The Folded World (19 page)

As he ran, he noticed that at the far end of the room—the end through which they had entered—the doorway appeared completely sealed off. But that was impossible, because only one of the doors, and the wreckage of the other, had been in place.

Then he quit distracting himself with thoughts of what was or was not possible. He hurled himself to the deck behind a couple of fallen shelving units, and hoped that their structural integrity, combined with whatever goods they still held, would shield him.

He had barely touched down when the bomb exploded.

A brilliant light filled the space, searing outlines of thousands of shelves and possibly millions of cartons, into Kirk's head. That was followed by a powerful concussion wave that carried dirt and shreds of whatever had been closest to the blast, metal pellets that tore into softer matter like old-fashioned bullets and bits of packing material and other, unknown objects. Although he was behind the tumbled-down shelving units, some of that still found Kirk, lacerating his flesh and tearing his uniform. Behind that wave came the heat, intense and seeming to linger, and the sound, which filled his ears and left them ringing. Through
that, though, he could hear the cries of the injured and the clatter of everything that had been blown into the air coming down again, as the ship's artificial gravity dictated that it must.

“Stay sharp!” Kirk shouted. “The Romulans are next!”

He had barely got the words out when they attacked.

Disruptor rifles fired from the upper elevations, all around them. “We're surrounded!” Beachwood cried.

“Fire at will!” Kirk said. “We're Starfleet, damn it!”

The sentiment would doubtless have been lost on the Romulans, but he thought it might mean something to his people. Phasers sent brilliant pulses toward the unseen Romulans. Kirk took grim satisfaction in the scream of one, followed by the unmistakable sound of a body falling from a height. Kirk waited until he saw another disruptor weapon's beam, and fired at its source. He heard only a faint thump, but that weapon didn't fire again.

The Romulans had several clear advantages. They had elevation, and at every stage of military history, firing down at an enemy had been easier than firing up. They could back away from the edges of the upper galleries, which shielded them from the Starfleet phasers. They encircled the Starfleet crew, which meant they could fire from any angle. They had darkness, while the glowing stones cast light on
the lower level. Their numbers were unknown, as was their motivation.

That last, though, Kirk could guess at. They were a warlike race in general, and they had no love for the Federation, or the Starfleet personnel who enforced their exile to the region beyond the Neutral Zone. They had tested the willingness of Starfleet to compel their compliance before, and nobody believed they wouldn't do it again.

There were, however, some things that Kirk couldn't figure out. How had they come so far from the Neutral Zone? And why attack inside the dimensional fold? How had they slipped past the
Enterprise
and the
Ton'bey
? These questions had plagued him since that first brief skirmish, and he had found no answers yet. Maybe they could take some Romulans alive and question them.

That was a consideration for later, though. To worry about taking prisoners, they first had to survive the onslaught. As much as it did Kirk's heart good to hear the sounds of Romulans falling, he couldn't ignore the pained screams of his own people.

He had to try to get around, to see who was hit, and how bad their injuries were.

He rose to a crouch. A disruptor beam angled toward him from high above. He dodged it and fired back. He thought he heard a grunt of pain, but couldn't be certain.

“Who's hit?” he called. “Anybody?”

“Beachwood is,” Romer said. Kirk barely recognized her voice. He shook his head, but that didn't help with the ringing. “I'm over here with him.”

“Anybody else?”

He heard a moan, close by. “Who's that?” he asked.

Another moan answered him. Someone to his left fired a phaser at an eighty-degree angle. A disruptor beam fired back, briefly, then stopped abruptly.

Kirk moved again, toward where he had heard the moans. Another form got there first. “I've got it, Jim,” McCoy said. “It's Jensen.”

“Is he—?”

“It's not good.”

Then a voice rang out, loud and clear, echoing in the big space. A Romulan voice. “Starfleet! A word!”

“I am Captain James T. Kirk, of the
Starship Enterprise,
” Kirk replied. “You have acted aggressively, without reason or quarter. I must insist that you cease all hostilities and hold a conference with me.”

“I am afraid you are in no position to insist upon anything, Captain,” the Romulan said. “But I am prepared to accept your surrender.”

“You'll be waitin' a long time for that, you no-good—”

Kirk cut McCoy off. “Never mind that, Bones. Tend to Jensen.” He raised his voice again. “Whom am I addressing?”

“Your choice is very simple, Captain Kirk,” the Romulan said, ignoring the question. Kirk listened
closely, trying, to the extent of his abilities in the echoing space, with his ears still ringing from the initial blast, to locate the speaker. “Surrender, or die.”

“What if I want a third option?”

“What you want does not enter—”

Kirk raised his phaser and loosed a burst at the unseen speaker. The Romulan's sentence came to an abrupt end, punctuated by a sharp groan and a heavy
thump
.

“We're winning,” Kirk said.

“You've got a strange idea of victory,” McCoy answered.

“They wouldn't have asked for our surrender if we weren't beating them, Bones. There probably aren't many of them left.”

“Captain?” Another voice issued from the darkness, but this time at ground level, and slightly behind Kirk.

“Is that you, Mister O'Meara?”

“Yes, sir.” O'Meara came closer, stooped low, pushing through the debris covering the deck. In the faint light, Kirk could see that he'd suffered a cut above his left eye, but otherwise seemed to be uninjured.

No Romulans fired at him as he approached, which Kirk took as validation of his theory. The one who had demanded surrender might have been the only one remaining. “What is it?” he asked.

“It's . . . this whole attack, sir. There's something strange about it.”

“There's been something strange about every moment we've spent on this ship,” Kirk replied. He took another look back at the double doors through which they had entered, which had appeared whole right before the bomb went off. Now the right-hand one—on his left, from this vantage point—had been torn off at the hinge. Through the darkness, he couldn't tell for sure, but he was willing to bet that the other one was dented on this side, bulging on the other. Somehow, they had come through the doors after the blast had damaged them, then suffered through the blast itself. He didn't want to think about the physics of it. That, he was convinced, would only lead to madness.

“Yes, sir, that's true. But this—the specifics of this attack—I've seen this before.”

“Explain,” Kirk said.

“Okay, not
seen,
exactly. Except in my mind's eye. But I've heard about it.”

“I'm not following you, O'Meara.”

“I'm not describing this well,” O'Meara said. “I'm sorry. It's all a little disconcerting. But . . . I guess I should start by telling you that I am deeply, unreservedly in love with Miranda Tikolo. Petty Officer Tikolo.”

“I know who she is.”

“Of course you do, sir, sorry.”

“And I hope you don't think that fact has escaped the notice of anyone on the crew.”

“Really, sir? I mean, I guess I'm not surprised. I'm
probably not as discreet as I ought to be. But I do have to disagree with you on one point—I think it has escaped Miranda's notice. At least, she doesn't seem to let it affect her.”

“Your point being?”

“Captain, my point is, she has described this whole attack to me.”

“Say that again?”

O'Meara hesitated. Kirk could almost see him trying to formulate a rational sentence. “All of it, sir. Starfleet personnel down below, in this huge warehouse-type space. The darkness. The messed-up doors. Then a Romulan bomb comes bouncing in out of nowhere. It goes off, and there's a firefight. Romulans shooting down from above, Starfleet trying to return fire, but at a tactical disadvantage.”

“But that never happened to her,” Kirk said. “She wasn't even on the outpost when the Romulans attacked. And they never left their ship. They vaporized the outposts with the ship's weapons. There was no close combat.”

“You're right, sir,” O'Meara said. “I should have been clearer. When she tells me about it, she's telling me about a dream she has. She's on the outpost, and the Romulans land, and there's a battle. She has this nightmare again and again.”

“How does it end, man?” someone else asked.

“She always wakes up before it's over. Or that's what she tells me. It's a nightmare, terrifying for her,
and when she recognizes that she's dreaming, she says she claws herself back to wakefulness.”

“I guess it's not impossible that she could dream about a similar situation,” Kirk said. He eyed the upper reaches, but nobody fired down upon them.

“It's not similar, Jim,” McCoy said. “It's identical.”

“Bones?”

“She's told me about the same nightmare. In our therapy sessions. One morning, she was in bad shape, clearly hadn't had enough sleep. I asked her about her dreams, and she told me this one. Same thing she told Mister O'Meara. I asked for details. Since then, when the dream recurs, she lets me know. This whole setup felt familiar to me, but I didn't know why until O'Meara said something.”

“So you both are trying to tell me that Miranda Tikolo dreamed this exact firefight.”

“Yes,” O'Meara said.

“I can't explain it, Jim,” McCoy said. “But it's the truth.”

“She's not even here.”

“That doesn't seem to be a factor,” McCoy said.

“It's just not—”

“What, Jim? Not possible? You want to think twice before you make that claim, given where we are.”

“Point granted, Bones. Still, I don't get it.”

“Maybe there's nothing to get,” McCoy said. “This damn ship is bouncing around through dimensions, through universes, playing hell with reality as we
know it. I couldn't begin to imagine the mechanism, but somehow it's manifesting people and places that those of us on board have known.”

“That's possible, I suppose,” Kirk admitted. “I mean, I don't know
how
it's possible, but I can't argue that it isn't.” He was thinking about his uncle Frank, who had been there earlier, so clearly visible, present even down to his scent. And the green-tinged landscape that Romer had recognized. Those things had to come from somewhere.

“Jim, the laws of physics are meaningless here, we know that. That doesn't mean that there aren't some kind of laws at work, which we don't understand. The universe has order to it, or at least we like to think so. And maybe there's even order here, only we haven't recognized it yet.”

“Okay, say that's true. Where does it get us?”

“What if part of the order here is that the things that are manifested all come from someplace? Or from somebody? What if overwhelmingly strong emotional states can, in essence, create their own reality?”

Kirk considered the idea. No Romulan had fired at them in several minutes. As if—as if the sleeper whose dream had created them had never slept beyond that point. “Go on.”

“These Romulans were here. Literally, physically here. But they were here because they were created from, I don't know, let's say the stuff of chaos, by Tikolo's mind. I mean, we've all got thoughts, fears hurtling
through our subconscious minds, but hers are more pronounced, maybe. They overwhelm everybody else's more mundane emotions. And as she interacts with them and becomes more frightened—”

“The manifestations become more widespread. Yes, I guess that's possible. But the injured—”

“And the dead, Jim. We lost Jensen, a few minutes ago.”

“Beachwood?” Kirk called out.

“He's hurt, but he'll live,” Romer said.

“Good.”

“Anyway,” McCoy went on, “yes, Jensen is really dead, and Beachwood is really wounded. The Romulans were
real
. They didn't come here in a starship, though, and unless we can get Tikolo calmed down, I'd bet we haven't seen the last of them.”

“I can do that,” O'Meara said. “If we can find her, I can calm her down. If she's manifesting these guys because she's in a distraught mental state, I can help.”

“This is all still very much theoretical,” Kirk said.

“I understand that, sir. But we need to find her, anyway. And the others.”

“Suggestions?” Kirk said.

“Let me talk to her,” O'Meara offered. “If she's living through this same thing, being chased around this ship by Romulan soldiers, she might be pretty manic.”

“He's right about that, Jim,” McCoy said. “Fear of Romulans is a continuing stressor for her.”

“If I can get close to her, I can reach her. She trusts
me, as much as she can trust anyone right now. I believe that. I know I can bring her around.”

“It's worth a shot. And the immediate danger seems to be over,” Kirk said. “Can Beachwood travel?”

“Aye, sir,” Beachwood said. His voice was weak, but his determination shone through.

“Good. We'll come back for Jensen.” Kirk knew that meant two bodies to pick up later, but they couldn't be slowed by bringing them along. And Jensen was among their heaviest; it would take two to carry him. “Let's go, people. Let's get this over and done with.”