Identity theft, p.21
Identity Theft, page 21
“No shame in that,” McCoy said. “The pressure of the deep is nothing compared to the pressure of being responsible for the lives of others. Trust me, I know that too well.” He placed a hand on Ryjo’s shoulder. “Stun first, but if that doesn’t do the trick… do what you must to stay alive. We’ll back you up.”
“You said it, Doctor.” Sulu gave Chekov a pat on the back. “All for one and one for all, as they say. Just don’t think I’m going to let you win our next bowling match because you get to play hero this time.”
“Not even one extra frame?”
Joking aside, all this heartfelt support and camaraderie unsettled Ryjo. He was not Chekov, and these people were not really his friends and crewmates.
Even if they were all in this together right now.
“Watch your back out there.” Tovar came forward, squeezing past McCoy and Sulu. For a moment, he thought (hoped?) she might give him a kiss for luck, but she simply squeezed his hands before assisting him with his helmet again. “You can do this. I have faith in you.”
“Thank you, Nurse.”
“Call me Simone.”
Twenty-Six
Copernicus’s lack of airlocks again posed a problem. Since they could hardly cram six humanoids into the cockpit, even with the Yarfites’ diminutive statures, everyone aboard had to helmet up before they gradually lowered the aft force field and, just as cautiously, opened the rear hatchway. Pushing against the incoming water, Ryjo exited Copernicus with the buoy clipped to his suit by a short cable. Sulu and the others would flush the shuttlecraft after they closed the hatch, then suit up again upon Ryjo’s return. If he returned.
This had better be worth it, he thought.
Using emergency climbing gear stored aboard Copernicus, he anchored one end of a long tether to what appeared, for the moment, to be a solid chunk of seabed. Was it secure enough to hold fast through another seismic event? He wanted to think so, but…
One more reason to get a move on.
To speed his ascent, he activated the thruster rockets on his levitation boots, which propelled him toward the surface, dragging the buoy with him, the tether playing out behind it. A heads-up display inside his helmet allowed him to monitor his rise so he could angle his legs as needed to keep speeding in the right direction. A good thing, too; it would be all too easy to get lost and disoriented in these murky currents. If there was any sunlight filtering down from above, Ryjo couldn’t see it, possibly because the sky was still bedimmed by volcanic ash and smoke? Phaser in hand, he watched anxiously for the telltale glow of the lurking lightning jelly. A slower, less dramatic climb might be less likely to attract the creature’s notice, but Ryjo chose to err toward speed rather than stealth. Time was running out for Copernicus, and despite his crew’s faith in Kirk, who knew how long the Enterprise would stick around searching for them? The shuttlecraft’s bulkheads and life-support were on borrowed time.
Plus, he simply didn’t want to spend any more time in this scalding, jelly-infested soup than he had to.
His helmet’s searchlight swept the swirling murk. He’d debated switching the light off entirely to avoid attracting unwelcome company, but swimming blind carried its own risks as well, such as colliding with some undersea reef or outcropping, besides being, honestly, just too scary to contemplate. He needed to see something of where he was going, if only for his own peace of mind. What if another huge stony fragment or lava bomb came plunging out of nowhere?
“Chekov to Copernicus. Can you read me?”
Nothing but static responded, just as they’d feared. The adulterated sea was interfering even with their personal communicators. The best he could hope for was that he could establish a comlink with Copernicus once the buoy was up and running. Until then, he was on his own.
Which, in a very real sense, he had been ever since he’d first beamed aboard the Enterprise posing as Chekov. All this time, he’d been surrounded by strangers who didn’t and couldn’t know the real him, leaving him very much alone, with no one else to rely on.
But not like this.
I could use another voice to keep me company. Maybe Tovar’s?
Blue-white flashes strobed the sea, speeding toward him. Ryjo fired the phaser, a crimson beam sizzling through the umber liquid, causing it to bubble and steam. His first shot missed the oncoming creature, reminding him that he wasn’t actually a trained Starfleet marksman and that none of his simulations had involved underwater target practice. Frantically, he fired again, this time grazing the jelly’s bulbous, bell-shaped head. A coruscating red glow flared against the monster’s electric-blue pulses as it darted away, boiling yellow froth obscuring its retreat. Ryjo looked about anxiously, reeling the buoy in closer, uncertain of how effective the phaser had been.
Had the beam stunned the beast? Repelled it? Or merely made it angry?
Peering out through his helmet’s visor, he cursed how it limited his field of vision. Ascending through three-dimensional space, there was no way of knowing which direction the jelly might attack from next. He upped the power to the booster rockets in his boots. According to the heads-up display, he still had roughly two hundred meters to go before he reached the surface.
Not that this guaranteed safety from the lightning jelly.
A luminous pulse, out of the corner of his eye, alerted him just in time as, quite un-stunned, the creature came rushing at him from an angle. A blazing tentacle whipped toward him with alarming speed. Unable to swing the phaser around fast enough, he kicked up his legs to blast the swinging tentacle away with the boosters in his boots. The desperate maneuver sent him pinwheeling out of control. He held the buoy tightly against him with one arm, protecting it with his body, while his other hand kept a tight grip on the phaser. Dropping his only real weapon would be a death sentence for sure.
Tumbling head over heels, he used a voice command to switch off the thrusters, then tried to arrest his spin by kicking his legs and flailing with his free arm, while dreading the jelly’s next attack—which was not long in coming.
A pulse strobed above him. He fired wildly, missing his target, and an electrified tentacle lashed against the back of Ryjo’s suit, delivering a vicious jolt that caused him to spasm in shock. He convulsed within his suit. His heart missed a beat.
And then his suit went dead.
His searchlight blinked out. The heads-up display vanished. And worst of all, the constant hum and buzz of the suit’s life-support functions fell silent, including the rebreathing apparatus.
Ryjo gasped, then clamped his jaws shut to hold his breath. Dazed and trembling, his nerves tingling from the shock, he still had the presence of mind to be properly terrified by the realization that his insulated suit, which seemed to have spared him from the worst of the jelly’s lightning bolt, had been shorted out by the jolt, which left only one question to be answered: What would kill him first, suffocation or the creature?
The jelly appeared in no hurry to finish him off. Ryjo watched, his cheeks bulging with used air, as the beast lazily circled him, as though waiting to see if the intruder’s light had been extinguished for good.
Right, Ryjo thought. It left Copernicus alone after it knocked out our exterior lights. Guess I’m safe as long as my suit stays dark.
So, suffocation then…
With the suit’s cooling system down, the burning heat of the sea began to penetrate the insulated layers protecting Ryjo. This was the least of his concerns, however, since he would run out of oxygen well before he boiled to death.
Lucky me.
Then, to his surprise, flickers of color appeared before his eyes. He fought to keep from gasping as the heads-up display within his helmet began to come back to life. Photonic images, visible only to Ryjo, declared:
System Rebooting
Hope flooded him. Maybe he still had a chance after all, if the suit didn’t take too long to restart—and some Starfleet engineer had been bright enough to prioritize the air supply in the reboot sequence.
It was going to be close. He was already feeling light-headed, a different variety of darkness infringing on the periphery of his vision. Starving lungs ached for relief. He clenched his teeth, trying to preserve his last precious breath as, one by one, assorted heads-up icons and displays manifested before his ever-foggier eyes. He couldn’t hold on much longer…
Restart Complete
The suit started humming again. Fresh air flowed from the rebreather. Ryjo sucked it down hungrily, just as the helmet’s searchlight came back on, shining in the dark—and attracting the lightning jelly once more.
Rut Starfleet protocols, Ryjo thought. His head clearing, he switched the phaser to maximum and fired dead-on at the approaching creature. A crimson glow suffused the jelly, overpowering its own innate luminosity, before it dissolved into atoms, leaving Ryjo alone in the deep at last. He panted loudly.
Would Chekov have resorted to lethal force quite so quickly? Ryjo didn’t know or care. Preserving his cover wasn’t going to do the Exile cause any good if he got himself killed before completing his mission. Now he just had to hope that McCoy was right about the jelly defending its territory, and that no new creature moved in to claim the dead jelly’s turf before Ryjo could deliver the buoy to the surface.
Only a couple hundred meters to go.
With some effort, he got himself pointed in the right direction again and reactivated his levitation boots. One last push got him to surface without further incident, and he found himself bobbing in the waves beneath an ashy, overcast sky of mixed ocher and umber. Flakes of ash continued to fall like snow upon the sea, coating its surface with a gritty film that was immediately replaced almost as soon as its accumulated mass began to sink beneath the waves. The sludgy expanse stretched all around him as far as he could see, with no solid land in sight. Copernicus had clearly crashed many kilometers beyond the shore.
Just as well. Ryjo had no desire to return to the quaking volcanic plain they had barely escaped from before. Focusing on the task at hand, he activated the buoy’s flotation system, which was comprised of an inflatable ring augmented by waterproof antigrav units that could be calibrated to adjust for the weight of the object or individual being supported. Making sure that calibration was correct so that the buoy didn’t sink back into the depths was among the reasons Ryjo had needed to accompany the buoy to the surface. The antigravs also helped stabilize the buoy, compensating for the waves and the pull of the tether anchored to its base. He gave the tether just enough slack to allow it to bob above the waves without being submerged.
That and protecting it from the lightning jelly.
Had the creature’s attack damaged the device? Ryjo anxiously inspected it by the light from his helmet but detected no obvious scorch marks or charring. He could only assume that his suit had protected the buoy from the jolt when the tentacle lashed him from behind. They’d lucked out that the strike hadn’t hit the buoy directly, when it was nestled against his chest. As it was, all vital systems appeared operational.
But would that be enough to reach the Enterprise?
He wasted no time finding out. Gloved hands successfully activated the signal enhancer, which was already preset to the Enterprise’s emergency frequencies. A few more tweaks and he synched his helmet’s comm system to the buoy; in theory, the enhancer would boost the signal enough to reach the Enterprise now that it was no longer coming from the bottom of the sea.
“Chekov to Enterprise. Can you read me?”
He held his breath, fearing that his perilous ascent had been in vain. Had the volcano thrown too much exotic matter into the atmosphere? Had Captain Kirk indeed given them up for dead and continued on to Voyzr? Did fate have one more dirty trick to play on them?
“Repeat, Chekov to—”
“Enterprise here, Chekov!” Uhura’s voice came over the line. It was faint and scratchy, broken up by pops and crackles, but it came through nonetheless. “Stand by while I clean up the signal on our end.”
It worked! Ryjo exulted. That crazy Yarfite’s plan saved us all.
Provided, that is, he told the whole truth about Copernicus and the other people still trapped in the sunken shuttlecraft a thousand-plus meters below. He had yet to attempt establishing a comlink to Copernicus, so he could try informing the Enterprise that he was the sole survivor of the crash, which might increase his own chances of being rescued in a timely manner, thereby getting him closer to completing his mission—at the cost of the others’ lives.
Tovar. Sulu. McCoy. Dipelly. Bwoj. Fressa.
He knew what Trath and other Exiles would want him to do, but could he really go through with it? Simone’s voice echoed in his mind:
“You can do this. I have faith in you.”
“Enterprise to Chekov.” Uhura’s voice, now much clearer, hailed him again. “What is your status?”
Twenty-Seven
“Time is of the essence, Captain.” Spock looked up from the scanner at his science station. “The super-eruption I warned of earlier appears to be imminent.”
“Can you be more precise, Spock?”
“Not with total accuracy, Captain.” He sounded pained by the admission. “Seismology is not an exact science, and certainly not when it involves the complex variables of a largely unexplored moon. Sensors indicate, however, that the extreme tectonic pressures beneath Wexx’s crust are rapidly approaching critical. We are likely talking hours at most. Possibly less.”
“Understood.” Kirk contemplated the cloudy, ocher sphere on the viewscreen, where they now knew Copernicus and its passengers were stranded and in desperate need of rescue, and not just from the coming cataclysm. According to Chekov and Sulu, the shuttlecraft’s life-support systems were on their last legs, posing yet another mortal threat to the landing party. “Are you suggesting that we’ve run out of time to rescue our people?”
“Negative, Captain. The safety of the many does not always outweigh the lives of a few, as my own unlikely resurrection attests. I merely apprise you of the risks entailed… and the need for haste.”
“Duly noted.” Kirk nodded. “Keep me posted.”
“I will endeavor to do so.”
Kirk gravely faced the daunting task ahead, as did everyone else on the bridge. Their earlier jubilation at discovering that the search party was still alive had given way to somber recognition of just how dire the crisis still was. Rescuing their imperiled crewmates, not to mention the three Yarfites, was going to be both difficult and dangerous. They had a plan, but there was no guarantee they could pull it off successfully. Split-second timing would be required, too many things could go wrong, and the clock was ticking…
Let’s get on with it, Kirk thought. “Take us down, Lieutenant Miller. Yellow alert. Shields up… for the present.”
“Aye, sir.”
Benuel Miller, subbing for Sulu at the helm, took the Enterprise out of orbit, descending into Wexx’s roiling atmosphere. To his right, Ensign Vicki Novak occupied the nav station. Despite their relative youths, having never served on the old Enterprise, both were fully qualified, well-trained officers who had more than earned their postings upon the bridge; still, Kirk couldn’t help wishing that Sulu and Chekov were at the conn for these tricky maneuvers—instead of being among those in need of rescue.
Sulfurous yellow and black clouds, densely laden with ash, filled the viewscreen. Compared to the relatively serene emptiness of space, the turbulent cloud cover seemed positively chaotic. Kirk could practically hear hot gas and steam whipping past the hull, pelting the deflectors with volcanic ejecta. Wexx’s atmosphere was nearly as unstable as its surface.
“Exiting upper atmosphere,” Miller reported, sticking to the plan. “Altitude one thousand meters and falling. Approaching crash site.”
Thanks to the comlink Chekov had established between Copernicus and the Enterprise, Spock had finally been able to pinpoint the shuttlecraft’s location beneath a vast equatorial sea suffused with heavy concentrations of metal sulfides. But even with the buoy enhancing the signal, Copernicus was still too deep beneath the waves to confidently transport its passengers to safety. According to Scotty, there was much more to be done before he could even try to lock onto Sulu and the others. Descending into Wexx’s atmosphere was just the first step.
“Acknowledged,” Kirk said. “Keep a close eye out for any volcanic plumes or lava bombs.”
“Aye, sir.” Novak monitored the tactical displays at her station. “On it.”
Just the same, Kirk didn’t intend to lower their shields until Copernicus could do the same, and then only for as long it took to beam everyone back to the Enterprise. He hadn’t forgotten watching all those explosive plumes blast up into space. He could only imagine what it must be like for Chekov right now, adrift at sea on an unstable moon that was violently coming apart at the seams.
Hang on, Pavel. We’re coming for you.
* * *
Ryjo clung to the buoy for dear life, as well as for the lives of everyone still trapped aboard Copernicus. Ultimately, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to betray Tovar and Sulu and the others depending on him. He rationalized that the risk of being caught in that lie was too great, that “Chekov” would never be trusted again if the Enterprise somehow managed to detect the crashed shuttlecraft and the life signs aboard it, but he knew he was fooling himself. The truth was, he couldn’t have lived with himself if he’d left them to drown, even if half of them were Starfleet and the other half foolhardy treasure hunters who’d brought this on themselves. They’d all been through too much together for Ryjo to abandon them now.
I can still complete my mission, he told himself. I can still kill the regnant… afterward.
At the moment, though, the waves were getting progressively higher and choppier, churned up by undersea tremors and the occasional large chunk of rocky debris crashing down from the sky. If not for the cable binding him to the buoy, he would have already been swept away from it by now. Meanwhile, the relentless ashfall was growing heavier by the minute, so that he constantly had to wipe the abrasive yellow sludge off his visor and the buoy, as well as keep adjusting the antigrav controls to prevent the buoy from sinking beneath the sodden weight of the ash. The Enterprise had offered to try to beam him up first, now that the signal enhancer could help them get a decent lock on him, but Ryjo had opted to stay with the buoy until everyone aboard Copernicus could be rescued, if possible. He’d already gone too far to desert his post now; if he was resolved to save Tovar and the others, for whatever reason, he was going to do whatever it took.
