by L. A. Graf
Uhura had her shock webbing torn off before the Bean had even finished landing. “How much time do we have?”
“Twenty minutes, more or less.” Sulu triggered the cargo hatch open, hoping the colonists would be restrained enough not to trample each other in their rush to embark. “Don’t try to prioritize the evacuation, just pack them in as fast as you can. Start with the ones on the roof.”
He swung around to watch the shuttle’s weight sensors, to make sure they didn’t get overloaded by the rush. To his surprise, the digital readings never flickered. Frowning, Sulu lowered the cockpit’s side window and stuck his head out into the dust to see if the cargo door had been damaged by Serafini’s crash. The ramp had lowered itself perfectly, but the only person he could see standing on it was Uhura. Her voice rose in desperation, audible even above the banshee howl of Llano Verde’s winds.
“—seen it coming! It’s going to be like a tidal wave when it gets here, hundreds of feet high!”
“Where was it when you saw it?” That male shout of reply was equally loud, but the emotion driving it was an anger scorching enough to make Sulu search for its source. A stocky, balding Asian man had shouldered his way to the front of the crowd, staring at Uhura in a belligerent way that Sulu didn’t like.
The communications officer didn’t seem to notice his hostility. “Almost to the far end of the gorge,” she said urgently. “We’ve only got about twenty minutes—”
“And you waited until now to come get us?” His voice towered upward in near-hysterical rage. “I’ve been begging for help from Big Muddy for the last six days! Why did you damned bureaucrats wait until the last possible minute to show up and evacuate us?”
If she had been the bureaucrat he’d accused her of being, Sulu thought, Uhura would have retreated from him. Instead, she glared up into his radiation-burned face. “We’re not bureaucrats from Big Muddy! We’re the Starfleet officers who were here two days ago, looking for the source of the floodwater. And we would have come back sooner, if it hadn’t been for the illegal olivium miners we ran into up at Bull’s Eye crater. The same ones who deliberately caused this flood to cover their escape from Belle Terre!”
There must have been enough impassioned vehemence in her voice to finally make an impact on the crowd. Sulu heard the colonists murmur and glance at the open hatch, but still no one made a move toward it. His stomach began to twist, a visceral reaction to the time being wasted in argument that could have been spent evacuating colonists.
“Half of us here have relatives in town, or working downstairs in the clinic,” the Asian man protested. He still sounded angry, but the dangerous edge of hysteria had vanished from his voice. “You can’t expect us to—”
“Listen!” Sulu shouted out the window. “You can hear the water coming!” He cut all power to the Bean’s antigravs, to get rid of the whine of the generators and the rush of propelled air. He wasn’t sure if that made enough silence to hear the roar of the approaching flood beneath the dust storm’s shriek, but he was counting on the colonists’ stressed imaginations to supply the noise even if it wasn’t there.
“Load up the people whose families are here and let’s evacuate them,” Uhura urged the Asian man. “While we’re doing that, you can send for the others’ relatives. And turn on all the alarms this building has in it to alert the rest of town. We can do at least two evacuation runs, maybe three if we hurry.”
That finally triggered the rush into the cargo hold that Sulu had expected. He heard Uhura directing the flow, packing the colonists in efficiently between the stacks of cargo. She continued to let them on even after the weight alarm had sounded and Sulu shouted at her to stop. He finally heard her footsteps coming toward the cockpit, but she only entered long enough to deposit two children in her copilot’s seat and wrap the shock webbing back around them. Their parents slid into the passenger seats, one carrying an infant and the other a mewing cat in a plasteel carrier box.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Sulu demanded.
“I only overloaded you by fifteen percent,” Uhura assured him. “That’s well inside Scotty’s usual safety margin—”
“Not that.” He jerked his chin toward the silent, wide-eyed children in the copilot’s seat, even as he turned the antigravs back on. “You’re staying here?”
“I can get them better organized for the next couple of runs.” She was already ducking back out into the gangway. “I’ll tell this set of passengers to take some of the cargo with them when they leave, so you’ll have more room on the next run. See you!”
She vanished before he could object, her footsteps echoing down the gangway. Sulu listened to her giving calm instructions to the evacuees as she passed through the cargo hold, and had to grit his teeth on an impulse to close the hatch door before she could leave. He had an ominous feeling he might never see Uhura again, but at fifteen percent over their cargo loading limit, he knew that even her slight weight would add too much risk to their journey. There was one thing Uhura hadn’t remembered when she was loading the colonists, and it was the thing Sulu was trying hardest not to think about right now.
The original weight limit that Chief Engineer Scott had programmed into the Bean’s cargo hold sensors assumed that the shuttle had three working antigravs.
I didn’t kill her, Chekov thought. Staring down at Serafini’s stunned body, trying hard to remember how to drag in even a single unlabored breath, he found a numbing peace in that awareness. Whatever else this planet had done to him, it hadn’t turned him into the kind of man who chose killing as long as he had some other option.
“Oh, my God . . . !”
Fatigue crashed over him, heavy and smelling pungently of blood. Letting the phaser slip from his hand, he sank to his knees as it clattered to the deck beside him. Even two days of swallowing airborne olivium hadn’t made him feel this tired, this sick. He suspected what was wrong when Thee clutched at the shoulder of his jacket and awkwardly interposed herself between him and the compartment floor. Then his next abortive gasp for air filled his mouth with a sour, coppery slime, and he recognized the crushing weight boring into his chest for what it was. He couldn’t tell which blasted through him first, the terror or the pain.
“Sit up!” Thee heaved him half-upright against the bulkhead, tearing at his uniform’s shoulder strap with trembling fingers. “You’re gonna have to help me here—they teach you guys more about this stuff.” He felt the front of his jacket rip away, the clammy slap of outside air chilling the blood on the breast of his tunic. “Does this tub have a medkit?”
“. . . I don’t know . . .” The fluid in his voice frightened him, almost more than the pain that slammed him with every hitching breath. “. . . try under the helm console . . .” Sulu had said it was the same model cargo shuttle they’d had on the Enterprise.
She left him, disappeared from his sight, from the narrowing cone of his attention. Squeezing his eyes closed, Chekov tried to will away his panic, steady his heartbeat so he could breathe around the pain. But all he could see in that darkness was Reddy’s blood-soaked linens, and Plottel’s pallid, lifeless body.
He forced his eyes open when he felt her hand against the side of his face. “Gwen . . . we don’t have time . . .” The flood waited for none of this. Serafini had known that, and Chekov knew it, too.
A glimpse of naked terror flashed across Thee’s face, only to vanish again behind an iron-hard wall of resolve. “Don’t tell me what we have time for.” She threw open the medkit on the floor by her hip. “If you have time to get shot, I have time to patch you together.”
Two hypos in quick succession. At least one was a painkiller, powerful enough to shroud his whole body in cotton. While pain suffused the blurry picture, it had lifted clear of his emotions. He knew he was hurt, he knew he was frightened, but he couldn’t really feel it anymore.
A scanner’s tooth-splitting warble danced through the chemical fog, and he felt her bear down on his chest as though from a thousa
nd light-years’ distance. His body must have arched gently in protest, because he was aware of aimless movement a moment before she murmured, “I’m sorry . . . I really am . . .” He wanted to tell her that it was all right, but couldn’t climb back down into his body in time. She continued in an artificially cheerful voice, “The good news is: It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Chekov opened his eyes, blinked without being able to focus. She was spattered with blood clear to the elbows. “How much worse could it look?”
Thee tried on a smile. “How much do you know about human anatomy?”
“Enough to know that it’s bad to make extra holes in it.”
“Look at that—” She stroked his cheek, her head tilted fondly to one side. “His sense of humor comes out under stress.”
He would have laughed for her, but was faintly afraid it would kill him.
“Missed everything important but the lung,” she went on, more seriously. “And it’s not bleeding bad enough to kill you anytime soon.”
He wasn’t sure he believed that last part. He watched her load another hypo, tried to guess how many doses she had before he drained the entire kit. “I knew this was going to happen.”
Thee sorted sterile compresses off the bottom of the kit. “Don’t be a defeatist.”
“There was a Peacemaker . . . when we first found the shuttle . . .” He gripped her wrist, made her look at him. “Gwen, I killed him.”
“You did what you had to. You took care of us.” Thee pressed a clean compress into place. “That doesn’t make you a murderer, Pavel.”
Swallowing hard to drown the bloody taste in his mouth, Chekov let his head fall back against the bulkhead. “I didn’t want to die like this,” he admitted, very softly.
She pulled his jacket over the wad of compresses, sealing it so tightly he could feel his heart pound against the inside of his ribs. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
When she stood, Chekov thought at first she’d gone to seek another medical kit. Then he heard the familiar rumble of a supply crate across the uneven decking, and remembered that Serafini still needed to be dealt with. It wasn’t until she bumped the crate to a stop beside him that it occurred to him she had other things in mind. “What are you doing?”
She threw back the lid, unwound the mat of shock webbing inside. “What do you think?”
“Gwen . . . no!” He struggled to draw his knees up and roll to all fours away from her. Whether from pain or the drugs, he couldn’t fight off the uprush of nausea and weakness that swallowed him. He collapsed in on himself, choking from the effort. “Don’t . . . ! I need to pilot the shuttle . . .”
“Don’t be a chauvinist.” She maneuvered behind him to lock her arms around his waist and lift. “You think you’re the only one who can crash a shuttle?”
The anguish that he didn’t think could reach him anymore laid him open. If he could have breathed, he would have screamed in protest. But if he could have breathed, he also could have stopped her.
“Don’t do this . . . !” The crate might have been kilometers deep. He felt suddenly thrust away from the rest of the world, abandoned for dead in the abyss. “Gwen, please!”
“Why?” Her face appeared over the side of the crate, and she lowered a squirming border collie in beside him. The other jumped in without having to be told. “I took an officer’s oath once, too. Why is it okay for you to play hero and not okay for me?”
He didn’t know how to explain. “Because . . .”
“Because why?”
—because the thought of a world without you is too desperate too dark too alone—
“Because you like me?”
The mischievous sparkle in her eyes brought tears into his own. “Yes.”
She smiled with touching gentleness. “I love a man who’s slow on the uptake.” Then she kissed him, quickly enough to catch his drug-fogged brain by surprise, long enough to silence any other protest he might have thought to make. “Take good care of my dogs.”
He saw her face for a very long time after she slammed the lid and pushed him out the airlock door.
For once, Llano Verde’s wicked mountain winds were going to be a help and not a hindrance.
Sulu spiraled the Bean around into another rising afternoon thermal, using the wind’s upward buoyancy to balance the experimental shuttle’s unwieldy weight. Boyhood memories of wind-gliding with his great-great-grandfather told him that he ran the risk of the thermal giving out before he reached the top of the Gory Mountains and found a place he could off-load his passengers, but with time ticking inexorably away, that was a risk Sulu had no choice but to take. By the time the shuttle could have lumbered up to this height on its two remaining antigravs, No Escape would have been obliterated and the flood would be well on its way to demolishing other towns farther down the river.
The rising thermal bucked and kicked beneath them, and Sulu heard the infant in the backseat start to cry. He slid a quick glance over at the two children in Uhura’s seat, and found their solemn dark eyes fixed on him rather than the scenery. If they were afraid of the shuttle’s erratic movements, it didn’t show.
“We’re almost there,” Sulu said, as much to their parents as to them. “We’re going to find a place way up high in the mountains for you to wait while the flood goes past—”
“I see it!” That was the father, leaning over to peer out the cockpit’s side window. “Look, here it comes—”
The thermal fluttered and sank beneath them before Sulu could manage to catch a glance. Cursing beneath his breath, he wrestled the overburdened Bean up through a layer of stiff mountain downdrafts and found another rising column of heat to ride on. This one swirled him around close enough to the steep slopes of the Little Muddy gorge that he didn’t have to peer through the shuttle’s side window to see the river below. The main cockpit window now framed a view directly up the narrow, incised canyon—right toward the towering wall of water crashing down over itself like a funneled tsunami. The roar hit them a moment later, so deep and bone-shaking that it sounded more like the thundering boom of an earthquake than a cataract’s watery crash.
“It’s already inside the gorge,” said the young wife in the backseat. Her baby let out a fiercer wail, as if she’d tightened her grip without realizing it. “Oh, my God, look how fast it’s moving! Are you sure you can get back in time? My parents are still there, at the clinic . . .”
“Take your children and get back into the cargo hold,” Sulu said grimly. “Tell the other people back there not to worry about off-loading any cargo, because I’m not going to take the time to land. They’re going to have to jump.”
The parents grabbed up their children and skidded down the canted gangway for the cargo hold, while Sulu sent the Bean bouncing across the thermal. He was scanning the dust-hazed hillside ahead of him for a slice of flat space. The only good thing about seeing the flood wave roaring down the gorge was that he now knew just how high he needed to go to make sure the refugees would be safe. He found the spot he wanted at the top of a triangular black cliff, one that protruded from the steeply slanted sides of the gorge like a battleship’s prow cutting through fog. The resistant rock made a triangular ledge at the top, large enough to land a shuttle on and high enough to be well out of the flood’s destructive path. Sulu sent the Bean angling toward it, his stomach churning with the time it took to climb those last few meters. It seemed like an eternity before the Bean was hovering on its two good thrusters over that rock platform, its cargo hatch door lowered to within a few feet of the ground.
“Everyone out!” Sulu yelled back at the cargo hold. At first, he wasn’t sure how he would know when his order had been obeyed, but the flicker of his digital cargo-weight readout caught his eye and reassured him. Sulu watched the number there dwindle until it was almost—but not quite—back to where it had been. He scowled, wondering if someone had left some luggage behind or if, worse yet, some child had been forgotten in the mad rush to off-load. Before
he could decide what to do about the discrepancy, however, a piteous mewling from the cockpit’s passenger seats told him what it was. Sulu triggered the hatch door shut again, before his former passengers could jump back aboard to get the family cat.
“If we’re lucky, I’ll get you back to your people again,” he told the feline. “If we’re not, it probably won’t matter anyway.”
Sulu lifted the suddenly responsive Bean up above the milling crowd of refugees, then swooped over the edge of the cliff and hurtled into a steep, efficient dive down the slope of the gorge. The abandoned cat’s mew became a howl of protest as its plasteel carrier went airborne with inertia, and even Sulu’s hardened stomach lurched. The Bean shook so hard when he pulled it out of that dive that Sulu knew he had finally found the ragged edge of the little shuttle’s performance curve. He only hoped he’d live long enough to tell Commander Scott that it had taken the loss of an antigrav to push the Bean to its aerodynamic limits.
The cat howled again as its carrier thumped back to the floor, but the sound was lost in the larger howl of wind that was sweeping over them, stronger and more sustained than any dust storm gust could be. Sulu recognized it as the leading edge of the compressed air mass being chased down the gorge by the flood wave. He realized in sudden terror that everything was wrong—the time estimate he’d given to Uhura, the elevation where he’d left the refugees from No Escape, even the steep dive he’d instinctively sent the Bean into as the quickest route back to the town. In all three cases, he’d forgotten to take into account the deadly blast of air that came before the water, destroying everything below and above with its explosions and debris.
Sulu pulsed the shuttle’s antigravs up to their highest power setting, ignoring the blare of warning alarms that ignited across his control panel. His only hope now was to get above that hammering blast of wind and let it propel him from behind, but he’d lost too much altitude in that first dive and the Bean wasn’t going to get it back in time. Sulu clenched his teeth and waited for the final killing blow.
