by L. A. Graf
“How about that,” said Carmela Serafini in calm amusement. More than ever, the mayor of Desperation sounded to Uhura like a total sociopath. “A perfect landing.”
Bartels spat out a mouthful of what could have been either blood or vomit, then gave her a seething look. “What was so damned perfect about it?” he demanded.
“Where we ended up.” Serafini pointed straight out the Bean’s cockpit window. Even from the backseat, Uhura could see the outline of a grounded orbital shuttle dwarfing their smaller craft. A face appeared in the cockpit window facing theirs, a face with familiar dark Asian eyes and an incredulous expression. “Now that they know we’re here, let’s see if they want to do a little horse-trading.”
“I can’t believe this,” Sulu said, staring out the shuttle’s cockpit window. Canted, rock-scuffed, and covered in dust, the Bean could almost have been mistaken for another chunk of impact debris, if it hadn’t been for the thin flags of steam rising from its overheated anti-gravs. “Someone actually got it to fly.”
“I wouldn’t call that flying,” Gwen Thee said, emerging from the gangway. Sulu could hear her dogs barking in identical agitation back in the cargo hold, although he wasn’t sure if they were protesting her absence or just responding to the thunderous arrival of the Bean. “It looked more like a controlled crash to me.”
“Better than we managed, the first time we came down here,” Chekov said gruffly. He shouldered past Thee, and dropped into the copilot’s seat, his pockets jangling with spare ammunition. Unlike Sulu, he didn’t waste any time staring across at the Bean to see who in God’s name could be flying it. Instead, the former security officer ran his hands across the control panel to make sure their shields were still fully powered up, then pulled his weapon onto his lap and started loading more projectiles into it. Sulu watched his friend for a long moment, not liking the harsh lines that had carved themselves into his haggard face. When Chekov snapped the weapon shut and wordlessly started sealing the flaps of his jacket, Sulu frowned and reached for the shuttle’s communicator.
“It won’t work,” Chekov said flatly. “Not with all the olivium we have on board, not to mention what’s still left out in the crater.”
The screech of radiation-generated static that spilled out from the open hailing channel would have told Sulu that even if Chekov hadn’t. Instead of turning the communicator off again, however, he began fiddling with the signal modulation, dialing the volume up to a banshee shriek that made Chekov grimace and Thee yelp in protest. Sulu paid no attention to either of them, merely adjusting the output frequency filters until the noise subsided to a more tolerable prickly throb.
“What was the point of that?” Chekov demanded, when his exasperated voice could be heard again.
“Negotiation,” Sulu said simply. “We have their olivium. They have a shuttle with a communicator that can reach up to the orbital platform.”
The Russian snorted. “And you think they’re just going to let us run over there and call for help? If Captain Kirk is anywhere nearby, they’ve got to know they’re going to be captured.”
“Not if we guarantee them safe passage out of the system.” Sulu glanced over at the security officer and saw the fierce disagreement he’d expected in his scowl. “What’s more important, Pavel? Shooting a few Peacemakers to punish them for what they’ve done, or saving thousands of lives?”
The blunt words had more effect than he’d expected. A darker color stained Chekov’s face beneath the painful red of his radiation burns, and he snapped his teeth shut on whatever objection he’d been going to make. “Call them” was all he said.
“Too late,” Thee said, leaning between them to get a better view of the Bean. “It looks like negotiations have already started.”
Sulu turned to follow the direction of her gaze. The cargo hold door of the Bean had swung down while they were arguing, and two figures were picking their way down that steeply tilted ramp. One was tall and broad-shouldered under a Peacemaker dust muffler and wide-brimmed hat, armed with a projectile weapon that was unmistakably pointed at the other. The hostage wore a strange kevlar dust suit and walked with an unfamiliar painful stiffness, but the faceplate of her suit had been opened so they could see the well-known coffee color of her skin.
Sulu’s and Chekov’s curses were simultaneous, but with his long-barreled weapon blocking his exit, the security officer took a few seconds longer to extricate himself from his seat. Despite that, he still managed to catch Sulu before he could enter the gangway to the cargo hold. “You’re not going out there!”
Sulu tried and failed to shake him off. “Of course I am. I can’t shoot that thing to cover you.”
“Nobody has to go out there,” Thee advised them. “The Peacemakers are hailing us.”
Chekov pivoted to catch Thee before she could touch the communicator, yanking her back despite her scowl. “I don’t want them to know how many of us there are.”
It was all he needed to say to the former Starfleet officer. She stepped with him into the shadows at the rear of the orbital shuttle’s cockpit, clearing the way for Sulu to scramble back into his seat.
The sound coming from the communicator was an indistinct mumble until Sulu pushed the frequency output up closer to its normal levels. “—make a trade,” he heard through the banshee howl of olivium radiation. “Your shuttle for ours.”
He recognized the voice he heard. He just didn’t believe that he had heard it.
“What are you waiting for?” Chekov hissed from behind. “Answer him!”
Sulu swallowed, tasting the acrid tang of olivium in his throat. It was one thing to find an illegal oliviummining operation hidden out in the middle of the Outland. But to discover that the corruption caused by the ultra-rare metal extended all the way to the continental capitol made him feel a little sick. “We hear you, Bartels,” he said into the communicator, without ever taking his eyes from the weapon aimed at Uhura. “Tell your man outside that we’re willing to make the trade.”
If Llano Verde’s chief technical officer minded being recognized, his irritable voice didn’t show it. “For God’s sake, get rid of that noise!” he shouted back at Sulu. “Narrow down your subspace reception frequency to the band between 1.5 and 1.7 milli-kumars!”
Sulu reached out and found the appropriate control. The shriek of subspace interference faded to a serpentine hiss, soft enough to let him hear Bartels’s contemptuous snort. “Good thing we had the communications officer,” the technical officer said. “Otherwise, you might’ve already figured out how to call the Enterprise.”
Sulu gritted his teeth on an urge to cut the connection with the Bean and do exactly that. But Uhura had been marched halfway between the two vessels by then, close enough for him to see the grimace of pain on her face whenever the blasting crater winds caught her. Sulu also recognized the strong-boned face of her captor. He’d last seen her in much the same stance, keeping her weapon aimed at the drunks of Desperation as they unloaded supplies from the Bean. Despite the fierce cyclonic gusts, then and now, Serafini’s aim never wavered.
“How do you want to do this trade, Bartels?” Sulu asked.
“Fast,” said the technical officer bluntly. “Serafini wanted me to leave a few Peacemakers on board here until we had the orbital shuttle under our control, but I don’t like the looks of that lake and I want to get out of here before the whole damn crater wall goes.”
Surprised, Sulu glanced to the right through his cockpit windows at the heaving gray surface of Bull’s Eye lake. It looked distinctly foamy now, as if it were being whipped to a frenzy somewhere deep beneath the surface. He couldn’t tell for sure if the level had dropped further, since all the rocks around the shoreline had been wetted down by spray and rain, but he thought it had.
“All right, let’s make it fast,” Sulu agreed. “I’ll come over to the Bean while you get all the Peacemakers out of it. Serafini can keep Uhura covered. When I give the signal that the Bean is clear, my friend Chekov
will drop the shields and you can let Uhura go—”
“No good,” said Bartels. “Serafini was supposed to pilot us up to our rendezvous, but after this landing, I don’t want her anywhere near the cockpit. There’s enough olivium loaded on that orbital shuttle to power up a starship, and the feedback circuit we’re using to keep the subspace radiation from messing up the antimatter drive might not be stable at high speeds. Flying out of Bull’s Eye is going to be about as safe as driving a wagon loaded with nitroglycerin through a tornado. I want a Starfleet pilot.”
Sulu frowned and closed the communicator channel before he twisted around to meet Chekov’s dark gaze. “We have to get the Bean up high enough to bounce a flood warning off the orbital platform to Big Muddy,” he said.
“And I’m not good enough with antigrav thrusters to do it.” The Russian finished his thought with the ease of shipmates who’d served together for more than a decade. “But I can fly a standard-issue Federation shuttle like this one.”
“You can?” Thee glanced over at him, one wry eyebrow lifting. “Even more talented than I thought . . . So we get to take Bartels and his Peacemakers up to their rendezvous with alien pirates. That should be fun.”
Chekov gave her the half-irritated, half-embarrassed glance that Thee seemed able to draw out of him at will. “You have a strange idea of fun.”
“I know. That’s why I’m still hanging around with you.”
Sulu toggled the communicator channel open again. “Bartels, my friend Chekov is also a Starfleet pilot. He’s agreed to take you off planet so I can try to salvage what’s left of the Bean.”
He half-expected the continental official to reject that offer, but instead heard him take a thoughtful breath. “Is this your friend from the orbital platform that you and Uhura were so worried about?”
“Yes.”
“The same one that Serafini’s Peacemakers kept losing track of after the shuttle went down?”
“Yes.”
Bartels grunted. “Then he’s not an idiot. And you wouldn’t let him do something suicidal, like fly a shuttle he’s not qualified for. Right?”
“Right,” Sulu said. “Is it a deal?”
“Almost. I want to hear your friend Chekov promise not to call Captain Kirk on that shuttle communicator before he drops his shields.”
Chekov startled Sulu by leaning forward immediately into the range of the communicator’s voice detector. “You have my word of honor as a Starfleet officer, Mr. Bartels. No one will call Captain Kirk on this communicator.”
“Good. Then send Sulu over to Serafini. I’ll have the Peacemakers out of here by the time she lets Uhura go. Bartels out.”
Sulu cut the communicator off again, then gave Chekov a questioning glance. “Why did you tell him that?”
“Because it’s true. You’re the one who’s going to call the captain and you’ll be using the Bean’s communicator to do it.” Chekov hauled him out of the pilot’s seat and sat down there himself to examine the control panel. “Anything special I should know about taking this up?”
“Don’t try to fight the cyclonic winds. Circle with them until you’re up at the top of the dust storm.” Sulu glanced out worriedly at the too-stiff figure standing under guard out in that perpetual storm. Other figures in dark dust mufflers were starting to emerge from the tilted cargo hatch of the Bean. “I’m going to head over now, before Serafini gets too impatient. I’ll pulse the antigravs three times to let you know we’re clear to go. That way, if they point a weapon at my head and make me give you a false report over the communicator, you’ll know to keep the shields up.”
“Good idea,” Chekov said. “I’ll try to delay them here for a while after you’ve taken off. That should give you a head start for calling the ship.”
“I don’t think you’re going to be able to wait too long,” Thee said somberly. “Look at that water.”
Both men glanced out at the crater lake. It had begun to swirl and suck downward in a spot just inside the rim, like water draining down a bathtub. The mine conduits draining the lake must have begun opening even wider underground, Sulu realized. The big flood was beginning.
“I’m going,” Sulu said, and scrambled to his feet. He paused only long enough to drop a hand on Chekov’s shoulder, although his words were ostensibly aimed at Thee. “Don’t let him do anything stupid and heroic once he’s up in the air with those Peacemakers, will you?”
“I’ll try not to,” she said dryly. “But you know how hard it is to break old dogs of bad habits.”
Whirring with alarm, the tissue regenerator poured its healing glitter over her from wind-burned face to aching ribs to kevlar-scraped ankles. Uhura shuddered violently in response, as if the filmy glow were ice-cold water instead of an intangible beam of healing photons. At first she thought her shaking must be a delayed reaction to having spent so long on the wrong end of Carmela Serafini’s projectile weapon, or perhaps a side effect of the molecular rearrangement that was fusing her ribs and mending her skin. But after the noise of the regenerator had faded down to silence, leaving a familiar ghost vibration deep in her bones, Uhura could still feel that violent shaking. It took her another minute to realize that it was the shuttle itself that was quivering around her, as its antigrav thrusters roared up to full strength. Sulu must be pulsing them outward to signal Chekov that they were clear to go.
Uhura disentangled herself from the emergency medical device that Sulu had dumped her into as soon as they’d boarded the Bean. Despite her protests, he’d turned it on even before he searched the ship for any sign of lurking Peacemakers. So far, it seemed as if Neil Bartels had kept his word, but unless she’d been in the regenerator for longer than it had seemed, the pilot couldn’t possibly have had long enough to look for any booby traps that her former captors might have planted before they left. Uhura scrambled through the tilted corridor that led to the cockpit, hearing the uneven throb of the two generators on either side. She hoped that was only because one had been more deeply buried by the crash than the others.
“No sign of tampering?” she demanded, as she slid down into the canted copilot’s seat. The smell of leather and smoke that she associated with the Peacemakers still lingered strongly in the confined space, but Sulu’s head-shake was emphatic enough to reassure her.
“Commander Scott still has about a million test circuits hooked up to monitor the Bean’s system performance during flight,” the pilot said. He made an adjustment to the control panel and the Bean heaved itself into a more normal landing position. The uneven pulse of the antigravs smoothed back into a more normal growl. “Everything reads nominal, except for the alignment on that left antigrav thruster. I think it’ll generate enough of a field to get us out of here, but I’m going to go slow just in case.”
“We can’t go too slow,” Uhura said. Through the dust-sluiced window, she could see the tremendous gyre that was building out in Bull’s Eye’s crater lake, as more and more of the water was sucked through the crater wall below. She didn’t want to think about what the steaming falls at Southfork looked like now. “We’ve got to get a warning down to Big Muddy.”
Sulu increased power to the thrusters obediently, but he also nodded at the Bean’s standard-issue communicator inset into its control panel. “Why don’t you call from here? The Enterprise might hear you even if the orbital platform didn’t.”
“They already did,” Uhura said, remembering the inquiring peak of response that she had seen, not heard, back inside the olivium mine. “But I never got a chance to call them back.” She switched on the Bean’s control panel, then froze with her fingers on the transmission key. A random crackle of interference filled the cockpit, probably from the olivium-rich rocks around them. “Will the other shuttle overhear us?”
“Not if you cut out the subspace range from 1.5 and 1.7 milli-kumars,” Sulu said. The Bean was off the ground now and penduluming slowly up into the fierce crosswinds of Bull’s Eye. “That’s the only frequency that can make i
t through the olivium radiation aboard that shuttle.”
“Is that another thing Bartels knew and didn’t tell us?” Uhura shook her head in aggravation. “If we’d managed to discover half of what he did about olivium, we wouldn’t be in this fix now. Uhura to Enterprise. Come in, Enterprise.”
Given the background haze of olivium radiation, the voice that answered her was remarkably clear. And remarkably calm. “The Enterprise has already been contacted, Commander Uhura,” said Linville. “She is on her way to Llano Verde at maximum warp speed, with an estimated time of arrival forty-five minutes from now.”
“Do they know about the flood?” Uhura demanded. “Did they send a warning down to Big Muddy through the orbital platform?”
“Yes. Captain Kirk said he would use his Starfleet override authority to make the evacuation mandatory.” There was a pause, and what sounded like a murmur of voices in the background. “No one has managed to get a warning to the smaller towns along the Big Muddy, though. Dr. Anthony and Dr. Tamasy have been trying to use the hydrology data network to contact them, but the landline seems to have broken in the last few minutes.”
Uhura began to reply, but the Bean hit a tearing sideways gust and was yanked abruptly out of the clear air of the crater, into the chaos of the storm wall around it. Sulu’s curse was barely audible over the sudden shriek of the winds, but Uhura could hear the laboring growl as the pilot jammed the antigrav thrusters up to maximum lift. The faint imbalance between the engine noise of the two lateral generators turned into a painfully loud stutter. Uhura opened her mouth to ask Sulu if he wanted her to go back and check on the left engine, when the experimental shuttle jerked upward as abruptly as a puppet yanked on its string, then fell back again toward clearer air. She saw a ragged ridge of rocks pass beneath them with only meters to spare; then they were skating down beneath the dust storm once again, this time down the outer flank of Bull’s Eye crater. It looked much darker than Uhura remembered from their last journey, its jumbled rocks glistening in the sun like dark molten glass. Uhura followed that dark gleam downward and watched it turn into a kilometer-wide sheet of flowing water, cascading down from somewhere up higher in the dust storm.
