STAR TREK®: NEW EARTH - ROUGH TRAILS

by L. A. Graf

  “Guanacos,” he said.

  That made her eyebrows go up. “I hope you don’t think that’s your name, or you’re sicker than I thought.”

  He felt his cheeks go warm again. “Sorry. I’m Lieutenant Commander Pavel Chekov. It’s just—I couldn’t remember their name.”

  That earned him a laugh and then a nod of what might have been approval, or at least some indication that his answer wasn’t entirely unexpected. “It’s good to meet you, Lieutenant Commander Pavel Chekov.”

  He angled his head to one side as she reached to pull down his collar. “You knew I was from the orbital shuttle when you first saw me.” This time, the chemical swab along the length of his collarbone felt chilly and slick, like the inside of his stomach. “How did you know we were out there?” He didn’t want to have to fear her, didn’t want to try and reconcile her kindness with the brutality of Plottel’s murder or their abandonment in the empty homestead. “Do you have a radio?”

  “Radios don’t work in Llano Verde.” She tossed aside the used pads, carefully sorted another length of tubing from the tangle exiting the machine. “Word came around the crater from some homesteaders on the other side that Eau Claire had lost an orbital shuttle with a four-man crew. Nobody said anything about Starfleet being on board, but . . .” She trailed off into a shrug, as though the Fleet’s presence didn’t need any further explanation.

  The needle she slipped into the vein under his collarbone wasn’t really four times as large as the one in his arm, but it felt that way. He clenched his opposite hand into a fist and allowed himself the luxury of a wince that was more graphic than he’d really wanted it to be. But he didn’t tense or pull away, which was the important part. At least, that’s what he kept reminding himself.

  Thee turned the needle gently to adjust it, then paused before taping it in place. “That okay?”

  He started to nod, stopped himself, and forced a smile instead. “I’ve had a whole lot worse.” He didn’t think she’d appreciate how indelicately an Orion medic could place the same intravenous lines. “So—” He took a steadying breath and changed the subject as she turned away to release the clamps and set the scrubber into action. “Does this mean that I’m receiving medical attention from a veterinarian?”

  Even the cell-scrubber’s heavy thrum didn’t drown out her laughter. “You’re getting first aid from a lab rat who knows just enough human anatomy to know where to hook up the lines.” Scooping up both bowls from the nearby counter, she slid one in front of him and claimed the other for herself. “Don’t take this as any kind of replacement for a serious gene rework once you get back on board your ship.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. How’s Mr. Baldwin?” he asked.

  “Sleeping. No worse off than you.” She leaned across the table to pass him a spoon, but caught hold of his hand instead and peeled it open palm-up between them. “Maybe even a little better.” The frown on her face—reflecting both irritation and concern—would have looked just as appropriate on Uhura. “What the hell did you do?”

  He’d almost forgotten about the burn. It seemed such a minor inconvenience compared with the rest of his problems. “I grabbed the barrel of a projectile weapon while it was fired.” He answered the implied criticism in her lifted eyebrow with a defiant upward tilt of his chin. “The owner had already killed one member of my team. I was trying to keep him from killing the rest.” Right now, he just wished she’d let go of him so he could attack the food while it was still warm.

  “Uh-huh.” She kept a firm grip on his wrist as she twisted around to rummage on one of the scrubber cart’s shelves. “And running away wasn’t an option?”

  “At the time?” He tried to soften the irritable edge to his tone. “No, it didn’t seem to be.”

  She scooted her chair around the small table, finally positioning herself so that their knees were nearly touching. Another expert flick of her wrist tucked her hair behind her ears again, and she switched on the small first-aid regenerator without even bothering to glance at its charge. “Lieutenant commander’s kind of an elevated rank for a security lunk.” The regenerator’s narrow beam itched where she drew it across his palm. “Are you the chief?”

  He almost pulled back in surprise, but managed to hold his reaction down to a slight twitch of his hand. “Who said I was in security?”

  “I was in Starfleet sciences for more than twenty years,” she explained, smiling somewhat indulgently as she worked. “We did a lot of crazy things, but taking on armed gunmen wasn’t one of them.” One shoulder lifted in a shrug.

  Chekov watched her play the small regenerator back and forth, not sure how bothered he should be by the security trademark stamped across his forehead now that he was supposed to be moving into command. “I was chief of Enterprise security for the last couple of years.”

  Thee took that in with a considering nod. “Past tense implies you aren’t on the Enterprise now.”

  “I’m transferring to the Reliant as first officer.”

  “Congratulations!” The smile she tossed up at him was bright and sincere. He surprised himself by letting it evaporate his irritation as easily as a sunlit day. “I was first officer on board the John Glenn for her first two tours. She’s another little Miranda-class science vessel like Reliant. Sturdy little ships, although a bit sparse on personal space. Start practicing folding your underwear into teeny, tiny squares now.”

  “Past tense implies you aren’t with the John Glenn anymore.”

  Another smile. He liked how easily they came to her. “Retired. A little early,” she agreed before he could ask. “What can I say?” She transferred her gaze to the dogs who had wandered into the sitting area to take up opposite corners on the long couch. “I started to want a home that didn’t move around or decompress. And I missed having dogs. When I heard about the Belle Terre project, I just knew I had to be here. So I signed up as head field biologist, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  “Including the Burn.” Chekov expected the same flash of rancor that mention of the incident ignited in every other Belle Terre colonist. Instead, she only sighed and tossed a measuring glance up into his eyes.

  “If I wanted to bump around the frontier without getting my hands dirty, I could have stayed on the John Glenn.” The regenerator’s persistent warble ended on a complex trill, and the itch in his hand receded to a warm, pleasant tingling. Thee tipped his palm into the light. “There you go—” She patted it briskly, sealing her handiwork. “Good as new. And judging from the way you’re staring at that oatmeal, your insides are doing better, too. Sorry.”

  She re-presented the spoon, and he took it with what he hoped was an appropriate level of decorum. Even so, he’d finished one bowl of the grain and dried fruit mixture, and two cold glasses of water, before it even occurred to him there was anything else to say.

  “Do the colonists you deal with know you used to be in Starfleet?” he asked when she paused in her dish-washing to check the cell-scrubber’s readings. Whatever they told her must have been encouraging; she dropped another ladleful of oatmeal into his bowl before turning to finish scraping out the pan.

  “Some of them,” she said over short bursts of hard running water. “It doesn’t always come up.” Another glassful of water joined the fresh food. “Why?”

  He took two swallows to clear his mouth, then a third to wash the oatmeal out of his throat. “The colonists who know—” But he wished now he’d taken longer to consider exactly how to phrase his question. “Does it affect your ability to work with them?” he settled on at last.

  “If you mean, ‘Are they so bitter you can’t get a straight answer out of them?’ It depends.” She turned off the water again, shaking her hands half-dry over the sink before returning to the table. “One thing you’ve got to remember, Commander, is that willingness to take on risk isn’t the same as preparedness.” She sat facing the cell-scrubber, one hand on the mechanism, one hand on his knee. “These people wanted a more cha
llenging life than they could have back on Earth, but that doesn’t mean they really understood what it means to live without a safety net. You and I know that you can’t always go back and make a bad thing right again. They’ve had their hands held in the most prosperous sector of the Federation since the day they were born. They’re mad at God, or Fate, or Evan Pardonnet for not protecting them from what everybody in Starfleet already knows—that the frontier isn’t romantic or poetic or glamorous. It’s just hard. Starfleet is just the easiest place to aim that anger, since they don’t want to aim it on themselves.”

  “The man they killed yesterday wasn’t in Starfleet,” Chekov reminded her grimly.

  She waved that off with an impatient shake of her head. “That was the Carsons. That’s different.”

  “Why?” he wanted to know. “Aren’t the Carsons colonists, too?”

  Thee thought about that for a moment, then sighed. “I suppose. Although I don’t know that they think of themselves that way.” She didn’t sound as though she thought of them that way, either. “They talked a lot in the Conestogas on the way out about setting up their own little environmental Mecca on Belle Terre, separate from the rest of the colony, living on the planet’s terms instead of forcing Belle Terre to live on ours.” She made a face and turned abruptly back to the cell-scrubber, obviously trying to mask her distaste of the subject in productive activity. “After the Burn, I didn’t think they had anything left on this hemisphere to protect. I expected them to hunker down with the rest of us, at least until everything got back on its feet. Instead, they were the first to disappear into the Outland.”

  Chekov clenched his teeth against a roil of frustrated anger. “Where they started shooting people.”

  “That’s recent. Either they’ve had some sort of philosophical schism, or the olivium’s made them bonkers. They’ve pretty much claimed the whole top rim of Bull’s Eye. Most of us are happy to let them have it. It’s that much less acreage we have to manage.”

  From what he’d experienced of the terrain inside the crater, it was acreage they were no doubt better off without. “I saw the ones who attacked us getting provisions from the homestead near where you found me. Do the other colonists always help them when they’re tracking people?”

  She broke open another ampule of the antiradiation meds, injected it into the scrubber’s intake port. “That would have been the Rohaus place. And, no—” He could almost feel the river of fresh chemicals ice its way into his bloodstream. “—there’s not much of anybody who helps out the Carsons when given a choice.” She pitched the ampule into a recycling unit on the other side of the kitchen. “But a lot of homesteaders don’t consider staring down the business end of a projectile rifle as having much of a choice.”

  At that, Chekov flexed his recently healed hand, appreciating the distinction. “Then someone took a big chance getting us to shelter. Any idea who?” When she shook her head no, Chekov said, “You should have told someone what’s been going on. Your continental governor, or the colonial liaison. The Enterprise could have sent in teams to clear the Carsons out, or at least helped the homesteaders set up protective measures so they couldn’t be taken advantage of.”

  “Newsflash, Commander—as traumatized and unprepared as these people may be, they’re still damned independent.” She didn’t sound angry. Just earnest, and very sure about what she knew. “They came here to get away from hand-holding. They don’t want Starfleet to waltz in and fix all their problems for them.” She readjusted the scrubber’s settings on her way back to her seat. “Besides, in Big Muddy—”

  He interrupted her with a frown. “Big Muddy?”

  “Eau Claire.” She looked at him expectantly, although he couldn’t begin to guess what reaction he was supposed to offer. “Eau Claire is French for ‘Clear Water’?” she prodded. “But after the Burn none of the water here runs clear, much less the main river, so instead of Clear Water it’s Big Muddy?” Then, somewhat more insistently. “Get it?”

  He did. He just didn’t see the point of invalidating every map on the colony all for the sake of a clever wordplay.

  Thee rolled her eyes in laughing disappointment and made a show of rooting through the rest of the handheld tools on her cart. “I’ll have to see if I’ve got something in here to fix your sense of humor.” But she gave up before actually coming up with anything. “Anyway,” she went on, settling back in her chair, “it takes weeks to get messages down to Big Muddy by camelback, and sometimes they don’t get there at all. When they do, we’re either told that we have to sit tight a while longer because the dryland farmers on the other side of the impact crater are in worse straits than we are, or that Governor Sedlak will take our concerns under consideration. Which is a bureaucratic way of saying no without having to actually say it.”

  Chekov recognized that ploy from a dozen other governments. “Don’t any of the homesteads have communications lines? Or radios?”

  Thee shook her head. “I told you—between Gamma Night and the dust, radios are useless. A couple of the towns have landlines—Useless Loop, Bad View, maybe Desperation. Half the time the lines are down because of weather, the other half because the Carsons tore them out. You can hike two days through the dust just to not make a call from any of those places.”

  “I have to get a message through to Eau Claire,” he persisted. If Uhura and Sulu knew enough about the shuttle’s crash to get word out among the colonists, then they knew enough to be worrying about him as much as he would have worried about them. “Can you get me to one of those towns?”

  “Right now?” When he only nodded, she gave an incredulous laugh. “You’re kidding, right? It’s the middle of the night!”

  “I don’t have a sense of humor. Remember?”

  She met his determined gaze with a look of surprising appreciation. “How could I forget?” Powering down the scrubber, she quickly reset the clamps before air could backwash into the lines. “I’ll make a deal with you,” she said, collecting a few loose squares of gauze into a little mat in her hand. “I’ve got a couple of dogs I need to deliver out near Useless Loop tomorrow.” She slipped out the subclavian needle so neatly, he barely realized she was finished until she pressed down the gauze to stave off additional bleeding. “Be real nice to me tonight, and maybe I’ll take you along.”

  Something about that ultimatum brought the blush back into his face. “How nice are we talking?”

  She pretended to consider the question before moving to slide out the needle in his arm. “I’ve got fourteen dogs, ten of them under twelve weeks old,” she said at last. She flashed him a wicked grin as she folded his arm over the last square of gauze. “Why don’t you use your imagination?”

  It was midnight, and Sulu still hadn’t managed to get the hell out of Desperation. He wasn’t sure whom he was more annoyed at: Uhura for leaving him here, Serafini for the way she’d delayed his departure, or Chekov for getting himself lost on Belle Terre in the first place. The only thing he was sure of was that he was cold, miserable, and completely in accord with the nickname that had been given to this particular Outland town.

  Their plan had made so much sense when he and Uhura hatched it over a quick dinner of emergency supplies, lukewarm tea, and the local guanaco sausage, which tasted like dusty pepperoni. Why wait twenty-four hours to continue their search for Chekov when they could resume it this very night? While the hydrologists studied the springs on the crater rim and Uhura used the slow trip to find the range where her communicator worked, Sulu could fly the Bean to all the remaining settlements where the lost orbital shuttle had been scheduled to drop supplies. This way, if the danger of a catastrophic flood seemed immediate, Uhura would be able to radio a warning down to Rand in Big Muddy on the trip back down. And if Sulu managed to pinpoint the most likely site of the shuttle crash, they could go straight to Chekov’s rescue after sending their flood report to Kirk. All Sulu had to do, Uhura decreed, was unload the emergency supplies Desperation needed before he left.<
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  Sulu got his first inkling of trouble when he’d seen the unsmiling and silent group of deputized civilians who arrived to escort Uhura and the hydrologists up to the crater rim. It wasn’t the warlike look of the armored and tracked vehicle they called a dust-crawler that alarmed him so much as the long-barreled projectile weapons they all carried. Just like the one Serafini had used to blast dents into the Bean’s duranium hull. When he suggested a change in plans, however, Uhura had stood firm on their decision to split up. He had been tempted to pull rank on her, but he intellectually knew that was irrational. Besides, she kept reminding him of how much time had passed since Chekov’s shuttle had disappeared from the orbital platform’s screens. The relentless internal clock in Sulu’s head—the one that kept ticking away their friend’s chances for survival—did the rest.

  So Sulu stayed behind, counting crates of relief supplies while Uhura heaved her experimental communicator into the dust-crawler and the hydrologists gathered up the last of their field gear. He’d watched them rumble off into the darkness, the deep growl of the crawler blending so gradually into the roar of Desperation’s winds that Sulu never really knew when it was gone. After that, he’d gone to hunt for Carmela Serafini, to ask for help in unloading the supplies her settlement needed. He’d found her in the long, rustic-timbered building that contained the town hall, the town jail, a communications depot, a citizens’ bank, and a continental claim-staking office. Despite the early-evening hour, the building was almost entirely deserted. That was Sulu’s second indication of trouble.

  “Well, now. I thought you were going up to Southfork with those friends of yours.” Serafini pushed back the brim of her hat to regard him with an unexpectedly critical gaze. “What’s the matter—you scared of the Carson gang?”