Disclaimer: Star Trek is the property of Paramount/Viacom.
This story is the property of and is copyright (c) 1984 by Lynda Carraher. Originally
published in Guardian #6, Linda
Deneroff, editor. Rated PG.
The Firefly Factor
Lynda Carraher
This must be what it's like to drown, he thought. And not
even in clean and icy water that would wash away the detritus of thirty-some
years of living and replace it with shining crystals of perfect nothingness.
No. This was like drowning in honey, trapped with his own used-soul foulness, warm
and sticky against his nose, inside his mouth, spreading to fill lungs that
drew in only remembered vanities, regretted actions.
I won't! he thought. No!
And came awake, bolt
upright, with just the remembered taste of it coating his tongue and slicking
his skin, masquerading as cold sweat.
Heart pounding, he looked
around the tiny room, knowing it would be empty but looking anyway, as if he
might catch that flicker of movement seen from the corner of the mind's eye, might
pin down a sticky-limbed demon or trap a wisp of honey-steam being sucked
through the ventilator grid.
There was nothing there.
Of course. His mind was the only landscape hospitable to the demons. It was
only behind his closed eyelids that they dragged him down and poured their
sibilant whispers into his brain.
The shakes were abating
now, and that heart-thumping panic that came when he jerked himself back from the
threshold of sleep, and he swung off the narrow-bunk, wondering why he'd been
foolish enough or crazy enough -- no; cancel
that image -- to lie dawn, knowing the danger and the terror that nested
under his pillow.
It had begun four days
before, in that deep pit his body told him was 0300 regardless of the numbers marching
across the chronometer on the bulkhead.
It didn't matter what
was done to time, what artificial boundaries were set for it; there was a three
a.m. in the circadian rhythm of every species he'd ever met or read about. There
was inevitably a time when sleep was so deep and the body functions so low that
the border between sentience and nescience, between life and death, blurred and
wavered and lost any real meaning. A time when being jerked awake by some extraordinary
set of circumstances produced symptoms of systemic shock. In his case, it left
him standing, shaking, in the middle of the room with absolutely no idea how
he'd gotten there, telling himself it was just a dream, it was just a dream, ITWASJUSTADREAM. Because if it wasn't...
He had refused to
consider the alternative seriously, then. He had gone back to bed, only to have
the same thing happen within half an hour; to have some unknown, unknowable,
stimulus yank him fully awake and as adrenalin-flooded as a battle klaxon would
have made him.
He had given up on sleep
as a bad job for that night.
When it happened on the second
night, he'd determined he would outwit the demons. He'd fought off sleep by prowling
the night corridors, by drinking coffee until his stomach rebelled, by inveigling
night-owl shipmates into long and pointless philosophical arguments, preferably
ones in which he was totally out of his depth and therefore honed to a
gut-response level of verbal tightrope-walking that charged his brain.
It worked, but at the
cost of his efficiency. The third night, with demon-memory fading, seventy hours
gone, he thought his brain so numb that he could sleep through any attack.
Any external one,
perhaps. Internal ones were not the sane, and it was then that he seriously began
to consider the possibility that something inside himself, some diamond-hard
and unbreakable sense of reality, had shattered like a flawed dilithium
crystal. And now, in the fourth night, he was beginning to believe it.
He was unaware, at
first, just where it was that his feet were taking him. The corridors of the
ship were as familiar to his waking brain as the shape of his teeth were to his
tongue, and as little noticed. Even when the doors of the turbolift slid shut
behind him and his hand closed around the activator, he knew the words only as
his ears perceived them, as though they had been spoken by someone else.
"Hangar deck."
The ship was still
there, as it had been for four days. He had expected nothing more, nothing less,
yet he felt a vague...something...stirring in its presence; something visceral,
almost sexual.
The alien craft looked remarkably
harmless now, empty and dead. Yet when it had first shown up on the ship's
sensors like a wandering piece of a star, there had been indications of life on
board. And aggressive life, though it had not fired on them. Nor had it
responded to their hails. It had just kept coming, a diaphanous point of light with
intentions unknown, capabilities unknown, seeming so powerful that the
navigator -- a rookie ensign who was going to find himself back on a starbase
at the very next opportunity -- froze at the phaser controls. Kirk had had to
launch himself out of the center seat and fire the weapon himself.
And then the
lightshielding was gone, the menace revealed for what it was: a vessel hardly larger
than their own shuttlecraft, embarrassingly small to have caused such havoc in
their defense systems.
Though he didn't
remember moving toward it, he suddenly found himself less than an arm's length away,
lifting a hand to touch the shining skin.
Flesh made contact with nonflesh,
and he felt a tingle, like a mild electric shock, and he remembered an
"Captain?"
He jerked his hand back,
broke the contact as a burning sensation engulfed his hand and arm. He turned,
rubbing his hand along his side as the sensation. ebbed away.
"She's a mystery, right
enou'," Scotty said, standing rumpled and grainy-eyed, arms folded across,
his chest.
"Did you see that?
What it did when I touched it?"
Scotty looked from Kirk
to the ship. "See what sir?"
Kirk rubbed his hand
across his eyes, no longer sure where reality became hallucination. "Nothing,
Scotty. What are you doing down here at this hour?"
"Same as you. Tryin'
to put it all together. I told the research crew I wanted their results the minute
they had 'em, an' the lads took me at my word."
"And what did they
find?"
"Just wha' I said
they'd find. There was nae life support o' any kind in tha' ship, not e'en space
for a pilot."
"But Spock
said--"
"I ken what Mr. Spock
said. But the way the sensors were misbehavin'... Captain, tha's a drone. A
verra sophisticated one, but a drone, for allo' that."
"I guess you're
right."
"Aye. But there's
naught to be gained standin' here gawping like a couple o' lack-wits--" He
broke off abruptly, embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Captain. Just because I ha'e no good reason--"
"Neither do I,
Scotty. Have a good night -- or what's left of it." He pushed his feet
into action, carrying him away from the ship, as something in his brain cried
out a denial.
"You too, sir."
He waved an
acknowledgement as he left, but knew he wouldn't have a good night. What he
would have was four more hours of solitary, eye-burning wakefulness, and a day
of fuzzy-minded tension to follow.
* * *
"You wanted to see
me, Doctor?"
Uhura's voice pulled
McCoy's attention outward. She stood silhouetted by the light from the hall,
hesitant, as if she didn't want to intrude.
"Yes. Come in,
Lieutenant. Sit down." He touched a rheostat and the light brightened. McCoy
did his best brooding in the dark, but he wanted to be able to see her face as
she answered his questions .
"I wanted to talk
to you about what happened on the bridge today."
The light did its job
well. He could see the conflict, marked by a slight tightening of her mouth as
loyalties warred.
"Today?" She almost
succeeded in making: it sound casual.
"Yes. Today when our
compassionate, level- headed, gentlemanly captain reduced a yeoman to tears
when she handed him a staticboard and no stylus."
She should have had one.
"And he should have
reminded her of that, tactfully. Not chewed her butt from here to Andromeda. She
can't decide whether to ask for a transfer or file a harassment report, or
both."
Uhura made no reply,
studying her folded hands instead, as if by ignoring Kirk's erratic behavior she
could put an end to it.
"I smell a
rat," McCoy announced. "There's something very, very wrong here, and
it's either physical or professional. If it's physical, that's my problem. If
it's not, I need to know." He thought of other times when Jim had
purposefully used bizarre behavior to head off unwanted inquiries.
"Have there been
priority transmissions from Starfleet, Lieutenant? Are we operating under sealed
orders?"
Her surprised look gave
him the answer to that one. Uhura could conceal the truth when the situation
warranted it: that was part of her job. But McCoy was seeing honesty, and knew
it. He didn't wait for her answer. "Well, that narrows it right down, doesn't
it?"
Uhura was studying her
hands again. Don't let her do it," she said. There was an almost pleading
note in her voice.
"Let who do
what?"
"Siebertsen. Don't
let her file that harassment report. I don't know what's wrong, but it's been
building up for two or three days. Like he was all full of broken glass inside.
Doctor McCoy ... can't you help him?"
"I have to catch
him first. As for Siebertsen, it's not up to me whether she files or not. But I'll
talk to her in the morning.
"Thank you, Doctor.
Was there anything else?"
"No, Lieutenant.
Thank you for coming in. I know it's late. Good night."
He left the lights up
after she left, tapping into the medicomp that stood at right angles to his desk,
flashing Kirk's latest medical readouts on the screen.
Nothing there, nothing
at all. And he'd had his quarterly physical less than a month ago, per regulations.
What was not per regulations was that the ship's surgeon should have to use a
combination of bluster, guile, sweet-talk, and outright intimidation to accomplish
his task.
Getting Jim Kirk to come
in for a physical was roughly comparable to nailing jelly to a wall. As long as
the captain was ambulatory, he considered himself fit for duty; when he wasn't,
he tended to get downright indignant if McCoy suggested the problem couldn't be
solved by a couple of mild painkillers and a strip of plastiderm.
McCoy chuckled softly at
that thought, then sobered as he began to plan his next campaign. Maybe reporting
Siebertsen's threat would start the ball rolling…
He heard the office doors
hiss open, turned, and was suddenly out of his chair and halfway across the room
as he recognized the figure hanging on to the doorframe, stumbling forward with
a sound that was half-whisper, half-sob.
"Bones -- help
me."
* * *
Spock was meditating
when the intercom beeped; he ignored it for some time before it became too
insistent to shut out.
McCoy was not terribly
informative, but whatever it was involved the captain, and it had disturbed the
doctor enough to call for assistance from a most unlikely source. That was enough
to shatter the inward calm he had so recently renewed, and to send him through
the night-empty corridors with single-minded haste.
The only outwardly
disturbing thing about sickbay, when he arrived, was that the patient on the
diagnostic bed was Captain Kirk. The body function monitors all showed reading
well within the normal range, even though pulse and respiration seemed a bit
high for a man who was sleeping as soundly as Kirk appeared to be. He was
absolutely still, except for the movement of his chest; the unnatural pallor of
his skin accented by the bruise-like smudges of fatigue under the closed eyes.
"What is the nature
of the emergency, Doctor?" The sound of Spock's voice yanked McCoy's
attention away from his study of the sleeping man. He looked startled,
disoriented, as if he had forgotten that he had summoned Spock.
"I don't know ... exactly.
I was hoping you might be able to help me figure it out."
"You are the
physician here, not I."
The fact that Spock had
passed up an opportunity to gibe McCoy about his medical competence did not
register on either man. McCoy took one final look at the monitors and then led
the way into his office.
"Has he ... said
anything to you about something bothering him in the last couple of days? Is
there something going on here I don't know about?"
"No." Spock
looked toward the closed door that led to the treatment room. "But there
has been ... a kind of tension about him."
McCoy nodded. "I've
seen it, too. I would have called him down here in the morning, but he came in
on his own about an hour ago. He was ... damned near incoherent, Spock. Kept saying
he didn't dare sleep -- that 'they' came in his sleep. Turns out he's been
awake going on five days, which is enough by itself to cause hallucinations. But
when I tried to get an explanation out of him, I couldn't get anything that
made sense. And when I suggested a sedative, he ... ah ... objected rather violently."
McCoy fingered a welt on his cheekbone, and Spock's eyebrow went up in a
combination of surprise, acknowledgement, and question.
"I did my time in
the violent wards," McCoy said softly. "A sprayhypo is a very easy
instrument to palm."
"You sedated
him."
"I did. With a dose
that should have knocked him on his can, given his condition when he came in here.
It just made him woozy enough for me to get him on a diagnostic table and give
him a second injection. I've never seen anyone fight unconsciousness like
that."
"A disturbing set
of reactions, I agree. But I still do not see why--"
"There's more, Spock.
I'm just trying to set this up so you'll understand why I called you." McCoy
swiveled around in his chair and fingered the keyboard of the medicomp before
he continued.
"With that much
sedative in the system, there's always the chance that respiration or heart action
will be impaired. His weren't. You saw the monitors?"
Yes."
"In fact, I was
getting such crazy readings that I did a brain scan. That was when I decided to
call you." McCoy tapped the medicomp again, activating the viewscreen
where a maze of impulses left their tracks across the screen.
"There are five
major impulses in the human brain, each with a distinctive pattern of frequency
that varies with the depth of the sleep cycle. Three of them -- theta, sigma,
and beta -- indicate a fourth level sleep state: very deep sleep, compatible
with the level of sedation. But these two--" He tapped a filtering
control, and all but two of the tracks disappeared. "The red one is the alpha
track -- the cognitive, thinking part of the brain, and it's registering a
totally conscious state. the blue one is the delta track, and that particular
frequency is associated with REM -- rapid eye movement, indicative of dreaming.
They shouldn't be there, Spock. A man can't be asleep and awake and dreaming
all at once."
Spock was nodding,
slowly, and McCoy wished he could see behind those dark eyes; could know if Spock's
quick intelligence was one step ahead of the doctor, and what his response
would be. "Something inside Jim's mind is eating him up, Spock; burning
him out. And there's no way I can see it. But you can."
"What you ask
requires his permission."
"If a man is
bleeding to death, I don't ask his permission to apply a tourniquet."
"This is hardly
comparable."
"More than you
think. There's a marked red blood cell decrease, a calcium imbalance in the cerebrospinal
fluid, indication of capillary hemorrhages in the brain cells. The situation is
critical."
Spock considered it. "I
would still prefer that you awaken him. To achieve total contact requires--"
The scream cut him off,
propelled both men to their feet and through doors that opened too slowly for
the taste of one Vulcan. He slammed them fully open with one shoulder and was
two paces ahead of McCoy when he reached Kirk.
The wide-open hazel eyes
showed no recognition, little sanity, as he struggled to break Spock's grip.
"Get them out!"
he screamed. "Make them stop! Make them -- I can't – no!" The sounds
of his rage and terror halted abruptly as Spock's hand sought and found the
vital juncture of shoulder and neck. The Vulcan caught the sagging form and
carried it to the diagnostic bed, where McCoy was already moving the brain wave
scanner into place.
He watched the patterns
as they appeared, noted the red and blue trails that twined around each other
like serpents within the mind of the man he named friend.
He flexed his hands,
loosening the muscles, preparing himself physically and mentally for the intrusion
he abhorred, but now saw as bitter necessity.
McCoy stepped back,
looked at him questioningly.
"I am ready, Doctor."
He reached out and touched the familiar face, plunging suddenly into --
--chaos. Images he/they couldn't identify; sensations without appropriate
channels of interpretation -- colors that sang; shapes that tasted; textures
that screamed through olfactory nerves. Panic, like a child suddenly loose in a
threatening landscape. And hunger. An overwhelming hunger, tantalized by
food-images that were not food at all, all around and unobtainable. Danger. Danger
that was tied to the panic and the hunger, shooting through him/them, and the
vulnerability of being alone.
Alone. Danger. Hunger. Help me. Help me helpmehelpme--
McCoy was bowled over,
pushed aside as Spock broke the touch and exploded past him, through the doors
that hung open uselessly.
"Spock? What's
going on -- why--?" He shot one glance at Kirk's still unmoving form and
then propelled himself after Spock, into the office where a long and lean form
hunched over the keyboard of the medicomp in wracking convulsions as the screen
danced and flared with impossible displays of light and form.
McCoy reached out for
him, missing contact by centimeters as Spock jerked away, stiffened, and then
slumped over: the keyboard, sliding limp and unresisting to the deck.
* * *
Kirk had almost
forgotten what it felt like to be rested, alert, back in control. It felt good:
After fourteen straight hours of blissful, real, uninterrupted sleep, he felt
ready to tackle any thing. Even this.
He switched on the recorder,
opened the briefing.
"Bones, you
start."
McCoy sketched the
events from the moment Kirk had entered sickbay until Spock had collapsed over the
medicomp keyboard. When he finished, he looked at the two men and managed a
weak grin. "I thought I'd killed you both, " he admitted.
"That you did not,
Doctor, is less a tribute to your dubious skills than it is to your uncanny luck."
"I thought Vulcans didn't
believe in luck."
"Gentlemen, you're on
the record," Kirk reminded them. "Spock -- the mind-meld?"
Spock gave McCoy an 'I'll
take care of you later' look, and
began. "I encountered a ... presence ... in the Captain's mind. A highly
agitated pattern of thought, composed basically of sheer terror. There was no acknowledgement
of my own thought patterns being imposed upon it, no response to my mental
queries. I..." The science officer's deep voice trailed off, and his downward
glance and tightly clasped hands told Kirk of-the difficulty this extremely reticent
man was having with describing something as intimate as a mind-meld.
Spock gathered his thoughts,
began again. "For the record, gentlemen, the Vulcan mind-meld cannot be
defined through the normal scientific process. It is, therefore, impossible for
me to describe my actions and impressions within the standard parameters. I can
tell you only what I know -- I cannot tell you how I know it."
The other two men nodded
silent encouragement. Spock shaded a glance at McCoy, as if waiting for a verbal
thrust, and then went on.
"I ... found it
necessary to attempt contact through a process of mental ... emptying – through
the creation of a vacuum of sentience within my mind. The force ... the
presence ... seemed to sense that somehow, and was attracted to it."
Kirk bit down on the
urge to blurt out what he was thinking -- You
... invited that thing into your mind? Knowing what it was doing to me? And did
it with all your barriers, all your control, knocked flat?
Spock continued, slowly,
the telltale, flush at the tips of his ears and his quietly working hands telling
what his voice did not.
"The ... presence ...
left the Captain's mind and entered mine. It compelled me to break off the mind-link
without proper preparation, an action which can be extremely dangerous. I have
no conscious recollection of the next few moments, and therefore must concur
with Dr. McCoy's description of the events."
"But you are confident
that there was, in fact, some kind of alien presence influencing my thought
patterns?"
"Yes."
"Bones?"
McCoy shifted uncomfortably
in his chair. He started to say something
about bogeymen, and then remembered that it was he who first called Spock for
aid, admitting that the physiology of the Captain's illness was beyond his
understanding.
"There was something in your system that didn't
belong there, and it was influencing your
brain-wave patterns.
"I think we have to
go with Mr. Spock's admittedly empirical observations, Bones. There was same
kind of force in my mind. Then it transferred to Spock. The question is, where is
it now?"
"There is one other
question, Captain," Spock began. "We still do not know--"
His words broke off
abruptly as the briefing room lights cut out, leaving only the soft glow of the
emergency panels. Kirk turned in his chair and realized too late that the
action was a mistake as his body, suddenly free of the ship's artificial gravity,
was lifted free of the seat by his motion.
He grabbed for the
table's edge and hauled his floating body within reach of the desktop intercom.
"Engineering: What's
going on?" There was no response, not even the white noise of a dead
speaker. It was a silence made more ominous by the absence of the klaxons,
which should have been blaring out their alarm by now; a silence that echoed in
his brain and bones and gut as he registered the cessation of the ever-present background
noises and slight vibrations of a functioning vessel.
A chill raised the fine
hairs on the back of his neck as he realized his ship, his pride, his silver
mistress, hung suspended in the infinity of space, cold and dark and dead.
* * *
The whirr of a
suddenly-activated ventilating fan and the abrupt glare of light within the
Jeffries tube warned him, and he made a grab for the handrails as the
artificial gravity kicked on. Kirk paused in his climb, waiting for the
momentary nausea to pass as his body readjusted itself.
How long had they been
blind and crippled in space?
Long enough for him and Spock
to pop the emergency panel and open the briefing room doors with the hydraulic
backup; long enough for him to climb halfway to the bridge through the
Jeffries, while Spock used a similar route to engineering.
Eight minutes? Twelve?
Long enough, he decided,
as he finished the trip by turbolift. Longer than he'd care to go through
again, certainly.
There was no chaos on
the bridge. His crew was too well-trained for that. But Sulu shot him an
unmistakably grateful look and released the con, wiping away a trickle of blood
that snaked from under his hairline.
"You all
right?"
"Yes, Captain."
He flicked a glance
around the bridge. "Anyone else hurt up here?"
"No, sir." Sulu
looked sheepish. "I was the only one not strapped down when the grav came
back. The air was getting pretty thick up here, and I was trying to pull the
filter out of the overhead ventilators to buy us a little more oxygen."
Uhura swung around from
the com as Kirk nodded. "Engineering reports fully functional," she said.
"Sickbay logs twelve injuries, most minor. Environmental fully
operational, tactical on-line, communications--" She broke off.
"Lieutenant?"
She frowned, and shook
her head. "Nothing. It looked like a message blip had been activated, but
it's gone now."
Kirk put the curiosity
out of his mind. "Position, Mr. Chekov?"
Chekov was scowling at
his board. "Ve're one hundred eighty degrees off our previous course, Captain."
"Bring her about,
Mr. Sulu. How long were we without power?"
"Ten minutes, twenty-nine
seconds, sir."
That's quite a drift for ten minutes, he thought, and was
yanked out of speculation by Sulu's voice.
"No response from
helm, sir."
"Override,
Lieutenant."
"Negative response,
sir."
Kirk thumbed a toggle as
he felt the subtle vibratory change that indicated warp drive engagement. "Engineering
-- get a team to the auxiliary. And cut poower."
He heard Scotty's
acknowledgment, and then, seconds later, "Negative response from th' board.
Leveling off at warp 2.6."
"Is Mr. Spock still
there?"
"Negative, Captain.
I believe he's on his way to th' bridge."
Kirk counted seconds and
watched the helm display, rubbing a knuckle along his cheekbone in an
unconscious gesture of frustration. He turned as the turbolift doors opened to
admit Spock, and briefed him quickly.
The Vulcan nodded and
crossed to his station, bending over his viewer as his hands demanded response
from the computers. He looked at Kirk and shook his head slightly, crossing to
the navigation console.
A woman's voice emerged
from the intercom speaker. "This is Garson, auxiliary bridge. Nothing's
responding here, sir."
Spock knelt at the navicomp,
popping an access plate. "Controls are not interfacing with the guidance
system, Captain." He killed power to the useless console and slid a
circuit board from its clip.
The lights went out and
Kirk felt again the subtle drift of a seated body in zero-G.
"Interesting,"
came Spock's voice out of the darkness. "Lieutenant Uhura, can you contact
the crew in the auxiliary bridge?"
Her hands moved over the
familiar terrain of the communication's board, and a red telltale winked as the
connection closed.
"Yes, sir."
"Do they still have
life support?"
She relayed the
question, and Garson's affirmative reply.
"Instruct them to
cut power to the auxiliary navigation console and report the result."
"Yes, sir." There
was a moment's pause, and then Uhura's soft voice. "Auxiliary bridge
reports a loss of lights, gravity, and ventilation, sir. And I'm getting
similar reports from other sections."
"Since when is life
support wired through the navicomp?"
Kirk recognized the
query as Sulu's, and the response -- "It is not, Lieutenant." -- as Spock's.
He heard the soft rustle of cloth and creak of boot leather as the Vulcan stood
up.
"Captain," he
said, "I believe we have now determined the location of the alien
presence."
* * *
"In th' master
matrix? Th' control computer?" Scott's voice wore open disbelief. "Tha's
hard to credit, Mr. Spock."
"Nevertheless, Mr.
Scott, it seems to be the unavoidable conclusion."
"An' how did it get
there, then? Tell me tha'." Scott, his arms crossed over his chest, scowled
at the impossibility of it.
"The creature
requires electrical power, Mr. Scott, just as we require oxygen. The electrical
impulses of an organic brain would appear to sustain it, at least partially,
but--"
"Are ye sayin' it's
... alive? Intelligent?" The engineer's face was clouded with doubt,
underlain with the centuries-old Gaelic tradition of creatures beyond human ken.
"It did return life
support when we repowered the navicomp," Kirk put in. "It knew -- maybe from linking with me --
that we required those systems. That's the conscious decision of an intelligent
mind, Scotty ... and an ethical one. To have the power to kill, but not use
it."
Scott's internal battle
raged -- he was the master engineer, the man who wore chained lightning on his
breast, and yet who could not cast out the racial memory of singing sword and
faery ring. And because he could not resolve it, he turned on Spock, the
instigator of his unrest.
"Ye still ha'e no'
explained how, Mr. Spock. Ye cannot transmit an electrical impulse into a grounded
system just by touching a keyboard."
"The entity appears
to be able to do so, Mr. Scott. It compelled me to activate the medicomp for
the express purpose of merging with the system."
Kirk frowned
thoughtfully and started to speak, but was cut off by Scott's impatient rumble.
They were all short of temper, frustrated at being hostages to the force that
now commanded the ship.
"Assumin' I agree
wi' ye -- which I don't -- wha's your point, Mr. Spock?"
"My point is that
we are wasting our efforts -- and possibly endangering ourselves – by trying to
retake the ship. And my recommendation is that we cease those efforts until we
understand where we are being taken -- and why."
"Just go along for
the ride?"
"Precisely
Captain."
* * *
Just go along for the ride, Kirk thought. It was easier to say than
to do. The rest, the passivity, the security, of being carried along in a functioning
unit, which had seemed so necessary in those first few hours after the alien
had been purged from his system, had rapidly become anathema to him. Being carted
across space like a flea on the belly of some cosmic hound was making him --
making all of them -- tense and angry.
And there was something
else nibbling at the edge of his awareness; something Spock had said about the
entity wanting to merge with the computer system.
Merging. Joining. It seemed that concept should have a meaning
to him. Something that had happened -- or not happened, though he had wanted it
to -- when his body had played host to the invader. He could not remember.
He pushed the vague and
troubling idea aside, scanning the bridge. He could almost taste the sense of
impotence shared by the watch crew as they idled through a pointless span of hours.
The watch was nearly
over when their long-range sensors picked up another vessel.
"It's an ore
carrier, sir," Uhura reported. "Unmanned, outbound from Rigel XII,
probably."
Kirk nodded and sipped
his coffee. A drone. A damned drone. It couldn't even respond to a distress
signal from them -- not that the alien would let them signal anyone. They had
tried, of course. The systems simply wouldn't respond. And any attempt to
re-program had been met with that frighteningly implacable cutoff of their life
support.
Chekov was plotting course
figures again, Kirk noted. Another exercise in futility. Kirk saw him frown, hunch
over his display, re-run the calculations, and mutter in Russian.
"Something wrong, Ensign?"
"That ore carrier;
Captain. She's going to cross our bow close enough to let us spit into the
cargo hold."
Something began to
simmer in Kirk's mind. "How close, Chekov?"
"Less than a
thousand meters, Captain."
"Time to intercept
point?"
Chekov consulted his
board again. "A leetle over eight minutes, sir."
Eight minutes. A drone
ship. No life support. But a comm system sophisticated enough for a planetside
programmer to enter course and running signals. And a cabin big enough for a
man in a life-support suit to do a little re-programming of those signals. A
thousand meters...
He looked at Spock, who
was already nodding.
"Suppose our host
will let us use the transporter, Mr. Spock?"
"I see no reason why
not, sir. The calculations will have to be extremely precise, however."
"Then start them. I'm
going to suit up."
"Captain--" Spock
started.
"I don't have time
to argue with you, Spock. Mr. Sulu, you have the con."
He was halfway into the
suit, sweating even in the air-conditioned calmness of the transporter room,
when the klaxons kicked on. That meant the drone was within ten kilometers. It
also meant collision shields.
He slapped the intercom
switch. "Mr. Sulu, we'll need an override on those collisions shields when
I'm ready to beam over."
There was silence for a moment,
then Sulu's tense voice. "It's not just collision shields, Captain. We've
gone to full attack mode. Phasers are arming now."
"Shut them down: And
get me some visual here."
Isolated in the empty
transporter room, cut off from the bridge both by distance and by their alien
hijacker, Kirk could only listen to the terse voices from the open comm. and
watch the screen in frustrated anger as the phasers knifed out and sliced into
the unarmed drone. Alone, something in
his mind sang. Alone. Cut off. Helpless.
And then the echo disappeared as the crimson splash of destruction reflected from
his face, from his empty, angry eyes.
* * *
He had been asleep,
dreaming of fireflies on a long-ago Iowa summer night, when the call had summoned
him to the bridge.
Now, as he watched the evanescent
flares on the screen, that image came back to him. He remembered stalking
through wet grass with a glass jar filched from the kitchen, Sam behind him,
intent on adding to his personal horde of tiny captive stars. He remembered
smuggling his treasure into bed when his mother called him, going to sleep
watching the winking lights and wondering what their signals meant, whether
they were sending messages he could not discern. And he remembered crying with
the intensity only a five-year-old can muster when morning saw his starbits
dead and colorless in their glass prison.
But these were not
fireflies. They were seven points of pure white light, giving the same impossible
readings activated by the alien drone they had taken aboard over a week ago. Only
these were not coming at them as that one had. They danced as if to some unheard
celestial music, their outlines flaring softly as though they were displaying
luminescent plumage for some ethereal mate.
A mate. A joining. It
struck Kirk suddenly, with the power of a nova, and he cursed himself for not
realizing it sooner.
"They're searching
for it:" he said, coming out of his chair, ignoring the startled looks. "The
alien -- it was in the ship we took aboard, and they've come to get it."
He looked at Uhura's wide-eyed stare of incredulity. "Didn't you say you
thought your saw a signal, just after the alien took over?"
She made a small gesture
of uncertainty. "It ...could have been, I suppose."
"It had to be: A
homing signal? A distress call? Something."
"Captain, there was
no life form on that ship when we brought it aboard." Spock's' voice was soft,
but its meaning inescapable. Error.
Delusions. The aftereffects of the alien's possession are clouding your mind.
"It wasn't in the
ship because it was already here: Here, even then. From the instant we fired at
it -- I fired at it, because Gomez froze
at the control. And it ... rode that beam, somehow. Got sucked into the system,
into me, because my hand was on the switch."
Spock cut a glance at
Uhura, and she moved to touch a toggle. As the Vulcan stepped down into the
well, one of the lights danced forward to brush against them.
It was tentative, almost
playful, like an overgrown puppy tumbling an unwary child. But they were unshielded,
wide open, and the result was anything but playful.
The ship rocked; the
hull sang in a high-pitched agony that sent half the crew to their knees. Spock
slumped over the railing, pale, his long hands over his sensitive ears in an
instinctive and vain attempt to shut out the sound.
"Get a med team up
here!" Kirk snapped, and turned back to the screen. The seven points of light
were distant again, waiting, swaying on an ethereal wind. He heard Spock
straightening behind him, breathing harshly as he fought to regain control.
Uhura was hanging on to
the board with both hands, as if stability could rescue her. She dragged
herself upright to relay the message from engineering -- hull strength weakened
six percent by the attack.
Sulu was sweating over
the unresponsive control board. "I can't get any response, sir. No shielding,
no phasers -- nothing."
"It doesn't want to
attack them -- it only wants to go back."
He shouldered past the helmsman and laid his palms flat against the board,
opening switches randomly.
"Came on. I'm here. We'll send you to the others,
but you've got to tell us how to do it"
There was a gentle hand
on his arm.
"Captain--"
"Leave me alone, Spock.
I know what I'm doing."
"Captain..." Spock
shuddered and forced the words out past the pain. "Jim... your experience with
the alien--"
"Told me. Only I didn't understand. Spock
I have to take it back. Into my mind." From the periphery of his vision,
he saw the turbolift doors open to admit McCoy and Chapel.
They came into the well,
and he realized McCoy was reaching for him, not Spock, when another of the
luminescent aliens danced closer again, delicately, in a weaving, almost
hypnotic pattern. The only visual effect was the intense, painful brightening
of the screen as it touched them, but the hull rang again with the effects of
the sonic disruption, and pain lanced through him.
McCoy was diverted now,
pulling out a scanner and running it over Spock as he shook his own head to
clear it.
"It's the
sonics," he said. "Vulcan system can't stand--"
"Engineering
reports another six percent drop in hull strength, Captain. We're nearing
redline."
He hung onto the board
still, willing the alien to notice him, to blend with him, and thought he felt
a faint tingle, but it vanished the instant he fastened his mind on it.
An emptiness, Spock had said. The presence was attracted to it.
He knew he could not do
it alone. He simply didn't have the mental strength. He let go of the board and
turned to where McCoy was injecting Spock with same substance.
"Is he fit, Bones?
I need him."
Spock was drawing
himself back up, his face deathly pale. "Perhaps we could gamble bypassing
the controls, to gain some shielding."
"Not for that, Spock.
I need you to help me contact the force. If we knew what it wanted--"
"What it wants, Captain, is its own way," McCoy
snapped at him. "And when it doesn't get that, it sends us to bed without
any life support."
"Bones, it's not
malignant."
"Not malignant! Jim,
it nearly killed you before. And it did kill that ore carrier -- which could
just as easily have been another starship, or a passenger liner."
"But it wasn't. It
hasn't killed yet, Bones. Those others out there -- they're more of its kind, and
they're trying to contact it. Only each time they try, they're weakening our
hull. If we don't do something, and fast, this ship will explode like an
overinflated balloon. Then there won't be any more argument. Just little pieces
of space ice that used to be human bodies. Is that what you want?" He
looked from one man to the other. "Spock?"
"I shall try,
Captain. What is it you that you want?"
Kirk put his hands on
the board again, twisting his torso away to free his face for Spock's touch. "The
meld. The emptying you did before. Can you help me do that?"
"Perhaps it would
be better if I--"
"No, Spock. It
knows me. And if this doesn't work … I'll need you to put me back together
again. Nobody here can do that for you."
Spock hesitated, nodded,
and brushed past the protesting McCoy. He put his hands on Kirk's face, and
Kirk was startled more by the cold and clammy skin than he was by the mental
touch.
There was a clear
pattern of disturbance in the Vulcan's mind, and Kirk thought, Those probes really bother him.
The effects are subsiding, came the reply.
He was unprepared for
Spock's response, and nearly pulled away before he subdued the impulse, sending
a mental apology. Spock did not even acknowledge it, concentrating on the meld
and on drawing Kirk's essence into his own mind.
Kirk felt a moment of
panic, like his first experience with freefall in space, and quelled it. I've been here before. It's all right.
Spock's here.
Yes.
Kirk settled down,
digging his hands into the toggles on the board, forcing his breath to come in slow,
easy rhythm. There was a glimmer, a tingle, and his body remembered drowning. Something
in his mind screamed, and the presence vanished.
No! I'm sorry. I didn't mean it; come back! Kirk called to the
entity.
Alone. Empty.
No; they're waiting for you.
They?
The others.
Others?
Kirk could feel the
entity exploring the concept of 'others' and finding no referent for it. There was
only the resonance of incompletion, and he tried again. The rest of you. To be whole. To merge.
Yes!
We'll help you. Only you must explain -- tell me how!
And then he was wrapped
in its essence, reliving the initial contact from the alien's viewpoint, with
no sense of past or present; with only a constant now which battered at his own
hold on time and place.
We approach, seeking contact. Power here. Much life-force.
Contact! Drawing us -- NO!
There was a desperate
panic of total, sense-numbed isolation and Kirk felt as if he was being ripped
from his skin. He fought for the two realities of here-and-now; his hands on the
control board and Spock's touch on his face. He felt the alien's anguish as it
remembered being pulled into--
--a weak subsystem, without sustenance for part.
That's me! some level of his mind registered, and suddenly
understood that what he had perceived as nightmares were the entity's attempts
to contact him.
Vacuum. Drawing. Another subsystem.
Spock? Yes. The entity had left his mind and entered Spock's,
using the Vulcan to gain entry to the computer system. Kirk felt the memory of
the renewed strength as the entity fed on the starship's power. Through the
alien's eyes, he relived the--
--attempts to steal power. Defend! Signal! Merge!
Time telescoped for him,
and he shared the being's search as it directed the
We are here. But separate. How can we be both? If we touch ...
yes … another touching…
Dimly, Kirk registered
the shriek of stressed metal and felt Spock's hands rip away from his face, carrying
part of himself ... away. But his shout of denial was buried in the squeal of
the klaxons as hull strength dropped into redline.
He saw/sensed Spock
pushing away McCoy's hands and ordering a reduction in internal pressure. Kirk's
ears popped and the air seemed suddenly inadequate, but he ignored the
sensations, moving toward the turbolift.
Merge. Return to the source. Merge!
He ignored the hammering
in his veins, the pressure behind his eyes, as an unexamined compulsion drove
him to the hangar deck. The ship waited, beckoning, and his hands went up
without conscious effort as he touched the sides.
His breath roared in his
lungs and throat like flame, and he felt the tingle, saw the opalescent glow
begin and swell with power. Then he was empty, drained, falling...
* * *
Sunlight. Golden. Warm. Dust
motes dancing.
How could there be
sunlight when his eyes were closed?
He opened them and met
the familiar angles and planes of a known face. Spock made a sound that could
almost have been a sigh, and let his hands drop from Kirk's temples. Kirk sat
up and looked around sickbay.
The last thing he
remembered was touching the alien craft, feeling the essence flow out of his body.
He allowed himself to
smile.
"It worked?"
"Yes, Captain. When
we reached the hangar deck, the alien ship appeared to be fully functional. As
soon as we cleared the area and opened the bay, it departed," Spock explained.
"And I missed it.
Damn!"
Spock and McCoy
exchanged looks, and McCoy harrumphed, which for some reason made Kirk feel even
better.
"I suspected that would
be your reaction, Captain." Spock pushed a tape deck into the viewer. "This
was taped from the bridge viewscreen seconds after the alien ship lifted
off."
He saw the seven points
of light hovering as an eighth point maneuvered into their midst. There was an
instant of hesitation, and then the weaving dance began, light touching light,
growing, swelling in an exultant mating that temporarily blinded the screen's
sensors. When function was restored, the eight were separate again, moving
away.
There was a odd,
piercing pain somewhere in his throat, and then one of the points broke away. It
returned, swelling in the screen until it filled a quarter of the field,
dancing a slow, stately farewell before it streaked away again.
He swallowed the sharp lump
that seemed to have manifested itself behind his larynx. "I wish..." His
voice trailed off.
"What,
Captain?"
He exhaled sharply and
shook his head. "Nothing, Mr. Spock. Tell me -- do you have … fireflies …
on Vulcan?"
THE END