New Moon

Tim O'Neill sat on the floor of a dimly lit grey room. It was hard to see because his glasses had been taken away, along with his shoes, his belt, his watch, his ring, his crucifix; and his liberty. He had been on his way to the hotel where he planned to begin his six weeks of shore leave. He had felt a sharp pain in the small of his back and felt himself falling. The next thing he knew he was here in this place.

He sat leaning against the wall, his wrists and ankles tied together with thin plastic cord. Every now and then he lowered his head to worry away with his teeth at the bonds on his wrists He was, as far as he could tell, making no progress at all, although it was hard to judge since, without his spectacles, he could barely see his own hands in front of his face. And then a door opened and he was no longer alone.

"Stop that. If you give me any trouble I'll gag you. And then, of course, I'll have to keep coming in here to check you haven't suffocated. That would be boring. So stop it, right now."

He looked up, squinting at the dim figure before him. He thought he recognised the voice but without his glasses all he could see was a blue blur.
"Do I know you?"
He waited but the figure before him made no reply.
"I do, don't I?"
Still silence.
"Please. Talk to me, at least."
"Yes, Tim, you know me."

And he did.
"Mariah!"
It came out half way between an exclamation and a groan. Mariah, the Dagger who had kidnapped him once before to pump him for information about seaQuest, and who had in the end traded his life for her liberty. Mariah. This could not be good.

There was no time to argue: she came toward him and suddenly he was in darkness as she pulled a thick black hood over his head and pulled it tight around his neck. He felt her do something to the cords which bound him and a tug at his wrists pulled him to his feet. The rope linking his wrists to his ankles seemed to have been untied and instead she seemed to be pulling on the end of it, pulling his bound wrists forwards on the end of a leash. There were a few inches of play in the ropes binding his feet and he moved forwards with shuffling steps. In silence and darkness he was dragged onwards until finally he heard a door open and close and they were still. He felt her hand on his wrists again and then blinked in surprise as she took off the hood and he was blinded by the sudden light. He peered forwards to see that she had fastened his wrists to a heavy chain which hung from the ceiling.

She walked away from him and pressed a button on the wall. Machinery whirred into action and the chain slid smoothly up into the ceiling and he was hoisted upwards. The mechanism stopped when his bare feet were almost but not quite lifted off the ground and he stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, dangling from his wrists, stretched upwards as if he was on a rack.

"You have to tell me what I want to know."
"What do you want to know?"
"The co-ordinates."
Tim had no idea what she meant. He saw a blurred outline as she once more moved towards him and then he felt the sharp pain of a hypodermic plunged into his arm. For a moment nothing seemed to happen but gradually he found he had begun to sweat. His tongue felt as though it had swollen to three times its normal size. And all the while the drug felt like a positive presence in his veins. He pictured himself from the outside, the drug feeling like fire, but from the outside seen as fine lines colouring in his veins like a drawing in an anatomy book.

Gradually it came to him that he was made of glass. A glass figure with a trail of fires tracing patterns around his body as the flames licked through his veins. He was, curiously, not afraid at all. A glass body filled with fire could hardly be hurt, hardly be broken. He could withstand anything she could do to him: up until the end, when he would shatter like glass and the fire would consume her.

Some time later, he found himself back in the dim, grey, room where it had begun. His wrists were again tethered to his ankles and reflexively he went back to chewing at his bonds to pass the time. She didn't come back to stop him. He was as thirsty as he could ever remember being but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.

After hours of this he was not sure whether he was more afraid of her coming back or of her never coming back.

Of course, in a while, she came again. Again the hood. Again the walk down the corridor. Again the hoist: again the drugs and the feeling of fire. And then, again the grey room. Again. Again. He had no idea whether he had told her what she wanted to know. After a while he was not sure whether he was curled in the grey room or stretched in the interrogation room. He was not sure whether he was awake or dreaming, alive or dead.

And then, after some more time, it stopped.

Someone gave him water. He found that the drugs had begun to clear from his system. He knew at last where he ended and the universe began. He knew he was cold and lonely and afraid and bone tired and there was no hope. But he also knew he had not told her what she needed to know. Because she came back.

"Well, Tim," she said, "I had expected to know what I needed by now. The last time all I needed were the drugs."
Of course he was still afraid. But, oddly, the thing which concerned him most was being deprived of his sight.
"Mariah, do you think I could have my glasses back please? After all, it's not as if I'm going to use them to tunnel out of here." He smiled. "In fact, they're made of lightweight plastic anyway: specially designed not to shatter and, if they do, not to produce sharp edges."

He peered at the figure standing over him. He saw her arm move and flinched away from her automatically.

"Don't be afraid: yes, you can have your eyes back. I need you to see this."

She put his glasses on to his nose and he felt an incredible pang of relief at being able, at last, to see clearly again. There was fear, too, because she hadn’t given him back his sight because it was over but because there was something else. She left the cell briefly but when she came back there was a body draped over her shoulder. She put the body on the ground by O'Neill's feet.

O'Neill looked on in horror. It was Miguel Ortiz.
[end of part 1]

Lucas sat quietly in the room. It was six months now since he had begun to work with Dr Murdoch, and he knew that they were coming to the end of the sessions. He had stopped taking the medication - or needing to take it - three months ago. But he still felt the need for these sessions, twice a week, more often when the dreams were bad, and, although he was feeling much stronger, he wasn't sure how he would survive when his prop was taken away.

Astonishingly, it had been Tony Piccolo who had set him on the path to recovery. He had been hiding how he felt from the rest of the seaQuest crew, spending his time lying in his bunk, watching the light reflected in the moving water of the aquatubes, watching Darwin swim past. The dolphin had seemed as concerned about him as the rest of the crew.

His nights, however, were a torture of silent weeping, jamming his fists into his mouth, desperate to remain silent, unobtrusive; terrified that Piccolo would hear him and wake. For hours each night he had lain there, shaking, terrified of being discovered, terrified of being noticed. But more terrified of being unnoticed, of remaining alone.

And then, one night, Piccolo's voice had come out of the darkness.
"You have to move on from here, Lucas."
He had carried on pretending he was asleep but Piccolo was relentless.
"It doesn't matter how you do it. Talk to me. Talk to Dr Smith. Go out and get drunk. Whatever you have to do. But you have to move on from here, kid."

Piccolo wouldn’t let him pretend any longer, had rousted him out of his bunk, taken him to the Captain, explained what was going on. It had been arranged quickly after that. He had been desperate not to leave seaQuest and so therapy from someone on shore was out of the question. But strings had been pulled, arrangements had been made. And so the next time seaQuest docked, a middle aged woman with a friendly face had come on board and taken up her role as temporary medical adviser. She had been available to all of the crew but everyone knew she was primarily there to talk to Lucas.

At first it had seemed hard to talk to her. She had asked him personal questions, questions he had never thought of discussing with anyone else. When they began to talk about Danner he had thought he would die of shame. But, in time, he began to understand what she meant about power, about responsibility. He was not responsible for what Danner had done, to him or to his friends. He had done what was in his power to do: he had had the forethought to set up the programme which had summoned Merle to his aid. When Merle had arrived he had done his best to help her. He had nothing to be ashamed of, there was nothing left undone.

It still disturbed him that Merle had disappeared while he was in the prison cell next to her. He had tried and tried to trace her but she had to all intents and purposes disappeared from all U.E.O. records, gone underground. He regretted, now, the way he had cringed away from her in their last moments on the submarine. He had learned to understand why he had reacted in the way he had. But of course now it was too late. He wondered if he would ever meet her again.

More immediately, though, he was pleased that he had finally sorted out his relationship with Ford and Brody. The two of them had been convinced that he was the villain of the piece and, when they had come to the undersea station, it had nearly broken him down when the people he thought were his friends turned out to think they were his enemies. On the submarine, though, it had seemed to him that Merle was Danner in disguise. Her reaction to Ford and Brodie had seemed to Lucas to put his friends in danger. He still flushed with embarrassment at the futile gesture when he thought back to how he had tried to stand between Ford and Merle. But Dr Murdoch had convinced him to look at it another way. He had thought he was saving their lives. He found it almost impossible to accept the image Dr Murdoch tried to reflect back to him of how he must have looked to Ford and Brody. Lucas had believed they both thought he was a whining, snivelling, weakling child. Instead, Dr Murdoch had persuaded him they thought he was some kind of hero; that, even though none of them knew it was unecessary at the time, he had been willing to put himself between them and Danner. But the astonishing thing was that Ford and Brody seemed to think it too. He had had two excruciatingly embarrassing conversations, one with each of them, where they had each tried to stammer out apologies for disbelieving Lucas and to thank him for what he had tried to do on the submarine. They had all ended up embarrassed but Dr Murdoch said it was necessary that they each understand each other.

Lucas could, almost, now look back on those desperate hours with a smile. After all, he had persuaded the psychopathic Danner that he, Lucas Wolenczak, had a twenty-eight year old girlfriend who was as psychic as he and could kick ass too!

The main thing, though, was that, when Dr Murdoch had gone, Lucas thought he could now carry on without her help. The six week break they were all due to have while the seaQuest underwent a refit should help too, even though Lucas had missed the first couple of weeks working on a new security patch on the computer and having his last sessions with Dr Murdoch. Lucas planned to spend most of the remaining month on Hawaii, preferably lying on a beach and soaking up some rays except for the time he spent on the town with Piccolo, Ford and Brody who were all staying at the same complex.

Tim O'Neill was supposed to be somewhere round too but no-one had seen him since his first night onshore two weeks ago. Miguel Ortiz had gone to look for him and he hadn't come back yet either. Lucas wondered idly where the two of them had got to, envisaging them lounging by a pool somewhere with some pretty girls handing out leis.

Miguel was unconscious, not dead. He had to be still alive because Mariah bent down to tie his wrists and ankles as she had tied Tim's. Then she hooded Tim and led him away to the interrogation room again. This time, when the hood was removed, there was a video screen set up where he could see it. The video pick-up showed Miguel in the grey room. Tim watched in increasing panic as Miguel slowly regained consciousness and, as Tim had earlier, tried to gnaw his way through the ropes on his wrists. Tim knew there was more; something bad was about to happen.

Mariah was looking at him and smiling. It was not a pleasant smile.

"I need to know the co-ordinates." Mariah pressed another button on the wall. All Tim could do was watch in horror as water began to pour into the grey room where Miguel was tied up.

"Mariah, please,"
"I need the co-ordinates."
"What co-ordinates do you need?"
"You know the co-ordinates. Tell me. Tell me now."

He was desperate: think, think - what co-ordinates? He racked his brains to think what information she wanted, what would save his friend.

The water was six inches deep. Miguel was struggling with the ropes which bound him. He had shuffled his way to the wall of the room and was doing his best to get to his feet. Bound as he was, all he could manage was a curled crouch. He shuffled over in that bent double position to the cell door and tried to operate the controls with his chin. The controls had been disabled anyway: the room was designed as a cell. Miguel thumped on the door panels as best he could with his elbows and started to yell for help.

O’Neill looked desperately at Mariah. She was still watching his face, her expression calm and thoughtful, as if she was watching a laboratory experiment. He couldn’t think of any information he had which was worth this.

The water rushed in. It was nearly two feet deep already. Miguel seemed to be panicking but when he called out his voice was steady and clear.
"Hey! Hey! Is anyone there?"
He had scrambled to his feet, curled up awkwardly because of the rope tethering his wrists to his ankles. But in that position the water was nearly up to his neck already.

"Mariah, please, don't."
"Tell me the co-ordinates."

She was watching him, not Miguel. He couldn’t think of anything to offer her in exchange for Miguel’s life.

"Mariah, please, don't." He was ready to beg, if that was what it would take.
"Tell me the co-ordinates."
"I'll tell you. I'll tell you anything you want. Just don't. Please. Tell me what co-ordinates you want to know and I'll tell them to you."

The water was now four or five feet deep and Miguel was floating, curled up in a foetal position on his back, doing his best to keep his face out of the water. He was still trying to attract attention, calling for help from an unknown captor.

"I’ll tell you! What co-ordinates do you want. I’ll tell you! Mariah, stop! Stop!"
She watched Miguel struggling in the water for a moment and then turned back to Tim as he too struggled with the ropes which bound him.
"I’m curious," she said. "You’ve been here so long and told me nothing. I must have hurt you, I know; but you keep giving me your name and rank and serial number like a comic book hero. But you’ll give it all up for your friend."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why? Because he’s my friend. Please. Don’t kill him. Please."
"What will you give me to stop?"
"Anything! What do you want?"

The water was already almost up to the ceiling. Miguel was panicking now, desperately trying to keep his face above water, holding his head up in the few inches of air which remained.

"I don’t understand humans."
"Mariah, you’re just as human as I am. Daggers are human beings too, remember?"
"I don’t feel human. I was raised in a laboratory and all I’ve ever known is labs and jails. Why should you care whether I drown this one or not? I wouldn’t."
"Yes you would. You’re not a monster, Mariah. Please. Don’t try to be one. Let him live. I’ll give you what you want. Anything! Just stop the water."
"And the co-ordinates?"
Suddenly O’Neill knew what co-ordinates she meant.

[end of part 2]

"Doc," Lucas grinned.
It always seemed to make him feel better just being with her. She grinned back but, as always, she wasted no time in bringing him to the point
"Well, Lucas, I think it's time."
"Time for what?"
"Time we talked about Danner."

Lucas felt the panic twist in his bowels again at the mention of the psychopath's name. Danner had hurt him, physically and mentally, far more than he had ever been hurt before. He could not imagine what he would do if he had to face Danner again.

"What is there to say?"
"Well, I think we should start with how you feel about him now."

Lucas thought back. Merle had warned him Danner would always be dangerous to him so long as they were both alive. So there was no way he, Lucas, - or any of his friends - could ever go back to the undersea facility where they had imprisoned Danner. Lucas was morally certain he had made the right choice, and it was Danner who was still imprisoned under the ocean, alone, isolated - but it would have made Lucas feel a whole lot better if he had had some way of checking for sure.

"The thing that really gets me," he said, "is not being certain that I made the right choice in the end. I mean, I know that it seemed to be Merle who escaped, and I know that it seemed to be Danner who we left behind. But on the sub I thought for a while it was the other way round. And I can't go back. I can never go back. And so I'll never really know."

"Lucas, forgive me but I think you're over-complicating."
"Oh?"
His face had taken on that sullen look he got when he disagreed with her or, more often, when she disagreed with him. She smiled. Over the weeks and months she had learned to ignore that look.
"Remember Danner is trapped in an undersea facility. But he isn't incommunicado. You could just call him up on the vidphone,"
"What good would that do...."
She didn’t answer but she saw his face light up as, finally, he got it. Danner had made himself look like Merle but not by changing his appearance: he had done it by clouding other people's minds. And he couldn't do that over a vidphone. Lucas’ face took on a wonderful expression of joy and the light in his eyes was worth all the time Dr Murdoch had spent with him. She saw that he could barely restrain himself from getting up there and then to go and make the call. And she watched, amused, as his thoughts surfaced in his face and a mischievous look came across his features.

"Tony offered to "accidentally" drop a torpedo on the facility" Lucas said.
Dr Murdoch smiled and said, as she had said so often over the past few months:
"And how did that make you feel?"

Lucas had to think about that one, for a long time, because in his heart of hearts what he really wanted, he found, was to see Danner dead on the floor. But if the base blew up he would still never, really, know it was true. He had to see Danner dead. He was surprised by how fiercely the temptation gripped him to arrange some kind of "accident" himself, something like bleeding the air out of the dome. It could, he suddenly realised, be done. In fact, he could do it himself, in a moment, using seaQuest's computers to override the safeties on the facility.

Lucas looked up at his counsellor and she saw the feral light in his eyes.
"I could do it." he said "I can see it all laid out in my mind’s eye. I could kill him now, this afternoon, make it look like an accident: and no-one could ever prove I did it."
She looked at him, without comment, without criticism, without anything needing to be said. And he understood that if he did decide to end Danner's life she would not give him away, would not even condemn. But that, of course, was what made it impossible. "But I won't." And then he saw. "But you knew that all along."
"No, Lucas, you knew it all along."

Tim a felt a lot better. For one thing, Mariah had let him take a shower and change his clothes before she tied him up and took him back to the cell with Miguel .~~~

The shower had been wonderful: she had untied him and then he had heard the click of a door closing and had fumbled with the hood which blindfolded him, finding at last that he was alone in a circular chamber around six feet across. Peering without his glasses it had taken him a few moments to realise it was a shower stall and he had fumbled blindly with the mechanism for a long time before he had worked out how to operate it and then stood for another long time, luxuriating in the sonic vibrations of the waterless shower, before he had the energy to take off his filthy clothes and get properly clean.

His eyes were closed and the warm vibrations were running all over his naked body, taking the filth and grime away, and he was, finally, starting to relax. He didn’t hear the shower stall open but he felt a whisper of cold air on his back and then there were hands on his shoulders.

She massaged the muscles in his neck, strong fingers probing deep into the tension knots. He ought to resist, he knew, but it was oh so good to feel those muscles relax. Her hands moved lower, taking in the whole sweep of his back, straying around his sides, brushing over his nipples, whispering round his flanks, until he tensed when a probing finger wandered into his ass. He was a prisoner, this wasn’t right...

She spun him around to face her and he raised his hands as if to defend himself but she grabbed both his wrists in one of hers and slammed him back against the stall, arms pinioned above his head. Her other hand was on his chest, circling his nipple and he groaned involuntarily. Her mouth sought his and her tongue gagged him. He wasn’t sure if he was too weak to resist her physically - he had been a prisoner for what seemed for ever, without food, bound hand and foot, drugged - or mentally. Because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to resist; it felt so good.

She was naked too, he realised, wishing he had his glasses so he could see the curves of her body, painted with the multi coloured patches of her dagger heritage. Her breasts were pressed against his chest and her free hand was still circling his body, teasing him with a light touch here, there; everywhere.

She pushed him firmly down onto the shower floor so they were both in the full beam of the sonic shower and the warm vibrations nearly drove Tim crazy. She still had his hands pinned above his head but she took her mouth away from his and he felt her tongue on his eyelids, his earlobes, his neck. He felt her teeth in the soft flesh of his neck and for a moment thought she really meant to bite deep. But then she reared over him and moved back to position herself over him, take his manhood into her. Without being able to see clearly it seemed to him almost like a dream, this multi-coloured succubus riding him to his climax and beyond. And then she climbed off him and he was left in the bath of warm vibrations until all the evidence of her presence was gone. Slowly he hauled himself to his feet, wondering if he would ever know whether this had really happened or had been a drug-induced dream.~~~

He hadn't realised how disgusting he had smelled until he climbed out of the shower: Mariah's ideas about the care and maintenance of prisoners seemed lacking in a few basics like hygiene. But she had left him a clean set of the same blue fatigues she had been wearing and he, gratefully, had put on the clean clothes and gone out of the shower room to face her.

She had, surprisingly, been quite gentle with him, finding a medical kit and putting salve on the marks on his wrists and bandaging them up before she put the ropes back. But there was nothing unrelenting about her. She had tied his hands and put the hood back over his head and marched him back to the cell without comment. Knowing that she still had Miguel locked up, in a room she could flood at will, he had not resisted. Indeed in his weakened state, he was not sure he could have resisted her anyway.

He heard Miguel rather than seeing him: his friend was protesting loudly at his captivity - and at being wet - from the moment the cell door opened. Mariah ignored him completely, pausing only to check Miguel’s bonds were still secure and to tie Tim’s wrists to his ankles again before unhooding him and leaving. When she had left Miguel was quiet. Tim had no idea what to say. Finally, he heard himself say "I'm sorry".

Of all the things he could possibly have said, that must have seemed to Miguel to be the most bizarre. Tim realised that, from Ortiz’ point of view, he had been knocked out, tied up, half drowned, and then left alone and mystified. How any of this was Tim O'Neill’s fault he would have had no idea.
"Care to explain?" Ortiz said but Tim, to his distress, was suddenly unable to speak. The whole ordeal he had endured over the last few days was something he found he could not describe out loud.
"Let’s just say I think we’re in big trouble," was all he could offer.

Ortiz was no fool: he could see something big had happened to O’Neill and he figured it must have something to do with the water torture he had just undergone.
"What did she want from you?"
"The co-ordinates. I’m sorry. She used drugs." He couldn’t seem to string a sentence together. "It’s been days. I wouldn’t have told her. I didn’t tell her. But I had to in the end. She would have drowned you."
"Hey! You saved my life, buddy. You’ll get no argument from me. But what co-ordinates did she make you give her."
Shockingly, O’Neill started to sob. Ortiz shuffled over to him and leaned against him, unable to put his arms around him for comfort but offering his shoulder for Tim, literally, to cry on.
"I had to-" was all Tim could say. Over and over, he castigated himself for giving in and over and over Miguel told him it was all right, that he had had no choice, that he had saved his life.

After an hour or so Tim had calmed down and, finally, fallen into an unquiet sleep. Miguel, having decided he would never make an impression on his bonds without a set of bolt cutters, was still awake, restless, trying to think of something effective he could do to get them on their way to making an escape. But when Mariah came back with another body there was nothing he could do except watch as Commander Ford, unconscious, was tied up along side him. Well, he still had a tongue.
"So," he grinned at her, "what are you doing, starting a collection?"

[end of part 3]

"Lucas?"
"Captain?"
"Give me a hand here, will you?"
Lucas excused himself from Dr Murdoch and followed Bridger into his cabin. Bridger looked puzzled. His computer terminal was showing the initial password screen, ready for the captain to log on for the first time since Lucas had finished setting up the new security patch. Lucas grinned.
"Nothing to it - you need to put in your old password and then pick a new one..."
"Yes, I know how to set my password. But the computer doesn’t seem to want to play."
Lucas sat down and started typing. Bridger was locked out, yes, but that could just be because he had mistyped his old password three times. Lucas ought to be able to bypass a simple error like that in a second, by logging in under his own identity and then re-setting Bridger with a default password that he could then change himself. But the computer wouldn’t accept Lucas’ password either. He tried a couple of things but then the confidence seemed to leach out of him.
"Captain, I think this is serious..."
"Serious how? Serious as in the computer is down or serious as in you need to do something particularly clever to re-set it. Or serious as in I need to call Secretary McGath and tell him the seaQuest is out of action???"
"Serious as in this isn’t supposed to happen. Give me a minute..." He ran down the corridor to his own cabin and computer and began typing furiously. But there was no way in: he was locked out of his own computer system.

After an hour he had undone most of the work he had patiently put together over the last couple of weeks and the computer was a spaghetti tangle of wires on the floor, the security patch forgotten as he tried desperately to get back into his own system. As far as he could tell, someone had piggy backed into his system on the security patch and proceeded to disable all the security procedures from the inside, leaving Lucas’ computer resisting all his attempts to reroute his way in.

"This is - this is brilliant! Whoever’s doing this is a genius."
"Lucas! I’m not interested in his credits, I’m interested in whether we have a workable boat."
"I can bypass. It’ll take some time, but I think I need..."
Lucas was typing furiously again, losing the thread of what he was saying in the urgent need to get his thoughts around the shape of the problem in the computers.

Bridger had seen enough. He summoned security on the com-link and was surprised when Brody appeared.
"Aren’t you supposed to be on leave?"
"Yes, captain, but I think we have a problem. Tim O’Neill has disappeared, and Miguel Ortiz and Commander Ford went looking for him and they haven’t come back either. I came back here to check out where the rest of the crew have gone to."
"Well, while you’re doing that, I want a man on Lucas."
Lucas looked up. "What?"
"Our computer systems are under attack. Our crew is vanishing. That makes you a target, Lucas. Brody, I don’t want him on his own for a second. Someone is with him if he’s just going to the bathroom. And he doesn’t leave the ship."
"Captain, you can’t do that! I’m a civilian, for one thing. You can’t stop me going ashore."
Brody grinned at the boy. "Wanna bet? You can sue him later, Lucas, but you have to admit he makes sense."
"Oh, and Dr Murdoch - is she still here?"
She put her head round the door at that moment.
"Right here, Captain Bridger. What can I do for you?"
"I’m sorry but we seem to be having a security crisis: I’m going to have to ask you to stay on board until we’ve sorted it out. Brody, get someone to stay with Dr Murdoch too."

Most, nearly all, the crew were dispersed on shore leave but there were a few people still around: Loni Henderson was one of them and so she pulled the duty of shadowing Dr Murdoch, while Brody split his attention between sitting with Lucas and trying to trace the missing crewmembers.

"So far as I can tell," he told Bridger after a couple of hours of telephoning, "most people are where they said they would be. But Tim O’Neill never made it to his hotel at all, and Ortiz and Ford were last seen heading out there to look for him. And we can’t make contact with Tony or Dagwood, so we have to count them as missing too."

"Dagwood, don’t move." Ford’s voice was calm and level and Dagwood instinctively trusted him and quelled his rising panic. His arrival in the cell had been different from the others’: Mariah had wheeled him in, already restrained by chains around his wrists and ankles. But although the chains weren’t particularly heavy, there was a good reason why Ford wanted him to sit still and not struggle. The chains were threaded through the arms of the chair in which he had been put, and on the other end of them was Tony Piccolo, who was strapped into an identical chair wired back to back with Dagwood’s. Ford had looked at the set up carefully but you had to admit she had thought of everything. Dagwood could pull at the restraints but if he did it would be Piccolo’s arms which broke, and not the chains. The scariest part was the wire noose which went around Dagwood’s neck and was connected to another around Tony’s. If either of them struggled it would most probably garotte the other. Ford patiently explained it all to Dagwood in terms the dagger could understand; that he mustn’t move, that if he did it would hurt Tony. He understood. The reasoning was compelling enough for him. He couldn’t conceive of doing anything that would hurt his friends.

Tony Piccolo was awake; had been for a while. Probably she hadn’t given him as much of the sedative as she’d given Dagwood. But he was sitting unusually still, fully conscious of the danger of his position. His mouth was taped shut. Mariah had slid the pair of them into the cell with the single comment that "your friend has a smart mouth." And so they were five, and still no nearer to knowing why they were there.

O’Neill still felt, obscurely, that this whole mess was somehow his fault, but he felt immeasurably better for having company, even if it was company that he couldn’t see properly. They were all in the same condition, barefoot and without watches, belts, rings; deprived of everything except the clothes they had been standing up in when she took them. O’Neill knew that the figures in the chairs were Tony and Dagwood but to be perfectly honest without his glasses to him they were just a big blur and a slightly smaller blur. And so he and Ortiz and Ford and Dagwood and Piccolo sat immobilised in their cell and waited to see what she would do next.

There was a series of clanking noises and then they all felt the familiar motion of a submarine leaving dock.
"Is this the seaQuest?" Dagwood asked.
"I don’t think so, Dag," Tim told him, "but I’ll bet they’re all looking for us."
"Mmmm. Well I hope they look hard. I don’t like this place."
"I know, Dagwood. Neither do I. Neither do any of us."

She came back, with food. It was just a pile of ration packs which she carried under her arm and dropped on the floor, not caring where they landed. But Ford and Ortiz had been waiting for this moment: as she passed him, Ford rolled sideways and used the weight of his body to crash into the back of her knees and, as she tripped over him and went down, Ortiz rolled the other way on top of her. Awkward because of their bonds, the two of them tried to pin Mariah down with the weight of their bodies. O’Neill squirmed over to help and Ford gasped out "Search her. She must have a weapon, something."
He did his best: they all did. But they were trussed up and she was fit and strong and very determined. O’Neill felt rather than saw the heel of her hand connect with his chin and then next thing he knew he was at the other side of the room wondering where all the pretty stars came from. She shook off Ford and Ortiz and climbed back to her feet, kicking Miguel savagely in the knee as she did so.
"Nice try, boys," she snarled "but did you think I was making this up as I went along? Computer?"
A computerised voice answered apparently from no-where.
"Mariah?"
"Gas."
The room began to fill with white smoke and as Tim drifted into unconsciousness the last thing he heard was her taunting "Did you think I wouldn’t be prepared?"

Dagwood, being a dagger like Mariah, was still conscious, less affected by the gas as he needed less oxygen than the others. He simply looked at Mariah with hurt eyes and asked
"Why are you doing this?"
"You’ll see."

[end of part 4]

The chamber was little more than an airlock: on one side of the door was the undersea facility and on the other Mariah’s ship. But Mariah watched the door carefully and in her hand she had, not a weapon, but a com link. The door clanked open and a slender man in his late twenties stood there. He looked around him suspiciously. Mariah watched him from beyond a force screen. To enter her ship he had to pass through the chamber: it had been carefully designed so that there was no other way. But he was well aware the room was also carefully designed as a trap.

"So...I step inside and I get a dose of nanotech in the bloodstream?"
If Mariah was surprised at having her mind read she didn’t show it.
"That’s right. We have to trust each other. You can have what you want but we get what we want too. Win win."
"And to do that you want me to trust you with a packet of toxins in my bloodstream that your friend can detonate from a distance?"
"Just as I have to trust you not to do to me what you’re going to do to our prisoners."
John Danner smiled broadly and stepped into the chamber and onto Mariah’s ship.

"Get out of my way!"
After six hours of baby sitting Lucas was getting to the stage where he was just going to have to punch his minder out if he got in his way one more time. Brody had pulled himself off this particular duty after a couple of hours and the man currently shadowing Lucas wasn’t even one of his friends but a marine named Farnsworth whom he knew only distantly. Farnsworth had a knack for standing exactly on the spot Lucas needed to occupy and Lucas’ nerves were frazzled enough by the problems with the computer without needing to navigate around a klutz every time he moved.

Dr Murdoch, still shadowed by Loni Henderson, showed up at his door.
"Lucas?"
"What" he snarled impatiently, but then on seeing who it was "-oh, sorry doc."
She sized up the room quickly; the spaghetti tangle of wires on the floor, the layer of paper over the top of that, the pencil stuck behind Lucas’ ear, the other one in his mouth, the boot marks on several sheets of scribbled diagrams from the unfortunate Farnsworth’s feet, the body language of the two of them.
"Not going well?"
"You could say that. I’ve practically had to dismantle the system down to the hard wiring and I still keep finding ways he’s ahead of me. But I’m getting there. I think. But I’d like to meet the person who thought this up because in its own weird frustrating way it’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen. If you look at..."
"You need to take a break." she said firmly
"But I can’t- if I don’t get back on top..."
"When did you last eat? How many hours since you last slept? How can you fight back if you collapse in a heap? Maybe the complexity of the attack is designed to give you a nervous breakdown and leave the rest of us standing around chewing our thumbs waiting for the engineers to come and bring us a new computer altogether! Come on."
Reluctantly he allowed himself to be led away from the problem and into the mess hall, feeling like he was leading a parade with Henderson and Farnsworth trailing along behind.

Somehow he didn’t notice he had eaten more in half an hour than in the past twenty four hours: Dr Murdoch and Loni between them kept up a stream of conversation that took his mind off the computer problem and had him interrupting, mouth full of burger, to show them both how wrong they were about popular music, politics and the effect of fish farming on the ozone layer. Even the unfortunate Farnsworth managed to stay out of his way for long enough for him to finish a second helping of creme brulee. And then as the parade went back to his cabin he realised Dr Murdoch was actually proposing he should leave off working for long enough to sleep...

"Wow," Loni Henderson said a couple of hours later when she and the doctor were sharing a late night coffee "I never thought you’d get him to call it a day."
"He was dead on his feet, poor kid. All I had to do was distract him from the computer long enough for the need for sleep to catch up with him. Tell me, though, do you think there really is a problem? Are we in danger?"
"Doctor, we’re docked at Hawaii: even if we were under attack, we could just get off the boat and run for the trees!"

Famous last words. Even as Henderson spoke there was a clang and the seaQuest lurched sideways alarmingly. A klaxon began to sound an alarm. Henderson looked worried.
"I ought to get to the bridge..."
"But you’re torn between doing that and the instructions you were given to babysit me. That’s easily solved - go where you need to be and I’ll follow you for a change."

When the gas cleared and Tim came groggily back to consciousness Ortiz was gone. The first thing he heard was Jonathan Ford asking Dagwood whether he had seen what had happened.
"No. After Mariah left I went to sleep too, like you and Tim. Miguel was here then. Is Tony OK?"
Tim was surprised to hear Tony’s voice.
"Yea, I’m fine Dagwood. She must have taken the tape off of me while we were unconscious."
"You know," Tim mused, "She’s being very careful to keep us alive. When I was here alone she talked about having to check I didn’t suffocate if she decided to gag me."
"I don’t get it. What does she want with us?" Piccolo asked.
Tim blushed. "I think it’s my fault. She wanted the co-ordinates of where we left Danner. She drugged me, but when I wouldn’t tell her she brought Miguel in and I had to give it up, or she’d have drowned him."
"Danner!" Ford and Piccolo were horrified: they had both encountered the psychopathic psychic before. Dagwood summed it up best: "He’s a BAD man"
"You said it, Dag," agreed Tim.

[end of part 5]

Tim O'Neill sat alone in the grey room once again. Mariah had used gas, again and again. There had been no chance. First Ortiz, then Ford, then Dagwood had disappeared. He and Tony had, in the end, sat together for a long time, knowing what was coming, helpless to do anything about it. There had been nothing to say.

And now it was ending as it had begun. Tony had been taken too. Tim sat alone and waited for Mariah to do whatever it was she was going to do.

When the door opened at last, however, it was not Mariah who came for him but Danner.

"You're not Wolenczak," Danner said. O'Neill's flesh crept at finally being in Danner's presence. He recognised him from the vidcam tapes from when he had kidnapped Lucas six months ago. Tim had experienced Danner's mental powers then, too, as Danner had played tricks with his memory, with the memories of all the seaQuest crew, making them forget they even knew Lucas.

Danner's face was dark and grim. "I was promised Wolenczak," he said. "Bad luck for you that I haven't got what I wanted." He gripped Tim by the collar and hauled him to his feet, impatiently breaking the rope which bound his wrists to his ankles. He slammed Tim against the wall. Tim tried to think of something witty to say, some last words, something which might make this psychopath at least remember killing him after he had done it. But his brain was as cramped and slow as his muscles and there was nothing he could say just as there was nothing he could do.

Danner put his hands on the side of Tim's head, squeezing his skull until Tim felt his eyes would pop out. "You belong to me now" All Tim could see was Danner's face, his eyes, the pupils of his eyes. They were dark pools and he was drowning. They were gun barrels and they were boring holes in his skull. He was lost, drowned, pierced, gone.

And then at last he understood. Tim O’Neill deserved to be drowned, like a kitten, a weak, mewling, helpless thing that couldn’t stand up to the harsh blast of reality blowing through the ship. He was a new man now: a wolfshead, an outlaw, a pirate. He saw himself in the mirror of Danner’s eyes: he was wearing leather trousers and a shirt slashed to the waist and a headband holding his hair out of his eyes. Where were his boots? Where were his eyes? No-one had the right to keep anything from him that he wanted. He laughed and burst the feeble bonds that held him back. He wondered at the blood on his wrists - he lifted a hand to his mouth and licked off the blood. It was hot and salt. He was a wolfshead and blood was his birthright. Danner was the wolf and he was his pack. They would rage onto seaQuest and take what was rightfully theirs.

"Does it feel good?" the Wolf asked him.
O’Neill looked up and there was an entirely new light in his eyes.
"You know it does," he snarled.

"Stop it."
The voice came from the doorway. It was Mariah.
The Wolf was laughing. O’Neill recognised this strange female. Part of him wanted to vie with the Wolf, claim her for his own. But the Wolf led the Pack, and he was of the Pack. The Wolf and the Female snarled at each other, hackles raised, and O’Neill watched them, waiting for the Wolf to lead him.

"Why? What’s your problem?"
"You know the deal. This one is mine. You aren’t supposed to do it to him."
The rest of the Pack were coming. O’Neill could smell them before he could see them. His comrades. Ortiz, Ford, Dagwood, Piccolo, all with bright and feral eyes and the smell of blood hot in the air. He wanted to join them, to run with the Wolf, to fight, to kill. They crowded round him, slapping him on the back, high fiveing each other, happy to be a Pack again. This female was nothing. Why did she think she could hold them back?

"But he’s happy with me. He’s one of my wolves - aren’t you, Tim?"
He was with the Pack now, reunited. "Yes," he said, "yes." He wanted to howl. Where was the moon? They should be outside, howling, running...
"And if you told him he was a frog he’d jump. Get out of his head, Danner. Manipulate the other four but this one is mine."
"And Wolenczak? He was supposed to be mine."
"You’ll get what you want. Wolenczak and the Blue Moon are yours. seaQuest is destroyed and the UEO broken for the Marauder. None of you can do this without me, though, and I’m telling you my price."

The Wolf moved towards him and took his head in his hands. His wolf senses were enhanced: he could smell Wolf on Danner’s breath, sense the blood in his veins. And then he was drowning in those eyes, drowning, falling...

Everything changed. He understood the universe at last. She was the universe. She was standing so close. He could scarcely breathe at being in her presence. He wanted to fall at her feet, kiss the ground she walked on. He cursed his fate for blinding him at this moment when he stood so close, so near... He tried to speak but all he could whisper was "Mariah..."

"Is this what you want?" Danner was saying. "Not a wolf but a lapdog? Well there you are."
"I want you out of his head. The plan didn’t include you doing anything to him."
"Not my plan. My plan included Wolenczak: I should have been amusing myself watching him die by now. If you bore me, you can’t blame me for finding my own amusement, Mariah."
"And I told you, you’ll get Wolenczak - but not until we get the seaQuest. So let’s get back to the plan. The sooner we’re done the sooner we can all go our separate ways."

Tim realised he adored her. He wasn’t a Wolf: he must have been mad. He was a lover, not a fighter. She was speaking to this ugly little man Danner and yet, instead of being stunned by his good luck he was actually having the temerity to argue with her. Tim moved to step between them but she impatiently pushed him back. She had touched him! He was stunned with wonder.

"Well? Danner?"
Danner waited, testing.
"Well?"
A voice spoke out of the air.
"I have to concur with my colleague, Mr Danner. I would be grateful if you would release Mr O’Neill from your voodoo as you were asked."
Danner’s face broke into a grin. This was what he had been waiting for all along.
"Dr Ketcham I presume? Happy to speak with you at last. So you are willing to support your colleague?"
"I think I really must insist."
"And, as you know, you have made sure I can’t refuse you anything by filling my bloodstream with poisons that you can release from wherever it is that you are. And I can’t influence you mentally because you’re out of my range."
"My colleague needed some assurance that you wouldn’t simply, shall we say, override her wishes and reallocate our joint resources, but would stick to the agreed plan. And, as I say, I really think I must insist you stick to the agreed plan, which includes releasing your hold on Mr O’Neill."
"And that’s your final word? You’d be willing to kill me - and, may I point out, aborting your plan since the remainder of my wolf pack would, of course, revert to their normal personalities - simply to satisfy your colleague’s rather irrational desire for Mr O’Neill’s continued sanity?"
"I think the point is that we all agreed what we wanted in advance. I can’t support the argument that Mariah’s wish to cherish Mr O’Neill is any way more irrational than, say, your own desire to terminate Mr Wolenczak."
"Hmm. ‘Terminate’. I think you are aware that I want to do rather more than terminate Mr Wolenczak. In fact I should have to be rather brusque with anyone who terminated Mr Wolenczak before I had seen him undergo _all_ of the experiences I have in mind for him. But be that as it may. If you insist, of course, Mr O’Neill is of no interest to me whatsoever. Come here."

Tim found that he had moved towards Danner without there being any conscious volition on his part at all. For the third time, Danner held his head as if in a vice, and once more he was lost in those eyes. Only this time when Danner released him he fell to the ground, retching; he knew who he was and what he was and where he was.

His friends watched, eyes bright with the wolf light, as he gasped for breath in the clear understanding of what had been done to him and what was being done to them: what Danner had made them think they were. As the sensation of being a member of the wolfpack faded, he felt strangely empty. Because the wolf was power and killing and the hunt; no responsibility, no will outside the will of the Wolf and the urge for blood.

But now he was just Tim O’Neill once again. And now, once again, he was a prisoner. And as a prisoner and a member of the seaQuest crew he had a responsibility to do what he could to escape, to defeat his enemies, to help his friends. But his friends had become his enemies, and his real enemies - Danner, Mariah, Dr Ketcham - were impossibly powerful. He was as utterly alone as it is possible to be.

[end of part 6]

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