winced as the clatter broke the silence of the ship.
Ilya leaped from his bunk, crouching, a knife glinting in his hand. Sulu froze, leaning down with one hand still stretched out toward his boot.
“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed, feeling the blood rise to his cheeks.
Ilya straightened up, scowling, and lowered the knife.
“Never mind,” he said. “I should have warned you. I spent two years behind the lines during the Orion border skirmish.” He slipped his knife back under his pillow. “But please do not touch me when I am asleep, or come up behind me without warning. Do you understand? I react by reflex and I might hurt you.”
“I’ll remember,” Sulu said.
Ilya nodded. The high-collared thigh-length Russian tunic he wore gaped open above its loose sash, revealing a livid scar that ran down his chest and across his abdomen. Sulu could not help staring, and
Ilya noticed his gaze. He shrugged.
“A souvenir,” he said, got back into bed, and fell asleep without another word.
Sulu finished undressing and climbed into his own cramped bunk as quietly as he could. He stretched, and rubbed the back of his neck, and closed his eyes for a few moments. But he did not want to go to sleep yet. He pulled the reader away from the wall so it hung suspended over his lap. He had not even had time to program it to his voice, and besides it was bad manners to talk to a computer when someone else was trying to sleep in the same room. He used the keyboard to pull up the schematics for Aerfen .
He studied for several hours, memorizing the plans and making note of the differences between this ship and the others in the squadron.
While he read, he pushed Mandala’s ruby ring around and around on his finger, around and around. He missed her. He did not miss the Enterprise yet, and that astonished him. But, oh, he did miss Mandala Flynn. Things kept happening that he wanted to tell her about, he kept thinking, At her fencing lesson, or At my judo lesson, or When I see her later. .. and then remembering that at least for now those times, their times together, were over.
Finally, nearly twenty-four hours after he had come on board Captain Hunter’s ship, he fell deeply asleep, with the pale light of the reading screen shining in his face.
Commander Spock walked down the wide corridor of the ship that was, now, his. He was not an unambitious being, but his ambitions lay in other directions than commanding a ship crewed primarily by often incomprehensible human beings. McCoy was right: he was, in fact if not in name, the captain of the Enterprise . He would do the job as best he could for as long as he was forced to; he would transfer, as science officer, to another ship as soon as possible. It never entered his mind that he could stay on the Enterprise ; it did not even occur to him that staying on the Enterprise under another captain would be the most logical course of action. With the death of Jim Kirk, this part of Spock’s life as well had come to an end, and he saw no point in struggling to prolong it.
He tried to make out what had happened, and how, but failed completely. Every reasonable train of thought ended in paradox or impossibility. No evidence whatever of an accomplice had been found, nor did it appear possible that one could have gained access to the ship and subsequently escaped. In contradiction to this, Mordreaux could not have escaped from his cabin unassisted, yet apparently he had done so. The medical records on Jenniver Aristeides were peculiar. She had been so seriously ill that Spock rejected the possibility that she had freed Mordreaux, then taken poison to cover her guilt. But she could have been a conspirator who was betrayed. It seemed within the limits of possibility, if not probability.
The gun had not been found. Nor had it been disposed of: no anomalous amounts of any unusual element had been found in analyses of the recycling systems.
Had the mysterious accomplice, or even Dr. Mordreaux, somehow managed to get to an airlock before all exits from the ship were put under guard? The gun could then have been sucked away into space, and lost. Or perhaps it had been beamed off the Enterprise to no destination, so its subatomic particles were now spread irretrievably over a huge volume of space. That was beginning to look like the only possible conclusion. Yet Mordreaux himself had had no time to perform such a task: Spock could not even work out time enough for him to have done what he was seen to have done.
Spock was slowly coming to the reluctant conclusion that a crew member had arranged and perhaps
even performed the so far motiveless crime.
But could he trust his conclusions? He had the evidence of his own observations to prove Mordreaux committed the murder; but he had the evidence of his own observations and what should have been reasonable conclusions to make him believe Mordreaux was not a violent man: and that conclusion, too, appeared false.
Spock hoped Mordreaux had by now recovered. He needed to talk to the professor; he needed to know his perception of the events. Spock strode toward the V.I.P. stateroom.
What had happened on the Enterprise bore certain discomforting similarities to what Spock had discovered to be implicit in his observations of the naked singularity. The analysis had seemed to indicate that entropy was increasing far faster than it should; that, in fact, the very rate of increase was growing. Spock found the results extremely difficult to believe, so much so that if he had ever permitted himself to feel either relief or anger he would have been more relieved than enraged when the new orders halted his mission. He needed time to go over his observational apparatus again, to determine if the results were merely an artifact.
The events on the Enterprise had that same disquieting aura of wrongness, of occurrences that should not, indeed could not, happen the way they appeared to.
Just as he could make no final determination on the entropy results without more data, he could not understand the events of the past hours without more information. Spock would observe, question, and investigate before he tried to draw more conclusions. Any other plan would be futile.
He would know what happened, and why; he would understand the cause.
The Vulcan language contained no word that corresponded to “coincidence.”
“Mr. Spock!”
Spock faced the cry. Snnanagfashtalli bounded down the corridor toward him, on all fours. Furred crew members were not expected to wear uniforms standard-issue for humanoids; Snarl wore a soft leather harness that carried Enterprise insignia, communicator, phaser attachment. She came to a silent, smooth halt, muscles rippling beneath maroon and scarlet spots. Her long thin fingers knuckled up in running form, and when she flexed her hands the claws extended.
“Please follow. There is great cause for apprehension.” Spock raised one eyebrow. Snarl spoke in fluent Vulcan, with barely a trace of accent, and none of the lisp that flawed her standard English. Vulcan sibilants were pronounced much differently.
“What is the matter?” He, too, spoke in Vulcan.
“Friend Jenniver. The illness has ... unsettled her mind. Disarray is in her, and around her, and she sees only one path to her honor.”
Spock saw no reason at all to believe Snarl did not understand exactly what that phrase meant.
Snarl switched to English. “She is in despair, Mr. Spock.” That could not be expressed in Vulcan, except by recourse to archaic words. “She wishes only to die.”
“Take me to her,” Spock said. “Quickly.”
Jenniver Aristeides gazed at a painting of her home. It hung on the wall, as if it were a window. She had done it herself, at a time when she felt miserably homesick and lonely, weak and incompetent. Painting was an accomplishment not much admired on her home world, and at times she felt contemptuous of herself for indulging in it. But the scene, a landscape, gave her some comfort. She had almost decided to paint the pasture behind her house, with the ponies out to graze after the day’s plowing. But that would have been hopelessly sentimental. And the picture would have been static; in a painting, the powerful creatures, twenty-four hands high, massing two metric tons apiece, would never prick up their ears, toss their manes, and gallop to the far fence kicking their heels like a group of foals. That was how she liked to remember them, not frozen in time. She needed a painting she could pretend might be reality.
The door to her cabin swung open. She heard it, but did not turn. Besides Jenniver, only Snnanagfashtalli could open the door, and she was glad she would to able to see her friend one last time. Not to say goodbye, though. If she said goodbye, Fashtall would try to stop her. She reached out quickly and concealed the remains of the crushed medical sensor. She had promised only that if she needed help, it would signal. It would never signal anything now, and she did not need any help for what she had to do.
“Ensign Aristeides.” The voice was not Fashtall’s; it belonged to the science officer, the first officer—the
