by L. A. Graf
[159] “And we’ll be most effective at doing that if we’re not panicking about when the force field might arrive,” Tomlinson guessed, nodding. “That’s a good thought, Lieutenant. We’ll keep our mouths shut about it.”
“Thanks,” Uhura said. “I wasn’t sure you’d understand.”
Tomlinson glanced down at Martine, then both of them smiled unexpectedly. “When you work in the weapons banks, Lieutenant Uhura, the first thing you learn is not to listen to the battle reports about what might be coming your way,” Martine informed her. “You already know you’re the part of the ship that the other guy is aiming at. If you waste all your time worrying about when you’re going to blow up, then you probably will blow up.”
“And you won’t have any fun in the meantime.” Tomlinson touched the small of Martine’s back to urge her up the conduit, and kept his hand there as they began walking. Uhura lifted an eyebrow, then saw that he was surreptitiously helping to support the weight of her heavy pack under the guise of flirtation. She wasn’t sure what Kirk would have said about that, but decided that she wasn’t going to make an issue of it.
The spiraling path up to the large column-filled upper chamber seemed much harder to climb now than when they’d first walked it. Uhura intellectually knew that was because she was far more tired and downcast than she’d been the first time through, but she couldn’t help feeling a little nervous as the conduits twisted, then straightened, then twisted again. Had they lost their way without the benefit of Chekov’s map? Had Jaeger in his [160] weariness led Sanner and Smith down the wrong side of those branches they’d gone through? Could they be walking into another ice cave, with another curtain of rippling force waiting for them?
A waft of distinctly warmer air against her cold-chapped face proved that the last of her worries, at least, was unfounded. Uhura glanced up from trudging last along their track, in the place she thought the commander ought to have. Ahead of her, she could see only a sharp turn in the passage, but she could already hear the way the other crew members’ voices echoed through a large, hollow space. And the warmth of the air flowing out of that upper chamber wasn’t an illusion. When Uhura stepped inside, she could actually feel her cave juniper relax its tight, insulating grip on her as it adjusted to a more reasonable temperature gradient. That must be the draft of surface air Jaeger kept talking about.
The sound of voices seemed unusually loud, even given the echo effect Uhura remembered from their first entrance into this cathedral-like space full of travertine columns. She glanced around, seeing Wright and D’Amato carefully lower Davis back to the makeshift bed they had left here, while Palamas began to pile silver emergency blankets on top of her. Jaeger sat in another huddle of blankets nearby, his hands wrapped around the minuscule warmth of an unmounted carbide light. That wasn’t where all the noise was coming from.
Uhura’s glance swung around to the giant rubble pile at the back of the cave, where Sanner and Smith had already gone to begin their assault. Tomlinson and Martine were joining them, and all four voices were raised [161] in what sounded more like exhilaration than anything else. Uhura blinked, becoming slowly aware of her own tiredness and resultant stupidity. She couldn’t see anything worth getting that excited about over there—no sudden breaks in the roof of the cave, or shafts of sunlight slanting in through the boulders. So what on Earth—?
The knot of crew members split apart, and turned to cross back to Uhura. She blinked again, and scrubbed at her eyes to make sure she wasn’t mistaken. Four members of the team had headed across to the rubble pile, but five members were walking away from it now. And the small, dark-haired man in the center, walking slowly but steadily back toward Uhura, was none other than Ensign Chekov.
Chapter Nine
AT LEAST THE FIRST question Lieutenant Uhura asked him was the easiest one to answer. “Are you all right?”
Chekov nodded stiffly. “Yes, sir.” Then he felt compelled to add, “I think so, sir,” because he was cold, and confused, and his stomach felt as though it had collapsed into water inside him, and it occurred to him that he might not be the best judge at the moment of whether or not he was functional.
Apparently agreeing with him, Uhura turned to motion Diana Wright forward out of what had become a surprisingly large group of people. The medic took his elbow and led him back through the little crowd, to where another woman in a gold cave suit already lay stretched out with her hand over her eyes. Chekov felt weirdly inappropriate seating himself on a pack near her [163] feet, as if he was impinging on a stranger’s bench space in a public spaceport.
It was weirder still to have the others follow him and Wright with such confident familiarity, crowding around the makeshift bed and staring at him expectantly. He stole looks over Wright’s shoulder as she examined his skull and shone her light into his eyes, trying to pick out someone he recognized in the jumble of unknown faces.
His eyes found Sanner standing with an older man in science blue who looked like he’d been on the losing end of a fistfight. Suddenly aware of Chekov’s attention, Sanner blurted out, “Where’s the captain?” as though he’d been holding his breath around the question ever since they’d stumbled upon Chekov.
“I ...” Of all the comments which could have been on the tip of Sanner’s tongue, this was not one Chekov had expected. He blinked, unsure how to respond to such an obviously serious and yet ridiculous question. “I thought he was up with you,” he finally managed, feeling utterly stupid. “The last time I saw him, sir, he was still with the rest of you.”
“You both disappeared together.” That was Uhura, visible again at the front of the group now that she had pushed her way between a tall blonde woman in blue and a short, stout, smiling woman in security red.
It was their syntax, Chekov realized abruptly, the English language’s damned capacity for inaccuracy and misunderstanding. If he could figure out how to clarify what he was saying, they’d realize there was no way he could know where the captain had gone once he himself had hit the water. “I didn’t disappear,” he said very [164] carefully, trying to speak clearly and choose the right verbs. “I fell.”
Uhura’s eyes widened in what could only have been surprise, but the scientist at Sanner’s elbow shot his hand into the air with a triumphant smile. “Ah ha! I knew it!”
Sanner pinned his companion with a curmudgeonly scowl. “Where? I’m telling you, the floor there was completely intact rock.” It wasn’t clear if he directed those comments at Chekov or the other man, who must have also been a cave geologist.
Before Chekov could figure out how to answer, the taller woman near Uhura asked, “Ensign, how did you end up back here?”
Who are you? he wanted to exclaim. Out of all this weirdness, that was the part that alarmed him the most—the fact that six people whose faces meant nothing to him had apparently joined their party in the brief span of time when he must have been unconscious. Somehow they all seemed to know him and care about the details of his mishap, and he couldn’t recall even the most basic introductions. He understood that they must be the members of Survey Team Three, lost in the cave several hours ahead of the landing party. But when had they become part of the rescue party and no longer just the rescuees?
“I don’t know, sir.” He directed that initial answer to the scientist who’d specifically asked him, then turned away from Wright’s examination to face Uhura squarely. “I mean, I fell when the ledge became icy after we fired our phasers. Sir, I don’t know where this—” He gestured vaguely around him. “—I don’t know where we are now. I ... I thought there was water below us [165] where I fell, but ...” But he was obviously dry and undrowned, and the thin skim of hoarfrost that covered the flowstone columns here came nowhere near explaining the icy plunge that was his last coherent memory.
“We’re talking about what happened after that.” Uhura came a few steps closer, calm despite his growing panic. “A long time after that, Mr. Chekov, when we went into Mr. Jaeger’s ice cave�
��did you fall again there?”
“There was nothing after that.” He wished he didn’t sound so frightened, so desperate. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know anyone named Mr. Jaeger, or anything about an ice cave. I only know that I fell down the crevasse we were walking along, and then ...” Then came the horrible chill of being swallowed by near-freezing water, the darkness, the realization that he was standing all alone in a vast empty chamber with a carbide lamp too wet to relight and no whistle around his neck. He’d called out once or twice only to have his voice bounce back to him in grotesquely attenuated echoes. It had actually crossed his mind that he was dead, that this was all there was. “And then I was here,” he finished lamely.
The tock-tock of water dripping and freezing on the cavern’s flowstone floor was what had finally saved him. Unless Hell was vastly more damp than predicted (or Heaven vastly more unpleasant), he had realized that he was still inside the caves of Tlaoli 4 somewhere, which meant the others would find him eventually. Chekov had unscrewed his useless lamp from the top of his helmet then, and had used the helmet itself as an uncomfortable perch on which to sit and wait. In the small eternity that had crept by since then, he hadn’t even tried to imagine [166] an explanation for how a fall into an underground cave pond had washed him up here. He realized now that this was because he’d known even then that no good explanation existed.
Diana Wright was the first to break the silence. “It could be shock.” She shrugged when the others all looked at her. “He doesn’t show any signs of having a concussion, or any other physical damage for that matter. But we don’t know exactly what that force field did to him.”
Chekov twisted around to stare at her, convinced she must be joking. “Force field?” But the medic, unsmiling, only glanced a further question toward Lieutenant Uhura.
“Ensign, I want you to listen to me.” Uhura squatted down in front of him, catching him by the arms and making him look her in the eye. Her smooth dark face was remarkably calm and serene, considering how insane she must think he was. “After you fell down the crevasse, Captain Kirk jumped into the water after you and you both broke through a rock ceiling into a lower set of cave passages. That’s where we are now. We located Survey Team Three—” She motioned toward the unfamiliar people surrounding them. “—that’s Lieutenant Jaeger and his people.” The older scientist by Sanner—Jaeger, Chekov realized—sketched a short, polite nod. “They led us to the other end of the cave system, to a chamber a lot like this one, where Mr. Jaeger thought we might be able to find a faster way back to the surface.”
“You mapped the whole way,” the burly female security guard added. “I helped you.” She held up his tape measure as if this somehow proved her claim. Her warm [167] smile made Chekov feel oddly guilty that he couldn’t even recall her name.
“Once we got there,” Uhura continued, “you and Captain Kirk walked out into the middle of the room ...” She trailed off into a shrug, the way people do when the only thing they can think to say is something embarrassing or unpleasant.
Sanner, on the other hand, never seemed at a loss for words. “And you vanished. Poof. Into thin air.”
Chekov looked back and forth between them for what seemed a very long time, not even sure how he felt about all this new information, much less how he was supposed to react to it.
“You don’t remember anything?” Uhura finally asked.
Chekov shook his head miserably. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“What about the captain?” The woman on the pile of supply packs barely moved, her hand still across her eyes and her lips still drawn down into a tense line. Her words sounded thick and blurry. “If that force field sent Ensign Chekov here, maybe it sent the captain here, too.”
The other members of the combined parties stirred restlessly. Even Chekov caught himself squinting out into the darkness as though expecting to catch some glimpse of something no one else could see.
“If he’s here,” Sanner asked, “then why haven’t we found him?”
Uhura pushed to her feet. “Maybe he’s lost his memory, too. Maybe he doesn’t even remember who we are.” She turned to the slim young man holding Angela Martine’s hand. “Tomlinson, Martine, start searching that side of the cavern. Smith—” This was apparently [168] the broad-shouldered security guard. “—you’ll come with me. Mr. D’Amato, I want you to stay just outside the entrance and watch in case that alien field gets any closer.”
The quiet male scientist at the back of the group nodded and pulled together his gear. “I’ll keep my lamp turned off.”
As D’Amato started off, Sanner volunteered, “And I’ll start trying to clear out that alternate exit.”
“Keep Mr. Jaeger on the ground!” Uhura obviously meant it as a warning, and didn’t move her gaze from Sanner until he’d sighed and given her his promise. Then she said to Wright, “Stay with Davis and Chekov.”
“Lieutenant!” Chekov only meant to stop Uhura with his call, but Sanner and Jaeger also paused and looked back at him. He reminded himself to be more specific when he addressed his commanders in the future. “Lieutenant Uhura, sir, I want to help.” He came forward a step, hands extended, when he saw her open her mouth to contradict him. “I know I don’t remember everything, sir, but I feel fine. And I want to do my part. Please, sir.”
Uhura glanced a question at Wright. The medic shrugged. “I can’t find anything obvious wrong with him.”
The lieutenant hesitated only a moment longer, then sighed as though sure she was going to regret her leniency. “All right. But if you start to feel sick or dizzy or—”
Chekov tried to smile reassuringly. “I promise I won’t fall down any more cliffs.”
From close by in the near darkness, Sanner made a [169] little noise that was half laugh, half snort. “You’re about five hours too late on that one, mister.”
“Drake. Hailing. Enterprise.” Sulu clipped each word into its own distinct sentence, knowing they would arrive in a barrage of subspace static. Beneath Tlaoli’s drab and timeworn surface, some monstrous force was stirring to life. The planet was spitting out subspace noise on every possible communications frequency now, and interfering with most of the shuttle’s sensors as well. Even the Drake’s most basic altitude-finding instruments had error readings high into the red. Sulu had learned the hard way not to trust them when he’d nearly plunged the unwieldy cargo shuttle into a saltwater swamp on his first trip down to the surface. On his second trip he’d flown strictly by sight rules, even through the garnet-colored glow of sunset.
“Enterprise ...” After that one word, Lieutenant Palmer’s voice disintegrated into another blast of static. Sulu forced himself to wait, his fingers tapping impatiently on the transmit button. If it had been Uhura, he would have replied right away, secure in the knowledge that she wouldn’t say more than she needed to on such a static-clogged channel. But just as he’d expected, the junior communications officer was continuing to send unnecessary instructions through the snarl of background noise. “Drake, please report in.”
“I’m trying to,” Sulu growled, but he was careful not to depress the transmission switch until after he said it. From the narrow passageway that led to the passenger compartment, he heard a stifled snort from one of the [170] geologists. “Drake is returning to Enterprise. Estimated docking time, twenty forty-five.”
“Acknowledge. Commander Spock ...” Whatever else Palmer said was lost in another tidal swell of static.
“Everything okay now?” Geologic Technician Fisher poked his head through the passage in an oddly tentative manner. Although he was technically second-in-command, and therefore had the right to occupy the copilot’s seat, Sulu had summarily evicted him during the launch. He’d told Fisher it was for safety reasons, which wasn’t entirely untrue. Scotty’s magnetic shielding had kept his engines powered up, but they hadn’t protected the Drake from the sudden and unexplained changes in course heading that he’d felt back on the Enterprise. In the much smaller mas
s of the shuttle, they felt like buffeting blows of invisible wind rather than gentle diversions of orbit. Sulu had needed all of his concentration and considerable skill as a pilot just to guide the shuttle up through Tlaoli’s treacherous gravity well.
“We’re past the worst of it.” Sulu could see the Enterprise emerging around the curve of Tlaoli 4, a shining silver beacon against the utter blackness of deep space. Like a small second moon, the ship was catching sunlight from a star that Sulu could no longer see. Tlaoli’s sun had set just as he had loaded the two remaining geologists from the survey team and their precious fossiliferous samples. Below him, the crimson and orange remnants of a glorious dust-filtered sunset made the planet’s western horizon look as if it were on fire.
Fisher took another tentative step into the cockpit. He [171] wasn’t looking at the Enterprise or, to Sulu’s relief, at the alarming displays of red light that flashed across the pilot’s console. All of his attention was focused on the darkening planet they had just left behind.
“I wonder what the hell is going on down there?” the geologist muttered, sinking into the copilot’s seat with a frown. “God, I hope we didn’t send Jaeger and his team into some kind of subspace window or wormhole ...”
“You couldn’t know that it was going to be that dangerous,” Sulu told him. “Tlaoli got the highest safety rating a frontier planet can have.”
“That was before we found nineteen wrecked starships down here,” Fisher said gloomily. “We should have known there might still be something dangerous around. But all we could think of was that we might have found a natural transperiodic ore deposit, and that wouldn’t be dangerous to people, only to starships with warp cores ...”
