Sondra Marshak - The Price of the Phoenix

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.

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.

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.