by L. A. Graf
"You mean, besides making a mess?" The angle of Chekov's jaw tightened in disapproval as he watched. "I have no idea."
"Well, hadn't we better find out?"
"I'll send Tenzing over to check." He sent a quick hand signal to one of his attentive security guards, just as the tallest green-clad figure straightened with a pistol-shaped object in one hand.
"Chekov!" Uhura gasped, but the security chief was already moving. His hand signal turned into a chopping wave that sent Enterprise guards diving forward even as he leapt toward them with what looked to Uhura like recklessly long strides. Four sleekly muscled black figures converged on the company official. He vanished beneath them, but not before a blast shattered the icy silence.
Uhura blinked and tipped her head back, watching as a sulfur-yellow flare feathered its way up into the clouds. It burned there for a moment, then sizzled out just as a rising growl of voices drew her attention back to the landing party. She squared her shoulders and headed for them.
" what right you have to interfere?" The Nordstral officer scrambled to his feet as the Enterprise crewmen moved apart, shoving his hard plastic face mask back so Chekov could see his scowl. Uhura recognized the jutting features of Curie's station manager, and winced. Captain Kirk had warned her that Nicholai Steno was not an easy man to deal with. "Just who the hell are you anyway, mister?"
"Lieutenant Pavel Chekov, Federation Starship Security." The Russian sounded calm enough, but Uhura could hear suppressed dislike in his deepening accent. "Captain Kirk put me in charge of security for this landing party."
"The hell he did! All he put you in charge of were those goons you brought with you!" Steno waved at Chekov's security personnel, two of whom had swung to face their startled Nordstral counterparts while the third cradled the confiscated flare gun. "As of this moment, I am the senior planetary officer of Nordstral Pharmaceuticals. I'm the one in charge here!"
"Begging the senior planetary officer's pardon." Chekov's voice had turned so cold, Uhura barely recognized the undertone of sarcasm in his words. "Federation articles clearly state that in a Priority One emergency, starship personnel outrank their equivalent planetary authorities. Sir."
"I'm not your equivalent authority, you bug-eyed idiot!" It amazed Uhura that the company man would snarl into Chekov's face like that, as if he couldn't see the readiness in the younger man's stance. Despite the half-meter difference in their heights, she had no doubt who would win if this came to a fight. The possibility made her pick up her pace. "You deepspace jockeys like to think you run the universe, but I'm not going to let you"
"You have no authority"
The snarled braid of voices rose to a roar. Uhura skidded the last few feet down the rocky ice slope, hurriedly tapping a dial on her insulation suit's translator as she went.
"Gentlemen!"
Both men swung around as her amplified voice cracked through the frigid air, Chekov with a swift pivot, Steno with a jerk and a curse. Uhura tapped her volume adjustment down again and faced them, trying to project as much calm patience as she could.
"Lieutenant Chekov, Mr. Stenoplease try to remember that we're here to rescue people, not to fight with each other."
"Yessir," Chekov muttered, ducking his chin against his chest. Steno snorted scornfully, and Uhura turned toward him, flipping up the goggles covering her eyes so he could see her frown. The sudden unshielded brilliance of the ice sheet made her eyes burn, but she kept the goggles up anyway.
"For your information, Mr. Steno, Lieutenant Chekov is entirely correct about Priority One emergency rules. In point of law, his rank may not make him your equivalent in authority, but mine certainly does."
The snap in her voice must have gotten through to the station manager. A muscle jerked in his cheek as he blinked down at her, his frost-whitened eyebrows lifting in surprise.
"Thank you, Commander." Chekov put a little more stress than usual on Uhura's title, and she heard Steno grumble a reluctant acknowledgment. With a sigh of relief, she lowered her goggles and blinked as the polarizers brought the white blur of the ice sheet back into focus.
"Now, Mr. Steno," Chekov said, very politely. "Would you care to explain to the lieutenant commander what you were doing with that flare?"
The Nordstral official grunted, wrestling his old-fashioned plastic visor back down over the coating of frost that had gathered on the edge of his foam suit. "It's standard procedure," he said curtly. "That's how we tell the Kitka to send out guides for us."
Uhura scanned the barren expanse of ice around them. "Do the natives have a settlement near here?"
"Who knows? They're nomads, they follow fish around from one open crevasse to another as the ice sheet drifts. When they do stop, they burrow down inside the ice like moles. It's easier to let them find us when we need guides."
"Do we need guides?" Chekov still made an effort to sound polite, but the undertone of skepticism in his voice must have gotten through to Steno. The taller man scowled through his frost-clouded visor.
"Listen, Lieutenantthis planet has more transient magnetic fields than a galactic core! You try finding your way around it alone, and you'll find out real fast how well your fancy Starfleet instruments work in a mess like this. We don't even have any decent maps, the way the ice sheet keeps cracking and movingit's like trying to map the scum on a stagnant pond." Steno snorted, blowing a cloud of mist out his breath filter. "Trust me, starboy. When the boreal winds kick in this afternoon, you'll be damn glad to have a Kitka here to guide you to shelter."
"Will I?" Chekov's voice sounded grim. "I wonder if your missing research team was glad of it."
The Nordstral officer took a step back, almost bumping into the tall Enterprise guard behind him. "What's that supposed to mean? You think the Kitka had something to do with us losing that research team?"
The sheer amazement in Steno's voice surprised Uhurawas the man so stupid he'd never even thought of that possibility? She didn't consider it very likely herself, but if twelve years in Starfleet had taught her anything, it was never to discount the improbable on unknown planets.
Chekov muttered in Russian, then said quietly to Steno, "You have no idea how your research team vanished, sir. All we know is that they probably sent up a flare just like this one, and you never heard from them again. We have to consider every possibility."
"Not that one." The station manager snorted out another cloud of mist. "Of all the stupid things I've heard today, blaming the Kitka for this mess is the worst. Listen, Lieutenant Checkers or whatever your name isyou just mind your goons and do what your little lieutenant commander tells you to. Leave the thinking on this trip to me."
Uhura watched speechlessly as Steno turned and strode back to his messy sprawl of equipment, swerving awkwardly around the security guard behind him. The tall, black-suited figure swung to follow him, then glanced back over his shoulder when Chekov snapped out, "No!"
"But, Chief!" Michael Howard's voice sounded oddly fierce through the breath filter. "He called you"
"Being rude does not make him a security risk, Mr. Howard." Chekov sent a quick signal to the rest of his crew, and they left the uneasy Nordstral men they had been guarding to gather around him. "This is a Code Three situation. Potentially dangerous ground parties are now aware of our location and converging on this site. I want perimeter guard at twenty meters, with surveillance cross-checks on anything that looks suspicious." The security chief glanced around. "Positions clockwise starting from that tall rock: Publicker, Tenzing, Howard, me. Phasers on stun."
"Yessir." The three guards scattered outward without another word, leaving Uhura and Chekov standing together. She lifted her eyebrows inquiringly at him, then remembered he couldn't see the expression through her goggles.
"Is there anything you'd like me to do?" she asked instead. "You know I haven't got a real job here until the Kitka show up."
"I was hoping you'd ask." Chekov jerked his chin toward their gravsled. "How about keeping an eye on
the supplies?"
"Is that really necessary?" Uhura asked, peeking under the gravsled's cover to see what was hidden beneath it. "What's going to happen to a few kilograms of tents and" Catching sight of a bundle snuggled near the bottom of the load, she angled a look up at him. "A solar-powered winch, Chekov?"
He shrugged, obviously not put off by her amusement. "We had extra room and I like to be prepared." He tugged the cover back into place as though to forestall any further comments. "I'd rather have you on perimeter with the rest of us," he admitted, "but if we leave our gear lying around unwatched, it might get ransacked by these Nordstral"
He paused, evidently searching for a word. Uhura smiled and supplied one. "Goons?"
"Goons." A flicker of his usual wry humor surfaced for a moment in his voice. "That's not exactly what I'd call them in Russian, but it's close enough."
Kirk stopped pacing the land station's narrow confines when a technician's voice rang out. "Yo, Clara!"
A short woman had entered the other end of the docking hut from a rabbit's warren of tunnels connecting it to the other buildings. She was dressed for outside in pants, knee-high boots, and a parka that appeared twice as thick as the Federation-issued garb. A large, bulky pack lay secured across her shoulders, and goggles hung around her neck.
She turned at the docking technician's call and waved a mittened hand. She tossed back the jacket hood and set free a wealth of multibraided hair that reminded McCoy of Medusa's snakes. "Don't be yarpin' at me, Tootsie. I got mail-run, and you know how them sailors hate to be kept waiting."
The tech jerked a thumb in their direction. "Two for the Soroya."
She nodded. "Ah, yes." She smoothly shrugged out of the cumbersome pack and left it leaning against the wall while she approached the Starfleet officers, pulling off her mittens as she walked. She offered a strong handshake first to Kirk and then to McCoy, and smiled broadly, her perfect teeth very white against her chestnut-colored skin.
"You'd be the Federation men," she said in a lilting, singsong accent. "I heard you were coming."
"Captain James Kirk and Dr. Leonard McCoy," Kirk replied briskly. "You're our guide? You'll take us to meet Captain Mandeville?"
Her grin broadened, puffing her cheeks up like a squirrel's. "Ah, yes. I'm Clara." The vowels were broadened to "ahs" in an almost southern-sounding dialect. She jerked her head toward the door. "Come on, then." She strode across the room without waiting to see if they'd follow, reshouldered the pack, and opened the outer door.
The frigid air made McCoy hiss. Clara cast a dark eye toward him over her shoulder while she adjusted her goggles and watched the men do likewise. "You don't sound used to this weather, Doctor."
"I'm not," he grumbled, securing the hood soundly around his ears as he walked. The snow and ice screamed and squealed under his boots and made him feel like he needed a good scratch. "I'm a southerner."
She chuckled as though she understood. "Me, too."
"You're not a native?" Kirk asked, sounding surprised.
Clara hooted with good-natured laughter. "You must never have seen a live Kitka to be saying that," she said, still grinning. "Bandy little folk, they aresquare and squat, not like this skinny body." She slapped herself in the stomach, but didn't seem displeased with her proportions. "More yellow than brown, too, with eyes that sparkle like fish scales. Blue- or green-eyed, most of them, going whiter and whiter as they get old. You'll never take a human for one, once you've met them."
Kirk nodded, glancing nervously around them. "But I'd heard Nordstral Pharmaceuticals hired native guides to lead everyone across the ice."
"Oh, that was in the beginning, when we first arrived. This area's as stable as anything gets on Nordstral, so we're all used to it by now. They still have to use guides out on the pack ice up north, though. Bad, dangerous stuff, that. Grab you up and swallow you whole without a trace. Whatever mystic ways they have, those northern Kitka are the only folk can walk around safely up there." She grinned when the men exchanged looks; or it might have been a continuation of the same grin, McCoy wasn't certain. She seemed to smile more than anyone he'd ever met, except for maybe Sulu. "No need to worry, though. I'll take care of you. As for being native, well, I thank you for the compliment, and I'm probably the next best thing, having been here as long as I have. I'm from EarthJamaica, to be exact."
"How did you end up here?" McCoy asked, curiosity getting the better of him.
Clara shrugged one shoulder and dipped the other for further emphasis. "Oh, that's a long story. I'll tell it to you, maybe, sometime."
"Can you tell us a little about the company?" Kirk asked, sounding as though he was just making conversation.
Their guide turned around and walked backward as easily as she had facing forward. "I'll do what I can," she replied agreeably.
"I'm curious. How do you harvest plankton on an icebound planet?"
"Only partially icebound. The Kitka hunting holes are open, as are various areas where the action of the glaciers calving has kept free water. And there's a good, sound band of open water around the equator." She pointed down as she walked. "Which is here."
"Doesn't plankton need sunlight to bloom?" Kirk asked. The tips of his ears and nose were red with cold, and his breath steamed and curled about his face.
"To get the biggest and heaviest blooms, sunlight always helps. But most of the plankton's energy comes from the planet's magnetic field, and that's present everywhere."
McCoy frowned. "It's not too cold under all that ice for plants to grow?"
Clara shook her head. "The ability of marine plankton to thrive under heavy ice sheets was first discovered on Earth by Russian fleets. They brought ice cutters in to catch the schools of fish that fed off the plankton." She cocked her head and studied McCoy. "What's so funny?"
He pursed his lips around a smile. "I was thinking about one of our crewmen. He's Russian, and he'd be proud as punch to hear you tell this."
"He should be. If not for the Russians, we probably wouldn't be on Nordstral now." Again, the grin. "Then again, maybe I don't exactly owe them a debt of thanks for that, eh?"
Clara swung her arms and shifted the pack across her shoulders. "Anyway, what the Russian fleets found under the ice where they'd previously thought plankton could not exist was an abundance of wildlife, all subsisting on plankton or plankton feeders. Fortunately for this company, Nordstral proved to behave exactly the same way, only on a much greater scale. Using submarine harvesters makes it fairly easy to gather the plankton."
"Indigenous life?" McCoy asked.
"Well, there's the Kitka, of course. And lots of marine life." She waved a thick arm at their surroundings. "Not much else can stomach what Nordstral has to offer."
"And the Kitka serve on the harvesters?" Kirk queried.
"Quite a few of them, yes." She winked playfully at the captain. "Don't let all those glaciers fool you. They've got quite a tech level in the cities that are strung along the equator."
"Are they hostile? Upset by the harvesting or having their skilled people drawn away to the harvesters?"
"Not to my knowledge. They don't seem to much care what we do, so long as we don't dirty up the place and we pay our rent. And it's not just the skilled working the harvesters. We've got plenty of young folk looking for good money, not to mention Kitka well into their middle years, with plenty of hunting and ice experience behind them." Her eyes twinkled. "That's to our advantage."
"What about Captain Mandeville?" Kirk squinted against the glare and turned the full force of his gaze on Clara.
She didn't seem particularly affected. She shrugged, turned about-face again and trudged forward. "What do you want to know?"
"What kind of man is he? How is he with his crew? Do they like serving under him?"
The pack shifted under the movement of her shoulders. "As much as sailors ever do. Somebody always complains about something, Captain Kirk. Such talk isn't worth much."
"Isn't it?" Kirk pressed
, obviously expecting that any captain, even one as good as he, would have disgruntled someone somewhere down the line.
"I can't know it all, obviously, but nothing's come to these ears worth discussing, and I do have a talent for hearing most things that go on around here."
"You wouldn't say that just to protect him?"
Clara stopped and turned to face him. For a change, her expression was completely serious. "Captain Mandeville doesn't need protecting from anyone. That much I can tell you." Without giving him an opportunity to respond, she turned away and continued toward the harbor.
McCoy, hunched as deeply in his parka as he could go without curling into a fetal position, looked at his friend. "So much for round one."
Kirk's eyes were pensive as he watched Clara trek across the ice ahead of them. "It's only the groundwork, Bones. Just because she doesn't know anything or is pretending she doesn't, doesn't mean someone else won't talk. I want to check out this Captain Mandeville close up. I think Clara's protecting him for some reason, and I want to know what it is." He followed Clara's retreating back.
McCoy watched him for a moment, then let his gaze drift beyond Kirk's broad shoulders. A cold fist clenched around his heart and he swallowed hard. He'd been so caught up in the conversation between Kirk and the guide, he hadn't realized how close they'd come to the water. The tiny ribbon visible from the hut had widened into an enormous channel of black, seemingly thick water. Icebergs as small as a child's snowman or larger than a shuttle floated majestically on the surface. He murmured and hurried to catch up with Kirk.
"What did you say?" Kirk barely glanced at him.
McCoy shook his head, finding it odd the way his hood stayed still and his head moved around inside it. "Nothing. Just something from an old song I once heard about the Titanic."
