by L. A. Graf
"They must not care for you very much." The guard gripping his elbow peered around suspiciously. "I see no one."
"We aren't stupid enough to wait out in the open. Whoever arrived first was to have left instructions so that the others could later find him." Chekov threw a sharp look at Oben. "Or her." He jerked a nod at the grit-scarred seismic housing. "The message should be inside somewhere."
Oben walked slowly around the squat metal station. Pausing again on the side nearest Chekov, he kicked the maintenance access plate with visible disgust. "Is this the only means by which to enter?"
For the first time since lying to them on the floor of the control center, Chekov felt a scream of panicked adrenaline through his bloodstream as it occurred to him that this might not work after all. "Yes."
"Which means only a small, worthless human like you can fit inside." The guard glared across at him coldly.
Chekov nodded. "Yes."
Tossing the manacle release keys to the guard at Chekov's elbow, Oben snorted disdainfully and sat on the top of the station. "It seems you humans are not so stupid as our Crown Regent would have me believe."
If all went well, he would be a lot more impressed with human intelligence by the time Chekov left this station.
Chekov's shoulders ached from being wrenched behind his back all morning, and he paused a moment to rub at his neck muscles before one of the Elasians butted him with a disruptor from behind and he stumbled forward a step. Chekov stopped himself from whirling to curse at the alien, then turned and glared anyway for the sake of locating all three of the Elasians still standing between him and the waiting flyer. They weren't clustered, and they weren't nearby. This was going to be so goddamned hard.
Moving slowly to the front of the seismic station, the lieutenant exchanged a furtive glance with Oben, still sitting on top of the housing. Chekov hated kneeling in front of the Elasian as though paying homage to his languid posture and smug grin. Bad enough that Oben thought selling out his own Dohlman made him somehow superior to the men who'd remained her loyal guards. The access panel only stood a bare one meter high, though, and Chekov couldn't crawl into it without first getting down on the ground, no matter where Oben was sitting. Gritting his teeth and staring resolutely in front of him, Chekov sank into a squat and attacked the first set of bolts with his fingers.
The panel came off in a shower and puff of grimy ash. Chekov coughed against his sleeve this time, trying to maneuver the panel off to the side one-handed without letting it fall and kick up an even bigger plume. Above them, curdling across the primrose sky, another smudgy veil of ash burped up above the mountain's crater, then began its silent slide away from them down another part of the summit. Rakatan Mons's thunderous rumble shivered through the ground beneath Chekov just a few moments later.
"Hurry up, human." Oben poked him irritably with one foot. "I want to be gone before it drops dust on us again."
Chekov only nodded stiffly, not trusting his voice with an answer.
He had to go down on his elbows to slither in through the narrow entrance. A dim, watery light blinked into being somewhere on the station's ceiling, and Chekov's shadow splayed out suddenly dark and swollen beneath him, filling the floor of the tiny chamber. He wished he'd had a chance to follow Mutchler in here earlier, to see what things looked like once they were all assembled and in their final place. Instead, he had to squint at every dark component and try to guess at its function while ash eddied past his hips to settle into feather patterns on the floor.
"Well?" Oben called after a moment. His heavy voice echoed from beyond the narrow doorway.
"I'm looking."
"What is there to look for? Either your Dohlman has left you a message, or you have wasted our time just so we can kill you out-of-doors."
Squirming over onto his back, Chekov pulled himself a few inches farther into the station. "I told you—I'm not certain what kind of message she would leave me. She wouldn't have wanted just anyone to access it."
The top of the seismic station ponged loudly as the Elasian hopped down and let it spring back into shape. "I think you are nothing but a lying root-worm," Oben grumbled. "I tire of this. Come out of there!"
"Wait!" Chekov glimpsed his own reflection in the strip of polished metal he'd given Mutchler for refocusing the misfit laser. "I found it! Give me just a moment to pull it free."
"One moment." As if that were some measurable period of time he intended to hold Chekov to. The lieutenant scooted under the laser fixture without bothering to reply.
Ash twinkled like bits of broken glass in the laser's steady light. Careful to avoid the forward optic projector, Chekov felt along the back of the laser device until his fingers ran over the tiny hole that served as access to the laser's emergency shutoff switch. He marked the spot with one finger, then brought his left sleeve up to his mouth and tugged at one of the service pins there with his teeth. It came off cleanly enough. He spat it into his palm, rolled it between thumb and forefinger, and lifted it gently into place against the back of the laser box. He needed both hands to guide the pin into the tiny hole, but once through the casing it clicked easily home. The dancing fiber of light above him vanished.
"Your moment is over."
Chekov held the pin in place with his thumb and started working the laser free of the station's ceiling. "I'm coming!" Beyond the doorway, Oben's feet straddled his—a silent warning.
Thin, spider-silk cables connected the laser to the seismic station's power source. Tracing them with one hand, cradling the laser with the other, Chekov ripped loose each point where the cables had been stapled out of the way, always careful to keep the conduits alive and intact. Then, with his pulse hammering thickly in his throat and a coil of cable tangled up in his lap, Chekov turned the laser over in his hand and snapped off the charge-buildup governor.
As if in response to his action, Rakatan Mons gave a great, gunshot report that made the walls of the seismic station ring like thunder.
"All right, human—out!"
A wave of earth shock followed almost immediately. Chekov saw Oben's feet stagger as pebbles and shimmers of ash danced up from the ground all around him.
"Oben, hurry!" someone else shouted from closer to the flyer. "Here comes another cloud!"
Cursing, Oben bent to grab Chekov's ankles. Chekov waited until their eyes met—until he was sure Oben was committed and couldn't jerk away at the last moment—then aimed the laser through the doorway and flicked the service pin out with his thumb.
Emergency shutoff now lifted, the laser released its overcharge in a single, silent blast. Chekov saw Oben stumble backward a step, then recoiled from a deafening disruptor shriek that shattered the roof of the station and kicked him back against the floor as it tore through him. Shock slammed over him, ripping away breath and pain together, and he saw Oben topple backward, face toward the sky, as if through a long watery tunnel. By then, it was too late to regret not being farther over to his right, not being more respectful of the speed of Elasian reflexes—a wave of soot crashed over the little seismic station and turned the world outside into a tumbling mass of gray.
Coughing and strangled cries of alarm marked the locations of the three Elasians still waiting outside for him. Chekov reached down to catch either side of the maintenance access doorway, trying to ignore the uneven tugging across the left side of his jacket as he dragged himself out into the swirling ash. He'd never been hit with a disruptor before—he didn't know how long he had before shocked tissue recovered enough to graphically explain the extent of his injuries. His only hope was to get as far away from the station as possible before that happened, and hope somebody found him there in time to make it matter.
Oben's disruptor lay, a milky gray outline beneath the carpet of fallen ash, still gripped tightly in the Elasian's lifeless hand. Chekov stumbled to his knees long enough to grab the pistol by the muzzle, perversely amused at the thought of fighting his way free with the very same gun that might have k
illed him. The muzzle cone was still warm, and tingled to his touch. He'd hadn't even tugged it free, though, before another disruptor called out from the gloom and ripped a corner off the top of the seismic station.
Chekov jerked the gun loose to return fire, then scrabbled away from the station's entrance as pain began its first deadly crawl across his middle. Behind him, another segment of the station housing disintegrated in a wail of disruptor fire. He wondered how many shots these guns were good for, and how many a human had any hope of surviving. Judging from the warm sheen of blood he could feel collecting beneath his left elbow, he had a feeling the answer would depress him.
Ash and dust and sand tore at him with stinging fingers. Unable to keep his eyes open against the blowing cinders, Chekov let himself drop full-length to the ground and buried his face in the crook of his arm. A blossom of anguish, deep and hard, made him gasp, and he choked for air against his filthy jacket sleeve as he waited for the pain to subside. It didn't. When he finally felt the sting of sunlight against his cheek that told him the ash cloud had settled, Chekov knew that if he wanted to escape the Crown Regent's cohort, he wasn't going to do it by running.
One of the Elasians shouted in excited anger, and Chekov jerked his head up, leading with the disruptor in time to catch a glimpse of quick, deliberate movement at the extreme right of his pain-blurred vision. There wasn't time to question the guard's intent. Firing blindly, Chekov rolled tight against the seismic station and took in a great gulp of ash when a disruptor bolt vaporized a patch of ground right in front of him. He shot again toward the sound of the disruptor's report, this time squeezing the trigger and sweeping as wide an arc as he could reach until the gun went dead and silent in his hand—drained of charge.
Chekov let the useless disruptor drop into his lap, and leaned wearily across the top of the station. Two more of the Elasians sprawled in the dusty rigor of startled death, making an uneven triangle with Oben's corpse near the station's access door. The last of the four Elasians who had escorted Chekov out of the flyer now lurched back to the craft with one twisted, bloody arm clutched rigidly against his side. Whatever he shouted, the two guards inside obviously heard him—the hatch whisked open to admit him, and a covering spray of combined phaser and disruptor fire drove Chekov back behind the station as the remaining pair dragged their wounded comrade inside.
Almost before the doors could have skated closed, the flyer's engines howled into life and sprayed a sheet of ashy dust over the seismic station and the bodies. Chekov closed his eyes and huddled down against the station, the heel of one hand dug into his side as if that pointless effort could somehow stop either the blood or the pain. There was no way he could outrun them now—they could blind him endlessly with flying dust and ash, then shoot at him from above while he was helpless to seek out better cover. Six to one are just bad odds, he decided dismally. He laughed weakly, but a fierce bolt of pain cut it short. If he actually managed to survive both the Elasians and the volcano, he promised himself he would never, ever try something this stupid again.
Boulders from some rock face farther up the slope formed a jumble at the mouth of the station's ravine. It seemed an impossible run in this ashy, oxygen-poor air, but Chekov saw nowhere else in the barren terrain that offered even a hope of shelter. Maybe if he avoided them long enough, they'd be forced to abandon the chase and take their wounded friend back for medical treatment. Or maybe expecting Elasians to care whether or not their companion died was giving them credit for too much compassion. After all, they could exercise exactly the same tactic on him, if they chose to. Seeing the flyer carve a graceful loop out of the sooty sky to come back at him, though, Chekov struggled to his feet in the bed of loose cinders. He might not be able to run either fast or far, but he couldn't just sit here and wait for the Elasians to kill him.
Blood darkened the pale dust on his jacket to a fearfully dark, sticky red, and ash slipped like oil beneath his feet. Dizziness crashed into him almost immediately, twisting tight in his stomach and lungs as a warning against trying to run too far in this improper air. He fought to keep his breathing deep and steady, struggled to stay upright and running despite the pain that ate at his resolve, and despite the rocks and crevices hidden beneath the blanket of ash. When the flyer's crisp black shadow swept over him and swallowed the light, he didn't even have strength to spare on grief or regret. When they told their Crown Regent how they'd caught him, they'd at least have a lot of explaining to do.
The force of the flyer's passage slammed into him as a wall of disturbed air. Wrapped in a blinding swirl of flying cinder, he dropped, gasping, to his knees and let the flyer scream by. It hitched nose upward as though starting into a sudden climb, then held in that position as the ship's rear thrusters roared and kicked it forward. Chekov realized it was going to slam the ravine's far wall only an instant before the undercarriage ripped open on the broken stone. He hit the ground just ahead of the warp core's dying pulse.
Only the faintest wisp of heat licked over him at this distance. Chekov shivered with horror, knowing what that unshielded blast would have done to him if it hadn't died out before spanning the high-walled ravine. Waiting for his heart to stop pounding and his spinning head to clear, he looked up carefully for what was left of the wreckage on the slope high above him.
The flyer itself was mostly intact. A long scar of shattered rock marked the course of its impact, and one slender warp nacelle had been wrenched almost upright underneath the passenger cabin, tilting the whole craft grotesquely sideways. There were no fires staining the ground around it with red, though—no squeal of freezing metal from the kiss of compressed nitrogen. Only the liquid heat shimmer of excited atoms dancing above the twisted nacelle betrayed how deadly a place that crash site must be. What could the pilot possibly have been thinking when he cut in those rear thrusters? Surely even an Elasian knew they would never have time to pull out of such a …
Chekov climbed slowly to his knees, resting with his head bowed almost to the sand when he found he couldn't straighten beyond that point. Light from the glowing flyer picked out his blood against the ash as hard little specks of flatly shining black. Takcas, he realized as he watched the splatters slowly fill in to a puddle beneath him. It had to have been Takcas. Knowing that the Crown Regent would just have him killed when the flyer returned to the mining camp, Takcas had taken command of his own destiny and exacted the only bit of revenge in his reach. The Crown Regent might only have lost six members of her cohort and a single human prisoner, but for Takcas that had apparently been damage enough.
"I just hope this volcano doesn't make everything you died for pointless." Chekov's voice sounded impossibly tiny against the high, distant rumbling of Rakatan Mons. Right now, he didn't know how he was going to rescue himself, much less Israi, Uhura, and the others.
But whatever he did, he wasn't going to do it here.
Straightening, he thrust out a hand to keep himself from swaying, and bid Takcas a silent, respectful farewell. He was afraid to think about how soon he and the Elasian kessh might yet see each other again. Now, in the shaky, adrenaline aftermath of the firefight, he peeled aside his tattered jacket and stole his first look at what Oben had done to him.
Jacket, belt, and tunic had all been blasted raggedly away along the side of his waist, taking enough of him along to leave a bloody patch wider even than the hand he had clamped over it. This probably wasn't a good time to know too much about disruptor damage, Chekov reflected dryly. Without a sickbay, or at least a well-equipped medikit, there wasn't much he could do to stop the bleeding—direct pressure would only work for so long, and he was too inconveniently hit to allow for a tourniquet. He crawled to his feet, hissing against the pain that rose with him, and turned awkwardly to look down the long, rugged length of ash-clogged ravine.
The three dead Elasians were dusted with ash, barely visible now against the monochrome ground. They could be a source of rags for bandages, but that was all they would be good for now
. What really mattered lay beyond them, a frightening distance away.
Past the ruined seismic station, past the crude landing pad, past even what Chekov could see now as the horizon, lay the only subspace communications console within a million kilometers. If he could reach it, he might still have some chance of contacting the ship and getting them all pulled out of here in time.
Considering that he wasn't certain he could live long enough to find it, the fact that both the console and Israi's captive cohort were well guarded by the Crown Regent's men inside the Elasian mining camp was, at this point, a technicality.
Chapter Nineteen
MULTIFORKED LIGHTNING lit the ash cloud over Rakatan Mons to the color of blood. It was followed by a sound too long and enormously explosive to be thunder—the blast from another volcanic eruption. Uhura felt her eyes wince shut in automatic reflex despite the hundreds of kilometers that separated them from the distant crater. She slipped on an unseen patch of loose cinder and would have fallen if a strong hand hadn't caught at her elbow and managed to steady her.
"You all right?" Sulu's voice demanded, barely audible over the volcanic roar.
"Yes." Uhura forced her eyes open again and scanned the towering ash cloud overhead. By now she knew that each thunderous outburst of the volcano launched a dark roostertail of ash out from the central column, feathering the sky with falling cinders and bombs. So far, they'd been lucky—prevailing winds pushed most of the ash trails toward the far side of Rakatan Mons. But each smoky curtain that swept across their path kept them halted for a frustrating length of time, heads huddled into arms to keep from choking on the gritty ash.
"No!" Feet braced on the steep talus pile beneath them, Israi tilted her head back and scowled up at the erupting volcano. The Dohlman's face was filthy with crusted mud and ash, but her almond eyes blazed out of the dirt with youthful indignation. "Turn your cursed evil ash away from us, you vile mountain! You will not spit at me again!"