The Folded World (18 page)

Tikolo could shoot them both where they stood. But there were others, just out of her field of view. One down; she couldn't remember how many that left. If they had gone to such lengths, even faking uniforms,
to earn her trust, what was their ultimate goal? They could have shot her as easily, but none of them had raised a weapon toward her.

The petty officer shook her head and bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood. Her head was foggy, and she needed it clear. She had the nagging sensation that she knew something about these people, about their uniforms—and about her own. She could not imagine, for the moment, where she was or why she was in a uniform and carrying a weapon. It felt as natural as breathing, but what did that tell her? Was she a soldier in some army? And what was this bizarre place, with chunks of glowing stone providing scant illumination, dark passageways, walls furred with growth, and stacked detritus behind which one could take cover? She had known that Romulans were attacking, though until the woman had mentioned it, she had forgotten. How had she known?

Uncertainty swamped her. She didn't know whom to trust, and that included her own heart and mind. If these uniformed people weren't her allies, was she actually with the Romulans? How could she find out?

Another man stepped up beside the woman. He was handsome, in a way, his short hair thinning on top and brushed away from his face. His eyes were brown and soft, his chin hard, his cheeks carved by trenches. But the glowing rocks revealed blood on
his hands and a smear of it on his forehead, where he must have touched himself. He looked both familiar and strange, like someone she had seen and remembered, but never actually known.

Yet he looked at her as if he knew her, and he came toward her, his bloody hands outstretched, with no fear or guile. “Miranda, you're okay. I was so worried.”

She shrank away from his touch. Misunderstanding, he looked at his blood-soaked hands. “I'm sorry, Miranda. It's Jamal's. I couldn't save him—maybe if Doctor McCoy were here, but I don't think even he could have done much. Poor kid was so torn up.”

“I . . .” Tikolo said. “I'm sorry, I don't understand.”

“The Romulans shot him,” the man said.

He didn't seem to view her as a threat, and they made no hostile moves toward her. Maybe they were friends, or even more than that. She could hardly imagine that if she knew these people, she wouldn't recognize them, recall their names. But even her own present circumstances, not to mention her past, were blanks, when she tried to examine them. Put that down to the intensity of the moment, the sudden firefight? Maybe. But still, since the fight had ended, those things hadn't returned.

She could remember darkness, solitude, terror, want.

That was all.

She decided, for the moment, to align herself with these people. She would remain alert, though. At the first sign of treachery, she would kill them all before they could kill her.

“I'm fine,” she said. She had to pretend she knew them, which could be tricky since she couldn't even summon their names. She knew her own, Miranda Ang Tikolo, but no one else's. “Thanks for the help.”

“Of course,” the man said. He wiped his bloody hands on his pants and extended one of them toward her. Tikolo pushed aside any squeamishness and clasped it, letting him help her to her feet. When both were upright, he gave her a quick embrace, then let go as if he had embarrassed himself. “Sorry. Public place, right? Though it's not terribly public here, after all.”

“It's okay,” she said. Maybe she really did know these people. Maybe the man was a lover. She couldn't say for sure, either way. She obviously had not been born in these few moments, but had a past, associations, friendships. She had enough sense of herself to know what she looked like, and she had what seemed like vestigial memories of pleasure. She just couldn't reach down inside and find specifics—the who, the what, the when.

And the memories of pleasure, fractured as they were, were far outweighed by pain.

“Where to?” she asked.

“You're in charge,” the man said.

“I'm . . . out of ideas.”

“We need to keep looking for Captain Kirk and the others,” he said.

“And hope there aren't any more Romulans around,” the tall woman added.

“What about Greene?” the other man asked. “We can't just leave him.”

“Bring him, then,” Tikolo said. If she was in charge, she would make the decisions. As long as she didn't have to haul the corpse, she was fine with somebody else doing it. And the one who had asked looked big enough to carry almost anything.

She started off in the direction the Romulans had come from, figuring that, although she had no clue where they were going, at least they hadn't come from that way. They climbed the stairs, past the Romulan bodies, and kept going.

•   •   •

Spock spent his first minutes in the library familiarizing himself with Ixtoldan text. At a glance it looked like random scratches, mostly up and down, with slight ticks to the right and left. Every now and then there was a swirling shape that connected some of the scratches, and occasional shapes—mostly dots but also triangles and dashes that curved up or down—floated above and below.

His studies of Ixtoldan history and culture had included a few small samples of Ixtoldan writing, so it wasn't entirely unfamiliar. He dredged his memory
and came up with enough data to get started learning what the basic shapes meant: how a scratch that leaned slightly to the left and included a short tick to the right, about two-thirds of the way up, differed from one that was essentially identical but leaning right. Ixtoldan writing was more alphabet than ideogram, so multiple characters had to be strung together to form words, and words to form sentences. Though he saw little punctuation at first, as he got deeper into it he realized that the curved dashes and dots were, in fact, punctuation marks.

He perused some of the physical books he found lying about the library, which was better preserved than most of the ship, and before long he was reading and comprehending. The first books he tried were simple technical manuals detailing some of the huge ship's systems, and held little interest except as tools for learning the language.

The data storage media and computers would be useless without full power to the ship's systems. One of the books might yet tell him how to accomplish that, though he doubted he could do it alone, with the materials at hand. Especially not inside the fold, where the effects might be considerably different than those expected or desired.

No, he would have to confine his studies to the physical books. It would not have been his preference, all else being equal, but it was the only logical approach, given the circumstances.

But where to begin? That was the quandary. There were probably a hundred books. Few if any were mass-produced. Most were bound in something like animal hide, with no text on the covers or spines to identify their contents.

As Spock stood looking at the shelves and trying to formulate a plan, he felt the presence again. Its familiar warmth told him it was the same one that had led him into this room in the first place. He was, once again, overtaken by a sensation of welcoming, of peaceful acceptance, that cut through his Vulcan side to the humanity he declined to embrace.

“Hello again,” he said. The Vulcan felt foolish speaking to empty air, but he didn't know if the noncorporeal being could hear. If she could—and once again, he had the distinct impression that
it
was a
she,
and he wondered if that was why she touched his human side, his mother's genetic contribution, so easily—then she would expect him to speak. If she couldn't hear, then it wouldn't bother her that he did. “Do you have something further to show me?”

The presence responded with a gentle tug on his hand. Spock allowed himself to be led across the room, to a particular bookcase. They stopped before it, and his hand was placed on the upper corner of the spine of a particular volume, on the third shelf from the top. At first glance, it was in no way distinct from those around it. He pulled it from the shelf and opened it. It had been handwritten in something like a
dark, soft-leaded pencil. The script was more flowing than what he had seen in the technical manuals. “Is this . . . yours?” he asked. “Did you write this?”

An unspoken affirmation wrapped around him like the gentlest of hugs.

“Very well, then,” he said. He took his seat again, and sat down to begin reading.

Captain Kirk led the way through a huge double doorway. The right-hand door had been removed in what looked like a violent fashion, leaving bent, splintered steel where it was hinged. The other door had suffered a different sort of damage, although not necessarily unrelated, resulting in a large bulge on the outer surface. He hoped that whatever had broken the doors would not make a reappearance. The invisible attack on Gao and a few Romulans notwithstanding, he hadn't seen much that was truly dangerous on this ship. All he wanted was to collect the rest of his crew and put this ship behind them.

The doorway led into what appeared to be a vast storeroom. Around the sides were multiple galleries, connected by ladders that had, in most cases, collapsed. The center was open to the ceiling, which must have been sixty feet high. Shelving units, some of which had fallen down and taken out others, like giant dominos, filled the big central area. Crates were stacked against the walls; these, too, had shifted and fallen over and been torn apart by violent force. The light from the inset stones didn't reach all the way up,
so he couldn't see what was on the upper galleries that ringed the big space. The floor was an obstacle course of fallen detritus.

“Bunker!” he cried. “Tikolo! Chandler! Is anybody in here?”

His voice bounced around the space, returning in the form of faint echoes. No other voices answered his call.

“They're not here,” McCoy said.

“I don't see any way around,” Kirk said. “If we want to get to the other side, we have to go through.”

“I don't like it.”

“Fortunately,” Kirk whispered to the doctor, “liking anything on this vessel is not required. All we have to do is survive it.”

“Aren't you usually the optimistic one, Jim?”

“I am optimistic, Bones. I am certain that at least one of us will make it off this ship alive. Maybe not in one piece, but alive.”

McCoy
humph
ed. “I guess you're more optimistic than me, at that. I'm no longer so sure of anything.”

The ship gave a jolt. Kirk froze, bracing for the worst. But nothing happened, that he could determine.

“Now I'm really confused,” Kirk said. “I thought we'd all change into clowns, or suddenly find ourselves on twenty-first-century Mars, or something.” He eyed McCoy closely. “Maybe only you changed.”

McCoy's hands flew to his face. “What?” he asked.

Kirk chuckled. As they had talked, they'd moved deeper into the storeroom. Most of what remained on the shelving structures was indecipherable, covered as it was by a thick layer of the same growth that coated most of the ship's surfaces. Some were recognizably cartons, but made of what material and containing what, he had no idea.

“A storeroom this size tells me one thing,” Romer said.

“What's that?” Beachwood asked.

“This ship was intended for a very long space voyage.”

“You're probably right,” Kirk said. “They weren't counting on being able to resupply any time soon.”

“That means somewhere there are food stores,” Beachwood said. “I don't mind telling you, I'm getting a little hungry.”

“I'm sure we'll find the others soon,” Kirk said. “This is a big vessel, but we've managed to cover a lot of ground.” His own natural optimism notwithstanding, the captain was aware as he said it that he was trying to put the best face on things. It was entirely possible that the ship had no fixed dimensions at all, and that they could explore for the rest of eternity without seeing all of it. He had told McCoy the truth: he still believed somebody would make it back to the
Enterprise
. Who it would be, he couldn't have said. And he was beginning to doubt, more and more, that Gao would be the only casualty. There were forces at
work on the ship that he couldn't comprehend, and it was hard to fight against the unknown.

Would it have been better to admit his fears to the doctor? Should he take advantage of the momentary calm to tell McCoy good-bye, to say that he had never served with a better officer or a better friend? Should he go back up to say the same to Spock?

Saying any of it out loud would have been counterproductive, he decided, so Kirk kept it to himself. Drawing people's attention to things they could not control would do no good, and admitting defeat ran counter to every instinct he had. The captain hoped the next few minutes would bring about a reunion with the rest of the
Enterprise
crew and all his fears would prove unfounded.

They walked down a wide central aisle, flanked on both sides by shelving units that reached toward the unseen heights. Near what Kirk took to be the middle of the room, they came across a large clearing, though whether it had been planned or the structures had simply fallen away, he couldn't say. The floor was relatively smooth and clear in its center, and he was just thinking that it would make for easier going when something sailed into view from one of the upper galleries. It landed on the hard floor, bounced twice, and came to rest.

The object was so out of place that even though he recognized it, he couldn't react for the first few tenths of a second. Then his head cleared, and he shouted, “Bomb! Take cover!”

His crew members scrambled, everyone seeking the strongest nearby object to duck behind. He did the same thing, but he was out in front and knew he had to get some distance between himself and the Romulan explosive device.