The Final Nexus Read online

  "Done, sir."

  "Mr. Sulu, continue the approach."

  "Aye-aye, sir."

  "Mr. Chekov, be ready to put up the deflectors on my order. Or at the first sign of any hostile action."

  "Hostile action, sir?" Chekov turned to look at Kirk over his shoulder. "From the Cochise? But they are a Federation ship, Keptin—and ve are within Federation territory."

  "A Federation ship that is acting very strangely, Mr. Chekov. And a Federation ship that is in close proximity to a gate that could lead literally anywhere in the universe. Just be ready."

  Chekov's eyes widened as he turned back to face the controls. "You believe that something has come through, sir?"

  "Anything's possible, Mr. Chekov."

  "Aye, sir, I understand."

  "How close, Mr. Sulu?"

  "Four AU, Captain."

  "Mr. Spock, I assume their sensors can detect us at this range."

  "Undoubtedly, Captain. Whether they have received your subspace message or not, they know we are here."

  "Any speculations on a reason for their silence, Mr. Spock?"

  "None at this time, Captain, but—"

  Without warning, a harsh voice burst from Uhura's receiver.

  "Identify yourself!"

  Frowning, Kirk complied. "As we have been broadcasting since shortly after our emergence from warp drive, I am Captain James T. Kirk, commanding the U.S.S. Enterprise. We are responding to—"

  "I know who you say you are," the voice interrupted. "Show me!"

  "As you wish. Lieutenant Uhura, open a visual channel."

  "Done, sir."

  The forward viewscreen flickered, but nothing appeared. "They're receiving our transmission, sir," Uhura said, "but they're sending nothing visual in return."

  "Captain Chandler," Kirk said. "A visual channel is open. Is something wrong with your transmission gear?"

  "We have been having some problems." Chandler's voice came back abruptly.

  "What kind of problems? Would you like to lower your deflectors so one of our technicians could beam over and—"

  "No!" The word exploded from the speakers.

  "Is there some trouble, Captain Chandler?" Kirk asked, purposely keeping his tone even and, he hoped, reassuring. It was obvious not only from Chandler's words and actions but from the brittle tension in his voice that something was very wrong. "Is there anything we can do to help?"

  For a moment there was only silence, punctuated by the sound of Chandler's breathing and an almost inaudible murmuring in the background.

  "You can maintain your present distance!" Chandler said.

  "You heard the captain, Mr. Sulu," Kirk said smoothly.

  "Aye-aye, sir. Three point four AU and holding."

  "Now then, Captain Chandler, can you tell me what's going on? Less than two days ago, you told Starfleet you suspected you had discovered a gate similar to the one the Enterprise was recently involved with. What has happened since your message to Starfleet?"

  "Nothing!" Chandler said sharply. "Nothing has happened!"

  "Then why are your deflectors up? Has something come through the gate?"

  "How would I know? According to Starfleet, the Enterprise has the only sensors in the Federation capable of even detecting one of these gates, let alone anything that might come through!"

  "We've surveyed the area, Captain Chandler," Kirk said. "You were quite right; a gate does exist. It is approximately forty million kilometers directly in front of the Cochise. However, our sensors indicate nothing else within range."

  "So you say." Instead of sounding reassured, Chandler sounded, if anything, even more tense, more suspicious.

  Kirk was silent, trying to think what approach to take, trying to imagine what could have happened to Chandler and his ship. Had something come through the gate? Something undetectable even to the Enterprise's modified sensors? Something that had taken over the Cochise? Was Chandler simply trying to warn them off? And if he was …

  "Very well, Captain Chandler," Kirk said abruptly. "As long as you're experiencing no problems, we can place a space buoy to mark the location of the gate, and we can all be on our way back to Starbase. Mr. Sulu, prepare to launch—"

  Suddenly, the sound of a struggle crackled across subspace from the bridge of the Cochise. A half-dozen voices—some shouting, some grunting, some gasping—could be heard. Something heavy, probably a body, thudded to the deck, followed by something metallic.

  "Ortiz! The phaser controls!" A deep female voice punched through the chaos. "Keep him away from the phaser controls!"

  Chekov's hands moved reflexively on the weapons console. Kirk motioned him to remain calm.

  Then Chandler's voice, high-pitched and angry, drowned out everything else.

  "Commander Ansfield! I demand you release me and obey my orders!" he almost screamed, and in the silence that followed, his breathing was harsh and ragged.

  "I'm sorry, Captain," the woman's voice said. "But I—"

  "The rest of you, help me! This is mutiny! Ortiz! Kronin! Nkrumah! I order you to help me!"

  "We reached our decision together, Captain," the woman's voice said, softly this time, even sadly. "You gave us no choice. In accordance with Starfleet regulations, with the full concurrence of Chief Medical Officer Nkrumah, I am herewith officially relieving you of command of the Cochise on the grounds of temporary emotional instability. I'm sorry."

  "You don't know what you're doing!" Chandler screamed. "That's not the Enterprise out there! And even if it is, that creature that says he's Kirk is under the control of—"

  "Dr. Nkrumah," the woman said, and a moment later there was the distinctive hiss of a spray hypo, and Chandler abruptly fell silent.

  "I'm sorry, Micah," the woman said softly. "I'm sorry."

  For a moment, there was total silence on both ships.

  Then the main viewscreen on the Enterprise sprang suddenly to life.

  "Full visual communication commencing, sir," Uhura said, and even as she spoke, the bridge of the Cochise rippled into sharp focus on the screen.

  The captain—presumably Chandler—lay on the deck between the command chair and the helmsman's station. A commander in science blue kneeled next to him with a medical tricorder, beads of perspiration glistening on his ebony forehead.

  "He'll be all right, Essie," the man said, and the small graying woman just behind him, also in science blue, let out her breath in an obvious sigh of relief and then, straightening, turned to face the viewscreen.

  "Captain Kirk," she said, only a trace of a tremor in her deep voice. "I'm Commander Esther Ansfield, chief science officer of the Cochise. I think we'd better have a talk. I'll drain the moat if you and your colleagues want to beam over."

  "Moat?" Kirk frowned, but before he could say more, Spock announced that the Cochise's deflectors had been lowered.

  Chapter Three

  COMMANDER ANSFIELD WAS waiting in the Cochise transporter room as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a security detail of three, led by the imposing figure of Lieutenant Ingrit Tomson, materialized.

  "Very pleased to meet you, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy," Ansfield said, offering a firm handshake to each as they stepped down from the platform, "although I can't say I'm overjoyed at the circumstances."

  "I understand, Commander," Kirk said. "What you had to do couldn't have been easy."

  "You have a gift for understatement, Kirk. No, it wouldn't have been easy under any circumstances, but I've known Micah—Captain Chandler—since he was a boy. But I had no choice." She paused, shaking her head. "I'm a science officer, not a starship captain, and I don't want to be one a minute longer than necessary."

  "Understood, Commander," Kirk said, "although you appear to have things well in hand."

  "I didn't say I couldn't be one, just that I don't want to be. Now, the quicker we can get things wrapped up here, the quicker we can be on our way to Starbase 1. For a start, I assume you and your medical officer would like to have a look at
the captain. And his log."

  "Those would be good places to start," Kirk said as the group made its way into the corridor toward the turbolift. "On our way to sickbay, you can fill in a few details. Just what has been happening since Chandler's message to Starfleet?"

  "I wish I knew. You saw—or heard, at least—what Captain Chandler was like. To some extent, he's been that way since we stumbled across this gate or whatever it is. I've never seen him in such a state. He's absolutely convinced that either the gate itself is ready to gobble us up or something that came through the gate is dead set on wiping us out."

  "Was there any evidence to support him?"

  She shook her head as they entered the turbolift. "Not a shred. Our sensors show nothing."

  "And you? And the rest of the crew?"

  "Did we go paranoid too, you mean? No, although we've all been on edge since this started. But that's probably largely because of the captain's behavior. Because we didn't see things his way, he's been acting as if he were afraid of us, too, not just that gate. He seemed to trust me a little more than the others—as I said, I've known him since he was a boy—so I was able, just barely, to talk him out of having most of the officers put in the brig or executed, particularly Commander Ortiz, who was in charge on low watch when the gate was found. You heard what he said about you, Captain. He was convinced you and your whole ship had been taken over by—by whatever you ran into when you went through that gate yourself a couple of months ago." She paused, her dark eyebrows arching inquisitively. "You weren't, were you?"

  "Not that I know of," Kirk said with a faint smile. Then he added, "At least not by anything that two days of painfully thorough testing at Starfleet Headquarters could find."

  The turbolift door opened, and they emerged into the corridor next to sickbay. "Right this way, gentlemen," Ansfield said, stepping out briskly.

  Seconds later, they approached the bed on which Captain Chandler was restrained. On the diagnostic screen above the bed, his respiration and heart rate, already high, spurted even higher as his darting eyes fell on Kirk and the others from the Enterprise. A nurse stood next to the bed, and Dr. Nkrumah hurried from the nearby lab to meet them.

  "Any progress, Doctor?" Ansfield asked.

  "The paralytic agent has worn off, as you can see. All tests—"

  "Paralytic agent?" McCoy asked, frowning.

  Nkrumah nodded. "Commander Ansfield and I agreed. We knew the captain would realize what was happening the instant I used the hypo spray. We therefore wanted him to be immobilized as quickly as possible, before he had time to harm himself or us in a last-minute struggle. In his state of mind, even a few seconds of mobility could have been dangerous. Short of a phaser or a physical blow to the head, this was the quickest, most efficient method. This particular agent also has the advantage of wearing off more quickly than any sedative."

  "And it leaves the victim conscious," McCoy said, still frowning. "Conscious but totally helpless."

  "We felt that that, too, was an advantage, Doctor," Ansfield said. "That way, he could see what we were doing at all times. As paranoid as he was, if we'd knocked him out, who knows what he would've thought we did to him while he was unconscious?"

  Grudgingly, McCoy had to admit that Ansfield was right. "And the tests you've run on him?" he asked.

  "All results so far are perfectly normal," Nkrumah said. "Normal, that is, for someone in a constant state of uncontrollable fear. The brain activity, the blood pressure, brain and blood chemistry, hormonal levels, cellular activity, everything is consistent with a normal, healthy male human who just happens to be terrified."

  "No foreign substance of any kind, Doctor?" McCoy asked, remembering uneasily the time he had accidentally been injected with an overdose of cordrazine. The state he had been in then—filled with terror, convinced with paranoid certainty that everyone around him, even his lifelong friend Jim Kirk, was his deadly enemy—was not unlike the state that Captain Chandler appeared to be in now. "No accidentally administered medication that could account for his agitation?"

  Nkrumah shook his head, obviously taking no offense at the question. "The computer found nothing but small amounts of the mild tranquilizer I have been prescribing for him for the past eight months. And the remnants of the paralytic agent, of course. Nothing else."

  "You wouldn't mind if I looked him over myself?" McCoy asked. He knew Nkrumah only by reputation, a good doctor but one who perhaps put too much trust in the infallibility of machines.

  "Of course not, Doctor," Nkrumah said quickly. "I would be glad for any assistance you can render. I have to admit I'm totally stymied at this point."

  McCoy stepped forward and looked down at Chandler. "Captain Chandler, I'm Dr. Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer of the Enterprise." As he spoke, his southern drawl was a little more pronounced than usual, his crooked Georgia smile a little wider, a little friendlier. "Hope you don't mind a little more poking and prodding."

  Chandler said nothing as McCoy took the scanner from his tricorder and brought it toward Chandler's body. Chandler twitched momentarily, then lay still, but his eyes, unnaturally wide, darted toward Kirk and then, even more rapidly, toward the others from the Enterprise.

  Still holding the scanner a few inches from Chandler, McCoy turned to the others. "No offense, Jim, but you're frightening the patient. Why don't you and the rest of this mob go tend to other business? Dr. Nkrumah and I will tend to Captain Chandler."

  Nkrumah looked momentarily discomfited by McCoy's directness, but Kirk nodded, smiling faintly.

  "Good idea, Bones. See what your bedside manner can do." He turned to Commander Ansfield. "Why don't we adjourn to the bridge? I'm sure Mr. Spock would like to study the readings associated with the appearance of the gate. Wouldn't you, Mr. Spock?"

  "Of course, Captain." The briefest of sideward glances indicated, though only to Kirk, that Spock regarded the question, and accompanying answer, as one of those totally unnecessary exchanges that humans so often indulged in.

  "And take your giant storm trooper with you," McCoy added, scowling as Lieutenant Tomson looked as if she were going to stay behind.

  Outside in the corridor, Kirk nodded toward the door to sickbay. "Lieutenant," he said quietly. "I don't expect any trouble, but stick around, just in case. Stay out of Chandler's line of sight, but keep your eyes and ears open, and be ready for anything."

  Tomson nodded her understanding and took up her post next to the door.

  A minute later, the remainder of the group emerged onto the bridge. Spock went immediately to the science station and its links with the library computer. The computer's capacity was not quite as great as that of the Enterprise computer, but it would do.

  The viewscreen, linked now to the bridge of the Enterprise, showed Engineering Officer Montgomery Scott seated uneasily in the command chair, watching the Enterprise viewscreen. When he saw Kirk and the others come onto the Cochise bridge, he breathed a sigh of relief.

  "Ye made it, Captain. No problems?"

  "None so far, Mr. Scott. Dr. McCoy stayed in sickbay to give Dr. Nkrumah a hand with Chandler. Spock is going to check through the Cochise's records of the gravitational disturbances that led Chandler to suspect the presence of a gate. Are things still quiet at your end? No activity at the gate?"

  "No' so much as a twitch, Captain."

  "Good, Scotty. Carry on."

  Turning from the screen, Kirk found himself the object of Commander Ansfield's pensive gaze.

  "This 'gate' we seem to have stumbled across," she said. "Starfleet's communiqués weren't exactly brimming over with information."

  "There isn't much information—reliable information, anyway—to be had."

  "Possibly not, Kirk, but I'm not fussy. I'll settle for whatever unreliable guesswork you can give me. You've been through one of them, and, unless I miss my guess, you didn't come back either empty-handed or empty-headed."

  Kirk couldn't resist a quick smile. "Not empty-handed by any mea
ns. Empty-headed is another matter. We brought back almost a thousand people, humanoids calling themselves the Aragos. They were originally from a planet a few parsecs from the gate in the Sagittarius arm. They'd gone through about fifteen thousand years ago and were—"

  "Their ancestors, you mean."

  Kirk shook his head. "No, not their ancestors. To make a long story short, when they went through the gate, they emerged into the middle of an interstellar war, and both sets of the combatants mistook them for the enemy. Luckily, they found a place to hide, a place already equipped with a hibernation system big enough for the lot of them. They were still there when we came through the gate. And the war was still going on."

  "A fifteen-thousand-year war?" Ansfield shook her head disbelievingly. "Even the Klingons—"

  "Strictly speaking, it wasn't the same war," Kirk went on. "The whole affair was a chain reaction. World B destroys World A. Years later, World C comes out into space and is attacked by World B, who thinks they're only wiping out a group of survivors from World A. C fights back and destroys B, and pretty soon D comes along and is attacked by C, and so on. I know it may be hard to believe, but it had been going on for at least forty thousand years. We saw the results, hundreds of worlds, possibly thousands, melted down to radioactive bedrock, some a few thousand years ago, some tens of thousands."

  Kirk paused, shaking his own head, as if to try to drive the images away. "It was that way for dozens of parsecs in all directions from the gate. We were lucky enough to get the current pair of combatants to start talking to each other, so maybe the chain has been broken. I sincerely hope so, at any rate."

  Some of the color had drained from Ansfield's face. "But how in God's name did it get started?"

  Kirk shrugged. "Maybe one truly insane, sadistic race, a race bent on wiping out everyone but themselves. Nobody knows, and at this late date I doubt that anyone ever will." He paused, glancing toward Spock, who was still absorbed in the records of the Cochise's discovery of the new gate. "However, the ones who built the hibernation facilities left records indicating that they suspected that whoever or whatever had started the chain was somehow associated with the gate."