After a moment, her communicator pin quivered again. Dax paused, translating the vibrating dashes and dots in mounting impatience. "Turn right under," they spelled out enigmatically. Dax turned right as ordered but saw nothing to go under, just more tangled tuq'mor wetland. "Log," added her communicator pin in slow, tired quivers. "In water."
Dax cursed, loud enough this time for her recovering ears to give her a faint, tinny backwash of the sound, and knelt down to scan the water line, looking for a charred log big enough to trap a Bajoran female. She found it not half a meter away, protruding from a wetland pond like a tilted obelisk. Its burnt wood was still ruby-warm on the upper surface where it hadn't been quenched. The dying firelight sparked glowing reflections in two dark eyes, peering up at her caustically from beneath the log's heavy shadow. Kira tilted her chin up just enough to lift her mouth above the waterline and, faint as a cricket's chirp, Dax heard her say, "About time."
Dax didn't bother replying, instead plunging down into the still-warm muck beside her friend, fearful that her position meant crushed limbs or battered organs. To her relief, she found the log split into a twisted fork half a meter below the water line, trapping Kira's half-turned torso in a vise of chokingly thick thorned branches. At least half a dozen of them had snagged on the tough fabric of her Bajoran uniform.
Kira said something else, too faint for Dax's shrilling ears to hear, then demonstrated by reaching both hands up over her head and wrapping them around the still-smoldering log. Her wet uniform sleeves began to steam before she could even lock her hands for one good tug against the tangled thorns. She pulled them away a moment later just as smoke began to rise. Dax winced, seeing the places where the cloth had seared through on the major's more stubborn attempts to extricate herself.
Lifting a finger at Kira to make her wait, Dax pulled out her phaser and set it to its narrowest, knife-thin firing spray. Taking a deep breath, she let herself sink down into the muddy water. She couldn't see much through the murk, but by patting her way along the edge of Kira's torso with one hand, she managed to sweep a careful line of phaser fire at a ten-centimeter distance, severing thorny twigs from their parent branch without trying to disentangle Kira from them. She bobbed up to take a second deep breath, then submerged again and sliced through the tangled vegetation on the other side of the fork. By the time she'd surfaced again and swiped the muddy water out of her eyes, Kira was already reaching up to grasp the smoldering log again.
"Wait." Dax tugged her friend's arms apart, then began scooping water onto the glowing wood with both cupped hands. It sizzled and steamed and exploded in little hissing pops, making the log slowly darken. Dax kept splashing until most of the surface was completely sodden, then stepped back and came around the log to stand behind Kira, holding a thumb up where the major could see it. She nodded and lifted her arms to clench tightly around the dampened wood.
"Now!" Kira's voice said faintly, and she hauled herself half out of the water with one strong upward jerk. Dax caught and steadied her when her momentum faded, giving Kira a chance to shake one booted foot free of the thorny tangle. With the flexibility that came with her size, the Bajoran then planted her heel on the log at the same height as her chest and kicked herself clear of the thorns, so powerfully that she staggered both of them back a step in the mud.
Dax caught her balance first, grabbing hold of the nearest unburnt branch to steady them both. "Are you all right?" she shouted at her companion.
Kira grinned at her through a mask of ashen dribbles. Despite the burns on her sleeves and the thorn cuts that had already started dappling her legs with drops of blood, the Bajoran major looked surprisingly unaffected by her ordeal. "I've been through worse tortures in low-security Cardassian prisons!" she shouted back. What little Dax could hear of her voice sounded cheerful. "At least here the water's nice and warm."
Dax shook her head, remembering the instant of scalding heat just after the fireball's passage. Her face still felt tender from that momentary immersion. "Too warm for me!" she shouted back, then paused to listen. A distant rumble echoed through the fading shrill of her blasted ears. "That sounds like another comet strike, either smaller or further away. This must have been a major debris cluster."
Kira winced. "Don't say that like it's a good thing. Another one could hit right here."
"That's statistically unlikely," Dax informed her.
"So is a stable wormhole." Kira hauled herself out of the muck, swinging up to balance with enviable ease on the low-hanging branch. Dax groaned and forced her aching muscles to scrabble their way to the same perch, feeling weighted down by her wet and mud-sodden uniform. "Our first priority right now is to get back to the Klingon exile camp and see if anyone's still alive there. After that, we'll contact the Defiant and see if they're still -- I mean, see if the battle with Kor is over."
Dax lifted an eyebrow at her. "Are we going to beam up if it is?"
"No. We're going to stay here and locate Bashir, even if we have to throw away our communicator pins to do it." Kira took a deep, decisive breath. "I never left behind a member of the Shakaar who could have been rescued. And no matter what Captain Sisko says, I'm not going to start now."
"Sounds good to me." Dax led the way back through the charred tuq'mor to the smoke-filled chasm of the banchory trail. The late night sky was even more radiant with afterglow than before, spiked near the horizon with a sunrise-bright flame and banded above that with rust-tinged sky and coppery clouds. If she hadn't known better, Dax would have thought it was dawn. "Of course, by the time we make it back to epetai Vrag's settlement, Julian may already have been there for hours, waiting for us."
Kira opened her mouth to reply, then caught sight of the destruction wrought in the banchory trail by the comet strike and broke into a fit of startled coughing instead. "Not hours," she said sourly, when she finally regained her voice. "Weeks. Because that's how long it's going to take us to get back."
CHAPTER 8
ALL HE KNEW was that he was coughing. So hard and so breathlessly that he thought he'd tear his body apart. No up. No down. He didn't know who he was talking to when he croaked, "Stop! Stop! Put me down!" But they listened to him. And even though the pain followed him and rode up through him in waves so thick he thought he'd vomit, Bashir realized it was true darkness pressing in all around him, not just his own unconsciousness. Strong Klingon hands lowered him into a sitting position against a cool, uneven wall.
Distant thunder -- or perhaps the explosions of primitive mortars -- trembled through the hard floor, shivered through his stomach. Shock. Undoubtedly. Whatever had happened, the pain alone was enough to bottom out his blood pressure, and he harbored a morbid suspicion that the cold wetness he felt collected in his boot was something other than water.
A vague sixth sense of other bodies in the same enclosed space. Bashir stirred only enough to rocket pain up his leg and into his stomach, but felt someone move touchably close in response to his gasp. He wound his fingers in that someone else's sleeve. "Where are we?" he whispered.
Another bone-deep rumble shuddered through the world, just below the level of hearing. Then K'Taran's voice, aberrantly loud, "Underground."
It told him nothing. But told him enough all the rules had changed. "The xirri... the one I gave you..."
"She's fine. She's with the others."
Better than could be said for him. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. A warm blur of light bloomed against the outside of his eyelids. He blinked, forcing himself alert, watching a handful of Klingon youngsters appear behind the spread of light as though chasing it ahead of them. Singed and filthy, they each brandished some form of fire, most of them carrying burning handfuls of tuq'mor in the slings of their wet tunics. The huge cave came alive with firefly motes of light as they scattered to distribute fire all over the chamber. Voices -- some Klingon, some not -- bloomed in the warming darkness alongside the light.
"The fire outside is dying." One of th
e boys drew closer, a tree limb almost as thick as his arm wrapped in cloth and sputtering erratically. "But more fire is coming from the sky. We will be here for some time." He knelt beside K'Taran. The flames strengthened somewhat now that he'd stopped moving, and the sudden flare of their intensity hurt Bashir's eyes. "Will he die?"
K'Taran reached to take the torch from the boy, her own eyes stark and gray in the unreliable light. "He is the Human doctor. He will tell us." And she held the light across his outstretched legs. As though doing him some favor.
Years of practice with trauma patients prevented him from vocalizing any sounds of horror, but Bashir couldn't stop the panicky whirl of his thoughts any more than he could stop his heart from thundering. His uniform was soaked and muddy, tunic and trousers all reduced to the same ash-riddled iron gray. Rents in the fabric exposed minute flashes of scarlet, but none of them accounted for the glossy overlay of blood down the inside of his right leg. He followed the stain upward to a knee already misshapen with swelling. Then realized that it wasn't edema pushing the fabric of his trousers medially out of alignment. It was bone.
His hands trembled as he pried his tricorder out of its pouch. Its normally reassuring warble rang piercingly off the flowstone walls, and at least the scroll of readings made a modicum of sense. BP was better than he expected, although he didn't like his heart rate or the shallowness of his breathing. Just reading the figure on how much blood he'd lost made him dizzy. Still, there was no arterial damage, and at least the hemorrhaging was slowing. Folding the tricorder closed in his lap, he rubbed shakily at his eyes.
"So..." K'Taran glanced down at his leg, then up at his face again with painfully adolescent bravery. "Will you die?"
Leave it to Klingons to stick with the most basic of questions. "Not immediately." And for some reason, that struck him as funny. He decided not to laugh, for fear he'd frighten them. "Where's the rest of my equipment?"
Even as he asked, the bump and scrape of a dragging container hurried up on one side. Bashir turned his head and smiled at the painted xirri doctor. "Thank you," he said, taking the strap of the medkit when it was offered. As though some signal passed between them, the Klingon boy left abruptly, and the little xirri sidled over into his place.
Only two at a time with any given dead man, Bashir found himself thinking as he fumbled with the latches on the kit. It unfolded clumsily, the front panel clattering onto the floor. Just another of many quaint Klingon traditions. He found a vial of stimulant and fitted it carefully onto his hypospray. "I'm sorry about this," he said as he calibrated the dosage.
A brittle, unreadable expression flitted across K'Taran's face. "It is not your fault."
"I should have stayed to the trail. The first rule of emergency medicine is to avoid making new victims."
This time she caught his hand, halting him just before he delivered the injection. "It is not your fault!" she declared when he blinked up at her. Then, in a tone of choked embarrassment, "It is my fault. You were caught in the tuq'mor, and the fire was coming..." She released him and clenched her hands miserably in front of her. "I did not realize you would break so easily."
He wondered what she would think if she knew he was far less fragile than most.
Arguing the finer points of blame was ultimately useless, though. Die from a comet strike, die from starvation, die from an open leg fracture. What difference did it really make? Digging a container of sterile water out of the open medkit, Bashir held the almost-empty bottle out toward the painted xirri. He remembered using most of his supply irrigating xirri wounds, and remembered his native counterpart following him from patient to patient with keen interest as he performed the procedure. Now, Bashir only had to shake the bottle once before the xirri ducked forward to take it from him and scampered away -- hopefully in search of water.
K'Taran watched in silence as Bashir sorted through the rest of his limited pharmacy in search of something that might tackle the pain of a comminuted fracture. Nothing powerful that wouldn't also render him useless for both himself and any other wounded. Choosing a more lightweight analgesic, he was still counting vertebrae upward from his sacrum when K'Taran asked quietly, "Is it true?"
Bashir finished counting, then carefully injected as large a dose as he dared into his spine. "Is what true?"
She swallowed hard, but didn't drop her gaze. "That you will die."
Ah -- that eternal Klingon pragmatism again. Moving slowly to give the spinal time to do its work, Bashir twisted apart the hypospray and tossed the empty vial back into his kit. "I don't know," he admitted wearily. "I've lost a lot of blood, and with no other Humans around, I can't replace it. And whenever fractured bone is exposed to air..." Just mentioning it made his leg shriek with remembered pain, but the spinal already smothered some of the reality. He managed to push the phantom anguish aside. "Well, that's not good even when you've got a whole sickbay to work with. If we're really stuck down here, and this is all the treatment I'll receive..." He met her gaze frankly, not wanting her to see just how badly he was afraid. "Yes," he said at last. "I'll very likely die."
The xirri returned with the water; Bashir was just as glad to distract himself from K'Taran's disturbing fixation with his impending demise. He flash-sterilized the entire container, then screwed on the irrigation lid with more dexterity than he expected. Bending forward flexed the spur of protruding bone, so he only sliced away the fabric at the point of the actual break, instead of opening his pantleg to the ankle the way he would have with another patient. Blessed numbness let him approach the procedure at a professional distance. A patient's fracture, a patient's blood. It didn't matter who the patient was. He showed the xirri how to hold the bottle overhead so gravity could work its magic on the water, and used both his own hands to explore the fracture as he irrigated. Only once did he find himself wishing he had gloves or even sterile drapes. No sense wishing for things that couldn't be had in an emergency, though; he banned the thought from his mind and went back to concentrating on his patient.
They were almost through the third bottle of sterilized water when a reassuring hand closed on his shoulder and a warm voice remarked, "You know, I'm getting less enamored with the native botany by the hour."
It was the humanness of the voice that jerked Bashir's head up; the swiftness of his movement scattered sparks across his vision. He clapped one hand abruptly to the floor, steadying himself, and blinked furiously to keep from losing sight of consciousness. The slim, elderly Asian man squatting beside him rolled smoothly to his knees and closed both hands protectively around the doctor's upper arm. "It's all right -- I've got you."
And the Klingons have us both. Still, it eased his dizziness to relax his weight onto someone else's strength. Leaving the xirri to finish with the water, Bashir let the older Human ease him back against the stone wall. He almost felt a rush of blood back into his brain as his sense of his surroundings realigned and sharpened. Well, thank God, he thought wearily, turning to really look at the man kneeling beside him. At least we've found the Victoria Adams's crew.
He was fit, trim, and flexible in a way completely at odds with the ancient wisdom in his dark eyes. At least one hundred, Bashir decided, for all that he looked not a day over seventy. He wasn't one of the scientists -- the cheerfully commercial jumpsuit on his slim frame was a familiar staple of the Interplanetary Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supplied volunteers to research projects in need of enthusiastic, unskilled help. Although their advertisements promised nonspecific "adventure and opportunity," Bashir had a feeling being shot down by Klingons wasn't the type of adventure the Foundation had intended. Still, there was something about his friendly, high-cheeked face and the cut of his iron gray hair that said "Starfleet Brass," and Bashir found himself wishing he could sit up straighter to convey his respect. "Captain..." He wasn't even sure why he said it. It just seemed the proper title for the easy competence surrounding this man.
A little glimmer of something bordering on pani
c chased itself through the old man's eyes. "Not here, son," he said gently. Just that quickly, his contagious smile resurfaced. "Here, we're just two Humans stuck in the same problem." He shifted position to offer one hand. "Why don't you call me George?"
Something in the keen way the old man watched him after this pronouncement said that this was both a lie and an order. Bashir nodded to show he understood, and lifted his own hand for shaking. Blood coated him like a torn glove. He pulled back before their palms could make contact. "My name's Julian, Julian Bashir."
"Dr. Bashir." He flicked his eyes across Bashir's medical uniform and dipped an acknowledging nod. "Our hostess tells me you could use a few willing donors."
The blood. On his hand, his pantleg, the floor. Everywhere but where it should be. "B negative," he admitted, "at least two units." Which would buy him time, clear his head a little, but hardly solve his problem. Necrosis was necrosis, no matter how much blood your heart pumped through it.
"Well, I'm A positive," George told him. "But we've got at least seventeen other Humans I think we can count on." He braced one hand on his knee in preparation to stand, and Bashir reached out to catch his wrist. George halted, eyes alert.
Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02 Page 16
