She woke with his hand on her arm and the bluish light of the tricorder shining on her face. She stared stupidly for a moment at his hand, noticing his over-long nails and the feeling of his fingers touching her so lightly.
'How long have I been asleep?' she murmured, still pushing the remnants of dreams from her mind.
He looked at her, mouth pressed shut, and the memory of his silence came over her. But he straightened two fingers from the grip around the tricorder, and she asked, 'Two hours?'
He nodded, and then turned the tricorder towards her. She took it from him, looking at the screen, and smiled. Somewhere beneath the shell-shocked carapace there was still Spock. He had made use of his phenomenal memory to create a three dimensional map of all the corridors they had travelled, marking the computer room at one end and their location at the other. Now Christine could see that they had walked three point seven nine miles in this stumbling darkness, through branching corridors, and that they were roughly a mile away from their starting point in a straight line.
'We need to find stairs or an elevator,' she said, studying the map.
They could walk as far as they liked, but readings showed they were still at the same depth. They had to get closer to ground level. She wondered if they were moving deeper into the radiation zone, or closer to its edge. Even if they gained the surface they would not be safe until they could contact the ship.
Hungry, she fumbled in her pack for ration bars. Some of the orange, alien ones tumbled out and Spock turned away from the sight or the scent of them.
'They're not harmful,' she assured him. 'They don't fulfil all your nutritional needs, but they're not bad for you. A little like candy, maybe,' she added with a spontaneous smile.
It was obvious that Spock did not appreciate the analogy. She pushed the bars back into her pack and offered him a Starfleet-issue bar. He took it without enthusiasm and began to slowly nibble at it as she ate hers with enthusiasm.
'Not quite plomeek,' he said with halting difficulty.
Astonished, she laughed, full of joy both at his speech and at the fact that he seemed to be attempting a joke.
'No, they're not plomeek,' she said. 'But you can't have it all. At least they're not orange.'
At that, Spock paused in his eating, his eyes moving to the pack where one of the orange bars sat at the top. He looked queasy, and she regretted bringing them up. But then he turned eyes away from them again and resumed his slow, reluctant consumption of the Starfleet bar.
'I am sorry,' he said after a while.
She turned to stare at him. 'Sorry? What for?'
'I am not fit…'
The apology was clear in his eyes, far more eloquent than his halting speech. And behind that there was – what? A sadness or tiredness, perhaps, or a memory of something he did not care to remember. She thought of those bright, bird-like creatures again, and of his screams as they reached into his mind, beyond all ability to control. How cruel to strip him of his disciplines, to probe about in his mind like a bird searching for worms in mud.
'Why can't you speak?' she asked him curiously. 'What did they do?'
He closed his eyes briefly as if lost for a response. And then he opened them and lifted his hand hesitantly towards her face.
'A meld?' she asked. 'Are you sure?'
He nodded, tilting his head a little to one side, obviously asking for permission.
'If you're sure you want to – go ahead, Mr Spock,' she nodded.
His fingers touched her face –
She was Spock. He was walking through a dark space, the dust and dirt thick in his throat and nose. Curious. The light from the hatch at his back, just enough light reflecting from the walls to give him some sense of space.
He fell. Clutched out, fingertips scraping on edges. Hit. Pain skewed through his wrist. A sprain, he thought. He sat momentarily, assessing the bruises, feeling the wetness of blood on his hands. Then checking the tricorder at his side. Opening it, using the light from the screen as a flashlight. He saw the curved stairwell and stairs leading down, and he stood and followed them.
The space opened up into a room. The light reflected faintly from pale walls. Shapes in the centre of the room. Desks, perhaps…
He found the square panel on the wall, pressed his fingers to it. Light flickered into the room and settled to a manageable dimness. Quickly he assessed what was before him. Computers, ranks of them, buttons marked with a language possibly based on pictograms. Highly abstract, but yes, he could see signs that possibly equated to sun or light, to birth, creation or perhaps simply starting up, to death or switching off.
He began to scan the images, recording them in the tricorder for further study. If decipherable, they would provide a fascinating insight into this dead culture.
He touched a button near the birth pictogram, and the computer hummed, stuttered, and then died again. Curious, favouring his injured right wrist and using his left hand, he prised open a panel near the floor and began to investigate the circuitry he found inside.
Simple. Yes, simple enough. He should be able to correct the problems he found and extract whatever it was these computers held.
He began to fiddle with the workings, seeing success unfolding as he did. Finally he stood and touched the button again. The computer hummed. The hum increased. A screen rose from the console and more of those pictographic symbols flickered across it. He angled his tricorder towards it, recording all that came onto the screen.
There was a noise to his left. He looked. A creature, bipedal, covered in shimmering fur patterned in red, blue and green. Something birdlike about its eyes. He stared for a moment, processing the surprise. He had not expected living beings down here. And then he said, 'I am Spock.'
A whirlwind noise of song emitted from the creature. Angry, piercing. The emotion was fully readable although his universal translator made no sense of it. The creature covered the distance in seconds. Its eyes, close to him, glittering. And then –
Claws in his mind, the contact like a slap. At first, feelings. Emotions drilling into him, drilling past his conscious mind, finding the subconscious, bypassing controls. Hatred. Fear. Disgust. Taboo. Flagrant. Disgust.
Slowly picking out meanings. His voice, unmelodic, coarse, low – disgusting, offensive. Cloth on his body. Disgusting. Daring to make that noise. Disgust.
And pain cording through his mind. Threads pulled through the softness of his mind, trailing fire and blood. His scream echoing somewhere outside his skull. Punishment. Intruder. Pain.
On his knees, shaking. More of them around him. Their claws in his mind. The removal of the cloth from his skin. Their claws prising through him, tearing through him, eager claws ripping the leaves of a book, rifling through all that his mind held.
Realisation. Something clear. The creature has fixed the computer. The creature knows. The creature's mind. He is disgusting, but he is of use. His mind is full. Put him away. Put him away, come back later, find more in his mind. Perhaps this is the hope that was spoken of. Perhaps things will change.
Dragging. Their thoughts pulling out of his, serrated wire pulled from something soft, pulling shreds of flesh. The jerk of withdrawal. Lying gasping on the ground, his hands tight, his voice swallowed somewhere deep inside. Darkness. Crawling to his knees after a time, shaking, exploring the darkness with his outstretched hands to find a small room, a tight enclosure and a door that would not open. His mind reeling and his voice tucked somewhere deep inside. Falling back to the floor, his cheek pressed on the ground, eyes closed, his mind shaking…
Christine gasped, her breath coming short and frantic, blinking to see Spock watching her, his hand withdrawn and a look of apology on his face.
'Oh,' she said slowly, unable to verbalise a better response to what she had seen. Then she said, 'I understand. I can't imagine…'
But she could imagine, having felt everything from Spock's perspective. The lingering memory of his mental pain still made her short of breath and her hands were shaking.
'Is the sound of our speech so terrible to them?' she asked, although she knew the answer.
Spock nodded silently. He seemed to have reverted a little more into the introverted state after reliving that memory.
'Unmelodic,' he said slowly. 'A great offence…'
'They only communicate meaning through telepathy. Emotions are expressed through their song… That's why their written language is pictograms – there's no sound to represent!'
Spock nodded, his hands entwined together and his face downcast.
'They'd make a fascinating study,' she said, and Spock looked at her. She could see the glint in his eyes – despite the trauma of contact, he agreed. 'I wonder who could communicate with them. The Medusans, perhaps… Someone who could cope with their level of emotion, and their way of seeing things…'
Spock nodded again. Then he pushed himself up from his seated position. As he stood the light from the tricorder glinted from the sinews of his legs and buttocks and Christine found herself momentarily catching her breath and then ruthlessly clamping down on the attraction. The last thing Spock needed was to think she was taking advantage of this situation.
She wondered if the Talasees had ever developed cloth, despite their apparent lack of clothing. It was likely, she supposed, but they hadn't yet come across anything that Spock could put into service as any kind of covering. Perhaps it didn't matter. Spock was still quite unselfconscious. Perhaps growing less so, and perhaps as he returned to himself it was growing harder for her to confine her appraisals of his body to merely medical interest – but at the moment they could do nothing about it.
'You washed,' she said, covering her embarrassment with words despite the fact that he almost certainly had not noticed her look.
He nodded, rubbing one hand down his arm as if pleased with the feeling of his clean skin. The desire for cleanliness, the frugal use of language, the modifications to the tricorder – they were all signs that Spock was slowly clawing back some of himself from the wreck that the Talasees had left him.
He looked at her and she caught a spark of – something – as if she had caught a thought that was not hers. She seemed to see herself briefly as though through Spock's eyes, her face smudged with dirt and her hair in disarray, and there was an unexpected overtone of affection modifying that momentary glimpse.
'Mr Spock,' she began, and he looked at her with a more deliberate gaze, total innocence in his face. 'Nothing,' she said quickly, confused. 'I – should have a wash too, and then we ought to get our things together and leave this place. We need to get to the surface or find more food before we start to really need it.'
He nodded, his gaze seeming to see right through her skin and bones and into her thoughts and feelings. Heightened telepathic responses, she reminded herself, turning away. He's not shielding as normal. Maybe reflecting my own thoughts somehow…
She bent over the basin and let the water flow, splashing it over her face and neck and trying to drive those lingering thoughts out of her mind. But again she caught it, a heated feeling of wanting contact, wanting to be close, teasing at the edges of her thoughts.
'Okay,' she said abruptly, straightening up again, shaking those out thoughts out of her mind.
She went and fetched the flask and refilled it at the tap, studiously avoiding Spock's eyes.
'Sooner we move on, the better.'
He nodded, watching her with a lingering gaze as she sorted out her pack and slung the tricorder across her body.
They turned to the left when they exited the room and continued to walk up the corridor in the oppressive semi-darkness, occasionally opening doors they found to see if they led to a new avenue of escape, but mostly just walking and walking, and hoping for stairs.
The rubble grew thicker underfoot and Christine kept a close watch on Spock, aware that his bare feet were at risk of injury. She tried to light as much of the ground as possible with the tricorder screen. The responses from the device were becoming weaker, indicating that they were passing through an area of higher radiation, and the tricorder was becoming less and less useful as anything but a flashlight.
'Okay,' she murmured finally as they reached the end of this particular corridor. Three rooms to their right and left had already proved too damaged to enter and the amount of destruction was becoming disturbing.
'We'd better pray the way's passable through this door,' she said in a low voice, putting her hand out to touch the panel. 'If we have to backtrack I don't know where we can go…'
'Reinforced,' Spock murmured, pressing his own hand to the panel. It appeared to be made of some kind of dull metal. 'Different.'
Christine looked closer. Spock was right. This door did look different to the others they had encountered. It was certainly stronger looking, and the edges were rough, as if it had been fashioned for the entranceway after a weaker door had failed.
'Could it be lead?' she asked curiously. 'Maybe to protect against the radiation. It's high here, I'm sure.'
Spock nodded, murmuring, 'Possible.'
Christine examined the tricorder again, trying to elicit some response, but it was useless to attempt to analyse the door. Spock's 'Possible,' was enough for her. As quiet as he was, he did not seem to have lost his analytical powers, just his ability to express them fluently.
'We need to go through it,' she said. 'We don't have a choice. There isn't any other way.'
Spock nodded, but his lips were pressed together as if the idea did not appeal to him in the slightest. Christine wondered if there was a firm reason behind his disquiet, but she did not want to press him on what might be an emotional response.
'Can you help?' she asked as she tried the handle. It was stiff and the door was heavy, lending credence to the idea that it was lead.
Spock moved to stand beside her, his fingers closing about hers on the handle. She let herself feel them for a moment, warm and strong and surprisingly steady around hers – and then she turned her mind back to the task at hand, and began to pull.
The door scraped open with agonising slowness, and as it did a brilliant light pressed through the crack, dazzling Christine beyond all ability to see. Spock's hand clenched on hers, hard enough to bruise, and then he jerked away, dragging her behind him, pelting through the darkness back the way they had come as if hell itself had opened up on the other side of that door.