by L. A. Graf
Oben swallowed, took a shuddering breath. "No."
Chekov swore silently, but didn't release him. "Do you know what I'll do to you?"
"I don't care," the guardsman answered hoarsely. "You are only a man, not my Dohlman. You can only kill me."
In most cultures, that would have been enough.
"Lieutenant!"
"Oben!"
Chekov jerked at Uhura's startled shout, pulling back from Oben and earning an elbow in the stomach for his inattention. It was more a practical strike than a vengeful one—they rolled apart without further violence, and Chekov made sure to keep a firm grip on the knife in his hand. Just in case.
Uhura picked her way around the edge of the ruined building, one hand gripping the roll of astral charts, the other hovering near Israi's elbow without quite touching her. The Dohlman's angular face was drawn and pale, but she carried herself with stiff indignation. Even the shiny patch of bandage on her upper arm looked more like a warrior's badge than an inconvenience. She was trying to keep her expression haughty, Chekov suspected, but the flush of girlish anger that leapt into her cheeks when Uhura drew alongside her betrayed more than he thought she realized. Wherever they'd been, the women had been fighting.
As though called by some smell or sound with which only they were in tune, the cohort converged on their Dohlman like bees around a flower. Sulu and Mutchler—dusty and fussing, but apparently unhurt—were swept along with them, then abandoned when the guardsmen realized there was no more need for revenge. Chekov grabbed the geologist's tunic and pulled him off to one side; Sulu he gave credit for extracting himself from the swarm.
"Sorry," the helmsman whispered breathlessly, sidling up close beside Chekov. "Spock called to tell us Uhura and the Dohlman were safe right after you left." He sounded truly apologetic. "I was coming out to tell you."
"Your Glory …" Oben stumbled to his knees as though stunned. Perhaps Elasians believed in apparitions, and he thought she'd come back from the dead. Chekov couldn't be sure. "How …" he stammered. "How could you …?"
Israi scowled and looked past his head as though he were below contempt. "Can I not leave you alone? You squabble like monkeys the minute you are out of my sight!"
"We thought to avenge you!" one of the cohort shouted. He looked around for support from his fellows, but Chekov noticed most of them were focused on their Dohlman, eyes respectfully downcast. "This worthless human Dohlman—she held you in the falling building so as to murder you!"
Uhura's eyes flew wide with surprise, but Israi motioned her into silence with a single upraised hand. She raked chilly eyes across her cohort. "Who told you this?"
No one answered. Chekov fingered Oben's knife, studying its handle to keep from seeing if Uhura looked to him. He returned Sulu's coaxing elbow with an irritable jab of his own, but said nothing.
At last, Oben stretched himself face-first into the sand, his fingers stopping just before they brushed the Dohlman's feet. "It was I, Your Glory. I … I feared for you. . . ."
Her mouth twisted, and for a moment, Chekov thought she would kick the prostrate guard. Then something more childlike and delicate played across her features, and she stepped away from him. "The shaking earth tried to murder me," she said, very stiffly. "It was this Dohlman who saved my life."
The silence that fell across them burned with tension. Chekov frowned a question beyond the Dohlman to Uhura, still not understanding what exactly had gone on. The commander pointed upward, mouthing, Enterprise, and fluttered her fingers to mimic the transporter. That explained how Spock knew what had happened with the women. Then Uhura rubbed at her cheek and raised her eyebrows in a question of her own. Chekov shrugged, embarrassed, but didn't try to answer. Next time, he thought, wishing there was some way she could hear him, tell me you're beaming out before I get beat up for it.
"Where is Takcas?" Israi asked. It seemed to soothe her to have imperious questions to ask and orders to give.
"He left with the dark human male," someone answered contritely. "They ran to the other side of the compound, and have not yet returned."
Israi nodded, and stepped away from them in an obvious air of dismissal. Her feet only barely missed treading on Oben's hands, but the guardsman stayed immobile, hardly even breathing. "When Takcas returns, tell him to beat Oben until sundown."
Uhura hurried after her, hand outstretched as if to stop her. "Your Glory—"
"Say nothing," Israi instructed her without turning. "Or I will have your cohort beaten, as well." She pointed at Oben, and the rest of the cohort obediently looked where she aimed. "His is the punishment for any who try to choose my enemies for me." She glanced at Uhura as though she wanted to say something more, but her resolve seemed to fail at the very last instant. Squaring her shoulders, she turned away with regal indifference and waved the commander aside. "As for you—you may go until I need you … Your Glory."
Chapter Eleven
THE LAST fire-gold sliver of Rakatan's sun slipped below the flank of the volcano, leaving a deep rose afterglow huddled in the western sky. A hand fell on Uhura's shoulder, warm against the sudden high-altitude chill.
"It's over," Sulu said.
Uhura lifted her head from her arms, but it took her a moment to be able to listen for the sound she'd blocked out of her mind an hour before. The distant lash of a whip rising and falling no longer echoed off the rock wall behind the Elasian mining camp. She heard nothing else in its place, neither groans nor whimpers nor curses.
"Do you think he passed out?" Uhura asked, looking across her shoulder at Chekov. No matter how annoyed she had been at Oben, she couldn't believe that any sentient being deserved this much punishment for a simple error in judgment. The fact that the Elasians accepted it without question made her aware of how truly alien they were, despite their superficially similar appearance.
"I doubt it." Chekov's face was half-hidden by the cold pack he kept pressed to his swollen cheek, making his expression unreadable. "A direct hit with a photon torpedo might make an Elasian pass out, but not much else would."
Uhura shivered. "But he hasn't made a sound since they started. . . ."
"That's because he'd rather die than cry out," Chekov said matter-of-factly.
Sulu looked up from the remains of the tricorder they had salvaged from the Dohlman's quarters. He'd been tinkering with it all evening, substituting spare components from his shuttle repair kit in a vain attempt to make it work. "And you like these people?"
"I never said I liked them." Chekov dropped the cold pack, showing them his scowl as well as the spreading bruise across his cheekbone. "I said I understood them."
"Well, I'm glad someone around here does. I can't decide whether Israi is a psychopathic monster or just a royally spoiled brat." Uhura paused, then shook her head, annoyed with herself for the comment. "No, that's not fair. She's only what her culture made her."
"And it made her to be an absolute despot," Sulu said soberly.
"That doesn't matter." Despite—or perhaps because of—his bruised cheek, Chekov's gaze had lost none of its Slavic intensity. "Commander, our mission here isn't to understand the Elasians or to like them. It's to find out whether or not they have a valid claim to this planet. Have we done that yet?"
"I'm not sure." Uhura flung an exasperated look at the dead tricorder. "I had just gotten the last translation from Israi when the earthquake hit. I haven't had a chance to correlate her information with the original astral chart."
Silence fell, strained and tense with frustration. From the open shuttle behind them, Uhura could hear the clatter of plates and the hum of the food synthesizer as Murphy constructed their evening meal. As the junior member of the landing party, the task of making supper had fallen to him. Uhura looked up when the dark-skinned security guard emerged from the shuttle at last, more than willing to be distracted from her worries.
"So, Ensign, what have you persuaded the synthesizer to give us this time?"
"Vegetable soup and
cheese sandwiches, sir." Murphy slanted a doubtful look at his tray of steaming bowls. "At least, I think it's vegetable soup. It has some little green things floating around in it."
Sulu groaned and fell over backward, clutching the broken tricorder against his chest. "Little green things? I have to eat little green things for supper?"
Chekov snorted, taking the bowl Murphy apologetically offered him. "Why not? You do it all the time on shore leave."
"That's different," the helmsman informed him, sitting up to take his own bowl. "Those are real green things, not synthesized green things."
Murphy cleared his throat. "Should I take some supper out to Dr. Mutchler, sir?"
Uhura glanced around, only now noticing the geologist's absence. He'd been so uncharacteristically quiet since they'd left the Dohlman's ruined quarters that she'd forgotten about him. "Where is Dr. Mutchler?"
"On the other side of the shuttle. I've been keeping an eye on him from inside." Murphy pointed under Gamow's stubby nose, and Uhura finally saw the geologist, prowling restlessly back and forth across the dry streambed that was their new landing site. "I asked him about supper before I went in, but he said he was busy taking atmospheric measurements and didn't have time to eat."
"Well, take him some anyway," Uhura ordered. "And make sure he eats it."
"Yeah, that way we can all suffer together." Sulu poked one of the green chunks in his soup with a suspicious spoon, putting it down untasted as soon as Murphy disappeared behind the shuttle. "You know, I can't remember the last time we had good food on a planetary mission. Do you think the synthesizers have been programmed to—hey!"
Uhura looked up from her soup and blinked in surprise. In reaching for a sandwich, Sulu had slid the tricorder from his lap to the ground beside him. It hit with a small thump, rattled briefly, then warbled into glowing life.
"Hey!" Sulu dropped his sandwich and knelt down beside the battered instrument, rubbing red-gray dust off its display screen. "I think it's showing us the Elasians' astral chart!"
A spurt of relief ran through Uhura, easing some of the tension that had coiled in her stomach. "Oh, thank God." She set her soup bowl down and went to join Sulu, pulling her salvaged computer notepad from her trouser pocket. "See if you can get it to download my translations onto the map. The entries are keyed to the number of pictograph symbols in each star's name."
Sulu plugged the notepad into the tricorder's data port and tapped a command into the smaller instrument. It whirred and clicked as it dumped its file of translated Elasian names and dates into the tricorder's memory. Uhura sat cross-legged in front of it, propping her elbows on her knees and her chin in her palms while she watched the spiderweb lines of Elasian pictographs transform into English letters. "Chekov—"
"I'm here." The Russian hunkered down on her other side, squinting at the screen. The copied image of Israi's chart flickered slightly, some bands of pixels refusing to light even when Sulu tapped gingerly on the display. "Maybe we should take this into the shuttle and transfer it to a bigger screen."
Sulu made a wry face. "I'd rather not. Whatever circuit connection's loose in there, it's not one I can replace. Better not to move it while it feels like working." The helmsman studied the tricorder, his face hushed with concentration. "I recognize most of these systems," he said at last. "But the distances between them don't look right. Is this an old chart, Uhura?"
"One hundred Standard years old, according to the tricorder's spectral analysis."
"Then we're seeing galactic rotational drift. That would explain the change in distances."
"Where did these discovery dates come from?" Chekov demanded. "I can't believe the Elasians recorded their history in Federation Standard years."
"No, they used a dynastic chronology. I translated the dates using Israi's royal genealogy." Uhura pointed at the star system at the center of the chart. "The oldest discovery date she gave me was for their neighbor, Troyius: twentieth year of the reign of Teslah, ninth Dohlman in the line of Sevuth. According to my calculations, that works out to about two hundred and thirty-five Standard years ago."
Chekov drummed his fingers on his cold pack thoughtfully. "That sounds about right. According to the military history of this quadrant, the Elasians launched their earliest nuclear-powered spaceships about two hundred and fifty years ago."
"And it makes sense that they would discover Troyius first," Sulu agreed. "It's in the system of their home star. Even those old Elasian fission-powered ships could have made that journey fast enough. What could they do, Chekov, about two-tenths of light-speed?"
"Maximum," his former navigator agreed. He gnawed on his lower lip, a habit he had when he was calculating something in his head. "At that speed, it would have taken them four years round trip to Troyius. Not much worse than Earth's first mission to Mars."
"Well, what about Rakatan?" Uhura leaned across Sulu to tap the five-planet system in the far corner of the astral chart. The line of English text displayed under it flickered, then steadied again. "It's got the latest discovery date on the chart—only one hundred and five Standard years ago."
"Ouch!" Sulu made another face. "That's fifty years before the Vulcans ran across it."
"I know." Uhura looked up at her companions, frowning. "But something about that doesn't sound right to me. I just can't put my finger on it. . . ."
Silence fell again as they peered at the flickering screen, but this time it was the comfortable working silence of a crew used to solving problems together. Sulu broke it with a single triumphant word.
"Time."
Uhura blinked at him, unsure of what he meant, but Chekov's indrawn breath told her he understood. He dropped his cold pack again, this time to stare at her. "You said this chart was one hundred Standard years old, yes?"
She nodded, still puzzled. "That's how old the tricorder said the plastic was."
"So only five years elapsed between the Elasians discovering the Ordover system and making the chart." Sulu shook his head. "That's not enough time."
Chekov grunted. "Not a hundred years ago, not for the Elasians. They were still using fission-powered ships when they came under Federation control."
Uhura felt her breath catch in her throat when she saw where they were going. "So one hundred years ago, they couldn't travel faster than light!" She darted a look at Sulu. "How far away is Elas from Rakatan?"
"Fifteen and a half light-years," the helmsman answered. "At sublight speeds, it should have taken the Elasians at least eighty Standard years to get home and report their discovery."
"Not five." Chekov scowled, then winced and brought the cold pack up to his cheek again as the expression tugged at his bruises. "Commander, this chart is a forgery."
"Or at least this entry on it is." Uhura took in a deep breath, the vague sense of unease that had been plaguing her finally put to rest. "I thought the Ordover system looked a little sharper than the others on the chart."
"Added later to an authentic map," Sulu suggested. "That way the tricorder wouldn't detect it unless you specifically told it to analyze the age of the ink it was drawn with." He glanced at Uhura, his smooth Asian face barely visible in the darkness. They had been so intent on the tricorder screen, Uhura hadn't noticed Rakatan's day-night terminus creeping over them. "Do you think the Dohlman would agree to that test?"
Uhura surprised herself with a snort. "I don't think Israi would agree to breathe right now if I told her to." She saw her teammates' perplexed looks and sighed. "She's feeling a little put upon because Dr. Chapel tranquilized her on board the Enterprise. I think she's holding me personally responsible for the insult since I'm the Dohlman of the ship."
"So what do we do?" Chekov asked irritably. "Wait for Her Glory to get over her temper tantrum while buildings fall down on our heads?"
Uhura tapped a finger against her lips, considering their options. "I think we already have enough information for the captain to act on. Let's call him." She reached for her communicator. "Maybe he
can put some pressure on—"
A strangled choke from the darkness interrupted her. Sulu and Chekov sprang to their feet, closing in on either side of Uhura, but it was too late. Without so much as a foot scrape of warning, a wall of Elasians materialized out of the night. Momentarily blinded by her focus on the bright tricorder screen, Uhura couldn't make out their expressions, but she saw the shivering glints of starlight that marked Klingon disruptors. She didn't need the fierce grip of Chekov's hand on her wrist to warn her against activating her communicator.
Something hit the ground, the solid thud of a body falling. After a moment, Uhura's night vision cleared enough to show her Murphy's unconscious body sprawled before them. Behind him, a large chunk disengaged from the solid wall of cohort and resolved into their leader. With one hand, Takcas held Scott Mutchler pinioned in a taut arc of pain. With the other, the kessh held his own disruptor steady against the geologist's throat.
"Thieves and liars." Takcas's voice sounded deeper than usual, as if he spoke through fiercely clenched teeth. "Throw down your communication devices or you will die in howling agony."
Uhura believed him. Carefully maneuvering her communicator up from belt level, she tossed it into the open space between them. Reluctantly, Chekov and Sulu followed her example.
"Weapons, too."
In the lifeless night silence of Rakatan, Uhura could hear the tense breathing of the man beside her. She reached back and gripped Chekov's forearm, squeezing it as hard as she could. She might not understand male Elasians the way the security chief seemed to, but even she could sense that this was no hormone-driven confrontation. If Chekov didn't obey them, he would be killed.
Uhura heard the small but unmistakable rasp of gritted teeth, then Chekov's phaser followed the communicators onto the pile. "Are you going to tell us what this is all about?" the Russian asked evenly.
"Do you tell a worm his crimes before you crush him?" Takcas stepped back and motioned at his cohort. Four of them circled around to drag Sulu and Chekov away from Uhura while a fifth burly shadow stooped slowly and painfully to pick up the equipment. Uhura stared at Oben, barely able to believe that anybody bruised as badly as he was on chest, arms, and back could still walk, much less want to obey the kessh who had beaten him for hours. Chekov had been right about Elasian pride and endurance.