Triangle Read online

  Kirk wrenched himself back then and fought fiercely to recapture his own single consciousness, fought his way up through levels and layers, and finally opened his own eyes.

  It was Gailbraith who knelt over him.

  The Ambassador had, clearly, refused to stay behind locked doors. And he had thrown off his white robe and Ambassadorial dignity to save his adversary's life.

  The gray eyes looked down at Kirk with absorbed interest, as if studying the lines of his face. The hands continued to massage the muscles of his arms, sending the flow of warmth through them.

  From somewhere, as though it were a carrier-wave, Kirk could sense the flow of a vast pool of life-energy which the tall man could tap at will.

  "Thank you," Kirk said when he could speak. "That will be enough."

  One hand moved deftly to release a knot in his neck, then stopped. "You are welcome," Gailbraith said.

  "A little too welcome, possibly." He understood only too well that if the man wanted to claim his reward now and press his advantage, there was probably no strength by which Kirk could resist. And there was some enemy within which possibly even wanted it. Was this the way in which he was going to be initiated into Oneness?

  "Ambassador," Kirk said quietly, "I thank you for my life. I am inclined to pay my debts. But the payment which I assume you want—is not mine to give."

  "Whose is it?"

  Kirk merely shook his head. "Call it—a prior obigation—to my ship, my crew, my friends."

  "Your Vulcan friend?"

  "I owe him, alone, my life, dozens of times over. If there were nothing else, I could not do it for that."

  Gailbraith nodded fractionally. "And yet you must always be locked in separate cages. Or so you believe. Except in those moments when the call of duty has required you to share minds. Captain, you regard my Oneness with distrust, distaste. Did you find those moments of Oneness—distasteful?"

  "No."

  "Or the moment you just shared?"

  For a moment Kirk was silent. "No," he said. "But I did not choose it, and I do not choose it."

  "You will."

  "Ambassador, I do not take easily to being taken over or forced. Conceivably you could take me into your Oneness without my consent, if I were weakened enough. I do not advise it. I would destroy you."

  Gailbraith smiled. "The thought has occurred."

  "I sensed—a plan. A galaxy-spanning plan. Yours?"

  "Captain," Gailbraith said, "this is the age of the mutation of Oneness. I-the-Many am not the only One. I have my plan. I know of at least one other Oneness, which plans, ultimately, on a galactic scale."

  "Who?" Kirk asked. "Or—what?"

  "Did you suppose that the Human conquerors of Zaran brought with them only the physical technology of the old totalitarian empires of Earth? No. They brought also the psychic technology which was researched first there. And with both they conquered an ancient species of great power which had never been defeated. The native Zarans had a power of Oneness, rare but very strong. Now it is being used by the ruthless. The time may come, Captain Kirk—and before long—when you will have to choose my Oneness, or theirs."

  Kirk struggled to sit up, and Gailbraith lifted him with one steely hand. "Ambassador," Kirk said, "I have found that when I am offered a choice of the lesser evil, it is still evil."

  He made it to his feet on his own and stood there swaying. "My life is here."

  Gailbraith smiled. "I have made something of a study of what you require for your life, Captain. Rather more than you have made yourself. It is quite possible that you will find what you have not known you needed on this trip—perhaps even on the planet below, where you hope that I do not know whom you will meet. I know. And I know what that one needs, also. For that reason you will play out the script I have written for you. There is no escape. But I shall enjoy the process of seeing you try."

  "Why me?" Kirk said.

  The gray eyes seemed to inspect them to his soul. "There are many obvious reasons, Captain. You are the epitome of your kind, the best of your breed, the hope of singletons everywhere. You are the prime target of the other side." He smiled rather oddly. "None of that is my primary reason."

  "What is?"

  The gray eyes looked through him. "Perhaps you remind me of someone. Did you suppose that I became a Oneness without fighting it virtually to the death?"

  Kirk looked at him intently. "I hadn't considered it. You still don't say that that is your reason."

  "You notice that?"

  "Ambassador, you will excuse me. I am expected."

  "Yes," Gailbraith said, and for the first time the gray eyes seemed to laugh. "You are."

  Kirk turned away, but his legs failed him. He found Gailbraith supporting him by a hand. Then the man's other hand touched his temple.

  Presently he felt much better. He walked away, not looking back, stopped at the sonic shower to program clothes, and went to keep his appointment with Spock. It seemed to him that there was something important which he should remember. He could not, at the moment, think what …

  Chapter 5

  McCoy saw Spock give up a fruitless search for Kirk. Abruptly he became aware that he had never—well, not for years—seen Spock search fruitlessly for Kirk. Unless some alien interference had cut off the "carrier wave" of some kind of empathy which they seemed to have between them. . . .

  Abruptly he became aware that he was missing something from Spock himself. McCoy had always contended that he had about as much psionic sensitivity as a potato. That was a pretty good cover. And it might even be true, given that plants shriveled when you directed hostile thoughts at them, and vice versa. But he had been aware for years that he tended to bask in the Vulcan's presence. Whereupon, of course, he made it a point to bristle. Now whatever it was that he basked in was shut down.

  "Spock," he said, "you're not there. And you can't find him. Have you—closed up shop—to keep him from feeling something?"

  Spock turned to him and his look was suddenly savage. "You will cease to pry into my personal affairs, Doctor!"

  He turned and strode toward the Transporter Room, leaving McCoy to follow in his wake with alarm bells going off.

  They met Kirk at the door and went through it without even comment, although McCoy saw Kirk flash Spock a "later for you" look for bringing McCoy. The Vulcan seemed oblivious. But he inspected Kirk closely, and evidently did not like what he saw. Personally McCoy thought Kirk looked better than they had any right to expect. He must have gone through some mental discipline of his own and banished most of the weakness and fatigue. You didn't survive as a Starship Captain without having a pretty fair selection of mind-body techniques and Alpha-hypno routines. But McCoy knew this man's mind and body better than he knew his own—and paid far more attention to them. He saw the underlying stress, perhaps worse than he had ever seen it.

  And there was some new abstracted look which he didn't like at all.

  He pulled out his spray hypo.

  "Not now, Bones." Kirk waved him off.

  "Who's the doctor around here?" McCoy grumbled and continued to set the hypo.

  "Who's the Captain?" Kirk shot back. "Mr. Spock, is it possible you are bucking for both jobs?"

  "Neither," Spock said stiffly. Then he seemed to make a massive effort to rise to the occasion. "However, I believe Doctor McCoy has complimented me on my bedside manner."

  "Doubtless," Kirk said. "The two of you make a pair."

  McCoy attached himself to an arm and shot the spray hypo home. Mega-vitamins and mild stimulants, and mild neurotransmitter normalizers. He didn't dare try more. If Spock was right, more stress could just push Kirk over the edge. And he wished he had a normalizer for Spock. He saw Kirk look at the Vulcan and not much like how he looked. But he was still irritated that Spock had dragged McCoy into it.

  "I don't recall inviting you, Bones," Kirk complained.

  "Scuttlebutt," McCoy said, "has it that you're going down there after a Free Agent.
I've never met one. Mind if I tag along?"

  Kirk sighed with his look of missing nothing. "Maybe I need a nursemaid." He gestured McCoy toward the transporter.

  But the outer doors opened and a Communications Yeoman came in. "An 'eyes only' command-code transmission, Captain."

  "Thank you, Yeoman. Dismissed." The Yeoman turned on his heel and left. Kirk snapped the seal, read the brief message. McCoy saw surprise register in his face, then a kind of shock.

  He looked up at Spock and McCoy. "You might as well hear this. 'Effective immediately Enterprise is placed at disposal of Free Agent 7-10.' It's signed by the Chief of Staff."

  "But that would be giving the Free Agent the ultimate authority over the ship," McCoy said.

  Kirk's jaw was set. "Exactly, Bones."

  "Must be hell's own crisis," McCoy said. "Or the Old Man wouldn't put you in that position."

  "We've had some tough ones lately. What if somebody is beginning to figure I've had it?"

  "Nuts, Jim. They know you."

  "Spock knows me—and he headed straight off to bring the doctor along."

  "Captain—" Spock began.

  "Never mind, Mr. Spock. You've made your point. Probably correctly. For your information, gentlemen, I have had waking nightmares lately in which I—or someone who might have been me—was drawn to Oneness. Let's go."

  A security man entered with equipment Kirk must have ordered earlier. Bio-belts with heavy hand phasers. And McCoy noted that there were already three of them. Maybe he had been invited, after all. Kirk knew damn well he needed McCoy now if that was happening to him—and not only as doctor.

  Kirk flashed him an expression which had a trace of the old mischief in it, and McCoy felt unaccountably better. Whatever the stresses and strains, this still wasn't a man who came apart.

  "Set phasers on heaviest stun and bio-belts on three," Kirk said.

  McCoy raised an eyebrow. "That would ignore everything but some pretty large animals, wouldn't it? What is down there?"

  "We're about to find out. Energize."

  Chapter 6

  The bio-belts were supposed to give you eyes in the back of your head—also neck and other anatomy. Directional sensors projected their biological readings directly on the nerves of the skin.

  The party beamed down into a jungle clearing where biological warning systems were obviously the first need of survival. But the bio-belts immediately set up such a clamor that they had eyes in every inch of skin. The neuro-dermal circuits which made the skin crawl in the direction of an approaching animal went crazy.

  The planet's surface was a biological soup—thick with life, boiling with activity, and smelling of danger.

  McCoy saw an animal scurry through the tall grass with the tiny timorousness of a mouse. It sat up and twitched its nose at him. It was the size of a medium dog.

  "If those are the mice—we won't have to worry about the tigers and the snarths," McCoy groused. "The pussycats can carry us off."

  As if in answer, there was a low roar which sounded like a saber-toothed tiger made out in triplicate.

  "In this form of gigantism," Spock said dispassionately, "the predators may not be quite as oversized as the planteaters."

  "Well, that's a comfort," McCoy grumbled.

  Enormous shadows and mysterious rumblings moved just outside the dense edge of the clearing. McCoy caught a flash of green-yellow horizontal cat-eyes. Very large. Some of the trees appeared to be interconnected, with multiple trunks and interlaced branches.

  "Reduce bio-belt setting to six," Kirk ordered.

  They turned to inspect the battered interstellar scoutship which had come down in the clearing. It had seen better days, and somebody had recently shot it up. But what looked like repairs jury-rigged in space had held it together.

  Spock scanned it with his tricorder. "No one aboard, Captain. The damage control measures are ingenious and effectual."

  "So where is this alleged Free Agent?" McCoy asked. "Assuming the local fauna haven't invited him to dinner, as the main course."

  He found himself getting worried. Hell of a place to lose a Free Agent of the Federation.

  "Setting up a warning perimeter, possibly," Kirk speculated.

  "No," said a voice from above and behind them, and McCoy felt the back of his neck tingle suddenly—from the bio-belt, or maybe only from the short hairs rising.

  They whirled in one motion, eyes reaching to confirm the astonishment of the voice.

  The woman uncoiled from the wide branch of one of the unit-trees which stretched out almost above their heads. She stood up and moved out on a narrower branch without effort or thought, and she was holding some sort of weapon on them. It looked like a coil of light which played through her hand—as if it could be rope, sword, spear. And deadly in her hands.

  Apart from that, McCoy thought, she was possibly a gorgeous female. He was not certain of what species.

  She was humanoid, certainly. She even looked, for all practical purposes, Human. But there was a hint of something almost feral about the tawny eyes. The matching tawny mane seemed to grow to some natural length and shape which she merely shook back. She moved on the branch with a curious certainty, as if she were of some hunting species as at home there as McCoy was on solid ground.

  But there was also some shocking contrast of utter civility and star-spanning culture. She wore soft boots and a coppery bodysuit which looked as it if were poured out of the living metal, cut in lines of elegant simplicity which suggested that she was indifferent to fashion, but not to design. But more than that, there was some aura about her which struck McCoy as being like no woman he had ever seen, of any species. Possibly some part of it was merely the knowledge that she was a Free Agent of the Federation, and of what that had to cost and imply. But also there was a power of certainty about her which he had seen in few men, few beings of any sex or species—something like the bedrock certainty of a Spock, but with a glint of humor in the tawny eyes which was rather more like the sunlit ease of a Kirk. She looked at the three of them as if seeing were an enjoyment, as if she saw them fully and fearlessly, not merely how they looked, but what they were.

  And the net result of her estimate of them was a pleasure which lit the clearing like morning.

  McCoy supposed that she was beautiful. He was too busy looking at her to see. It didn't seem to be the important question.

  He tried, with indifferent success, not to be surprised merely on the level that a Free Agent was a woman.

  But there still was that surprise. This woman would be doing the toughest job in the known galaxy—going alone among enemies, putting herself into physical danger, and worse, into the moral danger of the kinds of decisions a Free Agent would make over the fate of worlds.

  On the whole, McCoy might have picked a woman, if he had to pick anyone, for that job—but he would still have wanted to slay a few dragons for her. He saw a look on Kirk's face which suggested that McCoy would have company.

  But this Free Agent looked quite prepared to do it herself, with or without the energy coil which played through her hand like a live thing, from a wrist projector.

  Her eyes were without fear, but beyond the personal enjoyment which had brightened her face for a moment—something professional weighed the three men as if some decision were required. McCoy suddenly smelled trouble.

  "We came to offer assistance," Kirk said. "I am Captain—"

  "I know who you are, Captain Kirk," she said. "Or at least who you were."

  "Were?" Kirk asked, puzzled. "Forgive me, perhaps you have been out of touch. Permit me to present my First Officer—"

  "I know Mr. Spock, too. Assuming that he still is Spock. And I know Doctor McCoy, by reputation."

  McCoy bowed fractionally. He had seldom known a touch of Southern chivalry to do any harm. "I'm afraid you have the advantage of me, ma'am."

  "Yes, I have." She did not smile.

  "You have the advantage of all of us," Kirk said, "if you kn
ow of some reason why we might not be ourselves."

  She nodded soberly. "Yes. I have that advantage, too. . . . Captain, in this sector forty-three known ships of many species, including Federation Starfleet crews, have abandoned the pattern and purpose of a lifetime. I am not fully certain why, nor of what they became. But I know that they became someone else. Or—something else."

  "Then you know the fate of the missing ships?" Kirk asked.

  "Partly." She cut off his unasked questions. "Not here. If you know because it has happened to you, there is no point. If not, there is no time."

  She swung down from the tree, dropped lightly from half-again their height and landed without effort.

  Kirk looked at her now on the level and found that she had to look up at him. Suddenly she looked to McCoy rather small and far too vulnerable to carry the job she had to carry. "How will you decide?" Kirk asked. "And by the same token, how will we? If something could change a starship crew and Captain, it could change anyone. What proof can we have that you are who, or what, we think?"

  She shook her head. "None, Captain, on either side. I might point out that you have only me to thank for knowledge that the problem exists. But you already know that there is a mystery in the sector. I might have told you to disarm you."

  Kirk nodded. "Well, we have dealt with identity and authenticity problems before. There is always the Vulcan mind-meld."

  The tawny eyes approved the thought, but rejected it. "As what you believe I am, I could not consent to a mind-meld, even if I wanted to. As what I am, I would not."

  "And what are you?" Kirk asked.

  "I would prefer to tell you my name. I am—"

  For the first time the Vulcan spoke—as if the words were wrenched out of him. "Sola Thane."

  Kirk turned to look at the Vulcan.

  "Sola Thane," Kirk said, "disappeared years ago."

  Spock nodded. "Precisely."

  Chapter 7

  Kirk turned back to the woman, and now McCoy saw something new in the way he looked at her—as if all the fatigue had dropped away and something had clicked into place in the universe.