Progress

by Terri Osborne

  Liankataka nodded. “The Exiles used to bury them around any installation they considered important. They can be wired to be pressure-sensitive or even heat-sensitive.”

  “And they obviously must have considered the mine important.”

  “Yes,” the guardian said. “I am sorry, Captain, but this may change our ability to fulfill our bargain with your government. It may take us years to get the bombs out of the mine. There may not even be a mine left.”

  “With all due respect, Guardian, we need to prove there are more in there first. Have your people developed a way to scan for them?”

  A strand of garnet hair slipped out of place as he shook his head. “Not without setting them off.”

  A short, robustly built Dreman in a white tunic and pants ran over to where they stood, a long, brown box that looked to Gold almost like a toolkit in his hands. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Xurta,” Liankataka simply replied. Judging by the shock on the younger Dreman’s features, it was enough.

  Fighting the urge to cough that the thickening smoke from the fire triggered in his throat, Gold backed away and allowed the young doctor to kneel by his patient.

  Pulling a black and silver stethoscope out of his bag, the doctor quickly stuck the ends in his ears and pressed the plate to one of the less-burned places on the poor man’s chest. “His breathing is shallow, but steady. I don’t see any active bleeders. It looks like the heat from the explosion cauterized the arteries. Eliatriel, can you hear me?”

  Gold took a good look at the man’s bloodied and burned features and quickly wished that he hadn’t. The Dreman was lucky to be alive. The idea that the young doctor could have recognized who had once been behind the burned skin, missing nose, and forcibly closed eyes was, to Gold, a mystery. Then again, when he considered the average population of the city, not to mention the recent battles, the overall friendliness of the people he’d encountered thus far, and the general close-knit feeling of community that he’d gotten from the moment he’d beamed to the surface, perhaps it wasn’t that much of a mystery after all.

  Another rasp sounded from Eliatriel’s mouth. This one was completely unintelligible from where Gold stood.

  “Good. I know it hurts,” the doctor said, still checking over the man’s injuries and unwrapping what looked like clean white cheesecloth to cover the more severe burns. He checked over the hole that had once been Eliatriel’s nose and then draped another cloth bandage over it as well, making sure not to cover the man’s mouth or eyes. “I don’t think cold water’s going to help you here, my friend. We’re going to get you to the hospital very soon, okay? I’ll let the burn healers know you’re coming. They’ll take good care of you, I promise.”

  The roar of fire bellowed from the mineshaft opening. The two Dremans who’d been working on putting out the fire backed away, allowing the flames to lick at the remainder of the shed like a child with an ice cream cone. The fire wasn’t going to die until it had consumed it all. Gold jerked his head toward the sight. “Come on,” he said to Liankataka, “they need help.”

  The Dreman female stood with her eyes as wide as saucers as she watched the fire blaze. Admittedly, Gold didn’t understand precisely how the dilithium worked, but he knew one thing: dilithium focused energy. Fires gave off energy. If the dilithium did its job, there was no telling what would happen, but he had the distinct feeling it wouldn’t be good. Visions of free-flowing lava picked that moment to take up residence in his mind. They needed to get that fire out sooner rather than later.

  His boots began to make a disturbing squelching sound in the mud as he approached. Far more water was staying where they stood than making it to the fire. Gold grabbed the empty bucket from the woman’s hand, trying to usher her attentions to the nearby feeding hose. “Fill this up and then give me the hose,” he said. “Let me help.”

  He could see the panic in her eyes as she turned from the fire to him and back several times before it finally registered that he was there to help. She finally grabbed the hose and filled the bucket, handing the hose to him when she was done. It wasn’t an optimal fire hose, but Gold tried his best to make do with it. In between filling the water buckets, he trained the spray on the closest support beam.

  The fire was burning white-hot, and Gold thought he felt his eyebrows singe on a couple of occasions, but he kept at it. The spray from the hose was barely powerful enough to reach the fire from where he stood, but he didn’t dare inch forward.

  “Is there another bucket?”

  “What?” Liankataka was on the left side of the support beam infrastructure, bucket in hand, and the fire roaring between them was loud enough to drown out any creature who wasn’t screaming.

  “Another bucket!” Gold yelled. He managed to suppress a cough as the smoke tried to fill his lungs. “This hose isn’t going to last much longer. We need something with more force!”

  Almost on cue, a siren sounded in the distance.

  “What’s that?” Gold asked, once again raising his voice over the sound of the flames.

  “Something with more force!” A panicky, but also somehow prideful smile filled Liankataka’s face.

  The ground shifted slightly under Gold’s feet. Forcing the momentary urge to back away from the conflagration into a corner of his mind, he managed to overcome the strong need to be somewhere else and continued trying to fight the fire.

  The fire truck—or what passed for it, for when Gold spared a glance at it, he realized he’d seen more advanced firefighting transports in the museums back on Earth—pulled into the small clearing near the pithead and somehow worked around the Dreman doctor who, from what Gold could see, was still trying to stabilize his patient.

  Three men disembarked from the transport, all wearing heavier coveralls. Two wore a bright, easily recognizable orange, while the third wore red. The writing across the backs of each man’s uniform suggested their names, but Gold hadn’t had the chance to study the written Dreman language, so he couldn’t be certain. However, he assumed the writing was there for reasons similar to human firefighters back on Earth—identification in the event of catastrophe.

  It only took a few seconds for the three men to get the truck set and unroll the water hoses. The man in the red coveralls appeared to be the one in charge. Gold briefly took his eyes off the fire to see where they were, but it was long enough to see him instructing the other two. “Kleera! Take left. Laraka, take right. We need to approach this from both sides, or it’s going to take the mine down.”

  Take the mine down? I don’t like the sound of that. Still, he kept to the improvised bucket brigade in an attempt to help the firemen put the fire out. Within seconds, two of the firemen had the hoses pumping water at full-bore against the mine opening. It was helping, but the supports were still being stubborn.

  The ground rumbled beneath his feet.

  Gold tried desperately to ignore it, but the fire insisted upon keeping him close to the mine entrance. Every now and again, he got a face full of hot spray bouncing back from the streams that the fire hoses were projecting.

  Suddenly, the rumbling that he’d been trying to ignore turned into a roar. Gold tried to back away, keeping his hose trained on the fire, but he could only go so far and still be any help.

  In the middle of it all, he heard a woman scream and another woman yelling something about a collapse.

  Then the ground beneath his feet ceased to exist, and everything turned very, very black.

  Chapter

  6

  U.S.S. Progress—Drema Station

  Day 1

  Katherine Pulaski checked the records download one last time before disconnecting the portable drive from the Progress’s systems. She’d taken her general library over to the station in the massive data dump from the ship’s systems, but these were her private, personal files. The first records ever in Federation hands involving Dreman physiology were in there. She’d documented her method of erasing memories from those files—a
technique that she’d heard Picard had put to use a second time after she transferred off the Enterprise—but beyond that, she hadn’t allowed anyone access, not in five years.

  Looking around the now-empty office that had been her base of operations these last three years, she wondered what the rest of the crew would do for new assignments. Stocking Drema Station was the last extra-system mission for the Progress. The lightly-armed Mediterranean-class ship was scheduled to be reassigned to supply runs between Earth and Io, something that hardly required a full crew complement. The last she’d spoken to Captain Gold about the reassignments, he’d mentioned that he hadn’t decided yet between the several opportunities for a new captaincy he’d been offered.

  Her decision had been, she thought, rather obvious. Where Gold had everything from an admittedly tempting consultant’s position at Utopia Planitia to the center seat of that new Intrepid-class ship that was supposed to be testing those new bioneural gel packs appearing on his list of opportunities, Pulaski had considered and rejected every opportunity on her list, twice. All generic positions, nothing truly as tempting as her brief tenure on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Chief medical officer was a difficult posting to come by these days, and she really didn’t want to take a step backward in her career.

  Still, there had been that teaching job at Starfleet Medical. She’d been seriously considering that option when the search for a CMO for Drema Station had gotten her in its sights.

  Drema IV. There was a planet that brought back some difficult memories. She still felt as though, overall, they had done the right thing by interfering. An entire planet, an entire species, had been on the verge of extinction before it really had a chance to blossom into a starfaring civilization. It had gone against everything she had ever believed as a doctor to allow the people to die when they had been in a position to help, no matter how much some Starfleet officers had wanted to hide behind the Prime Directive. She could still remember how hard she’d fought Captain Picard to make the point. She’d always thought the Prime Directive was something that was far too easy to use to shirk humanitarian responsibilities in times of natural disaster. The idea of not helping the Dremans had been nothing short of anathema.

  In retrospect, she’d admired Lieutenant Commander Data’s strategy of isolating the frequency his little friend Sarjenka had been using for her messages before they’d left that meeting in Picard’s quarters. No matter how stridently Pulaski may have argued her case, it had been the fear and desperation in that little girl’s voice that had finally moved Picard to action.

  Jean-Luc Picard may have had a reputation for not tolerating the presence of children very well, but he was hardly a heartless bastard. She fleetingly wondered if that was why he hadn’t made admiral yet.

  A part of her was occasionally curious about what might have happened to the Dremans if Sarjenka hadn’t made that radio communication. The curiosity of one child saves an entire world, Pulaski thought. I wonder how she’s doing. She should be old enough for a university now, provided the procedure didn’t take away too many of her memories.

  She could still remember Captain Picard ordering her to do that as well, after Data had, in a fit of cybernetic overprotectiveness bordering on human, brought the child on board the Enterprise. The captain had ordered her to erase the child’s short-term memory, effectively removing any knowledge she had of the Enterprise, her communications with Data, or the fact that she’d seen things she was never, ever meant to see. She would be returned to her family to grow up as she’d been meant to.

  The procedure Pulaski had used was experimental at the time, but—fortunately for the little girl—that experiment had been a success. She didn’t want to consider what might have happened if the girl had remembered anything. For all they knew at that time, the Dremans were the type of culture who’d believe it when a child said they’d done something utterly fantastical like walk in a spaceship. Then again, for all they knew at the time, the Dreman culture could have held a large green glob of silicone as a supreme deity and worshipped it with offerings of bodily fluids.

  She’d seen stranger things over the years.

  Pulaski reached for a padd to make a note to check up on Sarjenka when she got to the station. Perhaps a quick visit to the surface would be in order, get to know the government officials, make a more in-depth evaluation of their level of medical technology, and see how she may be able to work with them to get them ready to eventually join the Federation. There may even be a way—provided she could find the child, of course—to make some kind of amends to Sarjenka for what they had to do to her so many years before.

  Finding one child on a planet of millions? Talk about your needle in a haystack.

  Her combadge chirped, and the relentlessly cheerful voice of the ship’s second officer, Lieutenant Commander Crisp filled the air. “Bridge to Dr. Pulaski. We’ve got another ship coming in headed for Drema IV—the Trosper . It’s an S.C.E. ship—they say they’re responding to a distress call from the station about bombs found in the mine?”

  Pulaski raised one gray eyebrow. To the best of her knowledge, she was the first of the permanent personnel to arrive, which was the only reason she could think of to explain how the message had been routed to her. Still, how’d a distress call get through the station and trigger a ship responding so quickly?

  “Can you put it through here, Commander? And send down Lieutenant Klesaris. I need help getting these trauma kits together for transfer to the station.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  Pulaski slid into her chair just in time for the viewscreen on her desk to flicker to life, showing the Federation logo before switching over to the image of an older man, perhaps her own age, with short, graying hair; a slightly receding hairline; and a round, generally jovial face. She got the impression that this man normally smiled a lot, even though the expression that greeted her from the viewscreen held a wary look. “You don’t look like Admiral Tucker,” the man’s rough voice said.

  “No, sir. Katherine Pulaski, chief medical officer. Admiral Tucker’s ship has been delayed. Captain…?”

  “Don Walsh, Doctor. U.S.S. Trosper . I assume you received the signal from Drema IV as well?”

  Pulaski tried not to look as lost as she felt. “Nothing that would indicate the need for another ship to come in.”

  The man on the screen’s brow furrowed. “Lolo was right. It must have routed through the starbase automatically to subspace. It doesn’t matter. The distress call was about some possible sabotage to the main dilithium mine on the planet.”

  “Sabotage?” Pulaski asked, leaning forward in her seat.

  Walsh’s lips pursed. “All we know right now is that one of the shift supervisors for the largest dilithium mine on the planet found a bomb embedded in one of the mine shafts. He was working on trying to get it out without it detonating, but according to the guardian’s office, the people who left it are virtually assured to have left more.”

  “The people they called the Exiles?” Pulaski asked. She’d tried to keep up with the Dreman people since they’d made contact with the Federation. The reports were sketchy, but suggested that about two years before, a small band of aliens referring to themselves only as Exiles had landed in the planet’s capital, and they’d come itching for battle. How a small band of aliens had managed to take over an entire planet, she wasn’t entirely certain, but when she considered how calm and quiet Sarjenka had been during her time on the Enterprise, she figured the Dremans exhibited a certain level of pacifism that probably had something to do with it. If there were no urge toward violence, how could there be an urge to resist? The Exiles couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “Yes,” Walsh replied. “From what I can tell, their arrival didn’t exactly do these folks any good. I get the feeling if they hadn’t come looking for us, we’d still be waiting to make official first contact.”

  Pulaski reluctantly had to agree. “Captain Walsh, how’s your medical staff? I can arrange to have triage
units on-hand if you want. I was chief medical officer on the Enterprise when it first came to Drema IV, and I’ve studied their physiology. I’m drafting notes for the members of my staff who are coming over to Drema Station.”

  Walsh gave a curt nod. “Thank you, Doctor; we’d appreciate a copy of those notes, if you don’t mind. Right now, though, nobody’s been reported injured, and we don’t know if there’s a legitimate threat. With the differences in focal energies of Dreman dilithium, my people are still running the simulations on what any explosion in the mines might do. If it’s what I suspect, there may not be anyone left for your people to treat.”

  “I’ll have my staff on standby in case you need us, Captain. We’re close enough that it would take less than an hour to get to you.”

  “Hopefully, they’re wrong, and we won’t need you. I’ll keep you apprised. Trosper out.”

  No sooner had the Federation logo cleared from her viewscreen than the comm chirped for her attention once again. “Bridge to Dr. Pulaski,” Crisp’s voice sounded. “There’s a message coming in for you from the planet, ma’am. Audio only. It’s Second Guardian Karjella. She says she’s relaying a priority message from Captain Gold.”

  Pulaski briefly wondered why the captain hadn’t been able to contact the ship directly, but said, “Route it in here, please, Commander.”

  A hiss over her office’s speaker system later, the message began playing, “This is Second Guardian Karjella to Drema Station or U.S.S. Progress . Priority message to Dr. Katherine Pulaski from Captain David Gold. There has been an explosion at the dilithium mining facility on the surface. At least one known casualty at this time. Please send teams for immediate assistance.” Another hiss of static, and the message ended.

  Pulaski slowly lowered her head into her hands. Explosions and dilithium were usually a messy combination, one best left to the engineers to figure out how to control. The real problem was going to be doing triage near an area where the energies of that explosion were still being focused and amplified through the ground beneath her feet. She’d already seen this planet try to tear itself apart once. The last thing any of them needed was for it to start trying again while she was in the middle of a delicate treatment.