The Price of the Phoenix

CHAPTER XVII

Spock kept moving.

They were both barely moving now, but he must not be caught by the bull rush or the bear hug. His broken ribs would not take it. Nor would the battered muscles, torn tendons, screaming nerves, gashed flesh. The Vulcan capacity against pain had long since been used and exceeded. He moved on nerve.

Omne’s arms reached for him with the slowness of his own deadly weariness and pain. The black silk hung in rags and the bared arms, shoulders, stomach, were green with Spock’s blood and blue-green with his own.

Omne was not merely a Vulcanoid, Spock thought again, slashing up at the reaching arms and throwing the giant off balance. He was of a related species, possibly. But he was in a class by himself. Spock knew that he had never met such a fighter in his life.

Omne swung back and Spock ducked, came up with his hands locked together and slashed at the bloody, heathen-idol face with great double-handed cleaver strokes.

He had to finish him.

Omne reeled, backpedaled, turned, and fled, staggering, lurching around the end of another lab bench.

Spock followed grimly, knowing that the giant had been looking for the fallen gun for some time. The search for the gun was a measure of the fact that Omne had never met such a man as the Vulcan, either, but Spock took small satisfaction in that.

He launched himself in a flat dive as he saw that this time the gun was there and Omne was going for it.

They fell and rolled, short of the gun. But Spock knew that this was final. He could not withstand the brute strength more than seconds.

And this time the knowledge drove his hands unerringly and unstoppably to the nerve pinch centers in both massive shoulders. He knew already that the centers were incredibly resistant, the nerves shielded by corded muscles like cabled steel. But the nerves were not invulnerable, and Spock’s hands were dura-steel forged in fire of purpose.

The giant’s arms locked around Spock’s broken ribs. Green haze blurred Spock’s vision and blood pounded in his temples. But his hands were inexorable.

He saw white agony in the black eyes, and saw consciousness fading in them. He saw astonishment and black rebellion in the eyes which had never been defeated. Fear. But no surrender.

Creeping paralysis loosened the great muscles. The arms fell away and the corded abdomen went soft under Spock’s. And still the black eyes did not yield the last shred of consciousness.

And—they must not, Spock realized suddenly. He needed the man’s consciousness—as guide, as map to the labyrinth of mind, else Spock could grope forever in the darkness of inert memories for the one memory he needed.

Worse, he wanted the man to know what was happening, wanted him to feel the violation of his mind. And there was another memory which Spock wanted to rip out by the roots.

It was a thing no Vulcan could do, violating the deepest prohibition of a telepathic race—the forcing of a mind…

Spock loosened his hands. There was a time for breaking rules.

The black eyes cleared a little in the astonishment of a new terror, as if Omne could read an intention worse than murder in Spock’s face.

Spock locked his left hand again into the nerve center and unlocked his right to reach for the mind-hold on the battered face.

“What—” the puffed lips said almost silently, then more strongly, “—what are you going to do?”

Spock cracked blood loose from his own lips and knew that he had bared his teeth. “I am going to take him from you,” he said, “all of him and both of him—the memory of him. I will find the memory and know it, all of it, and then I will take it away, bit by bit, and you will feel it going and know that it will be as if he had never been for you—never been seen, known, hurt-“

Omne’s breath caught “That is—worse than what I did.”

“Yes,” Spock said. “Would you care to beg?”

The lips twisted in a terrible grin. “Would it do me any good?”

No,” Spock answered, and he was certainly not smiling. “Would it have for him?”

Omne’s laugh rumbled faintly in his throat “No,” he said, and the black eyes were unrepentant and unyielding, setting themselves to fight on the level of mind.

Spock went for the link, thrusting in with one single, tearing, unstoppable stroke and for one single objective: the one memory he had to know first before anything might stop him.

He found it by the very force of Omne’s resistance, and then it was etched in Spock’s brain: the route to Kirk, to Jim. And—the way out.

So much for business. Now for—Spock turned to reach for the other memory. And he met the shocking vitality of the dark mind, now past the first shock and mobilized against him.

It was another fight such as there had never been, and another one Spock would win because he had to.

He tore along the memory as on a trail of fire, letting it burn into his brain too fast for full comprehension. But it would be there later, and would never be erased. He let the great, dark mind batter at his own with savage, flailing blows, trying to reduce him to quivering pain with the sheer power of its black essence.

He knew that he would feel the pain, even absorb the essence, and not be reduced.

“Say good-by to it,” he snarled aloud.

The black eyes locked with his in ultimate resistance.

And the great muscles heaved in convulsion. Pain hit Spock from directions he could not name—in body, in mind—but he held on.

The giant’s great legs bucked and heaved his bulk backward, dragging Spock along.

Omne’s hand reached the gun, and Spock’s hands abandoned all else to lock on the thick wrist.

“Die, Vulcan,” the black fury breathed.

The gun barrel shuddered by millimeters toward Spock’s head, and he forced it away with all his strength, began to force it down towards Omne’s head.

“You die, he said triumphantly and realized that he meant it. A thousand years of peace were cool in his mind, but the blood of millennia, of eons, pounded hot in his veins. And even the thousand years agreed: this one deserved it, for a crime worse than murder, for the hell he would unleash, for the lack of honor which made no peace possible. But it was simpler than that. For Jim. For James. Spock forced the gun down further. He had the vital knowledge. Let the man lose the memory in death. There was no other choice now, and he wanted none.

Take no chances.

He saw the real fear of death in Omne’s eyes, now, and felt it in his mind. It was not a fear at the level of sanity. It stretched to the blackest deep levels of the great mind and the vast ego, the ultimate “I” which would not yield to dissolution.

Yes, that would be the worst fate for this one. Yes.

Spock jerked as if he had been hit and stopped the straining of his fingers for the trigger.

What if this one died-but the I did not dissolve? What if it disappeared into the hidden machinery of some hidden lab to rise from the ashes?

Spock called some last reserve of strength to hold against the gun with one hand and free the other to go for the neck pinch again.

“No,” he said aloud and in the black mind. ” There will be no death to free you. Say good-bye.’”

Spock forced his mind to the root of the memory, began to pull—And the nerve hold was true. All of the giant’s last strength was in the gun arm and was not enough to force it back to Spock. The paralysis was creeping over Omne.

Fear hit him—and the sudden knowledge that it was possible to fear worse than death. Then, slowly, the gambler’s grin formed on the savage lips. “I—raise. Good-bye, Mr. Spock.”

The man who hated death suddenly let the arm yield, let the Vulcan muscles force the gun down and up under Omne’s jaw. Spock tried to recover to pull it away, but couldn’t. ” ‘Or—au revoir,’” the black mind said in the link.

Omne pulled the trigger.

Spock threw his mind back, fighting not to get caught in the death—true death, black and reaching. He felt the astonishment and rebellion of the great black mind, even in its choice…

Blackness reached for Spock, found him. He was not sure that he had lived through it…