THE MOUTH OF the dilithium mine yawned before them in the night, indigo black against the dusky cliffs that walled the Elasian mining camp. Uhura only glanced at it briefly while they approached. She was too busy watching her footing on the rough dirt track and trying to keep up with Takcas. The pace set by the cohort leader made her leg muscles hurt and her throat burn with the effort of breathing Rakatan's oxygen-poor air.
"In here." Takcas stepped aside, gesturing for Uhura to enter the mine before him. The pale amber light of Rakatan's moon sparked reflections from crystal flecks in the carved rock doorway, but no light showed inside. Uhura paused involuntarily on the brink of utter blackness, then remembered what had happened to Sulu when she'd argued with Takcas before. Digging her teeth into her lower lip, she forced herself into the mine.
The first shock was the temperature. Instead of the dank earthen chill she expected, the air inside the mine was dry and summer-hot. At first, Uhura assumed it was waste heat from the machinery she could hear thumping somewhere below. But when she put out a hand to guide herself into the tunnel, she felt the rock warm her palm like a live beast. Despite the underground darkness, the walls of the mine were hot as sun-baked brick.
Takcas caught her shoulder when she took another blind step. "No, Your Glory. This way." A hand-lamp flared into life behind her, chasing Uhura's shadow down a short length of entrance tunnel until it fetched up against a solid rock wall. The rest of the cohort followed Takcas as he led her toward that seeming dead end. It wasn't until they were a meter away that Uhura realized the rock wall was just the far side of another, more natural-looking tunnel, which the mine intersected. Takcas ducked into it and turned left, following the downward slope.
"Hey!" Despite a new hoarseness, Mutchler's whisper still managed to sound young and excited. "This isn't a mine shaft, it's a lava tube!"
"Dr. Mutchler, shut—" The sound of a blow interrupted Chekov's curt command. Uhura winced when she heard the geologist's cry of pain, but she didn't try to turn around. Knowing the Elasians, she guessed that any protest on her part would just get more of her landing party hurt.
"Down here." Takcas's hand-lamp glittered off a thick metal door, set into an equally thick metal bulkhead. He swung it open to reveal another section of snake-shaped corridor, this time lit with sullen yellow lights down the center of the roof. The thumping of machinery grew louder as they stepped in, and the air temperature went from summery to skin-prickling hot.
Uhura eyed the smooth rock walls on either side, seeing no signs of gouging or pits for mineral extraction. Wherever the Elasians were finding their dilithium, it wasn't here. The big machine must be some kind of air-cooling unit for the lower levels, she decided as they edged their way past its pounding roar. Otherwise, the miners would have needed environmental suits to work in this kind of heat.
"Stop." Just past the machinery, Takcas motioned Uhura to one side of the passage. The other side, she could see now, had been dug out in three neat cubical cells, each fitted around the edges with the familiar metal collar of a forcefield generator. The spiderweb of wiring that ran across the rough rock ceiling from the pounding machinery showed where the generators got their power.
"You go in this one, Dohlman, with the kessh of your cohort." Takcas steered Chekov toward the first and largest cell. Uhura darted a quick look at the security chief, waiting to see his nod of acceptance before she followed him in. The rock-cut room was deep enough that both of them could stand well away from the forcefield, but the ceiling hung so low that even Uhura had to stoop under it. For a male Elasian, the room's dimensions would have been torture.
"You, underling-pilot, go in here with the dark man." There was a thud as the cohort unceremoniously tossed Murphy into the center cell. Sulu ducked in after him, aiming a quiet but remarkably profane Orion curse at his captors. For his sake, Uhura hoped the Universal Translator hadn't caught it.
"And you, spineless scientific worm, you go in the smallest cell of all." Another choke from Mutchler preceded a second, louder thump. "Oben, turn on the field power."
A shimmer of force prismed inside the collared space when the burly older Elasian—still hunched and swollen from Takcas's cruel beating—flipped switches on the thrumming power source. After a moment, the forcefields steadied into their usual invisibility. Takcas pushed Oben unceremoniously away from the field generator to verify its settings himself, his strong-boned face carved with harsh lines in the overhead yellow light.
"Her Glory the Dohlman has not yet decided what to do to you for attempting to murder her." His lips curled in what looked more like a snarl than a grin. "But never fear. If she takes too long to decide on the method of your execution, you will simply sweat yourselves to death in here."
Chekov scowled but wisely said nothing while the cohort retraced their steps past the pulsing power generator and back up to the surface, Takcas leaving last of all. From the soft scuffing noises in the next cell, Uhura guessed that Sulu was moving Murphy's unconscious body to a more comfortable position. She stepped as close as she could to the corner without triggering the forcefield.
"How is Ensign Murphy?"
"Coming around." Sulu's voice echoed oddly off the flat rock walls, as if it were coming from across the corridor instead of from the next cell.
Chekov grunted, squirming out of his uniform jacket. Even as Uhura watched, a trickle of sweat carved a path through the dust on his bruised cheek. "Take his jacket off, so he doesn't get too hot," he advised Sulu as he rolled up his own sleeves.
"Coming down here was not a good idea."
Uhura paused in opening the flap of her own jacket, startled by the bleak despair in Mutchler's voice. Even the blistering heat couldn't account for it. It was uncomfortable, certainly, but not life-threatening. At least, not yet.
"We didn't have a lot of choice, Dr. Mutchler." Chekov sat and leaned wearily back against the rock wall. "Trust me, you don't argue with Klingon disruptors."
Sulu chuckled. "I don't think Dr. Mutchler means coming down to the mine, Chekov. I think he means coming down to the planet."
"I mean both." A frustrated pounding echoed down the passage. Uhura frowned, knowing the geologist couldn't pace inside his tiny cell. He must have been kicking the wall. "You guys don't want to know what my last argon isotope reading was before those idiots grabbed us."
Chekov snorted. "You're right, we don't."
"Yes, we do." Uhura shrugged her jacket off and pillowed it beneath her. "What was it, Dr. Mutchler?"
"It was—well, let's just say it was higher than any reading I've seen anywhere on Rakatan, much less on Rakatan Mons."
Uhura frowned. Even through the doubled thickness of her uniform, she could feel heat pouring out from the volcanic rock beneath her. She felt her stomach tighten nervously. "What does that mean? Is the volcano going to erupt?"
"Not necessarily."
Chekov shook his head, eyes closing in frustration. "I told you we didn't want to know about the argon levels."
The thumping noise stopped. "Hey, it's not my fault that I don't know how Rakatan Mons likes to erupt! Some volcanic eruptions are preceded by lots of tectonic activity. Others go up all at once, without any warning at all."
"And what does that have to do with your atmospheric measurements?" Sulu inquired reasonably.
Mutchler sighed. "Well, when dilational stress levels rise, microfractures open in the diorite and release trace levels of radiogenic argon from feldspars into the atmosphere."
Chekov groaned. "Could you repeat that in normal English, please?"
"We're going to have another big earthquake," the geologist said bluntly. "Probably within the next twenty-seven hours. Conceivably any minute now."
The mingled sounds of Chekov cursing in Russian and Sulu in Orion completely overwhelmed the hiss of Uhura's indrawn breath. Of the three of them, though, she was the first to recover.
"Dr. Mutchler, what chance do we have of surviving an earthquake inside this mine?"
"Some," he admitted. "The fact that the Elasians have incorporated some of the natural lava tubes in the volcano helps. Circular cross sections are always stronger than cubic ones, and given the intrinsic compressibility of andesite—"
Uhura ruthlessly cut across the geologist's incomprehensible scientific explanation. "Do we have as good a chance down here as we would on the surface?"
"Probably not."
The rhythmic drumming of the generator filled the silence that fell between them. After a moment, Chekov sighed and stirred from his sitting position.
"Well, that leaves us no choice," he said gloomily. "We're going to have to escape."
Sulu's chuckle was joined, although weakly, by one from Ensign Murphy. Uhura gave Chekov a concerned look. "You don't sound very enthusiastic about it. Is it going to be incredibly hard to do?"
"No, it's going to be incredibly easy." Chekov squatted next to the forcefield and stuck his arm through it. Instead of the fierce crackle Uhura expected, there was only a sizzle that barely rocked the security chief back on his heels. He grunted, then looked over his shoulder at Uhura. There was more sweat on his face now, and not all of it, she guessed, from the heat.
"Slip through the field now." Chekov spoke between clenched teeth. "You can get out while I'm drawing off—"
Uhura dove through the spitting field before he finished speaking, then ran for the power generator. It was easy to guess which way to push the switches, since they were positioned at the lower end of their range already. She glanced at the high end of the scale and suppressed a shiver, seeing how much power the Elasians thought was necessary to confine one of their own males.
"Good work, you guys." Sulu emerged from his cell first, then turned to help a swaying Murphy to his feet. "How the hell did you break through your field?"
"We didn't." Chekov scrubbed sweat off his face for a moment, then slowly levered himself to his feet. "Takcas set it on partial power—enough to be painful but not enough to knock both of us out." He waved Uhura off when she would have come to support him, pointing instead to Mutchler, who was trying to extricate himself from the pretzel he'd become inside his tiny cell.
"How did you know Takcas did that?" Sulu demanded curiously.
Chekov held out one forearm, bare beneath the rolled-up tunic sleeve. "A full-power field should have made the hair on my arm shiver. This one didn't." He reached back in the cell for his and Uhura's discarded jackets. "Takcas wanted us to escape."
"Well, that wasn't done out of the goodness of his heart." Uhura hauled Mutchler to his feet with slightly more force than necessary. "Why did he do it?"
Chekov scowled, handing over her jacket. "If I had to guess, I'd say Takcas isn't so sure that Israi will order us executed. This way, if we're shot trying to escape—"
"He gets us killed without disobeying his Dohlman's orders," Sulu finished. By now, the helmsman was frowning, too. "So the minute we step past that metal door, we're going to get every cell in our bodies disrupted."
"That's my guess." With a sigh, Chekov turned back to the forcefield collars around the punishment cells. "We'd better see what kind of weapons we can jury-rig out of these generators. If we can take out some of the guards waiting at the door—"
"Why do we need to do that?" Mutchler looked up from the cracks he was examining in the ceiling of the lava tube. "Won't it be dangerous?"
"Very." Uhura could see muscles clench in Chekov's jaw when he faced the geologist. "But you're the one who told us we'd be better off outside when this earthquake hits."
"We would," Mutchler agreed. "But we don't have to go past that stupid door to get there." He jerked a thumb at the tunnel. "Lava tubes have two ends, you know. It may be a bit of a walk back to the camp, but we can get out going downhill as easily as we can get out going up."
Uhura exchanged a considering look with her security chief. "Will the Elasians think to guard the other end of the tunnel?"
"Only if they know about it," Chekov said grimly. "And there's only one way to find out if they do."
"Captain!" Spock looked up from his sensors, dark eyes locking with Kirk's as the captain turned the command chair to face him. "The Elasian flagship is arming phasers."
Kirk's blood raced with sudden alarm. "Red alert! All crews to battle stations!"
Bloody light throbbed across the bridge, and Kirk heard the echo of alert sirens from the lower decks of the ship behind status reports. The ripple of raising deflector screens, like heat waves above a desert, distorted the frigate-turned-warship's lines for only an instant. When the image cleared, the flagship had peeled away from the backdrop of smaller ships behind her, bright streaks of phaser fire stabbing across the black of space. Kirk braced himself against the back of his chair, waiting for the impact. And it never came.
Howard gave a cry of surprise from the security station. "They're firing on the Johnston Observatory!"
"But …" The navigator looked up in shock from his console. "That's an unarmed station—they don't even have defense screens!"
Kirk was already out of his chair, leaning over the helm and snapping orders. "Break orbit! Get us between that flagship and the observatory."
"Aye-aye, sir!"
The ship surged beneath Kirk's feet, and he felt his own heartbeat quicken as they picked up speed. "Mr. Howard, ready torpedoes for launch on my mark."
"Torpedoes armed and ready, sir."
"Captain." The science-station sensors painted Spock's face in pale contrast to the red emergency lighting. "I am reading extensive damage to the observatory's surface facilities, and loss of atmosphere in at least one inhabited lab."
Kirk paced back to his command chair, teeth clenched. "Communications—get me that armada's commander." The alien flagship filled the viewscreen now, slewing noseup as they silently braked to avoid collision with the starship now squarely in their path.
Ashcraft jerked his head up in surprise. "They're hailing us, sir."
Kirk smiled grimly. He'd been counting on that—they just took a little longer than he would have.
"Coming on screen now, sir."
"This is Captain James T. Kirk of the United Starship Enterprise—"
The dark, elegant woman who materialized on the screen didn't even wait for Kirk to finish his introduction. "Starfleet vessel Enterprise," she spat in a voice both deep and thickly accented. "You are trespassing in Elasian territory. You will remove yourselves from this quadrant immediately."
Judging her against the stockade fence of Elasian men behind her, Kirk guessed that she was taller than Elaan of Troyius, and broader through the shoulders and arms. But she and the late Dohlman were without doubt related. This one had the same magnificent cheekbones and piercing black eyes, the same disdainful downcast to her generous mouth. With her inky hair cropped close to her skull and only a topknot's worth of braids left to cascade past her armored shoulders, she looked like some sort of wild samurai, caught without her sword.
Kirk met her gaze steadily. "You are the Dohlman of this fleet?"
One of the tall, flat-faced men behind her announced in a booming voice, "You are in the presence of Her Grandeur, the Crown Regent of Elas, Heir and Guardian to the glorious Dohlman Israi."
"Ah." Kirk tipped her a formal, if stiff, little bow. "Your Grandeur," he said, quite carefully, "I'm afraid I can't act on your command without the permission of my own Dohlman. As she is—"
"Don't patronize me," the Crown Regent snapped. "Starfleet has no Dohlmen."
It wasn't quite the response Kirk had expected, and he straightened slowly, considering.
"You call yourself captain. That means you command this vessel. You will deal with me yourself."
"Very well." He paced down the few steps of the command chair's dais to round the dual helm console. "As the Federation authority in this quadrant, I'm ordering you to deactivate your weapons and withdraw to a distance of fifty thousand kilometers from Rakatan."
"No!" She slashed the air with both hands, giving her head a braid-whipping shake. "I will not negotiate terms with the spineless pink eunuchs who sought to murder my glorious Dohlman!"
Kirk caught himself just before showing his surprise. "No one has harmed Dohlman Israi."
"She has told me differently!" The Crown Regent came closer to her own screen. Kirk could hear the heavy sound of footsteps against her flagship's decking. "Those rockgrabbing worms the Federation claims as scientists used their machines to start an earth tremor near our mining camp; then your own false 'Dohlman' tore my neice from her cohort when that attempt to murder her failed." She dropped her hand to the knife hilt on her hip. "Either of these deeds could be considered a despicable act of war against the government of Elas!"
Kirk shook his head, keeping his own hands still at his sides. "I promise you, Your Grandeur, no one from the Enterprise or the Johnston Observatory has made any such attempt against Dohlman Israi. But you—" He gestured offscreen at where the engineering station still labored over distress calls from the observatory. "You have opened fire on an unarmed Geological Survey outpost. That violates every treaty Elas has with the United Federation of Planets."
"I spit on your Federation." She followed word with action, then ground her foot against the wet floor. "You are lying dogs who use your own laws to steal what rightfully belongs to Elas. We use Elasian laws to defend what is ours." The men behind her broke formation with no apparent direction from her. She flicked only the briefest glance after them as they dispersed out of sight all around her. "Our first shot was but a warning," she said, nodding to something obviously said to her by someone Kirk couldn't see. "You will remove all Federation pigs from Rakatan and its satellites, or I will crush this outpost like a rodent's skull."
Kirk stared at her coldly. "And you will start a war."
She tossed her chin as though utterly unconcerned. "The Federation is not the only government in the galaxy. And I have powerful allies."
Kirk thought about the distinctively Klingon construction of the flagship in which the Crown Regent rode, and clenched his hands around the knowledge of exactly which allies the Crown Regent could call upon. Turning his back on the viewscreen, Kirk caught the young communications officer's eyes with his own and pressed a finger to his lips. He waited until Ashcraft had dampened the audio signal, then looked at Spock and sighed. "How long will our screens have to be down in order to evacuate the observatory?"
The Vulcan raised an eyebrow in what could almost have been human surprise. "Captain, withdrawal of Federation personnel could be construed as acceptance of Elas's claim to Rakatan."
"The Crown Regent has three hundred single-pilot fighters with her, Spock." He knew his voice rang sharp with annoyance, but trusted his first officer to know it wasn't aimed at him. "Unless we're willing to shoot them all out of the sky, we can't guarantee the observatory's safety under these conditions. We can always return the geologists to the moonbase once we've settled everything up here."
Spock glanced aside to consult some reading on his board. "With a transporter room standing by, we will only require a window of one minute sixteen seconds." He lifted dark eyes to Kirk. "Dr. Bascomb is not likely to approve."
"I didn't intend to ask her permission." He nodded Spock back to his science console. "Have Transporter Room Two standing by, then contact Bascomb via a closed circuit. Tell her she's got five minutes to get her people and her data together, then we're pulling them out of there." At the Vulcan's tacit nod, Kirk bent to the arm of his command chair and thumbed open the intercom. "Transporter Room One."
"Scott here," the engineer's familiar voice replied.
"Scotty, have you got a fix on the landing party's communicators?"
There was a brief pause as the Scotsman consulted whatever readings his transporter console gave him. "Aye, sir," he said at last. "That Elasian defense screen has been down since we brought up Commander Uhura this afternoon."
Kirk nodded shortly. "Good." At least something was still going in their favor. "Lock on and beam them out of there as soon as I get our own shields down."
The engineer hesitated for only a moment. "Sir?"
"All of them," Kirk told him. "I don't care what they're doing or where they are, I want them back on this ship now."
"Aye-aye, Captain." Scott's voice was crisp with determination. "I'm on it."
"Kirk." The Crown Regent broke across the last of his conversation in a cruel, waspish tone. "Speak to me, Kirk, or I will open fire."
She'd already been remarkably patient, compared to the Elasians Kirk had known. He couldn't help smiling somewhat at that thought. Turning, he seated himself as casually as possible while Ashcraft reopened their channel. "I wouldn't be too trigger-happy, if I were you, Your Grandeur," he offered, sitting back. Before her scowl could grow into a new string of insults, he continued, "In the spirit of cooperation, I'm removing all personnel from the Skaftar moonbase. I trust you will allow me to drop my screens long enough to effect a safe transfer."
She studied him for what seemed a very long time before stepping back from her own viewscreen and crossing her arms. "My neice Elaan warned me of your many wiles," she said with no small amount of disdain. "Make no attempt to deceive me."
Kirk couldn't help feeling that any deception on his part would be the least of the untruths floating around this coveted planet. Nodding to Howard, he stated formally, "Mr. Howard, lower shields."
The guard's face looked positively grim with apprehension as he threw the chain of simple switches. "Shields down," he finally announced, not looking up from his panel.
Kirk nodded again, and opened the intercom. "Transporter Room Two. Are you ready to beam up the geologists?"
"Aye, sir. Dr. Bascomb and crew report ready."
"Energize."
Only a moment later, the technician's voice came back, more subdued than before. "Beam-up complete, sir. We've got seven geologists safely aboard."
Four fewer than they should have had. Kirk thought of the breached lab in the Crown Regent's first phaser volley, and anger pushed dully against his chest.
"Your business here is finished," the Crown Regent announced. She waved in haughty dismissal. "You may now withdraw with your tail between your legs and leave us to our mining."
Kirk shook his head, clenching his hands on the arms of his command chair. "Not so fast, Your Grandeur." The flash of bitter fury in her eyes came nowhere near making up for what she'd done to those geologists. "I still have my orders, and those orders require me to secure proof that you have the rights you claim to this planet. I'm not going anywhere until I've got that."
"Impudent dog! I should unleash my cohort on you for such presumption!"
"And if you do," Kirk returned, "I will be forced to return fire, endangering you, your armada, and the Dohlman Israi." He leaned forward to lace his hands between his knees. "Face it, Your Grandeur. No matter who ends up with rightful claim to this planet, the Enterprise still has you outgunned. And neither of us wants this to come down to a fight."
But, as an Elasian, she would probably die before admitting that. Kirk matched stares with her for a long, hard minute; then she swung away with a brutal curse and the scene flicked again to the darkness of space and the waiting armada. Kirk sat back with a sigh.
"We take round one." He slapped open the intercom with the side of his hand. "Scotty, what's the status on our landing party?"
"I … I don't know, sir."
The nearness of the engineer's voice startled Kirk. He jumped to his feet, turning, and found himself facing the burly Scotsman as he exited the turbolift. "What's the matter?" Kirk frowned at the collection of equipment in Scott's cupped hands. "You didn't bring them up?"
"I tried, sir." Scott held out his hand to display four Starfleet-issue communicators and one Geological Survey comm band. "All I got was these."