UHURA STARED DOWN AT Chekov's bruised face, astonished by the expression of smiling peace that curved his bloodless lips and smoothed the perpetual lines from between his eyebrows. His head rolled back into the crook of Sulu's elbow with a long, easy sigh, and his hand at last dropped away from his wounded side.
"Israi." Uhura dropped to her knees, reaching out to catch the young Elasian's hand and turn it upward. Even through the fine glitter of ash that drifted into the overlapping halo of their lights, she could see moisture glistening on the slender gold fingertips. "What did you do to Chekov?"
The Dohlman's fingers turned and tightened reassuringly around Uhura's own. "It is difficult to comfort the unbonded, Uhura. I did not mean to steal your kessh from you. I only used the tears to make his pain less." She gestured down at the sleeping Russian. "You see it worked."
"Yes. Thank you." Uhura glanced from Chekov's serene face to the Sulu's fiercely haunted eyes, then pondered the small factory of alien biochemicals responsible for both expressions. "I think."
Sulu tore his own gaze away from the Dohlman. "Why aren't we getting beamed up now? Didn't you manage to contact Mutchler?"
"I gave him our coordinates and he relayed them to the ship, but the Enterprise can't beam us up." Uhura clenched her teeth on remembered frustration, crouching down to shield Chekov as more luminous ash swirled under their protective ledge. "The Crown Regent has a whole armada here and she's using it to create an antitransporter screen around this planet."
Israi sprang to her feet with a spitting snarl. "It is not her armada, it is my armada! Now that I have the tears of a Dohlman, the Crown Regent has no right to command it as my protector." She whirled and began to stride the threemeter length of their shelter, the furious pacing of a caged leopard. "This should not be! I am truly Dohlman now, she is only my heir."
"But she doesn't know that yet, Your Glory," Sulu reminded her.
"Then I will tell her!" Israi skidded to a stop in front of Uhura, kicking enough ash into the gritty air to make both of them cough. Lightning crackled outside and turned the young Dohlman into a slim pillar of darkness, her expression unreadable. "You were right," she said bitterly. "I should have stayed with the idiot geologist. Then I could have used his communicator to tell the armada I have the tears—"
"And your aunt would have blasted you from orbit!" Uhura reached out to catch the girl before she could break free of shelter. "Israi, calm down. I haven't dragged you halfway across this volcano just to lose you now."
The Dohlman hissed in wordless frustration but allowed herself to be tugged down beside Uhura. Sulu squatted protectively beside her, forming a solid shoulder-to-shoulder wall that shielded Chekov from the thickening fall of ash. Uhura could feel the occasional wincing bite of hot cinder against the exposed skin of her neck and hands.
"Captain Kirk must be doing something about that defense screen," Sulu said at last, his voice almost lost beneath a renewed fusillade of volcanic explosions. "What exactly did he tell Mutchler?"
Uhura gave him a sidelong glance across Israi's dark head. "Mutchler says he talked to Mr. Scott. Evidently, neither the captain nor Mr. Spock were available."
Despite the exhausted shadows painted on his face by their upward-slanting lights, Sulu's head went up alertly. "Neither of them? During a red alert situation?" He paused to consider it. "They're up to something."
"I think so, too." Uhura twisted to look out into the ravine, ash spilling from where it had begun to accumulate on her shoulders. Behind the frenetic dance of lightning strikes, a sullen fire-shot glow was building in the ash cloud overhead. "I just hope they manage to pull it off in time."
Israi straightened between them, her neck curving proudly. "If they do not, I can comfort my bondsmen before they die." Her voice sounded all the more fierce for the faint quiver beneath the surface. "We—" She stretched her hand to Uhura again, the quick, childlike clutch of her fingers betraying the fear she refused to show in her voice. "We must be stronger than the males, Uhura. We will die the true death as all Dohlmen do, but this evil smoking mountain will not frighten us."
Uhura managed a smile for Israi's steadfast arrogance, even in the face of death. "No, it won't." She tightened her grip on the small hand clenched inside hers. "Even if you did not have the tears, Israi, you would still be truly Dohlman."
Ash blasted fiercely under the ledge before Israi could reply. For one horrible moment, Uhura thought the final spasm of the eruption had finally reached them. But the choking swirl of ash collapsed after a moment as if it had been kicked up by some brief violence of wind. It took a long moment for Uhura to recover enough breath to hear anything past her own coughing. When she finally did, her brain almost refused to acknowledge the rhythmic pulse her ears detected below the volcanic rumble. It took Israi's startled turn of head and Sulu's growing smile to bring belief pouring into Uhura in a warm flood of astonishment.
"It's a ship!" She scrambled up and went to peer eagerly through the red-flecked rain of cinders. A shuttle's familiar dark bulk loomed across the ravine, but the crossed-rock-hammer-and-satellite symbol it wore startled her into a curse.
"Federation Geological Survey!" Uhura ducked as a cascade of hot ash slid off the overhanging rocks above her and sizzled in sinuous drifts around her feet. "Don't tell me those idiot geologists are doing fieldwork now?"
"Not unless they're a hell of a lot better pilots than I am." Sulu dragged her back into the safety of their rock shelter. "That's Captain Kirk!"
Floodlights blazed around the shuttle, their sweeping arcs starkly silhouetted by the surrounding blizzard of ash. In the glare, Uhura saw two cumbersome figures detach themselves from the larger shadow of the ship and cross the ravine, arms full of unwieldy bundles. She recognized the first one's fast, dynamic stride and let out a trickling sigh of relief.
"It is the captain."
"You were expecting the Crown Regent?" The voice was distorted by suit amplifiers and muffled by ash, but its quiet humor was unmistakably Kirk's. The captain ducked in below the ledge, movements exaggerated to compensate for his clumsy environmental suit. "Sorry we had to drop in unannounced like this, but the fewer people who know what's going on down here, the safer we'll all be. Everyone all right?" Behind the glint of his face shield, the bright hazel gaze raked the shelter and fastened immediately on Chekov. "Spock, get Chekov into the shuttle and see what you can do for him. I'll carry the rest of them over."
The taller suited form bent silently, shaking his bundle out into a fireproof emergency blanket. He wrapped it carefully around the wounded security chief, then used his alien strength to lift Chekov like a sleeping puppy. "I advise you to hurry, Captain. The volcano is becoming dangerous."
"I'd noticed that, Mr. Spock." Kirk moved aside until the Vulcan left, then unrolled his own blanket and took a step toward Uhura and Israi. "Who's first?"
"Sulu," they said in unison.
Kirk's eyebrows shot up behind his visor, and Uhura wondered if she was getting too good at sounding like a Dohlman. "All right." He held the blanket out toward the helmsman. "Ready, Mr. Sulu?"
"But Your Glory—" Sulu met Israi's stern glare and his protest collapsed stillborn. He wrapped himself obediently in the emergency blanket, hands shaking hard with exhaustion. "I can walk across myself, Captain."
"Not over the half-meter of hot ash out there, you can't." Kirk grunted and hefted the pilot over one bulky shoulder, then swung out into the heavy deluge of glowing red cinders.
Uhura stood on tiptoes to watch them go, almost losing sight of them in the dust and smoke until their lurching shadows cut the murky gleam of the floodlights. Someone much smaller than Spock came out to meet them, steadying Sulu as Kirk set him down, then handing something to the captain. Kirk turned and came back to them, somehow managing a jolting run even in the awkward environmental suit.
Uhura spoke as soon as the captain ducked into the shelter, forcing the words out between gasping coughs. "Take Israi next, Captain."
"No!" Israi grabbed her wrists and swung her forward with startling Elasian strength. "I am the Dohlman of Elas, Kirk-insect, and I order you to take Uhura next!"
"That's enough." Kirk tossed a blanket at each of them, face grim behind his helmet's faceplate. "Wrap yourselves tight and stand next to each other. I'm taking you both."
Knowing that crisp snap of command, Uhura didn't waste time arguing. She hooded the flame-proof blanket over her head and wrapped herself tightly inside it, glancing out through the folds only long enough to see that Israi had copied her actions. Kirk grunted in satisfaction, then ducked and caught one of them over each wide shoulder of his environmental suit, rising with only a slight stagger under their combined weights.
"No worse than Sulu," he assured them, although the breathless catch of his voice contradicted him. "Hold on!"
Uhura never knew how he did it, but somehow the captain managed to sprint through the thundering ashfall. There was one nightmarish moment when smoky air swirled up into her face and stopped her breath with its heat. Then she heard machinery grate on trapped cinders, and felt herself spilled down to a blessedly ash-free floor.
She struggled free of the smoldering blanket with someone's help and looked up through steady shuttle lights to see a vaguely familiar face regarding her from an unkempt tousle of brown-gold hair. "Are you all right, Commander?"
Uhura nodded and turned toward Israi, but the Dohlman had already scrambled free of her blanket and gone to crouch over Sulu's crumpled body. The woman in the environmental suit caught Uhura's arm when she would have followed.
"It's all right," she assured Uhura. "Mr. Spock said he just passed out from exhaustion."
"And Chekov?" Uhura swung around to see Spock fitting an emergency oxygen mask over the Russian's face. Kirk was already in the cockpit, gloves stripped off and hands busy on the controls. The shuttle's impulse engines rose to a roar, but the science officer must have heard her despite the noise.
"I have rebandaged the lieutenant's wound and given him synthetic plasma and oxygen to compensate for his blood loss," he informed her gravely. "There is little more I can do at this time. For the moment, he seems to be in no pain."
Uhura flicked a glance at Israi, silently thanking her when their eyes met over Sulu. "Let me hold him, Mr. Spock. You go help the captain." The shuttle had lurched off the ground, but seemed to be having difficulty getting any higher.
Spock nodded and reached out to guide her across the slanting shuttle floor. Uhura skidded across to him, gasping as another shuddering jolt slammed all three of them against the wall. Guessing that the protection of her lap wasn't going to be enough for Chekov, Uhura waited until Spock had climbed past her to the cockpit, then slid her hand along the base of the wall until she felt the corrugated mesh of shock webbing. She began to lace it carefully around the security chief's sprawled figure, seeing Israi watch her and then do the same thing for Sulu on the other side of the ship.
The woman in the Federation Geological Survey environmental suit looked up from the blankets she was folding. "Don't forget about Mutchler at the seismic station!" she reminded Kirk anxiously.
"Don't worry, Ms. Metcalfe. That's where we're headed next." Kirk's hands flexed on the controls, deliberately rolling the shuttle from side to side again. Uhura realized he was trying to shake off the heavy cloak of ash that had welded itself to the hull.
"Why didn't you pick Mutchler up first?" Uhura asked Metcalfe quietly, knowing better than to distract the captain from his work. "If you overheard his message to the Enterprise, you knew he was at Seismic Station Three."
Metcalfe nodded, gnawing at her lip. "Yes, but when he talked to Commander Scott on the ship, he was very insistent that your party should be rescued first." Her glance slid across Uhura to Chekov and became somber. "Now I see why."
The shuttle shook again, more violently, as it struggled to rise. "Come on," Kirk muttered under his breath. "Don't let that dirt stick to you—ahh!" A splintering crash outside the hull told Uhura that the shell of ash had broken and dropped away. The shuttle promptly hauled itself into the sky. "Mr. Spock, you have the coordinates of that seismic station?"
"Inputting to navigations console now, Captain."
A faint crackle of speech leaped out of the communicator panel, barely audible behind the transmitted thunder of volcanic eruption. Uhura recognized the raspy voice at once, although its tone of frantic excitement startled her. "Seismic Station Three to Enterprise, do you read me?"
Neither of the men in the cockpit moved to touch the transmitter controls. Uhura bit her lip as she guessed why. "We're still maintaining communicator silence, Captain?"
"Until we're out from under the geodesic defense screen and within beaming distance of the Enterprise." The shuttle bucked and pitched in a sudden gust of turbulent ash, even under Kirk's expert hands. "Otherwise, we're going to get blasted out of the sky by the Crown Regent's phasers. I don't want her to know we're down here until we're long gone."
Mutchler's voice threaded out of the communicator again, almost lost beneath the roar of the volcanic firestorm behind him. "Enterprise, do you read me?" He sounded even more desperately excited, his voice a mixture of terror and pride that tore at Uhura's heart. "Enterprise, this is Scott Mutchler, at Seismic Station Three. We've just had an earthquake of magnitude ten, repeat magnitude ten!" A thunderous explosion rocked the shuttle, overloading the communicator's circuits an instant before it hit. Mutchler's voice was a distant, drowning scream. "Enterprise! Enterprise! This is it—!"
The thunderous impact of what sounded like an avalanche of hot volcanic ash slashed the geologist's voice away abruptly. Before Uhura's shock had time to turn into grief, a hammer blow from what must have been the same ash storm crashed into the shuttle and slammed it toward the ground.