Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

Spock felt himself trembling. He clenched his fists.

McCoy and part of his medical team floated the trauma unit into the lift, while two of the paramedics stayed behind to take Braithewaite, knocked unconscious in his fall, down to sick bay.

The captain’s body was alive; it could be kept alive indefinitely now.

But Spock had felt Jim Kirk die.

Mandala Flynn leaned against the back bulkhead of the turbo lift, closing her eyes and seeking out the damage to her body in her mind. The bullet tracked diagonally from her collarbone in front on the left, across her back and down, and lodged against her lower ribs like a molten bit of lead. As far as she could tell, it had cut through without doing critical damage. But her collarbone was shattered, again: she knew what that felt like.

She cursed. The bullet had entered almost exactly where the shrapnel had got her two years before. Now she would have to waste a month in therapy; the jigsawpuzzle of bone would never return to its original strength.

Her blood pressure was way down: she had to will herself not to go into shock. The biofeedback techniques were working. So far she had even succeeded in holding the pain, most of it, back one level short of consciousness.

She was well aware that she could not stay on her feet much longer. She had lost too much blood, and even with biocontrol, the human body has limits which she had nearly reached.

The lift doors slid open onto an empty corridor.

There should be guards at every level! Fury rose in her, fury and shame, because however badly or insignificantly Captain Kirk was hurt, the responsibility was hers alone. Even if no one at all had been hurt, the prisoner had escaped. There was no excuse for that: she had thought her command of the security force was competent, even outstanding. She had watched morale rise from nothing, but here she was, revealed as a sham.

Face it, Flynn, she told herself savagely, they could have replaced your predecessor with a rock, and morale would have gone up. That doesn’t make you adequate to lead. They ought to bust you back to ensign, that’s where you belong. They were right all the time.

A lunatic wth a pistol was running around loose in the ship, and not so much as a single guard stood at the bloody-bedamned lift doors.

She stepped out into the hallway. Her feet were numb, as if they had fallen asleep, and her knees felt wobbly and funny.

Is this shock? she wondered. This isn’t a symptom of shock. What’s going on?

She took a few steps forward. Mordreaux’s cabin was right around the corner. Cliches about locking barns after horses got loose crept through her mind along with her usual uncertainty about what a horse actually looked like ... or a barn ... she forcibly pulled her attention back. If her people were not at the

lift, Mordreaux’s cabin was as good a place as any to begin looking for them. And him.

Could this be a planned assault? she wondered. Was Braithewaite right? All the security people taken on and eliminated, silently, one by one, in an attempt to free Mordreaux? In logistical terms it made no sense to assault a starship instead of the negligible security of Aleph Prime. Here, an attack force would have to get undetected through the ship’s sensors; the force would have to board the Enterprise through warning systems that included several layers of redundancy, and it would have had to do its work too swiftly, too perfectly, for anyone to be left to set off an alarm.

Mandala stumbled and fell to her knees, but felt nothing. Her legs were numb almost all the way to the hips. She looked stupidly down. That was no help. Somehow she managed to get back to her feet.

An assault made no sense in human terms; in human terms, it was impossible. But she had learned—one of the first lessons she had learned in her life—that the human consciousness was in the minority, and that limiting oneself to thinking in human terms was the quickest way to prove oneself a fool.

Still she had seen no one. She could call them on her communicator, but she was too angry to speak to any of her people any way but face to face. And, truth to tell, she did not think she could lift her left hand. All the strength and feeling had vanished from that arm.

She turned the corer.

There, in front of Mordreaux’s cabin, several security people gathered, milling in confusion.

“What the hell is going on?” she said, just loud enough for them to hear. “Mordreaux is loose and you’re all standing around like—like—”

Beranardi al Auriga, stooping to peer through the observation port of the V.I.P. cabin’s new security door, straightened up. He was head and shoulders taller than his superior. He saw the blood spreading between her fingers and down her arm and side.

“Mandala—Commander, what—? Let me help you—”

“Answer my questions” Flynn could just barely feel the heat of her own blood. The pain had gone.

“Mordreaux is right here, Commander,” al Auriga said. He unlocked the cabin so she could see. She looked inside.

Lying on his bunk, braced on his elbow as if he had just been awakened, Mordreaux gazed blearily out at them.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s all the commotion?”

“Neon,” Mandala said, “lift, portal, guards?”

“Commander,” Neon said in her silvery voice, “prisoner, cell, Neon, intersection; alarm.”

“What...?” Flynn’s confusion was not because she did not understand Neon’s unusual English. Neon had said not only that Mordreaux was in his cell, but that Neon had been guarding him when the alarm sounded.

“Prisoner, bridge, separation,” Neon said.

Flynn shook her head, trying to clear her mind of an encroaching grogginess. Any number of possibilities spun through her consciousness. An android duplicate. Clones. Clones, hell, maybe he had a twin brother.

“Barry, get everybody— everybody, roust the night watch out of bed—and search this ship. Double the guard here, and put a watch on the shuttlecraft and the airlocks and dammit even the transporter.” She gasped: she felt short of breath and dizzy. “Mordreaux just shot Captain Kirk on the bridge—or if it wasn’t Mordreaux it was somebody doing a damned good impression. Be sure to warn them that he’s armed.”

“Aye, Commander.”

“Where’s Jenniver?” Flynn said. That should have been her first question: she must be going into shock. Her vision blurred for a moment. She closed her eyes and held them shut. “Jenniver’s supposed to be on duty this watch, where is she?” She opened her eyes again, but her vision had not cleared.

“Sickbay,” Neon said.

“I’m all right,” Flynn snapped, knowing that was not true.

“Jenniver, sickbay, illness, intersection,” Neon said patiently. “Mandala, sickbay, intersection; instant.”

Flynn nodded. Neon spoke precisely, even though the only part of speech that matched between her language and English was the noun. If Jenniver had been hurt in an escape attempt that is what Neon would have said. But Jenniver had taken ill, and was in sick bay. Neon thought Flynn should be there, too, quickly. She was right.

“Jiffy,” Neon said.

Flynn closed her eyes again. She felt herself losing her balance and tried to catch herself. She flung out her left arm but it moved only weakly; her hand would not work at all. Pain shot across her shoulders and back and vanished into the numbness in her chest and belly; she staggered against the wall with another jolt, and began to slide toward the ground.

Need both hands, she thought dully. That’s it.

Her right hand would not move.

Startled, she opened her eyes and looked down, blinking to try to see clearly.

She moaned.

Delicate silver fibrils, glittering through the gray fog, entwined her fingers like silk, binding them to her shoulder. In a panic she ripped her hand away. The fibrils stretched and popped and twanged, like the strings of a musical instrument. The broken ends writhed across her shirt, and the free strands tightened around her hand.