CONSCIOUSNESS crawled over Chekov, tasting like vomit and dirty prefab floor.
He pushed weakly up to his elbows, and a spasm of nausea cut his arms out from under him and dropped him straight back down again. He lay very still after that. Sensation gnawed its way back into his limbs and spine in burning tremors, and a hoarse, distant howling roared inside his skull. For a man who thought he'd wake up dead beneath the boots of an Elasian cohort, he knew he should be grateful to suffer only the system shock associated with a heavy phaser stun. Instead, he was just grateful that he'd never gotten around to eating any of the food Murphy prepared for them just before their capture—it meant he had nothing more in his stomach to throw up, even if he'd found the strength to do it.
Pulling his arms beneath him one hand at a time, he struggled stiffly to all fours. Simple dizziness swept over him this time, and he was able to rock slowly back onto his heels with his hands pressed flat to the dirt-strewn flooring. His cheek still throbbed from Oben's earlier blow, and his hand trembled when he lifted it to comb through his hair and rub at the back of his neck. Then, as he straightened gingerly into a back-arching stretch, the wail of sound he'd taken for tormented nerves in his own ears heaved a racking breath and howled with renewed vigor. A man, Chekov realized with a jolt. He was hearing a man's voice—screaming.
He flashed his eyes open on a half-lit storage room, encircled by grim Elasian men.
Israi's cohort squatted shoulder-to-shoulder in an arc that started more than two meters beyond Chekov's reach and extended to either side until it disappeared out of sight behind him. He opted not to bother turning to see if the circle continued. Their eyes bored into him like phaser burns, black and angry, and he realized with a horrible twisting in his belly that they had let him live this long only because they had plans other than simply killing him.
He took a deep breath and scrubbed his sleeve across his face to wipe off dirt and sweat. He winced as his arm passed over his still-tender cheekbone. The cohort watched him with the dispassionate interest of wolves around food when they're not yet hungry. Even the ragged screams from somewhere outside failed to reflect in their alien eyes. Chekov wanted to throw himself on them, beat the chill superiority from their faces until they were forced to take him down quickly and kill him where he fought. At least Uhura and Sulu aren't here, he found himself thinking with painful desperation. At least they've taken the shuttle and gone. After all their years together, he didn't want Sulu to know that he'd died so helpless and frightened, and the thought of Uhura seeing his body when the Elasians were finally done with it was enough to clog his throat with tears.
He clenched his hands into angry fists and tried to speak over the distant, horrid screaming. "Well?" His voice was hoarse, the words broken with dryness. "What are you waiting for?"
The answer came from somewhere behind him and to his left. "Nothing."
Chekov twisted to look over his shoulder. One of the cohort looked up from where he crouched beside his fellows, black hair feathering his eyes until everything above his nose was lost in tattered shadow. He was the smallest of the Elasian men—still easily two meters tall, but lithe and whipcordlike compared to the rest of the hulking cohort. He lifted his chin to meet Chekov's gaze as the security chief turned slowly to face him.
"If you don't stay where you are, some of us may be forced to kill ourselves."
Chekov froze with one hand on the floor. That wasn't exactly what he'd expected to hear. "Have you been ordered to confine me?"
"We've been ordered not to touch you." The Elasian shifted his weight and looped his arms around his knees. "Takcas said to keep a man's-length distance from you at all times, but the walls only go back so far." He waved a weary hand back over his shoulder, and the metal prefab wall behind him gonged. "If you want to see us dead, so be it. But as kessh of your own cohort, we hoped you'd let us seek more honorable ends than death for disobedience."
Chekov glanced left and right among them, but still couldn't read their stony faces well enough to guess what lay behind them. "Where is Takcas?" he asked, settling crosslegged on the plascrete floor in an effort to prove he wanted no trouble.
The black-haired Elasian simply tipped his head toward the door. Outside, the screaming continued.
Chekov shook his head, frowning. "I … don't understand."
"Neither do we," the Elasian admitted. He sounded despondent, and infinitely worn. "Last night, the Crown Regent's men beamed down to tell us how the Federation planned to use its spineless scientists to murder our Dohlman with earthquakes and mountain slides."
"That isn't true."
The guardsman's angry black eyes burned with distrust, but he didn't answer Chekov's claim. "After we had taken you to the punishment cells," he went on as though the lieutenant had never interrupted, "Takcas told us to do nothing to interfere with your escape. And we obeyed. We did nothing when we heard the shooting as your airship took flight, then …" He shrugged, his expression hollow. "Then the Crown Regent's men brought us here and left us with your lifeless body. Our Dohlman did nothing to stop them or save us."
Chekov waited for him to continue. When he didn't, the lieutenant asked, "And Takcas?"
The Elasian's eyes flicked away toward the floor. The entire cohort fell into a terrible silence, and it occurred to Chekov for the first time that Takcas was the one being tortured, not the one administering it. His heart thundered hard against the base of his throat.
Outside, the soul-rending screaming had stopped.
"Why did he let us escape?" The question fell out of Chekov with desperate innocence. "He must have known that he'd be punished if we succeeded."
Invulnerable hauteur flared in the Elasian's dark face. "Our kessh is not afraid of any punishment!"
From the sound of what had gone on out there, he should have been. "He could have killed us in the punishment cells," Chekov said dully. "I just don't understand what he gained by letting us go."
Light dashed across the flooring, bright and sharp, and raced in a long, pale rectangle up the opposite wall. Chekov scrambled to his knees, turning, just as four Elasians he didn't recognize pushed their way through the open doorway with a fifth rigid figure suspended between them. They threw a shuddering Takcas to the feet of his waiting cohort, then left again without closing the entrance behind them.
The Elasian who'd spoken to Chekov silently broke formation. Approaching the kessh on hands and knees, he studied Takcas with grim intensity for a long moment before finally reaching out to brush a startlingly tender hand against the other man's face.
Takcas convulsed once, and the other guardsman jerked his hand away at the sound of his kessh's rasping scream. A crash of horrid memories raced like pain through Chekov's nerves, and he croaked a breathless, "Don't!"
The Elasian shot him a suspicious glare, but didn't move again toward Takcas.
Chekov crawled forward to join them, trying to pretend that movement could give him strength to beat back years-old terrors. "Don't touch him," he whispered.
"Why?" The Elasian's voice was hard and angry, even though he skittered back out of Chekov's reach. "I told you—don't come close to us!"
"I don't care what Takcas ordered you to do." He stopped just short of making contact with the kessh, not sure how to proceed. Shuddering, his breath jerking out of him in uneven gasps, Takcas stared straight upward with eyes too wide and dark to see. His pupils showed only as pinpricks of black inside a ring of duller amber. "He certainly isn't going to punish you himself."
Chekov gently probed behind the kessh's jawline, gritting his teeth instead of jerking back from the explosion of anguished movement that answered his touch. The nearby guardsman lunged in a blur of motion, then his hand clamped with stinging force around Chekov's wrist. Chekov gave in to the Elasian's wrenching pull for the sake of his human bones, but not before he'd found the soft, bruised patch of skin just under Takcas's hairline.
The Elasian drew back a fist to hit him, and Chekov said, very quietly, "You buy black-market equipment from the Klingons."
The alien hesitated, arm still cocked over his shoulder. "What does it matter to you with whom Elas trades?"
"It matters to all of us now." Chekov twisted his hand free from the Elasian's grip and aimed somber brown eyes down at Takcas. "He's been tortured with a Klingon-made agonizer. That burn behind his ear is where they accessed his nervous system. The agonizer … it …" The warehouse seemed suddenly frigid, and he hugged himself against a soul-deep chill. "His nerves are overloaded," he made himself say slowly. "After all that time with the agonizer, they don't know how to feel anything but pain. Sometimes, if you keep the victim quiet and free from stimulus, his body will learn how to recover. More often, the victim simply dies."
"Don't underestimate the strength of an Elasian man." Oben's deep voice clamored off the corrugated prefab walls. "Takcas will survive, just as I survived his beating. We have many other things to talk about yet, he and I. Doing the bidding of Her Grandeur the Crown Regent is my most sacred task in this life, but I did not enjoy pretending to be Takcas's inferior just for the sake of winning trust within the Dohlman's cohort. He will pay dearly for each indignity I suffered as his 'underling.'"
Chekov raised his head to scowl at the dark figures in the doorway, but made no effort to come up from his knees. Bracketed among the four guards who had returned Takcas, Oben smiled thinly and paced beyond the doorway to stand just inside the captive cohort. "Takcas says he wrought his treachery with your help, little Starfleet kessh." His smug expression looked distorted and bitter with the marks of Takcas's beating still so livid on his face. "Is that true?"
Did it matter? Would Oben believe him, even if it did? Chekov sat back on his heels and wished like hell he could stop shivering. "I don't think I have anything to say to you," he whispered hoarsely.
Oben only nodded as though he'd expected that answer from the beginning. "Maybe so." He pulled a disruptor from the hand of the guard closest to him, then motioned the others to encircle the waiting lieutenant. "We'll see if we can't change that soon enough."
The persistent sound of banging roused Uhura from something deeper and more painful than sleep. She woke with her face pressed into a tangle of shock webbing, one arm numb beneath her chest, and her mouth thick with the taste of smoke. The afterglow of burnt circuitry shed a faint reddish light over the cockpit, but the rest of the shuttle lay shrouded in predawn darkness.
The banging sound echoed through the metal walls again, angrily insistent. Something stirred and groaned under Uhura's outstretched hand. With an effort, she turned her head against her ropy cushion and saw Sulu peering back at her through the ruby-veined darkness.
"You all right?" The pilot's voice was hoarse.
Uhura nodded, not sure she could speak past the dry rasp of her own throat. She pushed herself up to her knees and promptly bumped her head on a crumpled sheet of metal that had punched its way through the cockpit door above her.
"We have—" Uhura heard the ragged whisper that came out as her voice, swallowed, and tried again. "We have to check on Murphy and Mutchler."
Sulu groaned again, but hauled himself up by means of the broken instrument panel. "What happened to Chekov? He told me to take off—I assumed that meant he was on board."
"He was, almost." Uhura scrubbed her hands over her eyes, trying to shake off her persistent muzziness. Lack of sleep gnawed at her, worsening the ache of abused bones and muscles. Her last glimpse of Chekov's face gnawed at her, too, a pale blur of remembered shock against the darkness. "I heard phaser fire just before he fell. I think they must have shot him."
"Damn." Sulu stood in dismayed silence for a moment, then staggered past her, slithering down on his knees to duck below the obstruction in the door. From somewhere farther back in the shuttle, the pounding had started again. "All right, we're coming—"
Uhura didn't bother getting to her feet. She simply crawled below the crumpled sheet metal, then crouched on the threshold of the shuttle's main cabin, trying to make her eyes resolve shapes out of the vague darkness. After a moment, she thought she could see the charcoal outline of a sprawled body against the far wall. She scuttled in that direction, carefully feeling for shrapnel on the floor. After a moment, her searching fingers hit warm flesh instead of cold metal.
"Wha—?" Mutchler's voice was a startled croak, as if her touch had jogged him awake. "What happened?"
"We hit the defense shield and crashed." Uhura slid her fingers down his arm, hunting for the safety strap she'd thrown over him. She found it jammed tight under his shoulder and worried the clip free to unhook it from around him. "Are you hurt?"
The geologist's bark of pain as he tried to sit up answered her. Uhura reached out to hold him still. "Don't move. Where are you hurt?"
"Leg. Left leg." Mutchler's fingers clamped vise-tight on her wrist, and he gasped brokenly. "Don't touch it! I think—I think it's broken."
Patiently, Uhura waited until he caught his breath and let her go. "There must be an intact medical kit in here somewhere. I'll get you some analgesics for the pain." She turned back to the dark interior of the shuttle and saw a familiar slender shadow move toward her. "Sulu, did you find Murphy?"
"Yes." The bleak tone of the helmsman's voice told her without words that the security guard was dead. Uhura couldn't answer, newly aware of the raw ache in her throat. "Here. I found you a medical kit for Mutchler."
She reached out with a wordless murmur of thanks to take it from him, but froze before their hands touched. The metal walls around them had begun to vibrate again with the echo of muffled pounding, and it certainly wasn't coming from Mutchler. Instead, it sounded as if it was coming from the back end of the shuttle.
"Good Lord!" Uhura spun around so fast she nearly fell over a dislodged seat. "Sulu, do you hear—"
"Yes. Don't go near it." Sulu scrabbled over debris to the far wall of the shuttle. Uhura heard the crisp pop of a locker door unsealing; then her eyes burned with the sudden light of an emergency lamp. When she managed to squint them open again, it was to see shadows chasing themselves up the back wall as Sulu approached it.
"Be careful," she said when he paused and cocked his head to listen. "It might be a trap."
Sulu shook his head, a torn scrap of his uniform collar fluttering with the motion. "No. I can hear someone crying." He leaned forward and dragged at a tortured metal panel whose red and white stripes identified it as the access to the warp core. "I think—" He grunted with the effort of pulling. "—that someone's stuck inside here."
"But who—" Uhura broke off as the metal panel sheared free of its splintered brackets. Light from Sulu's emergency lamp shot into the empty space behind it, striking golden sparks from heavily jeweled arms. Slowly, a dark head lifted from those cradling arms, showing them a sharply angled and familiar face.
"Israi!" Uhura blinked in utter astonishment. "What are you doing here?"
This time, the Dohlman of Elas did not flare up in instant fury at the use of her name. "My kessh hid me here, Uhura. He thought I would be safe." Tears brimmed from her almond eyes, sliding down to join the trickle of cinnamon brown blood spilling from her split lip. "I've been pounding on that door for hours. I couldn't make it open from inside, and I thought you were all dead—"
"Hey, it's all right." Sulu reached down to pull her out. "Where are you hurt?"
"Just here, from the torn metal." Israi brushed her snake-thick curls back as simply as a child, to show him a brownish line of drying blood across her shoulder. "And my face. It's nothing."
Despite herself, Uhura smiled at the Dohlman's tone of quavering bravado. "It may be nothing," she agreed, reaching for the medical kit Sulu had dropped beside her. "But we still don't have to ignore it. Just wait until Sulu and I have splinted Dr. Mutchler's leg, and we'll bandage you up." She paused, waiting for the pilot to join her. She was surprised when he didn't move. "Sulu, did you hear me?" Another, longer pause. "Sulu?"
Slowly, the helmsman turned his head to look at her. There was an odd rigidity to his expression, an unnatural stiffness around the mouth that usually smiled so easily. The wooden look clashed with the fierce leap of panic in his dark eyes. "I—Uhura, I can't—unless the Dohlman orders me—"
"Oh, my God." Uhura's appalled gaze went from Sulu's wet fingers to the equally wet smudge of tears on Israi's bare arms. The Dohlman gasped in comprehension, then reached up and touched the moisture on her face. She transferred her fingers to her mouth and tasted them in amazement.
"The tears." Her voice shivered, torn between apprehension and delight. "Finally, I am mature. I have the tears of a Dohlman." After a moment, she lifted her head and laid one hand proudly on Sulu's shoulder. "And you, Starfleet pilot, are the first true bondsman of my cohort."