by L. A. Graf
“What cargo shuttle?” Bartels asked.
Uhura gave him a surprised look. “The one that our friend Commander Chekov was coming in on. It never made it to the spaceport last night.” She saw the way his scruffy eyebrows shot toward his receding hairline. “You hadn’t heard?”
The chief technical officer’s disgusted headshake dislodged another shower of dust. “I’m supposed to be at the top level of administration in this province, and yet that—” He snapped his teeth shut on whatever he had been going to say, took a deep breath, then continued, “Governor Sedlak limits official communiqués to just the officials who need to deal with a problem. He says that’s more efficient than a daily news update, because it doesn’t distract the rest of us from our jobs.”
Sulu rose from behind Rand’s equipment bank, stretching and yawning. “You know, Sedlak’s a lot more authoritarian than I expected from any governor on Belle Terre. Didn’t you come here to get away from too much government control and regulation?”
“The settlers did,” Bartels said. “But they’re scattered across the Outland, out of reach. Most of the people in Big Muddy are contract employees like me, here for a few years just to help the colony get settled. We may not like how Sedlak runs the province, but we’re being paid to get a job done, not to express our political opinions.”
“In other words,” Sulu said, “it’s not your problem.”
Neil Bartels grimaced. “Oh, it’s our problem, all right. Every Outlander who comes in here mad about something makes it our problem! Do you think they believe us when we say we never heard about the tornado that killed their sheep, or the landslide that wiped out their town, or the militant isolationists shooting at them from over the hill?”
Uhura gave Sulu a reproving look. “Why don’t you go see if Scotty needs any help with the Bean?”
The pilot snorted, not deceived in the slightest by her polite phrasing. “Yes, sir, Commander Uhura,” he said, as if she were more than just a seniority step above him in the chain of command. “Call us on the landline if you get any response from the shuttle.”
“Of course.”
Neil Bartels stepped out of the doorway to make room for Sulu to leave, but came back in again as soon as the way was clear. “You’re taking that experimental vessel out to look for the missing shuttle?” he asked worriedly. “Is that safe?”
“Not according to your governor,” Uhura said wryly. “But since there’s a Starfleet officer among the missing, he can’t legally stop us.”
The technical officer glanced from her to Rand, who’d spent the time since he’d entered connecting the last circuits on the signal-detection side of the system. “And you think you can actually find the shuttle by combining your two communications systems?”
“That’s what we’re hoping.” A rainbow glow of lights sprang up across the detection control panel as Rand linked it to the lab’s power supply. “Ready for a real test, Lieutenant?”
“Aye, sir.” Rand scanned her detection panel, bumping all the sensitivity filters up to maximum reception. “Communications systems go.”
Uhura depressed her transmission key and took a breath, preparing for another long haul of hailing. “Uhura to Orbital Shuttle Six,” she said. “Come in, Orbital Shuttle Six.”
“We heard you the first time,” said an irritated voice from the detection panel, loud enough to make Bartels curse and Uhura and Rand both jump in their seats. “Where the hell have you been all this time?”
Chapter Five
“HEY, did you hear us that time?”
“We heard you.” Only Uhura’s long years on the bridge of the Enterprise enabled her voice to sound as calm as it did. Beneath that semblance of poise, her heart drummed hard with excitement. When she and Rand had first come up with the idea of combining their two very different communications systems, they’d considered all the possible technical problems and signal interferences they might encounter. What they hadn’t been prepared for was the chance they would contact the downed shuttle on their very first try. “Don’t worry, we’re on our way to rescue you. Do you know where you are?”
“Do we know where we are?” This was a second voice, deeper and more sarcastic than the first. “We’re in the middle of a dust blizzard, that’s where we are! All our power’s out and we’re low on water and the last thing we expected was for this transmission-activated communicator to finally turn itself on.”
Uhura frowned. Somehow, she’d thought the cargo shuttle’s crew would sound a little more happy to be contacted so quickly after the crash. Perhaps they were feeling the effects of post-traumatic shock. “We’ll try to triangulate on your signal, then. Just keep talking to us.”
She motioned Rand to start the signal analyzer scanning through the concatenated frequencies it was receiving, sorting through the slight variations in distortion and polarization that they hoped would indicate the direction and distance of the signal source. Neil Bartels had disappeared a moment before, but he reappeared carrying what looked like a thin-film holographic map of Llano Verde. Since no further transmissions seemed to be coming from the shuttle crew, Uhura pressed her own transmission key again, praying they hadn’t lost the signal.
“Uhura to Orbital Shuttle Six. How many survivors do you have out there?”
“Four,” said the second voice. Uhura let out a deep breath of relief. According to the spaceport’s manifest, the cargo shuttle had carried a crew of three plus its unofficial passenger. That meant all of them had survived the landing. She glanced over hopefully at Rand, but got a frustrated headshake in return. None of the responses they’d gotten so far had been long enough for her to track down the source of the signal.
“Can I speak to Commander Chekov?” Uhura asked, after another long pause. The former Enterprise security chief might be able to give her more useful information about the shuttle’s landing site than the shocked civilian crew. Even if he couldn’t, Uhura knew she could at least count on him to keep talking long enough for them to track the signal.
“No.” That was the first voice again, sounding distinctly apprehensive now. “Um—how soon are you guys going to get here?”
“We can arrive within an hour, once we have your location.” Uhura had an ominous thought, one that would account for both Chekov’s inability to speak and the shuttle crew’s frazzled demeanor. “Have you got a medical emergency?”
“Two of them,” said the first voice, starting to shake. “Kinney broke her tooth last month and now Gabby’s got a hot spot on her hind leg . . .” His shaking voice broke into a giggle for a moment, then steadied again. “Are you still there?”
Uhura blew out an exasperated breath. “Is this Orbital Shuttle Six?”
“Orbital Shuttle Six?” The deeper, more sardonic voice took over as the first speaker dissolved into helpless laughter. In the background, Uhura could hear a responsive chorus of canine yips and howls. “We thought you were calling Outland Station Six. Sorry about that.”
Uhura’s pent-up frustration boiled over before she could suppress it. “This isn’t a joke!” she snapped into her communicator. “We’ve got an orbital shuttle missing and its crew unaccounted for—”
“And we’ve got a hundred hectares of farmland buried under radioactive dust!” Amusement and sarcasm had both faded from the unknown Outlander’s voice. “The water we were supposed to irrigate our crops with has been stolen by a bunch of armed bandits, our automated farming equipment is useless because we can’t communicate any instructions to it, and we’re almost out of the emergency rations that were supposed to last us for a year. And every time we ask you people down in Au Contraire for help, all we hear is that the guanaco-herders on the other side of this damned impact crater are in worse shape than us, so we’ll just have to wait. We don’t even get to use this new olivium-proof communications system of yours, because you’re saving it for your own damned emergencies!”
Uhura collected back her professional composure with some difficulty. “T
his communications system is experimental—this is the first time we’ve managed to use it successfully,” she told him gently. “And whether you believe it or not, the government here in Eau Claire knows how bad it is out there. The cargo shuttle we lost was dropping off emergency rations to the worst areas of the Burn, to replace the ones the settlers have used up. You haven’t gotten any of those?”
That got her a contemptuous snort. “The nearest settlement to us is run by a mayor who wouldn’t give you a kick in the pants unless you paid for it. The only thing we’d get if we showed up in her town is a hard time.”
Uhura glanced over at Bartels, who drew a finger across his throat suggestively. Rand’s hand hovered over her board, ready to erase whatever tracking information she’d gathered. Instead of cutting the connection, however, Uhura left the frequency and signal strength unchanged, and tapped the transmission key down one more time.
“Outland Station Six, or whoever you are . . . tell me what you need in the way of supplies. We’ll drop them off after we find the missing shuttle.”
“Are you serious?” It was the first voice, no longer giggling but still sounding a little shaky. “You’re not just getting even with us, are you?”
“No.” Uhura ignored Rand’s lifted eyebrows and Bartels’s warning look. “What do you need besides emergency rations?”
“Andrew’s feeling the radiation pretty bad these days,” said the deeper voice. “Bring us a better tissue regenerator if you can find one—and a lot more dog food.”
“We’ll do that,” Uhura promised. “In the meantime, we’d appreciate it if you could spread the word about our missing cargo shuttle.”
“No problem.” Sarcastic again. “I’ll be sure to tell all the dogs and chickens that I see. Outland Station Six, out.”
Uhura cut the connection, then threw an inquiring look at Neil Bartels. “Is there really an Outland Station Six?”
“Not that I know of. There’s no numbering system within individual Outland settlements yet, just the global plat numbers assigned by the colony’s land distribution commission.” Bartels glanced at the monitor where the tracking information was displayed, then unrolled his holographic map across Uhura’s control panel. “Judging from that vector, I’d say it originated from one of the dryland farming claims on the alluvial fans around the Gory Mountains.”
The chain of craggy peaks that stood in holographic relief under his hand was labeled Glory Mountains on the map, but Uhura didn’t question Bartels’s nomenclature. Like Sulu and Scotty, the chief technical officer kept track of the many nicknames settlers used in Llano Verde. “We can’t get a more specific fix than that?” was all she asked.
Rand shook her head. “I couldn’t get a distance estimate, sir. The polarization of their return signal was nearly isotropic.”
“Probably smeared out from refracting through too many different crystal states of olivium,” Bartels suggested helpfully. Unlike Sulu, he had understood from the beginning the different technical strategies Uhura and Rand had chosen for their communications systems. “From what he said about impact craters and herders, I’d guess he was on the eastern end of the Gory range, but I couldn’t be more specific than that.”
Uhura made a note of the frequency and refraction angle they’d used for that first transmission. “We’ll try to contact them again once we’ve found the shuttle,” she decided briskly. “In the meantime, Lieutenant Rand, I think we’d better add another amplifier unit to our polarization detector, so we can get a better distance estimate just in case we really do manage to contact the shuttle.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Bartels asked.
“Not with that,” Uhura said. “But do you think you could find a couple of hospital-grade tissue regenerators in the next hour? If the colonists need them for the radiation levels out there, we will, too. Oh, yes—and one hundred kilograms of dog food.”
“One hundred kilos?” He gave her a startled look. “For just two dogs?”
“Two dogs at that homestead.” Uhura smiled. If there was one thing Captain Kirk taught his officers, it was to take advantage of any opportunity that might help them carry out a mission. “Dog food wasn’t included in any of the emergency rations the shuttle was dropping out there. And if Outland Station Six is a typical example, I think we can earn ourselves a lot of gratitude from the settlers by supplying it.”
A distant roar pounded through him like a second heartbeat. Its power rattled the roof of the world, shattering what should have been silence into an endless white noise that hammered the dome of wind-washed sky. When thunder broke across the cacophony, it did so almost gently. A giant’s hand, trembling the windows until the dream cracked open and reality spilled out across the dusty floor.
Chekov opened his eyes.
Dust glittered in the darkness on blade-thin bands of light, illuminating surreal hints of the room’s interior without really giving anything away. Outside the metal walls, the planet moaned and raged at being cheated of the life she’d had before the Quake Moon had devoured her. It was the same cruelty he remembered from the Russian winters as a boy. Then, he would bundle deeper into the quilts and pillows of his bed to hide himself from the ravening cold. Now, the thin blanket under which he huddled was chill as well as damp, and he suspected nothing man-made could protect anyone from Belle Terre.
He struggled painfully upright. Every inch of his skin itched and burned, and his bones felt rusted together. While waking up at all was something of a pleasant surprise, he could have done without the headache or the desiccated mouth. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, then paused, head in hands, to wait for equilibrium’s return. The wind outside seemed to swirl the room in circles. He was vaguely aware of the heat in his burned right palm, and the deep, penetrating ache of his bruised sternum. For the moment, he couldn’t recall how either got to be that way. Lifting his head slowly, he forced himself to focus on the items directly in front of him, and let that attention to detail draw the rest of his memory forward.
Brushed metal walls, stained by oxidation to a dull gray that had no name. A mirror, incongruously bright, and a packing crate upended beside a metal-frame bed to serve as a spartan nightstand. What little light penetrated the dimness bled through ill-fitting metal shutters a dozen feet away. A thin line of sand on the floor sketched the boundaries of that makeshift window. His uniform jacket, reduced by dust to a crusty oxide brown, lay draped across a second packing crate, this one nestled against the foot of the tiny bed on which he sat. A patch of dampness painted the jacket’s outline on the thin, hand-stitched quilt underneath.
He wasn’t sure what caught his attention first—the faint wisp of reflected brightness, or the intoxicating trace of scent. Whichever it was, he found the bowl of water on the nightstand without ever realizing he’d turned to look for it. It was lukewarm, stale from overzealous filtering, and so exquisite on his parched face and throat that it brought tears to his eyes. He didn’t even swallow for the longest time, simply let the precious liquid sit in his mouth until the need to breathe forced him to pass it down. Somewhere during the third mouthful, it occurred to him that he had no proof this water was safe for touching, much less drinking. Luxuriating in its coolness as he rinsed the dust from his eyes and his sinuses, he realized that he didn’t care.
Drowning the painful edge of his thirst abated the worst of his headache, although it did nothing for the rest of his aches and pains. It was a compromise Chekov was willing to make for the moment. He rose somewhat carefully, one hand on the bed’s metal headboard to stave off a rush of vertigo, and turned to find the doorway he knew must be nearby. He found it past the foot of the bed, pushed nearly closed without being latched. He knew even before he stepped away from the bed that the door led to a brief hallway, and the hallway to a larger central dome with a half-dozen other similar portals. Each of the modular prefab homesteads issued to Belle Terre colonists sported the same basic components and features; the only thing that
differed was how the individual homesteader had them assembled.
This one was apparently a single-family dwelling. A jumble of pillows delineated a living space on one side of the central chamber, with evidence of computer consoles and entertainment units now long removed. A single long, grimy window let in precious little light above one of the empty console ports, and a crudely welded patch in the wall told where another window had once resided. Opposite these, a plastic table and six molded chairs clustered in a nook of metal cabinets; a reclamation tub and a gutted food-processing center punctuated one corner. Dave Plottel lay meticulously arranged on top of that little table.
Chekov crossed the darkened room gingerly, careful not to stumble over pillows or other abandoned pieces of someone else’s life. An overhead light blossomed gently as he neared the kitchen. A living power source somewhere, then, with the usual complement of motion sensors and circadian controls. On the table underneath, Plottel seemed washed into curious relief, like a sculpture displayed in a museum. Chekov slowed, suddenly reluctant to immerse himself in the horrible details he knew were soon to follow. He closed one hand around Plottel’s wrist and stood that way for a very long time.
If he hadn’t been certain Plottel was dead at the lakeside, he had no doubt about it now. The man’s skin was gray, his jaw slack, his eyes dulled by the omnipresent dust where they weren’t completely closed. Barely a handful of blood darkened the breast of his coverall, and even that was so matted with sand and dirt that it almost disguised the neat little hole at its center, no bigger around than a human thumb.
Slipping one hand under Plottel’s shoulder, the other beneath his hip, he rolled the body to expose the back and the tabletop underneath. The smear of rusty brown on the white plastic surface caught his attention first, but it was the fist-sized wound between Plottel’s shoulder blades that held it longest. There wasn’t enough blood left in the cadaver to do more than stain the table, but the tacky crust soiling the coverall from shoulders to waist spoke eloquently of hemorrhaging hours before. Nausea coiled like a sluggish snake in Chekov’s stomach. His hand drifted absently to rub at his own aching breastbone.
