Crusher stared at the Jarada, wondering what she had missed. Of course she would help them; she was a doctor and never refused help to anyone who needed it. However, the implied threat in Vish’s words made her uneasy. What was it they wanted of her? “I’d be glad to help you. Let me beam the relevant materials back to the Enterprise and I’ll put all my research facilities to work solving the problem.”
“No. You don’t understand.” Vish’s voice was flat with certainty. “We cannot let word of this affliction go beyond this place. You will work here, without contacting anyone, until you have solved the problem.”
Chapter Eleven
LONG SHADOWS lay across the campsite when Keiko finally crawled out of her tent. She looked around and groaned, thinking of the entire afternoon lost. Tanaka was sitting beside his tent, fussing with his tricorder and with something on a cloth in front of him. “Why didn’t you wake me up sooner?” she asked. “You know we have work to do.”
Tanaka looked up, noticing that she was outside her tent. He glanced around, taking in the shadows and the low angle of the sun as if he hadn’t been aware of them either. “I didn’t realize what time it was.” He pointed to the ground in front of him.
Keiko looked at the scattering of miniature electronic components, miscellaneous bits and pieces of metal, and assorted tools. At first she couldn’t fit things together into anything she recognized. Her second thought was that, just like Kiyoshi, Tanaka had managed to cram more tools and gadgets into his pack than was humanly possible. Finally, with a sense of dawning horror, she recognized the scattered components. “Our communicators? What have you done to them?” She hadn’t thought anyone could disassemble them without access to a complete diagnostics and repair unit.
If her attack insulted him, Tanaka gave no sign of it. Instead, he examined his handiwork with a rueful grimace. “The damage was done long before I touched them.” He picked up one of the components and handed it to her on the flat of his palm. “This is the frequency modulator. Without it, we don’t send anything anywhere.”
Gingerly, she took the tiny object and examined it. When it came to electronics, her entire knowledge could have been inscribed in readable letters on the part she held, with room left over for the complete works of Shakespeare. However, the modulator looked strange, almost as if it had been heated with a plasma torch. “It looks melted,” she said with a frown.
“That’s a good description, for a nonspecialist.” He took the modulator back, examined it critically, and replaced it on the cloth. “Someone wanted to cut us off from the Enterprise pretty badly. I’d guess they zapped us with a high-gain subspace transmitter at very close range. Whatever it was, it put out far more power than these circuits were designed to absorb. It also seems to have overloaded the data links in the tricorders, although everything else works.”
She knelt beside the cloth and looked closer at the other parts. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see that most of the components showed signs of damage. “Could it have been an accident? I mean, could we have driven past something that did it?”
“Oh, we drove past something, all right.” He gave the scattered bits of circuitry a final scowl and then began putting them into a specimen bag. “But it wasn’t any accident. Otherwise, the tricorders and my diagnostic equipment wouldn’t work either. Whatever it was, they picked the precise frequency that would burn out the communications relays without damaging anything else.”
“That means we could be in a lot of trouble.” Keiko sat back on her heels, thinking. Before she could deal with their next step, though, there was something she needed to know. “How come you’ve got all that repair equipment in your pack? It’s not standard policy to bring an electronics kit with you.”
Tanaka’s expression went grim. “I’ve been on away teams with Lieutenant Deyllar. Have you ever seen what that man can do to a tricorder?”
Keiko groaned in sympathy, remembering the time Deyllar had managed to get sulfuric acid from a particularly unpleasant carnivorous plant inside the casing of his tricorder. To this day she had no idea how he had gotten the acid into the sealed device while not getting any on himself. The tricorder, however, had been a dead loss and the captain had ordered Deyllar to return to the ship until the doctor had checked him over for acid burns. Several other members of the away team had received multiple burns before they finished the survey, but Deyllar had emerged unscathed, except for his tricorder.
Tanaka continued. “Since he ranks me, when we’re on a survey together, he always takes my tricorder after he ruins his own. If I want to get any work done—even if it is on lichens—I have to repair his junk before I can do anything.”
“Why don’t you just call the ship for a replacement? Wouldn’t that be easier?”
“I tried that—once. Deyllar put me on report for damaging Starfleet property.”
“Because he ranks you.” Keiko shook her head at her own foolishness. Deyllar was the botany section’s albatross, completely incompetent but with connections somewhere that kept him from being booted out of Starfleet for his offenses. She shuddered, wondering why they were wasting time on unsolvable problems. “Enough. We should be planning our next move.”
Thumbing the lock tab to activate it, Tanaka sealed the bag with the damaged pieces of their communicators. “I’m open to suggestions, but right now I’m a little short on ideas.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the Jarada camp. “Since our hosts sabotaged our communicators, you could say that I’m feeling somewhat reluctant to trust them.”
Keiko leaned forward, resting her chin on her hands while she considered their situation. As per standard policy for such excursions, they had enough ration bars and water purification tablets to last them several days, so they wouldn’t starve or die of dehydration. They were scheduled to be gone two nights, but the captain would probably start looking for them sooner.
She was sure Miles would insist when she failed to call him and when neither of their communicators showed up on the ship’s scans. On the down side, she had no idea where they were and she doubted that anyone on the Enterprise knew which direction away from the city their vehicle had gone. Separating the sensor traces of two humans from a busload of Jarada shouldn’t be too difficult once the sensors were pointing in the right place, but she had no idea how long it would take for the ship to focus its search in their area. After a long silence she spoke. “The problem as I see it is that we don’t have any transportation. And we could be upward of three hundred kilometers from the city in almost any direction.”
“Northwest.” Tanaka stared out over the lake, a glum expression on his face. “But the only way the ship would know that is if they were tracking our communicators while we were riding out here.”
She studied his face, thinking how transparent he was. Reading his moods was like reading a book, with everything spelled out in terms only a fool or a blind man could miss. “You’re positive that the communicators were damaged before we left the city?”
He shrugged, his expression still bleak. “That would be easiest. Besides, wouldn’t the point be to separate us from the rest of our people? If they waited until the ship got a bearing on us, it wouldn’t work. The bus would have to change directions and double back onto another heading, or why bother?”
“What’s the point? What do they want with us?” The whole situation was ludicrous. Kidnapping them would only antagonize Picard and, through him, the Federation. There was nothing she or Tanaka could do for the Jarada that they could not better achieve by completing their negotiations with the Federation.
“Maybe they want hostages. Maybe they want to hold us for ransom or something.” All the animation left him suddenly, and he reminded Keiko of a lifelike wooden doll. She wondered what had caused the sudden change, but this didn’t seem like the time to pursue the matter. They had other problems to settle first.
She pushed herself to her feet, determined to force some answers from their hosts. A wav
e of dizziness swept through her as her body struggled to cope with the sudden movement. Tanaka reached for her, steadied her until her head cleared. “Thanks, Reggie,” Keiko murmured, unsettled by her reaction.
She had done that hundreds of times without being dizzy, so why should she have problems now, when she needed all her faculties at peak efficiency? Squaring her shoulders and straightening her back, she mentally ordered her body to stay under control for the rest of the mission. Crossing to her tent, she pulled out her jacket and shrugged into it. “As I recall, the Jarada are expecting us for dinner. I for one would like some answers. Are you coming?”
Tanaka climbed slowly to his feet, still in the grip of the strange mood that had hit him along with the idea that the Jarada wanted them as hostages. “I can’t let you go alone.” His words came slowly, in a flat, dead voice. “But I don’t think I’d trust them very far if I were you.”
“About as far as I can throw them.” She gave him a sharp look, wondering what had come over him. “You don’t have to come if you really don’t want to.”
He shook his head, a little life returning to his face. “Regulations. We’ve got to stick together now that our communicators don’t work.”
“In that case, let’s go hunt some explanations.” She started off, wishing she had a phaser to back up her brave words. She started to ask Tanaka if he had one somewhere in his collection of nonregulation field equipment, but decided he would have volunteered it if he did. Besides, she wasn’t sure she would trust him with a weapon in his present mood. That thought made her change her mind. “I don’t suppose you have a phaser hidden somewhere in your pack, Reggie?”
“No.” He sighed, his expression still oddly remote. “I never thought about needing one.”
It was probably just as well, Keiko thought. She wasn’t sure she could trust herself. The more she thought of Miles, worrying about her because she hadn’t talked to him in six hours, the angrier she got at the Jarada. It was one thing to insist on away-team duty, even though it separated them for a few days, and quite another to be deprived of all means of communications for the duration. The longer she thought about it, the more furious it made her. By the time they reached the outskirts of the Jaradan camp, Keiko had decided she was going to demand an explanation from the teachers and insist that she and Tanaka be returned to the city immediately.
The Jaradan camp was laid out in clusters of domed tents half buried in the sand. The tents ranged in color from pale gold to almost black, much like the Jarada themselves. No two tents were the same color, although within each cluster the colors were similar. Looking at the sand piled around the base of each dome, Keiko realized Tanaka had been correct about the artificial beach. From her brief survey of the meadow’s ecosystem, she knew the soil in the area was mostly clay. Such large amounts of sand were not natural in that environment.
The second thing she noticed was the camp’s silence. She looked around, trying to find anyone at all. This close to the announced dinner hour, she expected to see part of the group fixing the meal while the others relaxed or worked on their lessons. Instead, the camp appeared deserted. The only sounds were the rustle of the wind through the grass and the distant call of a bird or bird-analog.
“This is damned odd!” Tanaka muttered, twisting his head around as if trying to watch every angle at once. “Where did they all go?”
“I suppose they’re still at their assembly.” She looked around, trying to convince herself. Canjiir had said that the evening meal would be at sunset, and already Beltaxiya had dropped below the treetops. Unless the Jarada had a unique interpretation of the word “sunset,” the food should be served within minutes. Keiko shivered with a cold premonition, wondering if she and Tanaka had been deliberately abandoned here or if there was some other explanation for the complete absence of their hosts.
“I don’t know. The Jarada don’t strike me as the sort of beings that ever change a schedule once it’s announced.” He looked around the encampment, as if searching for a way to force it to reveal its secrets. Instead, he ended up staring at the empty level area at the end of the road. “They’ve taken the transport.”
Keiko, turning to see where he was looking, felt her hope shrinking fast. The Jarada had probably sent the vehicle back to the city and it would return only when the students were ready to leave. That complicated their situation, though, because it deprived them of any means of getting back to the Enterprise until the Jarada were through with the field trip. She heaved a sigh of frustration. “I don’t think they took it, Reggie. I think they sent it back to the city until they need it again.”
“Still . . .” Tanaka looked at the empty parking space and shivered. His eyes had a flat, empty look that frightened and angered Keiko more than the Jarada’s apparent treachery. What was wrong with him anyway?
“Let’s see if we can find where they went.” She started through the camp, keeping her eyes on the ground to see what story she could piece together from the tracks. As she expected, the sand near the tents was too churned up to tell her anything. She cast wider, hurrying now to find any clues before it became too dark. Even with flashlights and the buttery glow reflected off the three-quarters-lit gas giant, she did not want to go charging through an unexplored forest on an unsurveyed planet after dark, pursuing someone who didn’t want to see her. Still, for her own sanity, she could not stand around waiting for the answers to find her, and she desperately needed to shatter Tanaka’s passivity.
Finally, when she had almost given up finding anything in the churned sand, she spotted a line of indentations running in a straight line toward the trees. She gestured for Tanaka to join her and pointed to the tracks. They followed them across the beach, away from their own tents and to the edge of the meadow. Where the trail left the sand, the stems of the grass were bent over or broken. Keiko crouched down, examining the soil until she found the sharp imprint of a clawed Jaradan foot. “They definitely went this way,” she said, pointing toward the trees. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” Tanaka’s hesitant tone was what she would have expected from a green cadet, not an experienced officer.
“It beats sitting around waiting for them to do something to us! What’s your problem anyway?” The last thing I need right now is a partner who goes to pieces at the smallest sign of trouble! Keiko thought. Since the captain insisted on assigning her a partner, at the very least he could have given her someone who could handle the pressure. She started for the trees without waiting for his answer.
After a few moments Tanaka’s footsteps followed her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tick you off, but it’s getting dark and we don’t know anything about the local predators. Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait till morning?”
Keiko heaved an exasperated sigh and picked up her pace a little. “Use your head, Reggie. On this planet sunrise is almost thirty-six hours away. I for one have no desire to wait that long to find out what’s happening.”
“I just meant, without the communicators, we don’t have any access to the ship’s sensor scans of this planet. It really isn’t safe to go exploring after dark without getting as much information as we can.”
They entered the trees, ducking under the dense branches that formed a screen along the edge of the meadow. Overhead, the trees tangled together, forming an interlocking web of limbs and foliage. Vines twisted around the trunks and looped over the branches, adding to the massed greenery above them. Despite that, it was light beneath the trees, a curious half-light that diffused downward from the canopy. Tanaka moved up beside Keiko and thumbed his flashlight to its minimum setting, although they barely needed it to follow the line of tracks. The scuffs and gouges in the litter of dead leaves and twigs that covered the forest floor could mean only that a large group had passed that way recently. When she inhaled deeply, Keiko caught a whiff of the mixed, spicy scents of the Jarada, even though the smell of damp soil almost overwhelmed any other odor.
Glancing around, Keiko decided that Tanaka’s nervousness was probably justified. There was something eerie about the forest, something ominous that reminded her of the forests in the old Japanese stories her grandfather had read to her as a child. Nothing good had ever happened in those stories, and to be caught in a place that evoked the same feeling of menace was decidedly unsettling. “Tell you what, Reggie.” Keiko hoped her voice did not betray her own jitters. “If we don’t find anything in the next twenty minutes, we’ll head back. As much as I’d like some answers, I don’t think we should leave our camp undefended for too long.”
Tanaka touched his tricorder case to assure himself that the device was still there. “I’ve got a full pack of ration bars if we need them. But the rest of our stuff is in our tents, and we both know how secure those are.”
“Yeah. They’re good for about thirty seconds in a buffalo stampede or against a determined thief. Neither of which are we supposed to meet in the line of duty.” Keiko paused, her head cocked to one side. From somewhere ahead came muffled pounding, like someone playing a large drum. She glanced at Tanaka to see if he heard it too. “Do you think that’s them?”
He shrugged. “If so, they’re not being quiet about whatever they’re doing. And if not—I’m not sure I really want to know who else in this forest can play the bongos.”
She frowned, considering his words. The sounds she heard were too rhythmic, too purposeful, to be caused by an animal—or even a child—banging on a hollow log. If the unknown drummers were not the Jarada they had come with, then they needed to find out fast who else was here. Zelfreetrollan had told Keiko that their group would be the only people for many kilometers around the study site. Gesturing to Tanaka for silence, she moved forward as quietly as she could. He dropped behind a step, watching her back, although that meant someone could take him from the rear if he was not sufficiently alert.
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