"SO—DO YOU THINK they know we're gone?" Sulu's voice, barely louder than a breath, floated across the darkness between them.
Aided only slightly by the pale Rakatan moon, Chekov watched Elasian men disappear from one slab of floodlighting and rematerialize in the next as they made their unhurried passages between the prefab mining buildings. "I don't think so." He raised up slightly on one elbow and pointed past Sulu's nose. Gamow waited where they'd left her, just inside the edge of the encampment with her fine, reflective carapace stained amber in the tiny moon's light. "No guards," he whispered when the helmsman turned his head to look.
"Isn't that good?" Sulu asked.
Chekov crawled back away from the chain of rubble they'd chosen as their blind, tugging on Sulu's jacket for him to follow. "Not necessarily." Ashy dirt hissed in a dry river down the volcano flanks below them, and Chekov felt every muscle in his neck and shoulders knot as he willed the billow of dust to continue downhill, out of reach of the lights from the Elasian mining camp. He wished for a moon as large and white as Earth's Luna, so he could see where he was going and not just feel his way through the breathless alien darkness. Then he considered how much a full Earth moon would aid the Elasians in hunting them down, and was sorry he'd even had the thought.
Sulu caught up to him, for whatever reason moving more easily among the loosened stones. Crawling up the face of Rakatan Mons had stained both their hands and trousers an iron red to rival their uniform jackets. In the fullness of the night, the dust conspired to make both of them nearly invisible, even when they stood side by side.
"So why is it not good that they haven't missed us?" Sulu asked, pointing Chekov toward a clearer passage just a little to their left. "You just in the mood to argue with these guys, or what?"
"No." Chekov slid carefully to the lower edge of the slope, then let himself drop to what he remembered as a stretch of more even ground that he couldn't actually see. "The farther along we get in our escape, the more justification they'll have for killing us on sight."
Sulu landed beside his friend with a grunt. "You do have a talent for looking at the bright side of things. Come on—this way."
They hiked the rest of the distance to the landing party in silence. Chekov tried to listen for sounds of pursuit as they scrambled down the dirty mountain, tried to watch for some sign of Israi's cohort circling around from the sides. But vast, unbroken night made everything look unnaturally distant and two-dimensional, and even the slightest whisper of wind on rock traveled through the dry atmosphere like thunder. Every nerve in his body felt alert and overextended, and trying to walk without losing track of Sulu's dim outline didn't help. Chekov wondered how much longer it would take to exhaust himself beyond the point of being useful with worry over what to do when the Elasians caught up to them.
"We're back." Sulu's quiet greeting to the others was Chekov's first clue that they were nearly on top of the landing party's hideout.
Bodies just inside the mouth of the narrow hollow jostled further back into the blackness, giving Sulu and Chekov room to slip in away from even the most anemic touch of moonlight. The sudden blind pressure of total sightlessness sent a weak shiver through Chekov's insides. He found a wall to lean back against for the sake of keeping track of up and down, then folded his arms and blinked into the darkness in the hopes his eyes would adjust and he'd be able to see.
"Did you have any problems?" Uhura asked. She sounded both disembodied and impossibly near, and Chekov almost jumped at the loudness of her voice.
"No, we're fine," Sulu answered for both of them. "They don't even know we're gone."
Mutchler's sigh was just as overwhelming, but Chekov was ready for it this time. "Well, so far so good."
Chekov decided not to bother reexplaining the disadvantages attached to their current run of luck. "Dr. Mutchler was right," he said, nominally meaning the report for Uhura. "The shuttle's only about three hundred meters west of here."
"And straight up," Sulu added sourly. "The climb is not fun."
Uhura made a small, thoughtful noise. "What are our chances of being able to board the shuttle without attracting attention?"
"Fairly good." Chekov mentally pictured the miningcamp layout, complete with the few guards they'd spotted in their reconnaissance. "Most of their lighting is concentrated around where the Dohlman's quarters used to be, and there's no one assigned to watch the shuttle itself." He turned to face where instinct said Uhura should be. "There's always the possibility they've already disabled the shuttle, though, so they know we can't make use of it."
"Mr. Cheerful strikes again."
If Chekov had been sure which body he could feel beside him was Sulu, he'd have kicked the helmsman.
"Then why are we doing this?" Mutchler moved aimlessly from somewhere deeper back in the cut, and everyone ahead of him jostled a step in response to whoever he first bumped into. "Why are we all going into this if we aren't even sure we'll be able to get out of it again?"
"You would rather wait for your earthquake in the Elasian punishment cells?" Chekov asked testily. But Uhura spoke over him calmly, and he assumed it was her hand that landed warningly on his arm.
"Even if Gamow won't fly," she explained, "we can still use her subspace radio. Once we've made contact with the Enterprise, they can beam us out of here."
"But only if we're all together," Sulu added. "Without our communicators, there's no way to determine coordinates for the rest of the landing party if we get separated."
Mutchler sighed with obvious unhappiness, and Chekov heard what sounded like the scuff of a boot against the ridged basalt floor. "So all we have to do is climb up there and get inside your shuttle? How hard do you think that will be?"
The honest innocence of the question made Chekov smile. "Have you ever tried to sneak past an entire camp filled with seven-foot-tall, armed warriors, Dr. Mutchler?"
"No."
"Then this is going to be harder than you can possibly imagine."
Chekov crouched with his back to a volcano-spawned boulder, and waited while Sulu scrubbed dirt on his face and hands to minimize the contrast with his own darkened clothing. The security chief had smudged himself with swift efficiency upon first reaching the crest of the incline. He didn't feel as if he was moving quickly, but he knew Sulu wasn't the sort to dawdle and it seemed as though the helmsman were taking four times as long as necessary to do everything. It was an effect Chekov recognized from a dozen other planetary missions, so he merely fidgeted in silence and tried to concentrate on counting the stars while he waited.
"You ready?" Sulu whispered at last.
Chekov only nodded. He'd been ready since halfway up the slope, when all the nerves and adrenaline and borderline terror inside him finally caught up to his conscious awareness of what they were doing. Now even his thoughts seemed to tumble past at an accelerated speed, until the time between his nod and their move into the open felt like agonizing minutes. He suspected their hesitation had lasted less than a second.
The powerful floodlights near the center of camp carved a great wedge of light out of the night sky. Everything between the lights and the two officers was pressed flat and black by the stark brilliance, including Gamow, whose normally subdued paleness had been crushed by the backlighting to a pearly dark gray. Chekov tried to remind himself that those same bright lights worked drastically in their favor, too—anyone with his back to the camp looking outward would see the night as one uniform plane of flat blackness. But seeing every movement of the cohort so clearly exaggerated by their monstrous shadows left Chekov feeling hopelessly defenseless and exposed.
Sulu crawled around to Chekov's side of the rock, his eyes locked on the waiting shuttle. "Okay." It was less a comment and more a bracing sigh. "The maintenance access is about two-thirds of the way from the stern, underneath. It works on maintenance codes, so I won't need any special tools to get the panel off. Opening it should only take me about a minute, then another couple minutes to clear a crawlspace into the passenger compartment. Once I'm inside, I'll signal you."
And until then, he would stand out painfully in the slice of bright yellow that burned its way under the shuttle's raised belly. It would have made things so much easier if they'd parked the shuttle with the hatch facing away from the camp, instead of opening onto it.
"Just be careful," Chekov heard himself say in a grim whisper.
Sulu reached across to squeeze his shoulder. "Always." Then he lifted himself into a runner's crouch, and was gone.
The helmsman's speed was remarkable. He covered the open distance without a sound, dropping into invisibility alongside the nearest warp nacelle without appearing even to break his stride. Only the topmost curve of his head showed above that meager cover when he boosted himself to peek past the shuttle toward camp.
After what seemed a slow eternity, Sulu rose in a swell of shadow that seemed to pour over the lip of the nacelle and under Gamow's bottom. Chekov waited until he saw the helmsman reach up to begin work on the maintenance panel, then crept back around the boulder to rejoin the rest of the party.
Uhura had already moved her trio up from their place a stone's throw farther downslope. She looked a silent question at Chekov through the darkness, and the whites of her eyes shone above dark mahogany cheeks. He wished there were something they could do to lessen that effect, but couldn't think of anything in their present position. At least she'd exercised her usual quiet foresight and removed her bracelets and earrings without having to be told.
Chekov glanced down the row of tense faces to make sure everyone was ready. "He's in place," he whispered. "You all know what to do?"
Uhura nodded and held up a single finger. Murphy followed suit by holding up two, and Mutchler, behind him, three. The geologist looked particularly pale and thin in the darkness.
"As soon as I'm gone, move up," Chekov told Uhura. "The rest of you follow one at a time on my signal. And whatever you do, don't make a sound."
Even Mutchler didn't feel the need to comment on those orders. Flashing them an "O.K." for reassurance and luck, Chekov slipped away again to wait for Sulu's signal.
Sulu must have managed to pry free the access panel. The helmsman's slender shadow knelt almost upright under Gamow's belly, and even as Chekov watched, Sulu pulled himself through some unseen portal to disappear completely. Taking two slow, deep breaths to ready himself, Chekov padded away from his shelter and into the twelve meters of open night between the sheltering rocks and the shuttle.
Backlighting from the camp stretched Gamow's shadow into a long, unnatural parallelogram. Chekov stayed carefully within the shuttle's darkness. He knew he wasn't as limber as Sulu—that he couldn't crouch as low or cross the distance as quickly—so he concentrated instead on stealth. Keep to the shadow, avoid jerky movements, breathe in as much of the surrounding environment as his senses could give him. He was only halfway across, trotting lightly, when a flicker of movement disturbed the corona of light around the shuttle's edges. Nerve-heightened instincts dropped him into a ground-hugging crouch before his civilized mind even realized what he'd seen.
A tall, thick Elasian silhouette pulled away from the shuttle's greater darkness to stand as a separate feature a few meters off Gamow's stern. Chekov's fingers dug into the ashy ground between his knees, but he allowed himself no other movement, not even the releasing of his in-held breath. His thoughts raced ahead to fifty different permutations of what he must do should the Elasian see him, see the others, hear Sulu, open the shuttle, signal the cohort, bring up the lights. The answers flashed through his mind with emotionless clarity all in the few seconds it took the faceless entity to stand in the bracket of floodlight, look to left and right, then turn and walk away.
He could see the flash-black-flash of the Elasian's legs in the stream of light shining under the shuttle. Only after that ghost movement narrowed with distance, then vanished, did he rise up on cramped, shaking legs and dash the last distance to the shuttle.
Lying flat along the outside of the warp nacelle, he breathed into his hands to hide the sound of his gasping and told himself that "almost caught" didn't count. They still had three more lives to go.
Sulu's voice floated out to him on the faintest of whispers. "So much for them not posting any guards."
Even that tiny sound made Chekov's heart seize with fear. "Shut up and start your preflight sequence!" he hissed in reply. Then he lifted his hand into the light under the shuttle and raised a single finger for Uhura to see.
She slipped into the covering darkness, as lithe and graceful as a cat. Her small, dark figure barely disturbed the night's black fabric, and she followed the sweep of shadow just as Chekov had done. He never heard a sound from her, not even when she reached out to clasp his hand before slipping past him to disappear up the access panel after Sulu.
Turning back to the waiting darkness, Chekov lifted two fingers in the second signal.
Equally dark, but taller and less lissome, Murphy moved away from their hiding place to follow Uhura. Mutchler's pale face hovered like the faintest smudge of moonlight among the rocks a dozen meters from the shuttle. He was too lost in darkness to have any readable expression, but the preternatural stillness in his lanky frame spoke eloquently of his quiet terror. Chekov felt suddenly very sorry for the scientist, and for all the years of study that couldn't have prepared him for fieldwork quite like this.
A column of startling shadow blinded Chekov on the left. He registered a grunt of Elasian surprise, and saw Mutchler jerk to his feet with his mouth open as if to shout something. Then the blow Chekov aimed at the Elasian's knee contacted, and the scream of the Elasian's disruptor drowned out even the sound of breaking bone.
Someone barked a hoarse cry of anguish—Mutchler? Murphy? he couldn't tell—and Chekov shouted, "Go! Get into the shuttle!" at whichever of them hadn't been shot as he clipped an elbow across the Elasian's chin to take the warrior down. All hope of subtlety was gone. Wrenching the disruptor pistol out of the guard's vicious grip, Chekov jammed the muzzle into the throat joint on his breastplate and fired before looking up to see who was running for the shuttle, and who wasn't.
Mutchler was already squirming under the shuttle and into the access hatch, shouting frantically at Uhura and Sulu inside. Oblivious of the growing roar of voices from deeper in the camp, Murphy, wounded by the disruptor blast, writhed weakly on the ground only a few short meters away. They had minutes—moments, really—before the rest of the cohort recognized what they'd heard and descended on the shuttle like feral dogs. Knowing that speed was his only ally, Chekov bolted back for the young ensign with the disruptor still clenched in one hand.
Murphy had pulled himself almost to all fours—he'd made it to his knees, but collapsed forward over his arms in a fit of fluid, broken coughing. Chekov caught him from behind. "I've got you," he said, locking his arms around the ensign's chest and hauling him to his feet. "I'm not going to leave you. . . ."
Murphy gasped, stiffening, and reached up to clutch at Chekov's arm as his chief dragged him back toward the Gamow. A spasm of fierce protectiveness tightened Chekov's throat, and he breathed again, "I'm not going to leave you!" as the boil of angry voices behind him swelled nearer.
"Pavel! Here!" Uhura appeared around the rear of the shuttle, grabbing at his jacket to redirect him. "I opened the hatch—bring him here!"
They rounded the shuttle into the fearful exposure of light. Uhura raced ahead while Chekov, thighs burning, tried to run the last few meters backward with the security guard in tow. He could see the Elasians now, a swarm of distorted shadows coalescing near the source of the distant lights. Slinging the disruptor into the open shuttle door, he twisted sideways to pass Murphy to Uhura and Mutchler, and shouted, "Sulu! Take off! Now!"
Under Gamow's unflinching interior lights, one side of Murphy's face and collar looked warped and glossy with blood. Uhura and Mutchler dragged him away from the open hatchway, and Chekov climbed in behind them just as the shuttle lifted off in a cloud of pale and powder-fine ash. He caught the edges of the doorway, unbalanced on his knees just inside the hatch, and heard the first phaser fire from below as the Elasians turned their stolen weapons against them.
Uhura jerked around at the shrill report, and a deflected bolt skated past the hatchway to splatter against the wall behind her. Chekov meant to yell at her, to warn her to keep down and away from the line of fire. Instead, he felt his whole body arch in a single unexpected seizure, and his grip on the hatchway went suddenly numb and strengthless. They'd hit him, he realized dully. Damn.
"Chekov!"
He knew he'd fallen from the horrified sound of Uhura's cry. But he didn't actually feel it when he let go of the shuttle, and he never knew when he hit the ground.