Sisko waved a hand, impatient as always with the dry basics of biology and planetology. "What about the escape shuttle? Any sign of it?"
"Not so far." The Defiant cruised slowly over the planet's unglaciated polar region, then down across its other hemisphere. Here, night was falling across a second enormous blue-green sea, this one even more thickly laced with surf-fringed tropical islands. "Life-sign scans are still showing only native vertebrates and marine life -- no, wait... We've got a hit!"
"The crew?" Kira demanded.
"I don't know..." Dax flicked her eyes back and forth across her panel, trying to absorb every reading at once. "I'm showing about twenty life-signs on one of the small islands in that central archipelago. They're masked by some kind of phased energy field -- I think it might be the shield generator from the shuttle."
"What about the shuttle itself?" Sisko asked.
Dax shook her head at her display. "I'm not picking up any kind of equipment or power-source reading at all. Just the field interference and the --" A flutter in the readings distract ed her. "Julian, come take a look at this." She leaned to one side to let the doctor bend over her shoulder. "Is this a problem with my scanning filters, or are almost all of these life-forms injured?"
Bashir tapped a query on her computer, cursing softly at the response he saw. "There's nothing wrong with your filters. These are humanoid readings, and at least thirteen of them are injured, seven critically. Three of them are nearly dead."
A grim silence fell over the Defiant while everyone stared at Armageddon's unrevealing freckled oceans as if they could somehow answer all their questions. "That must be the Victoria Adams's crew," O'Brien said at last, voicing the conclusion that none of them wanted to reach.
"But there were thirty-two passengers and crew on the Victoria Adams," Kira protested. "You're saying half of them are dead or dying?"
"I'm saying they're in urgent need of medical help, whoever they are." Bashir glanced across at O'Brien. "Chief, can we transport them straight to the medical bay?"
"Not as long as that shield generator is going. And I doubt they're going to drop it -- they're probably using it to try and ward off comet impacts."
"Very well." Bashir straightened and turned toward Sisko, suddenly wearing the innate dignity that his strong sense of medical ethics could bestow on him despite his youth and joie de vivre. "Captain, request permission to take an emergency medical team to the planet's surface."
"Granted," Sisko said without hesitation. "Major Kira, go with him. And Dax" -- he fixed her with a not-entirely humorous glower -- "this had better be the end of your complaining about not going on the Victoria Adams, old man." Dax winced, but the acidic comment couldn't entirely quench the scientific enthusiasm bubbling through her.
Worf glanced over his shoulder, furrowed brow drawn into tighter lines than usual. "Captain, I am the obvious choice to accompany Dr. Bashir as protection. As chief tactical officer --"
"I'm going to need you here in case the Klingons show up and challenge us," Sisko returned. "Don't worry, Mr. Worf. I'm sure Dax and the major can take care of themselves."
The Klingon grunted and threw Dax the severely reproving look she was never quite sure how to interpret. "Under normal circumstances, I would agree," he said grimly.
"How reassuring." Dax set her sensors on autoscan until her replacement could arrive on the bridge. Kira was already accompanying Bashir to the turbolift, leaving Odo in sole command of her console. As she turned to follow them, Dax paused only long enough to blow Worf a facetious kiss. It made him wince and look away, just as she'd expected. "You be careful, too. You're going to be getting bombarded by as many comet fragments as I am."
The chief tactical officer growled up at the view-screen, although Dax didn't think it was the view that had enraged him. "Somehow," he said between his teeth, "I think the comets are going to be the least of our problems."
Bashir's first impression of Armageddon was that it stank like a butchery.
The stench slapped over them with a force completely overriding any images of dust-shrouded sun, crystal blue ocean, or pearlescent sand. Bashir brought his arm up to shield his nose and mouth. He knew it was pointless, a blind make-work instinct, even as his left hand scrambled to open his medical kit and dig out the tube of olfacan by feel.
He'd carried olfacan in every medkit, and stored some in half a dozen sick bay drawers, ever since his first medical school autopsy. Logic understood that illness could be ugly. Sight could be trained to see the person beyond radiation burns, to understand the pathology of trauma and disease. But smell spoke directly to those most primitive places of one's brain; it simply refused to be reasoned with. Still, after half a lifetime of downplaying his own assets for the sake of peer acceptance, it had taken him by surprise to discover a weakness he hadn't suspected. Later, he would try to convince himself that it was his supernaturally acute sense of smell that had betrayed him. At the time, his stomach gave in to a fight-or-flight reflex that no amount of intellectual resistance could override, and he'd fled the autopsy theatre in an effort to minimize his humiliation. It was afterward that an older resident introduced him to the joys of an anesthetized olfactory nerve -- a fingerful of colorless ointment across the upper lip, and even Bashir's keen sense of smell faded into blissful nonexistence for a good two to three hours. Years later, he still greeted the cessation of smell with a kind of guilty relief; the animal mind at work again, convincing him that no one with a half-million credits worth of biological enhancements should need something so trivial as protection from unpleasant odors. But the guilt didn't stop him from using it.
Warded against his baser instincts, he extended the tube to his physician's assistant, Heiser. The young lieutenant took a grateful smear with one index finger and passed half along to nurse Ledonne. Bashir twisted to include Dax and Kira in his offer, explaining, "It's a nasal anesthetic. It'll help block out the smell."
Kira gave a wry little snort. It was one of many sounds Bashir had learned to associate with the major's private conviction that he had the intestinal fortitude of a sand flea. "No, thanks. I learned to ignore worse than this a long time ago."
Of course. There was little Starfleet could expose her to that was as bad as Cardassian prison camps. Bashir wondered if she'd ever considered that the ability to tolerate something unpleasant didn't obligate you to do so. Or maybe that was more of what she labeled sand flea thinking, and not even worth mentioning.
He slipped the olfacan back into its protective sleeve and worked loose his tricorder instead. "My God..." He may not have been able to smell, but his eyes still stung; he felt like he was going to sneeze. "How many crew members did Victoria Adams carry?"
"Smells like thousands." Heiser scrubbed at his sparse blond mustache as though trying to help the olfacan work. "Should we do a reconnoiter?"
"No." Dax glanced up from her own singing tricorder in response to Bashir's startled glance. "Those aren't dead bodies," she clarified, dipping a nod toward her scan results. "Not humanoid dead bodies, at least. If the Victoria Adams crashed here, she did it too recently to allow for this level of putrefaction. Besides, we aren't close enough to the source of that shield generator to be smelling any corpses from that site." She snapped shut her tricorder and repositioned it on her belt, pinching at her nose again despite the olfacan. "Let's get going before this smell makes me vomit."
But the stench got worse instead of better as they made their way down the long curve of beach. Smooth, white sand -- so fine that it packed almost as solidly as soil where the waves shushed up to dampen it -- made a level shelf more than thirty meters wide for as far as Bashir could see. To his right, tropical blue water undulated like a platter of softened glass, bending itself into mountains, valleys, and gently stroking tongues of wave. On his left, what looked to be a wall of woven sticks and vines rose to more than twice his height, its seaward side decorated by draperies of mummified kelp and tangles of long-dead detritus. Some sort of w
eather wall to protect against ocean storms? Erected by -- who? The crash survivors? The natives? No, there was too much greenery beyond it, just as high and twisted as the wall fronting the shore, and stretching as far to that direction as the ocean stretched in the other. And Armageddon's volatile local environment made the possibility of sentient natives more than just highly unlikely. It was some sort of natural vegetative feature, then -- the planet's attempt to defend itself against itself.
At first, Bashir thought perhaps the rotten odor originated with this littered hedge. He and his assistants were sufficiently shielded by the olfacan to no longer notice what smells surrounded them. But Trills apparently didn't respond as well to the anesthetic, and Kira had refused it from the outset. Bashir rather easily tracked the strength of the stench through the simple expedient of watching the women's faces. Dax squinted to protect her eyes from the fumes, and Kira's already wrinkled nose wrinkled even further in disgust. It wasn't until they stepped in front of a gaping rent in the wall of brush that whatever they'd been smelling must have rolled out in force: Dax grunted a little sound of disgust, and Kira jerked away from the opening as though she'd been slapped. Even Bashir imagined he detected a pungent belch of stench too strong for the olfacan to fully counter. Still, it was the tacky blaze of clotted blood darkening broken foliage that jolted his heart up into his throat. It was already too old and rotten to tell if it had come from any familiar species. Touching a hand to his tricorder as though it were a talisman, he stepped gingerly into the crushed-down path and forced himself to keep a measured pace until he reached the end.
"Julian!"
The passage widened abruptly into a lidless natural amphitheater, its sides as smashed and shattered as the corridor. He meant to call back a reassurance to Dax. Instead, he looked up at the mountain of gore in front of him and coughed abruptly into one hand. There was a horrible moment in which he thought he'd be sick even with his immunity to the fetor, but he managed to swallow his stomach under control just as Kira trotted up from behind. He heard something that might have been a stunted sneeze, then the major croaked softly, "Maybe I'll take a noseful of that stuff after all."
In all his life, Bashir could not remember imagining something so wretchedly horrific. Carcasses -- each easily three tons even with skins and half their internal organs removed -- lay piled within a veil of buzzing flies and decomposition gases. They'd been stacked higher than Bashir's own head, but the combined weight of the upper layers had crushed the bodies on the bottom until only shattered bone ends and the occasional rotting hock jutted up from the bloody mud into which they'd been pressed. Some clinically detached segment of his brain noted the internal structures that said they were probably mammalian, and the flat, cylindrical teeth which suggested they were herbivorous. Some more emotional part of him struggled to pin a number on how many bodies one needed to build a pile of carnage five meters high and perhaps another twenty meters long.
He felt the warmth of someone close on his left elbow several moments before noticing a science tricorder's distinctive warble. "In case it matters," Dax said quietly, "I was right -- these carcasses are definitely too old to have anything to do with the Victoria Adams."
It was no consolation at all, and. Bashir bitterly envied Dax the lifetimes of experience that let her face something like this without losing composure. "If not the survivors, then what?" Relief throbbed in his stomach when he finally dragged his eyes from the slaughter. "The comet impacts?"
Dax shook her head. "Even the nearest comet damage is too recent."
"What else could have killed so many animals at one time?"
"Spears."
He didn't want to look at Kira -- he'd have to glimpse the mutilated pile as he turned, and everything inside him wanted to avoid that more than he was comfortable admitting. Dax rescued him by tossing a silent question at the major over Bashir's shoulder, then looking where Kira apparently gestured. "And somebody field-dressed them, too," the major went on. "I don't think they normally come with exposed organs and no hair."
Dax nodded slowly, thoughtfully. "You're right..."
"Do you think it was natives?" Bashir asked. Partly because the question of intelligent life brought to mind his original thoughts about the weather wall, and partly because he didn't want to seem so completely weak-kneed that he wasn't even following their conversation.
Dax glanced at him with a scholarly frown, as though prepared to debate all aspects of that question in the interests of science. Then something in his face softened her expression. Bashir suspected it was his waxen pallor, or perhaps the first hint of nauseated tears in his eyes. Whatever the cause, she slipped her arm across his shoulders and turned him back toward the beach with its virginal stretch of bright white sand.
"I don't know enough about the planet yet to even take a guess," she said, voice smooth with equal parts consideration and sympathy. "We'll ask the survivors about it when we find them."
By the time they reached the survivors' settlement, natives were the last thing on Bashir's mind.
"Cholegh'a' chIm ghobDu'wI!'
Dax's voice -- raised and rough strained to bark the words with what Bashir assumed was either authority or challenge-- fell flat amongst wreckage no longer tall enough to encourage echoes. From inside the shimmer of force field, swarthy, chiseled faces lifted, turned to them with no particular malice or interest. They'd apparently finished salvaging hours ago; by now, adult and sub-adult males clustered with adult females in the meager shade of the weather wall, well away from the shield's humming margins yet well protected by its umbrella. Their bodies were lowered into deep squats, their hands balanced on their knees as though prepared to spring into action despite the weariness etched into all their faces. Klingon faces. Bruised and weary and creased with despair, but still undeniably Klingon klingon sapiens. Bashir counted less than ten scattered about the tumbles of debris, standing or sitting. Judging from the bright blossoms of Klingon blood splashed across every survivor's clothing, there were at least that many again wounded or already dead. He saw no sign of Humans.
"NgliS Hol Sajatlh'a'?"
It hadn't been a big village even before its devastation. A row of strongly woven huts, opposing ends open to the air, seemed to have been extruded directly from the weather wall. They were little more than a scatter of twisted sticks now. The shield's iridescent bubble covered only the centermost sections of the camp, leaving exposed blankets and racks that had no doubt filled the tiny hovels only a few days before. The blurry touch of Armageddon's sun warmed hoops of braided vine and their circles of stretched hide, while hammocks of desiccating organ meat slowly dried beside what looked like racks of some frothy yellow gland. It was an impressive collection of foodstuffs, obviously the bounty from the hunting "scraps" the landing party had already found. This was certainly no temporary castaways' camp, and couldn't have been erected in the short time since Victoria Adams had reported Klingons in the area.
Dax halted with her toes just brushing the terminal margin of the shield. "Devwi'ra 'Iv?" Tiny sparks skittered in the sand between her boots.
Bashir wasn't sure if it was the Trill's words that ignited the flutter of interest among the silent Klingons, or the distinctly Klingon bravura of her approach. Whichever it was, something passed from Klingon to Klingon on a chain of turning heads until one of them rose to his feet from amidst a ring of other adult males. Bashir thought he recognized the arrogance of a Klingon commander despite the warrior's limping stride.
He didn't even stand as tall as Dax, but the broadness of his chest and limbs betrayed a strength easily a match for the entire landing party. Shoulder-length hair, still curling and black with Klingon vigor, went well with an equally vigorous beard but not so well with the bruise-deep shadows of exhaustion beneath his eyes. Despite that, and despite the swollen foot that he favored when he walked, Bashir saw none of the gauntness of long-term starvation in the warrior. The absence of traditional Klingon armor only accentuated the ripple
and bunch of his muscles, the smoothly filled planes of his broad face. It was clear why his crew felt secure enough to waste so much of the animals they'd hunted and killed, rather than utilizing the whole.
Bashir made an effort to push that last bitter thought away. For all he knew, the meat was inedible and the skin and glands were the only parts the Klingons could use. Besides, the entire planet would probably be blasted clear of life in just another few days. It hardly seemed reasonable to hold ecological grudges. The bandy-legged commander looked as though he might split the seams of his dusty civilian tunic when he halted just opposite the shield from Dax and flexed his shoulders. "I never believed I would someday be happy to stand unarmed among Starfleet officers." His Standard was clear, though heavily accented. If he'd meant his greeting as a joke, it didn't sound like a happy one. Thumping one fist against his chest, he rumbled, "I am Gordek, of the House of Gordek."
Dax lifted one eyebrow in what Bashir took to be surprise, but said nothing to expound on her gesture. "Lieutenant Commander Dax, from space station Deep Space Nine." She apparently felt no need to reciprocate Gordek's theatrical physicality. Bashir was just as glad. "This is Major Kira. And Dr. Bashir, Lieutenant Heiser, and Ensign Le-Donne."
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