Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“Nah,” Quinn said. “Getting shot at? Occupational hazard. It happens. Besides, it’s not like they know where we parked. Might as well scare up a job before we breeze out.”

For once, the grungy middle-aged pilot made sense. “All right,” Pennington said. Nodding toward the seedy-looking sector of the city they had cruised into, he asked, “What kind of job are we going to get here?”

“Ain’t here to get a job,” Quinn said. “We’re here to get drunk. And if you can learn to stop runnin’ your mouth all the time, we might get lucky, too.” He slowed the hovercar and guided it to a shaky landing on a dark street crowded with the drunk, the indigent, and the shifty. In other words, amid a throng of people just like Quinn.

Quinn vaulted out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of the vehicle toward a dive bar, which pulsed with annoyingly shrill synthetic music. Two enormous, vaguely reptilian bouncers loitered beside the entrance.

Pennington sat in the passenger seat, exhausted. All he had really wanted to do after evading the gunmen was to get back to Quinn’s ship, the Rocinante, and tumble into his hammock for some much-needed rest. “Go on without me,” he muttered.

“Come on, newsboy,” Quinn said. “I know you’re not into having fun, but you oughtta try it, just to see what all the fuss is about.”

Too tired to argue, Pennington pulled himself out of the hovercar and followed Quinn toward the bar. As they neared the door, one of the bouncers pointed at the hovercar. “You can’t park that here,” he said.

“We didn’t park it,” Quinn said, slipping the bouncer a few notes of the local currency. “We abandoned it.”

The bouncer pocketed the cash and opened the door. “I understand, sir. Have a good time.”

He and Quinn pushed through the crowd inside the dim, smoke-filled, and deafeningly loud bar. Pennington could barely shout loudly enough to be heard, never mind to convey how irritated he was. “Did you just give away our hovercar?”

“I gave away a hovercar,” Quinn yelled back. “And seeing as we stole it to make our getaway, the sooner we’re rid of it, the better.” He bellied up to the bar and caught the female bartender’s eye. He pointed at a bottle on the shelf, held up two fingers, then pointed at Tim, who squeezed in next to him.

“Well, that’s just great,” Tim said. “How the hell are we supposed to get back to the ship?”

Quinn accepted the drinks from the bartender, tendered some more local paper currency, then held up two fingers again and directed the bartender’s attention to a pair of attractive young alien women at the other end of the bar. As the bartender nodded and moved off to refill the women’s empty drink glasses, Quinn gave Pennington a brotherly slap on the back. “Relax, Tim. These things have a way of working themselves out—if you just stay calm and keep drinking.”

13

Captain Nassir huddled with Sorak and Razka around Niwara and her tricorder. Circled around them was the rest of the landing party except for McLellan and Tan Bao. Everyone was drenched and caked with mud from their desperate sprints through the jungle. The warm rain had slowed to a steady drizzle in the hour since they’d crash-landed, but there was still enough precipitation that Niwara had to wipe a sheen of droplets from the tricorder’s screen every few seconds while the captain and the landing party studied the area map.

“There’s no telling how far downriver Theriault might be by now,” Razka observed. “Our scan’s accurate only to ten kliks. After that, we’re making educated guesses.”

Sorak pointed at the screen. “This much is clear: the landscape slopes downward to the north. It is reasonable to deduce that the river therefore continues in that direction.”

“Agreed,” Nassir said. “Assuming she survived the fall, the river’s our best hope of finding her. If she makes it to either bank, and she’s able to walk, she can follow the river back to us. If not, it’ll give us something to follow.”

Niwara said softly, “I volunteer for the search mission, Captain. I was the one who lost her; I should go find her.”

“You didn’t lose anyone,” Nassir reassured her. “Accidents happen, you know that. And considering what we were up against, things could have been a lot…” Words failed him as he saw Tan Bao emerge from the tree line, supporting McLellan’s weight while she hopped along on her one remaining foot. Her right leg had been cut off just below the knee, and the severed limb protruded from Tan Bao’s backpack.

Tan Bao’s voice cracked with strain and exhaustion. “Little help?” Razka and Sorak both ran to his aid and relieved him of McLellan’s weight. The two scouts draped her arms across their shoulders and swiftly spirited her back to the circled landing party. The bedraggled medic jogged behind them and dropped to one knee beside McLellan as the scouts carefully set her down.

“Report,” Nassir said to Tan Bao, who was busy scanning McLellan with his medical tricorder.

“The Shedai…whatever it was, it did this,” Tan Bao said, gesturing at McLellan’s leg. “I can’t explain what this glasslike substance is, or why it seems to happen to every living organism the Shedai attacked. The good news is that it cauterized her wound, so she hasn’t lost much blood.” He packed up his tricorder and looked anxiously at Nassir. “We need to get her to sickbay, sir.”

Nassir plucked his communicator from his belt and opened it with a flick of his wrist. “Nassir to Sagittarius.”

Terrell answered, “Go ahead, Captain.”

“Raise the ship. We have wounded. And grab two full packs—I need you to lead a search and rescue.”

“Understood,” Terrell said. “Stay clear of the north bank; we’re coming up.”

The rest of the landing party began backing away from the riverbank. “Acknowledged,” Nassir said, following the others.

Seconds later the sepia-colored river boiled with white foam. Large waves formed in the middle and radiated ashore. The narrow bulge of the secondary hull emerged from the froth, followed by the rest of the oval-shaped primary hull. The ship hovered a moment, as if it were afloat. Then it drifted slowly toward the landing party until the port side of the primary hull scraped against the sandy bank and came to a halt.

A mechanical whirring and a loud hiss accompanied the opening of the top hatch. Terrell climbed out, followed by Dr. Babitz. Ilucci and Threx handed a stretcher up to Babitz, passed two large backpacks up to Terrell, then followed the two officers topside and began inspecting the hull.

Babitz ran to McLellan and set down the stretcher. She and Tan Bao spoke to each other in a quiet but steady stream of medical jargon. Terrell strapped on one pack and carried the other toward Nassir and the landing party. Setting down the second pack, the first officer said, “Orders, Captain?”

“Proceed downstream with Lieutenant Niwara and find Ensign Theriault,” Nassir said. “Niwara has the coordinates where Theriault went into the river. She’ll lead you there.”

Niwara nodded to Terrell and tucked her small pack inside the new, larger one that Terrell had brought.

From several meters away, Ilucci called out, “Whoa! What happened to Vanessa? I mean…to Ensign Theriault?” The engineer balked at Nassir and Terrell’s matching glares of reproof, then added in an apologetic tone, “Sirs.”

“I’ll brief you later, Master Chief,” Nassir said, allowing his chief engineer to save face. “Right now, we need to move.”

Terrell asked, “How long do we have to find her?”

“Until we get some antimatter,” Nassir said. “Or until something else goes wrong.”

The first officer flashed a disarmingly wry grin. “Not long, then. Understood.” He stepped quickly toward the river and called out, “Niwara, with me. Double quick-time.” The Caitian woman fell in beside Terrell, and together they jogged briskly along the riverbank, headed downstream.

Nassir turned to see Sorak and Razka helping Babitz and Tan Bao carry McLellan back aboard the Sagittarius. He fell in with zh’Firro and followed the stretcher bearers as they marched up onto the hull of the ship toward the topside hatch. The engineers were the first ones back inside the ship. At the edge of the hatch, the captain and zh’Firro took over for Babitz and Tan Bao while they climbed back inside the ship. Then the stretcher team carefully lowered McLellan into the waiting hands of the medical staff and engineers Ilucci and Threx.

Nassir watched the sky and the jungle for movement while the rest of his crew descended the ladder to the top deck. He grabbed the rungs and slid back down, the last one back inside. “Seal the hatch, Master Chief,” he said. “We’re taking her back down.”

In the span of just two hours, Ming Xiong had concluded that Tholian shipbuilders must be very fond of nooks, crawlspaces, and tight areas. Aside from main engineering, the compartment housing the miniaturized Shedai artifact, and the bridge, most of the interior spaces aboard the Tholian battleship were cramped and difficult for him to navigate.

Following the loss of contact with the Sagittarius, Xiong had spent his first hour of solitude on the Tholians’ bridge. Sending a message had been his first intention. Unfortunately, all the duty stations had looked alike. For all I know, he had reminded himself, they might be identical until configured by their user for a specific purpose.

Accessing the ship’s command and control systems had proved all but impossible. None of the apparent interfaces had responded to his poking and prodding. He had worried that he might accidentally fire the weapons or initiate a self-destruct mechanism while trying to send a distress signal to Vanguard, but his complete failure to make any of the consoles acknowledge his input had relieved him of that concern. His best guess was that the Tholians employed biometric security measures, ensuring that their systems could be operated only by Tholians.

After leaving the bridge, he had begun a methodical search of the ship, one compartment at a time, looking for anything that he could recognize as useful. Most of the ship’s passages narrowed into dead ends. He had probed several compartments packed with rows of honeycomb-like cells. Based on similar structures he had seen in the diplomatic habitat on Vanguard, he surmised that those were quarters for the crew.

An hour of mind-numbingly repetitive search protocols had brought him to a passageway lined with narrow, hexagonal apertures. Confident that the openings were wide enough to permit passage of his bulky pressure suit, he floated through one into a compact space that led to another dead end.

Tumbling awkwardly forward, he was instantly aware that the confined area had zero gravity. Eyeing its glassy black surfaces, he saw that they bore numerous small protrusions. He looked more closely at the edges inside the hexagonal opening. Multiple layers of what resembled hull plating and recessed mechanisms gave him the impression that this was an escape pod.

He decided with a satisfied smile that this was useful. Now I just need to figure out how to release it from the ship, control its descent to the planet, and escape from it once I get there. His hands glided over its various contours and raised surfaces. As on the bridge, nothing reacted to his touch. Stymied again, he let himself float while he formed a plan of action. Two ways to make this work, he concluded. Trick the ship into thinking I’m a Tholian so I can access the controls, or bypass the regular interface and make one of my own.

Xiong examined every square centimeter of the pod’s interior, looking for a way to access what was inside its bulkheads. As far as he could see, there were no removable panels. Damn, he thought with a shake of his head. I’d hate to be an engineer on a Tholian ship.

Questions formed quickly in his thoughts. How did the Tholian engineers make repairs to internal systems without access panels? Did they have some means of cutting through this obsidian surface and then making it whole again when their work was done? Might the ship’s bulkheads be like a mineralized form of smart polymer, capable of being retracted, reinforced, or reshaped by the application of properly modulated energy?

Looking at his multiple reflections on the black surfaces inside the pod, Xiong felt a surge of intuition: Somewhere on this ship, there is a tool that opens up these bulkheads. Climbing out of the pod back into the passageway beyond, he promised himself, Wherever that tool is, I’m going to find it.

Following the muddy river’s twisting path had proved to be the long way from the Sagittarius to the point where Theriault had plunged from a cliff into the rapids. Terrell had wanted to take a more direct route through the jungle, but Niwara had resisted. The rain, she’d said, had almost certainly obscured the trail that she and Theriault made during their flight from the Shedai attack, and she didn’t want to risk becoming disoriented while leading Terrell to the scene of the accident.

They had passed a high waterfall not long after leaving the ship. Since then they had traversed the top of the cliff. At most points along their winding route, there was less than two meters’ clearance between the edge and the tree line. Every few meters, Terrell snuck a look down into the ravine. It was choked with dry, tangled vines that stretched from one side to the other. They formed a thick layer of natural netting over the churning rapids below. He asked Niwara, “Were there vines like these where Theriault fell?”

“Yes, sir,” the Caitian scout replied. “Without them I doubt she would have survived the fall.”

Terrell hoped that Theriault’s ride down the river proved as fortuitous. “How much farther?”

“A few meters more,” Niwara said. She pointed at a bend in the gorge. “That’s where Ensign Theriault fell.”

He looked ahead and noted the gap that the science officer’s plunge had torn in the vines. When they reached the spot, Terrell said, “Hold up. We’ll run our first scan from here.” He lifted the tricorder slung at his side and powered it up. He set it to zero in on Theriault’s communicator signal. Within seconds it registered a lock. “Got her,” he said. “Bearing oh-eight-point-two, distance roughly twenty-one-

point-six kilometers. She’s moving, about three meters per second. It’s a good bet she’s still in the river.”

“It’s been two hours,” Niwara said. “I hope for her sake she’s a strong swimmer.”

Returning the tricorder to his hip, he replied, “Only one way to find out, Lieutenant. Take us downriver.”

Niwara continued forward along the cliff trail, and Terrell followed a few meters behind her. He hoped that Theriault was still alive and conscious, and that she could halt her journey on the river soon. Moving on foot, he and Niwara would only fall farther behind Theriault the longer she remained in the river.

As for whether the young science officer would be able to survive for two hours or more trapped in a raging current, he could only pray for the best and keep walking in slow pursuit.

Dr. Lisa Babitz hated germs. Most people she had ever known weren’t fond of infectious bacteria, but the blond surgeon reviled them with a passion that bordered on the pathological.

Keeping every surface of the interior of the Sagittarius clean and disinfected had been a challenge since her first day aboard, due in no small part to the habits of her crewmates. In the few short years that they had served together, she had learned to tolerate Ilucci’s penchant for eating with hands unwashed after working in engineering, Threx’s knack for leaving thick wads of shed body hair in the single shower that the entire crew shared, and even Lieutenant Niwara’s disturbing method of cleaning herself. In return, they had come to ignore her practice of conspicuously sanitizing every crew compartment on the ship at least once every other day.

Now there was mud in her sickbay.

There was mud, and trampled vegetation, and puddles of dirty water, tracked in long paths throughout the ship.

Worst of all, Lieutenant Commander McLellan, who was lying anesthetized on the biobed in front of her, and medical technician Tan Bao, who was standing on the other side of the bed, both were mummified in brown sludge. Just looking at them plagued Babitz with sensations of phantom insects creeping across her skin. She took a deep breath and searched in vain for calm.

Struggling to keep her tone professional, she instructed Tan Bao, “Cut away the fabric above the wound.” Tan Bao carefully sliced away several centimeters of the soiled green fabric. Babitz squinted at the unusual substance that had aggregated over McLellan’s wound. “Can you wash that?” she asked Tan Bao. “I want to get a clear look at it.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Tan Bao said, and he set to work rinsing the dirt and debris from McLellan’s leg. While he worked, Babitz reviewed the data from Tan Bao’s tricorder. The molecular structure of the crystalline substance on McLellan’s leg was very similar to one that Babitz had noted in an autopsy file Xiong had provided as part of her preparation for the mission.

Tan Bao interrupted her ruminations. “Doctor? The wound’s clean and ready for examination.” He stepped back to give Babitz more light.

She leaned down and eyed the dark, glasslike substance. “Hand me a two-millimeter biopsy punch,” she said. Tan Bao passed her the instrument, and she positioned it with care and precision above the thickest portion of the crystalline scab. With a quick jab, the punch penetrated its surface and came away with a tiny chunk of the substance lodged inside its circular cavity. She handed it back to Tan Bao. “Run a full-spectrum scan on this.” The technician nodded and carried the sample away to a compact analyzer on the other side of sickbay.

Babitz turned her attention to McLellan’s severed limb. The lower half of the woman’s right leg was cocooned in the peculiar crystal. She set it on the sickbay’s second biobed, from which she had only minutes earlier ejected engineer Torvin. A pallet of scanners mounted above the bed hummed as she powered them up. The indicators shifted on the bed’s display board. Babitz lifted her own tricorder and downloaded more complete results from the sickbay computer.

The severed leg showed no evidence of putrefaction. It had been all but completely mineralized by contact with the alien crystalline substance. Like petrified wood, Babitz thought. Except almost instantaneous. Impatient to verify her findings, she called up the autopsy report she had remembered from her pre-mission briefing. It took only seconds to find it.

Drs. Fisher and M’Benga had conducted an autopsy on the body of a Denobulan named Bohanon. According to the file, the man had been killed on Erilon during an encounter with a Shedai entity, slain instantly. His body had been returned in stasis to Vanguard, but as soon as it had been taken out of stasis for analysis something remarkable had occurred. Anabolic activity had been detected on all the exposed internal tissues contacted by the Shedai combatant. Some kind of alien bio-residue had started to transform the Denobulan’s organic tissues into a substance resembling a crystalline lattice. Fisher had noted that the process was short-lived, penetrating only a few millimeters into the surrounding tissue—but he also had speculated that the process might not be so abbreviated in a living subject.

Working quickly, Babitz placed McLellan’s crystallized leg into a stasis module, then returned to the woman’s side and initiated a new scan on the stump of her right leg.

She was still comparing her results to Tan Bao’s original scan of McLellan’s injury when the technician looked up from the analyzer and swiveled his chair to face her. “It’s a living crystal matrix,” he said with amazement. “A mineral composite with anabolic properties.” He added more ominously, “Just like what the Vanguard team found in that thing they brought back from Erilon, except…alive.”

“That’s not all, Tan,” Babitz said. “It’s spreading. Two hours ago, this substance penetrated two millimeters up her thigh. Now it’s twenty-two millimeters along. If it continues at this rate, it’ll start hitting vital organs in less than thirty-six hours. And in forty-eight…she’ll be dead.”

Theriault had lost any sense of how long she had been in the water. It had carried her through multiple sets of rapids, across clusters of half-submerged boulders, over sudden plunges into rock-bottomed shallows. Her entire body was covered with scrapes and bruises.

Her fall from the cliff had seemed to happen in slow motion. Succumbing to gravity’s pull, her senses had sharpened, and she had seen all the vines between her and the river. Her hands had grasped in vain at every one within reach, and they all had snapped under the force of her plummeting body.

Striking the water had been a stunning blow. Disoriented from the impact and the irresistible pull of the current, Theriault had spent several seconds fighting her way to the surface. Her first instinct had been to swim for one bank or the other, but the rocky walls of the winding ravine had offered her no handholds, no means of pulling herself from the water.

Little by little, the clifftops had drawn closer, the ravine had narrowed, and the water had gained speed. Now it emerged from the rocky gorge into a lush rain forest of azure. The river was wider here, and though Theriault now could see flat riverbanks on either side of her, she was too weak to fight across the current to reach them. It took all her flagging strength to keep her head above the surface, to gasp for breath without swallowing the silt-rich water.

The jungle was eerily quiet. There was no sound except her own labored breath and the splashing of her exhausted limbs. Have to conserve my energy, she reminded herself. Rest before I hit more rapids. She took a deep breath, then closed her eyes and rolled facedown into the river. Relaxing her arms first and then her legs, she let her limbs dangle beneath her as she floated limp in the current, letting it take her without a fight. After struggling for so long, she relished being able to rest her weary body, even if just for a minute.

When she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she rolled gently onto her back and exhaled, drew another long breath, then returned to her “dead man’s float” pose, drifting downstream like a corpse. Every time she held her breath she counted the seconds carefully to sixty. Then she counted the minutes each time she rolled over for a breath. Fifteen minutes passed quickly, then thirty minutes. She used the time to plan her next move. Once I reach shore, I should follow the river back, she decided, recalling her survival training. The captain will send someone to look for me, and that’s where they’ll start.

As her strength recovered, she took the opportunity to make an inventory of her equipment. The strap of her tricorder had broken shortly after her first run-in with submerged rocks in the rapids. Her fingers found only an empty loop of fabric where her communicator should have been. Only her small hand phaser was still securely in place. Figures, she thought. My least favorite piece of equipment is the only one I’ve got left.

Rolling onto her back at the thirty-five-minute mark, she started to wonder if she might be recovered enough to make an attempt for land. Then she heard the soft wash of white noise getting louder ahead of her. Twisting herself to face forward, she saw light low on the horizon and realized that the landscape was beginning another steep decline. She was drifting toward another run of rapids, and there would be no time to reach land.

The water around Theriault became turbulent, and where the river narrowed it churned itself white with violence and swallowed her whole. Adrenaline coursed through her body as she kicked and flailed against the water, unable to find air, unable to see, hearing nothing but the roar of water crashing over rocks and against itself.

Then she ricocheted off one enormous rock, caromed off another, scraped roughly along the bottom, and broke free for a fleeting moment. She had just long enough to pull one desperate breath of air and realize that the river was racing down a steep gradient and disappearing into a broad, cavelike opening in the side of a hill.

Panic fueled her frantic attempts to defy the current and strike out for the riverbank, which was dozens of meters out of reach. A dip of the riverbed dunked her underwater, and her head struck a rock as she was towed past. Dazed and blinking painful colors from her vision, she suddenly found herself in the dark. The river had gone underground and taken her with it.

No more points of reference, no more parallax along the riverbank to gauge her motion. Pure blackness engulfed her, frigid, merciless, and endless. Inside the subterranean channel the roar of the water echoed back upon itself, a deafening wash of noise so mighty that she no longer heard her own frightened splutters and gasps.

She kicked downward, hoping to hit a shallow patch or a sandbar, anything that might let her stop her inexorable forward motion, but the river hurtled through the stygian depths, its embrace deep and cold. Keeping track of time was a lost cause now. There was only fear and darkness. Then, as she bobbed upward for air, her head collided with the rocky roof of the cavern. Reaching up, she felt it close above her, slick with slime. The river’s passage through the underdark was running out of breathing room.

There was no way to hang on to anything. Every surface she grasped was coated in the same slippery mess, and the roof grew closer by the minute. Theriault kicked as hard as she could to keep her mouth and nose above the water, but the tunnel dipped and curved without warning in the blackness, and she had to cough out one mouthful of water after another. With the space above her narrowing to a sliver, she sucked in one full chest of air, then submerged and let the current carry her away.

Watery silence, no air to breathe. Just the rapid beating of her own heart growing slower as her lungs filled with carbon dioxide. Holding in the expiring breath was too much effort. She let it go slowly, a few bubbles at a time, reluctant to exhale because she knew that her body would reflexively try to inhale immediately afterward…and she knew that would not be possible.

One bubble at a time, one breath escaping, then another, like a prison break from her lungs. Letting go of her last breath was a relief, a surrender, an admission that it was time for the end to begin. A final push, and her chest was empty.

She resisted. Tried to will herself not to breathe in. Squeezed her eyes and prayed that she could just fade away without having to feel the water invading her lungs.

Her chest expanded, and she choked down on the reflex, fought it. It was too strong. Defying her will, her body breathed in. The water flooded her sinus, gagged her, assaulted her. A spasm sealed her airway, and water poured down her throat into her stomach. Terror overcame her training, and she kicked and twisted wildly, desperate to discover some hidden pocket of air, irrationally hoping to find one more fresh breath with her hands.

Involuntarily gulping water, she lost all sensation of her body. Darkness melted into vivid colors, bursts of turquoise and crimson, emerald and chartreuse. A siren’s song called to her.

Then she was free, released into open air.

She was falling, shot out of the stone tunnel by a jet of water and plummeting beside an ivory cascade of spray, toward a cerulean pool fifty meters below. Unable to scream or even breathe through her spasm-sealed airway, she marshaled her wits long enough to tumble into a feet-first position, pinch her nose shut, and cover her mouth before she made impact.

Her body sliced through the water like a blade, sank in a straight line, and came to a stop in the deep pool. Fighting against the weight of the water and the pull of gravity, Theriault kicked and stroked her way to the surface. For several seconds, she struggled to tread water and pull in a breath. Despite being free of the underground river, her body was still trapped in its panicked state. Then her throat relaxed, and she coughed out huge mouthfuls of icy water, clearing the way for the sweetest breath of air she had ever tasted.

Floating in the still waters of the enormous pool, she turned slowly and surveyed the space that yawned around her. It was a staggeringly huge cavern, two kilometers wide and a few hundred meters tall. All around the cavern, massive jets of water erupted from natural-looking tunnels in the walls and fell in majestic plumes to the deep, wide pool. Multiple entrances to a labyrinth of other caves gave the cavern’s walls a honeycombed appearance. The pool emptied into a vast, high-ceilinged tunnel that led deeper underground. High overhead, the dome of the cavern’s ceiling was open, revealing a sky streaked with the painterly hues of a subtropical sunset.

Using slow, steady strokes, Theriault swam to shore, crawled onto the sandy ground, and collapsed. She was grateful to be free of the water, to be tasting air, to be alive. It took her several minutes to notice that she was shivering violently. Looking at her hands, she saw that they were almost blue. Hypothermia, she realized. Have to work fast, before I lose consciousness. She looked around and spotted several large rocks. In her exhausted, battered state, dragging several heavy stones into a line beside a small nook in the cavern wall was a labor of desperation. She assembled enough to make a row as long as she was tall, then crawled into the nook behind the rocks and drew her phaser.

A quick check of the device confirmed that its outer casing was intact. She hoped that it was as waterproof as its specs claimed, and she primed it to fire.

Short, controlled bursts on a low setting swiftly turned each rock orange-hot. That’ll do, she decided.

She tucked her phaser back onto her belt and let herself start to drift off. Basking in the warm glow of the rocks, she decided that, though her phaser used to be her least favorite piece of equipment, it had just become her new best friend.