The Price of the Phoenix sttos(n-4 Read online

  And in fact he even let her Romulan muscles take the greater share of the strain of braking against gravity in the long slide—a slide designed for Romulan muscles and not for his, though he might have managed it on a normal day. At need, he would have managed it today, if it killed him. But it might have.

  She counted the levels mostly by feel and caught the stop-stirrup with her foot, wondering whether it would have broken his ankle. Possibly. The heavier gravity here was more like Romulan or Vulcan, too, not meant for his fragile strength.

  But he was quick and active in swinging off onto the level and he caught her hand and pulled her up and after him.

  She let him set the direction. It was as good as any other. The tour had showed her that the doors appeared to be numbered normally, but in fact were numbered by no system known to man—or mathematics. Forty-seven unblushingly followed eighty-three and led to 16-C. As far as she could tell, only the level numbers counted and made sense.

  It was an astute security system, really. A man who had business there would memorize the relevant parts of the maze. The rooms could be referred to by number for the turbo-lift, and the computer would select the nearest stop. But with the lifts off, a stranger could spend hours checking every door, even to find a known number.

  Hardly a road map.

  She had not thought it wise to say so.

  That was doubtless one of Omne’s little laughs. He could have removed the number from Kirk’s door if he had not wanted to create, at some point, precisely that hope.

  She wondered if Spock had noticed the numbering on his way to the candled room—under that stress. But, yes, almost certainly, with that Vulcan mind. Now the Human must have told Spock the number. Some link—although how they were managing that at a distance she could not fathom. But the Vulcan would have known that the hope was false. Where was Spock now, knowing it?

  The Human was just finding it out, turning to her with another look she hoped not to see again.

  She nodded with effort and freed her left hand from his to take his arm. Nothing to do but look. He staggered from some blow and she steadied him.

  A dark figure rounded a corner in front of them, and her eyes determined that it was not Spock while her gun hand flashed to the sidearm. The guard dropped and the weapon tingled in her hand, signaling emptiness.

  CHAPTER X

  It was not working, Spock concluded, letting lightning calculation click over at the sub-thought level one last time, on the hypothesis of some hidden pattern to the numbering system. None. Null. True randomness.

  It was possible that the only hope was to capture the turbo-lift system, reinstate it, and order delivery at the nearest lift position.

  Time.

  Time already had run out. The agony was more than mere pain now. Defeat. Loss. Hopelessness. Spock struggled to see and to keep moving.

  He had permitted himself—illogical hopes.

  Among them that there would be some extension of the directionality of the link through the strange resonance.

  But there was not.

  He could follow the movements of—James.

  But only the feelings of Jim.

  James. Suddenly Spock became aware that James was leading the Commander, his movements shifting from bafflement to purpose—tentative, groping—but purpose. As if James were following the most fragile gossamer thread—but following, and leading.

  Spock sighed. The resonance, then, did offer some clue, not to him but to James. It would lead James to Kirk and the link would lead Spock to James. Too late, but not too late to kill.

  Spock set off quartering across the level, trying to anticipate the other’s direction, afraid to reach for more contact for fear of snapping the gossamer thread.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Commander stayed silent and supported the arm of the man at her side. He did not look at the numbers. She doubted that he saw anything. His body seemed numbed even beyond pain, not capable of feeling her touch, but allowing himself to be steered by main force to keep from running into walls. And it was just as well that she had the main force to steer him.

  But it was he who had the direction.

  She did not know what he was doing or how he was doing it. But she followed.

  They were angling now. He was trying to walk through the left-hand wall. Warp him around the corner gently now.

  Suddenly she saw the tears burst from his eyes, his already heaving breath catch in a sob. Astonishment in the face, and shame, utter defeat—and still some kind of resistance, setting his teeth against words which screamed to come out with the sobs and were held back. She knew that she was not seeing the face of the man beside her.

  But the man she held set his jaw, too, and kept moving, blindly, tears streaming, around one corner after another.

  Then at the end of a long stretch of corridor, on the big swinging doors at its end, she saw the number.

  She leaned him against a wall, left him, and broke into a run.

  There was only one guard.

  His back was to her and his eye was glued to a crack between the doors.

  She hit him under the ear with the edge of her hand, telling herself that it was only necessary to knock him out. She suspected that she had broken his neck.

  She saw over her shoulder that her Kirk was lurching after her, trying somehow to see.

  She pulled both revolvers.

  The hairline crack between the doors seemed to show light from top to bottom except for a rather slender bolt. She smashed with the boot heel again and went through the bursting doors.

  She plunged straight in, and for an instant her eyes would not find the men. Then, halfway across the big room, in a tumble of furniture, Kirk on his knees in a kind of crumpled, tattered, bloody heap—Omne standing over him. The giant’s back was to her, and something in the set of his shoulders was the essence of arrogance and triumph, before he reacted to the sound of the swinging doors, saw her over his shoulder, and flung himself down on a Kirk struggling to rise.

  Her right hand had come up to shoot Omne in the back and it followed him down, but in the split instant of distrusting the strange weapon’s aim so near the Human, she had lost the chance. The two men were intertangled and down among the furniture, and then Omne had locked an arm around Kirk and was scuttling crabwise to one side, dragging the Human in front of him toward the cover of a big couch.

  No chance for a shot.

  She ran, leaping over furniture, seeing too late that it was the couch which held the bolstered gun as Omne’s arm snaked over the back to grab the weapon.

  A bullet whipped through her hair as she dived for the deck and tossed off a snap shot at the aiming arm. For a snap shot it was close, and she thought that it burned the black silk. The arm jerked back and she rolled, almost reaching the cover of a desk, but looking back, hoping to see that her Kirk had not reached the doors yet.

  But he had, and he had not taken cover.

  He was lurching and weaving in a low rush toward the area behind the couch.

  She vaulted up and rushed the couch, leaping over it in time to see the tattered Kirk raise a feeble hand to spoil Omne’s aim at the rushing Kirk.

  Omne swore and cuffed his Kirk with the heel of his gun hand.

  She still could get no shot, and Omne had gained several yards under cover of the couch while her Kirk was making his berserker rush.

  And now she saw the big man’s objective as he rolled into it—the drop-hole of a slide-pole, opening behind a panel which had slid aside at Omne’s touch.

  He had Kirk slung on one hip, his left arm around Kirk’s waist, and the gun still in his right hand. She saw Omne’s right elbow catch the pole, out could not see down into the hole to see whether the big legs had caught and held with their awkward burden.

  For a long moment she expected to hear screams and a long sounding of falling.

  But, no.

  And as her Kirk reached the hole and stepped out into space, she expected it again. />
  She was a step away from him and too late.

  But she saw his arms catch as she reached the hole and saw the three figures diminishing down into further depths, but not at the speed of falling. If he could hold-She started to swing around the pole after him, but the turn brought her to see Spock, already charging across the room, his eyes hollow with the knowledge that he was much too late.

  She saw a renegade Romulan guard, bowled off his feet by the Vulcan and aiming at Spock’s back.

  She shot the Romulan down without hesitation and with some satisfaction.

  She started again to step off onto the pole as Spock reached her. But she looked down and saw the pole-empty.

  Any one of uncounted levels, each a labyrinth as tortuous as this one. There would be no guide. Perhaps a long, slow search for a trail of blood, for a battered figure with the haunted eyes wet with the tears of a Starship Captain. For another figure in white velvet—probably also to be found in blood.

  There was perhaps only one man in the universe whom she would permit herself to look to for help.

  She looked to him now.

  And found the help even in the tortured eyes.

  “I can find them,” Spock said with control. “If—they—live,” the torture added in the Vulcan’s voice. “Come,” he said to her, and stepped off onto the pole.

  She followed.

  CHAPTER XII

  James Kirk limped on an ankle wrenched almost to breaking and on bare thighs scalded to blood by the friction of the pole, but he barely noticed that or his raw scalded hands for the pain from the other Kirk’s body, which throbbed still in his own.

  And he fought to keep the other’s pain, for it was his guide.

  They had dropped—God knew how many levels. Possibly twice the first drop. But he had seen where Omne left the pole. He had caught that stop-stirrup as he had seen the Commander do, but his foot was dragged out of it by the force. That left him clawing and catching the edge with his hands, and when he could look, Omne was out of sight with his burden.

  Oh God, he was going to get very damn tired of this place.

  He lurched raggedly along the halls, scrubbing at his eyes with the backs of his hands, mostly managing to keep from crashing into walls.

  He could have used the Commander.

  He could use Spock.

  But that could not be.

  That could never really be.

  The right was not his. The friendship. All the years before—and to come. The agonies and the little private jokes. The shared looks speaking volumes in a familiar silence.

  The right. It was the right of the other, who had just learned the meaning of Hell for that right. He had earned it again, and it had always been his.

  The link, for all its agony, was still full of the subdued note of the single fact which had been singing in the Vulcan’s mind, beyond shielding and beyond the need for words: Jim alive.

  Not all the Vulcan’s generosity would ever erase the difference. He had spoken the name of James.

  James. He was James. He had to be James.

  But damn it, he was also Jim. Always had been. And—he grudged even—the other—the life which should have been his.

  He heard the echo of—Jim’s—voice saying, “But he must have it if I can’t.”

  Was there no difference?

  Did—James—have that? Whatever said those words—and paid the cost?

  James lurched around a corner. Down there somewhere he told himself.

  He was about to find out.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Jim Kirk scrubbed at his eyes and tried to see, tried to breathe against the sobbing that racked him in uncontrollable spasms, tried somehow to ease the intolerable mass or pain that was his whole body.

  It was only a little worse where the big arm crushed him against the massive chest, carrying him now like a child, the single arm looped around his chest and under his thighs, balancing him on one hip, while the other arm reached for something. He saw it find some hidden spot on a plain panel on a corridor wall. The panel slid back and in, then aside. Omne stepped through and turned to close it.

  They were moving into some inner labyrinth, Kirk saw. There were tiny corridors, branching.

  Fight. No one would ever find him here. Fight, he told himself.

  And he knew suddenly that he could not.

  Could not.

  It was not in him, not even the will to fight. He could never remember a time when that had left him, that willingness to get up and make one more effort. There had been moments when muscle had failed, but never that. It was gone now, as if it had never been.

  Abruptly he swung a leaden arm at the heathen-idol face. When muscle failed, will, nerve, guts—there still had to be something.

  Omne only let the blow roll off the side of his head. And he looked down and smiled almost benignly, then finished closing the panel.

  A sob racked Kirk’s chest and he fought then just not to close his eyes and huddle, not to crawl off into some corner of his mind and never look out of his eyes again, never try to meet the eyes of a man.

  If you close your eyes, he told himself, you’re finally finished. Don’t think. You don’t have to think. Don’t feel. You can’t let yourself feel. Just look out of the eyes. Omne plunged into the inner labyrinth and Kirk made himself look at the way. It would not be a way out for him, but it was a way to keep himself looking.

  They came to branches and to some land of baffle walls of paneling blocking the passages. Omne pressed at a spot on each panel, the fingers of his free hand twisting in a pattern to touch hidden electronic studs imbedded in the paneling. Another touch closed them behind.

  Almost idly Kirk noted the pattern.

  No, he must not permit himself to hope. Hope could be used against him. Had been; it was hope which had broken him. Hope, and the playing on it, and the slow, unrelenting destruction of it.

  Omne stepped through a panel into a big room. Old books lined the walls.

  A study, Kirk thought, as Omne put him down on the couch.

  The big arms swung him down with surprising gentleness and rolled him onto his face. But he bolted up onto his side and onto an elbow, trying to ignore the convulsive shaking of his arm.

  Look up and meet the eyes, meet them, damn it, or you never will.

  The black eyes looked down, and something in them approved the man whose eyes could still meet them.

  Omne nodded then, and turned and busied himself with the air of a man who had reached haven. He moved into an alcove and was back out momentarily, with the black jumpsuit smoothed down, rolling up a torn sleeve to reveal a bullet burn. It seemed to be the only damage he had suffered. And he had replaced the lost holster, dropped the gun into its twin.

  He moved toward the couch.

  “Why here?” Kirk said, discovering that he could, after all, speak.

  Omne raised an eyebrow as if surprised that he could or would. “My safe-house,” he answered easily, as if he had no secrets left to hide from the eyes which could still meet his. “No other living soul knows that it is here. It needs no locks but silence and concealment. If the planet fell, the fortress, the underground, only a foot-by-foot measurement would find this inner complex. We could live here for decades on stored supplies.”

  It came to Kirk suddenly through the calm words: Omne was that afraid of dying. His whole life was built around not dying. He had invented immortality, not to preserve someone loved, not really for a galactic purpose, not even for the pleasure of tormenting Kirk, but as a last defense against the fear of death.

  “We?” Kirk said, realizing something else. “But why bring me to your last refuge?”

  “You will be safe here.’ The black eyes glowed with a certain satisfaction.

  “But why even run?” Kirk asked savagely. “From—a woman—and an unarmed man.” Twist the knife. Never mind that the Romulan cavalry looked pretty good. “You could have shot it out. Guards would come running. Were you scared of
the ferocious opposition?” Make him admit the fear.

  But Omne only looked startled, as if trying to trace down the reason for something which had struck him as self-evident. “I—” He hesitated, but the mood of self-revelation held. “I did not want you in the line of fire.”

  Kirk felt an odd jolt on some level he couldn’t even name. Or—wouldn’t. Perhaps somewhere on the level of what he was refusing to name, even to himself. Let it be blunt, brute fact.

  But this—

  He had snapped out the questions as fury, as release, half-hoping to goad an admission of cowardice.

  But what frightened him was to learn that the big man was not a coward. The man was pathological about death, he knew it, he didn’t let it stop him.

  And yet—”At—any other time,” Kirk said carefully, “your only thought would have been for your life—or—some game.”

  Omne smiled with the look of being understood. “Yes,” he said.

  “And—this time—it didn’t even occur to you.”

  Omne nodded gravely. “No.”

  The jolt he had—it was something very like pride, Kirk realized, and was shocked on some deeper level. It was as if this man had said: What I did to you, what I made you show of what you are, makes you worth more than my life.

  And it was as if that could matter to Kirk.

  But that was what the man had said.

  And it did matter.

  In some terrible way, it did matter.

  “But—you did break me,” he said against the tight agony in his chest. “I did—cry.”

  “You cried,” Omne said. “You didn’t break.”

  “How—do you know?” Kirk blurted. How do yon know—when I don’t? He choked back into his throat, but he thought that Omne heard it