"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.~
