Kirk had been back aboard the Enterprise for eleven minutes when the first alarm sounded, and it came from engineering rather than the bridge.
That was what frightened him. A bridge alarm tells a captain that something is wrong with his ship. An engineering alarm tells him the ship found out first.
He was halfway through the turbolift doors when the deck moved under him. Not a shudder and not turbulence. One hard sideways displacement that put his shoulder into the wall and made the lift lights flare white.
Then Scott, over the intercom. "Bridge, this is engineering. I've lost the number three field junction."
Kirk hit the control. "Lost how?"
A pause.
"It is no longer attached to the ship."
Spock was already moving.
The damage was on the port side of the secondary hull, three decks below the hangar bay. By the time Kirk reached the bridge, Sulu had the Enterprise rolling slowly to turn the opened section away from the planet and Chekov was reading hull pressures in a voice that was too calm by half.
"Compartment C-seven is open to space. C-eight is holding. Emergency bulkheads sealed."
"Casualties."
Uhura turned from her board. "Two injured. One unaccounted for."
"Name."
"Specialist Tenney. Engineering."
Scott came back on before Kirk could answer. "Captain, I've got three meters of structural member missing and half a power bus gone with it. Not cut. Not burned. Gone."
"Cause?"
"If I had one I'd be shouting it at you."
Spock bent over the science station, and Kirk was beside him in two steps. The screen held the port engineering section magnified until the torn hull filled it, and the damage was wrong in a way that took a moment to name. A phaser cuts metal. An explosion bends it. Vacuum tears a weakened structure outward in a pattern any engineer can read at a glance.
This looked as though a piece of the Enterprise had been taken between two fingers and lifted away. The edges were clean in places and folded in others. Fasteners had been drawn straight out of their housings. A conduit thirty centimeters across ended in open space.
Kirk thought of a subspace array torn off a survey ship twenty years ago and did not say it.
Spock said it. "The similarity is notable."
"That's one word for it."
"I can offer another if you prefer."
"Later."
"Captain," said Sulu, "orbital altitude is fluctuating."
"How much?"
"Six hundred meters. Correction is holding."
"Keep it holding."
"Aye, sir."
The turbolift opened and McCoy came onto the bridge at a run, which meant somebody had been hurt badly enough to make him forget that running onto a bridge was undignified.
"Tenney's dead."
The bridge went quiet.
"He was in C-seven when the bulkhead went. We had the compartment sealed in thirty-eight seconds. It wasn't enough."
Kirk nodded once. There was nothing else to do with the information yet.
"And Rivera is trying to get out of sickbay."
"Why?"
"Because he says he's fit for duty."
"Is he?"
"No."
"Then why are you telling me?"
McCoy looked at him, and Kirk came within a word of apologizing, and then the deck moved again and this time everyone felt it.
Sulu's hands went flat on the controls. "Altitude loss. Two kilometers."
"Compensate."
"Already doing it."
Spock came up from his viewer. "Captain, there is no measurable force acting on this vessel."
"We're descending."
"Yes."
"And there's no force."
"None detectable."
"That sentence," said McCoy, "is getting old."
Kirk opened the shipwide channel. "All hands, this is the captain. Secure for possible gravitational disturbance. Damage control to port engineering. No unnecessary movement between decks."
He closed it. "Uhura. The house."
She had the channel open before he finished. It answered on the fourth tone, and it was Alta.
"Enterprise?"
"This is Kirk. Put your father on."
A pause, and then Morbius.
"Captain."
"Something just tore a piece out of my ship."
Silence.
"One of my men is dead."
"I am sorry."
"No, Doctor. You're informed. I expect you to tell me what is happening."
"I have told you repeatedly that the systems beneath us are beyond your understanding."
"That isn't an answer."
"It is the only one I have."
Kirk looked at Spock, whose eyes had not left his instruments, and who shook his head by about a centimeter.
"I'm coming down."
"Captain, I strongly advise against it."
"That advice expired with Specialist Tenney."
He closed the channel.
"Jim," said McCoy.
"I know."
"No, you don't. Rivera's coming with us."
"You said he wasn't fit."
"He isn't. Which is why I lost the argument."
"With Rivera?"
"With myself." McCoy dragged a hand down his face. "He was the first man this thing hit and the first one to walk away from it. He says if we're going back down there he wants to see the place that threw him across a terrace."
"That isn't a medical reason."
"No. It's the same human reason you used on Alta."
Kirk let that sit where it landed. "He stays behind cover and he does exactly what you tell him."
McCoy's expression suggested he considered that a work of fiction. "Of course."
* *
The transporter put Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rivera and two security men on the terrace seven minutes later.
The house had not changed and everything about it had. The morning light was the same. The western garden still held the square meter where the tiger had stopped existing. The stones were ordinary stones.
But nobody standing on them was pretending anymore.
Alta was near Robby. Morbius was in the doorway. The android had moved closer to her again, and Kirk marked it.
"Doctor."
"Captain."
"One of my crew is dead."
Morbius's face tightened. "I heard you."
"Then hear the rest. I have standing Starfleet authority to remove the surviving member of the Bellerophon expedition if I determine that this planet represents an ongoing threat."
"You have interpreted your orders very generously."
"I've had a man killed, another thrown six meters through the air, my ship pulled out of orbit twice, and a tiger try to kill your daughter. I'm finished being generous. You are coming aboard the Enterprise."
"No."
It was almost conversational. Kirk had expected that.
"That wasn't a request."
"I will not leave this planet."
"You will."
Morbius came out of the doorway. "Captain, do you imagine that a uniform confers ownership of every life you encounter?"
"No."
"Then you will not remove me by force."
"If I have to."
Behind McCoy, Rivera shifted his weight, and Robby turned his head toward the sound. It was a small movement. Rivera saw it.
"So that's him."
"Don't start," said McCoy.
"I didn't."
"No, but I know your face."
Rivera's shoulder was strapped under his tunic and there was still discoloration along one side of his jaw. He looked at Robby, and then at the empty garden.
"What hit me?"
"I do not know," said Robby.
Rivera laughed once, without anything in it. "Everybody keeps saying that."
"Because it is true," said Morbius.
"My ribs don't care."
Kirk stepped between them before the conversation became something else. "Spock."
The Vulcan had his tricorder on the house. "Captain, there has been another transient change."
"Where?"
"Below us."
Morbius's eyes moved, and that was all Kirk needed.
"What changed?"
"I cannot resolve it."
"Ostrow?"
No answer.
Kirk turned. "Ostrow."
McCoy looked at the transporter marker. "He didn't come down."
Kirk went very still. Spock's head came up.
"No," said Spock.
Kirk already had the communicator open. "Kirk to Enterprise. Locate Doctor Ostrow."
The channel was quiet, and then quiet again, and when Uhura came back her voice had changed.
"Captain, he is not aboard."
Kirk looked toward the ridge, and Morbius looked there with him, half a second too quickly.
"Where is the educator?"
Morbius said nothing.
Kirk took one step toward him. "Doctor."
"Below."
"How do I reach it?"
The older man's face closed, and Kirk understood the answer before it came.
"You are not taking me there."
"Captain," said Spock. He had the tricorder aimed at the ground. "Something has activated."
Beneath the terrace, beneath the garden, beneath Julia's grave and the rooms Edward Morbius had spent twenty years building a life around, the great machine began to draw power.
Kirk looked up at him and found that the man was frightened, and for the first time in four days that frightened Kirk more than anything else on the planet.
"Take me to him."
Morbius stayed where he was.
"Now."
*
They found the first of it on the way to the entrance.
It had been one of the old laboratory sheds, a low building fifty meters off from the house, and half of it was gone. Not burned. Not collapsed. The remaining wall ended along a line so clean that the shelves had been divided with their contents still standing on them. A metal case had been cut through the middle. One side of it was there. The other side was not anywhere.
Rivera stopped walking. "That's what happened to the ship."
Spock scanned the edge. "No residual heat. No radiation. No molecular disruption consistent with phaser or transporter effect."
"Then what?" said McCoy.
"I do not know."
"Good," said Rivera. "We're all caught up."
Kirk did not slow down.
"Captain," said Morbius behind him.
Kirk stopped. The older man was looking back at the house, where Alta stood on the terrace with Robby.
"You will leave my daughter here."
"No."
"She cannot go below."
"Neither can you, by every sane rule I've issued since yesterday."
"This is not a debate."
"No," said Kirk. "It isn't."
He opened the communicator. "Kirk to Alta."
"Yes?"
"Stay with Robby. Do not go into the lower installation. If anything changes, anything at all, you call the Enterprise."
"I understand."
"Alta," said Morbius.
She looked down from the terrace at her father.
"I am staying here because Captain Kirk asked me to. Not because you did."
It landed harder than she had meant it to, and both men on the terrace knew it.
For one second the air over the terrace seemed to tighten. Spock's tricorder chirped and every person there stopped moving, and then the sound ceased, and Morbius was looking at the ground.
Kirk looked at him. There was no longer any room left in the morning for coincidence.
"Move."
*
The corridor lights came up ahead of them, as they always did.
Morbius led. Kirk walked directly behind him, Spock beside Rivera, McCoy and the security men at the back, and they went down into a world built by minds that had believed themselves past being afraid of anything.
The machine was awake. Kirk could feel it through the floor, and it was not vibration. It was closer to expectation.
At the first junction Morbius stopped. "This is where you remain."
Kirk nearly laughed. "No."
"If Ostrow is where you believe he is, that chamber is dangerous."
"Then you should have told him so before he went there."
"He was told."
"Captain," said Spock, "Doctor Ostrow requested permission to use the educator and was refused."
"I remember."
"He has therefore knowingly disobeyed a direct order."
"Thank you, Spock."
"It may become relevant."
"It already has."
The lights ahead of them brightened, and Morbius said something under his breath.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Doctor."
He kept his eyes on the corridor. "It recognizes intent."
Spock's face changed by one degree. "What does?"
"The installation."
"You have spent three days telling me these are passive systems," said Kirk.
"Some of them are."
"And the rest?"
Morbius said nothing, and from somewhere deeper in the installation came a sound that was not an alarm and not machinery.
It was a man screaming.
McCoy was past Kirk before the echo finished. "Ostrow."
They ran.
* *
The chamber door stood open and the plate had already come down.
Ostrow sat in the chair with his hands locked around the rests and his back rigid, and light moved across the plate above his forehead in patterns Kirk could not follow for even a second.
Morbius stopped dead. "He has taken too much."
McCoy went for the control and Morbius caught his arm.
"Do not touch it."
"Get your hand off me."
"If you interrupt the sequence now you may kill him."
"He is dying now."
Spock had gone to the far side of the chair. "Ostrow."
There was no response. The Vulcan's eyes were open and they were looking at something nobody else in the room could see.
Kirk stepped toward the control.
"Captain," said Morbius.
"How do we stop it?"
"You cannot."
Kirk watched him. "You can."
Morbius stood still, and Kirk understood.
"You've done this."
"Many times."
"Then do it."
Morbius looked at the chair, where Ostrow's breathing had gone shallow and fast. "Not yet."
"What?" said McCoy.
Morbius's voice was barely there. "If I stop it at the wrong point, he may come out of it with nothing."
Kirk moved so fast that Rivera never saw his hand go out. He put Morbius against the wall with a forearm across his chest.
"I don't care what he learns."
Morbius looked at him. Kirk's face was a hand's width from his own.
"I care whether he lives."
Something went through the older man's expression and did not come back out the other side. He looked away.
"Two seconds."
Kirk did not let go of him.
"One."
Morbius reached for the control, and the chamber went white.
