by L. A. Graf
Belle Terre was especially fascinating to Uhura, because it was a world just on the verge of becoming new, taking the first small steps that would allow the human race to blossom into yet another of the many unique cultures that had formed on colony worlds throughout the Alpha Quadrant. And of all the settlements on Belle Terre, from the carefully planned cities to the newly cleared pastures and windswept coasts, the Burned island continent of Llano Verde provided the most scope for studying human adaptation and survival. The settlers who came here had chosen to stake their claims in this most devastated sector of the colony. They were feisty, stubborn, and strong-willed, and as a result they had been especially swift to develop their own regional culture.
Idiomatic sayings and mocking nicknames for places, people, and things had sprouted up like weeds through the dust and the mud. Millefiore turned into Miles from Nowhere. Desert Station became Desperation. Ludlum dwindled ignominiously into Mudlump. The disrupted rivers and lakes created by the Burn had been given names like Bull’s Eye, Useless Loop, and Splat. Even the continental capital of Eau Claire had been rechristened Big Muddy by its residents when tons of windblown dust made the waters of its central river dense and murky rather than clear. Outlanders referred to the capital by even less respectful nicknames, such as Au Contraire, We Don’t Care, and So Unfair.
“Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu.”
The only good thing about communications burnout was that it gave Uhura plenty of time to mull over her observations of Llano Verde. One thing she had recently decided was that the level of citizen dissatisfaction in this part of Belle Terre seemed unusually high. Neil Bartels had enough sense of humor left to joke about it, but according to Sulu, the hostility of Outland settlers to their own continental government was growing stronger all the time. Some of that might be a reaction to the stress of living in conditions so hostile to human life, but it still didn’t bode well for the long-term health of this fledgling democracy.
It was a measure of Sulu’s concern, Uhura thought, that he had begun pressuring Scotty to declare their experimental transport vessel ready for service, despite its makeshift navigation system, so he could begin actually helping stranded colonists he saw on his flights, instead of just reporting them to the colony’s overworked Emergency Services Division. Of course, if Captain Kirk couldn’t convince Montgomery Scott to hurry in the middle of a pitched battle with Klingons, there wasn’t much chance of Sulu speeding him up just because of a little radioactive dust and colonial unrest. The chief engineer insisted on making sure the Bean’s antigrav engines really were completely dustproof, and that it had at least a crude semblance of its own internal navigations system, so it didn’t have to depend on leaping up above the dust layer to find out where it was. Of course, that would have been easier for Scotty to do if Uhura had managed to get her signal reflectance system working a few weeks ago. . . .
“Uhura to Sulu,” she said, her voice suddenly sharpened by frustration. “Come in, Sulu.”
“Sulu here.”
Uhura stared at her control board in sheer astonishment, barely able to believe she was really hearing that faded wisp of reply, even though she could see the tiny bluish tinge on the reception histogram. After a moment, she shook herself out of her daze of surprise, aware that she was acting exactly like those stranded crewmen whose disbelief kept them from replying to the first signs of rescue. Her fingers flew across the panel, locating the frequency that had come back most strongly on Sulu’s side of the board and punching up its strength for her next transmission.
“Uhura to Sulu. Please give me your location and altitude.”
This time, the pilot’s response wasn’t quite as faint, but its histogram told Uhura it still wasn’t coming in as clearly as it should have. She tried adjusting the sensitivity of her receptors, but the computer had already tuned them to maximum levels. “I’m on the ground,” Sulu said. “At the spaceport.”
Uhura’s first reaction was pure annoyance. After five weeks of system failure, the last thing she was in the mood for was Sulu’s mischievous sense of humor at the end of a long day. But then she realized the pilot wasn’t calling her on the normal hardwired landlines used for communications throughout the city. He was, for the very first time, successfully using the signal reflectance system installed in his experimental shuttle.
“How’s your reception of my signal?”
“Lousy,” Sulu said. “That dust-layer amplification thing doesn’t seem to be working too well.”
“No.” Uhura sighed. The spaceport was where her signal transmission tower was located. Sulu should have had crystal-clear reception there, with a straight up-and-down vertical signal path. If her signal was barely reaching him now, no wonder she’d had so little luck contacting him in the outflung regions of Llano Verde.
“So, do I get treated to dessert tonight for having thought to check our reception at home base?” Sulu inquired cheerfully. Uhura began to reply, then caught sight of the time display on her board and frowned instead.
“What are you doing back so early?” she asked. “Did you have problems with the Bean?”
“No, it’s fine.” Sulu sounded amused. “I just figured I’d better quit early, or Chekov would talk you into going out to that same boring meat-and-potatoes restaurant we went to last time. Tell him it’s real Belle Terre barbecue tonight, guanaco ribs with olivium sauce and all the trimmings.”
“I can’t do that, since he’s not here.” She wasn’t sure whether to laugh at the absurdity of using her sophisticated communications system to discuss tonight’s dinner menu, or to cry at the fact that it was probably all she could use it for. “He hasn’t come in from the orbital platform yet.”
“Yes, he has.” Sulu’s voice sounded as if it was fading, but Uhura didn’t try to adjust the signal frequency again. She could hear the snapping sounds that meant the pilot was stripping off his flight safety gear. “The last time I popped up above the dust to check my coordinates with the orbital platform, Kyle was keeping their communications officer company. He told me Chekov’s cargo flight had dropped off their screens an hour ago. Since I didn’t see it at the spaceport, I figured they’d already unloaded their cargo and left again. Are you sure he’s not waiting politely outside your lab for you to get finished?”
“I’ll check.” Uhura swung her chair around and headed for the lab door, with an inexplicable sense of urgency nipping at her heels. There was no one out in the main hall of the technical center, but she hurried down to the entry desk and made sure the clerk hadn’t let through any other Starfleet officers besides her and Rand. Then she ran back to her lab, but it was already too late. The bluish light had faded from Sulu’s side of the board. The pilot had obviously not waited for her to get back before starting to make some inquiries of his own.
It was several long minutes before Uhura’s landline buzzed. She grabbed it, not even bothering to identify herself. “Is he at the spaceport?”
“No, and he never was.” Sulu’s reply was as blunt as her question. The bridge crew of the Enterprise had weathered enough emergency situations to avoid wasting time with unnecessary words. “The cargo shuttle never landed here.”
Uhura took a deep breath, feeling the ramifications of that statement seep ugly and cold into her bones. “Then when it dropped off the orbital platform’s screens an hour ago—”
“—it was crashing,” Sulu finished grimly.
Shields held the water at bay. Glossy cataracts rode the interface between energy and fluid, and the big shuttle drifted downward like a cargo cannister filled with rocks. Chekov switched atmosphere control over to manual while Reddy powered down the antimatter drive; even so, the pressurized sections of the shuttle pulsed uncomfortably hot by the time the ship bumped to rest in the mud. The shuttle groaned, then tilted distinctly starboard one more step. Too deep in the dust-churned lake for much surface light to penetrate, Chekov couldn’t tell if the water just beyond their shield barrier boiled. But he could feel the p
ush of extra pressure against his inner ears, and heard Baldwin in the passenger compartment complain about the pain.
Like a hull breach in reverse. He wondered if the outside pressure was enough to crush the shuttle once the shields came down. They’d find out soon enough.
“How could . . .” Reddy swallowed audibly, pushing a little straighter in his chair as he stared out at the cloudy water. “How did you know we were over the water?”
Chekov’s stomach had just rediscovered the fluttery void that followed adrenaline overdose. “I didn’t,” he admitted. “Not for sure. But if we weren’t, the shields couldn’t have saved us, so we didn’t lose anything by trying.” As it was, that shell of cohesive plasma had absorbed enough kinetic energy from their fluid impact to almost make up for failed inertial dampers. It was the only reason they weren’t having this conversation in the afterlife. “See if you can raise the orbital platform on the radio. I think we’re still beneath that clearing you saw in the dust.” He was only a little surprised to find his hands shaking as he unhitched his seat restraint. “I’m going back to check on the others.”
A splash of wet decking greeted him when he shouldered open the powerless door between cockpit and central compartment. Panic shot quick looks at airlock, frame seals, bulkheads before Chekov fully registered the split supply crate or its scattered contents. Plottel’s canteen lay shattered under one corner of the ruined carton.
“Wow . . .” Baldwin looked around somewhat dazedly, but made no move to get up from the cargo floor bolt where he’d secured his harness. “That wasn’t as bad as I expected.”
Chekov took a deep breath to cleanse the alarm from his throat before picking his way through the mess. “Don’t be so sure of that.”
Plottel froze, looked up from unbuckling his harness. “What’s wrong?” He didn’t do as well as Chekov at hiding his apprehension. It showed clearly in the dilation of his pupils, the clenching of his hands. “Didn’t you get the engines back on line?”
“We got the shields up.” The seal around the cargo bay hatch was dry, and Chekov couldn’t detect any temperature variance across the surface of the door. “They’re keeping us pressurized, but I’m not sure for how long.” He crossed to do a similar inspection on the airlock. “We’re on the bottom of the lake.”
Baldwin nearly choked. “What?”
Always the pragmatist, Plottel asked the more cogent—and answerable—question. “How deep?”
Chekov was forced to shrug as he turned to lean back against the airlock frame. “There’s no way to tell. The bottom.” He shrugged again, frustration growing. “I don’t know where we went in.”
“What do you mean on the bottom?” Baldwin’s tieoff slammed taut when he tried to scramble indignantly upright. “How does a shuttle end up on the bottom of a lake?”
“It crashes, Mr. Baldwin.” Chekov snapped him a glare, at the end of his patience with colonial ignorance and self-involvement. “It goes too low into olivium-contaminated dust, and it crashes in the middle of nowhere, where God himself will be lucky to find us.” He pushed off from the bulkhead and stalked across to the shuttle’s pathetically small equipment locker. “That’s how.”
Silence followed him for the first few steps. Then Plottel’s voice volunteered to his back, “Bull’s Eye crater is about a hundred meters at its deepest point. I—” Hesitation filled with the sound of a safety harness clattering to the floor. “Do you think we went down that far?”
“If we did,” Reddy answered from the cockpit doorway, “we’re looking at an external pressure of about one hundred kilopascals.” He addressed his information toward Chekov, tacitly accepting the command chain that was already forming. “Not enough to kill you in principle, but way more than you want to take on without some kind of diving gear.”
“No luck contacting the surface?” It wasn’t really a question.
“There may not be any olivium in the air above us, but there seems to be plenty in this water.” Reddy made a sour face. “Our only hope is that Eau Claire thinks to look for us in the vicinity of our last drop.”
“That’s not our only hope.” Chekov looked at the equipment locker again. “Just our best one.”
Baldwin finished shucking his safety harness with a snort. “You’ve got some other bright idea?”
Chekov nodded slowly, still thinking, as he worked open the lock on the front of the cabinet.
“We’ve got a lot of leeway for rescue.” Plottel sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than the others. He craned a desperately hopeful look at Reddy. “Life support’s still working, right?” At Reddy’s nod, he brightened artificially. “That means we’ve got air indefinitely. And there’s enough food and water in the supply crates to last us for months.”
“And we do what with our waste products in the meantime?” Baldwin wanted to know. He’d begun gathering up the supplies from the ruined crate, stacking them precariously in his arms for lack of anywhere else to put them. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t even want to live with a month’s worth of my dirty clothes, much less anything else.”
“We’re not waiting here for a month.” Chekov pulled the first two environmental suits out of the locker and let them fall on the floor behind him. He had to step over the broken parts of a field battery pack to reach the other two.
Reddy looked quizzically down at the jumbled suits, but didn’t move to pick them up. “Commander, sitting tight might be our safest course. At least for now.”
Chekov draped the last suit, sans helmet, over his shoulder to free up his hands for the atmosphere portables. “Mr. Baldwin’s right.” He passed Reddy an O2 mixer, slid the rack of pressure governors ahead of him on the floor. “We don’t have the waste management system to handle four people. And even if Eau Claire thinks to send a rescue team to our last scheduled position, what are the chances sensors will work well enough to locate us under water? How long will it take to search two hundred fifty thousand cubic meters of lake using only divers and line-of-sight? Will they even think it’s worth doing?” He flipped the suit off his shoulder and shook it out to check the size. “I don’t intend to wait and find out.”
Plottel took the suit without seeming to realize it when Chekov thrust it toward him. “So we just bob to the surface? Do you have any idea what the waves are going to be like in this weather?”
Baldwin’s objection was more to the point. “I can’t swim.”
“You don’t have to.” The first suit he picked up was a size too short for Baldwin. Chekov set it aside and sorted through the small pile for another. “They’re called environmental suits because they encase you in a livable environment. Whether you’re in vacuum or water, the suit doesn’t care—it maintains a healthy pressure and gas mix regardless. And it’s heavy enough to keep you weighted down for walking on the bottom.” He passed a suit to Baldwin, but glanced at Plottel. “Even if there are waves.”
“This is nuts,” Plottel said.
“No—” Reddy scooped up the remaining suit, bobbing his head eagerly as he scanned for the matching helmet. “No, he’s right. This is how they teach you EV work—by suiting you up in a water tank and letting you maneuver around.” He shook open his suit with a grin. “Good idea, Commander Chekov.”
They wouldn’t know that for certain until they walked out on the surface.
Chekov kept an eye on Plottel’s bleak expression as the colonist fumbled numbly with the seals down the front of the suit. “You do know how to use an environmental suit.” He looked between Plottel and Baldwin for some hint of familiarity with the equipment. “Don’t you?”
Baldwin paused with his suit hiked up to his waist, only one sleeve attached to the torso, and that backward. Behind him, Plottel fussed with his own gear through a blush dark enough to almost hide his expression. “They showed us a training vid before we set out for Belle Terre.” Plottel spoke softly, not lifting his eyes. “It was for emergencies. We weren’t supposed to ever need it.”
>
No one was ever supposed to need it. “Well, this is your emergency.” Chekov picked up two of the helmets and passed them across to Baldwin and Plottel. “First, we need to verify that your suits have all their parts. On the torso, you should have a locking ring for the helmet, and intact seams between the breastplate and the sleeves. . . .”
Sulu hated Gamma Night.
He was probably the only one in Llano Verde who cared about it. The rest of Belle Terre might complain about breaks in communications when the astronomical blackouts hit, but in Llano Verde, the constant swirl of olivium dust meant the colonists had no communications to lose. Most of them barely knew when Gamma Night fell, and the province’s technical office was far too overworked to bother predicting it. That had often left Sulu in the vulnerable position of being several kilometers above the ground when the neutron star’s shadow swept down, unable to contact the orbital station whose precise tracking sensors he depended on for navigations. The loss of geographic location wasn’t so crucial, although it was exasperating to have to navigate back home by unreliable compass readings, or by following the Big Muddy River with all its meandering twists and turns. What really scared Sulu was altitude. When the dust was thick enough, the olivium in it disturbed all the altimeters and even threw off the safeguard proximity alarm. Since those were also the times when Sulu couldn’t make visual contact with the ground, he was forced to hover safely in the stratosphere until the worst of the dust storm had passed or until Gamma Night ended. He’d spent one miserable night trying not to fall asleep at the antigrav controls, and had only been able to orient himself when he drifted out over the ocean and saw sunlight dancing on waves below. He was in no hurry to repeat that experience.
Now Gamma Night was threatening to fall again when he least wanted it to.
His normal ship’s communicator—not the experimental one that sat silent as ever in the copilot’s seat—chirped and began the standard greeting. “Belle Terre Orbital Platform to Vertical Flight Vessel A-Three. Come in, Vertical—”