Riker straightened, drawing back his sore shoulders; he tilted his head in the slightest sign of acquiescence. He did not say, I told you so.
But he thought it very hard.
Chapter Eight
WORF CLOSED THE NEWLY PROVISIONED med kit firmly enough to elicit a protesting snick from the container, and La Forge looked up from his last-minute adjustments to the new secondary shields. He knew enough to recognize the glower on Worf’s face for the impatience it was. “Just a few more minutes,” he said. “It won’t do Commander Riker any good if you go down, too.”
“It will do him even less good if he is eaten before I arrive,” Worf said implacably.
Well, that was true, too. La Forge fine-tuned the frequency interaction between the two shields, and confirmed that both scavenged generators from the scooterpods were precisely aligned. There. He stood back and gestured to the shuttle controls. “Remember, keep these engine shields on at all times, even if you leave the shuttle. Other than that . . . it’s as ready as it’ll ever be,” he said, and that was true enough. It didn’t have enough seats—some of the returning passengers would have to sit on the floor—but it had Tsoran medical supplies and drugs, extra rations suitable for all the species involved, and a waiting crew of several Fandrean rangers.
“It is about time,” Worf said, not quite under his breath.
“Yeah, well, it’s about timing, too,” La Forge said. “Don’t forget that it takes tremendous energy to open that portal. It’d be one thing if we could be sure of hearing communication from within the shields, but—”
“I know,” Worf said, and then stopped abruptly, wearing the expression he often had when he seemed to be restraining himself. He recited, “The portal can only open three more times, and it will do so in six-hour intervals.”
Unfazed by fraying Klingon temper, La Forge added, “After that, you’ll have to wait two days before we can begin the cycle again. Recharge time.”
“It is a ridiculous system,” Worf grumbled.
“Which is why I’ll be working to solve the communications problem the whole time you’re in there,” La Forge pointed out. “We’ll be trying to raise you, so keep your ears open. If it works, we’ll take the portal off the timer and wait to hear that you’re ready to come out.” He glanced at the newly mounted shield generators, couldn’t think of anything else to adjust, and reluctantly headed for the shuttle door. “Good luck, Worf.”
Worf’s rumbling reply was low enough that La Forge wasn’t sure it was meant to be heard. “A Klingon does not need luck.”
No, of course not. But La Forge’s smile quickly faded as he stepped aside for the Fandrean rangers. Maybe Worf didn’t need luck, but he had the feeling that Commander Riker and the Tsorans could use a goodly dose of it.
* * *
Riker crouched to pluck a dart out of a wide, rubbery leaf, dropping it onto his palm. He straightened, and, holding the dart up to eye level, rolled it slightly in his hand, examining it. Takan, on a similar dart- and wood-gathering mission, came by and held out his hand for it. “We’ll need that.”
“Of course,” Riker said, and handed it over. He’d get a better look at another one later. For now, he didn’t have the time to waste. He left the rest of the darts to Takan and Gavare, and joined Rakal, Ketan, and Akaar in their search for defensible ground . . . and plenty of firewood.
“Over here!” Rakal called, excitement in his voice. Too far from the others for Riker’s taste, but if they had a window of safety within which to operate, it would be now, in the aftermath of the sholjagg’s presence. Cautiously, he left Takan and made his way to second group, watching the ground with distinct attention for any tubular threats.
Rakal, he discovered, had ample reason for the triumph in his voice. He and the others were crouched before a steep bank, a cliff that seemed equal parts clay and rock with striations of darkly rich soil layered throughout. The ground directly before the cliff was tangled with foliage, but free of any large-girthed, towering trees; there would be room to build a bonfire or two. Defensively, it looked to be about as good as this area was likely to offer—better, in fact, than Riker had ever expected to find, because for all the challenges of the footing, the actual terrain had been fairly mild. Not only did the spot put a wall at their backs, but it curved around, enhancing the shallow indentation which—if one were very generous—might be called a cave formation.
Riker was inclined to be generous.
“You see?” Akarr said, noting his arrival. “We don’t need your shuttle.”
“Regen might feel differently,” Riker said dryly. “If he were still able to feel anything at all.”
“And,” Akarr said, as though Riker hadn’t spoken at all, “we’re significantly closer to the portal.”
Riker wasn’t so sure about that, either. But instead of saying so, he added his armful contribution of wood. Not dry . . . nothing was. But the incendiary tablet would take care of that.
It had better.
“We’ll need more wood.” Akarr poked the small pile with his foot. “Enough wood to keep the fire high all night. That should keep them away.”
If I were a sholjagg, would I be afraid of a little fire? Riker recalled the size of the beast and wasn’t entirely convinced. But it was definitely a first step. “I’ll get more,” he said. He thought again of the tranks, hanging ineffectively in the sholjagg’s thick, coarse hair. Lots more.
“Now that we’ve found a defensible spot, we’ll all look,” Akarr declared. He lifted his head and bellowed, “Gavare! Takan! Join up!”
They set to gathering wood with intensity, combing the woods near the cave while the ambient light slowly dimmed and the bird and insect noise cranked up to the point where it was hard to hear anything else—even the sound of Riker’s own movement through the jungle. He found himself on alert, freezing each time the increasingly active insects sounded off nearby. A small, froggy creature that might or might not have had beetle-like wings poinged off his temple, dropped down to his beard, and got its sticky feet tangled there so thoroughly that Riker had formed a distinct image of himself striding through the Enterprise corridors with a small winged frog stuck to his face before he finally freed the thing and sent it off into the brush.
But nothing tried to eat him, and he had at least two of the Tsorans in his sight at all times. Very cozy, just a nice roaring bonfire for a pleasant little campout. . . . When he returned to the cave, he could barely see the dark hollow behind the stack of wood piled before it.
Riker began sorting through it, moving the main bulk of the wood—fallen branches ranging from green to punk-wood rotten—to the side so there was room to build the actual fire. He picked out the driest pieces for the fire-starting process, hefting anything that came into his hand that felt like it might serve as a club. Something with a longer reach than a bat’leth.
Besides, Akarr’s men had not yet thought past the firewood to the extra weapons they would need—even if the tranks worked on the next creature to come after them, they’d already severely depleted their supply of darts—and Riker had a feeling they’d follow suit if they saw him arming himself with crude tools.
Gavare wandered in dragging a branch almost as thick around as he was and dropped it beside the newly sorted wood, immediately sitting down beside it. His mind seemed to have cleared—or, at least, he was no longer apt to wander off on his own—though the actual process of serious thinking remained beyond him. “Wood,” he said. “That’s good.”
“It’ll help keep us alive,” Riker agreed, selecting a heavy green wood stick as thick as his arm and just as long, and thinking it would be even better if he could lash a stone of some sort to the end. Or a stone with random spikes, each tipped with poison—
Definitely spending too much time in Worf’s holodeck calisthenics. Or rather, in the toned-down version for humans. Worf Lite.
In any event, this would do nicely for a club. Riker set it aside, and looked over to see Gavare pokin
g through the sorted wood in a desultory way—though he soon ceased, as though he’d forgotten what he might have been looking for. Unlike the rest of them, he didn’t seem tense or worried; he looked content, as Riker would define “content” in a Tsoran, and he hummed to himself, a gentle under-purr.
“Why is it,” Riker said, considering that getting knocked on the head might in fact be a good strategy for making it through the next few days, “that all of you are willing to go to such extraordinary lengths to continue this kaphoora?”
“Everything must be just right,” Gavare said, answering in distraction as he found a potential spear that delighted him; he took out his small knife and carved away at the tip.
“Just right for the kaphoora? It’s too late for that.”
“Kaphoora,” Gavare said, and made a short snuffly noise, an odd flapping of his lips. “For the Federation. That’s what this whole kaphoora is about . . . more than just prime kaphoora to Akarr. He’s got Takarr to worry about.”
“Takarr?” Riker stopped arranging the fire circle he’d started and gave Gavare a hard look. Idle and wandering words from a concussed Tsoran, and he had the feeling they held the first truly crucial information the Tsorans had revealed.
But the sharp edge to his voice must have cut through Gavare’s fog, made way for some sense in the guard’s head. He said, “Better get that fire started. This time of day, the sculpers come out in gangs—” He cut himself short, tilting his head, listening.
Riker heard it, too, just as the others drifted to the heart of their camp area, cautious and hunting out the source of the noise.
Overhead.
Not as powerful as usual, but no less the sweet for that. A shuttle, flying low and steady, from the direction of the portal right along the flight path the Rahjah had taken.
Worf. The Collins. No doubt he was heading for the Rahjah’s planned landing site; with any luck the light was not yet so dim that he couldn’t see the crash path.
Not that there was anywhere near the Rahjah to land except in that crash path, and a tricky bit of flying that would be.
It didn’t matter. Worf was in the air, come to look for them in response to the broadband cry for help. He’d find the Rahjah, all right.
“And we’ll be nowhere near it,” Riker muttered out loud.
“What?” Akarr switched his attention from the now-fading engine noise to glare at Riker; surely he’d guessed the source of the noise, for he wasn’t asking. “What did you say?”
It was a dare, Riker thought. A dare to say I told you so. But not a dare he had any intention of taking. Not when he still had to get through the night, and that wouldn’t happen if the Tsorans decided to take serious exception to him.
“Come morning,” Riker said, his voice carefully neutral, “we’ll have a way out of here.”
“How long,” Gavare said, squinting out into what was definitely growing darkness, “will it take you to light that fire?”
“Depends on just how wet this wood is,” Riker told him, slinging his backpack off to pull out the incendiary tablets. “Why do you ask?”
Gavare didn’t answer right away; as his companions glanced warily about themselves and Riker shaved a quick pile of curling bark for tinder, the answer became evident—a slinking, long-bodied shape, a double-tailed whisk of movement in the foliage . . . the sculper was back.
“Get that fire started,” Akarr said, ignoring the fact that Riker was already assembling the tinder and kindling, had placed the flat button on the ground beneath it, and was prepared to pull its activating tab. “Everyone else—take a point. Use the rocks and spears, and save the tranks!”
Had they found time to make spears and gather rocks? Riker hoped it was so, but didn’t look away from his task, flinching as the tablet flared to life with intense heat and light, and wincing at the strong sizzle of the larger kindling. If it was that wet, it might well take two tablets to establish a self-sustaining fire.
One of the Tsorans shouted; Riker didn’t bother to check who, though he could tell why, even with ruined night vision. The rush of a sculper, its soft chittering laugh of a retreat—sounds he already knew by heart. He couldn’t help the others now; he kept his focus on the fire. Adding small branches to the small tablet-inspired inferno as fast as he could, daring to try a larger branch . . . he hesitated, ready to snatch it away if the fire dimmed, all too aware of the brief skirmish taking place off to the side.
But the tablet fueled the flames, and by the time it died, they had a large, healthy fire blazing before the cave— enough of a fire to spook the naive sculper . . . for now.
And no one else had been hurt.
For now.
“Akarr!” Takan shouted from the other side of the fire. “It returns!”
“No, over here!” Rakal cried, his warning harsh with under-purr.
In front of Riker, something bounded in close to the fire, bouncing back out again before his recovering night vision could quite see what it was. Not that it mattered; he didn’t need to see it to know exactly what had happened. The sculper was back . . . and he’d brought his friends. Riker picked up his newly made club in one hand, and adjusted his grip on the bat’leth in the other.
It was going to be a long night.
* * *
“What is the scuttlebutt?” Data asked over the comm link, his tone just slightly off normal. La Forge stopped his work at the Fandrean communication board for a mental double take on the words, then gave his head a slight shake and returned the greater part of his attention to his work—not that he had much attention to give it. The normal dull ache of the VISOR’s interface at his temples had sharpened into a true headache, a nagging discomfort that generated the frequent impulse to remove the device. As tired as he was, one of these times he was going to have the thing off his face before he even realized what he’d done.
“I said—”
“I heard you, Data. It’s the middle of the night here, everyone else is asleep, and I keep staring at this communications board, waiting for a solution to pop into my head. Meanwhile, Worf is off in the Legacy somewhere, and we have no idea if he’s had any luck finding Commander Riker’s shuttle, or even if he’s run into trouble himself.”
“Groovy,” Data said. La Forge’s link to the Enterprise, his link to anything outside of this museum, and he’d said groovy.
This time, La Forge did stop work, carefully replacing the spanning microflux calibrator in its special protective tool case. “Not groovy, Data. Not groovy at all.”
“I misapplied the word? I meant to indicate support and approval of your work there.”
“Well, you didn’t.” La Forge had no trouble visualizing Data’s slightly puzzled response, the tilt of his head as he searched for more information about the subject. “This isn’t the first time you’ve used an unusual phrase. Are you off on another slang kick?”
“Not precisely. I am running an experiment. After so many of the officers in the briefing indicated a familiarity with The Wizard of Oz, I thought I would see how many other twentieth-century phrases and allusions people would respond to. I am attempting to use them casually, in the course of a conversation. It is not my intent that the phrases be noticed for themselves, but to see if the participants in the conversation respond to the phrase with an understanding of its meaning.”
La Forge, sitting cross-legged on the floor—and why were these boards always so close to the ground—felt his mind go numb and foggy.
“For instance, when Captain Picard was leaving for the Tsoran reception, I advised him to paint the town red. He did not seem to have a full understanding of the phrase, but I fear the results of that particular experiment were skewed when it turned out that Atann actually had painted the reception room red.”
La Forge leaned back on his arms, smiling. “I heard it was curtains and rugs.”
“To be precise, although my point stands.”
To which La Forge didn’t respond, other than to give in to the i
mpulse to remove the VISOR and sit in his pleasant haze, listening to Data’s voice—which eventually said, “—my understanding of human physiology leads me to suggest that you will achieve no practical purpose in driving yourself this way.”
“Was that your way of telling me to get some sleep?”
“I believe it was.”
“Yeah,” La Forge said, and sighed. “You’re right. I just hate to think of them in there, with no way to communicate to us . . . who knows what kind of trouble they’re in. But . . . I can’t think straight anymore.”
“Then you are hardly doing your best for them,” Data said, as blunt as usual. Not to mention correct.
“Thanks, Data. That’s just the kind of pep talk I need.”
“It was not meant to be a pep talk.”
No, never mind. He was too tired to straighten that one out. But before he went to bed . . .” Data, how’s it going with the Ntignano evacuation? And with the Tsorans?”
“I would say . . .” Data started, and hesitated, hunting for the best response, his very hesitation a blinking red alert in La Forge’s mind.
“Just tell me, Data.”
“I am sorry to report that neither situation is progressing in a positive manner. The Ntignanos have much less time than expected, and the extended evacuation journey is creating problems. Dr. Crusher has the details; I can have her—”
“No, no, this is fine,” La Forge muttered. Well, he had asked. “And the Tsorans?”
“It is hard to ascertain how they feel about the situation, since they have broken off contact. I believe that Captain Picard has something in mind; he has not given up his attempts to acquire the charts.”
“Has he—” La Forge stopped, trying to think if Data would know about his request to send out a modified charting probe. He’d made it of Picard, who would work with engineering if he decided to move ahead . . . but would he have brought Data in on the decision-making process? “I’d been hoping we could start in on our own charts, Data. Do you know if Captain Picard is considering it?”
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