid.” And then they got to repeat the performance twice more, once each for Chekov and Khiy, with mad cheers from the Romulans for the latter.

“Get them coffee,” Harb said. “What’s your name—Khiy? Khiy, do you drink coffee? Never mind, we’ll find out. Satha, get the first-aid kit for Hikaru’s burns. You three, tell us what’s happening. Hurry.”

They did, interrupting one another constantly. “Scotty and Uhura can’t hold down the auxiliary bridge forever,” Hikaru said at last. “If we can make it to the bridge, they can transfer control to us there before Tafv and his people get at it. The Romulans stuck on the bridge are with us, they’ll lend a hand from inside if they can. But we have to get there first….”

“They’re all around us, Hikaru,” said Roz Bates, a tall broad lady from engineering. “Trying to break out seemed a little dumb before, when none of us were armed. Now, of course, the odds are a little more in our favor. But still—”

“Crawlways,” Mr. Tanzer muttered. “Incredible waste of time. If only we had the transporters—”

Chekov shook his head. “They’re all shut down, sir….”

Harb sat there, staring into the distance for a few seconds. “Yes, they are.” And then suddenly his eyes widened. “No, they’re
not….”

“Sir?”

“They’re not!” He got up and left the group, heading across the room and stopping to stare down at the 4D chessboard. “Roz, get the tools out of my office, would you? Moira!”

“What’s the problem, Harb?”
the games department computer said from out of the middle of the air.

“Moira, what’s the present maximum range for piece control in the chesscubic?”

“Ten meters, Harb. But no transits so large are needed.”

“I know,” Mr. Tanzer said. “We traded off distance for small-scale precision when we programmed the system. I want to arrange a different tradeoff.”

“Mr. Tanzer,” Hikaru said, caught between dismay and delight, “are you suggesting that one of us beam out of here via the
table
transporter? There’s not enough power—”

“Maybe so, maybe not. Let’s find out. Moira, think about it. Maximum transportable mass, over maximum distance, after
in situ
alteration, no new parts. All possible solutions.”

“Thinking, Harb.”

Harb bent over the games table, shutting down various of its circuits. “Besides, even if the table can’t handle a whole person’s mass—thanks, Roz, pop that other cover off, will you?—even so, there’s nothing to stop us from beaming smaller masses out.”

Chekov, beside Sulu, began to smile. “Take a grenade,” he said, “prime it, and beam it out into the middle of a crowd of Rom—I mean, a crowd of Tafv’s people—”

“Mr. Chekov,” Harb said, “I always knew you were a bright fellow. Not that solid, Roz, the next one. Don’t joggle that dilithium crystal, either. Moira, what’s taking you so long?”

“You always yell at me when I interrupt. Maximum mass with maximum distance, fifty kilos, eighteen feet. Maximum mass with minimum distance, eighty kilos, two feet. Minimum mass with maximum distance, zero to fifty grams, five hundred meters.”

“Try something a little heavier.”

“One kilogram, two hundred meters.”

“That’s more like it. Who’s got a tricorder? Harry? Good man. Start scanning. We won’t be able to tell which Romulans are ours, but—”

“Yes you will, Mr. Tanzer,” Khiy said between gulps of coffee, and held out his arm.

“My stars and garters,” Harb said. “Mr. Sulu, your assessment of my idiocy is accepted with thanks. Harry, scan for cesium-rubidium in the Romulans in the area. Pinpoint groups without it and note the bearings for me. Decimal places on those bearings, too! I don’t want to hurt the ship more than necessary; the captain’ll have my hide when he gets back, and Dr. McCoy’ll rub salt where it used to be. Who’re the best shots in here? Who’s got a good arm? Don’t give me that, Loni, I saw you with those darts last week. Have a grenade. Have several. Get off it, people; we’ve got work to do!”

Maybe five minutes later, Harry Matshushita had every one of Tafv’s parties on the nacelleward half of the primary hull pinpointed—most particularly two parties moving along deck seven, converging on the auxiliary bridge in a pincers movement. “They’re first,” Harb said, looking rather sorrowfully at the sonic grenade he held in one hand. “Ready, Roz?”