"I believe you are correct, Captain." Spock said.

"Standard entry pattern." Kirk said, and drew his

phaser. Behind him in the corridor the loose group

of crew members moved and shuffled and was suddenly a

precise security formation, four security officers

either side of the door with phasers ready and others

ready in a crouch to take their places.

"Excuse me, Captain." Sulu said, and politely but

firmly shouldered Kirk aside to take his place before

the door.

"Mr Sulu, I-"

"Will not be going through the door first, sir."

Sulu checked the charge on his phaser, levelled it,

and flattened himself against the wall by the door.

"Mr Sulu is quite correct, Captain." Spock said.

Kirk stepped back to where Uhura waited, her phaser

drawn. "Get the door open." he said to Tomlinson.

"You were outvoted, sir." Uhura said.

"I wasn't under the impression that Starfleet was a

democracy." Kirk said, eyes on Tomlinson's hands as

they darted over the door lock, seeking an over-ride.

"It isn't." Uhura said. She shifted her weight, wiped

sweat from her face. "The Enterprise is a team,

though." She gave him a smile. "Pleasure to serve on

your team, Captain."

"Got it." Tomlinson said. "Opening in three. Two.

One."

The door hissed open and as soon as it was wide

enough to admit him Sulu dodged through, phaser out,

vanishing from view almost instantly as he rolled

sideways to get out of the doorway. The next officer

gave him precisely two seconds to get clear and

followed. Tomlinson was third.

There was no way to see what in the room from where

Kirk stood, but he could hear footsteps moving

cautiously, the familiar pattern of step-step, pause,

swivel, step-step, pause, swivel that was drilled

into all of them at the Academy. No screaming, no

shouting, no phaser fire, no unexplained silences.

"Nothing here, Captain." Sulu called.

The rest of the crew members moved cautiously inside.

The room was cavernous, empty and still, one of those

useless spaces sometime created by starbase design,

here down in the core. The Enterprise crewmembers

fanned out warily and their footsteps made tiny

muffled thuds in the silence.

"If this is the centre of it all," Kirk said,

"where's *it*?"

"Here, Captain." Spock said. "All around us."

"Invisible?"

"Incorporeal." Spock said. "If it is possible to

communicate with this being, Captain, this is the

place."

"Spock - be careful." Kirk said.

The Vulcan merely raised an eyebrow. "I am always

careful, Captain." he said, and perhaps it was only

Kirk's imagination that cast Spock's face a little

pale, his movements a little too carefully steady.

"How can we help you?" Kirk asked.

"There is nothing to be done," Spock told him. "It

is not a matter of complex preparations." He

seated himself on the floor, and with a speed and a

lack of fuss that took Kirk by surprise, took one

soft breath and dropped into a trance.

Nothing happened. The Enterprise crew continued to

prowl around the cavernous space. Spock's chest rose

and fell gently, his eyes remained closed. Kirk's

hands remained sweaty. The tension stretched,

stretched further, became unbearable, and then

became ridiculous. ~After a while, even the most

extreme anxiety becomes boredom,~ Kirk remembered his

Academy tutor saying.

~And it's the boredom, and the inattention that it

brings, that'll kill ya.~

Kirk gave in to neither the tension nor the boredom.

He watched Spock, in between watching the doors and

his crew. He found the hyper-alert state of

relaxation that had served him well over the years,

that he had trained himself to and painstakingly

refined under Spock's tutelage. He waited.

When it happened, he was not surprised.

Not, of course, that it helped.

Some alteration on Spock's posture alerted him, some

change in his breathing or tension in his face. Kirk was

already half-way across the room to him when Spock's head

snapped up. He stared, wide-eyed, into space.

"I have ... made contact." he said.

Somewhere in the distance, a door slammed. Kirk heard

the sound and identified it before he realised that there were

no doors on a Starbase that could be slammed with that

particular, echoing, clang.

"It is ... an immature member of its species." Spock said.

Another door shut somewhere, again with a boom that

shook the deck plates, then a third.

"Curious..."

Bang! again, and again, each time sounding louder,

sounding closer.

"Adventurous..."

Clank! Crash! Clang! Faster and faster, as if all over the

Starbase doors were being flung open and shut - doors that

could not exist - in a monstrous parody of a tantrum.

"Fascinating."

The noise was in the room now, a thrashing hammering

that made the floor and walls shake, vibrating Kirk's uniform

on his body, bone-shaking mind-numbing noise. He was

knocked off his feet by it and began to crawl across the floor.

"Spock!"

~Not good, not good, not good at all,~ Kirk thought. Spock

was the only one in the room on his feet, but that gave Kirk

no comfort. The Vulcan was rigid, balanced on the balls of

his feet in a position that should have been impossible to

maintain. His back was arched, his arms outstretched, his

head flung back.

Smash! Crash! Boom! Who would have thought that noise

would have a weight? The noise flattened them all, belly to

the floor, like five gs of force. The noise, and the feeling of

dread that went with it. ~Whatever it is,~ Kirk thought, ~it's

angry. It's angry at *us*. And I don't think Spock is

winning this round. Come on, Spock. You've got a whole

planetful of pig-headed stubborn Vulcan pride to call on

here. Don't lose to this thing. I don't want you to lose.~

~I don't want to lose you. ~

"Spock!" Kirk had nearly reached him when he felt

himself flung backwards towards the walls, as if a giant hand

had picked him up and tossed him away. He hit hard and

rolled and then began to crawl doggedly back.

Crewmembers were being knocked hither and thither,

buffeted by unseen forces. The deck-plates began to come up

and Kirk saw one careen across the room and hit Tomlinson

in the face. She went down bleeding and didn't move.

Clang! Whang! Thwack!

Sent skidding across the floor again, Kirk saw that the

door was now shut. Sulu was trying to jimmy it open, but

without success. Rolling over brought the other side of the

room into Kirk's view. Uhura was grimly bellying over the

heaving floor towards a figure lying inert and bleeding.

Several crew members were trying to reach Spock, but none

had more luck than Kirk had. The science officer was now

suspended slightly off the floor in the centre of a lashing

storm of wind, deckplates, bolts from the wall panels and the

fine dust left behind from the installation. The wind whipped

at his hair and tore at his shirt.

Crash! Boom! Smash! Off to Kirk's left a high whine cut

through the noise and then the crackle of an explosion. He

turned to see scorch marks on the wall and floor, burns

and singeing on the crew members nearby, and where Eclson

had been

Nothing. Just the burns on the decking.

" - overload!" Uhura yelled, pitching her singer's voice to

cut through the noise. "Spontaneous phaser ... we have ...

ditch them! All of them!"

"Everybody unholster and discard your phasers!" Kirk

ordered. Even as they did so two more exploded. Clarkson

doubled over, holding the bloodied stump of her arm.

Drysden was not so lucky.

He was a strong young man, though. When Kirk reached

him he was still alive. Larssen, flattened to the deck, was

trying to keep pressure on the main wounds to his torso but

his body was so shredded it was an impossible task.

"Can you hear me?" Kirk asked, bending low over him.

"Drysden?"

"What-" Drysden gasped, teeth chattering. His whole

body trembled uncontrollably. "I ... can't ... see you!"

Kirk put his hand on the boy's cheek to show him there

was someone there with him. "I'm here, Drysden. I'm here."

"What ... time ... is ... it?" He stared blindly at the

ceiling. "Is it ... time? Is ... it ... time ... yet?"

Larssen, bloody to the elbows, turned her head. "It's time,

Drysden." she said. "We made schedule. You did good."

"Never ... thought ... I'd serve ... Enterprise..." he said,

and went still.

Kirk turned from the body and began to crawl towards

Spock again. "Spock!" he called. "You're killing our people,

Spock! Can you hear me? Spock!"

Each time he thought the noise could not get worse, he

was proven wrong. It pounded over them like wild surf, it

smothered and drowned them, it hit frequencies so high

and low they could only be experienced as raw pain.

Discarded phasers flew around the room and fired randomly,

parts of the floor and the walls battered the crew. Kirk could

see their mouths open and knew they were calling out,

screaming, praying even, but he couldn't hear a word they

said. He looked back to see Larssen still crouched by

Drysden's body, bloody to the elbows, and then realised that

the body was moving - although he had seen the light die out

of Drysden's eyes. The corpse flailed its tattered arms at

Larssen, gobbets of shredded flesh falling off and being

sucked into the maelstrom of wind.

~Is this how we die?~ Kirk thought. ~Half of us beaten to

death by the corpses of the other half?~

He reached up and snagged a phaser out of the air.

Without thinking, for he could not allow himself to think

about what he was doing, he flipped the control all the way

over and aimed at Spock, because if he did think he would hesitate

and that would be fatal to himself and his crew.

The phaser began to whine, scaling up through its tones on

the way to overload. Kirk knew to the second how long it

took without the need to count. He held it, feeling it begin to

vibrate, until the last possible instant, and then he drew

back his arm and pitched it directly at Spock.

Only then thinking - ~oh sweet heaven, Spock, I'm sorry.~