“Sure do,” he said, digging in his pack.
He handed it to her and she took it, letting the nylon line uncoil onto the ground. Quickly she made a loop and tied it around Reynold’s waist. Then she made another loop about six feet farther back along the rope and tied it around Danny’s waist.
“Now promise me, boys,” she said, “you will not take this rope off.”
“Promise, Mom,” Reynold said.
“Yeah, I promise, Mrs. Coates,” Danny said.
She nodded. “Here’s what I want you to do, so listen carefully.”
Both boys nodded.
“How come they get to go?” Diane asked.
“You are all going to take turns,” she said, smiling at Diane. “Reynold and Danny are just the first ones. Okay?”
Diane nodded.
“Good,” Lilian said. She figured that their best chance of being found was by being out in the open. If anyone was looking, they would see two boys standing on the hillside.
She turned back to face the two boys. “I want you both to crawl out just beyond the opening. Then I want you to look around, see what it looks like out there. Then call as loud as you can for help and come back in. Understand?”
Both nodded.
“Be careful,” she said.
Reynold got on his hands and knees and wiggled into the hole, pushing his way through.
Danny was right behind him.
With the two boys in the opening, the wind was blocked for a moment, letting the dust in the air slow some.
Lilian tied the rope around her own waist and held on to it with both hands, playing out just enough to keep the rope slack behind Danny. There was no telling what the earthquakes and weather were doing out there, and she wanted to make sure she could get the boys back in the cave no matter what happened.
She and the other four children all crouched around the opening, peering through as Reynold and Danny reached the outside and stood up.
The wind again slapped them and she had to fight to keep the rope fairly tight. Neither boy seemed to want to move away from the opening of the cave. That was good, but she didn’t know what that meant. What was happening out there?
Then Danny started back inside, followed quickly by Reynold. When they reached her she could tell they were both wet and scared. Very, very scared.
“The trees are all knocked down,” Reynold said, clearly breathless. “The forest is mostly gone and it’s raining really hard.”
Danny nodded. “We couldn’t see very far at all, and the wind is so strong I thought it would pick me up.”
“Yeah, me too,” Reynold said. “Real scary.”
Lilian nodded. It seemed that the tame weather of Belle Terre was now a thing of the past.
“I want to go now,” Diane said.
The other three said the same thing, so Reynold gave Diane his loop and Lilian made sure it was tight around her waist. Then Josiah took the next loop. They were both acting brave, but Lilian could tell they were both scared about what Danny and Reynold had said.
“Don’t stay out there too long,” she said as they started through the opening.
The two children made it outside without problems and stood up. Lilian kept the rope tight, just as she had done with Reynold and Danny, as the wind again smashed into her face through the opening.
Then she heard Diane scream, loud and long and hard. A scream that carried over the wind and cut through the swirling dust.
“Diane!” Lilian shouted, trying to see what had happened through the small opening and the wind and dust. She couldn’t see anything at all. Both children had moved away from the opening out there.
She started to pull back on the rope, but it was suddenly slack. The end came back untied.
Every nerve in her body panicked.
She dove into the opening. Maybe she could make her way out to get them, if she squeezed really hard.
Then in front of her the smiling face and broad shoulders of Captain Kirk filled the small cave opening, blocking the wind.
“Lilian Coates, I presume?”
She stared at him for a moment, not believing what she was seeing.
Then every ounce of energy left her.
She put her face down in the dirt and just lay there, trying to catch her breath, trying to let herself believe this was finally over.
She’d kill Captain Kirk later for scaring her. Right now, besides not being able to get to him, she just didn’t have the energy.
Chapter Twenty-five
Countdown: Terminated
KIRK SAT in his captain’s chair, watching the main screen and relishing how good a few full nights’ sleep felt. Belle Terre floated lazily below them, still beautiful from a distance. Too bad that wonderful beach he’d sat on wasn’t available anymore. It might be again, someday in the future, after the weather calmed down. But right now the beach was a cold, windy place with angry waves and blowing sand. Resting right here on the bridge was a much, much better place to be.
Around him everyone went about their duties quietly, giving him time to think and just relax.
Over the last few days, since what everyone was calling the Quake Moon incident, the colonists had been preparing to slowly move back to the surface. He’d pretty much stayed out of their decisions, figuring mostly that it was none of his business. The governor was a good leader. Young, but getting more experienced by the day. Kirk was going to let him make his own mistakes, as long as those mistakes didn’t threaten the overall safety of the colony.
Yesterday, McCoy and Dr. Audry had discovered that the natural bacteria they had saved on every ship would help the ground on the main continent grow crops again quicker. Kirk had found that fascinating, the planet helping itself. Typical of the ways of the universe.
Lilian Coates and the children had all gotten back aboard their ships safely. The kids had asked a lot about how their parents had saved the moon from exploding. McCoy had spent time telling them, as he gave each child a checkup, how their parents had been heroes, and would never have left them on the planet normally.
With luck, the children would all be healthy and come through the event all thinking it was a big adventure. If that happened they would have Lilian Coates to thank. She had clearly saved them, in more ways than one. Kirk found her fascinating.
There was only one loose end that Kirk couldn’t figure out. What had happened to the Rattlesnake and Captain Sunn? He could find no record of Sunn telling anyone which direction he was headed. And yesterday the Enterprise, using a high-boost frequency, had tried to contact the Rattlesnake without success.
Sunn and his small crew had simply vanished. Kirk knew that ships vanished all the time in space, but not a ship doing a mission for him. That ate at him. And in a few weeks, if Sunn didn’t make it back, Kirk was going to see if they could go find the Rattlesnake.
But first, they had a colony to protect and help get settled again on its new home. They had been lucky during this entire problem that the Kauld hadn’t interfered. More than likely they had figured the Quake Moon would do all the work for them by chasing the humans away. But again it hadn’t worked out the way the Kauld may have wanted, and that made Kirk smile.
On the main screen the image of Belle Terre floated peacefully, the Quake Moon just beyond it. Kirk knew that planet was a long way from peaceful, and taming it was going to take decades. Plus the contents in and around that Quake Moon were going to change this area of space forever when news got back to the Federation.
Kirk smiled and leaned back, letting himself relax. It was all going to be a challenge.
He loved challenges.
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“She’s away!”
Without benefit of an antigrav, the crate tipped gracelessly ov
er the lip of the shuttle’s hatch and fell free. Chekov leaned to the extent of his safety cable and watched the container tumble toward the ocean of airborne dust below, wondering how much chance they had of it landing anywhere near the drop target. The high-pitched shriek of its sonic beacon was swallowed up so quickly by the howl of Llano Verde’s winds that he suspected if it went too far astray, it would never be found again.
Behind him, Plottel’s voice, muffled by a filtration mask already several wearings too old, intoned blandly, “… and three and two and one …”
The crate’s parachute ripped into existence with a whhuf! Chekov could imagine but actually couldn’t hear over the roar of the dust storm outside. Fluorescent orange billowed into violent bloom, snapping the crate out of reach of the maelstrom only briefly before relaxing back into its descent. Almost immediately, wind tipped the parachute sideways and began dragging the crate sharply lateral of its original drop path. Storm-blown dust and sand swarmed the crate, the lines, the ’chute like famished ants. Once the air sealed behind the drop, Chekov couldn’t even tell where the supplies had torn their way through. Swallowed by this wounded and angry planet, just like the sonic beacon. Just like everything else.
“Heads up, C.C.”
Kevin Baldwin didn’t have to give a jerk on Chekov’s safety line to get his attention, but he did it anyway. Baldwin’s primary source of amusement seemed to be irritating everyone around him. The sudden assault on Chekov’s balance while hovering ten klicks above Belle Terre’s surface launched his heart up into his throat. He grabbed at the sides of the hatch with both hands, but clenched his teeth before gasping aloud. That instinct let him preserve at least a modicum of dignity. Backing calmly away from the opening, he tried hard to ignore Baldwin’s laughter as he disconnected the lifeline and shouldered out of its harness.
The hatch rolled shut with a grinding squeal that made Chekov’s teeth hurt. Dust in the mechanism, sliding between the parts. Dust in everything—the air, the floor, his hair, his clothes. When Reddy, the shuttle’s pilot, had promised they’d be above the ceiling of the dust storms, Chekov had assumed that meant they’d be flying in clear air. Instead, it meant Reddy kept the shuttle just high enough to avoid clogging the intakes on the atmospheric engines; Chekov, Baldwin and Plottel could stand in the open hatch under the protection of goggles and filtration masks, but didn’t have to wear the kevlar bodysuits required by stormgoers on the surface. Not much of a trade-off, considering he’d still have to buy a new set of clothes the minute he set foot in Eau Claire. Or, at least, he would if he wanted Uhura to be seen with him in public.
Swiping uselessly at the front of his trousers, Chekov finally settled for patting himself down to dislodge the uppermost layers of grime. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this.” He stepped sideways out of his own dust cloud. “But there’s too damned much olivium on this planet.”
Plottel and Baldwin shucked their breath masks before the light above the hatch had even cycled from red to green. “Maybe.” Plottel didn’t smile as he crossed the cargo shuttle’s deck to dig a battered canteen out of a locker. “But if it weren’t for all that damned olivium, Starfleet wouldn’t have stuck around, and we’d be deprived the pleasure of your company on this little flight.”
Chekov watched him fill his mouth with water, rinse and spit into a disposal pan, then pass the canteen on to Baldwin. “And if Starfleet weren’t here, there’d be no one in-system with rations to spare for your emergency supply drops.”
“If Starfleet weren’t here—” Baldwin discharged a mouthful of water at Chekov’s feet, creating an anemic slurry of mud, dust, and olivium. “—we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.”
Chekov nodded once, lips pursed, then went back to beating the planet out of his clothes.
This was an exchange they’d had, in various permutations, at least twenty times since the cargo shuttle kicked off from the orbital platform above Belle Terre. Chekov had given up pointing out that, while Starfleet’s actions might have directly led to the gamma-ray burst that most everyone called the Burn, it was only because of Starfleet that the planet still existed at all. Allowing the Burn had actually been the best in a very short list of options. While it all but defoliated most of a hemisphere, the colonists had been ferried out of harm’s way. When house-sized segments of Belle Terre’s largest satellite slammed into the face of her smallest continent, there was no one there to kill, no homesteads to lay waste. The combined Starfleet and colony ships, led by the Enterprise, had salvaged half a planet and an entire colony from otherwise certain destruction.
And the colonists had yet to forgive them.
From the moment they left Earth’s gravity well, the Belle Terre colonists had bristled with fierce independence. They made their own rules, picked their own battles, all but spat upon Starfleet’s offers of help and personnel—even when that help saved them from the numerous disasters that had plagued the colony expedition practically from the word go. Even now, when extended dust storms threatened the small continent of Llano Verde with starvation, the Enterprise’s sacrifice of its own rations to assemble relief supply drops was accepted with palpable resentment. The fledgling colony had nothing to spare for its own members, but the Enterprise’s continued humanitarian support was interpreted as an implied criticism of Belle Terre’s ability to take care of itself.
This flight to the surface was no different. The volume of olivium dust laced through Llano Verde’s soil after the Quake Moon impacts made transporter travel there impossible, and Captain Kirk had issued a moratorium on Starfleet personnel hitching free rides on civilian-operated shuttles. Which put Chekov in a bit of a bind. He’d been left on the orbital platform three weeks ago when the Enterprise set out to patrol for pirate traffic, keep an eye out for the Kauld—aliens who had attacked the expedition—and search for the missing vessel Rattlesnake. Chekov was officially cut loose, on leave, grounded. Sometime in the next two or three months, the light courier City of Pittsburgh was due at Belle Terre to pick up Chekov, John Kyle, and two other Enterprise crewmen for reassignment to the newly commissioned science vessel Reliant. Until City of Pittsburgh arrived, Chekov, Kyle, and the others were expected to rest, relax, and comport themselves in a manner that wouldn’t aggravate the Belle Terrans any more than was inevitable. In general, this translated into long stretches of profound boredom as far away from the colonists as possible. Chekov spent the time trying to get used to seeing himself with executive officer’s bars on his shoulder and answering to the title “lieutenant commander.” He hadn’t felt so small and ill suited to a uniform since being named Enterprise’s chief of security two years before.
Which was why he was once again violating Kirk’s prohibition to join Sulu and Uhura for dinner in Eau Claire, the continental capital of Llano Verde. The two had been stationed there with Montgomery Scott and Janice Rand for several weeks, cut off from chatty communiqués by Gamma Night and olivium-contaminated dust, not to mention swamped with work and colonial frustrations. Long months away from shipping out to his new assignment, Chekov was lonely, insecure, and painfully bored. Part of him feared he’d never make the kind of lifelong friends on the Reliant that he had on the Enterprise; another part half-hoped their reunions would somehow prove him too indispensable to let go. He would be allowed to serve under Kirk on board the Enterprise forever.
In reality, he knew all he would get out of the trip was a good dinner and a few precious hours of socializing before he returned to his restless and unrelaxed days on the orbital platform.
Chekov had made an end run around Kirk’s moratorium by refusing to be shuttled surfaceward like so much cargo. He knew about the weekly runs to air drop emergency supplies across Llano Verde. Showing up in the bay just before Orbital Shuttle Six kicked off, he offered to help the civilian laborers pitch the crates toward their assigned drop points in exchange for a shuttle ride down to Eau Claire. It wasn’t just a chance to “pay” for passage, it was also a chance to be
useful, sweat off some of his frustrations, and leave a positive impression on the colonials. Or so he’d thought. Vijay Reddy, the pilot, suggested that Chekov leave the heavy lifting to the laborers and ride up front with him. Not about to be coddled out of honestly paying his way, Chekov insisted on remaining in back to work alongside Baldwin and Plottel. Since neither of the laborers objected, Chekov assumed they were perfectly happy to have an extra set of hands.
By an hour into the flight, he’d figured out where he really stood. When he wasn’t dragging a crate—without help—forward from the cargo hold, he was supposed to either lend his back to shoving the crates through the airlock, or sit out of the way on one of the armless benches welded into the bulkhead. His comments weren’t welcome, and neither was his presence. They spoke to him only when forced to, and made no effort to censor their bitterness toward Starfleet when they talked between themselves. For his own part, Chekov swallowed most of the angry comments that sprang to mind. Another hour or so and they’d be on the surface. He would part ways with them in Eau Claire, and contemplate Kirk’s wisdom in recognizing from the outset that the colonists needed as much physical and emotional space as Starfleet could give them.
A little communications panel high on the bulkhead chirruped with incongruous cheer. Unlike communicators or even crystal-based radios, intercom systems based on hard-wire connections still functioned perfectly despite all the olivium radiation Belle Terre could throw out. The wall speaker, however, buzzed from the weight of the dust coating its tympanum. “Dave, how many crates have we got left back there?”
Plottel touched the container on which he sat as though silently acknowledging it in his count, then craned his neck to check the deck behind him. “Three up front, another twelve in the hold.”
“And who’s scheduled to get most of them?”
Baldwin set down the canteen and reached out to steady the cargo manifest dangling near the hatch door, squinting at its dust-fuzzed display panel. “Four go to Desert Station. Everyone else gets two or three.”
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