Ice Trap

by L. A. Graf

  "You'll have to sing it to me sometime." Kirk glanced sideways and gave McCoy a tolerant, lopsided grin.

  "In your dreams, Captain."

  Clara trotted back to meet them, her breath streaming in the air behind her. "We'd best stop here. Soroya's due up any time now, and sometimes there's a backwash in the rise. We don't want you being flooded off the ice into the water, now, do we?"

  McCoy took one giant step backward. "What are we here to investigate?" the doctor muttered. "I'd be nuts, too, if they locked me in a submarine."

  Kirk sharply nudged McCoy's arm. "You saw for yourself, they're not nuts. That's what makes this whole thing so weird." He watched the smooth surface of the water for several moments. "What's the matter, Bones?" he asked quietly. "We're going to be in a ship."

  "If you poke a hole in a ship, water rushes in." McCoy glared at the icebergs and tried hard not to imagine what kind of damage they could inflict on a vessel.

  Kirk laughed gently. "If you poke a hole in a starship, space rushes in."

  McCoy scowled at him. "It's different and you know it!" He suddenly gripped Kirk's arm, gloved fingers tight around the biceps. "You feel that?"

  "Yes." The ice quivered faintly under their feet. McCoy shot a frightened look in Clara's direction. Her eyes flicked from the sea to the sky and back. She looked altogether far more comfortable than McCoy felt anyone had a right to, given their surroundings. It annoyed him, which was better than feeling scared, and it certainly kept him warmer.

  "Here she comes," the woman drawled.

  First, the surface of the water moved. Eddies built and swirled, humps of water ebbed and receded. McCoy was reminded of a bass rising from the depths of a lake and not quite breaking the surface. Then the ship was suddenly there, emerging out of nothing like a khaki-green magician's rabbit out of a top hat.

  The turret rose like an oblong head sheeted with water. The rest of the harvester followed, surfacing in an almost stately fashion, as though aware of scrutiny. Water rushed and roared, falling off its pocked sides and cascading back into the bay.

  "We're actually going to board this rust bucket?" McCoy growled under his breath, eyes wide.

  "You'll be fine, Bones." Kirk's eyes roamed the harvester. "I thought it would be sleeker," he mused. "Less worn."

  "What for?" Clara snorted. "The money men don't care what the ships look like so long as they do the job. This tub's in pretty decent shape, given her age and the wear and tear she's seen." She pointed one long finger at a dent running a third of the length of the long ship. "You see that? Surfaced too close to a 'berg, didn't judge its drift right. It's hard to, sometimes. Those damned magnetic storms screw up everything."

  "Is Mandeville careless?" Kirk asked innocently.

  Before Clara could reply, the Soroya settled at the surface with an enormous sigh and a wash of water that nearly reached their feet and had McCoy backstepping nervously. A top hatch opened with a clang. A man with thick, iron-gray hair emerged to waist height and leaned on the hatch rim. Even from this distance, McCoy knew the man must be a Kitka. The heavy bone-lines of his cheeks and jaw swept his features into a broad, exotic circle; his eyes showed a clear and frosty green against the turbulent waters behind him. When he smiled, his copper-skinned face creased into a million lines. "Yo, Cap'n. You bring in the mail?"

  McCoy thought at first he was addressing Kirk. Obviously, so did the Enterprise's captain, until Clara raised one hand and caught the rungs of a metal ladder welded to the side of the ship. She snorted. "As though your family ever needs to write. You crazy Kitka talk through the ice." She turned, one foot on the bottom rung, and speared Kirk with a hard look. "No, Captain Mandeville is not careless." She started up the ladder, shrugged out of the heavy pack and tossed it to the waiting crewman. At the top she paused only long enough to clap the dark man on the shoulder. "Those are the Federation men. Show them where to bunk. I'll be up front." She didn't even favor McCoy and Kirk with a look before she disappeared down the turret like Alice down the rabbit hole.

  Kirk stared after her, jaw working and hazel eyes blazing.

  McCoy's eyebrows rose and a smile tugged up one corner of his mouth. "You're looking a little hot under the collar, Captain."

  Kirk glared at him. "I don't like being deceived."

  "She didn't deceive you." When Kirk's expression didn't ease, McCoy stepped closer. "Jim, she never once denied being Captain Mandeville. You just didn't ask her if she was."

  From below came Mandeville's voice. "Get them in here! Dammit, Nuie, we're a harvester ship, not a damned trundle cab!"

  The gray-haired crewman smiled with encouragement. "There's nothing to it. One, two, and you're up and in."

  When Kirk gestured for McCoy to ascend the iron ladder ahead of him, the doctor obediently took the first water-slicked rung in a hand gone clammy inside its glove. Both feet still firmly grounded on the ice, he looked back at his friend and found a smile despite his fear of the ship and the ebon water. "What you don't like, Jim, is being outfoxed. Mandeville was just being careful with her words around a stranger, just like you would." He leveled a finger under Kirk's nose. "And don't tell me you'd have done it any differently, because I've seen you do it a million times."

  "Maybe." Face still flushed with embarrassment, Kirk waved a hand for McCoy to get a move on. "I just hope Chekov's having a better time of it than we are."

  The boreal winds arrived without a rustle of warning. One moment the ice sheet lay wrapped in its usual dead silence, its noon brilliance slowly dimming into a gray-green afternoon. The next, Uhura heard a distant, high-pitched shriek and saw the security guards stop pacing their careful quarter circles to look around. She stood from her seat on the gravsled just in time to be buffeted back into it by a fierce slam of cold air against her insulation suit.

  "Boreal winds," shouted Steno across the three-meter distance separating them, with just a note of smugness in his voice. The wind's shriek rose to a howl, one that went on and on without remorse. Uhura winced and dialed the volume on her ear mike down as far as she could, then tried clicking on her insulation suit's communicator channels. She got only the same strange static she'd heard on the shuttle radio, a falling whistle that repeated itself as monotonously as the wind's howl.

  It occurred to Uhura that the planet Nordstral was about as close to a communications officer's vision of Hell as she could imagine. She shivered and tried to huddle deeper into the shelter of their piled gear as the wind bit through her insulation suit. With her sound input damped, the first hint she had of company was the tap on her shoulder. She jumped and swung simultaneously, not seeing the familiar black insulation suit until too late. Her fist rebounded from hard stomach muscles, just as Chekov's faint voice said, "It's only me."

  "Sorry." She rubbed her knuckles with a wince, then tapped her ear mike's volume back to normal. "Are the Kitka here?"

  "No. I don't know if that's good or bad." He lifted a hand to rub at the back of his neck. "Uhura, can you do anything about these suit communicators? I can barely hear my guards past the static."

  She shook her head. "It's planet-wide interference. I think Nordstral's magnetic field is so strong that it spins off magnetic storms as well as auroras when it gets hit by solar wind. Our communicators can't distinguish the radio output of the auroral storms from real transmissions."

  "That's what I was afraid of. We'll have to rely on our hand signals." He glanced down at her, expressionless under the bright shimmer of his goggles. "Are you all right here?"

  She shrugged and rubbed her arms. "Just a little cold, now that the wind's blowing. I'll survive."

  "It's warmer if you keep walking." Chekov glanced at Steno and the other company men, huddled close around their hastily repacked gear. "With this wind blowing, I don't think we have to worry about the, ah, goons."

  "All right." Uhura scrambled to her feet beside him, swaying a little when the wind buffeted her. "This is another thing I don't like about insulation suits,
" she complained as they headed out to Chekov's section of perimeter. "They don't break the wind."

  "That's because they're designed to reduce wind friction. You'd be getting hit twice this hard if you were in a parka."

  "But I wouldn't feel it half so much." She noticed that he put himself on the windward side as they started patrolling, and smiled without saying anything. Chekov hated to be caught doing something gallant.

  "What's the first thing?" he asked after a moment.

  "Hmm?" The wind was stirring up fine snow into a knee-high mist that hid the ground around them. She didn't bother to look up from her feet, since she wouldn't have seen Chekov's expression anyway. "What first thing?"

  "You said that the wind was another thing you hate about insulation suits. What was the first thing?"

  "Oh, that. It's nothing important." Uhura lifted a hand wistfully to her throat. She was too embarrassed to admit that she felt lost without the comforting brush of polished metal against her skin. An insulation suit's skintight construction didn't allow her to wear anything as nonessential as jewelry beneath it. "Soyou haven't seen any sign of the Kitka?"

  "Not a whisker." Chekov turned a slow circle as though her question had reminded him to look again. "Assuming that the Kitka have whiskers. You should know, you're the expert."

  "On their language, Chekov, not their facial hair." She sighed. "And to be honest, I'm not even an expert on that. The information that Nordstral Pharmaceuticals gave us was awfully sketchy."

  "Our suit translators will work, won't they?"

  "Nordstral says they'll catch most of the words for most of the Kitka, most of the time." Uhura shrugged. "The Kitka distinguish words by pitch, and that makes it hard to translate into English. God only knows what happens when the machine tries to translate from English to Kitka."

  "Great." Chekov blew an exasperated breath out through his filter. "We're expecting possibly hostile natives, and we may not even be able to talk to them."

  "Chekov." Uhura reached out and caught his arm as they turned to head back the way they'd come. The wind was swirling snow mist around them at shoulder height now, making it hard for her to see. "You don't have to worry about the Kitka so much, honestly. They're a tiny remnant of the pre-ice cultures that lived on this planet before the glaciers pushed everyone else down to the equator. All available information says they're isolated nomads, dedicated to preserving their environment, so peaceful they won't even harpoon a fish without asking its forgiveness first."

  Chekov made a frustrated noise, nearly drowned by the rising wind. "And do you think that they understand what the fish say back to them any better than they'll understand us?" He turned his back on a particularly severe gust, pulling Uhura around to stand in the shelter he made. "Commander, I'm not trying to say that they're evil people. I just think that we should be "

  The shriek of the boreal wind stopped as suddenly as it had started, dropping the snow mist like a curtain to reveal what had been hiding inside.

  Uhura stared in silent shock at the circle of needle-sharp harpoons surrounding them, held by a circle of burly figures in ragged white furs. The tip of each harpoon head looked as if it had been dipped in ruby-dark blood.

  " careful," Chekov finished grimly.

  Chapter Four

  CLAUSTROPHOBIA SHUDDERED McCoy's insides as he stepped off the iron ladder's final rung and put both feet firmly on the harvester's inner deck. He bit down on the fear, forcing it to bay. The inside of his mouth tasted filmy and bitter, and he was briefly reminded of the unsweetened lemon drops his grandfather had favored.

  The corridor walls curved closely around him, not even wide enough for two men to walk abreast. The floor was a straight lane as far as he could see, riveted metal covered with some nonskid material. The ceiling was low, heightening the sense of closeness, of being shut in an iron coffin. He was grateful for the open hatch above his head, the touch of breeze snaking down the entry to stir the fur of his hood and bring the freshening scent of saltwater.

  "I'd hate to end a promising surgery career."

  Kirk's teasing voice broke into McCoy's thoughts. The doctor tilted his head back and peered up at his captain, standing halfway down the ladder. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Kirk bent one knee and nudged McCoy's knuckles with the toe of his boot. "It means that if you don't let go that death's grip on the ladder, I'll be forced to tramp on your fingers. Starfleet might never get over the loss."

  "Oh." Doubly embarrassed at not only having been caught holding the rungs for support, but not even realizing he was doing so, McCoy released the smooth worn metal, crammed his hands into his pockets and stepped back to afford Kirk room to climb down. The Enterprise captain's feet had no more touched the decking than the hatch above closed with a resonant clang. There was the muffled thud of catches being thrown, insurance (McCoy hoped) against an inwash of seawater, and Nuie landed lightly beside them. He pulled shut the inner hatch and turned the locking wheel as far as it would go, then faced them.

  In the overhead lighting, McCoy saw that Nuie's eyes were silver-green, a striking contrast against his weather-roughened copper skin and sleek, thick gray hair. He was shorter than them both by several inches, boxy and squarely built. He smiled now, as broadly as his captain had, and jerked his head. "I'm Nuie, first mate on Soroya. Come with me, please."

  They followed him to a lozenge-shaped door several meters down the corridor. Nuie dogged it open and stepped aside to allow them entrance, but remained in the doorway, one hand curved around the jamb. "Captain Mandeville offers her quarters to you," he stated formally, as though in recitation. "She asks that you remain here until we're under way. I'll be back to fetch you then, and give you the " His face screwed up in concentration. "Ten cents tour?" He appeared confused by the idiom.

  Kirk smiled. "That'll be fine, Nuie, thank you."

  The crewman paused with the door halfway closed to bob a quick nod before he was gone.

  Kirk crossed the room and checked the door. It was unlocked and opened at his touch. He closed it again after glancing down the corridor in each direction. "Well, we're not being watched." His eyes hunted the corners of the room.

  "What are you looking for?"

  "Surveillance. Cameras of some kind."

  "Would you know them if you saw them?"

  "I don't know." Kirk tabbed open his parka and spread it wide, hands perched on his trim hips. "I'd like to get a look at that bridge."

  "You'll probably get your wish. I don't recall you ever being comfortable with strangers on the bridge when you're coming out of dock, either."

  "True."

  McCoy crossed his arms over his chest and looked around. The walls, floor, and ceiling were the same monochrome color. A metal storage locker was bolted in one corner, presumably for Captain Mandeville's clothing, toiletries, and personal effects. A tiny desk was hinged to the wall and depended from two chains. The chair before it was bolted to the floor but could swivel freely above the pedestal of its legs. Two pictures vied for space on the wall above the desk. The one on the left was a reproduction of an oil painting. It showed a large ship, its bow awash in a sea pocked with icebergs. The tiny brass plate at the bottom of the frame read, "Maiden Voyage of Titanic."

  "That's not very damn funny!" McCoy jumped back, afraid that studying the painting too closely might just tickle the Fates into bringing it back to life, starring the Soroya. He knew he was being foolish, but that didn't change the face of his unhappiness or the macabre fascination that made him step closer again to peer at the painting, searching the Titanic's decks for the faces of the doomed.

  "Hmmm what did you say, Bones?" Kirk frowned at the other picture, an ancient photograph of a man with short, dark hair, a round, cheerful face, and wire-rimmed glasses, posed before an old-time submarine. "Who do you suppose this is?"

  "I don't" McCoy's hand seizured out and clutched Kirk's arm as movement threw him momentarily off balance. The blood drained from his face and,
for all he knew, disappeared into the bulkhead. He was suddenly cold all over and slick with sweat.

  Kirk eased him onto the edge of the bed. "Come on, Bones. Out with it."

  Embarrassed, McCoy looked up from the floor beneath his feet. "Out with what?"

  "With whatever's bothering you."

  "What makes you think anything's bothering me?" McCoy made the effort to look his captain right in the face and smile sickly.

  Kirk snorted, but the doctor couldn't tell if it was in disbelief or annoyance. "Well, for one thing, you're not displaying your usual sterling personality."

  McCoy returned the snort. "I don't have Spock here to serve as inspiration." He burrowed his hands under his armpits on the pretense of crossing his arms.

  Kirk surprised his friend by leaning down and placing a firm hand on the bed to either side of McCoy, effectively trapping the doctor where he sat. "What's eating you?"

  "Nothing's"

  "Bones." He spoke quietly, without annoyance, and drew McCoy's attention like steel filings to a magnet. Blue eyes met hazel ones of an intensity the doctor had never experienced with any other single human being. "I need you with me on this one. I need your way of looking at things to help me figure out what's happening on Nordstral. I can't do it by myself."

  Staring into those eyes, McCoy found himself wondering just when he decided he would die for this man. He felt a flush of shame for pulling away, even momentarily, from the friendship and understanding he knew Kirk constantly offered. "I'm with you, Jim," he murmured, then nodded his head firmly. "I am."

  "Then what's wrong?"

  McCoy's eyes strayed across the cabin's narrow width to the wall opposite. The picture of the Titanic showed much the same view as Nordstral's surface, a ribbon of black interspersed with lurching chunks of white. The scene reminded McCoy of the harbor area where they'd waited for the Soroya to come for fuel and supplies, where all the harvesters came to discharge their loads of plankton. McCoy couldn't remember the last time he'd seen something that looked so evil.