by L. A. Graf
“Linville,” she called into the transmitter. “Can you still hear me?”
“Affirm—” The reply was thinned down almost to a whisper by the intervening wall of olivium dust, but when Uhura dialed the 1.5 to 1.7 milli-kumar frequencies back up to their normal level, the signal strengthened. She augmented that same subspace range on her own transmission frequency, recognizing it as one of the bands she and Rand had originally programmed into her prototype communicator.
“Forget about that landline, and get to higher ground!” she told the Carsons. “The entire south side of the crater is covered with water.”
“Is it steaming?” That was Greg Anthony’s voice, sounding more distant than Linville’s and a lot more shaky. “Does it look like what we saw coming out of the mine conduits at Southfork?”
“No,” Uhura said. “I can’t see any steam at all.”
She thought she heard a groan at those words, but the growing squeal of interference might have misled her. There was no mistaking Anthony’s next words, however, even through the dust-attenuated connection. “Get to No Escape as fast as you can!” the hydrologist said. “That water’s not coming out of the mine conduits, and that means the crater wall has started to collapse. With the weight of all that water behind it, it won’t be long before it bursts.”
“How long will the people in No Escape have to evacuate after that?” Uhura asked.
“As long as it takes for the first floodwaters to get there,” Anthony said grimly. “This is going to be like the Johnstown flood four centuries ago—the water will travel in a giant shock wave, hundreds of feet high and full of all the debris it picks up along the way. And after it hits No Escape, there won’t be anything left.”
Chapter Sixteen
“SO, YOU’RE OUR PILOT.”
The woman was taller than Chekov, taller than most of the men who followed her through the airlock hatch. She slapped dust off her trousers with the same wide-brimmed hat Chekov had grown to hate in the last few days, but never took her eyes off him. Not even when she flashed a crooked smile and spat onto the deck between them. Chekov suspected she would claim she only meant to clear the dust from her mouth, but she wouldn’t expect him to believe it. He didn’t. It was all he could do not to spit back at her.
A quick visual tally of the phasers and projectile weapons scattered among the Peacemakers erased any half-formed ideas about overpowering them, or somehow tricking them out of their weapons. Chekov’s rifle and the handful of ammunition still heavy in his pocket made for a pitiful defense against the kind of menace they represented. He was glad he’d hidden Thee and her dogs in the empty environmental suit locker, gladder still that the dogs would stay silent just because she told them to.
“Yes,” he said after what seemed like too long a silence. “I can fly this shuttle.”
Serafini’s smile widened, although it came no closer to being sincere. A quick jerk of her chin peeled one of the five black-hatted Peacemakers away from the others. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said sweetly as the man stepped forward and closed his hand around the barrel of Chekov’s rifle. “These projectile weapons just make such a mess when you shoot ’em indoors.” Chekov released the gun without resisting, but his teeth gritted together so hard he thought they’d crack. “That’s a good boy.”
He wondered if she’d ever noticed how much mess they made of people, whenever and wherever they were fired.
“Come on, Carm, we need to get going.”
The small, red-haired man who pushed to the front looked surprisingly comfortable with the phaser in his hand despite his neat civilian suit and bland face. Chekov recognized his voice as that of the man Sulu had called Bartels, and made a mental note not to underestimate someone who had so callously orchestrated the disaster they were all now scrambling to avert.
“Why don’t you all head back to the cargo hold and get strapped in for the trip,” Bartels suggested. “We don’t need you to get the liftoff started.”
“Don’t you?” Serafini tossed Bartels a glance the way someone else might toss a dog a bone. Then she sailed her hat toward one of the empty supply crates, and turned toward the rear, but not before Chekov saw the raw flash of disgust in her eyes. “Come on, boys.” The Peacemakers trailed behind her like dust in a comet’s tail, shucking various wraps, hats, and coats as they went. The shuttle’s ventilation system labored to clear the air in their wake.
Bartels waited until the hatch had closed behind the last one before heaving an aggrieved sigh. “If brains were olivium, not one of them would have enough to blow his nose.” He used the phaser to motion Chekov toward the cockpit, although his voice remained as congenial as only a professional bureaucrat’s could. “I don’t imagine that thinking two steps ahead of them for the past few days has been a herculean task for you. No offense.”
“None taken.” Chekov took his time moving into the cockpit, adjusting the pilot’s seat, strapping himself in. He’d promised Sulu he’d delay Bartels on the ground as long as possible, and it was one of the few promises he’d made since coming to Belle Terre that he was confident he could keep. Glancing up from the console, he looked across the dusty distance between the two craft, at the barely visible image of Sulu behind the Bean’s windscreen. It looked as if the pilot was already strapped in, but he saw no sign yet of Uhura.
“They’re only in this for the money,” Bartels said with another sigh. “Even Carmela.”
Chekov powered the engines down to full shutoff, letting them cool while he ran an unnecessary diagnostic on the board. “You, of course, are endangering thousands of lives for purely altruistic reasons.” He flashed the landing lights on-off, on-off to let Sulu know everything inside was okay.
“Hey, the colonists knew when they came to Belle Terre that death was a possibility.” If Bartels noticed or understood anything Chekov did with the helm console, he didn’t comment on it. Settling into the copilot’s chair, he kept the phaser trained on Chekov while he made himself comfortable. “We may have speeded up the time line a little, but that crater wall would have given way eventually. They can’t build their homes on a floodplain and then complain about the water in their basements.”
Chekov wondered if he truly saw no difference between a natural disaster and a man-made flood designed to kill as many colonists as possible. Outside, three quick, fierce clouds of dust enveloped the Bean as Sulu pulsed the idling antigravs, and Chekov closed his eyes briefly in silent relief. Whatever else happened now, he could take comfort in knowing that Sulu and Uhura were safe. Probably safer than anyone else on Belle Terre, at least once they were airborne. “You said there was a feedback circuit that let this shuttle fly?”
“Yes.” Bartels leaned forward to glance under the console at the maintenance panel Chekov had left open. “Did you disconnect any of this?”
“No.” Although he wished now that he had.
Bartels keyed a long string of code into the pad that had been added to the console, glancing aside at Chekov after every few numbers as though checking to make sure he was paying attention. Then, apparently reading something that disturbed him in Chekov’s impassive silence, he paused with his hand poised above the keypad. “In case it matters to you,” he said with a casualness that made Chekov want to hit him, “what happened when you first got here—the Peacemakers killing everyone on board your shuttle. That was just business. It wasn’t personal.”
It told Chekov a great deal about the level of trust among the members of this conspiracy that no one had bothered to inform Bartels that only one of the shuttle crew had died. “It doesn’t matter,” he said grimly. Just as it wouldn’t matter to a jury, if he could only manage to drag Bartels and the rest of them in front of one. Instead, they were escaping with a shuttle full of olivium that they’d mined at the expense of the people they were supposed to be serving. He turned his attention pointedly back toward the helm, unable to stand looking at this particular traitor any longer. It made him feel only a little better t
o see that the dusty shadow of the Bean was long gone. “Let’s get this shuttle started and get out of here.”
It had taken the titanic impact of an olivium-rich fragment from the Quake Moon to form Bull’s Eye crater. All it took to destroy it was a cascade of flowing water no more than a few feet deep, pouring relentlessly over a sag in its southern side.
Sulu watched the collapsed section of rim widen as they approached, allowing more of the crater lake access to the unprotected lowlands below. He was flying as fast as the Bean’s two good antigrav thrusters could push them through the drag of downslope winds, but he was afraid it still wasn’t going to be fast enough. The left generator’s misalignment meant the Bean had to fly at an awkward angle, slamming shoulder-first into Llano Verde’s turbulent winds rather than piercing them sleekly with its nose. It also meant they didn’t have enough lift to get above the dust storm, in order to get a navigational fix from the orbital station. Sulu never thought he’d be grateful for Gamma Night, but at least it had taught him how to use landmarks on the ground to steer by. Right now, he was hugging the flank of Bull’s Eye, using the crater’s downslope winds to give them a dust-free view out into the adjacent valley. Somewhere out there was the muddy expanse of river that would lead them to No Escape.
“Is that the Little Muddy?”
Uhura had a better view from her side of the slewed cockpit, but far less experience than Sulu at judging the size of the river channels that were forming beneath their shuttle. He craned around to check the one at which she pointed, then shook his head.
“No. Too narrow.”
The communications officer drummed her fingers nervously on the Bean’s communicator, rendered useless now by dust. Sulu could hear the frustration in her voice. “Shouldn’t the Little Muddy start where all the water is coming out? Weir and Anthony said the springs at Southfork were its headwaters.”
“They were. But that’s not necessarily where the mines are making the rim collapse.” Sulu banked the Bean outward to skirt an upthrust ridge of stronger rock that confined the pouring rush of water. “If the shafts cut obliquely across the rim—”
“—then Southfork could be further west of here,” Uhura finished. “But it can’t be too far—”
The break in her voice didn’t alarm Sulu at first. He was used to her attention being dragged away anytime they rounded a curve of the crater and got a new view of the landscape ahead. But this time there was some quality in Uhura’s silence—perhaps her sudden intake of breath, perhaps his peripheral awareness of how still she was—that warned Sulu to look up from his flight controls.
The sheet of water pouring over the crater rim behind them had just been the beginning, he realized. The resistant ridge of rock was not a shoreline but an island, separating the shallow falls from the roar and rising mist of a much larger cataract. Sulu watched the gleaming lake plunge over the rim and explode into bursts of spray and immense splashes as it cascaded down the crater’s eroding slope. The waterfall had already carved a canyon several tens of meters deep into the crater wall. Even as they watched, the rupture gouged itself deeper and deeper, until it hit what must have been the last remnants of the vein of olivium the Peacemakers had been mining.
The entire south rim of the crater erupted into a wall of billowing steam, flung debris, and angry water. Sulu never got to see what happened after that, because the shock wave from the explosion sent the Bean tumbling helplessly out of control.
Chekov lifted the shuttle just as Sulu had suggested—banking with the cyclonic sweep of the wind instead of trying to bull straight into it. Even so, the force of the hard gusts tilted the whole craft, rocking it like a sailboat on rough seas. Chekov rotated them to put the wind at their stern, steadying the shuttle’s trajectory around the bowl of the crater without actually increasing their altitude. He wasn’t sure how long he could get away with making minimal progress in maximum time. Even if Bartels never noticed how far they weren’t getting, the planet itself wouldn’t tolerate the shuttle plying its turbulent atmosphere for long. Whether from dust impaction or olivium-radiation overload, Chekov understood that he flew a precarious balance between killing time and killing them all.
Flashes of green-gold light flecked the shuttle’s screens, like a malfunctioning transporter wave that never quite took hold. Chekov watched the readings for the shield generator spike with each microscopic olivium ignition. He wondered how long it would be before the radioactive backwash from those tiny impacts finally overloaded the shields and left them vulnerable to every punishment Belle Terre could fling their way.
A monstrous updraft kicked the shuttle in its belly, jolting them briefly upward before dropping them into partial free fall. Bartels clutched at the console with both hands. “Watch your wind shear!” He recovered enough to thrust the phaser menacingly in Chekov’s direction, as though that might improve his attention to piloting. “I thought you knew how to fly this thing!”
“Just because I can doesn’t mean I have to.” Chekov dropped them intentionally this time, and heard Bartels bark a cry of protest.
“I can only guarantee that feedback circuit up to mach three in atmosphere,” the technician shouted. “After that, the electrostatic buildup from the dust against the screens gets strong enough to disrupt the loop.” Chekov brought them steady again, sobered at least a little by the prospect of yet another crash-landing. “Doesn’t this tub have inertial dampeners?”
“It has them. They just don’t work anymore. You should have thought of that when you designed your olivium-proof engines.” He angled the nose downward just enough to get a visual on the ground. It seemed to swim below them, glossed over with a gossamer veil of dust that peeled aside just ahead of their passage. “What about once we’re out of the atmosphere?” he asked. “What’s our top speed once we’re in vacuum?”
Bartels leaned forward to peer out the window, as if to see what Chekov could possibly be seeking. “Warp one point five. Assuming the engines are properly calibrated and balanced. Why aren’t we gaining altitude?”
The slump in the crater wall might have been lovely in other circumstances. Water cascaded over the crumbling edge in lacy billows, reaching fingers of foam hundreds of meters high. “How long will we have to maintain that speed?”
Bartels said nothing for a long moment, staring down at the wall of water. But it wasn’t horror on his face, or even surprise. Just a self-absorbed curiosity, as though he found the process fascinating but not particularly upsetting.
It wasn’t until Chekov dipped down to follow the course of the flood that Bartels jerked a look in his direction. “What are you doing?”
“Exactly what you think I’m doing.” The lake itself boiled like a witch’s cauldron, surging to dump its innards through that ever-widening notch. Wind dragged the shuttle halfway around the crater before Chekov could break free. Once he did, the shuttle wrenched over nearly onto its side in overcompensation. They tumbled down into the dust like a rock thrown into muddy water.
Bartels threw himself back into his seat, his face drained of all color but the radiation red on his cheeks. “Commander—”
“Chekov.” It seemed only fair to remind Bartels of his name, considering he was about to ruin the man’s life to the best of his ability.
“Commander Chekov . . . I don’t think you appreciate how very badly I need to get off this planet.”
“Mr. Bartels, I don’t think you appreciate how little I care.” Finding a slipstream, he released the shuttle into a steep dive along the crumbling crater wall. The speed indicator didn’t quite reach mach two, but it pushed up against it from below.
The phaser shook visibly when Bartels lifted it to Chekov’s temple. “Please—” He sounded frightened and angry at the same time, just like a spoiled little boy. “—just do as you promised and take us into orbit.”
The floodwaters seemed to clear the clouds from above them, dragging roils of dust behind them like a cape, pushing a pressure front of air in fr
ont of them like a battering ram. Chekov couldn’t tell if the roaring he felt in his bones was the voice of the waves or the shuttle’s engines laboring against the wind.
“Commander, if you don’t take this shuttle into orbit, I will kill you where you sit. I’m serious.”
Chekov threw him a glance of pure disdain. “Am I supposed to believe that you and your friend didn’t already plan to kill me as soon as we reached your rendezvous?” The dumbfounded glaze of Bartels’s expression almost made Chekov smile. “Or was it even sooner?” he continued, bringing the shuttle into line with the swath of clearer air carved out by the flood. “Getting out of the atmosphere is the difficult part of the trip, after all. I’m sure Serafini could pilot a shuttle through open space.”
Bartels didn’t respond. Chekov hadn’t really expected him to produce a convincing argument, but it did surprise him a little to discover Bartels had been startled speechless.
“I’m dead no matter what happens.” Chekov rapped a finger against the speed indicator, just to get Bartels thinking. “Shoot me while we’re traveling at twice the speed of sound, and you’ll be dead, too.”
Something jolted the shuttle hard from behind, knocking them both back into their seats. Chekov grabbed the panel and pulled himself forward, trying to orient himself using the view out the window even as he pored over the console in search of some alarm.
“What happened?” Bartels nearly shouldered him aside trying to get to the speed indicator. “What’s our airspeed?”
Chekov elbowed him back into his seat. “Your feedback circuit is fine. It’s not our speed.” He found the reading he was looking for in front of Bartels, hidden away on the uppermost corner of the copilot’s board. He switched the screen view aft and downward. “Someone blew the rear airlock.”
