by L. A. Graf
THE SHUTTLE BROKE CLEAR . . .
. . . of the dust and hurtled into shockingly transparent air. Chekov’s instincts had been right—they were only seconds away from contact with the surface.
Dust-swarmed inertial dampers struggled against the violent shifts in mass, but couldn’t entirely save them from the impact. It came with a weird sluggishness, as if the ground had somehow oozed around their shields instead of crashing into them. Then silvery curtains of water geysered up over the windshield, and all view of this world was drowned. . . .
L . A . G R A F
NEW EARTH CONCEPT BY DIANE CAREY AND JOHN ORDOVER
POCKET BOOKS
New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore Belle Terre
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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The Shuttle Broke Clear . . .
Rough Trails
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
STAR TREK STARFLEET: YEAR ONE
Look for STAR TREK fiction from Pocket Books
ROUGH TRAILS
Chapter One
“SHE’S AWAY!”
Without benefit of an antigrav, the crate tipped gracelessly over the lip of the shuttle’s hatch and fell free. Chekov leaned to the extent of his safety cable and watched the container tumble toward the ocean of airborne dust below, wondering how much chance they had of it landing anywhere near the drop target. The high-pitched shriek of its sonic beacon was swallowed up so quickly by the howl of Llano Verde’s winds that he suspected if it went too far astray, it would never be found again.
Behind him, Plottel’s voice, muffled by a filtration mask already several wearings too old, intoned blandly, “. . . and three and two and one . . .”
The crate’s parachute ripped into existence with a whhuf! Chekov could imagine but couldn’t actually hear over the roar of the dust storm outside. Fluorescent orange billowed into violent bloom, snapping the crate out of reach of the maelstrom only briefly before relaxing back into its descent. Almost immediately, wind tipped the parachute sideways and began dragging the crate sharply lateral of its original drop path. Storm-blown dust and sand swarmed the crate, the lines, the ’chute like famished ants. Once the air sealed behind the drop, Chekov couldn’t even tell where the supplies had torn their way through. Swallowed by this wounded and angry planet, just like the sonic beacon. Just like everything else.
“Heads up, C.C.”
Kevin Baldwin didn’t have to give a jerk on Chekov’s safety line to get his attention, but he did it anyway. The sudden assault on Chekov’s balance while hovering ten klicks above Belle Terre’s surface launched his heart up into his throat. He grabbed at the sides of the hatch with both hands, but clenched his teeth before gasping aloud. That instinct let him preserve at least a modicum of dignity. Backing calmly away from the opening, he tried hard to ignore Baldwin’s laughter as he disconnected the lifeline and shouldered out of its harness.
The hatch rolled shut with a grinding squeal that made Chekov’s teeth hurt. Dust in the mechanism, sliding between the parts. Dust in everything—the air, the floor, his hair, his clothes. When Reddy, the shuttle’s pilot, had promised they’d be above the ceiling of the dust storms, Chekov had assumed that meant they’d be flying in clear air. Instead, it meant Reddy kept the shuttle just high enough to avoid clogging the intakes on the atmospheric engines; Chekov, Baldwin, and Plottel could stand in the open hatch under the protection of goggles and filtration masks, but didn’t have to wear the kevlar bodysuits required by stormgoers on the surface. Not much of a trade-off, considering he’d still have to buy a new set of clothes the minute he set foot in Eau Claire. Or, at least, he would if he wanted Uhura to be seen with him in public.
Swiping uselessly at the front of his trousers, Chekov finally settled for patting himself down to dislodge the uppermost layers of grime. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this.” He stepped sideways out of his own dust cloud. “But there’s too much olivium on this planet.”
Plottel and Baldwin shucked their breath masks before the light above the hatch had even cycled from red to green. “Maybe.” Plottel didn’t smile as he crossed the cargo shuttle’s deck to dig a battered canteen out of a locker. “But if it weren’t for all that olivium, Starfleet wouldn’t have stuck around, and we’d be deprived of the pleasure of your company on this little flight.”
Chekov watched him fill his mouth with water, rinse and spit into a disposal pan, then pass the canteen on to Baldwin. “And if Starfleet weren’t here, there’d be no one in-system with rations to spare for your emergency supply drops.”
“If Starfleet weren’t here—” Baldwin discharged a mouthful of water at Chekov’s feet, creating an anemic slurry of mud, dust, and olivium. “—we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.”
Chekov nodded once, lips pursed, then went back to beating the planet out of his clothes.
This was an exchange they’d had, in various permutations, at least twenty times since the cargo shuttle kicked off from the orbital platform above Belle Terre. Chekov had given up pointing out that, while Starfleet’s actions might have directly led to the gamma-ray burst that most everyone called the Burn, it was only because of Starfleet that the planet still existed at all. Allowing the Burn had actually been the best in a very short list of options. While it all but defoliated most of a hemisphere, the colonists had been ferried out of harm’s way. When house-sized segments of Belle Terre’s largest satellite slammed into the face of her smallest continent, there was no one there to kill, no homesteads to lay waste. The combined Starfleet and colony ships, led by the Enterprise, had salvaged half a planet and an entire colony from otherwise certain destruction.
And the colonists had yet to forgive them.
From the moment they left Earth’s gravity well, the Belle Terre colonists had bristled with fierce independence. They made their own rules, picked their own battles, all but spat upon Starfleet’s offers of help and personnel—even when that help saved them from the numerous disasters that had plagued the expedition practically from the word go. Even now, when extended dust storms threatened the small continent of Llano Verde with starvation, the Enterprise
’s sacrifice of its own rations to assemble relief supply drops was accepted with palpable resentment. The fledgling colony had nothing to spare for its own members, but the Enterprise’s continued humanitarian support was interpreted as an implied criticism of Belle Terre’s ability to take care of itself.
This flight to the surface was no different. The volume of olivium dust laced through Llano Verde’s soil after the Quake Moon impacts made transporter travel there impossible, and Captain Kirk had issued a moratorium on Starfleet personnel hitching free rides on civilian-operated shuttles. Which put Chekov in a bit of a bind. He’d been left on the orbital platform three weeks ago when the Enterprise set out to patrol for pirate traffic, keep an eye out for the Kauld—aliens who had attacked the expedition—and search for the missing vessel Rattlesnake. Chekov was officially cut loose, on leave, grounded. Sometime in the next two or three months, the light courier City of Pittsburgh was due at Belle Terre to pick up Chekov, John Kyle, and two other Enterprise crewmen for reassignment to the newly commissioned science vessel Reliant. Until City of Pittsburgh arrived, Chekov, Kyle, and the others were expected to rest, relax, and comport themselves in a manner that wouldn’t aggravate the Belle Terrans any more than was inevitable. In general, this translated into long stretches of profound boredom as far away from the colonists as possible. Chekov spent the time trying to get used to seeing himself with executive officer’s bars on his shoulder and answering to the title “lieutenant commander.” He hadn’t felt so small and ill suited to a uniform since being named Enterprise’s chief of security two years before.
Which was why he was once again violating Kirk’s prohibition to join Sulu and Uhura for dinner in Eau Claire, the continental capital of Llano Verde. The two had been stationed there with Montgomery Scott and Janice Rand for several weeks, cut off from chatty communiqués by Gamma Night and olivium-contaminated dust, not to mention swamped with work and colonial frustrations. Long months away from shipping out to his new assignment, Chekov was lonely, insecure, and painfully bored. Part of him feared he’d never make the kind of lifelong friends on the Reliant that he had on the Enterprise; another part half-hoped their reunions would somehow prove him too indispensable to let go. He would be allowed to serve under Kirk on board the Enterprise forever.
In reality, he knew all he would get out of the trip was a good dinner and a few precious hours of socializing before he returned to his restless and unrelaxed days on the orbital platform.
Chekov had made an end run around Kirk’s moratorium by refusing to be shuttled surfaceward like so much cargo. He knew about the weekly runs to airdrop emergency supplies across Llano Verde. Showing up in the bay just before Orbital Shuttle Six kicked off, he offered to help the civilian laborers pitch the crates toward their assigned drop points in exchange for a shuttle ride down to Eau Claire. It wasn’t just a chance to “pay” for passage, it was also a chance to be useful, sweat off some of his frustrations, and leave a positive impression on the colonials. Or so he’d thought. Vijay Reddy, the pilot, suggested that Chekov leave the heavy lifting to the laborers and ride up front with him. Not about to be coddled out of honestly paying his way, Chekov insisted on remaining in back to work alongside Baldwin and Plottel. Since neither of the laborers objected, Chekov assumed they were perfectly happy to have an extra set of hands.
By an hour into the flight, he’d figured out where he really stood. When he wasn’t dragging a crate—without help—forward from the cargo hold, he was supposed to either lend his back to shoving the crates through the airlock, or sit out of the way on one of the armless benches welded into the bulkhead. His comments weren’t welcome, and neither was his presence. They spoke to him only when forced to, and made no effort to censor their bitterness toward Starfleet when they talked between themselves. For his own part, Chekov swallowed most of the angry comments that sprang to mind. Another hour or so and they’d be on the surface. He would part ways with them in Eau Claire, and contemplate Kirk’s wisdom in recognizing from the outset that the colonists needed as much physical and emotional space as Starfleet could give them.
A little communications panel high on the bulkhead chirruped with incongruous cheer. Unlike communicators or even crystal-based radios, intercom systems based on hardwire connections still functioned perfectly despite all the olivium radiation Belle Terre could throw out. The wall speaker, however, buzzed from the weight of the dust coating its tympanum. “Dave, how many crates have we got left back there?”
Plottel touched the container on which he sat as though silently acknowledging it in his count, then craned his neck to check the deck behind him. “Three up front, another twelve in the hold.”
“And who’s scheduled to get most of them?”
Baldwin set down the canteen and reached out to steady the cargo manifest dangling near the hatch door, squinting at its dust-fuzzed display panel. “Four go to Desert Station. Everyone else gets two or three.”
“Okay.” Reddy paused, caught up in some piloting duty, and Chekov felt the subliminal shift in mass that meant they’d changed heading without slowing down. “Hold out one from the Desert Station drop. They’ll have to make do with three.”
“Sedlak isn’t gonna like us changing the manifest like that,” Baldwin warned.
Invoking the continental governor’s name injected a startling level of annoyance into Reddy’s voice. “Sedlak isn’t here. We’ve got an extra drop on the list for the northeast side of Bull’s Eye—a group of herders who got stranded by the storm.”
“What the hell were they doing out on a day like this?” But Plottel was already scrubbing at his goggles to clear them, getting set for another round of labor.
“They went out three days ago, before the dust got so bad. The ranch they’re attached to didn’t get word down to Eau Claire until yesterday, and the spaceport wasn’t able to punch through the dust to the orbital platform until just now. Otherwise, we could’ve just put additional shipments aboard.” The speaker snapped, nearly drowning out Reddy’s grumbling sigh. “Now we’re going to have to shortchange somebody. It might as well be Desert Station.”
Ironically, if a Starfleet officer had made the same suggestion, there would have followed ten minutes of defensive resistance before any action could occur. As it was, Baldwin and Plottel started untangling their safety harnesses while Chekov was still stealing a single swallow of water from Baldwin’s abandoned canteen.
“Is there any way to contact Eau Claire?” Chekov asked as he scooped his own harness up off the filthy deck. He’d given Uhura the original arrival time, and didn’t want to leave her pacing the spaceport, wondering what had become of him.
“Don’t worry about Eau Claire—they’re used to this.” Plottel was either trying to reassure him, or head off any fretting before it began. “The spaceport won’t even consider us late until we’re three hours past our scheduled ETA.”
Chekov repressed a sigh. “It wasn’t the spaceport I was worried about,” he said, but without much expectation of being listened to. “Is there any way to contact anyone on the planet?”
“ ’Fraid not,” Baldwin said, wrenching the hatch open on the sea of roiling dust outside. “Nothing gets through that dust out there, not unless it’s falling through.” His grin was wide enough to see around the edge of his dust mask as he gestured toward the open door. “Feel free to take the message down yourself, C.C., if you want to. We won’t try to stop you.”
And they might even help me on my way, Chekov thought, remembering Baldwin’s previous push. He reached for the nearest lifeline and clipped it on a little more quickly than dignity allowed. Even the howl of Belle Terre’s dust storm wasn’t loud enough to drown out the resulting shout of mocking laughter.
“Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu.”
Uhura had said the phrase so often over the past five weeks that by now the words slid out of her mouth without the slightest effort—or attention—on her part. She pressed the correct transmission key on her experim
ental communications panel, paused for the appropriate time afterward to allow a reply to come through, but no longer really listened for an answer to her call because no answer had ever come. “Auditory feedback fatigue” had been the official term for it back at Starfleet Academy. Out here, on the nebulous fringes of known space, people just called it communications burnout. It was a condition most often seen in the crew of disabled ships who spent so long listening for an answer to their distress calls that they missed hearing it when it actually came.
“Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu.”
Uhura had recognized the syndrome in herself about two weeks ago and been horrified. Her entire career in Starfleet was based on her ability to listen. She knew she had a keener ear than many other communications officers, and she prided herself on her ability to thread out a signal buried in electromagnetic noise, or hear the barest scratch of a message through the resounding silence of subspace. Finding herself adrift in a numb haze of not listening, not even sure how many hours she had spent repeating the same six words without paying attention to them, had shaken her professional confidence right down to the bone. Could something as simple as futility really overcome all those years of training and experience?
“Uhura to Sulu.” She fiddled with the gain on the transmitter to keep herself alert, watching the transmission histogram on her monitor spike into alarmed red then fade back to green as the computer compensated for the adjustment she’d made. The reception histogram, which was supposed to display the frequencies of Sulu’s response to her hail, remained a dull, flatlined gray, just as it had since the first day she started hailing him.
A burst of irritation momentarily clawed a hole through Uhura’s boredom. There was absolutely no reason this experimental communications system shouldn’t be working. The pall of olivium-contaminated dust that hung over the island subcontinent of Llano Verde during its long, dry winter was known to attenuate every known kind of subspace and electromagnetic transmission. But the dust had created a dense surface layer in the planet’s stratified troposphere, permanently trapped beneath cleaner and colder air above it. The knife-sharp boundary between those air masses should have been able to amplify and reflect back any signal that managed to reach it—every computer model and Starfleet expert Uhura had consulted agreed on that. So while Janice Rand worked on augmenting the city’s short-range communications using olivium’s natural crystal resonance, Uhura had designed a long-distance communications system that relied simply on punching a strong signal up to the top of the dust layer and letting nature take care of the rest. All she had to do—in theory—was calibrate the system by noting which electromagnetic frequencies created the best reflections at different points on the subcontinent. With computers varying her output signal nanosecond by nanosecond as she spoke, and a special receiver carried in the experimental shuttle Scotty had designed and Sulu was test-flying around Llano Verde, the whole project should have taken about two days to complete.