by L. A. Graf
"What is it?" Uhura demanded, alarmed by his odd silence. "Dr. Mutchler, what's the matter?" And then, as she saw the way the muscles clenched in his bloodless cheeks, "Is it your leg?"
Mutchler made a painful sound, something between a bitter laugh and a gasp. "My leg is the least of our problems. Look there. The earthquake must have set it off."
Uhura followed his shakily pointing finger and blinked, unable at first to take in what she was seeing. Above the liquid expanse of shivering mud, dark clouds had congealed around the distant crest of Rakatan Mons. Lightning spit faint flashes through them, but they looked too thick and wrinkled to be thunderclouds. Even as Uhura watched, another ruffled wall of black curled up from behind the rest, and this time she saw the telltale glint of volcanic fire exposed for one brief moment in its heart.
"Oh, my God." The realization kicked inside her stomach like an exploding rocket. "The volcano's erupting."
"Only spineless human worms would think up a plan so inefficient and crude."
Chekov kept his eyes locked on the turbulent scenery outside the flyer window, and willed his face to stay impassive. Considering he'd only made up this plan a few hours ago, with the threat of a Klingon agonizer hanging over his face, the efficiency of it seemed nothing short of miraculous. It was good enough to get you this far, he thought at Oben bitterly. And the plan only had to work a short while longer.
"It isn't inefficient." Chekov tried to sound brusquely disdainful, but had a feeling he only sounded scared. "We took the geologist to this seismic station in the first place so that we could establish the details of our rendezvous plan."
Oben made a face and lounged in his seat near the front of the flyer's passenger cabin. "The Mutchler geologist said he was doing repairs."
"He lied." Just like I'm lying now. "We left a recording device there so that we could leave messages for each other if we became separated. If my Dohlman hasn't already gone there to contact me, then I will at least be able to leave instructions for her to find when she reaches the station later. I can tell her to meet me anywhere you say. Or lead you to wherever she is waiting for me."
"You would do this?" Oben asked, eyes narrowed. "Betray your Dohlman and your cohort?"
Chekov swallowed hard against a shiver of remembered fear, and turned back to the flyer window. "All my Dohlman can do is kill me," he said softly, intentionally echoing Oben's words from the night before.
The guardsman laughed darkly, but asked him nothing further.
Outside the flyer's window, clouds the color of smoke smeared the landscape to a minimalist blur. Chekov had watched the first rolling thunderhead sweep down on them when they were barely north of the mining complex, only to realize it wasn't rain pattering against his window when a dark layer of ash caught and built up in a crescent along the trailing edge. He'd wondered then if Rakatan Mons normally spit up such volumes of burnt material, but didn't think Oben would be predisposed toward answering his questions. For the first time since separating from the rest of the party, Chekov found himself wishing Dr. Mutchler were here.
"You are worse than the scientist maggots who feed off the corpse of this planet."
Takcas's voice startled Chekov. It was the first time the kessh had spoken to him since they were herded into the flyer's passenger compartment more than an hour ago. Coming out of his long silence after Chekov's supposed display of treachery, the big Elasian's words burned through him like fire.
"The science-maggots are honest in their weakness. They slink behind our backs to steal their rocks and readings—they make no attempt to curry our acceptance or walk upright among us."
It doesn't matter what you think of me, Chekov told Takcas silently, still staring out his window. Your understanding was never part of this plan. But his hands clenched within the manacles behind his back, and he couldn't stop a swell of frustrated anger from twisting his stomach full of acid.
"I am ashamed that we are both called kessh. Even a soft-bellied carrion crab would not betray its own for a few more moments of pitiful living." Seat leather creaked and hard Elasian boots struck decking as Takcas shifted and moved to stand. "I should do your Dohlman the favor of killing you, little tick, since you obviously haven't the dignity needed to kill yourself."
A crash of noise behind him jerked Chekov around, and he ended up facing the seats along the flyer's other wall just as Takcas slammed back against the bulkhead and sat down heavily. Oben stood over the kessh with one hand cocked back as though to strike again, the other poised on his disruptor while he waited to see if Takcas would fight. Takcas glowered hatefully up at the other Elasian, but didn't try to stand again. Chekov had to grip the cushion of his own seat to keep himself from leaping up to interfere.
"What a brave dog you are," Oben commented acidly. He kicked Takcas's feet out of the narrow aisle, then went back to his own seat at the front of the compartment. "You bark loudly for someone who is only here to flush out Israi if she refuses to come when I call for her."
"So you claim." Takcas rolled to his knees with surprising grace considering his hands were manacled behind his back just like Chekov's. "But I am not like you and this gutless parasite—I will not betray my sworn mistress."
"You do not have to choose to betray anyone. Under the right inducement, you scream as well as any parasite." Oben propped his feet up on a sliver of window frame and smiled evilly. "You forget, Kessh Takcas—I know."
What could only have been deep humiliation darkened Takcas's face to the color of tea. Chekov leaned across the seat back in front of him, suddenly unable to sit in brooding silence any longer. "Why don't you use that agonizer on yourself?" he snarled, nodding at the tiny device hanging in wait on Oben's belt. "Show us how bravely you don't scream while it strips you down to nothing."
"Stop it!" Takcas lunged across the aisle, face still red, and came to his knees on the floor next to Chekov to meet his startled gaze eye-to-eye. This time, Oben only sighed with weary disinterest and made no move to separate them. "I want no words from you in my defense! You sit here in silence, unable to explain away even your own filthy cowardice, then you wish for me to be grateful when you rise up to strike at my enemies! No! I vomit on your sympathy! I spit on your deceit!"
Chekov could only stare at Takcas while his own face burned. Lying, he thought in an agony of frustration. If only I were a better liar, I could think of something—anything!—to say. Instead, he clenched his jaw around his silence and remained painfully aware of just how much he would despise anyone who did what Takcas believed he was doing right now.
Beneath them, the flyer began its swift, even descent, and ash hissed like rain against the outside bulkhead.
"Go ahead," Chekov told Takcas dully. He just wished it didn't hurt so much to see the fierce disgust on the Elasian's face. "I would do the same, if I were you."
Gold eyes met brown ones with such force that Chekov nearly looked away, ashamed of the scaffolding of lies he'd erected between them. Then, the instant before his resolve broke, he saw something move in those Elasian eyes like water under ice.
"Human!"
Breath catching in startlement, Chekov snapped his attention back to the front of the flyer. They'd opened the door between the passenger cabin and the cockpit, and another of his captors leaned through the narrow hatch to scowl across the craft at him.
"We are at the top of the cleft. Say if this is where you meant to take us."
He turned away from Takcas, just as glad for the distraction, and peered through the ash-fogged window to study the ground as it approached below them. "Yes." Drifting ash had obscured the FGS identifiers on the sides and roof of the tiny seismic station, but a tall stake with a placard reading NO. 3 at its top still canted awkwardly just off to one side. Chekov had tried righting that sign while he and Sulu waited for Mutchler to install the laser sensor yesterday, but it had stubbornly resisted fixing. Now it seemed to stand there in effigy of all the other things around him that might b
e past the point of repair. "You'll find a landing area one hundred meters east of the station."
Then something struck him hard from behind, catching him at waist level and throwing him to the deck between the seats. Chekov tried to turn himself, but the space was too short and narrow, the sudden weight on top of him too heavy for him to displace without anything to brace himself or hands to help him. He met the deck facedown, and felt the heavy thump of the flyer touching down just as a growl of warm breath hissed next to his ear.
"Forgive my ignorance and my violence, Kessh Chekov," Takcas whispered, almost too quickly and softly to be understood. "But I can't let Oben know that I speak to you now in friendship." Chekov felt the kessh wedge himself more firmly between the passenger seats as other Elasian voices tumbled frantically over them. "Whatever your plan is to free yourself—if it fails, I hope you may die bravely."
Chekov struggled onto his back while a half-dozen of the Elasian guards wrestled Takcas back and tackled him out of sight. "If you try to kill the human maggot again," Oben snarled from the front of the flyer, "there will be nothing left for your Dohlman to claim except your ravaged corpse!"
The snap of the agonizer's activation cells echoed through the little flyer. Chekov closed his eyes, shuddering, and waited breathlessly for the screaming to stop. Fighting would only make this worse, he told himself, and it wouldn't help Takcas, it wouldn't get them any closer to freedom. He wanted desperately to believe that lying here motionless was the best thing he could do for either of them.
But he wondered if Takcas appreciated how much Chekov hoped that, if his plan failed, he would simply be able to die—bravely or otherwise.
Chapter Eighteen
"WHAT IN GOD'S NAME is this stunt supposed to accomplish?"
Kirk looked up from behind the transporter console, his finger pausing on the readout he'd been going over with Kyle. "Can I do something for you, Bones?" He knew perfectly well what McCoy was here for, but didn't have the patience to put up with it just now. "We've got a lot of work to do."
"Scotty says you're planning to fly a shuttle down to Rakatan." McCoy halted next to Spock on the other side of the console, arms crossed accusingly as he glared over the panel at Kirk. "Is that true?"
The captain tried to keep his voice neutral. "It's true."
"Dammit, Jim—!"
Sighing, Kirk tapped the room on the schematics where he wanted Kyle to set them, then retrieved the gloves of his environmental suit from the console. "Bones, I really don't have time to argue about this."
"Why? In too much of a hurry to get yourself killed?" The doctor turned on Spock as Kirk rounded the console to join them. "And what about you?" McCoy demanded, knocking on the faceplate of the Vulcan's suit helmet. "Don't tell me you think this is a good idea!"
Spock stepped neatly out of McCoy's reach to retest the seals on his helmet. "Given the extent of hull damage to the Johnston Observatory, Doctor, I find the captain's decision to beam over in environmental suits an extremely logical precaution."
"Why, thank you, Mr. Spock." Kirk wiggled his fingers to seat his glove in its joint, and returned McCoy's furious scowl with a warning look of his own. "But I don't think the doctor is critiquing our choice of duty attire."
"Damn right I'm not! Jim, I may only understand half of what Florence—" The doctor flushed abruptly and interrupted himself. "—I mean, Dr. Bascomb tells me, but even a security guard could tell that volcano is nothing but a goddamned time bomb!"
"And I have a landing party sitting right on top of it." Kirk took his helmet from Kyle a bit more brusquely than he'd intended. "We haven't been able to locate them past that geodesic defense net the Elasians set up, and I'm not going to leave them down there."
"Jim …" McCoy caught the edge of Kirk's helmet with one hand, and the captain looked up to find himself pinned by the doctor's steady sympathy. "Has it occurred to you that they might already be dead? And the Dohlman dead along with them?"
Yes, of course it had occurred to him. Every time he thought about it, it made his stomach ache. "The fact that they were separated from their communicators means somebody took them captive, Bones, and that somebody had to be our friend the Crown Regent. But if there was the slightest chance of escaping her cohort, I'm betting Chekov found it. I'm also betting Uhura had Her Glory the Dohlman tucked under one arm on their way out the door." He tugged the helmet away from McCoy with a grim smile. "I know my people, Doctor."
"And I know you!" McCoy threw his arms up in exasperation. "The minute you get anywhere near that planet, the Crown Regent's going to blast you right out of the sky!"
Kirk pursed his lips in irritation and flipped his helmet to lift it over his shoulders. "Have some faith, Bones. The Crown Regent can't blast us if she doesn't see us coming." He settled the lock ring until it caught. "That's why we're taking one of the observatory shuttles, and not one of ours."
"Bridge to Captain Kirk."
He hadn't expected a call over the suit comm so quickly. Glancing across at Spock, he waited for the Vulcan's nod to verify that both of their units were working, then punched his reply button with his chin. "Go ahead, Scotty."
"We're all set up here," the engineer reported. With Scott's voice made so artificially distant by the communicator channel, Kirk felt suddenly as though the bridge and ship were already a dozen light-years away, and not still humming beneath his booted feet. "I've got the screens rigged to flicker a wee bit, then drop when Mr. Kyle activates the transporter. Unless the Elasians' sensors are a sight better than the Klingons usually build 'em, it should read as nothing more than an energy fluctuation in our warp core."
Kirk flashed a thumbs-up to Kyle, who nodded. "Good work, Scotty. I don't want the Crown Regent to get even the slightest hint of what we're up to."
"Then you'll not be maintaining contact while you're at the observatory, sir?"
"No." Kirk turned to face the transporter pad so he wouldn't have to watch the medley of disapproving expressions march across McCoy's face. "We probably won't be able to get a communicator signal through that geodesic net once we're below it anyway. If we manage to find a working shuttle, we'll trigger a remote message from the moonbase after we've taken off. If you don't hear from us within six hours, that means we're still at the observatory. Drop the screens then and beam us back aboard, no questions asked."
"Aye-aye, sir. Good luck. Scott out."
McCoy lingered near the transporter console as Kirk waved Spock up onto the pad. "I don't suppose it would do any good to tell you this wild-goose chase of yours only has one chance in a thousand of succeeding."
Kirk scooped their phasers off the edge of the console. "If I want to hear depressing statistics, Bones, I'll ask Spock for them. At least his are accurate." He stepped onto the platform to hand the first officer his weapon, then pulled the gun back out of reach when he saw the Vulcan's mouth open behind his visor. "I said, 'if,' Mr. Spock, not 'when.'"
Spock raised an indignant eyebrow, but accepted his phaser in silence.
Kirk grinned to take the edge off his very human sarcasm, then stepped into place beside his first officer. "Bones, we don't even have that one chance in a thousand if we can't get a shuttle below that geodesic net. I don't care what the odds are, I'm going after my people." He looked up and met Kyle's waiting gaze. "All right, Mr. Kyle—energize."
Ash swept around the edges of Seismic Station Three in a breathy, silent roar. The square metal seismic housing looked smaller and more frail than when Chekov had been here before with Mutchler and Sulu, its roof frosted with volcanic debris, its sides obscured by drifts of ash and reddish sand. Showers of cinder had apparently been falling here for some time, sheeting down on the broken landscape as if someone in the heavens were shaking out a huge dusty blanket, or upending an impossibly mammoth container of soot. The cloud roiled down the slopes to engulf them, like smoke rushing ahead of some phantom fire they couldn't see.
Chekov ducked his face against his shoulder to avoi
d taking in a mouthful of soot, then still had to turn his back to the onrushing cloud when the additional grit stirred up by the four Elasians made its way into his eyes and breathing. Damn them for shackling his hands behind his back when he could hear them so clearly coughing into their own. He tried to keep his head bent and his breathing short, but there was only so much of his own reflexes that he could deny—he was coughing just as hoarsely as the rest of them by the time the billow of ash rushed past them to disappear farther down the volcano's slopes.
"It has been raining dirt all morning," one of the Elasians complained to the guardsman next to him. "What a great mess these humans have made of the planet!"
Mutchler might have considered Moscow someplace very tectonically boring, but at least Chekov knew that nothing done by man or machine could cause volcanic reactions like this.
"All right, human …"
Someone behind him caught his elbow and jerked him about to face the seismic station as though the ash cloud had never interfered. Planting his feet, Chekov tried to wrench himself out of the Elasian's grasp, just as a matter of principle. He gained a scowl and a vicious shake for his effort, but that was all. Oben, now as pasted with filth as the rest of them, commented amiably, "He sometimes needs reminding who among us wears the weapons."
Chekov's first instinct was to spit at him, but he decided that wouldn't be wise, considering how quick to make use of his agonizer Oben seemed. He hadn't cared for Oben as an underling; he liked him even less now that Oben considered himself in some position of command.
"This is the place my Dohlman and I agreed upon," Chekov said aloud, hoping to deflect the discussion from whatever inducements he might require. "If our party became separated, we were to come back here."