STAR TREK®: NEW EARTH - ROUGH TRAILS

by L. A. Graf

  “Not if there’s a continuous conduit system—”

  “Hold it right there,” Serafini said sharply. “Are you two hydros saying that the lake in Bull’s Eye is where that floodwater is coming from?”

  “Well, where else could it be coming from?” In her quest to snag the bartender’s attention, Weir either didn’t see or chose to ignore Sulu’s warning look. Her voice lifted with scientific enthusiasm. “Our data network shows increased flow in the Little Muddy all the way up to the springs at Southfork. If our visual inspection confirms that—”

  “—you’re going to stick drainage pipes through the crater walls and take all our water away?” Serafini finished.

  The preoccupied scientist didn’t seem to hear the note of challenge in the mayor’s voice, but people at several nearby tables swung around to follow the conversation. Sulu stiffened, and Uhura hurried to intervene.

  “It’s not a question of stealing anyone’s water,” the communications officer said, while Sulu caught Weir’s attention by the simple expedient of putting a hand over her tankard when the bartender finally came to refill it. He stifled the hydrologist’s protest with a look so quelling that she finally seemed to get his unspoken message. “We’d actually rather have your water stay right where it is. What we’re worried about is that the lake could break through one of the crater walls and wipe out every town downstream, as far away as Big Muddy.”

  Serafini let out a crack of laughter as sudden and unexpected as the sound of her projectile weapon. “Miss Uhura, have you ever seen Bull’s Eye crater? It’s a kilometer wide across that rim wall, if not more! Technical services surveyed the whole thing before they let us build here, and they said it wouldn’t break or flood out even in monsoon season.”

  “They also said they’d build you a filtration plant,” Greg Anthony pointed out. “Everyone knows you can’t trust those people down in Au Contraire.”

  The pause that followed the government hydrologist’s remark echoed with enough startled indrawn breaths to make it clear that everyone in the pub was now following this discussion. The mayor choked on a swallow of beer, then glared at him while she caught her breath again. “What exactly do you mean by that?” she demanded, when she could finally speak.

  The hydrologist glanced at Sulu and Uhura, as if checking to make sure he had permission to continue. Seeing that alarm and shrewd self-interest had replaced much of the hostility on Carmela Serafini’s face, the pilot gave him a quick nod.

  “The original studies of olivium impact craters on Llano Verde assumed they were just like impact craters anywhere else in the galaxy.” Anthony’s droning professorial tone lent a conviction to his words that all of Weir’s passion hadn’t been able to create. “What they forgot is that the olivium ore inside the fragments of the Quake Moon was still unstable, so it continued to generate heat and radiation after impact. As a result, Bull’s Eye is actually more like a volcanic caldera. The heat beneath it has disrupted the regional water flow system, creating a network of underground caves, conduits and reservoirs for springs like the ones at Southfork.” Anthony took a deep breath. “The more open space there is underground, the weaker the rim will get. Eventually, it won’t be able to withstand the lake’s water pressure anymore, and the whole side of the crater will fail.”

  “And you think this could happen at any minute?” Serafini demanded, looking skeptical again.

  The hydrologist shook his head, looking puzzled rather than defensive. “If you’d asked me two days ago, I’d have said it wouldn’t happen for another fifteen years. But the levels of olivium dissolved in the Little and Big Muddy are way higher than they should be, given local dust contamination. The only place that hot water can be coming from is here, and the only way it can be picking up so much olivium is by flowing through the buried ore and back out again. In big conduit networks.”

  “Damn.” It was all the mayor of Desperation said, but the single word held a wealth of cynicism, anger, and pride. She finished the last of her beer, then swung around to scowl at the group of men who’d moved away from the bar at her command. “Malin, Shaw, Banjak—start pulling together enough supplies for a one-day trip to Southfork. Take at least twelve other men with you. I want you out of here in an hour.”

  The abrupt volley of orders didn’t seem to surprise anyone in the pub. Three men dressed alike in heavy workboots, dust mufflers, and wide-brimmed hats stood and left the bar without a word. The remaining bystanders turned back to their drinks, as if the matter had now been settled.

  “Mayor Serafini,” Uhura said, after a moment had passed without any further explanation. “If you’re taking a party up to examine the springs at Southfork—”

  “No, thank you, ma’am. That party is all yours.” Serafini’s even teeth showed in an expression that didn’t quite seem to be a smile. “I don’t expect you’ll have a real good time at it, though. The winds up at Southfork can rip your skin right off your bones. Even the guanacos quit humming up there.” She must have seen the exchange of considering glances between Sulu and Uhura. “Well, how else did you plan to take a look at that crater? You didn’t think you were going to fly that jumping bean right up to the rim, did you?”

  “No,” Sulu said, answering Uhura’s unspoken question as well as Serafini’s. “But why do we need fifteen people to take us there?”

  “Because I’d like you all to make it back down again,” the mayor said. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard about it down in We Don’t Care, but we’ve got some militant separatists living in the high country. That Carson gang used to just take potshots at anyone who trespassed on their land, but lately they’re starting to harass settlers right off their own claims. We’ve had to deputize a force of Peacemakers just to keep the score more or less even.” Serafini finished the last of her beer and stood up without throwing down any of the plastic poker chips that Outland settlers used instead of encoded currency cards. “Of course, we haven’t seen much of the Carsons around here lately. Rumor has it they’re salvaging some emergency cargo drops that fell way off target, over on the north side of the crater.”

  Sulu caught the mayor by the arm as she turned to leave, heedless of the gleaming weapon she’d slung back over her shoulder. “Were those the cargo drops that should have come here?” he asked urgently. “From yesterday’s run?”

  “Afraid so.” Serafini shook her sleeve free of his grasp, a real smile tugging at the corners of her mouth this time. “Don’t look so worried, son. Even without the cargo drops, we’ve got enough smoked guanaco sausage to last us ’til the monsoons start.” She twisted her hair up in one hand and slapped her hat back over it, dark eyes glinting under the brim. “Assuming Bull’s Eye doesn’t decide to split its guts in the meantime. If it does, then all you’ll have to worry about is how to get the hell out of Desperation.”

  Chapter Nine

  WATER. Decadent, copious, warmed to just below the point of burning. Chekov hadn’t thought anywhere on Belle Terre possessed enough water to flush the fear and dust and sickness out of him, but their rescuer had said simply, “I’ve got a good reclamation system—use as much as you want,” as though completely unaware of the miracle she’d so casually tossed toward him. Fifteen minutes of bloodstained mud swirled down the drain from his hair and face and body before he could even feel the sting of the water against his olivium-burned skin. He would have lain down on the floor of the shower stall and slept right then, drugged insensate by the hot, pounding spray. But he was still faintly afraid of drowning, and even more afraid that he’d awake somewhere in the Outland and discover that this was all only a cruel dream. So he settled instead for sinking to his knees and bowing his head almost to the tile, letting the water sheet over him and run its persistent fingers down his neck and through his hair. Every now and again, he inhaled a handful of clean liquid into his sinuses and let it flush through, imagining it washing all of the olivium out of him, down the drain, far away. If this was weakness, he welcomed it for the first
time in his life that he could remember. He’d had too much of being strong these last two days.

  The woman’s dogs had found Baldwin and Reddy through the dust and gathering dark when Chekov proved unable to stand long enough to lead the way. He’d let the woman half-drag, half-carry him until the sheet-tangled bush came into view. At that point, he somehow found the strength to push her off, staggering ahead to rouse Baldwin and take up his end of Reddy’s homemade stretcher. They loaded their meager supplies onto the back of the small pack animal—the kind whose name wasn’t guano—then set off into the night with the woman in the lead and the dogs sweeping nervous ellipses back and forth behind them.

  After that, they might have hiked for hours, they might have hiked for days. Chekov’s entire awareness had distilled down to the excruciating task of placing one foot in front of the other, not dropping Reddy, not falling down. By the time they reached their rescuer’s homestead, functioning had become little more than an unconscious habit. He couldn’t muster the energy to feel surprise when confronted with the large dug-in structure, or its airlocked entries, or the cleanroom lab in its basement. He helped carry Reddy as far as the doors to the cleanroom, then steered Baldwin back upstairs as their host loaded the pilot into a Federation-issue stasis drawer. When she finally rejoined them upstairs, Baldwin had already collapsed in one of the two small bedrooms, and Chekov had stripped him and used a wet dishtowel from the kitchenette to swab off the worst of the dust. While he would have liked to dump the irradiated clothes in a flash-burn disposal chute, he settled for throwing them into the farthest corner of the room.

  “You guys are gonna need to eat,” the woman informed him as she hooked Baldwin up to a portable blood-scrubber. She fitted the tubes and medicine vials with an economy of movement that came from far too much practice. “Since you’re the only one still standing, you can use the shower. I’ll throw together some food, and see if I can’t scare up another batch of antiradiation meds for you.” When he’d only stared at her as though unable to understand even rudimentary English, she turned him to face the bathroom and gave him an encouraging little shove. “Your friends aren’t going anywhere. Take your time.”

  Chekov was out of his clothes and stepping into the shower before the first truly suspicious thought finally surfaced in his exhausted brain. They had no real reason to trust this woman. She could turn them over to their pursuers as easily as any other homesteader, kill them herself as they bathed and slept, with no one in Eau Claire the wiser. But she could have left them for the storm to kill if that was all she wanted. Why go to this much effort just for the sake of misleading them? Then the hot water crashed over his head and washed coherent thought away.

  Thought came back to him, along with a sweet, rich aroma that infiltrated the steam-filled bathroom and coiled around him on the floor of the stall. Chekov suspected the smell of any food, no matter how rancid, would have appealed to him just now. The cramping of his empty stomach pulled him upright when nothing else could have. He dragged himself reluctantly out of the shower, buried his face in the pile of warm, dry towels folded on the chair nearby, and wished he could take this feeling of safety and cleanness with him into the Outland.

  He left more hair on the towels than he would have liked, but no more than he really expected. Considering how many hours he’d spent breathing and wearing this planet’s olivium, he was happy not to be shedding teeth as well. He finger-combed himself into what he hoped was a half-presentable state, then stooped to check under the steam for the clothes he’d left in a jumble by the door.

  A tracery of sand marked the corner where he’d shucked them, but the clothes themselves were gone.

  So that’s the plan, he thought, picking through the towels for the driest, least rumpled one. She rescues us from the Outland just to kill us with embarrassment. He tried to remember the last time he’d been forced to walk out of a bathroom and face a woman without at least a pair of underwear to his name, but couldn’t bring anything immediately to mind.

  He heard movement in the kitchen area, crept only as far as the doorway with the towel clutched about his waist to peek in at where she sampled her own handiwork while arranging dishes on the counter.

  He cleared his throat self-consciously. “Excuse me. . . .”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him, flashing a quick but unmistakably friendly smile. “Terrible, isn’t it? Middle of the night, and here I am eating half your food.” She tipped one of the bowls toward him, not that he could make out the contents from this distance. “I hope you like oatmeal.”

  Chekov nodded absently, wondered why he bothered with a response. “You took my clothes.”

  “Of course I did.” She tucked her nut-brown hair behind one ear as she turned back to her work. “You were just a few rads short of glowing in the dark.” Then, as though sensing his objection before he voiced it: “Don’t worry—I know better than to throw away a Starfleet officer’s uniform. It’s in the decontamination unit.” Drying her hands quickly on the front of her trousers, she crossed to a chair on the edge of the central dome’s sitting area and scooped up a pile of clothes Chekov hadn’t noticed before. “I don’t know how much of this’ll fit—just some spares I’ve got left over from other visitors. But it should hold you ’til your uniform comes out.” She presented the pile on both hands as though offering a royal platter. “Take your pick.”

  He hesitated, not sure how to free up one arm to receive the pile without losing his grip on the towel that was his only barrier between minimal dignity and complete embarrassment. She saved him from having to agonize very long. Shoveling the clothes over to him, she left him no option but to let go of his towel with one hand and scrabble to hang on to both clothes and towel as he retraced his steps backward into the bathroom. “Um . . . thank you . . .” he managed, a little awkwardly. She was already headed back for the kitchen, tossing him an acknowledging wave over one shoulder without turning around.

  Safely back in his little steam and tile chamber, he picked through the eclectic collection of shirts, trousers, and socks. It had been a long time since he’d had to make decisions about what to wear, other than dress or day uniforms. Chekov quickly settled on a loose knit pullover in the same ice-blue as the dogs’ eyes. At least three sizes too big for him, it looked comfortable and warm—too attractive to pass up after a night spent in the desert chill.

  None of the many pairs of trousers fit. He stepped into all the likely candidates, then finally settled for a pair apparently cut to accommodate a teen-aged boy. It was stitched of the same heavy cotton as everything else the Outlanders favored, which made it completely devoid of give. Chekov spent longer struggling into the pants than it ever took him to get dressed on board the Enterprise. Afterward, he couldn’t bend forward far enough to pull on his socks, so he had to peel himself out of the trousers again just to insure that his feet wouldn’t get cold. His only consolation was that getting fully dressed the second time didn’t take nearly so long.

  When he finally slipped out of the bathroom to pad back into the kitchen, he was keenly aware of the blush warming his face beneath the radiation burns, and tried to will it away. Nothing like accepting a stranger’s hospitality only to reveal you barely knew how to dress yourself when presented with civilian clothing.

  She was just returning to the main dome herself, towing the waist-high scrubber from Baldwin’s bedroom into the well-lit kitchenette. “There you go,” she commented cheerfully as she nodded him toward an open chair. “You look a good bit more presentable. Don’t trip over the dogs.”

  He hadn’t even noticed them until then. They looked up in unison as he stepped over one, then shifted and resettled as though strange men tiptoeing above them were an everyday occurrence. For all Chekov knew, it was. He eased himself into the offered chair with all the dignity he could manage in stocking feet and overtight trousers, and tried not to think about the fragrant bowls of food sitting barely an arm’s length away on the counter.

&
nbsp; The scrubber bumped against the table as its owner rolled it into place. “Right-handed or left?” She ripped open a pack of self-sterilizing pads and quickly wiped down the machine’s connections.

  Chekov tore his attention away from the food. “Left.”

  “Give me your right arm.”

  He obeyed with a little nod, shoving the tunic’s loose sleeve as far up his arm as it would go and presenting his forearm palm-up on the table between them.

  “Sorry about the Dark Ages,” she said, pinning his wrist with one hand. “I’ve got the scrubber and plenty of radiation meds, but nothing like a medical-grade tissue regenerator. Otherwise we could have done something a little more constructive than just dumping your friend into stasis.”

  “That’s all right.” It didn’t help any of them to dwell on things they couldn’t change. Besides, Chekov had done this before, a long time ago, when less-than-ideal circumstances had rendered primitive blood-cleaning and intravenous medication the only options available to treat prolonged first-stage radiation exposure. He’d rather hoped to make it through the rest of his life without ever having to tolerate the uncomfortable chemical treatments again. Still, if Belle Terre didn’t qualify as a less-than-ideal circumstance, few other places did.

  He pretended to be distracted by something fascinating about the sleeping dogs while the woman sterilized the inside of his elbow with a few quick swipes of a pad, then slipped home the first large-bore needle. It stung, but not as badly as he’d expected. He stole his first look at her handiwork as she was taping down the length of tubing and verifying the set of her clamps.

  “You’re a doctor?” he guessed.

  She glanced up at him with an expression equal parts surprise and amusement. “Me?” Her smile broke into a short laugh. “No. A biologist. I was supposed to manage the cloning and care of Belle Terre’s livestock until the homesteads got well established.” That explained the downstairs cleanroom and the portable cell-scrubber. “Instead, I crank out radiation-resistant camels and guanacos and dogs, and patch up sick homesteaders as much as I can. Gwen Thee.” She thrust out her left hand as though routinely called upon to offer pleasantries backward, and he took it with a little smile.