by L. A. Graf
It bounced and rolled toward her in a wild spiral of light that showed her more red stains: a few trickles down one side of the station housing, small droplets splattered across the bank of seismometers, a web of smears and handprints around the still-wet pool in the far right corner. It looked like a reassuringly small amount until Uhura shone the light downward. Dark red stains glinted in a long smeared trail across the floor, almost hidden by the thicker layer of volcanic ash that clung to them.
"Oh, my God." She spun around and nearly collided with Sulu outside the station door. Either Uhura hadn't heard the order that freed him, or he'd finally managed to move without Israi's permission. "Sulu, I think Chekov's been shot! Look!"
The helmsman steadied himself with one hand on her shoulder, bending to watch the unsteady path of her light across the bloodstained floor. "He bled a lot."
"I know." Uhura met his gaze unhappily. "He wasn't in the flyer. I looked."
"And he wasn't here." Sulu swung away from her, frowning down the dark gash of the ravine. The hot ashfalls had ended for the moment, but a ghostly red glow of drifted cinders tracked the dry streambed down the slope. "Chekov knew this was the same valley that runs through the mining camp. If he went anywhere—"
"Wait!" Israi reached out to catch at Sulu's arm before he could move. The pilot glanced down at her and froze, pinned by her intent frown. "You say your kessh is hurt, but why do you need to go after him?" She turned her scowl on Uhura, ignoring an errant particle of ash that landed in her thick curls and glowed there, ruby bright. "Did you lie when you said we could beam my cohort up with us?"
"No." Uhura reached out to brush the cinder gently away from the Dohlman's smoldering hair. "We can beam them up anytime—now, if you want. But we can't beam up Chekov when we don't know where he is. We have to find him—"
"—before he bleeds to death," Mutchler finished grimly. The geologist had shed his blanket and was dragging himself painfully across the two meters that separated him from the station, seismic monitor cradled carefully against his chest. Guessing at his goal, Uhura went to help him. "You go look for Lieutenant Chekov," he told her unnecessarily, his rasping voice barely audible even this close. "I'll make contact with the Enterprise and get the Elasians beamed up."
Israi must have had sharp ears. Despite the thundering roar of the volcano, her startled gaze swung down toward the geologist. "You would do that?"
"Of course." Mutchler set down the seismic monitor and grabbed at the sides of the station access panel, wincing as he prepared to haul himself in. "No one deserves what's going to happen when this volcano finally erupts. Not even your damn Elasians, Israi."
"I did not give you permission to call me Israi, idiot geologist." Despite her sharp words, the Dohlman released Sulu and came over to Mutchler's other side, helping Uhura lift him into the station. After he had wormed himself in far enough to reach the communicator, she carefully handed the seismic monitor in behind him. "Give the idiot geologist your light, Uhura, so he can watch his screen make those stupid worm-lines."
Mutchler accepted the emergency light with an echoing snort that might have been laughter. "Those stupid worm-lines are going to tell me when this volcano decides to blow up, Your Glory."
"And what good will that knowledge do you?" she demanded.
"It'll just make me happy to know."
Israi looked up at Uhura over Mutchler's outstretched legs, baffled. Uhura answered her with a shrug. "All geologists must be idiots," the Dohlman decided, her voice sounding almost affectionate. She reached down to pat at Mutchler's good ankle, scattering crusted ash from his boot. "However, if you save my cohort, I promise never to call you idiot again. Even though you are one." A tremor of delicate emotion crossed her face, and she added suddenly, "Perhaps I should stay behind to pull you out of this punishment cell when you are finished calling the ship."
"No." Mutchler's voice was flat. "If that hot ash starts coming down thicker, I'll be better off inside here. You won't have any other place to shelter if you stay with me, Israi. You'll be safer going with the others to look for the lieutenant."
Israi reached down to Mutchler's boot again, this time to clasp his good ankle with her unseemly strength. "You speak as though you wish to protect me." The geologist didn't answer, but Uhura sensed an uncomfortable stillness from inside the seismic station. "You are not of my cohort, idiot geologist. Why would you think to do such a thing?"
"Because you're a royally spoiled brat …" Mutchler squirmed as though trying to dislodge himself from her grip, then gave up and sighed gruffly, "But I like you."
"Like me?" Israi's voice held bafflement and growing wonder. "But you have not tasted my tears."
The qualifer seemed to amuse Mutchler. "You're the one who keeps saying I'm an idiot geologist. Remember?"
"Yes," Israi agreed readily. "One whom I would be proud to have in my cohort."
Mutchler went quiet again inside the station, then asked plaintively, "Israi, please, can we not talk about this right now? We're running out of time as it is."
Uhura cleared her throat to stop Israi when the Dohlman opened her mouth to argue. Israi clenched her teeth with evident concern, but said nothing aloud to Mutchler's booted feet. "As soon as we find Chekov," Uhura suggested, "we'll call you on the Elasian comm bands and relay our coordinates."
Mutchler poked one hand out of the station to flash her an O.K. "Got it."
"You tell the ship to beam us up immediately. All of us, including you."
"Of course." The Elasian communicator whined when Mutchler began to dial in a Starfleet frequency. "Don't worry, Commander. You just take care of the Dohlman. I don't plan on claiming the honor of being the first geologist killed on this planet."
Kirk smiled as the little K-117 blasted clear of its moorings and leapt away from the shattered moonbase. Above them, Rakatan smoked like a clouded topaz, painting a provocative trail of dust and ash about her ample middle. The crude bulletships of the Elasian armada were too small and dark to see against the growing black shroud beyond them, but the ionized glow of their geodesic net glittered through the planet's stratosphere, as luminescent as an aurora, but steady, and more deadly.
"Spock, does this old boat have anything approaching a sensor array?" Kirk blinked hard against the sudden swap of subjective up and down as Skaftar disappeared beneath them and Rakatan suddenly dominated the screen. He gently rotated the K-117 until its attitude matched his new perception. "It would be nice to have some warning before one of those one-man fighters comes up to blast us."
The Vulcan interrupted his study of the approaching phaser web to examine the operations panel in front of him. "We do have a crude proximity sensor, Captain," he said at last. "However, its detection range is less than three kilometers. As I suspect no one-man fighter will risk approaching us that closely, the only thing we are likely to detect is an incoming photon torpedo."
Kirk grinned ruefully. "About a millisecond before impact." He edged them as precisely as he could between two of the onrushing lines in the phaser net. "Well, as long as the Crown Regent doesn't know we're here, we won't have to worry about torpedoes." At least, that was the plan.
Kirk felt the faint acceleration in their velocity a bare instant before it registered on his instruments. Accepting that as their entrance into the unyielding pull of Rakatan's inner gravity well, he carefully boosted the K-117's tail until she addressed the planet's surface nose downward. Feathers of atmospheric fire licked at the edges of the viewscreen as the little shuttle built up speed.
"Uh … Captain?" Metcalfe called uneasily from the passenger cabin. "I don't think this is the accepted reentry orientation for one of these."
Kirk tried to throw as much warm reassurance into his tone as possible. "Don't worry, Ms. Metcalfe—I know what I'm doing. Minnows slip through the open spaces in fishing nets all the time back on Earth." He flicked the switch for the rear impulse boosters, and threw them into a screaming, high-velocity dive. "Right now, we
're the minnow, and the open space we're heading for is between those phaser beams."
Metcalfe fell silent behind him, but Kirk could feel her uncertain gaze follow every command he gave the shuttle's panel.
"Spock, what kind of sensors are those Elasian ships working with?"
"Unless they have been retrofitted with contemporary Klingon equipment, Captain, they should possess no visual scanning capability, and their electromagnetic field sensors should be as poor or worse than ours."
Not as bad as it could have been, then. "So a minimum drop of three kilometers once we're through the net before we can assume we've evaded them."
The little shuttle jolted suddenly, shuddering so roughly that Kirk caught his breath. They whisked too close to one dying phaser strand in the net, taking a surface burn along one pylon while ionic discharge laced electrostatic fire across the viewscreen. Kirk forced himself to ignore the ship's complaints, keeping his eyes and mind on the altimeter reading flashing at his elbow. They'd made it through their open space—all they had to do now was fall.
"Mr. Spock?" Metcalfe called, somewhat tentatively. "What if those little ships have been retrofitted with modern equipment?"
The question seemed to intrigue the first officer. "Given a typical Klingon shuttle-based sensory array, their maximum detection range would then extend to fifty kilometers."
"Unfortunately," Kirk sighed, still fixated on the altimeter, "a free fall of fifty kilometers would put us somewhere inside this planet's crust."
"Actually, the upper mantle." Metcalfe released her safety harness with a clatter, and Kirk heard the shuffling stumble of her environmental suit boots on the decking as she came forward to join them. "Look on the bright side, Captain—at least there are no dinosaurs on Rakatan for us to kill off when we hit."
A scientist's version of "the bright side." "I think we'll just assume the Elasian ships have not been retrofitted."
A loud crack! echoed down the shuttle's frame, and Metcalfe barked a cry of surprise. Just expansion from atmospheric friction, Kirk assured himself. But he felt a trickle of sweat down his chest underneath the breastplate of his environmental suit. One kilometer below the geodesic net, and counting.
"Metcalfe, do you know where the troposphere starts on this planet?"
She sighed from behind his right shoulder. "I'm a geophysicist, Captain, not a meteorologist. I think it's about the same as Earth's, but I won't swear to it."
"Damn." He would have liked to pull out of their dive where no one was likely to see them. "Another five kilometers, then, before we hit significant cloud cover."
"Atmospheric pressure at two hundred millibars, Captain," Spock reported. Slim Vulcan fingers danced lightly across the monitoring instruments. "Hull temperature, five hundred fifty degrees Kelvin and rising."
Kirk nodded absently. "She ought to be good up to at least nine hundred degrees." The control panel shuddered dully beneath his hands. "Come on, we only have another kilometer. . . ."
Ash began its strident song against the ship's ceramic outside, and Kirk glanced up by reflex. What he took at first to be the edge of a small continent intruded on the shuttle's viewscreen. He realized it was one small part of Rakatan Mons when a white-gray plume of gas and steam slapped water across the vista and crackled against the overheated hull.
"Your landing party's in luck, Captain." Metcalfe leaned between Spock and the captain, tapping at what looked like a billowing cumulus cloud of black ash stretching off to their northeast. Another cluster of smaller clouds clung to the base of the first formation, flashing and winking with strikes of dirty lightning. "The monsoonal winds are blowing most the ash away from the Elasian mining camp."
"Hull temperature, six hundred eighty degrees Kelvin and rising. Atmospheric pressure, three hundred millibars."
"Only another five hundred meters to go," Kirk told his first officer tensely.
Metcalfe's tricorder warbled with excitement as she aimed it toward the view outside. "Ash cloud estimated at four thousand meters in height, with significant development of ground surge at the base." Kirk realized with a twinge of unreality that she was recording her observations for future reference. "The volcano has apparently completed the throat-clearing phase of the eruption and commenced a Vesuvian or sub-Plinean stage of the main eruptive sequence—"
The last five hundred meters vanished in a flash. "Ms. Metcalfe, sit down!"
Kirk couldn't wait to see if she obeyed him. With excruciating slowness, he coaxed the shuttle's nose out of its shuddering plummet, away from the surface, into a parallel streak. Despite his care, G-force slammed him back into his seat like a hammer, and he heard Spock grunt beside him. Blood seemed to rush away from his extremities, clouding his vision with sparkles of dizziness and gray—
Then, abruptly, his blood pressure stabilized sharply enough to make him gasp, and Kirk sat very straight in his pilot's chair. A mountain as tall and wild as the sky nearly filled the horizon ahead of them, its rear flanks carpeted with a rain of falling ash. Gray-violet smoke rolled down the volcano's slopes in long, clinging fingers. Their red-hot interiors were only visible near the leading edges, where the ash clouds devoured the ground before them in forward-springing jets, as powerful as charging lions. Behind the incandescent avalanche, black smoke and ash rose in towering clouds several kilometers high. Lightning split the blackness in vicious, recurrent strikes.
"Hull temperature, six hundred fifty degrees Kelvin and falling. Atmospheric pressure, five hundred millibars and stable." Spock looked up from his instruments at last. "My compliments, Captain."
Kirk, however, couldn't take his eyes away from the orgy of destruction pouring down the broken cliffs in front of them. "Metcalfe," he said softly. "It's too late, isn't it? The volcano has already erupted."
"Oh, Captain …" The young geologist reached out to knot her hand on the shoulder of his environmental suit. "You don't understand—Rakatan Mons hasn't even started its eruption yet."
Chapter Twenty-three
"CHEKOV?"
A warm hand pressed beneath his jawline, and Chekov came awake quite suddenly, gasping with surprise. He could feel his own pulse, quick and thready, thumping against someone's fingers, but couldn't quite blink enough focus into his eyes to recognize the darkened face bending over him.
Twisting on his knees to shout back at the lip of the overhang, the figure leaned back into his own lantern light. "Uhura! Your Glory!" Beneath layers of sweat and gritty ash, Chekov caught the faintest glimpse of golden skin above a jacket of Starfleet red. "I found him!"
Dark, brittle ash reached crooked fingers across the rock floor, as if the monstrous dark outside were trying to creep its way into the shelter while Chekov slept. He couldn't see anything of the storm or landscape past the mouth of the hollow, but the rocks inside had been lit to a pungent gray by what had to be an emergency lantern out of sight on the floor beyond Sulu. Chekov reached up to grasp at the helmsman's wrist.
"What are you doing here?" he asked miserably. "You were supposed to have escaped!" Fine, sparkling ash made a sheen of the air around them, like dust suspended in some thick and bitter liquid.
"Well, we had some problems." Sulu felt behind him for the lantern, then brought it around in front of him to sweep them both with its light. "The Elasians didn't like our flight plan." Chekov could tell Sulu didn't mean to let him see the shocked frown that tightened his lips and drew his brows together. The helmsman smoothed the fear from his expression quickly, then tried on a thin smile as he leaned across Chekov to deposit the lantern on his other side. "So what have you been up to?" he asked lightly, peeling Chekov's hand away from the bloodied patch along his side. "You were obviously in fine form back at that seismic station."
Chekov laughed faintly as Sulu unlatched his jacket and eased it gingerly aside. "I could have used some help," he admitted.
"Yeah …" Sulu prodded at the strip of makeshift bandages bound around Chekov's waist. It didn't hurt much—not really
—but Sulu's cheeks twitched against another expression of somber worry before he drew his hand back to dry it against the leg of his pants. "Apparently."
Weak beams of electric lighting slashed a bobbing trail through the darkness. Ash swam and glittered in the approaching lights, then wound into a swirl as first Uhura, then Israi disturbed the windblown piles near the entrance in their scramble under the shelter. They both looked pale and breathless in the murky lantern light, and their clothes and skin were sprinkled with tiny burns from the rain of ash outside. Kneeling, Uhura touched his shoulder as if to verify that he was really there. "Thank God you're all right."
Chekov decided it wasn't worth questioning her usage of "all right" just now. He gripped her hand when she slid it into his. "I really wish that you weren't here," he told them both.
"Don't worry," Sulu assured him. "None of us is going to be here much longer."
He wondered if Sulu realized how well that applied, regardless of whether or not the ship came to rescue them.
Uhura frowned and pressed his hand between both her palms. "Your hands are cold," she said, somehow making it sound slightly accusatory.
All of him was cold. He had been cold forever, it seemed. "It's the least of our worries."
"Sulu …" She shot a keen look across at the helmsman as she unlatched her jacket and started to strip it open. "How far are we from Mutchler at the seismic station?"
Pursing his lips, Sulu turned to look out at the violent ashfall, as if studying the invisible horizon would somehow give him the answer. Chekov smiled in tired thanks when Uhura draped her jacket over him and tucked it behind his shoulders.
"About three kilometers south-southwest," Sulu said at last. He looked back at them with an apologetic shrug. "I can't estimate any closer than that."
"It'll have to be enough." Settling back on her heels, Uhura pushed up the sleeve of her blue tunic and punched at the Klingon-made comm band on her wrist. It acknowledged her with a spit of static. "Uhura to Mutchler. Dr. Mutchler? We've found Lieutenant Chekov. Are you there?" Thin strips of high white noise were her only reply. "Dr. Mutchler? Hello?" She looked up at the rest of them with a frustrated sigh.