FROM LIGHT INTO SHADOW, PART TWO


Trip fell to his knees at Hoshi's side, eyes raking over the clinging folds of her uniform for even the palest spark of life beneath; but she was motionless, her eyes closed and her body twisted where she had fallen in a Picassian tangle, unconscious before she hit the ground.

he breathed, eyes slitted against the needles of rain striking his face. He blew the pool collecting behind his teeth out of his mouth and smudged his hand across his eyes, vainly trying to clear them. As he bent over her, water dripped from his brow and chin, pattering into the sodden cotton of her uniform in a drilling beat that punctuated each breath he took.

Each breath she did not take. She did not even stir.

he pleaded, knowing his only answer would be the wind in the trees. He stooped his ear to her chest, awaiting the gentle rise and fall of her lungs, listening for the whisper of air being pulled into her body. The storm beat into his back relentlessly, striking a percussion that drowned out all other sound.

Trip laced his hands together and crossed them over her ribs, palms flat, and began to apply pressure to her heart in abrupt, firm jolts. He felt her shudder under his hands, but it was only the reflex from his own force, and no motion of her own, that produced it. He pinched her nose between his knuckles, took a deep breath, and carefully sealed his lips over hers, reflecting humorlessly that his teasing about a kiss had turned out to be horribly, sickeningly prophetic. Her chest swelled as he breathed into her, expelling his own air into her mouth slowly. Her lungs deflated as he sat back, but they did not fill again on their own.

C'mon, Hoshi, breathe why don't ya? he mumbled, unaware he even spoke. Breathe, Ensign, that's an order! It rang away into the mist, and was swallowed in the gathering darkness behind. Day was giving way to night and the world descended from light to shadow, bringing a gray gauze over the plaza's flooding enclosure.

Hoshi lie there in a rising swell of turbulent black water, as lifeless as Reed had been in that sickbay only a few long hours ago.

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Reed faced his nameless nemesis—or was it accidental benefactor?—across an expanse of molten moonlight and darkness, the boiling sky faltering with each roar of thunder and each dagger of lightning, switching light to shadow and shadow to light. The Dark Man stared back at him, a haze of clotted night with two distant points of red glinting from the depths of his hooded face. Reed had never seen that face. He knew he never would. But he could, if he chose.

If he chose. The black shape gaped like the doorway to another dimension, waiting to devour him. A dimension he had seen into, still saw into, and where he did not wish ever to go.

(You don't have it in you to be as powerful as I am)

A taunt made in all innocence, perhaps, but it had been the trigger to some imperturbable notion deep in Reed's subconscious mind—the place where every echo of every recalcitrant memory was locked away, rattling in their cage until the time when they could be made sense of again.

(Do you think he'd be too strong for you, if he were under pressure?)

Once, he had replied in the affirmative, knowing the force of will levering his own was of a league he could never hope to counter. He had told Hoshi to shoot because he knew he could not win. But things had changed; he couldn't be controlled any more because he could win.

You knew I would see them, Reed said. The anger that had simmered on a low heat for so long suddenly volcanoed, and evaporated in a flash. You knew I would realize that I was changing, and do something if you threatened them. How could you know that? It wasn't a part of my natural timeline, it happened because you interfered. How did you see?

The Dark Man chuckled, in a manner so human that it made Reed falter with sudden disquiet.

It's elementary, Mr. Reed, the shade replied, the last of his dying laugh carried on a breath. The moment I realized I could no longer control you I assumed logically that it was due not to me but to you. That your human willpower and control had elevated to a level comparable to mine. In fact, it is mine.

You mean I'm . . . Reed shied away from the statement, not wanting to play all his hidden cards in one hand. Let this creature assume what he would; but Reed did not intend to voice the extent of that newfound will and surrender his greatest advantage.

You are becoming like me. The cells I injected into you regenerated yours in that sickbay, and in the process they have somehow spliced themselves to your own—a consequence I should have seen, and would have, had you been like any other human. But you had to be different, you had to make me kill you before you would listen to reason. It was spat with utter disdain, but against all of Reed's expectations, the Dark Man appeared neither concerned nor surprised. I couldn't let you go your way without knowing the extent of your transformation—how much of a threat you are to me—now could I?

And T'Pol? She's not going to . . .

No. She's a Vulcan, and she was not essentially killed by her friend and colleague. The shadows shifted, the mouthless smirk Reed had witnessed in the mirror materializing once more. It appears she is more careful in choosing her friends.

Reed's fists twitched convulsively but he kept them rooted at his sides, telling himself there was nothing to punch—only holographic matter that would disperse and reform at the blink of an eye.

I wished it, he declared abruptly, thinking aloud. He had controlled the hologram, altered it as he saw fit. I saw Hoshi and the commander were in trouble, and I wished I could help them. And it happened, they got their air back just like I wanted them to. Is that how it works? Do you just wish' things to be, and they appear?

Advanced psychokinetic and telekinetic ability. The Dark Man pondered a moment, giving no impression of defense or impending attack—he seemed content, for now, merely to exchange words across this gulf to an enemy he could not reach save in rootless insults. Yes. When it involves our holograms we think what we need to be, and it is. In more physical cases we often choose a host such as yourself to act as an intermediary.

Isn't that a little unfair? Do you mean you can just pop in and out when you feel like it, changing this and that, or infecting people the way you infected me?

Usually . . . yes.

But you can't just interfere with people's lives! It would be a fundamental infringement on their right to free will. Don't you people have any respect for the rest of the universe?

They have laws. Rules. They stifle what they are. They deny themselves, make themselves like corporeal beings, wish to make contact with them.

Like the nanobots.

The Dark Man nodded.

And the vision I saw? The ship being destroyed? It was never them, was it? It was you, all along. I saw what you planned to do if I didn't co-operate with you. Aren't you worried about retrieving T'Pol's nanobots, too?

She does not have them any more.

Reed could not be sure, but thinly disguised in that statement was a curl of the lip that could be heard, a disgust that could be felt, and he relished it, secretly. So what happens now? he asked, unable to prevent himself from appearing at least a little bit smug. It appears we've reached a rather impressive stalemate. You can't destroy me. I can't destroy you. It's checkmate, and you know it.

Around them, the neon and shadow continued to spin, blue and dead, cutting swathes across the conference room like a strobe light—or like the blades of a fan, chopping their way through the gloom.

You're bluffing, Malcolm Reed. A blink of the Dark Man was there, lit with lines of blue fire like the spider's web threads of the numbered floor; and then it was gone, black, and then lit again. A catherine wheel, revolving at speeds that accelerated as his own heart rate accelerated.

Reed had always been rather partial to fireworks.

Am I bluffing? He allowed a smile of his own, entirely humorless. Perhaps his poker face didn't need work, after all. Maybe I just know power when I see it. When I feel it. A merciless echo of his own design, mirroring the past as the past had so often mirrored the present. I have it in me to be as powerful as I need to be . . . to get rid of you.

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The damp material of her uniform had settled like shrink wrap around a squarish object in her breast pocket, and Trip's fingers brushed unmindfully against it as he pulled back a second time, his efforts disappointed. His throat burned like a firebrand, and thoughtlessly he opened his mouth and accepted the drizzle of holographic rain on his tongue, swallowing it back as he tore the zip open and fumbled the item from her pocket. Her communicator.

Three minutes. You've got maybe three minutes before she's brain dead. And I reckon you already had one.

His fingers slipped as he attempted to pry it open, the slick surface repelling him. He set his teeth hard and tried again, bruising the tips of his fingers as they scraped down its side; then he regained his grip, and flipped the communicator open.

One minute and twenty seconds. You hear that, Commander? You'd better.

Static sung brokenly in his hand, bursting intermittently between more definite strains of sound. A voice.

Trip yelled desperately into the communicator. Cap'n, it's Trip, can ya hear me up there? Cap'n, do you read?

There was a snapple, followed by the fractured syllables of Captain Archer's voice. Even butchered by the weak channel, his tone sounded urgent as Trip's.

One minute forty seconds.

Trip . . . are you? . . . breaking up . . . did you find . . .

Trip interrupted whatever else the captain may have had to say. Cap'n, Hoshi's not breathing. Get Phlox to the transporter room and beam us up!

The wailing wind blasted across the communicator's sudden silence. Then, faintly. . . . on it.

Trip slumped in relief, letting his forehead rest against her still ribs, her uniform sticking to his damp brow.

Two minutes.

He devoured three shuddering breaths, held them, and released them, his body partially shielding hers from the downpour. The manufactured water molecules forming a mist around him and sleeting down his back in a torrent tingled with an unseen energy charge, seeping into his skin, through his muscles, penetrating bone. The transporter had a lock on them, and each atom in his body hummed as he was disassembled, the beam gradually taking hold.

Perhaps his command capabilities were not so bad, after all.

The tingle dissipated as abruptly as it had built, the faint shimmer dying, and was gone in an instant.

Two minutes twenty. They had failed.

he said, clutching the communicator in his fist as if it may escape and run away from him. He dragged himself upright, his chest tightening instinctively once more. Cap'n, what happened?

Can't . . . transporter lock . . . interference . . . .your position . . . breaking up . . . Trip did not wait to answer. Two minutes forty seconds. He could do this.

He flung the communicator aside into the viscous black pool forming between the stones, and locked both hands over Hoshi's heart for the third time. He leant his whole weight into each pump on her ribs, throwing strength from the pit of his stomach and down through his rigid arms. One—two—three—four—five.

Nothing.

Trip scrambled back, kicking up spray with his heels, and fused his mouth over hers. Her lips were cold and wet under his, the breathless immobility of them sending a shiver darting deep into his spine; but he pushed past that instinctive repulsion, and breathed his own air into her. Her lungs rose and fell, but did not rise again unaided.

Three minutes. Surely, by now, he had had his three minutes. They had been and gone, and because of him, because of his failure to make a command decision and either drag her to the shuttlepods or allow her to go back, she was gone with them.

Trip fell back in the quagmire, not feeling the wet or the cold or his own weariness, perhaps not able to feel any more. Everything he had done, every decision he had made since this nightmare began, had been wrong. He had failed to check the phase pistol setting, and Malcolm had almost died. Had it not been for the captain's intervention in the sweet spot, T'Pol would have gotten the better of him, because he had fallen for her play. And had he agreed to bring Travis down here with him, then he could have sent the ensign back for help while he continued to search for the two missing officers.

(I'd be dead, Trip. There would have been no one to catch me and I'd be dead)
Trip reached across and took her small, clay-like hand in his. It was icy, limp, and fragile as an eggshell. But that didn't help ya much, did it, sweetheart? he murmured, bitterly.

Beside him, Hoshi spluttered.

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The laugh Reed received in return sailed high into the cross-lit bubble of the arched skylight. Those blue-black glimpses continued to kaleidoscope crazily.

So you're fond of fireworks, the Dark Man breathed. No surprise, from you. Would you like me to create a new firework, Lieutenant? Bigger and louder and brighter than all the rest? I think I'll name it Enterprise.

You wouldn't dare, Reed said quietly. Dangerously.

Then stop me.

(He will be coming for you and all who know you. Forever)

Reed thought quickly. He wouldn't stand a chance in a direct conflict; although strong, a virulent strain coursing through his gestalted blood, his abilities were new and unperfected, largely unknown. He couldn't protect the ship from any direct assault, he would just as likely destroy as defend it. For all he knew, it may have been his mishandling that saw the Enterprise blown out of the sky in his vision. But his strength, his ability, his own, human power, had never rested with brute force.

It had rested with tactical skill.

I will, he said, with impenetrable certainty. You see, you may be able to destroy the ship before I could figure out how to stop you. You may even be able to kill Hoshi and Commander Tucker. But we've already established you can't kill me. I can defend myself enough for that. And the instant you make a move against my ship and my crew, I will personally see to it that everyone at Starfleet Headquarters, everyone at the Vulcan High Command, in fact every friendly civilisation we've ever made contact with, knows about you. Your secret will be out. Having people know you exist will spoil your fun somewhat, wouldn't you agree?

There was an obstinate silence. But Reed already felt, in his heart, that what he had set out to do when he stole Shuttlepod One had finally reached its conclusion. He was walking a fine line, but he felt assured that, at last, he could keep his balance.

(Do you think he'd be too strong for you, if he were under pressure?)

No. Now that the question was raised a second time, his answer was very different from the first.

A rumble shook the very foundations of the conference room, and a white light flooded through the skylight above like a false dawn. Reed blinked at the sudden, penetrating beam lancing through his eyes, stabbing through his body, and threw his arms up to protect his face from the glare, flinching back instinctively into the last tattered shreds of shadow that had shrunken against the wall behind him.

On the far side of the light, the Dark Man shrieked.

The svelte shadow was as swift and silent as his long limbs and stealthy manner had suggested—faster, even, than Reed himself. The shriek that had startled him and should not have done so had barely rang into the shadows and the light lowering towards them had not yet fully eclipsed them, but the Dark Man was nowhere to be seen. Reed squinted against the strobe of searing light, nursing his singed right hand against his chest. It burned where those rays had struck him, far more fiercely than any other part of his exposed skin—a distant hurt as those in his dreams had been distant hurts, overlaid exactly over the net of bone that had itched so maddeningly, as the new wound in his shoulder had overlaid the old.

He couldn't believe he had been so blind—able to see across time and space, yet unable to see what lie under his very nose.

All your little secrets are coming out now, aren't they? he bellowed, his lone voice lost in the roar of the shuttlepod overhead; but not lost, he knew, to the Dark Man. The Dark Man did not need audible confirmation of things already taken directly from Reed's mind. He had tried once before to hide his thoughts, and failed. This time, he could not afford to fail. The element of surprise was his only weapon.

There, faint in the darkness beyond that light, he saw a movement. Human eyes would be blind to a rustle so slight as that, shifting tones within tones the only indication of life; but his eyes, at this moment, were not human. He saw in the dark, as they did. He burned in the light, as they did.

An echo rang through the darkness, words never meant for his ears coming back to him as clearly as if he heard them anew; Trip, out in the plaza, telling Hoshi to go. There were only two humans, he had said—Trip the one, Hoshi the other. He and the Dark Man had become, if not gestalted, then counterparts . . . and whatever would harm one would also, luck willing, harm the other . . .

Without warning, Reed darted from his sheltering stripe of shadow and out into the white-hot globe of light, out across the no-man's-land that seared where it touched, and into the shade shielding the Dark Man . . . and there he fastened his deadliest grip on the creature's coat sleeve, twisted, and yanked him out into the light. Smoke spewed from the very real, very solid black form in his hands, the air crackled with the sound of frying meat, and the Dark Man screamed again, too startled at this audacity he had not predicted to fight back.

He twisted and flailed and thrashed in Reed's hands, but Reed held grimly to his task, unmoved by the animalistic shriek almost flesh and blood in nature; for the first time this being he held became something he could perceive as living. The untouchable wraith he had feared in many a childhood nightmare since that first night was, for all his tricks and illusions, nothing more than a fallible, killable creature.

Reed's own skin burned, his eyes stinging with unstaunchable sweat, and his iron-fisted right hand shrieked like nothing he had ever felt before . . . but still, he held on.

You won't . . . kill me. The Dark Man's voice no longer struck like ice into his spine; it fluttered like the last breath of life in a dying moth's wings. All pretense at telepathy, at metamorphosis, at kinetic power, was abandoned now; all his tricks lie exposed and hollow. In the end, Reed, whose mind was supposedly open to and unprotected from this being, had nevertheless taken him by surprise. He had bluffed, and he had won. His poker face had never earned him a higher reward.

You sound remarkably sure of yourself, sir, Reed bit, his teeth clenched tight as his fists, his remark distorted between them. What did you do? Read my mind?

The Dark Man's brittle black shroud collapsed inward as this creature that filled its folds doubled, crumpling to his knees in Reed's wretchedly determined hands. Smoke poured from him, from the both of them, like spires of ash rising from a funeral pyre. If you kill me, it will alienate you from these people you work so hard to protect. The attack, so much more a promise than ever it was a threat, came in a broken husk of sound expelled on a weakening breath, and Reed barely heard it. You'll have squandered your new life here in space for good.

Reed bit back his own crescendoing pain and curled his pinching fingers closer into those paper-thin folds . . . but now, his hands trembled. His heart pattered quickly as an ensnared hare's, but his grip hardened, shaking, refusing to let go. I do what I have to, to protect them! They understand my duty every bit as well as I do.

The weak laughter that rippled out in reply clearly cost the Dark Man dearly; now, even his featureless face was shrouded in that cloak, limbs withdrawn within, body bowed and balled up beneath. He was dying, every blackened stream of smoke taking with it another second of life. Reed was beginning to feel faint and giddy with his own agony.

You won't kill me, the Dark Man whispered.

Reed demanded, shaking the weighty bundle shedding ash in a fine shower around them. Why won't I kill you?

The shape shuddered, but no more came until his last, weak admission: Because that's what I would do. I would kill you in a heartbeat, and you know it, human.

Reed tightened his jaw against the worst pain yet—being reminded that what he once was, he would no longer be; human. I know you would, Reed murmured, faint with distress. I know you as if I could read your mind, everything except your name. Do you imagine you know me? Do you honestly trust that I won't kill you? You think I'm bluffing; believe me, sir, I've been told my poker face leaves much to be desired.

The bundle—shrunken, deformed, twisted into a pool of black fabric and dense night and shrouded in a bitter, burnt odor that drowned the former acid—began to quake like a galleon in high winds. You'll never see me again, it promised, voicelessly as could be done when his powers of telepathy were, in his weakened state, beyond his reach. Let me go and I'll see none of my faction touch you or your crew.

Reed frowned, awaiting more. It did not come. Slowly, his fists uncurled from the smoking fabric bunched in them, and the figure scrambled away from him like a kicked dog escaping a vicious master. Without a further word spoken on either side, Reed let his tormentor go. His poker face collapsed, without fanfare, without audience, into the wrought, terrified shock his mask had been constructed to cover. It had been a trick. Just not the one the Dark Man thought.

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Trip dipped the shuttlepod down low until its underbelly kissed the skylight's framework, holding it hovered where the searchlights could beam through into the gloom of the cavernous room below. Hoshi watched over Trip's shoulder, craning her neck to see down past his pilot's seat and his blond head.

she murmured, tightly.

I am holdin' her steady.

A sudden, heavy wind buffeted the shuttlepod, sending it skidding into the skylight below. Hoshi was thrown from her seat, though she held tightly to its edge with both grim hands. A rain of shattered glass spun down into the room below as they collided.

I can see that, Hoshi said dryly, as she scrambled upright. Then, pointing down through the viewscreen: There! I can see him. How can we get down?

As if in answer to her, and with no warning whatsoever, the roof below them vanished. As the doors had vanished, the moment she entered through them. As the stepping-stones had vanished, leaving her stranded. The conference room was instantly ceilingless, open to the elements, and clear for landing.

Trip brought them down, and shut off the thrusters. Shuttlepod One's burring undertone dimmed to pensive quiet. The hatch swooped open, letting in a barrage of wind and rain, and Reed had thrown himself through almost before the hatch had finished opening, bringing with him that heady, bitter fragrance Hoshi never wanted to smell again.

Reed yelled. His eyes burned like flaring coals in his face, and his chest was heaving as he breathed as if he had never tasted air before. She could relate to that, all right. Hoshi tried not to allow her eyes to stray to the bloody stain in his undershirt, his uniform slung low on his hips, the redness of his visible skin. He didn't appear desperately hurt, merely . . .

. . . insane.

Go, I don't know how much longer I can keep the roof off! Go!

Trip cast Hoshi a puzzled glance, which she returned. Then her gaze returned to Reed, and there it lingered.

Trust him, she said.

Trip fired the thrusters, and did as Malcolm said.