by L. A. Graf
Whoever had bandaged Reddy had done it tight and clean. Chekov used part of the least filthy sheets in the house to add another few layers to the wrap, and in the half-hour he stayed with Reddy after that, no additional blood soaked through. He chose to take that as a sign the bleeding had abated somewhat.
“Maybe he just doesn’t have anything else left to leak,” Baldwin suggested when Chekov shared his cautious optimism. He decided at that point to greatly limit how much of his own thoughts he would share with Baldwin.
Reddy drifted toward consciousness without ever really surfacing. Cinnamon-brown skin had bled out to a horrid sallow, and the faintly blue tinge to his lips betrayed how little oxygen circulated through his tissues. At one point, eyes made shiny and sightless by shock found Chekov in the darkness. “It’s the dust,” Reddy explained in a startlingly normal tone of voice. “You can’t see anything through all this dust.”
Chekov got two swallows of the overfiltered water into him during that moment of near lucidity. Then he’d handed the bowl off to Baldwin and climbed stiffly to his feet. “I’m going to look for a radio, in case the dust clears enough for us to use it.”
Baldwin made a skeptical noise through his nose as he took Chekov’s place by the bed. “You’re kidding, right?”
Chekov almost answered him, forgetting for a moment his new rule against handing Baldwin fuel for his cynicism. Instead, he closed the door on his way out and pretended not to hear when Baldwin called after him, “Hey . . . C.C.? Where are you going to look?”
He worked his way through the homestead methodically, and more quickly than he’d hoped. The place had apparently been abandoned for months. The dilithium generator tucked between the plates of the main dome would chug happily along for another thousand years, supplying the place with lights, heat, and air filtration, but there was little in the way of domestic equipment left for it to power. Even the water-recycling unit had been stripped. If there had ever been a comm hitched into the homestead’s grid, there was no evidence of it now. No food or even food crumbs in the tiny kitchen, no eating utensils, no dishes. The most useful discovery was two five-liter jugs of water in the third and last bedchamber, neatly stacked near the hinges of the swinging door where they were hidden each time the room was entered. Not even the minimal decorations he’d seen in his own room, though. Just a sagging double bed, and a dusty, rumpled comforter not quite big enough to cover the entire mattress.
He carried the water back to the main chamber, then stood holding it for what seemed a terribly long time, not sure where to go from here. He didn’t need the sight of Plottel’s body, still framed by the lonely kitchen window overhead, to remind him of their dismal options. No matter who waited out there in the dust, no matter what finally happened to Reddy, Chekov and Baldwin had to leave. They had no food, precious little water, and absolutely no hope that rescue would find them here. The only variables under their control were which direction to set out in, and whether to take Reddy with them or wait here until he died. Chekov had a feeling Baldwin hadn’t yet accepted that aspect of their situation—that some stubborn part of the colonist firmly believed they could wait prudently for rescue, save Reddy, and somehow keep themselves from either starving or having holes blown in their bodies all at the same time.
By contrast, somewhere around the time he’d had to swallow the bitterness of saving Plottel from drowning only to see him so horribly murdered, Chekov realized that none of them were going to survive without the benefit of ruthless pragmatism.
It was that pragmatism which finally drove him outside to the barn. He didn’t know what he expected to find out there. Some kind of landline connection, maybe, like what the locals had been promised at the beginning of the dust season. Or signal flares. Pigeons, even. Perhaps deep down inside he’d known that he’d find precisely nothing. But he couldn’t ask Baldwin to help him load Reddy onto a makeshift stretcher and drag him out into the storm unless he could look the man in the face and tell him truthfully, “Yes, I looked everywhere. No, we have no chance of surviving if we stay here. We have to leave, and we have to leave now.”
Dust and screaming wind transformed the hundred or so meters from the central chamber to the barn into an impossible expanse when he viewed it from behind the safety of a window. Chekov remembered all too clearly the burn of sand whipping against his skin, dust searing his unprotected eyes. To make matters worse, he’d taken no prophylactic treatments against the olivium radiation before heading down to Belle Terre. Why should he? He was only supposed to be in Eau Claire for a few hours, with a real medical facility just around the corner. He’d be leaving the system altogether in a few more months. It had seemed a waste of medicine when McCoy offered him the antiradiation treatments a few weeks before. Now, a persistent headache and lingering nausea reminded him that even brief exposure to unstable transperiodic elements exacted a heavy price. And they no doubt had a good bit of walking yet to do.
The largest of the old comforters served well enough as a hood and muffler, shielding his eyes from the wind and keeping a majority of the dust off his face and hands. There wasn’t much to be done for his lungs. Chekov managed to stave off the worst of his coughing until he’d ducked into the barn’s relative safety, then ended up on hands and knees as his body fought to expel every molecule of olivium he’d just inhaled. This is how I’m going to die, he thought at one point when stars danced in his vision for want of a single productive breath. Not from the radiation, not from some primitive colonial weapon, but from coughing up so much dust that he finally had no lungs left to breathe with.
Once he could manage two or three breaths in a row, he let the blanket slide to the floor and climbed upright. Stalls lined one side of the narrow building, empty shelves and bins the other. Moldy straw—or hay or alfalfa, he had no idea which—filled only one small corner of the upper story, and a door on the opposite side from where he entered led to a three-sided pole structure carpeted in mummified manure. He tried to remember the name of the leggy, sweet-faced non-sheep the colonists had defaulted to when dust and radiation took its toll on their original ungulates, but could only come up with the apparently appropriate word guano, which he knew wasn’t right. Whatever they were, the homestead’s owners had apparently taken them along with everything else when they left. Or they’d been stolen by whoever drove the rightful owners away. In either case, he knew he wouldn’t find a comm unit in the pens. So he turned to the tiny storage room as his last hope before convincing Baldwin they had to leave, and found the heavy oilcloth package where it had been shoved to the back of the workbench.
He’d unwrapped it expecting a cache of tools that two desperate men might find useful. Instead, he found himself holding a contraption that wasn’t good for anything except killing another human being.
The gun lay exposed atop its square of oiled fabric, its pieces carefully sorted as though it were nothing more significant than an air-filtration pump, waiting its turn for repair. Already down on one knee, Chekov sank the rest of the way to the ground and studied the dilemma he’d unfolded.
For nearly a decade now, his world had been a place where tools classified as weapons were coded, counted, and secured outside the reach of the general crew. A place where people highly trained in the respect and use of those weapons had to sign them out, return them at the end of the day, and construct detailed explanations if the charge on the power pack was reduced by even so much as a photon—it didn’t matter if the phaser was used to warm a rock, send up a signal, seal a broken weld, or stun an aggressor in self-defense. On board a starship, there was nothing—absolutely nothing—the average crewman could get his hands on that was able to do anything as brutal and inhumane as what had been done to Plottel and Reddy. Yet here on Belle Terre, any colonist with a workbench could apparently construct his own little instrument of torture, then proceed to use it on anyone he pleased.
The weapon’s mechanism was frighteningly simple—a magazine for holding projectiles, a spri
ng-action loader assembly, and a manually triggered firing pin. Nothing apparently explosive in the weapon itself, which meant the propellant must be built into the projectiles. Wrapped with the dismantled rifle were five smooth, tapered metal cylinders. Jacketed, with a strike plate on the back of each. Chekov held one against the main workings of the firing mechanism, and nodded slowly as the details of its engineering became clear. An impact from the firing pin against the projectile’s strike plate ignited an explosive propellant within the jacket, launching the projectile at some horrendous velocity down the barrel of the weapon and across whatever distance the propellant and the barrel’s rifling would allow. There had to be some method for ejecting the spent jacket and chambering the next projectile, of course. He had a feeling the function of that mechanism became obvious once the weapon was reconstructed.
So this was what Pardonnet’s dream of Eden had done to its people—seduced them onto the frontier with promises of freedom and opportunity, then stranded them with their own base humanity when all those promises flashed into hardship and dust. Instead of perfecting their medical supplies, developing radiation-resistant crops, or working hand-in-hand to create an olivium-proof communications network, the colonists had turned against each other, summoning an all-too-easy solution to the fears now stalking them under cover of the dust which was their real enemy. They murdered strangers, abandoned their homesteads, and left each other no option but to turn into the same kind of monsters if they wanted to save their own lives.
Hating himself, hating the prospect of mutilating a human life the way someone had already done Plottel and Reddy, Chekov carefully replaced the weapon pieces in their oilcloth wrapping. Then he gathered up the bundle with its five opportunities for murder, and carried them into the house for reassembly.
* * *
“How much time are we going to get at the next stop?”
Sulu didn’t bother answering that question. He was in the middle of the critical upward thrust that took the overloaded Bean off the ground and up through the thickest part of Llano Verde’s dust layer. With no working proximity sensors, and the high wall of the Gory Mountains looming just to the south, he needed all his concentration to keep the vertical flight vessel oriented straight up. A flicker of peripheral vision told him Uhura had shifted the experimental communicator on her lap so she could turn around and answer the more vocal of their two backseat passengers.
“Dr. Weir, we agreed to let you observe the river at each of the stops we made, not wade in and start measuring it.” The calm patience in Uhura’s voice amazed Sulu. He’d lost his own tolerance two landings ago at Windblown, when it had taken him an extra half-hour on the ground to track down the two scientists. Weir hadn’t protested much then, since she didn’t seem to share Dr. Greg Anthony’s obsessive need to measure the olivium contamination level of every muddy rivulet he stepped in. But in Culvert, where the increased volume of the Big Muddy River had been much more noticeable, Weir had to be dragged forcibly out of the churning water when she refused to stop measuring flow rates with her tricorder. Sulu could still smell the odor of rotting mud and olivium on her boots.
“You just don’t get it! I know you want to find your friend, but there are thousands of people who could be in danger down there.” Weir’s emphatic gesture swept the area below them, although all that could be seen through the Bean’s windows was a featureless haze of gray-brown dust. “Every settlement we’ve stopped at along the Big Muddy is showing signs of increased outflow! When the monsoonal rains start—”
“—sometime later this month,” Sulu cut in sharply, “you’ll have had weeks to prepare. That shuttle crew could be dying now.”
Dr. Weir had the grace to snap her teeth shut on whatever she’d been going to say, although from the soft thump Sulu heard, he suspected an elbow in the ribs from her fellow scientist had something to do with her sudden tact. For a long while after that, the Bean was filled only with the hiss of dust slithering across their duranium hull as they broke through the storm into the bright glow of early-afternoon sunlight. Uhura blinked and then turned off the experimental communicator on her lap. As long as they were above the dust layer, there weren’t going to be any olivium-amplified reflections for her to detect.
It had taken longer than either of them had wanted to leave the continental capital. That was mostly because Neil Bartels had to be convinced that a single data point—from an automated data network that until recently hadn’t even been working—constituted a valid scientific crisis. After they’d discussed it for several minutes, it turned out that what the chief technical officer really wanted was enough justification to keep from losing his job if Governor Sedlak ever found out that he’d known about the unauthorized field excursion in advance. To get his approval, McElroy had to promise to keep Bartels updated on everything his field team discovered, which in turn meant Sulu and Uhura had to promise to allow the hydrologists to observe the condition of the Big Muddy River anytime they landed near it.
So far, unfortunately, that had been every single stop they made. In retrospect, Sulu decided, they should have started tracking the cargo shuttle from the first settlements scheduled for supply drops, rather than the last ones along the Big Muddy. That way, they could have just dropped the hydrologists off at Bull’s Eye crater and not wasted so much time.
An overload warning beeped from the Bean’s antigrav controls, and, a minute later, the vertical flight vessel sank back down toward the dust layer as it passed through a strong downdraft near the mountains. Sulu gritted his teeth and kept his hands steady on the controls, knowing it was useless to try and gain altitude against the wind. The addition of two hydrologists, two tissue regenerators, and a hundred kilograms of dog food meant the antigrav thrusters were already at maximum lift capacity and could no longer compensate for changes in atmospheric pressure.
If he’d weighed just ten kilos more himself, Sulu thought, they would’ve only been able to take along one of the two field hydrologists McElroy wanted to send with them, and they’d have had a much greater safety buffer on the antigravs. As it was, he had to wait so long before he could pull the Bean back up to clearer air that he found himself abruptly face-to-face with the craggy slopes of the Gory Mountains when he finally got there. Sulu swung abruptly around to parallel them while he checked his compass heading. The reading he got made him frown.
“Uhura, turn on the emergency landing lights.”
The communications officer obeyed him immediately. She only slanted him a questioning look when the Bean continued on its horizontal course without any further aerial gyrations. “Um—are we actually in any danger of landing?”
“No, I just wanted to see the air.” The crimson and gold flash of their landing lights sparked answering reflections in what otherwise looked like clear air to their starboard, outlining a column of nearly invisible glitter. “I thought so.”
“What is it?” Weir poked her head between him and Uhura to see what he’d pointed at. Anthony peered over her shoulder with equal interest, but a little more politeness.
“Olivium twister.” It was one of Llano Verde’s most bizarre weather phenomena—a dust devil made of almost microscopic olivium crystals, spun off into the upper atmosphere from the churning storms below. The warp it caused in the planet’s magnetic field had probably been distorting his compass readings for the past fifteen minutes.
“So that’s what they look like.” Anthony scrabbled in his backpack and emerged with a tricorder. He used it to track the olivium twister for as long as it stayed visible, bumping Weir unceremoniously out of his sight line when her broad shoulders got in the way. “Wow! It was worth coming along just to see that.”
Weir sat back up as he put the tricorder away. “Now we know why we keep seeing radioactive hot spots in such random places around Llano Verde,” she said. “Something like that could dump enough olivium on one spot to make a compass spin.”
Uhura glanced over at Sulu in sudden comprehension. “That�
��s how you knew it was there? The compass readings were off?”
He nodded, tapping at the old-fashioned magnetic detector Scotty had added to his control panel for navigating during Gamma Night. Its needle still disagreed with the alignment of the sharp peaks on their right. The Gory range ran east-west across Llano Verde, paralleling the Big Muddy River from Windblown all the way up to Desperation before breaking into badlands and impact craters. The haze of slightly more reddish dust that curled around their lower slopes showed how they had gotten their nickname, but their snow-topped peaks thrust far up into the layer of clear air above, forming an unmistakable landmark. That gave Sulu at least one thing to be thankful for today. With the compass inoperative and the orbital platform silenced by Gamma Night, visual reckoning was all he had left to rely on.
“Do we know where we’re going now?” Uhura asked. “Or do we just have to get away from the olivium twister and reorient ourselves?”
“We should be able to spot North Scarp pretty easily from the air.” From the sound of plasfilm rustling in the back, Sulu guessed Greg Anthony had unrolled one of his holographic river-drainage maps. “It’s right at the junction of the Little Eau Claire River and the Stony Creek. According to the map, there should be a deep gorge through the Glory Mountains there.”
“It’s the Gory Mountains, and the Little Muddy River.” Sulu squinted along the rocky spine of peaks, looking for the slash of sky between them that would mark their next stop. “You really should keep your maps updated.”
“That would be a lot easier to do if we were allowed to field-check them,” Weir retorted. “But since Sedlak thinks his computer modelers can answer all his questions without the inconvenience of actually going out and collecting data—”
“You’ve never actually studied the rivers out here before?” Uhura’s sympathetic voice made Sulu snort beneath his breath. From now on, she was probably going to allow the two hydrologists a lot more leeway in taking their mud and water measurements.
