FROM LIGHT INTO SHADOW, PART ONE


You shouldn't listen to them, Malcolm.

Reed teased any sign of alarm out of his face, and spun to the doorway at the far end—a doorway where an elongated shadow, spidery as a daddy longlegs, rippled in the gauze. As he looked about him, he realized the Sparek-figure had vanished, presumably removing the precious nanobots from any immediate danger of discovery and damage. Funny. That's exactly what they say about you.

The Dark Man advanced a step, never leaving the anonymity of the shadows for that patch of latticed moonlight, but bringing himself close enough for Reed to see the coat whispering in the wind, and how much taller this figure seemed now that he saw him again in the flesh'. You gave them back their property, the cold voice stated, intractably. It left little room for denial.

Yes. They seemed to think they could find a safer way. A way you couldn't sabotage. In fact, I'm surprised I got so far as to give them back. There was a time when it seemed you could control me, completely. Reed halted finally, snatching his breath back in his throat. The words rushed out, falling the one over the other without his permission, and it was all he could do to stop short of making the final accusation breathlessly, hastily, wasting its impact in a slew of verbal attacks of lesser importance. He looked up under his eyebrows at the Dark Man, and said, very softly: Like the time I signed my own death warrant by altering the phase pistol Commander Tucker would later pick up.

The Dark Man did not flinch. Reed needed no other confirmation of his suspicions. I did control you, the alien replied calmly. I still could.

Then why don't you? Why make me ill, instead of moving my feet the way you want me to walk? Why do you need my co-operation, why did you ever need it?

You're walking a fine line, Malcolm. Don't make me angry.

It's something about me, isn't it? Something you couldn't foresee because it's not common to other humans. Perhaps because it's something that would never have happened to me if not for your interference in my life.

The Dark Man's head dipped near imperceptibly in a nod, half-shrouded in a black fabric like nothing Reed had ever seen before. You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work. I've never given information for the asking; what makes you think you're anything special?

You did something, he said, slowly, as it came. Time was I was the same as any other being you'd taken over. Maybe I fought you a little more than you're used to and you didn't like it . . . but I was nothing special, then. Nothing you couldn't handle. As the thought formed in his mind, solidified, his words became slower, his tongue testing each as it found its way forward. He laughed, humorlessly, for his own benefit and not for the Dark Man's ears. Would you have been too strong for me, in the end? I'd have said yes, back then. But because of you, because of what you did in sickbay . . . something happened to my body that didn't agree with you. You tried . . . but you found you couldn't control me any more. You had to trick me and make me sick instead. As he spoke, Reed was beginning to feel sicker and sicker, the swamping dizziness that had unbalanced him in the corridor returning with full force. It seemed to confirm his suspicions, as if the Dark Man no longer saw any merit in hiding the truth. I doubt you've ever resurrected one of your hosts' before, have you?

The alien took one strong step closer, almost bringing his form to bear in the faded neon zebra stripes of bluish light. But you're forgetting one thing, the Dark Man said, calmly. I don't need you any more. We had a deal. And you broke it when you returned their nanobots to them alive.

I don't remember any deal'. As I remember it I turned down your kind offer, Reed snapped.

Initially. But you have your life, life that I gave you. Therefore we had a deal. Nothing is free.

You killed me to begin with!

That changes nothing. You didn't keep your end of the bargain; therefore I don't have to keep mine.

There came a shiver through Reed's body like an electrical charge, spreading from his chest and outward, and instinctively he collapsed under the blow. He sank to his knees, hands clutching protectively at his head. At a second strike, he pitched forward on his face, his jaw connecting sharply enough to make his teeth rattle in his head. Everything was going black . . . and faintly, very faintly but growing stronger every moment, he could see the shadowlands, lurking beyond.

-----------------------------

An arm reached down to Hoshi and fastened, with a reassuring iron-like strength in the hardened muscles, around her ribs beneath her arms. Her sweat-slicked body almost slipped from his grasp, but she reached up with her free hand, wrapping the angle of her elbow around his neck, and threw her weight forward into him as he hauled her up into the ventilation system.

Heard ya countin' down there, Trip teased, gently. Better thank your lucky stars you never made it to nine, or you might've had to kiss me.

Hoshi did not immediately grace the comment with an answer, but turned a watery smile away from him, and sighed. It's just a rhyme, she said, dryly. Then, as an afterthought: You stink of sweat.

You ain't so pretty yourself, Ensign, he replied. But there was no slight to it, and both officers laughed quietly, drunk with relief. Hoshi wrestled herself upright, and sat across from Trip with her back to the curving wall, the adrenaline still high in her blood. Trip, too, looked flushed, and his pupils had dilated hugely, black engulfing their pretty blue. Her one glance, shining the beam of her flashlight over him, revealed rips in his uniform and his hair in willful disarray. There was a red spot high on his cheekbone that would soon mottle and bruise.

You look awful, she said.

And what have you been doin', jugglin' flamethrowers? he returned indignantly. Is it any wonder I look awful, what's wrong with this place?

That's just it. It . . . it's not really a place. It's holographic, all of it's holographic, and these . . . She floundered, grappling desperately for a word that eluded her even as she grasped at it.

Trip suggested.

Impostors, right. They control the hologram. They separated me from Malcolm and kept me wandering so I wouldn't be in their way.

So where is Malcolm?

Hoshi bit her lip and sank back into the wall as far as she could go, wishing it would take her inside itself as those walls above had taken Lieutenant Reed. Anything that would remove her from Trip's cool, aqua-blue stare, and the bewildered revelation taking place in them. She wanted to ask him what he was doing here . . . but he was waiting for her answer, and as a subordinate officer, she had to be the first to give it.

I . . . I mean, he . . . she attempted, her throat catching on the confession before it could be born. Her eyes welled with exhausted tears once again, and she sniffed them back, angrily. She was tired of being the child of the crew. While she walked, she had wanted nothing more than to be found and rescued . . . but now that her wish had come true she did not want to admit, under a superior's stare, that she had lost her charge. The captain had trusted her to watch the lieutenant and see he didn't try anything stupid, and what had she done? Helped him steal a shuttlepod. Helped him break his parole. She couldn't help but feel that she had not been big enough for the situation, that any of her friends would have done better. That, once again, space had proven to be too big for her.

Hoshi took a deep breath, and straightened her spine as rigidly as the low space would allow her. I'm sorry, sir, she said, crisply. He was my responsibility and I understand that I'm in line for a reprimand . . .

Trip ducked his head forward a little, catching her eyes with his, and offered his softest, slightest smile. Well, responsibility isn't exactly my favorite word sometimes, Hoshi, he said, and the smile twisted in on itself, a bitter twinge of self-cannibalism. His dilated eyes swallowed the milky beam of light like black holes, concealing something he was not saying, but which rested just behind. She had rarely seen Trip look so shaken.

She returned the smile, and saw his spring back, softening again. He may be her superior officer, but that smile melted her every time. With the captain it was his implacable calm, with Reed, his voice . . . each of them made her feel safe, like they waited with open arms to catch her when she fell.

Hoshi glanced back at the mouth of the ventilation shaft, and chuckled, stifling the sound behind her hand. Sometimes, she reflected, the analogy could be quite literal.

I saw another shaft leading off a little way back, Trip said, casually brushing his shredded uniform down. How's about gettin' outta here fore these things change their minds? You can fill me in on the finer details later.

Hoshi nodded, gratefully. Lead on, Commander, she said.

-----------------------------

The room stuttered like a broken light bulb, shocks of arid desert rock breaking through the projection of a building that never existed. Each shutter-frame sent a fresh pulse of energy through Reed's system, one which barely ebbed before the next arrived, and he clamped down on the yell that wanted to come, his instinct overriding the fading notion he had that remaining silent was a mistake.

Is this that stiff upper lip I've heard so much about, Malcolm? the Dark Man taunted, his slow, circular pacing driving each deliberate step home hard. The one that brave little six-year-old showed me? You're weak, Lieutenant, so weak you believed everything I told you. What happened to that little boy I remember? He had spirit. He knew power when he saw it, when he felt it. That's why he was afraid of the storm. You forgot to be as you grew, and you forgot me, forgot there's some things that you can't fight. You don't have it in you to be as powerful as I am, to do half the things I do.

Reed heard the words through a filter of heat, but only the vaguest impression registered. He was blacking out. Somewhere far, far back where the blackness could not quite reach, those lightning bolts of airless desert continued to imprint themselves on his eyelids, and in one of those flashes, he thought he made out two figures, running, stumbling, looking back.

he murmured, feeling the name strike through the raging scream behind his eyes.

You see them, then. As I thought.

A fresh blast seemed to numb his every last shred of resistance, and he clutched his head in his hands, clamped his eyes shut, desperately holding off the threatening unconsciousness. The phase pistol energy that had been held captive in the Dark Man's living cells, absorbed and rendered harmless by them, now flashed back into his blood and bone with the force of ten hurricanes. That last taunt echoed, sending shockwaves through his battered nervous system—at first a glimmer, but slowly beginning to grow.

-----------------------------

Trip hauled Hoshi to her feet as she stumbled, half-helping, half-dragging her across the plaza. The storm that had awakened as they wound their way through the guts of the institute set the sky aquiver with neon and black, and a howling wind drove rain into them like nails from a nail gun. Even shouting they could barely make themselves heard; the wind tore their voices from their throats and shredded them in its own banshee wail.

Hoshi hung back stubbornly, wrenching at his hold, and if there were now any tears to see, then the rain had washed them all away. We can't just go, Malcolm's still in there! she accused, attempting one last time to tear herself from his hand. Let me go, Commander!

Trip lunged forward through the curtain of rain, hooked her wrist in his free hand, and brought her to a shuddering halt pulled up hard against him. Her lurching breaths cut through him as T'Pol's had done, one snapshot in time pasted to another. Her wide eyes burned as darkly. Hoshi. Hoshi! We don't even know that he's still in there. I couldn't find his biosign, he said, softly now despite the downpour, not wanting to give her this news now, and in this way. There were just two humans, you and me.

And you think we can trust everything we see when it's not real? Her black hair streamed like lank ribbons down her face and whipped about her cheeks in the gale. She was not going to be moved on this by force, that he could see.

I know. But Hoshi, we'll be more use to him if we go for help. That's what I shoulda done in the first place. That's why we're in this mess!

And if you had? I'd be dead, Trip. There would have been no one to catch me and I'd be dead. What if our help's too late?

Trip lowered his gaze, unable to look into those pleading, angry eyes, and still do what he was about to do now. What he had to do. He swallowed hard, taking a mouthful of sweet rain with it. I'm sorry, Ensign, I really am. But I'm orderin' you to get on that shuttlepod. I'm gonna count to three.

Hoshi remained rooted, feet planted squarely apart, and did not budge.

Trip counted firmly, raising his voice above the battering rain. There was a flash, a subliminal fraction of time, where for a moment Trip thought he saw rocky wastes imprinted on the silvered darkness; then it was gone, and he shook the momentary illusion aside. He must have been imagining things.

Hoshi blinked, water streaking her cheeks like tears.

he faltered. He didn't want to do this. He didn't want to be the bad guy. The command guy.

Lead on, Commander.

The echo struck, arbitrary and uninvited, and stuck fast in his craw like sawdust. Malcolm'd be the first to accept casualties for the sake of the mission, Hoshi, he said, weak with the knowledge that he lied. He'd know straight away when to cut and run.

(I don't want to use it, but I will)

Trip shuddered, and it had nothing to do with the cold seeping into his bones. Lightning sliced the cloud mass above, and the raindrops sizzled into a tangy lemon steam as they struck his skin. Reed had saved his life the day that line had first been spoken, on Shuttlepod One. Trip had been on the brink of becoming such a casualty, voluntarily offering his life for the success of the mission, and the insubordinate lieutenant had refused to accept a loss. Reed would rather risk neither surviving than live on the back of a friend's death.

Hoshi whispered, her unsteady lips wet with rain.

Trip looked down into her sad face, completely free from accusation now, and gulped. Go to the shuttlepod, Ensign, he repeated, without conviction. Not for the first time, he envied Hoshi her position, free from these decisions, these worries. Free from command. he yelled.

Hoshi shivered, and blinked owlishly. We can't leave, she said.

Trip sighed. We can't. But you can. I'm going back.

Then the sky screamed blue, and the fractured glimpses of dry sandstone plains flickered.

The plaza vanished. So did the rain, the clouds.

So did the air.

-----------------------------

He could see them. While his physical eyes had dimmed with the onslaught of phase energy racking his body, his vision shrinking to a telescopic pinpoint, the place away from the grayness saw them vividly, heard them clearly. He saw the rain splash in the rising puddles at their feet, and Trip's insistent manhandling to usher a belligerent Hoshi aboard. He heard her say she wouldn't leave. He heard Trip, deciding to come back. He heard it all, and accepted it onboard with stunned incomprehension that their delay could be for him.

I told you it was a secret, Malcolm, the Dark Man said. You should never have gotten your friends involved. I told you. Pleasant, so pleasant. Like he was Reed's best friend and confidante.

Let . . . them go, he gasped, needles shooting through him as he tried to stir. They don't know anything.

But I do, Reed thought. I know, and that's enough. The glimmer that had caught in his mind's net moments ago drifted closer to the surface, almost revealing itself, almost becoming . . . what? A revelation he needed, but which continued to elude him. The more the swollen blackness in his head increased, the more his thinking ability diminished, and it drifted further away from him, a message in a bottle carried by the current.

They know something happened to you. Is going to happen to you, the Dark Man said. He stepped over Reed, and continued his concentric pacing. The woman knows much more. Because you told her.

Hoshi. It jolted him awake, a spark catching light to reluctant kindling. An image of her came to him, standing in the rain beyond these walls, her hair loose and wetted like crepe over her face, her eyes a vehement lampblack in ashy lids. He saw Trip, as soaked and shivering with cold as Hoshi, yelling, coaxing, pulling rank on her.

I can tell you that won't work, Commander, he thought, with his last fading breath of consciousness. And then it hit him.

He could see them. The walls remained impenetrably solid around him and yet he saw it—not as a physical hallucination like the vision in the mirror, but internally, like a daydream.

Was he dreaming?

He could see them. As the Dark Man, all those years ago, had seen him across time and space. I think your plan didn't go as you'd like, sir, he forced, covering his eyes with his hands to keep out the wretched flashing light, clinging to that image of his friends . . . holding it up like a mantra against unconsciousness. In it they were gasping, staggering on to the shuttle, Hoshi bent almost double.

It is close enough.

Stop it! Reed found the strength to yell. Stop it, you'll kill them!

Not if they go quickly, I won't. But then . . . they don't seem to be taking me very seriously, do they?

In that dream-image he held to, their air resequenced from thin . . . to none.

-----------------------------

Trip felt the final drop in oxygen levels, and the sudden density of what remained hitting him in the lungs with a sucker punch. Hoshi's knees buckled and she dropped like a stone beside him, grazing her knees in the damp gravel between the flagstones. He hooked his fingers under her arms, weak with the burn in his lungs, and dragged her up and onward, their feet skidding. The two shuttlepods were maybe twenty meters ahead, side-by-side in welcoming attention.

Twenty meters, give or take.

He gulped back the last of his stored oxygen, feeling it slip in his throat like warm caramel, and looked firmly ahead as they tried to run.

But he could see, already, that they would never make it in time.

-----------------------------

Reed shuddered as one last electrical charge coursed through him from temple to toes, then diffused in a vapor of lemonade fumes. That scent grew stronger with every moment, an invisible rising mist. It always accelerated at the highest moments of cell activity between his own biology and the Dark Man's, but never like this.

Never like this.

His narrow field of vision shrank to a dot, darkened by impending blackness . . . but still, stamped on his retinas like a color slide, he could see Hoshi and Trip, suffocating only meters from the shuttlepod. He had to do something, he had to do his job and protect his crew . . . protect his friends. In the end, it was his fight—not in part, not as much as he could, but entirely. They were his responsibility.

He was sick of responsibility.

Reed hooked his elbows under him, pushing himself up from the ground. He was dimly aware of the Dark Man's booted feet, stalking past him in a narrowing arc. He could feel himself dragged back down, and fought against it.

(we guided you to make your way here)

They had guided him . . . but never, in his memory, had they said they had gotten him here. Which meant . . . which meant he had freed himself from that room. Whatever the Dark Man's gift' had done to reject the creature's hold over him, it had also done something to him. He had ceased to be a puppet, steered by remote control to whatever ends the alien devised. He understood things he should never have known, deducing conclusions that should never have been within his reach, as if the answers had been coming from somewhere else. And now, he saw as the Dark Man saw . . . across space, and maybe, should he take the time to try, across time as well.

(You don't have it in you to be as powerful as I am, to do half the things I do)

Yes, he did. He had had those abilities in him all along, branded into his blood with the Dark Man's mark. He just hadn't known it.

As suddenly as it came the pain subsided, and Reed levered himself up on one knee, forcing air through his hurting lungs in startled hiccups. The Dark Man's attempts to even the score had failed. Reed had fought for his lucidity, fought using some new force he did not understand, and won.

(you can't control me any more)

The two dim figures of Trip and Hoshi stumbled on for a shuttlepod mere meters beyond their reach.

-----------------------------

Hoshi was deadweight against him, and his own head swam with air deprivation, but Trip braced her unresponsive weight in his arm and set his darkening sights ahead, judging the distance—forgetting, for the moment, that the math didn't add up.

The returning air slammed him onto his knees, tipping his feet from under him, and he dropped Hoshi to the ground. The plaza fluttered back into existence, flagstones under his knees and air rushing into his lungs, and Trip swallowed heady gulps of it, fists thumping the circulation back into his chest.

He glanced across at Hoshi, lying where she had fallen.

She was not breathing.