The Folded World (14 page)

“No,” countered Beachwood. “Their eyes were bright green, like light passing through emeralds.”

Kirk hadn't seen either of those things. “Never mind that,” he said. “I think we all went different places, saw different sights. Trying to compare will only be more disorienting.”

“I can't help worrying about Miranda and the others,” O'Meara said. “If they went through that, too, wherever they are.”

“We need to track them down,” Kirk agreed. He noticed another member of the security force, Jensen, a burly guy with thick, black hair on his head and showing at his collar and cuffs, who was sitting on the deck, his back against a wall, head down between his knees. He was breathing in short, anxious pants, and his hands were trembling uncontrollably. Kirk inclined his head in the man's direction. “Bones.”

McCoy met his gaze briefly, nodded once, and went to the man's side, crouching beside him. He placed a hand on the man's arm. “We're all okay, Jensen,” he said. “So are you. Whatever happened to you there wasn't—well, I can't say it wasn't real. But it was only momentary. You're here with the rest of us now.”

Jensen tried to reply, but he couldn't force words out around his ragged panting.

McCoy reached into the bag he carried on a strap that cut across his chest. “I'm going to give you something that'll calm you down,” he said. “Try to take a deep breath, hold it in for a count of three, then release it slowly.”

Jensen tried to comply, and as he made the effort, McCoy shot a mild sedative into his arm. The man's breathing started to normalize. “It's just a mild one,” McCoy assured the man. “Can't afford to have you going to sleep. You never know when we'll need that strong back.”

Jensen showed a smile that was at least half grimace. “Thanks, Doc. I'm good now. I think, anyway.”

McCoy helped him to his feet. The others appeared to have largely recovered; most of the blank stares and gaping mouths were gone, replaced by what Kirk considered a determination to get the job done and get home. But a couple were still glassy-eyed, and he caught more than one fighting to contain tremors.

McCoy pulled him aside. “We've got to get this wrapped up, Jim,” he said. “Much more of this craziness and we're going to be dealing with some severe psychological trauma.”

“We can't just walk out on Bunker and the others, Bones.”

“I'm not suggesting that. I'm only saying we need to be quick about it.”

Kirk summoned Spock to join the whispered discussion. “What do you think?” he asked. “Can we resume the search party without that happening again?”

“I do not know, Captain,” Spock said. As he spoke, Kirk realized that he was as shell-shocked as the rest. His flesh was as pale as Kirk had ever seen it. “I really have no idea how to interpret what just happened. It was most illogical.”

“Logic and this damn ship have nothing to do with each other,” McCoy said.

“Maybe not,” Kirk said. “But we're here and we have to address the situation as it stands. I was hoping maybe you had recognized a pattern that eluded me, Mister Spock.”

“No pattern at all,” Spock said.

“You hate that, don't you?” McCoy asked.

“I would not use the word ‘hate' to describe—”

“That's
exactly
the word. You love logic, and we've gone down the rabbit hole and left logic behind. You look for patterns, because they're a way of making sense of the universe, and where we are there is no sense.”

Spock seemed to realize that McCoy wasn't taunting him, but trying to engage him. His eyes focused on the doctor's worn, comfortable face. “You are correct, Doctor,” he said. “I suppose I do hate this ship, if that is how you define the word. I wish we had never come.”

“I think that goes for all of us,” Kirk said. He took out his communicator, ready to try again even though he knew what the outcome would be. “Let's get off it as soon as we can, shall we?”

•   •   •

“Look out!” Greene shouted. He shoved Ruiz into the nearest bulkhead.

“What the hell, man?” Ruiz responded. He had a bright red spot on his cheek, where it had been slammed against the wall.

“That thing was about to hit you,” Greene said. “You didn't see it?”

“I didn't see a thing except you ramming into me. What thing?”

“Like a bat,” Greene said. “Only not really. It was bigger, like a big bird, but it had those kind of leathery wings and erratic flight, like a bat.”

“There was no bat,” Vandella said. “I was looking right at you guys. If there had been a big bat, I'd have seen it.”

“Not me,” Chandler said. “Those other guys were blocking my view.”

“What guys?” Vandella asked.

“Those ones from the shadows.”

Tikolo didn't like the direction the conversation was heading. The beings in the shadows had vanished the first time she'd fired her phaser at them. But since then, they'd been visited by all sorts of apparitions,
and she was no longer certain what was real and what wasn't.

They had left the corridor that seemed to be a Starfleet Academy hallway, but somehow they found themselves deep in the bowels of the ship, surrounded by equipment she couldn't even understand: tall racks of computers that went on for what seemed like kilometers, pipes that snaked in every direction, huge banks of gears caked with sludge. Now they were passing through a narrow tube, barely wide enough for them to walk two abreast. All hope of finding Bunker had fled; their only remaining goal was to locate anything familiar so they could get back to the rest of the crew.

As they made their way through the mechanical maze, semitransparent creatures had emerged from the walls, then disappeared again. They had heard the great, anguished sobs of a weeping woman, but when they rounded the corner behind which she should be waiting, the sound had stopped and there was no one in sight. And now, apparently, different people were seeing different things, instead of all of them experiencing the same vision.

Nearing the end of the tube—beyond, Tikolo could see that it opened into a cavernous, dimly lit space, though she could see no detail beyond that—she heard the unmistakable sound of a door opening and slamming shut. An old-fashioned door, like the
one her grandparents had had in their home when she was a girl, made of wood with hinges of brass that squeaked unless her grandfather remembered to lubricate them.

“That can't be,” she said.

“What?” Vandella was right behind her.

“That sound. It's a door. Hear it?”

“Yes, but I couldn't place it.”

The door creaked on its hinges as it opened. Then it squealed, shorter but louder, and banged shut.

“There could not possibly be a door like that on this ship,” Vandella said. “Could there?”

“The ship looks pretty old,” Tikolo said. “Doesn't seem likely, but who knows?” She started walking faster, hoping to spot the door when she cleared the tunnel.

Because the last thing she needed was for there to be no door. It helped that Vandella had heard it, too. Helped a little.

She had been fighting against the terror that threatened to engulf her, but every apparition, every audio hallucination, everything that looked or sounded or felt real but wasn't, made her fight that much harder.

If she discovered that there was no door—or perhaps just as bad, that there was a door but it was opening and closing on its own—that might just be the thing that would finally break her.

“Miranda,” Vandella said as she approached the tunnel's end. “Are you holding it together?”

“What does it look like, Stanley?”

“You look tense. Like your muscles are stretched too tight. You need to relax a little.”

She whirled on him, heedless of the others coming up behind. “
Relax
? Do you even understand how absurd that is?”

“I don't mean you should kick off your boots and take a nap. But you're too wound up. You're not at your best, and you need to be.”

“So that'll help. Criticizing me. That's perfect.”

“That's not my intent, Miranda, you know that.”

“I used to think I knew a lot of things. I'm not so sure anymore. Not so sure about anything.”

He moved in close, held her arms, and lowered his voice so only she could hear. “You can be sure that I love you, Miranda. I just want you to be safe.”

She wrenched her arms from his grasp and caught herself before she drove a fist into his throat. “Damn it, you did
not
just say that! Now? Come on, Stanley, think!”

“What? I—”

Tikolo punched his arm, pulling the blow so she didn't give it the full force she wanted to, then turned away from him and hurried the rest of the way through the tunnel. At the end, she emerged into a large space, mostly empty, but with a few pyramid-shaped structures in the middle and lots of open air
above them. She heard the door bang shut one more time, and then it went silent.

But there was no door. There was no door and she was lost and she didn't know what to do anymore.

And the panic? The panic was going to win.

That outcome was no longer in question.

“I canna understand why she's so dead-set on destroyin' that big ship,” Scotty said. “She's just been after me about it again.”

He had met with Chan'ya and Gonzales in his quarters, where he had gone for a quick nap. He'd been asleep for less than ten minutes when they came calling, and after they'd left he had not been able to fall asleep again. A man needed his sleep, he knew that. He needed to keep his wits about him, to stay alert and sharp. The landing party had been gone for hours.

“It's beyond me,” Sulu said. He somehow managed to look just as crisp as ever, as if he had slept for eight hours, showered, and eaten a full meal. Scotty knew that wasn't the case. With the captain gone, Scotty had been spending more time than usual on the bridge and less in engineering, and every time he stepped onto the bridge, Sulu was there, in his place at the helm. “But I am no expert on Ixtoldan customs or psychology.”

“I'm not sure there is such a thing as Ixtoldan psychology,” Chekov offered. “They all seem crazy as loons to me.”

“We probably seem the same to them, Pavel,” Uhura said. She had spun around in her seat so she faced into the bridge. “We can't judge what we don't understand.”

Scotty lowered himself wearily into the captain's chair. “I knew Captain Kirk had a hard job,” he said. “But I never appreciated how hard, before. It's all I can do not to throw the lot of 'em into the brig and let 'em rot.”

“I do find it disturbing,” Sulu said, “that the Federation seems so eager to admit them, yet they seem so ready to embrace a violent solution. They are certainly not the peace-loving people we were told about when the mission began.”

“They believe the ship is abandoned, though,” Uhura reminded them. “They're not saying we should destroy an inhabited vessel.”

“I suppose not,” Scotty said. “Still—”

“So we should be trying to figure out what that ship represents to them that makes them so anxious to vaporize it. If it's not some
body
they want to destroy, then it must be some
thing,
” Uhura offered.

“But then you're back to trying to figure out the Ixtoldans,” Chekov said. “And that just can't be done.”

“Has anyone tried asking them?”

Sulu smiled. “Uhura, you just might have something there.”

“That's all well and good,” Scotty said. He closed
his eyes and leaned back in the chair. “But who'll do the askin'?” Nobody answered, and after a few seconds, he opened his eyes again. “What are you all lookin' at me for?”

•   •   •

“Captain?” O'Meara said. They had made it down two decks, but they were taking it slow, stopping and listening for signs of life, checking as many doors as they could. It was a big ship, and searching this way took time. But they couldn't take a chance on missing anyone; because the ship was so huge, backtracking would take longer than moving cautiously in the first place.

“Yes, Mister O'Meara?”

“I don't think we're alone here.”

“Explain.”

“It's just a feeling, sir. You know, when you feel like there's someone watching you? Or just somebody in the room? You can't see them or hear them, but you know there's someone there.”

“I'm familiar with it.”

“Well, I've had it since we got here. Instead of going away, it's been getting stronger.”

“Me too, sir,” Romer said.

“Anybody else?”

Hands went up. Most of the group, including McCoy. Spock didn't raise his hand, but his right eyebrow arched slightly and he gave a subtle but unmistakable nod.

“I've felt it, too,” Kirk admitted. “Given everything else that's been going on, I wasn't sure if I could trust my own instincts. But if we're unanimous, then it's probably safe to say that something's on this ship with us.”

“What do you think it is, Captain?” Jensen asked.

“I don't think any of us can know that,” Kirk said. He led the way through an open door, into a shadowed chamber that looked as if it had been a mess hall. Tables and benches that humans—or Ixtoldans—could have used were jumbled against the far wall as if they'd slid there and piled up in random fashion. He felt, in a visceral way, someone standing directly in front of him, as if daring him to pass. He could almost feel hot breath on his face. But there was no physical presence, and he pushed past whatever it was.

O'Meara was right, though.

They weren't alone.

Romer came in behind Kirk, then McCoy, then Gao. Kirk was looking around the room, thinking that maybe if he didn't try so hard to focus on what couldn't be seen, he might be able to catch something out of the corner of his eye. He watched the crew members pass through the doorway. Gao had barely made it inside when some unseen force knocked him off his feet.