THE SHUTTLE LURCHED into the cold night sky, its empty hatch gaping like a mouth opened to scream. The fear that had been drumming through Uhura unnoticed in the rush of crisis suddenly clawed at her throat until it tore her breath away. She thrust the shuddering security guard she held into Mutchler's startled arms, and flung herself across the shuttle, flat against the floor to avoid phaser fire, intent on finding Chekov's fallen body below. All she could see through the darkness was a wind-lashed flag of dust marking the place where he had fallen. A dozen big shadows were converging on it.
"Sulu!" Uhura locked both hands on the vibrating edge of the hatch and craned her head back toward the cockpit. From this angle, all she could see was the swift red flicker of the instrument panel as it responded to the pilot's stabbing fingers. "We have to go back! We lost Chekov!"
The baying sound of a disruptor splintered the night before the pilot could reply, and Gamow jolted sideways. Compressed nitrogen screamed as it escaped from the cracked nacelle below, blasting a surge of cold air through the hatch. With a jerk that made Uhura's stomach reel, the shuttle began to skid sideways.
"Starboard nacelle!" she shouted at the cockpit, then rolled away from the hatch and scrabbled up the steeply sloping floor toward Mutchler. Sulu needed all their weight over the good port nacelle to have any hope of controlling the shuttle's downward plunge. Uhura shoved the geologist toward the far wall, stooping to help him drag Murphy with them. The injured security guard's shudders had become outright convulsions now. His face was a gray-brown mask of pain, and his juddering torso felt rock-hard beneath the blood-drenched uniform.
"Internal bleeding." Mutchler's voice over the laboring roar of the shuttle's remaining nacelle sounded ragged in her ear. With their balance readjusted, Sulu was slowly bringing them up again. "I think he's dying."
Another disruptor burst bayed through the outside dark, this time shearing harmlessly through Gamow's roof. Fragments of shredded metal drifted down on Uhura like ash. "I'll call the Enterprise, they can beam us straight to sickbay—" She struggled out from under the sprawl of Murphy's body and ran for the communicator panel in the cockpit.
"Hurry." Sulu's hands were steady on his helm controls, but the bare edge of a quiver in his voice told Uhura how close they'd come to crashing when the starboard nacelle blew. The lights of the Elasian camp were quilted bright across the ground below them, startlingly close. "We're still only four hundred meters off the ground. If they turn their defense shield back on before we make the perimeter, it'll fry us."
Uhura slammed the hailing signal, waiting only the bare second she knew it took the Enterprise's computer to acknowledge before she started to speak. "Uhura to Enterprise. Four to beam up immediately, from these—"
It was too late. As if Sulu's words had summoned it, the iridescent glitter of the defense shield flared on the edges of the shuttle's viewscreen. It began to close, its wavering fingers reaching toward the shuttle.
"Hurry, we can make it—" Uhura resisted an urge to shake Sulu to make him fly faster. With one nacelle gone, it was a miracle they were flying at all.
"Higher," Sulu said to the shuttle between his teeth, as the field swam through the night toward them. "Get us just a little higher—"
As if it had heard him, the shuttle bucked upward. For a moment, Uhura thought they had made it through. Then the Gamow jerked back like a fish caught at the end of a line—and the thundering crash of explosive decompression rolled over them.
"Port nacelle exploded—" Uhura could barely hear Sulu's voice over the scream of fusing metal. Her communications panel erupted into an inferno of sparks as the electrical surge of the explosion burned through its circuits, scorching the hand she had reached out to transmit their coordinates. Yellow smoke swirled off the blasted equipment, acrid with the smell of melted plastic and singed metal.
"We've lost all power." Oddly enough, Sulu's voice had steadied with the inevitability of disaster. Ignoring sparks, he pounded at the smoldering flight panel, trying to find a flight control that still worked. Uhura looked up from her own lifeless communication controls and saw the horizon vanish into a sky full of cold stars. The Elasian forcefield had spit the Gamow out like a lobbed rock, tossing it up and outward into the night. Right now, they were traveling faster than they could have done under their own power, but as soon as the momentum of collision faded, the shuttle would fall like a rock, too. And they had no way to stop her.
Sulu made one last stab at resuscitating the darkened flight board, then gave tp with a quiet sigh. The sound was almost lost in the rushing wind of their unpowered flight. "We're starting down. I'm going to engage the shock webbing—"
"Wait." Uhura spun and pushed herself out of her chair, barely feeling the bite of her burned fingers. "Mutchler and Murphy aren't strapped in."
"Uhura, no!" Sulu's grab caught her just before she ducked through the cockpit door. "There's not enough time—"
"Make time." She shook off his hand and ran for the huddled pair at the back of the shuttle. The sickening dizziness of free fall tangled her feet, but Uhura stubbornly fought her way through it. She made it almost to the back before an explosion shook the shuttle and reversed their downward motion briefly.
Uhura blinked in surprise, then realized that Sulu had manually jettisoned their port nacelle. The force of the blast momentarily buoyed them, giving Uhura time to throw two safety straps across the fallen men. Then free fall dragged at her again, harder this time, as she turned to skid back toward the cockpit.
Not enough time, Uhura thought, hearing the scream of approaching ground outside the shuttle even as she ran for the safety of Sulu's outstretched hand. Not enough time, not enough time, not enough—
Noise and activity swarmed over Kirk when he stepped through the sickbay doors. Quick eyes flicked over the instrument trays scattered on top of diagnostic beds and counters, noting what was in use, what was left untouched. Judging from the array of supplies and the number of geologists sitting up and arguing with their nurses, Kirk guessed that most of the injuries sustained by observatory personnel had been minor. He pushed past one knot of gesticulating researchers, and aimed a supportive smile at Christine Chapel when she turned to see who was trying to sneak by.
"You could always sedate them," Kirk suggested.
The doctor didn't return his smile. "Don't think it hasn't occurred to me." She shoved aside a storage cart with her foot, and nodded Kirk toward the back of the sickbay. "Leonard is in ICU. I think he's expecting you."
Kirk nodded his thanks, then hurried out of the press of people to hunt down McCoy in the restricted rooms of intensive care.
The chief surgeon stood with his back to the door, green lab coat hanging loose on his stooped shoulders while he read something off the panel on the bed in front of him. The patient's heartbeat pulsed strong and slow, but what Kirk could understand of the other vital signs on the monitor didn't look promising. He stepped up next to McCoy to study the quiet body.
"You didn't transport these people a minute too soon," the doctor said by way of greeting. He gestured to the patient in front of them, then again at a woman who lay equally still in a bed across the room. "These two were half-dead when they got here. If Spock hadn't warned me to expect some cases of vacuum exposure, I would have lost them both. Why'd you wait so long?"
Kirk couldn't take his eyes from the young man's frostbitten lips, or the spiderweb pattern of vacuum bruises lacing across both cheeks and eyes. "A Dohlman got in my way." When McCoy shot an anxious glare at him, Kirk made himself look up and smile thinly. "A Dohlman in a Klingon heavy frigate, Bones. Don't worry."
The doctor grunted. "It's my job to worry."
"Where's Dr. Bascomb?"
"In my office." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder without turning, his attention suddenly caught by something he didn't like about the placement of his patient's IV. "She's examining some of her precious seismic records on my medical computer," he grumbled as he fiddled the line back to where he wanted it. "I splinted a bad ankle fracture for her a little bit ago, but she refused to sit and rest until I let her look at her data." He shook his head in grim disapproval. "I should have sedated her."
Thinking of his own flippant comment to Chapel, Kirk chuckled softly and rubbed at his eyes.
"Any word yet from the landing party?"
This time it was the captain's turn to shake his head and sigh. "Not yet. Spock's trying to raise the shuttle now, but that's about all we can do. I don't want to try and beam anyone else past the Crown Regent until I know for sure what we've got going on down there."
"Well," McCoy drawled, a little too seriously for Kirk's tastes. "Now that's an uncommon bit of discretion." He glanced sideways at his captain, but Kirk decided he had more important things to do than let his chief surgeon bait him.
"Thank you for your input," he said dryly. "I'm going to talk with Dr. Bascomb now." But he clapped the doctor on the shoulder before leaving, just to let McCoy know Kirk didn't hold his ill tempers against him.
Bascomb had left McCoy's office door open, but the dimness of the inside light made it clear she wasn't inviting visitors. Kirk paused in the doorway, his hand near the lighting control even though he made no move to touch it. "Dr. Bascomb?"
She glanced up from the terminal screen in front of her. "Captain." McCoy's chair had been scooted back from the desk so she could stand with her injured leg bent, foot draped across the chair's seat. One hand braced against the top of the terminal while the other traced dancing rows of multicolored lines as they snaked and jerked across the screen.
"Doctor …" Kirk came farther into the darkened room, stopping just at the edge of the cluttered desk. "I … I'd like to apologize." Such words, like always, never came easily. "With the Enterprise in the system, that Elasian attack on your observatory should never have happened. I am truly sorry."
Bascomb shrugged off his apology, not even glancing up from her data. "Captain Kirk, maybe you can read the minds of alien female warlords, but I sure as hell can't. Who could have guessed that the Crown Regent would want to shoot at us?" She keyed through a sequence of codes on the terminal screen. "Other than disrupting our research, it didn't accomplish a damned thing."
"I think it was the Elasian equivalent of a warning shot." He took a deep breath, trying to decide how best to ask his next question. At last, he had no choice but to settle for his usual frankness. "How many people did you lose?"
"Three." Then she blinked and looked away from the terminal, a little real-time intellect coming back into her eyes. "No, make that four. Park, Dembosky, Poole, and Metcalfe." Her mouth twisted into a sour scowl. "The whole damned geophysical team." She thumped a finger against the squiggle lines on the screen. "Do you know what that means?"
Kirk leaned over next to her to peer at the screen. The horizontal bands of jumping color looked like little more than a collection of erratic alien heartbeats. "No."
Bascomb sighed and dropped her hand. "Neither do I. I'm a petrologist, not a geophysicist! All I'm sure of is that this damn seismic activity is not an aftershock from yesterday's earthquake." She sank against the chair back with a frustrated grumble and wrapped her forearm over the top of her head in profound thought. "Finally, after all these months, Rakatan Mons starts to do something interesting, and I've lost all the people who might understand what it means."
Kirk knew from years of dealing with Spock that what a scientist considered "interesting" wasn't always what a layperson meant by the term. "Dr. Bascomb, are you saying Rakatan Mons might erupt?"
She snorted. "Captain, eruption is what volcanoes do.
And with all the earthquake activity we've had lately—well, let me just say that if I were you, I'd keep an eye on my orbit from now on." Kirk frowned at her, and she added, smiling, "When Rakatan Mons goes up, it's going to blast a lot of the planet straight up through the atmosphere and out into space. I wouldn't recommend being in the way when it happens."
Kirk's mind immediately fragmented into a dozen different task options. "How long before the eruption starts?"
"I just told you!" Bascomb cried, flinging wide her arms. "I don't know!" She slapped a hand against the terminal as though disciplining a recalcitrant child. "That seismic pattern appeared on our network yesterday, but I don't have a guess what it means. Hell, for all I know, it's Wendy Metcalfe's magma men chattering to each other about the weather!"
"I believe that particular type of harmonic tremor commonly signifies that molten magma is within a kilometer of the surface."
Kirk turned at the sound of his first officer's voice. Spock nodded a succinct acknowledgment of his captain's presence, and Kirk gestured with his hand for Spock to turn up the lights as he entered.
"Are you a geophysicist?" Bascomb hobbled around behind Kirk, gripping his shoulders for support as she beamed hopefully at Spock. "That would be really convenient."
Spock lifted an eyebrow as if surprised. "Not at all, Doctor. I merely reviewed the studies done by your staff while we were en route to Rakatan. According to that data, a swarm of small seismic tremors typically precedes the onset of a phreatomagmatic eruption on this planet." He stepped up next to Kirk to examine the terminal screen. "Unless I am mistaken, the rate at which the magmatic front is rising can be determined from—"
"Spock …" Kirk tried to keep the impatience out of his tone, but guessed from the cool look of reproach on his first officer's face that he hadn't been entirely successful. "You can play geophysicist later. Did you manage to locate the landing party's shuttle?"
"Unfortunately, Captain, yes."
Kirk lifted his own brows in surprise. "Unfortunately?"
"Just a few moments ago, Ensign Ashcraft intercepted a subspace communication from Commander Uhura on the Gamow. We do not yet know the circumstances surrounding the contact, but before an accurate fix on the shuttle's coordinates could be determined, Gamow's transponder signal ceased."
Kirk chewed his lower lip. "Deliberately disengaged?" He didn't know whether it would occur to Chekov to disable the transponder to keep the Elasians from tracking Gamow, or even whether the lieutenant would do such a thing when he must know it meant the Enterprise wouldn't be able to find them, either.
Spock's answer erased what little hope he might have had in that scenario. "Unlikely, Captain. The transponder's final signal was the automatic distress call sent when a shuttle's engines are too heavily damaged to allow her to fly."
Kirk clenched his teeth, not wanting to admit that a distress call followed so closely by total transponder failure could only mean one thing.
"Captain," Spock said evenly for both of them, "I am forced to conclude that the shuttle Gamow has crashed."