Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02

by Armageddon Sky

  "Wherever it is" -- she stepped up close behind him to avoid another approaching banchory -- "it has to be safer than here."

  And then her arms were around him, iron-hard and tight. Bashir barely had the chance to gasp a protest before she yanked him off balance with enough force to shock the wind out of him.

  His feet skittered in the mud; a clink of boot-on-metal kicked his dropped regenerator out of sight beneath a skirt of branches and burned leaves. K'Taran dragged him backward as inexorably as a tractor beam. When the pungent smell of wet banchory wrapped around them like a wool blanket, panic swelled in Bashir's stomach. He surged against her hold, tried to tangle his feet in the burned detritus all around, kicked back against K'Taran in a desperate attempt to wrench himself free. New hands -- bigger, stronger pinned his arms, lifting him against an armor-plated side.

  "Let me go!"

  Then he was flat atop a banchory's wide shoulders, pushed face downward by the weight of two Klingons, his tricorder grinding into his hip. "Stop it!" he pleaded. "You can't do this!" He managed to work one arm under himself, but couldn't gain the leverage to lift himself before the force of the banchory lurching up from its kneel knocked him flat. "Let me go!"

  He felt K'Taran's hand flex slightly between his shoulders, but she said nothing. The trail they used stretched wider than their banchory, smashed open by everyone who had fled ahead of them, then gnawed at by the streamers of flame that still trailed randomly from the sky. Smoke curdled at banchory-height, snaking through the tuq'mor canopy; Bashir heard the shattering crash of a tree cleaving its own path toward the ground disturbingly nearby. Coughing, he struggled upright, away from the worst of the heat pouring off the burning tuq'mor. This time K'Taran let him.

  I hate you, he wanted to growl at her. Except he didn't, not really. He hated this grief, and the leaden, aching despair, but K'Taran hadn't been the one to bring the comets raining. She'd just forced him into what a Klingon no doubt considered honorable inaction. And he hated that. Hated having no way to save himself, and no one else to save.

  Xirri raced along the crumbling canopy, some slower than the laboring banchory, some faster. Everything scorched by the impact that had first exploded the clearing -- two kilometers on all sides -- crackled and puffed into flame in uneven spurts. The burn front seemed barely moving, just irregular platters of fire scattered throughout a nightmare landscape. When he first glimpsed shadow figures jerking and turning behind the tongues of light, he unconsciously identified them as refugees like themselves, heading into whatever insanity waited at the end of this pointless flight. Then something in the parallax between banchory and tuq'mor penetrated his stunned numbness, and he realized that the trio of xirri were simply struggling behind the path of the flame, not actually moving; K'Taran and her banchory were passing them by.

  He didn't consciously decide to rescue them. One moment, he knelt on all fours on the back of a running banchory; the next, he was grabbing at ash-blackened tuq'mor limbs and hauling himself off his mount and into the inferno.

  "Human, no!"

  But he was free of her, still moving, outrunning her in truth even as his thoughts raced precious seconds into the future.

  He gained the weave of charred canopy easily enough. It gave gently under his weight, springy and firm, like a trampoline. But the narrow fingers of vine and wood felt more like a tightrope beneath his feet as he picked his way across the surface. Thank God and his parents' vanity for the coordination needed to navigate the deadly course. Little worms of fire twice darted unexpectedly upward from below. The under-stories were burning, he realized. Suddenly, the image of creeping along a tightrope was replaced with a burning mine field, and Bashir felt a sting of sweat trickle into his eyes.

  The painted xirri looked up when Bashir bent over it. A tiny, bloodstained figure that could only be a child clung to the older native's back, and the adult xirri dragged imploringly at the arm of another, unconscious, adult. Bashir recognized her from his earlier round of triage on the xirri wounded -- a young female suffering from what had seemed like smoke inhalation and dehydration. Lucky, compared to the others. He'd assigned a geriatric male to keep her upright and feed her water, but hadn't had the ability to do much more for her at the time. Now, only the faint twitching of her eyelids betrayed that she was still alive. Too much smoke, too much excitement. Tug as it might, the painted xirri wouldn't get her even five steps closer to wherever they headed.

  "Go." Stooping, Bashir set his feet as widely as he dared and scooped the panting female up with one arm. "Go!" he shouted again, pushing at the painted xirri. "I've got her."

  For a terrible instant, he thought the message wouldn't pass between them. Then the painted xirri touched his hand, light as a butterfly's kiss, and bounded away with startling speed, the youngster still clinging to its back.

  Cradling the unconscious female against his shoulder to shield her from the smoke, Bashir straightened and turned back for the trail. He could hear K'Taran shouting, even though he couldn't make out the words, and thought he glimpsed her a ridiculous distance away. Flames cracked and snapped in a wandering line between them; she'd moved farther down the trail, away from the unburned path he'd clambered across to reach here. The thought of circling around turned his stomach to lead. All he would do was lose himself and never find his way back to the others before the fires overran him. Taking a deep, smoke-tainted breath, he hugged his patient protectively and ran at the line of fire before his common sense could suggest otherwise.

  Heat washed across him like a blast of desert air. A brief, searing sting across the exposed backs of his hands, then he was clear of it. Not even burned, he realized as the trampoline canopy caught him and staggered him with its chaotic gives and bounces. Then his foot crashed through to nothingness, and he fell to one knee so heavily that his jaw cracked against the top of the little xirri's head.

  "K'Taran!"

  Instinct, that was all -- he'd shouted because some foolish primate instinct said that any other ape close enough to hear you might be recruited to help. He could see her already leaping onto the tuq'mor, so very far away, too very far away to do anything about the predatory fire or the unravelling footing beneath him. Still, when the next layer caved in with a roar, and K'Taran abruptly slipped above his line of sight, she was the one who called out. Bashir was too busy jamming his foot into a knot of tuq'mor vines to answer.

  He had to lift the little xirri over his head to roll her onto the top of the canopy. He couldn't take her with him -- refused to let her fall and burn simply because he'd been too stupid to find a path through the tuq'mor that would hold his Human weight. When K'Taran's ash-stained face appeared above the lip of the ever-growing hole, Bashir thrust the xirri toward her. "Take her! Take her!"

  But he couldn't tell if K'Taran understood. Before her hands even found a grip in the little creature's fur, the world fell out from under him, and he went plunging into the abyss.

  The sky ignited two seconds after Kira's hoarse shout of warning echoed down the banchory trail. Dax knew what it was immediately -- her third Trill host, Emony, had seen an asteroid impact in her youth from the outskirts of Ymoc City. The memory had burned indelibly into her symbiont's neural circuits the explosion of light in the sky and the long rumbling roar that followed, the iron-scented wind smashing down from fire-colored clouds, the thunder of flames in the distance as the central city burned. And, for hours afterward, the slow downward drift of silent, black flakes of ash.

  The light this time was different -- bright and sharp as a photon torpedo blast, consuming the entire sky with its flare. "Get under cover!" Dax shouted back at Kira, then turned and dove for the most open spot she could see in the wall of tuq'mor rimming the trail. The thick tangle of leaves and branches resisted her entry, snagging in her hair and gouging deep scratches across the exposed skin of face and hands. Dax cursed and dragged herself deeper, worming her way down through the underbrush to the muddy wetlands below. The drenching rains h
ad covered the mud with a running glitter of water, making all of it look exactly the same.

  Dax paused, unsure where to burrow in. With the clumsy noise of her passage through the tuq'mor silenced, she could hear the ominous stillness that had enveloped the scrub forest, as if every living creature held its breath in fear. Jadzia's blood jolted with a distracting surge of adrenaline, but the symbiont's shielded inner brain was less subject to such animal instincts. It calmly sent her eyes sweeping across the wet glimmer, seeking out the place where the tuq'mor sent the least roots snaking into the mud. That was where the water would be deepest –

  Dax took a deep breath and dove head first for the hidden pool, feeling water and mud splash up around her even as her ears cracked with a sound so loud it registered as pain, not noise. An enormous boulder smashed down on her from above, slamming her breath out of her lungs and hammering her so deep into the muddy bottom that she felt the silken hug of sediment close over her entire body. Panic spiked through symbiont and host alike, and Dax struggled to stop her downward momentum, thrashing her arms and legs through the thickening sediment in a vain attempt to escape the rock pushing her down.

  An instant later, the enormous weight was unaccountably gone. Dax twisted and speared her arms upward, fireworks exploding across her vision from lack of breath. She felt a last, sick surge of energy kick through her muscles -- the release of her symbiont's inner reserves of oxygen and glucose in a desperate attempt to save its host's life and its own. With an effort that strained every muscle in her body, Dax hauled herself upward, swimming and climbing simultaneously through the mud to unseen light and air.

  Two convulsive jerks broke her head free of mud -- and slapped her face with scalding hot water instead. Instinctive panic launched Dax further upward, her face lifting with a gasp to meet the hot, dry kiss of air. There wasn't time to worry if the comet's fiery breath would burn her lungs -- air rushed into her starved chest without her even willing it, oxygen and smoke and heat all mixed together in treacherous blessing.

  Dax gasped twice, then smoke burned her throat like acid and she lost all her breath again in helpless coughing. She sank back down into hot water and cooler mud, submerging up to her chin before her frantically outstretched fingers caught hold of an exposed root and steadied her. Her next breath, however, was surprisingly free of smoke. She opened mud-crusted eyes and saw a swift of steam and exhaled gases rising from the wetland's scalded surface creating a layer of clear, warm mist that buoyed up the sinking smoke from above.

  For a long time, Dax did nothing but lie there, gasping like a beached fish and allowing her symbiont's internal reserves to build up to tolerable levels again. The blinding light of the comet's first impact was gone, but Armageddon's night sky still glowed with the pale radiance of explosive afterglow. The top of the tuq'mor glowed, too, sullen charcoal red where the topmost branches and leaves had withstood the worst of the fireball's passage. A flaming brand fell into the water beside her, its ruby embers turning cold and black after it hit. Something about that wasn't right. It took a minute of muzzy thought for Dax to realize she hadn't heard the sizzle the burning wood must have made as it quenched. In fact, now that she had time to think about it, she realized she couldn't hear anything at all -- no crackling of fire from the forest canopy burning overhead, not even a splash of water when she moved. The only noise her brain registered was a sort of soundless shrilling that she guessed came from her own deafened ears.

  Another burnt branch dropped into the water from above, this time close enough to splash Dax with raktajino-hot water. She cursed – silently -- and scrambled to free herself from her muddy sanctuary. The burning canopy wouldn't stay alight much longer, she guessed; the smoke was already starting to clear as the fires were extinguished by water-sodden wood. But deaf as she was, she had no way to find Kira if she stayed inside the tangled scrub forest. She would have to return to the banchory trail -- and hope her companion was ambulatory enough to do the same.

  With a scientist's unquenchable curiosity, Dax noticed that the lower levels of the tuq'mor had survived the comet explosion amazingly intact, protected from the fireball by their own dense, damp foliage. Many of the softer ivy leaves had curled and crisped from the heat, but the thicker succulents looked undamaged. Even some of the ivy-brambles had survived where they dipped long tendrils into the wetlands. This odd ecosystem may have been damaged by the comet's blow, Dax thought, but it had by no means been destroyed.

  The same thing couldn't be said of the banchory trail, however. Huge swathes of its tuq'mor rim had been smashed across the once-clear path and now lay smoldering on the seared ground. The lack of interlaced support at the scrub forest's edge must have allowed the comet's shock wave to penetrate more deeply there, while the open air of the slashed trail had let the fireball blacken the vegetation all the way down to the ground. Dax's hopes of locating Kira sank as she realized her line of sight wasn't much better here than it had been back in the forest interior. For a long moment, she hesitated on the edge of the destruction, watching the silent flakes of black ash drift slowly downward. Uneasy memory stirred inside her, sparking the same morbid fear in Jadzia that Emony had felt at Ymoc City... were any of those ashes the remains of someone she had known?

  Under her drying crust of mud, something fluttered against her shoulder. Dax cursed again and slapped at her uniform tunic, convinced she must have inadvertently hauled some inhabitant of the wetland out with her when she emerged. All she felt beneath her fingers, however, was the cool lump of her Starfleet communicator, clinging stubbornly to her despite her head to toe immersion in mud. It wasn't until the small metal pin quivered again that she realized she was being hailed by someone, and just couldn't hear the chirp.

  She tapped down the communicator's response button and held it to override whoever was hailing. "Dax here," she said, feeling the vibration of her words in her mouth and jaw even though she couldn't hear them. "If this is the Defiant calling, I can't hear you. You'll have to buzz the communicator off and on in universal signal code."

  She got a reply as soon as she lifted her fingers, but it wasn't the staccato coded message she'd expected. Instead, it was a long, chirping pulse, almost exactly the same length as hers had been.

  Eyes narrowing in suspicion, Dax held down the communicator response button again, but didn't speak into it. This time, she was careful to keep her transmission much shorter. She was rewarded with an equally short quiver in response, despite the silence that was all anyone on the other end of that connection would have heard. Assuming they could hear at all.

  "Kira!" It was joyful instinct that made Dax say it into the communicator, even though she knew her companion had to be just as deaf as she was. Then she slowly buzzed the same message through the pin in short on-off bursts, spelling out each letter of the Bajoran major's name in universal signal code.

  There was a long pause after she finished, during which Dax began to worry that Kira's lack of Starfleet training meant she might not know how to translate that coded message. Then her own pin began to vibrate, long and short bursts beneath her cupping fingers. "Dax," it spelled out first. Then, more slowly, "Tricorder position."

  Dax cursed and yanked her mud-covered tricorder up from her belt, praying it worked. It wasn't the immersion in mud she was worried about – the legendary durability Starfleet built into its equipment could withstand much worse conditions. But air-burst explosions like the one they'd just endured had a tendency to emit an invisible wave of electromagnetic radiation in addition to its atmospheric shock wave. Depending on how strong that EM pulse had been, there was a good chance the tricorder's delicate quantum circuits had been fused by stray electrons.

  The instrument's display lit up correctly, but the babble of machine code that streaked across it when she punched in the request for Kira's communicator pin coordinates confirmed Dax's fears. It looked like all the higher-level programming circuits had been scrambled. She scowled down at the display's final result.
Alett gerivok -- Vulcan computer code for the number twenty-seven. But twenty-seven of what units? In what direction? Could she even be sure the tricorder had understood her request to begin with, and wasn't just spitting out random nonsense?

  Well, there was only one way to find out. Dax took three experimental steps down the cluttered banchory trail toward the place she'd last seen Kira, then paused to reinput the request for her coordinates. This time the racing lines of codes steadied out on prern gerivok te prern -- the code for twenty-five- point-five. She glanced back at her initial position, gauging the distance she had traveled. a meter and a half seemed just about right.

  Encouraged, she continued walking in that direction, pausing to recheck the tricorder's output every time she had to clamber through another tangle of downed trees. At her sixth checkpoint, the Vulcan number on the tricorder was higher than before. Painstakingly, Dax retraced her steps and checked both sides of the trail until the readout would go no lower, then shoved herself into the charred embrace of the tuq'mor. According to the tricorder, Kira was only six meters away from her now, and the sky still held enough luminous violet light to see through the tangled vegetation. Dax rechecked the readout once more to make sure she was heading in the right direction, then clipped the tricorder back on her belt and started searching through the smoky shadows.