“CAN I ASK YOU a question?” Sulu said between gasps. The combination of Basaraba’s thin air, rain forest humidity, and his current fierce exertion made his ribs ache with the effort to take deeper breaths than were physically possible. He couldn’t see Chekov, but the other man’s voice sounded equally labored.
“What?”
“Did the other version of me take your suggestions very often?”
There was a moment of silence, then the Russian’s scarred face lifted just far enough over the silver curve of the shielded warp core to glare at him. “Yes, he did. All the time. Why?”
“Because it doesn’t seem like you worry a lot about feasibility when you think up ideas like this.” Sulu heaved again at the mahogany-tough rain forest branch he was using to try to lever the warp core out of its cradle. The power supply for the wrecked Edwin Drake wasn’t physically very large, but its dense dilanthanum shell weighed more than an equivalent ball of solid lead. With the added weight of Scotty’s magnetically charged cryosteel shielding on top, the core felt as heavy as a chunk of a neutron star. “Why didn’t we free some Romulans before we came back here to get this?”
That got him a snort and a stronger than usual heave on the other side. “Because they would have stolen our Gorn shuttle out from under us and headed for one of their homeworlds,” said the Russian. “I’ve got a six-centimeter wedge open on this side. I just need another three centimeters to slide the antigrav disk in.”
Sulu bent over, trying to recharge his lungs with oxygen for a final attack. He didn’t waste any of it talking until after he’d thrown all his weight onto his makeshift pry bar again. The wood creaked ominously, but it made the warp core shift by a noticeable amount. “Is that enough?”
“No.” Chekov heaved again on his side of the core. “I just need one more centimeter. Come on, you’re twenty years younger than I am!”
“And used to a lot more oxygen!” Indignation lent Sulu a strength he didn’t really have, and he managed a fierce dig under the core that brought it lurching up out of its cradle. He heard Chekov slam the antigrav disk home beneath it, then curse as the silvery sphere began to sink again anyway. Even the powerful antigrav lifter couldn’t totally compensate for the core’s immense weight. Sulu managed to keep it from settling back into its cradle, but his uneven branch slipped off its smooth surface a moment later and the warp core rattled the shuttle’s engine deck with its fall. He heard a gasp that didn’t sound like one of exertion, and swung around to the other side of the shuttle.
“Are you all right?”
“Sure.” Chekov was nursing one hand inside the other, but there didn’t seem to be any particular expression of pain on his scarred face. It wasn’t until he reached out to steady the core as it began to slide down the shuttle’s tilted deck that Sulu could see the way two of his fingers bent at an unnatural angle.
“No, you’re not,” he said sharply. “Your fingers are broken!”
The older man grunted, as if that was a trivial detail. “Then it’s a good thing I taught you how to fly the Gorn shuttle, isn’t it,” he said, with one of his mirthless cracks of laughter. “Come on, let’s get this thing loaded.”
Sulu blinked at him, concern slowly fading into a familiar chill of unreality and horror. This future in which broken bones were barely worth noticing and lives were sacrificed with grim satisfaction rather than sadness was one he suddenly wished he would never have to live through. Perhaps if he died today in Tesseract Fortress, Sulu thought, he could make that wish come true and save himself twenty years of agony and struggle.
In silence, he shouldered his part of the now manageable load of warp core and helped Chekov carry it out to the waiting Gorn shuttle. The smooth surface of the parabolic wing almost defeated them, but the Russian scrambled up into the cockpit and leaned out to lock wrists with Sulu as the younger man braced the weight of the core against his chest and shoulders. With a few fierce heaves that must have made his broken fingers stab with pain, Chekov hauled Sulu and the warp core together up the wing. They rested for a moment with the silver sphere balanced precariously on the cockpit rim, then Sulu swung himself beside the Russian and they lowered it down to the floor together. Not a word was spoken the entire time.
“The weight’s too far aft for flight stability,” was all Chekov said when he’d finally regained a little of his breath. “You’ll have to stand on top of it.”
Sulu nodded and slid the warp core as far forward as he could, then tried to balance himself on top of its smooth mag-steel cover. Coated with rotting leaf litter and buffalo dung, his boots slipped off as soon as he released his grip on the cockpit rim and tried to reach for the flight controls. “This isn’t going to work.”
“Yes,” Chekov said flatly, “it is.” He hauled himself up out of the Gorn shuttle, then climbed back a few moments later with their rain forest sticks clutched in his good hand. He wedged them between the sides of the Gorn shuttle, jamming the ends into the exposed structural supports of the wings and lashing them together with a length of self-sealing cable. “Try standing on that.”
Sulu stepped gingerly up onto the makeshift platform, and felt it bow beneath his weight until it was stopped by the warp core. “It might hold me,” he said dubiously. “But if the core slides out from underneath, the whole thing will snap.”
“I won’t let it slide out.” Chekov sat down behind him, pulling on his sound-damping helmet and bracing his own body across the shuttle’s hold to box in the core. He took a moment to jerk both fingers into alignment again with a wet crack! that made Sulu grimace, then said simply, “Come on, let’s go.”
Sulu pulled his own helmet on and yanked the cockpit cover closed overhead, then slid his hands into the hollow flight controls. The pressure-sensitive interior felt oddly damp against his skin, although he couldn’t be sure if that was because it had collected some of the rain forest’s humidity or because of his own clammy sweat. He didn’t doubt that Chekov would do his best to keep the Drake’s warp core from shifting beneath him, but a lot would depend on how smoothly Sulu managed to fly this overpowered shuttle. With a deep breath, he pressed his fingers down into the right sockets and lifted off with an absolutely vertical surge. He let the shuttle’s momentum take it as high as it would go before he added any forward thrust, allowing gravity to smooth the shuttle’s transition from vertical to horizontal motion.
They were halfway back to Tesseract Keep before Chekov spoke again. “He modified them sometimes,” he said abruptly.
Sulu spared a puzzled glance down at the older man, sitting with his shoulders rigid and braced against the lurching weight of the loose warp core and his broken hand cradled in his lap. “Modified what?”
“My ideas. Captain Sulu usually modified them, to make sure they would work. How close are we to the fortress?”
The abrupt change of subject warned Sulu not to make an issue of Chekov’s awkward confession. “About a kilometer.”
“Stay outside the perimeter wall,” Chekov ordered, then grunted with the effort of keeping the warp core steady as Sulu swung the cloaked shuttle into a tight arc to avoid the Gorn defenses. “Find a place to land as close to the gray tents as you can.”
Sulu scanned across the army encampment. “How about right in the middle of them?”
“What?” Chekov looked as if he was going to scramble to his feet, but at the last minute remembered that he couldn’t leave his position. “How can there be enough room to land there? Those tents were packed in like herring.”
“Not anymore.” Sulu guided the shuttle in a slow, quiet arc over the encampment. There were almost no Klingons in sight now, and many fewer Romulans. “It looks like they’ve already started shipping the troops out. About half the Romulan tents are gone.”
“Damn.” Chekov was silent for a moment, then glanced up toward him with an odd, probing look in his dark eyes. “Were you really serious about landing right in the middle of them?”
“Yes,” said Sulu.
“You know we would risk getting caught right away, if there’s a Gorn or Klingon in sight when we open the shuttle.”
“Yes.”
He could see the Russian’s lips move as if he had whistled, although his helmet communicator didn’t transmit the sound. “You really haven’t changed that much,” he said. “All right. Take us down, Lieutenant Sulu.”
Sulu already had the shuttle hovering near the spot he’d picked—a stretch of open stone near the crenulated wall of the wide mustering terrace, where they could make a quick dive over the edge if their plan failed and they had to escape. He cut the horizontal thrust to zero and let the vertical thrust slowly die away, trying for a graceful landing to match the rest of his smooth flight. The extra weight of the Drake’s warp core spoiled that by dragging the shuttle down much harder than he’d predicted. They landed with a rattling thump that must have been audible far across Tesseract Fortress’s stone terrace, perhaps even all the way to the guardian towers that now loomed on the horizon.
Sulu didn’t waste time apologizing. Even before the roar of the shuttle’s engines died away, he threw the cockpit cover open and reached down to haul Chekov up toward the opening. The older man accepted the boost without a qualm, grabbing onto the edge with his good hand, then vaulting over it without hesitation. Sulu followed a second later.
As quickly as they had moved, it still hadn’t been quick enough. They landed in the midst of a circle of weapons, and behind each gleaming metallic barrel was a lean, angular face taking aim with unemotional efficiency. Sulu felt a disorienting wave of disbelief—it was like facing an execution squad of multiple Spocks—but he drew himself up and made his expression as austere as he could, to match theirs. After one swift glance around to make sure there weren’t any Gorn or Klingon supervisors in sight, Chekov did the same.
So far, the first part of their attack plan had worked. They had found one of the self-governed bands of Romulan slaves who were trusted to work without an overseer. Now, Sulu thought wryly, all they had to do was convince these quasi-independent alien fighters to cast their lot in with two bedraggled humans instead of the entire Gorn empire. He was glad that it was Chekov’s job to do the talking.
“Humans,” said one Romulan calmly. It didn’t seem to be an exclamation of surprise or anger as much as a term of address. “How would you prefer to die?”
“Productively,” said Chekov. “By killing as many Gorn as we can and taking their portal hub out with us.”
That sent a response rippling through the circle of dark-uniformed Romulans, but it looked to Sulu like a wave of disbelief. Still, they made no move to shoot them or march them along to prison, and no green-scaled figures seemed to be converging on them from either the terrace or the towers. Their absence was explained a moment later when a deep thud echoed across the stone plaza, followed by the growl and clatter of heavy equipment being driven across the stones. The mobilization of the invasion force had saved them—among all the clangs and roars of moving equipment, the thud of their landing shuttle must have only seemed odd to the nearest troop of Romulans, who could see that the noise came from apparently empty air.
“How could you do that?” the leading Romulan asked. Her deep-creased face looked almost cruel with years of hard military service for the Gorn, but her dark eyes glittered eagerly as they bored into Chekov. “All your previous attacks on this place have failed.”
“We have a warp core that can be set to implode inside the Gorn transport hub.” Chekov scanned their faces, seeing the disbelief deepen, then said, “I know they scan for activated weapons as you enter the portal. But this warp core is shielded.”
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” inquired another of the Romulans.
Chekov shrugged. “You can try scanning for yourself,” he said. “Or just think back to yesterday, when that strange shuttle flew away from the Fortress after our last attack. The Gorn fired energy disruptors at it all the way from here to the outer ridge, but they never knocked out its warp core or its engines.”
“I saw that.” The Romulan leader silenced her subordinate with a swift gesture. “You took this shielded warp core from that vessel?”
“Yes.” Chekov gestured at the shuttle behind them. “We can carry it, with the help of an antigrav lifter, but we’d never make it past the guards in front of the portal. We need you to take it in for us, disguised as part of your battle gear.”
The Romulan leader’s slitted eyes looked like chips of dark ice in her expressionless face. “While you stay safely outside?”
“Of course not,” Chekov said, just as coldly. “How could we trust you to detonate it and not just turn it over to the Gorn? You’ll take us inside with you.”
“Disguised as Romulans?” asked the younger soldier.
“No,” Chekov said crisply. “Disguised as your prisoners. All you need to do is think of some devious Romulan reason that makes it necessary for you to take us along to Vulcan.”
“I think you can rely on us for that.” The older female Romulan smiled, revealing a set of artificial titanium teeth. “Your plan is to implode the warp core inside the portal and blast apart the Gorn’s transport system from the inside?”
“Yes,” said Chekov. “Leaving them open to an attack by the Federation, and coincidentally helpless against any future Romulan uprising.”
The Romulans exchanged glances of silent communication, and Sulu gritted his teeth as the agony of waiting for their answer dragged on. He was mentally debating whether their chances of making it back into the shuttle if the Romulans decided to fire were slim or none when the leader finally spoke again.
“This gamble seems worth taking, although the odds do not favor its success. We are willing to wager four lives on it. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” Chekov stepped back and rapped his fist on apparently empty air. “I’ll even throw in a shielded Gorn shuttle as part of the deal.”
* * *
After watching Sulu and then young Chekov step up to take hold of the Janus Gate, Uhura had somehow thought it would be easier for her to do it. She was wrong.
It had been easy enough to pass the archaeological translator over to Carolyn Palamas and back away from the alien transporter’s control panel. And it hadn’t been too difficult to walk the perimeter line around to the other side of the ice-walled chamber, since her blue-tinted reflection seemed to walk along with her. Approaching the actual transport station was a little harder, but it was when she had to step into the strangely angled alcove and find a place for her hands on the alien gripping bars that Uhura found her breath stuck in her throat. Unlike the other two crewmen who had stood here, she had seen this alien blue light sweep out into the chamber and suck people into its time-crossing rifts. Although intellectually she knew she was in no danger right now, the looming possibility that Spock would soon be depressing the transport bar and removing her from this timeline was far more terrifying than Uhura had expected.
“I’m right behind you,” Sulu said quietly. He stood where he had for Chekov, in the pool of protection that seemed to extend out from her awkwardly shaped slot. “Just be sure to tell me what you’re seeing. I’ll let Spock know how much he has to adjust time to get you to Basaraba from there.”
Uhura nodded, because right now she didn’t trust her tight throat not to strangle any words she tried to say. She tightened her grip on the uncomfortably slanted rods that connected her to the Janus Gate, then forced herself to look straight out into its flickering, dark blue heart. For some reason, seeing Spock gazing back at her with the same imperturbable expression that he usually wore on the deck of the Enterprise steadied her nerves and gave her the ability to speak again.
“Ready, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.” Uhura concentrated on meeting his gaze and not on watching the liquid streaks of fire climbing the arms of the transporter, then spiraling farther and farther up the bars she was gripping. There was a moment that felt like a strike of unseen lightning, bone-deep but skin-tingling at the same time. She opened her mouth to ask Sulu if this was how it had felt for him, but before she could do that, the ice-sheathed chamber seemed to suddenly leap away from her. It was replaced, after a moment of whirling nothingness, by what looked like the empty interior of a space station. Uhura could see stars glittering through several porthole windows, and what looked like reflected moonlight slanting in from behind her, but there seemed to be no lights other than that. She frowned, glancing around to try to locate something identifiable.
“I’m in a space station. It’s dark, maybe unpowered.” She tried to take a step forward to get a better view, but she didn’t seem able to control her movements in this reality. “That’s all I can see.”
“Does it look like a Starfleet station?” Sulu asked, seemingly in her ear.
“I think so, but I don’t see anything to identify it with.”
“I am adjusting the distance control,” said Spock’s disembodied voice. There was another disorienting whirl, and now Uhura was standing in a dark shuttle-bay, looking out through a hull breach at a wrecked starship as it drifted closer. She felt her throat contract instinctively, even though she knew the hard vacuum here couldn’t reach her back on Tlaoli. “What do you see?”
“A starship, the Alexander Jackson, wrecked and heading for the station.”
“That’s the Gamma M14 station right before we abandoned it to the Gorn,” Sulu said. “Spock, you need to move about eight more years into the future.”
Uhura got a brief glimpse of blue light glittering off ice, then everything whirled around her again and condensed into a sandy desert landscape, blasted by a sun much stronger than anything she’d experienced in her time on the Enterprise. She told Sulu and heard him sigh. “Almost to Basaraba,” he told Spock. “That’s Chetay, the planet we were fighting on just before we found the Gorn portal. We nearly died of radiation poisoning there.”
“Allow me to make a slight adjustment…”
The desert dissolved and was replaced by a stonewalled courtyard filled with the drifting smoke of a recent explosion. Uhura couldn’t be sure, because her other senses seemed so muffled compared to sight, but she thought she could hear the sound of distant weapons fire in the sky. She caught a glimpse of a dark figure sprawled and broken on the stones, and looked away quickly. “I’m in some kind of courtyard, filled with smoke. I think someone’s firing at a shuttle overhead, but I can’t see because of all the smoke.”
“That’s Basaraba!” Sulu’s voice had taken on an urgent sound that made Uhura’s own pulse start to pound. “Spock, can you adjust the distance to get her past the Gorn defenses?”
“I believe so.” There was another, shorter instant of disorientation, then Uhura found herself standing in the shadow of a stone archway, a tower looming overhead. The dark metal door ahead of her was closed, and she could see barrels of several weapons pointing out of slits in the stone beside it. “How is that?”
“Not good,” Uhura said urgently. “The gates are locked and guarded. I think someone might have seen you, Sulu, when you were here before. It looks like they’re waiting for us.”
“Damn.” She couldn’t see him, but she could hear the sizzling frustration in his voice. “Is there anything else we can do to get there safely, Spock?”
“Perhaps,” said the Vulcan. Uhura’s stomach lurched as she felt another spinning moment of transition. Then she was back in the frigid air of Tlaoli’s main cavern, staring across the flame of the Janus Gate at the ship’s science officer. “I do not believe that varying the distance will provide the margin of safety you will need in order to stay long enough to locate Lieutenant Sulu. But as I become more familiar with these controls, I believe that perhaps we have more ability to vary the time of crisis substitution than I previously believed.”
“What does that mean, Spock?” demanded McCoy’s voice from the conduit outside the cave. “That you can pick and choose when to send Uhura to the future?”
“Not quite,” said Spock. “I am still constrained by the overall timing of the crisis point for which we are aiming. However, since most events can be visualized as a bell curve of probability woven into the fabric of space-time, I can adjust the controls to place Lieutenant Uhura on either temporal cusp of the main crisis point. I may be able to place her in the time stream as much as a day before or after her death.”
Uhura heard McCoy make a pained noise at the Vulcan’s blunt words. “It wouldn’t help her to get there early, before our version of Sulu arrives,” the doctor pointed out. “And if she gets there a day late, he may already be gone.”
“That would not be logical,” Spock said. “Lieutenant Sulu should be able to reason that he must stay near the place where he first appeared, in order to facilitate a rescue from our side.”
“And even if he doesn’t,” Sulu said quietly, “arriving a day late might let me get this pack full of explosives down into the heart of Tesseract Keep.”
Spock lifted one eyebrow, as if that was not a major concern for him, but he didn’t make an issue of it. “Are you willing to attempt going to Basaraba one more time, Lieutenant?” he asked Uhura.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “And while Captain Sulu takes his explosives down to the portal hub, I’m still going to see if I can find Lieutenant Sulu.”
“Very well.” Spock bent over his controls, and once again Uhura watched quicksilver fire come streaking out from the Janus Gate toward her. That lightning-sharp shock shivered through her once again, and she found herself back in the original stone-walled courtyard where she’d seen her own limp body such a short while ago. It was empty now and filled with the slant of late-afternoon sunlight. Uhura could see thick rain forest trees overtopping the walls, their branches swaying in the breeze and dumping a glitter of collected raindrops down to the stone walls below. It looked oddly peaceful, after the mayhem of her last visit. Maybe a little too peaceful. Uhura had served in Starfleet long enough to know when something smelled like a trap.
“Spock, I’m not sure you should send us here,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something—”
There was another shock, a much deeper and more painful one, as if someone had dropped a metal lace-work of electrically charged links across Uhura’s body. She gasped and almost let go of the alien handgrips under the surge of pain.
“Spock, something’s wrong,” Sulu said urgently. “She’s starting to shake, just like Chekov did… Uhura, don’t let go!”
“I won’t,” she said and tried to see what was going on. Something interfered with her vision on Basaraba now—a shimmer like a heat-wave rose between her and the image of peaceful empty stones. Then, to Uhura’s surprise, that image tilted and slid sideways, and slowly vanished behind her.
“Spock, are you changing the distance controls?” she demanded.
“Not at all. In fact,” the Vulcan said, “I am attempting to bring you back again from viewing that point in the future. Unsuccessfully.”
“What?” That was McCoy’s indignant voice. “Spock, if this happened because you decided to push the limits on what this transporter could do—”
“I do not believe it is the timing of the transport which is the problem, Doctor,” Spock said. “I am beginning to suspect Lieutenant Uhura has encountered some kind of force which is keeping her pinned into that future timeline, even in her half-materialized state.”
Uhura took a deep breath, trying to ignore the constant prickle of what felt like small electric shocks across her skin. The sense of movement she felt now wasn’t the disorienting whirl of the Janus Gate spinning her into a new time and place—it was the slow and lurching feeling you got when you were being carried by more than one person. With an effort, Uhura managed to slew her gaze around enough to look beneath her and see the bulging, dark-green shoulders of the four reptilian aliens who carried her in what looked like some kind of stretcher or poled support.
“I think Mr. Spock is right, Doctor,” she said, wondering if only her teammates on Tlaoli could hear her or if she was making sounds on Basaraba, too. “From what I can see, it looks like I’ve been caught in some kind of force field. By the Gorn.”
* * *
Tesseract Keep just felt wrong.
Sulu had never thought of himself as a man with a vivid imagination. Piloting a spaceship like the Enterprise required steady nerves and quick reflexes, but a talent for envisioning all the possible things that could go wrong would have been a hindrance rather than a help. Sulu’s usual restrained demeanor reflected his calm temperament—one of the reasons his wild impersonation of D’Artagnan at Psi 2000 had been so mortifying.
He had expected Tesseract Keep to be intimidating and it was. Hewn of dark stone outside, barely lit inside and swamp-hot with the odor of many reptilian bodies, the Gorn fortress constantly vibrated with a powerful subsonic pulse as its transport hub worked deep underground. What Sulu hadn’t counted on was the feeling that swept over him as soon as their Romulan “guards” marched him and Chekov at gunpoint through the stone entrance arch: that there was something so fundamentally flawed about this place that it shouldn’t even exist.
“Chekov, what’s going on here? Is this place built over some kind of natural dimensional rift?”
The Russian slanted him an unreadable look. “If I knew that,” he said, lips barely moving beneath his stiff, scarred cheeks, “I’d know a lot more about how to—”
“Silence.” The Romulan behind Sulu dug his weapon deep enough into his ribs to make his breath vanish with a gasp of pain. “Prisoners do not speak.”
It was a warning as much as a command, and Sulu tried to look properly discouraged. It wasn’t all that difficult. There was still a long line of invasion troops to be cleared ahead of them before they even came close to the portal itself, much less were able to strip off the magnetic shielding of the Drake’s warp core and set the powerful antimatter heart to implode. For now, the warp core rode deep inside a Romulan photon-mine battery, concealed among the equally silver hulls of their deactivated weapons. They’d passed through a heavy metallic arch that Sulu suspected was one of the Gorn weapons scanners, but several gates and inspection points still lay ahead of them.
A dark column of Romulans stretched before and behind, stolid as the crates of supplies and weapons into the fortress. Their status as enslaved soldiers was obvious. Unlike the Gorn and Klingons, no large pieces of battle equipment accompanied the Romulans, and none of their arms seemed to be more than standard projectile weapons. Massive reptilian forms prowled along the line, poking at random groups to keep them moving into the shadowy interior of the keep. Sulu had never seen a Gorn except from the air, and he tried to keep himself from staring too openly at the sauroid aliens. But their sheer size, their fierce predatory jaws, and the spurts of mist that drifted from their broad nostrils even in this warm and humid air awoke a sense of unreasoning and instinctive dread. He couldn’t imagine fighting these creatures for twenty years; he couldn’t imagine taking on one of them in a hand-to-hand fight as Chekov said Gary Mitchell had once done. It was hard enough just to keep shuffling along when one paused to stare at him, craning its enormous head down so close that he could smell the carnivore reek of its breath.
“What is this?”
A deep rumbling sound accompanied that voice, but it took Sulu a moment to realize that it was the actual sound of Gorn speech. The English words came from a translating device the alien held clutched in one of its clawed hands. Sulu kept his head bowed and tried to look oppressed, taking his cue from Chekov’s sullen slouch beside him. They left it to the Romulan leader to answer. She had surprised Sulu by being the first Romulan to volunteer for this suicide mission. He just hoped she had thought up a sufficiently convincing story about his and Chekov’s presence while they’d been waiting in line.
“Prisoners.” She poked Chekov with her weapon, hard enough to elicit a curse. “We caught them trying to infiltrate our camp.”
The Gorn swung his massive weapon down toward them, growling. “Human scum. They should be killed.”
“Of course,” said the Romulan, and Sulu tried to hide his involuntary jerk of surprise by turning it into a cower. “And they will be, once they come through the portal with us. No human ever survives that trip.”
“Why bother taking them, then?”
Her dark eyes glittered fearlessly back at her slave master. “Because their dead bodies will have strategic value on the other side.”
The Gorn snorted thick mist across them, although Sulu wasn’t sure if that was an expression of doubt or frustration. “Explain this strategic value.”
Instead of answering, the female Romulan stepped forward and yanked Sulu’s head back by the hair, forcing him to slew around with a cry of pain. He found himself staring straight up into the Gorn’s sulfur yellow eyes, and fought the impulse to close his own. By now, he had guessed where this was going. “Retinal identification patterns are used to confirm Starfleet security levels,” the Romulan said. “We can use theirs to break into the Vulcan’s military computers.”
“These patterns survive death?”
“As a network of tiny capillary arteries,” the Romulan said. “But they must be as fresh as possible. The Vulcan security scanners are undoubtedly programmed to detect postmortem decay.”
There was a long, considering pause. Then, without another word, the Gorn swung around and stamped away into the shadows.
“Did we convince him?” Chekov muttered, drawing the words out so they sounded almost like a whimper.
“I do not know.” The Romulan leader pushed him forward into the gap that had opened in line while they talked to their guard. “He may be going to consult with his superiors about this—but at least he did not make us step out of line.”
“Yes.” Chekov glanced sideways, then stumbled a little on the stone pavement and caught himself on Sulu’s shoulder. Sulu felt the older man’s fingers flex through cloth into skin and muscle, hard enough to make him wince, but he betrayed no sign that a warning had been given. He had already realized that the Romulan leader’s explanation of their presence here had been just a little too plausible for comfort. And without words or gestures, he knew what the Russian was now telling him.
If they couldn’t get the warp core to implode before the portal began to activate, they were going to have to wrest one of the Romulan’s weapons away and make sure their retinal patterns didn’t survive one instant longer than they did.