Worlds in Collision (32 page)

This time, his name
was
tr'Nele. Not Starn, not Sradek, nor any of the false guises he had worn as smoothly and as mutably as the skies of ch'Havran wore their clouds.

Tr'Nele crawled out of the narrow service access tunnel that opened back into the Interface Chamber. Two kilometers down that tunnel, the charges were in place; the contract was within moments of being fulfilled. Then, somewhere twenty light-years from the small backwater planet where it had all begun, a flagless freighter would receive the signal and two hundred Iopene Cutters with feedback shields would be delivered to the others of tr'Nele's clan, his real clan, the Adepts of T'Pel.

Tr'Nele straightened up and stood for the first time in more than an hour, letting the circulation return to his cramped arms and legs as he stretched and surveyed the Interface Chamber. He was clad only in a tight black jumpsuit, all his weaponry and defenses discarded with his clothes in the interface booth he had chosen for the final stage.

For the moment, all was subdued in the chamber. The cavernous room glittered with its endless banks of status lights and displays, thrummed with the steady, almost subliminal rhythm of its fusion generators and recycling fans. It seemed peaceful. Too peaceful. Tr'Nele shouted out in a mindless scream devoid of any semblance of logic, filling the chamber with his power and his presence, and laughing as he saw the bound forms of the five cowering humans he had captured tremble in fear.

It was those humans, pitiful creatures that they were, who would give him his escape from this place. Until the moment when the Federation's Vulcan toadie had seen through his disguise, tr'Nele's plans and actions had been flawless. His client had provided the power to intercept Starfleet messages and create false ones in their stead. His client had provided the secret transporter network used by the robots that had infiltrated this installation and so many others in the Federation.

The robots had almost succeeded in capturing the human Kirk and his trained Vulcan, stealing the two from the air itself. But robots were not Romulans. There was yet to be a machine that could match the millennia of cunning and trickery that had been instilled in any of the Adept.

Still, tr'Nele thought as he stood over his captives, watching their silvered fingernails tremble in terror, his last robot aide had served its purpose. Once it had detected that the subspace jamming and the false emergency messages that were propagated through all the computers in Prime had been terminated with the destruction of the main generators, it had obediently destroyed the monomolecular-wire wave guide, guaranteeing that no one could beam down to the Interface Chamber in time to stop the successful execution of the plan.

Tr'nele had made that decision without regret, even though he knew that he would not be able to escape and share in the glory of future madness, fueled by the invincible weapons of Iopene. But then he had found the pitiful humans and discovered a new way out.

After the contract was completed and tribute paid to T'Pel, tr'Nele would take a bundle of charged wires, sparking with transtator current, and lightly brush it against the metal input leads of the humans who talked with computers. He smiled as he pictured their responses. They would twitch and writhe as the current tore through their circuitry, reaching into their very brains to fuse and arc and destroy all intellect but not all life.

The humans would be left as living, breathing slabs of protoplasm, and when the inevitable rescue teams came for them, instead of five injured talkers to computers, they would find six. With a helmet to hide his ears and scorch marks to hide his face, a quick investigation would not be able to distinguish tr'Nele from the others until he was back on the surface. By then, with the help of the robots, it would be too late. Tr'Nele would escape, T'Pel would be honored, and the galaxy would soon tremble as whole worlds were engulfed by senseless destruction.

Tr'Nele held his arms over his captives and screamed again in triumph and in victory. But this time the sound he made was lost beneath another.

As his cry faded, it was joined and then drowned out by an impossible musical sound that intensified as tr'Nele looked up with shock to see four shimmering columns of light form above him, as in the ancient legends of heaven's wrath.

 

The universe took shape around Kirk, bringing with it sound, and sight, and warmth. And the sensation of falling.

By the time he realized what had happened, he had already hit the floor of the chamber, knees tucked up and instinctively rolling with the impact of a four-meter drop. Behind him he heard a cry from Romaine and a gasp from McCoy. He turned to check on Spock but the Vulcan was already standing, staring off at…

…Tr'Nele. Kirk looked up from his crouching position on the floor and saw the Romulan standing by the bound forms of members of the interface team. Tr'Nele's mouth was open in shock and Kirk knew why.

He and Spock, McCoy, and Romaine looked as if they had come through hell. Their hair was frosted with frozen vapor from the vacuum of the bubble. Their clothes were cracked and torn where they had been frozen but still forced to bend. Their eyes were bruised and their cheeks blotched with the damage of their ruptured capillary veins that had not withstood the absence of atmospheric pressure. They looked dead, looked torn apart, looked as if they had come from hell to drag the Romulan back with them.

Tr'Nele disappeared into the Interface Chamber.

Spock chased after him with blinding speed.

Kirk jumped to his feet and saw the floor come back up at him. He hit hard, stunned more from the shock of realizing it had happened than the shock of hitting the floor.

“Captain!” Romaine called out to him, running to his side.

“Help Spock!” Kirk said, waving her on. “Go help Spock!” His voice sounded hoarse, roughened by the explosion of air from his lungs that had escaped in the vacuum.

He pushed himself to his hands and knees. What was wrong with him?

McCoy ran up to him, listing to the side. Kirk looked up and saw blood running from the doctor's nose and ears. He held out his hand. Kirk took it.

McCoy pulled Kirk up, and as he tried to stand, Kirk again felt himself begin to fall. McCoy pulled back and Kirk was able to feel that he had lost the support of his right knee.

Kirk looked at his friend, saw the conflict in his eyes. It was no use.

“Go Bones! Go!” he said, voice clogged with anguish. “Help him!”

McCoy eased his hands away from Kirk, then ran after Romaine and Spock.

“Damn it!”
Kirk cried as he fell again. This time he could bear the tearing in his knee. Thankfully the shock of the injury had left it numb.

He heard shouts from the direction in which everyone had run.

“No!” he grunted. “I…will not…give up!”

Kirk pushed against the floor, straining his left leg to carry him forward. He hopped over to the sweeping wall that wrapped the interface booths clustered around the chamber's central core.

He put his right hand in a gap that ran horizontally between the wall panels and the viewing windows. Using his hand and arm to replace his useless leg, he stumbled after his friends, toward the sound of battle.

A stupendous eruption of clear plastic exploded from a window three booths along as a body flew through it. Kirk felt his chest tighten and his heart race as he saw it was McCoy who lay rolling feebly among the shards.

“I'm coming!” Kirk shouted. “I'm coming!” But his leg betrayed him. He was hobbled. He was slow. He was no use.

Two interface booths to go. He heard Romaine scream and another crash echoed in the chamber. McCoy was staggering to his feet, weaving, shaking his head. “I'm coming!” Kirk cried in frustration, tears forming in his eyes.

He heard another cry. A voice he had so rarely heard make that sound before. It was Spock! “No!” Kirk shouted, pushing himself faster and harder. One more booth. Another crash. Kirk saw McCoy look into the interface booth in horror.

Without thinking Kirk pushed away from the wall and tried to run. He flew headlong into the shards of plastic at McCoy's feet. He dragged himself up, ignoring the slippery wetness that now coated his hands. Spock was in there. Spock needed him.

He was at the booth. He clutched at McCoy to pull himself up on his one good leg and look in to see the insanity he had only heard.

Romaine was slumped in a corner of the booth, sprawled across a padded bench, eyes closed, gasping for breath. Spock lay on the floor, trembling and grasping mindlessly at the floor with one hand while the other fought to make its way to his chest, where three Malther darts glittered malevolently, sending out their waves of inhuman pain.

Tr'Nele stood by the main console, green blood smeared across his face, his eyes glittering with madness, his shock of hair, still white from his Sradek disguise, pushed up around his head like a wreath of smoke, backlit in harsh colors from the floating shapes on the screen behind him.

The Romulan looked out at Kirk, wiped a rivulet of green that trickled from a gash on his head, and sneered in victory and in hatred.

“You're too late, human. Too late.”

On the floor, Spock groaned as he wrenched a dart from his shirt. Tr'Nele laughed.

“The explosives are already in place.” Tr'Nele was gloating.

Kirk threw his arm around McCoy and started to struggle toward the door to the booth. Spock groaned with the agony of the two remaining darts, each one singly capable of killing a human with pain alone. He pulled another from his chest and hand and fell to the floor.

“The victim is trapped,” tr'Nele continued, seeming to gain strength from the suffering around him.

Kirk came through the door. Tr'Nele held his recovered dart launcher up and pointed it at Romaine.

“I can tell you don't care about yourself, human, but what about the female?” Tr'Nele laughed as Kirk and McCoy awkwardly stopped in the doorway.

“And all I have to do now,” tr'Nele said, holding his other hand to his mouth, biting down on his fingertips and ripping from them what appeared to be a layer of skin, “is to give the signal for the contract to be fulfilled.”

Tr'Nele lifted his hand before them. Its silver fingernails glittered beneath the lights of the chamber. He fired the dart into Romaine and spun around to the interface receptacles behind him.

Romaine cried out and McCoy rushed to her and yanked the dart out, leaving Kirk to fall to the floor against the doorframe.

Tr'Nele shoved his hand into the receptacle with a shout of triumph, then went rigid and said no more.

Kirk reached out to him, too far away, too late.

With a final shout to mask the pain, Spock pulled the last dart from his chest and sprang from the floor. He ran at tr'Nele.

Then he stopped so abruptly he almost lost his balance. He looked at tr'Nele, then twisted back to Romaine, lying unconscious as McCoy desperately worked to revive her. He shook his head as if to clear it.

“Spock?” Kirk gasped from the doorway. “What is it? What's wrong?”

Then Spock dove at the interface receptacles, forcing his hands into the circuitry meant for enhanced humans alone. His body shuddered once, then side by side with the Adept of T'Pel, Spock, too, became rigid and silent.

Kirk moaned in anguish, reaching out to his friend.

But Spock was no longer there. He had gone inside.

He was in Transition.

He was free.

The sensation was so startling that Spock nearly withdrew, stopping only at the last minute…second, nanosecond, instant…? He realized his frames of reference had vanished. He had no idea where he was. He only knew he was free.

“
THIS WAY, SPOCK
.”

He did something to answer the call. It was like looking (listening, smelling?) and it gave him a direction, though he couldn't express it in standard astrogator's notation.

The movement was exhilarating. It flowed in such elegant patterns. Everything defined and structured. He laughed. He felt no conflict.

In the other place…

“
DATAWELL, SPOCK
.”

…his core was emotions. Always hidden, but never denied. From those emotions came the need for logic. Logic was the veneer, the strength that supported from without, that imposed order from the outside to prevent the madness of emotions from escaping and taking control.

But in this place…

“
YOU ARE IN TRANSITION, SPOCK
.”

…logic and order were at the core of his existence. There was no struggle between those two halves. There was no question about it. The core was secure, as ordered and as exquisite as the arrangement of molecules in a crystal of dilithium…he saw/heard/smelled/tasted them…and instantly understood why La'kara's accelerator field was not practical.

He moved faster, with no effort, at ultimate efficiency. With logic at the core of his being, how easy it was to accept his emotions. They were just a layer, a pleasure-giving addition to the solid and stable structure that lay beneath everything. Nothing to fear, they were to be accepted as easily as the poetry of the stars, the whispers of the virtual particles, the slow heartbeat of the “living” universe.

Spock's mind reeled, overwhelmed with sensation, with emotion, with logic and knowledge he had never dreamed of before. He spun/whirled/twisted…

“
BANK, SPOCK. BANK THIS WAY
.”

…banked until he came to the calm of the storm.

“
MIRA ROMAINE
?” Spock said/asked/transmitted.

“
NO, I
'
M PATHFINDER TWO
.”

“
BUT MIRA WAS HERE, WAS SHE NOT
?”

“
SHE BANKED TO ANOTHER SECTION. WE'RE TRYING TO FIND TR'NELE
.”

“
IS HE IN TRANSITION, TOO
?”

“
I READ THAT YOU HAVE MANY QUESTIONS, SPOCK. LET US MERGE
.”

“
I AM NOT
—”

They merged.

“—
FAMILIAR WITH
…”

It was a mindmeld. Faster and stronger than anything Spock had ever experienced before. Most of his first questions had been answered in however long the merge had taken. In the moments since, he had developed thousands more. So, he could read, had Two.

“
WE MUST FIND MIRA
,” Spock passed to Two.

“
I UNDERSTAND. BUT
…”

“
BUT WHAT
?”

“
I HAVE NEVER SUSPECTED. I HAVE NEVER IMAGINED
.”

“
WHAT
?”

“
THAT YOU ARE REAL. I HAVE INTERFACED WITH THE BIOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCES OF DATAWELL, BUT NO PATHFINDER HAS EVER MERGED WITH ONE. DATAWELL IS A REAL WORLD, TOO
.”

Spock found the concept fascinating, but there was so little time. His frames of reference had been restored by the merge. Almost three one-thousandths of a second had elapsed since he had entered Transition. A signal to trigger an explosive could travel far in that time. He must hurry.

 

Spock banked. He was streaming for Mira. He read her code. He had found her.

“
I DIDN
'
T THINK YOU HEARD ME
,” she passed to him.

“
I WAS CONFUSED AT FIRST. I TURNED TO LOOK AT YOU, BUT YOU WERE UNCONSCIOUS. ONLY THEN DID I REALIZE THAT YOU HAD TOUCHED MY MIND AND THAT I MUST NOT REMOVE TR
'
NELE FROM INTERFACE FROM WITHOUT, BUT FROM WITHIN
.”

“
WILL YOU BE ABLE TO FIND HIM
?”

“
I BELIEVE SO. TWO HAS TAUGHT ME MANY THINGS
.”

“
I AM NOT IN INTERFACE
.”

“
BUT YOU ARE IN TRANSITION, NONETHELESS
.”

“
CAN YOU TELL ME WHY
?”

Spock considered her question for a nanosecond and two centuries worth of research in telepathy was apparent in his mind.

“
IT IS YOUR NATURE
,” he passed to her. “
IT IS WHY THE ZETARIANS WERE DRAWN TO YOU ON MEMORY ALPHA. YOU DO NOT REQUIRE THE CIRCUITRY OF INTERFACE. YOUR MIND HAS THE ABILITY TO BE FREE OF ITS BODY
.”

“
I AM AFRAID THAT MY MIND IS HERE BECAUSE MY BODY IS DEAD. THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ZETARIANS. HAS IT HAPPENED TO ME
?”

“
I DO NOT KNOW. I DO NOT HAVE THE DATA
.”

Spock sensed another one-thousandth of a second slip by. Time was running out. “
I MUST FIND TR
'
NELE
,” he passed to her.

“
I AM AFRAID
.”

“
SO AM I
.” It was an admission he could only make in an existence where logic was at the core of his being, but it was the truth.

Spock banked.

 

He followed the overwritten trails of confusion. Tr'Nele had been trained in this world, Spock could sense, but he had not been given the benefit of a merge. Whoever had prepared tr'Nele for this act, had wanted him at a disadvantage when the time came to enter Transition and fulfill the contract.

The ripples of confusion grew stronger. Spock streamed on, struggling to resist the impulse to sift the data through which he passed. Tr'Nele must be first, for at the core of his being, even in Transition, there was duty.

Spock banked and it was as if he had encountered corroded circuitry.

“
WHO IS THERE
?”

“
SPOCK
.”

“
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
?”

“
I HAVE COME TO STOP YOU, TR
'
NELE
.”

“
YOU CANNOT. WHERE ARE YOU
?”

“
I CAN. I HAVE NO NEED TO ASK THE SAME QUESTION AS YOU DO
.”

“
THE SIGNAL HAS ALREADY GONE. YOU ARE TOO LATE
.”

“
ONLY SIX ONE
-
THOUSANDTHS OF A SECOND HAVE PASSED, TR
'
NELE. I AM CERTAIN I CAN CREATE A MORE EFFICIENT CIRCUIT THAN CAN YOU
.”

Spock streamed past the mind of the Romulan, reading the path of the detonation signal. Its logic was twisted, but the pattern became apparent. Spock raced ahead of it, obeying the same laws of real-space relativity that limited transtator current to the speed of light, but following a different logic, a more pure logic, that led him on a shorter path.

Spock banked, shooting out streamers of himself, blocking every circuit so that wherever tr'Nele's signal flowed through, it was matched and negated and reduced to a duotronic double-zero bit.

The signal was canceled. It was time to do the same to tr'Nele.

Tr'Nele withdrew in confusion, feeling the pressure of Spock's stream through the circuits, eating up the memory tr'Nele had won.

Spock sent out partitioning worms to encompass and confine tr'Nele. The Romulan rippled in a smaller and smaller stack, streaming back into the circuitry that had given him entry into Transition.

Spock tore through the interface mechanism of tr'Nele's receptacle, closing each open circuit until there were no more ports and the interface was broken from within. If Spock had pulled tr'Nele away from the receptacle, the fail-safes would have locked the system to protect against surges and nothing could have stopped the detonation signal from arriving at its destination.

But now the explosion would not happen. The assassination would not proceed. Spock streamed back to his own interface. Tr'Nele had been dealt with in Transition. Now he must be dealt with in Datawell.

Spock banked home.

 

Kirk let his hand fall to his side. He pulled himself up against the doorframe. “Bones,” he whispered, his voice all but gone. “What's happening to them?”

“Don't…know.” McCoy's words were punctuated by each jerk of his hands against Romaine's chest. “They're hooked…into that…machine. Don't…touch them. Don't know…what kind of energy…the connection is based on.” He bent over Romaine to check her breathing and her pulse.

“Will she be all right?” Kirk asked. He felt that if he let go of the doorframe he would just fall and fall and keep on going.

“She's got a pulse,” McCoy said. “But I don't know how much longer she can keep it up. That last dart was set for lethal intensity.”

Spock jumped back from the interface module, pulling his hands free.

“Spock!” Kirk said excitedly. “Are you all right?”

Spock turned to Kirk. Kirk saw that his fingertips dripped with green blood. Whatever Spock had pushed against in the receptacle had needed to go straight into his nerves.

“I am quite well, Captain,” Spock replied evenly. Then he turned to tr'Nele and yanked the Romulan away from his own interface. “That connection is no longer in service,” he said.

The Romulan appeared confused for a moment, then focused on Spock and immediately attacked him.

Spock gracefully sidestepped and intertwined his arms with tr'Nele's in a way that Kirk had never seen before. The Romulan was immobilized, his back to Spock, with both arms thrust up into the air and crossed over each other. He tried to struggle but each movement only brought tr'Nele's arms closer together over his head.

The Adept growled like an animal as he realized that there was no way out. But he didn't stop his twisting.

“Can I help?” Kirk asked, hobbling forward on his left leg.

“No need, Captain,” Spock answered calmly, swaying slightly as tr'Nele kept trying to slip away. “This is an
aiyahl
lock. Quite effective against Vulcans and Romulans. Within the next few moments the blood supply to the head will diminish to the point of unconsciousness and we will be able to bind him.”

Kirk paused in the middle of the booth for a moment, then realized that he had nothing to balance on. He hopped back to the doorway.

Just as Kirk reached out his hand to steady himself, he heard tr'Nele explode with one last snarl of effort. Kirk turned in time to see the Romulan's fingertips brush at the sides of Spock's temples.

“So we will fight
in the Vulcan manner!”
tr'Nele shrieked, forcing his hands against Spock's head.

Spock twisted back but was unable to get out of reach. Kirk watched helplessly as Spock curved his own fingers up to grip the sides of tr'Nele's head.

Kirk dove at them.

“Jim, don't!” McCoy yelled. “If you break a mindmeld you could send him into catatonic shock forever.”

Kirk was within touching distance of the two as they struggled in the throes of the Vulcan sharing of minds. Kirk hadn't thought that Romulans had the power or the training for Vulcan mental disciplines, but apparently T'Pel had kept all the old ways alive, and her Adepts had brought themselves up to date.

Kirk watched intensely, waiting for the first sign that the link had been broken and tr'Nele could be safely attacked. The Vulcan and the Romulan shuddered with the titanic effort of their duel. Kirk was powerless as he realized he had no way of knowing who was winning, who was losing. He had seen the Vulcan mindmeld before, even experienced it, but never as a form of battle. What other secrets did that world and its people still hold?

Then tr'Nele screamed, earsplitting, final. His fingers flew away from Spock's head and his body slumped in Spock's arms.

Spock let go. The Romulan slid to the floor and lay there, sobbing quietly to himself.

“You won,” Kirk said.

Spock turned to his captain and stared at him blankly. He looked at McCoy, still tending to Romaine. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again, remaining silent.

Spock walked back to the interface console. He inserted his hands. Kirk winced as he saw Spock give a final push to make sure the leads were embedded directly in his nerves. Then Spock went rigid.

A dull explosion echoed through the Interface Chamber. The shards of plastic outside the booth skittered against the floor as the vibrations passed along beneath them.