by L. A. Graf
So while he wasn’t exactly expecting to walk into someone else’s cabin while meaning to enter his own, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t already had nightmares about this very moment that differed only in the details.
The woman standing beside the room’s only desk jerked around with a gasp when the door hissed open. Chekov barely had time to register the hand which flew to her mouth and the shocked embarrassment in her blue eyes before he’d jumped backward through the closing hatch and into the corridor again. That was as long as it took him to realize that it was his desk she was standing over, his books and disks stacked on top of it, and his quarters in which she was doing it. All the same, he spared one extra moment to verify the cabin number and the name stenciled on the door before striding boldly back inside to confront her. “Excuse me—”
She seemed to have recovered herself by this time, and interrupted as though their first compromising encounter had never happened. “There you are! You’re late.”
It wasn’t the painfully abashed apology he’d expected. Blinking, he found himself suddenly unable to think past where he’d already started. “Excuse me?”
“Engineering told me you left twenty minutes ago.” She had to be someone’s yeoman—probably some high-ranking officer’s, judging from her elaborate blonde coif [37] and stiffly superior attitude. No yeoman who worked for anyone below a commander would have had the time to maintain such a hairstyle, much less the gall to speak so disdainfully to someone who was technically her superior. “I didn’t expect it would take you half the afternoon to get back to your own quarters.”
Chekov decided not to comment on that. Before he could inject something different, she swept up a bundle of clothing and equipment from the top of his desk and shoveled it into his arms as though glad to be rid of it.
Before Chekov could protest, she asked brusquely, “You don’t have any mental problems, do you?”
“What?”
The blonde yeoman twirled a finger alongside elaborate tresses, as if he needed to be shown where mental problems came from. “You know—fear of heights, paranoia, claustrophobia. Anything like that?”
What about fear of surreal visits from unfamiliar yeomen? “No.”
“Then report to Transporter Room 4. They’re probably waiting on you, too.”
This, at least, he knew how to respond to. “There must be some mistake.”
“You’re Ensign Pavel Chekov?” When he didn’t answer during her nonexistent pause, she planted her fists impatiently on her hips. “Command track cadet? Just released from a temporary tour in engineering services?”
“Yes,” he finally blurted. “But I’m scheduled to report to astrophysics at fourteen hundred hours.” He’d estimated that he only barely had enough time to clear out of engineering and visit his quarters to collect his [38] reference books before reporting in—and that was before his twenty minute detour and this ridiculous delay. “I can show you my orders if you don’t believe me.”
If the yeoman was at all impressed with his version of his schedule, she gave no sign. “It doesn’t matter what you were told before. You’ve been called up to assist on a planetary rescue mission.”
“What?” He hurried to intercept her as she whisked past him on her way to the door. The bundle in his arms threatened to tumble apart at the sudden movement, and he struggled to tame it so he wouldn’t have to gather up the pieces just to give them all back to her. “What possible use can I be to a rescue mission?”
“How am I supposed to know? I’d think you’d be thrilled to get off the ship for a change.” She shooed him toward the door with the same prissy fluttering of hands that old women in the Moscow suburbs used to chase sled dogs out of their kitchens. “Now get going! If you think I’m irritable when you’re twenty minutes late, wait until you meet Captain Kirk.”
Chapter Three
WHY, oh why, did it have to be D’Artagnan?
The teasing didn’t start right away, of course. Sulu hadn’t heard a single comment when he’d reported to the bridge after McCoy’s prototype antiviral vaccine had yanked him screaming back to sanity. The urgent need to escape from Psi 2000’s death spasms had dominated the first hour of that watch, followed by the sudden shock of finding out that they’d hurled themselves three days into the past. While the other bridge officers were still discussing the ramifications of time travel, Sulu had been called down to Sickbay where Dr. McCoy had ordered another round of detoxification for him and Kevin Riley, “just in case.”
It wasn’t until Riley accused the doctor of trying to shield them from unkind comments that Sulu started to [40] wonder exactly what it was that he’d done. His last clear memory of their stay at Psi 2000 was trying to keep a despondent Joe Tormolen from doing away with himself. After that came a blur of running, laughing, and fencing, laced through with the indistinct feeling that he’d made a total ass of himself. McCoy had gruffly denied Riley’s charge and told them both to rest while the last viral toxins that his prototype antidote had missed were screened out of their blood.
Exhausted from what felt like hours of fencing practice, and still depressed about the loss of Joe Tormolen, Sulu would probably have obeyed the doctor readily enough. But Kevin Riley in the next medical bed over had been more determined and more creative. As soon as McCoy left them alone, Riley squirmed out of his bed long enough to activate their room’s link to the ship’s main computer. At his request, the computer had shown them the visual logs it had recorded over the past two days, complete with Riley’s tuneless serenades from engineering and Sulu’s irrational dueling escapades. Sulu had spent the rest of his medical treatment wondering if Uhura would ever speak to him again, while Riley bemoaned his own stupidity and lack of musical taste.
An hour later, Sulu got a glimpse of things to come.
Nurse Christine Chapel began it, when she stopped by to check his blood counts and clear him for return to duty. “So, how is it with this madman?” she asked in her best professional nurse’s voice. Sulu shot her a quick look, startled by the not-very-professional question. The nurse’s face looked innocent enough, but the dancing glint in her eyes and the finger she had stuck into an [41] antique paper book with worn gilt letters spelling “Dumas,” gave her away. Sulu groaned.
“I read it when I was a teenager,” he pleaded. “It had a big impact on me. ...”
The nurse opened her dog-eared book and read aloud, “ ‘Never fear quarrels, but seek adventures. Fight on all occasions. Fight the more for duels being forbidden, since consequently there is twice as much courage in fighting.’ ” She waggled her forefinger at him as if it were a fencing foil. “Was that the part that made such a big impact?”
Her voice held a lilting mix of mockery, laughter, and feminine admiration. Sulu felt his cheeks tighten and he hurried to drag his tunic over his head so she couldn’t see what color his face had turned. He muttered something about being due on the bridge and bolted for the turbolift, not even waiting for Riley to join him. As the deck lights flashed by, however, Sulu faced the unpleasant fact that he would soon be stepping onto a bridge filled with people who had watched him swing shirtless down out of a hatchway, like a maniacal cross between a French musketeer and Tarzan.
He got a temporary reprieve when the turbolift whistled to a stop a few decks below the bridge to pick up another crewmate, but his sense of relief was very short-lived.
“All for one and one for all,” chanted John Russ, the engineering tech who usually worked the morning shift with him. His tone was insufferably cheerful. “The bridge crew has sworn to stick with you, buddy, even if you get arrested by Cardinal Richelieu—I mean Captain Kirk.”
Sulu was saved from needing to reply by the hiss of [42] the turbolift doors. He headed for the pilot’s console with the sound of the engineer’s laughter chasing him. Fortunately, Mr. Spock had the conn and merely gave Sulu an impassive glance as the pilot seated himself. But because Riley hadn’t reported for duty yet, Sulu had to share the helm wit
h Lieutenant Stiles for now. The second-shift navigator gave him a wicked smile.
“ ‘Why, this fellow must be the devil in person!’ ” Stiles said to the departing pilot, Ed Leslie. Evidently, Leslie hadn’t decided to take part in the shipwide joke, because he merely gave his fellow pilot a sympathetic look and a clap on the shoulder as he left. “ ‘Don Quixote took windmills for giants, and sheep for armies,’ ” Stiles continued smoothly. He must have spent the last few hours memorizing passages from the ship’s library. “ ‘D’Artagnan took every smile for an insult, and every look as a provocation.’ ”
“Then you’d better stop smiling, hadn’t you?” Sulu snapped at him.
Stiles’s obnoxious grin merely widened. “ ‘And for the first time in his life D’Artagnan, who had till that day entertained a very good opinion of himself, felt ridiculous.’ ”
That, unfortunately, was all too true. Sulu gritted his teeth and gazed down at his helm monitors, checking the orbital equations as carefully as if the Enterprise had been circling a complex triplicate moon instead of a normal terrestrial planet. He didn’t even look up when the bridge doors swished open again, and knew it was Riley only when Lieutenant Stiles started to hum a familiar Irish tune under his breath.
[43] “Stop it,” Riley snapped as he came to a stop beside the helm. “I don’t ever want to hear that song again!”
Stiles snorted with laughter. “Gee, that’s a shame. You were so good at singing it—”
Sulu reached out and caught Riley’s fist before it could connect with Stiles’s jaw. He succeeded, but there was no way he could disguise his movement to make it look like anything other than the interception of a punch. He heard Commander Spock clear his throat meaningfully behind them.
“Gentlemen, some of you may not be aware of it, but we are in the midst of an emergency operation. In a few moments, we will begin beaming down a party to rescue one of the survey teams on Tlaoli. And because of a possible danger to the Enterprise itself, we are maintaining a heightened state of alert on the bridge.” The tone of the science officer’s voice was so cold and steely that it sounded almost—but not quite—like irritation. “All departing shift members should clear the bridge immediately, and all arriving ones should review the ship’s logs to acquaint themselves with the situation.”
Given that direct order from a senior officer, even a troublemaker like Stiles couldn’t find an excuse to linger and torment them further. Sulu sighed in relief when the turbolift doors slid shut behind him.
“Get used to it,” he advised Riley quietly as the navigator dropped into the seat beside him. “Neither of us is going to live this down for a while.”
Riley shot him a sour look. “Easy for you to say, D’Artagnan. You’re not the one who almost got the ship blown up the other day.”
[44] Sulu gritted his teeth and began reviewing the helm records to find out what had happened while he was gone. If even fellow victims of the Psi 2000 virus couldn’t resist teasing him, he knew the next few days weren’t going to be fun. Maybe he’d use his spare time on this shift to figure out exactly how they’d managed to slingshot themselves back in time. If he could fling the Enterprise even farther into the past, he just might be able to steal every copy of The Three Musketeers from the San Francisco public library before a certain impressionable young fencing student ever read one.
Chekov was on deck three of the primary hull, halfway down the corridor to Transporter Room 4, when he finally decided this had to be some kind of elaborate joke. It had taken him that long to verify what combination of turbolifts and corridors would take him to his destination, and it was only just before exiting the last lift car that he’d finally taken a moment to paw through the bundle that had been thrust upon him by the prickly yeoman.
The coverall wasn’t all that different from the jumpers they’d sometimes worn in engineering, except this one was gold and it carried the command division star over the left breast instead of the twisted engineering lightning bolt. A lumpy plastic pouch with a loop of black nylon cord contained everything else, and it was dumping out this miscellany that finally convinced him he’d been targeted as just another scut on someone’s humor radar.
A manual tape measure and compass. A smaller pouch-within-a-pouch of reflective directional markers. [45] A bound booklet of blank waterproof plastisheets, a plastic-and-graphite mechanical pencil to go with it. And a metal whistle. It reminded him of the paraphernalia they were issued at the beginning of the Academy’s orienteering course. And it was all ridiculously redundant and useless on any kind of planetary mission he could think of. Tricorders and communicators did these jobs now, and did them better than humans. Issuing these sorts of materials to a new crew member could only be some kind of statement on his lack of usefulness, a joking implication that he might be left behind on some planet and have to find his own way home.
Indignation stopped Chekov just outside the transporter room door. He didn’t want to go in blushing with anger, but didn’t want to walk in as though he was too stupid to have figured out what was happening. Truth be told, he didn’t want to go in at all. He just couldn’t figure out what was worse—facing and identifying his tormentor, or slinking away to be laughed at behind his back for the rest of his term on this ship.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that a landing party really is waiting for you in there.
The thought of walking away from an actual duty summons was more frightening than any of the other prospects. He took a deep breath and straightened. If he were about to become the butt of some junior officer’s underdeveloped sense of humor, at least he could console himself with the knowledge that he’d let it happen rather than risk disobeying a direct command.
Lifting his chin, he stepped boldly forward through the sliding doors.
[46] All but one of the six people who turned to look at him were sealed into jumpsuits just like the one he now hugged against his chest. Three women in a rainbow of Services red, Command gold, and Science blue; a stocky man maybe twice Chekov’s age wearing a blue jumper that had seen better decades; the indifferent transporter tech in his unremarkable duty uniform; and the only other man in command gold, pale eyes irritable with waiting and a metal whistle bouncing impatiently in one hand.
“Ensign Chekov.” It wasn’t a question or a guess, even though Chekov knew he’d never met the captain face-to-face before. Kirk’s eyes flicked over him. “You’re not dressed.”
The blush Chekov had tried so hard to leave outside the door roared over him again. “Uh, no, sir. I assumed there must—”
“Let me worry about the assumptions, Ensign. Get dressed.”
“Yes, sir.” He willed himself not to stammer, but only partially succeeded.
Kirk turned to collect the rest of the room with his gaze while Chekov hastily shook out his jumper and began stepping into it. “All right, everyone, listen up. We’ll be beaming down to the survey team’s base camp, because we know it hasn’t been affected by whatever on this planet drains power and pulls ships out of orbit. That will give us a one-kilometer hike to the cave entrance itself. The terrain is wicked, so I want us to stay close together, both on the surface and once we get inside the cave.” His gaze swept across them and, to Chekov’s relief, snagged up on the woman in the gold jumper [47] instead of him. “Ensign Martine, I’ll want our power supplies kept close to Lieutenant Uhura so we can maintain contact with the ship as we travel.”
The pretty, dark-haired woman nodded, reaching back to touch the bulky pack across her shoulders as though to make sure it was still there.
“Lieutenant Wright, I’m going to ask you to stay in the middle of the group until we locate the missing survey team.” A surprisingly boyish smile flashed across Kirk’s face. “If anyone is going to run into trouble, I’d rather it wasn’t our only medic.”
“I understand, sir.” The blue-clad medic passed a hand through her close-cropped blonde hair. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather it wasn’t anyon
e.”
Kirk grinned again. “Point taken.” Then he waved forward the last figure in Science Division blue, catching the abbreviated helmet the other man tossed to him. “Equipment orientation now. Mr. Sanner, if you please.”
Sanner worked down the line of them, pushing a helmet toward each of them and barely pausing long enough to make sure each one was taken. “I know they’re uncomfortable and they look stupid,” he said, with that complete lack of formality only research scientists could get away with in Starfleet, “but wear ’em anyway. You’d be amazed what you’ll find to bump your head on inside a cave.” He thumped a lumpy structure on the top of the helmet he was handing Martine, and it rattled as though filled with small marbles. “Once we get underground, you’re going to need to light your carbide lamp. There’s water in the reservoir here, carbide rocks down below. This little knob controls the drip. The [48] more water you add to the carbide, the more gas it lets off, which means you can turn up the flow if you need a bright light, but you’re gonna be using up your light faster that way. I’ve got extra carbide with my gear, in case one of you decides he has to go wild and light up an entire chamber.” This time he paused in front of Chekov, quickly demonstrated how to start the water drip again, and triggered a small ignitor with his thumb. A neat feather of blue-and-gold flame sprang to life just in front of the lamp’s brightly polished reflector. “Don’t blow it out,” he instructed, “or you’ll waste gas. Just turn off the water.” Which he did, and the little flame guttered and died.
Turning the helmet over to Chekov, Sanner wandered back toward his place near the base of the transporter. “I’ve got a rope ladder, if we need it, and plenty of pitons. You’ve all got whistles—make as much noise as you can if we get separated in the cave, and we’ll find you. Otherwise ...” Sanner shrugged, seating himself on the transporter’s steps. “Don’t step anyplace where you can’t see the bottom.”
