Naked and . . . barefoot.
He zoomed in the exterior monitors on the shuttlecraft, looking for signs of unclad feet. It took him a few moments to pin it down, but there it was. Footprints left behind by Demora’s bare feet. He brought the shuttlecraft to a slightly higher elevation, so that he was now about twenty meters high.
There. There to the west, he saw the footprints leading off. He eased the shuttlecraft in the direction that the prints had come from in order to track them to their point of origin.
It took a few moments for him to backtrack, although not too long. Certainly a shuttle could cover distance much more rapidly than a woman on foot. Even if she was running, which Sulu could now tell that she had been doing. At least that’s what she’d been doing at first, because her footprints weren’t flat. Rather they were weight-distributed in such a way that clearly only the balls of her feet were making an impression. Not only that, but they were farther apart, the wider gait of someone taking long, loping strides.
He thought briefly of all the times they’d gone running together. What a nightmarish contrast this sordid world was to the times they had jogged side by side through San Francisco’s sloping streets.
Then he noticed something else. He saw booted footprints coming in from the side and roughly paralleling the running prints of Demora. But the booted prints were going in the other direction.
From the size of the booted prints, Sulu suspected that they likewise belonged to Demora. And the angle that they came from would be consistent with the landing party’s original arrival. In other words, Demora had come from the general area of the northwest, moved in this general direction . . . and then something had happened, reducing her to naked savagery, and she’d come hightailing it in a straight easterly direction until running into, and attacking, Harriman and his people.
So all Sulu had to do was get to the point where the encounter had been . . . find what happened there . . . and then he would have the answer.
Or at the very least, he’d have even more questions.
The shuttle continued its course. In the distance, Sulu spotted the ruined city that had been mentioned in Harriman’s reports. What had the inhabitants been like, he wondered. Had some outlandish virus swept over them, turning them all into mindless berserkers such as what Demora had become? Had they been reduced to predator and prey, tearing each other apart until there was nothing left?
And what had happened to Demora, then, was some sort of residual disease left floating in the air?
But if that were the case, why hadn’t Harriman and the others been affected? Why just Demora?
Why her?
Why her? Well . . . that was the question, wasn’t it. That’s what this was all about. Sulu had to admit that this was more than just an exploratory probe to find out what had happened. He was looking for some sort of cosmic answer. Something that would explain to him precisely why his little girl had been singled out to be overtaken by, and fall prey to, this awful demise.
In short . . . he wanted the universe to make sense.
He had traveled the stars for so long that he had almost begun to believe that he could see the barest meaning behind it all. Sometimes he thought that right there, just beyond human consciousness . . . there were the answers that every creature sought in order to understand. To seek knowledge. To boldly go, and all that. Just past the horizon line of understanding, he thought he could glimpse the start of comprehension.
And then Kirk had been snatched away . . . and then Demora had been taken from him . . . and just like that, the two great constants of his life had evaporated.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
The loss of Kirk, and now Demora, had left a great airless, souless void within him, and he was trying to fill it up again. Fill it with answers . . . with cognizance . . . with something, dammit. Anything.
The footprints stopped.
Sulu brought the shuttlecraft to a slow halt, hovering above the area that now seemed to serve as the origin point of the tracks.
At first glance, there was nothing particularly remarkable about this stretch of land. It was slightly hillier than other places, but the terrain was that same claylike texture. No shrubbery or brush, flora or fauna.
What there was was the beginning of the barefoot tracks . . . and the end of the booted tracks. Apparently Demora had gotten to this geographic point . . . removed her clothes . . . run back in the general direction of the landing party and tried to kill them. Right where they met, the dirt was a bit disturbed, although nothing too disorderly. As if there had been a very brief scuffle there.
There were no other prints around, which seemed to undercut the notion that some animal had bitten her, giving her an unknown and fast acting version of rabies. Still, it could have been airborne. How many diseases had been transmitted by insects, after all?
There was . . .
“Wait a minute,” said Sulu.
Tracks, to and from. No other tracks around. No brush. No place to hide. His view in all directions was unobstructed.
“Where are her clothes?” he asked himself. “Where the hell are her clothes?”
The dirt around where the footprints intersected was in disarray, but it didn’t seem dug up. So apparently she hadn’t buried her clothes. She could have phasered them into nonexistence . . . but then where was the phaser? Could have set the phaser to self-destruct . . . but someone in the landing party would certainly have heard the blast, plus there would be some sort of scorch marks somewhere.
He used shipboard sensors to scan the area where the footprints came together. The atmosphere precluded reliable sensor scans from orbit, but here the readings were a bit clearer. Not much, though.
Sulu chewed on his lower lip for a moment, and then angled the shuttlecraft downward. He landed the Galileo not right on the spot where he was suspicious, but instead fifty meters away.
He sat in the shuttle for a long moment, his mind working, trying to anticipate. Then he leaned forward and began to program a course for the shuttlecraft to follow. He set distance, speed, angle. And then he said, “Computer.”
“Working,” replied the calm female voice.
He gave instructions in quick, clear sentences. The computer acknowledged the instructions in its inflectionless tone. The thing he liked about dealing with a computer was that it didn’t bother to point out to him that the orders he was giving seemed, on the surface, crazy bordering on suicidal. There was no deep philosophical discussion. It was just a matter of, “Do this,” to which the computer would respond, “Okay.”
Sulu was all for spirited arguments, but every so often it was nice to have things go simply.
He ran an atmosphere check as a precaution and found nothing unusual. Nevertheless, just to play it safe, he placed a filtration mask over the lower half of his face. He took a deep breath to make sure that the mask was functioning as it was supposed to. Then he slipped on his field jacket to protect against the chill, opened up the shuttlecraft, and stepped out onto the terrain.
His feet sank a bit into it, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. His phaser was strapped to his belt, and he was holding his tricorder as he studied the readouts.
The filtration mask went a long way toward alleviating the breathing problems that the landing party from the Enterprise had experienced. Nonetheless, the deceptively chilled wind that flittered across the planet’s surface was certainly nasty enough to give him pause, even though he was wearing his field jacket. He stretched to work kinks out of his muscles as he felt his joints freezing up. Getting old, he thought.
Slowly, carefully, he walked over to the area where Demora had undergone her startling transformation. He circled it, frowning. There was something, according to the tricorder . . . something beneath the ground. He couldn’t quite make it out, however. He was still getting interference with the tricorders scanning circuitry. But was it possible that it was still the atmosphere . . .?
No. No, he began to suspect the
exact opposite. He walked the perimeter, clutching the tricorder as if it were a life preserver, or even the Holy Grail. Something was . . . was generating interference. Was mucking with the tricorder’s ability to fully apprise him of the area.
He stepped closer to the footprints and where they intersected, taking care not to tread directly on them. He didn’t want to obliterate them in case he needed to—
And the ground went out from under him.
He’d had no warning at all, except for the slightest grinding of motors from somewhere he couldn’t pinpoint. The ground beneath him opened up quickly and he felt something tugging at his legs. Immediately he realized what it was: a rushing of air like a vacuum, as if he were being sucked down into some great black tube. In the brief time that he had to register an impression, all he could make out was blackness.
All that happened in just under a second and then Sulu disappeared. He cried out as he plummeted into the darkness, but the sounds of his shout were cut off as the ground closed up over him.
Not that there would have been anyone to hear him anyway.
He fell out of control, Alice down the rabbit hole.
Alice . . . the rabbit hole.
The amusement park planet . . .
Even as he fell, even as blackness surrounded him, his mind was racing as he realized . . .
. . . the amusement park planet in the Omicron Delta region . . . where things had come up from underground . . . where beings and objects were instantly manufactured . . . beings like the White Rabbit . . . and Alice . . . and the black knight, and that revolver with a seemingly infinite supply of bullets . . . and the samurai . . . and.
Demora . . .
The name whispered in his mind, and then he slammed to a halt as unconsciousness claimed him.
* * *
It was very still on the bridge of the Excelsior. Anik sat in the command chair, watching the screen steadily. The planet, its secrets still carefully maintained, sat on the screen as the starship orbited it.
The bridge crew went about their duties in a hushed, almost apprehensive manner. There was the usual hum from the instrumentation, the quiet chatter among the crew. But overall there was an air of restraint. Part of their attention was on their work, but most of their minds was on the surface with Captain Sulu.
“Any word yet from the captain?” asked Anik.
“No. But he’s not overdue . . . yet,” said Rand.
There followed another awkward silence. Finding it intolerable, Anik turned to Janice Rand, whose calm demeanor went a long way toward hiding her inner turmoil. “Commander Rand,” she said slowly, “if you don’t mind my asking . . . what was it like?”
Janice looked at her with a polite air of confusion. “It? What it?”
“Serving with Captain Sulu back when he was at helm. What was he like?”
“Oh . . . much like he is now. He had his hobbies. A plant named Beauregard that was his pride and joy. And his fencing. Once he became ill and went nuts, chasing people all over the place with a sword. It was . . . odd.”
“And Captain Kirk? You were his yeoman. What was it like serving with him . . . with all of them.”
Rand sat back slightly, and she smiled. “It was . . . a remarkable time. It was . . .” She blushed. “This will sound awful.”
“Go on, Commander,” Docksey prompted from helm. The crew was sharp and alert, but on the other hand there was nothing like calm chatter to keep everyone on even keel.
“We were . . . we were the best ship in the fleet. And the best crew. And we knew it somehow. Starfleet knew it, too, probably because we were able to prove ourselves time and time again.” She smiled, remembering what it was like. Remembering the joy and excitement of exploration.
She rose from her station and went to Anik, crouching down with one arm resting on the command chair while adopting a masculine swagger. Anik grinned as Janice dropped her voice a couple of octaves and intoned in mock-serious fashion, sounding vaguely like a Starfleet admiral, “There’s a problem that needs solving? A major threat to security? Only one man for the job, ladies and gentlemen: James Kirk. Only one ship to handle the situation: the Enterprise. Who do you want to have standing between you and a planet killer? It’s the Enterprise. What, the Klingons are stirring up trouble and we need a starship to go in and show them what’s what? It’s the Enterprise. What’s that you say? A giant amoeba is heading your way and a starship is needed to face insurmountable odds? It’s the Enterprise.”
And suddenly from the science station, Lieutenant Tom Chafin—a muscular, handsome Terran with thick brown hair—reported, “Commander Anik, a ship appears to be dropping out of warp. . . .”
“Confirmed,” Lojur now put in. “Vessel bearing two-five-three mark four. It appears to be . . .”
Space warped ahead of them and a massive vessel slid into normal space ten thousand kilometers to starboard.
“One of ours. Federation starship, Excelsior class,” continued Lojur.
“Which one?” said Anik.
And Janice Rand, back at her station, looked up from her communications board as an incoming hail identified them.
“It’s the Enterprise,” she said tonelessly.
Chapter Twenty-seven
THE WORLD WAS BLACKNESS, and then a low mocking voice said, “So . . . it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it, L.C.?”
Sulu reached out, feeling the cool smoothness of the floor beneath him. Slowly he opened his eyes, then squinted against the intensity of the light. Around him he could hear a soft humming and burbling, as if he were surrounded by large vats of liquid.
He lifted his head up and looked around. He was surrounded by large vats of liquid.
Every so often, things were what they seemed. The vats lined the room, and there seemed to be hundreds of them. In either direction, they seemed to stretch unto infinity, like a tunnel. Sulu had no clue as to how large the place might be. At the far end he thought he spied some additional machinery, like a massive engine or power source of some kind, but he was too far away to make it out clearly.
The room itself had silver walls that curved upward into a cathedral ceiling, which seemed almost a mile high at its peak. In a way, the room had a feeling of a holy place, which struck Sulu as being slightly ironic.
Then he saw a pair of boots standing a few feet away. He craned his head and followed the track of the legs, up to the face. He knew, however, what he would see.
“Taine,” he said.
His hair was longer, and he had a thick mustache tinged with gray. He’d gotten slightly jowly, but he still looked hard and lean, and the years had not diminished the cold fury in his eyes when he stared at Sulu. He was dressed in green, his pants flared at the cuffs, his shirt hanging loosely.
“You remember my name. I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. I once had Vegan maringitis for a week and had to be hospitalized. I remember that name, too.” He paused. “Are your flunkies still with you?”
“My associates, you mean? Rogers and Thor, yes. Ours has been a fruitful, if occasionally bumpy, partnership.”
“And I was one of the bumps.”
“Ohhh,” said Taine softly, “you were a very large bump, yes, L.C. Oh, but it’s not Lieutenant Commander anymore, is it. It’s Captain, isn’t it. Captain Sulu. Very, very impressive.”
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “And why did you do it?”
“Do what?” asked Taine, all innocence.
And Sulu felt his control slipping away. “Demora,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Why did you . . . did you destroy her? What kind of creature are you that you would do that to . . . to . . .”
His hands convulsed in fury, and then he could hold himself back no longer. He lunged at Taine, hands outstretched.
He didn’t get far. To be precise, he got all of a foot before a heavy hand clamped on the back of his jacket and lifted him clear of the floor. He had just enough time to think Thor before he was hurled across the roo
m, crashing into one of the vats.
“Are you all right, Captain?” Taine asked with mock concern.
Rocky, Sulu tried to pull himself to his feet. He felt blood trickling down the side of his face, but he didn’t wipe it away. He didn’t want to acknowledge the dull ache he felt. “What are you doing here . . . and why did you kill her?”
Taine, leaning against one of the vats, laughed coarsely. “Her? Oh! You mean Demora! We didn’t kill her, Captain.”
“I know, Harriman did. But you changed her. You made her over into some . . . some beast. You were responsible!”
Thor, his massive arms hanging at his sides, stepped next to Taine. Taine was shaking his head. “You’re not listening to me, Captain. No, not listening at all.” He inclined his head slightly to Thor. Thor, apparently understanding Taine’s desire, reached an arm into the vat that Taine was leaning against. He seemed to be fishing around for something, and then found it. He pulled it up and out. . . .
Her eyes were closed, her face almost unrecognizable since it was covered with the thick liquid that coagulated in the vat. Her hair, which Thor was gripping in his meaty hands, was thick with it as well.
She wasn’t breathing.
Then, all of a sudden her lungs seemed to contract and she vomited up thick white liquid. It splashed out onto the floor, some of it getting on Taine’s boots. He stepped back distastefully.
“Could this be who you’re looking for?” asked Taine, chucking a thumb at her.