Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

Behind him, one of the doors to the medical bay opened. Footsteps approached, and he looked up from the tricorder to see Ensign Richter appear on the other side of the bed. She wore her reddish blond hair loosely about her head, he saw, with a curl to it that was not evident when she pulled it back in braids. Bashir felt a moment of surreal displacement, and of confused curiosity about himself, wondering why he even noticed such insignificant details right now.

“Oh no,” Richter said as she peered down at Ezri. “How is she?” she asked, even as her gaze rose to check the readouts for herself.

“She’s in a coma,” Bashir said flatly. “She’s dying.”

35

Treir reached across the dabo table for the gaming rondure. As she did, the bare flesh of her shoulder brushed against Hetik’s brawny triceps—equally bare—and she felt an instant of heat. In the morning quiet at Quark’s—only a handful of customers sat scattered about, having their breakfasts—the fleeting touch seemed intense enough to be heard. The strength of her reaction surprised her. In the past few years, she had only pretended at such feelings—for which she had been kept warm in other ways. But not like this. She found the unexpected jolt more than a little liberating.

Treir had hesitated in that sultry moment, and now she began moving again. She swiped the rondure from its cup in the dabo wheel and held it up before Hetik. “So,” she said, peering past the transparent orb with the starburst pattern at its center, “that would pay off on…?”

“Pass five and half under,” Hetik finished, and then he explained the structure of the payouts.

Beautyand brains,Treir thought, and then laughed at herself for such schoolgirlish notions. Still, a woman could look. And with Hetik, there was plenty at which to look. Right now, she satisfied herself with a gaze just a fraction too long into eyes she thought of as the color of night. “Right again, my cheltol,”she said, the appellative slipping out before she could stop it.

“Cheltol?”he asked.

“Uh, it’s an Orion term for a…uh… capable…male student,” she stammered, choosing discretion over description. It occurred to her that this must be how some of her own admirers felt. And she also considered what else she might be able to teach this sweet young man beside dabo.

Treir reached out and took Hetik’s hand in hers, placed the rondure in his palm, and closed his fingers around it. His dark, delicious flesh complemented her green coloring, she noticed. “Now you give it a whirl,” she said, nodding her head toward the wheel, and then scolding herself for the unintended double entendre. As interesting and even delightful as she found her unanticipated responses to Hetik this morning, that was not why she had brought him here. This was business.

Hetik grasped the side of the dabo wheel and spun it around. The twitter of the wheel filled the room, easily overtaking the intermittent ring of flatware on dishes. He dexterously rolled the rondure from his palm to the tips of his thumb and forefinger, then reached down and sent it swirling around the upper, outer rim of the wheel.

“Treir.” The voice cut through the ambient sounds of the bar like a diamond through glass, sharply and without much effort. Both Treir and Hetik looked up from the dabo table to the entrance of the bar, where Quark had just arrived.

Treir muttered an Orion oath. What’s he doing here?she thought in frustration. For the past few weeks, Quark had delegated the management of the bar during the morning hours to her. At first, he had still come to the bar himself at that time, keeping obviously watchful eyes– and attentive ears,she added—on her. Lately, though, he had stopped showing up in the morning. And despite her certainty that he still somehow managed to monitor her activities, through the use of surveillance devices or confederates or some other devious means, she had begun to feel some sense of autonomy during the times she was at least nominally in charge of the bar. Perhaps, she thought now, that had been naïve. As she decided what she should do, she absently clutched at her necklace, a collection of emerald green jewels set in a pattern of interlacing triangles.

As the chirrup of the dabo wheel slowed, Quark started for the table. “Stay here,” Treir told Hetik, squeezing his upper arm to emphasize her words. She strode in Quark’s direction, her long legs quickly eating up the short distance. She intercepted him about halfway to the table. “Quark,” she said, modulating her tone so that she sounded very pleased to see him. “What are you doing here?” She let herself almost sing the words, an attempt to focus Quark’s attention on her. Behind her, she heard the wheel come to a stop, and the staccato sound of the rondure bouncing into a cup.

“What are youdoing?” he demanded, even gruffer than usual. She saw that he looked upset, and she wondered if his mood had anything to do with his increasing flirtations with the station’s security chief. Two nights ago, after that Jem’Hadar had appeared as though from nowhere, she had watched Quark and Ro coquet with each other; she had also heard Ro suggest that she might return to the bar later that night, but Treir had not seen her in here since. Nor, she suspected, had Quark.

Now Quark leaned to his left and peered past Treir toward Hetik. “We don’t allow gamblers to touch the dabo wheel,” he complained to her in a lowered voice. “Let alone allow them to make the spins.” He looked angrily up at her. “Wasn’t that the first thing I taught you?”

Treir bent at her knees and slung herself around to Quark’s side. As she slithered a bare arm across his shoulders, she said in a breathy voice, “But not the last thing you’re going to teach me, I hope.” Obvious, and Quark would see the words as a ploy, but he often responded to such advances regardless. She draped herself around him, her tall, lithe form folding up in such a way that she actually seemed to become the same size as the much smaller Ferengi.

“Really?” Quark asked, looking at her lasciviously. “And what else would you like to learn?” Treir liked predictable behavior; it had kept her in luxurious accommodations, elegant clothing, and a relative life of leisure for some time.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, gently kneading his shoulders. “I’m sure you’ll think of something interesting for me.” She started to ease him around toward the bar and away from Hetik.

“Wait a minute,” Quark said, setting his shoulders and not allowing Treir to turn him. “The dabo wheel.” He pointed in that direction.

Bad instincts,Treir railed at herself. She had moved too quickly to get Quark away. She knew better, but she had acted rashly. Probably because I was flustered by Hetik,she thought, but that was a poor reason. “Don’t worry about it, Quark,” she said, trying to segue now from a personal mode to a business mode. “There’s no latinum on the table.”

“Then what’s he doing?” Quark wanted to know. He extricated himself from Treir’s hold. She pulled away from him, and in the blink of an eye, she towered over him once more. Quark looked up at her accusingly. “Is he rigging the dabo wheel so you two can steal me deaf later?”

“Be careful what you say, Quark,” she told him. “I know you were just in a bad mood the other night when you intimated you were going to fire me, and maybe you’re in a bad mood now, but you don’t want to drive away just about the only thing drawing customers in here.”

Quark made a show of peering slowly around the bar at the few patrons present. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m turning them away at the door.”

“It’s breakfast time,” she said. “Don’t be sarcastic.” She added a smile to her admonishment, attempting to find the right attitude that would work with Quark today. Treir had initially believed that his supposed pursuit of Ro had been for the sole purpose of gaining some business advantage relating to her position aboard Deep Space 9. His continued sour mood, though, was beginning to convince her otherwise.

She held her hand out toward the dabo table. “That young man’s name is Hetik,” she said. “He made a pilgrimage here to see the Celestial Temple for the first time, and he—”

“I don’t care what his name is or why he’s here,” Quark said. “I want him to stop touching my dabo wheel.” He glared over at Hetik. “And tell him to put some clothes on.”

Treir glanced over at Hetik. The meaty young man was paying no attention to them, instead studying the dabo table. He wore a pair of tight black shorts and a small matching top that barely covered the upper portion of his torso. He looked very good—very sexy—and he seemed remarkably at ease. Treir knew well how uncomfortable it could feel to wear so little in public. In fact—

“He’s wearing more than I am,” she said. Her outfit—provided to her by Quark, of course—consisted of little more than a pair of narrow bands of shimmering silk, one at her chest and one just below her waist.

“You have more parts people want to see,” Quark said with a leer.

“Some people,” Treir agreed. “But some would rather see Hetik’s parts.” She realized then how far this conversation had sunk, and that it would not likely improve, and although Quark’s mood might, there was an immediacy to her need to discuss Hetik with him. She had intended to speak with him later, convinced that by the time he arrived at the bar this afternoon or this evening, she would have been able to prove to him the worth of what she had done.

“Anybody who wouldn’t prefer your parts is a fool,” Quark said.

“Perhaps,” Treir said. “But fools spend their latinum as much as the wise do—maybe more so.”

“That’s true,” Quark said, but then he looked up at her with a quizzical expression. “But what’s your point?”

“My point is, maybe Hetik could bring in a new set of customers, and thereby improve profits.”

A smirk played across Quark’s face, his skepticism evident. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Well, that’s too bad,” Treir told him, “because he’s your new dabo boy.”

Quark’s eyes widened, and then his mouth dropped open, completely revealing his pointed, unaligned teeth. He closed and opened his mouth several more times. Like a fish,Treir thought, gasping when removed from water.Finally, Quark managed to form words. “He’s my new what?”

“Your new dabo boy,” she repeated. “I hired him.”

Again, Quark’s mouth oscillated between closed and open. “You what?”He brought a hand up to his chest, as though he were suffering a heart spasm.

She moved toe-to-toe with him and stared down directly into his eyes. “I hired Hetik,” she said, enunciating each word slowly, “to be your new dabo boy.”

Quark returned her gaze, still agape. “He’s…he’s…you…you…” he sputtered. It seemed to Treir as though he did not know what to be upset about first: a dabo boyin his establishment, or her—an employee—hiring a new worker.

“Listen to me, Quark,” she said, dropping any pretense from her voice and manner. “If some people come in here to ogle me while they’re drinking and gambling, then other people will come in to ogle him.” She pointed a thumb back over her shoulder toward Hetik.

Quark shook his head, then closed his mouth and seemed to regain his composure. “Nobody’s going to come into the bar to see either one of you,” he snarled, “once I have the two of you thrown out an airlock.”

Treir felt her features harden, and she leaned down until her face was only centimeters from Quark’s. “Be careful with your threats, Quark,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Hetik might hear you.”

“What he’s going to hear,” Quark said, apparently unfazed by Treir’s words, “is me firing him.” He backed up a half-step, then started around her. Just before he would have passed her, she reached out and took hold of his upper arm. Quark stopped, and they regarded each other.

“Don’t do it,” Treir said. She knew that this would work, that Hetik’s presence in the bar would bring in more customers, which would necessarily increase her own tips. And she liked Hetik and wanted to help him. She leaned in toward Quark. “Perhaps we can come to some sort of accord about this,” she said, breathing warmly in his ear.

Quark pulled back and stared at her for a few moments, his eyes squinting into slits. He appeared to consider Treir’s request. Then he said, “I’m a romantic, but I also know the 229th Rule of Acquisition: ‘Latinum lasts longer than lust.’” He pulled his arm from her grasp, but before he could take another step, she grabbed him again. This time, she pulled him in close to her.

“Then at least let me do it,” she said. “I hired him; let me fire him.”

Quark jerked his arm free. “Fine,” he said. “I just came in to get a bottle of groszfor Admiral Akaar.” He looked over at Hetik, and then back at Treir. “Make sure he’s gone when I come back in tonight,” he told her.

“Fine,” she said.

Quark started to head for the bar, presumably to retrieve the grosz,but then he stopped, came back, and leaned in to her. “Just be happy I’m not firing you too,” he said. Then he made his way to the bar. She watched as he pulled out a stubby, dark green bottle and carried it out.

Once Quark had gone, Treir finally turned to Hetik. She saw that he was now looking at her. She started toward him, wondering what she would say.

36

The smell of smoke reached him first.

Vaughn regained consciousness as though a switch had been thrown. One moment, his mind did not exist, and the next, awareness deluged him. With his eyes closed, his other senses painted the canvas of his circumstances. As he breathed in the acrid smoke, it irritated the dry membranes of his nose. A bitter taste coated his mouth, and his throat burned as though he had swallowed broken glass. His body ached within and without, his muscles strained, his flesh battered, and the air felt unpleasantly cool about him. The crackle of live flames reached him from several directions, but not so close that he could feel their heat. And beneath it all, something else made itself known…a noise that held more substance as a feeling than as a sound…like a far-off wind whispering at the very limits of hearing, moving air with a force diminished by distance.

Vaughn opened his eyes. He lay on his back, propped up against a section of bulkhead in what had been the rear of Chaffee’s forward compartment. The front of the shuttle was gone. No, not gone. It sat on the open ground thirty or forty meters away, engulfed by fire. A pillar of thick black smoke rose up from it, reaching for the gray clouds above as though for a kindred spirit.

Between the two sections of the destroyed shuttle, wreckage littered the ground. Two smaller fires burned off to the right, and hills sat far off in the distance to the left, but otherwise, the landscape extended away desolate and unvariegated, a flat, brown plain. Vaughn glanced over his shoulder and saw the bulkhead separating the fore and aft compartments. Through the misshapen doorway, the aft portion of the shuttle appeared relatively intact, although the roof had been almost completely ripped away.

Something moved directly to Vaughn’s right, just a meter or two away. The broken remnants of a chair tumbled from atop a heap of debris, and he saw a hand reach upward. “Prynn,” he said, his voice rasping, the word barely understandable. He gulped, trying to clear his throat, then coughed forcefully. Mucus filled his mouth, and he spat to his left, not surprised to see streaks of red mixed in with the yellowish fluid. “Prynn,” he called again, pronouncing her name clearly this time.

“I’m here,” she said, and she waved her hand. “I’m stuck.” She sounded remarkably calm in light of what they had just endured.

“Hold on,” Vaughn said. He set one hand against what remained of the bulkhead to his left, and the other down on the decking beneath him. He pushed himself forward and upward, and managed to get to his feet. His body ached everywhere—in his joints, in his muscles, on his flesh, and he felt a throbbing pain on the inside of his cheek—but he seemed to have escaped any significant external injuries. “I’m coming,” he told Prynn. He stepped carefully over and around masses of ruined machinery, leaning toward the aft compartment in order to compensate for the forward tilt of the decking.

When he got to the chair Prynn had pushed from atop herself, he reached down and lifted it out of his way. He swung the bent object back in the direction he had come, setting it down with a thud. Then he stepped forward and pulled away a snarl of mangled circuitry, revealing Prynn. She looked shaken and bruised. Her face and neck showed multiple cuts, and a long gash arced from her temple all the way down to her chin. A blood vessel must have ruptured in one of her eyes, because the sclera had turned a dark red. “Can you see out of both eyes?” he asked her.

Prynn glanced around, then back up at him. “Yes,” she said. “But my arm.” She pointed up toward her right shoulder, beyond which her arm disappeared beneath a fractured section of hull plating. She tried to push the plate away with her free hand, but it did not move at all beneath her efforts.

Vaughn studied the situation for a moment, then glanced around in the unlikely hope that he might spy a tricorder lurking somewhere nearby. Ideally, he would scan behind the metal slab before attempting to extricate Prynn. If some portion of her arm had been severed, the plating might actually be preventing her from bleeding to death; on the other hand, she might be losing blood right now.

Seeing no tricorder, Vaughn moved to his left and wrapped his fingers around the top of the hull plate. He had expected to find the metal warm to the touch, perhaps even hot, but it was actually cold. He pulled gingerly on the heavy slab, testing its weight; he did not want to manhandle it away from Prynn only to have it crash back down on her an instant later. Satisfied that he could move it, Vaughn repositioned himself so that he could brace his legs against an unbroken section of the starboard bulkhead. Setting his hands beneath the top of the slab, he pushed, using the combined strength of his arms and legs. The plate shifted forward a few centimeters and stopped, the loud screech of metal scraping against metal erupting from its lower edge.

From somewhere below him came the sound of movement. Vaughn felt sweat forming on his forehead as he struggled to prevent the plate from falling backward. He grunted as he tensed his arms and legs, pushing with as much force as he could manage, and still the plate began to slip back.

“I’m free,” Prynn yelped suddenly. Vaughn looked over to see his daughter moving away from the metal slab. As quickly as he could, he jumped back out of the way, onto the dirt beyond the fallen shuttle. The broken section of the hull slammed back down. Vaughn turned and spat again, and again he saw blood. He wondered just how bad his internal injuries were.

Prynn tottered to her feet, and relief flooded over Vaughn when he saw her raise her right arm and flex her shoulder, elbow, and fingers. Her uniform had been torn open in a dozen places, he saw, and her combadge no longer hung on her tunic. Considering what they had just been through, though, she appeared more or less unscathed. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” she told him as she found her way out of the wreckage and onto open ground. She faced him across a few meters and raised a hand to the side of her face, feeling cautiously at the wound there. She pulled her hand away and examined her fingertips, which were now red with blood.

He walked up to her. “You’ve got a deep cut here,” he said, drawing a finger through the air along the side of her face. He looked closely at the gash, then said, “It looks like the blood’s clotted, so you should be all right.”

“You’ve got quite a few cuts yourself,” she said, pointing up at his face.

“And I can feel every one of them,” he said with a halfhearted smile.

Prynn turned and peered back at the smashed aft section of the shuttle. “We need to find a medkit,” she said.

“We need to find Ensign ch’Thane.”

“Oh no,” Prynn said, distress filling her voice. “Shar.”

Vaughn glanced down and saw that, somehow, his combadge still hung on his uniform. He reached up and pressed it, and it warbled to life. “Vaughn to Ensign ch’Thane,” he said. He waited a few seconds, then repeated the call a second time, and then a third.

There was no response.

Prynn turned and surveyed the area, and Vaughn did the same. They began searching the nearby ground around the wreckage of the aft section. As they looked, Vaughn’s gaze alit on the distant pyre of the shuttle’s bow.

“The front of the shuttle,” he said, and he rushed by Prynn and back into the mass of debris from which they had just come. He heard her say something as he moved as quickly as he could through the twisted doorway and into the aft compartment. Everything lay in a shambles—he stepped on a phaser as he entered—but by simple fortuity, he saw what he needed immediately, lying in a corner and propped up against a dented metal locker. Vaughn took two long strides, bent, and picked up the fire-suppression canister.

He made his way back out of the wreckage. Prynn, he saw, had already started toward the fiery bow section. He ran to catch up with her. A million small aches nagged at him, but he counted himself fortunate that he could even stand up at this point.

Prynn stopped several meters from the burning cockpit, her arms thrown up in front of her face. As Vaughn reached her, he felt the heat of the fire coming at him in waves. The flames roared, the sound sending him back six weeks to the explosion on Defiant’s bridge, to when he thought he had lost his daughter. But he had no time for that now. “Stay here,” he yelled to Prynn. He walked forward a few steps, wanting to get close enough to be able to use the canister effectively, but the heat grew unbearable. He stumbled to the right, starting around the wreckage in search of a break in the fire that would allow him to move closer.

As Vaughn circled, he saw something through the blistering air, glimpsed as though through rippling water. He backed away from the fire to get a better view, and saw only a pile of metal and circuitry lying another twenty meters away. He continued around, though, looking not at the fire, but out at the surrounding land. Another heap came into view, and Vaughn recognized the gray of a Starfleet uniform and a trace of blue that could only be Andorian skin.

“Prynn,” Vaughn called. “Shar.” He dropped the canister and ran. As he drew closer to the fallen ensign, he saw that his body had landed in an awkward position, like a rag doll tossed carelessly aside. Ch’Thane lay facedown, his left arm bent back in a way that seemed impossible for a human or an Andorian; at best, the shoulder had been dislocated, and at worst, it had been torn apart.

Vaughn dropped to one knee beside ch’Thane’s head and felt for a pulse at the side of his neck. Vaughn knew little about Andorian physiology, but he knew enough to ascertain that the young man was still alive. He got up and began working his way around ch’Thane’s body, searching for any visible injuries. He heard Prynn’s footsteps race up and stop.

“How is he?” she wanted to know.

“He’s alive,” Vaughn said, not looking up. He moved down along ch’Thane’s body. As he reached the knee, he noticed a dark patch below ch’Thane’s shin. Vaughn examined that area of the leg and found a tear in the uniform pants. He reached two fingers from each hand inside the hole and pulled in opposite directions, the sound of tearing cloth strangely out of place in this alien environment. Vaughn examined ch’Thane’s leg, and what he saw made him want to turn away.

“What is it?” Prynn asked, her concern obvious. “Is he all right?” Vaughn heard her take a step closer, and he looked over at her and locked his eyes on her face.

“Stop,” he commanded, and she did, looking up and meeting his gaze. The dried blood from the gash, coupled with the injury to her eye, made her appear as though she was wearing a mask on one side of her face. “Stay right there and listen to me. Ensign ch’Thane is all right, but I’m going to need your help to keep him that way.” She nodded mutely, and Vaughn thought that shock might be setting in. “I want you to go back to the aft section and find a tricorder and a medkit.” Prynn turned immediately and started back the way they had come. “Wait,” he called, and she stopped and turned back toward him. “I think I saw the emergency survival cache in the aft compartment,” he said. “See if you can open it. If you can’t, or if you can’t find it, then you’ll have to search through the wreckage for loose equipment. I also need something I can use as a splint.”

“A splint,” Prynn echoed.

“Yes,” he told her. “Now go.” She headed away at a run.

Vaughn looked back down at ch’Thane’s leg. Halfway between the ankle and the knee, the jagged end of a bone protruded through the young man’s skin. The white of the bone sharply contrasted with the blue of Andorian flesh. Indigo blood spilled from the wound and darkened the dirt beneath.

Vaughn stood up and hastily pulled off his uniform tunic. He kneeled back down again and lifted ch’Thane’s leg just enough to allow him to slide one sleeve under the thigh. Vaughn pulled the sleeve out the other side, then tied it together with the other one as tightly as he could. The blood flowing out of the leg wound ebbed at once.

“We’re getting you help, Shar,” Vaughn said quietly. He reached up and again felt for a pulse at ch’Thane’s neck. “Don’t die on me now,” he said. “Don’t die on me.”

The day had moved on.

Vaughn pulled his coat closed against a breath of cold wind, grateful that the outerwear had survived the crash. He moved out of the wrecked aft section of the shuttle, carrying three handheld beacons, the last items that he thought they would need. As he and Prynn had ministered to Ensign ch’Thane’s injuries—and to their own—and then as they had raided the emergency survival cache and set up a camp around the fallen officer, Vaughn had begun to decide how they would proceed. Now, as he made one last inspection of the downed shuttle, he settled on a plan. Not necessarily a good plan,he thought, but of the few options available to them right now, it had been a simple matter to identify the best course of action.

As Vaughn stepped from Chaffee’s splintered decking onto the hardpan, he peered around. The two smaller fires burning closest to here had sputtered out, leaving behind smoldering mounds of seared machinery. The larger fire enveloping the shuttle cockpit still blazed, though it had abated. Overhead, the incessant cloud cover continued to hold the planet’s daytime hours in a continuous dusk. The gray conditions gave Vaughn the sense of an impending rainstorm.

Or of an impending attack,he thought.

He eyed the never-still sea of shadows above, remembering vividly the murky form that had penetrated the roof of the shuttle, and which had looked very much like an extension of the cloud cover. Vaughn had considered the idea that the clouds might actually be life-forms, but nothing the crew had learned so far, either aboard Chaffeeor back on Defiant,supported such a possibility. The “attack” on the shuttle had likely been akin to a lightning strike, he thought, with the clouds discharging energy, and the shuttle acting as a ground and conducting it; back aboard Defiant,when the ship had been similarly struck by an energy surge, Ensign ch’Thane had offered the same analogy.

Before returning to the makeshift camp he and Prynn had set up, Vaughn decided to loop around the wreckage of the aft section, just to make certain that nothing else they might be able to use had been thrown clear. They had already been fortunate that the emergency survival cache had come through the crash dented, but intact. Starfleet should make their shuttles out of the same material as their survival lockers,Vaughn thought, a flippant notion that had occurred to him on several other occasions; this was not the first shuttle accident he had lived through.

As Vaughn reached the back of the smashed shuttle, he looked back along the line of Chaffee’s descent, expecting to see long gouges where it had skidded along the ground, perhaps even a small impact crater where it had first hit. Instead, he saw only a level, unbroken plain. Vaughn squatted and set the beacons down, then pulled a tricorder from an outside coat pocket. He opened the device and scanned the area; although interference from the energy in the clouds and at the source of the pulse hindered long-range scans, it remained possible to gather short-range readings. In this case, Vaughn’s scans only confirmed what his eyes had already told him: Chaffeehad come down hard, but at neither the vertical nor the horizontal speed he would have expected. However that had happened, it had probably saved their lives.

At least for now.

Vaughn closed up the tricorder and placed it back in a coat pocket, then bent and collected up the beacons. He wiped at the corner of his mouth with a knuckle, his saliva no longer streaked with red. What he had thought might be a symptom of an internal injury had turned out to be nothing more than the result of a chunk of flesh he had bitten from the inside of his cheek. He had mended the wound and stemmed the bleeding, although his cheek still ached.

Vaughn went back around the wreckage and headed toward the fire that was still consuming the shuttle’s cockpit. As he walked, he noticed again the remote hum that he had first heard when he had regained consciousness after the accident. So far as he could tell, it had never stopped; it felt like Defianttraveling at warp, that constant background drone and throb of the engines that permeated the ship. It’s the voice of the clouds,he thought, the audible effect of all the energy surrounding the planet.

Vaughn passed the flickering orange flames burning the forward section of the shuttle. Beyond, the small encampment came into view—although calling it an encampmentseemed an overstatement to Vaughn. The area he and Prynn had staked out around Ensign ch’Thane consisted of little more than bedrolls, blankets, and the locker that had contained the survival cache. A second locker, which had held a small, portable shelter—a thin but insulative and weatherproof material and a collapsible framework over which it fit—had broken open during the crash, its contents ripped apart.