by Diane Carey
That was the place they were being drawn into—Atlantis Outpost.
“There they are,” Cadet Kirk said.
McCoy looked up. On the screen, inside the bright red, yellow, and white circles of the landing pad, were several men watching them come in.
“What’re they holding?” he asked.
“Laser rifles, that’s what!” Abruptly Cadet Kirk leaned into his controls, snapped off a couple of connections, and took the throttle in his right hand and the steering wheel console in his left. He leaned forward, and the engines whined in response.
“Cadet!” Spock shouted. “We’ll overshoot the complex!”
The cadet nodded sharply. “I’ll be sure to do that, sir!”
At that instant, the Atlantis complex sheared past beneath them. Instead of veering toward it, the craft muscled past, screaming and fighting against the tractor beam.
“That was not an order!” Spock reached out for the piloting controls. “Stop immediately!”
The cadet put out his own hand, just long enough to nudge Spock back. Not exactly a hit, but a firm bump. “Too late, sir!”
“Release your controls, Cadet!”
“It’s too late! Everybody hang on! We’re crashing!”
Chapter 6
Blustering noise pounded in Leonard McCoy’s throbbing ears. The cabin flashed with violent patches of light and darkness. Hard forces pounded the outer skin of the Spitfire—they must be clipping the tops of trees!
Branches reached up and swatted the shuttle as it rollicked closer to the ground. Red and yellow flashers on the console cast terrible shapes on the bulkheads. Those were warning lights—the engines were fighting to keep the ship up, but the tractor beam had dragged it down. Now they had to go all the way down before they could repair things and go back up.
Taking a hammering, the little craft zagged between the trees. McCoy caught sight of Cadet Kirk’s muscular arms working back and forth and his shoulders hunching. Then everything went dark.
McCoy felt as if he were sitting inside a kettle drum. Boom, boom, boom, boom. He hunched his own shoulders, pressed his right side against the back of Spock’s seat, and crammed his eyes shut.
Scraaaaaaatch—
That came from underneath! They were scuffing the ground!
Swerving like a hornet, the Spitfire carved a path for itself through the undergrowth, busting branches and smashing the edges of rocks. If one of those rocks struck them just right, it could cut the shuttle open like a melon.
Boom—boom boom boom—Charrrrack—
McCoy’s shoulder slammed hard against the seat, his hip driving into the deck. Then he was picked up for a few seconds, and dropped again in a different position, with the side of his face on the carpet. With a final bump, the Spitfire skidded to a stop against a solid object out there.
Leaning at a sickening angle, the little ship bleeped and wheezed and gasped. The alarms stopped ringing. The sensors stopped trying to tell them that they were too close to the planet’s surface. It was dark in here now.
Were the others alive? There wasn’t any sound from either of the pilot seats.
“Ouch.”
A voice! Certainly, it wasn’t Spock. A Vulcan wouldn’t say “ouch.” A Vulcan would say, “Noting pain in an extremity.”
Must be Cadet Kirk…
Invigorated by the sound of a patient in need of help, McCoy found the strength to push himself up. He could see something now—a faint emergency light had popped on. The little light was pink, easier on the eyes than white or yellow. It cast a candy-apple glow on the tilted deck and seats.
At his side, the bulkhead was bent inward as if punched from outside. Of course, that was exactly what had happened. As he gazed at the bulging bulkhead, he noticed that Cadet Kirk had been right—that overlapped clinker plating had held.
McCoy pulled himself up and looked between the seats.
Cadet Kirk sat blinking forward at the dark screen, coughing on puffs of electrical smoke from his console.
McCoy shimmied between the seats. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so,” the cadet rasped, then coughed again. He reached to his left, punched a toggle, and a ventilator started whirring in the ceiling.
The smoke twisted happily, and raced toward the ventilator.
“Ensign?” McCoy put his hand on the Vulcan’s arm. “Spock?”
Spock jolted as if startled, blinked, and looked at him. “We’re down,” he uttered.
“Yes, we seem to be.” Carefully McCoy touched a wound on the upper left side of Spock’s face. Green blood dribbled from the abrasion, which was surrounded by a quickly spreading bruise.
“Where are we?” Spock asked, fighting for consciousness.
Cadet Kirk waved at the electrical smoke. “Looks like … we came down about fourteen kilometers past the complex.”
The Vulcan grasped the console before him and tried to pull forward. “We have to get out in case the coolant ruptures—”
“Hold still,” McCoy told him. “Does this crate have a first-aid kit?”
“Starboard side, aft,” Cadet Kirk said as he unbuckled his harness. “I used it for a pillow last night.”
“Both of you sit still.”
McCoy hurried back along the tilted deck, to the rear part of the ship, then fished around on the starboard side. He found the first-aid kit, a leatherlike pouch with a magnetic pressure seal. Cradling it in one arm, he pulled himself forward again.
By the time he got back, the cadet and the ensign were arguing again.
“As soon as I saw their weapons, I reacted. There wasn’t time to ask what I should do. I just did it.”
“From now on, Cadet,” Spock said instantly, “you will take no action without consulting me. If there’s no time, my last orders will stand. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir, it’s clear.”
“What is this place?” McCoy asked. “What does Atlantic Outpost actually do?”
“It’s a weather-control experimentation station,” Cadet Kirk said. “It’s part of terraforming this planet for agricultural colonization. But mostly they’re trying to figure out just how much weather can be controlled.”
“How do they do that?”
“With satellites,” Spock filled in. “Computers map out natural weather conditions and project likely changes. Then, satellites are used to redirect the sun’s heat to various areas or deprive other areas of warmth.”
“Why would anybody want to control weather?”
“Controlling rainfall alone can have a great effect on farming conditions. Barren continents could be made green. Wet areas could be made more arid, better for certain crops and animals. However…” Spock winced as McCoy dabbed at his head wound. “Creating weather is one thing … manipulating it is another.”
“Doesn’t sound like such a big deal,” McCoy grumbled.
“On the contrary,” the Vulcan said. “One hurricane has more energy than all the nuclear weapons produced in the entire twentieth century. If that power could be harnessed, it would be a fabulous resource.”
“If they can do that on an unpopulated planet like this one,” Cadet Kirk filled in, “they’ll be able to use it on other planets too. They can put water in places where people are dying of drought, or dry up places where there’s too much flooding.”
“Sounds good to me,” McCoy commented. At the moment he found it hard to care about a little weather control.
“What about a mayday?” the cadet asked then. “We should broadcast one right now, while we have the chance.”
“That may not be the wise course,” Spock told him.
Cadet Kirk made a motion at the console with one hand. “The beam is off us now. According to regulations, we have to broadcast a mayday right away.”
“A distress call signal could also be a homing signal.” Spock was unbuckling his own harness now. “There is nothing in the regulations dealing with being kidnapped, Cadet.”
“But there
are regulations that deal with accidents and with crimes. This is one of those. Maybe both.”
“Which manuals have you been reading?” McCoy asked as he pressed a patch of sterile gauze to Spock’s injury.
“All of them,” Cadet Kirk answered. He looked at Spock again. “Sir, now that we’re on the ground, we’re compelled to follow procedure. We’re required to report in, so a search party can be deployed. Otherwise, nobody’ll know where or when we were pulled off course. They could search for years and not find us. I’m sending a message with coordinates.”
“The kidnappers could zero in on our signal,” Spock said. “Then they will be the ones to find us.”
“We’ve got to leave some kind of trail, or we could be stranded on this station for years. I don’t think you want that any more than I do.” When neither of them dared argue that particular point, the cadet added, “I’m going to send an automated mayday before we lose our power. Then it’ll be too late.”
McCoy and Spock looked at him, but neither said anything.
“Very well,” Spock finally said, “but you send it under my official protest.”
“Noted,” the cadet said. He reached forward, and deliberately punched in a mayday code with their location, then hit the BROADCAST button.
The cadet looked at Spock for one more second, then pushed out of his seat. He crawled over McCoy, and leaned to check something on the port side of the cockpit.
“We’ve still got our coolant,” he said. “No ruptures so far. We might be able to take off again if we can get the ship into a clearing. I’ve got a come-along and four antigravs in back. And there’s a laser torch we can use to cut trees.”
“Let me up, please,” Spock said to McCoy.
“I’ll let you up in just a minute,” McCoy said. “I want to make sure you don’t have a concussion first. A head injury is nothing to play with.”
“Hurry,” Spock instructed. “We’re now working against time.”
“Another half meter!”
“Almost there—” McCoy gasped. Together he and Spock heaved on the cable of the hand-held come-along, a contraption made to loop around a tree or rod, then crank its cable tighter and tighter.
Thirty feet away, Cadet Kirk managed two antigravs attached to the Spitfire’s bow. The little ship was crammed in between two very big trees. If it had hit either of those trees head-on, it might have disintegrated. But it was just wedged, and with some power and leverage, they could get it out.
Crank, crank, crank—inch after inch, the cable tightened. The shuttle’s blocky hull scratched backward toward them. On top of the rectangular-shaped hull, a small communications unit blinked silently, sending their distress beacon into space. Was it strong enough to reach the spacelanes?
Suddenly the shuttle slid harshly to one side, and clunked to the ground.
“That’s it!” the cadet called from the bow. “We’re clear of the trees.” He came jogging toward them. “We should be able to cut our way out of these bushes, then antigrav the Spitfire over to that clearing.”
“What good will it do to get to the clearing?” McCoy asked. “We can’t take off, just to get caught in that tractor beam again.”
“We might be able to skim the planet’s surface and find another angle away from here.”
Spock straightened and rubbed his hands, which were grooved and sore from gripping the come-along’s handle. “That’s assuming the tractor beam has a narrow band. If it has wide one, we may end up crashing again. We may not be so fortunate a second time.”
“Then we have to turn off the tractor beam at the source.”
McCoy looked at him, then at Spock, and waited for an argument to break out. He was licking his chops about which side to take when Spock surprised him completely by saying, “That … is very logical.”
The cadet shifted his feet and his face flushed a little. He appeared almost embarrassed by getting the Vulcan’s approval, which seemed to be rare indeed. “Then that’s the plan?”
“I would accept that as a primary goal,” Spock said coldly. “We shall see if it proves more dangerous than it sounds.”
The Vulcan walked away, to the other side of the shuttle.
So much for approval.
Deprived of his victory, Cadet Kirk clamped his mouth shut and dodged inside. He came out again with two laser torches. Tossing one to McCoy, he grimly set about cutting away the branches and vines that had snared the Spitfire.
“I guess I should help,” McCoy muttered, and tried to figure out which end of the torch the laser beam came out of.
Just when he found the business end, a loud whine cut through the air around them as if out of nowhere. He looked around, into the sky where the sound was coming from.
Cadet Kirk came dodging out of the bushes, craning at the sky. Ensign Spock reappeared from behind the shuttle.
Before anyone could speak, two small buzzardlike craft soared in at them and strafed the crash site.
“They found us!” Cadet Kirk blurted.
“They followed our mayday beacon,” Spock called over the howl of the circling attack crafts.
There were two of them, small two-man atmospheric vehicles, very common, used for everything from regional defense to taxicab service. They weren’t Starfleet craft, but just common, everyday planetary runabouts.
They swooped down to have a look at the three castaways, then veered off and came around for another pass. As they came around, a narrow white glow appeared on the nose of each craft.
“Take cover!” Cadet Kirk called. He waved them toward the trees. “They just armed their weapons!”
Chapter 7
Heavy laser bolts slashed through the bushes, burning the leaves and raising a terrible stink. Insects clouded upward. Sizzling branches crackled through the shaken trees and hit the ground inches from McCoy’s huddling body.
He had run, but he had stumbled. Spock and Cadet Kirk were somewhere in the bushes too, but he couldn’t see them. His heart pounded in his chest. Why would these people kidnap them, then try to fry them with lasers?
Without raising his head more than a few inches, he shimmied under the bushes, through the dry moss and decaying vegetation.
Teeeeuuuuu teeeuuuu teuuu—lasers again!
McCoy kept his head down. Bark and stones sprayed across his spine.
“This way!”
He looked up in the direction of the cadet’s voice, then crawled toward the sound.
As the lasers pounded the earth again only ten feet away, two sets of hands grasped him and pulled him under cover of a fallen log. He found himself curled between the cadet and Ensign Spock.
“How did they find us so fast?” he asked.
Spock squinted at their attackers. “The mayday signal. I was concerned about exactly this.”
Cadet Kirk glanced at him, frustrated that following regulations had gotten them into deeper trouble.
“Why are they shooting at us?” McCoy wondered. “If they want hostages, why are they trying to kill us?”
“They’re not,” the cadet said bluntly.
Digging an elbow into the moss, McCoy craned to look at him. “What do you mean, they’re not!”
“The laser bolts are hitting ten feet in that direction, and ten feet in the other direction. They’re firing at a column around us. They’re trying to scare us, not kill us.”
“Then they do want hostages,” Spock concluded.
The cadet peered out at the two small craft, which were now circling for a landing. “They want Richard Daystrom.”
“Then we should contact them,” the Vulcan said. “Tell them who we are. Once they discover that Dr. Daystrom is not among us, logically they will not pursue the actions they’re taking. They won’t want to risk a kidnapping charge for no profit. When they land, we’ll identify ourselves.”
The two craft were already on the ground, still buzzing with power and glowing with their power-packed weapons.
“Permission to speak, sir,�
� Cadet Kirk said then. He looked as if a light had gone on in his head.
“Yes?” Spock responded.
“Well … what if they don’t think that? Or what if they don’t care about kidnapping charges? What if they don’t even care about a murder charge?”
“That’s true,” McCoy agreed. “Just because we present them with logic doesn’t mean they’ll react like Vulcans.”
“What is the alternative?” Spock peered at them both, unable to think of any other way than simple, direct logic.
Cadet Kirk suggested, “We have to fight our way out.”
McCoy looked around. “Fight our way to where? Our shuttle is here. You mean get inside it and fight?”
“It’ll take time to clear the branches away,” Spock said. “We have no time.”
Cadet Kirk looked out at the highlands to the west. “We can get away from them, then make our way into those hills and hide out until a rescue detail shows up. The distress call went out,” he added, pinning Spock with a glance, “and all we have to do is hold our own until they come.”
“They might be coming into a trap because of us,” Spock pointed out.
“That’s their job, sir,” the cadet said unapologetically. “It’ll be mine someday. Our job right now is to be alive and well when they get here. We can do that if we can get to those hills.”
“We have to try negotiating first,” Spock said.
Cadet Kirk ducked under a branch to look at him. “I respectfully remind you, sir, that regulations specifically say that no Starfleet personnel should negotiate with terrorists.”
“There’s a time and place for everything,” McCoy said warily watching the nearby craft. “We’re unarmed, aren’t we?”
“We might be able to fake something,” Cadet Kirk said. “I’ll see what’s aboard.”
He dodged back behind the log as six kidnappers appeared outside their small crafts.