Myriad Universes_ Echoes And Refractions Part 6

"Destroyed itself," she deadpanned. "Blew up. It's gone. It's all gone."

Her knees buckled and she fell into Kirk, this time planting her face into his chest, while her own chest heaved with pained moans of despair. Kirk wrapped his arms around her, and his eyes peered out over the top of her hair. And as Thelin looked into those eyes, he saw only an emptiness as vast as the deepest reaches of s.p.a.ce.

3.

The hard metal floor of the brig rushed up to meet David with all the gentleness of a shuttle accident. He heard the buzz and faint crackle as the forcefield was reengaged at the entrance to his cell. The impact caused blood to start dripping again from his nose, which was almost a.s.suredly broken.

For the time being, he lacked the will, and most likely the strength, to move from his p.r.o.ne position. The harsh coldness of the ground was actually refres.h.i.+ng as the sweat continued to roll from his overheated brow. He found comfort in the sound of his own breathing, and in the sensation of his own pulse throbbing throughout his body, reminding him that he remained alive, at least for now.

The feel of a touch upon his shoulder pierced his trancelike state, and suddenly he found the strength to shriek and pull away. But then a soothing voice brought forth a sense of peace, and gently pulled him back from the brink of panic. "David, it's me. It's Saavik. Try to relax. You're having an acute stress reaction."

He turned his head toward the sound and struggled to bring the image into focus. The sight of her face and the firm gaze beneath her arched eyebrows instantly calmed him, and he reached out with his right hand to touch her cheek. "Saavik?" he said, and suddenly burst into uncontrolled sobbing. She reached her arm around to embrace him, slightly lifting his head and shoulders from the deck, and David buried his head into her lap, letting the cleansing tears flow freely.

He wasn't sure how many minutes pa.s.sed before his breathing began to steady and his fragile composure returned, but eventually he looked back up into her eyes. As he gazed into them, he suddenly became aware of a sensation-a tranquil warmth that seemed to emanate from her, the piercing gaze soothing his mind, and the caress of her hands calming his frayed nerves. "Saavik," he repeated. "I didn't tell them anything."

"Just relax," she instructed him. "Can you sit up?"

"I...I think so," David said, and he turned his body, attempting to prop himself up with his left arm, forgetting that his limb now ended at a cauterized stump, hastily wrapped in dirty cloth. The pressure of the wound against the deck sent a searing jolt of pain throughout his body, and he cried out as he rolled over onto his back, cradling the limb over his stomach with his good hand. The agony of phantom fingers burned mercilessly at the end of his arm.

Saavik allowed a moment for the initial wave of pain to pa.s.s, then once again cradled his shoulders. "Your injuries are not life-threatening," she said, unwrapping enough of the dressing to get a view of the amputation site. "They managed to stop the bleeding, despite the crudeness of the ligature. Allow me to help you up."

With a forceful a.s.sist from Saavik, David managed to rise to a sitting position. For the first time, he looked down upon the mangled remains of his left wrist. The skin was charred and encrusted with dried blood. A whiff of seared flesh entered his nostrils, and he gagged, feeling the bitter sting of bile rising up through his throat. He closed his eyes and turned his head, desperately hoping for the spell to pa.s.s without soiling the floor of their cell.

When he finally managed to let his eyelids flutter open again, he saw that Saavik's demeanor appeared more uneasy. She glanced out of the cell's entryway, to ensure that the nearest guard was safely out of earshot. "David," she said. "We may not have much time. Did they tell you what they plan to do next?"

"I didn't tell them anything," David mumbled, slowly shaking his head. "I didn't tell them anything."

"David!" she said with sudden firmness, gripping him by the shoulders. "Listen to me. Did they tell you what they plan to do next?"

He stared back at her. The memories of his recent interrogation remained fresh in his mind, but the thought of replaying them in search of clues was untenable. He began to shake. "I don't...I don't know...I think so, but I..."

"I can help you, David," Saavik a.s.sured him. "But you must help us first. Did they say anything before they returned you to the brig?"

David closed his eyes. His breathing grew more rapid, and his pulse quickened. He remembered the pain, the flash of light...the sight of his own blood spraying forth...the voices. Kruge's voice.

"Aaahh," David wailed, trying to form some coherence out of the jumble of impulses shuffling through his memory. He licked his lips. "Um, he said, a...a mind...mind-sifter."

"Indeed," Saavik said with resignation. "As I had feared."

David noticed the obvious change in her demeanor. "What?" he inquired. "I'm not going to tell them anything. I won't let them have Genesis. So many people..."

"David, you can't..."

"So many people have died!" he cried out. "And it's my fault. They're going to have to kill me, too."

"You can't resist the mind-sifter!" Saavik admonished him. "You don't understand. I would have the mental discipline to resist it, but you cannot. They will empty your mind, David."

He stared at her, horrified by her sense of certainty. "Oh, G.o.d," he muttered, looking about the cell in desperation. "Then we can't let them take me again. Oh, my G.o.d!" He struggled to his feet, agitated, and began pacing the length of his cell. Suddenly he turned, and pointed down at her with a trembling finger as she remained seated in the center of the floor, his sanity now pushed to the brink. "You...you have to kill me. You've got some...some sort of Vulcan death grip thing, right?"

Saavik rose and walked over to one of the slabs protruding from the walls that served as the only places to sleep in the cell. "David, come and sit down," she calmly said.

Drained of all emotion, as well as any remaining motivation for action, David simply did as he was told, robotically crossing the room and seating himself beside her. He envied her stoic Vulcan calmness as Saavik locked her gaze upon him.

"We are in agreement that they cannot be allowed to acquire the secrets of the Genesis technology," Saavik said. "And as long as we live, they will seek to retrieve it from our minds. Logically, we must convince them that we do not have the knowledge they seek."

David nodded. "Okay," he said.

"I will have to join with your mind to prepare you for your next interrogation," Saavik continued. "I admit that I never received much training in the esoteric mental disciplines, and certainly I have never melded with a human before. But the fact that we have been intimate together should facilitate the process."

David let out a snort, spraying specks of blood from his nose onto his tunic. "Gosh, you make it sound so s.e.xy when you say that."

"David, please try to concentrate," Saavik reprimanded him. "We may not have much time. Look at me."

David looked at her. Although she had the benefit of not yet having been subjected to Klingon interrogation, she still looked amazingly composed, and strikingly beautiful. The only real evidence of their harrowing captivity was the bloodstains down the front of her tunic, deposited there by David amid his tears just minutes earlier. David considered the traumatic events of Saavik's childhood, and how she had seemingly drawn strength from them, and now her impressive demeanor provided just enough inspiration to make him believe that, just perhaps, they could survive this. Saavik reached out with both hands and touched his face, her fingertips gently prodding the area around his temples, slowly moving to find an optimal position.

"My mind to your mind," she said.

David felt a brief moment of disorientation. He could still see Saavik seated before him, but suddenly his mind seemed unable to reconcile that visual data with the sense of her presence-both next to him and within him. Yet he wasn't alarmed; rather, his trust in her made the sensation oddly comforting.

"My thoughts to your thoughts."

David closed his eyes, and the conflicting visual sensations became clearer. In fact, he now realized that he was seeing his own face through Saavik's eyes, and it wasn't a pretty sight-his visage was blemished with welts and bruises, his left eye was a purplish ma.s.s beginning to swell shut, and his nose and mouth were caked with dried blood. Perhaps sensing the discomforting effect of the view, Saavik closed her own eyes, and without the visual distractions, David found himself awash in a sea of thoughts, memories, ideas...and he wasn't even sure which ones were his.

David, he heard Saavik's voice, though he realized she wasn't actually speaking-instead, he seemed to somehow feel the words within his mind. Concentrate.... Your knowledge of the Genesis technology is found within your memories. We must visualize a system of organization.

The words were cryptic, and yet David understood precisely her meaning. The maelstrom of images surrounding him began to coalesce-to arrange themselves into recognizable patterns, individual bound codices, sorting themselves methodically...categorically.

Surrounding him, an image began to come into focus of four walls...a comforting room, rustic and antiquated in its design, with chairs and a sofa, lit by the blaze of a fireplace, with hardwood floors and shelves...lots and lots of shelves. And onto the shelves, archaic bound paper books representing all the acc.u.mulated knowledge of his life fell into place. He stood enclosed within a quaint but familiar library-the official archive of his mind.

Next to him in the room stood Saavik, looking about with approval. Excellent, Saavik commented. Now you know what we must do.

Indeed, he did know. In the center of the room lay a large, colorful throw rug. David grabbed the edge and threw it aside, revealing the floor's wooden slats beneath. Saavik kneeled, setting her palms upon the floor, and found a hidden latch. She turned it, and a hidden trap door was revealed. The aperture swung open with a creak, exposing a dark shaft that fell away into nothingness.

Together they approached the long shelves and began to selectively remove volumes from the stacks. David held a book in each hand: Biochemical Modification of Ecological Systems, and Principles of the Meta-Genome. He tossed both into the hole in the floor. Saavik removed Molecular Waveform Reorganization and Propagated Metastasis from the shelf, and they followed the others into the darkness beneath their feet. As a well-coordinated team, they pored over the contents of the library and, one by one, removed anything that might reveal David's intimate knowledge of the secret Genesis technology, and concealed it within the hidden vault.

Once they were satisfied, they closed and sealed the trap door, the seams around the opening disappearing into the gaps between the floorboards, and Saavik pulled the rug back into place.

As they stood in the center of the room, David looked around, a.s.sessing what they had accomplished. The shelves about him were by no means bare-in fact, they'd worked to eliminate any large gaps that might arouse suspicion. But now for the first time, David became aware that something significant had been changed within his memory. The science, his research, the myriad experiments that made up the Genesis Project...all that knowledge was gone from his mind. He could hardly remember what the project even entailed, except for what he had discovered during their recent investigation of the Genesis Planet.

Saavik, he said, though at some level he realized that he wasn't actually speaking the words. It's all gone! It's...it's my whole life's work, and I can't remember any of it!

Relax, Saavik a.s.sured him. The knowledge is still buried deep within your subconscious. It can be retrieved. But now it is important that you a.s.sume the role...

"Hey! None of that in the brig! Keep your hands to yourselves!"

David spun around to see Torg standing at the entrance to the library with two guards close behind him. As the Klingons approached, the tranquil image of the room around him began to s.h.i.+ft, losing focus and cohesion, until the illusion completely faded away. David was still seated in their cell aboard the Katai, and Saavik was still gently holding his head between her fingertips. Torg forcefully placed his arm between them and shoved Saavik aside, and she fell backward onto the hard surface of the metal bench. Infuriated, David lunged at Torg, but the other two guards each grabbed an arm and easily restrained him.

"Don't try to be a hero, human," Torg admonished him. "If you cooperate, there's a slim chance that you may get out of here alive."

"You'll have to forgive me if I have trouble believing you," David shot back.

"David!" Saavik said, having pulled herself back up to a sitting position. "You need to cooperate. Just do what they ask. After all, we have nothing to hide."

He stared at her, and realized that she was right. His mind felt as barren as an empty house, once lived in as a home, but now bereft of all furnis.h.i.+ngs except for bare hooks on the walls and stained carpets on the floor. There was nothing left to be hidden.

David Marcus made no effort to resist as Torg strapped restraints onto his arms and legs as he lay face-up on the cold steel table in the Katai sickbay. He felt mildly nauseous as the odor of charred flesh and ozone still hung in the air from the earlier "treatment" of his amputated limb, and the pain still left him in a terribly weakened state. But even if he still had the strength left to fight, this was the fate to which he had resigned himself. This was the risk that Saavik had asked him to take, and he was willing to gamble his safety for her, not to mention for the sake of the entire Federation.

He did briefly test the strength of the bindings, more out of curiosity and instinct than any real expression of protest. This, he thought, was how they used to bind prisoners on Earth hundreds of years ago, before executing them by injecting them with lethal doses of chemicals, and they too rarely fought against the inevitable. The difference was that David, at least, held on to the hope that he might survive with his faculties intact.

Maltz approached the table holding a thin tricorder with a large display. He punched the b.u.t.tons and adjusted the dials with a certain disturbing eagerness, then attached a few wires and cables to it before handing the entire contraption to Kruge, who came up behind him, looking on with mild interest. To the other ends of the wires he attached a large metallic halo, which he fitted over David's temples. One additional wire fed into a crude control panel of sorts mounted upon a nearby pedestal.

David remembered hearing stories about the Klingons and their ability to wipe the memories of their adversaries. He had no idea what a "mind-sifter" looked like, or if the device they were currently employing was in any way typical. He could only hope that Maltz knew what he was doing, and that he would show some level of restraint before permanently emptying his mind.

"My lord," Maltz said, "you will see the bipolar montage on the readout, filtered into alpha and beta waveforms. Once we scan to a depth where visual data can be resolved, it will appear on the screen."

"Yes, yes, just get to it!" Kruge spat impatiently.

"Of course, sir." He flipped a switch on the control panel, and in that instant, David lost control of his mind.

That is not to say that he had lost his sanity; but rather, all of the conscious functions of his brain-things that he had spent a lifetime a.s.suming were in his own complete control-were suddenly at the whim of a mechanical device. Images from his past were forcibly and chaotically dredged out of his deepest memories and played out before him. Unlike the mind-meld he had experienced earlier with Saavik, this was not a warm, shared experience. This was rape.

David focused his concentration despite the unpleasantness, making use of his own limited mental discipline, aided by the energy he had wisely conserved by not resisting until now. He had to bring order to the turmoil cascading through his memories. Knowing exactly what they were looking for, he simply had to provide a frame of reference, and to lead them precisely where they wanted to go.

Like pieces of a puzzle, the random flurry of memories and bits of knowledge began settling into an orderly mosaic.... He had returned to the library. The same images of antique books, representing all of his codified memories, still lined the shelves. The fire still burned in the fireplace, the pictures still hung upon the walls, and the rug still concealed the secret vault of his deep subconscious.

No sooner did the placid image appear than it was disturbed by a fierce commotion. The walls of the room shook and the sounds of repeated battering against the entrance reverberated through the hardwood floor until the door violently crashed inward. Dark figures swarmed in between the jagged edges of the ruined framework and descended like vultures upon the neatly arranged stacks surrounding the room. Though humanoid in shape, they had no obvious features, existing more as vague shadows. Individually but with breathtaking swiftness they rifled through the books, checking each t.i.tle before unceremoniously throwing them aside.

Additional figures shuffled throughout the room, opening drawers on endtables, knocking items off shelves, and even peering intently into the burning logs in the fire. In a short time, the room was completely ransacked-the shelves emptied and the contents of David's mind haphazardly scattered in random piles all over the floor. On some barely conscious level, David was aware of the jumbled mess the mind-sifter had made of his memories. But at least they were still intact.

Having failed to find the information they were seeking, the ghostly shapes began to circle the room aimlessly, until they stopped all at once, as if receiving new instructions. One by one, the beings turned and headed toward the exit.

The last remaining figure had stood alone in the farthest corner of the room, awaiting its turn to depart following all of the others. Finally it took a step forward only to stop short at the sound of a loud crunch. The scene around it appeared to freeze in time. The shadowy specter slowly kneeled and retrieved an item from the floor.

It was a picture frame. Though the gla.s.s was shattered, the vibrant colors of the frame seemed to emit a soothing, radiant glow. The static photograph set within, while undamaged, had a peculiar quality about it-the image was not only soft, seeming to phase in and out of focus, but also appeared almost surreal, as if the product of some unrealized fantasy.

The photograph was of James Kirk and Carol Marcus. And a small bra.s.s plaque at the bottom of the frame read, "Mom and Dad."

The surrounding surfaces in the room began to s.h.i.+mmer and slowly dissolve away, revealing the colorless, sterile walls of the Klingon sickbay. The black, featureless figure still gripping the picture began to morph into a more rigidly defined shape, developing unpleasantly familiar features, until David saw Commander Kruge standing before him, staring down at the tricorder in his hand.

"What is it, my lord?" Maltz said from somewhere behind David's head.

Kruge's eyes had widened to a point where it appeared his eyeb.a.l.l.s were at risk of popping from their sockets. He slowly exhaled, then asked, "The device is off? These images are saved and filed?"

"Yes, m'lord," Maltz replied, craning his neck to get a glance at the screen.

David found that he was panting with exhaustion. The mind-sifter had drained both his mind and his body of energy in ways that he had never known were possible. He felt confused and disoriented, and certainly lacked the stamina or the will to endure another session, should it come to that.

Torg looked over Kruge's shoulder at the tricorder display. "It's the Starfleet admiral!" he exclaimed, pointing to the image of Kirk. "The one from the recording you obtained!"

"Yes, I know," Kruge replied. "The Genesis commander himself. Maltz! You're sure the boy knows nothing of value?"

"We could try a higher setting, and wipe his mind completely," Maltz said. "But it appears unlikely that he would have any useful knowledge."

"Then put him back in the brig," Kruge replied, his face revealing the cunning machinations already at work within his own mind. "Don't damage him any further. We've just found ourselves quite a valuable hostage."

In the eighty-three years since the Rigel colonies had achieved Federation members.h.i.+p, Rigel X remained the one world where U.F.P. governance still seemed to have little appreciable impact. True to its roots as a trading outpost established hundreds of years earlier, the planet had no native inhabitants and relatively few permanent residents, save for the owners of several hundred merchant shops and service industries, pa.s.sed down through families over many generations. Given the overwhelming majority of visiting traders and patrons who were not Federation citizens, precious metals and crystals were still the preferred units of currency, food was bartered as often as parts and supplies, and law enforcement was lackadaisical when it was available at all.

Thelin had arrived on the nighttime side of Rigel X with some trepidation, having never visited the colony before, and with discretion requiring that no one in Starfleet be aware of his presence there. Prior to his departure, he had chosen to confide in Kirk only as to his travel plans, but did not share his reasons, much to the confused chagrin of the admiral. Far too many unanswered questions yet existed to justify getting Kirk involved in a potentially explosive, emotional situation just two months after the death of his son.

The Andorian entered a dark, dreary-looking tavern-the name of which, he noted, with irony, read "The Clandestine Rendezvous" in the Orion language-at precisely five minutes prior to the designated time given in the mysterious communique he had received. Predictably murky and crowded, the room was filled to capacity with patrons from dozens of different worlds-some humanoid, some not; some citizens of the Federation, some of various species that Thelin didn't even recognize-all in various stages of intoxication. A green-skinned Orion woman served up drinks from behind the bar, and an odd musical motif played in the background-twelve-toned, from the sound of it.

Moving toward the rear of the room, he climbed a few short steps to an upper platform set off from the rest of the establishment by a long, sweeping railing. By some miracle he located an empty table near a back corner, secluded enough to remain inconspicuous yet positioned so that he could observe the entire bar. Within moments an Orion waitress approached him.

"Hi, hon," she said with forced brightness. "Are you waiting for someone?"

"I hope so," Thelin replied. "Or else I've made this trip for nothing."

"Well, can I get you something?"

"Just Altair water."

"Got it," she said, and disappeared back into the crowd.

Minutes pa.s.sed. A human-looking man approached his table, diminutive in stature, with long, dark wavy hair, holding a multicolored, sparkling drink in his hand. "Why, Thelin of Andoria!" he exclaimed. "Is this seat taken?"

Thelin scrutinized the man's face. Something about him seemed awfully familiar, but the memory was fleeting, and he couldn't nail it down. "I trust it shall be, if indeed you are the one who brought me here."

The man smiled, setting down his gla.s.s, then seating himself in the chair opposite Thelin. "Well, of course. I have some very important information to pa.s.s along from some very important people."

"You mean some very important criminals," Thelin construed. "Otherwise we wouldn't be going through all this subterfuge."

The man laughed heartily, and shrugged in acknowledgment. "You always were the clever one, weren't you? My...it's been a while since we met on Deep s.p.a.ce K-7, hasn't it?"

A light of recognition flashed on in Thelin's mind. "Arne Darvin!" he exclaimed with more than a hint of revulsion, recalling the man's role some seventeen years earlier as a surgically altered Klingon spy.

Darvin nodded noncommittally as he sipped his drink. "Well, I go by many names, and I must say I've rather grown to detest that one in particular...but if it helps to breed some familiarity between us, so be it."

"I thought you were in prison," the Andorian said.

"I was in prison," he said scornfully, "for several months before I was returned to the Empire in a prisoner exchange."

"They released you? Pfft," Thelin spat. "I'd have thrown away the key." The Orion waitress returned and set down a gla.s.s of clear liquid in front of the Andorian.