The Folded World (15 page)

“Gao!” Kirk shouted. He moved toward the man, but something blocked his way. As he tried to bull past
it he saw Gao lifted bodily from the floor—by what, he still couldn't tell—and hurled back down again. Gao cried out in obvious agony, struggling against his invisible foe. His face was going from red to purple, and Kirk could tell he was being choked.

Kirk body-slammed his invisible blocker, and felt something unseen give beneath his charge. He continued on toward Gao, but strong hands gripped his arms and shoulders, even twining in his hair, and yanked him back. Other members of the team were similarly hindered. They cried out, fought with everything they could. Kirk fired his phaser at a target he couldn't see but whose heft he experienced in every muscle that he strained trying to break away from it. The beam from his weapon passed through whatever was there and struck an empty stretch of wall behind it. For the briefest of instants, he thought the grip loosened. He wrenched his right arm free and aimed the phaser again, this time toward where he believed—from the position of Gao's strained form—his attacker was.

But it was no good. There were others directly behind. If the phaser beam missed, he would hit his own people. And given that they were under assault by seemingly shapeless, noncorporeal beings that still, somehow, had the ability to physically interact with them, he didn't dare so much as stun a member of his crew. He would need every hand available.

And, he saw now, it was too late to help Gao. The
man had gone limp, any motion simply the result of the force that still squeezed his neck. His eyes bulged from their sockets, his mouth gaped, and his throat was distorted by the presence of unseen hands.

Kirk raged against his impossible tethers. “Let me go!” he shouted. He yanked his left shoulder loose, almost tearing the gold fabric of his shirt, then spun and delivered a roundhouse right with all his weight behind it. To his satisfaction, he felt an impact, faint but there nonetheless, and he was free.

He rushed toward Gao again. As he got close, he converted his momentum into a flying kick, aimed just above the crewman. And again he connected with something less than solid but more than nothing. Gao fell to the deck.

Then everybody was released, and they gathered around Gao. McCoy shoved the others aside and examined the man. After several long seconds, he looked up at Kirk and shook his head slowly. “He's dead, Jim.”

“But . . . how? What were those things?”

“Ghosts,” O'Meara speculated.

“Aliens,” Beachwood said. “Noncorporeal but sentient.”

“The latter is more likely,” Spock agreed. “However, without more data, a definitive answer cannot be known.”

Kirk scanned the big room. He had not seen their
attackers before, and nothing had changed in that regard. “I feel like they're gone.”

“So do I,” Jensen said. “Before, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.”

Given the volume of that hair,
Kirk thought,
that would be an alarm hard to ignore.

“Bunker's not here,” he said. “Neither is the search party.” Another problem had just presented itself: now they had a corpse. He would not leave Gao's body behind, but neither did he want anyone to have to carry it while they continued searching the ship. They could leave an electronic beacon behind, but they couldn't trust it to function correctly. “Everybody make a mental note of this location,” he announced. “We'll return for Mister Gao on the way back to the shuttles.”

They continued moving through the ship, looking for the rest of their team, Kirk trying his communicator every few minutes. As they searched, he summoned Spock and McCoy closer. “We've encountered noncorporeal beings before,” he said. “But they don't make sense here.”

“What do you mean?” McCoy asked.

“Why would they have tables and chairs? Doors that open and close by hand? Controls that use dials and buttons and switches?”

“Good point.”

“And,” Spock pointed out, “they have made no serious attempt to communicate with us. A single attack hardly counts as communication.”

“That we know of,” Kirk corrected. “If they're so alien that we simply can't understand them, we might not recognize attempts to open a dialogue. But yes, I think you're right—whatever is aboard this ship with us is decidedly malevolent.”

“Mister O'Meara might have had a point,” Spock said.

“
You
think they're ghosts?” McCoy asked.

“I think we cannot dismiss the idea out of hand.”

“Now I really have heard everything. Our logical first officer believes in ghosts.”

“I believe there is much about the dimensional fold that we do not yet understand. What we do know about it suggests that the laws of physics that we take for granted do not apply here. Further, there has long been speculation that ghosts are simply electrical impulses that flee the body at death. Nothing that is can become nothing at all. Even electricity has to go somewhere.”

“I'll grant you that,” Kirk said. He pushed open a door, stuck his head into a storage closet of some kind, filled with gear he couldn't recognize. “So would these ghosts be the remnants of the original occupants of the ship?”

“That is one possibility. Keep in mind, there are other ships joined with this one. Including the
McRaven
.”

Kirk's thoughts had been moving in that direction, but Spock had gotten there first. The idea of
ghosts was hard to accept, but as the Vulcan had pointed out, the ordinary rules weren't followed here. But the ghosts of his fellow Starfleet personnel, so recently alive and rushing through space on a ship virtually identical to the
Enterprise
? That was an even more disturbing concept. “Why would they attack us?”

“I've got an idea on that score,” McCoy said. “As you know, I've been brushin' up on psychology recently.”

In part, to effectively monitor and treat Miranda Tikolo, Kirk knew. She was a good addition to the crew, but she was dealing with a unique set of problems. “Go ahead, Bones.”

“Well, some of what I've been reading talks about different theories of the mind. One twentieth-century Earth theory held that consciousness is present when a critical mass of electrical impulses reaches a certain level of activity and organization. By that standard—since we know by instrumentation and observation that there are such impulses on this ship—we can theorize that perhaps they have reached that level. They're contained within the ship, which could count as organization.”

“So you're speculating that the ship itself is conscious?” Kirk asked.

“I'm just sayin', it's not an idea we should dismiss out of hand.”

“Mister Spock?” Spock had paused outside another door. “Thoughts?”

“The doctor's analysis appears sound.”

“And there's one more thing,” McCoy said.

“What's that?”

“If this ship is conscious?”

“Yes?”

“It's as mad as a box of frogs.”

“Coming, Mister Spock?”

The captain stood just off his left shoulder. The away team had passed him by as he stood beside a doorway. The logical thing to do was to open the door and see what was inside, but as yet he had not been able to do so.

“Yes, Captain. But—”

“Yes?”

Spock didn't answer. He couldn't define exactly what he was experiencing—another insubstantial presence, he believed, but not an aggressive one, this time. Instead, he felt immersed in a warm, welcoming psychic bath. It—he had a vague sense of
she
—wanted him to accompany it. He was suspicious, but the overwhelming sensation was calming, confidently reassuring. “Captain, I believe . . . I believe that this being wants me to go with it. With her. Into this room.”

“Are you sure, Spock? We can just check it and move on.”

“There is something different here,” Spock replied. “This presence is not like those we have previously
encountered. And there is a sense of urgency I cannot resist.”

“I'll leave someone here with you,” Kirk said. “We have to come back this way anyway, to retrieve Mister Gao.”

“That is not necessary.”

“We at least have to look inside.”

Spock opened the door and peered into a room containing shelves of physical books, and computer stations surrounded by what looked like some sort of storage media arranged on racks.

“It's a library,” McCoy said.

“So it would appear. Perhaps here, I can learn more about our situation.”

“You can't read Ixtoldan, Spock.”

“You are only partially correct, Doctor. I cannot read Ixtoldan
yet
.”

“I don't like it, Spock,” Kirk said. “Dividing up our forces more seems like a bad idea.”

“I understand your concern, and its validity. Nonetheless, this presence assures me that this is where I need to be.”

“When we come back, we don't even know if this room will be here,” McCoy argued. “It could be a cornfield or a nightclub or something.”

“The hope of learning something valuable has to take precedence over less likely possibilities. I am convinced that I will be safe here.”

The captain's jaw worked. He wanted to say
something more, but he seemed to recognize that Spock's mind would not be changed. “All right,” he said at last. “But don't go anywhere.”

Spock didn't answer. The presence was tugging him, almost bodily, into the library. Behind him, Kirk and McCoy went to rejoin the rest of the group, waiting to advance down the corridor. Spock passed through the doorway and was flooded by a surprising, almost thoroughly human emotion.

He felt as if he had come home.

•   •   •

Miranda Tikolo was hopelessly lost.

Trying to retrace their steps, the team had instead found themselves in an area of narrow passageways between rusted steel walls inset with gauges and dials and even hand cranks that all served a purpose she could not begin to discern. The ceilings were so low that Chandler could reach up and brush them with her fingertips. The course twisted and hooked back on itself and felt, to Tikolo's hyperactively anxious mind, like an ambush waiting to happen.

With every step, she fought to quell her rising panic. It would be easy to give up, to accept that they would never again find Captain Kirk and the rest. The ship was impossible, its physical properties constantly in flux. Her heart was thudding rapidly in her chest and ears and throat, her breathing was shallow, and she had a hard time holding on to a thought for more than an instant.

But the captain had put her in charge, and until she could no longer function, she had to do her duty.

“This section can't last forever,” she said, although it felt like it already had. “I guess we're in engineering or something, but we'll get back to the crew decks soon enough.”

“What about Bunker?” Greene asked.

“He's on his own, I'm afraid. For all we know, he's already found the others.”

“I guess that's possible.”

“Of course it is.” Tikolo turned yet another corner and looked down an incredibly long, straight stretch, still narrow but with dark spaces along its length that might have been side passages. Terror welled up again; anything might be lurking in those shadows.

Then the ship gave a powerful lurch and everything turned black. The floor fell away beneath her feet and a rasping scream tore from her throat.

Light returned in brilliant flashes, showing a range of scenes that could not be: the nearby surface of a sun, with flares reaching out toward her; a tunnel formed of pure color, shifting and blending faster than thought; a thick, lush jungle draped in mosses and vines, birds screeching in alarm.

The darkness came back abruptly, and this time it stayed. Tikolo wasn't falling, but neither could she detect any solid surface beneath her feet. She was suspended in the complete absence of everything.

And it wasn't the first time.

The shuttle, off Outpost 4. Same thing. She had killed all her power so the Romulans wouldn't detect her. The tiny craft had been floating in space, the blackness inside it absolute. After several hours, the oxygen had grown thin and she had restored enough power to stay alive, but not enough to turn on any lights or gravity or other comforts.

All the while, the Romulans had been pounding the outposts, obliterating them, one after the next. Killing everyone she knew there, everyone she had worked with.

While she waited, floating, in the dark.

Abruptly, the lights came back on.

And there they were.

“Romulans!” she screamed.

“Where?” Greene asked.

“Miranda!” Chandler cried. “There aren't any Romulans here!”

“Didn't you feel that impact? Their phaser batteries are pummeling us!”

“Those bumps have been happening since we got here,” Vandella said. “They're atmospheric disturbances or something, not Romulan phasers.” He put a hand on her shoulder that she supposed was meant to be soothing.

She brushed it off. “You don't know that! How could you?”

“Miranda, I know because I've been here as long as you have. They come and they go, and when they
come strange things happen. Like this.” He waved a hand at their surroundings: a stark white laboratory space. The equipment that had once been used here was scattered around the place, smashed into pieces so small they weren't recognizable. The room itself had been spared the decay and seemingly organic growth that had taken over most of the ship.

“What about it?”

“Don't you remember? Before, we were in a long, tight hallway of some kind. Then it went dark, and now here we are. Completely different place. Romulans didn't do that. It's the dimensional fold, that's all.”