Sondra Marshak: The Price of the Phoenix

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.

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.

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.