STAR TREK®: NEW EARTH - ROUGH TRAILS Page 8

  He had Plottel’s coveralls unfastened and pulled down over one shoulder when Baldwin asked drowsily from behind him, “What’re you doing?”

  Chekov glanced back over his shoulder only long enough to find Baldwin in another of the small, darkened doorways, looking as wind-battered and exhausted as Chekov felt. All the dust on his clothes was tawny and dry, sparkling ever so faintly in the kitchen’s light.

  Chekov turned back to the business of stripping Plottel’s torso. “What do the colonists use for weapons in the Outland?”

  “What?” Baldwin crossed the central chamber at a groggy shuffle, like a man just waking from not enough sleep. Or on the verge of succumbing to radiation exposure. “Phasers? Rocks? I don’t know. The Burn killed every native animal on this side of the planet.” He paused at Chekov’s shoulder, blinking dully down at Plottel. “What have they . . . ?” He seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment, then took another step closer as his expression grew very still. “C.C. . . . Is that Dave?”

  Chekov hesitated, not wanting to answer, knowing he couldn’t just let the horrified question lie there. “Yes.” It came out blunt and stiff, and much too insensitive. He wished he could take it back and start over.

  “Well, he’s not . . . I . . .” Baldwin tore his eyes away from the body to look pleadingly at Chekov. “He’s gonna be okay?” It was a desperate question, one to which he must surely already know the answer. “He is, right?”

  Feeling like a coward, Chekov broke eye contact and lifted Plottel’s shoulders again. “He’s dead, Mr. Baldwin.” Then, because it was expected and not because he thought it would help, “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” Baldwin asked, leaning forward to make Chekov face him again. “You didn’t kill him, did you?” But his expression was angry, a bitter mixture of sarcasm and hurt. “You said everything was going to be okay—you promised you wouldn’t let him drown. Reddy told me that,” he added, smug in his awful knowledge. “He said you’d take care of him. You said you’d take care of all of us!”

  “He didn’t drown.” And everything isn’t going to be okay—right now nothing about this situation is okay. This time when Chekov rolled the body, the absence of bloody clothing revealed every detail of the ugly wound in Plottel’s back. Whether the sight of it shocked Baldwin into silence or he’d simply run out of momentum, Chekov couldn’t tell. But he took advantage of the other man’s silence to finish the examination he’d started before Baldwin entered the room. “Whoever killed him wasn’t using a phaser. There’s no cauterization along the edges of the wound.” He didn’t expect the details to mean anything to Baldwin, but it felt somehow important to help Baldwin understand what they were up against. Chekov fell silent himself for a moment, struggling to remember some pertinent detail of the rifle which had burned his hand on the lakeshore. He remembered the loudness of its report, and the shocking power with which something had slammed into the chest of his environmental suit and shattered it to pieces. That was good old-fashioned inertia—a mass accelerated to such a great velocity that it would impact any static object as though it weighed a ton. “It has to be a projectile weapon of some kind. Something the colonists put together for themselves.” But what were they using for an accelerant? How had they figured out the ballistics of the projectile mass? He felt again the gut-wrenching kick of something all but invisible blasting apart his environmental suit, and wondered how he and Baldwin could hope to preserve themselves now that they didn’t even wear that much protection.

  Baldwin reached across in front of him with surprising tenderness, tugging Plottel’s coverall back into place as neatly as he could without actually touching the body. Suddenly aware of his own bloody hands, Chekov took a respectful step backward to give Baldwin access to his friend.

  “Is there a bathroom?” he asked, very quietly. Years in security had taught him that there was really nothing he should be saying at a time like this, no matter how certain his heart was that there must be.

  Not looking up from his simple ministrations, Baldwin merely pointed.

  The bathroom was as small and spare as the bedroom, with nothing left but a still-active composting toilet and a discarded pile of cleaning rags. Enough to scrub the worst of the wet blood from his hands, but not enough to get the rusty details out of the creases. He did what he could, then stowed the dirty scraps behind the toilet where Baldwin wouldn’t have to see them.

  Back in the main dome, Baldwin had liberated the quilt from Chekov’s bedroom and draped it across Plottel’s body. It somehow made the death more personal now that the face was only a ghostly silhouette beneath the age-dimmed colors. Baldwin sat among the pillows on the other side of the chamber, his back to the kitchen, his face hidden in his own hands. Trying to grant him what little privacy he could, Chekov slipped quietly into the bedroom to retrieve his jacket, then took as long as he possibly could to shake the dust out of the fabric and shoulder it on.

  Baldwin didn’t look up when he finally reentered the chamber. “So, C.C. . . . Where are we?”

  Chekov paused in fastening his shoulder strap, looking out the barely transparent window above the sitting area. What little he could see past the dirt was dimmed by the dust storm—a vast tract of dust and scrub leading toward an upward-slanting horizon that went nowhere. Turning away from the view, he finished arranging his jacket as he went to sit across from Baldwin. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Then how did you find this place?”

  “I didn’t.” Chekov returned Baldwin’s startled look with a helpless spreading of his hands. “I thought you or Reddy knew of homesteads near Bull’s Eye and . . .”

  “And what?” Baldwin gave a sharp little laugh that didn’t sound particularly amused. Chekov let him hold on to the anger, understanding that it sprang mostly from shock, and wasn’t really aimed at him. “Dragged you here through the storm?” Baldwin went on, shoving to his feet in a spasm of frustration. “You think I’m too stupid to bring the environmental suits? Or smart enough to get us all past whatever killed Dave?”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid.” Chekov tried to drag him back to the practicalities. “Where is Reddy?”

  Baldwin only stared at him. After an uncomfortably long silence, he said with some amazement, “You really don’t know.”

  He didn’t wait for Chekov to answer, just turned and walked into another of the dome’s small doorways. Chekov rose to follow, his stomach churning again, his heart thumping painfully against the inside of his chest.

  He knew Reddy was alive by his breathing, shallow and too rapid, alarmingly loud in the small room. But as he moved closer to the narrow bed, he also knew by the smell of blood and sour sweat that the pilot might not stay that way for long. He knelt, wishing for something more to do than lift the edge of the blankets and glance underneath at the damage. While the bandaging about Reddy’s middle was neat and tightly wound, it was also sodden and warm to the touch.

  Baldwin’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “He didn’t bring us anywhere, C.C.”

  “No,” Chekov agreed grimly. He replaced the blankets, wincing in sympathy when Reddy murmured with pain. “But if he didn’t, then who did?”

  “Yeah . . .” Baldwin stirred uneasily behind him. “And are they still hanging around?”

  “Crooked Creek?” Sulu had to stick his head out the opened side cockpit of the Bean, since the ship’s internal communicator couldn’t reach even as far as Scotty, working under the belly of their dust-scuffed metal beast. Although they were shielded from the worst of Big Muddy’s dust by the spaceport hangar, enough olivium had filtered in through cracks to suspend a fine glitter in the air, and interfere with electromagnetic and subspace signals. “Mr. Scott, have you ever heard of an Outland settlement called Crooked Creek?”

  “Don’t think so, lad.” Scott’s gruff voice lifted to a shout to be heard over the rising whine of the right lateral antigrav generators he was tuning. “There’s one called Up the Creek. Maybe C
rooked Creek was its original name.”

  Sulu glanced down at the map and frowned. “I thought about that, but it doesn’t make sense—Up the Creek’s nearly six hundred kilometers away from the rest of the cargo drops they were scheduled to make.”

  Scotty picked up his engineering tricorder, yanking at the cables that he had to use for probing internal circuitry in lieu of remote sensors. “What about Useless Loop? It must have had some other name before that chunk of Quake Moon fell on it.”

  “True.” Sulu scanned his much scribbled-on map again, but couldn’t find that nickname either. “Where is Useless Loop? I don’t have it listed here.”

  “That’s because we decided it was too risky to try to land there.” The chief engineer plugged his cables into the left lateral generator, to test the antigravitational force being generated there. The only sensitive part of the Bean’s propulsion system was the balance of its three antigravs. If one of them got tuned to deliver a stronger thrust than the others, the ship had trouble maintaining a horizon. “Bartels told us it sat right next to one of those big impact craters, where the olivium levels would mess up our instruments. Now, was it Humpty, Dumpty, or Splat?”

  “What about Bull’s Eye?” Sulu traced an imaginary line across the map, connecting the nine cargo drops that he’d managed to locate so far. The route passed directly over Llano Verde’s largest impact scar. “That would put it in the right place. And the base map shows a crooked river draining off the northern slope of the crater.”

  “Does it show which of its loops turned into the useless one?”

  “No. And if I have to scout around for it, I’ll get thrown off the rest of my course.” Just having a general idea of the town’s location wasn’t good enough for this trip—Sulu needed specific coordinates to program into the Bean’s computer. With Gamma Night still blocking contact with the orbital platform, the only way he had to navigate was to keep rigorous track of map coordinates. That meant he had to laboriously preprogram their course using the Bean’s digital map data bank and the list of settlements John Kyle had transmitted to him.

  “Then leave it ’til the end of the flight,” Scotty advised. “With any luck, it won’t be the last place that got supplies dropped from the shuttle or the first place that didn’t.” He ran the rear antigrav thruster through its full power cycle, then cut the dull roar of the generator down to an idling hiss. “Don’t forget, lad, Gamma Night will be over in another eight hours. You can check your position with the orbital platform after that.”

  Sulu opened his mouth to reply, but the echo of urgent footsteps off the metallic hangar walls suggested that the rest of their crew had finally arrived. He hurriedly deleted his incomplete entry for Crooked Creek and merged the remaining segments into a complete course plan. “So, did the J-channel buffers work?” he heard Scotty ask outside the Bean.

  “Dear God, we hope not,” said an unfamiliar voice. “Mr. Scott, please tell us that what we’re looking at is just a malfunction in our data line.”

  Sulu looked up from his navigations panel, his attention caught not so much by the odd words as the ominous tone they were uttered in. He glanced through his open cockpit window to see three figures in gray-green government dust mufflers range themselves around the chief engineer. The taller two shrugged out of heavy, equipment-laden packs while the shortest one held out a tricorder for Scotty to examine.

  “Take a look at station ninteen-aught-nine,” he begged Scott. “Is that a valid data point?”

  “Can’t be. It’s way off scale.” Scotty punched a series of tests into the other man’s tricorder, then watched the display flicker back the results. Even from inside the Bean, Sulu could see the Scotsman’s craggy eyebrows jerk up in amazement. “Where the blazes is the transducer that measured that point?”

  “In the Little Muddy River, just south of Bull’s Eye crater.” The other man peeled back his dust-filtering scarf to reveal an anxious, bearded face. “So it’s valid? There really is three thousand cubic meters of water coming through per second?”

  “The pressure transducer might be malfunctioning,” Scotty said dubiously. “If a rock fell on top of it, or it got buried under too much olivium mud—”

  “The discrepancy in vertical and horizontal pressures would have shown up in the internal system checks. That data is real.” The new voice belonged to a woman, although it emerged from the most broad-shouldered and athletic of the three cloaked figures. She swung around to stare hopefully up at Sulu through the cockpit window. “You’ve got to take us with you, so we can see where the water’s coming from—”

  “Mr. Scott!” That was a voice Sulu did recognize, despite the hoarseness caused by too many weeks of continuous hailing. He also recognized the excitement that quivered perceptibly beneath the communications officer’s poise, and scrambled out of the Bean’s cockpit, heading back down the narrow passageway between the lateral antigrav generators into the crowded cargo hold. By the time he made it out the hatch, Uhura and Rand had joined the tense knot of people gathered beside the rear thruster plate. “—a ping off the shuttle’s automatic responder,” Uhura was saying, while she unwrapped her dust muffler. “We couldn’t get much of a fix on its location, but it’s transmitting the code for being powered down and intact!”

  “Any voice contact?” Sulu demanded, pushing unceremoniously past the three government employees to join her.

  “No,” Uhura admitted. “But we were right on the shoulder of our last frequency band and barely making contact. More intermittent signals—like voices—might have been smeared out by refractive variability.” She glanced past Sulu, at yet another dust-cloaked figure moving down the hangar. This one was guiding a cargo sled full of equipment and more sacks of supplies. “Um—how much more room do we have in the Bean?”

  “Not very much,” Sulu said. “Not unless you want to off-load some of the emergency rations you told me to put on board.”

  “Well, we may have to,” Uhura said. “I promised some sick and starving settlers that—”

  “Commander Uhura,” the bearded man said urgently. “We’ve got a more urgent problem than starvation to deal with here. Now that our data network’s finally sorting out signal from noise, it looks like there’s a potentially hazardous situation up in the headwaters of the Big Muddy–-”

  “A potentially catastrophic situation!” The female hydrologist pulled her dust filtration scarf off as well, revealing tousled blond hair and an intense frown. “Those flow rates in the Little Muddy don’t make any sense, coming in the dry season like this. Not unless that water’s leaking out of Bull’s Eye’s crater lake—”

  “—at three thousand cubic meters per second—” the bearded man interjected.

  “–-through some of those conduit hot springs up there,” the third scientist, a dark-haired and wiry man, chimed in. “All it would take would be one landslide on the crater rim—”

  “—followed by rapid down-cutting and outflow—”

  “—and we could have a flood wave big enough to wipe out every settlement between Southfork and Big Muddy!”

  Their intertwined voices rose in a chorus of scientific passion that reminded Sulu of Leonard McCoy when faced with an imminent medical crisis. He exchanged considering glances with Scotty, Uhura, and Rand, but it was actually Neil Bartels who spoke first, from behind his loaded cargo sled. To Sulu’s surprise, the technical officer sounded more irritated than upset.

  “Tom, weren’t your hydrologists scheduled to inspect the walls of the impact craters in Llano Verde back when you first realized they were starting to fill up with water?”

  The bearded man swung around, blinking at his fellow government employee. “Yes. Yes, we were,” he said after a minute, as if he had to pause to remember. “But we had to get the hardwired monitoring system up and running before the dust season started, and after that we never got the kevlar bodysuits we requisitioned for fieldwork. The last time I spoke to the governor about it, he said he thought it wou
ld just be best to wait until the dust season ended—”

  “—and the rainy season started?” Bartels snorted. “You should have known better than to let a sociobiologist tell you when to do fieldwork! There’s no way you’re going to get Sedlak’s permission to go out now, with the dust storms worse than they’ve ever been.”

  “We don’t need his permission,” said the female hydrologist. “We’re not taking one of his shuttles or any of his precious Emergency Services team. We’re just going to hitch a ride with Starfleet.”

  Sulu opened his mouth to object, but Uhura had already nodded agreement. “We’ve only got room for two of you,” she warned. “And a few pieces of light-weight equipment.”

  “That’ll be enough,” McElroy said, silencing the other two hydrologists’ incipient protest with a stern look. “All we really need is a couple of maps and our scientific tricorders. I was planning to stay here in Big Muddy anyway, to monitor the hydrologic data network.” He glanced over his shoulder at the hangar doors as if he could already hear the thunder of flood-waters coming toward them. “Just in case that crater gives out before you get there.”

  Chapter Six

  THERE WASN’T MUCH Chekov could do for Reddy.

  Starship security personnel received more extensive first-aid training than anyone on board except the medical division. Unfortunately, that training tended to assume a basic field medical kit, or at least some means of obtaining clean water. At worst, protocol expected that any guard tending an injured shipmate only had to hold tight until his starship beamed them to safety or sent in reinforcements. Nowhere was it acknowledged that the worst possible hell was having enough training to understand how badly a comrade was injured without being able to do a thing about it.