Failsafe

by David Mack

On his left, Hawkins counted three barracks, each large enough to house fifty personnel comfortably. Tucked into the far left corner, against the front fence, was a structure that he guessed was probably the latrine. On the opposite side of the assembly area was a long building whose roof was festooned with chimneys and steam vents. Probably the mess hall, he decided.

  Directly ahead of the trio was an enormous, ten-meter-tall concrete bunker that stretched nearly two hundred meters across, spanning the entire width of the nook. Rising from the bunker’s center was a fortified command tower fifteen meters tall. At either end of the bunker was a guard tower equipped with a searchlight and manned by a sniper.

  Set into the bunker on either side of the central tower, halfway between it and the guard towers at the far ends, were a pair of three-meter-tall gates. Each opened into a ten-meter-long, three-meter-wide corridor. On either side of both corridors were gatehouses complete with “murder holes”—narrow openings in the walls just large enough to point gun barrels through, in order to mow down people inside the corridors without the risk of the victims fighting back.

  Gomez was ushered toward the right-side gate, while Stevens and Hawkins were herded toward the one on the left. The two men passed a platoon of soldiers marching in formation. Based on the size of the camp and the number of buildings and vehicles, Hawkins estimated that there was, at most, a single company of soldiers garrisoned here—no more than a hundred and fifty personnel, including officers and support staff.

  The left gate opened. He and Stevens stepped forward into the dark, narrow corridor. As soon as they were past the outer gate, it closed behind them, and the gate at the far end of the corridor opened in front of them. Hawkins felt the eyes of the Venekan soldiers watching them from behind the murder holes as he and Stevens walked forward.

  They stepped out of the corridor, into the men’s prison yard. The inner gate clanked closed behind them. In contrast to the orderliness of the soldiers’ camp on the other side of the concrete bunker, the prisoners’ side was a shantytown of torn and rotting canvas and rusted sheet-metal lean-tos. More than two hundred X’Mari men and adolescent boys drifted like aimless shades or sprawled idly inside their pathetic shelters.

  Like the soldiers’ camp, the men’s prison yard was circled by a seven-meter-tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire. In several places there were narrow gaps between the fence and the cliffs beyond, but Hawkins looked back and saw that the gaps had been sealed on either side of the concrete bunker. Along the right side of the prison yard, parallel to the center fences, was a slope-roofed latrine building, thirty-plus meters long.

  To his right, beyond the center fence, was the women’s camp. It was a near-perfect mirror image of the men’s camp, down to the shoddy latrine building opposite their own. The two yards were separated not by a single fence but by two parallel fences, less than a meter apart, whose razor-wire toppings tangled together. There were nearly as many women imprisoned here as there were men. Standing in front of the women’s inside gate was Commander Gomez, who looked back at Hawkins.

  He heard her speak softly to him via the subaural transceiver. “Gotta give the Venekans credit,” she said. “They sure do build a good concentration camp.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Get past the fence and there’s nowhere to go. Go through the gate and you get shot.”

  Stevens craned his neck backward and gazed up through the falling flakes of snow at the towering cliffs of rock that surrounded the prison yards. Then he looked at the concrete bunker, the guard towers, and the central command tower.

  “It does have one flaw,” Stevens said. Hawkins fixed him with a look that urged him to explain. Stevens grinned.

  “It shows a fundamental lack of respect for nature.”

  Abramowitz peeked through one eye to see if any of the refugees were watching her. She had pretended to fall asleep a few hours ago to discourage them from talking to her, which would only increase the likelihood that she would be caught in a lie. She knew the X’Mari were xenophobes; if they realized she wasn’t one of them, they would very likely brand her a spy and kill her.

  The column had stopped moving several minutes ago, and the women who had been carrying her had put down her stretcher and stepped away. Realizing she had been given a fleeting moment of privacy, Abramowitz activated her transceiver and covered her mouth with her hand as she spoke.

  “Abramowitz to away team, do you read me?” she said in a near-whisper. She looked around nervously while she waited for a reply.

  Gomez’s voice filled her ears. “Gomez here. Are you okay, Carol? We’ve been trying to reach you for four hours.”

  “I know,” Abramowitz said. “I couldn’t say anything because I’m not alone. I got picked up by a X’Mari refugee column.”

  “Picked up? Where are you?”

  “We’re on a road heading into the high country. I don’t know exactly where, but I’d say we’re heading north.”

  “Carol, we need some tricorder magic,” Stevens said, jumping into the conversation. “Can you help us out?”

  “Not right now,” she said. “Still too many eyes around. Maybe tonight, after they make camp and go to sleep.”

  “It’s okay, we can wait,” Hawkins said. “They’re about to serve lunch here and I’m starved.” Abramowitz’s eyes widened with alarm. She hoped she’d heard Hawkins wrong.

  “Tell me you haven’t eaten anything,” she said.

  “Why?” Stevens said. “What’s—”

  “Didn’t any of you read my mission briefing? We can’t eat the food on this planet. Everything organic on Teneb contains a cyanic compound called thanacil. One mouthful and you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”

  Gomez stared in horror at the shallow tin of gruel in her hands. Abramowitz’s warning had come just as she had reached the front of the chow line and been given her thrice-daily ration.

  Lucky for me they made me wait near the back of the line, she thought. Being low girl on the totem pole finally pays off.

  On the other side of the fence, Stevens and Hawkins were just now having ladlefuls of the saffron-colored goop swatted into their own dented tin bowls. Gomez stared at them, then at the plate of poison in her hands.

  From behind her came a grumbled litany of protests and complaints. “What’s the problem?” one woman shouted. “Why isn’t she moving?” said another. A filthy ladle was waved in her face. “What’re you waiting for? Move it!” said the prisoner serving the food, shooing Gomez away.

  Gomez turned and handed her tin to the woman behind her.

  “I don’t want it,” Gomez said. “You take it. Enjoy.”

  A soldier standing guard in front of Gomez grabbed the edge of her serape as she started to walk away from the chow line. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

  “Not eating. Let me go.”

  He snatched back Gomez’s tin from the woman behind her and thrust it back into Gomez’s hands. “Move along.”

  Gomez held her ground and stared back at him. All activity and grousing on both chow lines ceased. Everyone watched the confrontation between Gomez and the soldier. “I don’t want your food,” she said, enunciating clearly and with growing defiance. “It tastes like death,” she said. She turned her bowl upside-down and emptied its sticky, yellow contents on the soldier’s well-polished black boots.

  On the other side of the fence, Hawkins and Stevens followed Gomez’s lead, and dumped their own bowls of gruel on the ground. The soldier facing Gomez lifted his arm to backhand her—and paused as the yard resounded with the splatter of hundreds of bowls of gruel being emptied onto the frozen ground. Every X’Mari man and woman in the camp had dumped their food and now glared at the soldiers. The air tingled with hatred.

  Gomez tensed and waited for the Venekans to respond.

  The soldier in front of her lowered his hand and stepped back toward the serving table in front of the chow line. “You want to starve?” he said. He grabbed the pot of gruel and du
mped its contents on the ground. “Fine. Starve.” He motioned to the soldiers who had been monitoring the chow service. They followed him back through the gate to the soldiers’ side of the bunker.

  On the other side of the fence, in the men’s prison yard, more soldiers did the same thing, spilling out the remaining food then retreating to safety on the other side of the gate.

  Gomez wondered if she had led the X’Maris astray—most of them looked like they couldn’t afford to miss too many more meals. As she pondered the morality of triggering an almost certainly futile hunger strike, a X’Mari woman who looked to be about Gomez’s age stepped up to her and clasped her arm.

  “Thank you,” she said as her eyes brimmed with tears. “We’d forgotten how to fight…how to resist. Thank you for reminding us.” She released Gomez’s arm and shuffled away, weak and tired, but no longer beaten.

  Gomez felt a wave of sympathy for the woman, for all the prisoners in the camp—but then she reminded herself that she wasn’t here to take sides. She didn’t know the history of the X’Maris or the Venekans, or what the issues of their conflict were. She was here for only one reason: to destroy a Starfleet probe before any of this planet’s denizens—whether they be Venekans, X’Maris, or anyone else—turned it into a weapon.

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Carol,” she said as she looked across at Hawkins and Stevens. “Let us know the moment you can use the tricorder. We need to break out of here as soon as possible.” Before we starve, she thought as her stomach growled.

  The refugee column had covered several kilometers between midday and nightfall, and everyone was worn out. The task of carrying Abramowitz’s stretcher had been shared by many dozens of women. A few would carry her for a while until they became fatigued, then others took their place. No one had asked for help or complained; the shifts had seemed to happen all on their own.

  The snowfall had petered out a few hours ago, and a break in the cloud cover along the horizon had allowed a few golden rays of sunset to slant through the jagged peaks surrounding the refugees before darkness fell.

  Now the group was quiet; a few women and old men remained alert, tending small fires or watching the road ahead and behind for any sign of unwelcome attention. Abramowitz’s benefactors had set her up with a bedroll and made space for her inside their crowded tent. Now she was huddled among them, shivering despite the body heat that emanated from either side of her.

  She pulled her heavy blanket up over her head to hide herself. Fishing her tricorder from its hiding place, she activated it and adjusted its display, reducing its brightness to avoid casting a telltale glow beneath her covers. She set it for silent operation, then interfaced it with her transceiver. Thank heavens for fully integrated technology, she thought as she accessed the tricorder’s voice-synthesis function. She would let the tricorder generate an audio signal to speak for her, and use her transceiver to transmit it to the rest of the away team. No one in the tent with her would hear anything, because Abramowitz herself wouldn’t have to speak.

  Abramowitz to away team, she transmitted. She heard the tricorder-synthesized voice in her transceiver. It sounded human, but strangely lacking in affect. Do you copy?

  “Gomez here. Did you go and catch a cold?” Abramowitz could tell that Gomez was kidding—the commander knew what a computer voice sounded like just as well as she did.

  I have to let the tricorder do the talking. What do you need?

  “Can you tap into the camp’s P.A. system?” Stevens asked. “If we can use it to transmit a properly focused ultrasonic signal at the right frequency, we might be able to trigger a controlled snowfall from the ridge above the soldiers’ barracks and make ourselves a bridge out of here.”

  I’ll see what I can do, but it’ll take time.

  “Let us know when you’re ready,” Hawkins said. “We’ll be standing by to walk you through the details.”

  Abramowitz began the slow, tedious process of scanning for weather-radar satellites that would help her gauge the snow density on the ridge, and looking for a “back door” in the POW camp’s communications software.

  Why couldn’t they have been captured by a X’Mari chieftain? she groused to herself. A few platitudes, a few gestures of respect, and I could’ve had them out in time for lunch. But, no, they have to go and get themselves locked up in a Venekan POW camp. She sighed heavily as she tapped into Teneb’s satellite-information network and began seeking out weather-radar systems.

  Stevens and Hawkins sat next to the fence that separated the men’s and women’s camps. The crisscrossing searchlight beams that swept like clockwork over the prison yards passed over their heads. Directly on the other side of the fence, Gomez leaned sideways against the chain-link and stared at the sky.

  In the hour or so that they had been waiting to hear back from Abramowitz, the weather had cleared considerably. The night sky was an unpolluted black field salted with stars. The air had grown colder and drier. Stevens watched his exhaled breath become gray ghosts that vanished into the darkness.

  He turned and looked at Gomez, then he glanced skyward, following the direction of her gaze. A brilliant, cross-shaped constellation dominated that patch of the sky.

  Gomez whispered through the fence to him. “Which one are you looking at?”

  He answered without looking away from the stars.

  “The same one you are.”

  “Second from the bottom of the cross, right?” Hawkins said.

  “Yeah,” Stevens said, somber and reflective.

  They sat together in silence for a few minutes. Stevens knew, just as he was sure Gomez and Hawkins did, that the star they were looking at was Galvan, and that none of them wanted to say its name. Hawkins finally broke the silence. “Y’know, sometimes…lately…I can almost go an entire day without thinking about it.”

  “I envy you,” Stevens said. He knew that Hawkins’s loss at Galvan VI had been just as painful as his or Gomez’s. Hawkins had lost most of his colleagues on the security staff, including his best friend, Stephen Drew, during that fateful mission.

  Another silence enveloped them. Then the mechanically neutral synthetic voice from Abramowitz’s tricorder spoke to them through their transceivers. “Abramowitz to away team, priority one.”

  Gomez put her hand to her ear, though it wasn’t really necessary. “Gomez here. Go ahead.”

  “I have good news and bad news.”

  Stevens, Hawkins, and Gomez swapped dismayed reactions.

  “The camp’s public-address hardware is a closed system,” Abramowitz transmitted. “I wasn’t able to access it.”

  “What’s the good news?” Gomez said.

  “I’m using an alternative method to trigger your snowfall.”

  Stevens suppressed a stab of panic. “What method?”

  “I found a derelict Tenebian satellite that was scheduled for atmospheric reentry and changed its descent profile.”

  The trio’s looks of dismay turned to terror.

  “You’re crashing a satellite into the mountain?” Hawkins said. “Isn’t that a little…” His voice pitched with disbelief. “…imprecise?!”

  “We’ll know in about thirty-five seconds. I suggest you take cover.”

  Stevens was about to say something about the importance of leaving engineering to engineers when a fiery streak slashed low across the sky overhead. Oh, no, he thought, then he sprinted to catch up to Hawkins, who was already running between the tents, shouting to wake up the other male prisoners. Gomez ran through the women’s yard, shouting for the women to retreat to the far side of their camp.

  A crimson flash on the mountainside above the camp lit up the night sky. One second later, a cataclysmic boom shattered the night. X’Maris and Venekans alike awoke in terror. A surreal, deathly silence washed over the camp.

  Then the rumbling began. Low, almost inaudible at first, then it grew louder. Stronger. Closer. The ground trembled. A gentle rush of air gave birth to a blustering wind.

&nb
sp; The camp’s alert klaxon wailed. X’Mari prisoners scrambled out of their fragile shelters. Half-naked Venekan soldiers fell over one another as they fled their barracks.

  The mountain roared, drowning out the siren. The avalanche exploded over the top of the cliff and plummeted in a roiling white cloud toward the camp. It seemed to fall in slow-motion, but as soon as it hit the ground it spread across the camp with terrifying speed, sweeping up tents, sheets of metal, and everything else in its path.

  From beyond the concrete barrier, Stevens heard the soldiers’ barracks snap like dry twigs crushed underfoot. “Get behind the latrine!” Hawkins shouted to the X’Mari men, who already were running in that direction, away from the oncoming wall of churning snow, dirt, and ice.

  The crowd broke like a wave against the latrine building, flowed around its sides, and reassembled behind it. Stevens and Hawkins were trapped in the middle of the group.

  “Push it over!” Hawkins yelled. With strength born of panic, the prisoners heaved against the back of the freestanding structure and tipped it forward, pointing its angled roof toward the raging gray-white crush that was about to hit it. “Get inside!” he hollered. The men leaped inside the overturned but otherwise intact building, piling on top of one another.

  The avalanche struck the sideways-facing latrine roof and shoved the building forward ahead of the snowfront. It crashed liked a battering ram through the first chain-link fence, then the other. Snow and ice from the avalanche surged through gaps in the walls and shattered ventilation grates.

  Stevens’s lower body became cocooned in snow and earth from the building’s open side, which was scooping up snow and dirt from the ground like a plow blade. He scrambled away from the incoming snow, climbed beside the other men, and pressed himself against the splintering roof.

  Then the avalanche slowed. The building’s slide halted halfway across the women’s prison yard. The wood-frame building creaked and moaned ominously. “Out!” Hawkins bellowed. “Now!” The X’Mari men fell over one another as they rushed to exit the buckling shell of the latrine building.