by L. A. Graf
“No, sir.” Greg Anthony’s automatic “sirs” and more respectful manner made Sulu suspect he’d gotten at least part of his education at a Starfleet training academy. “The governor’s office doesn’t give Technical Services enough funds to go around, and we’re always on the bottom of the priority list. The only fieldwork we’ve done was setting up the automated data-collection network.”
“And we only got that done because the order came straight from Evan Pardonnet,” Weir added. “Otherwise, we’d still be sitting in a bare office, doodling on our data padds.”
Sulu grunted, swinging the Bean farther north to avoid a mountain outlier that looked as if it could generate more annoying downdrafts. The compass was starting to swing back into alignment with the mountains, but he still didn’t entirely trust it. “What I want to know,” he said, “is how someone like Sedlak ever got elected governor of Llano Verde in the first place.”
“Sulu,” Uhura said reprovingly.
“Well, can you see him campaigning for votes?”
Weir surprised him with a crack of laughter. “ ‘Sedlak, the only natural selection.’ I have to admit, I can’t see it, either.”
“I don’t remember voting for him,” Anthony said. “And we elected all the continental governors as a group back on Earth, so no single interest group could dominate a small region out here.”
“Maybe one of the governors-elect got killed on the journey here,” Weir suggested. “Or resigned their post. Sedlak might have been appointed as a replacement.”
“Or promoted from a government bureaucracy job,” Sulu said.
“Neil Bartels said Sedlak was a sociobiologist,” Uhura reminded him. “Not a bureaucrat.”
“Then maybe he was transferred from an academic post. That would explain all his theories about moral expendability and colony survival-–” Sulu broke off, seeing the mountain range take an abrupt downward plunge into the dust layer. The snowcapped peaks reappeared a short distance away, but there was just enough open space left between the two escarpments for a river to thread its way through. “There we go. No Escape.”
It was a settlement he’d visited on one of his test flights and wasn’t particularly looking forward to landing at again. The original name of North Scarp had been more apt than most of the colony’s romantic nomenclature, since the entire community was perched on the steep northern slopes of the Gory Mountains, overlooking the canyon carved through them by the Little Muddy River. There were almost no horizontal streets in town, much less open plazas or other places for a shuttlecraft to land. The town reminded Sulu of the steep hills of San Francisco, or some of the villages along the south Italian coast. He supposed the original intention in settling here had been to recreate that kind of hillside charm. If it had been up to him, though, he’d have plunked the whole settlement down a few miles further north, on the less scenic but more practical high plains.
Apparently, Dr. Weir agreed. “Didn’t anyone back at the colony headquarters look at the survey maps of this planet before they let people decide where to put their settlements?” she demanded. Sulu heard the plasfilm map rustle in the back seat. “Look at that, Greg—it’s right inside an incised meander. No wonder they call it No Escape.”
“Wait until you see it.” Sulu began a careful descent into the dust. He tried to center the Bean as evenly as possible over the gap between the mountains, but the double dose of downdrafts he was getting along with the usual wind-tunnel suck of the gorge itself wasn’t making it easy to keep the craft steady. He glanced at the compass again, to reassure himself it really had returned to its normal orientation. Once he was in the dust, it was all he was going to be able to go by.
“Belt in,” he said. “This may not be real pretty.”
Since Uhura was already wearing her safety harness, she turned around to make sure the hydrologists got theirs on correctly. “Put your tricorder away in your pack, Dr. Anthony, and clip it to the floor,” she advised. “Maps, too. They might not be able to hurt you if they go flying around, but they could block the pilot’s view.”
“And that wouldn’t be good.” Weir rolled up the plasfilm maps, then folded and stuffed them unceremoniously into her tunic pockets. The Bean was bouncing and swaying now as it tried to compensate for every shift of mountain wind, but the hydrologist’s voice never faltered. “So, Mr. Sulu, you never told us how long we get to look at the river at this stop.”
“That depends on how well this descent goes,” Sulu said between his teeth. The Bean’s vertical jouncing was under control, but its side-to-side swings weren’t as easy to damp out with his limited antigrav maneuverability. He could feel them growing stronger as they got closer to the surface. Visibility had dropped to almost nothing now, with dust sheeting and slithering past their windows in fitful sprays. “If we hit really hard, you may be here for the rest of your life.”
“However short that is,” Weir said, cheerfully.
A sudden updraft destabilized the careful balance of the three antigrav thrusters, and Sulu gave up trying to make conversation. He kept his eyes fixed on the compass and the horizontal level, compensating for each change in wind speed and direction and hoping he was staying on course. If he was even a tenth of a second late on each correction, he could be creating a sidelong drift that would carry them into the side of the narrow mountain gorge. And with the amount of olivium swirling around him, he doubted his proximity alarms would go off much more than a millisecond before they hit.
“Oh, my God!”
Sulu felt Weir bump the back of his pilot’s chair with her sudden swing toward the Bean’s port side. He wasted a moment glancing that way, just in case she’d seen the side of a mountain looming through the dust, and was reassured to catch only a glimpse of shadowed fields and the vague silver glint of water below the thinning haze of dust. They were going to be lucky. The dust storm was getting blown away at ground level by the strong downdrafts of cold air rolling off the mountains.
“Bev?” Anthony whacked his colleague on the shoulder to get her fixed attention off the landscape. “What were you yelling about? You scared us half to death.”
“You should be scared half to death,” the female hydrologist said grimly. “Take a good look at that canyon, Greg.”
He craned past her to study the silver glimmer of the river, growing brighter and clearer as they dropped through the last of the dust. Sulu was making a final adjustment to the antigravs, one that corrected for the strong, steady push of the winds flowing off the mountains. He could already see the housetops and chimneys of No Escape resolving out of the dull red-brown color of the mountain soil, but he couldn’t seem to find the rough gravel beach along the river where he’d landed on his previous visit.
“Oh, my God.” This time it was Anthony who made the comment, underlined a moment later by Uhura’s wordless gasp. Sulu opened his mouth to ask what they were staring at, but before the words could even emerge, a closer look down at the rooftops told him why he couldn’t find his beach anymore.
The Little Muddy River was running through the streets of No Escape.
The mayor of No Escape was not happy to see them.
The job of tracking him down had fallen to Uhura and Anthony. After fifteen minutes of looking for a landing site, Sulu had finally been forced to hover with the Bean over a convenient rooftop while the rest of them scrambled out. Weir had broken out a flotation vest from her equipment pack and headed for the main channel of the flooded river, with Sulu following her from above in the Bean. In case she needed him to drop her a lifeline, he had said to Uhura, although Uhura suspected it was also a way to keep the errant hydrologist in sight until the time came to leave. Greg Anthony, on the other hand, had become much more cooperative since Uhura had needed to track him down at their first stop. He insisted on accompanying her to the roughhewn building Sulu had identified as the town hall, only pausing once or twice to measure olivium radiation levels in the ankle-deep water they were wading through.
&n
bsp; “Well, where’ve you been?” No Escape’s mayor swung around from behind his desk and glared at them before they could even introduce themselves. Outside his small office, the town hall was filled with the wails of tired children and the howls of tied-up dogs. It had apparently been pressed into service as a relocation center for the homeless. “I’ve been sending messages down to Au Contraire for five days now! You just getting around to reading your mail? Or did you decide you had more important things to do than rescue five hundred settlers from a flood?”
Uhura heard Greg Anthony’s nervously cleared throat and realized that the hydrologist’s gray-green continental uniform was what had sparked this diatribe. “We’re not Emergency Services,” she told the mayor. “I’m Commander Uhura of the Starship Enterprise, and this is Dr. Greg Anthony of the Hydrologic and Meteorologic Division. I’m sorry, but we didn’t even know you were flooded until we got here.”
“Didn’t know?” The mayor, a stocky Asian man with an anomalous mop of curly hair, gave her a startled look. “You came here from Au Contraire, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And no one down there has heard anything about the flooding on the Little Muddy? Not even any media coverage about us having to evacuate everyone in What’s the Point?” Uhura shook her head, and he turned toward Anthony. “No government dispatches about the emergency we’re having up here?”
“Governor Sedlak doesn’t believe in government dispatches, or a daily news bulletin,” Anthony said dryly. “We came up to field-check a strange hydrologic reading from one of our water pressure sensors. Governor Sedlak doesn’t even know we’re here.”
The mayor let out a frustrated noise, halfway between a groan and a curse. “Of course he doesn’t! He would’ve probably told you it wasn’t efficient to bother checking out that one measurement, even if it could have saved us from having to resettle every man, woman, and child in What’s the Point!”
“You lost an entire settlement to the flooding?” Uhura asked in concern. “Was anyone killed?”
“Not as far as I know.” The mayor scrubbed a hand across his face, turning its olivium-burnt ruddiness a shade darker with that ruthless massage. He looked exhausted. His second-floor office was stacked high with storage crates and furniture carted up from the floor below, and Uhura wondered if he had brought it all up himself. “I’m sorry—who did you say you were again?”
“Commander Uhura of the Enterprise,” she said gently. “And you are—?”
“Ang Wat.” He stuck out an olivium-burned hand for her and Anthony to shake. “I don’t suppose you brought any medical supplies with you? We could use whatever you’ve got, even if it’s just a first-aid kit.”
“We can give you at least three crates of medical supplies plus a high-quality tissue regenerator.” Uhura glanced out the window, seeing the glitter of water in the street beside the town hall. “Is it safe to drop them off here? It looks like the water is still rising.”
“It is,” Ang said tiredly. “It’s been rising for weeks now, but for a long time we thought it would just go away. Hell, the Little Muddy just doesn’t drain that much of the Gory Range. With as dry and windy as it’s been the last couple of months—well, it just didn’t seem like there should be that much water.”
“But the Little Muddy does drain Bull’s Eye crater,” Anthony said. “We think that’s where the water’s coming from.”
Ang Wat snorted. “You’re thinking right. We found that out the hard way. After the Little Muddy took out What’s the Point, we thought we’d better see for ourselves what was going on further upstream. Didn’t take long. Those hot springs up near Southfork are just about roaring with water, even when the dust’s blowing. We figured it had to be coming from the crater lake. And we told that to the people down in Au Contraire, too,” he added sharply.
“They may not have understood how serious it was.” Uhura didn’t really believe that, and she could see from Ang’s sour look that he didn’t either. “Is there anything else you need besides medical supplies? We’re in Gamma Night right now, but we can radio the orbital platform in a few hours and have them send another shuttle out with food and blankets—”
“Another shuttle? We never got the shipment from the first shuttle,” Ang Wat said indignantly.
That was the response Uhura had been fishing for. She’d discovered in the other settlements they’d stopped at that the Outland settlers were less suspicious and more helpful if she let them just complain about the lack of supplies rather than making direct inquiries about them. Perhaps they thought she was checking to see if they’d gotten more than their fair share. “You’re sure the packages didn’t get lost in the water?” she asked, trying to sound like someone with just a brief, casual interest in the problem.
The mayor of No Escape snorted again. “I’m sure. I had people out for hours, listening for those sonic beacons to make sure our stuff didn’t get waterlogged. The only one who heard anything was me, when they came back empty-handed and cursing. So I’ll pass on another delivery from the orbital platform. I’d never get another vote in this town if I made the folks stand out in that olivium-pickled water a second time. Just drop the medical supplies off on the clinic roof before you go. It’s the highest building in town, way up by the water tank.”
“All right. And if it looks like the flooding from the crater is going to get worse, we’ll come back and let you know.” Uhura turned to leave, but the expression of deep misgiving on Ang Wat’s ruddy face swung her back toward him again. “Is there some other problem we should know about?”
“Not here,” the mayor said. “God knows, having the lower half of my town under water is all the problem I need right now. But if you’re really going up to Bull’s Eye crater, there’s something you need to know.”
“About the lake?” Anthony asked, frowning. “Or the olivium deposits underneath it?”
Ang Wat shook his head. “I don’t know anything about either of those. But I do know this—the folks we sent up to check on those springs at Southfork almost didn’t make it back alive. And it wasn’t the dust storms that got ’em. They got shot at up there on that damned crater.”
“Shot at?” Uhura echoed in surprise. “By alien pirates?”
“No. By a bunch of antisocial militants who came here to Belle Terre just to get themselves their own private little territory. They call themselves the Carsons, and between them they’ve laid claim to the whole inside of that crater, never mind that it’s mostly water and hot enough with olivium to fry an egg on the ground. We thought at first they were going to try getting a water monopoly up this way, but they don’t seem to care about that. They just don’t want anybody getting near them.” Ang Wat gave her a warning look. “So when you go to check on that crater, Commander Uhura, you be real careful. Those Carsons don’t bother giving you a warning. They shoot first and then let the dust bury you.”
Chapter Seven
THE LITTLE MUDDY didn’t look as if it had ever been much of a river, even before the Quake Moon’s explosion had turned half its drainage basin into a crater lake. Its valley was mostly narrow and nestled between two close-set ranges: the taller Gory Mountains on the north, and the smaller Goosebump Mountains to the south. From previous trips, Sulu remembered the river as a thin sliver of broken mirror far below, meandering down the valley in lazy, snake-shaped loops before running north through its narrow gorge to meet the Stony Creek and then become the Big Muddy.
Now there was a sheet of water several miles wide across that same valley, so dull and thick with mud that it looked more like an enormous spill of concrete than a flood. Sulu needed most of his attention to keep the Bean steadied against the constant buffeting downdrafts sweeping down the mountain-walled valley, but he could see enough of the devastation to make him uneasy. Even if his gut didn’t want to acknowledge that the flooding in Llano Verde was starting to look almost as urgent as their mission to rescue Chekov’s downed shuttle, his intellect knew it. And he suspected
the hydrologists knew it, too.
“Make sure you get a good shot of the gorge entrance in the background,” Weir instructed Anthony as the other hydrologist slowly panned their tricorder back and forth across the floodwaters. “McElroy will want to see how much water’s been impounded there, so he can calibrate the data network.”
“Already got it.” Anthony brought the tricorder back to the handful of engulfed roofs over which Sulu had centered the Bean. It was supposed to have been the next settlement they stopped at to track Chekov’s shuttle, which meant they’d never know if any relief supplies had been dropped there. Sulu glanced down at the turbid, swirling waters and grimaced. If this was where the cargo shuttle’s trail had ended, he was afraid there wasn’t going to be much left to rescue. “Coordinates 93 slash 15 on map WR9,” Anthony told the tricorder’s audio sensor. “Former name Mineral Point, current name—Commander Uhura, what did the mayor say this place was called now?”
“What’s the Point,” Sulu answered, seeing that Uhura was listening so intently to the whisper of the experimental communicator on her lap that she hadn’t even heard the hydrologist.
“Current name What’s the Point,” Anthony told his tricorder. “Status: evacuated without fatalities, flood-waters ten meters deep and rising.” He set the tricorder down on his lap and tapped in the commands for condensing its visual records into a transmittable data packet. “Is that all we need to send down to Big Muddy, Bev?”
“Wait—I want to tack on the flow measurements I took in Culvert and No Escape.” Sulu heard the long buzz of data being transferred from tricorder to tricorder in the backseat. “Let me look that over and make sure the olivium dust in here didn’t frazzle it. I really hate to think how much radioactivity we’re breathing right this minute,” she added absently.
“And wearing,” Anthony said. The Bean was designed to be dustproof, but they’d made too many stops and tracked in too much mud and dirt for its limited air-recirculation system to handle. “Your face is already burned, Bev.”