Ice Trap

by L. A. Graf

  "Great-grandmother!" Nhym's slight form hurtled out of her sleeping furs almost explosively. Her whistle sounded shrill with fear. "What you do?"

  "Time to go meet god, Great-granddaughter." The keening note in Ghyl's voice was stronger. "Ice cries, and no one goes to ask gods why. Kitka need answers before all things come to an end."

  The young Kitka made a sound like a spitting cat. "Make Alion go!" She tugged at the older woman desperately. "Make him meet god and talk to him! Alion is the one who makes god angry!"

  Ghyl shook herself free with a reproving whistle. "Alion does not meet gods as we do, Great-granddaughter. He thinks it helps to make others talk to god for him, but gods stay angry." She slid her gathered belongingsdried shreds of fish, a fistful of crumbled seaweed, and one small bone knifeinto a fur-lined bag. "I do not trust his way. I will talk myself."

  "No!" Nhym's voice had taken on the same keening note as Ghyl's, only stronger. Uhura realized it was the Kitka way of crying and felt her own throat knot in sympathy. "Chinit Clan needs you here, Great-grandmother, not gone to sacred place. You haven't told me kraken stories yet!"

  "Your grandfather can tell them." Ghyl glanced over at the two older Kitka, who watched her in painful silence. "Hunt well, children. I will bless you all from Chinit's sacred place when I meet god there."

  She turned, slinging her travel sack across her shoulder, and crossed the alcove with unhesitating strides. The furred skins marking the entrance to the tunnel barely quivered around her when she slipped through.

  "No!" Nhym cried again. Her grandmother caught her when she would have followed the old woman, hissing a wordless comforting sound in her ear. The male Kitka merely bowed his head, stripping off one mitten and dipping his callused fingers into one of the unlit lamps. He brushed the clinging oil onto his face mask, streaking it with a dark film of wetness.

  "All Kitka go to god." His wail sounded unsteady, but his hand moved without shaking until the entire mask was smeared with oil. "As god comes to all Kitka in the end. So it is."

  "So it is," echoed the old woman, and dipped her fingers, too, rubbing the oil across Nhym's paler mask. The little girl was still keening, in short strangled gasps that sounded just like sobs. Uhura desperately wanted to comfort her, but she knew better than to interfere in what was clearly a native ritual.

  "This doesn't look good." Tenzing's gruff voice caught Uhura by surprise, speaking through the insulation suit communicator channel without the background accompaniment of the translator. The security guard had emerged from her tent, fully dressed except for the shimmer of her goggles. "What happened, sir?"

  Uhura took a deep breath that eased the ache in her throat a little, then turned to face her companion. A quick tap switched her own voice from mike to communicator, so the Kitka wouldn't be bothered by their exchange. "Nhym's great-grandmother just left on some kind of sacred journey. She said the Kitka gods were angry. She's gone to talk to them."

  "I wonder if that means she's going to where the shuttle crashedto their sacred place." Tenzing knelt and began to decompress her tent. "If Alion's right and it's safe to travel there now, we may be following her today."

  "That's true." Uhura shook herself free of her furs, feeling a little better. "Maybe I can explain that to Nhym"

  But when she turned back toward the Kitka, only two fur-clad figures stood in the wavering lamplight. Uhura glanced toward the swaying doorway skin and her eyes widened. She tapped her translator back on. "Where is Nhym?"

  The female Kitka's whistle sounded both resigned and puzzled. "She follows her great-grandmother, to watch her leave. It is not right, but the time comes too soon"

  A stronger rumble broke across her whistling voice. This time the sound didn't die away, but gathered itself up into an enormous slow roar like a shuttle rising. Uhura gasped and swayed as the alcove's floor rolled beneath her. She caught at the nearest wall to steady herself.

  "It's a quake!" she shouted to Tenzing, who'd been thrown down into the folds of her collapsed tent. The roar tore the ice sheet apart around them, cracking the floor and shaking the skins down from the ceiling. A chorus of terrified Kitka shrieks echoed down the tunnel, and Uhura felt her heartbeat slam into her throat.

  "Nhym!" She managed to stagger toward the alcove door, skidding and catching her balance as the floor thrashed in slow waves beneath her feet. "Tenzing, stay here and help the others. I'm going after Nhym!"

  "Sir, don't" Whatever else the security guard meant to say was lost beneath a fierce crackle of static across the communicator. All around Uhura ice splintered and cracked, fracturing the polished walls of the alcove. A chunk fell from the ceiling as she lurched into the tunnel outside, barely missing her as it shattered against the floor. She recoiled instinctively from the ominous darkness, then gritted her teeth and reached for her flashlight. The wavering circle of light caught a small furred figure up ahead, huddled in the angle where two passages met.

  "Nhym!" Uhura skidded across the buckling floor of the tunnel, stumbling when one block of ice thrust up suddenly and caught her across the knees. She threw her arms up as she fell, trying desperately to protect her unshielded face from the ice. The roaring in the ice had become a thunder that made her bones shake with its growl. Dimly beneath the chaos, Uhura heard a frantic wailing, and small hands caught at her shoulders to drag her across the ice.

  "Nhym?" Uhura managed to catch herself against a shaking wall of ice long enough to find her balance and scramble to a crouch. Nhym's small form plastered itself to her side, bone-masked face digging into her insulation suit with painful force. "Hold on tight, Nhym," she said as the icy ceiling above them groaned ominously. Flying shards of ice pelted them from above. "Just hold tight!"

  With a crash that made her ears hurt, the ceiling fell.

  Air rushed back into McCoy's lungs in a whooping roar that left his throat raw, accompanied by a loud voice over the ship's intercom. "Doctors Muhanti and McCoy to the bridge immediately! We have an urgent medical situation! Repeat, Doctors Muhanti and McCoy to the bridge immediately! Urgent medical situation requires immediate assistance!"

  Muhanti let up the pressure on McCoy's throat at the intercom's intrusion. His fingers still coiled wetly around the Starfleet officer's neck, but they were loose, relaxed as he listened, captured by the sound. His weight shifted slightly, back onto his heels from the pressing confine over McCoy's abdomen. With his last reserve of strength, McCoy bucked fiercely and threw him off. Muhanti collided hard against a cabinet and sprawled, stunned.

  Shaking, McCoy struggled to his feet and staggered out the door, turning left toward the bridge. He heard the clatter of Muhanti behind him in the lab, then the louder sound of running feet. McCoy was almost afraid to hazard a glance over his shoulder, certain he'd find Muhanti gaining on him, a murderous gleam in his eye and another shard of glass clutched in his lacerated fingers.

  A flash at the edge of McCoy's visionan arm pumping in time to the running man, one dark hand clutched around a generic-issue medikit in a bright green Nordstral wrapper. McCoy's feet fumbled and he caught himself against the bulkhead, breathing hard, hand throbbing and welling fresh blood. He stared as Muhanti ran past, one arm waving. "Hurry, McCoy! They need us on the bridge!" He dashed through an interconnecting doorway and on down the corridor.

  McCoy's chest heaved, adrenaline running so high as to give him the shakes. He tipped his head back against the cool metal and stared at the riveting overhead. "What the hell ?" he gasped. Groaning, he levered away from the wall and ran after Muhanti.

  "Chief? Chief!"

  Chekov rolled to all fours, spitting snow out of his mouth and shielding his eyes with one arm. Painful morning sunlight blazed like daggers off broken ice and snow, and bitter wind froze his tears to ice against his cheeks. Taking off his goggles to watch the morning auroras suddenly seemed an amazingly stupid thing to have done.

  "Lieutenant Chekov?" Publicker's voiceclear and open, not across the insulation suits' commun
icator channelsounded frantic and very nearby.

  "I'm here." Covering his eyes with one hand, Chekov squinted between his fingers to cut the snow glare. It only helped a little, blurring everything to a fuzzy, white-laced patchwork that only hinted at the destruction wrought on the ice field around him. Still, he was able to sight the tent a few dozen meters away, as well as the waist-high upthrust that hadn't been there before a few moments ago. "Howard! Publicker! Over here!" Maybe they'd be able to spot his missing goggles, or at least fetch a spare set from their sled full of equipment.

  The guards hurried across the broken ice to him, arms pinwheeling for balance on the uneven terrain. "Are you all right?" Chekov asked, using one hand to lever himself up to their level.

  Howard stooped to give him a hand, nodding. Publicker cast anxious looks all around them, his own goggles cracked and misted. "Just shook up," he admitted, sounding it. "What happened?"

  "Some kind of earthquake. I don't know " Chekov had crept out of the tent just before dawn, awakened by the sheeting brightness of auroras while the sun was still making its approach on the horizon. Then, the stark sameness of the rainbow-washed landscape had seemed almost beautiful in its stillness.

  Now, the ice sheet looked like someone had tried to wad it into a ball, strata crumpled until icy layers flaked and shattered into rubble. Sunken trenches of broken snow sketched out the Kitka village with intersecting dotted linesthe legacy of caved-in tunnel passages between more sturdily constructed alcoves and inner rooms.

  Chekov scanned the white-and-gray-clad bodies pouring out of the destroyed village, searching for some flash of human black among the natives. "Where's Tenzing?"

  Howard turned to follow his gaze. "With Lieutenant Commander Uhura, sir."

  Chekov felt the first twistings of panic in his heart. "Still down below?"

  " Yes, sir "

  "Oh, my God." He broke into a run without waiting to see if the other men followed.

  Natives milled around their damaged holes, howling in fear and confusion. Chekov started counting them in groups of three or four, then realized he didn't know how many lives this village harbored to begin with, so he couldn't assess the damage this way. Skidding to a stop beside a cluster of white-eyed elders, he flipped on his translator. "How many are still inside?"

  They turned to stare up at him, their wide, flat faces registering only uncomprehending shock.

  "How many?" His own taut worry made the words come out more harshly than he intended, but no Kitka words came out of his translator. He stared back at the natives, equally confused, until it suddenly struck him that nothing he said was being translated for the frightened natives to understand. And vice versa. "Chortov!"

  The old man closest to him shied away, and Chekov caught at his arm to stop him as Howard joined them with already-assembled shovels in hand. "My people," Chekov insisted, trying to make some connection with the old man, if only through shared panic. "The two women who were with the little girlwhere are they?" He ducked his head to wrestle his voice back under control. Even the insulation suit's communicator channel blew only deadly static. "God, can you people understand anything I'm saying?"

  One of the women answered in a complex flutter of whistles and whines that meant nothing more to Chekov than he knew his own pleading meant to her. Still, she pointed with one hand while plucking at his wrist to make him look behind. A sunken tunnel snaked away from them, still hissing with internal falls of ice and snow. Chekov felt nearly dizzy with grief. "They're under that?"

  Her only response was to push him toward the collapse.

  Howard climbed into the trench behind Chekov, handing his chief one of the shovels without waiting to be asked. Chekov tried to keep his shovel strokes rhythmic and steady, ignoring the brilliance of snow light in his eyes, ignoring the fearful trembling that wanted to shiver through him as they worked. The quake had broken much of the snow into heavy powder, the ice into manageable splinters that two men could easily enough heave out of their way. He tried not to think about the speed with which a phaser set on stun could melt past this jumbled blockage. If he had seen Alion at any time during their digging, though, he'd have been hard pressed not to turn his shovel on the shaman instead of the ice.

  Kitka men gradually converged on their work space, keening softly among themselves but apparently understanding the uselessness of trying to communicate with the Starfleet officers just now. Chekov accepted their help in grateful silence. It was somehow reassuring to know translators weren't needed yet for all forms of sentient communication.

  Howard turned over the first shovelful of bloody snow. He sank to his knees, one hand covering his breath filter. "Chief oh, no "

  The pain in Howard's voice shot through Chekov like lightning. He threw down his shovel, scrambling past confused Kitka to land on his knees beside Howard. The young ensign had already scraped out a slushy pile of scarlet ice, and sat now with his hands on his lap, looking downward. Trembling, hands made clumsy by desperation and fear, Chekov leaned over the open hole without letting himself think about what he would find there.

  Tenzing's goggles had been shattered in the earthquake, and meltwater sheened her golden skin in a glaze already frozen brittle by the wind. Chekov saw only enough of her eyes to confirm that they were dull and inanimate, then he rocked back on his heels and closed his eyes against the blinding whiteness of the snow.

  McCoy dashed onto Soroya's bridge at Muhanti's heels and nearly ran the Indian doctor down when he stopped quickly. Kirk and Mandeville knelt on the floor, Nuie stretched limply between them. Both doctors landed on their knees, one to either side of the unconscious crewman. Muhanti batted Mandeville's hands away. "Don't move him!" he ordered, digging into his medikit.

  "What the hell happened to you two?"

  McCoy looked up and met Kirk's baffled regard. Clotted blood wiped off on Nuie's clothing as McCoy routinely took vital signs the old-fashioned way, listening with one ear while Muhanti muttered over his equipment and ran a medical scanner above the Kitka. "It's a long story."

  "I'll want to hear it." That was an order.

  "Later." That was a promise. "What happened?"

  "He fell. The ship hit a wave, or a current pocket, or something, and he fell and hit his head." Kirk gestured at a nearby panel.

  "Is he going to be all right?" To McCoy's relief, Mandeville directed this question to her own ship's physician.

  "I don't know, Clara." He met her eyes briefly, and McCoy got a glimpse of the kind of doctor Muhanti probably was when he wasn't influenced by whatever was happening on this godforsaken planet. Muhanti pressed a loaded hypo against Nuie's neck and shot it home. McCoy recognized the drug, almost unconsciously noting that it was the correct dosage for the Kitka's build.

  "I'll need to examine him in sickbay." Muhanti grasped Nuie's arm and shifted to get an arm around his waist. "McCoy, get his other side and help me carry him. I want to run a battery of"

  His voice was cut off by an ominous rumble. They stared at one another, frozen by the rapidly growing sound. Suddenly, the Soroya heeled over on her side. McCoy slammed into the decking, crying out as he landed on his wounded hand. Kirk's fingers snagged his shirt and dragged at him as the helm fought for control.

  "Icequake!" someone cried.

  "Damn! Damn!" Mandeville moved along the canted interior of the ship, pulling herself from the back of one tipped chair to the other, her fingers tight and white-knuckled on the well-worn upholstery. "Take us down! Dive! Get us into a canyon!" Her eyes raked the map above the tech's station.

  "Can't!" the pilot grunted, hands fighting controls. "There's no response! Radar's gone to hell!"

  "Not good enough!" Mandeville snapped, reminding McCoy of a certain Starfleet captain he knew. "Get us upright if you have to go out and push her! Activate the cutting turret! Blast us a big enough hole that we don't breech her on the ice!"

  "Trying, Captain!" His fingers ran scattershot over his controls. "Not responding, Captain!
Mechanism seized!"

  Mandeville swore explosively and snagged someone's jacket off the back of their chair. She flung her arms into it and hurled herself up a wall-clung ladder. "I'll do it manually!"

  Kirk caught Nuie's rolling body and pushed him into McCoy's arms as he struggled to his feet. "I'll do it!"

  Mandeville looked down at him from her perch. "Not your ship, Captain. Here, you're just cargo." She sped up the ladder and disappeared into the upper decking.

  A moment later another shock, much worse than the first, rocked the harvester again. Rending metal sounded like the scream and tear of living flesh, and there was one short, loud cry from Mandeville. Kirk lunged toward the ladder and was blocked by another crewman hurtling up the worn metal rungs. An enormous roaring filled the air, and a fount of water gushed from the access, bringing the crewman's battered, lifeless body back down with it.

  "Bones! Get out of here!" Kirk struggled forward into the gout of water. "We've hit something! Evacuate the bridge crew!" he thundered, physically hauling people away from their stations and shoving them toward the door. He grabbed the pilot's arm tightly. "Can we secure the hatches?"

  Her reply was lost to McCoy in the surge and wash of thundering water. A klaxon began its raucous cry, alerting the rest of the crew to danger. McCoy hauled on Nuie's limp form, his hands locked across the Kitka's chest from behind. Where was Muhanti? One brief glance over his shoulder as he dragged Nuie toward the door showed Muhanti trying to get through the water rushing about his knees. He shouted something about trapped crew and Captain Mandeville, but McCoy couldn't make out the words. Kirk clutched at Muhanti. The Soroya's doctor shoved him aside and disappeared.

  Someone pushed McCoy into the corridor, Nuie still locked in his embrace. The Soroya rolled, driving him to his knees, and there was a sound like someone had pierced the ship's heart and ripped free her soul. The roar of water intensified, and McCoy looked up to see a wall of water bearing down on them.