by L. A. Graf
The gibe stung Sulu with more force than he’d expected, and he had to grit his teeth for a moment before he could reply in a manner befitting a Starfleet officer. “We still have a missing cargo shuttle to track,” he said at last. “I’ll be heading for Useless Loop as soon as I get your relief supplies unloaded.”
“Will you?” The mayor leaned back a little farther in her chair, looking amused now. “You may not have noticed, Mr. Sulu, but folks in Desperation don’t go out much after dark. For one thing, it gets colder than the back side of the Quake Moon. For another, you never know when a windstorm will come down from Bull’s Eye and blow you into next week. So I don’t know who’s going to help unload those supplies of yours.”
“You don’t have any more Peacemakers here who could do it?”
Serafini shook her head. “I’ve got one shift out patrolling and another one guarding the jail. All the off-duty boys went upslope with your friends. You should have told them to unload the supplies before they left.”
Sulu didn’t bother to say what he was thinking—that the only orders he would trust the sullen-looking Peacemakers to obey were those of the mayor herself. “That’s all right. I’ll just wait and unload the supplies when I come back tomorrow or the day after—”
“And let those greedy guanaco herders up in Useless Loop get first crack at our stuff? Hell, no.” Serafini scrambled to her feet, just as he’d hoped she would, although Sulu hadn’t foreseen the belligerence with which she grabbed up her projectile weapon once again. “I’ll roust out the folks from the pub and a couple of private clubs I know. If they can stay out drinking, I guess they can stay out unloading cargo. We’ll meet you in the plaza in half an hour.”
It had actually been more like an hour and a half before the mayor showed up again, with a handful of recalcitrant and noticeably intoxicated “volunteers.” By then, the night had turned just as cold as she’d said it would. Sulu kept forgetting that this town had originally been called Desert Station, since the longer he stayed here the more appropriate its new name became. But the cold, dry bite of the night air reminded him strongly of the winter he’d spent at the White Sands Test Range in New Mexico a few years before. Unlike those luminous nights in Alamogordo, however, in Desperation neither starshine nor streetlamps broke through the dust-hazed darkness. Only an occasional shiver of light leaked out of the town’s adobe buildings when the wind blew hard enough against their rugdraped windows.
Between the cold, the dusty dark, and the inebriation of his helpers, Sulu couldn’t manage to off-load more than a few crates of supplies an hour. To Serafini’s credit, she never left during the operation, although she never actually helped, either. Instead she wandered back and forth between the Bean’s emptying cargo hold and its cockpit, prominently displaying the weapon Sulu suspected was his helpers’ primary motivation while she asked idle questions about how the antigrav generators worked. By the time the last crates were on the ground, and the last of the laborers had vanished back into their clubs, it was nearly midnight. And the wind was rising fast.
“Looks like it’s going to get a little rowdy out here tonight.” Serafini paused halfway down the exit ramp, squinting across the plaza at what looked like a curling gray bank of fog. Only the slither of dust and sand pelting into the Bean’s hold told Sulu it was wind-driven sediment instead of mist. Occasional gusts of stronger wind curled entire sections of it up off the ground in whiplash streaks, then dropped it back into the roiling mass below. “You be careful, Mr. Sulu. However bad it is down here, I expect it’s ten times worse up in the dust layer.”
“Yes,” Sulu said bleakly. “It is.”
He watched the mayor walk back to the town hall, ramrod straight despite the battering gusts, and wondered how on earth she managed it. The wind was already rocking the Bean back and forth with gentle groans, like a giant’s hand caressing a puppy. Even after Sulu closed the cargo doors, the temperature inside the little shuttle kept dropping, dragged down by the wind chill transmitted through its bare metal hull. Sulu pulled his dust muffler closer around him and headed for the cockpit, intending to turn on the antigrav generators for their waste heat, if nothing else.
The blue-green phosphorescence of the control panels threw oddly bright reflections up onto the windows, now almost completely covered with windblown sediment. The thick coating of dust turned a flash of light in the northern sky into what looked like a glowing nebula. It wasn’t until Sulu heard the slow roll of thunder that he realized it had been a lightning bolt. He waited for a second one, to make sure it hadn’t been a fluke of dust-sparked friction, and to estimate whether he had enough time to outfly the storm.
Before he could decide, something pale and indistinct smeared across the cockpit window in front of him. After a moment, it resolved into a gloved hand, clearing an oval porthole through the dust. The hand disappeared, replaced by a face like a desert nomad’s, so completely wrapped and hooded that only a pair of goggled eyes could be seen through the folds of cloth.
“What on earth—?” Sulu leaned forward, trying to see how someone had managed to scramble so high up the side of his sleek-hulled ship. Another, brighter flash of lightning gave him a glimpse of ragged, rolling fur and beast nostrils narrowed into unhappy slits. Then his view was abruptly blocked by a piece of paper smacked against the window from the outside and held down firmly despite the tearing wind. Its hand-scrawled message was blunt.
You’re going to be killed. Leave Desperation before it’s too late.
Chapter Ten
“UHURA. To. Rand. Come. In. Rand.”
No need to worry about communications burnout now. Uhura had to shout each word between gasps for breath, using all the force of her voice to keep the sound from getting lost in the howl of the crater winds. She’d tucked her transmitter inside the folds of her filter scarf to increase her chances of being heard, but there was nothing she could do about the way the rim’s altitude stole her breath. She also had to be careful not to lose sight of the actinic glare of the crawler’s work lights, hazed as they were by Southfork’s steaming hot springs. Outside that diffuse glow, the night was thick with dust and erratic spurts of rain from the crater’s wind-churned lake. If she went too far astray in her quest to find the right distance for her communicator to work, Uhura was afraid she might never get back.
It had taken six hours to make the lurching journey here from Desperation, although the hydrologists swore it seemed longer. When Uhura finally hauled herself out of the metal-walled vehicle, she felt bruised and jolted enough to believe them. But she’d spent the entire trip so intensely focused on trying to hear Rand’s communicator signal that she didn’t notice the bumps or the slow passage of time. She’d caught occasional flares of connection during the trip, longer and more distinct than the microflashes she’d gotten from the Bean. Once, when they’d been stopped by a muddy, flooded stream, she’d even been able to make out an entire phrase: “—Commander Scott needs to know—” uttered in Rand’s distinctive soprano. But before she could answer, the Peacemaker up in the driving turret had backed the dust-crawler away to find another route up the crater slope.
Even those brief breakthroughs had been useful, however. Uhura had been careful to find a seat from which she could watch the crawler’s odometer turn with its tracks, despite the unwelcome looks that had gotten her from the Peacemakers on either side. She’d noted the distance between each connection node they’d crossed on their journey and, if her calculations were correct, there should be another such node within a hundred meters of the place where they’d finally ground to a stop. All she needed was enough time and voice to find it.
Most of the Peacemakers had retreated back to the crawler after turning on its work lights for the hydrologists, although a handful disappeared into the murk, presumably to patrol for outlaws. Uhura suspected the rest of them were drinking and playing cards inside their windproofed vehicle. They’d certainly made no attempt to guide or assist the hydrologists across the
steaming pools and mudflats ringing the main cascade of Southfork’s hot springs. The entire area smelled unpleasantly of sulfur, and a phosphorescent mist floated above the thermal waters, reflecting back more than just the glare of the work lights. Uhura had watched Greg Anthony measure the olivium content of that mist when they first arrived. She hadn’t seen his results, just the bleak look he exchanged with Weir before they doggedly set to work measuring the water flow of the springs themselves. The hydrologist hadn’t measured any radiation levels after that.
“Uhura. To. Rand.” She took another few steps to change her position, lugging the heavy experimental communicator with one hand while the other pressed against the side of her dust muffler’s hood to keep the audio remote positioned against her ear. “Come. In.”
Thunder rumbled along the crater rim, almost like a reply. Uhura paused to peer up at the night sky, trying to see any flash that might be lightning through the dust. They’d rolled through two of Bull’s Eye’s violent cyclonic thunderstorms in the crawler, and, at least once, a lightning bolt had hit so near that Uhura could smell the ozone past the crawler’s dust filters. The last thing she wanted, on this windswept high rim, was to be standing taller than anything else around with another storm on the way.
“Uhura. To. Rand. Come. In.”
“Here!”
Uhura stared down at her communicator’s dust-filmed display, but a hand tugged at her elbow before she could even get her hopes up. She turned and saw Bev Weir behind her, dripping muddy water from her dust muffler. The scientist must have been soaked to the skin beneath that sodden cloak, but what little Uhura could see of her face in the distant lights looked disgruntled rather than distressed. The smell of sulfur clung to her like smoke.
“What’s the matter?” Uhura demanded loudly.
Weir clapped her gloved hands together to knock off some of the crusted mud, then brought them up to cup around her mouth. “Not the right place!” she yelled back. “Not enough water!”
Uhura frowned, glancing back at what she could see of the hot springs. Steam rose thick over the series of cracks where the water emerged from the crater rim, but the wind blew enough of it away to reveal an improbably wet wedding cake of flowstone below, hundreds of layers as ornately fashioned and draped as confectioner’s icing. At the foot of the springs, a necklace of muddy pools steamed and sputtered up miniature geysers before pouring their excess water down a raw gully, away into darkness.
“You’re sure?” Uhura shouted.
Weir nodded so emphatically Uhura thought she was going to fall over. She reached out to steady the hydrologist and felt her spasmodic shivering through the thick cloth of her dust muffler. Weir leaned hard against that support, but it was only to get her mouth closer to Uhura’s ear.
“There’s not enough water coming out to flood that ditch down there, much less the Little Muddy,” she insisted. “We’ve got to go further downhill and look for more outlets.”
“Maybe there aren’t any more outlets.” Uhura could feel her own gloved hands getting wet and cold as she held onto the hydrologist. “I think we should get you back into the crawler.”
Weir didn’t bother shaking her head, she just yanked free of Uhura’s grip. “Greg says the conduits have to be there!” Her yell was barely audible past another growl of thunder. “The olivium level’s off the scale. He’s gone to wake up those idiots in the crawler, and tell them to follow us. Come on!”
Uhura wasn’t sure if she understood the scientific logic behind this decision, but Weir’s stride was reassuringly strong and decisive—and she was heading straight downhill, away from the danger of lightning strikes. Uhura hefted her communicator and went after her.
At the edge of the work lights’ halo, Weir paused again, but only long enough to yank the slender stick of a dilithium flare out of her pack and ignite it. Brilliant bluish light enveloped them in a ten-meter cocoon, and Uhura felt an entirely groundless sense of safety fill her, as if the light were a defensive shield instead of just a disorganized jumble of photons. She walked more confidently inside it, leaping across runnels of hot water and steaming patches of mud, and balancing against the increasing grade of the slope. The unwieldy weight of her experimental communicator was the only thing that slowed her down. Uhura thought briefly about leaving it behind, but she had far less faith in her ability to find it again than she did in her ability to survive a fall with it into a mud puddle.
“This way.” Weir veered to the left across the rocky slope, although Uhura had no idea how she knew which way to go. She couldn’t see anything outside their globe of light except the constant swirl and rush of dust; couldn’t hear anything except the ominous rumble of thunder. Then it occurred to her that this particular roar of thunder had gone on for much longer than it should have, and showed no signs of stopping. The smell of sulfur washed over them again, much stronger than before. Uhura felt the back of her throat prickle and turn sour from it.
Weir stopped so abruptly that Uhura nearly tripped over her, and had to drop her communicator to catch her balance. It landed with a soggy thunk that told her just how sodden the ground beneath their feet was. A moment later, Uhura knew why. An errant spray of windswept droplets fell across her just like the rain swept off the crater lake. But this “rain” was hot and burned like acid when it hit her exposed skin. She opened her mouth to ask Weir if they should move back, and let out a wordless cry of protest instead as the hydrologist flung the dilithium torch far out into the roaring darkness ahead of them.
The arc of light traced a thin bluish ribbon across a massive sheet of falling water, so wide they couldn’t see the other side. The torch plunged downward with the cataract until it vanished into the billows of steam at its base, briefly lighting them from the inside like an exploding fireball before vanishing completely. The roaring sound of the falls seemed even louder when it was gone.
“Damn,” muttered Weir. “I owe Greg another doughnut.”
“What?” Uhura reached out to catch at the hydrologist’s shoulder, both to get her attention and to steady herself against the irrational fear of plunging down into the darkness along with the rushing waters. “What are you talking about?”
“All the floodwater is coming from a conduit system through the crater rim. You’d never get this kind of discharge just from groundwater flow.” Another gust of wind spattered them with hot droplets, and this time even Weir yelped at their sting. “We better go back and tell him before those idiot Peacemakers drive their crawly thing right over the edge of the falls.”
Uhura took the deepest breath she could manage inside her dust-filtering scarf. “I hope you have another dilithium flare. Otherwise, we’re going to be stepping in a lot of mud puddles.”
“Don’t worry.” Weir leaned down to pull another slender emergency stick from her field pack. She ignited it with a quick smack against her leg, then held it up to take one last look at the cataract behind them. “Wow. I thought it was going to be bad, but I never expected anything like this. It’s not going to take this kind of erosion long to—”
With the sharp kick of metal hitting metal, the dilithium flare jerked abruptly out of Weir’s hand. She cursed and snatched her fingers back, curling them in as if they hurt. Uhura started to take a step toward her, then heard the delayed crack of an explosion too flat and focused to be thunder. Instinct turned her step into a dive, catching Weir around the knees and bringing them both down with a sodden crash right on the muddy verge of the falls.
“What the hell—”
“Someone’s shooting at us!” Uhura yelled past the water’s roar. Rock exploded a few feet away from them, and a moment later she heard another belated explosion. “With projectile weapons! They’re going to get our range in a minute—come on.”
Weir’s disbelieving look turned to terror when a third projectile smacked right through the outspread cloth of her dust muffler. She scrambled to her feet without further urging from Uhura, following her in a zigzag path downhill
and along the edge of the cascading hot springs. “Where are we going?” she yelled as they ran.
“Around in a big circle, then back to the dust-crawler,” Uhura yelled back. “The Peacemakers have guns, too. Maybe they can chase these people away.”
“But we don’t know where—” Weir paused to catch her breath. The exposure to the hot springs’ olivium-rich water had put the asthmatic wheeze back in her voice again. Uhura heard her take a couple of tearing breaths, then try again to speak. “The crawler was—coming toward us.”
“Then they should hear the explosions even sooner.” A projectile hit the ground nearby and threw splatters of mud up into Uhura’s face. She redoubled her efforts at evasive action, wondering how long it would take the Peacemakers to intervene, how the outlaws had gotten past their patrols. And wondering how long Weir could keep up the bruising pace with her breath coming sharper and more painfully each time she dragged it in.
A ravine loomed up in front of them, vaporous with steam. Uhura swung left, realizing she’d followed the course of the hot springs too far. Another explosion seemed to rise on its own from the muddy ground just behind them, followed by a crack much closer and more definite than the ones she’d heard before. She slewed to a stop, realizing she was trapped between armed outlaws, a ravine too wet and treacherous to cross, and the steaming rapids that led away from the base of the crater falls. Weir pulled up behind her, gasping.
“Only one place—to go now.” The hydrologist gave her a smile so crooked Uhura thought at first it was a grimace. “You ever body-surf down a canyon—like Slide Rock in Arizona?”
“No.” It was impossible to see in the dust-clogged darkness, but Uhura thought she could hear the approaching thud of several booted feet over the wind’s shriek and the rumbling of real thunder. The firing of projectiles had stopped, as if whoever was after them knew they had their quarry trapped, and didn’t want to use up more munitions than necessary. “What if there’s another big waterfall further down?”