Chain of Attack (20 page)

 

SPOCK'S VULCAN EYES, more accustomed to sudden or extreme variations in light than most humans, took in the dimly lit transporter room at a glance and then centered his gaze on the controls. The auxiliary controls, as the captain had said, looked jury-rigged, but to Spock's analytical eyes, the setup was more indicative of ingenuity than imperfection or any lack of understanding or skill. In some ways it reminded him of devices he and Chief Engineer Scott had improvised to work around failed equipment on the
Enterprise
or to make a piece of equipment perform an emergency service that its original designers had never intended it to do.

As he studied the controls, still relegating the humanoid forms in the room to the background of his thoughts, one of the other transport units was activated. Looking around, he saw that Dr. Crandall was materializing, and for a moment he wondered what logical reason the aliens could have had to select Crandall. If they had been observing the
Enterprise
crew where they were being held, they could well have determined, as had the first Hoshan brought aboard the
Enterprise
, that Captain Kirk was the leader and was therefore the first individual with whom to attempt contact. Knowledge of the language was obviously not required for such deductions to be made. Similarly, because McCoy and Scott and Spock himself were among those the captain had first gathered around him, the aliens could have selected from that group for their subsequent attempts at contact. However, he quickly realized, they would also have seen Crandall being rescued by Kirk, and that alone could have caused them to assume he was an individual of importance.

Satisfied with the logic of the situation, Spock turned his attention to the two dark-skinned humanoids. They were as the captain had described: a female and a bearded male, both dressed in simple, dark outfits with no indication of rank or authority. As his eyes took in their shadowy features, however, he detected something else, something in the way they stood, tensely waiting.

But it was more than that, he realized a moment later. Already, even before attempting any form of mental contact, he could detect something beyond the physical tension. Behind it, he could feel the mental tension and a trace of the fear that generated it. These humanoids, as the captain had hoped, were not enemies. They were not the ones who had destroyed these worlds tens of thousands of years ago. In emptying the
Enterprise
, they had not acted out of hostility. Nor had they acted solely out of fear of the
Enterprise
, although fear—fear not only of the
Enterprise
but of something ill defined and deliberately forced out of their conscious minds—had undoubtedly been a part of their motivation.

As it still was.

From Crandall, now fully materialized and looking about with frantic eyes, Spock felt nothing, but that was not surprising. During Crandall's time on the
Enterprise
, Spock had observed that Crandall, even more so than most humans, had the ability to conceal his true emotions and generate the illusion of other, totally false ones. Unlike Vulcans, whose emotions were rigorously controlled by logic, Crandall and others of his type were able only to repress and disguise their emotions. Behind the ever-changing and deceptive facades that they maintained, they were in truth controlled by their constant and illogical inner turmoil. Where Vulcans were masters of their emotions, Crandall was a slave to his, no matter how it could sometimes appear to other humans.

As Spock considered what effect Crandall's presence might have on his efforts to obtain a translator, the first image appeared on the screen in the far wall. As it had been for the captain, it was an image of the woman who stood next to the transporter platform, controlling the screen through the device she held.

"Aragos," Spock said before she could speak, and as he spoke the name, the same frustrating sense of familiarity that had troubled him before flickered through his thoughts. Turning his eyes on the bearded male at the transporter controls, he repeated the word, this time with a questioning intonation, though he doubted that the tone would have any meaning to them.

The woman's features, however, did undergo a change, and she hastily keyed something into the device she held. A moment later, the man's image appeared on the screen, and the woman repeated the word slowly.

Next, the captain's image appeared.

"Human," Spock said.

"The noble captain," Crandall said with obvious sarcasm.

Spock's own image replaced the captain's.

"Vulcan," he said.

"The captain's loyal and logical first toady," Crandall said.

McCoy and Scott appeared in rapid succession, remaining on the screen only long enough for Spock to pronounce them human and Crandall to provide derisive comments. Then Crandall's image took shape, and Crandall laughed sharply.

"The prisoner!" he said, his words overlapping Spock's repeated, "Human."

Meanwhile, even as the series of images and Crandall's illogical remarks had occupied one small segment of Spock's consciousness, the greater part of the Vulcan's mind had been reaching out in an attempt to strengthen the ephemeral bridge that had seemed to exist between himself and the Aragos woman from the moment their eyes had met. Even with that initial link, however, he knew that anything deep enough to be meaningful would be difficult without physical contact.

He had occasionally achieved such contact in the past, as when he and the captain and several others had been taken prisoner on Eminiar VII. At that time he had been able to influence the guard outside the room in which they were being held, but the actions he had induced the guard to take had been simple and not far removed from his assigned duties. A touch of initial mental confusion, an impression that all was not as it should have been within the room he was guarding, a slight damping of the wariness that went with the guard's natural curiosity were all that had been required. His disruptor drawn but his watchfulness and caution blunted, the man had entered the room and had been instantly subdued.

Here, however, it would take much more. It would not be a matter of simply making one of the Aragos step closer to him. Unless he could also force them to release him from the restraining field, he could take no physical action himself. When and if the translator again appeared in the transporter, the woman would have to be prompted to take it from the transporter and turn it on.

And leave it on, not just for a few moments but possibly for hours.

But even then, the plan might fail. Turning the translator on would automatically link it to the
Enterprise
's computer, provided the
Enterprise
was within range. If it were not, the limited capacity of the translator itself, even with its ability to detect and map the Aragos's neuronic activity as they spoke, would not allow it to build up a usable vocabulary in a totally unknown language for hours, perhaps days.

The plan did, however, offer the best chance for success of any he had been able to devise, so it was only logical to make an attempt. If it did not work, he would try whatever then appeared to have the next best chance of being successful.

While that same small corner of his mind continued to attend to naming the objects as they appeared on the screen, another portion observed and recorded in detail every move the two aliens made, every control they touched, both on the transporter and on the device the woman held. At the same time, Spock continued to reach out mentally. In an attempt to compensate for the lack of actual physical contact, he visualized his hands reaching toward her, their immaterial fingers splayed out and bent as they would be if he were actually touching her. At his sides, his own hands assumed the same position, their raised tendons the only visible sign of the strain he was undergoing.

Slowly, the visualization became more real, until it was almost as if his hands were physically there, coming together to cup the woman's head between them. He could not only see them but feel them, feel the physical texture of her dark, smooth skin, the whispering touch of her hair where the tips of his fingers reached beyond the hairline above her temples and pressed against the warmth of her scalp.

And the link itself became stronger, as if she, too, were reaching out, unconsciously grasping for his mind, pulling it toward her own.

For a moment, her eyes flickered toward him, and he felt fear surge through her, as if she suspected what was happening and distrusted it.

Instead of withdrawing, he tightened the link, forcing his own inner calmness and rationality on her mind like a warm, comforting blanket on a shivering child.

And as he did, as the link solidified even more, he felt something else.

Distant and faint at first, it was touching not Spock's mind but the woman's, but through her, he experienced it. She herself, he realized, was not aware of it, but it was there, and as he probed, ne began to understand her lack of awareness.

Unlike his own mind, this
other
was not an independent, questing intelligence, reaching out to touch and grip her mind. Instead, it was something that had been there for a long period of time. It was virtually a part of her, so intimate was its link to her mind. But it was also somehow lifeless, artificial, similar in a way to a computer but more nearly alive. Perhaps, Spock thought, it was similar to Nomad, a freak cross between machine and organic intelligence, or perhaps even the organic computer that he had first suspected of being the source of the anomalous life form readings detected on this planet.

And with the thought came confirmation.

Not the confirmation of an actual reply, but a confirmation born of his own logical analysis of the seemingly countless inputs he was receiving and had received. The pattern of the original sensor readings suddenly made sense. They had reflected, he now realized,
both
the organic heart of the computer and the hundreds of living beings over whose sleeping minds and frozen bodies it watched. Both had been linked so closely together—even more closely than they were now—that the readings had been inseparable and hence impossible to analyze individually.

But that in itself was only logical. In order to care for hundreds of living beings whose life processes had been slowed so drastically that they could survive not just hundreds but thousands, even tens of thousands of years, the system that monitored them and cared for them would
have
to be intimately linked to them, not only to their physical bodies but to their minds, for the minds would require as much care as the bodies. The caretaker would have to be, in effect, virtually an extension of those individual minds.

And so it had been.

And now, through the woman, Spock suddenly found himself in contact, not only with the organic heart of the computer but with the hundreds of others of her race. In the instant that he fully comprehended its nature, the barriers fell and he found himself face to face with a thousand-headed Hydra, each head with its own memories and dreams and hates and terrors.

In the instant full contact was made, a torrent of impressions and emotions descended on him, overwhelming even his capacity to observe and analyze, his ability even to remain aloof and unentangled.

But there was still more.

What Spock had intended to be a mind touch was, suddenly, through the power of what he had contacted, verging on a full-fledged mind fusion, not with a single mind but with hundreds.

And not only with the Aragos, still unconsciously linked as they were through the organic computer, but also with the crew of the
Enterprise
, each and every one. The thing that Spock had initiated had taken on a life of its own. Like the process that can instantly freeze an entire container of supercooled water when a grain of sand is dropped in to act as a "seed," it reached out and absorbed every mind, every memory within reach.

From the captain and McCoy, it took the shared agony that had wrenched at them as, to safeguard their entire world, they had been forced to stand helplessly by and watch Edith Keeler's brutal death under the wheels of a speeding car back in the Depression-era United States. And from their days on Yonada, it drew more shared suffering, this time mixed with the bittersweet joy that came when McCoy himself, though miraculously reprieved from his own self-diagnosed terminal illness, was forced to part from Natira, the woman for whom he had been prepared to forsake his last days on the
Enterprise
.

From the captain himself radiated the unsharable elation he had felt when he first realized he was about to achieve his life's ambition of commanding a starship, but mixed with that elation was the later pain not only of Edith Keeler's death but that of his brother on Deneva and the deaths of dozens of friends and crewmen under his command over the years.

And from Spock's own depths emerged the personal hell he had experienced at his first sight of the paralyzed remains of his one-time commander and lifelong friend, Fleet Captain Christopher Pike, a hell that had forced him, logically and inevitably, into mutiny against Starfleet itself.

These and thousands—millions—of other images and memories and emotions flooded over Spock, threatening to absorb him, threatening to take his mind and, in the fusion, dilute it and weaken it like a drop of blood being dissolved in an ocean of water.

Desperately, yet with an icy methodicalness, Spock tried to pull away. The first link in the chain was that between himself and the woman with him in the alien transporter room. If the fusion was to be overcome, that was the link that had to be broken. Even in the midst of this mind-wrenching turmoil, Spock realized that it was the combination of his own Vulcan telepathic ability and the ability of the organic computer to monitor its charges that enabled this all-encompassing fusion to exist. If the link to either was broken, the fusion would dissolve. The other links would decay to their normal strength or go out of existence altogether.