Progress

by Terri Osborne

  “It was a bomb, Eijeth,” Liankataka said, putting on the most consoling—no, Gold realized, it was actually placating—tone possible. “The last gasp of the Exiles.”

  “Exiles?” That seemed to panic the voice more than calm it. “Guardian, they’ve come back?”

  “No, Eijeth,” Liankataka said, still trying to comfort the man with his voice. “No, they haven’t come back. They merely left a few things behind.”

  “Scorched earth,” Gold absently said.

  “What, Captain?”

  Gold shook his head, not quite sure he wanted to believe how universal some concepts truly were. “It’s an old battle tactic that was also used on Earth centuries ago. Destroy anything useful to an invading enemy while you’re retreating from them: food, buildings, arable land. The idea was to keep the invading force from being able to set up shop comfortably. If they can’t even grow food, how can they enjoy the spoils of conquest?”

  Something that sounded like a snort of derision came from the Guardian’s direction. “It’s the behavior of children, Captain. ‘If I can’t have it, they can’t either.’ Very juvenile. Not at all surprising. The Exiles were a very childlike people in many ways.”

  “Aren’t we all, Guardian?” Gold asked. Turning his attentions to the world outside their tiny sanctuary of light, he said, “Eijeth, do the three of you have food? If we’re down here for any length of time, we need to ration every bit of food we have.”

  He heard muttering from above, then, “Not much. Jakara hasn’t eaten his lunch, but Kajkob and I did. We’ve got about four chunks of keena bread, some vituwater, and some dried teekir meat.”

  “Sounds like a feast,” Liankataka said. “All that for one day?”

  A deeper voice—Gold figured it was Jakara—said, “I work hard, sir. And my wife treats me well.”

  “Sounds like you found a good woman,” the Guardian said. “You’ll be okay, Jakara. We’ll all be okay.”

  Gold wished he could be so optimistic.

  “Would you please be so kind as to share some of that food with us, Jakara?”

  He heard a creaking like metallic hinges opening and closing, some rustling, and then, “Of course, Guardian. Do you need me to bring it down?”

  Gold and Liankataka shared a glance, then they both looked toward Kajana, the only uninjured person in their small group. She was huddled in the corner, leaning against the wall with her legs folded up to her chest. When she briefly raised her eyes to them, Gold noticed that the panic was still there. She rapidly shook her head and then huddled back over her legs. There was a good chance that she wouldn’t be able to help even herself, let alone them.

  “Yes, please,” Gold said. “But only if you’re able. The Guardian and I are injured, and Kajana isn’t able to move.”

  Someone scuffled their way down the mineshaft, the sound ending in a series of splashes and the entrance of a very large, very muscle-bound Dreman into the circle of light. Suddenly, Liankataka’s use of the word ‘feast’ made much more sense. It would have taken a lot of food to keep a man like this going. What little Gold could see of the man beyond his size showed a face covered in dilithium dust. The whites of his eyes shone in the faint light. “Guardian?” the man asked.

  “Jakara?”

  The man smiled, “Yes, sir.” He held out a small packet toward Liankataka. “The food. I split what I had in half. You want some water?” Jakara glanced back at the pool of water he’d stumbled through and said, “Maybe not. Looks like enough for all of us here.”

  Liankataka thanked Jakara profusely and then began divvying up the packet’s contents. He reached around and handed Gold a hunk about the size of his closed fist of what looked like a kind of whole wheat bread and two strips of dried meat the length of his hand.

  Gold’s stomach chose that moment to remind him that, in addition to the pain, he’d managed to ignore how hungry he’d become. He was grateful that he was sitting because a mild wave of dizziness came over him at the sight of the food.

  “Has anyone tried to get out yet?” Gold asked—his attempt to keep the dizziness at bay mentally complicated by the fact that doing so only made it more difficult to block out the pain.

  Jakara shook his head. “No, sir. We were waiting until we were sure the mine was through collapsing before we tried.”

  Gold couldn’t fault him that logic. Trying to dig them out with the tunnel collapsing around them was something of a self-defeating process. He checked the chronometer on the tricorder, just to see how long they’d been down there. Five hours.

  Five hours that felt more like five days.

  “Jakara,” Liankataka began, “we need your help. We need to begin working our way out of here, but Captain Gold and I are both injured. Kajana isn’t capable of helping right now. We’re going to have to rely on you and Eijeth.”

  Jakara nodded. “I understand, Guardian. We’ll get us out of here.”

  Chapter

  11

  Latik Kerjna, Drema IV

  Day 2

  Sarjenka sat back in the overstuffed chair in the front room of her home and waited.

  The hospital had threatened to sedate Rakan if she didn’t leave, so Sarjenka took her mother home. There was nothing they could do for Eliatriel in either location, but at least at home, Rakan could go through the motions of life.

  They’d been through this worry route once before, back when her father had been involved in a minor shift in the structure of the secondary mine. One level had collapsed, trapping a dozen miners for several hours until the rescuers could dig them out. Her father had sustained injuries that they were sure he would not survive, but he had.

  As she was neither strong enough in build to be a rescuer nor far enough along with her studies as a healer to offer anything more than first aid for wounded who hadn’t shown up yet, there was nothing she could do but wait. She pulled her small music stone from her pocket, holding it tightly in her right hand as it gave off the same lilting melody it had for all the years she’d had it.

  She had no idea where the stone had come from. All she knew was that on the morning after the tremors had stopped, she’d awoken with it in her hand. A part of her felt there had to have been something special about it, as nobody she’d shown it to had ever seen a stone that gave off music before; yet no matter how many times she was interrogated on the subject, she had no recollection of how it had come to be in her possession.

  The stone’s melody had always been a source of comfort to her, though, reminding her that there were things in the universe that she didn’t understand—yet. Perhaps her father’s fate was one of those things. If the news were bad, she reminded herself, we’d have heard already.

  Her mother, however, wasn’t quite as patient. “This is a nightmare. They’ll tell us if something happens?” she asked, an edge of hysteria in her voice.

  Sarjenka knew the look on Rakan’s face far too well. That tone of voice, the panicked look in her eyes, the otherwise placid expression, the wringing of the hands in the lap added up to one thing. Her mother was obsessing over every possible scenario that Eliatriel’s life could have taken in the explosion, and the preeminent vision was, Sarjenka was relatively certain, the same one that had been appearing in her mother’s mind far too often: Eliatriel’s body, skin charred as though it had been a teekir steak cooking over an open flame for too long, bones broken from the impact of the explosion, pain like she could not imagine, suffering in ways that no living creature had ever been intended to suffer.

  Traiaka, if it is your choosing, please make your embrace quick. Please don’t allow father to suffer anymore.

  “I don’t know, Mother. I don’t know.” While Sarjenka could think of dozens of possible ways her father could still unavoidably die, even sitting in his hospital bed, and think of them in ways even a fully-trained healer couldn’t treat, she didn’t dare speak of them aloud. Her mother was distraught enough as it was without adding something like that to it. If there were o
nly a way to talk the hospital into allowing her mother to sit with her father, but the burns were so severe they had to place him in a special isolation ward for treatment. Even the slightest risk of infection was more than they were willing to take.

  Rakan grabbed a small square of fabric from her skirt pocket and proceeded to wipe her eyes. “What are we to do if he dies?”

  “The same thing the other families will do if they lose someone, Mother,” Sarjenka replied, her voice far more calm than she actually felt. “We will thank Traiaka for his life, and then we will move on.”

  Rakan sobbed inexorably, her tiny wails the only thing breaking the silence between mother and daughter. Sarjenka considered getting up from the chair and trying to console her mother, but it was becoming increasingly obvious to her that something needed to be done. For one thing, the condition of the house had gone downhill in a drastic manner. It had only been a day, but it felt like a week. Clutter was beginning to form in various locations. The morning news journal sat unread on her father’s favorite chair, almost as though it was waiting on his return, too. The full basket sitting by the stairs indicated that her mother hadn’t even bothered to put away the clean laundry from the previous morning.

  If Rakan intended to be the one to break down, then the responsibility for remaining calm and rational would have to be Sarjenka’s.

  Pulling herself out of the chair, Sarjenka walked over to the front entrafield. “I can’t sit here doing nothing, Mother. I’m going to the hospital.”

  Chapter

  12

  Latik Kerjna, Drema IV

  Central Hospital

  Day 2

  Sarjenka arrived at the hospital more grateful to be away from her home than anything else.

  However, that gratitude was short-lived when she saw Healer Drankla walking toward her. His iridescent white robes were covered in dark blood, and she thought she saw flecks of black on him as he drew closer. His face, which held more than a few well-earned lines of age, seemed suddenly so much older.

  “Sarjenka,” he said. “I was going to contact your mother.”

  Drankla had been master to her apprentice for the last two years. She’d grown to know that tone of voice in him far more than she’d have ever cared to admit. Between that and the single raised golden eyebrow, she knew he was trying to figure out how to break some bad news.

  To her.

  “My father?” she asked, feeling a tinge of guilt that she hoped it was someone else.

  Drankla’s hands fell to his sides briefly, but he then lifted them to sit just above her shoulders. His face, which she had begun to think would never age, seemed to take on ten years before her eyes. When he lifted his red eyes to her, she could see the exhaustion in them. “He took a turn for the worse after you left last night,” he said. “The infection in his right arm began to spread. We were able to slow it down, but the medications are lowering his blood cell counts.”

  Sarjenka felt as though she’d been kicked in the stomach. While she’d been too young to actually study xurta wounds, she’d read enough to know what her next question was going to be. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to it, however. “The infection, is it dilithium poisoning? Did it get into his blood?”

  The master healer shook his head, pulling the glimmering white cloth that covered his head and kept his golden hair in check during delicate operations. “Sarjenka. You know the kind of injuries a xurta inflicts. Healer Nekara said there was a tremendous amount of dust in the air when he arrived. The best he could do was patch up the damage and get him here. However, I’m not certain how much more we can do. We are not Traiaka. We don’t have the power to reverse this kind of damage.”

  Her eyes lowered to the floor between them. If anyone would know what she had and hadn’t learned, it would be the master who’d instructed her. In the time since the Uprising, there had been sporadic xurta incidents—enough for them to itemize the kind of damage the bomb was capable of inflicting, but not nearly enough to figure out precisely how to disarm them. Nobody could figure out whether they should be thankful for that fact. It was far easier to set the things off than it was to do anything else with them.

  That was when a hope took hold in her mind, one she wasn’t sure she wanted to cling to, but did, anyway. “What about the Federation? They had the knowledge to stop the tremors before. What about them? Could they help? Maybe they could—I don’t know—make another arm for him?”

  Drankla shook his head, confusion in his gold eyes. “I don’t know. We don’t know how much their healers know about us, Sarjenka. Right now, we need to concentrate on what we can do right here.”

  She wasn’t settling for that. “But there’s a possibility they could do more?”

  “There are always possibilities.”

  Sarjenka smiled for the first time since the explosion, turned around, and sprinted out the door.

  Chapter

  13

  Latik Kerjna, Drema IV

  Bottom of Dilithium Mine Alpha

  Day 2

  “The latkes were delicious,” Gold said as he pushed himself away from the dining room table. Rachel’s latkes were one of his favorite foods on the face of the earth. He’d even attempted to program the replicators on the Progress with the recipe. However, as was the norm with anything Rachel had ever cooked, it seemed, it didn’t quite taste the same. This batch, however, had felt as though the recipe were just a little different. “Did you use—”

  “A little more scallion than usual,” Rachel replied, her delicate hand reaching for the empty plate. His sense of smell had noted the difference almost immediately, but after some of the things he’d been through recently, he wasn’t always sure that his senses still worked properly.

  His wife smiled that knowing smile of hers. “If they still worked properly, David,” she said, “you’d be back on that starship of yours and not stuck in a hole.”

  Gold’s brow furrowed. Now, where did that come from?

  Rachel walked the few steps from the dining room to the house’s state-of-the-art kitchen. The matte-finished metal of the appliances stood out against the dark wood of the cabinets, almost like stars in the night with the wood-burning stove acting almost like their sun. Of course, that had been one of the things she’d insisted upon when they remodeled the kitchen. While she might have had her rabbinical work to help refine her soul, his wife needed a proper place to practice her art.

  He leaned forward, fetching another empty ceramic serving plate from the table. This one was chartreuse, heavy, and cold. It looked almost like a flattened crystal of Dreman dilithium. “Rachel, where did we get this platter?”

  All he heard from his wife was a small laugh, followed by the sound of running water.

  No sooner did he stand from his chair than the entire universe around him shifted, and he was standing at attention in the captain’s ready room on the U.S.S. Boudicca.

  Captain Nechayev leaned back in her chair, sizing him up with a look. Her blond hair was pulled up into a tight bun, and the red of her uniform only served to make her usually austere expression hold more than a touch of anger. “Commander Gold,” she said, her voice turning arch. “You do realize the problem we have here, don’t you?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, his back remaining stiff as a board. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  Nechayev let out a long-suffering sigh. Gold had been her first officer for only a few months, but it had been long enough to know that whatever Alynna Nechayev wanted, she usually got, and woe be to the person who stood between her and her goal.

  She’d make a great admiral one of these days.

  “Relax, David,” she said, putting particular emphasis on the first word. “You’re not going to get out of this if you overanalyze and outthink yourself. You want to command a ship of your own eventually, correct?”

  Gold wanted to say that he already had a perfectly good ship and crew in the Progress, but something stopped him. Before he could formulate
a proper reply, the scene shifted again.

  This time, it was to the dais where he’d stood just a few minutes—or was it hours?—before. Only this time, he was alone. The sun was warm and bright in the sky. The air smelled of green, lush, dense, peaty life, with a little of the cool crispness of fresh water mixed in for good measure. He half expected to look past the trees and see a bright, sapphire-blue ocean beyond. A bird chirped in the distance. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d known such peace when he hadn’t been in space.

  Probably the last time I was home. But New York City is never this peaceful. This would be a wonderful place to retire.

  That was when Gold realized what was going on. He opened his eyes—at least, he thought he opened them, as the black of the mine tunnels was just as all-encompassing as the darkness behind his closed eyes. Dreaming, he thought, chastising himself. Gold felt around the flat stone outcrop that served as their resting place until he found the closed tricorder. He flipped it open, allowing its faint glow to illuminate their small chamber. He was almost grateful for the damage to his ankles, as he doubted that he would have been able to stand in the tiny space. Kajana had said the level had only recently been dug, so it wasn’t quite at full capacity yet. Not quite at full expanse, either.

  Testing his ankles, Gold discovered that taking off his boots shortly before falling asleep had apparently resulted in his ankles being able to do the swelling they’d been trying to do since he’d first come tumbling down the mineshaft. It wasn’t the smartest move from a first-aid perspective, but it was either take off the boots and cope with the aftermath or deal with feeling as though his circulation were being cut off. While the boots had hurt like hell to have on thanks to the compression of the swelling, the mere thought of movement now sent tremors of anticipatory pain up the sides of his legs.

  Ignoring the pain, Gold followed the sound of snoring and slowly worked his way across the mine floor to where Liankataka lay. The lights from the three miners on the level above them had given out hours before, so Gold was stuck once again with using the faint glow of the tricorder’s display as illumination. “Guardian,” he whispered. “Are you awake?”