by Melanie
It was less than a minute later that he had begun prodding her to think about talking to Tom. 'He just doesn't understand,' she told herself. 'Can't understand. Harry Kim's... Harry Kim. A good man who grew up with the unwavering knowledge that he loved and was loved. He has no idea what it was like to stick his neck out and have his head nearly chopped off. He has no idea what I'm going through with Tom.'
'No,' she corrected, 'there was no "with Tom" anymore. He made that clear when he made his choice not to come with you and the others in the simulation. He chose himself over your relationship. There was no way you ever can forgive him for that.'
"Please, B'Elanna," Harry begged. "He's miserable. You're miserable-"
"I am not miserable," she tried to deny.
Harry's look as he held open the door to the next museum for her told her he did not believe that for a second.
"Well, it'll pass," she growled under her breath and turned her attention to the tour guide who was collecting people for the next tour.
-------
The increased irritation of dust in his eyes was the only way Tom knew he actually had his eyes open. Everything was pitch black around him. Carefully he tilted his head up towards the swaying sunlight far above him.
'Swaying?' he thought. 'Why was the sunlight swaying?'
It was then that he realized it was he who was doing the swaying, not the sunlight. He was dangling in mid-air from his safety line. The moment he had reached the plateau his first action was to shorten his line. If he took a tumble off of the plateau while he was reaching over the edge to help Tuvok up he would fall only four meters, no closer to the ground a good five hundred meters below. That automatic action had saved his life though maybe not Tuvok's.
Tom gently grabbed hold of the line with his right hand. His entire left arm refused to respond to his command. That he would worry about later, right now he had to find Tuvok and assess his condition. With shear determination, he drew himself parallel with the line, head up. Resting his aching head against the line, he looked downwards and saw nothing other than the darkness and spots before his eyes from the sunlight. Somewhere down there was an injured man and he had to find him.
"Tuvok?" a voice barely recognizable as his own called. He cleared his grit-roughened throat and tried again. "Tuvok?"
There was a soft groan from below him somewhere.
"Hang on, Tuvok. I'll get help."
With his left arm useless, Tom used the pressure of his leaning his body forward against the line to hold himself upright. His hand flew from the line to his combadge and back again so quickly the line barely swayed.
The combadge failed to chirp.
He tried it again. And again. When he cut his fingers on the fourth try, he found out why there was no response. All that remained of the combadge was three loosely united pieces still attached to his outfit. There would be no help for the time being. When they failed to return by 1900 as expected, Voyager would start to wonder where they were and start trying to contact them. By his reckoning they still had about seven or so hours left to go before then. If they were going to survive it was up to him.
First he would need his light from his pack. Hopefully its beam would be strong enough to penetrate the darkness and he could find Tuvok. Using the same technique he had used for touching his combadge, he made an attempt to open his pack. It took five tries until he finally had the light. Tucking it under his chin, he was able to slide his wrist into the straps then use his mouth to tighten the fastenings and activate the light.
They were in a cavern. Huge stalactites and stalagmites shimmered eerily in the light from the wrist lamp. About five meters below him lay the injured Vulcan. His limbs were at awkward angles. Green blood was visible through the fine dusting of grit and fragments from the rock cavern roof and mineral "icicles" shattered by the rocks with which Tuvok had fallen. At the very least he was looking at broken arms and legs, internal bleeding, massive bruising, and a concussion. At the worst, a broken back and severed spinal cord. At least the groan told Tom the Vulcan still was alive.
Tom evaluated his situation. How was he going to lower himself down to his patient? With two good hands it would be a simple matter of releasing the safety and lowering himself by slowly playing out the line. With one hand it was more difficult. Difficult, but not impossible.
He dove into the pack for one of he climbing gloves he had discarded an hour after the climb began. Wriggling into it, he tugged it into place with his teeth.
For the first time since he had Awoken all those weeks ago, he was thankful for being an AlphaOmegan. The Implant he so despised took his fear-produced adrenaline and focused it for him. Whereas others would be panicking or surrendering to the pain from their injuries, he was perfectly calm. It summoned for him what strength he had left in his aching body and channeled it along with the adrenaline. He grabbed a hold of the rope as he brought his right foot up to toe off the safety.
Immediately, gravity tried to pull him downwards. His grip tightened. It only controlled his descent to a degree. After a minute, the rope finally cut through the supposedly indestructible climbing glove. He ignored the severing of muscles and tendons in his palm as he traveled rapidly downwards to the Security Chief.
The instant his boots touched the uneven floor, he collapsed, mere millimeters away from landing on the unconscious Vulcan. Clearly Tuvok was not the only one with a broken limb or two.
'Useless limbs or not, he *could* work like this,' he told himself. Images of his condition after his assault on Uucuu Prison came to mind, unbidden. While the Mission had been a success, Tom had escaped from there with a collapsed lung, five broken ribs, a major concussion, flesh cut away to the bone in seven places, and half-drowned. He had completed it, in that far worse condition, and he certainly could complete this self-appointed one now, in this condition.Propping himself up in a sitting position, he slipped off his wrist lamp and set it on a broken stalagmite. He angled it down so it illuminated as much of Tuvok and the area as possible. Mindful of his own so far unestablished injuries, he slid off the pack. Thankfully his medkit had survived his fall unharmed.
A quick scan with the tricorder confirmed what Tom's visual inspection had led him to suspect. He had been correct. Broken arms, legs, ribs, extensive internal bleeding.... It did not take someone with Tom's limited "advanced medical training" to know the prognosis was not good. Tuvok needed to get to Sickbay and get there fast or he was going to die.
There was a moan from the patient.
"Tuvok? Can you hear me?"
The brown eyes opened a crack. "Wha...?"
"The plateau collapsed," Tom explained. "There was a cavern inside. We're now in it."
"Hurt...."
Tom knew what the Vulcan was asking. "You're hurt bad. We need to get you back to Voyager immediately but my combadge is busted and yours doesn't look much better."
"Die..."
He opened his mouth to deny it then closed it again. This was Tuvok he was talking to, a Vulcan. Reassuring platitudes had no place here, especially not now. "If we don't get you back to Voyager A.S.A.P, yes."
"Katra...."
Tom frowned. "I don't understand."
"Katra.... My katra.... I must... pass on my... soul... essence...."
Something came back to Tom. Years ago, at the urging of his childhood doctor, Dr. Brown, he had read a biography of Dr. Leonard McCoy. Something about McCoy and Spock and Vulcans and souls.... It came to him. A dying Vulcan would mindmeld with another to pass along his consciousness. It would then be taken to Vulcan to join with the others so what that person had been and learned would not be lost for all time. That was what Tuvok was trying to say. He needed to pass on his "soul."
"But if you pass it along, won't your body die for sure? What if Voyager *does* find us in what would have been time to save you but your body's already dead?"
"Body will... live for a while.... Need to... take that chance...."
As the Vulcan's face
spasmed with pain, the pilot understood his meaning. Tuvok could not take the chance of dying without passing on his katra.
"I'll do it," Tom offered, ignoring the immediate objection a part of his brain tried to voice.
Brown eyes met blue and the axiom "beggars can't be choosers" seemed to pass from one to another.
"Can't... move arms...."
"Broken." Gently, Tom lifted the left hand with his right and fanned the fingers along his cheek and beside his nose.
Tuvok's face contorted in pain once more. After a moment, he appeared to force the pain away long enough to perform whatever mental task was necessary.
Tom's mind filled with sharp pain bright lights then he slumped backward unconscious.
-------
"Kathryn, I'm getting worried."
Kathryn looked up from her novel and into Chakotay's eyes. She had been quietly reading in her Ready Room for over two hours according to the chrono on her desktop computer. His entering, unannounced, into her private bastion of sanity was the first interruption in all that time.
"What is it, Chakotay?"
"Tom and Tuvok. They haven't returned and there's a storm entering their area. There was a bunch of our people at a resort not too far from there. They returned to the ship when the locals warned of the bad weather approaching. We've been monitoring it. The locals are right. It will be severe. Lots of rain, lightning and high winds."
"Have you tried raising Tom and Tuvok on their combadges?"
"We can't get through."
"Because of the storm?"
"We don't know. Maybe, maybe not. The storm is playing havoc with our sensor scans of the area. We can't cut through the interference well enough to get a lock on them to use the transporters." He paused. "Well, not and have a more than sixty-two percent chance of them surviving the transport."
"Is it still safe enough to take a shuttle down there?"
"I think so. Carey and Vorik are modifying the shields as we speak to improve their handling of the electrical discharges. Some of them are off the scale."
"As soon as they're done, go down there. Tom and Tuvok will have the sense to get into shelter when they see the weather changing. I'm sure they'll be fine but still I'd feel better with them up here."
"Agreed. Since there might be some climbing involved if they *are* in trouble, I'm going to take Neelix with me. He's getting climbing gear together as we speak."
"To be on the safe side, you'd better take someone with medical training."
"There's too much electrical activity to risk the Doctor. I'll see who he can send in his place."
"Bring them back safely, Chakotay."
He nodded and left.
-------
"How are you doing back there, Aidar?" Chakotay called from the pilot's seat of the shuttle.
In the back of the shuttle, the middle-aged crewwoman clutched her head with one hand and the seat restraints with the other. It had been her misfortune to be in Sickbay at the time Chakotay had asked the Doctor to send someone with medical training to the Shuttle Bay for an Away mission. Had she known the conditions they were to fly through, she would have asked for a motion sickness shot.
"Okay, sir," she answered, voice wobbly. "How much farther?"
The uneven voice worried Chakotay. He knew a bit about Crewwoman Aidar. She was a brilliant geophysicist who was rather clueless when it came to anything outside of her chosen field. She had made it through the Academy with the highest honors in geophysics while barely scraping by in other areas. Her file said she seemed to retain the information about subjects other than geophysics only long enough to pass her exams then promptly purged them from her mind to make way for new things. That had been the reason for assigning her to cross training. He and the Captain had hoped that by having her learn about the inner-workings of the other departments on the ship they would be able to reverse this quirk of hers. With the almost fear and uncertainty he was hearing now, it did not seem to be succeeding.
As he was about to question her readiness for this mission, another lightning bolt struck the shields. 'This planet really needs weather control satellites,' he thought. He remembered his time at the Academy on Earth. The weather stations had permitted it to rain when needed and where needed. Everything was nice, neat, and orderly. No unscheduled storms. No mass destruction. Never had he seen anything as fierce as this there or even on his home colony which did not have controlled weather systems as Earth did.
"Anything, Neelix?"
The Talaxian in the co-pilot's seat hunched closer to his instruments as if the closer his proximity the greater the chance of seeing the results he wanted. "No sign of them yet, Comman- There!"
"Give me the co-ordinates."
As Chakotay fed the co-ordinates into the helm, his heart gave a little jump. "Neelix, are you sure about this? The topography charts say there's a mountain directly *above* those co-ordinates."
"A valley maybe?"
"It would be on the charts. Hang on, you two, I'm going to get closer for a look."
The eyes of the three rescuers could not believe what they were seeing as Chakotay stationed the shuttle over the hole in the plateau. With a spotlight shining down from the underside of the shuttle and into the blackness, they could see on their monitors two crumpled figures. For millennia the cavern had been cut of from the rest of the planet with only the moisture that seeped in to breech its barriers. Now these two men and the rain that was pelting them had trespassed once and for all.
"This is beyond me," Aidar moaned, shaking her head at the results from the scans she was running on them with the shuttle's sensors. "I haven't been trained for this! We have to get them back to Voyager right away. Lieutenant Commander Tuvok is fading fast and I'm getting really strange readings from Lieutenant Paris."
"Do you think we can risk the transporters?" Neelix asked hurriedly. "If not, we could climb down and haul them up."
"The interference from the storm still is hampering the transporters. Unless..." Chakotay began to mutter to himself as he appraised the situation. After a few seconds, he nodded. "That should work." He looked at the others. "Neelix, get ready to beam them up. Aidar, break out the blankets. I'm going to drop the shields under the shuttle while extending the others to cap the hole. That should create a dome over the hole and block the interference so we'll be able to beam them up."
The other two nodded and readied themselves and their instruments and supplies.
"Okay, here we go."
As was par for the course where Tom Paris was concerned that day, the plan failed. The moment the shields touched the edges of the gaping hole, more debris broke loose from the edges and fell in. One particularly large stalactite impacted a scant meter from the men, pelting them with projectiles as it shattered. The shards rent Tom's back like a cat of nine tails. Fresh blood flowed from the wounds.
Blanching Chakotay scrambled for the controls to reverse his error. "Aidar?"
Rather pale herself, she tried to reassure him. "Looks worse than it is, Commander."
The Commander very much doubted that. "The transporters won't work without a complete seal to block out the storm. The edge of the hole is too fragile to touch, even with the shields. Neelix, go get the equipment ready and open the underside hatch. We'll have to climb down, put Tuvok and Tom in the litters, and hoist them up to the shuttle."
"Aye, Commander," the Talaxian agreed and rushed into the rear of the shuttle.
"Aidar, how much damage will we do to them by moving them bodily?"
She thought for a second. "They'll have to be immobilized before they are moved. Other than that, there's not a lot you can do to keep from injuring them further. Conversely, there's not a lot more you *can* do to them. But that's just a guess. I've only take a few classes with the Doctor and with Lieutenant Paris. If the Doctor had known this might have been the situation, he would have sent someone with more training, like Ensign Wildman. I'm only a geophysicist cross-training," she apologized.
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"Just do your best, Aidar. You stay on board the shuttle and monitor things from here. We'll send them up to you one at a time. Once the first litter gets close enough to the shuttle retract the ropes, re-establish the underside shields, and beam them in, litter and all, then reverse the process, sending down the second litter. That will be easier on them than you hauling them all the way in and risking them colliding with the sides of the hatch. Once both of them are up here, Neelix and I will climb back up."
"Retract the ropes, sir?"
"So they aren't sliced in two if something goes wrong when you re-establish the underside shields," he explained. There are safeties to prevent that sort of mishap but I want to play it safe."
"Oh."
"Ready, Commander," Neelix announced.
Chakotay double-checked the shuttle controls before joining Neelix in the rear. As Chakotay donned his own climbing harness, the cook/morale officer lowered a litter down to a position on the cavern floor a couple of meters from the victims. With a reassuring nod to the nervous Aidar, the two men swung out of the hatch and slowly lowered themselves down their respective ropes.
There was an audible gasp from Neelix when their feet touched the uneven floor. His eyes were transfixed on his bloodied friends in their awkward positions.
"Come on, Neelix," Chakotay urged, "let's get to work."
"Yes, Commander."
Tom groaned as they gently shifted him onto the litter and strapped him down. By the time he reached the shuttle and materialized inside, he was babbling incoherently in some language unfamiliar to the geophysicist. Leaving him strapped down, she administered a sedative to calm him and cut out the underside shields and lowered the ropes with the second litter.
When Tuvok arrived for her care, she was pleased to see he did not need sedation to keep him silent. After securing him and repeating her task, she spent her time while waiting for Neelix and the Commander by scanning the two unconscious men. She looked blankly at the readouts on the tricorder. Some of them meant nothing to her. She understood the notes about the broken bones, bleeding, and bruised organs. The significance of the other abnormal readings escaped her.