by L. A. Graf
“Stop it!” the woman’s voice shouted again, very near this time. “You’ll hurt the puppies!” Chekov wasn’t sure if she was yelling at him or his attacker.
It was a woman’s hands, though, which pushed him aside and yanked the wailing puppies out from under him. She thumped to the dirt right beside him, her curly blond hair catching what little light spilled in through the open doors as she scooped both puppies out into her lap. She didn’t look like what Chekov expected in a homestead raider.
The rifle barrel that prodded him hard in the chest, however, fit his image perfectly. He froze, still coughing, and glared up at the stocky man on the other end of that gun. It wasn’t the cocked firing hammer that dried his mouth and shocked him into silence, or even the knowledge that Chekov himself had made sure the gun had one of its four remaining projectiles already chambered before starting into the farmyard. It was the naked desperation in the other man’s eyes, the helpless anger that had him crying and contemplating violence all at the same time.
“It’s okay!” Thee dragged at the man’s arm, trying to pull him off to one side. “It’s okay! He’s with me!” Her voice sounded muzzy, distant, no doubt a side effect of whatever had impacted with the back of his head.
“I don’t care who he’s with!” Bob Mayr used the rifle barrel to ruck Chekov’s cloak higher up on his hip, exposing the flash of Starfleet red underneath. “He’s cost me twenty head of guanacos,” he raged, jabbing at the swatch of jacket hard enough to make Chekov wince, “not to mention every supply contact I had in Useless Loop.”
Chekov tried to push himself up on his elbows, was stopped by the rifle’s muzzle and his own fiercely pounding head. “I never did anything to you.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Mayr snarled.
“Bob, don’t be stupid.” His wife hugged both puppies to her with one arm, then rocked up on her knees and offered Chekov her hand. “He’s got no more control over what the Carsons do than we have.” Chekov took her arm gingerly, staggering upright alongside her with half an eye still on her husband, his loaded rifle, and the discarded shovel Mayr had left behind him on the floor. The thought of that metal blade slamming into the back of his head made him feel even more sick and dizzy.
“I’m Jan Mayr,” the woman introduced herself as she dusted him off and straightened his wrap. It was a strangely considerate gesture, made only a little frightening by the tears on her face and the glossy blankness of shock in her eyes. “This is my husband, Bob.” As polite as though he wasn’t holding Chekov at the end of a gun. “Thank you so much for bringing the beautiful puppies.”
Thee reached again for Mayr’s arm as Jan fell into silent weeping. “Bob,” she asked softly, “what happened?”
He didn’t take his eyes off Chekov, though his face softened somewhat at the sound of his wife’s tears. “The Carsons have pretty much set up a base in Useless Loop. I’d heard they were going house to house, asking after some Starfleet guy who’d gotten himself lost in the Outland. Word was he was worth a thousand liters of water, and they didn’t care whether or not he was alive.” Chekov felt a horrified twitch deep in his stomach, but said nothing to interrupt. “When they got here and asked if I knew anything, I told them it was none of their business what I knew.” The gun sank as he turned toward Thee, its barrel shaking slightly. “I’m tired of getting pushed around, Gwen. Water rights and comm access are one thing. I’m not going to let some gang of Outland bullies tell me who to help and who to hate.”
Thee nodded her understanding, then gently took the rifle out of his hands. Chekov’s heart thumped hard with relief.
Mayr looked impossibly tired. “What’re we going to do?”
“We’ll clone you new guanacos,” Thee reassured him. She held the rifle out toward Chekov without taking her attention away from Mayr. “I’ve even got some better gene sets now.“
Chekov stepped forward to take it from her, carefully settling the hammer back down against the strike-plate. Even that little bit of movement made his head sing, but not as much as the uncomfortable rage Mayr’s words awoke in him.
“And when they kill those?” Mayr gathered his wife up in his arms, holding her and the puppies so hard his fingers whitened. “And the ones after that? What are we supposed to do then?”
“They’re not going to kill any more of your animals,” Chekov promised him. “Or anyone else’s.” He looked at Thee, still standing where Mayr had left her near the fallen shovel. He wished for a moment that they were alone, that he could vent some of this horrible anger to a sympathetic fellow officer instead of forcing himself to maintain his composure in front of civilians. “Independent doesn’t mean abandoned,” he said in place of all the other things boiling up inside him. “The Enterprise can’t stand by and let people be terrorized like this. Not and call herself a starship.” He stopped himself when he heard his voice roughen, took a steadying breath, and asked more evenly, “What’s the closest town with a communications line after Useless Loop?”
Jan Mayr looked up from her husband’s embrace, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of one hand. “That would be Desperation.”
Chekov nodded a curt, silent acknowledgment. What an appropriate name.
“Is this normal?” Sulu swung away from the silent communicator toward an equally silent Agee and Bertke. The settlers’ uneasy expressions told him it wasn’t, but Sulu pressed ahead anyway. “Are there times when the connection to Big Muddy goes out? Maybe because of Gamma Night?”
“I don’t know,” Agee said. “It never did before.”
Sulu didn’t even try to stifle his frustrated groan. He could feel the curse of Llano Verde settling down on him like a strangling blanket of dust. “Something must be wrong down at her end.”
“Maybe the power’s out,” Agee suggested. “Or . . . or maybe they decided to evacuate after all.”
“Or maybe,” said Bertke slowly, “this damned Peacemaker conspiracy runs a lot deeper than we thought.”
Sulu swung around to stare at the two men. “Tell me what’s going on out here. Or, at least, what you think is going on.”
Bertke’s scarred face seemed to stiffen even further. “What we know is going on,” he said flatly, “is that most of the settlers around here are getting substandard medical care, inadequate food supplies, and a whole lot of excuses for why nothing can be done to help them. The only ones who are making out are government officials and the guys who wear Peacemaker badges. And both of them claim to be fighting some outlaws that nobody else has actually seen.”
Sulu frowned. “You’re saying the Carsons don’t exist?”
“They might exist,” Agee said. “But if they didn’t, I think the Peacemakers would still have made them up. It’s just another thing, like the radiation and the dust and the water problems, to keep us occupied while the Peacemakers do something behind our backs.”
“What are they doing behind your backs?”
“We don’t know!” Bertke’s and Agee’s voices joined in mutual exasperation. “We’ve been too busy being sick and tired and afraid of outlaws to notice,” the red-haired settler continued. “All we’re sure of is that Desperation is their headquarters.”
“That’s why you came to meet me there?”
Agee nodded. “The word got put out through the grapevine last week that any strangers who went to Desperation might not be heard from again. We figured that whatever the Peacemakers were up to, it must be coming to a head, and they didn’t want any witnesses they couldn’t keep under control.”
“Like me.” Sulu felt his stomach clench with sudden realization. “And like the rest of my shuttle crew. Oh, my God. Mayor Serafini sent them out to Southfork in a dust-crawler full of Peacemakers! Is there any way we can get up there?”
Bertke and Agee exchanged somber looks, then shook their heads simultaneously. “We don’t have time,” the darker-haired settler said. “And if we understood what she said before she passed out, Southfork is the last place anyone
should be going right now.”
“She?” Sulu glanced from one of them to the other, and his brain made a belated connection. “Is this the person you thought I should see?”
In answer, Bertke swung out of the office and headed back down the hall. The dogs waited for Sulu to join him before frisking ahead. Behind, Sulu could hear Agee press the transmission key and say, “Outland Station Six to Rand. Come in, Rand.” His deep, patient voice sounded as if it could continue that hail for quite a while.
In the kitchen, the Asian girls were now serving breakfast to an entire cluster of neighbors, talking softly and worriedly amongst themselves as they milled and waited. They fell silent when Bertke and Sulu came through, but it was an expectant silence rather than a hostile one. Bertke shook his head at them, and said, “We’re going to wake her up and have Mr. Sulu talk to her. Then we’ll make a decision.”
The gathered people in the kitchen heaved a collection of sighs: some wistful, some impatient, some resigned. Sulu glanced back over his shoulder at them as they went back down the hallway that led to the homestead’s bedrooms.
“What decision do you need to make?” he asked.
“Whether or not to evacuate ourselves.” Bertke knocked gently on a bedroom door, then pushed it open without waiting for an answer. Inside, a light burned low beside an occupied bed, and a slender young man in a rocking chair looked up from a book.
“She’s still sleeping,” he said quietly.
“I know, Keith. But we need to wake her so we can decide what to do.” Bertke leaned over the bed and gently touched the person lying in it. She woke with a desperate gasp, like a person starving for air after a long time underwater. “What?” she said thickly. “Where—”
Sulu recognized the asthmatic wheeze, much worse now than it had been even when they arrived in Desperation. “Dr. Weir?” He moved around to the other side of the bed, and saw her head turn blindly to follow his footsteps. Radiation blisters had ravaged her usually cheerful expression, her eyelids so badly swollen that she couldn’t squeeze them open. Sulu heard his voice gentle with regret. “Bev? This is Sulu. What happened to you?”
The hydrologist ran a tongue across her blistered lips and winced, then drank from the water glass that her attendant held for her. “Idiot Peacemakers,” she said with a ghost of her old intensity. “Took us to the wrong hot spring. Commander Uhura and I went on foot to find the big one. Someone shot at us, I never saw who. I jumped in the hot spring to get away.” She reached up to touch her face, then hissed and pulled her equally blistered fingers away. “Not too smart, huh? I guess it was full of olivium.”
“Keith and Heather Putirka found her out in their horse pasture when they went to round up the stock,” Bertke said to Sulu. “We’ve treated her with our emergency medkit, but it’s not much good at surface damage.” He touched his own scarred face ruefully. “As you see. We did get most of her internal injuries fixed, though.”
“Commander Sulu!” Weir’s head turned blindly against her pillow again, and she was breathing hard, as if she could locate him by scent. “Commander Sulu!”
“I’m here.” He didn’t dare touch her blistered hand, but he sat on the side of the bed so she could feel the mattress sag with his weight. “What’s the matter?”
“We saw a waterfall, before we got shot at—bigger than Yellowstone! Too much water for the crater rim to handle. It’s going to erode and erode until there’s a landslide. Then all at once, the whole lake will go!”
Sulu took a deep breath. “When will that happen, Bev?”
“Anytime,” Weir said, gasping. “Anytime now. You have to tell Big Muddy, and all the towns below. And all the settlers, like the ones who found me—”
Sulu dared a gentle touch on the least blistered part of her wrist. “You already told them. They’re ready to get the evacuation orders out now.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Bertke nod at Keith Putirka, then head back down the hall toward the kitchen. The clamor of questions that echoed back to them didn’t last long, and was immediately followed by a bustle of departure. “Bev, do you know what happened to Greg Anthony and Uhura?”
She started to shake her head, then groaned and shuddered for a moment until the spasm of nausea passed. “Never saw Greg,” she managed to gasp. “Don’t know if he got shot or was with the Peacemakers.” Sulu decided not to burden her with the knowledge that those two possibilities weren’t mutually exclusive. “Commander Uhura was right behind me, getting ready to jump in.”
Sulu frowned across the rumpled bed at the young colonist. “You didn’t find a second—” He didn’t finish the question, and it wasn’t because Putirka was already shaking his head. The word “person” seemed far too cold a way to refer to one of his two closest friends in the world, and he couldn’t bear to say the word “body.”
Even without seeing the gesture, Weir must have guessed Putirka’s answer from the quality of the silence that followed Sulu’s question. “Maybe the commander didn’t jump in after all,” she said to Sulu, consolingly. “Maybe the Peacemakers showed up in time to stop her.”
“Yes,” Sulu said grimly. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Chapter Twelve
A SHARP JAB in the ribs catapulted him awake, back into the helmet of pain he’d been wearing all day. Chekov squinted against the swarming dust—which had completed its recapture of the planet’s surface by midday—and thanked God for the dust muffler which had kept him from choking to death while he slept.
Although death might have been an improvement over the way his head felt right now.
“You awake?” Thee tossed the question back at him without turning. A chill gust of wind almost tore it away before he heard it.
Chekov forced himself to straighten despite the sting of sand and half-frozen mist against his face. “I am now.” He couldn’t see the dogs to either side, but he heard their rhythmic panting underneath the saddle’s creak and the camel’s sighs, and he knew Thee would never have lost track of them, even in this darkness. Dusk had settled heavily over the desert, dragging with it wet downdrafts off the summit of Bull’s Eye and the rumble of distant thunder. They’d crossed more than forty kilometers on camelback since mounting up this morning. Chekov could feel every step of the trip.
Thee reached back to clap him on the knee in what he at first took to be good humor at his expense. Yet she sounded sincerely concerned when she said, “Sorry, sweets, but you’re the one who ran into the shovel. You know the drill.”
He did. Which didn’t make being startled out of exhausted sleep every sixty minutes any more pleasant.
“How’s the head?”
“Hurts.” An honest answer that didn’t even begin to describe how much he wished he had taken that shovel to Bob Mayr instead of the other way around. Blinking over her shoulder, he pointed at a blurry smear of light coalescing out of the dust ahead of them. “Is that Desperation?”
“It better be. Otherwise, Alison Gebauer’s map isn’t worth the padd she drew it on.”
Before setting out for Desperation, they had headed first for the Gebauer homestead, led by the Mayrs and carrying what little of the homestead’s possessions had been deemed salvageable. Chekov had ridden the camel behind Jan Mayr and the puppies, despite his protests that he could walk the ten-kilometer distance as well as any of them and didn’t need to be coddled. Even so, Bob Mayr must have apologized twice for every klick they traveled. Chekov finally gave up and accepted the ride as part of that apology. When he found he couldn’t dismount without help when they finally reached the Gebauers’, he even acknowledged that perhaps he wasn’t as unscathed by the shovel attack as he would have liked to believe.
Ed Gebauer had proved a surprisingly talented cook, throwing together a quick, delicious meal while Bob Mayr and Gebauer’s wife, Alison, pieced together a map of the most direct route to Desperation. Thee hovered over their shoulders as they sketched and argued, while Chekov did his best to remain upright as Jan Mayr performed e
arnest introductions to each of the Gebauers’ half-dozen identical dogs. He hadn’t been able to decide if this was important to her because it distracted her from thinking about the life and animals she’d already lost, or if she’d simply decided it must be important to him because he’d been the one carrying the puppies. Whichever, he accepted each introduction with equal grace, and petted the dogs in turn so that none of them would feel left out.
When he and Thee finally set out again, they left armed with a warm packet of leftovers, two full jugs of water, and nowhere near enough daylight hours in which to make it to Desperation. So the Gebauers also fitted Chekov with a pair of Ed’s old trousers, heavier than his uniform and designed to stave off the chill of Belle Terre’s night, and a good pair of tread boots built for navigating the sands. “You’ll be there in no time,” Alison had promised. “Just go wide of Useless Loop, and don’t let the Carsons see you.”
The first was easy, the second less certain. Between trying to scan the horizon for any sign of human life, drifting in and out of confused, headachy dreams about dogs and dust and loaded rifles, and Thee elbowing him awake every hour or so to check on his concussion, Alison’s “no time” had swelled into the longest trip of Chekov’s life. He welcomed the town’s appearance now with a leaden relief far outweighing what Desperation’s empty streets and silent buildings deserved.
A few lonely footprints crisscrossed the big central plaza, insignificant dimples in a sea of damp sand. Their camel cut an unhurried arc through the middle, obliterating lesser trails with its long strides and platter-like feet, aloof to the wisps of music drifting out of the one or two still-lighted buildings nearby. Thee brought them to a halt beside a line of wrought-iron benches and hopped down as lightly as though she’d mounted only a moment before. “Now let’s hope somebody’s up and around to let us in.”
