grip. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now what?”
Kirk stared at the blank wall of the shadowed corridor, the fourth such passage they had encountered since leaving the infirmary and the body of the Reman doctor. All the corridors had been linked to each other by empty rooms, most of them small and dark like the antechamber of Virron’s brightly lit meeting room. The last chamber that he and McCoy passed through, however, had been some type of storage area, and they had helped themselves to a couple of Reman dark-leather cloaks. Now their civilian clothes were less evident and their alien features were hidden within hoods.
“Do these corridors make sense to you?” Kirk asked.
“Nothing on this planet does,” McCoy answered.
“But the corridors, Bones. There should be a pattern to their layout.”
“They all look alike,” McCoy said. He tugged back his hood to look up and down the corridor. “All of them. The same curve. No signs. One useless light every ten meters. Always one door at one end and a second door at the other. It’s…it’s…”
“Go ahead, say it.”
McCoy sighed. “It’s illogical.”
“Exactly. And it can’t be. This is a mining operation. These corridors have to handle thousands of people moving back and forth. Which means there’s something here we’re not seeing.”
“In this light, I guarantee there’s plenty we’re not seeing.”
Kirk waved off McCoy’s complaints. “So let’s try this,” he said. He swung the green-metal cane over his head and smashed it against the corridor wall as hard as he could.
Kirk’s entire arm vibrated with the force of the strike.
Startled, McCoy jumped, looked up and down the corridor again as if hordes of Reman security guards were going to charge them any second. “What’re you doing?!”
Kirk regarded the cane with surprise. Its rigidity was unusual. He ran his hand over the wall, felt the indentation where the cane had struck. “Prospecting,” he said.
He moved a meter along the wall, swung again. This time, now that he knew what to look for, he could see the faint shadow of the new indentation.
Kirk kept moving along the wall, McCoy shuffling beside him.
“How long before you think someone’s going to come and investigate the racket you’re making?”
Kirk hefted the cane in his hand, determined to ignore the tingling in his elbow. “Listen to how quiet this corridor is. It has to be soundproofed. Probably with antinoise. No one’s going to hear this.” He struck again, looked at the wall. “Now we’re getting someplace,” he said.
“Mind telling me where?”
“Look at the wall, Bones. See where I hit it?”
McCoy peered up in the general area of the strike, shook his head. “No.”
Kirk ran his hand over the unmarked wall, smiled as he felt the indentation and saw the tips of his fingers appear to melt into the wall’s surface. “Holographic screen.”
McCoy actually smiled. “You’re kidding.”
Kirk reached under his cloak and into his jacket for an ultrasonic scalpel. “Are you amazed because there’s a holographic screen, or because I’m right?”
McCoy held out his own scalpel, thumbed it on. “I’ll reserve judgment for now.” He began to run his hand along the wall beneath the area Kirk searched.
Then Kirk felt what he knew had to be there—the vertical indentation of a doorway. “Doctor, if you please…”
McCoy found and traced the indentation, then with superb skill, slipped his ultrasonic scalpel along it.
Kirk marveled at the sight of the scalpel appearing to move through a solid wall. There was a familiar metallic pop, and a puff of smoke suddenly bulged from the smooth wall. A moment later, the wall shimmered and two sliding door panels were clearly revealed.
“Well, I’ll be.” McCoy was positively grinning now.
Kirk handed him back his cane. “And to think you doubted me.” Kirk began to push, and the door panels slid open, more easily than the ones connecting each corridor to its linking rooms.
On the other side of the concealed door was another narrow passageway, lined along one side with pipes of various sizes but identical gray-green color.
For a moment, Kirk wondered if they had only escaped to another frustrating loop of corridors. But then he heard something new. Noise.
“You hear that?” Kirk asked.
McCoy listened intently, pointed to the left. “Machinery? Coming from that direction.”
“Very good,” Kirk said, starting forward, anxious to move on.
“And that’s because…?” McCoy asked, awkwardly keeping pace with his cane.
“Remans live in darkness, Bones. They rely on sound. Their ears are sensitive, so the corridors they use are soundproofed. But this passageway isn’t. So chances are we’re in an area restricted to Romulan Assessors.”
McCoy understood what Kirk had concluded. He began to shuffle forward faster. “So if we’re headed toward machinery which only Assessors have access to, there might be a control room.”
“A control room with communications…maybe even a transporter.”
“On a slave planet?” McCoy asked. “You honestly think they’d allow a transporter down here?”
“There has to be one,” Kirk said with conviction. “Someone used a transporter to save my boy.”
McCoy fell silent and concentrated on his walking, asking no more questions.
After another two hundred meters, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. The groans and shrieks of heavy machinery made the passageway so noisy conversation was impossible. And the din was increasing the farther they walked on.
After four hundred meters, McCoy was holding his cane under his arm so he could limp on with both hands pressed tightly over his ears. Kirk shielded his as well.
After six hundred meters, the passageway ended.
But what lay beyond seemed endless.
Ahead of them was a large viewport looking into an enormous black-rock crater.
By Kirk’s first estimation, the crater was at least two kilometers across, with sides perhaps five hundred meters high. Above its rim, there was a tenuous glow that held a scattering of pale stars. Perpetual dusk, Kirk thought. The boundary between perpetual day and perpetual night. The crater was located on the permanent terminator of Remus.
But the crater’s location was less important to Kirk than what was in it. No more than fifty meters below the viewport, on the crater’s smoothly excavated rock floor, Kirk saw spacecraft. At least five different classes, from enormous robotic ore haulers constructed from spiderweb lattices of open scaffolding, to sleek, eight-passenger atmospheric shuttles. Some of the craft were illuminated with running lights; others were dark. Some were connected to umbilicals and attended by workers in environmental suits, and others were isolated with no one near.
“A spaceport,” McCoy exclaimed.
“More like a cargo station,” Kirk amended. But terminology didn’t matter. He was a starship captain. He knew without doubt that he could tame any of the spacecraft on the crater floor. And once he had a spacecraft to command, he could do anything.
“We have to get down there,” Kirk said.
“Here’s a better plan,” McCoy suggested. “We have to get down there without being seen.”
Kirk held out his hand. “Give me your cane,” he said once more. It was time to go hunting for pressure suits.
It was too easy, and Kirk knew it. He didn’t even need McCoy to say it, but McCoy said it anyway.
“They have to know we’re here, Jim. It’s a setup, and I don’t need logic to tell me that.”
Kirk double-checked the power connections on the Romulan environmental suit he wore, then looked at the rack of helmets on the wall. The suit itself, along with its life-support pod, was bright yellow, scuffed here and there, stained with streaks of black and brown dust. The helmets were the same color, with visors that were little
