Firestorm

by L. A. Graf

  The honest innocence of the question made Chekov smile. "Have you ever tried to sneak past an entire camp filled with seven-foot-tall, armed warriors, Dr. Mutchler?"

  "No."

  "Then this is going to be harder than you can possibly imagine."

  Chekov crouched with his back to a volcano-spawned boulder, and waited while Sulu scrubbed dirt on his face and hands to minimize the contrast with his own darkened clothing. The security chief had smudged himself with swift efficiency upon first reaching the crest of the incline. He didn't feel as if he was moving quickly, but he knew Sulu wasn't the sort to dawdle and it seemed as though the helmsman were taking four times as long as necessary to do everything. It was an effect Chekov recognized from a dozen other planetary missions, so he merely fidgeted in silence and tried to concentrate on counting the stars while he waited.

  "You ready?" Sulu whispered at last.

  Chekov only nodded. He'd been ready since halfway up the slope, when all the nerves and adrenaline and borderline terror inside him finally caught up to his conscious awareness of what they were doing. Now even his thoughts seemed to tumble past at an accelerated speed, until the time between his nod and their move into the open felt like agonizing minutes. He suspected their hesitation had lasted less than a second.

  The powerful floodlights near the center of camp carved a great wedge of light out of the night sky. Everything between the lights and the two officers was pressed flat and black by the stark brilliance, including Gamow, whose normally subdued paleness had been crushed by the backlighting to a pearly dark gray. Chekov tried to remind himself that those same bright lights worked drastically in their favor, too—anyone with his back to the camp looking outward would see the night as one uniform plane of flat blackness. But seeing every movement of the cohort so clearly exaggerated by their monstrous shadows left Chekov feeling hopelessly defenseless and exposed.

  Sulu crawled around to Chekov's side of the rock, his eyes locked on the waiting shuttle. "Okay." It was less a comment and more a bracing sigh. "The maintenance access is about two-thirds of the way from the stern, underneath. It works on maintenance codes, so I won't need any special tools to get the panel off. Opening it should only take me about a minute, then another couple minutes to clear a crawlspace into the passenger compartment. Once I'm inside, I'll signal you."

  And until then, he would stand out painfully in the slice of bright yellow that burned its way under the shuttle's raised belly. It would have made things so much easier if they'd parked the shuttle with the hatch facing away from the camp, instead of opening onto it.

  "Just be careful," Chekov heard himself say in a grim whisper.

  Sulu reached across to squeeze his shoulder. "Always." Then he lifted himself into a runner's crouch, and was gone.

  The helmsman's speed was remarkable. He covered the open distance without a sound, dropping into invisibility alongside the nearest warp nacelle without appearing even to break his stride. Only the topmost curve of his head showed above that meager cover when he boosted himself to peek past the shuttle toward camp.

  After what seemed a slow eternity, Sulu rose in a swell of shadow that seemed to pour over the lip of the nacelle and under Gamow's bottom. Chekov waited until he saw the helmsman reach up to begin work on the maintenance panel, then crept back around the boulder to rejoin the rest of the party.

  Uhura had already moved her trio up from their place a stone's throw farther downslope. She looked a silent question at Chekov through the darkness, and the whites of her eyes shone above dark mahogany cheeks. He wished there were something they could do to lessen that effect, but couldn't think of anything in their present position. At least she'd exercised her usual quiet foresight and removed her bracelets and earrings without having to be told.

  Chekov glanced down the row of tense faces to make sure everyone was ready. "He's in place," he whispered. "You all know what to do?"

  Uhura nodded and held up a single finger. Murphy followed suit by holding up two, and Mutchler, behind him, three. The geologist looked particularly pale and thin in the darkness.

  "As soon as I'm gone, move up," Chekov told Uhura. "The rest of you follow one at a time on my signal. And whatever you do, don't make a sound."

  Even Mutchler didn't feel the need to comment on those orders. Flashing them an "O.K." for reassurance and luck, Chekov slipped away again to wait for Sulu's signal.

  Sulu must have managed to pry free the access panel. The helmsman's slender shadow knelt almost upright under Gamow's belly, and even as Chekov watched, Sulu pulled himself through some unseen portal to disappear completely. Taking two slow, deep breaths to ready himself, Chekov padded away from his shelter and into the twelve meters of open night between the sheltering rocks and the shuttle.

  Backlighting from the camp stretched Gamow's shadow into a long, unnatural parallelogram. Chekov stayed carefully within the shuttle's darkness. He knew he wasn't as limber as Sulu—that he couldn't crouch as low or cross the distance as quickly—so he concentrated instead on stealth. Keep to the shadow, avoid jerky movements, breathe in as much of the surrounding environment as his senses could give him. He was only halfway across, trotting lightly, when a flicker of movement disturbed the corona of light around the shuttle's edges. Nerve-heightened instincts dropped him into a ground-hugging crouch before his civilized mind even realized what he'd seen.

  A tall, thick Elasian silhouette pulled away from the shuttle's greater darkness to stand as a separate feature a few meters off Gamow's stern. Chekov's fingers dug into the ashy ground between his knees, but he allowed himself no other movement, not even the releasing of his in-held breath. His thoughts raced ahead to fifty different permutations of what he must do should the Elasian see him, see the others, hear Sulu, open the shuttle, signal the cohort, bring up the lights. The answers flashed through his mind with emotionless clarity all in the few seconds it took the faceless entity to stand in the bracket of floodlight, look to left and right, then turn and walk away.

  He could see the flash-black-flash of the Elasian's legs in the stream of light shining under the shuttle. Only after that ghost movement narrowed with distance, then vanished, did he rise up on cramped, shaking legs and dash the last distance to the shuttle.

  Lying flat along the outside of the warp nacelle, he breathed into his hands to hide the sound of his gasping and told himself that "almost caught" didn't count. They still had three more lives to go.

  Sulu's voice floated out to him on the faintest of whispers. "So much for them not posting any guards."

  Even that tiny sound made Chekov's heart seize with fear. "Shut up and start your preflight sequence!" he hissed in reply. Then he lifted his hand into the light under the shuttle and raised a single finger for Uhura to see.

  She slipped into the covering darkness, as lithe and graceful as a cat. Her small, dark figure barely disturbed the night's black fabric, and she followed the sweep of shadow just as Chekov had done. He never heard a sound from her, not even when she reached out to clasp his hand before slipping past him to disappear up the access panel after Sulu.

  Turning back to the waiting darkness, Chekov lifted two fingers in the second signal.

  Equally dark, but taller and less lissome, Murphy moved away from their hiding place to follow Uhura. Mutchler's pale face hovered like the faintest smudge of moonlight among the rocks a dozen meters from the shuttle. He was too lost in darkness to have any readable expression, but the preternatural stillness in his lanky frame spoke eloquently of his quiet terror. Chekov felt suddenly very sorry for the scientist, and for all the years of study that couldn't have prepared him for fieldwork quite like this.

  A column of startling shadow blinded Chekov on the left. He registered a grunt of Elasian surprise, and saw Mutchler jerk to his feet with his mouth open as if to shout something. Then the blow Chekov aimed at the Elasian's knee contacted, and the scream of the Elasian's disruptor drowned out even the sound of breaking bone.

&
nbsp; Someone barked a hoarse cry of anguish—Mutchler? Murphy? he couldn't tell—and Chekov shouted, "Go! Get into the shuttle!" at whichever of them hadn't been shot as he clipped an elbow across the Elasian's chin to take the warrior down. All hope of subtlety was gone. Wrenching the disruptor pistol out of the guard's vicious grip, Chekov jammed the muzzle into the throat joint on his breastplate and fired before looking up to see who was running for the shuttle, and who wasn't.

  Mutchler was already squirming under the shuttle and into the access hatch, shouting frantically at Uhura and Sulu inside. Oblivious of the growing roar of voices from deeper in the camp, Murphy, wounded by the disruptor blast, writhed weakly on the ground only a few short meters away. They had minutes—moments, really—before the rest of the cohort recognized what they'd heard and descended on the shuttle like feral dogs. Knowing that speed was his only ally, Chekov bolted back for the young ensign with the disruptor still clenched in one hand.

  Murphy had pulled himself almost to all fours—he'd made it to his knees, but collapsed forward over his arms in a fit of fluid, broken coughing. Chekov caught him from behind. "I've got you," he said, locking his arms around the ensign's chest and hauling him to his feet. "I'm not going to leave you. . . ."

  Murphy gasped, stiffening, and reached up to clutch at Chekov's arm as his chief dragged him back toward the Gamow. A spasm of fierce protectiveness tightened Chekov's throat, and he breathed again, "I'm not going to leave you!" as the boil of angry voices behind him swelled nearer.

  "Pavel! Here!" Uhura appeared around the rear of the shuttle, grabbing at his jacket to redirect him. "I opened the hatch—bring him here!"

  They rounded the shuttle into the fearful exposure of light. Uhura raced ahead while Chekov, thighs burning, tried to run the last few meters backward with the security guard in tow. He could see the Elasians now, a swarm of distorted shadows coalescing near the source of the distant lights. Slinging the disruptor into the open shuttle door, he twisted sideways to pass Murphy to Uhura and Mutchler, and shouted, "Sulu! Take off! Now!"

  Under Gamow's unflinching interior lights, one side of Murphy's face and collar looked warped and glossy with blood. Uhura and Mutchler dragged him away from the open hatchway, and Chekov climbed in behind them just as the shuttle lifted off in a cloud of pale and powder-fine ash. He caught the edges of the doorway, unbalanced on his knees just inside the hatch, and heard the first phaser fire from below as the Elasians turned their stolen weapons against them.

  Uhura jerked around at the shrill report, and a deflected bolt skated past the hatchway to splatter against the wall behind her. Chekov meant to yell at her, to warn her to keep down and away from the line of fire. Instead, he felt his whole body arch in a single unexpected seizure, and his grip on the hatchway went suddenly numb and strengthless. They'd hit him, he realized dully. Damn.

  "Chekov!"

  He knew he'd fallen from the horrified sound of Uhura's cry. But he didn't actually feel it when he let go of the shuttle, and he never knew when he hit the ground.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE SHUTTLE LURCHED into the cold night sky, its empty hatch gaping like a mouth opened to scream. The fear that had been drumming through Uhura unnoticed in the rush of crisis suddenly clawed at her throat until it tore her breath away. She thrust the shuddering security guard she held into Mutchler's startled arms, and flung herself across the shuttle, flat against the floor to avoid phaser fire, intent on finding Chekov's fallen body below. All she could see through the darkness was a wind-lashed flag of dust marking the place where he had fallen. A dozen big shadows were converging on it.

  "Sulu!" Uhura locked both hands on the vibrating edge of the hatch and craned her head back toward the cockpit. From this angle, all she could see was the swift red flicker of the instrument panel as it responded to the pilot's stabbing fingers. "We have to go back! We lost Chekov!"

  The baying sound of a disruptor splintered the night before the pilot could reply, and Gamow jolted sideways. Compressed nitrogen screamed as it escaped from the cracked nacelle below, blasting a surge of cold air through the hatch. With a jerk that made Uhura's stomach reel, the shuttle began to skid sideways.

  "Starboard nacelle!" she shouted at the cockpit, then rolled away from the hatch and scrabbled up the steeply sloping floor toward Mutchler. Sulu needed all their weight over the good port nacelle to have any hope of controlling the shuttle's downward plunge. Uhura shoved the geologist toward the far wall, stooping to help him drag Murphy with them. The injured security guard's shudders had become outright convulsions now. His face was a gray-brown mask of pain, and his juddering torso felt rock-hard beneath the blood-drenched uniform.

  "Internal bleeding." Mutchler's voice over the laboring roar of the shuttle's remaining nacelle sounded ragged in her ear. With their balance readjusted, Sulu was slowly bringing them up again. "I think he's dying."

  Another disruptor burst bayed through the outside dark, this time shearing harmlessly through Gamow's roof. Fragments of shredded metal drifted down on Uhura like ash. "I'll call the Enterprise, they can beam us straight to sickbay—" She struggled out from under the sprawl of Murphy's body and ran for the communicator panel in the cockpit.

  "Hurry." Sulu's hands were steady on his helm controls, but the bare edge of a quiver in his voice told Uhura how close they'd come to crashing when the starboard nacelle blew. The lights of the Elasian camp were quilted bright across the ground below them, startlingly close. "We're still only four hundred meters off the ground. If they turn their defense shield back on before we make the perimeter, it'll fry us."

  Uhura slammed the hailing signal, waiting only the bare second she knew it took the Enterprise's computer to acknowledge before she started to speak. "Uhura to Enterprise. Four to beam up immediately, from these—"

  It was too late. As if Sulu's words had summoned it, the iridescent glitter of the defense shield flared on the edges of the shuttle's viewscreen. It began to close, its wavering fingers reaching toward the shuttle.

  "Hurry, we can make it—" Uhura resisted an urge to shake Sulu to make him fly faster. With one nacelle gone, it was a miracle they were flying at all.

  "Higher," Sulu said to the shuttle between his teeth, as the field swam through the night toward them. "Get us just a little higher—"

  As if it had heard him, the shuttle bucked upward. For a moment, Uhura thought they had made it through. Then the Gamow jerked back like a fish caught at the end of a line—and the thundering crash of explosive decompression rolled over them.

  "Port nacelle exploded—" Uhura could barely hear Sulu's voice over the scream of fusing metal. Her communications panel erupted into an inferno of sparks as the electrical surge of the explosion burned through its circuits, scorching the hand she had reached out to transmit their coordinates. Yellow smoke swirled off the blasted equipment, acrid with the smell of melted plastic and singed metal.

  "We've lost all power." Oddly enough, Sulu's voice had steadied with the inevitability of disaster. Ignoring sparks, he pounded at the smoldering flight panel, trying to find a flight control that still worked. Uhura looked up from her own lifeless communication controls and saw the horizon vanish into a sky full of cold stars. The Elasian forcefield had spit the Gamow out like a lobbed rock, tossing it up and outward into the night. Right now, they were traveling faster than they could have done under their own power, but as soon as the momentum of collision faded, the shuttle would fall like a rock, too. And they had no way to stop her.

  Sulu made one last stab at resuscitating the darkened flight board, then gave tp with a quiet sigh. The sound was almost lost in the rushing wind of their unpowered flight. "We're starting down. I'm going to engage the shock webbing—"

  "Wait." Uhura spun and pushed herself out of her chair, barely feeling the bite of her burned fingers. "Mutchler and Murphy aren't strapped in."

  "Uhura, no!" Sulu's grab caught her just before she ducked through the cockpit door. "There's not enough tim
e—"

  "Make time." She shook off his hand and ran for the huddled pair at the back of the shuttle. The sickening dizziness of free fall tangled her feet, but Uhura stubbornly fought her way through it. She made it almost to the back before an explosion shook the shuttle and reversed their downward motion briefly.

  Uhura blinked in surprise, then realized that Sulu had manually jettisoned their port nacelle. The force of the blast momentarily buoyed them, giving Uhura time to throw two safety straps across the fallen men. Then free fall dragged at her again, harder this time, as she turned to skid back toward the cockpit.

  Not enough time, Uhura thought, hearing the scream of approaching ground outside the shuttle even as she ran for the safety of Sulu's outstretched hand. Not enough time, not enough time, not enough—

  Noise and activity swarmed over Kirk when he stepped through the sickbay doors. Quick eyes flicked over the instrument trays scattered on top of diagnostic beds and counters, noting what was in use, what was left untouched. Judging from the array of supplies and the number of geologists sitting up and arguing with their nurses, Kirk guessed that most of the injuries sustained by observatory personnel had been minor. He pushed past one knot of gesticulating researchers, and aimed a supportive smile at Christine Chapel when she turned to see who was trying to sneak by.

  "You could always sedate them," Kirk suggested.

  The doctor didn't return his smile. "Don't think it hasn't occurred to me." She shoved aside a storage cart with her foot, and nodded Kirk toward the back of the sickbay. "Leonard is in ICU. I think he's expecting you."

  Kirk nodded his thanks, then hurried out of the press of people to hunt down McCoy in the restricted rooms of intensive care.

  The chief surgeon stood with his back to the door, green lab coat hanging loose on his stooped shoulders while he read something off the panel on the bed in front of him. The patient's heartbeat pulsed strong and slow, but what Kirk could understand of the other vital signs on the monitor didn't look promising. He stepped up next to McCoy to study the quiet body.