by L. A. Graf
“I’d rather risk it than sit here and wait to get shot.” Weir’s shadowy figure stripped off field pack and dust muffler, then wound the heavy cloak carefully around her torso to protect her from internal injuries. Uhura bit her lip, then followed suit. She gave her experimental communicator a wistful glance as she stepped away from it, over to the side of the rushing channel. Weir was already sitting on the bank, legs dangling in the steaming water. “Feels just like a nice hot bath. See you at the bottom!”
And with that she was gone. Uhura blinked, but the dusty night had closed down over the hot springs, and she couldn’t even tell if Weir had managed to keep her head above the swirling thermal waters. It was as if she had never been there at all.
The footsteps were coming closer. With a shudder, Uhura began to lower herself down on the bank, ninety-nine percent sure it would be the last thing she ever did. Her feet were already in the warm water, and she was gulping the long, deep breaths she knew would oxygenate her blood, when hands fell on her from behind, snagging her arms and hauling her backward from the verge.
Uhura swung sideways against her captor’s grip, intending to use the scissors kick Chekov had taught her for breaking a hold from behind. What she faced was so unexpected, however, that she froze in mid-kick with uncertainty. Instead of the hooded outlaw she’d expected, what she saw in the darkness was the metallic sheen of an infrared face-mask and the glimmer of a sleek dark kevlar suit, complete with a life-support pack on the back and no weapon in sight. What on earth was a continental government employee doing out here in the middle of nowhere? Uhura opened her mouth to ask, but five more kevlar-clad figures materialized from the dust before she could speak. Three cradled the same kind of long-barreled weapon as the Peacemakers, while the other two carried the unmistakable—and highly illegal—humming cannister of a portable forcefield generator.
That was when Uhura realized she’d been captured by the Carsons.
Chekov had never dreamed Llano Verde could be so beautiful.
He’d awakened spontaneously when sunrise was still little more than a threat in the eastern sky, a transparent blush poured through the veil of dust. After a night that had seemed ten lifetimes in length, the sun had finally arrived to shame the darkness into retreat. Slipping into clean clothes for what felt like the first time in ages, he watched from his bedroom window as mylar shimmers of olivium dust crawled haphazardly skyward, like bubbles in a glass of champagne. In their wake, a sheer, coldly lit underlayer of fresh air separated from the morass above it. Clear as crystal and four times the height of a man, it spread like a blanket as far as each horizon, granting a glimpse of the russet and almond landscape Llano Verde kept so jealously hidden all the rest of the time. In that glimpse, Chekov saw the first possibility of hope for this ravaged planet.
The rest of the main house was silent, not even a stir of dogs disturbing the dawn, so Chekov helped himself to a few handfuls of dry rations and another glass of water, then crept outside to follow the sounds of canine yipping.
The air tasted crisp and impossibly dry, but not so much as a molecule of dust invaded his breathing. He began to wonder if everything about the horrors of last night had been just one monstrous hallucination. Or if he was hallucinating this oasis in the Llano Verde desert, and was in reality still huddled under the naked bush with Baldwin and Reddy, dying.
Except that he didn’t think he would have hallucinated a dozen urine-perfumed puppies. They greeted his arrival in the big kennel building with much wiggling and jumping, decorating his uniform trousers with smelly puppy footprints when he let himself into their enclosure, and nibbling playfully at his hands when he bent to excavate their various dishes from under their dancing feet. Thee had not exaggerated the amount of mess these little black-and-white dynamos could create. Chekov almost wished he’d kept on the borrowed clothes from last night until he’d finished here.
The puppies’ large enclosure and each of the adult enclosures opened into a series of fenced runs outside. Chekov let the four adults out one at a time, inspecting each one in an effort to determine which two had been his escorts back to the homestead last night. He even tried addressing them by name—calling “Nessie” or “Lynn” when they squeezed past him—but saw no more recognition in the distrustful glances they threw his way than if he’d been speaking to them in Russian. They might all have been the tired dogs on the kitchen floor, or none of them. The uncertainty was eerie.
The puppies were more of an effort to herd out the door. He finally succeeded by pretending to dash outside with them, then quickly backpedaling and closing the door behind them before they could figure out how to curb their momentum and bumble back after him. He left them leaping and rolling and yapping at each other, ripping back and forth in the big pen as though made of ignited jet fuel. Cleanup on the inside went much more quickly after that.
Thee found him with his jacket discarded over an exposed water pipe, his tunic sleeves pushed up past his elbows, and a pathetically shivering puppy suspended over the same washtub he’d used to scrub all the dogs’ dishes.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was an incredulous laugh as she nudged the door to the outside shut with one hip. The aroma of synthetic coffee, strong and hot, steamed up from the insulated cups she carried in either hand.
“You said to use my imagination,” Chekov reminded her as he squeezed the last of the water out of the puppy’s rat-thin tail.
Thee deposited both cups of coffee on the back of the washtub, then bent to scoop one of the last dry towels off the floor underneath it. “Well, you obviously have a better imagination than I gave you credit for.” She swept the puppy into her arms, scrubbing it vigorously dry even as she dodged its frantic kisses. “Yes, I know,” she exclaimed fondly, rubbing its head with her chin, “Uncle Pavel gave you a horrible bath.” Then, glancing up at Chekov, “What did you use for soap?”
He toweled himself off with the edge of the puppy’s wrap. “I didn’t. I really just rinsed them off.”
“All of them?”
“Just the babies. But I swept out all the floors and gave everyone fresh water.” He smiled at her disbelief, reaching over her shoulder to reclaim his jacket. “Was that nice enough to earn me a trip to Useless Loop?”
Apparently it was. Thee picked out two of the puppies who had already fluffed back up from their baths, and took them into the house for tagging while Chekov finished his bitter coffee and ate another generous breakfast. Lynn and Nessie ignored everyone from their sleeping places on the couch—where Chekov guessed they’d been the whole time he’d been out tending to their sisters. Baldwin joined the activities in time to do away with what was left of the food but turn down offers of more. He was still pale and shaky, but had otherwise rebounded to his pre-crash levels of annoyance. A good sign, Chekov assumed, although in some ways he’d rather have had back the silent, defeatist Baldwin of only a few hours ago.
Thee briefed Baldwin quickly on the dogs’ basic care, and showed him how to maintain the generator that powered everything in the complex, including Reddy’s stasis drawer. “We’ll have a medical transport team sent out from Eau Claire,” Chekov promised him. “If the Enterprise is back in orbit, I’ll bring her medics down myself.”
“You better, C.C.” That same frustrating grin on his face, but very little humor in his tired, dispirited eyes. “Otherwise, me and Reddy are gonna haunt you ’til the day you die.”
He’d known that since they’d left Plottel all alone in that abandoned homestead. He didn’t need Baldwin to threaten him with it now.
They took a single camel, plenty of water, and the best substandard antiradiation shots Belle Terre had to offer. Chekov was still feeling a little dizzy from the injections when he accepted an ochre-and-gray dust wrap and muffler from Thee. She showed him how to wrap it with just a few dramatic sweeps, then handed him a bag filled with squirming puppies and slapped him smartly on the behind to encourage him up onto the kneeling camel. He had a feeling
this was going to be a long and interesting ride.
Although he tried to avoid it, the camel’s seasick gait forced him to loop one arm around Thee’s waist to keep from pitching off one side or the other. She didn’t seem to notice, although the puppies grunted sleepy little complaints from inside their pack when Chekov’s attempts to stay mounted threatened to squish them between the two riders. He loosened the neck of the bag with his free hand and peeked in at them to make sure they were all right. Identical white noses prodded at his fingers while identical ice-blue eyes reflected the dusty sun like polished silver coins. He craned his neck to study the adult dogs trotting along either side of the camel, and verified that the same narrow white blaze bisected each of their skulls.
“Do they all look the same?”
Thee cocked her head back over one shoulder. “Who?”
“The dogs. They aren’t just the same color, they’re identical.” He understood that breeds of dogs could be startlingly similar to an uneducated observer. When he was a boy, his family had progressed through a series of bearlike white Samoyeds with cheerful black eyes and toothy smiles. He and his parents could still identify any of them from holos and pictures, even twenty years later, but no one outside his family ever could. “Are they more than just the same breed?”
“Good guess,” Thee acknowledged, rewarding him with a clap on the knee. “They’re all the same dog.”
Of course. He felt stupid for not having realized it sooner. “Clones.”
Thee nodded and returned her hand to the camel’s reins. “When the Burn made it impossible to use the automated herd-management equipment, we didn’t know what we were going to do. I mean, you can handle stock without autobots or dogs, but it’s a real pain. As it turns out, one of the pencil-pushers over at colonial headquarters had a pet border collie who generously donated her genome to the ranchers of Llano Verde. I’ve cranked out twenty-eight puppies so far—enough to hold most of the homesteads until we can get a variegated batch of border collie gene sets in from Earth.”
Chekov watched the lean, wary dogs pacing along beside him, and tried to imagine them as anyone’s pets. They seemed a thousand years away from the friendly puppies in his lap, only a few steps up from completely independent wild animals. “Can’t you just engineer gene variety into the dogs you’re making?” he asked. “Breed a second generation from these once they’re adults?”
This time, the elbow she aimed into his ribs was clearly meant as admonishment. “Don’t they teach you anything in security school?” she scolded.
Not about cloning dogs, he thought about telling her, but didn’t.
“If that original pet had been a boy, I could have cloned both girls and boys off the original cells—it’s just a matter of dropping the boy’s Y chromosome and duplicating a second X to make a girl. But starting with a girl means I’ve got no Y chromosome to play with, so the only thing I can make is more girls. Which is too bad.” She startled him by leaning back far enough to actually look at him, a teasing smile just showing above the edges of her muffler. “I don’t really like female border collies,” she whispered, as though trying to keep the dogs themselves from hearing. “Boys are much easier to manage.”
Chekov caught himself blushing again, and was glad for the dust muffler to hide his expression. “I see.”
He suspected she saw more in his eyes than he would have liked. Her smile widened, and she straightened again in the saddle. “That original female carried a recessive color-masking gene,” she went on, “which at least gave me the option of turning out both black-and-whites and blue merles. Between that, piddling with eye color and ear sets, and punching up their radiation resistance, we’ve already got a little variation to work with once the new genomes arrive. But it would sure be nice to have more than just this one flavor of girl to work with.”
“You’ve been working with dogs a long time,” Chekov guessed. “Haven’t you?”
Thee nodded. “My whole life, before Starfleet. I’ve owned them and trained them since I was a kid. I think it had a lot to do with why I went into biology.” She patted the camel beneath her, perhaps thinking fondly of all her animals, or perhaps just letting it serve as a substitute for the dogs. “Who could have known I’d end up six months out from the Federation border, helping splice together a new kind of collie for the frontier?”
“Belle Terre’s lucky that you were here.”
“Other way around. I’m the one who’s lucky to be here.”
He looked out across the blasted landscape, at the wind-scarred rock and naked bedrock, at the rare and brittle silhouettes of trees that punctuated an otherwise empty horizon like snubbed-out matchsticks. “You really think that? Even after the Burn?”
The camel labored up a crumbling rise, the dogs darting ahead to disappear over the hilltop. “Is the glass half-empty or half-full?” Thee stood forward in the saddle to lift some of her weight off the camel’s back. “Sure, things are harder than we hoped for when we set out for Belle Terre. But Llano Verde is also a kind of blank slate, just waiting for us to write a new future on her face. How many other places . . . can you . . .?”
Distracted by a tussle of movement in the puppy pack, Chekov didn’t realize at first that she had trailed away into silence. The Outland had that effect on things—disruptive, combative, always dashing off in unexpected directions that required a repositioning of your thoughts before you could find your footing again. When he looked up from the pack, he fully expected to see some new chasm blocking an otherwise well-trodden path, or an avalanche, or the reappearance of by now familiar dust storms.
Instead, he saw the remnants of a shattered homestead spread across the narrow valley, its split power source wafting rivulets of superheated plasma into the air above a carpet of slaughtered and partially disemboweled guanacos.
Chapter Eleven
“COMMANDER? Can you get up now? There’s someone here we think you should see.”
Startled out of uneasy sleep, Sulu tried to sit up to see who was talking to him. The muscles of his back and shoulders, knotted from long hours of piloting, then bruised by almost as many hours on the lurching back of a camel, cramped in protest. He groaned and dropped back into his tangle of dusty blankets, narrowing his eyes against the glare of light. Something snuffled at his shoulder, then whined. A moment later, he felt a wet warmth slop across his cheek.
“All right, I’m awake!” He used his elbows to lever himself up this time, but it still didn’t put him out of range of that enthusiastic licking. “You can call your dog off now.”
“Kinney, down.” The backlit figure in the doorway sounded a little breathless, but his voice still carried enough snap to drop the big, husky dog to the floor. A much smaller dog ran a circle around it, plumed tail frisking eagerly, but the big one never took its dark eyes from Sulu. “Sorry. She’s usually not that friendly with strangers.”
“I probably smell like dog food. The shuttle’s full of it.” Sulu scrubbed at his eyes, feeling the familiar day-after muzziness of having slept too little after too long a period of wakefulness. He glanced around the bare plas-steel walls of the prefabricated bedroom, trying to find a window so he could tell if it was day or night. All he saw were sacks that looked as if they had once held food or seed grain, tacked up in the places where windows should have been. Outside, a muffled wind hooted and moaned. “Is the storm over?”
“It’s never over.” The red-haired man put a foot out to sweep Kinney out of the way as Sulu got unsteadily to his feet. When his face caught the light, Sulu could see that it had once been handsome, but the blistered scars of too much radiation exposure had turned it into an expressionless mask around his pale eyes. “We’d better get you to the emergency med unit.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m just a little sore.” Sulu’s response was unthinking, born more of the assumption that his radiation shots were still protecting him than an actual assessment of his health. Now that he thought about it, he could feel an unc
omfortable tightness across his own cheeks, as if he’d gotten sunburned during the long night journey to this homestead. There was a hollow not-quite-nausea in his stomach that he hoped was merely hunger. Between the long camel ride and the sleep he’d tumbled into as soon as they’d arrived, Sulu had no idea how many meals he’d missed since last night’s makeshift dinner in the Bean.
He still regretted having left the experimental shuttle behind in Desperation, but there hadn’t been any other alternative. Peals of thunder had chased him from the cockpit back to the cargo hold, and when he’d opened the loading-ramp door, a close bolt of lightning had thrown the three camels and two riders waiting outside into stark black-and-white relief. Wind blasted into the Bean hard enough to steal Sulu’s breath even through the filtering scarf he’d donned as a precaution against dust. He knew there was no way he could take the shuttle up in this weather. But he also couldn’t ignore the warning that had been slapped against his cockpit window. When neither of the turbaned riders moved or made a threatening gesture toward him, Sulu had pulled his dust muffler close around him and walked out into the shriek of the storm.
As if that had been the sign he’d waited for, the nearer rider drummed his boots against his camel’s sides until it grunted and sank reluctantly to its knees. Its rider slid off with more efficiency than grace, then handed his reins to the second mounted figure and came to meet Sulu at the bottom of the Bean’s loading ramp. Even the closest buildings around the plaza were hidden by the thick fog of flying dust and sand that surrounded them. No settler sane enough to stay inside in this weather would ever see this midnight meeting.
“Who are you?” Sulu shouted over the storm’s roar.
