by L. A. Graf
“Any luck?”
The amplified snap of that voice told Uhura it didn’t belong to either Linville or Karen Roth, the young technician who kept their forcefield calibrated. She peered up through the cold bouldery darkness at the red glow of human warmth that was kicking its heels on the rock ledge. When Linville had announced to her fellow Carson scientists that Uhura needed escorts to help find her communications node, Lori Tamasy had been the first to volunteer. She’d introduced herself as an aquatic ecologist, but from the easy way she held her projectile weapon cradled in the crook of one arm, Uhura suspected she’d had at least some private security training at some point in her past. In fact, she seemed to be the nearest thing the Carsons had to a field commander. That must have been why she’d offered to come along, since from the beginning she’d been asking Uhura that same question with exactly that tone of doubt and impatience.
“Not yet.” Uhura pushed the communications box a half-meter to the right in an attempt to punch up the signal she thought she could see dancing in the noise. “But I’m getting closer.”
“Better be,” said Tamasy. “We’ve got to head home soon.”
“Do we?” From the quizzical sound of Linville’s voice, Uhura was sure the woman had lifted at least one eyebrow. “It’s been less than two hours since we left.”
“However many hours is still more than we’d planned on being out tonight,” Tamasy said. “You know we can’t drain the power cell. We’ve got to leave first thing in the morning.”
“Uhura to Rand,” Uhura said into the communicator. “Come in, Rand. Uhura to Rand.” She paused, listening to the crackle of the channel. When no reply came, she began shoving the box even further to the right, joined after a moment by Linville.
“Where do you have to go tomorrow?” she asked the woman, whose warmer shadow was even more intensely red than Tamasy’s. “Are there other people who need to be rescued from the flood?”
“No, but there’s an entire river ecosystem that does,” Tamasy said, before the woman could reply. “If we want to save it, we’ve got to stop those other mine shafts before they break through the crater wall.”
“You’re going to take on the miners in their own territory?” The communicator plowed through a drift and threw a dark mantle of heat-absorbing olivium dust across all their shadows before the night wind blew it away. “How does your society’s noninterference policy justify that?”
Tamasy didn’t answer her, leaving it to Linville to finally reply. “There are many who think it doesn’t,” she admitted. “They will carry our native DNA banks to higher ground in the Gory Mountains, in the event the rest of us fail to stop the flood from coming. That will ensure that at least some native life survives, whether or not the colony does.”
There was nothing Uhura could think of to say to that, so instead she yanked the communicator back around to face her. “Uhura to Rand,” she said. “Come in, Rand.”
The signal response meter stayed so flat that, for a moment, Uhura feared the olivium dust had finally done its circuits in. She frowned and cracked open her faceplate again. Even past the rising wind, she could hear the unmistakable hum of olivium interference across the channel. She gritted her teeth and resealed her infrared mask, then began to drag the communicator back to its original location. She hoped all that dust inside her hood would keep her embarrassed expression from showing.
“I thought Dr. Anthony said the mine conduits had already weakened the crater rim to the point where it could go at any moment,” she said, before anyone could comment on her course reversal. “Even if you stop the mining, there’s no guarantee you’ll stop the flood.”
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” Tamasy said. “Once we’re inside, we might be able to collapse some of the conduits and keep the flood from being quite so catastrophic.”
The Carson biologist’s voice was so matter-of-fact that it took Uhura a moment to realize she was talking about a suicide mission. She gave the communicator a fierce yank to drag it past its original position, then smacked the transmission key with unnecessary force. “Uhura to Rand,” she snapped. “Come in, Rand.”
The signal monitor spiked upward as if her vehemence had kicked it into cooperating. This time, Uhura was careful to turn the communicator in a slow arc so she could see in which direction the signal was getting stronger. She ended up facing Tamasy, who was watching her with the impatient glare of a tethered hawk.
“I’m just about ready to leave,” the Carson leader said.
“We’re close to the node,” Uhura said. “Just give me another five minutes to find it.”
“You know I was one of those who voted with you to stop the mine,” Linville said to Tamasy. “But I fail to see the point of leaving here before we warn the settlements downstream. Even with our intervention, the probability of a flood remains high—”
“And it’s getting higher with every minute we spend walking in circles out here!”
“We’re not walking in any more circles.” Uhura dragged the communicator another half-meter to the left and found her way blocked by rock. She looked over her shoulder, intending to ask Linville for help, but a long arm reached down from above and yanked the communicator away from her before she could say a word. She went up after it, her kevlar boots scrabbling for purchase on the dusty rock until Tamasy caught her by the arm and hauled her in like a floundering fish. Uhura found herself plopped unceremoniously down on the ledge beside her communicator. The strong peak on its signal readout was all she needed to see to make up for that indignity.
“We’re at the node,” she said, and knelt to press the transmission key. “Uhura to Rand. Come in, Rand.”
The communicator responded with a crackle she could hear even through her sealed faceplate. Uhura felt her heart pound up into her throat. That, she knew, was the olivium-augmented equivalent of a hailing frequency opening up.
“Commander Uhura? Is that you?”
“Yes!” Uhura stared down at the unrevealing readouts on her display panel. That thin voice was almost as hoarse and exhausted as her own, but she knew it didn’t belong to either Scotty or Rand. “Who’s this?”
“It’s me. Neil Bartels.” The colony’s chief technical officer sounded surprised, as if he’d thought she would recognize him. Perhaps he didn’t realize just how strained his voice had become. “When we didn’t hear anything else after you left No Escape, we were afraid something really bad had happened. Where are you?”
Even in the dusty darkness, Uhura could see the warning scowl Tamasy gave her. She amended what she’d been going to say. “In the middle of nowhere. We had to hike out here to find a place where the communicator would work. Where are Commander Scott and Lieutenant Rand?”
“Out helping direct the evacuation effort,” Bartels said. “Along with every other person in the building. You’re lucky I came back in to make another public announcement over the landlines, or no one would have been here to hear you calling.”
Uhura’s sigh of relief was so deep that it made her filter hiss with the effort of cleaning so much air so quickly. “Then you got the flood warnings from No Escape?”
“And from the orbital platform and from the Enterprise,” Bartels said wryly. “All the civilians have been evacuated, and we’re letting the civil servants go now. Is it really true that the crater is about to burst? None of my engineers can believe it, but I didn’t want to take any chances.”
“The reason your engineers can’t believe it is that it wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for an illegal olivium mine that’s been cut through the crater rim.”
“What?”
“The mining is being done by a group of settlers from Desperation who wear badges and call themselves Peacemakers,” Uhura told him. She’d used the previous hours of walking to condense all of her information into a terse, efficient package for transmittal. “They’ve terrorized or chased out all the settlers around Bull’s Eye to keep them from noticing the mining activity
. They tried to kill us to keep us from finding out how badly the crater is already leaking. Greg Anthony nearly died, and I still don’t know where Sulu and Bev Weir are.”
“Oh, my God.” She wouldn’t have thought Bartels could sound worse than he had at the beginning of their conversation, but the exhaustion in his voice had turned to horror. “How close is the crater to collapsing because of this—this illegal mine?”
“It could go at any moment,” Uhura said. “We’re going to try and—”
A hand swept out before she could finish that sentence, ruthlessly slapping Uhura’s hand away from the transmission key. She gasped, off-balance and flailing from the blow, but the same hand caught her by the scruff of her kevlar hood and pulled her back onto the rock ledge again.
“Sorry,” Tamasy said. “But you don’t know who else might have been listening to your conversation.”
“Neil said he was alone.”
“Maybe he was,” the Carson biologist said, although she didn’t sound too convinced of that. “But even so, there are other places where this communication system of yours works, aren’t there? How do you know the olivium mine isn’t one of them?”
Uhura opened her mouth, then closed it again. “You’re right,” she said. “Sorry. I should have known better than to discuss strategy over an open channel.”
She could see a quick, humorless smile glint behind Tamasy’s faceplate. “Yes, Commander, you should have. Just for that, you don’t get to go to the olivium mine with us.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” Uhura said flatly. “You’re going to need a communications officer there.”
“Why?” Tamasy demanded. “If all the cities down to Big Muddy are already being evacuated—”
“That still doesn’t save Llano Verde’s environment, does it?” Uhura glanced upward to check her intuition. The dust storm hung thick overhead, turned a dull red by the infrared glow of its own internal friction, but high on the western horizon, a thin slice of true night darkness appeared over the crater rim. It was what she’d hoped to see: the clear column at the center of Bulls Eye’s permanent cyclonic storm, free of olivium interference from the crater lake to outer space. “If we can haul this communicator up to the mine, the Enterprise can use its signal as a pinpoint focus for its phaser banks. They can collapse the mine conduits and seal the rim better than anything you could do from the inside.”
Tamasy eyed her for a long moment, then gave her a quick approving slap on the shoulder, hard enough to rock but not unbalance her. “Not a bad plan,” she said. “Assuming the Enterprise is actually anywhere in the vicinity of Belle Terre.”
“Don’t worry,” Uhura said, rubbing at her kevlar-scraped shoulder. “If I know Captain Kirk, it will be.”
Chapter Fourteen
“YOU’RE NOT going to believe this,” Greg Anthony said. “But I’m starting to miss that dust-crawler we were in yesterday.”
Uhura threw the hydrologist a concerned glance. He claimed that the Carsons had run him through their tissue regenerator enough times to make his teeth chatter, but there were still faint red radiation burns on his face and an odd stiffness to his torso where the blunt metal projectiles of the Peacemakers’ weapons had torn through bone and skin and cartilage, leaving uncomfortable scars. They’d shot him point-blank when he’d gone back to ask them to move their crawler, he’d told Uhura when she’d asked him about it. She could still hear the ring of disbelief in his voice, see it in the way his hands moved across his chest as if to catch the sudden spurts of blood. One of the Peacemakers had asked if he was ready to leave. When Anthony told them that he and Weir were sure there was more floodwater coming out farther down the slope, the man had calmly swung his weapon toward him and said, “Yep, you’re ready to leave.”
That was when the firing started. Anthony said he couldn’t remember it ending, probably because he was in shock by then, but he did remember clutching his scientific tricorder to his chest the entire time. Its duranium casing had saved him, deflecting the projectiles meant for heart and lungs into shoulder muscles and rib cage. Weir’s flung dilithium torch had helped, too—first by attracting the Peacemakers’ attention and turning their fusillade toward her and Uhura, and then a second time by floating past the Carson scientists who were running a gravity scan on the mining conduits below the rim. They’d managed to snatch Uhura out from under the Peacemakers’ noses, but didn’t find Anthony until much later, passed out from shock and blood loss. If the Carsons hadn’t brought along their emergency medical stabilizer, the hydrologist would undoubtedly be dead.
“Are you feeling sick?” she asked now.
“Yes. Motion-sick.” Anthony took several deep breaths in quick succession, making the airfilter on his kevlar dust suit hiss. Even behind the translucent mask, Uhura could see how his face had tightened into a grimace.
“Sorry,” Tamasy said without looking over her shoulder. A thick haze of dust made it hard to see the terrain across which they were driving, and the Carson biologist occasionally had to slam to a halt to avoid the sudden steaming gashes of hot springs. “I’m trying to get us to the mine as fast as I can.”
“I know. That’s the problem.”
The Carsons referred to their dust-proofed exploration vehicle as a roller, but it actually bounced across the rugged landscape on six oversize and oversprung wheels. Its agility and speed explained how the scientists could so easily evade their enemies as they moved around the crater rim, but the price they paid was a never-ending series of lurches and jolts that rattled teeth and wrenched stomachs. Uhura opened her mouth to ask if their emergency medical supplies included anti-nausea shots, but before she could, Karen Roth leaned around the steel cannister of the forcefield generator and did something to the controls of Anthony’s dust suit. Uhura could hear his relieved sigh even over the drone of the roller’s gyromagnetic motors.
“I increased the oxygen augment,” the young technician said. “The suit adjusts it automatically for elevation, but you can cheat a little if you have to. Do you need more, Commander?”
“Not right now,” Uhura said. She was wedged in securely enough between Anthony and her bulky experimental communicator to weather most of the exaggerated bumps. And she’d spent enough time flying with Sulu in the Bean to have gotten used to this kind of motion. “How much farther have we got to go?”
“Another ten kilometers,” Tamasy said. “I’m staying low and outside the crater until we come to the mine shafts. The Peacemakers mostly patrol high and inside the rim.”
That explained why the haze of dust outside their roller hadn’t cleared since they’d left the Carson headquarters earlier that morning. Uhura craned her head to peer out the roller’s side window, at what looked like a bizarre portico of thick white columns looming through the dust. It took her a moment to realize that each column was the steam geyser of an active hot spring, and then another moment to see that each spring was linked to the next in a continuous cascade of boiling water. Before she could say anything, Tamasy had gunned the roller’s gyromagnetic motor in an attempt to vault the thermal runoff. The vehicle leaped obediently from the rocks at the water’s edge, but the two back wheels splashed down on the far side with a jolt that made even Uhura’s hardened stomach lurch. Muddy hot water splattered across the back of the roller and then slowly sizzled off again, leaving slightly scorched marks on the windows where it had been.
“I don’t even want to think about how much olivium was in there,” said Greg Anthony.
Uhura frowned. “There seem to be an awful lot of hot springs down here. Is it because we’re so low on the slope?”
“No,” Tamasy said grimly. “This is the way we always come around to this side of the crater. Most of those springs weren’t here two days ago.”
A somber silence fell inside the vehicle. The six environmentalists who’d chosen to confront the olivium miners cradled their weapons in steady hands, their faces impassive behind the infrared faceplates they’d worn to see inside the mine.
They were mostly young and mostly female—the New Rachel Carson Society seemed to appeal more to women than to men—but Uhura wouldn’t have wanted to face them in a battle. Or Greg Anthony, whose pleasant face had turned hard and cold when he’d heard what happened to Bev Weir. With scrupulous honesty, Linville had informed the government hydrologist about the slim probabilities she’d calculated for overcoming the Peacemakers and collapsing the mine from inside, and the even smaller possibility that they could contact the Enterprise and have the crater rim sealed from outer space. All Anthony had said in response was “Can I have one of those weapons?”
Now, minutes away from their goal, Uhura could only hope that Sulu had managed to call Captain Kirk from the Bean and let him know how bad the situation in Llano Verde had become. If he had, she knew she could depend on the Enterprise’s commander coming to their rescue. But if he hadn’t, she was afraid that between the Carsons, the Peacemakers, and the doomed crater lake, no one was going to get out of Bull’s Eye alive.
“Are you sure you left it underwater?”
Chekov might have found Sulu’s question insulting under any other circumstances—after all, one didn’t just imagine a hundred nightmarish meters in leaking environmental suits. But given Orbital Shuttle Six’s perch on one of the more level stretches of Bull’s Eye’s inner rim, not to mention the unmistakably dry supply cargo now disgorged onto the sand all around it, Chekov had to admit that a moment of clarification might be in order.
“I’m not only certain about where we left it,” he shouted over the booming wind, “I’m also certain it couldn’t fly.” Had the weather really been this ruthless when they first made the hike out of Bull’s Eye? How in God’s name had they ever managed to survive? “I can’t believe they were able to get it off the bottom.”
“Maybe they didn’t.” Thee, flat to the ground on the lip of the crater, just like him and Sulu, reached across one of her crouching dogs to point down toward the water’s edge. A dark, distinct fringe of wetness discolored the ground from several meters below the shuttle to the lap of the lake itself. “Mud that deep didn’t just wash up. I think the water level’s dropping.”
