The Folded World (7 page)

McCoy planted his palm against his forehead. “Well, if you've both gone nuts, I guess I gotta go over, too, just to keep an eye on you. There's gotta be somebody sane along, to make sure you two survive the trip!”

Kirk started to respond, but stopped himself before he got a word out. He gave his answer another moment's thought. Finally, he said, “I guess that's settled, then. The three of us, and a security team. All volunteers—nobody gets ordered onto a mission like this. I wouldn't say it's certain suicide . . . in fact, I wouldn't say there's anything the least bit certain about any of it. Except, perhaps, for uncertainty. That, I'm pretty sure, is the one thing we can count on.”

Miranda Tikolo was one of the first to volunteer when Captain Kirk announced the landing party. She wanted to get away—away from the ship, away from Paul O'Meara and Stanley Vandella and Ari Bevilaqua. Of the three, Bevilaqua was the least demanding, the most willing to let Tikolo be herself, without expecting her to devote all her time and energy to just one relationship. Bevilaqua was easy to be with, comfortable as old, broken-in shoes.

But the petty officer wanted distance from her, too. She needed time to think, and space in which to do it. So she signed up for what the captain stressed would be a very dangerous mission. She made it down to the hangar deck with time to spare, moving awkwardly in the environmental suit they had been ordered to wear, and watched the engineering crew preparing two shuttles for service. She was engrossed in the preparations when she heard a familiar voice behind her.

“Miranda,” Vandella said. Like her, he wore an environmental suit, and carried his helmet under his arm. “I am delighted to see that we'll both be on this mission. It sounds like an exciting one, doesn't it?”

“You didn't know I'd volunteered?”

“How could I?”

She didn't say anything, but she noted that he had not actually answered her question. And the real answer was, there were any number of ways he could have known, including simply asking the captain or any of his staff, or checking the sign-up log, or speaking with someone who had been there when she'd agreed to the mission. The fact that he had dodged the question meant he would likely dodge her follow-up, which would have been, “Did you volunteer just because you knew I did?”

But she didn't ask it, because the doors opened and another group stepped into the hangar deck, including Captain Kirk, Commander Spock, and Doctor McCoy. “Oh, joyous,” Vandella said, sarcasm fairly dripping off the words.

“What?” she started to ask. But then Paul O'Meara stepped out from behind Spock and McCoy. From his angle, Vandella had been able to see him first.

“Oh,” she said.

O'Meara strode up to them and stopped before Miranda, a smile pasted to his face that looked every bit artificial. “Miranda,” he said. “Stanley. What a surprise.”

“Well, given what the captain said about the circumstances, I felt I could hardly decline. Apparently we all felt that way.”

“Looks like,” O'Meara said.

“If this is going to be a problem—” Tikolo began.

“No problem,” O'Meara said. “The captain needs backup. That's what we do.”

“That's exactly right,” Vandella added. “I know there's some . . . rivalry, here . . . but we are professionals, after all. Whatever our feelings for you, they needn't interfere with our duty.”

“They'd better not,” Tikolo said. She wanted to trust him, to trust them both. But trust was hard to come by lately. She suspected it had to do with her trauma. Before that, she had been able to love and trust Eric Rockwell completely, and after, those feelings seemed like distant memories, like dreams that dissipated upon waking, no more easily grasped than a fistful of water.

“All right,” she said, relenting. She didn't like it—part of her reason for volunteering for the mission had been to be away from these two, to get a change of scenery, see some different faces. But they were right. They were professionals. Landing parties were a crucial part of the job.

Before she had a chance to say anything more, the captain addressed the group and everybody fell silent. “Thank you for being here. I told you before you signed on that this would be a dangerous mission. I need to stress that. There's a possibility that none of us will make it back here. Of course, I believe we will.

“The
Enterprise
has been in tough places before. Some have given their lives for this ship, and we all
knew what the risks were when we enlisted. That said, I'm looking at this as a rescue mission. We'll be counting on you to keep yourselves and each other safe, and to do the same for anyone we find on the
McRaven
. We don't know what we're going to encounter when we get into what Mister Spock calls the ‘dimensional fold,' but on the way over, he'll explain what he has been able to deduce about it. And, as I told you up front, we're not entirely sure how we're going to be able to get back to the
Enterprise
. We have an idea—we just won't know if it will work until we try it. You can still back out now if you want. I'll understand completely if you do.”

For a brief instant, the idea of taking the out the captain had offered flitted through Tikolo's mind. Sending Vandella and O'Meara into the dimensional fold, whatever that was, would have the same effect as her going in without them. She would be away from them for a while, free of their constant pressure, able to think things through more clearly.

But she couldn't make a decision like that on such a purely personal basis. This was duty, and she owed Captain Kirk her loyalty and her service. She stayed put.

So did the eleven other volunteers. She had expected no less.

“I guess that's settled, then,” Kirk said after a moment. “Helmets on. Let's get this show on the road, shall we?”

The away team secured their helmets, split into two groups, and boarded the shuttles. Tikolo joined the group getting into the second, forcing O'Meara and Vandella to ride in the first, without her. They would just have to fend for themselves; she wasn't going to make it easy for them to get in the way of her alone-time.

•   •   •

Christine Chapel looked up from the computer screen, letting her gaze float toward the ceiling as she tried to wrap her thoughts around what she had learned. She sat that way for only a few moments, though; there was an obvious urgency to the information, and it had to be shared with Doctor McCoy as soon as possible. She only hoped she wasn't too late. She punched the sickbay's intercom controls and paged Doctor McCoy, but instead of his voice, Uhura reported back.
“His shuttle has just left the hangar deck,”
the voice said.
“Do you want me to patch you through?”

“No, thank you,” she said. Cutting the connection, she added, “Damn it all!”

“What's wrong?” Neola Aimenthe asked. She was a medical assistant who was helping Chapel in sickbay.

“Oh, I was hoping to catch him before he boarded the shuttle. I don't want to talk to him there—they're so small, and there's no privacy. People are entitled to have their medical records kept private.”

“Of course,” Aimenthe said. She was small and
dark, with eyes that might have appeared furtive in a less open face. As it was, they made her look lively, if a little unfocused. But she knew her medicine, and Chapel thought she'd make a fine ship's doctor one of these days. “It's about a patient?”

“Miranda Tikolo,” Chapel said.

“Oh, she's nice. Troubled, though.”

“That's not the half of it,” Chapel said. “What I just learned . . .”

“What?”

Chapel hesitated. Aimenthe was part of the medical team, just as much as she was. She hadn't been around for as long as Chapel or Doctor McCoy, but that didn't mean she couldn't be trusted. “I'm not even sure Tikolo knows, herself. I doubt that she does, in fact.”

“Knows what? You make it all sound so mysterious.”

Chapel let out a sigh and tapped the top of the computer. “When she was just a year old, her parents divorced. Her mother remarried, fairly quickly, and her father—I suspect this was one of the issues that caused marital problems in the first place—had a psychotic break. Miranda was not quite three years old. She was home one night with her mother, her new stepfather, and her older stepbrothers and sister. Her biological father came to their home, enraged. He had a knife hidden in his coat. The stepfather opened the door, and Miranda's father slashed his throat. He stepped over the man and into the house. His ex-wife
charged but he buried the knife in her eye, straight to the brain. Then he started in on the kids.”

“That's awful!” Aimenthe said. She had her fist up in front of her mouth. “I mean, awful doesn't begin to describe it, but—”

“I know,” Chapel said. “I'm not sure there are words in our language, or any other. The stepsister grabbed little Miranda, who was just a toddler, and carried her into a bedroom. She hid her in a closet, behind some coats, and closed the door. When she got back into the main room, her brothers were both dead. She was next.”

“And Miranda?”

“I'm coming to that. A neighbor noticed three days later that he hadn't seen anyone in the family, and he called the authorities. They discovered the bodies, and found Miranda in the closet. Her father confessed as soon as they approached him. He said he didn't know where the toddler had been hidden, and he was afraid to spend any time looking. He would have killed her, too. Miranda had not budged from the closet for those three days, and she didn't talk for seven weeks after that. But she didn't seem to remember anything about what had happened, didn't remember the murders, her father, anything. That night was a complete blank for her. As far as I can find out, she's never been told. The records were sealed because she was so young. She was adopted soon after, by the Tikolo family, and they never even told her they weren't her biological parents.”

“You're kidding.”

“It's a sensitive issue. Especially combined with early childhood trauma, although there's no indication that they even knew precisely what she had been through. Anyway, she didn't appear to suffer any long-term effects from it, and it never made it into her Starfleet files, nor was it referenced in her psych evals. I put it together from press accounts and court records.”

“You said they're sealed.”

“Any seal can be broken,” Chapel said with a smile. “You just have to have the right keys. I know this guy . . .”

“You don't have to say any more,” Aimenthe said. “I get it.”

“He's just a friend. Point is, Miranda Tikolo has suffered far more psychological damage than she even knows about. She thinks she's okay with what happened to her off Outpost 4, and maybe she is. Then again—”

“Maybe she's not.”

“Right.”

“You should try to get word to Doctor McCoy, if you can do it discreetly.”

“I will. In the meantime, I guess we just have to hope that she doesn't suffer any more trauma. Poor thing's had more than enough for one lifetime.”

•   •   •

“You know, Jim,” McCoy said quietly as he settled into his shuttle seat. “If we do find survivors over there—”

“We'll have to figure out how to get them back to the
Enterprise,
on these shuttles,” Kirk finished for him. “I know, Bones. I don't know what the answer is. I'm hoping that we'll learn enough about the anomaly by going into it to come up with the solution.”

The problem had been nagging at him ever since they'd come up with the idea of pushing shuttles in from outside. Even that plan was questionable at best, since there was no way to know what would happen to the shuttles once they entered the fold.

As a test, they had removed the explosive combination of matter and antimatter from a photon torpedo and launched it into the fold, and it seemed to follow its ordinary trajectory with only a few minor wobbles. The ship's instruments had lost track of it once it entered the fold, though, and the bridge crew had lost visual contact, regained it, then lost it again, for good. Spock had pointed out that without any passengers on board, there was no way to know what a sentient being would have experienced as the torpedo journeyed on what appeared to be a fairly straight course into the anomaly. Moving a physical object through space was one thing—moving through warped dimensions, possibly other realities, was something entirely different.

They were venturing into the unknown in a way that hadn't been done since Zefram Cochrane took his first warp flight, on the fifth of April in 2063. That flight had brought Earth to the attention of the
Vulcans and the larger community of the galaxy. Who knew where this one might lead?

Outside, the hangar deck had been depressurized, and the shuttles started to move. Kirk sat back, still impressed, even after all his experience, with the sensation of motion as the little craft launched into space. It was much more pronounced than he felt inside the
Enterprise,
even at warp speeds. And space looked very, very big from inside a tiny shuttle.

Within a short while, they were clear of the
Enterprise
and could glimpse it diminishing in size behind them. The second shuttle was a bright spot between them and the ship. The vessels locked in the center of the fold loomed larger and larger with every passing minute.

When it seemed that they had almost reached the twisting, shifting, color-phasing interior of the anomaly, Scotty's voice sounded over the speakers. “
It's time to cut your power,
” he said. “
We're ready to give you a push!
”

Bunker, the crewman at the shuttle's helm, turned back toward Kirk. “Sir?”

“Cut the engines,” Kirk ordered.