by L. A. Graf
Sulu stabbed at the override button to cut off the rest of that unnecessary hail. “Have you managed to triangulate the shuttle’s last transmissions yet, Kyle?” he demanded, not caring if he offended the station’s civilian communications officer. Lieutenant John Kyle was on interim leave from the Enterprise just like Chekov, but he could still pull Starfleet rank over the colony’s regular staff in an emergency like this. And the first thing the former transporter chief had told him, when Sulu had brought the Bean up into the clear air of Belle Terre’s upper troposphere to report the cargo shuttle missing, was that Gamma Night was due to arrive at the station at any moment. Unlike Llano Verde, the orbital platform cared enough to work through the complex quadratic equations that predicted when the swath of interference would hit.
“They’ve got it roughly centered on the central quadrant of Llano Verde, but they’re having trouble getting any more specific than that.” Kyle’s British accent sounded much crisper than usual, which told Sulu just how rushed they were for time. “Apparently, the shuttle was flying through some fringes of dust when it last reported in, which distorted the usual subspace polarization. I did get a list of ground locations that were scheduled for cargo drops. Transmitting now.”
Sulu toggled the voice/data buffer on his communications panel to make sure the subspace packet had been stored, blessing the Enterprise-trained officer’s efficiency as he did so. If Kyle hadn’t been there, the colony’s station crew would probably still be asking him if he was sure the shuttle had really crashed. “Any luck contacting the Enterprise?”
“No. They were due to hit Gamma Night twelve hours before we did. They’re pretty far out on the edge of the system—Captain Kirk was trying to lure some lurking vessels out of the cometary cloud to see if they were pirates or just passing aliens.” He could hear Kyle take a quick replacement breath, then resume the brisk flow of information. “Given their position relative to ours, mutual blackout could last at least eighteen hours. Assuming immediate return after we reestablish contact, their ETA is at least three days, maybe four. Orders?”
Sulu wasted a few seconds sorting through his limited set of options. “Contact colony headquarters and report the missing shuttle as soon as your Gamma Night is over,” he said. “I’ll report in eighteen hours from now on the status of our search for survivors. If you don’t hear from me then, contact the Enterprise and request an immediate return to Belle Terre.” He paused to let Kyle acknowledge the orders, but his subspace communicator remained ominously silent. “Sulu to Orbital Platform. Come in, Kyle.”
There was no reply.
Sulu clenched his teeth, trying not to give in to the pessimism that had dogged him ever since Captain Kirk had sent him down with Scotty, Uhura, and Rand on this frustrating planetary mission. It was hard not to feel that Belle Terre was a colony with a jinx on it. Bad enough that it had to endure the random silences of Gamma Night; even worse that it was so far away from the rest of the quadrant that it was effectively an orphan system. But to have suffered a planetary catastrophe like the Burn and to have become the newest target for all the galaxy’s marauding bandits and power-hungry alien races seemed like more bad luck than any colony, no matter how well prepared or how dedicated, could withstand. And today that jinx had definitely turned personal. Of all the cargo runs that could have crashed over Llano Verde, why did it have to be the one Chekov was on, during the worst part of the dust season and in the midst of Gamma Night? And why did his request for Captain Kirk’s assistance have to get cut off right before he could even be sure Kyle had heard it?
Sulu punched a quick sequence of commands into the Bean’s antigrav thrusters. The little craft turned back toward the continental capital, dropping to a lower cruising altitude with the stomach-lurching speed only antigravs could create and control. The surface of Llano Verde’s dust layer came into focus below him, billowing like a silent steel-gray sea. Sulu knew from experience how misleading that aqueous appearance was. He’d once taken the Bean down into a dust storm that looked like that and found himself whirled into a maelstrom of wind shears and cyclonic gusts. His quick stab at the antigravs—made almost before he’d consciously realized the danger he was in—had kicked his experimental vessel up out of the dust again, seconds before it would have been smashed to smithereens against the ground.
Sulu tried not to think about what could have happened if he’d been flying a larger, conventionally powered vessel, but his years of piloting experience couldn’t be silenced that easily. He knew how fast a craft could drop in the wicked wind shears of Llano Verde, and how badly sensors could malfunction here. He knew how little chance there’d be to survive with dust clogging the exhaust ports and olivium radiation crippling the inertial dampers. But the most bitter knowledge Sulu possessed was that there was absolutely no point in scanning the landscape for signs of shattered wreckage from Chekov’s cargo shuttle.
Because nothing on the surface of Llano Verde could be seen beneath its dust.
Chapter Three
BY THE TIME they finally got the environmental suits assembled, Chekov could see that the crew of the orbital shuttle had settled into whatever ruts stress carved for them. Baldwin had moved into that place of easy calm belonging to men who’ve realized their survival is no longer in their own hands. It made him more pleasant to work with than he’d been during the less eventful leg of their flight—he hadn’t cracked a single off-color joke, or invented any new, annoying nicknames for anyone—but it also made him more of a concern. Chekov knew from experience that people who had accepted death as an option often weren’t as careful about their safety. That left everyone else in the party to worry about their safety for them—one more worry than many groups could survive.
In contrast, Plottel had grown so careful, so fearful of succumbing to some error or oversight which no one could foresee that it was all he could do to count the fingers on his gloves, and check and recheck each seam. Chekov pretended not to watch as Reddy patiently helped him into the suit almost the way a parent dresses a toddler. At least the pilot had defaulted to the kind of optimistic, caretaking mode Chekov could depend on to help rather than hinder the coming walk.
Chekov himself stepped through assembling his suit in grim silence, making a conscious effort not to snap at his companions for a slowness he knew was all in his head. Time always attenuated for him under stress. Minutes stretched to the breaking point, and everything from fumbling with a suit to small talk devoured precious seconds. He’d figured out some years ago that this internal time dissonance was his own perception, not reality, and he tried hard not to berate his teammates for failing to feel it, too. He couldn’t always keep the irritation out of his voice, though. At least no one here felt the need to critique his social skills under duress, the way Sulu usually did.
While all of the environmental suits were technically fit for use, Chekov was glad he didn’t have to trust any of them in hard vacuum. He finished verifying that the breathing apparatuses functioned at least well enough to keep anyone from suffocating, then divvied out the cheap O2 mixers and gas exchangers according to suit user’s height, weight, and experience. As the one among them with the most complete EV training, Chekov took the atmosphere unit with the greatest risk of failing. At least he had some hope of maintaining enough presence of mind to keep from drowning.
Suited up and fitted with breathers, they could barely squeeze far enough into the airlock to seal the door behind them. Chekov reached for Reddy’s hand without speaking. They knew that the olivium suspended in the crater’s water was going to make suit-to-suit transmission impossible, and, while everyone had been introduced to the concept of touching helmets to talk, Chekov had a feeling they’d do better relying on pantomime whenever possible. He closed Reddy’s hand firmly around the back of Plottel’s equipment belt, then took Plottel’s hand and connected him likewise to Baldwin. Baldwin intuited the next step and took a grip on Chekov’s belt before he’d even turned away from Plottel. Pragmatic,
Chekov realized with a start. People convinced of their own demise became weirdly pragmatic. He gave Baldwin a curt thumbs-up, then turned to put his own hand on the airlock controls. He took a breath so deep, the CO2 gauge on his respirator jumped just a little. It was finally time to go.
Water rushed the airlock in a glassy wall. Prepared as he was for the impact, the force of it still surprised Chekov. He staggered backward a step, felt Baldwin’s grip on his belt let go, lost sight of the airlock’s outer hatch in a tempest of mud and debris. Then, just as abruptly, the tug and swirl of fluid stilled, leaving him upright and suspended in a slow-motion universe. Compared with the dizzying lightness of microgravity, the suit’s weight and the water’s drag turned every movement into a leaden slog. It was like running through ever-thickening air in a nightmare. Like bugs struggling in amber.
They reassembled their human chain in a silence that somehow seemed even more isolated than before, then stepped one by one out into the morass.
It wasn’t as dark as Chekov expected. Sediment hung suspended in lacy draperies over forests of shattered stone, all of it lit by a dim luminescence that twisted and fractured as the surface high above them danced. Each labored footstep puffed up silt the color of ink. It paused in a knee-high roil, talcum-smooth like Martian soil, painting a story of where they’d come from and where they were going.
Chekov chose a careful path among the boulders and stones. “Ejecta,” the geologists in the Enterprise’s science labs had called it. Fragments of Belle Terre’s surface rocks flung skyward when the Quake Moon slammed home, only to fall and make their own impact craters throughout the belly of Bull’s Eye and its surrounding slopes. No plants here, no fish. A dead lake filled with muddy water so radioactive Chekov couldn’t even bring himself to look directly at the reading on his heads-up display. He hoped fervently that the upward trend beneath his feet meant something—that they were headed for the surface, and shelter, and some way to contact civilization before breathing and drinking and wearing this place damaged their cell structure beyond any chance of repair. He didn’t want to think about how many kilos of olivium-tainted dust would glue itself to their clothes if they had to shed their suits to heft themselves out of the water.
When he first felt the tug on the back of his suit, he assumed Baldwin had lost his footing somewhere beneath the curtain of mud they’d churned up with their passage. He slowed, putting out one hand to catch the rock in front of him, and hoped Baldwin could right himself without pulling everyone else down. The second tug was stronger, and the third turned into a fourth, fifth, and sixth in rapid succession. Damning the inflexibility of hard-shelled torsos, Chekov turned cumbersomely, groping for Baldwin’s arm to stop the pulling as he did so.
He saw where Baldwin pointed before he’d even finished his turn. A dozen meters back the way they’d come, Plottel and Reddy huddled in a near embrace, surrounded by a swirl of mud, helmets touching. Plottel’s movements, as jerky and animated as the water would allow, told Chekov almost as much as Reddy’s still, calming posture. It occurred to him only now that he might have made sure before they left the shuttle that no one was claustrophobic, or pathologically afraid of water. Disengaging from Baldwin’s grip as gently as possible, Chekov told him, “Stay here,” while gesturing the same command with both hands. The words might not have carried across without a radio signal, but the expression apparently did. Baldwin nodded obediently and took a seat on the nearest flattened boulder. Chekov retraced his path down the incline, uncomfortably aware of how the veil of mud surrounding their small party billowed and thickened as he trudged his way back through it.
Reddy shuffled aside slightly as Chekov approached, creating just enough room for Chekov to fit his helmet into the discussion without letting go his grip on Plottel’s shoulders. Their voices sounded thin and distant, blurred by the water the way they wouldn’t have been by the purity of vacuum.
“I can’t tell where it’s coming from—” Plottel’s eyes shone with fear, his breath so hot and rapid that he’d made mist on the inside of his faceplate. “—but there’s a lot of it, and it’s still coming—”
Reddy nodded calmly. “All right, don’t panic—”
“Don’t tell me not to panic!” Plottel wailed. He struck at Reddy’s hands to dislodge them, but couldn’t get enough momentum through the water to do much besides bump him ineffectually. “Whenever you tell me not to panic, I know it’s even worse than I thought!”
Chekov interrupted before Plottel could work himself into hysterics. “What’s wrong?”
“My suit’s leaking.” Plottel heaved a deep, shaking breath, then stated, more evenly, “I’ve got water in my suit.”
Chekov’s own heart hammered. This wasn’t space, he reminded himself. A breached suit didn’t necessarily mean anyone was going to die. “How long?” It was the only thing he could think to ask.
Plottel shook his head. “I dunno. Just a few minutes. I felt wet, on my one leg, and I thought I was imagining it because of all the water. But now it’s higher, and that leg’s real heavy.” He lifted his right leg somewhat awkwardly and moved it around to demonstrate. “I can feel it sloshing in my boot.”
“All right—” Chekov stopped himself just short of telling Plottel to stay calm and not to worry. “We’re not too far from the surface,” he lied. A little lie—he was pretty sure the surface was only a few dozen meters above them, and the upward trend of the lake bed had to be a good sign. “Can you stay with me and keep moving for just a little farther?”
“And if my suit fills up before we get out?” Behind the steam on his faceplate, his eyes looked wet and wide. “I don’t want to drown!”
Chekov shouldered Reddy aside and placed himself so squarely in front of Plottel that he blocked all view of everything else. “I won’t let you drown,” he stated firmly. When Plottel slid his gaze away, Chekov took his helmet in both hands and gave it a little shake to bring them eye-to-eye again. “There are ways to share atmosphere between suits,” he went on. Not that any of them would work with these suits, under these conditions. “If we have to, we’ll tear the breathers out of the suits and buddy-breathe until we get to the surface.” It would leave them both chilled and soaking, exposed to more radiation than Chekov cared to think about, but it would keep the water out of their lungs. Assuming they could do it at all. “I promise, I will not let you drown.”
This time, Plottel’s eyes never left Chekov’s face when he nodded once, stiffly. “Okay.” That kind of trust came with a terrible price.
Chekov returned the nod, then took hold of Plottel’s wrist and angled himself to bump helmets briefly with Reddy. “Stay with Baldwin. Get him to the surface and find some kind of shelter.” They didn’t dare keep up their human chain from here—Chekov and Plottel had just become the damaged members that it was safest for the group as a whole to leave behind. “We’ll be up right after you.”
He hoped to God that wasn’t another lie.
It had taken more time than Uhura had expected to track down Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. It wasn’t that he was done working for the day—Scotty was never done working. But now that he had the antigrav thrusters on the Bean nearly perfected, his troubleshooting skills were in high demand with Llano Verde’s other technical specialists. Uhura began at the spaceport, checking in with the technicians who were designing a dust-repelling shield for the landing pad. They sent her to the cargo-loading area, where she was proudly shown the dustproof antigrav castors Scotty had designed for the baggage-handling carts before being redirected to the spaceport’s power-distribution grid. From there, she had to take one of the new underground walkways across the city to Big Muddy’s main power-generating station, where the magnetic antimatter containers had been reacting badly to olivium corrosion.
By then, it was almost dusk and she was starting to regret having run out from her lab without the protective cloak and sewn-in filtering scarf that Big Muddy residents called a dust muffler. She was also starting t
o fret over the amount of time the search had taken. She knew Sulu would be coming back to the spaceport as soon as he’d informed the orbital platform about the shuttle’s disappearance. If he couldn’t find her or Scotty, the pilot might decide to take the Bean right back out into the dust storm, to search whatever area the station had pinpointed as the site of the crash.
That was the frustration with a city limited to the use of hardwired landlines for communication. You couldn’t just say someone’s name into your communicator and let the computerized switching system locate them for you. Sulu would have to buzz the number for her lab, and although Uhura had left Janice Rand there to answer for her, Rand wouldn’t know where Uhura’s search for Scotty was going to take her, any more than Uhura currently did.
Where it did eventually take her was to a nondescript warehouse deep in Big Muddy’s industrial sector, the only one with lights still on now that night had fallen. There were no underground walkways within the warehouse complex, and Uhura had to pull up her uniform collar to cover her nose and mouth as she hurried through the swirling dust. The acrid tang of Belle Terre crept into her throat. Uhura knew she couldn’t really taste the trace levels of olivium in the blowing sediment, but just knowing it was there, emitting its transperiodic combination of subspace and hard radiation, usually made a phantom burning sensation slide down her throat when she swallowed. It was a measure of her urgency that she felt nothing but grit tonight as she coughed her way through the warehouse’s dustsealed doors.
“Krista, did you remember to make one of those pasta dishes vegetarian?” demanded a voice from behind a bank of equipment-laden shelving. “Greg says he’s not eating guanaco sausage anymore.”
Uhura followed the sound of the voice to a passageway jammed with coils of optical data cable and water pumps. At its end, an athletic young blond woman and a wiry dark-haired man huddled over what looked like a remote data-processing station, doing something with a laser welder. Knowing from experience how badly engineers tended to react to interruptions, Uhura waited for the hiss of the laser to fall silent before saying, “I’m looking for Commander Scott.”
