by L. A. Graf
Laying his rifle carefully across the console at the base of the front window, Chekov slid out of the copilot’s seat to pry off the main maintenance panel. The spiderweb of new wiring seemed to engulf the entire board.
“They must have installed some kind of governor.” He slipped his finger behind a programmable monitor chip, tried to pop it loose without success.
“Do you need something to cut the connection?” Thee asked from the cockpit’s doorway.
He shook his head, then realized that neither she nor Sulu could see him clearly while he was half-underneath the copilot’s seat. “Not here. This is just some sort of monitor . . . or interface . . .” He squirmed backward out of the crawlspace to sit back on his heels and look at Sulu. “I can’t disconnect this until I find out where it’s actually tied in.”
“Then get going.” Sulu nudged the maintenance panel closed with his foot. “You track it down, and I’ll see if I can’t initiate a manual start-up sequence that bypasses the damned thing.”
Thee followed Chekov back into the main compartment, hanging back only long enough to order her dogs out of the way when Chekov pulled loose another panel halfway up the starboard bulkhead.
“Anything I can do to help?” she asked.
Chekov identified the new connections easily enough, following the main cable between two fingers until he couldn’t stretch his arm any further behind the plating. “Just take things as I hand them to you.” He angled a look down the bulkhead, toward where he guessed his hand had ended up. “And bring me a cutting torch from that equipment locker.”
He could sense the shuttle trembling as he peeled back section after section of bulkhead to trace the new wires. He wanted to believe it was the heavy hand of the wind that rocked the heavy ship, or some success on Sulu’s part in waking up the quiescent engines. In reality, he knew it was erosion in the crater walls themselves, shaking Bull’s Eye like an earthquake. He hoped the crater’s protests meant they still had time before the flood began, but he had an ominous feeling that just the opposite was true.
Thee interrupted his brooding as she accepted yet another still-warm piece of bulkhead and threw it out of the way behind them. “Do you think they know about the flood?”
Another tangle of wires, heading off in a dozen distracting directions. “Who?”
“Whoever pulled the shuttle out of the lake.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” But even as he separated out the branch of wires he wanted, Chekov remembered the broad-rimmed hat of a Peacemaker on the man he’d killed outside the shuttle, and the crawler full of Peacemakers who had taken the hydrologists up to check on water levels only to turn around and kill them. “Probably. Why else would they want to keep anyone from investigating the water levels up here?”
Thee spun open the lock on the hatch leading to the rear cargo hold while Chekov made a burn on the wall to mark the direction of their wiring. “I really hate people sometimes.” She sounded bitter for the first time since he’d met her. “I hate knowing that we can go from civilized Federation citizens to selfish barbarians within six months of setting foot on a new planet.”
Chekov stopped her from slinging the door open and turning away from him. “Aren’t you the one who told me that willingness to take on risk isn’t the same as preparedness?” He lifted her chin and made her look at him. “No one came to Belle Terre intending to become a barbarian.”
“So that makes it all right to shoot each other with primitive weapons and sentence everyone downriver to die?”
Guilt squeezed his heart in an unforgiving fist. “No,” he admitted, very quietly. “That doesn’t make it all right.” But I understand a little better than I used to how easily barbarism can sneak up on you when you feel like you’ve lost all other options. He reached around her to drag open the cargo bay door. “But maybe it explains how people like the Peacemakers could be so desperate to get away from Belle Terre that they’d do something stupid like hijack a cargo shuttle.”
A throb of familiar heat swelled out at them as the door rolled into its pocket, and Chekov took an involuntary step backward as though transperiodic radiation could be ducked or otherwise avoided. Thee bumped him from behind, rising up on tiptoe to steal a look into the crowded cargo bay.
Her dyspeptic snort sounded right next to his ear. “Of course, this could also explain why someone would be desperate to get away from Belle Terre.”
The hold was stuffed nearly to bursting with the eerie glow of pure olivium.
Chapter Fifteen
THE SECOND-WORST nightmare of a communications officer’s life was not to be able to hear. The worst nightmare was not to be able to hear when you knew someone was trying to contact you.
The thunder of projectile weapons had exploded inside the confined space of the mine like a photon torpedo blast. Uhura felt the impact without actually ever registering it as a sound. She fell to her knees and clapped her hands over her ears, but the damage had already been done. She had been slammed into a deafness so complete that it pounded deep inside her skull, preventing her from hearing either the return fire from the Peacemakers or any commands from her Carson allies. It also kept her from hearing any sound that might have accompanied the distinct spike that had just appeared on the signal detection monitor of her communicator. The inquiry soared into a full-blown peak of response, paused as if waiting for a reply, and then sank again until it disappeared back into flat-line noise.
Uhura watched the panel for another minute, but no further hailing signal came. She reached for the transmission button, intending to respond even if she couldn’t hear the words she made, but a body fell across her before she could complete the gesture and slammed her to the ground. Gasping for breath, Uhura struggled free of the frighteningly dead weight, keeping her own profile as low to the ground as possible. Had their forcefield generator stopped working? Or had deafness prevented her from hearing a command to move, so that she was no longer inside its protection?
A quick glance through the faceplate told her the body beside her belonged to Linville. Despite its limpness, Uhura felt no breaks in the kevlar bodysuit, saw no patches of wetness with the bright infrared glow of fresh blood. She glanced up from the woman in bewilderment and saw another Carson fall, this time only a meter away from the forcefield generator. Most of the rest were still firing, but their deafening fusillade of shots made no impact on the silhouette of the Peacemakers. Uhura saw the tallest kevlar-suited figure drop her projectile weapon and swing around, hands slashing the universal “down” signal at the rest of them. The glitter of the phaser beam that caught her was unmistakable inside the dimness of the mine. She crumpled before she had a chance to follow her own command, and although a few Carsons managed to hit the ground before the phaser beams caught them, it didn’t save them from being targeted. Uhura gritted her teeth, watching the pale fire of the light weapons flick from body to body, and grimly waited her turn to be shot.
But the glittering stopped while she was still aware and breathing. Thinking that perhaps the Peacemakers had mistaken her stillness for a phaser-induced collapse, Uhura kept her head low and forced herself to close her eyes. The silent pounding inside her skull had beaten itself into a whispering froth, through which she was beginning to discern the thin edges of sounds. The faint raindrop sound she heard must be the echo of booted footsteps coming down the mine, and that leaf-like rustling was probably the sound of voices. Uhura couldn’t distinguish any words, but she could hear how calm and unhurried the conversation was. How could people who’d just been shot at be so composed, she wondered? An instant later she knew the answer—for the same reason that she’d been composed herself during most of that battle. Until she’d seen the unexpected glitter of phaser beams, she’d been certain the Carsons’ force-field would protect her from any harm. The Peacemakers must have finally obtained a forcefield of their own.
One set of footsteps resolved out of the muffled raindrop patter, growing louder and more distinct as they
approached her. They came to a stop less than a meter away, and Uhura felt her eyelashes flutter with the effort not to look up. She heard the ghost bark of a laugh; then a hand reached out and shook her roughly. She couldn’t tell what was said, but the unrelenting tone of that voice told her there was no point in any more playacting.
She opened her eyes and saw what she’d expected but still couldn’t quite believe. Neil Bartels, the chief technical officer of Llano Verde, squatted on his heels beside her, an oversize dust muffler puddling around him on the mine floor. His mild face, with its pale city skin and puffy technician’s eyes, looked utterly incongruous under the flat-brimmed Outlander’s hat he wore. Beyond him, Uhura could see the tall figures of several Peacemakers aiming their phasers at her. Not at him, at her. The significance of that support was quite clear, even before a gloved hand fell lightly on Bartels’s shoulder. Uhura looked up to see Carmela Serafini’s strong, radiation-burned face appear behind the government technician.
“Kick that Starfleet idiot awake,” the mayor of Desperation said, in a voice sharp and cold enough for Uhura to make out every word. “We’ve got to get out of here before the crater collapses.”
“No, we don’t.” The solid centers of sounds were reaching Uhura now, and she could hear the disturbing ring of self-congratulation in Bartels’s voice. “Trust me, Carm. I engineered this mine so that the far end was where the crater would break, not up here where the ore was stored. We have plenty of time to get to the orbital shuttle.”
That earned him a snort from Serafini, along with a smack hard enough to rock him back on his heels. “And what if those other Starfleet idiots figure out how to use your fancy olivium-proof antimatter drive and take off while we’re diddling here? Come on, Bart! If we don’t get your sweet little girlfriend down there in time to stop them, you’re going to find yourself floating facedown in the Big Muddy along with her.”
Uhura scrambled to her feet so abruptly that Neil Bartels scuttled back out of her way and even Serafini took a startled step back. “You’re not going to use me as a hostage to get my friends killed!” she said, and dove directly between the two of them. She was trusting that the Peacemakers wouldn’t dare fire their weapons at their own leaders. The five steps she got away with told her she was right, but the diving tackle by Serafini that brought her down was more brutal than Uhura had gambled on. She landed on the mine floor half-twisted beneath the other woman’s hard-muscled weight, and heard the sickening inward punch as a rib cracked beneath the impact.
Uhura gasped for breath, then cried out with the pain of taking it. The pain blossomed into a dizzying roar as Serafini hauled her ruthlessly to her feet, dimming her vision and fogging her hearing once again. By the time her senses had returned, Uhura found herself being half-dragged and half-carried by two silent Peacemakers, back out toward Bull’s Eye crater. A painful twist gained her one last glance back into the olivium mine. The scattered bodies of the Carsons lay where they’d fallen, near the dark gleam of Uhura’s experimental communicator. She could hear its patient hailing chirp fade behind her as they stepped out into the howl of the crater winds.
It wasn’t the sound of that automated hail that had sparked Uhura’s attention-grabbing break for freedom, nor was it her very real reluctance to be used as a hostage to stymie whatever Sulu—and maybe Chekov?—were trying to do. It was the unmistakably conscious lift of breath that she’d felt in Linville’s chest, and the consequent flash of understanding that whatever Bartels had done to make the phasers work inside that olivium mine, the results hadn’t been entirely fatal. All she had to do was distract the Peacemakers from noticing that the Carsons were alive, and then Linville would be free to contact the Enterprise.
The only question after that was whether Captain Kirk could arrive in time to save them as well as the colonists of Llano Verde.
“Stop gasping,” Carmela Serafini said irritably. “I know how to fly this thing.”
That was debatable, but Uhura knew better than to argue with her captor. Even if she’d wanted to, she wasn’t sure she had the fortitude. The last thing she’d expected after getting hauled through the jumble of impact debris outside the olivium mine was to see the familiar smooth contours of Sulu’s vertical flight vessel concealed among the boulders and guarded by yet another of the ubiquitous Peacemakers. Uhura had been so sure that the pilot had escaped the conspiracy’s reach and gotten in touch with Captain Kirk that the sight of the Bean hit her harder than the throbbing ache of her cracked rib.
A muzzy exhaustion was seeping into her now, leaching away her ability to think of what else she could do. It didn’t help to know that her fatigue was probably a blend of shock and radiation exposure, or that there was a tissue regenerator in the cargo hold of this very vessel that could erase it all in a few moments. With her hands bound behind her, and a silent armed Peacemaker wedged beside her in the cockpit’s passenger seat, all Uhura could manage to do was hold her breath in anticipation of the painful bounces and spills that Serafini seemed to think were the Bean’s normal cruising style.
“Too bad you didn’t think to grab that pilot before he snuck out of town,” Bartels said from the other side of the Bean’s front seat. The baleful look Serafini shot at him made Uhura shiver, but the chief technical officer didn’t seem to notice. “If he steals my shuttle, Carm, I’m never going to forgive you,” he added querulously.
“Your shuttle?” Serafini sent the Bean over a ridge on the crater wall with less than a meter of clearance. “All you had to do was fake an emergency request for supplies up to the orbital platform. That’s hardly what I call a major effort.”
“If it weren’t for me,” Bartels snapped, “you and your Peacemakers would never have found your way off Belle Terre.”
Serafini was wrestling the Bean through a wild corkscrew turn against the wind, but the cold note in her voice had deepened noticeably. “Don’t be so sure of that, little man.”
Bartels made a scornful noise. “Please. The only thing I give you to do is keep the hydrologists away from the hot springs and take care of the supply shuttle’s crew. Look how well that’s worked out.” He slanted his ally a belligerent look. “You think it was easy to sabotage all of Starfleet’s efforts to get a working communications system up and running? Or simple to feed Sedlak enough false data to make him disregard all those flood warnings? If I hadn’t falsified his signature on those arrest warrants, the Starfleet personnel still left in Big Muddy would be out running through the streets telling people to evacuate!”
Even through Uhura’s tiredness, that callous comment sparked a flicker of indignation. “You locked up Rand and Scott? Did you lie to me about evacuating the city?”
Bartels gave her a half-careless, half-uneasy look. “Well, I had to. You don’t know that damned governor the way I do. He’s easy enough to fool, if you feed him enough fake data to make the colony look like it’s fulfilling all his favorite sociobiological theories about communities evolving and adapting to new environments. But once I’m gone and Sedlak realizes he’s been tricked, nothing will stop him from making sure we get caught and punished by Starfleet. Flooding the city’s the only thing we could do.”
Uhura’s exhaustion retreated a little more beneath the hot flare of her anger. “You’re going to kill thousands of people and destroy most of this colony just to distract Sedlak from your trail?”
“Oh, no,” said Carmela Serafini. “We’re hoping to actually kill the bastard.”
“You Starfleet types never understood,” Bartels said, and Uhura could hear the passionate self-justification in his voice. “I came to this colony on a contract that specified everything—work hours, benefits, bonuses, even an option to retire here if I wanted. But it was never meant to apply to a place like Llano Verde! The overtime and the extra technical problems, the malcontent settlers and the damned unbearable weather—”
“—and the worthless olivium deposits that would make you a fortune if you just took them somewhere else i
n the sector,” Serafini finished cynically. “That possibility wasn’t in the contract either, was it, Bart?”
The technician surprised Uhura with the vehemence of his head-shake. “That’s why you’re here, Carm, and how you talked all your boys into working for you. But I just want what’s rightfully mine. I did all the extra work they wanted, I even figured out ways to get around their olivium problems—tuning up phasers to olivium’s crystal resonance frequencies, retrofitting antimatter drives with olivium feedback cycles. But when I asked for one-tenth—just one-tenth—of what those inventions would have been worth anywhere else in the sector, do you know what Sedlak said? ‘You’re trapped here just like the rest of us. If you want this colony to succeed, self-preservation will eventually force you to give your inventions freely to Llano Verde.’ ”
“So you decided to show him how wrong he was, by cutting a deal with the Kauld,” Uhura guessed. “And you sabotaged everything that might have made life easier on Llano Verde after that.” Bartels said nothing, but the guilty hunch of his stooped shoulders told her she had guessed correctly. She exhaled as much of a sigh as she could manage past the fierce ache of her ribs. “Neil, didn’t it ever occur to you just to request a transfer to another part of Belle Terre?”
Before he could reply, Serafini dropped the Bean into a more precipitous downward bounce than any Sulu had ever tried. Uhura heard Bartels and the Peacemaker cursing, and even her own hardened stomach lurched. The ground loomed up below them much faster than seemed safe. “Reverse power to all thrusters!” she told Serafini urgently. “Now!”
The mayor’s hands shot out to adjust the antigrav controls, but even with that last-minute upsurge, the Bean’s momentum brought it to earth with a crash and skid that sent rocks flying ahead of it down the crater slope. Uhura cried out as her ribs were jarred, her eyes watering so badly with the pain that she could barely see. By the time she caught her breath and blinked her vision clear again, the Bean had stopped its downward slide only a few tens of meters above the heaving gray lid of the crater lake.
