MULTIFORKED LIGHTNING lit the ash cloud over Rakatan Mons to the color of blood. It was followed by a sound too long and enormously explosive to be thunder—the blast from another volcanic eruption. Uhura felt her eyes wince shut in automatic reflex despite the hundreds of kilometers that separated them from the distant crater. She slipped on an unseen patch of loose cinder and would have fallen if a strong hand hadn't caught at her elbow and managed to steady her.
"You all right?" Sulu's voice demanded, barely audible over the volcanic roar.
"Yes." Uhura forced her eyes open again and scanned the towering ash cloud overhead. By now she knew that each thunderous outburst of the volcano launched a dark roostertail of ash out from the central column, feathering the sky with falling cinders and bombs. So far, they'd been lucky—prevailing winds pushed most of the ash trails toward the far side of Rakatan Mons. But each smoky curtain that swept across their path kept them halted for a frustrating length of time, heads huddled into arms to keep from choking on the gritty ash.
"No!" Feet braced on the steep talus pile beneath them, Israi tilted her head back and scowled up at the erupting volcano. The Dohlman's face was filthy with crusted mud and ash, but her almond eyes blazed out of the dirt with youthful indignation. "Turn your cursed evil ash away from us, you vile mountain! You will not spit at me again!"
Uhura heard a muffled choke of laughter from Scott Mutchler. The geologist had taken advantage of the pause to sink down and rest his splinted leg, leaning his head back against a fallen boulder. Pain had drawn his skin down tight over jutting cheekbones, but his eyes still managed to glint with amusement.
"You can't order a volcano not to erupt at you, Your Glory," he said dryly.
"No?" Israi pointed in triumph to the dark ash trail hurtling east and away from them. "What do you call that, idiot geologist?"
"Luck." Mutchler turned his shadowed gaze toward Uhura, his flicker of amusement fading back into strain. "Can you still get a reading from Seismic Station Three?"
"Let me check." She sat back on her heels and unstrapped the portable seismic monitor from her belt, wiping off the display screen as she turned it on. Volcanic ash gritted under her fingers, adding more scratches to the screen's transparent shielding. Uhura squinted past the fretwork of fine lines, setting the output to STATION SWEEP the way Mutchler had shown her when he'd first handed the monitor over.
Five circles appeared on a map display, glowing into life one by one as the monitor picked up the signal being broadcast from each seismic installation on the volcano. The last time Uhura had checked, there'd been six of the small circles; originally there'd been eight. One by one, they were losing seismometers on the far side of the volcano, where the ash fall was greatest. But the station labeled THREE was still on the map, its neon green halo far larger than the rest.
"It's there." Uhura laid a fingertip over the scale at the bottom of the screen, then slid it up to measure the diameter of the glowing circle. "I think we're about two kilometers away now."
"Two thousand meters." Mutchler dropped his head into his hands, groaning. "God, I'd hoped we'd be closer than that."
Uhura eyed him worriedly. "We can give you another painkiller. I have one more left in my emergency pack, and it's been an hour since the last one."
The geologist nodded and began to roll up his muddy sleeve. Israi slid down the slope in a sputter of loose cinders and held a dirty hand out to Uhura.
"I'll do it this time."
Uhura looked up from her emergency medical kit in surprise. It might have been a delusion born of exhaustion and stress, but she thought she could read concern in those slanted almond eyes. "You don't have to—"
"We must both care for him." Israi kept her voice carefully lowered, so it wouldn't carry past the dwindling volcanic roar. "His own Dohlman is not here to give him the death he needs."
Uhura gritted her teeth against a surge of anger, knowing that it was mostly born of frustration with her own helplessness. "He's not going to die!" she hissed back. "As soon as we reach the seismic station, he's going to use the transmitter to send our coordinates up to the moonbase. That's all Captain Kirk will need to beam us up to our ship."
"So you say." Israi made an odd noise, something between her usual snort of disdain and a wholly unaccustomed laugh. "Forgive my doubting, Uhura. But from all I can see, nothing done on this planet has ever gone as smoothly as you say this will."
Uhura felt a reluctant smile crumble the dried mud from her cheeks. "Well, I can't argue with that." She dug out her last blue-green hypospray of painkiller and handed it to the Dohlman. "You know how this works?"
Israi nodded. "Hold against the skin and press the button down. Do I give him all of it?"
"Yes." It was Sulu who answered. "Otherwise, he's going to pass out before we ever get to this station of his." The pilot rummaged in his own belt kit, coming up with a bright yellow hypospray. Uhura frowned, recognizing it as a mixture of adrenaline and natural endorphins.
"Activity stimulant?" She darted a glance past Israi at the hunched figure of the geologist, seeing the lines of pain carved deep into his face. "Sulu, do you think his system can handle it?"
"No, but mine can." Sulu began to roll up his own jacket sleeve. "There's no way Mutchler can take another two kilometers of hiking. I'll have to carry him."
"Bondsman." Israi's sharp voice arrested Sulu's hands and brought his gaze rocketing toward her. She pointed at the yellow hypospray. "Will this not harm you?"
"No—" Uhura saw Sulu's throat muscles ripple, as if the Dohlman's scowl had arrested the lie before he could finish it.
"Not much," Sulu said. "Not enough to matter."
"It will let him work past his usual threshold of exhaustion," Uhura explained quietly. "And he won't feel the pain until it wears off. We only take it in extreme emergencies."
"But this idiot geologist—he is not even of your own cohort." Israi put her free hand out to clench on Sulu's shoulder when he shrugged. "Why do you care so much about him, bondsman?"
"The same reason that I care so much about you, Israi." Uhura reached out and pulled the Dohlman's hand away, freeing Sulu. "Because you're a sentient life-form and you're in danger. It's called compassion."
Israi frowned at her for a moment, as baffled as a student faced with an unfamiliar equation. "You care about me whether or not you are of my bond or bloodline? Whether or not you even know me?"
"Yes."
"That is crazy." Despite her negative words, however, Israi's hand turned and tightened for a moment around Uhura's before she let go. "Very well, bondsman," she said to Sulu with a resigned sigh. "I permit you to carry the idiot geologist to this seismic station we seek."
A ghost of Sulu's usual smile tugged at his lips. "Thanks so much, Your Glory."
An answering smile curved Israi's mouth, surprising Uhura once again. "The favor costs me nothing," she said dryly, then scrambled up to give Mutchler his shot.
"Is this really a good idea?" Uhura asked quietly once the Dohlman was gone.
"Probably not, but I don't think we have any choice." Sulu positioned the hypospray against his forearm and pressed. "Did you get a good look at that last spurt of ash?"
"Not really." Uhura turned to peer through the storm-dark afternoon, but the brief volcanic spasm was already over. The noise of the eruption had dropped to a distant low thunder as Rakatan Mons pumped out more wrinkled, billowing folds of ash cloud. "What was wrong with it?"
"It glowed red, even on the outside." Sulu rolled his sleeve back down.
"So the next time it hits us, it will burn." Uhura was amazed her voice could sound so calm when her pulse was thundering in her throat as loudly as the volcano. "We'll have to hurry."
"Yes," Sulu agreed. "And pray the seismic station is working when we get there."
As always, the transporter effect released Kirk a seeming instant after he'd first felt it engage. Habit made him check his air levels, verify his suit integrity, and test his comm circuit before he even glanced up to inspect the room around them. By then, Spock's tricorder warbled strongly beside him, and Kirk knew they at least had atmosphere enough to hear by.
"What's the air like?" he asked, turning in a circle to visually scan the area for rents or signs of leakage. They were in what looked like the observatory's central ops—science panels, equipment, and monitor stations kept him from seeing all the corners and edges.
"I am detecting traces of oxygen depletion, undoubtedly as a result of life-support system shutdown." Spock's voice came to Kirk twice over, through the comm and through outside audio pickup, an eerie imitation of itself. "As we will be the only life-forms present, the depletion should not reach critical levels for another forty-nine point six five hours."
Kirk grinned and reached up to pop the seals on his helmet. "Well, that should give us a good forty-three-hour safety margin."
Chill, dry air blasted up under the collar of the helmet, and Kirk winced against a sudden urge to sneeze when his sinuses tingled with the sharp cold. The air smelled clean, though, and carried no betraying currents to warn of rapid heating nearby, or atmosphere breach somewhere else. He set his helmet on the seat of a chair, then rounded the central console in search of the docking controls. For whatever Vulcan reason, Spock retained his own helmet and drifted away to his tricorder's continued singing.
The control panels were dusty but free of frost. Some still glowed on a trickle of minimal backup power, while others sat as dark and useless as children's toys. Kirk only made two attempts to initiate a wake-up sequence with his gloves on before irritation moved him to yank them off and slap them onto the panel beside him. Across the room, Spock glanced up with a curious lift of his eyebrow, and Kirk pretended not to notice.
If there were docking controls for the observatory's shuttle fleet, Kirk couldn't find them. He didn't want to waste even a few minutes of their six hours looking. Waking up the central command board, he ordered an abbreviated station status report and drummed his fingers impatiently while awaiting the reply.
The first screen of amber type made him sigh. "Looks like Shuttle Bay Two is the only one still on-line," he called to Spock without looking up from the terminal. "Of the other three, one's got first-level contamination from a breached shuttle core, one's unoccupied—" The shuttle they'd dragged into the Enterprise's hangar bay, no doubt. "—and the last is altogether gone. That means …" He fell silent, caught by the flow of schematics now flickering across the screen. "Damn!"
Spock paused in his readings and glanced up. "Captain?"
Kirk waved at the traitorous screen. "According to this, the only thing they've got in that bay is a K-117 light transport shuttle." He sat back in his seat with a growl. "I thought they took those old dories out of service years ago."
"The K-117 was once one of the fastest interatmospheric shuttles in Starfleet, Captain."
Kirk snorted. "About a hundred years ago."
"I believe the Federation Geological Survey now utilizes the K-117 as a portable drilling rig. The heavily shielded warp core provides a safe source of power, even with personnel nearby on the ground."
"Shielded or not, Spock, a shuttle that old probably also has the power conversion of a food synthesizer." Which meant unmaneuverable and slow—painfully and dangerously slow. "We're not going to evade those armada gunships by running past them at a dead crawl." He swore again.
"At present, Captain, the efficiency of our chosen transportation is not our most immediate problem." Spock stopped on the opposite side of the control panel and turned his tricorder to face Kirk. The captain studied the chemical readout on the little screen for a moment, then felt a jolt of surprise when he realized what it was telling him.
"An oxygen problem?" He shot a startled frown across the tricorder at Spock. "I thought you said we had fifty hours of air left, even with the life-support gone."
"Forty-nine point six five hours," the Vulcan corrected him. "Indeed, that estimate remains acceptably accurate given the rate of our combined oxygen consumption. Upon compiling additional data, however, I have been forced to revise my estimate to forty-two point eight one hours."
Kirk propped his elbow on the edge of the panel and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. Sometimes, he actually suspected that Vulcans came by their supernatural patience by eating it away from everyone around them. "Mr. Spock, I believe I made it clear we aren't even going to be here for six hours."
Spock straightened his already ramrod posture ever so slightly—a gesture Kirk had learned meant his first officer didn't appreciate being spoken to as though he were dim-witted. "You misunderstand me, Captain. It is not the duration of our oxygen reserves that concerns me. It is the reason for their depletion." He consulted his tricorder again, but this time made no attempt to show the results to his captain. "There is a third life-form sharing our atmosphere in Johnston Observatory."
Kirk shot to his feet and quickly rounded the console. "Human?"
"It would appear so."
"Where?"
"According to the observatory moonbase plans I downloaded before leaving—"
Kirk stopped himself just short of shaking his first officer. "Where, Spock?"
The Vulcan closed the tricorder and returned it very pointedly to his side. "In the main seismic processing center." He nodded impassively beyond Kirk's shoulder. "Beyond that exit, and twenty-seven meters down the hall."
"Oh, my God!"
Kirk froze just inside the lab doorway, not sure what he'd expected to find, but knowing it hadn't been a tired—yet unhurt—Wendy Metcalfe huddled over a fall of data disks as tall as she. He'd assumed anyone left behind on the moonbase was too critically injured to contact the Enterprise for help.
"Captain! Mr. Spock!" Metcalfe sighed dramatically with relief and turned back to the bank of data screens scrolling behind her. "You scared me half to death! I thought you were that horrible Crown Regent woman."
Kirk picked his way through the disk- and coffee-cup-littered lab, trying not to step on anything that looked important without really knowing why he was taking the precaution. "Ms. Metcalfe, what the hell are you doing here? This base was supposed to have been evacuated hours ago."
"You didn't expect me to leave right in the middle of gathering the most crucial data in my doctoral thesis, did you?" She reached up with a light pen to scribble some annotation amid a shimmer of squiggled lines just like the ones Kirk had seen Bascomb grumbling over in McCoy's office. "We've just had a magnitude-six quake near the summit," Metcalfe explained excitedly. "There's been at least one landslide triggered by the event, and satellite reports have confirmed at least six incidents of venting, including two from the central chamber." She scooted a little to one side to give Spock a better view when the Vulcan came to lean over her shoulder. "And look at this, Mr. Spock—I'm even more sure than ever that there's some kind of sentient life inside that magma chamber. If you look at the cyclicity of the harmonic tremor—"
"Wait a minute." Kirk pushed up beside his first officer to separate the two scientists. "You said venting," he told Metcalfe, catching her attention with the keen sharpness of his voice. "Are you saying Rakatan Mons is actually starting to erupt?"
She beamed like a mother over her baby's first tooth. "You betcha! See now why I couldn't leave when you told us to? Rakatan Mons is prone to such long periods of dormancy—this may be the only time our species will ever get a chance to see it active!"
"Given those circumstances, Captain," Spock broke in quietly, "I must admit that I would be equally inclined to remain aboard the moonbase."
Kirk thumped a hand against the breastplate of the Vulcan's environmental suit. "Don't even think about it, Spock. I'm not leaving either of you up here while I play hide-and-seek with the Crown Regent. This is the first place she'll take shots at once she realizes I'm gone."
Metcalfe wheeled around in horror. "You mean you're trying to get the station destroyed?"
"I'm trying to rescue four of my crewmen from your doctoral thesis!" Kirk shot back at her. "How long do we have before there's no chance of setting down on the volcano's slopes?"
Metcalfe blinked at him as though she didn't understand. "You mean you're going down to the planet? Now?" When Kirk only nodded, she rose slowly to her feet with one hand braced on the edge of her seismic console as if for support. "You're actually planning to land on Rakatan Mons? And you want to take me with you?"
Kirk felt a twinge of sympathy for the student, and nodded soberly. "I'm sorry, Ms. Metcalfe. I don't have any choice."
She gave a whoop like a cadet on her first training flight and began slapping at panel controls too fast for Kirk to follow. "Captain, you have just made my thesis committee happier than you can possibly imagine! Getting surface data from Rakatan Mons right in the middle of an eruption—" She stopped with her hands full of portable seismic equipment and tricorders. "My God!" she gasped, grinning. "I could win a Nobel and Z.Magnees Prize in geology for this!"
Kirk ducked out of her way as she shot past him for the nearest suit locker. "That's assuming you survive to write it up," he pointed out dryly.
She shrugged and kicked open the locker door. "If I don't, they can always name the next geological observatory here after me. Because as you'll soon see …" She threw both officers an apologetic shrug as she shook an environmental suit off its frame. "… the Elasians haven't left us very much of this one."
Uhura was the first to climb down into the narrow ravine that sheltered Seismic Station Three, and thus the first to see the ruin it had become.
Disrupted bodies littered the bare gray rock around the station, each one ringed in cinnamon brown spatters of dried blood. Uhura's throat tightened in dismay, but she forced herself to scan the silent battlefield, searching for the one corpse she didn't want to find. She saw only the hulking forms of Elasian males, most dressed in unfamiliar steel blue armor. At least one of the bodies had been scored with laser burns as well as disruptor lesions. After a moment, Uhura recognized the short-trimmed beard and burly face as Oben's. The other two she didn't know.
Behind the corpses, the small metal enclosure of the station looked charred and gashed, too, as if it had been used for shelter during the firefight that had obviously erupted here. On the far side of the ravine, the crumpled remains of a small Elasian flyer lay strewn and smoking, the empty husk of its shattered warp core crackling as it cooled.
One by one, the others joined her at the base of the slope, staring wordlessly at the destruction of their hopes. Sulu was the first to break the appalled silence.
"Well, the good news is that Chekov's still alive."