Chapter 8

Spock saw the coil of light flash out from Sola Thane’s hand, circling the animal’s throat, stunning it and bringing it down at her feet.

Spock’s phaser was in his hand, but he had not been quick enough to fire before she had struck.

“There is a pack,” she said as calmly as a Vulcan might have.

But Spock and Kirk were already moving, as if choreographed, to stand at her shoulders and cover her back. And McCoy moved in, fast, to form a hollow square.

“Beam up,” Spock said, reaching for his communicator. But the clearing erupted animals. They were faster than snarth and could cover a hundred meters while a hunter thought about it.

But Sola Thane’s coil of light was there to meet them, its tip flipping from one to another by some dynamic of skill which Spock did not understand but was forced to commend as a fighting skill to equal any he had seen. He saw no fear in her, merely an intent concentration-somewhat superior to his own at the moment.

He focused on dropping animals. And on keeping an eye on Kirk. The Human was not up to his usual standard and this sudden stress could drain him, cause him to make a wrong move. Spock noted that he was trusting Sola with part of the job of guarding Kirk’s back, as if he could trust both her logic and her commitment. But though her logic and her light coil were used faultlessly, it was not enough. Animals fell, stunned-but not soon enough. Momentum carried the great beasts, even unconscious, to crash at the fighting party’s feet, or through it.

Spock pulled Kirk out of the way of one, Sola deflected another. A third caromed off McCoy’s shoulder, knocking him half-senseless until Sola steadied him.

Kirk was fighting and dodging with most of his usual agility, but Spock knew that the Human was burning his last reserves and could not keep it up.

Spock reached his communicator, but it was knocked out of his hand as an animal hit him squarely. It was an impact which would have broken Human bones. Spock was jarred. He was still rolling up from the fall when two animals broke from the cover of the scoutship and leaped for Kirk’s throat.

Sola dropped one out of the air, but the other was past her and at Kirk’s throat. Kirk got an arm up, and the animal’s teeth closed on the arm, not the throat. But twice Kirk’s weight jerked at the arm and hit him, at express speed, bearing him down. He fell, hard, and was out.

Sola’s light-line coiled around the animal’s throat, knocking it out and pulling it off, and Spock poured a phaser stun into it when it was clear of Kirk.

But Kirk did not move and Spock saw the white-to-the-bone look of deep shock in the Human’s face. Spock dropped to one knee beside the Human’s body and his left hand clamped a pressure point to stop the bleeding from the arm. He fired across the body as the animals kept coming.

Sola fought her way toward Spock, foot by foot, until she stood beside him. Her free hand dropped to touch his temple and he felt the flow of some kind of mental contact which was alien to him, something which struck him as born of jungles and of ancestors even more fierce than his own Vulcan breed. It cut right through the shield he had set up, and he knew it would undermine his defenses, perhaps fatally. But he sensed her purpose was to save Kirk, and he could not deny her.

Then the mental touch seemed to gather amplifying force from him and to flow out through her in some great and terrible mental warning-the psionic hunting cry of the most formidable species on its planet.

Spock saw the charging animals pull up or veer off, confused, and in some dim recess of their rudimentary brains-terrified.

One crashed into McCoy again at the last second, and Spock saw him again get hit on the already damaged shoulder and knocked out.

“The scoutship,” Sola ordered in the tone of command, and Spock was giving no argument. It would take the Enterprise longer to hear them and beam them up than they had.

He picked Kirk up in one arm and was not surprised to see Sola get an arm around McCoy and move him bodily toward the double doors of the scout.

The animals were losing their terror, starting to move in again. The scout’s double-doors opened to Sola Thane’s voice, and she heaved McCoy in and turned to cover Spock as he stepped up with Kirk. She dropped an animal as she jumped in after him. The doors closed on the muzzle of another great beast, then recoiled like turbolift safety doors, threatening to let it in. Sola snapped the last of her weapon’s charge straight into its face and it fell back. The doors closed with finality.

The scoutship began to shake with the impact of animals still crashing into it in their fury. As a rule, they could not have damaged it, but Spock was dubious of the recent repairs.

Sola bent swiftly to check McCoy and appropriated his medical kit. “The doctor is unconscious, an arm dislocated, but in no danger,” she said. She turned to Kirk, running McCoy’s medical scanner with precision.

“He has been suffering from old injuries and cumulative stress,” Spock said flatly, “and I believe that a Oneness has made persistent efforts to absorb him, with some momentary successes. He is in great danger.”

She read the results on the scanner, and Spock saw her face, under the tawny look, go white. It told him all he needed to know, about both of them.

“Mr. Spock,” she said. “I assume you can fly this antique. I have had some medical training as a Free Agent.”

Spock merely nodded. If it flew, he could fly it. A Free Agent had the field-medical skills of a doctor. At her gesture he yielded Kirk into her care, putting him down on a narrow bunk while she knelt beside it and replaced Spock’s pressure-hold with her own.

Spock stood up and looked down at Kirk’s bone-white face for a moment, but what he saw was the shape of a long emptiness if the last of that living color and presence ran out.

He went forward, and his eyes and hands methodically read the controls of the obsolete Starfleet-type scout-possibly one of the small Federation ships which had vanished in the Marie Celeste sector. He could have flown it, blind-which was virtually the case. He no longer tried to disguise from himself that the mental assault from the Oneness and his unsuccessful efforts to shelter Kirk from it had eroded his own mental defenses against the one thing he feared most. And the woman had completed his undoing. He felt a dark rebellion against his fate, a fate which she had sealed. But then again, perhaps he had already been too far down that road to save himself. There was nowhere to go and no one to go to. Vulcan was weeks away at maximum warp. Humans were far too fragile, even if he would, or could-Spock fired the impulse-power engines and lifted the ship slowly out of the clearing, careful not so much of the jury-rigged repairs but of Kirk’s life hanging on a thread which might snap at any sudden acceleration or stress.

Spock flew the scoutship as if its cargo were infinitely fragile and infinitely precious.

He saw his hands locked whitely onto the controls, and Spock of Vulcan knew that the non-emotion disciplines were finally crumbling entirely, and that that was his death sentence.