by L. A. Graf
“You’re not a very good liar,” said Thee’s muffled voice. Just in case he didn’t already know.
He turned back to the window with an acknowledging tilt of his head. “I can’t sleep,” he said, more accurately and more reluctantly.
“Want to talk about it?” Bedding rustled and one of the dogs gave a sleepy groan as Thee discarded enough pillows to work herself into a sitting position.
Chekov looked away from the window again, caught off guard by that suggestion. “No.” He didn’t even talk to Sulu and Uhura when things bothered him unless he absolutely couldn’t avoid it. It seemed somehow unfaithful to breach that moratorium with someone his friends didn’t even know.
Thee snorted and smacked her fist deep into one of the discarded pillows. Perhaps as another substitute for his head, Chekov thought wryly. “Okay, let me explain how this works. If you’re going keep me up all night, pacing around like a border collie after a fly, then I get to chat about what’s worrying you. And you’re not allowed to answer in words of one syllable.” She looped her arms around her knees and settled back against the headboard. “Talk or sleep, it’s your choice.”
“It’s just . . .” He wasn’t even sure which part of her proposition he was responding to. “I hardly know you.”
“So I can’t possibly understand?” She sounded irritated, maybe even a little hurt. It struck him as strange that exclusion from his emotional turmoil should bother her. “Am I supposed to be stupid enough to believe this is all about your head still hurting, or the dogs on the bed, or some archaic sense of chivalry, and not about you tearing yourself apart because you’re worried about your friends?”
Saying it seemed to grant Chekov’s fears a life of their own. He shivered convulsively, feeling again the frigid wind and the bitter bite of olivium dust against his skin. “I’ve been out in that,” he tried to explain. It came out very quietly, too much like a child’s explanation of a nightmare.
Thee’s response held no trace of judgment or ridicule. “I know you have.”
“If you hadn’t found us when you did . . .” He shook off the rest of that thought, suddenly superstitious about where pursuing it might lead. “And now we’re just sitting here, doing nothing because we’re afraid of a few civilian bullies with guns . . .” Or maybe just afraid of the guns. Anger tightened Chekov’s throat, followed quickly by a sick, leaching sense of self-hatred. Bad enough that he was the reason Sulu and Uhura had braved Llano Verde’s Outland to begin with; he couldn’t bear to accept that his squeamishness about the colonists’ primitive weapons might be the only thing that kept him from saving his friends in their own crisis. Especially if what they needed to be saved from was the same kind of fate Dave Plottel had met . . .
“We’re up here doing nothing, Pavel, because there is nothing we can do.” Thee raised her voice to talk over what must have been an expected protest, although he made no move to interrupt her. “I know that’s hard for you security types to accept, but there really are times when the best course of action is to rest, preserve yourself, and use all that energy where it can do some good.” She shifted among the pillows, facing him more directly. “It’s dark out there, with wall-to-wall dust and thunderstorms. Even if we could sneak out past the Peacemakers, we wouldn’t be able to see a damned thing, and we’d be just as likely to get killed as to save your friends.”
Chekov couldn’t argue with that. He hadn’t fared too well on any of his journeys through Llano Verde’s dust, not even when all he had to worry about was getting Baldwin and Reddy down off the slopes of Bull’s Eye crater. “There’s the landline in the Peacemakers’ of fice.” He couldn’t quite let go of the conviction that he was being cowardly and disloyal as long as there was something—anything—he could do to rescue his friends. “We could contact Eau Claire, have them punch a message through to Captain Kirk.”
“You could also get shot trying to break in and spend the next three hours dying.”
A flash memory of Reddy, bleeding out and nearly dead. Of Plottel with a hole the size of a fist in his back. Chekov clenched his jaw and swung back to the window, trying to convince himself that those were good enough reasons not to try and help his friends.
Thee sighed again, almost as if she could hear what he was thinking. “Do you ever take no for an answer?”
He watched a dark curtain of dust sweep up the side of the building and crash into his window. “Not often.”
“You must be a pain in the ass to live with.”
Chekov thought about Sulu, haranguing him for his stubbornness, and managed a faint smile. “So I’ve been told.”
Thee stirred again, pushing one of the dogs off onto the floor. When he turned to look, she reached out her hand toward him through the half-darkness. “Pavel, come to bed.”
He opened his mouth to answer her, even took a step into the room. Then a shadow blacker than the nighttime outside fell against the windowpane, and his attention snapped back over his shoulder. A humanoid silhouette, as distinct as a paper cutout, solidified out of the storm winds and craned up to peer into their window.
Chekov ducked to one side, out of the blanket of light, and hissed at Thee to switch off the bedside lamp. She was already there, stretching across a startled dog to snap the room into darkness. Chekov snatched up the rifle from where he’d left it against the wall. He had his hand on the window latch, the rifle hefted over one shoulder like a club, before their visitor had even finished his surveillance. Chekov whipped the window open, toppling the intruder inward and onto the floor amid a flurry of alarmed barking. He straddled him in a single step and raised the rifle high—
“Pavel! Pavel, don’t shoot! It’s me!”
Chekov froze, shocked into immobility by that familiar voice. “Hikaru?”
Sulu lowered his hands and tugged the masking folds of cloth away from his face. “I don’t know how to break this to you,” he remarked, his voice a good bit less frantic, “but the other end of the gun is the one all the colonists use.”
Chekov caught the helmsman by the front of his dust muffler and heaved him to his feet. He almost couldn’t believe he was real until his friend’s hug tightened painfully around him. “We thought the Peacemakers had killed you,” he said, between gasps and volleys of barking. He heard Thee give a single, sharp command and the dogs fell silent again.
“Not for lack of trying.” Sulu blinked in the sudden light of the bedside lamp, pushing away from Chekov to steal a look toward the bed, Thee, and the watchful dogs whose collars she was holding. “Um . . . should I come back later?”
Thee made an odd noise, half laugh and half exasperated sigh. “It probably wouldn’t matter if you did.” She released the dogs with a quick hand signal that kept them on the bed. “I’m Gwen Thee, attached to the Belle Terre biology division. You must be one of the two friends he’s been fretting about ever since we got to Desperation.”
Sulu returned her smile with a readiness Chekov found himself a little irritated by. “Lieutenant Commander Hikaru Sulu, from the Enterprise.” The pilot moved to close the still-open window, shutting out both the chill and whoever else might be within earshot on the street. “Uhura and I brought the Bean out to track your supply drops as soon as we realized your shuttle had gone down,” he told Chekov over his shoulder. “We got as far as here, then Uhura had to take Weir and Anthony—” Chekov frowned a question, and Sulu quickly sidestepped to explain, “—two of the hydrologists from the colony’s Hydrologic and Meteorologic Services—”
Which raised the other question that had been plaguing Chekov. “Why did you need hydrologists to come looking for me?”
Sulu sighed. “Trust me, we didn’t. But the continental governor in Eau Claire won’t let anybody set foot in the Outland without an overwhelming probability of coming home again. That’s why there weren’t any regular search-and-rescue teams out looking for your shuttle. The hydrologists needed to come up here to study the river, and we were the only ride they could get. Uhu
ra felt sorry for them and gave them permission to come along.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know!” The helmsman paced a few steps, seemed to realize what he was doing, and came back again. “The Peacemakers took Uhura and the hydrologists upslope to check water flow rates through the crater wall—”
“—and then came back without them,” Chekov finished for him.
Sulu nodded. “I’ve been hiding with some farmers near here since then. They managed to find Dr. Weir, although she was in pretty bad shape, but there’s been no sign of Uhura or Dr. Anthony. Weir says they were attacked by Carsons.”
“Or maybe by Peacemakers?” Thee asked cynically.
Sulu gave her a quick nod. “That’s what I’m afraid of. The farmers who rescued me said there’s some kind of conspiracy going on around here, and that the Peacemakers are a big part of it . . . but that’s not the real problem.”
“It’s not?” Chekov frowned at him again. “Then what is?”
The pilot took a deep breath, as if he hated what he had to say. “The Big Muddy’s going to flood.”
Before Chekov could ask, Thee volunteered sweetly, “That would be the Eau Claire River to you, Pavel.”
He angled an unamused look in her direction. She responded with a thoroughly aggravating smile.
“Water levels are already way too high all along the Little Muddy,” Sulu continued, either not noticing their byplay or choosing to ignore it. “A couple of the smaller towns are completely flooded out. Once the crater wall lets loose, it’s going to make a flood wave that’ll take out everything from here down to the capital.”
Chekov didn’t know for sure how long a stretch of river that was, or how many towns and homesteads and guanaco barns it encompassed, but even a handful of lives lost on this fledgling colony would constitute a disaster. The loss of the whole riverside population could be a planetary catastrophe.
With a resigned groan, Thee hauled herself out of bed and reached for the dusty trousers she’d left draped on a nearby chair. “Our first priority is to get a warning out to the rest of the valley, right?” she asked pragmatically. It occurred to Chekov that a haircut wasn’t the only way you could know a Starfleet officer, active or retired. “How long do we have?”
“According to Dr. Weir, the flood could start at any minute. The farmers we were able to reach have already started evacuating, but there’s no way word of mouth can travel the length of the river in time. Not in this weather. I came back to Desperation to get the Bean and head straight for Big Muddy.”
Tentative hope leapt in Chekov. “The Bean is here?”
Wincing at Chekov’s optimism, Sulu shook his head. “Not anymore. I thought maybe they’d hidden it in the stables, but all I found there was somebody’s tossed-off Starfleet jacket.” It was a transparent attempt at his usual humor, and somehow made the situation seem even more grim. “Which means the Bean is probably in a million pieces over the side of a cliff somewhere.”
Taking all their hopes for an easy trip to Eau Claire along with it.
“How did you figure out we were here?” Now fully clothed, Thee sent the dogs to sit by the door and extracted their freshly cleaned dust mufflers from the closet.
“This is the only hotel in town.” Sulu took one of the cloaks and passed it along to Chekov. “And this was the only lighted window that wasn’t covered by a sack. I figured it had to be you. Desperation doesn’t seem to get many tourists.”
Chekov nodded absently, accepting the dust gear with one hand and collecting up his rifle with the other. Going out into the darkness was no longer an abstract prospect. Whatever danger they might encounter at the hands of the Peacemakers was minuscule compared with the greater danger that thousands of unwitting colonists were in. Even the search for Uhura would have to be deferred until the evacuation orders had been delivered. Chekov grimaced, knowing now why Sulu hadn’t liked telling them about the flood. Chekov would just have to hope that Uhura had fared as well as they had, finding refuge with someone as kind as Sulu’s farmers, as strong and reliable as Gwen Thee.
“Pavel . . .” Sulu took hold of his elbow and made him turn. “If she’s out there, we’ll find her.” His gaze was sympathetic yet stern in a way only years of friendship could convey. “But you know she’ll kill us if we let Big Muddy get flooded because we went looking for her before we sent a warning down.”
She would. Chekov knew she would. Just as surely as he would hate himself if anything happened to her in the time it took them to warn Eau Claire.
Taking a deep breath, he disengaged from Sulu’s grip and shook out his dust wrap to swing it on. “There’s a landline to Eau Claire in the main Peacemaker office.”
“No.” Thee snapped Chekov a glare that was clearly meant to remind him of their conversation a few minutes ago. “It’s too dangerous—”
“And too unreliable,” Sulu added firmly. “Whatever conspiracy these Peacemakers are involved in reaches all the way down to Big Muddy. Even if we can secure our end of the line, there’s no guarantee that the person we’re talking to will pass the warning along. I think we have to deliver this message in person or not at all. If we could find the Bean, or even some mothballed colony air transport . . . I just need something I can fly!”
“I know where there’s something.” The answer was suddenly clear to Chekov—as clear as the air above the churning crater lake. He blinked his mind back to the moment and found Sulu staring at him quizzically. “If you’re a good enough pilot to get it above the dust layer,” he said, donning his dust muffler with a practiced flick of his hand, “there’s a slightly waterlogged cargo shuttle we could salvage right at the top of this crater.”
Every new world is a new chance to learn.
The old motto was running through Uhura’s head again as she followed three shadowy figures through the dark maze of boulders in which the New Rachel Carson Society’s camouflaged headquarters were hidden from attack. The night was thick with dust, and even their dilithium torches barely carved out the next few steps ahead of them. In the hours they’d been out here looking for a communications node, Uhura’s borrowed kevlar dust suit had scraped her knees and elbows raw, and trapped her body heat so efficiently that sweat stung against every centimeter of chafed skin. Each step was a battle fought against blasting wind, shifting rocks, and treacherous drifts of dust, a search for that invisible place in the darkness where olivium crystal refraction and atmospheric reflection combined to form a perfect but elusive partnership.
So far, what Uhura had learned from Belle Terre was to never again take open communication channels for granted.
She had always supported the idea of developing an olivium-proof communications system for the Burned regions of this planet, but that was mostly because it was the kind of professional challenge she loved to rise to. Even the long, frustrating weeks of trying to hail Sulu, and the random silences of Gamma Night, had only taught her how much personal annoyance could be caused by a lack of communications. But this olivium mining conspiracy that had spread like an undetected cancer across the heart of Llano Verde, with its miasma of misleading rumors and the potentially catastrophic flood that no one could be warned about—none of those would have happened if there’d been a working communications system in place here from the beginning. Outland settlers could have talked to each other, put two and two together, sent reports and warnings into Big Muddy . . .
She didn’t notice that the kevlar-clad figure in front of her had stopped until she bumped into her. “We’re four meters north-northeast of our last checkpoint, Commander,” said Linville’s suit-amplified voice. The heavy experimental communicator swung as lightly as a tricorder on her shoulder, and she wasn’t even out of breath. “Should we try calling Big Muddy again?”
“Yes.” Uhura reached out to steady the communicator while the woman lowered it to the ground. She would have preferred to carry it herself, but her new Carson allies had strict rules governing their excurs
ions into the outside world. Their policy was to stay out only as long as their defensive forcefield’s power cell lasted—one of the reasons they hadn’t been exterminated by the Peacemakers a long time ago. Even though Uhura’s calculations suggested that the nearest communications node lay just west of Carson headquarters, the jumbled impact debris blanketing the area made it impossible for her to lug the communicator herself. She’d been forced to entrust it to Linville’s stronger but far more cavalier hands, wincing every time it slammed into a rock surface or thudded carelessly down into a drift of olivium dust. She just hoped its inner circuits could withstand as much stress as its duranium shell.
She crouched down to wipe off the thick coating of dust that the output screen had collected and wake the communicator up from power-saving sleep. The rainbow glow of its diodes refracted through the blowing dust and sparked an answering glitter off the silver cannister of the illegal forcefield generator. It had been set down by the other two members of their group, one of whom squatted to fiddle with its adjustments while the other hauled herself up to a convenient sheltered ledge on the boulder that towered over them.
Uhura unsealed one edge of her infrared faceplate, wincing at the immediate influx of dust and wind. Her night vision, formerly enhanced by the cloudy glow of infrared augmentation, dimmed down to black nothingness. She had to fumble to find the communicator’s output panel so she could put her ear against it and listen to the feedback from her signal. It sounded as if the connection might be open, or at least getting close to a node. There was a peculiar crystalline hum that the communicator made when its signal was being entirely absorbed by olivium interference. She couldn’t hear any of that here.
“Uhura to Rand,” she said, coughing as she resealed her faceplate. The suit’s air-cleaning unit was far better than the loose filter scarf of her dust muffler, but it hadn’t been designed for someone who kept unsealing her suit. “Come in, Rand. Uhura to Rand. Come in, Rand.”
