by L. A. Graf
The boy didn’t wait to find out what Chekov was or wasn’t going to do. Lashing out with his free leg, he kicked the ensign hard twice, once on the wrist and once further up the inside of his arm. But as much as that hurt, it wasn’t the boy’s blows or even the violence of his cursing that shocked Chekov into releasing him. It was the fierce hazel eyes that burned in the handsome young face, and the unmistakably Kirk-like set of his fourteen-year-old jaw when he finally wrenched himself loose, got up, and ran.
Uhura had thought that going back into the caves of Tlaoli would be one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. Intellectually, she knew that squirming down through the twisting passage that had led them out through the rubble pile would be physically dangerous and emotionally draining. But when the time came to take that first step down into darkness, all she really felt was numb and exhausted. After nearly twenty hours of constant toil and danger, Uhura’s mind no longer [222] seemed able to envision possible disasters, and the jangle of stress hormones in her bloodstream had lost its sharp edge. She followed her own orders as automatically as if they had been given by someone else, setting one foot below another on the swaying cat’s cradle of ropes that dangled down into the muddy sinkhole, until she stood beside Sanner at the bottom.
“Heigh ho, heigh ho,” said the cave geologist with a crooked smile, while they waited for McCoy to join them.
Uhura tried to find a smile to match his, although she suspected it looked more like a wince. “And just who are you calling a dwarf?”
“Hey, I think I’m pretty bashful.” He reached out and adjusted Uhura’s water drip until her carbide light glowed a little brighter, then grunted in satisfaction. “You want to make sure you can catch all the reflectors ahead of you. There should be twelve of them.”
Uhura blinked at him, startled back into alertness. “I’m going first?”
Sanner nodded. “That passage is too narrow to pull someone through. If Dr. McCoy gets stuck, I’ll need to push on him from behind.”
“I’m not going to get stuck.” A wiry figure in anomalous gold jumped off the last rung of ropes and came sloshing through the mud to join them. Ensign Davis’s cave jumper had been the one that fit McCoy best for height, although it stretched a little tightly across his shoulders and sagged in a few other places. “I feel like a greased pig already, with all this mud I’m wearing.”
“If you think you’re muddy now, just wait until you see the soil zone we’re going to crawl through,” Sanner [223] said cheerfully. He consulted the folded map he had pulled from his jumper’s chest pocket. “All right, it’s three hundred meters from here to the edge of the rubble pile. If anyone gets stuck, just yell for the person behind you to come up and push. Ready?”
“Hell, no.” Despite his wry words, McCoy had been the one who’d insisted on coming with them, even using his authority as the ship’s chief medical officer to overrule Wright’s protests that she knew the caves better. He followed them willingly enough down the sinkhole, although he couldn’t refrain a snort when he saw the ankle-high wedge of darkness that was their entrance. “I can’t believe you got Yuki Smith out through that crack,” was all he said, however.
Uhura caught a last glimpse of Banner’s grin as she lowered herself to her hands and knees. “I pushed, Tomlinson pulled,” Sanner told McCoy, his voice fading behind her as she squirmed through the jagged opening. “And to tell you the truth, I think that opening might have been just a little wider by the time—”
The passage twisted a meter past the entrance and Uhura lost the sound of the others’ voices. The tightly clinging walls of the passage echoed back her own sounds to her with claustrophobic intensity—the scrape of her gloves as she hauled herself around projecting rock corners, the thump of her booted feet pushing off any ledge or wall they could find to propel her forward, the hiss of her strained breath.
It seemed forever until Uhura saw the first glint of a cave reflector, guiding her past a vertical crack that looked far too narrow to represent a viable alternate [224] route. The second reflector warned her away from an even less appealing solution cavity along a bedding plane, but the third one was mounted at a place where the passage widened for a deceptive moment, then split into two halves. Uhura turned her carbide light back and forth several times, but there was no mistaking it. Sanner had posted the cave reflector squarely over the more narrow and sloping of the two passages.
“Hey.” A groping hand caught at her ankle, withdrew, and then gave an inquiring rap on one boot sole. “Something wrong?” McCoy asked.
“I’m trying to make sure ...” Uhura squirmed one outstretched hand back to her face, tugged off the glove with her teeth and licked at the tips of her finger. She stuck her hand forward again and realized at once that she hadn’t needed to make her skin wet to feel the sucking indraft of warm outside air being pulled into the cavern below. It blew strongly against her unprotected skin, and to her surprise it pulled into the narrow uphill slant of the fork. “Ail right,” she said, and twisted to her left to fit her shoulders through the crack.
She realized almost at once that had been the wrong decision, since another twist of the passage put her on her back instead of her stomach, without even enough room to spin herself around. By then it was too late to back out—she could hear McCoy bumping and cursing his way through after her. Fortunately, this was the section of cave whose roof was snarled with tree roots, allowing Uhura to pull herself hand-over-hand along it instead of crawling. It would have been the easiest part of the trip so far, if the roots hadn’t made the ceiling so [225] soft and crumbly that at every other pull clots of dirt and mud scattered across her eyes or nose or mouth. Somewhere along the way, Uhura lost the glove she had been carrying between her teeth ever since she’d stripped it off to check the draft, but by then she barely cared.
The cave passage angled down again, this time steeply enough to dump her in a slithering rush into a larger, shoulder-height chamber. Uhura barely remembered to pull herself out of the way before McCoy came hurtling through after her, upside down and coughing. A moment later, Sanner’s carbide glow descended the slope right-side-up and a lot more sedately. He emerged with a loopy grin that made Uhura want to smack him.
“Boy, you guys make good time!” said the cave geologist. He dug around in his chest pocket, then tossed Uhura her abandoned glove before she could make any of the crushing remarks that came to mind. “I’m going to tell that kid Chekov that he’s a slug compared to you.”
McCoy paused in wiping mud from his face to give the other man a sour look. “I don’t care what you tell Chekov,” he said. “Just tell me that we’re almost to this big upper chamber of yours.”
“About halfway,” Sanner estimated. “But there’s no more spots quite as tight as that. Want me to go first now, Lieutenant?”
Uhura finished pulling on her glove and opened her mouth to say “Yes,” but what came out instead was a decisive, “No.” It startled her a little, because it wasn’t what she would have expected of herself, but she had to admit that she liked being in the lead. The constant need to look for cave reflectors kept the crawl from becoming [226] too monotonous, and the knowledge that McCoy could easily push her through any spot where she happened to get stuck made the constricted twists and turns of the cave passage seem a lot less claustrophobic. “I don’t mind going first,” she said, smiling under her mud mask when she realized it was actually true.
“Onward and downward, then.” McCoy tightened the strap of his cave helmet under his chin. “Although I’ll warn you—if we find Mr. Sulu drinking coffee at the base camp when we get back, I’m going to dump him down this sinkhole just on principle.”
The sound of Sanner’s guffaw followed Uhura into the next winding section of the cave. The passages here were generally wider, with only occasional places where what looked suspiciously like blocks of broken roof crimped the space down to a few dozen centimeters in height. Uhura wriggled through easily enough, although she tried n
ot to think about how hard it must have been for the sturdier members of the original cave party, Tomlinson and Smith and Wright, to make this trip the first time through.
After the last of the pinches, a final cave reflector glittered over a spot Uhura remembered: a jagged hole in the passage floor that opened like a narrow downspout over the rubble pile below. She crawled over to the edge of it, angling her carbide light into the rush of arctic cold air that came blasting up from the darkness. The drop was at least three meters down to the unstable footing of the breakdown pile that filled the back end of the big cavern. Uhura grimaced, but when she pulled her head back out, her light splashed over the slim length of rope Sanner had left dangling from a couple of pitons at the [227] top. She scuttled around to that side of the hole, tested the rope with a jerk, then swung herself down onto it just as McCoy’s carbide light appeared on the far side of the opening.
“What, don’t we get to slide down this drainpipe, too?” he asked tartly.
“Not unless you want to start an avalanche when you land,” Uhura retorted. McCoy crawled out to the edge and watched her rappel downward, grunting when he saw the size of the breakdown pile below. With the glare of his carbide light added to hers, the immense size of the column-filled cavern below began to reveal itself. Uhura could feel the cold biting harder at the skin of her face and neck as she entered the main chamber, and she fervently hoped that didn’t mean the alien force field had grown to envelop this end of the cave system, as well.
It wouldn’t make sense for it to do that, Uhura assured herself, as she found her footing on a large boulder and released the rope for McCoy to use. After all, if the purpose of this system was to transport people here, it wouldn’t also take them from here. Although it made Uhura wonder why, with the sophisticated energy-gathering technology these unknown aliens had apparently been able to construct, they had used their force field simply to send people from one end of an hour-long walk to another. Or had this once been part of a much larger transportation system, similar to the continent-wide transporter systems back on Earth, that had simply eroded through countless millennia down to just this last functioning piece?
Sanner followed McCoy down the rope and added his [228] carbide glow to theirs. The combined illumination lit the cavern all the way to its end, painting long, thin shadows like prison bars on the floor from the cathedral-like columns that supported its arching roof.
“No shuttle,” said the geologist, unnecessarily.
“No,” Uhura agreed. She lifted her voice to a ringing shout. “Sulu! Lieutenant Sulu, can you hear me?”
Only silence answered her. The cold must have frozen even the water dripping off the columns, which had previously filled the chamber with a sound like tiny aqueous chimes.
“Want to go down and look around?” Sanner asked after a while. His voice sounded distinctly more glum than it had a moment before.
“Not yet.” Uhura reached up to twist the control knob on the water reservoir of her carbide lamp. A memory of waiting in the darkness of alien conduits and seeing an indigo-blue light glowing behind its ice-covered walls had sprung unbidden into her mind. “Turn off your lights for a minute.”
McCoy gave her a scandalized look. “Lieutenant, are you nuts?”
“You can only see the alien force field if your eyes are adjusted to total darkness,” Uhura explained. She heard the last of her acetylene gas hiss into the combustion chamber, then her side of the rubble pile suddenly became a little darker. Sanner was already extinguishing his own carbide light, and, a moment later, McCoy grumbled and reached up to dim his, as well. Their lights went one right after the other, wrapping them in utter, stifling darkness.
With neither sound nor light to orient herself, Uhura [229] felt oddly less sure of her balance on the rubble pile, although she knew for a fact that she’d wedged herself securely between two boulders just a moment before. Only the hard press of rock against her back and the bite of cold air against her skin kept her from feeling as if she’d entered a sensory deprivation tank.
“Over there,” said McCoy, in an unnecessary whisper. His hand brushed across Uhura’s shoulder as he tried to point in the darkness. “That one big column—is that the light you meant?”
Uhura touched the doctor’s hand to see which way it was oriented, then put her own hand against Sanner’s shoulder to point the way for him. She kept it there to steady herself as she turned very carefully to look in the direction McCoy had indicated. Her eyes registered light almost immediately, but it took her a moment to actually focus on it. The cloud of golden sparks flitting like fireflies around one of the columnar cave formations was so different from what she’d expected to see that Uhura wondered if she’d have noticed it anywhere near as quickly as McCoy had.
“Actually,” she said wryly, “no. That’s not what we saw before at all.”
“But maybe it makes sense,” Sanner said. “The blue light was the part that made you vanish. Maybe the part that makes you appear should be another color.”
“Maybe.” Uhura dug her teeth into her lip, straining to see what kind of pattern those golden shimmers were making in the darkness. “Dr. McCoy, do you see ... ?”
“Yes, I do.” McCoy began scrabbling with his carbide [230] light in the darkness. “Dammit, how do you get this thing back on?”
“Here, let me—” Sanner reached across Uhura to adjust the water drip and ignite the flame. The glow of McCoy’s lamp dazzled Uhura blind for a moment, but her eyes adjusted fast enough to see the questioning look on one man’s face and the grimness she’d been afraid of on the other’s.
“What’s the deal?” the geologist asked, glancing back and forth between them as if their silence had alarmed him. “What the heck did you guys see?”
“A human shape,” Uhura said, trying to keep her voice calm and unshaken. “The lights were outlining it, as if it was just starting to appear.” McCoy was already scrambling down the rubble pile, and she snapped her own helmet alight, then levered herself out from between her boulders to follow him. “The problem is, it’s appearing right in the middle of that rock column.”
Chapter Twelve
THE SWARM OF GOLDEN SPARKS inside the stone column grew brighter, tracing more and more clearly the outline of a human body trapped inside solid rock. Uhura scrambled recklessly down the pile of cave rubble, her boots skidding off one frost-slicked boulder after another. She could see the jerk and bobble of McCoy’s carbide lamp become a swift, straight line when he reached the bottom of the breakdown pile, then disappear entirely as he approached the glowing pillar.
A fierce golden-white fire seemed to have ignited inside the rock formation, brilliant enough to illuminate the breakdown cavern all the way up to its sparkling ice-crusted roof. The light also showed Uhura the smooth pavement of water-laid flowstone that surrounded the column, with not a loose stone or broken stalactite in [232] sight. She skidded to a stop at the foot of the breakdown pile, looking for a sharp-edged chunk of rock she could use as a hammering tool.
“Don’t bother with that.” Sanner vaulted down off a boulder somewhat higher than her head. Uhura glanced up to ask what he meant, and saw that he was already striding across the cavern toward the pile of gear Survey Team Three had stacked into a makeshift bed for the injured Davis. The cave specialist threw off the emergency blankets and dove into the backpacks below like a terrier digging for a rat, tossing out sample bags and surveying markers until he finally emerged with a rock sledge in one hand and a prybar in the other.
“This should let us break through that rock formation.” Sanner handed the bar to Uhura and hefted the sledge onto one shoulder, grimacing in a way that made her wonder if he’d hurt himself coming down the rubble pile. “And I complained about Jaeger’s damned handprints ...”
Uhura opened her mouth to ask him what was wrong, but a shout from the heart of the cavern interrupted her. The gold light was bright enough now that, when she turned, Uhura had to squint against it to see McC
oy. The doctor had plastered himself up against the rock column and was using some kind of antique medical sensor whose cables ran from his ears to a metal disk that he held pressed against the stone. He paused for a moment to peer out into what must have looked like darkness to his light-blind eyes, then beckoned when he spotted them.
“Hurry up,” he yelled. “We’ve got to get him out of here!”
Uhura leaped to follow Sanner as he ran toward the [233] glowing column. As they got closer, she could see that the light was coming from deep inside the rock, turning the outer layers of flowstone into a translucent alabaster shell. A blurred but familiar face was visible beneath the stone.
“Is Sulu alive?” she asked.
“I can hear him breathing.” McCoy moved the metal disk to another part of the flowstone casing. “The transporter must have taken the stone out when it put him in. But he sounds ragged, like he’s gasping. There might not be any air in there with him.”
“All right, you guys, stand back.” Sanner hefted the sledge as they obeyed him. “God dammit, here goes a thousand years of laminar accretion,” he said regretfully, and swung.
The first blow rebounded off the stone with a crash that stung Uhura’s ears and made her eyes blink shut involuntarily. She saw McCoy wince and yank the cables out of his ears. A network of little cracks appeared on the glowing surface, radiating out like rays from the dent Sanner had made, but nothing broke or fell. The cave geologist stripped off his cave gloves, spitting on his hands despite the bitterly cold air, then hefted the sledge and swung again. A louder crash was followed by a fierce crackling sound. Uhura threw a worried glance at the ceiling, but a moment later a shard of flowstone detached from the face of the rock formation and came clattering down at her feet.
