by L. A. Graf
He listened to Baldwin now without turning. An artificially cheerful voice telling Reddy about things the pilot was no longer aware of, a voice Reddy might or might not have still been able to hear. It was all Baldwin could do besides hold up his end of the sheet, and Chekov saw little harm in letting him do it. Bad enough that one of them agonized over the realistic details of their situation—forcing everyone else to accept just how bad things were wouldn’t bring them any closer to getting out of it.
Digging underneath the quilt wrapped about his head and shoulders, Chekov worked to loosen the knotted sheet strapping one of the water bottles across his back. It was only half-full now, but still thumped to the ground with a reassuring slosh when the knot came undone. He tucked the rifle’s muzzle through the bottle’s handle to weight it from rolling away in the wind—not because the rational part of him believed it could go anywhere, but because irrational precautions against devastating loss had already become second nature. Because in nightmares you could leave things unattended and they were just gone, with no possible explanation. And the boundary between reality and nightmare grew thinner every hour they were out in this hell.
He crawled around the wind-scarred bush with his face tipped down and toward one shoulder, dragging the sheet in one hand as he felt out the way. He would have held his breath, but had learned the hard way that the compensating inhalation at the end would be far worse than a series of tiny, protected pants. So he tried to keep his mouth away from the wind, tucked behind a fold of quilt, until his back was to the tempest and he could rise up on his knees. Then he let the storm’s heavy hand plaster the sheet against the bush like molecule-thin reflectant against a starship’s hull. He adjusted the edges with a couple of neat flicks, then crawled back around to the little bubble of relative stillness he’d created on the other side.
Baldwin had already pulled Chekov’s half-empty water bottle and its accompanying rifle in out of the wind. He sat only partway in the shelter, leaving a majority of it for Reddy. Chekov settled down to form a sort of third wall, coughing into his hands and trying to stay out of the way as Baldwin opened their dwindling water and carefully unwrapped Reddy’s face.
They all three looked like hell. The red glow across Baldwin’s cheeks and forehead might have been from sunburn, except the dust didn’t allow enough ultraviolet through the atmosphere to produce a respectable burn. The colonist’s hands shook as he tipped a small portion of water into Reddy’s mouth, and his breathing was audible even over the wind. Chekov felt as if he were looking into a mirror. His own face ached with inappropriate heat, and every airway all the way down to his lungs was clogged with dust, dry to the point of cracking. He’d started shivering before they even left the homestead. Not because of any chill—Belle Terre was nothing if not temperate during the day—and not just because he’d had nothing to eat for going on thirty hours. The planet was simply killing them.
He let Baldwin tend to Reddy, the way he had at every other stop, and turned his own attention toward clearing the worst of the dust out of the rifle.
The loading and firing mechanisms were as simple as he’d expected, the assembly of the components as straightforward as any weapons officer could have wished. He’d had a single primitive weapons seminar at the Security Academy—a distant lifetime ago—and retained from it only a vague memory about the inaccuracy of ballistic weapons due to the perturbations in a projectile’s flight path caused by wind and gravity. Given the vagaries of the former and the persistence of the latter, he didn’t know how anyone on Belle Terre could hit anything with such an artifact. But they had, which meant he had to assume they could do so again.
That awareness raised the ugly question of whether or not Chekov could protect them from another such attack. He and Baldwin had never talked about Chekov’s position on the Enterprise—maybe Baldwin just assumed everyone in Starfleet knew how to field-dress a belly wound and assemble unfamiliar weapons—but it was clear what the colonist expected from him, and the promises Chekov had made to Plottel on the lake bottom hung over everything like an unfulfilled contract. Whoever had brought them to the homestead had done so for reasons that remained ominous as long as they were unknown. To keep them under surveillance? To send them a warning about their vulnerability on Belle Terre? To give them false hope before finally hunting them down? It wasn’t Chekov’s job to figure out their motives, only to keep his own team members alive. If that meant doing the unthinkable to some future aggressor, he was duty-bound to make sure he was capable.
And that was exactly what he’d done, just before they’d left the homestead’s shelter. While Baldwin prepared Reddy for the journey, Chekov had quietly taken the reassembled gun and one of the heavy metal projectiles out into the barnyard’s maelstrom. Loading the projectile into the rifle, he’d chambered it with a harder pump than he’d expected it to need, shouldered the smooth plas-steel stock, and taken aim across the yard at the squared-off top of one metal fencepost. At the Security Academy, they’d test-fired reed-slender rifles that discharged with a report like the delicate bursting of a balloon. The projectiles were no bigger than the tip of his finger, and the breezy gusts off Chesapeake Bay had kicked them hither and yon like so many butterflies. Chekov had been one of only two cadets to hit his assigned target, and even then hadn’t managed to come anywhere near where he’d been aiming. They’d all laughed about it, congratulated themselves on being lucky enough to live in an era of line-of-sight armaments, and went back to working with their phasers with nary a backward glance.
Standing out in the dusty barnyard, he tried to remember everything about brandishing those little rifles and focusing on targets one hundred meters away. Belle Terre’s angry winds tore over him from the right; his own slow, careful breathing shifted the barrel ever so slightly; his heartbeat pulsed beneath the stock where it rested against his left shoulder. This projectile was larger, heavier, the propellant load undoubtedly more explosive than the toy guns he’d used years before. He kept his eyes trained on the fence post, felt out the strength of the wind with his whole body, lifted the barrel and aligned it slightly more to the right, took a single slow, deep breath. Held it. Waited for that moment of stillness between the beatings of his heart. Depressed the trigger.
For one miraculous moment, he thought the gun had discharged without so much as a sound. Then he realized that the omnipresent wind had silenced, his breathing had grown eerily quiet, that the entire world had suddenly leapt to a cottony white distance on all sides. The bone-deep ringing in his ears wasn’t noise, it was deafness. Slapped by a thunder too loud to process, his hearing had simply gone into hiding, waiting for the echoes to recede.
Across the barnyard, the top of the metal fence post was shattered. A monument to violent efficiency, frozen in a moment of supernatural silence.
Come to think of it, that was when he had first started shaking. He hadn’t been able to stop in all the hours since.
“Hey, C.C. . . .”
Chekov blew down the length of the gun’s barrel, then snapped it shut again. “Don’t call me that.” They’d argued at their first stop about whether Chekov actually needed a meaningless nickname. But the more Chekov protested, the more Baldwin persisted, and Chekov finally just defaulted to not responding unless Baldwin addressed him by his proper name.
“No, seriously, come here.”
The lack of humor in Baldwin’s voice erased Chekov’s irritation and brought him crawling over to Reddy’s side. Baldwin had unwound the blankets from the pilot’s face and rolled down the edge to fit his hand inside. As Chekov approached, Baldwin took his hand and guided it under the blankets. Chekov knew what he’d feel even before Baldwin splayed his hand against the warm tack of wet fabric. Reddy made a wordless little noise, but stirred only faintly. His face was paled to the color of stained ivory.
“We keep hauling him around like this,” Baldwin whispered, “we’re gonna kill him.” As though stating the obvious too loudly would cause it to come true.
Chekov withdrew his hand and pulled Reddy’s covers back into place. If we don’t haul him around, he couldn’t say to Baldwin, he’s going to die anyway. The only thing that would change was their chances of dying along with him. “It’s getting dark.” An equally obvious statement that they still couldn’t do very much about. “We should at least find somewhere protected to stay for the night.” He looked around, seeing nothing but wilderness and the prospect of a hideous night spent out in the open. “Stay with him,” he said at last. “I can move faster alone. I’ll try to scout out an easier route.”
Baldwin shouldered in and took over the task of bundling Reddy, as though Chekov couldn’t be trusted to do a proper job of it. “An easier route to where?”
“Anywhere.” Chekov reached back to place the rifle carefully between them, then climbed to his feet without saying anything further.
He had already tugged the quilt back around his face and turned to head out when Baldwin grabbed hold of his pantleg to stop him. The colonist lifted the gun by one finger through its trigger guard, so that the barrel lifted a few centimeters off the ground. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked, somewhat peevishly.
Chekov pretended not to notice the self-conscious heat that rose into his face. “Protect yourself while I’m gone.”
Baldwin gave a snort that might have been a laugh and tossed the gun back on the ground. “I can’t hit a bulkhead with a phaser, much less some fanatic half a klick away in a dust storm. I don’t even know how to aim the thing.” Catching hold of it by the barrel, he shoved it back across the dust until it bumped into Chekov’s feet. “I saw you outside before we left, C.C. You take the damned thing.” He looked up with eyes more serious than Chekov had ever seen on him before. “Just make sure you get ’em before they get us.”
Chapter Eight
THERE WAS something familiar about Desperation.
“I feel like I’ve been here before,” Uhura said, peering at the hazy view outside the Bean. She leaned forward to scrub at the cockpit window, but the dust was mostly on the outside, settling in the afterdraft of their landing, and there was nothing she could do about the twilight. Despite that, her memory insisted that she knew this town. Its wide central plaza, which Sulu had used as a landing site, was lined with old-fashioned ironwork benches. Matching wrought-iron gates and balconies decorated the stucco buildings on three sides of the plaza, while on the fourth rustic logs projected out from a long town hall to form a portico. Did it suggest the French Quarter of New Orleans? Some ancient piazza in Tuscany? Or maybe one of the medieval city-states of Rigel V?
“Sulu, look at this place. Where does it remind you of?”
The pilot lifted his head from where he’d rested it on his forearms after he’d cut the antigrav thrusters. The trip down to Desperation had been a nightmare of wind shears and dust devils spun off the nearby Bull’s Eye crater. Only swift reflexes and years of experience had let Sulu maintain any semblance of a normal descent, and even so there’d been moments when Uhura hadn’t been sure they’d reach the ground in a single piece.
“I think they built it to look like Sante Fe,” he said after a moment’s frowning thought. “Or maybe Taos.”
“Definitely Sante Fe,” Weir said from the backseat. The hydrologist still sounded cheerful, but there was enough hoarseness in her voice to make Uhura give her a concerned look. Both scientists seemed more haggard and sick than the Bean’s lurching descent could entirely account for. Anthony’s skin had turned dusky red from radiation exposure, and Weir was breathing with the quick, shallow rhythm of dust-induced asthma. “I did some post-grad work at Los Alamos. We went down to Sante Fe for dinner all the time.”
“So did I, when I was testing shuttles at White Sands,” Sulu said, yawning. The exhaustion in his voice mirrored the lines etched into his usually smooth face and the deep shadows beneath his eyes. He’d gotten up before dawn the previous day to make the trip to Mudlump, and he’d been flying through sleeting dust, violent crosswinds, and jagged mountains ever since. “Did you ever try the banana, tamarind, and mint salsa at the Sunflower Hill Inn?”
Uhura set her experimental communicator on the floor and unbuckled her safety harness with a decisive snap. “Before we start comparing Mexican restaurants, I think we should all pay a visit to the tissue regenerator.”
Anthony started to get up, then groaned and fell back into his seat. Uhura barely managed to catch his tricorder before it spilled to the floor. “I don’t know why I feel so bad,” the hydrologist said between his teeth. “I got my radiation booster shots right before we left.”
“It’s probably my driving.” Sulu extricated himself from his harness and helped the other man to his feet, while Uhura turned to give a hand to Weir. “Antigrav thrusters aren’t known for being easy on your stomach.”
“No, I think it’s the olivium.” Weir swayed a little as she stood, but waved off Uhura’s offer of support. She followed Sulu and Anthony gingerly down the Bean’s passageway, past the cooling crackle of the antigrav generators. “It’s radioactive and transperiodic, remember. That means you’re getting a double whammy from gamma and mu-epsilon radiation.”
“Whatever the problem is, the tissue regenerator will fix it,” Uhura said. “Stand here, Dr. Anthony.”
Anthony grimaced as he obeyed her. “Is this a good time to say that I really hate regenerators? They make me feel like I’m getting transported sideways one molecule at a—ow!”
Uhura straightened from having switched on the self-contained medical unit. It let out a loud buzz of alarm as it detected the hydrologist’s cell damage, and the filmy glitter of tissue-repair beams played over his thin, wiry frame for a surprisingly long time, making him grimace and yelp. Sulu tugged Uhura aside after a moment, drawing her back a step behind a stack of emergency rations.
“Have you noticed they’re feeling the radiation worse than we are?” he asked, beneath the hum of the regenerator. “Is it because they keep getting themselves covered in olivium-contaminated mud?”
“I don’t think so,” Uhura said. “The antiradiation drugs Dr. McCoy gave us were designed in the Enterprise’s medical labs specifically for the radiation here in Llano Verde. But he told me the continental government refused to accept them. They insisted they could manage with the generic antiradiation drugs they had on hand.” She saw his frown deepen. “What’s the matter?”
“Chekov hasn’t had any antiradiation shots at all,” Sulu said. The hydrologists had traded places, making the tissue regenerator buzz in alarm all over again. “If the olivium can make these guys sick, what do you think it’s doing to him?”
Uhura repressed a shiver. “Chekov knows about the radiation problem. He’s probably safe inside the cargo shuttle.” Sulu’s dubious look told her he didn’t believe that, either. “At least we have a hospital-grade regenerator to use on him when we find him.”
“If we find him!” Sulu said in frustration. “It’s been a full day now since the shuttle went down! It’s going to take at least twelve more hours to get Captain Kirk the report he wants, especially since we can’t fly to—”
A muffled explosion outside the Bean cut off the rest of his sentence. It was followed by the pure crystalline ring of something deflecting at high-speed off their duranium hull. Sulu cursed and turned around to dive toward the cockpit. Uhura barely managed to catch him before he left the hold.
“Stay here,” she snapped. “That’s an order!”
That brought Sulu up short. “You don’t outrank me.”
“Okay then, that’s a request. You’re the one who told me that Outlanders use projectile weapons because of dust depolarization.”
Weir and Anthony had been watching the confrontation between the two Starfleet officers with bewildered faces, but Uhura’s words—and a second muffled explosion outside the cargo hold door—made them drop abruptly to the floor. “If they see you through the windows, they might decide to aim for you. That would definitely sha
tter the windows, not to mention your head.”
Sulu’s scowl deepened as a third detonation went off outside, followed by the now-familiar ricochet off the Bean’s duranium hull. “Then how are we going to stop them? They can’t hear us through the hull, and we can’t hail them on any communicator frequency.”
“No, but we can chase them out of shooting range before we open the doors and tell them who we are.” She pointed past him at the two lateral antigrav generators, and saw his face light with understanding. “On my count of three.”
Sulu nodded and disappeared up the gangway.
Uhura headed for the aft generator, pushing aside several piles of dog-food sacks to get there. She was familiar enough with Scotty’s dustproof design that she could find the field-distortion controls with only a little searching. All of the Bean’s nonvertical movements were made by modifying the shape and size of its anti-gravity field in such a way that air was sucked through its self-contained thrusters. It only took a moment for Uhura to set the vertical lifting vector to zero and aim the horizontal thrusting component outward. “One,” she shouted over her shoulder, and heard the hydrologists relay the count forward to Sulu. “Two. Three.”
The generators came back to life with a roar, followed by the sound of several distant explosions in a row. Since none of them were followed by the clang of anything hitting the Bean’s hull, Uhura suspected her strategy of startling their unknown attacker with an outward blast of dusty air had been successful. She ducked out from behind the dog food and joined the rest of the Bean’s crew in the cargo hold.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s open the door.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Anthony asked. The scientist was still wearing the faint red afterglow of olivium poisoning on his cheeks, but he seemed to have regained much of his energy and alertness. “We don’t even know why they’re shooting at us.”
