Progress

by Terri Osborne

  Grabbing a padd from the desk as she stood, she began to put together a basic triage unit. The ship could spare a couple of nurses, and they’d just resupplied the medical stores in addition to the stockpile for Drema Station, so burn treatments, dermal regenerators and bone knitters were at peak capacity. Grabbing an empty medkit, she began filling it with hypospray canisters of sterilite and asinolyathin. On a whim, she even threw in some canisters of dylovene. She had a feeling they were going to need those just as much as the bone knitters.

  And where the hell was Klesaris?

  Chapter

  7

  Latik Kerjna, Drema IV

  Somewhere in Dilithium Mine Alpha

  Day 1

  David Gold was falling head-over-heels down a very steep incline. He wasn’t sure where or when it was going to end, but he knew that it had to end eventually.

  If nothing else, the mine shaft had to have a bottom.

  No sooner did that thought enter his mind than he landed—thankfully, feet-first—in an enormous pit of what he assumed was water from the firefighting effort up above. When he finally was able to get his bearings, he realized that the fluid was, in fact, only about one meter deep and had the clean, crisp smell that he’d long grown to associate with cold water. He took a deep breath, only to discover that there was enough dust still floating in the air from the collapse to make breathing unpleasant. He pulled the neck of his tunic back over his mouth. Above him, a blinking pinpoint of light was the only indication he could find of the surface. How far had he fallen?

  And why did the air feel so stuffy and cold?

  Pulling himself up to his full height, he tried to squint into the darkness to take inventory of his situation. Physically, his ankles hurt like hell from the landing, and he half-expected one—if not both—to be swelling up as he stood there. His arms were a dissonant mass of over-tensed and pulled muscles from involuntarily bracing himself for the impact as he’d fallen. He felt as though he were covered in bruises, and he wondered if the water weren’t covering up some bleeding in his lower extremities.

  The portion of his body that wasn’t submerged in water was chilled to the bone, but that was when he noticed that the portion of him that was in the water was beginning to warm. As far as he was aware, he was the only living thing in the small pond, so it couldn’t have been body heat or any other fluids, unless he was bleeding a far cry more than he felt he could have been. So, what was it? Thermal energy from the dilithium? If that’s the case, I do not want to be down in this water for long. The last thing I need is to test the old story about slowly boiling alive.

  A frightened whimper told him there was a person nearby, but the envelope of pitch black that had sealed him up so tightly made him wonder if he hadn’t lost his eyesight in the fall. “Hello?”

  “You’re alive?”

  Even though he couldn’t see it, he involuntarily looked down at his waterlogged uniform and tried not to laugh about the whole thing. “Either that or Rachel has really been lying to me about the afterlife.”

  That elicited what sounded like a nervous chuckle out of the woman. He immediately began worrying about her mental state because nothing he said should have made sense to her. The poor woman was probably in shock.

  “Good, keep laughing. It’ll help me find you.”

  It amazed him how utterly black the cavern was. He held out a hand, thinking it felt as though it was in front of his face, but he had no visual data to prove it to himself. Gold got two more steps toward her when another rumble preceded the sound of another scream in the distance. This one was distinctly male. Gold scrambled to get out of the pit before whoever was about to join them arrived.

  He got out of the way just in time. One enormous splash later, a spluttering Liankataka surfaced. He was quiet for a moment, but then began shouting.

  “Guardian, what’s wrong?” the woman asked, sounding a little less frightened now that another of her kind was involved.

  “My leg,” he said. Gold could hear the repressed pain in his voice. “It won’t bear weight.”

  “Do you know how to swim?” Gold asked.

  “What?”

  “Floating?”

  “I’m sorry, Captain. I don’t know.”

  The increasing level of pain he heard in the guardian’s voice worried him. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t dealt with broken bones before. His son Daniel’s first adventures in skiing had taught him a lot about that. However, they’d been near a med station there. A bone knitter had been less than an hour away. If the others were still fighting the fire on the surface, there was no way of knowing how long it would be before they were rescued.

  “All right,” Gold began, stretching his arms out before him and slowly beginning to work his way back toward what he thought was the center of the small pond. “Can you follow the sound of my voice?”

  A series of stumbling splashes in the darkness ensued, while Gold tried to direct him with his voice. The slight echo to the splashes gave Gold more than a few moments of confusion as he tried to localize the guardian. Finally, Liankataka’s arms flailed against him. It took some convincing, but Gold was able to get the Dreman to hold still and allow the captain to take his floating body in tow.

  “Miss?” Gold asked into the darkness.

  “Yes?” was the weak reply.

  “Please, keep talking. I need to find you. Are you out of the water?”

  A moment’s pause and then, “Yes.”

  “Feel the area around you. Do you think it’s safe? Does it feel like there’s enough room for the three of us?”

  The sound of something fleshy patting something wet made it to his ears. After a few seconds, she said, “Yes.”

  Gold reached down to his waist for his tricorder, thinking perhaps it would have something that might be of use to them. It wasn’t a medical tricorder, so trying to use it to diagnose their injuries wouldn’t get them very far. Dreman circuitry operated on different frequencies from Starfleet, making it of little more use in connecting them to the surface than his combadge in the mine’s depths. Still, it might have some worth beyond its designed intent. Flipping the tricorder open with his free hand, he was comforted as the faint light from the display gave the cavern a slight glow.

  It was certainly better than flailing around in the dark.

  He forced thoughts of using the frequency modulation to try to contact the surface into the same corner of his mind where the pain resided. Right now, he needed the light more than anything.

  Just on the edge of the field of light, he could see a thin, white-sleeved arm reaching toward him. A face leaned into the light, concern on her features.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Kajana.”

  Gold was thankful for the faint light from the tricorder, as he’d have had a bear of a time finding her in the dark. “Can you take this?” he asked, holding the tricorder out in front of him. “I can’t carry it and the guardian at the same time.”

  Kajana nodded. He assumed she found a way to brace herself, as the extent to which she reached out over the water wasn’t one he would have considered safe. Gold extended the hand with the tricorder as far as he could, even scooting the tricorder across his palm to a point where he was only holding on with his fingertips. That bracing she had found was short-lived, however. Just as her fingers reached the tricorder, she lost her balance, reflexively her putting hand down, but finding only water instead. Her flailing arm hit the tricorder, knocking it out of Gold’s grasp.

  The light flickered as it tumbled into the water, darkening as it finally came to rest at the bottom with its display facing down. “I’m sorry,” Kajana said, her voice not much more than a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

  Gold tried to secure his own balance, even though he felt as though his calves had become malformed sheaths for the swords that had replaced his feet. “Keep talking. Please try to stay calm. As soon as the guardian is on the ledge with you, I’ll get the tricorder.”<
br />
  He was fairly sure he knew how to get Liankataka over to the ledge, but without the light, having her voice to guide him would help the process.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to stay calm, though.”

  Closing his eyes, Gold focused on the sound, willing himself to sort through the bouncing waves and localize the source, wishing for the dilithium to have had more anechoic properties.

  “We’re stuck down here for Traiaka knows how long.”

  Tugging Liankataka behind him, Gold gingerly took a step in the direction where he remembered Kajana was waiting, then another. His back shivered as he tried to restrain his reaction to the pain.

  “The fire is only going to radiate heat down here.”

  Kajana left a gap of about a second in between her sentences to allow the sound of her voice to dissipate. It was just enough to keep Gold focused on where he was walking.

  Out of nowhere, his left foot slammed into an outcrop. Uncrossing his eyes, he leaned forward to discover that there was a stone ledge about five centimeters above the water line. Keeping his right arm around Liankataka, he reached forward with his left hand and was greeted by what felt like a clothed leg. The limb was still warm, and it was accompanied by a decidedly feminine gasp. “Kajana?” he asked.

  “Who else would it be?”

  Gold allowed himself a long exhale. Finally, he reached back and got a good grip on Liankataka. “I’m going to need your help. I can’t get him onto the ledge alone.”

  A hand came out of the darkness and fell onto his arm. “Where is he?”

  Gold grabbed her hand and guided it to Liankataka’s shoulder. Part of him wanted to get on the ledge with her and drag the guardian onto the stone floor from there, but Gold knew that would be harder on any back injury the Dreman might have sustained. Forcing himself to ignore the pain for a few moments more, he placed a hand on Liankataka’s arm, using it to guide him as he took careful steps out to where the guardian’s feet floated.

  With a gentle push, Gold allowed Kajana to guide their patient toward where she was holed up. When she said that she had him, Gold moved alongside the guardian, running his hands up the man’s spine to see if there was any obvious sign of damage. Damn it, Pulaski, why didn’t I let you brief me before I came down to the surface?

  “Because it hadn’t seemed important at the time,” he bitterly answered himself.

  “What, Captain?” the guardian asked.

  Gold shook his head and then remembered that the Dreman couldn’t see him. “Nothing. Just wishing that I’d sat through one more briefing before coming down, that’s all. How does your back feel?”

  A moment’s pause, and then Liankataka said, “Stiff, but no pain.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “For me?” the guardian asked, backing it with a chuckle. “Yes and no. You might say it comes and goes.”

  While Gold’s knowledge of Dreman physiology was virtually nonexistent, one thing he knew very well was that a stiff back wasn’t always a sign of spinal damage. Sometimes, it just meant that the muscles had been overtaxed. As Gold didn’t feel any obvious signs of damage in the vertebrae, he hoped that was what it meant. Nice, uncomplicated injuries meant that they’d all be able to help themselves out of this predicament.

  The way he saw it, this gave him a choice. He could trust that the stiffness meant there really was no significant damage to Liankataka’s spine, and with Kajana’s assistance he could slide the guardian onto the ledge she occupied, or he could take every precaution imaginable to protect the Dreman’s anatomy, but possibly at the cost of his own mobility.

  “Captain, you’re seriously injured. You are our guest. It is we who should be helping you. Come. Float beside me.”

  Gold had to admit that did sound nice, but it didn’t change his options. Finally, he decided that Pulaski may be able to repair any significant damage to both of them, and they needed to get out of the pool of water. Slowly, he and Kajana managed to get Liankataka to the ledge.

  When that was complete, he allowed himself to float on the water’s surface, trying to spot the tricorder’s faint glow in the water. It took a few moments, but he finally found and recovered the unit. That accomplished, he then slid up alongside Kajana and Liankataka and collapsed in a heap. The pain felt as though it were trying to take over his body. A deep aching scattered through his arms suggested bone-deep bruising that was still forming. His neck was even stiff. There wasn’t a part of his body that didn’t hurt. Gold leaned his head back against something that had the cold, worked-flat feel of a stone outcrop, but he was too tired and too achy to really care. There was no way he could see to prop up his ankles to avoid swelling. Perhaps if he kept his boots on for as long as he could tolerate them, it might mitigate the damage.

  With the immediate danger past, Gold reached a hand toward where he usually wore his combadge. It was gone.

  Probably fell off in the fall. The realization was a blow to the hope he’d been trying to foment. If they tried to locate him by the combadge signal, it could have been anywhere in the pile of dirt closing the tunnel shaft to the bottom of the pool of water he’d landed in. And that was provided they could even find the signal through however much dilithium and dirt was above his head.

  Sighing, he flipped the tricorder closed to save power. They all needed to rest for a few moments. The tricorder would be there to help them cope with the darkness, and maybe it would even help them contact the surface.

  Until the power supply ran out.

  Gold had no idea how long that would be and tried not to consider that they’d be down there long enough for it to happen.

  Chapter

  8

  Pithead, Dilithium Mine Alpha

  Day 1

  Sarjenka ran up to the entrance of the pithead just as a small medical transport was pulling away, sirens wailing. What she saw beyond that, however, felt as though someone had pummeled her in the abdomen and refused to stop. The shed that had covered the top of the mine was on fire, a thick gray smoke billowing into the air. Three firefighters were doing their best to put the thing out. The assistant staffing coordinator, a woman Sarjenka had only met once a year or so before and whose name she could not remember to save her life, was standing there gaping at the flames. An older human male in a red and black Starfleet uniform—she assumed it was Admiral Tucker, but she’d never seen a picture of the man to be certain—stood holding a small hose aimed at the shed. The stream of water was barely reaching the flames, but the fact that he was willing to trade his personal safety for the safety of her world was an interesting revelation.

  For the moment, the fire looked on the verge of being under control, but she didn’t want to think about what was resonating through the dilithium and what it was doing to her father.

  The smoke tickled the back of her throat, just enough to make her think that getting the growing crowd of gawkers to back away may be beneficial to everyone’s health.

  “Sarjenka!”

  She turned toward the voice and found Eklian, Sinterka’s mate, standing a few feet away. His arms were wrapped tightly around his midsection, his face had flushed pink, and she couldn’t help but note that he looked both nauseated and terrified. A sheen of moisture had formed on his slightly undersized brow, reinforcing the sharp smell of sweat that hit her nostrils. How long had the fire been going?

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Eklian nodded, but his expression never changed. When he briefly released his grip on his midsection, Sarjenka noticed that his sleeves were soaked. It looked almost as though he’d been sticking his hands up to the elbows in water. Had he been trying to fight the fire?

  “Sinterka came to warn us,” she said, trying to calm him. “He’s not down there. He said my father found the bomb.” Frantically looking around, she added, “He ran over from the house with us.”

  At that, his eyes widened. “You mean—”

  “He’s here somewhere. Have
you seen my father?” she asked. A knot of fear began tightening in her stomach as his face ran a gamut of emotions from frightened to a horrified realization to abject sympathy. “Eklian,” she began, “is he—?”

  His eyes darted back to the fire. “Sarjenka…”

  “Please. Where is he?” She grabbed Eklian’s upper arm a little more tightly than she had intended, but it got her point across.

  “He was on the transport that just left for the hospital. I couldn’t get a good look at him, but what I saw was burned. Badly.”

  The knot in her stomach turned into a tightening noose. Turning her back on the firefighting effort, she began to work her way through the expanding crowd at the pithead, trying to get out to the hospital. The nearest burn healers were only a kilometer away, but it felt as though they might as well have been on another planet.

  She was five steps into the crowd when a booming, reverberant roar sounded from behind her. A woman’s scream grabbed Sarjenka and brought her away from thoughts of her father. When she turned back around, the top of the mine shaft had partially collapsed, and the staffing assistant had vanished—presumably down into the mine shaft, but Sarjenka couldn’t be sure.

  The woman may have survived, provided she remembered to curl up and allow herself to roll down the shaft. A straight drop would have killed any of them automatically, but the angle of the shaft was just enough to allow a quick descent for the miners and somehow still kept the roof from caving in.

  Normally.

  Then again, her father had always commented that if they really thought about how the thing had been constructed, nobody in their proper mind would have gone down there.

  Sarjenka’s eyes darted back through the mass of people. Eklian had disappeared back into whatever crevasse in the crowd had given rise to him in the first place. She saw familiar face after familiar face, but not one of them was a healer. If the healers were following the procedures from the last drill, she figured them to be at the hospitals awaiting casualties. She had railed against the idea of not setting up first aid as part of the emergency protocols, but thanks to her youth, no one had listened.