by L. A. Graf
Uhura considered how well her gamble of being honest about the antidote had served her, and nodded. "Agreed."
"Good." The Dohlman pointed a slim, imperious finger at Mutchler, who was watching them in gasping silence from the other side of the shuttle. "Now, go and tend that idiot geologist with the medications you carry on your belt. And tell him he is safe from me." Israi stood back, resting one hand proudly on Sulu's stiff shoulder. "A Dohlman is measured by the strength of her cohort, and I would scorn to have a scientist among mine."
Years ago—when he was still a young ensign, and hadn't yet figured out that he was destructible—Chekov had felt the agonizer's kiss rip him open and tear him inside out. It had lasted for only a minute, maybe not even that long. But it had been enough to father nightmares for more than a year, and to make him awkwardly excuse himself from a class at the Security Academy during a lecture on what the agonizer did to a victim's nervous system. Only a year ago, the prospect of being face-to-face with Klingons during border negotiations had kept him sleepless for three awful nights, praying that nothing went wrong enough to allow the capture and torture of hostages.
And now, on a planet half a galaxy away, here he was.
They all but carried him across the mining compound. If they had let him walk he could have attempted escape, and possibly been killed in the process. As it was, he didn't even have the leverage to fight effectively. He made one attempt to plant his feet against the doorjambs to keep from entering their destination building, but Oben only shoved his legs aside with one shoulder and barked at the others to bring him along.
Chekov's eyes caught on the row of portable control stations lined up against one wall as someone slammed the door behind them. A power-frame manager butted up beside a field communications panel, with the security monitor for the camp defense screen tucked into the corner away from them both. A dozen armor-clad Elasians milled around the equipment, pointedly taking no notice of Oben's arrival or the delivery of his prisoner to the briefing table on the other side of the room. For some reason, Chekov had thought they'd drag him somewhere dark and sterile to do their interrogation, not a place so grossly public as the base of camp operations. Humiliation mingled with the flutters of terror in his chest, and he closed his eyes against the crowd of faces as they pushed him flat atop the narrow table and pinned him there.
"On Elas, kidnapping is punishable by the loss of both your legs."
He opened his eyes to find Oben at his shoulder, hands resting lightly on the edge of the table.
"Kidnapping a member of the Dohlmanyi, punishable by death."
An anger more comfortable and familiar than fear pushed at Chekov in an effort to break to the surface. "We've done nothing to your Dohlman."
"Prove it." Oben's face was still, and unconvinced. "Tell me where she is."
"I don't know."
The older Elasian shrugged, his gaze drifting to one side as he reached for something Chekov couldn't see. "Not according to Takcas. He placed her on board your shuttle, knowing that you would escape and take her far from here." He straightened again and turned over the small device in his palm as though marveling at its simple construction. "Now we have you, and we don't have her." Frosty green eyes flicked to Chekov. "I would like to rectify that."
The dry overhead lights stitched silver sparks along the agonizer's edges. "I don't know what you're talking about. . . ."
Oben didn't ask again.
Chekov tried to steel himself—tried to believe that knowing what to expect this time would at least help preserve his dignity while they used this Klingon technology to winnow him down to a shuddering scrap. Instead, primitive fear took over the instant cold metal brushed his skin. He exploded away from Oben's touch, twisting, kicking, wrenching himself to the edge of the table with no thoughts in his mind but to run. He somehow missed the actual moment when he tore free, but he knew when he hit the floor, and scrabbled for the outside door without looking behind. Shouts of anger and alarm boiled up from all over the room. The men who before had minded their panels with such studied disinterest suddenly broke away from their stations in a pack and rushed for him. Chekov knew he couldn't really fight his way through the wall of them, but he had to try. He landed a dozen blows before their combined weight overpowered him and toppled him to the floor in a tangle of violent struggle.
"So …" Oben's laughter, surprisingly soft and amused, lit his battered face with delight. He leaned forward to brace hands on knees, and smile. "This isn't your first exposure to the agonizer, is it?" Whatever he saw in Chekov's eyes made him laugh again, and he straightened. "Isn't that intriguing."
Chekov clenched his hands, unable to move in any other way. "We had no idea your Dohlman was on board—"
"I know that."
"We were only trying to reach our ship." The truth rushed out of him, too harmless to matter, even to him. "If Israi was somewhere on board, she was taken to the Enterprise along with the others." Surely Oben would realize there was nothing either of them could do. Chekov couldn't bear the thought of being tortured to death for simply knowing nothing.
"Your shuttle never reached the Enterprise," Oben stated with deliberate slowness. He knelt, first on one knee, then on both, and Chekov's heart thundered breathlessly against his rib cage. "It couldn't have, we know that. Which means the Dohlman is still somewhere on Rakatan, and you're going to tell me where." He displayed the agonizer between two fingers, and waited.
Chekov hated the thin, frightened sliver of voice that crept out of him. "… I don't know where she is …"
This time, he could only buck once against the bodies holding him when Oben put the agonizer in place. Its slick, alien contours moved against his temple, and he squeezed his eyes shut in anticipation of agony. "I don't know where she is!" he cried, helpless. Then inspiration sliced through him on the memories of long-ago pain. "But I can show you how to find her …"
Oben answered with a silence so long, Chekov felt the first hope he'd known since waking up in the Elasian warehouse. He dared, very slowly, to open his eyes.
"You know what will happen if you've lied to us," Oben warned him darkly.
Chekov nodded, never taking his eyes away from Oben's. No belief flowered in the grim Elasian face, but the agonizer's threatening touch lifted. Chekov found himself suddenly able to breathe again, dizzy with the prospect of freedom. "I would do anything to avoid that," he promised hoarsely. "Believe me."
Chapter Seventeen
RAKATAN'S SUN rose grudgingly out of charcoal clouds, its sullen fire picking fragments of twisted wreckage out of an encircling sea of red-gray mud. Even as Uhura watched, braced on her elbows in the crumpled hatch, a shard of nacelle housing shifted and disappeared. She made a wordless sound of dismay as her last hope of freeing Sulu sank with it. There was no way she could find the lost medical kit in this swamp.
"Any luck fixing the communicator?" Already mud-stained to the thighs, Sulu clung to the outside of the shuttle with both hands to keep from sinking in the ooze that had saved them. Although he spoke to Uhura, his gaze slid inevitably behind her, drawn like iron to Israi's silent magnet.
"No," Uhura answered, in a voice almost as toneless as his. "All the circuits are burned out."
Sulu grunted. "Then we're going to have to walk out of here. The mud is only bad around the shuttle. Away from it, there's a hard crust we can walk on, and a sort of shoreline not too far away."
Uhura pulled herself through the hatch, balancing carefully on what remained of the starboard nacelle. Gamow canted steeply beneath her, its blunt nose buried in a mud-softened impact crater. The shuttle's main cabin was buoyed up by the nacelle beneath her feet, but the other side, from which Sulu had jettisoned the port nacelle, had sunk deep into the churned-up mud. From the occasional bubbling noises that swam up through the metal hull, Uhura suspected the ship was still slowly sinking.
She stood on tiptoe to peer across the top of the shuttle, but from this angle all she could see was
the shredded metallic lacing of the disruptor blast in the roof. "How far is the shore from here?"
"Less than a hundred meters." Sulu stepped up on the nacelle behind her and pointed to the right, where a pale gray bluff of volcanic rock ended the sprawl of mud. Thunderheads loomed in the sky beyond it, shrouding the crest of Rakatan Mons in a dark cloak of clouds. "The mudflat is long, but not very wide."
"That's because it's really an abandoned river channel." Mutchler wriggled his head out of the empty hatch beside them and eyed the surrounding mudscape with professional interest. "Probably left over from the last ice age, when Rakatan got a lot more rain than it does now." He leaned down and scraped a drying curl of clay from the mudsplashed shuttle, rubbing it to reddish dust between his fingers. "Hmm. Smectite and montmorillonite. About what you'd expect from weathered volcanic ash."
Uhura exchanged amused looks with Sulu, relieved to see a glint of his usual humor beneath the somber mask Israi had made of his face. If there was anything short of impending disaster that could distract a scientist from making scientific observations, Uhura had yet to find it. "Are you ready to go, Dr. Mutchler?"
"Oh, no. I want to salvage my seismic monitor first." He wriggled back into the shuttle before they could haul him out. "Don't worry, it's portable."
Something bulky and Starfleet red tumbled out of the hatch as soon as he was gone. With a gasp, Uhura recognized it as the bundle of survival packs she'd put together while waiting for the sun to rise. She snatched at it, spurred by a horrid vision of all their food sinking under the mud, and managed to catch it by one strap just before it hit the clay.
"Uhura, why do you allow that rock-grubbing insect even to speak?" Israi's voice demanded from somewhere inside the shuttle. Another bundle of blankets slid out the hatch before Uhura could drop the one she held. Fortunately, Sulu caught that one. "He has been witless beyond helping since first we met him."
Uhura frowned, finding a dry place on the nacelle for the survival kits. "How do you know that?"
"Because he babbles in words that make no sense." Uhura heard an indignant yelp from inside, and then a third package sailed out the hatch. This time it consisted of Scott Mutchler's field pack, belted with hammers, sledges, and a specialized tricorder.
Uhura sighed. "Israi, all that means is that your language has no equivalents for the scientific words he uses."
"Humph." Israi appeared in the collapsed hatch and dropped the last piece of salvageable equipment—Chekov's Klingon disruptor—into Uhura's hands. The Dohlman regarded the expanse of red-gray mud around them, then turned her intent gaze on Sulu. The pilot let out a quiet sigh, then pulled in another breath and held it tight, as if her nearness both calmed and disturbed him. Oh, Chekov, Uhura thought, I wish you were here to help me cope with this.
"You can get me out of here, bondsman?" the Dohlman demanded.
"Yes."
Israi nodded and swung herself through the hatch without another word. Her angular face had lost much of its aggressive uncertainty, Uhura saw. Instead, her almond eyes glittered with a new and serene confidence, born of knowing that men would now die for her. The expression made her look intensely like her older sister, Elaan.
In matching silence, Sulu slung the bundle of blankets over his shoulder and stepped forward to lift the small Dohlman in his arms. It apparently never occurred to him, Uhura thought wryly, that Uhura might not be the best one to support Mutchler's lurching steps through the mud.
An unfamiliar alarm went off inside the wrecked shuttle, a thin rising whine like a wasp's warning buzz. Uhura threw a bewildered glance at Sulu and saw his equally baffled head-shake. Then Mutchler cursed in a voice that barely sounded like his own. Uhura could hear him scrabbling frantically across the floor toward them, his splinted leg dragging behind him.
"We've got to get out of here, now!" The geologist wrestled himself through what was left of the hatch, his resin-epoxy splint catching painfully against one edge. Pain crashed white across his narrow face, but Mutchler hauled himself free despite it, half-falling and half-vaulting down to a mercifully soft landing in the mud. Uhura leaned out to steady him when he swayed, and he slewed around to catch her by the shoulder, his thin fingers digging hard through her uniform jacket. "There's been an earthquake near the summit! If we get caught in this damned thixotropic mud when the surface waves get here—"
The panic in the geologist's voice told Uhura more than the unfamiliar words. She slapped his field pack into his hands and shrugged the bundle of survival kits over her own shoulders, then plunged into the mud beside him so he could use her as a crutch. The wet clay dragged at her feet, sludge-thick and determined to cling to her boots. In minutes, she had sunk so deep that each step became a battle.
"Hurry!" Mutchler groaned, as if she and not he were the one lagging behind. The thin air of Rakatan had already broken Uhura's breath into ragged gasps that burned against her ribs. Mercifully, the geologist seemed to be less affected by the lack of oxygen. Perhaps he was used to it. "We don't have much time!"
They labored through the mud at a heartbreakingly slow pace. Sulu had already rounded the shuttle ahead of them, grimly determined to see his Dohlman safe at all costs. Israi, however, had not lost track of them. She cast a frowning look back at Uhura over the helmsman's shoulder.
"Have you forgotten the one of your cohort you gave death to in the shuttle?" she demanded. "You wouldn't leave his unburned body for the crows?"
Mutchler saved Uhura from having to answer that. "There are no crows on this damned planet!" he snarled. "Get it through your empty Elasian head—if we don't get out of this mud in the next two minutes, we're going to die!" The geologist groaned as his splinted leg caught on some snag beneath the mud. "And all because you don't want to get your glorious feet muddy," he added, soft but vehement enough for her to hear.
Israi spat at him in wordless fury, then shocked Uhura by twisting out of Sulu's grip to land in a staggering splash of mud. "No!" She shoved the pilot back when he would have picked her up again. "Go back and help that idiot geologist. I order you!"
Sulu scowled and picked her up anyway, but only to toss her a meter toward the shore, out of the shuttle's impact crater. She landed on a stiff scum of drier clay that cracked and grumbled beneath her weight, but held firm. The helmsman didn't wait to see if she stayed or went on. He turned back and helped Uhura tug Mutchler's leg free of the sucking clay that now engulfed them to their knees.
"I'll drag him by the shoulders," Sulu said curtly. "You hold up his broken leg."
Uhura nodded, too winded to bother with words, and bent to her task. Despite their rough handling, Mutchler seemed impervious to pain. "Hurry!" he urged again, his voice cracking with desperation. Uhura heard the now-familiar roar of tearing earth, far away but getting closer. Memories of the Dohlman's collapsing quarters crashed over her, and lent her aching legs new strength. "Hurry!"
With one last, lung-tearing effort, Uhura helped heave the geologist up onto the drier crust of the mud. It broke beneath their combined weight, like the thin edge of newly frozen ice. Mutchler's breath hissed in pain as part of Uhura's weight fell on his broken leg. Cursing, Sulu shoved the younger man up onto the hard surface again. This time, it held him.
"Thank the Lord—" Uhura moved a careful meter away before hauling herself out. Sulu did the same thing on the other side.
Mutchler struggled up onto his elbows stubbornly. "We're not safe, not until we're up on those rocks. Help me up."
She groaned, but went to help Sulu hoist him to his feet. Surprisingly, Israi had waited for them. Without a word, the Dohlman of Elas pulled the geologist's field pack from his shoulder, then turned and started running for the ridge. The rest of them followed at the best pace they could manage.
The first shock waves hit while they were still on the crusted mud. Uhura felt the swaying, sealike motion of the clay and heard it sigh beneath them as it shifted. Instinctive panic thundered through her at the thought of being stuck
in the engulfing morass again. She forgot her burning lungs and aching legs, forgot the heavy, clinging jackets of mud on her boots. With a gasp of utter terror, she grabbed at Mutchler and dragged him toward the shoreline ridge.
They made it with only moments to spare. Uhura collapsed against the blessedly gritty and solid rock face, barely feeling the tug when Israi pulled her up to safety. More shock waves chased across the mud crust after them, but they dampened out when they hit the ridge, giving them only a slight shaking. Cracks followed the crests of each wave, twining and intertwining until, with a vast, moaning grumble, the entire lake of mud bubbled and turned itself liquidly over.
"Oh, my God—" In the center, the shuttle pitched and sank beneath the mud with a breathtaking suddenness. Uhura blinked, barely able to believe what she had seen. A last set of shock waves shivered through the red-gray clay, this time slapping foamy wavelets against their ridge. There could be no doubt. The mud that had cushioned and supported them a few minutes ago now sloshed like water beneath their feet.
"Thixotropic clay." Mutchler's voice may have been shredded with shock and pain, but it remained stubbornly pedantic. "Solid under long-term stress, liquid under a sudden shock. It always causes the most damage in an earthquake."
"I know," Sulu said bleakly. Uhura felt him shudder where his shoulder pressed against hers, and wondered if it was the nearness of death or the memory of how he'd first responded to the threat of it that bothered him. Even now, the pilot had one arm wrapped around Israi's bare shoulders in an unwilling but fiercely protective embrace.
The Dohlman took a deep breath and lifted her head, scrubbing at her cheeks with muddy hands. "Idiot geologist, you were right about the earthquake coming," she admitted with immense reluctance. "I—I wish I hadn't called you witless."
As close as a Dohlman could ever come to an apology, Uhura guessed in half-hysterical amusement. She glanced over her shoulder to see if Mutchler appreciated Israi's grand gesture, only to see the geologist staring transfixed up at the crest of Rakatan Mons. If he'd heard Israi, he gave no sign of it.