by L. A. Graf
Tucking his elbow tight against his aching side, Chekov watched the rain of luminous ash and waited for the world to end.
Chapter Twenty-one
KIRK FINGERED THE EDGES of the blast-shattered corridor, studying the frozen splash patterns now recorded forever by the debris strewn across Skaftar's dusty surface a hundred meters below. Apparently there had once been a whole other wing of the Johnston Observatory down this direction—complete with a waste-elimination system, judging from the piping that jutted out from the remnants of the wall. Now nothing stood beyond this airless intersection except the flat, matte darkness of space, and the brilliant aqua crescent of Rakatan peeping up over Skaftar's horizon.
"There!"
Kirk turned at Metcalfe's breathless but triumphant shout. She obviously wasn't used to functioning inside an environmental suit, much less talking to her companions only via radio. The captain had given up reminding her that she didn't need to shout to be heard when they were out of sight.
"All clear?" he asked, intentionally pitching his voice softly and calmly.
Wriggling backward out of the narrow cranny Spock held open for her in the collapsed wreckage, Metcalfe paused as though caught off guard by the nearness of his words. Kirk understood how she felt. "Yeah, it's set," she said more quietly as she crawled free and rotated to sit on her bottom. "I managed to shove the power conduit off to the far side." She scooted to jab a thickly gloved hand awkwardly toward the one wall. "Under that chunk of transparent aluminum."
Kirk nodded, then glanced over to catch the confirming tip of Spock's head when the Vulcan lifted his tricorder in front of his helmet's faceplate. Every time Spock consulted the device in the eerie vacuum silence, the complete lack of sound washed a chill of unreality over Kirk, as though everything around him were part of some unfinished dream. He waited until Spock, still studying his tricorder, reached to take Metcalfe's arm and move her aside; then Kirk checked the charge on his phaser and aimed at the snarl of debris.
A finely calibrated beam splashed silently against the blockage and flashed it an instant, stunning white. The sudden rise in the corridor's ambient temperature registered on the gauge to the right of Kirk's vision, then vanished abruptly as the heated gas cloud puffed away into vacuum on the other side of the wreckage. Kirk cut the beam and waited for the dust to settle.
Even though they'd done almost the same thing at every barricade they'd found for the last four hours, Kirk still held Metcalfe back while Spock inspected the burned-out passage. Only after the Vulcan had declared the edges cool enough to pass and stepped through to the open corridor beyond did Kirk release Metcalfe and start forward as well. It wasn't that the young geologist had made any sort of attempt to hurry forward when she shouldn't; Kirk just wasn't taking any chances. They were running out of time as it was.
Reflected light from Rakatan's watery surface lent the faintest trace of detail to the dark corridor beyond the wreckage. Kirk ducked through the still-warm hole, gritting his teeth in frustration when the light from the lamp on the top of his helmet glanced off another debris wall barely ten meters ahead of them. Spock already stood at the base of it, sweeping his tricorder smoothly left and right as he scanned the pile from top to bottom.
Something thumped the seat of Kirk's environmental suit, and he sidled against the outside wall in response. "Sorry, Captain." Metcalfe crawled clumsily through the opening, then stumbled into Kirk as she regained her footing. She smiled a thanks when he reflexively caught her, but sobered again quickly as soon as her eyes turned to follow the course of his gaze. A groaning little sigh escaped her. "I was sure we were almost there. . . ."
"I was hoping so." He only had a few shots' worth left in the phaser. "Clearing battle wreckage isn't exactly what Starfleet designed these things for."
Metcalfe glanced at the pistol in his hand, then let her frown travel upward to the scarred window above his left shoulder. Kirk recognized the bright smear of reflection across the front of her faceplate, but turned to face Rakatan anyway. It looked sharply defined, and very, very distant. "What's this?" he asked, reaching up to trace a smudge of gray trailing off across the water to the east of Rakatan Mons.
Metcalfe scrubbed at the image, as though it were a dirty patch on the transparent aluminum that she could somehow rub away. "Ash from Rakatan Mons. It's thrown up about a cubic kilometer of it so far."
Kirk remembered the inkblot of smoke and lava they'd watched on their first day here. "I thought Dr. Bascomb said that when Rakatan Mons erupted, it would throw debris up into outer space. So far, this eruption doesn't look any worse than that other volcano we saw."
"Mazama Mons," she informed him automatically. He could tell from her grim nod, though, that her mind was on the more serious question. "So far, it isn't any worse. I won't know for sure until I get down there and analyze the ash composition, but my guess is that Rakatan Mons is just clearing its throat." She turned her shoulder to the window and looked up at him. "The volcano has to blast out the old welded ash that's clogging the crater before any new magma can get through."
Which meant there was worse yet to come. "How long does that stage usually last?"
"Hard to say." Metcalfe shrugged and shook her head. "Sometimes, months. Other times, hours."
Kirk glared across the kilometers at the volcano, acutely aware of which time frame the damned thing had better be working in.
"Captain …"
Over the suit comms, Spock's voice sounded tinny and flat. He slipped his tricorder into its holster on the side of his equipment belt and came back through the darkness to join them. "I detected no active power conduits inside this deadfall, Captain. I believe it will be safe to destroy it all."
Kirk moved as close to the wreckage as he dared and studied the surface for a weak spot. Two shots, he estimated. That's all he had left before they were forced to resort to tearing obstructions apart by hand and hoping they didn't damage any of their suits in the process. He fired low, carving out a deep cleft through the wreckage near the floor and letting the upper layers collapse downward and forward to clear themselves out. It wouldn't make for the best walking environment, Kirk suspected, but it would be better than no passage at all. He actually managed to coax a third weak shot from the weapon before it lapsed into darkness in his hand. "All right …" He returned the spent phaser to his belt. "Let's see what we've found."
"Be careful, Captain."
Kirk grinned as he felt for his first toehold in the partially collapsed pile. "Thank you, Mr. Spock. That was my plan."
Debris slipped and settled only slightly beneath his moonlightened weight. When he reached the top of the pile, he polished dust from his helmet lamp with the palm of his glove and directed the light straight forward in an effort to see how far the jumbled deadfall extended. He pulled back slightly in surprise when a glare of Starfleet white erupted almost directly in front of him, the blocky crest of a scarlet "2" just rising above the junk line.
"Congratulations, everyone. I think we've found the shuttle bay." It was all he could do to keep from shouting the way Metcalfe had.
"Are the doors intact, Captain?"
Kirk had an impression of Spock moving up closer behind him, but couldn't turn around enough to see for sure. "I don't know, Spock—I can't tell. Ms. Metcalfe, is there an airlock on this door?"
"Yes!" she exclaimed. Then, as if the loudness of her own voice in her helmet had startled her, she went on more quietly, "There should be controls about halfway up on the right."
Kirk dug a hand down between the wall and the pile, shifting stray bits of debris until he'd gained a little column of clear space. A keypad and visual display nestled almost out of reach below him. "I found it. What's the access code?"
"Sesame."
"Ah." He started to punch in the letters with some effort.
"Very secure."
"Well …" Metcalfe sounded embarrassed. "We don't have a lot of problem with intruders around here."
"No
t even with your sentient magma men?"
"Very funny, Captain."
Water vapor puffed, white and diaphanous, into a cloud against Kirk's faceplate as the airlock doors ground silently open. Scraping away frost with the fingertips on his gloves, Kirk swept his light around the small room within, looking for damage or contamination. The walls and floor gleamed as clean and even as the day they'd been installed. "Well, it holds an atmosphere. Let's see if it cycles." He leaned over on one elbow to swing his legs around and slide down.
Kirk busied himself kicking and shoving debris away from the doorway as Metcalfe climbed in behind him. She landed with a grunt on the floor of the airlock, then crawled out of the way to give Spock room to enter with a more agile jump. The Vulcan cranked the doors manually shut without having to be told. "I presume you have some plan for exiting this airlock should the atmosphere fail to cycle, Captain."
Kirk leaned a hand against the big red button that should start the flood of breathable air. "None whatsoever, Spock. That's the beauty of it—I can't be disappointed."
He felt the press of invisible weight against his suit, though, and heard the faint sounds of the atmosphere pump gradually rush up on him, louder and louder, as the lock filled with air. He smiled up at his first officer with a suave spread of his hands. "At least something on this station works."
The Vulcan raised an eyebrow. "It would be preferable if that something were the shuttle."
Kirk grimaced, unhappy to be reminded about that century-old bucket. "There is that."
"Don't worry, Captain," Metcalfe assured him from her place on the floor. "John Dembosky was really proud of our ships—he kept them in good working order, even when he had to build the parts himself."
Somehow, that image wasn't very reassuring. "Unfortunately, Ms. Metcalfe, what's considered good working order for a Geological Survey outpost probably isn't what I had in mind for outrunning the Elasians." He cocked his head back to watch the airlock's pressure light darken slowly from amber to green. "We'll just have to make do with whatever we've got." And hope to hell it was enough.
The doors to the shuttle bay opened with a deep, reassuring sigh. Dim emergency lighting painted the domed walls a sick mercury orange, with the four-fold seals for the launch doors running up the framework like scars until they crossed at the top to form a great X. Beneath that X, balanced gracefully on runners that had been swept back for aerodynamic beauty while still allowing room for a warp nacelle, the K-117 looked too fragile and tenderly constructed to have survived for one hundred years beyond her retirement. But every contour of her monopiece hull had been kept polished and calibrated, and even the difficult exhaust manifold on the rear of her nacelle had been cleaned and resealed so recently that the heat bleed-offs still shone. There wasn't even a reentry ripple or debris scar in her brilliant blue-and-white finish.
Kirk shook his head in admiring wonder. "Thank you, Dr. Dembosky."
"Captain?" Spock glanced aside at him curiously.
"Why, Mr. Spock," Kirk said jauntily, "don't you realize that the K-117 was once one of the fastest interatmospheric shuttles in Starfleet?" At his first officer's uncertain frown, Kirk waved Spock forward toward the waiting craft and hurried Metcalfe along beside him. "It looks like it's going to be again. Let's go get our people."
By Uhura's mental clock, they'd spent at least eleven minutes in the brutal subspace radiation of the Elasian flyer. She'd hustled Israi out even before the Dohlman had finished murmuring her ritual chant over Takcas's body, but the spidery shiver of cold in her bones told Uhura it hadn't been soon enough. She clenched her teeth on her instinctive dread, telling herself that there'd be time enough to have the damage treated on board the Enterprise. Or else not time enough for it to matter.
The climb back up to the seismic station seemed much steeper than it had coming down—a bad sign, Uhura thought wryly. As they approached the splintered building, she could see Sulu sitting exactly where they'd left him. His gaze tracked them up the ravine slope, precise and fierce as an automated phaser. Behind him, Mutchler huddled under an emergency blanket, engrossed in whatever data were still coming through to his portable seismic monitor. Ironically, the geologist had his back turned to the actual column of volcanic ash looming overhead.
Rakatan Mons had spread more of that gray-black shroud across the sky, Uhura saw, and occasional scatters of it swept across the ravine like thin veils of rain. Unlike the earlier falls, these cinders still glowed ember-bright and left tiny seared places on Uhura's uniform—and on her skin. Lightning blasted almost constantly through the curdled ash cloud, but the answering roars of volcanic thunder were drowned out by the larger thunder of the eruption itself. Only the western horizon still held light: a thin rim of sunset darkened by ash to the mahogany of Elasian blood.
Uhura hoped the dimness would keep Sulu from noticing her persistent shivers, but he read her face as easily as one of his star charts. "You were inside too long." The pilot half-rose from the ground, his thin face contorted with the effort even that slight disobedience cost him. "What happened?"
"We found my kessh and had to comfort him." Israi clicked her teeth in exasperation and went to push Sulu down again with one hand on his shoulder. "I told you to rest, bondsman. Who will carry our idiot geologist if you cannot?"
Sulu's glance up at her somehow managed to combine fierce devotion and equally fierce frustration. Even through the livid volcanic twilight, Uhura could see smudges of exhaustion around his eyes and mouth, dark as bruises beneath the gray volcanic ash. The synthetic adrenaline must finally be wearing off.
"He's not carrying anyone anywhere." Uhura tried to put a Dohlman-sharp edge in her voice, but was afraid it came out sounding more like alarm than anger. "We're going to contact my ship from here as soon as I hook this communicator up to station power."
Israi scowled at her, hefting her Klingon disruptor in one hand. "But my cohort remains captive. We cannot leave them on this smoking mountain."
"Don't worry, we know their coordinates. As soon as we make contact with the Enterprise, we'll have them beamed up, too." Uhura headed for the open access panel of the seismic station without waiting for an answer, hugging the Elasian communicator under one elbow while she crouched to peer inside. A nearby flash of volcanic lightning strobed through the cramped interior of the seismic station, but it didn't last long enough for her to find the power source whose reassuring vibration she could feel through the housing. Hot ash hissed and pattered on the metal roof, sounding oddly like rain.
"Israi." This time, Uhura didn't have to fake the impatient snap of her voice. "Bring me one of the lights from our emergency kits."
"Generator's in the far right corner." Mutchler raised his head, cheekbones jutting like dead branches underneath his ash-crusted skin. One volcanic cinder a little brighter than the rest fell onto his blanket, but the fireproof material merely blackened under it until it cooled and faded. "I left the power leads there when I yanked the controller."
"Were they still live?" The volcano groaned and lurched beneath them before the geologist could answer, slamming Uhura headfirst into the station. She fetched up against the array of broken seismometers and banged her shoulder painfully on their concrete dais. When the ground stopped quivering at last, Uhura caught her breath and found the power leads by the simple expedient of putting her hand down on one and feeling it bite at her palm. That answered her question about whether they were live. Then her other hand landed on something damp and sticky, and she yelped in dismay.
"Uhura?" Bright white emergency light stabbed through the darkness of the station, making her shadow skitter across the bloodstained concrete floor. Israi's voice sounded concerned. "Are you hurt?"
"No, I'm all right." Uhura squirmed backward, away from the drying pool of blood. "Point the light over my right shoulder, Israi, so I can see to connect this. A little more—yes, there." It only took her a moment to untangle the coil of wire Mutchler had left dangling and splice it into
the Elasian communicator. With Israi's emergency lamp brightening the wires to strands of silver and her fingertips to copper-gold, Uhura even managed to avoid touching the live ends of the circuit.
"That's it." She plugged the last circuit together and sighed in relief when the communicator's antique frequency display flickered into faint blue life. She tried to angle the display up into the beam of Israi's light, but gave up when the power leads stretched so far that the display flickered. "Israi, can you tilt your light a little further down—no, not that way, back—"
Uhura broke off abruptly. The momentary wobble had skated the brilliant emergency light across one of the bloodstains on the floor and kindled it into a dark garnet red glow. Not the mahogany brown of dried Elasian blood, not even the warm cinnamon of Elasian blood when it was fresh. The color of that gummy pool was the unmistakable iron-rich red of human blood.
Chapter Twenty-two
"CHEKOV!" Uhura almost dropped the communicator in her shock. Chekov had been here, and he had been wounded. Although Sulu had been certain that this mayhem marked their friend's passage, Uhura realized she hadn't entirely believed it until now. She put down the communicator and scrambled back to the opening, suddenly needing to see how much of his blood the Russian had left here. "Israi, throw me that light!"