by L. A. Graf
Sulu rose up on his elbows to squint toward the other side of the thirty-kilometer-wide crater. Chekov doubted he could see a dozen feet past his own nose. “The beginning of our flood?” he wondered aloud.
Chekov couldn’t let himself believe that they’d arrived too late to accomplish what they had to. Not after traveling without sleep all the way from Desperation, and sucking in enough olivium and dust to mummify their own lungs along the way. Although the logical part of him knew it had been hours ago that they traded camels with Joe Agee in Desperation’s stables and sent him on to meet up with his partner, it felt like it had only just happened. Even the diffuse brightness of encroaching dawn couldn’t convince his internal time sense that enough time had passed to allow all those innocent people to die. “The shuttle’s above the mud line,” he pointed out with stubborn certainty. “It’s been moved.”
Sulu looked over at him keenly. “And that bothers you.”
Everything about this colony and what was going on here bothered him. The complete absence of people guarding the raised shuttle bothered him. The callous discarding of the precious supply cargo, and the humanitarian help it represented, bothered him. Chekov contented himself, however, with saying, “It bothers me that I don’t know why they moved it.” He found the rifle under his wrap, pulled it loose as he crawled a short distance away from Sulu and Thee. A symbolic separation that would also tacitly prepare them for his decision. “Let me scout around the rim. When I’ve got a better view of the terrain and can cover you, I’ll wave you down.” Because he wasn’t sending anyone down this slope until he was positive there was no one waiting to repeat what had already been done to Plottel.
“You’ve just got to get in one last hurrah as chief of security, don’t you?” Sulu squeezed his shoulder briefly, tightly, then let him move away. “Don’t dawdle.”
Chekov hadn’t intended to.
Mist torn off the surface of the lake sheeted rocks and slope alike, turning the talc-fine olivium dust into a sticky, slimy coating on every surface. Chekov clutched at spars of upthrust stone as he picked a trail away from the others, the rifle tucked under one elbow and angled down toward the uneven ground. Sunrise hadn’t worked the same magic at these elevations that it had several kilometers farther down—there was no lifting of the dusty shroud, no hopeful stillness in the lashing wind. If anything, the arrival of sunlight only made matters worse. It was hard not to fixate on all the things that could go wrong when even the rocks behind which you hid looked so much like jagged teeth in the dawn’s light, the lake far below as hungry and churning as a monster’s maw.
He slipped to his bottom, slid between a narrow cut in the stones, and came out a little lower on the slope. Chill mist lashed against his cheek, and wind whistled through the tight space he’d just traversed like an impatient ghost. Swallowing hard to clear the dryness from his mouth, Chekov pressed himself as flat as possible into the next break in the rocks, and stared downslope at each angle, each depression. Somewhere in the surreal shadows and misleading light, images teetered on the thin line between what instinct feared and logic looked for. He’d seen art in a spaceport’s gallery once that made a game of hiding faces and creatures in what otherwise appeared to be innocuous landscapes. Uhura had been charmed by the paintings, proclaiming them clever and creative. Chekov had found them unbearably disturbing. They’d been a security officer’s nightmare made manifest, where the threat looked like anything, hid anywhere.
He felt as if he were trapped in one of those paintings now.
Logic said all the rocks and sand and blowing dust were of the same material, and so essentially the same color. But distance and moisture and the uneven handprint of shade and sun created a chaos of shapes, textures, and movements. When his glance first skated over a pool of black and dusty gray, his eye identified the composition as a collage of rock and shadow a dozen meters clockwise and farther down the slope.
Instinct snapped his attention into sharper focus. Maybe it was a subtle movement, or a shift in the pall of dust that let a finger of sunlight suddenly reach down and clarify things with its touch. But he blinked down the grade at the confusion of shadows not once but twice before the wide-brimmed black hat and rain-soaked dust muffler separated from the background and solidified into the form of a man.
Chekov’s heart slammed fiercely against the rock beneath him. The Peacemaker faced across the slope, toward a spot high on the rim above the water and the waiting shuttle. Was this the same way the sniper had been positioned when Dave Plottel stumbled wearily out of the lake? A ready view, and a rifle balanced casually in a notch between two rocks where even the most vicious gust of wind couldn’t knock it to one side. Twisting to follow the Peacemaker’s gaze, Chekov searched the direction from which he’d come with redoubled intensity. Maybe the man had seen him before he slipped out of sight and now didn’t realize that Chekov had circled around behind and above him. Or maybe the camels they’d abandoned just shy of the crater’s rim had developed a sense of curiosity, and made their own way over the lip to strike a noticeable target against the lightening sky. Instead, Chekov’s eyes were drawn inexorably to the Starfleet officer crouched and waiting to make his way down to the shuttle. Little more than Sulu’s head was visible above the knot of boulders sheltering him, but it was enough.
“Sulu! Get down!”
Wind stole the words almost before they left his throat. He could barely hear the shout himself, knew it had no hope of traveling the torturous distance to his friend. Chekov lunged to his feet, saw Sulu’s expression change, and dropped his own rifle to wave the helmsman down! with both arms. “Get down!” he screamed again. Not because he thought Sulu might hear him this time, but because he had to do something, anything to appease the accusing ghost of Dave Plottel.
Sulu turned away to begin his climb down to the shuttle.
“No!”
Chekov threw himself down the slope, sliding and scrambling to intercept the lone Peacemaker, or at least grab his attention long enough to let Sulu regain cover. The planet separated them the way it did everyone—with wind, and rock, and dust, and distances too great to cover on foot before disaster. He called out again when he saw the Peacemaker notice Sulu’s movement, rise into a crouch, and draw his gun up off the rock. Sulu still didn’t seem to hear. Chekov grabbed a rock, meaning to throw it, but couldn’t jerk it loose from the hillside. Instead, he stumbled to his knees in the slippery mud and slammed up against a shelf of stone still too far away from anyone to do any good.
I don’t want to do this I don’t want to do this—!
He struggled with his conscience until the Peacemaker settled his rifle against his shoulder and swung it to track Sulu’s progress. Then he shut down the horrified voice in his head, drew back his own rifle’s hammer with his thumb, and took aim at the wide-brimmed hat so far below him.
A single shot was all it took.
Uhura had thought the wind gusts were bad up on the crater rim, where they’d battered the Carsons’ roller to a grinding halt and sent it into a sidelong skid across the barren rock slopes. But once they crossed over the top and began descending the other side, the sound of the wind increased to a hurricane roar. The roller didn’t just stop and skid now, it actually got most of its wheels lifted completely off the ground. Only its heavy suspension, and Tamasy’s firm hands on the wheel, saved it from overturning when it was bounced back down again.
Anthony leaned closer to Uhura, but even so she only caught part of his comment. “—why the Peacemakers use crawlers!”
She nodded, gritting her teeth against the roller’s next lift and drop. The sky above them was slowly turning blue as they cut through the inner fringes of the dust-walled cyclone around Bull’s Eye. The glare of sunlight pouring down through that rupture wrapped everything in a thermal halo of infrared, throwing strange dancing auras off the sunward side of rocks. Farther down the slope, Uhura could see the platinum gleam of the crater lake, heaving and churning with the sw
ells kicked up by the maelstrom around it. It looked as if it were boiling, too.
“Uhura to Enterprise.” She had to shout just to get the communicator to register the sound of her voice over the wind’s howl. Instead of listening for a reply, which she probably wouldn’t have heard between the wind and the muffling kevlar of her dust suit, Uhura kept her gaze pinned on the signal readout. Back in Big Muddy, she and Rand had tuned the transmitter output to the range of normal electromagnetic frequencies that could be amplified by the olivium crystals in Llano Verde’s dust. That meant her hail had traveled to the Enterprise at normal light speed, not with the instantaneous touch of subspace. Still, unless the starship was too far away to help, it should only take several seconds for a reply to come back again.
So far, nothing had spiked on the signal response meter.
“Almost there!” That was Linville’s voice, rising above the storm’s fury in a belly-wrenching shout. “Prepare for mine entry!”
The wind’s roar muffled the sound of weapons being loaded and extra projectiles being transferred from belts to pockets, but it couldn’t drown out the thin shriek of the forcefield generator warming up, at least until it disappeared up into the ultrasonic. Uhura pulled the carrying strap of her communicator over her shoulder, then put her mouth down closer to the transmitter. “Uhura to Enterprise!” she called again, but still got no reply.
The roller slewed to a stop, in a protective jumble of rock debris thrown up from the crater floor. Uhura could see the mouth of the mine just beyond it—not the civilized barred and gated opening she’d expected, just a raw gaping wound in the crater’s flank with a jumble of debris spilling out of its mouth. There was no sign of Peacemakers nearby, but Uhura didn’t let that lull her into a false sense of security. She knew they could be hiding just around the bend of the mine.
“Is this the only entrance?” she demanded over the fading drone of the roller’s gyromagnetic motors.
Tamasy was already opening the door of the roller, and either didn’t hear or didn’t bother to answer her. But Linville looked around and nodded. “It splits three ways inside to follow the ore,” she said. “But we’ve got to stay together, within five meters of the forcefield generator for safety.”
Uhura opened her mouth to say that she had to stay near the entrance to call the Enterprise, but the woman was already out in the blasting wind of the crater. Anthony and Roth were next to go, carrying the heavy silver cannister of the forcefield generator between them. Uhura took a deep breath, then dragged the communicator across the seat and out after them. The wind met her with a slap that nearly sent her back inside the roller, followed by just as hard a gust in the opposite direction. Weighted down by her gear, Uhura fought in vain to catch her balance. She ended up on her knees, crouched under the gale-force winds while sunlight paradoxically streamed its bright infrared glitter all around her. She had to find the communicator’s transmission key by touch rather than by sight.
“Uhura to Enterprise!” she shouted. “Come in, Enterprise!”
“Come on!” She could barely hear Linville’s shout, but there was no mistaking the woman’s intention—she caught Uhura under the shoulders and swept her into motion, communicator and all. She never even had a chance to see if her hail got a reply before they were all running up the slope, in zigzag paths that were more a result of wind direction than any evasive maneuvers on their part. By the time Uhura made it up to the mine mouth, she was gasping so hard from the fierce exertion of the run that she wasn’t sure she could have heard shots even if they’d been fired at them.
After the gale blowing outside, the quiet inside the mine entrance seemed almost cathedral. Uhura saw Roth and Anthony set down the forcefield generator and fell to her knees within its shelter, fumbling the communicator box around in front of her to see the signal output. There was still no flicker of response from the Enterprise. Uhura looked up to meet Tamasy’s inquiring glance and shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “Were we getting shot at out there?”
“No. There was no sign of anyone outside.” The Carson biologist scowled into the darkness behind them, as if its silence bothered her. “Or in here. There’s usually automated crawlers coming in and out of here loaded with ore—you can hear them a kilometer away. I don’t hear them.”
“Perhaps they’ve abandoned the mine,” Linville said. “It would be logical, if they knew how close the crater is to collapsing—”
“If they knew that, then why the hell did they keep mining for so long?” Tamasy demanded in sudden, fierce anger. She thumped a gloved hand into the wall of the mine, hard enough to make Uhura wince. “We kept waiting for them to stop before the mine weakened the crater! We were all so sure that’s what they were going to do, that we wouldn’t even have to interfere—and now when they have stopped, it’s a day too late and two hundred meters too close to the edge! Why?”
“Because they wanted the crater to collapse,” Uhura said.
Silence fell inside the mine again, and the Carsons turned to stare at her as if she’d suddenly sprouted horns and hooves. “Wanted it to?” Linville said at last. “Why?”
“To wipe out any evidence of illegal mining. And to cause so much destruction that no one, not even the Enterprise, would have time to track them and the missing olivium.” She saw the confusion in Greg Anthony’s eyes change to understanding, but the Carsons still looked puzzled. “You’ve been assuming the miners planned to stay here on the colony with their profits, and wouldn’t want to destroy it. But the Peacemakers could have cut a deal with the Kauld or some other alien pirates—”
“—in order to be evacuated from this living hell.”
The voice that finished that sentence was so familiar that Uhura nearly fell over her communicator when she jerked toward it. A light had flared to life farther down the mine shaft, silhouetting a handful of men in distinctive Peacemaker dust mufflers. She opened her mouth to say “Neil?” but before she could even make a sound, the Carsons had lifted their rifles, aimed, and fired.
Chekov’s hands shook as he pulled another handful of projectiles out of his pocket and fitted them, one by one, into the body of his rifle. He’d never had the weapon fully loaded before. He hadn’t known it would hold so much ammunition.
“Now all we have to do is hope there are no Peacemakers hiding in the hills, waiting to jump out and shoot us.” Thee pulled shut the hatch to the shuttle’s outside airlock, shoving it once with her shoulder as though verifying that the seals would still hold. She stripped out of her dust muffler and threw it toward the bench where Plottel and Baldwin had once shared a container of orbital platform water, about a million years ago. When Chekov didn’t look up at her passage, she paused and bent to peek over his shoulder. “Where’d you’d get all the ammunition?”
No condemnation in her question, yet he felt a shameful flush in his cheeks that wasn’t caused by the hours he’d spent in olivium-tainted dust. “I found it outside.” On the body of a man I killed because this planet wouldn’t let me leave without taking at least one human life. That was the curse of Belle Terre, he thought. It either killed you with its radiation and dust and flooding, or you fed it someone else’s blood to make it grant you a reprieve.
He felt Thee’s uncertain pause, her half-drawn breath as she tried to decide whether to push for something more than a too-easy answer to her question. Then Sulu joined them from the cargo shuttle’s cockpit, and the opportunity was past.
“What do you want first?” the pilot asked. Chekov was never certain if Sulu truly never noticed the tension when he walked into such tableaus, or if he was just too thoroughly a gentleman to let on. “The good news or the bad news?”
Thee straightened. “There’s good news?”
“There’s always good news.” Ever the optimist, Sulu came to stand where Chekov could see him without getting up from the deck. “Whoever pulled this old girl out of the lake not only cleared the engine intakes, they’ve installed filters
that ought to at least let us fly long enough to get above the dust.”
They could always worry about making a controlled crash-landing at Eau Claire, once they dropped below the dust mantle again. Chekov snapped the rifle closed and climbed to his feet. “What’s the bad news?”
“We’re still not going anywhere.”
Sulu led the way back into the cockpit, waving Chekov into the copilot’s chair as he retook the helm. “I’ve run through two start-up sequences so far. Diagnostics say that everything’s a go, but I’m not getting ignition. It’s like my start-up command just isn’t being heard.”
They should have known it wouldn’t be this easy. “In addition to the clogged intakes, we also lost sensors and inertial control.”
Sulu shook his head. “Olivium radiation messes up the readings but doesn’t necessarily kill the equipment. It’s the dust in the mechanisms that does that.” Lean hands flew through another start-up sequence on the helm panel. Chekov watched the progression of readings, looking for some sense in the sequence as the shuttle’s systems locked up, aborted, and fell quiet.
He was still frowning over the incomplete start-up when Sulu reached in front of him to tap at one of the console’s controls. “Is this something the colonists installed up on the orbital platform?”
A keypad and a blank readout screen, wedged between the controls for monitoring cargo bay atmosphere. Chekov hesitated a moment, trying to recall the board’s configuration during the few minutes he spent in the cockpit on the way down. “No.” Saying it made him even more certain. “No, it was a standard shuttle control board. This was added after we abandoned it.”