by L. A. Graf
Dust slid, slick as ice, over the sloping rocks. It carried them halfway back to the water, ramming them against a shoulder of welded granite and sending the weapon skittering down the bank ahead of them. Chekov heaved clear of the gunman, not liking their proximity, and rolled into a crouch with the upper slopes of Bull’s Eye at his back. He didn’t like the shroud of white noise spun by the dust storm, liked even less not knowing how many others might be with this gunman, or how many of them carried the same loud, destructive weapon. When the stranger climbed to his feet, turned partly away, Chekov tensed himself for anything. “What the hell are you doing?” He had to shout to be heard over the wind. “I’m from the Enterprise!”
The gunman answered by spinning and aiming a rather inexpert swing at Chekov’s head.
He intercepted the blow without having to think about it, then returned a faster, more precise strike before taking the man’s legs out at the knees. He knew it was a good hit—could tell by the jolt it sent all the way up to his shoulder, and by the heavy pulse of pain it drove through his already-burned palm—but he didn’t expect it to take the man down altogether. After what felt like an eternity of waiting for the gunman to rise, Chekov dropped cautiously, awkwardly to one knee and reached to feel for a heartbeat through layers of dust-laden clothes.
The wind seemed suddenly alive again. Driven back temporarily by the adrenaline rush of combat, it slammed into the forefront of his awareness again, bringing with it all the dust and radiation he had hoped to avoid. Feeling suddenly shaky, Chekov ducked his head against his sleeve and willed his breathing to slow, his lungs to stop rebelling against the filthy air. The dust caking his clothes and hair would serve him almost as well as a cloaking device right now, buying him a few precious moments. He found the gunman’s heartbeat beneath his hand, thought he would be relieved at the discovery. Instead, he horrified himself by hesitating over whether or not he should leave this man alive.
Despite Eau Claire’s directives, there was no kevlar bodysuit protecting the gunman, only heavy cotton trousers, several layers of tunics, a coarsely woven green-and-orange striped face scarf with a sewn-in filter, a pair of plasma-welding goggles, and the finest link chain gloves Chekov had ever seen. What skin he could glimpse beneath goggles and scarf was as olivium-burned and dust-dry as any other colonist’s, and the shoes on his feet were the same Federation issue Plottel and Baldwin and Reddy wore.
You can’t just kill a colonist.
The Enterprise had made the long trek to Belle Terre to protect these people. Instead, the pioneers had been ravaged by dust storms, preyed upon by raiders, put on the defensive by other equally desperate colonists. God only knew what the man thought when he saw Plottel and Chekov.
Still, to murder an unprotected man on a lakeside just because he was unfamiliar . . . It went against everything the Federation—and Belle Terre—was meant to stand for.
So did killing an unconscious assailant just because you were horrified by what he had done. And leaving him for the storm to kill wasn’t much better.
It proved harder than Chekov expected to roll the man into the lee of a boulder. Wind shoved at him with malicious abandon, and microscopic crystals of olivium lashed his hands and face with an unrelenting sting. He couldn’t breathe deeply enough to drive off dizziness, couldn’t see well enough to avoid stumbling over rocks so big they could break a man’s leg. By the time the colonist had been safely tucked away from harm, Chekov’s lungs felt tacky with dust, his mouth dry all the way down into his stomach. When his eyes slitted open, the wind sliced across them like razors and the dust sucked away tears of pain.
He couldn’t find Plottel anymore, wasn’t even sure how far down the shoreline he’d stumbled. This whirling, this sick dizziness that wrung out his insides like a dry rag, it wasn’t just a lack of air. It was the horrible dryness of the Outland, the cell-destroying kiss of olivium, the incredible stupidity of surviving a shuttle crash, a hike through muddy water, only to die on the slopes of Bull’s Eye because he tried to save a man who’d murdered one of his team. He went down hard, coughing, making things worse with each whooping intake of dust. Guilt clawed its way stubbornly above his rising panic—guilt over Plottel, over losing Reddy and Baldwin, over leaving Uhura and Sulu without even a clue where to look for his body. Then dust overwhelmed the last of his senses, and even panic was pushed down into darkness and smothered.
“We’re wasting our time here,” Sulu said. “Let’s leave.”
He made the suggestion more to fill the oppressive emptiness of the governor’s office than because he had any hope of it being heeded. When it came to matters of civilian authority, Commander Scott believed in going by the book, even if that meant waiting an hour to get a ten-minute slice of a politician’s time. And although Uhura and Rand had initially been as exasperated as Sulu that Governor Sedlak wouldn’t meet with them until his evening meal was over, they’d since become so deeply absorbed in finding ways to solve Uhura’s communications problem that he didn’t think they even heard his plaintive remarks.
Sulu didn’t have anything equally productive to occupy his time, so he’d spent most of the past hour counting the number of places he’d visited on the map of Llano Verde that spanned an entire wall of the governor’s office. Most of the names on that map were no longer in use, Sulu noted, and some of them didn’t even exist as settlements anymore. It made a stark contrast to the landing-site map he and Scotty had tacked up in their hangar at the spaceport, where all the official place-names of the Outland were scribbled over with one or more of the nicknames Sulu heard on his various journeys. Finding such deep apathy—or arrogance—in the office of the province’s appointed leader didn’t inspire much confidence in his leadership.
“We should have started looking for the shuttle right after I got back from the orbital station,” Sulu said. “If we’d gotten out there early enough, we could have used thermal imaging to locate the crash site while it was still hot.”
“According to the meteorologists, there wasn’t a crash.” Uhura used the tip of one finger to erase something on the data padd she and Rand were sharing, then tapped in another variable for the processor to test. “So there wouldn’t have been anything out there to detect, even if we’d flown right over the shuttle.”
“What if the meteorologists were wrong?”
“We still wouldn’t have known where to start looking,” Janice Rand pointed out. “And we couldn’t have thermally imaged the whole subcontinent in the time it took the wreckage to cool.”
“Not unless there’d been a rupture of the antimatter core,” Montgomery Scott said dryly. “In which case, there’d be no one left alive to rescue.”
Sulu drummed his fingers on the polished marble top of the governor’s conference table. “We could have started by visiting the settlements that were scheduled for emergency food drops. We’d at least get a rough idea of where the shuttle went down by finding out where the shipments showed up and where they didn’t.”
The chief engineer snorted. “You’re not going to find out anything by pounding on those settlers’ doors in the middle of the night! From what I’ve heard, they’d be more likely to hit you over the head with a shovel than talk to you.”
There wasn’t much Sulu could say to that, since he was the one who’d first noticed the Outland settlers’ hostility toward strangers. Fortunately, he was saved from needing to reply by Janice Rand. “That worked!” she said, tapping the data padd’s small display excitedly to store the current value. “Now all we have to do is reprogram my olivium-enhanced signal detector for those scanning rates and integrate it into the transmission reflectance system. In a few hours, we might be able to contact the shuttle, or at least pick up its automatic distress signal.”
Uhura nodded, folding the data padd closed with a sigh of relief. “While you do that, Janice, the rest of us can pack the Bean with as much food and medical supplies as it can hold.”
“For the shuttle crew?” Sulu aske
d.
“For the colonists that the shuttle never got to.” The worry and compassion in her voice made Sulu feel ashamed of his irritable mood. “Some of them must be starving, or the province would never have agreed to let us deliver emergency food supplies.”
Sulu glanced around at the cold polished marble and etched glass of the governor’s office, and felt annoyed all over again. “If this province had done its start-up a little more efficiently, maybe they wouldn’t have needed emergency food supplies. Then Chekov wouldn’t have gotten stranded to begin with!”
“What a remarkable discussion.” The carefully measured cadence of that remark reminded Sulu instantly of Spock, although the voice that spoke was at least an octave deeper. Its rich timbre seemed at first to hint at warmth and humor, but one glance back at the speaker froze that impression stone-cold. The man standing in the doorway was tall and had the spare, cadaverous look of a lifelong academic. He also had one of the narrowest and most ascetic faces Sulu had ever seen, with slitted eyes as dark and unrevealing as those of a statue.
“Each of the individual statements is based on social values or emotional states rather than fact,” the man continued. “Yet the progression of arguments is taken to be logically valid by all involved.”
“Governor Sedlak.” Scotty stood up from the table as the politician crossed the room, forcing his subordinates to do the same. “Commander Montgomery Scott of the U.S.S. Enterprise—”
“—currently attached to our Technical Service to improve transportation and communications,” Marcus Sedlak finished. He took his seat without inviting them to join him, or seeming to notice the awkward hesitation before they did. “I am familiar with your mission, Commander, although I never approved of it. Given its remote probability of success, I find it an intolerable waste of technical expertise and time.”
Scotty’s face stiffened at that curt dismissal of his work, and Sulu half expected him to burst into an impassioned defense of his dustproof vertical flight vessel. But years of interaction with engineering professors had apparently taught him that it was futile to argue with academics.
“I’m not here to discuss my mission, Governor,” the chief engineer said between his teeth. “I’m here to make a Priority One Starfleet request for assistance from your Emergency Services group. We’ve got a downed shuttle—”
“A missing shuttle,” Sedlak corrected without the slightest compassion in his voice. “Currently only a few hours overdue.” He lifted an eyebrow at Scott, a gesture far colder and more disparaging than Spock’s version. “Most likely it has merely been delayed and will still arrive at the spaceport tonight.”
Scotty’s eyebrows beetled. “And it’s equally likely, sir, that—”
“—the shuttle has crashed,” Sedlak agreed. “In which case, there’s a better than even chance that all crewmen aboard are already dead. In either case, a rescue mission is unnecessary.” He favored them with what might have been supposed to be an understanding glance. To Sulu, it just looked supercilious. “I am aware that members of Starfleet tend to suffer intense emotional reactions to the loss of their social peers, but that’s not a valid reason to risk the lives of more colony personnel during Llano Verde’s dust season.”
“It’s my opinion, as a Starfleet officer, that any chance of the cargo shuttle landing with its crew alive is enough to justify a rescue mission,” Scotty said stubbornly.
Sedlak inclined his head a minuscule amount. “Your opinion is duly noted, Commander. I believe that concludes our meeting.”
Sulu could hear Uhura and Rand both take a startled breath in the silence that followed, but he kept his eyes fixed on Montgomery Scott. He could tell from the bunched muscles of the chief engineer’s shoulders that he must have been clenching his fists beneath the table, but his voice sounded only a little gruffer than usual. It was the much stronger Scottish accent that betrayed the intense emotion he was feeling.
“It doesna quite conclude there, sir. I’m required by Starfleet Directive C-Sixteen to inform you that a Starfleet officer has been placed in danger on this colony. That gives me the right, under Federation Law, to disregard any orders from civilian authority that would impede my ability to rescue him.”
The governor raised his eyebrows again, this time in an ironic look that seemed to mimic amusement. “I have issued no such orders, Commander, nor do I intend to. Please feel free to conduct whatever maneuvers you feel are necessary. I assume you will also inform Captain Kirk of the situation and request his assistance?”
“Correct.” The long Scottish roll of r’s in that word sounded almost like a growl. “And I dinna think he’ll be too happy to find out how you’re running this province, Mr. Sedlak.”
Sedlak’s narrow face remained unmoved, only the tiniest glitter in his dark eyes telling Sulu he’d registered the implied threat. “Your captain’s emotional state is of no concern to me, Commander Scott. When he arrives, all he will find is that I run this province in the most efficient manner possible. Any inadequacies are due to our suffering the brunt of the Quake Moon incident, an environmental catastrophe which I believe was caused by a certain James T. Kirk.”
* * *
“Uhura to Orbital Shuttle Six. Come in, Orbital Shuttle Six.”
She took her fingers off the transmission key, then glanced at Janice Rand. Since they’d hooked up only the transmission side of their integrated communications system so far, she wasn’t expecting a reply, just a status report. The junior officer was staring intently at the various readouts they’d patched into the line. “Seeing any signal interference?” Uhura asked.
“Not on the main band.” Rand clicked a dial through a range of frequency modulations, checking the readouts for each one. “Actually, it looks like we’re getting minimal interference throughout the spectrum. I’d say our concatenation worked.”
“Don’t count on it yet.” Uhura had spent too many useless hours at this control panel to believe in anything until it materialized. “How does the signal strength look on the short-range array?”
Rand swung around to check the bank of readouts behind her, wheeled in from her own lab down the hall and still trailing a few unattached cables. While Uhura had spent the past few weeks trying to hail Sulu, Janice Rand had cajoled a small army of smitten technicians and settlers into installing a hardwired detection array around Big Muddy, to test her olivium-enhanced communications system. Now that her system and Uhura’s were calibrated to the same scanning rates, they could measure how strong Uhura’s transmission signal output really was.
“That’s strange,” Rand said after a minute. “It’s really attenuated near the spaceport, but it picks up strength farther away.”
“Isn’t that what your augmenter does?” Sulu’s voice was muffled by the tall signal-processing unit, in whose shadow he was catnapping while he waited for them to complete their system integration. He’d finished loading supplies into the Bean an hour ago, and had been ordered to rest while Scotty tuned the antigrav thrusters and readied the vertical flight vessel for an extended mission. “Doesn’t it make signals get stronger by bouncing them off the olivium dust?”
Janice Rand threw a stymied look over her shoulder at Uhura. No matter how many times they tried, they couldn’t explain their two different methods of signal enhancement to anyone but fellow technical experts. “The signal’s actually refracting through the olivium crystals rather than bouncing off them,” Rand said. “Crawford’s Law of Subspace Resonance says that a transperiodic element in a crystal lattice can amplify an electromagnetic signal when the subspace emission frequency equals wavelength times the Saunders Constant. Once Mr. Spock determined the range of Saunders values for olivium in its various crystal states, all I had to do was program my transmitter to concatenate those amplification wavelengths without creating any nodes of negative interferences.”
“I knew that.” His audible yawn made Sulu’s words somewhat less convincing than they might have been. “So what’s strange abou
t the signal getting stronger as it travels away from the spaceport?”
“Nothing,” Rand said. “What’s odd is how weak it is right next to the spaceport. Our theoretical calculations of olivium interference didn’t predict anything like that level of attenuation.”
“No wonder I spent the last six weeks talking to myself,” Uhura said ruefully. “Just because something works in theory doesn’t mean it works in Llano Verde.”
A figure paused in the lab doorway, anonymous behind its dust muffler until a cheerful voice emerged. “Can I borrow that as my department’s motto?” Neil Bartels unwrapped his filtration scarf with a glittering cloud of dust. “It’s certainly more appropriate than ‘Technology builds a brighter future for Llano Verde.’ ”
“How about ‘A month late and a million excuses for not doing the work,’ ” Sulu said from behind the banks of equipment. “That’s the version I hear most in the Outland.”
Despite the light tone of his voice, Uhura knew the pilot well enough to know the comment wasn’t made entirely in jest. His trips to the worst Burned areas of Llano Verde had made Sulu increasingly unsympathetic to anyone who worked in the relative safety and comfort of Big Muddy, no matter what technical or logistical problems they might have in getting their job done. She could tell from the quick downward tug of Bartels’s eyebrows that Sulu’s wisecrack hadn’t gone over well, but then surprise washed away all other emotions on his face.
“Commander? I thought today’s flight plan had you taking off at dawn for Splat.” He took a step into the room, glancing around at the banks of extra equipment they had jammed in and cobbled together overnight. “What’s the matter? Did something go wrong with the Bean?”
“No” was all Sulu said.
Uhura sighed and elaborated. “Rand and I are trying to combine our communications systems to jack up my signal strength, so we can contact the cargo shuttle.”
