by L. A. Graf
"You didn't transport these people a minute too soon," the doctor said by way of greeting. He gestured to the patient in front of them, then again at a woman who lay equally still in a bed across the room. "These two were half-dead when they got here. If Spock hadn't warned me to expect some cases of vacuum exposure, I would have lost them both. Why'd you wait so long?"
Kirk couldn't take his eyes from the young man's frostbitten lips, or the spiderweb pattern of vacuum bruises lacing across both cheeks and eyes. "A Dohlman got in my way." When McCoy shot an anxious glare at him, Kirk made himself look up and smile thinly. "A Dohlman in a Klingon heavy frigate, Bones. Don't worry."
The doctor grunted. "It's my job to worry."
"Where's Dr. Bascomb?"
"In my office." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder without turning, his attention suddenly caught by something he didn't like about the placement of his patient's IV. "She's examining some of her precious seismic records on my medical computer," he grumbled as he fiddled the line back to where he wanted it. "I splinted a bad ankle fracture for her a little bit ago, but she refused to sit and rest until I let her look at her data." He shook his head in grim disapproval. "I should have sedated her."
Thinking of his own flippant comment to Chapel, Kirk chuckled softly and rubbed at his eyes.
"Any word yet from the landing party?"
This time it was the captain's turn to shake his head and sigh. "Not yet. Spock's trying to raise the shuttle now, but that's about all we can do. I don't want to try and beam anyone else past the Crown Regent until I know for sure what we've got going on down there."
"Well," McCoy drawled, a little too seriously for Kirk's tastes. "Now that's an uncommon bit of discretion." He glanced sideways at his captain, but Kirk decided he had more important things to do than let his chief surgeon bait him.
"Thank you for your input," he said dryly. "I'm going to talk with Dr. Bascomb now." But he clapped the doctor on the shoulder before leaving, just to let McCoy know Kirk didn't hold his ill tempers against him.
Bascomb had left McCoy's office door open, but the dimness of the inside light made it clear she wasn't inviting visitors. Kirk paused in the doorway, his hand near the lighting control even though he made no move to touch it. "Dr. Bascomb?"
She glanced up from the terminal screen in front of her. "Captain." McCoy's chair had been scooted back from the desk so she could stand with her injured leg bent, foot draped across the chair's seat. One hand braced against the top of the terminal while the other traced dancing rows of multicolored lines as they snaked and jerked across the screen.
"Doctor …" Kirk came farther into the darkened room, stopping just at the edge of the cluttered desk. "I … I'd like to apologize." Such words, like always, never came easily. "With the Enterprise in the system, that Elasian attack on your observatory should never have happened. I am truly sorry."
Bascomb shrugged off his apology, not even glancing up from her data. "Captain Kirk, maybe you can read the minds of alien female warlords, but I sure as hell can't. Who could have guessed that the Crown Regent would want to shoot at us?" She keyed through a sequence of codes on the terminal screen. "Other than disrupting our research, it didn't accomplish a damned thing."
"I think it was the Elasian equivalent of a warning shot." He took a deep breath, trying to decide how best to ask his next question. At last, he had no choice but to settle for his usual frankness. "How many people did you lose?"
"Three." Then she blinked and looked away from the terminal, a little real-time intellect coming back into her eyes. "No, make that four. Park, Dembosky, Poole, and Metcalfe." Her mouth twisted into a sour scowl. "The whole damned geophysical team." She thumped a finger against the squiggle lines on the screen. "Do you know what that means?"
Kirk leaned over next to her to peer at the screen. The horizontal bands of jumping color looked like little more than a collection of erratic alien heartbeats. "No."
Bascomb sighed and dropped her hand. "Neither do I. I'm a petrologist, not a geophysicist! All I'm sure of is that this damn seismic activity is not an aftershock from yesterday's earthquake." She sank against the chair back with a frustrated grumble and wrapped her forearm over the top of her head in profound thought. "Finally, after all these months, Rakatan Mons starts to do something interesting, and I've lost all the people who might understand what it means."
Kirk knew from years of dealing with Spock that what a scientist considered "interesting" wasn't always what a layperson meant by the term. "Dr. Bascomb, are you saying Rakatan Mons might erupt?"
She snorted. "Captain, eruption is what volcanoes do.
And with all the earthquake activity we've had lately—well, let me just say that if I were you, I'd keep an eye on my orbit from now on." Kirk frowned at her, and she added, smiling, "When Rakatan Mons goes up, it's going to blast a lot of the planet straight up through the atmosphere and out into space. I wouldn't recommend being in the way when it happens."
Kirk's mind immediately fragmented into a dozen different task options. "How long before the eruption starts?"
"I just told you!" Bascomb cried, flinging wide her arms. "I don't know!" She slapped a hand against the terminal as though disciplining a recalcitrant child. "That seismic pattern appeared on our network yesterday, but I don't have a guess what it means. Hell, for all I know, it's Wendy Metcalfe's magma men chattering to each other about the weather!"
"I believe that particular type of harmonic tremor commonly signifies that molten magma is within a kilometer of the surface."
Kirk turned at the sound of his first officer's voice. Spock nodded a succinct acknowledgment of his captain's presence, and Kirk gestured with his hand for Spock to turn up the lights as he entered.
"Are you a geophysicist?" Bascomb hobbled around behind Kirk, gripping his shoulders for support as she beamed hopefully at Spock. "That would be really convenient."
Spock lifted an eyebrow as if surprised. "Not at all, Doctor. I merely reviewed the studies done by your staff while we were en route to Rakatan. According to that data, a swarm of small seismic tremors typically precedes the onset of a phreatomagmatic eruption on this planet." He stepped up next to Kirk to examine the terminal screen. "Unless I am mistaken, the rate at which the magmatic front is rising can be determined from—"
"Spock …" Kirk tried to keep the impatience out of his tone, but guessed from the cool look of reproach on his first officer's face that he hadn't been entirely successful. "You can play geophysicist later. Did you manage to locate the landing party's shuttle?"
"Unfortunately, Captain, yes."
Kirk lifted his own brows in surprise. "Unfortunately?"
"Just a few moments ago, Ensign Ashcraft intercepted a subspace communication from Commander Uhura on the Gamow. We do not yet know the circumstances surrounding the contact, but before an accurate fix on the shuttle's coordinates could be determined, Gamow's transponder signal ceased."
Kirk chewed his lower lip. "Deliberately disengaged?" He didn't know whether it would occur to Chekov to disable the transponder to keep the Elasians from tracking Gamow, or even whether the lieutenant would do such a thing when he must know it meant the Enterprise wouldn't be able to find them, either.
Spock's answer erased what little hope he might have had in that scenario. "Unlikely, Captain. The transponder's final signal was the automatic distress call sent when a shuttle's engines are too heavily damaged to allow her to fly."
Kirk clenched his teeth, not wanting to admit that a distress call followed so closely by total transponder failure could only mean one thing.
"Captain," Spock said evenly for both of them, "I am forced to conclude that the shuttle Gamow has crashed."
Chapter Fifteen
CONSCIOUSNESS crawled over Chekov, tasting like vomit and dirty prefab floor.
He pushed weakly up to his elbows, and a spasm of nausea cut his arms out from under him and dropped him straight back down again. He lay very still aft
er that. Sensation gnawed its way back into his limbs and spine in burning tremors, and a hoarse, distant howling roared inside his skull. For a man who thought he'd wake up dead beneath the boots of an Elasian cohort, he knew he should be grateful to suffer only the system shock associated with a heavy phaser stun. Instead, he was just grateful that he'd never gotten around to eating any of the food Murphy prepared for them just before their capture—it meant he had nothing more in his stomach to throw up, even if he'd found the strength to do it.
Pulling his arms beneath him one hand at a time, he struggled stiffly to all fours. Simple dizziness swept over him this time, and he was able to rock slowly back onto his heels with his hands pressed flat to the dirt-strewn flooring. His cheek still throbbed from Oben's earlier blow, and his hand trembled when he lifted it to comb through his hair and rub at the back of his neck. Then, as he straightened gingerly into a back-arching stretch, the wail of sound he'd taken for tormented nerves in his own ears heaved a racking breath and howled with renewed vigor. A man, Chekov realized with a jolt. He was hearing a man's voice—screaming.
He flashed his eyes open on a half-lit storage room, encircled by grim Elasian men.
Israi's cohort squatted shoulder-to-shoulder in an arc that started more than two meters beyond Chekov's reach and extended to either side until it disappeared out of sight behind him. He opted not to bother turning to see if the circle continued. Their eyes bored into him like phaser burns, black and angry, and he realized with a horrible twisting in his belly that they had let him live this long only because they had plans other than simply killing him.
He took a deep breath and scrubbed his sleeve across his face to wipe off dirt and sweat. He winced as his arm passed over his still-tender cheekbone. The cohort watched him with the dispassionate interest of wolves around food when they're not yet hungry. Even the ragged screams from somewhere outside failed to reflect in their alien eyes. Chekov wanted to throw himself on them, beat the chill superiority from their faces until they were forced to take him down quickly and kill him where he fought. At least Uhura and Sulu aren't here, he found himself thinking with painful desperation. At least they've taken the shuttle and gone. After all their years together, he didn't want Sulu to know that he'd died so helpless and frightened, and the thought of Uhura seeing his body when the Elasians were finally done with it was enough to clog his throat with tears.
He clenched his hands into angry fists and tried to speak over the distant, horrid screaming. "Well?" His voice was hoarse, the words broken with dryness. "What are you waiting for?"
The answer came from somewhere behind him and to his left. "Nothing."
Chekov twisted to look over his shoulder. One of the cohort looked up from where he crouched beside his fellows, black hair feathering his eyes until everything above his nose was lost in tattered shadow. He was the smallest of the Elasian men—still easily two meters tall, but lithe and whipcordlike compared to the rest of the hulking cohort. He lifted his chin to meet Chekov's gaze as the security chief turned slowly to face him.
"If you don't stay where you are, some of us may be forced to kill ourselves."
Chekov froze with one hand on the floor. That wasn't exactly what he'd expected to hear. "Have you been ordered to confine me?"
"We've been ordered not to touch you." The Elasian shifted his weight and looped his arms around his knees. "Takcas said to keep a man's-length distance from you at all times, but the walls only go back so far." He waved a weary hand back over his shoulder, and the metal prefab wall behind him gonged. "If you want to see us dead, so be it. But as kessh of your own cohort, we hoped you'd let us seek more honorable ends than death for disobedience."
Chekov glanced left and right among them, but still couldn't read their stony faces well enough to guess what lay behind them. "Where is Takcas?" he asked, settling crosslegged on the plascrete floor in an effort to prove he wanted no trouble.
The black-haired Elasian simply tipped his head toward the door. Outside, the screaming continued.
Chekov shook his head, frowning. "I … don't understand."
"Neither do we," the Elasian admitted. He sounded despondent, and infinitely worn. "Last night, the Crown Regent's men beamed down to tell us how the Federation planned to use its spineless scientists to murder our Dohlman with earthquakes and mountain slides."
"That isn't true."
The guardsman's angry black eyes burned with distrust, but he didn't answer Chekov's claim. "After we had taken you to the punishment cells," he went on as though the lieutenant had never interrupted, "Takcas told us to do nothing to interfere with your escape. And we obeyed. We did nothing when we heard the shooting as your airship took flight, then …" He shrugged, his expression hollow. "Then the Crown Regent's men brought us here and left us with your lifeless body. Our Dohlman did nothing to stop them or save us."
Chekov waited for him to continue. When he didn't, the lieutenant asked, "And Takcas?"
The Elasian's eyes flicked away toward the floor. The entire cohort fell into a terrible silence, and it occurred to Chekov for the first time that Takcas was the one being tortured, not the one administering it. His heart thundered hard against the base of his throat.
Outside, the soul-rending screaming had stopped.
"Why did he let us escape?" The question fell out of Chekov with desperate innocence. "He must have known that he'd be punished if we succeeded."
Invulnerable hauteur flared in the Elasian's dark face. "Our kessh is not afraid of any punishment!"
From the sound of what had gone on out there, he should have been. "He could have killed us in the punishment cells," Chekov said dully. "I just don't understand what he gained by letting us go."
Light dashed across the flooring, bright and sharp, and raced in a long, pale rectangle up the opposite wall. Chekov scrambled to his knees, turning, just as four Elasians he didn't recognize pushed their way through the open doorway with a fifth rigid figure suspended between them. They threw a shuddering Takcas to the feet of his waiting cohort, then left again without closing the entrance behind them.
The Elasian who'd spoken to Chekov silently broke formation. Approaching the kessh on hands and knees, he studied Takcas with grim intensity for a long moment before finally reaching out to brush a startlingly tender hand against the other man's face.
Takcas convulsed once, and the other guardsman jerked his hand away at the sound of his kessh's rasping scream. A crash of horrid memories raced like pain through Chekov's nerves, and he croaked a breathless, "Don't!"
The Elasian shot him a suspicious glare, but didn't move again toward Takcas.
Chekov crawled forward to join them, trying to pretend that movement could give him strength to beat back years-old terrors. "Don't touch him," he whispered.
"Why?" The Elasian's voice was hard and angry, even though he skittered back out of Chekov's reach. "I told you—don't come close to us!"
"I don't care what Takcas ordered you to do." He stopped just short of making contact with the kessh, not sure how to proceed. Shuddering, his breath jerking out of him in uneven gasps, Takcas stared straight upward with eyes too wide and dark to see. His pupils showed only as pinpricks of black inside a ring of duller amber. "He certainly isn't going to punish you himself."
Chekov gently probed behind the kessh's jawline, gritting his teeth instead of jerking back from the explosion of anguished movement that answered his touch. The nearby guardsman lunged in a blur of motion, then his hand clamped with stinging force around Chekov's wrist. Chekov gave in to the Elasian's wrenching pull for the sake of his human bones, but not before he'd found the soft, bruised patch of skin just under Takcas's hairline.
The Elasian drew back a fist to hit him, and Chekov said, very quietly, "You buy black-market equipment from the Klingons."
The alien hesitated, arm still cocked over his shoulder. "What does it matter to you with whom Elas trades?"
"It matters to all of us now." Chekov twisted h
is hand free from the Elasian's grip and aimed somber brown eyes down at Takcas. "He's been tortured with a Klingon-made agonizer. That burn behind his ear is where they accessed his nervous system. The agonizer … it …" The warehouse seemed suddenly frigid, and he hugged himself against a soul-deep chill. "His nerves are overloaded," he made himself say slowly. "After all that time with the agonizer, they don't know how to feel anything but pain. Sometimes, if you keep the victim quiet and free from stimulus, his body will learn how to recover. More often, the victim simply dies."
"Don't underestimate the strength of an Elasian man." Oben's deep voice clamored off the corrugated prefab walls. "Takcas will survive, just as I survived his beating. We have many other things to talk about yet, he and I. Doing the bidding of Her Grandeur the Crown Regent is my most sacred task in this life, but I did not enjoy pretending to be Takcas's inferior just for the sake of winning trust within the Dohlman's cohort. He will pay dearly for each indignity I suffered as his 'underling.'"
Chekov raised his head to scowl at the dark figures in the doorway, but made no effort to come up from his knees. Bracketed among the four guards who had returned Takcas, Oben smiled thinly and paced beyond the doorway to stand just inside the captive cohort. "Takcas says he wrought his treachery with your help, little Starfleet kessh." His smug expression looked distorted and bitter with the marks of Takcas's beating still so livid on his face. "Is that true?"
Did it matter? Would Oben believe him, even if it did? Chekov sat back on his heels and wished like hell he could stop shivering. "I don't think I have anything to say to you," he whispered hoarsely.
Oben only nodded as though he'd expected that answer from the beginning. "Maybe so." He pulled a disruptor from the hand of the guard closest to him, then motioned the others to encircle the waiting lieutenant. "We'll see if we can't change that soon enough."