by L. A. Graf
It came with an unexpected burst of light, fire-white as a photon torpedo blast and with a shock wave just as powerful. Sulu felt the Bean unexpectedly lifted up by that impact, hurled skyward like a fragment of debris along with rocks, trees, and huge twisting spouts of water. The upward motion went on and on, taking him higher than Sulu had thought any blast of flood-compressed air could possibly have flung him. It wasn’t until he saw the tops of the Gory Mountains pass below his wings that he realized he couldn’t possibly still be feeling the effects of the flood wave. His scattered wits finally came back, and he began to work at the Bean’s controls, finding he could once again maneuver his little shuttle despite the surprisingly turbulent air around him. Sulu swung into a wide circle and noticed the unexpected glow of sunshine across his cockpit window. The entire sky had opened up above him, almost as if a hole had been blasted into it.
A hole had been blasted into it.
It had also been blasted into the ground below—a new crater that split the Little Muddy’s narrow gorge in half, crumbling the walls on both sides and gouging deep into its bottom. The crater walls were still avalanching and falling with enormous splashes into the water-filled interior, but already Sulu could see that it would be an even deeper and more enormous lake than Bull’s Eye. The flood wave must have crashed into it just as it formed. Some of water had splashed skyward, some had vaporized in a steam blast whose remnants were still rising like smoke above the valley. But most of it had been diverted into an enormous whirlpool, circling around the edges of its new imprisoning crater rim. Farther downstream, Sulu could see the Little Muddy river already beginning to drain back to its normal levels.
Sulu felt himself shudder with sudden disbelief. Had he died and dreamed himself an afterlife in which the final problem he’d confronted in his lifetime had magically been fixed? How else could you explain the dumbfounding coincidence of a new impact crater forming just where it was most needed to contain the flood, an impact crater so wide and deep it had to have been formed by an even larger bolide than the one that had fallen from the Quake Moon?
Sulu’s gut knew the answer to that question before his mind did, and knotted with fierce anguish. There was another way to make a crater that big, a deliberate alternative to the random violence of gravity and space debris. All it needed was a shuttle loaded full of ultrapowerful pure olivium.
And a suicidal pilot.
* * *
Uhura didn’t think she’d ever forget the sound of the flood wave crashing down the Little Muddy gorge toward No Escape.
She hadn’t really believed it was close enough to hear when Sulu first turned his antigrav thrusters off, despite the frightened couple who swore they did and begged her to take their children on her lap even after the shuttle hold was full. Uhura had put their hysteria down to Sulu’s previous use of the power of suggestion, an assumption that made it easy for her to give up her seat in the cockpit and allow the entire young family to leave. But a few minutes later, while she helped carry the last of No Escape’s radiation-poisoned flood victims up to the medical clinic’s roof, she heard a distinct rumble in the distance. It sounded like a growl of summer thunder, except that it never really died away again. It seemed to retreat into the background for a while, while Mayor Ang Wat set off all the medical building’s emergency alarms to alert the rest of No Escape’s citizens about the evacuation. But it didn’t take long for the subdued growl to rise into a roar, and then into a crashing thunder that made the sirens entirely unnecessary.
Uhura turned toward the gorge, drawn like the remaining settlers to stare at her oncoming destruction. The flood wave itself couldn’t be seen beyond the screen of tossing trees that fringed the mouth of the gorge, but Uhura could see a churning mass of upthrown trees, rocks, and debris exploding far above the mountain’s shoulder. It was the flood wave’s deadly harbinger, she realized, the explosive rolling wave of compressed air blasting its way down the valley ahead of the towering wave itself. Uhura wasn’t sure if it was terrifying or reassuring to know that she’d most likely be dead long before the flood wave cascaded over No Escape. The only thing she was sure of was that Sulu couldn’t possibly make it back to town ahead of that swift annihilation.
Then the horizon exploded in a pure, silent shock of light.
“Get back down!” Uhura whirled around, pushing and dragging at every person she could reach. “Back into the building! Now!”
Some were already headed that way, perhaps hoping the walls of the medical clinic could protect them from the flood’s imminent destruction. The rest must have heard the snap of Starfleet experience in Uhura’s urgent voice. They turned their backs on the rising aurora that was burning upward through the sky, and rushed instead for the roof’s double doors. There was a brief jam and jostle of bodies, until Uhura and Ang Wat took up positions on either side of that portal and held the settlers back until the stairs had cleared, then rationed them through two by two. They were just shoving the last handful down to safety when the sound of the detonation hit them. Uhura never heard it—she just felt the slam inside her ears and the resulting spike of piercing pain. In the utter deafness that followed, all she could do was drag her half of the roof door shut and pray that Ang Wat had the sense to follow her silent lead.
He must have—his burly body slammed against hers as he threw down the locking bar across both doors. The shock wave hit an instant later, a powerful hammering blow that promptly burst the doors inward and flung both of them backward down the stairs. The only thing that saved them was the evacuating queue of people still jammed into the lower part of the stairwell. That mass of humanity cushioned their fall with its own swaying, jostling flow, then ebbed away beneath them and left them stranded on a landing.
Uhura hauled herself painfully up to her elbows, feeling the warmth of blood seeping from one scraped cheek and trickling from both ears. Across from her, the mayor of No Escape didn’t look much healthier. His shoulder hunched at an angle suggesting dislocation, and he wore identical stripes of blood beneath his own ears. But the fierce, almost hysterical anger he’d been suppressing since she’d first seen him seemed to have been punched out by the explosion’s hammer blow. The only expression she could read on his broad, radiation-burned face now was bewilderment.
Time passed, and nothing else happened. Ang Wat’s puzzled dark eyes went from Uhura’s face to the opening left by the burst-in doors at the top of the clinic’s stairwell. The only thing pouring in through that gap was a cascade of bright, anomalous sunlight. His gaze came back again, and his mouth moved in a silent question. Like all good communicators, Uhura was trained to read lips in case visual communications were all that was available. Even if she hadn’t been, however, she would have known what the mayor was asking.
“It was an explosion,” she said, exaggerating the motions of her own lips in the hope he could make out her answer. She couldn’t even hear her own voice, although she felt the familiar vibration of her breath through her vocal cords. “It stopped the flood.”
Ang Wat frowned and pointed upward, lips silently forming another question. “From the Enterprise?”
“I hope so,” Uhura said grimly. But deep within her heart, she was afraid she knew that the real answer to that question was “No.”
Five atomospheric shuttles from the Enterprise arrived a half-hour after the explosion, swooping down through the wide clear space above the brand-new crater and fanning out across the landscape. Three of them landed in No Escape, disgorging a small army of doctors, nurses, and medical technicians armed with medical scanners and tissue regenerators. Uhura, in the midst of a silent but determined search for victims of the blast wave, found herself forcibly swept up and hauled back to the medical center along with No Escape’s vigorously cursing mayor. Judging by the shocked expressions on the Starfleet medical corpsmen, Uhura guessed that Ang Wat was regaling their rescuers with some of Llano Verde’s most colorful new idioms and metaphors.
As colorful as those cur
ses undoubtedly were, they didn’t seem to have much effect on Leonard McCoy. As soon as they’d been settled into his newly established medical center, the doctor clapped a portable tissue regenerator over Uhura’s ears first, then scolded her nonstop for risking permanent hearing loss by walking around with punctured eardrums while he worked on repairing the rest of the blast damage.
“There were other people in worse shape than me,” she protested, while he did the same thing to Ang Wat.
“Not very many.” McCoy sounded both surprised and impressed. “Aside from the radiation victims you already had, of course, there’s not much work here for us to do. So far, we’ve found five folks with broken arms or ribs, one with a collapsed lung, and a couple with concussions. The rest of ’em said they heard some kind of siren and figured that meant go inside, so they did.” The doctor gave her a quizzical look. “How did you know that explosion was going to happen?”
Uhura took a deep breath, reveling in the simple fact that she could once again hear the faint rustle of that sound. “We didn’t,” she said. “We set the sirens off when we were trying to evacuate.” The word “we” reminded her abruptly of Sulu, missing since before the blast. “Has any of the other shuttles located the Bean?”
The slang term made McCoy’s mobile eyebrow levitate again. “The Bean?”
“That’s an antigravity-assisted vertical flight vessel to you, Bones.” The amused ring of that familiar voice swung Uhura around toward the medical clinic doorway, her breath catching again in sudden hope. Captain James T. Kirk would never have sounded that lighthearted if he still had Enterprise crewmen missing and possibly dead. The Enterprise’s commander came over to face Uhura and held out the communicator he carried. “I believe someone’s hailing you, Commander.”
Uhura flipped the communicator open, blessing the sunlit, olivium-cleared sky for allowing normal hailing frequencies to function again. “Uhura here,” she said.
“I found him.” It was Sulu’s voice, exhausted but exultant. “I remembered that the crates had whistles, so I opened the cockpit window and flew real low.”
“What?” Uhura tucked her communicator closer to her ear, as if that could somehow help her hear better despite the noisy channel. It wasn’t olivium static that was muffling the pilot’s voice, but an incongruous fexline howling accompanied by a flurry of canine yips and barks. Occasionally, a female voice shouted something and the barking subsided, but then another howl from the cat would start it all over again. “Sulu, did you find Chekov?”
“Chekov, and his girlfriend, and her dogs,” the pilot informed her. “They threw themselves out of the orbital shuttle in those big crates we were using to send relief supplies down to the colony, the ones that whistle so you can find them in the dust. I heard the first one while I was trying to spot any wreckage in the crater lake—it was right on the rim. Once I knew what to look for, I just worked my way back up along the flight path they took from Bull’s Eye to the new crater.”
McCoy was unabashedly listening over Uhura’s shoulder. “Did they survive the impact of the crates?” he wanted to know. “They were never designed for living cargo.”
“They were both pretty banged up,” Sulu said. “Thee got a heavy dose of olivium poisoning from landing so close to the explosion, and Chekov has a nasty projectile hole through his chest. They’re back in the cargo hold, still arguing over who’s going in the tissue regenerator first. Both the dogs seem to have survived just fine,” he added wryly. “But I’m not sure if the cat will hold out until we get it back to its family. Speaking of which, I should probably stop—”
Kirk took the communicator back from Uhura for a moment. “Come straight back to No Escape, Commander,” he ordered. “We’ve already found the settlers you evacuated, and they’re on their way here for medical treatment. I’m already sending messages through the orbital platform to all the other Llano Verde towns we can contact, telling them the emergency is over. And I’m ordering Governor Sedlak to schedule an emergency meeting first thing tomorrow, so we can discuss his policies regarding colony safety and survival procedures.”
“Good” was all Sulu said, but there was a wealth of satisfaction in the word. “Is Uhura still there?”
She reached out to take the communicator back, smiling. “I’m here. What do you need?”
“Nothing,” said the pilot. “I just thought you’d like to finally get to say it.”
It took her tired brain a moment to realize what he meant, but then her smile widened. “Uhura to Sulu,” she said. The familiar words felt like a balm to her bruised throat. “Come in, Sulu.”
“Sulu here,” he said. “I’m in sight of No Escape and getting ready to land.”
“Acknowledged,” Uhura said, and took a deep, fulfilled breath. “Uhura out.”
Chapter Eighteen
SIX WEEKS LATER, Uhura barely recognized the valley of the river that the irreverent colonists of Llano Verde now called the Little Messy.
She glanced down from the side window of the Bean as Sulu swung it around in an unusually exuberant arc. After four weeks of monsoonal rains, Llano Verde’s skies were nearly clear of windblown sediment, with only a faint icy glitter of olivium left high in the stratosphere to catch the glow of sunrise and sunset and make them spectacularly beautiful. Aside from the occasional quiver of their instrument readings and the faint background crackle of remnant olivium on most communicator channels, there was almost nothing left to remind them of the island continent’s first excruciating winter.
Except for the pale cerulean glimmer of water Uhura could see just ahead of them.
The Little Messy’s floodplain, judiciously seeded with native Belle Terre wild grasses by the New Rachel Carson Society, had bloomed into a model spring prairie, nearly Earth-like in its lush and verdant green. Unseen among those grasses were native hunting cats and lagomorphs, shy ungulates and graceful walking birds, all painstakingly restored from DNA scans of pre-Burn specimens. What wasn’t there, much to the Federation’s surprise and the Carsons’ delight, were any settlers.
Uhura shook her head, remembering the uproar over that. Governor Sedlak might be a man of very narrow vision, to whom theories were more powerful than unseen proof, but his decisions were utterly logical. When James T. Kirk had dragged him on a tour of Llano Verde’s devastated river towns, intending to show him the need for rebuilding, he’d responded by turning every flood-prone river bottom into an inviolate provincial park. His colonists might grumble and complain at the loss of prime farming land, but none of them would ever again lose a house or homestead to the rush of floodwaters.
The Bean turned again, settling down in a spiral that was more artful than necessary. Uhura dragged her gaze from the shimmering landscape to Sulu’s bland profile. “Who are you showing off for?” she inquired. “I thought the hydrologists were working on the northern side of the Gory Mountains today.”
Sulu slanted her an amused look. “Bev said she might drop by to check on the olivium levels in the lake, if she got a chance. How’s Ang Wat doing these days?”
“A lot better since we got the new emergency alert channel up and running for the Gory Mountain sector,” Uhura said tranquilly. “He wants to know when No Escape is going to get their own medical transport Bean from Emergency Services.”
“As soon as we get to the N part of the alphabet,” said the interim head of Emergency Services. “And tell him that no amount of smoked guanaco sausage is going to make that change.”
“I think he’s just trying to make sure he’s one of the citizens you select for the pilot training.”
Uhura watched the silky blue glimmer of Crash Lake widen until it stretched from wall to gouged-out wall of the Little Messy gorge. The rims of this crater were green and growing, not poisoned and dusty. Most of the olivium that had been mined from Bull’s Eye had transformed itself into pure energy on impact, obeying the laws of Einstein and Cochrane. The rest had been buried so deeply that neither radiation nor heat had yet
escaped.
Greg Anthony theorized that in a few more decades, minor hot springs might appear on the crater’s flanks. But so far, all of his and Weir’s measurements showed that the water in the crater was pure and drinkable. As a result, Montgomery Scott had spent the last few weeks happily designing a hydroelectric plant and irrigation system for all the farmers who’d been resettled on the fertile but dry lower slopes of the Gory Mountains. The upper slopes had proved more hospitable to sheep and guanaco herders, forcing the two groups of settlers to mix and intermingle along the mountainside instead of separating into isolated communities. Uhura also suspected a certain Starfleet officer who’d volunteered the remainder of his reassignment leave to help organize an effective rural police patrol for Llano Verde might also have had something to do with that.
“Do you see them yet?”
“No.” Sulu circled the Bean lower, while Uhura peered out at the shores of the lake. She could see colorful splashes of wildflowers resolving along the shoreline, russet and teal and gold. The russet ones seemed to be drifting along the shore. After a minute, she realized she was looking down on the fuzzy backs of a herd of guanacos. Familiar streaks of black and white circled the grazing flock in ceaseless, instinctive motion.
“There they are.” She pointed, and Sulu brought the Bean down to the surface with a less pretty but more efficient swoop. Through the opened side window, Uhura could hear the alarmed hums and trills of the animals, and the responsive whistles of their herder. A dog flashed past the Bean even as it settled, oblivious of all but its task of keeping the flock together. It circled around to catch the frightened surge of guanacos, then slowly walked them back toward its handler. Sulu craned his head out the window and whistled in amazement.
