uglies behind her question. His face went verdant with
bottled emotions as, with effort, he answered, "An
associate. Merete AndrusTaurus. A Star Fleet physi-
cian. She was loosely involved with Piper and Sarda
when they interfered with the dreadnought affair."
His humiliation was obvious, even through the Vul-
can shields. He knew damned well he was betraying
something sacred when he defiled the privacy of the
training melds he had shared with Sarda. Was it habit?
Had Mornay exerted subliminal control over him for
so long that he had forgotten his responsibilities to
anyone else?
Ursula Mornay thought about what he had told her,
then nodded and put her needly glare on me again.
"Your friends out there can be traced. You've kindly
supplied me with the means to attract their attention."
She awkwardly gathered the tileorder into the same
hand that held the communicator and said, "They'll be
sure to answer a distress call from one of their own
signals." She handed the two instruments to a guard
and reset her phaser, then looked up at Perren. "See
that they are locked up in the storage room. I promise
you they won't be hurt unless they themselves force
me to act. Such things are sometimes necessary, aren't
they? For the ultimate kindness, we must fortify our-
160
selves. Take them immediately. The guards will go
with yore Then meet me in the main lab."
Mornay knew Perren's weaknesses very well after
all their years together. My heart sank to see it work-
ing.
Once again I locked my lips, redirecting my frustra-
tion long enough to help Scanner lift Sarda. Con-
sciousness was seeping back as the phaser stun dissi-
pated, but he needed help to walk. A short, cold walk
to a small, cold room.
When we got inside, I let Scanner take Sarda to a
crate where he could sit down. I turned instead to
Perren. The mercenaries remained outside, and with
my voice low, only Perten could hear me.
"Can you really think of selling transwarp to hostile
powers?" I asked, my tone one of unexpected inti-
macy.
He tossed his head in a motion of frustration and
said, "I assure you, Commander, I will destroy
transwarp and myself if necessary, before I allow the
flux technology to leave Federation hands."
That took me by surprise. For a moment I just
gawked at him in confusion, then blurted, "So it's all a
bluff."
"No," he said. "Not a bluff. Ursula will do what she
threatens to do. She has her purposes and I have mine.
For the moment, they are parallel. When the time of
divergence comes, I will be able to control her."
"How can you be sure?"
"Question me no more, Commander!" he snapped.
"You begin to irritate." That was obvious enough,
judging from the way his lips curled in when he said it.
With a fan of dark hair, he spun and left. The door
clanged shut. We heard the grinding of a mechanical
lock.
"Huh," Scanner grunted. "Vulcan is skin-deep."
He glared at the door for a count, then turned back to
161
Sarda. The contempt he felt earlier for Sarda had
apparently found new targets. There was none left
here. He began busily rubbing sensation back into
Sarda's arms and knees, ignoring those tiresome pro-
tocols about not touching Vulcans. Scanner never did
pay much attention to them, and this wasn't the occa-
sion to change him. "Come on, Points, you're okay.
Here, lean on this. Atta boy. Got any feet down there
yet?" He paused, then asked, "How are you?"
Sarda blinked to focus his vision and slowly said,
"Unwell."
I flinched at the weakness of his voice and the effort
he put behind it. I lowered myself onto the next crate,
facing him. "Do you feel horrible?"
Only then did the whole impact of his regret surface
and only for an instant. A sadness touched his down-
turned face. "I feel foolish," he murmured. The in-
tense honesty startled us.
say something. I cut him off with a quick shake of my
head.
Carefully rephrasing, I asked, "Do you think you're
hurt?"
Sarda made a laudable effort to straighten himself,
though his arms and thighs shook. Without thinking,
Scanner and I each caught an elbow. "Nothing perma-
nent," Sarda uttered weakly. "She has always . . .
resented my association with Perren."
The effort drained him and he fought a bone-deep
shudder, but the gloss was returning to his eyes now
and his complexion was regaining its luster.
"We've got to talk," I said. "Come up with a plan of
action."
"What action?" Scanner howled. "She's got us
hemstitched?
"Never stopped us before," I muttered back. "The
captain's out there somewhere, expecting us to be
ready for him."
162
Sarda blinked hard and straightened a little more.
"Captain Kirk? Here?"
"Yes, with Spock, McCoy, and Merete."
Scanner added, "Yeah, and now they know we're in
trouble."
I nodded, my nose wrinkling at the reminder. "And
thanks to my bad acting, Mornay's ready for them.
They'll walk into a trap."
"Maybe," Scanner agreed, "but she still doesn't
know it's the captain, and that's goana make her
underestimate."
Nervous now, I slid off the crate and paced to the
room's only opening, a newly mounted metal door
with a wide, tinted duraglass window. I pressed my
shoulder against the glass and peered into the stone
corridor, where four mercenaries were eerily lit by
those inexpensive little diogen torches. Those guards
looked too casual about their job, casual in a danger-
ous way. Casual as though they did this for a living.
Casual as though the phaser dries were extensions of
their own arms. My nervousness doubled. "We've got
to buy Captain Kirk time. Mornay thinks he's on
board Enterprise. The starship should be here soon."
"When?" Sarda asked.
I threw my hands up, only to have them clap down
onto my thighs. "How do I know? Kirk never tells me
anything! All I know is that Mr. Scott and Dr. Boma
are bringing the ship in while Kirk lurks around here.
We were supposed to break you out, and here we are
locked up like penned ducks! We've got to get out of
here and get on with our mission."
"Uh-uh," Scanner complained. He took that as a
cue to lean back against the wall next to Sarda and put
his hands behind his head. "Our mission was to sepa-
rate Sarda from the witch and the warlock. We done
that. He's separated."
I ignored him. It was that or whack him one, and I
figured I'd save my strength. A few strands of thick
163
hair fell around my face as I stared at the floor,
cloaking me from their eyes. I'd have liked to think of
my hair as golden, but somehow it never got past
pyrite. The worse the situation got, the browner my
hair felt. Even after all those weeks under Earth's
gaudy sun ....
How did my hair get into this? I widened my eyes
and shook my head to clear it. A deep breath helped
me cope. "There's something weird about this," I
grumbled, my brow knitting until it gave me a head-
ache. "Something about Mornay isn't fitting with what
we were told. I don't think she's as unenlightened as
Spock thought. She was careful not to say things to us,
as though she..."
I faltered, staring into a convenient wall.
"As though she what?" Scanner prodded.
My eyes narrowed as I thought harder, forcing
myself to add up things that were abstract at best.
"Perten doesn't know much about humans, does he?"
Sarda frowned. "Why do you ask?"
"He can't see through her. She's stringing him
along. Saying the things he wants to hear. Like I said,
she's not so ignorant. I don't think we should underes-
timate her. She knows better than to try to ransom the
technology by itself. She knew enough to build the
device. Is that going to be enough for her? You heard
her talk about testing transwarp. It's the next logical
step. She intends to take her leverage as far as it'll
go!"
"Piper," Sarda said calmly, "your logic is accept-
able, but Mornay has no support for such a project.
Beyond ransoming the technology, she has no lever-
age. The dreadnought was supposed to be the test for
transwarp, but it's not an option any longer." He
paused then, fatigued by the long talk, and closed his
eyes. Soon they opened again, slightly dulled from the
strain. He was recovering, but I knew what full phaser
stun felt like, and I frowned sympathetically.
164
"She might have more support than we realize," I
went on, pacing now. "Rittenhouse had plenty of
support. Star Fleet is only scratching the surface of the
corruption. Who knows how deep it runs? Mornay
probably knows exactly who to contact when she
needs something."
"Even so," Sarda argued, "she will need special-
ized scientific help to mount transwarp on a ship, and
that is assuming she can call upon people who know
how to select an appropriate vessel. That takes spe-
cialized knowledge. She cannot simply call upon new
scientists. Herself, Perren, and I are all who remain of
Rittenhouse's science team."
I stopped pacing. Scanner and Sarda both gazed up
at me, and I down at them, and I think we all stopped
breathing. "No," I said. "You're not. You're not at
all!"
The little stone room echoed.
"Boma," Scanner murmured.
"And he's already on board Enterprise," I finished.
Sarda's eyes widened as he stared at me. We had the
same thought at the same time. We said it together.
"The test ship!"
165
Chapter Nine
"1 suppose most of us overlook the fact that even Vulcans
aren't indestructible."
--Amok Time
"IN HIGHER PHYSICS, concepts are not expressed as
laws and certainties, but as probabilities. There is only
a 62 percent chance that transwarp will work. The
danger is not that it will fail, but that the test ship
would fail to return from interdimensional warp travel.
Professor Mornay and Vice Admiral Rittenhouse were
willing to take that chance. Perren does not realize that
Mornay still intends to."
Sarda struggled to hide the vestigial weakness left
by Mornay's phaser attack. He knew we didn't quite
understand the science he was talking about, but it
didn't matter. We understood the danger. ff from
nothing other than the careful lack of inflection, Sarda
made us understand the nightmare of being forever
caught between dimensions.
"Seems there's a lot about Mornay that Perten
doesn't realize," Scanner commented. "She said she's
got no more use for you," he told Sarda. "How long
before she doesn't need Perten anymore?"
By this time I had been standing silent for many
minutes. All the parts of this puzzle were wild. A
deviant professor whose theories, when twisted into
reality, became a galactic threat; a renegade Vulcan,
no less, whose thought patterns could barely be pre-
166
dicted by another Vulcan, much less a 1oopy pack of
humans who'd come into this wholly unprepared; a
starship about to become a sitting duck, no doubt
sabotaged from inside by Boma--but how? Could one
man shut down a whole starship crew? Even ff he was
a leading astrophysicist, even if he had built some of
the finest war machines of the past decade, even if he
did resent Ente rprise officers for a court-martial that
ruined his military career--then again, maybe he
could do it.
More than anything I hated being trapped. If I had to
fail, why did it have to be this way? If determination
was a factor for Boma, then it would have to become
one for me. I was on the inside, the captain was on the
outside. I should be the one getting him in, not him
getting me out.
I began to stalk the doorway, The guards knew they
were being watched. They glared at me and shifted,
lips twisting. Sometimes they rearranged the phaser
rifles in their arms. They looked dirty. They looked
ready. Exactly the kind of people Mornay would hire.
Not an ethic to share between them.
I stared at them. Moved to the opposite wall. Stared
some more.
One of the guards kicked the bottom of the door and
swore at me, his lips curled back in silent rage.
My eyes narrowed. I kept staring. This was a deli-
cate art. I had to hate them.
"Piper," Scanner warned quietly, "those blizzard
brains are gonna come in here and gently reprimand
you if you don't cut that out."
The wall was gritty against my shoulder, its stone
cold and forbidding. It fortified my burgeoning resent-
ment. I continued to irritate the guards with my eyes.
"You can feel it," I murmured. Then, more strongly, I
said, "There's a rift between Mornay and Perren. I
mean to widen it."
167
"Yes. We must," Sarda agreed. "If Perren supports
Ursula now, he will be immoral. He is in a dangerous
dilemma for a Vulcan to face."
I spun around. "And we can use that. Perren's
already vacillating. I saw it in his eyes."
His doubt surfaced immediately. "Piper..."
"Don't tell me I didn't," I snapped immediately.
Under the sharp wave of my hand he fell silent. "The
lives of the test ship crew--that's the angle to take
with him. Either Mornay hasn'
t told him about using
Enterprise as a test ship, or she's somehow convinced
him it's safe enough to risk. But what are they going to
do with over 400 crewpeople? It doesn't seem rossible
that two scientists could take over a whole stafshj'p full
of military personnel."
"The logical assumption is that they will incapaci-
tate the crew in some way," Sarda said.
"Or trick them into beaming down," Scanner
added.
"Or blackmail them into beaming down." Once
again the stone floor rolled beneath my feet. Back and
forth, back and forth, pause for a heavy stare at the
guards, back and forth again. "This is getting us
nowhere. We could guess all night and still be wrong.
We've got to get out of here and deactivate that sensor
screen or tie up the guards or something, anything to
help Captain Kirk get in here and do what he wanted to
do in the first place. He's got to be informed about
Boma and Enterprise."
Scanner stretched and arched his back. "I've heard
of pipe dreams before, but not Piper dreams."
I returned to the window. My reflection was caught
in the blue caste of the duraglass. Did I really look so
tired? I felt old, but not experienced. Years had passed
in minutes, all laden with this terrible impotence.
Outside somewhere--my mind went out to the Arge-
!ian hills with their red and blue foliage, bathed in the
light of the banded moonsmthere, somewhere, Kirk
168
was waiting for me to take action. Had he understood
my message? Did he know he was on his own?
The mercenaries in the hall started moving around,
casting rude glances at me. The more I stared, the
more they twitched. I couldn't get out, but they could
get in. Their anger would bring them in. It was only a
matter of degrees.
A fierce man with missing teeth and a long grassy
moustache was the first to lash out. He struck the
duraglass window with the butt of his phaser rifle. It
bounced off. The glass hummed.
I refused even to flinch. My stare became a leer. I
mocked him with my steadiness. Never mind being
frozen with fear, of course. This seamy type of planet-
trotter would have no trouble killing all of us with